Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Closed Captions

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why closed captioning is 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/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Closed captioning. Known for Being Words. Famous for being words on TV at the bottom. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why closed captioning is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode.

A podcast All About Live Being Alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Smith. I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of closed captions? I think I've used them mostly to understand very quiet British people in sort of dramas.

Because there's a lot of dramas. Because I'm not talking about subtitles, right? Like I use subtitles quite a bit. We're talking about closed captions, right? which is different from subtitles. It is. And yeah, also it turns out,

especially in the U.S. and in Canada, people will kind of use those terms interchangeably. So we'll mostly talk about what's actually closed captions this week, but like the whole history of film subtitles will come up to.

Yeah. So I think that, like I use subtitles, right, if I'm watching something in a foreign language, but I use closed captioning when I'm watching something in English, but it's hard to understand

like British drama. where they're like, right, there's just a garden and we go and pop down to the fish open and then found a body there and we just go out who'd done it. Who does it smell? And I don't know what, I don't understand what they've said. All our listeners know we're going to the fishmonger to pick the queen, but you, I guess, can't make that out. That's interesting.

Go on down to Chippy and got a girl she was a murder. There's always a murder, yeah. Life is Broadchurch at all times. It's just broad church, broad church, broad church. I respect both the British and the Scottish acts, and I think it's really nice, actually. It's a bit of the uncanny valley where it's like, I feel like there's a word there and I know it, but it's got all wibbly and squiggly. And so I can't really fully comprehend it unless maybe I turn on the closed captioning.

So that's my limited, you know, experience. Apparently that's a big thing worldwide, especially now with the internet and digital stuff, people have more access than ever to media in their language, but maybe not their accent. And so it helps. Like, oh, what is Bluey saying, you know? Right. I'm not Australian. How could I ever figure it out?

Oh, they're Australian. I'm pretty sure. I thought they were dogs. Our household kind of does the same thing. Yeah, and I also find that Brenda likes to have captions on more universally than I do, but I still like them and use them. And I also love the captions on internet video, especially like Instagram Reels or TikTok if I'm, say, on the toilet. I don't want to, like, blast the sound. I just watch it with those sound and read the caption.

Yeah, that's disgusting. It is gross, yeah. Don't touch my phone. I can't believe you admit to using the toilet, but fine. This is a great suggestion for listeners because it's so all around us in a ton of formats, not just specifically a closed caption TV broadcasting standard. Thank you to both the Jazz Weeb on the Discord and also the Hannah on the Discord for picking this. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week. That's in a segment called, When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always.

do da da da da da da da da sif stats yeah beautiful that's good that was fun submitted by jesse on the discord thank you jessie i got to add that to baby g's uh playlist yeah he can go downtown in his lovely european city you know yeah yeah exactly the tiniest vespah just burp burp burp burp burp you know you kid but we need to get a tiny vespa that's it's really good you Yeah, yeah. And yeah, we have new name for this every week. Please make them a silly and whacking as possible. submit the years to Discord or is hit pot at Gmail.com.

The first number is 21 million Americans. That's a good number. It feels good, yeah. And in the year 1980, there's the estimated number of people who could not hear television well enough to watch it. And we'll have a few dates here for when closed captioning really gets going. But that's about how many people were being served by it, as it really got going in the early 80s. I see. So these are people who are hard of hearing or deaf or some classification

where maybe some sort of hearing processing disorder where you can't hear what's going on the TV and follow it. Exactly. Yeah. And I think a lot of people assume especially deafness is sort of niche. But if you expand to also people who are hard of hearing from illnesses, injuries, just some modest hearing loss in some way, then in 1980, that was about 21 million Americans, which was just short of 10% of the U.S. population. Like this technology really opened up the dominant medium of TV to a huge amount of people

in the world. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to me. Hearing is a very complex sense. You don't have to just be completely deaf in order to have issues with hearing. Yeah. There's a lot of different points at which one can have difficulties with hearing. So it's very much a complex issue.

Totally. And this technology also, it took more than a generation for it to be available to TV viewers. Our other number here is about three decades. Because depending on when you place it, there's sort of a loose estimate that around 1953 or 1954 is when most U.S. homes gained TVs, a majority of homes. And so according to historian Karen Peltz-Strauss, that's kind of the beginning of television. And that means it took about three decades for most people to have a TV that also could caption the broadcasts. Like, until then, like PBS did a wonderful feature about this. They interviewed lots of people with

hearing loss who grew up without anything like closed captioning. And they said that the main TV they watched was either sports or like violent cartoons like Tom and Jerry because that still had something for them. And even then you're missing the fun cartoon sound effects, the like context from sports commentators. It's just a really limited medium if you can't hear or read it. But it is sort of beautiful that the universal language that we can all understand is cartoon violence. Yeah. Like itchy and scratchy is so wonderful to me as a document of America. You know? Yeah.

Like, that's really something we've always been into and across all groups. Yeah. I mean, like, either if you see a cartoon cat run into a shovel and then the shovel deforms into the vague shape of a thwarted cat, or if that's described to you, right, then, or if you can sort of feel a deformed shovel in the shape of a cat trying to catch a mouse. Those are all things that I think we can all appreciate with our various sensory abilities. And the next number here, this is sort of the very, very beginning of the topic, but also not. The number is 1972.

1972 is the date when WGBH, which is the public TV station in Boston, WGBH staffed a department to add captions to TV shows. and the whole goal was accessibility. They said people who are hard of hearing or deaf need to be able to enjoy a show. And that was the first team of its kind anywhere in the world, 1972 in Boston at the PBS station. Was this for all pre-recorded TV or would they also do this for live TV? Excellent question. It was for some specific recorded TV.

The first things they captioned were episodes of the French chef, which is the main Julia Child cooking show. And then the other thing they did initially is they basically got the tapes of yesterday's ABC News, national news. Because ABC would give you their old news, sure. But yesterday's news with captions is still better than nothing for deaf people. So PBS in Boston just added captions to the previous ABC News and aired it. Right. Unless the news is like tornadoes coming today.

then that's a bit of a problem. Right. I feel like it was also a slower news era of the 70s, you know? It was like... You don't think they had as many tornadoes. Well, actually, that's true. I was going to make a joke about this thing. Oh, like there were fewer tornadoes in the 70s.

