Stuff You Should Know - Playing Cards? You Got That Right!

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

If you've ever wanted to learn more about playing cards, now is your big chance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. So that makes this a rough and tumble, root and toot an episode of Stuff You Should Know. How you doing? I'm great. How are you? Pretty good. You just celebrated a birthday just 24 hours ago and less.

Yeah, I did. Happy birthday, Chuck. Thanks, man. How do you feel? I'm good. Good? I feel great. I feel, I'm tired today but not because of birthdays.

I'm just, I don't know, I'm tired today. Do you remember the times back, years back when you would be tired because of your birthday? Right, exactly. It's like the day after. Right, exactly. Now you're just tired because you're a full year older. Yeah, I was tired before my birthday too. But we're not talking about being tired or birthdays, Chuck, are we?

We're talking about playing cards. Yeah, this one, Dave Roos helped us out. This is chock full of fun little nuggets that I think next time you're playing cards with people, you can just kind of pepper these in. Yeah, and they'll love you for it. They'll say, give us another one. Yeah, this is one of those. It just has lots and lots and lots of little fun factoids.

And yes, I said factoids. Yeah, they're 10% of a fact. That's right. I wonder if anyone will get that. A couple of people will on the Army page, I'm sure. So Chuck, we talked a lot about playing cards before in our tarot episode. And one of the things we talked about was that it's a myth that playing cards developed from tarot, which is what I had always thought too.

I don't remember if I said that on the tarot episode, but it was quite the opposite. And playing cards were around long before tarot cards were, or even though they are related, tarot cards were originally invented as new Trump cards, basically, and then they kind of evolved into the cardomancy and all that stuff, and just took off from there and went on their own path. But playing cards themselves are much, much older. And there's a lot of debate about exactly where the first playing cards were developed. And a lot of people say China, obviously, China invented a bunch of stuff.

And it's possible China did invent playing cards, but they seem to have possibly invented them in isolation. And they may or may not have influenced the playing cards that we trace our lineage back to. Our playing cards today trace its lineage back to. Yeah, and they may not be, as far as the original Chinese cards go, as old as they think. Because, you know, some people point to this game called the Yezi Ge. Yeah? I'll go with that.

Okay, Y-E-Z-I, separate word, G-E, called the Chinese Leaf Game. And this was like 9th century CE Tang Dynasty time. And for a long time, people, I think, were like, well, the leaves in the Leaf Game were pieces of paper and probably cards, but then more, you know, scrutiny has landed on, no, maybe the leaves were just like a rule book or a log book that you wrote stuff down because it was really a dice throwing game, or it could have been more like dominoes and the cards were used in that way, but not used like actual playing cards. But we do think we know pretty sure that the Chinese eventually did get their playing cards

in isolation in the 13th century, not, I mean, pretty close to when Europe got them. Yeah, so 1294 is the first unambiguous reference to an actual, what we would call, playing cards in China. Europe, they showed up in 1365, so that is a really, really short amount of time for China to have influenced Europe. That's not where European cards came from. Instead, European cards came from the Mamluk Empire, which I believe we also talked about in the Tarot episode too, right? I think so, in Egypt. Yeah. And it's interesting, like these cards came about because of, or they got popularized, I guess, because of trick-taking games, like not the exact games we play today, like Yooker

in Spades and Hearts, and I think Bridge is another one, but kind of a similar thing where you have a suit that takes the hand, aka the trick, and there's usually a trump card or a trump suit, and these were among the very first card games, and apparently, in medieval times, they were wild for this game, for these kinds of games. They weren't so nuts that some officials were like, you have to stop playing that, we're going to actually ban it. We don't get it, and you guys are into it, so we're going to say you can't do that anymore. Right, but those Mamluk cards from Egypt were pretty similar to what we have today, right? Yeah, so there's 52 in a deck,

which is what we have today, four suits, 13 cards per suit. Is that what we have? Okay. Yeah, because, yes, that's right, so, yes, 13 times four is 52. Well, I think where I'm getting mixed up is they had a number one card, but they did not have a queen. Is that the swap? Correct. Okay. So, yeah, they had a one card, one through 10, and then they had courtesan cards, which we call court cards or face cards today, but like you said, they didn't have a queen. The queen wasn't introduced until the French in I think the 15th century said, no, we need to feminize this a little bit, and much for the better. But back in the Arab world, they were like, no, we're not doing that.

