Stuff You Should Know - Stuff You Should Know July 4th Extravaganza, Part 1: Mom

Episode Date: July 12, 2011

What makes America unique? In the first segment of this special two-part episode, Josh and Chuck join up with guests from The Daily Show and The Onion to take a closer look at the Stuff You Should Know About America. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. So, hey, I guess, and welcome to the whatever this thing is, right? It's a podcast now. I guess it is. We're chopping it up, stripping it down, using parts elsewhere. Right? Yeah, what are you talking about? Well, Chuck, I think you know exactly what I'm talking

about. But you and I went to Sirius XM headquarters in New York. That's right. In their studios. We got like 50 Stuff You Should Know listeners to show up, and they sat there and watched us do a live radio show, Live the Tape. Yeah. And it was about July 4th. It was about America. Totally fine and Nido. And I'm kind of like this live show thing. It's like, you know, it's a little weird at first. Right. But I think we got over that in the first few minutes. I never did. Plus, also, I don't know if you'll be able to pick this up. But starting at about the 30 minute mark, I became almost overwhelmed with the need to go to the bathroom. Yeah, you told me this afterwards. I had to so badly, and I was just holding it because

I drank so much water. Remember? I was nervously drinking water, which is like the dumbest thing you can do before you're about to sit down and perform for two hours. Yeah. So I guess listen out for that as we present this two-parter episode, which helps for us because one of our listeners sent in some beer and Jerry's refusing to do anything for this week because she's mad at us because we didn't share it with her. So this is good for us, right? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that went down. This is why we're doing this. Okay. We're releasing this for this reason. All right. So without further ado, we got the stuff you should know does America with special guest Wyatt Sinek and Hallie Haglin of The Daily Show with John Stewart. That's right. And Joe

Garden and Joe Rendazzo of The Onion and Jill Morris of The Onion as well. Yep. So let's begin, Chuck. Let's take you back to July 1, 2011, the heady days starting right now, right now. You ready? Yeah, I wanted to change that music at the last minute to the Elvis. Josh said it's too late. And then I was going to walk in like Elvis backwards. Then Hallie said you might trip. And that might be funny, but I didn't do it. I'm good. You ready? Yeah. So hey and welcome to the live radio show. I'm Josh. This is Chuck. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the stuff you should know. That's good. That was special for the radio special. You didn't even tell me about it. No,

you never tell me. I edited it down. It's right here. That looks fresh too. Yeah. The ink is rubbing. Yeah. You just came up with effects of life bit. Yeah. In the moment. So we're doing this a little different Chuck than normal. Yes. It's just you and me. Now we have 50-ish pairs of eyes on us while we're doing this. That's more than 100 eyes. Yes. Yes. And then we also have some special guests that we're doing for this stuff you should know about America live show, right? Friends from the Daily Show. Yeah. With Jon Stewart. Right. We have, well, Jon Stewart's not here. Yeah, but you get, that's the full title. I'm told you have to say it. That's what Hodgman told me. Okay. So our friends from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Yes. Include Wyatt Sinak, right?

Who you all know and love. Taylor Pariah. And one of the esteemed Daily Show writers, Hallie Haglin. How are you, Hallie? How are you? I was also a performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. And if y'all are fans of that, then you're pretty smart and cool because it's awesome. Exactly. So, well, we'll quit. Stop growling. And then we have friends from The Onion as well, America's finest news source, which just celebrated its thousandth issue last week. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's been around for a while. We have the editor, Joe Randazzo. Say hi, Joe. We have one of the head writers, Joe Garden. And we have another writer, Jill Morris, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we have quite a lineup here today. Yeah. Joe's lovely wife, Anita,

sitting in front of us. Yeah. Hey, Anita. My lovely wife is sitting in front of us. Yeah. And then a bunch of strangers. Yeah. That's right. That's not quite true. We have friends here as well. We do. And thank you, strangers and friends, for coming out for this. This is really flattering. So thanks a lot. Thanks. Hopefully it'll be fun, right? Yes. You want to get started? Yes. So are we supposed to wear these? I mean, you can if you want. I don't like that. We don't normally wear... This is like behind the scenes. We usually do have headphones. And apparently, we're the only ones who don't wear them at stuff. You should know how stuff works. That's right. Yeah. We're rebels. I don't think we should change now, Chuck. I just don't want to get sweaty. Okay.

So let's start. We're going to start. We recently did a podcast on America's First Murder. I think it came out yesterday, right? Yeah. Who was it? John Billington. That's right. We just gave away the ending. That's right. We were digging around like doing research for this podcast. And I don't know how many of you have heard it or not. Hopefully very few because we ripped off some of the content from it for this part. But one of the things we found was that John Billington, who was a Puritan and lived in Plymouth Colony, when we started digging around in Plymouth Colony, there's this whole seamy underbelly. Yeah. Puritan. We should do that. Yeah. Yeah. The Puritans. That there was this whole life of crime that like we had no idea existed. And so we started digging further and

further and we came to realize like America is kind of this like crazy place, right? Yeah. For a reason. It's been built like echelon by echelon. Upon crazy, upon crazy. Right. Right. So we figured we'd just kind of go over some of the factors that led to the craziness that was taking on the British, right? Yes. And we had our good friend Wyatt Sennac come by to talk to us about that. Right. Hey, Wyatt, you want to come sit with us? He just looks surprised. Why is Sennac, everybody? I'm going to wear the headphones. You're going to wear them? Because I'm a professional. These headphones were probably worn by Bridget the Midget on a power stern show. Yeah. You see that door is tightly sealed. Yeah. I asked if I could take a peek since no one's here

