Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Barbed Wire

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (new novel "If This Book Exists, You’re In The Wrong Universe") for a look at why barbed wire is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Barbed Wire. Known for being sharp. Famous for being fences. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Barbed Wire is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. My guest today is Jason Pargin, and he has a new book out basically right now. In case you don't know, Jason Pargin is a New York Times bestselling novelist, and today is a celebration. Because tomorrow, if you're hearing this right when it drops, tomorrow is the release date for his

newest novel. It's titled If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. It's the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. It also stands on its own. It explains itself. I can tell you that because I've read it and it's excellent. I'm really excited for you because you get to enjoy this fantastic new novel. Also, I do hope you'll consider getting it, if nothing else, because Jason Pargin is an amazing guest on this podcast, and he does these podcasts entirely to let people know about, you know, his latest novels, because that's his job, that's his business, and he's amazing at it. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes, used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge

Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Ts'ahtsa Yaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about barbed wire, which is a topic Jason and I picked for a whole bunch of reasons, because as you'll hear, it's a perfect fit for this podcast. As we'll discuss, it's also a relatively dark topic, especially as this podcast goes. Barbed wire has had a lot of, you know, negative uses, negative valences, and the reasons for that, background for that, history of that, that is why we got an amazing episode

out of talking about it that I'm really glad you're about to hear. So please sit back and get Jason's new book out now. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, so good to have you as always. And congratulations on the new book. Also, we have a wonderful topic today. What is your relationship to or opinion of barbed wire? Probably the most consistently childlike thought I have, meaning that this is the way a toddler looks at the world, is I like to look at simple inventions and try to

remember that at one point this was brand new and that nobody had the idea before. Like I saw a factoid come up that may or may not be true, but that the concept of a corridor in a house, come up that may or may not be true, but that the concept of a corridor in a house, like a hallway, was not invented until like 1500. Because prior to that, it had just never occurred to anyone that with a hallway, you can access multiple rooms. Otherwise, you just have to go through the rooms, I guess, to get somewhere. And there was a point when that was a wild, innovative idea. Well, barbed wire is one of the perfect examples of an invention that appears almost primitive because it's just a hunk of wire with a little other bit of wire, sharp wire twisted around it, that totally changed the direction

of history. Because there's multiple arenas where this changed the world and is such a simple and inexpensive invention. It's easy to forget that most of the things that have come along to change the world were stuff like that, just a piece of metal being bent in a certain way, like the stirrup or the sword or the plow, whatever. Yeah, right on. When you think about ancient history, people talk about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

And it's because tiny modifications to metal or metallic alloy systems were society changing. It was like, oh, we'll live totally different now. Great. Let's do it. Yeah. And that all of it seemed weird at some point. There's also a factoid about when the fork came out, people thought it was ridiculous. It's like a little tiny pitchfork you stab your food with.

It's like, how would you not think of this? It took a borderline crazy person to think of it at one point. Yeah. And it was fun researching this, especially in the sense that like I see it in big cities from time to time, just in my life. And I had semi forgotten that, you know, it is a recent thing and also a historical thing that began as not the like security wire that hurts you on top of a fence in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or some other super industrial area. Like I, I weirdly come into contact with this a lot,

even though basically all the history we'll talk about either involves farming or colonization or war. Like it's, it's also just around my life a lot. And you, in a lot of big cities, you'll just like be taking a walk on a sidewalk and be within a foot or two of a big coil of concertina wire on something. Yes. And the invention has changed so little in the 160 or whatever years since they came up with it, uh, that someone, you could grab someone from the old West and walk them down the sidewalk and they may be baffled by the buildings and the cars and everything else, but the barbed wire, they would recognize instantly. I just imagined them like hugging it as a friend. It wouldn't work. Bad idea. Like, oh, my buddy.

But no. And also when we were thinking about, hey, what has this item meant in our life? I ran into it being surprisingly wide ranging across it. Like when I was a kid and when I still watched football, the best player on my favorite team was Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears, whose main distinctive feature was like a bicep tattoo of a bunch of barbed wire. And then one of the inventors we'll talk about, Joseph Glidden, turns out he's from DeKalb, Illinois. He was a benefactor of Northern Illinois University where my mom went and where like people in my family went. So it just keeps popping up in all kinds of contexts. And I think it's a pretty, you know, universal global everywhere thing.

But also that barbed wire tattoo meant a certain thing. It's not a love of agriculture. Sure. Yeah. It is a symbol as much as anything, because that our hypothetical time travel, when they saw that on top of a fence, they wouldn't need to touch it. They wouldn't need to see a sign. They wouldn't need to be told anything because they knew it meant keep out. Right. So as a symbol of like, you know, you're tough or aggressive or whatever, barbed wire is kind of etched, etched into your mind. If you surround your house with barbed wire, it means a specific thing. And it does not mean that you are, that they are happy to see you. Yeah. Right. It's so visually obvious what's going on with it and

how negative it is. I'm also a, the, the comedy term is hat on a hat, like when a joke is just the same as the joke it's on top of. I like putting a tattoo of barbed wire on the humongous bicep and tricep of violent linebacker Brian Urlacher. Really not a necessary additional threat. You could tell from looking at him without a tattoo. That's a tough guy. Yes. But yeah, we have a bunch of amazing stuff here, so let's get into it. Yes. But yeah, we have a bunch of amazing stuff here. So let's get into it. And on every episode,

our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And that's in a segment called... I'm like getting the feeling of counting during research. I'm getting the feeling of counting in the recording booth. I'm getting the feeling of counting in the Patreon bonus episode. When I count up, when I give stats in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling. So, you know, I'm counting day and night. I mean, it's terrific, right? Aha! So, you know, I'm in stats heaven. And

that name was submitted by Mo. He specially requested a Jason Parjan episode or a Robert Brockway and Sean Baby episode. And there's a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. Those are always my favorite moments of the episode because there's a brief span of time where someone who's new to the show would just think you'd had a stroke. Sure.

