Latest / Stuff You Should Know / SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Dragons: As Real as Mermaids

Transcript

SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Dragons: As Real as Mermaids · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Chuck here with episode 7 of the S-Y-S-K,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: not S-U-S-K, like we get in emails, Stuff You, Y-O-U,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Should Know playlist. Because we're getting weird, everybody. This episode's
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: on dragons. Dragons, colon, as real as mermaids.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: See what we did there?
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Dragonslayer Bryant. And, well, that's it. It's just the two
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: of us. We can make it if we try, Chuck.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Just the two of us. Dragons and us.
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: And the great Bill Withers.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Was that Bill Withers? I can't even say it with
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: a straight say. We just had the same conversation like
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: two months ago. I'm not doing it again.
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: Oh, about Bill Withers?
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, I didn't realize that that was a Bill
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Withers song. It was a good song. Lean on Me, though, man,
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: is just, whoa. I cannot take it.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Grandma's Bed.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: What is that? Is that a Bill Withers song? I
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: did not know that.
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: It's good. He's great. And we probably had this exact
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: same conversation.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: I don't know if we had that one or not.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: But you know who else I like? Who's a little
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: bit like Bill Withers? Not quite as cool, I guess,
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: if you're like a cool person. But George Benson was
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: amazing and still is. I think he's still around. You
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: ever listen to his stuff?
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but now I'm realizing that I, maybe I should
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: just not correct myself and let people be, send in
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: a bunch of emails.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. I love that. When we get
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: a million of the same emails.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: It's grandma's hands. I was getting it, John Denver's grandma's
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: feather bed kind of just was in the ether. So Gotcha.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Because we just talked about John Denver, about karaoke.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: Grandma's bed. Grandma's hands. The follow-up to Use Me Up.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: So dragons.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about dragons. Let's have a pleasant conversation
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: about dragons, shall we, Chuck?
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Dragons aren't real. And you'll notice by the title
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: of this episode, which is dragons colon as real as mermaids.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Mm, yeah.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: And it's funny because I think the week before this
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: comes out, Mermaids is our pick for the— Selects? The
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: select episode, so it aligns perfectly.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: That is perfect.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: The dragons aren't real.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Well, okay. Please stop saying that because you're crushing my dreams. Sorry.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: So when we talk about dragons, we have to say
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: right here at the outset that there's a lot of
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: different kinds of dragons.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: And typically when you think of like the flying winged,
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: usually long, maybe scaly.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: Fire breathing.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind of serpentine tail.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Sometimes it's even pointy like the devil.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Which we'll see why. That's considered a Western dragon. And
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: that is its own thing that kind of evolved from
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: a number of different traditions. But there's also the Asian dragon, which,
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: you know, has variations among different Asian countries, but it
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: generally seems to be kind of the same ancient Chinese thing.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: that's a totally different thing, and it evolves on its
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: own in isolation as well. And so because you've got
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: these different traditions of dragons that seem fairly similar in
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: a lot of ways, there's a lot of people out
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: there who say, wow, this is astounding. Every culture in
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: the world has some sort of tradition of dragons. And
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: that's kind of true, but throughout this episode we'll see
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: that's not really accurate. Nowadays it seems that way because
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: we have overlaid the idea of dragons over everything, but
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: if you really kind of dig into the past and
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: look into the nuance of some of these things that
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: we term dragons, they're very different. So it's a lot
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: more accurate to say that every culture in the world
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: has mythical beasts, some of which share a lot in
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: common with with our modern conception of dragons. And that's
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: probably where our modern conception of dragons came from was
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: all these different ideas of it in the ancient past.