this week and they said no, no, no, no. No one peeks. Yeah. No, they keep bababoo in there. It's hermetically sealed. It's scratching it. Let me out. Yeah. So as I'm sure everyone here knows, you are formally trained in colonial American history. You have a doctorate in it, right? I do. I have a doctorate from the University of Hawaii. Right. Go warriors, right? Rainbow warriors? No, it's the University of Hawaii at Arkansas. Okay. Go warrior backs. Yeah. Well, that's why we invited you. You buy here today. Are you familiar with some of the, the senior underbelly of American history or are you just kind of part and parcel to the, you know, the, the textbook stuff? I know the textbook stuff that, you know, and I know the stuff that they talk about in like

reality shows when it's like, oh, yeah, you're going to go live in like an 1800 house or like you're going to go live in like a, you know, so I assume it's, it was like that where there were camera crews following you everywhere and we just haven't found those tapes yet. Right. I assume they're three quarter inch tapes, so that's probably part of the problem. Nobody has a three quarter inch machine anymore. Right. Yeah. We're going to, I guess, open your eyes a little bit then. All right. Are you cool with that? Sure. So Chuck, one of the first things that we, that we figured out, I guess what caught our attention is the, the, the criminal element that was in Plymouth Colony with the, the Puritans, right? Yes. And by criminal, we mean specifically

buggery. Are you familiar with buggery? Not on an intimate, but I do know what, I do know what buggery is. I should point out real quick that there was an email exchange last week, a real email exchange where Josh had written this out and it said, you know, buggery is a very polite term for bestiality. It's like, yeah. And I had the cinnamon eel said, Hey, dude, by the way, buggery is also sodomy. I have the email still. It's framed and on my wall. I'm just curious if we have those people at work that like spy on your email. All it literally said was, by the way, buggery is also sodomy, Josh. I wanted you to know that. I also like the idea that like, that in the time when buggery was popular, that perhaps if you were a registered buggerer,

that like somebody was like, oh gross, you're, you mess around with animals and someone would get indignant and like, no, no, I do not. I am a sodomist. A very proud one. Yeah. Very true. Very true. How dare, no, I would never do that to an animal. They're beautiful creatures. Especially that one. Yeah. Okay, maybe I would. All right. All right, you got me. I'm an all-around buggerist. There was an actual buggerist that we came across, right? His name was Thomas Granger. And can you read old English? Sure. So this is, this is a, this is a quote from the, the court records of Plymouth colony, I think in like 1631. Do you, do you mind taking it? It's right here. Sure. Just read that. Is this a test to see if I know how to read?

Yeah. Read old English. Boy, that'd be really embarrassing. And the, the years are Vs. Oh, is that what that is? Okay. Do you want me to read it in old English? Sure. Oh, yeah, of course. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off.

The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's your boy, Michael Kaya, world famous, often talked about alleged comedian. Some of y'all know me as Mr. Whitaker from Martin. Some of you know me as Shobo from House Party 3. And yes, I have told you I'm crackers for everybody. And some of you don't know me at all.

But you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael Talks to Everybody. That's right. They gave my own show y'all. Woo, woo, woo. Michael talks to everybody where every week we'll be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game. Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else. We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking. Most importantly, we're gonna have a lot of fun. It's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out. Everybody, I'm telling you, it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael Talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got T.I. We got Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just a comeback. He just

gonna be here for a minute. Everybody, we're gonna be talking to him. We're gonna be talking on this show. Listen to Michael Talks to everybody on December 5th on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Was this court, that's how everyone used to sound in America, was this court indicted for buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, diver sheep, two calves, and a turkey, and was found guilty and received sentence of death by hanging until he was dead. Right. So that's what happened to you if you were caught. I guess this guy is probably like the worst serial buggerist that Plymouth colony produced. That you know of. That I could find record of. But I was gonna say, it does seem

like, okay, so there's a mare, a cow, two goats, some sheep, some calves, which I don't know if they're related to the cow, and a turkey. Like it does, and I was saying this to you earlier, for whatever people want to say about our technological distractions that we have, those may be the only things keeping us from having sex with animals. This is clearly, these are bored people that are just like bored and there are no singles bars. There's just that barn. There's that barn and this groin. Let's make some happen. Also, I'm just gonna say this, I'm gonna throw this out there. The turkey, how do we know the turkey didn't bugger the man? I think that's an excellent point. Yeah. But so Thomas Granger, right? He's, he's hang till dead

as you just read. And he got it. So how he would have you believe. Right. Well, that's, that's the court records. That's what they say. Right. But the ghost of Thomas Granger. Right. It's still around. He's out in the barn. Yeah. Well, it's like that movie. What was the movie where the guy who got electrocuted to death and then like. Shocker. Was that shocker? No, no, no. Yeah. Did he come back to life? Yeah. The green one. No, the green shocker. Okay. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. You don't want to talk about that. Okay. It's a clean show. Oh, I know. We're just talking about bestiality for like seven minutes. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's true. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, it's good. You did the, you did the old English voice and everything. Yeah, I'm sidetracking here. So

well, the point is that there was crazy crime in Implemouth Colony. Are you seeing that now? The Puritans? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And he got off kind of harshly because he was a pretty big into the buggery. Other people would be. Chuck enjoyed the, he got off kind of harshly. I tried not to laugh so hard. There was something in the air and everybody needed to release it. I think we're all more appreciative of it now that we've gotten it out there. Yes. Right. Right. So he was hanged. Other people were put into stocks, right? If you were a gossip, you would be dunked on a log is one, one type of punishment. So there was a lot of crime. There's a lot of punishment, right? Weird punishment for weird crime. Yeah. Like gossiping was one that you would get you

dunked on a log in a lake. That seems like a weird, yeah. Which I imagine you'd be tied to the log or else they just put you on a log and dunking and you just fall off and be fine. Swim back to shore and be like, can I go back home now? But again, it goes that idea of boredom where it's like, we need to punish this person. Yeah. Right. You know, you put them in the stocks. Right. That's, that's boring. Well, no, with the stocks, like apparently people would come, like they, they closed school down and people would come from surrounding villages to children would mock them and laugh. Yeah. And they would have a sign that said what their crime was obviously sort of like the scarlet letter. So being in the stocks was like being a standup comedian.

