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The History of Fake Towns. · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. We are very excited to be going back
0:03
Speaker 1: out on the road in early February to Seattle, Portland's
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Speaker 1: and San Francisco. That's right, February first, second, third, the future.
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Speaker 1: We're gonna be in those fabulous towns on stage for
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Speaker 1: the first time in three years. Chuck. That's right. Tickets
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Speaker 1: are on sale now, go get them, come see us,
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Speaker 1: s y s K Live. That's l I n K
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0:34
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
0:37
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
0:46
Speaker 1: there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, across the country. Even, what
0:50
Speaker 1: a time to be alive, What a time to be
0:53
Speaker 1: alive listening to Stuff you Should Know? Uh? Yes, and
1:00
Speaker 1: should we can? We start off with a little shout
1:03
Speaker 1: out to our colleagues. Yes, for sure, our buddies that
1:07
Speaker 1: stuff they don't want to to know, did something big, huh.
1:09
Speaker 1: They wrote a book like we did. And we are
1:13
Speaker 1: very proud of these guys are colleagues. We've known our
1:15
Speaker 1: friends for so long now mm hmm. And what do
1:19
Speaker 1: they cover? They cover conspiracies, but not like trust me.
1:22
Speaker 1: It's not like this big pro conspiracy thing. No. No,
1:26
Speaker 1: they do a lot of um ripping the lid off
1:29
Speaker 1: of the crack pots. It's a good way to say
1:35
Speaker 1: thank you. Well. What they do is they apply critical
1:38
Speaker 1: thought and critical thinking, which is one thing that's missing
1:41
Speaker 1: a lot when it comes to conspiracy theories, right exactly,
1:44
Speaker 1: because they're all smart dudes and they're pretty down to earth,
1:47
Speaker 1: um and they have a great podcast, and now they
1:50
Speaker 1: have a great book and it's um an eponymous book.
1:53
Speaker 1: Stuff they don't want you to know is the name
1:55
Speaker 1: of the book and the podcast, and I think it
1:58
Speaker 1: just published, Chuck. So that means that you can get
2:01
Speaker 1: it everywhere. I mean everywhere. You can get it at
2:03
Speaker 1: like Eagle Eye Books in Atlanta, you can get it
2:07
Speaker 1: at UM, the Corner Shop, Amazon dot com. Uh, you
2:11
Speaker 1: can get it everywhere in between the stuff they don't
2:15
Speaker 1: want you to know in hardcover because it just came
2:18
Speaker 1: out hot off the presses. As a matter of fact,
2:19
Speaker 1: when you pick up this book, you should probably be
2:22
Speaker 1: wearing other myths because it is that new. That's right.
2:25
Speaker 1: I can't wait to get my own copy. If you're
2:27
Speaker 1: into history, for into reading about proven conspiracies and uh
2:32
Speaker 1: not a bunch of goblody cook then highly recommend. I'm
2:34
Speaker 1: sure you can't wait go check it out. Um, so
2:39
Speaker 1: we're talking today about fake cities, right, yeah, like rock Ridge,
2:44
Speaker 1: rock Ridge, do you get that? No, Oh, it's Blazing Saddles.
2:53
Speaker 1: The name of the real town was rock Ridge. But
2:56
Speaker 1: they at the end of Blazing Saddles Cleveland Little comes
2:59
Speaker 1: up with a g enius plan to build a fake
3:01
Speaker 1: rock Ridge for when the bad guys come in and
3:06
Speaker 1: then they'll blow it up. So well, that's that's sort
3:09
Speaker 1: of kind of what we're talking about today. Yeah, I
3:11
Speaker 1: was gonna say that that, Um mel Brooks like really
3:14
Speaker 1: did his research because there's a there's a lot of
3:17
Speaker 1: reality in that people have done that kind of thing
3:20
Speaker 1: many times over the years, many times, and some are
3:24
Speaker 1: cooler than others. For sure. I can't wait to talk
3:27
Speaker 1: about the Seattle thing that's really cool. Well, which one
3:31
Speaker 1: is not cool? Let's start with that. Well, I don't
3:34
Speaker 1: know about not cool, but possibly not even didn't even
3:36
Speaker 1: really happen. Is in the seventeen hundreds there was a Russian,
3:42
Speaker 1: very famous Russian military leader named Gregory Timken because he's Russian.
3:47
Speaker 1: It's not Gregory, right, it's Gregory with an eye. I
3:51
Speaker 1: don't see a lot of that anymore, hey, greg Although
3:56
Speaker 1: it did have a friend in high school. His last
3:58
Speaker 1: name was Griggs though, all right, I take that back. Yeah,
4:01
Speaker 1: that's way different. But supposedly, as the story goes, they
4:05
Speaker 1: built under his guidance what we're called, um what was
4:09
Speaker 1: called a Potemkin village in order to impress Empress Catherine
4:14
Speaker 1: the Second as she came through town and like, here,
4:17
Speaker 1: look at this great fake town that she would think
4:19
Speaker 1: is real. And then they would supposedly strike the set
4:23
Speaker 1: and then go build it down river, and then she
4:26
Speaker 1: would see and I guess believe it was a different
4:28
Speaker 1: place and like, look, how great we're doing kind of thing.
4:32
Speaker 1: But then I believe, after more digging, historians have said,
4:35
Speaker 1: I don't think they actually did that. It was probably
4:38
Speaker 1: more of a let's get this place all cleaned up
4:41
Speaker 1: for her visit, and somehow history kind of changed that. Yeah,
4:45
Speaker 1: which is I mean, I buy that he was one
4:48
Speaker 1: of Catherine the great favorites of the court, so um,
4:51
Speaker 1: it's possible that he would have gone to all that
4:53
Speaker 1: trouble to please her. Um. Regardless of whether it happened
4:57
Speaker 1: or not. Potemkin Village is now like a whole term
5:01
Speaker 1: for any kind of fake facade that's used generally as
5:06
Speaker 1: some sort of propaganda. The fact that it was kind
5:08
Speaker 1: of like Catherine the Great um centric kind of leads
5:13
Speaker 1: to that that extension of government propaganda. And and there's
5:17
Speaker 1: a very famous North Korean village that's frequently referred to
5:21
Speaker 1: as a Pattempkan village to yeah, the peace village. How
5:25
Speaker 1: are you going to pronounce that North Korean name? I'm
5:27
Speaker 1: going to pronounce it as such Jong Dong. I think
5:31
Speaker 1: that's it. Uh. They also call it propaganda village, while
5:34
Speaker 1: they don't call it that, but other people call it that. Um.
5:38
Speaker 1: But you know the famous d m Z there the
5:40
Speaker 1: Demilitarized Zone, you can you know, you can see this
5:44
Speaker 1: very clean, lovely, modern, prosperous area of North Korea right
5:50
Speaker 1: there from the d m Z. But you know, as
5:53
Speaker 1: far as people speculate, there's really it's kind of just fake.
5:56
Speaker 1: There's nothing there. There's no people, there's no nothing. Yeah,
6:00
Speaker 1: And if you look like closely at it, there's no
6:03
Speaker 1: glass in the windows. Even like it's as far as
6:06
Speaker 1: pattemp and villages go. It's a halfhearted effort if you
6:09
Speaker 1: ask me. The Nazis did this too in World War
6:14
Speaker 1: Two too, you know, disgusting effect as well. Right, Yeah,
6:19
Speaker 1: they did an altered version of it. They took a
6:21
Speaker 1: real village UH and dressed it up in a way
6:25
Speaker 1: for that that suited their propaganda needs. But there was
6:29
Speaker 1: a place called UH. I think it's thair sheen stopped,
6:35
Speaker 1: but that might be wrong. So it was a it
6:38
Speaker 1: was a depot essentially, it was a sorting place for
6:41
Speaker 1: um Jewish Germans and um Jews from other countries the
6:46
Speaker 1: Germany had invaded there were shipped to this place and
6:49
Speaker 1: then they were sorted out and basically sent to different
6:52
Speaker 1: death camps around Germany. So so many people passed through
6:56
Speaker 1: this that even for the short time they were there,
6:59
Speaker 1: conditions were so bad ad that they would um, they
7:02
Speaker 1: would die while they were there. Plenty of people died.