Or that they had tuned to something else. And for those of you who don't know what was being referenced there, I can't explain without ruining the family nature of, of Alex's show, but just don't Google it. Don't Google to try to find out what that was a reference to. That's all I can say. It's, it's fine. Just, just move on with your life. Yeah. If your parents will let you watch a documentary from the seventies called pumping iron, you will find out that's, that's the, the onboard I will allow you. Yeah. Why he was, if he didn't recognize the Schwarzenegger voice, that's what, but for some people, his catchphrase is I'll be back. But for me,

is catchphrases, I'll be back. But for me, it is this. And I also, I like how you like plug it into the chat for one 900 hotdog.com business from time to time. It was happening more before, but it was still a very fun phenomenon where it would just come up. It was great. But anyway, we have, we have many numbers here. And the first one is a big one. It is more than 600,000 miles or more than 965,000 kilometers. That is the amount of fencing in just the western portion of the modern contiguous 48 U.S. states. And also most of that is barbed wire, not all, but National Geographic says most of it is, and we'll explore why later. But in what's generally called the American West as of 2021, they conservatively think over 600,000 miles. And also National Geographic says a lot of that fencing is old fencing that was put up for a purpose and then abandoned or just left there. So there's a lot of fencing out there that is not even supposed to be out there.

It just never got taken down. to be out there it just never got taken down and to try to give you some idea of what 600,000 miles is that's enough barbed wire to reach the moon and then come back and then go halfway to the moon again pretty good like uh or it's enough to wrap around the earth at the equator 24 times? Are you picturing it? There's so many barriers and basically all of them have been put up by people who came in and colonized the area and pushed other people off the area. Yeah, right. And as a symbol, it has to live on in the imaginations of all of the people who lived out there, because it was specifically people who came to settle the area and rope it off and say, this is mine. Because it's clearly, you know, it's like seeing a plant that's got thorns all over it, right?

You don't need to grab it with your hand to know those thorns are there to stop you from touching it. Well, when you see barbed wire, even if you've never seen it in your life, you would sense, oh, these people are here to exclude me from whatever they're doing back there, specifically raising cattle. there, specifically raising cattle. Yeah. Even, even seeing it in cities, my reaction is often like, I'm not trying to enter your weird auto lot. Like I'm not, it's like, cut it out. Take a, take a step back from this really violent, weird way of fencing. Like, come on. Yeah. And if your neighbor one day just put it up around their house, if you live in a house and not, not an apartment, you would think they had gone nuts. You would think they were an apocalypse prepper or they were mentally ill or something. But once upon a time, this was the only way to mark a boundary in a part of the world that did not used to have strict boundaries. And the cultures there didn't necessarily have those. But yeah, we'll get into that. Part that partly speaking of that the next number is a

year it is 1873 1873 that is the year when to cal billinois farmer joseph glidden applied for a patent for his version of barbed wire and one of the the big sources for this episode it's an amazing piece for popular science by eleanor Cummins. And she says that Glidden was not the first inventor of barbed wire. The earliest, earliest patent was a French one in 1860. And another American named Lucian Smith did the first US patent in 1867. Glidden's version was the big hit of this kind of technology. His 1873 design was two wire strands that wrapped together to hold the barbs in it in place so it was relatively simple as a design relatively cheap to make and according to history.com it was an immediate hit and it became the most common barbed wire type in 1873

and really to this day and that is just not very long ago. How many years is that? Just about 150. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like everybody in our listenership knows about the movie Blade Runner, that movie was made 40 years ago. So this is like three and a half Blade Runners ago. And you have to understand that the concept of manufacturing a whole bunch of wire in mass quantities was recent. Because again, electricity was, they were not power lines wired up everywhere. Like, you know, telegraph, all the things that required thousands of miles of wire were just coming online around that period. So the concept of this, you know, they have like a specific

metal extrusion method where you take the molten metal and run it through a tiny hole and it cools in a certain way and you can coil it. To be able to do that, that's an industrial revolution thing. Prior to that, like all materials, you could make wire by hand, you know, in very meticulous and difficult process. That in terms of being an effective and inexpensive material, the wire itself was fairly new. So the invention of barbed wire, that's why it took this long to come up with it. Yeah, I love that you dug into that because it turns out this is a few years before really every other purpose of wire in human construction and buildings and homes and everything. They started to develop the telephone later in the 1870s. And then the earliest examples of electrified homes I could find were Cleveland,

Ohio in 1879 and Wabash, Indiana in 1880. It's amazing to me to think about much less than 150 years ago, wiring was not part of building stuff for humans. They would be like, why are you trying to put thin metal inside all the walls of this cabin or home or whatever? That doesn't make sense. And it was decades after that before you got to a point where most of the homes in america had electricity if you go back exactly 100 years you will find plenty of homes that not only don't have electricity in the usa but don't have indoor plumbing because these are rural houses as expensive drawn wiring out there you know it came to the cities first it's not like it's not like now when a new type of phone comes out and they have it everywhere instantly.

