Stuff You Should Know - Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in to this classic episode and find out all about it with Josh and Chuck.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. check out the second season of my podcast shell game on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts hi everybody uh chuck here on a saturday i'm just sitting here drawing cubes and things

with my poor artwork but you know who is really good at this m c escher and this episode from december 2019 gets all into the life of the great artist and the title is m c escher and his trippy art i hope you enjoy it Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the artsy edition. This is Jerry, roomtone, Roland. Yeah, I think that's make-believe stuff. Room tone?

Yeah, she might as well be like, let me capture a few fairies in this mason jar first. I think it's the same thing. We may need those in the final edit. I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone. Room tone is you do this on film sets and in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently while you capture the sound of the room. So I guess you can, what do you do with that, Jerry? Do you layer it in case you need it or something? Did you hear that, everyone?

She said she cleans up the background. To everybody listening, it sounded like, wamp or wot, wot, waw. There's something about it, though. It's like being in church and getting the giggles. It's really hard, especially on a film set when there's like 50 people standing around, being completely silent, no one farting. I suspect it's strictly a power trip.

You think so? By the person calling for room tone. That's what I think. I'm going to start doing that at my house when things get out of hand. Room tone! Right, exactly. Don't make me bust out the room tone on you.

None of that has to do with this stuff. No, no. I was going to say since we're talking about room tone, Obviously, the topic today is M.C. Escher, who is well known for going berserk anytime someone asked him to be quiet for room tone. You would trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension, just do all sorts of weird stuff. That's funny.

Did you think so? That was a joke just for you. Yeah, so he, everyone knows, M.C. Escher, if you've ever been to college or taking drugs. Or sold drugs to somebody in college? Then you've probably seen Drawing Hands Or I mean that's not what the name of that one was

But It's called drawing hands Oh is it Or some of us more famous ones Are these impossible rooms Like stairs that Lead to Sideway Stairs But you've got to wrap your head around it

In a certain way to even make sense of it all Right Or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead back into the other stairs Sure Just constant Or I'm a big fan of that one self-portrait he did in the... With the sphere?

Yeah. The mirror sphere. Mirror sphere? Yeah. It's cool. It is very cool. I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure he did it exactly precise.

But the hand, if you look at the hand, it's really realistic. It's very pretty. Yeah, I mean, I like this stuff. This is not my style, as in anything I would put on my walls these days. But I still think he's one of the, like, coolest, more innovative artist out there. Yeah. And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold till the end. Which one?

Or not the end, but kind of where it falls in our non-outline. What does factoid mean again? Does that mean you've killed 10% of all the facts? That's right. And this is just one of the 10% remaining? That's right. Okay. Gotcha.

So one of the things you talk about MCSher that I found was that if you were impressed by his work, prepare to get exponentially more impressed. As we talk about how he made those works, too. That's the fact of the show to them for me. Oh, okay. That's the factoid you're doing? Yeah, well, you've got to hold on to that. Oh, sure, sure, sure.

I was just teasing it a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about, although I should have guessed. Yeah. So this is us talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about the artist being born. And in the case of M.C. Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz, Cornelis. I want to say Cornelius, but there's no you in there. I think Cornelis. Sure.

Escher. I nailed the last NERM. That's right. But I misspoke on name. Oh, you didn't say NERM. I said NERM. I said I nailed the last NERM. This is the point where the people say get to the point already. Well, we are at that point. That's M.C.

And then Escher, born June 17th, 1898, not 1989, as the grabster put it. Yeah. I was like, man. He's like, here's some numbers. He was born. Born in Liu Warden, Netherlands, grew up in Arnhem, which is about 60 miles southeast of Amstadam.

Is that right? Yeah. Okay. I mapped all this stuff out. Nice. It's all kind of in that general area. You went on a little Google tour? Sure.

And he signed, even from early on, as MCE, he signed his paintings, although people called him Mock, M-A-U-K, friends and family. Right, which didn't mean anything Ed points out, but it's just like, you know, an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah. Is it Moritz? Probably Moritz, Cornelis, Escher. But it could also go the way of Morris. So is it Moritz or Moritz?

I don't know. I wish I knew. Well, what we do know is that, and this we should put a pin in, because it sort of plays a big part in how he pursued his art. But his dad had some money. He was a rich kid. Yeah. For sure.

Which really helps, as we'll see, as he's traipses. around Europe on Dad's Dime. Slowly getting better at art, slowly. Yeah, that's a good point, because he was not great in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't, you know, he didn't have his second grade teachers falling over themselves about what a talented artist he was. No, and apparently he also didn't consider himself much of an artist,

although he engaged in art, like he did produce art from a very young age. he was terrible in school except at math and at drawing apparently when he was in grade school primary school he failed his finals all of them except for math and i read that his father noted in his journal with some affection that his son consoled himself by producing a linotype of a sunflower that's how he made himself feel better after after failing out of school well and he he was somewhat adept at math early on but um it's interesting his his work is highly mathematical as far as art goes but later on in life when he was confronted with real mathematicians he would sort of be like no not me man like I'm an artist

I'm not that kind of mathematician so yes but he was most of his friends were mathematicians for most of his career he was mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists those are the people who really vibed on his work and drugs

that came later Okay. That came later, and he got real popular. But I saw that somebody made a movie called Journey Into Infinity. It's a documentary, a full-length documentary, I believe the whole thing's on YouTube. And it starts out, or the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, hey, I called up MC Escher one day, just to say, Mr. Escher, I think you're a really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say. And he said, I don't consider myself an artist.

