Good Job, Brain! - 54: Epic Fail

Episode Date: March 19, 2013

Flops, failures, and follies! We dedicate this show to all those who have picked themselves up after falling down. Facts and juicy stories about New Coke, the wobbly Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the dotcom boom, and the biggest financial movie flop in the world. And why "sexy yogurt" should NEVER exist.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, fresh and frenzied frat of freethinking friends. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 54. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen. And we are your snappy and snarky, snickering snoopers. I'm Colin. I'm Dana.

And I'm Chris. All right. Let's jump into our first trivia segment. Pop Quiz, Hot Shot. And this one's a little bit different. We got a lot of good listener mail from our trivia about trivia episode. We talked about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Clyde from Maryland wrote in.

And he said that he was actually a contestant on the show. Hey. So Clyde said, I was on the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. with Meredith Vieira. Unfortunately, Clyde did not make it to the million-dollar question, but he did go home with $25,000 in a very cool story and a cool experience. And here's his final question, and I'm going to ask you guys. All right.

All right. It's a $50,000 question. A person who has rhodicism, and that's R-H-O-T-A-C-I-S-M, Rhodicism, would most likely seek treatment from which of the person. these professionals. Oh, okay. A, cardiologist, B, ophthalmologist,

C, speech therapist, D, massage therapist. I think it's ophthalmologist. I wonder if, I mean, I don't know if I would wager $25,000 on it, but if it was the, if it's like the rods in your eyes or something like that or whatever,

I would say ophthalmologist. Which is like an eye doctor. Yeah, right. Rodicism, R-H-O-T-A-C-I-S-E-E-S-E. Like roticism. I wonder if rotoscope is throwing me off. It's not spelled that way though. No, it's not.

Or is it the Greek letter row, perhaps. I don't know why. Something just says eyes. Yeah, I don't know. Joe Bloggs' answer, but yeah. Well, what is it? It is speech therapy. Colin, you actually, you're close.

So rhodicism is the inability to pronounce the letter R correctly. Wow. So it is based on. row, sort of. Huh. Interesting. And to continue our Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Pop Quiz Hot Shot, Mr. Logan Steele also wrote in,

he used to be a producer on who wants to be a millionaire. And he has a couple of questions for us. With the name like Logan Steve. I know. I think it was going to be in Action Stars. All right, here we go. What year did Kurt Cobain leave the world and Justin Bieber enter it? Was it 94?

I think it was 93 or 94. Let's go with 94. I'll go to 94. Final answer? Sure, why not? It is 1994. Good job. All right.

Hindsight is 2020, but what's legally blind? Oh, I read this once. What is it? I remember thinking it was shockingly high the ratio. We had no multiple choices here, huh? I want to say it's like 2080. I think it's higher than that. I think it's like $2,200 or something.

I don't know. I have no idea. What is it? It is $2,100. Okay, all right. All right. Next question. Would it take less time to sink with the Titanic or watch the movie?

Sink with the Titanic? I'll go, yeah. I think less time to sink with the Titanic. Less time to watch the movie Titanic. Just to be contrary. Okay. But also, I mean, I feel like it would take a while for it to fully sink. Yeah.

That's true. That's true. We're talking the entire process. Right. I think it'd sink really fast. What is it? Sink with the ship. All right.

The movie is actually longer than the actual ship sinking. Yeah. All right. Last question. In January 2010, what book was banned from a Southern California elementary school for less than one week due to, quote, not age appropriate content? Hmm. Banned for a week. For one week.

So it was banned and then there was an... People overturned. Yeah, not age-appropriate. I don't know. Is it like one of the Judy Bloom books maybe? Oh, are you there, God. It's been right on. Here's a clue.

It is nonfiction. Oh, oh, this was Anne Frank. This was the diary of Anne Frank, right? Incorrect. I know why the Cage Bird sings. It is the Miriam Webster's Dictionary. What? Oh, did they?

find like swear words in the dictionary abandoned. Not age appropriate. That's great. The ban lasted one week. Yeah, and then people were like, what? Come on. All right, good job, Brains. Thank you, Logan, and thank you Clyde from all the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's stuff.

So this week, we are going to talk about something that hopefully is not depressing. I don't know. Okay. We're going to talk about flops and failures. Flip, flop and fly I don't care if I die

Blop flip flop and fly I don't care if I die Don't ever leave me Don't ever say goodbye Sounds depressing I tend to hope that all of our shows aren't depressing Just in general I don't know all four of us started smiling

As soon as you said flops and failures People love reading about failures The bigger the failure, the more fun it is. In the world of popular culture, one of the biggest failures of all time, synonymous with the word failure is New Coke. Yeah. I think we should talk about New Coke. It was the, let me set the stage.