There used to be this lag time in the culture. And the idea that some people actually had lights at night and other people were still working by candlelight is fascinating. But there had to have been a huge divide in the culture and how people lived, how they thought, everything. Yeah, man. As far as products people could get, the next number is more than 700. And more than 700 is the number of styles of barbed wire recorded in one illustrated guide to United States barbed wire. And the book is called The Bobbed Wire Bible. Popular Science says that this one book by a writer named Jack Glover has more than 700 types of barbed wire in it. The names for these varieties include Scutt's Wooden Block, Greenbrier, Glidden Union Pacific, and J. Brotherton Parallel. The actually famous kinds are the basic Glidden design and the concertina wire that's big spirals. And that's named after an instrument called a concertina that sort of

accordions in and out, but I'll link stuff for seeing that. Cause that's so visual. The point is that like, as soon as this basic technology got developed, everybody tried to make the best kind in a really relentless kind of way. An exercise for the listeners. If you want to pause the show right here,

sit down and with a pen and paper, try to write down from your imagination as many different types of barbed wire as you can imagine. Because I would run out after, I think, four. And this book had more than 700. I'm sure that it would be disappointing if I actually had the book because my mind is just dizzying at the, the thought of 700 different and how wild some of the designs must've been. Like, is there one that spits acid or one that's just on fire all the time or one where the wires shaped into like clowns to scare away people that are scared of clowns?

Cause once you get to that many, it seems like you're getting into true, just surreal. But I'm sure in reality, it's all just different types of metals or whatever. So I will not go unchecked. It's also, it's a book from the 1960s. So I'm sure some of these types died out. Like the guy who made the clown kind was probably at the trade show like, eh, eh. And then nobody came to the booth. Because, yeah, I think I have really just two in my head.

The glidden kind that matches Brian Urlacher's arm and the concertina wire. Yeah, I know. That's that's a good point. I don't even have four. I think it's just those. And the next number here is basically the chemistry of it. The next number is 50 years. And 50 years is the modern potential lifespan for barbed wire, according to one manufacturer.

And that's because of what barbed wire is made out of. The Popular Science interviewed Charlie Ruff. It's spelled R-U-G-H. I don't know how to pronounce it. But he was the vice president of sales and marketing for the San Antonio Steel Company. And he described the latest version of barbed wire, which is made of galvanized steel. And if people have heard the stainless steel episode or the toasters episode, there have been a few metallic alloys shows. Right? The hottest hit topic.

But galvanized steel, it's steel that's made with a coating of zinc. Stainless steel is steel that's made with chromium. Galvanized steel is made with a coating of zinc. And that was invented in the 1830s. I can't find sourcing on whether all barbed wire is made with it, but it was invented early enough to be barbed wire when it started. And apparently in the early 2000s, steel companies tried to innovate the composition of this stuff, hit on a version that is 5% zinc and 95% aluminum. And thanks to that innovation, they raised the lifespan of it from 20 to 30 years to 50 years. And those lifespans are, you know, out in the elements, out in weather. So it's very resistant stuff. It lasts a long time. Yeah. And this is where we're going to get into

talking about the, there's thousands of miles of it left abandoned by people who don't remember where it was, you know, once it's there and strung through maybe overgrowth or undergrowth or weeds or bushes where it's not visible if you're picturing in your mind what it looks like when an animal gets caught in it yeah um so boasting that it lasts for 50 years that's great if i guess you're running a prison and you don't want to have to replace your wire constantly uh that when stuff's been abandoned or left out in what has become the wild or whatever or left out in what has become the wild or whatever. It's just there for wildlife to get tangled up in it. And that's, yeah, it's ugly stuff.

Yeah. As we prep this, we kind of wrote notes to each other about how much bad vibes and maybe just straight up evil is within the basic nature of this topic. I think it's an amazing topic, partly because that is something to examine and kind of unique among most objects. So yeah, it's an item that visually, you know, it's dangerous. And then in practice, it is so dangerous to things that run into it. Yeah, for better, but maybe worse, the latest manufacturers have made it hardier and longer lasting. I mean, basically, talking about the symbolism of have made it hardier and longer lasting.

