Stuff You Should Know - How the Maori Work

Episode Date: October 15, 2013

It's a familiar theme, an indigenous group's culture falls apart when exposed to European ideals, weapons and disease. For the Maori of New Zealand, however, a determined effort to preserve and revive its ancient identity has started to pay off. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the complexities of Maori culture. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just fill and chill. Available at participating retailers and at epson.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Jerry with her face tattoos.

Hipster. Yeah. Mowry wannabe. Yeah. Mowry? I thought it was Mayory. It's Mowry. Yeah, we just looked up the pronunciation.

I was sure Chuck was right because he picked this article. But it looks like Mayory. It seems like that should be an acceptable pronunciation as well. I know. You know we have lots of Kiwi fans there in New Zealand. Yeah, hey everybody. And so this is for you. And if you're not from New Zealand.

All the other ones you shouldn't be listening to. Just this one. If you're not from New Zealand then I think you'll enjoy it anyway because Indigenous tribes are interesting. Plus, those of you outside of New Zealand won't know how much stuff we got wrong. That's right. Yeah. So Chuckers.

Yes. Were you familiar with the Mowry ahead of time? Did you know much of this stuff from this article? No. I've seen the movie Once Were Warriors and that was my introduction to them many years ago. Is that right? Yeah.

That was the one that won a bunch of Academy Awards, right? Or I'm thinking of Whale Rider. You're thinking of Whale Rider. But yeah, Once Were Warriors is not a feel good movie. Is it a documentary? No. It's just a regular narrative feature but it shows sort of the dark side of the modern Mowry with like propensities for violence and crime and alcoholism.

So basically it's like, I guess anyone who hears the story in the US will be like, hmm, this sounds familiar. An Indigenous group pushed around and almost completely obliterated by Europeans. Yeah. And then later on, perhaps suffering from alcoholism and further marginalization, trying to hang on to a culture that is not, well, it exists but I don't want to spoil anything. Well, I think, okay. So the extent that I came to figure out my awareness of the Mowry culture was my familiarity

with Mike Tyson's face tattoo and the fact that there's such a thing as tribal tattoos and that those are mostly rooted in Mowry tattooing. And in fact, the Mowry, they didn't necessarily come up with tattooing. They're directly descended from the people who did but they had a specific kind of tattoo, a specific method of tattooing, I should say, that kind of gains them the status of the toughest tattoo people around and that they used not needles but chisels to do their tattoos, which are called the TAMOKO. Yeah.

TAMOKO? Two words. I think so. Yeah. No, I mean, it's two words. Yeah. MOKO is the face tattoo specifically, I think. Right.

It's a type of tattoo that's not quite as spiritual as we'll find out called Kirituhi. And that's kind of more like the tribal band you see around people's arms and things like that. Yeah, like if you're a hipster with MOKO face tattoos and you're from Michigan, then you're going to be frowned upon by real Mowry people because you shouldn't have a MOKO on your face. No. That's the other one because that's not as sacred.

Right. You know what I'm saying? I know what you're saying. And the question is, do the people who have these face tattoos know what you're saying? I don't know. I've seen these white dudes with it and I'm just like, you know, you're not Mowry. Well, I was when I was looking up like Mike Tyson, Mowry face tattoo, like a whole slew of articles came up about how his visa was canceled before a trip to New Zealand.

Oh, really? I was like, oh man, was it because he had a face tattoo? No, criminal past, which makes sense. Yeah, and I don't think his is a MOKO. I think it's just a face tattoo. Yeah. Okay. Let's get into it, man.

Yeah. Because there's much more to it than face tattoos. Yeah. So the Mowry are credited as being the first settlers of New Zealand. The thing is there's a lot of controversy around this, I should say. In academic circles, it's typically accepted, widely accepted, that it's been proven that the Mowry were the original settlers of New Zealand. There are other circles that are like, no, there's evidence that they're not.

The Mowry's own oral history says that there are people there before them, there's evidence here or there. But for the most part, if you believe that in academic circles, you are considered fringe twetler. Right? Sure. So for the most part, the generally accepted idea is that the Mowry settled New Zealand from Polynesia somewhere between 1280 and 1450 AD.

Yeah, and they came over on canoes, on ocean canoes that they still use today. And they supposedly came from a mythical land called Hawaiki, but these days scholars will say what that probably is, is a combo of some real places, Tahiti, Samoa, and the Cook Islands. Yeah. Tomato, tomato. Exactly. But they got to New Zealand and they named it Otaroa. And there's a lot of pronunciations in here.

We might not get exactly right, by the way. I think that was one. I think that might be right, actually. Otaroa? I'm going to say the A is silent. I don't think so. It's capitalized even. That means land of the long white cloud.

Right. In other words, it's the Mowry name for New Zealand. Yeah. And we should say that when the Mowry arrived, they arrived as they didn't describe themselves or self-describe as Mowry until the Europeans came. Right. And it was just disparate tribes that were familiar with one another, but they settled. It's believed either in close together waves or pretty much all at once heading out from

Polynesia, arriving and saying, okay, let's go to war. Pretty much. The name means ordinary or common, and they were, and are, tough people. Right. And the reason Mowry means ordinary or common is they're referring to themselves in comparison to white Europeans who came later. And their fancy pants. Right.

And their fancy hats with feathers and their muskets. Yeah. So that's not very ordinary, especially compared to Mowry. And they had a name for them, Pakeha. Yes. Those were white Europeans who came calling them settlers. Anybody who wasn't Mowry or ordinary. Very true.

And like we said, they were tough. They were very fierce when they battled one of the trophies that they would, and, you know, a lot of tribes you'll see do this. They will put the old head on the stake as a trophy. Very tough. And then something else we'll get into in a minute is very important to them called mana, which is power or prestige. And there was a lot of fighting going on when the mana was challenged or disrupted, basically

sort of like, you insult me, so we're going to go to war. Right. So all of this was extremely structured. The Mowry wars were typically held in the fall after the harvest, right? Yeah, football season. Yeah. That's a really good analogy. They would use weapons that were usually clubs.

There were short-range battle clubs called wa kaika. And then there were clubs that had a cutting edge that were called patu. These are the most typical weapons used in these battles. And you would get brained and creamed and beaten up to heck. But as far as loss of life goes, compared to firearms, there were relatively few. Yeah, it sort of reminded me of the old gang fights back in the day. Like when you would get together with your chains and your clubs and hit each other and fight.

Try it in. Yeah, and then you would walk away with your bruises and your scrapes and not a lot of loss of life. Right. But the intent was the same. It was to vanquish people, to get control of their land, to make them move to more populated, less fertile areas. And like you said, it was to gain mana or prestige for your tribe.

Everything changed once the Europeans came and brought firearms, as is the pretty by now familiar narrative for anybody who's listened to one of our cultural, historical episodes. Yeah, it's pretty interesting that it follows about the same path all over the world. The boomstick comes in. The white folks come in with the boomstick and the powder, the boom powder, and then things change. And things change by the Maori gaining access to some of these guns.

And it says here, they would trade things like pigs and flax and potatoes. But I watched the documentary last night and six, as the documentarian said, was a big trading coinage, basically. What was? Six. What is that? SEX. Six.

Oh, six. Gotcha. He kept saying it, though, in that Kiwi accent, which is one of my favorites, by the way. I got you. And so they would trade when they ran out of other stuff to trade. It was a big hotspot for Europeans, not even to settle necessarily, but to come by and do some trading and stop over. And they would stop over and they would sign their women up to three-week contracts and

trade for one musket. And it was a very sexual culture. Like women, and this was in the 1800s, could take multiple lovers and not be looked down upon. And they didn't have the hang-ups that Europe did about sex. Yeah, I know that HMS Bounty was mutinied because the sailors wanted to go back to Polynesia. Well, dude, the Mallory were down with it early on. They didn't have big hang-ups.

Hang-ups? No, they didn't. In the 70s? You could have sex before you were married and it wasn't a big deal. So the sex trade by the 1830s was the biggest moneymaker in New Zealand at the time. Or musket maker, huh? Very nice. So Chuck, when the muskets come along, 1807 is kind of a seminal year because this is

the year when the first Mallory tribe got their hands on muskets and used them for battle. The problem is they hadn't practiced quite so much. And so as they're trying to fire and reload and aim, they were vanquished by the tribe they raided with using traditional clubs. They get clubbed in the head while they're trying to load a musket. And I think some of them started just swinging the musket like a big club. Which makes sense, especially even out of frustration. And that actually started the musket wars.

Yeah, because the leader of that tribe said, you know what, these firearms, we shouldn't abandon them yet. So let's get some more and we'll trade whatever we need to for them and let's practice this time. And hence the musket wars were born once they got good. They started tearing up the countryside in 1815 and just basically said, we've got these guns. We're going to kill you.

Take your land. Yeah. Enslaved you. And maybe eat you. Yes. We didn't mention that. A lot of Polynesian tribes, they were accused of cannibalism. Yeah.

I don't know if it's true or not. Yeah. There's bears pointing out there. Right, sure. But this first group that got the muskets definitely changed everything because now it was kind of like when the Soviets and the Americans had the bomb, Soviets were like, we have to have the bomb now. You can't just have one country with the bomb.

You couldn't have just one Maori tribe with firearms. Other groups were forced to adopt firearms as well and hence the musket wars got pretty bloody. Yeah, but it became the great equalizer. About 20,000 Maori in New Zealanders died, but once everyone had guns, it sort of calmed things down in a weird way. Yeah, well, it's like the mutual assured destruction. Exactly.

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Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. All right. So let's continue. So Chuck, the 1830s, two tribes that have been forced off their land by other musket using Maori's went south, I believe it was south to the Chatham Islands. Yeah. They wanted to basically find a better place to live where all this war wasn't going on,

but they found the Moriori people. Right. I don't know if that's right, but... What's one more war? Exactly. Because they were peaceful people and they were like, well, you know, these people are here. Let's figure out what to do with them.

And they said, kill them. Kill them basically. Yeah. That's what they did. They killed them, thrust them into slavery and then basically took over Chatham Island and now it was a Maori island. Right. So one genocide but got another genocide.

That's right. So now you're like pretty well established by this time, but they're kind of hanging on to their cultural lives and everything kind of hinged on a rumor. I don't know if it was a factual rumor or not, but come 1835, there was a rumor that France was going to try to annex New Zealand. Yeah. In previous, previous to 1848, they were pretty welcoming of the Europeans. Yeah.

Like they started trading with them. They got along pretty well. Exceptional point. The guy in the documentary that said six said that they were, you know, they got pretty friendly and they said, you know, come here, route down will be trade partners and we all got along great. But like you said in 1835, that's when France started or at least their, the Maori's point of view was France was trying to get their little French hooks in them.

Right. And by this time, the Maori had a pretty good idea that they were in trouble. They were losing their numbers, which they think hit about 100,000 before contact with Europeans to not just the musket wars, but also disease. Sure. Introduced by Europeans. Another familiar thing. So they, they decided to ally themselves in the face of this rumor that France was going

to annex New Zealand. They decided to ally their lands to the British. And why not? At the time, who else are you going to go with? Yeah, they're like, we like your powdered wigs, your red coats. Yeah. Like your accent. We can nick that and change it around a bit and make it our own.

And so let's sign the treaty of Watangi. Yes. And it was, it was a pretty good contract at first. They thought it gave the Maori control over their own land and gave them sovereignty. Yeah. So they think until it turns out that the British really said, you know what, we're going to take a lot of that land. We're going to tax you and violate the treaty in that way.

And this ancestral land that's been in your family forever, we're going to, we're going to just take what we want basically and shuffle you to the side. Yeah. Who knew? Just like Americans. A treaty was going to be broken. So that started the New Zealand wars. And this guy in the documentary said it's sort of again, sort of like here in America,

they weren't really taught that so much in school or they were taught a very sanitized version of the New Zealand wars. But in fact, it was 30 years of very bloody, fierce battling with the British soldiers in the British government. And dwindled down to 45,000 Maori by the 1890s, it's really sad. So at this point, what you have is what would be called an evolutionary bottleneck basically. You have a group of population that's in real danger of extinction. And I guess what the Maori does say, okay, all right, the British control New Zealand,

we're not going away. We are fierce warriors. Have you seen these tattoos we got? And the British said, again, we are in control of New Zealand. You just said it yourself. We won't wipe you out entirely because, hey, it's almost the 20th century and who does that, right? But we are going to anglicize you.

And first, let's start by creating an alphabet, which this struck me as weird, right? Maori culture had an oral tradition. They didn't have any written language. They had totems. Yeah. Basically, what amount to totems is the closest comparison. But they didn't have any kind of alphabet or written language. And so European missionaries said about creating one rather than teaching them just English.

Like, oh, here is your written language. It's English. That was really odd, too. They went about creating a Maori written language, which is strange to me. This is the Maori experience. It's almost like a condensed version of what went on in North America and the United States. There's like one treaty. There's some weird aspects to it where missionaries are not just trying to anglicize the groups.

They're helping them preserve their culture simultaneously. And I think that that helped Maori culture survive by taking their oral traditions and writing them down. But let's not just say the Maori were helpless in preserving their own traditions, because as we'll see, everyone's expected to know their own history and to be able to recite it. Yeah, for sure. And that came along in the 70s is when they really started to sort of gain more ground

in reestablishing their culture and claiming their culture as their own. Previous to that, it really dwindled because they scattered, basically. They started to move to urban areas. After World War II, there was a mass migration. Prior to the war, 75% lived in rural New Zealand, and 20 years later, 60% lived in urban areas. So when you move the tribe from their native land, you take their land, then they move to the big city, the culture's just going to go away. Well, it gets diluted, especially in the face of the government.

The official language of New Zealand was English. Yeah, they tried their best to stamp it out. Yeah, there were government schools that didn't teach anything about Maori culture. So yeah, the people were still there, but they were losing their culture. And then, like you said, again, analogous to North America, the 1970s saw an awakening of pride in being a Maori, just like the aim, the American Indian movement, was founded in the 70s. Exactly.

And in the 1980s, by that time, about 20% of the Maori were actually fluent speakers of their language, which was Te Reo Maori was the name of the language. Right. So it was a big win. It was, but there was a lot of groundwork that was laid between the 70s and 80s. A lot of battles that were fought in one, there's the establishment of the Maori Party, a political party. They sued the government to have Te Reo Maori, the Maori language, be officially recognized

somehow. And in 1985, the British were forced to say, yes, this is a treasure that we were supposed to protect under the Treaty of Watangi, and we didn't. So now we're going to make this one of three official languages in New Zealand. English, New Zealand sign language, and Te Reo Maori are now the three official languages of New Zealand. Exactly. In 1975, that was the designation of Maori Language Week, and they opened the first

bilingual school in 1978. So by the time 85 rolled around, they made it an official, one of the official languages. Like we said, about 20%, we're now speaking it and fluent in it. And the British were like, we'll give you these small things, but what we don't want to give you back is your land, but they were forced to eventually with the Watangi Tribunal in 1975. It's not a, I don't think it was, I don't think they established laws. I think it was just like you fill an application out and to a claim on some land, and they'll

decide whether or not to give it back to your family, and they did to a large degree. Not all of it though. So was it like a European run tribunal that like, that indigenous people went and petitioned? Or was it, was it made up of indigenous people? Because I got the impression that they were like, jealously guarded Maori culture, and were like suing for repatriation of Maori artifacts from other museums and. Well, yeah, that definitely happened because there were, you know, Maori trinkets and momified heads all over the world.

And it's still ongoing today. Like all these reparations are still going on, like people are still getting back their land. Yeah. Even here in the 21st century. So the, the Maori culture kind of is vibrant, beaten down, hangs on by a thread and starts to revive. Right?

That's right. That's good. That's where we're at. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about their culture. Again, a lot of it was diluted and lost over time, but there's still like some very robust fundamentals that are very much alive today. Yeah.

They're very spiritual people. They were fierce warriors. And you know, a lot of the white folks thought they were savages, of course, sounds familiar. Like the face tattoos were very much repressed, but never went away. Exactly. So they're very spiritual. They believe that their ancestors and other supernatural beings are always around. Their family and their ancestry is really, really important.

Their genealogy, which they call the waka papa, waka papa. I went with waka papa. Waka papa. Yeah. The genealogy of the ancestors, spiritual and mythological significance, and basically your whole spiritual existence as a person is told through the waka papa. And the face tattoos will tell that story. That's what it means.

That's why they're not hip on non-mowry people getting these things. Yeah. Brooklyn hipsters. Yeah. You're insulting like their ancestry, basically. And they're really protective of this stuff. I was reading about Maori waka papa stories and how like if you are like a social services worker, like you're not necessarily told to ask these questions that would be considered

part of somebody's waka papa. Right. Like they'll tell you if they trust you. Yeah. And you don't just run around telling just anybody. Right. And there's actually some sort of, I believe there's a law where Maori will tell their waka papa to government agencies, but these things have to be like explicitly protected.

Like now that they're being put out there on the internet and everything, they need to like extra protection because these things are sacred, they belong to the individual because that's their history. And since there wasn't anything before like a written language, speaking it out loud is extremely sacred and protected. Yeah. Well, part of it too is they're really big on learning and changing things that they did wrong.