Basically, what sort of you talk about all of your problems or in this case, they put a sign up of all your problems and people would laugh at them. I think there's less money in standup though, as I understand it. So apparently finding a house is a really, really difficult thing. Right. It was very difficult. Like they lived in caves originally. Yeah. Did you know this? I did know this that they lived that there was some, there was a lot of cave living. So yeah, so they, so they get to the new world and they're like, well, I don't know how to build a house. I thought you knew how to build a house. And they had to live in caves for a while until they figured out how to build a house. And then

the houses they built were really crude and rudimentary. Like they were, they were thatched, covered in mud with sticks with maybe a hole in the, in the top. So you don't die. Sure. Right. Which apparently still kills 2 million people a year. Did you know that? I gotta bring me down. Having a hole in your roof kills 2 million people. No, not, not having a hole in your roof. Yeah. Particulate matter. That's a real fact. Yeah, it really is. So wait. So you're saying like, if you live in an apartment because there's no hole in your apartment, you're, you're dead. Right. Only if you're in your apartment right now, get out. Don't cook anything with dung in your apartment. And that's actually, that's probably good to know just in general. That's

why people die though. That's sad. It's not funny. No, but and, and, and apparently in the colonies too, you had to keep your fire going because no one had matches. Right. So if you let your fire go out, you had to go to the neighbor's house and borrow a charcoal. Yeah. And this sounds, I don't know. People are living in caves. They don't have fire. It sounds like, I can't understand. Yeah. I thought they were a little more advanced than that. And, you know, it was apparently a roll bummer because you had to start your own fire. And I don't know. I don't buy it. There's something though about like they had to keep their fire going like all the time, that you look at just how far we have or have not come in that they wasted a lot of energy back

then and we still do it today. Thanks for fathers. Very true. But the hole in the roof we bring up because it would also, you know, it's kind of crappy. It would let in rain and, and snow and other drastic elements. Right. So the one guy who could build the houses, Thomas Granger, I guess, wasn't around. All right. He was dead. He was dead. So they had to find out once they got sick of the caves, they had to find. That's where that term comes from. Yeah. That tribe called Questong Bugging Out is all about, oh, there was a New York animal sex and scene that, oh, they were, it was a warning to people like, look, you don't want to be bugging out because they will hang you to death. That's right. And death by hanging until you were dead,

which I thought was a little weird. So they, they eventually did get houses though, because there were these people that maybe you've not heard of called Indians that lived in this country. And we did a nice job of coming over and killing them with disease. Thanks to, was it DeSoto that brought over the pigs? Here's one of them. But yeah, DeSoto brought over like 300 pigs. He brought 300 pigs to eat. To eat. But he just made them walk around until he'd kill them and eat them. Oh, because you can't really pack a lunch back then. Right. I mean, it makes sense. Makes sense, for sure. But they spread like pox. Yeah. So the pigs killed the Indians and then they're like, Hey, now we got a place to live. Yeah. Look at all these awesome

Indian huts. It took them a little while to figure it out. But then they still, that's the first example of gentrification. That was, that was the Williamsburg Brooklyn of colonial life. So we've got cave living. We have a lot of a lot of abandoned dead Indian houses, right? Right. The Puritans we've now agreed are the first hipsters. Right, right. I'm sure they also had twirly mustaches. Right. Yeah. And then you pretty much have to make anything that you want, right? Sure. So it didn't bring anything over with them. So you had to like churn butter. Sure. You had to plant crops. You had to sow crops. Is that so? Is that the same thing as plant? Harvest, reap. Yes, sow and reap. So seeds. Right. You reap what you sow. Yes.

Yes. Definitely. Yeah. And then you fear the reaper. Right. You have to make your candles and pretty much like anything. So it is everything that hipsters in Williamsburg do. Exactly. Yeah. We're uncovering a thread here that like I didn't realize was in this. Yeah. If you want to see colonial America. That's why it is, that is colonial Williamsburg. It's not in Virginia. Yeah. That's, wow. Look at that. It all came around. The brain is working. Not feeling well in the tummy, but the brain functioning. He just turns it on like that. I know. It's amazing. And then so you've got all this work, right? You've got indentured servants at first. Yeah. They came over with a promise of land. Right. Like, hey, I'll come over there and work

for you for, you know, four years if you give me a parcel. Right. And then it's like AmeriCorps. Right. Pretty much. And then they ran out, right? Yeah, they ran out of servants. I think most of them got hung. And then just like AmeriCorps. Somebody figured out that if you left Massachusetts and just followed the trade winds, it took you right to West Africa. So apparently we started to go to West Africa and get all sorts of free labor. And like between 1450 and 1900, like 11 million people were captured and brought to the Americas. Right. That's one way to say it. Yeah. That's one way to put it. So we've got now everything in place. Right. We have crazed like animals starved hipsters running around. These are the colonists with the will to carve out,

you know, the place in the wilderness. You've got we have slave labor. We have dead Indians. And we have butter churning. Right. The whole thing. It's just a really rotten life for everybody involved. Right. Yeah. But out of all this came like these cities around 1700, a little after that, you've got cities like Boston and Philadelphia, and they were starting to get nicer and nicer. And people started to take a little more pride in them. And all of a sudden the British start flexing their muscles. Right. And I think because of the niceness of the cities, you have this certain level of resentment among the colonists of being told what to do. Like you're familiar with the Stamp Act. That was a big one. The Tea Act that led to the Boston Tea Party.