And then I remembered climate change. And I was immediately humbled. I was just thinking of Richard Nixon being a criminal for like entire years consecutively. But yeah, also that. True. We didn't have the TikTokification of news back then. Can you imagine, though, if Nixon had his TikTok. It would be that one time he came out on laughing, but every day. Every day, he would just do a new, like, now I'm with the Smothers Brothers. Now I'm at Gallagher. It would just be, I know Gallagher's later. Don't write to me. Yeah, and WGBH in a sense invented closed captioning, but technologically it was totally different. Until researching this, I did not know the specific meaning of the term closed captions.

The word closed is in there because the captions are closed off within one function of the broadcast. You use an option in your TV to turn them on. In analog times, it was like a part of the broadcast signal. now there's a different digital way to do it. But what WGBH did is what's called open captioning, where they just burned captions into the picture, and that's the only way the show is. I see, okay.

Like nobody's TV was set up to display captions, just someone at WGBH's office put captions into the tape, and then that's how it looks for everybody. Everyone sees these captions, not just those who push the TV, button that says closed captions. I don't remember how TVs worked. I had never thought deeply about this. I also had assumed the word closed captions.

They called it closed because it's within a little black box maybe, you know? Like the letters are closed in a box design-wise, you know? But no, it's sort of like the term closed circuit TV where you're describing limitation of the media in terms of how it's transmitted. Right. I see. So it's like sort of a distinct function, not the general thing. Exactly, yeah. Like the captions can be closed off from the picture. If you just turn it off, you don't see them. You know, that's what closed captions means. I should have called it discrete captions so that it sound a little bit saucy, you know?

Discrete. I thought you were going to say elegant, but it's saucy too. I guess elegance is soppy too. I guess elegance is Sassy, if you, you know. I mean, just because it sounds a little bit like it's, it's like me. You've got to be discreet with these captions. You're watching the show and all the captions just say, this is just between us. Hi, this is my name. These are my secrets.

It's not related to the. You see this news guy, this weather guy, don't listen to him. Listen to me. It's me. The guy writing your closed captions. I'm looking through your window. And I must say you have beautiful eyes and a mouth. The guy on the screen doesn't recycle.

I found that out about him. I've been spying on him. Right. That would be a great thriller if someone writing closed captions. It's just like stalking. Someone they know is hard of hearing. I also, I'm really excited to link. PBS has a screen cap of what those old Julia Child broadcasts looked like.

I'm excited for people to see it because the text is huge. Not only is it burned into the picture, it's in the middle of the screen in very big letters. So it's kind of overly dominant. Sometimes this happens on TikTok videos where it's just like the word, there's too much big words. Right, yeah. And also the caption says, the first stew. Sorry, I'm not doing the Julia Child. The first stew is dark.

It's cooked in red wine. I think that's what she sounded like. Pretty much. Yeah, so also I wish people who are hard of hearing could experience that part, you know. The caption should have a little descriptor that says, in a wild voice, you know? In a wild, possibly transatlantic voice, maybe British. I don't know. I don't know.

Entirely sure. Science wonders, yeah. But so, yeah, so, like in 1972, the PBS station in Boston, both did this revolutionary thing, and it was totally a middle step. It wasn't what we have now. The other amazing number is less than two years. That's how long it took between these Julia Child broadcasts and engineers pretty much completing closed caption technology. It's been largely the same or just adapted to a digital format since all the way in 1974. And the tech was simple to 70s people. You basically add additional data.

the broadcast stream, which is already separated out into parts for the color and the sound and everything else. So it's one more part. And then the second thing you need is the TV has to have a little chip. They called it a decoder chip. So then the signal has one more thing. The TV has a chip to read it. That's the entire tech. That's it. Does this explain why some TVs don't have it? Because I remember sometimes pressing the closed captioning button and nothing would happen. And I was mad about it. I didn't need it. I just wanted to see what would happen. And when nothing happened, it disappointed me. Yeah, apparently so. And the one year that will come up a lot is 1990. That's a lot of when the federal laws really got going to make closed caption a thing across the

U.S. And so, you know, you and me are of an age where we could have been around TVs from before then as possible. I mean, I was 89, so one year. Right. But like if they make the TV a few years ago, you get an old TV. Right, right, right. I mean, I also, I do remember being a newborn and wiggling my way over to a TV and just glomming onto it. You're like, I need to learn Julia Child recipes. Right. Calling to the TV.

She imprints on you. You talk that way if you're out there's cool. They had to give me speech therapy to talk like this. I used to talk like this. Yeah. I would like give me cinnamon toast crunch, mother. Baby Julia Child is a sketch character of some kind, right? Like, my binky, like some kind of something, yeah, yeah.

Oh, well, my little binky. I would like some milkies. Yeah. So it did not take much effort to build the technology, basically once it was an idea, and once it was conceived by initially people in Boston. And then lots of good steps happened before 1990 to really get this going. As early as 1979, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, they form a nonprofit called the National Captioning Institute. dedicated to just promoting and improving the tech. And that partly existed because Jimmy Carter was a very progressive president. There's a whole siff about Jimmy Carter. And also, the federal government starts backing up little organizations like WGBH Boston

and national TV networks get interested. The landmark date is March 16, 1980. On March 16th, 1980, PBS and ABC and NBC all aired a closed caption show for the the first time that night. They kind of did it together. It's very cute. Oh, what was it? It was Masterpiece Theater on PBS, the Sunday Night movie on ABC, and the Wonderful

World of Disney on NBC. So they were also all like showing it works on anything. It's not just only for specific material. Right. I mean, the Masterpiece Theater, it's perfect use for it, too, because, again, British. Sometimes I cannot understand what that will. Belcham man is saying when he's solving

crimes he'll say And he's those the clue And I'm like, what's a clue? I don't know what a clue is An Eclare? You want an Eclare? Are you hungry? You want an Eclare? No, I have those a clue. Now I'm making Paro a baby. I'm like,

Are you hungry? Are you hungry? Mm-hmm. Why? Okay. No. Baby Poirot. We've done baby Looney Tunes and stuff. And we did Baby Sheldon.