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a book called An Instinct for Dragons written
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: by an anthropologist named David E. Jones about dragons and
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: dragons throughout cultures and across cultures. And there's a theory
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: he's got going, which is humans evolved and primates evolved
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: with a fear of three predators, basically, snakes, cats, which
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: are big cats, house cats, and eagles. And that a dragon,
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: it sort of makes sense that every culture sort of
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: has something like a dragon, because in folklore and myth
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: and storytelling, you might combine the three scariest things into
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: one super scary thing, and that is a dragon.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: Right. And you might say, like, well, wait a minute, like,
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: I think eagles are kind of cool. I'm not at
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: all scared. Sure. Number one, have you ever been around
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: an eagle when it was loose? I'll bet you'd be
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: kind of scared of it because those talons are serious.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: Or one that dive-bombed you?
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly. More to the point, though, or more to, I
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: should say, David Jones's point— this would be this fear,
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: this innate fear that humans have would be based much
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of eagles,
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the harpy
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: eagle in the sloth episode because they can mess a
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: sloth up. They can mess a monkey up too. So
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: this guy's premise is like we have these ancient fears
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: of these things and as we evolved and became humans
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: and started telling each other stories, these things combined, like
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: was basically the sum of all of our most primal fears.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And then, of course, if you look at ancient cultures,
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: they always had sort of mythical stories and folklore to explain,
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: you know, everything from weather phenomenon to things like volcanoes.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: And if they happened upon maybe dinosaur bones or whale
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: bones or then a story might go along with that
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: to explain it away. Like, you know, this was clearly
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: some huge lizard-like creature or maybe a snake-like creature, and
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: there was probably a story around it and why they
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: should fear it or usually some sort of a sacrifice
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: that they needed to make, you know, sort of in
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: lockstep with those stories. But that's just sort of another
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: theory on maybe how the dragon might have come about
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: as far as folklore goes.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: we should say no one has a widely accepted answer
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: for this, which I love as always. Sure. But that
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: it was the bee, that the description often in ancient cultures,
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: they used to use like riddles and exaggeration and metaphor
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: to discuss and talk about and describe actual things. A
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: description of a bee, or I should say a swarm
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: of a bee, is what actually became the dragon in mythology.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: And at first, you're just like, that doesn't make any
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: sense at all. But some of the points that these
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: people made, there was a journal article in it. I
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: think like a journal on Tolkien studies or something like that.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: But they say that a bee swarm moving together... It
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: doesn't necessarily resemble a dragon, but it makes a lot
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: more sense along those lines than it does when you're
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: talking about an individual bee.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: It does in a cartoon.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It can make an arrow to point in a direction,
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. And
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: then another one is that the fire, the idea of
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: a dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the feeling
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: of like your skin burning from a bee sting or
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: the intense pain. And then lastly, in the Western tradition,
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: a lot of dragons protect like mounds of gold or treasure.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: And that this is a metaphor for honey and gold,
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: like the honeycombs that ancient people would have used. basically
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: considered gold, not just, you know, food, but also it
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: was used as medicine as well. So if you kind
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: of put all that together, it seems like a pretty
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: interesting theory, at least. It makes a lot more sense
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: than a bee, you know, when you really kind of
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: dig into it.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. The word itself is, well, you can look
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: back to the Iliad when Homer wrote about the D-R-A-K-O-N,
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: the dracon, which supposedly is the first known use of
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: the word. And ancient Greek sort of has some confusing
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: etymology behind it. But basically, Homer uses that word to
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: describe snakes.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Like unequivocally.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And not, you know, huge flying fire-breathing snakes, but
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: just snakes. Yeah.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He even says, no, I'm just talking about snakes, everybody.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: Not dragons. Don't get ahead of yourself. These are snakes.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: And, I mean, they say that, like, he points out
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: that he's talking about snakes because he even says a chimera,
