Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Buttons (For Pushing)

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why push-buttons are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Buttons for pushing. No for turning on. Famous for turning back off. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why buttons for pushing are secretly incredibly fascinating. There folks, hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast is all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt and not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. Katie. Hi. What is your relationship to or opinion of buttons for pushing, like push buttons? I don't read what the buttons do.

I just push them. Pushing the buttons. I remember watching Dexter's Laboratory as a child, the cartoon. Yes. Dexter's a genius. He's got a lab. And then his sister, Diti, is not a genius, but she loves pushing buttons, like literal the buttons and then she always explodes something and I really related to DD

because like I too you know when I see a shiny button I want to push it of course I do I don't want to I don't I I've learned as an adult to read instruction manuals but yeah I've really got an attitude of like you know what like if I have a new device I want to push things and find out what happens. Gosh, what a good show. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know, the only other thing with buttons is I like the sound they make, you know, I'm a, I'm an ASMR freak and I love it when I'll just like watch a

video of someone type it on a keyboard or pushing buttons. I'm like, you know what, this is great. Like, I like this. Yeah. You know, this is, this is the good stuff. Like, you're like, hey, you want to watch a movie or a TV show? Everyone's into things like, I don't know. What's that?

Like pluribus. Everyone's trying to get me to watch pluribus. And I'm like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to watch someone typing on a keyboard. That's what I'm going to do instead of watch pluribus. I'm sure pluribus is great. I'm sure it's great. It's got a plot and everything.

But is it the gentle sounds of someone pushing buttons and typing on a keyboard? No. Well, then sorry. I don't got time. You know, I feel like the main character of pluribus really needs to sit with an ASMR for a second. I know a lot's going on. But like, chill out. Carol.

Do it, do it, Alex, do I need to watch Pluribus? The show is not sponsored by Pluribus, so. It's actually quite good, yeah. Okay. All right, well, let me see. Like, once I get through, once I get through the last season of Kindly Woman. Kindly Woman typing on a nice sounding keyboard, then I'll, then maybe I'll give Pluribus try. But, no, I do.

I like, I like buttons is the point. They're nice. This is almost kind of a broader category of something we've done on SIF before. There's a SIF about keyboards for typing. There's a SIF about computer mice. Those have buttons, but this episode's basically about, you know, one big red button. Big red button. Not necessarily that, but any sort of individual or just a few buttons for operating stuff is the topic.

And thank you to at Gobu Killer on the Discord for suggesting it. Lots of folks supported it. It ran away in the polls. Yeah. It's a good topic. Yeah, buttons are cool. They're truly siff. I really never think about them much. Our new car has a push button start. Our previous car was from like 2012. So it had a key. At either way, it's kind of the same experience. It's fine. Yeah. That was a hard transition for me. I don't have a car, but when I rent cars in the U.S. now, often they're on the newer side. And it's like where I put the keys because I'm old. And then there's like a button. I'm like, I just push the button and the car starts. I'm like, ah. Yeah. It's always a little, it's always a little spooky for me with the buttons in the car.

And I've seen like, I don't know, I think some cars, it's like instead of like a, you shift gears with like a, with the lever, it's like buttons now or something. And that weirds me out. Yeah, that's a total thing. Yeah, like the gear shift is just a series of pressing buttons. And it's very annoying to me, but it's fine. Yeah. Same thing. Same thing with the turn signal now.

It's like instead like left and right where you push down for left and up for right, it's like two. I think the cyber truck had a pretty bad design where it was like just two buttons on one side, which seems like hard to like know which one you're pushing. I'd be into like two but like one button on the left and one button on the right like a game controller. That kind of makes sense for turn signals. But the two buttons on the left doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. And we'll get into cars as we go, too.

Because, yeah, buttons are also truly everywhere. They're everywhere. I'm thrilled we have this topic. And also, you know, speaking of members picking topics and stuff, thank you so much to everybody who helped us out in the maximum fun drive. Hey, yeah, thank you. Because now that time has progressed, you all really came through. We had well over 400 people contribute.

So you funded digital art that you will receive for episode 300. and you funded one new episode of the inspectors, inspectors. Oh, boy. Which will come sometime this year. I love to hear that. And Katie, Katie, where are you getting up? Katie? What?

Nothing? No. Why are you opening the door? Katie? That's fine. I'm going for cigarettes. I'll be right back. No, I love the inspectors.

It's so fun. The television program is very good. I like it a lot. Yeah. No notes. All right. Well, teach me about buttons, Alex. Yeah, on every episode, we lead to with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called,

Some folks are born, made to read the stats, who, and read numbers to. That's it. Thank you, James Amaz for that suggestion. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a vacillian way as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to Sif Pot at G. I got the new boy son and he likes to be sung to and I realize that I don't know a lot of songs.

So I got to I got to remember these to sing to the boy child. Raise him on stats and numbers songs from SIF. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Now I regret last week's song being based on Roland by Limp Biscuit. That was a mistake. No, you know, honestly, anything's better than cocoa melon.

So I'm fine with it. But our first number here, this kind of sticks with the theme of futuristic stuff. The number is 2007. Ooh, future. Right. Yeah, 2007 is when Steve Jobs demonstrated a tech feature he called The Pinch. Oh, you can do The Pinch. Oh, right.

Like Pinch to zoom in and out. Exactly. He demonstrated it in the landmark 2007 Apple demo for the prototype of the iPhone, which went on sale later that year for the first time. And according to NPR, that demo was so influential and also either copied or being copied from other tech companies that as soon as 2009 people in the tech field were saying, maybe buttons are going to go extinct. Maybe there will be no more buttons because of touchscreens being so amazing. Yeah, I remember also with keyboards, there was a hot minute there. I know that this isn't necessarily about keyboards, but there was a time where it felt like they were trying to transition away from button keyboards to like just sort of like touch keyboards. And I do not remember particularly liking those, the ones that didn't have as much haptic feedback because you'd like type and it's like, I don't remember where my fingers went. So it seems like that the attempt to completely shift away from buttons or any kind of haptic feedback being like you push something and it like gives you a sensation of being pushed or like a slight push back or click or something. And now they've like they even like fake haptic feedback.

So when it's not like a mechanical button, they like fake a sound and a feeling of something being clicked because otherwise we don't know what we're clicking or touching. Yes, that's one of the biggest reasons buttons will probably never go away. We love the feedback. We love the physical something. If there's a click to it, you feel like you completed the action. And touchscreens are totally valid. They just don't do that so much or at all. Depends if they build in anything haptic or not. Yeah, because like now isn't it the case? I don't even remember. Things are just so automatic muscle memory. But like now when you're, because like I'm pretty good at typing on my phone, I feel like. But like there is, there can be like. like feedback on your phone that tries to make it like a little vibration just to make it seem like you're pushing a button even though you're not. It's like a flat screen. Yeah, they can't. Yeah. Even when we don't use buttons, like we like the feeling of buttons. We do, yeah. And so as amazing as touchscreens have gotten, buttons have in parallel stuck around, but pretty reputable places like TechCrunch, because a lot of Silicon Valley news is through the internet.

at TechCrunch.com in September 2009 ran an article headlined, touching all rumors point to the end of keys slash buttons. And it was based on basically Apple and Google pushing that. It turns out in the development of the iPhone, Apple immediately regretted their board of directors because one of the members of their board of directors was Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt's. No relation.

