Josh
Appearances
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
To kind of circle back to a talking point in the podcast, I'd just like to find more congruence between how I show up and then how I feel. And then for that to feel like it's enough and not that it needs to be different or it needs to change.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say a majority of them, yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think frustration is good because when I, you know, I've worked really hard on a lot of things for five, 10 years, and that frustration has pushed me to keep working on it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's a great thing.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It does... Give me that ability to start working on something that I'm very fearful of. We talked about statistics and to tackle a big project. I feel very anxious that I'm not capable and prepared. But that anxiety on the other side of it is, well, I should do it to be able to. Or I could do it to be able to then learn it and understand it and become more proficient at it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And it probably keeps me from doing anything that would actually be hurtful or like something that would actually like put me at risk. So it does keep me safe.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's very important.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's very powerful, yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say the thing that overwhelmingly comes to mind is that I really care about other people.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say it shows me that I have... high expectations that I can achieve something and can be successful at what I do and work toward, and that I'm just on one side of it or experiencing the side where I'm working toward that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's very powerful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's very important.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's very important that I...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
like experience sadness um because i can also experience and understand other people who are going through the same thing so my mom um is having a bunch of tests done to figure out why she's having certain symptoms and to be able to empathize with her um and kind of share my feelings about what she's going through is very important to me well yeah that is that a beautiful thing
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, it's very beautiful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, that's right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I would say guilt is... The thing I appreciate about it is that it shows me that I can do something else to... You know, I can live up to the expectations that I've set for other people and for myself. So I can accomplish real. I can have really big achievements and I can find success. I don't like shame as much. Shame just generally feels bad.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So I don't know how many positives I can find in that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's kind of that same idea as guilt. It allows me to improve in areas that I feel like I have a lot of room to grow. So it shows me... You're honest. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's humbling. I think it allows me to keep a so-called level head and realize everyone's going through similar things, everyone's struggling, and that inadequacy is part of understanding that there are a lot of similarities.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's allowed me to develop a lot of independence and allowed me to have so many experiences that I don't think I would have had if I wouldn't have felt lonely and sought out community and things that I think would help me develop as a person and become more capable.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
They don't sound very good. I would say they allow you to kind of function around other people in more socially desirable ways.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's very important. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I think that's right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say it's another driving force. It really pushes me to do everything in my power. prevent it, basically, to restore hope.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. One, it was it was kind of nerve wracking for me to ask if we could we could do that. But I thought it'd be really fun because I listened to you on the psychiatry and psychotherapy podcast. You had a fantastic interview with Dr. David Pewter and you talked about imposter syndrome and vulnerability. And I was like, oh, that would be really fun to almost recreate that on my podcast as well.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Kind of struggling to come up with something else.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's very important.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I think that would be one of the most important parts of it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I chose that I have, I think it shows also that I have high expectations and that I can see things through and be, I can, I can be successful. Um, and that anger is a part of like almost the friction of not, not, not achieving it, um, or being able to do it. Um, so it's kind of in line with frustration and anger is something that in my childhood I felt like was just
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
solely negative and solely kind of like used in a really kind of like aggressive judgmental way. And I think having it in this context is way more helpful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
They're very real, yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Incredibly powerful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Very important, yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And I went into it really nervous and kind of unsure. And honestly, having the ability to experience that firsthand just connected so many of the dots around the concepts you discuss at length in the podcast and in your books, which I found very helpful for myself. So I thought it was an absolute honor and really insightful and helpful to get a good sense of what those techniques really mean.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
The number that comes to mind is around 20.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Is that enough? I think that's plenty, yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
You know, I've experienced a little bit of sadness during our conversation when you relayed stories about people you've worked with and their life experiences. And that was really beautiful, actually, to do that on the podcast. I would say maybe a 10 or 15. 10 to 15, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say that's probably 15 as well.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Like 10. Is that enough inadequacy? I think that's plenty. I think, yeah, I think that's plenty. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say 20. I'd say 20. I think loneliness is a good driver of kind of getting out and exploring the world.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
20.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Maybe 5. Anger doesn't feel as helpful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say I'm not attractive.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
100%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say that's like 90%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's probably 90% too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's like 85%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Because it's assuming that for all of the people who exist to perceive me, I'm saying that no one would find me attractive.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Because I would be assuming that people have the same... Preferences and standards. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
People have people there, you know, individual differences, really powerful and very real. So I think everyone's, you know, everyone has their own preference and own thoughts.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, it's an unrealistic standard.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Because, I would say, because it's untrue. So it's adhering to something that's untrue.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Makes me, I'm not sure I have a good answer for that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That sounds great.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. Let's say Corey. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, of course.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think you look great. I think you're a very attractive person.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I'm being honest with you.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Maybe 50.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Huh? What's that?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. I'll start off as the negative Joshua.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yes, of course.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I do know who you are.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. I think that's untrue. I think you're just being very critical for no reason and just trying to bring me down.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think I won that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say big. Big or huge? I'd just say big.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
You know, Joshua, you... You're disfigured, and because of that, you're unlovable. And that's an unavoidable thing you're going to have to deal with.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
The last thing I think we talked a lot and I'm kind of a little nervous to ask this, but we talked a lot about team. Could we role play a little bit to give an idea to the listeners of what that is actually like?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, so you had acne growing up, and now you have scars as a result, and that makes you look different from everyone else.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
What's that, Joshua?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So who won? You won. Big or small? It was big. Big or huge? It was massive.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
There was a lot of acceptance there. There was acknowledgement of things that you've done, I've done. And it was just... felt so authentic and so um so okay with you know the way things are and um controlling the controllables and um not letting that get in your way and be something that's like defeating and draining
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, that's right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, actually, that, you know, I just checked the time, and very sadly, I do need to end this conversation and... It's been fantastic, and I don't want to say it's been a dream, but to be able to talk to you and experience this, David, has been a tremendous opportunity.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So if they haven't listened to a podcast, they would have a sense of what they could expect.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay, I can do two minutes, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Well, even if he is trying to bullshit me, it's okay to have what are thought of as flaws. And there are plenty of things that I have going for me that provide a lot of richness and value to my life. And those... make me more attractive to people and provide me with a sense of meaning and really allow me to then help and contribute to the lives of other people.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So regardless of any superficial appearances, that doesn't define me as a person.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say that I won. Big or small? I'd say big. Big or huge? I'd say huge.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, well, I could fail at what I'm currently doing, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to be successful in any other host of possibilities and avenues of becoming a professional or providing for a family or contributing to the lives of my family and friends. So defining success in a very small way, I might fail.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
But broadly, I think I'm going to live a life that I ultimately want to live because I'm working hard at it and I have a lot of things going for me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I think that's untrue. I might struggle and I might have to work hard to kind of get out of that sometimes. But I think ultimately I'm going to be happy and I'm going to be fulfilled and I'm going to be surrounded by people that I love and people who love me. And that is worth more than any superficial success or failure.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think I'm winning. Big or small? I'd say I'm winning big. Big or huge? Huge.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I don't feel anxious at all. Let's say zero.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero. Embarrassed. Zero, surprisingly, for doing this on a podcast.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Zero. And angry. Zero. I think that would be a negative if it could be.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'll be sure to reach out. I'm going to share everything that you have worked on, all the projects you have going on, all the all the products. And I hope people really do check out the podcast you produce. Check out the books you've written and check out the app. Feeling great. It's been an absolute honor. You're a legend. And, you know, you've taught me more in this two hour podcast than ever.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think almost anyone else has ever taught me about just being, you know, so warm and caring.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, it's great to see both of you as well. David, you're looking handsome as always. And Rhonda, you're looking incredible as well. Thank you. Tell us more. The one thing – I've reflected on this quite a bit and I've given it a lot of thought knowing that we were going to discuss it. And on my end, like what has it changed for me?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And has there been something that's been overwhelming enough to like, oh, wow, I can see this as a difference in my life. And the first thing I want to say – is the importance of actually experiencing the techniques.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So I've listened to over 250 episodes of the podcast and actually engaging in them with you, David, was incredibly insightful and almost like unlocked some secret to it, which is the positive reframing component for me has been a game changer.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And as someone, um, in graduate school, someone who has, you know, full-time job, a graduate assistantship, and then a course load on top of that, plus whatever research and work, other work obligations, seeing anxiety as a positive has been very helpful from just not seeing it as overwhelming and disruptive. Um, and seeing it as something like, Oh, this is good.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'm glad it's here because now this project I need to work on, um, I'll actually start working on it rather than just being anxious and wondering like why I'm overwhelmingly feeling anxious. I think being able to pin those emotions, um, to something and saying it's having an impactful or important role and getting me to do that or accomplish that or, or, or see it through. Um,
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
has been incredibly helpful. And if I can just relate a short story, I was getting a tattoo the other day and I kind of thought to myself like, wow, I wish this didn't hurt so much. And then I reframed it as I'm glad this hurts because if it didn't, that would probably be a big, a big issue if I could just get stabbed with a needle and not feel anything.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Um, so I thought that that specific aspect was really impactful for me as reframing anxiety and sadness as, as things that have
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I would say it's also I've noticed that, you know, different points in my life I've been able to be more accepting of certain qualities and features that I have. And, you know, if people people have gotten to this point, they've listened to our conversation and being able to.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
talk about how i feel about my my looks and appearance openly like that um that was actually something i've never really done and then oh wow yeah yeah and i would always skirt around it so i'd had therapists in the past where you know maybe i'd mention it and they would kind of allow me to skirt around it a little bit and feel comfortable not really divulging all the details um
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Being able to directly kind of be face-to-face with that, so to speak, kind of made it so I feel comfortable telling other people that more casually now. So I was talking to a friend and kind of mentioned like, oh, yeah, like I've had trouble accepting my appearance, thinking I'm ugly or whatever it is.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And it's like that's reduced the initial inability to talk about it or the shock of having to kind of come face-to-face with it. So I found that pretty powerful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Oh, incredibly so, because I don't I don't really think about my appearance now. I just think about like with this, you know, if I want to talk to someone who I would be interested in, do we connect as people? Not am I attractive enough to be to warrant a relationship or to have?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Well, and I've noticed that when I had that, when I would hold on to that flaw too much and try to hide it, I would be very judgmental towards others.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, it's it's liberating from the perspective of I've been able to do a lot of really cool stuff. And I like I've been able to, you know, develop a great podcast and I've been able to kind of pursue my education. I've been able to coach people to, you know, top five or whatever in the nation. And it's not that I'm defined by those things, but it's really cool.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I've been able to do it and then know that I'm capable of doing that instead of... It's like this weird thing where all I wanted to do was get a PhD. And when I got into the program, I could feel myself diminishing it. Like, oh, well, this one doesn't count. And being able to address that not good enough component and be like, actually... it is, it is good enough.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
You know, it is like, it is what I need and what's right for me. Um, that's been really liberating. I guess that's like the word of it, but it just feels good. Um, Rather than kind of that imposter syndrome. And it's not that I don't feel that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I mean, when I was when I great David graciously allowed me to be in the Tuesday group and I felt that's the immediate sensation I had was I'm just why am I here? Who am I? What have I done? What do I know? But instead of giving into that, it's like, OK, I'll just contribute where I can and listen to people who know a lot and, you know, see what see what it's all about.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I loved it personally because I think going like a deep dive into a technique, which was the achievement addiction and then in watching you and Jill role play and then talk through different scenarios or how it could be, you know, reversed and then having everyone break out and then practice themselves, I thought was very, very insightful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And, you know, as someone who really appreciates like a lot of context and information, I felt like I was you know, a lot more understanding of something like achievement addiction after the fact. So I thought it was fantastic. And I can only imagine how beneficial it would be if you covered, you know, all of the techniques or, or, you know, as many as you could come up with really.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So I thought it was a great addition to.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Oh, you remember? I can't remember her name. I do remember there's a woman who was Australian in the group. Oh, yeah. And then there's a guy who was a general, like, I think it was a physician, like a general practitioner. And I think maybe Libby might have been a woman who was also in the group. But the leader, her name just escapes me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Oh, it was great. It was so much fun.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So I thought, again, it's interesting because I've seen a therapist for months and months and months, and I've had one prior to the one I'm currently seeing. And I felt like we never really were able to sink our teeth into the distortion that I have. There's this idea of like acceptance and acceptance.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I even ended up listening to a book that she recommended about acceptance, like the heart of the Buddha or something. I don't remember exactly what it was called, but I never felt like there was always a gap between being accepting and like cognitively knowing I should accept myself. And that was because I, I don't think we really had any like techniques or really practice make it stick.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
If that makes sense.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So like actually engaging with it with you, David, and engaging with the distortions really helped me feel what that was actually like versus just like intellectualizing it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. I will say I'm not good enough is one that probably is like an overarching.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I've had many. I would say that I struggle with... self-esteem and self-worth. And, uh, I have this overarching or overwhelming feeling that I won't be successful and I won't kind of live the life that I would like to live.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think I'm hopeless is one that I often come back to. That's like a general distorted thought.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, and right before I do that, I want to say the fact that I'm having a harder time thinking of distorted thoughts now probably speaks to our experience together. It's like, ah, I haven't really thought about that stuff since.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So I would say, yeah, the treatment didn't work.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It didn't work on me. I'm different. There's something special about me that won't allow it to change my thoughts.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would like to start with the thoughts about, oh, this therapy or this treatment wouldn't work.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. I think she would hit harder.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Well, I understand that I could be depressed and feel down at some point. And, you know, I'm okay with that because I think there are a lot of positives that come from feeling down and feeling sad. And... You know, kind of in knowing that, I also know that eventually I'm going to feel better because things tend to work like that. Like I felt bad in the past and I've felt better afterward.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So while that's true, I don't think it's, you know, reason enough for me to identify myself as someone who's just going to be depressed or going to be sad.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say that I won that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I felt like it was large.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I mean, I felt like it was huge. I think if I told myself that, I'd be very convinced.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Yeah. maybe I will be hopeless and maybe I will be hopeless for the rest of my life. And, you know, I guess that's something I can live with and something I can be okay with. Um, and, um, regardless, I still get to, I still get to do the things that I love to do and still get to, to be a part of a community of great people that I have, you know, next to me. Um,
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
So even if I feel hopeless, I can still share experiences with people and still share my life with them.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think I won.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I didn't feel as confident in that one.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Okay. Joshua, I know you, uh, have been feeling hopeless and that feeling's never going to go away because you're just not really, uh, worth having any hope. You just, it's just, it's something that you're never going to encounter.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I thought you won that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say big.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say huge. And the reason why I would say that is I connected with, maybe I tend to feel this way, or maybe this does come up for me often. Yeah. And that acceptance of it not being permanent, and then also there are great things they get to be involved with and accomplish and do. That really could, for me, put a really nice spin on it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
All right, Joshua. Here's the... cold, hard truth. You're always, yeah, I love truth.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. So you're just, you're meant to be hopeless. There's no way you're ever going to experience any form of hope. And that's just the burden you have to bear.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I thought that was great.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
No, I don't think you're going to be hopeless for the rest of your life. I think it's just a feeling that you're having. And it's not at all reflective of who you are, not at all reflective of what you've done, not at all reflective of your background, your upbringing, any of that. I think it's just a transient thing you're going to experience.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And eventually, you're going to be out of that and into greener pastures.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
It's absolutely true, 100%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
That's true.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. That was great.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Well, what, what specifically isn't good enough?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Yeah. I would, I just curious because, um, if, if I don't know, then there's something I can't work on or, or, or change. Um, And if I know, and I don't want to change it, then that's, that's perfectly okay too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I won that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I think it was large. Large or huge? Huge. Because when I know there's something specific, I, I feel like I have the power to change it. Um, And to relate this just to weightlifting a little bit, I like to look at those problems in the same way. It's like if I know why we're not making progress or seeing a result, I can change it and I can have a hand in that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
If you're just saying this is bad, that doesn't tell me, it doesn't give me a bunch of information. If you just say it's good too, it doesn't give me a bunch of information. It's like what specifically is good about it, what specifically is bad or could be changed.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Thank you.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
What's that?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'll have to put that quote on my podcast.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah. Well, I mean, personally, I like being different. I think it makes the world a more interesting place. And I think that difference is going to allow me to kind of stand out and be a really valuable part of, you know, the world. the people I coach and the friends and family that I have. Um, and I don't think that means the treatment isn't going to work because I'm different.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Um, I just think it means that I have a unique skillset and, and, uh, ability to, to kind of be a part of the communities I'm in. So, yeah, I think, I think it's going to work.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I won.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say big.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say huge.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Well, I think what I'm really appreciative of and what I found very useful is that I don't know if I had heard the relapse prevention training before.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
uh like example on the podcast so to experience it actually was very very helpful because those thoughts about the treatment not working are the exact same as the thoughts that preceded the treatment about myself yeah they're no different and they're using the same tools and techniques to say like uh this isn't really like something i have to take as truth at face value yeah
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
And I think it's important that you brought that up because when I first started coaching, I focused on kind of the sets and reps and performance. And now I'm just so people focused that like the performance matters. If I'm coaching, say, coaching Danny Myers, she placed fifth in the nation twice in a row. So last year she was fifth. This year she was fifth. Performance definitely matters.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
But how she feels like. Per as a person matters first. And then we can layer on the means and methods because that stuff's just I mean, it's it's kind of like stress. It's stimulus response. You do something, you get a response. But making sure the person who's carrying that out is cared for and taken care of, to me, is the most important thing. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I haven't always been like that, but I think the resources you put out, David, the resources great people like Stephen Hayes have put out and all the kind of the psychologists I've listened to and read about. It's reminded me that, you know, people are at the heart of this and then performance is just kind of like an adjunct to that. So I would say it's I'd say it's very, very important.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, thank you both so much. It's an honor. David, you're a role model to so, so many. And Rhonda, you're an absolute great host and contributor. Much appreciated.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, related to intimate connections, I won't find love, like romantic love. Mm-hmm.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Thank you both.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I it's kind of hard to say on a podcast. I think I'm ugly. So I think I'm not attractive and worth being with.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
They're very defeating. They feel like even if I were to intellectualize them and reject them, that it's just true regardless.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, it makes me feel hopeless.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say yesterday I felt probably like a 90 to 95 for various reasons, but I'd say it definitely contributes to I deal with anxiety quite a bit. A 95. How sad and down? I would say probably the same, 90, just thinking about the trajectory of my life and where it's going.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yes, I'd say I feel probably like 85, 90 with those as well. Okay, 85 to 90 on guilt and shame.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
85.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I'd say 85. 85.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
A little bit less. I'd say 70.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
75.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I would say those are probably the overwhelming feelings, shame, embarrassment, hopelessness.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
Yeah, I would say that that's very accurate. I. Yeah, I think like there's an aspect of like loneliness and maybe being understood and. Yeah. I know that people very close to me, like my best friends, I can talk to them and they'll empathize. But professionally, it's hard to hard to communicate that and feel authentic and be able to show up in a way that I'm actually feeling.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
427: Live work with Joshua--The Secret of Self-Esteem
I feel like you have to wear a mask and put your best clothes on, so to speak. And that that makes it even more difficult. I would just rather tell someone like I am really struggling and doing the best I can.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Go ahead and I'll wait.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, just to cut to the chase here a little bit, if you're on high doses of benzodiazepine, certainly don't try to treat yourself, but do it in conjunction with a medical doctor. What's the best way for you to taper?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
One other thing that you said that took me aback a little bit, you said, if I heard correctly, that if someone comes into the emergency room with a panic attack, instead of giving them a 30-day dose of benzos, you should refer them to a psychiatrist for CBT. And I don't think there are – there's only one psychiatrist in the United States who's good at CBT. And he doesn't do CBT anymore.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
He does team, which is awesome. And his name is Matt May. But I don't think there's a lot of psychiatrists who would – use psychotherapy rather than just more drugs.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And if I was in an emergency room, I'd want to be able to refer people with anxiety or depression to psychologists and clinical social workers and people who have expertise in team CBT or traditional CBT rather than people who were trained mainly to prescribe medications.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Awesome point. Let's look at Gray's intriguing question about music. And thank you for that detailed expertise, Matt. Much appreciated.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
No, it wasn't.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Josh. Well, thank you so much, Josh, for those kind comments. And I think we have a question from you, too, or maybe that's just the endorsement that I wrote. But it means a lot to get the question. Three is the Josh. Thanks, David, for techniques. And so maybe that's that that is that that third question there. But I really appreciate that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, I'll give my answer first because it's very short. Usually I give my answer last. But I agree with Gray that music can be beautiful, especially the songs we love, the certain songs for each of us just fill our heart with so much peace or sadness or beauty. And And that can be a magical and emotional experience.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I don't think we have to look for thoughts in the form of sentences to explain our reaction to music. I'm not aware of thoughts triggering the reaction to music. I once asked Beck, you know, aren't there perceptions other than like a sentence with a negative or positive thought that can figure our emotions? And he said, yes, cognitive therapy is not about thoughts. It's about perceptions.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And, for example, in anxiety, the perception that makes you anxious might be a picture in your mind. Let's say you have a fear of elevators. You may picture that elevator closing off. And so you're terrified of elevators, thinking that the walls are going to crush you or the oxygen is going to disappear or you're going to get trapped. And you kind of picture this.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I thought that was very liberating that cognitive therapy is all about, it should be called perception therapy. And I guess you could say that music is a kind of auditory perception that can move our hearts or anger us to warfare, you know, that there's a lot of kinds of emotional reactions to music.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And that's about all I have to say, because I don't have expertise in this particular area, but I thought it was a really neat question.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And remember that we have a podcast on the four techniques for working with anxiety. The hidden emotion is certainly an important one, but it's only one of four. And if you want to get complete elimination of anxiety, and you may be doing this already, but you want to use not only hidden emotion model, but the motivational model, the cognitive model, and the exposure model. As well.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Maybe that book is good. When I hear a question like that, I have a very powerful answer. I don't know. Yeah. When people try to explain things in words that don't make any sense to me, I'd rather just say, I don't know. There's a lot of things we don't know. And just because we're a psychiatrist or a psychologist or whatever doesn't mean that we have special insights into everything.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, that's right. There we go.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Right. That's a beautiful Buddhist thought. But what does it have to do with music? I know.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah. Okay. Well, let's bullshit on some other topic. By the way, I see that Josh's question, that was the beautiful endorsement you wrote, was the third question.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I have an additional partial answer for Josh, and that you'd be welcome, because you are a mental health professional, and all strengths who are listening, whether you're a pastoral counselor, a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, whatever, if you're doing clinical work, You'd be welcome to join either my Jill Levitt and my Tuesday group at Stanford or Rhonda's Wednesday group.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Oh, in November.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
So, yeah. And then your group is once every other week. No, no. It's every week.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Did you think we were talking about you, Rhonda?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah. Well, you can give that information in a minute. But when is your group meet, Matt?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
So we'll put the contact information for all three of us. And Rhonda, you can add the contact information for your group, who is Anna Teresa. Is she still the contact person? Yes. Yeah. And we'll put that in. And then ours is Ed Walton for our Tuesday group for 5 to 7 p.m. That's the Stanford group. And Matt, you'll see his website and email too in the context.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
So if you are a shrink, we would love to have you join us for a period of time or a long period of time. And we practice team CBT techniques. Okay, on to question number four.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But thank you so much because we do share our best for free. And when someone like you writes in and says, hey, the message is getting through, thank you. That means a tremendous amount to all of us. So thank you so much.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Okay, I'll let you two take first crack at this, and then I'll come in at the end. If you like, if you want to answer it. I have some thoughts on that. How about you, Rhonda?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Okay, Matt, take it away. What's your thoughts for Harold?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
That's great. I love your answer, Matt. That's brilliant. I might add that if some of our listeners are interested in taking a look at the Feeling Great app, we have a class in there called Your PhD in Shoulds and talk about specific techniques to get rid of self-directed shoulds like I shouldn't be so screwed up, I should be better than I am, etc.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Other directed shoulds, when you're telling yourself person X, Y, or Z is a jerk, he shouldn't be that way, he's got no right to be that way. And then world directed shoulds, which is kind of like the ones you have, life shouldn't have so much suffering and so little joy. So that's my first point. My second... I mean, you really hit the nail on the head there, Matt.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
That was brilliant, what you said. I loved it. The second thing, I wrote back and told Harold, if he were in a session with me, how I would respond to him, or if we were just friends talking. And that's the... The Maury anti-moaner technique that is described in Feeling Good.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
When someone is just complaining, complaining, complaining, I respond with the disarming technique, thought and feeling empathy, I feel statement, stroking and inquiry. I don't try to help the person. And I give some examples in the show notes. Like if you be... In fact, let's just demonstrate it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I'll be Harold and one of you can be the friend and modify how to respond to a complainer using the five secrets. Does either of you want to give it a try?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
You know, life is just so much suffering and so little joy. That's so true.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Okay, what grade did you give yourself?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yes, I agree. And I thought that you didn't try to help. You were just a good listener. And the big mistake that everyone makes, except for you, Matt, and a few other people in the world, is they try to help the person or encourage the person or solve the problem. That forces the whiner, the complainer, just to keep going. To keep complaining.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
So that's how I would handle it on an interpersonal level. What I also said to Harold, and let me go back to my notes here, is that this is nearly always a hidden emotion problem.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
When someone is obsessing about the meaning of life or some vague thing, there's often something real in their life that they're upsetting about, that they're not confronting, they're not dealing with, and instead they're just kind of complaining about life in general. And the solution is often to find the thing that you're really kind of upset about.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I exchanged a couple emails with Harold, and what turned out is he had made a kind of a common error in dating and got rejected. And what it appeared to be is that he was talking to some woman, and was saying, you know, would you like to go out sometime?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And she said, yes, but when he tried to pin her down, she said, oh, I have to check my schedule, and I'll get back to you in about a week or so. And he agreed to that. And she's really giving him the runaround, and he's falling for it. And I don't mean to blame women. Women will do that. Men will do that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But that's something you don't want to fall for, that kind of thing, and get out of that situation. Because what happened then, that she just made him wait a week, and then she didn't contact him, and then he contacted her back. And then she said no at that point. And so he just kind of had a week of his life scooped out. And you don't want to give someone that kind of control over you.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And, you know, when people are having trouble with dating, you know, I sometimes suggest the book... intimate connections, which he'd actually said he'd read three times, which I was really, really proud of him.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And then maybe get a colleague or something, a therapist or a friend who's pretty good in the dating arena and learn a bit more about dating strategies, because there's a lot to learn about it and to focus on the real problems in your life. But there's a lot of other techniques one can use in addition to the ones we've talked about here.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I want to say that I admire Harold because he's put in tremendous effort into his personal recovery efforts. And I've never met anyone who put in that kind of effort who didn't get really good results that just really trying will eventually open the door you're looking to. You're looking to get open. But it can be frustrating.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I know I was really lame in the dating world myself for a long time and everything I did was incorrect. and eventually I kind of found a mentor who was, you know, well, let's say a shameless womanizer, so everyone will hate me for saying that, but he was. He was Palo Alto's, you know, most famous womanizer, and women used to say how awful he was.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
All he cared about was sex, but he used to go around just picking up women, All day long. And behind his back, they'd tell him, talk about how awful he was. But when he was around, they always wanted to be around him. And he was having a pretty good time.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, it's fun to get a note all the way from Bangladesh. It seems impossible, but life has gotten so amazing with all kinds of wonderful and awful as well, unexpected things happening all around the world. I'll give my answer quickly and then see what additional things Matt might have or... You, Rhonda, might have.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And he took me under his wing and kind of gave me a lot of pointers and tips on how you date and what that world is like and what works and what doesn't work. That was the thing I loved most. the most when I was in clinical practice because 60% of my patients were single and didn't know how to get into the dating scene.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I learned so much from that fellow who in my book I called Bill to disguise his identity, but his real name was Michael. But I couldn't find him. You know, I know his last name, but I want to ask permission. And I called up a lot of people with his name, but it wasn't the same guy, so I never knew what happened to him. But we made a weird friendship. He lived with his mommy.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
He said he was a mommy's boy, and he had a part-time job at Bloomingdale's selling men's clothing, and he had a motor scooter. not a car that he rode around on. But there was something about him that women just found absolutely irresistible. And I kind of learned eventually how that works.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
So there is a lot to learn, and sometimes if you're too sincere and too nice, you get shot down, and that's true if you're a guy or a lady. And...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Talk about that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah. Well, it was a joy working with you, Matt. It's always been a joy knowing you as a friend and working with you as a colleague and formerly as a supervisor when you were a psychiatric resident. And it was just so much fun. And it's still so much fun.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But I'll never forget the night that you had gotten over all this anxiety and being jerked around by women and the shoe suddenly was on the other foot. And I remember you came to me once and said, David, I'm in terrible condition and I need your help. And I said, well, what's the problem? And you said, I got confused and made a mistake and I have three dates scheduled for tonight.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Oh, yes, that's right. Happy New Year. Happy Rosh Hashanah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But there was a study, and this was, you know, it was a good 20 years ago, but it's still vivid in my mind. I don't even remember the reference to it, but I'm sure it exists somewhere on the web. But it was a study done at Harvard. And the conventional thing in going off of benzodiazepines, that's drugs like Xanax, Librium, Valium, Ativan, and that type of thing.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, what is the overwhelmingly main, massively important thing to do to help someone who's complaining about world events? Because there's plenty of world events to complain about. So let's say in the empathy phase, someone's upset about politics and the Ukraine and Palestine and Israel and Putin and Alzheimer's.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
all the awful things in the world, big and small, and you've empathized, and they give you an A in empathy. What is the overwhelmingly most important key to successful treatment, Rhonda, with that person?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Absolutely. That's it. And you don't get hooked into, you know, throwing help at people just because they're talking about problems. You know, if a miracle happened in today's session, what miracle would you be happy hoping for? Right. And we certainly can't end the war in Ukraine or, you know, cure the political quagmire in the United States.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But we have all kinds of ways to work with someone, but it depends on what they want help with.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, it's a good one. And the next one is a great one. I'll be right back. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I'll give you my answer right now. I have to take a pee, and so I'll be right back to give my answer.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, I'm back. I think it just made us seem more human, but that's just my point.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, it's a short question, so let's push ahead.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, now we're going to go on to question number five from Maritz.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Okay, I can give a quick first answer, but I have to correct one thing. You said real psychological disorders with known causes. All psychological disorders have unknown causes, but there are real brain disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar that are really due to some biological error in the brain that we don't yet know.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And at my hospital in Philadelphia, we developed a large cognitive therapy program for the people in our inner city neighborhood. And there were many of them had schizophrenia or bipolar. including some needing hospitalization kind of involuntarily because they were so severely out of control. But when I've worked with people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
They're all so-called, used to be called minor tranquilizers. is that a lot of them, like Xanax, go in and out of the blood very quickly. And so when it goes into your blood, you just feel wonderful. And all your cares are gone. And if it's evening, you can fall asleep and wake up feeling terrific. But the problem and your anxiety is improved or goes away completely.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I've worked with them in the same way I would work with anybody. I don't try to treat schizophrenia. Sometimes people with schizophrenia need to have neuroleptics if they're in a state of acute, severe paranoia or psychosis. But the things that I would be helping them with, say, as an outpatient, is exactly the same. Is there something that you would like help with?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And generally it's with their moods, in which case we'd pull out a daily mood log and write down their negative thoughts and the event and the emotions and identify the distortions and talk back to those thoughts. And I've worked with many, many people with schizophrenia, but I'm not trying to challenge their delusions or paranoia, just give them a greater sense of self-esteem.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
People with bipolar, I've treated many people with bipolar disorder, And again, during the acute phase, they may get so, of mania, get so psychotic that they need one hospitalization to understand what they're dealing with and to get on some kind of mood stabilizer like lithium is the one I used. I think they're using some other medications that work fairly well.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But they need the same help as anyone with the feelings of depression. It seemed like bipolar patients often had a lot of perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking and thinking they had to be so great to be loved or to be worthwhile. And I found that helping them with that was life-changing for many of them. And some of my most patients I look back most fondly had bipolar issues.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And and and before I learned cognitive therapy or team therapy, I for a while I ran the lithium clinic at the VA hospital in Philadelphia. And all I had was drugs, drugs, drugs to offer. And those poor guys were going in and out of the hospital like a revolving door. And I can't remember a single one of them who seemed to have a decent adjustment to life, to be honest with you.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
There was a lot of alcoholism and a lot of unhappiness and a lot of pills that we were prescribing. And once I started doing my outpatient practice, I still got bipolar patients, but they did just fantastic because I had something to offer them by way of psychotherapy. I also would say that working with people with schizophrenia or bipolar, for all of us, the therapeutic relationship
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
is important. We all want someone to feel fond of us and to care about us and to approve of us and accept us. But I think that's especially true with schizophrenia and bipolar, that the kindness and warmth that you extend to people with schizophrenia or bipolar, many of them will never forget you. And it means so much. But you also want to have technical skills.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And let me say finally that at our hospital in Philadelphia, we had an inpatient unit for people with extreme psychotic episodes. And one of our clinical social workers created a series of cognitive therapy games. We didn't have team therapy yet at that time, but we had cognitive therapy And he created about 40 games. And he would have the patients on the inpatient unit play these 45-minute games.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Like instead of group therapy, you get together with a group and you kind of play a game designed to illustrate some aspect of cognitive therapy. Like there's the paranoia game and the high George game and things like that. And they really enjoyed playing those games, and they would learn about, like, the cognitive distortions, like mind reading, for example, the paranoia game.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But then when it goes out of your body, you go into a kind of withdrawal, which is the opposite. The anxiety comes back and you get insomnia. And the conventional wisdom was to convert patients on Xanax to a long acting patient. benzo like Klonopin, which has a long half-life, so it goes out of the blood very slowly, so you don't get those sharp withdrawal dips, which happen quickly and intensely.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
He would have all of them sit around a circle and give them an envelope with, if there were 12 patients with 12 pieces of paper, and say, I want you to write down one nice thing about each person here, and then fold it and hand that piece of paper to them. And then when someone gives you a piece of paper, put it in your envelope, don't read it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And so they're all busy, you know, writing down nice things about each other and handing them around. And so it's not like typical, you know, inpatient treatment. Now, keep in mind, they're seeing a psychiatrist, they're getting medications that they might need, but they're playing these games all day long.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And so they hand them around, and then he would go around to them one by one and say, do you think you know what people said about you on those slips of paper in your envelope? And they'd say, oh, yes, I know exactly what they're saying about me because I can hear people's thoughts. and say, okay, what do you think they're saying about you?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And this one woman said, they're saying they think I'm a prostitute and they're scheming to try to get my gold. And then George said to her, how strongly do you believe that? And she said, I know that's, because I know that's what they're thinking because I can hear their thoughts. And he said, why don't you take and read them out loud one by one.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And then she took out the first one and it said, you know, Rose, I want you to know that you're the person on the inpatient unit who's helped me the most, even more than the doctors and nurses, because when I'm upset and I talk to you, you really listen. God bless you, Rose. I can't thank you enough.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And every piece of paper had some beautiful comment by someone, and tears came to her eyes because when people have schizophrenia, they're often hard to relate to, so they don't hear a lot of affectionate and kind comments from other people. We get kind of frustrated with people with schizophrenia, and we argue with them about their hallucinations and delusions.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And this was a very different way of connecting. And we didn't have the goal of curing anyone with schizophrenia, but just helping them develop joy and self-esteem given their severe condition.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
biological problem and I used to see they would show me letters that they got from families or patients who had been discharged from our inpatient unit just saying and they were often written in kind of broken English you know not very extremely articulate but things like God bless you for the helping me so much or helping my my son so much on the inpatient unit and things like that and
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And the neighborhood really, really appreciated our programs. They even had a feeling good day every six months at the hospital. They'd give out feeling good T-shirts. They started a feeling good jazz band. And it was quite the thing. But it was really based on bringing compassion to a group of people who had very few resources.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Well, the question is just how do you help someone with bipolar or schizophrenia, so-called real brain disorder, as opposed to just depression or anxiety? Right, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And so they randomly assigned... People who had dependency on, I think it was Xanax was the one that they were using. And they first switched them over to Klonopin. And there were two groups, random assignment groups for the patients. And one group just got the traditional Xanax.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I had a young teenager referred to me who had one of the... severe brain disorders more in the area of limited intelligence. I'm trying to think of which one. It might have to do with your brain getting squashed during the birth process. I'm not sure. But she had very, very limited intelligence.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
mental functioning, and she was in a high school, but in the special classes for people with severe mental, you know, cognitive impairments. And she had been getting all A's, but she got mad at her teacher, so she refused to study for some quiz, and she got an F. And And then she became suicidal because she flunked that quiz. And her parents brought her to me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I asked her, just as I would with anyone, you know, what are your thoughts? What are you telling yourself? And she said, because I flunked that test, I'm going to flunk everything from now on. And that's just the same kind of thought that anyone would have. She just put it in her own words. But, you know, it's an overgeneralization, all or nothing thinking, discounting the positive thinking.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
You know, mental filtering, fortune telling, emotional reasoning, self-blame, you know, should statements, all of that stuff. But I worked with her in a very simple way. I just said, the issue here is what grades did you get, you know, in your quizzes before this one? She said, I always got an A.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And, um, and then I would ask, uh, do you, do you think it's possible that if you start studying again and maybe talk to the teacher, what you were so mad at him about that, that then you could start getting A's again. Um, and, and, and then she would say something like, are you saying that I, it's not necessarily true that I'm going to flunk everything, uh, for the rest of my life.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I said, yeah, that's what I've been hinting at, uh, And then she would say, could you explain that again? I'm trying to understand this. And we'd go through that 30 times in a row, the exact thing. And then by the end of the session, she said, are you saying that even though I flunked this one quiz, it doesn't mean I'm going to flunk all of my quizzes from now on?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And I said, that's what I've been trying to hint at. And she said, oh, I got it. I'm feeling so much better now. And so it was the same thing. It's just presenting things in a way that people can understand.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And again, it was sad because the goal wasn't to remove her severe brain damage, whatever it was that caused her very tragic and horrific cognitive impairment, but it was just to give them the gift of self-love and joy and self-esteem.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And it was using exactly the same kind of techniques, but delivering them in a way that someone can understand that takes into account who the person is, what is their social functioning, what are their religious beliefs, their religion, their race, their social structure. How can you explain these things in a way that someone will understand from their point of view?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
withdrawal, slow withdrawal, like over a period of weeks, you know, switch them to Klonopin and then slowly withdraw the Klonopin by expert psychopharmacologists at Harvard. And the other group got the same exact pharmacologic treatment, but they also had a group cognitive therapy group every week.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
The principles are always the same.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
We can. One is just John expressing gratitude to us for our answers on positive reframing, which I have in the show notes that people can read if they like. That was from a previous episode. Okay, why don't I read that? Well, I was going to say we could skip it and go on to the last question, number seven.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
It's actually not at all complicated, number seven.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
No, it's only 30 seconds.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And the upshoot of it, as I recall, and I don't recall the details exactly, but there was a massive difference between the groups. And most of the patients, a good 80% of the patients in the cognitive therapy group were able to withdraw successfully from benzodiazepines. And in the pure psychopharmacology withdrawal group, only like a minor percentage
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
What Rhonda is this?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, I love your, okay. I love your questions, Rhonda. And you want to know what are the four feared fantasy techniques. And there's four of them. For the approval addiction, they're for self-defeating beliefs. And if you're working on the approval addiction or perceived perfectionism, then you do the I judge you feared fantasy technique.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
If it's the achievement addiction, you do the high school reunion feared fantasy. If it's the love addiction, you do the rejection feared fantasy. And if it's submissiveness, you do no practice. And now you know the answer.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And we could go on much longer on this and other role-playing techniques, but it is Rosh Hashanah, the first chapter. day of the Jewish New Year, if I understand it correctly. And our love goes out to everyone who's celebrating Rosh Hashanah. You won't hear this until much later. It'll be like four or five weeks from now.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But we still want to send our love and warmth and best wishes to all people in our podcast fans and people all around the world of the Jewish faith. Our love and Our hearts are with all of you. And we're so sad at so much trauma now in the world affecting Jewish people and the country of Israel. And I at least want to express my love and support.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, me too. Okay.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
OK, goodbye, everybody. Thank you for listening. We really appreciate all of you. We love all of you. And we're so glad you join us here on the podcast, sending your questions and criticisms and your praise. And and we just we love having the dialogue and turning it into a dialogue.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, that's right. Trialogue. Yeah, that's right. OK, so.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
fraction of them like 20 percent or 25 percent only were able to to to withdraw and so the moral of the story was that the cognitive therapy support greatly at least in that one study that i saw enhanced the success in withdrawing from benzos and i've also had some uh personal experience with this, not with that exact approach.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But when Xanax came out, the drug companies make a lot of claims initially for drugs that turn out not to be true. six months after the drug has been on the market. And when Xanax came out, they claimed it was not addictive and that it was helpful for depression and anxiety.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And so I thought, you know, sometimes I was having trouble getting to sleep at night, so I thought, well, I'll take the smallest dose, a one-quarter milligram of Xanax, and I would fall asleep, you know, quickly. and wake up the next morning feeling fantastic with no side effects or anything. And I thought, man, this is a magic bullet, this drug.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But then after being on it for a number of weeks, I realized that I was getting addicted to it and wanted to take two of them rather than And one of them. And I thought, this sucks. This is not good. And so I stopped taking them. And I went into withdrawal, which lasted about three weeks. And the withdrawal consisted just of, you know, anxiety and difficulty sleeping.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
But I just kind of toughed it out because I understood that that was just, you know, the natural chemistry happening in my brain. And after that, I was fine. And I think I probably did a gradual. I probably went from a full pill to a half a pill for a few days and then to a quarter pill for a few days and then no pill.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah, and then there was one pill I took once. I didn't do a lot taking this kind of pill, but another one came out that was touted for sleep. And it was also a more potent benzo that put you right to sleep. And I took one pill on one occasion, and I went into severe withdrawal from that. It put me to sleep, but as it went out of my blood, I got really wired up, something pretty intense.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
It was awful. And so I never took it again. Matt, you might remember the name of that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
No, uh-uh. I don't remember the name of it. Klonopin or Klonazepam? Did you say Klonopin?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
I was just talking about Klonopin, the study at Harvard. Oh, okay. Maybe you didn't tune into that, but I'm very familiar.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah. David, you're very boring. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yeah. So I don't prescribe them for anything. My colleague, Henny Westraw, a number of years back, and I think I put this reference...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Yes, in the show notes, but she reviewed the entire world literature on treating anxiety, and she concluded that benzodiazepines not only are not effective in the treatment of anxiety, they always make anxiety worse because you just get dependent on them, and then they make it almost impossible to recover anxiety.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
And she said the most effective treatment for anxiety is cognitive therapy with no medications. And that's how I've always treated anxiety for the past 25 or 30 years. So now I will shut up and give it over to my better angels, you might say, Rhonda and Richard.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Great. What do you think, Matt?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
422: Ask David: Getting off Benzos; Music and Emotions; Negative Thoughts about the World; and more
Or Xanax.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Thank you to Samsung Galaxy for sponsoring this episode.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Do you and Claude think about, like Paige and I think about that with our kiddos. Are you and Claude thinking about that?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
You like working out. Not working out, but you like playing basketball. For sure.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It's interesting. Like my son at school, the great state of California, shout out, all kids in public school get free lunch and free breakfast. That's nice. So on Tuesday and Thursdays, they have pizza and they get it out. It gets brought in from Domino's. Wow. Yeah. Delish. High end. Delish. Not like the little French roll pizzas like we had.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
And they have a lovely salad bar for the kids, like, you know, fruits and some veggies, cucumbers, carrots. And each kid only gets one slice. But Tuesday and Thursday, usually we pack his lunch three days a week. And we know Tuesday and Thursday, he loves getting the pizza. And so we don't make it a thing.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
We like a barter. This is the perfect barter. Perfect barter. And put our face not on a 787, but a regional jet, a CRJ 1295. No problem. The jet that goes down? Yes. Inevitably? Our faces in the Potomac.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
We just go, yeah, have your one slice of pizza Tuesday and Thursday and Friday night or Tuesday, Thursday night will be chicken and rice or something rather healthy. But we don't want to limit it.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah. Wow. We're so deep. We really are. Speaking of food, I have brought from a little eatery. You're kidding me. Not well known. It's called Russ and Daughters. You're kidding me. Are you familiar with this? They happen to have a location on 34th Street straight out of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
So I got two and I thought we could do halves and halves. Halves and halves. Halves and halves.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Okay, so I went a tuna, and then I added, they didn't have lettuce, but I added the onions. No capers.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Tuna salad from Toro. Can you imagine? Jesus Christ. This is the best. I'm so sorry. You can turn off. We are such fat, fat, fatty here.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I'm having the whole thing. Yeah, you can take a nice five-minute break. Come back in. But I'm telling you, shout out Russ and Daughters in New York City.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It really should be. And then this, of course, the classic Nova scallion cream cheese.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Thank you. And these bagels aren't that big. Yes. They're well-sized. They're designer.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
They can't wait to sponsor us now. Oh my God. Shout out to those poor souls. We apologize. It's horrible. So this is how I get it planned out. I'm here doing a talk for Meta. Heard of it?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I have no idea, and I don't want to know. Caper, you know I like caper because it also means a heist. Okay. Let's go have a caper. Yeah. Oh, this is so good. We're on a bit of a caper. Benjamin, I just want to share with you because I like sharing things that mean something to me. Yes. You mean something to me. Thank God. We go out. What am I? This is Ben. This is my Ben. You do.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
This is, you know. I'm arm candy. I'm your arm candy. Yes. Yes. But you know that my Galaxy S25 Ultra means a lot to me too.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It's replacing you adjacent. Listen, it's the ultimate AI companion. We know this.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
But are you familiar with night video? Are you seeing what's happening here?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
You ever tried to shoot video on your phone? It's past magic hour. It's now dark out. It's like, this sucks.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It's just not good. No. But, you know, finally now with night video, low light situations, noisy backgrounds, things, they finally, Samsung has figured out how to optimize the settings so that when you're filming at night, you're getting those wow worthy videos that we want.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
And have you used night video? Because I'm out here on them streets at the club and I'm shooting with it. It's literally a way in which for me to capture things in low light situations and still make it look beautiful. Yeah. And things at night are beautiful, Josh.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
And it's the audio eraser. It's AI powered, right? Yes.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
You know where we're at at night. The club. Oh, yeah. We're partying. Yeah. So we need that night video, right? So it looks cool. You know, it's a dark club. We want it to look. We're fist pumping. We're popping bottles. Then you got the audio eraser because you got all this background noise. You got to isolate, man. You got to get that quality.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Well, the truth of the matter is the Galaxy S25 Ultra is available at Samsung.com.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Thank you. Baruch Hashem. Listen. Okay. And for only $65, you too can get two bagels from Russ and Daughters. No, it was actually like 15 bucks each. It's not crazy. That's pretty good. Yeah. Listen, Russ and Daughters, man. Oh my God.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Anything hot? Let's see. What's going on in the world? Anything steamy? Okay. Let's see. Bisexuality is a near universal experience in primates, humans included. I've been telling you. This is from the New York Post. But which way does your sexuality swing? The bisexual cohort, those who are sexually attracted to both men and women, is growing.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
A 2024 Gallup poll showed that 4.4% of American adults say they are bisexual, including 57.3% of those who already identify as LGBTQ+.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
But 57%, so more people than who say they are just purely straight.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I read it as showed that 4.4% of American adults say they are bisexual, including 57.3% of those. Oh, okay.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
He wore, he did a tribute, a testimony to Benson Boone's incredible performance. Is that his name, Benson Boone? I think so. I feel like a dad. Yeah, no, he's Benson Boone.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I'm not. I'm just totally open to it, except it doesn't do much for me.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I fall in love with men emotionally. Me too. Right. Spiritually. Of course. Give a nice kiss on the cheek. Yes. I love get half a lip. You know, you kind of go in.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I just don't. And, like, that's also the thing for me. Like, whenever it becomes politicized or controversial in any way, I'm like, are you freaking nuts? What is? Like, just in general, where, like, recently there was something about, I don't know whether it was in the government or whatever, but removing the plus. From the LGBTQ. It's like, let's just assume there's a lot we don't know.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I'm pretty sure 30, 40 years ago, we couldn't have known what we know today when it comes to the spectrum of sexuality and being attracted to whomever. Just like, just let people love.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Always. Always. Always. What about, what are you currently worried about that you have no business being worried about?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a present, which is why they call it presents. God, that deserves a bite of tuna. Wow. That deserves a bite of tuna. You got a foot in yesterday and a foot in tomorrow, and you're pishing all over today. Ooh. Yes. That's good. I know. Josh. Moe Robbins. Josh. We could do what she's, Mel Robbins, who is it?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It'd be cool if his name was Mercedes Benson.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
The slogan for mandolin should be, who needs fingertips? Not me. I've lost two fingertips this year from a mandolin. Slice right off. Awful. Well, did you know that more than half of Americans say they're turned on when their partner does chores? Why an untidy home could be a deal breaker. Shout out. More than half of Americans are turned on by their partners doing chores.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
According to a new survey studying the link between home cleanliness and romance, with a vast majority admitting an untidy home could be a deal breaker. Deal breaker. The most alluring chore of it all, according to experts at house cleaning company Home Aglow, doing the dishes, an everyday act that could wind up sparking a night of passion. Love it. It's good to be at home. Hey, Paige!
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Thousand percent. Hundred percent. All day long. We have a, you don't have this problem. We have a crawl space in our garage. It's not really a crawl. It's kind of like a, we have a very tall garage. It's almost two stories tall. I always wanted to get one of those car elevators. You should. Sick. Sick. Sick. Love that.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
So we have like an attic space, you know, about 10 feet above and it's a big platform. We can keep boxes. So whenever we go travel or whatever, my wife goes, please put the luggage up there or please put the kids old car seats up there.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Now I got to get, first of all, we don't have a ladder ready to go. We have one of the expandable ladders. So I got to expand this ladder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now just know in six to 10 years, I will be paralyzed.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
God forbid. It's too scary. It's too scary. I get up there. First, you don't even want to know this Jew getting up there. So first of all, I'm opening, you know, and I put it next to the space. Then I put on shoes because I go, if something happens and I got to jump, I don't want to break an ankle falling in bare feet. Sure. It's a crawl space, right?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Maybe we go find the set where they're shooting today in New York City. I'm in. Quick crime scene. I'm in. Just as a fun aside, I did a movie with the great Peter Herman, who is Mariska Hargitay's husband. Yes. And I'll never forget he once said to me, he's like, you know, we love our family and it's great. And, you know, and I do well. I mean, I don't do well like my wife. Yeah. Peter? We know.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Should we get to a speak pipe? Yes. If you want to ask us questions, if you want advice, go to speakpipe.com slash good guys. Keep it brief. Brevity is key. We don't want your what are your nuts is. No. They're awful. We don't want your inquiries about our goings ons. If you need advice or have a question, you don't know. And listen, we're blessed. We get 30, 40, 50 a week. Million.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I'm sorting through this, this track. Yeah. Too much. Just short question advice. No inquiries. No, this is not a comment box.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Right. Scorpio. Yeah. Well, this first one is from... Incarcerated. Incarcerated.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I feel like I could, when the pickles get brought at Second Avenue Deli, at Factor's, at Cantor's, and you know, I gotta be downing 10 ounces of pickles. I think so too. 10 ounces to a pound.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah, no, it's- You need a pickle fridge. Some people have a meat fridge. A pickle fridge. Yeah. But again, they're not perishable, so it doesn't need to be refrigerated until opened. True. Okay. But they leaked, which is weird.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yes, the great Len, my friend, my bet on the West Coast says that he works in trucking logistics, 20 years, the master, master operator. Now he too, sometimes will run into a problem where the driver of the big rig, Tough on turns. And the pallets, the freight shifted, as you know. Yeah. You're a huge beverage entrepreneur.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Sounds like me. He's an amazing guy. Just the Hargitay, the Hargitay Hermans. Come on the show. We'd love to have you. A gorgeous family.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Right. Or it's awful. Continue. And you, have you ever had Spritz rejected?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah. It's interesting. Like, so Len basically every like six months to a year will go some rejected, you know, drinks, food, whatever. is now at our truck yard. Yes. Because the people who made the sports drink or whatever, like we don't want it back if it was rejected because it shifted in transit or whatever. So then he goes, would you like 800 bottles of Mamba Forever body armor? Wow.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
And I go, thank you, but no thank you. Where the hell is that going to go? I know.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
His garage is just, it's a beverage paradise.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
And did you see on Kyrie Irving's live, Kyrie Irving, who plays for the team, the Dallas Mavericks, who traded Luka to Los Angeles. Luka, unless I misread this, was on the live saying, get away from that organization. That's wild. He feels done dirty. He was done dirty. I'm not going to get on the wrong side of a Serbian. I've seen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Oh, yeah. What? Or is he Slovenian?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Well, you know who they're not going to mess up? This next caller. Let's hear from Anonymous. They might. You never know.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
The strangest part is that you would couple a beautiful homemade dish with an Olive Garden salad. Oh, that too. Weird. Wild.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
If you get Olive Garden salad to go, can you call up the store and have them deliver more? More. Yeah. Unlimited. Yeah.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah, ZD Gate is really funny. And I, first of all, communal refrigerators in general, and I'll say this about the Dear Media office, they smell. Yeah, for sure. Of course they do. No one's cleaning it out.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
But, and then they never get cleaned out. And then they're always, they're always threatening. Everything's getting thrown out on Thursday.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
So good. So many interests you have. I know. The things you know. I know. And the things I don't. Oh, well, okay. So yes, you're flying. I plan this out. So I go, okay, I'm going to fly at night. You fly at night because at night, this is a wash. This means nothing. Right. So you utilize the time you'd be laying in bed. Yeah. I could fly in at four Tuesday afternoon. I landed at midnight.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
All I have to say to Leonardo is, Bom dia. Beautiful. Hello in Portuguese. Amazing. I love Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I love Rio de Janeiro. Love. I love... Who's your great player? Neymar? Sure. I love it all. Soccer? Football? Gisele Bundchen? Sure.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I would love to. There's Brazilian Jews. There are. There are? We would do great in Brazil. I'm in. Anywhere but here. Yes. This place is gross.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Insane. Nuts. So nuts. My what are you nuts moment of the week, as I mentioned, as I teased, I flew the great United here. Love it. So wonderful. Wonderful airline. Polaris. My flat. I am schluffing, which is the Yiddish word for sleeping. I am having a nice schluff.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Because they have nice bedding. I got to say, again, not sponsored. Yeah. Because you usually get a pillow that's full of tissues.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Horrible. Horrible. They give you two. They give you a memory foam and a nice down Saks Fifth Avenue thing. Wow. So I'm sleeping. I'm schluffing. I'm beautiful. I feel... I wake up, mouth guard in, you know, I'm, yeah. The woman goes, the flight attendant goes, we're landing. It's time to wake up. I go, oh, sorry. Okay, gotcha. Now I go, look at where we are in space right now.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
You know, so I go up on the board, the little thing, and I see flight tracker, 32 minutes till landing. Till landing? Till landing.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
The producer passed out. It stinks so bad in here. Sorry, man.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Thank you to Samsung Galaxy for sponsoring this episode. Get your Galaxy S25 Ultra right now at Samsung.com.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
What am I doing? I'm sleeping more. Yep. You know? Yep. So I get on the flight and then this is what I do. I book a hotel airport. Look at me. Look at me, listeners. You book a hotel airport for the night before and the night after. Right? Yep. Check-ins at three. No. You landed at 6am.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
That's it. So I land. Bring your own padlock. That's it. I bring the little door alarm thing. You know, if it moves, woo, woo. Startle, take out my night guard. Fucking taekwondo. So I get there, 6 a.m. now. There's a Newark Marriott Hotel. Yes. It's nice, close, nice. $3.70 a night. Nuts. Nuts. Too much.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
It's a convention center? All Marriotts have a convention component and or ballroom. Interesting.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Where are you getting married? The airport hotel. I wanted to make it easy for people flying in.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
After parties at Hudson News. It's good. And so I go, but here's the thing. I know the hierarchy of the Marriott chain. And this is not sponsored in any way. And it should be. It should be. It's a shonda that it's not. Beyond. Now, as we all know, the Marriott Courtyard is the ultimate Marriott sort of commuter hotel. Yes. Great. No frills. Perfect. Modern. Beautiful.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
But then they have a class adjacent to the Courtyard. They're called the Fairfield Inn Suites and the Spring Hill Suites. Yeah. Where is no frills as possible, except they have breakfast. Yes. Gorgeous continental breakfast. Yes. They have coffee in the lobby. Yes. And a kitchenette. Fantastic. This I know. I look up the Spring Hill, which is a half a mile away from the airport. 110 a night.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I said, I'll take the ADA room. They said, sir, you're completely abled. I said, so you think? I can't do these ADA rooms.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah. When they hit the doorbell, the lights flicker.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
In the first 15 minutes, we've gone after the people who's tragically died in the Potomac.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
So I slept four hours on the plane. Okay. And we'll talk about that because that was its own Woody and Nuts. And then I go straight from the plane. It's around 540. Okay. I go right to my room. It's on the app, my key. Oh, what a luxury.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Tucked straight in. I go straight in. I go right into my room. Five minutes, wash up a little bit. I'm in bed by six, slept till 10. I got eight hours.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Well, Kazzy David, Larry David's daughter, who is spectacular. Spectacular. She would fit right in here. Oh, yeah. Kazzy. She would. Please, anytime.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I don't want to know what you did. The good guys, we're not interested in your goodwill. No. No. The good guys, we're not interested in your ill will. No, I don't want it. If there's goodwill, great. If there's ill will, keep it to yourself. There's not the ill will games. No. There's goodwill games. Goodwill. Yeah. Should we go to a goodwill after this? Pick up a couple of coats?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah. Although the smell of thrift stores gives me post-traumatic stress from growing up impoverished. I understand. I understand. Like when hipsters are like, we're going thrifting. I'm like, spare me.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Well, it's elliptical, right? You give your stuff. The goodwill then uses that money to employ people who need jobs.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Yeah, it's sort of like one system. In my humble opinion, just in the recovery game, I think a wonderful sort of organization is the Salvation Army.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Because they have rehabs and they actually give people beds who are in need, who are addicted, what have you. Interesting. And part of their penance or part of their structured living to hopefully get out there and get a job and start their life again is they then go work for the Sally. That's what we call it. And they'll drive the trucks and pick up the furniture that you're going to give away.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
They'll run the store. So it's kind of great.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Sorry. Who are the Latin guys in the all white? Yeah, I don't know. What is that?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
He said nothing. Because as my wife would say, she delineates Christianity and Catholicism. She is a Catholic. And she says Christian, while all-encompassing, sort of infers a different sect. And by that, I mean one less serious. So maybe she judged... His sect. He judged, probably. He was like, I'm not a Christian, I'm a Catholic. Or sorry, she incorrectly sected him. Misreligioned him.
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
No one looks at you and goes, are you Mormon?
Good Guys
Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
I am so proud of the way I set this trip up. Walk us through it. I would love to. Thank you. Flew here united. Red eye. Thank God. Shout out united. Wow.
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Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Crazy. It begs the question for YouTube and social media families, right? Which is like, clearly, it's your family. They're your kids. Like, there shouldn't necessarily be any intervention with how in which you want to raise your children. But if you are putting them on the internet and making what I imagine is a good amount of money from it.
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Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
They weren't spending that on Instacart. No. You know what I mean? No. No. But does that that does beg the question, though? Well, shouldn't that enter in child labor laws?
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Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Sounds like my mom had an audition when I was eight.
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Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
That was the opposite. She was a feeder. Oh, my God. My mom's relationship with food was so fucked up. Literally at the beginning of the day, she'd be like, we are keto. So are you. So have a Diet Coke and some bacon and go to school. Me. And by the time I got home.
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Live From New York... It's Thursday Morning!
Wow. You know what? This is a new era for me. And by that I mean I had a voucher I had to use by the end of March. Wow. But shout out Maggie and Jasmine at United. Hopefully one day the official sponsor of the Good Guys podcast. I mean, I don't know what they're waiting for. The official airline?
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Wait, what were you doing? Were you working in Jackson Hole too? In Jacksonville, I had a... Oh, Jacksonville.
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Jacksonville is great. And what's great is one of Cat Williams Netflix specials. I don't know if he was a little light on material. And I only say this because I am one of the biggest Cat Williams fans on earth. He's hilarious. I think he was recently on Theo Vaughn and he introduced him as some people say he's the Black Oracle. He's spectacular. He is a once in a lifetime talent. I love him.
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Well, I don't want to be in a contest here, but we're also in my mother's assisted livings newsletter this week.
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But it was a Netflix special that he shot in Jacksonville. He did 25 minutes at the top of his special crowd work about Jacksonville. And I'm like, you know, everyone doesn't live in Jacksonville, right? He's like, he's like, how about Davy street? Yeah.
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yeah it's also just like there is whenever i would do a college gig and i've done quite a bit over the years i would always do recon with the students i'd be like give me like two inside jokes on campus about like and i could always like sort of lean on like where's the bar that you go drink what's annoying let me guess parking as far as i can tell there's not good parking in any university in the great country of america they they don't like that and they don't like the food
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And whenever I bring that up in front of the students and I figure out a way to hopefully make it funny, their faces melt. They're like, how the hell does Josh know about, you know, I don't know. Olivia's here. Bearcat Tuesdays. I don't know. Shout out.
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I know. Like, what would the inside joke be at the yeshiva? Like, can you believe the tefillin on floor 70?
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Will you explain what a shiva call is for our three people who listen who aren't Jewish?
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Prove it didn't happen. Barbara, our esteemed resident, her son is a bit of a sugar. And... He has a AM radio internet show with his other sugar friend, and they're both rotund.
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Ben calls me. He's like, I've gained five weight, five pounds. I think it's from the creatine.
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I was thinking about continuing our game from last week, Twofold, which is we were guessing calories for different wonderful things. Ooh, yes. Now, we did it for donuts, for the great Krispy Kreme, for the great Dunkin' Donuts. In fact, I have a good Krispy Kreme story for our stories this week. But first, I like to play a game for our calorie counting day.
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How many calories are in Chick-fil-A items? Olivia, as always, feel free to weigh in. We'll do five of the major Chick-fil-A offerings. First, their standard chicken sandwich. Chicken sandwich. Their fried chicken sandwich.
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An eight-piece nugget coming in at only 250 calories. What the fuck? A real steal. A real steal.
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But they're little nugs. They're not, like, massive. All right. Let's just say for variety, how about eight grilled nuggets? What do we think is the calorie count on the eight grilled nuggets?
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A snatched 130. That's a nice snack. It really is. Go and get an eight piece grilled nugget. Go 12 piece at 200 calories? Fantastic. 38 grams of protein?
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I know I'm that guy. I am that guy. Just saying. I'm constantly playing roulette with my calories. What about a, we can end it here with a, I would have loved a dessert, but I know their ice cream cones probably coming in at sub 250. What about, let's go with a large fry, a large waffle fry. 425. It's coming in at six. Sorry, I missed you, Olivia, but it's 600 calories.
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Once in a generation. Thank God. Anyway, dude, can we do a best bite of the week real quick? Please. I have. I have one. Go. The other night I went to a restaurant in Beverly Hills called La Doce Vida.
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This place, this was an institution in Beverly Hills for many years. And then I think they kind of did like a refresh. I mean, this was out of control. I went with my West Coast Ben, Len. We went and let me tell you, I'm going to walk you through this because I had already done what all Jews do, which is I pre-planned. Okay, I did homework on the restaurant. I got my intel.
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Josh, Olivia, this segment brought to you by the country of Iran. This segment brought to you by the Iranian Tourism Board. Shout out. In Tehran, we do it a little different. Stories. I will tell you, and you're going to find this. I know you will because you're a beauty and you're just like me.
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You're going to have your beautiful son and he's going to be playing with an adorable little girl one day. And the parents of whomever, maybe not friends, just the parents will say, oh my God, they're so cute. You never know one day. And you'll be like, huh? And in the back of your mind, you go, never, ever going to happen. Never. Your little nose picker will never be with my son.
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Speaking of, as I mentioned, Krispy Kreme earlier, a baby born at Krispy Kreme gets sweet treatment from donut chain. It is an experience to remember a sweet life ahead. A couple's baby was born in a Krispy Kreme parking lot in Alabama during a winter storm. And the donut chain made the family in a glazing promise for the future. What? Oh, amazing. Fucking up your game. New York post.
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You're usually good. A glazing promise. A woman gave birth to her son in the Krispy Kreme parking lot. The couple couldn't make it to the hospital because of a winter storm that had as much as 11 inches of snow pummel parts of the state. And Krispy Kreme was closed because of the weather. But okay, can we get one of Krispy Kreme down?
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This is a terrible story. Continue. Krispy Kreme is sweetening the family's, here we go again, a glazing celebration by throwing Dallas a birthday party every year until he's all grown up. And that's going to include plenty of free delicious donuts. I mean, they hit the lottery, dude.
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I know. And what about like when he's six and he wants to have his birthday at Charles Entertainment Cheese? Are they going to say like, yeah, but we didn't give birth to you at a Charles Entertainment Cheese. We're going to the crispy.
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These people, they sit down, they peruse the menu for 30 minutes. It's not changing. You know, this is not SAT prep. Order, be ready. He's here, order. So first, beautiful bread basket arrives. The vibe on this place, I feel like I was in the Lucchese crime family, allegedly. Then they do a table side Caesar. You know we love table side. The best.
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Totally agree. I totally understand her outrage. Anyone who doesn't follow their taxes for five years and keeps it a secret and accrues $40,000 in debt. Your dad's a sick fuck. He's sick. It's okay. He's just, he's one of you nuts. And so try to have the same sympathy and grace that you would have for another sick person. And yeah, you can't not pay your taxes. You also, they'll get you.
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And then you can't be Q on that. Like when you owe the IRS, they will get their money forever. All that being said, I agree with Ben. And I also think I understand you wanting to be defensive of your ride or die, your mom who you love so much and it's a beautiful thing. She's a big girl and so are you. And I would do your best to keep that separate.
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So yes, you are entitled and 100% need to feel this. And no, and this is one of the great things I've learned in sobriety is we learn to live with unresolved issues. We sometimes never get the resolution we want and we don't get the amends we think we deserve, but we do the best we can because that's life on life's terms.
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So, you know, I could imagine a scenario where your dad never even like apologizes about it because unfortunately people have their weird justifications for things that they do. But I agree. I don't think you'll regret loving him in the end and you might regret sticking it to him till the end.
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They're making it rain freshly grated Parmesan on this thing beyond. Then we do some apps. We do a shrimp fra diavolo. Beautiful. And then, and these are really, these are proper shrimp. These are like, these are shrimp on those Barry Bonds drugs. You know, that good, good, right? All juiced up. These shrimp, they had to get a bigger hat when they were in their mid thirties, which is normal.
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I got it. Playing it for two reasons. This is an example of the way you don't want to go about a speak pipe. This is so long. So long. So unnecessary. Could have easily cut out 60 seconds of that.
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You stink at speak pipes, but thank you and we love you. And we would hate to lose you, but you're horrible at speak pipes.
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I completely agree with you. I think it's ridiculous, the idea of having two massive parties in a row. I think you can definitely make it special. But I think if the bat mitzvah is at the shul and the hall and the DJ and the stations and the thing you go for 16, we're going to do something amazing in the backyard, you know, totally.
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And we're going to spend, you know, a 10th of what we did on the bat mitzvah. Like maybe there's some world. And what were you going to say?
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You can try and stop me, but it won't work. What are the origins of Sweet 16? Oh, I just got transferred to the FBI. I'm googling something to do with 16-year-olds. The term Sweet Sixteen has multiple origins. The celebration may have originated with Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign marked the beginning of the Middle Ages.
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That's right. That's right. And then we order that. And then we order, and this is not, this is, I think, really ubiquitous on the East Coast, but you don't see it as much in LA. And shout out Winter Vegetables. We had an artichoke, but a stuffed artichoke. The best. Oh, in like a lemon butter type piccata. You think I'm done with piccata? I'm not done with piccata.
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It may also have originated as a way to introduce girls to social skills and hostessing.
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I would love. Oh my God. A posh, like a, you know, a couple decades late quince. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth 13 years in advance. Cause BH, BH, you're, you know, you guys have a fricking blowout bar mitzvah for, for the software to be named. And tell me what you think, Ben. I think a bar mitzvah is awesome.
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I think growing up during the 90s and the mid-aughts, of course, there were always the blowouts. There was always the rich families that went over the top. Then there were wonderfully modest ones. I just have experienced in the last 10 years, I feel like I'm seeing people drop a quarter of a million dollars on bar mitzvahs. It's insane to me. It's a little, what are you nuts? What do you think?
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OK, that's all. But is that reasonable? Like you would consider spending that much money?
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Then the mains, a limon bucatini in almost like a light cream lemon sauce. My favorite. That bucatini bullies spaghetti when no one's looking. That bucatini has negative talk to spaghetti and goes, you call yourself a noodle?
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That would be so hot. If I get like 55 year old Nickelback. She gives this like your son a beautiful Jewish name. So it's like, look at orange photograph. Every time you make me laugh. Happy Bar Mitzvah to you. Giving nachas to your parents too. Very good. Very good. God bless. I don't know.
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I have, I want to separate this and not be, because I think everything you said sounds great and is perfect and is how a lot of people think and I think I have my own.
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It's fine. You go to each their own. Yeah. I have my own nuts things that I feel like, first of all, and I think this is like a little bit of growing up with a mother who made things about, who made things about her, but it told me it was about me. Like I see a lot of, like for my bar mitzvah, I wanted my theme to be Star Wars. And she's like, ah, Broadway, baby. I was like, I'm embarrassed.
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And she's like, we're performing at your bar mitzvah. I said, we are embarrassed.
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Well, to say the least, but again, like to your point, right? Like I know you're joking, but like the meatloaf cover band and this, and like, you didn't say a thing about your kid. It was all about you. And I think parents do that. And I don't, I guess that's what I have qualms with.
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And what do you think about like, you know, cause this happens sometimes where like you and Claudia are so wonderfully like, you know, you just have incredible personalities and you're so like such people, people and outgoing. And, and maybe you have a kid who's a little, you know, more shy and like a little bit more introverted.
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And what if they say like, dad, I would love to do the entire bar mitzvah process and Hebrew school and whatnot. And I'd rather just like go to Israel or like do something like a trip, like not a party.
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No, and a great party is awesome. And what has been revealed to me with having, and you see this once you have more than one kid, is nurture is as real as nature. And because both of my kids are singularly my children and yet completely different. And it doesn't make sense. And yet it makes perfect sense.
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how they can be like so uniquely my wife and mine and have our parts of our looks and parts of our personality traits and things that we love and things that we don't love. And yet they are so uniquely themselves that was just done in the beautiful miracle of their... So cool. Yeah, it's fun. It's cool to see how it reveals itself. Okay, you want to do What Are You Nuts?
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Google it. You don't want it. Totally agree. My what are you nuts is if you sign an email. A letter, a text with love and light. with health and healing, with healing love that is also light, that lights you up, babe. What are you, nuts? How about sincerely? How about best? Save it. Save your love. Save your light. Take your health. Take your healing and keep it to yourself, okay?
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And then we had a Branzino Piccata, right? Yeah, delish. From the waters of the Mediterranean. Because otherwise, if it's not from the Mediterranean, as my friend Max Shapiro would say, just sea bass. Just sea bass. It's not Branzino. And then the marquee item, we had a Veal Parmesan.
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You just threw a weird wrench in this thing. It was fantastic. I swear. A curry mayo. But don't say that like you're talking about, you know, the days of the week. This is a curveball.
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Your Harvest Cheddar, man. So is my son. What's your favorite chip? Don't get me started. I like it all, and I like it all under the sun, but I think they live in different worlds. You cannot compare a Frito to any other chip. You can't compare a Dorito to any other chip. No? Am I tripping?
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absolutely she took it as a challenge and all i gotta say folks is don't don't mess around with bad food this is not good you don't need it you don't need it okay don't do it well that's what i always hear because you know i'm on the prepper side of tiktok yes don't worry about it i just want to see people's shelters and this one guy who was a prepper who was showing his his nuclear fallout shelter under his house was like these best buy dates are a total suggestion
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He's like, more than a year after you can go. I'm like, a year? I don't believe a couple weeks.
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Non-perishable Nutella. Nutella, I remember he was like, oh, please, this will be good for another year. I think I would agree with that.
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Okay, Dad. What do you think about almond milk? Geez. All right, we spoke about it. Hey, it's Josh and Ben, and we are here to tell you about the Galaxy S25 Ultra from Samsung.
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And it does just, you know, I simply just ask naturally. I make the requests. I like to say, please, you do what you want to do. And the new Galaxy S25 Ultra takes care of the rest. And then you have Galaxy AI. Heard of it? Well, that provides personalized daily briefings that keep you a step ahead. It shows your appointments, the weather, your energy score, and more all in one place.
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I know you like 4K because you're a little old school. How about 8K? How about 8K? You like that resolution? Well, what can I tell you? That's what we're working with with our Galaxy S25 Ultra.
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And it's got audio eraser with Galaxy AI to really isolate and reduce unwanted sounds, crowd noises, voices, which for me is super important, especially when I'm recording something that I'm going to throw up on the gram or wherever. I really want to make sure that that audio is crisp.
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Certain features compatible with select apps and require Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.
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Why are you so anti-neurologist? Neurology is cool, dude. It's one of the rare specialties that won't be replaced by AI. Because you're going to get me. I'm looking at you, radiologist. You're making me a hypochondriac.
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No, hypochondriac is people get worried about fake shit. You should be getting worried about. You're making me think I have something real. You're a neglecter.
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That way, Josh, I'm not so stressed. I don't forget things. And you're not trying to ship me off to some loony bin. Okay. Now brief is saving me.
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It'll give you what you got going on tomorrow. Keeps you bettering yourself. Honestly, Josh. Where has this been all our lives? I love it.
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This episode of the Good Guys Podcast is brought to you by our friends at Element. Folks, Element helps anyone stay hydrated without the sugar and other dodgy ingredients found in popular electrolytes and sports drinks. Who wants dodgy ingredients and sugar? Not me. Electrolyte deficiency or imbalance can cause headaches, cramps, cramps, fatigue, brain fog, and weakness. Things we don't want.
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This deal is only available through my link. You must go to drinklmnt.com slash goodguys. D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T dot com slash goodguys.
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I think the only thing stronger is the Taylor Swift fans that are now angry because Blake called her the queen of the whatever it was, Dragon's Den. I think that once you have the Swifties all over you, then you are gone.
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This morning? When did this happen? This was like over the last month.
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Apparently, they were like dear friends, and she described the relationship as just, Taylor is just like the dragon queen that they all kneel to. Not a direct quote. I don't know if this is true.
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And once you upset the Swifties, it's no good. It's over. It's no good. We don't do that. We love Taylor Swift, and we love all her fans.
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He married well and so did she. We're a family of podcasters. Tough job.
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I think they're so cool. I wish I was addicted. I just can't. I can't get addicted. I can't. I smoke them and I want more. I can't. I'm like a one, two cigarettes every six months.
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I want a pack a day. We'll hang out with the queen. I'm not that cool, queen.
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Have you seen those Canadian cigarettes with the warning symbols where, like, there's, like, a... Oh, they have, like, the dead people.
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The dead people. Or the one that I loved was Josh when they, that... That cigarette carton that had a naked person on it and it said something to the effect in French of like smoking can cause you to get naked in the middle of the night. Like they have these weird slogans that don't make any sense.
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Congratulations on the baby train. Thank you, Queen. Congratulations, baby. I'm naming him Queen. Queen Cosmo. Queen Cosmic. Josh, what I'm giving up is Ozempic. That's what I'm giving up for 40 days.
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And what did they put you on? It sounds like they put you on a dose too high.
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Josh, we have to get Cosmo on Wagovi. Wagovi or Zepbound, we need to switch you. Because maybe Ozempic isn't right, but there are other meds that could work.
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Put it right in your belly. Right in the belly. Don't put it anywhere else in the belly. So did you lose weight on the Ozempic? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I said I wouldn't say my weight. I will say. I was 290. I'm now 251. I was 239. Wow, bro.
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By the way, I love it. I ship it. Sorry, Paige. This episode of the Good Guys Podcast is brought to you by our friends at BioNature. Folks, we know you've been abroad. You've told us a million times. You went for six months. You found yourself. Yada, yada, yada. You came back. You were just as annoying as you were always, okay? You were just as annoying. You were no more cultured.
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But what you did notice was that everything that you were eating over there
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felt significantly worse than what you were eating over here right let's say we're in italy all right maybe we're in venice we go we get some pizza we get some pasta we feel amazing over there we come over here we're eating pizza and pasta what are you nuts we feel like crap that's not good that's not good at all well folks what if we could get products exclusively from italy how about tomatoes only grown in italy how about sauces that are made from tomatoes only grown in italy
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Okay? Well, folks, that's BioNature. BioNature has made it their mission to produce premium, 100% organic foods, all grown in Italy, sold right here in the U.S. From premium Durham semolina pasta to whole wheat gluten-free and sourdough pasta. Yep, sourdough season. BioNature is committed to their passion for organic foods. and their personal connections to Italy in traditional Italian cooking.
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They also have some delicious brand new tomato sauces. You like a spicy arrabbiata, maybe a traditional marinara, maybe a fragrant basil. Yeah, that's right. A fragrant tomato basil. All of these made with tomatoes exclusively from Italy. They're all absolutely fantastic. So folks, if you want... some of this yourself. And who wouldn't?
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Visit Bionature.com and use code GOODGUYS at checkout for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-I-O-N-E-T-U-R-A-E.com and use code GOODGUYS for 20% off your first order. This episode of the Good Guys podcast is brought to you by our friends at Built Rewards. PSA for anyone who rents, if you haven't heard of Bilt, you're about to thank me.
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Earning points on rent is now a reality when you pay your rent through Bilt. You don't even have to check with your landlord to start earning points that you can use towards flights, hotel stays, fitness classes, and even your next rent payment. I'm telling you, we earn points everywhere else. We earn points on groceries, travel, and practically everything but rent, our number one expense.
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Why not? Let me explain to you what Built is, okay? There's no cost to join Built. And as a member, you'll earn valuable points on rent and on your everyday spending. Built points can be transferred to your favorite hotels and airlines, and even the ones you haven't heard of. There are over 500 airlines and 700,000 hotels and properties around the world you can redeem your built points toward.
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Points can also be redeemed towards a future rent payment and unique experiences that only built members can access. So if you're not earning points on rent, my question is, why not? Start earning points on rent you're already paying by going to joinbuilt.com slash goodguys. That's joinbuilt.com slash goodguys. J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash goodguys.
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Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Joinbuilt.com slash goodguys to start earning points on your rent payments today. J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash goodguys.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
I'm mom adjacent. I actually, I went to school in the Heights. So a little bit higher than Spanish Harlem in Washington Heights. But I am familiar. I pop out, look to the left, going up the FDR. And I think, God, it's great that I'm passing this. Thank God I didn't have to take the streets.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Yes. Very long. Mom needs to stop listening, but I do want to know if the 2.9 is erect or soft.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
I was just going to say, Josh has heard me tell this story. I was once staying in a house for the weekend with a man that just had this surgery that you're talking about. And he was leaking by the pool the whole weekend. He would get up and there would be a puddle. No.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
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Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
It sounds to me like they live in a cheap building with thin walls. So look, if you're not going to pay up, okay, to have thick walls, you're going to need to deal with some inconvenient noises. I completely agree that it's not illegal to own a dog the same way it wouldn't be illegal to have a crying baby.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
If you don't want to hear it, you need to live in a building that has thicker walls or put on a noise machine, Josh. How about you put on a noise machine? I personally don't think unless this dog, the way that she explained it, the dog is once an hour and the person is being dramatic.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
If this dog really is nonstop, you talk to your porter or you talk to the person in the building who runs the building and say, look, for B, the dog won't shut the fuck up. We have to do something. But otherwise, I don't I don't think there's anything to do. You picked a building with thin walls.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
think you deserve oh that's a queen of sober podcasts right there oh my god ladies i'm i'm with you but i also but i also think like if she's that type of personality where she's anxious like he should know that and he should give her some reassurance if he's marrying a nervous nelly you know I don't know. Just fucking do it. Rip off the Band-Aid. What are you waiting for?
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
To the same point, Josh, it's never going to be perfect on his side. So he might as well just pop the question at In-N-Out after a burger. She just wants to get married. She doesn't want anything. You can't want something special and just want it to happen. So if she just wants it to happen, he should just do it. It's her loss on the big celebration. You know?
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
I knew I wanted to do it. What I was going to say was, honestly, it's on your mother to go to him and say fucking propose to my daughter next week or there's going to be hell to pay. It's on somebody else to pressure him, not you.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Yeah, jaywalking with an infant. What are you, nuts? I literally made a right. I drive everywhere in the city, as everybody knows. I'm going to make a right. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see a dad with literally an infant strapped to his chest, crossing against the light. Are you brain dead? Like, I just, you can risk your own life risking the baby.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Like, it's just the definition of what are you, nuts? Nuts.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
It's like tasters at an ice cream store, Josh. Tasters at an ice cream store, two tops. And if you walk out, if you try three, you can't walk out. You can't. You're locked in for a scoop. 100%.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Locked in for a scoop. Cosmo, the Queen of Melrose, this was a pleasure.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
You are amazing. We can find Queen of Melrose cross-platform everywhere. We're global, especially TikTok shop. Okay? Listen to us, good guys, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch us on YouTube. Share our clips, Instagram, and TikTok. We're on TikTok too, Cosmo. Just so you know. Mondays and Thursdays, folks, we will see you next time.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
I knew the Palm was gone the second I saw it at Newark Airport. That's when I knew the Palm is done. If he can get a stake in the airport, that means that the brand is dead. It's over.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Very similar. But my grandma did live in Queens. I was going to say, where in Queens? Astoria. Okay. I mean, Astoria is fantastic food. Fantastic food.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
But there was a lovely Key Foods. I loved the Key Foods.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Yeah, Key Foods is great. There was a great diner in Forest Hills. I don't remember the name. The Clock? Something TikTok?
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Supreme Tuna. Supreme Tuna. They have the best food in New York.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
What you guys can't see is Josh is adjusting Queen's headphones and they are looking fantastic. Blame the hairdresser.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
The Queen of Melrose. I can't quite explain to you how excited we are to have you. When I told our dear friend, do you know the points guy, Brian Kelly? No. If you don't know him, he wants to know you. Where is he? He is your biggest fan. Boyfriend material.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
She's had unbelievable longevity, that Halle Berry. I was talking about it with Claudia. I'm like, what the fuck has she been? I haven't seen her in anything in 20 years. And she's still, like, she gets on that carpet and she is the moment on that carpet. Yeah, I would be pissed if I was the girlfriend.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
If I made out with Halle Berry, she would throw me off a roof if I made out with Halle Berry. I think I would have a better time if I made out with Adrian Brody.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Is he going to come out? We should have. We should have, Josh. Damn it. We'll set up an intro later. Yeah, we'll set up an intro later. It's great. He's two young boys. He's single. He's in New York. I'm going to set you up. Oh, he's single and ready to mingle.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
How much, how amazing is Israel? Like your trips, like it's just the most gorgeous country. Oh my God.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
Josh, you know I'm a little bit of a disorganized person, okay? I just want you to see a neurologist. That's it. That's all I've asked of you. I have too much going on. There's nothing wrong with my brain. The problem is there's too much going into it from too many different places, okay? Too much going on. And I needed a solution, Josh, so that when I woke up in the morning, I wasn't in a frenzy.
Good Guys
Mob Adjacent with The Queen of Melrose
What am I going to do today? Who am I going to speak to today? I needed something all in one place, and that, Josh, is NowBrief. The NowBrief on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Is everything and more that I needed. It's going to tell me what calls I have today. It's going to tell me what meetings I have today. It's going to tell me the weather. Okay. Everything in the morning.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
The following podcast is a Dear Media production.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
But the first time I was like properly kissed, I remember I was 16 and I was in North Hollywood at a party and playing spin the bottle with other kids that I went to acting class with. And so it was like Evan Rachel Wood was there and like Penn Badgley and Evan Peters and like all these people that have gone on to be incredibly successful and talented.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
But I remember that the bottle landed on Evan Rachel Wood and I, and I was about to say Evan and I, and then I'm like Evan Peters And I know you wish I know. And she just looked at me and gave me just like a proper, wonderful kiss. And I remember being like, thank you, Evan. Like, you didn't have to do that. I really appreciated it because it's 16. I needed some connection.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Those were the days, Josh. Whoa. How do you feel? with your beautiful child, you know, Baruch Hashem, coming into the world, I have a bit of an aversion about... I see it with older, like, grandparent types, but also people my age. I don't do that thing of, oh, like, Max, do you have a little girlfriend? Like, oh, this is his girlfriend, Charlie, or whatever. I just don't like to put that on kids.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I think it's a little weird, and I know it's like 99% of the time, like, it's just like a cutesy, silly thing about... But I don't know. I like try not to do that with kids. What do you guys think?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I cannot get over it. What's more scary is I know that you're only 75% kidding and it ruffles my feathers good and hard.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Ew. Olivia, you should feel free to quit. I would quit. I'm going to fire myself.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
But the problem is, is like, you think that, and then I don't, you know, when you have your kid, when you have your own kid, it'll shift and more will be revealed. Like, I think-
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
while Paige and I hopefully hold a lot of the same, I would imagine, same values that you and Claudia have, we're very different than maybe a lot of the couples just who are more Northeast, typical New York Jewish couples. Like, cause we haven't, we've had a different thing. Yeah.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And you might have your kids and suddenly go like, oh, what Josh and Paige have with their families actually presented itself to be kind of more attractive than the thing that I was used to or grew up with. Or you might be like, no, I clearly would never want that. I love what me and my friends have. Like, that's the interesting thing is watching your friends, how they raise their kids and
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's a blended thing. Like I have like the great kid, David, who was on the podcast. He's a single guy. So he I have single friends who have said, you are now your own entity with your own family. And I'm not going to make an extra effort to be in that new sort of equation. And I go, great. I will be making no effort to make your single life more comfortable.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Like Len's beautiful Russian immigrant mother would be cooking us Red Baron pizza just so that her kid could sit on the couch watching an LA Kings game, scratching his nether regions and going, I like the vinegar.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
All good, love you. And then David has said, I want to be in your kid's life. And so our friendship has leveled up because my children love him and I love him. And I also make it a point because I'm very mobile with my kids and my family. Like we will come visit you.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And then especially like if I lived in the city and you have your kid, I have my kiddo, you know, I think you have to be able to be like on a Sunday morning, like Ben, we're going to the park. You want to come or not? Like we don't have to plan it, but like if you're free and doing nothing, let's go to the park and we'll get a bagel because look, we both got to get these kids energy out, you know?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah, I think like being able to enjoy the park is probably like one, one and a half. But also there is something great of like, I got this blob here who's six months. Yeah. You got a blob. Let's just like sit and distract each other with these blobs for a couple of hours. I can't stare at this thing any longer.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
That should be our daddy daycare. Blobs. Blobs. Blobs. Like heavyweights.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah, yeah, so good. No, the screenplay is by Judd Apatow and it was directed by Steve Brill, who I worked with, who directed a movie called Drillbit Taylor, who I know. And Steve Brill, funny enough, created the Mighty Ducks franchise and became absurdly rich from it.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And I will never forget, he did not appreciate my obsession with Mighty Ducks and he would give me notes during scenes and I'd be like, do you want me to do this the way Charlie Conway did it when he was doing the Triple Deak at the Goodwill Games? And he was like, you're fired.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
No, I don't. He loves Rookie of the Year. So good. He likes Sandlot. I mean, he's sick, so he can't really appreciate it yet, but he likes, yeah, for sure. He definitely is slowly getting into those. I feel like you could have been in Mighty Ducks, no? I was too young and too fat. No, they already had a Goldberg. I was too young.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Were you ever like, I remember once, I have one regret about actually growing up, me and Len, we had a younger buddy, Daniel, and we would be like 11, 12, 13 years old. He was a year younger than us. And we would just like, I just remember one time playing a prank on Daniel where he woke up at the sleepover and Len was over his face with his ass in his face.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think of, I think everything became algorithm based. And so everything became an attempt at reverse engineering what once worked before.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And then you also like, and then people like take that, you know, I look, I love and I'm proud of the show I did, Turner and Hooch, and that was IP from the 80s. And I think what was hard was the original movie, like Tom Hanks in that movie is a total dick. Like his character is a jerk and he's like a real dick to the dog. And he's like pretty curmudgeonly.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And it's like, there's like murders and shooting. Like he's a proper detective and like the stakes are high. Yeah. You know, cut to 25 years later, you have to make a show for Disney Plus that is like honoring those elements, but really can have none of them because like, God forbid, anyone offends anyone about anything. And it loses that edge, I think.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And Daniel was like, I'm not sleeping over anymore. And I was like, I don't blame you, Dan. That stinks.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I know, but that music from Cocomelon is hot.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Where are you? Here I am. Here I am. How do you do?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah. With exception to Sing. Sing's bomb. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, we mess with Sing in our home. We like the things, you know, like it's amazing and no shade and whatnot. But like the first Moana, the songs are so good because it's Lin-Manuel Miranda. And the second Moana, they're like, we got someone new. They're great, too. And it's like, I don't know any of those songs, guys.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
So good. Speaking of hockey, so I got to tell you about this thing. I did this charity hockey event for the LA Kings on Sunday. Okay. to honor LA Strong, honor the first responders, to raise money for the California Fire Fund and all these different entities and shout out the LA Kings, an amazing fundraiser.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And so it was really an interesting process because about a month ago, we have a lot of friends who are ex-Kings, a buddy of mine, Matt, who played for them and now works in the organization. So he texts me and he goes, hey, we're going to do a charity event, charity game. You want to play? Like in a month.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
oh i go i'm in matt he goes beautiful i'll have someone reach out i think between then and two days later they somehow got justin bieber and steve carell to do it too and they forgot about good old joshy suddenly i'm not getting emails So I'm like, it's okay. They're busy. This is more principles before personalities. This is more important. So they hit me up like two days before.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
They're like, you ready to play on Sunday? I was like, what are you nuts? They're like, yeah, here's the info. Bring your gear. I'm like, first of all, it's hilarious that you think that an actor has full hockey pads. Bring your gear.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
bring your gear I've played in celebrity basketball games as we've talked with Nick Swartzen about I know how deeply demoralizing and embarrassing it is to be out in front of an audience really just sucking and I'm actually okay at playing hockey but as I said I've never been great at skating because at 14 when I should have been skating my mom said you're too fat for skates and
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And the velocity which your body will hit the ground would mean compound fractures. And I can't have that. You know, we don't have great insurance. So I never got great at skating. So I wind up saying, listen, I'm not going to skate. I'm not going to be part of the game. And they're like, OK, we'll just come, we guess. So I did come and it was a really nice event.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And there's Vince Vaughn and Colby Smulders and great ex-hockey players, Marc Messier, Teddy Purcell. Wow. Matt Green, Dion Neff, like all these amazing players. And then we get to like the biggies, the big celebs. Will Ferrell. Okay. Wow. Snoop Doggy Dogg, the two announcers. Wow.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
No, he didn't skate. He's a big Kings fan. So it wasn't a surprise he was there. Okay.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
So now I'm like, and I'm walking around, I'm like, I'll be the equipment manager, whatever. It's fun. So they're like, okay, you'll be the equipment manager because we already have coaches for the red team. So like, let's get them all lined up and we're going to introduce you guys. You're going to go out on the ice.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
so last minute they're all skating out right and then they're like and right as the last person goes out of the tunnel to skate out they go an equipment manager and i didn't go out i literally went like this nope I was so embarrassed to go out as the equipment manager that I said, I'm not going out. Equipment manager. Oh my God. That is so classic too. It's so me, man. You should have played.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
So I should have been, I think I would have been okay, but it is what it is. And then I was chatting with some of the players as they were lined up to go out. And then I see the great Josh Richards and, And we chatted up a little, dab it up. Wonderful. You know, one great Canadian, Josh Richards. And then they go out and I turn and I hear someone go, hey, Josh. And I turn around and who is it?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And he was, he was going to play. He goes, Hey Josh, good to see you, man. And I was like, JB, how are you? I didn't call him that. I was like, Hey Justin, good to see you. And we're chatting real quick. And I had heard, cause I told you, I got some friends at the Kings.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
They were like, Oh, they're like Bieber actually asked to, if he could like have some ice time before the game to like practice a little bit. And I was like, damn, like that's how, you know, someone's great when even a charity game, they're like, I'm taking this seriously. I need to warm up. Yeah, it's no joke. I love that. Ooh, so you had a star-studded afternoon.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I said to him, I'm like, I heard you asked for a little bit of extra ice time. And he was like, yeah, I had to knock the cobwebs off. And I was like, so humble. We love a humble king.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
It's amazing to see someone like that who's like internationally superstar famous. It was funny. There was a girl who was like in her probably late 20s who was the one who would like direct people to go out. Like she was the one who would give someone their cue to like, okay, now go out to the ice. And she was very professional and good at what she did. And she'd be like, go, go, go.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And the last person who gets announced obviously is Bieber. So she goes, go. And then I see her turn to some of her other friends and go. Like holding her heart like, oh, God.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I couldn't agree more. And I know because we have to give that caveat of like, obviously, it's an exceptional life and how cool that he gets to live and experience all this stuff. But I don't think it's easy being him. And I think that's a lot, a lot, a lot of pressure that kind of never lets up.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah. No, you have to be. What is Olivia? What does Justin Bieber mean to you? First is our resident young person and also as a musician yourself and just as a good person.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And we're not judgmental. We need to adopt that. I'm not gay. I'm just a 38 year old at camp with my bros.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Do you think if he showed up at a Chili's and it's busy, everyone's ordering Nashville mozzarella sticks, they're just inundated. Is there a Chili's on this earth that makes Justin Bieber wait? Saturday night, 8 o'clock.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Kill me. Yes, story. Let me make it Jewish. I think it's a black and white cookie.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Well, did you know that doctors are charging six grand per eye to change eye color forever? This is scarier than any horror film. This risky trend is irresistible. An ophthalmologist with 344 million followers on TikTok has gone viral due to his specialization in changing people's eye color permanently.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I'm just, and feel free to turn the podcast off, listeners, but I'm going to need some more details. Now we need the logistics.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Dr. Brian Wachler has revealed the results of his work on social media showing before and after results. Yeah. Really? That's really dangerous, Josh. Intense. I mean, it's pretty wild. It's no joke. It's people are going from like very dark eyes to like baby blue light eyes.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Roll the dice. Live a little. I went and took my friend Joe for his with Dr. Paul C. Lee in Koreatown. And it was cool. You get Valium. That's worth it alone.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I'll have any elective procedure for Valium. I should see if Joey Kamasta has a guy that can do LASIK for me. For sure. It's somewhere in central Jersey.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Well, did you know that Luigi Mangione has been asking Twisted fans to stop bombarding him with so many photos? Luigi Mangione is asking his Twisted fans to stop bombarding him. The accused UnitedHealthcare CEO unaliver made clear that his legal defense fund, sorry, made clear on his legal defense fund website that he cannot keep up with the fan photos flooding into his Brooklyn federal jail.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Luigi is allowed to receive photos via Shutterfly and FreePrints in accordance with mail procedures while in custody.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
They're like, Luigi Mangione's favorite snack from the canteen is Snickers. You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
The finger just goes off the red button. That's what Hamas needed, Snickers. Oh, man. Well, and last thing about Luigi Mangione, there has to be so many bad fathers on this earth that there are this many women sending Luigi photos.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
How many fucking bad fathers are there? A lot. A lot, Josh. A lot.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
A lot of them. Gwyneth Paltrow is selling a $200 sex pillow. Doctors weigh in on whether it's worth it. If you're looking to spice up your love life, Goop has a suggestion, but it'll set you back $195. Gwyneth Paltrow's pillow, The Prim, claims that the taboo sex pillow will make your intimate moments more comfortable and satisfying. But do you really need to shell out big bucks for better sex?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
The post spoke to three experts to get the rundown on the pillows that Goop is recommending. So I guess it's just a pillow maintained to hold on to its shape to lift you in certain ways for canoodling.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Yeah, it's something for lumbar, some sort of thoracic spine support.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
This one, Dr. Deborah Lino said, a ramp-shaped pillow can have a bit of a wedge lift. I'm turned on.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I don't know, but if you have like a truck fantasy, like open up the hatch doors. Get the ramp. I got a pallet for you, baby. Get the ramp. So I'm shifted in transit. yuck yuck yucky oh boy should we get to uh one speak pipe and then what are you nuts yeah all right this one is from oh here this will be this will be a fun one lauren
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Benjamin, how the hell are you? And how is that beautiful blue zip up of yours? Do you like it? It's nice, right? It's handsome. I find you have been wearing versions of that more recently.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Love him. Should we get to our Woody and Nuts? Yes. Our Woody and Nuts moment of the week are our gripes with people, places, and things. All the things that are ticking us off, sticking in our craw. Ben, go for it.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And then one kid, and then one kid eats it. That's gotta be fake. Cause we've all heard about that growing up, but no one actually did that.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
My what are you nuts is at funerals and memorials, stop releasing balloons. What are you nuts? First of all, it's pollution. Okay. These things, it doesn't go well. They land in the ocean. And secondly, I know you want to write, oh, grandma, you know, grandma Diane loved golf. So I'm going to draw a three iron on her balloon. No one cares. Diane's gone. No one can see it.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
You're hurting the sea animals. What are you nuts?
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Thinking of that, you're like, look, there's a lot of folklore. Narnia, Lord of the Rings, ooky cookie. Speaking of that. Speaking of Ookie Cookie. Oh my God. Let me ask you, wait, I was going to ask you something about camp and, oh darn, I lost it. It's just such a gross visual. I couldn't get past it. Ookie Cookie, yeah, it's rough. Ookie Cookie's rough.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Who knows? sure we had 14 len and i had 14 shots of mandarin vodka when we were 14 years old and that he stole from his russian parents 14 each yeah it was bad wow yeah that'll hurt the that'll hurt the tummy we cleared the bottle and that was the first time we drank and it was yeah it was intense and then we we threw up in my trash can and I don't think I drank again.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I would, you know, it's funny. I was talking about this the other night, but I would go back to New York over summers from like 14 to 17 for a month. And we would like smoke a blunt on my buddy's roof in Chinatown, or we would like drink a 40 amongst like the three of us. But we never really like, it didn't click in. Like it was unremarkable. I don't remember it.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
I also don't remember thinking it was great. And then of course at 17, I think as I had lost all this weight and I was looking for something else as a crutch, Then when I was smoking pot and whatnot, it was suddenly like, oh, I like this. This is a relief. This gets me out of my head.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
It's funny you ask, and I don't mind sharing. I don't know if you're familiar with the Galaxy S25 Ultra from Samsung. But they have portrait selfie, which is like, listen, I don't care. I'm you know, I actually do care. I care about having a good selfie. And the truth of the matter is every sort of camera I've had before this, it just skin tones would start to look a little weird.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Textures weren't preserved. It just wasn't right. But I just find that you can capture you look the way you think you look. You know, when a camera takes a picture of you and you go, I don't look like that.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
What I like with the portrait selfie is that it's, you know, it's this dedicated thing that knows that selfies are their own thing and that it needs to be sort of curated for exactly that. So it preserves all the beautiful kind of things that you need for a good photo like that. I'm a big fan. I think my kids and I looked gorgeous on the slopes. You know, I don't want to brag, but we did brag.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
All right. Listen, I want to share with you. Can I not share with you? You can share. Look, I know I can share with you, and I just want every shot to have that nice professional look. So shout out portrait selfie. Now, let me ask you, Ben, when you posted that beautiful selfie at the wedding you were recently at, now, be honest with me. Did you use the best face feature?
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
And you know what? How many times you're taking a photo and you're annoying your friends, you're going, hey, look at this. It becomes this think tank when... Samsung goes, you know what? Give your friends a break. We have a feature now that can help you find the best one. No problem. Best face. You're welcome.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Best face. I said best face. Which one's the best? And they said, none. You're ugly. No, I'm kidding. You can get your Galaxy S25 Ultra at Samsung.com.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
The great Yanis Papas, one half of the History Hyenas podcast with Chris DiStefano, does say that people who are mentally challenged are finger snippers.
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
That's crap. Because that's the kind of thing that if you tell your parents that happened with your friend who was a little bit of a bigger person, broke through it, your parents go, don't worry. We'll figure it out. They don't go, bring me a check from your friend.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Can I tell you a disgusting thing that my other best friend, not Ben, but Len, used to do growing up?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
It's cheaper to buy a new one. I was going to say, can you even fix a wooden table? What are you going to find the one woodworker left in the Northeast? You have to go to the fucking Amish.
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Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
Is it, Olivia, and feel free not to answer, but do you remember when Spin the Bottle and those kind of games became a thing?
Good Guys
Celebrity Spin-the-Bottle and Bieber on Ice?!
It's so, I've told this story before and I think she commented on it, like on Twitter or something, but I like played spin the bottle in sixth grade. I performed in arts high school. It was crazy. And then in between rehearsals for Annie and then, uh,
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I didn't know that something like that could be in anybody I've ever known much less me. And he continued to deny having any recollection of events from that night. Scott's trial began in May 1999 and his lawyer, Michael Kimmerer, argued that Scott had lived an almost quote-unquote perfect life with a happy loving family and had absolutely no motive for the murder.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Live Good. These days, we all take supplements, or at least we know we should be, right? But why are so many supplement companies charging ridiculous prices for products that really aren't that special? is frustrating and frankly unacceptable.
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Dude, I agree. Sleepwalking, for one, is just an interesting thing. Why? by itself yes and it's something for thousands of years we've all been trying to figure out like what's going on here yeah what is this about but then to add in the element of sleepwalkers that end up murdering people it's a whole other yeah can of worms and then trying to convince a jury that that is even possible
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Austin and I got sent some products from them that we've been using for over a month now, and
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honestly i'm pretty impressed yeah i think the ingredients are are top notch um they're very transparent about where they come from and they're high quality because there's a lot of supplement companies out there that you know jazz you up other ways right through their branding or you know sell you the sun moon and stars but ultimately the ingredients are no good are they're very low quality what have you been taking
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super reds same actually i got the same thing yeah super reds is is really good stuff i mean as we are aging yeah you know we need all the blood flow we can get to certain areas to certain areas my feet my hands yeah you know i uh i've been throwing it because i also do the collagen peptides and i just throw all the powder in my smoothies that i make every day so
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That's a great way to take supplements. Just make yourself a smoothie. You got breakfast taken care of and then you got all your supplements in there as well. Yeah, the Super Reds is really good stuff. It's great for circulation, you know, sexual health, cognitive function. Lord knows I need that. Need some help up here. Yeah.
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But they've got a wide range of different stuff from nootropics to creatine to just multivitamin gummies. They even have some more obscure stuff. Himalayan shiljit and organic sea moss, which I know there's a lot of benefits to that. Supports nervous system and brain function, hormone balance, thyroid support, boosts sexual health and fertility.
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chlorophyll drops, even basically anything supplement wise.
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Yeah. So if you're ready to make the switch and start saving, we'll make it even easier for you. Use our link and you can save an additional 10% off your first order on top of the already lowest prices. Just go to livegood.com slash lights out to save 10% on your first order. That's livegood.com slash lights out. Don't miss out on this opportunity to invest in your health without overspending.
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Why would their child lie too? Right. He's 12. Most of the times it's the opposite. They're spilling the beans like, oh, actually, nobody else outside the house saw it, but at home they went at it. Right. And there's none of that here.
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That this person did not know what they were doing because they were still asleep when they brutally murdered, usually their loved one too. A partner, a child. I mean, it is, it's such a bizarre thing. that it's really hard to wrap your head around. They still don't fully understand what's going on, why it happens. There's a lot of theories.
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Yeah, and we have no idea if he recognized her or even knew who it was. Yeah. Or what, while he's, you know, in dreaming essentially, what he thought was approaching him. So, and how do you even figure that out? There's no way to figure that out. Or he did recognize her and he's like, this is just a dream. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Well, the prosecutor wasn't having any of it at all.