I mean, basically, talking about the symbolism of it, if you're out on a road trip and you drive past like a vast campus of buildings, the only thing that distinguishes a prison from a school is one of them has barbed wire around it. Yeah. Because otherwise it could be anything. It could be a small college, could be, you know, whatever. But when you see the wire of the layers of fencing, each one with the coil of razor wire at the top, that's like, oh, that's a prison. And suddenly the way you feel when you pass it is totally different. Yeah. Even with urban prisons, because there are a few like there's a correctional center in Manhattan that I've walked past and they just try to make it as plain looking as possible. They're trying to not let you know that it's that. And, you know, one of the things they do is try to not make any visible barbed wire be going on because it's just so viscerally a thing

you don't want to see. Yeah. And I've been, I've lived in neighborhoods that had what you mentioned earlier, the, the tiny used used car lots the ones where that they always promise like no money down no credit check and all that but they've they charge like an obscene interest rate and it was always like 24 cars on a little lot and they would they were always surrounded by barbed wire and and i guess because they were so because of their customer base or where the neighborhood they were so paranoid about vandalism or theft and it's like that's such a different world from an upper class person going on to a lot in the salesman is desperately trying to get them to buy the car and get them into the seat of this bmw or whatever and they're lavishing them with free coffee and everything else whereas here it's like

you're walking past a barbed wire fence yeah and it And it's like, if you're not here to buy, get out. And we don't, you know, we don't want you. We don't, it's a. Now I almost want to encourage anybody who goes and shops at one of those lots to feel like they are liberating the Corolla or whatever. Like, like you're busting it out. Good job. These are the bad cars.

But yeah. Yeah. And we'll, we'll get way into this characteristic in the bonus show but also across this main show too i think we can go from here into one of the big takeaways for the main show takeaway number one before the invention of barbed wire the u.s government believed the great plains could not be colonized. And this is a super brief takeaway, but I think about it a lot ever since I learned it. People who've heard this show, they know I really, really like to be cognizant of progress involving like a lot of colonialism sometimes, and especially the expansion of the country of the United States.

That was what they were doing. But the U.S. government believed before barbed wire was invented, there was not a way for white colonizers to permanently live on the land that we call the Great Plains. And I'm going to link a general map of one person's estimate of what the Great Plains is, especially for folks outside the U.S. Think the central part of the 48 states between the Rockies and the Mississippi River Valley, and also think huge. This is several modern-day entire states. This is a lot of land, mainly known for having like a prairie-type ecosystem.

There's nothing we can say that will accurately bring home the idea that a huge chunk of the United States was looked at as like traveling into outer space. Yes. There was a time when trying to get from east to west was a trip like going into a rocket in the early days of the space program, meaning you didn't expect to come back, going into a rocket in the early days of the space program,

meaning you didn't expect to come back or you didn't expect all of your traveling party to make it where you were, where you were going because the wrong weather, the wrong anything could strand you. And those prairies were so vast. There's a stories. I think we all heard it in school where the, the grasses were so tall and in those kind of stogo wagons, like they would lose children

forever because they would the kids would run away in the grass and the grass is you know like 12 feet higher higher however tall it is and that's it it's it's like drowning they're just gone you you would never find them and this is in you know a place now in that spot is a Walmart super center and whatever, you know, an interstate highway. But it is not that long ago when they saw this and said, there's no realistic way to settle this and do the thing we are here to do, which is claim this land as our own, not just as a culture, but where individuals can rope off a chunk of land and say, this is now mine and anyone else's steps foot on it will be shot. And one invention, like when you watch any movie about the old West, about the frontier, about settlers in the

background of everything that's happening, there is one invention that totally changes the direction of history of the country, how it was settled, the culture, everything. Absolutely, yeah. This is a huge chunk of the United States. It's also the southern part of what's now Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in Canada. I don't know if the British or British-Canadian government felt this way, but the U.S. government felt that that whole region,

because specifically it could not be fenced, it was not workable for the specific type of white colonizer settlement that they wanted to do. And that's even though they had come across many, many Native peoples who lived there and just lived there in a way that fit with the land and the ecosystem and how it was set up. But I'm going to link the amazing podcast 99% Invisible. They're one of a few sources in this section. And they touch on a study. It was done in 1871. It was done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the question was, can we go out and do agriculture in the Great Plains? And in 1871, the USDA said, no, we cannot, even

though it's great farmland, like the soil, you can grow all kinds of things. Look at the grass that's already there. Very fertile soil. But there is simply not enough fence building material. There's not enough stone. There's not enough trees. There's not enough other materials to build fences out of. And that gives you problems as a farmer if a bunch of animals come in and wreck your crops, whether it's somebody's domesticated cattle or a herd of wild bison. The USDA decided because of that one issue, it was simply not possible for white people to live there permanently. It just could not be done. But then according to Popular Science and 99PI and also NebraskaStudies.org, which has an amazing piece about this, they all say that barbed

wire changed that. It was the one thing that did because, you know, instead of needing a bunch of stone or a bunch of trees or, you know, maybe back in Britain, they had things like hedgerows as a barrier. You couldn't do that in the plains, but with barbed wire, you could get one relatively lightweight spool of wire. It's heavy, but it's not as heavy as an entire forest worth of lumber. You could just ship that wire to a location, unspool it, and attach it to a very minimal amount of fence posts, probably wood, maybe metal. attach it to a very minimal amount of fence posts, probably wood, maybe metal.