I would be fantastically wealthy if there was. And so then Steve Jobs decided possibly accurately that Eric Schmidt just was on the board, saw all the iPhone stuff and turned it into Android. And then Jobs like forced him off the board, but too late. And also it seems like both those companies cribbed from other companies, this kind of touchscreen had been going since the 1980s in prototypes. So everybody's stealing from everybody. It's kind of like AI now, right? where it's once the cat's out of the bag, you can't just be the only company that, like, does AI or, like, has, is the only, it's like, I've thought of doing this thing with AI.

It's like, yeah, you and basically everyone else who has, like, a AI company. So it's, uh, yeah, not impressive. It's very funny when an AI company is like, oh, you stole from our data, this other AI company while, you know, like, they're stealing all this other data from, you know, everyone else. It's just like, oh, you can't, you can't steal what we've already stolen. That's not fair. Right. Our theft-based business is being stolen from.

Like, yeah, well, that's fine. Oh, yeah, you know. F*** it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, and the other weird thing about Steve Jobs and buttons is it turns out he had a, like, profound and spiritual negative feeling about buttons because they are a binary on and all. off. Jobs was into a lot of different spiritual things and also was ill while he was doing a lot of his big advances in his career. And apparently in an interview with 60 minutes, when he was known to

be sick, he told them that, quote, maybe it's because I want to believe in an afterlife that when you die, it doesn't just all disappear, the wisdom you've accumulated, somehow it lives on. But sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone. And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on-off devices, end quote. Interesting. And that the button is an on-off switch with most tech like that. So he felt like a button implies that when we die, we just go away. And so that's part of why he wanted to do more touchscreen, he kind of stuff. That's really interesting. He was so odd individual. Like he was obviously there's probably, there's probably with his personality in terms of just getting along with others.

But like I feel like he had such a strong sort of design aesthetic that was something where he was extremely passionate about to the point of being an a-hole. But he had a very, he had a very like strong point of view from the standpoint of like what he wanted stuff to look like, what he wanted the experience to be. I'm not like a Steve Jobs, like, fan girl. But I think that when you hear about these stories about like CEOs of companies or people that like had these companies that have these like designs and it's like, you know, like being philosophically opposed to buttons as being like ontologically evil or something. It's just like, you know, like part of me kind of likes that because at least you have a point of view whereas like I feel like it's harder and harder to find things that are. made from like a philosophical perspective, like a chair that's made because it's made by

Ames and he's got like a philosophical perspective on chairs. Like now it's just like, ah, it's just a chair that we make because it's cheap and we can sell it, you know, on Amazon. And, you know, so yeah, just having that interesting philosophy on design, even if I think it's a little bonkers. I like buttons. I don't think when I look at a button, I'm not like. Like, oh, man, this makes me contemplate my mortality.

But it's kind of fun that he was so crazy. Yes. That really gets us into the next number, too. Because the next number, it's 2026. Hmm. Future, future. Future is now. In, in 26, the European New Car Assessment Program, NCAP,

they announced that they would start deducting from the safety ratings for cars. if the card didn't offer physical buttons or switches for every crucial feature. Instead of just touch-screening things, they said, in order for the car to be safe, you need a physical way to do every critical thing. I once again agree with the European Union. We're not always in agreement, me and the European Union, but often we are. Here's another one. Yeah.

They were wrong about prunes two weeks ago, and otherwise pretty good. They're also, I think, a little bit too strict about cinnamon, but, you know, in general, that came up. Yeah, remember when they were real jerks about cinnamon? Yeah, they attacked Danish bakeries for no reason. Yeah. Yeah, there's some other stuff. I can't remember right now.

But, you know, sometimes they get it wrong. But I think this is totally, like, some of the newer car futures where it's like if you sneeze, you like veer into another lane, like, that's probably not good. Yeah. And it turns out there's basically been a new trend in car design that is now being pushed back on with buttons. Pushed. It didn't mean to that. Nice. Good one. The new trend was, hey, we can just make everything a touchscreen.

And now, according to ours, technica, a lot of the world, wherever there's solid regulations, they're pushing back. Good. European Union, this crash testing for cars, they said that starting in 2026, if the car's basic controls don't have separate physical options, that's considered unsafe. And then ANCAP, which is a similar organization for Australia and New Zealand, is doing the same thing later this year, 2026. It will start. The U.S. regulations are weak, so we'll probably stay the way we are. But it turns out a lot of the philosophy of making everything in a car a touchscreen is laziness and a lack of a design philosophy. Great. Yeah. Both the engineers and the accountants at carmakers say,

like the engineers say, great, we can just yada yada most of the interface of the car. And then software guys have to solve it with the one screen we put in. Oh, good. And then the accountants say, great, we'll just manufacture one touchscreen instead of all the very specific buttons and fiddly parts. That's cheaper. But then the software people and the safety people both say, this is terrible. There's a very bad way to run a car. Yeah, of course.

Well, the reason you don't have a touch screen, number one, you have to look at a touchscreen to know what you're touching. Like, if you've ever tried to type on your phone without looking at downs, I mean, I'm sure probably there's like zoomers out there going like, geez, you olds can't even type with that. Like, you have to look at your phone to type. I find it. There's probably video game speed run type guys who can type a novel without looking. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like I'm pretty good at typing on my phone, but I usually have to look down. And I mean, just in general, the problem is like our appropriate exception, our ability to know like where our finger is in sort of time and space is not so precise that you can be so like if you have a small enough screen, right?

Like because what are you going to do? Have like a giant screen with huge buttons in your car? No. Obviously cars were made when we didn't have touch screens. But one of the nice features about buttons and cars and say like in airplanes and stuff is that you can like physically touch a thing and know what it is by a touch and maybe a brief glance. I don't have to like go through a goddamn menu to get to the air conditioner. Right. Like it's.

Right. I think it's extremely obvious why buttons are better, like why you would want them. With baby Schmidt, like our newish car has one touchscreen, which I'm fine with. but we added an app to our phones to track Baby Schmidt's bowel movements and feedings and so on. And I haven't figured out how to not display that on the car's touch screen. So now like a lot of the screen is the map, but then the rest of the screen is truly the last time Baby Schmidt nursed. When did Baby Schmidt poop? That's great.