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He was just like... This is just nonsense. To his point, he pointed out that Scott had deliberately tried to hide the evidence of the crime. The investigation had found items in Scott's car, clothing, the knife, the murder weapon, and all the items that would indicate that he committed a crime. He had also washed the blood off of himself, treated a wound on his finger, and changed his clothes.
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So some have also proposed a theory that Scott was sleepwalking when he stabbed his wife, but then woke up and realized what he'd done, and in a panic, he might have finished the murder by holding Yarmula underwater and then cleaned up everything.
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Why would you do that? You know that that's going to make it look bad for yourself. I don't buy that theory either, but I can see why they're trying this different angle.
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On cross-examination, sleep expert Dr. Roger Broughton, who worked at the Sleep Disorder Center in Ottawa and founded the Canadian Sleep Society in 1986, acknowledged, it was unusual for a sleepwalker to carry out so many actions during a single episode. Because I think most of us are like, there is a lot of steps to this.
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And he really did all this while still asleep.
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What a lot of people point out, when his wife is screaming, it didn't wake him up. Yeah. At what point did he actually wake up or did he not at all? I mean, that's a tough part to prove, right? Prosecutor Juan Martinez's main argument was that Scott's actions were too deliberate for him to have been sleeping.
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And jurors soon became overwhelmed at the number of sleep experts that were brought in to testify. One of the prominent experts, as we mentioned, Dr. Broughton, admitted that to do as many specific and complicated actions as Scott had was unusual. including committing a violent crime, hiding the evidence, and changing his clothes.
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There's obviously some science behind the sleep cycles and what's going on there. But how does one who has potentially been sleepwalking for a long time all of a sudden during an episode of sleepwalking just snap and then murder somebody? Right. And why?
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Because it seems to insinuate that at some point he realized what he had done was wrong. But could have that still been in that sleepwalking state?
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It feels far-fetched, right? Very, very far-fetched. But if he was awake and he was trying to you know, cover up the crime or hide evidence, you would have thought he would have wiped the blood off, make sure to get all the blood off of him. But he didn't remember he's in interrogation. He's still got blood on the back of his neck.
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Which I guess some would argue it all happened so fast that maybe you just missed. But yeah, this one's really, I mean, there's so many different ways to look at it.
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Dr. Brown along with Dr. Rosalind Cartwright concluded that it was entirely possible Scott committed the murder while sleepwalking. So they're bringing all these experts in, and they're all making the argument that it is very possible all of these events happened while he was still asleep.
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Yeah, which there is no way to fully prove this at all. Yeah, how could you? Unless he was hooked up to monitors the entire time they were monitoring his brainwaves. Yeah. So they're going off of past, I assume, past experience with other sleepwalkers.
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This is a big blade too. This isn't just like a little pocket knife. Like normally if I'm doing stuff, I'm not using a hunting blade. True. Yeah. That's for skinning an animal. True. True. Cause that'd just be dangerous to some, but maybe it's something that he did on a normal basis, but it is strange. And I don't, I don't fault the jury.
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In this case, because I think there's enough doubt there that,
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But it, it is a bit surprising that he got a unanimous decision to find him guilty in this. Cause I don't know that there's enough there too, to I don't know if it would convince me. Again, I wasn't there and maybe there's more evidence and stuff that they saw that might convince me otherwise. But it seems tough because it's like, then what was the motive?
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The motive that the prosecutor presents, feasible, I guess. I mean, people murder people for far less. But considering all the circumstances, the timing, where it was, the fact that the neighbors were right there. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
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What's even more interesting, too, is that Scott's two children pleaded for their father's life since he was potentially up for the death penalty. And I think largely in part because of this, the judge decided against capital punishment. Yeah. And he was sentenced to life in prison, which I think... Yeah.
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See, at the very least, because there's so much like gray area here where it's like, because what if he really was right.
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It's kind of in the same wheelhouse as the devil made me do it. Yeah, it's like how do you... Although I think this has far more science probably.
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Yeah, it is. That's terrifying. Makes you, uh, Yeah. If you're, uh, dating or, you know, you meet somebody new, maybe ask them if they're a sleepwalker. Yeah. Cause you know, do you have a history of sleepwalking? Should be added to the dating questions. Yeah. Cause I mean, unload my gun and store it. Well, and that's the other interesting thing too, is the access to weapons.
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Which is a big factor in these, you know, makes this, this rate go up much higher of something violent happening. Yeah. Um, but yeah, no, it's so torn. I know me too. Uh, and you just don't feel like, like based on what, again, there could be something they didn't uncover conversations that were had that they weren't able to find, dig up any info on that would give us more of a motive here.
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I just feel like it just seems all very random and just kind of out of nowhere.
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Yeah, this topic is, it's very interesting because I personally, as far as I know, I've never sleepwalked. Are you a sleepwalker?
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Well, if he was going to hide him, wouldn't you hide him somewhere better? Right. That's what I thought. Throw him in a dumpster or take him down the block or something.
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That's the thing, too, is that as sketchy as it seems those events were, if he really was going to try to cover this up, or spin it a certain way, you would have thought not only would he have done different things with the murder weapon and the clothing, but also what he would have said to investigators.
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He might have said a bit more that would have rather than be like, I don't know what happened. You know what I mean? Which again, criminals do all the time. They're like, I don't know, just play dumb. But sure. If you were truly going to try to spin this in a way of, I feel like he would have said some different things, but I don't know. Yeah. Um,
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but I keep thinking I'm like the screaming part of it is, is really what trips me up. But I'm like, well, if you're in a deep enough sleep to sleepwalk in the first place, there might be a good chance that you're not going to respond to that sort of sound. Cause like, what if you're,
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yeah if you sleep people sleepwalk and drive their cars and you know if you leave your car radio on and you get in the car and there's radio playing if it's just something if it's a loud noise like i feel like just even the engine turning the engine me up yeah there's plenty slamming the front door behind right you would have you would think that any one of those sounds might wake you up but if you're that not deep of a sleep
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I feel like all of us personally could probably name instances where we slept super, super deep and then maybe our, our, our partner didn't. Yeah. Like, like Kendall says to me all the time, I'm surprised you didn't hear me wake up. Cause she went in the bathroom, the toilet's not far from her bed and she was puking.
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And she's, she, she does this, um, she gets sick sometimes. And so she's always asked me the next day, she's like, did you hear me get up? I'm like, No, not a thing. No, I was out the entire, I didn't even know that happened. And given, I have a fan going and like other noise, we have like a noise machine, but still like getting up, um, and flushing the toilet and stuff like that.
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People sleep right through it. Yep. So I think, I think it's possible.
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It's possible that this could have happened the way that, uh, the defense said it was, but I see why the other side ended where they did.
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Yeah, Kendall's been on Nutrafol for years. I remember you saying that. So I've watched it work firsthand for a long, long time, and it's amazing, amazing the results. I mean, she swears by it and has been taking it, you know, religiously for a long time. And she's definitely seen improved hair growth and decreased shedding, so...
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scott is currently incarcerated at yuma prison he practices meditation he gets plenty of sleep and he's got letters from other sleepwalkers and he said he encourages anyone with a sleep disorder to get treatment which is great i'm glad he's advocating for that yeah you never know like you should probably get it checked out and there are treatments for uh people of sleep disorders so
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He also claims he still cannot recall the events of that night, but he said, quote, there's no one else I can place a responsibility on. It's on my shoulders and I accept that and I have to move on. He hopes to reunite with his wife in heaven saying, quote, she knows more than I do about what happened that night and she will actually know how I've conducted myself since then.
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I want to be sure that I'm still worthy of her by how I carry myself now. He's also expressed how he will never forgive himself, which
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I don't know either. That'd be very, very difficult. But we actually found a short clip from a 2020 interview he did. We'll play that for you now.
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And what he said, just, I think we can all be like, it's heartbreaking. Yeah. I think he's innocent. Yeah. That seems, that seemed very genuine. Yeah.
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Well, I think the violent nature of this too plays into it. Definitely. 44 times.
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I mean, a jury is seeing this or hearing this, and obviously they have the prosecutor that's going for the death penalty in this case and panning him out a totally different way. So how split you would be. And it'd be really interesting to talk to somebody on that jury. Seriously, yeah.
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And get their thought process behind it because it must have been very difficult to... Because at the same time, you want to do right by the victim. You want to do right by...
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Yeah. It's, it's really wild. My brother was a sleepwalker. Um, I don't, I don't know that he is anymore, but definitely when he was a child. he would get out of his bed. He almost would leave the house at times. So much so that my parents started putting a chair in front of the door because he, he knew how to get up. He knew how to get to the door, unlock it in his sleep.
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yarmula and yarmula sorry yeah i am it must have been really difficult because from the jury's perspective you want to do right by yarmula and and uh you know get justice if if you believe that this was a murder this was a cold calculated murder or whether or not it was some a random act of violence i mean she would died brutally and as you just heard from him he's like
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the terror she must have felt so i see it from that perspective too uh because yeah there's just there's almost more evidence backing up that this was a murder than there is that this was sleepwalking i think you have to really evaluate that in your mind you're like could be this. These experts are saying it's possible, but I don't have anything else to go off of other than it's possible.
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Versus on the other side, there's a knife. There's, you know, the wiping off the clothes and the fact that yelled her head under the water, which is all very bizarre and strange, like to go the extra step. And just, if you have a sleep expert saying, It's possible, but yet it's rare to do all of these events in succession. I don't know. Is that enough for reasonable doubt though? Right, right.
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Is it enough? And then to throw a wrench in it, you have their children that are supporting their father throughout his trial and sentencing. And to this day. Yep, yep. Scott has also said that he has been in touch with his kids over the years and he said, I will go to my grave extremely proud of both of them. So we have a clip of his son, Michael, who was 12 years old at the time of the murder.
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Yeah. How do you even deal with that? How do you even begin to process that? I have no idea. But I think, I mean, if anybody knows their father best, it's his kids, right? Sure. So hearing them say that, I agree with you, Danny. It's pretty convincing.
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You know, I'd say I'm like 70% leaning towards sleepwalking, 30% that this was, and I want to leave a little bit, I'm not higher than that because I think there's enough. There's just enough that we don't know. But we can agree there's enough for reasonable doubt.
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I know that I can come to a unanimous decision that he's guilty of murder, especially first degree murder.
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So the sheriff for a long time down there. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Scary guy. Yeah.
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They're kind of known for going. Really hard.
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Cause that's the interesting thing is people are actually far more capable than you would think when they're in that deep REM sleep. They can interact with things. Yeah. And like people go grocery shopping, drive a car for miles. Yeah. It, I learned so much, uh, in researching this episode. I'm like, this is, this is far crazier than I ever expected. That's nuts. Danny, have you ever slept walk?
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What about just sleeping on your extremities?
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Like, like where the, where you, because when you're awake, you never just lay on top of your arm. Oh, I get what you're saying.
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But then when you're asleep, you'll do, I'll put myself in a pretzel position and I'll wake up and I feel like all my limbs are amputated and I start freaking out or usually it's one arm and I'll be, I'll be like this in my bed, holding my other arm, praying the blood comes back to it or I'll be scared. I'll be like, I'm gonna have to get my arm amputated.
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I've had both arms one time. Really? I felt so helpless. I think I rolled out of bed onto the floor to try to get up on my knees so that I could, but I'm like, why did I go into that position in the first place while I'm sleeping? And was there something that I was dreaming that potentially put me in that position? Or did I just,
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roll over from my back to my stomach to get comfortable or something and then fell on top of my limbs but because i was still sleeping there could be it's weird i don't know i hate it yeah i'm gonna start strapping myself down fully just get a straight handcuff me yeah straight jacket
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Yeah, I agree. Not only that, but one I definitely have experienced that is a parasomnia is night terrors. Night terrors. That's a huge one.
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I used to think demonic entities were descending from my ceiling.
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And one time I woke up thinking that my apartment was being shot at. Damn. Like I, I, I woke up pop, pop, pop. I jumped out of bed, like from a deep sleep, jumped out of bed, went to the window and was like peering out the window. And I scared the shit out of Kendall. I was like, there's gunshots. There's gunshots. I just heard gunshot. And she was so great.
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She's like, that was one of the scariest fucking nights. Cause I was like, what are you talking about? That's terrifying. Yeah. Or, or then the other time was I woke up and I was like, oh my God, do you see that? See the black thing descending from the ceiling? And I like woke her up too. And I was freaked the fuck out.
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Sleep terrors. There you go. But if I, and we'll get into the science behind it, but I was under extreme stress during that time of my life. For sure. Very stressed out with, with school and work. And, um, you know, I was a struggling college kid. And so, yeah. And then I was also had a really bad, I was also deconstructing from Christianity at the time. Fun. Fun times. Been there. And
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Yeah, and my relationship with my parents was horrible. So I had all these factors. So my stress was on a whole other level.
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And then we're all going to lay down on our cots and take a nap.
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We're talking about such niche. A percentage of a percent. Yes.
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Yeah, which is interesting because I don't think there's been a case as far as we know where somebody has gotten a hunting rifle out and then went out into the streets and started shooting at people. Like, yeah, randomly? No. Or any sort of mass shooter event, this hasn't cropped up.
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Yeah. And like 99% of the time, it's not a big deal. I mean, tons of people, I know there's tons of viral TikToks of sleepwalkers that are pretty wild when they go out, they literally leave the house and they're like walking dog down the street and stuff.
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Or just put a bunch of Legos on the ground where they walk. Well, the chair thing kind of worked too because he would walk into the chair and that was enough to kind of make him fall. Like he would fall to the ground sometimes.
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it's kind of funny just imagine i know better than leaving yeah i'd be like oh okay he's back because i think sometimes i don't think my parents would always wake up and i think sometimes he would literally wake himself up from running into the chair or tripping over the stairs or something and then come and just be like oh back in the bed and be like where'd you go dude yeah yeah
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But just this whole, whole phenomenon is, is really wild, but specifically what causes somebody to then escalate to this aggressive state where they proceed to murder somebody and oftentimes stab somebody multiple times. I mean, it's just like when there is no history of that sort of behavior before.
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Yeah. Kitchen knives. Yeah. They're all over the place. So was it just the fact that he was working on the pool before and that that was still programmed and it was just like, that's the, we'll pick up where we left off here in three hours when I'm asleep. And that's the idea is that he was just, he knew he had to go do that.
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how the hell are people sleep driving and then going to the grocery store? Yeah. That happens. If that's all that you did, maybe day in, day out, but like, wow. Yeah. If only there was a way to train ourselves to, To get shit done while we slept. Clean your house. If I could go walk safely.
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Cause they will do a sleep study on you. Your PCP will order a sleep study for you and then you can actually go see. And then you might, a lot of us have sleep apnea and we have no idea. That's true. Yeah. My brother had sleep apnea for a long time. Yeah, I think I have it too, but I won't do the sleep study. I need to.
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Yeah. I'm glad I'm not walking either. Things just go. Yeah. A lot of things can happen. Yeah. This episode is also brought to you by Helix Sleep, and they're running an awesome sale right now. So it's perfect time to upgrade your mattress. Just head over to helixsleep.com slash lights out for more info. I am a huge, huge fan of Helix Sleep.
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So that's what we're going to dive into today, which I'm very, yeah, I'm interested to hear if anybody out there has any experiences with sleepwalking personally. And I mean, hopefully nobody has any direct experiences with homicidal somnambulism. Let me say it again. Somnambulism is the term. scientific word, I believe, for sleepwalking. Right, right.
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They were nice enough to send me new mattresses for my home for everybody, including children's mattresses. But I can't say enough good things about Helix, so much so that I literally have gotten them for all my friends and my family. Actually, Helix was nice enough to get my mother-in-law a new mattress after hers got kind of dirty from the recent hurricanes.
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And she just got it and she absolutely loves it. She actually slept in my guest bed, which is a Helix mattress. It's the Midnight Luxe. And she loved it so much. She was like begging me. She's like, how do I get my hands on one of these? I need a new mattress. And Helix was nice enough to send her one. And she loves it so far. I love Helix. You will too.
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Again, they have mattresses for everybody, all types of sleepers. They have a sleep quiz. You know, some people are skeptical about buying a mattress online, which I get. You want to try it out before you buy it. But Helix makes it so simple. You just go through the quiz and they match you up with the mattress they think they'll be best for you.
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And they have mattresses at all price points, which is great. They have their award-winning Lux version and ultra premium elite collections as well. They're designed for big and tall sleepers. And like I mentioned, they have a Helix kids mattress as well. The best part about Helix though is that they'll deliver your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US.
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It comes rolled up in a box. It's super easy to set up yourself. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see. See the unboxing process, setting it up. It really is that easy. It's amazing that they're able to stuff these massive mattresses into a box at all.
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But if it makes you nervous to buy something online that you haven't tried, Helix has a 100 night sleep trial so that you can get more than three months to make sure that you love it. I'm personally a back sleeper, kind of side sleeper. But again, they make a mattress for everybody. The one that I love is the Midnight Luxe. Highly recommend it. And right now, Helix is running their president sale.
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and it's only running for a limited time. They're offering our listeners here at Lights Out an exclusive discount this month, 27% off your mattress purchase. So a really, really great deal. They also have sheets, they have pillows, they have bed frames. They got you covered all the way around when it comes to elevating your sleep. So check it out today, helixsleep.com slash lights out.
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But sleepwalking usually begins one to two hours after falling asleep, right? And it generally lasts several minutes, but in some cases it's been known to last longer. What's interesting is that sleepwalking also often runs in the family.
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And although not all factors are completely understood at this point, some of them include genetics, psychological stress, sleep deprivation, medications, and medical conditions. So, so many different factors that can play into it. I mean, it could be a medication, a supplement.
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Medications like benzodiazepines, GABA agonists like Ambien, antipsychotics, Parkinson's medications, some antibiotics, and blood pressure medications can potentially cause parasomnias. And the list goes on and on and on. But it's important to look at side effects of your medications because you never know.
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According to Dr. Michelle Kramer-Borman, out of hundreds of cases, about a third of the cases they reviewed involved the alleged influence of, you guessed it, Ambien. This term Ambien zombies, as they've been called, can potentially begin sleepwalking, sleep eating, sleep sex, and sleep driving. I mean, I've heard wild Ambien stories. Same, same.
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Yeah. I mean, I, I don't even know that I've ever tried Ambien before. Yeah. It scares me. I just, if I had, it was like a tiny, tiny bit, but I've, I've no people who have. And when, when you take enough of that, I mean, you can, you know, just subtract a few days from, yeah. From your life. Cause it's just, it's like a complete blur. Yeah.
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Yeah. So don't, don't eat, don't deep fry that chicken while you're on. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's... There's so many things, though. Yeah, a lot of factors. Many studies into parasomnias are relatively new in the field of sleep medicine. For example, REM sleep behavior disorder wasn't officially identified until 1986, but even though some of the research is fairly new...
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Parasomnias are not rare at all. Sleep medicine specialist Carlos Schenk from SFA and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School claims that millions of Americans have some type of parasomnia. I believe it. I do too. Some people even climbed out of windows, driven for miles, and even had sexual affairs while sleeping. How do you explain that?
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Yeah. One woman apparently dreamed that she was cooking for a dinner party and woke up at 6.30 a.m. and she found her kitchen table fully set and the meal prepared, which is, that's a best case scenario. Right, yeah. While you sleep, you made your breakfast for the next morning or dinner the next day? Table set, but you still got restful sleep. Sweet.
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I wish I could do all my chores while I was sleeping. I'd have so much more free time. If I could just like clean up all the dog poop, groom my animals and like... Might change the litter boxes while I was also getting arrested. That'd be great. I'd gain so much time back in my day. Do all your chores. All the laundry, all the, you know, clean my garage. Were the dishes done when she got up?
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You know, it was probably a disaster. Yeah. Something had to have gone wrong though. Yeah. Glass all over the floor. She dropped a few on the way to the table. Yeah. Others have also been reported as having violent tendencies while sleepwalking. And forewarning, this is about an animal. It's disturbing. If you don't want to hear about animal violence, skip ahead. Yeah, just like 10 seconds.
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One woman once woke up to find that she had gotten her cat, put it on the cutting board, and sliced it up. Oof. Terrible.
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Dude. That's so nuts. Dude, her guardian angel. Yeah. Working overtime to do that. Another man had nearly snapped his wife's neck while he was dreaming of deer hunting with his hands as a weapon.
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Somnambulism. yeah so let's get into it one of the most bizarre sleepwalking murder cases in the u.s happened in 1997 when scott fullader a devout mormon stabbed his wife 44 times with a hunting knife this is crazy yeah this one just blew me away So Scott and his family had been living the American dream.
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Seems like you can get in a deep enough sleep that nothing happens.
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works like you just have to wake yourself up right yeah whenever you you know transition from that uh phase of sleep right exactly you're like locked in right which is also terrifying it is really scary yeah it's terrifying but i think it kind of proves to you know his point that it proves it helps prove his innocence in a sense anecdotally speaking at least right yeah yeah i don't know any cat that would willfully allow you to pin them down on a cutting board right true without giving up a damn good fight right exactly that's a great point
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What? What? Your brain can be split? Half asleep, half awake? The brain is... We just still don't know anything. Yeah. So for sleepwalkers, the part of the brain that shuts down is the part that controls a person's judgment.
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He worked as a product manager at Motorola Semiconductor Plant and was a youth group teacher at the Mormon Church. He lived in Phoenix, Arizona with his family, his wife, Yarmila, whom he called Yarm, who was his childhood sweetheart, and their two children. And I mean, you can probably just envision what him and his family were like.
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Their eyes are open, they can observe the environment and they can interact with things, but the main problem is that they don't consider the consequences while they're acting. They also don't feel pain, which is also called analgesia. Some sleepwalkers have gone out barefoot in the snow without waking up, even when their skin is blackening from frostbite. Oh, man.
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In another example, that's a fake. Oh, sorry.
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In another example the SFA investigated, a man had just gotten out of successful back surgery at the hospital and 12 hours later he was found dead outside wedged between a generator and a hospital wall six floors below the hospital rooftop. So the question was, had he jumped or was he pushed? Ultimately SFA concluded the answer was neither. He was sleepwalking and walked off of the roof.
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but how did they figure that out? The autopsy showed that there were significant abrasions along the individual's back that indicated he fell straight down, and if he had jumped or was pushed, he wouldn't have fallen straight down. Investigators concluded he had walked upright, just straight off the ledge. That's crazy.
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He was also barefoot, meaning he had walked willingly across the roof's layer of sharp stones, and since sleepwalkers cannot sense pain, This was how SFA argued the case. SFA also clarifies that moving while asleep is not always a form of technical sleepwalking.
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For example, REM sleep behavior disorder, sometimes called RBD, occurs during rapid eye movement sleep, but sleepwalking occurs during the stage known as non-rapid eye movement. REM is the stage where we dream, and if you remember from our sleep paralysis episode, this also means that this is also when our body essentially paralyzes itself. Or it's supposed to.
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It's a protective mechanism that keeps us and the people around us safe from our potential physical reactions to a dream. Which, I'm sure we've all had some violent dreams before. Sure. But Dr. Mahold and Shank reported that some people can leave the paralysis of REM sleep and then physically act out their dreams. I want to film myself sleeping. I want to know what I do.
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They went to church, they're a relatively quiet family, according to neighbors. but their lives would radically change on January 16th, 1997. At around 10 p.m. that night, Yarmila had fallen asleep watching ER in the living room. Scott had prepared a lesson plan for his Mormon religious education class and then briefly worked on fixing an issue with their pool, but ended up just giving up.
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Thank you. Hostess Twinkie. Used to eat those a lot as a kid.
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He had gotten the tools, which allegedly included a knife for removing the O-ring in the pool and his work clothes from the trunk of his car, but had decided to delay work until the following day because he was just too tired and it was dark out. We've all been there.
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Yeah, because that wouldn't turn out well either because then everybody would be trying to fake this parasomnia defense. Yep. While the research into parasomnias has only gained more traction in recent decades, the earliest use of a sleepwalking defense in U.S. history dates all the way back to 1845.
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So we're going to go back to a long, long time ago in the case against Albert Tyrrell in the murder of Mary Ann Bickford. So here is that story. 22-year-old Albert was a wealthy man from Weymouth, Massachusetts, and was born in 1824. In 1845, he was married and living with his wife and two children, but he was known to be an unfaithful man. He was a little fuck boy back then.
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That year, he left his wife to be with a woman named Marianne, also known as Maria Bickford. Mary was married at 16 years old and was now 21, and she had escaped her husband in Maine and worked as a prostitute living in a Boston boarding house on Cedar Lane.
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Albert disapproved of Mary's prostitution, but she continued to work regardless, and they soon fell in love and began living together as husband and wife inside of the boarding house. The relationship had quickly scandalized the city of Boston, and the owners of the boarding house also charged much higher rent for cohabitating unmarried couples. No, no, no, no. Not allowed.
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Regardless, they were often connected at the hip and traveled together using aliases. Reportedly, they had a toxic relationship. Mary apparently told one of the other boarders that she enjoyed fighting with Albert because they had, quote, such a good time making up. And you know where that's going. Oh, boy.
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Albert was later indicted on charges of adultery on September 29, 1845, but friends and family, and even his wife, pleaded to the prosecutor and requested a stay of proceedings in hopes that Albert could be reformed. His trial was then postponed for six months, and Albert posted bond and immediately rushed back to live with Mary at the boarding house.
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And the knife thing obviously is a big component to this, but I know I've used probably much larger knives than I should have for... To remove something.
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But their love affair would end abruptly on October 27, 1845.
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We all have. Yeah. He then found his wife asleep on the couch, kissed her goodnight, and then went upstairs to bed. Hours passed and Scott claimed that a commotion outside woke him up and his dogs began barking. Local police entered his home and found Scott at the top of the stairs in his pajamas, acting confused and asking what was going on.
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On the first day of the trial, the prosecutor called witnesses who helped establish a circumstantial case against Albert Terrell.
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but there was enough doubt in the case when the medical examiner claimed that the neck wound could have been self-inflicted i don't think anybody's doing a neck wound that deep another witness mary head who lived near the boarding house claimed that albert had visited her on the morning of the murder He rang her doorbell.
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When she answered, he made a gargling noise and asked her if there were some things there for him. According to Mary, she was frightened by his, quote, strange state as if asleep or crazy.
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Another odd eyewitness report came from Albert's brother-in-law, Nathaniel Bailey, and he claimed that when Albert arrived in Weymouth, he said he was fleeing the adultery indictment even though it seemed like he was fleeing the murder. When Nathaniel told Albert that Mary had been killed, Albert appeared genuinely shocked by the news.
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The defense began by attacking Mary's character and proposing that she might have cut her own throat. They defended Albert, saying he was an honorable and upstanding gentleman until he met Mary, and he was simply a, quote, prisoner who was, quote, spellbound. Very sound argument. Yeah. And after assassinating Mary's character, the defense then introduced somnambulism into their strategy.
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The defense even argued that Alexander the Great had even imagined a battle strategy in his sleep. Where'd they pull that out? Then the defense called Albert's family and friends to the stand and each of them recounted how strange he had behaved at different points in his life. Some claim he began sleepwalking at the age of six and the instances got worse with age.
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Police had their guns aimed at him and ordered him to get on the floor. And obviously in that type of situation, you're just going to comply. But he warned the other officers that there were three other people in the house, his two children and his wife. He was then placed under arrest.
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One time he forcibly grabbed his brother, pulled down curtains and smashed windows and even yanked his cousin out of bed and threatened him with a knife. Each time he was sleepwalking and he would speak with a shrill, trembling voice.
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These testimonies were then corroborated by Walter Channing, the dean of Harvard Medical School, who testified that a person in a sleepwalking state could conceivably rise in the night, dress himself, commit a murder, set a fire, and make an escape.
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And of course, from Harvard. Yep. Yep. I guess Harvard is in Massachusetts, so it makes sense. Yeah, it's close by.
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And when police started looking around, they found his wife's body floating in the blood-filled pool in their backyard. And apparently this was such a disturbing scene that they compared it to a shark attack.
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I'm sure prosecutors either know this from law school or they go and look into it. Yeah.
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Well, the fact that we actually understand the sleep cycles helps a lot. And there's a lot more obviously data and studies going on. But over the years, many cases that have used a sleepwalking defense have failed.
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Many lead to a conviction, but another strange, almost unbelievable case with a more legitimate argument for a sleepwalking defense involved a 24-year-old Canadian man named Kenneth Parks and his in-laws in 1987 in the Toronto area of Ontario. According to Kenneth, the last thing he remembered on the night of May 24, 1987 was falling asleep to an episode of SNL.
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He then experienced strange flashing images like in a dream. He saw his mother-in-law with a panicked look on her face. And the next he was yelling, kids, kids, trying to warn them about something. The next was just the sound of a phone beeping off the hook. And all of a sudden he was awake in his car with a bloody knife next to him in the passenger seat.
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Kenneth then drove to the closest police station at 4.15 a.m. and he blurted out, "...I just killed two people. I've just killed my mother and father-in-law. I stabbed and beat them to death. It's all my fault." Police also noticed that Kenneth appeared completely unaware of the fact that he had severed the tendons in both of his hands.
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The police then detained him and raced over to his in-laws house in Scarborough, which was 14 miles from Kenneth's home. At the in-laws townhouse, police found Kenneth's father-in-law, Dennis Woods, barely alive. He had been strangled until he fell unconscious and also stabbed in the back. and the head with a kitchen knife.
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As for Dennis' wife, Barbara Woods, she was found dead after being bludgeoned with a tire iron and also stabbed five times with a kitchen knife.
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of dennis woods that was initially a first degree murder charge but they knocked it down later to a second degree kenneth's grandmother hired him one of the best criminal lawyers in canada and one of the first female lawyers in the country marlis edward and we actually found a clip of marlis edward and here's some of her thoughts on the case
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Marlis Edward then contacted Dr. Ronald Billings, an expert in forensic psychiatry, and according to Dr. Billings, he reported that Kenneth was depressed over what had happened. He found no evidence of delusional thinking. He didn't have an aggressive personality, a personality disorder, or antisocial behavior. And he was not a psychopath.
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Kenneth at one point had even been given the nickname, the gentle giant. And for the prosecution, it seemed like an open and shut case. Kenneth's father-in-law, Dennis, identified Kenneth during the attack and the murder weapon was found in Kenneth's car. Not only that, but they had his confession in the police station. But just like in the Scott Flader case, no one could find a motive.
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So here's some more of Marlis Edward explaining how they plan to build an argument for the defense.
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While his defense moved toward making the argument for sleepwalking, Marlis received feedback from her colleagues that the claim was ridiculous and far-fetched. The key would be convincing a jury, which would be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, Marlis pushed on and came across the neurophysiologist in Ottawa, Dr. Roger Broughton.
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the same expert who would later testify during the Scott Valater case.
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This is when his gambling addiction began, and for the next year he placed bets on horse races until he started losing significantly. He even began stealing small amounts of money over time from his employer to cover his losses. He had worked nearly 10 hour days as a project coordinator for Revere Electric, and in the end he had embezzled about $30,000.
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He was caught, fired, and charged with fraud, and he even spent a night in jail. But Karen and his in-laws, Dennis and Barbara Woods, supported him through it all. He also began attending gambling support groups, but unfortunately no one wanted to hire him after the embezzlement for obvious reasons.
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Meanwhile, Karen was also pregnant with their first child, and with the growing financial stress, he lied to Karen and claimed that he had gotten a job, but really, he was betting on horse races again hoping he would hit it big and be able to support his family and repay his former employer. He then borrowed money from loan sharks and stole money from Karen's bank account.
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The family's finances dwindled while Karen gave birth to their child. Three days before the murder, Kenneth's stress level shot through the roof when one of Karen's checks bounced. She assumed it was a mistake, so she visited her bank where they showed her several check receipts with her signature on them. And she realized that Kenneth had been forging checks.
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And when she returned home, an argument ensued, and she forced Kenneth to sleep on the couch. And that night, he didn't get any sleep. The next day, Karen discovered Kenneth had been lying about having a job, and because of the loan sharks, they were in more debt than she had ever realized.
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She was obviously very pissed off with him and began worrying that Karen was going to take their newborn and leave him for good. Again, he couldn't sleep that night. On Saturday, the day before the murders, Kenneth had been awake for about 48 hours straight. He then played rugby, hoping the exercise would be enough to finally get him some sleep.
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Later that evening, Karen returned home and Kenneth expected to be served divorce papers. Instead, she told him the plan was to sell their house, repay his former employer and start over. which he was absolutely shocked by her mercy, but he agreed, and he knew that he would have to confess to his in-laws about what had been happening, which added even more stress to the situation.
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He feared that all the love and respect they had built over the years would be gone, but he figured that was the price he had to pay for his poor actions. That night, Karen asked if Kenneth was coming up to bed, and he insisted on sleeping on the couch until he could make amends and move forward. He finally fell asleep that night to an episode of SNL after being awake for nearly 60 hours.
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With the mounting stress and exhaustion, along with a family history of sleepwalking, Kenneth was in a state where he was highly likely to sleepwalk. But the defense was worried whether or not they would convince the jury that Kenneth drove 14 miles along a highway and committed an intricate murder and assault against his in-laws while sleepwalking.
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The defense argued that since Kenneth had gone to sleep with anxiety about the next day, when he was planning to come clean to his in-laws over dinner at their house, that he might have began sleepwalking as if he was carrying out the next day's events. And this is possibly what led him to his in-laws house in the middle of the night. He had also driven the route hundreds of times before.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
The defense also noted that he had left the house without socks or underwear and left the front door to his house wide open, two things which he had never done before. Seem pretty obvious, you know, not only leaving the front door open, but going to your in-laws with no socks or underwear. Yeah.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Which imagine being the neighbors and how shocked you would be. Seeing something like this play out late at night, too?
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
This case is so... It's similar, but it's also different in a lot of ways. Yeah. From the Scott Flater's case. Because it's just like... I mean, this guy...
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
stress for one on a whole other whole other level um but then just the prior history that's there prior history also like leaving the front door open no underwear no socks i think that's a that's a big one um his hands being his hands cut up to the point that the tendons are severed i mean
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
It is hard to believe that he was sleepwalking for this long, but if there was somebody who was going to break the norm, I feel like it would be him.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
And they have family members that are cooking in their sleep. I mean, this seems like a, you know... Whether it's genetic or it's some type of, I don't know.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
And then obviously five neurological experts who are all unanimous and we believe he was sleepwalking.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Yeah, a lot stacked in his favor with this. But in the aftermath of the not guilty verdict, an appeal was brought to the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld Kenneth's acquittal. And there were questions on the quote, criminal automatism defense.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
The Supreme Court document read, the failure to prove that the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt in accordance with such principles will result in an acquittal. That is exactly what has happened in this case. The respondent has been acquitted in accordance with ordinary criminal law principles.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
And Chief Justice Antonio Lehmer found that the trial judge was correct in his analysis of the evidence and his decision not to characterize sleepwalking as a mental disorder. Part of me is like, this is Canada though.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Yeah, it seems like they really looked at the evidence and really looked at all the information that they were given. You know, it wasn't just like the prosecutors was like, I want to get a conviction in this. So let's go, let's shoot for the, you know, death penalty here. You know, go as hard as we possibly can to just convict him no matter what.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
But they really looked at all the different factors here. Even Kenneth's wife, Karen, had been convinced that he was innocent. And after the trial, they reconciled their relationship. But after four years, they did get divorced. Reportedly, Kenneth Parks remarried, fathered five more children, and later ran for school trustee in Durham in 2006 where his children went to school.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Locals were concerned with the previous murder charge from 20 years before, but many more were concerned with the proven embezzling from his employer and gambling addiction. His whereabouts today are unknown. But in the aftermath of Kenneth Park's case, many have reconsidered the sleepwalking and the quote non-insane automatism defense.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Kenneth's case has taught nearly every law school in Canada, and many might find the idea ridiculous, but the field of sleep forensics has been growing throughout the years and uncovering more about the bizarre scenarios that can arise from sleepwalking.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Many are concerned that if a sleepwalking defense results in acquittal, should that mean the person goes free without any repercussions or mandatory treatment? Canadian college professor Dr. Mayor Krieger, in an article titled Sleep Medicine and the Law, warned, If someone commits a crime, they shouldn't mean they're off the hook. They need to be treated to try to prevent it from happening again.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
One question is a legal one, whether the person should go to jail or not. The other is the fear that the person might do something similar again. What if they do something in jail? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair point.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
At the very least, I feel like they should also go and agree to be studied and try to further the science on this. Uh, you know, especially somebody lost their life here. So if we can try to prevent this from happening in the future or learn more about what's going on with, with sleepwalking, then, you know, it's a small price to pay. It definitely beats being in prison, but.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Yeah, I agree with you. I think, I think that they should mandate something.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
But at the end of the day, do you think sleepwalking defense is legit?
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Yeah. Or, you know, I know there's other cases where if like, let's say your daughter is was murdered by her boyfriend and her boyfriend claims the sleepwalking defense. Sure. Are you going to feel differently about that than say, if it was within your own family, you know?
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
But if you didn't know them as well as Dennis knew Kenneth, you know what I mean? You didn't know this boy and, you know, he's claiming that, oh, I was sleepwalking. Again, I think it really comes down to the facts of the case and, you know, understanding the health and behavior of, you know, and history of his past with sleepwalking and things like that.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
very very convincing yeah um for for it to work you know there's always the fear that people will try to abuse it you know claim i have parasomnias and which we've seen we see the insanity defense too right yeah exactly pull that one all the time but it rarely works um in their favor so yeah i i think it should i mean if you are not conscious when you do you commit a murder especially
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
as horrible and tragic as that is, should you be held to the same level of liability as somebody who was, did this consciously, that would just be a scary world to live in. Right. Especially knowing what the brain is capable of. Um, but you damn sure should be able to back it up and experts should be able to come to your defense and be like, yeah, this person, you know,
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
I agree. I agree. And I, I mean, I think the most important thing is we just got to keep studying the brain and neuroscience needs to continue to advance. And hopefully technology can assist us in understanding the brain more and why this happens and, and be able to measure it a little bit better. So it's not just like expert opinions, but rather we can have some data.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
We have a way to pinpoint somehow. I don't know.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Well, and just stress in general. I mean, how many people commit crimes because they're stressed about something? So it's just, I think stress is kind of the underlying issue of which we all battle it daily, but finding ways to mitigate that stress and reduce it the best that you can definitely helps. But yeah, at the very least, if you're struggling with a
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
sleep disorder or you think you might be just just talk to your doctor about it yeah um because chances are you know your doctor will refer you to a sleep specialist who can do a sleep study on you and i know with insurance the way that it is it's doesn't always cover it and it can be expensive i've heard some crazy prices on sleep studies but um at least talk to your doctor about it if you think you might have it and you know when talking about some of the things i experienced in the past
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
I did talk to my doctor about it and they did recommend I take a sleep study, but for snoring was what it was. But the sleep terrors and stuff like that resolved themselves pretty soon after that because stress just went down with time. But I think I was massively stressed out with my situation at the time that that's what was causing it as time went on.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Because I don't have sleep terrors anymore or anything. I don't think I have really any parasomnias at this point unless... falling asleep on my limbs is a parasomnia, but maybe. But yeah, super interesting. I mean, what do you think, Danny? You think sleepwalking is a legitimate defense?
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
There's science to back it up. So you would believe somebody, you know, it'd be easier to believe somebody with a sleepwalking defense if somebody's like, I was possessed by a demon when I did this.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Which, and again, in, you know, devil made me do it cases, usually there's some psychiatric thing that could be, uh, that comes up that you can point to, um, in those cases. But yeah, I think, I mean, the sleep phenomenon is so interesting. I could talk about sleep all day. In fact, I want to go sleep right now. This was a long episode. If you're still awake, hey, we're done.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
But yeah, no, we want to know your thoughts on this. Let us know if you have any crazy parasomnias or experience with sleepwalking. Yeah, drop it in the comments. Let us know about it. And also, if there's any other sleepwalking cases you want us to take a look at in the future, because I'm sure we dive back into this topic. There's plenty more. Yeah. Oh yeah. There's, there's definitely more.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
I know there's like a, there's a famous documentary on a case, uh, that we kind of alluded to at the beginning.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Maybe we revisit that at some point, but yeah, let us know your thoughts. And then before we go, I did want to just make a quick announcement, but, uh, If you enjoy the video version of this podcast, I just want to let you know that from now on, the only place to enjoy the video version of the podcast will be on YouTube. And before you start cussing me out in the comments, let me explain why. So
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Basically, Spotify has been working to become a YouTube competitor. And, you know, we started, I started the show on YouTube many years ago. And YouTube has always been our home. And, you know, going forward and kind of with some other agreements that we have with, you know, our basically...
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
rss hoster and you know they they sell over ad spaces for the show audio boom uh we have to we are not able to push the video to spotify anymore um and also just because of the you know it was affecting the youtube channel quite a bit in a negative way and so the best way to support the show going forward if you want to watch the show is on youtube uh Links are below.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
If you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, come over, hang out with us. We do a live premiere for the episode every Friday, so you can come hang out, chat with us, and watch the show with everybody else, which is always a good time. But the audio will still be on Spotify, so you can still listen to it.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Same as always, it's still there, and we love Spotify for all you audio listeners, and so it'll still be there. No worries, but video is on YouTube. But Thank you guys for hanging out with us. We will see you guys next week back in the paranormal realm. Yeah, I'm excited. Which will be good. It's been a little while. So we'll see you then. Until then, lights out.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
So many unusual things about that statement. Really odd, right? If somebody was going to do this, and this was some type of premeditated murder, or in a fit of rage they did this, most of the time they wouldn't want to get caught, so why would they do it outside where everybody can hear and see? Noises. Yeah.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
But the circumstances are certainly important. Yes, very hot. And because typically you don't see this in these types of murder cases. No. After Scott was charged with first degree murder, Scott's mother and sister confirmed that Scott had a history of violent sleepwalking incidents in his youth.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Lights Out. I'm your host, Josh. And I'm your host, Austin. And I'm the producer, Daniel. Today, we're covering a topic that all of us, I think, find very interesting.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Independent testing on a device called a polysomnograph also indicated that he fit the profile of a sleepwalker. So instead of an insanity defense, his attorney put together an argument for a sleepwalking defense. At the time of the murder Scott had also been under severe stress at work, resulting in serious sleep deprivation, which experts say are common triggers for sleepwalking incidents.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
The defense planned on insisting that Scott unknowingly killed his wife. Psychiatrists in courtrooms call the defense, quote, non-insane automatism, a state where a person has no control over their actions and their behavior is, quote, unquote, robotic. Sleepwalking is one form of non-insane automatism. The sleeper simply carries out a deeply embedded program.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Yeah. Where does that come from? Because who's programmed to do that? Right. Courts have accepted this explanation in cases in the past where a sane person can commit a crime without intent, malice, or even awareness. But it's often hard to convince a jury because attorneys have to ride this fine line between criminal responsibility and quote legal insanity.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
Right. In Scott's case, the sleepwalking defense gained national attention, and at first, even Scott thought a sleepwalking murder was a ridiculous concept. He even called it, quote, bullshit, pure and simple. But this was the only argument the defense had, and prosecutors in Maricopa County would be seeking the death penalty.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
As he considered the sleepwalking argument more, Scott said quote, I thought my brain had thrown a rod and I thought I'm going to the state hospital or to prison for life. That was before I even knew that you can take drugs that can change your sleeping patterns at night.
Lights Out
235: The Most Shocking Sleepwalking Murders
At that point I was saying I'd accept a lifetime probation of living alone, let my kids sleep somewhere else, lock me up on my own because I don't want to hurt somebody else. Later he said, quote, Sometimes when I think about this I wonder, what kind of Jekyll and Hyde am I? There's no way I would, could hurt Yharn.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Hey, guys. How's it going? Good. Good. How can we help you? Well, so I'm 43. I've been lifting pretty consistently since I was about 14 or 15. Of course, times throughout life, there's been different life's demands and stuff, but I've pretty much always stayed active. The challenge, though, is ever since I've hit 41... It doesn't seem to matter what I do.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
I don't see the physical results that I'd like to. I've tried changing up workout plans, tweaking diet. I eat about 80% clean. Nothing seems to work the way that it used to. I've had a couple setbacks. over the years, went through a divorce, um, tennis elbow that lasted for about two and a half years, did lots of PT with it, still dealing with some issues with that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Um, I've had like constant stomach distention for about two years. I've seen GI docs, seen normal docs, um, seen like functional medicine doctors. Nobody's been able to kind of pinpoint that one had a PT who, um, So I had very little diastasis recti, but nothing that would lend to that. I've had a scope done. Um, upside to this during all this, I've gotten remarried, have, um, awesome wife.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
We've got five kids combined ages 11 to 17. Um, I'm just wanting to be in the best possible shape for my wife and kids. Um, you know, kind of disappointing, you know, get remarried and you don't feel like you have the energy that you did when you're younger. I feel like that's kind of like a less than scenario.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Um, kind of feel stuck in a, a dad bod situation, no matter how much kind of effort put in and change things up. Just wanting to get some advice. I want to continue to be an inspiration for my boys who they've started working out in the past year. And then I've got a almost 16 year old daughter who, uh,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Of course, I want to just look jacked enough that any guys wanting to date her think twice about anything.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
It's more so I'd say like eating 80% clean, 20% processed in that sense.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Okay. Yeah. Mostly whole foods. I have like one day a week, Friday morning that I go to a men's prayer breakfast and it's like down home Southern cooking. So I don't know. I can't skip out on that, but outside of that, try to keep it pretty clean.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Yes, parasites, SIBO, C. diff. They did a scope to just see if there was anything internally going on. They said – I had a very minimal hiatal hernia, but the GI doctor was like, there's no reason that like from her perspective that that should cause anything.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Yeah. I went gluten free, did keto, did dairy free, those kinds of things.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
So I'm consistent as far as like bedtime, what time I get to bed, what time I set my alarm for. Sleep's been off and on, honestly, since the divorce. But like lately, I can't seem to get more than about six and a half hours of sleep. But that's typically interrupted in the middle of the night. Go ahead. What interrupts your sleep?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
just wake up. I'll wake up pretty consistently between about two 30 and three 15. Um, I can even, let's say I go to bed at nine. I could even wake up at 1230, pop a melatonin in, in the middle of the night to just try to stay asleep until my alarm goes off and I'll still wake up.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Um, most recent current workout routine I did, I just came off of a, like a deload week and just started something new this week. But before that I was kind of doing a, um, I'd say like a combo between Dorian Yates and Mike Mincer approach.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Um, doing, um, weightlifting three days a week, but you know, like one day was legs. We'll say another day was back and buys. And another day was shoulders and arms trying to just get seen if I needed more rest and recovery for each body part. And then in between those days do abs and zone two cardio.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Not in that part. I wasn't falling to the extreme just because with my elbow, even having been through PT and everything, I can't always seem to go to complete failure because of the elbow, if that makes sense.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
it just always kind of feels that way. I mean, it'll feel worse if say like I've eaten a bigger meal, just kind of like, even if I didn't have the gut distension, you know, you kind of eat too much. You're like, ah, why did I do that?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Yeah, pretty tired all the time.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
The last time I had my hormones checked were about, I think, close to two years ago. And testosterone was like between like 420 and 440. Yeah.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
No.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Okay. That's it. Awesome.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Um, how long do you think y'all to follow like the maps? 15.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Oh, yeah. I'd love that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2539: Four Critical Things to Consider Before Getting Surgery & More (Listener Live Coaching)
Awesome. Thank y'all. Y'all have a great day. You too. All right.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
I like that. They hate us because they ain't us.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
Does this have anything to do with the fact that... I told him to take notes and then bring it up in the Eagles.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
Jalen Carter.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
Yeah. Memes? I woke up. I was going to root for PFT to win the Super Bowl. And then he tweeted a picture of Amy Schumer interviewing for the Jets head coaching job.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
They're talking to everybody. That's all the joke was. But we get to stay in New Orleans till Monday.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
I know misery sells, but has... Anything positive happen to you guys that we know the outcome of that? Numbers wise? Number wise. Double Doink was the most listened to podcast. No, misery, dude. Misery. Has anything positive happened?
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
Hank celebrating the Boston Celtics went viral.
Pardon My Take
NFL Divisional Round, Fastest 2 Minutes, Commanders And Eagles On A Collision Course, Bills Outlast Ravens And Head To Kansas City + Who's Back Of The Week
Jack is here.
Scam Factory
Negotiation with the Devil | 5
I'm telling them that it's true. But they don't believe me.
Scam Factory
Negotiation with the Devil | 5
They smashed me in the back. They kicked me in the legs. They kicked me in the body.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Wouldn't you have been freaked out when you cut the can open and you found the thing just fixed to the bottom of the can looking back up at you and blinked?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Right. One other thing, though, I noticed on this list, Old Speckled Hen uses widgets, too, which I didn't know. That used to be one of my fave beers for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yep. This episode of Short Stuff brought to you by Coors Banquet Beer. Yeah, I doubt that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, and they did. It's this thing that makes canned Guinness much more like Guinness from the tap, which is actually much more like Guinness from a cask, because Guinness is its own kind of thing, as a matter of fact. I say we dig into how Guinness is Guinness.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I think so. All right. Well, I think you should take the lead then.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yes, the widget is simple, right? So let's talk about what we're talking about. If you open a can of Guinness, and just the can, it's not in the bottle, there's a little plastic sphere with a hole in the bottom that you will hear rattling around the can. If you cut the can open, very gently set one aside and then be very careful holding the other one up because it's a sliced can.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
They're very dangerous. And look inside, you'll see this little plastic sphere. That is the Guinness widget.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
It's not that big, is it? No, it looks a little smaller. But could you, though? Does it have bounce to it?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Okay. Well, I didn't know. I could see that being like a thing that the Internet figured out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Okay. So everybody else calls it a widget then. Yeah. Okay. So they put this in there, and only God himself knows how they work.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
No, no. So if you have a cask, the beer that's put into the cask, it ages in the cask. Like when you deliver it to a pub, it's still doing its thing aging. And once you tap the cask, you have three days to drink it. That's how like unpasteurized and new it is. But the thing is, is when you get the beer out of the cask, you have to actually pump it out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And that creates like a totally different pour and finish than if you're pouring it out of a keg. So because the world kind of transitioned from casks to kegs around the middle of the 20th century, Michael Asher was like, well, then what can we do to make Guinness more cask-like or keep its cask-like profile and look and taste and everything?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And he figured out that adding nitrogen is what would do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yes. And even though it's harder for nitrogen to dissolve inside beer, CO2, it's very easy. Nitrogen will, some will dissolve, and it forms smaller bubbles and more stable bubbles. So when you pour this nitrogen-infused Guinness beer, the fermentation,
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
The head will be foamier, much creamier than, say, like a CO2 lager head that eventually kind of settles down and looks like urine in a glass after a while, especially if you're talking about Coors Banquet beer. This is like a foamy head that, because the nitrogen bubbles are more stable, stays around way longer, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
So he figured out by adding nitrogen, you can basically replicate the look and the feel and the taste of cask-poured Guinness like it used to be.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
So you like the canned version better, huh? Oh, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're talking short stuff today. We're talking widgets on short stuff, I should say. Widgets that were first introduced as a concept from a play. Right, Chuck?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I might not be doing it right then because I'm like, what is this crap? I would rather just drink the Guinness out of a bottle any day of the week. I mean, do you like Guinness in a pub? I don't know that I've ever actually had real Guinness in a pub.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I must not have poured it correctly because it doesn't make any sense that they would even go to this trouble of putting a widget in it to make worse Guinness than it is in the bottle. So I just didn't do it right. That's my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Wow. So I've been doing the opposite because drinking a single bottle of Guinness is like eating a whole loaf of bread to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Wow. OK, so I got to try this other version because what you're talking about is basically the opposite of the Guinness I'm familiar with. Oh, wow.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Like I really want to try it. Like you've just blown my mind.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Well, there's this other thing they have now, too, that I guess kind of takes the whole thing into a new level. It's called Nitro Surge. Yeah, I saw that. You put it on top of a can and it does the pouring like it would from a cask, as far as I understand, right there at home or, you know, in the parking lot of a convenience store.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Oh, yeah. I forgot we were talking about the widget.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Right. But the specific kind of nitrogen bottles that make Guinness Guinness, which are smaller and more stable. So you get that foamy, creamy head and the cascade and all that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
You have to hold it just right. Put your thumb over the hole and then just throw it in and put the top of the can on really quick.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Right. And they're wrong, but I get the point for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I guess it depends which version of the Internet you're talking about, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Like I just associate a stout with like like I just had dinner three hours ago. I can't drink a stout because I'll I'll throw up. I'll be too full.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
OK, we're getting tripped up by semantics again. It to me. Yeah. The big milky thing. If I drank a big glass of milk after I ate, I would probably throw up. So it's the same thing in that sense. But no, it's not making me like, you know, like Coors Bank would be or would burpee or whatever. Yeah. It doesn't fill you up in that sense. It like literally fills you up. I got you. Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
So, yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing. Well, now I'm worried that I have experienced Guinness like you're supposed to. And there's not like a whole world out there for me to try. Well, you may not like it. I'll try it for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Hey und willkommen zu The Short Stuff. Ich bin Josh und da ist Chuck und Jerry ist hier.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Right. And if you're a purist, you definitely have to get it from Quebec. That's just the way it goes. That's right. So there's a bunch of different families or people who lay claim to inventing Poutine, but they all hail from the same area called the Centre du Québec. which means center of Quebec, which is ironically in the south.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
And that is a really important place because that's where the fromageries, the cheesemakers, who made these squeaky cheese curds that are essential to poutine, if you're a poutine purist, where they're made. And the first guy who we'll meet is from Warwick in Quebec. And his name was Fernand Lachance. Yeah, that was in 1957.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Warte, nein, sie ist nicht hier. Jerry ist nicht hier. Dave ist nicht hier. We're left on our own, like a pair of losers. And this is short stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
And he replied in French, I'm not even going to try it, but he replied in French, that will make a damn mess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Do you want me to try the French quote? Oh, sure. Ça va te faire une maudite poutine. Nice. So, okay, we've got our first entrant, Fernand Lachance, courtesy of Eddie Lannes. This is 1957? I guess, no, 1963 is when he added the gravy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah. Pretty fun. So poutine, actually the name of it is, it essentially means messy or mess, at least in slang in Quebec for sure. But people say that it's probably or possibly one of the etymological theories is that it hails from the English word pudding. And not pudding like you and I think that has the jiggly skin off top that you have to peel off when you take it out of the refrigerator.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
This is pudding as in like figgy pudding, which is essentially like a mixture of various foods, sometimes fig, and that it can be kind of messy. It's not like, it's just like a hodgepodge, just kind of mixed together, that kind of messy. And so poutine, possibly from pudding, is where this whole thing came from.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, so what we do know is that it showed up from the more rural area of Centre du Québec to Quebec City in 1969 at a place called Ashton's Snack Bar. It made it to Montreal in 1983 and then it started to spread far and wide from there. They say we take a break and we come back and we trace poutine's spread like so much gravy flowing over a pile of fries. Great.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah. How do you like it? It was great. I mean, it's hard to mess up poutine, in my opinion.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
There's also one more thing, I'm sorry. There's also a restaurant in Toronto, I can't remember, also I totally name check, but they made like Korean poutine.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
I can't remember what made it Korean, but it was the bomb. Oh, okay. I think it had some sort of smoked meat on it as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, but it's a great name. Yeah, pretty good. So, it first started to spread to national restaurant chains back in 1985. There was a Quebec fast food franchise called Fritz, F-R-I-T-S. And they did not last very long, but they seemed to be on record as the first national chain, or at least large regional chain, to feature poutine. But the one that really kind of kicked it off was Burger King.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Einer ihrer Franchisees, Jean-Louis Roy, war 1987 und sagte, ich möchte wirklich Poutine Burger King anbieten. Bitte lasst mir Poutine anbieten. Und der Burger King dachte darauf und sagte, ich wünsche mir das nicht. Und so begann diese erste Burger King Franchise, Poutine zu verkaufen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Und ich glaube, es verkaufte sich gut genug, dass Burger King gesagt hat, wir werden es in allen unseren Québec-Restaurants verkaufen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
But in Canada, you got to eat some of that poutine. You definitely do. Whenever we visit Toronto, I'm always on that stuff. Aber einer der Gründe, warum wir so viel nicht essen können, ist, weil wir in den südwesten Vereinigten Staaten leben, wobei Poutine ursprünglich in Québec inventiert wurde, was in der Mitte des Winters sehr kalt werden kann.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Er ist in Ottawa geboren. Und es sollte nicht aufgeräumt werden. Es ist wie ein sehr einfaches, einfaches Straße-Food. Und er war wirklich wütend. Ich denke, in der Interview sagten sie, dass er seine Füße gehalten hat und dann seine Schuhe weggezogen hat und seine Schuhe auf dem Tisch gehalten hat, während er schreit.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
What's he what's he what what in Atlanta?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, 5 and 10 was great. That went in where, what was the super threadbare restaurant that had been there for a million years before 5 and 10? It was like an Athens institution.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, but even still, just maybe also if you can't make it to Quebec, like look up how to make as close an approximation as you can and enjoy it that way.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Sure, sure. Since Chuck said he's going to give it a shot, everybody, that means short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Also macht es eigentlich viel Sinn, während dieser Zeit eine höhere Kalorien-Diät zu essen, wie ein Bär.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Have you had any of the other Fantas, the grape, et cetera?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I got you. I was more of a Faygo man as a kid. I never drank those.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
No, no, it's not. It's its own thing for sure. I don't know that you should ever break the streak now that you've reached this long without trying it, but it's not lemon lime. It's its own thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
It sure did. One of the things that Coca-Cola did over time was they expanded around the world. They became an ambassador of American democracy everywhere. One of the places they expanded to is Germany, pre-war Germany, or maybe interwar Germany. I'm not sure when they showed up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But regardless, by the time World War II was starting to ramp up, say the 30s, the late 30s, Coca-Cola was heavily entrenched in Germany, and its subsidiary was Coca-Cola GmbH. which stands for Gelschaft mit Beschreiterhaftung, which translates to company with limited liability. And there was a guy named Max Keit who ran the show there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And boy, oh boy, was he dedicated to Coca-Cola and furthering the cause of Coca-Cola in Germany.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. Can you imagine? I looked high and low for a photograph of that, and I could not find it. I'm sure Coca-Cola has dedicated a significant amount of its operational funding to destroying any evidence of that banner ever. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I'll bet they don't have it up, too. There was also for the 10th anniversary of Coca-Cola GmbH, they decided to commemorate their deepest admiration for the Fuhrer for Hitler's 50th birthday with a mass Nazi salute, I guess, of employees who worked there at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
So Coca-Cola was very much entrenched in Nazi Germany even before the war, especially before the war, I should say.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. And also at the same time, he's walking this fine line between not having access to the product that his company makes and trying to keep the German government from officially seizing and taking over his company. And to do that, he needs a hit. He needs the most delicious, most nutritious thing you could possibly put together that's going to sweep Germany away.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Right off the bat, and I feel like we should talk about this product that Max Kite introduced after a break.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Chuck, I have a question for you. Yes? Don't you want to Fanta?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Okay, Chuck, so Max Kite's like, what am I going to do? I need to come up with something fast to keep my company afloat. I think I'll just create an entirely new drink that no one's ever even thought of making before. And because there's so many wartime rations going on, I'm going to have to get really creative here, but I'm going to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah, it took me a couple of reads to be like, well, wait a minute, how does that taste like Fanta? And then I realized with just sudden horror, it didn't taste anything like Fanta. And apparently it didn't taste very well at all. Historians, no one knows what it tasted like, or at least no one's been able to find somebody who actually drank this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But they're like, just look at the ingredients. There's no way it tasted good. And they think that it was probably mostly sold to be used as like a flavor agent for soups and stews and stuff like that, that people weren't just knocking back bottles of this stuff because they would have vomited until they died, I guess. Instead, they're just using it in other ways.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Don't you want to Fanta? That's how I remember it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But that's not to say it wasn't a huge hit. It was a big seller. And not only that, it instilled like a kind of national pride among Germans. Like, look at how resourceful we are in the face of, you know, wartime scarcity. But have you tried this stuff?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. But also, so this name, just the name, right? They could have come up with anything else. But just the name has Nazi ties, like you said. It was created in and for Nazi Germany. And it was also made from apple pulp and beet sugar and whey. Why would you use that? I would think you would want to do the exact opposite and bury that name like it was a banner with the Coke logo and a swastika.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But instead, they just went with it and they introduced it in Italy first as this the version we know now, this orange soda version in Italy was like, yeah, it's pretty good. Let's go with that. And they started to export it, finally made it into the United States in 1958, which was, I think, three years after they reintroduced it in Italy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I see. I see what you mean. And they were like, I'm sure people just forget about it anyway within a year or two. Anybody who even knows about it will never come out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Right. It goes to support the upkeep of Hitler's tomb or something like that. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But the author Pendergrast was like, it's this is pretty it is still pretty significant that people like this drink enough that even knowing its its roots or where it came from, you're just like, it's just it's an orange soda. I like it for what it is. And it's not just orange, as we said. They have a whole line of flavors, including grape.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And I think it's much more popular in South America right now, but it's still pretty big in America, in the United States. Man, we keep getting taken to task for that, for calling the U.S. America.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Sorry, everybody. That's what they tell us. That's what they teach us here.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Oh, one other thing about that, too, is Kite, as the Nazis rolled into country after country, Kite was right behind the tanks going, your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland. Your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland. And so when he was made the head of Coca-Cola Europe, he had consolidated through... conquering other businesses.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
He had consolidated all into one company because of the Nazis conquering these countries. Isn't that nuts?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. He kept pounding his fist in his hand whenever he talked at like board meetings and investors meetings.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Okay. Well, that's it for Fanta. Do you want a Fanta? I don't know. That's only a question you can answer yourself. And while you think about that, we're done with this. So short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, I think in either a bread episode or a beer episode, we explored whether or not bread was created to make beer portable or a beer starter portable. But regardless, it's been around for a very, very long time. And yet, would you say 30,000 years? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
His age was close to 80. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I don't, as a matter of fact, but we could kind of guess. He lived, he was, oh, 1960. There it is right there. I was going to do some math, and luckily I was bailed out at the last minute. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, well, there's one other thing. There's an extra happy end to this story. That guy, Frank Bench, the nearly bankrupt baker who took a chance on his friend Otto and his new machine, his sales increased by 2,000% when he started selling sliced bread, and he was saved. Yeah, pretty cool.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I really hope that Otto's like great-grandson Tim writes in and he's like, it's real weather.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
No, Clark was Clark. It's a derivative of clerk, so I come from a long line of pencil pushers.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I agree. I'm glad you said that. Thank you. Yeah. I guess short stuff's out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Okay. Let's say bread was invented 30,000 years ago. It took 29,900 years before this point for somebody to think of pre-sliced bread, or if they thought of it, to actually follow through with that idea. And we have a hero, a hero named Otto Frederick Roeder to thank for that. We'll meet him in a minute.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, because that guy I mentioned before, Otto Frederick Rowetter, the father of sliced bread, he had been tinkering with this for well over a decade, right? Rowetter! He was a... It's got to be German. It has to be. Well, his name's Otto Frederick first. I mean, those are your first two clues. And then they really kind of drive it home on the third name. Then Auf Deutsch. He, no, he was.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
You're not going to do it? What, the Rohwetter? I just want you to say it German. Otto Friedrich Rohwetter.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I didn't even know I could roll my R's.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Well, I'm, you know, from Georgia and Ohio and Florida. All right. All right. So anyway, O-T, O-F-R. I don't know. It's his initials. I'm trying to think of something else to call him that you won't make fun of me for. How about Otto? So Otto, he was an inventor and I don't I didn't see anywhere where he got the idea to do this, but just suddenly sat up one day. He's like sliced bread.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
We should make sliced bread so you can just go buy store buy at the store pre sliced bread. And he got to work making a machine. All the way back in 1917. But you mentioned it wasn't until 1928 that people started being able to buy pre-sliced bread at the store. And that's because he got pretty far, got a prototype developed, had all these blueprints for making this machine.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And there was a fire at his office that just wiped everything out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah. And I mean, think about how just normal that seems now. Yeah. Just to imagine that somebody had to have that idea at one point, and then we know the person who did it. His name is Otto. I just find that fascinating. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
If you want to put it like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
So Otto had that fire in 1917, and he kept working at it. And 11 years later, he had a working machine that was pumped by foot, I saw, like a sewing machine of the era. And it was two sets of very sharp blades, some going up, some going down at the same time. And a loaf of bread would come from the top down a ramp past the blades and come out the bottom of the machine, sliced, but kind of a mess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So this is an official bonafide short stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
They were just kind of laying all over the place. And a loaf-ish machine. shape, but really a pretty messy low fish shape.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, for sure. So two things. Frank Bench was a baker on the verge of bankruptcy and just decided to take a chance and pay his friend for this machine. And number two, before Gustav Poppendieck came along, Otto's solution to these floppy, flimsy, like falling apart loaves of bread was to stick a hat pin in them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And then part of the instruction was to take the hat pin out just far enough so that you could take however many slices you wanted from it and then push the hat pin back in. And everybody was like, that's a terrible idea. What else you got? And luckily, Pap and Dick was like, no, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
We'll have it wrapped so that by the time it comes out of the slicer, this loaf isn't falling apart and it's wrapped for freshness. It was a great, great improvement because without it, sliced bread would have gone nowhere, basically. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Right. You're not going to choke on a hat pin, but 18 people a year choke on a king cake baby.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I also want to shout out Mental Floss and Zachary Crockett on Priceonomics.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Right. And to help them out, I think Wonder Bread first came out. It was, I think, the first sliced bread nationally available or widely available. And it became the most popular. And originally it was called Wonder Cut because it came pre-sliced and they shortened it to Wonder Bread. But I was like, seriously, how much of a time saver is this? And then I read a quote from a woman who was upset.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
We'll talk about why she was upset in a minute. But she makes a really good case that like if you're having to slap together sandwiches really quickly for your family's lunches before they leave. go out the door and you're also cutting bread to make toast for them at the same time, like you might have to slice 30 slices of bread really quick. And that's actually kind of time consuming.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
So if you can buy pre-sliced bread, that's going to save you some time and effort. And it actually is worth it. So I finally wrap my head around how much of a time saver sliced bread actually is.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
No, and they tried to, didn't they?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yes. So as part of the wartime conservation in the United States for World War II, Claude R. Wickert, who was the U.S. Food Administrator.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Sorry. You're probably right, but I'm going to call him Claude Wickard. He ordered a ban on sliced bread in particular. Not bread. Not anything else. Just sliced bread. And his reasoning was you have to use thicker wax paper to keep pre-sliced bread fresh because there's a lot of holes in it now. There's a lot of extra surface area to go stale. So that means you're using more paraffin.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And God knows what else they were trying to use paraffin for. Probably waterproofing stuff like clothing and things like that at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
So they needed the paraffin. And at the same time, they're also like the price of grain is about to go up. And we don't want bakers to be able to use sliced bread prices, which is more expensive, to hide passing on higher grain prices. So we're just going to say you can't have sliced bread. And Claude Wickard walked away whistling and like dusting his hands off. And he thought that was it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And he ran into America's homemakers who surged up like a tidal wave of angry people. People wearing aprons came after him, and he ended up backing down pretty quick.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Okay, good. Well, Chuck, one of the things that I think immediately pops up that we can't possibly get past without mentioning first is that regardless of the color of the eggs, I really hope this is true. One is not necessarily more nutritious than the other.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
You're thinking of rice or flour. Oh. Non-brown chicken eggs are not bleached. That is not true. That would be a really bad thing to do to an egg. The white eggs that you see that make up the vast majority of the eggs that you buy in the United States They come from leghorn chickens, as in foghorn leghorn. But he was a rooster. But the hens of his breed lay white eggs. They're not leached.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, we need to shout out a University of Georgia poultry scientist named, get this, Justin Fowler.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
It is amazing. And so he provided a lot of the insight on how all of this works, and he basically said it's genetics. But you don't have to run a chicken's genome to figure out what color eggs it's going to produce. It's much easier than that. You can at least distinguish...
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
colored egg layers, not necessarily the color, but whether they're going to lay an egg that has some sort of tint to it versus ones that are going to lay just white eggs based on their earlobes. A couple of things about this. I didn't know that you could judge the color of a chicken's eggs by looking at its earlobes. I also didn't know that chickens had earlobes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah. I mean, I've seen them a million times. They're like they almost look like mutton chops, like meatloaf from Rocky Horror Picture Show. But they're on chickens faces instead. Those are their earlobes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're about to take you on a ride through a chicken's oviduct at some point in this episode. And why we're doing that is to explain why chicken eggs have different colors in some cases. And we're going to get really into the weeds on it, and it's going to be great.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, but again, not necessarily like the same color as that. But it just means that they're producing more pigment than other chickens, and they like to really show off by laying some of that pigment on the eggs. And I say we take a break, and we come back, and we take that trip down the oviduct when we return.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Okay, Chuck, get your miner's cap on. Turn on the light. Yep. Maybe don some gloves. Yeah. And we're going to go in the oviduct of a chicken, a hen. And when you go in there, we're going to see the ova. That is the chicken yolk. And it forms in the chicken's ovaries. And an ovum leaves the ovary and it gets deposited in the oviduct. And it's almost like a cartoony conveyor belt.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Like I can almost see like mechanical gloved hands shaping things along the way.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Or his fraternity nickname. But they all start white, right? Right. Yeah, because they're made of calcium carbonate, and that is white in nature. And so all chickens' eggs are white. That's all you really need to know, except for everything else that's about to follow. And that is that once the egg is formed, and it's a white egg, some kinds of chickens deposit a pigment on it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Again, like leghorn, white earlobe, no pigment deposit. But other kinds, like you said, Plymouth Rocks, Orphingtons, Rhode Island Reds, they all put a little bit of pigment, I guess, just to kind of make the world a slightly brighter place. I can't think of any other reason for this, evolutionarily speaking.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
But we have narrowed it down to two distinct pigments that are responsible for the galaxy of colors. Maybe not galaxy, but the wide array of colors that chicken eggs come in.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah. Does it come out of like a pastry frosting bag?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Okay. That's it. Yeah, that is. Those two make the whole thing. The greens and blues are the Billy Verdon, and the protoporphyrin make the reddish-browns. That's right. And it's not just chickens that this happens with. You know, robins lay Tiffany box blue eggs.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Well, we also have to presume that you can even find the eggs to buy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I think it's usually described as robin's egg blue. But that's from the same process. It makes that same sound. Can we hear it again? Yeah. There's also a bird called the common muir, and they have a blue egg that sometimes is speckled.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I think all of this is so wonderful, but really there's nothing that can compare to an Easter egg that's been dipped in a vinegar food dye dip or blend and held by that little wire thing that you kind of bring it out with and then you mark, or no, you start with the crayon and then you dye it. Like, let's see a chicken do that. Make a chevron pattern on your egg naturally, chicken.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, and be forewarned because in the United States, at least, the term pasture-raised is not regulated. You could slap that on any egg you wanted. Do some research. Luckily, there are some certification groups that go through and actually certify these are pasture-raised. So you want to look for certifications like certified humane is a legitimate one.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
That means that that chicken actually was walking around pecking at the ground, not in like some big metal shed with a trillion other chickens.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, but there's some things that you need to know about this if you're eating locally sourced eggs. One is that they probably haven't been washed, which is fine. That they don't normally come washed unless you're buying commercially produced eggs in Australia, the U.S., Japan, Australia. You have to wash them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
The problem with washing an egg, though, is that it removes the little waxy coating that the egg is naturally encased in that keeps bacteria out of the shell. As hard as the shell seems, it's actually kind of porous, and bacteria can make it right into the egg and kill you and everyone you love. But that waxy coating keeps that from happening.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
The problem with all this is, and this is the reason why the United States and Japan and Australia require their commercially produced eggs to be washed, is that coating really hangs on to things like salmonella and chicken yard poop and all this stuff. So you kind of have to balance the two. Do you want salmonella or do you want E. coli? Which one do you want?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
So if you get locally sourced eggs, it makes sense to keep them unwashed until you want to eat them. Then you wash it, use a little bit of Dawn, some water, wash that off, and then you eat it washed.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Why? What's wrong with Dawn? I love Dawn. Great. They have a free and clear. It's got a little duck on it. It's totally natural.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
But once you do wash them, you need to refrigerate them because, again, bacteria can invade them pretty easily.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Really? Oh, yeah. Did you get a little poop in your eggs? No. They're great. Cool. Well, there you go. Everything you need to know about locally sourced eggs from your friend Chuck B. That's right. Chuck said that's right. And that means, obviously, that short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah. And they don't just stay open at all costs because they couldn't care less about their staff. And they're just greedy and want to make money. This is actually like by design. There's a corporate... Mandate? Ideology? Mandate works, sure. That Waffle House should serve as essentially a community center during disasters. And during normal times, they're just Waffle Houses.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
But during a natural disaster in particular, you should just stand back and watch them go because they have actual plans that the company has developed to figure out how to stay open to serve the community. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah. Whether you're like somebody whose house just got ravaged or a first responder helping people whose house just got ravaged. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
It's a really important thing that you just totally overlook. Like if your kitchen is gone and all of the other restaurants in town are shut down, having a Waffle House open is a really, really big deal. And they have like actual what are called Waffle House jump teams there. That can show up. Parachuters. They parachute in. Yeah, they do parachute in.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Better than Plan B. But they parachute in, like you said, and they will open a Waffle House faster than you can say Waffle House.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Wait, hold on. Faster than you can say scattered, covered, smothered, and chunked.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, I don't eat ham anymore, but I haven't been to a waffle house since I stopped eating ham. So yes, I always got it with ham, cheese, and sauteed onions.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I see. I got you. I thought you were saying you don't want to replace that memory with another. Oh, no, no, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yep. So I say we take a break and come back and talk more about this Waffle House Index and what it is and where it came from. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Hey, and welcome to The Short Step. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, sitting in for Dave, and we're just cooking it up here at Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, for sure. Not only did they come up with the book, that's when they figured out, okay, what kind of limited menu can we come up with? How can we store it? They identified like local temporary food storage they could use that was, you know, I'm sure central to a number of Waffle Houses, not one for each one. And we're just basically ready. It's called disaster preparedness.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I had no idea about this. I really just thought Waffle House just stayed open just out of sheer will until I researched this. But they have a disaster preparedness plan. And apparently other companies do in the United States too, like Lowe's and Home Depot will, because people need lumber and shovels and hammers and stuff because they're blew away and they need to rebuild.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
And probably also more like generators and... And gas cans and so on and so forth. I don't know why I'm staying on this list, but Waffle House isn't the only one, but they're just part of a handful of companies who've essentially made themselves like de facto essential operations for post-disaster preparedness stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I feel like we've taken a pretty good chunk out of what would have been a Waffle House episode. Agreed. Because we're talking about the Waffle House Index. And yes, there's plenty of interesting stuff about the Waffle House.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah. And I mean, it's as simple as like calling the local Waffle House in Tampa after a hurricane just passed through and saying, are you guys still open? And if they don't answer the phone, there's trouble in that community. And he was saying, like, that's where FEMA should start sending its people first, because that's as bad as it gets if the Waffle House isn't open.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
And they actually color coded it. There's green is the best part of the index. It means that your Waffle House is totally fine. Maybe there's like a cracked window, but everything else is good and everyone in the community can come there. Yellow has a limited menu and they're probably using a generator. And then red is like it's closed. The Waffle House is toast.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
But I would argue that the Waffle House Index is possibly the most interesting thing about the chain of what everyone in the South or Southeast knows is 24-7 restaurants that are legendary for staying open against all odds. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Come here because this is the community that's hardest hit. That's how like dedicated Waffle House is to staying open. That if they're closed, FEMA knows that that's where you should go first.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, there's this really great story I read on the Waffle House blog. Well, the North Carolina back in 2011, Hurricane Irene passed through there and the Waffle House, the local Waffle House lost its power because. But the gas was still going to the grill. And so the Waffle House stayed open and was cooking for people as long as it was light enough for them to see what they were doing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
And then when it just became too dark to keep going, they closed and then opened at first light at dawn.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Or maybe they just didn't have candles. And then the Waffle House employee or the manual afterward was like, buy candles, make sure you have plenty of candles. We learned from Hurricane Irene.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
If it is a food truck, though, there's 100% chance that they're serving empanadas. Right. Even from the Waffle House food truck. But they have a great nickname for it, though, at least. Yeah, well, it's from Stripes. What did they call it? The EM-50, which is apparently the assault vehicle that Bill Murray drives in Stripes was the EM-50. I never got into that movie.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Well, yeah, of course. I feel like it might have just been a couple of years ahead of me when I was younger. I was more a meatballs guy. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, I don't know how I was allowed to watch Meatballs because I was never allowed to watch Porky's or just about anything. My mom wouldn't even let me watch Sanford and Son because she thought Red Fox was a dirty old man.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, well, it wasn't funny when you're a kid and you want to watch Sanford. It's not funny at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
She loved playing the banjo. I love that. And I love the Waffle House Index. And Waffle House didn't even sponsor this, everybody. That's just how impressed we are with the Waffle House Index. I always thought it was just some fooling around pop culture thing. Nope, it's a real thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
No, but I mean just that phrase, most exquisitely slender diet, sounds awesome. So I thought it was worth putting in there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
What's weird, Chuck, is I saw that it was this whole adage that we that is like basically encouragement is taken as an encouragement or advice today was originally taken as like a warning that if you feed a cold, that cold will turn into a fever and then you'll have to starve the fever. Like and that the reason that it was ambiguous is because of that comma in the middle.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
OK. But well, what was the whole point? I mean, like if what was the idea that it was based on, I guess, then?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Sure. That was, I think, what they think the whole thing was based on. And regardless of how you slice it, though, how you take it as a warning or anything like that, it's pretty much... generally viewed as not good advice by the medical community today. I say we take a break and come back and talk about how this is not really good advice. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. There's Chuck and I'm Josh and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. So this is short stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. So just go to squarespace.com slash stuff. And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Squarespace.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Now, and that's bad enough, but the actual harm is in the second part, starving a fever. Because pretty much everybody in the medical community agrees that if you feel hungry while you're sick, you should go ahead and eat because your appetite can come and go and it can be so thin. You want to take advantage of it when it does show up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And even more to the point, if you starve yourself on purpose while you have a fever, you're robbing yourself of some really much needed nutrients and calories that your body really needs specifically when you have a fever.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Right. And the reason that your metabolism would jack up when you have a fever is because your body's literally raising your core temperature to try to cook out the virus that's got you in its grips.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah. Yeah. It is kind of weird. It's like almost giving it like a grudging salute, like way to go, Bobby.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Oh, for sure. The worst is when the fever comes on in the morning and you've got fever all through the night. Fever.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Just want to make sure that wasn't an accident. Yeah. You said, can you imagine the coincidence? Like, what would the odds be of that? I don't know. It'd make you a natural songwriter, I guess. So you said that you want to drink, especially if you can't eat solid foods, at least try to drink things that have calories, like a sports drink with electrolytes, like they had in Idiocracy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Or like thin broths, like a chicken broth can have a bunch of calories in it. Even vegetable broths have some calories. So you want to get it wherever you can. The key here is this. Even if you don't want to eat at all, That's okay. Like most people, especially in the developed world, aren't on the edge of nutrition.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
We all have some reserves that can last us the few days we're not hungry while we're sick. What we don't have is a reserve enough of fluids to keep us going for very long. So you have to, it's not a choice, you have to stay hydrated one way or another.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Well, yeah, I looked that up. So they call that for low alcohol beer. Like I guess session beers basically would be a small beer, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, I think most people have heard that, right? That's a pretty widespread adage. Sure, yeah. Our friends at the Cleveland Clinic, not normally known for their etymology resources, but they traced this back, at least half of it, to 1574. There's a dictionary that was compiled by a guy named John Withalls. And Withell said that fasting is a great remedy of fever.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I love doing that, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Mm-hmm. I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Water gruel sweetened with honey. Yeah. So I looked all over to see if anybody had conducted a study on whether this was true or not. And thank God our friends over in the Netherlands did it. In 2002, a group of Dutch researchers conducted a study, and they wanted to see whether feeding or calorie restriction has any effect on whether you have a cold or a fever or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And what's astounding is that they found that it actually does have an effect on the level of your immune system with the types of cells that are produced.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Right. And then kind of as expected, the other group, the group that had to fast. their interferon gamma levels actually went down by about 83%. So they lost some robustness to their immune response because they weren't eating. So, so far, you're kind of like, all right, this makes sense for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
The surprise came with a different kind of immune cell called interleukin-4, which they found actually rose in the group that was fasting.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
No, for sure. That interferon that helps produce antibodies like for specifically targeted to an infection and the interleukin uses our bodies like innate response, like sicking cytokines that you normally have laying around in your body on it. So yeah, you can't game the whole thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
So that's why doctors across pretty much the board say, if you're sick and you feel like you can eat, like you're hungry, eat something for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Well put, especially when people rewind and listen a couple of times.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Well, Chuck said he hopes so, which means everybody's short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
So you've got the second part right there, starve a fever, right? It's as far back as anyone's traced it. Although, if you kind of want to expand your definition of what's being discussed here, you can trace it all the way back to Hippocrates, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Like she was really, really famous. She was on Letterman. She was on Carson. And she was an exotic dancer by trade, by profession. And I saw, Chuck, that her act, I saw it described as part nudity, part comedy. Right. Which is kind of tough to pull off, if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
But one of the things, in addition to running onto baseball fields that she was known for, that was very attention-getting, was her bust. She was extraordinarily buxom. Apparently, she had a 60-inch bust that required an eye cup. And so that, combined with running onto the field at sporting events and kissing players, it really captured the attention of the American public.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah. I didn't know that. Which part? The outfield part.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, and a great example of her sense of humor, she said later that her career started with a bet from her friends and Pete Rose's career ended with a bet because of course he got caught betting.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Right. Yeah. I say we take a break and we come back and talk a little more about Morgana and her prolific career.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, sitting in for Dave. And this is Short Stuff, kind of sports-related, but real pop culture, to tell you the truth.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, I think he might have been one of the only ones that she got twice, which is why he got her back. And like I said, she was prolific, right? I think between 1969 and 99, pretty sure this was Sports Illustrated who came up with this stat.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
She kissed over 50 athletes, not to mention managers, umpires, and mascots, including the San Diego Chicken, who just keeps popping up again and again in Stuff You Should Know episodes lately.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And I think this one was from our friends at Grunge. They said that her presence often doubled the number of fans in the stands. Like she was really well known and she would announce where she was going, what game she was going to attend. And people would just show up because you wanted to see that kind of thing in addition to a game.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
So there was, from what I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong, there was a love-hate relationship with her because she would disrupt games. But at the same time, she would, Phil, you know, double the attendance in a stadium when she said that she was going to a game, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Oh, is that what changed things? That particular incident?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
She did have a few encounters with security that ended up pretty rough. There was one, I think the 1970 All-Star game in Cincinnati. The Reds management put a bounty on her, 100 bucks to whoever could catch her because she, I guess, had announced that she was coming. And they did catch her. And I guess they got her on the ground and security started kicking her in the ribs. That's ridiculous.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah. But despite that, I mean, not just three broken ribs, she also suffered a broken kneecap once. She suffered a broken tailbone, all at the hands of security. But she just apparently shrugged it all off because I read an interview with her from not too long ago where she chalked it up to rent-a-cops getting a little carried away.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
So I think she just kind of took this as like, you know, it kind of goes along with it. It's going to happen from time to time. And she did get arrested quite a bit, but, you know, usually without incident. There was one incident in particular when she rushed the field at an Astros game to kiss Nolan Ryan on the mound. He was on the pitcher's mound. She was kissing him on the cheek.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And she was arrested and she had to hire an attorney because she was called to defend herself in court, even though she didn't actually have to go through with it. It got far enough that she hired this one particular attorney.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, I think the Houston Sports Association got involved. They're like, this is not a good look for Houston, guys. Let's just drop this. So they did. And that was the one time where she had to go to court, was called to court. But that just became part of her legend, too. The gravity defense.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
It's like you can't read an article about Morgana the Kissing Bandit and the gravity defense not get mentioned. It's just part of her legend.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And one of the other things I saw about her that I wanted to mention, Chuck, was she was apparently like very crafty. I saw it put that there was one time in particular, I think in 1986, she said publicly that she was going to kiss Don Mattingly of the Yankees. She was going to go to New York for a game. And so everybody was on high alert in New York.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And while they were doing that, she flew to, I guess, Seattle to kiss the Mariners catcher Steve Yeager. So she would use a little deflection and sleight of hand. She wasn't above that, which also, I mean, this lady was pretty cool.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, apparently she was born Nancy Lee Rose in Louisville, Kentucky. She started lying about her age at a very young age, as we'll see, because she had a very difficult, really rough adolescence. But she became so famous for this during the 70s and 80s. That at one point, Pete Rose said that he considered her bigger than any one baseball player in the whole game.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Great. Well, here's to Morgana the Kissing Bandit, one of the more interesting 20th century figures ever. Short Stuff Friends is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And apparently still today in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Tajikistan. Yeah, I said it right the first time. They call the refrigerators yakchals, which is how I would say it if I were in Iran. But that's the name for the fridge, which means that at some point someone in Iran has gone into a store and said, you got a smeg yakchal?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Some of these were several meters thick. Some of these yak chawls were. There was a study. We got some of this information from the engineering firm Max Fordham. And they did an analysis in 2018 of yak chawls and just how effective they might have been.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And they found that the walls of a yak chawl had the same insulative properties as a wall of concrete three inches thick surrounded by a one foot thick wrapping of styrofoam insulation. That's how effective these things were. Sand, clay, egg whites, lime, and goat hair, and ash. I was going to say, like, the secret is egg whites, but I don't know. You throw goat hair in there. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Who knows what the secret is? I think the secret is the whole thing together, the whole ceruge mixture.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah. And so the channel has a little diversion into a trench or a pit or like a very shallow, like rectangular pond usually. And they'll divert water in there to fill it up. And then they let it freeze overnight. Over the course of a few nights, it'll continue to freeze and freeze and freeze in layers.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And what they're taking advantage of, you know, like when it snows and then the temperatures heat up and all the snow melts, but there's a little pile of snow like in a shaded corner of your yard that never gets direct sunlight. And it just takes forever to melt. They're taking advantage of the same thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
They're building that big old wall to keep it shaded and just let this ice grow and grow and grow. And then once it reaches, I think, 50 centimeters, which is like about a half a meter thick, then they'll cut it into blocks and they put it in the yak shell and they store it. Through summer, like this stuff will stay frozen for an entire summer.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
So in that sense, these yak chawls are built to store cold throughout the course of a year. Even when the summer comes around, still cold.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
They also have wind catchers that they call badgers. And they actually take wind and direct it downward into the Yakchal Dome. And so the air that hits it is cooled by that ice and the air that's not cooled by it or cooled enough, like you said, that chimney effect takes it up along the curved sides toward the hole in the top and it says, see you later, don't come back.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave. And so this is Short Stuff, the How Do You Say This Again edition.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
That has to be better than it sounds, don't you think? Oh, I think it sounds great. I think the pistachios are what are throwing me off.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
I do like pistachios. It's just they don't seem to go with the rest of the ingredients. But like I said, I'm sure it's delicious. I mean, it's a traditional Persian dessert. It's got staying power. So who am I to question falooda? Exactly. I bet it's delicious. One of the cool things about this is that yak chals, I mean, and there's some still around.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
I think there's one in Kerman, Iran, that's about the size of a five-story building. So you would think, of course, obviously this was reserved for royalty. You would be dead wrong, because not only were yak chals open and available to the public, there were some that people just built for their houses that were of private use as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And once they figured that out, someone said, go get the donkey.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
One other thing I saw in that Max Fordham analysis, they figured out that they could make about what would be equivalent to three million ice cubes a season. Wow. Yeah, which is a lot. But they were like, you'd think it'd be more. And I was like, it seems pretty good to me, especially in 400 B.C., you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
I'm going with the straight ahead yak chals. All right. Okay. So you say it your way throughout. I'll say it my way. And I'm sure I'll inevitably unconsciously start saying it your way.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
That's right. You're absolutely right. I expect that they're probably all donkey head size. So three million donkey head size ice cubes. That's big. Think about the poor donkey that had to cart those around.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
For sure. But also there's a lot to learn from them, especially when we're trying to advance like passive cooling and other things that require less energy to cool things down. Yak chawls are something to turn to and say, how do we do this? And someone says, go get the goat here.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
What do we do with all these yolks? Yeah. Well, I think that's it for short stuff. Right, Chuck? I think so. Well, that means short stuff is that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah. So after you guys hear this short stuff, you will realize how just preposterous that headline from CNN is.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
So, like you said, they're from East Asia. And in Japan, they're called Juro gummo. And the reason I say Joro, a lot of people say Joro, which makes sense because it's spelled J-O-R-O. But in the Japanese spelling, there's a long symbol over the second O. So the first one would not be a hard O. It'd be J-O-R-O. Okay. That's right. And that means entangling or binding bride.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And you'll see why they call them that. In Korea, they're called Mudang Gumi. Okay. which means shaman or fortune teller. So however you slice it, these things have pretty cool names and aptly so, because like you said, they're just absolutely beautiful and they are pretty good size enough so that you can see like all of them pretty clearly.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, they also have orange bands like around their legs. They're just really, really pretty. The males of the gyrospiders, too, are smaller and they're kind of drab looking. So if you ever see a gyrospider and you're like, wow, that is a cool looking spider. It's a female every time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And then the other dead giveaway is if it's spinning a web, it's a female because only the females spin webs for gyrospiders. And you said you walked face first into or you almost walked face first into a web? Correct. Have you ever run into one?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah. So one of the things that's characteristic of gyrospider webs is they don't necessarily break. Like it takes a lot to just walk through them. Like you can walk through them and you're kind of going to bounce off a little bit. It's not, you know, not going to send you flying backwards, but it's not just going to snap as you walk through it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And I saw that those webs are so strong, birds can perch on them. Like it's not like the bird's getting caught in the web, but they can like Just perch on the web for a little while while they figure out where to fly next.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry there. And we're caught in a web of greatness because this is short stuff from stuff you should know.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
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Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
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Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
So one of the reasons that gerospiders are spreading so quickly is because they're very new. Like you said, a little over 10 years since they were first spotted in the U.S., which means that predators haven't, I guess, spotted them yet. So they have a ready supply of flying insects. They apparently particularly like stink bugs.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And little competition for those insects, in part, I think, because they weave their web higher than other spiders that they would be competing with for food. And so an ample supply of food and no predators means that any species is going to just boom for a while. And that's what we're in. We're in the golden age of gyrospiders booming all over the eastern United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah. So a little bit more about the actual spiders themselves and how they behave. You'll notice like there's a couple of different webs basically right up on each other. Gyrospiders live very close together. I guess they're not super territorial, if at all. And again, if you see a beautiful spider in the web, it's a female. And there's probably a male trying to get to her.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And he's using all sorts of cute little tricks to make his way from one place to another toward his intended love target.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I would not say that. I get so deeply disturbed by that word for some reason. Oh, me too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Oh, my God. That and moist. And if you put them together.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
They apparently also the males will like fly float on the air. With a little bit of gossamer, like a little parachute or a hang glider from like tree to tree or branch to branch, making their way toward a web, which is pretty cute if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I've seen a bunch of them myself. We have them all over the house. And I had been remarking to myself, like, wow, these things are all over the place. And you sent this and I was like, oh, well, that's why they're an invasive species here in Georgia. South Carolina for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
No, you shouldn't. For one thing, it's not entirely clear what kind of impact they're having on the ecosystems they move into, but there's certainly no apocalyptic impacts going on because everything seems to be fine and the other spider populations don't seem to be shrinking as the gyrospiders move in. That's a really bizarre thing if that's true, if they're having like no weird impact.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
But again, they expect that they're going to start being predated on. That's harder to say than you'd think.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Pretty soon. So we shouldn't have much to worry about. And I hope this isn't one of those podcasts that ages like milk, you know? Yeah. But yes, I'm hoping that all the entomologists are right where they're like, just relax, everybody. They're poisonous or they're venomous and they will bite you under certain circumstances.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
But if you leave them alone or even if you walk into their web, more often than not, they're going to run away from you. So to answer your question in a very long roundabout way, no, you should not kill them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
No. And this article likened it to a bee sting. And I remember Yumi getting bitten by one of these. And I asked her, I was like, was it like a bee sting? She's like, no, it wasn't nearly as bad. Yeah. So I decided that wasn't a dramatic enough story. So I was going to tell everybody that her hand blew up like a cabbage patch doll. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
She was gardening and they are all over our yard. They got in like one of her rose bushes while she was deadheading her roses. And yeah, she got too close and it went, and that was that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, for sure. Especially those heavy-duty ones. You got anything else? I don't think so. No, I feel like we covered everything, Chuck. You know what that means. Mm-hmm. Short Stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And they're starting to move a little bit northwestward into other southern states like Tennessee and Alabama, but definitely up the eastern seaboard. And what we're talking about is what CNN called giant venomous Joro spiders are infiltrating parts of the U.S.,
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yes. Distant thunder. Rumbling thunder even. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously that's very alluring. Everybody likes those sounds. So brown noise makes sense. And because there's also white noise and pink noise, you think brown noise is just named after the color brown. Like for some reason, maybe it evoked the color brown in the person who named it. Wrong.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
There was a scientist named Robert Brown from Scotland who in the very early 1800s was looking at pollen grains through his microscope and saw them basically dancing around. And he said, this is not possible because pollen is not alive. And he had no idea what this was, but he published his paper so that future generations could solve it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And apparently no less than Albert Einstein took it on and found this was an excellent demonstration of atomic particles interacting and basically moving ultimately these pollen grains along. the reason that it's named after Robert Brown, Brown Noises, because he tried to figure out how to quantify these random movements, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's there. She doesn't have a sound associated with her because she's already listening to sound, and this is short stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, well, other people who came used his formula to generate sound. I don't understand it either.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, I mean, it's all math, so technically you could use math to translate into other kinds of math, I'm guessing. But just the idea of, yeah... Figuring out how random movements can turn into sound is just, I love that stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Let's talk about this offline, Chuck, while we take a break.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
One of the coolest things I learned ever is that in Kyoto, Japan, there is a the sound of wind blowing through bamboo in this one park is a protected heritage site. Like the sound itself is protected as a world heritage site.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
That's cool. I think you're confusing that with Q-Bert.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Pink noise is a little different. It's kind of like the compromise between white noise and brown noise because the white noise includes all frequencies. A lot of people are like, I don't like those high frequencies, especially when I'm trying to sleep. But I'm not down with just nothing but the low bass heavy stuff. Give me some mid range.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And maybe accentuate the lower and higher things a little bit, but not too much. And if you do that kind of stuff, you have pink noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, it's called Dwellspring. The guy who created our website, Brandon Reed, friend of the show and just friend in general, and also one-time world record holder, Guinness record holder of the 400-meter piggyback. Man, what a dude. Yeah, he created just a world-class sound generator app. And in addition to all the different colored noises, he also has things like a box fan.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, it's really great. I mean, like, it's a really good app. The one that got me was crackling fireplace in a thunderstorm.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Go check out Dwellspring. It really is a good app. And I think it's everywhere you can get apps.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Okay. But still, falling asleep, not being able to fall asleep is a part of insomnia. Not being able to get back to sleep is another part of it, too. So, yeah, I mean, I would say that's great. A year before, somebody decided that they wanted to see how – how much better you could recall vocabulary words if you slept using pink noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And I guess they found that 16 young adults who slept with pink noise had slightly improved recollection of vocabulary words. So they were like, and pickle. Whereas the control group couldn't ever remember pickle.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
They're like, man, I should have slept with pink noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And again, that word was pickle. That's right. There was a study in Iran. This is probably the most robust of all of them. They looked at 60 elderly coronary patients. And they said half of you are going to sleep with white noise. The other half are not going to have white noise. But all of you are in a hospital.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
I used to try it, too, during work. It is supposed to help you focus and at the very least drown out other noises. But it just didn't take with me, at least at first, at least for working.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And if you've ever tried to sleep in a hospital, it should be illegal, the sounds that they have, because your sleep just deteriorates the longer you're in the hospital. It's awful. Yumi took care of her brother when he was in the hospital for like three weeks. She would stay there overnight. It's tough.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
She would, in addition to just all the bings and the beeps and all that stuff, the nurses come in and they're just like, hey, how's it going? It's time for your blood pressure. And it's three in the morning. And that happens every, like, you know, there's something that wakes you up every 20 minutes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And it's just so nuts that hospitals are just so aloof about that when we all know how important sleep is. And then that and the nutrition in hospitals is abysmal as well. I should say American hospitals. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to go off on that because it is something that should be fixed and remedied.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
It'd be like going to get your tires changed at Sears and they keep tacks all over the floor. You know, like they're trying to they're just sabotaging themselves and doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is healing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah. Not bad. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like just put a white noise generator in every single room or give every patient wellspring.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yes. But I get it for sleep, for sure, which is what most people use it for. Jerry's an odd duck.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
You got anything else, man? I got nothing else. I think that was very nice of you. You gave some great advice to people who have trouble sleeping, which my heart goes out to people like that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that means short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Hey, what if I told you that you could switch your business software to an interconnected suite of programs that's more efficient and simpler than what you're using and would cost a fraction of what you're spending? You might think, oh, wow. But you should think, oh, do.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
He was just amazing in a really kind of specific way.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. So, but also if he grew up in the Midwest, like... The stuff he was doing, there's not many places to learn that. I mean, I guess if you're from like upper Minnesota or something, but I'm guessing comparing an upper Minnesota winter to an upper Canada winter is like night and day.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Uh, they don't necessarily contend that he could have been a transplant from Sweden who was just raised in like a Swedish speaking community.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Um, apparently based on his teeth, uh, isotopes that he was, he was raised in or grew up in the Midwest.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, but I don't think we ever mentioned it on the episode, on the podcast, did we?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Great, great. Well, if it ever comes out who the mad trapper of Rat River was, everybody, we want to know so we can tell everybody else. For sure. Yeah. And in the meantime, Chuck, I think short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. And we're talking like the northernmost parts of Canada, like basically along the Arctic Ocean.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Oh, do is that suite of software I'm talking about with all the business software you need from CRM to sales to HR on one platform. Discover how Odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Hi and welcome to the short stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. He was essentially living where the guys from the Terror and the Erebus that we talked about were trying to get to. When they were like on their march down toward Canada, they had they done this in 1931, they might have run into Albert Johnson. He was that far up. Right. So this is a really, really rugged, wild, dangerous place to live.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And like you said, he arrived in July and a few months after that, I think in November or December of 1931. Yeah. OK, December of 1931, a couple of trappers from the First Nations who lived up there got in touch with one of the local police and said, hey, there's this guy. His name's Albert Johnson, and he's messing with our trap lines and he's not supposed to do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So can you go tell him to stop doing that? And three days later, a couple of cops just knocked on Johnson's cabin door, assuming that they were just going to talk to him and tell him to stop doing that. And that would be that right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
He pulled down the blind and went, masher.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, they threw dynamite on his roof to flush him out. And it certainly blew up the roof as expected. It also took down some of the walls of the cabin. And amazingly, Albert Johnson survived. And even more amazingly, he still refused to come out. And engaged in a gunfight with this posse that the Mounties had assembled to go take this guy out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Because, like, he shot at an officer who just wanted to tell him to stop messing with trap lines. Like, shot and tried to kill him, right? So this guy was already a big deal by this time. And he managed to hold off this posse from taking him alive. They actually had to get out of there because they were running low on food and the weather was terrible.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
This is December in the northernmost reaches of Canada along the Arctic. Not a time you want to be outside. Apparently the temperature was negative 45 and this guy's holding these guys down in a gunfight. And then they leave and four days later they come back and now they find that this destroyed cabin is now empty. He's fled and a blizzard has covered up his tracks.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's here too sitting in for Dave and the three of us are on the run to the Canadian Arctic recreating the story of the Mad Trapper and it's not going very well for us.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, it's definitely on my to-do list.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So I don't think we've said yet. Now there's a manhunt underway. This guy who they want to take in for shooting at cops is on the run in the Canadian wilderness. And this manhunt lasted seven weeks from December to mid-February. This guy kept evading them. They'd catch up to him. He'd shoot at them. They'd have a firefight.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
One time he killed a cop, Constable Millen, who was like a member of this posse that was hunting him down. And he would manage to fend them off every time they caught him in a firefight. And one of the other interesting facts about this, Chuck, is this is the first time an aircraft was ever used in a manhunt, as far as anyone knows.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, I saw a photo that he took from his aircraft of like this. He was really high up. And there's a little tiny speck in the middle of a frozen river. And it's identified as Albert Johnson. And then there's like three more tiny specks coming out of the wood line chasing after Johnson. And Wat May got a picture of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And it's just when you understand what you're looking at, it's just astounding what these guys were running through.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Over the course of seven weeks. It's nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And so people heard about this thanks to the radio, which was still a pretty new invention. But this story that was kind of playing out over the news in real time actually helped sell a bunch of new radios because people didn't want to miss out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, this is, I saw it referred to as like an iconic Canadian story. This guy just tore us up in 1931, made international headlines. And died, it's still to this day, no one knows who he is. And not one of those things where like, we're pretty sure it's this guy. We just can't prove it. They have no idea who this guy is. They're starting to kind of chew around the edges of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
That is so unsettling. It is totally. It's another thing that just kind of adds to his legend, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So, yeah, people by this time, this was during the Depression, and a lot of the public that was following the story were actually rooting for him. Because remember, this was a time when the public rooted for like bank robbers and other criminals and outlaws because the establishment had basically screwed everything up and taken advantage of everybody. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Um, so there were people who were pulling for him and even if you weren't pulling for him, it was just astounding what this guy was doing with just some, I think he had a rifle and a shotgun. He had his clothes and he was like out maneuvering and surviving against this, um, posse that was on his trail. Um,
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And I also saw, Chuck, that one of the unsung or overlooked groups that was part of this posse were some of the First Nation members who helped track him, that this posse probably would have lost his trail in the first few days had it not been for the trackers that came with him.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
I didn't. I just saw that one of the members' last name was Rat. So I'm guessing he was named after the Rat River.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. So at this point, they're like, this guy is not human.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And again, another First Nations member comes through. I think somebody came back and mentioned that they heard a rifle shot in this like totally desolate area. And the Royal Canadian Mountie Posse were like, well, they can only be Albert Johnson. And they headed that way and they found his trail and they started chasing him. They engaged in one last firefight with them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And this one, Albert Johnson didn't come out of alive.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. Yeah. Which is just deepens the mystery further. By the way, one other thing. It was Charlie Ratt, who was the guy that helped the Mounties find. Oh, nice. Albert Johnson.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So they had a picture of him. There's a very well, I guess, famous if you're Canadian picture of his dead body on like a morgue slab.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
No, he looks rough and tough for sure. He does. You could not know his story and see that picture of his dead body and be like, I'll bet that guy could survive in the Canadian wilderness for seven weeks with the cops on his trail.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So they they took this picture because they wanted to circulate. Everybody wanted to know who this guy was. And it made it in all the papers in Canada and the United States. And no one came forward. The details of his life and demeanor didn't match anything that anybody knew of. I mean, like people came forward with tips, but none of them were legitimate or panned out. And
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Very quickly, this guy just became this anonymous weirdo who did some crazy stuff in the winter of 1931. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
But the fact that he is still unidentified just makes it that much more interesting. But even if you were identified, Chuck, his story is still just totally fascinating on its own.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
No. And this company called Othram, a genome sequencing company, they have figured out a few other things about him that he almost certainly grew up in the Midwestern United States. His autopsy revealed that he had extensive and expensive dental work and that he had scoliosis. This guy did this for seven weeks, scaled a near vertical face cliff with scoliosis as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
That was not a pleasant thing to have applied to you. And it basically meant that, buddy, you're on your own. It was it was applied at least in a lot of cases to fugitives. But like we think of fugitives today is like people who the U.S. Marshal Service goes and gets like we talked about in Operation Flagship. That kind of falls under the same rubric.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
But this was a fugitive in that like they were summoned to court. They decided not to come to court. And after a certain procedure, they were declared outlaws and that that meant like the law no longer applies to them. All the protections that are afforded to you are gone. And it does seem a little harsh, I have to say, for just failing to appear in court.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah. And so like today, our conception of outlaw or modern conception, like, say, applying to Johnny Cash, like you said, or Jesse James or even Robin Hood, they're not types to show up to a legal summit. So they definitely do kind of fall into that same category. But we kind of have it backwards in that we we think of those people as like they chose a life of crime outside the law. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
They're outlaws. Right. But in reality, with outlawry, the law itself has withdrawn itself from you and left you outside the law. Kind of in a really catty turn, the law is like, oh, you don't recognize my jurisdiction over you. You're not going to come to court when we ask you to. Well, then fine. I guess you don't need my protections anymore either. Hence, you're an outlaw.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. And this is a very special short stuff, Chuck, because Dave requested this topic so long ago that I don't even remember when he did.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah. And it was a big deal to be declared outlaws. We'll see. I say we take our little break. Let's do it. Come back and talk about outlawry a little more. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Okay, so when you were declared an outlaw, essentially the way I saw it written was that it amounted to a conviction as well as an extinction of civil rights. So there were different kinds of outlawry. Just failing to appear in court seemed like outlaw light, spelled L-I-T-E. But there was also major outlawry, in which case you were really in trouble.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Like big felonies, treason, rebellion, like big deal stuff. could have you labeled a major outlaw. And again, like if they did find your cache of chickens, those were theirs now. They could take them. Any like real property you had, anything that was yours, they could seize and keep. And that's pretty standard stuff even still today.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Like if you get caught with suspected drug money, the sheriff just keeps your money and says, prove it's not drug money. That's not like completely out of the norm. The thing that really makes outlawry very surprising to us today is anybody could come and take your property. Anybody could come and beat you up and kill you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And because the law no longer applied to you, there was no law that was broken when they murdered you. They weren't breaking a law. You had no protection any longer. And that's the thing that makes it really kind of shocking as far as like a legal formality is concerned to us today.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And you would end up being an indentured servant. And one of the other things I read about that that was kind of interesting that really drove the point home. It's not just like I'm an indentured servant over here now. I wish I wasn't. Like maybe around your area, you might have some sympathetic friends that might hide you or bring you food out in the woods or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
In America or Australia, you probably knew no one. So you had no help whatsoever. And you truly were ostracized. So that in and of itself was a big deal. Another thing that could happen to you, too, is if the sheriff ever did catch up with you, like there was a very high chance you were just killed on sight because it was a death sentence for you as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Like they had no obligation to bring you in. If they wanted to just kill you and get over with it, the sheriff could do that to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
I'm kidding. I didn't, Chuck. It was a good one. I'm glad you pointed it out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Probably not. A few people would. And those people were very satisfied that you just said that. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
No. Yeah. But, yeah, I can't remember who Hanson was. I think we talked about them in the episode, too. But, yeah, that was a long time ago, but it's a good episode. Haven't heard it in a while. Same. There were some ways to have your outlaw status revoked. One of them was just showing up to court. Yeah. There was a specific court you had to go to. It was the King's Bench. In London.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
So you had to make your way to London and you basically pled to have it removed. And I think that that was part of the procedure because, again, if you showed up to the court that had called you in the first place, you might be murdered. And that would be that. Yeah. So that was, I think, the initial part of the process.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And there does seem to be like a pretty generous amount of forgiveness for, you know, lesser crimes, I think, like that where you just hadn't shown up. Right. Especially if you're like, I'm sorry, my foot, I twisted my ankle jogging and I just couldn't make it to court. Or, you know, my stupid cousin was supposed to take me, but his cart broke down, that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
The court would probably take pity on you and remove your outlaw status because now you were playing ball with them, which is the whole point of them conferring you an outlaw is that you hadn't in the first place. What was really shocking to me is that this same stuff could be applied to somebody in a civil case. Like somebody's like, this guy stole my chickens.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And we are finally. So this one's for you, Dave. And it's a good idea, too, because most people think of outlaws as a specific, you know, like. Like Johnny Cash. Yes, exactly. A lot of people think of Johnny Cash when they think outlaw, don't they? Yeah. Outlaw country music. It's a thing. But this turns out to have been an actual legal standing. Yes. That could be applied to people.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
I'm going to sue you and you didn't show up. You could also be considered an outlaw for that, too. That's just nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And it wasn't until 1879 that England revoked that part of their outlaw statute that it couldn't be used in civil cases anymore. But as far as I know, and I looked high and low for definitive proof of this, but just from references I saw, it seems like there's still outlaw books or outlaw statutes on the books for criminal acts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, Dave, this was a great idea. Thanks for it. Short Stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
You can get out of this if you buy the contract. So you pay me what the mob's paying me to kill you. You pay me to not kill you and we'll just call it even. And not only was that a way for the scumbag of a killer to make double the amount on the contract,
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
by basically duping Charles Morgan into thinking he could buy his way out of it, it also was a great excuse to get him to an isolated spot to hand over the money, as it were, but really to murder him out there in the desert. If you look at it like that, this guy was so in over his head, and he was trying so hard to save himself. It's so sad. This is just...
