Stuff You Should Know - The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

If you've ever been to Philadelphia then you've probably walked right by a Toynbee Tile embedded in the street. But what's the meaning on these mysterious installations, and who is doing it? Listen in to find out.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. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here too, which makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Oh, you know what? Say small talk while I look up who gave me this idea. Why do you keep doing this to me? I have to like entertain everybody. You once did this to me on stage. Get this everybody. We were on stage at the Bell House in Brooklyn. And Chuck said he had to go to the bathroom all of a sudden. And I was left on stage having to entertain everybody while he just hung out backstage. I don't think you even went to go to the bathroom. And long story short, I ended up showing off my moonwalk.

Yeah, but I totally went to the bathroom. You think that was all a bit? Yeah, maybe you went and took some drugs to keep going back on on stage. But I'm sure in the green room, you didn't even need to go do those in the bathroom. No, I genuinely had to pee such that I didn't think I could make it through the show. I've felt that way before too. San Antonio, I had to run off the stage once because of that. That's right. All right, here I got it. This idea initially, this is on my list, but I forgot about it, but then was reminded by Alexander or Alex Ramos in State College, Pennsylvania. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Alex Ramos. This is a great idea.

Twainby tiles. Had you ever heard of this? Sure. Okay. Had you not? What? Well, no, I just said it had long been on my list. Oh, okay. That's right. Where did you hear of it? It just one of those things that pops up on the internet and you're like, oh, let me read about this. This looks interesting. For sure. And it is definitely interesting. And it would have been, I think, even more interesting 10 years ago before the mystery was virtually solved. True. But it's still interesting if you ask me. Yeah. And I think this is one of those where you should very clearly tell everyone what we're talking about right now. Okay. So what we're talking about is a phenomenon called the Twainby tiles,

where in the asphalt on the street, on street corners and crosswalks and intersections, all over the northeast, seemingly concentrated in Philadelphia, but also going as far west as, I think, Kansas City. And then also, strangely, down in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, these tiles bearing some really bizarre messages cut out of linoleum, and again, embedded into the asphalt of the street, started appearing and have appeared mysteriously. No one has any idea or any demonstrable proof of who is actually doing this. But they have been doing it since at least the mid-80s and conceivably still going on today. Right. And they are known as the Twainby tiles. They're about the size of a license plate. And the general main message that you see

on most of these is as follows. And it's in a very distinct script. It is generally all caps. Yeah, cut out letters made of linoleum. Cut out linoleum. And it says this. Twainby, that is T-O-I-N-B-E-E. Twainby idea. Underneath that, it says in Kubrick's 2001. Underneath that, it says Resurrect Dead. And underneath that, it says On Planet Jupiter. And then a lot of tiles will have these little tags underneath and much smaller script that say all kinds of things. We'll just read a few examples here. Media will be reduced to ash. You must make plus place tiles. You. I like that one because you has three exclamation points after.

I'm only one man, which turned out to be a clue. And when I caught a fatal disease, they gloated over its death. This is my favorite. Can I read? Sure. Now Galileo's cult of the Helian is now searching for more than one hell ideologies to get more reward. Right. And then one final one, I think, because it's instructive to the story, murder all journalists. I beg you. Yeah. So these are the little smaller messages underneath the main four, I guess you would call tenets of this individual. And one thing we should point out, and Ed helped us put this together, is apparently,

and this is something I didn't even realize until yesterday, when this person refers to Hellians, apparently he's talking about Jewish people. I don't know if it's proven. I think specifically he's talking about like a Jewish conspiracy, a Jewish cabal, usually a Jewish media conspiracy is seemingly what he's referring to by Hellians. Okay. So there is, in some of these tiles, an anti-Semitic bit to them. And Ed also points out that this person, perhaps, may have some sort of mental illness, but it's also not right to even say that because we don't even know who this person is, demonstrably, as for proof, like you said. So it's also not great to project that when

you really don't know anything. No, and depending on where you look on the internet, what sites you visit, some, I think there's one called Toynbeeidea either.net or.com or something like that. It's an authoritative site. It's by one of the main investigators of these Toynbee tiles who ended up working on this documentary that basically solved the case. He refers to the Toynbee tiles as like an art project, basically. So it could be the ravings of a madman or the ongoing project of an artist, or it could be somebody who legitimately wants to make a crazy idea happen. There's a lot of different interpretations. And like you said, because we can't say for sure who it is that is doing this,