Why not baby Poirot? And he solves baby crimes. Yeah. And he does a huge mustache, please. The little guy says and the little boopo dappy. I'm sorry. This, like, people are trying to learn from this podcast, but I just, we keep having Good sitcom ideas.

Yeah, they're too good. They're too good. Yeah, and then these broadcasts by really three of the four big networks, like not CBS yet, that really pushed TV manufacturers to consider closed captioning as a product feature. Because also it's a very cheap thing that then you can put on the box or the ad that says we also do this. Yeah. It sells the TVs. Yeah.

And the big federal laws were 1990, both the Americans with Disabilities Act, and then also the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990 that said any TV with a screen 13 inches or larger had to support closed captioning. So basically tiny screens for security systems or something didn't need it, but TVs 13 inches and up needed it. Right. If you have a security system,

you can't do close captioning fast enough to be like, and then the robber trips over the window, crashes into the priceless vase, it breaks into a million pieces and the robber goes, oh, damn it, I was going to steal that. Me, the robber, John Smith. That's my legal name.

You know, I do remember, like, when there used to be, like, TV. And maybe they still do this in sports bars and stuff, but, like, TVs in bars often have closed, like, no sound on, but closed captioning and they're playing news or sports. Yeah, yeah. Or in waiting rooms. It's so useful beyond the accessibility reason that was the spark in Boston, yeah. And also for the federal law's accessibility was a lot of the push.

One key number there is 1974. 1974 is when a Democrat named Tom Harkin won on his second try to flip Iowa's fifth congressional district and get elected to the House. Tom Harkin served 10 years in the House and then 30 years in the Senate. he authored the Americans with Disabilities Act. And his brother is deaf. So Tom Harkin, also in 1990, became the first person ever to do a congressional address in American Sign Language. There are a few other legislators who also had personal experiences and interest with folks with disabilities. But Harkin was a big one, especially for the close captioning.

He was kind of a leader. The first time I've ever seen three here in Italy, because I haven't. seen so much Italian sign language. And like I saw three, three guys walking down the street and they were speaking in Italian sign language. I'm unfortunately, I don't know enough about American sign language to really identify the differences. My understanding is that in different languages, it can be very different just how languages can be super different in terms of grammatical structure. But it was really interesting. I didn't want to like be a dork and like, like, like, Hey, can I just like watch you do sign language while you're trying to, you know, hang out?

But, yeah, it was very cool. That's amazing. One thing with this whole episode with closed captioning, I'm basically yada yada and how it went from the U.S. to the rest of the world. It's just that the U.S. has been kind of the leading country in the development of television in the worlds. And I'll link the sift about cathode ray tubes for more about that. So our choices with closed captioning just influenced the rest of the world. That's kind of the rest of the story for the international part. That's why every close captioning, every five minutes, there's like an advertisement for McDonald's wedged in there by design.

Coca-Cola. Eagles. Yeah. There are capitalized letters that spells out by a big Mac. And the other reason the U.S. led this was a significant victory that might be the real birth of closed captioning as a universal medium. That birth is the summer of 1982. Because, like, sure, the U.S. Congress and some TV stations wanted to do this, but the biggest reason they did it is successful civil rights activism by either people who are hard of hearing or just people who cared. And in the summer of 1982, they orchestrated a nationwide protest against CBS.

Unlike PBS, NBC and ABC, CBS had not adopted closed captioning. Wow. And this was before the Barry Weiss takeover. Yeah, yeah. They arguably had like the best reputation of any U.S. network. Like they were nicknamed the Tiffany network and they were like really vaunted. And also they claimed at the time. that they had a different captioning technology called teletext. And they said, you know, all TV makers should just adopt that instead. But they didn't want to because they were already doing one of them.

Yeah. And according to the New York Times, in 1982, more than 100 people picketed CBS headquarters in Manhattan. And then further pickets happened outside dozens of CBS affiliates across at least 10 U.S. states. And because there was just such genuine grassroots support for closed. captioning that made CBS change tack and just add it to their broadcast signal. Because they didn't even need to do the second part with TVs. They just needed to do their end. Yeah. Why were they so hung up on this teletext idea? It's not clear. I guess maybe they thought there would be some profit in being in charge of the

format or something. But we're lucky that they were defeated. And from then on, this kind of captioning has been a relatively open format and universal format. It just makes it easy to do in media. It's pretty gross to be like, yeah, we're going to own the only way for people to watch TV, be able to understand TV. Yeah, and like cable was just beginning to take off some TV historians, say, 1981, is kind of the landmark majority of U.S. has cable years. So I wonder if CBS wanted to just retain dominance any way they could. Because until then, CBS, NBC, ABC, plus public broadcasting, if folks don't know those were kind of the dominant version of TV. And so that's probably part of the mentality, too.

Like, we're CBS, we're TV. Yeah, we decide what TV is. We are TV. We are the TV. And I'll link about these protests. because they're also, they're just like wonderful. It was truly all ages of people from elderly to little kids picketing and holding signs because all ages are hard of hearing.

And my favorite protest sign said, see how you like TV without sound. Right. Great message to hearing people. Yeah. What a just obvious basic wish that these people had. And then they, in a really grassroots way, succeeded and they got it. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a, it's, it's,

completely makes sense. It's totally doable. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And a few last numbers here before our takeaways. These are like estimates of how many Americans use captions all the time now. And 2023, Netflix shared some numbers. Netflix's numbers are all internal to Netflix. We can't verify anything. But they said about 40% of Netflix users use captions most of the time or more. and about 80% use captions at least once a month. So that's almost everybody using it at least a little. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people like to just have the TV on in the background these days,

or maybe in a lot of days, and then having the being able to mute it and then have the captions on while it's muted. Yeah, yeah, it's just great. And then we have a more journalistic poll from CBS News in 2024. they found 21% of Americans keep captions on some of the time and 34% keep captions on all of the time. So that's a third all the time and more than half, at least most of the time. And they also said just as you divide the groups up, younger people use them more.