I consider myself a mathematician. Oh, really? Yes. So I'm going with Graham Nash's interpretation. Everyone's counter to this. Spoke to him directly, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I mean, not to spoil anything, but he died in 1972 at just 73. So, you know, if he would have lived to his, like, mid-80s, which is somewhat reasonable,

he would have been, like, alive in the 80s, which just seems so weird. It does seem kind of weird. You know? Yeah. Because he was, he seems countercultural for sure. even though his personality was not very countercultural. No. And he didn't really have much love for hippies.

In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are illegally making copies of my work. Right. He didn't exactly follow, you know, the normal, usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but he was also a very imaginative square. That's right. I was trying to make a square joke, but it's not coming to me. Remember that show? Square pegs, square pegs.

Yeah. Square pegs. Sarah Jessica Parker. Was she in that? She was also when girls just want to have fun. That's right. Yeah. And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring.

Really? Yeah, she and her husband are co-starring in Plaza Suite, Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. Very nice. Very excited about that. I'm trying to align it with the Bonnie Prince Billy show, but they're like a week apart. And I'm like, I can't just stay in New York for a week. That's a lot of time to kill,

especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta and New York. I know. I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy and come home because he didn't play much. But that's a story for another day. All right, so he goes to school at Technical College of Delft, not for very long. And then he went to the Harlem with two A's School of Architecture

and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam. not Harlem, New York. Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is named after, right? Yeah. That's where Bonnie Prince Willie's playing. He's at Town Hall, actually. Oh, is that right? Yeah, we played there.

That's right. We got our stank on that joint. So his dad said, you know, because, you know, his dad had a lot of money and made money, and even though you want to support your kids, you want to try and edge them into something. Sure. If you're that kind of dude that might be lucrative. So he said, hey, you like to draw shapes. why don't you go study architecture?

And he did that for a little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But while at school there, he had a very fortunate meeting by being mentored by one Samuel Jeseran de Mesquita. Who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his early art. I'm not sure how he saw it. But he took one look at Escher's art and said, you don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me and learn graphic design. And so Escher did, he became a graphic designer, which he, whether he knew it or not, he had been his whole life up to that point.

All of his work is very graphic in nature. And designing. Yeah, it really, really is. But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know, 1920s was probably like, is that even a thing? Right. That sounds made up. Yeah. Well, his dad also, I don't know if you said or not, it was a civil engineer.

So, of course, he would be like, you draw, just go do architecture. Right. That's what I know. Civil engineering. and there's architects in the world. Just go do the other thing that I don't do. And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you're going to make signs.

Right, or postage stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on. That's right. So he made a little bit of dough. So in the early 1920s, he started on his sort of rich kid journey traveling around Europe on his dad's dime. On a gap year that was really, really long.

Very long. But on one of these trips, he went to a couple of places that would end up having a big influence on him. Yeah. One in Spain at the Alhambra, and then just traveling through southern Italy, through the countryside. Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy. Yeah, but in Spain, this is one that didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated by these mosaics and tessellations, which are described as.

Okay. They are repeating designs that interlock with one another, leave no space between one another, and that when you fit them together, they fully cover a plane, which is harder to do than you would think. Yeah, like if you've ever seen the Escher fish sort of tessellation. The white fish and the black fish kind of working in one another.

Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this a lot later on. If you've ever played Kubert. Those cubes are tessellations A certain kind But he got really into this Even though it wasn't like right away That he started doing these things

That sort of came a little bit later But what he did do was started drawing The Italian countryside Because he loved it Loved it I mean like he went to Italy And he was like this is my home And he was quoted at one point in time

And he never wanted to become an Italian Among Italians He liked being a stranger but he loved Italy. Yeah, which is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure what it means. I think what he was saying was he likes being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain amount of responsibility

that comes with being one of us. You know what I mean? Whereas if you can be like that guy over there who will accept him, we're not going to throw rocks at him every time we see him or anything like that and we'll take his money and maybe even say hi to him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone. We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local.

Gotcha. That's what I think he was after. Clearly, I can identify with that. Well, that kind of came through in his work, too, because if you'll notice, even in these, before he started doing the trippy three-dimensional hands drawing hands and stuff when he was doing countryside. He didn't do a lot of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were very much in the background and nondescript. But even when you look at these, when you say,

Italian still lifes of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush, colorful recreations of a countryside? Nope. Nope. When you look at these, they still look very much like in the MC Escher style that we all know. Yeah, like very clearly, a lot of that. I love them, too. They're cool.