This is the 13th century. We're just going to go with the Malik, the king, the Naib Malik, which would be the king's right hand man. Sure. The Thani Naib, which would be the king's right hand man, right hand man. The second AD. Yes. And that was it. Those were the, those, in addition to one through 10, those were your 13 cards in each suit. And the suits themselves, like the cards had a lot of similarities to what we think of today, like they had pips. Each suit was represented by a symbol that's called a pip. I never knew that. I knew that somewhere in the back of my head. I'm not sure why, but if you looked at one of these cards, one of these very ancient Mamluk deck cards, there would be say like 13 or say

eight pips on one card. That's the eight of say cups. If there were eight cups on it, just like today, if there's eight little spades on there, that's the eight of spades. I mean, this is, it follows in a really old tradition, I guess is what I'm trying to say in a really, really clumsy way. Well, the difference is they didn't write a number eight. They just had eight of the pips pictured to represent that number. And we still have that. We just added the number as well. Exactly. We've got both. Yes. And we'll get to there. Because it's, I think the history of how these things sort of have changed from country to country as they became the leading manufacturers is pretty interesting.

It really is. Let's say we'll take over from here every century or so. Yeah. And I think it looks like as far as Europe goes, the Spanish and the Italians were the first to start manufacturing and using playing cards. They were called, are called Latin decks. And they had, as their foresuits, the cups, the coins, the swords in the clubs. But instead of, I don't think we mentioned that a polo stick was the club and the mom loot cards. Spain said, what the heck is polo? Our clubs look like something you beat someone over the head with. So that's what we're going to go with. Yeah, they look like real Captain Caveman type stuff. Yeah, it's kind of cool. So the Spanish being among the first to

start adopting these decks is pretty, pretty appropriate because they were under rule by the moops or they had been for just a few centuries before. So they were in a lot of contact with their Muslim neighbors. So for that to be imported to Spain and then probably trickle over to Italy, that makes a lot of sense. And so that's kind of reflected in what the Spanish word for playing cards is, naipes, N-A-I-P-E-S. And the Arabic name for playing cards is naib, N-A, apostrophe I-B. So it very clearly descended from it. And that's one of the things that really fascinates me about playing card history is like, yes, there's neat like symbolism and weird stuff going on, but it's all explicable and it all follows like in this

neat tradition that was built upon and changed, but really still kind of kept like the general guardrails that it was originally set up with. Yeah, and the changes are like kind of fairly minor and they usually have to do with whatever made the most sense in that country. For instance, Spain not knowing what a polo club was. Right, but they're like, you can hit somebody over the head with that. So we'll replace it with a club. Yeah, we'll use the smasher. Right. And there are some speculation and theories about what these initial, and this is in the medieval society, what these four suits represented. But one of the theories that kind of makes sense, I think, is that the sword was for the military or the nobles, the cup for the clergy, the coin for the

merchants, makes sense, and the club for the peasants. And then in Europe, we moved to Germany, they kind of took over in the 15th century as making, as being, I guess, champion card makers. Sure. And they replaced the cup with a heart. It's getting a little more like we know it now. Yeah. The club was replaced by an acorn. Which is a type of mast. A type of mast. The sword becomes a leaf, but if you look at it, it's sort of the similar shape as what we would know as a spade. Yeah, it's like an ivy leaf almost. Yeah. And then the coin, because they were nuts about falconry in 15th century Germany and falcons had bells attached to the hawks and falcons, I guess. Why don't they call it hawkry?

I think falcons take the cake and falconry. You know, hawks play second fiddle to it. They're like the Thani naib to the falcons. You know, the Joe Karen Atlanta that I use is whenever we see a hawk or a falcon and we have both obvious as evidenced by our sports teams. Emily says this is at a hawk or a falcon. And I said, well, you'd know it's a falcon if it flew into a tree and then hit the ground. What does that mean? The reference to the Atlanta falcons. Oh, I see. Yeah. Like it was like, I'm flying so high and then no, not anymore. All of a sudden, yeah. Exactly. But I mean, doesn't the same apply to the hawks too? Or do the hawks just never get off the ground? No, you could kind of interchange them. Yeah. But anyway, the falcons and hawks