Like the younger you are, the more likely you are to caption all of TV. That's interesting because there has been, I think, a shift in how TV is consumed. Like I said, I think a lot of younger people maybe are doing more passive TV watching, like kind of having it on but not fully paying attention. It's true, yeah. And we'll talk a little later about the like huge set of reasons why people will just keep it on all the time. And that gets us into takeaway number one.

Closed captions are a technology from the 1970s and a turning point in the history of text as dialogue. Ooh. In a way I find amazing people watching TV now is a lot like the dawn of cinema for separate reasons. We've had more than 100 years of figuring out the best way to represent dialogue as text in moving pictures. Right, because we used to not have talkies. We only had move ease. How did you coin that name so fast? Wow.

Yeah, well, just extremely intelligent. Key sources here are digital resources from the Chicago Film Society and then also reporting for The Guardian and CBS News and the Hollywood Reporter. That CBS poll, it technically just asked people if they use subtitles when they watch a show, and they used it in the interchangeable U.S. and Canada way where people will just call the words on the screen at either of those names, subtitles or closed captions or whatever. In Europe, apparently, people and languages tend to be more specific about what the word subtitles means.

It means like captions that translate the dialogue into another language. And that's partly driven by Europe having a big cinematic tradition. Right. And people like watching languages or watching movies from other countries and other languages. I mean, it's funny because in Italy, there was a long period of time where they didn't want to use subtitles, only voiceovers. for foreign cinema, the idea being like, ah, but we don't want people to not use Italian or learn English or other languages. It's got to be all in Italian, which I think is changing quite a bit now.

Oh, okay. With any dubbing, I'm always curious, like, what my favorite, especially comedy characters in the English language, sound like in another language, you know, like people passed around French Canadian Simpsons one time, and it was hilarious. It was really good. Yeah. So I want like Italian Will Ferrell. Like what does Italian Ron Burgundy say?

That's a really good question. I can, I can, let me get that up. Let me get that up for you right now. And at the very beginning of cinema, apparently the word subtitle was the name for those cards that showed the dialogue. Like in silent movies early on, people might know the trope that like you see the characters do an action and a clip. And then there's just a.

card on screen with what they said. Apparently, accounts from that time at the turn of the century, they name those subtitles, even though I always thought the sub part of subtitles means it's like below, like it's below all the action. Yeah, me too. Yeah, we, I guess in a backwards way turned the name subtitles into those captions and have since then called those cards intertitles, but subtitle was the name at the beginning for those cards that take up the whole screen. So if it's not because it's like sub as in below, why? We don't know. It's either because it's like a less significant tier of titles than the title of the movie and the credits and stuff.

Ah, okay. Or it's because it's a substitute for spoken dialogue. Like a subheader? Yeah, like a subheader or alternatively like a substitute meaning. Like it's a substitution for hearing dialogue with words. So we actually don't quite know why they did that. But we know that either in 1897 or 1898, which is a good enough estimate, one of those years right before the turn of the century, there was a moving picture with a card that was the dialogue. So it's really old stuff.

And yeah, and then because movies lacked sound, dialogue starts out as text. And one ramification of that was that early film studios would just do minor editing of the movie they made to put. the cards in whatever language was the language of where they're releasing it. Like early film studios, they could really internationally market a movie. Because it didn't take much splicing to just put in different cards. Right, right. It seems like it's easier to do, if you have just a few cards to do like translations versus finding, for instance, a man named Pino Enceño to do the vocal dubbing for another

man named Will Ferrell. Which I could play for you. This is from the movie Zulander in which Will Ferrell plays. You're about to hear Pino and Senio doing Will Ferrell's Mugatu.

Yes, Derek. When Morrow you have said what I want to do for you. Turniam to the real motive for which we're here. without ulterior indugio I present Okay, so

As you can tell That's the state of dubbing Yeah, and then in the silent era Everything was exactly the same It didn't matter. It's great According, the Chicago Film Society claims that basically there's a potential alternate history of cinema

Where Hollywood never catches up with France Or with Italy But French and Italian productions get disrupted by World War I and then a lot of studios get damaged in World War II. And their argument is that's a lot of why Hollywood got ahead is that sound got in the picture and the places that were otherwise ahead of them got blown up. Right. That's usually an impediment to post-production.

Yeah. The other thing here is because initially there was no sound at all, then initially the intertitles, the subtitles, whatever you call them, were not for accessibility. It was just part of the basic artistic medium. It was paste and designed to be art. And so you had this weird trend where we start to get the forerunner of closed captions to make movies easier to understand after that had been art.

And then it's like just a wonky fix for selling movies outside their original language. Like it kind of got downgraded in esteem. and taken out of the art almost. I see. Interesting. So, like, originally because it was for everyone, they had to put some art into how they were presenting the text and what the text was. And then it was like, ah, this is sort of more of an afterthought.

So then it became less artistic. Is that kind of the idea? Yeah. If people look up pictures of these silent movie dialogue cards, they're, like, beautiful. And like the editing and the pacing is really designed to make them work well. And then oddly, more than 100 years later, we are now starting to get a specially TV where captions are a load-bearing part of the art. Because for several reasons, the dialogue is just hard to hear or make out.

And there's a lot more reasons for that than I expected. I thought about foreign accents being tricky. And then beyond that, there's people who want to learn the language of a show that they're watching if they don't speak that language. language. Another issue is modern TVs are usually built to be more stylish in a way that makes the speakers worse. That seems a little silly. Yeah, I feel like I've noticed this too. And it's like the best I can describe it as like being muddy. Like the audio is muddy where it's I'm less like it'll be an English American good old USA of America English. in an accent that I understand.

Right. Regular Will Ferrell. Yeah. Right. Will Ferrell. And he's going like, I'm Will Ferrell and I'm Therrell and I'm saying you saw him. I'm like, excuse me, Will Ferrell.

