Good Job, Brain! - 263: Hard Mode

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Put on your hard hats and gulp down hardboiled eggs because it's all trivia about things that are hard. How about a super duper hard quiz for the most discerning trivia experts? (It's okay to feel discouraged, it's supposed to be hard.) Discover how the exoskeleton of a beetle tempted the British rule to make some bad decisions. What is the hardest puzzle on earth? What makes it "hard"? And take a knee as you get iced by some cold, hard facts about hard seltzers. ALSO: Largest snowman dispute For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, painstakingly patient pacing patrons of paleobiology while paying for paintballs. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 263. and, of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your squishy and squeezable squabling squires, squaring away squiggles. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris.

There's some commotion. There has been a bit of a, let's call it a snowball fight that we've learned from our Lope Trotters group, Colin in the last episode. One of your questions about the world's tallest. slash biggest snowperson. Snowperson. Yes. I had scarcely just finished telling you guys on the show that Olympia in Bethelmain was the world's tallest snowman.

Two days later, Karen, you said, uh-oh, Colin, commotion from lobetrotters. And you pasted a link to an article from the Lewiston Sun Journal title of the article is, Olympia no longer the world's tallest snowman and I was like what dang it what the heck is going on so I read the article and it's talking about how a team of snow builders in Austria in February 2020 apparently built a giant snow person named Recy nearly 125 feet tall which would make it two feet and change taller than Olympia, the snowwoman. So now I read the article and I was like, okay, all right, really? Like, is it, I want to see Guinness. I want to see that this is certified, right? Because you sourced it from Guinness.

So the very first thing I did, I went back to the Guinness website. I'm like, what the heck? Nope, the page still says, World Solis Snowperson, good old Olympia Snowwoman, Bethel. So I was like, what's going on here? So I entered into sort of a web news, circulate. similarity situation where I found a lot of articles sourcing each other, but I did not find any kind of primary source. And I certainly did not find anything official from the Guinness Book of World Records people on their website. Nothing I could find. So I was digging and digging

and digging. You can't hide a giant snow person. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this thing was a figment of someone's imagination or like a hoax. Oh, I'm sure they did it. A hoax. No, I mean, there are photos and I saw photos of recently now. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, in my opinion, I'm just going to say his hat was very tall. I'm just going to leave it at that. I'm just going to say like, okay, you're going for the record. Like, it's, it's tallest snow person, not snow person with tallest hat, right? You know what I'm saying? Anyway, so the article you sent me quoted MSN. I dug a little bit. I could not find the MSN article, but I found a lot of other articles all sort of quoting each other. I found a Reddit thread talking about Risi holding the record for tallest

snowman ever with a pretty good picture of Risi. So I was not satisfied. Eventually, I ended up on an article. You found him. From the Bangor Daily News from January of this year, Maine still holds the world record for the tallest snowman. What happened to the other one? Good question, Karen. All right. So in this article by Emily Burnham goes into great detail. I will spare you recapping the whole history of Olympia, Snowwoman, go listen to the last

episode. We covered it in some good detail. The people in Austria built this thing. They did say that they applied to Guinness to have the record certified. And at that point, it sort of just got a life of its own on the web. Like the stories were kind of quoting something that was not in fact official, all right? According to the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, the Guinness people did not verify the record. And they later said that in fact their attempt was disqualified.

As far as Guinness is concerned, Olympia was, is still the record holder. for World's Tallest Snowperson. I found a small article on Bethelmain.com under Bethelman.com slash snowpeople, talking about how Bethelmain was home to the World's Tallest Snowman in 1999, topped their own record in 2008. In February of 2020, it was widely reported that our record was beaten by people in the town

of Donner-Spokwold, Austria. Many news outlets from around the world shared this information. However, we learned later that year that the Austrian record was disqualified. We never learned the reason why we were simply told, quote, if it's in the book, you still have the record. It is impossible to correct the entire internet, so we'll just say it here. Our record still stands.

So that is the voice of Bethelman carrying the torch for a limit. be a snow woman still world record holder despite no mic drop yeah snow mic drop yeah i cannot fault our diligent listeners for for being led astray because there was quite a bit of coverage on the internet so we just don't know why it was disqualified it could be it could be they didn't get a checker or auditor it could be the hat yeah those records might be sealed right i'm gonna keep on digging for sure if i if i if i uncover the dirt here i will let you know precisely why it was not certified. It'd be the hat. It'd be the hat. It could be the hat. Um, and listeners, I have one quick, um, actually language changes. Last episode, I talked about kaffir lime leaves. And I was

notified that now people call it a macrute lime, macrute lime leaf. Because kaffir is a not nice word in South Africa. All right. Good to note. that. Macrut lime, not kaffir lime. All right, that was a lot of ado. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here I have a random trivial pursuit card. It is pop culture too. Okay. You guys have your barnyard buzzers. Let's answer some questions. Blue Edge for TV. What reality show required host Phil Keegan to fly the equivalent of 10 laps around the earth in a year. Chris.