Exactly. On my car. I need an app like that actually for Baby Golden. It's great. for a little G.B.'s bell movements. G.B. B.M. G.B. stands for Golden Baby. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly right.

Buttons are a wonderful interface for the life and death situation of operating vehicle. And that's one of many places that probably won't go away. Yeah. And it's at this point hard to find any big pushes to totally eliminate fiscal buttons in an industry. The big example I could find is a button that's really just the Internet. the number there is in 2019 a German court

ruled against Amazon's dash buttons this is a defunct now Amazon program Oh is this the oh I remember this I was actually going to bring this up earlier but I thought you might bring it up and I was right

the like tied pod buttons those are so funny Yeah I think people who are like I don't know five years younger than us are shocked this ever happened I'm going to link a Reddit post where almost 20,000 up voters were like, can you believe this existed? From 2015 to 2019, Amazon heavily promoted what they called Dash, where it's basically a tiny plastic physical button with a company's logo on it.

And the standard example was Tide laundry detergent for some reason. Tide pods button. Yeah. Also, yeah, I like the idea of when you eat the Tide Pots as soon as they arrive. But we had a friend who was like, I mean, you didn't have to be rich for these buttons, but this friend was like stupid rich and like bought a bunch of like dumb bull do-doodoo. And he got a tied pod button. And he was like, check this out.

And he pressed the button. He's like, I just ordered some tied pods. I was like, okay. I don't know, man. Like also smartphones were widespread when this started. theoretically you can pull out your phone and add it to a list or order it. But the idea was no, you just press the button and Amazon takes it from there, like magic convenience. Yeah.

But according to NGadgett.com, they lost a court case in Germany in 2019. A Munich court ruled that dash buttons violated consumer protection laws because you don't know the price you're paying when you hit the button. Also, you could be drunk and like push it 20 times because you're like, I need more paper. And you push it and you come back later and you're like, you're like, did I order more paper towels? I don't know. Push, push, push, push. Also, children, a child could push it like 20 times, you know.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I was thinking like, oh, you know, like it would be kind of like nice to be able to. I mean, I don't love the idea of a courier having to come just for paper towels. That's like kind of wasteful. But, you know, it's like you run out of paper towels. You know, you're tired. You want to like just get some more paper towels, especially. you've got a kid running around, but then it's like, but then your kid comes over and it's like,

I'm going to order 100 paper towels. And then, you know. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, bo, pop. Yeah, Amazon lost this German court case in January 2019. In the story, they say, we will appeal. But then the following month, they retired the dash program worldwide. So I think they either decided it wasn't worth it or something. Yeah.

I can't imagine it was such a big moneymaker. You know what they're doing? Can I tell you their newest thing, though, using dubious technology? Amazon? Oh, I'm filled with trend immediately, but sure. They're coming for us, Alex. There's a new feature where you can, it's an AI podcast that you are on a product page. And then you can click like, you know, this button that gives you an AI podcast that tells you about the product,

summarizes the reviews of the product. And it's like, it's not just an AI voice summarizing stuff for you. It's like a fake podcast. And I listen to one of these about diaper rash cream. There's a reporter for, um, I have a lot of diaper rash cream podcast as it is. Yeah. But okay. I'll check it out.

So this is by, this is by Katie Natopoulos, a business insider. Oh, yeah. I've read her stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Amazon invented the world's least necessary podcast. So it's essentially this thing where it's like also just tries to sound kind of like a podcast where it's saying, now tell me about like why is this diaper cream different from other diaper creams, Emma?

Sure, I'll answer you that. And then it's like, you know, just this kind of like one of them had a British accent and I don't know why. And they had like sort of the podcaster cadence. So what I'm saying, Alex, we got to get in on this is that we have to start doing. our own diaper rash cream podcast and combine it with the dash button technology. So like we send out a bunch of buttons and then whenever you want our opinion on diaper rash cream, you press the button and it plays us talking about diaper rash cream. Only if I can record it in an alienating sounding voice for no reason.

Right. Only if that's my one condition. Well, Alex, I'll tell you why this diaper rash cream is more important than other diaper rash creams, Alex. Aqua four. Aqua four. That's a kind we use. Anyway.

It has zinc oxide in it. Yeah. With buttons in all technology, it really feels like the science fiction version of buttons making life easy is much better than the reality. Yeah, because nobody actually wants this dash button stuff. No. I mean, it's very like, you remember those sort of old? I think they might have been Tex Avery cartoons, but it was like the, like, kitchens of the future cartoons that they had in, like, the 50s.

And it'd be like, you press a button and you get, like, a cake that pops out of your oven or something. And it's, it was all these things. And, like, some of them were pretty close to being accurate, but some of them were, were pretty goofy. And it seems that sometimes innovation comes from just like people who've watched these cartoons. And they're like, this would be fun to, like, make for real. Truly, yeah. Like you said, all sorts of random tax avery or 1950s stuff presented this. We talked about Ray Bradbury's writing recently. He kind of fictionalized some of that. Another number here is 1962 and 1963. The Hannah-Barbara cartoon, The Jetsons. They aired new episodes on primetime US TV those years. And it was huge incitication. And there's one Jetson's episode where Jane Jetson, the wife and mother of the family, She complains about push button finger. And the joke is she's developed this chronic physical condition from pushing one button a couple of times a day.

Yeah. Which is all she ever has to do in the amazing future. We do have carpal hunger. It's like a gag about carpal tunnel. Yeah, we do have carpal tunnel though. Yeah. And the other super popular trope about buttons making our lives easier was a 2005 marketing campaign by Staples. the U.S. office supply chain.

Oh, yeah. In 2005, they created a campaign around an easy button, which was a large red button with the word easy on it, and then they added a catchphrase of, that was easy. Everyone knows this in the U.S. I don't know if everyone, but probably most millennials. Yeah, I remember the easy button.

That was, and I think someone brought it like, I don't know if this was cracked or something. some other office that I worked at, but like someone brought it in and thought it was really funny to keep pressing it. Yes, like this started out as just a prop in a TV commercial. It didn't exist. And then this was such a massively popular campaign that they first put it on TV in 2005. And before the end of 2006, the Staples office store had sold more than 1.5 million physical easy buttons. for $4.99 a piece. And they don't do anything.

It's just a gag. Yeah. Like you press the button and there's a little voice that says that was easy, right? Like that's the whole thing. Yes. Yeah. And in the commercial, you know, the camera cuts and magic happens. But people like, as we'll talk about especially in the second half of the show, it turns out people in the United States have a profound obsession with a button that makes life easy.

