Good Job, Brain! - 281: Skin in the Game

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Time to exfoliate with facts and trivia about skin! From peach fuzz to leather, from scales to polyurethane, we got you covered. Get cute and cutaneous with sharks, and how their skin might save our lives. If you can dodge a wrench, then you can dodge Colin's quiz questions about sport balls like why are soccer balls black and white? And are footballs really made of pigskin? Books bound in human skin: bogus or boy-get-this-outta-here? Chris reports live from the restricted section of the library. And on the opposite end, Karen explores the history and phenomenon of fake leather. 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, lavishly, luscious, lemony listeners. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 281, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen. and we are your poignant poindexter's poising for points while eating poy, pointlessly among poinsettas. I am Colin. And I'm Chris.

And please do not eat the poinsettas, yes. Do not eat the poinsettas, yes. Speaking of poy, if I sound weird, it is because I currently have food poisoning. Nice. But the show must go on. You didn't put that into the intro? The trivia, the trivia must flow. And boy, do I have a quick bits of trivia for you.

This is from our Loeb-Trotters community, our fan club on Facebook. Kate shared this amazing list, amazing list of weirdest Guinness World Records set in each U.S. state and Washington, D.C. I'm not going to go through all 50. But let me just call out some highlights. Illinois, farthest distance walking barefoot on Lego bricks. Ouch. Iowa, longest stand-up comedy show by an individual. I look this up.

The show was, it was 40 hours and eight minutes long by a gentleman, a stand-up comedian, David Scott. Montana has the largest festival of Texas. Festicles. Oh, the festicle. What is it? Yeah. Is it called? It should be called the festival.

Yeah, a festicle. Excelsior, New York. Most shoes removed by a dog in one minute. Removed from what? Real feet? Or like dummy feet? Were they volunteers? Is this just like random passers by?

Yeah. Like, are they cooperating with the dog? Yeah. Yeah. It's just like freestyle. Yeah, that's street. Street mode versus, yeah. Oregon, fastest time for alphabetizing letters in alphabet soup.

Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, that sounds messy. You can find more of these really silly, weird Guinness Records native to each state. I guess this is the trade-off we get for them, you know, no longer doing like most cigarettes smoked at

once and heaviest pet, you know, and things like that. It's, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. They stop the ones that have potential harm. It's like if you're stepping on Lego bricks, yeah, you're doing that to yourself, right?

Most stories fallen by a toddler. Yeah. Yeah. We can go for seven. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you, Kate. That was a very, very good list. Well, piggybacking off of that.

This week, you guys, I did something I have not done in a long time. May have been a long time since you guys have done this, too, is I went and did a little something called pub quiz at an actual, on a Wednesday night in the dark. Yeah, I made my way out to an actual pub quiz. At an actual bar, it was great. It has been a number of years, I think, at this point. Oh, natural. Yeah, it was, you know, we were a little rusty there getting back out of the scene. Oh, he had clothes on, I'm sure.

Yeah. It was a lot of fun, though. It was good. Got the juices flowing. Do you guys win? We took second place, I'm proud to say. Okay. That's good.

Yeah, we took second place. And we won some beer. It was a great night. Had a lot of fun. Big thanks to trivia host, Mary, at Two pitchers brewing in Oakland enjoyed it. I, in fact, enjoyed it so much that I brought a question back with me from this quiz that I had to share with you guys. This is a really good one.

So, you know, it was one of those nights where we had a few of the, like, oh, we've heard this one before in Pub Quiz. We had a few that were just totally new. I like this one a lot. I can see this one popping up again, so I wanted to share with you. All right, I'm going to, this is a country name-based question, all right? I'll put you guys on the clock here. We'll add a little element of danger maybe or fun to it and get a little writing implement ready. I want you to tell me all five countries with names that end in the letter L.

Five countries names ending in the letter L. and this is where all of our minds just immediately go blank cannot even remember a single country it's like well I know America I know Canada I'll give you a small hint maybe they're all single single word

no like the something in there and their common names at least Karen doing some sort of song, no doubt. Oh, yeah. Two, one. Oh. Time is up.

You guys were talking. I was trying to sing the whole song in my head. Sorry, sorry. I know. All right, what do we got? What are we got? What are we got? Maybe between the two of you.

I immediately wrote down Portugal and Brazil. Uh-huh. And then stop. I got to Portugal and Brazil. All right. All right. We, we, at our team, I will admit, we got to three pretty fast, four pretty fast and then we were sweating for the fifth one with even with even with five of us there here are

in alphabetical order the five countries with names ending in the letter l Brazil israel oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's so easy now i know i know i know i know i know i know Portugal as you both mentioned and senegal oh okay sure Brazil Israel Israel and Nepal Portugal senegal yes So I really enjoyed that question It was it was one of those like where it's tough but easy You know what I mean And like after it you're like Oh sure

Yeah Yeah, period afterwards and it's like oh of course it was so easy But yeah All right well that was just a little nugget I brought back So yeah again Thank you to trivia host Mary for letting me steal your question there We enjoyed it All right without further ado

Let's jump into our first general trivia segment Pop quiz hot shot Here I have a random trivial pursuit card You guys have your barnyard buzzers. Let's answer six questions from this card. Wet our palettes. Here we go. Let's do it.