He says, well, I couldn't have been clearer. I said, no, yeah. I thought maybe it's like some issue with audio mixing on the production side of the TV shows. But yeah, it could be our TV is bad. Apparently it's both. Like with TV design, when TVs were the old boxy kind, possibly with giant cathode ray tubes, the set is so huge. Companies went ahead and put large speakers on the front. Like, sure.

And maybe people buy extra speakers and make a nice system. But today a lot of TVs are slim and flat and supposed to be as like out of the way as possible. and companies will either make the speakers too small or put the speakers on the back of the TV or both. Like if it's in the back of the TV pointed at your wall with the TV itself also muffling the sound, yeah, you can't hear it good. Right.

Like, of course. Yeah, we do actually not only think of it, we do have a sound bar. So that should solve some of the audio issues. But sometimes it is still hard to understand. So I assume that might be. because of the audio mixing. Yeah, and then like the production company making the television show,

they're not responsible for the TV speakers. Like they're like, hey, that's the TV people's fault, you know, whatever. So they don't try to adjust for it at all. Right. But then also the way Hollywood produces movies, the actors and the microphones and the mixing are all not being set up to get dialogue as clear as it used to be. According to Oscar-winning sound mixer, Tom Fleischman,

And just like actors in past few decades, they would project their voice a little more. And they would have maybe more of almost a stage acting kind of approach. And now actors know that there's multiple excellent microphones. And they might be going for more of a naturalistic performance. So they might just kind of do a whisper that you can't mix up that much. But the director on set loves it. And they just kind of go with it. Right.

And then when it's time to mix the sounds, we almost. have too many options. Like digital technology means, it's a little technical, but basically you put all of the different sounds on tracks, and digital technology means now there can be dozens or even more than a hundred tracks.

So an editor, they might add just so much stuff that it takes enormous labor to keep the dialogue clear. Well, this is my issue is that they're always like making us listen to the lip sounds. Timothy Shalamay's lip sounds.

Sure. Like have you noticed, they can like it now. You know, like just so much, all of the third dune was only lip sounds. That was it. There was no dialogue.

All they did was wet, smacking lip sounds. Dendaya was out there in the desert. And the whole thing is just, and the worm comes, and the worm is like, sure.

Yeah, and it's just the whole, thing is and like rustle like like like shirts rustling. Mm-hmm. Timothy kisses the worm. They both make mad noises. Yeah. Right. If you if you, if you, and so saying if you walk without rhythm, you want to track the

worm, it was just like some, some, some, the pants rustling. Yeah. No, I, I, I don't know. Like, I feel like a lot of, there's a lot of this more like media should just be sort of like realistic in a way that it's a facsimile of realism. That's not really real. So it's like, ah, well, when you look at something, it doesn't look like a technicolor bright thing.

And people aren't talking to you. There aren't necessarily enunciating everything really clearly. Sometimes they're mumbling. So then it's like, well, everything has to be dark. The audio has to be kind of muddy. And everything's kind of muddy. Yeah, dark picture. A gritty, a gritty filter.

And I don't mean the mascot gritty because he's great. Oh, sure, sure, sure. You know, modern Lawrence Sillivier. Friend of the show. But yeah, everything's kind of including the audio. And so it's like, yeah, let's make everything muddy and gritty. And I don't know, do a blue filter over everything, unless it's south of the border, in which case it's a yellow filter for some reason.

And I just, I don't need. to feel like I'm just in a room with some poorly lit dragons and or FBI agents. I want there to be art. You know, it's like I don't need to feel like I'm there. I want to feel like it's art and I'm looking at art. Totally. And it really, to me, means that captions have become part of the art again and not just for accessibility for, again, you know, at least 10% of people, but still, I feel like we're back to the silent movie era in a totally different way, where for different production choices and media infrastructure choices. And the other reason is productions are just cheaping out or short on money. Right. What was his name? Tom Fleischman says that, quote, you have to cut corners.

You just can't spend enough time making sure every syllable is there in a word, end quote. Like he said that about his own field. So for all those reasons, they've basically offloaded, seeing the picture to if you can get your windows dark enough and turn up your TV brightness enough and then hearing the words they've offloaded it to captions to some extent. It's just the captions job now. Right. I mean, I think it's cool that captions can be an art form and they should be. That's great.

I would like both though. Can I have all of it? Right. Let's have more people have jobs doing all of it. of this. Yeah, and Netflix has also turned one of their staff and do a micro celebrity with this because in 2022, Netflix released season four of Stranger Things. There's five total. The fifth one was in 2025. But when that came out, some screenshots of it went viral for fun sound effects closed captions, like tentacles squelching wetly. Yeah. There's one shot where

11 is hiding from somebody and the caption is just 11 pants because she's breathing heavily. I mean, that would be confusing, though, if you're visually impaired because it could be 11 pants. There's 11 pants on screen. Yeah. Or if you're British, it's 11 pairs of underwear, right? Yeah, yeah. Right, which is even more confusing. And yeah, Netflix, they ended up producing like blogs about caption.

writer Jeff Tashige, who has written a lot of those and, like, his passion for exactly capturing the, like, most fun and succinct way to describe the sound that's going on. Like, a few years later, Netflix said so many people just use the captions to hear dialogue and are hearing people. And then in April 2025, Netflix kind of doubled down on captions are their own thing. They started offering captions for hearing people. Like not people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it's captions of the dialogue and no captions for the sound effects and the soundtrack and other things that you can hear with your ears. They've just fully adapted to most people using captions for dialogue. I see.

So, but do they still have the closed captions for people who have difficulty hearing? Yeah, you have to look in basically the options for each show you're watching because not everything has it. But a lot of Netflix shows, especially their own productions, will now offer. English captions for like closed captions or just the dialogue. Because we're kind of back to the silent film era where like text on screen is an artistic medium, not just accessibility. And a lot of the reason it was possible to easily implement that was that closed captioning developed starting in the 70s for hard of hearing people.

It's a very weird progression. It's cool. You know, what's interesting is I've noticed that on YouTube videos, that YouTube does its auto-generated captions, but there's a lot of videos when there's enough people who really loves them, right? And maybe it's a YouTube creator who doesn't, you know, is kind of a small creator.

