Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Bookmarks 2026

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

This week, it’s our annual Bookmarks episode.We read a lot of books to research this show. And this episode is dedicated to the great stories that didn’t fit into our regular season.We’ll talk about the importance of numbers in marketing, and a hilarious tale about expense reports.And we’ll tell a story about a doctor who was drummed out of the medical establishment all because he insisted doctors wash their hands.We know you want to listen to all the ads in this show. On the off-chance you don’t, subscribe ad-free here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, I'm Callie. I'm a co-founder of Apostrophy Podcasts alongside Terry, Debbie, and Sydney. We're a family business that brings you a family of podcasts. We also have a subscription option, where you can listen ad-free, hear bonus episodes like my sit-down with Terry to ask him burning questions, or extended versions of Under the Influence episodes. Just visit the link in the description to subscribe. This is an apostrophe podcast production. We're going to show you our big new studio baker. That's a spicy meatboard. What love doesn't conquer.

Alka-Seltzer will. What a relief. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. As a writer, I am in love with words. I love the impact they can have, how shadings of different words have slightly different temperature, and how a surprising verb can make a sentence not only memorable but quote-worthy. When I write, I always have my thesaurus and dictionary close by, and often I'll look up the meaning of an everyday word

and actually be surprised at its origins. You have to wonder how their meanings have changed so drastically over time. For example, the word nice used to mean silly, foolish, and simple. The word awful once meant something was worthy of awe. That actually makes sense. Full of awe. Awful. Who knew?

And naughty used to mean you had nothing, or not. Every year, the Washington Post publishes the winning submissions to its annual contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. Here are the winners. Coffee. The person upon whom one coughs.

Flabbergasted. To be appalled over how much weight you've gained. Abdicate. Meaning, to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. Esplanade. To attempt an explanation while drunk. Willie-nilly. An adjective meaning impotent.

Funny. Negligent. A condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your negligee. Lymph, an adjective meaning to walk with a lisp. Gargoyle, a gross olive-flavored mouthwash. Flatulence. An emergency vehicle that picks you up after you've been run over by a steamroller. Cue Wiley Coyote.

Boulder Dash, a rapidly receding hairline. I resemble that remark. Pokemon, a Rastafarian proctology. And lastly, circumvent, the opening at the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men. Welcome to our annual bookmarks episode. We read a lot of books to research under the influence, but every season there isn't enough room to include all the great stories we find, so this episode is dedicated to those stories that didn't fit into our regular shows.

Sometimes they are surprising, and many times, they are words to live by. You're under the influence. One day, when I was in university studying radio and television back in the Jurassic period, the professor was talking about what all of us in that room had in common.

He said, we all love movies, we all love television, we all love radio, we all love great writing. Everybody was nodding yes. Then the professor said, and we are all terrible at math, And all 40 of us couldn't argue with that, which made me laugh. But it's true, creative people are, generally speaking, bad at math.

But I'm intrigued by math. As a wise man once said, your fear is your task, and my task is understanding math. On that note, a book I read not long ago is titled The Grapes of Math, Subtitle, How Life reflects numbers and numbers reflect life by author Alex Bellows. As someone who directed humorous commercials for a living, I've always believed that 11 is the funniest number. 10 is a round number, a prime number. 11 is one too many.

If I said there were 11 angry florists outside your door right now, it's funny. If I said there were 10, it's less funny. It just is. Alex Bellow shares my view, sort of. In his book, he says the number 11 is powerful. For example, it is an essential element of KFC's corporate mythology. Its fried chicken is seasoned with Colonel Sanders' original recipe of 11 different herbs and spices. The reason?

The number 11 represents going one better, an extra ingredient, beyond the ordinary. 10 is the order of things. 11 is exploring the possibilities beyond. I know what you're thinking. If you can see, the numbers all go to 11. Look, right across the board. 11, 11, 11, 11. And most of these, amps go up to 10.

Exactly. Does that mean it's louder? Is that any louder? Well, it's one louder, isn't it? Exactly my point. Now, numbers are an important part of brand. As Bellows says, a classic example is Levi's 501 genes. It's not Levi's 500 genes, it's one better.

