Learn from some of our favorite expert guests about yoga, volcanoes, meditation, and more on this special episode of the Curiosity Podcast. You'll hear from accomplished authors and academics from past episodes, in addition to a special guest you've never heard before on the show. Plus, hear about the past, present, and future of the Curiosity Podcast. Additional resources discussed: Alex Hutchinson's website "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance" Champions of Zen: Inside the controversial world of competitive yoga | Racked How Tarot Cards Work | HowStuffWorks Dr. Lucy Jones' website "The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)" Dr. Rick Hanson's website "Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness" Read more about the topics Cody asks Ashley about in the "Lightning Round" Curiosity Challenge: You Can Swim In Warm Pools Of This at Starkenberger's Castle 20 Percent of All Mammals on Earth "Count" Victor Lustig May Have Been The World's Smoothest Con Man Are You More Attractive When You're Drunk? Where Does The Word "Nerd" Come From? You Used To Be Able To Win A Gold Medal For... What?! Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn from some of our favorite expert guests about yoga, volcanoes, meditation, and more on this special episode of the Curiosity Podcast. You'll hear from accomplished authors and academics from past episodes, in addition to a special guest you've never heard before on the show. Plus, hear about the past, present, and future of the Curiosity Podcast.
Additional resources discussed:
Read more about the topics Cody asks Ashley about in the "Lightning Round" Curiosity Challenge:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-curiosity-podcast-wraps-up-with-yoga-volcanoes-and-meditation
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm curious, what have you taken out of the interviews that we've never heard before?
CODY GOUGH: Oh boy, are you about to find out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, I'm Cody Gough, with the very curious, curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today we're going to learn lots of different things from our favorite guests, both old.
CODY GOUGH: And new every week we explore what we don't know, because curiosity makes us smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is The Curiosity Podcast.
CODY GOUGH: This is a very special episode with some very special news at the end. So you're going to want to stick around.
ASHLEY HAMER: You'll hear some of our recent guests talk about stuff we weren't able to include in their episodes. And learn a little about a variety of things, like our daily podcast honestly.
CODY GOUGH: Plus, we'll hear from a guest you've never heard from before, ever. And as always Ashley will drop in from time to time to inject some knowledge. And again, we'll wrap up with an extremely important announcement. If I didn't already mention that. So don't touch that dial.
ASHLEY HAMER: We'll talk about yoga, volcanoes, meditation, and the occult's. Yeah, this is going to be a fun one.
CODY GOUGH: We'll start with a very popular recent guest, Alex Hutchinson. He's the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Love that title. Alex competed as a middle and long distance runner for the Canadian national team. And spent years conducting research on the limits of the human body.
And we had a great conversation about how our limits are actually a lot more mental than physical. The episode is definitely worth checking out and we talked a lot about how to improve your running times or lift heavier stuff with the right amount of training. But I know that activities like, yoga and pilates are also really popular these days. I'm into DDP yoga myself.
Those activities are a lot harder to quantify though, if you're lifting you can see your progress and numbers. And if you're running, obviously, you're going after faster times on the clock. But with yoga, it's not like you're measuring how many inches you can stretch or anything.
So here's what Alex had to say when I asked him this question, is there a good way to develop endurance or measure your progress with yoga or other less quantifiable activities?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I guess, I think the first thing you have to ask in that context is, what is your goal? Is your goal to be on a never ending staircase of improvement. Because for runners that's actually a bit of a trap to always think that tomorrow's run should be a little faster than today's, and the next day should be a little bit faster.
And sometimes someone may have a yoga practice that makes them happy and keeps them healthy. And they don't necessarily need to be stretching a little farther or pushing themselves a little deeper to get the benefits of it. So I think that's maybe one thing to keep in mind.
But beyond that, as most of us are generally trying to get a little bit better at things we do. I think it's really domain specific, you have to-- and in a sense, it's like, if you're trying to find interesting answers, you have to ask the right question. And it's the same thing, if you're trying to track your progress, you have to understand what it is that you want to progress.
And not fall for the mistake of whatever is easiest to quantify that's what we're going to try and improve. Because it may be that maybe in yoga, how far you're able to push a given stretch is easy to kind of measure, but that may not be the point of that particular exercise, the point may to be cultivating awareness of your breath or whatever the case may be.