7:05
Speaker 1: But the this thing was such a focal point, It
7:08
Speaker 1: was such a crux of this Nazi death machine that um,
7:13
Speaker 1: if it were you know, revealed for what it actually was,
7:16
Speaker 1: the Nazis plans would have been revealed to the world.
7:19
Speaker 1: So when the Red Cross said we want to see
7:21
Speaker 1: this place that we want to make sure everybody's being
7:24
Speaker 1: cared for appropriately. Um, the Nazis kind of started scrambling there,
7:29
Speaker 1: like give us two weeks. You know. It's funny as
7:32
Speaker 1: I was going to say, give us three weeks. You're
7:35
Speaker 1: you're way more aggressive on your schedule than I. Totally,
7:39
Speaker 1: that's very appropriate. Uh yeah, you know, they cleaned it up.
7:42
Speaker 1: They brought in apparently rose bushes. They changed the hospital
7:47
Speaker 1: to a library. They changed the gymnasium or as you
7:52
Speaker 1: would say in Germany, ga nasium into a place of
7:57
Speaker 1: prayer for the Jewish people. They shipped out out anyone
8:00
Speaker 1: who didn't look well basically, and only people who looked
8:04
Speaker 1: healthy and were in good health remain. And you know,
8:06
Speaker 1: they put a town square and made it look like
8:09
Speaker 1: a really lovely thing with swings and sandboxes and even
8:12
Speaker 1: a phony restaurant. And uh, what I didn't see was
8:16
Speaker 1: how it worked. It worked perfectly. The Red Cross came
8:21
Speaker 1: and we're like, oh, this is delightful, and left and
8:24
Speaker 1: then everything just got right back to business after that.
8:28
Speaker 1: So it served its purpose, Like it fooled the Red
8:30
Speaker 1: Cross into going back and telling the rest of the
8:32
Speaker 1: world like, no, the Nazis aren't running death camps. Come on,
8:35
Speaker 1: everybody relaxed. They've got a restaurant and rose bushes. So
8:39
Speaker 1: we know this only because of post World War two history, right. Um.
8:44
Speaker 1: The thing that I saw that makes it just just
8:47
Speaker 1: the the uey gouey evil topping on this horrible Sunday
8:53
Speaker 1: is um. They build it to the rest of the
8:56
Speaker 1: world as a spa town that elderly drewman Jews could
9:01
Speaker 1: go live in in peace and safely. Just when you
9:05
Speaker 1: think you've learned all the bad stuff the Nazis did, Yeah,
9:10
Speaker 1: here comes another one. I've never heard of this before. Surprising. Yeah,
9:14
Speaker 1: and I just wanted to reiterate, Chuck, I hate Nazis.
9:17
Speaker 1: I hate Nazis of today. I hate the Nazis back then.
9:20
Speaker 1: If you're a Nazi, I hate your guts. You can't
9:22
Speaker 1: stand you. You're You're terrible. You're on record. I'm with you.
9:26
Speaker 1: I'm on record too, So I feel like Chuck, Um,
9:29
Speaker 1: you can kind of swing the whole thing back around.
9:32
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily for propaganda, but um, there's there's decoy
9:37
Speaker 1: cities that were essentially created to um well to to
9:41
Speaker 1: act as decoys during wartime. Right yeah, and this was
9:45
Speaker 1: I think this was the initial seat of the idea
9:47
Speaker 1: for this topic. Maybe I don't think anyone said anything
9:50
Speaker 1: in or maybe they did. But the more I started
9:52
Speaker 1: kind of poking around, I was like, wow, there's been
9:54
Speaker 1: a lot of times in history where for one reason
9:57
Speaker 1: or another, a fake city was built old and once
10:01
Speaker 1: I started sort of unpeeling that onion, I was like, wow,
10:04
Speaker 1: there there's been all kinds of fake cities, and decoy
10:06
Speaker 1: cities was a big part of it in World War Two, uh,
10:09
Speaker 1: specifically in Britain what they did at first, it started
10:13
Speaker 1: out as something called a que site, which is when
10:16
Speaker 1: they just said, hey, let's put up like a fake
10:19
Speaker 1: factory or something that will divert uh. The German bombs
10:24
Speaker 1: that way and they'll waste some ordinances and they'll we'll
10:28
Speaker 1: get them off track and confuse them, and more importantly,
10:30
Speaker 1: they won't be bombing the real factories. Uh. And this
10:34
Speaker 1: was I believe the idea of someone named Colonel John Turner.
10:37
Speaker 1: And they said, well that bully to that, sir, that
10:40
Speaker 1: works so well, why don't you go out and build
10:43
Speaker 1: seven fake cities? And he went huh, And they said, hey,
10:48
Speaker 1: it only has to look like a city from a
10:50
Speaker 1: guy throwing a bomb out of a plane, so you
10:52
Speaker 1: don't have to get too fancy. Yeah, that was like
10:54
Speaker 1: a stroke of genius when they figured out, like, yeah,
10:56
Speaker 1: you don't. You can just do like the rough edges
10:58
Speaker 1: of it, because they remembered that they were hiding from
11:02
Speaker 1: bombardiers who were looking for cities that were undergoing blackouts,
11:07
Speaker 1: so that you know, there wasn't supposed to be much
11:09
Speaker 1: of the city visible at all. They would look for
11:12
Speaker 1: maybe somebody had left their door open accidentally, or someone
11:15
Speaker 1: had forgot to extinguish a street light, something like that.
11:19
Speaker 1: So they were able to just kind of make a
11:21
Speaker 1: few structures, put some scaffolding together, and then light it
11:25
Speaker 1: randomly here there, um, and all of a sudden you
11:29
Speaker 1: had the impression of, at least from you know, ten
11:32
Speaker 1: thousand feet or however high up you are when you
11:34
Speaker 1: drop bombs on British cities, um, that it looked like
11:38
Speaker 1: there's your target right there. And it actually worked to
11:41
Speaker 1: great success. It really did work, and they ended up
11:44
Speaker 1: being I believe the first site was called Starfish and
11:48
Speaker 1: so they ended up calling them Starfish Cities just from
11:52
Speaker 1: that first one. But initially they were called special fire
11:54
Speaker 1: sits or s f sites, And part of that had
11:57
Speaker 1: to do with the fact that after the bombing run
12:00
Speaker 1: would go through, they would go through and set little
12:04
Speaker 1: fires and set off a little explosions on their little
12:07
Speaker 1: fake scaffolded city. Uh so again, so the bombardier would
12:12
Speaker 1: look down and say, we got them. Look at that.
12:14
Speaker 1: Look at that beautiful, big firetown there. Yeah. And even
12:16
Speaker 1: more to the point, successive bombardiers that came the next
12:20
Speaker 1: night or whatever would be like, oh, that was the target.