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: which is, I think, the head of a lion, the
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: goat body, a serpent tail, and bat's wings. He even
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: says the serpent tail, the back portion of the chimera,
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: is a dragon. So he's talking about just regular old
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: snakes for sure.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and other writers and other classical stories did the
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: same thing, whether it was Dracontus or Draconis, using all
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: these words sort of interchanging. with other words for snake.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: But then we go to the history of, not the history,
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: but just the history of animals. And that's the first
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: sort of scientific take on the Dracone, which is an
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: enemy of the eagle because an eagle as a bird
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: of prey would eat snakes, obviously. And different people got
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: a little more specific in later writings as to what
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: kind of snake. But it's still just snakes. Yeah.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: So over time, like that's where the word dragon came from.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: It was a word for snake. That's it. And then
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: over time, as people started to exaggerate here or there,
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors that aren't
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: found in snakes but saying that they were. And they
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: all kind of put that under the umbrella word for
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: snake's dragon. It seems like the legend or the myth,
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: the mythical version of dragons started to kind of plump
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: up and grow. Yeah.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: And this is a point Ed, the Grabster, put this
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: together for us. But Ed points out something I kind
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: of never really considered. Back in the day, in the
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: classical period, writers were writers. They weren't like, hey, I'm
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: going to write only about natural history and I'm only
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: going to write fiction and myth and storytelling like writers
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: just wrote. So there were people that wrote natural history
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: tomes and also myth and storytelling legends. And so a
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: lot of this stuff could get kind of mixed up
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: and confused, exaggerated. Mistranslation is a huge, huge deal. Yeah.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: And a lot of this is sort of where the
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: sort of myth of the dragon came from.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: I just think of, like, some writer getting confused what
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: they were working on that day, and now we have
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: the myth of dragons.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: It's like, was this real or not? I can't remember.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: Who cares?
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, like, you really hit upon something really important. Mistranslations,
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: or a different way to put it is lazy translation,
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: have really kind of changed our idea of what people
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: were talking about in the ancient world. And I can't
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: imagine how much nuance and understanding has been lost. Oh, sure.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: probably dumb in a lot of ways ancient people seem
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: compared to how they actually were because of this tradition
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: of like um people translation that was passed down over
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: the year people yeah that's very cute and the the
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: reason why it's kind of lazy translation is it seems
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: like anybody who came across an ancient text or a
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: text in another language um who's translating something into english
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: is And they seem to be describing anything even remotely dragon-like.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Any mythical beast, anything that might have wings, anything with
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: a serpent tail, anything that breathes fire. Boop, dragon. It's
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: a dragon. And then now, those of us who have
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: a certain... compartmentalized idea of what a dragon is, everything
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: was a dragon. And now we've reached that point where
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: it's like, this is how we got this idea that
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: every culture has dragons. No, we just kind of lazily
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: translated what other cultures were talking about into dragons along
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: the way. Right.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: I think that is a great first act.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. I'm bowing.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: I'm throwing roses at your feet.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: And we're going to take a little break, Aruni, and
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: be right back.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: So the rose petals i sent you arrived in time
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: just in time thank you for throwing them and not
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: saving them for something.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: Else I also realized I just went all Ned Flanders
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: with the break-a-rooney. I've never said that before in my life.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: I liked it, though. It was refreshing. We need that
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: kind of wet-behind-the-ears, you know, wholesomeness right now, Chuck.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, in year 14?
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: No, not just us. I mean the world.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: Okay. You know? Yeah, up with Flanders.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, up with Flanders. That's right.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: So my favorite thing always about Flanders is when he
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: would be really buff. Like every time he took off
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: his shirt magically.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: Stupid sexy Flanders.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: It's hilarious. This is so funny. He ascribed it to
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: a healthy dose of vitamin church. Right. Oh, man.
