Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Number 13

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Alex Schmidt and special guest Robert Brockway explore why the number 13 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.

The number 13. Known for being unlucky. Famous for being counterintuitively lucky. Nobody thinks much about it. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why the number 13 is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cephalopods.

Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. And my buddy Katie Golden is out this week. As you may have heard recently, she's expecting a baby, but I'll let her share any news. It's her news if there's any news. And I'm joined by a wonderful returning guest. He's an amazing comedy writer, podcaster, and novelist. His new book just came out now as a starred review on Publishers Weekly.

It's called I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. Please check it out. I will kill your imaginary friend for $200. I really loved it. And our guest today is Robert Brockway. Hey, Robert. Hey, thanks for having me. And, and for eager listeners of secretly incredibly fascinating, Schmitty himself makes an appearance in the book.

And does get murdered. So it's the coolest thing, because, like, you very kindly asked, hey, would you like your name to be the name of a character who dies? And I was like, yes and yes, please. Like, of course I want to be named it and die. And so then I got to read it. It was tremendous. Thank you. Yeah.

I mean, you don't, you never want to be a character. in a horror book that survives. Like, I don't, I don't know, what kind of weirdo would say yes to that. You're one of the boring ones that doesn't. Right. Like the convenience store employee who just sells them bugles, and then they continue fighting demons.

I mean, I guess if he's also going to be the guy that warns them not to go into the woods, that's pretty good. Oh, ominous warning character is good. That's true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, otherwise you're like,

you're like the d' f***ed cop or something. I don't know. I don't know who the other. characters are. I guess the final girl could have been Schmitty. Schmitty the final girl? Yeah, Schmitty can be a lady's name. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've heard

it used for both sexes, of course. Yeah, truly, I hope people check it out. I love it. And also we have a topic that you folks pick that happens to fit horror, among many other things. Thank you very much to Clown Milk for suggesting this topic on the Discord.

Robert, what is your relationship to or opinion of the number 13. Well, I'm a spooky or spooky adjacent guy. So I like it. I've got a little bit of affection towards it. I mean, Friday the 13th and all that. I'll tell you one thing that I kind of, I assume and hope will learn like you already have prepped is the whole thing about buildings, not having a floor number 13. You're going to talk about that? I have like a short thing about that in the number section. Yeah. Okay, good. Mostly just because I have never seen that happen. I have lived on the 13th floor of a building.

I've stayed on the 13th floor of hotels. I've asked a lot of people, like, have you ever seen this? And nobody's ever seen it. But it's such a, like, as far as urban legends go, everybody knows that one. And everybody assumes that one, unlike some of them. Yeah. They assume that one is true. Like, yeah, no buildings have a 13th floor.

But go look. Yes, they do. Thank you. I think I've seen it, but I have been told about it way more often than I've seen it. If I've seen it, it's like once or twice ever. I feel like it's just one weirdo. One weirdo did it one time and everybody's like, oh, that must be the rule. That's not how that works.

I don't know, man. That's a weird one. I would love to know what that's all about. Yeah. I would find that secretly, incredibly fascinating. Hey, it's a little bit show. People have said the title, no one's ever done a wink and then a magical sparkle appears in their eye.

That's what I'm looking for. I'm glad the sparkle came across. I was working on that. Yeah, I don't think about this number a ton. I feel like I'm not afraid of 13 person. And I'm also not one of the people who's like turn that around into making it their lucky number or something. You know, it just doesn't weigh on me very much. But I don't find Friday the 13th.

That's scary. Even though this episode will come out a little bit before Friday, February 13th of 2026. And then there's also a Friday, March 13th of 26. What? We get two? This year there's three actually in November as well. Wow. So it's a heavy year for it.

I'm going to watch the first three Friday of the 13th movies. But yeah, you wait until November for the third one. Forget everything. Like who's this daddy guy? I don't recall any of this. I'm not following this. I thought it was a lady. And also programming note if people love numbers, this is kind of the third time.

There's been a SIF episode. about a number. We did a show about the number zero. And then we did kind of a stunt half episode for episode number 150. We tried to see if there's a show about the number 150 and got about half an episode. And then other stories from there. That's a great discovery to learn halfway through a podcast. You're like, and that's it.

All right. Didn't work. That one did not work. See you next time. Hopefully the next one works. My famous closing sign off of, I'm so sorry. Oh yeah, that's how I am. Whoops.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. End of podcast. Yeah. So if folks are looking for that, that's out there. All right. And on most episodes, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This one, I do want to do some takeaways first about like the story of 13 across time.

So in the number section, we'll get into the building floors and stuff. But this is going way, way back and trying to figure out the extreme basics of why anybody cares about the number 13 at all. Like, why? It's a number. First guy. The first guy to invent 13 who's like, everybody else stopped at 12 and he was like, what if there was one

more? You're a madman. It can't be done. Yeah, his heroic ability is counting. And then his heroic flaw is, he counted too high and everybody got scared. That's how it started. That's the origin.

There's no one definite theory or explanation, but maybe the most likely theory is our takeaway number one. The likelyest origin for negative superstitions about the number 13 is that it's a byproduct of positive beliefs about 12. What a twist. There's like a lot of especially driven by calendars and math, positive ideas about 12, like at least the 12 is solid and fundamental and sturdy.

Good solid number. And so the theory is simply that we decided the next number must be weird. Oh, that's, yeah, that's too many. It's too many. If 12 is good, any more must be bad. It's almost the joke of did a guy count too high? Like, it's almost that, but there's more to it. Yeah.

I mean, there are 12 days of Christmas, the day afterward. Nobody likes that day. Kind of, yes. Yeah, Christianity is one of the many world traditions where 12 got held up as very fundamental, especially with the 12 apostles of Jesus. People said, oh, okay. 12 is the normal number. And the 13th one, Paul 2.

He was Paul 2. Paul too. Paul Harder. He was the bad one. He was the one they left out. He didn't make the band. He was the bitter guy that once the 12 apostles saw fame and stardom, he was like, I that could have been me. I think the real Paul was famous for writing letters.

to various communities of Christians. So I hope when they got the letters, they were like, this better not be from Paul 2. This better not be from Paul Harder. I'll read a Paul 1 letter, but about otherwise. Paul 2's always bum me out. He's always got some bad news. Like, oh, look at this.