So I was alive during this, but I was only five years old, so I wasn't really paying too close attention to any of this. The day was April 23rd, 1985, and the Coca-Cola company called a massive press conference to announce what was already sort of predicted would be. be a change to its formula. In fact, it was already known it would be a change to its formula because Pepsi executives had managed to get a six-pack of the new formula smuggled out to them. It was huge corporate espionized. Yeah, yeah. And so people already knew that they were reformulating Coca-Cola. And what exactly was it? It was actually just, they had really had a big

hit with Diet Coke. Diet Coke was not Coke with the sugar replaced with Aspartame. It was a different It was different flavor. It tastes different. It tastes different. Not just from the fake sugar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had, there were different flavors in there and it was formulated to be a pleasing drink even with aspartame versus sugar.

New Coke was just the Diet Coke formula, but with high fructose corn syrup replacing the aspartame. So the first question is, well, why would they do this? At the time, Coca-Cola was actually in the process of losing market share to Pepsi. Coke was not maintaining its dominance in what were even then known as the Cola War. Right. Pepsi was actually gaining on a Coke. Coke was still number one, but Pepsi was getting up there. Pepsi was considered to be a little sweeter than Coca-Cola. Maybe people like that. Maybe people wanted something that wasn't to sweet, whatever. But there was a lot of back and forth over what, you know, sugary beverage you were going to buy. But Coke was losing market share. And another rationale for this is that they had run taste tests. And in every single taste test that they ran, the overwhelming majority of people, they tried. Pepsi. They tried the original Coke formula and they tried New Coke. And so many people said the best one was New Coke. They were like, this is the tastiest one of these three. They were really sure they were onto it. Yeah. So they had declining market share and they needed to come in and, you know, shake things up. And they had a product that focus test told them was the superior product in blind taste test. So they had this product that they actually knew, you know, as best they.

could tell was actually better so they go in there and they make a big announcement like we're changing up the old formula and what they just absolutely did not expect was that the the many many years of goodwill that they had built up with the Coca-Cola brand and the you know the flavor of coke being the same you know from when you were a kid in the 1950s all the way through the 1980s and that people had really even though they they were losing market share the coke fans really were so attached um to these decades of goodwill. that they had built up and the backlash was just insane thousands of phone calls a day to coke headquarters anybody that they could get on the phone they'd yell at them people hoarded there were people

buying like i mean very rich people but they would they would rent a wine cellar and they'd buy up all the they'd buy up all the coke they could get their hands on and put it in a wine cellar thousands of cans and bottles and they were hoarding it and it just it didn't matter how it tasted people just wanted Coca-Cola that as they remembered it, they would have no other. The failure was just an absolute failure to recognize that was going to happen. And it was a failure of messaging. It was a failure of introducing the product. But it was also that they were putting out the new formula and removing the old one. And so a common misconception is that they immediately realized the error of their ways, pulled new Coke off the market, put regular Coke back on the market, massive mea culpa,

and that was it. Half of that is true. Immediately, July 10, 10th, 1985, so just a couple of months later, for reversal, and they took regular formula Coca-Cola, and as we all know, rebranded it Coca-Cola Classic and put that back on store shelves. But New Coke stayed on store shelves for many, many years after that. And one of the other crazy things about this is they actually kept classic. It was still technically called Coca-Cola Classic. Does anybody want to like take a guess as to when they finally took classic off the cans and just changed it back to Coca-Cola?

I remember it being sometime in the 90s. I really don't remember when. No. Was it because it seemed to? It was not, it was only finally because they were just like, this doesn't need to be on here anymore. Got it. Yeah. When was it?

There was no reason. The year was 2009. Wow. It has, those cans have said Coca-Cola Classic up until just a couple of years ago. Yep. This was also really the big switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup, right? It was contemporaneous with it, but it was not because sugar to high fructose corn syrup had nothing to do with the switch. Okay.

There's a, yeah, there's various conspiracy theories around this. Like, they did this to mask the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Not true. They had already switched to high fructose corn syrup in the regular formula before new Coke. Got it. The conspiracy theory is they deliberately engineered this as a marketing ploy. I mean, as near as anybody can figure, not true either. was a big mistake. But Coca-Cola, in the end, within a year, had come out of this smelling

like a rose. Because what had happened was, by taking the product away, they revived people's sense of loyalty to that product. Like, you heard us. All these, you know, millions of people went out and like, Coca-Cola is part of America, like mom and apple pie and baseball, and how dare you take it away from us? And when they reintroduced it, they won the Cola Wars. You know, they actually, they turned that failure into a huge success because, you know, sales of Coca-Cola a classic, then got to the levels that they had wanted it to. Now, Pepsi, as I found when I was researching this, had done something much worse, like, much stupider.

