Stuff You Should Know - Juggling: What the Heck

Episode Date: January 15, 2015

There is a lot - A LOT - to juggling and Chuck and Josh go over the lion's share of it. Delve into the deep history, physics, how-tos and different types of juggling in this surprisingly sweeping look at a putatively innocuous pastime. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. Just doing a little tandem juggling with my bra. That's what we're doing right now. Yeah, man. I wish you guys could see this because we've gotten pretty good.

Cascade right now. Oh, look at this, half shower, half shower. Half shower. Man, that was a good one, bro. Seventeen balls at once. Yeah, Jerry, come light these torches on fire. Wow. Man, half shower of rain and fire.

This is really dangerous. Can you juggle? No, but I want to after this. My brother learned of course. Of course. I'm sure he was born knowing how to juggle. Yeah. He came out of the womb juggling.

Yeah. Now he learned back when I was in high school and mastered it pretty quickly. Yeah. And now, and he can still juggle some. I think it's one of those things where once you learn sort of the basics, you can always do it. Because apparently a lot of it comes down to muscle memory, which is to say motor memory. Yeah.

And in true Chuck fashion, I tried to learn to juggle for about an hour and never finished. Did you like see any progress over that hour? Yeah. I did the little one hand juggling two balls with one hand thing. Uh-huh. Okay. But I did a lot of chasing the ball. That's a problem.

Which apparently if you're a beginning juggler, you're going to be throwing the ball further and further away from you just naturally. Chasing the ball. And they call it chasing it. So what do they suggest? They suggest that you learn to juggle close to and facing a wall. Yeah. Because that way you can't move forward.

Or you'll just keep hitting your head. You'll scratch your face up on the brick. Quit juggling. Do you remember Jonathan Strickland joint of tech stuff? It reeks of Strickland. It does. Like even if the byline hadn't been on there, I would have been like, this is Strickland. But I remember when this one was made, it was like right when I got here and like there

is a video embedded of Strickland teaching you how to juggle. Yeah. It reeks of bald head cream and bowling shirts. Yeah. And it also has an illustration by Marcus who clearly always wanted to be a comic book illustrator. Yeah. And then in the graph on how to juggle is just totally ripped.

Yeah. Like a comic book here. I remember Marcus. It seems like a million years ago. It was. So juggling history, how long have people been juggling? Chuck, people have been juggling since at least 1994. No, Tomb, exactly.

They found in Egyptian tombs, hieroglyphics showing women toss juggling. And there are many kinds of juggling, by the way, and we're mainly going to talk about toss juggling, which is throwing something up in the air, throwing more things up in the air than you have hands. Yes. That's toss juggling. And there are, like you said, a bunch of other kinds. But if you're a toss juggler, you probably don't consider the other kinds real juggling.

You're like, those are cool and everything, but that's not real juggling. Yeah. I asked my friend, our friend, Brandon Ross, from the stuff you should know, art department. Clearly a juggler. Very good juggler. Yeah. And I sent a message to him and did not hear back in time. I was like, it says in here that modern jugglers poo poo things like taking a bite out of the

apple and like some of those old school tricks. That's pretty cool. And I was like, is that true or not? And I didn't hear back from him. So maybe I'll fall. Crickets. Well, he was on Facebook. Oh, okay.

So he'll get to it when he gets to it. So anyway, we're in ancient Egypt. 1994 BCE, to be exact. That's right. There were jugglers in Greece and Rome and India and Thebes and Thebes and Europe. And I think 400 BC was when it was actually written down that people were juggling. Yeah. Supposedly in the Talmud, a rabbi named Shimon Ben-Gamalil.

Yeah. I think I probably nailed that. Probably. I would juggle eight torches at once. That's hard to believe because world records today are like seven. I think for clubs, is it seven? I think so. Yeah.

But I mean, if this rabbi was juggling eight torches, that sounds like it maybe pumped up a little bit throughout the years. Gotcha. You know, like it was two and then it was like, oh, it was eight. So this was the time of miracles, you know, like enough oil to keep it going for eight days. Oh, sure. During a siege.

Yeah. Why not a rabbi who could juggle eight torches? It seems kind of paltry by comparison. Good point. Through the Roman era, apparently, that jugglers were actually held in high esteem. But then they kind of went down into pooper a little bit. It's hilarious. Because people associated with them like magicians as con artists.

So I don't know if it was like, hey, look at what this guy's doing while someone else is picking their pocket. Right. But that's kind of what it seems like it might have been going on. Yeah. Apparently you were a con artist, like you said. Sure. Everybody knows that you can't trust a juggler.

A juggler. Well, at the right, at the, at the, at the time, that's how people thought of jugglers. This seems to be during like the Holy Roman Empire in the West, right? Then the medieval era hits and suddenly jugglers start to become a little, a little less threatening. And actually a little more clown-like. Yeah. Like initially they seemed to have been not revered necessarily, but thought of in fairly high esteem.

Then they went the opposite direction and then they came back as clowns. Right. I wonder how many like behind closed doors, how many like emperors and kings tried it out after seeing it in the court and were just like morons with it. Yeah. And then had someone's head chopped off out of frustration. They took the chuck route, although I didn't behead anybody. But yeah, during the medieval era, you could, if you found a juggler, you probably also

found something of a minstrel or performer and all around entertainer who'd probably traveled from town to town, maybe asking people to bring out their dead for some side work. Perhaps. And then juggling corpses, which must have been a sight to see. And then in the 1700s, they became more of a circus act. And in the late 1800s and 1900s, vaudeville came along and of course any sort of skill like that was big in vaudeville. And I did not know this, but W.C. Fields was a juggler in the vaudevillian days.

I didn't know that either. Before he became just a drunk actor. And he's not the one who raped anybody, right? Who was it? I think that was Faddy R. Buckle. Faddy R. Buckle. That's who it was. Yeah.

Yeah. Same era, same guys. I looked it up and I ran across the Hollywood Hell Club. So apparently before the Rat Pack, before the Rat Pack, there was a group of early Hollywood guys. Other white dudes. Included Aero Flynn, who was a rapist, W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, that just raised hell in Hollywood in like the 20s.

Aero Flynn was a rapist? Uh-huh. Really? Accused rapist. I didn't know that. They were all declines, circuses sort of declined a little bit for a while. And then jugglers started hitting the streets, or as Jonathan Strickland said, or become mathematicians.

Yup. We'll get to the math connection, which is legit. That's foreshadowing. But I don't know that like they formed their own stage shows, performed on street corners, or became mathematicians. Right. Those were the three options, if you were a juggler. And then of course, in the 1940s, I say of course, because it's common knowledge that

these are when the juggling groups and conventions were formed and held, the International Brotherhood of Magicians decided, you know, at a meeting, hey guys, like the jugglers got together and had a few drinks and said, I don't like being known as a magician. Yeah, you know, that's how the jugglers tell it. The magicians were like, get the out jugglers. Is that what it was? Yeah. Yeah.

And then they went through down their smoke bomb when they were gone. Yeah. So they formed and splintered off and formed the International Juggling Association. And in 1969, they started holding championships and competitions. Summer of juggling. And in 2000, Jason Garfield, a very famous juggler, formed the World Juggling Federation and said, ESPN, you need to put this stuff on TV. So once a year, they put it on TV.

Progress. Along with the spelling bee and the dart competition. What else? Which I watched the other day. Log rolling. Yeah. Lumberjacking. Sure.

Lawn darting. No. That's illegal. No more. It's like cock fighting. So all right, let's get into it then. So we're actually going to teach everybody how to juggle. Like no kidding.

Yeah. And if you're really into this, like we're going to describe a lot of things visually, which is always a train wreck for us. Yeah. So I would recommend you do like I did and just get on the old YouTube and look up what cascade juggling looks like. And there are four or five guys who have tons and tons of videos. There's a few.

There's one guy that I believe is kind of the gold standard for YouTube instructional juggling videos. His name is Adam Shomsky, S-H-O-M-S-K-Y. And like. I'm sure I watched them. That guy pops it into slow motion for you. There's like like graphics wherein like he throws something straight up. You might not have caught it.

So it says throwing straight up. He's good. Okay. And he's just doing it for the love of juggling. You can tell. I think they all do. I would hope so. I don't know if you make a ton of money as a juggler these days.

Or fame. Well, although there is, I should recommend it's going to wait till the end. There's a great article on grantland.com called dropped by Jason Fagone. And he details a big long story on Anthony Gatto, who may be the best juggler on the planet. He juggled for Cirque du Soleil. Oh, he had a bunch of the records until recently. Yeah.

12 world records. And he's amazing, dude. But he quit last year to run a concrete resurfacing business after becoming disenchanted with the juggling scene. Huh. Basically calling out all these kids these days saying like, you filmed something a hundred times and only nail it once and then you upload it to YouTube. That's not the same.

He basically, his quote is, if you can't do a trick in three tries, you can't do it. He said, you may have done it, but it doesn't mean you can do it. It's essentially what you're talking about this guy's story is the premise for office space. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. But he's amazing if you watch Anthony Gatto juggling, like he will break the record

for like, let's say the number of balls in a rain shower. And for the amount of time though, he won't like do it for 10 seconds. He'll do it for like 10 minutes. Right. And other jugglers are like, this dude is insane. How long he can keep all these clubs and balls and torches or whatever in the air. That's really funny that you mentioned him and what happened to him because I noticed his records were like all mid 2000s, the most recent ones were.