you can't really get to the genuine like, you can't prove, oh, well, this person has a mental illness that this is how they're communicating that mental illness. You just can't say that. But it is worth putting in the back of your mind as you kind of hear the rest of it, you know? Yeah. And that documentary, by the way, is called Resurrect Dead. It is available on YouTube with your recent, I mentioned YouTube as I didn't find that you could pay for it anywhere and watch it. But that's where I watch it. I did. You can pay for it? I did pay for it like a chump. I couldn't find it on YouTube. See, I was trying to do the right thing. Where did you find it? Voodoo? See, I looked all over. I used my handy app that tells you where you can stream stuff and it was

unlisted. And then I looked on a few streamers and it was unlisted. So I went to YouTube and it's just sitting right there. So I'll watch it. Oh, man. I looked at YouTube and all I could find were the stupid previews. Did you type in Toynbee Tiles documentary? Yes. I typed in the name of it, Resurrect Dead. It's weird. It's the first hit. I don't know what happened. Well, regardless, it's about an hour and a half long and it's worth watching. I think it's a good doc. It's not great, but I think for when it was made, I think they did a pretty good job with it. Yeah. I think it's got like a six plus, maybe even a seven on IMDB and I would agree with that. It was worth the four dollars I paid to rent it. I'm fine with that. So we should talk a little bit about the message,

I think, and break down what that means because there's a lot of components to this mystery from what the message means, where it came from, to who is doing this, how they're doing it. And it's a pretty interesting little multi-pronged mystery, I think. Yeah. And thanks to those three investigators who worked on the documentary, who are kind of portrayed on the documentary, we basically understand everything there is to understand about what the Toynbee tile makers ideas are and what they mean. But that's fairly new. I mean, for years, basically from the advent of the internet, the Toynbee tiles were taken up as like something to commemorate and discuss and talk about from the very beginning. And so there's a lot of time for this mystery to brew and it was

fairly recent that it's kind of been settled. But what they figured out is from the outset, the Toynbee that was discussed or mentioned in the tiles is Arnold J. Toynbee, who's kind of a popular historian. He wrote about civilizations and the history of civilizations and the history of politics and how it all kind of banded together and how the civilizations that rose and fell over time were all part of the same kind of current that they were all related to one another and that they rose and fell in predictable ways. Usually they would rise when a group of very smart creative people would kind of lead the charge in creatively addressing a problem and civilizations would fall when people stopped responding creatively to problems and were overwhelmed by those problems.

And he was really, really popular for a while, but then he started to really kind of take an increasingly Christian view, a worldview of history and politics and placed a greater emphasis on the role of religions and Christianity, I believe in particular, than historians in general were comfortable with and his views kind of fell out of favor. Suffice to say, he was a genuine original thinker who is definitely worth reading about if not reading directly. And it's a good thing his name was Toynbee. It really made it a lot easier to narrow down the first mystery, basically, which is who is Toynbee. If it was the Smith tiles, it's a lot harder, but that is certainly the Toynbee and it seems like the idea that

it and we'll refer to the person as the tile maker as Ed does. Toynbee's book experiences, it seems to be the centerpiece of the crux of the idea that the tile maker is, let's just say, fixated on the concept of the soul and the possibility that you could resurrect after death down to the molecular level. And that's sort of what, you know, what resurrect dead means in this case. And then as far as on planet Jupiter, that comes, it seems like, at least, and again, they were piecing this, people pieced this together because they've never interviewed the tile maker. But it looks like that's from Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, because it mentions Kubrick. And in that novel, they are, as you know, the star child is reborn on Jupiter.

Yeah, and that's where the astronauts are being dispatched to is Jupiter to figure out what's going on with some weird signal coming from that planet, right? That's right. So if you put all those things together, then these four ideas as the Toynbee idea makes sense. It does, it does kind of make sense. And like Toynbee died, you cannot say, like the tile maker does, that Toynbee had the idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. And that 2001 was about that Toynbee idea. That's the tile maker's interpretation of all of that stuff. But Toynbee was talking about scientifically resurrecting people or whether it was possible. And the tile maker took that idea and ran with it and basically came to believe that science was meant to carry out the project of

creating the afterlife that God promised. And that to resurrect everybody who had ever lived, you would need a planet the size of Jupiter, which is a huge, huge, it's a gas giant, that you would need a planet the size of Jupiter to fit all those people. So it makes sense in all sorts of different ways once you understand all of it. But even still, if you step back and think about what they're saying, the tile maker saying, it's a genuinely bizarre idea, especially if you stop and realize that they legitimately were trying to make this idea happen. Well, and again, that's an assumption in and of itself, like one day the tile maker could come out and say, Hey, this was all a joke. I'm basically Banksy meets the Max