Blue Wedge for a geography. Which iconic New York skyscraper used to house the cloud club, a three-story club, and speak easy? Hmm. Hmm. I think that was a roost. I did it earlier, I just said, I should have, yeah. Chris. The Empire State Building.

No. Yeah. Colin. The Chrysler building. It is the Chrysler. You know, I should have, I should have realized that the American State Building was like too easy. Yeah. Pink Wedge for Pop Culture.

Which talk show host introduced the first lip sync battle? Talk show, the first, okay. Chris? Jimmy Fallon. Correct. Jimmy. Yeah. It was like a fun segment and now turned into a show hosted by L.L. Cool J.

Oh. This is a pretty recent card. All right. Uh, Yellow Wedge. What are the cutesy sounding names of the two government-backed lending giants embroidered in the housing market crisis of 2008? Oh, geez. Oh.

Chris? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Cutsy names. Purple Wedge, which book about a bunny's bedtime was ranked third on Time magazine's 100 Best Children's Book of All Time? Colin.

Is that Good Night Moon? Good night moon. Good night moon. The Christopher Walken version. I cannot hear the title of that book without hearing the Christopher Walken joke from Yes, from The Simpsons. My daughter has that book. I read it to her.

I don't read it to her in the Christopher Walken voice. You should? I could. I should. Yeah. I mean, maybe I did one time. Good night. Moon.

Green Wedge for Science and Nature. What does LED stand for in LED lights? Colin. That is a light emitting diode. Correct. And final question here, Orange Wedge. What are the three events in the order they happen in an Olympic triathlon? Oh, gee.

Oh, this is a Karen question. That's no fair. Right. All right. So just go for it, Chris. Think about exhaustion and energy. All right. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So it's running and then swimming and bicycling. It is. Well, I mean, I haven't flipped over. It should be swimming, cycling, and then running. Yeah, yeah, swimming, cycling, running. Swimming, cycling, running. I knew swimming was first.

I knew it wasn't last, because I remember seeing them, like, hurriedly changing out of the swim into the next. I couldn't remember. Is it okay. Yeah. Swimming's probably the hardest. Or, you know, so you want to, like, put it in earlier. You know, when people have a lot of energy. That's a good way to remember it last because then people will like,

you might drown or you might get tired and it's a little bit more dangerous. You've done one, right, Karen? No, I volunteered at many, though, because my husband used to do triathlons. I'd wait for him, but then I was like, oh, you know, I'll start volunteering. So I'd volunteer and they would give me the shift of the person who would help peel off sweatsuits off of the swimmers as they come to shore. I've seen so many Montana has the what festival testicles that was like me

triathlons helping people because they don't care they just want to get it out every second counts every second count so like they don't have room or time to feel shame

or or be embarrassed I'm just literally ripping the wet suits off like a banana you know just like feeling and like feeling a banana Like, whoops, you know, I'd see, I'd see some things like pop out, you know. Hey, good luck.

Yeah, yeah. We're a community. The funny thing is they told the previous 50 volunteers, they try to get them like, no, obviously not. Then you come in and they're like, all right. It's like, yeah, sure, why not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No problem. Yes, sir. All right. Good job, brains. So this week's topic, I chose the topic. It is skin, skin, skin, skin. And I think I was like brainstorming. I was like, epidermis, packaging, outer coating, that kind of stuff.

And I was inspired because a lot of people send me like trivia TikToks or like trivia reels and stuff. And one of the really interesting ones I saw was, have you guys heard of the Shirley card? The what? The Shirley card. No, I don't think so. used in photography. So like in old school photography, before digital photography, you had chemically processed film, right? And so the Shirley card is a registration reference that you would hold it up to the camera. And it's a portrait of a person with a bunch of color blocks. I have

seen this. Yes. And as you develop the film, you're trying to match the actual Shirley card so that colors in your lighting. Right. It's a reference. Right. And the Shirley Carly card is named after Shirley, and she's a white lady. And the film captures a certain range of light and color. Optimize for this Shirley card for people who are lighter skinned. And so there's been decades and decades of people of color where their photos don't turn out that great because it becomes really dark and you can't really see features and stuff. People have been bringing it up to Kodak and other film companies be like, hey, There must be another way.

Like, we have all the chemicals. Can we just have a film that's inclusive to a lot of people or allows lighting and different processes so that the people of darker tones or anything in darker tones can show up a little bit better and photograph better, especially a lot of kids' school photos. And Kodak didn't really do anything until two key industries complained. One industry is the furniture industry, because they have to photograph wood in the catalogs to show furniture like walnut or cherry. Okay. The film doesn't capture the difference in the different wood, the darker wood panels. And the other industry is chocolate. You know, you have all these print ads and also like film commercial ads and milk chocolate looks the same like dark.

It's all just this narrow range of brown, right? Yes, because the film only develops a narrow range. And so those two industries were like, Kodak, we really need to improve this process so that we can sell more furniture, wood, and chocolate. It's kind of messed up that it took those two industries to make a change. And Kodak in the 90s, finally, big deal. I think we lived through this Kodak gold. Remember Kodak gold that was like such a big.