And I wondered what happened to Anthony Gatto. Now I know. He hit the finger. It's a really good article actually. It's Nick dropped on grantland.com. All right. So how do you juggle? So Chuck, here's how you juggle.

Basically you want to start with three balls. And if you have even half of a brain, half, you will make sure that those balls are beanbags because beanbags are dead drops or they drop dead. You're not going to chase them all over the room. No. When they fall, they just stay put. Yeah. Hacky sacks are good too.

Or you can buy like my brother did the little, which are basically hacky sacks, a little juggling kit. Yeah. The complete klutz's guide to juggling, isn't that? I don't know. I'm sure there are many. I think it was before the complete idiots guides, there was something called like something for klutz's and it would teach you like things how to juggle.

They're required dexterity. Yeah. Interesting. So anyway, you start with three beanbags, which in the juggling world, what these are, anything you juggle are called props and specifically a beanbag falls under the category of balls, even though they're not necessarily balls, they're still under the prop category of balls. So because it's not a chainsaw or a torch or a club, which would fall under the category

of clubs. Right. So for most of the time, we're going to say balls, but just imagine as you're starting out, we're talking about beanbags. Okay. Okay. So you get three of them, Chuck. Yes.

And you put them in a drawer to start as the first step to learning juggling. Yeah. Take two of your three balls and put them away. Yeah. And Strickland and experts say you should literally start with tossing one back and forth to get your arc down. That's, yeah. The key is consistency.

You don't want to, and, you know, once you get good, you can do all sorts of things, but you don't want to toss one beanbag up four feet and one three feet. When you first starting out, you want to kind of toss them all about the same. Yeah. And you need to learn your hand movements, which are very important. Sure. Once you get hand movements down, you can do variations on the hand movements, but ultimately there's a basic hand movement that's a scooping motion.

Yeah. And the easiest one to start with, to start practicing is the cascade pattern. Yeah. There's two main patterns, the shower and the cascade, which we've joked about so far about 10 times. The shower is the one that you see on cartoons when someone's basically just throwing balls in a big circle in a big loop. Beautiful.

Beautiful. Very cool looking. The cascade looks kind of like fireworks if you like squint your eyes and use your imagination. Yeah. Never thought about that. Yeah. Like as the balls go up and they arc out, they're basically arcing outward across your body.

Yes. And it looks just kind of like, you know, one of those big fireworks where like blows up and then like just kind of trails downward slowly. Yeah. And that's ultimately what it looks like to me. Yeah. I get that. Yeah.

So the cascade, you move your hands in a figure eight and for the regular cascade, your right hand goes clockwise, your left hand is counterclockwise, alternating these tosses. If you reverse that, it's called a reverse cascade. Right. So the key here, just remember, you're using one ball still, but you're making a scooping motion in toward your torso, like in toward yourself, not away from your body, but in toward your body, right? In front of your chest, your feet are shoulder width apart because they always should be.

When you do anything. And you're tossing the thing up into an arc in about just above eye level. That's the one that you start with and you usually start with your dominant hand. Yeah. Because that'll just probably be easier because you're more used to throwing things with that hand. Right. And I didn't see it anywhere, but I put two and two together in this article and it looks

like. Well, it looks like, so it could be wrong everybody, but it looks like if you are doing a cascade of any kind, reverse cascade, anything like that, whatever hand is going clockwise is the hand that you throw in the highest arc above your eye level. Oh, okay. Okay. So you've got your one bag and you make a scooping motion with your right hand in a counter and a clockwise motion and you toss the ball or yeah, you toss the ball in an arc just above

eye level and then it drops and you catch it in your left hand. Yeah. And then now in your left hand, you toss it again, but this one should be slightly under the arc of the first one. Yeah. It's moving in a counterclockwise motion so that eventually when you add more balls and you have them all in the air, they're not just bumping into each other at the same place. The one from your clockwise motion hand is going higher and the one from your counterclockwise

motion hand is following just beneath the arc of the first ball. That's right. It's inside that ball's path. Yes. And you're going to at first be very frustrated because you're going to want to throw both of the balls at the same time when you're just starting out with the two just to get used to the motion. Yeah.

Because it's just that sort of like if you've never played drums, it's hard to make your right arm, your left arm, your right foot, your left foot do different things. Yeah. That's a bit of a brain trick. I think some people catch on quicker than others, obviously, but you want the two tosses to be distinct and separate. And one way to do this, Strickland says, is to count your tosses, like toss one, toss two.

Yeah. Toss one, toss two. And then your little brother's going to say, what are you doing in there? Shut up. Yeah. Nothing. Toss one. Toss two.

So we might as well add the second ball now. Are you ready? Have we just been with one ball? Yeah. Oh, wow. Because that one, toss one is with your clockwise hand. Yeah. Toss two is with your counterclockwise hand.

You catch the second one, your toss two with your clockwise hand, toss one, toss two. You're still just with one ball here. Now we're going to add two. Okay. So you have one in your left hand, you have one in your right. We're doing a cascade. So with your right hand, you're making a clockwise scooping motion. Yes.

Right? Uh-huh. Yeah. I got it right. I wish people could see this one. This is delightful. So we're going to throw the first ball and as it reaches its zenith just above our eyes, we're going to throw the second one just underneath the arc of the first one.

Yeah. You know what's funny is that people that were walking by my desk all day saw me doing the same thing. Because you kind of do it to yourself to be like, okay, I get the motion. Yeah. And like, what is trickling saying here? And we were using no bean bags. No, just imaginary ones.

Exactly. I didn't drop a single one. I'm a great imaginary juggler. So Chuck, with this toss one, toss two, ultimately what you're doing is, let's say it takes a second for you to throw one ball to your other hand. Yes. You throw the second ball at about the halfway mark of that first throw. So every half second, you're throwing a ball.

Is that the deal? If you're fast, you are ultimately you're doing that, but it doesn't even necessarily have to be a second. Let's say it takes two seconds for it to go up and then down. So every second you're throwing, every half of whatever bead it takes for the ball to be tossed and then come down, you're throwing a ball. Right. Okay.

Okay. Which means that when you finally add the third ball in there, you can, which let's go ahead and do that now. Yeah. You want to hold two balls in one hand, obviously, and they suggest to hold the two in the dominant hand, although if you're having a problem making that third toss, they say sometimes switch it up and it may help to hold the two in the non-dominant hand to begin with. Some people just want to hold one and you're really just throwing two with another one

in your hand, or else you're throwing one and then two at once, which you don't want to do either. Yeah. You're going to be frustrated. It takes a lot of time and practice. Yeah. Like don't give up like I did when you didn't master it in one hour. Right.

If you think that you're supposed to be mastering this as we're speaking. No. No. We just covered like six months of work. No. What you can master in a minute though is just clicking on YouTube and watching videos of jugglers. Again, I'm almost done.

Yeah. So with this cascade, you've got the third ball. And just remember that every half of a beat that it takes, you're throwing a ball. Yeah. You're constantly throwing a ball. The cool thing about the third one is, is when you start with two balls in one hand, you obviously start with that hand for tossing. Sure.

You toss it up in the air. Yeah. As that one arcs, you toss your left one. As that one arcs, you toss your third one. And about the time you're tossing your third one, your first one's landing. That's right. And you've just done what's called a flash of juggling. That's right.

And if you have trouble catching at first, don't worry about it. Yeah. They recommend just work on the tossing. And if you drop the ball and it's not a big deal at first, you just want to get that hand motion down and learn basically the motion of the cascade. And again, stand in front of a wall because you're going to find yourself chasing the beanbag forward because you're tossing it further away from you. Yeah.

But be careful. Yeah. Don't start with chainsaws. Don't start with chainsaws. Which, by the way, are modified. They're props. They're not using real chainsaws unless you're crazy. Oh, well, they probably don't have the thing.

Bam. They're like the haunted house chainsaws. Right. All right. Well, after this break, we are going to get into variations on the cascade. 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.

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Oh, I'm sorry, you're scooping outward instead of inward. Which sounds weird, but if you just do without balls, if you just do your hands like that, it makes sense. Yeah, you can just kind of do it in your imagination and then just change directions. Yeah, and you're like, wait a minute, I've seen guys do that. Right. It'll feel like natural. Yeah, the only big difference is here is with the hand that you throw in a higher arc

has changed. So your first throw is going to be at a lower arc than the second throw. That's all. Okay. And your hands are moving in different directions. So remember, the hand that's going in counterclockwise motion throws in the higher arc. And that's called Josh's law. Okay.

So after you've mastered this, which will take a while, as we've said 150 times, you can start doing little tricks thrown in there because just a regular juggler isn't going to get very far in life. Where you really make your dough is when you start throwing in things like the half shower or the tennis move, which is, and if you look all these up, basically when you see jugglers just juggling regular and then their arm does something crazy looking, that's what these moves are. Right.

