Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Number 23

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

There are people out there who believe that there’s something special about the number 23. Exactly what? Who knows. Exactly why? Because it pops up a lot. But does it? Who knows.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Josh. Put the three of us together.

This is short stuff. It's so short. Yeah, and we should mention that Josh is in here with this guest producer, and he asked what we were recording on, and I said the number 23, and he said, oh, I'm into that. Oh, yeah? And I said, well, I apologize,

because I'm probably gonna make fun of it a lot. That's funny. So Josh, then you're a 20-30-an is what they're called. The number two, the number three, the letter R, the letter D, the letter I, the letter A, the letter N, and then because there's more than one, the letter S. And we know that's real because there's a Facebook page. Yeah, Facebook basically legitimizes everything.

So we're talking about the number 23. Apparently, a lot of people put some stock into this number. Yeah, not just Josh. No, he's not the only one. They made a very... Jerry does too. They made a very bad Jim Carrey movie called the number 23.

Did you see it, or are you just presuming it was bad? I'm presuming it was bad from all the people that said it's bad. I have never seen it, and I presumed it was bad too, but I have gotten just desperate enough on Netflix and Amazon Prime to just try it. There's so much good stuff out there, and you're gonna watch that?

Hmm, is there? Oh, I don't know. Does everything stink? I don't know if everything stinks. I don't want to say that, but I think I am at the number 23 level right now. All right, let's follow up. I want to hear about it.

All right, you got it. All right, so the number 23, you've seen it on Michael Jordan's uniform. Sure. He picked it, apparently, because that was as close as he could get to half of 46, which was his older brother's number. I think his older brother's was 45.

Oh, 45. Yeah, he came close. Because 23 would be exactly. Right. And then, of course, since then, other people have tried to emulate Michael like LeBron, and so the other 23s you see in basketball, and even some other sports sometimes

are a tribute to Michael Jordan. Yeah, like David Beckham's 23, when he went to Real Madrid, was an homage to Jordan too. So yeah, Jordan was the first. Every other 23 was an homage to Jordan, which is, that's great, but that's not where the number 23 ends.

Oh, I thought you got to say that's not where the number 23 started. No, well, it did. It started elsewhere. The number 23's been with us for as long as Arabic numerals have. But the obsession with the number 23, they've tried to trace back as far as they can,

and there's actually a guy who came up with a book that came out in 2013. This guy's got one of the better names I've heard in a while. Barnaby Rodgerson. Yeah, and this book title is just out of hand. Rodgerson's book of numbers, colon, the culture of numbers, hyphen from 1,001 nights

to the seven wonders of the world. That's the end of the title. It has a colon and a hyphen. Yeah, he should have ended that with a exclamation point. Right. You have to when you say the seven wonders of the world. Yeah, I don't know anybody who says it like without an exclamation point.

Yeah, so Barnaby Rodgerson traces the obsession with the number 23 to a little writer that was drugged out named William S. Burroughs. Yep, the man who shot a million bucks in his arm, says Matt Dillon. Oh, really? Was that the thing, the quote? Yeah, it was from drugstore cowboy.

Oh, right. William S. Burroughs played an old aged heroin addict and Matt Dillon said he must have shot a million bucks into that arm. See, watch that again instead of the number 23. Okay, all right, you got it. That's your assignment. Okay.

So supposedly in 1960, this story has many, many holes and probably because of all the drugs. Burroughs was in Tangier probably because of the drugs and said he met a sea captain named Clark. Not me. You said he'd never been in an accident in 23 years. Yeah.

Later that day, Clark sank his ship and died. Which that'll perk your antennae up for sure. And then supposedly later that same day, that night, Burroughs heard a radio story, news story about a flight 23 that crashed in Florida, also piloted by a captain Clark. This all sounds very interesting until you realize that that didn't happen.

Well, there was a flight 23. I didn't see whether it was piloted by Clark or not. So it's possibly heard a story. From 27 years earlier? Yeah, but like maybe they were recounting the story or something like that. You know what I mean? Sure, we also have to remember again,

he's hopped up on smack. Right, either way. I think smack was just one of many at any given time going through his bloodstream. But he is usually the guy who is first credited with becoming obsessed with the number 23. And he was, you could say, fairly influential

in the underground scene in the 60s and then into the 70s and so on. And one of his friends was named Robert Anton Wilson. And Robert Anton Wilson went on to co-write the very famous Illuminatus Trilogy. Have you ever read any of those? I haven't, but that's Josh's main interest. Okay, they're fascinating books.

They're wonderfully written, they're hilarious, they're engrossing, they're really interesting. But he was friends with Burroughs. And so the number 23 is a major foundation of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which also draws from another kind of underground school of thought, I guess, in the 60s and 70s, which is called Discordianism,

which is kind of like a made up parody religion that actually makes a lot of sense. So much so that it kind of blurs the lines between reality and non-reality when you look into it. And number 23 is a holy number for Discordianism. So if you kind of take all that together, Discordianism, the Illuminatus Trilogy,

and William S. Burroughs, and put it all together, that seems to be where the kind of cult-like awareness or obsession with the number 23 came from. All right, so we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back and talk about more 23 coincidences right after this. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug,

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

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So I should mention, when I said that that's a guest producer,

Josh's main interest, I didn't mean in life. I just meant, as far as the number 23 goes, he was like, yeah, I read Robert Anton Wilson. Yeah. So I thought it might be fun just to kind of tick through a bunch of the things you might find on a 2030 and Facebook page, where people are like, look, man, 23 again.

