Stuff You Should Know - 10ish Worst Business Decisions Ever

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

It’s easy (and kind of fun) to laugh at the misfortune of CEOs and other high up business types when they bring it on themselves – so let’s do that now. Herein lies some of the worst business decisions ever made, hindsight being 20/20, of course.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student teacher relationship on our favorite show. We're Suzy Bannock-A-Rum and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect, where each week we'll revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us and probably you to try to understand what it taught us about the world and our place in it. You're the first person that I've talked to about this for years and years. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Dressing, Bollacing, French dressing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was good. I'm AJ Jacobs and my current obsession is Puzzles. And that has given birth to my new podcast, The Puzzler.

Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly. Oh, man. This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to The Puzzler every day starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know. One of our, really, it's been a while. Top 10 editions where we don't actually do top 10.

Yeah. Some people out there are like, what in the world eats all are going about. And some people are like, oh my gosh, this reminds me of the old days back in the 2000, oh, I don't know, 10s, eights, nine, 13s. Oh yeah, 13 was lousy with top tens I think.

Yeah, we used to do a lot of these top, one of that a lot, but we used to do top tens from the old House of Works website and it seems like they never had 10 great entries. Right. So we would just, on the fly say, oh let's not do this one, but we were better now, we're professionals. Yeah. So we got just on the fly say, oh, let's not do this one. But we we were better now. We're professionals. Yeah. So we got together beforehand and said, well, let's just do these eight. And yeah, it feels weird to know ahead of time

what we're not going to do rather than just saying it in the middle of recording. But I do feel like it is more professional. Let's call growth, my friend. more professional. Let's call growth, my friend. So we are not doing all 10, but there is one that I think really kind of introduces this concept out of the gate chuck. What concept? Well, oh, yeah, I forgot to talk about the concept. We're talking today about bad business decisions, and you could call this the shot and fraud

hour, because if you are kind of, if you take a grim view of CEOs and captains of industry and all that, this is like a chance to really kind of poke fun at people who have made some really terrible decisions over the years. And not all great decisions over the years. Sometimes they're bad, and we're here to talk about eight of them. But hey, the games you've never won or the ones you didn't start playing in. What's that saying? Is that it?

I don't know if that's it, but that totally makes sense to me. I'm saying yes. Okay, good. You only miss the shots you don't take. Yeah, that's much better than mine. But I like yours. I undermine our professional spiel at the beginning just now. So there's a pretty well-worn story about how Alexander Graham Bell

invented the telephone and went to a Western Union and said, hey, you captains of communication. You guys rule the world as far as long distance communication goes. I've got this neat invention. Why don't you buy it from me for $100,000? And the heads at Western Union said that as ridiculous, nobody's going to want this thing, hit the bricks. And Alexander Graham Bell just went off and created his own phone company. And those patents that he received turned out to be what are widely considered the most valuable patents ever issued in the United States.

And some pretty valuable patents have been issued. Like this is nothing to sneeze. We're not talking about some also ran patent. This is the patent of patents, right? You beat out the Squatty Party. Oh, by far. Like by twice as valuable even maybe. Probably more so.

But that it just kind of goes to show you, like it's easy to say, ha ha at Western Union. But it also is a teachable moment, as Oprah would say, because if you dig into the story, you find that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone,

he didn't invent the telephone, so you and I could pick up a receiver and talk to one another on either end. He basically invented it to be the radio before radio. The intent was for you to sit in a room and somebody on the other end of the telephone line in a different city perform a play or read a monologue or play a symphony and you were going to sit there and listen, you weren't supposed to talk back. That was the idea.

If you put it in that context, Western Union doesn't see so dumb anyway. So I think it's a reminder to keep in mind in most of these cases, hindsight is 2020 and that there is a lot of exacerbating circumstances and that nothing's ever at that one-sided, but it's still kind of fun to think about. Yeah, and you know what, a great example of that hindsight

being 2020 is, I'm gonna go with this one, is when Excite did not buy Google. You just called an audible. Everybody remembers Excite, or you may not, but if it sounds familiar and you look up the Excite logo, the immediately probably, if you were of a certain age, but if it sounds familiar and you look up the excite logo, the immediately probably, if you were of a certain age, go, oh yeah, I remember excite.

They didn't really stand out to me when I was researching this until I went and saw it, and I was like, oh yeah, I remember those guys. I did not ever use it, but exci.de.com, believe it or not, is still around. And in one of what will be two bits of serendipity with this episode releasing now. Yeah.

Excite is literally ending their email program this month. I know that's what prompted this episode. Is it really? No. Oh, I had no idea. Well, because what's funny is I made fun of Emily up until, oh, about a year ago, because she's still paid for a Mindspring email.

No. Yes, because she's like, I've had this email for 20 years and everybody's got it. And I can't, like, she was locked in, she felt like, but she waited it out eventually, because I think they may have stopped supporting it as well. I'm not sure. Oh, yeah.

But they still kept taking her money, right? Maybe, I don't know. Anyway, excite, if you go to excite.com today, you will laugh because you will see what is a very old school looking internet site. It's like a list of, it's a new scroll, like a list of headlines. It's got these little icons that I assume

they pay to be on there because it's like Amazon, eBay, State Farm and Casper mattress. Like prominent icons as if this website is the place to go to get to the other places. And then on the left rail you will see a list of things like email, which of course is going to fund a bunch of redirects like whether it goes to acu, whether sports goes to ESPN and then entertainment, travel, finance and games all goes to ask.com. Wow. Apparently, excite was, that's today. I thought excite turned into ask.com, but apparently they're separate.