12:23
Speaker 1: They hit it, and now that's where I'm gonna drop
12:24
Speaker 1: my bombs too. Beautiful. Yeah, it really was. And here's
12:28
Speaker 1: the thing though, you said they actually worked, uh and
12:30
Speaker 1: I bailed on you, but I'm back with numbers. They
12:33
Speaker 1: built two hundred and thirty seven of these uh starfish
12:38
Speaker 1: sites or starfish cities, and I think the estimates are
12:42
Speaker 1: they diverted about seven hundred bombing raids and potentially saved
12:48
Speaker 1: about three thousand lives. Pretty great, big success. So um as, Yeah,
12:54
Speaker 1: it was extraordinarily successful. But the British weren't the first
12:57
Speaker 1: um to come up with this idea and leave on
13:00
Speaker 1: little wasn't even the first to come up with it.
13:02
Speaker 1: It was actually our friends, um Leigh Francais uh in Paris.
13:07
Speaker 1: They decided in World War One that they were sufficiently
13:10
Speaker 1: concerned about German zeppelin bombing raids, which has got to
13:15
Speaker 1: be the slowest most just you know, terrible bombing well
13:20
Speaker 1: probably not terrible, but definitely the slowest bombing um around.
13:24
Speaker 1: So they said, we need to we need to find
13:27
Speaker 1: a different site and build a replica of Paris. And
13:30
Speaker 1: the whole idea was to like really rebuild a replica
13:34
Speaker 1: of Paris with the champsi Lisse and the Arc de
13:38
Speaker 1: Triomphe and um, like you don't I don't know if
13:41
Speaker 1: they had plans for an Eiffel Tower. Surely they did,
13:43
Speaker 1: but um they had it in three sections, and the
13:46
Speaker 1: first section they worked on was the industrial section, and
13:49
Speaker 1: eventually that that came to be the only one that
13:51
Speaker 1: was completed. But it sounded like it was pretty amazing. Yeah,
13:55
Speaker 1: I mean they had they were I would love to
13:57
Speaker 1: see pictures of this thing. Did you see pictures? It's
14:00
Speaker 1: pretty cool. I mean, how how to scale was it?
14:04
Speaker 1: It was giant, so they made it life size, but
14:08
Speaker 1: they used you know, um Chinsey materials, so they used
14:14
Speaker 1: like really kind of you know scaffolding like a skeleton
14:17
Speaker 1: of a giant building like that would serve as a
14:20
Speaker 1: like a fake industrial building. And then they would put
14:24
Speaker 1: some sort of like um opaque canvas over it or
14:28
Speaker 1: an opaque covering up subsort, and then light it from inside,
14:31
Speaker 1: so to a bombar deer, it looked like a glass
14:34
Speaker 1: ceiling industrial UM building at night. So they were doing
14:39
Speaker 1: stuff like that. They had UM they had like a
14:41
Speaker 1: little platforms that moved along that were carrying lamps, so
14:45
Speaker 1: it looked like trains moving around the area. Uh. They
14:49
Speaker 1: did it to to really great effect. UM. And apparently
14:53
Speaker 1: the only reason they didn't move on with the rest
14:54
Speaker 1: of the plan was because the French military got good
14:58
Speaker 1: enough at UM shooting down zeppelin's that the Zeppelin attack stopped.
15:03
Speaker 1: The Germans were like, you should probably figure out something
15:05
Speaker 1: faster than a zeppelin to to drop bombs from. Yeah,
15:08
Speaker 1: the difference is like, why are we building these fake cities.
15:10
Speaker 1: Look how slow that thing is. Somebody just shoot a
15:12
Speaker 1: flaming arrow that way, Yeah exactly. We can all just
15:16
Speaker 1: move to the left at our leisure and we'll all
15:18
Speaker 1: be all right. Well, all of this it's funny. Um
15:21
Speaker 1: ed helped us out with this one, and he kind
15:23
Speaker 1: of started out with a section that we're not going
15:25
Speaker 1: to cover about, like movie backlots. But I'm sure all
15:29
Speaker 1: of this stuff, I mean, in World War two and
15:31
Speaker 1: beyond was influenced by the fact that they're like, oh,
15:35
Speaker 1: wait a minute, we're making movies now where we build
15:37
Speaker 1: fake cities. It's a great effect. Like it ain't that hard,
15:42
Speaker 1: right exactly. I mean, it's just I guess it's it
15:46
Speaker 1: must just be one of those ideas that's out there
15:48
Speaker 1: where it's like, we needed a new city, but we
15:50
Speaker 1: don't want to build a whole new city, so let's
15:53
Speaker 1: just build a part of a city, just enough to
15:55
Speaker 1: kind of fool people from a distance. Yeah, the whole
15:58
Speaker 1: backlock thing, bat backlot thing is pretty. It's pretty. It's
16:02
Speaker 1: got its own interesting um story itself. The thing is is,
16:08
Speaker 1: if you stop and think about it, you're like, oh,
16:09
Speaker 1: they had a they had a fake barbershop there. Oh,
16:12
Speaker 1: they had a fake Victorian mansion there. It's like, if
16:16
Speaker 1: you really step back and think about it, you're like,
16:17
Speaker 1: who cares? But for some reason, there's something really engrossing
16:21
Speaker 1: about that kind of stuff. Oh I love it, alright,
16:25
Speaker 1: So that's a good set up there. You ready to
16:27
Speaker 1: take a break, I am, Chuck. Let's take a break
16:31
Speaker 1: right now, all right, and then we'll talk about Seattle
16:36
Speaker 1: stuff you should know, Nash stuff you should know. And
16:56
Speaker 1: speaking of Seattle, Chuck, we're gonna be in Seattle. Had
16:59
Speaker 1: a feeling you're gonna work a live show promo into this. Yeah,
17:02
Speaker 1: we're gonna be in Seattle on February one at the
17:05
Speaker 1: More Theater. That's last February. And this is actually happening
17:11
Speaker 1: to This isn't something we forgot to edit out, like
17:14
Speaker 1: these shows are going on come hell or high water.
17:17
Speaker 1: That's right, We're going to Seattle, to a real city.
17:19
Speaker 1: But one of the cooler stories I think in this
17:22
Speaker 1: episode is the fake city that Boeing built in Uh.
17:29
Speaker 1: This was Boeing was building B seventeen bombers at what
17:34
Speaker 1: was called Plant Number two, and that was a very
17:38
Speaker 1: dangerous place to work in World War Two and for
17:41
Speaker 1: obvious reasons. So they said, all right, here's what we're
17:44
Speaker 1: gonna do instead of building because what you typically do
17:46
Speaker 1: with like a decoy factory or que site or whatever
17:49
Speaker 1: is build something, you know, fifteen miles away. And they said,
17:53
Speaker 1: why don't we just build, like, build something that looks
17:56
Speaker 1: like the real thing. Fifth females away, they said, why
17:58
Speaker 1: don't we just shield our real thing by building an
18:01
Speaker 1: innocuous faketown on top of the factory. And that's exactly
18:05
Speaker 1: what they did they did. Have you seen pictures of this,
18:08
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is super cool. It's all about what
18:11
Speaker 1: it looks like from overhead. So again they didn't need
18:15
Speaker 1: to build everything exactly life size and exactly with great material.
18:20
Speaker 1: They built cars out of plywood, and the grass was
18:23
Speaker 1: like dyed burr lap and stuff like that. The trees
18:25
Speaker 1: were these weird kind of surrealist approximation of trees um.