Yeah, they're beautiful. They're black and white, and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right? Yeah. But they are beautiful in their way, and lovely even. I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I mean, this is something I would. put in my wall.

You're an art snob. You're like, oh, I only like Escher's early Italian landscapes. Oh, man. You take that, you save that trippy stuff for Graham Nash. I'm so ashamed. No, I think it's great, Chuck. You have cultivated yourself. But they are gorgeous.

And then in 1923, he met his wife, whose name was Jedda. Jetta Umeeker. That's right. Very nice. Thank you. She was Swiss. I learned from the best. They met her in Italy.

but she was Swiss and she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters it's a very sweet story I'm sure an MCC Escher movie would be pretty cool somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation

about the process of writing a script about MC Escher it's from University of Texas I wrote it in 2017 I can't remember the name of it but just look up oh just some random stuff

comes up if you look up Mesquita Bootprint which will come up later Right. But if you search that on Google, it brings up, have you ever done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored? I want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google. No.

And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It doesn't want to give you just randomness. Sure. So you have to trick it. So maybe you'll type in a weird word or the first three letters of a word or something like that. And weird stuff will start to come. Well, if you type in mosquito boot print, probably only like, the first three of them pertain to M.C. Escher, and the rest are just a random assortment of links.

I remember early in the days of Google, we had a mutual friend who they did this, what I thought was a very dumb game, where they would try and find two words together that they would try and produce the fewest amount of Google results. And whoever could put two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember them doing that. I don't know. I don't remember you talking about. A colossal waste of time.

But I remember that some guy did, like, a TED talk about that. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, well, maybe I'm the dummy. No, no. No, it was, me. I mean, look at me. I do, like, M.C. Escher's early work.

I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. Yeah. You know? So, he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy, and they marry in 1924. Do you mean Jedda Umaker? That's right.

She would become Jedda Escher. Jada Umaker Escher. And they had a son named Jore. Giorgio, later had sons Arthur and Jan, and they were still just sort of traveling, and his dad was, even though he was married, his dad was still footing the bill. Escher's dad, MC Escher's father. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which I was thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, how do you like wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror? But if you're... Look it in the mirror sphere. Right. And then how do you draw it? Yeah. So amazingly.

the father Escher's father though and like what better way to spend your money than to just be like this is what you want to do with your life son you want to pursue art and live in beautiful Italy than like here this is what I want for you if that's how it went down that's awesome that's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in a lot of ways no totally I agree

it's not like hey why don't you go take up heroin and here's a bunch of money for you to like lay around in Abitha true I want to want to know more. I'm not, I hope I'm not coming across as cynical, but I wonder if some of this was like, he'll come around if I, you know, to architecture or whatever. Right. You kept waiting

for the part where his father cuts him off? I was. His father apparently wouldn't like that. All right. I know how you feel. I'm not trying to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm just saying like I had I started out thinking the same way you did and then something happened. I was like, oh, it was actually really neat of his dad. It was.

It all seems above board. Yeah. So World War II has a profound effect on Escher and his work. In 1935, he learned that they were making his nine-year-old son, Giorgio, march in fascist youth parades. And he said, pack your bags. We're going to Switzerland. That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah. We're getting out of here, marching for Mussolini. Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet? No. Is it good? Is it as good as it looks? It's great. Oh, I can't wait. It's great. Everything about it is great. Do I need to see it in theater?

It doesn't seem like one I have to see in the theater. No, I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people, although by now it's probably thinned out. Yeah. And I was laughing a lot, and people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that. Kind of one of those deals. Yeah.

I mean, it's a movie about a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend, so. Don't tell me that. You didn't know. I had no idea. Hitler's on the poster. I know, but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh, get out of my brain. Sorry.

That really doesn't spoil anything. Okay. Don't tell me anything else. That's not some big reveal. So they go to Switzerland. All apologies. It's all right. It's really not a big deal.

As long as it's not a big spoiler. No, no, no, of course not. They go to Switzerland and he, even though he did not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did not like cold weather. So they moved to Belgium after a couple of years. Which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland. Belgium's nice. Sure. In May of 1940s.

though the Nazis invaded Belgium and so they moved to the Netherlands in 1941 where the Nazis already were I guess they were like can't occupy it again well and it's home right and they

settled in Barn which is about 23 miles southeast of Amsterdam I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it B-A-A-A-R-N right I like it's probably Baron oh yeah I'll bet you just nailed it

I think so, but Dutch is very strange language. I'm not strange, but just for my English, dumb English ears. Supposedly English is the strangest of all. Yeah, I'm sure. It's just a hybrid mongrel language that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not a native speaker of it. You know what is an interesting language is Welsh, because I'm watching the Crown, and when Prince Charles starts coming around, Prince of Wales,

there's people speak in Welsh, and I was very ignorant about even knowing that. what it sounds like what it sounds like and that it was still spoken and it was a very odd hybrid it sounded like of several different things it's all old Celtic stuff

yeah it's very unusual Gallic Golic yeah I think it's Golic that's like the language group one of the two yeah everything I know about Welsh I learned from super furry animals oh yeah

because that guy's Welsh man I saw them blow granddaddy off the stage one time oh you saw him live oh I think you told me that melted my brain It was so good. I'll bet.

