Stuff You Should Know - The History of Fake Towns.

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

There have been a lot of fake towns built throughout history for a lot of different reasons. Tune in to learn about some of these bogus burgs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, we are very excited to be going back out on the road in early February to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. That's right, February 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 2023, the future. We're going to be in those fabulous towns on stage for the first time in three years, Chuck.

That's right. Tickets are on sale now. Go get them. Come see us. And you can get those tickets at linktree.sysklive. That's l-i-n-k-t-r.e-e slash s-y-s-k-live. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. Across the country even. What a time to be alive. What a time to be alive listening to Stuff You Should Know. Yes. And can we start off with a little shout out to our colleagues? Yes, for sure. Our buddies at Stuff They Don't Want You To Know did something big, huh? They wrote a book like we did. And we are very proud of these guys, our colleagues we've known,

our friends, for so long now. And what do they cover? They cover conspiracies, but not like, trust me, it's not like this big pro conspiracy thing. No, no. They do a lot of ripping the lid off of the crack pots. That's a good way to say it. Thank you. Well, what they do is they apply critical thought and critical thinking, which is one thing that's missing a lot when it comes to conspiracy theories. Right, exactly. Because they're all smart dudes and they're pretty down to earth. And they have a great podcast. And now they have a great book. And it's an eponymous book, Stuff They Don't Want You To Know is the name of the book and the podcast. And I think it just published Chuck. So that means that you can get it everywhere. I mean, everywhere. You can get it

at like Eagle Eye Books in Atlanta. Yeah, you can get it at the corner shop amazon.com. You can get it everywhere in between. The Stuff They Don't Want You To Know in hardcover because it just came out hot off the presses. As a matter of fact, when you pick up this book, you should probably be wearing oven mitts because it is that new. That's right. I can't wait to get my own copy. If you're into history, if you're into reading about proven conspiracies and not a bunch of gobbledygook, then highly recommend. I'm sure it's great. Yeah, can't wait. Go check it out. So we're talking today about fake cities, right? Yeah, like Rock Ridge. Rock Ridge. Did you get that? No. Oh, it's Blazing Saddles. The name of the real town was Rock Ridge, but they, at the end of Blazing

Saddles, Cleveland Little comes up with a genius plan to build a fake Rock Ridge for when the bad guys come in and then they'll blow it up. So it's sort of kind of what we're talking about today. Yeah, I was going to say that Mel Brooks like really did his research because there's a lot of reality in that. People have done that kind of thing many times over the years. Many times. And some are cooler than others, for sure. I can't wait to talk about the Seattle thing. That's really cool. For sure. Well, which one's not cool? Let's start with that. Well, I don't know about not cool, but possibly not even didn't even really happen is in the 1700s, there was a very famous Russian military leader named Grigory

Potemkin because he's Russian. It's not Gregory. Right. It's Gregory with an I. Right. I don't see a lot of that anymore. Hey, Greg. Although I did have a friend in high school. His last name was Greg. So all right, I take that back. Yeah, that's way different. But supposedly, as the story goes, they built under his guidance what were called what was called a Potemkin village in order to impress Empress Catherine II as she came through town. And like here, look at this great fake town that she would think is real. And then they would supposedly strike the set and then go build it downriver. And then she would see I guess believe it was a different place. And like, look how great we're doing kind of thing. But then I believe after more digging,

historians have said, I don't think they actually did that. It was probably more of a let's get this place all cleaned up for her visit. And somehow history kind of changed that. Yeah, which is I mean, I buy that he was one of Catherine the Great's favorites of the court. So it's possible that he would have gone to all that trouble to please her. Regardless of whether it happened or not, Potemkin village is now like a whole term for any kind of fake facade that's used generally as some sort of propaganda. The fact that it was kind of like Catherine the Great centric kind of leads to that extension of government propaganda. And there's a very famous North Korean village that's frequently referred to as a Potemkin village too.