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
For some reason, this one really gets me. I don't know if it's because it was recent enough or what, but there's just a lot to it that really makes me sad for him and his family.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Agreed. There's some other weird stuff to this case, so I would suggest that anybody who is interested, go check it out. You can read a lot about it. And in the meantime, RIP Chuck Morgan and Short Stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Exactly. Before he said, let's go get lunch.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. So he was an escrow agent. And the escrow agent, as anyone who's ever bought a house knows, is the person who holds the money.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
They're this impartial third party who follows a set of rules about keeping and dispersing money. And basically wants the sale of some high value thing, almost always real estate. But sometimes things like if you're buying a bunch of gold or you're buying a private jet or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
There's going to be an escrow agent involved because you don't just hand over the money and hope for the best. And then once everybody's signed and all the stuff is legal and set, then the money gets sent out. But they hold it in escrow.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
And by being an escrow agent, not just Charles Morgan, but any escrow agent, I think even still today, is in a really good position to help organize crime launder money.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
What? Good one, man. I love that. That's the best one since sniff him off the case. Oh, man. Yeah. That's wonderful. As it was coming out of my mouth, I knew that it was not right. 17 years in, and you're still doing it, man. I appreciate that. I love it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, because again, like you said, just taking tainted money, money made from selling drugs, you put it in an escrow account, it gives it legitimacy. If the escrow agent isn't asking where it came from, from that point forward, once it's in the escrow account, that's when the paper trail really kind of starts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
So if they use that money to buy, legitimately buy legal gold and platinum and then turn around and sell that, that illicit drug money just became legitimate in the eyes of everybody. Thanks again in part with the help of Charles C. Morgan. And did you say he oversaw a billion dollars worth of transactions in the few years he was doing this?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
A billion dollars. That's what Don Devereaux estimated that journalists for Unsolved Mysteries. And like you said, he he was a good guy. That's the sad part of all of this. He wasn't some scumbag. He wasn't a scale. He seems to have gotten in over his head. He was definitely helping the mafia launder their money or organized crime.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. He's older than 50, it turns out. And there's Jerry. And this is short stuff. And let's go.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
But he was also a dedicated family man who cared very much about the safety of his family. And I say we take a break and come back and really kind of get into the sad story of Charles Morgan's death.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Okay, so surely there's other people out there who know much more about this and the chain of events that led to this. But if you take it from the story of Ruth Morgan, Charles Morgan's wife, the whole thing starts in March of 1977, when all of a sudden, one day, Charles Morgan goes missing. And he's missing for three days, and he finally turns back up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
But when he turns back up, he's not carrying like flowers and chocolate to apologize. He shows up missing a shoe, among other things.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, so I get the impression that he wasn't just telling his wife that because he didn't feel like talking to her. I think he was naive enough that somebody told him that they did that, and that he was really worried it was true.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
No. I mean, you would still absorb whatever drug through the mucous membranes of your mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
I don't know, but I did see that Ruth nursed him back to health from different sources. So I don't know what the deal was. He also was handcuffed. So it could have been, you know, trauma from that. Who knows? But he didn't want her to call the cops because, like I said, he was dedicated to his family and he did not. He was so up against the wall that he could not involve the cops.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
He had to figure out how to do this himself. I mean, like people write entire books about this situation. few week segment of Charles C. Morgan's life. That was the kind of trouble he found himself in.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Okay. I think when you, yes, you're right. No, it's not bizarre.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, pretty much. So things kind of, like you said, get back to normal a little bit. But that was March of 1977. In May, a few weeks later, he suddenly went missing again. And this time, I mean, I can't imagine the dread Ruth experience. Like the first time, I'm sure she was like, where is that Charles? And she had a rolling pin in her hand or something like that waiting for him to come home.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
This time... After he showed up the way that he did, after he started wearing a bulletproof vest, as scared as he was, and then also not letting her in on anything, him disappearing a second time had to be torture for her. I think he was gone nine full days before she got a phone call from an anonymous woman. And it was a bizarre phone call.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
So let's say that if the whole case wasn't bizarre, Chuck, there's bizarre elements. And this is definitely one of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
It is unsung in that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. No mention of this whatsoever on all of Wikipedia, which is very surprising. But we're talking about the death of a man named Charles C. Morgan. who died in May of 1977 in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona. And his death was, like you said, almost certainly a murder.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. I mean, yeah. But it was also really odd. I mean, I'm sure if I had read much more around it, it would have made a little more sense. But the end of it being just the way that it did, I think somebody said, like, lies. These are all lies at the end. Yeah. Which is not, you know, it was just really strange. Yeah. So, yes, I find that bizarre that that was even mentioned.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
And it also comes up again after that. Right. So this Ecclesiastes 12 colon. verses 1 through 8, is also mentioned on a $2 bill that was found on Charles' body, Chuck's body. Not you, Chuck. I hate to even say that out loud, just the thought of this happening to you. Yeah, I appreciate that. It was on this $2 bill.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
He had written Ecclesiastes 12, and then he circled a 1 and an 8 that were in the serial number of this $2 bill to reference that this was in verses 1 through 8.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
I've never seen any explanation for what his tooth was doing wrapped up in a handkerchief.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, I guess. And then left. There's not really any bigger message that you could send rather than leaving his dead, murdered body right by the car. Why would you put his tooth and a handkerchief in the car? It's just strange to me. You know what? I would even go so far as to call it bizarre.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
He said, I thought you said, leave the tooth, grab the cannoli. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
No. And that's really just such a sad twist, too, because he seems to have spent the last week of his life on the run under the idea that he had some hope. He had hope that maybe just maybe he could get out of this by buying that contract back and maybe this would all go away. But it does seem that he did have a contract on his life for real.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
But it was pronounced suicide by the local sheriff, even though the coroner was like, I don't know what this was. Everyone else on the planet will tell you it's a murder, especially once you know the details, which we're going to get into right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
That it was because he was informing on the mafia to the feds, the Treasury Department specifically. So that does seem to have been true. And then that journalist for Unsolved Mysteries, Don Devereaux, he posits, and this makes a lot of sense, that the hitman did get in touch with Chuck Morgan and said, I'm afraid to tell you this, but I'm coming to kill you. But.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And so, like you said, all the way back in the 17th century, people consider the first economic bubble to have surrounded tulips and tulip bulbs in Holland.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
No, that's what it's referred to, I'm sure, among economists, among historians, among the Dutch, among podcasters. It's called tulip mania. That wasn't just me being funny.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah. So tulips first arrived in Holland around 1600. The Dutch East India Company was moving spices and exotic goods from the east to Europe, Holland in particular. And tulips arrived. And for the first couple of decades, they were, you know, if you were a plant enthusiast, You probably had a tulip in your collection.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff about tulip mania.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
If you were very, very rich and just wanted to show off how cutting edge you were, you might have some tulips in your garden. But they weren't a big deal until 1634. And the reason they became a big deal almost overnight was because those same upper classes and nobility in Holland decided that tulips were now a status symbol.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And that if you didn't have tulips growing in your garden and you were a member of the aristocracy or nobility, you were a total loser with a capital L. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, that 50 to 150 grand, that was like day-to-day stuff. Right. That's what a single tulip bulb would go for. Single bulb. It was nuts. Even at the time, there were people who were watching this and they were like, this is crazy. They're tulips for God's sake.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Right, exactly. I say we take a break and come back and talk some more about Tulip Mania.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah. It's where the price of a good or an asset or something like that, let's just say item. Sure. Goes sky high, way, way, way beyond any reasonable value that it should have. And it's because of exuberant trading. And the more exuberant the trading is, the more people get sucked in by it. And they want to make some money, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Okay, Chuck, so we were just talking about how crazy expensive a single tulip bulb was in Holland in the 1630s. Single tulip bulbs. Right. So some people among the wealthy would use like significant portions of their fortune, of their wealth, to buy tulips and just grow them. They weren't reselling them. They weren't doing anything. They were buying tulips and growing them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
They were spending half of their net worth to buy tulips just to show off, right? Yeah. At some point, people started saying, like, I think that if I start buying tulips and then selling them for a higher price, I could really make some money.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And as a matter of fact, I can start speculating where I will go into futures contracts with people and say, hey, I'll sell you X number of tulips in three weeks for X number of dollars because I'm betting that the price is going to go down. You're betting that the price is going to go up. Let's see who wins. And speculation is one of the main drivers, essentially, of an economic bubble.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Like it's crazy that the single bulbs are going for that. But once people started speculating and creating like instruments and futures contracts based on that crazy high price, that's when it really started to get troublesome. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah. The bubble burst because some people, like we said earlier, that there were some people who were like, this is crazy. And even some speculators and people who are invested in tulips were like, this is not going to last much longer. I'm going to get out. And as more people started to decide to get out, you can trigger a panic.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And if you trigger a panic, all of a sudden the bubble bursts and the price just drops precipitously. And that's what happened with the tulip mania bubble. A bunch of people who had large stocks of tulip bulbs when the price dropped almost overnight were ruined financially.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
They had, say, hundreds of thousands of dollars with the tulips that they'd paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for that were now worth hundreds of dollars. And it was a bad jam for anybody who was caught with tulip bulbs when the bubble burst.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, because, again, you're saying I will buy a thousand tulip bulbs in four weeks at, you know, a million dollars. And when the bubble burst and those tulip, the thousand bulbs were now worth a thousand dollars and you're on the hook to pay a million dollars for them. Yeah. Those speculators were like, I'm not I'm sorry, I'm not doing this. Or they can't.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
So more people start investing and the prices keep going higher and higher and higher. That's the first part of the bubble. There's another less happy side of the bubble, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, they might not have been able to any longer. But the suppliers who had these tulip bulbs and were technically owed a million dollars, regardless of what the tulip bulbs were worth, they won their bet. But they still, the buyers would not pay the suppliers. And that's what really created this huge financial crisis. And it got bad enough.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
At first, the Dutch governments of the big cities and I think the monarchy did not get involved. They did not want to get involved. The courts were like, we're not going to hear any cases because these are bets as far as the law is concerned. And a bet isn't legally binding.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
But it was so bad, the Dutch economy was in such tatters because so many people had gotten into tulips, Chuck, that they just, like you said, tradespeople just sold their tools, people sold their houses. The regular economy that was built on that kind of work and stuff like that, it sagged. It was unmaintained during this tulip mania. So it was a big problem that the Dutch had.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
So finally, some of the higher-ups got involved and tried to figure this out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, that's what the Dutch government ultimately decided to do is nothing. And it just had to mend itself naturally as people got back to work and people sold their tulip bulbs for way less. But they did sell their tulip bulbs because the Dutch were still and are still kind of crazy for tulips. Oh, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
I read that they still pay higher prices than other countries for tulip bulbs because people just know that the Dutch are crazy for tulips and they'll pay it. And I guess every about this time of year, every year, the Dutch countryside just explodes in color.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
I'm sure you can still find it. Thanks, man. Thanks for the recommendation.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, and beware economic bubbles. Yeah, that too. Short stuff is apt.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
For sure. And then some people, because it's actually kind of counterintuitive, you think if you've gone through the school of hard knocks, I think is the way that the study put it. Yeah. You would think that they'd come out like much more world wary and like suspicious of people. And so they'd be less likely to fall for a scam.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But no, instead, like you said, they just they question their own judgment for having gone through what they went through.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's a wonder any of us can function in any, like, real way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yep. I mean, I can't imagine. Like, that's got to just keep you up at night sometimes if you think about it too much, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yes. Another one that really stood out to me, though, that this I would not have predicted is the more cynical you are, studies have found that the likelier you are to be gullible or duped. And the reason why actually makes tons of sense. Again, if you're cynical, you think you've got everything figured out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You think the world sucks and everybody's trying to take advantage of you and the government's constantly screwing you over. And everyone's going to try to get an angle on you. That's cynicism, right? At least in the modern sense. And it's actually a lazy shortcut to experiencing reality because on the one hand, you lose out in opportunity costs. So you miss a lot of great stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Like you might not make friends that you could have made because you were suspicious of this stranger chatting you up at the outset or something like that. But as far as gullibility goes, if somebody comes along and talks to you in your language, they can pull one over on you much more easily because they are tapping into your cynicism, which again is just lazy shorthand for experiencing reality.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's based largely on intuition and supposition and not necessarily taking each experience and looking at it based on the facts as a unique thing. It all has this one cast to it that's the same, and that's just not how the world actually works.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
For sure. And then conversely, too, not being cynical requires way more brainpower and thought and just participation than being cynical does. Like you have to actually like ask yourself, like, is this true? What kind of source is this coming from? I might need to go do some research. I might need to ask people. It's just so much easier to be like, nope, they're screwing me over.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I don't even need to bother to look into that. Because you're also defending yourself at the same time from getting taken advantage of. Again, until somebody comes along and is talking your language and then you will oftentimes fall for whatever they're saying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You do. I heard that there's a really bad norovirus going around, and that's got to be what you got, man.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Oh, that's true. I forgot you got that. Yeah. Well, there's still a norovirus going around, so don't catch that, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, think about how good you have to be to purposefully lose at golf.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Well, I take that one back. And on accident. So, yes, but on the contrary, if you are upset, if you're sad, if you're depressed, if you're mad, if you're in a low mood, you are actually more likely to pay attention to granular things. I think it actually kind of ties into rumination. You're just thinking about stuff. You're turned inward.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So if somebody comes along and tries to sell you something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's going to be harder to slip it past you because you're paying attention more than somebody who's like, yeah, whatever. Let's have another round.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Right. Yeah. So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy that they are less likely to be scammed because they're so vigilant. That's amazing to me. Yeah. So there was this one study that kind of backed all this up from the University of Toronto. And they found they looked at adults 60 to 90 who handled their own finances. They didn't have any diagnosed cognitive issues.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
There's no way. Well, Chuck, I guess it's entirely possible since I haven't seen you. I've just, you know, been talking to you while we record. I have no idea whether you're actually sick or not. And it's entirely possible that you're fooling me right now. And if you are, I would argue that doesn't make me gullible because I generally believe you're trustworthy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And they found that people who had reported being victims of a fraud, there was nothing that really happened or there was no characteristic demographically, anything like that, that made them different from anybody else. The only thing that seemed to really kind of stick out was that the people who had been scammed before had low conscientiousness, one of the big five. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
They were less honest, humble, which is another kind of personality trait from a different scale. And from what I could see, the honesty thing means they explained it like if you are low on honesty, you're more likely to – Try something that might be a scam because you might get rich quick or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You're more willing to take a shortcut, say, than somebody who would score higher on honesty, which puts you at greater risk. But that was about it. There wasn't like, you know, the older you get or the less educated you are in this group, you're more likely to get scammed. It was some other stuff entirely. But...
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
They found also that people who do experience cognitive decline do tend to get taken advantage of more, which is really messed up and sad, but it's true. And as a matter of fact, they've started to – some people have started to push this idea like if you fall for a scam, you should immediately be tested for –
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Alzheimer's or dementia, because there's a high correlation with getting scammed as an older person and the early, early developments of cognitive decline. It's got to feel terrible. I mean, it's bad enough to feel like you're getting scammed, but then to stop and be like, well, is this it for me in my mind?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
We should do an episode on that sometime because I just don't I don't I mean, I get it, but I don't understand like where it started or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I thought he was, isn't he like the Dolphins quarterback now?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Have you heard about the lonesome loser? He still keeps on trying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
There's no reason to believe that you're not sick. So really, you'd just be a shameful, dirty liar. And I would be the hero in this situation. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And then another thing about being online to the Better Business Bureau back in 2015, I think they looked at a, I guess a bunch of their like scam complaints that came in just to see who reported them. And they found that people between 25 and 35 were,
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
were more likely to lose money on a scam than older people, which is totally contrary to what people think of when they think of people who get scammed. And one of the explanations that they came up with is, in part, younger people are just online more.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So they're just more likely by the numbers to have scams presented to them, which means that they're more likely to probably go for a scam than, say, people who are online less, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I thought they all had like flip phones that only dial numbers.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Well, then that makes it even less understandable that 25 to 35-year-olds would be more likely to be scammed. I don't know. Maybe that generation is just more trusting these days or something like that. Actually, I got to take that back because as we'll see, being trusting is not necessarily correlated with being gullible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, another aspect is, like you said, people in science typically know a tremendous amount about their field, but they can make a mistake and think that that understanding, that depth of understanding, will just apply to other fields as well that they just don't know as much about. And that's another way they can fall prey to it. But also scientists like to be right as much as anybody else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And, you know, I don't remember what episode we did this in. I think it was about the just reproducibility crisis in science papers, if I remember correctly. But just how like the scientists don't set up experiments to disprove their hypothesis. They set them up to prove their hypothesis. That's how you get published. That's how you get celebrated.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Like nobody wants to hear about you failing, even though that's what science is meant to be. That's a part of it as well, just wanting to be right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So if somebody comes along and is like, yep, you're right, let's use that to explain this other thing that's actually not true, the scientists might go along with it because if it is true, then it will prove their hypothesis and make them very famous and they'll probably end up having an HBO movie made about them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Maybe. But, I mean, we definitely talked about papers just being, some of them just being outright fraudulent because their experiments are set up incorrectly. It could have been scientific method.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I thought that was so her line where she tells Bill Murray that she won't dance with him. It was a little out of nowhere.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I get that. A little harsh, I think, is what I'm trying to say.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
All right. Wait, Lucy Liu doesn't or does want to dance with Bill Murray?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Wait, I just, before we go to a break, I was saying I would like to dance with Bill Murray. Oh, yeah. Okay, I just want to make sure that no one walks away to this ad break thinking that I don't want to dance with Bill Murray.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, interestingly, yes, science can be gullible. On the other hand, you could argue that Americans aren't more gullible than usual, that there's actually just different factors involved that make people want to believe things. Maybe. It's weird. I think one of the reasons why it's so hard to wrap our head around is social psychologists are still trying to wrap their head around it. Totally.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Okay, we're back, everybody. And I mentioned before that trust is not necessarily correlated with gullibility. And I love that. That just makes me feel good about the world again.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. And so we'll kind of explain why. But there have been study after study after study that basically say, yeah, that's actually true. Like you can have a high level of trust, be tested for that kind of thing, and you are not more likely to be gullible. And in fact, it seems that if you are a higher trusting person, you're actually less likely to be gullible compared to, say, like the cynic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Like there's this researcher named Toshio Yamagishi, who's considered one of the most prominent researchers in gullibility and trust out of Hokkaido University. I know how to say Hokkaido. I don't know why I had trouble with that at first. But one of the things that Yamagishi did in the 1990s was to tell people who scored high in trusting this and other people who scored low.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
About the story of Bill and Chuck, I think you should take it because it's got a great story.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Right. But the bottom line was, even with positive information, like Bill littered, but he also cut in line. If you took all of the tallies, you would see that people who are low in trusting others and people who are high in trusting others, they had about the same scores.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So this research from Yamagishi and others shows that you can trust other people and it doesn't open you up to being taken advantage of. That just doesn't make any sense because just the idea of being gullible means that you're trusting what somebody else is saying. That's the popular conception of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But as we've seen, really the idea of gullibility is trusting what somebody says because you either don't care enough to go figure it out yourself. because you don't feel like thinking for yourself, because what they're saying confirms your biased beliefs, not that you just trust people in general.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And the explanation that I saw that really kind of drives it home for me, Chuck, is that people who have high trust are also more discerning. So they would have probably a better social intelligence than people who don't trust as much. And that makes sense because if you don't trust people like the cynic, you're actually protecting yourself. You're guarding yourself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And you know what happens when social psychologists get a hold of something. Oh, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You know that you are probably not as discerning as other people. And so rather than get yourself into trouble time and time again, you just keep people at arm's length. You don't really trust them. Whereas if you are high trusting, you are better at discerning. And that either means that...
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Because you're good at discerning, you have the freedom to trust other people because you can be confident in your judgment of other people. And you're probably not going to be taken advantage of. Or if you are just a trusting person by nature, you have to have a higher discernment or else you're going to be taken advantage of. Either way, high discernment and high trust go hand in hand.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's a little unsteady as they figure it out. That's right. It's an oyster stew party. So I think it's not us is what I'm trying to say. And you, dear listener, if you're like, what is going on? It's not you either. It's social psychology.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, because at base, you can go through life not trusting other people and you can make it all the way to old age and die at pretty much the same age that you would have had you trusted people. But again, you're missing out. There's opportunity costs. to not trusting other people that people who do trust other people are not missing out on. And you're just not connected as socially.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And research after research after research shows that social connections are like the number one predictor of living to a healthy older age. So you're actually robbing yourself by just not trusting other people. But again, it's kind of understandable if you were taught that your judgment is questionable, either through trauma, through a jerk stepdad or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's understandable, and I'm not sure if that's something that you can learn to break out of, although I sincerely hope it is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. And people also judge other people to be more likely to be duped than they are, more gullible than they are. But yeah, his whole message is like, no, we're actually as a group, as a species, not all that gullible. What appears to be gullibility is actually just somebody not caring enough to argue a point or they're accepting information, but they're hanging on to it loosely and
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Olivia, I thought this is awesome. She pointed out that if you are shown like an AI generated baby peacock that looks super cute and has huge eyes and is colorful and is nothing like what a baby peacock really looks like.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
If you're not like a peacock researcher or your job doesn't depend on positively identifying baby peacocks, it doesn't really matter if you think that that's what they look like. Because you're holding on to it loosely enough that if somebody comes along and says, that's not what baby peacocks actually look like, you're not going to like, that's not the hill you're going to die on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You're going to be like, oh, that's crazy what AI can do. Or, oh, it got me. Or just be like, great, I now know what baby peacocks feel. or look like. And that's his point is that's not gullibility. That's just not stopping to analyze, you know, whether it's true or not, because it just isn't that important right then.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, because it came at your beliefs and said, yep, go for it. Like that's what that's the official line now is anti-Semitism. Yeah. Yeah. And also similarly, political ads don't don't really work. That's what they say. Yeah. And that makes me wonder, though, if that's just being suspicious of the messenger because of polarization, that you're not going to be like, hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Let's hear what this opposing political party has to say about Medicare. I'm really interested. I'm going to keep an open mind. No, it's like this message is from the opposing party. I'm just going to laugh at it because it's just so full of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
They came up with a report that found that worldwide people lose a trillion dollars to scams every year. Man. That's a lot of money. But some of these same researchers are like, hey, there's actually some short, like easy stuff you can walk around in your head with to use to apply to new information to protect from being gold, which is actually a word.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. One of them is the first step is to admit that you're as susceptible to being scammed as anybody else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. Well, it also puts the kibosh on being overconfident, which again can increase your chance of being duped.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Don't make emotional decisions like we talked about. Keep a lid on impulsivity. Don't respond to like, act now. Supplies are running out kind of like come ons. Don't respond to false scarcity. Like remember people hoarding toilet paper?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Those are emotional decisions. You want to just stay cool and level-headed. Another one is ask questions. Ask for more information. Don't be afraid to look dumb. That's a big one. Yeah, it's a big one. And then consider the source. Is there any supporting information? And when you put all this together, you are probably going to come up with a good decision or understanding.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And if you're being gulled by somebody, that's a real word, you are probably going to say, I don't believe what you're saying. You, sir, are a cat and a scoundrel. Please get out of my face before I smack you with my glove. And we have to duel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Well, at least the next day when they send out the email, they ask if you fell for it. They don't show like a list with pictures of all the people who did fall for it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I agree. And that is no fooling. and if you want to know more about gullibility, go do some research yourself on it. That's kind of the point of not being gulled, which is a real word. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I take issue with this right out of the gate. I kind of did too. I think that's a terrible distinction because I think you can totally fall for something and be duped. Yeah. And you be the only person who knew that, who knows it. You know, somebody could say something that duped you and they don't stop and focus to get like that reaction.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Pretty impressive. Thanks a lot, Mark. I'm just going to call you Mark for now because I feel like we're on a first name basis. That was a great email. Great story. And if you want to see if you can top Mark, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That question of whether they duped you or not answered, they just keep going on. But you know you've been duped. You don't have to respond to a Nigerian prince email or send somebody a bunch of Walmart cards to get out of some random federal case that's against you. To have been gullible, you just have to believe it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And usually in the absence of any kind of supporting evidence and sometimes in the presence of contradictory evidence, that's gullibility in my understanding. You're believing something without bothering to go check it out. And that to me is the baseline of gullibility.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. McQuarrie? Not that. Although anytime you do that, you sound like Murray from Flight of the Conchords to me. Murray in present.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No. You can just believe. What's up with Greenspan? And no one in the world could know besides you that you believed and you're still gullible in that sense. The thing that really stood out to me that we'll talk about a lot more, though, is... But you could make a really good case that people aren't as gullible as other people think they are. And I found that kind of reassuring.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
We'll talk about that later. But I don't want anybody to get the impression that we're just like, yep, people are generally stupid. And here's how they fall for stupid stuff. And you're probably stupid too. That's not actually what the science of gullibility has turned up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, you're not informed enough in that particular thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's a big one. If you're low in curiosity, you're like, I don't care. Just tell me what to think. I'm too lazy to go figure it out myself. I got better things to do than think. Or if you have a high need for independence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
This struck me quite a bit because if you're independence minded, you don't need smarty pants, pencil neck college boys telling you what's right or what's wrong or what's true or what's false. you can figure it out yourself. And those people are actually at high risk of being duped, which is really surprising. But if you stop and think about it, it makes total sense.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
They're overconfident, and that's a huge factor in being gullible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Right. And strangely, ironically, almost as if he did it on purpose because it supports everything he wrote about. Stephen Greenspan, the author of that book about gullibility, he finished his book and shortly afterward, he was informed by, I guess, his stockbroker that he had lost a bunch of money by investing in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So he was like, even the guy that researched this and wrote the book on gullibility can fall for it. That's a really great little tidbit. But I think it also goes to show just how specific gullibility is. Because I don't get the impression that Stephen Greenspan was like, this Madoff guy is making a lot of really great points and this is incredibly high risk.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But I'm going to go along with it anyway. Like he went through a stockbroker and everything. So there's only a certain amount of gullibility. Bernie Madoff is like shorthand for fooling people. You know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Not to pick on Steven Greenspan or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So some other people have said, well, we really want to show off as social psychologists. We're going to create a gullibility scale. And in fact, Alessandra Tunis from Macquarie University – I'm not even going to try that one, but it's Australian for university – Sorry, Australians. There's this beer called Foster's that here in America we think you drink a lot of.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And in America, the ad campaign says Foster's. It's Australian for beer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That's the best I can do. That's how I think Australians talk.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're flying solo again, which means we hopefully won't crash this joint, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It did because they backed it up. I can't remember what it's called, but they tested the validity. They tested the validity of the self-reporting panel and found that the people who reported themselves or scored the highest on gullibility on this test were more likely to click a link on a phishing email than people who scored low. That's right. So it seems like a valid test.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And one of the things, I went and looked it up, Chuck, and one of the questions wasn't even a question. It was, you are very persuadable. And the only option to check was yes. Ah, what? No, I'm kidding.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It was more of the joke. I wasn't trying to take advantage of you, although I realize now that I did.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, pretty much. And depending on and it doesn't even have to be like you're such a stupid kid every day. It can just be things like where your your opinion is not really heard or validated or just all sorts of little missteps that parents can make that make parenting a living nightmare. So you can carry on as an adult and it can make you doubt your own opinion. So you're not going to speak up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That's right. How are you, man? You're still sick, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It can make you be afraid of looking stupid. So you don't ask questions because you don't want to seem like I don't I didn't immediately get it. So I'm going to look dumb if I ask these questions. There's like it just sets you up for being more likely to be a victim of being duped than somebody who has a lot of confidence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No, is he really? No, actually, I don't think so. Oh, you got me back. There you go. We should just do that to one another like every minute or two. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But I guess that depends on whether paranormal activity is real or not, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I mean, that's described from a point of view where you're just like, that's all fake anyway, so. Yeah. Duh. One of the things about social intelligence that's worth pointing out, so that's basically a package that you can have.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Some people are much better at it than others, but basically everyone alive in a society has some degree or other of this package of skills that form social intelligence, like whether or not you're good at conversation, whether you are good at effective listening, what your knowledge of like social roles and social scripts are, and then awareness of like what make other people tick.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And then what people think of you and you put all this together. And if you have like high emotional or social intelligence, you're going to be able to navigate interactions with other people much better than somebody with low intelligence. Part of that is not getting scammed by somebody by being able to be like, you're a scammer and I'm not going to send you a Walmart gift card now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I admire people with high social intelligence because it's not just, you know, being able to spot a scammer. It's being able to see the best in other people and I think to bring out the best in other people and let them bring out the best in you. That's just, it's maybe in another life, maybe the next lifetime. Oh, buddy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
A lot of his advisors were like, we don't need to go back to Memphis. We have a trip to Africa scheduled, and let's just follow through, and we'll leave it behind us. And he was like, no, we have to go back. So he actually canceled that Africa trip and brought everyone back to Memphis. And he got back there on April 3rd.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And that evening, he gave what's been known today as his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech. I believe it was his final speech. Gave it at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis. And it was a pretty significant speech, as you can imagine. I mean, basically everyone's aware of this. But in it, he recounts a previous assassination attempt that I had never heard of. Had you? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Right. Well, so he was signing a book at a department store when he was stabbed in a chest by a mentally ill woman named Azola Curry, stabbed in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. And Azola Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like MLKs were tracking her, had singled her out and were tracking her, preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated MLK, obviously he survived, was that the letter opener came so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it would have penetrated his aorta and killed him. So he really lucked out. And he talked about this in his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
But the thing that most people remember about it is that he, in a way, almost predicted his death the following day at the end of the speech.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, and I've read that some people are like, he felt like that death was close, that he didn't have much time left. So it makes sense that he would have put that in. I don't think he expected to be murdered the next day, but I read that he sensed that he was not going to live much longer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I was thinking about that and just like living in an era of assassinations, like successful assassinations of prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at the time. I just that's just nuts that America went through that period.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
and, you know, the world mourned. I mean, that was all true, but there was just so much more to it. So hopefully we'll kind of get some of that across in this. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So that day on April 4th, it was the evening. It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Well, yes, that's much more accurate because that's when it happened. King had just been grinding away in Memphis for two days by then, and he was staying in room 306 of the now very famous Lorraine Motel. That was the room that he usually took any time he and his people were in Memphis.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
They stayed at the Lorraine Hotel because it was a black-owned business and had been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Lori since the 1940s. It was listed in the Green Book even. It was just a Black-owned business, and it was a nice hotel to stay in. And by the time the late afternoon, early evening rolled around, MLK was late for a dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house in Memphis.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And they all started to leave to head to Billy Kyle's house for dinner. And he stepped outside of his room and onto the balcony, and he was speaking down to some other members of his group. I think he told one of them to start the car. And a shot did ring out, and it hit MLK in the face.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Bessie Brewer's boarding house.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, and a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco was the medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he conducted an autopsy, and he concluded that Martin Luther King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
I read somewhere that Martin Luther King probably didn't even hear the shot that killed him. It just hit him so fast. It was shot from a high-powered rifle close enough by that he just wouldn't have heard it. And I was thinking it was possible that he died almost instantly. Had you read that he was still alive for a period, like when he got to the hospital?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So let's talk MLK, because he kind of skyrocketed to prominence from just the start. He became involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, which most people say kicked off the civil rights era in the United States, thanks to Rosa Parks. who we did an episode on, Rosa Parks' agent of change. You remember that one? That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Well, hopefully he was completely unconscious at the time. So, I mean, it's my hope that he just never knew what hit him or anything hit him. Yeah, I didn't realize that. Yeah, I thought he probably died instantly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, that is fairly unique. So yeah, that's pretty specific. At the boarding house too, at Bessie Brewer's boarding house, people who were staying there later told police that they heard people, or at least someone maybe, going back and forth. to the bathroom. This is a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom rather than a bathroom in each room.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And somebody kept going to the bathroom, hanging out in the bathroom, coming out of the bathroom, going back to the bathroom. And the cops who investigated found scuff marks in the bathtub, obviously left by somebody's shoes. And the bathtub was where you would have had to have stood to see out the window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on the balcony.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So the people in the boarding house heard MLK's assassin. The question was who it was. And obviously we know now it was James Earl Ray, but at the time they didn't realize that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah. We'll talk about the investigation and everything like that in part two. But I say we take our second break and come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, the National Day of Mourning was April 7th, but. Throughout that whole period from the day that his assassination took place to his funeral, there was a lot of places closed down. And I saw, Chuck, that on the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange closed, which is pretty significant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
The NBA and the NHL were in their playoffs and they rescheduled their games. But the Major League Baseball, they did not postpone opening day. much to their discredit. But Roberto Clemente and Maury Willis of the Pirates said, well, we're not playing today. It's Martin Luther King Jr. 's funeral. That's great. We're not going to disrespect it like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And they inspired players on other teams to sit it out too. So from what I saw, effectively opening day was postponed for a number of teams, if not all of MLB.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I would call it more like a match thrown on a powder keg. Just the explosive reaction was, like you said, not just because of MLK's assassination, but that was the thing that set it off. Previously, the summer before, it was called the Long Hot Summer because there had been a ton of riots nationwide. in cities like Detroit. There was five days of rioting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
It just kept happening all over the place in Black communities around the United States. And there were reasons for this. There were, like, segregation had officially ended, but in practice, there was tons of segregation left, especially kinds of, like, housing discrimination that essentially created Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yes. But one of the things you don't learn about these days as often is that he was, at that point, beginning to become widely criticized, not just by white Americans, many of whom have been criticizing him all along, but by black Americans as well. There was a real division in the civil rights movement.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
between Martin Luther King's vision of his doctrine of nonviolence, which is basically saying like, hey, we're going to essentially do everything we can to show white Americans the problems that black Americans face just by being black in America. And no matter what they do to us, we're not going to fight back. And we're going to make an example of ourselves
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Okay. Thank you. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
that will hopefully set for them, and the ultimate goal was to integrate into America, to integrate black Americans into America so that there wasn't black America and white America. And that ran very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was Malcolm X's idea.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, and again, that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of nonviolence, which Malcolm X considered criminal, as he put it, in the face of just being beaten by whites just for marching in the streets peacefully. And a big portion of the people who are critical of King and his nonviolence doctrine were the younger generations. They tended to lean more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And then in white America, with white Americans, He was basically never popular during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah. And so this was, it's really hard to oversee how controversial the speech was. Like he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Bain Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him. I think Laura helps us out with this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
She found 168 newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for that speech. So he was already not super popular with white Americans. His popularity was so-so with black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were. And then one of the other things that really proved to be very difficult for him later in his life, later in his career—
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
was he shifted focus from strictly civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor People's Campaign. came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core. And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Like, we're not going to be quite as peaceful as we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X, like, full-on militant. But you can expect, you know, I think he famously said 15% to 16% more militancy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just the two of us today, which is fine because we need to keep our nose to the grindstone and really focus on a pair of really important episodes, which we kick off now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Right. So, Chuck, do you want to take a break now?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So in the spring of 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, which had previously prided itself on its white community and black communities kind of, you know, fairly getting along, especially compared to some other places like places in Alabama, it was by this time in high tension as a town. And it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
MLK became very interested in helping further the goals of the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike because he basically saw this as like, this is a perfect bridge between this transition from a focus just on civil rights to this larger focus on poor people of all colors. Because...
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Like, this was mostly, almost exclusively Black sanitation workers who were struggling for recognition of their work, dignity in their work, decent wages. Apparently, if you were a full-time sanitation worker in Memphis, you were still eligible for food stamps after your full salary. And he was like, this is exactly the perfect kind of thing that I'm trying to get across. Like, this is important.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So he kind of focused on Memphis in the spring of 1968. And like I said, it was in a state of high tension because a couple of protests, marches essentially to support the workers, had not really gone really well previously.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, that was verbatim what I said. And I said, let's do it. There was a ton of stuff that I did not know about MLK's assassination.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, and this was on the heels of another march the month before in February where protesters, including some ministers who were marching, were maced by police. So Memphis just like basically almost like throwing a switch went from like a generally okay city as far as race relations were concerned to like the National Guard is now here keeping order in like a month. It just changed that quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And because he was leading the march on March 28th, King became totally, I don't want to say obsessed, but he was fully zeroed in on returning to Memphis to set things right. Because that was a huge black eye against him, his career, and in particular, his whole doctrine of nonviolence. And again, like the invaders were not related to what was going on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
James Earl Ray. Like, there's a lot of stuff around it. And it's just a reminder that history gets so boiled down to, like, its bare essence or even, like, a caricature of itself. Yeah. when you really dig into like a historical event, you're just reminded that there's just so many people affected and involved. And it's not just, you know, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
They essentially used this as a chance to mix things up. And King just basically wanted to go give it another try and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of the civil rights movement he was leading. And he put everything on the line. to go back to Memphis and try it again. Because it could have gone wrong again, and that would have really damaged things even further.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So to legitimize this idea that it was the hand of glory, somebody just said along the way, maybe even Margaret Murray, that the hand was severed and found at the trunk of the tree. And you will see that everywhere, even in ones that don't mention witchcraft. It's just, that's how cases like this just get, you know, that's how they become unsolvable over time.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter, but for some reason it's just always ticked me off.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
I got to check this out. Let me go grab my phone. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So Josh really did go get his phone. Like, it doesn't even look old. It looks like they just severed a hand and planted some wicks on it. Like, wow.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Well, okay, so it looks like an aged person's hand, but it's not like a mummified hand. No, no, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. I do feel like we need to change the name Hand of Glory, though. First of all, it doesn't make sense. And secondly, it really does sound dirty. Let's just be honest about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, by the way, that was Charles Walton who was murdered almost certainly by his employer in a raid.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Right. And the police said, well, T.S., because you're going to have a secret meeting.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, he has been. Hats off to you, John. Like that's, you should be very proud. We're all proud of you for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. And Anna's name was Una Mossop. And she eventually became Una Hainsworth. But during the time of the murder, she was married to a guy named Jack Mossop. And I saw alternatively that he worked in a local munitions factory or that he was a RAF instructor or that he worked in a factory building plane engines. Regardless, he existed. He was married to Una.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And Una told the story to the cops that one night Jack brought home a friend named Van Ralt, a Dutchman. And that apparently at some point Jack admitted to Una that he was on Van Ralt's payroll and Van Ralt was a spy for the Nazis. And apparently Jack was feeding him information about local factories and stuff to help the Luftwaffe plan their bombings. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So Jack was a real grade-A bastard as far as things went because he traded his country in for some spending money. And Una said one day Jack came home in March or April of 1941, came home late. He was drunk, but he was super agitated.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Uh, wow. That was really cool of you to bring up. I'm glad you did.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, he died of, as far as his death certificate is concerned, a combination of cerebral softening, myocardial degeneration, chronic nephritis, and acute something insanity. I can't even remember my own abbreviation. But you put those together, and that guy is like dead, dead, dead. So Una's story sounded like this actually all makes sense.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
From what I can tell, she provided information that you wouldn't have just been able to glean from the papers. And what's more, she didn't really have much to gain. She wrote in anonymously and resisted coming forward. So it wasn't like she was a publicity hound.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
She would be like a mastermind attention getter to to to really like. Yes, it would be a weird thing to say to make up.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Exactly. One of the things is, though, is so like if this was a joke, what, you know, what tree? How did Van Ralt know that that tree was there in the first place and that it had this 12 by 24, you know, space in it? The thing is, this is far and away the most legitimate explanation for what happened. This is an unsolved case. It's an unsolved mystery.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But for my money, like this is as close as we're ever going to get.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
That's cool, man. Yeah. You sent me and Jerry some good pictures. Yeah. It was fun. Um, okay. Well onto the murder of a woman. Awful. So this is a pretty true, pretty famous true crime case, like really, really famous. I'm not sure if you'd heard of it before. Have you? No, no. I'm not sure why or where it first got me, but I'm pretty sure. So I think Dave helped us with this.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. So Dave points out that this guy had a habit of making his puzzle pieces fit together a little too neatly. So essentially he found out about Una Mossop's story and decided to make it real by corroborating it with his imagination. Yeah. His book, though, is the book that we get the very famous pictures that I was familiar with that caught my attention as a kid.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But it's really important to point out here the tree that he shows is not the tree that she was found in. You said toward the beginning of the episode that the cops chopped that tree down to look for more evidence. So that tree doesn't exist anymore. And yet that's that picture that Donald McCormick put forth as the tree.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
is what you see on the internet still today is the tree she was found in, and that that's possibly not even the kind of tree, that she might not have been found in a witch elm. The cops mentioned that she was found in an elm, but that's it.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And then apparently some people have been able to examine the photos of the original tree and said it's not a witch elm because you don't cut witch elms down that way. That story about you seeing that picture, when did that happen? I was probably like 10, 11. I think probably in like a school library book or something like that about mystery.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Okay. No, no, no. That's how I was walking around with this case for that many years. Like I saw it in some book when I was a kid. I got you. That makes it so much better. I can even remember like the cellophane covering of the book cover even. I can feel it in my fingers right now. I can smell it.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot that's weird about this. So Clara Landau, this picture of Clara Landau was actually a picture of Clara Bowerly, who was a well-known, I saw her described as a movie star, but at least a movie actress and a cabaret singer, a German. Lily von Stupp. And so, yeah, exactly. I think that's almost exactly who this could have been based on.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
She was apparently, as far as Yosef Jacobs has said to MI5 in multiple interviews, that this was his mistress, that they met in Berlin. Bowerly was singing with a group called the Bernard Etta Orchestra. It just goes to show you Dave's dedication to research. Yeah, yeah. And that Jacobs and Bowerly were both –
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
crypto-Nazis, meaning that they were not actual Nazis, they were pretending to be Nazis, and they had fooled the Germans, or at least Yaakov had, into taking him on as a spy and sending him to England. He planned to get to England, defect, and make his way to America, but first he wanted to set up a fake operation enough to convince the Germans to send Bowerly after him.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And he linked to a pair of pictures of a tree and then a diagram of the woman, the murdered woman in this case. And like, you know, like almost an anatomical picture.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And this this is that's it. Like that's that's what Yosef Jacob said. But the Independent was like, oh, let's fill in some blanks and come up with our own theory. Donald McCormick style.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
They did. I mean, think about it. So like she left a full eight, nine years before Bella and the Witch Elm happened was was killed. And yet, yeah, the independent's like, so what? So based on all this, with a bunch of pie filling that they mashed in with it, the independent came up with a new theory. And I say we take a little break and come back and talk about it after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
diagram of like what was found where and what she was wearing and all that and it has like a real Ripley's believe it or not look to it the drawing does and those things are as etched in my brain as pictures from like the time life paranormal series oh wow from when I was a kid so at some point I was exposed to this so it's one of those things that I've always just kind of known about and
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So like I was saying, the Independent came up with their own pet theory for the Bella and the Witch Elm case. And what they said was, OK, so Clara, Clara Bowerly, had come to England in the 30s and was a performer, a cabaret singer here as well as in Germany. And that she became known as Clara Bella. Like maybe this is a stage name she adopted or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But it was a mashup of her name, Clara Bowerly. And that was the foundation that they based everything else on.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So, yeah. So there's some problems with this theory. Number one, she was not Clara Bowerly was not five feet tall. She was approaching six feet tall. That's the biggest problem with this, right? That's a pretty big problem. I would I would say that there's an even bigger problem than this. And that is that she died a full year after Bella did in a German hospital of a barbiturate overdose.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But I didn't know any of the details, really. And it's a truly fascinating case that I think one of the things that makes it appealing, too, is there's this level of the sense of like witchcraft or some sort of like pagan cults involved or something like that. And it turns out that that's not true.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
No. And this is 2013. This isn't the independent, you know, decades ago. This was, well, I guess a decade ago. But still, it was recent enough that they should know better than making up basically new theories and printing them as if they're basically fact. So one of the good things that came out of this was of Yosef Yaakov's being brought into this case.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Although just totally, like, that was the independent that did that. That was... Like he was not mentioned that he was not tangential. The case, he had nothing to do with it, basically. But his granddaughter, Giselle K. Jacobs, or Jacobs, I'm not sure which one she goes by. She has a Ph.D. in ancient history.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So she knows about being a historian and she's applied some of that to the Bella and the Witch Elm. case on a website called yosefjacobs.info. And it is very well researched and well written information about this case. So if you're interested in it at all, go check that out.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
No idea. That's gone for good. That's not in any warehouse anywhere. No, which is probably a good thing. And now we'll wrap up this episode with five minutes on the ancient woodland management technique of coppicing. Very funny. You got anything else? I have nothing else. Well, go forth if this floated your boat and read more about Bella and the Witch Elm, the case.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Just be wary of where your information's from. And there's a lot more to it. There's a lot, well, there's a lot more out there to read. How about that? And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Well, also, I called up John Williams, and he was like, yep, I love that funeral march. Keep up the good work, boys.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
That's not the case, that a lot of it is just associated with the tree that she was found in, a witch elm, which has nothing to do with witches. And that she might not have even been found in that kind of tree. So let's get into it, Chuck, because I like confusing everybody from the outset.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Loved your turn as the little kid in Lost Boys.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, it definitely did. I saw it not too long ago and I was like, this is, like I said it before, I'll say it again. It's a good movie.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Well, thanks a lot, Lad, again. I appreciate being backed up. That was very refreshing. And if you want to be like Lad and back me up about some stand I took that everybody tried to shout me down on, and I said, no, I'm not going to be shouted down. They're like, yes, you are. And I said, no, I'm not. And then it just kind of hung out there until you email in. We love that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
You can send us that email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. I think their quote was humming, humming, humming. Plus tax. So, yeah, they could have gotten in a decent amount of trouble. I couldn't find exactly what, but they were poaching, and poaching was a big deal still then. I think it still is now, but it's probably lost a little bit of its punishment.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Regardless, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willits, he was 17, despite this vow, went right home and told his parents. And I say, good boy, Tommy Willits, because it was clear to him, like, We just found a human skull in a tree, and that's something that we need to talk about. So very quickly, the police were called in, and they started to investigate.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And they brought in a guy named James Webster, who was a pathologist with the Birmingham Forensic Laboratory. And he essentially led the initial investigation and came to some pretty good basic conclusions. Because there's one thing to know about this case. It has been... hijacked and molded in all sorts of different ways.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And you really have to be careful that you're aware of what source you're getting your information from, because it's just one of those cases that people have loved to talk about and add to and lie about and do all sorts of stuff with. But the stuff that comes from James Webster is definitely legit. He was, he firsthand examined the body.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Right. So Webster was like, I'm pretty sure this is a murder. There's a few things that stand out to me. One, stuffed into the jaw, pretty deeply into the jaw, was a piece of the taffeta from the woman's dress. Yeah. And enough that it was enough of the piece of the dress that he was like, this could have asphyxiated somebody if it was stuffed into their mouth while they were still alive. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Probably wasn't a dress eater. So maybe this is murder. He also said that there's no way that this person was placed into this tiny opening. So it was about 12 inches by 24 inches, like, say, a third of a meter by two thirds of a meter. OK. Yeah. Which is a very tiny place, even for a five-foot woman. I get claustrophobic just thinking about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And that if they were dead already, then rigor mortis would have prevented them from being pushed into there even. Yeah. And then also, this is not the kind of place that a person is just going to crawl into on their own accord. Like they were placed in there, possibly while alive still, which is one of the ghastlier aspects of this case.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And so Webster said, you know, you put all this together, I'm pretty sure this is a murder that we're looking at.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. So this is where we get the name of the victim that everybody knows and the type of tree that the victim was found in that everybody knows from graffiti, from an anonymous person. Yeah. But it was enough that the police were like, okay, this seems a little weird. There were other people who started to kind of copycat the whole thing once the paper started writing about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But there was at least... A third one, a couple of days later, that was clearly written by the first person who wrote the first two. And they were like, maybe this person knows who it was and they want to find justice for the woman. And they reopened the case. And this is, I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated having like both Both jaws.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
They're like, great, we'll do dental records and we'll find who it is. Nothing matched. They tried to comb through all of the missing persons reports. No one matched. They get this, Chuck. Did you see that they investigated the shoe and got really far with it? They traced the shoe that they found with her back to the Waterfoot Company in Lancashire.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And they traced down all but six of the owners of all but six of the pairs. They were sold in a market stall. So this wasn't like looking through the market's credit card receipts. They didn't have credit cards. No. Like, they really were doing some legwork here. And, you know, hats off to them because let's not forget, England was getting bombed almost nightly by the Luftwaffe.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
There was food rationing. There was a war on. And they investigated this random, you know, dead person that hard. And then they reopened the case. I'm just saying I think they did a good job with what they were working with.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
I think it was Diners Club, in fact, with Telly Savalas. No, that was Players Club.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yes. Yeah. They looked for everybody. Bella, Lubella, Isabella, Lubega, everybody. And nothing came up, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
That was one of the best pranks ever played on us.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. Yeah. So the witch elm thing, for those of us who aren't familiar with British trees. Sure. The name witch elm does not mean witch, W-I-T-C-H. You spelled it before. It's W-Y-C-H. And it comes from an old English word, maybe vice, vis, vice. W-I-C-E. And that means smooth or supple. And that describes the bark of a witch elm. Has nothing to do with witches.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Jerry. Oh my gosh, there's Chuck. Sorry, Chuck. And this is Stuff You Should Know, and we're off to a weird, weird start already.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Witches are not associated with the witch elm. It's not even spelled the same. And yet... There's been an association with witchcraft and this case, at least in part because of that, even among Brits. Like there was a folklorist and archaeologist named Margaret Murray who loved to spin a good yarn.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And she was one of the first people to associate this case with witches and basically said witches killed this lady.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, it's nothing like what it sounds like with Hand of Glory. Instead, it's an old burglar's superstition that you would take a severed hand and put a candle in it, like make it hold a candle, or you would basically attach candles to all five fingers, the tips of them, and then you'd light it. And if it stayed lit, then that meant that everybody in the house you were about to rob was asleep.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
I just don't know what happened. My efference copy's on the fritz.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
If any of them went out, that meant that there was somebody still awake and you shouldn't rob that house. It had nothing to do with witchcraft. And then even more so, there was no hand found severed from the body. That doesn't appear in any of the initial police reports. It's just an... It's a great example of the lies that came up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He lived there for about a decade. And... But when you put all this together and then also bring in tourists, because don't forget, this is a hotel that some people are living in for decades, but there's also people coming and going. And then you also throw in rich people who are basically just trying to hang out with avant-garde artists, even though they have no artistic talent themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
It's just the crowd they want to hang with. You put all these people together and you've got like who you would see if you went into the Chelsea Hotel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the super cool edition. Another edition in our ongoing New York saga to explain every single building or theme or trend in the entire city of New York.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I love Chelsea. I think that is one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York, if not my favorite. We stayed there a bunch of times when we went and visited New York.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Okay, so I said earlier that the Chelsea Hotel was in capable hands for decades, and those hands were initially David Bard, and then after that, his son Stanley Bard. And between the two of them, they took Philip Hubert's vision of the socialist utopia, but really the really artsy part of it, and just went to town. I saw it described as Stanley curated who lived in the Chelsea Hotel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
It wasn't like, hey, I've got some money. I want to live here. You basically had to be vouched for by another avant-garde artist that probably already lived there. That was a good way to get in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I have, too. Oh, yeah? Yeah. But that actually answers a question that I had. I was trying to figure out where you came up with this as a topic. I would have guessed the Taylor Swift song, The Tortured Poets Department, because she mentions it in there. That's, I guess, not what inspired you to do this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, so apparently Milos Forman, a true bohemian, he lived at the Chelsea from, I think, for the early 70s, about the first half of the 70s. And he asked Stanley once if anyone had ever died. I believe to basically get him to admit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Because there were a lot of deaths, whether it was by suicide, murder, mattress fires, overdoses. Yeah. And it was just well known that there were a lot of deaths that happened in the Chelsea Hotel. So Milos Forman asked Stanley once if he could think of anybody who ever died there. And he could only come up with one person. And he was a painter named Alpheus Cole.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He died in 1988, the oldest man in the world at 112. He died at the Chelsea Hotel. And that's the one person that Stanley could think of in the entire time that he was running the Chelsea Hotel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. Like you could get away with, from what I saw, you could get away with basically anything up to murder, essentially. And Stanley would put up with it because that was the rhythm that his father had kind of laid out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And if you want to cultivate an avant-garde artist colony in the middle of New York, you're going to have to do that or else just give up because it's not going to work otherwise. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. Which I don't know who those people were. Yeah. I saw Matt as a hatter used more times in the oral history of the Chelsea Hotel than I ever have anywhere else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So my favorite Arthur Miller quote, by the way, is these pretzels are making me thirsty. It's a great one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So he references another song on the same album that he wrote.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
No. Yeah, gotcha. But yeah, that was pretty seminal. I mean, that's one of his biggest albums, right? And I saw that at the time, too, that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol went basically head-to-head over E.D. Sedgwick. who also stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. And apparently that was the end of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick's red-hot... I don't know what you'd call it. Not a romance, just... Interaction?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Relationship, sure. We'll just go with that. But it was something other than that. And it lasted less than a year. But apparently, Andy Warhol was so jealous that Edie Sedgwick had become totally obsessed with Bob Dylan, who may or may not have returned her advances. It just depends on who you ask. Bob Dylan says no. But Andy Warhol lost that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Because Bob Dylan was at the time like basically the biggest person in like alternative culture, the counterculture at the time. Like even more than Andy Warhol was. Like he was just huge. And it's kind of difficult to overstate what a big deal this very big person was doing living and working in the Chelsea Hotel. Like what it did for the Chelsea Hotel's reputation. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Right. No. Another really famous thing that happened around that time was from Edie Sedgwick. She set her mattress on fire.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Was it on purpose? Because this was not her first apartment fire.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Okay. So it's possible this is a very turbulent time for her. She could have been heartbroken over Bob Dylan. She could have been upset Andy Warhol had turned his back on her. I know the previous apartment fire in a different building was because she had shot up a speedball and the cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto her mattress and set her house on fire.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I guess so. Yeah. But that kind of leads me to something. There's something that just doesn't show up in the histories. I mean, here or there, it kind of comes up. But I think it's really understated the effect that it had on the community that developed in the Chelsea Hotel from the entire time that the building was open. And that is drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So everybody from Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress, to Bob Dylan and beyond. I wouldn't put it beyond Ethan Hawke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. So, I mean, the club kids, like with the capital C and the capital K in the 80s and 90s, like some of them lived there and they were definitely doing drugs. It was just a really big part of the experience of living at the Chelsea Hotel. It was like essentially one of the muses that was walking around the halls of that building all the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Uh, how about some more famous stuff that happened there, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. He wrote about that in Chelsea Hotel No. 2, one of his songs, a very famous song. So they were together from 68 to 70 when Janice died. I don't know if they were like an item or if they just, you know, liked hanging out, if you know what I mean. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
But regardless, they were just a famous couple from there. Yeah, that's not the right word. I'm having trouble pulling words out of the air. Another couple that you could probably call more of a couple was Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. They moved into the Chelsea. They were totally broke at the time. Patti Smith became like the poet of the punk scene.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Robert Mapplethorpe famously became the devil incarnate with his photos.
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The Chelsea Hotel
That's one way to put it, sure, of BDSM culture and gay culture in the 80s and almost got the National Endowments for the Arts canceled. Although I think it's unfair to say it was him. Jesse Helms almost got the NEA canceled. And it was Robert Mapplethorpe was just making art. And Jesse Helms just did not think a bullwhip coming out of a man's rectum was art.
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The Chelsea Hotel
No, I do. I love Jimi Hendrix. And clearly I love at least Jefferson Starship.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
That's right. And I spent at least one summer just listening to Janis Joplin's greatest hits over and over again. So I could be down with that scene, man.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, yeah, and that's great that they did a good job with it because people all the way back to the 1940s with Edgar Lee Masters, the poet, author of Spoon River Anthology, who lived there for a while, was worried about the gist of the Chelsea Hotel being stripped away by new owners. Yeah. And it's changed hands a few times, but it's also stayed in really capable hands for decades.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. There were people who jumped out of windows. Remember, it was a 12 story building. And this is nothing new. People there was a there's a rumor of a ghost of a woman who supposedly lived there and was an artist who was upset with herself and cut off her hand. And then threw herself out the window. This would have been in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
But it didn't stop with her. It just kept going and going and going. And then even if someone didn't die by suicide or wasn't murdered or their place wasn't set on fire. Just the day-to-day grimy grittiness of it, of heroin addicts like shooting up in the bathrooms or sex workers like washing their underwear in the bathrooms.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
That was another quote from the oral history of all places that Vanity Fair had on the Chelsea Hotel. Um, like there was just a, a definite dark side to it, which was, I just kind of underscores what I was saying before that people were like, and I felt so safe there. And it was like, what was it like outside of this building? If this was what it was like inside, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
There's a biographer, author named Phil Strongman or Strongman. I would call myself Phil Strongman if that were my name. But he wrote a punk, a punk nonfiction book, I guess, called Pretty Vacant. And he points to Rockets Red Glare, who was a bodyguard for the Sex Pistols at the time, who was the last person known to have seen Nancy Spungen alive.
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The Chelsea Hotel
And there was also supposedly a bunch of money, cash, in the apartment that couldn't be accounted for after her body was discovered. Yeah. He makes a pretty good case. Apparently also Rockets Red Glare was admitted to it later on to some people. So who knows? But I don't think it was Sid Vicious.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, because he was the only person in the history of the hotel who actually wanted milk at one point.
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The Chelsea Hotel
So, you know something about him? I've become more and more of a fan over the years. I think he's really kind of grown into his talent.
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The Chelsea Hotel
And those capable hands, as we'll see, helped give the Chelsea Hotel its very famous vibe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So you mentioned that the Chelsea Hotel underwent renovations for a long time, over a decade from what I saw. The whole thing started when Stanley Bard was forced out back in 2007 or 2008. I saw both. Um, remember that his father, David Bard had purchased the Chelsea with two other families, two other men. Well, their heirs were basically like, you are not, um, making money here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Like he was very, Stanley was very famous for accepting art in lieu of rent. If you were hard, you know, down on your luck, uh, but you were an artist, like he would just, you know, look the other way for a few months. Like he was not running it like a business and he was very open about that. So apparently the heirs of the other two owners were like, you need to get out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
We have two thirds of a vote and you're out. And that was when things just kind of, yeah, big bummer. Things just started to change because a few years after that, they sold it to some investors. I think that was in 2011. They sold it for $80 million. The investors came in, fired all of the staff because they were union and brought in non-union workers. They did away with,
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
basically everything that was cool and intangible about the place. And they also took down all the art. Like one of the things Stanley did was hang art by the artists who'd lived there all throughout the place. It was just laden with art. They took all of it off the walls, put it in storage, apparently some that wasn't Stanley's or that wasn't the hotel's too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
The Larry Rivers Foundation is suing to get one of his paintings back that they say was just on loan. And from that point on, it just became kind of ham-fisted and not very pleasant for the people who lived there in the Chelsea area.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, which is pretty cool that they're still there. They're also rent-controlled, I believe, which is how they're able to still stay there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, you know, you bring that up. I thought that, too. You and me and I stayed there a couple of times over the years. We did the most avant-garde thing you can do. We stayed at the Chelsea Hotel when we went to see comedian Tom Rhodes at the Gotham Comedy Club next door.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, he's super underground. But, I mean, I totally get that feeling that you're talking about where it's just like, this was something and now is this like the dolled up version? Like kind of the fake Disney-fied version of what it used to be. And that leads me to a question that I had throughout researching this, Chuck. Where is... Whatever the Chelsea Hotel was now, where is it?
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The Chelsea Hotel
I don't think it's in New York anymore. I don't think something like that can survive in New York because it's just gotten so wealthy and wealthy and wealthy. And wealthiness is not really – it doesn't really jibe with what the Chelsea Hotel was in its heyday. So – Like, where is it? Is it somewhere else in the world? Is it in Kansas? Like, where did this go?
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The Chelsea Hotel
I really want to know who's doing really interesting, cool work these days. Where can you find it or is it just not around?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. So based on what we'll learn about what went on in the Chelsea Hotel, I think it's very telling how dangerous New York was at the time that almost to a person when they interviewed residents years later, they say they felt safe in the Chelsea Hotel. And the Chelsea Hotel was as crazy as a place could get.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. I mean, look what happened to San Francisco. Like, it lost a lot of its... Oh, yeah. I don't want to say luster because it wasn't luster that that made it so charming, but it lost some of its jam.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Oh, I mean, also not just like people living there. I mean like the art, the art, the artistic vibe that was there. Where did that go? Cause it's not like that stuff dies, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, that's it for the Chelsea Hotel. We could keep going on and on and on. But I feel like this is a good place to stop, don't you?
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The Chelsea Hotel
Cool. Thank you for figuring that out because I could not make heads or tails of how the sign was restored, but then they auctioned off the sign.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Pretty cool. Okay, well, that's it. That's it for Chelsea Hotel. If you want to know more about the Chelsea Hotel, go check out the Chelsea Hotel. And since I said Chelsea Hotel three times, as was foretold in 2008, I've unlocked listener mail.
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The Chelsea Hotel
And yet it just goes to show you how much more dangerous it was outside of the Chelsea Hotel in New York at the time.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, that's really cool. I'm glad Emily's delighted. Yeah. I'm delighted, too. Me, too. Well, if you want to be like Lauren and write in and let us know that you're a part of a club, too, well, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So Hubert actually followed Fourier's vision and turned the Chelsea into not just a co-op, but an attempted socialist utopian paradise where it wasn't just for the wealthy. It was, I think, I don't know if you said it or not, it was one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time. So it was a very...
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The Chelsea Hotel
tony address when the building opened and yet he said apartments aside for some of the people who had built the building like some of the electricians if there was such thing at the time uh some of the plumbers some of the carpenters like they had shares they were able to live in this co-op because there was room made for them and there was also room made for artists and musicians and writers.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Oh, I thought it was I heart New York. Is that what that means? Yeah. I get it now.
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The Chelsea Hotel
And the point was for everybody to kind of rely on one another. So if you needed plumbing help, you could pay your plumber in a painting or something like that if your plumber would accept it. Everybody was meant to depend on everyone else and be kind of self-sufficient as a unit.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. And so the rooms also apparently were fairly cheap, especially for a luxury place, a luxury building. So if you were an up-and-coming or starving artist, you could still probably afford a place there. And because it was created to house artists and talent of all different kinds, it was automatically attractive. It was...
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The Chelsea Hotel
It just kind of became a place where art was created, not just a place where artists could live. There was a longtime Chelsea resident named Harry Smith, who I saw described as the archetypal bohemian trickster figure. And he's just Chelsea Hotel through and through from what I could tell.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He said that the hotel exuded atmospheric vibrations that attracted artists and also helped produce great art. So like the building itself and the vibe that was in it led to better art than maybe would have otherwise been produced, at least according to Harry Smith, who was a trickster, apparently. So he might have been lying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
It is a very cool city, and this is a cool place in the city's history for a long part of the city's history, actually. The Chelsea Hotel, which little known fact, is actually supposed to be called the Hotel Chelsea. And I could not find who first turned it around because surely it was a poet or a singer or something, a writer.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think some people, though, I'm not going to name names, but I think over time, some artists who stayed there have wanted to kind of capture what that hotel does and maybe bit off a little more than they could chew.
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The Chelsea Hotel
I think you should have a second thought or two if you're like, I'm going to make an ode to the Chelsea Hotel where there's a song, a movie, it doesn't matter.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, which is pretty cool that they opened their doors to them. I'm sure other hotels did too, but I thought that was neat.
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The Chelsea Hotel
And we should say these artists that were staying here, O. Henry was hiding from creditors. when he stayed there. John French Sloan, he was a member of the Ashcan School of Art, which made its name by showing some of the grittier, more dismal side of New York life, which is totally contrary to the zeitgeist. And so the artists were avant-garde.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Basically, throughout the entire history of the Chelsea Hotel, the artists working there were like the vanguard of the avant-garde. Yeah.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, I saw that somebody said he ran out into the street one night at like 3 a.m. and shouted that he'd written 10,000 words in one day.
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The Chelsea Hotel
That's pretty substantial. And Thomas Wolfe, also not to be confused with Tom Wolfe.
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The Chelsea Hotel
He was an influence in his own right. He influenced the Beats, mainly through Jack Kerouac. He influenced the New Journalists. So ironically, Thomas Wolfe influenced Tom Wolfe. Yeah. And in fact, there's a story that fear and loathing from fear and loathing in Las Vegas and at the Kentucky Derby that Hunter Thompson took that from a Thomas Wolfe story.
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The Chelsea Hotel
No, he might be undoable. You know how, remember the time we did that live show? It was the worst idea where we did how humor works. And we realized partway through in front of a live audience that explaining humor is like the least funny thing you can do. I don't remember that. Was that like a tour show or was that like for a... It was a pod fest. Was it really? Yeah, in L.A. Years back.
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The Chelsea Hotel
But at some point it got basically transversed, even though the official name is and always has been, since it was a hotel, the Hotel Chelsea Hotel.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, and he's the guy I was saying earlier who wrote Spoon River Anthology that was worried about it losing its vibe.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yep. So this was the 40s. I'm guessing this was 1943 when it changed hands, I think, for the first or second time and was finally turned into the Hotel Chelsea. But he had very little to worry about because it got even more avant-garde after that.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, I read that on the day that he fell into a coma that eventually he died from. He said, I've had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that's the record. It's got to be.
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The Chelsea Hotel
So yeah, Dylan Thomas was one of the ones whose death really kind of, I don't quite know how to put it, but there's certain aspects of the Chelsea Hotel and tragic figures dying in it is part of that. That's an aspect of it in and of itself. And Dylan Thomas kind of set the tone for that, right?
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The Chelsea Hotel
Immortalized maybe? Sure. So he he became he helped make the Chelsea Hotel famous in that respect by dying as a tragic figure there. Other people are just kind of famous. And because they stayed in the Chelsea Hotel, it kind of gives it a little more props like Jackson Pollock. He lived there for a little while. Little known fact, the CIA paid his rent. Oh, really? No, I'm kidding.
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The Chelsea Hotel
Virgil, have you ever heard the theory that the CIA was behind the abstract expressionist movements to make the United States seem more intellectual to the Soviets?
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The Chelsea Hotel
Wait, wait, wait. You want to talk confusing? There's a Marriott Renaissance Chelsea Hotel in the same neighborhood. I mean, I could see myself accidentally booking that and being like, this place is a little more put together than I expected.
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The Chelsea Hotel
OK. For falling for it. So there are other people, too, that you may not have heard of that I hadn't heard of that were longtime residents that really kind of gave it like legitimacy. There was a music critic and composer named Virgil Thompson. who was apparently just incredibly prolific. He lived there for 50 years and died in room 920. Larry Rivers, he's considered the godfather of pop art.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Right. And we'll get into that a little more in a minute, but just kind of progressing on with his early career. He essentially, not just his singing voice, but his stage presence, his presence was monumental. But also he used his movements and sometimes props and stuff on the stage to kind of tell the story that this folk song was trying to tell.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
So his act was just a sensation, like basically out of the gate. And he very quickly got picked up and put onto Broadway, this time from the stage. And the first thing I think he was in was John Murray Anderson's Almanac, which was a musical review in 1953. And he did such a good job that his first time out, he wins a Tony. Not only does he win a Tony, he's the first black man to win a Tony.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Okay. All right. Okay. I like that. If you have any ideas to freshen it up ever, you know, lay them on me. All right. Let's see. We're coming up on year 17. Just want to point that out.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Let's take a little break and we'll come back and talk a little more about his Calypso stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Uh, and, uh, today also we are talking about Harry Belafonte and, uh, part of the reason why, but not the full reason why, because this is, he was a perennial man, a man of all seasons, but it's black history month. So we wanted to profile him at least in part for black history month.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Okay, Chuck, so we're talking Calypso now. It's really, really difficult to understate, like... How big of a star Harry Belafonte became thanks to Calypso music? Calypso music is like this traditional Caribbean music, typically folk songs, work songs. Call and response is a big one. So the people in the chorus seeing like daylight come and we want to go home.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That's like the response where Harry Belafonte singing the call part. Right. It's just traditional work song stuff. Come on. And so he starts out this whole jam where he is playing folk music at the Village Vanguard, goes on to Broadway, starts singing some of this folk, like Caribbean folk music. And within a couple of years, he's on an NBC show.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
doing the same thing and um dave helped us out with this and he makes a point that had it not been for a guy an artist who went by lord burgess but his real name was irving bergy irving purgy who was also a caribbean american who was raised in new york also being into calypso at the same exact time and then meeting harry belafonte and them collaborating It probably would not have taken off.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But thanks to Lord Burgess and then a playwright friend of Harry Belafonte's named William Attaway working together, rewriting some of these traditional songs, rearranging them to make them peppier, a little poppier.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Like they made Calypso like they just they made it way more palatable to Americans and way more dancing and just way more infectious than other people who'd recorded some of these same songs previously had.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. I think also he was criticized by Trinidadians for being known as the king of Calypso. They're like, we have our own king of Calypso competition every year and you ain't it. And he's like, so? And they just couldn't come back with anything after that. So the whole the whole beef ended right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yes. That was just in the U.S. alone. It did the same thing in the U.K. And Chuck, one of the songs on this album was Deo, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Deo itself sold a million copies just to the 45. So just the single, right? I can see just the single selling a million copies and then the album suffering because of that. The album continued to sell as well. It's crazy how... nuts for Harry Belafonte, the United States and other, a lot of other parts of the world too were at that time. Like he just blew up.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
You said it was number one on the charts for 38 weeks, not on the charts for 38 weeks, the number one album in the United States for, for all like the better half of a year. That's no one does that. That's crazy. Yeah.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yes, absolutely. That didn't stop him, though. It didn't discourage him. Like, he found it personally discouraging, but he didn't behave... He didn't acquiesce, basically. Yeah. One of the things he did was he took a role, and this was... very much in line with his decision-making as far as his career went, which we'll talk about a little more in a second.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he took a role in a movie called Island of the Sun. It's from 1957. And in it, he has an insinuated romance with a white woman, Joan Fontaine. And they don't touch. They don't kiss. There's nothing like that. The closest to a kiss that happens is they share a sip from a coconut. Like one of them takes a sip, hands it to the other one, and then she takes a sip.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That's the closest thing to an on-screen kiss that there was. Yeah. Not close to a kid's home. But that was at the forefront of pushing the envelope as far as race relations in America went. And that's why Harry Belafonte was like, yes, give me that role. I will totally take that role.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
For sure. She was also Brando's girlfriend when they met.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Oh, man. Beyond handsome. Yeah. So, Chuck, when we were just talking about Islands in the Sun, I was saying that Harry Belafonte would totally choose a role that pushed the envelope for race relations. Not to stick it in the eye of white America, but to push things forward and just basically say black people are people, too. Let's portray them as such on the screen. OK. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
In doing that, he had to choose over and over and over again between advancing his career and standing by his values. And without missing a single opportunity, he stood by his values every time.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, exactly. But certainly professional rivals, because almost invariably the roles that Belafonte passed on would go to Poitier, because like you said, he would take these roles.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That's pretty cool, man. Yeah. Yeah. There's a rumor that seems fairly substantiated that he's Kylie Jenner's real father.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he became, as a result, the ambassador of black America to white America, because these roles he was taking in the early 60s, these films were written to advance the cause of black civil rights in the United States. And Sidney Poitier is like, yes, Put me out there. Tell me what we need to do. And let's let's show these Americans that black people are people, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And like you said, Belafonte was like, there's just it's still missing some stuff. And like Lilies of the Field is a good example. It's from 1963. It starred Sidney Poitier. He went on to win an Oscar for it. And he plays a black man who is helping Nazi nuns hide from the communists. And the reason Belafonte passed on it is because he said that this black man has like no background, no history.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He's not really a human. He said to Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1996 in the New Yorker. It's a really good article. He said he didn't kiss anybody. He didn't touch anybody. He had no culture. He had no history. He had no family. He had nothing. So he was like a not even a caricature of a black person. He was like human being happens to be black. Go, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And that just was not nearly enough for what Harry Belafonte was willing to take on as an actor. So he would just let these things come and go and pass on them or else he would try it, push the envelope. That thing would get canceled and he'd just move on. He never, ever went to Hollywood, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. Apparently there's a lot of a lot of swinging going on out in that neighborhood back in the day.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
On his knees or asking like they came to him and he would either pass or not based on what kind of how what how willing they were to portray black people in that film.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. He he looked out for MLK's family during MLK's life, but also like he he funded his children's education. Yeah. He took out a huge insurance life insurance policy against MLK. And then he just was there for the family afterward. Like he he. kind of stepped in when MLK was assassinated. So he certainly walked the walk. He was at all these, you know, sit-ins and rallies and marches.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he just was there. Like you said, he wasn't just a figurehead. He didn't just show up for the press. He didn't just write checks behind the scenes. He did it all. And, again, it just goes right back to the upbringing from his mom who taught him, like – Not only just wherever you see injustice in the world, go go fight it and try to fix it.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Like actively search every day for injustice that you can go help. And, you know, there was nothing more unjust and right in your face for an American, a black American in particular at the time than the civil rights movement.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
No, nothing like that. And actually, I'm not sure any living human knows exactly what Kylie Jenner looks like. So who's to say? Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yes. So that was just huge. I mean, also, you got to credit Johnny Carson, too. He did that on purpose. He wasn't like, I'm going on vacation for a week. Just call whoever. Like, he did that on purpose because he was trying to advance race relations as well. So hats off to him for that as well. They also had really high ratings. That was another thing, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Harry Belafonte, when he did something on TV, it drew viewers. And even still, it didn't matter because there were so many angry white racists in America that would call up these sponsors and be like, you're sponsoring this black guy on this show. You better stop. They'd go to the producers.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
The producers would come to Belafonte and be like, hey, you know how you have white people and black people dancing together? What if we just did white or just did black? Belafonte wouldn't blink and it would get canceled despite all of the crazy great reviews and viewership it had. And, you know, that would be that. And he would just kind of move on.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. So Harry Belafonte, I was trying to figure out how we can name this. And we might just say Harry Belafonte or something like that. But we could also say the thinking person saint.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But of course he developed like this distrust and distaste for the entertainment industry. And I saw that he initially thought that he would be able to help change America, but Through Hollywood. And then he quickly came to see, like, no, Hollywood is just one more facet of this machine that keeps things going exactly as they are. So he got really disgusted by that.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Kind of fortunately for us, because he really kind of started to throw more and more of his energy into being an activist, not just in the United States, but around the world. And in particular, Paul Robeson, like you said, was one of his idols, who was also just one of the early... civil rights crusaders around the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And then Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife, first lady, introduced him to the plight of different countries in Africa, which was decolonizing at the time. And he really kind of turned his attention toward that continent for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. Which is, you know, exactly part of the point. In addition to raising money to. Yeah. One of the cool things I saw about it was I'm not sure if it was his idea or if he kind of headed up the push to do this or both. But Harry Belafonte is credited with talking radio stations around the world. into playing We Are the World at the same time on the same day. It was, I think, March 28th, 1986.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I remember. There was something like, do you remember that? Oh, yeah. Cool. There was like 5,000 radio stations around the world, and they all played it at the same time, I think 10.50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. And Muzak actually played it as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And it was only the second time in the history of Muzak that they played voices over their service, which, by the way, at the time reached like 80 million Americans. So that's a lot of people listening to We Are the World at the at that same moment, which is neat.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. Like he he did it all. He was just one of these people who, you know, when you when you approach an iconoclast, especially one who's just revered universally and you start picking at the edges, you're like, oh, my God, I hope it's not like garbage.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I don't remember listening to it on the radio, but I do remember my family sitting around listening to the record.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And you just don't get to that point. Um, like he was through and through a genuinely good person. And one of the reasons why you don't get to like pick off the outer coating and find garbage underneath is because he was just pretty much fully transparent his whole life. And, um, he just, he was who he was and he wasn't apologetic for it.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Right. And so he would just leave show business for, you know, years at a time or at least like TV or movies or something like that. But he got pulled back into it in the early 70s because his buddy Sidney Poitier was like, hey, I want to start directing blaxploitation movies. Let's do this. And they made Buck and the Preacher, which I have not seen. I think it was from 1972.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Everything I've read about it makes me want to see it basically immediately. Sidney Poitier directed it, but he also plays Buck, who's this ex-Civil War soldier who Helps ensure safe passage for African-Americans moving out of Louisiana out west after the Civil War. And the preacher is Harry Belafonte, who's this con artist dressed as a preacher. It just sounds awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And then Uptown Saturday Night. Haven't seen that one either. It sounds pretty great, except it's so hard now to get past anything with Bill Cosby.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
It's so hard, not just because of the horrible stuff he did, sexually assaulting women, but also because he was so preachy leading up to it. He was so holier than thou. And it makes the whole thing so much worse, if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he just put it all out there based on his, his beliefs and his beliefs tended to, um, coincide with the right side of history typically. He saw people who were downtrodden being taken advantage of, being discriminated against, and he wanted to go help make that better. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. But he had a really great inspiration in the form of Paul Robeson, who kind of guided things. You mentioned him before. He was an idol of his and a real inspiration. He was the guy who sang Old Man River, among other things. But he was a model for Harry Belafonte. Paul Robeson was running around the world. He took his fame and he used it to highlight, you know, plights around the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he was also like a huge... He protested for peace and he ran around the world trying to make peace. I mean, between the U.S. and the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War, this guy was going back and forth trying to like create friendships where there was nothing but animosity. He did the same thing with communist China.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he was also not afraid to criticize the United States and like its racist policies, too, at the time. So you put all that together. This guy was prime meat for the McCarthy trials and he got blacklisted, but he refused to be count. He would not name names. He would not renounce his work. He would not take back anything that they demanded he take back.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he really served as this model for Harry Belafonte. Despite, I mean, Robeson had it hard. He fell hard. The State Department, he was doing all this traveling to promote peace. The State Department suspended his passport from 1950 to 1958. Kind of hard to run around the world pre-internet. Phones are still relatively expensive to use.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Trying to organize peace when you can't travel outside of the U.S. But he was a really, like he deserves it, I think, an episode himself. But he stood as this inspiration and model for Harry Belafonte. So even when he would get downtrodden and defeated, he had Paul Robeson to look to and be like, this guy went through even worse than me.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. So we've kind of talked about some of the stuff, some of the causes he took up that he's best known for, like civil rights. Did you mention anti-apartheid? Yeah. He performed at a rally, a no-nuke rally in the early 80s in Germany. He sought to broker peace between the Crips and the Bloods in L.A. back in the late 80s. He protested the Iraq War in the early 2000s.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And then the cause that he kind of got behind toward the very end of his life was incarceration in general. He was, I think, the first performer to play Rikers Island. James Brown famously did in 1972. Harry Belafonte did it a couple of months before James Brown did. And then throughout the rest of his career, he would he would visit prisons and hang out with the inmates.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he also really focused on child incarceration and just found that totally amoral and immoral and inexcusable. So he really started a whole generation of like activists in that right before he died. It's just one more thing he did, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. I also saw he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. And the bio almost defiantly dares you to be like, he's not rock and roll. They said that basically every artist who's mixed politics with their music, from Bob Dylan and Bono to Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy, they, quote, stand on his broad shoulders, which, I mean, that's absolutely true.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Let's kick the whole thing off, right? Because for those of you who don't know, we should probably say Harry Belafonte is a legendary entertainer. That's what he's most widely known for. And most widely known for the song Deo, which is why I said, hey-o, come full circle now.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Sure, but they were like, say something, and then you did, and then you felt like a jackass.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I don't know. I could see Gene Simmons saying something about it. There's also a really great appearance on The Muppet Show where he sings Deo with some of the Muppets, and it's just sweet and wholesome and just great. Yeah, good stuff. One more thing. We cannot not mention Beetlejuice, dude.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. And the whole I mean, the whole thing is just amazing. But for some reason, Catherine O'Hara is just you just see she is so cool when she's doing this. Like, it's just perfect. And she's supposedly the one who suggested Calypso for the music that they use. Oh, that's funny. Not funny. No, it's not funny at all, Chuck. You're absolutely right.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But apparently Harry Belafonte said that about a year after Beetlejuice, he became popular with kids. Apparently Deo and Jump the Line, or Jump in the Line, sorry, they both ended up on the Billboard 200 after Beetlejuice for a little while. And he said that all sorts of kids would come up to him after they saw Beetlejuice.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he said that they would wipe their hands full of tomato ketchup and mustard on my clothes. And I enjoyed the whole excursion.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
uh it's some of it's uh maybe unusual to modern ears but it's like really good stuff yeah and it's even better if you watch like footage of him singing it too like you really his stage presence really comes across even on video years later that's right did we mention he was handsome he was easy on the eyes not hard to look at no for sure he could really wear a shirt unbuttoned down to his navel too man
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. And if you don't know what we're talking about still, just pause this, go into YouTube, type in Deo, look for the original version and listen to it and come back. And you will be pretty much as versed as you need to be going into this episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I can't either. All right. Well, that's Harry Belafonte, everybody. R.I.P., Harry.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And if you want to know more about Harry Belafonte, like Chuck said, go look him up and start listening to him and watching some videos. And in the meantime, I think that means it's time for listener mail.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That is Matthias Dernford. That's a great one. We should have done that as like a segment, but now we can't because everybody knows it.
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Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Good. Well, if you want to be like Matthias and have us debate how to say your name, love that kind of thing, you can send us an email, too, to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and he was raised by his grandmother there. His maternal grandmother, Melveen's mom, was a white woman, a Jamaican white woman. And she really raised him to kind of love all people, which is a big early influence. And then another influence of living in Jamaica at the time was he saw black professionals. He saw black doctors, black lawyers. Completely competent, completely normal.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
There wasn't anything wrong with them. They were just black doctors and black lawyers and et cetera. And it really kind of served as a foil to him to how how things were back in America.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Which was very discriminatory at the time. He was smack dab in the middle of the Jim Crow era in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and that's what they would get paid based on, how much they had loaded overnight. So you couldn't leave until the guy came along and said, you loaded 5 million tons of bananas. Here's your $50 or whatever. Then you could go home. I had no idea that's what that song was about.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I don't even remember what I was. I was just listening and it was all just kind of like vocal sounds. It was like the cock two twins or something like that. He was just making sounds, not actually saying anything or saying words. So now that I know there's a story behind it, I love it.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, they turned him on to books like The Soul of Black Folk, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. And like that combined with his early upbringing where he was able to juxtapose society in Jamaica and society in America, like this really kind of got things started. So by the time he met his wife, his first wife, Marguerite Byrd, he was radicalized at this point.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I saw it described as like he was full on like civil rights movement guy. And this is the 40s. So this is before the civil rights movement had really kind of started in earnest, at least the version that we think of when we think of it historically. And Marguerite was not that way at all. She was from an upper middle class black family. She was a sorority girl in Virginia.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
She was just raised in the type of conservative household where it's like, You just trust the system. You trust society. If the news tells you something that's true. And she and Harry were almost like foils to an extent. She saw her role as taking care of this misguided, like angry man and trying to help him through life. And I'm sure he saw his role in part as like opening her eyes.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But the big thing that came out of their union was his first two kids.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and they both did so because they wanted to do whatever they could to get their foot in the door into theater, the world of theater.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I saw somewhere it mentioned that when they were just two broke stagehands, they loved the theater so much that they would pool their money together to buy a single ticket to Broadway shows, and then one would see one act, and then they would switch off, and the other would see the second act or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, I mean, you really love the theater. Like you said, he caught the bug. if you're doing stuff like that. He also enrolled in a really – that's the measuring stick, by the way, for whether you love theater or not.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Right. He also enrolled in a legendary acting workshop that was held at the New School for years. Some of his classmates were Walter Matthau. Did you see the documentary Sing Your Song about him? Not Walter Matthau, but about Belafonte?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
It's good. But they show like some stills from that workshop. And there's young Walter Matthau. He looks like some doofy 20-year-old Walter Matthau. It's pretty great.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he has like a cowlick and he's wearing like a heavy flannel shirt. Like he just walked out of the woods of Minnesota or something. Yeah. I love it. He was also in class with Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, and then the future Dorothy Petrilos-Bornak, also known as Bea Arthur.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Can you imagine you go to class and that's who you're in class with? But they don't mean anything yet. They're all just acting students.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Hey, yo, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, which is appropriate because this is a barn burner of an episode, if you ask me. Did you say, hey, yo? I did. Very nice. I got to freshen it up here or there sometimes. It's starting to get a little stale.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, they actually became pretty good friends.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I think we could do just one episode on Don Juan DeMarco.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, because like you said, he wasn't happy with singing jazz standards or pop music, despite the fact that I saw that he was backed at some points by Charlie Parker, the famous drummer Max Roach, and Miles Davis, all his young musicians. And he's like, nah, let me go on to folk music.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he got so heavy into folk music that he spent his time researching folk songs at the Library of Congress to expand his repertoire. That's how into folk music he got. And he was so broke that he would find somebody to split a ticket into the Library of Congress's archives and would research for an hour and then they'd trade off and do the next hour. And that means you're really into folk music.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And he was also very motivated by money because he was building his own house and he needed as much money as he could get to build said house.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Not too bright. That's a really important point that Taylor would hammer home any chance he got. This guy was sluggish, mentally speaking, is the way that he put it. But he got through to him with a pep talk, where essentially he said, are you a high-priced man? And Schmidt was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And when he wrote about Schmidt, he replaced his W's with V's and stuff.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
He was a German immigrant. And he said, well, this is what a high-priced man does. He does everything that his manager tells him to do. If your manager tells you to pick up that pig iron and take six steps and then set it down over there, you do that.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
If your manager tells you to sit down and rest for 90 seconds, then after 90 seconds he tells you to get up and then go grab that piece of pig iron, you do that too with no backtalk whatsoever. Right. That's a high-priced man. You want to be a Mr. Big Boy Pants? Exactly. And high-priced men make more money. So we'll give you not just the $1.15 an hour that you're making.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
We'll give you $1.85 for making this 47.5-ton quota. And all you have to do is do what your manager tells you. And this is the other thing that I guess Frederick Taylor revolutionized in a way. He divided the workforce into two parts, managers who had the brains and did the bossing around and workers who were, according to Taylor, meant to do exactly what their managers told them.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And if you put the two together, you would have the most efficient way to say like load pig iron onto a railroad car.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I don't like three hour podcasts, but I also don't like living under the clock, which is why I probably would not have personally liked Frederick Winslow Taylor.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Well, yeah. Also, William Wilson said basically like we're not dealing with singing birds. We're dealing with men here who are part of society and for whom or for whose benefit society is organized. Right. So you can't essentially you can't treat people like automatons and drones and robots. You have to consider them as human beings.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And the lines from his book that you mentioned, apparently Jill Lepore reported that. that he did so poorly in this committee hearing that, by the way, if you want to ever be nervous about a committee hearing you have to go testify at, go to one that's literally named after you.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
This hearing was called the House Committee to Investigate Taylor, not Taylorism, Taylor and other systems of shop management. And so he actually ordered one of his underlings to go steal William Wilson's copy of his book. and I guess wasn't successful and just kind of went ahead with the terrible testimony.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
I don't think we have any choice. And by the way, this is not a biopic. It's not a biography or a profile. It's about a man that you can't not talk about, but really this is about his whole system. Okay. I just want to make that clear to you specifically.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
But as we'll see, he used it to turn bad publicity into any publicity, which is good publicity.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yep, and now through the 24th, DoorDash has big deals running for the holidays from Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, Wingstop, Aldi, and more. You can save money and the holidays all with DoorDash. Whether you tell people is up to you.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Okay, Chuck, you mentioned that we're going to talk about the Gilbreths, so I say we do that now. We're talking about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. And anyone who has ever read the book or seen the movie or the remake, Cheaper by the Dozen, this is the family that that movie and that book were based on.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were one of the more amazing, interesting couples that came out of the 20th century.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and it seems like Frank kind of came up with this interest independently of Frederick Taylor, even though he and Lillian and Taylor would essentially form kind of a cadre of cohorts, I guess.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
This is like an independent thing. These were two independent groups who eventually came together because they helped develop this field out of thin air. So what the Gilbreths did, Lillian and Frank together, they formed the Gilbreth Inc., a management consulting firm. they got really, really in the weeds about the movements it took to carry out a task.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they figured out that you could break any task down into 18 different kinds of movements, right? So you're not necessarily gonna have all 18, but no matter what task you're talking about, It's going to be made up of no more than those 18 specific kind of movements. Things like searching for an object with your eye, grasping an object, reaching for it, disassembling it.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they call these things therbligs, which is their name roughly spelled backwards.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, I think they're right. They're like, you're our guy.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and to do that, so they would use their kids. They ended up having a dozen kids, 11 of whom made it to adulthood. One of them died at age five of diphtheria, sadly. And I don't know how, but they planned to have six boys and six girls. And I think they were successful at that. No idea how they did that because we're talking about the beginning of the 20th century.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they decided to raise their kids in the under these principles of efficiency. But they weren't weirdo clinical types like this was a tight, cool family. Like the kids were participatory, like they would have family meetings. Um, and each kid had a vote. And so they would have a family meeting and someone would put forward a motion. Like I say, we get a dog and someone would second it.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And then they put it to a vote and then, you know, the eyes had it. So they ended up getting a dog. They named Mr. Chairman. Like that was how they ran their, their family, but they were all very focused on efficiency because they were obsessed with it, but not in a, a, a deleterious way, um, or deleterious way. They, they were, um,
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
So it was a really different viewpoint of the same thing compared to Frederick Taylor. Yeah.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Yeah. I think I explained it already. I'm sticking with my idea.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
No, I don't think he was evil. I don't think that he set out to exploit workers. But I think even after he saw what his invention was being used for, he was indifferent to that. And that says volumes about him. He never denounced it. He never called people out for misusing it. And he actually helped foster its misuse to exploit workers. So I think he was a bit of a misanthrope.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Not evil, and that wasn't ever his intention to be evil, but when it turned kind of evil, he was like, sure, let's keep going if you guys are giving me money.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, maybe. For sure. I mean, it's possible. I think that we're barreling toward a future where every single person has a diagnosis of some sort or another.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think we already know that. But we haven't we haven't come up with a label for every single one of those types of issues that people are working with. That's the difference that I'm talking about.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
I agree. I don't think I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just interested to see like where we're going. But yes, I agree. We've in large part as a society scuttled the idea of the Ubermensch and Nietzsche is very unhappy about that.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Didn't Miller Lite have an ice too? Didn't everybody have an ice for a while? Light ice?
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
No, I screwed it up then because I should have said Bud Ice. But yeah, that's what I was going for. I know Milwaukee's best had an ice.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, I think it had something. It messed with the alcohol content or the way it was delivered or something like that.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Exactly. No, the opposite. You had to drink 12 instead of 14.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And Brandeis is ironic because he was dyed in the wool progressive. Like you said, he was worried about big business. And so the idea that he's the one that made this concept that's historically viewed as exploitive of workers. famous and introduced to the world and essentially gave it its breakout moment. It's just terribly ironic.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
But the whole basis of that is that he was arguing before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is holding hearings on railroad rate hikes. The railroad said, Stuff's getting expensive. We need to increase the prices that we charge to carry freight, to move freight. And of course, that has cascading effects all throughout society and prices were going to go up.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And Brandeis represented a bunch of companies that were going to have to pay those increased rates. And Brandeis' argument was that the railroad companies don't need to raise their rates. They need to get more efficient. And here's how they can do it. This guy named Taylor has figured out a scientific way of getting more efficient.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And that's how they can keep their prices low and still keep their profits high.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. And he was riding on the publicity from that Interstate Commerce Commission hearing, but also that congressional hearing that came, I think, later that same year. He saw an opportunity to get his name out there, even though his name was kind of being dragged through the mud.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Have you ever heard of the work triangle in a kitchen?
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
But for those of you who don't know what it is, the kitchen triangle is like the places where you do the most work. And so the idea is that they should be all within a step or two from one another. The sink, the oven, and the ice cream maker. I don't remember what the third one is. The dishwasher. Dishwasher.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
So anyway, she came up with that. If you have a kitchen island, you can thank her. I've seen. So, yes, she's just kind of pivoted because people were finding out that there was a woman that ran Gilbreth Inc., the management consulting firm, and were just walking away from their accounts because it was run by a woman. So she had no choice. She had 12, 11 kids to raise. And so.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and I could just hear our left-leaning listeners going, boo-hiss. But efficiency was not in and of itself a naughty word on either side of the political spectrum at the time because you could also hope that a more efficient factory or a more efficient workforce or a more efficient whatever –
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
had to provide for him. She wanted to send them all to college. So, yeah, she pivoted to home ec. But it wasn't just her. It's not like she invented home ec out of whole cloth. It was already being developed by a very famous or should be famous lesbian couple, Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer. Yeah, Rensselaer, right?
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
R-E-N-S-S-E-L-A-E-R. Rensselaer. Yeah, that's what I'm going with. And the reason I specifically called them out as a lesbian couple is because they were out as a lesbian couple in, I believe, the 1920s or 30s. I mean, you just did not do that. And they were like, say something. Just bring it. And they just went unchallenged for their lifetime from what I knew.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
But they wanted to turn working in the home into something scientific, domestic science, which kind of elevated its status as well as made things easier for the woman working in the home.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Sure. The only question is who decides what really matters. And I think one of the things about that is that at the time when that guy was talking like that, kids in public schools were viewed as being trained and molded into the workers of tomorrow. So it was the government and the economy who decided what was important.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And, yeah, we were making a lot of money off of reciting Greek poems, like you were saying. So that would get scuttled in the face of, say, I don't know, shop class maybe. What class? Shop?