Headroom incident. And I've been meets Andy Kaufman, and I've been punking you guys all these years. Sure. Of course, I know that that's not possible. But I don't know. It seems like this is something that this person believes and that they're trying to get this message out. Because another way that this message was gotten out is in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. And I guess the 1980s was when people would be watching television, and all of a sudden, their signal would be interrupted by this Toynbee message coming through the TV. And they figured out that it was, and I hope I'm not getting too far ahead, but we'll keep the mystery intact. But it was coming from someone driving around their car with a high powered

antenna that could cause this kind of interference. Right. And this is pre tile. So this would have been the very early 80s because they think the first tiles that were laid down were laid down in the mid 80s. And then even before the first tile, so basically around the time, no, I think even before the driving around interrupting people's TV watching. Yeah. The posters. There were posters around Philadelphia that were placed up that had very odd messages on them. And then, but they were all generally like the same stuff the tiles were talking about, which again was the idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. That was a Toynbee idea that was depicted in 2001. That's generally the bulk of the message. But also there's a weird little kind of side

tangent that happened. David Mamet plays a role in this. Yeah. Because in 1983, Mamet wrote a play called 4am. And he said later that it was an homage to Larry King who back in the early, early 80s was a late night radio talk show host, long before he had his TV show. Long before he bought suspenders. Yeah. And Mamet used to listen to that. And he wrote a one act play based on it. And in the one act play, the caller who calls into this radio show talks about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter and how people are dead molecules that you could bring back to life. And Mamet basically said, I guess this guy got the idea from me. But if you step back and look at the timeline of everything that call apparently went in in 1980 and Mamet didn't

write the play for three years later. So David Mamet probably wrote a play based on a call he heard of the tile maker who called into Larry King in 1980 to explain his views on resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. Right. And everywhere I've looked, I haven't really seen that anyone is accusing Mamet of being dishonest. I think the general consensus is if that were the case that he probably didn't realize that he had heard it and probably remembers it as an original idea and not that he just stole this thing and lied about it. No, but it is impossible that it's a coincidence because of the language that's used in the one act like resurrect dead molecules. Just resurrect them on Jupiter. Yeah. 2001 is mentioned. Toynbee is mentioned. It's just not

possible that it's a coincidence. Somebody influenced somebody else. But yeah, it does seem to be honest from what I can tell to you. All right. Good time for a break, I think. I think the mystery is mounting. I think so. I think people have their popcorn out and they're ready for part two. Okay, well, let's give it to them. We'll be right back. 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. 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So you mentioned at the beginning, Philadelphia is the centerpiece and it is,

I mean, I feel like we can almost certainly say that the towel maker lives or lived in Philadelphia, perhaps still does. And because they were not only did Philadelphia have the most concentration of tiles and then it sort of spread from there, Boston, D.C., Maryland, New York, again, some sort of on a direct westward band out to Kansas City, like through Cincinnati, but never anything south. There are in this one neighborhood where they end up thinking they pinpointed the tile maker. They found all these little test tiles all over the place. He's just little bits of tile, little letters here and there, but the same script and the same technique. So it's pretty obvious that this is where it originated. Yes. I mean, that to me is like,

well, there's your answer right there. Yeah. So they also, like the people who were reporting, having their TV interrupted by somebody driving down the street with their shortwave radio, that happened in Philadelphia in the same neighborhood where those test tiles were later found by the documentary investigators. And that wasn't a mystery, right? They were like, we know who that is. Stop doing it. Yes. And that became clear once those investigators visited that neighborhood and started talking to neighbors. And one of the reasons they were able to link it was because the radio broadcast that was coming through their TVs from the guy driving on the street was talking about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter, an idea of Arnold Toynbee's that was

depicted in 2001. So basically this tile maker got this idea starting about 1979. They pinned it down and was trying to figure out creative ways to spread this publicity. And one of the first ways that they tried to do it was to turn to the press. And they called the Philadelphia Inquirer and tried to relate their ideas to one of the journalists there, a guy named Clark Day Leon. And in very much the same way that they called Larry King three years before, Clark Day Leon took the call and then wrote up a very unflattering piece about the idea. And I think kind of set off that disdain for the media that the tile maker displays in some of the additional tiles. Yes, absolutely. So at some point there was a group formed by the TM called the Minority Association.