I do film. Yeah, and that was that was the film that was more inclusive. Oh. Yes. I just remembered as a branding name. I didn't know anything about what it was supposed to. Yeah, we were kids. We didn't know what film was for what. But yeah, Kodakold was the change.

So that inspired today's topic of skin. Woo. So this week, we've got skin in the game. All right, I have a story for you guys that is ripped from the headlines, ripped from the recent headlines. Recent headlines. Yes, there was action on this this year, just earlier this year. March 2024 headline in the New York Times. Harvard removes binding of human skin from book in its library. Oh, my goodness. Maybe you heard this one before.

No. So as soon as you said this is the topic, I just thought of this because I'm like, oh, I read this story. Yeah, Harvard removes binding of human skin. I have heard about books like this. I have not know Harvard had one until recently. Harvard had one.

So the New York Times story, this is what it says. For years, the volume, a 19th century French treatise on the human soul was brought out for show and tell and sometimes, according to library lore, used to Hay's new employees. Now, how do you get, how do you acquire for your library

a book bound in human skin? So this, and you're wondering, Well, how do you know it, it is human skin? How do you know it's human skin? So this particular book, was called de destiny de l'am or the destiny of souls now this was a book that was you know 19th century french book not all copies of this were bound in human skin it wasn't like a special like a pre-order bonus the collector pack this was just a guy a doctor a doctor in france had bought just a regular

copy of this book and apparently for some reason uh he there was a woman in the psychiatric hospital, I guess, where he was working, who had died. And he removed the skin from her corpse and made a new binding for the book with the skin and wrote a note inside the book that said, says, a book about the human soul deserves to have a human covering. Oh. Now, you might say, wow, that sounds extremely creepy and probably wrong. And so Harvard did eventually agree that they probably shouldn't just have this sitting on their shelf.

But I should point out that this book is covered in human skin, you know, story was really kind of just a story because they weren't really able to absolutely determine whether or not the binding really was made out of human skin until, until 2014. And in 2014, there was a group of science. scientists called the anthropodermic book project, the anthropodermic book project. Scientists studying books that are purportedly covered in human skin came up with a new method of determining once in the fall if a book that was, you know, alleged to be a bound in human skin was indeed bound in human skin. So it kind of leads to the question that Karen already asked, assuming that you've got a book on your shelf and you start thinking to yourself,

this binding feels a little bit like human skin. You know, how would I actually... Yeah, how would I know? How would I know? So, number one, and this is something that people have done for a while, is you could look at it. Like, are there hair follicles? Oh, okay. All right, all right.

Like, that could be a clue. So let's say your book kind of has some follicular actioning happening on your cover of your book. You can now, you can look at, you could look at the pattern of those follicles to see if it matches like a human follicle pattern versus like the like a pig or a cow because remember there's lots of books out there that are bound in the skin of animals right yeah but this is imprecise because you're stretching the skin out to put it on the book in the leather a lot yeah so

it's hard to it's hard to look at the patterns and say well this is what it was before it was you know okay so maybe that's you know maybe that's something you could do but it's not going to really get you the answer. DNA testing? Okay, yeah. Yeah, okay. You could try it, but DNA degrades over time. And also, if a bunch of people have been touching this book all over time, they're getting their own DNA all over it. So you do your DNA test, and it's like, oh, this tested for human DNA. But that's just because your hands were all over. Yeah. It's like, oh, it's my DNA. This is covered in my skin. So what the anthropodermic book project did was they decided that they needed to use a technique that is called peptide mass fingerprinting.

I want to be really clear. I am too stupid to understand what that means. But essentially what they're doing is they're taking something, they take a sample out of the book cover that of something that does not degrade nearly as much as DNA, which is collagen. which are like some of the actual like proteins that are still there and they they break it apart and look at the amino acids and they look at the patterns of amino acids and those end up being unique to each species okay that that will give you a definitive answer now the anthropodermic book project does note the limitations of doing a peptide mass fingerprinting which is it's it's it doesn't give you as much information as like DNA would doesn't tell you

who this person's family might have been, where they might have been from, you know, where they nail female, whatever, like all that kind of stuff. All it really tells you is we can nail it down. This was a human.

So so far, this project, which was active actually up through early this year and it's kind of on temporary hiatus now, but they have heard of, they've sort of documented 51 books out there in the world.

Oh, holy moly. Holy moly. And so far, they've determined that 14 of those 51 are actually bogus. In fact, we're not covered in human skin. But are bogus, are bogus. We're not, we're covered in some other animal skin and not covered in human skin, even though they were said to it then. But 18 of the books that actually were, probably the most famous of these books.

And what's unique about this book is that it's the only one that's known about so far that was actually bound with the consent of the person. person whose skin is a woman. Okay. That was a question. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a book. It's in the Boston Athenium Library. It's called Narrative of the Life of James Allen. It is the memoirs of a guy named James Allen who was a robber. He was a highwayman. And he wrote down all of his crimes and deeds and stuff like that. And then he requested, please bind this in my skin. They were like, yeah, sure. Wow. I mean, it'd be really weird if they got someone else's skin. Well, yeah, exactly.