So like if they were going to make their own bespoke captions, it's sort of difficult for them. But then audience members will volunteer and they'll create captions for these videos. And then they're often really creative of because it's like an audience who really likes the creator. And then they're doing really fun captions that are accurate, but then add some, I don't know, character to it, right?

Right. That perfectly gets us into our next takeaway. We're going to take a quick break before we dive into that and just refresh ourselves. But we'll return with a takeaway about that and then a takeaway about a galactic empire. Oh, good. I was hoping we'd get to that. Galactic Empire. I'm always like, what are we going to get to this galactic empire, Alex?

The caption would say, Katie, awaits, right? Instead of 11 pants. It's clearer that way. Right. Right. Folks, we're back and we have two totally different takeaways remaining. And this next one is takeaway number two. A group of people with the skills and the keyboards of court reporters are fighting for

their jobs writing the closed captions on live TV. That's the other whole facet of this technology and industry. Starting in 1982, a very special group of stenographers have made live TV accessible. And to this day, we need people to do it. The auto-generated or AI version is not working good. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because I think that you could conceivably have AI get to the point where it is high fidelity. But if you don't have a human being accountable for it, right, then it could be really bad, right?

Like, it could have, if it does make a mistake, then it could maybe alarm people or misinformed people. Exactly. And the other reason is that closed captioning specifically is when this became an accessibility issue with lots of popular support and government forced behind. it. And so these laws that say TV needs to be accessible to people, they also require a basic level of accuracy and context and everything else in the captions. So until AI is amazing at it, it won't comply with U.S. federal law. I've thought about this a lot. And I'm, I think that I often see arguments about AI where it's like, well, it's just, it's not very good. And I think there's a stronger argument that even when it gets good, do we actually want to eliminate the human

element from things, right? So once it does become quite accurate, do we not want a human involved in this process? Because is there something that we're going to be missing out on without that human element? Even if, say you had, obviously, no, AI is not there at this moment. But hypothetically, what if you had like a 99% accurate AI, you know, doing these captions? Might we still be losing out on something when we eliminate human beings from this process? I agree. Yeah, for all sorts of human elements, like the funny tentacles squatching wetly or like a, you know, just thoughtfulness about people's emotions, all sorts of things. Yeah.

Yeah. Key sources about this trade of captioning live TV. Writing for the New York Times by Thomas W. Hockelm Jr., writing for Mental Floss by Scott Allen. And then there's a blog called Language Log by Mark Lieberman, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. They say that, you know, closed captioning, it developed pretty quickly as tech. And then engineers also quickly developed a system for captioning live TV. It said again, in 1980, PBS, NBC, start doing closed captioning. and then in 82, CBS gets pressured into doing it.

That same year, 1982, engineers developed a basic system where you have a person who is either actually a court stenographer or has similar skills. They just caption the broadcast as it happens. They type up to 250 words per minute, and they use the same machine that court stenographers use. It's a keyboard on a machine called a stenotype. And I've never used one.

If people want to fully know how it works, you pretty much need to learn it. But the gist is it uses a code based on phonetics for every word. So you're not typing letters. You're typing sounds and syllables. And then you can also press multiple keys at the same time to get specific words. That's a process called courting. It's very hard to describe, but it's a phonetics-based keyboard that lets you type much faster than Quarty or something based on letters. Right.

because Quirty is like based on the old typewriter keys that weren't really designed to be as maximally fast as possible. And it sounds like this is just designed so that you can learn to type on it. You hear the words. And then you are translating that hearing of the words into the muscle memory that your fingers have. That's that's very cool. And like a QWERTY keyboard's fine. But these people have also just spent so many hours learning to be amazing at this.

Right. none of us could just sit down at one and be fast. It takes enormous amount of learning. Apparently it even matters how much force you put into each button press. It's a really intricate kind of system. If you press it harder or softer, it results in like a different... Yes. And in a way I don't understand beyond that.

But yeah, yeah. Right. So it's a truly amazing skill. And apparently this work was relatively rare at first, but then by around 1990, U.S. accessibility and disability laws made it a standard thing that broadcasters staffed. They usually use contractors who would do it for a whole bunch of shows. And again, auto-generated captions like wacky ones that YouTube makes don't meet U.S. federal standards, so it still has to be people. But it's also, it's a very challenging job and apparently pretty stressful for the people.

One reason is that the specific phonetics-based way the keyboard works means you can make specific errors that lead people to assume it's dumb AI or something. In 2004, political bloggers created a kind of stupid, I think, viral story where they said that some dumb computer was doing the captions for the Republican National Convention because the Spanish captions specifically, they described a person named Seth. Senator Olympia Snow. Her last name is S-N-O-W-E. But it sounds like the precipitation snow. And so the Spanish captions said her name is the Spanish for the snow of Olympia. You know, it's like stupid. But it happened because of how the tech works. It was like a dedicated, trained professional who pressed the buttons for the sounds. And then it wasn't geared to this extremely specific person. I see. A little bit of grace there. Maybe.

Right. And also, I'm sure no one noticed or cared and then just bloggers harped on about it. You know, it was fine. Yeah. I mean, it is, look, it's, it's, it's funny. Can we just, can we just like, you know, it's, it's a little, it's a little oopsie. It's not the end of the world. Yeah. And the other big kind of error is just people have to work really fast.

And apparently in 2005, there was a small scandal around the live captions on an episode. of American Idol, the TV singing reality show where also viewers use a phone number to text or call a vote for who should win American Idol. And on one episode in 2005, the live captioner got a digit wrong in the phone number for the voting. So like the screen had it right, but if you were relying on the captions, it was wrong. And then people said, oh, the episode would have picked some, you know, like the audience would have picked someone else if they got it right. It was kind of an art. argument there. Right. Yeah. No, that's very important. Right. Another earth-shaking error. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other, other thing that these captioners go through is that apparently it's just emotionally stressful to be doing live captioning when a tragedy happens. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. And the main account of this I have is from a New York Times interview in 2000. The first thing I thought of was what was 9-11 like. But even before that, in 2000, Jeff Hutchins was an executive at a live captioning contractor called VITAC. And he said their staff really struggled with Princess Diana's death, with John F. Kennedy's

junior's death. Like it's a, it's not a totally easy job to just be a stenographer for everything that's ever broadcast in terms of your emotions and your thoughts, you know. Yeah, because you're, you know, you have to move extremely fast. Because one could say like, well, also to be a news anchor at that time. But with the news anchor, it's like you can see them, maybe hesitate and say something or maybe get a little emotional like Walter Conkite tearing up. And we are like, oh, that makes them human. Whereas like with the stenographer, it's like you don't necessarily have that context of, yeah, that's a human being writing those up.