And so because that material worked and also because barbed wire was easy to construct with, suddenly it was possible to demarcate chunks of the West for, you know, the animals or property or crops of white people. So simple. It's such a, such a Like, oh, now we've got cheaper fencing materials that even the people at the time probably didn't grasp what a game changer that was. Yeah. Even apparently once they had the invention of barbed wire, there was still a stage where people thought, OK, this is fine, but there's no way it would stop like a large animal, like a Texas longhorn or a bison. And then when people tried it out, it did. The animals had the natural reaction of not wanting to be stabbed by a bunch of barbs. And people were mistaken initially when they thought that the animal would just be too tough and blow through it. And yeah, and before that change, I really love NebraskaStud Studies.org on this because they have examples of like maps and situations where people called the Great Plains the name,

the Great American Desert. That started from an 1820 expedition by a colonizer named Stephen H. Long. And to be clear, he's not talking about like Southern Arizona or the places we think of as having a lot of sand and dryness and cactus. This is Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and also a lot of places with big rivers in them, like the Platte River and the Arkansas River. Stephen H. Long described this area as, quote, unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture end quote because they they just until they had this one single tool and as jason says it's just wire with barbs on it that's it but until they had that tool and thought of making fences out of it this was an area where they were like that's basically the surface of the moon or Mount Everest or the bottom of the ocean. You just can't put people there long-term doesn't work.

Right. And I, you know, I'm 47 years old. So this is like three of my lifetimes ago. It is not that long ago. It's hard to wrap your head around, you know, this place where there's now convenience stores and everything else is it's like, it's not that long ago that it was this mysterious, like anything could be out there. Who knows? I w I was talking to our friend, friend of the show, David Bell the other day,

and he talked about a unit of Feinstein's, which is the current lifespan of us Senator Diane Feinstein. And this is, I, if I'm doing'm doing the math right this barbed wire invention is less than two feinsteins ago yeah if you are anybody's a fan of like science fiction because i've written now a couple of sci-fi novels in addition to whatever genre this other one is and the thing that no sci-fi writer can really anticipate. Anybody can predict. Like, for example, lots of old shows and movies predicted something like the iPad, right? Or in Star Trek, they had a little handheld communicator that also had all the knowledge on it. And you say, well, it's like they predicted the smartphone. But it's not that hard to predict that computers will get smaller.

Everything will have a screen on it. Space travel will get better and cheaper. You know, robotics, robots will get smarter. What no one can anticipate is the social changes that come with tiny little, little invention. So like if, for example, if you went back just in my lifetime, 1970s, 1980s, said, hey, you know, in the future, your telephone, the thing that you all have in your home, you actually won't need the cord that goes to the wall. You can actually take it with you and it'll be small enough you can put it in your pocket. And the response at the time for me would have been, oh, that'll be handy for like an

emergency. If you get your get a flat tire in your car, you can remember, oh, that'll be handy for like an emergency. If you get your, get a flat tire in your car, you can remember, oh, I've got, I got a phone. I can, I can call some, a tow truck with the idea that this would fundamentally change the way society works and how information flows wouldn't have occurred to me. And it didn't occur to anyone else. No one predicted this. And the same thing, if I said, well, in fact, as a little bonus feature, those phones will have cameras on them. Again, the response would be, oh, that'll be handy because like video cameras, you know, like my dad has one that he takes to our birthday

parties and stuff, but they're very bulky to carry around. They don't last very long. This will be handy and convenient for when you're going to a wedding or something and you want to take a picture to just be able to say, hey, you know, think my my phone's got a camera on i can just use that that'll save us that'll be a nice little novelty it's like no no this will change everything this will change how information moves this will change how you know resurgent groups or insurgent groups or whatever whatever revolutionaries and terrorists how they communicate and and how you know, resurgent groups or insurgent groups or whatever, whatever, and revolutionaries and terrorists, how they communicate and how, you know, and how they talk to each other and how they coordinate and how people find each other all around the world. And that you have people

uniting by common interests across, you know, borders. It will totally change how our brains work. Everything will change. But you wouldn't have thought it, even if they told you, even if they showed you the device at the time, you could have predicted that the device would exist. You could not have predicted the effect it would have. Wow. Every bare description of what a smartphone does and my initial reaction is like, we need to break that out into multiple devices. Are you kidding me? I have one.

I know how it works. But when you make a clinical like that, I'm like, I don't know if my camera should be my phone. It should be my GPS, man. But this is why anytime you see someone speculating what the world will look like in the year 2070, whatever, pick a year. whatever, pick a year. And they're just extrapolating from now on and saying, well, yeah, you know, we'll have virtual reality and we'll have this. It's like, no, the invention that will totally change the game in 2060 or 2050 hasn't been invented yet. And if somebody told you about it, you would think it was nothing because you're not, you're not going to be able to comprehend how it fundamentally changes society until you actually see it in action. And then you see the culture that springs up around the existence of, of that thing.

All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever

you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. No running in the halls. I do love futurism where it's just like, next we'll have the smarter phone. You know, it's just some very obvious, you're just thinking of the most recent invention. Like, I hope futurists right after the invention of barbed wire were like, more barbs. Like, that was what they thought was going to be the next thing.

But it's going to be different, like you say. So again, the idea of, well, people out there, yeah, they need something. They don't have, it's too much of a pain to make a full on wood fence. It would stop a cow. They need like a cheaper, more transportable solution. Will wire would work, whatever. There's no way they could have been shown what the next hundred years of history will look like, including of warfare we're going to get into.