had bells and the coin on the German cards became a bell because they were wild about falconry. Yeah, it's very cute. The Germans had definitely the most rustic pips of all time. I mean, an acorn. Come on. That's wonderful. So the Germans are going along. This is the 15th century. They dominated that as far as the card manufacturing went. And then the French took over in the 16th century. And Rouen, which is kind of in the northwest of France, became the playing card capital of Europe. And one of the reasons it became the playing card capital of Europe, as we'll see, is because they put out so many playing cards and their production increased so dramatically that it's just mind boggling. And as a result, the pips that the French

adapted are the ones we still use today, even though we have different names. They were the ones who came up with the designs we use today. Yeah. So they were hearts and clovers, self explanatory. They had the diamonds, but their diamonds were represented paving tiles called Carreaux. And then the pike, which is the spear tip, I guess, is the spade. Right. Just the tip. Right. But they didn't. Oh, yeah, let's get me with that. They didn't call it a spade at the time, but they did a couple of key things as far as what we recognize as playing cards today is they came up with the red and the black colors. Very big deal to differentiate that and to make card tricks more fun. And then they, like you said, they manufactured a ton of them and they did this

because they standardized the pips so that they could be stenciled on and it was a lot cheaper and a lot faster than hand drawing or doing wood cuttings and hand painting these decks of cards, which was super expensive and time consuming. Yes. And it made the cards, the deck of cards, incredibly unattainable to the average person back in the, you know, up to the 16th century when the French took over. And once the French took over and started producing these cards on mass, card playing was just, it just took off like a rocket. People had already loved playing cards, but now more people could love playing cards. And it was because they figured out how to print these things, you know, more cheaply and more quickly. So that's why we use the French card

today just by virtue of the fact that they produced so many that it became like the dominant type of card in the world. And then the other reason I saw is that England eventually adopted the French card and then kind of put their own twists on it, basically just renaming it. And then British colonialism is one reason why so many people around the world use the French deck today. So they took the French deck and spread it around the world. Yeah. And so the English, like you said, they sort of, they used the same pip icons. I was about to say logo, but I guess they're icons. And they just sort of changed the meaning. So the clover, they went back to calling it the club, even though it's a clover when you look at it. So that's why you've, if you've ever

wondered why in the heck do they call that thing a club? That's why it's a hat tip to the malware. The OGs, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The spade, it looks like sort of the head of a spade, a type of shovel. But we think that the suit name actually probably, and this makes a lot of sense, is the Anglicized version of espada, which means sword in Spanish because sword was the original suit. And then the diamond, they just called the diamond, but they said, you know what, this has nothing to do with dumb paving tiles. Let's just call it a diamond. And as Dave so aptly puts, a heart is just a heart. Is that an actual song or are you making up your own? That just made that up. But I bet you there's a song that goes a heart is just a heart.

Well, you really, you really do that in actuality, huh? Well, that didn't really count. It's usually more like, and by the way, we heard from a lot of listeners who do this. I know. Yeah, you're definitely far from alone. Yeah, I didn't think I was unique in any way. But it's, it's usually, like sung to the lyrics or sung to the tune of another song. Right. Like when you're a heart, you're a heart all the way. Like that. Exactly. I looked up that where that heart shape came from, because if you think about it, our hearts don't really resemble that very much. Like the human heart? Yes. And what is that? I know, I cannot find the original source. There's a lot of debate over it, but it's centuries old. And prior to it, when it first started to emerge,

the, the heart was kind of iconographied. Ogrophized? I don't know. I think you had it right. Okay. As a kind of a pine cone shape. Oh, interesting. A little more accurate, but I like the, the new heart icon, new meaning centuries old, but the most recent one. Yeah. I mean, that'd be very funny if it looked like the actual human heart. Yeah. He just, you know, the guy in Temple of Doom just pulls out like this heart emoji from the guy's chest. Should we take a break? Yes, I think we should. All right. We're going to take a break and get to those face cards right after this. It feels like making smart money decisions has only