Oh, okay. They clearly like each other because they link four different things to ask.com. And do you know, of course, ask.com started out as Ask Jeaves. Remember that? I thought it was. I just couldn't remember for sure. So these are search engines. Some of them were Yahoo! Apparently categorized the entire internet by category, strangely enough. But supposedly it was a search engine. It just wasn't super good And there's a story out there chuck that The search engine was purposefully not super good because

These these search engines used to be called web portals that was you would go to excite first Search for what you're searching for and then hopefully while you were there take in a bunch of ads So the longer you stayed on excite before leaving and going off into the internet, the better it was for Excite's bottom line. So their search wasn't that great, and that is an explanation from one of the people who was part of this deal for why Excite passed on Google. Yeah, and they weren't just a search engine. They were a, they're like what they are today still.

They were an aggregator. They had new scrolls and stuff like that. It was almost like a, a front page of a newspaper that you would go to. Right. But a really like super low-fi newspaper. Yeah. So, Google comes around. This is 1999 Larry Page and Sarah Gibran said, all right, we got this thing. It's basically like an algorithm essentially at this point.

And we would like, we could sell it to you, excite for a million bucks. And then they bought it and they said, all right, how about $750,000? and fifty thousand dollars and they said no we're excited why do we need you this weird search engine uh... that isn't even really a search engine yet and i think uh... this is one clear example of hindsight being twenty twenty because no one could have predicted uh... what google would become absolutely not and so the cio of excite george Bell is known as the guy who passed up on buying Google for less than a million dollars, right? But he's like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not some dummy. Like, these guys wanted to gut Excite's search engine and put in the Google search algorithm

instead. And I was dedicated to my engineering team. They had worked really hard to create the search engine that I thought was perfectly fine. And I wasn't about to completely poison our culture for Google. And Google's people said, no, actually what happened was we had a bake off between their search engine and our search engine. And their stuff came back with terrible stuff. Our stuff came back with really good stuff. And they were like, this is too good. People are going to immediately leave excite so we don't want your algorithm. Those are the two competing stories for why this didn't happen.

Amazing. It is amazing. Bad business decision still though? Sure. Absolutely. All right. Where should we go next? We might not even get to aid everybody. That's how exciting these episodes are. I'm going to go with Kodak. I was going to go with Kodak too. Everyone that grew up in the pre-digital revolution remembers Kodak as the photograph company,

the film paper company, the film stock company, founded in 1880 out of New York. They controlled 90% of the film market into the late 70s and about 85% of the camera market and employed about 60,000 people. In the mid-70s, there was a engineer there named Steve Sasson who basically figured out digital photography. He was experimenting with something called a charge-coupled device, a CCD. And he figured out how to translate an image into ones and zeros and built the very first digital camera. It was a 100,000 pixel image, which is pretty cute. This 0.01 megapixels.

It's a little grainy. And went to the bosses and said, Hey, like this is the future guys. This is what we should do. And Kodak said, Oh, well, I'm not so sure about that. So yes, they there were some people in Kodak. They were like, this is dangerous, man. We're like, our money is in print photographs. Our money is in regular cameras. And there was another group in Kodc those like this guys write see sassons right this is the future and they did invest billions of dollars in developing

a digital camera whole outfit and those conservative forces manage to keep it back keep it back and then finally by the time codec joined the digital camera revolution they had been passed by so not only did they miss the digital camera revolution despite having invented it, they also wasted billions of dollars on their digital camera division

that never got to really get a good start. So it was just a complete waste. Like this is a genuinely bad business decision, Chuck. Yeah, but they had the disc camera. Remember those? Yes. That was the big code act product that was, um, wasn't digital, but it was a little film wheel. It was a disc. And it was a little flat camera.

I remember that it was all the rage, all the kids wanted them. It was a very big deal. I see that now. Yeah. That does kind of take me back. Yeah. Did you have one? No. Fisher price made one. Did you have that one? No. Yeah. I didn't have either either. Yeah. You and I had similar upbringing. So we didn't get the best choice. No. But apparently, those, at the early 90s, when digital cameras came out, they're like $1,000, but they could only store like eight pictures at a time. You could take eight pictures and then you had to plug it into your computer and upload

those eight pictures, format the disc, and then start over again. Yeah, God bless you, early adopters, but it usually pays in my experience to wait a little bit on the tech to figure itself out. For sure. Like the first flat screen TVs, remember how expensive those were? Oh my god. But it's the early adopters who drive the prices down because they are buying these things, you know what I mean? Hey, I mean, they walk the righteous path.

So just to wrap it all up, Kodak ended up laying off 50,000 employees. And in 2012, they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. And they're still around, but they basically make printer cartridges and motion picture film stock. Yeah, which is also not used very often anymore. Nope. Poor Kodak. Poor Kodak. Time for a break.

I was going to say the same thing, man. We are really sympathetic to this episode. All right, we'll be right back. I was gonna say that too. Oh! This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bannock-Harram, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker.

Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student teacher relationships, and one, very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe, because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand what these moments taught us about the world and our place

in it. I want you to really smell the ax body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. OK. And that's not a long story. Not a long story. Not a love story.

It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to yourining Sea. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun. I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my new podcast, The Puzzler, Dressing, Dressing.

Oh, Frick's dressing. Exactly. Ah, that's good. That's good. We are living in the golden age of puzzles. And now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears for 10 minutes or less. Every day on the puzzler, short and sweet. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is, and now I definitely know what this is.