It had less of an effect. They really stepped in it with this. And I can't even believe this exists, but you can find images of this. In 1989, the Pepsi company picked up on stories that people's coffee consumption had been decreasing, and people weren't drinking as much coffee as they were. And Pepsi misinterpreted this as a market opening for a caffeinated beverage. people can drink in the morning. So they increased the amount of caffeine in Pepsi

and released it as Pepsi AM. I remember Pepsi A.m. I remember that. Which, I mean, that just strikes me. I mean, I know that there are some people who might enjoy drinking caffeinated cola in the morning as a way to wake up. I do.

It just strikes me as so gross. It's so weird. Yeah. Can anybody guess what the takeaway was from Pepsi A.M.? As in why it was actually a bad branding? even if you assume that drinking cola in the morning is okay, which I am not willing to concede. I'm guessing that they advertised early in the morning

when their target audience wasn't up yet. No. So the takeaway from this is you don't say that your product is only for one specific time of day. Right. You don't actually say that because then people would go into the store, see this, and be like, well, it's not the a.m., so I'm not going to drink this. I'll look like a fool if I don't drink it in the morning. I drink it after 12.

Oh, that's true. And in fact, I mean, if you look at coffee now, I mean, one of the big things in the explosion of the coffee market has been just turning it into an all day, all the time, beverage, just sweet snack for after work, have a frat-a-cheon. You know what I mean? Like, you can drink coffee whenever you want. Drink it at night. We talk about inventors on the show a lot.

You know, one of the reasons that inventors fascinate me is because I think the greatest inventors in history, they're not afraid of failure. They embrace failure. It's just another milestone on the road, exactly. And, you know, I think you need to be a little bit bold and crazy and just the right balance of ignoring failure, okay? You know, you do need to learn from it, but you also need to be able to shrug it off.

You've got to recoup. I'd like to talk to you guys about a man who I think perfectly embodies the spirit of ignoring failure. Cool. That's like a back-handed compliment. Well, I'm giving the man as nice a compliment. as I can. It's such a strength when you're making things to be able to bounce back from failures.

Exactly. And not let it get you down. So like a lot of other inventors we talked about, Franz Reichelt is one of those guys who did not know the meaning of the word quit. He was born in Austria around the turn of a century and moved to France in 1898 to make his fortune. And he started a dressmaking shop in Paris that by all accounts did pretty well. He was pretty successful guy, you know, doing his thing, single successful man in Paris.

Um, uh, yeah, you know, he, they, he never married, uh, and it sounds like he, uh, he sold a lot of dresses to, uh, tourists and things like that did pretty well. But somehow by 1910, Franz had become obsessed with the idea of creating parachutes. So this is, you know, 1910, turn of the century, like that previous 10 years is just the booming beginning of the aviation age. Plains are, they're not novelties anymore. They're not just crazy inventors. They're a big part of military life and business.

And the field of aviation was moving so fast that safety wasn't always necessarily keeping up with it. You know, when there were aviation accidents in this era, they were spectacular and they were gruesome. And so one of the earliest safety devices that they were developing was parachutes basically to get the pilots out of the plane in the event of catastrophic failure. In air. Yeah, in the air, making emergency evacuations, yeah, from the plane. So there was this whole field of money to be made in parachutes. that were portable and wearable and could work at low altitudes, like in emergencies. So our boy, Franz Reichelt, made this his life's goal of perfecting the emergency parachute.

Being a dressmaker and a tailor, he was really handy with fabrics and sewing construction and not afraid to whip something up. Sounds like he actually had some early success with kind of wing-based suits that he would build out of fabric with some rubber and some supports and he would kind of flap out. And, you know, you might imagine like a Batman kind of suit, basically. So you would just glide. That was the thought, right. So he ran some tests with dummies that weighed about as much as a normal adult,

and he would strap on his device and push it off the upper floors of the building, and it would gently glide to the ground, and he was really encouraged at first. So he took his prototype. I'd be so scared if I was just a bystander walking down the street. We're like, whoa! It's in a Batman outfit. Like a dummy flying towards me. So he took his prototype to the Arrow Club of France.