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you get your podcasts. All right, so we mentioned the courtesan cards, aka face cards, is how we know them today. They represented the royal court, of course. And just like today, back then, they were the champion cards, the most valuable on the deck. We'll get to the ace. There was no ace card yet, and I think the story of the ace card is pretty cool anyway, so we'll save that. But these face cards were all men until, like you mentioned before, the French introduced the queen, and here, to me, is one of the first really fun facts of the episode that I love, is for a long, long time, and I guess they don't do it anymore, but in the UK and in British India, they would follow what they call Commonwealth rule or British rule, which is to say that the king and the queen

can flip-flop in which one is better in status, depending on who the monarch is at the time. So, if you have a woman on the throne, then the queen is the top card just below the ace, or until the ace came along. Yeah, pretty neat. Yeah, agreed. Something I didn't realize is that for many centuries, the kings, the queens, and the jacks, which were at the time called the knaves, were actually modeled on historical figures. Like Charlemagne was the king of hearts, I believe. King David, the guy who killed Goliath, he was spades, Julius Caesar was diamonds, and Alexander the Great was clubs. Had no idea, but like if you look at a super old deck, and I'm guessing somewhere around, probably up until the 19th century at some point, you could say, yeah,

of course that's Charlemagne, I'd recognize him anyway. Look at that beard on King David. Right. He's juggling a rock. Should we go through the queens and the jacks, or just surprise to say that they stood for people? No, I think we should. Give them a shout out. The queens were Paulus of Athena, Judith, Rachel, and Arjean, which could be an anagram for Regina. That's all over the place. If you search Arjean, the only thing that comes up is the card name. So there doesn't seem to have been a historical person named Arjean. Yeah, this is one of those upon research that it's difficult to corroborate some of this stuff, but you see the same facts everywhere, which a lot of times when we did our

episode on how to research stuff well, that can be a big red flag. Yeah. But maybe this is the case where it's not so much a red flag and just lore that people have just agreed upon. Yeah, because if there is a red flag attached to it, we usually turn it up eventually, and this one just didn't seem to have it. But yes, I'm with you. It smelled like it, but upon a much deeper smell, I was like, okay, this might actually work. Who were the jacks? The jacks were Hector, who was the hero from the Greek city of Troy. Etienne de Vignoles, who was the hero of the Hundred Years War in France. Ogeard the Dane, who was Charlemagne's knight. And either Judah Maccabee or Lancelot was the nave of clubs. And Judah Maccabee was from the Hanukkah story,

Lancelot was one of King Arthur's knights. Remember that, the Maccabees? So yeah, depending on the deck you had, it would basically, you just knew back in the day that if you're playing the King of Hearts, that was Charlemagne right there. It wasn't just this generic weird-looking king. It was supposed to be somebody. Yeah, a brand-name king. Exactly. And speaking of brand-name kings, the, gotta talk about the Suicide King. Definitely. That is the king that looks like he's stabbing himself in the head with a sword. That is the one, if you're looking at a modern deck of cards, that's the King of Hearts. And that's the one that looks most different from

the other kings, in that he has four hands and does not have the moustache, which is interesting. And like I said, appears to be stabbing himself with a sword. For a long time, there was a legend that that's how Charlemagne took his life, but we know that's not true. Because he died of pleurisy. But what they now think is that the early French decks, Anglo-French decks, had a King of Hearts with an axe above his head. And that just printing over time, the axe went kind of further and further down until it was behind his head such that you couldn't even see the axe blade. And so I guess that axe handle just became a sword, looking like it was going into the king's head. Yeah. And now that you know, so like that axe was originally, it was like

the King of Hearts was captured in the backswing. Like he was about to chop somebody with his axe, right? Yeah. And now if you know that, you can see that the King of Hearts is now just doing the same thing with the sword. He's in the backswing. Yeah. He's about to lob someone's head off. Right. But not his own. Yeah. Either one. The important point is someone's head is about to come off. They don't care whether it's lob or lob. Look at that. No moustache. Yeah. No stash. And one other thing, the King of Diamonds now is the only one with an axe, which I never noticed before. I didn't either. I mean, you don't often, or at least I don't often sit around and look at a deck of cards like I play cards, but I never study them because it's sort of one of those things

that's so ubiquitous in your life over the years. Right. That you don't really, it's interesting, might tie into our semantic satiation. Short stuff coming up. Nice tease. But let's talk about that ace card because it took a while for the ace, and it has a really neat story of how it happened, but it took a while for the ace to become the high card because when the ace eventually did come along, it was the number one, and it was the lowest card. It was the worst card on the deck. Right. It was so lowly that they referred to it as an as, which was the least valuable coin in the Roman Empire. But then the French changed all that, right? Yeah, which is this is why the ace can sometimes be the highest card in the deck or serve as the number one card. Because if you've