This is so weird! This is fun! Let's try this one. Listen to the puzzler every day starting October 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's awful, and I should have seen it coming! Okay Katie, rapid fire. What do you think about when you think about Black storytelling? Joy, history, Tony Morrison, long novels. Zines. Very complex stories. BTS Awards. Hood Motifs. Unreliable narrators. Absurdity. Movie Night. People yelling at the screen. Residing Maya Angel's poetry for poetry competitions. Sang Lines that you know from a movie that you've seen a million times already in tandem with a person in the movie. Ooh, or saying lines in your normal conversation that you got from TV.

Yeah, obviously. It's hard to condense a story that's so inexpensive into such a small space. It's cool though. That's why we have the podcast. I'm Katie. And I'm Eves. And on on theme, we tell stories about black stories. Oh, you're getting really met of their Katie. Listen to on theme

every Thursday, starting on September 28th on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. There's a place beyond this place. A middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nadir and the zenith. For some is a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. touch the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to Hip Hop Horror Stories. I'm your host, Belly.

And each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too. Everywhere I look, I slow something. And I looked closer and noticed there was a footage figure. And whatever it is, it's like K-Bit, it became reality. Listen to hip-hop horror stories starting October 3rd on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, I'm going to pick one and I'll spend the big wheel. Okay. Oh, it landed on Western Union again. So we're going to have to go over that one over again. Okay. All right. So Western Union, now we won't do that. Let me just move at one space to this JC penny one. How about that? Oh, all right. I like this one because it really kind of gets to the bottom of some some tricks that closing retailers use actually all retailers do, but some closing retailers are particularly guilty of it. That's right. Uh, we were talking about the Clothier, JC Penny, uh, which in 2012 hired a shiny new CEO named Ron Johnson, who had made quite the name for himself in business

in retail as, uh, two things. First, the guy who, who hipped up target. Oh, okay. Remember growing up target was like, whatever target was not, you you know It's kind of like a came art thing Mm-hmm, and then all of a sudden tarjet was like this cool hip awesome place Mm-hmm is because of Ron Johnson's efforts largely gotcha then he went to work at Apple and he is the guy He he was their VP of retail. He's the guy who basically oversaw You could say invented the Apple store and the genius bar and stuff like that. Right, yeah, so I mean, like he was legit.

JC Penney was like, come save us. Like we're really flagging. Like even compared to some of these other retailers that do the same thing, like TJ Maxx or Walmart or whatever, we're getting no love whatsoever. So Ron Johnson came in and looked around and he's like, this industry is shameful. Like, basically what he'd walked into was an industry of clothing retailers that would sell

items that were say a $10 item for $10. But on the price tag, it would say that it originally started out as like $50 or something, right? It's up off. And yes, at one point, they charged $50 for it, but it was so that they could later market down in a sale that probably took place the day after that thing arrived and was sold for $50. So that means there were some suckers out there who actually paid $50 for that $10 shirt. But the way that they got you was by not only marking it down,

but having a reason to mark it down. They would have sale after sale after sale. Hundreds of sales, different sales in a year. And it still wasn't working. And Ron Johnson was like, this is desperate. And we shouldn't do this anymore. Yeah, there were coupons even. And people,

you know, Americans eat that stuff up. If you hear half off blowout sale this weekend, your mouth starts watering a little bit, and you think, wait a minute, I can get something that should cost twice as much, for half as much, or I can bring in this coupon and get two things for one thing. It's unbelievable, and we still fall for these tricks. We all do

So he said no, here's what we'll do We're gonna just basically out ourselves and say you know now what we're gonna do is it's called fair and square every day is our new pricing system It means you don't need a sale you don't need coupon. Our stuff is just gonna be inexpensive all the time and people hated it. Right away people started complaining. They love their sales, they love their deals. He would call them on the phone personally.

He wouldn't do that. And say, you dummy, don't you understand? You're paying the same price. It's just cheap all the time now. People didn't understand that. They didn't want to hear that. I saw one person that said that he seemed to almost have a disdain for his customer base because behind closed doors were saying they're dumb and they need to be educated and like how can these dumb-dums not understand that cheaper clothes every day is a better

situation? Yeah, because studies have found that people will pay more for a cheaper thing. If they think it's more valuable, then they would pay for the same thing. If it were marked, they would pass up something that was actually the same thing at a lower price. And the reason why is because a $10 shirt seems cheap

and maybe cheaply made and probably just not a good shirt. But a $50 shirt that you can buy for $10 was valuable to begin with. And then yes, not only is it a deal, you could make the case that it's a steal and people love that. Like you said, there's a thread of vain of America that is crazy for that kind of stuff.

And Ron Johnson found out the hard way that when you go up against that vein of Americans, you lose every time and he lost pretty big in 17 months. Yeah, I got two words for you, my friend, Outlet Mall. Yeah, that really says it all about America. Yeah, but I don't even know how they operate, but it's gotta be something like this without letmals, right?

Very much, but also there's a lot of them that are like crypto outlet malls. They're not outlet stores. They're just regular stores in an outlet mall. It's BS. If you're a developer of an outlet mall, you're letting stores in there that are actually not selling their outlet stuff, but it's just a regular store, you're at fault. It's on your your hands. Blood is on your hands So what this got Ron Johnson was what is known as the worst quarter in retail history Which was a store to store 32% drop? Wow Quarter over quarter That that's just a death knell for him he only made it up believe seventeen

months uh... and that was it and they came back in and said hey we're gonna go back to our fake pricing scheme and people loved it and sure on johnson's like that's alright thanks for the multi-million dollar golden and parachute everybody yeah man he made he supposedly made like $400, $500 million in livestock. God, so he didn't even need this job.