Okay. Yeah. I don't realize that was all forms of paper at the time. Is that right? The Stamp Act. Yeah. Yeah. Like any piece of paper you had to pay a tax on. They just didn't like that. Yeah. It's kind of weird tax if you think about it. The Tea Tax really drove them crazy though. And then you had to quarter British soldiers, which meant like let them stay in your house, which is kind of a thing too. Which is nice if you need like a roommate or something. Yeah. I'm kind of lonely and right. There's no TV back now. Or you need like an extra hand around the house. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Hey, British soldier, would you mind grabbing me a beer out of the non-existent fridge out of that pig? My arm's about to fall off. Yeah.

Well, so I guess you're right. I think you make a pretty good point that like it, quartering British soldiers wasn't that bad. So it was the taxes I think that really got them. And one of the things that the colonists did was to basically tar and feather tax collectors. Are you familiar with this process? Tar and feathering, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They still do it in Williamsburg. Do they? Yeah. Just bring it all back to Williamsburg. It's the only thing I know. So it's a pretty horrific process, right? I mean like to get the tar onto somebody's skin. Well, because that boils because it's got to be hot. Right. And then the feathers is just adding insult to injury. Yeah. I'm sure at that point the feathers are probably

not as bad. It was just like, Oh God, this tar. Oh, this is terrible. Right. Why are you putting feathering? I mean, that's fine. But really, the tar, you could have just stopped at the tar. Be perfectly honest. Oh, this hurts so much. Well, then the feathers might have provided a nice cooling effect. You never know. Yeah. And that was their little secret. They were like, No, not the feathers. I look like a chicken, but it's okay. Oh, thank you. Hollow feather. Oh, the wind blows through you. So, well, but whether without the feathers, it was pretty awful. Right. To have the hot tar well agreed on that. Yeah. And you point out specifically in here that it's a lot worse than you might think. And I was like, it's actually, I thought to begin

with it. It was probably pretty bad. Well, no, it's so cartoonish, you know, tarring and feathering somebody. I think Scooby Doo did it before. It just seems like, you know, what's a big deal. But then you think, well, yeah, hot boiling tar. You ever been waxed? No. Yeah. That's that's hot, too. Yeah. Well, then, because yeah, because then you got to take it off to and taking it off is a problem. Yeah. And it's like you use like turpentine or which then that burns, which when you and you maybe probably still have little chunks of tar on you for the rest of your life, like you're never totally clean, which is also like a time when everybody had bedbugs. And like that was just a thing. Williamsburg again. That's Bushwick, actually. Williamsburg is totally fine. We got rid

of the bedbugs there. It's all in Bushwick. Those jerks. No, but that's like the weird thing when you think about like, oh, yeah, it would be interesting to have a time machine and go back to that time and see people. No, it wouldn't. You've got like some guy who's still trying to like pick off tar on his arm. And then it was just like pockmarked all over from bedbugs and dysentery or whatever else, whatever horrible things like people probably looked horrible. They like that's the one like everybody looks like mutants back then. Just saying no, it's not it's really it's just a point that when we look back at that, you know, this time with like great affection, we should also realize like these are some awful looking mutant

people. But I think I think that's the point. And I think they were aware of this. They were aware that they had bedbugs. They were covered in hot tar. They had more or did they just accept it as like, like, I feel like if all you know is bedbugs, you don't know a world without bedbugs. Like you're just kind of like, you know, like if you if you showed up, if you got a time machine and showed up like you are, you know, with your fancy haircut and your exfoliated skin, people would be like, Oh, demon. Where are his bug bites? Clean of skin out. He just pets that cow. He doesn't try to have sex with it. Burn him, burn the witch, then put him on a log and dunk him. See, but according to the thing that I wrote, though, they were aware of it is the thing, right,

which is what drove them crazy to, you know, they were crazy enough to take on the bridge, which little known fact, by the way, right, this, this, this taxation that drove them to tar and feather people without representation. Well, that was the big problem. Sure. Yeah. Keep an eye on DC because they don't like it either, right? Sure. But they these taxes, most of them were appealed because of the tarring and feathering, right, before they were ever even enacted, but the colonists still decided, no, we're going to revolt anyway. We really like Philadelphia. It's pretty nice. We're kind of tired of having you here. So they took on the world's largest military, the controller of the largest empire from Canada to India, Canada, those Canada India.

Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah, it's been America's hat for a long time. And they won, right? Sure. Yeah. Using things like crazy guerrilla tactics. That was one way. Yeah. And then so on what I think June 11th to 18th, Chuck, June 11th to 18th only took that many days for TJ Thomas Jefferson, who also rewrote the Bible, as some of you may know from listening to our show. Yeah. He decided to take a break from that blasphemy to draft the Declaration of Independence. And it only took him what, seven days? Seven days. I mean, God created the earth in seven days. You'd think that, you know, it's not that long of a document, really. Yeah. It's a one sheet, right? Yeah, it could just bang it out. Couldn't bang that out in a day, an afternoon. Seriously, right now,

I bet all of us could write our own declarations of independence. Just text it to one another. Yeah, we could just, we could tweet. If we have some time at the end, maybe everybody could just take a half hour to write their own declarations and start reading them. I think that would be a nice thing. I think everybody wrote their own Declaration of Independence. And then we'd all put on hats with little teabags on them and go to a tea party rally and say, this is the declaration we should all follow. This one, because I don't like the current one, because it got weird now, somehow, for some reason. Yeah, well, thanks guys for stopping by. Yeah, thanks, you got it. Yeah, and now let's get back to midnight sounds with Wyatt Snack.

Thank you, Wyatt Snack, everybody. This is stuff you should know about America from the Sirius XM Studios in New York City. Now, more from Josh and Chuck. How about that? Well, we're winging it, you know. Are you staying on it? I mean, you don't have to, I know you're not feeling it. Yeah, Wyatt came in here, like, on his deathbed to do this, so. I didn't say all that. I don't feel it too well. I don't want to get anybody sick, so. So long, Wyatt. Thank you, everybody. Wyatt. I felt like he was going to stay, and then I ran him out. Kick Wyatt out. He very clearly. He told me he was leaving. It's not my fault. So, that's okay, right? Jill seems to think so. Okay, thanks, Jill.

Um, what do we have next, Chuck? We're going to talk about America, right, throughout this. That's right. And what's more American than baseball? Baseball. I'm holding up a baseball for those of you listening in three hours on Sirius XM. Yeah, baseball, we thought about, hey, we should do something on Apple Pie and baseball and Chevrolet, but Apple Pie is kind of boring. And Chevrolet, we, you know, there's obviously implications there. We spend a little time looking for an Apple Pie recipe and realize that, yeah, unless we could have somebody actually making it. Which makes for great radio, as I understand it. Yeah, it kind of sunk in pretty quickly that we weren't going to do the Apple Pie. We'll just pick the baseball.

But, Chuck, you're out of the two of us. You're definitely the sports guy, right? Yes. So, you want to tell everybody about Mordecai Brown? Yes, this is the history and how to throw a curveball. We will teach you all this so you can go practice at home in Williamsburg. The curveball actually was not invented by this guy, but it's definitely the better story of the three dudes who were kind of the first ones to throw a curveball. And his name was Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown, later to be known as Mordecai Three Finger Brown. And that is foreshadowing. Right. And he was named Centennial because he was born in 1876, right? But I didn't know that. Yeah. Is that extra research? Yeah. Well, no, I mean,

it was born 100 years after the country's birth, it says. I figured I had something to do with that. Right. So, he was named, he was a Centennial baby. That's right. And he was a baseball fan, as a small child, and wanted to play in the big leagues, the burgeoning big leagues. And he, didn't he, his parents' advice, and he put his hand, I would guess, by accident into a wood chipper? A food chopper. A food chopper. Feed chopper. Feed chopper. Yeah, there's a big difference. One is for animals. And it, what it did was, it cut off, I believe, his index finger on his right hand. Yeah. Mangled the others. Mangled the others. And if that's not enough, a few weeks later, I believe, while he was still healing, he slipped and fell and broke and mangled

the rest of his fingers. He was a, he was a rambunctious young man. So, that's where he got the name Three Fingers, leaving him with three. But it is thumb. But they were very, they were very accurate back then. Because, technically, the thumb is not a finger. That's right. Did you see a picture of this guy's hand? No, it was messed up. It was messed up. He's got, like, the one finger that was mangled literally made, like, a right turn at the middle knuckle. But this was all good news. So don't feel bad for Mordecai, Three Fingers Brown, because what he did years later, he went to work in the coal mines of western Indiana. Yes. And this is not good news. And he had a co-worker named Legz O'Connell. I couldn't make this stuff up. His name was Legz O'Connell. He was a former

big leaguer. And he encouraged Three Fingers. He was like, you should go try and pitch with that funky looking hand, my friend. Yeah. It might do some weird stuff. And it did. What it did was, it caused an inordinate amount of topspin that was very frustrating at first until he realized that that topspin curved the ball. If he could control it. He could use it to his advantage. That's right. Yeah. Because, think about it, he's missing, he's down an index finger, so he's holding the ball like that. Yeah. So, yeah, it's going to produce topspin. And while I was researching this in our office, I kept going like this. Is that what you were doing? Yeah. That's exactly what I was trying to figure out. I had no idea. I thought you were having fits. No.

But, yeah, so we figured it out, right? A big time. But I think we should, I don't know if he fully understood it. Mordecai Brown, right? Three fingers. Three fingers. He mastered it. Who knows if he fully understood it? Because it was only like 20 years earlier that a guy named Gustav Magnus, right? Came up with this idea called the Magnus Effect that explains how a curveball works, right? That's right. So, the physics of it are that the spin of the ball, sure, when you throw a curveball, and this is mainly for you guys here in the studio audience, me holding up this baseball. This is an apple pie and how you make it. But when you throw a curveball and you give it topspin, the seams hit the air, right? And the way they hit the air, the flow of air causes friction,

right? That's right. So, there's, like you said, an inordinate amount of friction on the top of the ball. Because it's fighting the wind, essentially. Right. So, it's higher pressure here, lower pressure down below. Because it's going with the wind. Exactly. So, it creates kind of this whirlpool underneath the ball. And the Magnus force, which is the downward pull of it into that whirlpool, causes a ball to suddenly drop, right? That's right. And Magnus figured this out because I believe it was, he saw a spinning sphere under water, and notice that if it was spinning in water, it moved, it was forced to move to the side. Yes. So, he wasn't a baseball guy. No. This is maybe before baseball. Was it? Yeah. It was like 1850. Do we have any baseball aficionados?