never noticed before, the number card started two. You go through two through nine, right? No, two through 10. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I'm a hundred percent certain. Two through 10. But this as the ace card, it was named after the least valuable coin in the Roman Empire. And it was kind of like a slang term to kind of just talk about how lowly the that one card was. Then the French Revolution came along, and they kind of conceptually pitted the as card against the court cards. They said, you know what? This lowly one, we're going to make it topple the court, the king, the queen, the jack. And now the ace is the top of the the heap. This little lowly single card is now higher than any of the other ones. And then by the way, they also changed the king, queen,

and jack to liberties, equalities, and fraternities. So they didn't, they weren't really into the kings and queens around the French Revolution very much. Yeah. And if you've ever wonder why the ace is the most sort of lavishly decorated card, generally speaking, it's got a cool story behind that one, too. Yeah. So the British had a pretty interesting solution to taxing decks of cards, which was if you were a card maker, you had to, you couldn't print your own ace of spades. You had to get that from the government as an official, you know, card of the British Empire. Right. Yeah. And that was your, that was your tax. And they were, as such, they were very highly decorated. They were uniquely stamped to try and prevent forgeries from happening. Right.

And you couldn't like as a card manufacturer, if you were just like, forget that, I'm not gonna, we're just going to print our own ace of spades. And we'll never know. You could be hung or have your head lopped off or lobbed off. You could be hanged, you mean? The penalty, what did I say, hung? Yeah. The penalty was death if you forged an ace of spades playing card. Yeah. There was a man named Richard Harding, which as far as I or anybody else can tell was hanged for forging an ace of spades. Isn't that nuts? That is crazy to think about. And a weird, I guess it sounds like a weird way to pull off attacks, but it's also sort of brilliant in a way. Yeah. But I mean, that's why so each company had their own design. And it was a lavish design.

And that's why still today, the ace of spades just stands out as the most lavishly designed card. There was one other thing about that too. While they were during that period, I think in the early 19th century to the mid 19th century, the name for those ace of spades was Old Frizzle. Old Frizzle? Yeah. I found that on a website. There was a post about the evolution of the history of the evolution of playing cards written by a game reviewer named Ender's Game. I thought it was going to be Snoop Dogg. No, no, but it does have a definite Snoop quality to it, doesn't it? Yeah, that's kind of fun. If you've ever, you know, bicycle playing cards are very popular brand. I prefer the aviation poker cards personally. Okay. But I like a good bicycle deck. If you've

ever looked at the ace of spades, you might see the number 808 on there. And there's long been speculation that there was some sort of cryptic meaning behind what the 808 is. And apparently, it's just a model number because they had earlier decks that were 606s. So there's no like kind of fun hidden meaning to that. No, and bicycle is not its own company. It's actually the eighth edition of the US playing card company's designs. Right. It's the eighth design they came up with. So that's what the 808 is. And so you'll find that 808 on the ace of spades, you said, right? Ace of spades, baby. So the ace of spades, in particular, the bicycle ace of spades has a really storied history as far as world wars go. Apparently, in World War II, the ace of spades

was considered a lucky card. And so sometimes you'd see soldiers carrying the ace of spades around with them. Yeah, or you see it a lot in the tucked in the helmet in those war movies. Yes. And this is why most often you'll see it in movies about the Vietnam War. There is a myth that was apparently considered correct at the time that the Viet Cong viewed the ace of spades as a symbol of death. The legend was that French cardomancers who had occupied the country previous to the war had basically introduced them to the ace of spades as a doom card. And the Viet Cong were just scared to death of it. That's the legend. But that's not true? From what I saw, it seems to not necessarily be true. Now we're coming into the true part. There were a couple of lieutenants,

I believe, in Charlie Company, who rode into the bicycle to the US playing card company, makers of bicycle cards, and explained this and said, could we just get decks of nothing but the ace of spades? And US playing card company said, you got it. You know, for the war effort. They actually did produce decks of nothing but ace of spades for US soldiers to use to scare or intimidate the Viet Cong. Yeah, and they were called the bicycle trademarked brand, the bicycle secret weapon. And apparently they would drop these cards throughout the villages in the jungles and stuff just to sort of, you know, freak them out, even though they may not have been. Yeah, but even if it didn't work as, you know, because the Viet Cong were already primed