No, I'm sure. He just wanted to show all this loser Americans what the deal was. He still got a job, he's doing something else like two years after this. Like, why is this guy working? Go retire on your island or something. So there's a, there was an ad that JC Penny came out with like that ran very It was very short-run Intentionally, but it basically

Pleaded for their customers to come back. They're like we know we made mistakes We're getting back to our roots. We love you. Please come back again like they were begging their customers to come back And apparently it worked because this is another common theme that we'll see. And I think this is a good segue into the new Coke's debacle. Ooh. When you take away something that people love but have come to take for granted,

they will not only fight for it, they'll come back for it in droves when you give it back to them. New Coke the end. Pretty much, yeah. So of course this has got to be in there. If you grew up in the 80s, like we did, you remember a time where Pepsi threatened Coke a little bit,

not literally. Like Dr. Pepsi didn't come up to Mr. Coke's door and say, listen, I'm gonna take you out back and you're behind the witch head and take care of you. The company threatened Coke because their sales were doing pretty good. It was a different taste. I think it was a little sweeter.

I don't even drink Pepsi, so I'm not really sure. But I think it had a sweeter taste. I don't know if they were winning the Coke Wars, but they are the Cola Wars, but they were edging in on Coke's dominance. It was Chuck, it was that choice of a new generation campaign. Yeah. That was that was what had done it. They got Michael Jackson. They got Madonna. They

got I think Geraldine Ferraro did one of these commercials like that's advertising goals. These were right. These were just internationally famous commercials. And so Pepsi had kind of come out and nowhere, and was eating Coke's launch all of a sudden. Coke had do caucus. Big mistake. Yeah, Dan Quail. So Coke was a little worried. They saw the writing on the Serpie writing on the wall. And they said, all right, under the behind closed doors,

let's start rejigging our recipe here that had been around, you know, since it was, you know, sold in that very first pharmacy, very, very classic. That's a little hint of what's to come, very classic, classic taste. And for a couple of years, their engineers mixed up little batches. They did taste tests. They let people taste them. People are like, I like the taste of this better. And so in 1985 and April of 1985, new coke came out with a redesign can, redesign, you

know, they kept their colors and stuff. And the, I'm not sure if did the font completely change or was it just sort of a modified version of the old script? I think the new was slightly different, but the Coke was the original. Okay, but at any rate, they unveiled a new Coke, and it was a not only a tremendous flop, but it costs a lot of anger and people hoarding their old Cokes, and people were just like, how can you change an American institution like this without

even asking anybody, even though they had done testing. They had done tons of testing, and the tests came back roundly in favor of this new formula for Coke. But Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink, apparently pointed out that if you're doing a taste test, you're not sitting there drinking a whole can. You're just taking a little sip of something

and comparing it to a little sip of something else. And so it's possible that that new Coke really tasted terrible if you drank the whole can. It was too sweet. The explanations I saw were more that it was psychological. People didn't like messing with their beloved Coke. Number one.

And I saw that kind of wrapped up in a quote from somebody that was, that they said the biggest mistake Coke made was telling the public about the change to the recipe. Because people were like, you can't mess with my stuff. I don't care what it tastes like. And of course, it's not going to possibly taste good because you're messing with my original Coke. So people just kind of turned on it from the outset. Well, like they think they should have just changed the recipe and just left it and that said anything.

This guy was saying, if you're going to change the recipe, they shouldn't have said anything because that happens from time to time. But then the bigger problem was that you kind of touched on. They didn't stop and ask their customers, do you want a new Coke? They just made a terrible business decision based on fear of Pepsi getting some of their market share all of a sudden, they went and completely rejiggered the formula. That was their response to that.

Yeah, and it didn't last long. It was less than three months later, a new Coke was gone and they added classic, Coca-Cola classic. And I remember, and I didn't even drink a lot of soda back then, even, but I remember it being just almost like this nationwide relief setting. It was really a big deal and it sounds so funny now. If you're some kid who didn't live through this, it really, like, it was big, big news and sort of captured America's attention for a little while. And Coke Classic coming back was like an old, long-lost friend reappearing at the front

door. And eventually, of course, the word Classic was dropped, and they were just like, can we just forget about all of that? And we're just Coke forever. But that lasted for a while. There was many years where you differentiated by saying Coke Classic, even after a new Coke was long gone, you still referred to Coke as Coke Classic for a while, and then it finally went back to Coke. And to do it. Is it time for another message break?

Buh. Sure. OK. Chuck said sure. Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette Karam, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker. Every week we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student-teacher relationships and one very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic as you do.

I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. And that's not a lot of story.

It's not a love story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun.

I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is Puzzles. And that has given birth to my new podcast the puzzler Dressing Dressing Frick's dressing exactly We are living in the golden age of puzzles and now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered Straight to your ears for 10 minutes or less.

Every day on the puzzler, short and sweet. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is, and now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird! This is fun! Let's try this one. Listen to the puzzler every day starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's awful, and I should have seen it coming! There's a place beyond this place. A middle ground, between the light and the darkness.