The Amazing Race. Correct. Sorry if I pronounce his name wrong. All right. Pink Wedge for fad. What libation when mixed with rum and whipped cream do Viennese call a fiacer? Oh, no. Colin.

Coffee. It is coffee. Oh, yeah. Viennese coffee. Nice. Yellow Wedge, Buzz, what star of Desperado claims she once told men who'd kidnap her, kill me. I believe in reincarnation. I'll just come back.

Wow. What a strange question. What a strange question. Desperado. Desperado. Okay. Chris. Selma Hayek.

Yes. Oh. Sorry. Selma Hayek. It popped into my head and I'm like, hmm, I think there's a reason that's there. Purple Wedge music. What's Ozzy Osbourne's given name? Oh, sure.

Yeah. Does Sharon ever call him that on the Osbournes? Does she ever... Colin. Just first name. Oh, okay. Yeah. Stuart.

That's a pretty good guess. No. Aloysius. It is John. Oh. Here we go. Green Wedge for movies. What Shrek 2

character coughed up the most hairballs. Chris. It would have to be Pussing Boots. Yes, correct. You're correct. It better be Pussing Boots. Because he's a cat. Right.

Yeah. Okay. Last question. Sports and Games. What Maxis computer game lets you build your own wild animal park? Ha ha. Oh. That's a good question.

fallen. I'm not going to overthink it. Is it just Sim City? Incorrect. Okay. So there's Sim City. There's Sim Farm, but it's not Sim Farm. It's not Sim. I don't think it's Sim Zoo. I don't think there's anything called Sim Zoo.

Wild Animal Park. Sim, it's like a preserve. Safari. Was there a Sim Safari? Sim Safari. Really? Okay. All right. Good guess. All right. Good job, Brains. Crazy. So today's episode, weird topic, our topic, our theme is hard, H-A-R-D, hard.

What was the inspiration? Well, listeners, you might, you will never know, but this season I've done some, we've recorded some quizzes that I have concocted, and it turns out they were too hard. Hard to a point where it's like listening to it is like not really fun. Punishing. This happens. That's okay. So I was like, oh, that'd be an interesting thing.

Just things that are difficult or things that are physically hard. So this week, we're going on hard mode. All right. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, Karen, you said it. I mean, sometimes those quizzes are too difficult. I sometimes feel like maybe my quizzes are too. easy and if this is the hard mode episode i decided to create a very very hard quiz um this quiz

is hard it is difficult i really want to level things up here on good job brain um it's i'm going to have some questions that are just absolutely nails hard difficult questions and if if you guys can get these i'll be very impressed now there is a theme so maybe the theme will be able to help you here but you know good luck figuring it out so here we go it's the hard quiz it's a right now quiz okay get your piece of paper uh 12 questions in the quiz get ready for some absolute total stumper questions you're laughing you're laughing but i'm going to destroy you with i'm nervous now i'm legitimately nervous if and when you hear these questions and you're like, I have no idea, you know, don't, don't worry.

It's a really hard quiz. Like, don't rack your brain about it. Just move on. Maybe it'll come to you. All right. That's all, you know, maybe, maybe it'll come to you later, but probably not because it's too difficult. Theemed quiz, you're writing them down.

Here we go. Question number one, what was the title of the allegorical play written by Bulgarian playwright, Jordan Radikoff in 1974. What was the title of the allegorical play written by Bulgarian playwright Jordan Radicoff in 1974? Jordan Radikoff. Oh, my goodness. Jordan, sort of like Jordan with a Y, Radikoff, like Radish, but with a D, K-O-V at the end.

1974. So don't put any of his allegorical plays that prior to that. Yeah, it's Winnowing them down is the By Bulgarian playwright Fratikov. Wow. So,

okay, well, you're writing these down. So here's the thing. I don't want to see it. We'll, you just write it down basically because it is a theme round. So, you know, write it down and just,

you know, keep it safe and then we'll see at the end who's doing what. So question number two, assuming you already wrote down your answers. Yes. Question number two, what was the title on the seventh track

of indie rock Band, the Apple Seed cast's 2006 album Peregrine. So just in case you didn't get that. Question number two, this is trivia. This might come up one day. What was the title of the seventh track of indie

rock band The Apple Seed Cast 2006 album Peregrine? Okay, write down your answers. Question number three. Question three, what was the town in England where Gold Prospector, William Billy Barker, was born?

It's the town in England where Gold Prospector William Billie Barker was born. Question number four. What was the Finnish metal band best known for its 2008 studio album? Anthems for the Rejected. Finnish metal band best known for its 2008 studio album, anthems for the rejected. That's question four. Question number five, what island off the coast of Scotland boasts St. Adrian's Chapel as well as sightings of over 285 bird species.

Oh, name of island? The name of the island. Island off the coast of Scotland. It has St. Adrian's Chapel as well as sightings of over 285 different bird species. That's amazing, isn't it? That's question five. Question six. I hope you're, maybe you've got one or two of these.