I remember. Yeah, no, no. No, it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't his skin versus somebody else's, but they did use his, so you can actually go see that in the Boston Athenium. And then, okay, so what happened, we're getting to the end here, what happened to the copy of De Destined the Lam in the Harvard Library? Harvard eventually realized that it, first of all, I mean, you know, hazing employees with it, probably not a great idea.

Yeah. And it's just really not a good idea for this. Like, we shouldn't be dealing with human remains in this way, especially when those remains were sort of taken very much without consent of somebody. They are, they have now removed the binding from the book. And they are consulting with authorities in France, basically, to,

uh, they're going to respectfully, uh, dispose, you know, or respectfully bring those, the human remains. back to France.

Yeah, okay. There is what they're going to do. So don't bind books in human skin, everybody. It's creepy. Wow. Extraordinarily creepy. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, oh, well, you know, a doctor, you know, he did this.

And it's like, why would you do that? You're not supposed to do that? I want to know, and maybe buried somewhere in these articles, is the chain of custody from this doctor to Harvard's library. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It ended up in the collection of a rare book collector who had, I think, then donated, like, the whole thing to the Harvard Library. They said that some of these might have been done. A criminal was executed, but before that they had to confess and write down all of their crimes.

And then it was found with their skin as, like, further punishment or something. You used to do some weird stuff back in the day, man. Yeah, man. I don't know what I expected. I'm like, I'm going to start researching the phenomical. of books bound in human skin. Turns out a lot of these stories are really off-putting. It makes me think of like Harry Potter restricted area of the library kind of deal where it's

Right, or like a... I'm going to bind someone's soul or something. I've heard that like Alistair Crowley had books like, you know, covered in human skin. It's just like always sort of a cult or occult adjacent. Tales from the crypt, yeah. They probably realize that you could sell them one, whatever books. as long as you told him it was in human skin you know so it'd be like oh alister i got another one for you this definitely human skin it's great that this project uh this group of scientists is actually

figuring out like hey how can we like verify yeah yeah separate out the bogus from the real here but the fact that they found more real than fake at this point of all the things that they've tested is really pretty fascinating whoa that's it everybody wow have a good have a good Good night. Human skin counts as real leather. I want to talk a little bit about fake leather. Oh, sure. Okay, yeah.

A good alternative. A good alternative. Can I be bold to say that I think one of the greatest advertising slash marketing spins I got to live through in my lifetime is people calling fake leather. vegan leather Oh That is the most Amazing It is

Masterful A masterful spin Yeah It's up there with Chocolate diamonds Yeah chocolate diamonds Oh my God Yes

These are flawed diamonds They're brown and ugly No they're chocolate diamonds Oh I'll take five Vegan leather Yeah I love it It's perfect It's like such a Don Draper

Mad Men kind of. Yes. Absolutely. Before it was called vegan leather. In the 90s, we called it pleather. Pleather. I remember, yeah, pleather.

It's leather, but it's made out plastic. It's a lot cheaper. And then before that, in the 80s, it was like faux leather. Foe. You don't remember faux was really like French words, faux leather. But vegan leather, the term became popularized more in the 2010s. It was used as early as like even before the 2000s. For a long time,

Leather is referencing pleather, is referencing fake plastic leather. That is vegan leather, right? There's no animals killed in this, but it's made out of plastic. Yeah, it really calls your attention to the plastic part. Let's talk about fake leather for a moment. Like many things on good job brain, a lot of inventions had their start or had their moment during World War II. World War to in Germany they had something called pressed off pressed off it was layers of paper that they would dip in resin and treat with resin and it's amazing because I saw pictures of things from like the 1900s it looks like leather and they used it for a lot of things anything that you would use leather that's not like wear and tear that it actually looks incredible and so Germany made a lot of

things with pressed off, except for clothes, because it can't withstand their wear and tear. That's the wear and tear. Yeah. So, so even before plastic, there was fake leather and it was made out of paper. And obviously, as the whole world got into plastics, of course, people are like, hey, let's take plastic. Let's press on texture of leather. And then, oh, it's, it's leather now. No, no, no. And it's so cheap. You know, when something was described as vegan, leather most likely they're referring to plastic leather but now vegan leather the term is a much bigger umbrella uh thanks to all the advancement in in technology in producing plant based alternative leather uh without a great dependency on plastic it is wild people are trying to make

leather out of everything apple skins you know all the apple skins that are discarded a lot of like produce waste. Okay, okay. They would dry it and they would compress it and it's like plant pulp felt. It is naturally, yeah, resilient and naturally tough. Okay. Yeah, fibrous. And then they would stamp on the leather texture and be like, aha, look, it's apple leather,

uh, pineapple leather. One of the big problems with pineapple production or pineapple consumption is we only eat the fruit. The tops of the plants and a lot of the leaves are just discarded. There's no use for them. until there is pineapple leather where they take all this plant matter, you know, treat it, compress it, make into a flat thing, press on the leather texture, and all of a sudden it's a pineapple leather.