It might be our greatest national value from like the late. 1800s on. Who says that America doesn't have a unifying culture? We have the, that was easy button from commercials. Yeah. The Geico Gaco. We have rich texts here. There really is like a video essay to be made about how like so much of modern American cultures just shared TV commercials because like that's that's the thing that we all share is watching commercials. Especially comedy. It's kind of our dominant cultural comedy. It's just like Jake from State Farm. That's kind of the main, like the vast majority of Americans, they haven't seen Tim Robinson's stuff or anything. They think comedy is a couple of commercial premises. Right. So thank you

for supporting maximum fun, which is actual comedy. I've literally sort of recited the, what was it? Sears air conditioner commercial from the 90s of so many times. Oh, my heart. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Another scorcher. Another scorcher.

You said you'd call yesterday. Or wait, no, no, yesterday. Yesterday you said you'd call Sears. I'll call today. You'll call now. I'll call now. Sorry. It's like a Vietnam war flashback for us.

And then we're like, what happens in, I don't know, the nativity story? he's bored or something. I can't track it. Yeah, like movies and stuff. Like, no, look, my media consumption now is like old commercials and someone typing on a keyboard that is all my brain can handle. And cocoa melon. And co. Oh, God, no. Please no. Sorry.

I'm going to, I'm going to see if I can avoid that if possible. You just start self-soothing with me covering lip biscuit. Like, ah, ah, ah. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And buttons are truly all around us ever since the late 1800s. Second half of the show will really explore that.

But for buttons around us right now, we have a first takeaway number one. A surprising amount of the buttons in your life might be placebo buttons. Ooh, placebo buttons. It turns out in a lot of the built modern world, old's. There are buttons that were either set up to never work or used to work, and then the system's been taken apart. And it's just something we press and we feel better about it. Let me guess. Crosswalks. Yes, in a lot of places and in a lot of times of day. It doesn't actually do anything. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. They all called me crazy, but I knew it. I knew it.

I knew pressing that button did nothing. Truly, people basically felt that way checked and found out that of big cities. The crosswalk buttons don't do anything, such as London and New York City. Yeah. I still press them a lot of times, but my eyes have been opened to the button gas sliding that happens at crosswalks. I now see my whole world differently. And our key sources for this are a feature for BBC feature by Chris Baraniuk, and then two features for the New York Times, one by Michael Luo and one by Christopher Melle. Because it turns out that a lot of the infrastructure around us has what's called a placebo button, which is a button that objectively does not control the system but is psychologically fulfilling to push. And a lot of the

academic study of how this could work goes back to the 1970s. There's a psychologist named Ellen Langer who went on to be working at Harvard, who called it illusion of control. Yeah. And said that it's broadly beneficial to us as human beings, even though we're not dominating anything and running anything. We're essentially Skinner rats. Skinner box is a little box when you put a rat in and then you have a couple of levers that the rat can push and then you can run a bunch of different types of experiments with that.

Like do they prefer sugar, water, or cocaine? And we're basically Skinner rats in the society of ours. Yes. And one of the biggest examples is crosswalks. We want to feel like we're. getting through the city faster. And it turns out that in the 2010s, journalists for the BBC found out that people in London mostly weren't controlling any of that, even though there's a button and there's instructions

like if you want to cross, press the button, you know? And they found out that specifically in central London, a lot of the crossings were programmed at timed intervals for red and green lights. And when you push the button, it had no impact unless it was between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m. Like when theoretically, especially in London because business is closed around midnight, when theoretically no one's on the street and no one's driving, you can make it go faster. But otherwise, the button does absolutely nothing and you just are happier because you think

you're doing something. And the London example is particularly wild to me because they didn't just take away the system. It does run specifically at a time that seems like cars don't really need it anymore. It's so weird to not just, I keep wanting to say turn it all off, but that's confusing in a button context. Like they didn't just get rid of it. It still runs, but they mostly turned it off in a way that's very puppeting the skinner rats to me. Right, right. Yeah, because it's all automated.

It's based on like light cycles and stuff. I guess the original idea of it is like if there wasn't anyone there and that way you could get more cars through. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting psychologically because it does. actually can literally impact our physical health when we feel like we don't have control over our environment. I mean, which is something that is mostly in sort of a bleak way studied in, say, like, nursing homes or a convalescent homes where it's like, you know, when you give people who maybe don't have as much control over their lives anymore, like either the feeling that they do or like something to actually have like some autonomy over.

like it does improve health outcomes. So, you know, we like a button. I guess there's even like the glass half full version too where it's just nice to feel better than you otherwise do in a situation you don't control, I guess. You know, like it's just what we've kind of picked for everybody. Yeah. And the glass half empty way to look at it is this is the way

that autocracies run elections, where they're like make it seem like you're voting for something so that you're pacified. And that's what they're doing with. these little buttons on our crosswalks. And also people have just, like, demanded that their journalists look into the crosswalks, I think, especially in big cities. They're just like, this bothers me every day, my crossing.

And way back in 2004, the New York Times investigated New York City pedestrian buttons because more and more people told them, it seems like this doesn't do anything. And when they got a hold of the Department of Transportation, they found out that New York City had about 3,250 walk buttons. And out of those 3,250 walk buttons, more than 2,500 of them officially did nothing. They are mechanical placebos, any benefits only imagined. At any time of day, the crossing was just going to be based on the timing it is. Right. I wonder if they've done a study where it's like you give people, this would be wildly unethical, actually. I guess you probably couldn't do it. But if you gave people a button

that was supposed to give them pain relief during like something painful, I don't know, like childbirth. But like, because there are, in the US at least, and in some other countries, you can have like a button that helps release like say morphine or

an epidural, not just for childbirth, but all sorts of things. But I wonder like if you could still get some like pain relief if you gave them that button and then and like nothing happened. It turns out that's oddly been studied with thermostats.

Oh, okay. I know it's not directly the pain relief you're talking about. Which would be a wildly unethical study. Right. Yeah, apparently many offices have thermostats with buttons on them, but then it's all been wired to only be operated from some kind of central system. And so when workers are pressing those buttons, it's not actually changing anything. But when they've studied it, the workers,

complain less and are happier because they simply feel like they adjusted the temperature for themselves. But, you know, there are reasons to not let just one worker change the temperature for 100 people in the building, you know. Right. But it just makes people feel good to change the buttons on a thermostat, even though the temperature doesn't change. So if I get a button with the label, Sleep button, and I push it, and it's like every time I push the sleep button, I get more restfulness. Am I going to feel better? We're both just hammering that button, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And then apparently the other big example of this is buttons that used to totally work in elevators. Okay, I had thought to ask about elevators, but then I thought, well, obviously the elevator button has to work because how else does the elevator know to come to you? But yeah, tell me about elevators. Yeah, so the whole button. button interface works, except that apparently in a lot of places in the last couple decades, they've disconnected or stopped letting you use the door close button. Okay, that's, yes. Yeah, okay.