I mean, half of them, half of them for sure. Half of them for sure. Question number six. Question six, what mountain played host? to the ski and snowboard events of the 2006 California Winter Games. Oh, my God. Just think back to watching the 2006 California Winter Games on TV. It's the mountain.

It's the mountain that played host to the ski and snowboard events. Okay, all right. Question number seven. What is the gamer name, the gamer handle, of professional Starcraft player Park Sung June? That's question seven. What's the gamer name of professional Starcraft player Park Sung June? All right. I'm sure the theme is starting to emerge here as you're writing down your answers.

Question number eight. Question number eight. What 1986 Eric Clapton album featured It's in the Way That You Use It. What 1986 Eric Clapton album featured It's in the Way That You Use it? Yes. Question 8. 86 Eric Clapton album featuring It's in the way that you use it. Write down that answer. Question number nine. What 1978 Earth, Earth, Wind and Fire song. was later added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Got it. Question number nine. What 1978 Earthwind and Fire Song was later added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry? Question number 10.

What 1917 Revolution put Lenin and the Bolsheviks into power in Russia? Question number 10. What 1917 Revolution put Lenin and the Bolsheviks into power in Russia? Question number 11, what is the letter N in the nato phonetic alphabet? Question 11, what is the letter N in the nato phonetic alphabet? Yeah, all right. Question number 12. I know you're never going to get all the questions in my extremely hard quiz, so I'm going to give you question number 12.

Question number 12, this was the second of several hit singles from the 1995 album by alternative rock group collective soul. wow the second of several hit singles from the 1995 album by alternative rock group collective soul is question number 12 so as i said this is a really hard quiz a lot of really hard questions extremely difficult trivia there is a theme so in about five more seconds i'm going to ask you to put your answers up and We will see how many points each of you has gotten. Five, four, three, two, one. All right, answer sheets up. Let's see. Perrin says, question one, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Collins says the same thing.

Yes, absolutely. January, allegorical play by Bulgarian playwright, Jordan, Rack. of Coffin' 74, February, 7th track on indie rock band, the Appleseed cast 2,000 album Mary Green. March. Did you even listen to that song? No, absolutely not. Have you? Three, town in England, where Gold Prospector William Billy Barker was born.

That is March. April is the finished metal band best known for its 2008 studio album, Anthems for the Rejected. Island of May, off the coast of Scotland, really famous. they've seen over 285 puffins and all kinds of stuff they go there to watch seabirds like all the time they've got video cameras set up on it because so many different seabirds show up there June Mountain in California June Mountain popular popular place for skiing schoolboarding number seven weirdly enough ironically enough you have a person named June Park Sung June his gamer name is July 86 Eric Clapton album August August by Eric Clapton 86 It's in the way that you use it

Question number nine may have been a bit too easy Looking back It was later to the library of Congress's National Recording Registry was September The October Revolution put Lenin and the Bolsheviks into power in Russia Letter N in the NATO phonetic alphabet is November And the second of several hit singles From the 95 album by Collective Soul

was December so you guys that was somehow incredible what a doll quiz my extremely hard quiz the light went on when I saw Karen's light go on Karen's light went on I think and for in September when you had Earthwind and Fire Karen's like oh got it and then I'm like how could she get it from wait a minute 12 questions and then it was good and it was like you had just good Good level design there, Chris, because it was like, you had the inkling, and then the very next question lets us confirm that we have it correct. Like, okay, October Revolution. That was, that was great. That was good.

I mean, not that this is a work post-mortem on a project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would probably keep all of the questions super hard and obscure and left September in. Very nice. It was more of like, I wonder what would happen if I did this. Yes. Yeah. Not me. I'm not saying this is me. But like, honestly, how many of these would be actually guessable questions? All right. I mean, like, September, yeah, you know, October Revolution, November, December. So I feel like those last four definitely. Eric Clapton, that's totally getable. You could know the gamer. He also didn't word the questions in a regular trivia, the way that we usually would word, right? That we would put in clues or insinuate.

Oh, of course. Oh, yeah. You on purpose is like, what is this? 1974 obscure play. Yeah, I think like an eight would be a very impressive, just pure trivia score. Like if you had enough time. I'd be blown away because so many of these things are like the absolute, like, well, that's the thing. You know, it does really go to show you that there really is an art to writing a trivia question. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Literally just asking a question about something. It's, you know, it should be, it should be getable. There should be clues in it that would lead. the average person to sort of be able to try to figure it out if they've heard of it before you should never feel like we're just floundering around yeah no that was great thank you for yes thank you for coming along on the on the troll quiz it's hard to in some ways articulate what makes a bad question until you hear a bad question and as you noted you know at one point on early show chris like we could easily stump each other 10 out of 10 like like each of us has

such obscure knowledge that we could if we wanted to just come in and just stump each other but that's not fun for anybody involved and you know yeah yeah yeah all right good job thank you chris oh sure we're warmed up now at least yeah from rage all right well i'm gonna ask pop another pop quiz hot chat for you guys off the dome on the subject of world history What color do you associate the British military with? Red. Red. Yes, why, Colin.