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: I love it.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah. All right.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: Where were we here? Giant snakes.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. We talked about them. We were talking about mistranslations
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: were a big problem. And I think a good place
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: to start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the Sumerian legends wrote about something called the Usum, U-S-U-M,
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: also called dragons or, you know, at least referred to
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: as dragons now. And these were kind of like you
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: said at the beginning. These were just sometimes just large monsters,
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: large scary things, and not necessarily a dragon, but was
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: sort of just translated as dragon.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I should say Sumer, not Sumeria. But these
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: were like their gods that they were talking about. These were,
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: you know, like the goddess of water who gave birth
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: to the world. Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: that explained, you know, where they came from, where the
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: world came from, where the sun came from. And we,
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: along the way, translated that to dragons. Right.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: So luckily there are scholars who have learned to speak Akkadian,
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: I guess the world's oldest spoken language, A-K-K-A-D-I-A-N, not the
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Canadian group that the Cajuns come from. This is different.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: So we understand now that there's much more nuance, much
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: more detail to it. But I think the upshot of
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: this is that there were conceptions of like, fire breathing
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: and like flying serpents and like potentially malicious, malevolent, evil,
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: mythical beasts that would resemble kind of what we would
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: understand as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: And, you know, this course goes straight to the Bible
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: as well in Revelations. There's a lot of talk about
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: the archangels, archangels battling a great dragon. In this case,
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: the dragon is Satan. But again, this is sort of
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: a translation, like Satan was always sort of the serpent,
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: at least in Genesis, it first appeared as a serpent.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: And so, in the end, Satan is also a serpent,
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: but spelled, you know, with the D-R-A-K-O-N, like the ancient Greek.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, is that right?
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but there's, you know, I mean, not in the
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: King James Version and stuff like that, obviously.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: But again, you know, pre-translation. And, you know, there were
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: sort of renderings of this, of the big war for heaven,
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: and this is when we see, you know, kind of
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: what we would see later on, which is metaphor for
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: good versus evil in a big battle.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: So that's what William Blake's Paradise Lost is about, right?
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: I've never read it.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: I haven't either. I'm just familiar with it from that
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: movie Red Dragon.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: About the Silence of the Lambs prequel, I think.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: Oh, sure.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He's like, do you see.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: You remember when Ralph Fiennes has got poor Philip Seymour
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: Hoffman strapped to that wheelchair? Oh, man. And he's showing
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: him crime scene photos.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: I had a spoiler coming. Didn't love that movie. It
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: was okay. But that shot of that burning wheelchair and
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: body going down the parking deck is one of the
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: most sort of chilling images I've seen in movies.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: I know. The thing that chills me about it, though,
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: is it's an antique wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate those.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: You don't like those, huh?
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: No, I think we just talked about it recently. And I,
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: for the rest of my life, I will be creeped
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: out by those things.
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: I'm going to get you one. Slide whistle with this Christmas.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Next Christmas, you're just.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: Going to get an ancient wicker wheelchair.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: I don't want to be wasteful, so I won't throw
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: it away and I'll just have to live among it.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: It's going to be terrible. Like I'll never get used
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: to it either.
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: You could make a.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: A life-size chuck dummy put it in there and set
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: it on fire and roll it down a parking oh.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't do that i'd make a life-size version of
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: chuck and just talk to you be like listen i
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: got a lot of stuff to say to you that's
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: even creepier but you're gonna sit there and listen to
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: it i'll be wearing nothing but an apron.
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: Just like a real doll with a big fake beard
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: oh man OK, so, yeah, good versus evil is sort
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: of how a lot of these tales and folklore play
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: out and also incorporating stuff that you would see time
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: and time again in literature later on. Like there's a
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: dragon that lives out by itself near a village and
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: it's a greedy, vengeful dragon. And we need to appease
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: this dragon with sacrifice once a year or else it
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: will come down and like rain fire upon everyone.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so all of this stuff, like this idea, this
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Western dragon that you're describing, that's taken from Beowulf, I believe,
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: the dragon that killed Beowulf. I always thought it was
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: a Norse legend, but apparently it's English, Old English. It's
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: just set in in the Netherlands or in Scandinavia in
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: the Norse I think I don't remember exactly where it's set.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: It's just set there. It's not written by them. But
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: that dragon was malevolent, and I believe it was guarding treasure.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: I think the reason it went berserk and Beowulf had