I feel so validated right now. You can't believe it. Like, I knew that freaking thing doesn't do anything. We've all just been getting, like, soothed and comforted by buttons that don't work in our daily lives. Yeah. I mean, because I think the elevator open button works. Yes.

But the elevator door. Have you ever done the thing where someone's like rushing to get to the elevator and you're like, oh, I'll be nice and I'll push the elevator open button. But the elevator open button and close button are just like two triangles. And I get confused between them. So then I push the closed button giving them like giving them a big friendly smile as I close the door. So I seem like a complete psychopath. I have done that once or twice, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, oh, I try to like open it, but it's too late.

So I apologize to everyone I've done that too, because I've done that multiple times. And I don't mean to do it. But it's a... Yeah. Yeah. And it's possible to make that mistake, too, because some door closed buttons work. Not all of them are turned off. Yes.

And they don't tell you... At the very least, what I'm doing is not opening the doors. So it's like, even if they're just closing on their own. I'm not helping because I'm like pushing the button. I think I'm pushing the button to open them, but instead I'm either doing nothing or hastening them closing, which is, I'm sorry. Yeah, because here's the logic of it.

The door open button has to work for safety in case you're like trying to escape the elevator. Your arm. Your arm is stuck. And then especially in the U.S., the timeline here is, according to the New York Times, the average elevator has a useful life of 25 years. And then about 36 years ago, the U.S. passed a law called the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. The legislation required that elevator doors remain open long enough for anyone who uses crutches a cane or a wheelchair to get on board the elevator.

And between that and other elevator makers just deciding people shouldn't actually get to use the door closed button. It's not just a disabilities thing. A lot of those buttons either never worked or have been disconnected. because in the disabilities case, in order to make sure the elevator is compliance and the doors are open long enough, they just can't let you close it too soon. Right, right. It's like we have to make this jerk proof. Yeah. And then the other reason, again, it's not just people with disabilities. Then some elevator makers say, we're just not going to let people be jerks. And it just closes when it's going to close and that button is totally fake. So that's so interesting though that they

I mean it makes sense to me if you disconnect it and it's still there and you don't change it because you know it's extra effort but what's really interesting to me is the like adding in a fake button that that's interesting right and we all expect both options to be there and I think people would complain if the door closed button was not there yeah so we just want that so they gaslight us yeah

And apparently there are ways that either firefighters or maintenance workers with like essentially secret keys and codes can make the door close. But otherwise, in most cases, the public can't make it close. The only way you could is if it's a pretty old elevator that was not updated for this law or was not made with the kind of jerkproofing. Right, right. So that button's probably been fake for most of us in most of our lifetime. I'm going to test it out as someone's trying to get on the elevator. Yeah, but we like the idea that we can hasten our journey. And then I feel like especially in horror movies or something that button isn't working,

but it turns out that just kind of doesn't work in general. Like it's always been a placebo. Yeah, probably in a horror movie, I would accidentally open the doors to an elevator when a, you know, a serial killer's after me. And the like, bloodthirsty ghoul is like, hey, thank you, like the way regular people are. I appreciate it. In real life one time, I opened the door for someone stealing Amazon packages from my apartment complex. Because I just like saw a guy come in, like have a bunch of packages under his arm.

and then he was like trying to get through the door and I like opened it for him I was like hey there and he like runs across the street and I was like it took me like 10 seconds to be like now wait a minute I've probably done that and not even realized I let a few do that in Brooklyn just being real friendly like hey there neighbor taking a bunch of packages from random uh doorsteps running across the street all normal here now hold on a minute Hang on a second. So, yeah. But the jokes on them because their tiny Italian car can't fit the packages. Right. Now, this is in Los Angeles. All of my wackiest stories of people being stranger from Los Angeles.

So we're all just kind of self-soothing with buttons all the time. I need a lot of placebo buttons. I need like I need a button that's like make time. tummy feel better. I need a button that says, uh, one hour nap button. What other buttons do I need? Ummon cookie. Yeah, summon cookie or feel self-confident. Yeah. And folks, that's a giant takeaway about you being fooled all the time and tons of other button numbers. We're going to come back and then press a few more takeaway buttons. That was a takeaway. That was a takeaway. Folks, we're back and we have a few more takeaway. We're going to. We have a few more

takeaways about buttons. And they're going to bring us way into the past because takeaway number two, 1880s and 1890s Americans sparked several moral panics amongst themselves by making things button operated. Ooh, interesting. Was this like of the Steve Jobs variety of a button implies no afterlife? You would think they'd have some kind of like Calvinist worry. But. Right. Right. It looks too much like a nipple. This is inappropriate. So one of them involves female sexuality and a different part of the body. Are you kidding me? Yeah.

Are you kidding? That was a joke, Alex. I was joking. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And there is also a, I mentioned Calvinism. There was also a fear that we were losing the ability to do anything. You know, like stuff was just a black box with a button and we wouldn't be able to do anything anymore as human beings and skilled people. Yeah. I mean, you know. And that's kind of happens. It's sort of true. I mean, it's like, it's like you do, like you do lose certain skills.

Like nobody knows how to use an abacus anymore, but then you get different skills. People in the United States obsessed about making everything button operated, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. And then any new technology we freak out. So, yeah, the U.S. in particular. is the button country in a lot of ways. Really got into buttons. Nice. And the key source here is an amazing book.

And also a few listeners sent excerpts of it that have been posted online. It's called Power Button, A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. That's a really nice sounding title. That's a lot of alliteration. Yeah, so many peas. Wow. And it's by Rachel Plotnick, who's an associate professor in the Media School at Indiana University.

It's an amazing read. I highly recommend it. And she traces huge leaps in button technology. Also, the history of buttons at all. Buttons are, you know, they're just a tech interface. Anything could be behind the button. And they only really, really got going in the 1800s. Also, the name of a button that comes from a French word of the 1300s.

Buton. Yes. That's how it. it's pronounced. Oh, okay. It's, it's B-O-U-T-O-N. It originally referred to, quote, a pimple or any small projection. Ew. Yeah. Yeah. Gross, man. And then apparently as people started making what we think of as technology, that word got applied to not just what we see as buttons that we push, but also buttons on clothing. And then also lots of dials and switches and any kinds of controls. And then later on we specifically made it push buttons. Can I say I love dials and

switches? You put me in front of a bunch of tiles and switches and I'm like, all right, let's get, let's get this plane off the ground. And I don't know what I'm doing, but I love them. It just feels good. Like children's toys really tap into it. Yeah. Oh man, I got to, when G.B is old enough, I got to, I got to build them just like a board with a bunch of switches and buttons that don't do anything. I'm so excited. Oh yeah, like Maggie Simpson's car steering in the intro of the Simpsons. Yeah, exactly. Just like a control, like something that looks like it belongs on a nuclear sub, but it doesn't do anything. Like it's going to be so fun.