The first thing, his dog's sick? I don't want to know about that. His dog's named Dogg Paul or something. Not Paul 3. Paul 3 of the return of Paul, of course. So this, it's especially about calendars and math. The key sources for the takeaway are digital resources from the Moorhead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina. And digital resources from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, also leaning on a feature for National Geographic by Brian Handwork.

Because we'll talk about a few reasons people could be afraid of 13 or even excited about it. It isn't necessarily this reason. but a lot of cultures have assigned some kind of fundamental power to the number 12. And the two biggest and related reasons are calendar systems and math. And the calendar system thing is driven by lunar calendars and lunar cycles. Early civilizations, early communities, people noticed, hey, the time between full moons is about 29 and a half days. and 12 lunar cycles is 354 days.

If you're not great at figuring out how long the year is, that feels like about how long the year is. A lot of civilizations from like Babylon to Egypt to Rome to China, they laid out a calendar where there's 12 lunar months and then something that modern people have called stuff like intercalorie months, where it's a funny-shaped short month that tries to expand the year to make it fit,

how the actual sun and earth are related to each other. You get 12 real months and then one party month where like nothing counts. Basically, yeah. The purge, purge month. Many cultures then proceeded to say, hey, let's divide the year into 12. And month is an English word, but like the idea of a month essentially. There's a few exceptions, especially the Mayans. The Mayan calendar had 18 months of 20 days each, which gave them a 360 day year.

that's more accurate than a lunar year, but still off. And every number after 12 just gets more and more spooky. Oh, my God. There can't be another 15 that's ludic by 18. It's just terror month, nonstop terror month. Yeah, the basically coincidence of the arrangement of the Earth and the Moon and the Sun. People tried to divide existence into 12 parts in terms of time. and any calendar is a made-up way to count a real thing.

Like those planets and moons are really where they are, and then our calendar we make it up. I say that all the time. It's a made-up thing. There's a past stuff about leap day if people want to hear about ways we've tried to correct this discrepancy of split days over all of time. The upshot is people eventually realized,

for one thing, it actually might make more sense to divide the year into 30. 13 months. Because if you do 13 months that are 28 days, 13 times 28 is 364, which is kind of perfect, actually. Yeah. Close. Good enough. And then you have one extra day and then sometimes leap days. And those are special and a party day instead of a wild week and a half of partying. You need one day every few years where you can just, I don't know, go outside and fight the garbage man. And like, after it's over, your friends again. But like just, you know, all that pent up garbage rage that you have.

Are you buzz marketing the purge? Every time I talk to Robert, he's like, I'm most marketing the perch. I think I'm independently inventing the purge, even though I have heard of the perch. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and so despite that making some sense, there was just enough lore and tradition around a 12th part year that that stuck around. and there are still huge cultural touchstones around it. The biggest example is probably two famous zodiac systems, the Greek zodiac and the Chinese zodiac.

It's 12 animals or characters, everything from astrology to lunar New Year celebrations hinges on it. We love the splitting it in 12 idea, even though it's really an antique concept based on guessing that the moon aligns with the sun, which it doesn't. Which one are you, Schmetti? Which animal are you?

I am an Ares and then I was Year of the Dragon. I know I'm Capricorn and it's always been such garbage to be Capricorn. It's like, I'm what? I'm like a water goat? You just panicked at the last one. We're like Capricorn. It's a fish goat. Everybody knows the old fish goat.

Right. You crabs and lions and scorpions. Everybody's got like at the very least an easily digestible animal like a, trait and a strength. And then what's a fish goat? What's the defining trait of the fish goat, everybody? There's even in the Greek zodiac at one point they tried to do a 13th symbol, which is probably news to most people.

I just like found out trying to do this, but it's called Ophiuchus. And Ophiuchus is a constellation of a man holding a big serpent. Oh, that rules. But they just decided the sun isn't in Ophiuchus enough of the year. kind of coalesced around the 12 symbols. So there's this endless push to make things 12. We could have gotten, you could have been an Ophiufus? You could have been a guns and roses video.

That's awesome. Just got, I got a snake whip. What do you got? Fish goat. Right, the song November rain is about November generally being the Ophiuchist's birthdays. Like that's most people. The cold November snake rain. Of course.

That would rule. But yeah, so we now basically live on the Gregorian calendar, which on the Leap Day episode, we talk about that being updated a bit too. Also, fun numerical coincidence that's named after Pope Gregory the 13th, another 13 hiding and stuff. One Pope's too many. Yeah. Scary Pope. And then, you know, as people developed calendars, they somewhat jointly developed math and just counting in numbers. and a lot of cultures did a math system based on the number 12.

We tend to think of our math as base 10. We start doing new place values for tens. And one of the main origins of that is just that most people have 10 fingers and thumbs, but we really have these eight fingers and two thumbs. And if you only look at the fingers on one hand, the four fingers are divided into three segments apiece by your knuckles, And so you actually have an easy way to count to 12 on the four fingers on one hand. And base 12 also makes sense, Duder Anatomy.

Classic, classic thumb erasure, though. Yes. Yeah, what I read about it suggested the thumb is just like a tool for pointing at your finger knuckle segments, which really degrades the thumb to me, but it's fun. It's fun. What does that thing for? It's for pointing at the knuckles. you know it kind of curves in it's pretty easy to do

I don't know those kind of look like knuckles to me don't you go to that 50 base 15 stuff I don't want to hear any of that's terrified it's one too many it's one too many fingers I guess 14 but still yeah yeah I got a weird thumb huh and yeah apparently Sumerians in particular push the idea of base 12 for math and that also led to some base 60 systems

and also base 6 sort of fits this. So like base 10 is huge, but a lot of people who thought base 12 is the way to do math, that's sort of like the cosmos seeming to promote 12. They said also our anatomy and the basic numbers of the universe promote 12. I'm a convert. It's kind of all over from those two things. If you're an early person,

you don't have a lot in your life besides looking at your own body and looking at the sky. So besides counting knuckles, what do you like to do? Yeah, I like to count these guys. And then I wish somebody invented TV. I don't know. That's kind of how I spend my day. For those reasons or maybe just other reasons, then people spun out all kinds of cultural

lore about 12. The Greeks didn't just have a zodiac of 12 beings like a goatfish. They also picked a set of 12 gods that they considered major gods who live on Olympus. There's Greek story cycle about Hercules performing 12 labors. In the Hebrew Bible, the character Jacob had 12 sons who created 12 tribes of Israel. In the Christian Bible, Jesus had 12 apostles. There's a major Shia branch of Islam that believes in 12 divine imams who are successors to Muhammad. It seems like calendars and math compounded with all sorts of lore about the number 12 to make that seem like the fundamental number of life for a lot of people.

Yeah, classic 12 propaganda. I'm glad we got those guys. I'm glad we won. We base 10ers. Yeah, Base 10 really kind of diverged. Yeah. It's a big difference. We got them, boys.

10, 10, 10, yeah. Yeah, there ain't no 12 commandments. Oddly, even though we're on base 10, maybe the biggest sign of people who speak English deciding 12 as normal, 13 is weird, is the English words for 12 and for 13. The roots of both those words, they're from a language called Old English, which could be a ton of linguistic and history podcast, but Old English led to Middle English, led to what became modern English.

And it basically started when the Roman Empire lost control of what's now England, and then ended when the Normans invaded England and brought a lot of French in. So for about 700 years, the 400s to the 1100s, people in what's now England start developing a language for that place that we can kind of recognize. And as they did it, they basically picked one approach for the numbers 11 and 12, those words, and then a different approach for the numbers 13 through 19. Oh, so we didn't have it. We didn't have 13 until then.

And then like, we had to go ahead to come up with new shit. We, it was like, we like had the, like switching to USB style. You're like, no, no, we got to. We got to, it's all changed now. Everything you used to do, there's a new one. Got to plug this number in. It's basically like what's now England, people spoke mostly Celtic languages and there was some migration of Germanic language speakers.

And then Latin speaking Romans came. And as they left, there were no more rules about everybody should speak Latin. And so people cobble together what starts to be old English. Party language. Yeah, party. It's always a party language. Oh, they're gone. Mom and dad are gone.

Time to invent a new language. Classic. Dad's not home, but dad is the emperor. Dad's not home. Let's come up with 13. It is, I, through this, I found out exactly how Roman Britain ended. apparently in the year 409 people who were like running Roman Britain asked the emperor for troops and help and he sent them a letter saying no you have to defend yourselves the emperor honorius did that and that was basically it then they were like well you're not in charge of anything and we're not paying to haxes and like forget it sounds familiar somehow yeah if only we could i don't know learn from this somehow the only is there was there was like a it was like a way to study what has happened to before, but I don't know.

Pastology. My dad's not home. I'm inventing new fields of study as a minor rebellion. Yeah, so as people start to cobble together a language that's more specific to England, they have one approach for the numbers 11 and 12, and they're both from Germanic root words. 11 comes from roots that mean one left. Like you got to 10 and then there's one leftover beyond that is the idea. And 12 is the same kind of thing.

It's two left. And you can even kind of hear it 12, like 12 left, you know. 12th. Yeah, like it's vaguely still in the language, all the parts of it. To 11, to a left. And then 13, they pivot to a different method. It also came later in the old English era, kind of agreed on word for it.

It means 3 and 10, 13. And you can almost hear words. like that, like Thurrentine. It's sort of like that. And so then counting up to 14, 15, 16, it's all the same idea. So that means even in the extremely basic words English speakers used for 12 and 13, 12 feels like it's still connected to the beginning of numbers, and 13 feels like we're starting to get weird.

Like there's even a little strangeness. Oh, we're getting weird with it. We're starting to goof. Yeah. It's number goofing. I'm just going to riff for the rest of these numbers. Yeah, it's like jazz now. Yeah, yeah. Shwafed and quattie. I don't know. Are any of these sticking?

Quattie felt right. Wow, that's good. Yeah. Quattie teen? I don't know. Let's go. But yeah, so that is a bunch of different ways we decided. 12 is super important. And the theory is around the world in many places people said, if 12 is important, the numbers that come before are probably foundational to that. number after is probably weird. Yeah, probably. We don't need those. They're decorative numbers.

Let's be real. Nobody uses them. And there's one other related but separate big theory of 13 becoming considered evil in culture. And that's our takeaway number two. The biblical story of the Last Supper sparked a widespread belief that gatherings of 13 people are unlucky. Because it was Jesus plus. 12 apostles, and then one of the apostles betrays him and he's crucified shortly after the last supper.

This wouldn't happen if we just had one less apostle, any one less. It doesn't matter which one. Right. Yeah. And it also turns out, like I grew up in churches and stuff, but I didn't remember that in a book after the Gospels called The Acts of the Apostles, they make a point of describing Judas's death. It varies how he dies in the various Gospels.

But then the other remaining apostles find a new 12th apostle. They recruit a guy named Matthias. They didn't learn anything. They didn't learn anything from that. You can't have 13 guys. And I guess Jesus had ascended to heaven at that point. So they felt, you know. Oh, this is that.

Okay. I thought it was like immediate. The second. Like, no, no, no. You, Paul two, you're back in. Like almost. Apparently there were two kids. candidates and they were both guys who had known Jesus when he was still around.

And they picked Matthias as essentially Paul 2. Yeah. He was like Jesus is Cato Caelin? Like he was just a guy that was around. You're like, eh, that's good enough. Cato, you're in. It really seems like they went to the top of the minor leagues or whatever. Yeah, they just said like, oh, who's the next most Christian guy?

We'll do him. Yeah. Who's the next guy who was near Jesus a lot? Yeah, Matthias, yeah. Yeah, Matthias, he was always around. What did he do? Not really anything. Man, I don't know.

He's just, he's thinking he's sleeping on the couch mostly. Yeah, yeah. Jesus should have had a loser friend from high school around. I think that really would have spiced up the Bible. A loser friend from high school? Yeah. Like, that's really what that story was missing, right? There is, people have kind of remarked on Jesus's teenage years and 20s not being described in the Bible.

And so that could be when all that happened, you know, yeah. Yeah. Party years. The party years, yeah. And yeah, and this legend especially makes sense in a lot of countries where this podcast is popular, where there's some tradition of Christian people being there, at least part of the time. And in all four major versions of the gospel, Jesus has 12 apostles. He has a group meal with them.

The meal happens immediately after a disciple named Judas Ascariot sought out. the authorities and said, I will tell you where Jesus is so you can capture him in exchange for a bribe. And so that seems to have caught on at some point. Could have been really early on, could have been later on, but it caught on as basically not only as 12 apostles natural and good, because they even made a point of getting a new one after Judas died. So they could get their numbers back up to 12, but also specifically the idea that a gathering of 13 people, if it's the same kind of situation where Jesus knew he was betrayed and was about to be captured and crucified. That must be bad.

Like 13 people shouldn't hang out. Yeah. No. You either you get a 14th or you just, you got to get rid of them. Yeah. You got to get rid of one. Right. Like somebody needs to bring a date or somebody needs to leave.

Yeah. Now, like, are we counting animals in this? Could you bring like a dog in mix up the vibe? It seems like animals don't count, but I don't have anything solid about that. Air apostle, apostle bud? Right. There's nothing. I've looked, there's nothing in the Bible that says a dog can't be an apostle.

Yeah, Paul 2's dog, Paul 3. Yeah, right. Yeah. We're bringing them all in. Bringing them all in. B teams, B teams in here. Bad news, bad news bears apostles is what we're doing. Yeah, apparently in the 1800s, the novelist Victor Hugo.

He was famous and then people recorded that he fled a dinner, party because he noticed more arrivals came and now we were at 13. And he like immediately left and got out of there. And there's there's a long history of people doing that kind of thing. There's written records at least to the early 1800s and newspapers of people saying the last supper's head count is why you can't do this. One reason we think it might go eat way before the 1800s is a Norse poetic myth from the 1200s, the Norse, the Vikings, you know.

The 12th. My God. I didn't even put that together. It's all coming together. I'm putting another pin on this board. I put some yarn to it. Numerology is also just extremely fun. So yeah, that's great.

And yet, some people think that this might not be an old, old myth in Norse culture. It might be influenced by Christianity in the Last Supper story, because by then places like Iceland had adopted it. but in the 1200s people wrote down the eddas and one story in the poetic eddas is a poem called the loka senna which translates to loki's flighting but it really means like loki's argument battle the gods hold a banquet there are 12 guests and then loki crashes the party as an uninvited 13th guest and that's and that's bad because loki seems pretty cool it seems pretty rad Yeah, and people think it might be Christian Last Supper influenced because at this dinner, Loki reveals that he is the guy who killed another one of the Norse gods. And then the fallout of that spirals out enough to cause the entire Ragnarok, the entire end of the world and rebirth of the new world. Yeah, but it's something, you know, it's not board games again. Like, it's like you're going to talk about that party. why you invite Loki.

Right. And like, Odin gets up to do a charade and everybody's like, one-eyed guy, one-eyed guy, one-eyed guy. And he's like, no, guess something else. Guess something else? Cyclops, that's just another one-eyed guy. That's just, come on. Guy with two ravens.

Guy with two ravens. No, you're just seeing things about me. You got to stop. Wait, I have two ravens. Yeah, this, in the Locasena, they wrote sort of an interesting variation on existing myths about Ragnarok. Because in the buildup to it, the chief God Odin and his wife Frigg, they have two sons named Balder and Hodder. And Balder is sort of the heroic prince of the whole Norse God family.

Hoder is liked but also blind and easy to fool. And then prior to this dinner party, Loki tricks Hoder into throwing a mistletoe spear that kills Balder. Baldur's dead. And then when Loki crashes this banquet, everyone's arguing with them shouting at. him. And at one point, Frigg tells Loki, oh, you wouldn't talk like this if Balder was here. And then in the translation I'll link, Loki's reply is, quote, mine is the blame that Balder no more thou seest ride home to the hall. Which is a garbled way of saying, I am the reason he's dead.

Oh, snap. Oh, that's classic Loki. Yeah. And in other writings, I found people just saw Loki got him killed when it happened. But in this poem, it's more of a Last Supper thing. And it's the 13th guest at the dinner talking about killing a divine being. It seems very inspired by it and related. And so it would fit the idea that Christians worried about 13 for many centuries. That's such an awkward thing. Like, no party could get to be more than 12 unless like a bunch of people came at once.

Unless like, God, I hope he's bringing a date. Otherwise, I have to go home. Yeah. Like at some point, at some point, every party's going to reach. 12 unless like the numbers add up that you you would just have to come in together I guess right yeah you would need to jump from 12 to 14 or greater yeah yeah if one person comes they have to wait outside or something I'm having a good time but if one more guy comes here I gotta get I gotta get the hell out of here man and if he brings his brother or wife or something they can come in sure yeah I'm normal we all think this And yeah, and that enormous amount of lore gets us into yet another takeaway number three. One U.S. Civil War veteran sparked a national movement featuring four presidents to turn 13 into a positive spooky number. So still spooky?

Yeah, like it was still all death themed and had scary elements and skulls and stuff. But they created a group called the 13 Club. But they were like, but this kicks ass. Yeah. I really like that they still kept it spooky. Yeah. Yeah. Put it on the back of a jacket. Rules. And in the late 1800s, one guy got the entire U.S. and people in other countries interested in 13 themed dinner parties with 13 people and like thumbing their nose at this last supper worry. See, that's how you party. That's how you party right there.

It's cool. Yeah, and key source here, amazing essay by reference librarian Joseph did a for the New York Historical Society, because this person did it in New York initially. And also features for the Paris Review by Sadie Stein and for Atlas Obscira by Kara G. IMO. There's a story of a guy named William Fowler. William Fowler, born 1827, died 1897. And for some reason, mostly coincidence, his entire life featured the number 13. He lived a life where he said 13 is always around. me. From grade school, he attended PS-13 in Manhattan, PS Public School, graduated from

that school at age 13. Then after a little more schooling, he went into the construction business. He allegedly completed 13 structures in New York before joining the Union Army and the Civil War. Okay. I'm not fully convinced seeing the number 13 three times in your entire life. Yeah, it also seems like he started to kind of make it happen too, because then he leads a unit of New York volunteers for the Union and the Civil War. He leads them in 13 battles. Mm-hmm.

And then... Like, you know he picked one of those battles. One of those, he was just like, look, we could probably get out of this one, but we're at 12. Right. We've done twill-Eft battles. Let's do Twil-A-13 battles. just knock it out.

This is cool, man. It's sexy. Do 13. I love the idea of going paleo with numbered names. Like, Twalefts. I say two lefts. I've just kind of more fundamental than you. Yeah, you know.

We're traditional. I just, it feels good to live how we should. You know, how are we supposed to say in Twill left. And yeah, he, I think he was leaning into it at this point because allegedly after fighting in 13 separate Civil War battles, he on purpose resigned his army commission. He also resigned it on August the 13th of 1863. And apparently by this time in his life, he was trying to make all his significant decisions

on the 13th date of months. So on September 13th, a month later, he purchased a whole building in Manhattan that he turned into a social club called the Knickerbocker cottage. Party Central, right? The Nickerbockers, man? And in the 1800s apparently guys,

guys joined a lot of social clubs and secret societies and so on, and Fowler had made sure to join 13 clubs. And like, no joke, apparently one of the clubs was just him and one other guy, and he basically kept it going to be at 13. Yeah, to be at 13. Like, listen, Gary, I don't like you. You don't like me. We got nothing in common here.

Listen, I don't really like birds. I know that's what this is. I know it's a bird watching club. But you don't have a lot. going on in your life, Gary. And I need the number 13 here. So let's talk about tits. Let's just, let's do it. It's even less meaningful than that. The source here says that the only feature of the club of two guys that we know about is that they drank hot whiskey. I think they just got plastered. Yeah, but it's got to be hot. Nobody else drinks it hot.

It's our thing. Yeah. So Fowler has been like a civil war office. and apparently made money enough to buy a building in Manhattan and stuff. So he's like, I am enjoying my life with my club in Manhattan. And I feel like my life is good and I'm happy about it. And also my life's been dominated by the number 13, partly because I made sure it would be. So that must mean 13 is good and everybody's wrong about it. Oh, of course. And he added the 13th floor to every building.

And that's why I think that no longer exists, this guy. Yeah, I shouldn't have held off for so long about that, but we'll get to it. But no joke, his Knickerbocker cottage was a large enough space that it had numbered rooms and there was a room 13. And so on January the 13th of 1882, William Fowler holds a dinner party and room 13 of his club. And he calls it the 13 club. It's a dinner for 13 people, including himself. There are 13 courses. and then also they plug in a lot of other on-purpose doing negative superstitions.

Like to get into the room, everybody walks underneath an open ladder. There was a banner on the wall that said moriturit salutamus, which means those of us who are about to die salute you. Everyone was told they can use the salt cellar at the meal, but they can't throw salt over their shoulder for good luck. Stuff like that. Like everything's relative to its time. You know, I understand that.

Yeah. I'm just trying to decide if this guy was like just Party Central. Like, this guy's a madman. These parties, these parties rage. I can't believe where, I can't believe there's 13 people here. We're walking under ladders. It's crazy. Or if everybody was just like, this, this nerd again, this goddamn nerds doing his 13 thing again.

It's not like, he's my boss. I got to go to this party. And he said, every time I come and I walk under a ladder and he's there going, ooh, what did you just do? I can't take it. Right? Like, hey, the food's free. So, so, whoa, yeah.

Free food. He's got hot whiskey. It's not, I don't like it. It's not good, but it's whiskey. Right. Like, I think I've had a hot toddy and enjoyed it, but like just straight up hot whiskey sounds weirder somehow, even though a hot toddy is mostly whiskey. Yeah, it sounds bad. It needs another thing.

Yeah. It needs a. One more thing. One more thing. That's the theme we're going with. A maximum of 11 more things. Not a total of 13 things. No, no.

And then this club kept meeting on the 13th of the month. Apparently they ramped up to having wineless printed and cut in the shape of a gravestone. Later he got a custom table in the shape of a coffin. He had everybody at one meal open an umbrella indoors before. eating because you're not supposed to open an umbrella indoors is another superstition. Oh, what a naughty thrill. Oh. Yeah.

Now I've got an umbrella open indoors and it's really, and there's 12 other people here doing the same thing. It's really awkward. Where's bumping umbrellas. Yeah, it also, this reminds me a lot of like Halloween. Like, there's a spooky theming, but it's actually all just fun. Like, it's all silly and goofy. Yeah.

This party needs a Loki is what I'm hearing. Like this is. This is a charades party and it needs some spicing up. It needs somebody. Somebody's got to throw some mistletoe at somebody here. And nobody died and Fowler made a point of recording that. Apparently after one year of meetings, he wrote that, quote, out of the entire role of membership,

whether they have participated or not at the banquet table, then this all caps, not a single member is dead. And then back to regular writing or has even had a serious illness. On the contrary, so far as can be learned, the members during the past 12 months have been exceptionally healthy and fortunate, end quote. And how many, how many months was that again? 12, yeah. Right.

So you didn't do it. You didn't do it, did you? Yeah, you forgot the premise. Yeah. Yeah. The next, the next month, everybody died. And he was just like, I'm not, I'm not writing that down. I didn't count.

Right. Even the man running the 13 club is under the sway of 12. I love it. Yeah. And yeah, and this idea, a lot of these things you hear about, especially like in internet times people make up a holiday. Like, it's National Popcorn Day, ha, ha, you know. But this really took off as a fad.

You know, the club first meets in Manhattan, 1882. Within a few years, the news of it sparked sister clubs in Brooklyn, Chicago, Iowa, England, and France. and there was also so much demand to attend that their club started admitting women, which was super rare for these men's society kind of things of the 1800s. The 13th gender, of course.

Right. The first 12 are men with different facial hair styles. Yeah. Moustache, goatee, soul patch, all different genders. Yeah, yeah. There's only 12 of us. We need one more. What are we going to do?

The 12th gender was Chester A. Arthur and his mutton chaps. The big long ones that you can pull out and they looked at that guy and were like, well, that's the end, right? You can't do any more than that. That's the last hairstyle. Yeah. Let's get one of those funny looking like little men with the round things. Get them in here.

And yeah, and then also just lots of people requested permission to be honorary members, especially if they weren't near where the banquets are. And so the 13 Club recruited four U.S. presidents of their era. The president's Chester, A. Arthur, Grover, Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and Theodore Roosevelt all at some point joined the 13 Club. All right. I was going to make fun of it, but I guess Teddy Roosevelt's in here. I guess this is a party.

Yeah, the first three are fine. But him, yeah. Smash on hot whiskey and riding his moose through a wall being like, I heard this is bad luck somewhere. Let's all do this. I heard, whoa, my pants are, my pants are coming off. They say don't do that. They say don't do that. And I don't know.

Turkey, maybe? Bad luck. Are you just naming countries to say that's bad luck while you're doing? Hang on. No, I'm the president. They wouldn't let a president do that. Yeah. It would be bad luck in Djibouti or whatever.

It's bad luck. Oh, that means the president's got to do that. Yeah, and this was a big enough phenomenon that the 13 club lasted into the 1920s, even though its founder William Fowler died in 1897. It like both encouraged the lore of 13 as unlucky because they were promoting going against that. And also kind of helps spark a lot of things people have gone on to do where they make 13 their number and lean into it. Yeah, but like you can see that it died out as soon as like record players became popular. And they're like, thank, thank Christ we have something else to do.

Yeah. Oh, God. The radio. Oh, God. Phew, okay. We put on your first record and you're like, the first thing you say, I'm not going to that dinner. I am not going to that dinner tonight. And then you just sit in a chair and listen to faint harpsichord or something.

Yeah. While saying out loud, this is enough stimulation. And folks, that's three takeaways about kind of all of civilization and its relationship to 12 and 13. We'll come back with our numbers section at last. after a quick break. We're back, and we have a relatively quick number 13 numbers section. And this week, that's in a segment called, Stats in an elevator, number it up when I'm going down.

Stats in an elevator, number it up till I hit the ground. Beautiful. Thank you. Can't wait for the remix, Dance Club remix. That name was a bit by L.S. Gregor on the Discord. Thank you, L.S. Greger. Let's get a remix going. We have a new name for this segment every week.

Please make a miscellian wacky as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. Gregor, Gregorian, I see what this is. There's more 12 propaganda. At last, the long-promised high-rise floor numbering stuff. The number there is about 9%. This is like a business survey. It's not all that scientific or whatever.

But in 2015, a company called City Realty, surveyed more than 600 buildings in New York City that are at least 13 floors tall. All of them had elevators and only about 9% had a button with 13 on it for a 13th floor. Really? Like a tiny amount actually did a 13th floor, which shocks me because like you, well, you've never seen it. I think I've seen it, but not that much. It's usually normal. God, maybe it must just be like a New York City thing.

I do not go off. And just one of those things that did not really like make survive the trip out west. It really could be because also it seems like a lot of this is driven by either a chain, especially with hotels or like one architect or influential person deciding for a bunch of buildings all at once. And according to the Wall Street Journal, it's more newer buildings in New York City that lack a floor labeled 13. some of the most famous and historic buildings like the Empire State Building and the Flatiron Building do have a labeled 13 floor, but its other stuff doesn't. So it's a new thing. People are still doing it.

Yeah, it's relatively new. And then buildings also can do a move of calling the 13th floor floor 12A. I've never seen that, but that's kind of clever, I guess. 12 and one more. Yeah. Just all crowded onto a little button. Oh. Right.

I get what this is. Very good. And then that's in a speech bubble from like a man on a Velasipad and he's like dashing. Yeah, you can make the buttons to look like the little wheels. Yeah. Of course. It all, it works. Sell that as a magnet.

Slap it on your favorite elevator. The other story with this, the number is 1994. Because in 1994, Disney opened their first. Tower of Terror thrill ride at Disneyland. And that ride makes a point of having a 13th floor, the number 13s all over the theming. But meanwhile, the real-life hotels at most Disney parks omit 13 from the floor numbering. So they're going both ways.

They're like doing it for a ride theme and also avoiding it. But not for real. Not for real. We're just kidding. We're just kidding. We would never. We would never. Next number is about a fan of 13.

the number is December 13th, 1989. That is the birth date of Taylor Swift. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's been bad luck. Yeah, like, until I learned about William Fowler, I thought she was the most famous fan of 13 in the world. And she has more famous, but like the most important, I guess. More famous than William Fowler than Billy the Fowl?

Are you... Are you kidding me? I got Billy the Fowel merch all over. I've never even heard of this. This Taylor Swipe. Is it what you said? Taylor Swipe, yeah. Nobody knows who that is.

If we get this Taylor Swipe joke going, we can do Taylor Swipe merch, and it's not violation. It's not legally actionable. Yeah, I think the first thing I ever learned about Taylor Swift is that her username on Tumblr had a 13 in it. And it's because she threw out her career in, has featured 13 because of her birth date, December 13th, in her personal lore, her social media usernames. And apparently fans think her next album will be the biggest landmark in her whole career, or at least could be, because she so far has now released 12 studio albums.

Yeah, it certainly seems like it's trending that way, right? Right. It puts even more pressure on what will be a higher pressure release because the 12th album, the life of a showgirl, did not get great. reviews. So, no, didn't do good, but that 13th is going to bring it all back. Maybe, maybe that's what it is because there's such an adversarial relationship as we've established between Tileftians and Thortenians that like, that, that she had to make the 12th album suck. Right. So that the 13th album could be great. I love it actually. Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

basically entirely for numerology reasons. There's a ton of extra pressure on her next album. It would be no other reason at all. And then after that is her Quadi album, the Quadi albums, man, that's going to hit. Yeah. That's the one I'm waiting for. People are like, how many songs are on it? She's like Quadi.

There's Quadi songs. Of course, Quadi. And you won't believe this. They're all Quadi minutes long. Yeah. So yeah. in the near cultural future, the biggest musician in the world is going to release their highest pressure album ever. So that's fun.

That's cool. That's good. That's good. I'm glad for her. I'm interested to see how that goes. And she's not the only fan of 13. And it's just kind of a factoid, but I guess worth mentioning the sort of invented in the 1900s name for somebody who likes 13 is a Triskeedecophile. It's based on Greek roots, these words.

And then the fear of it is Triscodecaphobia. and then Fear of Friday the 13th is Frigatrisca decaphobia. If people remember that Loki dinner party story, Friday is named after the Norse goddess Frig. So that she's in that and also is in the name of Fear of Friday the 13th. Frig a Trisketekophobia. That's silly. Honor and got to get that frig in there. Can we call them Triscuits?

Can we call them Triscuits for short? I like it a lot better. And I like Triscuits. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and Taylor-Swif and William Fowler, not the only fans of 13. The biggest number there is five because that's how many basketball teams retired the number 13 to honor Wilt Chamberlain. Oh, hey.

I didn't realize Wilts Chamberlain was the 13. I didn't realize he was a Triscuit. I never knew his uniform number, even though he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. He played before most everybody else. but he, yeah, he played long enough ago that there's a game in 1962 where he allegedly scored 100 points, and we're pretty sure he did, but it was early enough in basketball that there's no video of the entire game. So we just, we used to just take the word for it. Yeah.

If the biggest guy you know came up and said something, you'd be like, yeah, that's how this used to work. That's how it used to work before the internet. If a big guy told you something, it was true, and the bigger he was, the truer it was. Will Chamberlain can say anything. Let's bring that back. Yeah. And it was a fact. Because he's Will Chamberlain.

He wore 13 his entire career, so his college team, the Kansas Jayhawks, retired it. Before he went pro, he played for the Harlem Globetrotters for a little bit, and they retired it, which is just fun. I didn't know that either.

That's real interesting being on the Harlem Globetrotters and being like, oh, hold on. Hold on. This guy's playing real basketball. Like, he's like, he's like, actually he's making shots and stuff. He doesn't need to bring out like a ladder or pull somebody's pants down.

He's just like we got to get him out of here. This is not what people came to see. Right. His teammate is like, what's your comedy bit, Wilt? And he just dunks over him and smashes the whole backboard. And I have sex with lots of women.

I don't think, I don't think the Globetrotters are the right place for your schick. It's just it's edgy comedy. People don't, people don't really get it. Yeah, if folks don't know the other famous number about him is allegedly having sex with 20,000 women in his life, which is just 13,000 plus a few more. Maybe he hit 13,000 and then said, I need to keep going for the luck thing. Yeah. Otherwise, it's unlucky. I need to have sex with 7,000 more women.

Right. Because that's a lucky number. Got offset it. And, yeah, and then he played for the Warriors and Sixers and Lakers in the NBA. They all retired it too. And there's a bunch of other athletes who war 13, American football quarterback Dan Marino and baseball weirdo Alex Rodriguez are probably the biggest ones in their sports. I got to write about Alex Rodriguez for Robert's Wonderful Site, 1-900 hot dog. He's incredibly strange. Yeah, and he partly wore it on the Yankees because the smaller numbers are mostly retired already. But yeah, like if 13's curse that didn't stop Rodriguez from winning a World Series with the Yankees and Chamberlain winning two NBA titles, like people wear it in sports, it's fine.

Right, but he wound up being a really weird guy. Maybe that's because of the jersey number, you know? Could be, yeah. And then the one sport where they seem to have feared 13 the most is auto racing. Circuits like NASCAR and Formula One have each banned cars from being number 13 for multiple decades of the. their history. And nobody's really come out and said why, but it seems like nobody wants to have a fatal crash happen involving car 13, because then it'll be the fault of whoever numbered the car that way, you know?

Not until Taylor Swift makes her racing debut. That's the 13th album. It's not an album at all. It's a race car. And her fans are like, it was in there the whole time. Her last name is Swift. She's fast. Of course she's a race driver.

Brilliant. She's fast. Of course. All adds up. All adds up, man. And we have one numerical final takeaway for the main episode here. Takeaway number four, there are exactly 688 Friday the 13th per 400 years of the calendar. Oh, I don't know what that means.

I was going to act how excited, but I don't know what that means. It's a thing that makes sense as you think of it, which is that the calendar has a, cycle. It's not just endlessly different alignments of the months and numbers and days of the week and stuff. And on our Gregorian calendar, the way it's currently laid out, there's a 400-year cycle where the dates exactly repeat again. And within that time, there are exactly 688 Friday the 13th, every time for all of history and the future and everything. I get it. And if you add 6 and 8 and 8, you get 13. right and then 400 times three is 13 hundred right I believe that first math for too long all checks out yeah and and we'll link about this the very fun source of a lot of it is

pieter jerk de boer who's a Dutch professor of design and communication systems at the University of Twente also linking a feature for National Geographic like Friday the 13th whether you fear it or not, it's one of the most predictable things in the universe. The current Gregorian calendar has leap days because the solar year is about 365 and a quarter days. But if people have heard the leap day episode, we talk about how it's not quite an extra quarter day. It's slightly less than that. Each solar year is 365 days and then a quarter of a day minus about 11 minutes and four seconds. You don't need to remember the exact amounts or anything.

Oh, and that's 13. Thank you for continuing to look. Is that what we're doing? Did I get it? So as astronomers noticed this, they help the Catholic Church further update the leap year system. The upshot is that there is a leap year once every four years, but they skip that once every 400 years. For example, the year 2000 theoretically would be a leap year

but that's a year they skipped the leap day to keep this 400 year cycle correct. Oh, okay. And so there's no leap day in the years 2400, 2800, 3200, and then backwards 1,600, 1,200, 800. So if you were born on leap day in the year 2000, you don't have a birthday and can never die.

That's what the new Highlander is about, right? I'm imagining the doctor at the hospital telling that to new parents on like March 1st, 2000. And he's just confused. This baby will never die. He'll only age like a lobster and grow bigger with every year. And the mom's like, can I go home? I don't think this guy's a doctor. Let me just let you end, isn't that?

Because of that extremely specific leap day adjustments, the, days of the week repeated an exact way on our calendar, but it takes 400 years for the cycle to fully repeat itself and complete. And so because it's so exact, people like Pieter Jerk de Boer have calculated out exactly when and how many the Friday the 13ths are across all of time on Earth. Okay. So you can you can predict where Jason will strike next. So I'm not that into those movies, but either way, like the name Friday the 13th, I always find. felt like, yeah, okay, so be careful that day. And yeah, I don't know.

Like, just don't, don't have sex at a summer camp that day, I guess. I don't know, that's pretty easy. Right. Unless you're married is the feeling, you know, like, he does respect the bonds of marriage. Yeah. You see him famously in that movie sometimes, like, see people making out and the machete comes up. And then he, like, looks over, sees a little flash of the ring. And he's like, oh, all right, I'd see you.

Good luck, you kids. I wish he saw like a lot of marriage evidence, like the photo album and a piece of cake they froze. Picture of the kids, but it doesn't do it in these modern days. Am I right? Am I right, folks? That's what he says on his podcast. You can't. Yeah, you can't dress it. Yeah. Stay tuned for more of my right wing podcast with Jason Voorhees. Yeah. And so because it's so exact, there are exactly 688 dates. that are a Friday and a 13th of the month per 400 years. And I know numbers are hard to track in audio,

but the point is 688 out of 400 means there's an average of 1.72 Friday the 13th's per year. Ah, if you add those up, if you add them all together, you get 688. 13, 1 and 7 and 2. And yeah, they're not evenly distributed across years either. This year, 2026, has three of them. Other years have two or have one. And the weirdest coincidence to me is no years have no Friday the 13th. Apparently, there are a few time periods in our 400-year cycle where there are more than 12 months without a Friday the 13th.

But none of those include an entire calendar year. There's always a Friday the 13th between January 1sts. Yeah, you've got to have one. You have one just to thin out the herd a little bit, just to get those kids out of here. It does feel faded that way. Like if a year didn't have one, it would be luckier or something, but you can't avoid Doom, yeah. Poor Jason, the year that it doesn't have one. He's just waiting like, I mean, it's December already.

I'm starting to feel like this isn't going to happen for me. Or it's great. Like, he's on a beach in big shorts, but in that mask. And like, yeah, he just, he takes a year to figure himself out, travel Europe or whatever. He tries to go backpacking, but his knives keep slicing it open and his stuff falls out all over Switzerland. Everybody still runs from him. And he's like, no, no, no, it's the year without one. It's the year without one.

We're good. We're good. But next year there's going to be three. So you watch out. I'm just kidding. You kids are all right. Because I see the ring. Folks, has the main episode for this week.

And again, if Katie has news, I want to let her share it. And I want to thank Robert Rockway for coming through doing this episode. He does a ton of things online, in particular, the amazing website, 1-900 Hot Dog. They had their own podcast, The Dog's Own 9,000, and yet another podcast called Big Feets. Those are all amazing if you don't know right now about him, check them out. And then he's a wonderful writer. He's written many novels, and his latest is, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. Again, that's I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200.

It just came out and every sale helps him continue to write these kinds of wonderful books. So please check it out. Please pick it up. It's really, really, really heartfelt and grounded while also being an astounding universe and canon and cosmology and everything. So it really speaks to me and my name is in there because he was very kind to me and a few other people and said, do you want to be named in it? So I am recommending the first and only book to feature. my name as a character ever.

Please check it out. I will kill your imaginary friend for $200. And hey, you're in the outro of our 13 episode. It's got fun features for you, such as Help Remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the likeliest origin for negative superstitions about the number 13 is that it's a byproduct of positive superstitions and beliefs and lore

about the number 12th. In particular because of calendars, math, human anatomy, and the Earth and Sun and Moon's relationships. Takeaway number two, the biblical story of The Last Supper sparked a widespread belief that gatherings of 13 people are unlucky. Takeaway number three, William Fowler, a U.S. Civil War veteran, sparked a national movement featuring four U.S. presidents to turn 13 into a positive spooky number. Takeaway number four, there are exactly 68th Friday the 13th per 400 years of our calendar, and every year of all time we'll have a Friday the 13th. On top of that, there are, of course, many numbers in this episode about a number. In particular, we looked at some of the luckiest and proudest fans of 13 besides William Fowler,

such as Taylor Swift and Wilts Chamberlain. Also, the auto racing fear of 13, the faking, Greek-langugy lingo for being a fan or a fearful person around 13, and the way 13th floors are or are not in tall buildings. 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 show is the bizarre, deceptive, and last-minute process that created the future U.S. state of Georgia and made it specifically 13 colonies rebelling against the British. So basically the entire origin of numerology about the United States. Visit sifpod. Fund for that bonus show.

Also for a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and the 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 lot of material about astronomy and ancient civilizations, in particular from the Moorhead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, also the University of Nebraska Lincoln, also wonderful writing about history and numerology. for the New York Historical Society by reference librarian Joseph Ditta,

for the Paris Review by Sadie Stein, for Atlas Obscura by Karajiyimo. And then special thanks to Pieterjerk de Boer, an associate professor of design and communication systems at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hokking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people, and the Wappinger people.

as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Robert taped this on the traditional land of the Podunk and Wangunk people, and I want to acknowledge that in my and Robert's locations and 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 is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 157. That's about the topic of bras. Fun fact there, the Maiden Form Bras Company made special jackets for pigeons in World War II. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. I believe that's on a brief hiatus while Katie does some family things. And also there's an enormous catalog of amazing creature feature shows.

Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo's Band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on 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. 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 supported directly by you