I actually have a sample pack of pineapple leather. It's pretty cool. I would say a lot of these plant-based leathers, it's kind of like felt, a little bit foamy, a little bit bouncing with like a texture on it. And then there is also, get this. This, to me, is kind of weird. Scobie leather. Scooby leather.

It is kombucha tea growth that sits on top as a kombucha is brewed. It is this weird, ghost-like, but also sensual piece of rubber, organic, alien, slimy, rubricy, mucus, top. It's the culture. It's the culture. Scobie. They call it leather. but it really is it's not that strong and it disintegrates real fast so but there is a race guys for mushroom leather I was gonna ask you if there's yeah mycelium leather it's mycelium mushroom

it's mushroom that they can direct and grow when I talked about like apple leather or pineapple leather it's all plant matter that's essentially compressed and squished into like a piece of fabric. With mushroom leather, you can have it grow 3D. You can have it. It doesn't have to be one flat she. You can have it grow. Can you grow a jacket? Yes. They can technically do that. Incredible. All this is so interesting to me because like it feels like we're at an eighth grade science fair. You know, the ideas are just kind of out there. They're super creative. What else are they going to make into leather. But yeah, so that is my update on, on vegan leather, the best spin in the world.

I really did not know that it had progressed past just branding. Yeah, honestly. Like, yeah. Now, so I have a question with any of these, like, this is a dumb question, Karen, and I apologize, but could you eat it? Like, could I eat the mushroom leather? Or is it, it's just been treated and it's not? I mean, I know it's, I know it's not fit for human consumption, like, you know, in the general sense.

It's, it's like you eating those, like, corn straws. Okay, all right. You can eat it. Okay. And it will eventually digest. Okay. I think it depends. You can definitely eat scobie leather, but that's disgusting.

Sign me up. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know listeners, no. I make shoes from scratch. Like, I make sneakers from scratch. I'm a cobbler, so, like, we use a lot of leather. Is that why you have the pineapple leather?

That's why I have the pineapple leather. And guess what? While I'm doing this research, I bought some mushroom leather. The leather's coming in. I'm going to check it out. I'll keep everybody updated on mushroom leather. I'm very excited. All right.

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And we're back. And this week, we're talking about skin. Okay. If I were to ask you to come toss around the pig skin with me, what am I asking you to do? Play football. Yeah, I'm asking you to come throw around a good old-fashioned North American gridiron football. with me. We call it the pigston colloquially. Question for you.

Oh. Are footballs made out of pigskin? Yes or no? No. No. You're correct. They are not, in fact, made out of, or the external casing of pigston. Were footballs ever made out of pigston? Oh, I've been there made out of everything.

I don't think they were. I think they were like an inflated bladder or something like that. Oh, I think of like chichoronis. And I don't feel like it can like. It's so delicious. I mean, I don't know if it can like withstand a lot of, you know, wear and tear. I mean, they're not frying the football, to be clear, you know. I mean, someone probably has.

Somebody on this planet of ours has probably fried a football. I shouldn't say that. No, no. Football's, at least as we know them, were not made out of pigskin. They are not made out of pigskin. But as you alluded to there, the first inflatable sports balls of any kind that we would reasonably call a sports ball were really nothing more than inflated animal bladders. No! Yeah. I mean, going back, I'm talking, you know, a few hundred years here, but if you wanted a roundish thing to, you know, use as a sporting object, you could stuff something, right, you know, with feathers or, you know, sawdust or rags or whatever. But if you wanted something inflatable, you had no other option but an actual animal bladder. Yeah. And indeed, the idea of what passed for a ball, standards were a lot looser. It's pre-sfeared. It didn't. It's sphere-ish. That's right. It's generally sphere-ish enough. But yeah, it's not much more complicated than an animal bladder. You clean it up a bit, maybe. You tie a knot in the open parts. And you blow it up. You put your lips right up on that sheep bladder or what have you and just and blow it up. A very common choice for this type of bladder was a sheep's bladder, especially if you're in, older communities, farming communities, you would have fairly ready access to animal bladders, right? A sheet bladder in particular. What else are you going to do with it? Yeah, exactly. What else are you going to do with the sheet bladder? Right. But it's just sort of like, you think I can blow this up. Yeah. You look at it. You do it. Yeah, yeah. You do it. Yeah. Let me see how big I can get it. Yeah, I keep going. Keep going. Everyone around cheering you on. Pig bladders, however, were another choice for this type of ball.

So you can sort of see the line from pig bladders into calling a North American-style football the pig skin. There were some steps in between, to be very clear. There was, thankfully, for those who had to inflate them, by the time of the mid-1850s, the rubber bladder had basically started to take over. The vegan bladder. The vegan bladder. Thank you, Chris. But they still call it a bladder. And, you know, I mean, again, it's like, it's almost one of those things that we don't even,

maybe some of us don't even think about, but you have an inflatable ball today and you still call the inner part a bladder, right? They did, of course, cotton on pretty quickly to the idea that, you know what, this thing would be a lot more durable if it had a coating of some kind on the outside. So, proto-modern sports ball would be an inflatable bladder, maybe animal, maybe rubber covered in leather. Durability, you could stitch it, get it a little bit more spherical. This has largely stayed the same, even for non-inflatable balls.

