Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Number 150

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the number 150 is secretly incredibly fascinating. They also discover hoax moon beavers, and discover Saint Nicholas's past life as a pickle-murder solver.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The number 150, known for being an integer, famous for being this episode. Nobody thinks much about that number, so let's have some fun on the 150th episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-hosts, Katie Golden and Katie. Wow, we are celebrating episode 150 of... And I would walk a hundred podcasts, and then I would walk 50 more podcasts, just a podcast on this podcast. Yeah. That was a surprise attack. Either that tune has been a stats song or it's just so plausible I'm inventing the memory. It feels so right. Such a fit. Feels so good. As longtime listeners know, I like to celebrate the

big round numbers by doing an episode. All the episodes we try super hard. So here is another episode. Also had a fun premise idea for 150, which is that the giant numbers section this week will be about the premise of the number 150. The main premise of the episode is that the integer 150 is secretly incredibly fascinating for episode 150. It's a little stunt, a little fun. And then also we'll have a couple takeaways this week that are amazing stories from some recent topics that just didn't quite fit.

When I was prepping, I was like, there's just not quite room for this. And so you'll hear some amazing stuff in this show about beavers and pickles. And then in the bonus show about taxidermy and about ducks. So it's interesting, even if you haven't heard those episodes, but also if you have, it enriches them. I like, you usually ask like people's relationship with the topic or my relationship with the topic on the episode. I like 150. You know what? It's just a good number. Yeah. I like it when something costs 150, like $1.50. I like the sound of 150. It's nice. 200 feels intimidating. 100 feels, I don't know, cliche. And 150 is just right.

is just right. Yeah, it's such a big anniversary and also an in-betweener. Yeah. It's like, oh, but there was a bigger one and there will be a bigger one. And there's just a little buddy in between. Yeah. Feels good.

Yeah. Just squeaks right in there. And our fascinating things about that topic are in a segment called Stats Across the Water. Water. water stats across the sky. Yay. That name was submitted by me. I wanted to pick one because it's the anniversary episode.

So there we go. It's a little Paul McCartney for everybody. He's gone mad with power, folks. I'm like Paul McCartney after he got all the Beatles money. I'm like, ah, what can't I do? I'm writing an orchestra about Liverpool or a symphony about Liverpool. That's something he did. So anyway, we have a new name for this segment every week. You folks pick the rest of them through Discord or to SipPod at gmail.com. The first number here about the topic of 150, the first number is the number 150. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yes. Wow. Astounding. Because 150 is the number of squares on a toy called the Professor's Cube. The Professor's Cube. Ah, yes. Me and the Professor's Cube spent many a long childhood afternoon together. What are you talking about? What's a Professor's Cube. The Professor's Cube. Ah, yes. Me and the Professor's Cube spent many a long childhood afternoon together. What are you talking about?

What's a Professor's Cube? So it's an expanded form of the Rubik's Cube. Ah, what? And what people have done is... 150 cubes? It's... Squares. There's 150 squares on it.

Okay. Because it turns out if you make the grids, you know, regular Rubik's cube, it's a grid of three squares by three on each side. It's those nine squares. A professor's cube is a grid of five squares by five on each face. And so five by five is 25 squares. There's six sides. 25 times six is 150.

That's a lot of cube. I can't figure out a regular Rubik's Cube. I think I tried once. It made me angry. Same. I don't understand. Because I know with Rubik's Cube, you kind of memorize a sort of algorithm what you twist and turns you do to get from point A to point B. I don't I don't see how a human could do that with one that is that massive.

Because like how many how many squares does a OG Rubik's Cube have? Fifty four. It's fifty four. So that's so that's almost three times a regular Rubik's Cube. Yeah. And there is a Rubik's Cube culture that neither of us are into, but many, many people all over the place are. Good for you if you are. And it turns out that, you know, the Rubik's Cube, it was created by a Hungarian design teacher named Erno Rubik. He called it the Magic Cube. And then a U.S. business called the Ideal Toy Company started marketing Rubik's Cubes in 1980. That started a phenomenon. And then it turns out the Rubik's

Cube community basically immediately just made it bigger. Within a year, designers created a four square version, you know, like each face has a four squares by four squares face. And then they made this professor's cube where it's five and then just every bigger size they could physically make. But I don't like it. I don't want to be I don't want to be down on the Rubik's community, but you've already blown my tiny mind with the original Rubik's cube. I don't understand it. It scares me. It intimidates me. And then you just keep it's it just feels like kicking me while I'm down. I have never solved one and never will try. It doesn't appeal to me. But they're they're out

here. You know, there's competitions where people are trying to be champions of solving them. And so, yeah, the community is into these bigger sizes. And that also brings up what's the upper limit. I couldn't find a great scholarly source for that. So I just used Wikipedia. They say that the most complex physical Rubik style cube ever built has faces with 33 square long grids. It's sort of hard to have terminology for this, but the biggest one, one face of the cube has 33 squares by 33. And then you're turning all of that together. Wait, so how many total squares for the entire thing? Over 6,500 squares.

No. Stop. Jail. Because it's 33 times 33 times 6. I don't believe anyone's ever just solved that as a human being. Yeah. Have they? I couldn't find. I'm sure some nut took it apart secretly or something, you know? But that's the largest one ever constructed.

And then the biggest one constructed and sold commercially to like more than one person is 21 cube long sides. To how many total? Which gives you a total squares over 2,600. No. Also no. And then the last and most terrifying step is that we have yet to find the upper size limit for a digital Rubik's Cube where you use software to construct it.

There's no clear sense that there's ever a limit on that. It seems to be infinite. The limit does not exist for how nerdy you can be on the computer. Yeah. Yeah. So infinite amount of being a dork. I don't want to be mean, but also, yeah, I do want to be a little bit mean. Rubik's cubes make me mad. I'm pretty sure that when I was given one as a toy, it was one that was inexpensive enough that

the colors were stickers. It wasn't painted onto it. And I just started peeling stickers off at one point and rearranging them that way. I was like, I hate this puzzle so much. I don't want to do it anymore. I just want to peel all the stickers off and leave it blank. So it's like any solution is right. Enjoy. Yeah. Look at my cool twisting gray cube. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Now it's fun. Why can't you just enjoy the twisting of the gray cube and not worry about the colors? Because there are no colors. Yeah. And the next number is another games thing here.

Because the next number this week is 150. You know, everybody just take a sec to remember that. Makes sense, Alex. Um, you know, everybody just take a sec to remember that. That number 150 is the official, like what the marketing said, number of Pokemon in the first Game Boy games. 150 Pokemon. Wow. That's a lot of Pokemon.

Yeah, they started big. And then it turns out there was a 151st Pokemon kind of tucked in there. If people are huge Pokemon fans, they probably know this. But yeah, it turns out the franchise really benefited from a hidden 151st Pokemon. It was like a secret, like an Easter egg. The main source here is an amazing piece for Uproxx.com by Nathan Birch. He says that, you know, Pokemon, it was first pitched to something called Pocket Monsters by Satoshi Tajiri. He pitched it successfully to Nintendo. They spent about six years creating the first Pokemon games, which were Pocket Monsters Red

and Green in Japan, Pokemon Red and Blue in the US. But the first games were supposed to have 150 Pokemon, from number one Bulbasaur to number 150 Mewtwo. However, there was a gag thing a designer did when they were finishing the game. the developer debug mode from Pokemon. This freed up a minuscule 300 bytes of cartridge space. As a bit of a gag, Morimoto decided to use those bytes to slip in one last Pokemon of his own creation. So there was just a hidden Pokemon that you could not find through normally playing the game, but then people found little hacks to pull it up, and number 151 was the Pokemon Mew. Oh, wow. Wait, so Mew, but that's now an actual Pokemon, right? Yeah, and then what happened is Pokemon first comes out in Japan in 1996. It does not sell all that well. It just kind of does okay. And then word of mouth spread about a hidden 151st Pokemon. Players found glitches where they could uncover Mew. And then from there, that became a lot of the Pokemon lore,

especially in the first official Pokemon movie. A lot of the story is about Mew and kind of finding Mew and bringing Mew to be. Right, because Mew is like a cat that's in sort of some kind of science experiment. At first he's mean, but then Pikachu teaches him the power of friendship. I think, right? That's basically it. Yeah. They ended up having this one programmer invent the first huge Pokemon story in a lot of ways, other than Ash and Pikachu being friends and so on. They created this mystery and this secret and then this exciting reveal by fooling around with the code

and going one beyond 150. People love that. I also love that the little secrets in games, not just Easter eggs, but things that are so thoroughly hidden that you really can't get them unless you do some kind of weird hocus pocus with the game to find the thing. That's cool. I'm never going to do it. I don't have the patience. So other people. I'm sorry I called people who play with Rubik's cubes dorks earlier. I take it back if you can find these secrets without me having to do anything.

I like that we're both not that patient with these kind of puzzles. Absolutely not. Like my brother was huge on the computer games Myst and Riven. And I was like, I don't know, it doesn't seem fun. I just want to play a game where it's all in front of me. Yeah, I played Myst when I was a kid. And by I played i played i mean i watched my dad play it um and so that was the way for me to enjoy that game and then i thought maybe i'd enjoy riven but no it's just i like look i like puzzles but i need a certain amount of logic that is very readily apparent to the puzzle to enjoy it. You know, like once you start

playing mind games with me where it's like, rotate this cube and then memorize the alphabetical order of the colors. And it's like, nope, you've lost me. Pokemon, thanks to this one weird thing, it seems to have had both appeals. This article says that these rumors spread across Japan's school playgrounds about, oh, there's 151st Pokemon. There was a manga magazine that announced a contest where people could mail in their cartridge to have Mew unlocked for them. They got nearly 80,000 cartridges in the mail and sent them all back. The rest of the Pokemon game was very in front of you and you just play it and do the thing. But then they accidentally baked in a mystery and there's some people who

think that Pokemon might never have really taken off without this mystery. They might have needed that 150 first. That's interesting. Yeah. People love a mystery. They love a hook. Yeah. Our next number here, and this is a very social number as well, the next number is 150. Oh, really? I love this game. I didn't see that one coming. That is the number of people which are known as Dunbar's number. What?

And this is a sociology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology theory from the scholar Robin Dunbar. What? And his theoretical number for humans is that we can maintain 150 meaningful connections. And after that, we just don't have the mental space or energy to keep bringing people into our lives. And then like we meet Mew and then we forget our own like father because Mew is now in the picture. Right. My father was number one Bulbasaur and his leaves are forgotten to me. Oh, no. But yeah, that's it's not a totally provable number. But I'm going to link a piece from Robin Dunbar written in 2021 where he affirms his confidence in this idea.

I'm also linking a journal article from 2021 in Biology Letters as one of many challenges to it. This is widely debated and has also been a pretty influential idea that there's a set amount of people, probably about 150, that humans can like meaningfully really keep tabs on. It's not in a maybe social media sense where you just have a bunch of people indexed. This is like people you're really thinking about. I mean, okay, I'm a little skeptical of that's such a precise number. And I mean, obviously, he's probably saying it's not exactly 150, but it's around 150.

But still, I mean, like what what is his proof that that is sort of around the limit of how many people we can know? Did he what was sort of his methodology to find this number? It was apparently two big steps. It was looking at human brain size. And you and I have talked many times about brain size is not a hard and fast signal of much of anything you have to keep going. No, it's brain efficiency. Yeah.

And so he looked at that and also studied groups of non-human primates and the sizes of their brains. And then the other thing he did is look at anthropological records of human societies, mainly trying to get to a default of how human social groups work, even though, again, that's super complicated, too. And I agree with you that the roundness of the number is fishy. That's sort of what's interesting about an integer like this. It's so round, people will make things gravitate to it,

even if it's not quite the exact thing. I mean, it sounds like one of those numbers that gets repeated, like it's easily repeated. It's sort of like the whole, you know, it takes you 28 days to form a habit. I kind of don't know if that number is real. It just sounds good, right? Like it's almost a month. It's sort of this like, sort of this nice sounding number, like, oh, 28 days. But I don't know that that's really at all true. It really only takes 28 days to form a habit. I think it probably depends on the kind of habit and like the person. I would assume it's a similar thing with the number of people,

because like if he's only looking at sort of anthropological records and stuff, you know, your capacity for making meaningful connections with people probably depends on your society, how you were raised. You know, we have, it's like we devote a lot of our cognition skills to these things that we learn socially, like language. I don't know. I'm a little skeptical of that. Yeah. It is interesting. I'm sure there is a limit to how many people you can keep in touch

with. It seems like that would be something very, very variable depending on your culture. Absolutely. This number has been used to sort of shoot down the concept of social media and digital connections to each other. But I also feel like if he's looking at early anthropological versions of human society, one limiting factor was like walk into each other's dwellings and stuff, you know, and I think digital stuff actually makes it somewhat easier to increase that number, if anything. social can be members of huge flocks where they are socializing with huge numbers of birds. Yeah. Their brains are quite small and yet they can be incredibly intelligent. Absolutely. This, this number is almost a continuation of the recent crows episode. And we're going to continue other episodes later in this episode, but yeah, like what a,

what a brilliant bird that probably doesn't fit this schematic at all. So, yeah. Oh, well, I'm going to inform the crows and they are they'll be pissed and they're going to come after this guy. Because as we know, crows can hold a grudge. You're done, Dunbar. You're done. It's shouted from the sky by black winged masses. When when was this? When did this sort of idea and number come out? 1991 was the start of him working on this. And he's still, he's still like around and working today. He's, he's faculty at the university of Oxford, you know, and this isn't the only thing he's

ever done, but it's loomed so large, especially in internet discourse, that it's called Dunbar's number after this guy. Yeah, I mean, he's probably, I'm not super familiar with his work, but he's probably done a lot of interesting studies. I don't want to just poo-poo this guy's entire body of work. I just think that, you know, maybe there might be something a little bit more complicated than just, you know, like you can know 150 people and then you start forgetting, forgetting other people. But yeah.

My father Bulbasaur, forgotten. Bulbasaur. Oh yeah. I forgot about Bulbasaur. Damn it. And my, is my mother Ivysaur? Is Ivysaur too? Anyway, it doesn't matter.

Next number here, it is the number 150, because that is the number of psalms in the religious text, the Book of Psalms, which is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Western Christian Bible. Oh, you mean psalms. Oh, our Greek listeners are so mad. Our ancient Greek listeners, they like cut it out. That's where the word's from. Anyway, yeah, there are also a few more psalms in some other churches, but the psalms were text in the Bible, and then they were originally songs with stringed

instrument accompaniments. And there's also some like extra psalms often being found in studies of old texts. There is a 151st psalm in the Bible of the Eastern and Orthodox Christian churches, most of those, because it was in a significant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, but not the original Hebrew Bible. There's also an Orthodox church in Syria with a few more psalms from there. Was it all about Mew and how Mew has risen from sort of the laboratory to unite all Pokemon? Listeners, sound off if you saw the 151st psalm in theaters, or if you saw that on VHS later, right? We all know when that came out. And with these psalms, apparently they come from the tradition of practicing these religions,

especially early Judaism. And so I'm going to link a theologian and pastor in Wheaton, Illinois, who says that the psalms are one of the few parts of the Bible very explicitly written by humans. It's not handed down from on high. We came up with these songs because they're good to worship to, and here we go. And so it's a relatively flexible section. These are good bops if you want a headbanger to really pray to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's the Psalms. And yeah, apparently the 150th Psalm is a doxology for the rest of them, which means it's

sort of a capping easy song to do. And it's a song about songs. It's all about using various instruments and voices to praise, you know? wow this is the year 150 bc on the gregorian calendar i was like what's a highlight from that year in this challenge of making 150 interesting that's the year when a roman senator named cato the Elder did an annoying oratorical trick that helped destroy Carthage. Huh. So this was the first person who, like, destroys someone in an argument. Like, we see now everyone's destroying everyone in arguments.

I see it on YouTube all the time. So-and-so destroys so-and-so with some kind of debate. But it sounds like this debate actually destroyed a town. Yeah, this is not quite a filibuster, but it's almost like a weird, relentless way of being a legislator. And it helps encourage this thing because it was distinctive. This ancient Roman history stuff in 150 BC, Rome had already fought two giant wars with the Carthaginians, which were a people based in northern Africa, what's now Tunisia, especially. In those two wars, they got a bunch of concessions and surrenders from the Carthaginians, but they didn't take them over. In her book, SPQR, historian Mary Beard says that the Roman

senator Cato was obsessed with like finishing off Carthage. He thought they're right there, they could always come back, we'll have a third war, we just have to go attack them and destroy them. So for all of 150 BC, he ended every speech he gave in the Senate with the phrase Carthage must be destroyed. Anytime, any speech about anything, it didn't matter what, if he spoke at all, he said, this is what I had to say. Carthage must be destroyed. Thank you. And let's sit down again. He really sounds like an unpleasant person to hang out with. like an unpleasant person to hang out with. It's like, can you pass the water?

Carthage must be destroyed. I'm running out of toilet paper. Carthage must be destroyed. I think the dog got something like a chicken bone he's not supposed to have. Carthage must be destroyed. And then the dog barks, so there's a little subtitle, Carthage must be destroyed.

Yeah. The dog's in on it. Kato the doggo. And so, yeah, he would say this, and yeah, it doesn't sound fun to me. It's usually presented in Latin as Carthago de Lenda Est. That's not the exact words, but that's how we've recorded it. And he did this all of the time constantly. He even started mixing in other stunts too. His main other stunt was that one day

Cato went to the Senate. He had loaded his toga with a bunch of Carthaginian figs, like the food. And then what he did is he went out onto the floor of the Senate and spilled all the figs. And the accounts say that they were deliciously ripe. And the senators were like, wow, look at those yummy figs. Amazing. And then Cato said, aha, well, these are Carthaginian. And they came from a city only three days journey away. You know?

So therefore, they're so geographically close. We need to destroy Carthage right now. Hurry up. Wait, but then where do you... but if the figs are good, you can't destroy them. Oh, yeah. You take them over so you don't have to trade for them anymore. Then you just own the figs. Yeah, but I don't know if war is good for fig horticulture.

It almost definitely isn't. That's a good point. Yeah. Because the thing that happens here is he is doing this all of 150 BC and maybe a little before that. That convinces the Senate to mobilize the army and navy. And in 149 BC, they begin what's called the Third Punic War, a big war against Carthage. they begin what's called the Third Punic War, a big war against Carthage. And it ends with Rome destroying the city of Carthage and allegedly salting the fields to prevent agriculture.

That may or may not have happened. That's definitely not good for figs. Terrible for figs. That's definitely not good for figs. Yeah. Now you got no figs, Cato. I'm a pacifist. And so I'm generally against war when it's not necessary, which it usually is not. But yeah, I'm definitely against war when figs are on the line. Yeah. And man, figs would be a good topic. But because they're great. Yeah.

I don't know a lot about them. But yeah. They're weird. We'll do figs. Let me teach you about figs, son. What are you, some kind of fig expert? Such as, what's a scientist's name? Fig Newton.

That's it. There's the fig thing I know. Fig Newton. But yeah, so Rome completely defeatsats absorbs carthage in this last war and then this like thing cato did all the time lived on in history among basically classics nerds like to this day if somebody says carthago's elenda asked the the meaning is that they are completely fixated on a policy or proposal. Like if somebody says Carthago Delanda Est, they're saying, I am not going to let this thing go.

That's the only thing I care about in the whole world. But it's only really used among like, I don't know, British parliamentarians from the recent past or, you know, people who've gone to Oxford and Cambridge, basically. You can say nerds. It's okay. Yeah. Nerds, nerd and Cambridge, basically. You can say nerds. It's okay. Yeah. Nerds, nerds, nerds. Take that, nerds.

I'm really, I'm being a real bully this episode, really harshen on the nerd community, which I pretend I'm not like a full-time member of. That's true. I think every number except Psalms, we have pooped on nerds. That's cool. Wait, let me think. Choir nerds, you know? Yeah.

And one last number for the Stance of Numbers on this topic. It is the number 150 AD. The other half of the calendar. Yeah. And this one's a little vaguer and also amazing. This is a key construction year for the Pyramid of the Sun, which was built throughout the 100s AD. It might have taken more than 100 years, but that was a giant central pyramid in the Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan in what's now Mexico.

Okay, I think I may have heard of, it might be a different one, but I've definitely heard of a really, really fascinating, some of these pyramids have just incredible structural engineering. There are so many interesting, almost like Easter eggs, like hidden things about it that like the sun, the angle of the sun causes certain shadows to fall. The sound, there's just all sorts of really incredible genius architectural details. This is probably one of those because yeah, this pyramid, it apparently has such an intricate subterranean network of systems that we're still figuring out how many chambers and passages are under it. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art says it was probably used for a lot of ceremonies involving the creation of the world. And so you could have people or things kind of pop out from it in interesting ways for symbolizing the origin point of humanity in the world.

Wow, that's amazing. It's one part of Mesoamerican history that I wish I had known more about before. part of Mesoamerican history that I wish I had known more about before, because I think in especially US school, we hear about a people called the Aztecs. In Charles C. Mann's book, they usually call them the Triple Alliance, or they refer to them by the Nahuatl language, which was their main language that they spoke. But it turns out that empire was relatively recent. It really got going around the 1300s, 1400s. And so there's this whole thing where Teotihuacan existed for more than a thousand years before that. It was probably multicultural. There was inhabitation by Toltec, Teutonic, Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec peoples to name a few.

And the city was a massive religious center for the entire region, probably the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere for more than a thousand years. Yeah, it is weird how I think, especially in like U.S. education, there's just this entire huge era of human civilization just to the south of us. And we don't really talk about it too much because I don't remember learning that much about it as a kid. And we don't really talk about it too much because I don't remember learning that much about it as a kid. Also, I think like the impact of learning about sort of the Spanish like genocidal tendencies in Southern America like would have more of an impact if you understood that, hey, this was there was a whole civilization of people there. And it was really cool and really rich with culture and yeah that's that's what because like when it's just sort of a vague when you focus on sort of the you know the villains of the story it's like you don't necessarily understand what we lost uh through colonization yeah a thousand percent and so it was neat to learn more about this pyramid just by being led by the integer 150. I enjoyed that. Like, so it's a, it's a nice thing to get to do.

And that's all of the numbers about the number 150. I think it's an interesting number now. It's fun. We don't have 150 topics about the number 150 on the episode. That is the 150th episode. Alex. So somebody please Photoshop the very famous movie that we all remember. The movie The Number 23 starting Jim Carrey. Do that for The Number 150. I know everyone's thinking about that

movie all the time. It's one of the couple biggest movies ever made. I do actually. I think about it a lot. He wrote all the number 23 on his face and he was really obsessed with the number 23. his face and he was really obsessed with the number 23 um yeah i'm basically that but with this bigger number yeah so better really it's a bigger number so better well folks we are gonna take a quick break to reset ourselves a bit because then we'll

return with a couple of amazing stories about stuff like moon beavers moon beavers. Moon beavers. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

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

Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Remember, no running in the halls. And we're back. The rest of the show is a couple of amazing stories from recent topics that I just left off for time, even though they're totally incredible. And they're not going to be numbered takeaways, but we're starting with takeaway number beaver. Beavers! Takeaway number beaver. There was a major 1800s newspaper hoax claiming to find a beaver civilization on the moon. Huh.

That's fun. There's no trees up there. Hang on. I've found a major hole in this. It's that they got no trees on the moon. I've seen it. I've seen no trees. trees. This is one of those fun things from the surprisingly recent time when most people on Earth thought that all other planets had the same rivers, forests, ecosystems that the Earth does. They just thought it had all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of makes sense, except for like, look at the moon. You can't see any. We can see the moon. Look, I understand for other planets, it's actually very, I think it's actually quite humble and, you know, intelligent thing to assume that there would be life or plants on other planets. I think that makes sense. It may not be true in our solar system or who knows, maybe we'll find something somewhere. But we can see the freaking moon with our bare eyes yeah like especially there's

a long ago episode about venus where we talked about how it's not earth-like clouds but there is huge cloud cover on venus and it's reasonable people thought there was like rainforest or something you know sure yeah the moon you're right we can definitely just look at it and see it's pretty bare we can just see it we can just look at it and see it's pretty bare. We can just see it. We can just look at it. And like, yeah, of course you can't, like, if there's one beaver on the moon, you're not going to be able to see it from the earth. But if there's like a forest or continents or water, yeah, you can see it if it was there,

but it's not. And here is what they did. This hoax was mainly designed to sell a new newspaper in New York City. And the main source here is an amazing piece for The New Yorker by Kevin Young, also resources from the Museum of Hoaxes by writer-curator Alex Bosey. In 1835, 1835, there was an event called the Great Moon Hoax, which is that a new paper called the new york sun was looking for a first big story and their other hook was that they only cost one cent per issue most of the other city papers cost six cents so it was a huge discount newspaper that

also wanted to get itself selling with something besides the low price. So I guess they hadn't thought of Bat Boy yet. This is so almost Bat Boy. It's so close. Yeah. I don't know. For the younger listeners out there, Bat Boy was what? Do you know which paper was it? It was some tabloid.

It's either Weekly World News or the National Inquirer. I'll look it up for sure. Yeah. World News, Weekly World News. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, you know, some kind of like art photo manipulation of like a bat boy, a boy mixed with a bat. Yeah. Doing a screaming face. Yeah. Doing a screaming face. It's a funny photo. And, you know, as like a little kid, when I saw that, I was like, really? I wanted to believe.

Right. I wanted to believe in Bat Boy. But of course, there is no such thing as a Bat Boy. Only only bats and a boy. You can have bats and a boy, but not a bat boy. There were so many years of going to the grocery store, acquiring food to live, and seeing the bat boy at the checkout stand. That was life in the United States. There was always the bat boy.

Yeah. That was how we all lived. It was wild. all lived. It was wild. And this, the main part of this moon hoax is a claim that there were four foot tall winged humanoids on the moon, which is essentially a bad boy, like a civilization of bad boys. Because this, this story, in 1835, the New York Sun starts printing a series of fake reports about a real astronomer publishing Scottish journal articles about seeing life on the moon. He did not see that. They just claimed that about him. But this massively raised the circulation of the New York Sun. At one point, it became the highest circulation newspaper in the world because they had the exclusive story of water

and landscapes on the moon, four foot tall winged humanoids, a form of moon bison. Very interesting to me. And then a monstrous form of unicorns and then a species of tailless bipedal beavers. Quote, these extraordinary beavers walked on two feet and bore their young in their arms. They lived in huts constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages. Okay. And they also said there were signs of smoke above the huts of the beavers, indicating that they had mastered the use of fire. Yeah.

A few things. I mean, beavers can already be somewhat bipedal because they can carry stuff in their little arms. Have you ever seen the video of the beaver carrying a bunch of vegetables? Yeah. If anyone has not heard our beavers episode, we had wonderful guest John Hodgman on. And both during and then for a long time after the taping, we just looked at some vids of beavers carrying stuff and it was great. It is fantastic watching beavers carry anything. Really good. I like to imagine the beaver's going to go home and make soup.

Oh yeah. Such a yummy vegetable soup. Wear a little plaid shawl around it, like a tartan shawl while you're eating it. Oh man, so cozy. Right. So it's a bipedal tailless beaver? Yes. Then what makesilless beaver? Yes. Then what makes it a beaver? Yeah, it's the damming action and living near rivers is basically... We build dams and we live... But we live near rivers and we're not beavers.

This logic is very, I don't know, one might say unscientific. So that's a very good insight about this. The other other thing about this moon hoax is that it might have been satirical in a way that is very hard to understand today and was also probably not understood by most readers. It might have been a like vaguely anti-racist satire of 1800s white scientists who claimed to use science to back up like white superiority. So this was vaguely possibly written in the voice of those scientists, but in a way that like doesn't work satirically, really. It's hard to follow and hard to understand. So this could just be fake news to sell a newspaper. This could also be

work by, in particular, New York Sun editor Richard Adams Locke to parody very confident scientists who said, I have observed some non-white people and here's why they are inferior. I'm right. And he did it through fake moon reports is the possible claim that my main source says, and we don't know. So, I mean, what is the evidence that this is sort of a satire of sort of the pompous anthropologist kind of thing? Apparently the main evidence is, and it's in like 1800s tropes, but it's that the four foot tall winged humanoids were vaguely like opinions of black people at the time. They thought that minorities had wings?

That's sort of a fantastical element. Apparently there was a bunch of intricate description of facial features and phrenology and stuff that also oh gross yeah oh this took a turn and i'm just speeding past it yeah and then also the bipedal beavers were vaguely similar to how native people were described by white people oh god and so this this all gets into like weird race science stuff too and it seems like the paper was trying to do a good thing, but it's so hard to follow that they probably just fooled a lot of ordinary readers about the moon. Yeah, I mean, fair enough.

Yeah, it's so hard to find any like quirky thing about the past without finding some connection to white supremacy. It's just, you literally can't avoid it. It's like, hey, I'm looking at facts about vevers. Oops. Oops. Race science.

Whoopsies. Yeah, and it's so amazing, and I felt like it would take us maybe a little away from the animals, so I saved it for now. Because what a story that, again, like what became the main newspaper in all of New York City was based on moon beavers, a weird, messy attempt at satire involving pretending there are beavers on the

moon. It's so weird. I'm gonna say it's good to trick people into thinking there are beavers on the moon because then maybe, I don't know, people want to go to the moon. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Yeah. What if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were like landing with gifts for the beavers? Like, I can't wait to make friends.

Where are the beavers? They're so excited. So disappointed. I brought some vegetables for them to carry. But it's really cute on the moon because like a beaver takes one little waddle step and he kind of bounces up. And then he slowly falls back down. I just imagine it dropping its carrot and it starts bouncing away. And it's just cutely like, oh, no, no, no, no.

Oh, man. There's just a turnip slowly spinning downwards. Yeah. When there's one other takeaway I've saved up here, and there's more in the bonus, but this other takeaway is takeaway number pickles. Takeaway number pickles. One key early legend about St. Nicholas describes him resurrecting pickled murdered children. Saint Piccolos. Oh, wow. Of course. Yeah, this is a it helps explain the entire origin of Santa Claus. And

it's pretty much a mythological true crime story about this guy. Hang on. He's resurrecting dead pickled children? Wait. Yeah. A murderer killed some young boys, put them in pickle vats in their basement, and then St. Nicholas detected them, put them back together, and brought them back to life. What? Yes.

That was an early story about the guy we know as santa claus now yep but so put them back together again meaning like they were dismembered yes yeah that was what the murderer no yeah so like santa's toy shop where he's like assembling toys it used to be like a pickled child shop where he reassembles murdered pickled children. I think I think the lore is he only needed to do this one time ever. It didn't keep happening. But he in general was going around rescuing and saving children from all sorts of stuff. Yeah.

Right. Because how many how many times does someone like pickle a child like that doesn't seem that seems like a very niche serial killer to like be chopping up kids and pickling them. Exactly. That's not a super common MO for murderers. Yeah. So in the lore, in the lore, was this just some guy doing this where it was like some serial killer psycho murdering and pickling kids? Or was it like a demon? You know, it's unclear. It seems to be an innkeeper who murdered three boys and then

was in a hurry and pickling barrels were what was available in his basement for temporary storage of the bodies. Okay. And again, folks, none of this ever happened. It's a made up story. It's okay. Okay, that's good. I'm really glad you said that. I mean, also, so, I mean, I figured it was made up when we got to Santa Claus stitching together pickled children. Santa Claus is based on Saint Nicholas, and most of his lore comes from a Greek bishop in the early Christian church canonized as Saint Nicholas. And National Geographic talked to a bunch of experts about the origins of Santa Claus, in particular, University of Manitoba historian Jerry Bowler. Apparently, there was a huge range of heroic stories of Saint Nicholas saving and protecting children. He was a patron saint of children.

Saint Nicholas saving and protecting children. He was a patron saint of children. And yeah, in this story, the story is that Nicholas entered an inn, possibly just to visit an inn, like get a drink of water or something. But the innkeeper had very recently murdered three boys and then dismembered and pickled their bodies in basement barrels to dispose of more fully later on. Like this was a hasty... Okay, so he wasn't going to like make a sandwich. Yeah, it doesn't seem like Hannibal Lecter stuff. This was a hasty, where can I stick a body in a time before refrigeration

and other technology and then cover of darkness or something. I'll get rid of it. But oh no, a Greek bishop walked in. I need to play it cool and just hide them in these barrels for a while. Yeah. And he's like like would you like a sandwich but no pickles sorry fresh out of pickles please don't ask any any condiment other than pickles like mayo chopped up little boys. I mean, relish. So, yeah, so then the rest of the story is that Nicholas has walked into an inn where boys have been murdered and are in the basement. And then just through miraculous powers, Nicholas senses everything that happened. He's like, hang on.

I think there was a murder here and the boys are pickled in the basement and then from there he goes downstairs finds the barrels and through more miracle powers like reassembles the boys good as new resurrected everything's fine right just kind of like always smells like pickle juice now um right like like any serious version of the canon the boys would have memories of being greener than they used to be or so but you know there would be a bunch of like interesting lore but yeah alex i don't think the pickling process turns things green i think that's true just because if you pickle a cucumber it's green but if you pickle like a carrot it stays orange Or you pickle an egg, it sort of stays egg colored. I don't think it generally turns green unless you put like a lot of green sort of dying stuff in there. Anyways.

Let me try again. The boys remember being in a Vlasic jar? No, that's not it. Okay, hang on. What's pickles? Yeah, but this is a wild miracle about a guy we now think of as Santa Claus. Apparently there was also one other famous Santa story, which is that there was a father with three daughters. Did he pickle them? Please tell me he didn't pickle them. There's no pickling, but it's just a different legend. The legend is that this father is so heavily in debt that he's planning to sell his daughters into prostitution. And then Nicholas intervenes, he secretly delivers enough gold to the father to pay off all those debts and to fund dowries to get the three daughters married instead. instead. And this is a less miraculous, more regular St. Nicholas miracle. But those were kind of all the St. Nicholas stories before we progressed to a Christmas and Santa Claus situation. This is dark. Santa Claus is more like Liam Neeson in Taken than he was sort of, you know, I don't know, Tim Allen. Wow. It's almost, I'm thinking of that sketch from the show.

I think you should leave where Sansa acts in bloody detective movies and shoots people. Yeah. No, that's like accurate. It's kind of this stuff like like hardcore gritty saving kids on the street stories as a detective. Yeah. He's like he's a detective with superpowers where he can reassemble murdered children. It's really dark. Yeah.

And that was his whole deal. Wow. That was Santa for you. I'm glad he didn't get his dark detective work confused with his toy shop work and accidentally send a child a present. That was just like a pickled arm. Oh. Or like weapons. Like, this will keep the heat off you love santa and the kids like i didn't i didn't ask for this at all i i wanted an xbox for your christmas present

little timmy i have gotten you witness protection order it's a new identity timmy's not your name anymore love santa It's a new identity. Timmy's not your name anymore. Love, Santa. Hey, folks. That is the main episode for this week. It was a sort of special funky one and, of course, all new stuff for you. I'm making this outro super brief because if you're hearing this episode, you've probably heard at least one other episode of SIF before and heard the outro there. I just want to say it's a tremendous joy and a real privilege to get to make you this podcast and spend time with my wonderful buddy, Katie. And the whole reason any of that happens is members of Maximum Fun. So especially thank you to those folks because they are the

reason this show exists. They're the reason we've made 150 episodes, and I'm hoping they're the reason we can make 150 more and 150 more and on and on. Members can check out this week's bonus show with more very fun stories about taxidermy and ducks and so on. Also, there's a message in there about a special gift that is just for members that's coming in the next few weeks to celebrate this milestone. As with all CIFF episodes, our links page features resources such as native-land.ca. And I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still

here. That feels worth doing on each episode. That's why we've done that for 150 episodes now. And like I said on the 100th episode, on the 50th episode, on end of year things, on any milestone that this podcast has, I feel like the way to honor that milestone is to keep on nailing it every week. And that's what we go for. We do a regular episode for each milestone like we do every week, because every week is a milestone. So I'm thrilled to say we'll be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you on episode 151. MaximumFun.org

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