Darwin's Origin of the Species was released in 1859. You add up one eight, five, and nine, and you get 23. That's one of the more interesting ones. Some of them are just pictures of like a truck with the number 23 on it. Like there it is again. Those are a little lame. Right after 22.

But there are some interesting coincidences that pop up when you look around, like Kurt Cobain. He was born in 1967. And if you add those up, it comes to 23. He died in 1994. And if you add those numbers up, they come to 23 as well. Okay. Much more interesting than a truck with the number 23 on it.

For sure. Conspiracy theorists will point to the 9-11 tragedy. You add up 9-11, two, zero, zero, and one, and you get 23. That's a good one. Shakespeare was born and died on the same day, April 23rd, but years apart, obviously. Julie Caesar was supposedly, if you look at detailed reports, stabbed 23 times.

Mm-hmm. That's not bad. I like this one. There's one called the birthday paradox. Have you heard about that? I did see that. And after reading it four times and not fully on understanding it,

I just walked away in tears. It's really fascinating. I was like, ooh, we should do one just on that, but it's actually too simple. So the birthday paradox is where, if you get 23 people into a room, you now have enough people to where there's a 50-50 chance that two of them are gonna have the same birthday,

which makes zero sense since there's 365 days in a year. You would think that you would need that times two to have, I guess 365 to have a 50-50 chance. But no, because each of those 23 people have the opportunity to be compared to the other 22 people, you get a number way more than 23, a number of comparisons, way more than 23,

and it turns out it's enough to have a 50% chance of having the same birthday among two people. And has that been proven out? Yeah, oh yeah, it's mathematic. It's mathematical. Yeah, no, it's very well proven. It's interesting, but once you look into just the probabilities of it,

you're like, oh, it makes way more sense. Okay. I took statistics in college, actually. That was one of the maths that I took. I took statistics, Chuck, one, two, twa times. Did you get an F and F and a D? Yes, the last time I got a D, because I had the same instructor all three times,

and last time she's like, D, just go, just go away. That's well- You're never going to get this. Yeah, you and I were liberal arts guys. I was an English major, and before that class, they actually had a math class called Math for Poets, was the nickname, and it was basically like the math class all English majors took,

because it was very simple arithmetic. Not bad. Let's get back to a couple of 23 things. Oh yeah. Princess Leah, Josh, and the very first Star Wars film is held in detention block AA-23. Okay. And apparently in George Lucas' first film, THX 1138,

there is another 23 in there, so some people might think that was his little way of giving a nod to that number. I would guess so, and George Lucas wouldn't be the only person who's a famous devotee of 20, yeah, 2030 and a famous 2030. One of the most famous is John Nash, the guy who's the mathematician whose life was dramatized

in A Beautiful Mind, both the book and the movie, which is a great movie if I remember correctly, but he was obsessed with the number 23. He said it was his favorite prime number. That's not where the obsession ends. He also says that he, or he said, that he appeared on the cover of Life Magazine once, disguised as Pope John the 23rd.

Right. And Pope John the 23rd really did appear on Life Magazine, but John Nash was saying, well, that was me. Yeah, I shouldn't laugh. In the Bible, which is a book, there is a, I was about to call it a chapter, but I guess they aren't called that. The book of Numbers and the verses,

it's Numbers 23-23. If you look that up, what hath God wrought? That is also the very first message sent by Telegraph in code by Samuel Morse in 1843. So if you take all of this and you look at it a certain way, it becomes plain that there's something very special about the number 23. If you look at it a different way,

it becomes plain that people have invested a lot of mystical significance to 23 that isn't actually there. That it could be any other number, especially any other number that is within one to 30. Because a lot of people ascribe dates, significance to dates. I should say John Nash died on the 23rd of May in 2015.

Good point. And so that just proves it to people who are 2030, it's obviously 23 means something. But it could also be 15 or seven or three. There's a lot of numbers that we ascribe a lot of significance to. And if you ask a cognitive psychologist what's going on, they will just basically say that our brains contain a mechanism for detecting patterns.

We search out patterns, how we make sense of things. It's how we save brain energy as finding patterns and we can predict things and just make sense of the world around us. And sometimes we force patterns onto things that don't actually have any significance, that don't actually mean anything. And that could be things like the number 23

popping up suddenly or randomly. Yeah, when you look at the clock and it's 11-11 and you make a big deal about it, it's more likely that you just don't make a big deal about every other time of day that you look at the clock. Exactly, Chuck. I got nothing else except for 23 chromosomes. Hey-oh!

Well, with that, short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.