If it's got a hide of some kind on there, very good chance it is, in fact, leather. I have a question for you guys. Of the major American professional ball sports leagues, okay, ball sports, team sports. which which is the only sport that today uses a non-leather ball. We're not counting hockey as a ball sport. Hockey is not a ball sport. Definitely not a ball sport.

NBA. I feel like the basketball is... Okay. All right, Karen says NBA. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll probably have to go with Karen on that one. No, no, in fact. Is it leather?

It is leather, as is the American football, as is the baseball used in Major League Baseball. Obviously not inflated, but it is soccer, association football, soccer. Yeah, that's right. MLS, not just MLS, but really all of the Premier Pro Leagues around the world, like the Premier League, other top leagues, FIFA World Cup matches. They all have moved to a fully synthetic ball. That's right.

It's usually polyurethane. Pleather. Pleather. That's right. And they're usually made of, you know, many outer panels. They're sealed together in very complicated patterns. They're super aerodynamic. Did, of course, used to be leather for many, many, many years, leather over a bladder. I had a closest to the mark question here for you guys. What year was the first non-leather ball used in a FIFA World Cup? Okay, I'm thinking like It's got to be like signifying like Now we're in the modern age of FIFA And hence we got a modern ball Everything became modern

I would say we're in the mid-1990s Ooh, that's good 1997 I'll say 2000 Okay, all right Chris is closer You guys are both a little off the mark But it's, what, 1954?

I like the way you're thinking, though, Karen. Like, you were on to it. I think you were just maybe just a couple decades too late. Yeah. So the first non-leather ball used in the FIFA World Cup was 1974. Wow. And this was the dur-last, not dur-last, the dur-last version of the Telstar model ball. I know you guys know what the Telstar model soccer ball is.

The Telstar model soccer ball has the distinctive black and white pattern, 12 black pentagons, 20 white hexagons. That ball was very famously debuted in 1970, the original Telstar ball, made of leather at the 1970 FIFA World Cup. And I don't think there's an example of a sports ball pattern that locked in the global consciousness any more than that design does. Was it not like I can wait before? Nope, absolutely not.

The 1970 ball, you're absolutely right. It was a modern era, the new age, everything was changing, technology. The name of that Telstar ball from 1970 was named after the Telstar communication satellite. This was the illusion of the ball name. We're ushering in a new age. Right. And the tell star satellite, which had gone up the decade before, was, I mean, literally world-changing technology. Like, this is what allowed real-time satellite transmissions and live TV and communications. And so people were aware of what the tell star satellite looked like. And if you Google it, as you can, as you probably are, you'll see the tell star satellite. It kind of looks black and white, you know, patchwork sort of sphere. And that was the name of the tell star satellite. ball that has to this day, if you Google clip art soccer ball, 99 out of 100, it's going to be that black and white style ball. That's right. So FIFA pretty much every year will debut a new

ball style, new pattern, color, the panel shape and construction changes, the materials change, but that classic look has basically been fixed. That's right. So four years later, after the original tell star yeah um adidas rolled out the the first entirely polyurethane coated ball with the the dur last tell star 1974 174 was a big year for changes in leather in balls if you'll stay with me here on this thread in 1974 in 1974 major league baseball made a change in the leather used for official baseballs.

For one point each, what type of leather did they switch from? From? And what type of leather did they switch to a change that has stayed in place through today? I'm looking for the names of two animals here. Oh, okay, okay. I was like,

one type of animal leather out the door, another type of animal leather, come on board. I wonder if there's like a weird old, old tiny saying, you know, like, hey, let's throw some... Let's toss the old blank skin around. Right.

I will tell you, neither of the animals is cat. Yeah, it is not cat. They were not making baseballs out of cat leather in 1973. No. All right. Potential two points on the board here. Yeah, right. These are both decidedly

non-vegan leathers. All right. Answers up. Karen has written donkey to cow Chris has written cow to sheep Karen is the closest with one point in the correct slot

up until 1974 baseballs for Major League Baseball were manufactured from horse hides Oh that's what I'm almost in it It was in fact a basically a shortage of horsehide. It was the amount that Major League Baseball needed to produce its baseballs, and the amount available, it started to become just a cost and a resourcing issue.

Yeah, so they switched to the much more plentiful cowhide. If you're a baseball fan, there is a whole, whole history about live ball eras, dead ball eras, you know, the ball is juiced, you know, this is a conspiracy. We're not even going to touch that more than we need to, but a lot of people blamed a drop in home runs after that season on the switch from horse hide to cowhide baseballs. As a little bit of a side here, this could be a whole segment in itself.

I had to restrain myself, but if you research the history of the actual ball used for Major League Baseball, it's truly, truly bananas. In the early days of baseball, the balls were by and large homemade. They were essentially, the pitcher for each team would make his own balls. Sounds totally safe and not exploitable at all. Totally separate from the fact that they are not in any way durable.