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
No. I was just fascinated by that. They had one on Saved by the Bell, and I always thought that was the coolest thing.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Well, there was a huge shift in the American economy from car making to lamp making in the early 80s. So I'm sure that's what the result was.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Systematic soldier? Yeah. I say we take our second break.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
would increase productivity but also give workers more free time and then ideally a larger share of the profit in the form of higher wages. Yeah, that's how that works, right? Exactly. I mean, I can't imagine a more naive progressive movement than that, but that's exactly what they were hoping for.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about the fridge. Yes, yes, absolutely.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Right, and I'm sure that she didn't have a dishwasher in the 1930s and 40s, so, you know. Yeah, so you're right, Chuck. Just say it again. I think it was the fridge. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But not just hoping for, they were fighting for it, agitating for it, doing whatever they could, taking it to the courts. Sometimes they were successful, but I think we all know, spoiler alert, in the long run, they lost thus far.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And so de-skilling workers, taking away the overall understanding of making, say, like an oven and just giving them the one job of putting the door on the oven as it's coming down the assembly line. Not only does that take away from job satisfaction, it also makes you way more replaceable. Because you don't have to train somebody to build a whole oven.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
All you have to do is train them to put that oven door on and then you train somebody else to put the thermostat in the oven and so on and so forth. And you, the owner of the factory, has that oven you want, but you have a bunch of replaceable workers that you can pay fairly low wages, even combined, compared to somebody who builds the oven from scratch.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That is a huge, like you said, that was already underway. But Taylorism and the fact that it was so pervasive and widespread, especially in America in the first half of the 20th century, really solidified that as like a basis of the American workforce.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yes. And so to be clear, it wasn't like every single time Taylor showed up, like that's just how it went. There were some successful pushbacks over the years. There's one specifically at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts in 1911. They made guns, I think, for the government. It was a federal arsenal. And Taylor sent one of his emissaries, essentially told him to just make up a number.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
You don't even need the stopwatch part. And I think word of that got out and really kind of undermined that. But also just the process of being timed, doing your job. One of the workers said, I'm not doing that. You can't time me. And he was fired on the spot. And the rest of the workers were like, oh, yeah, well, we're going on strike.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they ended up being successful because, again, this was a federal arsenal. And those congressional hearings to investigate Taylor, one of the results of them was that the U.S. federal government banned Taylorism from being used in any way, shape or form in any kind of federal facility or agency.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But but overall, I mean, Taylor certainly won the day. I mean, that's that's just how the economy is in America and other like minded countries. Like even though we've kind of walked away from it overtly, it's just gotten more and more entrenched over the years rather than further and further away.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Right. No, for sure. And yeah, that's a really great point. But some studies have shown, from what I saw, just briefly reading about this, that The happier your workers are, or I should say economies that have happier workers, like more fulfilled workers, typically have, they're richer for the most part.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I guess America is an outlier because I think overall workers are not necessarily happy with their jobs or lack of job. But supposedly, if you invest in your workers' well-being and actual happiness and fulfillment with their job, they're going to work more for you. They're going to work harder because they care about what they're doing.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Totally. Yeah. And then one of the other big things that shows that Taylorism is still alive and well today, Chuck, is computers, AI, whatever you want to call it, they're fulfilling the role of managers that Taylor envisioned. So remember, the manager was in charge of figuring out the best way to do something and then instructing the worker to do it exactly that way at exactly that time.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That is what computers do today for workers, which is a bizarre reversal of authority, I guess, if you think about it. But that's the way it is, especially in places like, you know, big warehouses or call centers. There's computers essentially running the show.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
No, I don't remember that guy. You got to tell me. I'll remind you. Okay. Please do.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Just one last thing. Do you have anything more about Taylorism? No. OK, great. Well, then I do have just one last thing. If you want kind of a lighthearted look, a comedy with heart efficiency, check out the 1991 film The Efficiency Expert starring Anthony Hopkins.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That was, yeah, kind of a different one. But, yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of crossover for sure. What's this Tony Hopkins picture? What is it? The Efficiency Expert. It's exactly what you just described. And he ends up in, I think, a factory where the workers make, they change his view of things. I think they kind of turn him around. Oh.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Well, anyway, we're about to end. Well, wait, hold on. We got to do listener mail, don't we?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
By the way, Chuck, I got to tell you that we ended on 45 minutes on the nose. Holy cow. Yeah. Way to go, champ. Oh, since I said way to go, champ, of course, that means it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, at Midvale Steel Company, that's where he really made his name. I think that's where he became the chief engineer.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, nice. Thanks, Stanley. You're a true listener through and through, aren't you? I love that humble, like, I can't figure out how to put the words together, but here they are.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Exactly. Well, if you want to be like Stanley and make me say wow, not once, not twice, but thrice, then you can try your hand at it. Send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And one of the things he did as he was working his way up was he was, I guess, out of the gate obsessed or at least deeply interested with the idea of doing something in the least number of movements, the most precise way, the most foolproof way, and that if you studied a task closely enough – and understood it well enough, you could find the most efficient way to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so over his 26-year career at Midvale, he conducted more than 30,000 experiments in metal cutting, figuring out which tool went with which motion, went with how to grab the tool the best way. And from that, he ended up writing a book called On the Art of Cutting Metals in 1907. And from what I saw for years and years, that was considered like a Bible in the metal cutting industry.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so he definitely put his money where his mouth is. And that's how he first kind of got into the idea of becoming an efficiency expert.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And your response is like, well, can I go home early? Probably so.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, remember in our Peter Principle episode, we talked about a corollary to that called Parkinson's Law, which is like a tongue-in-cheek law that work expanded to fill the time allotted. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, if you're sitting there like making widgets, sorry to be cliche, but that's what I'm going with, eight or ten hours a day, you're not going to be the most efficient you can be.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
You're going to be about as efficient as as ambitious as you are. Like your ambition, how far you want to go, is basically equal in some weird ratio to the amount of efficiency that you produce at your job, right? So if you're like, I'm happy here, I'm not going to bust my hump like that guy to go an extra half mile because I'm not going to get anything in return.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
So I'm just going to do my job at a pace that I find – And that the people I work for find acceptable. And I mean, if you want to call that slacking off or being lazy, fine. And Frederick Taylor definitely did. But it's also just kind of like being a human being, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they appreciated your soft touch with the donkey that pulled the cart.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. I think the reason you're – man, we're really going deep on this. But I think the reason that you're feeling mischaracterized is because you're misusing the word lazy. That's not lazy. That's what they call work harder – or work smarter, not harder.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
No, that's not necessarily true. I think it's just sensible.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Okay. There you go. But they're not necessarily inextricably tied together in that instance. Okay. Anyway, I don't think what you just described qualifies as laziness. But what Frederick Taylor considered laziness, he called something called systematic soldiering, which I still can't make heads or tails of. It does not make any sense to me. Does it to you?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I don't know. I mean, you go off and fight battles or you go and follow orders. I don't know. I don't know what he means.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It makes no sense because that was his term, systematic soldiering.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Right. That's what he called slacking off. And like this guy was an aristocat through and through. Right. His mother's family came over in the early 1600s, I think, to America. So like he was a wealthy, blue blooded. A quicker boy who, because his parents were like do-gooders, his mom certainly was. She was a suffragette, an abolitionist.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
He was raised to care about humanity, but he also didn't have that spark of compassion that it takes to care about humans individually. So he cared about creating a better society for humans, but he couldn't really help but look down on other people he considered lower than him, including immigrants. So he did notice things like, you're not working as hard as you can.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I'm going to see to it that you work harder. And he felt totally comfortable with filling that role. And he actually created that role for himself to fill, which is pretty remarkable if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, timing us, telling us to hurry up, scowling at us even, which makes this another average episode of Stuff You Should Know. She said, get this in 45 minutes on the nose. No more, no less. And then she went and walked out of the room holding a pillow.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And so those management companies like KPMG and McKinsey, they would not exist ostensibly had Frederick Taylor not created that field. Like that's what he created. These huge just mega world influencing companies came from this guy basically making up the profession.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And that thing about people getting tired, he called the law of heavy laboring. And from what I can tell, he made up that law that I just put into scare quotes. And this is a really good example of what he did.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Like he was supposed to be precise in finding like ultimate efficiency, but he was arbitrarily rounding up and arbitrarily coming up with 40 percent off based on this law that he made up. And now you kind of start to get to see like behind the veil or like the meat that's on the bones. I don't know the analogy I'm looking for, but you can pull back the curtain. That's the one.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And see that this stuff is actually not what Frederick Taylor cracked it up to be.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Here's the thing, though. So Schmidt, yes, was a fictional invention, essentially, of Taylor's making. But he went around the country giving this lecture or wrote in his books, like, as if Schmidt, this actually happened. About Schmidt? Yeah. It was a great movie. I really felt uncomfortable when he made a pass at the wife of the friendly couple that he met.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Other than that, I thought it was a great movie. Yeah. I think at that point, that was actually just an outtake of Jack Nicholson doing his thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
This is great. So he put out there that the Schmidt character was like a real deal thing, not a made up thing, not a made up anecdote to prove his point. And he actually did consult at Bethlehem Steel where Schmidt supposedly worked. But the upshot of all of it was this. There was this guy named Schmidt who is known to work very hard.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And so Bruno was like, maybe we should just replace this with an actual board and tiles. And that really kind of helped move things along a bunch.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Okay, so the year before that, I've seen it told as a legend or a widely told story, Laura put it. I don't know why no one's like, yeah, that's what happened. But supposedly the president of Macy's came across the game. I'm not sure how. Played it, liked it, ordered a bunch to stock up. Of course, that meant Gimbels immediately followed suit. And so the game took off from there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So this would have been 1952. when that supposedly happened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Good old-fashioned pop culture games edition. Yeah. And yeah, here we are, finally talking about Scrabble. I've been asking for you to do this with me for... at least a decade and you kept refusing. I still don't know why.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, and Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up with this demand. Like, this has just skyrocketed, which is great. But they turned to a company, a game maker called Celcho and Ryder, and they took over making the game. And they did so for... They were the people who made Scrabble for a really long time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Within two years, two years of that great Macy's president story happening, four and a half million copies were sold. Like it just hit America like, you know, a giant packet of Pop Rocks and Diet Coke. Fermentos.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
This is one of the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while. Agreed. He was interviewed in 1984 about his invention. And he said, people are always asking me if I'm rich. I used to get two to three cents for each game sold. One third went to taxes. I gave one third away. And the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life. Great.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And if there's such thing as heaven, I believe that Mr. Butts is there right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Uh, okay. Well, there you go. You had a great life, apparently. I love it. So, um, things turned kind of dark when the Cabbage Patch Kids bought Selcho and Ryder in 1986.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, you must be a Scrabblist because that would just be like the word construct without any kind of meaning to it. So you're in there, Chuck. You really did some method research. Yeah, maybe so. So Coleco, yes, bought Selcho and Ryder and just did not really give much of a care about Scrabble. I mean, it was just a moneymaker to them. Apparently they were already in trouble, which is nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
That they declared bankruptcy by 1989. I can't remember. Surely we talked about it in our Cabbage Patch Kids episode why that happened. But to go from having one of the hottest toys in the history of toys to bankrupt in the same decade is breathtaking. Yeah. As far as business goes. But when Coleco declared bankruptcy, Hasbro stepped in and they did seem to care a lot more about Scrabble.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And so under their ownership, I think it's still owned by Hasbro, if I'm not mistaken. It's been fine. It's had its ups and downs, as we'll see. But there was also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble. And Mattel beat them out for that. Right. And that I can't imagine what a plum that is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But it also occurred to me, and I know we've done an episode on intellectual property, but there's some fictitious right out there that says this one company is allowed to produce all the games just internationally. This other company has this other fictitious right to produce all of the games just inside of the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And it's just so mind blowing to me that we've just kind of created that kind of made up structure for things and how much just gobs of money that legal fiction creates for people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
No, not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it. I was more just astounded by it, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, it was really cute to just kind of follow along.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. Anybody who knows Hodgman, too, right when they saw the Scrabble episode of Stuff You Should Know, knew that there was a 100% chance that Hodgman was going to come up at some point in time, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I meant, hell yeah, buddy. All right. Sorry, you can't see me, but I'm raising the roof right now. Yeah, let's do it. So you mentioned competitive Scrabble, that there are tournaments, which isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into Scrabble, so... When you start throwing money down for prize money for tournaments, people are going to flock to them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And for years, the biggest Scrabble tournament, what they called Nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament, which had its inaugural championship in 1978. And was held every year through to 2009. And Selcho and Ryder actually formed the National Scrabble Association, which was very smart because that kind of thing generates a lot of interest, enthusiasm.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Newspapers cover, oh, it's so crazy. There's a Scrabble championship right now. And like it just helps keep the thing topical, you know. Instead of just letting people buy it and crossing your fingers, that kind of thing. It was a pretty smart business venture. And then, like I said, Coleco came along. They did nothing for it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Apparently the Players Association had to shame Coleco into chipping in $5,000 for prize money for the national tournament. And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it a lot more lavishly. But then they kind of said, you know, this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys are, you know, maybe a few hundred people coming to these tournaments.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And you all have all of the Scrabble boards that you're ever going to need. You're not going to buy any more. So they stopped funding those. And they actually shut down the National Scrabble Association. So an independent version came up, the North American Scrabble Players Association. I think back in 2009 is when it was formed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yes, because those kids have a long life of buying Scrabble boards ahead of them. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, a documentary called Word Freaks, I believe. Oh, is that what did it? It introduced it to a whole new generation of people. Oh, okay. Well, there you have it. Yeah, and it took off like Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that documentary, from what I understand.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, for sure. There was also a lot of internal strife, too. The North American Scrabble Players Association didn't make a lot of friends. They established a real top-down hierarchy of how that association was run. So some other players associations were developed, splintered off. There was a lot of...
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Okay. You like to kick the hornet's nest and then watch him go. I just think, I don't know, if you play the word Scrabble, give it just a little bump. I agree. I think you're right. All right. That's my only suggestion. My only note. A little more about it. The Scrabble board is 15 by 15 squares, 225 total squares. And because it's 15 by 15, you're limited to no more than 15 letter words. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
fracture, I guess, in the Scrabble community that just kind of came around that time that surely affected attracting new people. Like, I hate to use the word toxic because I feel like it's definitely overused, but it feels like that community got a lot more toxic around that time. And, you know, that doesn't exactly attract people. Like, hey, I want to join that toxic subculture. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, those aren't the people you want to attract to your toxic subculture, though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So, yeah. So that one, from what I could tell, I found that as a Spanish word for an indigenous chieftain, usually among Caribbean tribes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, I mean, so that's one word for 392 points. To put that into perspective, a good, you know, average person's Scrabble score, from what I can tell, a couple to a few hundred points. This is like a Scrabble score with just a high Scrabble score with just one word. This is like the level that these people are playing at.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And Chuck, I say we take another break and we'll come back and we'll poke around in the brains of those high-level Scrabble players and see what neurologists have found out recently. Let's do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Okay, Chuck, so we've kind of made mention a couple of times that people who play Scrabble like think of words differently than normies do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And there have been studies using the Wonder Machine in particular by neurologists of the brains of people who play Scrabble because there's a lot of longstanding discussions, rival theories and hypotheses about how we process words and information associated with words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And by studying Scrabble players, like high-level Scrabble players, they found that their brains literally work different when it comes to words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, one of the studies, I can't remember what year it was. I actually failed to look now that I think about it. They found that when you put a Scrabble player through what's called the lexical decision task, which is showing people very quickly jumbles of words and saying, is there a word in there? Too late. Is there a word in here? Too late. And they have to answer really quick.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And there's always some lab assistant shouting too late and really just mix things up a little bit. Scrabble players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use. And they don't use regions of their brains that people normally do use. So like when you think of a word, you think of the meaning usually. That's how you grasp a word. And you're really kind of processing what the word is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
there's a meaning attached to it. There's a symbolism attached to it. With the Scrabble player, they do not think like that. They think of words as physical constructs of letters. There's no, meanings aren't attached to them. That takes too long. They process them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of letters that you put together. It doesn't matter what it means.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And I guess just a quick summary of the rules. So when you play that first word, you have to play it in the center square. That's where you start. And you can build off of other people's words. You get up to 15-letter words by building onto other words because you could never spell more than a seven-letter word because at no point in time do you ever have more than seven tiles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
It just matters that you can get this number of points on a Scrabble board. One of the other things they found is that they also use more spatial reasoning than the average person does when they're recognizing and processing words and letters because they have to figure out how to orient them on the board and how they would intersect with other words on the board.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So their brains change and the way they approach words change the more Scrabble you play.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students. And by they, I mean the people who conducted this study. And they said, here, Russian engineering students, we're going to teach you Scrabble, and you're going to play it for a year, and then we're going to test you. We're going to have you play teachers who teach English as a foreign language. So they're Russian, but they know a lot of English.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And we're going to play the English language Scrabble, by the way. So there's all the pieces on the board right there. And what they found is that the engineering students who didn't speak that much English were able to, I think in the words of the study, smoke the English as a foreign language teachers in Scrabble. That's incredible. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Even though the teachers knew more English than the engineering students did.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Exactly. But I mean, that's how you get better at it. Apparently anagramming is a huge thing to do if you want to get better at Scrabble. Because when you look at the, you know, there's seven tiles on your tile holder. It's just a jumble of letters, and you have to find the words in those letters. That's part of the game. So if you go practice that, yeah, you're going to get a lot better.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But I saw that among just the population in general, just people who play Scrabble for fun, it's much more closely divided. It's more like 60-40 men to women.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, because to them, they're just words. The meaning has no purpose or point whatsoever in the game. It doesn't matter. So why would you take any words out that we could potentially use and score with?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And Jerry, best of luck beeping all those out. It should be pretty easy. So, yeah, so there were a lot of Scrabble players who were like, this is outrageous. Who cares about offensiveness? And other people are like, this is kind of society evolving in real time right here. So I guess Hasbro made a compromise and they said, well, how about this? For tournament level, we won't take these words out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
We'll have a separate book called The Official Word List. Among players, it's called TWL 98. That's when it came out. It was 1998. But for everybody else, and by the way, the TWL 98 is just available to Players Association members. So it's not available to the general public. And then the other one, the toned down version, that's the one that the public will be able to get their hands on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, and I discovered a new dish from this too, Chuck. Cockumber? Usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's also okay to spell with a C. It's an Indian dish featuring cucumbers. Oh. It's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad. And actually, I should correct myself. I think it could be Indian, but it's also possibly like Anatolian. I'm not 100% sure. But it sounds delicious.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. Oh yeah. That's a great way to run up scores from what I can tell. And then across the board, there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores, and triple letter scores. And basically when you lay a tile over that, depending on whether it's a letter or a word, you get bonus points for it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, you could. You could also play yeet. What is that? I don't know, man. You know, I really feel like I've outed myself in the last couple episodes. Skibbity toilet, buddy. Not the edgelord that people assume that I am. Edgelord.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There's no way that it's not. As a matter of fact, you keep talking, you tell the story, and I'm going to look it up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts just how many players do cheat in like high level tournaments.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, there was a kid. He was 13, so he's unnamed as far as I can tell.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
He was playing down in Orlando at the Scrabble Nationals in 2012, and he got caught palming blank tiles. Man, what a jerk. I don't know that we even mentioned what blank tiles are good for, but they're like a wild card. They stand in for any letter that you want. So they can really come in handy when you have like a bunch of letters, but you just can't quite connect them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
That blank tile comes in there and you say, thanks, blank tile. So if you have that, you have a huge advantage. So finally, this kid was caught cheating, but this was on the heels of a year before when he won the $2,000 prize for winning.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So when you're like, like if you play a bingo across like a triple word score, you got a bunch of points. You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Even though, apparently, statistically, the percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across the game, or the games that he played throughout that tournament, it just doesn't add up. But they let that win stand. But for 2012, he got booted.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, there's, I don't want to say well regarded, a well-known player named Sam Contamati. And he is not just a player. He also has a side business of like custom equipment, like tile holders, boards. Timers is another one because in tournaments they use timers like chess. So he's got his whole line. He's, like, really integral to the current, like, Scrabble world, tournament world.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And for a long time, especially before Me Too came along, he just got away with it. Like, the Players Association president would make a point of escorting women who went up to Kenna Matthews' hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought from him or were buying from him. Like, you just... Didn't go alone, like it was an open secret. And then finally, like he just groped the wrong woman.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Me Too came along and I think at least 15 named women came forward and put their story on the record about him. And the response from the Players Association was essentially like, Okay, but don't do it again. Yeah. And he had already been banned for cheating. He palm tiles, too. He was a national champion. He palm tiles, too. He got suspended for four years for cheating.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But for the allegations of sexual misconduct, nothing. Just a warning, essentially. So that really ticked off a lot of people, especially high-level women players, too, who were like, you know what? We hold our own tournaments, and he's not invited any longer. So... He's kind of been ostracized, but I have the impression that he's still very much around.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
No, nostalgia is a toxic impulse, according to Hodgman. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I'll bet every once in a while you can peek in on Hodgman sleeping and he's got a big smile on his face because he's dreaming about that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I have a live update as well. Chode is not in the Scrabble allowable word list.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, it's called sending them packing with tears in their eyes, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. And Scrabble being the arbiter of what words we can and can't use now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So Scrabble, of course, has popped up in pop culture here or there. Rosemary's Baby, very famously used, Mia Farrow used, well, Rosemary, uses Scrabble, a bunch of Scrabble tiles to try to figure out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using the tiles to figure out anagrams. Yeah. Same with Sneakers. I couldn't find that. I saw that movie. I never saw the movie.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I couldn't find the clip with the Scrabble. I just saw mention of it in a couple of places.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Which that's all you need to do. That's better than Frank, I think. And then Seinfeld and Calvin Hobbes both kind of famously had Scrabble made up high value Scrabble words in their shows in the first season of Seinfeld. I don't remember. Who was it? Do you know? Seinfeld's mom played Kwon, Q-U-O-N-E.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And like Seinfeld calls her out on it and it's not actually a word, but Kramer's like, yeah, Kwon, whatever. But the biggest thing that stood out to me in this scene, I watched it today, it had the original dad who just did not work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And then Calvin and Hobbes, I think Calvin played ZQFMGB and said it was a type of worms from New Guinea.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And then lastly, Chuck, we can't forget Scrabble led to Trivial Pursuit being created. Because remember they went and got a new Scrabble board and were like, how many Scrabble boards have we bought over the years? We should make our own game. That's right. Yeah. And that's it. Scrabble has not appeared in any other part of pop culture except for those things. Right. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
All right. Well, that's Scrabble, everybody. Thank you for finally doing it, Chuck. And since I thank Chuck for finally relenting and giving in on doing an episode I've wanted to do for years and years and years, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, nice. So what are the what are the monthly centerfolds?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I don't know. I'm trying to come up with it now, and I don't really think I keep a calendar in my head. I'm just too, like, in the present, you know, like in the now. Yeah, baby. Sorry to let you down. Who is that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There's your problem. Thanks a lot, Daisy. That was wonderful. I feel like also that somebody can make a T-shirt of like the visual representation of the calendar in Daisy's head. And it would be the most arcane, deep cut stuff you should know T-shirt of all time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. So if you want to get in touch with us like Daisy did and share your mental whatever, we would love that. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Even Jerry chimed in and was like, will you guys please do Scrabble? And finally you relented. I think just because you wanted me and Jerry to stop bothering you about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, for sure. And it's not like evenly distributed. For example, there's 12 E's, but there's only one J, K, Q, X, and Z. And then the other letters are just kind of distributed in weird, random ways. So that, like, you could, I guess, easily count that stuff. If you play Scrabble enough, you're just going to pick up on how many are out there at any given point. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And also, just real quick, I did some poking around, Chuck. And I found that there's some mnemonic devices that like tournament level players use to remember how many points a particular letter gets. You should say that after I list them all. Well, I was going to just do it by group, if that's okay with you. Sure. So the first group, one point, they use astronauts eat in limbo.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, you just have to ignore the L. Okay, all right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Right. There's also, like if you have S tiles, there's a 10-point advantage. And the reason why I was like, that doesn't make any sense because S, as you remember from your mnemonic device, is only a one-point tile. You should throw that on the end though, right? Yeah, that's the thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So like if you add, if you, like I said, you can add on to other words that are already on the board, even ones that another player wrote out. And whatever word score they got for that word, if you add an S, you get that same word score plus one point for the S. So that's a really easy way to rack up some quick points. Totally. And I think also probably annoy other players.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yes. And there's but there's plenty of rules that are fair game that are also like you're a jackass.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
QI? No, sorry, that's qi, like life force, I think. Okay. And you get 11 points for that one. And then, I can't remember, there's one more that's like a Q word that does not require a U. Oh, no, QI is in here because that's the highest scoring two-letter word along with ZA.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
You know, I wish I were. I'm not, and it's not like I have an aversion to it or anything like that. It's just not part of my world, I guess, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, and I looked up Z-A, Za, and it's slang for pizza. I'm not certain that that usage is allowed, but it's also an archaic word for a B-flat notation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, from what I can tell, Scrabble players don't care what a word means. They don't think of them like that. And, I mean, that will come up later with those controversial words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, good point. Yeah, it's just us. We're curious types. Scrabble players are not.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, it's a really weird 80s comic strip. You know the clown with the Zippy the Pinhead? No, I don't know it. You should look it up. It's weird. It's a weird comic strip.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But it couldn't be that. Sorry, I have to correct myself before all of the Scrabble players email in. It couldn't be Zippy the Pinhead because Zippy the Pinhead would be a proper noun.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
They're really serious about that stuff too. Oh, I bet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
No. Get that mess out of here is what they'll tell you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. I like it both ways, though. Muzzjicks. Muzzjicks. Look at all the Muzzjicks toiling in the fields. Yeah. I like that. So I was confused because there's a lot of, like, one of the rules is no proper nouns, no words that end in apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah. And then also no foreign words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But clearly some foreign words are allowed in because they're so common in English that they've just basically been adopted into the language. I get that. But a musjix is not a common word in English. So it must mean that that does appear in some English dictionary somewhere because that's kind of the great ruler, arbiter. But I just don't see how it could be. That's just weird to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There's also bingo, I don't know, what city? Bingo bird? Stadt, maybe? Bingo stock. Sure. So in some other countries, too, in foreign language versions of Scrabble, there are some adjustments with the tiles. Like some have more than 100 tiles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. There's like double L and double R in the Spanish language version. There's also the N with the tilde over it. That's also a tile. Yeah. Spice it up a little. Yeah. I think that's worth eight points. Nice. Yeah, but you have to remember that that's eight points. You have to say nice.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, I feel like based on Stuff You Should Know history, our best episodes are ones where we explain games that we don't actually play. Soccer, chess. Yeah. I mean, the list just keeps going on. I feel like we're about to add to it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Are you sure it's just that that community in particular isn't big Scrabble fans? Yeah, I'm positive. Okay. So did you say he was an unemployed architect?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, so he did not have a great success with it out of the gate. He initially tried to call it Lexico and crisscross words, and he took it around to game manufacturers, and they were like, nah, I'm not really feeling this. And that was the way it went for a good decade before a man named James Bruneau bought the rights. He saw something in it that I guess other people didn't.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
He renamed it Scrabble. He changed the gameplay a little bit. One of the biggest changes he made was that the way that Mosier Butts had come up with is that you just thought the word in like a kind of a mental version of the board and the other player hopefully was able to pick up on the word you were thinking.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yes, and I have been racking my brain what episode we first introduced the Ice King in. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. Igloos? I don't know. I don't think so. I really don't remember what it was, but he popped up again later in our episode on Thoreau because one of the places where he was cutting ice from was Walden Lake, and Thoreau noted the Ice King cutting ice
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Or Walden Pond. Sorry, Mainers. Yeah. While he was writing his book, Walden. I think he appears in Walden.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So I talked about how, like, the technology is really just kind of improved on ancient technology. The uses for this stuff, too, have really kind of been relatively the same. We haven't had a lot of stuff that we wanted ice for aside from cooling our drinks, which is… Really, honestly, Olivia turned up a mention of the king of Tekoa, I saw different spellings, in what's now Syria.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And she's wearing a little red beanie and looks like a mini penguin.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And he used it to ice his drinks almost 4,000 years ago. So, I mean, people have been doing that for a really long time. Another one is to store perishable food, like you said, keeps the flies away, right? Yeah. And in doing these things, as we've gotten better and better at it, it started to have like really monumental, massive sweeping changes on humanity.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And here in America, one of the first changes it had, we will talk about right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Oh, okay. All right. I see what you're doing. Nice work, Chuck. That was a good old-fashioned stuff-you-should-know segue. And in full stuff-you-should-know fashion, I stepped all over it, so it didn't actually work that well.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So, Chuck, I was talking about how refrigeration had massive sweeping changes as we got better at it. And in America, one of the first things it did was it allowed people to expand their diet some. Because unless you were in like a southern state or something like that, you did not have access to a lot of different kinds of food year round. Yeah, yeah, right.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like spring and summer, maybe even into fall a little bit, you would have things like dairy and poultry and meat. And then as winter... Fresh veggies. Yes. And as winter started to set in, you had pickled cabbage...
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
neighbor who died that winter like pickled everything canning didn't even come around i didn't know this until the 19th century i thought it was really really old so like you really did not so actually you didn't have pickled anything now that i think about it you had like salted stuff cured stuff um and a lot of it was grains too right stuff you could store fairly easily
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And then when we started learning how to preserve food with refrigeration and got better and better at it, like people, their diets just changed radically. Like apparently in the northern states, by the time spring came, you were so malnourished from a lack of niacin, vitamin B3 that you normally get from like poultry and fish and meat. that they had a name for it, spring sickness.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Today we call it pellagra, but it's a type of like severe malnutrition that people would just annually get because they had that limited access to different foods. And then once we started being able to store and then more importantly ship items by refrigerating it, then things really changed. That spring sickness went away. And I'm also the first person in history to say the word refrigerating
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yes, we are talking about refrigeration, which is why you brought that up. And again, nice work. This is one of those, I guess, topics that has popped up myriad ways in myriad episodes recently. So, I mean, literally 30,000 ways in 30,000 episodes. And this is one of those stuff you should know things where we're just going to bring it all together and finally talk about the main topic.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Okay, cool. So, yes, you could pickle your neighbor then.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Well, what's the deal then? I mean, they just hadn't figured out how to use heat baths and that kind of thing?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. This, Chuck, was one of those episodes where I went near mad trying to understand like the physics of the whole thing or even like the mechanical engineering aspects of this stuff. And it's got to be because my dad was a mechanical engineer by profession.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So like I've got that little bug that I can't ignore. And I look all over for how William Cullen's thing worked. And apparently no one knows because the same like four or five sentences are basically copy and pasted everywhere on the Internet.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So we do know that in the before even 1750, he was the first person to demonstrate artificial refrigeration. It didn't go anywhere, but he showed that this was entirely possible and that it was pretty clever to use something like artificial refrigerant rather than just say water. Although water is an excellent refrigerant in a lot of different applications.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Right. Yeah. So it's just nuts. If you see like a diagram and how it's explained and how a vapor compression refrigerator works, which is almost certainly the kind of refrigerator you have in your home, there's really just like four components to it. And they're really doing some basic stuff to this. But it's more a question of, like, why?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like, why would you put something into low pressure and heat it up for the next step to be to, like, depressurize it and cool it down and then you turn it into liquid up here? It's just – it doesn't make sense. It's almost just nuts. Like, somebody just went crazy with a diagram, but apparently that's how it works. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And it's all, I think it's like you said, it's just taking advantage of the different properties of lower pressure liquid or higher pressure gas. Like they can cool and heat. And I guess it puts off so much coolness or so much heat that it can be used to refrigerate. And then it passes through this other thing, like I think a condenser. And that gives off the waste heat.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's what's under your fridge. And then like the evaporator cools everything down. And I finally got it, Chuck. So I've been looking at it wrong the whole way. The refrigerator doesn't pump cold into your fridge, right? The actual mechanical refrigerant process. What it does is it sucks heat out of your refrigerator. And once I finally understood that, I was like, I got it finally.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I got it because this cooler refrigerant goes through a coil. And I thought like it was emitting cold and that that's how it cooled down. No, it's drawing any heat from there, kind of tricking the heat into joining the coil and leaving the fridge box cooler, which is what that refrigerant wanted all the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It thinks that heat was a sucker for falling for it, but that's exactly what it does every time. And now the inside of your refrigerator is way colder.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I think it's kind of amazing, too, because it's the opposite of what I always thought was going on.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, which hydrofluorocarbons are good for the ozone layer, but they're actually horrible as greenhouse gases. There's a rating of just how much of an effect like a chemical has on warming the atmosphere. And they use carbon dioxide, CO2, as a one. That's like the baseline because we know how much it warms the atmosphere over 100 years. So it has a global warming potential or GWP of one.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Carbon dioxide does. Hydrofluorocarbons have a global warming potential of 14,800. Wow. That's a lot more than CO2, if you really stop and think about it. And these are the refrigerants we're still using. These are the alternatives that we developed and started using in the 90s. So it's like we go from the frying pan into the fire whenever we try to do something environmental, it feels like.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Did you say that to yourself out loud or were you just thinking this?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Right. That's what sixth grade bullies call you, too, when they tell you to meet them in the playground at 3 p.m. But that changed that changed absolutely everything. This is when meat became like a staple of the American diet. We talked a little bit about Chicago being the epicenter of this and that. What did Americans eat before the FDA came along or something?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But all of a sudden meat was much easier, much cheaper to ship. And they could ship it further and further. So they started supplying the cities with meat and people started to be able to afford it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And that was another huge change, not just for humans, but for cows too, because apparently the cow population in the United States more than doubled in 30 years after we figured out how to refrigerate meat or ship refrigerated meat.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. So a single pear was $11.00. in the 1870s, and they were two for $1.80 in the 1890s, thanks to refrigeration. Did you ever get an orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking? Because I never understood why until I started researching this.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I was going to ask that. I had a follow up question and then you just answered it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
You never did? Oh, we always did, and I was always like, why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking, making it seem like there's way more stuff in here than there actually is.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So I think initially you were thinking like refrigerators, like home refrigeration, maybe like warehouse refrigeration, fairly recent refrigeration. But Livia, like you said, who helps us with this went, no, no, and wagged her finger and said, this stuff goes way back beyond this chalk. And you said, how did you get in my kitchen? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yep. So, Chuck, little by little as these like innovations in shipping stuff, meat, produce, things that just could not make it from, you know, California to, oh, I don't know, let's say Denver. Okay. Without rotting or something. As we got better and better at this, something called the cold chain started to emerge and evolve.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And that was basically how we moved perishable items from one part of the country to another, thanks to this refrigerated stuff. And it was super primitive and separate. I think the I don't know if you said or not, but the very first private rail cars were these meatpackers refrigerated cars. They just did this on their own as like a great business move.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But these things became so invaluable and people became so hooked on having stuff available year round that they normally wouldn't, that it just became an institution, like a part of any growing, developing country's infrastructure. There was something called the cold chain.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, like fantastic, basically, but fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means. Yeah, that sounds like a sentence product.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Shut up. Take it back. Yeah, exactly. So like you said, he died penniless, as you like to say. But his his legacy lived on. Eventually, people said like, OK, we can get used to this. But it took some it took some selling for sure. One of the other major things that helped establish the cold chain was not just shipping, but it had to like sit for a little while when it got to where it's going.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like it's not like the train stopped at every house for anyone who wanted eggs. Like it went to one central destination and it unloaded its contents. And so as a result, cold storage had to develop. You remember Rocky. He helped train by punching huge sides of beef. That was part of the cold chain. He worked in at least, I guess that's where he worked, was a cold storage place.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, and they really did breed them, Chuck, through selective breeding programs. There's something called the red jungle fowl, which is a type of chicken, wild chicken. It lays about 10 to 15 eggs per year. And like you said, normally in the spring, maybe in the early summer. That's just not enough if you want eggs year-round.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So the breeds that we developed, like the leghorns, which is the top egg layer, the champ, they lay about 350 eggs per year, year-round.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But before that, yeah, you could just hang on to eggs. I almost said you could just sit on eggs for a while thanks to cold storage.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. And that was one of the roles of the FDA and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was to basically say, OK, we get why you don't trust some of these people, because some of them are actual total scales. Some of the people selling food Apparently, one technique was to if you had a bunch of meat that was about to spoil, you just froze it and shipped it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And the person wouldn't be able to tell until they thawed the meat out and tried to sell it. And you just rip them off. That was a big one. Or if you had a cold storage facility, if you're storing something for months. You need to keep it cold for months. There can't be like a week where everything breaks down and you just hang on to that stuff and sell it anyway after things get back online.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And this was the kind of thing that like people in the U.S. were having to worry about. So thanks to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and then later on actual laws that gave it teeth. That kind of helped set the stage for people to finally relax and be like, OK, I can deal with frozen food. Because it was like the GMOs of its day.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like people were just like, it'll give you cancer if you eat frozen food. Like it was like people did not trust food that had been frozen.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Flies don't like cold. So one of the things that people have long loved to do is cool down their drinks, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It's just something you take for granted these days, but that's one of the first uses people put cold storage or refrigeration to, which was to store ice so that they could chop it off with an ancient ice pick, probably made out of a bone or tusk or something like that, and put it in their drinks. And as we'll see, that's just long been a desire of people.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Right, not just call them. Yeah, there's also that whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox, like icebox cakes.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't take off. They weren't super reliable. They were pretty expensive. But not too long later, a decade or so later, in 1927, GE introduced its refrigerator. It's nicknamed the Monitor Top because there's a big round turret on top of the refrigerator that gives it a very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by like a sixth grader.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Um, but monitor refers to the civil war ironclad USS monitor. Um, and that's just, that was the nickname. I was looking all over for what general electric called it and they seem to have just called it refrigerator.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But whenever someone has access to ice in places you normally can't get ice, it's one of the first things they do to it. And it's also almost always a sign of wealth to start off for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Oh, yeah, for sure. Again, though, people were kind of like, I don't know about this. I was about to say fortunately, but related to that, scarcity during World War II and World War I, but also the Great Depression, basically said, hey, everybody, you can't just be throwing food away. We need to be very thrifty with food. And that really kind of gave leftovers a big boost.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Also, because the government came in and created propaganda campaigns to kind of persuade people to start eating leftovers more. Because again, thanks to your new handy GE refrigerator, you can do that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce. I thought that was great.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I understand. I hated salad. So maybe that's why I hate iceberg lettuce because that's all that's all we got was iceberg as well. And like French dressing or something like that or ranch. And that was it. And you ate it and you liked it and you shut up about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
For real. Like even when you were a kid, you would eat that.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So that's funny. I hated salad so much I would refuse to be served anything except for some iceberg lettuce and some carrots. And I wouldn't even eat that. No salad dressing, nothing. Like whenever everyone else was finished, if I was still eating my salad, I had to stay at the table and finish it. And so at that time, I would just start slowly putting it bite by bite under the credenza behind me.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But then I was short-sighted enough I didn't go back and clean it out. So every few months like the credenza would get moved and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg lettuce and carrots.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, and while we're on it, I believe in our Food Origins episode, I don't remember what it was, but we talked about the TV dinner. And we totally credited Jerry Thomas, a salesman for Swanson, as coming up with the idea. And since then, it's become much clearer that Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And that the real hero was a 21-year-old bacteriologist named Betty Cronin. who was the one who not only, she might not have come up with the idea, I think she said one of the Swanson sons did, but she was the one who figured out how to make it work and to make these meals that are different foods entirely that all cook at the same time and come out the way that they're supposed to.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
There's one other thing I wanted to mention. So the cold chain is now so diverse and there's so many different versions of it all working together. It's now called the cold web. And Olivia gives a great example of what we can do now. We can catch a fish in Norway, send it off to China for processing, and then send it from China to the United States for eating. Wow. All within a half an hour.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Well, maybe longer than that, but still, it is still amazing. You got anything else?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Nice idea. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got 10, 12 more minutes worth of material. Do you mind just sitting there? No, let's do it. Since Chuck said let's do it, I think it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Number one, thank you for coming to see our show. And number two, congratulations on your new house. Yeah, for sure. And number three, thank you for sending us a delightful email. And if you want to be like Amy, you can send us an email too to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And even if you're like into cocktails, like you might not want ice in your drink, but I'll bet you used ice to chill that drink.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I remember there's one of the lamest mixology trends that somebody tried to start. And there was it was around long enough for there to be some press on it. And it just went away inevitably. It was room temperature cocktails. Yeah. Like, why would you do that? You might as well make sure that every single one of them has to have celery bitters in it, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Huh. I just realized I drink room temperature water. I have a glass of it right here. So I guess I can't just stand with you 100 percent there, Chuck. I'm sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Supposedly, your body metabolizes room temperature water much more easily. But supposedly, you also burn more calories warming water up in your body. So you're going to be torn.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
One other thing about ice and drinks. I think the best martinis are the ones that have you get them so cold that they have like a little shard of like Arctic ice on the top.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yes, I love that, too. And then also when they leave five thousand dollars in cash with you for no reason other than ordering the five thousand dollar martini.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yep. That's going to happen many times and I'll never do it on purpose. So I just apologize in advance. One of the other things that people figured out pretty quickly is that when you have a liquid evaporating, usually water, as it evaporates, turns from liquid to gas, that phase change is what they call it. The eggheads call it a phase change.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It requires energy, and typically it gets that energy to change phase from heat. My God, the heat. And it usually just pulls it from the surrounding air, which means that when a liquid turns into a gas, the air around it is cooler because it pulls that heat right out of the air to use it for the phase change.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And if you have some way of moving that cooler air from around the vessel of water that's evaporating, you have yourself a primitive air conditioning system that's sometimes called a swamp cooler, I saw. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
No, for sure. And it has to be, this is the downside, it has to be a dry, hot place. Yeah. If it's muggy out, then it's not going to have much of an effect.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, I thought that was weird too. I also saw one of the other really basic uses for it is to dampen a towel and hang it in front of a breezy window. And as that water evaporates in the towel, as it dries off, is what the lay people call it, the breeze pushes that cooler air into your house. And I realized that I was having trouble envisioning this stuff for...
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Why anybody would go to the trouble? And I was like, oh, yeah, before the kind of AC and refrigeration that we're used to, you had to go to all sorts of trouble. It's just so easy to take for granted these days. But before this and in other places where they don't have AC, people would hang damp towels in front of a breezy window to get cooler. That's how desperate they were to cool down.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, there's things called spring houses or spring boxes, depending on how big the structure is. But typically, if you have a stream or a spring running through your homestead, which from what I've read recently is like point number one that you want to make sure your homestead has is a source of fresh water. One of the cool things you could do with that is to build an enclosure around it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But first, within the enclosure, what you want to build is like – kind of like a widened area for the stream to flow into, and then it kind of fills up, and then it exits the other side of this widened area. So you narrow the channel of the spring or the stream, line it with rocks, line this box with rocks, basically, and it stays about half full year-round of this nice, cool stream
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
mountain spring or mountain stream water, and you just keep your butter in there and crocks and stuff. So it's just like doing it in a stream, but you're basically making it a little easier to store your things in there. You could put more stuff in it than you would if you just threw it in the stream like a total hayseed.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like even the mountainists of mountain people are like, you didn't go to the trouble of building a spring house, right? For somebody who just throws it into the stream themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. And Jerry Chilly Willy Roland is here doing the recording, wearing a little red beanie, looking all cute. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. Also, remember, in our feed, a cold starve a fever short stuff. We talked about how there is like a doctor's viewed heat and cold as a duality of health. So, yeah, if somebody was sick with one of the hot sicknesses, you would probably give them a cold drink. And that was considered as good as medicine is today.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Sure. So one other thing I want to mention real quick is we're talking about people like technologies that are like thousands of years old. There was something called a yak chal that Persians created that to listeners may or may not sound familiar, depending on when we release the short stuff on it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. But it was like an ancient Persian ice making machine that dates back at least to 400 BCE, which is really impressive. But yeah, we'll get way more in depth on those in whatever short stuff we do. But the point is that people have been doing this for a really long time, and they figured out some really ingenious technologies that harness natural processes to cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And as we kind of progress through the technology, you'll see that we're basically... Doing the same thing, just a little more whiz bang, much more efficiently. It delivers much cooler air or water or whatever we're cooling. But it's still basically the same premise as what we were doing thousands of years ago to keep things cool.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's 45,000 U.S. dollars today, which you'd think it'd be way more, but that's what— Did you really do that? I found a Swedish currency converter, historic currency converter.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Amazing. And that's why you're Josh Clark. I didn't make this website.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
6,000 Frank Fine, he drew a caricature of King Louis Philippe with a pear for a head. And then when he was threatened with this fine, he put out a possibly one of the first or the first multi-panel cartoon, a four panel cartoon showing the metamorphosis from this king going like he's the king as a caricature. And now he looks a little more like a pear, a little more like a pear.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. And the whole point was, come on, like the guy looks like a pear. And it's ridiculous that you would try to fine me $6,000 for pointing out something so obvious.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And I guess he avoided that fine at the time. But afterward, he's like, OK, I really need to get in trouble. So I'm going to create one called Gargantua. And this one was way worse than saying the king looks like he has a pear for a head. This was the king giant, like gorging himself on taxes that were being fed directly to him by the poor people.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
He's sitting on his throne and then he's pooping out like tax breaks and special treatment for the wealthy friends of his. And that one got him in trouble.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, it's a good cartoon. It's like it's a ramp from the ground straight up to this giant's mouth with people in their wheelbarrows just like walking up and getting in his mouth and being pooped out as as spoils.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's a great, great piece of art, too. Yeah, not just the political version of a political aspect. It's beautiful as far as art goes.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But that got him six months in the Husqvarna, but they let him out and he started working again. King Philip was asked about this and, you know, kind of like, why are you cracking down on this? But people can have a pamphlet printed with words that are very critical of you. And he said, a pamphlet is no more than a violation of opinion. A caricature amounts to an act of violence.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
You started out with almost a French accent there for a second.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I debated it, then I came back, and then it was British for a hot second, and then it was just regal, general regal.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. It really did evolve that quickly, too. I failed. So, yeah, King Louis Philippe put his finger on something that there's something special or something different about a political cartoon that is way different than, say, a news article or even a photograph. You know, you can make the point the news article for centuries and centuries.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Because there used to be more than 2,000 about 100 years ago. Now there's less than 20. And Dave, you know, helped us with this and found that stat. And I think we were both initially like, oh, my God, they're all going away. Right. Not necessarily true. Those are full time staffers on newspapers. Newspapers are in trouble. So that's a big reason why we'll get to that.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
could only be read by a select number of people, everybody could get a political cartoon. But there's something more than that, too. There's just something about a political cartoon that people who've been taken down by political cartoons have been able to put their finger on and said, this is way worse than just writing about me for some reason.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, I think that tracks to even to like if you think about in like high school, if a teacher caught you writing like a note to your friend that said, you know, Mr. Clark is such a jerk. I think that would be taken different than if someone drew a picture of Mr. Clark like bent over being paddled by a line of students or something, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
No, it would be equal unless you put like stink lines coming off of me and then it would be really hurtful.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I don't know. I'll bet it was a political cartoonist who wasn't that great.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about one of the more famous political cartoonists of all time, Thomas Nast.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But there are still plenty of editorial cartoonists and political cartoonists mainly working online.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Right. Yeah. And for syndication companies like you can work for a syndicate and they'll distribute it to newspapers that want to run your political cartoon, just like with comics.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
All right, we're back. Josh promised talk of Thomas Nast. He's the most famous American political cartoonist, probably very influential cartoonist of the 19th century. And that's, you know, early on, you were like, what? What was going on back then? Well, the Civil War was going on back then.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And he was a German immigrant who drew for Harper's Weekly when Harper's Weekly was really growing in their readership with a lot of pro-union political cartoons.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. There was one that I think kind of tracks with what you were saying. It's not at all funny, but it's super poignant.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Called Compromise with the South. Yeah, totally. The Democrats had run on a platform that the Civil War had been a failure up to this point for the 1864 election when Lincoln was standing for re-election, and that we should basically work with the South to just forget about the Civil War and end this. And Thomas Nast didn't like that one bit.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. So I won't say like we're at peak the golden age of it, but it's still alive and well and just sort of a different form.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So this Compromise with the South image shows an amputee Union soldier standing on a crutch, shaking hands with his head bowed, shaking hands with a triumphant Confederate officer. Jefferson Davis. Is it Jefferson Davis? He's got like his his boot standing one foot on a union soldier's grave. And Columbia, who represents the United States, is weeping at that grave.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And then also poignantly, there's a union soldier, an African-American union soldier and his wife who are now on the southern side and they're shackled back to being slaves.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It is. It's a really good example of a political cartoon that isn't funny, but really gets the point across. And apparently it had a huge impact on America, especially the union, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, I mean, some people say that had a lot to do with Lincoln getting reelected. Lincoln referred to Thomas Nast at one point as our best recruiting agent. And in the 1868 election, Ulysses S. Grant credited his win to the Sword of Sheridan and the Pencil of Nast. I had never heard of Columbia before.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But you'll see in a lot of these political cartoons, Colombia as a representation of America was used a lot. And I think this is just a guess. I didn't look it up, but it seems like Lady Liberty, Statue of Liberty has sort of replaced Colombia as far as the cartoon ship goes, because anytime there's like a sort of one of the sad gut punch ones, it's some shameful thing America has done.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. I've seen the golden age referred to as in the 19th century. And I'm like, these people didn't live through the 80s. That was the golden age, baby.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And like Lady Liberty is crying somewhere or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. I think Uncle Sam also displaced Columbia as well. And Thomas Nast is the one who popularized the current image of Uncle Sam with his hat and all that. That was Thomas Nast as well. He had a huge, huge impact as a political cartoonist.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Well, he was the guy who came up with the elephant and the donkey for the two political parties. That's right. And also popularized our current conception, American conception of Santa Claus.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, because remember, German immigrants are the ones who really brought Christmas to the United States. And Thomas Nast was a German immigrant, so he loved Christmas. And yeah, he gave us our version of Santa Claus.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
The thing that he's most remembered for as a political cartoonist, though, is that he is credited with taking down William Boss Tweed, who was one of the most corrupt political officials in the history of the United States. Apparently in a decade, he is thought to have stolen a billion dollars from New York City in today's money. Oh, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's incredible. Yeah. He's popped up a lot in our obviously our New York centric episodes about the history of New York. Very corrupt person for the, you know, Tammany Hall political machine. And I think Nast had more than 140 boss tweed cartoons alone in Harper's.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Oh, man, I saw, if I had a dime for every, like, cartoonish drawing of Tip O'Neill or Ronald Reagan I saw growing up as a kid.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. So, yeah, it was a big deal. Boss Tweed, very much like King Louis Philippe, was aware that these things were having an effect on him. And he apparently said, stop them damn pictures. I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can't read, but they can't help seeing them damn pictures.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And I mean, there was a lot of reporting at the time by some of the New York newspapers about Boss Tweed. And they definitely had some effect on getting him investigated and ultimately put into prison where he died.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But like you really can't like you could put all those articles and combine them pretty much equally with Thomas Nast's political cartoons and be like, this is what what took down Boss Tweed. These two things basically equally.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there are a lot of times I think people think about political cartoons as coming from the political left or, you know, the liberal progressive side. And that is certainly true.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But there, you know, all kinds of newspapers have always had political cartoons and all sorts of issues have been attacked from all angles from political cartoonists over the years have been, you know, plenty of examples of both. Nass was one of those that was sort of a contradiction. There's, you know, we'll talk a little bit about immigration and political cartoons throughout history.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And he was one who kind of hit it from both sides. He would draw one, one year in 1870, criticizing anti-immigration, the know-nothing party. And that was called throwing down the ladder by which they rose. And about a year later, Had political cartoons out, you know, criticizing Irish immigrants as violent drunks taking over the country.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, no, that's a really great point that they, editorial cartoons are, like, of the moment. Sometimes, like, of the day. where they, like, they'll still make sense later that week, but they're not hidden because something already changed or moved on. And they don't, as such, it's very rare that an editorial cartoon can still, like, land the way it originally did.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Right. Yeah. And this was a time when immigration was a huge, huge issue in the United States for probably the first time. It became like a flashpoint issue that you could run an entire campaign on.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
For example, there was a cartoon from 1903 in a satirical weekly called Judge called Unrestricted Dumping Ground.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It is. And there's a lot going on in this cartoon. There's, it's color, which is, it really pops. But Uncle Sam is basically standing at the shores of the United States and And there's a bunch of immigrants swimming to the shore, but they're rats with human faces, which number one is unsettling, but number two is really offensive.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And they're being dumped out of basically, it looks almost like a mailbox or something that says the slums of Europe. And they're being dumped into New York Harbor. And Uncle Sam's just standing there watching, wondering if he can do anything about it. And then William McKinley is floating in like a cloud. The reason William McKinley was featured is because he was president.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
He was assassinated by a guy named Leo Cholgosh. In 1899 and Cholgosh born in Michigan, but he was considered a an immigrant because his parents were immigrants. So like this was the kind of stuff that was being run in papers and magazines at the time, basically saying like like immigrants are rats and like you can't let them in.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, well, and those rats also, just to further drive the point home, they had labels on these individual human rats that said, like, mafia, anarchist, socialist. So it was, you know, pretty on the nose, I guess you could say.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
There was another ad as far as the immigration front goes. Teddy Roosevelt at one point talked about hyphenated Americans being able to vote like that shouldn't happen. Irish American, German American. And this one was from Puck. magazine, which was, uh, is that American? Was that British? I thought that was British.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I think punch was British and puck was American.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Punch was British. Um, but it had a caption again, uncle Sam saying, why should I let these freaks vote when they're only half American?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, it's a really bizarre cartoon. It's tough to describe, but go look that one up. So one of the other things we said is that political cartoons sometimes also target policies, social issues. And there was a really good one that Dave turned up called From the Cradle to the Mill that really got across child labor or the need for child labor laws.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's this innocent-looking little probably five-year-old kid. I think he's holding a teddy bear still. And this dark, ghoulish spirit named Necessity.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, essentially, has come into the child's house and is taking him by the hand to lead him off to the mill for work. And it really, it gets the point across. Like, you know, this was from 1912. And if child labor was still an issue today, you could run it today. It just really just captured what the problem was.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
That means that whatever it was talking about was so historic that people decades on know what the ins and outs of it that the political cartoon is referring to. But for the most part, it's like... daily minutia of ongoing politics and government.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And if you just go back like 10 or 15 years, it's like, I forgot John Boehner even existed until I went back and looked at some of the old political cartoons. And it's so important at the time. But, you know, all these years on, it does not matter what that political cartoon was saying. At the time, it wasn't. That's a huge point about those things.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Oh, yeah. His wife, Kitty. That's right. And Dan Quayle spells potato wrong.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But, like you said, it's sort of like Greatest Hits. You can look back at some Nixon Watergate political cartoons and totally get it, and they land. But they're not always funny, and that's the whole point of this. Or not the whole point, but it's satire. It's... Satire can be super, super funny, like if you read The Onion or something like that, or a well-made satirical film or television show.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So I think we should talk about a guy named Herb Block or Herb Block was his pen name, cartoon name. And he's considered probably the most important political cartoonist of the entire 20th century. He's got three Pulitzers for cartooning alone and an additional Pulitzer for public service that he got for just excoriating Nixon over the Watergate scandal.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, I imagine if you're a political cartoonist during Watergate, you're kind of licking your chops a bit. Yeah, for sure. Or McCarthyism, like he was really around during a fraught, fraught time politically.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, he drew, just block alone, drew more than 100 cartoons about Watergate between 72 and 74. And that's something that I think bears pointing out. Political cartoonists are expected to draw a cartoon a day. Like, you didn't write an article every day. You didn't go cover something. You drew a political cartoon five days a week to run in the daily newspaper. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. And 25 of them for Saturday and Sunday. Right. And Block actually, I mean, I talked about the time that he was there. I mean, it's actually pretty vast. He was there from 46 to 2001. Yeah. So he got to cover quite a bit politically. He coined the term McCarthyism. I think we talked about that in the McCarthyism episode in a 1950 cartoon.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
uh he was definitely you know on the on the left side of the political spectrum uh because he would go after you know environmental polluters and uh the and war the immorality of war uh the government you know as a whole and they have named um since 2004 the best editorial political cartoonist is named after him the uh her block prize
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. And I went and looked to see who some of the recent candidates or winners were. And there's one that I noticed. I was looking through current political cartoons and this guy kept coming up. His name was Pedro X. Molina. And he draws for counterpoint. So he is super lefty. He was a 2024 finalist for the Herblock Prize. But his cartoons are just on point. He's
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I think probably the best working today of the younger generation. Oh, cool. One of the ones that I saw was there's an old extension cord outlet. It'll have the two outlets that you can plug into.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. It just looks old and worn and everything. And one of the outlets says Biden and the other one says Trump. And then also in the picture is an Apple charger. And that says Gen Z. They have nowhere to plug into.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And it's just there's no words aside from the names and Gen Z. And like it just, again, really gets the point across. But I like that guy's work.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, it also, instead of saying Gen Z, could have said a lot of America.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So we should finish up by talking a bit about Charlie Hebdo. As promised early on, you mentioned that France has been a hotbed for satire since the get-go. And the radical satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has been around for a long, long time, since 1960. Their original motto was mean and nasty.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But it's a different kind of humor. A lot of times satire isn't necessarily laugh out loud stuff because the point of satire usually is to influence what somebody thinks about something through, in this case, an image.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And they made, we probably would not here in the States, unless you just are sort of in the know, not known much about Charlie Hebdo, had it not been for a couple of tragic events. On Halloween Day in 2011, they published an issue number 1011, They retitled, instead of Charlie Hebdo, they retitled the issue Sharia Hebdo for Sharia law.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And it was a cover in response to the Tunisian news where an Islamist party had won parliamentary elections there. And on the cover, it featured a cartoon rendering of the Prophet Muhammad. And the caption read, 100 lashes if you do not die laughing.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
In Islam, any image of Muhammad is very much forbidden, much less a cartoon making fun of something. And violence ensued because of this.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, I think in 2012? No, that same year, 2011. So within a couple months, the offices were firebombed. No one was hurt. But in response, and I didn't know this, I thought it was just that cover, that drawing, which is, you know, like you don't do that. That's a violation of, like a huge violation of
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Islamic custom to make any kind of, like you said, picture of Muhammad, let alone making him a cartoon. But they went even further after the firebombing. And in 2012, they published more cartoons, one of which was Muhammad naked on all fours. And that actually, from what I can tell, is what triggered the murders of a bunch of the people who worked at the offices in 2015. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, it was two men stormed into the offices, murdered 12 people. This was, you know, the biggest news. There's a cat walking around outside my house right now that I do not recognize. Very interesting. Sorry, just caught me off guard. Yeah, it did. I was like, did one of my cats get out? It's like, no, it's not one of my cats. It's a bird. Yeah. Murdered 12 people.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Right. One of the explanations I saw for satire is that it uses a surface-level presentation of a point to point out that the counterpoint is actually the more sensible thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Probably not the best time to mention that during the middle of this awful, awful retelling, including the editor of of Charlie Hebdo for other cartoonists. It also went on to kill four Jewish people. And then the French police took them out.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. And so like immediately there were protests and marches in France, like millions of people across the country. And basically a meme was developed almost immediately. It was just sweet Charlie. And it means I am Charlie. And they were saying, like, I'm standing up for freedom of expression, freedom of speech. And yeah. that was pretty much the zeitgeist across all of France.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Like everyone stood up and supported Charlie Hebdo after that tragedy. And I saw, Chuck, that 10 years on, the 10-year anniversary just came and went this past January. Apparently people have changed their opinions in some cases. Like 31% of people polled agreed with the idea that Charlie Hebdo brought that on themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Whereas that same, the answer to that question would have probably been in the low single digits right after the shooting.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. I thought that was interesting. I mean, how different things can change in 10 years, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. I mean, in the wake of a tragedy like that. Yeah. I'm not saying I agree one way or the other. I just I just I think a lot of times opinions change on stuff like that over time. Yeah. For certain people.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Ten years is a long time these days. It didn't used to be. But man, oh, man, a lot can happen in 10 years. We've learned to pack it in. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So we mentioned early on that there's only 20 on-staff major newspaper cartoonists. The reason for that, as we all know, is newspapers are having a tough time. Declining subscriptions mean they don't want to have further declining subscriptions by angering readership.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
on either side of the political spectrum, because people might cancel over something like that, and they just can't afford that anymore. So people are more sensitive these days. Sadly, editors are not standing behind their cartoonists like they used to. And if they flag something, they'll pull it, and the cartoonist may quit or may be fired.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. I mean, if people complain about a political cartoon, it used to be like, hey, it's true. Now it's like, oh, sorry. And then they print a retraction and then fire the political cartoonist. That's new. That's the way that the industry is changing. But it seems to be pretty much relegated to newspapers now. And just some newspapers. Right. You know, like Mike Lukavich at the AJC.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
If I thought about that and saw it written down, I could probably figure out exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
He's one of the premier editorial cartoonists still working today for a newspaper.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Okay, I've got one for you. Alexander Pope said, "'Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.'" No, still nothing? Okay, go watch the movie Soul Plane or Brian's Song and you will know what I'm talking about with satire.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Man, he's been around for a long, long time.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. And he doesn't pull punches. And I think the AJC is behind him every single time. Yeah, that's good. So it's not like... It's going to happen, you know, no matter what newspaper you work at. It just depends on the usually the outlook of the publisher. Right. And if you offend the publisher used to be like the editors would talk them down, but the editors don't do that anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And so you can get fired. And there is a very well-known political cartoonist, another Pulitzer winner named Anne Telnaise.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And in 2019, she kind of saw the writing on the wall, and she published like a series, or not a series, it was a multi-panel cartoon that basically was an infographic explaining what political cartoonists do, the danger that they're in right now in the United States as far as like being canceled and fired, and then what the ultimate problem with that is.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And she essentially says political cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine. If we start getting fired for expressing opinions and views that are legitimate because people don't want to hear that, that is a big red flag that freedom of expression is under attack in your country. And she was saying that's basically happening right now. And she ultimately quit just earlier this year, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, she had been at The Washington Post for 17 years and quit because her editors there at The Post refused to publish one of her cartoons based only on her opinion. So it's yeah, that's kind of the state of things at The Washington Post these days.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yes. And across a lot of newspapers. Again, they're like an endangered breed. But that's specifically at newspapers. It's still a very thriving art form. And you can make a really good case that it's still around and very popular. It's just transmuted in a lot of cases to memes. Right. I'll give you an example of one I saw recently. You know, this is fine.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
The dog sitting at the table drinking coffee in a room that's on fire. I haven't seen that one. This is fine.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's a great meme. But in one panel, he's just sitting there and it says, arson is free speech now. And then the next panel, it's him just sitting there drinking the coffee in the room on fire. And he says, this is fine. And that, I mean... It's a meme. Somebody put it together probably using a meme generator.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But you can also make a case that that is, in a lot of ways, it bears a strong resemblance to political cartoons. All right. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well, since we got nothing else, that means this episode is done and it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
This one's Scrabble-centric. Before I read this email, we do have to acknowledge that we failed to mention the ultimate Simpsons reference, of course, of Quijibo. Very, very old Simpsons reference from an early episode where Bart Simpson, I think it was Bart, argued for Quijibo, which was just the letters as they appeared on his rack was a word, right? Mm-hmm. Right. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
You know, they used to use that in crying studies. That's the one thing I remember about Brian's Song was when I was a kid, I saw a news report where they're like, this new movie is so sad. And it showed people like in a room watching Brian's Song with these little tear gutters strapped to their face.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So sorry about the Quijibo. We heard from a lot of people. But this is a different email. Hey, guys. The real reason I'm writing is to tell you about the role of Scrabble in my family's history.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
My parents loved to play Scrabble, and my dad, being the kind of guy he was, made up a table to record their stats by hand using a ruler, both to make sure the lines were straight and the columns are each the same width from page to page. Ended up using five pages or so of very thin lines. He would record the date and the game that was played in the final score and my mom's final score.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Two more columns in which he would track a running total of how many games each of them had won. Besides being a perfect example of my dad, there's also an interesting thing about the dates. There are three periods when they begin to play all the time following periods for which they hardly played at all in between each my two siblings and I were born. Yeah. That's pretty funny.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
They're like, why did things drop off for two years?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Exactly. When my dad died, I inherited their Scrabble board and their record was in it. And this is one of my most precious possessions. That is from Reverend Eric.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
That's a sweet email. Thanks a lot, Reverend Eric. That was great. I can just imagine, man, making your own columns and rows with a ruler. That's dedication right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I know those dads. I'm not that dad and my dad wasn't that dad, but I've known those dads.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yep. If you want to be like Reverend Eric and send us an email that tells us how sweet your parents were, we love those kinds of things. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And I'm sure the political cartoon of the day about that had people crying and somebody said, are they watching Brian's song? And the guy says, no, they just found out Ronald Reagan was reelected governor.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Well, we also, you and I are, as we said on record many times before, grew up as adherents to Mad Magazine. And they didn't, I mean, they did political cartoons essentially. It just wasn't for a newspaper, but there was plenty of that stuff in there.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Nice point. One of the other things about political cartoons is they present an opinion. They do it in a way that's humorous, that's recognizable. You don't have to know how to read, which was for a long time the point of political cartoons. And it's presented in a way so that it takes everything you know. It makes assumptions about what you know, but usually they're pretty good at that.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And it takes everything you know and can turn it on its head, can point out the folly, the ridiculousness of usually governments, politicians, policies, that kind of stuff. But sometimes it's aimed unfairly at groups of people. The other point about it is that the actual like types of art it uses have been shown to neurologically like hit us different than say like a photograph.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, like when you draw a caricature of someone or exaggerate. Exaggerate? That was beautiful. The three-year-old, if you exaggerate something. Wait, hold on.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
That's all right. That's pretty good. Yeah, it has more of a, like neurologically more of an impact than an actual photograph of somebody doing something even ridiculous.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, it's called a supernormal stimulus or a super stimuli, which is it just hits your brain that much harder. And so the caricature, like it's just something people just figured out over time, building little by little to create like the optimal political cartoon, which apparently popped up around the 1950s.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Well, or if you go to, you know, a theme park or the streets of Paris or something and you see a caricature artist parked next to the realistic, like I'll do a realistic pencil sketch of you.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
You got like one person over there. You got 10 people in line trying to get a big old fathead version of themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, because they want to be super stimulated.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Can I amend one thing that you said? You said that they use humor. Almost always that's the case. But some of my favorite political cartoons over the years, sometimes they'll have just the really brutally gut-punchy sad ones. Yes. That are very, very effective, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, no, they definitely, it doesn't always have to be humor. You're right, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But what it always has to do is prove some kind of a point. There's never a political cartoon that's like, oh, this is just funny or something. Right. Because that's a comic strip or that's family circus.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Exactly. So I say we go way back to potentially the origin of political cartoons, which were religious in nature because back in the 16th century, when Martin Luther was trying to reform the Catholic Church, and ended up just kind of spinning off his own jam. Religion was politics. They were interchangeable. It was one and the same.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
So when he started printing woodcut cartoons that were really unflattering depictions of the Pope, and the bishops and the cardinals who aided the Pope, he was making a political statement. And so some people say that some of these prints from like way back in 1545, there's one called The Birth and Origin of the Pope, that this was essentially the first political cartoon ever printed.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Because that's another thing too. You have to have a mass medium to spread this idea And so this was shortly after the printing press was invented and almost off the bat, Martin Luther was among the people who were using it to make political statements using cartoons.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
That's right. And if you're at home saying like, I bet he did that because so many people couldn't read yet. You're exactly right. The printing press was brand new and that changed literacy for the world, basically. But right after it was invented, a lot of people still couldn't read. And so he knew that if he wanted to hit his target audience in the right way,
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
The birth and origin of the pope was a good way to do it. We'll describe a few of these that are sort of easy to picture. We're not going to get in the weeds, I think, kind of describing in detail pictures on an audio show. But this one is very simple. It was the pope and the cardinals being pooped out by a she-devil.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And then, yeah, and then nursed by other she-devils. Medusa's breastfeeding looks like a bishop in one part of this. It's really something. And that was, I think I said 1545. And then nothing happened for 200 years. And then a guy came along named William Hogarth. And those of you who really, really, really pay attention to the stuff we say might find that that name rings a bell.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And that would be because we talked about William Hogarth in our gin episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
That's right. There was a political cartoon he drew about, you know, drunks basically living at the corner of Beer Street and Jen Lane. And that was Hogarth, who's considered the grandfather of political cartoons. He was a serious painter, but then he got into making fun of rich folks in London.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yes, for sure. And he also it was a social commentary. So it was satire. It was exaggerated. That's another kind of key part of political cartoons. And it made a point about, in this case, society rather than politics. And so as a result, William Hogarth is considered the grandfather of political cartoons.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
He was not making political cartoons, but he definitely set out some of the points on the table that would later be picked up actually fairly quickly by printers, publishers and cartoonists, among whom was Benjamin Franklin, who started he ran what's considered the first American political cartoon back in 1754.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And that's it. It's the Andom edition.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. So that was only, you know, a couple of decades after Hogarth. Hogarth? Hogarth? His earliest work. So it was sort of in the same era. And as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, Benjamin Franklin ran a newspaper. Yeah. The Philadelphia Gazette. And it was a cartoon.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It was a it was a cut up rattlesnake with each section of the snake being a colony like, you know, New York had the abbreviation of the colony and it said join or die. And it was, you know, to try and rally people to unify against France in the lead up to the French and Indian War.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
and he is credited as uh even though he he probably didn't draw this thing he ran it he is credited for making the rattlesnake a popular symbol for the colonies of the united the well not united states yet the colonies yeah that's all i need to say and that's a pretty famous image that cut up snake as far as um the us is concerned um
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
But that was almost like a little sidestep for political cartoons because, again, nothing happened for a good 50 years. And then along came James Gilray. He is considered the father of political cartoons. He was drawing satirical images to lampoon and point out the folly of people in charge. In this case, King George III was his favorite target because he was British.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
He was also anti-colonial too. And so there was one very famous one that he did that depicts the prime minister at the time, William Pitt, with Napoleon carving up the world. To eat. Yeah, it's in the form of a plum pudding, also known as plum poutine. And Pitt and Napoleon are sitting at a table carving it up, just greedily eating the rest of the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
And apparently Napoleon was well aware of James Gilray because he had a pretty great quote, didn't he?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, I used to do a good Napoleon. I'm not going to try, though. He said he did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down. And if you look at this cartoon, it's it really sort of looks like what we know as a modern political editorial cartoon. It's really, really cool looking. It looks great. The art is great. But it just it sort of has that look.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, this is about editorial cartoons, a.k.a. political cartoons. They are one in the same. They usually appear traditionally in the editorial section or the opinion section of newspapers. So that's why you can call them either. And this is a profession. that appears to be dying out if you look at the number of editorial cartoonists that are, like, full-time staff at major newspapers. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It seems like one of the or probably the first person who was making these cartoons that look like what we have today.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Right. That's why Gilbray is considered the father of the whole thing. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
and he came around i think that the plum pudding in danger was the name of the one we were just talking about that was in 1805 and at the same time magazines started um being established and founded around this time that were dedicated to satire so the the form the art form of political cartoons and political satirical magazines came together at the very beginning of the 19th century not just in britain but france
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Turns out France is basically the Spears point of satire. Yeah. Did not know that, but it's the truth, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
I remember when the Charlie Hebdo stuff came out and we're going to talk about that in the act three here. But that's when I sort of learned like how, you know, astute and on point their satire had been for a long, long time. I didn't know that previously. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah. Doesn't seem like a very French thing, but I don't know. Maybe it is. I didn't either. But there is a guy from the early 19th century, I think, named Honoré Daumier. And Daumier actually got in trouble. I think he actually went to prison for his political cartoons, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Yeah, in the 1830s, the French government sort of relaxed their laws against censorship, and so he had a little bit more leeway, I guess, to operate. And initially, in 1831, he was threatened with a 6,000-franc fine in 1831. I don't know what the conversion is, but that's got to be a lot of dough.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Let's just say that. I almost got really fancy for a second, but I'm just going to say they were internal into each town, growing and growing and growing, connecting subscribers. But each town was kind of like its own isolated island of telephony.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, but I say we take a break, leave this as a cliffhanger, and when we come back, we'll say whether or not they were eventually able to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Okay, so when they finally did start connecting towns, they would use switch ports, right? So your town would be connected to another town by a switch port. They used trunk lines. These were like these longer, stronger lines that people would use to connect one town to another. And let's say that you were in Topeka and you wanted to talk to Tacoma, Washington. Okay. To great T-towns? Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Boy, this is going terribly. But I think it really illustrates how kludgy the whole thing was. And then it would go from Muncie slash Munchie to Garee, Indiana. Okay. And then to, I don't know, onwards and upwards until finally switchboard after switchboard after switchboard after switchboard, town to town to town.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. First, I want to give a shout out. If you ever find yourself in the town of Maitland, Florida, go to the Maitland, I think, well, it's the telephone museum. There's probably not more than one telephone museum in Maitland, even though I can't remember the name of it. Just ask somebody for directions there and they will tell you or ask your app. Regardless, it's really cute.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It would finally connect all the way through all these towns from switchboard to switchboard, you to your friend in Tacoma who wasn't even home.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You know, for that call, they brought Alexander Graham Bell out of retirement because he'd left a super big, fat, rich man by this time and had him talk to Watson. Remember, the first phone call was room to room between him and Watson. He said, Watson, come here. I need you. And on this huge, monumental, historical phone call from New York to San Francisco, Bell said, Watson, come here.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I need you again. And Watson said, I will, but it's going to take me a week to get there.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, they had detectives that would go bust down doors and confiscate bogus phones, which were phones that weren't part of the Bell network, which again held a patent. Then even after the patent expired, they would just sue anybody and everybody. They would bribe officials to keep new phone companies from being allowed to develop phones. or found themselves. It was really ruthless.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And one of the reasons it was ruthless is because JP Morgan by this time was the head of either AT&T or Bell's board of directors. And Bell eventually bought AT&T And just consolidated, consolidated, consolidated.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They would either, following JP Morgan's typical example, they would either buy up the competition or crush them out of existence if the competition didn't want to sell at AT&T Bell's price. So this is just how it was like that. I don't remember what year the U.S. government finally stepped in and broke up Bell. into smaller versions of itself.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But it was a monopoly, a government-sanctioned monopoly for decades. And in some ways, this was good because in other cases where local phone companies were allowed to compete, it was super kludgy. Sometimes you had to subscribe to two different companies to be able to call two different friends, depending on who they were subscribed to. The rates were all over the place.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It's not the biggest museum you'll ever find, but it's a very dedicated museum.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
There was very little regulation. So having this monopoly was good in some ways, but in others, monopolies typically overall are not good for the health of an economy.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, I think we should talk about phone numbers.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, you'd love this. There's a bank of wall telephones from the 70s, probably. And each one's a different color. It's very pretty. Oh, my God. Yeah, you would like this place, Chuck. It reminded me that something that was just such an integral part of our life is a completely obsolete, outdated, antique technology. There's basically no reason for it to exist any longer.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Right. And the reason why, like if you have four numbers, you can accommodate up to 10,000 subscribers. But as you add more and more numbers or even letters, then you can add more and more people. And so I think that the numbers or the letters eventually or initially changed. We're like that went to this particular switchboard station.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And that was this one group of people in town whose connections were all coming out of this one station. So if you ask for Klondike 5555, it took you to this one switchboard. And then that switchboard operator would find subscriber 5555 and connect it. And the reason also I keep going to Klondike 5 is because that's the original 555 fake number in movies.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Like if you watch movies, they ask for Klondike 5 all the time. Like that's the phone number because apparently the phone company set aside the 555 exchange for use by movies.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, really? Did you tell them to go to hell?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So did you or did you not tell them to go to hell with their script?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Okay. There's a big difference. So to get a little further to wrap that up, so those letters were eventually overtaken by numbers because, again, I don't even know if I said it and we edited it out, but if you look at an old phone, I think even a new phone still. You said it. Okay. The numbers are associated with specific letters.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So two is associated with ABC, three is associated with DEF and so on. So if it was Klondike, that's KL, both of those are on the five. So eventually it just became 555, whatever the rest of the thing is. And when we went to all numbers, that was a big step in the direction of eventually phasing out switchboard operators. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. But area codes weren't around for a while. I think it was.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, I don't remember exactly when it was, but I'm looking. That's why I'm still kind of talking a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, no, no. You're right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There was just an exchange. It wasn't. Yes, you're right. Mine was 382-9040. All right. Sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And it may not, as far as I know.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That would be pretty awesome. What would be through the portal? Either gnomes or robots. It's got to be one of the two. Really earthy or really futuristic? Adam Curry? Wait, wait. Which one?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I think you still have to have it to connect some home alarm systems maybe, but that's the only application I know of anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I feel like we went long before the first break. So let's keep going.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, which is even adjusted for inflation. That's only $1.50 an hour today. Yeah. Pretty meager. But she was a pioneer. And probably one of the reasons why she kept her job was eventually it had a lot of prestige to it. It was one of the more respected jobs a woman can have, but it was also one of the very few jobs a woman could have.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So women proved to be a fairly docile workforce because they had so few choices, other choices for work. And so they were exploited to the bone as phone operators, sadly, as it turned out.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, this is to get a job as a switchboard operator.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I mean, I just don't think that there's any reason for them to exist anymore. I'm sure I'm wrong, but that's the best I can come up with is home alarm systems.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You're required to speak the King's English and not in a cockney way or a northern way. Yeah. And so women would accept these positions. Again, these were coveted positions. In some cases, they paid them and gave them financial freedom. They were looked upon with respect by their community.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
To make it as an operator, even be hired as an operator, it told the rest of society, this one's a good egg because we only hire the best eggs. One of the things, though, like you said, was that there were really strict rules on their behavior, how they comported themselves when speaking to customers, and then just how they even sat and positioned themselves at their switchboard.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
There's a 1910 booklet that the Bell Company wrote that Kyle found where they were saying, like, do not answer these calls with hello. They said, would you rush into an office or up to the door of a residence and blurt out, hello, hello, who am I talking to? When they put it like that, it's actually a reasonable thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But what's funny also is there was a big debate initially when phones were invented between whether the proper way to answer a call was hello or hoi hoi. And Alexander Graham Bell was a hoi hoi boy. And Thomas Edison, who was his big rival in founding phone companies, he was a hello guy. And that's why you'll hear Mr. Burns say hoi hoi when he answers the phone.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It's just going to show how ridiculously old he is.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
To keep this amazing network of technology still around?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Did you write it in nail polish?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, okay. I never had a phone that had any feature like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I thought you actually wrote it on the screen.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So, oh, there were a couple of things that I saw that were really harsh. There was an interview that I found, I think, American Experience. They did a documentary on the telephone. And they were interviewing like some of these original operators. And one of them was like, so they used Taylorism. So there was like five supervisors to every single like switchboard operator.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And they would just hover over you like a hawk. They would constantly be like, come on, girls, faster, faster, that kind of stuff. And this woman was like, if you even lifted your head up from your switchboard, not even looked around, not even talked, like you just lifted your head up, four supervisors would be on you being like, what do you need? What's going on?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
There was another one that I think it was on history.com. They were writing about telephone operators. And they quoted from a woman who was like one of the original ones who said, I had to work 10 unpaid hours as punishment for a single giggle. Like that's how just regulated the women operators were for decades and decades. That was just part of the job.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I didn't, but I worked for another company. I have a story about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, they could not do that. They would get in trouble and possibly fired for that kind of stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So actually, one of the cool things is they figured out that, OK, wait, there's thousands of us in this workforce. Let's form a union. And they were told, no, they can't form a union. So they said, OK, we're going on strike. And I think in 1919, New England telephone operators walked out and just crippled the phone network for basically half of New England.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And the company was very quick to be like, OK, what did you say you wanted to begin? Yeah, exactly. So that was pretty cool. But for the most part, they were treated rather poorly.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Or does this shirt make me look fat?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They were. And there were like five things you could say to a customer, no matter what they said to you, no matter how abusive they were, anything like that. You could say like, thank you or something like that. Saffron. Yeah, right. That was the safe word.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
The supervisor would come over and be like, hey, hey, what are you saying?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Are you allowed to leave if not say saffron?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That's right. There goes the flower. Wireless is better, I know. I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think there is some real value. It's not pointless to look at the telephone system that was created over the decades in the 20th century and just be impressed. Like it wasn't a marvelous technology and it did some amazing stuff while it was around. It's just we've moved on technology wise.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, they would pass them along. I don't know if they were making up the orders themselves. Do you think anybody would have thought that? I did.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, but it was still hilarious to hear you say it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I know. That was very cool. It's sad that it took that long, but at least they finally got there. Yeah. I'm sorry. I keep imagining a whole cadre of operators just making up orders for bombing. This lady just said to storm the beach. It's just chaos.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Okay, Chuck, so I think I said before that once they started going to all numeric, well, numbers, that was like a huge first step toward automating the system and eventually phasing out human operators. And one of the reasons why is because you can take numbers and you can quantify them essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And that's what those original phones, the rotary phones, then apparently the fake keypad phones would do when you dialed a number. your finger would eventually hit a stop. For like a three, the stop was closer. For the zero, the stop was an eternity away. Because once you hit the stop, the dial would go back to the original position.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And as it did, it would put out, you know, three impulses, say, three electrical impulses when you dial the three. And what that did was it told the automated switches that were eventually invented to start paying attention and start dialing some numbers here because I just sent some electrical impulses.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
What did I say? Impulses? Did I? Yeah. It's a little late in the day, and my brain is mush from all the engineering week we've been doing.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, hey, you got me back for the operators giving directions.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You think it was the dial up like when you.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. I don't know if I knew that either, though. It seems new to me. So if I did explain it before, it didn't stick.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
One thing I do think we talked about in the phone freaking episode was the invention of the Strouger switch, which was invented by an undertaker named Almond Brown Strouger. And the reason that he came like an undertaker in Kansas City invented the automated phone switchboard, because as legend has it, he was losing business to a rival undertaker whose wife was the town operator.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So when people call up and said, undertaker, please, she would just route him to her husband's business and leave Stroud's business out. And he's like, you know what? I want to get rid of the operator. So he went and invented one of the more sophisticated pieces of technology that was around at the time. And this is in 1890 that he came up with the first automated switch. And it is impressive.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I do, actually. It's really fascinating.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
All right. So let's say that you dialed that three, right? That first number, those three impulses, I think in slang it's just called pulses.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They went down the line and they hit the first switch and they told the first switch, okay, we're going to three. And so that would narrow down the number of subscribers to this telephone switchboard whose number started with three. Oh, yeah. And then the next number would come in, five.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Right? Yeah. Five impulses of electricity would come to the second switch and it would tell that switch, OK, now we're just trying to get to the people whose first two numbers are three, five and so on and so on until finally all eight, no, yeah, seven numbers. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
were dialed, and so it led to the only person whose phone line could possibly be connected to this specific circuit of seven numbers, and then it would connect the call from the caller to the callee. Wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really amazing. This guy came up with this in 1890.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I don't know either. But that's a great point.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But that meant that there were humans who were walking around knowing how to connect Topeka to Tacoma. They knew the combination of switches to connect or the number of levers to pull, the number of like wishes to make. I don't know. So cool. And they would they knew how to connect a call like that and not just to Topeka to Tacoma, like whatever city to whatever city. They just knew how to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And I mean, that's impressive. Yeah, that's just an overlooked part of history that there were people walking around who knew how to do these complex algorithms, basically. And they were all different for depending on what city was calling what city. So that kept operators around for much longer than they would have been had long distance not existed because they got phased out at the local level.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But for long distance calling, they were just too valuable to get rid of at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, number one, there's no landlines. There's just, you get like an alarm, somebody's house alarm, I think maybe. Yeah. And then number two, there's no zero anymore. Gen Z got rid of it. All right. Good deal. So I think by the 70s, the whole thing was digitized. There was no corded switchboards any longer. But there were some like pockets of switchboards that were still around, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That held on long beyond the time it was necessary. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Give me Klondike 5, 6,000. Exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
In Kerman, and what was sweet was I saw one of the reasons that the owner of the company held on to human operators for so long was because there were so many migrants who lived in town that the phone operator was bilingual and could help connect calls between people who spoke two different languages.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, I'm serious. That's what they said at the company picnic. That's our specialty.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I mean, I don't know why you're getting the impression that I don't believe you. I believe what you're saying.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I'm still thinking about the operators telling everybody to bomb Rouen or something. You got anything else?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Big thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one. It was very technical and complicated. And since I said technical and complicated, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Very nice. Appreciate that big time. Who was it?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Thank you very much, Karen. I'm just going to call him Karen. Sure. If you want to get in touch with us like Karen did and give us a great story that kind of sums up, ties up, circles up a story that we talked about, we love that kind of thing, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. Not dots and dashes, but hey's and how are you's. Or ahoy's. Yeah, right. So he did this in 1876, right? He set out to figure out the telegraph clogging and invented the phone pretty quickly. The next year he founded Bell Telephone Company. And the first permanent telephone wires were in Boston, I think that same year. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So we had telephone service set up within a year of him inventing the telephone. One of the other things, too, is he helped kind of spread telephone technology by giving lectures that people would come see and then go off and like build their own versions that would work.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But initially, when you were talking to somebody on a telephone, your telephone was physically connected to their telephone, which made a lot of sense initially. But if you want to talk to more than one friend in town... You need another wire to connect your phone to somebody else's telephone and so on and so forth.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And if you just kind of follow that logical path, you very quickly realize like, man, we're going to need a lot of wires to connect one person to everybody else and everybody else to that one person. It's just that's the definition of exponential growth. And so they figured out they needed a different way rather than connecting each telephone physically.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And that's where they came up with the concept of the switchboard. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yes. One thing really quick, too, when some of these first commercial switchboards popped up in towns like the one in New Haven that I guess George Coy was the inventor of, they would publish phone books. And the first phone books would be like one page with like 50 people's names on. Because when you called, you would call. And your call would be connected by an operator.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So you'd pick up your phone, and the only person it would go to is the operator or switchboard. And you would say, I want to talk to Chuck Bryant, please. And the operator would look up where your jack was that went to your house. and then now connected the call, right? So they would plug my phone cord into your phone jack and connect our call.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But first, they would plug in themselves to you and say, Josh Clark calling for Charles Bryant. And you would say, tell him I'm in the shower. And they would plug back into mine and be like, he's in the shower. He can't talk right now. And I would say, tell him that I know he's not in the shower and hang up angrily. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But first they spend 10 minutes going down each jack like Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Right. Exactly. And one of the other things about a central switchboard, too, is there's a phone company employee connecting calls. And so now you can track things more easily and hence bill people more accurately, too. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I'm sure there's some listeners like, I didn't have a phone when I was a kid. Well, maybe. So as more and more people had phones, more and more jacks were required in switchboards. So you're getting bigger switchboards, more switchboards. It became kind of a mess in and of itself, as we'll see. That was known as the switchboard problem, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But then finally they figured out, okay, there's a few tweaks we can do here that are going to allow us to support this growth. Because the phone companies weren't like, whoa, we're good at 10,000 subscribers. Let's just hold here. They wanted everybody to have a phone so they could bill everybody for using those phones.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And also America or the United States or the world, I think, was like, we really want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to people. It was a huge challenge. enormous technology that completely changed how humans interact with one another. So everybody wanted a phone. Phone company wanted to give people phones.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
The big sticking point was how you can connect that many people in an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after switchboard after switchboard.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Football phone from Sports Illustrated.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, I think you got it. Provider. Provider.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Internet service provider, ISP. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, I remember Yumi has a story from when she was a kid of going to the phone store with her dad and renting a princess phone. I remember it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It is weird. It's just weird to think of. But like you said, that was a way for them to control revenue even more. And also, I think it made it more available to more people because I think even into the 60s, the 70s, phones were still kind of expensive to make. And so they were expensive to buy. So you could lease them. But I think ultimately it was it was really the phone companies.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And they were able to get away from this, as we'll see, because for years and years and years, there was essentially a monopoly on the phone in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Ring, ring. There's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Right. Yeah. So the A person, the person at the A board would be like, oh, yeah, Josh is on B board 72, but Chuck is on B board three. So I need I need to be the one that connects B board 72 and B board three for this call. These are human beings doing this and expected to do it really fast, too, as we'll see.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
What's the number for dominoes?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. And the current in the line was a huge thing, too. Not only would it light up the little light above your jack showing the operator like, oh, this guy's trying to call right now. But it also allowed for telephones to carry a little bit of a current, which was how the voice was broadcast anyway. But it was one more thing that they controlled.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They powered everything, which made the whole thing more efficient. Rather than having a bunch of batteries out by the lines, there was a central group of batteries and power generation that came from the main office too. So when you put all this stuff together, they got really good at analyzing traffic too to kind of put resources together. where it needed in any given time.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You put all this together for the next four or five decades, the phone system just kept expanding and expanding and expanding. But there was always a frontier. These were individual cities, individual towns. And if the town or the city was close enough to another town or city, They would probably be able to connect. But for the most part, these phone systems are growing intra, well, internally.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. He keeps mentioning fish and chips every, like, few paragraphs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
He put them all into a collection that he attributed to Mother Goose. So I couldn't find definitively that he invented Mother Goose, but he certainly made Mother Goose a star.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, well, we should probably say that the reason why there's not a lot of people that you've heard of today because they stopped adding bones in 1860. They said that's enough. This is a little nuts. Somebody thought of this like almost 100 years ago. They were clearly insane. Paris went along with it. Let's just pretend like it was OK, but just stop doing it any further.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I looked to see if he ever went and visited the catacombs, and I could not find that he ever did. So let's just say he didn't.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. So when you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. And actually, based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So, Chuck, there's been at the catacombs a lot of bone deposits, bone stacking, that kind of stuff. But that, I think we said at the outset, that takes up just a really small amount of all of the tunnels that are under Paris. They've done some other really fascinating stuff. Dozens and dozens of different interesting, really creative, inventive things with these tunnels, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. I don't remember mentioning that in our Amaro episode, but we definitely talked about chartreuse.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, which is about 15 and a half degrees Celsius for our French friends.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Exactly. One of the things that made it so appealing in addition to being able to keep it at like a constant cave temperature, cave age to anything is pretty great typically. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Um, this is also real estate in the heart of Paris that, you know, you can use some steps and go up street side and all of a sudden you're right there at your customers without having to pay the incredibly high price of real estate in Paris topside.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I recommend it. Have you ever been to the Moulin Rouge?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. For some reason, I'm going to have to ask you never to use the word fruit and mushroom near each other again. I find it troubling for some reason. Really? Yeah. Mushrooms fruiting is, I don't like that at all. That's really funny. Yeah. All right. But I'm serious though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay. Thank you. Although you do owe me about seven or eight mentions for that oyster stew.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay. So the Moulin Rouge is generally topless dance numbers typically, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, good. Oh yeah, that's right. You should tell everybody you're finally feeling good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Congrats. So let's see. What else, Chuck? Oh, I was totally joking when I said there's been hundreds of creative uses. There's been basically three, and two of them are technically the same, which is brewing alcohol.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Brewing alcohol and brewing alcohol, depending on which kind of alcohol, beer or chartreuse. That's it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Did you notice that when you're at the Moulin Rouge, boobs just, there were so many boobs everywhere that they just totally lost all context and meaning?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, until the 50s. And in some cases, even decades after that, there were a lot of buildings in Paris who had doors, sometimes forgotten doors in their cellars or basements that led directly to the catacombs or the underground tunnels in Paris. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So it was kind of easy to get down there for a very long time. It's actually really recent that it's now very hard to get into the off-limits parts. But as we'll see, that doesn't actually deter anybody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Can't you just see them in like adjoining tunnels but not knowing that the other one's there?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, actually, to tell you the truth, I was going to translate the dollar that you could make off of a cow in our Tragedy of the Commons episode. Euros and stuff like that, but we never got around to it. That's funny. I can also tell you it's 0.8 pounds to the dollar today as well. But $1.60 Australian dollars to the dollar.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But I'll bet even 12-year-old Chuck was like yawning by the end of it, right? Because there's just so many boobs everywhere that they're just, it doesn't mean anything anymore. The catacombs are the Moulin Rouge of human bones, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Is it 20 now? I thought it was like 10 last time we were there. I think it's 20. Am I just wrong? It was 20 back then? Like last year?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
How long does the tour take, Josh? You went through it. An hour. I don't remember it taking an hour more or less. It's weird because when you're in the catacombs, you're out of time. Like there is no light whatsoever reaching you. The only light in there is electric. And apparently that's only been around since the 70s. Before that, they gave you a candle and said good luck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But the light that is in there is almost – it makes it even eerier because it's sodium light. So it's got a – kind of an orangish-yellowish cast to it. Oh, yeah. It's just a weird place to be. So I believe that it's an hour, but I have no recollection of how long it took.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. Yes, there is. Okay. Like 500 steps or something like that. So, yeah, you go down like a spiral staircase and there's multiple stairs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It does. I don't remember it, but I looked up a picture and a little bit on that. The guy who carved that was an inmate at this prison for years and redid it from memory, carved into the stone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And he actually died there from a landslide or a rock in or something like that. I can't remember what it's called. While he was building some steps to get to it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
He dedicated his life to that thing. That's very sad. Yeah. Yeah, but appropriate for the catacombs, if you think about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, I also saw that she helped Theseus get out of the labyrinth by leaving a thread for him to follow back after he slew the Minotaur.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I don't remember it either. Okay. It's supposedly on the ceiling. I think it's just a black line.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I don't. It's weird. Like I have pictures of it and I remember the thing with Mila. But like a lot of these pictures that I went and looked at online, I'm like, I don't remember seeing that at all. I don't think I was drunk. I'm pretty sure I was fairly sober. I think I just my my episodic memory is shut. Holy heck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I do. I guess they made more of an impression on me than I remembered. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So, OK, that might that may be why I don't remember some of these.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I guess I'm just hey, man, I'm just grasping at straws here. Help me out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That was one of the coolest things about that movie, that backstory that the crazy, amazing, rich hotel slid into the ocean and now that's where they lived and there were old chandeliers kind of hanging out. I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. Super cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I did not look that one up, but there are... Let me give you a couple other ones. There was a group called the Mexican de la Perforation. Let's just say it like that. They overtook one of the caves beneath the Palais de Chalot and set up a movie theater there with a bar and room for 20 people to watch a movie, and I did not find what movie they showed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, I saw that was a subgroup of UX called the Untergunter. And they were the ones that actually did the clock. UX is almost like an umbrella group.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Right, exactly. And then UX also is like an acronym for urban explorer, too, which these people also are. So they kind of almost made a play on slang, which is really something. Oh, okay.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, they played Chopin's Funeral March. And I was like, I'm not familiar with that one. It's Darth Vader's theme.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It's Darth Vader's. It's not possible that John Williams just coincidentally came up with that as Darth Vader's theme. Yeah, it's like an adaptation of the funeral march.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It's got to be. I've never heard that before, though. And I know everything there is about Star Wars. Just try me. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Human bones. Yeah. That'd be the right answer. Choice A. What would be the other choices?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. And I say we take another break and we'll come back and find out. Do people find their way in if they want to? After this, let's do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay. How long does that take? I don't know, but it's changed since we were there. Hours. I remember it taking hours. It used to actually test IQ and now it just tests like retention.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. It is a special detachment of the gendarmes that their whole thing is catching people down in the tunnels. And from what I read, that if you're a true cataphile, and I guess there was an article in, I think, 2015 or something like that, that estimated there's around 100 genuine cataphiles, the cataflicks are probably going to leave you alone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
At the very least, just maybe give you a warning or something like that. If you're a tourist in the sense of like the Fight Club support group tourist, then you're probably going to get that 60 euro fine because you really, as far as the cataflicks are concerned, you have no business being down there. It's dangerous. You got no respect for tradition like the actual cataphiles do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And something else I read, Chuck, you're actually trespassing on private property. Because if you buy a piece of real estate in Paris, your ownership extends to whatever's below it in the underground. Wow. That sounds kind of cool until your house caves in and the city's like, it's your property, top to bottom. So good luck with that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And they actually at City Hall make that sound when you come in to ask them for help.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, no, no. And it kind of does kind of give you a sense that it's not considered like the crime of the century in Paris. But at the same time, there's a special police detachment to catch people doing that. So there's almost mixed messages with that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Chat is C-H-A-T, that's cat. Oh, nice. Andiers is flaps, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. One of the most famous uses of the Paris Underground came in The Phantom of the Opera. And I'm not sure if it was in the original novel, although it probably was. But I certainly know that in the stage play or the musical, that's where the Phantom lives. But more the point, there's supposedly like an underground lake there that the Phantom like rose his gondola on, right? Yeah. Cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
There actually is an underground reservoir under the Paris Opera House. It's not an urban legend that Gaston Theroux made up. Wow. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the two. When they were building the opera house to keep the foundation from just filling up with water over and over again while they were building it, they built a reservoir to impound the water in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And so it's like 12 feet deep by almost, I think, like 60 yards, 60 meters long. Hey. Little reservoir that you could conceivably sail a gondola on if you were the kind of person to live underground.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I don't know. Give me a break, man. Okay. Well, what about the evaporation? Right. But I mean, so it definitely has to be constantly replaced because they had to build this reservoir to hold the water that was always trickling in. But yeah, it makes sense. Why wouldn't it overflow once in a while?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Pretty cool. I was looking at screenshots of that. It's pretty neat. Did you play that one?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Are they like jump scares or do they just create like a sense of ongoing dread?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Alan Wake too, everybody. Like Alan Wake, like somebody's name? Yeah. The second or the sequel? The sequel. Okay. It would be Alan Wake Jr., I think, probably. I guess so. Don't call me Jr. Henry Ford II was not a junior. Yeah, because who wants to be called junior? I don't know. I'd go with JR if I was a junior. Oh, totally. Call me JR. What does it stand for? It stands for junior.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It would be fun. I have one more story about the catacombs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
What's cool is because of that 18-minute exposure time, any of the photographs of workers working in the catacombs are actually dummies as stand-ins. Oh, that makes sense. It makes it even a little creepier, too, if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So when we went, I've only been once, and it was a few years back, but we went with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and our niece, the very famous Mila, who's been in a bunch of movies. She played young Mary in the movie Mary that came out on Netflix this past Christmas. Did you know that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I have one more thing for you about dummies in underground places. There's an awesome, one of the great, I'm sure I've talked about before, one of the greatest tourist attractions I've ever been to in my life was in Budapest. There's something called the Hospital in the Rock.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And I think it was maybe World War II, maybe Cold War, but it was a hospital that they dug out of a cave system on like a stone hill in Budapest. And it's a hospital. It's got like that white, creepy subway tile. Like there's gurneys everywhere still. And it was like just this emergency hospital in case the town ever got bombed or whatever. And they have dummies everywhere, mannequins.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And that just just chefs kisses it for me. Like it makes it so scary, even though they're not trying to make it scary. It just really is. I think if you have dummies in your tourist attraction, you've just taken it to another level. Like put dummies in your tourist attraction. Don't just leave it for people to use their dumb imaginations.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Like give them some dummies dressed up and it'll really make it. You'll be rolling in the dough after that, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But if you ever go to Budapest, you have to go to the hospital in The Rock. It's amazing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I think I asked you if she did or not, and I don't know if she did.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It definitely seems like it would have been up her alley, though, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, apparently in 2017, some thieves stole over a quarter of a million dollars worth of wine that was cooling in a cave. I guess belonged to some winery.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, you don't want to do that. I mean, just not just for the illegality. That's really disrespectful.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. You can put a little emphasis on the T at the end there. Aspert? I think so. Maybe that's a little too much, but somewhere in between those two.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, they do that a lot. That's how they get you. Exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, we were off. So I didn't get a chance to. But it's definitely worth watching. It's like a pretty religious movie. I mean, it's about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Oh, Mary Mary. Yeah, yeah, that Mary. You're like, oh, Mary Mary, sure. And it is fascinating. Like, actually, my brother-in-law also was a producer on it, too. And they it has like action. It has like it's a thriller.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Hey everybody, it's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It was not at all creepy. It's not presented to be creepy either. It's just, it is what it is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
You got anything else about the catacombs? Nope. It's on the list. Yep. You should go. You'll enjoy it. And don't forget the hospital and the rock, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Since Chuck said right, of course, that means it's time for a listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine. Oh, yeah. Can you believe we didn't mention Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine in the entire episode?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I think both of us thought that we had because Livia clearly included him in the article as mentioned. I think we just passed over him and didn't talk about him, which is just sad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike. I mean, criticism from Caesar. That's pretty awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, if you want to be like Mike and just completely devastate us in something we said and just show how utterly wrong we were, we'd love to hear that stuff, especially if you're an historian, semi-pro or otherwise. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It has like a really evil villain played by Anthony Hopkins. Like it's just a really good movie that you'll watch from beginning to end and be like, this is pretty good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, anyway, back to my story. So little Mila, she must have been five-ish at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
She went to the cat that comes with us, right? So she's walking around this ossuary with bones and human skulls everywhere. And Yumi or I asked her, like, are you scared right now? And she said, I would be. Now they're like boobs. Right. She said, I would be if these were real. We just looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes and we're like, well, let's look over here now. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It was very adorable. What's funny is, the irony of the whole thing, is this is the same kid at about the same age who was scared to death on the movie ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, but is standing there in an ossuary of millions of bones, human bones and skulls, and is like, meh.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So those are all my stories about the catacombs. I figure we should probably start talking about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Right, right. But you have no idea who's who. Like one bone doesn't belong to another bone. No idea whose skull is who. It's crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, something like 32 square kilometers of tunnels, which to put in American terms is like a lot of bananas.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Ten times the size of Central Park apparently is underneath Paris. Yeah. I think it's 300 kilometers of tunnels. Isn't that just nuts? Yeah. It's a lot. But I mean, if you think about it, if you mine an area, a small, relatively small area for a couple thousand years, you're going to make some headway eventually. And that's what they did. The key is this, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Originally, these quarries were sensibly well outside of the city of Paris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But we're talking about a very, very tiny original city of Paris that eventually grew and grew and grew. And over time, Paris overtook these old quarries that in most cases were no longer used or mined any longer. So the city built itself over abandoned mines that people had just plum forgotten about.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, yes, please. The Inspection Générale des Carrières.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So carrières is French for careers. And another word for career is a path or tunnel. So this was the commission overseeing mines and mine shafts in Paris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, and like you said, there was a body problem. I think you kind of touched on it a second ago where there was a general sense of disease coming from these putrefying bodies that were just piling up in the cemeteries. But structurally speaking also, so like I guess at the time in France, they would bury you with a bunch of other people who died at the same time in a group pit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
let you decompose. After five years, they would bury you up and then they would just deposit your bones in an ossuary. They were like, here's a bunch of bones. Let's move on to the next group of people and bury them for five years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So many people's bones built up over the years that neighborhoods built near this, their cellars would collapse in and bones would just come out because of the pressure put on these huge piles of bones that were building up. So there was a huge problem with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But I also read that that was a bit of like a cover story, that they were really interested, the government of Paris was interested in reclaiming some really great real estate now. And so they did this, whether people liked it or not, and they actually went into these cemeteries and moved the bones under the cover of night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I think so. Oh, man. Thank you for gently correcting me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I sound like a six-year-old kid trying to pronounce it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. So just to be clear, when they moved the bones from the graveyard to these abandoned mine shafts, they would just go up to a hole in the ground and dump bones into the mine shaft. And they would just pile up where they fell at the bottom of the mine shaft. That's how they were transferred.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And like you said, finally, one of the inspectors, a quarry inspector named Louis-Étienne-Héricard de Toury. Pretty sure I said that right. Nice. He said, like you said, let's have some fun. So he got busy with his quarry men stacking bones into these now famous configurations of tibias and fibias and finger bones and thigh bones and neck bones and then head bones finally.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
All of them with their eye sockets facing out. They built walls throughout these whole catacombs that had been designated an ossuary Or in French, an ossuary.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Isn't that what it is in that old dry bone song? Isn't that what they call it?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And then everybody just stops singing and goes home. Yeah, yeah. The skull.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, you're right. I was going to say et, but there'd be an extra T-E, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we are going deep underneath the city of Paris, city of lights, city too busy to sleep because it eats big apples. In this episode of Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That is not true. There's plenty of places for jokes here.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Do you remember we did one on comas and we had jokes? So come on, we can do this.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. And we should say that most of this migration and most of the migrants are going to be coming from or going moving within what's called the global south.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And you don't use the equator as the dividing line for the global south. For example, Australia and New Zealand squarely in the southern hemisphere, but they're not considered global south. It's a distinction between the developed and the developing world. So you have Latin America, Africa, India is usually included, China is included, and Southeast Asia.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
So we're talking climate migration, and it's a really interesting topic. This was your idea, actually. And I tip my hat to you. Thank you. And I'm just joking. I'm not wearing a hat. See, another joke. So...
