Something You Should Know - Understanding the Flaws in Your Evolution & The Story Behind Some of the Coolest Toys Ever

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

A lot of things about you determine how likable you are but there are a few simple techniques to make you appear more likable instantly. I start this episode with three ways, according to Psychology Today, that will make you more likable to others when you meet them. And they aren’t what you probably think. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/let-their-words-do-the-talking/201107/get-anyone-you-instantly-guaranteed-1 Evolution is what got us to where we are today. But the evolutionary road we have traveled to get here is a bumpy one. Biology professor Nathan Lents author of the book, Human Error: A Panorama of our Glitches from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes https://amzn.to/2zo2u67 takes us on a journey of the human evolution timeline and points out what went right and what went wrong. Ever wonder why so many people have back and knee trouble? Could it be a flaw in our evolution? Why do humans get so many colds? Another flaw? You will find the answers in this episode. As you go through life, you collect stuff. Then, over time that stuff collects in your home and you forget about it – even if that stuff serves no purpose, is outdated or useless. We start with a list of things you may not even notice that are most likely cluttering up your home that you really ought to throw out – NOW! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/08/things-in-your-home-to-get-rid-of_n_4748455.html Frisbee, Hula-Hoop, Slip & Slide – they are all toys you and just about everyone else have played with for over 60 years. And they are all made by the Wham-O Toy Company. Had did one small company create such iconic toys? Tim Walsh, author of The Whamo Superbook: Celebrating 60 Years Inside the Fun Factory https://amzn.to/2NE8LxX takes you inside the workings of Wham-O, which has specialized and excelled by making outdoor toys while other toy companies have gone high tech.  Advertisers in this episode: Helix Sleep. Get up to $125 off your mattress order by going to www.helixsleep.com/something SimpliSafe. Protect your home with the best home security system. Go to www.simplisafe.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, three simple ways that can instantly make you more likable. Then the fascinating quirks in the timeline of human evolution. Human evolution is a story of us changing pretty rapidly and anything you do quickly you don't do well. Human evolution, we favored our cognitive abilities so much that the rest of our body was allowed to change pretty haphazardly. Also a bunch of things almost sure to be in your home that you need to throw out right now and the amazing story of Wham-O toys. They've been a part of all of our lives from the frisbee, the slip and slide, and of course the hula hoop. The hula hoop craze was born in January of 1958, and by October, the fad was over.

But in that time period, they sold close to 100 million hula hoops. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk

every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel.

The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. We start today with getting people to like you. We all want people to like us, but it turns out that whether or not people like you has a lot to do with the signals you send out non-verbally. And there are three gestures, according to Psychology Today, that will get people to like you more. The first is the eyebrow flash. It's that quick up-and and down movement of the eyebrow. As people approach one another,

they eyebrow flash each other to send the message that they do not pose a threat. Second is the head tilt. The head tilt is a slight tilt of the head to one side or the other, and this cue signals that the approaching person is not a threat because they are exposing their carotid artery. The carotid artery is the primary source for blood to reach the brain and, if disrupted, causes severe brain damage or death within minutes. So exposing the carotid artery sends the signal that the person exposing their carotid artery does not pose a threat, nor do they think that the person they are approaching poses a threat. And then there is the smile. A smile sends the message, I like you. When you smile at someone, they have a hard time not returning the smile. A smile triggers a small endorphin release in the

brain, which promotes a feeling of well-being. In other words, when you smile, you feel good about yourself. So there it is, the eyebrow flash, the head tilt, and the smile. In other words, when you smile, you feel good about yourself. So there it is, the eyebrow flash, the head tilt, and the smile. Use all three and you will probably be irresistible. And that is something you should know. After thousands and thousands of years of evolution, we humans have done pretty well. We're on top of the food chain, we're smarter than the other animals, and physically our bodies seem pretty functional. Or are they?