It suggests a little extra button here, a little extra bit of sewing there, a mystical added element. That's not to say round numbers don't have juice. An anti-dandruff shampoo was searching for a memorable name. It came down to two choices, either zinc-25. or zinc 31. When both names were tested, respondents overwhelmingly chose zinc 24, so much so they were willing to pay 10% more for it. When that decision was analyzed, it was determined that people prefer the number 24 because

they are more familiar with the number from their school days. In math class, three times eight equals 24 and four times six equals 24 was drilled into your head. The number 31 wasn't. That means we process the number 24 more fluently, and therefore it gives us the feeling that we like it more. In another experiment, two names for a brand of contact lens were tested, Solace 36 and Solace 37. The tagline on the packaging said, six colors, six fits. Respondents over. overwhelmingly chose Solace 36, because in their minds they did the math. Six times six equals 36.

The name and the tagline were arithmetically related. The pleasure rush from subconsciously doing the math makes us feel good, and we misattribute the buzz as satisfaction with the product. Yep, math is intriguing. I just finished reading Graydon Carter's excellent memoir when the going was good, subtitled, An Editor's Adventures during the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years,

and I was a subscriber for all that time. The book details his rise through the magazine business, and it's full of delicious tales from overseeing the celebrity-rich Vanity Fair pages. He makes some interesting points along the way. To begin with, he is honest about his failures, He says, sheer ignorance of the trials ahead is often a blessing. So very true.

If you knew the tripwires and all the obstacles awaiting you in the future of a big job or a new company, you would probably run for the hills. But not knowing keeps you going. He also says that underdogs want to bite the ankles of overdogs. Very true. It's one of the reasons people are drawn to small feisty brands that are in a battle with the Galilee. IELYATS. Graydon Carter also never wanted his advertisers to feel unappreciated.

He would write a thank you note to every advertiser, and it would be clipped to a hand-delivered copy, and he did that for every single issue for 25 years. Vanity Fair averaged over 200 pages of advertisers per issue. Never underestimate the value of appreciation. In the many amusing and scandalous tales he tells in his book, there was one in particular that made me laugh out loud. During the Golden Age of Magazines, the budgets were enormous. Graydon and his Vanity Fair editors all had company cars and drivers,

first-class airfare, clothing allowances, and seemingly unlimited expense accounts. Before he worked at Vanity Fair, Graydon wrote for Time magazine. One writer there, a friend of his, was called into the office of the executive editor. The Pope was coming to America, and the religion correspondent had fallen ill. The editor assigned Graydon's friend to cover the story,

all because the friend was the only practicing Catholic within earshot. Except, the writer didn't want the assignment. On the spot, the writer made up a story about how he had planned to take his family on a fall vacation to Maine for the week. The editor said, go cover the Pope and send your family on vacation.

You can expense the cost of their holiday. Now the writer had a problem. He had to cover the Pope's visit, and he had to expense an imaginary trip to Maine. When he got back from covering the Pope, he had a printing company produce a fake letterhead that said, whispering pines, along with a fake Maine address.

Then he created, in granular detail, the bills for his family's imaginary vacation. He submitted the expense report, and it was duly paid. Some time later, he found the receipt from the printer that had produced the fake letterhead and hotel bills. So, he decided to submit that receipt, too. And time paid the expense. Too funny. When we come back, the difference between feelings.

fear and danger. If you're enjoying this episode, you might also like striking images, matchbook advertising from our 2020 season. We tell the story of how the U.S. Army used matchbook ads to spread the word of rewards for information about Osama bin Laden. You'll find the episode in our archives on your favorite podcast app. In a book titled How I Built This by Guy Raz, who also hosts a terrific podcast by the same name, Raz interviews successful entrepreneurs.

He also quotes French novelist Victor Hugo, who wrote in 1862, One withstand the invasion of armies. One does not withstand the invasion of ideas. So very true. Every Banana Republic knows it's one brave idea away from collaboration. It also holds true for entrepreneurs and marketers who revolutionize their industries with ideas that can't be ignored. Brass also quotes James Fallows, who writes for The Atlantic.