And now the Aero Club was a fairly prestigious early aeronautical association. I mean, this was founded by Jules Verne and Andre Michelin and, you know, big names to sort of encourage and foster wonders of aviation. So he took his prototype to them and they basically said, don't waste your time on this, buddy. Like, they were not encouraging at all. They basically said, we don't think this is feasible. This is not going to be safe. But, of course, in the spirit of great inventors, Franz was not deterred. What do you know, Jules Verne?

Yeah, what do you know? Dummy? So right around this time, there was a big development that really spurred Franz on. In 1911, one Colonel La Lantz announced that there was a prize of 10,000 francs awarded to whomever could come up with a truly portable emergency parachute. And by truly portable, he meant, you know, no more than 25 kilograms, which was a big hurdle for France, because up until this point, his suit weighed 150 pounds. Whoa. Yeah, which is like a person. It was about three times the last.

limit they were looking for in terms of portability. But he was motivated. So he kept on testing and kept on testing. And now I should mention at this point that he decided to stop testing primarily with dummies and start testing primarily with a human, specifically himself. So he was willing to put himself on the line. So he kept on testing and refining his suit. And I'll say things went poorly.

On one early jump, you know, he pretty hard landing about 30 feet. He fell, but he landed on some hay. Another jump he took, he broke his leg from about 25 feet. So around this whole time that he's testing, for about a year, he had been petitioning the authorities for the right to run dummy tests off of the Eiffel Tower. And this was not unheard of. Like, they had authorized other kind of tests and things of scientific nature. And ultimately, he did get permission to go up and run a test there.

So on February 4th, 1912, he rolls up to the Eiffel Tower with his friends and all of equipment. And, you know, he's alerted that the press is there. The police are there. They've roped off the area. I mean, this is official. Like, he's gotten permission to do this. The only thing is he's gotten permission to do this with a dummy. Yeah. And of course, being Franz Reicheld, he decides, no, I'm going to do this test myself. So he gets there, and he's dressed in the parachute, not a dummy. And his friends are like, this is not a good idea. His friends are telling him, we don't think you should be doing this. You haven't done successful tests with this thing yet, but he's really convinced that he just needs a little bit more height to work it.

He is confident in his invention. Darn it, this is about failures, right? I don't want this. So no nets, no ropes, no nothing. He gets up there and he says, you know, I'm going to show you how much I believe in my device. So he climbs out to the outer edge of the deck. This is the lower deck, the Eiffel Tower. He stood there for a while kind of gathering himself, smiled, leaps off the edge.

edge, spreads his arms, and plummets to his death. Oh! 185 feet below. Killing himself instantly. Oh, no. Instantly. Instantly. They did take him to the hospital, it sounds like, but there's no doubt that he was

killed on impact. Yeah. All the press was there, so they were not kind. They really were kind of pushing at the story of crazy madman, you know, jumps to his death under the eye of the police. And the police really had distress. Like, no, no, no, no. We did not give him permission to jump.

We thought this was going to be a dummy jump. Right. So they were wanting to make sure that they were off the hook. One of the reasons that Franz Reichelt is really remembered, you know, maybe more than he might have been otherwise, is that the entire event that I just described for you was captured on film. It was not just photographs there. There is, if you go on the Internet, of course, in the age of YouTube, and you can now find it even as an animated gift of Franz making his historic leap of faith slash leap.

deep of death. His friends really should have tried harder. Yeah. Friends don't let friends jump off the Eiffel Tower. One of the newspapers the next day, some wag made the comment that he may have been a mad genius, but only half of that was correct. Oh, journalists. So snarky. This isn't going to lighten the mood that much, a little bit.

But I'm going to talk about the dot-com bubble and the boom and burst. We're from California. We're from the Bay Area where basically the heart of this stuff. And we were growing up, we were entering the job market or about to enter the job market right when all of this was happening. And some of my first big grown-up parties were dot-com parties. They were awesome. They were open bar and lots of food and all sorts of. I'm so impressed there were foothball tables. Yeah.

What is this website for? Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. We're going to figure that out after the launch party. Right. Yeah. That's exactly it.

I have a quiz about the name. So at the time, a lot of the sites wanted to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and it still happens. And so they take kind of a nonsensical word and try to create brand awareness. So they'd spend tons of money on parties and marketing and ads. And I have some dot-com failures, some names of companies that failed. I'm curious if you guys know what these companies do or what their product was. There may not be an answer to some of these questions. They were making something, but like, they didn't always work.

Yes. All right. Kibu.com, K-I-B-U. Wow. That sounds like a... We're not starting with the easy ones. That sounds like a dot-com name. No idea.

Foreign language. K-I-B-U. It could be a portmanteau. You know what? I'm just going to guess it's a travel site. Just to get the ball rolling. You know what? Just to get the ball rolling.