Like we could describe them in detail, but it's really a lot cooler if you just go look. But when you're watching juggler and you go, oh man, what was that? Look what that girl just did with her arm. That was maybe a tennis move or Mills mess invented by juggler Steve Mills. I don't think he can juggle or Burke's Barrage or Rubenstein's Revenge. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah. These are all just complex arm crossing patterns as you're juggling different variations on

that. Another variation that I like, have you seen this before bounce juggling? It's my favorite thing. Rather than throwing the balls up. My favorite thing. My favorite juggling. Okay. Got you.

Rather than throwing the balls up in the air to toss juggle, the you throw the balls down on the ground and bounce them. So awesome. There's this kid I saw on YouTube. If you just search bounce juggling, it's the first video. It's the thing, the first thing that comes up on YouTube, that guy's good. He starts out in profile. Yeah.

And you're like, what's the big deal? In like his basement or whatever. Yeah. But then once he, I don't know how many balls he had going. Yeah. You had quite a few. Yeah. And there's different ways of doing this.

You can either lift bounce it by just sort of tossing it in the air and letting it bounce, or you can actually throw it at the ground, which is called a force bounce. Right. And then he wrote, coolest, exclamation point, bounce juggling is really cool looking. There's clawing, which is basically palms down juggling. So it's just the regular cascade, but yeah, you're like snatching them out of the air. Yeah. And that's cool looking.

You can do that solely, or you can just throw in a claw every now and then to delight your nieces and nephews at Christmas. There is the chop, which I think this one is where you grab a ball and then throw it underneath your other arm. You throw it upward underneath your other arm. Yeah. It's like a diagonal, quick diagonal move. Yeah.

And like I said, it all, you'll just notice if you're not a real juggler, if you're just watching in the park one day, they'll do some crazy arm thing. Sure. It's just, I call it flair. Well there is actually something called flair, that's the type of juggling. That's it really. Bartender's flair. Oh.

You know the movie cocktail? Yeah. Bartender's flair. That was a type of juggling supposedly. Not a fan. Oh, I thought it was great. I haven't seen it. The movie?

Yeah. I haven't seen it. Are you a fan of bartending flair though? Hey, I'm a Jerry Thomas fan. So yes. The answer is yes. All right. I like a bartender to like grump at me and slide my whiskey down the bar.

That's the best trick I want to see. That's fine. I pretty much like all bartenders. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. They do it. They're doing God's work. So Jonathan Strickland says, generally speaking, if you have an odd number of props, you're

going to require a criss-cross pattern. If you have an even number of props, it's going to be two separate groups juggled in each hand. Yeah. Remember you said you could juggle with one hand kind of? Yeah. So remember, toss juggling is any kind of juggling where the more the objects, the number of objects you're juggling exceeds the number of hands you're using.

That's right. So if you use two balls in one hand. That's toss juggling. That still counts. Yeah. So if you're juggling four things, you're basically toss juggling separately with two hands, two different things. So two bowling pins in each hand is toss juggling.

I don't know if you could do clubs with one hand, can you? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you do it in columns and... Yeah. Yeah. That's some talent right there. That's how most people do clubs is like one hand. Oh really?

I've just seen like the Cascade mainly. No. No. Every time I've ever seen clubs, it's like one handed, two one handed juggling. You need to get out more. I guess so. I need to go to the park. Yeah.

That they hang out there along with the hacky-sackers. Yeah. Well, like you'd mentioned then, I guess if you're going to be juggling with one hand, you've got the fountain, which is the circular pattern. I think if I had two balls and I was just throwing them in a circle or the straight up and down, which is the column. Right. And that can be either synchronous or asynchronous.

If you look up synchronous column juggler on YouTube, they're going to be doing the exact same thing at the same time with both hands, which is pretty neat. I think asynchronous may be a little tougher though, just judging by the looks of it. Well, Strickland makes the point that since most people start out learning to juggle asynchronously, which is like that cascade is asynchronous, the hands aren't moving at the same time. They're moving at opposite beats. It's actually easier for people to do that, to do asynchronous. Oh, yeah.

Makes sense, I guess. Yeah. What do I know? Even handed juggling. What is that called? It's the one thing in juggling that doesn't have a name, where you're just juggling four things at once or like an even number of things and you're using both your hands, but you're juggling two clubs.

There's no name for it. It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there's a name for it. Well, I don't know what it is. You should name it after you. At any term. Oh, no. Here it is.

Numbers juggling. Okay. Okay. When you're doing numbers juggling, an even number of numbers juggling, you're just doing it asynchronously, probably to start. That was my point before my little tirade. I wonder how many angry jugglers we have right now. Oh, probably a lot.

A couple hundred. There's a couple of other kinds of juggling that are fun to watch. Cigar box juggling and shaker cup. You've probably tried the cigar box thing with two boxes or whatever. That's when you have any number of boxes. You're holding one in each hand, but then you have quite a few in the middle and you'll toss them up and flip them and then catch them between the other two boxes. Yeah.

It's pretty neat. The same sort of thing goes with the shaker cup. Your cups are nesting inside one another, though, like cocktail cups and you're tossing those up and catching them. They're probably was born out of bartender flare. Yeah, probably so. All right. We mentioned clubs as an alternative.

They look like the standard club looks sort of like a modified bowling pin. Yeah, like a slim svelte bowling pin. Yeah. A sexy bowling pin. They are European and American versions, and I think the European version is slimmer and sexier than the American go figure, and I think they're a little more popular as well. Right. And the larger end is meant to fit into a champagne coupe.

That's it. So the European one, that's pretty neat. And I think you said that clubs also if you want to do like knives and torches, they call that a club as well. Yeah. So a few broad categories of props, balls, clubs, that kind of thing, and then they fall under those subcategories. Like axes and torches.

Categories out the yin and yang. And then there's ring juggling, of course. They're very stable because of their gyroscopic properties. Don't even mention gyroscopic properties. Well, the point is, though, you can juggle a lot more rings at once, maybe then you might be able to juggle a ball. Yeah. And that's pretty impressive to see as well.

Yeah. And then there's this thing I found today called contact ring juggling. It's when you're not throwing rings. You really just have to see it. Oh, you're rolling them along? Well, no, that's contact juggling with like a ball. Uh-huh. It's when you're like doing the Harlem Globetrotter thing and rolling it down your arm and over

your body and stuff. Right. Well, it's pretty cool. But the contact ring juggling, just look it up. It's really cool. It's like, I mean, there's all different shapes, but the ones I've seen are mainly a figure eight and you're just manipulating them such that they look like, uh, it looks like an illusion almost like one will be stationary and it looks like the other ring is circling

around it. Well, it is, but just take my word for it. Okay. Contact ring juggling, everyone. Go check it out. Very popular in Asia. It looks like. Okay.

They've mastered it. Okay. Uh, very cool. So let's say you got a buddy and you both like to go to the park. Well, this is a big one and it's pretty cool. It's a thing. You've seen it. Yeah.

Strickland makes the point that juggling is kind of a social thing populated by social creatures. Like there's lots of juggling clubs and that kind of stuff. And that, um, where, you know, you and I think of juggling as like a solitary activity. No way, man. If you get too good jugglers together, it becomes a feast for the mind and the eyes. We could add this to our live show. Juggling us juggling.

Yeah. We have a lot of practice to do because what we could do, Josh, on stage, if we put a lot of work into it is something called stealing and replacing. And that is when you basically will go up. If you're juggling four clubs, I'll go and steal one or maybe steal two and then three and then four. And then I'm the one juggling, but the juggling never stops. Right.

It's as, as a seamless synchronous pattern uninterrupted. If you just like stop another person from juggling, it's just being a jerk. Yeah. The point of it is that combat juggling, yeah, I guess so, but you're still juggling the whole time you're doing that. That's right. The whole point of juggling with two people and like stealing and replacing is that the balls, if you were able to ask these juggled balls, what they think is going on, they would

say nothing. It's the same thing. We're doing the same pattern. They'd say Chuck's hands were a little sweatier. Right. But what really happened was I replaced you. Yeah. That's one way to do it.

Or we could stand in front of each other like four feet apart and, you know, we're juggling the clubs and then tossing each other the clubs. Right. And we've got our little post stuff you should now act all worked out. Yeah. What's cool. So with stealing, replacing with, with juggling balls, like I would stand facing opposite you and just kind of grab yours, like you said, and just ultimately like take over your

catches and then I would be juggling and then you could steal it back and we could go back and forth indefinitely with clubs. I would be standing next to you and just basically kind of push you out of the way. Well that's if you're stealing and replacing over passing, then we're standing in front of each other and just throwing them back and forth to each other. And there's actually a pretty established way of, of passing where it's called the 3,3,10 where we do three passes where every third toss, I pass to you and you catch it. So you know, we're in tandem and everything's going right.

And then after three of those, you do every second toss, then after three of those, you do every toss, you toss another one. And then by that last one, we're just like on fire, just throwing, throwing ones back and forth between ourselves. Yeah. And we did mention combat juggling that was not a joke. It is a thing and I've seen, I looked up these little competitions, it's when it's sort of like dodgeball, you get, you know, 10 jugglers on a stage and they all start juggling and

they all start to try and thwart the other jugglers juggle while maintaining theirs. So I would go up and throw mine in the air and try and knock yours out of your hand, but you can't, you know, get too crazy because you've got to still juggle or else you're out. I've been describing this one, it feels like we've been replaced by imposters who listen to the show a lot and didn't know what topic to pick. Right. Yeah.

Isn't that weird? It is weird. I'm myself. Are you yourself? No, I'm you. Oh God. Weird. Well, we'll get to the bottom of this right after these messages.

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.

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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. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

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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. And now Chuck comes to the darkest time. Is this Josh Actual? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I'm replaced. I replaced the replacement. Okay. Um, nope, still here saying bizarre stuff like I replaced the replacement. All right. And we're talking about the physics of juggling. Fun. Fun.

Which is, it's actually kind of straightforward, it's stuff you would think of, but it's nice to put it into terms where we can say that we covered the physics of juggling. That's right. Like so the main factor acting on juggling, probably the most important part in the whole thing is our good friend gravity. That's right. An acceleration due to gravity specifically is 9.8 m slash s to the second power, meaning 9.8 m per second every second.

Right. So when you drop something, speed is going to increase by 9.8 m per second. And don't bother us. We're, we're not including any kind of air resistance. We're in a vacuum. Yeah. To demonstrate all of our physics. We're always in a vacuum.

Right. Our little stuff. You should know vacuum part next to the wayback machine. Yes. Um, so it's a constant acceleration and because of that, the only way to slow down your pattern is by throwing something higher. Yeah. And so the more things that you add into your pattern, the higher you're going to have

to throw. Right. Because you have a constant acceleration, downward acceleration after your toss. Um, so that means you have to open up your pattern by throwing it higher up the more stuff you have because you simply would not have enough time to throw X amount of balls in the air. I mean, you can increase your hand speed somewhat, but at a certain point you just can't do it.

Exactly. You can't throw X everywhere. Yeah. Another, um, factor is that it's not really a factor. It's more of a fact when you're throwing your balls, you're throwing them in a parabola. Yeah. Which means that the only, uh, the only velocity that counts is the, is the, um, vertical velocity, the vertical acceleration.

When you throw something up, you're exerting your own force upward. And once it peaks, it's, gravity's pushing it back downward. That's right. It's going to have a horizontal velocity, but that's going to be constant. So there's no force acting on it. Exactly. Unless I mean, I guess with the column, it's pretty much straight up and down, but generally speaking, uh, you're going to be, have both.

Right. Yeah. It's moving horizontally, but there's no force pushing it. There's no change in, I'm sorry, there's no change in acceleration. It's constant. Exactly. Okay. So the mass of your props also count.

Yeah. Which is why if you've ever seen the old trick where someone's doing a bowling ball with a tennis ball with a club, it's super impressive because it's much, much easier to juggle things with the same mass. Yeah. Because you're just making the same motion over and over again. Yeah. When you are juggling things with three different maths, meaning they have three different, um,

three different amounts of inertia or they, they require, uh, more different amounts of force to overcome inertia. Yeah. Um, then yes, like you said, that's kind of impressive. It just requires that much more mental acuity. That's right. Is that all the physics? Yeah, that's all the physics.

Now we get into the math. I know this actually kind of interested me a little bit despite the fact that it is math and I'm well known to not love it. But, um, there was a mathematician who, uh, named Claude Shannon, who proposed a juggling theorem, um, that basically describes a relationship of, of a cask or well just of a juggle. Right. I keep seeing juggles. Is that a thing?

Yeah. Did I make it up? No, I think it's a thing. I think it's called something else though. A juggle? Yeah. Oh, uh, a flash. A flash.

There you go. That's a round of juggling. Right. So all three or all five or all seven of your balls have been tossed once at least. But to the layman, it's called a juggle. Right. So everyone knows what I mean. Uh, and this is, uh, in parentheses F plus D, um, and then that would be times H, right?

Yeah. Outside the parentheses equals V plus D in parentheses times N. Uh, when F is the time the ball is in the air, D is the time is the ball in the hand, H is the number of hands, D is time that the hand is empty and N is the number of balls being juggled. So basically what he's saying is if you add together the amount of time the ball spends in the air plus the amount of time it spends in the hand, right? Yeah. Which is the full amount of time that that ball exists during a flash.

Multiply that times your hands to the number of hands that's going to equal the time your hand is empty, uh, plus the time the ball spends in a hand times the number of balls being juggled. So I saw no reason for this equation whatsoever. Yeah. Like at first I was like, oh, that's, that's pretty cool. And then I spelled it out to myself and it's like, yeah, the amount of time the ball's out of the hand plus the amount of time the ball's in the hand times the number of balls

that who, what, yeah, I, I didn't understand what the point of it was. So Claude Shannon, please get in touch with us. Well, that's why he did it. So, uh, people would write stuff about it, Anna. Well, the thing is, I guess the problem is it, it says Shannon build a juggling robot. So I guess this formula allows robotics to happen. Yeah. And I saw the juggling robots, different robots that toss things and catch things.