Fallos was talking about the fact we are all really bad at differentiating fear from danger. We're scared of flying, but we have no problem whipping down the highway at 110 kilometers per hour, even though you're 86 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. The odds of dying in a plane crash are one in 10,000, three times less likely than choking on food. We are afraid of sharks, but not of bathtubs, yet one person dies in a bathtub incident every day. Sharks only claim one per year on average. Therefore, Fallow says, bathtubs. are 365 times as frightening as sharks.

And that's the problem we all have differentiating between fear and danger. We're more relaxed around things we're more acquainted with, like bathtubs. Shark encounters are so rare it turns them into mysteries, which in turn becomes uncertainty, which ripens into fear. And we fill that gap in our knowledge

with worst-case scenarios. all of which means we should have bathtub week on the Discovery Channel, not Shark Week. My latest book is titled Against the Grain, subtitled Defiant Giants Who Change the World. I write about people who had a great idea, but were dismissed by superiors, ridiculed by colleagues, mocked by competitors, and in many cases, these brave people lost their reputations, their jobs, and their livelihoods. Some came close to losing their sanity, but in every single case, their idea was right and revolutionary.

One of those people was Ignaz Semmelweis. Born in Hungary in 1818, Semmelweis grew up to become a doctor and was the chief obstetrician at the Vienna Hospital, the largest maternity hospital in the world at that time. It had two large maternity clinics. One was run by doctors, the other by midwives. Over time, Semmelweis noticed an alarming statistic. Five out of every 1,000 women died when delivery was performed by midwives,

yet the death rate was 10 to 20 times higher when delivered by doctors. It didn't make any sense. The deaths were due to what was then called childbed fever. It was a leading cause of death among women second only to tuberculosis. Semmelweis was determined to find the cause. The doctors claimed the fever was related to lactation, therefore unpreventable.

Semmelweis didn't buy it. He started to analyze every variable. He wondered if bad air was being inadvertently piped into the doctor's clinic, but that wasn't the case. In the midwife clinic, women were, gave birth on their sides, whereas the doctors had women give birth on their backs. Semmelweis had the doctor's switch to side-position births. Still, the doctor delivery deaths piled up.

When a woman died in the doctor's clinic, a priest would walk the hall ringing a bell. Semmelweis wondered if the sound was terrorizing the women. He had the bell silenced. Still, no change. Semmelweis cross-referenced 64 more correlations. It revealed no abnormalities. Exhausted and frustrated, Semmelweis took a short leave of absence. When he returned, Semmelweis learned that a young colleague of his had died.

While performing an autopsy, the colleague had nicked his finger with a scalpel. A few days later, he died of a high temperature and infection. In other words, the man had died of childbed fever. That was an epiphany to Semmelweis. He wondered if some kind of matter from cadavers had entered his bloodstream. And if so, maybe the doctors were the one spreading the fever. After all, doctors performed autopsies, not midwives. The Vienna Hospital was a renowned teaching hospital,

and one of the best ways to teach was with autopsies. Doctors were performing the post-mortems, then walking directly into the maternity ward to deliver babies. So Semmelweis instituted a policy that all doctors had to thoroughly wash their hands and scrub under their nails before entering the delivery room. The doctors rebelled. They were insulted, offended, outraged that a doctor, a person trained to save lives, could possibly be responsible for killing patients. The doctors dismissed his theory.

The problem was that Semmelweis knew he was right, but couldn't isolate the scientific basis. The concept of germ theory was still two decades away. His contract with the hospital was suddenly terminated. He applied for teaching positions at other hospitals, but was denied. He applied for grants to further investigate his theory, but was turned down over and over. again. Then he was socially shunned. Women continued to die at the Vienna hospital,

and it enraged Semmelweis. He began writing heated letters to prominent doctors and medical journals. They called him unbalanced and crazy. The ridicule began to take a toll on his mental health. His wife and best friends schemed to take him on a tour of a new medical facility, but it was really an insane asylum. When Semmelweis realized what was happening, he put up a fight, was beaten by orderlies, sustaining cuts and bruises,

and was put into a dirty straight jacket. His wounds became infected, and two weeks later, Semmelweis, the father of infection control, died of sepsis, the very infection that had been taking the lives of women

at the Vienna Hospital. It is a remarkable story that Semmelweis was so mocked and ridiculed and shunned and all he wanted doctors to do was wash their hands. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Today, Semmelweis is revered in the medical world. Hospitals and universities have been named after him. Ignat Semmelweis relied on his instincts,

and with instincts, you know before you know, know why. He was two decades ahead of medical theory, but he was right all along. There is one more thing named for him. The Semmelweis reflex. It refers to the propensity to reject new ideas if they challenge established theories, even if the evidence is compelling. When we come back, the surprising links between Bond and the Beatles. Read another fun book recently titled Love and Let Die by John Higgs. It lists the surprising parallels between the Beatles and James Bond. Don't believe it? Listen to this.

For starters, Dr. No, the very first Bond film, and Love Me Do, the very first Beatles record, were both released on the very same day, October 5, 1962. Two British cultural phenomena unleashed on the world at the same moment. Both Goldfinger and A Hard Day's Night were released in 1964, both by United Artists. Both are on the British Film Institute's list of the 100 best British films of the 20th century. Both were nominated for Oscars. Both had soundtracks that hit the top of the charts, with the Goldfinger theme nudging A Hard Day's Night off the number one spot.

Both the song Goldfinger and A Hard Day's Night were produced by George. Martin. And in Goldfinger, Bonn says drinking improperly chilled champagne was as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs. That's very harsh, James. Anne Fleming's nickname for her husband, Ian, was Thunder Beetle. Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who produced the Bond films, were offered a hard day's night, but turned it down. The Beatles didn't think a hard day's night was as good as a Bond film, so their next movie, Help, leaned more into adventure and villains.

As a matter of fact, track one of the Beatles' original Help album begins with a hat tip to the Bond theme, played by guitarist Vic Flick, who played the original Bond theme. Help was filmed in the Bahamas, and Fleming's Thunderball was being filmed nearby around the same time.

John Lennon's two books, released in 64 and 65, were published by Jonathan Cape, Fleming's publisher. McCartney, Lennon, and James Bond all got married in 1969. John Lennon married Yoko in Gibraltar. Sean Connery married both his wives there. Both James Bond and Paul McCartney were declared dead in 1967. Both were a hoax.

Bond had Spector and the Beatles had Phil Spector. McCartney wrote the theme song for the Bond, film Live and Let Die, and George Martin produced it. Actor Christopher Lee is on the cover of McCartney's band on the run album, and Lee also played the villain Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Barbara Bach played a KGB agent in The Spy Who Love Me and later loved and married Ringo Star. Tomorrow Never Dies is a play on the Beatles song Tomorrow Never Knows. In Quantum of Solace, actress Gemma Arterton,

character is named Strawberry Fields. Billy Eilish and her brother learned to write songs by listening to The Beatles. Eilish's theme song for the Bond film No Time to Die won an Oscar. Ringo handed her the award for Record of the Year at the Grammys. Lastly, at Glastonbury 2022, both Billy Eilish and Paul McCartney performed, meaning two Bond themes were played on the same stage that year. Love and Let Die is a fun read about the most successful band of all time and the most successful movie character in history.

World domination. Same old dream. Books are barbells for the mind. If you want to be a good writer, read. I fear there won't be enough time to get to all the books I want to read. There are so many great ones out there. Look what we've found in those pages today. Numbers have deep meanings. 11 is the funniest number, and at the same time, it's a number that means to go above and beyond.

And isn't it interesting, we prefer numbers that harken back to the math drills of our youth. There is a vast difference between fear and danger. We run from fear and accept danger daily. That's a weird homo sapient quirk. The heart truly is a lonely hunter. Entrepreneurs and people like Ignat Semmelweis are brave souls with big ideas who face unrelenting pushback until they are proven right and sometimes change the world. And one more big thing we learned today.

Always double-check those expense reports when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Taylor. Airstream Mobile Recording Studio. Producer Debbie O'Reilly, Chief Sound Engineer Jeff Devine, theme music by Casey Pick, Jeremiah Pick, and James Aiton. Tunes provided by APM Music, follow me at Terry O. Influence. This podcast is powered by ACAST.

Terry's top slogans of all time. Number five. Penn Tennis Balls. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. See you next week.