Cooby? 1850? Baseball? Yes or no? Not a baseball aficionado. So, Magnus figured this out. Three fingers figures this out. Three fingers played for the Cubbies in 1903 and was a member, a very important member of the last World Series team the Cubs ever had in 1908. 1909. 1909? Yeah. He was the, that was their first pennant, and then they won consecutive pennants. Right. So, the 1909 Cubs were the last ones to win the pennant, right? You're right, but he did not invent the curve ball. It's just the best story. The curve ball was generally credited to Fred Goldsmith and William Arthur Candy Cummings. And I don't know why I made air quotes. I don't know why he was named Candy, but he was apparently five, eight, 120 pounds. So, he may have just been a little plaything of a

baseball player at the time, although he was probably big at the time. Right. Who knows? Yeah, yeah, I bet he was a giant as we'll find out. Foreshadowing? So, when those guys were pitching though, like 30 years before three fingers, like the curve ball, or they call it the skew ball? The skew ball and pitchers were called twirlers. Right. Well, the twirlers who threw skew balls were thought to be a ill-repute because that was just kind of, you know, against the rules. Yeah. You can't throw a ball that curves. By the time Mordecai came around, it was, you know, his curve ball was so sweet that they let it in. Plus the hand, they kind of felt bad for him. I mean, it's something to do with it. So, Chuck, there's also a lot of discussion that's been going on,

and I don't know if it's still settled or not, but there's a lot of people wonder if the curve ball actually exists or if it's an optical illusion. Right. Yeah, I remember hearing about that a while ago, and I thought, supposedly it does exist. Physicians are physicists. Totally different. Physicists have concluded that, yes, the curve ball does exist. It's this Magnus effect. Nine out of 10 dentists agree. Doing this right. But still, the explanation of how it could be an optical illusion is pretty interesting, right? Yeah. This guy from the University of Pennsylvania, Arthur Shapiro of Bucknell University, I'm sorry, in Pennsylvania, is a real buzzkill of a guy, because he tried to prove that the curve ball didn't exist, right? Right. And he was wrong, right?

Yeah, the way he saw it was that when you're standing there taking a pitch, the ball comes from your central vision, and then all of a sudden it hits your peripheral vision. And at about that time, it appears to just jerk suddenly, is why you see batters jump back. Yeah. That was his explanation for the optical illusion. But it looks like upon recent camera work that there is such a thing as a curve ball, it actually does move. Right. And it moves gradually. And then the reason it appears to break so hard when you're in the batter's box is because you're not facing the pitcher dead on. And I have a theory of the guys that have the more open stance and the ladies. Maybe they hit curve balls a little bit better because they're facing the pitcher.

I don't know if it's that's my own personal theory. That's fine. That's good stuff. We'll go with that. Who's your favorite curve ball thrower? Oh, even better. What's your favorite name for a curve ball-esque pitch? Oh, boy. I didn't know you're going to ask me this. I'm going to go with the big breaker. I like the fork ball. The fork ball? It's good. Yeah, because there's different methods of throwing the curve ball. There's the sinker. There's the slider. Yeah, and they all curve. There's the Japanese chuteau. I had never heard of that one. I hadn't either until this one. They play baseball in Japan. And also I wanted to point out too that the raised stitches is why it curves more and cheaters scuff up the ball. That's why in the old days you would

see pitchers cheating with like an emery board in their pocket. Yeah. And they would scuff up the ball as much as possible. And it's also the reason why they switch out the baseball so much, because the more the ball is scuffed up, the more it's going to curve and be unfair for the batters. There's some twirlers of ill-repute out there. There are. Yeah. So that's a curve ball. Do you got anything else? I think that's it, man. Nice. That's curve balls. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on

the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody, it's your boy Michael Kaya, world famous, often talked about alleged comedian. Some of y'all know me as Mr. Whitaker from Martin. Some of you know me as

showboat from house party three. And yes, I have told Jim crackers for everybody. And some of you don't know me at all. But you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael talks to everybody. That's right. They gave my own show y'all woo woo woo. Michael talks to everybody where every week we'll be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game. Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else. We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking. Most importantly, we're gonna have a lot of fun. It's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out. Everybody I'm telling you, it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael

talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got TI. We got Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just come back. He's just gonna be here for a minute. Everybody we can be talking to him. We can be talking on this show. Listen to Michael talks to everybody on December 5th on the I heart radio out Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is stuff you should know about America from the serious XM studios in New York City. Now more from Josh and Jeff. And that was jazz hands. Right. That'll get people clapping every time. You just go like this. Somebody wants to fight you. Go like this. It'll just start clapping. So up next, we have something I'm really excited about because I have no idea what we're in store for, to be honest. I know that it is called unsung

American exports. And I know our buddy Joe Garden from the onion and Jill Morris are going to present it. And that's all I know. And ladies and gentlemen, Joe and Jill. Gosh, this is a am I I don't actually hear myself being projected because we're in this sort of aquarium like structure. It's called the fishbowl. The fishbowl. I feel like the treasure chest in the fishbowl. Anyway, I would like to point out Josh and Chuck do not know what I'm doing. This is based on my own research. And the pressure is really on. So I would like to encourage you all if you find factual inaccuracies, which you probably will fact check gently. Don't don't be angry. Just sort of say, hey, Joe, you made a mistake and correct corrected thusly.