Upon further investigation in this documentary, it seems that it was not a group or an association at all. It was just this one person. And there are some little clues that we'll get to later on about that. But that was this group that was formed. And there were these radio broadcasts where the tile maker would say, I will send information if you want it to anyone who wants it. And someone did because they had this stuff 20 years later, all these materials sent from the quote unquote Minority Association that the documentary filmmakers eventually got their hands on, which was a big, big find for them. Yeah. And it was really interesting to watch it in the documentary how they managed to come across that. I was like, this is some

really weird filler that they're using. And it finally led to finding these documents and turning up people who knew this guy back in the day. But when they got these documents, that's when a lot of the questions were filled in because it was that minority associations like press materials and it explained everything. Like anything you had a question about before was basically answered in this. And there was most of the documents were signed by somebody named James Morosco, which like you were saying, they believe now that the minority association was just one person, the tile maker. And that the tile maker was using aliases to make it seem like there were more people than just one. And James Morosco was one of those aliases.

It just so happens there was a James Morosco in Philadelphia who seems to have had nothing to do with this. It was just again an alias. Right. So that was a bit of a red herring. But elsewhere in the document, there was only one other name mentioned. And these people, these three dudes basically that became, I don't know about obsessed, but it became like a fixation for them to solve this mystery. And this was at the very beginnings of the internet is when they started off. Like, you know, there was no information when they first started looking on the internet about the 20 tiles. Yeah, we should say their names because they really did some good detective work. Justin Durr, Steve Weineck and Colin Smith are the three investigators. And then John Foy

made the documentary and they all seem to have worked together for that. Yeah. And these guys did not know each other previously. They met online through their individual interest in the 20 tiles and got together and seemingly became friends, you know, as they investigated this. Yeah. Which I think could have, they could have fleshed out a little more in the documentary, but that's fine. Human element to it. Sure. Well, yeah, they seem to really focus on Justin. Yeah, they did. He seems to be the guy that sort of ran with it the most. But the only other name in this minority association set of documents was Severino Verna, aka SEVI, SEVI Verna. And they tracked SEVI Verna down to this neighborhood in Philadelphia. And they said, well, SEVI Verna

is the guy that rode around in the car broadcasting these ideas. And they were like, well, that's got to be him then. And they were like, he's a recluse. He never, you don't see him much. He does his shopping in the middle of the night. There was this incident where because all this stuff happened, some people broke in like held a knife to his throat and like, you know, because he was interrupting everyone's TV and all that stuff. And especially after that, it seemed like he became even more of a recluse. And they said, but he had this old car with this huge antenna and didn't have a passenger seat and had a big hole in the floorboard. And it was just a mess. And they're knocking on this guy's door in the documentary, and he's just not coming to the

door. And in the meantime, they're, they're exploring these other side roads, either figuring out the deal with Morosco, or there was another candidate named, was it Railroad Jim, which had a little bit of, I mean, I could see why they went down that road, but it became pretty clear that it wasn't Railroad Jim. Yeah. And then same with James Morosco, he lived in Philadelphia at the time, but he died in like, I think 2003. And some of the tile makers, a lot of the tile makers tiles continued on after that time. That can be pointed as like, no, these are definitely the original tile makers tiles. Because one of the things that clouds this mystery is there have been plenty of copycats. Of course. Some of them are just kind of following up, like picking up

what the tile makers laying down kind of thing. Other people seem to be actually trying to actively confuse people by making tiles that look as much and seem as much like the tile makers tiles. But these three investigators, among others, have gotten so good at examining the tiles, they can, they can tell what's the tile makers and what's not. And have even pointed to like, like change, like different periods. You know how artists like Picasso had a blue period and all that? Like the tile makers had periods over the years. And some of them are so different that it wasn't until years later that these investigators have gone back and been like, actually that was the tile makers. We thought he stopped for a while and this was a copycat.