to be afraid of the ace of spades, you would probably start to associate it with some bad stuff if any time you came upon like a fallen soldier of yours with the ace of spades on his chest, laying in the jungle. Sure. Even if it hadn't already had that connotation before, I'm sure it developed that connotation pretty quickly just by use of it. Yeah. By the way, I came across one of my closet the other day and I came across my box of trading cards. Oh yeah? Yeah, and I popped them out and kind of looked through them real quick. The one thing I forgot that I had in addition to all those Star Wars cards, and it turns out I have a lot of Star Wars cards, and I looked and apparently they're not valuable or not very valuable, but I had a

bunch of Superman the movie trading cards. I remember those, man. Yeah. Like they're photographs from the movie, right? Yeah, yeah, just like little scene stills or whatever. I remember those. And then also, even though I don't even remember necessarily being that into the show, I guess I watched it a little bit, but I also have some Battlestar Galactica cards, 80s version obviously, and then a fair amount of football, NBA, hockey, but mostly baseball cards that I think are all basically worthless. You just jogged my memory. I remember now that they had Rambo trading cards for a little while. Oh, I would have loved to have had those. I guess it was three where he's like shirtless and shooting like rockets at people. I mean, I was a first blood guy,

and the Rambo's got a little more ridiculous with each one, you could say, but I stand by First Blood as being a really great movie. Yeah, it's a good movie, but it's a different genre than the other two, you know what I mean? Yeah, I fully agree. Although I do have to say that First Blood never produced the greatest chewing gum of all time, second greatest chewing gum of all time, Rambo chewing gum, which is Blackberry flavored big league chew. Oh my god, it was good. And it was second only to lemon lime bubble yum, the kind that was green on the outside with the yellow center. Yeah, I love that stuff. There is a pack for sale on eBay, and every once in a while, I'm like, would it still work? Could I still chew it? Should I buy that? Like a toothbreaker.

Yeah, probably, but man, that'd be amazing. Did the big league chew have a little caricature of Rambo on it? It had like a movie still of him shirtless with a rocket launcher shooting it at somebody and like a big fire explosion in the background. That rocket launcher. Yeah. And you'd just put the whole pack in your cheek and be like, somebody gave me a rocket launcher. It's amazing how many products they marketed at us were phony tobacco products. Oh yeah, I used to do, remember beef jerky chew? It was like a can of dip, but it was shredded beef jerky. Love that stuff. Gum cigarettes that you could puff on. They still have those. I saw those recently. Did they really? And I was like, what? They still make these in my local convenience store.

Wow, that's very surprising. Yeah, it was pretty funny. What about those pink gum cigars? I don't remember those. They were just a long stick of gum in the shape of a cigar and then it had like a cigar band wrapper on it and they tasted awful. It was the most awful gum there was, worse than like the sticks that you would get an old baseball card packs. But it was just a different taste and it was not good gum, but they were still fun to like, pretend you were a up and coming smoker with. I wonder if there's a candy cane blunt or something like that we don't know about. I suddenly realized why I started smoking at age 14. I was kind of primed to do that. Also, before we break, I know we're tangenting on tangents, but I meant to clear up when I told

that story about Emily getting a note from her mom to buy cigarettes at the store. Yeah. She was like six years old. Wow. This wasn't a teenage thing because you were like, yeah, I bought him when I was 10 or 11. Right. She was younger than my daughter and just the thought of her going into a store at that age, a child and getting cigarettes because you would notice just it doesn't get any more 70s in that. Well, not just that, it's very Ohio too. Yeah. So much so, I'm going to coin a new term. That's so high. Okay. Yeah. We're using that from now on. All right. Well, let's reel it in, take a break, and we'll come back and talk about the Joker or the Joker right after this. I'm Jay Shetty. And on my podcast On Purpose,

I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant. The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Hart. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lourence Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself. And many, many more. If you're attached to knowing, you don't have a capacity to learn. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people

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the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth? Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the lore. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you.

Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the body's joint. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of iHeart radio, Blumhouse television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, you really teased it up right before this ad break. We're gonna talk about Euker, which is where the Joker came from. You play Euker? Yeah, we've talked about it on the show. My Ohio relatives introduced me to it,

and I had to get it re-explained every Christmas because I just could never remember the rules. Right. Euker is very Soho. Yes, it's Soho. But Euker came from the Alsace region of Germany, and it was originally called Eukerspiel. Okay? Yeah, with the J-U-C-K. Yes, J-U-C-K-E-R-Spiel. Whereas, what's the Euker card game? How's that spelled that we play? Today, it's spelled U, sorry, E-U-C-H-R-E, Euker, and then Dave points out like Eukerist, and I think he was trying to trigger in us a mention that he's the host of the hit podcast Biblical Time Machine. That's why I think he put that in there. Was that what it was? Okay. Although, there's not many words out there that are like the word