18:31
Speaker 1: So when you were walking among this stuff, you're like
18:34
Speaker 1: that car is um cut off in half lengthwise, or
18:37
Speaker 1: that house is like all it is is like the top,
18:41
Speaker 1: you know, third in the roof. It's weird, but from
18:44
Speaker 1: overhead it really did a good job disguising it. And
18:47
Speaker 1: they would send Boeing workers up there once in a while,
18:49
Speaker 1: like hang laundry or sunbathe, or walk along the sidewalks
18:53
Speaker 1: and just to give the impression. And I was thinking
18:55
Speaker 1: about I'm like, that is a really dangerous thing to
18:57
Speaker 1: have your employees do yeah, so like, hey, if you're
19:02
Speaker 1: gonna take a smoke break, go up there. Yeah. But
19:04
Speaker 1: at the same time, if the if the building is
19:07
Speaker 1: gonna get bombed, whether they're up there in the building,
19:10
Speaker 1: I guess it doesn't really matter. So it's more good point,
19:12
Speaker 1: no more dangerous than working inside anyway. Yeah, that's a
19:15
Speaker 1: really good point. I didn't think about that. Uh. Yeah,
19:18
Speaker 1: they had, um, I think kind of the more ingenious
19:21
Speaker 1: things because obviously they're seeing it built, uh from way
19:25
Speaker 1: way high up where the bombers are, it couldn't look
19:29
Speaker 1: out of place, like in relation to everything else around it,
19:32
Speaker 1: So they couldn't just like stick it down there in
19:35
Speaker 1: any old order. They had to align the street grid
19:38
Speaker 1: with generally what was going on around them. And it's
19:41
Speaker 1: it's really cool. There's a cool website that has a
19:44
Speaker 1: lot of really great pictures of like and you know
19:46
Speaker 1: it's the time too, so this like super cool lady
19:50
Speaker 1: in like standing at the street corner. They got a
19:52
Speaker 1: little cheeky with the street signs Burlett Boulevard and Synthetic Street,
19:58
Speaker 1: so I think they ended up uh having a little
20:01
Speaker 1: fun with it, maybe a little. Somebody thought in the
20:06
Speaker 1: middle of World War two to put joke signs up.
20:08
Speaker 1: At least, that's pretty great, right. Um. Also, Chuck, I
20:13
Speaker 1: heard that those streets were so well lined up you
20:17
Speaker 1: could get on in the middle of that fake suburb
20:20
Speaker 1: on top of the Boeing building and drive straight through
20:24
Speaker 1: all the way to Portland's and then on to San Francisco,
20:27
Speaker 1: where we'll be on February two and very nice. So um, yeah,
20:34
Speaker 1: the whole Boeing thing, Luckily it never worked out. The
20:37
Speaker 1: whole reason that they did that was because they were
20:39
Speaker 1: on the West Coast in Seattle and they were worried
20:41
Speaker 1: about Japanese bombing raids that never happened. Um, obviously, I
20:45
Speaker 1: think it's possible. I mean I know that we in
20:51
Speaker 1: our book. I think on our chapter about Coma Kaze.
20:55
Speaker 1: This is a really book forward episode, isn't it. Um.
20:59
Speaker 1: The Japanese Actually there was a battle in the United States,
21:02
Speaker 1: but it was in Alaska. So I don't think the
21:05
Speaker 1: Japanese ever came to the West Coast, did they. Well no,
21:09
Speaker 1: I was just kind of kidding, like I think they
21:11
Speaker 1: would have known if there was, you know, a bunch
21:13
Speaker 1: of plane circling overhead, and they were just like, we
21:15
Speaker 1: just can't find where it's working. Just keep smiling, just
21:20
Speaker 1: keep pretending we're in a sober Uh. Sometimes the project. Uh,
21:26
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot of these I think they're
21:27
Speaker 1: well intended and they get off on the right foot
21:30
Speaker 1: and then it ends up being scrapped for one reason
21:32
Speaker 1: or another. But you know, it makes a great point.
21:35
Speaker 1: If you're the United States Military and you want to
21:39
Speaker 1: build some big facility somewhere, you you want to build
21:43
Speaker 1: it away from things, obviously, so it's a little more secretive.
21:46
Speaker 1: But you can't build it too far from stuff because
21:48
Speaker 1: you need workers, and you need equipment and shipping and
21:52
Speaker 1: construction and all the things that being close to things provide.
21:56
Speaker 1: So uh with the town of apix floor to a
22:00
Speaker 1: p I X, which will explain what that means in
22:03
Speaker 1: a minute. This was in Palm Beach County in the
22:06
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, where they bought up ten square miles in
22:12
Speaker 1: what was at the time kind of rural western Palm Beach.
22:14
Speaker 1: There weren't a lot of people around then because they
22:17
Speaker 1: wanted to build a factory. They were developing liquid hydrogen
22:20
Speaker 1: is UH fuel, and they're like, let's develop this fuel,
22:24
Speaker 1: will build this factory in another place nearby and we'll
22:26
Speaker 1: build a pipeline. Uh, And it just kind of never
22:29
Speaker 1: fully came to fruition, I think because they realized it
22:32
Speaker 1: was too expensive to ship liquid hydrogen that way. Yeah,
22:37
Speaker 1: they figured out it was cheaper to just put them
22:39
Speaker 1: in refrigerated trucks and drive them. So they actually did
22:42
Speaker 1: create the liquefaction plant to produce the hydrogen for the
22:46
Speaker 1: rocket fuel UM, but they just never went on to
22:50
Speaker 1: do UM the full project, which was built a worker's
22:54
Speaker 1: village to support the plant. And the whole idea was
22:58
Speaker 1: they were just going to say, this is a nilizer plant,
23:00
Speaker 1: and this is a basically, you know, a suburb, suburban
23:03
Speaker 1: town that's sprouted up around the fertilizer plant, just filled
23:08
Speaker 1: with normal people. Nothing to see here. This is a
23:10
Speaker 1: pix Florida Welcome and goodbye. But what does APIs stand for?
23:15
Speaker 1: This sort of the funny I'm not sure why they
23:18
Speaker 1: did this, but go ahead. So it was actually technical
23:22
Speaker 1: designation that that had to do with the project itself,
23:25
Speaker 1: Air Products Incorporated Experimental. So a pix UM you just
23:31
Speaker 1: remove the E and replace it with the X. You
23:33
Speaker 1: got a pix right and ED. Actually UM had a
23:36
Speaker 1: little editorial comment that I thought was pretty interesting, and
23:39
Speaker 1: he's like, I don't why would you possibly name the
23:42
Speaker 1: town like a technical term from the very project you're
23:46
Speaker 1: working on, the super secret rocket fuel. And he said
23:49
Speaker 1: that his wife Meg pointed out that, um, it actually
23:53
Speaker 1: worked pretty well, or it could work well, because if
23:56
Speaker 1: you heard people talking about a PIX, you just assume
23:58
Speaker 1: they were talking about that town of Florida and maybe
24:01
Speaker 1: not consider searching much further into what was actually being
24:06
Speaker 1: discussed when they were actually talking about the rocket fuel.
24:09
Speaker 1: Go Meg, Yeah, I thought so too. I think it's
24:11
Speaker 1: the first time we've heard from Meg, right, yeah, alright,
24:15
Speaker 1: I love it. Uh. This it's interesting. This is kind
24:18
Speaker 1: of functioning as a top ten in a way because
24:21
Speaker 1: we move on to yet another sub topic, which are
24:24
Speaker 1: paper towns. And I had never heard of this before.