There's no way they could have predicted it. There's no way they could extrapolate the effect it has on people and how they live and everything, how history plays out. This barbed wire on some level, the idea was easier fencing for agriculture and then we'll feed more people and the second takeaway is about i feel like the main result being violence um the the next takeaway takeaway number two barbed wire spread worldwide within about 50 years of its invention within about 50 years, this technology that starts for real in the 1870s goes everywhere. And it's a lot because of the Western colonization by

the United States, but also a lot because of World War I. And this is not only a violence item, but it gets used for a lot of that because it turns out to be both a tool in that and a spark for further violence. Yeah. World War I, you don't, when people think of World War I, they probably think of trench warfare and machine guns because it's always, you think of these black and white photos of these guys in these trenches and it's all muddy. That was a barbed wire war. That was a barbed wire war. A lot of really simple inventions fueled that, including the ability to mass produce gunpowder and propellant, things like that. There's a whole other probably podcast episode just about that. But the big feature, the thing every soldier saw thousands of feet and miles of was barbed wire. Yeah, you've got amazing numbers here for that. There's an estimate that by 1918, at least one million miles of barbed wire

had been strung just through Flanders. Like just, you know, Flanders being a big hotspot of World War I in Europe, they put enough there apparently to circle the earth 40 times. Like four to zero. That is in one theater of the war they strung enough barbed wire that if you had unspooled it it would go around the planet

40 times a million miles of it enough to go to the moon and back then to the moon and back again. It is mind-boggling. The sheer manufacturing capacity and the sheer, the sight of that much wire. And there's quotes where people talk about it being so dense that you couldn't see the sunlight through it because they laid it in layer after layer after layer after layer. Because the whole point was this was stopping the cavalry charges in between your trenches. So it was a trench and then just an ocean of barbed wire as dense as could be because if you tried to run through it, you'd get tangled up in it and this stuff would slice you down to your internal organs because they did have to charge through it. The way they would do it is they would use the artillery and try to blow the barbed wire

apart and make a path through it and the troops would run forward through they would use the artillery and try to blow the barbed wire apart and make a path through it. And the troops would run forward through the smoke and the gas as fast as they could through this basically prairie of barbed wire, praying that the craters from the artillery had blown it to pieces and it had been cleared. And more often than not, they would find out that it had not been. And you would run headlong into the stuff and it would cut you to ribbons. Yeah. And it's just, it's a deeply unpleasant war. And this is one of the hugest drivers of that. The gas, obviously, and bullets and bombs gets in there too. But like when I've spent time in Britain, you know, just Britain and France and Germany

and countries like that were in it so much longer than the U.S. The body count is so high. Like it's just really, really on their minds because, you know, death technologies like this were new and very effective. Yes. And the trauma that this inflicted on a world that wasn't ready for it. Yeah. Because they had never seen anything like this. It was the end of the world.

The world had gone mad. There had never been anything that looked remotely like that before. It's such, the whole idea of like this ocean of barbed wire and it's all stained red with blood and there's corpses tangled in it. That's such a heavy metal album cover image that it's almost absurd. It's almost like something you would only paint or draw for shock value. But this was the reality for troops that stayed in those battlegrounds. Like you'd be there for months. You'd be living in that trench for months. And that's your world is just this world where every surface has razor blades sticking out of it.

I can't imagine what that does to someone's mind. I can't believe anyone came back from that war normal. Yeah, especially coming out of World War I in a time when mental health was not a thing. I think I did a 100 Hot Dog column recently where I said at the time mental health was saloons. It was just, there was no system. And then you saw the worst things in the world. So yeah, a violent, horrible time. Not great.

And that barbed wire, like it, prior to World War I, it was mostly a United States Western thing. You know, other places could hear about it and start making it. With it being a U.S. Western thing, within that place, it facilitated or encouraged humongous violence. You know, people have heard of the genocide of Native Americans. With barbed wire, that was specifically also a tool for the wiping out of millions and millions of American bison. The conservative estimate for peak bison population is 30 million. And in modern times, that got down to hundreds. And also, like some white coloners combine those projects on purpose. We'll link an Atlantic article, they quote a US Army colonel at the time, who said, kill every buffalo you can, every buffalo dead is an Indian gone, end quote. And so, you know, it was like the basic building

block of that kind of thing in terms of land grabbing. And then on top of that, the white settlers started attacking each other because, you know, some of them were primarily farmers, some of them were primarily cowboys. And a lot of cowboys preferred a more open range because then, you know, much like this barbed wire was obstructing bison and people, it also obstructed cattle. It would prevent cowboys from feeding their cattle on various patches of grass, driving cattle to various places. And farmers wanted to fence it off to just keep that land only for themselves and the crops don't get stepped on. The violence between them started with what was called the fence-cutting wars,

and there were entire organized gangs. Apparently some of them named themselves stuff like the Blue Devils and the Javelinas and other team names, more or less, to cut down people's barbed wire and then leave them threats about it. And from there it escalated into entire range wars, which were not just about fencing. There were also water rights or like big ranchers versus small ranchers. But throughout the late 1800s, there were just organized conflicts between hired gunmen or like militias, posses, armies of people in the West battling each other over land. And barbed wire was how they either held or tried to open up patches of land.

And here's where we could, if we wanted to, go off on a tangent that lasts 200 hours. Because the character of American culture, and that we still to this day use Wild West iconography to point out how our tough individualism, things like, you know, six guns and cowboy hats and cowboy boots and spurs and barbed wire, all that stuff means something. stark divide between the type of people who wanted to rope off land and grow crops on it and people who liked the more wild living of being out on the range as the songs said with the cattle and moving them from place to place and their concept of you know the land is wherever we need to graze you know it's it's everybody's grass and suddenly some stuff is being roped off. And when you don't have a strong central government to oversee those kind of disputes about who owns which land and where the actual property line is, that is so much of how we live, how we solve disputes, how we see

each other, how we talk about ourselves, our rights, our property, the ability to shoot someone for coming onto your property, which is a treasured sacred right in large chunks of the United States. This all starts here. This is etched into the way we live based on not just the settling of that area, but then the romantization of it, where there were, you know, like dime store novels and comics and books and everything where we, to this day, we will watch shows and movies about that era and think of it as this more romantic, simpler time. And when men were men. And it's also an era where I feel like when we depict it, barbed wire is one of our least

favorite elements to include like western fiction and movies and stuff will have some pretty brutal harrowing stuff in it like you know there's murder obviously and then you know misogyny and racism and cruelty and and rich people beating up poor people and we'll put all that in the show and be like yay great but it's usually in that town main street it's not out on the property that has been massively fenced off with barbed wire for agriculture. Like we don't really feel like seeing that negative part of the whole negative thing. The iconography of history, like the images that imprint themselves in our minds, were driven by something else.

Like here, just this one invention of cheap fencing, all of that other stuff from the guy with the boots and the chaps and the six gun on his hip, that kind of all stems from this invention of this fence and what it allowed people to do or try to do. And also, like, hidden within this, with barbed wire rapidly spreading across the American West, is that there was one other purpose they found for it. And again, I want to plug 99% of

this bullet's an episode called The Devil's Rope, produced by Katie Mengel. Really amazing to me, because they cite the basic discovery that barbed wire could be early telephone wires for especially rural U.S. people. There was the patenting of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone around the same time as Joseph Glidden. Bell was a few years later in the 1870s. And cities rapidly built telephone lines and networks. But, you know, people kind of decided that rural telephone service was not that important, just there weren't that many people there and maybe they didn't have the political or financial pull to make it happen. But according to 99PI, an estimated 1.5 million people in the rural West rigged up their barbed wire as local telephone lines. You would just send the signal through the same wire.

And it was not as good as a regular telephone signal, but it was something. And they say that as of 1912, there were more U.S. farm households with phone service than non-farm households, mainly because they already had done all this stuff to rope off their land. They could also use that quote unquote devil's rope to send a signal on a wire and talk to each other. Right. And so the context again, is that you could say the real revolution was just the ability to make wire because now wire is part of everything. I have it on my microphone and my computer and it's inside my monitor. It's something you just take for granted as one of the building blocks for making anything. Constantly inventing new things you can do with wire from powering lights to talking to people over it had to seem like magic. Yeah, you found a wonderful article.

It's by Tim Harford. And it's, I think, part of his book, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. But it's on the BBC's website, and we'll link it. And he talks about both of these things, barbed wire and the regular telephone, kind of hand in hand. Because before those two items, I think most people would never even conceive of like, yeah, I need a lot of thin metal that I can just have all around me, is a very strange way to live. Like, yeah, I need a lot of thin metal that I can just have all around me is a very strange way to live. Like it's probably almost like before the television was invented. Like, boy, I need screens is a thing we feel now.

But then they would probably have been like, why? That's a very random thing. And I've kind of never heard of it. Yeah. And prior to that, again, wire was made, but it was jewelry. Like you can find ancient little bits of wire, but it was a giant pain in the butt to make. Yeah, I guess electricity and jewelry, it's stuff that was only for rich people initially. Yeah, wow.

How about that? Well, there's one more takeaway for the main episode here. Let's get into takeaway number three. Takeaway number three. Barbed wire removal is a burgeoning field of environmental science and green policy. And the biggest source here, it's a National Geographic piece by Hilary Rosner. It talks about an entire field that's known as fence ecology. And I'd never heard of it.

And I have an interest in green things. I've been learning about the Inflation Reduction Act and stuff because I want to know. But it turns out fence ecology is an amazing good thing people are doing, where they're looking back at 150 years of barbed wire spread and checking on how that impacts wildlife. And then in a lot of cases, taking it back down. Yeah. And finding it is the struggle, right? Because you cannot know barbed wire is there.

If it's overgrown enough, you won't know it's there until you've stepped into it. Like, I don't know how you even begin to find it. Yeah. Apparently, part of the biggest challenge is that it is difficult to see barbed wire with satellite imagery. And they use satellites to see all kinds of other environmental issues, like everything from a hole in the ozone layer to a big black oil spill on the water or something. But barbed wire is not visible on satellites. It's also not factored into the Global Human

Footprint Index, which is a mapping tool that was built by teams at NASA and also the Wildlife Conservation Society. But what they can track is what's happening to animals that run into it. It's also a global field. This is not just an American West thing. Apparently there's pervasive livestock fences in the Patagonia region of Argentina. And ones that are especially just left up for no reason are killing a lot of the guanaco species, which is a type of wild llama nat geo says that in one two-year period on one sheep ranch they recorded 124 guanaco deaths on one ranch in two years and then totally separately there's a team of danish scientists

and kenyan scientists who studied an exponential increase in fencing in a region of East Africa called the Maasai Mara grasslands. And apparently that was built for agriculture, but it is preventing the migration of wildebeest and a lot of other animals. So I, especially learning a lot about bison, I've learned some about the pretty advanced tracking they can do on a large group of moving, migrating animals. You know, scientists do with birds and smaller things too. And as far as I can tell, that's where they're starting. They're saying which fences are interfering with this herding animals. Those are the first ones we will send a group of volunteers out to take down. And it's interesting that you can track like migrations and just see what areas the animals

are avoiding and probably work backward and say that must be our fence. Yeah, especially if you're not seeing anything solid, like there's not a mountain or whatever. It's like, oh, okay, well, since they're doing a U-turn at that one point, that must be the deal. Yeah, and if you're talking to me about an area referenced East Africa's grasslands, I'm assuming that it is not easy to see fencing someone has put up there i i just i'm picturing in my head something that's

like tall grass it just covers it up yeah yeah and uh the good news with this whole field of study is that it is a pretty simple solution like the if. If you want to call it fence pollution, the solution is just take it down and maybe even turn that scraps material into something else in the future. But in Wyoming alone, according to National Geographic, there's a bunch of agencies and groups working on it.

Everything from a group of volunteers called the Absaroka Fence Initiative to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, that's a state agency, then federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, and also bigger conservation groups like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Nature Conservancy. And this writer, Hilary Rosner, she follows a group that goes out and takes down a chunk of Wyoming fencing for the day. And, you know, maybe that maybe there's something nice that it is almost as easy to take down as it is to put up in terms of effort. Like you have a tool to clip it, you roll it up, put it in some kind of car or something and drive it away.

There you go. Yeah. And then someone can replace it just as quickly. Oh, is's that. I suggested being on the show to do the barbed wire episode because I find it fascinating. But it's fascinating to me because it is enormously useful. We are not suggesting anyone is putting it up in like, you know, somebody wants to rip off their land. They have every right to do that if they're trying to keep their their livelihood from wandering away. if they're trying to keep their livelihood from wandering away.

It's just that it is an invention like so many others, like the firearm, like so many things that is incredibly useful, world-changing, and at heart is a very ugly and mean invention. It is meant to carve up your skin if you try to climb it or brush up against it or if you try to plow through it, it is designed for you to get tangled up and die. And if you're not picturing an animal getting tangled in barbed wire and then starving to death, go ahead and don't do that. Because our goal is not to, our goal is not to depress people. That it is wherever humans have been rounded up against their will, the last thing they saw was a bunch of barbed wire that has been marked by, you know, every oppressive regime, every, every terrible situation a person can get into at the hands of someone more powerful.

Their odds are there's barbed wire involved somewhere along the way. And I, I feel like if you took a group of people and surveyed them and said, like, come up with the five most destructive human inventions, they would probably come up with firearms. But I think much less this, even though, like we're saying, it is a tool and people using it as a tool, especially for a livelihood and for feeding people, makes sense. And then also it's been used for everything else. And, you know, you don't need like a permit or whatever to buy it, at least in the United States, far as I know. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure those of you out there living in the suburbs and you're considering putting barbed wire around your house,

I'm guessing there are permitting issues that they won't let you do that. Or your insurance company will probably discourage you. But that is the difference between the modern world and the old world. Yeah. You can't put it up and then go to the HOA meeting in a military dictator outfit and argue with them. There were, there will be issues. Yeah.

You've got a complaint. You can pin it to my door. If you can get over the wire. folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to jason pargin for making this show part of a very busy time in his life with book release and book promotion everything else i'm so glad this is still part of what he does i I really appreciate it. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a big idea about barbed wire in our historical memory, and our lens on that is three surprising stories of barbed wire as used in modern oppression. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than nine dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring Barbed Wire with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, before the invention of Barbed Wire, the U.S. government believed the Great Plains could not be colonized. Takeaway number two, barbed wire spread worldwide within about 50 years of its invention.

And takeaway number three, barbed wire removal is a burgeoning field of environmental science and green policy. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. He's great. Jason Pargin's new book is out basically right now. It's called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. I tremendously enjoyed reading it. It's the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series and enriched my experience of that series. Also, I could tell it stands completely on its own. If I can pitch it to you one other way, I want to talk about the narrator of the audiobook of this. Again, the title is If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. If you go to Amazon or Audible, you can get an audiobook of it. And hey, maybe because you were a podcast listener, you are also an audiobook

listener. That's pretty likely. Jason's newest book has a fantastic narrator for the audiobook. His name is Stephen R. Thorne. It's the same person who fantastic narrator for the audiobook. His name is Stephen R. Thorne. It's the same person who narrated the first John Dies at the End audiobook, narrated What the Hell Did I Just Read, a bunch of other stuff by Jason, and he is back to do a wonderful job once more. So anyway, great news. There's a fantastic narrator for this book. The title is If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe, and that's written by my guest today, Jason Pargin. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. Leaned on an amazing piece for National Geographic by Hilary Rosner, an amazing piece for Popular Science by Eleanor Cummins,

lots of material from Nebraska Public Media collected at nebraskastudies.org. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. Also, a special shout out this week to the podcast 99% Invisible. They have a past episode titled The Devil's Rope, produced by Katie Mingle. My podcast today has lots of stories that that doesn't have, but that show does an amazing job of some of these stories. And I just always want to shout out 99% Invisible in general. It's fantastic, and it should be in your rotation. Check it out. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show.

And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.