Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Roundabouts

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why roundabouts 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. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Roundabouts known for being circles. Famous for being loops full of cars. Nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why roundabouts are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alec Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of roundabouts? I have no problem with them. I don't find them. They used to be unfamiliar to me because I grew up in Southern California.

USA, USA. Usa. Yeah, I grew up in Southern California, so we didn't really have them that frequently. But so I had always heard when I was learning to drive, like, oh, you know, wait until you get to roundabout. It's going to be really confusing. and then I learned how to use it. It's like, oh, it's not that bad. Yeah, there's so many warnings from adults when you're learning to drive in the U.S.

Yeah. Roundabouts will destroy you in the future. And you probably don't live where they are. So you just assume they're right. No, and it's like you just, like it sounds very confusing on paper, but then when you're actually doing it, it's like, oh, yeah, you just yield to incoming traffic. Now, that being said, I have seen. Some video evidence of very confusing situations in roundabouts, such as I think there was like a roundabout, a video where it was a bunch of buses and they all got stuck in a roundabout.

Yeah, because there was no space for the, but I don't know how it happened. But it was a situation where there was too many buses trying to do the roundabout at once. So then the buses got stuck because you need some buffer space in order for the roundabout to work. But they had none. So then it was just endless buses, endless bus cycle. Awesome. So that was a hoot. It's like one of those little snake video games where you just run out of screen because the snake's gotten long ago.

Yeah. Yeah, for me, no roundabouts in Illinois. And then really the only place I've lived with more than one or two roundabouts is my current location in the Hudson River Valley. And I think it's because of the Dutch colonial era and then the English kind of making that a little bit of a thing. But the only like travel driving experience I had with them as me and my now wife, we got to go to Barbados early at our relationship. and Barbados is British influenced. And then there were a lot of four-way roundabouts. And for some reason, the voice on the car GPS,

they got a really weird take of the word third. So like the voice was very normal unless it said the word third. And so at a lot of roundabouts, it was like, at the roundabout, take the third exit. And I don't know why they didn't get another take of the word third. It said it's so funny to us every time. That's fantastic. I love that.

Yeah. And that's basically a left. turn at a four-way roundabout. The third exit is just you're making a left. But yeah. I think most of the roundabouts I've used have been one or two-lane roundabouts, not like more than that. And then I could see, if you have multiple orbitals, I could see that messing you up because I remember organic chemistry and trying to learn orbitals. I was not good at that. So if there's like more than two lanes in a roundabout, I think I would start to find it. challenging. Yes. Yeah, the only truly despicable roundabout I've been in is the one around Grand

Army Plaza in Brooklyn, which will come up a little later in the show. Dispicable. Because, yeah, like, usually it's just at most four or even five roads in a small situation, and it's easy. It's fine. Right, right. Has anyone, like, do you know what Mom Donny's stance is on this heinous roundabout? He actually announced he's going to fix it, like, shortly after becoming mayor. Are you serious? Yeah, we'll talk about it. It's awesome. And thank you to Exevalis for suggesting this. It got support from Catfish 27 at others and was picked in the Bulls on the Discord.

And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, We got some numbers now. We got some numbers and stats for you. That was submitted by Osomatic on the Discord. And it's based on a song called Roundabout by the Prague Rock band Yes, which will come up in the bonus show this week. So you get some Prague Rock and the bonus.

It's fun. Hey. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a misleading making band as possible. Submit through Discord or to SIFPOT at GMO.com. Thank you, Osomatic. And the first number this week is 2024, the year, 24. Yes, that was two years ago. I had to do that math in my head. It took a while.

Now we're in Jetson's years, so it's hard, yeah? Yeah. But 20204 is when the road navigation service weighs added step-by-step directions for going through a roundabout, not just which end you want to end up on, but where you enter, which lane you use in the middle, and then exactly how to exit, step by step by step. This would have been confusing to me until I realized that roundabouts can be quite large. Like there was a roundabout in the town where I grew up. And I always thought it was funny when people kind of talked about it like it was this big scary boogeyman because it was very tiny and simple roundabout.

And then I learned about the roundabouts on the East Coast that can be these giant things with like many different lanes. I don't know. Like it was, it was just very funny because it was, I remember sort of receiving all these instructions and directions for this roundabout.

It was just like one lane, very small. It was a glorified little intersection. Yeah. Very, very easy. It's just like, use your eyes. If you see a car, don't go. If you don't see a car, do go.

That was it. Right. Pretty straightforward. But yeah, I guess like with the multiple lane ones, having some ways directions would make sense? Yeah, and even then, the rule of thumb tends to be you go all the way to one side to turn left or turn right and you kind of stay in the middle if you're going to go straight through. Like it's, you can use your eyes for the most part and there's usually signs and

lane lines and stuff. But also, you know, finally in 2024, this very advanced service, Waze added this as a latest feature because Waze was an early hit road navigation. GPS kind of app. It got bought by Google in 2013, and there's still a separate way of service, but both that and Google Maps are some of the most popular navigation services in the world. And it still took all the way until 2024 for you to have truly blow-by-blow directions for how to go through a roundabout until 2024 we all had to use our eyeballs and our just like skills. Yeah, I mean, that sounds pretty stupid. I don't want to use my brain. Doesn't sound right to me.

Me neither. I feel like there's also something to how good the rest of that service is. You start to think less. And then when you're in a roundabout, it's suddenly scary. You're like, Luke, you turned off your targeted computer. You know, it's like really, oh, what happened? Oh, no. Yeah.

I mean, this is feeling more and more relevant, like, to our lives, the more are we sort of, like, outsource to, computers is we're just going to be like what do you mean roundabout i am only familiar with square about and uh just i really like the idea of a cartoon cubic robot not knowing roundabouts that's so funny why did it take them so i mean you know i would assume given how much people would like make hay over the fact that roundabouts are tricky i'm surprised took them so long to incorporate instructions. Me too.

Yeah, I would think that would be one of the first moves after basic point to point, especially to Americans who are like running a lot of tech companies. And so a lot of this stuff's American influenced. I thought you're going to say, especially to Americans, because we're really stupid. Well, there's that. But yeah, you would think a like a company like Google full of Americans and Californians, they would go ahead and program help with this, but either it was too complicated or they were so not thinking about roundabouts, they let it slide. Well, I mean, that kind of makes sense.

California, like I said, doesn't have a bunch of roundabouts. That seems like that's more of an East Coast thing. It is, yeah, especially the Northeast and also like the former 13 colonies kind of states have some. We did have some in Durham where I lived in North Carolina. But it's more of a global thing, especially from Europe. And as we look around the world, I wondered like, okay, if most little roundabouts are easy, what's the hardest roundabout? Like, what is the biggest and most complicated roundabout on Earth? And it turns out it's hard to define that partly because there are some like beltway type freeways or gigantic looping highway interchanges or road interchanges that are sort of roundabouts, but sort of not. One truly wild one is there's the city of Putrajaya. in the country of Malaysia, they have a giant circular roadway with a bunch of entrances and exits. The space inside it is a diameter of 3.5 kilometers across.

Whoa. And some sites will tell you that circular roadway is a roundabout, but to me that's just like a whole region. You know, I don't think that counts. What's that in miles? I still haven't metricized my brain. Yeah, there's about 2.7 miles, 3.5 kilometers. So that's like a region or a neighborhood. More than one mile.

That's big, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So in my opinion, a roundabout has to be a circular one-way interchange where maybe there's like a monument or even a small park in the middle, but it doesn't feel like you can't see the other side of it or something, you know? Right, right. And one amazing roundabout that stretches that is located in central Spain.

Atlas Obscira says there's a small town called Villanueva de la Caniata, and this town near Madrid went through really rapid expansion, and they ended up not moving their existing cemetery by building an unnecessary roundabout around the small cemetery. So that roundabout solved a how many of the bodies do we exhume problem for urban planners in this town. I mean, that's got to be kind of weird for mourners, though. Like, you go, is it just so old that people aren't going back there to visit? I think that's their hope. And they also, I feel like they should have just completely left it alone. But Alice Obscure says they relocated 59 bodies and left the other 130 bodies. So I agree, anybody mourning them has to be inside of a busy roundabout.

Yeah. And like, it's probably annoying. to even cross the roundabout to get in there. It would feel not like the peaceful cemetery I want. Yeah, that ghost a joy must be really pissed off. That's the perfect spooky I join. And then if there is a biggest roundabout in the world, it's probably in Paris. Like biggest in terms of complexity and size.

The date for its origin is the year 1853, 1853. 1853 is when a French emperor named Napoleon the 3rd ordered an administrator named George Ejohn Hausman to rearrange the city of Paris and Hausman's relatively famous in like city planning history because a lot of the character and style of Paris today with the height of the buildings and the huge wide roads is from him demolishing entire neighborhoods

because the emperor led him and just making everything straighter. ends what feels more modern but also more like geometric. Yeah, I think that, and that happened in a lot of different cities in Europe, I think in general, where you'd have a lot of very narrow streets because they were designed maybe in the medieval era. And then there was sort of a redesign of a lot of them so that they were more accessible by carriage.

Yeah, totally. And Housman wasn't even really helping cars in 1853. he just said everything should be straight and nice and big broad avenues for the big streets. Yeah. And you would still have carriages. So carriage travel was a consideration and horses. Totally. Yeah, you want a lot of room for them.

And then also Paris had just built a monument called the Arc to Triumph before Housemen started rearranging. Triumph! Yeah. Which honors the victories of Napoleon, the first, the maybe famous Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the uncle of Napoleon III. So housemen and his boss agreed that a bunch of the roads in Paris should all lead to the Arc to Triumph. And he made it so 12 major new roads all end up at one big circle around the ark.

And to this day, that's a key roundabout in Paris. And it's estimated there's width for between 10 to 12 lanes. But that's an estimate because there's not really lane lines so much. Yeah. There's a few, but not a lot. And so it's just this giant one-way circulation of cars in the middle of Paris. It looks like an ant cyclone, if you've ever seen one of those, where the ants just start following each other and marching themselves to death. It really does.

I've been to the Art de Triumph or De Triumph. There we go. Yeah. The harder it is to breathe, the more right you are. Yeah. I was just trying to clear my throat. But I don't, if I remember correctly, I think I used an underground passage to get to it. Because I don't think that it is really feasible to cross the street to the Archde Trior. Like there's like an underground walkway.

Yeah, that's what they've set up. Yeah, because also this roundabout is just completely hostile to anyone on foot. The idea is as many drivers in Paris as possible should think about Napoleon and drag. passed it and then you have to go under the whole thing to get into the arc. It's a real frogger situation and that is actually where they get most of the frog legs is the little frogies trying to cross the road. The frogs. That's what the British call them. Yeah. That's, you know, that's, uh, whoa there. You're going to cause an international

incident. And the other thing I wondered is just, what's the most complicated route-wise in the world for a roundabout. And this Paris roundabout, which is now named after Charles de Gaulle, is one of the major candidates. Twelve huge roads all come to it. Another possibility is Columbus Circle in New York City because it's crucial to the entire car pattern of Manhattan. It was built in 1909. It's arguably the first roundabout in the sense that it was the first built with cars in mind, Columbus Circle in New York City.

It's sort of in the middle of Manhattan. Is this the one that's messed up that needs to be fixed? I haven't heard that, but probably, you know. Ah, so there's multiple confusing roundabouts in New York City. Yeah, there are a couple. It's also sort of at the corner of Central Park, and it's just like so crucial to the whole car pattern that it can impact a lot of life in Manhattan.

And of course, it's named after a horrible guy. There should be some changes. I actually, you know what's funny is like I kind of forgot about Christopher Columbus. Good. Yeah. Let's keep it up. Just like Columbus, huh? Yeah.

And then there's another candidate that's modern. It's in the city of Shanghai. And it might be very good in terms of getting people around. It's a highly complex roundabout. It's named. Mingzhu roundabout. And the goal is to be a roundabout for cars and then on a second level above it, a round walking way for pedestrians. So when you look at it from above Mingju roundabout, there's like a bunch of different lanes to hopefully let cars kind of pass straight through if they

don't need to make a left. And then also there's a round pedestrian walkway above it kind of dwarfing it. I just like the complexity of that one. Yeah, that's wild. I'm looking at like an overhead of it. It looks like there's also a lot of sort of markings, traffic direction markings. Yeah. Part of why Houseman's terrible Paris roundabout exists is that it was just old times.

And so they said, yeah, a bunch of carriages can have a big pretty circle. And then cars are faster and it's freakier. And then modern ones, they're trying to do more and more markings and lines and directionality of things. and that led to what might be, unfortunately, the most complicated roundabout in the world in terms of routes. And it's in the town of Swindon in southwest England. Not a famous town, Swindon. They have one that's nicknamed the Magic Roundabout.

And that is a nickname that is referring to it being frustrating, not good. I'm looking at it. Yeah, the Magic Roundabout is five smaller. roundabouts surrounding one larger central roundabout. And popular mechanic says the traffic and the big roundabout in the middle goes in the opposite direction of the traffic in the small roundabouts. This looks like a fidget spinner created by someone who is drunk. Yeah.

Well, you know, 1970s British people quite possible. But because apparently this was built in 1972 and it was based on studies. by the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory. And they had studies saying that traffic moves 25 to 35% faster if a roundabout is physically smaller. And they said, Swindon needs a big roundabout for five roads. What if we take advantage of the small roundabout belief we have and make a tiny roundabout at the end of each road? And then theoretically you can have like kind of a more direct route through the whole thing. That's such a great example of like the ways in which research can be inappropriately applied.

Like, well, we tested it on mice. So what we need is a really big piece of cheese and then the cars will understand. Yeah. Yeah. And also like it's been this way for more than 50 years. They built it in 72. It's still there. And apparently people use it daily for their commute.

And I would imagine if it's your daily experience you do know. kind of how to exploit this terrible thing, especially if you mostly go one route. But it consistently pulls with drivers as one of the worst intersections on earth of any kinds. And the nickname is ironic. There's a children's TV show from the 1960s in Europe where there's a, it's called the magic roundabout and it's about a carousel that everyone's happy on, not a road feature. So Swindon is calling there's the magic roundabout as an opposite meaning because it stinks. It looks, you remember, did you ever play that gay mouse trap? It was like this board game where you had sort of set off a Rube Goldberg machine.

I was jealous of the commercials. It looked really cool and we didn't buy it. So, well, don't be too jealous because like the commercials made it look like it worked really well. I could never get it to work because it was supposed to be where you would set it off and then it would set up off the mousetrap. But like everything had to be aligned so perfectly. that it didn't really work. Anyways, that's what that looks like to me.

There's all these, like, confusing arrows and circles and vortexes. And it looks, you said this was made in the 60s? 70s, early 70s, yeah. 70s, that makes, that. And when was LSD invented? Now I want to know when that Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher threw a perfect game on LSD. two years earlier.

Yeah, so it's that era. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I figured. Oh, he threw a no-hitter. I apologize, baseball fans. But yeah, it really feels this way.

Yeah, and Swindon is not a tiny community, but it's not huge either. Like, London has generally more normal roundabouts and what they also named circuses. The first roundabout in London was St. George's Circus, south of the Thames. So Swindon just really got out of pocket here. Yeah. It really is goofy. Like if you look up no other image for this show, do look this one up because it is. It's like patently silly.

Yes. Anyone designing this should have looked at the schematic or whatever it's called and seen right away that this is silly. Yeah, I'm going to try to make sure to put this in the Instagram carousel, too. That's funny. that it's called a carousel. That's what a set of pictures on Instagram is called. I mean, it's a carousel in the same way that, like, I don't know, five bicycle wheels that got all jumbled up is a carousel. Oh, no, my bicycle wheels. Oh, no.

My fiva pad or whatever a five-wheel bike is called. This is a roundabout for clown cars. And like, oddly, this segues well, because Britain is also a world leader in not only promoting the name Roundabout, but making that more confusing because they kept using it to refer to Carousels too. Oh, good. And the number there is the year 1895. That's when the recorded debates and discussions in Britain's parliaments in 1895 featured the British saying of swings and roundabouts. Swings and Roundabouts is more of a Britishism. It's not well known in the U.S.

But it's slang that means the longer version is what's gained on the swings is lost on the roundabouts. That doesn't clarify anything, Alex, not even a little bit. I agree. Because it's fuzzy. Some people think it refers to Road Roundabouts. But we think that through a few steps, this came from people who run carnivals. And the meaning of what's gained on the swings is lost on the roundabouts. roundabouts is that you make more money on the rides that are giant swings, but then you don't make as

much money on your carousels. And the slang has always meant basically whatever several steps we do or several decisions we make, the situation will kind of shake out the same. I see. So the idea of being that the operating cost of the carousel does not make up for whatever profits you make on the swing. Yeah, maybe the opposite. But the same idea, yeah. Yeah, like the swings are more profitable. The carousels are less profitable. But it's the implication is the profit nulls, nulls out to zero, right? Because it's like. Yeah. Yeah, it all just kind of doesn't work out. And that's even kind of a slightly different meaning that the slang ended up being, I don't like it as slang. But then since this has been coined in the 1800s, people have proceeded to think it's some kind of. of meaning with road roundabouts and then whatever a swinging road would be probably like a curving road so there's ongoing confusion due to the British but in Britain is pretty clear yeah well I mean British people

I would say don't be so silly it's not aluminium it's alluminum yeah so knock it off we did you a favor calling the French frogs and now you have to take it on the chain you know We take everybody down. Alex, which other sovereign nation would you like to insult during the podcast? A lot of episode to go. We're going to find out. Mama Mia. And the next number here is for their terminology stuff.

The number is almost 39%. Almost 39%. That's how many respondents in a U.S. survey said that they used the name traffic circle when they're describing a roundabout. Just absolute, absolute monsters. And, you know, that's not a majority, but it is the most popular, apparently, U.S. name for these things. Roundabouts is second place. I've never felt more alienated from my fellow American since the Iraq War.

And this one, I'm pretty sure I had heard both growing up. And this is one of those U.S. dialect things, which became famous in 2013 because starting in 2002, researchers at Harvard started the Harvard dialect study to learn just regional differences in how Americans name things. And then in 2013, the New York Times made an online quiz game kind of thing where it's similar questions and they'll try to tell you where you're from. Oh, yeah. I think I remember that. Alex, how do you refer to a fizzy beverage? Yeah, so we called it pop growing up. And then that's been like pressured out of me on both coasts. So it's soda now. You got shaken up until it got pressured out of you. Yeah, like from college on, people have just mocked me for calling it pop.

Yeah. That's the way it goes. Well, you deserve it. Yeah. And when I took that survey, it was almost exactly right. It thought I was from Aurora, Illinois, which is pretty close. Yeah. Yeah.

It was really neat. But yeah, they say that about 39% Americans call it a traffic circle. 24% call it a roundabout. Third place was Rotary at around 12.5%. But also this is very regional. And rotary is extremely dominant in New England and in Atlantic Canada. And then oddly, the survey's fourth biggest result was, I have no word for this. Which was also around 12%.

and much more popular than the choice of other. A lot of Americans had, I don't know what to call that, was more of a thing for them than I have a different word for it. Yeah, I mean, we always called them spittie-dos. Yeah, like those seem to be kind of the three big names, Traffic Circle, Roundabout, and Rotary. But Rotary is pretty specific to New England and Atlantic Canada. and traffic circles more of a U.S. thing.

Roundabout is big in a lot of the rest of the Canada and then the U.K. and the rest of the English-speaking world. This is one of the few episodes where I feel like I'm choosing the episode name based on not the most dominant American word, but it's partly because it seems like a lot of U.S. and Canadian media use as many of the names as possible to make it clear. I'll link to the Atlantic. They have a story where they pull a newspaper article that uses all.

three names as fast as it can in the U.S. Because, like, we really don't know what to call it. There's no dominant name. Will it be, like, a sign of world peace when we all agree on what to call these things? It would be, because I almost expect that the U.S. would be, like, we are with our measurements, where we're just stubborn and everybody else is kind of on the same page. But we're not. Like, like, we're partly into what the world is and partly not.

And this really varies a lot, what it's called. So, yeah. This feels like the Cars universe version of the Tower of Babel. Which implies a car god, which I guess the franchise already implied. Yeah, because there's a Cars Pope, isn't there? And the Pope is a Pope Mobile inside a Pope mobile. Oh, right? So there is a Cars God.

So, yeah, that's canon. It's Canon, Canon. Yeah, there's a Trinitarian car god. Right. Which is the God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Yeah. There is a Christ car that died for the sins of the other cars and was crucified. Hey, there we go.

Hey. Listen, you handle alienating all of the countries in the world. All handle alienating all religions. Yeah, by the end, we might even have one or two listeners, you know. That's pretty good. Right. We'll find out what they hold dear. Our last number here is more than 40%.

More than 40%. That's how much of the population of the Faroe Islands lives in or near the capital city of the Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islands are an island chain in the far north of the Atlantic. It's a few hundred kilometers northwest of Scotland. They have about 56,000 people there, and at least 23,000 live in the capital city of Torshoun. Torshan is a name that means Thors Harbor.

It's a very Norse place. Ooh, cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But this Faroe Island capital city of Torshound gets us into takeaway number one. Most of the population of almost a country depends on one undersea roundabout. That feels like kind of. of apocalyptic, like snowpiercer, but with a roundabout. Yeah, this only opened in 2020, and it's an amazing new piece of infrastructure in the

Faroe Islands. I called it almost a country because they're self-governing, but they're a region of Denmark. They've flirted with full independence, but they're kind of part of Denmark. I thought you were just insulting another country. They're almost a country. It did sound very insulting, yeah. And this capital city of Torshoun and the Faroe Islands, it depends on a three-way undersea tunnel to connect its parts. And the center of the three tunnels is a huge undersea roundabout that some people think looks like a giant jellyfish. It's really cool and scary to me. Yeah, this must be your worst nightmare.

It's like under the water. so all of your natural enemies are floating above you. That's true. And you're inside a giant jellyfish. Yeah, I can see that. It kind of looks a bit like the monster from Nope as well, the colorful. Yeah. It really does, yeah.

You must have hated that movie if you don't like jellyfish. I tell you what, I had to gut it out, but it was worth it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good movie. I mean, it's, it is a, I have no such fear of jellyfish. and I was also spooked by certain scenes. It also looks like it has a bunch of phantoms circling around the middle. Care to elaborate on the like phantasmal people forming a eerie circle in the central core of the roundabout?

Exactly. So it seems like the jellyfish look is maybe accidental and there is a chain of figures. statues around the base of it. And according to Faroese artists, Trondur Patterson, who built this, it's supposed to represent people participating in a traditional Faroese chain dance. So that's like the main artistical, but then like the big colors and lights and shape have a jellyfish energy. Yeah.

It's like a really short tree trunk. And then that is like sort of flowing out into a dome overhead, which. Yeah, it is like underneath the bell, like you're underneath the bell of a jellyfish. And then there are silhouettes of ghostly people surrounding that center column and just standing there. I mean, I dig it. I love it. This is some liminal nightmare stuff. The kids are really into liminal these days.

There's the back rooms. that's liminal. Like it's no longer into subliminal. It's just liminal. Liminal's where it's at. And this does, it's just literally a liminal space because is it like liminal is sort of like a transitional space. And that's what this is.

Like this is super liminal, I think. I'm with you. It really, it really feels like art of a jellyfish cults worshipping like a jellyfish god. Right. It's so wild that this exists at all. And it is under the sea. It's at a depth of 189 meters, which is over 600 feet.

It's under the ocean. That's cool. I like it. I like that it does. I mean, I think it's a very kind of unsettling situation. And I admire that and I appreciate the design that goes into that. Because if you're unsettled while you're driving, you're paying attention. Yeah

Yeah and I This is To me the most fascinating roundabout on earth ever And it just opened basically in this decade Yeah I don't know Alex I have a long list of roundabouts that I know of That I find fascinating So we'll see if it competes

Just sitting on a picture of the one roundabout in the town you grew up in It's just got like a little flower planter It's got a few six bushes in the middle, Alex. I don't know if this is going to top that. And key sources here are writing for Atlas Obscira by Brittany Hunsacker, writing for The Guardian by Tim Eccat, and a feature for The Times of London by Eden McLaughlin.

Because the Faroe Islands, it's 18 islands. It's very remote. It's been populated for at least 1,000 years and also being very rural for a long time. Its name comes from Old Norse for sheep islands. It's been perceived as a rocky place with some sheep. I mean, it's stunningly beautiful. I'm looking at, I mean, first of all, the town is beautiful, really amazing, colorful buildings right on the seaside.

And then the wilderness areas where I assume people don't live too much on our amazing, these really gigantic sheer clueless. cliffs that go right into the sea, bright green all around. Yeah, beautiful, amazing. Oh, there's a church with grass on top of it. I'm sold. I'm converting. Grass church. Grass church. He mowed for your sins. It's a denomination competing with the jellyfish god. They're on the land with grass, yeah? Yes.

Yeah, and this is a really stunning looking place, and Torshoun is so Nordic and stunning that it is spread across two sides of a fjord. It's on an island called Esteroy and the cities on the east and west sides of its fjord. And then along with Esteroi, the other biggest island in the pharaohs is called Stremoy. And so for a long time, people have taken very circuitous. ferry routes to get between those two islands and between the two sides of the fjord and the capital city. And the two islands are 11 kilometers apart. That's a long

boat ride. And at last in 2020, they built a tunnel that cuts the travel time from more than an hour on a ferry to 16 minutes by car. Wow. Huge for basically everyone in this, almost a country. This just, this looks like a fantasy land. This doesn't look. real. And so having this like eerie sort of fay-possessed fairy circle, underground, you know, traffic circle. I'm sorry, I don't know why I use the term traffic circle. Something's wrong with me. Roundabout. It makes sense. This is, this is wild. I want to visit this place now. I mean, you know, this is wild looking. That is a legitimate thing. Millions of people out. line are saying, and it could change the entire situation of the Faroe Islands, this roundabout.

Oh, dang. Because, yeah, in 2020 they opened, it's a three-way tunnel. Like, there's a tunnel from each side of the fjord and then a tunnel all the way to the second large island. And instead of doing three tunnels in a triangular way, they did, the three tunnels intersect in this amazing roundabout made by a Faroese artist and Faroese engineers. And apparently otherwise the Faroe Islands have. some trouble attracting tourists. They're jealous of a place like Iceland that is similar,

but draws a lot more people. And they built this in the social media era. The pictures of it are wowing people. They're making them think of visiting the Faroe Islands at all. And this is a tiny rural place that is politically part of Denmark. They are watching Greenland kind of get preyed on by right-wing authoritarians in the U.S. and maybe in Russia. And they don't want that to happen to them. So the more attention, the more tourism, the more money, it could legitimately change their entire future history. All right, well, I'm in a good way, right? Because if we got to get tourists over there, all right, there must be an airport, correct, on the main island? Yeah, there's just one airport and you can fly to it. Yeah. It's like in the vicinity of

Torshawn. It's not in it. But it takes, you know, international flights. And, And people go there, yeah. And then otherwise, to get to the other islands, it would either be by ferry or now by the under the sea road connected by a roundabout. That's right. And the ferries do work well. They're just slower. And apparently the huge success of this triple tunnel with a roundabout is leading Faroese people

to try to extend the tunnel network. Because once you can get between the two main islands by car, you want to go everywhere else. Right. So it doesn't connect all the islands, just the two main islands. Yeah, just the two main ones, Esteroi and Stramoy. And you drive past a jellyfish god when you do it. It's amazing. This is very cool. I mean, to be clear, I think my interest in visiting was when I saw, like, the natural beauty, but the roundabout's pretty great too. Yeah, I agree. There's more to it than just the roundabout but like you know I have been to Iceland and I didn't even consider the Faroe Islands and right this is more of a reason to now it legitimately could change their whole almost a country's

future it's cool could too much tourism ruin the roundabout like I feel like you people only come to jellyfish church for the big holidays you know you're not your jellyfish worshippers right our tour bus is going to clog the roundabout and cause an incident. Oh. That's one of the parables of the jellyfish cult. Folks, I think we're just going to circle around this for a bit and take a little break. And then we'll come back with a few more takeaways about roundabouts. And we are back and we have two more takeaways.

The next one is... Thanks for sticking around. About... A roundabout. And the next takeaway that you can go to is takeaway number two. Roundabouts are helping solve climate change despite ridiculous conspiracy theories about them causing tornadoes. Roundabouts do not cause tornadoes. Hang on a second. Hang on. I have one more sigh in me. Okay, go ahead. I'm ready now.

Yeah, this of all the conspiracy theories I've heard of, this one was sparked by just one guy. calling into local news, right? Like it's not like this has always been with us or something. It's so weird that this had legs. And then meanwhile, in real life and science, roundabouts are helping in at least two major ways to resolve climate problems. They're really great.

Okay. Is the mechanics of it like cars go in a roundabout so fast it makes a tornado a la Tasmanian devil from, okay. I'm sorry I cut off you saying the Tasmanian devil, but yes, that's it. Yeah, but does anyone actually, like, I don't want to question your research, Alex. Does anyone actually believe this? It keeps going viral since 2019, and it's because there's, like, funny audio of a guy saying it.

But I do think not that many people believe this or even think this, no. Does at least one person believe it? Yeah, and he lives in. the Musick, Pennsylvania area. He's in Pennsylvania. Okay. And in 2019, he called into WNEPTV, which is the ABC affiliate because their news show has what I feel is deeply irresponsible.

It's a segment called Talkback. And on the Talk Back segment, they just air phone calls from people. So it's not news. This is really good information, though, for me, if I want to just kind of like give someone an earful of some of my interests, I can just call in. Yeah. And also, Musick is in the Scranton area. So I feel like there's some kind of television's the office character or something.

Yeah. No, certainly. Yeah. Because here's the main quote. Quote, we didn't have tornadoes here until we started putting in the traffic circles. Because on account of, you know why? When people go round and round in circles, it caused disturbance in the atmosphere. and causes tornadoes.

I used to think that if I ran around a lot in the backyard, I could cause wind to happen. Yeah. Did you do that? Yeah, like with the weather, especially if you flap your arms or you'd take a pair of leaves and you flap it around, I thought I could make weather happen. Yeah, that or trying to fly. Yeah, for sure. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so this guy, partly because the call is funny, it keeps resurfacing online. like the clip more than the idea. And well into 2021, there were still reputable journalists at sites like Jalapnik sourcing meteorology experts to make sure this isn't true. And it's untrue for a technicality reason on top of all the main reasons. The technicality is that tornadoes form from the top down. They form in the sky and then reach down to the ground.

Okay. So if you go from the ground up, that's not a tornado. Right. It's, what do you, if it's from the ground up, what is it then? The, like, nicknamey name is a dust devil. I've seen those. But then the real reason is just even, apparently even with vehicles as tall as trucks, going as fast as possible, you couldn't change air patterns to get, like, the focus spin for a dust devil in a roundabout. Sure. What if it was a really tall truck with a fan on it?

It's just, yeah, it just gets so wacky, so fast. All the next steps are, what if I build a big Dr. Robotnik machine and I'm battling Sonic the hedgehog? Well, that was going to be my next question. What if we got a lot of hedgehogs running around a roundabout of the sonic variety? Yeah, especially because every real roundabout is either so tiny and suburban or kind of clogged, you know, like not necessarily stopped by four Norwegian buses. but like nobody's gone that fast in these. No, I mean, no one's flying through a roundabout. And if they are, I mean, that's probably one of the main causations of accidents in a roundabout is coming in too hot into the roundabout.

Yeah. And our other takeaway involves accidents. Yeah, we'll get into it. Yeah. Cool. I mean, not cool. Accidents are bad. Learning is cool.

Accidents bad. Yeah. And climate change good with roundabouts. It's working on helping. Okay. Climate impacts good. There we go. It was a confusing.

Climate change good. Listen, folks, neither of us can speak, and we're making a podcast anyway. Right, right. I got, I got, you want to know how many, how many sleep I got last night? Single digit? Yeah. Not many. Not many.

So, yeah, the New York Times. covered the climate impact of roundabouts extensively in a few features. And one of them, they sent a reporter to Keene, New Hampshire, a college town called Keene, about 23,000 people. And Keene gained some notoriety because in 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. compiled their whole set of new studies across New England and announced Keene had the worst air in New England. A town of 23,000 people, apparently so much sulfur. dioxide and soot and particulate's in the air the worst air the main reason is it's in a valley that

kind of traps it yeah that's actually uh here in uh turin that's an issue like in the whole sort of uh piamont uh valley is it's not so much a valley but it is kind of a bowl and it even though it is a beautiful region it does trap a lot of pollution so often the air quality is like surprisingly bad. It doesn't necessarily look that bad always, but it is kind of shockingly bad. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that. That's amazing.

Yeah. And points to you this can happen at kind of any scale of community, yeah. Yeah. And with Keene, they said, it's embarrassing that our tiny bucolic New England college town has terrible air. What can we do?

And so over the next 20 years, they made changes. They've dropped the sulfur dioxide levels by 40%, and the main solution was to replace six of their traditional intersections with roundabouts. Because roundabouts let cars continue moving forward instead of just sitting and burning gas at a red light. And there's not that many cars on the road so far that totally turn off at an intersection, you know. So the benefit is biggest with small roundabouts, and Keene decorates those with plants, which also help fight air pollution a little bit.

And just putting in more and more roundabouts has made all of the air better in the city. That's really interesting. Yeah, because like the startup cost of having a car go from a completely stopped position to accelerating is also more than like slowing down and going. So like if you should stop at a stop sign, but if you are ever caught doing a rolling stop, you should say you're just trying. to save the environment. Yeah, I kind of, you know. I've been to tell myself that. I've been doing that all the time.

Don't tell anyone. It's just between us. Alex, you're right, yeah. And yeah, and like, Keene is not a factory town. Like, there weren't a bunch of other ways they could change their carbon footprint and their pollution. So. Big fan pointed at Shelbyville. And yeah, and so that is one huge way roundabouts help the climate.

There's also like some people saying there's sort of a post-apocalyptic climate advantage to roundabouts, which is that you don't need to spend electricity running them. So if there's brownouts and blackouts and so on, a roundabout still operates. It isn't just the like flashing emergency version of a traffic light at a four-way intersection. Right. So once the total collapse happens because some. gave AI a bad prompt, the roundabouts will still work. Yeah, and I also love the concept that after society collapses, will still want orderly traffic is fun to me.

Yeah. And we might, you know, who knows? Well, the AI will. Yeah, right. The AI king, who the jellyfish god has to fight in the Ragnarok of all this, yeah? Yeah. But yeah, and then the other last takeaway here about roundabouts is takeaway number three. In terms of safety, roundabouts cause a lot less harm to humans and a little more harm to vehicles.

In general, you get more small car accidents, but far less big accidents and death. So if I'm, okay, bending my fender, saving lives. My fender saving lives. This is tough. So Lisa needs fenders. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can kind of intuitively see sort of the mechanism of it where it's like the

roundabout forces a car to slow down. And if it doesn't slow down, it kind of like slams into a ballard of some kind. Yeah, it's the slowing down and also paying more attention. And then also the angle the cars are turned at when they're in a roundabout. Yeah, explain the angle. It turns out in traditional intersections, tons of the crashes are head-on or T-bone. And in a roundabout, everyone has chosen the same circular direction. And so most of the times cars collide at fenders balking into each other or relatively gentle.

Hmm. So it sounds fun. Bumper- bumper car situation just like bonking in. No, that's really interesting. I'm I'm this is like sort of a like a little side passion of mine is urban design and how terrible it usually is. But like that but yeah, just like there's so much you can do to design roads to be safer for people. And that usually means making them just slightly less efficient for cars. Because when you think about it like maximum efficiency for cars means they're going fast.

which is, you know, not great for pedestrians or even other car occupants, right? Exactly. So like when you have, when you force cars to slow down, pay attention, the drivers to think more, you know, maybe notice that the giant jellyfish that they are traveling inside, that all increases safety. So, yeah, I'm not surprised that a roundabouts help with. that. There's, yeah, a lot of, a lot of interesting road features that can, like, are relatively simple that have much, much bigger effects than you would think. Yeah, and, and if folks are excited about that, I'm going to link the past SIF about speed bumps, because that's another version.

One, one weird technical term for this stuff is traffic calming devices. Yes, yes. And especially in a place like the U.S. where roundabouts are not common, they really make drivers stop and slow down and think a little bit. Yeah. In a way that saves lives and, you know, it's good. Yeah, did you know that trees can be considered a traffic calming thing? Awesome. Yeah, because it's like if you have a tree, it makes the driver feel more hemmed in.

And so they go slower because they're like kind of afraid to crash into a tree. Totally. Yeah, and there's tons of people researching all of this, which is awesome. One source this week is Andrea Bill, who is Associate Director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And when she talks about the stats on roundabouts, she says that she tells people, quote, would you prefer an ambulance or tow truck? Yeah. No, for sure, yeah. Because a roundabout slightly increases the chances of damaging your car and drastically decreases the chances of your death or totaling the car.

Okay, but has she considered if like four tow trucks try to go into a roundabout at the same time and they end up like towing each other and being sort of an infinity loop of towing? You need a tow truck, but doctor, I am Pagliac tow truck. Yeah, no, I mean, that's pretty clear to me. I remember there was like some debate. I think this was like even pre-Ela on Twitter. when it was normal levels of stupid and not like ultra stupid. It was bad. It was always some level of stupid.

But like this one, there was some debate over someone was arguing against traffic calming things like ballards or having a traffic circle where you had like a central planter. It was talking about sort of like how, oh, but these pose a danger to cars because it's like a, an immovable object and that, you know, like if you crash into it, it damages the car more. It's like, yeah, I'm okay with that. Like, if it means that the person that might be behind that doesn't get plowed into. Like, the cars should indeed not be driving that fast. Yeah. And we have tons of data on the saving people.

Apparently, the biggest example is a city called Carmel in Indiana. There's a few Carmel's in the U.S. It's Carmel Indiana. It has a little over 100,000 residents, and it has more than 140 roundabouts. And the main reason is that in the 1990s, they elected a new mayor who has proceeded to serve seven terms. And Jim Brainerd is a Republican who's been one of those Republicans throughout this era. And yet he spent some time in the 1980s studying in Oxford and got really excited about roundabouts. And so he put in a bunch of people. of them. And apparently it's made Carmel enjoy some of the least lethal roads in the United States. I wish that's what republicanism was about like incredible, like all the law and order stuff being about traffic law and urban planning order. I feel like the joke about law and order SVU is to call it law and order SUV. It's not even really a joke. It's just a dumb pun, but now that was good. But that would be the car law show. Yeah, Carla. Yeah, that seems pretty dope.

Yeah, the stats are, and it's fun because apparently they measure this based on amounts of 100,000 people, and Carmel's population is a little over 100,000. But not fun because it's death stats. In 2020, the U.S. average was 11 deaths per 100,000 people per year on the road. 11 deaths per 100,000 people. In that same year, Carmel had two deaths for that amount of people. And in the exact same region of the country, Columbus, Indiana, racked up almost 21 deaths per 100,000. And is there a pretty clear link between the roundabouts and like, are there any other potential traffic laws in place or does it seem like the main difference is the roundabouts? Yeah, it seems like the main difference is the roundabouts. especially because Carmel and Columbus are somewhat similar communities,

and Indiana state law is a lot of the traffic and speed stuff. So, yeah, it seems like this is really working, and the city apparently constantly researches this and debates people over whether it's working or not. Well, I mean, that's pretty cool. And it's just like how many roundabouts per unit is effective? Yeah, they have 140 roundabouts, so that's about, a roundabout for every 700-something people.

Okay. And it's not a crazy, dense place. So also, you don't have intersections that would be a gigantic, horrible roundabout, like the Ark the Triumph. Right. And also apparently Jim Brainerd, when he came back to the U.S. and became mayor of Carmel in the 90s, when he brought up his roundabout plan, a city urban planning consultant immediately said, no, those are crazy dangerous.

You can't do that. And he asked them to name an example of a dangerous roundabout. and they said the Arc de Triumph in Paris. And he said, oh, well, we're not doing that. That's like an 1800s carriage loop that is not like modern roundabouts. Yeah. No, that ironically named Triumph is not so triumphant now, is it? Paris.

Yeah. Yeah, and Paris has proceeded to remove a lot of those few giant roundabouts that give them a bad reputation. Like the Arc de Triumph one's still there, but in 2013 they converted a roundabout at Pless de la Republic into a pedestrian space. That became a huge hit with locals and tourists, and then they turned several other circular roads into just pedestrian spaces. Oh, that's interesting because when I see a lot of news stories about how Paris wants to become car-free. I forgot what year. In some approaching year, they want to have the city center be car free. It's kind of a, there's a lot of debate about, like, how hard it is to get into the main city from public transport.

But, like, almost always, whenever there's a news article about Paris going car free, it's always the Arc de Triomphe and that horrific traffic circle. Yeah, it probably sounds like I think it stinks, and I do. And then amazingly, the latest example of this changing is a different triumphal arch traffic circle in Brooklyn, New York. That we mentioned at the beginning. Yeah, you promised me some dirt on this Brooklyn. You got a roundabout to sell me. Yeah, it's a place called Grand Army Plaza in pretty much kind of the center of the borough of Brooklyn. And there's a huge triumphal arch honoring veterans of the Union Army in the Civil War,

like the Grand Army of the Republic as was named after. And that's surrounded by two layers of nested and also snaking together roundabouts. It just sort of agglomerated from some parks and a fountain and the arch and 1800s carriage logic. I've driven through it. It's completely horrible. And I've walked through it and it's also terrible because it's so full of weird cars. coming at you in directions you don't expect, even though there's official crossings and stuff. And then that's a constant problem for many, many people because not only is there a busy

neighborhood all around it, but the central Brooklyn Public Library is right on the Grand Army Plaza facing it. Right. Do they also have an Arc de Triumph? What's going on here? Yeah. Yeah, it has almost exactly the same monument, but to Union Army. soldiers. What's with these arcs and causing bad roundabouts? Riley, it really kind of blew my mind when I finally put this together researching that the two roundabouts I like the least in the whole world have a Napoleonic triumphal arch. Right. Napoleon really like this feels like a kind of intentional sabotage on the part of Napoleon or as the French like, to call it sabotage.

Yeah, Le Beastie Oms are big about singing about sabotage, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at the photo of the actual roundabout. It's kind of more of an oblong about. It's not really even, you know, round. I guess it's rounded. Yeah, it's like oblong and nested so there can be weird little chunks of green space, but it's not really green space because you can't get to it. And then they have little statues nobody can see from a distance.

It's terribly designed. It's truly a mess. Yeah. No, it doesn't look good. And then in 2026, you know, on New Year's Days or on Mamdani is inaugurated as mayor of New York. And shortly after that, he unveiled a plan to remove an entire slice of this roundabout and make the whole space in front of the central library for pedestrians. And so then most of the roads are still there, but it's not such a hub that all of the car traffic in Brooklyn goes through. And not only will it make the library simply easier to walk to.

I wanted to say accessible, but it's not even an accessibility thing. It's just like you can get there without getting run over so much. I like how you said so much as if it's a given you're going to get run over a little bit, just to get run over less. Right, right. And yeah, and like it's yet another way a city is trying to fix the kind of roundabout that gives roundabouts a bad reputation. The giant old ones that are leftovers of 1800 cities design have made roundabouts scary to people all over the world, even though the vast majority are tiny and good for the environment at easy. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, although I do got to say, when I look at an area,

view of the Grand Army Plaza triumphal arc. It does look like a little face. Like there's a bush. Yeah. So here's what I like. The chunk that Mom Dani wants to take out is directly south of what you're showing me. And I think it would look sort of like a little Abe Lincoln beard on the face. Ah, okay. If he does that. Nice. So, you know, it's like we win the Civil War all over again. Great. Right. Right. Second. concern is that communism? I should just clip that out and we could use it for all topics and situations on the podcast. Are you going to improve this traffic circle somewhat, but isn't that what the communists want?

To make them tornadoes. Oh, right. Mark says tornadoes. Yeah, yeah. 15 minutes city. to make weather tornadoes. I don't know why I said it like tomatoes, but possibly a link there as well.

The guy, when he's in the clip, the first time he says it, he says tornadoes. Yeah. Which tells you he knows his meteorology and science. Yeah. It feels like I try to make stupid jokes on this podcast, and every time Alex is just like, no, that is correct.

That is just what life is. Yes, that's so, it's great. Yep. I promise. I don't look at the notes. I'm just, my brain is as silly as reality. 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, most of the population of the Pharaoh Islands depends on one undersea roundabout to link all of its islands and people together, and it kind of looks like there's a jellyfish god in it. Takeaway number two, roundabouts are helping solve climate change, despite ridiculous conspiracy theories about roundabouts causing tornadoes. Takeaway number three, in terms of safety, roundabouts cause a lot less harm to humans and a little more harm to vehicles. And all of that gets even better if we replace the few giant antique 1800s roundabouts in the middle of some cities. On top of that, so many numbers this

week, and also some images that they evoke will also have them on Instagram as much as possible. Everything from the notorious magic roundabout of Swindon to the demolition of a bunch of Paris that created maybe the most notorious and defaming of the concept roundabout in the entire world. 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's bonus topic is three quick stories of bizarre art and athletics inspired by roundabouts.

Three stories of art and an athletic achievement inspired by Roundabouts. That includes the song Roundabout by the band Yes, as promised. Visit SIFPod.fod. Fun 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. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at Max. Maximum Fund.org. Key sources this week include a lot of reporting on urban planning and design by the New York Times, a 2021 feature by journalist Kara Buckley, a 2026 feature by journalist Stephanos Chen and Helmuth Rosales, a piece about Keene, New Hampshire, by Sachi Kittajama Molki, and a piece about all sorts of U.S. roundabouts by Paul Stenquist.

We also have far more sources than just the New York Times. We're leaning on Atlas Obscira, The Guardian, digital resources from the Nordic Cooperation Organization, wonderful automotive journalism from popular mechanics, from the drive.com, from jalapnick.com. And again, I'm thrilled for you to see various visual elements of what we talked about, everything from specific roundabout designs to the beauty of the Faroe Islands. 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 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. It is random. This week's pick is episode 295. That's about the topic of ladders. From two weeks ago, another tip there is I do post a carousel of images on Instagram, as I mentioned in the show. And the carousel I posted for the Ladders show includes the picture I took of a guy in my town

way up on a ladder, whacking icicles with a garden hoe while smoking a giant hand-rolled cigarette and really prioritizing holding the cigarette over most of the rest of what he was doing. Truly, my fellow American. And my local news says he was fine, so it's okay. Anyway, I do recommend that recent Ladders show.

It's great. I also recommend Katie Golden's podcast, Creature Feature Feature Feature, about animals, science, and more, which has a gigantic, amazing archive. 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' own shows

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