The nature and the zenith. For some, a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to Hip Hop Horror Stories. I'm your host, Belly. In each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too. Everywhere I look, I slow something. And I looked closer and noticed there was a footage figure. Whatever it is, it's like K-Bit, it's like

it became reality. Listen to hip-hop horror stories starting October 3rd on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Katie, rapid fire. What do you think about when you think about Black storytelling? Joy, history, Tony Morrison, long novels, Zines, very complex stories, BTS, hood motifs,reliable narrators. Obsertity. Movie Night. People yelling at the screen. Residing

My Angel's Poetry for Poetry Competitions. Saying lines that you know from a movie that you've seen a million times already in tandem with a person in the movie. Ooh, or saying lines in your normal conversation that you got from TV. Yeah, obviously, it's hard to condense a story that's so inexpensive into such a small space. It's cool though, that's why we have the podcast. I'm Katie. And I'm Eves.

And on on theme, we tell stories about black stories. Ooh, you're getting really meta there, Katie. Listen to on theme every Thursday, starting on September 28th, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Chuck, you're up. What's next? What are we going to do next? Well, my Amigo, we are going to go with the Blockbuster video. Oh, yes, my favorite. It's another boy, the 80s, was pretty rough on some companies that didn't see the riding

on the wall because Blockbuster, if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, well, you know, if you're a teenager at least in the 80s by that time, you spent a lot of time, we've talked about it before, browsing your early Friday evenings with your friends at Blockbuster video, looking over the shelves, reading the back of those boxes, the backs of the boxes and standing by the door at that bin because you just could not get your copy of Excalibur

and some nerd walks up and dumps it through the slot and he grab it before it even hits that bin. And the employee says, you're really not supposed to do that. That was a great blockbuster employee question. You do it anyway. And blockbuster ruled the video market except for you know The which I still love that the charming mom and pop so I had a oh, yeah Family at our church even ran their own little video store and that was a good business for a while

But Blockbuster eventually would gobble most of those up. Yeah to me Blockbuster was a 90s thing the 80s were Mom and pop places where you'd actually rent the VCR when you also rented Beverly Hills cop. Yeah. Video shaker, video house, video barn. And there's just as an aside, I wonder I want to know if anybody out there knows what the name of this phenomenon is, but whenever I walked into a blockbuster, that whole mental list of movies that I wanted to rent just vaporized. I like the test takers syndrome. It would be like I had just walked into a building for the first time, let alone like a blockbuster video.

Like I had no idea what I was doing totally and over my head. And I would invariably walk out with some movie that I just didn't really want to see, but I got to rent something in a canner mouge. Yeah, pretty much. I spared myself that one, but yes, that's generally correct. And then you get home and you're like,

man, I went in there for gleaming the queue and I walk out with Turner and Hooch. That's exactly right. That was kind of the wrap-up of it, wasn't it? That you remember after you get back home, it's the worst or it was the worst. It would be still the worst if Blockbuster were around, but it's not because of that business decisions.

That's right. If you remember in the late 90s, there was a company called Netflix that said, hey, we're going to start mailing DVDs to people. So you don't even have to go to the store. You can get on this thing called the internet and you can look up the movie you want and you can order that DVD to be shipped to your house and then you can just drop it in the mail afterward. We failed to mention, by the way, I didn't know this.

Blockbuster was making about half a billion dollars a year in late fees. Man, they were a lot more consumable. That was a big part of their business. But Netflix is like, and those late fees, like you can keep these things for a long time and they would eventually say, but you know what, maybe we should try and,

I think there was a merger idea, right, unless of a sale. What do you mean? Oh, with Netflix. With Netflix, they try and emerge with Blockbuster and say, hey, why don't you let us take over and start doing mailing stuff for you as well? Yeah, that was the impression I had.

That Netflix wanted to kind of slide in and become part of Blockbuster and help Blockbuster do its own thing And blockbuster said no twice at least yeah for 50 million bucks by the way Yeah, and Netflix by the way is valued at about 200 billion today. So 50 million dollars Was pretty pretty good price and that's not just because Netflix was an unknown Netflix had already shown that it was a proven success, but it hadn't been around long enough for Blackbuster to see the writing on the wall. They just thought, I think John Anticoco, Antiocho, the CEO, considered not just Netflix

niche, but the internet was still niche in 2000 to the CEO. So Netflix shrugged and went on their merry way, And blockbusters just started to fall further and further and further behind. Yeah, I was actually a member of the blockbuster DVD mailing program when they finally got around to copying Netflix. Yeah, I didn't jump on Netflix. I was like, a blockbuster loyalist. I was like, I'm going to use their thing because it's the same basically. And I don't, I think it may be eventually when

Blockbuster stopped, I did jump to Netflix DVD. And yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. But I mentioned in the first, one of the first segments that there was a bit of serendipity, two bits of serendipity, that excite finished their email program this month, Netflix this week just announced the shutdown of their DVD side. I know. That's what prompted this episode. Oh, I'm not following for that again. 25 years of those DVD mailings, they just shut it down. They said, they said, you can send them back up until September 28th, and after that, we're not going to ask, which basically means, keep what you got. Oh, yeah. And not only that, but to liquidate their DVDs, they were selecting random customers and

they're just sending them 10 DVDs. Oh, wow. And saying like, here, have fun. Apparently 0.5% of their revenue these days, and just quickly to go over their, their monies, they Netflix is a rough company to be invested in. I think I don't know much about this stuff, but in November 21, they peaked it about $302 billion. The next summer, they crashed all the way down to $80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 when they, they like basically doubled their streaming fee, their monthly fee to stream.

Everybody was like, forget to you and then people would come back. All right. So you were saying that Netflix was giving way their DVDs because they knew they didn't need them. Right, great. That's such a wonderful thing to do. Blackbuster did the opposite of that.