I mean, they would be coming apart, literally coming apart at the scenes by the end of a game sometimes. Every pitcher would make his balls the way he liked it a little bit differently, right? And some of them were a little bit livelier and some of them were a little bit deader. Oh, absolutely crafty. It's amazing to me that the general construction was even remotely standardized, but they were all essentially the same gist of an idea of like a rubber, a rubber core, rubber of some kind or rubber bouncy core, wrapped in yarn or string of some kind,

and then that wrapped in leather that you would stitch up best you could and try and keep the whole thing together over the course of a game. It really was not until like the mid-1850s that that baseballers, at the professional level decided we got to kind of standardize this. Like we got to agree on a general size and weight. Yeah, one of the more prominent voices pushing for high quality standards was a extremely famous at the time pitcher by the name of Albert Spalding or A.G. Spalding. And if that name sounds familiar, yes, it is indeed the same Spalding.

as in Spalding Sporting Goods. Yes, he capitalized on his great fame as a pitcher to start his own sporting goods company. He was the one, I'm getting a little excited here, I have to calm down. I learned that Spalding, he was the one who started the trend of wearing a baseball glove. This is how unrefined the game was, even as late as the 1860s or 70s. Like, yeah, some pitchers would wear a glove on their catching hand. Some wouldn't, you know, it's kind of, you know, sort of a maybe a little bit of a macho thing. Some would try to catch a ball with their mouth, you know.

Yeah, you know, hey, whatever, whatever you got to do. So he wasn't the first one to wear a glove, but he was the one who made it a thing. Like, he was popular enough and skilled enough that people would emulate him. Yeah, it's incredible. Amazing. It was also a cost savings measure to standardize the balls, too. I was reading a little bit about this that in, like, late 1800s. early 1900s money the cost of a baseball then would be roughly equivalent to a hundred

dollars or more yeah the club owners and managers were extremely stingy with the balls yeah and if you go to a basketball game today right and you know every now and then the ball will bounce into the stands you know and the players come over and like hey toss the ball back you know and you give the ball back like that's what they would do in the baseball games back in those days like any ball that we going to the stand and say, hey, we need the ball back. We got to finish the game with it. It was not unheard of for a ball to last all of one game into the next game until it just became so unusable. They had to replace it for another ball. Just take it for granted. They're just like giving kids baseballs, you know, like throwing around

these days. I read that MLB rules today say that teams are required to have a minimum of a 156 baseballs at the ready. And, like, if you watch a professional major league baseball game today, if a ball goes in the dirt, out of play. Ball gets like a little bit of a scrape or a scuff, out of play. Pitcher doesn't like it, out of play. You know, catcher doesn't like it, out of play. And it's like disposable.

They are practically disposable. They really are, yeah. So we will move on to the last of the major American professional league ball sport, which is basketball. Uh, basketballs at the professional level are made of cowhide. And specifically, it is a panel style ball. They're no longer stitched together. So when I say a panel style ball, meaning it is cut and shaped panels of leather wrapped

around the sphere and then the seams are, you know, glued down together. It throws me off because they, hey, they're bumpy. Uh, and then they have like the black grooves on them. It feels, it feels synthetic. You know, the bumps are stamped on, Karen. So you were talking about the fake leather stamping that goes on to the vegan leather. You got the bump stamp. This is true for footballs as well.

The grain or the pebble on them is actually stamped on with hundreds or thousands of pounds of force by a, yeah, a pebbling machine. All right. Last question. In 2006, the NBA endured a near mutiny from its star players. After doing what to the official ball? After making what change? Whoa, wait, the ball change or the players did something? The ball changed.

The league said, here is the ball for the 2006 season. It was different in what way? Oh, interesting. And they're like, we don't like it. They had to go back after just a little. bit more than two months. I'm going to say... Players hated it.

Hated it, hated it. A color change. Oh, okay. Good guess. Good guess. Did they make it slightly smaller? Take the bumps out? Also, good guess. Ooh, good guess.

Make it make it the smoothie. Right, no, no. I feel bad springing this answer on you guys, given what transpired earlier. But what they did is they changed it to a synthetic material ball. So leading up to the 2006 season, it had always been leather for years and years, decades and decades. And they,

the league wanted to be very forward thinking, modern. They switched to a microfiber synthetic material that, like it had the same color, you know, I mean, but that was about where the similarities ended. The players complained that among many other things,

it cut their fingers. They said that the act of, of holding and dribbling the ball as much as they do. The synthetic microfiber material was so unforgiving. Steve Nash, star player at the time, he said he had like bloody fingertips from playing with the ball. Did they not test this? They did not test it with the pros, if you can believe it or not, Karen.

They did some trial runs in lower level play. They never tested it, did not get the approval from the NBA players themselves and kind of just sprung it on them. They hated it. There were players who were sabotaging the balls. Players were hiding them. Players were practicing with the old leather balls, but then having to play with the new ones because they hated them so much. And the pressure just got to be too much that the league relented and threw their hands up and said, we're sorry, we messed up. We should not have done this this way. And they went back to the leather balls and they haven't looked back since then. It would probably be another generation before they

even try this again. They'll have to wait and until the memories have all faded. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is a little bit, a smattering of trivia and questions about our country's sports, sports balls, yeah, sports balls. Skin balls. Wow. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you,

no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Okay, I have our last segment here. I'm not going to mince words, y'all.