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: to kill it was because somebody stole one of its
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: golden goblets, a.k.a. honey, because they're really talking about a bee.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: But so you have an idea of a greedy, murderous
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: dragon that protects treasure and Like that comes from an
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: ancient tradition, but that's a pretty standard feature of dragons
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: like you were saying.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So all this is going on for many, many,
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: many years. Finally, the rubber kind of meets the road
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: as far as Western dragons are concerned with the legend
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: of St. George, who was a Christian saint, a real
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: Christian saint, maybe a real person who may have been
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: a Roman soldier. who was tortured and killed for converting
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: pagans to Christianity. This is circa 4th century AD. And
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: because of stories getting passed around like a game of telephone,
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: the actual first name of that story when it was
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: told was St. Theodore, but it was really St. George.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: So I saw that they're both possibly... known as dragon
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: slaying saints.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: It's not necessarily like George took that from Theodore. They're
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: both known for having slain a dragon. But what's interesting
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: is if you see St. Theodore depicted with his dragon,
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: it's very clearly a crocodile. And the origin story of
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: either one, but particularly St. George, is that there is
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: a town in modern day Turkey or possibly Palestine, I'm
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: not 100% sure, but in what would have been called
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Anatolia back then where they had the spring like this
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: town got their water from the spring and it was
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: guarded by a giant massive crocodile and that the townspeople
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: would sacrifice a sheep to sometimes two a day basically
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: to distract the crocodile so they could go get the
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: water and then get out of there. And then they
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: ran out of sheep. So they said, well, what comes
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: after sheep? How about maidens? So they started throwing maidens,
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: sacrificing maidens, literally throwing them to the crocodile to distract
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: it so they could get the water. And eventually they
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: came upon the king's daughter. They drew straws to see
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: what maiden would go next. And St. George apparently arrived
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: just in time to slay the dragon, a.k.a. the crocodile.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: But that's this idea that that's where this story of
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: somebody slaying a dragon could have been rooted in reality.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: That over the years, this massive crocodile, which was so
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: fearsome and so murderous and killed so many people, was
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: converted into a dragon over the years. And so St.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: George slew the dragon. And that's where that came from.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: And there was a real crocodile that lived by a
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: real spring. Right. That's pretty cool.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought so too. I love it when something
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: that seems totally legendary is rooted in some sort of fact.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: It's just people embellished or exaggerated over time. Totally.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: Uh, if you want to go with the sort of
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: real great first image of what we think of as
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: a Western dragon, uh, you can go to 1260 AD, uh,
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: in an illustration in a medieval, uh, bestiary called MS
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: Harley 3244. Uh, Great title. I think Ed said it
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: was probably a catalog designation.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the real title is Peraltus' Theological Miscellany.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, which is, that's an actual great title.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like MS Harley 3244.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: It's cool looking though. You can, if you're near a
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: laptop or something, you can look this thing up and
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: it is, you know, you look at it and this
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: is exactly what you think of as something from like
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. Yeah,
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: it's like, it's a dragon.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: It's how a scene starts, you know?
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: So, oh, sorry, I see what you're saying. Like the
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: dragon that shows up in there specifically, the red one?
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: Well, no, I just mean sort of the dragon that
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: we all think of in sort of literature and folklore.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: Like this is clearly that.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And supposedly it's the first one from around 1260.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: Did you say that? Yeah. So, and yeah, when you
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: see it, you're like, yes, this is probably the basis
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: of the Western dragon as we understand it. And it
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: would have spread to Europe which it did I think
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: that was English it was by a guy named William
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: Peralt and I believe he was English so it would
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: have spread from England to the rest of Europe and
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: that that kind of set the stage for at least
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: the visual version of the Western Dragon from that point
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: on thanks to England Dan right I think we said
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: English Dan it's England Dan oh is it English Dan
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: makes way more sense yeah England Dan's a little weird
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: yeah But hey, England Dan was a little weird.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: But your nickname is America Josh.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Sure. How about All-America Josh?
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: Should we take a break now and talk about Asian dragons?
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's. All right.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: We'll be right back with a kinder, gentler dragon right
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: after this.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Chuck, you mentioned something. You said kinder, gentler dragon.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: It's true. Western dragons are generally, in the tradition, murderous, greedy,
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: wealth hoarding, Jerks.