Red coats. Red coats. Yeah, going way back to our nation's fierce revolution. For a really long time, the British military used to wear red as part of their military uniform. Obviously, it was phased out by the 20th century. Like, they changed into khakis, which was way more. makes way more sense. And now, you know, British military is in camo.

It's kind of similar to all of the militaries all over the world because it's effective. The British infantrymen in most military wore these iconic red coats between 16th and 19th century. So I had a good run. For today's topic on hard, initially I wanted to do something about shells. I talked about lobsters a lot. I was thinking about like seashells, you know, having a hard extest. maybe animals that have shells like tortoises or like exoskeleton like insects in creatures with their skeletons on the outside exoskeleton so I'm going to talk about the Kachanil

that sounds dirty a C-O-C-H-I-N-E-A-L Kachanil you've probably heard of this before it's a beetle yeah and it's a pretty popular kind of fun fact that shows a on the internet or shows up on TV, especially when we talk about weird food ingredients or additives, right? Before the time of synthetic dyes, people relied on natural sources for coloring, for dyes, for pigments. And so Cotanil is a beetle that they grind up the female beetles and they mix it with other chemicals to produce dye, also known as parmine. So red dye, this is what we currently call natural red for. Natural. So Red 4 is made up of processed, ground-up, cochineal beetles, their shells, their bodies mixed up with other chemicals.

I know it makes sense, but yeah, when I see natural, I think, you know, oh, it's from plants or something like that. I don't think it's from beetles. Oh, yeah, it's like, oh, the skins of berries. That is natural, yeah. Natural Red 4 is used to, it used in a lot of different ways, cosmetics, but mostly it's used to color meat to add a bit of, a little bit of a pop to meat products, especially like salami or cured meats to have that like deep, vibrant maroon red. And it's thermally stable, which is why people use it because it doesn't really change that much. It's not volatile. When we hear about the Carmine beetle or

the Cocheneal beetle, it stops there. Like, oh, did you know your food has ground up beetle? How gross. And like the trivia stops there. But I've discovered a story so fascinating. I just had to share. So the female cochineal beetle, they're not like Roman around everywhere and anywhere. Right. Like you can't just find them. Not as many as it would be otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like they specifically only feed on prickly pear cactus. Prickly pear cactus. They're kind of like the flat upside down to your drop shape cactus. We're growing on top of each other. They only feed on prickly pear cactus, which means cochineal beetles only

live where prickly cactus cacti live. And this is South America, Central America, in the southwest region of the United States. In the late 1700s, Spain and Portugal had a

monopoly on Cocheneal red dye because they had colonized most of South America. Yay! Hey. Not yay. Boo. And so, of course, Spain, Portugal, controlling the regions that have this cactus, thus controlling the cochineal beetle. And of course, the Brits, the British rule was like, hey, we want to control our own red dye source too.

Our military coats are red. We need this red dye. We need our own source of red dye. And so the Brits tried to start their own carmine red dye industry. And so they looked around, they're like, all right, what we got? Okay, what countries do we have? Australia. Oh, great. Australia, kind of like a desert, has desert-like conditions. Yeah, it's hot.

It's hot. It's dry. Let's make that our HQ for farming these beetles. Let's grow a bunch of cactus there. What's the worst that could happen? Yeah. So, Mr. Captain Arthur Philip traveled to Brazil. collected some beetles, collected some a beetle-infested cactus, and sailed on over to Australia.

This plan epically failed because, first of all, the bugs just all died. Second of all, they were right. The prickly pear cactus loved the conditions. They thrived in the conditions. The cactus loved their new Australian digs so much that it started to take over. Oh, no. Fields of this cactus. Like, you can't even, you can't get anywhere.

Like, it took over 100,000 square miles, almost the size of New Zealand in Australia. It's from the Queensland government. And I quote, acknowledged as one of the greatest biological invasions of modern times. Oh, my goodness. and subsequent spread of prickly pear into Queensland in New South Wales

had infested millions of hectares of rural land rendering it useless completely useless so useless that people just abandoned their land

I can't imagine doing now The prickly pears have it now It's too late Yeah Well what do you do So clearly the solution is Let's introduce

another bug that eats the cactus Yes And I don't It's so funny because I feel like Australia So so many times throughout the 10 years of the show Australia always has these The frog eats the fly

The cat eats the frog And the dog eats the cat What is it with Australia? Yeah They introduce this moth Called this is the scientific name Cacto blast us To blast some cactus

This cactyl blastus moth introduced in 1926. So this moth, it's not native to Australia. They had to get this moth from Argentina. They introduced at first 3,000 moth eggs. In the next generation, there was 2.5 million eggs. And they were distributed, and they ate the cactus into pulpy mess. Wow. And brought it under control.

However, life finds a way. However. They needed Jeff Goldblum to tell them not do any of this. Yes. Okay. Now they're finding new cactus varieties that aren't very attractive to the moths anymore. And so, yeah, so this is just like this really is the nature's game of the old lady who swallowed a fly. Yes.