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And these countries, ironically, if you accept China and India, most of these countries have put out the least amount of emissions that triggered climate change. And yet they're the most vulnerable to climate change in large part because they're developing. And if you're a developing country, you're probably still really reliant on agriculture.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
You're reliant on things like timber and other natural resources. And those are the things that are getting impacted first, right off the bat. And so if your economy is based on agriculture and there's a drought that covers your entire nation, your economy is in big trouble and your people are probably going to have to move.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, there's a lot of examples of modern slavery, forced labor in the UAE and other countries, very wealthy Gulf states. And that is a good example of climate migrants, but really any kind of migrant being taken advantage of. And it's something that definitely has to be paid attention to. On the other hand, there are studies that say, OK, this actually might be good.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Like, yes, we need to make sure that the receiving countries are not exploiting the climate migrants or any migrants. But the pressure that could be relieved from their home country if they're moving to more developed or wealthier countries that are more set up with infrastructure and social structure to absorb them. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
The thing that surprised me, so climate migration, we should just tell people off the bat, is where people have to move somewhere else because extreme weather, droughts, basically anything, extreme temperatures, anything that has to do with climate change ruining where they live. That's climate migration.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That actually could be a plus because all of a sudden the population is not swollen in an urban center where it's really hot and you're around people from an ethnic group that your ethnic group has hated for a thousand years. Like moving some of these people out to other countries could actually be a relief valve that could keep social upheaval from happening.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. Like, why not add the sun? You can be fleeing the sun. Yeah. And we'll consider you a refugee from now on.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Right. You just go down in your basement, right, and turn tasty. I do. Yeah. So, yes, there are, like, I guess – there's structure, there's like global structure that can be applied to climate migrants and climate refugees. It's just that's not necessarily happening right now. But it wouldn't take much, I think, is what we're saying, right? To just kind of expand the existing definitions.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That's really surprising. Did you follow up with Jewel of the Nile? No.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. The sun can do that. Yeah. So one of the things that a lot of these nations that are going to be most affected are saying is like, hey, we appreciate you guys thinking about this, but we don't really want to move.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
So is there like a version of this where we can stay and you wealthy countries who kind of got us into this mess in the first place can maybe help fund some of the mitigation efforts that we're trying to put in place? And so far, the wealthy countries are like, well, I can't hear you. The connection's breaking up. But that may change as we get a little further down the road. Who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But there are some governments that are like kind of starting to plan because they're like, this is not 2050 for us. This is like 2030 that we're having to worry about. And in some places, it's already started happening, like Kiribati. is a Pacific Island nation. It's 32 nations, about 130,000 people. And at best, it's just about at sea level.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
No, we did a whole episode on plant migration that was due to climate too. So this is, yes, that was a good catch. This is human specific. And one of the things that struck me about this is there's not a lot of like solid agreement on exactly how bad things are going to be and exactly how far people are going to have to move.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And when sea level is rising, Kiribati is going under the sea. And apparently sea level is rising about four times faster than other parts of the world.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
For sure. So their government was like, OK, we have to figure out how to move people and we have to figure out how to do it right. And they started looking at Fiji, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I could see Mau Mau, um, basically running on this platform because I'm guessing 130,000 people in a 32 island spread is Kiribati. Um, like I'm guessing moving the entire country to Fiji is probably top of the mind of the voters there. So I'm guessing that Mau Mau or Mau Mau, um, ran on a platform against moving and was like, no, we're going to figure out how to stay here.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
We're going to build seawalls. We're going to cross our fingers. We're going to use fairy dust. Who knows what they were running on, but they won because people don't want to move if they don't have to. If there's a chance of them staying where they lived, where their families have lived, they want to stay typically. That's what people who study climate migrants are finding.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Well, they tried to. They created a new visa specifically for residents of places like Kiribati who are like, we need to get out now. And New Zealand very kindly was like, you guys can come live here. We're going to make it as easy as possible on you. And the people of Kiribati just gave them crickets back.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
In New Zealand, within six months, like cancel the program because they had basically no takers. They did not need the special visa because people, again, don't want to move if there's any chance of them not having to move.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
You know, I totally get it as well, for sure. And I mean, if you if you put yourself in that mindset, it suddenly is like, OK, I kind of get why people keep moving back after their house burns down from a wildfire or gets blown away by a hurricane or gets picked up by a tornado. That's where you live. And it just hasn't
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I feel like it just hasn't gotten quite frequent enough for people, at least let's say in the United States, it's my frame of reference, to just be like, okay, this is not going to change. It's going to keep getting worse. We need to leave.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And even among the people who do agree, the experts who do generally agree on some stuff, they're still like, I don't know that this is going to be as bad as it's being portrayed, like, say, in the media.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
What's nuts, though, is if you go to Miami today, their skyline is covered with construction cranes. They cannot build skyscrapers for housing fast enough because so many people are still moving to Miami. And I say we take a break and come back and talk about what's going to happen to cities in the U.S. as far as climate migration is concerned.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
OK, Chuck, so I name checked Miami before the break, and that is a really good example of a city that is kind of up in the air for how much climate migration is going to affect it. Is it going to get so bad down there that they're just going to have to abandon Miami? And it'll look like a reverse The Day After Tomorrow, but with heat and seawater rather than everything being frozen.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Which, by the way, I saw that the other day. For the first time? No. It's actually one of my favorite movies, it turns out, because every single time it's on, I will just sit there and watch it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. I hesitate to use the word good because it's great. But it's, yeah, I just like it. It's one of those really, it's like Zodiac. I can watch Zodiac anytime it comes on. Like I might not search it out, but I'll just sit there and watch it if it's, you know, presented to me somehow.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Okay. But I just wanted to put a lid on the hysteria because, like you said, we just don't know yet. And it might not be as bad as we think. There might be some pluses. There are definitely going to be some minuses. But it's something that we're talking about now. And it's decades enough into the future that we have time to prepare for it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, for sure. But the day after tomorrow, it's like that for me.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, that's actually what triggered that idea. Oh, okay. That was you and me just talking about something that only you and I know about.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That's not the ones. Well, there's Mount St. Helens. That was a big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Right. So that two to three million number, those are people who move permanently, right? That's not just people who like leave and then come back.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
It's kind of like we went from, okay, let's stop emitting greenhouse gases to, okay, it's too late for that. Now we have to figure out how to deal with the repercussions of that. That's where we're at, but we have a little bit of time.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And if we start thinking about and talking about how to do this smartly and responsibly without, again, becoming hysterical and over-planning and overdoing it, we could do this right and make it as comfortable as possible.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Well, not Dawn. It says on the label, Egg Safe Cleaner.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Thanks a lot, Meg. That was a top-notch email. We appreciate it. And thank you for saving everybody who was about to wash their eggs with dish soap under my suggestion. If you want to be like Megan, get in touch with us and be like, oh, no, no, no. Here's what you really should do. We love those kind of emails. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. And it's going to definitely get more poppy for sure as we go. Yeah. But as it stands right now, especially say like you can take California for an example. They deal with wildfires like that's just a fact of life and it's getting to be a much more frequent fact of life. So if you leave your house.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
because there's a wildfire in your backyard, you are technically a climate migrant right then. But if you go back and rebuild or your house didn't end up burning down, you're basically following the current pattern of climate migration. You're leaving long enough for you to take yourself out of harm's way during the disaster, the extreme weather event, and then going back.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But if you do that enough times, some people are going to just get tired of that and they're eventually not going to go back. And that's kind of like how climate migration, at least say in the United States right now, is starting to look or starting to establish itself.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. And even more so, like if you're a migrant, even within your own country, like you said, say like to an urban center or something like that, a lot of times when you show up, you might show up with all of your neighbors, your entire community, maybe your entire region if the, say like the drought is bad enough.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And the city's not like, hey, we just happen to have all this extra free housing for you guys, so come on in. Very frequently, you'll end up in what amounts to a refugee camp. It's a climate refugee camp, but it's essentially the same thing as any other refugee camp. There's usually not running water. There's not good infrastructure.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And this is a point that I hadn't thought of, but Livia pointed out. you're maybe even more vulnerable to natural disasters now because you live in a tent. So if a sandstorm comes along, you're in trouble because you just are in a tent rather than, say, the house that you had to leave because your farm was no longer producing crops.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Right. Yeah. And there's probably the most famous and most well-studied recent example of climate migration leading to violent conflict was the Syrian civil war. Between 2006 and 2010, there was a really, really bad drought in Syria and the surrounding region. And a lot of people had to move to the city. or cities, and a lot of people were displaced.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And they joined people who had already arrived as refugees before from Iraq and from Palestine. And so all these people are there. The government is basically ignoring them, pretending like they're not there. Their farms are being lost. They're getting zero help from the government, which has become neoliberal under Bashar al-Assad, who took over from his father.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And they start, the unrest gets bad enough that a civil war starts. Like there's a rebel insurgency to topple Assad. And it actually ended up working. It didn't at first because Assad famously used chemical weapons on his own people. And he got everything under control. But then they made a second push this past, I think, December. and ran them out of the country and actually took over.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And you can trace that ultimately back to that drought that was created largely by climate change. And that's nuts. Like if you think about it, if that drought had never happened, there wouldn't have been a Syrian civil war. And that's probably the most extreme version, example of a climate crisis leading to violent armed conflict. But it's not like it doesn't exist.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
It's not like it doesn't happen. Like that happened.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me edition?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
It hasn't buckled. Yeah. There are actually some estimates all over the place about how many climate migrants they're going to be. And there was something called the groundswell report that the World Bank put out in twenty twenty one.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And they are saying by 2050, 216 million people will have moved either to another country or within their own country because climate conditions have made where they used to live untenable. So we're talking 25 years, not even 30 years anymore, Chuck. We're in 2025. If my math holds up, that's just 25 years from now. That is a tremendous amount of migration.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Some people say, nah, it's probably going to be more like 50 million. But it seems like that World Bank analysis is the most commonly cited, although you could also suggest it's the most commonly cited because it's such an eye-popping number.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, for sure. So the World Bank broke it down that sub-Saharan Africa is going to see by far the most. 86 million, followed by East Asia and the Pacific at 49 million. South Asia, 40 million. North Africa, 19 million.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Although some people are like, it's going to be even more than that for North America and parts of the Middle East because it's going to get so hot that it will be uninhabitable by humans.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That's right. Yes, North Africa and the Middle East, not North America and the Middle East.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
You know what, though? I think we should introduce a new device in year 17. Whenever I misspeak, just cut me off in the middle by doing your egg color spot sign.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
You ready? Yeah. So it's going to get so hot in the Middle East and North America that what did I say wrong, Chuck?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I think we've come up with something new that we really need to do.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, they really do keep them cool. Frankly, cold.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, we can take a break. I think you should take us out on your egg splat sound again.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. I was going to skip that one, too, or suggest we do. Great. And if you did it, I was just going to not talk. I was going to skip it either way.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Is it on Criterion Channel?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I was going to say that's all over the place for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So I guess if you've seen Ford vs. Ferrari, you're familiar with this story?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Okay. So I'm going to tell this story then because I haven't seen that movie, so this was new to me.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Okay, so in the 60s, Henry Ford II, who was the successor president of the Ford Motor Company, and I guess probably a relative of Henry Ford's, he decided that he wanted Ford to get into racing just to basically, like, make Ford, just to expand the brand, basically. Rather than just giant land yachts, we also make really fast cars, too. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He also was like, you know, I know that there's probably easier ways to get into racing than to build race cars. And that is let's just buy Ferrari. Like they were already known around the world for building cars that were just fast as all get out.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. And Ford was not very happy about this, right? Of course not. So out of spite and to get back at Ferrari, and I think also to get into racing too, Ford decided to build their own race car, which came out to be the Ford GT40. And I went and looked it up. I'm not a car dude, but I am like, this is an amazing car.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And in fact, it actually did best Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966. And you can buy that car, at the very least the original body, that won Le Mans in 1966 for a cool $675,000 from what looks like a private owner in Jacksonville, Florida.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Jacksonville. It's beautiful.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, because they just drive around and around and around for 24 hours to see who can go the furthest, right? Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. It's an endurance race.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. And every once in a while it starts to get boring. They just push pedestrians out in there and see what happens. Exactly. So there's a little more to this story, a little separate spoke that Ferrari had going on at about the same time or a couple of years earlier. Our friends at Mental Floss pointed out that Lamborghini actually was founded out of spite to Ferrari.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Let's see what happens. So, you know, the the old saying cut off your nose to spite your face.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. He said, stick to making tractors, Lamborghini. Who's ever heard of Lamborghini?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. So Lamborghini was like, well, I'm just going to go make my own car. And in 1963, I believe, he started making Lamborghinis with the help of five workers who had recently been fired from Ferrari. That's how he established his car company. And had Enzo Ferrari not rebuffed him, we would never have that classic Garfield poster from the 80s where he's standing next to a Countach.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Gorgeous. Those Magnum Ferraris you can get for a song these days. I mean, they don't work very well. Like how much? I don't know. I'm going to guess anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It is. And they're so small, too. Like, I'm not sure either one of us could fit in one of those cars.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I think that was a stunt double half his size.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I'm not familiar with that one.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. For grocery shopping. Exactly. How many have we done for this thing? We just did one, right?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Okay. All right. Let's get going. Because it turns out that there was a road in China made out of spite.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No. As a matter of fact, it was all new to me. But that doesn't mean we didn't do it already.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. Sure. Did you see pictures of this, though?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, like it wasn't even a roundabout. It's just that the road widened and kind of curved in a bulge on the sides around this house, literally in the middle of a highway. Even worse, even more reckless if you ask me, they kept electricity going to this house. So there's an electrical pole in the middle of the highway too, totally unmarked. It doesn't look real. No, it doesn't.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So just want to put out there that this actually has nothing to do with that phrase. And I'll explain why that phrase doesn't actually have anything to do with this. Oh, really? But I guess I should probably say that we're starting this episode out in like the worst possible way with a really downer of a story that may or may not have to do with spite. So I say we just go ahead and start that now.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It does not at all, does it? And if you want to see what we're talking about, The Atlantic has a good photo spread called The House in the Middle of the Street from 2012. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No, they definitely didn't. So I've looked into this a little further. It was a five-story house that they had just built for $95,000 when the provincial government said, you need to move because we're building a highway through here. And they weren't the only ones who had kind of tried to stick it out. So they were also aware that they could not leave their house.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
They had to stay in their house 24 hours a day because if they left, the government would come and bulldoze their house while they were gone and be like, T.S., what are you going to do? And they had no choice, but just holding out was kind of a protest and to draw attention to this generally unfair practice.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Because, I mean, any government can exercise eminent domain, but typically you want to give at least market value. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It's nuts because they were on like their porch, like a second floor balcony. And they're looking down and you're looking down, not at a front yard, you're looking down at the road. Like it went right around this house.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. So that was a spiteful road.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. So the story went that in the late 19th century, I think December 17th, 1898, this bridge between Bonn and Buell, which was supposed to be a joint construction project between the two, ended up being paid for entirely by Bonn because Buell was like, we'll use the bridge, but we're not going to pay for it. You go ahead and pay for it.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And so under wraps until this unveiling of the bridge was that little statue of a little man carved into the bridge with his butt sticking out, basically mooning Buell.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Can you imagine just the hilarity of seeing that?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
When it was unveiled? Yeah.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, and you can believe that any time you had out-of-town guests visit, you had to take them to go see the little bridge man.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So, yeah, they ended up what was supposed to be a joke at the expense of Buell ended up to be an actual expense for the city of Bonn because they had to pay this fee to get onto the bridge. But supposedly they're friendly rivals still, or they were. Now I think they're one town, kind of like Budapest. There's Buda and Pest, and it's separated by the river, but it's still one city now. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's how I understand it. So you can still see the little bridge man, but he's not the original. The original was almost destroyed in the Second World War. The bridge was at least, but they were able to get their hands on the statue and get them out of the Rhine. They put them back on the rebuilt bridge, but then some local youths in 1960 destroyed that.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So now there's a recreation of it on the bridge. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Little punks at least. Yeah. So that was a little bridge man made out of spite.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Want to learn about a terrorist or don't call a pterodactyl? How to take a perfect poop and all about fractals? Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. The Lizzie Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, and actually the way that this neighborhood was arranged is a cul-de-sac, but in the center of the cul-de-sac was Bill Ansell's house. So with his light display, it was just kind of like driving through a holiday light display because you just drive past and go all the way around and come back on the other side and leave. It's kind of perfect, actually. It was perfect.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And Bill Ansell definitely thought it was perfect. But like you said, the neighbors were like, man, come on, this is... 100,000 watts of Christmas joy, it's too much. So can we do something about this? Bill Ansell apparently was not the type to take criticism well. Sounds like it. I think he actually was required to take down the holiday display.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yes. I think they cited him for an out-of-season decoration or something like that, right? So he took it down, but in short order, he put up a new display and specifically designed it so that the neighbors regretted ever asking him to take down the original joyous display. And he did this, Chuck, out of spite.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
There was also a warning, a sign that said Ross Township, don't touch any of this property. If you do, there will be bloodshed.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. No, it totally is. And there was another one. I read an interview with 2020 with the neighbors who were like, this guy actually wrote a sign. I didn't see what he said, but he came up with the disparaging sign for the deceased wife of Tom White, one of the neighbors. The day after she died, he put up some sign disparaging her. Yeah. This guy was definitely off the chain with this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And I mean, like he would stay up at night and hit metal with sledgehammers to make noise. He had floodlights pointed directly in the neighbor's houses. And I mean, living like that's bad enough, but they said something that stuck out to me that I hadn't thought of. That's like, this is a living nightmare.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
When you have a neighbor like that and you sell your house, anytime you have a showing, they're going to turn around before they even get out of their car. That's like you're trapped. They were totally trapped there. And despite the township fining him, despite court orders, like you said, he kept it up year round and he kept it up for years.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yes. I thought that there was definitely a parallel between those guys, too.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Sure. And if your neighbors come to you with a complaint about some special thing that's special to you, rather than going off the handle, maybe say, well, let's figure out a compromise because this is really important to me.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Sure. And if they're like, no, we insist you take it down, then you do something out of spite. At least give them a fighting chance.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Spite plus. We want to thank not just our friends at 2020, but our friends at Mental Floss, too, for pointing that one out to us.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So I think we got a couple more, right?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, and it was a very lucrative contract. A lot of people were playing like the world's smallest violin for Prince at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But not to spite our faces, to spite the Vikings. No.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
20 years later, re-signed with the same company.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I got you. Okay. Did not realize that. But this was like a $100 million contract. It was worth $215 million today. It was a big, fat contract.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
The thing is, is Prince, I saw like when he died, when they went and do his audio archives, they're like he could release an album like every month for the next 50 years or something like that. He had that much stuff recorded.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And he wanted to release music really fast. quickly and with high turnover. And Warner Brothers is like, no, you're going to flood the market. You're going to shoot yourself in the foot. You can only release X number of albums every, say, 12 months. So like one a year maybe or something like that. He didn't like that.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And then apparently Warner Brothers owned the rights to his songs too, which I'm quite sure he really, really didn't like. So to get out of his contract, he thought, well, okay, the contract is between Prince and Warner Brothers. I'm going to change my name and maybe the contract won't be valid any longer. I'm not sure how much he actually believed that because Prince wasn't a dumb person at all.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But at the very least, he was trying to humiliate Warner Brothers, make life harder for them. And he did all this, as you said, out of spite.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, one of the things that Warner Brothers, too, had to do, Chuck, was they had to send out digital files to the media. And this is the 90s because there was no way to, there was no, like, combination of keys on the keyboard to make this symbol. So they had to send a digital image of the symbol for the, like, newspapers or magazines or whatever to insert into their articles about Prince.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It is horrific. Yeah. No, I'm not saying like this is a laugh riot or anything like that. I'm just saying.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And then finally, the media was just like, we're just going to call him the artist formerly known as Prince. And Prince was like, damn.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
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Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He just showed up there like, how did I get here?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Anyway, back to the horrific story. Saint Aby said, and she wasn't a saint at the time, but this certainly helped her case later on. She said, come nuns, let's go sit around and talk. I have something to say to you. To prevent ourselves from losing our chastity, from being raped by these Vikings, we're going to cut off our own noses.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, we were going to do the same thing. And that's actually what we were going to scalp. We were going to go. And I don't remember why we didn't. But that's kind of par for the course for me because I did that with Prince. I did that with Pink Floyd. I did that with Stevie Ray Vaughan. And I did that with the Grateful Dead. I was just like, I'll see him next time.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yumi saw him for some tour, I think Musicology tour, and she was like hands down the best show I've ever seen.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Apparently he was quite the dancer.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, he was cool. He was one of those guys that you appreciate the older you get. You know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Great. Let's move on to the pink house, Chuck, the last of the last.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No, that's a little pink house. This is just the pink house.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Just a desolate marshland.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And it's just looking at it, it's very eerie, especially now it's abandoned. It's kind of ramshackle and run down. But it was built on Plum Island, and it's considered one of the all-time great examples of a spite house. And a spite house is basically any house, wall, structure that's built to get under someone else's skin, right? So sometimes it's built to block their view.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
We talked about Henry Clay Frick building a mansion that was bigger than Andrew Carnegie's that would be considered a spite house. And in America, they go back at least until 1806. That was the earliest one I could find. Yeah. But this one on Plum Island off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which, by the way, is one of the more charming towns in the entire country.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, I've never been there. Oh, it's wonderful. That's where this pink house is. And there's a great backstory to it that makes it a spite house.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yep, he did. So he built it on Plum Island. At the time, there was no one else living there. No fresh water, no electricity. It was just the worst place you could build a house. And he said, there you go. There's your spite house. And he walked away rubbing the dust off of his hands. What do you call that?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I'm going to cut off my lip and maybe I'll inspire you to do the same. And the rest of the sisters said, yes, let's do that. And they did. And there's actually old like wood cuttings. And there's at least one stained glass panel of this happening. And it's gory. Even as a wood cutting, it's gory.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, we need to come up with a name for that, right?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So, yeah, that's how it ended. And the story went that she lived there for a while and sold it. And it actually was inhabited, weirdly enough, by a succession of people up until 2011. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
In that sense, yes, it did. But it's just, I mean, like the sea off of Massachusetts can be fairly unforgiving. So, you know, this is an old house from the 1920s. It's going to probably be kind of drafty depending on the time of year.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yes, but you would have to paint it pink or else everybody in Newburyport would hate you.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And it was made out of spite. Or was it, Chuck?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. Which is a much less interesting story. So we're just going to go with spite house for that one. Agreed. All right. Well, that's it for things done out of spite. We hope you enjoyed it. And since I said we hope you enjoyed it, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Tree Marchink from South Carolina. Thanks a lot. That's a good one. And I remember we talked a little bit about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. Oh, yeah. People were like showing up with actual wheelbarrows of cash because it was just going nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Great, great example. Yeah, we've got to do that episode.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
For sure. Well, if you want to be like Tree and fill us in on something we've said we want to know about, we'd love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And when the Vikings showed up, they found these nuns missing their noses, bleeding, missing their lips, just in quite a state. And they were like, we're just going to move on to the next monastery and see what we find there. The nuns, however, their lives were not spared, were they? No.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. But there's a different way of looking at this, and that is that these nuns protected their chastity, which, as you said, is like really, really important. They're known as the brides of Christ. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why they're chaste, why they're meant to die virgins, is because they have given themselves to Christ or to God.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So as long as they're chaste and they die chaste, then they have fulfilled this covenant. Even if it's not by their own will or decision that they lose their virginity, if they lose it through force, it's still not quite the same as dying chaste. So they manage to come out on top, religiously speaking. So that's that story.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, the reason why it doesn't have anything to do with cutting your nose off to spite your face is because that phrase means that you're doing something in revenge to somebody else or to harm somebody else, but you're actually harming yourself much worse than you are them.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. So that's a heck of a way to kick off what was supposed to be a semi lighthearted top 10 list.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It's kind of like there's another saying that hating somebody is like drinking poison and expecting them to die.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It's a good one. It really gets the point across. It makes you not want to hate or steal something about someone else.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Thanks a lot. I just made it up. Look at you dropping nugs.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, anytime like Carnegie's companies, I can't remember which steel company he owned, but anytime there was like some misstep or bad decision or business went awry, Frick would send a note like chiding him or taunting him for having made a terrible decision. Like just constantly kept it up. There was, I think Carnegie built a mansion in New York.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And Frick was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to build an even bigger one right down the street just to show you up, like would not let it go.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. His other thing that he was said to have said was not until he admits that I'm the Mary and you're the Rhoda. Yeah.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Like the original where she worked at the TV station?
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Those shows used to like just be written so well too and acted too.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I can't remember. There's one episode where... I think Ted.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He was doing, he was doing something and it was so ridiculous and preposterous, but he was playing it straight so well that the rest of the cast just started cracking up and like they couldn't not, they did it in every take and it ended up kind of in the show. It's some classic, like well-known episode, but check that one out. Make sure you, you see that one too.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Valerie Bertinelli? No. Valerie.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. I'll check it out.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Well, thanks for the recommendation.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. He said, sure, I invaded Kuwait, but that doesn't mean you have to come over here and liberate Kuwait. And George Bush said, yes, we do. And as a result, after this war, Saddam Hussein was still in power. And he apparently was willing to use his power in all sorts of weird ways. In tacky ways, frankly.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And one of the ways he did that was he had a mosaic mural, an unflattering mosaic mural of George Bush laid into the floor of the entrance of the Al Rashid Hotel, one of the nicest hotels in Baghdad, if not the nicest. And the whole reason was it also said Bush is criminal on it, too. And the reason was that anyone coming into this well-traveled hotel would walk right over George Bush's face.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. Or taken out back and shot one of the two.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I did. It is an unflattering portrait, but you can totally tell who it is.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I don't think so. From what I saw, it looked just like a picture. I didn't see a close-up of it. I just saw a soldier standing next to it. Yeah, I couldn't find one either. Like the head was out of proportion with the body.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. The sledgehammers had don't mess with Texas engraved on them.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No more lines, no more hassles, just affordable, fast care. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And this episode, Chuck just made fun of, even though I took pride in helping to assemble it.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But yeah, I mean, that's spiteful, right? To make a mosaic portrait of one of your sworn enemies so that your people walk all over him.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. So we have a definitive example of spite.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Well, then I think that means we should take a break while we're ahead.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Want to learn about a pterosaur and call a pterodactyl? How to take a perfect poop and all about fractals? Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Lizzie Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything till your brain explodes. It's Chuck and Josh and stuff you should know.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Okay, Chuck, I guess we should, at this point, decide which one we're not going to do if we're doing 3-3-3-3.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yes. And you said earlier that we were going to talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career. That's right. So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up in Missouri. And he was the oldest of nine kids. And his family was impoverished. His father was a convict himself who didn't work very often.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
His mother was, as James Earl Ray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate. And she also drank very heavily. And there is a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward regulations was that he violates all of them. This was him as a kid, and he didn't improve very much as an adult.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
He dropped out of high school at 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the Army.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. And he was serving a 20-year sentence for robbery in Missouri. He started it in 1960 when he broke out in 1967 and began that year on the lam that culminated in the assassination of MLK.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
I heard that too. Yeah. You would have found me eating loaves of bread too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Just snapping my fingers with a mouthful of bread. So his criminal history, just because you're a lifetime criminal doesn't mean you're good at it. And James Earl Ray is an excellent example of that. Time magazine described him back in 1977 as a bungling, petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And they weren't lying because some of his greatest hits that they went on to cite was that at one crime scene, he dropped identification. He dropped his ID.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
One holdup in a neighborhood, he got lost as he was making his getaway, ended up driving back into the neighborhood where he just robbed somebody and was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene by then.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And I don't think they meant like matters, like race matters.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, get a load of this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So even when he was in London, too, when he was on the run after assassinating MLK, he carried out not one but two bungled robberies. It's crazy. One was a bank, and he managed to only get 100 pounds from a bank.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
The other was a jewelry store where he got nothing because the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and pressed the alarm. So James Earl Ray ran away.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. He just was not a very good criminal, even though he tried it over and over again. And he was successful. I mean, like he did successfully rob people and break into places and all that. But if you put it all together, he didn't have like a violent criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
That's how he supported himself in life as a criminal who went from that to murdering one of the most important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight. And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, because, again, how did this petty criminal plan an assassination that he successfully carried out and then also in a panic, like, dropped the murder weapon and ran off in a place where it would be found within a minute or two? Yeah. Where did he get the funding that he would need to support himself for a year on the lam and then to travel abroad to flee after the assassination?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
These are just a few of the questions people have come up with. And the obvious solution is that he had help in some way, shape or form. But another really big question that I think that a lot of people overlook is why? Why? Like, why did he murder Martin Luther King Jr.? He wasn't known as a fanatic. He was a racist.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And like we said, he supported George Wallace for his segregationist presidential bid. But he wasn't like a fanatic. And also, like, he didn't have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for MLK. He just was his murderer. And this just does not make a lot of sense.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy. One of them was House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. They said that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King. But they didn't think Raul was involved or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
It was much more pedestrian and mundane, and in my opinion, then much more likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they put it on two – prominent but shady St. Louisans. I'm pretty sure that's what you call people from St. Louis. One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner. His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Both of them were dead by the time the committee hearings were held in 1978. But they supposedly put a bounty on MLK's head. And James Earl Ray, whose brother was a tavern owner in St. Louis at the time, heard about this bounty and decided that he would go ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And I also saw that he probably believed that as a white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a black man in the South. And even if he did, George Wallace was definitely going to win the 1968 election and George Wallace would pardon him. So if you put all that together, it really seems like a pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did or you did not commit murder.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. I say we take a break and we come back and kind of stick with the late 90s because the 90s were a big decade for conspiracy theories and the MLK assassination. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
No. No, he said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Wow. Like he was sympathetic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. And so that was, you know, that's crazy, but it's a mock trial on HBO and it's a mock jury. It doesn't mean anything. It just basically promoted William Pepper and his theories. But after that special was aired, conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
He said he was inspired to come forward by the series and come clean, essentially, after all of these years. And he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house, where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired from.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big, giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis police, the FBI, the mafia. himself and some other just tangential players who were all coming together to kill King in order to collect on a bunch of money. Lloyd Jower said that just him alone was offered $100,000 to basically project to manage the contract killings.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Oh, definitely. That'll get everybody's attention.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
They did. And I read two things. I read that Dexter King basically said, like, we did this so that, you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened. And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets reopened or not, this is like the period on the sentence for us. Like this just basically supports everything we've always said. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
The Justice Department, their civil rights division, had simultaneously launched an investigation into Lloyd Jower's claims. I guess they seemed legitimate enough. But also this investigation entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson. And Wilson said that he had been, I guess he had been, one of the people who had searched through the Mustang that James Earl Ray got away in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
How many rifles do you guys have just laying around in Memphis that day?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And that he had found some papers in this Mustang that had info about the JFK assassination. I think Donald Wilson was like, how can I get people to listen? JFK. He also said that the name Raul was mentioned in it as well in these papers. And so the Justice Department starts looking into it, and they concluded in a report in 2000 that this is all just kind of BS, to paraphrase.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Right, just 100 feet or so away from the murder scene. So, yeah, they couldn't conclusively link that to the gun, but they were able to trace the serial number, and they traced it back to a sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Aero Marine Supply. And they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few days before MLK was assassinated.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Okay. Because, yeah, you have to be like, that's believable, right? Yeah. When you're buying a gun, you got to have a cover story.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Right. So two weeks after the killing, they figured out that the prints on the gun matched those of a guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James Earl Ray had been an escaped convict from a state prison in Missouri for basically a year. He'd been on the run.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So now we had a suspect and we had photos and they started circulating it around to people who had putatively interacted with James Earl Ray, including the guy at the Aero Marine Supply Store who sold him the gun.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
It seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. on May 7th, a couple months after, or no, a month after MLK was murdered. Yeah. And an international manhunt began. I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And so they issued it far and wide, a wanted poster with his data and his photos on it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point. After the assassination, James Earl Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Sorry. I'm sorry, Tarana. I know that, too. I know. Thanks, Chuck. So at the time, apparently, if you were an American criminal in Canada, they were very, very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name, we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do. They would go to Canada when they were on the run.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
They would look up old newspapers at, like, the library and find birth announcements from about the same time that they were born, finding people who were their age. And they would get their name. They would get their mother's maiden name sometimes. And apparently you didn't even need that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
You just fill out this form, say your name, say, yes, I swear I'm a Canadian citizen, and mail off for a passport, which would be mailed back to you toot-sweet. And now you had a fraudulent but official and legitimate passport that you could use to travel the world with under a new alias.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
I heard Sneed from somebody once, but I don't know if that was definitive.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. So, I mean, he went to Lisbon hoping to secure passage to Africa. And while he was there, he's like, I've got a great idea. Surely that people are on my trail, that feds are on my trail now, and they might even know my alias. So I need a new alias. I'm going to go to the Canadian consulate here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they misspelled my name on my passport.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So he went there and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last name actually is spelled with an A, not a D. And they're like, OK, whatever. Here's your new passport with your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias, Ramon George Sneya instead of Sneid. So there was one letter change. And apparently that satisfied James Earl Ray that he had a new alias now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky and the Brain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, thank you much, and starts booking a flight to Brussels from London. And it was in London, on his way to Brussels, that he finally got nabbed, but not because somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that he was him, but because he had those two Canadian passports, and he had them in the same wallet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yes, and the passport checker noticed that he had two passports and asked him about it. And I guess a cop was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey, why don't you join us in the back room? We've got some questions for you. And that was it for Ramon George Snade Sneya. Yeah. He was quickly identified as James Earl Ray. He had a .38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Going to board a plane. You could do that back then because they didn't have metal detectors. Yeah. As long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff. Right. In the plane, then they didn't really care. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is part two of our two-parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Okay, so James Earl Ray's been taken into custody and he's flown back to the United States on July 19th to stand trial. And the whole world is watching. They want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., did that, why he murdered MLK. What was the point? What was the reason?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
They also wanted to know if he had been working with other people, because from the outset, the public was just openly skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in MLK's murder. And the world got none of that. Because James Earl Ray pled guilty instead of going to trial.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And there was a paper reporting on the case who was at this hearing where he pled guilty and said that it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case. And everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially that. There was no trial ever and there were no facts presented. So it was just like, yep, I did it. Send me to jail.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
They do. And so these microwaves, I've seen both, Chuck. I've seen that they're constantly beaming transmissions, like basically uninterrupted from the satellites, or that they do it like on a repeating pattern. Regardless, however this information arrives, it contains a few really important pieces of information.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And one thing we should point out, apparently there's a misunderstanding that a lot of people think when you open up like your location services or whatever on your phone, your GPS antenna ping satellites. That's not the case. It passively listens for GPS, the four GPS satellites broadcasting data. constantly or intermittently, and it picks them up, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And so the information it gets is the time, and this is a really important component. And we talked before about atomic clocks and just how ridiculously precise they are. And on a GPS satellite, there's multiple atomic clocks that are keeping time together and to make sure that they stay synchronized. And then the satellite sends its own location.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Apparently they figure out their location using celestial landmarks like quasars. So the satellite knows where it is at all times, so it can tell you or your GPS receiver. And then there's a satellite ID that says, I'm me, and that is good enough.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, he is the guy who started it all. And it's really hard to understate the impact that that guy had on our lives.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
No, but they can also talk to you, too, virtually at the same time, if not at the same time. Because don't forget, you're getting information from four different satellites to figure out where you are. So you don't want to get one from one, wait a couple minutes, get one from the other. You want them all to be coming in basically at the same time.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And by slightly altering their frequencies, they can all arrive.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. So now they have all the basic information. I think this is why you were saying at the outset, this is actually kind of a simple setup, GPS is. If you take it, so if that satellite sends you an information piece of like a signal and it says, I sent this exactly at 1.45 p.m. and it arrives at 1.45 p.m. in one second and
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
and you know that microwaves travel at the speed of light, you can use that information to calculate the distance between you and the satellite, okay? When you know that the satellite is located here in space, and then you figure out your distance from the satellite, you start to have your first piece of information about where you are, because now you know where you are relative to one satellite.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's not enough information to tell you where you are on Earth, but it's a really good start.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. So once that known point has that discrepancy, it sends that out, that information out to all the GPS receivers in the area. So they can use it to adjust their own GPS readings that they're getting from those satellites that were slightly off, but they didn't have any way to remedy it. Now they do because the known point is like, hey, satellite B is off by like 10 nanoseconds.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I can't. I have to choke it down. And gross is the wrong word. It's just too harsh.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Oh, no. You're the trilateration expert between us. Let's tell everybody what happened.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. Okay. Okay. So I think you should also tell everybody that when you sent me a picture of your three circles with the part where they overlap, they all overlap, you would put a point in there and wrote, bingo, with an exclamation point. You're like, case closed.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I think you may have discovered something else that we're not aware of yet. Someone will tell us. No, I think you might have just invented a new way of calculating things.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Oh, I wish they would because I don't know either. But like hats off to you because, man, I can't tell you how many circles I guess you probably drew just trying to get this to work. And I don't blame you. I was smart and was like, there's madness there. I'm just going to try to understand this as best I can. I'm not going to try it myself.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And I was like, OK, I'll draw them perfect. Okay. So, well, let's talk about trilateration. Because in theory, I guess, it's very simple. And the way that Marshall described it was, let's say you're lost. You're in the United States. And you ask somebody where you are. And that person says, you are 625 miles from Boise, Idaho.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But after you get away, you're chased by the police, but you make it down an alley and hide behind some garbage cans as they pass by, you have a good idea. You go buy a map, and you spread out your map. Maybe you buy a compass as well, a la Chuck, and you draw a circle around Boise, Idaho, using Boise as the center point, that is 625 miles in diameter, or at least represents that by scale, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And you're like, OK, I am somewhere on this circle that has a diameter of 625 miles around Boise. Kind of helpful. It's a little bit narrowed it down, but I need more information. So you go find somebody else and you say, hey, do you know where I am?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Okay, so that's great. At least they didn't repeat the Boise thing, right? Because if they said that, you'd just be like, man, that didn't help at all. But now you know where you are from Minneapolis, and you can do the same thing with Minneapolis. Using that as the center point of a circle, you draw a circle with a radius of 690 miles around Minneapolis.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I met him a couple of times. He was a good guy. I think some of his first articles, I think the first one might have been like how air conditioning works.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Now you're really close because what you'll find is the circle around Boise and the circle around Minneapolis, they overlap, right? Yeah, you get a little football in the middle. Yeah, like a Venn diagram. And if you look at a Venn diagram where those two circles overlap, there's two points where they intersect. Right? Where they cross each other. Those lines cross each other.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And because you are 625 miles from Boise and 690 miles from Minneapolis, you are somewhere where those two circles overlap at those two points. One of those is right. The other is off by hundreds of miles. So you still need to narrow it down.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Remember Scooby-Doo? We did an episode on Scooby-Doo based on one of his articles. Was that Marshall? Yeah, totally. Oh, interesting. But yeah, he was a very good guy. And without him, I can tell you, I would not be podcasting. And if I were, it probably wouldn't be a very good podcast because you and I would have never met. Yumi and I would have never met.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, all three circles will overlap with one another, so they intersect at two different points. Each circle intersects with the other at two points, but all three of them will only intersect at one single point, and you have just trilateralated your position. You know where you are. And Marshall said, this is Denver, by the way. That's where you are is Denver.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Because I think if we hadn't have included that, some people would have been really upset.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's right. And now you have to figure out what to do even though you're dead.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's like all of the shows we've done in Denver, it's like a wedding, like split down the middle. The people on one half of the room all have guns out. The other half are all playing hacky sack.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Okay, so that's trilateralation. That's 2D trilateralation because what you've done is found your, if you were a flat point and the Earth was flat, which it's not, that's all we would need to do. But the Earth is a sphere, it's round. And so what GPS uses is 3D trilateralation, which rather than flat circles, it uses spheres.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And when the three or four usually, because you use four satellites, where those spheres all intersect, the one point, that's where you are. Because now you not only know where you are longitudinally, you also know where you are altitudinally.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I know, and I've been wanting to say trilateralization for so long. Well, you weren't even saying that. I just had to get it off my chest.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So that's it. That's how you figure. Well, I should say that's how your GPS receiver figures that out. It has it knows where those three or four satellites are because they tell it where they are. It figures out the distance between you and your receiver for each of those four. And it tells it, oh, here's where I am, because here's where all those that information intersects.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And there's a really pretty image out there. I can't remember what website I found it on. But if you search like how GPS trilateration works. It will come up, I'm sure, but it shows like the four spheres created by the satellites, and they're all in four different primary colors, and it's so pretty. I saw that, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I understand that there are three primary colors, but whatever the fourth one is, it's basically a primary color as far as I'm concerned. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Like the fact that Marshall came along and founded How Stuff Works set my destiny in a lot of ways. So I'm really grateful to him for that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, I think so, Chuck. We earned it with that trilateralation. Trilateralation. Explanation. Explanation.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Okay, Chuck. So there's one other thing, kind of like a little sidebar I felt like we should talk about. If you've ever tried to figure out where you are and your phone's like, turn on Wi-Fi and we'll get a better reading.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So what it's trying to do is it's prompting you to turn on your Wi-Fi-based positioning system. And that is based essentially on the same thing that Dr. Getting was getting at, which is you can use information from different sources in comparing those sources to figuring out where you are. And so rather than using satellite information, this uses the, it bases it on the known strengths
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he's a transhumanist down with Nick Bostrom and all those guys.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Of different Wi-Fi network towers antenna. And so depending on how strong one signal is compared to where you are, in addition to comparing it to another signal and another signal, another signal, it's like, oh, you're you're in Denver. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I don't think you're dumb. I know you're not dumb, but let's hear what you have to say.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So yes, that's one way it does it. And it does it in your house too, but that's because your router is a big blabber mouth and tells everybody where you are. So I just can't afford it.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. You got a hickory tree? Well, TS for you because GPS isn't going to work.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Thick canopy? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's a known shade tree. Oh, it's a KST? That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
If it could broadcast information, it would also be a known point. Yeah, exactly. So there's a couple of other things that can mess with your GPS signal coming from the satellite. Because remember I said that they navigate celestially? Well, if the Earth's position itself relative to the satellite, satellite can know where it is. But if the Earth shifts a little bit, like the magnetic core shifts,
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
sloshes around just enough that the earth kind of wobbles a little bit. Or if the sea currents are particularly strong, it can like slow the rotation of the earth. Those things, I mean, just the tiniest, tiniest changes can alter the accuracy of the signal that it gets. But that's just the signal that they're like, we're going to get you within six feet.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
They don't guarantee your receiver and your receiver typically adds a little bit of inaccuracy. I think five meters is usually what you what you're going to get from like your average dumb GPS receiver.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Which is five AA batteries end to end. We're going to get even better than that, though, Chuck, because right now there's some really good GPS antenna that are starting to pop up in smartphones. And those are dual band, dual frequency receivers, one of those two. And that uses the L1, the standard civilian GPS band that has been around since the beginning, but it's gotten better over time.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And it also uses the new Whizbang L5. And this is like the next generation of GPS. It's not widespread enough yet. There's not enough satellites out there that are L5. for an antenna to just rely on that. But when you put L1 and L5 together, it gets pretty good.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
The thing is, is you might ask yourself, like, why would you need to get, like, within centimeters of the restaurant that you're going to? It doesn't make sense. Well, some people use GPS for more than just finding the restaurant that they're going to.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I think that Garmin was actually one of the original GPS devices.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. Also, things use it to basically stay in position, like modern agricultural equipment, like harvesters. They go in a straight line by themselves thanks to really precise GPS. Same with self-driving cars.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And then, like, apparently it's just grown so ubiquitous and so reliable that contractors use it. Like, digital blueprints will have GPS coordinates for, like, a nail, right? or an electrical outlet, or something like that. So you can know exactly where that thing's going to go, which, I mean, that's got to cut down on construction costs and time dramatically.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So here's to you, Marshall. Rest in peace. And as a tribute, we chose an article, one of the few ones that we hadn't recorded that Marshall wrote originally on GPS. And this is like bread and butter Marshall brain stuff. There's engineering. There's science. There's some more engineering. There's figuring things out with circles and diameters and stuff like that. Like straight up Marshall stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, a tunnel that goes through a mountain with like a hairpin turn in the middle. That sounds great. And if you put all this stuff together, all these different uses for GPS, which again, the American taxpayers give to the world for free, it generated, I think in 2022, $94 billion worth of stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
All of the receivers that were sold, all of the tunnels that were drilled correctly, all that stuff came to generate $94 billion. And in the next five years, it's expected to hit almost $300 billion. So it's a big deal. We rely on GPS a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And so because we rely on something this much and because, like you said, we don't have a backup of GPS in particular, it can be pretty delicate, I guess you could say, to put it delicately, because it can get screwed up pretty bad, pretty easily. And in fact, on a very local level, you or I could go screw up somebody's GPS for fun anytime we wanted.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I know. They're like a Friday's. Right. I want to go to Binigan's. Yeah. So you were talking about spoofing. Apparently Iran in 2019, just for kicks, spoofed a British cargo ship's GPS and told that it was in international waters when really they had drifted into Iranian waters. So Iran was like, oh, you're our ship now and you're our crew now. And they held the whole thing for 10 weeks.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Just by being jerks, apparently. I can't figure out what the point would have been for that other than to flex.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I know. I know. My niece Mila was schooling us on slang and I'm like, there's no context for that. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I'm trying to think of one example. I know I'm going to get it wrong.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yes. And I understand. Yes, it's a web video or whatever. But the the the videos itself make no sense whatsoever, too.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And I don't mean to complain. I mean, each generation like builds on the last, comes up with its own stuff. I'm happy about that. I just don't understand it. Well, that's the point, I think. You know, I think you're right, actually. And I'm kind of hurt by that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, you have to turn the whole thing off and reset everything. You can't just reset the GPS antenna. They need to work out all that stuff, don't you think? They definitely do. But something about those flights being jammed, those are civilian flights being jammed by bad actors and sometimes governments and militaries. So what you're trying to do essentially is to crash a plane full of people.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Like that's your shot. It's not like a really – dedicated shot at it, but that's pretty much the goal of doing that to an airliner.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Okay. There's another thing that spoofing, I believe, I think they use spoofing for it, is to cheat at games like Pokemon Go.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Where you can fake where your own GPS coordinates are to say like, oh, I'm at the, I don't know, Pikachu's lair or something like that. So give me the egg that Pikachu is guarding, which I can turn into like some skee-ball tickets and get a comb.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It means nothing from what Mila's told me. Like, it's just basically a thing you say. I hope I'm not outing Mila as uncool, though.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I don't know if it's vital that I know that Skibbity Toilet exists.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Oh, I believe it. Have you seen the videos, though, that it's based on?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
They're mesmerizing. It doesn't pull me in. You should watch a second or two of it. You don't need to watch much. You get the gist of it really quick, but it's like you'll find that your mouth is open. Not in awe, but just because you're glazed over. Right, right. So, like you said, the United States is not unaware of the vulnerability. That was what I was saying. It was in a delicate position.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's vulnerable. It's a very vulnerable system. And, you know, like globally and also locally. So they are taking steps to update it. And that is going to come in the form of adding more and more L5 satellites, right? That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But for now, if you want to be a little shocked taking into consideration how dependent we are on GPS, the average age of a GPS, specifically the United States' global positioning system satellites, is 13 years. Yeah. That is really old for a satellite. But Chuck, tell them how old the oldest satellite in the constellation of GPS satellites is.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
For sure. Hopefully we made you proud, Marshall. And thanks again for everything. And since we said thanks to Marshall Brain, then I think it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I don't even remember mentioning that, let alone knowing that tidbit.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I have heard that, that anti-inflammatories are actually not very good for you.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's awesome. Thanks, Sarah. Way to spread the good word. I know there's a lot of good advice and information in there, but it's just going to take months of digesting that information to try to figure out those acronyms. Yeah. If you want to be like Sarah and put something on our radar that we weren't aware of before, we love that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
You can send it to us via email like Sarah did to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, global navigation satellite system is the generic term. And GPS has become like the Kleenex of global navigation satellite systems. Like it's the proprietary eponym.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And GPS is owned and operated by the American government and it's paid for by the American taxpayers, but it's used worldwide. I think out of eight point something billion people on the planet today, six billion of them use GPS every day. So it's America's gift, I think is what I'm trying to say, because if anything, that's what America is known for.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's like creating things and giving it away to the rest of the world for free.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
For sure. Technically, you just need three, but let's not get into that right now, okay? So the satellites, they're up in medium Earth orbit, about 11,000 miles above Earth. They circle it constantly. They're not geostationary. So they circle the Earth, and they rise and set, I guess, every 12 hours, so twice a day. They're like the tides, basically. And the GPS satellites are just one component.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
There's three components. There's a satellite component. There's the control component, which is on the ground. The Space Force runs GPS. So they're constantly tracking, monitoring, telling satellites what to do, like really bossing them around. And then the third component is you, the person using GPS, or more technically your receiver that is telling you where you are in the world.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And the people around getting, especially his greatest critics, were like, oh, yeah, yeah. How are you going to do that? There's nothing up in space, you jerk. How are you going to do it? Exactly. And he said, just wait. And they sat around and they waited. I don't know how long they waited for a while. And they finally went home.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And then a couple of years after that, the Soviets came to the rescue in a certain weird way. They launched Sputnik. And in America, in the United States, it was not a happy time. They called it the Sputnik crisis because basically at the time we thought the Soviets were just like some backwater, backwards country. And all of a sudden they were the first ones to launch a satellite into space.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And it took us by surprise. But... Dr. Getting's theory was able to be put into use because American scientists figured out that you could track Sputnik because its radio signals, I don't know quite how to put it. Let's say they engaged in the Doppler effect. They dabbled in Doppler.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So that when the satellite was moving away from you, the frequency that reached you here on Earth was different than the frequency when the satellite was moving toward you or when the satellite was just stationed above you. So they figured out that you can track satellites based on these radio signals.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And that gave the initial rise to GPS, which is you need to track the satellites to know where they are because that is an essential piece of information for GPS. led to people saying like, okay, let's get Genning's idea off the ground. Literally.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, in 1995, the whole thing was finally operational. They just kept shooting up satellites and tinkering with it and get it going. And I wish we would have kept the name Navstar. I think it's a little cooler than GPS, but I don't know, maybe it sounds a little more hostile or assertive. So GPS is probably okay.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Space Force is, I don't know what Space Force is, the name. It sounds like a movie. It does. Like a Mel Brooks movie. It does. But so we call it GPS. And there were two versions that they released at the same time. One was L1. That bandwidth was used for civilian purposes, everything from – well, if you were in the military, let's say you used L1. If you were in the military, you used L2.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's much more precise out of the gate. But the entire reason that this went from what I think was originally a military project intended just for use by the military – to one where everybody who had a GPS receiver could use it for free was actually based on a tragedy that occurred in 19, I think, 83 with Korean Airlines Flight 007.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Well, having been raised in the United States and being 12 in 1983 during the Cold War, I'll bet you were so mad at the Rusky commies for doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, it was weirdly it was a thing, but I'll bet it was it was Survivor that sang the song.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I don't know. Maybe they just thought that there were other potential tragedies that they couldn't foresee that could be. I don't know. I don't know. If there's one thing that I'm not, it's in Ronald Reagan's head. Right. I just don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Jerry's at a cabin in the woods even, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Podcasting from the future.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. It just takes too many floppies to back up our GPS. So we're just going without right now. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. I think it's a fantastic setup. Okay. And when we come back, we're going to really wing it by trying to explain how GPS works.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Thanks, Capital One bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Well, it's officially too cold to do anything, Chuck. But the upside is that you can cocoon yourself in Bombas socks, slippers and underwear all winter long.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and Bama's knows that the little things really do make a big difference. So they removed all the itchy tags, fixed the annoying toe seam, and perfected the fit of everything. No more socks that slip down or underwear that rides up. Just perfect comfort.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
So we promised to talk about the Black Death. Apparently one of the high-profile, I guess, forensic dentistry cases recently was a study that looked at the teeth of, or I think it extracted DNA from the pulp of the teeth of medieval villagers who died from the plague. And I guess they were able to exclude the plague in some cases, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Like people had died and it was falsely attributed to a death from the plague. That seems almost inconsequential to me because the other thing that they did was definitively prove that you're seeing a pestis, which is a bacteria, I think a bacteria that's carried by fleas typically. So the rats came to town. The fleas were on the rats. The bacteria was on the fleas.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And that's what spread the Black Death. That's what they've long said. And they extracted that from the DNA of the pulp of teeth of medieval people who died from the plague, definitely died from the plague, and said, yep, here's your smoking gun. There's your problem.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
You should have just smoked a bunch of cigarettes, done it yourself, saved some money.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And I also saw the oldest tooth that they successfully sequenced a genome from by extracting DNA from the pulp was 6,000 years old, from about 4,000 BCE. Back in 2005, they managed to do that. And you know those people are still talking about, like, hey, did I ever tell you about the 4,000 BCE tooth we extracted DNA from?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Oh, God. Good God. That was awful. I was not expecting that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Oh, OK. Well, then, yeah, you definitely need to hand those off for staining in the lab.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, that's a big one. Also, bruising and lividity can also obscure a bite mark or change it or alter it. So they often have to wait for the bruise to heal if the human's still alive or wait for the lividity, the pooling of blood to just kind of come and go before they really examine it.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, there was a 2015 study that found they used 39 experts. These were board-certified forensic odontologists or members of the American Board of Forensic Odontologists, the accrediting body. I don't know why I went into that much detail, but there you have it.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
In this study with this 39 experts, they showed 100 photographs of bite marks and said, OK, we want some information about this. Are these, let's just start with, is this a human bite mark or an animal bite mark?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Exactly. And only 8% of the photographs. So eight of a hundred photographs. I just did that math and I'm quite confident it's correct.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Could 90% of those experts, I don't know what 90% of 39 is, come to consensus that, yes, this is definitely human or, yes, this is definitely animal? That's hard to believe. Yeah, they did not agree on the other 92 photographs.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, especially if the animal's wearing human dentures at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Uh, yeah, like that, you know, that cartoon wolf from the old timey 1930s cartoon. I don't think I know that. Oh, sure you do. He was always like his eyes would pop out of his head and like he was. Oh, yeah. You know, like.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, it is pretty gross. I mean, the whole process from start to finish is fairly gross in that case.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Well, they classify them based on the kind of transfer pattern is what they call it. And it's not just specific to forensic odontology. Transfer patterns are what you're looking at when you look at the rifling on a bullet to try to identify what gun it came out of, which also apparently is junk science. fingerprints, you're transferring your fingerprints. So it leaves a transfer pattern.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Same thing with forensic odontology and the different kinds of forensic patterns are based on the damage that the bites do. So if it scrapes, like if you're, I don't need to put it any other way. That's considered an abrasion bite.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, when there's an actual part of the body missing because of the bite. It's not just a bite mark. There's actually tissue or something missing, like an earlobe, I think, like Evander Holyfield's earlobe.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
I'll tape it for you on the VCR. All right, send me the tape.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yes. And then there's also the different depths or the obviousness of the bite mark is another category that they use. And it starts from lowest to highest. It took me a minute to figure this out because I don't think the wording they used is really good. Agreed. A clear impression means that there was significant pressure used. That's the lowest of the three categories. Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
An obvious one signifies medium pressure, which that to me just shows that this is not accurate science. Medium is a type of fry order, French fry order. Right. The, you know, depth of a bite mark. Like medium is so subjective, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
All three of these are. And then noticeable, that seems to me like that would be the least of the three. That's the most pronounced bite mark of all because the biter used violent pressure to bite down.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, for sure. There's also some other things that the biter can do during the biting. If they use their jaw a bunch, it's not just one bite where they clamp down. If they bite in succession a few times, That was going to leave a totally different mark from one that is going to where they just clamp their jaw down or something.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
If they move their tongue, it will move the skin around and will affect the bite mark that's left behind. We should have probably given like a heads up at the outside of this episode, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Oh, good one. And then there's another one, too. If the victim is being is still in my which to me means dead because nobody's going to sit still while they're being bitten hard enough to leave a bite mark that could be used against you in court. But, you know, if they're moving, that's going to affect the bite mark that's left behind, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And then, of course, also the kind of tooth profile they have, too, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, like if you ate a bunch of chips and they're just stuck between your teeth. Is that what you meant?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
In some cases, they would say things like with 100 percent certainty.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Another thing that they say, too, that we'll find that seems to not be at all true is that each person's arrangement and teeth, like your mouth, everything inside your mouth is totally unique, like your fingerprints. And that apparently is not true at all. But you'll find it all over the Internet as fact.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. I mean, just from researching this, it's like what kind of judge is still allowing this in as evidence? It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I just revealed my take on forensic dentistry or bite mark analysis specifically because the other version you said identifying deceased people is – Not as controversial. No, it's pretty much set.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. Well, let's take that break and we'll come back and we'll talk about all the controversy surrounding bite mark analysis as a part of forensic odontology. Man, that's a mouthful. If you're driving right now, look around. I'll wait. All those cars you see, they're all probably on autotrader.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
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Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
What does that stand for? The National Institute of Standards and Technology. They're like a federal agency, if I'm not mistaken.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
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Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
I didn't read anybody who was challenging it or its legitimacy. And apparently it's been really useful over the years because the teeth are the strongest part of the body. They can survive fire. They can survive exposure to chemicals that could just get rid of the rest of the body. They can survive explosions up to, I think, 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They can take heat up to that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, yeah. In my opinion. Yeah, for sure. But the fact is that study, and we should also caveat that with the fact that this study used dental charts only. And they made sure that they were highly high quality dentists. dental charts that they examined.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But the fact that they were able to find dental charts that were identical between two people totally undermines the idea that everybody's mouth is unique. Everybody's teeth arrangement is unique.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and this was 2,000 dental charts. They didn't choose, like, three. Like, this was a pretty decent, high-quality study. And, yeah, I think it totally undermines that. But, like you said, yes, there's also enough uniqueness that you can kind of use this. And I think, like you said, nobody's really saying, like, stop doing bite mark analysis entirely. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And actually in their defense, the American Board of Forensic Odontology says they basically admit like, hey, we made some mistakes in the past. We've cleaned up our act. We've revised our guidelines. And now if you're a legitimate forensic odontologist, the furthest you will go is to make three different calls.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
One, exclude, meaning that this person's teeth could not have possibly made the bite mark that you're showing me, cops.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Not exclude, which is only saying it's possible. I'm not going to go any further than that, but their teeth resemble enough this bite mark pattern, this bite pattern, that it's possible that this person made it. And then inconclusive. And that's as far as they're supposed to go. They're not supposed to in that sense. I guess you could testify those three things.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But if the prosecutor is like, OK, so so not exclude, you're saying it's his right there. They're supposed to bail essentially at that point. They're not supposed to go any further than that. That's the standard in the guidelines for forensic dentists doing bite analysis, bite mark analysis today. But there's still plenty of people out there who are going beyond that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, he was sentenced to jail. I think was that Roy Brown?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
As anyone who's made it far enough in Breaking Bad knows that eventually, if it gets hot enough, they'll pop like popcorn. But most of the time, if a dead person who's unidentifiable comes into a medical examiner's office, they have not been exposed to that level of heat.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
OK, so, yeah, he spent almost 20 years in jail, 15 years from 92 to 2007, largely based on that that bite mark analysis testimony.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, that was a big one, too. I think maybe in one of those cases where they were appealing it. I don't know if it was Roy Brown's, but there have been plenty of forensic odontologists who have gone back and been like, what I was saying apparently is not right or grounded in science. I recant my testimony. And at least one judge that I read was like, well, we didn't really need you.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
The jury could have come to the same conclusion that the bite mark matched their teeth. So I'm not going to overturn this case, which is nuts in and of itself. But Roy Brown is far from the only person who has been exonerated after being convicted on bite mark analysis, too, right? Like, haven't there been like at least 26 people?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. Remember when I was saying some expert witnesses on the stand say like this, it's 100 percent match. That happened to a guy named Roy Crone.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
He did 10 years based on bite mark analysis because you got to understand if you're a juror and the prosecution is saying like this person is an expert in forensic odontology and that expert tells you, the jurors, there is 100 percent match between that man's teeth and this bite mark on this murder victim. It's going to be tough to overlook that for the average juror, I would guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, there was another thing too, I think from that same study where they took the same experts and went back to them eight weeks with the exact same photos they'd shown them eight weeks before. And some of those experts didn't even agree with their previous assessments.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. So that was and they weren't like, hey, you said this before. What do you think now? It was like they I think they thought that this is a new set of bite marks and they were just basically guessing is what they found. So it's been pretty thoroughly debunked. But people still use it. The Innocence Project has really taken an interest in this, and I think rightfully so.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
We did an episode on that with guests. If I remember correctly. And yeah, so they're a group that go around and basically free people who were railroaded or wrongfully convicted, usually based on DNA evidence that wasn't heard in their case. And so one of the things that they've done is taken interest in bite mark analysis.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And one of the roles they play now is I don't know how they keep their finger on the pulse. But if a prosecutor, which is very rare these days, from what I understand, tries to introduce bite mark analysis into a case, the Innocence Project will show up and be like, we object to that. This is not science. This should not be admitted. And I think they're fairly successful.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
This is a big one. So there is a forensic odontologist from Mississippi named Michael West. And he essentially just changed careers to be an expert witness in forensic odontology. That's how he made his living.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And he came up with a technique called the West Phenomenon, wherein you can, according to him, using some special goggles and a UV light, you can basically resurrect a bite mark that's healed years later and see it well enough that you can compare it to a suspect's bite and use it to convict. He totally made it up.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Apparently, at least in the first case that he used it on, he took photographs, but he wouldn't share them with anybody. So it was just his testimony that this person was convicted on. And it became a tool of the trade. So other people, including John Konko, were convicted in part because of this West phenomenon, which is part of the overall junk forensic science.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
So this is the junkiest of the junk that people were being convicted on.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But he sold them as X-ray goggles that you could look right through people's clothes with. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. You just use it to exclude. That's what most people can agree on for bite mark analysis is as far as they'll go.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Chuck, did I ever tell you about Paul Revere in Forensic Odontology?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. So Paul Revere, in addition to being a blacksmith, he was a dentist too. And one of the things he did, he was one of the first forensic odontologists who used dental records based on his own knowledge too. He made dental work for a lot of people in the Revolutionary War.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, I disagree. But yes, we'll find out. You think? I'm going to go find something.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, you forgot forensic foot smelling. Then we're going to have to go do that one.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Right. Nice. Oh, actually, I can do this old school, too, because if you want to know more about forensic dentistry, you can go check out a HowStuffWorks article that we used in part for this episode. That is kicking it old school, isn't it?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and since I kicked it old school, then it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
If you want to be like Steve and tell us that you had to pull over because you were so overcome by something we did or said, we love that kind of thing, especially if it was positive, not because it was so terrible that you had to pull over. But even if that was the case, you can still email us. Either way, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Forensic Dentistry
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No more lines, no more hassles, just affordable, fast care. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon.com. 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.
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Forensic Dentistry
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.
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Forensic Dentistry
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.
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Forensic Dentistry
Yes, and that was a very fateful decision because as that case made its way through appeals and a final appellate court upheld it, that also simultaneously not only convicted the killer, it also said this is legitimate. Bite mark analysis is admissible in court. It set a precedent. And that exception that those three forensic dentists in their defense
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Forensic Dentistry
you know, went to bat for for use in this particular case became the rule. And there was no longer like, hey, this is not actually that great of an idea. It was, hey, we've got this new way of prosecuting scumbags. Let's use it to the max.
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Forensic Dentistry
And there was a really famous case within just a couple of years of it becoming widely used in American courts that's still celebrated today as one of the great successes of bite mark analysis. Because it's not like every single case is worse than the last.
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Forensic Dentistry
But there's enough bad cases and enough people who've been wrongly convicted and later exonerated based on bite mark evidence that it should not be allowed. You just go figure out who did it some other way. Stop using bite mark analysis.
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Forensic Dentistry
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Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, the two Chi Omega women who died, who did not manage to live, were Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. But he did some pretty terrible damage to the other two, I guess. But that bite mark, apparently Ted Bundy had extremely crooked front teeth. So much so in the bite mark was clear enough that they use that bite mark analysis in part to convict him for those murders.
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Forensic Dentistry
Those were he apparently admitted to killing 30 women, possibly killed as many as 100. And so one of the one of the cases he was prosecuted for were the Kyle Omega murders.
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Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. And also by law, I think every state requires dentists to keep dental charts on their patients. And then they also have to retain them for a set number of years, depending on which state demands what. So they do come in handy, just the charts alone. Well, like there's not going to be x-rays with them necessarily. There's not going to be any photographs.
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Forensic Dentistry
Just from the charts and the coding systems that they've worked out to codify teeth can conceivably give you enough information that you could use it in some form of forensic dentistry. That's how accurate the charts are meant to be.
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Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. Yeah. It takes a special kind of dentist to do this kind of work because by the time the cadaver, the corpse has made it to the forensic dentist, everybody else upstream has said like, no, they don't have fingerprints. Their face is unrecognizable. It just keeps going on and on and on until finally your last chance of identifying the person is forensic dentistry.
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Forensic Dentistry
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here, but she's here in spirit. We're all flashing our pearly whites because we're in a lineup and this is Stuffish.
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Forensic Dentistry
And they'll often, I mean, like if it's a mass casualty, you know, you know who is on the plane. Apparently that's when it comes in handy a lot for plane crashes. You know all the passengers on the plane. You go get their dental records. You hand them over to the forensic dentist and say, good luck. Can you match any of these teeth with these charts?
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Forensic Dentistry
And they're, I mean, they're a huge part of a forensic team in like mass casualty events. They're really important because, again, they're like – The last hope of some families getting closure, being able to like give their loved one a funeral or something like that. Like that's the role that they're playing.
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Forensic Dentistry
They're not doing this because they like just playing with dead people's teeth or anything like that. Like they are helping other humans with their work by identifying disaster victims, not extending that to bite mark analysis.
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Forensic Dentistry
Well, not only that, you can also like when your teeth develop as a human, it follows a set pattern. So you can go and look at somebody's development, especially if they're under age, I think 20 something or 35 and say, well, they have they've developed this tooth, but they haven't developed this tooth. So they're probably 18 ish.
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Forensic Dentistry
Did you see any pictures of a skull with a wear from pipe smoking? Yeah. It's crazy. It's like the person's teeth like curve up at some point, like on basically I think it was the right side of their face, just from holding a pipe in their teeth for years and years and years.
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Forensic Dentistry
I also saw another lifestyle one was something called a tailor's notch. This is pretty arcane. But if you find a tailor's notch, there's a chance that this was a dressmaker, a tailor, something like that, because they hold pins in their mouths as part of their profession, usually in their teeth.
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Forensic Dentistry
And when you do that enough times, it actually wears a little indentation in the tooth that you normally hold the sewing needle in. So do you want to talk about the Black Death or just keep moving on? Let's take a break. Okay.
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Forensic Dentistry
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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Forensic Dentistry
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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Forensic Dentistry
If you're driving right now, look around. I'll wait. All those cars you see, they're all probably on autotrader.com.
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Forensic Dentistry
AutoTrader has been attracting car shoppers for years now, and for good reason. Not only do they have supercharged search features that allow you to easily find your perfect car, AutoTrader has Kelley Bluebook MyWallet. From credit scores to down payments to interest rates, we all know that car buying requires a lot of math, so enter MyWallet on AutoTrader.
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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.
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Thanks to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, healthcare just got less painful.
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Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you.
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So visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you.
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Thank you for not throwing up long enough to record this episode.
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Man, that is awful. Are you going to be able to record tomorrow?
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, there was a really low likelihood that one customer was going to expose themselves to the other customers. It just wasn't that kind of place, right?
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How Automats Worked
And like you said, they are gorgeous. They were Art Deco, which was the trend at the time. Beautiful. And they would have, some of them had like two-story facades. There was a lot of marble stained glass, bronze everywhere. They had big windows that let in tons of light. Some of them had a mezzanine upstairs dining area. They were huge.
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How Automats Worked
And then they also paid attention to details too, like that famous coffee that you were talking about. You would put your nickel in this cool little dispenser and the coffee came out of an Italianate Dolphin's mouth.
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How Automats Worked
I didn't see, but I'll get you one just as a present for recording today. How about that?
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Kind of like the Merv Griffin set. They just found him out back of a Burger King. What? I never heard that. You remember in Seinfeld when Kramer found the old Merv Griffin set and he started hosting the Merv Griffin show in his apartment?
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How Automats Worked
That's right. So you said they were rigorously clean. That was one of the things they were known for. The other thing they were known for was that their food was like Like, really fresh. I couldn't think of a non-offensive way to put it, but it was a really fresh take on food.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah. Or two and a half cents. Yeah. If you could find a half cent.
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How Automats Worked
For sure. As long as it hasn't fallen on the street in public. Right. For sure. No street pie. And they were also known for that really good coffee, right, that came out of dolphins' mouths. So at the time, if you were in America, the coffee you drank, and this is the, I don't know, the 1910s, it was boiled. Yeah. And there was no filter, no nothing. So like grounds would come out.
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How Automats Worked
So your coffee was gritty. There was no filter, again, to take out any of the oils, any of the tastes. It was harsh, harsh coffee. And that's what people drank. And you liked it and you didn't complain because the coffee would punch you in the face if you did. It was that kind of coffee. Well, Horn and Hardart had a different take. They had French drip, right? Yeah.
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How Automats Worked
which still makes pretty good coffee. But at the time, you had to go to New Orleans to get coffee like that. And Horn and Hart are serving the stuff in New York and Philadelphia at all of their 60-plus automats for a nickel. And every 20 minutes, they throw out the old coffee and bring in fresh stuff.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, and I did the math. In 1912, which is when they hit New York, a nickel was worth $1.60 today. By 1950, it was worth 64 cents. So they started definitely losing money over time on that coffee.
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How Automats Worked
Maybe we can tie it into the idea that I had about why everything is so much more expensive now, even relatively speaking, than it used to be.
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How Automats Worked
But even still, even doubling the price from a nickel to a dime in 1950s money, that was still 20 or so cents less than what they were getting for it in 1912.
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How Automats Worked
Adjusting for inflation. So it sounds like to me. The bigger problem is that they just doubled it overnight. And again, that's all they could do because their slots only took nickels. So that's what they had to deal with. But like you said, even still, they came out on top revenue wise.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, I think every. Yeah, because they were pretty proper back then, too, you know, pie for breakfast. Even today, though, I went and looked. I was like, OK, surely our attitudes have changed. No, no, they haven't. If you look up breakfast pies, it's all like, you know, breakfast stuff. But in like a pie shell or something like that, there's no one out there eating actual pie for breakfast.
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You can make the case that almost all breakfast foods are desserts in the United States, man. Have you heard of like IHOP?
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Although I don't like biscuits very much as a sandwich. I like a biscuit on its own. Like say a Cracker Barrel, if you get biscuits and honey, really good. But if you take that biscuit, cut it in half and put anything like an egg or cheese or something on it, I'm like, this is grody. Give me an English muffin. Make it a mick. Wow. Okay. For sure. Never knew that.
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You need to learn four words in Spanish. I'll have that neat.
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That's funny. So I guess they decided that that 99-cent price really brought people in more than a $1 movie would, huh?
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One of the things, though, Chuck, did you see, I guess, in the documentary, the nickel throwers and like the bubble glass, the glass bubble fronted things that they said and they look like fortune tellers.
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How Automats Worked
But it was part of that whole ornate look to everything. Like just the whole most of those places were really pretty.
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How Automats Worked
So one of the things, though, is including people like Neil Simon, other people who were interviewed in the Automat documentary, people tend to remember the food as like good food. And it's entirely possible it was for a while. But the older, the longer you go along in the history of the automat, the worse the food probably got for a little while.
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How Automats Worked
So it's not entirely clear that the food was actually good toward the end. And we can't really say because, again, the last one closed in 1991. And I'm guessing by the time that one closed. It probably wasn't too good. Right. You shouldn't really compare the food in general over the course of the history of the automat to that last one.
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How Automats Worked
But I'm guessing it was probably pretty decent for a while based on some of the stuff I'm reading.
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How Automats Worked
You know, I'm with you. So, Chuck, I say we talk about how automated the automat really was because it turns out not really. It was really a facade. Literally, it was a facade of food that seemed to be mysteriously conjured out of nowhere, possibly by robots. Yeah.
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Yeah, so say that you went up and you're like, I'm going to have that delicious bowl of bubbling, greasy oyster stew that's just sitting there looking at me in the face. I think one of those oysters might still be alive. That's how good it was, right? And you put your nickel in and you pull the lever, correct? Yes.
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How Automats Worked
Well, that's what we're doing. We're doing an episode on automats. There's nothing more newsier current than that.
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Or like you were buying cigarettes as a kid when you were 14 in a coin-operated machine. That kind of lever is what I'm talking about, right?
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How Automats Worked
Exactly. So, you would do something like that and then either it would open, like it would allow the little glass compartment window to open up so you could get your oyster stew or what have you from inside. Or it might rotate a drum, like you were saying, so that that oyster stew was now available to you and you'd open the window and then…
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there would be an open compartment in the back of the drum that somebody who was working the back of the automatic cases would see was empty and would put a new thing of oyster stew in there. And then the whole thing would just continue. I also saw that some of them had a photo of the food and that, yeah, you would like open the case and just pull it out.
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How Automats Worked
And then the people in back would notice that that one was empty. But suffice to say, however, the food came out, There was a way to see in the rear that that compartment needed refilling. And one of the things Horn and Hardart was known for was employing armies of people who made sure that that food was there, that the compartments were full, and that the food was fresh too.
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How Automats Worked
That the Salisbury steak wasn't getting jiggly. You know what I mean? Yeah.
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How Automats Worked
There was also an actor named Apache Ramos, who is best known for playing one of the orphans in The Warriors. But also is lesser known as having managed the Fat Boys in the 80s.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah. What a great Afro. Yeah. But he also managed the Fat Boys like the Fat Boys are back. Uh huh. In the 80s. He worked at an automat and so did his grandmother. I'm assuming one or the other got the other one the job. But he remembered that the Horn and Hardart would throw holiday parties for the workers' children around like Christmas time. Oh, man.
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Can you imagine how beautiful those places looked when they were decorated for Christmas parties in like the 50s and 60s? Yeah. You know, people are like, if you could ever go back in time, what would you do? I would go to that Christmas party.
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Your friend Richie was like, well, my dad owns the tire shop, so you can come to that. We don't really have a party, but we stand around.
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How Automats Worked
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.
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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.
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We have another huge shout-out to give. This is the first episode we're doing with help from our new writer, Laura Clausen.
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Thanks to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, healthcare just got less painful. Running a small business is complicated. There are, I don't know, dozens of software programs that you need, and they're all so expensive. And since they come from different companies, they don't always play nice with one another. But what can you do, right? Odoo. That's what.
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Odoo has all the software business owners need. We're talking CRM, sales, accounting, literally every kind of software. And it's all on one platform. So it works together. And it's quality software, so you're not sacrificing. It's just a better experience than a hodgepodge of programs. I mean, you'd expect to pay a premium for it, right? But that's the most amazing part about Odoo.
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Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you.
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So visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you. Okay, Chuck, just before we took a break, you nailed it on the head. You said we were talking about the inclusivity of the automat, and in particular, the Horn and Harder automat, which, again, they were synonymous with automats.
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I've been thinking, Chuck, a lot of our writers have good nicknames. Okay. Laura spells her last name like Claw, C-L-A-W, son. So I think we should call Laura Dr. Claw.
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They were one of the earliest chain restaurants in the United States to integrate, not discriminate against their clientele. Not just, you know, like unescorted women, God forbid. Right. But also racially speaking, economically speaking, like whoever came to a horn and heart or automat to eat was treated equally. And that was huge. I mean, we're talking starting in the 1910s. Yeah.
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How Automats Worked
That was an enormous deal. And that's something that, I mean, my hat's off to them for that.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, it's pretty cool. There was also a historian named Lisa Keller, I believe in the documentary, pointed out that if you were an immigrant, this was a great place for you to go because you just went and looked at the food and put your nickel in. You didn't really have to be able to read or speak English and you could still get a good meal of oyster stew.
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I can't wait to see what Aaron Cooper does with this. Yeah.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, and James Dean, his favorite baked beans in the world were Horn and Hardart's baked beans.
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That's right. He really knew what he was talking about, too. That's how he died in that car accident. He was eating some baked beans at the time and lost control of the steering wheel. Oh, God. That's not true, everybody. We did a short stuff on it. So. Yeah, exactly. Don't at me.
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How Automats Worked
Right. Like how like when we were kids, you went to that city's like Hard Rock Cafe to get the shirt. Remember that?
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How Automats Worked
Yeah. You wear it with your Panama Jack sunglasses and everybody at home would be like you had a great summer, obviously.
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How Automats Worked
Wowee. Did they put your guitar up under a glass case afterwards? They did. That'd be pretty sweet. They should.
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How Automats Worked
I actually have seen it. So if you don't have cable, but you have an antenna, over-the-air antenna.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah, Wild West Room. I could not find a picture of that. But apparently one of the automats, this one in Times Square, they put a Wild West Room in in 1966. I mean, I'm sure people would have gone crazy for that in 1966.
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How Automats Worked
There's a station called MeTV, and they just play all sorts of great reruns and everything. Well, they just launched a whole new channel called MeTV Tunes, and they show some deep cut tunes. I mean, like Beetlejuice, the cartoon. There's Scooby Doo on at 6 p.m. Eastern every day, which makes me very happy. But they show Inspector Gadget, too.
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How Automats Worked
No, but instead of selling them, they said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's remove the automat and put Burger Kings in instead. There you have it. Franchises. So that's where you would have gotten your old automat cases is in the back of a Burger King.
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How Automats Worked
There's this one Burger King ad that keeps playing over and over and over again. I had to hit myself in the knee with a hammer to get it out of my head.
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How Automats Worked
That's like my oyster stew. Well, I guess I won't do a song right now. Actually, I know exactly why. Now we're even.
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How Automats Worked
So, yeah, I guess you can just if you can mute the TV fast enough, then you can keep watching me TV tunes.
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How Automats Worked
No, in those same families, they're like, oh, let's go down to the automat, step in, and they're like, oh, it's seedy here. So they stopped coming in, which just reinforced the ability of the homeless population to hang out in Horn and Hard Art. Horn and Hard Art's whole thing was serve everybody and serve everybody the same way. So as far as I ever saw, they weren't exactly rousting.
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How Automats Worked
vagrants who were hanging out drinking like a cup of coffee. And it just was basically the same story as the inner city in the United States in the 60s and 70s. Once the suburbs rose and everybody moved out of there and the neighborhoods and the communities that did survive had U.S.
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How Automats Worked
interstates built right through their neighborhoods, things just took a turn for the worse and the automat was not immune to that whole thing.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah. So the other thing, too, is it's interesting and I think it's kind of appropriate that Horn and Hardart got into fast food franchises because the automat kind of helped lay the foundation for that. But rather than hundreds of different dishes, which is apparently what Horn and Hardart offered at each of their automats.
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How Automats Worked
Um, you know, fast food has like 10 and like, yes, you can have it your way, but really you can have it your way choosing from these five ingredients or whatever. Um, and the, the, there were much like downscale, um, like surroundings. It was just like the automats, um, vision with all of the glitz and idealism removed from it. Then you have fast food franchises.
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How Automats Worked
And I was like, this is actually a much better cartoon than I remembered.
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How Automats Worked
That's right. It's a Gap. What else? Hmm. So, like you said, if you went to New York, like you go to the Empire State Building, you might go see a Broadway play and you would go eat at an automat. That's just how iconic it was. Right. It popped up like any time you're trying to get across how New York your your your movie was like there would be a scene in an automat or something like that. Yeah.
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How Automats Worked
Francis Ford Coppola apparently directed a movie in the 60s that featured an automat called Automat Now. Um, that showed up in, I'm kidding. Uh, it showed up. I get it now. I'm a little slow. Hey, I think you're doing magnificent for considering what you've been through the last couple of days, man.
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How Automats Worked
Um, Bugs Bunny went to an automat and the hair grows in Manhattan.
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How Automats Worked
And there's a book that I think I've heard of, but I'd never read from the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
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How Automats Worked
Oh, no, I've got a really high-tech setup. I have hijacked the coaxial cables throughout my house, and I connected my outdoor antenna to the indoor cable feed so I can connect TVs throughout my house to get the reception from the outdoor antenna. Okay.
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How Automats Worked
Well, the thing that sounds familiar to me is that these kids hide out living in the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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How Automats Worked
That's yeah. I guarantee that was an homage to that thing. Yeah. But anyway, in this children's book, these kids are runaways and they live in Met. That's the Met, right? The Met isn't the opera house. It's the art museum.
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How Automats Worked
OK, right. Well, one of the things that they do is they feed themselves by going to the automat.
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How Automats Worked
Oh, yeah. Wes Anderson does not rip stuff off. He lovingly pays homage to it.
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How Automats Worked
Andy Warhol, this is just what an artist he was. He could just talk about it. He just mentioned something in passing, and people are still talking about it 50 years later.
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How Automats Worked
But he said that he was going to come up with the chain of Andymats, which are like automats, but instead of having to go get your food from a case, you would sit down on like a red mohair banquette and order through a pneumatic tube. Yeah. And you would order frozen food and champagne. That's what he was going to offer at the Andy Matt.
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How Automats Worked
No, it didn't. But there's some people who are trying to revive it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, I'm sure that they do. I remember going to Toledo Hospital to visit my mom when she was at work, and they had basically automat sandwiches. I always just thought it was like a vending machine. Yeah, but no, it was an automat basically.
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How Automats Worked
One of the things you can choose for that pizza maker is, I don't want the cheese to scald the roof of my mouth. And the pizza machine's like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, definitely not.
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How Automats Worked
That makes me feel good about the effect I have on you. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
There you go. Well, since Chuck's back on his feet again, obviously anyone who's ever listened to this show before knows that he just unlocked the listener mail.
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How Automats Worked
Yeah. So there you go. You don't need to just stream. You can also get free TV.
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How Automats Worked
Mod Podge is what you use to glue together a big jumble of things that don't go together.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's great, Kelly. Thank you. And to the other thousand of you who wrote in, it's nice to know that there are people out there still using Mod Podge. It's fun. Yeah. I mean, it's fun to say. And it's got a cute label, too. Yeah. Mod Podge is really a lot of fun. I enjoy it. For sure. And we heard from Martha Stewart, too. She said, yes, I have Mod Podge laying around.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Well, if you want to be like who? Kelly. If you want to be like Kelly and write in to gently correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Thanks, Capital One bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Well, it's officially too cold to do anything, Chuck. But the upside is that you can cocoon yourself in Bombas socks, slippers and underwear all winter long.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, and Bama's knows that the little things really do make a big difference. So they removed all the itchy tags, fixed the annoying toe seam, and perfected the fit of everything. No more socks that slip down or underwear that rides up. Just perfect comfort.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
No, no. I don't have any announcements, but I do have a question for you.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Oh, nice. Okay. Well, Chuck, then I think you would have enjoyed a trip to the automat.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, your oyster stew. Blah. Yeah, but you would walk up and you'd just sit there with your finger like on your lower lip looking from case to case trying to figure out what appealed to you right then. Very much like you were looking at the menu, but you were looking at the actual food you were going to consume instead.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So you didn't even need to be able to read to know what you wanted at an automat. And then, like you said, you put your money in and you'd get your food out and you'd go sit down. And to people who first went to the automat, Chuck, we're talking like this is the turn of the last century when they started to take off. This was as high tech as anything got.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Because it's really important to point out in like the first third, at least, of the 20th century, a lot of people in the United States didn't have a refrigerator. Right. They might have had an icebox, but they certainly didn't have anything pumping Freon through it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
No, no cable TV. Not even over the air antennas in some cases. Yeah. No Beetlejuice the cartoon. And they also might not even have electricity in their home. So the idea of this futuristic serve yourself out of a glass case that's lit. Kind of experience was a really big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And what's even more remarkable is, so, okay, you're like, yeah, everybody in the 1910s was just a yokel by definition, right? These things lasted until the 1960s, and they were still viewed as these amazing places to go eat.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, let's start at the beginning. That seems appropriate.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, and it took a little college try, I guess, the first few times for it to make that leap across the Atlantic. And it was two guys, Joseph Horn and Frank Harder, whose last names have become synonymous with automats. In fact, depending on what city you were in, you would probably refer to the automat as a horn and hard art. They were like the Kleenex of automats, essentially, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They were already in business together. They owned a chain of cafeterias in Philadelphia. And they said, what's next? What will the future bring? And they figured out the best way to predict the future was to build it themselves. And I think they actually made a trip to Germany and found out about the automats. And they decided they wanted to bring it back to the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And like I said, it took a few attempts for them to actually get it to work, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. And so Horn and Hardart's automats, I think, like you said, started in Philadelphia. And then after Harcone went out of business, Horn and Hardart kind of muscled in on that market, which is actually pretty brave because somebody had already proven that automats may not work in New York. Right. Good point. But I guess they had faith in their food.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's not here, but Chuck is, and Chuck's new nickname is Poopy McGee. Actually, Pukie McGee. Not both?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They were like, have you tried this oyster stew? It's amazing. I've got to stop saying that. And so they hit New York, I think, in 1912. By 1932, 20 years later, they had 42 automats in New York City, another 20 in Philadelphia. And H&H became the largest restaurant chain in the entire United States. The United States was big at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They were also known because they were clean and safe and you could get really good coffee for a nickel. They became places where you would just go sit and rest your dogs or take a load off for a little while or catch your breath, whatever you wanted to do for a little while. And one of the reasons why...
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
people did that was because part of the allure of the automat was that there was no front of house staff generally. There were no servers, there was no maitre d', there was no manager. If there was a manager, they were in the back. So you didn't feel like hustled or rushed or like anybody was judging you for sitting there as long as you want, nursing a single cup of five cent coffee.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And so like automats kind of got that reputation where you could just go chill out. And as big of a deal as they were in New York and Philadelphia, they actually didn't take off everywhere, even though people tried because Horn and Hardart were so successful.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I mean, that's like that cereal. It's like a plain white box that says Bran Flakes in just black font.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Take a break so you can go throw up. 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.
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How Automats Worked
See CapitalOne.com slash bank. 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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How Automats Worked
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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How Automats Worked
Grave danger, I would say. Like, it's Wednesday at 3, and we need an episode for tomorrow at 5 a.m.
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How Automats Worked
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.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And then there was also Micheline Paré, Galen Weiss, Pamela Darlington, Colleen McMillan, and Monica Ingus, and then Maureen Mosey. And again, all of them were killed between 1969 and 81 all along Highway 16. And a lot of them were hitchhiking as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. The man, this is a bummer edition.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yes. And from what I've read about him, Bobby Jack Fowler is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him some more. He was terrible. And when the Canadian cops were like, hey, you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons to the officials in Oregon. who killed at least one girl here, but probably three total.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
You should probably look around at your own files. They started finding, I think they've said up to maybe 20 murders that they've pinned on Bobby Jack Fowler. Nothing they can prove, but it's just likely that he committed them. And he'll obviously never be convicted or tried for him because he's dead. But it just, it goes to show you like there are human beings out there who will,
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Just kidnap, rape and murder and just do it over and over again. And the easiest thing to do in the world is if you're going to do that kind of thing is take advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely populated area, which makes Highway 16 just like the perfect spot.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, he hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently a fairly typical sting operation. They call him a Mr. Big operation where he's just introduced to successively higher up criminals in some organization, but they're all cops. And
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Um, the, the judge was like, no, the, the admission to, um, or confession to Catherine Mary Herbert's murder inadmissible, but he thought that he was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out of the, out of being tried or convicted for Monica Jack's murder. So they're like, that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But yeah, I mean, he, he went down for it, but like you said, he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for one of these dozens of murders.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and so all three of them were from Prince George, which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway of Tears. And Cody was 19 when he killed the first of them, Jill Stacy Stachenko. He's not the youngest serial killer in Canadian history, but he too, like the other guys, was a scumbag and still is. He was sentenced to no less than 25 years, four times.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC, the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's been a decent amount of coverage, but it's not the kind of coverage you would get when, say, like a Caucasian girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind of coverage about how this group of people have just been totally –
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But it appears that his sentences are concurrent. So he's serving 25 years for four murders. And the judge reminded him that he could apply for parole as early as 15 years in. So that's four years from now that this guy might be able to get out after being convicted of murdering four, three women and a girl. I don't like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, so Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister, she works for Caria Sicani Family Services. And she's the one employee of the Highway of Tears Initiative. And she frequently has to work for free because they just are like, we're out of money again. Wait till next quarter for the check to come in. And obviously she's extremely dedicated, but that's a kind of a par for the course thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Like just the funding is just not there. And if you follow like government funding, it usually goes to stuff that people care about or like a lot of people care about. So if you don't get funding, it's kind of a big slap in the face in addition to really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying to do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, because as the Canadian government has said many times and is recognized and apologized for, Canada's history of how they've treated their indigenous populations, like putting them in residential schools, apparently in the 60s there was a second wave of that kind of thing. But rather than residential schools, they took kids from their family homes and put them in with foster families.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And so there was a lot of breakup of the culture and families in the indigenous tribes in the area. And as a result, like poverty began, violence really set in, deaths of despair like suicide and alcoholism and drug overdoses, and just an inability to deal. take care of themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
basically left on their own to deal with something like this, that they have, they don't have the resources to deal with this. And it's just such a terrible story. The story is so much larger than this collection of murders. But at the core, that's what it comes down to, just women who were treated like disposable beings.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And then you couple that reality with somebody coming to the police and saying, my daughter hasn't come home since Friday. And they're like, Friday, huh? What was she doing last? Well, she went to a party. Then she's probably just on a week-long bender. Just give her a few days. From all the stories I've read, I would say 90% of the family said that that was the first response they got from police.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Right, which obviously didn't foster any further trust with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And I guess in response in 2018, the commissioner of the Mounties, Brenda Luckey, actually issued like a formal heartfelt apology for the problems that the families have been facing and the lack of support they've been getting from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Um, which has been few and far between, but I think when it does, when something like that does happen, it goes a long way. And I think the families are kind of like, okay, let's, let's get back to work with the Mounties again.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And there's a guy, a staff sergeant named Wayne Clary, who said, you know, we probably aren't going to be able to make any more arrests in these cases. That most of them are stranger on stranger violence. So there's basically no motive other than to sexually assault and kill. It's really hard to track somebody down, especially when you don't have many leads involved.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So we're probably going to have to get used to the fact that these murders are going to go unsolved. But from what I was reading, there's a lot of families who are like, this wasn't a stranger. We know the guy who did it. He lives over there and they're not getting listened to. And then also there's a report from 2016, an analysis of 32 cases.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Did you see this part about where the police had said that there was no foul play in these murders of indigenous women? And this analysis is like, that's kind of a weird thing to say because some of them were found nude. Some of them had unexplained injuries. In some cases, the coroner contradicted the idea that there was no foul play.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And the whole thing starts at the very earliest, as far as anyone knows, the first murder that's become part of what you call the canon of the Highway of Tears murders and abductions. Started in 1969, a woman named Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway 16. And it went... Kind of went along like that for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And yet they have been logged as no foul play and therefore they're not being investigated because they're not considered murders.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. Let's take our second break and we'll come back. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But no one had kind of put together this whole group of people and called it the Highway of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come. But at the time, there was enough going on that they had coined this term the Highway Murders.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
OK, Chuck, so you said the magic word missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. It's a thing. And Canada launched an inquiry into that group. And some people in the Highway of Tears community gave testimony for it. They released a report in 2019, and they said, look, let's just cut to the chase here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
It's not like Native American tribes were living in poverty and destitution and engaged in sex work and alcoholism and drug addiction before we Euro-Canadians came along and just completely disrupted their culture. So this is actually this...
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
problem of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, it's part of a larger, bigger picture, a history of being exploited and left vulnerable and not protected by the people who were supposed to protect them. This is not new.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And by 1981, enough women and girls had been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16 that a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives from all over British Columbia and I think Alberta got together and decided to kind of compare notes and see if they could solve some of these unsolved cases.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, there's reports that show like an actual correlation, like a man camp shows up, sexual assaults of Indigenous women goes up in the area too. And unfortunately, this part of northern British Columbia that the Highway of Tears runs through, that's like the central area for Canada's resource extraction. So there are a lot of man camps there and there's plenty more coming.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So that in and of itself is a problem. And it's not just in Canada. Apparently, North Dakota underwent an oil boom back in the 2000 aughts. And as more and more people were brought in as laborers, sexual assault of indigenous women there went up, too, because they're also pretty vulnerable here in the United States as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and just a lot of people just don't have cars, and if you do have a car, it's probably being used by somebody else. I remember, what was that movie, Smoke Signals, I think? They talk about the res car, where it's just like a car everybody just kind of shares, and it just gets handed from person to person when you need it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So yeah, hitchhiking is going to be a lot more convenient in some cases. Cell phone, you said also cell phone service is a big deal too, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And that was a big one of the 231 calls for justice that came out of that symposium in 2015. And for I mean, that's lightning fast if like for this kind of stuff that happened that that fast. So just two more to go, everybody. Let's get it done in 2025. Yeah, absolutely.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
There's also like a little bit of a certainly I wouldn't call it a tussle or anything, but there's a growing kind of disagreement on how to approach this up to basically, I guess, 2023. The approach was exclusively this is a horrific situation. This is tragic. This is super sad. And it doesn't need to be portrayed any other way. That's just what it is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And the Carrier Sakani Center, remember they run the Highway of Tears Initiative. They're like, what if we just kind of alter this a little bit? What if we make this more of a hopeful thing? For a very long time, there's some famous billboards along the Highway of Tears.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
It had pictures of three of the victims, Ramona, Delphine, and Cecilia, who isn't included in the canonical victims, but she was Delphine's cousin. They went missing within six months of each other. Um, and I think Cecilia has never been found again. Their pictures around this billboard and on the billboard, it said, girls don't hitchhike on the highway of tears, killer on the loose.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Well, um, that was helpful for years and years and years, but carrier Sakani's like, You know, there's a way that some people who don't understand our way of hitchhiking, why we do it, could possibly see that as like there's some sort of victim blaming in there. So what if we just kind of remove that and make this whole more hopeful message?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And they unveiled, I think, four billboards that kind of change things a little bit, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Right. Yeah. And I think the billboards coexist. And the critics of that were like, OK, these billboards can coexist. That's a great billboard. We're fine. But it was when they proposed, I think, yeah, Carrier Sakani proposed, hey, let's let's rename the Highway of Tears officially the Highway of Hope when activists and supporters like Gladys Raddick were like, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
We are definitely not there yet. A lot of these cases are not solved. There's not much traction still. Like, that's ridiculous and we're not going to do that. But hopefully someday it will reach that status, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So until then, that's the Highway of Tears. Here at Stuff You Should Know, we say rest in peace to all the victims, and we hope peace can come to all their families who have to live with this and the ongoing frustration of not getting the help they need. And since I said all that, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Very nice. That was a very mean email. Who is that, Mike? That's Mike. But I get your point, Mike, and I appreciate that because I've been studiously avoiding any mushroom supplement that has the word fruiting on it. So maybe I should just bite the bullet. I could put a piece of electrical tape over that part and just take the supplements as needed. Yeah, bite the mushroom.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
If you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us and turn my stomach, you can do that. Send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a Wet'suwet'en Nation woman. And in 1998, there was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears, which I don't think you can really calculate how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media, here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while. I guess at least since the 90s, but really in the early 2000s, I think, is when it picked up. Regardless, it is a stretch of desolate highway that runs in British Columbia, up in Canada, from the port city of Prince Rupert,
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
It's even got a catchy name. Despite, you know, the actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears, I think it really helped quite a bit. And Florence Nazeel also is credited with starting a walk that covered the entire, again, 450-mile stretch of the Highway of Tears for the first time. That walk's been made…
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Scores of times by now over the years by family members and community members and members of other nations who've gotten involved to try to, again, help ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more, because that's another recurring theme throughout this, Chuck, is that the police have shown over and over again, opportunity after opportunity to just not really seem to care.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been called to task time and time and time again for not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting enough resources to it. But also the media is largely responsible too, not just in this case, but in any case of a missing or murdered
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
woman who's not white in the United States or Canada, they get much less coverage and the intensity of the coverage is much less too compared to white women. And that's not just anecdotal. I was reading at least one study on it from 2016, I think, in the Journal of Law and Criminology. And they were like, yes, we analyze this stuff and it's absolutely true. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So there's like a but there's a bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoher, she like it did bring a lot of attention to this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And you just can't you can't deny that. And so that's good. But at the same time, it's just like, man. Why does it take that, you know? We've been trying to deal with this for decades. And now this one white girl becomes part of the crowd of murdered girls. And, like, now people care. It's got to be really tough to take. And I know I called her a girl, and she was 25, so she was a woman.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But there's, like, this whole group is made up of women and girls. I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say, like, some of these, I mean, the youngest victim was 12, Monica Jacks, who I think died in the late 70s, maybe 1978. Like, there are plenty of girls who were picked up and murdered. There are also plenty of women, too, but... And not all of them were indigenous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
A lot of them were white. But the cops, as they started to get together, came up with some criteria that they applied to these cases that kind of narrowed the search, but also brought on new cases that they hadn't considered before, as we'll see.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
All the way into the interior to Prince George. And it's, I think, 720 kilometers, almost 450 miles. And it's known as Highway 16 officially. But the stretches of this highway are so desolate. so remote and so sparsely populated that it has become a haven for murderers who pick people up, mostly women, mostly indigenous women, on this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
I think so. Whether they like it or not, everybody calls them Mounties.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and just one thing, Roxanne and Alicia, who also went by Leah, they were friends and also colleagues. They both were sex workers who were engaged in survival sex. Ramona, who was not engaged in anything like that, I think she worked at a restaurant or something, but Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah...
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
All were murdered in the same area between, Ramona was June, Roxanne July, Leah in December of 1994, I think. And all their cases, like, in this area, everybody's like, there's something going on. The cops are like, just give us 11 more years and we'll come together and come up with this new EPANA project. And right when they did, those three just stuck out immediately.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
It's like, there's some real commonalities here. They need to be investigated. Right. But like you were saying, those three criteria that they came up with from this ePANA project, you had to be female, you had to last be seen dead or alive within a mile of Highway 16, and then you also had to be involved in high-risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And we should say here, too, like for those of us who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs and you could walk places and get to where you're going easily or ride your bike, Like hitchhiking almost seems like frivolous. Hitchhiking is a way to live and survive and get to work in this area. It has been for decades.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So it's not like I think you can view hitchhiking as like, man, why did you hitchhike? In a lot of cases, the women and girls who were picked up hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going. Like they weren't like just hitting the road like they that was just part of daily life for them, unfortunately.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And Ayala, I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name, she was the last one to be officially added. Like, as far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned, she's the last Highway of Tears victim missing. Although, as we'll see, there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure. The problem is EPANA is very much underfunded and not basically not really operational right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And it's endemic in this area so much so that it's caught national attention just how poorly this group of women are being treated and their families as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So they're not adding people for that reason. But when they looked into this a little more, they basically went back to their credit and found that there was about 300 boxes of information and paperwork on all these cases. And so they're like, we can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff logged in some sort of database.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So they created the database and they logged it and it took them like a year. But after they finally got all that stuff in, some of those older cases, the ones between 1969 and 1981, They started bubbling up toward the top and were eventually included, starting with that first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No. I've always heard it called the inner monologue, too, or internal monologue. But Anna helped us out with this, right? Yeah. Anna G. She points out that inner monologue is a pretty limiting term because that voice in your head, the way that you talk to yourself – it can take all sorts of different shapes rather than you having a conversation beating yourself up quietly.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And then there's one that was initially called Calm Optimist, but Polchaska Waisel did a follow-up study testing to see if her initial results were confirmed. And Faithful Friend, Ambivalent Parent, and Proud Rival were all there again in the second one, but Calm Optimist didn't show up.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So she ended up replacing that with something called Helpless Child, which apparently is probably the worst of the worst. All right. That's a lot. It is. It was a lot. Do you understand this anymore? Sort of. Okay, good. Well, we're making headway, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Okay, Chuck, so one of the things we're talking about with inner speech is it's easy to kind of confuse it with, like, say, private speech where you're actually talking out loud to yourself. Somebody could hear it. But one of the big differences with inner speech and verbal speech is Is that it's just faster. I guess allegedly for some people. It's not for me.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Mine goes very slow and actually slows me down. It's like it goes slow. Yeah. The part of me that has to process the words slows down the speed that I could conceivably go at. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like old Fernie Ho. It just kind of puts the brakes on everything. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But normally, if you compare the two, it should be much faster just because a lot of times you're using condensed speech, which, you know, again, is you're just using shorthand that you can understand. I think that's where I get tripped up. I don't really do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And then like physically, physiologically, it's just you can think a lot faster than you can speak because you're not moving your mouth. You're not like taking a breath or anything like that. It's just supposedly faster. Is yours faster?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Those are kind of the keys to what we would call inner speech, or the people who research it would call it inner speech.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, that's at least twice as much.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Was that the guy from the Dunkin' Donuts commercials or the FedEx commercials in the 80s?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I'm not going to knock him down.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So I guess then we reach another question. How does inner speech develop? Which apparently, when they started figuring this out, thanks to a guy named Lev Vygotsky, who we'll meet in a second, it completely changed our understanding of children. Because up to this point, it was like, do kids learn first? And then, or does their brain develop and then they learn first?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Or do they learn first by, or do they develop their brain by learning? Clearly, I did neither at some point. You can kind of get the gist of what I was saying.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. And then they start to after that, they continue to develop and get good at things like condensed speech and create creating their own self shorthand and stuff like that. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So, again, I said that this kind of turned things on our head as far as understanding.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Piaget, who was a very famous French psychologist, he said kids are dumb and then they learn – or their brain grows and then they learn. And this showed the exact opposite, that they develop their brain and their understanding of the world through learning, through this inner dialogue. And it was Vygotsky, believe it or not, was a Soviet researcher –
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So the West wasn't exposed to his ideas until, like, the 50s. And when they finally came out, were translated, it was like, great, okay, now we finally understand.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what that is in Russian, but yes, apparently it translates to inner voice.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It sounded Russian to me in my head.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So it's a way to alleviate her anxiety? I guess. How interesting. That's cool. I've never heard of that. Yeah. Hey, man. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Emily is one of a kind.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, how is her air penmanship?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Very neat. Wow. Can you really or are you just joking? No, no, no. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
All right. Nice. Too hot for TV.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Or no, don't have inner speech, right? Yeah. So that's just that's wildly different. It is wild. That's a great term for it again. Wild. So now Fernie Ho comes in and says, whoa, everybody, I'm not really excited about this having its own term, an endophagia. And and means lack. Endo means inner phagia speech because and I think he makes a reasonable argument here that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
When you come up with a term, especially a Latin term, for something, a way people behave or think or whatever, it seems to suggest that this is a condition, maybe even a disorder. And he's like, that's not necessarily true, especially if the majority of people don't have this inner voice. So do we really need a name for it?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And I think Nettergaard and Lupien were like, it's a pretty cool name, though. Can we please keep it? And Fernie Ho is thinking about it right now. you
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. Yeah. Should we? Who are you? They have other things, though. Like, it's not like if you don't have an inner voice that there's no thought whatsoever. It can also come in different forms, I think, is what they're finding.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
The poor bastards. The thing is, though, is that seems to be, at least as far as they've discovered, really the only big drawbacks is you don't do well necessarily in memory tests or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But even for somebody who isn't thinking in inner speech where they're talking to themselves, there's a voice in their head talking, there's other ways that you can think using what is basically some sort of inner voice. Well, inner speech is the best way to put it, but imagine that without speech, without language or words. There's inner seeing. Some people think in images. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Feelings, like just your emotions, which I'm kind of like, okay, is that... Does that get you in trouble if that's how you respond and move and behave from the world? Because that's one of the big things from inner speech is when what we do is we prepare ourselves and come up with a plan of action. What are we going to do next? How are we going to respond to this?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, and it's really impressive that people are figuring out how to research this at all. It's a definitely developing field. It's not established quite yet. So it's kind of the Wild West in a lot of ways as far as, you know, psychology goes. But one of the reasons why it's fairly new is because people forever just thought, like, there are such things as inner voices.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So if you're not thinking it over in your head and it's your emotions that drive you, like that just seems like it could get scary. Yeah. There's – Huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Fraught. Exactly. Yeah. There's un-symbolized thinking. So you've got like, you're just not, you're not thinking like, okay, I need to get in that car. You just, I don't know. I don't know. I can't even give you an example here. And then the last one that they've mentioned is sensory awareness, which is just sensing things and then I guess responding to Essentially like an amoeba.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like, oh, this stove is hot, so I'm going to move my hand. But imagine nothing in between the heat, the sensation of heat entering your hand and removing your hand. No thought whatsoever between that. That's apparently what sensory awareness is like.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Gotcha. That's pretty cool. I tested myself on this a little bit to find out what I do. Like I typically just think in words, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
A lot of times I talk to myself, but I think I don't know. I think there's a lot going on in there that I'm not cognizant of. I'm really bad at like how I feel and like just understanding, you know, what's going on in my head at any given time. Like really just introspecting. Like I do it a lot, but I'm not necessarily good at it is what I guess what I'm trying to say.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I can be like that too. See, I don't believe that one bit. I think you're a champion at that kind of thing. Well, maybe certain kinds.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but you're wrong about you not being good at it. So I tested myself to see if I could think in just images without words because I've never really thought about that. So some part of me told myself to think of a watering can. And I didn't hear it. It was just like it wasn't in words. I didn't hear it. No one spoke it. I didn't see it spelled out.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It was just there was some command all of a sudden to think of a watering can. And all of a sudden a watering can came up. And the proof that I was not thinking in words is that I couldn't think of the word for what I was seeing. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then some other part of me came in and was like, you know, I think you were actually supposed to produce an image of a flower pot.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And then I got worried about cognitive decline. And that's no joke. Like that was the whole process right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I guess I didn't. It was more like not. It wasn't like I was saying, like, don't do this. It was more do this or try this. So because there wasn't like that blanket prohibition on not thinking about the word, it was easier to do. But just back to Ruby. So did you ask her if she has an inner voice or if she thinks in symbols or whatever? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
We'll never be able to study them because they are the definition of subjective. And like you said, self-reported tests are how they had studied them before. And that's just not super reliable. William James, the father of American psychology, had a quote. I'll paraphrase him.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Okay, do let me know. Text me.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Burn Josh. No, she loves you. I know. I love her, too. I think she's sweet.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Hey, did she, no, did she like Magdalena Bay? She did. Did she really? I just figured that she hadn't and you were just not mentioning it. No, I thought I texted you back.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, I'm glad I was right. For some reason, every time I heard it, I would just be like, Ruby would really like this. That does not happen every time I listen to something. So I thought I should just say something.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
She's great. Is that a place, too, or are you joking?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Man, you're getting me all over the place today.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Even in your head, it doesn't.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
He basically said like trying to study something like inner speech is like turning up the lights to get a good look at what the dark looks like. You can't do it was the end of his speech. Yeah. Oh, boy. That makes a lot of sense. It does. I've heard another one, too, that I love. Studying consciousness is like trying to use a flashlight to find the shadows.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Ooh, that's a good one. That's a good one, too. What was Spud's McKenzie party animal? Two words. That's all you need to know.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, that kind of leads us to the purposes of inner speech a little bit, right? I mean, talking about it clearly helps connect people, but there's things that we gain from talking to ourselves or just being able to do that. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. Yeah. And also, I mean, executive functioning, like making decisions, figuring out the best solution to a problem by simulating them, like thinking through your actions before acting, which also oftentimes ties into emotional regulation. All of this uses some sort of like inner voice, inner speech, inner hearing is another way that you can experience it.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
That's an enormous role because that's essentially how we navigate life as adults.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
You know, it's not exactly tied to what you're saying, but what you were mentioning before, like how you were planning out which action to do next for cooking and then the one beyond that. I realized that's why I had to stop playing video games because I would walk around thinking about how to do it better next time. Oh, interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I think another way to say it is we don't understand it, so those listening to this episode aren't going to understand it by the end of it either.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Even when I wasn't playing the video game and realized this is no way to spend my mental energy. Like, it's one thing to just sit down and relax and play a video game. And if that was it for me and I could leave it there, I would totally play video games still. But I just couldn't leave it there.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Do they still call them video games? It feels really 80s or 90s. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I heard that in a magazine.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Okay. I'll watch my steps then. Nothing wrong with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Not with a German accent, an American, but yeah. So also deaf people apparently, and I would guess especially if you were deaf from birth, they see or think in sign language. So they visualize the word but through signs. Yeah. So cool. That is super cool. And then other people can actually they might envision someone like their face. So they're reading their lips.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But they're not hearing anything. I just think that's just fascinating. They also don't speak it themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
There was also in that same Guardian article with the woman who was featured with the Italian couple bickering in her head. There was a dude, man, I can't find his name anywhere. But he, I think, is the hero of this entire story, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
His name is Justin Hopkins. I found it. Oh, okay. He has this, what he basically calls an island in a sea of void. And the island is his mind. And his mind turns on when it needs to. So an example, because I don't fully understand how this guy, how his mind works. But the best I can say is he realizes that he's out of milk. So he needs to go buy milk. So he buys milk. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But imagine that being the extent of it. So he needs to buy milk and he goes and buys milk and he puts the milk back in his refrigerator and then he doesn't have another thought until the next thing that comes along. He said that he can go hours without a thought.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And so he can just sit in front of a sunset and enjoy the sunset in the most basic way that you can enjoy a sunset and just not be thinking about all the problems he has or what he has to do next or how to most efficiently watch the sunset. And this guy is like... I wouldn't want to necessarily live like that all the time because I do enjoy having like an inner life.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But to just be able to modulate it and do that once in a while, I think that guy's amazing. And apparently in the Guardian article, they said that he says he sleeps like a baby, which I could totally imagine.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So, OK, OK, I'm I'm fascinated by this. Like, give us an example of how your brain starts just becoming nonsensical or speaking gibberish or whatever that you can recognize you're starting to drift off. Like what?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And then like, yeah, but a lot of times you can just experience it and not note it and just fall asleep.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Man, that's amazing. I've never heard of that. It's very hot. That's pretty cool.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, there you go. Full circle, I guess, in that sense. Yeah, it's not a very satisfying one, but yeah. So like we said, inner monologue is a little too limiting. We don't want to use that. Inner speech is way better. And inner speech is actually a little limiting, as we'll see, too. But it turns out there's a lot of
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I think that's that's I was going to say, like, I know we've been talking about ourselves a lot, but part of part of it for me is like, you know, I want to hear from people saying like, yeah, absolutely.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
OK, well, one other thing before we go. There was a tweet, what's become kind of a famous tweet from a few years back, I think in 2020, where somebody just basically said some people have an inner voice and some people don't. And it revealed this commonality among people. If you don't really have an inner dialogue, monologue, inner speech, whatever, you just assume no one else does either.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And if you do have it, you just assume everybody has it. And it was really kind of eye-opening to people to find, like, that's not the case at all. It's basically a spectrum.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, you got anything else?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Okay. It is parked. And since we just parked it, as everyone who has been listening to the show from the outset knows, we've just unlocked Listener Mail. Ding.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It's like a hot dog place, very famous in Toledo, and then Jamie Farr made it famous on MASH.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I don't think they've let us sign the hot dog bun, but I appreciate the thought, Alex.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, there was a listener years back who was trying to get us, actually, the key to the city, and I don't think it went anywhere.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
well you should get a key to toledo i should get a key to stone mountain georgia you should sign a hot dog bun and i should sign uh like a stone mountain plus also we should have the hot dogs while they're there because alex ain't lying they're really good and i have to say if you're ever in toledo or apparently dayton columbus cleveland and you aren't in the mood for a hot dog but there's a tony paco's nearby go get the stuffed cabbage because it is top
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
things that our inner speech does besides, like you demonstrated, beating yourself up. It can be used to motivate. That's a good one. You kind of did that at first, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
notch like you wouldn't think this hot dog place why does it have stuffed cabbage well because it's a Hungarian place and it is really good like really good okay I'm just going to say it again it's really good stuffed cabbage what's it stuffed with love magic I'm guessing three kinds of meat probably awesome it is it is very good well thanks a lot Alex it's always nice to hear from a fellow Ohioan I'm guessing
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. And if you want to be like Alex and write in and tell us about something we love, like Tony Paco's or whatever, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. We use it for memorizing things, problem solving. We use it to regulate ourselves. Like, okay, Chuck, don't be mean to yourself. Calm down. Yeah. That kind of stuff. But again, not out loud. And then even more, not me saying it. Because, dude, if your voice in your head was my voice, I would be so sorry for you. I dream as you. Is that weird?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I'd like to hear more about that, though, later on.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Ferneyhough is what I saw or what I heard, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. What you can't see is the giant furry purple monster with googly eyes and a tiki drink. Oh, man. That'd be great. So, yeah, dialogic seems to be fairly common, too. There's also condensed inner speech. It's kind of like a different form of... So this, okay, here's one of the things that I had trouble with, Chuck. Let me just be forthright here.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
There's not any neat package of there's this kind, this kind, and this kind, and then there's this subkind of this kind and this kind and this kind. No one's put it together like that, so it's a little confusing. So, for example, dialogic inner speech. You'd think that the next thing would be monologic or something like that. That's not here.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Instead, we're talking about condensed inner speech, which is using, like, abbreviations or— like just words rather than full sentences, and that this is a way that you speak to yourself in a very private manner that you would probably never use to speak out loud. It's just the kind of shorthand that you use for yourself. Doesn't fit this list at all, and yet here we are.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right, but at the same time, you could be having a conversation with somebody about phone, keys, wallet. So it would be dialogic condensed inner speech. Drives me nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right, for sure. Like, you're the bystander, basically. There's two people talking. Did you see that Guardian article that included the woman whose inner voice was like a stereotypical Italian couple fighting, arguing? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And that's how she works stuff out. Like the wife would be like, no, she needs to quit her job and follow her dreams. And the husband would be like, no, she's got a good job. She needs to keep her feet on the ground. And like eventually one would win the argument and then that's what she would do. That's what that lady's inner voice is like.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. And I saw that that was kind of expanded or changed or kind of cut into subcategories later on or at some point. There's evaluative critical, which is basically like, you know, did I do a good job or why didn't you get 100 percent? That kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
There's also positive regulatory, which kind of ties into what you were just saying. Like, if you imagine yourself, you know, doing really well, practicing shooting baskets, there's some part of you that could be like, keep up the hard work and you'll be in the NBA in no time. Or you did a great job. Like, those would fall under positive regulatory.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Nice. I was going to say, I was waiting for you to say brick because that's what I hear.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Very smart. Boy, you know what you're doing, don't you?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, it's the opposite of condensed speech. Like you're thinking in or hearing in your inner voice the exact words with the phonetics and the grammar and everything that you would say out loud. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I think your reference copy probably.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Reverberating Skull is a great album name.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So what you're engaged in, Chuck, is called private speech.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
There's now we reach a point of the list where coherence starts to emerge. We've got like basically like a one and then the opposite. I don't know why I just put it so confusingly. So let's just start. There's elicited or prompted, which is inner speech that's basically triggered by some external factor. Someone comes along and says, here's some pictures of different stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Pick out the ones whose names rhyme. So you've got a boot and then a, I don't know, a foot or something like that. Like you would pick out the boot and the foot. And depending on how liberal they were with their judgments, they would say, yes, that rhymes.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like that is your genuine, true inner voice. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere. Sometimes when you just are talking to yourself and don't even realize you're talking to yourself in your head. Like that's what Herbert Herbert calls pristine. And there's this really great Aon article about your inner voice that was written by Phil Jekyll. J-A-E-K-L.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
That's still private speech. No way you're going to do a good job. Oh. As long as we can hear you and you're talking to yourself, that's great. Oh, yeah. I get it now.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And Phil points out, I'm hoping I can, we're on first name basis, me and Phil. But he points out that this is leading psychologists to be like, oh my God, oh my God, if we can study pristine inner voices, like that's essentially like the external, the exterior of the unconscious. And we would be tapping into people's unconscious.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And other people are like, I think Fernie Ho is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Let's just kind of take this one step at a time. Old Fernie Ho, that's what he's known as. They call him the Brakes.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Is it the parent of a Gen Xer or a Gen Xer as a parent? I'm confused.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I would think so. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. That's not ambivalent. So here is another problem with this field. People are naming stuff just way off. Yeah. Way off. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And it's hard to remember and understand this stuff if the pieces don't fit together because they're dripping. You know what I mean?