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: Boo.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: Who may be pure evil personified.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: An Asian dragon, which everybody has seen, at the very
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: least in like a photo of a street parade. Yeah.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: Or in some sort of like a Chinese silkscreen or
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: something like that. An Asian dragon is typically much more
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: benevolent than that and usually is associated with rain and water,
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: that kind of thing. And so when you see those,
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: like a dragon being paraded around where it's a bunch
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: of people like under like a dragon costume, that's actually
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: based on a very ancient rain dance, essentially a ceremony
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: to invoke rain because these dragons were associated with that.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: And this is far, far, far older than in the West.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: I think in about 6,000 BC, there were people in
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: China that were carving little dragon jade figurines. And there
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: was art back then, I think as far back as
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: 400 BC, where it's clearly some kind of dragon. But again,
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: supposedly independent from the sort of evolution of the Western dragon.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so all of this was based on some
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: of the early Chinese religion It was based on animism
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: and not just Chinese, but a lot of ancient religions
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: are based on animism where like an inanimate object is
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: symbolic of like a larger thing or like the god
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: of wind or the god of rain. And so these
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: ancient dragons were considered gods of rain. And there were different–
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: there's different types. There's different kinds. But again, like the
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: fact that they are generally– um beneficial to humankind rather
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: than harmful i think is is it's it's interesting it's
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: i wonder what that says about the two different cultures
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: if anything you know that dragons are harmful and they're
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: going to kill you and they're going to steal all
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: your gold or they're going to bring the rain that's
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: going to grow the food that saves your family you
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: know where did that diverge or did it just they
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: just don't have anything to do with one.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: Another yeah that's interesting um Sort of a side note,
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: I've been playing video games some during the pandemic, which
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: I'm usually not a big gamer. But I've been playing
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: a game lately called Ghost of Tsushima, which is you
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: play a samurai warrior that's sort of traveling through Japan
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: in ancient times.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: And it's really interesting to compare that to like the
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: analog for the West would be like Red Dead Redemption
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: in the Old West with gunslingers.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: And it's just such a different... game design and everything.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: It's the, the one in Japan is, or the ghost
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: of Tsushima is so peaceful. It's one of the most
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: beautiful games I've ever seen. And instead of like a
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: map telling you where to go, you press a button
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: and the wind guides you. And if you see a Fox,
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: you follow the Fox up to a shrine and you,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: and you pay your respects to the shrine. And it,
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: it doesn't really get you much other than it's not
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: like you get like a million points or something for
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: doing that. It seems like they really tried to honor
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: Japanese traditions in so much of this game. And the
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: motivations are always pure. Like even when you're slicing guys
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: up with your katana, it's because you're rescuing some old
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: lady in a village.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: Whereas the other game is just like, hey, just go
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: and just pillage and murder and do awful things.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: Shoot them up, yeah.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: It's really interesting. I'm much more enjoying this game.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Well, you said something that struck a memory in me
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: about dragons. There's a commonality between Asian dragons, particularly Chinese dragons,
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: which are called long or lung, L-U-N-G, and Western dragons.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: And typically they live in isolated areas away from everybody.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: And in Asia, the chinese dragons usually live in old
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: ruined temples like that's where you'll find them dwelling oh
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: interesting there are plenty of those in that game exactly
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: so are there dragons in that.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: Game not yet but now i'm kind of wondering oh.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah look out it's pretty early because i did run
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: across a japanese type of dragon that um That is malevolent,
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: not very nice. I don't remember the name of it,
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: so I guess be on the lookout for all of them.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: Interesting. Yeah, so far there's nothing supernatural. It's Mongols that
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: are the bad guys. I gotcha. Yeah.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: And then there's another type of Japanese dragon I ran
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: across called Ryu. And this one actually bears a lot
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: in common to the intelligent Western dragon in that it
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: writes poetry.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: Hmm.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it uses shed scales from its belly as paper.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: And I don't know what it uses for ink, but
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: I think it uses its tail as a pen, a quill.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: The blood of a virgin?