And I saw that it was very famously described as failing at failing. Because as it was clear that Blockbuster was doomed, and it was clear for years before anybody actually, before the last Blockbuster closed. Rather than basically pumping all the money out to shareholders, which apparently is what a sociopathic corporation is supposed to do.

They brought a succession of CEOs in to try to save the place, and those CEOs just spent hand over fist money that they wasted on these schemes that did nothing but waste money for Blockbuster to try to resurrect the brand. And then finally, after I think bankruptcy in 2010, it was bought for a song. I don't even think it was a good song by Dish. And there's still a blockbuster now. Dish is one of their on-demand groups of channels. It's called Blockbuster at home.

So blockbusters are still around. Check if you're a blockbuster loyalist. Get yourself Dish. And you can watch on-demand movies to blockbuster at home. Amazing. Uh, it was, was it the song Escape? That's a bad song. What song is that? If you like the K.A. the Pini Kalata song. Oh, that song is not only bad, it's morally reprehensible. It's awful. And I just pointed this out to a group of friends this last summer who liked it including Emily. I was like, you've never listened to the word to this song. Yeah. She's like, well,

not really. I know the chorus. I said, it's about a guy that wants to cheat on his wife so bad because he can't stand her that he puts a one ad to go find some new lady and he hits it off with her and it turns out being his wife. Yeah. and he's like, great, things are fixed. Yeah, exactly. Because in the 70s, that's all you need. Is that in a little, you know, a bottle of, I don't know, Bacardi and some pills? That's right.

The 70s were great, but the people in the 70s were the worst. All right, we got two more. Which one are you gonna pick? I know which one are you gonna pick. You don't know which one are you gonna pick. You do not. Very. Yes, you do. Just go ahead and pick it for me.

We have, you're probably gonna say ET. That's right. And technically we have three left if you wanna go for it, but okay. Do we have three? What else are we missing? I can't say it'll ruin the surprise. Well, we agreed not to do that one though.

You wanna do it again? No, no, we didn't do the AOL time order one. Oh. Yeah. Okay, let's skip that. There is one thing I wanted to say about that. All right. At the time in 1999, AOL was worth $200 billion.

And I was like, wow, that's a lot. How much is Apple worth these days? In 2023, Apple's worth two and three quarter trillion dollars. Wow. Trillion dollars, that's how much that company is worth. To more than one trillion dollars, almost three trillion dollars, that's amazing.

And this is 24 years later. That's how gobsmackingly much like just money has increased by then by now. Crazy. So I just wanted to point that out, it's just insane. All right, well, ET, the movie. Oh, one other thing. I want to go on record that we should do an episode on AOL and the beginning of the internet, because it is so interesting. I mean, talking about Excite and AOL and I remember the first time I heard the word

Google, I literally remember that very first time. Yeah, you remember it, you used to say like, I'm feeling lucky. It was a production manager named Kevin Edge. If anyone knows Kevin, tell Kevin, he said, hi, he in a production office on a TV commercial in LA in the early 2000s, he said there were Google and I went, what? And he said, it's a search engine. I know what, excuse me, Kevin. No, Kevin was great.

You say you mean a web portal? Uh, ET colon, the extra terrestrial, uh, very popular movie, some might say, some might say it's a classic. Some might say that they still love Reese's PCs because of that classic movie. Yes, so I said Reese's PCs, I think, but you know what I mean. Yeah, to me, that might be the greatest mass-produced candy of all time.

Oh, what? I love Reese's pieces. I can eat them by the bucket full on 412. I love them too. I love them too. But they've only been around since 1978. Did you know that? Yeah, I mean, I remember when they came out, my friend. Okay. I was not quite aware. I was two years old at the time. Give me a break. But I came out. I was seven. I was candy central. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So, but yeah, by the time I was seven, I was

like, give me these things. Yeah. In 1978, when they came out, they actually did pretty good. Hershey's made them. And then they crested and peeked and then started to decline really quickly. And so Reese's pieces appeared to have run their course. And people say quite reasonably that it's possible. Reese's pieces wouldn't be around anymore. Were it not for ET eating recesses pieces on screen and the irony of the whole thing is that it was originally supposed to be M&Ms and M&Ms wouldn't bite they said we don't know what this ET thing

is we're not going to give you a dollar for it. ET was based on a book. There's either a saw somebody describe it as novelization, so it's possible that they made a book version of it. Yeah, that's what it was. Okay. Well, in that, apparently, in the original novel that was made from the movie, it's M&M's that E.T. eats, not Reese's Pieces.

Yeah, okay. That's a nice little nugget. I read the novelization of Raiders of the Lost Ark. How was it? It was great. Did it differ from the movie at all? Or was it just basically the movie in book form? It is the movie in book form,

but there's novelizations. I read a couple of them back then. They're always a little bit different. They had extra details because it's a book. And it was kind of fun. I'm sure they still do that, don't they? I think so. Maybe? I'm sure Marvel does. If you can't they? I think so, probably.

I'm sure Marvel does. If you can make a dime off of it, Marvel does. Yeah, that's a good point. So depending on who you talk to, there are different stories. I think this is one of those things where, when something works out so well, everybody you interview later on was like, it was really kind of my idea.

Because Steven Spielberg is is I saw the interview the words came out of his mouth that he said you know my favorite candy was M&M's and so I thought when M&M's passed I thought well what's my second favorite candy? It's Reese's pieces. I saw other things say it was when a Spielberg's kids say that was his favorite. I saw others that said there was this guy named Steve Adler who was the vice president of merchandising for a company called MCA, the merchandising corporation of America, which was a subsidiary of Universal. It was kind of like the early days of movie merchandising period.