So they're traveling around still, even though they're settled in Bairn. And they go back to Alhambra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is. No, it's a 13th century Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain. It's beautiful. It is very beautiful. And they built it in the Moorish style, and then it was eventually taken over by the Christian royalty that explored the new world and all that stuff. Yeah. But this castle was.

done in these tiles that are renowned for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. And they got to Escher. He'd seen him before, but it was, I guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. Right. But the second trip that he went back with after they moved to, from Switzerland, I think, to Belgium, or maybe to Switzerland. That's when he was like, I am obsessed with these now, these tessellations.

Started drawing them. Jetta did too. It says that they worked together. So I didn't know that she was an artist. Yeah, I didn't either. But they, World War II comes back around. Well, not comes back around. It never left.

Let's be honest. But Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant that he was kind of stuck in outside of Amsterdam for a little while longer. Yeah. He wasn't doing as much traveling. No, he was in the Netherlands. And he rekindled his friendship with Mosquita, his old mentor, who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time.

And Mosquita was Jewish, and he was taken away by the Nazis eventually. He was killed at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife. Terrible. And their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to Escher. Like, this is one of his dear friends, and he had a work, a sketch of mosquitoes. When he went to his house to visit Mosquita, he found the door was open and they weren't there, and they clearly had been taken by the Nazis.

And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a Nazi boot print on it. And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search. Mosquito boot print. Was there a picture of it? No, I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it was a sketch, Not that it was a sketch of what or anything like that, just that there was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a bore a boot print

and that Escher hung on to this his entire life. It was very important to him. And he was not a very flowery, like, passionate man or anything like that. I get the impression that he, and this is Escher, I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff. And I think that him holding on to that piece of art was probably more significant than even it appears on the outside. Yeah, and supposedly hid some people from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years, did not exhibit or release any prints.

Wait a minute. I think you just said hid some people from a Jewish family. Or did you say hid some members of a Jewish family? Well, people, members of a Jewish family. You said from, I think. Yeah, I mean, like, they were from a Jewish family. Oh, oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. He didn't hide them from the family. Right, right.

Don't tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here. No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should take a break now. Oh, I think it's unraveled to the point. Sort through who the good guys are. Yeah. All right. draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the

link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratlift. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that There's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been, like, unimaginable without AI and now it will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get to. your podcasts. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford.

And on therapy for black girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity, relationships, mental health, and the choices that help us grow. As cybersecurity expert, Camille Stewart Gloucester reminds us, we are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of black women are standing up and speaking out because they feel the brunt of the pain. Each week, we explore the tools and insights that help you move with purpose. Whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself. If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Like, if we're on the air here, and I literally have my. contract here and I'm looking at you know as soon as I sign this I'm going to get a seven-figure check I've told them I won't be working here in two weeks from the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creatives who built the cultural empire the Atlanta ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world the thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers man each episode explores a different chapter of Atlanta's rise featuring conversations with ludicrous Will Packer pastor Jamal Bryan

DJ Drama, and more. The full series is available to listen to now. I really just had never experienced anything like what was going on in the city as far as like, you know, seeing so many young, black, affluent, creatives in all walks of life. The church had dwindled almost to nothing. And God said, this is your assignment. And that's like how you know, like, okay, oh, you're from Atlanta for real. I ain't got to say too much.

I'm a Grady, baby. Shut up. Listen to Atlanta is on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get Your podcast. Okay, Chuck, so World War II kind of comes and goes around Escher despite his best efforts to escape it. And it definitely had a mark on him, but one of the other things that had a really big mark on him was having to move from Italy. It was like you said, like he was married, had a family, his father was still supporting him,

and every spring and summer he would just tour the Italian countryside and visit small, quaint towns and just be inspired to keep making these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art, very beautiful, my favorite. Technically proficient, they're Chuck's favorite. But you would almost certainly have never seen them

in your entire life. Were it not for him moving from Italy? because in doing so he lost his source of inspiration and was forced to kind of turn inward because he hated what Switzerland looked like he wasn't apparently very inspired by his home country of the Netherlands so he had to kind of turn inward into his own imagination

and start coming up with new subjects and in doing that the true Escher was unlocked yeah because early and like a lot of artists early in their career they kind of free-ranged through different styles trying to find their own personal thing. He had a very, very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre.

It doesn't fit with the rest of it. Very John Wayne Gasey. Right. But you can very clearly see if you look at Mosquita's work, that connection and the influence from him, although Mosquita did a lot of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas Escher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces. Yeah, yeah.