I got a segment here about two things we like. It's sharks and pee. But not what you're thinking. So for new listeners, I am somewhat of a semi-professional shark. enthusiast. I am an author of a of a shark facts book called Jossam Shark quizzes. You know, hey, let's all picture a shark. Okay. Like the full animal. Done. Very easy. Very easy. Done. Got it.

How would you describe what you see? How would you describe? It's got like a fish with like a triangle on its back and then the mouth is open and there's lots of big teeth inside. Yes. A lot of triangles. Lots of triangles. Triangle on the back. Triangle in the mouth. Yeah. Probably like a very sleek, aerodynamic form with things, you know, murder teeth. Yeah, like a dangerous dolphin. Like a dangerous dolphin. Yeah.

So here's something that I didn't really realize until I did this research. Do you remember in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the Davy Jones Locker one, there's that cursed pirate crew, right? They're cursed. Yeah. Davy Jones is like an, you know, like an octopus. And then people on the crew are starting to kind of morph into, like, to like sea creatures.

Yeah, yeah. They're becoming crusty with barnacles on their face and seaweed and algae and enemy. When you think about a lot of other sea creatures like tortoises and whales, you know that they swim around and there's like barnacles on their underside. There's sometimes like seaweed or other creatures kind of attach to their skin. There's like algae. And sharks are remarkably clean.

the crustiness by the way it's known as a biofowling biofowling you imagine like old ships and like the bottom of buoys particles and mussels and mussely and yeah and sharks are super sleek and clean and this is such a unique characteristic unique enough to maybe change our lives so shark skin is actually made up of tiny, tiny little, little scales called dermal denticles. If you get to pet a shark, you're not going to pet a shark, but like when the shark is moving in the forward direction, it's very smooth. It reduces drag and friction makes them like move very quickly in the water. And then when you stroke in the opposite direction, like against the grain, it feels like sandpaper, like like a grader almost. And Chris, you had a question a few seasons ago. It was, what

special flavor of KitKat has a piece of shark skin photographed on the box. Oh, yes. And it was the wasabi-flavored KitKat because in Japan, traditional wasabi is graded against a piece of dried shark scale. Right, right. Sharks do have scales. They just don't look like what we think of fish scales. They're individual little tiny diamond scales.

And as sharks grow from baby sharks to adult sharks, the scales don't grow bigger. The scales stay tiny. They just grow more of the scales. They don't scale. They don't scale up. The scales don't scale up. A man named Anthony Brennan, a professor, found out that this micro-patterned surface of shark skin makes it hard for algae and bacteria to hang on to. This is why sharks seem really clear compared to your old buoys or like your whale with barnacles and weird growth all over it because the skin surface makes it hard for the bacteria to hold onto.

Instead of killing the bacteria, don't even give them the chance to like settle. Yeah, they can't get a foothold at all, right? If this is the case, what if humans could replicate and manufacture this surface? Could that reduce germs and bacteria from traveling and transferring? And turns out the answer is yes. They were able to do exactly that in catheters. Catheters, apparatus to help you deal with your pee if you're in the hospital and can't go to the bathroom. Because in hospitals and like nursing homes, a lot of the infections from UTI, from your

tract infections from from catheters and so there are catheters in this shark skin pattern that helps decrease the amount of bacterial infection because the bacteria they can't stay on the surface it's wild that is really cool from shark to pee that reminds me of something that I read recently, but you're talking about how like the shape or the microscopic features of the shark's skin repelling pests. I read that the reason they believe that fuzzy fruits, right, like peaches, right? Okay. You know, like, why do they have the fuzz on there? You know, it's like what what evolutionary purpose does the fuzz serve on a peach, right? I mean, it's like if the peach falls off the tree, it's not like that little extra bit of cushioning is going to save it from a, you know,

plant evolutionary perspective, why is it worth it to the plant to invest the energy and growing little these tiny little fuzzy hairs all over there? I read that it annoys insects, that insects don't like walking on that surface. Oh, because it's uncomfortable. It's it's some, it's either awkward enough or uncomfortable enough that it dissuades enough insect and bug pests from crawling on the fruit that it's worth it to the, the fuzzy fruit to grow that little peach fuzz on the outside. I thought that's really interesting.

It's just very small scale kind of defense. It's petty. Yeah. It's like, yeah, go find a pair. Go find someone else to bother. Yeah. Oh, I'm poisonous to insects. I'm just slightly annoying to them. All right. And that's our show. Thank you all for joining me. And thank you listeners for listening

in, hope you learn stuff about petech fuzz, about annoying peach fuzz, about books bound in human skin. Wow, what a spectrum already. About mushroom leather and about sports

balls. You can find us on all major 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 Pulse

of the planet, who arted, and nature nerds. And we'll see you next week. Bye. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history. Go to Explorespodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast.