Stuff You Should Know - Is the Uncanny Valley Real?

Episode Date: August 22, 2017

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote an essay that said the closer robots come to lifelike, the more they unsettle humans. His theory became the Uncanny Valley, and science has been evaluating it ��� and what makes something creepy - in recent years. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 Bright, and there's Jerry over there doing the robot,

which means this is Stuff You Should Know, robot style. I knew I'd get a laugh out of you sooner or later. Did you do the robot? Can you do the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot. I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do a pretty great robot. Oh yeah.

I think that's what you've seen. I can't do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either. And really, if your claim to fame is like a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe take up some other hobbies as well, kind of round that out. You don't want that to be the only thing you're good at.

Right, because if you list that on a dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah, according to eHarmony. Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one, don't you? Yeah, I had some issues with that whole bit. Oh yeah, yeah. We'll get to that.

This is Ted. All right, well, let's start at the beginning, almost the beginning, Chuck. Let's go back to 1970, which was the beginning of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah, neither one of us are born yet. I can finally even say that I'm still not even born. It must feel good.

Yeah. Okay, well, welcome to the club, I guess. Yeah, thanks. And in 1970, we're not just going just anywhere in 1970. We're going to Japan in 1970. I bet Japan was pretty cool in the 70s. Yeah, a lot of bell bottoms, a lot of Ninja running around still.

Yeah. There were calculators being wielded all over the place. Probably. It was a good time. Yeah. Good time for Japan, right? And one of the things that was going on in 1970, I could not for the life of me find what issue

of this journal it came out in what month, but at some point in 1970, there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic journal called Energy. And at some point during that year, it published a article by a Japanese roboticist and his name is Masahiro Mori. Nice.

Thank you. I have a lot of practice. And Masahiro Mori published this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani Gensho. It's actually the full name of the whole thing. Yeah. You'll see it's kind of difficult to translate into English, right?

And it took many, many years after he wrote this article for it to be translated into English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically Mori was this roboticist and he wrote this essay. And at the time he just put it out there and went back to work,

started teaching more and more roboticists, a whole new generation of roboticists learned under him. And his work just kind of sat there unobserved that article, I should say. And then in 2005, a rough translation of it was leaked out. It wasn't intended for publication and the world entirely changed, right? Because Masahiro Mori had in his article

put his finger on something that no one had before in his capacity as a roboticist and a human. And that was what we call today the uncanny valley. Yeah, so that's the idea that you're making a robot and we'll see this applies to more than just robots. But in his case, you're making a robot and you want to make it look like a person, which I guess not all roboticists do.

Some of them like the clunky Jetson style robots. Shh, you're like Rosie. But I guess if you're Mori, you're on the path to designing lifelike robots. And the closer you get to that lifelike, look, everything's going great. Everything's going great. People are like, this is so cool.

This is so cool. Then all of a sudden people go, oh. Like right as it approaches its most, or basically when it reaches its most lifelike capacity that whoever's making it can conjure, people are repulsed by it. Yeah, which is something that most people who ever hear of the uncanny valley are like,

yeah, I've noticed that that's happened to me before too. But the thing is Chuck, it doesn't actually make sense, right? Like we know a robot is a robot. Yeah. So maybe you could be afraid that it's going to like pick you up and break you in two or something like a cartoon,

but that's different than being creeped out by it. Like why would we be creeped out by a robot? And this is what Mori put his finger on, was there's something to this and it doesn't make sense. And he didn't, it wasn't even just this article that he wrote, he created a graph as well that's become quite famous that really kind of gets the point across more than anything else.

Yeah, and he wasn't even the first person to go over this and to put some thought to it. Freud of course, cause he liked to think about everything. He thought about it a little bit. And before Freud, there was a German named Ernst Jynch. Oh, nice. I did not realize that's how his last name should be pronounced.

Jynch? That's good stuff. I think I put a T on the end, but the T's in the middle, Jynch. Yeah. I think that's right. I've been saying Jynch. Well, we'll have to look that up then.

I think you're, no, I think of the two of us. You get the German down. And he had a little term called umheimlich that he called it. So like, you know, different languages had different names for it. And you go back in time all the way back to like the 17th century and people were, and I guess, you know, robots didn't look super life

like back then, but whatever their version of life like was in the 1600s, people were like, eh, I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah, it's got a quill and it's writing things. But like you said, Mori made this graph because he was a roboticist and he thought, you know, let's look at this on a plotted out so we can stare at it.

And on the X axis, he had human likeness. Then on the Y axis, he had affinity like whether or not you like the way this thing looks. And just as we're talking about the graph went up and up as things got more lifelike and people liked the way it looked. And then at a certain point, there's that valley. There's a big dip that really just kind of says it all. Right.

And again, this all makes sense intuitively, but as we'll see, it's been very difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's confounded research thus far is because we're not even 100% sure what Mori meant by some of the words he chose, at least as far as translating them to English, right? For example, Bukimi, right? Yeah.

It was translated in 2005 as uncanny. But again, that original translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out. And so uncanny valley became the way we all think of it here in the West. But Bukimi more closely resembles something like eerie. Like I've seen it explained that a word like Bukimi means more than uncanny is just weird or remarkable

or noteworthy. It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Bukimi is something that gives you the creeps. Like Steve Bukimi. Nice, exactly. So Bukimi probably more should have been translated the eerie valley, but by the time an actual official translation that Mori signed off on came out in 2012,

the cat was out of the bag. Everybody knew of it as the uncanny valley. And there was no way anybody was gonna come back and be like, no, no, no, everybody, stop calling it that. It's now the eerie valley, okay? Right. Right. And it may be one of the things where we're so used

to uncanny valley now that it's hard to imagine eerie valley, but. Right, I think that was the issue. Yeah. Like nobody's gonna go along with that. So this graph, like I said, it starts off on that left-hand side, and this is where you have things that are super robotic, like a packaging robot in a factory.

Right. That apparently most people don't have fondness for. I do, because I love mechanical processes. Right, right. Okay, so there's part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the kind of feeling that Masahiro Mori was talking about. He was like, yeah, you're interested in robotics

and robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching how it's made, right? What he was talking about was more like how it resembles a human and then how it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of a human, right? Well, in that case, it makes me feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, okay.

So that would be about the origin of the graph. It has no resemblance to a human really, and it's not eliciting any real affinity in you at all. As far as it looking like a human. Right. But lots of affinity as a thing. That's just, that's called props. So you go a little bit further on the graph

and then you have things like little stuffed animals and I know C-3PO is a common one that's mentioned because C-3PO is built to look like a human. He does a great robot, by the way. He talks like a human and acts like a human, but when it comes to that face, and as we'll see, the face is kind of the key to all this for the most part, C-3PO looks nothing like a human

in the face. Right. So everything's still good and people love C-3PO. Right, so if you're looking at the graph, C-3PO is going up in human likeness because he kind of, you know, he's got some commonality there and we're feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness.

So it's, he's going up. Yes. Okay, we're going, everything's going pretty well so far, right, Chuck? That's right. Okay, so then we're gonna start hitting some areas where things start looking a little more human, a lot more human, I would say, than C-3PO,

like say the characters in Moana or Frozen, Pixar characters, that kind of thing, where they look like they're supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse at first glance for an actual human, right? So they have like big eyes, small noses,

things that make them cute, right? And so our affinity for them is going up as the human likeness is going up. Again, things are going really well so far. That's right, because in Moana and Frozen, they look a little bit more like people and we like them a lot more for that reason. Right.

And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere, the whole thing, this line that's just been going up very pleasantly at a nice little slope, just drops downward, right? And it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below the x-axis into negative territory. And now, this is the uncanny valley. That's right, and that's why it has that name,

because it's a valley. Right, and this is where those things like really, really lifelike androids live, or corpses live, or zombies live, because Mori, he had the idea that if something's moving, it's even creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So he actually created two lines on this graph.

One for things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate. So if you look at this uncanny valley, on the inanimate line, the non-moving line, you've got corpses are at the bottom of it. But if you look at the animate line, it dips even further below than the inanimate line, and at the bottom of those are zombies.

So dead people up and moving around and saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far as this graph is concerned. Yeah, and Mori wasn't the only one that Ernst Jynch that we talked about, the German psychiatrist. He also talked about the fact that if you are looking at something that should not be moving

and it moves, I mean, I think we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly turns its head and looks at you, probably one of the creepier things you can witness. Right. Yeah, it's about as creepy as it gets. Or have you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few, I'm not a fan at all.

No, it makes sense. We've really kind of closed or put a lot of space in between us and death way more than we used to have in like the 19th century. Yeah, they would sit up with the dead. Sure, right? So this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that. But if you've ever been to an open casket funeral

and have just stared at the corpse long enough, like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something, your brain is so anticipating that it's about to start moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll also be asked to leave the funeral. Well, you shouldn't be like giving a commentary

about this out loud, but you can do it to pass the time in the funeral if you're looking to kill some time. So here's the thing with all this. We know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling, but no one and all this research has been done and no one is exactly sure why this happens.

So Maury's essay, and especially once it was translated, a lot of research started happening in this area. And it's problematic though, because there are a few different problems. One is, well, it's subjective. This dependent variable, whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective. So it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically.

Right. All right, so the number two is human likeness, right? This is the independent variable. Yeah. And if you have human likeness, like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What doesn't look human?

They're like, we haven't pinned that down. So like if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study. Correct. And then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah, the third one is the original hypothesis.

It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really specifies the shape of this curve. Right. So it's still hypothetical, I guess. Right, which means that, so if you look at Maury's graph, it was, he just basically made a line, right? It wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing was really an essay

more than anything else. So researchers who are trying to seriously study this scientifically have nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against, which leads to, it puts them at risk for what's called the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Yeah. They're just named Fallacy around.

And it's based on the idea that if you take a sharpshooter out in Texas and have them shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times, some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn. And then the Texas Sharpshooter walks up and then draws the bullseye around the bullets that he already sunk into the side of the barn. That's the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

It's ignoring data like the ones where you miss the barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could do the same thing with the data that you get from testing the uncanny valley if you have no model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they would have done better if they would have just, instead of trying to prove

something, to maybe just research and call it a thought experiment, you know? Right, but people are taking it seriously. And we'll talk about some of this research right after this, Chuck. In the coming weeks we'll find out how dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we're back. And despite the fact that this is really tough to study, it's not even established that it's a real thing in everyone's mind, by the way.

There are people out there who are really studying the Uncanny Valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah, one of these people is at Dartmouth College, a psychologist, and I didn't look up there, mascot. The pub darts, the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley, and she's done some research and has found

that it's not just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing, it's kind of all over the world. She studied tribes in Cambodia, and they have these same sensitivities to these things that look human but aren't human. And they've even found that, I think it kind of all comes down to the eyes, but they found just looking at the eye can be enough.

Yeah, somebody can tell whether it's a human or not, just looking at a picture of the eye, right? Yeah, and that's where I think people lose credibility in, and we'll talk about movies and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never get, you can't get the eyes right. Like you can't put life in lifeless eyes. Yeah.

No matter how hard they try. Only God can. And there was this other experiment where they, you know, like where you can morph a face digitally or whatever. Like that Michael Jackson black or white video. Yeah, I think some people were creeped out by that even. Sure.

But they would show this doll image, and it would morph into a human face, and basically they would have people mark where they thought that it would look more human than doll and it landed at about the 65% mark as far as morphing into human. Which I mean, you can't really apply that necessarily, but just off hand, 65% point is about where

the uncanny valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it would be higher than that. Yeah. It's still super interesting. And you were saying that the eyes, that's what you're betting on, is that it's gonna turn out to be the eyes, right? Yeah.

So trying to investigate what constitutes a human likeness. There's a researcher named Angela Tinwell, and she basically says like, yes, it's all about the upper facial features, and that we detect those, we read those. And so if there's anything that's even just slightly off, and the eyes, or the brows, or the wrinkles that form, that will lead to the uncanny valley.

That's the creeping part. Or the smile too, she also says. Well yeah, and all these things kind of come down to evolution, and her point is like, you can't battle millions of years of evolution that has honed our dumb little human brain to detect something that's off about a face.

Right. It's just too much to overcome basically. Right. This other researcher named Carl F. McDormand, who's from the University of Indiana, who actually, he's basically like dedicated his career to this now. He found that certain kinds of people,

if you do like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny valley sensitivity, some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the uncanny valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious people. That makes total sense. Yeah, neurotic people. Yeah.

And people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. I don't even know what that is. It's basically anything that reminds you that hey, you're super civilized, and you drive a car, and you know how to play poker, but you're still an animal just as much as that ape over there is. Right.

An animal reminder. People who are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go off on the uncanny valley as well. And then people who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny valley, as far as McDormand is concerned. Yeah, that anxious thing makes sense too, because they're probably just more prone to be,

I don't know, just have a reaction to a lot of things like this. Right. But we should say, the science in all this, the fact that the independent and the dependent variable are still not defined. The science is this, this is like the scientific equivalent

of that backward over the head, half court basketball shot. Yeah. That's the level of science that these people are carrying out at this point, because a lot of them, sadly, are conducting experiments based on something that, again, doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how can you do that is my question.

Well, yeah, I mean, because in each experiment, they're gonna be using different stimuli, different faces, whether it's a doll or a wax figure or a CGI character, and then they're gonna be doing different things and have different expressions, and each person has their own subjective take. So it is a very tough thing to kind of nail down.

Yeah, and I think some of them are actually trying to form the basis of this field of study right now. They're doing the groundwork, but I think some of them also are just chasing headlines. There's no better way to get into the media cycle with your study than releasing some findings on the uncanny valley. People just eat that up.

Sure, they love it. One thing I thought was interesting was at Princeton, they tried this with monkeys, and they found the same thing happen when they had these realistic looking, but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were like, ah, ah, and turned away. It did make me think though,

like all the, you've seen these situations where like an orphaned animal has a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And they seem to like that, but however, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but toward the end of this article, it points out that human babies don't have this reaction at first either,

and that it's kind of learned. So maybe that explains it with the animals. I know you're talking about that cage, like wire monkey mother. It's super creepy. Is it black and white photo? Well, no, I mean, there's all kinds of animals. Well, they're have like a fake tiger

or a fake duck or whatever. Just so the animal will feed, I mean, it's usually an animal that milks from the mother, I guess. I see. But it's a common thing they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfed animals. And they're always creepy, huh?

Well, I mean, to us, but to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet, give me the teat. Yeah, there's a T-shirt. Maybe even a band name. Sweet, give me the teat? Yeah. Yeah, this kind of falls into the long band name category.

Yeah, for sure. But here's the thing is not everyone agrees with this whole thing. Like you said earlier, there's a man named David Hansen and he's a roboticist as well in Plano, Texas. And he did a very, very basic study. It was a survey where they showed images

of two different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions and basically just asked, hey, what do you think of this? And 70% said, I like them. Yeah. I can see why people had trouble with this study though. Yeah, he said not one person said they were disturbed.

Yeah. So, okay. Sounds good. For the most part though, studies into the uncanny valley are like, now we're finding something here. Although we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the uncanny valley

that Mori just graphed out of his, like with free hand. Right. Like if you come across a study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data. Are you about to say out of his butt? Yeah, maybe. There was another study,

Edward Schneider at SUNY Potsdam in New York. I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got together 75 characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey Mouse to Lara Croft. And who is very attractive, by the way. She's a computer character. Yeah. Are you talking about Angelina Jolie?

Well, no, I'm talking about playing Tomb Raider. Oh, I never played. Yeah, when it first came out, I played Tomb Raider and I was like, oh. Wow, look at her. Lara Croft is kind of hot. Well, she gets a lot of stuff done. That's very attractive.

Not sure what that means. Well, she travels a lot. Oh, oh, sure. She's an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was attracted to her mind and her adventures. Right. So anyway, they asked people in this study

how attractive do you think these characters are or how repulsive do you think they are? And again, there was a graph with a dip in it at a certain point, as you would expect. Yep, careful, careful, everybody. So if you're a robot designer, right? One of the things, like even back in his essay written in 1970, Masahiro Mori said,

there's problems here with movement. There's problems here with the smile. It has something to do with the face, right? Yeah. And somebody else said, I don't remember who it was, but there always seems to be a lag time between how realistic a designer can make a robot and how realistic an engineer can make that robot look.

Yeah. Right? And that disconnect in Mori's mind was a big part of the uncanny valley, but he also seemed to focus on the smile on the eyes. And one of the things that's at stake, like besides this just being like an interesting topic of discussion, like there are actual

real world implications for this whole thing, right? Like if you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's not gonna freak people out because the whole purpose of robots is to interact with humans and you want them to interact with humans. I should say life like looking at robots, right? Because like Ford Motor Company's ever gonna buy

an Android that looks human to just work on an assembly line when they can get the same thing that does the same job cheaper when it just looks like a robotic arm or something, right? Yeah. The whole purpose of a life like looking robot is because that robot's being designed to interact with humans.

And if you are going to run into this spot, some people say it's not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable, a cliff or a wall. So if you're gonna run up against this, you want to figure out how to overcome it because you don't want to creep people out with your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a lot of money

to develop a robotic Walmart greeter at every store because it's happening, like this is coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or Actroid F, depending on who you ask. I've also seen it called Ellie. And she is out of this lab by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro. And he is probably the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like Android,

it probably came out of this guy's lab, right? Yeah. And she is starting to get out there in the world. She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from war with PTSD based on the idea that they might share more with a robot that they knew was just a robot than they would an actual human.

Yeah. She's in a play. She stars as an Android. Good role. Right. And then there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah, Casper is a robot boy with a great cause

created to help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. Right. If you look up photos of both of these, Geminoid F looks great. And really, Ishiguro is doing great, great work. Yeah, he really is. Casper looks terrifying.

Right. So Casper is creepy, but that's not his purpose at all, right? No. Of course not. His purpose is to teach kids with autism how to connect. But if he's repelling them through this uncanny valley, he's defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishiguro and say, hey,

we have this great cause. Can you make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares? Right, exactly. I wonder if Casper has been effective, you know? I don't know. I don't know. Now I feel bad I didn't look into that.

Well, I just don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly. It's kind of like, no, he's not finished. Get back to the drawing boy. Either that or, and this is what Mori said, like go the other way. Like just make him not human at all.

Just cute or approachable. Right. So the roboticists are not the only ones who are facing this, Chuck. There is a pretty powerful, moneyed contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in overcoming the uncanny valley, or at least figuring out if it's totally insurmountable.

And that is Hollywood. Yeah, Hollywood has a sort of a rich history of getting it wrong when it comes to creepy CGI characters. Pixar had their very first short film actually, it's called Tin Toy, it's a little five minute short, and they showed it to, you know, this preceded Toy Story and everything. Yeah, it was actually kind of like the outline

of Toy Story's plot. Yeah, but they showed it to test audiences and they made the mistake of making the baby, Billy, look too realistic and everyone loved Tin Toy and everyone hated Billy. Yeah, have you seen it? Yeah. Yeah, so.

I hate Billy. Yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure. And he is the antagonist, but he struck some chord with viewers that Pixar did not mean to strike. Right. And they actually, I mean, this was extraordinarily fortunate for Pixar.

Oh, sure. They were very early on in their history and they learned from it actually. They're like, okay, note to self, don't try to make any of these characters life-like, let's go a different direction. And so they came up with those exaggerated features that we've all just come to know and love.

Yeah, which was a great, great direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of success with that model. You can make the case that it may have saved the company because other companies and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah, one of the first big photo-real computer animated movies

was Final Fantasy Colon, The Spirits Within. You should never have a colon in your movie title, by the way. So that was a first mistake. Right. But this one was from 2001 and based on the video game. And it was off-putting to a lot of people and it was a big, big bomb for Columbia Pictures.

But this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established before Maury's essay was translated. So reviewers didn't quite know what to say. Now they would just say, we've tumbled into the Uncanny Valley again. All right. But they would say things like Peter Travers, great reviewer from Rolling Stone,

said at first, it's fun to watch the characters. Ellipsis. Ellipse? Ellipse. Ellipse. But what's an ellipsis? Is that two of them? A couple of them. But then you notice a coldness in the eyes,

a mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah. So he's describing the Uncanny Valley. He just didn't have the name of it yet. Right. And then a couple of years later,

you had the Polar Express, which became, I think, even more famous than Final Fantasy as far as the Uncanny Valley goes. But again, it's like you said, the reviewers didn't know how quite to put their finger on it. And I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done, but I know that Polar Express used similar software and hardware to what roboticists are using now,

where it's like motion capture. But rather than translating the motion to the robot, it's translating the motion into like a digital 3D rendering of the character, right? Yeah. So Polar Express was really, really expressive, but not quite there. So it fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley.

And I think David Germain of the Associated Press compared the kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the children from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want. It's not at all what the studio wanted. And I think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah, there was another one. And these are all, by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemeckis.

He really had his, he went all in on this technology. I don't know why, I think he just, I think sometimes you, as an artist, you can get so wrapped up in the coolness of, wow, look what we can do now, that you don't step back and look at what you're doing. Like, should we be doing this? Because he also had a part in the Beowulf movie

in 2007 that was a huge bomb. And the New York Times said this about that, people who are meant to be enraged, who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths, just look a little out of sorts. When it was over, I felt relieved to be back in the company of uncreepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad.

And then did you see the Adventures of Tintin? Yeah, I really liked Tintin, though. I did, too. I think Spielberg, I mean, there is that Uncanny Valley a little bit, but the story and the movie were so good, he overcame that, I think. I was about to say, I think Spielberg has come the closest to overcoming that chasm of anybody.

But did he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes? I don't know. I don't know if it, I don't know if it was a combination of the two, I don't know, but it is extraordinarily, it's an extraordinary, so you know those that stuff, you'll see every once in a while, where somebody does like what Beavis and Butthead

would actually look like in real life, or what Charlie Brown would look like in real life. Oh yeah, which is fantastic. Right, so it still has kind of got a cartoonish quality to it. That's the same thing with the Tintin movie, but it was like, as if you were living in a dimension where humans looked somewhat cartoonish. Is that making any sense or does that just make

the whole thing even harder to understand? No, I get that. So he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying to nail what humans look like. I'm gonna take you to another world where these people live, and if you lived in this world, you would look like this too. It's weird, it's like he bridged an uncanny valley that doesn't exist in this dimension.

Yeah, he built a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. Right. I think the biggest example in recent years or the one that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did you see that, the Star Wars movie? I haven't asked in any of the new Star Wars ones, except for the first six, I guess, is how you purchase it.

But none of the two new ones. No. Well, in Rogue One, they completely bring back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who was played by the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought him back as a character in this movie. And in the theater, when it first happens, he's got his back to you and it's sort of in the shadows,

and you're like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool. And I didn't know that they would do that, but they got too comfortable, I think, and showed too much and gave them too many lines and too much light, and then it became uncanny valley. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, for sure. Think about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that.

Yeah, I don't know how that works. I'll bet they just weep during that movie. Well, I'm curious about life rights and image rights and stuff like that, if they had to get that cleared. I don't even know. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Oh, Cushing was famously mellow. Oh, was he?

He would have taken and draw off his doobie and been like, whatever, man. Yeah, I think he spent the last year of his life on his weed farm in Northern California. Right. What about this Mars Needs Moms? I had never, ever heard of that movie, and so I went and watched the trailer,

and it still is like, I have no idea what this is. Yeah, you know that comic strip Bloom County? Well, you know, I'm a huge, huge lifelong Bloom County fan. Oh, okay, so maybe you know how to say the last name. It's Berkeley Breathed, or breathed? Oh, it said breathed, but I don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud. Breathed sounds nice.

Let's go with that. So Berkeley Breathed, the person, the guy who did Bloom County. Yeah. He wrote a book, a children's book, called Mars Needs Moms, and basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so the Martians came and kidnapped human moms,

and it was up to the human kids to go get their moms back from Mars, right? Pretty cute little premise, but they took it and ran it through Zemeckis's nightmare mill, which is called Image Movers Digital, was the trade name of it, but everybody knew to just steer clear of this place, right? And this was like the apex, or the,

what's the opposite of the apex? The valley. I guess so. The deepest part of the CGI Valley of the Uncanny Valley, right? It was the stuff that they created. It was so off, and just so spectacularly and colossally off, that when I guess Disney came along

and bought this company, they came in, looked around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie's it, we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here is wrong, and you're all going to jail. Yeah, here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer, and it didn't look any worse

than any of the other ones to me, and in fact, I don't know the character's names, but there's a kid, and then there's this one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy looked pretty good, actually, I thought. I think this was a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad, and I think it was the last straw at the end

of all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because again, this was the same company that had created Polar Express. Yeah, the Nightmare Factory. And A Christmas Carol did not do very well either. So yeah, I think it definitely bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. But I thought this was as bad as it got, if you ask me.

I totally saw what Disney saw with this one. Yeah, anytime something is marked as the thing that killed the thing, it's always just the last thing. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Anyway. But it could have also been the thing that saved the thing

had they gotten it right, you know? That's true. So, like I said, Mori was like, and every time I say Mori now, unless I say it like Mori, just saying Mori. Sounds like an old Jewish guy. I think of the wig salesman and good fellas. Yeah, Mori, an old Jewish guy.

Whoever came here was like, give me money. And Ray Leode is just in there laughing because Mori's two payfalls off. Yeah. Imagine that guy is the guy who came up with the young Canny Valley, okay? He gives a whole different spin to it, right? Yeah.

So Mori says, just don't even try guys. Like you're never going to be able to do this. Even if you can, we're so far away from it. Yeah. And this was in 1970, he was saying it. And it still holds true now. Yeah, yeah. We're so far away from this

that just maybe put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example he gave was say like a prosthetic hand, right? Yeah. Rather than trying to create a life like prosthetic hand that was in danger of creeping people out, which is the opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants when they're walking around the prosthetic hand.

He said, maybe choose some like wood, well-sanded, beautifully grained wood. Yeah. In the shape of a human hand. It gets the point across, this is my hand, I lost my hand, I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful looking, isn't it?

Yeah. That was Maury's take. And a lot of people side with him as well. As a matter of fact, I said, I think at the beginning that he was already an established roboticist when he wrote the uncanny valley in 1970. And he went on to teach a lot of people roboticists, or a lot of roboticists as well.

And that very famous robot, Asimo. Asimo. Uh-huh. You know the one I'm talking about? He was one of the first ones that could jog in place, and he was kind of humanoid for sure, but very cute, all white, shiny, lacquer plastic. Yeah.

You've seen him before. He was created by one of Maury's students who clearly subscribed to Maury's theory that you're not gonna overcome the uncanny valley, so just make these things exaggerated and non-human-like. Yeah. You'll have people love your robot. Yeah, I think that's a good tack.

Yeah. All right, well, we're gonna take another break here, and then come back and finish up with a little bit. We're gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness. [♪ upbeat music playing On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

I'm here to help. Oh, good. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband Michael.

Oh, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Not another one. kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure

to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts all right so I promised that we would talk about creepiness. So that's what we'll do you promise Chuck the creeps such a great phrase everyone says it gives me the creeps it's just such a it just one of those phrases that sums things up so perfectly it's live it as a fresh bruise and we have Charles

Dickens to thank for this evidently because he gets credit for using the creeps and David Copperfield in 1849 people had had this feeling before this sort of unpleasant off you know what it feels like to get the creeps but they said things like ill like or clammy not bad not bad but if you said the thing makes me feel ill like today people be like what the heck are you talking about right I think also you would use that to describe somebody who gave you the creeps as well

like that guy's really clammy you know I mean sure well that means you're touching them like like Peter Laurie would be clammy or ill like and some of his characters you know Peter Laurie I do too right so everybody understands that there is such thing as the creeps right but we don't understand why we get the creeps still to this day and again this is important and relates to the uncanny valley because another way to put the creeps is negative affinity

remember affinity was the x axis yeah and when the valley dropped down below the x axis you dipped into negative affinity into the creeps the creeps exactly right so you talked about Ernst Jynch yeah yeah they get it sure it was probably the first person actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness I bet he was creepy himself I don't know I think he was just kind of a neat thinking man right so you inch and I like saying his name a lot more now he wrote

an essay in 1906 called on the psychology of the uncanny yeah and that's the English translation the German word he used like you said is in Heimlich is that right and not in in Heimlich in Heimlich yeah okay nice you're getting better thank you he he used that word and in Heimlich is a variation of the word Heimlich which is not just to say the maneuver it means something else entirely which is homey or familiar right yeah in Heimlich is the opposite of that it's

something strange and foreign and very frequently is translated into uncanny here in the west here in in England yeah and he he has he thought a lot about this and one of the things that he noted which I think that was pretty interesting was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're critical thinkers about the world right so that makes sense like just they

pay attention maybe a little more yeah they're curious like they're they're like why am I creeped out let me get to the bottom of this rather than I'm creeped out I'm gonna go eat a whole thing of chips ahoy and hide under the covers right he also actually went even further and said it's it's possible that all of humanity's knowledge has been accrued over these millions of years from the the people investigating what's behind this creepiness yeah it's a

pretty weird and neat theory of knowledge well yeah and speaking of theories there are a bunch of theories on creepiness and why this happens and I think they're all pretty interesting yeah the first one is called pathogen avoidance theory and we talked earlier about evolution and this one kind of fits into that bucket basically a warning that we have evolved to have in our brain this is that person is off they are diseased even right you don't want to go

near them right you want to avoid that pathogen makes sense yeah it's pretty under pretty approachable sure there's another one that I've seen that's I think a fairly recent and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when when they're trying to non verbally mimic people yeah and so like a robot doesn't do it so we're like well that's unsettling or somebody who you would describe as clammy or you like maybe over does it a little bit yeah like they're trying to

fit in it's not natural to them yeah and that can give you the creeps as well that makes sense but it doesn't really encompass everything it's definitely not a unified theory of creepiness it just seems to kind of inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum yeah there's another one called violation of expectation this is like you know you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life but if you go and you shake a hand and you don't know that you're going

to get a prosthetic hand it may give you the creeps right right and that is probably very fleeting because you might just say oh okay well it doesn't give me the creeps now but it's just unexpected for me and actually you said that was fleeting right Chuck so I think it was you or somebody who said that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might not give us the creeps later on yeah which will kind of come into play later like Ernst you basically he laid the ground

work for the study of creepiness and it seems to have gotten a lot of it right right out of the gate. Yeah and like you said if it if it doesn't give you the creeps later than that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because then you can change your expectation. Right exactly yes yes another one's mortality salience theory is good yeah this one Maury and Freud both subscribe to and it basically said that we when we encounter like a

robot or an automaton in Freud's day they remind us of dead people which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how we're going to die one day and so all of a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley right which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack but raises another of Yoonche's points is uncanniness inherent in the object or is it inside the observer who's experiencing the creeps or uncanniness.

I think it's in the observer. Yeah I think it is too which would explain why it can go away when you when you come to experience it again. Yeah like this when you go through that when you shake the same prosthetic hand again you it's not creepy the second time it might even be interesting or why some people might not experience it at all like someone might sit there and see a doll and the dolls head turns and looks at them

and they're like neat right which means for that doll which means you've just met a serial killer right and then the dolls creeped out after that this one I like the even though I can never say this word for some reason anthropomorphism nice job dehumanization dichotomy which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the robot. And till we realize that they don't have them right so like we're looking at this robot that looks like a person we're

saying oh look it's just like a human and they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling and then oh God look at their eyes their eyes are dead look at the eyes they don't they don't have any internal thoughts at all they're not human yeah and then all of a sudden uncanny valley which is a little bit about expectation to I think those are crossover little I think sure and so creepiness I think especially the modern incarnation of creepiness this is my these are

my thoughts they seem to be they represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily creepiness I think was probably it's it alerts us we're on alert when something's creeping us out we're really focused on that thing right then yep but we're also bound by society not to just turn and run from anything that could conceivably be a threat you can also take it a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking it would not make sense for us to turn and run from every single

thing that could conceivably be a threat before we've identified it as a threat because we would be using up a lot of calories and energy and we would have to find more food than we do it be inefficient right so we're kind of bound socially to stand in place until we identify something as a threat or not in which case during this period that's when we experience creepiness yeah and I think everyone is experienced this like you're in a coffee shop or something and like some super

creepy dude comes in and if you're like me you're just like all right I'm going to keep my on that guy I'm not going to bolt and run but it might stand near the door sure you know I might get my car keys ready exactly it is this is weird social contract and you know I feel bad for people that just inherently look a little creepy well yeah let's talk about that yeah so there is these there are these researchers from Knox College who did what they build is the first empirical

study of creepiness and this is in 2016 such a great study and it was an online survey lot very little heavy lifting but it was a pretty pretty cool survey it was in four parts and what they found overall was that yeah physical characteristics physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to creepy people do have an effect they are creepy as far as the participants in this study are concerned yeah so the first section said hey you know what what is the likelihood that this

person is creepy and there's like you know descriptions of them the 44 different behaviors right yeah and the second part was the participants rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations love to see that was the third section it said list two hobbies that you think are creepy love that they only needed to it was open ended and then the last section the participants said whether or not they agree to 15 statements about the nature of creepy people yeah and

overall again like they found like yes if you have physical traits that people find creepy like bulging eyes or you lick your lips a lot or you know you you arch your fingers and then just kind of tap them together a lot okay yeah it's kind of creepy but the the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily in and of themselves it's when it's in conjunction with other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy right and of course the one behavior

they put in here I think those probably universally creepy was someone who persistently steers the conversation toward a sexual topic right yeah you don't you don't do that they yeah they also found now they also found 95% of participants and this is like I think 1800 and so no 1341 people 95% of them said that men were more likely to be creepy than women yeah I think that's generally true I I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my life by strictly from the appearance of a

woman right but a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps sure but we should say so there's a website called girl.com URL.com and they went on to Reddit and found a thread somewhere that they wrote a blog post about and now we're reporting on it so it's really come full circle but it was a thread about how women can be creepy and it was written by dudes and there are some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women right yeah women

that are too needy can be creepy women who use baby talk too much or who quote never leave a guy alone. Yeah I just I'm just going to go ahead and dump that right into the trash bin okay that's my only comment on that okay. What about you harmony I mean if you come home and then Glenn closes in your kitchen boiling your pet bunny. Well that's a threat. Yeah that's not even creepy that's just a threat right although I will say in fatal attraction the the scene where she is

sitting there clicking the light on and off listening to madam butterfly that was that was kind of creepy I was trying to think of like a creepy woman and I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well these are creepy behaviors though you know yeah not like Glenn close close walked into the room and you're like ooh I don't know about that. Right right right there's a difference right there's a difference between genuine creepiness and just doing creepy things. Yeah I think

it is much harder for women to be creepy than men cannot think of a single actual creepy woman. I'd like to hear from people though. Yeah. E harmony so we talked about Reddit now we're going to talk about E harmony. They had an article where they wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to avoid the creep zone. Right. And their advice was for your hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla. Don't like and even if you are an amateur taxidermist maybe don't put that down. Right

they said it can be attractive for a guy to have an off the beaten path hobby. And one of the examples they gave of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records. But don't get weirder than that. Yeah and if you know taxidermy in and of itself some people might say is super creepy we did an episode on that other people might say no it's just beautiful artwork. Right. But Norman Bates was in a taxidermy for a reason in psycho. Right. It was unsettling. Yeah. You

know. Yeah. And so they're the Knox people who carried out the survey the Knox University researchers they basically said here's what we think it is here's creepiness explained and what they explained was what can be called as the threat ambiguity theory. Yeah. This this one I think I kind of put a cherry on top on this one. Yeah we really did like it it's just basically where you are creeped out by something because your hackles are raised right then and it's because

you haven't determined whether that things a threat or not. Yep. Right. There's another one though that I subscribe to. I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness. I think it covers everything and it's called the category ambiguity theory. Yeah. That was now did David Livingstone Smith make this up or was he just champion this. I think he made it up because he wrote about the Knox researchers and said what they're talking about you can call threat ambiguity

category or threat ambiguity theory with category ambiguity theory. He didn't cite anybody else. So it seemed to be his own construct. Yeah. So this is the idea. It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there is some confusion but it's not a threat like I think this dude in the coffee shop is going to kill me. It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy. Right. And that freaks me out. Right. And it's based on what's called essentialism. Yeah. Right. Where if you are a

member of a species of animal whether human or raccoon or tiger there's something about you or there's some collection or set of things about you that that are totally unique to your species. Yeah. It's something you possess because you're a member of that species and because you're a member of that species you possess these things and it can be very difficult to put your finger on it but it's just one of those things that you know when you see it or know when you don't see

it. Right. Yeah. And there are clear borders between these things. You either have this essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're lacking it. You're missing it and something is really wrong. So in this article he used the example of a wax dummy. Yeah. Have you ever been to like Madame Tussauds? Sure. Yeah. I find that the ones and again with the eyes the ones that work the best are the ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah. You know again Michael Jackson. That's right.

But the whole point with these wax dummies with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around. The facial expression is locked in. The skin itself you know they can only do so much. And Madame Tussauds and museums like that are the best of the best and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole point with the uncanny valley is you can't get 99% there and say we're fine. It's that 1% that still gives people the creeps. Exactly. And that's and it sums up

everything like the threat ambiguity could fall into this category. Whether you're talking about robots whether you're talking about a half dog half lizard combo which living stone sites or living stone Smith sites. The desert. Yeah. A desert would be creepy when you saw it. Yeah. But so things that are a threat are creepy but there's also things that are creepy that aren't a threat in this category ambiguity theory figured it out. So if that's true Chuck and David Livingstone

figured out what is the basis of creepiness we finally have the independent variable licked and Masahiro Morty's uncanny valley graph and we can get to work. Is he still around. Yeah he is. I wonder if he's happy about all this. I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever gone off on his own little thing. Okay. And he's fine. He wrote it in 1970 after all. Yeah. I mean most 50 years ago. Yeah. He's probably up there. Yeah. You got anything else. I got nothing

else. Good one. Yeah. If you want to know more about the uncanny valley we should say this was based originally on a grab store article. That's right. But if you want to know more about uncanny valley come read that grab store article. You can type uncanny valley in the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bars time for listener mail. Well today it's a very special listener mail. This is Josh edition because you picked out a very special one. I love this

one. I'm going to butcher the dude's name but that's right. Take it away. It's a good one. Okay. I'm going to call this one. Email from a real Irish historian. It feels pretty good Chuck. Am I out of a job. Yeah. Maybe. Okay. Hi guys. I'm a big fan of the show. It's informative and insightful and I find myself interested in things that I never looked at twice at before. One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation between the Native

American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland. I didn't realize that was a thing that you not at all. This is a story which isn't well. Okay. Which isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland. And of course within the tribe but it's a really good story of solidarity between two groups of people despite being thousands of miles apart. Less than 20 years after the Trail of Tears which forcibly displaced thousands of natives the Great Famine hit

Ireland. During this time as you know Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human. He goes on to give more examples but just suffice to say it was not good for the Irish people during the famine. Word spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe. They sympathized with the Irish people so much that only 15 years after the

Trail of Tears they donated $710 during 1845 to send Ireland as part of a relief fund. This is estimated to be roughly $68,000 in today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people and after the famine the bond continued. In Cork we have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people and in 1990 members of the tribe came to Ireland and walked the famine walk in Mayo to replicate the walk that starving people made to

ask the landlord for help. In 1992 an Irish commemoration group walked from Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and raised $700,000 to help poverty in Africa. These two groups continue to work together and to this day our president has declared an honorary member of the Choctaw tribe along with the Quakers who fed Irish people to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The Choctaw tribe

remained some of the unsung heroes of the famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long. I'm an Irish historian so I tend to waffle. Love the show. Best of luck with yourselves. Royzen Kilroy. Fantastic. Great story. Thanks a lot Royzen. I'm quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name because there's a lot of accent marks over letters that are normally

aren't. Yeah. So I apologize for that but I nailed your last name on positive of it. And Josh Clark, three and a half stars. Not bad out of three and a half right. I remember what was Star Search. Is it four stars? Oh I don't remember. I just just now remember there was such thing as Star Search. Yeah. Well okay well you take the end part Chuck since I took listener mail. Oh jeez. Thanks for listening. Hey if you

want to get in touch with us you can find Josh at Josh Um Clark on Twitter and me in Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or you can go to our official pages. Stuff you should know podcast. What else? Let's see if they want to send us an email. Oh yeah. Email us at Stuffpodcast at HowStuffWorks.com and have a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough man. Alright.

For more on this and thousands of other topics visit HowStuffWorks.com on the podcast Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to

come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.