And they're maybe hesitant or making an error because they have human emotions. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so this job, it still exists and also it's kind of like a lot of jobs in modern capitalism. Like the amount of government regulation there is protecting it is good. Like the regulators forcing networks to make these captions good means the laborers are paid and treated pretty well. But a lot of people already assume it's just computers. And either way, if those regulations go away or if contractors get squeezed, the job could just get worse and worse. Like we should rest. this is a cool part of how TV reaches us and the TV industry. Yeah. So yeah, that's just going on. Like, I think if you'd forced me to guess, I would have said it's some kind of auto generation for live TV captions, but it's always been people since the 1980s. That's so cool. We're so capable of such incredible things.

It is pretty wild when you find out things are human beings where it seems like, no, it computer has to have done this because it's so quick and seems superhuman. That too. Yeah, they just type so fast. And it's fun that they use the exact court reporting keyboard. If you've seen a person on a legal TV show with the little thing they're typing on kind of tightly in their lap, it's that machine. Yeah. Neat. And on a totally different topic, let's get into our last takeaway number three. One skilled closed caption writer. pretty much invented the Klingon language. Wow, cool.

Yeah. And it's not fan fiction. Like the Star Trek franchise and production company hired him. He's a guy named Mark O'Kranz. And he took a tiny germ of fake Klingon and turned it into the entire language as sort of a side project of a side project in his real life. So he's like the, I was going to say modern day and then I realized Star Trek's. really old. It is old.

The somewhat more modern day version of Tolkien. Really, yeah. And that was never his dream to do this. It just kind of basically one job turned into a totally different job doing closed captions, which turned into a totally different job creating Klingon. Right. I mean, sometimes you just kind of fall into creating the Klingon language. He truly did. I love it. Yeah. Because you would think it's that a guy like Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, was some sort of Tolkien and wanted to do it. But no, he didn't even bother initially. And the first appearance of Klingons in 1967, they speak English. There's no difference.

Well, now there is a difference, Alex, and it's that their noses have ridges. And they didn't even have that initially. And there's like extremely weird. Star Trek canon and lore trying to backwards justify it. Are you serious? Okay. You have to tell me what that is, though. If I remember right, there's one time when Wharf says Klingons just don't like to talk about it. Like why Klingons look totally different facially and different ears of history. That's so funny.

I love that. Oh, I see why they changed it. Uh-oh. Right. And the initial Klingon makeup looked pretty racial. in a way that's just not great. It looked a little bit, yeah. So, yeah, so it's good.

They changed it too. But like Katie said, Star Trek is old. And there's two wonderful features about this that are the sources, a piece for popular mechanics by Matt Blitz, and a feature for TDM.com by David Buck. Star Trek just celebrated 60 years. It debuted on US TV in the fall of 1966. And later in that first season,

they introduced Klingons who, along with Vulcans, are arguably the most famous Star Trek aliens. But they just spoke English and had just kind of racist brown paints and eyebrows makeup. And then from their Star Trek tried to make them more advanced and interesting and alien in all sorts of ways. So like if you know, Worf the character, he's the sort of, I guess you'd call it modern Klingon. And before Wharf in 1979, Paramount makes a first movie with that original Star Trek cast. So they said, like, let's make it really science fictiony. It's not just a cheap TV show. It's a Paramount movie, you know.

And allegedly, the very first words in a Klingon language were just sort of made up on the fly by actor James Duhin, who didn't play a Klingon. He played the engineer Scotty on the first chip. He on the set came up with some words and phrases that he thought sounded alien and then taught them to the actors playing Klingons phonetically. and they just repeated them. So in 1979, in that movie, Star Trek debuts a Klingon language that nobody's thought through at all. It's just some pieces of things. When you think about it, isn't that how language came about? We just were like, you know what?

That looks like a caribou. I'm just going to say caribou. Yes, yeah. And then the rest of it follows from there, yeah. There's like a billion linguists just cried out in pain. Now I'm kidding. No linguists listen to this podcast. And also like, you know, most languages start from incredibly basic words.

This Klingon scene was the bridge of a science fiction combat ship. So apparently the word they said the most is the word for torpedoes, no joke. Like they're not starting from basic stuff. So say it, say it, Alex and Klingon. Apparently it's cha. But, you know, that just sounds like Mandarin for tea or something. I don't know why they picked that. It's kind of basic.

Sure. So anyway, this all changes thanks to Mark Okran. His first job that he really focused on was as an academic linguist. He was a specialist in the Native American languages of what's now California. and he got his doctorate at Berkeley, then he teaches at a few universities across the country. By chance, one of his university jobs is in Washington, D.C., not for government reasons.

And then he gets a side job while still being a professor in D.C. He gets a side job as a supervisor at the new National Captioning Institute, formed in 1979. And then because he's there early, that leads to a next side job, where 1982 TV networks are starting to do live captioning. And they say, if we want to hire the best captioner, I guess we would hire you. Can you do live captions for the 1982 Academy Awards?