They were just kind of like almost. afterthoughts. But early on, he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did do like a sketch of a building, let's say, it would be from this really, like, tall, odd angle looking down on it, very severe angles and like a horizon or trees that sort of go on into infinity, stuff like that that would become very much his style later on. And Ed very astutely points out that there's something about his style that, I don't know how dark of a person he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity of these angles and a lot of his work that was just sort of uneasy feeling.

Right. It didn't look like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something kind of strange and unusual about it. Something about the contrast of black and white definitely does it too. And he was such a master of shading that if something was stark and black and white, I mean, unless it was his earliest work, it was because he wanted it to look that way and to make it stark and kind of unsettling like that.

But yeah, there's like a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff. Yeah. And it's not something you can easily put your finger on, but it's definitely there. Yeah, like did you see the mummified priests? Yeah. That was creepy. And then one of his... But isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life?

To mumma vibrates. Yeah, to stand them up like that in these little alcoves? Well, yeah, absolutely. Sure. He was just, don't kill the messenger. And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of his work and stuff like that, like the one of the eye, I believe called I, right in the middle of the pupil is a skull staring back. Yeah.

So he had little touches like that without going full, like, you know Lovecraftian Right Or Goya or something like that I don't even know Oronomous Bosch I don't know who that is

Sure you do I'm just kidding Okay I know those people Okay So His I guess this is where we get

To the fact of the show for me Take it away Chuck Because Folks If you've ever seen An MCSher print And you thought Man

That guy could sure draw a print Imagine Cutting that out of wood Yeah In reverse In reverse. Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff were woodcuts.

Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph. Yeah, so a wood cut, if you've ever made a, used a stamp or made a potato stamp as a kid. You're basically M.C. Escher. Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving this stuff into wood as a negative image because then when you run ink over it and stamp it, you get the positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard enough to draw and sketch this stuff. much less cut it out of wood.

Right. So just take a step back and think about the Eshers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were originally carved out of wood. And now imagine that to get even more detailing because you can't adjust how much ink a certain part of the woodblock gets. It's all going to get an even layer of ink. So to shade something, you have to do crosshatching, lines, stippling, something like that. But to get really detailed with shading, you need multiple blocks.

of the same image in the exact same size with different parts accentuated so that you can layer over. You can take the same paper and layer them on different blocks and line them up so that you have layers to this image. That was the level of the wood cuts this guy was doing.

Yeah, like that's sort of like a T-shirt hippie screen printing like a four-color shirt. Right. You got to put it on exactly in the spot that it needs to go each time, drag that ink across, so it's not off by a centimeter. Right. Because it would look bad.

So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell they are woodcuts, they look like woodcuts. Some of them do not. There's some of the Italian countryside that just are just, yeah, are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that it's not a drawing, that they're woodcuts, multiple blocked woodcuts. cuts is pretty astounding. But like I was saying, to me, even more difficult is making

the lithograph. Yeah, I think I talked about this on some other episode. I know it talked about patiquing, but I also talked to it. In industrial arts, we did offset lithography. In that social experiment high school you wanted to. Exactly. We did offset lithography, which basically, I mean, that's the process today. I mean, and that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of everything is to do with offset lithography. It was in... You remember?

It was in the Etchusketch episode. Oh. That's what Ohio art originally did was lithography. Okay. Oh, man, that's a deep cut. This is pre, like today you use, like, aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet. Right. And these emulsions and chemicals.

Back then, it was drawn onto limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil and then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically water and ink don't mix it's sort of all built on that principle. Right. So the areas where you have written in grease do not hold that ink

or is it the other way around? No, I think they don't hold the ink. Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image just like the wood cut essentially. Right. So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink water and grease right and when you put it all together on

limestone it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading that are kind of like a hallmark of some of Escher's more well-known works yeah the hands drawing hands right yeah that was a lithograph he made that with limestone and grease pen and ink and did it in reverse too because just like with the woodblock you have to create the negative of it yeah because the you want the positive image on the paper you have a very special brain if this is if you can work this stuff out as an artist yes you know it's uh not saying that any kind of artist is any better or worse or smarter than the next but your brain just has to be wired a little bit differently to think in negatives like that like a mathematician basically yeah your

brain has to be set up that way yeah absolutely uh but lithography is difficult very labor intensive uh so later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create his prints after he is sketched and drawn this stuff out smart move and he would destroy the limestone well he wouldn't destroy it he would scrape it clean so we could reuse it right so that's the reason like if you want to buy an original mc escher good luck well there's there's no such thing there's original prints that he made right uh and apparently But you're not going to get your hands one of those limestones. No, but there are a couple of those left over,

but he said that he wanted them, I think, canceled is what they call it in his will, where they intentionally damage it so that even if you got a hold of one of these things and you were like, I'm going to print me a brand-new Escher, there'd be like the negative image of snagel-puss comes through and like the hand-drawing hands picture. And he did not do many original prints

from those original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did 10 of still life with spherical mirror. And so anything, obviously, anything you buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to be a print anyway. What? They told me it was an original. You mean bikini lady on Corvette? You can probably get the original that at Spencer's.