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The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So like you said, I think in 1977, James Earl Ray escapes. And Cantrell lived in the area. He said it was big news at the time. So he was aware of this. And a few years later, he and his friend Carl Henn, known as Raw Dog, for reasons that I don't want to ask about.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So they decided to hike into the state park. This is a place where he's like, okay, we could totally do so many more than eight miles in 54 hours. Let's go check this out and have fun. And like you said, most of this area are not... nature trails where like there's signs posted, there's a path you can look down and follow.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like these are hard to find trails that you need to know how to use a compass, a contour map. Like you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called. That's right. In addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible, just uncomfortable stuff and pushing your limits. So these guys were like, let's just go for a fun hike for a day.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
They didn't even like, yeah, know his his existence. Yeah. He just walked right by.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, and this is just a 50 to 55 mile version. Like you said, officially, the current Barkley Marathon is 100 mile. And in reality, it's also like 120 to 130 miles based on reports from people who've actually run it, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So the first version, like you said, is three loops. And it wasn't until two years after the first one that somebody completed it. And I mean, we're talking like dozens of people attempting this. And it took three times before one person completed. And there was something about this that I don't know if we've mentioned yet. Just this first version, there was an elevation gain of 24,000 feet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So all of the times you went up and down, if you count all the ups, It would equal 24,000 feet in elevation that you've climbed over these three loops. And that is a lot. And in fact, the guy who finished, Frozen Ed Furtaw, he was just Ed Furtaw until he won. And from then on, he was Frozen Ed Furtaw.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running Magazine that the elevation was actually 2,400 feet, not 24,000. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. So, yeah, the total elevation is 120,000 because, yeah, if you go up 60,000 feet and you're coming back down, you got to come down 60,000 feet. Yes, it's harder to climb up, but it's not that easy to go down too, especially if you're on an incline. And that's a big part of it too is sliding into things like briars and saplings. Yeah. It's rough.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like just watching like the effects on some of the runners' bodies and like what they were coming back to camp looking like was –
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Some guy had, like, a head wound, and they show him, like, slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead. It was really nuts what these people are doing to themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, it really is. One of the other things that really kind of gets us across, too, is in what you said. So you've got 60 hours to finish. And from the start, the clock's always ticking, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
But you're going 130 miles. So if you do the math, Olivia helps us with this. And she pointed out that you could sleep for two eight-hour nights. and still finish this course at a 20-minute mile pace, which you can basically do on your hands and knees, and still complete it within the 60-hour cutoff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So the fact that some people can't even finish the first loop goes to show you how difficult this is. That if it were flat, it would be beyond easy. But those same limits, the time limit and the length,
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, there's a really great documentary from 2017 called The Barkley Marathon, colon, The Race That Eats Its Young, which is a nickname for that race. And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultrathoners, like
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
put on this this particular terrain or in this topography is just it changes absolutely everything oh yeah um i this 12 hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary right yeah that confused me too because they they were finishing in like 13 hours and something like that i didn't get that so yeah i think it must have been a new one
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Right. Yeah. And in the documentary, Cantrell points out like these, by this time, these people who had like formed serious bonds by running together on these loops are now direct competitors. Like now it's a race because they're in the fifth loop and whoever's going to finish and what time they finish at is going to determine the actual winner.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like now there's a possible winner and everything changes. So I don't... They probably don't like class pans and then, you know, they're pulled apart, you know, sadly, when they have to go in different directions at that point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
people who who know their stuff and have done crazy things as far as running goes who are like this is far and away the hardest race on the planet like there's nobody who's doing anything like this and if you think you know what you're doing you're going to be completely amazed at how far off you were in what you thought this is going to be like it's that hard yeah you got a chance to watch it
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. Um, that's, that's what I took it as too. And one thing that I didn't get, I got from context, I didn't see it anywhere because I guess it's so obvious. No one thought it needed to be spelled out except me, but, um, it's the same loop, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Okay, so they're doing the same loop five times, which is why they do it clockwise and counterclockwise and different ones at day and night. So that you can't just be like, yep, I remember this. This is nothing. Now I remember exactly what the trail is. You're super disoriented the first time, but it's not like you have it down pat after that first loop necessarily. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Um, I say we take a break and talk about how you would get into this race and then what it's actually like running it. Yeah, let's do it. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a special operations, like, I guess, a former special ops soldier. Yeah, it was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body. And this like that did nothing to prepare me for this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Well, it's officially too cold to do anything, Chuck. But the upside is that you can cocoon yourself in Bombas socks, slippers and underwear all winter long.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, and Bama's knows that the little things really do make a big difference. So they removed all the itchy tags, fixed the annoying toe seam, and perfected the fit of everything. No more socks that slip down or underwear that rides up. Just perfect comfort.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. And at some point you might as well be like, well, at least I guess I'm going to have to finish the first loop. I might as well keep going that direction.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Right. Yeah. So going even back before the start of the race, you said that the Barkley Marathon has no website. And that is intentional. The whole thing is meant to be kept largely a secret. There's not a website. There's not like some information on this is how you apply. You have to use... basically your investigative skills just to figure out Gary Cantrell's email to email to ask to apply.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And they make it really, really hard to apply for this because in part they're just weeding out people who don't have even the beginning of the motivation and dedication to complete this race. Like if you can't even go to this trouble to like really do your research to figure out how to apply, then don't even bother trying to apply.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Exactly. And if you do want to apply, you have to cough up a dollar sixty.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, he didn't. And he was like, this is six hours, man. Like, he didn't make it very far at all.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And this guy was way more qualified to do it than, like, the average person. Like, it wasn't like he was just some, like, he went and plopped the guy out of McDonald's, like, mid-bite of a Big Mac and threw him on the trail. No, no. This guy was in pretty decent shape, and he thought that he had a chance. It's not like he's like, yeah, I'm going to go be the sacrificial human. Right, right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He thought like he was going to try to complete it. I don't even think he made it halfway through the first loop, did he?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. Yeah. Imagine if he'd started like yelling. You just brought me out here to make fun of me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, that's the whole jam. The way that it's treated is like you're not going to finish. You're a dummy for even trying. There's this weird kind of push-pull going on that Gary Cantrell established basically out of the gate that's based on his kind of impish sense of humor. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And so that means that like you're just as likely to be abused or mocked when you like quit as you are to be told like, hey, you completed one loop. That's pretty good just in and of itself. It just I guess depends on what his mood is right then. And a lot of people like don't really like this guy that much. Like if you don't if you're not tuned into his sense of humor.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
you're probably not going to like him. You might find him obnoxious or, you know, might find him just mean. But if you are tuned into it, I think he's pretty funny. Like reading about him on paper and reading interviews with him, I was like, I don't really like this guy. And then I saw him in the documentary. I'm like, oh, okay. He's just hard to translate into a description.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
When you see him talk yourself, you're like, yeah, he's fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, and the camel cigarettes play a big role because the start of the race is marked officially by him lighting a cigarette. So everybody's standing there at this gate that's the official starting line for the race and just standing there waiting for him to light the cigarette. And he finally does. And it's like a random time. I think it was like 8, 11 a.m. when the whole thing started.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Oh, okay. So the whole thing about Barkley Marathons is that you can trace them back. I mean, you could start at the very beginning. We talked about in our, what was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, I mean, there's bragging rights for sure. Like if you told any ultra marathon runner, you know, trail runner, that you completed the Barkley Marathon, like they would drop to their knees and start kissing your rings. Yeah. Like it's a big deal to have finished this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And yet there's also like from Gary Cantrell's perspective, from everything that I've read, the way that he describes it is like he's giving people an opportunity to push themselves to their maximum possible limits. Because remember, this race is intended to be just inside the possible human capacity. The possibility of the human body, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So if you can complete it, like you're doing all sorts of things that you never thought you were capable of doing. Like your mental endurance is among the greatest of people walking around. And so, yeah, it's way more than just bragging rights. Like if you're into bragging rights, you're probably not even going to finish the first loop. Like if that's why you're doing it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
and you somehow got accepted, it's not going to translate. So these people don't care about bragging rights, even though they would have bragging rights for life.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, it was on a specific marathon in, I think, Los Angeles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, because as people get pared down, the people around them are like, they want to see somebody succeed then.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Something like that. Either way, you're stripped down to like the bare essentials.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And you have a map, but you don't have a copy of their map. They give you the master map to use to trace the route onto your own map. And if you trace it incorrectly, well, that's TS for you. And people do get lost, like, a lot. There was one guy who – Oh, man. I don't remember what year it was. Oh, in 2006. Yeah. Yeah. This guy wandered off the course and spent 32 hours trying to get back.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And in the end, he only did like two miles of the actual course. He wandered so far off course. So the way he put it, he did 16-hour miles in this race.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, remember the guy who was running the human zoos at the World's Fair came up with a, like a, he called it the Special Olympics Marathon. This was months ago, man. Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy. All right. Well, I can't remember.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. And I'm guessing that they are the books in the same place every time? That I'm not sure about. But I do know that they hide them. They're not just always out in plain sight. Like one of the things you're having to stay oriented, you're having to push your body and endure. And then you're also at the same time having to make sure you don't trot past one of the books.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And also, if you're like, well, how do you get the same page 11 times? You get a different bib number for each loop. So you would be tearing out a different page each time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I read about one runner, too, who I think this I don't remember what year was, maybe 2016 or 17. He made it. He showed up six seconds after time. Oh, my God. And but he had all his pages and they said like he was just collapsed on the ground. And he said, I have all my pages, but he didn't make it by six seconds.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
You'd have to be one hell of a perfectionist to be like, well, I failed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yes. Anyway. Oh, get this. Apparently we did an entire short stuff on Saturn's rings and didn't mention it because I have no recollection of doing a short stuff on Saturn's rings. Do you?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He said that he thinks the reason why is because it's just one final punishment for you from Gary Cantrell to basically be humiliated with taps. Then on the other side, some runners, when they finish, especially when they actually complete the race, he has one of those Staples easy buttons that they press. And when you press it, a voice goes, that was easy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. The guy who was on the documentary was I think his name was John Kelly. He finished second of two, I think, that year or maybe three. And he they show him and he's just totally out of it. Like he's sitting on a chair with people surrounded surrounding him talking.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He's just in another world, like totally out of his skull because he hadn't slept at all like that whole time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
That was a – well, yeah, so I think officially 20 out of 1,000-plus people have finished. So I'm sure we have some sixth graders who can calculate that for us and send it in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. So she finished with two minutes left, right? That's incredible. Yeah, it really is. And one of the reasons it's incredible is because Gary Cantrell, this is another reason a lot of people don't like him. For years and years and years, he would say publicly there's no woman out there who could possibly finish this race.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
You do remember we did a Saturn episode that came out like a few days back.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And, you know, he was criticized for saying that kind of thing because there's plenty of amazing women marathoners and ultrathoners and trail runners. And he defended it by basically saying, if a woman could defeat this, it would be exactly the kind of woman who would need to hear somebody say something like a woman would never be able to complete this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Right. So finally, yes, I think Jasmine Paris. She's a Brit who teaches at the University of Scotland. Did you say that part?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
It might not be L.A., but it was like just – you remember like that one Italian guy? I think he was running in like – Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. He'd stop and eat people's fruit and stuff and chat with everybody. And there were the two guys from Africa who were like – I remember that now. Yeah. It was – I can't remember where it was or what the name was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, although you do kind of have to be a dum-dum to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. I say we finish on the story of John Fega Varese. All right. Let's hear it. He was a runner in, oh, I don't know what year he ran, but he was an experienced ultramarathon runner. He participated in the Badwater Ultramarathon, which runs through Death Valley, 135 miles. Yeah. And he was like, this is, that's nothing. I'm paraphrasing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I'm sure he wouldn't say this, but he was basically like, you can't even really compare the two. And he completed it. And he was so incoherent from sleep deprivation that he apparently didn't remember like downing a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream like at the finish line. He had no idea that he'd done that. And he spent the next day and a half just laying around the campground recovering and
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So after that time, he's like, all right, I guess I'll drive home. And he started falling asleep on the way home. So he had to stop and check himself into a hotel where he slept for another 16 hours. Oh, man.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. And I say we quietly close the door and leave John to his slumber and go on to listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Wow, Chuck, I feel more lake-informed than I ever have been in my entire life.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
The sad thing is the whole reason I brought that up Chuck was to say that we went over a lot of the origins of marathons in that episode so we don't need to do that in this episode. Can you believe that we just did all that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yes. And I can vouch for Chuck Mark. We just edited out many minutes of him searching for that email. So he really did give it a try.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Right. If you want to be like Mark and his unnamed sons, you can write to us as well. Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. Barkley, he's a farmer. He's like he's never run anything like that. And he said, I have no idea why he named it after me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
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Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. He also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he would continue to improve. And that's a big part of running. That's a big part of running. It's a big part of hiking. It's a big part of doing everything worthwhile. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, he got the bug pretty early on. He started running marathons. I think in 1966 he started running.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
By high school he was running marathons. And then he started running ultramarathons. And he was there like right at the beginning of the ultramarathon craze, which I think kicked off in 1974 with California's Western States 100. A guy named Gordy Ainsley set that up. And so by this time, you know, the ultramarathons were starting to catch on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And Gary Cantrell was enough of a runner that he knew of these things. But he was also married. He was starting to have kids. He had a job as an accountant. And he just couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultrathons. So he started setting his own up around Tennessee.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
That's so bad. That's just such a bad idea. Well, he called it the idiot's run for a really good reason. Yeah. And that's the whole his whole jam is like he loves coming up with a kind of race that just is at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance of what the human body can actually do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like he wants it just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race. But most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, because I think the astonishment at how difficult it is probably takes up a lot of your mental energy and focus while you're doing it for the first time. And that, yeah, once you've even tried it before and even dropped out, you probably are past that. And it's got to be a huge leg up. Totally. So we should talk a little bit about the whole basis of all this, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barclay Marathon.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Okay. Well, the whole thing is held at Frozen Head State Park. That says it all, huh? Yeah. It's named after the tallest peak in this state park. It's in northeastern Tennessee, which is kind of, I guess, where northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee. It's a beautiful area. This would be in the Cumberland Mountains.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And this particular state park is not like the kind you just, you know, go to, everybody goes to on the weekends for a picnic. It's pretty remote. It's 330 acres. But this 330-acre state park is surrounded by 24,000 acres of forest land. And the whole thing, I guess, started with convict leasing. So this area is, like, really dark.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, and this area is inhospitable because of its terrain and in part because of the weather and the elevation. Yeah, yeah. But the whole reason there's a prison there is because back in the 19th century, Tennessee started making money by leasing its prisoners, convicts, to mining companies, coal mining companies.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Just make a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor, right? Well, I think in our... Man, I need to keep a list of all of our episodes like handy because I can't remember the name of it. But do you remember that one war, the strike war in the 19th century? And I think coal mines in... Matawan. Matawan. Yes. Thank you. In that episode, we talked a lot about...
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
What happened also in Tennessee's coal mines where the labor was taking on management and it was resulting in wars. Well, one of the things that resulted out of this in Tennessee was that the laborers, the free laborers who worked for the coal mining companies would frequently help the convicts whose labor was being leased out by the state escape.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And so Tennessee was like, well, fine, we're not doing that anymore. But undeterred, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
You did fantastic. My favorite out of all of them is fluvoxamine.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I like all those letters together like that. It's great. Yeah, and I'm not saying the drug itself, just the word.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They're just hanging out there like, where's my Uber?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
There is so many other things I could have said. And I just, I don't know. I couldn't come up with anything better.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So that's specifically what you just said SSRIs do. And they live up to their name, essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I think you did, but yes. So they specifically focus on serotonin and they prevent its reuptake from the synapse that sent it, or the neuron that sent it out, right? So the great thing about SSRIs is that they work really, really, really well on most people with the fewest side effect. And it's in part because they selectively target serotonin.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And despite the fact that there's fewer side effects in fewer people than other types of antidepressants, some people do not respond particularly well to it. It depends on the brand. Not necessarily the brand, but the type of drug. I mean, all of the SSRIs aren't exactly the same. So if one's not working for you, you can try another one and another one and another one.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And if that doesn't work, then you might move on to another class of antidepressants. But from what I can tell, SSRIs are essentially still today like basically the flagship antidepressant, if there is such a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Well, actually, that's not true, isn't it? It's a dirty, dirty lie. What are you talking about? It's just me and Chuck. We're producing our own jam today, I guess you could say. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right. For sure. Is that a good way to say that? It is. And patient education is a really important part of treating depression. Like it's not one of those things where you just turn up and say, well, you know, here, treat me like you're going to be armed with a lot of stuff on how to help yourself, too.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And I guarantee you they're going to say exercise every day for 20, 30 minutes a day will be one of the things that they say. Because it works so well. It's crazy what it does. And that's part of also treating things with antidepressants is if you are suffering from major depressive disorder, you probably can't get yourself up and exercise.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So on antidepressants, it increases the chances that you can exercise. And then that just makes it even more effective.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
No, I still don't think it was silly. I think it was a great shout out for sure. Good. So a couple more things real quick on SSRIs before we move on. Fluoxetine in particular, Prozac, has a long half-life.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So you can get away with just one dose, which you're like, who cares?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, but that actually decreases your chances of missing a dose. So that's a good thing. And then one of the other things, too, is when you go to the doctor, especially if you're a kid, they start treating you with antidepressants. They're going to start at really, really low dose and just kind of slowly move it up. And as you get adjusted to it, it cuts down on the chances of side effects.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
But there can be side effects with SSRIs from antidepressants. anxiety to sexual dysfunction to vertigo. So, I mean, you need to go into understanding what you're facing, but a good psychiatrist or doctor will be like, okay, let's just do this a little at a time to get you on your feet as gently as possible.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yes, those were some of the first, but not the first, strangely. But these were really kind of early pioneering antidepressants that they worked on serotonin. That was kind of their goal. They were a reuptake inhibitor as well. The problem with these things are is that they weren't selective. That's why SSRIs are just so desirable.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Tricyclic antidepressants are just like, come here, neurotransmitter. And they kind of dry hump the neurotransmitter no matter what kind of neurotransmitter it is and prevent it from being taken back up again.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
We should just leave it in once just to really punish her.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, you probably associate these names with the smell of mothballs. That's right, exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I can't. Yeah, sure you can. Meprotiline. Okay. The brand name's even worse. Luteomil. Yeah. Desipramine. That's norepramine is the brand name. Amitriptyline.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Clomipramine. That does not roll off the tongue. That's anaphranil. And then imipramine, which is trophanil. I've never heard of any of these. But they apparently work fairly well. It's just the side effects that are really problematic. I mean, strangely, they treat it just as well as SSRIs. But again, they treat everything, all the neurotransmitters.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
She's got like a little bit of miso in the corner of her mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And because, as we've seen, neurotransmitters perform more than one function in the body, they have a whole host of side effects that you just don't want.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So, Chuck, today we are doing something in grand Stuff You Should Know fashion. We're doing a tangential episode where we haven't done like the core episode that it relates to. Have we never done one on depression officially? I could not believe it. I looked on the stat sheet maintained by Jill Hurley, which is infallible. I looked all over the Internet.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right. That has, I saw a black box warning that the FDA slapped on it that says it can cause suicide. And I was like, how? How does that stuff happen? And the way that I saw it explained is that if you have, like, if you are, if you're suicidal and you have depression, you're thinking of suicide, you may be too immobilized to actually carry it out. Uh-huh.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
A tricyclic antidepressant may lift the depression just enough for you to act. And apparently there's a warning on the box that says that. So, yeah, tricyclics don't sound particularly desirable. Yeah. But they probably saved quite a few people in the 50s and 60s when they came out.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. And what's weird is SNRIs. You think it's better, right? Yeah. Despite selectively targeting two neurotransmitters, it's basically just as good as the SSRIs.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I think they have about the same number of side effects, too.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's right. What just happened? That was great, man. Benaflexine is Duncan.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
There's another related class called noradrenergic and specific serotonergic. I'll bet the psychiatrists are just laughing, laughing, laughing. Have fun, fellas. Or else they turned this off a long time ago. Yeah. But those type of antidepressants, NASSAs, lowercase a first. So I'm pretty sure there's no other. I guess you could say not SSAs. Surely people don't say that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Sure. That's even better. It's better than venlafaxine. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. They – the NASSAs have – they do the same thing, but they have different side effects. It's just so bizarre. Yeah. Like you can experience weight gain and sedation rather than, say, sexual dysfunction like on a SNRI. But they're all doing the same thing. But again – None of them seem to be any better than SSRIs, and SSRIs have the fewest side effects.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yes. So I've heard of MAOIs like basically my whole life. Haven't you? No. Okay. So they're this like very like widespread class of drugs, but they have a weird twist to them in that they prevent you from breaking down something called tyramine, which is an amino acid. And tyramine is great because it regulates blood pressure, but you don't want too much tyramine.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
It gets out of whack and your blood pressure gets out of whack. And tyramine is present in a lot of different foods from like soy sauce to fish to sausage, aged cheese, the best cheese.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And as a matter of fact, it's called the cheese reaction, where people get hypertensive from taking MAOIs and accidentally eating the wrong food. So what the monoamines get broken down by is monoamine oxidase, MAO. And the MAOI is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So it prevents this thing from breaking down the monoamines. And that's why you can't eat aged cheese.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I've never heard of any of them, but sure, if you want.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Well, I think what's also interesting is that it was discovered by accident.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I sat there and had a conversation with myself. Nothing. It's not there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, so I think they started in 1958 with Marsalid, the first ever MAOI antidepressant. But again... Because you can't eat aged cheese, people don't usually prescribe that as an antidepressant anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Sure. I mean, yeah, that'll make anybody depressed not being able to eat aged cheese.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Yeah. We did do bipolar. We've done PTSD. We've done ADHD, obviously, all that. But we'll definitely do depression at some point. OK.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
OK, Chuck, so we started talking about nutraceuticals, and that's just a fancy name for a supplement that you could conceivably use to treat a malady. And in this case, people have long been seeking supplements to treat depression with, whether it's clinical or, you know, diagnosable or passing depression. Who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Oh, that was a good one. That was great, man. So, yeah, we're talking about antidepressants. That was a great one. Thanks. And to talk about antidepressants, we really do have to kind of give at least the briefest overview of what depression is like. It's kind of everywhere.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
People don't necessarily want to take pharmaceuticals and it's tough to blame them. So they'll follow studies and they will read about new discoveries with people poking around trying to figure out what causes depression. And very often they'll turn up some specific amino acid or something like that, that they show that there's low levels of that in the brain of people with depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And so they'll go off and test this amino acid and they'll show like, yep, actually it improves symptoms. And then people go out and buy tons of that supplement. But the problem is in the United States, if it's a supplement, it's essentially totally unregulated.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So there's no one checking out to make sure that the dose is the same pill to pill, that they actually have what they say they have in them, that they don't have old newspapers ground up with it. It's just the Wild West when it comes to supplements, which makes it really a tricky thing to treat your depression with, even though I totally understand how somebody would not want to
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I remember that. That was our parents taking St. John's Wort, wasn't it?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I saw something like 60 million adults in America, and I think they define that over age 18 these days for this kind of stuff, have some sort of diagnosed depression. I think 20 million of those have major depressive disorder, which also is called clinical depression or unipolar depression, as opposed to, say, like bipolar, where you have ups and downs, mania and depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I can't bring it to mind either, but I'll bet I know what you're talking about. So, yeah, St. John's Wort, it was all the rage in the 80s. And I think one of the other things that lent it a lot of credibility is people have been using St. John's Wort to improve mood for probably thousands and thousands of years, if not longer.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
The problem is, is all that time through history, people weren't also taking like birth control pills or pharmaceutical antidepressants, both of which St. John's Wort reduces the effectiveness of. You don't really want to reduce the effectiveness of your birth control pills if you're trying not to get pregnant at that time. It also prevents the breakdown of antihistamines.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
It does all sorts of unwanted stuff. That's just such a great stellar lesson in the problems with using a supplement to treat something like major depressive disorder. But it's also a lesson in just how far we need to go to look into non-pharmaceutical treatments for stuff and actually study them and figure out exactly how to do it and start producing that treatment as well.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Because, you know, I think most people do prefer something that you could conceivably consider more natural than a pharmaceutical treatment.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
The problem with that, though, is that we're not set up, the United States at least, isn't set up to make a trillion dollars off of St. John's Wort. It's tough to do that as opposed to creating a new proprietary compound that treats depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. So the government was all about, I should say, the FDA back in 2019. They prescribed or they approved, sorry, a prescription version of ketamine called esketamine. And apparently that to ketamine I've seen compared to CBD to THC.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Exactly. That like, say, a geriatric person might take.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. So psilocybin is just gangbusters at treating depression. Ketamine is too. We should say also that psychiatrists are like, we need a more potent version of ketamine. So please approve that FDA. Right. They're not, as far as I know, on the way to do that. But who knows? But psilocybin in particular, there's just study after study after study that's like this stuff really works.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And it works in like you don't have to stay on it. You don't have to take mushrooms every day for the rest of your life, which sucks. You know, but you only take them a couple of times and it can have effects that last up to a year. There was a, I think a Johns Hopkins study from 2022 where they gave two doses of psilocybin to patients two weeks apart.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And so they gave each patient a dose of psilocybin two weeks apart. They didn't just wait two weeks to go to the next patient, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. So they found that the effects could last like a year, a year from the second dose. And the effects were like just mind-blowing too as far as the, I guess, quantifying the symptoms of depression, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And it apparently is picking up so much that the World Health Organization is saying like, hey, guys, by 2030, that will be the leading disease essentially in the entire world. Depression will be just the way that things are going. And everyone in the world is like, yeah, we know. And it just kind of is going from there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, so that was 2022. I wonder if they check in with these people now what the scores will be. You know, do you have to take psilocybin every two years, twice over two weeks, and maintain control over depression? That's pretty amazing. There's another study from 2024 that found that psilocybin is at least as effective at treating MDD as SSRIs, probably more.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's right. So just real quick, because we'll probably go over this a little bit in the depression episode, but if you go in for treatment of depression, they're going to treat you in three different phases. Two, possibly, but... Probably three. The first is acute, where you show up and you're like, I can't take this anymore. I need treatment.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They're going to get you on probably an SSRI, but they're going to get you on some antidepressant to start. They're going to try to work their way up while also balancing getting you feeling better as soon as possible. And time was they would try an antidepressant for like four to six weeks. That was what was generally prescribed. Like that's what all psychiatrists did.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And if after four to six weeks, there wasn't more than a 25% reduction in symptoms, they would say, this isn't working for you. Let's try another one. But I guess something happened to the psychiatry zeitgeist. And now they're waiting as long as six months to give it a chance. which has got to be tough when you're suffering from major depressive disorder. But that's the acute phase.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And once they find an antidepressant that can manage your symptoms, you'll move into what's called the continuation phase.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So I think I said most people will suffer multiple or chronic or recurring episodes of major depressive disorder once they have one. Something like 50% to 85% of people who have one will have another episode. So it's probable that your continuation phase will eventually turn into a maintenance phase where they'll just keep an eye on you. You'll probably...
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
keep up with, say, therapy or psychoanalysis or something like that. And if your episode starts to come back, they'll put you on the antidepressant that worked before. And this can go anywhere from a year to indefinite. Just the point is to stay on top of your symptoms so that you don't have another episode. Or if one starts to come along, they nip it in the bud very quickly. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right. Plus, if you're just counting prescriptions of antidepressants, you might miss that, say, the tricyclic antidepressants are now being prescribed for neuropathic pain. Right. So that would get lumped into that as well. And yet you can totally get the viewpoint of people who are like, yeah, that probably accounts for some of it. But, dude,
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I saw a statistic that in the United States, people ages 12 to 25, between 2016 and 2022, monthly prescriptions of antidepressants went up 66%.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I think from 2020 to 2022, if you just look in that window, especially for, I think, girls and women aged 12 to 25, it went up like 150% in those two years. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. So it's also possible that that the stigma has been reduced. Thank you, Gen Z, around seeking treatment for mental health and talking about your mental health. So more people could be seeking help. which could lead to a higher increase in diagnoses, which would, of course, lead to an increase in prescriptions.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
At the same time, some people are like, a lot of this is just pathologizing human sadness. So everybody agrees, basically, that if you have a low-level diagnosable depression that's not MDD, then you should not start out with antidepressants. You should start out with lifestyle changes, like changes in your diet, exercise again, getting good sleep, just stuff you can do without pharmaceuticals.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Everyone agrees, except I'm sure for the pharmaceutical companies that you should not start with that for like low level depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So there's just a couple of other things we want to cover real quick that fall under the umbrella of antidepressants making depression worse.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Because you would probably be bewildered if you were taking antidepressants and you're like, I actually feel way worse than I did before. And there's a whole kind of little suite of possible reasons for why that might happen.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, you might have a chump for a doctor. Yeah. Genetics is also one. Apparently, that also determines whether a risk factor, like you said earlier, like grief or something like that, pushes you into major depressive disorder. There's a gene, the SLC64A, the serotonin transporter gene, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
There's a variation in that where you can actually feel worse after taking antidepressants because of that gene.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, and then being under 25 before your brain is fully developed, that's one. There's something called akathisia, which it's basically just an internal restlessness that keeps you from sleeping, makes you anxious, and then those will make your depression symptoms worse. And then just being on too many drugs, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right, exactly. So that's it for antidepressants, right? You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, go forth and seek treatment if you have depression, especially if you think you have major depressive disorder. Go get help. Things can get a lot better. And since I said things can get a lot better, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Thanks, Jill. That was a great one. We love naming stuff that we experience and didn't know there was a name for, right? Right. So, okay. Well, if you want to be like Jill, send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, and for a lot of people, I think for most people, statistically speaking, it's chronic or recurring. You don't just have one episode. It can keep coming back and back. And it's nothing new. Like, depression is not new, although it has really kind of picked up as far as diagnoses and prescriptions go.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
But, I mean, we used to call it melancholy, and they associated it with black bile all the way back to Hippocrates. And depending on what culture you were from, they would either say, tell you that you needed positive rewards. Let's say you lived in Persia in the ninth century. Or if you were in medieval Europe, they might burn you at the stake or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Luckily, we've come a long way with treating depression. That's the that's I think we should say here at the outset. That's the message we're trying to say. Like it is highly treatable.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Like if you have depression and you're not treating it, there's definitely hope. So please don't feel like there's not. There's plenty of hope. And if anything, hopefully that's what we get across this in this episode. But there used to be, they used to give people enemas, they used to give people baths, positive thinking, diet, exercise.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And what's interesting, Chuck, is some of those are still prescribed today, depending on the severity of your depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Just as an aside, every time I think of depression being like really accurately portrayed, I think of Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, the Lars von Trier movie. Lars von Trier, of all people, seems to have most accurately portrayed clinical depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
In that movie. It is a great movie, but she just does an amazing job. Like there's a part where she's just in physical pain, such physical pain from being so depressed that like she, can barely crawl into a bath.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
For sure. So we should say that you rarely will get an enema when you present yourself to a physician and are diagnosed with clinical depression, major depressive disorder. Instead, they will prescribe you pills, antidepressants.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And the reason that they will prescribe you antidepressants is because ever since the 70s, people have kind of basically treated depression based on what's called the biological model. And the biological model says that you're depressed because there's an imbalance of neurotransmitters, chemicals in your brain. And usually they zero in on serotonin.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They say you are depressed because you have low levels of serotonin. And that's been the dominant view for decades now. That's how we treat depression is based on that presumption.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, so much so we have so little of a grasp on how people become depressed, especially like MDD depressed. Studies show that people with MDD aren't likelier to have lower levels of serotonin than other people. And that just throws out basically the whole premise of the biological model. And yet, we know that antidepressants work. They work better than placebo.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They're definitely doing something. And we know that by design, what they're doing is going in and messing with the concentration of neurotransmitters in your brain. We know they're doing that. We just don't know how that mechanism is treating the depression. We just know it works. And I guess over the years, psychologists or psychiatrists and doctors have been like, let's just not ask questions.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, that's a newish, from what I can tell, rival theory to the biological model, even though it's biological itself. It's very, very confusing stuff. But the idea, remember you said earlier that like you differentiate, you know, MDD or even just non-major depression, but, you know, diagnosable depression from just a passing feeling of the blues, right, for like a day or so.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Sure. So this theory basically says that thing that people normally come out of, people get stuck in it. It just seems to get worse and worse and worse the longer you're stuck in it or the harder you're stuck in it. So I love that theory, and there's actually support for it because some of the newer, more far-out treatments, psychedelics in particular, like ketamine and psilocybin,
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
they have been basically irrefutably shown to treat major depressive disorder really well. And we know that psilocybin, for example, goes in and basically rewires your brain. So that would support the idea that it's a change in neuroplasticity that antidepressants create that helps treat depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right. That's where the money is. They go to the horse's mouth. That's another word for the synapse. That's what neurologists call it, the horse's mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right. Here's the twist to all that, though. Neurotransmitters do all sorts of other things besides, say, like regulate your mood. I think serotonin does all sorts of crazy stuff like it helps regulate sleep, digestion, nausea, blood clotting, bone growth. It does everything right. So if you start messing with the serotonin in your brain.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
It can also start to mess with the other functions that serotonin does, hence side effects. And so those are something that we are still figuring out, too. But luckily, that's another thing we're getting a handle on is the side effects.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
The dessert knife is a little smaller, fancier. It's got kind of a sharp, pointy end that you could easily drive through the hand of the person sitting next to you at the table.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Okay, Chuck, so we're back and we're finally talking about the titular scam, Operation Flagship.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Thank you. It's arousing. I can't think of another word for it, but let's just say arousing. Yeah, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, this particular game versus the Bengals on December 15th, 1985, it was to whoever won was going to win a wild card playoff berth, which has significance. So it was an important game.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Thank you. Also, not to mention, too, I mean, even looking back, you're like, wow, these guys were great. But at the time, these two were at the peak of their careers. It was Theismann versus Esiason as far as the quarterbacks went.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, that was horrific. I mean, it was a compound fracture that came out of his thigh, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
One of the ones that got me, there was a Miami Hurricanes player in early 2000s. And he was like running down the sideline and somebody dove to knock him out of, well, out of bounds. And and they got him right in his knee and his knee turned into like his whole his whole leg. But the apex was his knee just turned into a rubber band that went really far to the left.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
This was the zeitgeist at the time. They showed that injury in slow motion 15 times while the dude was laying on the field. They didn't cut to anything. They just kept showing it over and over like it was a new volume of Faces of Death or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
But yeah. So anyway, that was that was it's forever burned into my brain that that image. And I don't think he broke anything. He just apparently is like the most flexible, resilient leg of anybody's.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And there's our daily assistance in helping criminals evade capture by law enforcement.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if he was fine. I don't remember that. I just remember like I don't think he was like anything broke. It just went.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. But ironically, I think he had the nickname before that because he could play the rubber bands on his knee.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, yeah. We're talking about the cops. Yeah, that's right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Like, really? Right. So even if even taking that one out, it is 100 percent confirmed that they signed it. I am wanted backwards. I am debt and all.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So we're talking about one specific operation, Operation Flagship, which was conducted by the U.S. Marshal Service back in, I think, 1985. And It's just kind of mind boggling. What did you hear about this? Did it did somebody write in or did you already know about it being an NFL fan?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. So like this is like these are the things that they're doing to just make it like a whole teehee thing. Right. Right. To where if you again, for no reason, no reason, but to amuse themselves like there's no reason. As we'll see, I'm sure part of the reason also is for the media blitz that they knew was coming after they showed this off.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
But. Not only is there really no reason for it, you're actually sacrificing potential captures. Yeah. Because there's. You're tempting fate. Some of these people have wives. All you had to do was show your wife that letter and say, this is wanted backwards, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. How many of these people were like fell through the dragnet because they saw that Detnaw is wanted backwards. And they're like, I think this is not legitimate. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yes. And I thought something you mentioned is worth emphasizing that being entered in a grand prize drawing for tickets to Super Bowl 20 in New Orleans.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That actually struck me as a really nice touch because now you've moved the focus a little further out and you're diluting the focus that's being paid to this most immediate thing. So they're thinking about something else as well. Really, I thought that really was a good touch.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So to get prepared for this whole thing, they held three different dress rehearsals. That's dedicated for sure because this was a big production. And it was smart that they held three different dress rehearsals because, again, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a ton of different cops. I think 166 different agents were involved.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, the janitors were cops. Everybody was cops. Like when you walked into the Washington Convention Center that day, there was no one who wasn't a cop, a wanted fugitive, or the plus one of the wanted fugitive who had the haplessness of being brought along to this whole show. Yeah, the real victims. Yeah. So, so they, they rehearsed it many, many times.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And one of the things I saw of these 166 law enforcement agents that were part of this, a lot of them were brought in from out of state because they didn't want to risk some of these fugitives from recognizing the, the marshals who say like were in the courtroom with them when they were first brought to trial or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
had escorted them from jail to prison before they escaped or something like that. So they brought in a lot of ringers from around the country. So there was a lot of cops working from a lot of different offices, all for this one huge scam operation flagship.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I made it through up to, I think, minute three. I was like, I cannot watch law enforcement try to play it tongue in cheek. It's just, I can't do it.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
What was that? There's some movie where they do that to great comedic effect.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. I can't remember, but they're like hugging people while patting them down, but like just clearly patting them down. Man, that's going to drive me crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Or somebody will email in, but at least one person does. So, yeah, like we said, everybody there who was in this building was a cop, including the San Diego Chicken was armed, was an armed cop.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So how I keep talking while you look. OK. So the U.S. Marshal Service, they're one of the first American law enforcement agencies. They were founded back in 1789. Dave helped us with this. It's Dave Week, by the way. Oh, yeah. As Dave put it, in the time of George Washington— So they've been around quite a bit.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That just goes to show you how big the San Diego Chicken was in the early to mid 80s, that they were like, bring the San Diego Chicken in for this Washington Cincinnati football game on the other side of the country. Make sure the San Diego Chicken's there. just to legitimize things.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Really? That's hilarious. It's very funny. That shows a little heart.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I should also say I poked fun at law enforcement trying to be funny. So I looked up to see if there's any cops turned comedians. And there are.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I don't know if it is or not. But I can just tell you to go out and check these guys out. There's Kevin Jordan, Chad Ridgely, who went on to be a groundling, Jim Perry, and Alfie Moore. And I defy you to find the one Brit out of those.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, he said no one can act like a cop. Kill them with smiles.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Right. Oh, my gosh. So, like I said, there's a lot of moving parts in this thing where you're trying to nab 160 or so criminals all at once. Again, they rehearsed it three different times, but there's still tons of X factors that can crop up that you just can't plan for. And one of the reasons why they were really kind of on edge is some of these criminals who they'd invited were –
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
pretty hardcore there were like armed robbers uh rapists there was one murderer in particular who was who had escaped from prison he and two other guys had dressed up as security or not security guards um prison guards and um they from what i was reading they have no idea where they got these prison guard uniforms but they managed to escape the other two guys got caught
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
The other guy, Charles Watkins, again, who was in on murder, he had become a fugitive and was wanted as a top 10 fugitive in the D.C. area. So he was a big fish that they were trying to reel in. But at the same time, this guy's a murderer on the run. You have no idea what he's going to do. So they really had to kind of keep it tight as much as possible.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I say that before we get to the actual day, December 15th, 1985, we take another break.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And over the course of this history, like they've done a lot of different really kind of great stuff. They escorted students into the first segregated schools, black students to segregated schools. They protected them. They enforced prohibition, which I guess, depending on your views on prohibition, it was great or not. They operated the U.S.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. But so for this day, she's a Redskins cheerleader.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So what they would do is the cheerleaders would hug you as you were coming in, would not accept kisses, it turns out, but they would hug you, pat you down. Although you weren't supposed to know that you were being patted down, they would direct you toward a table.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Right, exactly. Very thorough. So they would point you to this table where you would check in and to claim your prize, to make sure you were you, you had to show positive ID. And then when they verified that you were on the list, meaning that you were a wanted fugitive who just showed up to claim your two free tickets to the Washington Redskins football game, they would give you a name tag.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Census, which seems like they were at the time just really looking for busy work for the marshal service.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And the name tag would say confirmed winner. And then if you were a dangerous criminal, they would give you a name tag that said double winner. And I could not find anywhere how they would explain why somebody was a double winner and not just a confirmed winner. Like, hey, what does that mean? Right, exactly. Like, why me? I have no idea what they said.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Surely they had to say something, but I could not find it. It's lost to history.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
No, they took him outside. They had to keep it under wraps. So, okay, you want to talk about unexpected guests?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Do you want to know the definition of a scumbag? Sure. A fugitive who gets caught up in the dragnet of a scam carried out by the U.S. Marshal Service in 1985 and shows up without bothering the RSVP. There were 15 of them.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And then and turn them loose. And then famously, Chuck, anytime you hear somebody call like a Wild West law enforcement guy marshal.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yep. They just showed up. Didn't even bother the RSVP. It just got under my skin when I saw that. This is bad manners. For sure. So there was a decent amount of people in this convention center. I mean, 100 and something, 150 cops? Yeah. I think 160, a little over one cop to one fugitive. And then most of these fugitives had a plus one, if not all of them.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So there is hundreds of people in this convention center. And like you said, it was a big party atmosphere. But right under the surface, there's a bunch of people with guns ready to, like, take you to jail. But the problem is you can't just round everybody up all at once, right? No. So what they did was pretty clever.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They would take 15 to 20 winners at a time to one of like the separate conference rooms in this convention center, which really, it made me nostalgic, Chuck, because we played a show or two in the conference room of a convention center, you know? Yeah. Australia loves those. Yeah, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And they would sit them down and they would present them with some, I guess, spiel to start as they shut the doors and everybody was settling into their chairs.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They were a U.S. marshal. That was one of the roles they played. They served as the long arm of the law in the Wild West era of American history.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I have to say something really quick while I was researching this. I had a great little brush with coincidence that I was reading. I got to that part where McKinney says everybody's under arrest. And I just happened to be listening to the Beach Boys Smile album at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
It's not something I listen to a lot. I just happened to decide to listen to that while I was researching this. And within seconds of reading that part, it reaches the part in the Beach Boys album where they say, you're under arrest. Wow. I mean, that's something, right? I mean, that's not your everyday coincidence. No, I love stuff like that. I do, too. So anyway, back to the story.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Dave, like I said, helped us with this and he wondered something that I did as well. What happened to all the guests who are like the crowd of plus ones are getting left behind in larger and larger droves as this party room is like, you know, set and reset and people get taken out of the back door to jail.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And no one knows. I mean, no, at least no one ever covered what happened. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know about that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
For sure. Especially those wives that found out that their husbands didn't let them read the letter. Right. From I am Dettinol.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, my God. There are definitely plus ones like that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, man. So when this whole thing was pulled off, the reason why the NFL films little mini documentary is so thorough is the media was there and it would make sense. The media was there because this is supposed to be some big deal celebration. So you see people who are like fugitives about to be arrested coming into the convention center, like party, like into the cameras.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
that are really there to film their arrest, but they think they're there to film this big celebration because they won these tickets. The LA Times was there. CBS News was there. Washington Post was there. Journalists were allowed to go basically everywhere. They were allowed to interview all of the higher-ups conducting this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I guess they were just required to basically play it straight and pretend like They didn't know what was going on. But as a result of this direct involvement of the media, there was a huge national celebration for how great the U.S. Marshal Service was and how well they pulled off this amazing sting with not a single shot fired.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And aside from violently throwing some of these people to the floor, totally nonviolent roundup of 100 plus perps.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's super efficient. And again, not a single shot fired. And don't forget, they nabbed Charles Watkins, the big fish they were trying to reel in. The murderer who had escaped from prison dressed as a prison guard, which really is If you're going to escape from prison, that's a real black eye to that particular prison, dressing up as one of their own guards and escaping.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So it was a big deal that they caught this guy. And Stanley Morris, who was the head of the Marshal Service at the time, was quoted in the L.A. Times saying, it's a safe, clean and creative way to get these people off the streets. There's no safer way to make an arrest than away from the home environment.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, it was a December 2024 episode. So what I'm guessing is that the listener wrote in after hearing the Criminal episode.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, according to Criminal, like, he finally was able to convince them by showing, like, some ID and some other, like, identification, saying, like, I'm not the guy you're looking for. You're looking for my son. And huge, again, hat tip to Criminal. They did some serious digging. Like, I was listening to it, and Alan Goldberg, who is a huge source for this, they're the ones that he talked to.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
This is not like all over the place. Like they found this guy and managed to just completely turn all of the coverage of Operation Flagship. Still today, when you read contemporary stuff about Operation Flagship, it is unquestioningly written about as just this perfect success. They found this guy who was like, this is not actually how it went at all.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
There's actually, in addition to getting the wrong Charles Watkins, the other big fish they were trying to get, Lloyd Golden. He was a top 10 wanted fugitive for armed robbery. And this Alan Goldberg, you know, God bless him for his journalist streak. He dug into Lloyd Golden and found that he was wanted for selling some drugs, not armed robbery. He wasn't on any kind of top 10 list.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So that's bad enough. But when you really start digging into it, you're like, well, this is not only a waste of money, it turns out, even though it was super efficient. It's actually legal, but pretty unethical considering who they actually did nab in this dragnet.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And now remember, a lot of these people were thrown to the ground regardless of their of what they were wanted for. They were a fugitive and they were thrown to the ground violently in some cases for traffic offenses.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
He's like, I want to speak to Mr. Dutton on now. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, pretty impressive. Thirty five hundred fugitives in eight weeks over four states and parts of Mexico. That's with no scams whatsoever. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I think the answer is that starting in 1986, they went to nothing but beer and wine at their Christmas parties.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So one of the things about Operation Flagship is that it is so nuts that it actually happened. And when you just step back and look at it from the, you know, from the total outside and how great it was and everything, it's extremely entertaining. Cops smart. Criminals stupid. Can you believe they fell for this? There's football involved like it has everything you could possibly want. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So it did actually inspire some stuff. Like we said, that whole Mr. Zip thing inspired like the got some rose delivery for you, fugitive. Yeah. This specific Operation Flagship inspired apparently the opening scene in Sea of Love with Al Pacino. Where Samuel L. Jackson is among the fugitives who were tricked into a Meet the Yankees scam.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. And Tommy Lee Jones doesn't care if you're innocent. His job is to get you and bring you back to jail. No, no. Kill my wife. I don't care. So great, man. One of the great lines in movie history. So, yeah, you can be a fugitive all sorts of ways. And regardless of how it is, the U.S. Marshals are out there to get you. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So have you seen the movie Trap, M. Night Shyamalan's vehicle for his daughter's musical career?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Okay. So I know I am a sentient adult human being, and I know that a lot of M. Night Shyamalan's, some of his films are bad. Yeah. Just bad. Terrible. I hated Signs. hated signs. Although that was largely because of Mel Gibson's acting. Most of them are pretty bad to me.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Well, that's what I was going to say. I will still watch every movie that that man puts out because they're so imaginative, so creative. I also love the cinematography in his films. It's always so dark and moody. Yeah, they look pretty good. The Sixth Sense is one of the greatest films of all time.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And even like you can give up on him and then come back years later and watch the stuff that you missed. And you're like, man, I love this stuff. It's such a great thing to watch on like Saturday afternoon or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Good? Bad? No. It's really good. It's a really good show. He does a great job. He's a confounding filmmaker. Yeah. You know? Just watch Servant. I think you'll like it. I haven't seen all of the seasons. I might have seen the first three, and then I stopped. But I can tell you the first three are definitely worth watching. I think you'll get sucked in pretty quick.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And for the most part, when they get you, it's because they've tracked you down. Maybe they got a tip. Maybe they just started looking for you and they found that you're actually at your last known address.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Yes. I'm sorry. I've watched it yesterday. I guess I was watching it and I noticed something that I'd never noticed before. What was it? At the head of the scene, at the beginning, as they're pulling up to the police station, Homer's falling for a scam like Operation Flagship, but instead of Redskins tickets, it's a free motorboat.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So he's all ready for this. He's wearing a captain's hat, driving the family up to the police station to claim his free motorboat. And at the beginning of the scene, as they're pulling up, Lou, one of the cops, has the door kind of like slightly jarred and is peeking out. Right when he sees Homer pull up, he like closes the door real quick. Yeah. Oh, my God. You have to see it.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Like, I can't do it justice. It's just this extra quick little thing that did not need to be added at all, but makes that whole scene so just perfect.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Season nine is the whole episode, by the way, to Lisa. The skeptic is like, yeah, one of the like more heartfelt episodes around to so good.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Thank you, Dave. That was great. We appreciate the assist on this one and on Harry Belafonte. It's Dave Week, everybody. That's right. And since I said it's Dave Week again, that unlocked listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And they arrest people quite frequently. I think I saw that they rounded up like 75,000 fugitives in 2023 or 24. Okay. They arrest a lot of people. But for some reason, during the early to mid 80s, the U.S. Marshal Service went on what can only be described as a cutesy streak.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That's right. I like to have a balanced breakfast. I like the dessert part with a bunch of pancakes or French toast and syrup. Then I also like the eggs and the bacon part too.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Well, yeah, I'm the same way. I don't typically eat breakfast. So if I'm going to eat breakfast breakfast, like it's going to be something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I gave up cereal and I'm the better off for it. I just have to admit.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That's right. Nice work, Charles. Well, if you want to be like Aaron and vindicate me, bring it on. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They clearly did. I mean, like these things, this whole thing was hatched hours into an office Christmas party in 1979. That's the only explanation for this.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. It is you. I think that was actually in The Fugitive, too.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I mean, it's been in a lot of different movies, but... Like Here Are Your Roses, that kind of thing?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So I don't know if this is actually the origin of it or not, but it certainly seems to be because I don't get the impression that they did a lot of this stuff before this era.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That was pretty fun. Yeah. So Puno means fist in Spanish.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yes, that is inherently the problem behind this whole thing is a lot of this. I was about to say steps, but I'm just going to say missteps that happen to work out in their favor. We're just basically like, hey, criminals, do you speak Spanish? Do you think anybody would ever name their airline Fist Airline? Well, they want to give you a free weekend to the Bahamas.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That was the Puno Airlines thing. And I love it. Like, I think it's cool, like in retrospect. But when you stop and actually think of it from a law enforcement perspective, you just end up pinching the bridge of your nose. But it actually worked.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, for sure. I think it was right next to Air Haiti.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So, I know. I'm sorry. I've really messed with reality. That was 1985. There was another one the year before, Fist 7. Yeah. Right? But they would spell it with Roman numerals to make it look super cool. It's so funny. Because I think this is, yeah, this is the era of the Rocky sequels.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. That one was enormous. It was a multi-state, multi-agency sting operation. There were 113 marshals involved, five ATF agents, 105 police officers, all from across eight different states. And it involved a bunch of different scams that really all together were part of this one big sweep that was just coordinated by the Marshal Service.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Um, there was one pretty straightforward in Buffalo where they wrote letters to fugitives and said, Hey, um, you don't know this, but you won $10,000 in the lottery. You know, that lottery you may or may not have ever played. Well, you won $10,000, but we can't give you the money unless you come to the lotto office and show us your ID and then you can claim your prize.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That one actually seems like the most effective one because it almost has like a scam sense to it, like outwardly, like overtly.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Right. It's all called this number. Have we got an opportunity for you?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I agree with you. In New York, part of FIST 7, their sting was called the Brooklyn Bridge Delivery Service. Not to be confused with New York's finest taxi service, but it's basically the same thing. Their motto was don't mess with the rest, come to the best. And it was essentially the same thing as Mr. Zip as far as the scam goes.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
But they would just leave like we missed you slips on their door saying you have a package that you need to come pick up. And there was a guy involved in this scam. I can't remember his name. But, oh, Robert Leshorn. He was one of the chief or deputy chief marshals. And this was his scam. And so part of it was the criminal would call to find out where to pick up their package.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And depending on what they were wanted for, he would tailor what was supposedly in the package. So he said, like, if you were wanted for robbery or theft or something, it would be like a brand new stereo or something. Yeah. He would tailor it, which made sense, and apparently that worked to a certain extent.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
But all of these, all of them pale in comparison to the one that they ran in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
No, not a chance. As a matter of fact, we should probably just stop after this one because no scam in the history of law enforcement has ever been greater than this one.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the freeze edition.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I saw that part of the package that they won was also a photo shoot. I saw that in a couple of places.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Oh, okay. And then one of the marshals who headed up the Hartford, Connecticut Boy George scam said,
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
um said it was just like one of the other ones where like when you went to get picked up by this limo right when you got in the limo they arrested you he said all these people that they got with this were all dressed up to go to the culture club concert oh god can you imagine what they looked like when they arrived in jail like those feathers that you clipped to your ear yeah yeah like glitter war paint like on your cheeks like the whole the whole shebang
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Right. How can you refuse a photo shoot with boy George?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I think we would be violating some sort of unwritten rule if we didn't right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I can't. You know how people keep lists of like episodes we say we should do or movies we've mentioned or something like that. They should keep a list of the different things that we've talked about and then completely forgot we talked about because I'm sure it would be extensive.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. So just for a quick example, let's say the news decides to focus on crime and that the framing they use is that crime is on the rise. And you hear about this over and over again, night after night on the news, or you read about it over and over again on your favorite news site.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Eventually, you're going to be primed to think that crime is on the rise and you might even be a little scared of it or relating to politics. A politician might latch on to that and be like, crime's really hot right now. We're going to make crime like the main point. We're going to use it to set the agenda of our campaign.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So speaking of big lists, Chuck, we're talking today about priming, which is the present tense of primus. And what it refers to is a psychological term where you are prompted to respond in a certain way, behave in a certain way, choose a certain behavior. selection based on some prompt that was given to you without your knowledge.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And we're going to tap into that fear that this person, this lack of safety that the people out there watching the news feel because they're being told over and over again, crime is on the rise. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. Yeah, there's no data that it is. Exactly. They feel that that crime is on the rise.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So we, the politician, are going to tap into that and use it to hopefully get an election, because now we can prime them to get that emotional response out of them over and over again until we finally move them to the voting stations to to vote for me, the politician.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I would never, ever run for public office.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Would you vote for me for best all-around boy?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. Two things about that. One, if every if implicit bias is a universal thing and everybody has it, you're free. You don't have to feel as bad about it. I mean, it's definitely something you should work to correct. Yeah. But you don't have to feel like it's just you. Right. That's one thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And then the second thing, too, Chuck, is if it is true that we all are implicitly biased, say, like along racial lines.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I feel like you could explain it by saying by it's an example of our evolutionary history not being caught up yet to our current social history. Like when we form modern societies, we jump light years ahead as far as evolution goes. And the way that we think and see the world just completely just hit warp speed. But evolutionarily, there's still a big lag catching up to it.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So we're fearful of people who don't look like us or have a slightly different culture or live in a different nation. Just evolutionarily speaking, even though we know we shouldn't feel that way, that that's not actually how things are, that conflict between those two things is what the real issue is.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So we don't have to do anything about it. It'll work itself out in 10,000 years.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. So we've made it pretty squarely into social psychology territory right now. And there were some early experiments trying to figure out how you can persuade people using priming, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, late 70s, early 80s. And so one of the first ones came out in 1979, and it was a social psychology experiment where you gave people scrambled, like a scrambled word list and said, make a sentence out of this. Right. And so you would get something neutral like her found new I. And I knew her is a sentence you could make out of that. Or you would give something like leg break arm his.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
It could either be so flashed so fast or something on a computer screen that your conscious awareness didn't pick up on it. Mm-hmm. Or it could just be presented to you in a way that you're not aware that it's actually related to the thing that you're being, say, tested on.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You could say break his arm. And so one group was given more hostile word scrambles to make sentences out of. The other was more neutral. And then that was part one. After that, they were asked to consider a hypothetical scenario in which somebody is kind of ambiguously responding or interacting with somebody.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I think I saw that Donald is refusing to pay rent until his landlord paints his apartment. And the people who were given the hostile word scrambles rated Donald as much more hostile than the people who were given the neutral word scrambles.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So what they're showing is that you can nudge people toward forming an impression about someone they know basically nothing about based on priming them to feel one way or another about them. And that was like, if we can do that, man, what else can we do? That really opened the floodgates.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. And we'll, like you said, we'll talk about some of the more shocking or surprising studies. But before that, we need to mention a guy named John Barg, who became basically the rock star of this field starting in the 90s. He essentially wrote a paper about that said like, all of this is possible. Like, here's how you do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Here's how you take the findings of cognitive priming and turn it into social or behavioral priming. And he was very famous for a couple of studies, many studies, but there's two that really stuck out to me that, let me give you an example. One is that he tested whether something is as random as temperature could affect your impression of another person.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. So that means that you can nudge people to feel a certain way based on metaphor, priming using metaphor and not even words or images, but temperature.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Another one that he figured out was, and this is the one he's really famous for. I think this is the one that came from his 1996 paper. But he tested to see how certain kinds of words affect certain kinds of behavior. And he took some 19, 20, 21-year-old students and had them do that famous word scramble. Priming researchers love word scrambles. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And some had just a normal neutral set of words to pick out from. Another had sets of words that were associated with being old, but not so straight ahead that you'd be like, these are all old people words. But they were like bingo or Florida or wrinkles, that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. That was part one. And then the students who were participating thought that they were done at that point.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
But he said, OK, now we've got to do part two, but we're going to have to go to the end of the hall and turn right. And there's another lab we need to go to for the second part of this test. But the real thing he was doing was clocking how long it took the students to make it from one end of the hall to the other.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And he found the people who had worked with word scrambles that had age or elder-related words Walked slower than the people who had the neutral words. And this was the one, this experiment, Chuck, is what broke open. This is what led to nudge economics.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
This is what led to governments saying like, man, we could use this to like move people in a way that we want them to that's healthier and happier. This is the study that did that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I think we can just go ahead and reveal now.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So I wish you had been a luminary in the field of social psychology and priming research back in the late 90s, early 2000s, because you could have derailed this whole thing before it ever got started.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Because if that seemed ridiculous to you, that idea that you could suggest old-related or age-related words to 20-year-olds and they're going to walk slower because they were just thinking about being elderly. Yeah. If that seems ridiculous to you, you are 100% right.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
It's a ridiculous study and it's ridiculous that the entire field of social psychology, economics, the politics paid attention to this and went all in on it. But what we have, what we're actually talking about today is one of the biggest black eyes in the history of psychology that didn't involve torturing human beings.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Can you imagine reading that in a scholarly journal and being like, man, that's really crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. There's another one. Remember power poses? I specifically remember John Hodgman realizing that I was nervous backstage at the Bell House once and telling me to do a power pose. Oh, really? To get over my stage fright. And I was like, this isn't working. The reason it doesn't work is because that was a finding from priming research. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
No, I'm going to let him hear this episode. Okay. There's another one. If you make a frowny face and you're shown upsetting pictures, you will self-report that should be a red flag in and of itself. That you were upset by pictures of starving children, people arguing, accident victims that had been maimed more than people who weren't making a frowny face at the time they saw the pictures.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I think it was they were winning money in like games.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. And also, if your study is supporting just a general moral judgment against a certain group, it may have been biased in and of itself, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
If you think about stabbing a coworker in the back, metaphorically, you are more inclined when given a choice to buy soap, detergent, or disinfectant than you are to buy batteries, juice, or candy bars.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yes, exactly. Why don't you give them the last one, Chuck?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. The first group preferred mouthwash to soap unless the soap was Lifebuoy. So, okay. Yes, we should probably rein it back a little bit because our bias is showing. But for good reason. I mean, we should say priming is not just this point of ridicule. The bottom fell out. of this really hot, super sexy field of research that everyone had bought into, like a mudslide going down a mountain.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Like, it just erupted. It went so south so fast that today, about almost 15 years on since everybody was like, this is all made up, it's essentially a discredited field. Like, there's almost no one working in this anymore because most people are like, this isn't true.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Or if somebody asks, like, what was Chuck's senior superlative in high school? I would think back to a fact that I learned and I would say best all round boy.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. And this is really kind of like breaking it down to a really rough, basic level. It's much more complex than that. But we bring that up because it's tapping into the different ways that you access memories that priming is based on. And you said it falls under the rubric of cognitive psychology. Mm-hmm. And that is true.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Right. There's another big problem called p-hacking, which is taking data and then making it work statistically so that these random flukes suddenly became statistically significant. That's a big problem.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Cognitive psychology has shown very clearly that this actually works, that if you give somebody, say, a word and you show them a list of associated words, it's going to just happen that they're able to pick out the associated word faster than other words. Well, we'll give you some examples rather than just me mushing it all together. Let's tease it out a little bit like 80s perm.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And I read that it's not so much that researchers were sitting there purposefully massaging their data over and over and over again to tease out some results that they could publish. But it was more like they were just falling for flukes being more significant than they were. That's what I read, that that was really the big problem, that it wasn't like an entire field of bad actors.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. And so there's something called publish or perish. Like you basically are advancing your careers if you get published in an academic journal. The problem is academic journals, they're like the media. They want to be splashing and sexy. So they don't really publish negative results anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So even if you wanted to, you'd have a hard time getting it published in a legitimate journal these days. So that's a big problem. Ultimately, Chuck, the biggest problem, and this is what really tripped up social psychology. It's the drum that you've been beating this whole time. Humans are not predictable computers who will respond in a predictable way.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
If you give them a specific stimulus, that's just not how humans work.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Sure, so the same person will respond differently. You better believe different people will respond differently to the same stimulus. And then it also depends on who's presenting the stimulus. Is it being presented by a grad student who's posing as one of the participants? Or is it like a professor wearing a white lab coat for some reason?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
That's definitely going to shape the information or the stimulus that's being received. And when you put all this together, It's essentially impossible to replicate a priming study. And if you get the same results, that's essentially a statistical fluke from what I understand.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. And developed a Southern accent. That one always stuck out to me. Exactly. So one reason why, I mean, when you're looking back, so we should say that there are still people, I think I did say working in this field earnestly, but they're essentially going through and picking out what could be salvaged from it.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And what they're finding is that priming does work, but like we said, it's going to work differently for different people. There's very few universalities, if any. But one thing that they have figured out that is legit with social or behavioral priming is that you can be primed most easily and most reliably if it's pointing you in a direction you already want to go.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So let's say you want to lose weight. If you're given a menu that has words like light or diet on it or something like that, you're more likely to choose those items than somebody who isn't interested in dieting. Yeah, for sure. That's essentially what it got reduced back to, which is just barely beyond cognitive priming, but it's legitimate. And that's where they're starting out from again.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
That's the current state of social priming. But just one more thing I wanted to talk about, Chuck, is why everyone bought into this. Well, why do you think everyone bought into it? I'll tell you why. Thank you for asking. Because it reduces humans to an understandable, predictable state.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, and understand, not feel threatened by, but also to feel superior to. I ran across one explanation called NPC theory, non-player character theory, like referencing background characters in video games who don't think for themselves. They're just kind of automated. And something like social priming... It underscores that idea that other people are like that. I'm not like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Is that right? Yeah. OK, well, we'll get you one. What kind do you want?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
It's a classic. It's the best of the best.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Maybe he's one of those guys who eats his cheeseburgers on a brioche moon.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
They are. We don't very frequently tee off on something, but it does feel good when we do once in a while. Chuck just said, yeah. And as everybody who's ever listened to the podcast knows, he just unlocked listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Katie knows how to speak our language, doesn't she? Katie really knows. She knows how to flatter. Thanks a lot, Katie. Have fun in Istanbul. That's very exciting and thrilling, and I'm glad you did not miss your stop. If you want to be like Katie and let us know where you live and some funny story about stuff you should know, we love that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. And it's basically words that share a similar category are more easily accessed once you've been primed. Almost like the way that we sort things is by putting them into large categories like doctor, nurse, hospital, stethoscope, right? And then once you open that category by thinking of doctor—
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You're going to be able to access the other stuff in that category much more easily than, say, something in a totally different category like cheese in the same category as delicious, that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, or basketball. Sure. That seems like what it's tapping into, and it actually seems to reveal that that's kind of how we store memories.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
There's another demonstration that was pretty famous that shows for sure, again, I just want to get this across, cognitive priming really works. If you give people a list of words and one of those words has a letter missing, say a vowel that could make multiple different words, they're going to choose or they're going to fill it in differently based on the other words in the list.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So, for example, if you have a list of words, bread, milk, hot, and then the last word is S-O blank P, poop. Sure. Or soup. Oh, sure. I think would be a good one, right? Yeah. And depending on whether you know how to spell, you might spell it with an O or a U. Doesn't matter. You're still getting the point across.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right, and then there's also another, there's a number of different ways of priming people cognitively, but one that just makes total sense, and I think we've all run into is repetition priming. Yeah. To where if you are shown like, say, a pair of words, maybe sometimes one of which is a nonsense word and you have to pick out the nonsense words.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
If you see like in a list over and over again, doctor and nurse, doctor and nurse, it comes up three times out of a seven word pair list. You're going to move through those much more quickly because it's right there in the forefront of your mind. So it hasn't faded yet. So you're just going to pick it out faster and faster the more it's repeated. That's a form of priming too.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. And at the end of each of these experiments, it kind of quickly became tradition where the researcher would stand up and point at the person and be like, you've been primed. Maybe adding a booyah once in a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. So we know that this is true also, not just because study after study has shown that this is actually correct, but when you put somebody in the wonder machine, the fMRI... Got to do it. Yeah. They found that, like, if you ask somebody the name of... Let's say Anya Taylor-Joy. Say who was the star of The Witch, but also The Gorge, which isn't that good.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Agreed. Yeah. Agreed. It just, wow, it takes a sudden turn. It's just really surprising. But yes, I agree. I think that's a good way to put it. You would stop and think like, oh, Anya Taylor Joy. And by the way, the Queen's Gambit is one of the best things I've ever seen in my entire life.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Okay, but if you also said, you know, name an animal that you think of when we say the word dog, what they found in the fMRI is that different parts of your brain light up. So we do know that priming does have a certain effect, and it is different than our normal kind of conscious recall.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So, okay, that's cognitive priming. Now, imagine if you were a psychologist and you said cognitive priming is kind of boring. What if we could use that same stuff to get people to eat more cheeseburgers?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Or to vote for a particular candidate in a political election? Like, what if priming works for that?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yes. So this is the handoff right here between cognitive psychology to social psychology. And social psychology has studied priming in great detail. It was a huge hit. You'll remember back to nudge economics. We talked about it in our PR live episode. Like it was a big deal in like the late aughts to about the 2012, I think, something like that. It was just a big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And it makes a lot of sense. It's the basis of things like ideas like McDonald's uses red and yellow in its logo because those colors are associated with excitement or energy or happiness. Or they call it a happy meal because over time, your kid will associate McDonald's with being happy or I'm loving it. It's just a jingle or whatever, and it makes sense. It's very catchy.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
But there's some part of your mind that has been primed to later on associate McDonald's with love, a positive feeling. All of this is examples of social psychology research supporting this idea that you can prime human beings to behave in a certain way just by using the same techniques that cognitive psychologists prove work.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, I've said it before and I'll say it again. For some reason, some ad exec chose morning reruns of Murder, She Wrote on Start TV over the air channel network for the Burger King terrible singing ad.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, Charles W. Chuck Bryant, the best all-around boy. And there's Jerry Rowland, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Had to be. But the thing is, every single other ad is for like Humana life insurance or health insurance or dental insurance because you're you're you just retired and now you have Medicaid. Like every other ad that almost stood out. You know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I guess that's it. But it really grated on my nerves because I watched that almost every day.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, we haven't said it yet, but OK. John Johnson bore a really striking resemblance to Larry Bader also.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, Betty Johnson's impression was not isolated. Apparently, people who met Fritz Johnson felt essentially the same way that she did. Like, he was a cool dude that you wanted to be around. Debonair, you could say. But he also was a bit of a character.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And by a bit, let me just say that he bought a hearse and rearranged the back so that it was like a little lounge area for him when he picked up women on dates. And I saw one place... But it was a legitimate source, like a contemporary newspaper article that said that he had somehow gotten it licensed with the city as a hunting vehicle. Can you imagine anything more 1957 than that? 1957 Bachelor?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yes. He went to great lengths to escape Ohio.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That is not what he was going for. You think? I mean, I don't know. Yes, you don't put a lounge area in the back of your hearse for dead deer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But either way. We'll take it up with UPI, buddy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, I want to just backtrack a little bit and specifically say there is nobody in any interview or any article that I read about this who seemed to think that Fritz Johnson was a creep or like a jerk or like a sicko or anything like that. I know we've kind of painted him. a little questionably, but there doesn't seem to be anybody who had any kind of weird vibes from him at all.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He was just a fun guy to be around and just living up the bachelor life. Apparently he was saying like, I spent, you know, my youth in an orphanage, having to listen to the people who ran the place, tell me what to do. I spent 14 years in the Navy listening to them, tell me what to do. And now I'm finally free and I'm living it up. So yeah,
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Um, that's essentially, I think the best care, the best way to paint his character is that he was living it up his newfound freedom.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Isn't that weird that they would cash that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Thanks a lot, dude. Every time he made that deposit, he'd think to himself, are you going to withhold the milk delivery sign?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So one of the other things that he was known for is being a little unkind to friends who were engaged or married or about to get married. He was like, marriage is just another way to trap a fella. Yeah. Whoever gets married is a sap. Probably said something along those lines.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And then a few years after he appeared in Omaha in 1961, he got married. Yeah. He got married to a model named Nancy Zimmer, who was 21 at the time. And she had a daughter from her first marriage. She said later that they were just too young. And not only did Fritz Johnson adopt her daughter, they also had their own son. So he had a family all of a sudden within just a couple of years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He's like, well, maybe consider making the arrow straight.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
You're like, I'm just as surprised as any of you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
How far away, though? Are we talking like five feet?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. You just have to say that out loud with every shot.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Speaking of blind luck, one of the other things that kind of made Fritz Johnson a noted character around town is that he ended up donning an eyepatch. And he was one of those eye patch wearers who really needed one because they found a tumor behind his eye, I think his left eye. And to remove the tumor, they had to permanently remove his left eye.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So he wore an eye patch rather jauntily from what I can tell. And that just made his legend even more. So like one of the local beloved TV announcers now wears an eye patch with his little pencil thin mustache. And everybody just loves this guy so much.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. I mean, I've never met one, but yes, I'm sure those people are out there. I mean, they're the same people who wear glasses. That's how they start. It's the gateway drug is like wearing glasses that don't actually work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, you're just an eye patch wearer waiting to happen.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, for sure. For sure. But yeah, also not as a pirate. You can't be dressed as a pirate. No, no, no. Just be like normal street clothes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. I think there's no other place to take our second break on this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
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Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
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Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
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Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No, I mean, I can get that. If you cook a chicken enough, like it can be.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, essentially. The thing is this, that's not a party trick that you do quickly. People have to stand around you for possibly dozens of minutes while you do this trick. Everybody watch this. Right. Stop what you're doing and come over and quietly watch me. Like it takes a real showman to hold people's interest while you're eating a whole chicken.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Oh, I want to see that. Why have you never done that for me?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No. So he joined the Navy in 1944. I think he left high school to join the Navy because the United States was in the grip of World War II. And he served for, I think, a little under two years. And when he came back, he graduated from high school and he went to the University of Akron. But school was just not for him. And he dropped out after a semester.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
My only party trick was holding my breath until I fainted.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, we used to do that where you'd hold your breath, like you bend over and hyperventilate yourself, and you'd take that last breath, cross your hands over your chest, and your friend would just push as hard as they could on your chest, and you'd just faint.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, I shouldn't have that tone of voice right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
It was very strange. I remember feeling like I was dropping in on a half pipe on a skateboard as I went down. Oh, cool. I was kind of like, this is all right. We didn't do it for very long.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I'm sure Jerry will with her responsibleness.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Pretty much. Yeah, her quote was, pardon me, but aren't you my Uncle Larry Bader who disappeared seven years ago? Yeah. And he was like, ho, ho, ho, no, I'm not. Go away. Actually, supposedly he was super polite.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But was quite insistent that they had the wrong person.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But the resemblance was enough that then Susanna turned around and called her uncles, Larry's brothers. And they, I think, got on the phone with this guy and his voice enough convinced them that they should fly out to Chicago. They flew out to Chicago. Suddenly this guy's like, man, I wish I didn't have to work this convention. All these people are surrounding me and telling me I'm another person.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And so to kind of settle the whole thing, he's like, how about this? Well, let's go get my fingerprints taken. And they were like, that's a capital idea because our brother was in the Navy, too. So his records, his fingerprints will be on record. So they went to the local police department. They took his fingerprints. They handed them over to the FBI.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The FBI compared them to the Navy fingerprints on record of Larry Bader. And the FBI looked up and said, this is a perfect match.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. Like if he knew he was hiding from his family and he was found at this sporting goods convention, he would have shot like a smoke bomb tipped arrow at the floor and then it vanished as the smoke just choked everyone out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Apparently, he was known for money-making schemes more than he was known for acing tests.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But he didn't do that. And that is a really significant thing. Like he so not only remember if he was Larry Bader who had assumed a new identity to agree to fingerprints is a dumb move to begin with. But he could have been calling a bluff or something like that. Who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No, plus also one other thing, Chuck, if you're on the run with a new identity, usually the last thing you do is become a local TV personality in a large-ish city in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So it doesn't make sense. Well put. I think that was much more succinct than my whole jam.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, and initially she said that she wished he'd never turned up again, that they had gotten used to life without him. They'd accepted that he died. And, yeah, she moved on. And now all of a sudden her life, to say it was complicated is a real understatement. Like a handful of people's lives were ruined when that guy, the acquaintance of Bader, saw Fritz Johnson at that sporting goods convention.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
like ruined. Not only do you have like Mary Lou Fritz slash Larry, Larry's wife, Nancy, their kids. Um, you also have like the, the nameless fiance that was engaged to Mary Lou, like people's lives were completely upended by the news of this. And apparently the The whole time, Fritz Johnson is like, this makes zero sense to me. But the FBI said that my fingerprints match this other guy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. Or you wear a suit that's got dollar signs printed all over it. It's a green suit with dollar signs. That's another way to become known for money-making schemes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And everybody else from Akron is telling me that I'm this other guy. I think I'm Fritz Johnson. But he resigned himself to be like... Maybe this is right. Maybe they're right. He didn't deny it the whole time, and he did not seem fishy at any point. He was also more than willing to talk to the press as this was going on, but he was not an attention hound.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, for sure. So a few months later, it's funny. She waited a few months. Mary Lou took her four kids and they went to meet him in Chicago, I guess, like a neutral city. And they spent the weekend together. And she told the press later that she was like, he's a great guy. Good with the kids. But we're strangers to him. So it was a bit of an awkward weekend, essentially. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The thing is, is she didn't really have a choice now. Like she was a Catholic, like you said, she didn't believe in divorce. And now her husband was all of a sudden back. So she has to figure out how to work him back into her life and their kids' lives as minimally disruptive as possible. And she's just completely just lost.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
By this time, Nancy also, she was saying, you know, I'm going to stand by my husband Fritz. At some point, she even said, I'm willing to go back to work to help pay Mary Lou child support if he's going to stay with me. But it just did not. It didn't work out as well. So Nancy took her kids and kind of went back into the background to leave Fritz to deal with this whole Akron thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Right. So, again, he's not he's not denying this. He's saying, I don't get this. This doesn't make sense to me. But he's not like he stopped denying it after the fingerprint thing, but not like, oh, you caught me kind of thing. He seemed genuinely baffled by this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
There's a really good kind of like one of the authoritative articles on this whole thing that was written by the Akron Beakron Journal in September of 1965. Beacon? Beacon. What'd I say?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The Akron Beacon Journal. I say it like a local. Yeah, sure. And it's funny because the journalist who wrote this clearly had just read Hell's Angels by Hunter Thompson. Oh, really? He was trying his hand at it. Oh, no. So, like, the whole thing starts in this jet flight that he's on on his way to Omaha. Yeah. It ends on the jet flight too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And like he's talking about them walking through the town to the YMCA. It's just like he wrote himself into this article. It was just kind of funny to see.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Right. But there was a quote in there that stood out to me that Fritz Johnson told this guy. He said, I've begun to think that God might solve the problem. And it turns out he was right because a year later he died from cancer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Right. You don't want to tempt God to kill you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No, I said cancer. It moved to his liver, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I agree wholeheartedly. There's just one other thing I want to say about his two funerals. In Omaha, the funeral was given for Fritz Johnson. In Akron, the funeral was given for Larry Bader. But it was the same body. They moved from one city to the other.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Right. Yeah, fugue state, I mean, it's basically like they are describing what happened to them. But essentially what happens is you have this amnesia, but it wipes out your episodic memory, your biographical memory. And to the point where you accidentally, inadvertently move away from home, depending on how long it lasts, you're going to travel fairly far away from home.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
When you get to where you're going, you're going to set up a new life, the new identity, make new relationships, and you're not going to have any memory whatsoever of the life that came before this. That's a fugue state. And apparently it is actually real. I looked all over for like fake. This is made up. This is not correct. Like this is a crackpot theory that some psychologist came up with. No.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Dissociative fugue is a widely accepted, very, very rare medical condition that they do not know how to explain. There's a struggle between neurology and psychology or psychiatry. Like, is it brain-based or is it like a break from some traumatic experience? And apparently it usually is prompted by some negative experience, but it's not something like seeing your family killed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
It can be something like being $2,400 in 1957 dollars in debt.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So I guess kind of what you're saying is he died in a fugue state, like he never emerged from the fugue state, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
OK, I think that's a pretty good theory, actually. I mean, it does seem like he was not malingering. He was not faking. This is not a con. It's a just genuine mystery because also like he just checks so many boxes for a fugue state. But it's just it usually goes on for what, weeks or months, right? Not years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's what I saw. Oh, really? Yeah. But in that time, you're so convinced of your new identity that you can form relationships that now all of a sudden are jeopardized around the rocks because you don't remember these people anymore. And you're like, what am I doing in Omaha?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, hopefully we figure out more about fugue states because then we'll understand a little more about Larry Bader. And if if we don't, then we're never going to know what happened. Like, it's just a mystery.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
A 10 hour long movie. Yeah. With with tons and tons of archery montages.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Uh, so you got anything else about Larry Bader?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. Thanks a lot. How'd you hear about this? I meant to ask you that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, Chuck seems like he's having an autobiographical crisis right now, and that, of course, unlocks Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. A show in Nana's living room.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Especially if it's in Omaha. I've always wanted to see beautiful Omaha.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, thanks a lot, Nana. Thank you very much for not only listening to us all this time, but also for turning Nori on to us. That's pretty great stuff. And if you want to be like Nori and tell us about your awesome grandparent, we want to hear about them. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. He also like he didn't pay his taxes for like five years, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Thanks, Capital One bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No. And it was bad enough. He was bad enough with the bills or behind enough that the milkman apparently said, like, I'm not bringing milk anymore until you pay your milk bill. Yeah. Um, so the thing is, is this guy, like you said, family friend from when he was a kid was like, he was a rich kid, but he was actually really charming, fun to be around rich kid.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
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Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
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Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And apparently as he grew up into an adult, he remained essentially the same. Like basically everyone who met him or had something to say about him later on became basically unanimously said this guy was a good guy. So if he's like cracking under the pressure of these bills and this debt, it's not showing outwardly to anybody who knew him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
One of his friends said that he was a red blooded American 30 year old family man who liked hanging out and drinking beer. uh, with friends and his friends liked hanging around him because he was just fun to be around essentially without being like a reckless party animal. He was just fun to be around.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So one of the things he did was he paid some bills before he left. And one of those bills was a life insurance premium. He had recently adjusted or changed the policy to include a nice payout for an accidental death. And he whistled as he drove off to Cleveland and eventually went to Rocky River, Ohio, which is a little town on the Rocky River, which flows into Lake Erie.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And he rented a boat at Eddie's boat dock about a half a mile inland from the lake from a guy named Lawrence Cutler. Yeah, Cutler. Cutler. Yeah. Anyway, he paid 15 bucks from a big roll of bills. It's also kind of important. And he said, hey, Lawrence, I want you to put some running lights on this boat because I'm probably going to be out after dark. And Lawrence said, OK, I'll do that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But it's going to cost you an extra fiver, I'm presuming here at this time. And Larry Bader paid it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And like a Stephen King novel about Cleveland, maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No. And the life jacket was in the boat, you said, right? That's right. So that's a really, that's a, so that's a big point because the Coast Guard was like, that was one heck of a storm on Lake Erie. There's no, no way that anybody could have survived this. Even a strong swimmer like Larry Bader was known to be without a life jacket.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Right, but the boat was generally in pretty good shape. The thing is, is like this is not an uncommon thing. Like people drown in Lake Erie pretty frequently. It's a great lake. It's a very big lake. And just as a little side anecdote, when I was a kid, we used to vacation on Catawba Island on Lake Erie. And every week we would go there for a week, every summer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And every time we went, I would have to wait on the beach the first half of the week because somebody had drowned. And I was convinced that if I went in the water, they would, their dead body would bump up against me. And I just couldn't even bear the thought of that. So finally I would watch the news every night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And finally, when they announced they found the missing person, then I would start to go into the lake.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, because no one had any business swimming in Lake Erie back when I was a kid.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Oh, you play mini golf and putt putt. Um, we stayed at this place. It was just like a block of, um, like I guess little condos or apartments or something like that. And everybody had beach towels, like drying over like the railing. And it was like on the beach, like the sand came up into your little front stoop. And, uh, it was just great. It was wonderful.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I remember my oldest sister went on a date with a dude. She met there and they went and saw top secret at the drive-in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Thanks, Capital One bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Okay, Chuck, where we last left off, Larry Bader's missing. He's disappeared, but enough years have gone by, I think roughly three, that he's officially declared dead. His insurance policy has come in. His wife has said, this is what you get for telling me maybe I will, maybe I won't when I tell you not to go fishing. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And if we rewind just a little bit to the day that Larry Bader went out on the lake and add, usually people say about three days, and zoom on over from Lake Erie over to Omaha, Nebraska, and we sit down at a little bar called the Round Table Bar in Omaha, what we will see on May 18, 1957 is a guy walk in, and his name is John Johnson. Take it, John.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So that's not a joke. That's making fun of my hard work.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And in exchange, I think Christie's was the first auction house to have a license to independently operate in China within the next year or something like that. So that's how powerful they became. And then also it's kind of a nod to how valuable Chinese antiquities became when China started to become interested in them.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
But also thanks to you. Where'd you come up with this idea?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
There was an auction in 2015, less than two decades after China became interested in its own heritage. The presale of this 16-inch vase. Sorry, this is 2010. A 16-inch vase presale value was $800,000. A half hour after it went under the gavel, it sold for almost $70 million to a Chinese billionaire. That's a lot of dough. It is. It also just shows how bad they want this stuff back.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Because there's one other thing, Chuck, you mentioned the billionaires getting involved. It's not just one way to show off how much money they have. It's also to show everybody how patriotic they are because they're buying these things at astronomical prices to bring back to China for China.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. Lu Yang had quite a reputation. I read in that Alex Palmer GQ article that he wrote a comprehensive book on all the looted antiquities, at least from the old summer palace, and could show you printouts of websites from museums around the world where that thing was being held.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So I guess there was also a really tense meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he showed up, too, because he would just walk around and be like, that's China's, that's China's, that was stolen, that was looted. And very strangely, that was, what did you say, 2009? Yeah. The very next year, this string of museum heists of Chinese antiquities began. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Right. Are they commissioning people to rob art museums? And I mean, not just like, you know, some Tinkertown museum on the corner of a neighborhood that like, I don't know. You know, not a good museum. You know those museums? I'm talking like world-class museums like the Fountain Blue outside Paris. Paris, France, that is, not Texas.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, that was my interpretation, too. So apparently the whole thing started in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Drottningholm Palace, which is, well, a Swedish royal palace. And they have a Chinese pavilion there. And there's a state-owned collection of Chinese antiquities. And on August 6, 2010, it was quite a surprise because there was a group of cars that were set fire to elsewhere in Stockholm.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And as the police ran over there and were very much distracted by these sudden car fires, because usually that means riot. So I can imagine that put the police on edge. The thieves ran over to the palace in their Chinese pavilion and started ransacking some specific items. I think they smashed three display cases.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And I'm not sure how many items they stole, but I believe it seemed pretty specific. And they were out of there in six minutes. So they were clearly pros.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, just like Charles Grodin and Miss Piggy.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Right. Yeah. There was another one, what, three years later. And this is a big deal. When a museum gets struck, like, it's not good, especially if word gets out. Because as Livia was pointing out, museums a lot of times don't announce the fact that they've been robbed.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Number one, it's very humiliating because they're entrusted with protecting these things that are part of humanity's cultural heritage. And then secondly, it also practically means that they need to beef up security because now thieves are on alert like, oh, the Code Museum is really easy to break into and they'll become a much bigger target.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So for two different break-ins to become public knowledge, it's just not really a good thing. But it was also very curious that they both seemed to be Chinese art heists. Right after that, they suddenly became very interested in negotiating with China to give back some of the antiquities that they held.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And in particular, a Chinese billionaire named Huang Nubo, I'm quite sure it's not exactly how you say his last name, because I said it like I'm from Mississippi or something. Um, he came to, um, Stockholm or no Bergen and said, what do you got? I can give you a donation if you want. And they showed him some columns from the old summer pals. And I read that he wept when he saw them.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So, yeah, there's like a – still to this day, people don't know exactly what the deal was. And it seems like despite what Palmer, Alex Palmer was saying, Palmer basically was like, you know, didn't point the finger directly. But that was kind of the premise of the article that who knows who's behind this and it's possible that the government of China has some hand in it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
No, I think by renovation they mean the head curators in the basement clutching the remaining objects to their chest.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Get back. Get away. So the Swedish burglars and both code burglars were not caught. But kind of an indicator that really does point a bit of a finger at China. Someone in China, they got a tip the Code Museum did from the publicity the second robbery brought. They got a tip about one of the objects that was stolen in the first robbery, that it was in a Shanghai airport on display.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So that does kind of show you that China is very much like, where'd you get this? Who cares? They probably didn't even ask that unless they were congratulating. And so when Norway found this out, they decided not to do anything about it because they had just recently ticked China off. by giving the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned at the time in China.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So China wasn't happy with Norway. So Norway was like, you just keep your airport antiquity. We're going to just not say anything about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
They did. They got some people from what I was reading up about it. They were like in their early 20s, not very pro. I think they were up and coming criminals is the impression that I have. But I think crass ineptitude says it all. It really does. They also this is another giveaway. The police found a cell phone in one of their underpants while they were being arrested.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And they used that cell phone to kind of build a case that connected that heist to, I think, the Cambridge heist and a bunch of other ones, actually. And they ended up tracing it back to a group of travelers like Brad Pitt and Snatched. Snatched? No, Snatched is that Amy, what's her name?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Schumer, yes, thank you. That was a stupid sidetrack. But so these were real-life travelers, and they had a gang called the Rathkeel Rovers, and they were responsible for a bunch of different burglaries and robberies and things like that. But they seemed to be behind all of the Chinese art heists in the country.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
But also the Chinese art market, as we'll see, has blown up so much that it's also entirely possible that it's just like that makes a lot of sense for thieves to steal Chinese art. The thing is, is the string of particular heists that Alex Palmer talks about that really kind of form this galaxy of particular heists.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
What's significant about it is that there was a member of this gang named Chi Chong Donald Wong, He was from South London, and he seems to be their Chinese connection because he kept traveling in and out of the country going to China and smuggling their loot over there. And I don't think they recovered a single thing from those heists, did they?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Exactly. So the question remains, though, because the police are like, we never caught the highest person at the top of this, the head cheese, the ultima hombre, that kind of person. And they think that even if they had found that person, that person was probably commissioned by Chinese mafia, Chinese billionaires, maybe the Polly Group. Who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
But that seems to be the case for all of the robberies where they found people. the people who carried out the robbery, they were just hired criminals. They were not doing this because, you know, they love China or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
They were either commissioned to or they knew that the Chinese art market was so hot that it would just make sense to steal Chinese objects because they were going to fetch a pretty high price.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
The thieves would go in and steal really specific stuff that were Chinese antiquities. A lot of times they've been looted and they would walk right past other things that were really, really valuable. And it almost seemed like they had a shopping list of items that that were particularly Chinese that they wanted to steal.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Okay, Chuck, so we're back, and you promised talk of more heists, and I'm going to take us to France. Won't you come with me?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
How about France in 2015? Wasn't that a particularly pretty summer, I think, or spring? I think it was. Well, let's go find out, because on March 1, 2015, at the Chateau de Fontainebleau outside Paris, which is, I think, beginning back in medieval times, one of the homes of the French monarchs, There was a collection assembled by Empress Eugenie, who was the wife of Napoleon III.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
She was the last Empress of France. And she put together a collection of at least 800 objects. Those were just the ones on display. 300 of them, these were Chinese objects, antiquities. 300 of them were from the old summer palace alone, mostly taken by French soldiers who were there to sack the old summer palace. In 1860, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So I think thieves, when they broke into the Fountain Blue in 2015, they made off with like 15 different things. One of which sticks out to me. It was a replica of the King of Siam's crown. Siam is now Thailand. And that really has very little to do with China. It was certainly not a Chinese heritage object from what I can tell. Hmm. That one seems a little hinky to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
I'm not sure if that was a commissioned robbery or not. But regardless, I don't. Oh, they did find at least some of the people who were behind it. And again, these were just hired guns, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. Pretty good specialty. This apparently was the origin of the phrase, no sh**, Sherlock.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
It's true. It is. You could see that list be like, you know, Imperial Seal, China Dog, or the waving cat that's fortunate. And then, you know, eggs, butter, and apples.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
No. Again, that hot Chinese art market kind of dilutes the possibility that it's just the Chinese government. There was one, there was a second robbery on the Fountain Blue, an attempt. The police broke it up before it could happen in Operation Bamboo. The, I guess, Spanish and French police got together and they said, let's get these guys. And they did before they could rob the place.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And those guys said that they were hired by the Chinese mafia. that they had been going after three specific pieces of art, Chinese art. And I don't think that that led anywhere either. I think also, though, even if you could trace it back to, say, the Pali group or the prime minister, It wouldn't matter. China would basically just say so or they would deny it or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And everybody needs to be essentially in at least good economic terms with China right now. That's just the issue is not going to get pressed. So it doesn't really matter. It's more just an academic kind of interesting thing to try to track it back to who's behind it. It's not actually going to result in any kind of geopolitical differences. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
No. And there's no apparently there's no legal repercussions for it either. Even if somebody from Norway or Sweden came over and said, this is ours, like this was stolen from our museum. China would just be like, well, there's no laws here that could punish whoever did this. So go home. And they officially apparently do discourage theft. But because the item could become damaged in the robbery.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
That's why. Not because it violates any laws or treaties or anything like that. Because, again, there's a lot of soreness from the idea that these things were stolen. Right. And there's I mean, it's not even like they make a good case. That's exactly what happened historically.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, they just walk right past really expensive stuff. But, yeah, it wasn't because they didn't know what they were doing, it seems like. Some of the people who were caught with this were clearly professional thieves.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And so I was trying to figure out, like, OK, if there's museums around the country that, you know, there's this growing movement for repatriation here in America, we have like the Indigenous Graves Act, which is like if you have Native American remains in your museum collection, you should give them back to the to the group who from from which they came so that they can be
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
bury the remains or do whatever custom they do rather than keeping them in a museum collection. That's a good example of this kind of growing awareness of a responsibility museums have for giving stuff back that was stolen from a country But museums just aren't really going with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And I was looking at it and I sent you, I think, some parts of, I think, an artsy article that talks about this, like China, Greece, Nigeria. They're all like, you guys have some really important cultural treasures of ours, so give them back. And museums are basically saying, like, no, you won't be able to take good care of them. We can take better care of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And then I think the British Museum was just discovered to have suffered an extensive robbery from inside that really kind of undermines that argument that, you know, they can protect these things better than the countries can because this curator at the British Museum stole something like 2,000 pieces from the museum's collection and was selling them on eBay.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So it's not like China and other countries don't have a legitimate claim to this. It's just more like Western museums are just basically they're just digging in and saying, like, no, we're not going to give these back.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, maybe even more than half. That's got to be ultimately the reason why they don't want to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, exactly. I think also in the UK in particular, they have a law that says museums aren't allowed to repatriate cultural artifacts to other countries. And they're like, yep, that's the law. And I think the Chinese government is like, that's your law. You can change that law. Stop hiding behind that. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
I mean, there were a couple of instances where I'm like, OK, this makes sense to not give it back. Like if there's a lot of instability and turmoil in that country. Another one that really kind of stuck out to me is if the cultural heritage is now divided among multiple countries. So let's say it was a Yugoslavian item.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And now, yeah, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, they're both saying, like, that's ours. That's a ticklish spot. But for the most part, if it's, you know, a stable country is like, that's ours. Give it back. Especially if it was looted. There really shouldn't be any discussion about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
You got anything else? I got nothing else. Oh, well, you can look out for a movie by Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chu coming out sometime soon. Netflix is going to have something based on Grace D. Lee's novel Portrait of a Thief. And there's a 2012 Jackie Chan movie called CZ12 about this very kind of stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Well, since Chuck said Jackie Champ, he unlocked listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Thanks a lot, Chandra. Whole house swamp cooler. Can't you just see like the tops like open and it says Igloo and giant letters on the side?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Very nice, Chuck. Very nice. Well, if you want to be like Chandra and write in and tell us about something that we talked about that's whole house size, we love hearing that kind of stuff. You can shoot us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. So this idea, this concept of the century of humiliation was coined by Mao. And in the 21st century, the Chinese Communist Party that Mao founded have kind of really kind of used that as a point of pride. And as a point of unity among the country, which is really interesting because they view it as a really shameful period of their history.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And yet it does generate pride in them and brings them together. And I think a sense of like, we're going to overcome that. We're never going to go back to that. But that's a change from how Chairman Mao approached it. He was like, we're never turning backwards. And in fact, everything that reminds us of the past, we're just going to destroy.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So go into museums, go into libraries, go into, you know, anywhere that like landmarks, things that remind us of the past. They call them the four olds. that were just meant to be destroyed. And it was the Cultural Revolution is what they called it. And that's how it was approached for about 50 years. And then finally, it kind of turned and then that pride kind of extended to Chinese antiquities.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And in particular, today in China, There's a tremendous amount of, there's a tremendous sense of loss over some particular items that came from a particular place called the Yuan Ming Yu, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, I think is what it's called. But less formally, it's called the Old Summer Palace. It's in Beijing, I believe. And it was magnificent from what I can tell.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, they were apparently already in the process of looting the palace when they heard about the torture deaths of that delegation that was trying to broker peace for the Second Opium War. And they were like, oh, OK, well, I guess we'll burn the place down, too. And they did so over, I think, two days and nights. But the fire kept going for like three days.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And rather than rebuild, China decided to preserve the place in ruins. It's kind of like Hiroshima. Like they decided to preserve some of the bombed out areas as just a reminder. But rather than a reminder to never use nukes ever again, this was a reminder to China of like what... outside powers did to China. Like this is what happened to China in the past.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And it's something to use to kind of motivate you to become the best kind of China there is that could never let something like that happen again.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And I think it was the first Pekingese in all of England.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
They're the most symbolic. So again, this summer palace stuff, it was just such a big deal. Like you said, one of the biggest acts of cultural vandalism ever. It's such a symbol in this country of China's shame. And these things are like the greatest symbol of that larger symbol. Like these Zodiac heads mean everything to China. And to get them back is enormously important.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
The Communist Party kind of took a shift, especially as China became more and more economically powerful. And it started to kind of look at getting some of these antiquities back rather than looking at them as reminders of some terrible backwards past. They became part of China's heritage. And the Chinese government in particular started to want to get these back.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And they started a kind of a trend, I think, culturally that was like, hey, start having pride in these heritage antiques. And let's see if we can get them back into China. How? Who cares? Just go get them.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And those are just museums in just 47 countries. I saw that the Chinese government itself estimates that there's about 10 million antiquities spread throughout the world outside of China. And China considers basically all of these stolen.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're going to talk a little bit about Chinese art heists. So let's get started. Go.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Even if a Westerner came in and paid for them back in 1900, the Chinese government basically considers whoever sold it to have been taken advantage of by that Westerner. So if you have a piece of Chinese art, an antique that's Chinese— Hang on to it. You may want to hide it, actually, because there's a good chance that China considers that stolen and that that's not— rightfully yours.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Maybe there's some law in your country that says it's yours. China doesn't really recognize that because in a lot of cases, they weren't sold legitimately. They were stolen. They were part of war loot, like with the old summer palace. And they have a great point. There's a lot of stuff out there, not just from China, but from other countries that colonial powers went to and said,
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
We really like this. We're going to literally steal it and we're going to display it in our museums. And 150 years from now, you're going to ask for it back and we're going to say no.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Right. Okay. So in 2000, China, as far as like its search for repatriating its art in antiquities, was so powerless that Christie's and Sotheby's felt comfortable telling the government of China, sorry, no, we're not going to give these back to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Less than 10 years later in 2009, when the estate of Yves Saint Laurent went up for auction, China contacted Christie's and said, hey, you're about to auction off two more of those Zodiac heads. If you do it, it's going to be really bad for you. And China had become such a player in the global art market that Christie's, they handed them over. They gave them to them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And that kind of coined this term or this slogan that they adopted, we never sleep, and led to the logo, which was this open eye, like the all-seeing eye that's watching you that never sleeps.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
As a matter of fact, I saw that he was, I guess the term that you would use today is like he posed as a handicapped brother to Kate Warren.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, I know. It was quite a choice. And only Daniel Day-Lewis would have been allowed to do that, too. Yeah, totally. Anybody else, the director, would have been like, what are you doing? Yeah, exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Oh, you set me up, huh? I'm sorry. That's okay. Well, here, let me say it now. Schlemazel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
In Portland, Oregon. Yeah, in 1908. Okay. So 44 plus 8 is 54, 52 years? Yeah. Yeah, 52 years ahead of schedule. Pinkerton hired a woman and made her a very famous detective.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Okay. Are you ready to get on with our sausage party?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, sure. Okay. That was nice of you to kind of give that behind-the-scenes tour to everybody, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
No, he rooted out a spy ring led by a woman named Rose O'Neill Greenhow, who was a Southerner but was still like the toast of Washington, D.C. society. And she was really running a very sophisticated and very developed spy ring for the Confederacy. And he found her out, busted everybody. It was a big deal. But with estimating troop strength,
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
No, he he may have single handedly added years on to the Civil War when he told McClellan, General McClellan, that he estimated the Confederates had between, I think, 100 or 200000 troops. Yeah, I saw 200. Yeah. So at the time, Robert E. Lee had 40,000 to 45,000 troops. So he grossly overestimated it. And McClellan had something like 76,000 troops.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Whatever. Everybody likes you, including me, especially me. At any rate, so we're talking today about the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And this one strikes me as odd that we have waited this long, 17 years, to finally talk about them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So they could have very easily overwhelmed the Confederacy early on had Pinkerton not overestimated the troops. And I also saw McClellan didn't vet that information at all. He just took it on face. Yeah. And by the way, all of you Civil War buffs, if you can go back and unsend your emails, it's not William McClellan, it's George B. McClellan. I'm sorry, I misspoke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. Alphonse Bertillon or Bertillon. He he and I think like the 1840s came up with the idea of mugshots, fingerprints using like head measurements to basically create a database of criminals so that they couldn't pose as other people. And I guess that Pinkerton heard about this and brought it to the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. And each picture had a senior superlative underneath it. So there is like most likely to unnecessarily shoot someone you're robbing in the knee. Yeah. Stuff like that. That's good. I also saw that this was so sophisticated that it wouldn't be until the FBI was formed that something like a criminal database like this would be expanded upon, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And because they're just so legendary, you know, like everybody knows what the Pinkertons are. And if you don't, I'm not taking that back because everyone else knows what the Pinkertons are.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I did. Most likely to talk about criminal databases. Oh. Did I in reality? I don't think so. No. Because my senior quote was, leave me alone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Oh, jeez, man. I see you in a different light now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Oh, I say all-around. But then again, I call stovetop hats.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, you can claim her. All right. So there's another thing that Pinkerton did to really kind of help establish his agency as like just nationally recognized and also kind of heroes. They were considered heroes across the United States. Because they went after bad guys and they usually got their man. They were very persistent and dogged. Sometimes they would pursue criminals for years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Like it wasn't like, well, we tried for a month and we gave up. Like they would just keep going until they found the person. They would pursue them into Canada sometimes, into Mexico and beyond. And I guess one of the reasons why they were revered is because they had a code of conduct that was like strictly implemented and It was things like we will take no bribes. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Which was a big one at the time. Oh, yeah. Probably still is now. We'll never compromise with criminals. Yeah. We will partner with local law enforcement when possible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
This one stood out to me. I thought this was kind of upstanding. They wouldn't take divorce cases or any case that could create a scandal for anybody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Right. Or you better drink this rye whiskey or else we'll know you're a Pinkerton man. Exactly. They also, unless you had a direct order from your superior to, you weren't allowed to use alcohol to get like confessions or anything out of suspects either.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
codes of conduct for back then totally yeah i did not see any stories of like rogue pinkerton agents or that this was all just you know a whitewashing and they actually didn't behave like this at all they do seem to have been pretty upstanding and then so the other thing that really expanded the legend of the pinkertons and probably in part of why we still understand or know them today is um
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Alan Pinkerton wrote a bunch of books or at least published a series of books under his name that were like true crime detective stories. This would have been in the 1860s, 1870s, I think. So this is like the dawn of detective stories. Yeah, I would think so. I don't remember when Poe wrote Murder in the Rue Morgue. Was that the first detective story? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
It was ahead of its time. Yeah. One of the most famous ones was the detective in the somnambulist, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. I saw there was another one where Kate Warren posed as a fortune teller to get a confession out of somebody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, but these are like the books that they're saying, like, this is what we did. And I mean, like, if this was even remotely close, it must have been thrilling to have been a Pinkerton detective at this time. Totally. Because this is, again, when they were just a cause celeb in America and did not have the blemished reputation that they have today.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, and we played like a semi-fictional version of ourselves or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
One of the other things they were known for, Chuck, was nabbing outlaws in the Wild West. Because as the United States expanded westward and the frontier just kept going, it was a wild and raucous and lawless place. You might have a marshal. I know we talked about the Marshal Service serving as the law enforcement out west. But it was kind of far and few between.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So the Pinkertons filled a real need at the time because one of the first things that developed after the Civil War was train robberies.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, in the two years that the Reno gang was active, they stole about a half a million dollars in 1860s money.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That was a ton of cash. They were very successful. So, yeah, they definitely caught the attention of the train companies. Adams Express hires the Pinkertons, and they start hunting down the Reno gang. And this is a good example of them just using dogged persistence over and over and over again. They just kind of one by one captured the gang members.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
The first was John Reno, not Jean Reno from Twin Peaks. I had that same joke. They got him first. He may have been the leader as far as I know. They also caught a guy named Charles Roseberry, who was a member of the gang.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And I don't know if they were expecting this or not, but the locals who were with them when they caught Charles Roseberry strung him up and hung him right there when they caught him. And I didn't see like what the Pinkertons thought about this kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Right. This doesn't seem to jive with the code of conduct.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I also saw they recovered about $300,000 in cash in at least one instance. So you definitely got your money's worth when you hired the Pinkertons to nab Wild West train robbers.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
No. And then things kind of went pear-shaped for the Pinkertons. As far as I can tell, this was the first time the Pinkertons' reputation took a real hit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, yeah, that's one thing. So there's a lot of stuff you'll find when you dig into the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It depends on who you're reading. Either they were pretty great and did some really great work, or they were evil from the start.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, they went after the James Gang led by Frank and Jesse James. I didn't know this. Yeah. But they were terrorists, Confederate terrorists during the Civil War in Missouri. That's where they were from. And Missouri was this powder keg that actually kind of helped kick off the Civil War because...