Yeah, the peace village. How are you going to pronounce that North Korean name? I'm going to pronounce it as such. I think that's it. They also call it propaganda village. Well, they don't call it that. But other people call it that. But you know, the famous DMZ there, the demilitarized zone, you can you know, you can see this very clean, lovely, modern, prosperous area of North Korea right there from the DMZ. But you know, as far as people speculate, there's really it's kind of just fake. There's nothing there. There's no people. There's no nothing. Yeah. And if you look like closely at it, there's no glass in the windows even like it's as far as Potemkin villages go. It's a half-hearted effort if you ask me. The Nazis did this too in World War

II to, you know, a disgusting effect as well, right? Yeah, they did an altered version of it. They took a real village and dressed it up in a way that suited their propaganda needs. But there was a place called, I think it's Thersheenstadt. That's how I would say it. But I might be wrong. So it was a depot essentially. It was a sorting place for Jewish Germans and Jews from other countries that Germany had invaded. They were shipped to this place and then they were sorted out and basically sent to different death camps around Germany. So so many people passed through this that even for the short time they were there, conditions were so bad that they would die while they were there. Plenty of people died. But this thing was such a focal point. It was

such a crux of this Nazi death machine that if it were revealed for what it actually was, the Nazis' plans would have been revealed to the world. So when the Red Cross said, we want to see this place, we want to make sure everybody's being cared for appropriately, the Nazis kind of started scrambling. They're like, give us two weeks. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was going to say, give us three weeks. You're way more aggressive on your schedule than I am. Totally. That's very appropriate. Yeah, you know, they cleaned it up. They brought in apparently 1,200 rose bushes. They changed the hospital to a library. They changed the gymnasium or as you

would say in Germany, ganasium into a place of prayer for the Jewish people. They shipped out anyone who didn't look well, basically, and only people who looked healthy and were in good health remained. And you know, they put a town square and made it look like a really lovely thing with swings and sandboxes and even a phony restaurant. And what I didn't see was how it worked. It worked perfectly. The Red Cross came and we're like, oh, this is delightful. And left, and then everything just got right back to business after that. So it served its purpose, like it fooled the Red Cross into going back and telling the rest of the world, like, no, the Nazis aren't running death camps. Come on, everybody, relax. They've got a restaurant

in rose bushes. Right. So we know this only because of post-World War II history. Right. Right. The thing that I saw that makes it just the ooey, gooey, evil topping on this horrible Sunday is they build it to the rest of the world as a spa town that elderly German Jews could go live in peace and safely. Just when you think you've learned all the bad stuff the Nazis had said, here comes another one. I'd never heard of this before. Not surprising, though. Yeah. And I just want to reiterate, Chuck, I hate Nazis. I hate Nazis of today. I hate the Nazis back then. If you're a Nazi, I hate your guts. You can't stand you.

You're terrible. You're on record. I'm with you. I'm on record, too. So I feel like, Chuck, you can kind of swing the whole thing back around. It's not necessarily for propaganda, but there's decoy cities that were essentially created to, well, to act as decoys during wartime, right? Yeah. And this was, I think this was the initial seat of the idea for this topic. Maybe, I don't think anyone sent anything in or maybe they did, but the more I started kind of poking around, I was like, wow, there's been a lot of times in history where, for one reason or another, a fake city was built. And once I started sort of unpeeling that onion, I was like, wow, there's been all kinds of fake cities. And decoy cities was a big part of it in World War II,

specifically in Britain. What they did at first, it started out as something called the Q-site, which is when they just said, hey, let's put up like a fake factory or something that will divert German bombs that way. And they'll waste some ordinances and they'll, we'll get them off track and confuse them. And more importantly, they won't be bombing the real factories. And this was, I believe, the idea of someone named Colonel John Turner. And they said, well, that bully to that, sir, that worked so well. Why don't you go out and build seven fake cities? And he went, huh? And they said, hey, it only has to look like a city from a guy throwing a bomb out of a plane. So you don't have to get too fancy. Yeah, that was like a stroke of genius when they figured

out like, yeah, you don't, you can just do like the rough edges of it because they remembered that they were hiding from bombardiers who are looking for cities that were undergoing blackouts so that, you know, they, there wasn't supposed to be much of the city visible at all. They would look for maybe somebody had left their door open accidentally or someone had forgot to extinguish a street light, something like that. So they were able to just kind of make a few structures, put some scaffolding together and then light it randomly here or there. And all of a sudden you had the impression of, of at least from, you know, 10,000 feet or however high up you are when you drop bombs on British cities that it looked like there's your target right there. And it actually worked to

great success. It really did work. And they ended up being, I believe the first site was called Starfish. And so they ended up calling them Starfish cities just from that first one. But initially they were called special fire sites or SF sites. And part of that had to do with the fact that after the bombing run would go through, they would go through and set little fires and set off little explosions on their little fake scaffolded city. Right. So again, so the bombardier would look down and say, oh, we got them. Look at that. Look at that beautiful big fire down there. Yeah. And even more to the point, successive bombardiers that came the next night or whatever would be like, oh, that was the target. They hit it. And now that's where I'm going to drop my bombs