Yes. Yes. You end up with super moth resistant cactus all just because the British wanted more red coats. How crazy is it? that. Thanks, England. Thanks for throwing a wrench into the ecosystem of Australia. Wow. Just kidding. I love you, England. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. When planning for life's most important moments, sometimes the hardest part is simply knowing where to start. That's why we're here to help. When you pre-plan and prepay a celebration of life with us, every detail will be handled with simplicity and

professionalism, giving you the peace of mind that you've done all you can today to remove any burden from your loved ones tomorrow. We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at Dignitym memorial.ca. The Dignity Memorial brand name is used to identify a network of licensed funeral cremation and cemetery providers owned and operated by affiliates of Service Corporation International. When Johan Rawl received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later. Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was was a warning, delivered to the Heshen Colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces.

The next day, when Rawl lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter was found, unopened in his vest pockets. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh well, this is the constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at constantpodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Our trivia.

Good job, brain. And we're back. Today, we're talking about things that are hard, physically or mentally, or maybe emotionally. This has been a tough show. Those are not mutually exclusive. I'm feeling a little tender right now. Yeah. I think talking about what makes a good trivia question is a good.

segue into what I want to chat about. In prepping for the show, I was really fixated on the idea of hard puzzles, right? And, you know, not to get too philosophical, but we're going to get a little philosophical. What does it mean when we say a game or a puzzle? Like, what do we mean? We say it's hard.

It's one of those words, it seems so intuitive. Oh, that was really hard. Well, what do you mean? What do you mean it was hard? It's like, oh, Colin. I know you don't use Facebook, but me and Chris are on Facebook. And in the lop-trotter's discussion, there was a very interesting connections puzzle the other day. And people in the group are talking about it.

And it's so divisive. I'm in the camp where I was like, that was so hard. I got it, but I was sweating. There's some people like, oh, I got it right away. And I think that sweat, the sweating, I don't know how to describe that, but I need that sweat. aspect to make a puzzle feel hard. Oh, like I got that little skin flush. Okay, it's interesting.

But I mean, I think it's also interesting that you contrasted it with people saying, oh, I got it right away. Like I feel like however we want to add the middle steps, it comes down to time. When we say a puzzle is hard on some level to be a little reductive, we mean it took a long time. You know, like it's it's almost as simple as that. And that can take a lot of forms, meaning I had to think about it for a long time. Or it was very physically precise. And a jigsaw puzzle, I've seen these.

You guys probably have, you know, it's hundreds of pieces and they're all one color. It's kind of tedious, but it's solvable. It's just you've got to kind of work your way through it. That's hard, even if it's not taxing your brain. Yeah. So I was kind of going with the angle of puzzle in some sense is harder the longer it takes to saw. Then I remembered back to a story that I first came across about a year ago, maybe a little bit more. I want to tell you about a puzzle that was commissioned really by a man

named A.J. Jacobs. And you might recognize his name. It might sound familiar. He's the right for Esquire, right? He also has written a lot for mental floss, among other places. So before we get to exactly what his puzzle is. Have you heard the term of a generation puzzle? Have you heard this term before in the puzzling world? Do you remember when we were at Sporkel Khan some weeks ago? The three of us we got into a conversation with someone else about Rubik's cubes and speedcubing. Yeah, yeah. You know, like I'm not even going to say what the world record is. I think the last time I mentioned on the show was broken the very next day. Even if you're a speed cuber, you know your path forward. It's, it's, it's, you're just working, it's algorithmic, you're just working your way through it.

So, all right. So a Rubik's tube is three by three, right? So imagine if you had a nine by nine cube, okay? There's still an algorithm to solve it, but it's just more steps. Okay. So you're still following a process, but the nine by nine cube is, by some definitions, it's harder because it takes you longer, all right? So you can kind of see where I'm going here.

So imagine, let's stick with Rubik's tubes for a minute here. Imagine a 100 by 100 side cube, right? Or a thousand by a thousand. You know, let's leave aside the physical manufacturing concerns, right? It's going to take you longer and longer and longer and longer to solve this. And eventually, even if you're following the checklist, you're going to reach a Rubik's tube that is longer than a human lifespan. So we're starting to get sort of a rough analogy of the idea of a generation puzzle. So there is a class of puzzle makers and puzzle solvers who, in recent years, it's gotten more popular, but it's an old concept of a puzzle that might take a very, very, very long time to solve, such that you might pass it down to your children.

You might start working on this generation puzzle, and you know what, my time's up. I got part of the way through it. Here you go, kids. Yeah, but you just don't have closure. And it's not for everybody, Karen. I know that you are the kind of person. I know that you're the kind of person who wants to see it through to the end. There are some very, very fun artisan-level, well-made puzzles for sale that fall into this category.

Kubia games, for one example, they sell a puzzle called the, this is the name of the puzzle. It's a puzzle lock. It comes in the shape of like a padlock, all right, and your task is to open it. It is called the $341,718,750 move generation puzzle lock. It sells for over $400. It is not a cheap toy. It is a work of art as well as a generation puzzle. This is their own description.