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I guess abolitionists and pro-slavery people came together to settle Missouri and they did not get along. And during the Civil War, one of the things the James Gang did was murder union supporters in Missouri. Not even on the front lines. These weren't even soldiers. These were civilians. They were just running around killing and terrorizing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And then apparently also one of the things that complicates it is Alan Pinkerton was known to kind of hype his own company, hype his own exploits. And some people interpret that as like personal myth-making. And whether that's correct or not, a lot of historians have delved into.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And I think the answer generally is it's a case-by-case thing, whether it's actually true, whether it actually happened quite that way. But for the most part, from what I saw from researching this is – Generally, most of the stuff can be accepted at surface level, for the most part. It's not like if you buy into the story that we're about to tell you, that you're just being totally misled.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So for the most part, just relax is what I'm trying to say.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, and so 300 Pinkertons showed up on July 6, 1892. They were pulled down the river on barges, and they were all armed to the teeth with Winchester rifles and Colt 45s and all the modern guns you could hope for. And when they arrived, they were met with, I think, 2,000 or 3,000 homestead, not just steelworkers, but neighbors, community members, just people who were supporting the strikers.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, they were really mad, not just because they were in the midst of the strike, but because this private police force had shown up to intimidate them or possibly kill them the way that they were armed. And so a battle ensued like there's no other word for it. It was a 12 or 15 hour battle. Only a dozen people died. But that's amazing to me, as violent as this battle was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
They tried to or I should say they pushed a flaming train car out. at the barges to try to kill the Pinkertons. Like that was just one thing that the strikers did. Like it was really violent.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, because strikers typically recognize federal troops as more legitimate than a private police force showing up, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, they had Gatling guns, like it was demonstrated at the end of the Wild Bunch. That's right. You don't want to mess with those. So, yeah, from those of us like looking back today, you might think, well, that's just what they did back then, which is messed up. But that's just the norm. Not true. Congress actually investigated this incident.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
They were like, that is pretty screwed up that you hired the Pinkertons and brought in Gatling. the National Guard, to essentially put this town under martial law. And as a matter of fact, Congress urged states to pass laws to make it so that corporations couldn't hire private companies to break unions. And Ohio went so far as to say the Pinkertons themselves are now illegal here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, they trade on the name still, for sure. But it's a massive company, I think, with like 50,000 employees and offices all over the world. But they still use the Pinkerton name. Like, you can hire Pinkerton for corporate security. Apparently, they'll ride along on container ships to protect against pirates. Wow. They've served as guards at Marilyn Monroe's funeral back in the 60s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I also saw that same year they escorted the Mona Lisa from France to the U.S.,
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
It is fairly small. And then one other thing where they pop up, and this made me wonder if this is where this idea came from. Apparently, they're bad guys in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, which I know for a fact that you've played.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Is that where you got the idea to do one on them?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That was a good movie. We should talk about the death of Alan Pinkerton real quick, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, he wouldn't go get it treated, and it just kept getting worse, and that was it for him. Yeah, he was put to rest near his wife. And very interestingly, he also, in his family plot, buried Kate Warren because he so admired her. This is the first female detective ever hired. He so admired her and her work that he had her buried with him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
She was still alive and was very unhappy about this, but he admired her that much.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Right. Yeah. And election of parliamentary members, that kind of stuff. This basically democratic reform in England. And at the time, this was considered radical politics.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That's it for the Pinkertons, everybody, at long last. And since I said at long last, I just triggered listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And Alan Pinkerton actually fled the country with his family because the fuzz was looking for him, essentially. And they landed in the Chicago area, Dundee, Illinois, appropriately enough.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Deanna Garman? Yeah, that's right. Thanks, Deanna. We appreciate that. That was a great email. And if you want to be like Deanna, you can email us, too. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And he decided that he would become a cooper. Which is somebody who makes barrels. And I guess he was a pretty decent barrel maker because he did it for a little while.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, this was actually before Chicago had an established police force. And it was a big deal to be a cop. And if you were a cop, they also called them watchmen because in a lot of cases, that's what it amounted to. Like these men would not go into the highest crime areas and they would avoid the most dangerous criminals. And there were just a few handfuls of them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
But Pinkerton made a name for himself very quickly as somebody who had just like a sixth sense for just knowing when somebody was up to no good and following them and seeing what they were up to, for being fearless and for not accepting bribes. He was as honest as the day is long as far as bribery is concerned. And that made him stand out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And he started kind of moving up the ranks pretty quickly and moved from Kane County to Cook County. where he worked in the assessor's office protecting Steven Spielberg.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
From Blues Brothers. Remember, wasn't Steven Spielberg the Cook County assessor eating the sandwich when they come to pay the taxes? Frank Oz? No, Frank Oz was the guy in the property room.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I'm pretty sure he was the assessor at the Cook County Assessor's Office.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So either I'm like really just making this stuff up, but we've had this conversation and you were fully on board with Spielberg being the assessor.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Okay, it wasn't two weeks ago, but we have had this conversation. I know we have.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, so there was one. He apparently was bosom friends with John Brown, as he put it. He had a real chance to coin the term bosom buddies, but he didn't do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
No, it really doesn't. But John Brown, the white abolitionist guerrilla, essentially, made a raid on a few farms in Missouri and ended up freeing 11 enslaved people and leading them to Canada. And one of the stops was... with Alan Pinkerton in Chicago.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And Pinkerton by this time was wealthy enough that he paid for, I guess, the train ride from Chicago on to Detroit for everybody who John Brown had busted out. So he definitely was an abolitionist. And from what I read, it was like from the moment he landed in the United States, he was an abolitionist. This wasn't like him pumping up his image years later.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. I think one of the big distinction was they weren't out there like actively seeking crime as part of the public good. They were hired to find like specific things, specific criminals or to prevent specific crimes by corporations typically. And one of the early employers or clients, I guess, were the railroads companies. Because at the time, people would steal from railroads left and right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
There were just so many goods going across the United States. It was just too tempting. And they started, I think, the first railroad, possibly, if not one of the first, was the Illinois Central Railroad. And they worked security and did detective work for this railroad. And this would be a significant railroad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
client for Pinkerton to land throughout the rest of his life because the corporate attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad at the time was Abraham Lincoln. And the president of the railroad was William McClellan. And when you put those two together, you have some high-powered Civil War people on the Union side. And as we'll see, Alan Pinkerton joined them in the Civil War.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're keeping an eye on you, sucker. Did I throw you off when I pre-recorded? No. I'm always expecting anything from you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
For sure. I have trouble any time I say stovepipe hat, not saying stovetop hat.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Because I was raised on stovetop stuffing. Did you eat that stuff?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, we ate that stuff for sure. We ate all sorts of weird stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yes, but very tasty and savory. With herbs and stuff? Mm-hmm. And what do you do?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
You put it in a pot with some, wait, you boil a little water, and then you add it to the water, soaks up the water, and then you add like 10 sticks of butter, which is really what drives the whole thing home.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And then, yeah, you put it in your mouth directly from the pot, typically. Okay. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Hey, one other thing, too, while we're on a tangent. I mentioned Sam Spade earlier. I cannot recommend enough the limited series Monsieur Spade. It's on Netflix starring Clive Owen. Have you seen it?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
God, it's so good. But at the same time, I've never seen such a tightly constructed show just come totally off the rails in like the last hour.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, compared to the rest of the show, it's bad. But it's almost like they forgot that they had to wrap it up, and they just shot a scene, and that was it. And it was, like, so totally improbable and just stood out so far from the rest of the series that you're just like, what? But luckily, the rest of the series is so great, it doesn't really damage it at all.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I'm really glad you guys liked that. Did you finish it? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, that's good. That one fell apart at the end, too. You think?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
William McClellan, who would become the general. That's right. The head of the Union forces.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, he did. This was apparently like part of a general plan to prevent Lincoln from making it to his inauguration in Washington. Right. Just kill him in Baltimore.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Right. So as Lincoln got toward Baltimore, they enacted a plan where he was taken off of the train at a stop, I think like Harrisburg or something right before Baltimore. And he was disguised. And he basically played the brother of a woman named Kate Warren, who is a detective who we'll talk about in a second. And she escorted him on another train through Baltimore that went through at night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Again, in disguise. No one knew who he was. And one of the things that kind of came out of the story that was so significant was that Kate Warren stayed up all night and watched over Abraham Lincoln on this train ride to Washington, D.C.,
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Duelists have to be great listeners. We already talked about the empathy piece. They have to be very empathetic. And they will, like I said, start meeting before birth to answer any kind of questions, come up with that birth plan, and really listen. a lot to the wife and the husband. So everybody is on the same page. And like I said, on the day, things can change.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
But going in, you generally want to have a pretty good idea of everything from medications you might want to use, if any, to where you want to have the baby. The doula can come on board and kind of explain if they're knowledgeable, which hopefully they are, about the hospitals around you and maybe even help you pick out where you're going to give birth.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah, and it says in this article that there are specialist doulas like antepartum doulas and postpartum doulas and labor doulas. that if you want an antepartum doula to be, if you want more than those two meetings, you might want to hire someone who will be with you for several weeks beforehand.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Or if you want someone postpartum to be with you to coach you through breastfeeding or, you know, changing diapers or just any of that kind of coaching, you can hire someone to do that. But I get the sense that doulas generally will sort of work with you on whatever kind of plan you want.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
It may cost a little extra, but I get the sense that a doula wouldn't say like, nope, you get two meetings and that's it. They might be like, no, I'll come in for a third and fourth meeting. It'll be an extra of this much money and I can hang with you for a week or two afterward here and there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah. The other thing about doulas, another misconception a lot of people think is that it's just some hippy-dippy thing that if you don't want to, if you only want to have like a natural childbirth, then you get the doula in there and they're not there for anything other than that. And that's not the case.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
They are there to support you in whatever kind of birth you want to have, whether it's a home birth or water birth or whether or not you want to get an epidural or be loaded up on every pharmaceutical they offer mothers in labor. They're there just to have knowledge of all that stuff so you know what you're getting into. Yep.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah, when my kid was born, I was shocked at how many people were in the room, first of all. How many? Oh, man. Baker's dozen? I mean... 20? Emily and I, birth mom, obviously. Our adoption counselor, who was a licensed doula, so she really served that function for the birth mom, which was really a great, great plus. The doctor...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
It happens. I mean, we'll go ahead and spoil it. Generally, doulas are, well, let's just get into this. Generally, doulas are women who have already had a baby.
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I guess the I'm not even sure what the roles are, what their technical titles are. But the doctor came in when it was go time and basically just check things out and said, well, I think it's go time. And then he stepped out of the way. And these two nurses came in there and. Ninety seconds later, there was a baby. Wow. So it was – and those were – so it was two nurses.
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There was probably like – there was probably at least 12 people in that room.
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It was crowded and fast and surreal and weird and amazing. Uh, even, even weirder, they brought in carrot top to cut the cord, right? No, Emily cut the cord. Okay, cool. Emily actually helped sort of deliver in a way.
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Cause you know, they, they like to bring in, uh, I guess, you know, in a, in a regular biological birth, it would be the husband probably, uh, in there saying, Hey, do you want to help hold the legs or do whatever? In this case, it was Emily. And I just took a respectful position, uh, By the birth mom's head. Sort of looking down that way.
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I was like, you know, she was like, you can go wherever you want to go. But I was like, you know, I'll just hang right here.
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Yeah, I wanted to be there. And, you know, I was helping support her as well, holding her hand and patting her on the head and all that nice stuff.
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Not even just women, but women who have had a baby. So they can really know how to help another lady have a baby.
Stuff You Should Know
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All right, well, let's take another break now that we've shared our stories. We'll come back and talk a little bit about how you become a doula right after this.
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Well, before you decide to become a doula, you need to give a lot of thought on what you're going to be getting into. You know, the hours are long at birth. Childbirth is very stressful. And especially if there are complications, it can be super stressful in a matter of life or death. So you've got to be able to deal with that stuff in the moment.
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And hang in there and be the birth coach that mom needs, you know, in the most stressful of situations. But then on the plus side, you get to see little babies coming out on the reg. And what's better than that, you know? I can't think of too many things. Talk about an oxytocin hit. Maybe magic cake. Magic cake? Mm-hmm. You do not have to have a college degree.
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Yeah, you don't. But there are more and more programs now and more certification and licensing programs out there So if you want to be a doula, my advice is to go that route. You probably just get more work that way.
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Yep. It depends on where you live on how much you're going to pay. If you live in a big fancy city like New York City, you're going to be paying top dollar for your doula. If you live in Los Angeles, you're going to be paying top dollar for your doula.
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Yeah, but that scale can go all the way down to... Zero. Well, sure, all the way to zero. But if you're paying a doula, that number can go all the way down to... $600,000 to $800,000 in the flyover states. Right.
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Yeah, so doulas, we haven't even said what that is yet, and that would probably help clear it up if you don't know. Doulas are people, like we said, generally women, but not always, who are childbirth coaches. They coach you through the process. They will, depending on the service they offer, will come on before, obviously, you give birth and kind of prep you for what's going to happen.
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And this, I mean, it kind of depends on when your doula will come aboard in the process. But at the very least, they will help you in the delivery room, and they are your advocate to kind of coach you through this whole thing. And that term actually started in an article in 1969 by a woman named Dana Raphael, and then later on in a book in 1973 called The Tender Gift, Breastfeeding.
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And that's when she brought this term back and said, you know, we're going to start calling these women doulas, and it's going to be a real job.
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Yeah, and it's not just C-sections. They're your birth advocate to make sure, or at least as best they can, to try to ensure that the birth plan that you feel best about is the one that you end up with.
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Things always change, of course. And a doula would never put you in danger by insisting on something. In fact, they can't. But they are there to speak for you on your behalf because as a mother in labor, you're going through a lot on your own. So it's nice to have someone that is just there to do that job.
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Yeah, it's definitely gained popularity in the 2000s. I think I tried to find more recent statistics than 2012, but I couldn't. But in 2012, there were 6%. And this is in the United States. It's very much... I know it does happen all over the world some, but it's sort of an American thing. Six percent of people in 2012 used a doula versus three percent in 2006.
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And in that same survey, 27 percent of people said they would they would like to use a doula. So, you know, at least they're they're wishing or hopeful that they can.
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Yeah, and the impression I get now is that If you have a good doula who is good with people, which is ideally what your doula is, if your doula is not a people person, it's probably not going to be a good thing. But the idea I get is that doctors and nurses like having doulas there now because they can just concentrate on – they don't have to be the ones providing emotional, empathetic support.
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So what's the deal with doulas, everybody? That's my question to you on this wonderful Saturday morning. This one goes back to December 12th, 2017. Doulas do great work. They're wonderful people, and they bring babies into the world. So I hope you enjoy The Deal with Doulas.
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Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Although they can still do it if they want, they can just concentrate on the medical aspects of it, and they know that they have a trained – hopefully licensed doula, and we'll get into that later, on hand to sort of say, you know what, I don't have to deal with that part of things. You're in good hands with this doula, and I can just concentrate on the medical parts.
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Yeah, like they're sitting in the room with you and hanging out. They don't get called in like 20 minutes before you give birth. They're with you sometimes days and weeks beforehand coaching you on what to expect and how you're gonna go about this and what your plan is. And then on the day, like even if dad is in there and the husband is in there,
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Providing support, that's great, but the doula is just that extra step and that extra measure of support that is super knowledgeable about what it's going to be like where the husband might not exactly be able to lend the most insightful ear there. You know what I mean?
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All right, so here's a misconception. Some people think that doulas are authorized or trained to give birth. That is not true. They don't deliver babies. They don't perform any sort of medical procedures. They don't put an IV in your arm. They don't work the heart rate monitor. Most times they don't even work for the hospital. You have hired them independently.
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And again, they're just there to coach you. They're not even midwives. Midwives can deliver a baby.
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Yeah, and maybe not even offer advice. Like I think the idea is that a doula will lay it all out there so you can make an informed decision and not necessarily say, well, if I were you, this is what I would do.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And what came out of it is both an indictment and an inspiring affirmation of humanity. And on a personal note, I would like to wish my sweet, sweet wife, Yumi, a very big happy birthday. Enjoy.
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Yeah, and so these guys being inmates of the state at a time where Ypsilanti had like 4,000 people, 4,000 patients in just this one institution. And if you were already like on the margins of society and then moved into a place where you're with 4,000 other people on the margins of society, it's a really good place to get lost, to not get any real help. Yeah.
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And so one of the things that was part of this experiment design is to make participating in these discussions, this group of these three Christs as attractive to these three men as possible. So they were moved to Ward D-23. They were given their own private day room to eat in, to sleep in—or not sleep in, but to hang out in, away from everybody else.
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They got some, like, place to stretch out and to have some company. They got a lot of attention. A lot of perks. Like, basically, their lives were changed in— like incalculable ways by being part of the study. And so when they say like these were voluntary meetings and these men were voluntary members of the study, that's definitely true. They were voluntary participants.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave is here with us today and we're all just quietly holding hands. Now we have to stop and come into the real world and start talking to you fine people for this episode of Stuff You Should Know. My lip got caught in my tooth when I said you and it came out a little weird.
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But the perks on offer were just so amazing. Like you could not turn down, you know, participating in some degree.
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I don't think so. Okay. I don't want to disparage those great actors' names again.
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So let me ask you this because I didn't see the movie. Was it like – and I loved the fact that they made a movie about Freddie Mercury and the other members of Queen. But was it like in the movie – what was the name of that movie?
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Bohemian Rhapsody. Bohemian Rhapsody, that's right. Do you remember like every time like Freddie Mercury did something brilliant, they would have Brian May, they'd do a pan in close up of him just looking like in awe and astonished. And that's maybe pushing it doing that once in a movie, but they did that every like 15 or 20 minutes. Was it kind of like that same sentiment?
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I got you, yeah. So not the real story. It sounds familiar or similar.
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Right, exactly. This is not a feel-good story. I wonder if it was performance art you accidentally stumbled upon.
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I got it. All right, all right. I liked Awakenings too, but it sounds like what you're describing is more along the lines of Greatest Showman, like that kind of sanitization. I didn't see that. Okay. Did you? No, but remember we did that episode just tearing it apart. Yeah, yeah. We hadn't even seen it yet.
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I think his name actually was Josephine as well, and he went by Joseph. So he wanted to be a writer. I think, did you say he was 58 at the time? Yeah. OK. And he did not really take to working outside of the house. He and his wife did not have a very good relationship necessarily. He didn't want kids. She did. They ended up having three daughters.
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And he later on came to believe that they were not his children after all. And that may have been correct. But then things started to take kind of a turn for the worse in that he started to become really paranoid. He started to accuse people of poisoning his food. He became a bit of a hoarder, especially with books.
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And probably the greatest crime a man could commit in mid-century America, he did not want to work.
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So that was basically that. He ended up getting sent to an asylum in Canada. and then on to Ypsilanti eventually. And he'd been in Ypsilanti for, I think, about 20 years, or at least in and out of the hospital system for about 20 years. And for about 10 of those years, he had decided that he was God or Jesus Christ or both.
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Splendid. Yeah, so Joseph, despite his inability to take care of himself and the fact that he hoarded and all of that, he was a very sharp person. So remember to keep that in mind. He was very sharp and a good writer as well. Clyde, and these men's names were changed. Clyde Benson, he was 70. He'd been hospitalized for the last 17 years. He was in pretty rough shape. He really was.
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And Rokeach definitely starts to recognize that pretty quickly after meeting Clyde and ends up almost letting him just stay in the group, even though he's not really participating any longer. But Clyde was apparently raised in an overprotected manner and didn't really learn how to make his own decisions and kind of ended up stunted there.
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As a result, which you can make your way through life like that if you if you want to. But he ended up turning to alcohol and became a really hardcore alcoholic to where it was starting to wreck his life. And apparently that came into collision with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point. Right.
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Yeah. And when he did, he was very direct and to the point. And I don't think he was actually physically violent, was he?
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Right. So he would say things like, I am him. See, now understand that. Like that was the extent of how he would explain that he was God. He didn't need it to be challenged. And if you did try to challenge it, he would just shut you down kind of thing in a very... Yeah, like you said, kind of a scary way.
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Nice. That'll be a special treat for everybody, especially me.
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Which is sad because that means that Rokic made things much, much worse for these people.
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And that's something to really understand, that there were three men who were living, you know, their delusional lives in this state mental hospital, but they were generally unmolested until they were dragged into this study and messed with, like, in ways that you just don't do to other people, you know, and that their lives probably were worse, far worse than they would have been had they never met Milton Rokic.
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I really was. The worst was when you had that little case that you would put it in and it had vents so the smell could waft out of it.
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For sure. Yeah. And he had, like, there was a time where he was living a normal life. He served in World War II. He worked at different jobs back in Detroit. He tried to go to college. He was trying to make a life for himself. But he suffered from fatigue, which I looked up as apparently a really tough comorbidity with psychotic disorders. Mm-hmm.
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And it's like got a terrible positive feedback where, you know, the more tired you get, the worse your disorder is. And the worse your disorder is, the harder it can be to sleep. And it's just not good. So he had that. And then he also started hearing voices himself. that were telling him that he was Jesus Christ.
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And that didn't really jibe very well with his mother's own religious fanaticism because he saw that she was, you know, worshiping these other, what he considered idols.
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And he went on a... a bit of a violent tear once, removing all of the pictures of the saints and breaking all of the figurines and all that stuff and demanding that his mother worship him as Jesus Christ and threatening that if she didn't, he would strangle her. And so that was enough to get him locked up for good. He'd already been locked up one time for a brief period.
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And then about six months after that, he was locked up from then until the time that he met Milton Rokeach.
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Man. Sorry. So he went by, not Leon, and again, Leon was a fake name that Rokic gave him for the book. But he went by Dr. Domino Dominorum et Rex Reserum Simplis Christianis Puris Mentalis Doctor, which is Latin for Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Simple Christian Boy Psychiatrist. But he asked everyone to call him Rex for short.
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Sure. And he was, he was, like you said, like the most, probably the most personable. He, like Joseph, he was very sharp too, but also like from a very, a very early stage, he saw quite clearly what Roe Keats was trying to do. And he thought that it was morally repugnant, that it was not a nice thing to do to somebody, that you shouldn't mess with people like that.
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Yeah. No, it was great. It was very liberating.
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And he said as much multiple times throughout the study. Yeah.
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I think this is going to be a good one because, Chuck, I've been wanting to talk about this for a really long time. This is one of those things that you, like, hear about – And you're like, wait, what? That can't be right. And then you read a little more about it and a little more and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
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No, and it was like really, it was kind of in and of itself just that finding that not only did they not have their identity shattered, but they just rebuilt and reinforced their identities however they could find a way to do it to their own satisfaction.
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That's a pretty big psychological finding in and of itself, you know, although it doesn't seem worth putting these men through that just to find that out, you know.
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Don't think I didn't notice you just slipped Peter Dinklage in there. I know. That only leaves one more, so I don't need to do the third.
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So one of the other things about Joseph was his interpretation of why they were there in this study, why the three of these men had been brought together, was so that they could sort out with the other two that they weren't Christ, that he was the one who was actually Christ, so he could do his work here on earth better without having these two basically harassing him or whatever.
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So then Leon, like I was saying, Leon was the one who kind of saw the most through Rokic's intentions and saw that they were just wrong. And like Clyde, I think Clyde said that they were a re-rise. That's what he considered the other two, or a hick.
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Joseph said, you know, I am who I am. And also, by the way, we all know that I'm really God. And then Leon, he said that he said the other two were instrumental gods. They were hollowed out gods. They were possibly dead already. And machines were operating them and making them say these things. But even in that, like he wasn't attacking them personally.
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It was what he felt forced to explain his position. And so that's what he said his position was. But as he was saying this, he would turn to Joseph. He would turn to Clyde and he would say, you know, I mean this, you know, respectfully, I don't mean to be to tear you down. Whatever your belief is your belief and I don't want and I'm not trying to take it from you.
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But yet it's just kind of one of the, like a landmark study in the field of psychology that we're talking about today.
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I have my beliefs and you have your beliefs. And that's. That's good enough. And so through that kind of... like truce that was kind of established between these three men, they basically kept the researchers at bay. The researchers would try to come in and bust things up and get them to like argue or, you know, make them confront one another.
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But when left alone, those three men just generally did not argue about who was God. They avoided the subject altogether and just let the other ones be and just kind of entered this live and let live kind of position, which I think is pretty heart heartening, you know?
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Yeah, that story in particular was about how Rokic was treating three psychotic men who thought they were Christ. And to read that to them is really mean. Again, he was trying to see what would happen if they were confronted with their identities being considered delusional by other people. And Leon in particular didn't like that.
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He said that a doctor or a person who's supposed to be a doctor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct, inspire. He said that what you've just done is deploring. And Rokic said, you know, deploring, I've traveled 75 miles in snow and storm to come see you. And Leon said, yes, but what was your intention in coming to see me, sir?
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And so he didn't put up with Rokic's BS at all, which was pretty cool, you know. To hold delusions and to have your delusions attacked like that and then to be able to push back, but also in still a respectful way is, I think Leon's one of these, one of the great unsung heroes of 20th century America.
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Yeah, I say we take a break, man.
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You started wearing, like, Three Christs t-shirts and stuff.
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Man. It's just brutal. It keeps getting better and better. Yeah. Yeah. When those grad assistants said, you've gone too far, I think Rokic probably said something along the lines of, too far? I haven't even begun to go too far. Richard Gere said that. Just watch what's next. Yeah, but there was like upbeat music while he was saying it.
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Exactly. That is exactly what I was thinking of. Thank you for putting it into words, Chuck. So what happened next? So what happened next is as follows. Rokic basically saw, like, these guys are not going for this, for the level of prodding that I've been doing. I'm going to really kind of turn up the heat.
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And he wondered if you took the members, people that were part of these patients' delusional belief systems and personified them, like pretended you were them, say started communicating with them through letters or whatever. Yeah. What would happen?
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Could you conceivably get these people to abandon their delusions under the guidance of these authority figures that were actually part of their delusions? It's really kind of mind boggling when you lay it out in like a flow chart like that, you know?
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Or maybe he was scared of what would happen if Clyde broke.
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Archangel. Those are two different. So he was married to the Blessed Virgin Mary and had that uncle.
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But he wasn't married to his uncle. He had another wife later on named Madam Yeti Woman after he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary. That's right. Because his uncle, Michael, the archangel, married the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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Well, the upshot of it is Rokic started posing as Madam Yeti Woman and started a letter writing campaign as Madam Yeti Woman, basically reaching out to say, hey, Leon, I just want to say hi and I'm thinking of you and let's start talking. So there was correspondence that was established as Leon's delusion, like wife, Madam Yeti Woman.
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Yeah. And so he did. He did go ahead first with Leon, I believe. And by this time, Leon had one of the things that he had done to transform his identity was to become Dr. Righteous Ideal Dong or Dr. R.I. Dong. And apparently the head nurse asked him directly, like, can I please not call you Dr. Dong? And he said, yes, you can call me R.I. But everybody else called him Dr. R.I. Dung.
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And he did this, Rokic concluded, to basically make himself not worthy of being harassed anymore. But he was still secretly God, like he knew he was God. He was just pretending to be something else. And during that period, he became married to Madam Yeti Woman. So Rokic started addressing letters to Dr. R.I. Dung and basically saying – You know, here's a dollar.
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Why don't you go buy yourself something nice in the hospital store and then share the change with Clyde and Joseph? Or one of the things that they would do is they would take turns between the three patients as to who was going to lead the session that day.
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And one of the things you did when you led the session was you chose what song everybody sung at the beginning and at the end of the session, which is adorable. And so Madame Yeti Woman suggested that he choose onward Christian soldiers and he chose onward Christian soldiers.
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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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And so like to Rokichi seeing like there's this there's like an actual influence that is being exerted by this delusional figure. And also it demonstrates that that Leon is showing like he definitely believes Madame Yeti Woman's a person for sure. Yeah.
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And so with Leon's letters in particular, there's a couple of like really sad things. Like the whole thing was sad to begin with, but there's this passage in the book where Leon gets a letter and Rokic realizes that he's holding back tears. And he starts to ask him, like, why are you, like, you know, are you happy? He said, yes, I'm very happy.
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It's a very pleasant feeling to have someone think of you. Like, he was moved to tears by the idea that Madame Yeti Woman was writing to him and talking about caring for him and sending him money to go buy himself things with. And rather than just say, like, oh, we might want to back this off, Rokic used it to step that up and arranged for a meeting with Madam Yeti Woman. Yeah.
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But there was no Madam Yeti Woman who was supposed to show up. He was going to get stood up from the outset. But still, Leon went to go meet Madam Yeti Woman and had his heart broken. I think it was after that that he stopped responding to the letters. Yeah.
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Yeah, he's great, man. I went back. I told you I was watching The Shield again. That guy was amazing in that.
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I don't think he was on to him from the beginning.
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Oh, gotcha. I see what you're saying. But, yeah, but it's really easy to forget because you're reading Rokic's accounts that these men weren't in on the idea that it was from Rokic. They believed that these letters were coming from their delusional figures. Yeah, that was the whole point. Which makes it just even more gut-wrenching when you stop and remember that, you know? Yeah.
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So then he says, OK, all right, Leon's done. I'm done writing letters to him. Who can I write letters to next? And he moves on to Joseph, right?
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Yeah. Yeah, he played one of the main characters.
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Yeah, he said, be assured that I will always love you just exactly like a father who deeply loves his own son.
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Yeah. So just like with Leon, through these letters as Dr. Yoder, he tried to get Joseph to start doing stuff, innocuous stuff at first. He stopped saying that he was from England and that he was from Quebec. Uh-huh. Started going to church services, that kind of stuff.
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So there was an influence on Joseph just like there was on Leon using their delusional characters or delusional friends, authority figures, whatever. And I think even Dr. Yoder prescribed, the fake Dr. Yoder prescribed a placebo for Joseph's stomach ailments. He had like digestive problems or stomach hurt. And these placebo pills just fixed him right up. Yeah.
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Yeah, he apparently stopped writing to Dr. Yoder and moved on to JFK. Started writing letters to JFK asking to be one of his speechwriters because, remember, he was a writer as well. Right. So Rokic is like, okay, all right, let's see what's next. Oh, nothing's next. This is the end of the line. He finally realized, like, okay, this is— not going anywhere.
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Not only had he not at all moved Clyde's delusions or Joseph's delusions, the only persons whose delusions had changed at all was Leon's, and his had just gotten more complex and intricate, certainly not any closer to reality. They got further away from reality because of this influence from Rokeach and his experiment. And he has like a pretty rich little admission in the book.
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But they didn't, and that's okay. And we don't have to talk about that movie ever again now that we have. Instead, I think we should start by giving a little background on the guy whose idea the Three Christs of Ypsilanti experiment was. And it was a researcher, a psychologist, a social psychologist. Your favorite? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Named Milton Rokeach.
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That he says that we do not know to what extent our very presence, behavior, and questions may have influenced the results obtained. Which is bizarre to say because the whole point of the experiment was to influence these people through this experiment. So it's a really weird thing that he even put it in there.
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And from some of the stuff that I've read, kind of picking apart this book at the end, it really just kind of peters out and like he's just kind of slashing in the air with his sword trying to figure out, you know, what the point was of all this stuff. And even without like a satisfying conclusion or end.
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And it ended up getting published in 1964 and became, like, a really big success in the field of psychology, but also got widely criticized right out of the gate.
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Because even though this was mid-century America, and we're talking about mental patients in mid-century America who have very little rights or were treated very poorly, like, there were still, like, a lot of people around who were like, you don't do this to human beings. This is not okay. Not everybody did, but some critics definitely came out immediately.
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No, he finally figured out the point of the book and the point of the book was for him to figure out that it was unethical what he was doing and finally come to terms with what he'd done to these poor men and that you have a right to just be left alone and not have your identity challenged no matter what you believe you are, who you believe you are. And so he actually changed his methods.
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His general belief in the idea of belief systems changed. remain the same, but he changed his tactics in that he got involved in self-confrontation where he would try to present people with, you know, self-examination where they would examine what their values were, what their beliefs were, and then they would kind of be challenged on that. Like, okay, you believe in freedom.
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You place a high value on freedom. Uh-huh. But you also rated equality pretty low. But isn't equality freedom for everybody? So you care about your freedom but not other people's freedom? How does that really jibe? And then the hope was that they would go back and self-reflect and be like, no, I really do care about freedom. I do care about other people.
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And Milton Rokeach had some ideas about what it was to make up an identity, what made up a person's sense of who they were. Yeah. And he basically had broken it out into beliefs, a series of different kinds of beliefs, which we'll kind of talk about here or there a little more. Yeah.
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Maybe I should care more about equality and improve as a person. And that's ultimately how he ended up making his name starting in the 70s.
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I know exactly what you mean. It's still smacks of self-involvement and egotism. And also, like, what happened to these men after the experiment was done? They were just cast right back into the general population. That's right. Like, used Kleenex, basically, to deal with what they'd just been through. It's just rotten all around, for sure.
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And at the very least, it does exist to make Milton Rokeach feel better. Right, right. You got anything else?
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Nice. And if you want to see the movie that they remade about this, don't. Nah. Well, since I said don't see that movie, it's time, of course, for listener mail, everybody.
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But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed around that kind of like lays the early groundwork for this idea that someone's belief in who they are could conceivably be challenged. And it came one night when he was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and his two young daughters.
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Just no matter what. Everybody tells you to stop. Please, God, stop. Don't quit. You don't listen.
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Way to go, Jared, from all over the place. I think Idaho.
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So let's see. If you want to get in touch with us like Jared did, please email us, won't you? You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
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And he accidentally, in like a moment of frustration telling them to settle down at dinner, called one another by their opposite names. And the girls just thought that was like the funniest thing they'd ever heard at first.
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Yeah. I even stuck my finger up like, all right, now you. But you can't see it, can you?
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Yeah, and he learned a couple of things. One, you can very quickly challenge somebody or you can very quickly push someone to a state of like trauma or anxiety or panic even.
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Just by simply challenging their identity by calling them the wrong name purposefully.
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He also, right. Yeah, I know, Jerry.
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Do it one more time and I will crumble. Okay, Jerry. Thank you for, oh, God. But he also learned like, okay, there's consequences to this. You can't take somebody with a well-formed, well-developed sense of identity and I guess a normal sense of identity and push them to the edge, mess around with that sense of identity. There's harmful consequences to that. Yeah.
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So he started to kind of explore this. And like I was saying, like he had broken everybody's belief system into a handful of different types of beliefs.
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And the belief that you are who you are, which is what we call our identity, he ascribed to primitive beliefs, which are just like basic truths in the same neighborhood as, you know, I'm wearing a headphone on one ear and I have the other one behind my head right now. I have brown hair. My name is Josh. You're Chuck.
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Like just basic truths of the universe that anyone you talk to is going to generally agree with. Right. That's where the personality comes from.
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Right, right. So what I was saying a minute ago with like how we saw that there's consequences to messing with a sane person. I just made air quotes if you couldn't tell from my intonation. Messing with a sane person's identity. You can't really do that. But this is the mid-century in America.
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And there's a whole group of people that you can do basically whatever you want to with as far as mental stuff goes. And that were people who are suffering from mental conditions who were locked up in state institutions at the time. And so Rokic came up with this idea like, OK, wait a minute.
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What if I what if I got my hands on some mentally unstable people, some possibly diagnosed people and messed with their sense of identity, took their delusion and challenged it? That could be okay because, hey, their lives are basically useless anyway. I'm paraphrasing Roe Keech here. And if something does come of it, there's a good chance that it could be positive instead. So let me have it.
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Let me add them, basically.
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Right. Yeah. That's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of this study. Yeah.
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Exactly. Just right out of the gate. And I read this commentary magazine article from 1964 by, oh, I can't remember who it was. I don't have it pulled up, but he's a famous poet at the time. And he was basically saying like, you know, surely Rokeach, the guy who's writing the book, Well, it understands that Rokeach, the character, this doctor, is like out of his mind.
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And he's like slowly realizing, oh, wait, this guy, even the author of the book has no idea that the doctor character, who's himself, has any idea just how unethical this is. And that's a great example of it that demonstrates it right off the bat.
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Sure. I've heard public radio before.
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Same here. Fresh air. I always still love fresh air. But it's one of those things where I just bulk it up. And then like when I'm painting a room in our house, I listen to just fresh air the whole time or something. You know what I mean? Yeah.
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Would that do it? Yeah, I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we hit 20 years, and then maybe, yeah.
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Yeah, there was a man in the 17th century that Voltaire wrote about named Simone Morin, who was deranged in the parlance of the time. And he thought that he was Christ. And so he was locked up in a madhouse. And he met in that place, in that institution or asylum, another man who thought he was Christ. And Simone Morin saw Christ.
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just how like crazy this guy seemed and was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy. And in confronting this other guy who claimed to have the same identity, he regained his sanity to a certain extent. And unfortunately, he relapsed and ended up being burned at the stake for heresy. But there was a moment there where he had kind of like been knocked out of his delusion. That's a huge deal.
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If you have schizophrenia or delusional beliefs, if your mental disorder is to the degree where you hold delusions, and we should say a delusion is not like a made-up belief where you know you made your belief up. This is what you think is real. It is real to you, and you will defend it when it's challenged.
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Hi everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode from August of 2021, where we take a look at one of the most unethical social psychology experiments in the history of the field, where Dr. Martin Rokic assembled three men who each believed he was Christ, put them in a room together, and sat back and waited for the fireworks to start.
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So the idea that somebody who was delusional could be knocked out of their delusion by being confronted with somebody else who had the same delusion, that is groundbreaking. And I can see why Roe Keech was like, there we go. That's it. There's my methodology for this experiment.
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Plus a great book title. It's one of the great understated book titles of all time.
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No, and I mean like Ypsilanti is like this town outside of Ann Arbor where, you know, that's where one of the mental asylums were in Michigan at the time. And it's just like, you know, it might as well be Walla Walla or Lackawanna or it's just an unusual name in a town that doesn't really have much of a claim to anything. You know what I mean?
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No, no, it's not an insult. It's just, it's not like a hot happening town. And it'd been like the three Christ of New York that loses something or the three Christ of London. It's just a rather generally unremarkable place. Guys, Ypsilanti, if you live there and you don't know that it's Generally unremarkable. I'm sorry to be breaking this news to you. I don't mean it in an unkind way at all.
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Okay. To let everybody really stew on what I said?
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And sitting in for Jerry today is our great friend and co-producer, Dave C. And the C stands for cool. Say hello, Dave. Hi, everybody. That's a really great Dave impression. He's a troll. He is. I always hear him as... Dave is great.
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So visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you.
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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.
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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.
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The Bronson Pinchot National Forest.
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Right. Well put. So the whole thing starts actually even before the whole thing started. And I saw in 1975 that two volcanologists published a paper saying that it was very likely Mount St. Helens was going to erupt in the 20th century at some point, like a big one. Yeah. And five years later, on March 20th, 1980, the whole thing was kicked off by a 4.0 earthquake, which is nothing to sneeze at.
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And it was at the mountain, like this earthquake took place at the mountain. And all of a sudden, within five days, there were quake storms. There was 24 quakes of 4.0 or greater within eight hours.
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When a volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when the geologists come running from far and wide.
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You're going to have to take our word for it.
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Yeah, like, the thing is, is the people who did live on the mountain were not the kind of folk who listened to, like, you know, pencil neck college boys or the government to be told, like, leave your home. And then also there was those youth groups that were like, you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake. There was also Weyerhaeuser. They're hoping to get to first base. Exactly.
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It's like a roller rink over there. Yeah. And then there was Weyerhaeuser who had a contract to be able to log on the on the mountain. They definitely didn't want to have to shut down operations. So there's a lot of pressure, a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you would think to keep the mountain open.
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Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to all the people who don't know much about Mount St. Helens, prepare to have your socks knocked off.
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And David Johnston and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like, you really can't do this. And they managed to convinced the governor of Washington that it was the right move. And then later on, as we'll see, there was even more pressure to reopen because things didn't go as fast as everyone thought. And they managed to push that back as well.
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And as a result, David Johnston is frequently credited for saving thousands of lives, potentially, which is pretty cool. I mean, and everything I've seen about him, he was a genuinely great person and also like a really great pioneer in volcanology, too.
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Or your skin seared off of your muscle.
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Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in, like, you know, medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.
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Yeah, no way. Not a lodge codger. So Harry Truman will come back in. This is Harry R. Truman, by the way. Everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him. He'll come back in later. But so the last thing that happened on the mountain, March 25th, in eight hours, there's 24 4.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes. And that brought everybody running.
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This whole thing was so perfectly planned that on the day of the eruption, there was the mineral and gem show in Yakima, like I think less than 100 miles away from Mount St. Helens. So anybody who had anything to do with geology just happened to be in the area or was purposefully in the area. And then on March 27th, it's just getting more and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right?
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And none of that margarine stuff or low fat. It's like full milk fat butter. Oh, man. Bread and butter stuff you should know. Salted butter even. You like salted, huh? It depends on what you're using it for. I like just plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece of like bread with butter.
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They did. There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three-piece suit handing people a pen and being like, sign here. It's really hilarious. But they did. Some people started to trickle in. And that's actually why there were, you know, I think we ended up with 57 casualties, 57 people died. Yeah.
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And that was one reason why it was actually that high. It could have been less, but people were allowed to trickle back in. They still kept like a perimeter, but I think it was kind of porous. If you wanted to get through, you could get through. And there are stories in that minute-by-minute episode of people.
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There's this one backpacker who is probably hilarious at parties because he makes like a funny voice for the police when the police is talking when he's recreating a conversation he had.
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He snuck through with friends. There are a lot of people on the mountain that otherwise might not have been had they kept it closed. But they did open it up a little bit. And it was because nothing had happened for a little while. And then about three days later, everything happened. You said S was getting real. This is when the S hit the fan.
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Yeah, and I think there have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around Coldwater, too. And Johnston sent them away. He's like, this is outside the red zone. It's still potentially dangerous. There's no reason for more than just one of us to be here at a time. So you guys go. So at 8.32 a.m. on May 18th, 1980, Mount St. Helens, like, blew up.
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And there's like a typical idea that people have of a volcano going off, and most of the time it's shooting like a huge thing of ash and magma straight into the air from its top. Yeah. But that is not what happened with Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because it didn't go out of the top.
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It came out of the side, and it came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption. Wow.
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Yeah, I got you. What's your brand?
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Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by about six feet a day. That was what the bulge was. It is because, like, it's as violent as you can imagine that a bulge, something that could make a bulge on the side of a mountain would be. Yeah.
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And so under other circumstances, a Plinian eruption where a volcano explodes out of the top, like you typically think of, that pressure, that magma is going to basically force the top of the mountain open. And that's how it's going to explode. This is not what happened with Mount St. Helens. That kind of, I guess the hump was on one side. It was on the north flank, wasn't it? Yeah.
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So it was on the north flank. And the thing that kicked off Mount St. Helens eruption wasn't the volcano. It was actually an earthquake in the volcano. And that earthquake caused the largest landslide in recorded history on Earth. More than half of a square mile of Mount St. Helens suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped off the side, the north side of the mountain.
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Yeah, and one of the reasons they were able to witness it, and we have such great documentation, is because at 8.32 a.m., a pair of geologists, husband and wife geologists, happened to be flying in a plane. Yeah. Because they'd hired a plane to go look at Mount St. Helens because they'd heard that, you know, there's some stuff going on.
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And they happened to make one more pass right as the mountain, that earthquake dropped the side of the mountain. They were, like, right above it in a plane, as a matter of fact.
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Right. You must be a social justice warrior. You buy local butter.
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Right, exactly. It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain. Yeah. And the reason why the north of the mountain was so dangerous is because that's where that hump had been.
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That's also where the earthquake moved a good portion of the mountain, which meant that all that pressure that was keeping that pressurized, superheated water from boiling under the mountain was suddenly exposed. It was—that pressure was gone. And so all of that incredibly hot water— Flash heated into steam. And when that happens, that expands.
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Like you said, one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation is because it's too expansive. When it does have the chance to expand, it does so with incredible force. Yeah. And that's what happened. That's why Mount St. Helens blew out the side rather than the top, because there had been a weakening in the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out. And blow out it did.
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Like I've researched it. Like I've literally researched butter because I want to get the most bang for my buck. And it is at the top of basically every list. It's good. Of like any butter of any kind. It's really, really good butter.
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Good Lord. But, I mean, that's what it would take to move 0.6 square or cubic miles of mountain all of a sudden, too, you know?
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And that blast, Chuck, that 24-megaton blast, it was described as like a fast-moving cloud of heat and stones moving at some points pretty close to the mountain, 300 miles an hour. Oh, man. Heated to like 660 degrees Fahrenheit. I think that's like 380 degrees Celsius. Just blowing northward away from the mountain. And everything within eight miles of that, of the mountain, was in that blast zone.
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And if you'll recall correctly, David Johnston's Coldwater 2 camp was within about five miles.
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Yeah, I have the impression the same thing happened to David Johnston and also that ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it. He documented David Johnston getting covered up. He said – He said, gentlemen, the camper in the car that's sitting over to the south of me, he was talking about David Johnston, is covered, is going to hit me too.
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And that was Jerry Martin, that ham radio operator, and that was his last transmission. He was vaporized as well, essentially. Everything, everything north of the mountain within eight miles was just destroyed. Just destroyed. Like entire hundred-foot trees that were like... 10, 12 feet in diameter, just completely flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way as well.
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Yeah, I carried around in my pocket.
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And this was just a blast. The landslide that was created from the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption, that had some incredible effects as well.
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Yeah, it was like it had so much power, Chuck, that Sly did, that one part of it was carrying chunks of rock as big as 558 feet or 170 meters across.
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That's as big as a 50-story building. It was moving rocks that size. Holy cow.
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fast as you can imagine down the mountain into the valleys. And I saw it described as if you were watching it from a ridge, as some people were, like far away, you would see the cloud or the debris starting to come at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then all of a sudden it would come up over the ridge and keep going. It was just filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's unimaginable.
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I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because we have a cute little butter dish that we use. Of course you do. So we use the sticks. So anyway, back to Mount St. Helens, the episode today. I was four years old when this happened. So, I mean, I didn't know what was going on. But I imagine you were like, holy cow, this is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on my TV.
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Trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier that some people are actually there watching this happen. Crazy. It is crazy. You want to take a break?
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Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you.
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So visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah. I also saw that lake was now 200 feet higher in elevation than it had been before. As if like there was so much debris, it like raised the lake 200 feet, even though it also made it shallower. It's nuts.
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Yeah, I can't remember. I think by like 600 meters or something like that, some ridiculous amount of height just blown off. And that was another thing, too, like the after effects of it. If you look at Mount St. Helens today or especially like right afterward, it turned into like an amphitheater. Like the north side was blown out and the other sides were kind of curved around.
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And what was neat is one of the huge aftereffects of Mount St. Helens, one of the more positive ones, is I saw it described as like a crash course for volcanologists and seismologists and everybody who now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in. And the eruption, because it was a lateral blast, opened up like basically a cross-section of the mountain,
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That they could study now its past history from the inside out, which I thought was pretty neat.
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Oh, wow. That was just completely made up.
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I also saw there was a lot of devastation. Any big game animal in the blast zone was, I said big game animal, by the way, was in the blast zone, was killed without question. But they were very surprised. Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found there were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and plants everywhere.
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microbes, fungi that had survived just fine and were among the first to recolonize and were part of the reason why Mount St. Helens ecosystem started to rebound so quickly.
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Probably. And then the animals that lived underground will come above ground and say, it's our time, baby. I look forward to that day for some reason. What else happened? Oh, I saw that the ash cloud that blew finally out of the top, we should say that the lateral blast was followed by a plinian blast. Right.
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And that shot, like, you know, that was the money volcano shot that everybody was looking for. A plume of ash and smoke rose 80,000 feet into the air. And it was moving so fast that it circled the globe in 15 days. Came back to square one in 15 days. And, of course, that was, like, affecting air traffic. Do you remember that Icelandic volcano that affected air traffic in Europe for, like, weeks?
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Yeah. Weren't you stranded by that or something? Yeah.
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Okay. I don't think so. Okay. Like they knew what to do in part because of how Mount St. Helens affected air travel. At the time, they were like, this is brand new to us. But it helped lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for, how to deal with that kind of stuff later on.
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Yeah, if you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing, you could have probably made it across the lake. You probably could have.
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Yeah, although I think it was more of like a regional thing for the lead up. And then also if you were a geologist, a volcanologist, a seismologist, anything that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then it would have been a big deal to you too. And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And because there was so much warning – And it was able to, by it, I mean, Mount St.
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But in that minute-by-minute episode, there was a pair of high school sweethearts who'd been camping, and they had a harrowing experience because they both got thrown into Spirit Lake, and the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend as the logs were starting to close in on him. He pulled her out from the lake, and they were hanging on to logs when they finally made it out. And were rescued.
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That happened. Like that happened to somebody. Yeah, they were in their car. Oh, is that how, that's how they got in the lake? They were in their car?
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Right. Yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them, right? Yeah.
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Right. Yeah, and some people didn't make it. There was one guy who was chronicled in that that was driving as fast as he can, and the blast just caught up with him and buried him in the ash, and he probably died pretty much instantly. But, like, again, that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a house just flowing down like a newly engorged mudslidey river.
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Moving so fast that you probably could have towed water skiers from the house, essentially. It was moving that fast just down the river. So, I mean, again, it was one of the most documented volcanic eruptions of all time. So there's really amazing footage on there or just on the Internet is what I mean. But that wasn't the last time that Mount St. Helens has erupted.
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I think it erupted a few times between 1980 and maybe 1996, I think.
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And then the biggest one recently was between 2004 and 2008.
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Yeah, I believe, you know, the eruption was such a big deal that they've opened, the USGS opened a research station nearby. And also that 2004 activity basically ran from 2004 to 2008. Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely. So there's amazing time-lapse footage Of those four years. And it's astounding how fast and how big Mount St. Helens just grows from that eruption activity.
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It's called time-lapse images of Mount St. Helens dome growth. It's on YouTube. And I recommend checking that out as well.
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Or bulge growth. Oh, boy. So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we? Sure. And by we, I mean me. No, me too. But like we said, Mount St. Helens bounced back. Spirit Lake opened back up. And the Coldwater 2 Station has been renamed after David Johnston. And there's an amazing memorial, too. I saw on some TripAdvisor post that somebody said it was like one of the best –
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Helens was able to kind of draw to it like a magnet. All of these amazingly well-trained researchers, they were there when it went off. And it's probably the most best documented volcano in history because of that.
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Like, not welcome center, but, you know, information centers that the person's ever been to. So I would like to go there someday.
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You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, go forth and research Mount St. Helens with Ines. And you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak. Since I said Dante's Peak, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Top to bottom, start to finish, wonderful email. Also, just put so nicely, too. Not like you big dummies. Yeah. Because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess. I didn't think it was a bad guess. But, I mean, that was really hard. Like, that was obscure, you know? Very much. Anyway, I love knowing that now. That was one of my favorite emails. So thanks a lot, Nat.
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And if you want to be like Nat and get in touch with us in the best way possible, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you.
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So visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you.
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OK, so just a real quick refresher. We've done volcanoes and I think we've done super volcanoes, too, because that sounds like us.
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OK, so we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in those episodes. So if you want to know a lot more in depth, go check those out. But just as a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that Mount St. Helens is, it's a stratovolcano and it's created when one younger plate is subducted under an older plate.
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And as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of the earth, all of the rock it carries with it gets heated up. Same with water, too. And that stuff travels upward because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle down below. And as it gets closer and closer to the crust, it wants to pop out of there.
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But it can't necessarily. Sometimes it can. And when it can, it just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that builds the volcano in a kind of a cone shape, which is what Mount St. Helens was up until May 18th, 1980.
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Right. Yeah. 40,000 years ago, maybe less.
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Right. So the whole thing that's driving Mount St. Helens, and apparently also there's some other, I guess, volcanic mountains in the area, like Adams. I think Mount Adams is one as well. Yeah. There's a magma chamber somewhere under there, I think possibly miles and miles below the surface. But under normal circumstances, like I said, when a straddle volcano is formed, the magma
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The lava just kind of is able to find cracks in the crust and like it's released through there and it builds the mountain up slowly and slowly. But if there's not a crack in the crust, as in the case where Mount St. Helens is, that magma starts to back up. It hits the crust and it starts to back up below.
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And all of a sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens.
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Yeah, like this pressure is building up so much, it's causing a boil on the mountain. The mountain grows a goiter, basically, and that's just full of pressure and magma just waiting to go off. It doesn't always go off. And in fact, Mount St. Helens had two bulges, also called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome, from previous volcanic eruptions.
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One was called Goat Rocks Bulge, and then the other one was called the Sugar Bowl Bulge. And they just never – like the magma found its way out other ways, but the bulge was left. This is a new bulge, and like you said, it was growing I think about six feet a day. Every day it kept growing another six feet, which is really fast for a mountain to grow. Mm-hmm.
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And that was one of the big signs initially that something was going on. And one more thing before we start to get into Mount St. Helens itself, Chuck. I think we need to say, like, Mount St. Helens was big. It was a big eruption. But it was not the biggest eruption Mount St. Helens has ever had.
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Apparently, the biggest eruption it's ever had came just about 4,000 years ago, which is within traditional, like, folktale memory. Yeah.
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Hey everyone, it's Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our January 2023 episode on the Mount St. Helens eruption. Seems like just last year. It's a really good episode that's packed with science, action, adventure, heroics, life and death danger. It's got it all. It's one of my favorite episodes, so I hope you enjoy it as well.
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Yeah, I think that's a great idea, actually. And the reason they call it Luit, that was she was named after a like a famous volcanic fire tender woman. And Luit and a couple of other men who fell in love with her and fought for her became Luit became Mount St. Helens or Luit, if you want to call it that. And then the other men who were fighting for became Mount Hood and Mount Adams.
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They were smited by the creator God and turned into mountains for fighting. And there's legends, not just from the Puyallup, but other indigenous tribes around the area that something really big happened. And it looks like what it is is a geomyth, which we've talked about before.
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And I think the Great Floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation that describes this enormous eruption 4,000 years ago. Pretty good stuff. Yeah, for sure. And it was a big eruption, too. There's just one other thing. There is a layer of tephra, of basically volcanic ash and debris and stuff, that is so thick and so wide it goes up into British Columbia.
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And 62 miles away from Mount St. Helens, it's still 20 inches thick, almost two feet thick of ash, 62 miles away. That's how big that 4,000-year-ago eruption was.
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I'm being short because I don't want to take up too much time talking about certain things.
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Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.
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No, definitely not. Because also in the 19th century, there was a lot of eruptions, too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist named Paul Kane who painted an 1847 eruption. So, I mean, starting in the 19th century, Mount St. Helens was documented pretty clearly, scientifically, too, as being an eruptive volcano, a disruptive volcano, you can almost say.
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Yeah, he was just like this dude who lived in Delft in the Netherlands and never left his hometown and had a wife and 15 kids. Fifteen. Yeah, 15 kids. And just kind of painted, and he made probably a comparatively small number of works. I think around 36 are attributed to him. And there's a theory that as many as a fifth of those were done by his oldest daughter, Maria.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's here somewhere, so this is Stuff You Should Know, the Art World edition. Yeah.
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but he's kind of like this enigma at the time, not just personally, but also the stuff he was painting. There was a huge movement among the Dutch painters at the time that they would paint like these, you know, horrific hellscapes or there was a lot of like obvious narrative and symbolism just all over the paintings. There was just a lot going on.
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Vermeer went a different way where he would almost peek in on very normal daily life and capture like these really just kind of boring or otherwise mundane moments. But he did it in a way that this guy was like the master of light. He makes Thomas Kinkade look like puke as far as like, you know, light mastery goes. Yeah.
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Oh, no, the Mona Lisa's eyes actually don't follow you. I think that was the big reveal of that one.
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Yes. From what I've seen, art critics and historians basically tend to think that there was no person that this was modeled on. It wasn't even necessarily his daughter. In fact, it was kind of a trend at the time, a painting called a tronie, which was an imaginary figure, a person who didn't actually exist. And the point was to kind of show off things like costumes and jewelry, which is...
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ostensibly the point of that painting. But the thing is, the Vermeer, the face that he did and the place that he put her, like we were talking about how she gets compared to Mona Lisa. She's called the Mona Lisa of the North. Mona Lisa is like sitting back in the painting. The girl with the pearl earring is like right in the foreground, like right. There's very little between you and her.
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And she's turned around and her mouth's open, which apparently was very unusual for painting Dutch painting at the time. And it looks like she's going to say something. I guess that that is what entrances people with this image that, you know, what's she going to say? What did he capture her about to say?
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You know, it looks like she's turning around like, oh, and, you know, this other thing I hadn't told you.
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She said yes anding.
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Yeah, and I saw that argued as well, that it was like, you know, if we knew who she was, we would lose a lot of the interest in it.
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Yes. Yeah, and you're right. We probably won't ever know. But because of this, so like it wasn't like very well – thought of or nobody really thought much of it until 1995. The National Gallery used it as the poster for their big exhibit. But since then, a lot of people have really kind of examined it.
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That sounds like something I would skip, though, even had I thought of it. I don't know that I would have pulled the trigger on that.
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And I hadn't noticed this before, but I saw it pointed out, Chuck, if you look at the pearl earring, first of all, it's improbably large is how I saw it described, like the ear couldn't physically hold up a pearl that size. But then secondly, it's really basically made with two brushstrokes. Both of them are reflecting light.
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One is from the light source, and then the lower one is reflecting the light off of the collar. And it's pretty amazing that, you know, we talk about the girl with the pearl earring, and this pearl itself is like kind of a cultural icon too. And it's basically just two brushstrokes, which kind of goes to show how great Vermeer was.
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Have you ever seen Tim's Vermeer, the documentary?
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Oh, Chuck, you've got to see it. It's directed by Teller from Penn and Teller, which makes you think, like, how did he direct if he doesn't talk, you know? But he somehow did. I think he talks in private. It's about what? That's just a bit. And it's about a guy who basically figured out that Vermeer somehow projected images that he built in real life onto a canvas and then painted them that way.
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And he actually replicates a Vermeer, like, perfectly. It's really just one of the better documentaries you'll ever see. Very cool.
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So what do you think? On to Raphael? Yeah.
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Right. I would have just been engaged in self-loathing for the rest of the podcast.
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Yeah, totally. Doesn't it even talk? Doesn't it say something like someone's guilty conscience or something? I don't. Or am I making that up?
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So the portrait of the young man, which they think was a Raphael self-portrait, and actually we have no idea what the colors were because the only photographs we have of it were in black and white. But he used to hang in the Prince Zartorski Museum in Poland.
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along with two other really important paintings, Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, which is a goat, stoat, I can't remember, kind of a weasel-like animal, and then Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan.
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And all three of those and everything else in the Prince's Zartorski Museum were swiped by the Nazis when they came to Poland and placed in the office of a guy named Hans Frank, who was the head of the government for the Nazis in Poland, right? Yeah.
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I love this one, man. This is great. This reminds me like of a Stuff You Should Know episode from years back for some reason.
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Which seems crazy improbable that they would end up back with him. But they did. And the Allies came in to Poland, I guess, and arrested Hans Frank in 1945. And they were able to find the lady with an ermine and the landscape with the Good Samaritan. But the portrait of the young man was nowhere to be found.
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Sure, they definitely did, but the three most important pieces in the Prince's Zartarski Museum were those three, and two were recovered, one wasn't. And it's very odd to think that they were separated at any time, or that it's even odder to think that two were kept together, but one wasn't.
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And so because the portrait of the young man was not recovered, and it's a Raphael, who's one of the great Italian Renaissance painters, it's considered... Maybe the most important piece to go missing in World War II.
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You would think so. And, you know, maybe they will eventually.
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Well, some people think it was destroyed in that movie Monuments Men.
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They show the Nazis igniting it with a flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art. And, you know, there's a whole camp that says, now this thing is gone forever. So they did something to it because the Nazis were known to not just plunder but also destroy art as well, which just one more reason to love them Nazis.
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Yeah, I would guess not. No, I didn't realize it was on panel, but that makes sense. But the National Museum in Krakow bought the entire Princess Zartorski collection from a private collector for 100 million euros back in 2016. I know. And that included the rights to Portrait of a Young Man in case it's ever found. And for now, they have the original frame hanging empty in the gallery.
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Yeah, it's sad. It's very poignant. It says, come home. Come home. We're leaving the light on for you. Come home. Just like Motel 6. That's right.
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We'll see. We're going to play it fast and loose. I think that's another reason why it reminds me of an old Stuff You Should Know episode. Fast and loose. Like I was, yeah, fast and loose. First you got the fast, then you got the loose.
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So, Chuck, before I launch into a Sacagawea-type tirade onto you, is that how you accurately pronounce his name?
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So, okay. So instead we're just going to go with Van Gogh like everybody else, right?
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Sure, sure. I hear you. So Van Gogh was most – he was just such a sad, tragic figure. I feel for this guy so much after learning more about him. We should do an entire podcast on him if you ask me.
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But instead, here we're going to talk about his death because there is a mystery surrounding his death. He's very famous for having cut off his ear. He definitely did that. And I had always learned that he did it to impress a sex worker who he was enamored with. And he definitely did give her his ear after he cut it off. But that's not why he cut it off.
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He cut it off in a fit of angst, basically, after having an argument with his friend Paul Gauguin, who he was living with in Arles in the south of France. And he said, well, I'm going to make some sort of lemonade out of this lemon I just gave myself. And he took it to his, I guess, neighbor. hopeful girlfriend. And I believe she was not that impressed with it.
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Yeah, I saw that too.
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Right. So here's the thing. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that supports that theory that he was killed by two boys. I buy it. It's also circumstantially plausible that Van Gogh died by suicide as well. But even if you take his story and start digging into it and the statements that he made, supposedly made, apparently everything we know about it comes from
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the owner of the inn where he rented a room's 13-year-old daughter at the time, who was a witness to all this. But even if you take what he supposedly said, it still doesn't add up. That number one, he shot himself in the chest. And most importantly, that number two, the gun that he shot himself with could never be found.
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I think I've heard it before that that series is the highest grossing movie franchise in the history of film, like worldwide.
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And instead of actually, you know, finishing the suicide, completing the suicide, he... Couldn't find the gun after he shot himself in the chest and just walked back to his room where he died after suffering 20 more hours. But still to the end, claiming that he had done this himself. Even if you take all that together, it seems like, no, there's something really fishy going on here.
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Yeah, which is very peculiar as well. Yeah, for sure.
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So what seems to have happened is that this gun, possibly that it wasn't actually murder or any kind of premeditated murder, more like a manslaughter where Rene and his brother Gaston were messing around and accidentally... Basically, he had seen a Wild Bill Cody Wild West show the year before and became obsessed with it. So that's what he was doing with the gun and playing cowboy.
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And that they had accidentally shot him with this gun that was kind of, you know, known to misfire. So the thing was that the gun was never found, right? Rene went back to school like right after that, which was still in the middle of summer break from what I saw. And the town seems to have circled the wagons around these boys because, you know, Van Gogh was an outsider.
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He was not very well thought of. He used to get really drunk and argue with the locals in the cafe and everything like basically every night. And these boys came from like a good, well-to-do family. So for many years, like that was just the thing, like it just happened. And then slowly, little by little, it seems to have trickled out some support for this idea.
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Like, no, like Van Gogh wasn't anywhere near this field. He said that he had shot himself in. He was actually on the road to the Secretan's house. And then finally, years later, René Secretan said that, you know, It probably was his gun and that Van Gogh had somehow gotten a hold of it. It seems likely that he was shot by them, whether accident or not.
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Yeah, it is. I really do want to do an episode on him.
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He did, but he also said that it probably was his gun and that somehow Van Gogh had gotten it.
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No, but also to backpedal and be like, it probably was my gun. Because that was another thing. Everybody was like, where did Van Gogh get a gun? Van Gogh didn't have a gun. And no one would have given Van Gogh a gun, you know? He was the guy who got drunk every night and had cut off his ear before. That was like, no one in town would have given him a gun.
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So the fact that he even admitted that it was his gun is probably as close as Rene Secretan ever came to confessing publicly about it, you know?
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Yeah, because if he wanted to die but was also – he didn't want to die by his own hand. Like this is kind of a lucky gift in a very strange way, you know?
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It's very neat. It sounds neat. I mean like basically they just make the stars come out whenever you come in. I think so. Like come sit in this yellow chair.
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Like, I can't even imagine. And plus also, I mean, it's pretty involved movie making, I would guess. Like, I'm sure because there's so many stars involved that, you know, the shooting schedule for each one isn't necessarily – you know, a year long endeavor or anything like that. And they probably have it down to like a pretty fast science by now.
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I got to check that out, man. Thanks for telling me about it.
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All right, Chuck, you want to finish out talking about Hitler?
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Is he in there as Hilter?
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That's great. Oh, yeah, he did them. Yeah, Hilter did these paintings. So we're talking not about Hilter, but about Hitler, Adolf Hitler in particular. And as everybody knows, Hitler was a frustrated artist.
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You know, people have made a lot of hay about how possibly the world would be a totally different place had he been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts. And he came, well, I don't want to say he came close, but he made two different attempts in one year to be accepted. Yeah. And they basically looked at his stuff and said, look, man, you have the skill of a draftsman.
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Maybe you should go into architecture. But you're not going to be an artist. And he said, architecture? That was a direct quote. But this was a huge deal for him. I think I read in Mein Kampf, I haven't read Mein Kampf, but I read an article by somebody who read Mein Kampf and said that he said it was like a bolt from the blue.
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And that, you know, he was pursuing this dream that his father would like beat him. Like his father enrolled him in a technical school. He's like, no son of mine is going to be an artist. He would beat him up whenever he brought the idea up. And so finally after his father died and then he nursed his ailing mother until she died, he got up the gums and did like go and enroll in art school.
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And apparently he, being Hitler, who I guess had been fairly –
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bonkers his whole life just knew that he was destined to become an artist so the idea that he was rebuffed not once but twice by this Vienna school these people were like the the people the guardians of what is art and what is not and they were telling him what you got is not um that was a huge deal to him it was a very big deal and it's funny it's just now occurring to me that there was sort of a similar thing with Manson's rejection as a musician yeah
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But like, I would think that would eat up a pretty decent amount of your time shooting one of those films every few, you know, a couple of times. Well, I guess every few years.
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So when he rose to power in Germany, one of the things he did was he had his works collected and destroyed. I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was behind that, I guess because he knew it wasn't very good. And he needed to focus on his political career rather than his artistic career or have everybody else focus on it.
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But to no avail, because I saw a 1936 critic or a critic wrote in 1936 that his style was prosaic. utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritualism. And this was before he, I'm sorry, or spiritual imagination. And this was before he had really become an obvious threat. This is 1936. So even back then, even without hindsight, people thought his stuff wasn't very good. Yeah.
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Man, I'm slowly like degenerating into Bob Newhart, man. Have you noticed? Oh man, good. Yeah, you could degenerate into worse things than that. I mean, like, I'm really hitting that Newhart note these days, I've noticed.
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So, yeah, he had his stuff destroyed. And it was kind of a footnote for a very long time that he was an artist and no one really cared after his death.
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Yeah, Morgenstern.
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Yeah, and even if you can't necessarily suss out the future from his paintings, you can make a pretty strong case that his artistic ambitions being utterly crushed had some sort of driving force or impact on his psyche at the very least. Sure. That and his... his later political career and dictatorship did not exist in a vacuum.
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I don't think you can possibly make the case that they were just unrelated in any way.
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Yeah, the problem is because he didn't have a style of his own, that he was copying postcards, that he didn't have any formal training, and that he lacked a lot of creativity, or any creativity it seems like, it's really hard to say this is a Hitler and this is a fake. And there's developed a really enormous...
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Well, you've got it, buddy.
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market of fakes because anybody who's like a passingly good artist in watercolors of streetscapes and landscapes could drum up something and be like this is a Hitler and it would be really difficult to say yes it is or no it's not yeah what kind of a garbage human do you have to be to think I'll do Hitler forgeries and try and sell them to garbage humans that want to collect them
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Yeah, and it's not like these are even fetching like $10 million a piece. We're talking like you might get $10,000 for it for your Hitler forgery.
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So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he do this? Yeah, did he do those paintings? You got anything else?
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For sure. So keep an ear out for that, everybody. And since I said keep an ear out for that, I think it's time for listener mail.
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So Caravaggio is my new favorite painter. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Not just because he was a scummy, low-life swordsman. Murderer. Murderer, yeah. He was a gambler. He had weapons charges against him while he was alive. He was not a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. Very troubled person is a really polite way to put it. But if you look at his art... Like, I had no idea.
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Thanks, Helen, Amy. We'll just call her Amy, as is customary.
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Wow, I can't wait until they read my listener mail, says Amy. If you want to be like Amy and get in touch with us for whatever reason, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
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I've seen, like, so many works of his art, and I never pieced together that they were the same person. And then when I really started to read some criticism of his work, I'm like, oh, my God, this guy, he's considered one of the fathers of modern art. And this guy was painting at the beginning of the 17th century, the early 1600s.
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And just like Pogs, he burned hot and bright and fast and furious, actually, sadly. Yeah.
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Like for a month.
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Yeah, it was an altar piece for the Order of St. John, also known as the Knights of Malta. They were going to, again, put this behind the altar in their church on Malta. And it was actually his little entry fee. They charged an entry fee, usually money, to their initiates.
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But they accepted this altar piece, this giant painting. of St. John the Baptist being beheaded. And it was actually, I mean, as far as a Caravaggio goes, especially toward the end of his life, it's actually fairly tame because there's not, you know, like jets of blood spurting out. It's a pool of blood that's being shown. He painted some really violent stuff.
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And like you said, that kind of, that he was a master of light and shadow. It's called Chiaroscuro. Yeah. And he used it to really dramatic effect, including in that painting. And in fact, one of the other paintings that you might have seen of his, Chuck, it's called Judith Beheading Holofernes. Have you seen it?
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So Judith, the woman who's in that painting, the woman who modeled for Judith, that was the woman that he killed Renuccio Tomassoni over.
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Did you know that? I did. Oh, you did? Okay.
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Yeah, another explanation I saw was that it was over a tennis wager. And this is real tennis, not lawn tennis. And real tennis is kind of like this kooky mix between squash and—
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racquetball and tennis and it's all indoors and there's like horse sheds basically involved that you can play off the roofs of it's really interesting stuff and he used to play that a lot too but so it was either over a wager or it was over this woman her name was what was it Judith No, Felide. Felide, I believe, was the actual woman's name who modeled for Judith. So he ends up on Malta.
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He becomes a knight. And when he becomes this knight, he paints this altarpiece. And he signs his name in the pool of blood, which you're like, well, he's an artist. That seems like something an artist would do. Not Caravaggio. This is actually the first and only work of his that he ever signed, which a lot of people are like, okay, wait a minute. Let's examine this.
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Right. So that's kind of like where the mystery comes in. Was he confessing to the crime of murdering Renuccio Tomassoni? Um, uh, From what I saw, most, I can't say most, but the art historians and critics that I saw basically said, no, he almost certainly wasn't doing that. For one, everybody knew that he did it. He'd already been convicted in absentia. That's what I thought.
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So it's not like he was confessing to it. Although you can make the case that he was confessing in the Catholic sense of the word. Do you know what I mean?
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Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode on art mysteries. It's a great one. Chuck and I are secretly jazzed by art history, it turns out. And this episode is the best of any we've done on the subject. May also be the only one. At any rate, it's a good episode, and I think you'll enjoy it. So enjoy.
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Yeah, exactly. Or De Beers. Yeah.
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Okay, yeah. Well, I mean it was the altar piece. Like it was a big deal that they got their hands on it because he was a celebrated painter at the time already in his lifetime. But the other interpretation that he was saying F as in freighter or brother, Michelangelo –
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about himself, that's probably the likelier version because he was at the time seeking a pardon from the Pope so he could return to Rome. And by saying, like, I'm in this holy order, I'm basically like a Catholic orator holy man now, a leader of the church, because the order of St. John, the Knights of Malta have inducted me.
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He was basically shouting it loud and proud by signing that one particular very holy painting that he did.
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After a month, dude, he lasted a month in the Order of St. John. And it's not like they ran around willy nilly inducting people like they basically had no idea that they had. What was Vic's last name in the shield? Vic Tabak. No, not Vic Tabak. I don't know. I didn't watch The Shield. Oh, you didn't? That was good. I re-watched, like, the last seven episodes the other night. Oh.
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Over a couple of nights. It still holds up, actually. But anyway, they didn't realize that they had inducted him, the guy from The Shield, and they figured it out pretty quickly. So he made his way back from Malta to, I believe, Sicily on his way to Rome, and I think he actually got a pardon and got into yet another squabble, another sword fight, and sustained some wounds.
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And between infected wounds, they think he got a staph infection, lead poisoning. He apparently had gone rather mad from being exposed to the paints that he painted with. And then sun exposure, sunstroke on the beach in Tuscany finally killed him.
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Yes, it does. But his paintings are still just amazing. I can look at them all day, you know. Yeah, me too. I like this stuff. I do too. So that's Caravaggio. How about Vermeer?
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And it's also a story, though, of great feats of athleticism and social heroics as well. And even if you're not into baseball, I guarantee you'll like this episode. So enjoy.
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That actually paved the way for one of the great unsung chapters in baseball history, which was the creation of the Negro Leagues.
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Yeah, because that's a definite overlooked segment of the early baseball history are Latino players. Oh, totally. And one of the cool things about the Negro Leagues is they were integrated. They had Latino teams like the Cuban Kings out of New York, I believe.
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Yeah. And as a matter of fact, so this barnstorming thing, I want to talk a little more about that, right? Yeah. One of the reasons barnstorming came about was to make ends meet, but it was also because these teams had to figure out a way to put on games as cheaply as possible.
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All of the stadiums at the time were owned by whites, and the whites apparently were not very friendly to the idea of black teams playing in their fields. So if it were just like black teams playing...
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one another the white owners of the fields would just charge an exorbitant amount so these guys were going basically anywhere they could find a place that would stand still long enough for them to play a baseball game on yeah that's what they would play and they play like three games a day oh yeah every day yeah and they all traveled together and like um hung out with one another and spent a lot of time together
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. And here's the stuff you should know.
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So, like, the Negro Leagues came out of this kind of camaraderie of barnstorming together.
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So, yeah, this guy, Rube Foster, he owned the Chicago American Giants. And confusingly, there was also another Negro team called the Chicago Giants. And the St. Louis Giants. Yeah.
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Louis versus Chicago. Yeah. But if it was Chicago versus Chicago, well, which one? The Giants. Well, which one?
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Okay, now I understand. Not just the Giants. But Rube Foster was like this booster of boundless enthusiasm. This guy literally put together the first real Negro League.
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And when he was basically removed from it, the whole thing fell apart. That's how much of a driver this guy was.
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Sportsy. I think really we should air on just the side of history.
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Right. So not only do you have black players' careers developing.
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You have like black enterprise developing in a time when there were very few avenues of opportunity for black people to advance in business. Yeah. In a sense where they own the business. This is a really good way to do it.
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Yeah, and that was a point of that article that I thought was pretty cool is that One of the things they lamented about the segregation of baseball during this time is that we'll never know how Babe Ruth would have stood up against Satchel Paige pitching to them because they never got to play each other. So the truly great players are truly great during this time within their own skin color.
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You know, you can't say they were the greatest in baseball because there were two legitimate parallel leagues going on at the time. And yeah, they played each other sometimes. But if you wanted to sit down and put stats against stats, you'd be very hard pressed to do that.
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Yeah, and actually it's funny you bring up Ty Cobb because I was like, oh, yeah, Ty Cobb was a huge racist. I wonder what he thought about the Negro Leagues. And I looked it up, and I found an article from a guy who argues that Ty Cobb was not the horrible racist that he's made out to be these days. Written by Jimmy Cobb.
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He found – well, he actually did cite his son, and I think his son's name might be Jimmy.
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Oh, wow. But the guy found an article from – Maybe the 50s or something, 1952, where Ty Cobb is quoted at length coming out in favor of integration in baseball. Yeah. Saying, like, of course these guys should play as long as, you know, they conduct themselves like professional baseball players. Like, why would they not be able to play? I'm totally in favor of it. Interesting.
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Yeah, that's not what this guy says. All right, well, I'm going to look into that. That's not what his son says.
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Dude, do you know the Atlanta team played directly across the street? Ponce de Leon Park. Yeah, where there's now a Staples and a Home Depot and a PetSmart. And a Whole Foods.
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If you walk into Whole Foods and listen, you can hear the ghost of a bat cracking on a ball.
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Ponce de Leon himself would have punched you in the stomach if he heard you say his name like that.
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Did you hear Whole Foods got caught with uncalibrated scales for their hot bar stuff? Like it's not already expensive enough? Right, yeah.
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Yeah, like peel it off with your teeth, spit the meat into your little basket and throw the bone back into the hot bar. Yeah.
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And everything's going pretty smoothly except two things happen, right? There was even like a Negro League World Series. Yeah. It was a best of nine. The Kansas City Monarchs.
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Yeah, the Kansas City Monarchs narrowly beat the, The Hildale team, they're from Darby, Pennsylvania, which I guess is near Philadelphia, in the first one in 1924. So these leagues have established themselves. By 1924, they have their own World Series going, right? Yeah. But just within a few years, there are a couple of hits to the league that ultimately led to the Negro majors disbanding.
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One is that Rube Foster suffered gas poisoning in a hotel room in Indianapolis. He was found unconscious. And there's some theory that everyone believed in ghosts and spirits and mediums in the 19th century because they were all being poisoned by the natural gas that was leaking into their kitchens and homes all the time. Well, this guy had an acute poisoning and was found unconscious.
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And after that, when he regained consciousness and was nursed back to health, he lost his mind. And he just kept getting worse and worse. And by 1925, I think this happened in 1924, 1925, he was institutionalized. And by 1930, he died of a heart attack at age 51. And again, his guidance was so integral in this first incarnation of the Negro Leagues that, you know, when he...
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was institutionalized obviously they weren't like what was the league do next yeah he was in an institution um and the league started to falter and fall apart and eventually that coupled with the depression the onset of the depression yeah really kind of led to the unraveling of the first negro league yeah and this uh the major league baseball site um you know these were
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Unless you were one of the Walker brothers whose dad was a physician. Yeah. Yeah, they probably had a little money. Sure. But they were playing, so I'm sure their parents got in for free. Probably so. So it's all just a moot point. I wonder if they did get free family tickets back then. I would hope so. That's got to be as old as tickets, right? Probably. We got to do an episode on tickets.
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No, a lot of these guys were still barnstorming on their off days.
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Yeah. There are plenty of white players who are better than the black players. And there are plenty of black players who are better than white players.
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Yeah. I would say evenly matched is a good way to put it. So if you had an integrated league, you would get the best of both. Right. Which is eventually what we got. Plus also in some of these cities, Chuck, there were not just baseball was segregated, but just within the city you had a white team and you had a black team. Right.
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And that's evidence to the names of some of the black teams, like the Black Crackers or the Black Yankees. Yeah, yeah. There were the Yankees and then there were the Crackers, right? So if you were a white player or a white person, you're probably a fan of the white team and you weren't going and watching the black teams play.
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I'm sitting here like, keep going. Yeah. So I think we should start with a little bit of history, right? So just a brief primer of American history. Okay. We'll start with slavery. It's a good place to start. The transatlantic slave trade built this country. Yep. And frankly, I'm just going to come out and say it. I think some of the major issues that the United States faces today are
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Yeah, that was the end of the first one.
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And there were more to come, and we'll talk about it right after this.
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Yeah. And this basically kicked off what's known as the golden age of the Negro Leagues. Yeah. Starting about 1931, 32, 33, when these other teams came about. And Greenlee's team himself, was it his? No, I'm sorry. It would have been right across the river, the Homestead Grays. Yeah.
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comes from a lack of accountability for slavery really is contributing to a lot of the inequality and a lot of the strife that we still face today and have faced over the decades. So you've got slavery, and then you had the end of slavery. You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which a lot of people say, oh, well, that was great.
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So they were the same team that went from one town to another? They weren't rivals?
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Yeah. Yeah, okay. And I was like, are we going to the right place when the car was taking me? So Homestead used to have not just a team. They used to have the best Negro League team possibly ever. Oh, yeah. Easy. For nine consecutive years, they won the pennant.
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Yeah, just some of them. In 1935, they had no less than five future Hall of Famers on the team. Five. That's amazing. Point to a team that has five future Hall of Famers on it now, or ever did.
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I don't know. I could see Freddie Freeman hitting the Hall of Fame one day. Mm-mm. Oh, really? I haven't been watching the last couple seasons.
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White players would come and see the teams playing and it was basically more popular than ever in both communities yes, and we said that they had the the Negro League World Series going on right yeah and There was actually another game that came out of this. I think it was, it might have been Gus Greenlee. I think it was. Who came up with this, the East versus West All-Stars game. Yeah.
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And that became bigger than the World Series in whatever was in the Negro League. Yeah, it was huge. Yeah. So that became kind of like the de facto big game of the year rather than the World Series for them. Yeah. And they played it every year, I think, in Comiskey Field. Oh, really? Yeah, in Chicago. Because, you know, East meets West in Chicago. That's right.
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That's what it says on the t-shirts, at least.
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Maybe the greatest pitcher of all time in the sport of baseball. Maybe. He was eccentric. He was an entertainer. Yeah. He was like the Usain Bolt of his day. People loved him. Oh, okay. Except he didn't like to run. That would make it a little different. He even said he didn't like to run. Yeah. What was his quote? He said that training for me is rising gently from the bench. Back onto the bench.
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Yeah, with those old-timey baggy baseball pants and all that.
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Abraham Lincoln spoke some magic words and freed the slaves, and everything was great. Yeah, it was just perfectly equal after that, right? No. No. So it took the union to win the Civil War to begin to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the South and in Texas. Apparently, Texas were among the last holdouts. And there was slavery going on in Texas like years after the Civil War was over.
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He first signed in the majors, white majors, at 42. Yeah, 42-year-old rookie, technically. He's the oldest rookie ever in Major League Baseball. And I think the oldest pitcher ever as well.
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So one thing that was problematic or is problematic when you're going back and looking at the Negro Leagues is that a lot of teams were allowed to, depending on the league, were allowed to set their own schedules. Yeah. Stats weren't kept quite as well as they were in the white leagues. Yeah, we don't know Satchel Paige's real lifetime stats in full.
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No, but there are some estimates, and they are high.
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So one that I saw is that Satchel Paige had, I think it was in this article on MLB.com, which eventually will say the author's name, right? Yeah. They said that he had 300 career shutouts. 300 career shutouts. And this guy says in italics, not wins. Yeah.
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Right. He would have pitched like all nine innings. Back in the day, they used to do that way more than they do now. Okay. So he had 300 career shutouts. 1,500 wins is the estimate that's on MLB.com.
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To also put it in perspective, Cy Young is regarded as one of the best pitchers ever in Major League Baseball. Sure, they named the top award after him. Exactly. He had 76 shutouts. Which is amazing. He had the most wins ever still in Major League Baseball at 5'11". So Satchel Paige had conceivably three times more wins than the highest win count ever in Major League Baseball.
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Which, again, was very, very long. Sure. It was a very long career, but that just makes it all the more amazing, especially as he gets older.
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And the fact that he sat in a rocking chair in the dugout and had, like, a huge personality, it's just awesome.
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He's like, no, it's called a hesitation pitch. Don't you know?
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They were just like, we're just not going to pay attention to that. Sure. So the Civil War is fought. The part of the Union victory of the Civil War was coming into the South and saying, like, all you Confederates, you guys are out of power. And as a matter of fact, this power vacuum is perfectly willing to be filled by freed blacks. Yeah. So go ahead. Run for office. Become judges.
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And those appearances, if you were a team owner that had Satchel Paige on your team, you might let him go make some scratch and probably take a cut yourself by lending him to another team whose attendance was struggling. And all you had to do was advertise for a week that Satchel Paige was going to be pitching one day and you would sell out.
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So he would help other Negro League teams that were struggling.
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Yeah, right. That was the thing. The Negro Leagues were ultimately, as we'll find out, victims of their own success. The players that they supported and brought into the game were of obvious Major League caliber. Oh, yeah. In any Major League. They were the best in the world. They were just playing on segregated teams and
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And so, finally, a group of people, but especially, it usually comes in the form of one guy named Branch Rickey. Yeah. Did Tom Hanks play him? No. Harrison Ford? No.
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I can't tell if it was him or not because the actor didn't have a diamond studded earring in, but Harrison Ford could have taken it out for the role. This guy named Branch Rickey, was he an executive or a manager for the Dodgers? He was... He was an executive with the Dodgers. And he said, and this was when they were in Brooklyn, right?
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He said, this is ridiculous. We need to break this color barrier. There's plenty of great players out there that I want to sign. I'm going to break this unspoken rule. And he looked around. to find a player who was not only good, but who he felt could withstand this horrendous reception that whoever the first black player would be would definitely receive. For sure. And who did receive.
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And he found it in the person of Jackie Robinson.
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Yeah. And I don't know if it was on this or on, there's a site called negroleaguebaseball.com that has a really good article called Negro League Baseball 101 or something like that.
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Like, become part of the Reconstruction power group. And that lasted for a very, very short time.
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It's just the basics. There's a definite story to the whole thing, right? Yeah. But they point out that Probably more than anything that helped break the color barrier was blacks serving in World War II.
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Serving alongside white soldiers and stories coming back from the front of like, hey, these guys are killing Germans just as fast as any white guy. Yeah.
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At the time, America was like, well, we love that about people. So when they returned, the black soldiers came home to a different America that they helped change by fighting in World War II. That's pretty cool. And I mean, the timing of this apparently is not coincidental that Jackie Robinson was signed in 1946, a year after World War II ended.
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The white southern former power base who were leading the Confederacy, and even ones who weren't necessarily part of the actual Confederate government or even the Confederate army, but just the people in your town who used to own the sawmill or whatever, that guy came back in power within a couple of years, and the white southerners who'd been supplanted, when they came back into power,
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Yeah, that's a good point, man, because a lot of times stories like this end up being about the guy who took the chance and paved the way for the black player. But he did. He did, but the emphasis, it's just too easy sometimes for the emphasis to go on to that. Where it's like, well, the black player was one of the greatest baseball players of all time.
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So, okay. So he was a complex human being like all other human beings.
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He can't just be shoehorned into an easy caricature.
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That's great. So Branch Rickey, complicated human being. He selected Jackie Robinson, and it was a great selection.
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Yeah, and they should. Great. But Jackie Robinson definitely threw open the floodgates. Within four months of Jackie Robinson being signed... Or no, I guess actually being called up to the majors.
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Two other guys were signed, both in July. And I think that year there were a number of other black players suddenly playing for white Major League Baseball, which is suddenly not now just Major League Baseball, not white Major League Baseball. That's right.
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Yeah, the Boston Red Sox notably were the last. They waited until 1959, 13 years after Jackie Robinson's debut season in the minors.
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They remembered the black people who had tried to take their positions. Right. And so it got ugly.
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I just went into Hulk speak. So, yeah, it would have been a much more satisfying end to the whole thing if the Negro Leagues had poached the best players in the white Major League Baseball.
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Yeah. Give them to us. Yeah. So that is Negro League Baseball, the history of it.
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And so rather than having actual legal slavery, it came in other different horrible pernicious forms, which came to be called post-Reconstruction the Jim Crow South.
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And this article makes a point today, or at least in 2012, Major League Baseball was 40% non-white, which I was like, what? I would have guessed it was the opposite of that. That it was 60% non-white? I would not have guessed 60% of Major League Baseball players are white.
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I know, I was pushed. My dad was like, get out there and get hit in the head with the ball. See, I wasn't allowed. I had to play church softball. So lame. So then the color barrier is broken, and now the last vestige of any sort of color issue is the Native American slurs that are rampant in all sports as far as teams go. Yeah, Atlanta Braves. Once we get past that,
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Maybe it'll be finally totally legitimate. If you want to know more about the Negro Leagues, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. You can also go check out this amazing article called Negro Leagues, a Kaleidoscopic Review. It's on MLB.com. And check out NegroLeagueBaseball.com. They have all sorts of great profiles on the players and all that stuff.
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I think you mentioned Cool Papa Bell. Yeah, Cool Papa Bell. That is the greatest name ever.
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Oh, yeah. Turkey Stearns, they definitely go for it. Those are great nicknames. All right. Oh, yeah. Okay, so now that we said Turkey Stearns, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Uh, no. Pneumatic. Pneumatic. Pneumatic is when you remember it while you're pumping air up and down.
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It's on the Major League Baseball website.
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That's not a mnemonic device, is it? It's pneumatic.
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Thanks a lot, Katie from West Texas. We appreciate that. Kings play chess on green silk.
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I'll never remember the fine part. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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Right. And so if white people think that black people are inferior to them, who are we, the government, to say otherwise? Yeah, we're to try maybe and legislate our way out of it even. Right. So in, I think, 1896, there was a court case called Plessy v. Ferguson.
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And in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld and legitimized and actually made real the segregation that had already been going on ever since Reconstruction or ever since the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of Jim Crow laws, right? So the United States was officially segregated in 1896, but baseball had actually segregated years before that, but not— As far back as people think.
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And a lot of people think that baseball had always been segregated up until 1946 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
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Including me until yesterday when we started researching this. Oh, did you know this already?
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Well, yeah. So in 1867, I think, two years after the Civil War, there was already baseball. Remember, Abner Doubleday created baseball in what, 1839? Oh, in like 1300. But that's a legitimate story, right? Yeah. Like he really did. He was the inventor of baseball. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it did happen in Cooperstown, New York and all that, right? Yeah.
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Okay. I don't know, but was he in Cooperstown? I believe so. Okay. Well, that makes sense. So within just a couple of decades, there was the National Association of Baseball Players. They were the league, right?
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That's right, baby. My hometown. Integrated baseball team in the 1880s.
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Well, this is the 19th century. I think they phased him out.
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Okay. So the Walker brothers were playing for Toledo in 1886, right? Correct. Correct. And actually, this article on How Stuff Works Gets It Wrong says that they just played for the team for one year before the team went under. That's not the case, as a matter of fact. Moses Walker, they may have only played together on the team for that one year. But Moses Walker had played for years before them.
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Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, and in honor of Black History Month, I've chosen our 2016 episode on the Negro Leagues.
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And actually, Moses Walker and there were several other players at the time. In 1886 and 87, there were at least four black players in the minors. but the Walker brothers were playing for Toledo, which was a major league team, right? But the presence of Moses Walker actually brought to the fore this kind of simmering resentment and kind of the big elephant in the room,
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there's a black guy on your team. Right. What are you guys doing? And so Toledo actually went to go play the White Sox in Chicago. And the White Sox had this, like their great player of that season, I think in 1884. Who was it? Cap Anson. Great nicknames back then. So Cap Anson said – he said some horrible things and ultimately was like, I'm not playing if that man's on the field. Yeah.
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And Moses Walker was actually injured and still was like, oh, well, I'm definitely going on the field today anyway.
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So he dressed out, and I'm not sure if he actually played in the game, but he was like part of the team. And Cap Anson – was not indulged. Toledo was like, we're not taking our guy out. He's one of our players. So Cap Anson can go suck an egg. And Cap Anson went and sucked an egg. He was really mad.
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It's a story that follows an arc a lot like another episode we did on the Harlem Globetrotters, where we have a group of people who were discriminated against, so they went off and formed their own league, their own thing, showed their greatness, and then were eventually co-opted, which left some of the people who'd helped build what they had out in the cold.
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But the issue that day, that dispute at Comiskey Field brought to the fore the concept of integration and ultimately segregation among Major League Baseball teams. And it actually increased the pressure among owners and managers to to get rid of the black players, not just in the majors, but in the minors.
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So here's the thing. They never officially did that. They had the minor league ban black players.
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And the way into the major leagues was through the minors.
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Right, exactly, which paved the way for Branch Rickey to break that unbroken rule without actually breaking a rule. Yes. Yeah. Good point, Chuck. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it.
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Oh, yeah. They say that's the best way to prevent getting the flu or spreading the flu is washing your hands a lot. Do it a lot. It's so simple that you almost might discount it, but it's actually true. That's the best way to do it. You can wash the flu virus off of your hands with some soap that will bind to it, and the water will wash it right off. Wash that flu right out of your hair.
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Yeah, and if you have the flu, stay home. Yeah. Everybody but me. Stay home. Well, we're up against it. We had to record today. And also wash your hands just constantly. Like if I'm about to touch anything, I'll wash my hands first. Right. If I'm going to go somewhere outside of the hot zone, which is whatever room I'm sequestered in, you know, I will wash my hands.
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All right, Chuck. Did you breathe? Yeah, a little bit. Let's talk symptoms, okay? You know what I need? I need one of those like reeds that Bugs Bunny used to like hide in the water when Elmer Fudd was hunting him. I could just like get a long one and maybe a crazy straw would be even better and just like pipe it out to the air duct right there. That's a great idea.
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But that fever, that's the big one apparently. It's a big distinction between the two.
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Yeah, and the colds are also caused by viruses. They're caused by coronaviruses, which can, there are types of coronaviruses that are really bad that cause like MERS and SARS. Yeah. But for the most part, when you catch a cold from a coronavirus, it's a low-level virus or it's a rhinovirus. That's the other one that causes the common cold, right?
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So it's just a different kind of virus producing similar symptoms to a flu.
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I think his younger brother was Pennywise the Clown in the It movie, right? Yeah. Oh, I don't know. I'm pretty sure that was a Sarsgaard, and he is amazing. Yeah? Have you seen it? No. Oh, you got to see it. You're going to love it. Now, was he a Sarsgaard or a Skarsgaard? Oh, God.
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No. Who's that? Peter Sarsgard. Yeah, that's another dude. What is up with all these guys? So are you sure you're not just dropping the K off of Peter Skarsgard?
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Yeah, I believe he's the youngest of them. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was Tim Curry I was talking about.
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Yeah, his acting goes way beyond the costume. They did good with the costume, but it was his acting.
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I also want to apologize for any medical students who are being forced to listen to this as part of their class. Hopefully your instructor fast-forwarded through that part.
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Oh, yeah, that's right, because that's from the coronavirus. This is the influenza virus we're talking about that creates this inflammation, which is your immune response, right, in your lungs?
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Yeah, I am a little... Under the weather, I guess, is a good way to put it. I can tell. So those are just standard flu symptoms. You can have secondary symptoms from complications of the flu, right? One thing that has long gone hand-in-hand with...
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the flu as far as like death from flu complications goes is bacterial pneumonia yeah that's no good and um for a very long time science wasn't quite sure why that why you were just so susceptible to bacterial infections when you were battling the flu and they figured it out it's actually your body's immune response that is responsible for it right right so when you have the flu and your body starts to battle it off and you get a fever um
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is stuff you should know about the flu, which I have. You don't have the flu, do you? I don't know, man. I can't. I've been on the planet for 41 years. Okay. I still can't really tell the difference between a flu and a cold.
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and your lungs become inflamed, that's your immune system's response to the flu virus. But when your body says, okay, calm down, everybody, let's bring the temperature back down, and your body represses its own immune response, it opens the door for bacteria that normally it would be able to fight off to take advantage of this kind of naturally weakened state that your immune system is in.
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And you're much more susceptible to infections from bacteria. And that's where pneumonia comes from. You can get viral pneumonia, but you usually get bacterial pneumonia. And that's the stuff that people can die from because that bacteria infects your air sacs in your lungs, which fill with fluid and pus and blood. And you die from choking on bloody froth that fills up your airway.
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Why would you be dehydrated from the flu? It's from sweating?
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Your nose running? Yeah. You're just leaking fluids. Yeah, you are. And, like, they start to add up, and all of a sudden you're dehydrated before you even knew it.
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Well, the reason diabetes is comorbid with the flu or is problematic when you have the flu is because type 1 diabetes especially is an autoimmune disease. So your immune system is already... Repressed, I guess. Yeah. And then heart conditions can be exacerbated by it because you're getting less oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream, which strains the heart.
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And if it's already weak, people have heart attacks from the flu if they already have a heart condition. Isn't that crazy?
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Yeah. Or she had like a stomach blockage. They initially diagnosed it as the flu.
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But people do, so your point still remains correct.
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No. Because they are dirty, dirty, dirty creatures.
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And if you go even further back, there's an even earlier origin before kids picking it up at daycare or preschool for the flu. Usually it comes from other animals we're finding, right?
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Very frequently birds, like we were saying, right? And they used to think that for a human to catch a flu from a bird especially – that flu had to show up in a mixing vessel, usually a pig, which was capable of taking it. It could be infected by a bird flu and a human flu. And flu viruses have this amazing talent called reassortment.