That's a good guess. It was a teen girls community site. Oh, okay. So that wasn't a good guess at all. But thank you for humor. I would, if you said, oh, kibu.com, I booked my flight on kibu. I would be like, oh, yeah, sure. Teen girls gossip, is that what you said?

Community, sorry. Like chats and articles. Wow. What about flus.com? F-L-O-O-O-B. You guys know it? That one I remember, yeah. I believe that this one was, they would deliver groceries to your house.

No? No. They tried to eat the virtual currency. They wanted to be, like, the internet currency. I got it confused with you. You would buy their currency, and then you could use their currency to spend on things. Right. And they never really answered the question of, why don't I just use my credit card to buy the things.

Like, oh, it's safer. Yeah. I guess like PayPal. I think they were trying to sort of cash in on that window of when there was Internet commerce, but people didn't really trust entering their credit card. It was true. Yeah. I mean, there were people who were just like, I mean, when I was like buying things on eBay and even Amazon,

We're just like, is it safe to buy things on the internet? You enter your credit card in? Didn't they have, I think they had the Whoopi Goldberg was their spokeswoman, I think. Oh, I was thinking about Beans. Oh, yeah. Beans was another online currency. I'm sure that they deliver groceries to your houses coming up at some point. Getting ready for it.

There you go, webvan.com. They deliver grocery steers. Yeah, good job, Chris. Boo.com. B-O-O. Oh. Karen. It was an online retail store for, like, clothes and furniture.

I think mostly clothes, right? And they also have, like, baby stuff, too. Yeah. Yeah. A bunch of stuff. It was, I remember it. It was so funny. I remember, like, when boo.com came out.

It was like, I was first getting started in, like, web design. Everyone was like, oh, have you seen the boo.com site? Have you seen boo.com? And then, like, I was like, oh, I'll go check it out. And then, like, two months later, they were out of business or something like that. So I was reading about it, and they said it went out of business because of the website, Because the JavaScript and the flash was so kind of clujy. How about pseudo.com?

P-S-E-U-D-O.com. Oh, yeah. I remember pseudo. They did a lot of like early web video. Yes. Yeah. So is it like YouTube? Like Hulu.

More like Hulu than YouTube. Oh, pseudo. But that was before people had broadband, so it was hard to street. I mean, like they were before their time. How about cosmo.com? K-O-Z-M-O. Of course there's a Z. I think these guys were another delivery, but wasn't it like, we'll deliver anything?

Wasn't it that their pitch? Yes. Whatever you want, we'll go out and we'll buy it, we'll bring it to you. Yeah. Like a pack of gum and some BBBs. It costs too much for them to just deliver stuff to you within an hour, too. It was awesome. Whoa.

But I think I only knew about it for one month before it went out of business. Right. What about pop.com? P-O-P? Yeah. Pop. Pop.com. What is it now?

I tried to get there earlier. I couldn't, but nothing came up. If you need a father, they will go out, find one and bring it to your house. Within an hour. Same day, yeah. So pop.com was a Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard project, and I think it sounds like it was online multimedia movie tours, and it had a similar problem that Sudo had where nobody could look at this content because it was, took too long.

It was too high time. What about go.com? This was Disney. I knew you would know this one. This was a Disney, but it was like, it was sort of an undefined Disney web portal for doing Disney stuff that they never really figured out. Because if you go to the park websites, they're all Go.com. Yeah, go dot Disney World.

This is a big deal. I don't know about all, but I know a lot of the media properties still are, like, ESPN even, still has ESPN.com. Yeah, they still use it because, you know, it's go.com. Right. They were kind of like Yahoo. And then this was maybe the spokesperson. child.

Yes. Failed internet.com startups. It was Pets.com. Oh, yes. Yes. What did they sell? Pet supplies. Pet supplies.

Not pets. Not pets, but pet supplies. Their famous mascot is a sock puppet dog. Right. I was reading articles about the dot com boom and they said, yeah, when you want the kitty litter, you actually want it right now, not in a couple days. Yeah. Like your cat is not going to just poop on the floor for a few days while you wait for pets.com to deliver your kitty litter.

Kitty litter. Anyway, so creative failure. Can't someone bring this podcast back up to happy anyone? Maybe I can. Can you? Maybe. All right. I'll try.

Let's see. So, Chris, you talked about New Coke. I have another food product failure that I want to share with you guys. I'm going to ask you this. What does cheese products and intimacy have in common? Oh, interesting. I have some answers, but I think we'd change everything. I'm going to say.

say very little. The parting. The correct answer is, well, it should be nothing. It should be nothing. Nothing in common. But that's not the answer, is it?

On view, it's very sensual. We know, of course, the brand, cosmopolitan. I just call it Cosmo. Cosmo, yes. Biggest selling women's magazine company. They actually had some success with brand

extension in the UK and Australia, not in the states, but in other countries. So they would have Cosmo brand of this type of item and this type of item. Actually, they launched their own brand of bed linens. And that was very successful. Okay. So which kind of makes sense because Cosmo's all about like sexy tips. And it's like, oh, and I have linens. The connection is there. Yeah. Okay. Sure. In 1999, Cosmopolitan surveyed a bunch of people in the UK. 65% of Britain, said that they use edibles or food in the bedroom for sexy and intimate activities. So this is basically a poor reading of numbers and data.

Cosmo marketers deduced that, oh, well, that means we should launch some sort of line of food that fits with the data. Sure. And somehow, the food that they decided to settle on were dairy products. This includes yogurt, soft cheeses, something along those lines. This is a committee decision for sure. And they were actually priced, especially the yogurts, they were priced even higher than normal yogurts because they wanted to seem like, oh, this is the sophisticated. This is a sexy yogurt. It's sexy yogurt.

So it's very strange. I don't know how they arrived at this point. They've had success. They're like, oh, well, you know, the linen sold really well. That means the Cosmo brand must be really strong. So if we attach this brand to almost anything, we can sell it. No, that is not the case. Obviously, this failed.

Yeah. This has brought my mood up because I'm so happy that this failed. Bed cheddar. Yeah, that's right. So unsurprisingly, the line was discontinued within 18 months. Sexy yogurt did not sell. People didn't start hoarding it when they heard it was going. off the market.

That's, anyway, that's six times as long as New Coke was around for. That's true. That's pretty good. I couldn't find any reports on the taste. If it tasted good, you know, they had two flavors, a Mediterranean peach. Uh-huh. And there's a cherry. Oh, of course.

Sexy fruit flavors, I guess. Just go for it. Cosmopolitan actually had more plans at that time to expand their brand. So they were. Romantic hot sauces. There were plans for Cosmopolitan Cafes. Actually, I think that's Cosmopolitan Cafes could work. Cater to the ladies.

Yeah, you're kind of sex in the city image. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yeah. All right, let's take a break, a work from our sponsor. No frills, delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first. five orders. Shop now at no-frails.ca. When Johann Raul 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 Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Raul 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. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job, Brain. And this week we're talking about flops and failures. So I would like to tell you the story of a product that was actually quite successful. But had something happened to it, was it just a fatal blow that it never could have expected and could never recover from? Beginning in 1937 and going very strong until the early to mid-1980s, there was actually a certain

dietary supplement. And what this thing was, it was a candy. Uh, yeah, basically you would eat the candy and it would act as an appetite suppress it. So you just have a piece of it before meals and there was a drug inside of it that acted to suppress your appetite. It was quite popular. It worked. It was so popular that it had like many, many television commercials and radio commercials for this product. And I'll play you one now. I've tried bad diets, powders, pills. Still my weight's been up and down like a yo-yo. Until the AIDS plan taught me how to take off weight and help keep it off. AIDS may taste like a candy, but AIDS contains one of the most effective appetites

of presents you can buy. Let the AIDS plan teach you how to take off weight and help keep it off. Try peanut butter eggs. Yeah. I've never heard of this. Yeah, that's going to be a problem. Peanut butter. Try peanut butter.

Try peanut butter eggs. Yes, so the name of this wonder drug was AIDS. AIDS. It was A-Y-D-S, as in it AIDS. You know, you can help you lose weight. Age you're losing weight. Yeah. So what was in AIDS was it was an oral anesthetic that you guys have maybe used at some point in your life. It's called Benzocane. It's the name of the oral anesthetic. And it numbs your mouth. It's a numbed. It's a cough. Like cough spray. Yeah. So if you have a cough, if you have a canker sores or whatever and you need to numb something in your mouth, you might use, it's over-the-counter benzocane. And they would put it in chocolates. then you would eat one of these chocolates with a hot drink and you would essentially numb your mouth. What this would do is when you then sat down to eat a couple minutes later, food would not taste as good, so you'd eat less of it. They did clinical trials.

You will just eat less food and you'll lose weight. You can, I think, buy them. I mean, not the AIDS brand, which is long gone, but they sell things like slim mince today, like, you know, that do basically the same thing. But it's kind of fallen out of favor as a diet plan because it's tricking yourself. Today, what we try to do with diets is we actually try to get people eating the right kind of thing. Right, right, rather than just, yeah. But, and so this is a very unfortunate thing for autoimmune deficiency syndrome to come along. Take this product that it had this name since 1937 and suddenly, as you turn that perfectly normal, totally inoffensive commercial into something incredibly offensive and or hilarious, depending on who you are.

Possibly both. For that to come along and do that. And that was just something unfortunate. But here's the fail in all of this. It was made by a company called Jeffrey Martin Incorporated. They told Time Magazine in 1985 when Time was writing about this product with its unfortunate name, what they said was, the product has been named AIDS for more than 45 years. Let the disease change its name.

They doubled down. They did. They doubled down. They're like, we are not going to change our name. you can change the name of the disease. Oh, no. Take that. The company, yeah, the company was soon sold,

and the new CEO of the parent group, when asked, said, obviously with a name like AIDS, we'll have to do some remarketing. Following this up with, obviously, our product does not give anyone AIDS. I just want to go on the record. So this new executive now realizes, okay, clearly we should, you know, do something with the marketing. and the naming of this product now.

Now it's like 1987. The, I believe it was the New York Times ends up talking to like a branding expert who suggested she said, oh, they should change it. They should come up with a new name that also incorporates the old name. So she said they should call it Skinny from the Makers of AIDS. So they still didn't quite get it. Even though it was purchased by a new company, they went over and over it and over it. And they finally, in 1988, introduced, they were like, we've renamed it, everybody.

After all this work, they renamed it to, I am not making this up, diet AIDS. Yes. They get it. Because they get it. Because they get it. That's why. This whole thing, it was just a slow motion train wreck of marketing. Somebody was, like, really digging in.

No. This has been around a long time. It was a failure to realize what was going to happen. And, yes. Well, you know what it is? We may have talked about this in the show before, but it's the sunk cost fallacy, the idea that, oh, but I've spent so much money in this case, marketing and building this brand name since 1937. We've invested millions and millions of dollars into it. We can't just dump it all and start over again.

It's a fallacy. Like, you can't just look at all the money you've thrown after something. You have to make the right decision. So when I was a kid, we used to take a lot of trips to Seattle. I remember one trip, I was probably eight or nine, and we were at a science museum, and I so clearly remember this moment. You know, they have those little video kiosks at science museums of demonstrating physics or gravity or things like that. I remember seeing a video there about physics and engineering failures that has stayed with me to this day. And this video, it just encapsulates failure.

If you're an engineering student or an architecture student, you're probably going to know what I'm talking about as soon as I start describing it. I think I even know. And I think all of you may have seen this video in the past as well. So what I'm talking about is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And if you don't know the name, you may know just from the description, which is it's a suspension bridge, famously caught on film, swaying violently, violently, ultimately collapsing into the river below. And just rolling, right? Rolling. Yeah.

So there's no drama here. Sometimes I like the stories that build up to twists or dramatic moments. There's no Franz Reichelt twist here. The bridge falls down, okay? So end the story, the bridge falls down. Yeah. So we're going to go build up to that. The bridge was only open four months.

It was really doomed from the beginning. So suspension bridges, part of the appeal is that they're very delicate and long and slender looking. And this one really was one of the most kind of slender that had been built up into that point. The problem ultimately ended up being it was not able. to withstand the wind in the area you know looking back it seemed like this should have been easy to fix it's not like high winds were a mystery I mean people knew you're above a gorge and people knew there were winds in the area as they were building the bridge even they were starting to get really nervous because you know the construction crews noticed that when the winds were blowing

even moderately the bridge would move and when I say move I mean move not just the normal swaying that comes with even a normal suspension bridge like the Golden Gate moves a lot. This would be rocking and moving up and down. Ports of people getting seasick, people not wanting to work on the bridge. The workers sort of semi-affectionately named the bridge galloping Gertie, even as they were building it because of its tendency. Why did they just stop? Well, so because partly. It's a government project. You can't stop. As Chris was just talking about sunk costs as part of it. They needed a bridge there. They really, this was an important bridge. They, so rather than go back to the drawing board, they were sort of building improvements

into it as they were going. Oh, yeah, that'll totally. Wing it. What they realized too late was the bridge was basically finding its perfect harmonic vibrating frequency. This is what I remember from class. And any architecture or engineering or physics student will come across us at some point. When you get just the right around of wind moving across it, it'll generate motion

that's self-sustaining. And on this one perfect day, the morning of November 7th, 1940, the winds were just a little bit too high and the bridge which had been sort of waving motions before now started rocking back and forth in a perfect standing wave so the left part of the bridge would go down the right part would come up and back and forth and back and forth so it had been doing it all morning people were still driving across going across the traffic you know as I say it was not totally unheard of of this bridge to move and sway and it was even kind of oh that bridge that's just what it does but then it started getting really bad to the point that people were fleeing the

bridge. Yeah. And so thanks to a man named Barney Elliott, we have the most well-known footage of the collapse. He owned a camera shop nearby, so he had access to some pretty good equipment. So he went out there and started filming. Really, the video, if you didn't know it was real, you might think it was faked. It was just so exaggerated and violent.

It looks like something out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. It really does. With landscapes rolling up and down. Important question. Did anybody die? No people died Now, Karen, I have to say Unfortunately, one dog did die

It is sad There is the tale I mean they talk about it in terms of It's amazing that the only casualties were one dog There was a dog who was sadly he was trapped in a car And people tried to get the dog out of the car But he was freaking out And they just they couldn't get him out of the car in time

And again, if you watch the film of this People are literally running off the bridge at the end They didn't rebuild it for about 10 years, partly because it was the war and partly because it was really expensive. And they wanted to make sure they understood what they had done wrong. Also, nobody would drive across it at that point in. Right. It's cursed. Everything has its own natural frequency.

Yes. And once it gets matched, that's where the oscillation starts. That's why, you know, those opera singers who sing and then they shatter glass. It's because their voice vibrations match the natural frequency of glass. And that's why it explodes. That's absolutely right. One famous story, I don't know if this is like a misconception or not, is that in the military, when troops have to march everywhere, especially when they have to cross a bridge, they actually tell everybody, walk at your own pace. Break step.

No, that is absolutely 100% true. Just in case. No, and they still do it today. It's not just in case. This is a very real danger that if everyone is marching and step across a bridge, it will bring it down. And this isn't just to be careful. They've actually had to do that. Yeah, as you say.

And this is an example of that. Once it starts rocking on its own, the old saying goes, don't drive across it. Save your dog. Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. At the Explorers podcast, we plunge into jungles and deserts, across mighty oceans and frigid ice caps, over and to the top of Great Mountains, and even into outer space.

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. So come give us a listen. We'd love to have you. Go to Explorespodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast. So I have one last failure tidbit for you guys, and this is actually excellent trivia fodder for your pub quiz or quiz competition. I found out that there is one movie that is financially the biggest box office flop of all

time worldwide. And this is with inflation adjusted. Do you guys know what movie? Is it recent? In the 90s. I mean, I know the legendary ones were always talked about like Ishtar was one. And before that, Heaven's Gate was one. Total net loss.

With inflation justed, $147.2 million of net loss. It's got to be some big budget or big star that they were banking on. Was it that Travolta one? The Battle. Oh, Battlefield Earth, maybe? It's not a bad thing. It stars Gina Davis. Oh, was it Cutthroat Island?

It was Cutthroat Island. Really? Yes. Eight years before Pirates of the Caribbean, there was this attempt to make epic pirate movie starring Gina Davis. It was a total disaster Because of this flop No one touched pirate material

Until Pirate to the Caribbean Studios just thought it was unbankable Because of Cutthroat Island So there you go Number one money losing movie of all time Cutthroat Island All right lots of fails and flops Luckily only one person and one dog died

That's true Compared to the tally for some of our shows And, Dana, you have a last segment for us. These are terrible laughy-taffy jokes. Joke fails. Joke fails. Pose the riddle to you guys. You tell me the answer.

Keeping in mind, these were written by children. Well, allegedly written by children. What flies and helps people? A ambulance. A helicopter going to a hospital. An ambulance. Oh, wait. What flies and helps people?

bird. Oh, nice, nice, nice, a counten talk. You ready? A helo doctor. Oh, you're close. It was close. When was meat so high? In college? It was meat so high.

What does that even mean? When was meat so? When the cow jumped over the moon? Yes. Yeah. It's horrible. At least say beef. I like my answer.

Where do fish sleep? They sleep on a Seeley mattress In a waterbed In a water bed Mine is so much better This is the last one right What do you call a chicken

Crossing the Road? Dead Ambitious Oh I think I know Is this Jerk chicken? Poultry in motion Yes

What? I'm sorry what I've heard this one before I didn't just make that up poultry in motion Good night everyone Enjoy your joke fails Everyone sucks the soul right out of you

All right Thank you guys for joining me Sorry I just want to say sorry Hope you learned a lot about failures And groaned a lot At bad jokes You can find us on iTunes

On Stitcher on SoundCloud and on our website Good JobBrain.com and check out our sponsor at bonobos.com and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Thanks.

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