Yeah. Learning from past mistakes. So part of the waka papa is it's not just like some rosy history of their family. It's also the bad because if you understand your past, you can understand your future better. Right. And the point of it is to keep going as far back as you can. And usually from this article, they end at about the time your ancestors arrived to New

Zealand. Yeah, by canoe. Yeah. So we talked about mana a little bit, the honor and prestige. There are three forms of mana in the culture. It's one is achieved by birth. So basically what the rank of your descendants and your ancestors, the mana given by other people, which this article says they've boiled down to good deeds like being recognized for

what you've done. Pat on the back. Yeah. Here's your mana. And then mana of the group, which is when outsiders visit. And if they leave with a good review on Yelp for you or TripAdvisor. These guys are so welcoming. Then that's mana of the group.

Yeah. And it's very important to them. I want to have a good, leave a good impression, I guess. Well, yeah, there's mana at stake. Exactly. You can also be affected by Correo. This one's tough. Correo.

Yeah. K-O-R-E-R-O, which is the spoken word, which is where you gain mana by how people speak of you personally, I guess. I think it's kind of like mana of the group, but for an individual. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier how they had an oral history that, of course, the white Christian missionaries poo-pooed. They said, no, you got to write stuff down.

And they said, no, we're not just like telling stories here. We actually, like historians are trained and their memory is trained to remember everything about the history. So it wasn't just like, hey, let's just tell stories about our past. Like historians were revered and very important and acknowledged for their incredible memories. So coming up next, we've got to have a little message break, but we're going to talk about what I think is one of the coolest things, which is the haka dance. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your

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Huh? Yeah. Let's get back to it. All right. The Hawkeye Dance. Have you seen this? I have. I saw in a Budapest of all places really at a natural history museum, there was a like

a basically a grass outfit and like there was video of a guy wearing this grass outfit doing a Hawkeye dance by himself. Yeah. Huh. It was like a ethnographical footage. Oh, see, I've never seen it with a like a solo dancer. I've usually just seen it as a big group like a whole tribe and it's really cool. Like you should look it up on on the YouTube H aka very in fact, they're doing it in the

picture right there. Very like intimidating. They would do it before battle and it's kind of scary and like when they first get started before they're even moving in unison, they're just like individually shouting out things and sticking out their tongue and their eyes are wide and crazy and it's just like it's it would have sent me running for the hills. Right. Well, that's what it was intended to.

And the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks, they do a Hawkeye before every rugby game. Yeah. They still do it. They've done it for more than a hundred years. I think starting in 1888. Yeah. They've got the name the All Blacks when they change uniforms to all black uniforms.

Makes sense. And again, to intimidate and even watch the rugby team do it. And it's pretty cool. Yeah. Like I would like to try it out, but I think I would just people laugh at me if I wouldn't intimidate anyone with my Hawkeye. Especially if you like both your eyes and stuck your tongue out to it wouldn't have the same effect.

Nope. Let's talk. Let's talk Chuck. The tattoo. Yeah. That is actually from the Polynesian word, T-A-T-A-U, Tatau, I guess. And which means to mark. Yeah.

And they, we need to do one on the whole tattoo thing. We will. And like we said, the Maori aren't the first to come up with tattoos. You can trace back further in their Polynesian lineage. But they are the ones that use chisels, really sharp chisels, but chisels nonetheless. I wonder how that works. It's like you hammer in, I know how that chisel works, but, and then you rub the pigment in. So basically you take a very sharp chisel and a hammer and you tap it, you make a mark.

And then after you've made your marks, you go through and rub a pigment usually taken from a certain type of caterpillar. And then the, since you've used a chisel instead of a needle, there's not only a tattoo, there's also scarification along where you made that chisel mark. So the original Maori tamocos were like, they were pretty severe looking. They looked even more like hardcore than a regular tattoo. Well, that's what I was going to ask is how like, how tight was it, you know? I think I have the feeling that like this was like considered an art form is pretty tight.

All right. Well, I know they incidentally are the ones who introduced color tattoos. Even though most of the moco have seen her black, so I don't know if they just don't use color that much. They like, yeah, I haven't seen any colored one either, but it's like a, you know, a rainbow dolphin. And then they're like, let's just go back to the moco. Yeah.

Men typically have the moco on their face, but women also have the tattoos and they have them on the arms, the thighs, the abdomen and the crotch apparently, while men will have them on the face, buttocks and thighs. And it's detailed stuff. Like I'm sure you've seen it before, but if not, look it up right now because it's not like Mike Dyson. Right. Well, it has to be an entire face.

Yeah. I mean, it's there. It's supposed to depict the waka-papa like each swirl and symbol has like a real meaning that has to do with the person's genealogy. That's right. It's pretty cool. And then again, we said that there's another kind of tattoo that's not quite as intricate. It's called the, what is it called, the Kira Tuhi?

Yeah. Yeah. Which is just fun to say. And I think that won't offend a Maori person. And I think the impression that I have is Maori culture, from this resurgence of Maori pride in the 70s and the revival of the culture and like taking steps to save it, they do very jealously protect and guard their culture, their cultural history, their personal lineage. And so it is, I mean, maybe even compared to other indigenous tribes, respecting Maori

culture on its own terms is a good idea. For sure. These days, they've made quite a comeback in population. New Zealand as a whole has more than four million people and about 14% or Maori compared to a low of about 45,000 in the 1890s. Yeah. It's about 560,000 people. But like I said, there are like many marginalized indigenous tribes all over the world.

There are problems with alcoholism. The Maori are 82% as far as more likely to be drinkers than 56% Pacific Islanders. And among those who consume alcohol, hazardous drinking occurs and 36% of Maori. And crime too, and violence is still sort of part of the culture, sadly. I think I have some stats here from a criminologist. Even though they only make up 14% of the population, I believe they make up about 50% of people in prison. And they throw that right back to the fact that they were marginalized and their culture

was stamped out. Sure. Young people are more likely to be violent, young Maori are than older ones now, but apparently the losing your cultural identity will really put a hamper on your evolution as a people. You can see that all over the world, can't you? You certainly can. So that's Maori. If you want to know more, do you have anything else right now?

I got nothing else. If you want to know more about the Maori people, you can type in MAORI in the search bar at yourhousetowork.com. We'll bring up this article. And since I said Maori, it's time, Chuck, for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this email from a student at North Carolina, Wilmington. Okay. Hey, guys, he's an econ dude.

My girlfriend and I have been together for a little over three years and are both members of the stuff you should know, Army. In the early days of our relationship, I used to pay her in doll hairs for favors, such as cooking dinner or getting out of bed to plug my phone in when I forgot. I do this too. I tell Emily, like, I'll give you $675 to take out the trash and I'll just make up, you know, we keep a running tap of what we owe each other. Gotcha.

It's just fun. He uses doll hairs. Being that a doll hair is not real currency, that's why he uses it. I could bid the price up or down with ease depending on her mood. The going rate for dinner was about $12,000 and a back rub was $21,500 DH, capital DH. Of course, she quickly figured out that she was not accruing the American dollars she thought she was and wanted her doll hairs exchanged for US currency. To get myself out of this, I quickly got on eBay to purchase her $600,000 Zimbabwe dollars

to fulfill my financial debt obligation. Like UI, I appreciated the novelty of owning paper currency from a country that's all hyperinflation on the scale the world has never seen. We both got a real laugh out of a joke and I am out of debt now. We both now carry $100,000 in our wallets every day so we don't feel like broke college kids. Economic research is a great passion of mine from observation to data collection and model building.

I find happiness through math and statistics. We don't have much in common, Talon. That's his name. I would be more than happy to help you all with any economic questions you ever have, although I don't think you need much seeing as how your super stuff guide to the economy was so well presented. Awesome. Yeah, so that is from Talon Wisdom.

His last name is Wisdom. From UNC Wilmington. And I wrote him back and he followed up and said he was in the middle of writing a lesson plan and eating leftovers when he got my email and he said he's often daydreamed about being on listener mail so this is a dream come true and you're going to like this part Josh. Okay. He has a dog named Conway Twitty.

Conway Twitty owned by Talon Wisdom. That's right. He and Conway Twitty called his entire family to let them know to look out for the upcoming listener mail. Good going. Thank you, Talon Wisdom. Talon Wisdom, Conway Twitty and his girlfriend. Yeah.

He's got a lot of doll hairs who is very easy going with a good sense of humor about money. If you have a good story for us that has anything even remotely to do with something we've even mentioned in passing on any of the episodes here on Stuff You Should Know, you can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at discovery.com and you can hang out on our website with us at stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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