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where a flu strain and another flu strain can get together and be like, oh, hey, you have eight proteins that make up your RNA? I do too. Let's mix and match and see what happens. And they thought for a long time that this really only took place in pigs, and then out would come a new super virus that no one had ever seen before that humans could catch. But
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From Southeast Asia, people being in close contact with infected birds, especially like in the poultry industry or something, there have been cases that started in the 90s of avian flu coming directly from birds to humans. So that theory went out the window. And that's what set off those fears of a bird flu pandemic that we lived with for many years.
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Yeah, and it scared people because those bird flus are no joke. Like they have like a 60% mortality rate. 60%, 6 out of 10 people who come down with H5N1 bird flu die, right?
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Luckily, it's really, really difficult to catch it even when you are around sick birds. It doesn't very frequently make the jump to humans, but it can is what they found. Yeah.
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Yeah, I've had, no, I've definitely had like lots of aches and I woke up like shivering one night. Oh, so you had a fever for sure. I guess so. I guess it must have just been one night in the middle of the night. So that's the flu, right? Probably. So I guess I do have the flu. No joke, everybody.
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Yeah. And if you're like having an anxious day at work and you're doing your normal thing of chewing on your stapler to relieve anxiety and the guy who borrowed it was sick, you're toast.
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Right, and they say that even after you feel better, you should stay in bed an extra day because, again, your immune system is compromised and you can catch other stuff. So you want to be careful. That extra day really pays off.
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Season two, a lot of pressure. Well, yeah, that's how it happens. The sophomore season is very frequently like everyone's aware of the success of the show and what people are saying about it, and they try to adapt to the expectations rather than continuing on doing what they were doing before. But good for you guys, Stranger Things.
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Yeah, I think that I've had it long enough now based on the research from this article that I'm not contagious or else I would have called this off. So did you get it in New York, I wonder? I think so. Yeah. Dirty, dirty New Yorkers.
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All right, Chuck. So we were talking about how seasonal flu has seasons. That's why it's called seasonal flu, right? That's, I guess, one classification of flus. There's also a pandemic flu. And the same kind of flu virus can be a pandemic flu or a seasonal flu.
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And I think usually the way it happens is a new virus will emerge from, say, like livestock or poultry or something like that and infect humans. And if it's totally novel, where no human has ever encountered a flu of this type before, it can just lay waste to people. It can kill a lot of people. It can infect a lot of people. It can spread the world.
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And when that happens, it becomes classified as a pandemic flu. After a couple of rounds around the world, people will have started to develop an immunity to it, but it'll still be passed around. And so for the decade or so, it can be the predominant strain of the flu, but it'll have changed over to a seasonal type of flu.
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So it's almost like the pandemic versus seasonal type flu describes how contagious it is and how virulent it is. I think that's the big distinction. Right.
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Which I was like, I was just walking around like with my hands inside of a couple of like plastic Duane Reade bags. And it still didn't work. Well, that was your problem probably right there. Right. Duane Reade. Because I didn't take them off when I ate. Gross. Yeah. So, yes, we were in New York for some Bell House shows, right? Those went pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. Thought they were great.
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And it killed most of those people actually in four months from September to December. Isn't that crazy?
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I saw in many reputable places 50 million people died around the world. Man, that is just staggering. Yeah, and it was like right at the end of World War I. And just came out of nowhere. And one of the other really noteworthy things about it that just baffled people was it was killing like healthy people under the age of like 22, 23, 24. Like just healthy young people killed by the flu.
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A lot of them died from pneumonia. And they finally figured out that it was because... It had been about 20-something years since a flu resembling that type of strain had made the rounds. So people under, say, like age 25 had never been exposed to it. So it was a novel flu which just leveled the people it was exposed to who had never encountered something like it before.
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Yeah, that can totally happen. It's a real concern.
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Nursing home is not just people who work there, but the residents too are in a really vulnerable position. Because they are in the elderly age range. Their immune systems are pretty compromised. If they're in a nursing home, they're probably ill already. And then they're living in close quarters with other people who are ill. That's a recipe for disaster.
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All right. So the flu. We won't reminisce about past victories. We'll just talk about the flu instead.
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Oh, I do remember that, actually. Yeah. Yeah, that's just really unnerving, the idea of maybe it's permanent.
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Flu stop. Well, antiviral drugs, they seem like a good idea, but they seem like a good idea under the premise that seasonal flu strains, they used to think that they died out at the end of a season, right?
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Well, they started tracking them. Like our global monitoring system is really top-notch, and they can track flu around the world, and they found that seasonal flu at the end of the season in North America, it just goes to South America.
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So since that's the case, when you use antivirals and you're exposing these flus that go on to survive, you're also training them, evolutionarily speaking, to adapt so that those antiviral drugs are useless against them for people who like really need them.
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So just like with antibiotics, using antivirals just to cure a common flu or to shorten a common flu is probably a bad idea when you're talking about the whole population.
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Yeah. Yeah, there's one keeps them, well, two, a pair of them keep them from replicating, and then another one traps them inside a cell once they enter. Right. It's like, oh, God, I can't get out. The door is locked, and then... And they're all prescription drugs. Right. If I'm not mistaken. So vaccines are like pretty hot.
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They're like the hot thing to do on a Friday night is to go get a flu vaccine, right?
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And also, sorry, everybody, for the sniffling that's going to inevitably happen. I'm trying hard not to do it. You're a method podcaster.
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Yeah, and they say, like, especially if you have a baby under six months of age, they can't be vaccinated. And so everyone around them should be vaccinated is the recommendation from the CDC.
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Do you get them now, though? Is it a habit of yours now?
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Right, and when you have kids, if you get them vaccinated, once they're able to be vaccinated, again, under six months, they say, no, no, no, don't do that. When they're young, though, and you're getting them vaccinated, they need to be vaccinated twice, like a month apart. Yes.
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And so with flu vaccines in general, they recommend that you get it as early in the season as possible because it takes about two weeks for that to take effect. So with a kid, then, I guess you would want to get them So six weeks before the flu season? I don't know. Or is that second one pretty much like, okay, now it's taking effect?
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And so for a while there, there were two kinds of flu shots that the CDC recommended. One was an actual shot. The flu vaccine that was in a shot form.
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And then there was another one that's called live attenuated influenza virus, which came in the form of a nasal spray. And that was usually recommended for kids. I don't know if it's because kids don't like needles or what. But the CDC has officially stopped recommending nasal flu vaccines. Okay. Yeah. Don't do those anymore.
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Right, because if they get all three wrong, well, then you're toast when you encounter the flu that's going around that season. Yeah, it's really interesting. But even when they do get it right, it's kind of baffling that sometimes the flu vaccine just doesn't bestow any kind of immunity.
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Apparently, Australia just came out of a really bad epidemic flu season down there. And it didn't cause a lot of deaths, but everybody was sick with the flu. It was an H3 type flu that went around. And even though that strain showed up in the vaccine that was given out, only like 15% of people who got vaccinated and were exposed to the flu were immune to it.
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Like 85% of people who got flu vaccines and then encountered the flu still got sick. That's a pretty bad track record for a flu vaccine, and they're just not sure why. One of the theories is so when they make flu vaccines, they grow them in egg protein typically, like hen's eggs. Uh-huh. That's the medium they use to actually grow the viruses that they then kill.
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One researcher pointed out that at least one kind of flu virus mutates in the presence of egg protein so that the virus that you put in to grow in there is different from the one that comes out. It's a mutated version. And so maybe that would prevent your body from recognizing the original one that you were trying to introduce it to in the vaccine. So interesting. It is pretty interesting.
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Yeah, there's like a couple of other ways that they make flu shots, flu vaccines, but that chicken egg is the most predominant way to do it.
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Right. And if you're an anti-vaxxer, then you probably already decided that flu shots aren't for you. Correct. Which we will never do an episode on that. On vaccinations? Right. Oh, you don't think so? I don't know, man.
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So the idea that a flu vaccine can, you know, check all the boxes but still just be wrong, wrong, wrong or not confer immunity has some people looking for a universal vaccine or one that lasts way longer than just a year. What they're targeting is so when you get a normal vaccine, that vaccine is based on that HA protein, the hemagglutin.
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And that's the most quickly evolving part of any flu virus, right? So they're saying, well, let's look at other parts of the flu virus that don't evolve nearly as quickly and target that. And some of those parts are even basically universal among all flu viruses.
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And normally when you get the flu, it's just you're laid up for a couple of days, right? Yeah. Like you said, you feel like dog dew or something like that. Yeah. That's the seasonal flu. But even with a seasonal flu, which usually here in the United States or in North America runs from, what, like October to March? Yeah, roughly. Okay.
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So if you can find, if you can create a vaccine based on a stable part of a flu virus that's a part of every flu virus, one vaccine could confer ideally lifelong immunity from all influenza for anybody who takes the vaccine.
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Oh, that's nice. What's that from? Is that an Atlanta Rhythm Section song? No, they're better than that. Oh, okay. Well, since I said Atlanta Rhythm Section, everybody, that means it's time for Listener Mail. Listener Mail.
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No, and also I want to say thank you to everybody who wrote in to just say congratulations or to thank us. That was all, every single one of those emails or tweets or posts were all well received. So thanks for those guys.
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Yes, sir. After 27 years of dedicated work. I know, man. Not cool, guys. So, that is Rich, our man on Cape Cod. Well, thanks a lot, Rich. Appreciate that. That was one of the better emails I've heard in a while. Agreed. If you want to try and top Rich, let's see what you got. Send us an email, stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com, and join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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And then, I didn't really think about this before, but in the southern hemisphere, it runs the opposite and actually peaks in August. Right. Yeah. Most of the time, it's just an inconvenience for you. But it actually kills people sometimes. Yeah, it can be dangerous for sure. So in 2011 and 12, that was a pretty low year for deaths from the flu in the U.S.
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There were 12,000 people who died from the flu or complications from the flu. 2012-13 flu season, 56,000 people died. That year. And I think the average is something around 36,000 people in the U.S. die from the flu every year.
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It is. So, I mean, and the idea of dying from the flu, that's awful because, I mean, if you feel bad enough as it is from a flu that you recover from in a few days, imagine dying from that. That would just be a terrible way to die. Yeah. And the whole thing, Chuck, comes down to this little tiny virus, the influenza virus, and there's different types.
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And influenza, I found, is actually a shout-out to the Italian name for it originally. Did you know this? I did not. So I'm going to say it normally, but then you have to say it in your famous Italian accent. Influenza di freddo. Are you talking about the influenza di freddo? Yeah, which means influenza of the cold. Oh, all right.
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A lot of – for many, many, many, many years because the flu is most predominant in the colder months, everybody just assumed that it was the actual cold that was getting you sick. Right. That turns out not to be true. It's an actual – it's a virus that does seem to favor the cold, drier conditions of the winter months. Right.
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But this little tiny virus gets into your body and it starts this chain reaction that is just fascinating.
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Right. And let's talk first before we talk about the actual effect of the flu. Let's talk about the virus a little bit for a second, okay? Okay. So back in 1931, there was this Iowa farm physician, which is to say he was a human physician of humans, but he probably lived on a farm because it was Iowa in 1931.
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His name was Richard Shope, and he was trying to figure out what this bug that was getting people was. And he investigated with pigs first because there are plenty of other animals that can come down with the flu, not just humans, right? Right. And he finally isolated it. He isolated the flu virus in swine, and it led to this discovery of the isolation of the flu virus in humans too.
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So right after that, they started classifying the flu by strains. You got A, B, and C, right?
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Poor C. Yeah, it'll make a comeback one day, and it'll shock the heck out of all of us, right? Probably so. So type A infects all sorts of different species, right? Humans, birds of all kinds, pigs, bats, horses even.
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B strain is almost exclusively infective of humans. Apparently, the only other species we've ever found a type B influenza virus in is seals. God knows where they got it from. Or if we got it from seals, who knows? Maybe up north? I don't know. And then that sea one, it just infects humans and pigs. So you got the three types. That's right.
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And then one other thing about them, about the classification of flu strains is that there are also subtypes, right? And so you mentioned like avian flu. And the one that scared everybody was I think H5N1. Yeah, that was it. I remember. So the H and the N are the, they refer to the two kinds of, the two main proteins that you find on the outside of a flu virus. hemagglutinin and neuraminase. Okay?
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And so depending on those types of H protein or M protein, that's how they subtype flu strains.
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Yeah, you can be like, oh, well, they're talking about hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. And they'll say, shut up, nerd. I hope you get sick.
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The one I think we really went in depth on was HIV where we talked about how a virus enters the body and takes over. It's just vicious. It is, but it's also kind of like admirable in a really deadly efficient way, you know?
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Right. And when it does that, the cell has been officially hijacked. And the virus uses the cell's own RNA transcription process to— create the proteins that are needed to make new versions of the virus. So the virus is using this host cell in your respiratory tract to make copies of itself. And suddenly, before the cell knows what's going on, it's made millions of copies of these viruses, right?
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And apparently, when you talk about it step by step, it seems like this takes a little while. Right. No. In seconds. Right. Seconds after that the virus has entered your respiratory cell, millions of copies of it have been made.
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Right. So if you think about it, if that first cell produces millions of viruses, viral copies, and then they're released from the cell out into the rest of the other respiratory cells, and each of those infects another cell, and then those cells all make millions, you see how quickly these viruses reproduce in your body.
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And once that starts to happen, you are infectious. I think once that first cell ruptures, you become infectious. But this can be like a day before symptoms, right? So this is something people are always saying, like, oh, I'm not infectious anymore. Like me.
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said it earlier too right i know but supposedly the day before you you even know you're sick the day before the first symptoms start before you start like sniffling a little bit or whatever you're infectious buddy yeah and you're infectious up to seven days after that day you first start showing symptoms with the flu and if you're a kid you can be infectious even longer because if kids are anything they're walking germ factories they are disgusting monsters it's hilarious
Stuff You Should Know
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All right, we're back. So the scavenger hunt's still on, Chuck. Correct. And they make it, the cops follow from the note that Brian Wells had to the next clue, and they found the next note, and that directed them to another place even further out of town to where they found the jar where the note was supposed to be, but the note was gone.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the true crime edition again. Yeah, we've done a few of these, right? True crime is so hot right now.
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Yeah, it really was. It was like it's one of the things that makes this just an incredibly bizarre crime.
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Why the scavenger hunt? It's going to keep coming up again and again, right?
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So when the scavenger hunt ran out, the trail actually went cold. The case started to get cold for a few months. The cops sniffed around. Brian Wells tried to figure out, you know, why him, what happened with him, and they went back to his place of employment. And they kind of checked out the kind of person he was, right?
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Right. But nothing came of it. And the cops, as far as I know, never went and met with Bill Rothstein, even though his house was right next to the delivery place where Wells was supposedly accosted, right?
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And then, like I said, the case has gone cold by this time. If a couple months have gone by, the whole – I mean, you've got this crime, this very public caper that's captured the public's attention. A guy died by being blown up while under police supervision. And there's no leads. There's no nothing.
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And then finally, several weeks, a few months, I think, after the call, there's a 911 call from Bill Rothstein. And he tells the police that in his freezer, he has one of those serial killer chest freezers, there's actually a body, a man's body.
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And that it was – it is not someone he murdered, but he helped cover up the murder of this man who was the boyfriend of Bill Rothstein's ex-girlfriend from way, way back in the day. And now the chain of events has been set off.
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That is right. I'm glad somebody finally said it.
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The cleanup, getting rid of the murder weapon, and then holding on to the body.
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And he said, he told the cops that the reason he called them finally was because since he wasn't going through with grinding up the body, he was worried what this woman, Marjorie Deal Armstrong, was going to do to him.
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And so when he says Marjorie Deal Armstrong to the Erie cops, just alarm bells start going off because by this time already, Marjorie Deal Armstrong was a local legend as far as criminals are concerned. She was this very, very bright woman who I think at the age of 35, back in the 80s, had been indicted for killing one of her boyfriends, shot him six times.
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She pled that she had killed him in self-defense, that he was an abuser of her, and she was actually acquitted. A few years after that, she was married to a guy named Armstrong, and he showed up at the hospital with a head trauma and actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage. But there was no coroner's inquest or anything like that.
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And so it just was something suspicious, you know, the second significant other of this woman to die under suspicious or violent circumstances. So when Bill Rothstein said, I'm worried about what Marjorie D. Armstrong is going to do to me, the cops seemed to have taken it very seriously.
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Yeah, because true crime can be extraordinarily interesting, especially when you're talking about an extraordinarily overcomplicated heist that results in a man's bizarre death, death by bizarre means, and involves what really ultimately you could make a case is an unsolved mystery still today, even though it's technically bureaucratically been solved.
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Right, and so you said that he had considered killing himself and even wrote a suicide note, right? Yeah. There's something very, very odd on Bill Rothstein's suicide note. And again, he didn't kill himself. He died of cancer, but he was able to actually show the cops where his suicide note was, and they read it.
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And the first line of it, from what I understand, was, this has nothing to do with the collar bomb heist or the Brian Wells murder.
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Right. They said, we just want to make sure your fire alarm is working. Yeah, exactly. Part of a community service. Cool, but the bed's fine. So that is a very weird thing to say, and that definitely piqued the interest of the cops. But like you said, the cops convicted or the state convicted Marjorie Deal Armstrong of the murder of James Roden or Jim Roden, right? Yeah.
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She's already in prison, and when she's in prison – Somehow, this is what I'm unclear on, somehow it comes up or she starts talking or something like that, that Jim Roden's death very much had to do with the Wells case, with Brian Wells' murder, this collar bomb heist, and that she knows a lot about it. And if they'll transfer her to a minimum security prison close to Erie, she'll start talking.
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So is that how it came up, like she approached them? Because I'm unclear on that.
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Right. So there's a couple of things going on here by then. By the time she calls the cops, the cops have already spoken apparently with several informants that have shared cells with her or spent time with her in jail already who are saying, like, this lady is the mastermind of that collar bomb heist that's making you guys look bad.
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Right. But for Deal Armstrong, she said, but I had nothing to do with it. Even though I had all these other little things to do with it, I never met Brian Wells. I didn't know Brian Wells. I had nothing to do with his death, aside from supplying the kitchen timers. And knowing all about it. Right, exactly. So now it's just getting weird, right?
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Because there's the Jim Roden murder, who she says that she killed because he was abusing her, who Rothstein said she killed over a dispute with money, but now she's saying is tied to the Wells case, which she knows... A lot about, but really nothing about and had nothing to do with. So the cops are like, well, let's just get this lady to talk all we can.
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And one of the things they got out of her was she agreed to a tour around Erie showing them all these places where she had been. And these were all places that were related to the crime. Like, I believe she said she'd been at the pizza delivery site. I think she said she'd been within a mile of the bank when it was robbed.
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A lot of people say, no, this thing hasn't been solved yet.
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Like all of this stuff, she's just like, they just keep giving her this rope and she's just wrapping it around her neck again and again and again. And then finally, Chuck, at the end of this car ride, after she's been interviewing with the cops multiple times, giving them tons of info, what does she say?
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Right, and Barnes' brother-in-law was who turned him into the cops.
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So Barnes is like, I'm in jail for selling crack. That's way different from being, you know, very much involved in this collar bomb heist. So he said, OK, I'll tell you guys everything you want to know. I'll be your star witness. Just reduce my sentence for my involvement in this. And he started talking.
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When he started talking, it was at Marjorie Deal Armstrong's trial, which was a pretty spectacular trial from all accounts.
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Okay, Chuck. So before Marjorie Deal Armstrong goes to trial, and remember, she's already in prison for the murder of Jim Roden, right? Shooting him in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun. Yes. Bill Rothstein is dead. I want to call him Ace Rothstein so bad. But Bill Rothstein is dead. He died of lymphoma a couple of years before.
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And by the time Marjorie D. Armstrong is brought to trial for her involvement as the mastermind of the collar bomb plot... They have to verify that she's actually mentally competent to stay in trial. And that's kind of touchy because remember when she was charged with killing her boyfriend back in, I think, 1984 or 1986? Yeah.
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Right. A little crooked. Yep. So the whole thing does start actually with a pizza guy, a pizza place and a teal Geo Metro. And like you said, the whole thing starts in 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania. And there was a and still is. I looked it up. There's a pizza place called Mama Mia's Pizzeria. Little on the nose, but fine. Sure. It gets the job done, right?
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She was deemed incompetent seven times by psychiatrists before the judge finally said, I'm throwing all that out and deciding that she is competent. We're going to go ahead with the trial. Yes. They also found like 400 pounds of butter and 700 pounds of cheese in her house when they were investigating that particular murder.
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And in between 1984 and the time she was tried in the collar bomb heist, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So it was actually kind of questionable whether she was mentally competent to stand trial. And right as they were about to start the proceedings, I think the judge ruled that she was competent to stand trial, she was diagnosed with cancer herself.
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So they waited for the cancer diagnosis, her prognosis. And the cancer doctor came back and said, three to seven years. And the prosecutor said, giddy up.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right. As a very important thing that that showed up in this indictment.
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Right, and so Brian Wells' family did not like this at all. Apparently during the press conference where the DA of Erie County is announcing this, you know, this case is closed, this is the indictment that they have, some of Brian Wells' sisters were shouting liar at her. They did not take the idea that their brother was an accomplice in this at all very well.
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Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of back and forth about
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So Marjorie Deal Armstrong's lawyer said, you know, to heck with caution. Let's put you on the stand, okay? You've already incriminated yourself multiple times. Why not do it in open court too? And she apparently was quite a – she put on quite a performance on the stand over like two days, I think five and a half hours of testimony.
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She yelled, she cried, she berated the prosecutor and her own lawyer. When she did mention Brian Wells, she said, I've never met the guy. I learned of his death when everybody else did on the TV news. And she stuck with her story, though, that She had nothing to do with this. She knew a little bit about it. She knew the conspirators. The real mastermind was Bill Rothstein, and it wasn't her.
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That's what she maintained, though, throughout the trial and even afterward.
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And at about 2 p.m. on August 28, 2003, a pizza delivery guy named Brian Wells—I think he was 46 at the time— He was about to end his morning shift when a call came in for two small sausage and pepperoni pizzas. And the delivery was, I guess, the opposite way of where Brian Wells was going to go on his way home. But he said, you know what, I'll take this one last order.
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So imagine this, Chuck. Imagine being Brian Wells, and you're agreeing to put on what you are presuming is a fake device,
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collar bomb to go carry out a real bank robbery because you need money because you're indebted to crack dealers because you borrowed from crack from them to give to your girlfriend who's a prostitute who you have to give crack to to be with and then you find out on the day of that this is a real bomb and they're putting it on you whether you like it or not
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What a horrible turn of events for this poor guy. Yeah. I mean, it's just so sad no matter how you slice it. And then if you take his family's opinion that he was 100% innocent, that he really was delivering pizzas and was accosted and had nothing to do with any of this. which I take with a pretty big grain of salt. I mean, that's just as bad. But it's bad either way.
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Whether he was an accomplice at one point or not, it's super sad. There's a very sad thread that's running through this story in the form of Brian Wells, you know?
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Right. Basically, he and Marjorie Deal Armstrong are fishing, right? Yeah. They're fishing buddies. He's somebody that she would turn to. And she's finding out that her father is blowing through her inheritance. And she wants to put a stop to it. And so she approaches Barnes to get him to kill her father. But to get that $250,000... that he says he will kill her father for.
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She's got to rob a bank. So she turns to her friend Bill Rothstein to come up with this collar bomb to put it on this other person, Brian Wells, who's going to carry this out. And oh, by the way, we're also going to come up with a scavenger hunt to either throw the cops off or to actually make Brian Wells feel more comfortable, give him some sort of cover in case he is caught.
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And that's what we're going to go with. Go team. And Marjorie D. Armstrong said, that's preposterous, that wasn't me. Kenneth Barnes said, that's exactly what happened. And then Bill Rothstein wasn't alive to contradict any of it.
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So she's sentenced, right? She's convicted as the mastermind of this plot.
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That's a big one, I'll bet. I'll bet that carries a hefty sentence with it.
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No, they gave her three to seven years and she lasted seven.
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Yeah, Jim Fisher's gone a little bit down the rabbit hole, if you ask me.
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Yeah, and so there's probably not many people who are familiar with the case who would say that it wasn't Rothstein who built the bomb. But what Jim Fisher's saying is like Bill Rothstein was behind everything. And Marjorie Deal Armstrong murdering Jim Roden was just like a gift that dropped in Bill Rothstein's lap that he could use to make all these puppets dance, including the cops.
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And that the whole point of it was to create this elaborate scheme, this elaborate crime that would puzzle people for years and years to come, which it's doing that. And that that was the point. And that Brian Wells was going to die one way or another, right?
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Because I think the FBI said they concluded the whole scavenger hunt was a hoax and that Brian Wells was never going to survive this, didn't they?
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So this is Jim Fisher's position. But like you said, now that everybody's dead, really the only question is, you know, just how complicit was Brian Wells is the last big question. That's right. And then there's one other guy who seems to have got off scot-free named Floyd Stockton. Did you look into him? A little bit. So he's a guy who was there. He was there.
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And he walked out the door at about two. And the next time that Brian Wells was seen in public again, he was entering a PNC bank branch just down the street from his pizza place a few miles up the road. And he looked a lot different than he did when he left the pizza parlor about 28 minutes earlier.
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He supposedly handed Rothstein the bomb to put around Brian Wells' neck. He was staying with Rothstein as a buddy on his couch, fleeing a rape charge in Washington. And somehow, for some reason, he got immunity. and was not indicted even though he was very much involved in this, and he got off scot-free.
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And Brian Wells' family is going nuts over the fact that this guy's out there walking free, that he was a part of this caper, and he didn't see a second inside of a jail. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more people involved even. So what do you think? Do you think Brian Wells was complicit? And if so, how much?
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Do you think Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the mastermind? I don't know. I don't know either. Maybe we'll never know. But we might. But probably not. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right.
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Well, if you want to know more about the collar bomb case, you can type that word in the search bar, your favorite search engine, and it will likely bring up a very great article on Wired from Rich Shapiro. Read that. Start there. It's great. And since I said Rich Shapiro, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Okay, so everybody just look up Jake Sconier's Boston History Podcast, and he'll probably bring it up, right? Yeah, probably so. Thanks a lot, Jake. Thanks for keeping up the good fight up there. That's pretty cool. Good story, too. If you want to get in touch with us like Jake did, tell us about your podcast, that's great. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.
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And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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Kind of, but in the teller at the bank's defense, could have been an artificial torso and she probably didn't want to draw attention to it.
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Right. So one thing I want to point out, too, there's already a discrepancy. What we're like a minute into the story and there's already a discrepancy. That shirt he was wearing over that boxy thing underneath his shirt said Guess on it. And I've seen that it was written somehow like in spray paint or marker or that it was an actual Guess Jeans T-shirt.
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Yeah, and if you look, the pictures don't really show one way or another. Yeah, I couldn't tell. It looks more like it's homemade, and I looked up to see if there was a guest shirt that, you know, if I could find the actual guest shirt it was and couldn't. So I think it may have been homemade. Okay.
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Regardless, he's wearing this shirt that says guest on, and he walks up to the teller, and he hands the teller a note. And the note says, I have a bomb. Get everybody who has access codes to the safe together and put $250,000 into a bag and bring it to me. I think he said you have 15 minutes to do this.
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It is. It's like almost like luxurious amount of time. I would have said like 60 seconds. Yeah, or this should have happened yesterday. Chop, chop. Right. So he stands back and waits, apparently grabs a dum-dum lollipop out of the little basket while he's waiting. Because why not? And the teller says, sir, we can't get into the safe. That's just not how things work. I'm sorry.
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But as a consolation prize, I'm going to put $8,702 into a bag for you right here and send you on your way, okay?
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So he walks out of the bank, a free man. And the next time that he's seen in public is about 15 minutes later. And he's seen in public by some Pennsylvania state troopers who are on the lookout for this guy. And he's still wearing that shirt. He's still got the big bulge. And he's standing around his Geo Metro parked in a parking lot that is actually shared with that PNC bank and a McDonald's.
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And he's in a parking lot right there. So basically he left the bank robbery and went about 100 to 200 feet away from it. And that's where he was found like a full 15 minutes later.
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Yeah, it was. And it was pretty quick. And then three minutes after the bomb goes off, the bomb squad showed up. So they—so he's dead. This guy, Brian Wells, is dead. And the whole time he was protesting, he's like, you know, this is—I was forced to rob the bank. Are you guys going to get this off of me or what? Yeah, he said something like, did you call my boss?
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Because apparently he was a very loyal— He'd been working at Mamma Mia's for how long? Like 10 years or something like that? I don't know. For years and years. And he'd only called in late once. Not even sick. Late once when his cat died, said Rich Shapiro in that Wired article. So...
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It seemed like he actually was telling the truth, that he had been abducted and forced to rob the bank and then had been a victim. I think the bomb going off really kind of put an exclamation point on his story that he was not a willing participant in this, right?
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Yeah, which was, I guess, the thing that started beeping faster and faster.
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Sure, but I mean, like, that's pretty smart. So there's decoy wires. There were apparently also stickers that said, like, don't do it or, you know, skull and crossbones or rat poison, whatever. Skinny and sweet. Yeah. Oh, that's a good 9 to 5 reference, man. I just saw that the other night. So it was a homemade bomb, but it was by all accounts a well-made bomb too.
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And it worked, which I think is one of the big questions about any homemade bomb is whether it will actually work or not. And this one worked with deadly effect.
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Yeah, the last one will give you the keys and the combination. But you better hurry because you have a limited amount of time. If you stop and think, you're going to waste time and you're going to die. We can detonate this remotely and we're going to be following you. It was written pretty crazily. Have you read any of the note? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so, like, it's got a lot of...
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Like, just, like, a lot of jump cuts or jump scares in it, you know? Like, it's like, go do this and then go do that after that. And then don't try anything funny or we're going to blow you up, you know? It has those every once in a while. And there's drawings in there of where he could find, like, the notes and all that. So he made it as far as the first note, which was McDonald's. It was...
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In that McDonald's that shared a parking lot with the PNC Bank, that was where the first note was. So he made it to that McDonald's, grabbed that note, and that note was directing him out of town to another note. And he didn't make it that far when the cops caught up with him.
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They were like, whoa, you just blew my mind. That's some great policing.
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Right. Very well. Under normal circumstances, when you pick up that rod or you pick up that stick, the electrons are staying put no matter what. Right. But we figured out along the way, thanks to the work of all of the people from the Greeks to Faraday to Ben Franklin to your guy with the core puzzle idea. Yeah. JJ, what's his name?
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JJ Core Puzzle. I think it was Thompson. So thanks to the work of all of these people, we figured out how to knock electrons loose. And it's ingenious and simple, but it's also very complex. And it involves the relationship between magnetism and electricity.
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So Chuck, we're talking about knocking electrons loose, which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.
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And static, you know, you have static and dynamic, and dynamic indicates motion, static indicates motion.
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staying still um and they use that to describe this type of electricity because the electrons don't flow they just sit there and wait for a connection like when you touch something that's charged like a doorknob yeah after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet when you touch that doorknob you're forming that connection and all of a sudden the balance is achieved once more and the electrons flow like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. Chuck's wearing his last chance garage hat, which means that all is right with the world.
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Right. So with current electricity, those electrons move. They move along a conductive material. Yeah. Say like copper wire or something like that. That's a hot one. Right. So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current, right? Okay. Let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.
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Right, I think that's what generators are called, why they're called that.
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Right, but you've heard it so many times you take it for granted and it loses its meaning. It's like looking at a word too frequently.
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So what I think Faraday figured out... was that because of this relationship between a magnet and electricity, you can take a magnet and you can move electrons in, say, a conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose, basically, using a magnet.
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You know, if Chuck's not wearing that hat, who knows what's going on? Yeah. I thought I lost this thing. Oh, yeah?
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And you create a flow by flipping the polarity. And you can do this by rotating metal... Right? Yeah. Say like a coiled copper within the two poles of a large magnet. And when you do this, you're reversing polarity all of a sudden.
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And you are knocking the electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you spin the coils very quickly is by... hooking the coils to say a shaft yeah we kind of did this backwards let's start at the beginning you want to okay let's go to niagara falls okay back in uh 18 95 george westinghouse who is nikola tesla's boss which by the way if you want to listen to another really good podcast
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Go listen to that one, the Nikola Tesla one. Remember it was all about the AC-DC war between Tesla and Edison? Yeah. It's a good episode. Killed shocking animals to death. Yeah, it's pretty awful. What a jerk. But in 1895, George Westinghouse set up a hydroelectric power plant along the Niagara Falls.
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And what he did was he had a means of taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy, The water at the top of the falls has potential energy, and then once it falls over, that potential turns to kinetic energy. Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch this movement of water, right, which is actual energy, and have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller, or a fan.
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Right, the grist mill is. In this case, it's capturing that energy, or it's transferring it, we should say, by converting that kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy, spinning the turbine. The turbine is connected to that shaft I was talking about where we suddenly changed course.
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And at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning thanks to the turbine, thanks to the movement of the water, is some coiled copper. And that coiled copper is spinning within those two magnets. Yeah, that's the key. Right. And because of that, the electrons are being knocked loose. You have a power line leading from the coiled copper out. And all of a sudden, you have an electric current.
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Like Bruce Springsteen. That's right. How you doing? Great. Chuck? Yes? Let's talk about electricity. Electricity, electricity. I've had the Talking Heads song in my head. Which one? Electricity. Oh, okay. Where all he sees are little dots.
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Right, and then also for thermal power plants, they use nuclear power to create a nuclear reaction to produce heat, or they burn coal to produce heat, and then they use that heat to heat water, and then they use that water to create steam, and then that steam turns a turbine.
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And all it is is you're using that stored energy or that kinetic energy, like over here, to create electricity so that you can transfer it into work down the line. That's right. It's so cool.
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And that whole using water as an analogy for electricity fits very well.
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It's the same with water. Like, you have water pressure that forces the water down the line, right? And with electricity, you have a force that moves electricity and its voltage. Like you said, measured in volts. Yeah. And the electrical current...
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is measured in amps and the amps represent the total number of electrons flowing through any one point of a circuit in any Every second and there's a lot of them and if you have voltage and you add that to Current which is amps you get power which is watts Right, and I think it's multiplied by it.
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But it is. It is a math formula, and the reason why it's a math formula is because they're related. Like, you can flip-flop them, you can adjust them, and that's the whole basis of industrial power transmission, which we'll get to later.
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And a good rule of thumb is the higher the volts, the more dangerous the shock is. Which is why in America, most outlets and homes are 120 volts, where if you touch it, you're going to feel it, but it's probably not going to kill you.
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Right, which is why a European appliance can't be plugged into an American appliance because... You've got to get those adapters. Yeah. So... You were talking about current, which is the number of electrons flowing through a circuit. You have the volts, which is the force or pressure that's pushing them down the line.
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And then you have those two multiplied by one another to create watts, which is power. Yeah. Also, there's another factor to electrical currents. Yeah. And that is resistance. Oh, yeah. We didn't talk about that.
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Well, I mean, everything has a certain level of resistance.
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Yeah. Or glass is another good resistor or insulator. Yeah. And so is rubber.
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But even something is like... as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance. And again, that water flowing analogy comes into place. Like if you pump like some water really, really hard, try to get a lot of water through a very small pipe, it's still not going to come out very high. very fast because you're trying to force too much water through that little pipe. Right.
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So in the exact same way, a thin wire where you're trying to push a lot of amps through and a lot of volts through, it's going to resist. And when you have resistance in an electrical circuit, you lose some of those electrons that are flowing in the form of heat, which is produced by electrons, bumping up against other atoms that aren't sharing their electrons, and that's the result of friction.
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Right, because there's... And the reason they're not going to be flowing any longer is because the positive pole and the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected. That's right. Another way to look at voltage is that it is the difference between electrons on one side and electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember we talked about nature always wanting balance.
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Oh, yeah, I didn't think there had to be like a, you know, I didn't know it was like the Stones or the Beatles, you know?
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Electrons flow from negative to positive, right? Right? That's right. And as they flow, the reason they're flowing, the whole reason they're moving at all is because there are not as many electrons on the positive side as there are on the negative side.
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So they want to leave the negative side to go achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever circuit it's traveling neutral. Yeah. You stick something in that circuit, and as those electrons are moving from the negative side to the positive side, because, again, electricity is just the flow of electrons. Yeah. You can convert that movement into productive work.
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Yeah, mechanical energy. Right, and anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that flow of electrons for work is called a load.
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Right. And there's all sorts of things you can do by attaching a load to a circuit, like a light bulb. A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to flow into a resistant filament, very thin wire, that purposely resists that flow of electricity, generating heat and in turn heating up to produce light. That's how a light bulb works.
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You can also recharge batteries, which go in and force electrons back into the negative position so that the batteries recharge and those electrons are ready to flow again once you connect the circuit. There's also appliances that use resistors to produce heat, like a hairdryer or a toaster. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to...
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connect into the circuit but it's all the same whether it's a battery or a toaster or a whole house if you want to look at it that way it's you're plugging a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow of electrons yeah and i kind of misspoke a minute ago when i said it it's creating the mechanical energy you need a motor to actually do that so yeah if you have a electric drill
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Right. And an electric motor is probably the best example of how you're converting energy from one form to another and then reconverting it. Because an electric motor is basically a generator in reverse. And so you use that mechanical energy, the spinning of the turbine down the line, and convert it in your electric drill back into mechanical energy to spin the drill.
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And in between is that flow of electrons that's causing the whole thing or that's carrying that energy from point a to point b is
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Well, plus the electric company came on after Sesame Street, I think.
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There's one other thing. If you look at a plug that you're plugging an appliance into, because again, you're just attaching a load to that flow of electrons and diverting it through your appliance, and then it goes back on its merry way, right? Yeah. If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs. And the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems different from the other ones.
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And then even younger than Sesame Street was Pinwheel, if I remember correctly. That was after your time. Pinwheel was pretty cute. It was like little kids, and then Sesame Street was like little kids. And then electric company was like cool.
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It's round. And that is actually a grounding wire. Yeah, very important. Very, very important. Because as awesome as we've gotten with producing and directing electricity, we can't control the amount of electrons that flow through an outlet down to a single electron. Right. And so there's such a thing as leakage of electrons, which is crazy.
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And there's also electrical buildup that can happen, where if you're not using all of the amps through an appliance, the residual amps can build up and they charge the appliance. And again, as with static electricity, a charge is just sitting there waiting to be neutralized. Yeah. Sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous.
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To prevent this, they connect the appliance through either that third prong in a plug or through an actual grounding wire to a copper wire that's driven into the ground.
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and that's where the word comes from, ground, you're actually transferring that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically an infinite reservoir for charge dispersal. To Earth, right?
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Exactly. Same thing with a lightning rod. It's a ground for your entire house so that the lightning doesn't go through your house. It goes through the lightning rod. And the point of all of those is that the earth can take it. Go ahead. Give it as many electrical shocks as you want. It's going to be fine. So we think. And it's very good at just dispersing those charges.
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So that's what grounding comes from. Very important stuff. Yeah.
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More elsewhere. Nice and safe. Right. And then you just plug your appliance into it, and all of a sudden that electrical energy transmits to... Your toaster strudel being warmed. Your Hot Pocket with tainted meats. Wow. Did you hear about that? Yeah. Remember that whole horse meat thing with IKEA the last couple of years?
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It wasn't just IKEA, but they were definitely called out maybe most strongly for it.
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Yeah. It was very childish. I think Raggedy Ann and Andy were in that. Well, at any rate, we've angered enough people now. I know. I have an intro for this one. Great. Okay, you ready? Mm-hmm. About 13.8 billion years ago, a little something called the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created. So says you. So says a lot of people. Yeah. You know, we weren't around. Nobody saw it.
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Seriously, go listen to that podcast. That's a great one.
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They were good. Yeah. Are good. Are they still around? Yeah, man. David Bowie played a pretty mean Tesla. No, I'm not talking about Tesla. I'm talking about ACDC.
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That's why I was really confused for a second. I was more confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity. I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around. I was like, and they're Australian? Yeah, no, ACDC's great. And they're still around, huh? Yeah, I think they're putting an album together right now. Good for them. I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest. It still rocks.
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And he was alleged to have helped botch the first electrocution by electric chair by a state. Oh, yeah. I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely in our episode. He exploded the guy. Yeah, he was a real jerk, remember?
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Yeah, just think about it this way. Negative, an electron's negative.
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So in any terminal, that's where all the negative charge is. Bad vibes. And then positive is where the electrons want to be because they're seeking to balance it out and create neutrals so that there's no pole. Good vibes. Yeah. Or at the very least, so-so vibes.
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Which are pretty important, too. But, yeah, I think we kind of came out in the same way on that episode. Yeah, Tesla won. They both kind of won.
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But Tesla was the cooler dude. Although Tesla died penniless in New York in the 1940s. Oh, yeah? And Edison died a rich fat guy.
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And if you leave that heater on for an hour, you've just used 1.2 kilowatt hours, which is how you're billed.
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But it's been detected and it's strongly suspected by scientists that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that it came from something called the Big Bang, which, by the way, I would love to do an episode on. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. And under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the TV show, but the actual theory, at that moment...
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You got anything else? No, don't play around with it. No, don't. Yes, always wear rubber-soled shoes. Because rubber is an insulator. It is. Why? Because it hangs on to its electrons. That's right. The atoms that make up rubber. It's just that simple. If you want to know more about electricity, you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com.
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You can also go on all sorts of kids' science sites and find out more about it, too. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Well, if you want to get some sort of shout out, sometimes Chuck Danes too. He's very nice. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
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All of the energy in the entire universe was created right then. Boom. Bam. Ever since that point, no more energy has been created, and none of that energy has been destroyed. But it changes states. It changes shapes. It can be locked up in different places. It can be transferred from one place to another via some natural ways, like convection, conduction, radiation. Yeah.
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And like I said, it can be stored in stuff. Like it can be stored in your body, right? Fat is potential energy that can be burned and used for energy to carry out work, which is all we're looking to do is work. That's right. We use energy to carry out work, whether it's digging a shovel or lighting a light bulb. That's what energy does. It produces work. Right? Yeah. Okay.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
We figured out along the way that we don't have to wait around for radiation or convection or conduction to do its thing to provide energy because we'd have a lot of waiting to do. We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called electricity. Yes.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
which is basically how humans have figured out how to harness converting energy from one type of another and then transmitting it a very long distance. Because electricity isn't a primary energy source like the sun or solar radiation or nuclear energy. or even the flow of water, kinetic energy. No, it's created. Yeah, it's a secondary energy source. It's a carrier. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
So electricity carries energy from one point to another. And if you understand that, you understand the very basis of what we're going to talk about today.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Like we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry energy to produce work down the line. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Yeah, so think about this. If you capture mechanical energy like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about, in Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to light your light bulb 200 miles away. No, not by itself. No, unless you connect the two. You send the work produced, the energy captured in Niagara Falls down to your light bulb. And that's what we do using electricity.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Yeah, let's talk about electrons, man. Let's talk about the atom.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
No, and getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Right, and that amber plays a pretty big role. It's actually amber, the Latin, or I'm sorry, is it Greek? Greek. Greek word for amber is electron. Yeah, with a K.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
That makes it look way heavy metal. So our word electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber from that first experiment with static electricity.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. We should probably differentiate. There's a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity and then there's current electricity, right?
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Selects: How Electricity Works
And current electricity is what we are able to generate artificially. Static electricity exists in nature, just naturally. And that was the first experiments carried out. Then there's other types of current electricity like lightning. But at this time, when these people are messing with static electricity or saying it's electric for the first time, the concept of electricity was that it was fluid.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea or concept of electricity. And Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including a guy named Thomas Francois Dalabard, were studying electricity big time. And it was when they really investigated lightning that our understanding of current electricity started to take shape.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
If he didn't do it, other people did. There were guys who died carrying out that experiment.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
It was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben Franklin did it or not.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it, the experiment. Yeah.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
Yeah, and the force of these charges is proportional to their product. So if you multiply the charges, they are going to be very strong or cancel one another out or push one another away.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
And would you say like 1897? Yes. So before that time, I guess he didn't understand the electron, but he understood electricity. A guy named Michael Faraday was working on the case. Stud. Yeah. Basically, everybody's like, Ben Franklin, electricity, hand in hand. Really, it's Michael Faraday, who's British, who really came to lay the foundation for electrifying the world.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
He created the first dynamo, which is a generator, which we'll talk about. First electric motor? Yeah. He got electricity, and he explained it to other people very well.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Hey everybody, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2014 episode on electricity. And I chose it as a kind of Casey Kasem-esque special dedication to one of our younger listeners, Charlie Pendergrast, who wrote in with a bunch of good ideas, one of which was electricity.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
Hats off. Top hats off to these guys. Last chance garage hat off. I'm back on. Like, I have trouble understanding it now when it's explained through, like, kids for science websites. I know.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
Well, we should say a Leyden jar is a very primitive capacitor. You use a metal rod in a jar... Like a nail. ...that's sunk into, like, some water, and it can store a charge. Yeah. And I think Ben Franklin's kite experiment attached the kite to, or a rod or something, to a Leyden jar to store the charge to. If that happened. Right. But again, he did make the proposal.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
It's whether or not he carried it out is a good question.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Yeah, atoms are the building block of matter. That's right. And atom, remember we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
Yes, it does. You've got a balance that nature always seeks. Tries to achieve it. Same with atoms, or atoms are no exception, I should say. Within an atom, you have a nucleus, which is made up of protons and neutrons. Protons are positively charged particles. Neutrons are neutral. And then orbiting that nucleus, making the cool atom symbol, are electrons, and they're negatively charged.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
That's right. And when you have an equal number of protons to electrons, you have a neutral atom.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
They go on rumspringa. Yeah. Yeah, and it depends on the material. And those types of material that have either tightly connected or loosely connected atoms either end up conducting electricity very well or don't conduct electricity very well. So they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Electricity Works
Well, rather than just send him a link and being boring, I thought I'd share it as a Select for everybody to enjoy. So, if you enjoy this Select, you can thank Charlie. Thanks, Charlie!
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
He busted Bugs once because Bugs had tears coming out of the outside corners of his eyes, like a freakazoid, rather than the inside corners.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So grab a cup of tea, a nice little blanket, and enjoy this cozy little episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, no, I mean specifically with the outside of the eye thing. But yeah, no, I'm sure there are plenty that I missed.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I knew where the tears came from.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Sure. There was rarely a grand finale where they would be pressed to death in front of a crowd. Nah.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So, I mean, that's it. Like, bing, bang, boom. That was when you started on page one of an Agatha Christie novel. You knew exactly how everything was going to play out. And then one of the other things is because this thing was so formulaic, there was also room for the author to kind of play with you, the reader.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And in using things like bluffs and red herrings.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I think are basically the same thing. But the idea is that so the author, in this case, Agatha Christie, would say something like, you know, early on in the book, a suspect would come running out of the house looking shaken and pale. And you, the reader, would be like, well, that's just way too obvious.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
She's not going to name, she's not going to point out who the murderer is at the beginning of the book. So I can disregard that person or this very obvious clue or something like that. That was just kind of part of the interplay between author and reader. But then it could go even deeper to where she would say something like, well, I know that you think that this is too obvious.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So I'm going to actually make this the actual murderer, which she did in some cases, which was like a double bluff. Apparently, you could just keep going on and on and on. But it was this kind of wrestling match or maybe slap fight between Agatha Christie and you, her reader, which made the whole thing all the more delightful.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, and for some reason, either it was the time or maybe because of her, I'm not sure. It was kind of a chicken or the egg thing, but she happened to write about stuff that a lot of people wanted to read about, these small stories. you know, English villages and, you know, quaint mannerisms of the upper middle and upper class English society set in this period of time.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. I don't know if we're going to be able to get used to Jerry being around again. Is she fired? I don't think so. She may have fired herself, though. I don't think so. I have better things to do than hang out with you, cool cats and kittens.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And for some reason, it just captured everybody's attention. And apparently, when she started expanding, I think after World War II, to some slightly more exotic locales like Egypt or Mesopotamia, you know, for like Death on the Nile was a very famous one during this time, or the Orient Express, that really catapulted her into superstardom, international superstardom too.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, I'm not sure either. Nothing that I'm familiar with, I can say.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, and that's something like if you're not really familiar with Agatha Christie and you just kind of look her up in passing, one of the things you'll be confronted with is that a lot of people, a lot of critics say she was a hack. And what they're talking about is that formula that she followed to almost like a – a soullessly rational degree. Like, that was the formula. That's what she followed.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But that really misses, like, the fact that she had a really great eye for detail in the dialogue, like you were saying. Like, she was a good writer, and she could just crank work out. I think during the decade of the 20s, she wrote a book a year. It might have even become more prolific later on in the 30s and 40s, too.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, go fly it with extreme prejudice.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I think so, man. We'll come back and talk about her life. Great.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Okay, Chuck, so Agatha Christie was born in 1890 in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, which I always want to say Tanqueray, Devonshire. Sure. And it's in the southwest of England, so Torquay is kind of like our, or Devonshire is like our Arizona, basically. That's my impression.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right, which stalks the moors. That's right. And she was one of three kids, and I think her older brother and sister were both at least a decade older than her. So she had like a very solitary childhood, which appears to have made her fairly happy. She didn't go to school.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
She was raised by governesses and educated by governesses, spent a lot of time reading, and just hung out around her family's estate.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yes. There are people doing that very thing right now, Chuck, and you have just mocked their existence.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right, but she was a very, very shy person. The novelist Joan Nakasella says that even as an adult, she was so shy that sometimes she wouldn't go into shops because she would have to interact with the shopkeeper. She was a novelist.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
You have never met Philip Roth, apparently.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right. Go play some pickup basketball and maybe volunteer at the local food bank.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, and, you know, I think not only fits the mold, the more I learn about her, she made the mold.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Like, basically everything we take for granted as far as writing and mystery writing goes, like, she basically made it up. It's pretty impressive stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, I know. Jerry's not a fan.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Or a listener. So I have a question for you, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, she was rejected out of hand. And apparently also she'd started writing because her sister told her that she probably wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel, which I love. So she did. She wrote the – what was it? Snow on what?
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Snow Upon the Desert, and she was very young then. And in between the time she wrote Snow Upon the Desert and The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which would be her first published book, I believe, she wedged a lot of life in there in the form of getting married to a guy named Archibald Archie Christie.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And one of the things about Agatha Christie is that she wasn't a born writer, even though she did write As a younger person, like you were saying, she just didn't want to be a writer as a kid. And she ended up writing really seriously after she and Archie Christie got married because Archie Christie wasn't particularly wealthy and couldn't necessarily care for her himself.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So she started writing to make money, which some people suspect is the reason she got into mystery writing in the first place because it was a very, very popular genre even then.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So she had the skills to pay the bills, it turns out.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No. No, don't be ridiculous. Chuck, have you ever met Agatha Christie?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
which is kind of cool and ghoulish, you know. She's like, how exactly would a person die from this bottle that I'm holding? So, yeah, and apparently most of the deaths in her books are poisonings. And like you were saying, like you very rarely see the person die. They just come upon the body. And most of the time it's a poisoned body. Sometimes there was violence visited upon them.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But for the most part, it's a body that was found poisoned to death. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right, right, yeah. So poisoning is what she went with typically. It's another example also, Chuck, I think of like her writing what she knew too.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Or at least writing what interested her. And she wrote in, I believe, 1920, right? No, during World War I. So while she was working at the dispensary and Archie was off flying in France, I believe, she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Stiles. And it was – that's the one I started reading, and I don't understand how it was rejected at first, but –
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
It's a really interesting book just right out of the gate in that it pulls you right into this little country English estate and all of the people on it. And you realize just after a couple of pages that you're already invested in them, which is pretty amazing. And this is like not her first book, but it was her first serious work that wasn't published immediately. It wasn't published until 1920.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, really? Do you have much of a memory of that encounter?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And I think even after it was published, it wasn't an immediate catapult to success for her. But it was a remarkable first book to be published.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, he was also a well-known dandy who was very vain about his appearance. And he apparently said in one of the later books that he plays up his foreignness and his dandiness to disarm suspects when he's interrogating them to make them take him less seriously than they otherwise might.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
You cannot. I appreciate you not doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, wow. That's got to be worth some money.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, not yet. Again, she really catapulted later on because she moved to some of these more exotic locales. But one of the things that cemented her legend as a mystery writer, in addition to all of the work she did, in addition to her prolificness and her extreme talent at this formula that she had worked out, was what still today is considered an unsolved mystery.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah. Do you still have that?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
In fact, it was featured on a 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which I just randomly happened to see recently. And she disappeared. There's a whole subplot to Agatha Christie's life that was really surprising, especially compared to how boring and normal and just kind of plodding with D's instead of T's, her normal life was.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
The fact that she has this grand mystery plunked down in the middle of it is pretty impressive.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, and her car wasn't just near the rock quarry. According to some reports, like one of the wheels is hanging over the edge of this cliff.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Didn't you say once that your brother has like a copy of number one Superman or something nuts like that?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I thought he has something, some valuable comic book. No. Huh.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I must be confusing you with my other co-host Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I got you. Well, having met Agatha Christie when you were a kid, I feel like you'll probably have a lot to bring to this one. I have never met her still to this day. Probably never will. And I have read a couple of her things and seen a couple of movies based on her stuff, but I would never consider myself like a... a rabid Agatha Christie fan, but I do appreciate her work a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
You picked this one. Why?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Without any notice given to her, she didn't know this was going on at all. Yeah. They just were like, I don't think the Americans are going to go for this. The Brits can barely stand it. The Americans definitely aren't going to take this well.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And they were bad even at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Like it wasn't. Yes, you can say like, yeah, a lot of people had different social attitudes toward race and racism. And in that sense, she wasn't that much different. But there were cases where she was standing well outside of the norm. including in book titles and characters and things like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And one book in particular, And Then There Were None, was revised many, many times, not just in the U.S., but in Great Britain as well. And it's remarkable in that sense. But in another sense, it is also remarkable in that it's considered pretty widely to have given birth to the slasher film genre. Did you know that?
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, I looked this up a little more, and on its own, and then there were none, the book ends, sorry for the spoiler, everybody, but it ends with, I think, all of the suspects killing one another, and everyone dies. In the stage adaptation of the play that she helped write, the final girl, a female character, is left alive and has out...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I started reading The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which I think was her first published work, last night. And it's just great. She just sucks you right in. She does what's... She creates a lot of books, not all of them, but she creates what's called a cozy mystery with an S because it's British. And I'd never heard that term before until this article.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
done the murderer who's come to get her which is you know the formula for any slasher film whatsoever but there's a bunch of other elements in there too and they're like you know even on like horror fan wikis they point to that as like the genuine birth even more than Psycho of the slasher film genre how interesting Yeah, it is pretty interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Who would have ever thought that Agatha Christie with her nonviolence and poison and occasional racism would have been the one to birth the slasher film?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah. So, again, it's a bit like exploring Elizabeth Blackwell or any historical character. There's always weird little bugs under the rocks you turn over, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, no, it's true. But just wait for 20 years from now, they'll be like, I can't believe they talked about those guys were ageist bastards, you know? Probably so. There's one other thing I want to say too. So when she lived through World War II, Agatha Christie was worried that she was going to die in the bombing blitz of Great Britain.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And she really wanted Hercule Poirot and Jane Marples to have a final case. So she wrote a book for each of them. One is called Curtain. That's Poirot's final book. And the other is Sleeping Murder. That is Marples' final case. And it just kind of explains what happens to them. I believe Poirot dies and Marple just retires.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But when she survived World War II, she was like, well, I'm not ready for these guys to be retired yet. So she kept those books and had them posthumously published. And they were in the 70s. And when Hercule Poirot's last book came out and he died, the New York Times ran a front page obituary for him, the only fictional character to have that honor bestowed on them.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Have you ever seen one last thing? Have you ever seen Murder by Death? I know I've asked you before.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Well, that's amazing that you have that on your desk and you wait, is it on your desk at work? It is.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I was going to say watch it tonight, but don't watch it tonight. Wait until everything clears. Was that one of her books?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, it's a spoof actually of detective books of like Charlie Chan and Agatha Christie and Sam Spade and all that, that she helped, you know, kind of create. But it's actually like a complaint from fans of mysteries. It's just a wonderful book, movie. Truman Capote's in it. David Niven –
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Peter Falk, yeah. A lot of people. James Cromwell as a younger man. Oh, yeah. James Coco as Hercule Poirot. It's just great. You're going to love it, man.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But when I came across it, I was like, yes, I love that kind of thing. And that's exactly what I love about Murder, She Wrote. Like the Murder, She Wrote's where she goes to like Broadway or Paris or something like that. I can take her leave. They're fine. But it's the ones that are set in tiny little Cabot Cove.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No. Her last words were, good to meet you, Chuck. You got anything else?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Well, friends, that is Agatha Christie. If you want to know more about Agatha Christie, go start reading Agatha Christie books. And since I said Agatha Christie like three or four times, it's time for Listener Mate.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, yeah, I love this email.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I love it. It is a little weird, though, Emmett. You're right. I love how self-aware this guy is.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, you're like the Bay City Rollers. You throw a dart at a map and go with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No need to double check that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
That's some fine reverse psychology right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
That is full circle right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah. Happy birthday, Emmett. That reverse psychology worked, man. If you want to get in touch with us like Emmett did and see if we'll wish you a happy birthday, I'll bet we won't. But who can tell in these crazy times? You can get in touch with us via email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
that's just isolated from the rest of the world and it's cozy and small and it's like a village and all that. Those are the murder she wrote that I love the most. And I think that's what I like about Agatha Christie mysteries too is they're very typically cozy mysteries.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, that would be seared into my brain forever.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I've not seen it yet. It's still like $7 on Amazon Prime, so I haven't rented it yet. I'm waiting for the price point to drop.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, I'm taking a stand on this.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So I have a question for you. I have one more question. Have you seen the Agatha Christie film adaptation of Crooked House that came out in 2017? No. I think you'll like it. It was big budget, but it also looks like British made for television big budget. That's great. Gillian Anderson, Dana Scully is in it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Because, you know, the Brits are nuts for her.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, man. She's like their favorite person in the world and has been for years. Don't know why. Nothing against Gillian Anderson, but like she just never hit it as big over here as she did there. Terrence Stamp is in it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And I was like, this is really good. So I was reading little synopses of it and all that stuff. And it seemed like it's widely regarded as one of her best, most ingenious and inventive works.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Crooked House. I believe that's on Amazon Prime for free.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I don't want to do that. Okay. I just don't want to do that. Probably pennies. Why did you do that to me? All right. So, Charles, let's get into this because I know that this one could be a little long if we're not deliberate and I would say maybe considerate of our time.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I saw $4 billion in one place, and I think after you hit the billion mark, you can just start tossing around whatever number you want. I think so.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
For example, we've had 70 billion downloads now, I just decided. Oh, great. That's a lot of downloads. But think about it. Stephen King. How many books has that cat written? How many has he sold? All around the world. And it amounts to $350 million. And he's one of the best-selling authors of all time. A lot of people say that Agatha Christie's numbers hit $2 billion, like you said.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, you never say never, though.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Never say never. I also saw that she's the most widely translated author of all time, too. I buy that. I saw 45 languages. I was like, this thing's a little low. So then somewhere else I saw 103. So let's go with that.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's surprises and everything woven in. I mean, the whole thing is meant to be a surprise. It's a mystery. And part of the mystery, the allure of the mystery is that Agatha Christie not only wrote, but actually the whole genre she helped to develop. is that you are ostensibly able to figure out who the culprit is in the murder. It's almost always a murder.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And so there is like, there is surprise involved. That's the point. But there's also a tremendous amount of familiarity. And that's that formula you were talking about. And that's what really has sucked generations of people into this whole genre and her 66 plus books.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Yeah, because Hercule Poirot was a retired Belgian police detective, so he has some measure of authority still to question people and interrogate people as he wishes. With Miss Marple, she's just kind of a quiet old lady who sews and knits a lot. And she just has a very keen eye for detail and an interest in solving the murders that seem to happen around her.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Basically, yes. But rather than interrogate people directly, Miss Marple's thing is she just kind of quietly is there and people tend to confide in her and she kind of quietly helps them along and she gives them the rope to hang themselves with. That's how she interrogates people or figures out who the murderer is.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode from 2020 on Agatha Christie. It's a neat little episode about who is possibly the greatest selling writer of all time, by far, and may inspire you to get into Agatha Christie's books. And there are definitely worse things you could do with your time.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
I confused that with Snowpiercer. I think I've seen both, but I can't remember which one's which.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, then I think I've just seen Snowpiercer.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Dude, that's saying something because that genre has gotten a little stale. Tired? Hey, let me ask you this. I know you've seen it. You had to. Ozark?
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Okay, yeah. You mean I just started at season one, and I'm like, all I want to do is sit around and watch Ozark. It's amazing.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah. Smart.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hey, you're getting responses. That's that's a big step forward. It's nice to be told no and just not ignored. Yeah, right.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
No, that's the point. So like in an espionage thriller or something, the locales are all over the place and, you know, the character's constantly moving. In these cozy thrillers, like even if they're in an exotic locale, they're still set in a small part of that exotic locale.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right. And here's the thing. What I was saying with the kind of mystery that Agatha Christie wrote and really established, you are part of the mystery. Like you're either the investigator, the detective has an assistant that they explain things to very much like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Sure.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Or if the detective is working solo, say like Miss Marple, Miss Marples might write a list of suspects and their motives and little clues down as part of the narration. And you're led in every step of the way. So you're part of this working towards solving the mystery.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
And as it's very frequently put, it kind of pits you in a competition with the author to see if you can figure out who done it before the end of the book.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Right. Man, I love those. Those were so great. Encyclopedia Brown. I remember he busted one dumb kid who did something bad. I can't remember. Was it Bugs Meany? Oh, man, good memory. It may have been Bugs Meany. Was he kind of a big, dumb oaf who'd, like, beat up on chipmunks? I think so. Okay.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, it's definitely on my to-do list.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W. Chuck Clark. There's Charles Malcolm Bryant. And there's Jerry the Wiz rolling.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Right. And the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets, but crickets feature prominently in the report. They're the star. It was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general. And it made a pretty big splash. I remember when it came out. It really hit the news cycle pretty hard. But it also caught the attention of that Bockhuber guy.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
who said, all right, I think I'm going to get into this, because he'd already been exposed to eating crickets in Thailand, and then when that UN report came out, he, I think, began his startup here in the states of his commercial cricket farm startup.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, I didn't see that anywhere. I think he said that at his TED report.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
But, yeah. It definitely made a splash. I'll give him that for sure.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Right, right. The animal itself is efficient at converting food that you feed it into stuff that you can get from it.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. Maybe we'll have, like, the swirly face, like the weird people in Jacob's Ladder.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
No, it's like 40% of a cow is edible and digestible.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So there's two different things here, right? So you've got efficiency in nutrient conversion, which is, say, like if you eat an apple, you can convert, you know, X amount of the energy available in the apple into, you know, energy for yourself. Metabolism, right? And poop. Right. Yeah. But poop is waste. So that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
It would actually subtract from your efficiency and lower your efficiency. If you ate an apple and used every bit of it and it produced zero poop, you would have 100 percent efficiently converted that apple into useful energy.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
It would be a bee, a magic apple, and you wouldn't need a poop chute. But instead you do because there is no such thing as 100% efficiency in any animal, right? But some are better than others, like you were saying. And with a cricket, it's something like they're like 12 times more efficient at converting food into usable energy or stored, in this case, stored protein, right? Yeah. So for every...
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of live cricket weight, which is a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but kilogram to kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes 1.7 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of live crickets. Not bad. For a cow, it takes 10 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef. Very inefficient by comparison. So if you take the fact that it doesn't take much feed to produce...
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
biomass of crickets and that crickets are 80% edible and digestible compared to the cows 40% edible and digestible, then you really have a, if you're just going pound to pound or kilogram to kilogram, a much more nutrient dense, much more efficient, and then therefore much less wasteful animal that you could eat.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Well, I have a mealworm farm I was going to ask you to buy in on.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Kevin Bach-Ruber? I think he's... He's Irish-German, maybe.
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What's that? It's this band. Oh, okay.
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Yeah, I couldn't find the current number. Yeah, let's just say at least 25. Okay. Although I'll bet they go under pretty quick. You think so? I could see losing your shirt on cricket farming right now. It's just so early. Yeah, true. And the market is so not there, and the stuff they're producing is so expensive.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, did you... Do you watch Shark Tank?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Okay, so did you see the one with Rose Wang and Laura Desario?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Okay, so you saw the one with Chirps. They're cricket-based snack product Chirps. I want to try it. I do too.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
No, and I would try it as well. And I don't know if you remember or not, but when we did that locust thing for Science Channel, it's like the second time it's come up this month, weirdly enough. Um, they made fried locusts and I refused to eat them. Right. And it wasn't because I was grossed out. It was because I was sure that I was going to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Oh, right. Because they're shellfish, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I would have had to have been like, you know, life flighted somewhere to a hospital and would have missed my flight home. That is the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing to do with disgust.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
But in that UN report, they address allergies and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod. Yeah. Or to an insect, I should say. But the reason why I thought so is because, yeah, I had had like a shrimp blow up once.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And I just was not about to roll the dice on that. Not for what Science Channel is paying us.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, shrimp chips. Yeah. Which use real shrimp powder. It's like, I think, Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy. But now you can eat shrimp, right? Yeah, I did immunotherapy, and now I'm fine. I can eat shrimp all day long.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, I love shrimp, man. Good shrimp, like seasoned with Old Bay, just simple stuff. Oh, man, so good.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have to put your fork down and take the head and tail off.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So I ran across a reason probably why.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
There's something called chitin, which makes up the exoskeleton of bugs, but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well. And chitin supposedly, if you don't have an allergic reaction to it, chitin is apparently good for – it's said to be good for weight loss.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
It aids in digestion, allegedly. And I think it has something to do with your blood pressure, too. And in other countries, non... non-Western countries, I think they prescribe chitin quite a bit. It's like a dietary supplement. And I saw one study that said, yeah, it had a little bit of an effect, a little more than placebo, but not clinically significant. But it was just one study.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So I'm curious if chitin actually does have an effect. But it's possible they're saying you should eat the whole thing. Well, that's what I was going to add. All of the shell.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I mean, I don't know. They could also just be a fat, lazy chef, you know?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
But if you think about it, though, if you're eating a fried cricket or something, you're eating the whole thing, shell and all, antenna.
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I don't know that I've ever had soft-shell crab.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
That was nice of you. That was very gracious of you as a host.
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Okay. Yeah. I thought that was crab, like, spelled with a K, like fake crab.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, how's it going? You're going to eat me in a second, aren't you? Oh, I'm getting hungry now. You want to take a break real quick?
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Right. We're contractually obligated to mention Mark Cuban.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I would try chirps for sure. If the chirps people are out there listening and you want to send us some chirps, I will try them up. All right. So let's take that break. Okay.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, it's definitely on my to-do list.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
There's something called cricket flour, which is ground up cricket meal, basically a protein powder made from crickets, right? And it's anywhere from like $35 to $50 a pound for it. Yeah. It's very expensive. A lot of money. But it's really ironic because crickets require so much less space and food and water and and electricity.
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It's apparently the labor force that is the most expensive thing of any commercial cricket farm because it's just hard to find people who can do that, even though it's not exactly hard. It's just there's a lot of trial and error going on. So from what I saw, it's the labor force that's eating up most of the revenue or profits from
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
uh cricket farming well finding all those tiny people those three-inch people right it's not easy but there are startups also that are that are trying to sell like home cricket kits too yeah because that's part of the the whole idea where if you're gonna get people to supplement their diet well just let them grow them at home too so should we talk a little bit about this the farming
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, I saw that they have tried all sorts of different material and they keep going back to egg cartons. For some reason, crickets just love hanging out on egg cartons. Well, who doesn't?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, so many eggs, in fact, that they typically just throw most of them out. They'll keep some to grow a new generation from, but there's just so many that are just tossed out because they don't have the capacity yet to grow them. I think Bachhuber put it like he could be drowning in eggs if he's not careful.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
He probably really does wake up every night from the cricket chirping. Oh, I never really thought about that. That must be nice, actually.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. Roughly. Yeah. And if you can do this yourself at home, you just need basically two terrariums. You need to put them near heat because that is substantial. 85 to 95 degrees is hot, way hotter than you're going to keep your house. So you do need like a heat lamp of some sort. And you need water, a source of water, too. Those are the two most important things with raising crickets.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And the reason you have two terrariums is because in the one where you have like the 30 initial crickets, say, you're going to put a dish of soil and that's where they're going to lay their eggs. You want to check the soil every day for eggs. And when you find eggs, you take that little soil dish out and put it in the other terrarium.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And then that's where the eggs are going to grow and hatch again. And when the crickets hatch, they're fully formed. There's no larval stage, right? They don't go from like a maggot into a cricket. They're fully formed. They're just much smaller, right? Yeah. And according to Aristotle, it's about around here or maybe within the next like week or so that they're the most delicious.
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Yeah, Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animalium, actually he was writing about cicadas, that they're better before their last molt. So I guess that wouldn't apply to crickets. No, it would, because they molt. Did they? They do molt. He also said that females taste best after copulation because they are full of eggs. After Aristotle has copulated? Right. Or after the cricket happens.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Instead of a cigarette, you just eat a pregnant female cicada.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Or it'd just be like, oh, man, he just keeps going on and on about cicadas.
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Yeah, apparently they eventually freeze solid. So they spend about 24 hours in the freezer and then they're ready to be sold.
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Either ground into, say, like a powder or baked into a fried snack or sold to somebody else. But that's that. And I was like, do they wake up then if you heat them up in a pan? But apparently after 24 hours in their frozen solid, they're dead. Yeah. But to them, it's just like going to sleep forever. Yeah.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Supposedly, it does not count as vegetarian.
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Yeah, I saw crickets referred to as mini livestock, all one word. Yeah. I mean, they are a living animal, for sure. So I guess it's a personal choice, it sounds like. Yeah. Just like, you know, vegetarians eat fish sometimes, too.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I guess, but I've met plenty of vegetarians that are like, I'm a vegetarian and I eat fish. Leave me alone.
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We need a big bowl of chirps right here.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, those guys too. Wow, I'll bet they're not the sharpest tacks in the box anymore.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, you could cook almost anything with butter, salt and onions and you're fine.
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Yeah, I think that one guy who advertised on Craigslist. He did. Yeah, he sauteed with, yeah, onion, you're right. Penis, I think it was. Say what?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, and you want to clean them off, too, if you're cooking them from raw. I guess so. Because, I mean, they're bugs. That's something you want to do.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I guess so, yeah. But I think, like, if they're already prepared, you're probably okay. Because one of the big things that, like, Bockhuber did by getting FDA approval, like, now you can't just raise crickets on just anything, right? Like they have to be fed food that is okay for humans to eat too.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Which is something that the cricket farming industry is running up against because one of the big things proponents are saying is like, man, you could raise crickets. If you had large scale cricket farms, you could raise crickets on food waste. And if you do that, not only are you like raising your crickets, you're also getting rid of Food waste, you're composting basically, right?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Composting, that's the way you say it. But apparently the FDA is like, no, you can't feed things food waste, you nut job. You're going to eat it eventually. So there's big rules against it, but I think they're trying to chip away at that as well.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, not okay. Yeah, that's not right. So I saw in, I think, Popular Science, they had a little nutrition facts thing for crickets. It's so cute. They said for 100 grams of crickets, you're looking at about 120, 121 calories. Okay. Um, you've got, uh, about five and a half grams of carbs, 12.9 grams of protein. That is substantial.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Um, 75.8 milligrams of calcium and nine and a half milligrams of iron. That's also pretty substantial. Just from a hundred grams. I think they estimate that's about 20 to 22 crickets. Um, like a handful and a half. Yeah. Nice. That's pretty good. And the idea that if you are just raising crickets yourself, you can feed them your own kitchen waste. Yeah. And then eat the crickets yourself.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
There's also very low barriers to entry into cricket farming. So if you're not a wealthy person and you need to make some extra money, you could conceivably raise crickets yourself and then sell them at market too. It's like podcasting. Exactly. Exactly. I think that's it.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
All right. Well, that's cricket farming, everybody. Go make it happen. And in the meantime, you can look up this article on HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Smack them with a length of dry bamboo and say it again. Say it again.
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That was pretty great, Mary Jean. Your brother is a little social engineer, isn't he? I like that. And thank you also for the spoiler about Kevin Spacey becoming president on House of Cards. If you want to get in touch with us like she did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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Man, that's like how some people commit suicide. I know. You know? Yeah. And these guys are just doing it gratis for you.
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Yeah, I'll bet. I'm glad you made it, man. You look good. You look okay. Thank you. You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gaunt. I think you're okay.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I know. They put me to sleep. I'm glad we set that up. That was pretty good. That was one of our better segues, sadly enough. Thanks. Yeah, we are talking crickets, aren't we?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. They're, I mean, they're pretty easy to raise. Uh, they don't require much space. Uh, you can set up your own cricket farm at home. Um, And really, we should say the point of all this, the whole reason anybody would want people to start raising crickets at home is because the well, the the earth is about to collapse and our food supply is in in real danger. Right.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So I've got some stats for you, Chuck.
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So meat consumption per capita has increased into the developed world. Actually, it's doubled in the last 30 years. And that's thanks in no small part to the rise of the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, who have huge, massive populations. And as they entered the capitalist global economy, have generally become enriched by
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And the more money they have, the more meat a civilization tends to consume, at least these days, right?
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So that doesn't seem bad in and of itself until you look into what kind of resources it takes to actually raise meat. So you ready for this one?
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I'm afraid. To produce one pound of meat, that's a half a kilo, basically, of meat. Is this beef? Beef, sorry, yeah. It requires about 2,400 gallons of water.
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Which is, like, absolutely nuts. Even when you consider that not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering... you know, the crops that you feed to the cow. So there's double water consumption. But one of the problems, one of the reasons cattle, beef requires so much water is because you only consume 40% of the cow.
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So 60% of the water is going to sustain parts of the cow you're not even eating, right? So there's a lot of wasted water, even if your water delivery system is 100% efficient, right?
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And one-third of the world's adequate or high-quality cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years. Now, that's a huge problem, whether we are all vegetarians or not, because we're talking cropland. But we use way more cropland to feed our livestock than we do to feed ourselves, right?
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Something like 56 million acres of land are used to grow crops in the United States to feed animals. Four million are used to grow crops for human consumption. So there's a lot, a lot of resources that are used up just from meat-based diets, right? A lot of people say, well, just go to plant-based diets.
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And other people say, you can't get enough protein from plant-based diets, which apparently is not true from what I'm seeing. Other people are saying, fine, you want some protein? I got something for you. And it's crickets.
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Well, that's kind of heartening. Like if, if there does seem to be, if I guess if, if societies follow. Yeah.
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Well, there's a, I mean, it's definitely associated with wealth, right? If you can afford to eat a nice steak kind of indicates you have a certain amount of status in your society, right?
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I don't argue with that part. That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a 20-ounce ribeye for lunch. I mean, that was Don Draper, you know? Yeah. I never saw that show. I know. I never saw it. It's available. Where? Is it out there, really? I thought they erased it all. Yeah, they did. They said, that's it. It's done. Didn't he go become a lumberjack at the end? No, he did not.
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I actually never saw the end of that one.
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Apparently it's a $20 million industry already. Not bad. No, it isn't. And we should say that Bach Huber is one of several people who are into this, the idea of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming. Yes. And he's definitely one of the OGs for sure. His business was the first to get approval from, to sell crickets as food in the United States. You got FDA approval.
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Because the cricket industry actually is kind of old. Well, it's not too old, but I saw anywhere between 50 and 70 years old in the U.S. And they're raised to, say, feed fish for commercial fish farming or to grind up as a protein supplement for livestock feed. So people have been raising crickets for a while or to feed to, like, reptiles to sell them to pet stores.
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So there was an established infrastructure of cricket farming, but making the transition from selling it to feed to cows or fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly, that was a big step. And Bach Huber was the first one to take it in the U.S.,
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I should just say the reason I point out he's just one of many is because this HowStuffWorks article is basically like, here's my report on Kevin Bachhuber's TED talk. Sort of. You know?
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I think just he definitely deserves, you know, credit because he's leading the charge, but so are other people as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So I saw, so this article kind of says the standard 80% of the world regularly consumes insects as part of their diet. I saw that there's a food and agriculture organization, the UN organization report said something, it was more like about a third of the population rather than 80%, maybe like 30 to 35%. Which is still significant. Yeah, that's a big difference. It is.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And in the West specifically, the idea of eating bugs is not commonplace, right? And I actually saw a pretty good explanation for why. Like 13 of the 14 large livestock animals that are domesticated are found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas. Right. And those things, those animals provide not just meat, but also things like milk and clothing, everything basically.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So since these, what you would call Western countries, had access to these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source. And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, By definition, they had a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their exposure to bugs was bugs as pests.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So not only were bugs not edible, they were something that were just undesirable on their face. Oh, sure. So that led to the... It closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners. And so that came to be filled by a sense of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn what is disgusting from your cultural group.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
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Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Roland. So this is Stuff You Should Know, Scratching Edition. Yeah, this is one of many. You remember when we did yawning? Yeah. Well, that's the only one I can think of, where just researching something makes you do the thing you're researching. This definitely happened with this one.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
We'll just cut to the chase here. This is why everyone's listening. How do you scratch a niche correctly? You rub it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Were you biting down like a broomstick while you were doing that?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So we'll actually talk about this because you're raising some great points here.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
No, no, this is good stuff. We're going to analyze what was going on with your arm after this break. How about that? Sounds good.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Well, I'm glad. I've been wanting to do this one for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So what happened was something in the cement, and I'm not sure what it was, reacted chemically with the mast cells in your skin. Yeah. And histamine was released, right? Apparently. And so the histamine sent a signal through specialized nerve cells called C-fibers to
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right, right. So they use the same type of neural pathway as pain, but for itch, basically it's just like, no, these are just for itches only. Yeah. And it sent a signal through your spinal column. And in your spinal column, it released a neurotransmitter called gastrin-releasing peptide receptor. And so at the skin, the histamine would have released a neurotransmitter called what?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Okay. So that says itch signal coming your way along those C fibers.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Okay. It makes it to the spinal column. And I guess in about 2007, they found that there's another neurotransmitter in the spine that I guess accepts the NPPB.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
and says, I'm going to transfer this along up to the brain, that's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor. That shoots up to the brain, and it starts this cascade of activity, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Because when they, like after Handwerker said, hey, you know, itching's its own thing, these other researchers went to town and traced and figured out that there were specific types of itch receptors that were dedicated just to itches, right? Yeah, more germans. More Germans. And Swedes in this case. A couple of Swedes, but mostly Germans. Just for good measure. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And what they found eventually from tracing this pathway, they were able to follow it into the wonder machine. And apparently they made some people itch and would not let them scratch it. And then they had them lay down in an MRI. And they took a brain scan. And they found that there's this whole galaxy of stuff going on in your brain that combined is the itch sensation. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, we have to just play the whole thing, and then we'll talk about it for an hour after. That sounds good. Okay. I think it was a Brain Stuff video, wasn't it? Yeah, I watched it. Did it scratch your itch? Yeah, I watched it yesterday. Oh, okay. Nice work. Thank you very much. Now we finally arrive at what I was after.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right, and maybe go smoke some crack and eat some cake while you're at it. Because that'll help.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, that's an itch and then followed by the irresistible urge to scratch it, which apparently research has shown those two do not happen independently. They're part of a cycle.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
There's something called the itch-scratch cycle, right? And so you have an irresistible urge to scratch the itch. It's weird if you think about it. On the one hand, it makes sense where you sense that there's a really hot heat source that your hand is really close to. So you have an irresistible urge to pull it back. But it doesn't feel like an urge.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
It almost feels like an involuntary reflex, right? Yeah, I think it's that quick. A scratch is almost like I'm going to kill this itch. I can't wait to scratch it. Like you're almost exacting revenge on the itch for itching you, right? So a scratch is an irresistible urge where it's like pulling your hand back from a hot source or something is like an involuntary reflex. It just feels different.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right, and so you would think that itch receptors are super finely tuned and they cover just this one tiny micron of skin. As a matter of fact, no. Apparently an itch receptor can sense itch stimuli like three inches away from it on the skin.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
compliment yeah no it was great thanks man um so i guess the the point of all that is to say you guys are going you're going right my videos are the best uh that you're going to scratch you're going to feel an itch which is one of the great mysteries of itches it turns out we only very very recently have started to get a handle on
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So the itching is a good strategy if you think about, say, there's a mosquito on you and that's what's making you itch. When you go to scratch it, you're getting rid of the mosquito, maybe even smushed it or something like that. The problem is taken care of. The issue is that itch scratch cycle eventually becomes a vicious cycle because when you scratch, this is what they think is going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
This is another mystery with itches. We don't understand how scratching alleviates an itch or why we scratch really, right? What they think, the current hypothesis is that when you scratch an itch, you're stimulating other receptors in the area that aren't itch receptors.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right, exactly. It's sending feedback to the brain saying it's being taken care of. You can settle down with the itch. Gotcha. Right? I think. The problem is that neurologically or neurochemically, when you scratch an itch, You're activating those pain receptors in the area, pain pressure, that kind of thing. You're causing serotonin to be released. Right. Natural pain reliever, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Or at least mood enhancer. And what they found is that serotonin, among other neurochemicals, actually exacerbates the itch sensation. So your itch not only comes back, it gets worse.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
No. But I think the reason why it's possible that it could have that effect is supposedly scratching also activates your pleasure center.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
But there's different places where you're scratching on your body have different amounts of pleasure associated with them. Did you know that? I mean, I guess so. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, but, I mean, think about it. It's like if you scratch your clavicle. Who cares? It's nothing, right? But then you scratch, like, your head, right, above and behind your ear. It's great.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
what itches are yeah um and there's still plenty of mysteries left to it like for example it's bizarre and there's really no evolutionary reason as far as anyone can tell why just hearing about itches or seeing someone else scratch can make you itch right that's that's odd that's that's weird we're seeing a video of an ant crawling up yeah an arm will make you itch It will.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I think it crosses a line once they're potentially clawing away skin cells. I think that's no longer in the masseuse range or masseur range.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
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Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
But, I mean, think about it. If somebody is sitting there, you see a video of some schmo who's got his hand like near an oven and he pulls it away really quick, it doesn't hurt your hand. It doesn't make you feel like your hand is burned. No. That doesn't happen.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, I think the itching came after the shingles even. And at first, her physicians were like, well, I mean, you must have damaged some nerves in there. So, T.S. for you, I guess. Yeah. And then eventually, after treating it like all these different ways and it still being scratching… They said, okay, you're crazy. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And she said, well, whatever. I still have this itch. Do whatever you need to to treat it because I'm literally scratching this itch in my sleep. It was on her scalp, wasn't it?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah. Can you believe that? She scratched her scalp so much that she scratched through her skull. And she went into her doctor one day and said, they've got like this green fluid coming down. And then apparently the doctor didn't even say anything.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
It was just she or she was like, excuse me, went and called an ambulance and came back and said, please lay down and don't talk or move or do anything else. And they finally told her after she was at the ER that, You scratch through to your brain. Like, that's your brain you're touching right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
She said also in this article, she said that she had a, what do they call them? A roommate. Yeah. Okay, a roommate. Yeah. So she had a roommate while she was, like they treated it. Gave her a skin graft. And then she itched. She scratched away the skin graft. Oh, man. And then they finally were like, okay, you're going to an asylum. And she's like, do they even call it that anymore?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
You're just like, what a stupid idiot. That's what it excites, you know? I hope that guy's hand just burns clean off. That's what I think, right? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And they put her in this asylum and restrained her, like you said, while she was sleeping. And she had a roommate in there. She said in the article she heard didn't survive. He had scratched through his carotid artery and died, bled to death.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So... They never really got to the bottom of this. She finally got a doctor. The doctors were like, it's something that had to do with the shingles. This is what we think happens at our doctors, that the nerve endings around the area where she had shingles were so devastated by the shingles that there were just a couple of nerve endings left, and it just so happened that they were itch receptors.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, itch receptors. Bad luck. And that those were like really exacerbated by the fact that there was no other competing sensations. Oh. Ipso facto, there's your problem, right? So they said, well, we'll just cut the main nerve to your face and that should solve the problem. They cut the main nerve to her face. She said, thanks a lot. Yeah. And then the itch came back.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And she's like, you have to be kidding me. So finally she met a doctor who said, I don't think it's your receptors or the nerve transmission. I think it's your brain.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Not psychologically. I don't think it's a psychosis. I think that the actual itch signal in your brain is being set off without any stimulation or transmission going on. And apparently she was right. But then they were like, good luck treating that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
They said, a tool, a tool, come on. So the idea, though, that even if this woman was hypothetical, I think Atul Gawande is a pretty upstanding cat and didn't make this up. But even if, say, she was hypothetical, her problem, what the doctors initially thought it was, was that she had a neuropathic itch. Type of chronic itch.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
But then the doctor who apparently figured it all out said, no, no, no, it's a neurogenic itch, another type of chronic itch. And it has to do with whether it's the brain going off or the nerve transmissions going off. Either way, you don't actually have an itch, although you're experiencing the itch sensation.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
One of the best names in writing today. Yeah, that may be my new hotel name. Well, you may be thronged by science fans because that guy's pretty well-known.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right. Finally. And then again, they said, there's really nothing we can do to treat it. The one that they've got down pretty well is prureceptive. We've got all sorts of stuff to treat that because that's basically histamine is being released and your skin is itching. So you can treat histamines with antihistamines.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
The other three, you're in trouble, it turns out, as far as it stands right now. Maybe five or ten years from now, there'll be something. Apparently, there is a lot of movement right now on treating this stuff, but it's like they're having to figure out how to block some really otherwise important chemicals in the body, like that NPPB, right? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
You said it, Morgellons, right? And I said Morgellons?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I don't know. I read another article called Accidental Therapists. It's by a guy named Eric Broodman and it was published on a website called Stat. It's all about delusional parasitosis. but how it's treated sometimes by entomologists, like those extension services at universities.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Here in the U.S., state universities have what are called extension services where a scientist will basically be there for the public to come talk to about whatever. Usually it's like household stuff or farm stuff, something like that. And apparently entomologists frequently are approached with people who are like, I've got these bugs like crawling all over me. Here's a sample of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, but you have to be like, I'm not Brad Pitt. I'm Atul Gawande. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And it turns out it's like carpet fiber or something like that. And these people just can't stop itching or whatever. But it turns out they have a delusion. They don't actually have parasites. My question is, is that our understanding of it now and in five or ten years we're going to know that they had neurogenic itches and we just treated them like they were crazy even though they weren't?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And it's going to be like a real blemish on the history of neuroscience? Maybe. Or will this idea of psychogenic itches hold up?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I know what you're talking about. No, it's called the Road to Wellville. Is that what you mean? No, it's called Safe. Okay, I'll check it out.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, I mean, have you ever like stopped and thought about something and thought, there's the path to madness right there. I'm staring down it right now. I should probably not keep thinking about this.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, I mean, somebody can. Like, obviously, like, you know, if you're like, a little left, a little left, up, up, up. Yeah, see, I agree with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I think what they're saying is it doesn't have quite the same relieving properties as if you do it yourself.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So calm down for now, Atul's mom. We'll get to it eventually.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Unless you get somebody who really goes the extra mile and puts almonds on the tips to make it look like the claw.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
That's the difference between a baker who loves their job and one who's just in it for the money.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
A couple more things, Charles. Like we said, there's still plenty of mysteries around itches. Yeah. Why, say, does a feather tickle sometimes but itch other times? Uh-huh. Big question. They don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Only the Germans can save us. You got anything else? No, I don't. I don't either. Itching.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
No, I've been scratching the same spot, and it's starting to get a little tender, so I'm stopping.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
So I guess the moral of this one is, what would Tom Petty do? I'll ask him tomorrow. If you want to know more about itching or what Tom Petty would do, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
They had the itch to explain the itch. I guess so. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
That was a very nice email. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us like Ms. Alan did, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
It is. And actually, it's so on the money that anywhere you look in the medical literature, whenever they define itch, word for word, that's the definition they use. The Haffenreffer? Yeah. Although poor Haffenreffer doesn't get credit for it all the time. But that's the one. The only expansion of that that I've seen is that can occur anywhere on the body, which apparently is true.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Oh, I hadn't thought about that. I'm pretty sure that I was – I don't think I scratch as much as – I don't know. You raise a really good question.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right. I'm surprised that that's not already a TV show, frankly. Josh and Chuck scratch? Just being followed around.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Oh. You know? No one wants to see that. Well, that's probably why it's not.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
See, that's what I'm saying. I don't think I scratch this much.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, do you know what a falsifier is? Us? No, really, isn't that somebody who bears false witness or somebody who falsifies a document?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
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Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Sure, apparently. There's a special place in health for them, literally. Well, I guess actually not literally. Figuratively. Sure. Literarily.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, and that's still, as far as I know, the evolutionary hypothesis for why we experience itching. Yeah. And it's not just us either. Well, you're scratching like crazy now. It's found throughout the animal kingdom from us to apparently fish have shown scratching behavior. Yeah, that's crazy. Fruit flies. How does a fish scratch, you might ask? It rubs up against rocks. Yeah, it's kind of cute.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Right, because up to this point, up to actually 1987, everyone thought that an itch was just a low-grade pain stimulus. Yeah, I guess they were just happy with that. That's just what they thought it was. And Handverker said, you know what? Let's find out if this is actually true. I'm tired of sitting around just assuming this is fine. I'm Handverker.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And he got to Verker with his hands testing this, right? So what he... I know it was like Jonathan Strickland level puns. What he did was... This is just awful.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
He introduced using like electrical stimulation, I guess. He introduced histamine to skin cells, right? And histamine is a natural, I don't know if it's a protein, but it's a natural chemical, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
that the body releases in response to certain stimuli, say, for example, like a mosquito bite or something, and it triggers the inflammation and immune response in that area, right? So histamine is associated with itch, and it had been for a very long time. So this guy was using electrical stimulation to introduce histamine in increasing amounts in these poor study participants.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
And it went from barely noticeable to, this is a quote, the maximum imaginable itch. And they never felt pain.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
They said, please, please, for the love of God, stop. Let me out of this. And Handwerker just cackled and cackled. Right. These men with like black leather gloves were holding the participants down.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, that's nice, man. This would have been pre-Euro, I think. Oh, yeah. Even though the EU was around, I don't think the Euro was around in 87, right? No, no. It was the 90s?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Yeah, because, I mean, if it's not just a low-level pain sensation, then that means it's its own thing. And if it's its own thing, it probably has its own system, and we need to know more about it. So they got to study in it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I don't know because from what I was reading, and all of this was pretty recent stuff, there is a real unmet medical need in dealing and addressing chronic itch. Sure. Because most people who go through life just experiencing itch under normal circumstances, right? Let's say you or me, we're like in itch, yeah, they suck for a second and then it goes away.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Imagine it not going away ever, whether you're asleep or awake or swimming or in outer space or doing whatever, you're itching constantly. Supposedly, it has as much of a pronounced effect on a patient's life as chronic pain does. It's constant, persistent, and agonizing. And it's not being met or treated because it's not understood. So they're just now starting to get into itch research. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
I saw that somebody put it where pain research was about 20 years ago. So it's starting to really heat up, but we're still just starting to understand it. So I would think that they weren't looking to cure it. I think it was just pointed out that there was this whole branch of neuroscience that was totally not understood. So get to work, neurologists.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
You just go out there with your hands bandaged up just holding them up. Like how do you fight that on camera?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Tom Petty grins and bears it. He had a hardscrabble childhood. He sure did. It prepared him for that. I'm going to see him tomorrow night.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: How Itching Works
Well, it's a good question. Thanks. Do you remember when Costas had red eye at the Olympics and he was so dedicated to being the commentator, the anchor for the Olympics, they finally were like, you have to stop.
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The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
And if you can take 20 to 30 minutes completely away from thinking and being engaged, it really allows your body to sort of reset there. So anyways, I think in terms of stress, You know, that's an important thing to consider. And I talked about the business side. It's a similar thing, though, with parents, whether you're a business exec or not. I know a lot of moms out there.
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
They're with kids all day and they probably get zero alone time in an average week. And so one of the things I work with those moms are doing is getting three hours by themselves a week. And so they can walk through the mall or do lunch with the best friend or whatever it might be. This is really I think it's important for everyone to try and do.
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
you know, I know everyone has a different spiritual beliefs, but this is a, this is something, you know, taking a Sabbath or a day off from, from, from the beginning of time. And if you look in other cultures, both in Asian culture, European culture, there is a very long time in the middle of day where people are resting. So,
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
You know, in Europe, lunch is definitely longer, typically an hour and a half to two hours in some cases. In Asia, again, there's times for tea and those sort of things in the middle of the day. And so a lot of times I know business execs in the U.S. are working from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. I mean, that can be common.
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
And so, again, you can work as hard. I mean, in most cases, you can work really, really hard, be into things and give it your all. But you have to take at least one day a week off. And you have to schedule things throughout your day that get your mind off things and allow your body to rest. And so your mind, in a way, is a muscle. It has to work if you never rest it.
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
It's just like if you're trying to work your biceps over time, if you give it too much of a load, day after day after day, you're lifting these heavy dumbbells. Eventually, you're going to tear it. You're going to injure it.
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
and the same thing can happen with our with our with our minds and our emotions if we overdo it and so one of the things i've had my patients do over the years is get out a sheet of paper have them write down on the left side everything that is stressing them out and their work hours and kind of all you know we kind of brainstorm and write out all those things on the right shot side of the sheet of paper i have them write down all of the things they love to do things that bring them joy things that help take their mind off things
The Action Catalyst
CLIP: Managing Stress the Healthy Way
And, and whether that be going for a walk or going to the mall or watching a movie by themselves, whatever it is, we kind of write down all those things that they love to do. And so we go down the left side and we start figuring out, okay, how do we better deal with this situation? What can you get out of your life? Because a lot of times we have too many things we're doing.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
it i have seen josh what you think bro goofiest team thus far i'm gonna agree with trista and i'm gonna tell you and i'm gonna tell you why you trade luca donchik last year's leading scorer last year's finals runner up before the finals how was they talking about luca Like he was Michael Jordan. You're going to trade him for Anthony Davis when you could have traded him. I would have gave him OG.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
I'd have gave him Bridges. I'd have gave him Towns. I'd have gave him Leon Rose. I'd have gave him Patrick Ewing. I'd have... Take them all.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
That's what we should be talking about. Spike, take them all. Stephen A?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
Oops, oops. I can understand that. How you, like, can swing your arm and, you know, while a baton is in your hand, if the girl might have been too close to you. Did she hit her twice? She hit her twice.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
With a Celtic jersey. It ain't even hanging on me. It's right here.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
He's what we call a whore fan. Everybody can get some of Juju. He got every jersey. Bruh.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
And y'all boy lost to the Spurs. We're missing our engine right now. You really going to judge us over these games? Versus the Spurs, yes. Versus the Blazers, yes. In San Antonio, you're not really waking up to play the Spurs. We really a playoff aspirant. We know we better than the plan. As long as we can evade Giannis in that first round and people like that.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
Y'all don't have to see every top team. You're going to have to play somebody. I know the game. No, I don't. Giannis and Dame is like that combination nobody's seen yet, and I don't want to be the one team to find out that they them guys in the playoffs. I don't want to be that team again. You found out about Hallie Byrne.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
You know what it is about the P.J. Tiger pickup? When he come in the middle of the year, it's not the same thing as when you spent a training camp with some young kids and stuff like that. He just came, and when I look at him, I feel like that. You're just here to collect a check. You're not ready to slap nobody. I need somebody that's ready to slap somebody. Wait, wait, wait.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The Fuzz
Why we got a Knicks segment? I'm not understanding what's happening. Nah, I'm rolling out the red carpet for my dog. Nah, don't roll out the red carpet for me. This is what I'm talking about. And we can't come back at you because you got five teams and you're trying to act like you're a Celtics fan. You're not a Celtics fan. Come on, I'm a Celtics fan only. But with a Celtics jersey.
The LOL Podcast
Kate Raged and Slapped Kenzie!
And shin splints are in your leg. Wait, what are you calling it? A shin splint.
The LOL Podcast
Kate Raged and Slapped Kenzie!
Well, Miss Zillmer would not laugh, but Harper would definitely scream and then laugh. And then probably go proceed to put it in someone else's shower.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
I'm okay. I appreciate you taking the call.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
I guess I'll cut right to it. I've been following you guys for a little while, trying to get my finances on track. I've come to a
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
other substance abuse issues and i let that go i've been clean from all that and i just kind of picked up the bottle and i'm just tired of it tired doing the same things over and over again tired of relying on something to feel like i need it to function awesome i'm proud of you man i'm proud of you so uh how can we help
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Well, pretty much my insurance situation, the only way to get into treatment, it covers most of it except for about $6,000. Okay. $6,000 to $10,000, depending on location. So, really not trying to get into any more debt.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
But I want to take care of this.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
I've been calling and asking for scholarships. I've called hundreds of places probably.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Maybe a slight exaggeration, but I've been on the phone.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
No. That'll cover my insurance.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Because that's the cheapest thing I've been able to find is a $6,000 copay.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Yes, that's the cheapest thing I can get. I've applied for scholarships. Okay. They're saying they're not doing it.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
No. I mean, I've got a truck, but it's my work truck.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
No, I'm upside down in it.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Probably about 11 grand. What do you owe on it? About 200,000 miles on it. 12.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
No, I get what you're saying, but it's a truck with 200,000 miles on it, and not that many people are going to spend $11,000.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Nope. Unfortunately, no.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
And that's another thing I'm worried about. Finances bills keep coming.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
I've even been looking into detoxes, and it's still about that same number. Just for like a week, detox.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Oh, no, no, they will. They will do that. That's why I was no interest, but that's why I was on the call because I've already got other debt racked up.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate everything.
The Ramsey Show
The Hardest Decisions Are Often About Money & Relationships
Yes, I want to be. I mean, I'm tired of it.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
Hey, not much. I got a quick question for you guys and try to be brief. Uh, me and my wife, we just moved out to Phoenix, Arizona about a year and a half ago for my job. As we moved, she was job hunting and you know, she sees, she follows a lot of social media, some influencers and she's like, man, I can do this. So she was kind of doing that on the side, kind of fun, creative, um,
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
thing for her to do while she was job hunting. And a year and a half later, she's kind of blown up all over social media. I mean, she's about to hit a million subscribers, a little over on some TikToks and Instagram. And we're starting to get some pretty big brand sponsorships, some ad revenue, you know, just stuff like that that's reaching out to us, people asking about doing a podcast with her.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
We haven't said yes to any of this. We don't know how it's really going to affect our family's life. I know you guys kind of handle this. We don't know if it's like, oh, is this something that's going to work out well for us? Do we pursue this? And it's a lot of money that some of these brands are throwing at us or people. What's a lot of money? How much money? People asking podcasts.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
Go ahead. We haven't cashed in anything yet. We're just kind of on standby because we don't know how it's going to affect our family. If we want our family lives on social media, we're starting to have kids. But we've had podcast people reach out and say, hey, let's do an episode, 75,000. We've had ad revenues say, hey, make a video with our podcast.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
Product in it will give you $10,000 or $15,000, and that's for a 30-second video on TikTok. That number is real.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
That's what we don't know. People who have a podcast want her to come on.
The Ramsey Show
Quit Trying to Outearn Your Stupidity!
Yes, sir. Like how lucrative is this? Is it worth doing it? And you guys, I know you guys are all over social media. And so how has it affected your family with people knowing about your lives and trying to, you know, I don't, we just don't know. Is this something we want to dive into and explore or is this going to ruin our lives type of thing?
The Ramsey Show
It’s Time to Stop Surviving and Start Taking Control
What's up? Well, I'm planning on proposing to my girlfriend in a couple months. Nice. And we're both debt-free. Okay. And I'm starting to think about our future in terms of finances. We both agree we need to be on one checking account, and we're going to do everything together. I'm going to try to do everything the right way.
The Ramsey Show
It’s Time to Stop Surviving and Start Taking Control
And right now the type of boyfriend that I am, I like to do a little surprises here and there, maybe surprise her, you know, one day with, uh, flowers or decorate the house and make her feel special. However, how can I still, keep those surprises if we're both on the same checking account. Got you. And have her not question, why are you spending $1,000?
The Ramsey Show
It’s Time to Stop Surviving and Start Taking Control
a gift from me if we're still both depositing our direct deposits into the same account? Sure. Of course it is.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
Good. How are you doing, Dave?
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
Zebula, North Carolina, a little small town just east of Raleigh.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
$203,400. Love it. How long did that take? 63 months, right at 5.3 years.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
And I'm a systems analyst at a transportation company.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
I'm very thankful to say very little of it has to do with us. So we both were raised with parents and even grandparents that modeled biblical principles for how to handle money from a very early age. So they modeled giving. They modeled investing. They modeled living on less than you make, living on a budget, and just generally managing God's resources well.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
And I'll give you a short story that illustrates what I mean. So I grew up with a dad that I've always called the boring version of Dave Ramsey.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
He has a little more hair, but you're a lot more fun to listen to. And I remember one story in particular. He went to a yard sale and haggled with this poor elderly lady for a nutcracker. She had the nutcracker marked at 50 cents, and he walked up, and the nutcracker had a chipped tooth, so he got that thing for a quarter. Well, there you go. That's how you do it. I love it. That's fun.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
And then if I can say it, so and then college, this is where the Ramsey organization comes in. So I at college found your videos. I'd never heard of you before college. And FPU made such a big impact on me, even though I hadn't actually taken the course. As soon as I graduated, our church started offering it. And I think I took it three times because I liked it so much.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
And then Rebecca attended the last one. And we also led a couple of small groups. And so FPU was a big part of that. So our story is a success story, not so much because we're fantastic or amazing, but because the people around us are fantastic and amazing. And you, Dave, and the entire organization are certainly a big part of that. And we cannot say thank you enough.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
Good. Rebecca totaled, well, actually a deer totaled our only half-decent car last Thursday. Oh, wow. So we lost our only decent car. So I looked up the Kelley Blue Book value of our two remaining vehicles, an old truck, my grandfather's truck, and the first car she ever bought, and it's like $4,900 between two vehicles. Yeah, you need to upgrade.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
We're going to get anything that allows us to have enough confidence such that we're not praying on the way to Ramsey Solutions.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
So I've been very blessed to get to know a 99-year-old World War II combat veteran over the past few years. He was my grandfather's best friend. And he told me once, once you become emotionally invested in something, it becomes virtually impossible to change your mind.
The Ramsey Show
Normal Is Comfortable, but Comfort Doesn’t Build Wealth
And so I think the key to getting out of debt is simply becoming emotionally invested in it, allowing the stuff to drop from your head to your heart. You know, rain that falls on grass doesn't actually do anything. It's the water that soaks down to the roots that causes life change.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
Good. So I've got a couple questions. So first off is my wife and I recently moved to a remote town in Idaho where there is no major companies and there's no handyman up here either. So my wife and I decided this year we're on baby step two currently. And we've kind of decided that this year might be a good year for me to start a handyman LLC. I've already got all the tools to do it.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
The only thing that would cost me out the door is the initial startup through the state for the LLC paperwork and the filing fee and all that. So that's roughly about $500. The downfall is I'm having a really hard time finding business insurance as well as the only thing it would cost me running this LLC is my time and my fuel. That's all it would take. So those are my two main questions.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
Is starting an LLC at this point in our life a good idea, a bad idea? And then as far as business insurance, I don't know what to do anymore.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
Okay. So I've been told by multiple companies that because I am too much of a jack of all trades, that they won't cover it because of the fact there's too many things that I can do. They're telling me that I need to specialize in one or two specific skills if it's But the downfall is if I specialize in flooring, then I can't do trim. If I do trim, I can't do painting, stuff like that.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
Yeah, no, it's fine. So I could get my general contractor's license. It's not overly expensive, but they do require you to put down one or two specialized skills specifically instead of having a large array of certain things.
The Ramsey Show
Your Future Self Deserves Better Choices Today
Well, there's a lot of flooring up here that needs done as well as everybody around here has got a piece of wood busted, broken somewhere. So it's, I mean, it's a little old mining town in Idaho.