And so I realize I'm sort of punting on the question here. But I think you really for any of these, especially non-quantifiable activities, you have to think really carefully about what it is you're trying to optimize. And not fall for the trap of optimizing something just because you can measure progress in it.
CODY GOUGH: I thought is a great answer, I know it's kind of a bit of a field question. But I just it just popped into my head because I know there are people participating in very different activities than the traditional running or lifting. And want to make sure that we're able to speak to that, because again, not just the numbers thing with running and lifting.
But when you're running a race, for example, and you hit that last stretch, you're near the end. And then you can do that final sprint, that final burst of energy. And kind of get it done where a certain other activities are maybe a little bit more. They're not quite as demanding on that last boost, which you talk about quite a bit in that final stretch that runners especially are used to.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, and I think in a running race, Yeah, as you say you see people sprinting towards the finish, because they're trying to squeeze out the last drops out of the rug as it were. And that's an interesting phenomenon in its own right, but it definitely doesn't generalize to all activities.
And again, to use yoga as an example, I think some of the ideas we've been talking about awareness, mindful awareness of discomfort, and enduring are absolutely crucial and fundamental to the practice of some types of yoga. But that doesn't mean you're trying to push yourself to your maximum in yoga or to there's no finishing sprint in yoga.
But the ability to cultivate the awareness of your body, and to dissociate the emotional response to be able to just be aware of feedback from your body without judging it. I think that's integral to yoga. And it also has a lot in common with the ability to say, maintain your pace in a marathon. It's all about bodily awareness.
And not letting signals from your body trick you into thinking you've reached a limit. To allowing yourself to either stay in a pose for longer or to maintain your pace for longer. And understand that discomfort doesn't signal it's a warning sign, not a stop sign.
CODY GOUGH: Great advice and awesome observation, obviously, based on lots of really great research in the book. Is that the main takeaway? Is that practice makes perfect. And that's how you're going to have better endurance?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: I think that's certainly a very valuable, practical takeaway, that the best way to get better is to get out and do something. The deeper takeaway for me is that I hope people would take away from the book is, that limits that really feel physical that feel like a brick wall in a sense are mostly mediated by the brain.
And so, and that means, they're negotiable. And I think just having that awareness, understanding that the feeling that you can't go any farther, doesn't really mean that your body is tapped out. I think that has tremendous potential for helping people to motivate themselves to keep pushing if that's what they choose to do.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know what you're thinking, who the heck worries about endurance and competition, when they're doing yoga? Competitive yoga athletes, obviously. Well, it might seem completely counter to its basic principles. Yoga is quickly growing as a competitive sport. There's even a push to make it an Olympic event.
In the United States, the sport's national governing body is USA Yoga, which makes the rules for how competitions are scored. In their events competitors must perform six poses within 3 minutes. And each pose is scored on a scale from one to 10 with a maximum possible total score of 60. But these events are hard.
According to an article by Chavie Lieber for Racked, the average score is only 30 and the highest score ever recorded was just 42. You have to have perfect alignment, balance, and breath control all at once. It's no easy feat. As you might expect a lot of yoga practitioners have problems with their practice becoming competitive. But adherents, say it's less about competition and more about seeing what you can do as an individual.
As one competitor told Lieber, quote winning doesn't motivate us, we are there to help our personal growth end quote.
CODY GOUGH: The next guest, you're going to hear from is somebody you've never heard before on the curiosity podcast. But first we want to thank one of our sponsors, LinkedIn. We know you've heard of LinkedIn, of course. But did you know that it's an incredible place to find quality talent. If you're looking to hire than LinkedIn is the way to go. Don't settle for posting a job and just hoping the right person will find you and apply.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Before you look for your next hire visit linkedin.com/curiosity and get a $50 credit toward your first job post.
CODY GOUGH: I literally work at Curiosity because of LinkedIn, seriously. So if you're not using LinkedIn for your hiring needs, you're missing out on quality talent like me. So get a $50 credit towards your first job post at linkedin.com/curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: One more time, that's linkedin.com/curiosity. Head there way and get your $50 credit today, terms and conditions apply.
CODY GOUGH: Up next is a guest, you have never heard from. I want to give a little background first. Last October, our editor-in-chief at the time was really into the idea of doing a spooky Halloween type special episode.
And I happened to know a guy who is an occult hobbyist. I don't really know how to say it. He's really plugged into the world of modern magic. And it's magic with a CK, magic with a CK was defined in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.