Yeah, that would be great. And yeah, really in the 1800s, people started thinking of the button as a concept for like an interface on a thing. Potnick says that one of the earliest ones is from the year 1821. A French watchmaker named Nikola Rusek wrote up an idea for what he called a chronograph. Chronograph. Yeah. Sorry. Most of it would be a computor. And then the user, quote, presses a button.

And when he's saying that, that's like a new phrase. But what he's describing is essentially a stopwatch. He says, what if a watch was kind of a computer and you press the button to make it stop timing. That's, you know, that's basically what we have. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, and then, like, at the end of the 1800s, basically every existing technology, people said, can a button operate it? Because instead of needing to know how to flip all the dials and switches, if you could hit one button and then the black box of the machine does everything, that would be great. Right. And it used to be that, like, the button was connected to a stick that would, like,

prod the servant who would actually do the thing. So you'd, like, press a button for the the elevator doors to close, but it was just a stick that would prod that person at the elevator who would pull levers and stuff. Or like on a horse-drawn carriage, you push the button and it just like go faster, but it just pokes the carriage driver. I'm joking, but unless I'm not, sometimes my jokes turn out to be true. It turns out that's how a lot of hotels worked at the end of the 1800s. Like, wait, what? So what you're described? What? What you're described? was basically the second huge way Americans set up buttons, which was a hotel system that was named an an nunciator. And not enunciating with an e-like speaking, but a nunciator.

An annuncator. And the system was basically like the super nice hotels of the 1880s in the U.S. Each room would have a button. And then when you press the button, that closed a circuit, which then like set off some kind of of physical signal in the central main office of the hotel, either like a little paper card would drop or a little flag would flip up. And then hotel staff would see that. And the initial ones, it just meant the room wants something. And then as they made them more advanced, there were specific buttons for room service and changing the sheets and stuff. So it's like the flight attendant

button. That's another one. I'm not sure actually works. I feel like they've been trained to disregard it, yeah. Yeah. But that's like, that's like slightly different from like, it's, it is, that is a real button that causes a thing to happen. It's not like you push a button and it makes a stick go and poke someone. Yeah, it's not quite like Flintstone's technology or something. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right.

Where it pushes a bird to like play a record and the bird goes, it's 11. Right. I meant just an impression of caveman Elvis or something. Yeah. Yeah. That's like another, that's like the, the Flintstones and the Jetsons were sort of the opposite ends of the spectrum. Like they're both Hanna-Barbera.

You have the Jetsons with the like futurism, but then the Flintstones would have a lot of like, here's like a funny thing about like technology, but it's just you have it made out of rocks and, and, uh, woolly mammoths. Yeah. Basically. And yeah, so that was like the second big way the U.S. got into buttons, and the first way was fire alarm systems. If folks have heard there's a passive about emergency phone numbers, we talk about fire alarm call boxes. Those started to get put in in the 1850s.

But a lot of times that'd be a lever or a relatively complicated thing. As soon as the 1870s inventors developed one where it's just a push button and then that one button could separate. off alarms and bells at several locations across the system. And they also put up networked systems of buttons like that in theaters in particular, because theaters kept burning down. So you wanted to be able to alert anywhere in the building. Did they have like a cover on it so that someone wouldn't lean against the wall and like alert the entire thing of fire? Like sometimes not always.

Yeah. Because also Rachel Plotnick says that buttons became so popular so fast in those last two decades of the 1800s that by 1900s there were more than 50 different designs of push buttons sold at a fraction of the previous costs and by all sorts of companies. If you lived in the 1880s, it felt like buttons were taking over your life in a big city. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. My mom has this story. Now, my brother wasn't from the 1880s, nor was my mom. But she has this story of like my brother who, when he was a baby, she brought him to some building.

And like he, I don't know if it was a button or a lever. It might have been a, or like maybe a pole string. It was something, something that a baby could operate. And he like set off the alarm for this giant building. because he got too close to the shiny red button and pushed it or pulled it or whatever it was. And like a big, big alarm went off. And like as soon as those buttons were available, there were kind of two opposing moral panics. Because one is that specifically boys would be pranksters.

I don't know if my brother at the time was doing a prank because he was like under two. But, you know. Yeah, apparently as soon as mainly in big cities, they started rolling out doorbells, boys just press the doorbells. And then the other opposite moral panic was that basically pranks were getting less good. And that when there used to be big door knockers, people really had to have an art to knocking on the door knocker and then getting away. And now it was too easy with a button, essentially. That's incredible. So you can't do anything right if you're a little boy in the 1890s.

Well, now there's like, because there was that moral panic about boys going around. And instead of like, instead of doing the doorbell, they would come and like start banging on the door and then run away. So like the moral panic like kind of inverted. Now it's like if you don't use the doorbell and you're doing the like knocking and running away, then that's now seen as, you know, boys these days are much worse. men, the boys in the past, because they did the innocent thing of ringing the doorbell, not knocking on it. People just want a moral panic about anything and everything, yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, children are super annoying.

Yeah, and it's also a weird thing where these buttons were both spreading across all the U.S. and a lot of people never experienced them until a ways into the 1900s. both Rachel Plotnick points out, and also if you've heard our past episode about refrigerators, we didn't electrify most of the U.S. until well into the 1900s. Apparently in the year 1915, only about 8% of U.S. households had electricity. So you can't have an electric doorbell yet, you know. But there would be the social and media description of this phenomenon because it was happening in big cities where newspaper writers lived.

And so people already freaked out about it. And then also companies sold it as buttons are the entire products, especially in the 1890s Eastman Kodak took over photography by selling one button being how you take a picture. Right, because like with a lot of cameras, like there's a lot of complicated knobs and focal point do hickeys. I took a photography class in high school, so I used to know how to operate these old. older cameras and you'd have like a little lever that you could pull and all these things. And it was definitely not just like a single simple button you could push. And I'm sure like, because like with the old cameras, you would also have like a separate

squeeze bulb thingy and then you'd have a separate like flash. So you'd have two hands that you'd have to operate a camera with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then like Kodak, even if the pictures weren't that good, their slogan was quote, you press the button, we do the rest. Yeah.

And then that was all it took. People were like, great, I'm just going to buy this product. And Kodak was one of the biggest companies in the world for a long time, just on that premise. And it's so interesting because, yeah, like I had kind of had some whim about getting a film camera. Because now, like our iPhone cameras are so good or any kind of phone cameras, like really, really good, high quality stuff. But there is something kind of nice about the simplicity of just like you have a box and you. pointed at something and you push a button, you don't know what's going to happen until you get the photo developed or printed out. So, you know, it's a kind of fun. Yeah, like it's a black box. Buttons fundamentally just remove us from a system somewhat. There was also a moral panic about

if you press a button, you will get electrocuted. And maybe like early designs were poorly designed, but initially people were afraid that of electricity is just this amazing force and they worried if I press a button, I'll touch it. And then that flipped into buttons keep me safe from all the other gizmos in that black box and now I'm safer from electricity. Interesting. People really freaked out and then didn't freak out back and forth. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah.

And then apparently there were so many buttons in the lives of wealthy, powerful Americans in cities that, People started to wonder if just all the systems in the world are basically a button. And the incredibly dark way that that played out is in female sexuality and the study of it. And there was an influential journal article in 1892 where a doctor named Robert T. Morris theorized that, quote, the clitoris is a little electric button which pressed by adhesions rings up the whole nervous system, end quote. And unfortunately, his point was not that we should like figure out female pleasure and center that. He was getting at the idea that each woman's entire health depended on a well-functioning and not, quote, out-of-order clitoris. And that if women have any sort of problem, remove that clitoris.

And then you fixed it. Oh, my God. Yes. I hope I foregrounded how dark that was going to get because yikes. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. Okay. Well, that's, I'm glad that, you know, that's wasn't, that's no, gee, oh my God.

But he probably got that theory from a button that turns on the lights in his house or a button that rings the fire alarm. Yeah. It's stupid. For the fellows out there who, you know, no judgment. Those of you who are not yet so familiar with female anatomy, that would be like saying, like, the male, the male penis is like a lever. And if there's anything wrong with it, you just chop the whole thing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's the same logic. Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. That's, that's, um, yikes a Rooney, Alex. That's, uh, um, wow. Horifying. Horifying. Yeah, because I thought, I thought you're going in the direction of like, I remember, well, not personally, but, you know, from history books that, that, uh, when hysteria was, like, considered to be something where it's like, ah, if they're hysterical, you just, like, you shove a vibrator up there until they're happy again. Yeah.

And it was seen as this like medical thing. It wasn't just like, ladies be horny and they have a sex drive and you have like they need to be fulfilled just as much as men. It's like, there's something wrong with their womb. So shove a vibrator up there. And then that'll like correct wandering womb syndrome for something like that. Was this just like some kooky guys like paper? Did they, were there doctors who are actually like mutilating women because of this theory?

Apparently some people did it. We don't know how many. Yeah. Oh, my God. Jesus. And, of course, medical science was a nightmare in the 1890s, so this wasn't the only kook out there, not the only quack. Oh, boy.

And like you said, there was also the hysteria thing where luckily they weren't doing surgery. They were just, like, doing a different logic of pressing the button. Yeah. If you're going to do that, at least do it in the direction of, like, medicalized vibrators. Yeah. Yeah. It really makes the whole, like, hey, make your.

your son eat corn flakes so he doesn't touch himself a lot more innocent. Right. It's true. Yeah, I guess I'm glad for the boys that the theory was you should eat to cereal and ram crackers and not mutilating surgery. There is definitely, though, that, like, medical misogyny of, like, you, I can't imagine something, any doctor being like, what if we tried chopping off, like, the head of the penis? Like that just wouldn't, that wouldn't fly because men would be like, ah, God, no. Right, right. Exactly.

Yeah, and then these wealthy American men also basically brought buttons into a tech-based racism against other cultures. Okay, of course. Apparently there were like 1890s editorials about the idea that Americans know how to press a button and other cultures like can't even figure it out. Right? Like that proves we have a more advanced society. Sure. And then in 1922, an English-born American scholar named Jacob Warshaw wrote up a treatise on life in Latin America. And he said that, quote, Americans push a button. A Latin American orders a servant. We turn on the heat. He tells a servant to make a fire or stir it up, end quote. And his point was that clearly the United States is more enlightened society because instead of pushing servants around, we've just set up buttons. Rachel Plotnick points out that then and now a lot of U.S. button users are forcing humans to do things by pushing a button. It's not different.

Like, for example, an Amazon Dash button makes a warehouse worker who doesn't get bathroom breaks do stuff. You know, like it's still the same. Yeah, it's just removing you. It's removing you from the nuts and bolts of the situation, but it's, you know, it's the same kind of thing. That is pretty funny to be morally superior because of buttons. It's so wild. Yeah. Yeah.

And then from then on, in this week's bonus show, we'll talk about the idea of the nuclear button. And also in the 1960s, there was a notorious, probably pseudoscientific experiment by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist where people pressed a button to, like, theoretically deliver pain to other people. Like the button can remove us from other humans if we let it. And so that has always been a worry amongst society and even fiction. Like there's a short story about you press a button and somebody dies, but you get a million dollars, that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. So buttons can be spooky because they're so powerful.

But the joke's on you because that person who dies, Albert Einstein. Now you just killed Einstein. That's how that story goes, right? Now I don't understand relativity. which I didn't before kind of so it's fine yeah no it's true and the Milgram experiment I think it's like specifically like it's a little misunderstood because people were actually quite resistant to the to shocking people like it it's always presented as it's not so much that the study was complete BS but it was like it's always presented as like uh you gave them a button where you're like

it's gonna shock this person and everyone was like yeah sure sounds good to me That's how it's told, yeah. Like a lot of people refused to do it. A lot of people had to be like kind of really pushed and cajoled into doing it. Like the experimenter had to repeatedly say like, no, you have to do it. You have like in order for them to be willing to do it. So it wasn't so much that they were like, now press the button to shock this other person. There was like, all right, sounds great.

Bam. Right. And that is exactly what buttons are. We're around 150 years now of especially U.S. society using buttons for all technology and systems. And the buttons are exactly as good or evil as the technology or the systems or ourselves. They're just what they are. It's a very simple way to put the whole interface behind something. They've replaced the little devil and angel on your shoulder, though, with a button, two buttons on your shoulder.

A red one and a green one. A red one and a green one, the red one says, that was easy. And the green one orders. You tied pods. I thought the green one would be another office supply chain. I guess Dunder Mifflin? There we go. Great.

Michael Scott bothers you if he press that button. Yeah. I'd press that button all day long. He's adorable. Well, and we have one last quick and very different takeaway for the main show, which is takeaway number three. Scientists are beginning to study whether dogs can talk to you with a board of buttons. I want treats.

I want treats. I want treats. I want treats. Yeah. I don't know if people have seen the viral internet videos, but some dogs are given a board of like 20 buttons. They press them with their paws and they seem to be having a conversation with the owner. And there's really one main scientist at UC San Diego starting to study this for real. and it seems like maybe the dog can understand some things and communicate.