It was actually him all along. So it definitely was not James Morosco. His widow says, I have no idea what you guys are talking about with Jupiter or 2001. My husband had nothing to do with any tiles. Please stop calling. And then same thing with railroad Jim. He died and the tiles continued on. So it couldn't have been him either. So it definitely seems to be Severino Verna. And that's been, there's just so many things that point to him. It's pretty much conclusive. Yeah. And that was, we also should mention beyond the regular kind of license plate size tiles, there was one sort of massive information dump tile set of tiles that just had a bunch of like, I mean, you can go online and read this one. It's really long.

They talk about a lot of things from, there seems to be an obsession with the Soviet Union, which, you know, during the Cold War, it sort of makes sense that this might be a thing. The media, again, the tile maker talks about the mafia breaking into his house to kill him, which is probably a reference to the people in the neighborhood who broke in to threaten him. And it's just sort of a long rambling info dump that is, I think, when you talk to these three investigators or anyone that's in the Toynbee tiles, they're like, this is the real sort of Magna Carta, I guess, of the tile maker. And this has the most clues in it. And I think we also forgot to mention that the reason they even found Verna was,

I think it was one in Brazil had an actual street address in Philadelphia that turned out to be Verna's address. Oh, okay. I thought the address turned out to be a dead end, but there was definitely one of the earliest tiles, maybe the earliest tiles were those with that address in Philadelphia. So it turned out to be his, huh? Yeah, but I think that the only place that was was on one tile in Brazil. Okay, I got you. But so those were those were tiles from the mid 80s, and they think that those tiles were put down before even one started appearing in Philadelphia. Yeah, and that's sort of like one of the mysteries of the of the documentary is that they eventually talked to Sevi's Verna's mom, because he's not answering the phone or the door.

And she was like, it's Sevi doesn't like travel. He's got a lung condition. And he wouldn't have traveled to South America or even outside of Philadelphia really, because of this condition. Yeah, that's a puzzler, because if you look at those tiles and the fact that it's a Philadelphia address in the same neighborhood, at least as, as Sevi Verna, like it's, it's definitely one of Verna's tiles. So what he could add a proxy, I guess. I guess so, for sure. And they also say like, why South America? There's apparently something in that book experienced by Arnold Toynbee. It's a bit of a autobiography as well. And he talks about going to these places that these tiles appeared in in the 80s. So I guess it's possibly could have

had a proxy do it. Right. But here's the thing, and we'll leave you with this before our break. It seems very much a 100% sure it's Sevi. But no one has ever seen this happen. These tiles that are embedded in asphalt. So the question for a long time remained still, how was this happening without, how are these hundreds and hundreds of tiles getting embedded in the street without anyone ever seeing this guy do it? And we'll talk about that right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end

of the road. 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. Oh, not another one. Mm hmm. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make

sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, that was quite a cliffhanger. Right. So no one's ever seen Seve Verna do this. No one's ever seen anybody do this. Um, and it was thanks to the three investigators, which by the way, did you ever read those Alfred Hitchcock books, the three investigators? One of them was like Hitchcock's nephew and Hitchcock would make a cameo every once in a while, but they were like, I remember what you're talking about, but I didn't read them. Kind of like a hearty boys type thing. Sure. They were great. And every time I say three investigators, I keep thinking of that. It's

very nostalgic for me. There's like a little portion of my brain that's really enjoying things right now. Um, not to say the rest of my brain isn't, but it's enjoying it in a different way. So I think I did too. Um, but these three investigators, I can't even remember what I was talking about. Uh, I was talking about, we were talking about the fact that he, uh, had never been found doing this. Oh, yes. These three investigators nailed down how this actually happened. And then further, they, they pieced together how Seve Verna in particular would have done it too. And it's pretty ingenious. Yeah. So the way they figured out how it was happening was a near miss, which was the, and this is crazy coincidence. Uh, but the lead

investigator guy, Justin was in Philly looking around doing investigating. And a lot of this investigation at the time was literally walking around city streets, looking down for these styles. Yeah. I was like, you know, kind of the hard way. Um, before the internet was truly like filled up with information about this. And there's some of the first guys that filled the internet with this stuff, but he happened upon a fresh tile that had just been laid down that he said was not there when he passed by before. And he was like, it happened within minutes of when I was there. And it's in the documentary. It's pretty thrilling that this guy, like he starts yelling around and, and saying that he's, you know, I, I believe then Toynbee