And it's used to differentiate the occult magic like invocation or divination from performance magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Anyway let's just say that the occult is still around in 2018. And there are lots of people out there who practice magic with a CK.
And like I said, I know a guy, who's pretty well versed in the history in modern practice of the occult and the magic they practice. Perfect for Halloween, right? So I did this interview, and you know who it was with my oldest brother Jason.
We had a really interesting conversation. But we decided the interview didn't really make sense for a full episode for this show for our audience. But I recently listened back to the interview. And I was like, you know what? There's some good stuff in there that I think our audience would find interesting.
So here's a little excerpt from an unreleased episode with my brother Jason. That I thought was pretty interesting, especially if you've ever wondered about tarot cards or Ouija boards. Where do tarot and Ouija fall into all of this?
SPEAKER 1: The tarot is part of the Kabbalistic system, Kabbalah the tarot is the lines in between the spheres on the tree of life. So the tarot has a deep symbolism in Egyptian mythology, in Greek symbolism and kind of astrological stuff planetary, correspondences, as well as herbs, I mean there's a lot that goes into the tarot. Ouija, I think was just a board game. That they literally made frat fun at home.
CODY GOUGH: Oh Wow, Yeah not really deep there?
SPEAKER 1: Ouija is I believe just like the gaming company made it. The Ouija board itself does not have any occult history.
CODY GOUGH: I'm actually looking online. Yeah, it was a parlor game unrelated to the occult.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it was popularized as a divining tool during World War I, by spiritualist Perl Curran. But before that, Wow, it really was, this is--
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, it's a board game literally.
CODY GOUGH: Wow, that's a lot less dark than I thought.
SPEAKER 1: Know Yeah, Ouija totally not dark. Tarot interesting, the tarot like the devil and death cards are not the worst, interesting.
CODY GOUGH: What do you mean, not the worst?
SPEAKER 1: Everybody thinks, well, the devil card, or the death card would be the worst? It's actually not.
CODY GOUGH: What is?
SPEAKER 1: It, all depends on how they are laid with the other cards. But typically the tower is a pretty bad card.
CODY GOUGH: What's the tower?
SPEAKER 1: It's one of the major arcana of the tarot.
CODY GOUGH: But I mean, what does it represent?
SPEAKER 1: Oh, downfall like, Sauron.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, OK, Yeah, I think that Lord of the Rings, or not so good.
SPEAKER 1: That's where that came from.
CODY GOUGH: All right, cool good to know.
ASHLEY HAMER: A tarot deck is made up of the minor arcana, and the major arcana. The minor arcana is a lot like a regular deck of playing cards, and that it has four suits. But instead of spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. It has wands, swords, cups, and circles or pentacles.
The major arcana by contrast, are those one off picture cards, most people probably associate with tarot. It's where you'll see cards like the devil, death, and the tower. Like Jason says, the devil and death cards aren't all that bad. Death just signifies the end of a major phase of your life. And the devil is just a warning that there's some sort of negativity going on.
The tower card, however, is super bad. It usually depicts a lightning bolt striking a tower on a stormy night, and suggests that something terrible is going to strike you without warning. The 10 of swords is also not one you want to see. It says that you'll suffer some unwelcome surprise in the near future. Same for the five of pentacles, which points to a time of financial strife or adversity.
So why are we digging so far into tarot on a podcast that usually deals with science? Well, tarot isn't the magical snake oil you might think. Most people associate tarot card readings with psychic readings. But they're actually pretty different. Instead of a psychic telling you your future, tarot is designed to make you think about your own life.
Like have you ever flipped a coin to decide where to go to dinner, and the minute the coin lands on heads, you wish it had landed on tails. The coin helped you realize the decision you really wanted to make. Tarot cards are the same way, by asking broad questions and being open to what the cards might be saying. You can help understand what you really want and need in your life. It's stuff you know already, the cards can just help you find it.
CODY GOUGH: Just a few weeks ago, we talked to Dr. Lucy Jones, a leading seismologist and author of The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them. It's funny because we were going to talk about natural disasters. And ended up zooming out and talking about human psychology, and how we prepare for and react to natural disasters.
The conversation was really interesting. But I almost kind of felt bad, because we barely talked about the book. But we did have a short conversation about one disaster that I'm happy to share now. In her book, Dr. Lucy Jones, writes about the Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783 to 1784, which quote researchers believe is the deadliest natural disaster in human history. The total death toll was in the millions, and the devastation spanned the globe unquote.