Like Star Wars kind of busted it wide open a few years before. Oh, yeah. So this was sort of a newish thing and like brand placement and getting money for that kind of thing. So Steve Adler was a merchandising VP at MCA and he says that it was his kid who said, I love Reese's pieces. And that kid was me. Exactly.

So that's how it ended up. Like her, she said, no, or, sorry, M&M Mars said, no, we're not going to, we're not going to spend a million dollars. That was the deal. Universal said this, this alien that everybody's going to love or just share of it is going to eat either M&M's or Reese's pieces. It comes down to who wants to pay a million dollars in advertising, like spend a million dollars in marketing

in return for basically being part of the ET marketing blitz. Who wants to do that? And M&M said, no, we're not going to do that. And Reese has said, let's give this a try. There was a guy named Jack Doubt, who is a business development VP, who was basically the person who decided to take that risk

and spend a million dollars, which at the time, there was a lot of money. We're talking about 1980, 81, 82 dollars. So it's worth like two and a half million dollars today at least. And, like ET is, this is where the hindsight is 2020 thing kicks in. Like, they didn't see a script. Nobody knew what ET was. Aliens up to that point were not lovable or hoggable.

They were creepy and weird. So there really was a risk that Jack Dow took. And he can take a victory lap for making that decision. Yeah. And ET is, you know, the rest is history, as they say, because ET is now a top 30 all-time grocer domestically for the United States. It's a green grocer. I went down the box office mojo rabbit hole out of curiosity because it's just littered

with avatars, and and Avengers and stuff like that. And ET, if you dig in, it is the number two all time movie that is not a franchise movie. Nice. So not bad, second only to Titanic. Oh, okay. And guess what? Barbie's already at number 15 all time.

I know, that's pretty great. Isn't that amazing? I finally saw Oppenheimer too. My god, it's a good movie. Yeah, how are your ears? They're fine. I saw it in like RBX or RPX or DMX or something like that where like it shakes the seats and everything. I'm like this is unnecessary. It's loud. Yeah. Also just for you movie trivia buffs, if someone asks you a trivia question about non-franchise box office Titanic then ET and the number three all-time movie non-franchise little orphanage Passion of the Christ What?

Yeah, wow Speak movies like 300 and something million bucks, but that's I mean that's considering it even was boy-cotted by Lots of churches around the world and that still made that much. Well, maybe why? No publicity. No, there's not just thing as bad publicity. That's right.

The swings you don't take are the ones that you miss the most. All right, let's finish up here with a little quick, we'll go through this quickly. Monday night football, set the TV landscape for you in the 1960s. There were three main networks in BC, CBS and ABC. ABC was in last place. There was also a fledgling network from Howard Hughes, which I didn't realize, called Hughes Sports Network. That was ahead of its time. Very much ahead of its time. And even though they showed

like bullying and stuff, but at one point, the national football league decided, you know what? There's Pete Rosel was a commissioner back then very forward thinking guy. He said, I think we should have a prime time football game. How about Friday night? And they said, no, that'll mess up high school football. And he said, Saturday night, and they said,, that'll mess up high school football and he said Saturday night and they said no There's actually a log against that because I forgot about that. So he said all right We already played on Sunday. He said how about Monday night and they said no one's gonna care They played the first Monday night game in 1964 but it was not televised. And then they had, I think, CBS and NBC had, because CBS

had the NFL, NBC had the AFL before the merger in 1970. And they each tried their hand at Monday Night Games, a couple each during 68, 67 through 69. but none of those were televised, and they finally got together and said, these things need to be on TV. Yeah, so they started putting them on TV, and apparently one of the reasons why is because you said, you know, some of those Monday night games, the early ones weren't televised,

but people still went to them. They turned out like aces. So it was very obvious that there was a market for this. So putting it on TV was It was not a no-brainer. It was still very risky, but there was there was reason to think it might take off So I think CBS and NBC since they already had a relationship with the NFL They got first first refusal from P Rosel Yeah, and NBC said that would mean we're preempting Carson. And apparently we're too afraid to even bring it up.

So no, we're passing on that. No, Carson, I'll have you killed CBS said, are you crazy? We're getting great ratings with the Doris Day show and laughing. Yeah. We can't get rid of those for some football game. And ABC just was like, you know, that that nerdy kid in class that has their hand up so hard, it's about to be dislocated from their shoulder and they're just wiggling in their seat. That's what ABC was doing.

And finally, P. Roselle is like, yes, ABC, you can have it. That's right. And, you know, it turned out to be a very big deal. There was a guy named Roon Arlidge there that kind of spearheaded this project for ABC sports. Flash your graphics, more cameras, more camera angles, and slow-mo and stuff like that. Like using all the sort of newer technology more than they had before. You have to say so.

And the biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for the next three minutes, And the biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for the next three minutes, the biggest change was they all of a sudden had three, a three person broadcasting team, which had never been done. It was always just a color commentator and a play by play person. But in this case, they had, they play by play guy and Keith Jackson, only there for one year, then replaced by Frank Eifford. And then Dandy Don Meredith was the color guy. Very, he was an actor, former Cowboys QB,

handsome, just great in the color position. And then, how could you sell? Well, explain to people who don't know what you're talking about what the color position is. Oh, well, the play-by-play is the person that goes, and then he takes the ball on the four-yard line and cuts it outside and runs it down to the three. He tackles hard by number 85.

And then the color guy comes in and says, I got to tell you man, the way they're playing tonight, it looks like they're pretty inspired. I don't know if the cheerleaders are getting them all pumped up or what? Oh, that's great. Okay, then who was Kosell? Well, Kosell was Kosell. He was, we should do a full podcast on him. The guy is a legend, an amazing broadcaster. He was fired and disgrace at one point, but quite a story. But Kosoel was just,

he was sort of a surbic and he would make fun of players and people and teams and... Oh, he was the Dennis sort of plastic time. Well, Koso was so much better. But you know, Koso was very famous for sort of verbally sparring with Ali and going toe-to-toe with Ali in interviews and just a great broadcaster while he was doing his job. He was the third sort of wild card and he and Don Meredith would go at it and when Gifford came in, that was really a solid team and they it was a huge hit I think it's still one of the highest

rated TV series period on television. Yes, and it's one of the longest running too, although it started in 1970, right? Yeah, do we even say what day was it? Well, it was a Monday in 1970. It was the Browns Jets and the Browns 1-31-21. I know that. And it's been going ever since then. So this thing's been on for 53 years, but it's it's a baby compared to some of the longest running TV shows in America. General Hospital started in 1936. Guiding light came the year after, Sesame Street's been on even longer. So it's old, but there's older, just FYI.

Yeah, for sure. And it bears pointing out the reason they went with the jets was because the guy from ABC was like, we have to get Joe Namath on TV for this first game. Because Joe Namath was a huge football star with the AFL and then when they merged in the NFL. And just a huge presence. He was a sex symbol. He was on the brainy bunch.

He was like, he and Bert Reynolds were like the two hot guys of the moment and they had to get Namath in there. So that's why they went with the Jets. Smart. Well, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, it's our episode on Monday Night Football, everybody. So if you want to know more about all this stuff,

we would say head on over to how stuff works. You can read the mystery one we left out. And by the way, this was written by our very own Dave Ruse. So hats off to our Ruse for that. Thank you. We just have to email Dave separately and make fun of him for calling Reese's Pieces peanut butter and chocolate candies.

That was, that was written by somebody who's clearly never had Reese's Pieces. I mean, technically you may can say that candy shell is, no, chocolate. Nope, not at all. No? There's not a drop of chocolate in Reese's Pieces. Well, I don't mean the ingredients,

but, I mean, isn't it known as a chocolate gel? No, it's a candy-coated peanut butter candy, peanut butter confection. What about M&M's? Is that a chocolate gel? Yeah, totally. No, it's a candy-coated chocolate inside, and then sometimes there's an additional inner nugget

of peanut or, God knows what now, but originally, all but original stuff. It was candy coated chocolate. This is a candy coated peanut butter candy. I mean, I know what it is. I just didn't know if that was the thinnest proxamation of chocolate. Nope. Well, I think we already kind of kicked it over to House the Fork, so that means, of course,

everybody. It's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. over to house the fork so that means of course everybody it's time for listener mail. Hey guys, love, love, love, love the show. Started listening when I was working my very first job after graduation during the pandemic. Spotify kept prompting me to try to listen to stuff you should know, and I thought the title was condescending at first. I truly thought the podcast would be telling me about the stuff I already should know at this point in my life.

Here's how to fold laundry or here's how to do your taxes. The jokes on me though, because I think one of the first episodes I listened to was about Satanism. Why don't you know about that already? Exactly. At this point, wherever I started to get into something, I'd do a quick search on the podcast first to see if you've covered it before checking out Google. You two are great teachers to make every single topic a hoot. So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into sailing I've covered it before checking out Google. You two are great teachers to make every single topic a hoot. So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into sailing, and I saw you haven't even

skimmed the surface. Ooh. I think you should look into sailing, guys, because it's really interesting. Sneak preview, the wind is technically pulling, not pushing your boat. Yeah, the buckbuster Fuller said the wind sucks instead of blows. Psh, see, you can't teach you anything. You know that stuff already. You may taught me that, so I got a head tip her.

Yeah, well, and he taught her, and he taught us all about the geodesic gum. That's right. And synergy chuck. That's right. Ooh, all right, that's from Sam. And Sam sailing reeks to me of one of those that we would flail a bit and just get crushed by sailing enthusiast. Yes.

But maybe we'll do it anyway. Well, yeah, why spare sailors? We've done it to chess players. European football players, everybody. Soccer, surfers. Right. If you want to get in touch with us like Sam did and suggest some topic that you know about that you'd like us to ruin for you, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.

If IHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student teacher relationship on our favorite show. We're Suzy Bannockerim and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect, where each week we'll revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us,

and probably you, to try to understand what it taught us about the world and our place in it. You're the first person that I've talked to about this for years and years. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. Okay Katie, quick, rapid fire. What do you think about when you think about Black Stories? Tony Morrison, Long Novels. Zines. Very complex stories. Movie Night with popcorn. Lineage and history. BTO Awards. Hood Motifs. I'm reliable narrators. I'm Katie. And I'm Eves. And on on theme, we tell stories about Black stories.

Listen to on theme every Thursday, starting on September 28th, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. There's a place beyond this place. For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead. Yet for others, it's something else entirely. Welcome to hip-hop horror stories.

I'm your host, Belly. And each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of their normal experiences. This is Belly. Listen to Hip-Hop Horror Stories starting October 3rd on the I-Hart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Dressing. Dressing. Oh, French dressing. Exactly. That was good. I'm AJ Jacobs and my current obsession is Puzzles.

And that has given birth to my new podcast, The Puzzler. Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly. Oh, man. This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to the puzzler every day starting October 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.