Euker, but we Latinized it, right, from J-U-C-K-E-R to E-U-C-H-R-E. But originally, that J-U-C-K-E-R, in America, people started calling it Juker with the hard J, like the J pronounced, not like a Y, and then that very quickly became Joker, which was a card that was designed expressly for the game of Euker, right? That's right. The jolly Joker who has always been sort of a sort of a court jester-y imp-like person, and they think that that's a reference to the Joker in Euker was a trickster who took the tricks of the game. Because it was the Super Trump card. Yeah, exactly, like the number one Trump card, and we're not going to go over Euker, but it's all about the Trump cards and descending value of the Bauer and the Left Bauer,

and then the Uber card, which is the Euker or the Joker. And they call those original Trump cards the right and left Bauer, B-O-W-E-R, like they're in the act of bowing, but that's actually a bastardization of the German Bauer, B-A-U-E-R, which means farmer in German. Hmm, like Jack Bauer. Yeah, so it's really interesting to see how just completely mixed up things can get. Yeah. When you just change the spelling of a word and even pronounce it the same, but just change some spellings here or there, and all of a sudden you have, you've just completely lost its original meaning and adopted a new one. I find that fascinating. But anyway, to sum this up, the Joker was created to become the best Bauer, the Imperial Bauer,

and then over time, because it was associated expressly with Euker, Juker, it became the Joker. That's right. And we're going to finish up with some fun poker facts slash Las Vegas facts. Yeah. Here's one, Barry Mandela has his own blackjack tables. Yes, we've seen them with our own eyes. Didn't play on them because I didn't want to desecrate it by losing on a Barry Mandela table. But playing cards and gambling obviously is, you know, people started gambling with playing cards a long, long time ago. And when it comes to poker or really any kind of card game you're gambling with, they wanted to understandably not have their cards be seen by other people. So these sort of gigantic icons of suits and these

bigger fonts and things like that wasn't working out. So for poker cards, they introduced a few few little changes to make this more possible to hold your hand tighter together. And that is called the squeezer card, which was, you know, the first cards to have a very small symbol at the top left corner, indicating the number and the pip or the suit. And so that means that's why when you see a poker player holding that really tight hand, all you need is that left hand corner barely exposed. Yeah. And those little the little this the pip with the number or the letter of the face card is called an indice. Those are indices. And before them, the reason why it makes so much sense in poker, like you were saying, you used to have to spread your cards out wide to say like, oh,

there's nine pips on here. This is a nine of clubs. And now it was just kind of marked in the corner, which is great because you're not sharing your hand with the other people. There was another way you could give away what kind of cards you had in old style cards. And that the face cards, the court cards, were printed one direction. There was one direction that was up and one direction that was down, not like today, where they're both up or down. It doesn't matter which way it's dealt. Before, you would have had to have taken that court card and flipped it around. If it was dealt to you upside down, and you would have just told everybody at the table, I have at least one face card in here. Yeah, with total give. And think about the mom looks,

they had to sit there and out loud go one, two, three, four, five, six. And they would have to count those pips and every now you have a six of something. Right. But that's what that's what the poker players had to do too. Well, until you had the squeezer cards. I thought they had the number on there. They just had a bigger number. I don't have the number at all. No, I don't think they had the number at all until the squeezer, the indices cards were introduced. And there was one other thing about it too. Why would they do that? Because other decks of playing cards had numbers on them. Why didn't they just use those? Like prior to the 19th century? No, just prior to the squeezer card. They did. So the squeezer card came out in the 19th century is what I'm saying.

Oh, have they been around for that long? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And that's the first time that the actual number was printed? Yes. Before you would just have nine hearts on there. There you go. I thought they just did it super small. No, well, no, they put it super small, like out of the gate, but that was to, so you wouldn't have to spread your cards out and see what you were dealing with. You see what I'm saying? Okay, I got you. Sure, sure. The other thing that was changed with the indices, Chuck, was remember I said that the jacks used to be called naves. And a nave is like an assistant to the royal family, basically, or a knight or something like that. And it's spelled like knight, K-N-A-V-E. Well, now that you have the indices and you have

A, K, Q, or J, if you had A, K, Q, or K, N, which is how they initially abbreviated nave, if you didn't spread your card far enough, you might think you had a king, but in fact, you had a jack. And they actually changed nave to jack because of those indices at the top. Yeah. And they also used to be white on the back. They didn't even have fancy decorations. That's right. And, you know, if you have, it's very easy to mark a white card with some smudge or something, or it might just accidentally get a smudge or a stain or something. Sure, you're in Doritos at a poker game? That's going to get everywhere. And then, you know, of course, the Dorito card is the Ace of Spades or whatever. Right. And apparently, the Thomas De La Rue and

Company was a British printer who was first credited with those beautiful lithographic designs on the back in the early 19th century. And I did mention Vegas. Right. If you dug this stuff up, it was kind of fun. If you wonder how much they switched decks of cards in Vegas, if it's going wild and crazy, they might switch a deck of cards every hour. Yeah. For that same reason, they don't want them to get marked so that somebody would have an advantage by noticing that there's like a fray on the Ace of Spades, you know, right corner or something. Yeah. The most that they use them for is 12 hours, right? Yeah. I mean, that's at the Berryman table, which wasn't getting much action. There was another thing too that a lot of people point out that we have no idea whether it was

purposeful or not. But it's pretty astounding if it's coincidence, right, about the whole the seasons and the year and the months and all that. Yeah. 52 cards, right? 52 weeks. Yes. The two colors, are they night and day? Yes. Do those four suits represent the four seasons, perhaps? Correct. And then what's the last? Just knock them down here. There's 12 court cards. There's 12 months in the year. There's 13 cards in each suit, and there's 13 full moons in a year. The one that, so up to this point, you're like, wow, that's pretty amazing. This is the one that gets me. If you count every single pip on all 52 cards and add them together, there are 365 of them. What? Yeah, isn't that neat? That's good stuff. I agree. And there's a pretty cute Ted talk by a

guy named Marco Tempest from several years back, where he explains all this while doing pretty neat card tricks. It's a good one. You can find it on YouTube. All right. You got anything else about cards? I got nothing else about cards. We've done tarot cards, trading cards, playing cards. I guess greeting cards is next. No, yeah, we could do one on the Hallmark Company. Maybe they'll sponsor it. Oh, that's a great idea. We'll talk to AdSales about that one. Yeah. Well, while we're off talking to AdSales, what will hold off on that and instead do a listener mail first? I'm going to call this just a follow-up as I was talking about people making up their own songs. We heard from quite a few listeners. It seems like mostly bored dads who do the same thing as I do.

This is from, who is this from? This is from Jeff. He said, hey guys, at the very beginning of the episode Chuck details how he makes up songs like that's Amaro, my eyes lit up because dude, I do the exact same thing. Maybe it's a common thing that most people do that they're too embarrassed to admit to, but I've never met anyone else who claims they do it. One example from last night I'm particularly proud of was I was making my three-year-old daughter dinner, grabbed the box of Annie's macaroni and cheese. Shout out to Annie's. And almost involuntarily, the words, involuntarily, the words flew out of my mouth and I'll go ahead and sing it in the tune of Nights in White Saturn. Oh, okay. Shells in white cheddar. Microwave is your friend. I don't know what's better

when there's not much to spend. That's pretty good stuff. Yeah, that was really good. I also had a little social commentary at the end too. Yeah, and that's from Jeff with a G. Because it's Annie's brand, I was expecting her to say something like, it's a mac and cheese night for us. You know what I mean? Wow, I'm getting on that train too, Chuck. It is intoxicating, isn't it? It is intoxicating. Well, if you want to be like Jeff and tell us about some amazing song you came up with. Way to go, by the way, Jeff. That was pretty great. You can email us at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart 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, 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. I Heart podcasts is excited to welcome Jay Shetty to the I Heart family. Tune in to On Purpose with Jay Shetty, the hit

podcast where the former monk shares fascinating conversations with insightful people and investigates ways to live life today on purpose. When was the last time you did something for the first time with your partner? We're used to watching them do the same things, do the same activities. Let's see them do something fresh in you. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for a show where you don't have to look far to see yourself? Welcome to the Professional Home Girl podcast. I'm your host, Ebony, and every Tuesday I interview women of color from all walks of life, and all of my guests are anonymous. So you're here stories from survivors to spirituality

and family secrets. And let's not forget about the professionals out there, okay? Listen to the Professional Home Girl podcast with Ebony presented to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.