Yeah. Where are my balls? I want treats. Where are my balls? I want treats. Yeah, boy, that really ties into the gentle stuff from before. Yep. Yeah, I'm like as someone with some background in animal behavior, like I am open to the idea that they are able to associate

buttons with certain actions. And the sound, like they remember the location of the button and the sound the button makes. And then they can associate that with like when I press this button, I get a treat. Or if I press, like if my owner says this thing, I have an option of these two buttons. And if I press one of them, I get this response. And if I press the other one, I get this other response. I am highly skeptical of the idea that a dog could understand grammatical structure to have have a real conversation, there would be a large onus on a researcher to show a lot of evidence

that that's the case, because that is generally something that's even quite difficult to prove with primates who are more likely to have sort of a language system or be capable of sort of a more of a complex kind of communication in that way, in the grammatical structure kind of But with dogs, absolutely, you could be like with a dog like the dog knows that like a button could either get it water, belly rubs or food. And then it could learn which buttons to push. And then if you say something to a dog like, how are you feeling? And they're like, belly rub. Like, you know.

I think that's, I think that's plausible. But if it's like, I don't know about dogs being able to like, you know, it's like. How are you feeling like, well, if I'm being honest with you, you know, today's been a little rough. You know, I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that yet. Science wonders if they can make the rough, rough pun as dogs. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And what you said about what dogs could or could not do, the main cognitive scientist here is saying the same thing, at least based on his work so far. Okay. And the key sources here are popular science and also Canadian broadcasting. They both covered the viral dogs such as a dog named Stella and another dog named Bunny, who are now Instagram famous for pressing the buttons that their owners set up on a series of floor pads of buttons. Because they're just soundboards that they set up to be some dog-type commands and requests.

And then the main lab studying this at the University of California, San Diego, cognitive scientist Federico Rosano is the main author of two different studies in 2020. for that both seem to indicate dogs can use button boards deliberately and in ways to especially do like two-word button combinations that can't be explained by chance based on how dogs act with them. Give treat. Give treat. Give treat.

Exactly. And Rissano says that he describes his studies as being, quote, kind of like traffic lights on the road to decide whether to continue a line of inquiry or not. He says that we think a dog can do basic commands with the buttons, but we can't prove that dogs understand abstract concepts or can do like verbs independent of commands. And it doesn't indicate dogs can quote speak human language. But these indicate that we could keep looking into it. And that the basic thing you're seeing on Instagram is probably real communication from a dog in that way. It's not just that they like train the dog to do buttons and a button.

funny way before they started rolling. The dog is probably actually asking for stuff. Yeah, I mean, I mean, dogs can communicate even without buttons. Like if Cookie wants bell pepies, because she hears me slicing bell pepies, she comes and she, like, goes like, and then if that doesn't do it, then she gets up on her hind legs and starts, like, hitting me repeatedly in the leg until I give her bell pepies. So that's the state of things here. So I already know that dogs can communicate.

communicate. Yeah, that's the button. Bell peppy, bell peppy, bell peppy. So yeah, I, I totally, like, if I, I did actually once try to train her, like, I had like a little bell she could push with her paw when she wanted to go outside. And what I learned is she's just always wanting to go outside because she would just be like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, all the time. So we had to take away the bell. Because that wasn't, that wasn't sustainable. Yeah, and I'll link some of these videos. These dogs are in front of a board of like 20 or 30 buttons. So it is actually neat that they can specifically pick out buttons for specific things. Yeah. Even if that's not reaching the level of, hey, how are you doing? And so on, you know, it is something. It's cool.

And we could study it more and see how far dog communication with us can go. Yeah, because dogs are actually, it's like I remember, I don't know, a decade ago there's like sort of this idea that like dogs are the new chimps when it comes to cognitive studies because they're like abundant and we don't have to make special accommodations for them it's not cruel to like keep them in captivity uh well i mean captivity being having an owner and you know being a pet uh whereas like with chimps like if you want to study them in a lab setting rather than in their natural habitat it's all these ethical uh issues Yeah, I don't know. I think it's pretty cool that we're doing these studies with dogs.

Just I don't think they're going to be writing, you know, any kind of novellas. Any time. Right. If you give, what's the chimpanzee thing in Shakespeare? Anyway, if you give dogs a million typewriters, they'll write Gary Paulson's novels, Jack Linden's novels, any kind of dog fiction, you know? It was the best of times. It was the blurst of dogs. times. You wrote a tale of two puppies. Well, I do want to read it, obviously, but it's not what I was looking for you.

Sounds better. Tale of two kitties. Wishbone. Remember Wishbone? Which bone? Oh. Witchbone. Now that's a dog who can write.

Now we're talking. That's a dog who can write, dance and perform, and read. He does it all. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the modern world is full of placebo buttons that do not actually do anything in elevators, crosswalks, and more. Takeaway number two, rich people in the 1880s and 1890s United States tried to make everything push button operated in a way that caused several moral panics and one health nightmare.

and more. Takeaway number three, we are beginning to study whether dogs can actually communicate with you using a button board in front of them. Hopefully you've seen that on social media. We're linking to examples if you haven't. It's delightful. And then so many stats and numbers this week about everything from a brief false belief that Steve Jobs would end buttons forever, to the push to have more buttons in cars and less Amazon dash buttons in our lives to the most utopian buttons in fiction. Again, it's a truly amazing kind of technology interface in our lives. In the late 1800s, people were afraid doorbells would kill them if they pressed them. And now everything is a button all the time. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more

secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at maximum Fund.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. And as promised, this bonus topic is about the nuclear button. Specifically, it is about people in the 1890s inventing the concept that became the nuclear button. They had no idea what nuclear weapons would be, but they came up with a button that ends the world. Visit sifpod.com.com. for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows it's special audio it's just for members

thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation and again you unlocked wonderful things in this latest max fun drive in the previous one we created the nickname syphilopods and a bunch of inspectors inspectors and digital art and more so excited to do more wonderful things like that with you members as this year goes on. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include an absolutely wonderful book of technology history and media and culture history. The book is called Power Button, A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, and that is by Dr. Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor in the media school at Indiana University Bloomington. Also, thank you to listeners for sending me excerpts and pieces by Dr. Plotnick

that are in places like J. Store Daily and Popular Science. She's really leading the study of buttons in this era. I really enjoyed reading the book and finding out more. We also have tons of tech coverage informing this episode, especially from NGadgett, NPR, and R's Technica. We also lean on popular science and Canadian broadcasting for coverage of the latest studies of whether your dog can talk to you. And then the BBC and the New York Times illuminated the placebo buttons all around you that you keep pressing because it feels good and it's the same outcome either way. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wappinger people,

as well as the Mohican people, Skategoek people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 66. That is about the topic of gargoyles. And fun fact there, there is a French Catholic cathedral with a silly Muslim gargoyle on the outside of it, because that is the traditional way gargoyle artists honor each other. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon

Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. A worker-owned network Of artists' own shows Supported directly By you