24:27
Speaker 1: This is so cool. I need to talk to my
24:30
Speaker 1: buddy Rad, the cartographer out in Montana and see if
24:34
Speaker 1: he puts any uh trap streets or copyright traps in
24:38
Speaker 1: his work, because they were initially called trap streets. And
24:42
Speaker 1: this is when a map maker a cartographers drawing a map,
24:46
Speaker 1: and they even knew early on. They're like, hey, listen,
24:48
Speaker 1: anyone can just go out and print copies of these
24:50
Speaker 1: and then sell them. I did all the hard work,
24:53
Speaker 1: and now they're just going to sell these maps as
24:55
Speaker 1: their own. So they started putting trap streets, like made
24:58
Speaker 1: up streets in there. It's sort of like the brown
25:00
Speaker 1: Eminem's and the Van Halen writer. So they would know
25:04
Speaker 1: if they saw a map with their trap street that
25:06
Speaker 1: there was copyright infringement. Man, what a great analogy you
25:09
Speaker 1: just made the brown Eminem's. Yeah, that's the person I
25:13
Speaker 1: thought of. So, um, they're the This one particular story
25:17
Speaker 1: centers on aglow or a glow. No one on the
25:21
Speaker 1: planet has any idea exactly how to pronounce it. New York,
25:26
Speaker 1: Upstate New York and the cat Skills and uh, there
25:29
Speaker 1: was a firm that was basically two guys from what
25:33
Speaker 1: I could tell uh in the twenties who were making
25:35
Speaker 1: maps and they created that town, which is a an
25:39
Speaker 1: amalgam um an amalgam okay of their of letters from
25:45
Speaker 1: their name. So aglow Um New York is just it's
25:49
Speaker 1: one of those paper cities that didn't exist, and it
25:52
Speaker 1: was meant as a copyright trap, like you were saying.
25:54
Speaker 1: But the reason that Anglo New York is probably the
25:57
Speaker 1: most famous paper city is because it managed to fall
26:03
Speaker 1: um backwards into reality. It went from a fake town
26:06
Speaker 1: on a map to a real town in upstate New
26:10
Speaker 1: York in a weird roundabout way. Yeah, but we should
26:13
Speaker 1: say town very much in quotation marks, because there was
26:18
Speaker 1: not a lot going on there. There are a couple
26:20
Speaker 1: of ways the story went down, and the one I
26:23
Speaker 1: saw that seems most reliable is kind of the second one.
26:27
Speaker 1: But apparently there was a fishing lodge that was built
26:31
Speaker 1: after this map was drawn with a fake town name
26:34
Speaker 1: on it, the paper town, and they saw that it
26:36
Speaker 1: was near this place, so they just named it after it.
26:40
Speaker 1: They said, all right, that's the closest town. So this
26:42
Speaker 1: is now the Aglow Lodge farms fishing lodge. And the
26:48
Speaker 1: New York Times ended up reporting on it and said
26:51
Speaker 1: that some of the first guests there, one of them
26:53
Speaker 1: was a map publishing firm and official from a publishing firm,
26:58
Speaker 1: and said the owner said you should put this place
27:00
Speaker 1: on the map. Even though that was like a New
27:02
Speaker 1: York Times contemporaneous piece, I don't know if that's super accurate.
27:08
Speaker 1: I think the other ones is a little more accurate.
27:11
Speaker 1: Not only is that questionable. It's it's very confusing to
27:14
Speaker 1: like was the map was the map publishing executive one
27:18
Speaker 1: of the guys who created Aglow, New York? As the
27:21
Speaker 1: trap is it is it did things really come that
27:24
Speaker 1: full circle? Was it somebody from Rand McNally who would
27:27
Speaker 1: later use it to their advantage. I've got a lot
27:31
Speaker 1: of questions about was it a minotaur? But the second
27:37
Speaker 1: version um is, really it's not that much different. There's uh,
27:41
Speaker 1: somebody who decided to open a general store on the
27:44
Speaker 1: spot where that was marked Aglow. And the other thing
27:47
Speaker 1: about this too is the fact that this town became
27:51
Speaker 1: real in a certain way means that there was the
27:54
Speaker 1: monumentally coincidental fact that they happened to have the type
28:00
Speaker 1: of map that have been created by that firm that
28:03
Speaker 1: made up Aglow. Because remember, no other map is going
28:06
Speaker 1: to have that town. It's a copyright town that just
28:08
Speaker 1: one firm's maps would show. So they happened to have
28:11
Speaker 1: that firm's maps two when they decided to figure out
28:15
Speaker 1: where their general store was or their fishing latch was,
28:19
Speaker 1: and so they named this general store the Anglo General Store.
28:23
Speaker 1: But the weird thing about it is where Rand McNally
28:25
Speaker 1: comes in in this story. Yeah, and I will just
28:28
Speaker 1: in defense of that, I will say it was an
28:31
Speaker 1: s O gas station map. So I think those things
28:34
Speaker 1: were kind of everywhere. Uh that was my interpretation. Yeah,
28:39
Speaker 1: but I'm just pointing out it wasn't some like weird
28:41
Speaker 1: obscure map. It was a it was a pretty heavily
28:45
Speaker 1: it was a map in the rotation, you know. So
28:49
Speaker 1: they built this general store, Rand McNally comes along. They
28:52
Speaker 1: publish a map, uh, you know, seemingly using the other
28:57
Speaker 1: map because Aglow was on there, and they got sued
29:00
Speaker 1: but they said no, no, no, no, no, you can't
29:01
Speaker 1: sue us, like this is a town now that I'm
29:04
Speaker 1: standing in front of the ago. They had a press
29:06
Speaker 1: conference in front of the Anglo General Store. They didn't
29:10
Speaker 1: they didn't really, but they probably should have and said,
29:13
Speaker 1: you know, this is a real place. And you know,
29:15
Speaker 1: they ended up winning that case because of that, and
29:18
Speaker 1: at various times over the years, Aglow is sometimes on maps.
29:22
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's on Google Maps, sometimes it's not. I think
29:27
Speaker 1: the fishing lodge is there, but it doesn't go by
29:29
Speaker 1: that anymore. No, but it's there still. I mean, there
29:32
Speaker 1: is a fishing lodge there, but there is no the
29:35
Speaker 1: building of the general stores there, but I don't think
29:37
Speaker 1: it's a general store anymore. Right, I've seen both. I've
29:40
Speaker 1: seen that you can find the general store still. Yeah,
29:43
Speaker 1: I've seen that the fishing lodge and the general store there,
29:45
Speaker 1: which is kind of like putting both both UM stories together,
29:50
Speaker 1: and I guess they don't have to be mutually exclusive.
29:53
Speaker 1: I also saw mentioned that at its peak, UM a
29:56
Speaker 1: little mini town sprang up around either the general or
30:00
Speaker 1: or lodge or both, that there was a gas station,
30:04
Speaker 1: two houses. Um there, there was something happened. It came
30:09
Speaker 1: up out of the map, the map became reality. It's
30:13
Speaker 1: such a great story. And there's an author named Tom Green.
30:17
Speaker 1: He's a y a author. I've not heard heard of
30:19
Speaker 1: him and read his stuff, but he he wrote a
30:22
Speaker 1: book called Paper Towns that were Aglow figures into it.
30:25
Speaker 1: So apparently UM teens will show up once in a
30:29
Speaker 1: while and be like, I'm an aglow so by this stuff.
30:32
Speaker 1: They don't want you to know. Book by the stuff
30:35
Speaker 1: you should know book by Paper Towns. Yeah, I didn't
30:39
Speaker 1: even think about it. That's another book. It's another book
30:41
Speaker 1: by Rand McNally Atlas. If you've only if here's my advice.
30:47
Speaker 1: If you're a a person of a certain age who
30:49
Speaker 1: was literally never used a real map in your life
30:52
Speaker 1: and only interacted with digital interfaces by by an Atlas.
30:56
Speaker 1: By wrote Atlas, it's kind of fun. It's good to
30:58
Speaker 1: have around in case, you know, in case that it
31:02
Speaker 1: all goes down the tubes and we're all feral wandering
31:05
Speaker 1: around the country. I was road tripping with Emily recently
31:10
Speaker 1: and kind of reminiscing about, Yeah, I remember when you
31:13
Speaker 1: sat the pull over on the side of the road
31:15
Speaker 1: and get out the map and say, well, I think
31:17
Speaker 1: you can take this to this to this to get
31:20
Speaker 1: to that. Yeah, it was fun. It was a good
31:23
Speaker 1: sense of adventure that has now been ruined by technology.
31:26
Speaker 1: But also I've said before and I'll say it again,
31:28
Speaker 1: I think that, um it made people smarter in some ways,
31:36
Speaker 1: um than than today. Yeah. Again, I think we talked
31:40
Speaker 1: about like balancing your checkbook or something like that. You
31:42
Speaker 1: had to do that. Oh no, it was keeping bowling
31:45
Speaker 1: scores by hands, right. It's it's the same kind of thing,
31:49
Speaker 1: like having to stop and figure out where you are
31:52
Speaker 1: and where you're going and then how to get there
31:55
Speaker 1: on a map. So much different than like take a
31:57
Speaker 1: left in a hundred and eighty feet um, and I'm
32:00
Speaker 1: not like, I'm not mad about that. I use ways
32:02
Speaker 1: every time I drive that I don't know where I'm going. Yeah,
32:06
Speaker 1: but there's there's a qualitative difference in what your brain
32:11
Speaker 1: is doing when you're using ways and when you are
32:14
Speaker 1: looking at a paper map and figuring out yourself. Yeah,
32:18
Speaker 1: like I like knowing where the best breakfast burrito is
32:20
Speaker 1: in the next down I'm going to and the old
32:23
Speaker 1: rand mc now I didn't show you that. Should we
32:27
Speaker 1: take a break? Yeah, let's let's take a break. Okay,
32:31
Speaker 1: a question, breakfast burrito. We'll finish up after this. Stuff.
32:38
Speaker 1: You should know, stuff you should know, so UMO. One
33:00
Speaker 1: of the other reasons that people make fake towns is
33:03
Speaker 1: not to just um act as decoys, but instead to
33:07
Speaker 1: use for testing, often weapons testing. Probably the most famous
33:11
Speaker 1: fake town that has been used to test weapons is
33:15
Speaker 1: in Nevada. The Nevada is in Nevada, Nevada, Nevada, Nevada.
33:20
Speaker 1: You're right, the Nevada Test Site, UM, which in the
33:23
Speaker 1: fifties until the mid sixties I believe, was where we
33:27
Speaker 1: set off I think seven hundred plus nuclear bombs and
33:32
Speaker 1: we would often build little towns and be like, k boom,
33:35
Speaker 1: did you see what happened to that town? And yeah,
33:39
Speaker 1: I'm only a few miles from it, because that's what
33:42
Speaker 1: happened with I've've seen it called survival town. Probably the
33:45
Speaker 1: most famous one is the one where they actually shot
33:47
Speaker 1: a bunch of footage the Apple To test site, uh
33:51
Speaker 1: in ninety five, where they gathered six thousand people to
33:55
Speaker 1: watch from six miles away. I believe the army was
33:59
Speaker 1: about two to three miles away. And they built, you know,
34:02
Speaker 1: they built a bunch of stuff. They built some houses,
34:05
Speaker 1: built some buildings. They had a away station, some trailer parks,
34:09
Speaker 1: some cars, apparently a propane tank station. So they built
34:14
Speaker 1: a little bit of infrastructure. And this is the one,
34:17
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen, the very famous footage. And part
34:20
Speaker 1: of the reason they did this was to be able
34:22
Speaker 1: to show Americans like and scare them, say, here's what
34:25
Speaker 1: will happen to you of the you know, those mannequins
34:29
Speaker 1: dissolving into fiery blast right before your eyes. And by
34:33
Speaker 1: the way, you call your senator and tell them you
34:34
Speaker 1: want American defense spending doubled. Basically, very well known footage,
34:40
Speaker 1: but um one of these houses that it's called the
34:42
Speaker 1: bell And Building was manufactured by a company Bellon Manufacturing,
34:47
Speaker 1: who did steel panels. Uh. It was only six feet
34:50
Speaker 1: away and it survived very famously. The blast And was
34:54
Speaker 1: a legit, you know, tourist attraction for a long time.
34:58
Speaker 1: It may still be. Is it still there, Yeah, still is.
35:00
Speaker 1: There's a couple of houses that are still there that survived.
35:04
Speaker 1: One was a two story colonial or two stories something, um, yeah,
35:09
Speaker 1: colonial with a brick fireplace and chimney on the outside,
35:13
Speaker 1: and a lot of it survived. The other one was
35:15
Speaker 1: an all all straight up brick house, um, which I
35:18
Speaker 1: believe was the inspiration for the Commodore song. Brick house,
35:22
Speaker 1: that's right. And the one of straw did not make it. No,
35:26
Speaker 1: But if you looked inside those houses, they had like
35:29
Speaker 1: mannequins dressed up, some of them dressed to the nines frankly. Um.
35:33
Speaker 1: They had like frozen food, canned food in some cases
35:37
Speaker 1: fresh food. They had stuff, infrigerators, they had like they
35:42
Speaker 1: had oh yeah, that's right. That was the third one, right, yeah,
35:46
Speaker 1: fourth one? Okay? Um? Oh yeah, no yeah, what was
35:51
Speaker 1: the third one? Thet I don't know what's happening in
35:56
Speaker 1: my aging mind. Um, but the if you looked to
36:00
Speaker 1: see like the before and after, I have to say
36:03
Speaker 1: the mannequins fared pretty well. They got bounced around, they
36:06
Speaker 1: definitely weren't standing up anymore afterward, but they weren't like
36:09
Speaker 1: vapor either. Right. It's just great the test work. Our
36:14
Speaker 1: buddy Van Nostrin said he went to that site really
36:17
Speaker 1: one of the more amazing places he's been. Yeah, I'll
36:20
Speaker 1: have to check that out. Japan did something kind of
36:22
Speaker 1: similar with Project Ichiban and that this was post Hiroshima
36:29
Speaker 1: and Nagasaki when they're like, hey, we want to see
36:32
Speaker 1: like what radiation does to people and what radiation sickness
36:35
Speaker 1: might do. So they built a village that could actually
36:38
Speaker 1: be moved around. It was built on wooden skids, so
36:43
Speaker 1: you could move this village around two different uh, you know,
36:46
Speaker 1: and subject it to different levels of radiation to see
36:49
Speaker 1: what would happen. I think that was actually American built
36:54
Speaker 1: umulated to Japanese village. Yeah, because they're like, WHOA a
36:57
Speaker 1: lot of people died of radiation sickness. We weren't expecting it.
37:00
Speaker 1: I guess so because it was built on the Yucca
37:02
Speaker 1: Flat and that in Japan. It's a outside of Nagao,
37:07
Speaker 1: I know, big big with by me. So um. There
37:11
Speaker 1: are other cities that are built for testing not nearly
37:15
Speaker 1: as much destructive stuff as like a nuclear bomb. And
37:19
Speaker 1: there's one of the University of Michigan in ann Arbor,
37:23
Speaker 1: Um called m City, and it's basically like uh fake
37:29
Speaker 1: drive around town, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, No,
37:33
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody knows what I'm saying. Let me
37:35
Speaker 1: just rephrase that. It's like it's the it's like a um,
37:39
Speaker 1: it's like a town, a fake town that's really um
37:42
Speaker 1: car centric. It's like Los Angeles but in Anna Arbor, right,
37:46
Speaker 1: but fully like it's it's only fake in the sense
37:48
Speaker 1: is that there are fake buildings that no one lives there,
37:52
Speaker 1: like they really because what they're doing is there. Uh
37:55
Speaker 1: it's all in partnership with I believe, initially Forward, but
37:58
Speaker 1: I don't know who all is involved now to test
38:00
Speaker 1: driverless car, so they the streets have to be really
38:03
Speaker 1: real and the stoplights, like it has to really function
38:06
Speaker 1: as a real city if you want to really test
38:08
Speaker 1: driverless cars out. Yeah. I saw they even have like
38:11
Speaker 1: you know, crash test dummies as pedestrians and stuff to
38:14
Speaker 1: make sure the things stop when they're supposed to. It's
38:17
Speaker 1: pretty cool. And there's an app where if you are
38:21
Speaker 1: testing at m city, you will have access to an
38:24
Speaker 1: app that lets you like control different conditions around the
38:28
Speaker 1: fake town Truman Show. Yeah, I guess so, but you
38:33
Speaker 1: can use it on your phone. I don't know if
38:35
Speaker 1: they can really make it rain, although I bet you
38:37
Speaker 1: they can. I'll bet they can at the very least
38:39
Speaker 1: make the streets wet. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's
38:41
Speaker 1: a road condition. I mean, that's legit right. So that
38:48
Speaker 1: reminds me of something I went to when I grew
38:50
Speaker 1: up um in Toledo called Safety City. Oh, I think
38:54
Speaker 1: I've heard about this. It's so amazing. You you take
38:58
Speaker 1: your big will um and you go to Safety City,
39:01
Speaker 1: which is a small miniature fake town with like intersections
39:06
Speaker 1: and a railroad crossing and traffic lights, and you learn
39:09
Speaker 1: like what all the stuff means, like what do you
39:12
Speaker 1: do at a yield time? And you get to ride
39:13
Speaker 1: around on your big wheel like you're in a car
39:16
Speaker 1: driving around town. It was one of the better experiences
39:19
Speaker 1: of my young life until you that's amazing. Uh, there's
39:23
Speaker 1: another one that seems really creepy uh in every way,
39:26
Speaker 1: but it's hasn't come to fruition and it really isn't creepy.
39:30
Speaker 1: I think it's just the fact that it's called the
39:32
Speaker 1: Center Capital T Capital C and it's this billion dollar
39:37
Speaker 1: future fake city. Uh. That's they've been planning missing out
39:41
Speaker 1: since twelve. Uh. It's Pegasus Global Holdings. That's also creepy sounding,
39:47
Speaker 1: although it's probably completely innocuous. Uh. And the Center for
39:51
Speaker 1: Innovation again Capital TC and I and Testing and Evaluation.
39:56
Speaker 1: So it's the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, sorry,
40:00
Speaker 1: C I, T E. UH. And what they're doing it
40:03
Speaker 1: seems like, or what they want to do eventually. It
40:07
Speaker 1: seems like there's all kinds of testing that could go on,
40:09
Speaker 1: but a lot of it has to do with energy
40:12
Speaker 1: savings and you know, transporting energy, um, getting water from
40:17
Speaker 1: one place to another more safely. Uh. It just seems
40:22
Speaker 1: like transportation. It seems sort of like a catch all
40:25
Speaker 1: of anything that you would want to use the city
40:27
Speaker 1: for without having to block off real streets and pay
40:30
Speaker 1: real money and suffer repercussions from real damage and stuff
40:34
Speaker 1: like that. But it does seem to have a real
40:36
Speaker 1: focus on sustainability, like like the some of the projects
40:40
Speaker 1: also include UM like you could test UM low and
40:44
Speaker 1: low loss transmission lines remember and like I can't remember
40:49
Speaker 1: what episode that Like that is a huge problem with
40:51
Speaker 1: creating a renewable grid. Is there so much energy loss
40:54
Speaker 1: over time? Like you could test that. You could also
40:57
Speaker 1: test driverless cars um And have you seen the die
41:00
Speaker 1: grammar the renderings of this city. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
41:04
Speaker 1: It is. There's like a whole highway that comes into
41:06
Speaker 1: town just like a regular city. There's a rural area,
41:09
Speaker 1: there's suburbs, there's like a downtown area. It looks like
41:13
Speaker 1: it's going to be really great. And I could whoever
41:16
Speaker 1: thought of building that. I think it's one of those
41:18
Speaker 1: if you build that, they will come kind of things.
41:20
Speaker 1: But it sounds like they're having trouble convincing people about
41:23
Speaker 1: the second part, right, I bet it will happen at
41:26
Speaker 1: some point, I hope. So, yeah, And it's not creepy
41:30
Speaker 1: at all. It just at all of like all the
41:31
Speaker 1: capital letters really free to me. Right, No, But that
41:35
Speaker 1: on top of the idea that if you went to
41:37
Speaker 1: this place, it would be like a Twilight Zone episode
41:39
Speaker 1: where there's no one there. You've got like a city
41:42
Speaker 1: and no one's in it. That's just so creepy. That's
41:45
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why this is so this whole
41:47
Speaker 1: episode is me and gross. There's just some creep factor
41:51
Speaker 1: that's lurking right under the surface. Yeah, it's it's the
41:54
Speaker 1: same creep factor from like an abandoned city almost. There's
41:58
Speaker 1: just something creepy about infrastructure with no one there. Yeah,
42:01
Speaker 1: So I just want to give a shout out one
42:03
Speaker 1: more um for one more thing on Florida. We were
42:06
Speaker 1: talking about APIs Florida and reminded me that down in
42:08
Speaker 1: Dade County there's something called the Arrow Jet Facility and
42:12
Speaker 1: it was a rocket testing site, a missile testing site,
42:16
Speaker 1: and there is a missile in an underground silo still there.
42:21
Speaker 1: It's obviously not armed or anything, but there's some really
42:24
Speaker 1: cool Urban Explorer pictures of this this missile, usually from
42:29
Speaker 1: the top down, but somebody went figured out how to
42:31
Speaker 1: get down to the bottom. So they're like standing at
42:33
Speaker 1: at the base of this missile. It's towering over them,
42:36
Speaker 1: but it's it's in this weird overgrown area outside of Miami.
42:40
Speaker 1: It's really cool looking. To check it out on the Internet.
42:45
Speaker 1: It's like the bomb and Savannah in the ocean. They
42:47
Speaker 1: saw it, found that right, No, no, but they know
42:51
Speaker 1: where this is. Oh yeah sure. Uh so the last
42:56
Speaker 1: it's kind of fake city has been used a bunch
42:58
Speaker 1: of times by the military and by UM as we'll
43:02
Speaker 1: see later. Uh the modern police forces a k a.
43:07
Speaker 1: The mini military UM. But you know training centers every
43:12
Speaker 1: everyone from the FBI to the c i A to
43:16
Speaker 1: the army has training centers all over the country where
43:19
Speaker 1: they have fake towns built tactical villages. Um. You know,
43:24
Speaker 1: if you ever seen like Jodie Foster walking through the CIA,
43:29
Speaker 1: or was the FBI, she was FBI FBI training where
43:33
Speaker 1: you know the bad guys pop around the corner of
43:35
Speaker 1: a fake house like this is more along those lines. Basically, Yeah,
43:39
Speaker 1: that was actually either said at or meant to be
43:42
Speaker 1: um Hogan's alley at Quantico UM. And yes, she didn't
43:46
Speaker 1: look behind the door. Remember I didn't look behind the door,
43:50
Speaker 1: so um. Yeah. There's also Fort Polkan, Louisiana used to
43:53
Speaker 1: have a like a Vietnamese village for training before shipping
43:58
Speaker 1: out to Vietnam and the sixties UM for Irwin in Barstow,
44:02
Speaker 1: where the drugs kick in. They had um Afghani Village
44:06
Speaker 1: basically UM built for the U S military to train
44:10
Speaker 1: at UM. And then you mentioned the mini military today's
44:14
Speaker 1: police forces. UM. In the sixties, the US built two
44:18
Speaker 1: different fake towns on military bases. I didn't see which, UM,
44:22
Speaker 1: but in the United States there were two what were
44:25
Speaker 1: called Riotsvilles, and that was like an informal term forum
44:29
Speaker 1: and it was a place where local police officers or
44:32
Speaker 1: law enforcement could travel to these bases and be trained
44:38
Speaker 1: in violently suppressing protests. UM. In like a fake town
44:45
Speaker 1: that that simulated a real world situation. Yeah, this is
44:49
Speaker 1: one I think we should do a full episode on
44:52
Speaker 1: for sure. There's a new documentary out called Riotsville, USA
44:56
Speaker 1: that popped up I believe in just September of this year.
45:00
Speaker 1: Was this year, I think, so it's pretty recent and
45:02
Speaker 1: this actually may have been where I got the idea.
45:05
Speaker 1: I might have seen an article about this. But it's
45:07
Speaker 1: really interesting because then we can get into the Kerner Commission,
45:10
Speaker 1: which was basically this you know, in depth study of
45:15
Speaker 1: history and data where they concluded that hey, um, social
45:20
Speaker 1: welfare funding is is necessary in this country. UM. And
45:23
Speaker 1: it wasn't just as simple as like, hey, there's racism,
45:26
Speaker 1: so we need social welfare funding. It's hey, the way
45:29
Speaker 1: this country went and when everything happened with industrialization and
45:33
Speaker 1: where people live and where African Americans were coming out
45:37
Speaker 1: of Jim Crow like, it all aligned in this terrible
45:41
Speaker 1: perfect storm and imperfect storm where uh, we need to
45:48
Speaker 1: help take care of people a little bit more. And
45:51
Speaker 1: this was all reversed, and I believe it was a
45:54
Speaker 1: Johnson administration said Oh, actually, what we're gonna do is
45:58
Speaker 1: we're gonna take We're gonna divert all the money we
46:00
Speaker 1: can towards making the United States military or i'm sorry,
46:04
Speaker 1: police forces more like paramilitary forces and train them in
46:09
Speaker 1: you know, standing down these riots where people are asking
46:12
Speaker 1: for you know, basic human needs, right right, And as
46:16
Speaker 1: Ed points out, the fact that these two riots bills
46:18
Speaker 1: were built basically shows like no, it's essentially the official
46:22
Speaker 1: policy of the United States to like suppress protests brutally
46:27
Speaker 1: often rather than actually addressed like the actual issues that
46:32
Speaker 1: are causing unrest in the first place. So yeah, I
46:37
Speaker 1: think that we should, um, we should do an episode
46:39
Speaker 1: on that too. That's a great idea. Yeah, I want
46:41
Speaker 1: to watch that doc because I think there's just a
46:43
Speaker 1: lot more to it than an addendum here at the
46:46
Speaker 1: end of this one, for sure. And if only Riotsville,
46:49
Speaker 1: USA the documentary have been a book instead, that would
46:52
Speaker 1: have been the ultimate button anonymous episode, you know, it
46:55
Speaker 1: would have. I do want to mention a movie though,
46:58
Speaker 1: Joel Schumacher made a movie called tiger Land, which was
47:03
Speaker 1: the name of the training place in in Yeah, in Polk,
47:08
Speaker 1: Louisiana where it's sort of simulated an Asian jungle environment.
47:12
Speaker 1: Was Colin Farrell in tiger Land rated are coming to
47:19
Speaker 1: a theater ten years ago? Yeah? Or more? Um, well,
47:23
Speaker 1: you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since
47:27
Speaker 1: Chuck evoked the name of Colin Farrell, that obviously means
47:30
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm gonna
47:35
Speaker 1: call this a little more detail on our vinyl stereo exclamation,
47:41
Speaker 1: explanation and exclamation I make dear mrs stuff. You said
47:48
Speaker 1: in your episode on vinyl that stereo records are created
47:50
Speaker 1: by cutting the left right audio on the left right
47:54
Speaker 1: side of the record. Proove it's even more black magic
47:58
Speaker 1: ey than that. An old technology g WHI shellac records.
48:01
Speaker 1: The mono information was engraved from side to side with stereo.
48:05
Speaker 1: The mono information is engraved in the same way, and
48:08
Speaker 1: the side information is engraved up and down. Uh. This
48:12
Speaker 1: is then, I know, I mean that's still I mean,
48:14
Speaker 1: I can't even understand this. Uh. This is then turned
48:17
Speaker 1: into the left right audio using a process called midside decoding,
48:22
Speaker 1: which is basically duplicating the mid information phase, inverting it,
48:27
Speaker 1: and then adding it together with the mid and other
48:31
Speaker 1: side information. If that blew your mind as much as
48:34
Speaker 1: it did me when I got it explained, check out
48:36
Speaker 1: this article and this is uh. Uh just google sound
48:42
Speaker 1: processing mid side stereo and that will probably answer right. Ah.
48:49
Speaker 1: And that is from Marcus, who is also, by the way,
48:51
Speaker 1: not satisfied with our description of compressed digital audio. Sorry Marcus,
48:57
Speaker 1: but that is really interesting email. And it was one
49:01
Speaker 1: of those things like every once in a while we'll
49:03
Speaker 1: hear something from somebody and you just it almost like
49:06
Speaker 1: hurts in your guts that you didn't know that thing,
49:11
Speaker 1: or you didn't know it to that degree, you know
49:12
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like you almost want to go back
49:14
Speaker 1: and correct it somehow. Yeah, And we also should mention
49:17
Speaker 1: we got a few emails from other audio file uh
49:22
Speaker 1: people who also said, hey, you guys kind of glossed
49:26
Speaker 1: over the digital audio compression because there's a bunch of
49:30
Speaker 1: codex and ways of doing things. And uh, we also
49:34
Speaker 1: got a not very nice email where someone was like,
49:36
Speaker 1: you guys are playing your stuff wrong. Why bother? I
49:40
Speaker 1: didn't notice that one. But I mean, it's not like
49:43
Speaker 1: a how digital compression works episode. It was about final
49:48
Speaker 1: give us a break, everybody. Those were the people I
49:51
Speaker 1: was talking about when I made the disclaimer at the
49:53
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode, and they didn't listen to me. Yeah,
49:56
Speaker 1: that this, I'll send you the email. Then that nice
49:58
Speaker 1: guy he basically said, Josh, you Moneys will give away
50:01
Speaker 1: your records to someone who can play him right, Okay. Cool,
50:05
Speaker 1: And for the aspect of my record playing, so we're
50:10
Speaker 1: doing it wrong, but hey, we're living our best life
50:12
Speaker 1: and having a good time. Think as as my wife
50:16
Speaker 1: would say, Oh never mind, I'm not gonna say that. Okay.
50:19
Speaker 1: And that was from Marcus, right, that was from Marcus.
50:21
Speaker 1: Marcus was fairly kind about it. Cool. Thanks a lot, Marcus.
50:24
Speaker 1: Thanks for all the extra info. I mean, that's definitely
50:27
Speaker 1: something you can do to boost your chances of being
50:30
Speaker 1: on listener mails. Adding info that we just didn't know
50:32
Speaker 1: about in a nice way. Um, and if you want
50:35
Speaker 1: to be like Marcus and send us some extra info
50:38
Speaker 1: we didn't know about in a nice way, you can
50:40
Speaker 1: send it in an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart
50:43
Speaker 1: radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
50:49
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
50:52
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
50:55
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. One