A volcano eruption in Iceland though the deadliest. I had to find out how. By the way, how did it kill millions of people?
DR. LUCY JONES: OK, In Iceland itself it killed about a quarter of the population. Mostly from starvation, it put out poisonous gases that poisoned all of the land-based food. So basically, the only thing left to eat had to come from the ocean. And people were poisoned by this contaminated food.
But then the gases continued to spread out over Europe and the poisonous gases directly killed people in Europe, they compared the death rate that summer to the long-term death rate around the time in the UK. And found an extra 23,000 deaths.
So and then probably at least that many across Europe because people were clearly dying, they didn't know that it was coming from the volcano in Iceland. It was that people went outside and would collapse while trying to work in the fields. But we're still on the 100,000 dead category.
To go beyond that what happens is the gases were ejected, some of them were in lower level eruptions that then settled in Iceland or blew over to the continent. Some of them were ejected high up into the atmosphere, and got into stratospheres. And when you start putting sulfates up into the atmosphere, it blocks incoming light, and it cooled the Earth. We saw this with the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1993, it cooled the Earth by about a degree and 1/2 Fahrenheit a little under a degree centigrade.
And the Icelandic volcanoes have an easier time getting gases into the stratosphere, because the stratosphere is thinner up in the polar regions than at the equator. So there was enough gas that got the sulfates up into the stratosphere. And then they stay for a few years because it's so dry there, there's nothing washing them out. And they travel around the world, and they cool the continents, which disrupts the monsoons. Because the monsoons happen when you have a warm ocean or continent heats up during the summer, and the cooler ocean, then the sets up the flow.
When that didn't happen, the Nile didn't flood. Egypt went through a major famine that killed 1/6 of its population. Probably 1/2 a million people or more. There were also major famines in India and Japan. And they think that there was also El Nino that year, so it isn't purely the fault of the volcano.
But the famine in India killed 11 million people and the famine and Japan killed over 1 million people. So you sum all that up and subtract a few for say, that's not all the volcanoes doing. You still are talking about more than 1 million people, maybe well more than 1 million people dying because of that one eruption.
CODY GOUGH: That is incredible. And yet not as memorable as something like maybe Pompeii, where we have it's a tourist spot, right?
DR. LUCY JONES: Right. It's a better story in Pompeii. But actually in Iceland this is the defining event of their culture. It became a whole nation of refugees. Basically, all of the main cropland area was covered by lava. And so people had to leave their homes, most of the church records of births and deaths fall apart at that point. Because there was nobody left to make the records.
So in Iceland, it is one of their defining characteristics of the whole country. But they're seeing it from their own perspective losing a 1/4 of their population. They had no idea that the rest of this was going on.
CODY GOUGH: Are you ready for literally the most seamless transition ever?
ASHLEY HAMER: Am I?
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CODY GOUGH: Back to another more recent episode. We talked to Dr. Rick Hansen about why resilience is the key to well being in a changing world. He wrote the book, Resilience: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm Strength, and Happiness.
The whole episode is really worth listening to. But to sum it up, he talks about how the world around us is always going to change. So if we want to find a way to be happy, then one of the best ways to do it is by growing internal resources.
So you're about to hear a quick second explanation of why that's important. And then he talks a little bit about meditation. What's interesting is that whether you meditate every day, or you've never meditated in your life. He still has a great takeaway from the world of meditation, that you can use to become more resilient. And of course find happiness as a result.
DR. RICK HANSEN: To have well-being, which is my primary focus here and be able to contribute to the world, based on a person's values. It's really good to have external conditions around you that are as good as they can be obviously, you look for a good partner, look for a good job, try to live in a good place, try to install stop signs near schools. Good that said, we tend to move as people from situation to situation.
And also external conditions often kind of end they fall apart. And what we have inside ourselves in terms of durable, trait-based inner resources, is what we take with us wherever we go. So I think, it's really useful to have good relations with friends and family and intimate partners and so forth. What's even more useful is to really internalize what it feels like to have a good friend or a good intimate partner or to be close with your family. So that you have that inside you, even if something changes in that relationship outside you.
CODY GOUGH: I think internalizing is part of the trick behind all of this. And you're a big proponent of meditation, is this where that comes in?
DR. RICK HANSEN: I think meditation is a really useful practice, but it like many other things is a useful way to generate states of being. And just to pop back up and out Cody if I could, isn't it interesting that we're having experiences continually. But most of us don't pay much attention to the actual process of experiencing.
And we don't pay much attention to the internal factors that nudge our experiences for better or worse. Even though we live in our experiences in a sense. In a profound sense, we are our experiences, right? That's all we know from which we infer that there's a material world outside of our phenomenology that somehow in our bodies is making our experiences.
And this is kind of deep stuff that's under our nose. And yet to your podcast type here, how often are people curious about the actual process of experiencing. And how often are people actually curious about how to make the most of it in terms of lasting value? I don't think most people are very curious about that.
And one of my hopes is that people in general for multiple reasons will actually become more curious about their process of experiencing, and curious about the process of growing, of healing, learning, developing, becoming more skillful becoming more competent, cultivating various virtues, and even on the pathway to self-actualization and awakening. Becoming curious about the process of growing. People are often not very curious about that.
So anyway, back to meditation. Meditation is a great opportunity to be curious about experiencing, the stream of consciousness, the mind unfolding, which is right available to us without getting mystical about it. There is hearing, there is seeing, there is thinking, there is remembering, there is imagining, there is wanting, there is hurting, it's all happening.
Meditation is a great opportunity because then you're not distracted by shiny objects. You're just watching the stream of consciousness roll by breath after breath after breath. That is really instructive, as well as typically calming and promoting a resilience along the way.
That said, as you're having experiences while meditating or while jogging or walking the dog or holding hands with your sweetie or sitting down to pray or offering a little bit of gratitude as you eat or hanging out with your friends.
All right, one experience after another is occurring, including maybe what seems like more special experiences say in meditation. The question always remains. What are the lasting residues left behind by those experiences? And I live in I've been meditating since 1974, I teach meditation. I think it's useful for people. And there are many different kinds of meditation. And I'm not pushing any particular kind of meditation or meditation in general.
That said, I've known a lot of meditators, who are as neurotic as ever. They're really at peace when they're on the cushion, because the cushion or the meditation practice are doing is an external source of their state of being at that time, they're good or bad. But when they get up off the cushion, they're not taking anything with themselves.
So the next time they're stuck in traffic or dealing with an email or in an argument with their partner, they are as irritable or prickly or grouchy as ever. And so one of the key points here is that experience saying, does not equal growing, does not equal learning.
In particular, we're very quick to learn, to turn experiences of fact or concept into knowledge, we do that pretty rapidly. But at the end of the day, I think when most people really care about is their mood or what it feels like inside their body, or their outlook, or their attitude in general, or how skillful they are with other people, or in managing their own mind, that's another domain of soulfulness or competence.
And so I think that kind of learning, social, emotional, motivational, somatic, attitudinal, even spiritual learning is the learning that most people really care about. And for that kind of learning to occur, we must slow the brain down, so it can actually physically be changed by those kinds of experiences.
CODY GOUGH: It sounds to me like presence of mind is a really key component to all of this?
DR. RICK HANSEN: Yeah, because if you're not present you can't be aware of the opportunity for internalization, you're right. And then you need that presence of mind as well to internalize. Now that said, the brain is so fast, neurons are firing five to 50 times a second. Large scale patterns of synchronized neural activity that are tracked through measuring brainwaves, they're happening five, 10, 80 100 times a second, the brain is really quick.
So over the course of a breath or two or three that's roughly long enough to begin the process of consolidation. The more the better there is a quote, unquote, "dosing effect." But the process of internalization, it's really useful to appreciate. Is something that people can do on the fly. It's private, it's internal, nobody needs to know that you're doing it.
And yet as people do it, let's say a few times a day, maybe 1/2 a dozen times a day. It takes less than 5 minutes total probably over the course of a day. As people do that, they really do start to feel like they're filling themselves up from the inside out.
Instead of as many people feel these days, like to running on empty, or instead of feeling that they have deep down, a hungry heart through this process of internalization that we're talking about. People it's the essence of self-reliance. People become stronger, they become more resilient, they also become happier.
And interestingly, as people resource themselves research shows, and they fill up their own cup, they tend to be more generous, forgiving, loving, and reasonable to deal with other people.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're interested in meditation, but aren't sure what style you should try. Have I got a resource for you. Curiosity made an entire video about how different styles of meditation affect your brain in different ways.
It's called, What's the best way to meditate? And you can find it in the latest episode section of our Facebook page, on our YouTube channel, or in the show notes.
CODY GOUGH: We end every episode with the Curiosity Challenge, where I ask my guest about something I learned about on curiosity.com But I don't have a guest today, right? I did think it would be fun for Ashley and me to swap questions. But the thing is, she's our managing editor, and she's either written, edited, or read pretty much every article on curiosity.com. So that would not be fair at all, right?
So fortunately, you've never heard the Curiosity Challenge I did with my brother Jason last October. So here's that. I'm going to give you a little trivia question, maybe teach you something possibly that you don't know. There was a very famous inventor who actually patented a spirit phone. The inventor had plans to create a device--
SPEAKER 1: Tesla.
CODY GOUGH: That would, hold on, that would communicate with the dead, but this was like actually going to be a real thing. He wanted the device not to function by any occult means, but by scientific methods. So your guess is Tesla?
SPEAKER 1: I would just guess Tesla.
CODY GOUGH: Just right off the bat, kind of close. It was Thomas Edison.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, jeez.
CODY GOUGH: It was, in 1920, Edison told American magazine, that he had been working on his spirit phone for some time. News that shocked the public. He was quote building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us, unquote. And well, he never quite finished it up, there are virtually no record, plans or prototypes of this spirit phone, but we do have evidence that he toyed with the idea.
SPEAKER 1: Wait, virtually, no prototypes? Because that seems suspicious. Just like, Yeah, he got one we don't know where it is.
CODY GOUGH: I wish I knew, but you can learn more about that on curiosity.com. We've got an article on Thomas Edison, inventing the spirit phone.
SPEAKER 1: I like it.
CODY GOUGH: So there you go. And I believe you've got a trivia question for me as well, which has nothing to do with what we've been talking about today.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, jeez. OK, trivia question. Yes, who was the Grateful Dead's keyboard player when Jerry Garcia died?
CODY GOUGH: Wow. I'm not going to know this at all. No idea, I can't--
SPEAKER 1: It was, Vince Welnick.
CODY GOUGH: It was Vince.
SPEAKER 1: Welnick, Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Vince Welnick, how long was he with the Grateful Dead?
SPEAKER 1: After Brent Midland died, I believe '89, I think he died, so I think the last run of it. And the last few years. Bruce Hornsby was in there and Piano as well for a while. So there was a two keyboard player time. But Yeah, most of the shows I saw with Jerry it was Vince Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: How many Grateful Dead shows have you been to?
SPEAKER 1: Well, I mean, when Jerry was alive actual Grateful Dead, not counting further, and dead in company, current incarnations, I think I went to 10 shows.
CODY GOUGH: How about Fish?
SPEAKER 1: Hi I lost track.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait a minute Cody, so just because I've written, read, edited, done pretty much everything with a lot of the stuff on curiosity.com, that doesn't mean I remember all of it. That's all a lot.
I think you can ask me questions, and we can see if I remember the answers.
CODY GOUGH: You really want to do the curiosity challenge?
ASHLEY HAMER: I do.
CODY GOUGH: All right, well, fortunately, I prepared for an occasion such as this, we're going to lightning around this.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
CODY GOUGH: This is kind of like a daily podcast that we do.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Where we learn lots of new little random things in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: You're going to ask me a question, I'm going to give you my answer. And then you're just going to tell me whether it's right or wrong. And tell me the right answer, if I'm wrong.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah let's do a handful, let our hair down a little bit.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm ready.
CODY GOUGH: All right, here's your first question, Stark and Berger's Castle is a place in Austria where you can go swimming, they have seven pools that are about 13 feet deep, but they're not filled with water. What is the substance that you can swim in?
ASHLEY HAMER: Beer.
CODY GOUGH: Yes, the beer pools began in 2005, when the fermentation cellar became obsolete. Relaxing in the hot tubs of beer may actually be good for you, It's believed that the nutrients and the beer help condition skin.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: And may help cure wounds and psoriasis.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow, don't drink it. That's gross.
CODY GOUGH: That's very gross, it'll cost you a few dollars though, so it's not cheap.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: All right. Here's another one. 1/5 of all mammal species are what type of animal?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh no.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah about 20% of all mammal species are what type of animal?
ASHLEY HAMER: This is wrong, rodent.
CODY GOUGH: No you're close.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
CODY GOUGH: Bats.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh that's right, man. That's amazing.
CODY GOUGH: Scientists--
ASHLEY HAMER: I love that.
CODY GOUGH: Believe that their proliferation has to do with their extraordinary ability to adapt quickly to new environments. They tend to evolve very specialized bodies and behaviors depending on the region where they live. And you can look at different species and see a huge diversity in their physicality and their diets.
ASHLEY HAMER: All those bats out there, and you probably hardly ever see them.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, let's try this question number three, a man named Victor Lustig, may have been the smoothest con man the world has ever seen. On the curiosity Daily a few weeks ago, we talked about a guy that sold the Brooklyn Bridge.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
CODY GOUGH: Several times, so Victor Lustig is most famous for his unbelievable scheme in 1925, it's not the Brooklyn Bridge. He made a deal to sell a very famous structure, and he almost did it successfully a second time the same year, what did he sell?
ASHLEY HAMER: Boy that was close, that was the Eiffel Tower.
CODY GOUGH: It was the Eiffel Tower. Lustig met with scrap metal dealers in Paris to sell one of them the metal of the Eiffel Tower after the tower was to be torn down. And the winning bidder paid him the equivalent of $1 million of today's dollars. And Lustig fled once he had the money in hand and the guy who got conned discovered it was a scam, but he didn't report it because he was too ashamed that he fell for such a stupid scheme.
And then Lustig repeated the scheme six months later, but fled to the US when it wasn't going according to plan. All right. Here's another one, alcohol affects your perception, right? Well, a 2015 study from Bristol University showed how many drinks is the ideal number of drinks to make you look more attractive. Not to make others look more attractive. So research indicates that you appear most attractive to others after you've had, how many drinks?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think it's one drink.
CODY GOUGH: It's one drink.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: It is thought to be because after consuming one drink the students in the study had a slightly rosier complexion which can be a sign of good physical health.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: There's some other theories too, which you can read about in curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: I will.
CODY GOUGH: This one, you should know, because you're a nerd, just like me. The first printed instance of the word nerd occurs in a book published in 1950. The passage lists a nerd as a fantastical animal, who wrote the book? And for a bonus point, what was the title of the book?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, no. Was it like C.S. Lewis or someone?
CODY GOUGH: Wow, you don't know this?
ASHLEY HAMER: No, I don't.
CODY GOUGH: Wow, you were stumped the author was Dr. Seuss.
ASHLEY HAMER: Dr. Seuss.
CODY GOUGH: And the book was, If I Ran The Zoo. The text reads, "and then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a Preep and Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker too." One year later Newsweek Magazine included the word in an article with its now familiar definition someone who's kind of a drip or a square, which I think it's changed quite a bit.
And some believe that nerds popular usage evolved in the 1940s slang term, nuts which describes a stupid or crazy person.
ASHLEY HAMER: I want to just use the word Nerkle. I want a shirt that says talk Nerkle to me.
CODY GOUGH: Dr. Seuss rules, here is this is actually my favorite question, which of the following sports was not once part of the Olympics? Town planning, poetry, tug of war, or euchre?
ASHLEY HAMER: Euchre.
CODY GOUGH: It's euchre, you do get this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Town planning is the weirdest one, right? Can you believe that?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah tug of war was an official event between 1900 and 1920. Town planning was an event in four Olympic games, from '28 to '48. And poetry was an official Olympic competition from 1912 to 1948. Town planning fell under the architectural design category.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that old category. Oh, those great athletes.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, so for anybody saying Oh, E Sports should never be in the Olympics? Come on.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, town planning, men.
CODY GOUGH: We've done we've done a lot worse. Well, you knew almost all of those. So, I guess, you win the Curiosity Challenge.
ASHLEY HAMER: Now I feel like a jerk for saying that I wouldn't.
CODY GOUGH: Well, I will include links to all of those random trivia questions I just asked about in the show notes. So you can find those on curiosity.com or whatever podcast player you're listening on just tap on the podcast, and you should see all the links right there.
And traditionally, the guest brings something that's totally unrelated to anything. So Ashley, I'm just going to let you ask me some random trivia question.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK, what is the lowest pitched saxophone there is in the world?
CODY GOUGH: It's a contrabass saxophone.
ASHLEY HAMER: I actually just learned this from Wikipedia, this moment because that is the answer I would have had. There is apparently a sub contrabass saxophone.
CODY GOUGH: What?
ASHLEY HAMER: That is a full octave lower than the bass. And like 1/5 lower than the contrabass.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I played the bass sax in a couple of pieces. And--
ASHLEY HAMER: It makes your whole head vibrate.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it was about proportional for me. But Yeah, the bass saxophone is pretty huge. I'm 6' 4. So I'm very tall. And I know the contrabass sax you have to climb a ladder to play, that looks stupid. It literally looks like a tuba.
ASHLEY HAMER: It looks like a tuba, it looks like someone made a tuba into a saxophone. But it's more convenient than climbing a ladder, right? Because it's just all squat and fat.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: And you can just sit in a chair.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: That's a great trivia question, you did a lot better than me on the curiosity questions. Why don't we move on to the other question that we ask every episode.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's do it. It's time for this week's extra credit question, this one is a fun trivia question for long time listeners. How many total weekly feature length curiosity podcast episodes have we released since we first launched last June? This includes numbered episodes and special episodes. And does not count our new daily episodes or the episode zero, we released before we officially launched the show. The answer after this.
CODY GOUGH: It's not a secret that Ashley and I have been working on a new daily podcast, where you can learn something new in just a few minutes every day.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's the whole idea behind curiosity.com, right? On our website, Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. Basically, that's our goal, make it easy and fun to get smarter.
CODY GOUGH: So that's what our new daily podcast is doing. And we've been doing this weekly podcast that you're hearing right now for about a year. And it has been so much fun, but a daily podcast is going to be our focus for a while now. We've decided that with Memorial Day weekend coming up. We're going to hit pause on our weekly podcasts, at least for the summer.
ASHLEY HAMER: Don't worry, you can hear us literally every day now with a new Curiosity Daily. So it's not like you can't keep listening. We're just going to hold off on feature length weekly episodes like this for a while. And of course, we'll be happy to hear from you about what you think of the new direction we're taking.
CODY GOUGH: Yes please email us at podcast@curiosity.com, or find us on Twitter to let us know how you feel about the move. And we'll take another look at what we're doing when August rolls around. Until then, we would love to keep reaching you every day on the Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: You'll automatically get new episodes of our daily show. If you're already a curiosity podcast subscriber. And you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Google Play, Pocket Casts, Player FM and everywhere podcasts are found.
CODY GOUGH: You can also find links to listen to our daily shows in our email newsletter. If you're not already signed up for the email newsletter, then go to curiosity.com/email to sign up. We promise our emails are awesome. And of course, you can opt out any time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Our daily podcast is also part of the Amazon Alexa flash briefing skill. If you have an Amazon Echo, just tell your device play my flash briefing. And if you've got curiosity on your list of flash briefing sources, then you'll hear our new episodes that way.
CODY GOUGH: There are seriously just so many ways to listen, we'll include links to all of this and so much more in today's show notes. So please check them out and follow us wherever it's the most convenient for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: So to recap subscribe on any podcast app, sign up for our email newsletter at curiosity.com/email or add us to your Amazon flash briefing skill. It's so easy.
CODY GOUGH: And now I think Ashley, has an extra credit answer for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: I sure do. How many total full-length episodes of the Curiosity Podcast have we released since we launched last June? The answer 40, we have 37 numbered episodes plus 3 special episodes. The first special episode featured Michelle Nichols from the Adler Planetarium. And she talked about the super awesome 2017, solar eclipse, which Joni and I covered live from Carbondale in August.
Then we released a special episode similar to this one in December, where we played some of our favorite clips that we had to leave on the cutting room floor as they used to call it. And of course, today's special episode season finale, brings us to episode 40. Who is your favorite guest? Email us to let us know at podcast@curiosity.com and we'll be sure to let him or her know. I'm sure they'd really appreciate it.
CODY GOUGH: Well, this is really weird, but that's it for this week slash season on the curiosity podcast. At least, the long ones we've been doing for the last year. I invite you to join Ashley and me on the Curiosity Daily which we'll be back tomorrow. So it's not like I'm going anywhere, to get smarter in just a few minutes every day. And we will have a lot of fun in the process.
ASHLEY HAMER: I for one have been really enjoying hearing my own voice every single day.
CODY GOUGH: Why do you think I do this for a living?
ASHLEY HAMER: For the Curiosity Podcast, I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Thank you so much for your support over the last year. And one more time, stay curious. Yeah, it sounds cheesy.
SPEAKER 2: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.