You probably could, the original negative. Bikini Lady on Corvette. Oh, man. Remember that? Garfield with Lamborghini. These lithographs, he would also layer those Just like you did with the woodcuts Creating multiple plates to layer on top of one another

For shading and toning and stuff like that. Right. It's just amazing. Yeah. I mean, I did it to make a Monkees T-shirt. I forgot you used to screen print, too. So did I. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, actually, the Monkey's t-shirt was screen printing. I think a can remember what I did for a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that said like my name and something else. Oh, that's right. So you screen printed in industrial arts? Yes. Okay.

Like, were you ever employed gainfully as a screenbook? Oh, no. Oh, no. Did you do that? Yeah. No, I mean, I would have loved to it. I wasn't good enough. Oh, it's not hard.

Yeah, but you would draw the stuff or you would just... Oh, no, no, no. Would, like, burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through. If you did that for a job? Sure. Well, like high school? No, this is college. It was college.

What kind of dough do you make doing that? Jack. Yeah? But it's fun. It's cool work, you know. You just listen to music. Get paid in beer and a few bucks. Pretty much.

Hang out with some cool dudes and, you know. Yeah, yeah. I got you. It's a good early college job, you know what I mean? I think it'd be cool. I mean, there's a very cool T-shirt, local T-shirt shop here that every time I go over there, because that's where our friend, the Patchmaker, Katie Culp, works. Or at least she used to.

I think she's got her own space now. Oh, cool. But she shared a space with T-shirt dudes. and any time I'm in there, it's just a good vibe, you know what I mean? It really is. Yeah. There are a lot worse places to spend your time than a T-shirt shop. Yeah.

So, oh, another thing we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was a whole different. You had to do a separate stone for each color. Right. So that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in black and white. Right. Aside from the fact that he liked it as well. Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general.

Yeah. I'm not saying he was lazy. No. But let's take a step back here for a second. And examine the idea that you thought M.C. Escher was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing all of the stuff with a pencil. Yeah. Now, really let it sink in, that he carved these things in reverse out of wood.

Or limestone. Or limestone. Yeah. And then used these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise, and technical works of art. It's amazing. It really is amazing. Truly astounding. And like you said, there are a few of those stones and wood blocks that are owned by the M.C. Escher Foundation.

Snagal puts on every single one of them. And apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works. Right, which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the work of art and then going back and looking at that limestone and then looking at the work of art, it really kind of sinks in like, oh my. Yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff. Me too. They've picked up in recent years. Have they? Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.

Yep. In 2011, the record for highest overall attendance in the world, out of all the museums in the world that year, was at the Centro Cultural Banco de Brazil, which held their magical World of Escher exhibit. Oh, wow. 570,000 visitors, about 10,000 a day. Holy cow. Yep. So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about mesotent. That is sort of like woodcutting, except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out as a rough surface and then use these little tools to smooth out things that are going to be the image, applying that ink and then wiping it off.

Right. So the places you smooth out are the ones that are going to be white on the paper or black. on the paper right it's the rough edges that hold the ink so you cover the whole thing with ink wipe it down the smooth starts parts come clean the rough stuff

has the ink and you can use this like this isn't like oh look I made an X this is like incredibly fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this in a mezzotint and the eye that you were talking about

the one with the skull. If you go back and look at that, that was a mezzo tint. Yeah, so was dew drop. Yeah. Very detailed, cupped leaf, showing a single drop of dew inside it with all kinds of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art. He only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking.

And I think he just, he did a handful of them and then moved on to the far easier woodcutting. Right, right. He's like, oh, I came back, baby. All right, well, we'll take a break and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story again, which is, I believe we left off in what, end of World War II? Sounds right. All right. And I'm sorry, Joshua. Hi, Kyle.

Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault.

I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person, a billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast. Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And on therapy for black girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity, relationships, mental health, and the choices that help us grow.

As cybersecurity expert, Camille Stewart Gloucester reminds us, we are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of black women are standing up and speaking out because they feel the brunt of the pain. Each week, we explore the tools and insights that help you move. with purpose. Whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself. If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel.

If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I, I've done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black.

All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. World War II is over. M.C. Escher was, like, a lot of people, very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this point, he still is not a super famous artist making tons of money.

No, but he's more famous than this makes him out to be. Like, he's got some renown in the Netherlands or some exhibits, yeah. But he's not anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he has been the last few decades. since about like the late 60s. Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere. No, but the people who most appreciate

what he's doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like, this is astounding. This guy is taking what we write out as formulas and turning them into art and making them precise. Yeah. Like you could describe this work of art as a formula.

That is what M.C. Escher was able to do. He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, remember what you said earlier. This is where we are in his life where he is not in the Italian countryside. He's been ripped from its bodice. So his muse is gone, and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own unique brain.

He's being forced into his own bodice, face first. This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects as tessellations. Really, really cool stuff. his brother said hey dude you know what you should do is go talk to a crystallographer he's like if you want to talk detailed shapes and math yeah and he does so and that taught him a lot and then he learned about the 17 17 wallpaper groups yeah which is so dense that I you know how much do we even want to talk about it well the we'll just sum it up the 17 wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that says every geometric pattern two-dimensional geometry pattern falls into one of 17 categories. There's only 17, and they're called kind of half-jokingly the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has geometric patterns on it usually, right?

Escher couldn't understand it mathematically. Yeah, it was proved out twice independently. That there are 17 wallpaper groups? Yeah, the mathematical proof. One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the alhambra apparently is the only place in the world that contains all 17 geometric or... geometric wallpaper patterns. Within its walls?

That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, of course, this would appeal to Escher. But he didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain like we can't what the 17 wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically. Right.

But he understood them intuitively. And as he became friends with mathematicians, you know, about mid-career, he was apparently kind of amused to find, like, you know, these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out in these formulas, and I just know it. It was almost like I was born knowing it.

Yeah. I mean... I guess he was real cocky. Yeah. He wasn't really, though. I'm just kidding. And I didn't get the idea either that he was like, take your math and shove it. He was just a little more amused that, like, you've got these mathematical proofs that, like, I'm drawing this stuff for my creative brain.

On limestone. Yeah, on limestone. Cutting it out of wood. So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But, and he was very, like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians, I think, later in life. Who did he, he friend. The Penrose?

Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I love how it's described here. The father and son mathematician team. Yeah. You know those. They wore matching dolphin shorts. Oh, man. It's part of their uniform. I wish people still wore those.

Yeah. Did you ever wear those? No, they were a little before my time. Well, they were for joggers and runners. Yeah, I didn't start that until it's 2011. And Hoot, I forgot about that. Yeah, that is what Hooters' Waitresses wore on. Yeah, it was orange dolphin shorts with bronze panty hose.

Yeah, and then chunky white socks. Yeah, and Reebok high tops. It was bizarre. It was an interesting look. Somebody put that together and not a woman. Do you remember there was a Hooters airline? What? Yeah.

Wow, that kind of rings a bell. Yeah. That was very short-lived, I imagine. I believe so. It was pretty short-lived. short-lived. Interesting. I guess, yeah.

So you would get asked, like, what kind of drink and what style of chicken wing do you want? I bet they did serve chicken wings on those. Of course. But can you imagine being on an airplane being forced to smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it? That's like every flight I ever take. It's true. There's somebody with some stinky food. You know, if I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if it's okay if I eat first.

Like if you bring food on? Yep. I don't bring food on to a flight. Sometimes, dude, you just have to. It's a long flight and they run out of turkey wraps like in the first half a second. So you just pull out your what? My kung pow. Out of your pocket?

You had just in case they're out of turkey wraps? Not even in a container. It's just in my pocket. Oh, goodness. So I thought this part was sort of amusing how orderly he always was with his art. And he tried to get into chaos a bit in this one work, contrast parentheses

order and chaos parentheses wherein he went and dug up a bunch of trash and said I will

draw chaos and it ended up being if you go and look at it there's like a broken bottle broken eggshell an open

sardine tin a broken clay pipe and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I guess woodcutter

lithographed with perfect beautiful precision right that was chaos his interpretation of it

he just couldn't do it He was very much preoccupied with chaos. He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quote, quote, we adore chaos because we love to produce order. And he's like, by we, I mean me. Yeah, sure. Sounded very much like an I statement.

But he was very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that. Yeah, and also as his career would progress, these repeating patterns on a finite space, if you've seen his circle limit series that's where you'll find the fish or these demons and they start out with like one in the center and then there's a pattern all around and as it gets closer and closer to the edge

they get smaller and smaller and smaller and you can just sort of imagine that there is no end to these shapes that they're just going infinitely around the sphere perfectly but again you have to stop and remind yourself this is a two-dimensional image I'm looking at

and then secondly this is cut out of wood but yeah he apparently made a three-dimensional wood carving of his circle limit series later on in life and I'll bet that's spectacular to see too he made a what a three-dimensional wood carving of it basically proving that his two-dimensional drawing was accurate yeah because he made it in the three dimensions

that's awesome yeah he was just showing off toward the end there I like reptiles yeah that's a good one aside from his early countryside work that is far superior the tessellation of the lizards and reptiles is really neat that's the one that has the lizards being

like crawling off of the page as a drawn image circling around walking over some books and then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image yeah very neat

it's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or one another but they're also three-dimensional too and that actually kind of jibes with another quote he had that I think really sums that style of art up he said the flat shape irritates me

I feel as if I were shouting to my figures you are too fictitious for me you just lie there static and frozen together do something come out of there and show me what you are capable of and he would shout it just like that and then Jetta would back out of the room slowly okay dear here's your tea and that sort of brings us too

with the reptiles, we need to talk a little bit about illusion, because it started sort of early on. He was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards coming off the page or still life and street, which is a tabletop that blends into a street scene. That's a neat one. Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one too. Or relativity, which, I don't know, I mean, is there a most famous, maybe hands? It's between hands, self-portraitosphere, and relative. Relativity. Yeah, relativity is the one with the staircases. Yeah, and people going up and down stairs that don't go anywhere, but they go everywhere,

and they circle back on each other, and it's just an impossible staircase. I actually called Penrose Stairs. Oh, really? Yeah. After the famous father and son, math magician, Gene? And speaking of the penrose is the... Did I just say math magician? I just invented something.