If you're buying this, be warned. There are a minimum of 341 million, et cetera, moves required to open this lock. And it involves sliding, you know, little knobs, basically, and just the correct sequence. As the name implies, it might take a generation or two to open the lock. Assuming you work around the clock, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and average two seconds per move, the puzzle will still take you more than 21 years to solve. No, get out of here. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't. I cannot. Some people would say like, oh, this is beautiful. It's not like, I mean, I will fess up that like as a kid, I certainly took the stickers off a Rubik's Cube and kind of solved it the cheap way when I would get frustrated. You know, there's no, there's no equivalent here on the 341 million and change move generation puzzle lock.

You've got to just work the process. You got to just do it and you do it until you're tired. And then someone else in your family maybe takes over the next shift. And it's almost more a kind of meditation exercise on what does it mean to solve a puzzle? What does it mean to work through a puzzle, knowing that you'll never see the end of it? Would you classify this as hard, though? That's a really good question. That's a really good question.

It just sounds like it's a lot of busy work. On some level, isn't that where anything crosses over from being easy to, you know, like, Chris, Right. For example, you know, in the world of level builders, games that have custom level builders, as you well know, there is a whole community, many communities of people, their goal is to make just the most grief-inducing, punishing level possible. And what is solving one of those other than just memorizing the correct sequence, right? It's just trial and error until you get the correct sequence down and then you punch it. And then you're often very mad when you finish and you're like, thank God I did it, I never have to do it again. That's hard. That's a kind of hard, right? So yeah, I mean, I will leave it up to you to decide if you think that a puzzle that takes 40 years to solve is hard just by virtue of taking 40 years, even if there's a way through to the end, as opposed to you having to figure something out, as opposed to just go through the steps. So back to A.J. Jacobs. A.J. Jacobs decided that

as sort of an extension of his love of puzzling, writing about puzzles extensively, sharing them with the world, he was going to commission a puzzle for himself and his family that was the hardest or the longest to solve puzzle ever created. There was some coverage of this in 2022. There was an article on The Atlantic that called it The Puzzle that will outlast the world.

And that is not being hyperbopiated. So, A.J. Jacobs partnered with a well-known puzzle designer named Oscar Van DeVenter. Basically, Jacobs gave him the challenge of, I want you to create something that is on another level compared to these generation puzzles. 21 years, come on, 50 years, I want something that is astronomical. What Oscar Van DeVentner came up with is called Jacob's Ladder. All right. It's a pun on Jacobs, AJ Jacobs. Yeah, it's clever. It's good. And the puzzle itself is a, it's made of wood. And it's kind of a square-ish tower. It's tall. And it sort of has lattice-like structure around the edges. The goal of Jacob's ladder is essentially to turn wooden pegs. There are many wooden pegs along the sides in the right sequence to release the center structure. Okay. The thing to take away here is that it is a very elaborate, mathematically based puzzle that you turn a knob, you try and open up the corkscrew-shaped rod inside, you solved it.

The only problem is how many turns it takes to get there. According to Jacobs and his puzzle designer, there are 1.3 decillion turns required to solve this puzzle. Okay. That is the number one followed by 33 numbers. Okay. If you, if you twisted one peg per second nonstop, it would take you about 40 septillion years to solve the puzzle. By the time,

by the time, this is longer than the sun is expected to last. Like our, the sun will have burned out our planet. We will not be here. Our planet will not be here. It is heat death of the universe type time stills that we're talking about. Not only that, I read, if you rubbed off a single atom due to friction with every turn,

the puzzle would have eroded before you could even get to the end because it does not even have 1.3 decillion atoms in the puzzle. So it is, unless you break, unless you break it, it is, this. literally unsolvable. It is not conceivable that as a human race, even, we will ever see the end of Jacob's ladder. So it's the basically it's the tootsie roll pop of puzzles. It's like how many turns until you just crack the thing open. It's more like an installation piece. Yeah. You know, Jacobs has basically said this is, it's something that he does with his family. You know, he knows that no one in his family is going to see it. And it's, it's meditative. You know that when you're done, you're closer to the end than the beginning.

Okay, Colin, I have a question. Yeah, yeah. In your research, have we heard reports where people have completed a generation puzzle? Oh, yeah, interesting, interesting. Well, none of the sort of modern ones that I saw. You know, they say that this is really simplifying a little bit, but you guys are maybe familiar with like at this point the seven rings puzzle or the Chinese rings puzzle. sometimes called. There are a lot of variations on this puzzle that it sometimes is not even

rings anymore. But it's, it's basically sort of a binary, you know, type puzzle, right. It's you, and if you manipulate something in just the right order, you can pull the rod out of the rings or you can slide the thing out of the thing. And it's usually a set of seven, you know, turns or something like that. Those games are sort of, I mean, they seem simpler now, but those are in the family of what we're once considered generation games. Yeah, that like, if you didn't know the pattern, it might take you a year or longer to solve the Chinese rings puzzle once upon a time, you know? It is hard if hard means takes a long time. Throughout history, royals across the world were notorious for incest. They married their own relatives in order to consolidate