too. Beautiful. Yeah, it really was. And here's the thing though, you said they actually worked and I bailed on you, but I'm back with numbers. They built 237 of these Starfish sites or Starfish cities. And I think the estimates are they diverted about 700 bombing raids and potentially saved about 3,000 lives. Pretty great. Big success. So, yeah, it was extraordinarily successful, but the British weren't the first to come up with this idea. And Cleveland Little wasn't even the first to come up with it. It was actually our friends, Les Français. In Paris, they decided in World War One that they were sufficiently concerned about German Zeppelin bombing raids, which has got to be the slowest, most just terrible bombing. Well, probably not terrible,

but definitely the slowest bombing around. So, they said we need to find a different site and build a replica of Paris. And the whole idea was to really rebuild a replica of Paris with the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe. And I don't know if they had plans for an Eiffel Tower. Surely they did. But they had it in three sections. And the first section they worked on was the industrial section. And eventually, that came to be the only one that was completed. But it sounded like it was pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, they had... I would love to see pictures of this thing. Did you see pictures? Yeah. It's pretty cool. I mean, how to scale was it? It was giant. So, they made it life-size. Oh, okay. But they used chintzy materials. Oh, sure. Yeah. So,

they used like really kind of scaffolding, like a skeleton of a giant building, like that would serve as a fake industrial building. And then they would put some sort of like opaque canvas over it or an opaque covering of some sort and then light it from inside. So, to a bombardier, it looked like a glass-ceilinged industrial building at night. So, they were doing stuff like that. They had like little platforms that moved along that were carrying lamps. So, it looked like trains moving around the area. They did it to really great effect. And apparently, the only reason they didn't move on with the rest of the plan was because the French military got good enough at shooting down zeppelins that the zeppelin attack stopped. The Germans were like,

you should probably figure out something faster than a zeppelin to drop bombs from. Yeah, the French is like, why are we building these fake cities? Look how slow that thing is. Somebody just shoot a flaming arrow that way. Yeah, exactly. We can all just move to the left at our leisure and we'll all be all right. Well, all of this, it's funny. Ed helped us out with this one and he kind of started out with a section that we're not going to cover about like movie backlots. But I'm sure all of this stuff, I mean, in World War II and beyond was influenced by the fact that they're like, oh, wait a minute, we're making movies now where we build fake cities to great effect. Like, it ain't that hard. Right, exactly. I mean, it's just, I guess it's,

it must just be one of those ideas that's out there where it's like, we need a new city, but we don't want to build a whole new city. So, let's just build the part of a city just enough to kind of fool people from a distance. But yeah, the whole backlock thing, backlot thing is pretty, it's got its own interesting story itself. The thing is, is if you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, they had a fake barbershop there. Oh, they had a fake Victorian mansion there. It's like, if you really step back and think about it, you're like, who cares? But for some reason, there's something really engrossing about that kind of stuff. Oh, I love it. All right, so that's a good setup there. You ready to take a break? I am, Chuck. Let's take a break right now.

All right, and then we'll talk about Seattle. 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 my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are 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, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if

you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And speaking of Seattle, Chuck, we're going to be in Seattle.

I had a feeling you were going to work a live show promo into this. Yeah, we're going to be in Seattle on February 1st at the Moore Theater. Yeah. This is 2023, not last February. And this is actually happening too. This isn't something we forgot to edit out. Like, these shows are going on. Come hell or high water. That's right. We're going to Seattle to a real city, but one of the cooler stories I think in this episode is the fake city that Boeing built in 1944. Boeing was building B-17 bombers at what was called plant number two. And that was a very dangerous place to work in World War II. And for obvious reasons. So they said, all right, here's what we're going to do.

Instead of building, because what you typically do with like a decoy factory or Q site or whatever is build something, you know, 15 miles away. And they said, why don't we just build, like build something that looks like the real thing 15 miles away? They said, why don't we just shield our real thing by building an innocuous fake town on top of the factory? And that's exactly what they did. They did. Have you seen pictures of this? Oh yeah. This is super cool. It's all about what it looks like from overhead. So again, they didn't need to build everything

exactly life size and exactly with great material. They built cars out of plywood and the grass was like dyed burlap and stuff like that. The trees were these weird kind of surrealist approximation of trees. Yeah, they were cool. So when you're walking among this stuff, you're like, that car is cut off in half lengthwise or that house is like all it is is like the top, you know, third in the roof. It's weird, but from overhead, it really did a good job disguising it. And they would send Boeing workers up there once in a while, like hang laundry or sunbathe or walk along the sidewalks. It's just trying to get the impression. And I was thinking about, I'm like, that is a really dangerous thing to have your employees do. Yeah. So like, hey, if you're going to take a