Right. It's kind of cool. Okay. Yeah. So if, if that's the point of the Shannon theorem, is that what that's called? Sure. The Claude's, Claude's law. And then I understand it and I take it back.

What if there's some Claude's law that's something awful that we don't know about? I hope that's the case. And then there's site swapping, um, which is another math application is sort of like a musical akin to a musical score to a musician as a form of notation describing the juggling pattern and is what jugglers use to, um, basically if you were going to write out your juggling pattern and send it to your buddy, right, you wouldn't say, take your right hand and blah, blah, blah. You'd use numbers to represent it, which this actually does make sense.

Yeah. This may have a little more sense to me for sure. Yeah. And, um, so like a normal three ball cascade is three, three, three. Each throw takes three beats, a zero is a rest on an empty hand and a one is handoff from one to the other. And you can actually, if you add them all together and take the average, you can tell how many balls are in that pattern.

Right. So in a three, three, three, you add those together. That's nine divided by three because there's three different numerals and you've got three or a four, five, one, four, one is also three. Right. Man, that sounds pretty difficult. The four, five, one, four, one. You think?

Yeah. The three, three, three makes intuitive sense to me, but that's, you know, the four, one, four, five, one, four, one. That's tough. Oh man. Is anyone still listening? No. Can you hear the echo?

I can. Uh, if you look at a juggler, you might notice that they're probably not looking at their hands like at the catching. The catching is sort of automatic. Right. Uh, they're kind of looking sort of up at the, the arc, um, and they have done experiments to see where, um, your eyes go, um, A, A, M, Van, Santh, Vord, Peter, Jay Beck did some experiments that actually found that, uh, while the peak is important, if you see the

first 100 milliseconds of the flight path, then you can juggle successfully. Yeah. Which is pretty impressive. They found that jugglers are relying more on feel than, than vision. That's why you can juggle blindfolded if you're really good. Supposedly some people can. I've seen it. Oh yeah.

I bet Brandon Ross can. I could see that. Dude is talented. So Chuck, we could probably keep talking about juggling for the next five years cause there's a lot to it. Yeah man. This is just a primer. Hopefully you guys are inspired, or at least we're inspired in the first maybe 20 minutes,

the good part of this episode to go out and, um, and learn to juggle. I know I was. Yeah. And while we hate ourselves, we don't hate ourselves that much. Right. We're going to end this one. Yeah. So we think that you should learn about juggling.

And you can start by typing that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. This is a really touching story, oddly enough, from Jennifer Grace. She's an actor in New York City who, um, played a very long, uh, run of our town on stage and had to go there without her husband at first because they were in Chicago and stuff you should know turned out to be the thing that linked them together, uh, before he finally moved to New York to join her. Um, they've been together for 13 years now and they had their son Emmett last fall and

a month before Emmett turned one, uh, Tom, her husband was admitted to the hospital and has been there ever since. Um, he has a very rare issue with his bone marrow that they finally, uh, diagnosed as aplastic anemia. So basically he has no immune system, which means he can't risk getting sick, which means her son, their son, can't even visit him, which is just unbelievably sad. She can visit wearing, uh, masking gloves and gown, but they can't even touch each other, uh, the husband and wife.

And this came on suddenly too, right? Yeah. She said it's pretty much the worst thing ever. I mean, they spent a lot of time even diagnosing this thing before they can, I know it's just so terrible and they're just really, really great people. Um, she said, uh, it looks like we will be going forward though with a bone marrow transplant, uh, because he has a brother who is a match and he does have a good chance of recovering with the good brother, uh, with this bone marrow transplant and a round of chemo followed

by this transplant in the new year. She says there's not a lot that I can give him by way of a Christmas present this year, given the circumstances, but I'm hoping that perhaps you would give him a shout out on an episode. It's been a very special shared experience for us and it really brightened his day. So Tom, dude, they also sent me a video of them, uh, playing a song together in the kitchen doing, uh, Springsteen song and it was just like, they're the cutest couple ever and they're really great.

And, um, I'm going to plug their GoFundMe site because, um, they didn't even ask me to. That's why I'm plugging it. Uh, it is GoFundMe.com slash F759ZG and that will help out offset, um, their hospital bills a little bit. And they're just really nice folks. So Tom, get better soon, man. I hope that operation goes great. Yeah, Tom, here's to you, buddy.

And, uh, yeah, and keep us, keep us posted. You guys. Yeah, please do Jennifer. That would be great. Uh, and we should totally post that GoFundMe stuff too. Yeah. On social. Yeah.

I have a great story about how Chuck and I brought you together with your ESO or helped you through a rough time or did anything good. We want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and it's always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tim. 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 Podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.