power and keep their blood blue. But they were oblivious to the havoc all this inbreeding was having on the health of their offspring, from Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own sisters to the Habsburg's notoriously oversized lower jaws. I explore the most shocking incestuous relationships and tragically inbred individuals in royal history. And that's just episode one. On the history tea time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals explore royal family trees and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. I'm Lindsay Holiday, and I'm spilling the tea on history. Join me every Tuesday for new episodes of the History Tea Time podcast, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed. All right, I have one last segment. It's a bit

of a story, some trivia. We got some questions in here, so bear with me. This is one of my unhinged story rants of my life. So in my long list of extracurricular activities, I also used to admin a singles dating group for people who run

Disney marathons. I did not know that. How do I not know that? Wow. They used to call me Mama Bear. It was like a social matchmaking group for Disney fans and runners, marathoners. And because of that group,

I got invited to several weddings due to successful pairings. Yes, yes. So a lot of people did find love. And so in 2018, I flew to Orlando to my friends, Mike and Candice's wedding. And on the day before the big event, it was really cute. They organized a little 5K around like the hotel grounds because we all met running. And afterwards, they had like a casual party for all the wedding guests. It was at this party, which was just at someone's like hotel room where Mike the groom handed me a can of something I have never seen or heard even heard of before at this point.

So this was 2018. This was my first time ever seeing, then tasting a white claw. Where were you when you had your first white claw? You know what? I can tell you exactly where I was. It was like a company picnic or something like that. Someone opened up a case and they were all just, oh, yeah, I got the white. And I was like, oh, what is this?

I'd never had one before. It was 2019. I can tell you exactly what I was. It was 2019. It was summer. Yep. Karen, I think I was at your house. I feel like I think you guys had a party and like there were white claws there.

For those who are minors or those who live outside of the United States. States, a white claw is what you call a hard seltzer. It is club soda or flavored, just carbonated water with alcohol. Oh, is that why we're talking about this? It's hard, it's hard shelter, yes. And very briefly, historically, a drink is hard if it has alcohol and soft if it doesn't, which is why we have soft drinks. Hard, not all the time, but hard can also denote that the alcohol is from distilled alcohol versus fermented alcohol. Hard liquor. A beer or wine.

Hard liquor, right? Back to this wedding trip. I remember this moment so clearly because, A, it tasted very refreshing because it was just bubble water with alcohol. And two, what a genius idea. Yeah. It blew me away. It's not sweet.

There's no added sugar. The alcohol is like malt. And so it was just at this time, I was like, this is right when the big LaCroix boom. Colin, you had a whole segment in our underdog episode about the fascinating kind of mind-blowing history of LaCroix. And, hey, people love drinking flavored bubble water. Let's make it alcoholic. It just seemed like a really simple concept. And I can't believe it took so long to get us here or did it.

So a lot of historical things had to happen to, set white claw and hard seltors up for success. Like something had to walk in order for white claw to run or to claw, I guess. That something is the butt of 90s jokes.

Oh, I was hoping. I was hoping we were going to have an appearance. Known as Zima, Z-I-M-A. For all you babies out there who don't know, Zima. So trivia question time. What company made Zima?

Oh. Was it Anheiserbush? Incorrect. Was it Miller? It was Coors. The Coors Brewing Company made Zima. Follow-up question. Where does the name Zima come from?

Hmm. Sounds like the end of the word or something. Yeah, I was going to say just like very 90s or the beginning of a word. like zemantic acid or so i don't know something like that yeah they like their xes and zes and like weird you know you know high value letters uh in the 90s is it semantic acid no it's not zima uh means winter in a lot of like slavic languages ah it also sounds like seema s i m a which is a meed mead alcoholic beverage that traditionally the finnish people drink seym S-I-M-A.

I can tell you exactly where I was when I had my first Zima, too. I've never had it. Because I was a child. It's one of those things I wanted to like it. I was in my college dorm room. We had heard, just kind of like through the scene, we had heard that there was this product being test-marketed in Sacramento. All right.

Now, this was like college in Berkeley. And so I swear, I swear, I swear, this is what happened. Not me, but my roommate, And his buddies, they had heard about this thing. They drove. No. They did. They did.

I swear. Like after class on a Friday, they got in one of them car. They drove from Berkeley to Sacramento. But so somehow they got their hands in Sacramento on a case of Zima and brought it back to Berkeley. Wow. What heroes. And they were like, it was like this big unveiling. It was just this one like ever like we were all crowded around.

Like we had all heard. it's like beer but it doesn't taste like beer and it's clear and it's like oh okay i'm like who is this for like who what what is this anybody anybody in this room have a problem with beer in the most 90s way possible man like everything had to be clear everything had to be a new take it had just very this angular kind of designy bottle had fluting on it i remember i can feel it in my hand i can like i can feel it in my hand still and I probably finished it but I don't think I enjoyed it. It just had a- How would you describe the taste and the flavor and the drinking experience? I would describe it as it was kind of cloyingly sweet in my memory.