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: Writes poetry. Yeah, there you go.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: It's like that was a sweet story.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: It's super nice except for that one thing. Yeah.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: Oh, if we could just get it some ink.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: There's something else I think people should look up here
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: if you're looking up images, which is an artist named
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: Chen Rong, C-H-E-N-R-O-N-G. Yeah. A very famous painter in Asia
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: of dragons. And this was like 13th century AD. And
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: if you look up some of this stuff, it's really,
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: really neat looking.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah. About the same time as Peraltus' Theological Miscellany was
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: done with that first Western dragon, Chen Rong was making
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: these just amazing works of art. I think one of
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: them's in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Oh, cool.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: It's called like Nine Dragons or something. But it reminded
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: me of the artwork in the original Scary Stories to
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Tell in the Dark series.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: I never read that.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Dude, that artwork in there is just amazing. But it
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: has like all these weird kind of splotchy clouds of ink.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: And Chen Rong makes use of that as well. It's
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: really kind of startling how closely the two resemble. I
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: wonder if the artist from... Scary Stories of Telling the
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: Dark was inspired by that in some way.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: I bet. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: No. No, that's not ripping off at all. I don't
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: know why you'd even say that. Why would you even
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: bring ripping off up?
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: So we should probably talk about famous dragons at this
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: point because we've thrown a couple out, like the one
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: from Beowulf, who apparently doesn't even have a name.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: I mean, you know, there are so many stories in
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: literature about and movies, obviously, that have had dragons throughout
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: the years. Certainly Tolkien in the mid-1930s when he wrote
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: The Hobbit. This was a really evil dragon and, you know,
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: drawn from that Western sort of influence of evil dragons.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Smaug, right?
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, S-M-A-U-G. Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s was a
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: very big sort of I don't know how much dragons
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: had fallen out of the sort of pop culture eye,
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: but it really brought it back in if it did
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: fall out. Because in the game, there were different kinds
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: of dragons. There were a couple of different sets who
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: were indicated by different colors. Red, green, black, white, and blue,
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: I think, were evil. And then there were the bronze, brass, silver,
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: and gold, which were, for the most part, good. And
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: they all had different things they could do and different
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: temperaments and Something that we talked a little bit about
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: is the fire breathing thing. There are lots of different
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: theories as to how that came about. Maybe the tie
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: to Satan with fire early on when they were just serpents.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: Perhaps they were drawn spitting venom and that could have
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: looked like fire.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: But there's always some sort of breath emitting weapon going on,
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: it seems like.
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Over time it's translated into, um, I think like
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: the white dragon in Dungeons and Dragons blew like basically ice,
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: like cold. Um, some dragons, uh, uh, blew out electricity, um,
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: which you would think would be kind of new, but
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: apparently the Leviathan, which is mentioned in the Bible is
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: a sea dragon, basically supposedly spit electricity out. Um, But
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: there's something weird coming out of the dragon's mouth that's
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: probably going to kill you.
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't want to test that.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: No. And we were saying also that the first visual
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: depiction of the dragon shows up in Harley 3244. The
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: first mention of the dragon in like a story, like
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: a fictitious story, supposedly comes in Spencer Edmonds' The Fairy Queen.
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah?
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then it shows up after that a little
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: while later in Marie Catherine Dolnois' The Green Serpent. And
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: then it just kind of takes off from there.
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: You know, you have a connection to Pete's Dragon, right?
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: I do. My friend Toby was a producer on Pete's Dragon.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for the remake, obviously.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, which was really, really good. good and, and touching and,
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: and tear jerking a little bit.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: I never saw the remake. I need to check that out.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: It's, it's very good. They did a really good job
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: with it.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: Uh, but you know, if you haven't seen the movie
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: rain of fire, just stop what you're doing and watch
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: that because that is the King daddy of all dragon movies.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: I have not seen that. Do we, should we pause,
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: come back and finish the episode after?
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: It's great. It's one of those movies that, um, I
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: don't know how well it did at the box office.
