Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Valentine’s Day

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why Valentine's Day is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is Alex, and I am excited to announce the next live episode of this podcast. Secretly incredibly fascinating, it's going to be the second live episode ever. That live show is exclusively available to patrons of this podcast. So if you back this podcast, you get access to it. You also don't need a separate ticket or anything, there's no extra charge. Just back the podcast in general, and you're in. You get this bonus. Also, the live show has an incredible guest lineup. I'm very happy to be joined by David Christopher Bell and John Cullen and Caitlin Gill. David Christopher Bell, John Cullen,

Caitlin Gill, three amazing guests all at once. And that live show is going to be Saturday, February 26th at 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. Patrons get in free. Patrons also get a recorded version afterward. So if that time and date I said doesn't work for you, you still get to enjoy the show by being a patron. Patrons also get immediate access to a recording of the first live episode of this podcast that was with guests Katie Golden, Adam Todd Brown, and Andrew T.

So please join up at sifpod.fun. That way you can join us February 26th for the second ever live episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. And thanks. Known for being lovey. Famous for being dovey. Nobody thinks deeply about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Valentine's Day is 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. think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Jason Pargin is my guest today, my former colleague, my old pal, one of my favorite authors, and breaking news, Jason has a new novel on the way. You can pre-order it and everything. I really, really, really hope you do. Here's the title of Jason's new novel. It's a statement. Here's the title.

Here's the title of Jason's new novel. It's a statement. Here's the title. If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It's available for pre-order. It's the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. It enriches that series. You can also just dive straight into it. You don't have to read the previous three. Also, Jason is a full-time novelist, and he does podcasts like this to let people know about that. Right. So like if you if you enjoy hearing him on this podcast, I hope you will thank him by getting one of his books and checking it out. And if you preorder this one, that is the absolute best way you can do that. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and use Internet resources like native dash land dot C.A. to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee,

and Sa'atza Yaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about Valentine's Day, a holiday that is the day this episode releases in 2022. It's also a holiday you don't know the depths of and roots of and international significance of yet. Please sit back or happily accept your execution from a Roman emperor, because someday your name will be on candy in drugstores. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up.

Talk to you then. Jason, so excited to talk to you and about this topic. Why don't you let folks know your relationship or opinion of Valentine's Day? So I was on the Halloween episode last year that I think it came out sometime in early, maybe early October, late September. I don't know, you can link to it. And I said there that that was my favorite holiday for maybe obvious reasons. Valentine's Day is my least favorite holiday by far. And I don't want to be, I feel like anytime you say you don't like a holiday, you're automatically a bad guy. Because like in pop culture, if there's ever a holiday movie and there's the character that doesn't like the holiday, they're never given the opportunity to explain why they always, by the end of the movie,

they learn that they were wrong to not like the holiday. But it's not because I don't believe in romance. It's just, it's of all the holidays. It's the one that feels to me like it puts the most pressure on certain people to perform a relationship or a ritual that they otherwise wouldn't. And I don't know. I don't like it. I have no great memories of it. I just feel like I remember a lot of times in my life when we've been under like economic stress or financial pressure and then feeling like we still had to do something for Valentine's Day. We had to go out to eat. We had to get flowers, things that are not lasting, you know, of any lasting economic benefit. You know, flowers die two days later, you know, a meal you eat it and it's gone. But it's like, no, we have to do this or else

there's something wrong with our relationship because that's what the holiday says. I've had that similar experience you've had where it is one that people mark, like, especially if you're in a relationship, it would be weird to just blow it off totally. You do need to at least talk about it. It'd be strange not to. Yeah. And I feel like it's not even something you're doing for your partner. It's something you're doing to demonstrate to the outside world that we have a romantic,

like the fire has not gone out of our relationship. So there's a performative element to it where if you don't participate in Halloween, like I don't feel pressured to participate in Halloween. You know, I don't. And I know that we're out something, things like Thanksgiving. A lot of people don't have great relationships with their families. They feel like they're pressured to go spend time with people they don't get along with or whatever. I get it.

But like one of my most vivid memories of Valentine's Day, the last like real job I had before I went to Cracked, I was working at an insurance company and their data entry center. One of, I think there was 150 cubicles in this giant building. And one of the, it was mostly women working there, you know, like middle-aged women in that age range. And one of the women got, it was on Valentine's day. And like a lot of women, she was delivered flowers at work to the office because that's the, you know, a big thing. And she was outraged. She was extremely upset because she did their bills and their finances. She did their books and she knew that they couldn't afford that. And she's like, I told him not to do this because people out there who have not bought flowers, trust me, they're not

cheap, especially on Valentine's day. If you're, if you are paying for a dozen roses on Valentine's Day with the delivery fee, you're paying a hundred bucks. So she was extremely mad at it because it's like, this is our collective money and these flowers are going to be dead by Thursday. I told him specifically not to do this, but I get both sides of that, of that dispute, because from his point of view, it's probably like, well, she's saying that, but it's Valentine's Day. And the idea of all of her coworkers sitting around with flowers on their desk, that their husbands and boyfriends got them, and that she doesn't have them. And then people are like, well, what's wrong with their relationship? Like, he probably did it. He probably doesn't like flowers either. He probably did it because it's

like, no, this is the holiday. This is how you signal to the world that your relationship is healthy. And I will never forget that because like, man, that is repeated all over the country and now in some parts of all over the world where people did this, even though they can't really afford it, or neither one of them kind of really wanted it. But it's like, no, it's Valentine's Day. This is what you do. And everybody does it. I grew up mostly Catholic and somehow a saint's day for St. Valentine is everybody's holiday. And also in the church there, we never even a little bit examined who this was, even though we did a little bit

examine St. Patrick, whether or not people were Irish. That's the other Saints Day I can think of we all do. I guess it's the force of everybody seeing each other's flowers and each other's red stuff and each other's chocolate kind of collectively makes it a thing, because there's no historical reason that we're all doing it. And man, sitting here now, you bring up St. Patrick's Day. If you put me on the spot and made me try to explain who St. Patrick was, I would embarrass myself very quickly because it'd be like, wasn't it something about snakes? Like he got rid of the snakes from Ireland? And I feel like either that's true or else the listenership would be like, are you having a stroke?

What are you talking about? I don't know. Something about snakes? You know, that famous ecosystem of snakes, Ireland. You know, that one. Yeah. That's all I know. know that one yeah and why like we now we celebrate it and everybody it's it's like everybody gets uh everybody gets drunk is there a saint patrick's day episode of your show yet or in the works

i i would do it especially if people want yeah yeah you have someone else on because i i want to just listen to it and learn that way but anyway yeah that yeah, that is fascinating that I, even then I have more of a footing on what that saint is than St. Valentine. Valentine, I could not, like prior to the research for this episode, could not have told you one thing. I would have said, was he like just the saint of horniness? I don't. It's like that HBO show, The Young Pope. It's basically that vibe, but around the saints. He was the hot saint. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just so weird that that broke through to the whole culture, especially in the U.S. where like it's been more than 100 years probably.

But there used to be kind of an anti-Catholic thing in the U.S. It used to be much bigger. And now we just all do a couple of saints days every year just to do it. It's the weirdest. Yeah. And someone, again, out there will point out, you don't have to go back 100 years that when John F. Kennedy was running for office, he was going to be the first Catholic president. And it was the equivalent today of having the first Muslim president.

Because back then there was a whole lot of, well, is he going to be loyal to the United States or is he going to be loyal to the pope? Like, who is he really serving? And there were all of the conspiracy theories and everything else you would get today if you had, for example, somehow, I don't know, I can't imagine, but if you ever had a candidate who was accused of being a secret Muslim or something, it's the exact same thing. So you don't, you actually don't have to go back that far. And it's fun. It's great that now that to a lot of our listeners, they think I'm joking, like Catholics, who's mad at Catholics? I assure you there's, there are prejudices that persist. There are others that we've kind of forgotten that once upon a time were everything, just as today it's ridiculous, the prejudice against the left-handed people. But that was one of the most persistent prejudices down through history. Yeah, wow.

Yeah, I think I also I just saw a tweet about Valentine's Day. It was on February 1st at dumb guyguypod tweeted, at the CVS and LOL, and it's a picture of a CVS shelf where the banner is, surprise, you're Valentine, and it's all pink and full of hearts. But that's over a rack of hammers, like hardware store hammers. It's silly and also, as we'll talk about, kind of equally as random as all the rest of the Valentine's Day stuff. Like, sure, OK, that's vaguely threatening and weird. But, you know, if your beloved loves hammers, equally good Valentine's Day gift. Great.

Yeah, because this is part of the ago, today in the West, they are primarily about how you can repackage things to sell them. And I've always joked probably in recent years, somewhere there's a guy at the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup factory trying to figure out if there are one shape we can make the holiday Reese's that we can, the shape is vague enough that we can claim it's a Valentine heart and a Jekyll lantern and a Christmas tree. Like, could you have a shape so that it's general? It's like, if you squint, it could be any of them. So they don't have to switch out the parts on the factory every year or every few months. But I will be the first one there to grab one. Like, ooh, it's the heart-shaped Reese's.

Exact same ingredients. Exact same candy. Doesn't matter. It's like this one's in the shape of a heart. I've got to get one because it's special. I get so excited every Halloween when the little pumpkin-shaped ones come out. It's so dumb. But it's like, no, I don't get these

the other nine months out of the year. It's only this Halloween period. I'm going to start giving myself the gift of telling myself that the standard Reese's shape that's a slight, slight, slight sunburst is a 4th of July firework. I'm just going to give myself that trait, that it's seasonal in my head now. I'll be like like they're back and just point to the regular ones on the shelf people won't get it well uh and yeah and

selling stuff i think brings us into numbers because we got numbers and statistics as always on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of them this week that's in a segment called Stats. And that name was submitted by Katie Copenhaver. There's a new name for it every week. Please make a massillion making bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. I don't know if it's clear that I was saying the word stats in a Tarzan fashion, but that was the suggestion. There we go. And I know I say this all the time,

but I don't know if you've got listeners too young to know who Tarzan was because the last Tarzan movie would have been like the Brendan Fraser one back in, gosh, the 90s, 95, something like that. Yeah. Like that's one of these staple characters from my youth that now I think if I asked like a 16-year-old, if I said, man, that guy's as strong as Tarzan, they'd be like, who? Or maybe not. I don't know. And that movie's George of the Jungle, right?

Like it's a joke about Tarzan too. It's not even the original. Yeah. Oh, wow. So what's the last Tarzan thing? I think Disney animated one, but otherwise it's been forever. Yeah. I don't want to stop the podcast. I had what I used to do, zoo tours.

Some of the crew was like retired folks, like much older than me. And one of them, we went past the polar bears and the polar bear was swimming and he said he described the polar bear as a regular johnny weissmuller and later i learned that's a guy who played tarzan like i think i think 80 or 90 years ago at this point but the entire tram of kids was just just lost they didn't know what he was talking about at all yeah and it was last week i had said in the presence of some people, like, Bumble and I run like the Three Stooges out here. And then I just stopped and thought, hold on.

Even somebody in college, do they know who the Three Stooges are? This like Depression-era comedy troupe. Like it was a staple. They were still showing those when I was a kid, but it's like, well, damn, that was 40 years ago. Are the Three Stooges still a thing? I literally have no idea. Anyway, I slammed the brakes on this podcast to say that, but this is all actually relevant to what we're going to talk about because we're going to get into why some things persist in culture and others get forgotten. Exactly.

Yeah. And that leads perfectly into this first number here. Unsurprisingly, it's February 14th. It's a number on the calendar. It is the Roman Catholic feast day dedicated to St. Valentine. That's February 14th in Roman Catholicism. There's also some Anglican and Lutheran churches that celebrate saints from before the Reformation. Other Protestant churches don't really do saints days. And then if you're in the Eastern Orthodox Church, there's a feast day for St. Valentine, but it's one on July 6th and another St. Valentine on July 30th.

So this this romantic holiday is springing pretty specifically from a Catholic feast day. from a Catholic feast day. Yeah. And I, again, I realized that there's a lot of listeners out there like patiently waiting to find out how we got from St. Catholic feast day to novelty panties being sold in gas stations in February for, for, for people to buy on their way home. I assure you, it's not going to make sense how that's not how culture works. Like why, how we got from there to here, we're going to describe it as best we can. Yeah. But you're still going to be a little bit confused because

no one plans culture. It just happens. And lots of things just don't make sense. Now I, now I wish those sales of novelty panties were why the reformation happened. Like Martin Luther was writing about that. That's what he's mad about. Cause sure. Makes sense. When the next number is two, cause we have this one saints day, but two is the number of pro is the approximate number of Saints Valentine celebrated on February 14th. And the source, we'll mostly just touch on this because it's a lot of like Catholic theology and history and stuff. But if you want to go deep, there's a piece on theconversation.com by Dr. Lisa Battelle, professor of history and religion at USC. There were, especially in the Roman Empire, a lot of saints named Valentine

or else named Valentinus. And just within the 200s AD, there were three of them. One of them died in Roman North Africa, and we don't know much more. There was also a priest in the city of Rome who cured a girl's blindness through Christ and then was executed for that by a pagan Roman emperor named Claudius Gothicus. Then there was another Valentine who was the Bishop of Turnai in Italy, who also healed the child through Christ, also got executed by Claudius Gothicus. Some Jesuit scholars believe the second and third story there are one guy, so that would still leave us with at least two celebratable St. Valentines. And also back when holy relics were a thing in the Catholic Church, one of the most popular relics was having one of Valentine's body parts, in particular his skull.

There was a bishop in 11th century Brittany in northern France today, who used a St. Valentine's skull to halt fires, prevent epidemics, cure illnesses, and end demonic possessions, according to legend. This is a piece of history that I love, and it's something that I don't, I still think there's a lot of people that aren't aware of this, this entire stretch of history when the body parts of saints were considered to be magic and where there was this whole market of counterfeit body parts where they would claim, I've got the left hand of saint whatever. And you would have dozens of hands of the same saint people claiming in these different

churches claiming to have. And if you go and Google these relics and look them up, they've got them encased in like these beautiful golden and glass display things that they've made. And then there's in the middle of it, there's like a rotting hand in there because once upon a time, this was considered a holy thing, which I this is a question I wanted to ask Alex. If you think either of those two saints, Valentines, we're aware of, if we could go back and like in a time machine, would they be more surprised by how we celebrate Valentine's Day and their name? Or would they be more surprised by the fact that people thought their skull could do magic and used it for centuries after to try to put out fires and whatever else could cure illnesses. Yeah, I think because these guys are all from like the 200s AD. It's when the Roman Empire is like switching to Christianity, but still killing a bunch of Christians. And I think they were all just like sad, hardcore freedom fighter guys. Like they like it's I think a John le Carre novels where

it's where spies are just really sad. They're not James Bond. I think all those guys were just like very, very hard bitten guys sleeping on a mat, trying to like fight the system. We try to tell them fun stories and they just frown at us. It'd be very different. frown at us. It'd be very different. I always, I have this fantasy of imagining that somehow I went down in history through this somewhat random process that we often talk about on this show, where I find out that a thousand years from now, there's like a holiday named after me, but it's like a holiday where everyone waxes their car that day or something. Because it's so many steps removed from you and what you did, too, and how they've chosen to celebrate it. That if it's something that even if they tried to explain it to me, it just wouldn't make any sense.

Yeah. Or even just being memorial make any sense. Yeah. Or even just being memorialized very randomly. Like there are so many brand names where they just pull somebody famous's name or like, oh, you were a Pennsylvania Quaker? Great news. You're known for oats now. That's what you guys did. One guy's face is symbolizing all of you. Okay.

you guys did yeah and one guy's face is symbolizing all of you okay or trying to go back to like the puritan pilgrims you know and knowing their like their beliefs and their the type of religion they were and all that and then fast forwarding them and showing them like the thanksgiving day football games it's like yeah because you did this with the natives who live there, we now, like, this is called the Dallas Cowboy Stadium in Texas. It costs like $10 billion to build, and we play this sport on this day, and we watch it after eating turkey. That's how we celebrate. And they'd be like, yeah, but what does that have to do with, who are these people? It's like, well, that's going to take some explaining. What's a cowboy? Well, that's a good question. Let's get into that.

They're like, I'm mad about this. I'm getting back on the Mayflower. And we're like, yeah, yeah, the Mayflower, that's a moving company. We print it on trucks and then they haul stuff. It's great. The team, the team, the Cowboys are playing is just called the Washingtonhington football team what were they called before we're not going to talk about that we're not going to get into that at all we'll be here all day if i have to explain yeah and it's your guy's fault but you're anyway you're dead so yeah you're not you're not blameless in this but let's just i think I do think, to be dead serious, I think they would just be happy that we're all alive and have plenty to eat. I think that would be the thing they notice above all.

It's like, well, all the people in that stadium, they don't seem to be starving. So, fine. Otherwise, I don't really care. Yeah, we made it through. We apparently made it through the winters because you guys are still here. So, fine. But, and speaking of modern things to astound people, the next number here is modern. It is 52%.

52%. That's a trade group estimate of how much U.S. Valentine's Day spending goes towards spouses and significant others. And that number, it's coming from the Atlantic and also from Valentine's Day 2020, which, and so in the U.S., that's considered pre-pandemic. We were mostly still acting the same. And the National Retail Federation projected that in 2020, only 52% of Valentine's spending would go toward spouses, significant others, romantic interests. The 10 years earlier number was 61%. So it's been trending down. And the other almost half of that Valentine's spending in 2020 was projected to go toward

non-romantic, non-spouse people like our friends, co-workers, grade school classmates is always huge. And they also estimated about a quarter of spenders would buy something for their pet, which I did not do and have never done, even though I have cats and think about them all the time. But also, you know, about a quarter of people are apparently celebrating with a pet. Yeah. And see, I'm as ridiculous a pet owner as exists in terms of what we will spend on our dog. And yes, we, of course, get our dog Christmas gifts, even though the dog doesn't know what Christmas is or whatever. Valentine's Day for pets, I didn't know that was a thing.

And I guess even being ever present on social media like I am, I'm not aware of. Because, again, I know the stats when you're hearing them audibly in your car, it's hard to sometimes keep numbers in your head. What he just said is a quarter, a quarter of Valentine's Day spending is going to pets. Well, and technically it's like a quarter of people are spending, not that a quarter of all the spending is going toward it. Oh, okay. Well, that makes, that makes a little bit more sense. So you're still huge. So it's, it's still, it's one out of four people who bought, that's actually just as astounding because it's one out of four people who bought something for Valentine's Day, bought something for an animal. See, I would have thought again, even among pet owners, I would have thought that was kind of a fringe thing to do. I've never even considered getting a pet something for Valentine's Day and wouldn't know what to get

them. But I'm sure if I went to PetSmart, they've probably got little heart-shaped dog cookies or whatever. But that would be purely for my benefit. The dog doesn't know what that shape is. But I do find that all those numbers I do find interesting, that only half of the spending is going to spouses and romantic partners, significant others, that so much of it is going to friends, coworkers, that kind of thing. it as going to friends, coworkers, that kind of thing. That's not the way I understood the holiday to work back in my youth when I still believed in Valentine's Day. But that's an interesting shift that I'm sure is its own subject. And last number here before we get into the

takeaways. Last number is 1902. 1902 is the year when the New England confectionery company began making sweethearts. So I'm just realizing 120th anniversary. That's fun. But sweethearts are better known as conversation heart candies. And the Reader's Digest says they first appeared in a mixed bag of lots of shapes, including horseshoes, baseballs, watches, and postcards. And the company proceeded to drop the other shapes because the hearts were the huge hit and the one that people focused on.

Yeah. And everybody, these are those little chalk heart things where they've got room for like a few characters of text on them. That is 120 years of a, just an objectively terrible product. Awful, yeah. They've sold billions of these. And again, this is such a perfect example of things that persist in the culture versus things that died out, where you're like, why? Why?

Why didn't that other thing? And it's like somehow these little chalk candies are still there. Yeah. Like I'd always see them and think, I don't want to eat these and I can just talk. I don't. Is this am I supposed to be communicating like some kind of Morse code weirdo with these things? I don't get it at all. And and also they they're successful enough that new england confectionery company which shortened their name to necco if you know necco wafers it's those same people but they made them also sweet tarts made a version brax candy made a version in 2018 necco went out of business and then sweethearts got restarted by another company in 2020. But either way,

these have gone on for so long. There are a lot of like cycling of messages, like they go in and out of fashion and technology and everything else. Reader's Digest article has a fun list of old ones. And my favorites are Fax Me. There's also On Fleekek if people remember that and then 2 000 hugs and 2 000 kisses when the millennium was coming and then my absolute favorite is just website two words website is a conversational heart you're supposed to get people one thing that's always frustrating about this stat section of the show is that there's always numbers that i wish i knew but that they're just unknowable because it's how would you and the one stat for example here like you have all these these stats about this this candy i would love to know what

percentage of these that have been manufactured have actually been eaten versus i guess thrown away because one are they edible like it but if you saw if you were sitting there talking to somebody in like i don't know august and they just pulled out a bag of these chalk hearts and started eating them as a snack you would think they've gone mad. Like that they would treat these as a food. You'd be like, what are you doing? But even because even with something like candy corn, you know, is that I know you talked about a previous episode. I know lots of people that like candy corn. It's fine. It's just it's like not super sweet.

Like it's fine. But the chalk heart things, I don't think they're meant to be eaten, are they? It's fine. It's just, it's like not super sweet. Like it's fine. But the chalk heart things, like, I don't think they're meant to be eaten. Are they? It's more just like a joke. Like I give you one that's got a funny little corny little message on it. And then it's like, now you have to throw this away. It's like eating a stack of postcards or something. Like it's, it's an outdated communication system that I don't think we should be eating. But yeah, there's just like an expert. I think everybody dumps them in a bowl, lets them get stale, which is also not a difference,

and then throws them out. I really can't imagine eating them on purpose. I love the idea of chewing into chowing into a sack of them on purpose and letting people freak out. That sounds great. of chewing into chowing into a sack of them on purpose and letting people freak out that sounds great the candy corn the candy corn outrage is a little bit manufactured there's lots of people that like like i know it's like an internet meme or whatever but that that's always felt to me the way people used to talk up bacon as a joke a few years ago exactly like i okay there's some people

don't like candy corn but if there's nothing weird about it it's just a very mild flavored candy it's fine it's not my favorite but now circus peanuts i i don't know what the deal is with those that though that feels like some candy left over from another era but again i don't i don't want to sidetrack the episode we can do a separate episode about circus peanuts i'm sure there's some story behind it some very grim story i would predict yeah those are terrible but uh well yeah and we have a couple takeaways for the main show about valentine's day let's get into takeaway number one in some countries the valentine's Day holiday is secret or illegal. And yeah, there are some countries where if you just think beyond, especially the U.S. where many listeners are or Canada where many listeners are, there's some countries where the combination of things about the modern holiday, where it is ostensibly Christian, especially if you don't know how we actually do it. And it's also definitely Anglo-American. It's definitely sexual.

That whole combination is not popular in many places in the world, at least with the government. You know, a lot of times the people like it. But there are many places where that's not a given. I feel like in the really good episodes of the show, there's a moment where the listener realizes, oh, this subject actually goes to some deep, dark places, doesn't it? Yeah. And the episodes where that I agree to be on, there's usually something else there. Like in the Halloween episode that you talk about the LGBT origins of that holiday and the way it's practiced and what it means to to those groups most people are unaware of. Well, here, he's going to get into some stuff, but you think of, probably think of Valentine's Day as this very, almost maybe the most vapid of holidays, where it's kind of like,

it's greeting cards, candy, whatever. Here's how the rest of the world or many parts of the world see it. Yeah, because we're about to talk about countries where a total of, I don't know, over a billion people live. The four examples here are Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. And the first one is Pakistan, because in the year 2017, the government of that country banned Valentine's Day. The Islamabad High Court ruled that the holiday was un-Islamic, and they're roughly analogous to a U.S. appellate court. Nobody brought it to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Nobody legislated against it. Valentine's Day is illegal. As far as I could tell from Reuters and NPR and a couple other sources, Valentine's Day is illegal to this

day in the country of Pakistan. And it's also become sort of a wedge issue both ways, because NPR says there are conservative groups there that turned Valentine's Day into, you know, something they kind of pick on, like they spend the day affirming that they're into Islamic law, vote for them if they're a conservative candidate, because among many ways, they're great. They hate Valentine's Day. And then Reuters also points out that, you know, among people in everyday life, the holiday is also thriving, because you have US pop culture and media still promoting it worldwide. You also have shopkeepers who can legally just have more flowers, and just have

more stuff that could be a gift for it without saying it's for Valentine's Day. And then maybe most interesting, Pakistan is also a very young country demographically. Apparently more than 60% of Pakistanis are under age 30, which is much younger than other countries. I looked up US census data, got a rough estimate about 40% of the population is under 30. Pakistan, over 60% under age 30. So it's such a young country. That's a fun holiday if you're young, if you have someone you're sweet on in school or building a new adult life with.

A lot of people seem to just celebrate it under the table, but not even that far under the table because, you know, it's legal to go on a walk with a date. You don't have to run it by the police as official Valentine's Day business. And now you're getting into why this subject, it's like that famous picture of the iceberg when you got the little bit poking above the water and underneath it is this vast hunk of ice. Above it, you have controversy over Valentine's Day in Pakistan. Underneath it, you have the whole clash of cultures thing and the very subtle but overwhelming and relentless way that Western culture is spread around the world just via media, movies and TV and the internet

and our social media and TikTok and everything in the way making American culture the way we live our lives just seem fun. It's a form of, I guess, colonization, you could call it that, but we never talk about it that way. And we don't think about it that way because in many ways, you're just showing people what life is like when you're a little bit more free talk about it that way. And we don't think about it that way because in many ways it's, you know, you're just showing people what life is like when you're a little bit more free and able to do, you know, to live a certain way or to live the way you want. But they do not see it that way. And what they see is a consistent trend of replacing occasions and ceremonies that have deep religious and cultural roots with something that feels more just about shallow consumerism and that there's no like deeper meaning behind it. And from their point of view, it's just like degrading the culture in favor of just

buying stuff or do whatever feels good or whatever. But the point is that here, like from our side of it, it can seem all very low stakes because it's like, ah, it's a bunch of grumpy old clerics who don't like the kids doing what kids do, which is rebelling and dating and doing whatever the grownups tell them not to do, but dead serious from their point of view. And I think this is a tension that most people don't appreciate. It's easy to understand that, like, well, Pakistan hates us because of our military interventions, things like that. And, you know, it's countries like Iran with economic sanctions, that kind of thing. But the just overwhelming and persistent cultural influence

of the West everywhere, and it's not just in Islamic countries, but it is something that we just take for granted because it's like, well, so what? Our movies are fun. It's like, yeah, but from their point of view, we're promoting a very specific set of values that we've decided are right and that anyone who, you know, doesn't like it is prudish or oppressive or whatever. And they take it very seriously. So it sounds almost ridiculous or almost comical. It's like, wow, why, how could they be so mad about like outlawing Valentine's day? Like that's ridiculous. That's like the plot of some silly lifetime movie where a grumpy mayor had his heart broken. So he bans Valentine's Day.

Trust me, it is dead serious. Yeah, it fits so well with that Halloween episode we did, because I think on that one we talked about how, you know, every sitcom will pull a Halloween episode, mainly because that's like a fun trope to do. And then like horror movies and Halloween movies are a fun genre to do. But on the receiving end in a country where that's not a thing yet, it can feel like targeted or it can feel like a destabilizing force or a colonizing incursion into how your country works. And I think on both ends of it, people don't totally know the intention or the results. It's just kind of going on. Yeah. And I assume no one in the listenership thinks we're taking the side of the people outlawing the holiday or punishing people for celebrating it or

whatever. That's not the issue. The issue is I don't think people understand how serious the conflict is. And I don't think people understand how serious the conflict is. And I don't think they understand, because again, here, nothing can be more frivolous than Valentine's Day. Like it's mildly stressful, you know, like what we just discussed. But the idea of this being seen as an incursion into somebody's culture, it's easy to write it off. And we have a habit of saying, well, if I disagree with your concerns, that

means you don't really, they're not valid and therefore you don't really feel it. It's like, well, no, just because you think they're wrong doesn't change how important it is in terms of how they react. And they literally passed a law banning it. And the story actually gets, it gets darker from here. And the next example is in India, because across India, Valentine's Day is legal. However, in the year 2009, it was a few days before Valentine's Day, there were a group of Indian women just kind of pre-celebrating the holiday. I guess it was some hangout that was seen as part of it. And this was in a pub in Mangaluru in southwest India. A group of Hindu nationalist men targeted, attacked, and beat up the women. Two of the women were hospitalized. And then there were further

attacks happening elsewhere in India on the holiday itself, February 14th. The Atlantic did a lot of coverage of this. They said that in response, there were progressive and feminist Indians who did a campaign of mailing pink panties to the offices of the Hindu nationalist group that did these attacks. Because they also, it seems like, took credit for it and were not ashamed of it. And then ever since then, the holiday has been kind of an annual flashpoint in a larger struggle between like a very conservative, very aggressive Hindu nationalist movement in India and a more feminist, multicultural, modern movement in India. It seems like mainly because the holiday is viewed as encouraging sex outside of marriage. And then probably another factor is that it seems like it's being imposed from outside, like from Britain and America and elsewhere.

Yeah. And I bet the average listener prior to now did not know that violent Hindu nationalists were a thing or that this was a flashpoint in India or could even describe exactly what their problem with it was. But it's very similar to the above because it's a whole lot of things bundled into it. It's not just the westernization of their society, but it's also feminism. It's also, you know, what they see as usurping, you know, gender roles, you know, and sexual impropriety and monogamy, things like that. A lot of things they consider to be sacred or the glue that holds their society together. And again, I feel like from my point of view, when people are exposed to this, the holiday, the chance to celebrate it like this, they take to it and that that should tell you something. But from their point of view, it's like, well, no,

it's encouraging promiscuity and teenage pregnancy and STDs or whatever dangers they want to attach to it. But ultimately, it comes down to this always in the background sense that this other culture is dictating to you what your culture is going to look like. And I think someone who was born and raised in the United States, that's a pressure you don't really understand because there is no other culture out there. Like if you went to the theater and 80% of the movies, of the big movies were all from China and you had China dictating, you know, fashion trends, you know, everything, food trends, everything.

I think there would be a resentment there that is almost, it sounds like a science fiction scenario when I say it, because even then I'm making it sound like it would be harmless. But I think there would be an enormous backlash, even if every single one of those trends was on its own, not a big deal that, you know, if they were just, just, you know, Chinese words entering the language or, or slang or anything, any, I think there would be like, well, no, this is another culture that is imposing itself on us. And I think that it is hard to understand why would there be backlash? It's just, you know, it's the way we live is awesome.

And it's about being free. It's like, well, the world will make more sense to you if you understand this tension. And that exists in many, many, many countries and manifests itself in many, many different forms. forms to the point that these days, like the Chinese government strictly, strictly limits what American movies can be shown there and are very strongly trying to encourage like their own domestic film production. Because it's like, no matter what, whether you don't think of some dumb American, you know, blockbuster about superheroes as promoting American values and lifestyle, but they totally are. It's just that it's invisible to us because, you know, why, why wouldn't it be? I'm even thinking of reporting around the, the bigger seasons of Game of Thrones where it gets, it would get reported as the most pirated show in the world. And I like, yeah, these, these

cultural forces and pressures will even slip through what governments try to do. And so people get very wound up about it. They get upset. Or you can, there's an entire rabbit hole you can fall down reading about how North Korea tries to keep South Korean culture out of it. Because it's right across the border. And South Korea, of course, has a thriving film and TV industry, which we now know because you can turn on Netflix and see another South Korean blockbuster drama turning up every week and they're all great. But to try to have a totally isolated culture and to try to keep all of that stuff out is very difficult. Like the black market for trading those DVDs and that stuff crossing the border is thriving.

And there's very weird stories about how they've tried to impose extreme penalties up to and including deaths for people being caught with copies of these South Korean soap operas or whatever. Again, sounds ridiculous from the outside, but this is the kind of thing that's happening everywhere. And for the most part, we're usually just totally ignorant of it. Because all the stories in this takeaway, I had no idea until researching.

And the last two examples are Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. They're both countries where the commerce around Valentine's Day is the way they're specifically trying to target it, manage it, control it. The BBC covered both. They said that, quote, Saudi Arabia's religious police are on alert at this time of year

for love-themed merchandise, including flowers, cards, and suspicious red items. End quote. The BBC also says florists in Saudi Arabia have been known to do covert nighttime flower deliveries, and Saudis have been known to schedule Valentine's vacations to nearby countries like Bahrain and the UAE because those places are more relaxed about the holiday. Like they, Valentine's Day is a thing like just general movies, TV, other pop culture,

or other culture culture that some governments say, this is something we need to keep an eye on because it's something else bleeding in. And it gets into how difficult it is to kill an idea once it takes root, because you look at how once, how easy it is to evade because you're, you're trying to stop people from observing a holiday. So it's like, OK, well, any items that are too red or where there's an implication of romance or whatever, like it gets in these blurry areas where like all government attempts of censorship are ultimately ridiculous because they have to draw arbitrary lines. But here, like wanting them to try to stop the celebration of a holiday, there's almost like a clumsy slapstick nature to it. And it's like you're trying to look for illicit red items. It's like this candy wasn't shaped like a heart before.

And it sounds so dumb, but it's people wanting to do a thing and observe a holiday and trying to stop them against their will. That is very difficult to do in the 21st century. Yeah. And this last example with Indonesia, I think kind of fits that perfectly, because for one thing, Indonesia is sort of like a mix of these examples. There's a patchwork of laws either banning or allowing Valentine's Day in different parts of Indonesia. There were police in the city of Makassar that raided shops displaying condoms for sale, and the police seized the condoms that were on display. But then the city's mayor was asked about it, and he said that condom sales would be allowed to continue, but it had to be discreetly and without special, like, Valentine's-related promotion. So in that case, like, in most cases, I'm assuming these are the exact same condoms they just objected to and raided and seized a specific Valentine related promotion of them, probably for moral, sexual, other religious practice reasons.

Yeah. Because they think that the holiday is trying to do the thing that these holidays are supposed to be doing, which is to give you permission to do a thing you wouldn't normally be doing. So they're like, well people and the, you know, religious authorities or whoever cracking down as being the oppressors. I'm open to someone telling me that I'm wrong, but from my point of view, it's the same as we talked about on the Halloween episode, which again, I assume a lot of people are going to go listen to that one if they've not already. Part of what Halloween did and the reason why Halloween was sacred to certain groups was that there were things that in many cities had laws against things like cross-dressing for a long, long time. Some,

I think, are still in the books to this day. But those laws were never enforced or typically not enforced on Halloween because it just wasn't practical. It's Halloween. Everybody's dressed up. It's something. So it became the one day holiday as an excuse to express, you know, love or sexuality in a way that normally is not accepted in that culture. From my point of view, it's inspirational because it's like the holiday is giving them permission to be open in a way that they're not.

But that's, I realize I'm taking a very, I'm expressing values that I was raised with where these things are always universally good in every movie I've ever seen. It always takes the side of, of course people should be able to express their love. Of course couples who should be able to get together regardless of what the grownups tell them.

But I think someone on the other side of that from that culture would tell me that that is just as ignorant of me to say that as any other kind of prejudice where I'm not understanding why they object to these things. I'm not understanding why they object to these things. That it's like I get their anxiety over it because they have to sense the same thing. That you can pass all the laws you want, but ultimately it is very, very hard to stop an idea. It just is. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a universal problem that these authorities feel they have.

And yeah, it almost seems like their goal is simply to still feel like they're authoritative and less to squish any specific Valentine's Day or television show or any other specific thing. Like even in most of these stories where their Valentine's Day is being cracked down on in some way, except for the condom one. It's not very specific about what the thing was. I think the people in charge just want to feel like they still run things the way authorities used to get to. Really jealous of them. Like, oh, to be a king 100 years ago would have been great. Or the idea that through history, through all of human history, the idea of married couples getting together via this process of some sort of romantic love and romantic gestures, a quartering, that's not how most people live through history. You go read the Bible and their descriptions of someone getting a wife is he's buying her like a piece of cattle. It's so for us to treat it like, well, this is the universal. Like, obviously, I think this is the better way to do it.

People can actually choose each other as partners. But the assumption that everyone was OK with that change when it used to be, it's like, well, no, if I want to acquire a woman, I just exchange a cow for this woman, and now she's my wife. That was not, I don't sympathize with them, but that was to assume that that change was no big deal because they all just accept it. It's like, well, sure, this is the better way to do it no they didn't they reacted very badly to it lots of cultures through history and kind of the same thing and i'm not saying that in india they still trade women for cattle i'm just saying that the american ideal of it you know being open about dating and sexuality and talking about subjects like that openly discussing them openly

and and portraying them in culture openly, you know, in our pop culture, on a mass media, the assumption like, well, this is just the way it should be. But I think I would say that even now, most of the world still disagrees, like in terms of the sheer, sheer numbers. Yeah. Including a lot of the U.S. and more of it before. Yeah. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. 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. 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. And I think thinking about these older trends, older traditions, that transitions us pretty well into the other big takeaway of the main episode. Let's get into takeaway number two. The Valentine's Day heart shape came from a few ancient traditions, a few medical

misunderstandings, and one candy company. And say that one more time because it's long. The Valentine's Day heart shape came from a few ancient traditions, a few medical misunderstandings, and one candy company. Because we're going to talk about all the different things that honestly, somewhat confusingly came together to create that heart shape. You know, if you stop and think about it for a moment, the standard scallop shaped two big loops heart shape that you think of is not anatomically what a human heart looks like. It's definitely created and constructed. Yeah.

And if what he said is confusing, I'm telling you, once he gets into the details, you will be even more confused. How we got that as the symbol for a heart and that every child in America, I don't know how many countries they have this symbol. You say, draw me a heart. They're all going to draw the same thing. They're not going to draw like the ventricles and the, here's the aorta. Here's the, like, they all draw that same shape. In no way resembles a heart, at least you wouldn't think. And how that came to be, it is very complicated and very almost nonsensical.

But it's another, we're going to walk through it, but it's another example of how cultures mutate over time in ways that don't necessarily make sense. Like there's no rules for how that happens. Yeah, exactly. And we're, cause we're going to talk about a few different contributing things and trends. And also it's not super clear what the exact through line is. Like there's not, you know, John B. Hartshape, the inventor of the heart shape or something. It's a lot of different old cultural traditions and other things coming together. And key sources here are a bunch of things. There's an excellent set of interviews with experts done for Time Magazine by Olivia B. Waxman, another Time article by Rachel E. Greenspan, a TED Talk by historian Dr. Marilyn Yalom, formerly of Stanford, and also a great Mental Floss piece by Michelle Debchak. Because when we're talking about this

heart shape, we're really talking about two things being created all at once. Because there's one creation of the concept that the human heart is a love-related organ and is a place where love happens. And then the other thing that's created is the trope of this heart shape. So this symbol is really two things we've invented all at once, a heart meaning love and also that shape that is... I think about emoji a lot. I think there are at least seven or eight different emoji for heart shapes because of all the colors. But also there's little clouds of them and shapes. And like this is a really dominant shape and really world culture at this point that we invented. Yeah.

And I would actually be curious to how because I know that if you go to, you know, Japan, the heart shape is everywhere. I don't know what cultures or parts of Earth don't have that, where if you show them that shape, they wouldn't associate it with the heart or with love. I assume, I just assume things like that are now totally universal everywhere, but maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, as far as I know, it's like the smiley face where it has at least gotten everywhere and there's not really an alternative to it. Yeah. The heart, a blood pump in the human

chest, has become a love symbol and that shape. One source is possibly the ancient Greeks. Historian Marilyn Yalom says that they are one inventor of the idea that the heart is a love organ. She cites poetry by Sappho that describes her, quote, mad heart, and that, quote, love shook my heart. She wrote that in the 600s BC. She also says, quote, Plato argued for the dominant role of the chest in love and in negative emotions of fear and anger and rage and pain. Aristotle expanded the role of the heart even further, granting it supremacy in all human processes, end quote. And, you know, there were a bunch of Greeks, a bunch of different city-st states and stuff, but it seems like many of them very rapidly tied the chest organ, the heart to love and many other emotions too. Yeah. And now it's my understanding that the anatomy behind this isn't

the heart, but it's the, there's one like huge nerve that runs through your torso called the vagus nerve. Cool. That the reason when you're stressed out, you feel it like in your chest or when you're feeling very strong emotion, you feel it in your chest or you're in love with somebody, you kind of feel it in your chest. That's because you have like one, the human body, if you didn't know, it's total nonsense the way it's built. If you didn't know, it's total nonsense the way it's built.

So the reason chest pain is so vague of a symptom that people mistake heart attacks for indigestion or for a pulled muscle. And you kind of like, well, how can you mistake a heart attack for whatever? Or people have panic attacks. Great example. They'll mistake it for a heart attack. It's because there's just one giant nerve that's activated by, it's like a check engine light. It doesn't mean anything. So chest pain, the reason so many people don't know what chest pain means, it's not because they're dumb, it's because your body is not specific in what its complaint is. So the reason strong emotions come through your chest, it's not your heart, but it's

the, you know, it's that vagus nerve, but a primitive person could put their hand over their heart and feel it, that, that beating it's like, well, that's where my heart is. And that's where I feel stress and emotion. So that thing that's beating must be where the emotion is coming from. Absolutely. I also, I always wonder if it just being in the middle makes it feel important to like the brain is so much more important for how we think and feel, but it's out on the end at the top, you know, like the heart seems like it's downtown. Sure. And it's, and I think, um, I think they separated like the brain is the thinking intellectual part of you

and the heart must be like the emotional part of you because that's where you feel emotions you feel it more in your torso in your body in your chest and so I think the separation of well love doesn't come from up here in the skull it comes from

I feel it down here so I think with that separation, again, this is, I'm saying this like it's obvious. There's a bunch of cultural things, but I think it relates all the way back to the very, very beginning to just how it feels in your body. And it's just because of how those nerves are set up. Yeah, I think you're right. And also there's another key role here for the Romans and they're kind of pulling it from the Greeks. But there's, as far as the symbol of the heart relating to love, Greek mythology contained a god of love and sex called Eros. any teenager type boy. And in stories, he would more or less force people to fall in love. And for some reason, the Romans, as they adapted a lot of Greek mythology and religion to their culture, they changed Eros' name to Cupid, and also made him like a little chubby boy with wings,

who causes desire by firing arrows through hearts, and also less forceful. It seems like Eros really threw people into really those like hardcore Greek mythology stories where somebody's suddenly forced to do something. Cupid was more of a cute, hey, why don't you fall in love? And according to Rachel C. Greenspan, that Roman specific version of Cupid became a hit with Renaissance painters in the 1600s. She cites Samantha Bradbeer, the in-house historian for Hallmark Cards, because Hallmark has an in-house historian. And Samantha Bradbeer says, quote, 1800s greeting card publishers were simply following suit with what was on trend, end quote. So the part of why we see the heart as a love organ is that

the Romans very specifically turned a Greek boy god into someone who manipulates the heart as a love organ is that the Romans very specifically turned a Greek boy god into someone who manipulates the heart to make people fall in love. Yeah. And today you get, you basically have two bits of iconography for Valentine's Day, any Valentine's Day decoration at any school or office or anywhere, there's the hearts and there's Cupid. Yeah. And if you ask the average child, well, who is Cupid? Why do you have this baby, this flying baby with a bow and arrow? Why is that? And it's just, this is a subject that I find absolutely fascinating.

And there is precious little research done into it. And it's something that is very crucial to me as someone, because I'm a horror author, I write horror novels, which is the concept of iconography. Why do certain images stick in the brain through generations? Like why Cupid? Why could you find an image of Cupid on a wall on this holiday today, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago? Yeah. There has to be brain biology behind it because everyone who sees it immediately wants to use it, to put it up somewhere, to put it on their greeting cards, to put it on their wall. Whereas many, many, many holidays have come and gone, been totally forgotten. Many characters, many saints, many gods, many whatever, you know, you can look them all up and they came and went.

And we don't know any of them. them all up and they came and went and we don't know any of them. There are specific, you know, religious figures, you know, Santa Claus, monsters, things that for whatever reason, they persist forever. And there's often no rhyme or reason to it. I have no idea why the idea of Cupid, why that's compelling other than I guess that is what it feels like to fall in love. Like there's no logic to it. So it feels like someone else struck you like from the sky, but it's just, I don't know. People love that decoration of that flying baby with a bow and arrow. It's another one of those ones where I really wish we could go to the people in the past

and ask them what they think about it. Cause like, especially a practicing pagan and Greece or Rome, if you went to them and were like, the main god from all this we'll all be talking about is the little love boy. That's going to be the Zeus barely mentioned. Forget it. He's we're going to we're going to take the love boy. I think the name Nike is from that stuff. That's about it.

That's what we'll hang on to for the most part. And I would love to know if you fast forwarded a thousand years from now, what persists from now? Because lots of this stuff goes back that far. Like, I think you'd see lots of familiar symbols, but the meaning would be totally different. I would be fascinated. I'd be fascinated to see because ultimately to try, there's no, because there's no like logical reason why it would be really interesting to see if, I don't know, if 500 years from now, like they still to explain it's like, oh, no, no, no. Hundreds of years ago, he was like a musician and he smoked a lot of weed. And, but that's exactly what's happened, right? Like some of these, these saints were not as famous in their time, like to the point that like today, the name Valentine is known by however many billion English speakers and on the planet.

That many people didn't know that person's name when they were alive. Yeah. If you were like, name one disciple of Jesus, they might struggle. And then Valentine, this random saint from hundreds of years after, is an industry. It's amazing. Yeah. Or when you hear people refer to Santa Claus as Saint Nick, like, well, now hold on, who was Saint Nick? It's like, good question. Good question. Go to

Wikipedia and look it up. Fully forgot he's a saint. Yeah. Who would be? Well, because again, he got merged with Father Christmas and then Coca-Cola redesigned him a little bit. It's like the path from here to there is fascinating, but he, I'm sure the, the real St. Nicholas would be stunned to see this big chubby guy in the red suit. It's like, what does any of that, like, what are the reindeer? What is that? It's like, well, we merged, there was a poem a guy wrote about a reindeer. It's a long story. Right. Also poems used to be hits. You know, they used to be very popular, actually, poetry. Yeah. Set that up.

And with the saints, another source here for one of the ideas, the idea that the heart is related to love, is the medieval Catholic Church. According to UCLA medieval literature professor Eric Yeager, Europeans started specifically associating the heart with love in the 1200s and the 1300s, medieval times. He says before that, quote, people thought of our hearts as books of memory, a place where God's commands are written, and believed feelings for the beloved were somehow written on your heart, end quote.

He also says there were stories in an extreme version of this that imagined female saints who died and then their hearts were cut out of their bodies after death. And miraculously, people would see physical written inscriptions on those hearts. Any inscription would say like, written inscriptions on those hearts. And the inscription would say like, oh, I love God so much. I love Jesus so much. I'm paraphrasing. But this was, so this idea that the heart is specifically for love is coming out of maybe a medieval tradition where the heart is for all of your most important emotions to the point where it might be written on it in literal words. Just a side note. I come from, my mother's side of the family is very religious. And I used to have people ask me, like, well, what do they think of you writing

these extremely violent, gory stories? And I always just chuckle to myself because like, oh, so now I've spotted someone who does not know anything about Christianity or has never read, know anything about Christianity or has never read. Because it's things like cutting open, that they cut open this woman's chest, hacked open her rib cage and on her heart was etched or inside the valves were etched her love for Jesus right on the organ itself. Yeah, it is not a faith for people who are squeamish about gore or guts or anything else. I have never come up with anything as messed up as 30 different stories in the Bible. They even kind of blend with science in some of these traditions, because Eric Yeager also says that the idea that the heart handles complex emotions stuck around

despite people in the early 1400s in Europe starting to theorize that the human brain is the seat of lots of our thinking. And Yeager says in science in that time, quote, the brain takes over, end quote is his phrase. But he says that, quote, iconographic inertia is why we kept the trope of the heart recording love emotions specifically. Like we took that religious and cultural belief, combined it with what was probably very theoretical science. I don't know how they even found that idea, let alone tried to prove it. But you know, all that combination of things sort of stripped out the idea that your heart is in charge of memories or your heart is in charge of

even anger. Like we'll metaphorically describe our heart being angry, but we really, really held on to the idea that the heart is in charge of love. Yeah. To the point that you can, there's a pop song playing right now somewhere that's something to the tune of listen to your heart or ignore, ignore what your brain is telling you. Listen to what your heart says instead. Like that has persisted. We, for whatever reason, that belief is maybe will always be there. find it more useful to think of ourselves as the brain does the logic, the heart feels the emotion and the heart in American Western culture that we should, we should go with our heart. It's our way. Every movie has this lesson. There's like some cold hearted banker who wants to close down the youth center. It's like, no, your heart, your heart is telling you that this is wrong. Ignore what your, what your brain is telling you and go with your, your heart, you know, or, or the, the guy who, the love triangle where there's like the logical partner they should be with,

they're more financially stable. And it's like, no, go with your heart, go with the homeless artist who the free spirit, your heart is telling you. Right. Listen to your heart and those rollerbladers over there. Don't listen to cold logic. Thinking of one specific movie, but yeah, yeah. It's such a thing. And then another thing that might've led to the heart being about love, but also to this heart shape we got comes from a plant. There is one plant in modern Libya, in North Africa, that influenced the whole thing. Because historian Marilyn Yalom says that there was an ancient Roman city in North Africa there called Cyrene.

And the people there made a lot of money growing and trading a plant called silphium, S-I-L-P-H-I-U-M. And silphium was a species of giant fennel. It is also now extinct. Apparently you can't get it anymore, but it was recorded as being a useful contraceptive. And some records said it was a useful abortion-inducing substance. And the seed pods of silphium match that heart shape that we think of, that sort of scallop, two big lines shape. And the economy of Cyrene was so driven by growing and trading silphium, they printed the seed pod shape on their coinage. with this basically, it almost looks like the peach emoji, but it's really a heart-shaped sylphium pod. And there's a theory that that not only spread the shape, but also the use of this seed connected that shape to, you know, the ideas of love because it's being used in sex and birth control and those practices. Yeah. And here's where, and I know there's more to go into here, but this is where it's going to

start to get confusing for some listeners because they're going to be like well now hold on i thought the shape is it because of this leaf or is it because of they thought that's what the heart was shaped like it's a bunch of different things like that it's it's not clear like the where the symbol came from but it appears to be a combination of multiple things that kept reinforcing it somehow. I just feel like we know the final step is mass media and especially visual mass media. And then it's just a bunch of things leading up to that. Maybe the second to last step is the British Empire. leading up to that, that maybe the second to last step is the British Empire.

And then a global mass media, especially from English speakers, put this heart shape everywhere. But yeah, we have all these different things leading to it. A whole other theory about the shape, that heart shape, is that it might have come from medieval European dissections of not humans. European dissections of not humans. Because Time cites a cardiologist and medical illustrator named Carlos Machado. He says that the heart shape trope, for one thing, it's what you get if you split open a four chambered human heart, like if you pull out the heart and then split it from there. He says you also get that shape on some echocardiograms of the heart. So there are ways to get that shape out of a human heart. But he also says that before the 1300s, the Catholic Church objected to most dissection of the human body. It was seen as profane. So Machado says scientists at that time said, OK, what hearts can I see?

Like, what research can I do dissecting things? So it was within church rules to dissect most animals. And the heart shape that we think of looks a lot like the actual hearts of some European birds and some European reptiles. So again, there's not a clear progression. This is just one more thing that pushed us toward the heart shape we have today. And then another push toward that is some popular texts in the 1300s and 1400s. The former publisher of the medical journal The Lancet, his name is Pierre

Winken, he says that before the 1300s, drawings representing a human heart drew it as a round based pointed object, like the drawings sort of drew it as a pear shape before the 1300s. pointed object, like the drawing sort of drew it as a pear shape before the 1300s. But he says there was a hit Italian didactic poem. It was called Documenti da More. It was by Francesco Barbarino. That had an illustration with a heart shape we know. There was also a tapestry in the 1400s called Le Don Decor, featuring a man holding a small red heart shape that represented courtly love. A lot of people copied that tapestry and reproduced that art and other things. And so in the 13-1400s, we start to get just artists and people who repeated tropes in visual art starting to use this heart shape rather than apparently the previous thing of more of a pear shape, which probably matches more closely to like a stylized version of a human heart.

And this gets into another subject that is extremely fascinating. People who have taken classes in art know about this, but it's the concept of iconography. If you take a child and ask that child to draw a house, they're all going to draw the same shape, right? It's like a square with a triangle on top of it. Like how many houses are actually shaped like that? If you ask them to draw the sun, what are you going to get? You're going to get a yellow circle with yellow lines coming off of it. That in no way looks like the real sun. The real sun is not yellow. But that iconography, for whatever reason from childhood, you teach them how to draw that and then that's what it is. Same thing with the heart. Like there are certain shapes. And I said that people who do art have to

know about this stuff because if, for example, if you are animating a cartoon and if you draw a character holding or eating a banana, it has to be drawn in a certain way. If you accidentally give them a green banana, like in real life, you see a green banana, you say, that's a green banana. In a cartoon, if a character pulls up this green thing, it's like, well, they have like a giant pepper. What are they eating? A jalapeno? It doesn't register as banana anymore because the iconography of a banana is very specific. It's yellow. It's peeled in a certain way. Do you see what I mean?

Like it's what registers with the brain as this thing and as that how that thing actually exists are two completely different things. Iconography is the way that our brain reduces certain ideas to symbols, and it's hugely important. And once that shape came to be the symbol of the heart, that's a heart. That means heart in your brain. And it's a form of language, and we don't think of it as such, but it absolutely is. And it's almost a form of universal language because that means heart to even the people who don't know how to read and write English. Yeah, exactly. And it gets into kind of why we are sharing this story this way, where it's a lot of things that come together in sort of a fuzzy way because that's really how people know it. The gist is that they're pretty sure that we got this heart shape, also meaning love, by around the 1400s or so.

And we know that by 1861, it was the go-to shape and meaning for a box of chocolate for Valentine's Day. Because according to Mental Floss, 1861, that's the year when Cadbury Candy Company debuted the heart-shaped box of chocolate, and it became one of the biggest hits and game changers in candy. They also embellished the box with cupids and roses. They encouraged buyers to reuse the empty box to store keepsakes from the person they love. to reuse the empty box to store keepsakes from the person they love.

And Cadbury also did not patent or trademark the heart-shaped box, which means everybody else copied it. And it's another way this heart shape spread is a memetically spread as a meme. And then also that all taps into another trend with long, long roots and vague origins of chocolate being an aphrodisiac, because that is, you know, chocolate is coming from the Americas, but Mayans used it in wedding rituals. The Aztec Emperor Montezuma II used it because he felt it fueled him sexually. And cocoa beans were one of the first crops brought across the Atlantic and the Colombian

Exchange, and chocolate gained a similar role in European culture. So the heart shape and the heart meaning love and chocolate and all these different things, along with Cupid that add up to what you think of as Valentine's Day, we kind of know where it came from. And also the exact progression is a lot of just sort of people culturally agreeing on it over time. And to pull back the curtain a little bit for the listeners, Alex on his Patreon has a thing where people can submit ideas for episodes and then other people vote on them. Not to load the process, but I have for March or the next month, I have submitted a chocolate as a subject of an episode. Oh, you went in and put it in there. Nice. as an aphrodisiac, there is so much to explore there that this episode could be another 90 minutes going into that. Because there are biological reasons and the way that chocolate and then the way we make

it reacts to the brain. And there's a biochemical reaction and the origins of how that chocolate came to be associated with love even today. That goes back a long way. That may go back longer than what we have written language to describe it. So that has to be its own episode, the history of chocolate and why chocolate is secretly incredibly fascinating because the cultural origins of it and then getting up to how it's made today and where it comes from and how the workers are treated. There is a lot to unpack there. And we, it would be doing it a huge disservice to dash it

off in the Valentine's day episode, even though chocolate is a massive part of this holiday. Like chocolate is as much a part of Valentine's day as roses. And if you didn't know, if you were coming in cold from the outside, it wouldn't be clear why. It's like, well, why this specific candy? Why not like a fruit flavored candy? Why not, you know, Jolly Ranchers? It's like, no, it's got to be chocolate. Chocolate is the love candy. And the reasons for that run deep. It will take longer to explain than this whole episode, I suspect. I also, I think this will air after this current poll process ends, but we'll get it into the next one if it doesn't win this one. Like, add it as another suggestion again. Because, yeah, we did that vanilla episode and found much more than I expected.

And chocolate is probably even bigger. Amazing. So that's democracy, folks. Chocolate has entered the democracy. Here we go. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jason Pargin for diving very deep on this topic, even though I think we are both pretty, you know, upset about our experiences eating Conversation Hearts.

I'm really surprised the holiday has survived that candy. You would think it would just shut the whole thing down. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the bizarre origins of sending valentines. Yeah, this topic is so humongous we have not even begun to talk about the act of sending a valentine. And there's a ton there, turns out. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show,

out. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than six dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring Valentine's Day with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, in some countries, the Valentine's Day holiday is secret or illegal. And takeaway number two, the Valentine's Day heart shape came from a few ancient traditions, a few medical misunderstandings, and one candy company. Plus a ton more stuff about saints, pet gifts, chalky candy, and everything else that goes into Valentine's Day. pet gifts, chalky candy, and everything else that goes into Valentine's Day.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please pre-order my guest's book, because he's great. Jason Pargin is someone you can hear from many ways. He's at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter. He also has a sub stack that I'll link with just free amazing columns that he writes. Here's the thing, though. He's a novelist. He's a full time novelist, and he has a new book up for preorder. The book is called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. And then it's the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series, which is already an amazing series. And you don't have to have read the previous books to enjoy the new book.

And no matter what, novelists depend on pre-orders. I'm going to link posts from Jason about why that is and how that works. And it's publishing industry stuff that you don't totally have to understand. All you really need to know is that all of the decisions about the next books that are going to happen from everybody are based on pre-orders for the upcoming books. And I think I said it at the top. I'll say it again now. If you enjoy Jason on this podcast, if you enjoy Jason on any podcasts, the thing that really funds that and is the reason for it is his novel writing. He is out here to, you know, get you excited about his amazing novels. And I think it's an amazing way to do it.

I think I really benefit as a podcaster from him doing it. And so please, please consider, you know, enjoying a good novel from our pal Jason by pre-ordering as soon as you can. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. An amazing piece from theConversation.com by Dr. Lisa Battelle, professor of history and religion at USC. Also a TED Talk by historian Dr. Marilyn Yalom, formerly of Stanford University. Tons of NPR and Reuters and other coverage of Valentine's Day across the world. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at SIFPod.fun. more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you

love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.