If our bodies have evolved to such perfection, why do so many people have back trouble? Why do we get colds all the time? Why do we breathe and eat through the same hole? So maybe we're not as evolved as we think we are. Nathan Lentz is a professor of biology and author of the book Human Error, a panorama of our glitches from pointless bones to broken genes. Hi, Nathan. So this is an interesting take on being human and all that's wrong with us. Where did the idea come from? I sort of stumbled on this by reading from some anthropologists that were working about 10 or 15 years ago and in their writings, they made it clear that during the last about

3 million years in Africa, our lineage was evolving more rapidly than any of the other apes, the other primates even. We were going through a lot of changes in a very short amount of time. That sort of piqued my interest because we tend to think of evolution as working on very long time scales and things happening really almost imperceptibly slowly. But actually, human evolution is a story of us changing pretty rapidly. And anything you do quickly, you don't do well. And so I think that a lot of quirks that we have, we share with other animals, but we also have a lot of quirks that are just ours and that are purely a function of us changing so fast. Human evolution, we favored our cognitive abilities so much that the rest of our body sort of was allowed to change pretty haphazardly.

Well, you're right. I think of evolution as moving so slowly as that you can't really see it happening. But on the other hand, I mean, if you just go back a couple hundred years, people were shorter then. My mother used to live in a house in Connecticut that was built in the 1700s. And my brother always used to hit his head on the top of the doorway because the doorways were so short because people were short. And we've evolved into being taller. And that seems to have happened pretty fast. Yeah, things can change really quickly and the world is changing as well.

The environments are changing very well too. And so most organisms are sort of struggling to keep up. And we made some changes to try to adapt to a changing world, but there's no target, right? There's no end point to this. Right. So it is just kind of a race against our competitors. And that's resulted in things like what? For example, our upright posture, that transition happened really quickly.

And so our spine, our knees, our ankles, they're not perfectly adapted to this upright walking. We certainly walk better upright than we do on all fours. But if we had made that transition more slowly, I suspect we would have knees that don't twist and tear as much as we do on all fours. But if we had made that transition more slowly, I suspect we would have knees that don't twist and tear as much as we do. We would have spines that aren't weirdly S-shaped and with slip discs coming out all the time and ankles that have this vulnerability right on the back, which is the Achilles tendon. We have a lot of sort of vulnerabilities and little quirks of our anatomy that I bet if that transition had happened more slowly, we would have gotten it better. Yeah, like who hasn't had

back trouble? Well, if we were so well designed, you would think very few people would have back trouble, but everybody has back trouble. Almost everybody, yeah. But see, there's two separate issues there with our back. So first of all, I think that the design itself isn't great. You know, more of a straight or a J-shaped spine would be better than this S-shaped feature that we have. But the other problem is that we don't really use our bodies now in the way that we did when it was evolving. So, I mean, the majority of us spend our waking hours mostly in chairs, and chairs never existed before the modern age. So our body really isn't designed to be in a chair all day. Some of it is not great design, but some of it is, we're not using it for what it was designed for. And what was it designed for?

Well, the posture of say hunter gatherer tribes, they spend time squatting, standing and laying down. And so when they're relaxing, they're often just laying on the floor, laying on the ground. The sitting posture really isn't great for us, but it just feels comfortable. And then we've gotten used to it. So now it seems like that's the most comfortable posture is sitting in a chair. But it really isn't in good concert with our body to be sitting so much. But if we do it long enough, maybe it will be. Well, it's unlikely, I think, that we'll evolve into a creature that's built for chairs because the way that evolution works is through the success or failure of individuals. So unless you somehow leave more offspring because you're good in a chair, I just think we've escaped most

of the forces of natural selection. Not that we're not evolving, but we're really not playing by the same rules anymore in terms of who reproduces and who doesn't. So knowing that, knowing that we shouldn't be sitting in chairs, I mean, what, for example, what changes have you made, if any? I work at a standing desk now, both at home and at work. I just try to be on my feet. And when I take phone calls, I try to pace the room rather than sitting in a chair. And I think it's made a difference. I don't have as much back pain as I once did. Get out of your chairs, I think, is one lesson.

How do humans compare to other creatures on the planet? How do we compare to them in terms of how often we get sick and what we get sick from? We are more sickly than our closest relatives, that's for sure. And just to finish the point on the back, a slipped disc is absolutely unheard of in the other apes. So gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, they never have a slipped disc. That's just not an issue. Their spine is very well designed for their posture But if you're talking about other forms of sickliness the example I use in the book is that The average human adult this is not even counting children just adults suffers between four and six of the common cold every year

Again, this is not something that the other apes deal with we have sinus cavities in our face that don't drain very well because they have to work against gravity. And the drain pipe of our largest sinus cavity is at the top, not the bottom, the top. And so it makes it much more likely that mucus will pool and you'll have sort of ripe conditions for an infection. So we really do get sinus infections much more commonly than our relatives do. But we've been told, and it would seem, that so much of the way we are was adaptable to something. And yet when you look at it through your lens, it looks like we missed the boat in a lot of this. The other way to look at it is that perhaps more than any other primate, we're evolved to be generalists. So we're not particularly specialized for one particular thing, one particular activity or way of living. The big advantage that the human lineage had was its

ability to make a living, so to speak, in a wide variety of environments and settings. And so what we lost in the ability to be very well suited for something, we gained in being able to survive in lots of different climates. So if you look at gorillas, for example, they're really very well adapted to a very specific climate and lifestyle. Same with chimpanzees, orangutans. But if you look at humans, we live on every single continent and we thrive in a wide variety of, and this was true even before, you know, farming and civilization. We really have the ability to make a living in a lot of

different ways. And that partially explains why we don't seem perfectly adapted for anything. Not that there's such a thing as being perfect, but we're the ultimate generalists in the natural world. And I think it really led to what would later become our unique human features of this big brain and so on and so forth. So I think we're good at lots of stuff rather than being excellent at just one thing. My guest today is Nathan Lentz. He is a professor of biology and author of the book Human Error, a panorama of our glitches from pointless bones to broken genes.

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Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to

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During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Nathan, I guess you're saying that as generalists, we're not excellent at a few things. We're good at a lot of things. But that ability to be good at a lot of things and to live almost anywhere is what makes us so excellent.

If you look at our past, we survived and thrived in a perhaps really unlikely way by being able to deal with almost any possible scenario. And if you are totally reliant on your body to do that, it'll never work. I mean, if you can imagine living in a tundra in the Arctic and then living in a desert and then living in a rainforest, totally different physical challenges involved. So the only way that a species can really cross all those boundaries and still thrive is to be very smart,

right? So you can invent clothing and you can invent irrigation and you can invent water storage. So once you free up your body from having to bear the burden of survival and you put that on your brain, it's sort of expected that your body's not going to be perfect because it didn't have to be. There was no pressure on the body to get absolutely everything right. So I think it's a good story, actually. I think it's uplifting way to look at our past is these flaws. Unfortunately, when you're in the throes of a cold or if you have back pain, it's easy to just see it as a negative. But I like to see it as a positive because it shows how much we've overcome, how much we've been liberated by our big brains and our cleverness, which, by the way, could be our biggest flaw of all. But I think it's a happy story more than it is a depressing story. But do you think or can you look back and based on the past predict that these flaws that you're pointing out will eventually engineer themselves out of us or not?

No, I don't think so. I think we have mostly escaped the forces of natural selection in terms of, you know, in order to, natural selection only works by mutations followed by selection, meaning who survives and who doesn't. And so back pain is not a predictor of reproductive success anymore. People who have back pain aren't less likely to reproduce than those who do, unless it's so debilitating that it kills them as a child. But, you know, that doesn't happen. So I think if we fix these things, it'll be through intervention. And I don't think that's right around the corner by any means. I

mean, I think we're going to be curing genetic diseases fairly soon. We have the technology to do that now. But fixing a back like your spine with genetic tools, we don't even know where to start in that process. So I don't think those are going anywhere. But we don't have to. That's the point. We can fix it surgically. And I think our tools to do that will continue to advance. So it's another story of how our brains have sort of liberated our bodies from having to be perfect. We don't have to fix it genetically. We can fix it surgically. So what you said just now is interesting because I've always thought of human evolution as this continual process of humans changing because that's what humans do. But you're pointing out that the changes that

happen throughout evolution serve a purpose, and that purpose all comes back and always comes back to survivability and reproduction. That's right. So if you look at the transition to upright walking, our ancestors were in the rainforest and they started to explore a new habitat, which was the border of the rainforest and the open grasslands, the savanna in Africa. Well, you have a big advantage in the savanna if you can stand up because you can see over other things, you freed up your hands to do things and you have, you know, good social interactions. You're looking each other in the face and so forth. And so the individuals who could stand up better, um, were more successful. They were more, they were more likely to get their food and to,

and to feed their children and all of that. And so they out-competed. If you, if you think of all the members of the species as competitors with each other, even if they're not directly, but, uh, in the sense of who leaves more offspring, those who were able to stand upright did the best. But the thing is, is that it wasn't overnight, right? It was a gradual transition, living in the border and then eventually living out in the grasslands entirely, which is what we know our ancestors eventually did. But there's a loss there too, because once you start transitioning to a striding gait, you know, walking the way we do now, you can't climb trees very well. And there were advantages to being able to climb trees. So every single innovation came with a

trade-off. Well, here's a question I guess I've always wondered about, and maybe it's simplistic, but humans evolved from apes, but we still have apes. So why did some of us become human and others just stayed apes? So apes have been changing too. If you look at chimpanzees and gorillas, you know, our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees is about 7 million years ago. But that ancestor wasn't a chimpanzee and it didn't look like a chimpanzee. It probably looked a little bit more like a chimpanzee than it looked like a human just because we've been evolving faster. But we're no more closely related to that ancestor than the chimpanzees are. So every species is constantly changing. And gorillas, we go back even further. You're talking about 10, 11 million years. But that ancestor wasn't a gorilla. It

didn't look like a gorilla. It looked like, you know, something else, something between human, chimpanzee, and gorilla. But we know that our line was evolving fairly rapidly and that we do know that gorillas have been living in mostly the same kind of way for a long time, which is why actually their fossil record is so poor, actually, because in the rainforest, things don't fossilize very well. But what we do know is that humans started really changing in their behavior and how they were living and how they were thriving. And that is a good recipe for evolution, for fast evolution. Because when you start doing things differently, you change the rules of the game. And who is successful versus who is not will be different in different environments. So if you take a gorilla and put him in the grasslands,

you know, he's not going to do very well. But if you take that gorilla into a rainforest, he's very well suited. So as you transition from one environment to the next, the rules are different and that, that enforces evolution. And the sad part about it is evolution works best when individuals are dying fast because they're taking their genes with them and the few that survive sort of give rise to new innovations. So where you see rapid evolution, what you're also seeing is a lot of death and suffering. Why then are we still evolving? If we don't have the death and suffering that initiates these changes in evolution, then why are we still changing?

Because anytime you have non-random reproduction, then you have evolution. So here's just a very simple case of this. If you look at the birth rates among the Japanese, they're very, very, very low. And this is also true of the Italians and other groups. And if you look at the birth rates in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Somalia, they're very, very, very high. So right there, you automatically know that the gene pool is in flux. There will be more people of Somali descent in a generation now than there are in a generation than there are now. And there will be less contribution from the Japanese and the Italians. So there is change happening. But that could change so fast.

And it's not based on survival. It's based on reproductive rate. So right there, you know, there's some changes. Because we know that Somalis and Japanese are not identical genetically. So there's some flux that's taking place. Where that will take us, we don't know. Because that could all change very quickly. And our ability to alter our own genetics is just now beginning. So that could have an impact as well. So I can't

predict where we're going to be 100 years from now. But I can say that we won't be exactly as we are now, at least in the basic sense. Do other species have races like we have races? Oh, sure. Absolutely. So, if you look at mountain gorillas, for example, there's three or four populations and there's a little bit of interbreeding, but they have gone in slightly different ways. And that could be the beginning of speciation where they might eventually diverge into two groups, but there's no way to predict that future. Right. Um,

populations are always, you know, diverging and then coming back together and you just never know at any one point, you just have a snapshot. Um, but yeah, and we,

what's interesting to me is that, um, the different populations of the same species start to show what we show, uh, in terms of our differences. So for example, I don't know if you know this, but chimpanzees and bonobos, they both communicate with gestures. So, they have like body language. Well, that body language takes on regional dialects. So, they will have

slightly different versions in different places. Really, you can map what's happening with our language, you know, the linguistic history of our species with other species. And it works sort of the same way. So, you know, you have to be separated for a very long time to really become different species. But that's certainly, you know, what's happened many times. So that would, you know, lowland gorillas versus highland gorillas, will they eventually be two species? You know, who knows? But they definitely are showing those signs just like we did.

Well, we are the result of human evolution. We are who we are and we're here because of it. And it's interesting as you talk to listen to how it's worked well and how it's worked not so well. And yet, nevertheless, here we are. Nathan Lentz has been my guest. He's a professor of biology

and he is author of the book Human Error, a panorama of our glitches from pointless bones to broken genes. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Nathan. Thanks, Mike. I've really enjoyed this interview. I'm sleeping just a little more soundly now because my home is protected by SimpliSafe. I mean, these guys are obsessed over the details. Here's an example. A typical glass break sensor sometimes gets fooled. There are sounds like a dropped plate or a baby crying that can sometimes set them off.

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We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. If you live in North America and maybe some other parts of the world, at some point in your childhood or your child's childhood, you have bought and played with a toy made by the Wham-O Toy Company. Hula hoop, frisbee, slip and slide, super ball, silly string, hacky sack. It would have been impossible to escape your childhood without coming into contact with these toys. And the reason I'm talking about this is that the company, Wham-O,

and the toys it created that you've played with, it's all a pretty interesting story. Tim Walsh is a speaker and a writer who has written quite a bit about toys. One of his books is called The Wham-O Superbook, Celebrating 60 Years Inside the Fun Factory. Hi Tim, so one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this now is that it's the middle of the summer as we record this, and the one thing I associate with Wham-O toys is outside and summertime. The toys they created are primarily outside summertime toys. So how did Wham-O get started? They started in 1948 around a slingshot.

Spud Malin and Richner are the founders of Wham-O, and they were into falconry. And they were teaching their birds how to dive for prey by shooting meatballs in the air with a homemade slingshot. And the legend goes that a gentleman walked up to them and said, hey, where'd you get that slingshot? And their entrepreneurial light bulbs above their heads went off and said, we should start making slingshots. And Richner told me that they went to Sears and Roebuck, and for $7 down and $7 a month they got a bandsaw, and they started making the Wham-O slingshot in 1948. And predictably, you know, when your first product's a slingshot,

they evolved into making other weapons. They were into hunting, but they made really strange weapons like tomahawks and throwing daggers and blowguns, things that clearly were not for adults. They were for teenage boys. So that was their product line from about 1948 to about 1957, when in 1957 they came out with something called the Pluto platter, which would be renamed quickly to the Frisbee. And that's what launched them? Well, actually, no. In 57, the Frisbee came out first, and it didn't sell that well to begin with.

But the following year, 1958, things exploded with the hula hoop. I spoke to Rich Naird, one of the founders of Wham-O, and he told me that the hula hoop craze was born in January of 1958, and by October, the fad was over. But in that time period, they sold close to 100 million hula hoops. That includes Wham-O's sales and all the other toy companies that knock them off with other types of hoops. But the hula hoop was the biggest craze ever and probably still remains one of the biggest toy crazes ever from the summer of 1958. And looking back in retrospect, what's the big reason why the hula hoop was such a huge, huge fad? I think two reasons.

One was the simplicity. You know, hoops have been around since, you know, the times of Christ. There's tomb drawings from Egyptian times of cane hoops or bamboo hoops. They've been around forever. It's just such a simple thing. But keeping it revolving around your waist in sort of gravity-defying manner is not easy. A lot of us, you know, can't do it. So I think there was a little bit of a skill level needed or some sort of practice needed for people to kind of master it. And when one kid saw another kid doing it,

they had to try it, and the word of mouth took off from there. So I think those two factors really made it one of the best toys ever. And in that short period of time, they sold, you know, gazillions of hula hoops. But I thought I remember reading that they could have sold more, but they literally couldn't keep up with the demand. So there was actually a hula hoop shortage. There was. At the height of the demand in the summer of 58, they were making 20,000 Holo Hoops a week trying to keep up. And, of course, predictably in the toy industry, when you have a hit like that, you're going to have company.

And Mark's Toys and a lot of the other toy companies of the time came out with their own hoops. And there were so many hoops on the market that it was just oversaturated. And almost as quickly as it took off, the fad died. And it was, as I said, dead as a doornail in October, which is what Rich Knurr told me. And really, one of the most interesting facts about the Holopoo is the fact that Wham-O survived it. Because when you sell that many of a product and then have the floodgates just shut off, a lot of companies go bankrupt. But they were able to weather the storm and then had a hit with frisbee shortly thereafter and and was it riding the coattails of the hula hoop you know in other words you know from the makers of

the hula hoop this is their new great thing or did the frisbee stand on its own as a great thing well I think it certainly helped that whammo was put on the map because of the hula hoop. They were all over the press. The New York Times, Life Magazine covered the hula hoop, so they were certainly known. So that certainly boosted their chance to come out with a new product. But the Pluto platter was just genius in its simplicity. The fact that that's what they called it, and then some kids that were familiar with the Frisbee Pie Company up in the Northeast

kept calling them Frisbees, so Wham-O said, well, if you can't beat them, join them. We'll change the name to Frisbee. But really, today, there's Ultimate Frisbee, there's Canine Frisbee, there's Freestyle, there's Frisbee Golf. You'd be hard-pressed to find a toy that's more popular in more incarnations than the Frisbee. So I think in that regard, it sort of stood on its own as really a smash hit toy right after the biggest craze of all time. So that's a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. And that relationship you just described between Wham-O and the pie company that made the pie tins, that was it?

Because I always thought there was a stronger relationship between the Frisbee Pie Company and the toy. No, Frisbee Pie Company was founded in the 1850s, and they were in New England, Connecticut. And really, the legend goes that some workers would flip over the pie tins and have catch with them. And that's not uncommon. In my research, I found that cookie can lids and woven paper plate holders were used to throw. Of course, they were too light, and the metal tins and the metal lids were a little too heavy and kind of dangerous. So when injection molding plastic came after World War II, there were a lot of companies that made plastic discs, and the Pluto platter

was one of them through Wham-O. But because this pie company had been around forever, kids on college campuses in Dartmouth and Princeton and throughout the Northeast were referring to these plastic discs as Frisbees, or they were Frisbeeing, or any kind of spelling variation. And Wham-O recognized that, geez, if everyone's calling it this, we might as well change the name. And they were able to secure a trademark. So they made a deal with the pie company for the rights to the name? No, actually, the pie company was sort of defunct, and they did spell it differently. Frisbee Pies was F-R-I-S-B-I-E, and the Frisbee Disc is F-R-I-S-B-E-E. So they spelled it a little bit different, and actually the pie company closed its doors

the same year that Frisbee took off. So it's sort of a transition of power from pies to discs. I remember getting my first slip and slide, which I remember was a big whammo toy. In fact, I think at one point it was one of their biggest sellers. How did the slip and slide get started? Well, an upholsterer by the name of Robert Carrier came home one day and saw his eight-year-old son, Mike, with a hose running on their slick painted driveway. And he and his buddies were running and sliding on the concrete. Robert Carrier said, you guys are going to kill yourself.

And he was an upholsterer. So the next day he brought home a long roll of Naugahyde, this vinyl-coated fabric. And he created what would become the slip and slide. He stitched a long tube, which he attached to a hose, and he sewed the other end shut. And then he left spaces in between that long length of tube where the pressure would force water out and lubricate the surface of this fabric. And pretty soon he had kids from all over the neighborhood running and sliding on this fabric, and he brought it to Wham-O and said, you know, this could be made into a toy,

and they made it shorter and made it out of plastic instead of vinyl. But they released the Slip and Slide in 1961 and sold about 9 million of them that year, almost an immediate summer hit. And today it's still on the market going strong. Yeah, I always remember that whenever we got the Slip and Slide out and the neighborhood kids came over, somebody would always get hurt. There'd be a rock underneath there or something, and somebody would always end up getting hurt. Yeah, and nothing killed the grass like flip and slide. My parents would leave them up, and we'd take them down,

and the grass would be dead. But thankfully, my dad didn't care about that. But, yeah, today they're strictly for 12 and under and for a 110-pound kid or less because adults were getting injured because they're too heavy and they can run too fast and slide too far. Also, today's slip and slides have sort of a collection pool, an inflatable part at the end to kind of cushion your landing. But a lot of kids will remember from the 60s and 70s of running and there would be a muddy,

grassy swamp in the end of the slip and slide. So there were some injuries with the toys over the years. Everyone has certainly played with a Super Bowl, but what is it? What is a Super Bowl? Super Bowl, technically, is a compressed polybutadiene. It's a type of rubber that is compressed under a lot of pressure. Wham-O famously advertised 50,000 pounds of compressed energy. But it's really just a high-bounce ball. And a chemist by the name of Norm Stingley invented it in 1965 and brought it to Wham-O.

And he told me that the first ball that he molded blew up when he tried to open the mold. It really was so dense that it just had to get out of the mold and tore itself to pieces. So he patented a way that you could just barely fill the mold and create a Super Bowl. And he brought it in to Spud Malin, one of the founders of Wham-O, and told me the story that he bounced it under the table and made it come back to him, and then he handed it to Spud, and Spud predictably bounced it too hard, and it smashed into the ceiling. And they said, oh, we need to do this.

And they launched the Super Bowl in 1965 and became an immediate hit. Now it's still on the market, but, of course, you can buy really cheap high-bounce balls and coin-operated machines outside of Kmart and Walmart. So the Super Bowl has got a lot of competition. But in 1965, it was the ball to have. When you look at the Wham-O catalog online on their website, in many ways it looks like time stood still, you know, where other toy companies are making very high-tech-y kinds of toys, Wham-O still focuses on the outdoorsy toys, and not a whole lot of them. So why don't they just sell what they have and let it all become part of Hasbro or Mattel?

Why don't they just sell out? Well, they have sort of been bought and sold through the years. The original owners sold the company in 82, and then it was sold a couple more times before its current owners took a hold of it. The real challenge they have, Mike, is when a lot of these legendary toys came out, there was only three TV stations. So you could advertise a 99-cent Super Bowl on national television or a $2 Frisbee on national television,

and you were sure that a huge amount of the population would see it. Well, now there's thousands of channels and there's no way that you could afford to advertise such an inexpensive toy with TV advertising. So really they sell on word of mouth and on their historic classic style. You know, the fact that we've all played with Frisbee and Hula Hoop and Super Bowl. So they have a battle when it comes to promoting their products, and that's probably why the Slip N Slide is their biggest seller, because there's enough of a margin in that toy to afford to do a little more promotion,

whereas Frisbee and super ball and hula hoop sort of have to stand on their legendary status. But they aren't a big player like a Hasbro and Mattel, and they're not as big as they once were. Yeah, they are bigger. They were, of course, their heyday was the 60s because we're focusing on sort of their big hits, but they had a stretch of hits there with Air Blaster Toy, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic in 1970, you know, Monster Maggot comes to mind in the middle of the 60s. So they had a string of hits.

Silly String was a huge hit for them in 1969. It's no longer made by Wham-O. A lot of their classic toys were sort of licensed off to other people. So the 60s were their heyday. So I would agree that nowadays, you know, they sort of are resting on their laurels of some of their bigger hits. But I would say from 1960 to 1970, they really were hitting their stride. Is there a good story about one of their products that really bombed? Well, it's funny you mention that word. I read everywhere in researching this book that they

did a bomb shelter during the weapons race with the Soviet Union. And sure enough, I got access to their archives. And they made, in 1960, a fallout bomb shelter. And I asked Rich Knurr about it. And he said, well, it was really just a bunch of bricks that you bought from us, and then you made your own shelter. That's all it was. And I asked him if he sold many of them. He said, no, not really. And really, in their history, what they did was they'd create a product and run some ads for it like they did with their original slingshot. And if they got orders, then they would make some and sell them. If they didn't get any orders, that was the end of that. So they did a lot of strange toys that were sort of experimental.

They made a bow-making machine called the Bowmatic that looks like it came right out of Ron Popeil's infomercial. That didn't sell too well. So they certainly had their share of flops along with their mega hits. Yeah, but I guess back then you could do that. You could come out with a product, run it up the flagpole without spending too much money and see if there was any interest. That's right. Their slingshot was advertising the back of Field and Stream and, you know, magazines of that era. And that's really where they took off as a mail order company. And then they slowly got into retail and had, you know, sales reps taking their products

throughout the country and then eventually the world. But they started off by just running some that and seeing if they got the response and they were certainly advertisers in the back of comic books uh... in the days of sea monkeys and ant farms they had a product called uh... instant fish which uh... came out right around the time of sea monkeys and it didn't take off because they couldn't get the dormant fish eggs fast enough and that was one of their

famous flops but they were right there with sea monkeys. The two guys that started this, did they retire wealthy? I mean, you would think the people behind the Frisbee and the hula hoop and these iconic kind of toys should have gotten very, very rich. So did they? They did. In 82, they sold their company for $12 million, which was a good amount of money in 82, still today. And it was a lucrative deal, so they took it and they stayed on and worked for Kransko,

the company that purchased them, for a few years. But I think they missed it. You know, shortly thereafter, they sort of probably regretted from talking to the family members that that was their, the love of their life was that company. And from everyone I talked to, all the employees that I spoke to, they really created a family atmosphere. And their legacy really is that, the fact that another legendary product they made called

Hacky Sack in 83 and Frisbee are two toys that really have this culture around them, this sociology around them, where people have married because of these toys. They meet at tournaments. They end up having kids because of this plastic disc or this little beanbag that you're kicking around. And really, the Wham-O legacy is the fact that, you know, marriages and families and that real family atmosphere

carries on even after the founders sold the company. Well, I always think it's interesting, and I hopefully think other people think it's interesting, to hear the backstory of, you know, products that you've known all your life, of toys you've played with. And the story of the Wham-O toy company and their iconic toys is interesting to me and obviously interesting to you because you wrote a book about it. The book is called The Wham-O Superbook, Celebrating 60 Years Inside the Fun Factory. Thank you, Tim.

It is interesting how we all accumulate the same stuff and we all have the same tough time throwing it out when we don't need it anymore. Sometimes it just becomes part of the clutter and when we don't need it anymore. Sometimes it just becomes part of the clutter and we don't even see it anymore. Here are a bunch of things I bet you have that you can toss out right now and free up some space in your home. That extra packet of buttons that came with the shirt that you've already donated to charity. Old holiday cards. All those plastic grocery bags under your sink. Unidentified foil-wrapped things that are in your fridge or freezer. Any calendar in your house that

isn't a calendar from this year. Promotional mugs or glasses that came free with a meal. All the stacks of magazines that you haven't touched in months and will never touch again. Expired coupons. Half-scrawled lists, notes, and post-it reminders that you have no idea what they even mean anymore. Old invitations. Anything you've agreed to take from your parents' house

solely out of guilt. Hobby supplies for hobbies that you've already given up. Paperback novels that you'll never read again. VHS tapes and DVDs you'll never watch again. Printed recipes that you tried, you didn't like, but you saved the recipe anyway. Old pens that don't even work anymore. Discount shopper loyalty cards to places you don't even work anymore. Discount shopper loyalty cards to places you

don't even shop anymore. And all the chopsticks, duck sauce, ketchup, mustard, and soy sauce packets that came with a to-go meal that you'll never ever use. Clean out all that stuff, you probably got a whole lot of new space. And that is something you should know. Please take a moment to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you listen to it on iTunes or TuneIn, Stitcher, Google Play. It's a great way to support this podcast, as is doing business with our advertisers. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks.

And me, Melissa D. Montz, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong?, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice and want to know if they are the villains in the situation. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events and present situations that we might even be wrong in our lives. Spoiler alert, we are actually quite literally never wrong. But wait, there's more.

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Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well,

including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.