smoke break, go up there. Yeah, but at the same time, if the building is going to get bombed, whether they're up there in the building, I guess it doesn't really matter. So it's no more dangerous than working inside anyway. Yeah, that's a really good point. I didn't think about that. Yeah, they had, I think kind of the more ingenious things because obviously they're seeing it built from way, way high up where the bombers are. It couldn't look out of place, like in relation to everything else around it. So they couldn't just like stick it down there in any old order. They had to align the street grid with generally what was going on around them. And it's really cool. There's a cool website that has a lot of really great pictures of like,

and you know, it's the time too. So this like super cool lady in 1944, like standing at the street corner, they got a little cheeky with the street signs, burlap boulevard and synthetic street. Yeah. So I think they ended up having a little fun with it, maybe. A little. Somebody thought in the middle of World War II to put joke signs up at least, that's pretty great. Right. Also, Chuck, I heard that those streets were so well lined up, you could get on in the middle of that fake suburb on top of the Boeing building and drive straight through all the way to Portland and then on to San Francisco, where we'll be on February 2nd and 3rd 2023. Very nice. So yeah, that whole Boeing thing,

luckily it never worked out. The whole reason that they did that was because they're on the West Coast in Seattle and they were worried about Japanese bombing raids. That never happened. Obviously, I think maybe because of that. It's possible. I mean, I know that we in our book, I think our chapter about kamikaze, this is a really book forward episode, isn't it? It is. The Japanese actually, there was a battle in the United States, but it was in Alaska. So I don't think the Japanese ever came to the West Coast, did they? Well, no. I was just kind of kidding. I think they would have known if there was a bunch of planes circling overhead and they were just like, we just can't find where Boeing is. It's working. Just keep smiling. Just keep

pretending we're in a silver. Sometimes the project, it seems like a lot of these, I think they're well intended and they get off on the right foot and then it ends up being scrapped for one reason or another. But Ed makes a great point. If you're the United States military and you want to build some big facility somewhere, you want to build it away from things, obviously. So it's a little more secretive, but you can't build it too far from stuff because you need workers and you need equipment and shipping and construction and all the things that being close to things provide. So with the town of Apex, Florida, A-P-I-X, which we'll explain what that means in a minute, this was in Palm Beach County in the 1950s where they bought up 10 square miles

in what was at the time kind of rural Western Palm Beach. There weren't a lot of people around then because they wanted to build a factory. They were developing liquid hydrogen as fuel and they're like, let's develop this fuel. We'll build this factory in another place nearby and we'll build a pipeline. And it just kind of never fully came to fruition, I think, because they realized it was too expensive to ship liquid hydrogen that way. Yeah, they figured out it was cheaper to just put them in refrigerated trucks and drive them. So they actually did create the liquefaction plant to produce the hydrogen for the rocket fuel, but they just never went on to do the full project, which was build a worker's village to support the plant. And the whole idea was they were just

going to say, this is a fertilizer plant and this is basically a suburban town that's sprouted up around the fertilizer plant, just filled with normal people, nothing to see here. This is Apex, Florida. Welcome and goodbye. But what does Apex stand for? This is sort of the funny, I don't know why they did this, but go ahead. So it was actually a technical designation that had to do with the project itself. Air Products Incorporated Experimental. So Apex, you just remove the E and replace it with the X, you got Apex, right? And Ed actually had a little editorial comment that I thought was pretty interesting. He's like, I don't, why would you possibly name the town like a technical term from the very project you're working on, the super secret rocket fuel?

And he said that his wife Meg pointed out that it actually worked pretty well or it could work well because if you heard people talking about Apex, you'd just assume they were talking about that town in Florida and maybe not consider searching much further into what was actually being discussed when they were actually talking about the rocket fuel. Go Meg. Yeah, I thought so too. I think it's the first time we've heard from Meg, right? I believe so. Officially. Yeah. All right, I love it. It's interesting, this is kind of functioning as a top 10 in a way because we move on to yet another subtopic which are paper towns. And I had never heard of this before. This is so cool. I need to talk to my buddy Rad, the cartographer out in Montana and see