It tasted alcoholic. It did not taste like, you know, like the advanced was like, oh, it doesn't, it just tastes like you're drinking a soda. And I was like, no, it did not just taste like I was drinking a soda. Yeah, I feel like I remember having Zima, but then, it's like, am I just remembering Crystal Pepsi? Like, I'm not really sure which one. But it does, it does, when you say it,

it just seemed like, like overly sweet and sticky. Like that's sort of, yeah, that sounds about right. So, so yes, Zima is clear, first of all. Zima is carbonated. Zima is sugary as sweet. And Zima is lemon lime. Ah. You are correct.

This is what is called the clear craze. Our electronics were clear. We had a clear Game Boy with clear phones. We had clear inflatable furniture for some reason. Like it was just such a Y2K 90s aesthetic now. But like for food to be clear, it meant that we didn't add anything to it. That was kind of the visual, you know, shorthand to be like, oh, we didn't treat it. Like tired of beer and it's yellow color that we added.

Try this clear thing. If there was anything bad in here, you'd be. able to see it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can see right through it. So trivia question about this. So obviously the biggest publicity and marketing campaign for clear products is,

belongs to Crystal Pepsi. A clear Pepsi. Wow. Pepsi's arch nemesis, Coca-Cola, also had a rival colorless soda. What was it called? Ooh. A colorless cola. Yeah.

Yes. Colorless cola. Right. Because it wasn't It's not like Sprite Yeah, yeah, yeah Right Coca-Cola had a colorless cola

In the, what, the 90s? Do you think they had the The Coca-Cola Company did, yes. Did they, yeah, I was going to say, did they have the confidence to call it Coke Or was it like Diamond Fanta Or something like that? Orbit, was it Orbits?

Oh, I loved Orbits. Tab clear. Really? Oh. So not under the Coca-Cola moniker. Tab was Coca-Cola's diet soda. Right, right. It's a separate brand called Tab.

This is before Diet Coke. Tab had Tab clear. So it was their diet cola, but clear. I think I vaguely remember that. That's funny. So back to Zima. Zima failed. There are tons of reasons why Zima failed, but to Zima's credit, they did put

malt alcoholic beverages on the map, the public consumer awareness map. It helped create this category of drinks, which is sometimes called Maltternative. Malturnative, alcoholic soda or alco pop. Malturnative has become its own beverage category. Trivia question. Around the 2000s, what was the name of the viral prank that involved kneeling and chugging a particular malt beverage? I see. I see.

Yes. Oh man. I have not thought about that in several years. Smyranoff ice, right? Is that what it was? Smyranoff ice, another malternative. How do I even explain the rules of this? If a bottle of smirnoff ice is in your line of sight, you have to kneel down and then chug the bottle of smirnoff ice. I don't know why we did this. I think it was an elaborate construct so that people could drink these things and pretend they were doing it ironically when they really just wanted to drink smear off ice. And one of the things that led to the decline of these hard malt sugary soda drinks was the problem of underage drinking. And so even California, California try to raise the taxes on what they call alco pops. Right, right. It could be that.

But it also could be people were just becoming more conscious about sugar intake, carb intake at that time. Keto was on the rise. Gluten allergy was starting to get more awareness and the popularity of LaCroix. All of those things kind of help make White Claw happen. And thanks to the massive success of Hart Seltzer, now we're seeing all these other brands trying to make regular. drinks hard there's hard kombucha yes there's hard ice tea yes there's hard mountain dew haritos the mexican soda there's hard heritos oh i didn't see that one there is duncan spiked ice coffee i've seen these i've seen the spike ice coffees yeah yeah and where where does like uh was was mike's hard

lemonade was another one of these too right yes they were pretty early in that scene i feel like. No surprise. Mike's hard lemonade, their company also made White Claw. Ah, uh-huh. So they dip their toes already in this, uh, very smart in this category. Yeah. And it's really about, it's, it's about the sugar, right? I mean, it's, it's, people are, are drinking a lot fewer sugar to drinks. So they're like just looking for something that's like, what can get me drunk? Yeah. I still want to get drunk. Don't got me wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's our show. We've completed hard mode. Wasn't that hard? Wasn't that hard? Well, thank you for joining me and thank you all listeners for listening. And hope you learned stuff about generation puzzles, hard puzzles, about beetle shells, about Chris's troll quiz.

You can find this on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, and on all podcast. apps and on our website good job brain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like The History of Everything, the movies that made us, and

Who Arded? We'll see you next week. Bye. If you like this podcast, can we recommend another one? It's called Big Picture Science. You can hear it wherever you get your podcast, and its name tells part of the story. The big picture questions and the most interesting research in science. Seth and I are the host.

Seth is a scientist. I am Molly, and I'm a science journalist, and we talk to people smarter than us, and we have fun along the way. The show is called Big Picture Science, and as Seth said, you can hear it. it wherever you get your podcast.