ideas, where are you? Come out, come out. And it's like, Oh my God, this guy's just like almost solved the case. Uh, but what they found was these tiles were, and this is really pretty ingenious actually how it's done. Uh, they use like asphalt crack filler, like this black tarry stuff. Um, and the key though is the tile is wrapped in a roof paper tar paper, which is black. So it's laid down and it just looks black on top. And then over time, this thing is run over by cars and walked over and gets embedded further and further. And eventually the tar paper just wears away to reveal the tile. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. So over the course of weeks, maybe even months as this is being pushed down and melting into the asphalt, apparently

on one of the tiles where he instructs people on making more tiles to do it themselves, he says, put them, lay them in the, in the summertime so that the sun will bake them into the asphalt. Um, but he never provided any other really detailed destruct instructions aside from that and said use asphalt crack filler. And then that's it. So these guys managed to piece this together from that, that one tile, that fresh tile they found, but even still the mystery remained on how they were appearing in some really strange places, like the middle of the street, like a busy street, um, the middle of a highway, uh, the entrance of the hall and tunnel. Yeah, that's the big one. It would be like really dangerous for a person to be squatting down,

like trying to install one of these tiles and they piece together by something one of the neighbors told them that you had mentioned earlier that Seve Verna had a car that didn't have a passenger side seat and that had no floorboard or a huge hole in the floorboard. And what they figured out once they found this fresh tile is that he might pull up to a stoplight, might stop in the middle of the road, put his hazards on, who knows, but he could lay down one of these pre-made tiles with asphalt filler, crack filler on the bottom and tarpaper on top, smooth it down and then drive off and just wait for it to be revealed, you know, over the coming weeks or months. I, this, this is the part that I love more than any other part of this whole mystery. Yeah. Is the ingenious,

elegant, yet simple way that this tile maker would do this. Yeah. I love it, would just, and didn't even necessarily have to stop for too long. Like, I get the impression that this thing is tarred on the bottom such that you can just kind of drop it there and it'll stay in place. I would guess. Drive over it with that back tire and it's, it's in there. Yeah. And the idea that it's like slowly, it's protected until it's revealed, like people walking on it, people driving on it, not paying any attention to it whatsoever. And then in doing so, they're actually helping anchor this piece. I just find that just, just like chef's kiss, you know. And then the other part of it too is, it's ephemeral. Like these things are made of linoleum embedded in the asphalt

and they're being driven over, they're being walked over even after the tarpaper's gone. So they're not meant to last very long. I saw like a lifespan of usually about a year. Oh, really? Yeah. And that's if the, like the road crews don't happen to be repaving that street in the meantime. In some cities, they actually go dig these things up when they're reported. I think Chicago and New York do that. But for the most part, they tend to just kind of linger along until they slowly like kind of get trashed and then are eventually repaved over. So it's an ephemeral project as well that he's just constantly updating and doing and has been since the mid 80s. Yeah. And you get a sense of the real delight from the people, from these three guys and then

just other people in general of finding these and like, it's almost like a scavenger hunt. And then when they find them, like then assessing and appreciating and reveling in its condition, like, oh, this one's pretty new. It's still in pretty good shape or look, there are only fragments of this one left. It's pretty neat. I mean, I'm going to New York in two days for the first time and two years and you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to be trying to find one of these and get a picture. Well, you'll probably find there's a lot of copycats these days. Some, like we said, are trying to confuse the issue. Others are just kind of vibing on the tile maker's vibe. I won't be suckered by any copycat. The most prolific is the House of Hades.

They don't seem to care at all about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter, but they really like the idea of reducing all media and journalists to ash, which is kind of a side thing, like we said, the Toynbee tile maker is into. So there's a good chance you will see some, but it's not necessarily a tile maker unless you actually go actively seek them out. And you can find that on toynbeeidea.com or.net, whatever it is. They have them like archives, so you could go look for sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to cheat. I'm not just going to randomly walk around for three days trying to find tiles. Looking down the whole time. Yeah, I got other stuff to do, but people to see. But the other thing I want to mention to before we close is just I found myself watching this

documentary and sort of exploring the idea of anonymity and how I feel about that in a case like this, where you have someone who let's let's say this person is has some sort of mental condition and this is their outlet. And instead of, you know, standing there with a bullhorn on a street corner, this may be their their messaging system. And like when I saw these guys banging on the door and making phone calls to his mom, I was like, leave him alone. Yeah, it kind of hurt to watch. Yeah. And they even talk about that. And they are trying to be respectful, but they do talk about the fact that, you know, they think they saw someone upstairs clearly at home, not entering the door when it sort of hit them that like, this person may be up

there really scared. When the documentary came out, there was a lull and activity from the tile maker. So but then I thought, you know, but then why are you going out and putting these things all over the place and seemingly trying to start a movement or attract attention? Although I don't know about the start of movement, because it's not like that ever genuinely was the goal, I don't think. Yeah, it was. I don't know. It didn't feel like it to me because it seems like if that would have been the case, it would have been here's who I am and here's where we'll meet. And I don't know. I never, I'm not convinced that this person wanted other people involved. What, but that's so imagine if you felt like you were the only person who

understood what God wanted science to do. And you were a reckless who could not, it was not at all comfortable interacting with other people. What would you do? Well, you would, when, when someone came knocking in your door saying, hey, listen, I think you're a great, brilliant thinker and I believe in this movement, I can help you get your word out, then you, then you take them up on it. Like it seems like this person did not want to be discovered. Right. And thus did not want to start a movement to be at the center of. Yes, I don't think that he wanted to be at the center of it. I think he wanted this movement to start. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. So one of the things that, that was in that,

that press kit that the, the guy wrote off for in the early 80s and still kept for like 20 or so years, it says as the most unusual scientific movement in the USA, the group wants the world to put all other affairs aside in order to scientifically colonize the planet Jupiter. So like, if, if, if he believed that and that's what his genuine aim was, but he felt totally ill equipped to actually publicize it himself, like making tiles and, and, and embedding them in a clever way and asphalt actually kind of makes sense to me. See, I think that's the final mystery is the purpose of this to begin with. Yeah. Yeah. If you take it on face value, then, then he was trying to make resurrection happen,

knowing he couldn't do it himself. He needed science to do it, but he had to rouse everybody to do it on his behalf, basically. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe it is just the ongoing art project. Who knows? I don't know. I think that's a mystery we'll never solve. In the documentary there, it sort of closes on an interesting thing where I think the main guy tells the story of, I think he's, was it on a bus or something? Yeah. He thinks they're on a bus together. And it's sort of a mutual acknowledgement and eye contact of, I know who you are. You're the guy that's been knocking on my door that did the documentary. And I know that you're the, the tile maker and there were, but no words are exchanged.

No. And he, he's like, he concludes like, I need to leave this guy alone forever. He just, like, I just have to accept it and move on that he doesn't want to be a part of this. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about the Toynbee tiles, there is a lot on the internet that you can read about it. You can watch Resurrect Dead. It was a pretty good documentary, definitely worth $4. And since I said definitely worth $4, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this Phantom Kidney. Hey guys, you've been my go-to for audio entertainment since 2012 when I was working to finish my forensic science graduate research. I finally have something to email about though.

Four years ago, this May, I donated a kidney to my friend's mom. Technically, my kidney went to someone else directly because we were in the paired exchange program, which I learned about from you guys. Wow. And I actually experienced Phantom kidney sensation. Wow. I know, right? Luckily, the Phantom sensation was not painful, but almost a weird specific awareness and feeling. I mean, because who can actually feel their kidneys, right? Right. But it was on the same side of the one that I lost and lower back. Who knows? It could have been placebo because they warned me that it was possible, but it was fascinating to learn of Phantom organ pain firsthand and from you guys.

Yeah. Just figured that was unique enough and it's sort of a fun learning experience. If you have an opportunity to emphasize the paired exchange program, please add it in again. Just by me jumping in to donate, three transplants were able to be performed. While every donation program was different, my experience was absolutely wonderful and I would gladly do it again if I had another despair. And if anyone were interested in more information, I would gladly share it with them. I love what you guys do. It's been fun going through life alongside you both. That is McKenzie from Maine, currently in Pennsylvania with one kidney. And yeah, definitely check out the paired kidney exchange program. Yeah. If that's something that you are able to do. If you have a

good healthy kidney that you can healthily donate, then someone would be glad to take it off your hands. Emphasis added. Also McKenzie, I mean hats off to you for doing that. That's an amazing thing that you did and you deserve to be canonized. So congratulations. And if you want to be like McKenzie and basically say, Hey, you want to hear about this cool thing I did? You can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the Phantom Kidney and send it off to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you

ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.