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: I don't think super well, but it's one of those
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: that has really become sort of a cult classic since
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: then with McConaughey and Christian Bale. It's so over the
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: top and just so fun. It's really, really good.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of like the Pacific Rim of dragon movies?
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Or Starship Troopers of dragon movies?
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: Oh, man, that's another great movie.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: There's also Puff the Magic Dragon. Don't forget him.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: God, the saddest song of all time. My mom taught
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: my daughter that. It's the worst.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It has nothing to do with pot. So just,
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: you know, forget that, hippie.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: It's just sad.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: It is a very sad one. And then also I
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: think our younger listeners would be really mad if we
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: didn't mention Dragon Ball Z. Right.
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: And there's, you know, I didn't watch Game of Thrones,
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: but I know there were little trained dragons in that one.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: That grew.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And Chuck, it's just so satisfying to look over
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: all of the different depictions of dragons that you see
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: and all the differences and all the similarities and realize
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: that all of them are talking about bees. Yeah. You know? Totally. Yeah.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: You got anything else? I got nothing else.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: There's dragons.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: Well, if you want to know more about dragons, head
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: out to a ruined temple or maybe go search for
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: gold in a cave and you might encounter one yourself.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mails.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: This is a story about corn and poop. Oh, God.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: Hey, guys. Here's my corn story. One I've repeated often
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: throughout my lengthy life. I just turned 70. Woo-hoo.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: Nice. Happy birthday.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: So this is from Mary. Mary's 70. Well, not happy birthday,
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: but happy decade turning.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: What does that mean?
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: I think birthday still works.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: No, but it wasn't her birthday necessarily.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: Happy decade turning? I don't know what I'm saying.
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, like when you hit 70 or 60 or 50. Sure.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: No, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm just
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: saying it's a new thing.
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: It's a rich history of saying happy, the song, happy
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: decade turning.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: What song is that?
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: Happy, happy decade turning.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: Is that a Bill Withers song?
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: You made it another 10 years. Lean on me.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: That's good. You guys see Jay's hands there.
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: Man, I think I awkwardly got my way out of
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: that really awkward sentence.
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: You did. It was really good.
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: I grew up in Houston, Texas, guys. One blazing hot
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: summer day when I was about three or four, I
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: was out in the driveway standing around kind of checking
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: out the neighbor kid who was in her driveway, who
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: was about two. It's hotter than the blazes. Her name
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: was Bianca. She was younger than me and still in
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: the diaper phase of life, but it was so hot
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: she wasn't wearing a diaper or anything else. Nature called
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: to Bianca and voila, a couple of little poos were
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: deposited on the cement. Being a curious child, I went
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: over to check it out and lo and behold, they're
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: in the poop. Embedded securely but definitely visible were corn kernels.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: Unmasticated yellow against the brown corn kernels.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, no, we got it. Just the corn kernels.
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: Thusly, I've never been able to look at corn nor,
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: God forbid, eat corn literally in any form ever since.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: I could see that happening if it hit you in
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: just the right way, especially at a certain age.
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: Yep. She says, not even corn pone. Which I had
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: to look up. I didn't even know what corn pone was.
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: It's like cornbread, I think.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Not even corn pone? Good God, how have
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: you lived 70 years without corn pone?
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: A great emotional scar was born that day. The only
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: benefit of that experience is that whenever I want to
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: gross anyone out, I just pull out the corn and
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: the poop story. All adults hate it. All children are
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: gleefully grossed out by it. Love your show, guys. Especially
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: when y'all wander off topic and then wander back. I
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: think in the chili pepper episode, y'all wandered over to
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: Yoko Ono, which was interesting. And that is from Mary
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: Foy in Issaquah, Washington.
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks. Well, yeah, I guess thanks in quotes. Mary,
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: for that one.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: I love it.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: But thank you also for listening to us. If you
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: want to write in and kind of gross us out
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: like Mary did, we're always up for that kind of thing.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: You can take your best shot. Send it off to
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: production of iHeartRadio.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.