if he puts any trap streets or copyright traps in his work because they were initially called trap streets and this is when a map maker or cartographer is drawing a map and they even knew early on they're like, hey, listen, anyone can just go out and print copies of these and then sell them. I did all the hard work and now they're just going to sell these maps as their own. So they started putting trap streets like made up streets in there. It's sort of like the brown M&Ms in the Van Halen writer. So they would know if they saw a map with their trap street that there was copyright infringement. Man, what a great analogy you just made. The brown M&Ms. Yeah. It's the first thing I thought of. So this one particular story centers on aglow

or aglow. No one on the planet has any idea exactly how to pronounce it. New York, upstate New York in the Catskills. And there was a firm that was basically two guys from what I could tell in the 20s who were making maps and they created that town, which is an amalgam, an amalgam? Amalgam, I think. Yeah. Okay. Of letters from their name. So aglow, New York is one of those paper cities that didn't exist and it was meant as a copyright trap like you were saying. But the reason that aglow, New York is probably the most famous paper city is because it managed to fall backwards into reality. It went from a fake town on a map to a real town in upstate New York in a weird roundabout way. Yeah. But we should say town very much in

quotation marks because there was not a lot going on there. There are a couple of ways the story went down. And the one I saw that seems most reliable is kind of the second one. But apparently there was a fishing lodge that was built after this map was drawn with a fake town name on it, the paper town. And they saw that it was near this place. So they just named it after it. They said, all right, that's the closest town. So this is now the aglow lodge farms, fishing lodge. And the New York Times ended up reporting on it and said that some of the first guests there, one of them was a map publishing firm, an official from a publishing firm, and said the owner said you should put this place on the map. Even though that was like a New

York Times contemporaneous piece, I don't know if that's super accurate. I think the other one's a little more accurate. It's not only is that questionable, it's very confusing too. Like was it a map? Was the map publishing executive one of the guys who created aglow New York as the trap? Did things really come that full circle? Was it somebody from Ren McNally who would later use that to their advantage? It's very confusing. We'll see on LSD. I've got a lot of questions about was it a minotaur? Right. But the second version is really it's not that much different. There's somebody who decided to open a general store on the spot where that was marked aglow. And the other thing about this too is the fact that this town became real in a certain way

means that there was the monumentally coincidental fact that they happened to have the type of map that had been created by that firm that made up aglow. Because remember, no other map is going to have that town. It's a copyright town that just one firm's maps would show. So they happened to have that firm's maps when they decided to figure out where their general store was or their fishing lodge was. And so they named this general store the aglow general store. But the weird thing about it is where Ram McNally comes in in this story. Yeah. And I will just in defense of that, I will say it was an ESO gas station map. Okay. So I think those things were kind of everywhere.

Oh, okay. So it was my interpretation. Yeah. But I'm just pointing out it wasn't something like weird obscure map. It was a it was a pretty heavily it was a map in the rotation, you know. So they build this general store. Ram McNally comes along. They publish a map you know, seemingly using the other map because aglow was on there and they got sued. But they said no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't sue us. Like this is a town now that I'm standing in front of the aglow. They had a press conference in front of the aglow general store. They didn't they didn't really, but they probably should have and said, you know, this is a real place. And you know, they ended up winning that case because of that. And at various times over the years,

aglow is sometimes on maps. Sometimes it's on Google maps. Sometimes it's not. Yeah. I think the fishing lodge is there, but it doesn't go by that anymore. And no, but it's there still. I mean, there is a fishing lodge there, but there is no the building of the general store is there. But I don't think it's a general store anymore. Right. I've seen both. I've seen that you can find the general store still. Yeah, I've seen that the fishing lodge and the general store there, which is kind of like putting both both stories together. And I guess they don't have to be mutually exclusive. I also saw mentioned that at its peak, a little mini town sprang up around either the general store or fishing lodge or both, that there was a gas station, two houses. There was a

something happened. It came up out of the map. The map became reality. It's such a great story. And there's an author named Tom Green. He's a YA author. I've not heard of him or read his stuff, but he wrote a book called Paper Towns that were aglow figures into it. So apparently teens will show up once in a while and be like, I'm an aglow. So by the stuff they don't want you to know book by the stuff you should know book. Sure. By Paper Towns. Yeah. I didn't even think about it. That's another book. It's another book by Rand McNally Atlas. If you've only if here's my advice, if you're a person of a certain age who has literally never used a real map in your life and only interacted with digital interfaces, buy it by an Atlas, buy a road Atlas. It's kind of fun.

It's good to have around in case, you know, in case that it all goes down the tubes. Sure. And we're all feral wandering around the country. I was road tripping with Emily recently and kind of reminiscing about, yeah, remember when you sat the pullover on the side of the road and get out the map and say, well, I think you can take this to this to this. Yeah. To get to that. Yeah. That's fun. It was a good sense of adventure that has now been ruined by technology. But also I've said it before and I'll say it again. I think that it made people smarter in some ways than today. Yeah. Again, I think we talked about like balancing your checkbook or something like that. You had to do it. Oh no, it was keeping bowling scores by hand.

That's right. It's the same kind of thing. Like having to stop and figure out where you are and where you're going and then how to get there on a map. So much different than like take a left in 180 feet. And I'm not like, I'm not mad about that. I use Waze every time I drive. We're not anywhere that I don't know where I'm going. Yeah. But there is, there's a qualitative difference in what your brain is doing when you're using Waze and when you are looking at a paper map and figuring out yourself. Yeah. Like I like knowing where the best breakfast burrito is in the next town I'm going to. Sure. And the old Rand McNally didn't show you that. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. Oh, okay. You answered your own question.

Breakfast burrito. We'll finish up after this stuff. You should know. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart 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 my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to

guide you through life step by step. 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 you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in

the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, one of the other reasons that people make fake towns is not to just

act as decoys, but instead to use for testing, often weapons testing. Probably the most famous fake town that has been used to test weapons is in Nevada. The Nevada, Nevada, Nevada, Nevada. You're right. The Nevada test site, which in the 50s until the mid 60s, I believe, was where we set off, I think, 700 plus nuclear bombs. And we would often build little towns and be like, did you see what happened to that town? Let's do it again. Yeah, I'm only a few miles from it. Because that's what happened with, I've seen it called Survival Town. Probably the most famous one is the one where they actually shot a bunch of footage, the Apple II test site in 1955, where they gathered 6,000 people to watch from six miles away. I believe the army was about

two to three miles away. And they built, you know, they built a bunch of stuff. They built some houses, built some buildings. They had a way station, some trailer parks, some cars, apparently a propane tank station. So they built a little bit of infrastructure. And this is the one if you've ever seen the very famous footage. And part of the reason they did this was to be able to show Americans like, and scare them, say, here's what will happen to you, of the, you know, those mannequins dissolving into fiery blast right before your eyes. And by the way, call your senator and tell them you want American defense spending doubled. Yeah, basically. Very well known footage. But one of these houses that it's called the Bellen

Building was manufactured by a company, Bellen Manufacturing, who did steel panels. It was only 6,800 feet away and it survived very famously the blast and was a legit, you know, tourist attraction for a long time. It may still be, is it still there? Yes, still is. There's a couple of houses that are still there that survived. One was a two story colonial or two story something. Yeah, colonial with a brick fireplace and chimney on the outside. And a lot of it survived. The other was an all straight up brick house, which I believe was the inspiration for the Commodore Song Brick House. That's right. And the one of straw did not make it. No, but if you looked inside those houses, they had like mannequins dressed up. Some of them dressed to the nines, frankly.

They had like frozen food, canned food, in some cases fresh food. They had stuff in refrigerators. They had like Indiana Jones. They had, oh yeah, that's right. That was the third one, right? Fourth one, yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. No. Yeah. What was the third one? The last crusade. Last crusade, yeah. I don't know what's happening to my aging mind. That's okay. But if you look to see like the before and after, I have to say the mannequins fared pretty well. They got bounced around. They definitely weren't standing up anymore afterward, but they weren't like vapor either. Right. They seemed just great. The test work. Our buddy Van Nostrand said he went to that site. Oh really? It was one of the more amazing places he's been. Yeah, I'll have to check

that out. Japan did something kind of similar with Project Ichiban. And this was post Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were like, hey, we want to see what radiation does to people and what radiation sickness might do. So they built a village that could actually be moved around. It was built on wooden skids. So you could move this village around to different, you know, and subject it to different levels of radiation to see what would happen. I think that was actually American built. They simulated a Japanese village. Yeah, because they were like, whoa, a lot of people died of radiation sickness. We weren't expecting that. I guess so because it was built on the Yucca Flat and that ain't Japan. It's outside of Nagano.

I know. Big whiff by me. So there are other cities that are built for testing not nearly as much destructive stuff as like a nuclear bomb. And there's one at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor called M-City. And it's basically like a fake drive around town. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. No, I don't think anybody knows what I'm saying. Let me just rephrase that. It's like a town, a fake town that's really car-centric. It's like Los Angeles, but in Ann Arbor. Right, but fully like it's only fake in the sense that there are fake buildings and no one lives there. Because what they're doing is they're, it's all in partnership with, I believe initially Ford, but I don't know who all is involved now,

to test driverless cars. So the streets have to be really real in the stoplights. It has to really function as a real city if you want to really test driverless cars out. Yeah, I saw they even have like, you know, crash test dummies as pedestrians and stuff to make sure the things stop when they're supposed to. Yeah. It's pretty cool. And there's an app where if you are testing at M-City, you will have access to an app that lets you like control different conditions around the fake town. That's Truman Show. Yeah, I guess so, but on your phone. You can use it on your phone. I don't know if they can really make it rain, although I bet you they can. I'll bet they can at the very least make the streets wet. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's

a road condition. I mean, right, that's legit. You're playing God. It's gonna be harder, right. So that reminds me of something I went to when I grew up in Toledo called Safety City. Oh, I think I've heard about this. It's so amazing. You take your big wheel and you go to Safety City, which is a small miniature fake town with like intersections and a railroad crossing and traffic lights and you learn like what all this stuff means. Like, what do you do at a yield sign? And you get to ride around on your big wheel like you're in a car driving around town. It was one of the better experiences of my young life in Toledo. That's amazing. Yeah. There's another one that seems really creepy in every way, but it hasn't come to

fruition and it really isn't creepy. I think it's just the fact that it's called the center, capital T, capital C. Yeah. And it's this billion dollar future fake city that's, they've been planning this thing out since 2012. It's Pegasus Global Holdings. That's also creepy sounding. For sure. Although it's probably completely innocuous. And the Center for Innovation, again, capital T, C and I, and testing and evaluation. So it's the Center for Innovation, testing and evaluation. Sorry. C-I-T-E. Yeah. And what they're doing, it seems like, or what they want to do eventually, it seems like there's all kinds of testing that could go on. But a lot of it has to do with energy savings and transporting energy, getting water from one place to another

more safely. This just seems like transportation. It seems sort of like a catch-all of anything that you would want to use the city for without having to block off real streets and pay real money and suffer repercussions from real damage and stuff like that. But it does seem to have a real focus on sustainability. Some of the projects also include, you could test low loss transmission lines. I can't remember what episode that, that is a huge problem with creating a renewable grid. Is there so much energy loss over time? Like you could test that. You could also test driverless cars. And have you seen the diagram or the renderings of the city? Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It is. There's like a whole highway that comes into town, just like a regular

city. There's a rural area. There's suburbs. There's like a downtown area. It looks like it's going to be really great. And I could, whoever thought of building that, I think it's one of those, if you build it, they will come kind of things. But it sounds like they're having trouble convincing people about the second part. Right. I bet it'll happen at some point. I hope so. Yeah. And it's not creepy at all. It just, it all of like, all the capital letters really freaked me. Right. No, but that on top of the idea that if you went to this place, it would be like a Twilight Zone episode where there's no one there. You've got like a city and no one's in it. That's just so creepy. That's one of the reasons why this is so, this whole episode is me and gross.

There's just some creep factor that's lurking right under the surface. Yeah. It's the same creep factor from like an abandoned city almost. There's just something creepy about infrastructure with no one there. Yeah. So I just want to give a shout out one more, for one more thing on Florida. We were talking about Apex, Florida. And it reminded me that down in Dade County, there's something called the Aerojet facility. And it was a rocket testing site, a missile testing site. And there is a missile in an underground silo still there. It's obviously not armed or anything, but there are some really cool urban explorer pictures of this missile,

usually from the top down, but somebody went and figured out how to get down to the bottom. So they're like standing at the base of this missile and it's towering over them. But it's in this weird overgrown area outside of Miami. It's really cool looking. Wow. So check it out on the internet. It's like the bomb in Savannah and the ocean. They still haven't found that, right? No. No, but they know where this is. Oh yeah, sure. So the last kind of fake city has been used a bunch of times by the military and by, as we'll see later, the modern police forces, a.k.a. the mini military. But you know,

training centers, everyone from the FBI to the CIA, to the army has training centers all over the country where they have fake towns, built tactical villages. If you've ever seen like Jody Foster walking through the CIA or was it FBI? She was FBI. FBI training where, you know, the bad guys pop around the corner of a fake house. This is more along those lines, basically. Yeah, that was actually either said at or meant to be Hogan's Alley at Quantico. And yeah, she didn't look behind the door, remember? Didn't look behind the door. So yeah, there's also Fort Polk in Louisiana. Used to have like a Vietnamese village for training before shipping out to Vietnam in the 60s. Fort Irwin in Barstow where the drugs

kick in. They had an Afghani village basically built for the US military to train at. And then you mentioned the mini military in today's police forces. In the 60s, the US built two different fake towns on military bases. I didn't see which. But in the United States, there were two what were called riots, vils. And that was like an informal term for them. And it was a place where local police officers or law enforcement could travel to these bases and be trained in violently suppressing protests in like a fake town that simulated a real world situation. Yeah, this is one I think we should do a full episode on. Okay. For sure. There's a new documentary out called Riotsville USA that popped up, I believe, in just September of this year,

2022. Oh, it was this year? Oh, cool. I think so. It's pretty recent. And this actually may have been where I got the idea. I might have seen an article about this, but it's really interesting because then we can get into the Kerner Commission, which was basically this, you know, in-depth study of history and data where they concluded that, hey, social welfare funding is necessary in this country. And it wasn't just as simple as like, hey, there's racism, so we need social welfare funding. It's, hey, the way this country went and when everything happened with industrialization and where people live and where African Americans were coming out of Jim Crow, like it all aligned in this terrible, perfect storm, an imperfect storm where we need to help take care of people a little bit

more. And this was all reversed. And I believe it was the Johnson administration said, oh, actually what we're going to do is we're going to take, we're going to divert all the money we can toward making the United States military, or I'm sorry, police forces more like paramilitary forces and train them in standing down these riots where people are asking for basic human needs. Right, right. And as Ed points out, the fact that these two riots bills were built basically shows like, no, it's essentially the official policy of the United States to suppress protests brutally often rather than actually address the actual issues that are causing unrest in the first place. So I agree. Yeah, I think that we should do an episode on that too. That's a great idea.

Yeah, I want to watch that doc because I think there's just a lot more to it than an addendum here at the end of this one. For sure. And if only riots bill USA, the documentary had been a book instead, that would have been the ultimate button on this episode, you know? It would have. I do want to mention a movie though, Joel Schumacher made a movie called Tigerland, which was the name of the training place in, yeah, in Polk, Louisiana, where it sort of simulated an Asian jungle environment. It was Colin Farrell in Tigerland. Really? Rated R. Coming to a theater 10 years ago. Yeah, or more. Well, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since Chuck evoked the name of Colin Farrell, that obviously means

it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this a little more detail on our vinyl stereo exclamation, explanation and exclamation, I think. Okay. Dear Mr. Stuff, you said in your episode on vinyl that stereo records are created by cutting the left right audio on the left right side of the record crew. It's even more black magic than that. An old technology with shellac records. The mono information was engraved from side to side. With stereo, the mono information is engraved in the same way and the side information is engraved up and down. Wow. This is then, I know, I mean, that's, I still, I mean, I can't even understand this. This is then turned into the left right audio using a process called mid side decoding, which is basically duplicating the mid

information, phase inverting it, and then adding it together with the mid and other side information. If that blew your mind as much as it did me, when I got it explained, check out this article and this is just Google sound processing mid side stereo, and that'll probably answer it. And that is from Marcus, who is also, by the way, not 100% satisfied with our description of compressed digital audio. Sorry, Marcus, but that is a really interesting email and it was one of those things, like every once in a while, we'll hear something from somebody and you just, it almost like hurts in your guts that you didn't know that thing or you didn't know it to that degree. You know what I'm saying? Like you almost want to go back and correct it somehow.

Yeah, and we also should mention we got a few emails from other audio file people who also said, hey, you guys kind of glossed over the digital audio compression because there's a bunch of codecs and ways of doing things and we also got a not very nice email where someone was like, you guys are playing your stuff wrong. Why bother? I didn't notice that one. But I mean, it's not like a how digital compression works episode. It was about vinyl. Give us a break, everybody. Those were the people I was talking about when I made the disclaimer at the beginning of the episode and they didn't listen to me. Yeah. I'll send you the email, the not nice guy. He basically said, Josh, you might as well give away your records to someone who can play them

right. Okay, cool. And he got on me too, for the Bluetooth aspect of my record playing. So we're doing it wrong, but hey, we're living our best life and having a good time. Exactly. Exactly. As my wife would say, well, never mind. I'm not going to say that. Okay. And that was from Marcus, right? That was from Marcus. Marcus was fairly kind about it. Cool. Thanks a lot, Marcus. Thanks for all the extra info. I mean, that's definitely something you can do to boost your chances of being on listener mail is adding info that we just didn't know about in a nice way. And if you want to be like Marcus and send us some extra info we didn't know about in a nice way, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, 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 podcast,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.