I did. That's amazing. Completely by accident. The penrose is... That would be great. Math magician. Yeah, I bet that's something. four

right but the penrose is apparently wrote they saw some of Escher's work wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like impossible stairs

which came to be called penrose stairs and Escher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody pointed out to him so he created something called House of Stairs

or upstairs downstairs one of the two and sent one of the original prints to the penrose So in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another was like a set of impossible stairs in real life. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And this is, you know, we were talking earlier about how his work somehow felt unsettling.

And, you know, the subject matter as well, when you think about these, the subjects walking and relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking downstairs, I'm sideways all of a sudden, I'm walking back into the same. staircase i was just on right like you imagine if these things were to come alive they would be frustrated angry people right and as a matter of fact one of the um the one that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs they um that was supposedly based on some a staircase in his school oh really which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology don't you think well how so uh well i mean like these these students aren't going anywhere they're not even human There's centipedes with human faces.

Gotcha, gotcha. And they're kind of trapped in this, what you could definitely call like a purposeless existence in this building. It's kind of a dark building. Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later in his life. Like he said, he was holding exhibitions in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe. But he did one in Belgium in 1950 that led.

to an article in the studio, which was an art magazine. And that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote about him in time and life magazines, which definitely propped them up a little bit. Yeah, oh, yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in 54. Flash forward to 66.

He was featured in Mathematical Games column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner. Mathematician. I guarantee you that's a thing. And that increased his, and this was 66, so it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counterculture. Right.

And I guess, who was it, Graham Nash? Graham Nash, Mick Jagger sent him a fan letter and made the mistake of calling him by his first name. Oh, really? Cheshire did not appreciate. Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit him to make 2001 of Space Odyssey a fourth-dimensional film. Huh.

Yeah, there's this interesting article called The Impossible World of M.C. Escher that Stephen Poole wrote in The Guardian that has a lot of that stuff in it. But he was kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my mathematician friends. Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led to the big daddy of him all. He got featured in Rolling Stone. And then after that, it was all over. He was huge. Yeah. Dorm room huge. 448 works.

Yeah. Then this doesn't count all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual final works. Right. And like we said earlier, he died in 1972 of cancer at the age of 73. And I tried to find more about his family, but there's not a lot out there, like his sons and whether or not his, I mean, I guess his grandkids would be contemporaries of ours. Yep. I don't know.

Like, he was born in 1890. Well. Great grandkids, maybe. Yeah, okay. I guess if his kids were born in the 1920s, yeah, contemporary. of our parents, maybe. Sure. The oldsters.

Yeah. Boomers. Hey, boomer. Okay, boomer. Hey, boomer. I can't even get that right. In that journey to infinity movie, apparently all three of his children appear in it.

Oh, really? So if you want to know more about them, go watch that. I saw one picture of him where he looked a lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had a beard. Oh, yeah, he did, didn't he? He looked a little bit like him. Yeah.

It's not expecting that. Yep. So there's MC Escher. That's right. Speaking of not expecting that, Bikini Babe on Corvette. Sure. And Hooters Airline made appearances in the MCSher one. I just want to point out.

If you want to know more about any of those things, go on to the internet and start searching. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Hey guys, I've been listening to your show since 2011. I've even seen you on your first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a whole year to hear that on the podcast. Oh, yeah. That's how it works. Sure.

Sorry. It's not even guaranteed that it's going to be the show you saw. Yeah, a lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons of live shows. We don't do that. No. Yeah, and I honestly think the live shows are a little better in person. I don't think they make, as a fan of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the best just regular content.

I think most people think that. So that's why we only put out the one. Right. So back to the letter. This show is so great. I would even save high interest episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Nice. You were one of the few people that can keep his attention.

I never thought I would write, but as a science teacher, you said something recently that is so true. Some of the best science websites are children's science websites. Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell people to look up a child's definition for that word. Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for all your work.

And now I'll have to figure out what to do now that I am finally caught up. Keep up the great work, and that is from Jenny with an eye. Thanks, Jenny with an eye. Hopefully you dot the eye with the heart, maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. Remember that one? Two curved lines, topped and I guess bottomed with a straight line. I think I know what you're talking about. Here, I'll show you.

Oh, boy. Since we just... Oh, sure. That. Yeah, yeah. It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral two. Inside the heart. That's the reflection of light.

That's where the light's coming from. It's beautiful, thank you. That's an Escher reference. I'll treasure that. You're welcome, Chuck. I wasn't going to give it to you, but now I have to. Just sign it first. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyoshinot.com and look for our social links there,

and you can also send us an email like Jenny with an I did. You can send it to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks.

Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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