I also have another disclaimer. The following presentation contains information about sexually transmitted diseases, which we already sort of I mean, I don't even know if I need this after I think why I primed us all with that. Yeah, after the buttery. And it also brings us to doubt the question of a certain gift bearing figure popular with children. You may wish to usher those under the age of 12 out of the room. Oh, wait. Are they gone? Okay, screw those kids anyway. Wow, Jerry's cracking up over there. She's not actually in the she's not actually here. I just decided if I was going to do a stuff you should know event, I was just going to go waste deep with it. I always wanted to say that. So moving on. I heard an interesting anecdote earlier this

week. It was at a party that featured a lot more taxidermian animals than I'm accustomed to seeing and I met a I met a Pakistani documentarian. And we struck up a conversation. And in the course of in the course of our conversation, we found out I worked for the onion and he said, oh, here's something you really should know. In my hometown of Karachi, there are, you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of like a suicide bombings subject covered by an earlier podcast and a lot of terrorist attacks. And but the interesting thing is the terrorists usually target KFC or Pizza Hut and almost never target McDonald's. And I was really interested in this because when people think of American imperialist restaurant hegemony, they always think of the

golden arches. I mean, it's everywhere if I mean, I would have thought that somebody looking to attack a symbol of the United States would have just gone to the to McDonald's. No questions asked. So I asked why the terrorist choice was KFC. He said that people just liked McDonald's more. So this is yet another way that I do not sympathize with terrorists. And we didn't make we didn't McDonald's before we came here. I did not. I'm sorry, I threw you in with that. That's okay. So you did I use the Wi-Fi and sit nervously at an imaginary bottle of water. So I wasn't going to get kicked out. But I haven't. So anyway, I just like to point out, I have not verified this fact through independent sources. So please use caution if you choose to

repeat this fact. As it stands, I'm not even sure how you would research something like that. I tried Google searching Karachi McDonald's bombings, Karachi KFC bombings. They have both come up. But if you do manage to verify it, please let me know so I can use it again at future radio events. In any case, this all leads me to my team today. President Calvin Coolidge famously said, the business of America is business. And this maxim has led the United States to all corners of the globe. There's the Transformers in China. There's Harley-Davidson's in Dubai, Miller Beer in Germany. But what about the exports that aren't monetized? Who will celebrate those things that have an impact that can't be measured in billions or even hundreds of dollars? Why that person would

be me, Joe Garden, with the assistance of onion contributing writer Joe Morris, who will be providing pertinent fact notes or footnotes to my rambling. First up, Santa Claus. Before you jump on my throat, I'd like to acknowledge that Santa Claus is not of US origin per se. He's an amalgam of several figures that drew from St. Nicholas, but primarily drew from St. Nicholas, who would place gifts in children's stockings hunting from the hearth every December 5th. After the Reformation, the Dutch disavowed all Catholic saints, and particularly they tried to ban the celebration of St. Nicholas's holiday. But when you try to take a gift-giving holiday away from people, people, they don't react very well to it. So what they did is they, the Dutch, changed the name from

St. Nicholas to where was it again? Oh, here we go. The figure is Sinterklaas, who would sail from Spain and travel from house to house in the company of Black Pete, distributing spice nuts and candies to good children. Black Pete was a devil Sinterklaas had defeated and made to do his bidding, usually depicted by the very Caucasian Dutch as a man in blackface. The legend changed in the 1850s, at which point he became a former slave that Sinterklaas had freed. Dutch parents threatened their children by saying that if they're good, Black Pete will bring them candy and toys. But if they're bad, he'll stuff them in his duffel bag and take them back to Spain. The early Dutch settlers brought Sinterklaas back with them to the New World, where his name

was changed to Santa Claus and the race to the sidekick was dropped. An 1863 illustration of Santa Claus by Thomas Nass is generally credited as being the first defining depiction of Santa Claus as the rotund Jolly figure we know today, and Coca-Cola's use of the character cemented him in the American public consciousness. Now he lives in the North Pole, where his elves make the toys he delivers to good children every Christmas Eve. The North Pole is a northernmost part of the world and is often written on an envelope which contains a child's wishes for Santa. Such wishes may include, please help my parents get back together, please kill my parents, and gimme gimme gimme bike bike bike. As with most cultural traditions brought to America,

he was in short order repackaged as a pitchman and shoved down the throats of every human with two pieces of currency to rub together. All this would be fine and good, but so long as Hollywood makes Santa themed entertainment and keeps appearing as a shill for numerous consumer goods, Santa refuses to be contained by American boundaries. As his popularity grows and spreads across the globe, Santa Claus is in danger of edging out local Christmas figures, and that's not sitting very well with these locals. A school in Brighton, England banned depictions of Father Christmas in a red suit saying that it smacked of commercialism. A group of Czech advertising professionals stated, started an anti-Santa Claus website to protest the replacement of its

own gift-giveting figure, pardon my Czech, Jeselschik. I think that's right actually. Really? Yeah. Oh great, which translates roughly as Baby Jesus, and in Austria the Christ child brings gift to Austrian children, and some of the Austrians mobilized to hand out anti-Santa stickers because they didn't want them to dominate. It seemed like a kind of a hopeless battle, though, because the jolly old elf is coming to your land whether you like it or not. My next American export is a little harder to tie down than Santa Claus, but even further reaching. I'm speaking of course about syphilis. It's very difficult to pinpoint the origin of syphilis. There are no Thomas Nast drawings of the spurious shed that caused the disease,