Yeah. Like our biggest live broadcast of the year, can you caption it? That would stress me out because I'd be like, what if I accidentally announced the wrong winner? One of the articles I found they talked to Kathy DeLorenzo, who's a longtime professional live captioner and she compares it to writing naked. It's incredibly stressful work if you're on a big thing. I don't know how else are other people writing. Like don't you need a little bit of a fresh breeze to be inspired? Yeah. We each do what's called discrete writing, if you know what I mean. No one come in. I'm nude. Right. So yeah, so Mark Al Crenz, through

Accidents. Like he on purpose becomes an academic linguist who knows and rediscovers Native American languages, but then accidentally becomes a leader in developing closed captioning, then becomes like a leading live captioner. And just because the Oscars are in Los Angeles, he visits for about a week. And he has lunch with a friend. His friend is working on the production of Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Khan, the second Star Trek movie with the original cast. And his friend, his friend, says we're in a huge bind because there's a scene where two Vulcans talk to each other, and now the production wants them to be speaking some kind of Vulcan language instead of the English that we taped it in. So whoops. Yeah, can you just do a Vulcan language? That's what they asked him to do and he did it. Yeah.

They had already filmed the whole thing. He had one week to look at the video, make up syllabular. that fit the lips of the actors, and then coach the actors to dub the syllables phonetically over their own performance. Oh, my God. So he couldn't even just like, here's a language that sounds vulcany. He had to work with the film that had already been filmed. It was in English and then like make it, that's wild.

That's nuts. Yes. You have to be so good at basically captioning work and linguistics. Like, he's the perfect guy. You have to be good at every skill at once, including anger management. Yeah, yeah, same. It's such a frustrating gig to be offered. And he probably partly did it just because his friend needed help, you know?

Like if it was a stranger, he might have been like, I don't know, good luck. I don't care about you. If it was a stranger. You're like, ah, who are you? How did you get in my home? They be men, yeah. Oh, God. But so that stupid job meant that Okrend was in touch with the producers of Star Trek.

And in a better way, they reached out to him early, early in production of the next Star Trek movie, Star Trek 3, The Search for Spock. And they said, here's those couple of clips of Klingon in Star Trek 1. Would you like to expand that into an entire Klingon language? And he did it. Like what James Dewan made up in a couple syllables and words, apparently the only thing. requirement in like the script scene directions is that cling on sounds quote gutterol. But otherwise, Okrend used a bunch of actual linguistic skills. Like he basically compared the syllables he was handed from Star Trek One to real human languages,

then took the human languages that would use those syllables and mixed in sounds from other languages that are rarer in that language because then the whole thing sounds very alien. He also gave it the opposite sentence structure of English. It's object, verb, subjects instead of English as like subject-verb-objects. Subject-verb-object is like he hit the ball. The subject he hit verb, the ball objects. But apparently language is like Turkish and Russian do this opposite way that he gave to Klingon. And then 1984 Star Trek 3, The Search for Spock, debuts a put-together Klingon language.

and the following year they published a Klingon dictionary that was a relative hit as a book. People picked up copies, and it's all this guy's work and ideas. This is someone who wakes up every morning with somehow a lot of energy and just a love of the game. Right. I almost feel like it helped that he wasn't just a sci-fi nerd or something. Like he just has so many interests that he really got into this kind of. a new combination of all them. This is weaponized, uh, nerdery.

Yeah. Like it's so, it's so good this guy wasn't, wasn't evil or malicious because that's scary what he could have accomplished. Oh, right. Right. We'd all be under the flag of his global empire or something. But instead he came up with Klingon and Vulcan. You know, that's cool.

Yeah. He would have broadcast a sound that made us. I'll forget how to speak any language. Now it's starting to be a James Bond movie. I'm into this. This is good. This is good. My two favorite franchises.

Great. Right. Yeah. And yeah, he has kept working for Star Trek at least through 2016. The movie Star Trek Beyond brought him in for a couple original languages for new aliens and that. He describes this part of his life as a very lucky accent. And the origin of it is that he was an overqualified linguist writing closed captions for just recorded TV programs. Right.

I mean, that's the best kind of overqualified. Yeah. And was, was he like also doing professor stuff at the same time? Yeah. The sense I get is he has ramped that down or stopped since the 80s, but only because there's just been so much interesting Hollywood. would work to do. Like, he liked to do it, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, fair enough. Like, if it's between grading papers and inventing an alien language. It's almost like, if it's between grading papers and inventing an alien language, kaplok, goblok, kaplok, you know, like, I just launch it to it. Yeah. I like that gobbledygook was your go-to word there. Yeah. was the first Klingon-ish word I could think of

of and then I ran out. Yeah. 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. Takeway number one, closed captions are a technology from the 1970s and a turning point in the history of text as dialogue.

From the silent film era to the cruddy TVs and rushed TV. programs you're of today. You know, text can be more of a pillar of holding the whole medium up, and then closed captions help make it a universal accessibility feature. Takeaway number two, people with the skills and the keyboards of court stenographers are fighting for their jobs, writing the closed captions on live TV. Takeaway number three, one skilled closed caption writer named Mark Okrand pretty much invented the Klingon language. On top of a tough job making some Vulcan and more. And then a really massive stats and numbers section this week, including

essentially the entire history and development of close captioning, the 1982 summer when protesters against CBS really made this a format that everyone in the world can enjoy, and more stories too. 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 fun.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. This week, the obviously incredibly fascinating story, that bonus topic is Christopher Nolan's dialogue in his movies. And why he might have found a high labor, true labor of love version of dialogue that's hard to hear.

That's the opposite of the productions are just rushing kind of reason. Visit sifpod.fund.fund for that Christopher Nolan bonus show for a library of more than 25 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. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a range of truly excellent feature writing on the internet. thankful to Matt Blitz writing for popular mechanics, David Buck writing for TDM.com, unnamed writers at the Chicago Film Society, Mark Lieberman and his language log blog maintained by the University of Pennsylvania. Also a few different journalistic features from the New York Times, CBS News, The Guardian, and a piece for the Hollywood Reporter by Carolyn Giardina. 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, Skategoke 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 in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discs.

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 298. That's about the topic of bees. Fun fact there, there is one bee species that started out in central Italy, was pretty much bred out of existence there, and continues to thrive on totally different eucalyptus plants on kangaroo island. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's podcast, Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. I hope that when we were off for a week, you may be checked out Creature Feature, because that's one of the many pieces of audio

you can enjoy while we're away. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's 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'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.