nor was it popularized by a soft drink company. It was mostly popularized by the oldest profession in the world. However, medical historians and anthropologists have determined that syphilis didn't exist in Europe prior to the discovery of the New World. When examining skeletal remains of pre-1992 Europeans, there's plenty of evidence of other diseases from the same species of syphilis, such as pinta and yaws. God, those are such great disease names, yaws. It sounds so old-timey, but it's also probably very terrifying. But none that bore the same end results of syphilis, such as the near destruction of the nasal passage and the formation of carious seca. Carious seca is a deformation of the bone that starts as a depression of the outer layer and

sometimes the middle layer. When it heals, it leaves a nodule, resulting in bony protrusions surrounded by depression. Ew. The commonly accepted theory is that venereal syphilis was bought back to Europe by members of Christopher Columbus's crew from the Dominican Republic. They left to find a new route to India and instead came back with a disease that can result in madness and death. Even though Ulysses S. Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic in 1871, it was rejected by Congress. It is a sovereign nation in the Caribbean, not part of the United States, and it's a stretch to include it in your little speech about American experts. That may be true, Jill, but the United States recognizes Columbus Day as a holiday and as a

result, I think it's fair game. It's a new world export. The first documented cases occurred in 1495 in Naples, Italy following its invasion by the French. As it was a venereal disease, no one wanted to lay claim to it. It was called the French pox by the Germans and English. The Russians called it the Polish sickness and the Poles in turn called it the German sickness. However, it spread and infected such notables as composer Franz Schubert, gangster El Capone, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, painter Edward Monet, and possibly Hitler. Though Joe Gardner has endured many medical conditions, including appendicitis mononucleosis and several nasty flus, he has never contracted syphilis. I had to use this little soapbox to advertise that fact, by the way.

So this leads us to our next export, the raccoon. I know. It's sort of a weird... You don't think of the raccoons as anything. If you see them on television or film, they always just sort of look cute. They're fuzzy little bandit masks and grabby little paws are kind of adorable. They almost look like they have little black human hands. They're very cute. But anybody who's ever shined a flashlight in a rattling rustling tree at night and seen their beady little eyes glowering back at you knows that there's something more sinister than a grizzly Adam's sidekick within. The Life and Time of Grizzly Adams was a television show about a man wrongly accused of murder who ran to the mountains and befriended raccoons, a bear, and the guy who

played Uncle Jesse on Dukes of Hazard. It ran for two seasons in 1977 and 1978. Its star, Dan Haggerty, was arrested for selling cocaine in 1984. Indigenous in North America, raccoons can grow to the size of a small dog. In 2006, they accounted for nearly 38 percent of rabies cases reported in the United States, edging out bats and skunks. They made themselves at home in rural and urban environments and are not terribly deterred by the presence of humans. A cursory search of raccoon plus cat door on YouTube will send you down a rabbit hole of terrifying videos featuring them entering homes to try to steal food. YouTube is a video sharing website in which users upload their own videos to

that others may watch, write, and comment on them. This joke is originally by Josh Clark and a previous stuff you should know podcast. Yes, raccoons are jerks, but did you also know they have a Nazi connection? You should know what Nazis are. It's true. In 1934, a German animal breeder approached the Reich Forestry Office, then headed by Hermann Gehring, with a plan to breed the raccoon in order to enrich the local fauna. The rationale was that they would be popular game for hunters and the pelts could be put to good use. What they didn't count on was that the crafty critters powers of exponential reproduction. It looks so good on paper, that phrase. The crafty critters powers of exponential

reproduction. Thank you. Now there are between 100,000 and a million raccoons in Germany and they haven't stopped there. They spread all over the continental Europe and have even crossed the channel through the channel and invaded England. Game over. Now after those three, I would like to end on a, we're running pretty long actually, so I apologize for that. I'm doing fine. Do you need some water? I don't know. I'm good. I drank some of Wyatt's, so I can get sick later. But he was sick. Oh, never mind. So anyway, I'd like to end on a high note. Hip hop. In my lifetime, there's been no cultural movement that has spread as far and as fast as hip hop. In fact, because it's in still an art form in motion and because I'm running very, very long, hip hop is

going to get the short shrift as usual. It began at parties in the Bronx in the early 1970s. DJ or Jamaican born DJ Cool Herk is considered the father of hip hop for introducing the concept of rapping over music and break beats. Break beats are the funkiest instrumental parts of the song that are best suited for dancing. A DJ would isolate the break beat on two different turntables to create a dance party that can't stop, won't stop. A hip hop, hip into the hip, to the hip, hip hop, and you don't stop rocking. I moved slowly out of the Bronx and broke big when the song Rappers Delight charted on the Billboard 100 in 1979. Since then, it's been an unstoppable musical jugonaut dominating the American charts and consciousness

and moving outward. Hip hop has established itself in the UK, France, Germany, South Africa, Tanzania, Japan, Indonesia, Argentina, Russia, Poland, and so on and so on. For more information, please consult your local library. Thank you all very much. You're wonderful and lovely audience. So that's the end of part one. Yes. And I don't even know where we've cut this yet. Maybe it's a cliffhanger. Maybe it was just between segments. I'm thinking it's not a cliffhanger. No, probably not. We'll see what happened to America. That could be a good cliffhanger. That's a great cliffhanger. Yeah. So that, like you said, is the end of part

one. Join us on, what, Thursday? Yeah. Okay. For the, for part two. Yes. Coming up next in two days, or if you've downloaded both of them on Thursday right now. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House Defork staff as we explore them as promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being

robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Boring. I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting ground breaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J. Quinta Brunson, and so many more new episodes around every Tuesday, many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners, conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts.