Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Josh and Chuck here,
Speaker 1: Jerry's there too, Dave's here kind of and this is
Speaker 1: short stuck.
Speaker 2: This I think is sort of why we started short Stuff.
Speaker 2: This is the perfect little bite size topic and this one.
Speaker 2: The articles that I used to cobble this together were
Speaker 2: from houstuffworks dot com and the Chicago Tribune and one
Speaker 2: of our old favorites Atlas Obscura. Hey, oh, let's talk
Speaker 2: mood rings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you were alive in the mid seventies
Speaker 1: and probably over the age of eight, there's a good
Speaker 1: chance that you had a mood ring.
Speaker 2: Chuck, I did not. I believe my sister did though.
Speaker 1: Sure of course your older sister, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, six years older. So that was right in the wheelhouse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they just kind of came out of nowhere
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five. There's a couple of theories of
Speaker 1: who came up with it. As we'll see in a
Speaker 1: few months, forty million mood rings sold. And then, just
Speaker 1: like everything else that was a fad in the seventies,
Speaker 1: pet rocks, well, pet rocks, it was just gone as
Speaker 1: fast as it came along.
Speaker 2: Key parties, cocaine, all that stuff went away.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's amazing how fast and how lucrative this flash
Speaker 2: in the pan was invented. And there's a couple of
Speaker 2: stories here about who introduced this thing. Most people point
Speaker 2: to in nineteen seventy five Maris Ambats and Josh Reynolds
Speaker 2: as the inventor's. Reynolds, as the story goes, at least
Speaker 2: was a Wall street worker and was very stressed out
Speaker 2: with that high stressed job. Said I'm going to I'm
Speaker 2: going to drop out. I'm gonna start getting into biofeedback.
Speaker 2: I'm going to open a meditation center. It's called the
Speaker 2: q Tran Ltd or q Tran Limited. I guess, sure,
Speaker 2: And he said, I got a ring that actually produces
Speaker 2: mood feedback. So the idea is that you can you
Speaker 2: can see how you're doing literally by looking at the
Speaker 2: ring on your finger, and then know where you are
Speaker 2: if you're anxious, if you're upset, if you're chilled out,
Speaker 2: and what you need to do, like you might need
Speaker 2: to meditate or come and pay me money to come
Speaker 2: to my center.
Speaker 1: Sure, And there's actually like legitimacy to that with biofeedback
Speaker 1: in particular, where if you can recognize what emotional state
Speaker 1: you're in, you can actually take steps to get out
Speaker 1: of it. If it's a negative emotional state, you can
Speaker 1: sure purposely relax your muscles, like your neck muscles. You
Speaker 1: can try breathing exercises that slow your heart rate a
Speaker 1: little bit, like it's And that's the point of it.
Speaker 1: It's to be aware of your emotions. And so exactly,
Speaker 1: and what he was coming up or you could do
Speaker 1: some cocaine. Sure, what he was coming up with was
Speaker 1: this ring that you could just look to and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's my mood. I need to like, I'm actually anxious,
Speaker 1: so I need to do.
Speaker 2: Some yoga, yeah exactly, which is pretty smart. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: that's one. Maybe we should. Now let's go ahead and
Speaker 2: talk about the next guy. Okay, before we take our break.
Speaker 2: The other story, which doesn't have a whole lot around it.
Speaker 2: Like on the internet, almost everyone points at Josh Reynolds
Speaker 2: and Maris Ambats, But Marvin Wernick was a jeweler, and
Speaker 2: some people say he invented the mood ring kind of
Speaker 2: the same year, basically nineteen seventy five, because he saw
Speaker 2: a doctor put a thermotropic tape to the forehead of
Speaker 2: a child to measure their temperature, and thought, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: that's a great idea. If we could just measure our
Speaker 2: body temperature and sort of see it, you know, beyond
Speaker 2: like a readout but see a color. I could market that.
Speaker 2: And he didn't get a patent. And I don't think
Speaker 2: we said earlier Josh Reynolds didn't get a patent. It
Speaker 2: takes a while to do that. And like we said,
Speaker 2: this thing was a really quick flash in the pan.
Speaker 2: And so by the time any of these guys tried
Speaker 2: to get a patent, it was kind of over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was one guy who has a patent, Chinese
Speaker 1: inventor who patented it in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 1: But even still, like by the time that I mean
Speaker 1: just by the time Josh Reynolds tried it, it was
Speaker 1: over nineteen ninety seven. It's like, why would you even
Speaker 1: waste your money on that?
Speaker 2: But well, I think that's not too dumb though, Like
Speaker 2: it could come back in a do in different way, okay,
Speaker 2: and then this dude holds the patent. Not a bad idea, okay, fine, especially, oh,
Speaker 2: I could see doing that because the seventies were in
Speaker 2: again in the nineties. Yes, some you can retrend hats
Speaker 2: off unnamed Chinese inventor, like I am the patent to
Speaker 2: parachute pants.
Speaker 1: That would be lucrative.
Speaker 2: I bought that in the nineties and everyone's like, what
Speaker 2: are you doing?
Speaker 1: Man? Did you ever have parachute pants in the nineties.
Speaker 2: No, I was, you know, we didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of money to buy like the bachetable stuff, and that
Speaker 2: was never in the the uh. I never can remember
Speaker 2: the name. But whatever the thing is where your shoelaces
Speaker 2: have one too many eyes, or your zippers backwards or whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh the like factory seconds. But there's another name.
Speaker 1: For him too, factory rejects.
Speaker 2: I don't know. But anyway, that's where I was shopping, right,
Speaker 2: and the parachute pants never came through there. I probably
Speaker 2: would have gotten them had I had the opportunity.
Speaker 1: Well, I had some and they sure something else you
Speaker 1: were rich. They were not like, these were not really
Speaker 1: nice high They weren't like Arimez parachute pants or anything
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: I don't even know what that is.
Speaker 1: Ames is a very high end luxury brand, okay, and
Speaker 1: I don't think they ever made parachute pants. And now
Speaker 1: that a joke sucks because I had to explain the
Speaker 1: whole thing.
Speaker 2: Oh no, let's go to break. You should have say Gucci. Alright,
Speaker 2: let's go to break, all right, Charles, I know what
Speaker 2: Gucci is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I should have said Gucci.
Speaker 2: Or Polo.
Speaker 1: Okay, that joke is in the rear view about cost.
Speaker 1: So we're talking mood rings, after all, and not just
Speaker 1: mood rings. They came out with like mood pendants, mood chokers,
Speaker 1: mood bracelets, anything to show you what your mood was.
Speaker 1: And if you kind of start diving into mood rings
Speaker 1: or what later became called like mood jewelry biomod biomood
Speaker 1: jewelry or truth jewelry, there's an actual like function of
Speaker 1: those rings. It's not a stone. It's not magic or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Well, it's magic if you find science magical.
Speaker 1: But there's a pretty easy explanation for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, and before we get to that, like the
Speaker 2: question is do mood rings work? And the answer my
Speaker 2: Chuck's answer after reading a lot about this is kind of.
Speaker 1: I have the same answer kind of kind.
Speaker 2: Of Yeah, they're definitely not They're definitely not bs or bunk.
Speaker 1: No. But at the same time, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people who think that they're real think that it's
Speaker 1: actually sensing your emotion. It's not. It's just sensing minute
Speaker 1: changes in temperature on your skin.
Speaker 2: That's right. So how these work is is it's got
Speaker 2: a sometimes a little hollow glass container mounted in a ring.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it was like a clear glass stone on a
Speaker 2: little thin sheet of these liquid crystals. And inside the
Speaker 2: clear glass container were these thermotropic liquid crystals.
Speaker 1: Yes, which I looked up and I cannot make heads
Speaker 1: or tails of what they're used for specifically or it's
Speaker 1: everything about it is like all nothing but science direct,
Speaker 1: and it's all our cane.
Speaker 2: I wonder if what's it called when you can like
Speaker 2: predator heat sensing.
Speaker 1: Thermal imaging.
Speaker 2: Yeah, has that got anything to do with it?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think so. I saw that
Speaker 1: it's used in displays, but I didn't see how or
Speaker 1: what kind of displays.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, liquid crystal displays. I geah, LCDs, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess so LCD sound System, Sure.
Speaker 1: They use thermotropic liquid crystals.
Speaker 2: Sure, but at any rate, as my friend Josh would say,
Speaker 2: the upshot is these liquid crystal molecules are just super sensitive,
Speaker 2: and they are very sensitive to temperature in particular, and
Speaker 2: when temperature is affecting these crystals, they will twist around,
Speaker 2: they'll move positions depending on that temperature. And what happens
Speaker 2: then is when they're twisting around, they are affecting the
Speaker 2: light spectrum. And that is why it is literally color.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like they twist one way, they reflect blue, so
Speaker 1: the thing looks blue. They twist another way because of
Speaker 1: a change in temperature, they reflect black or green or
Speaker 1: something like that. I think amber is another one. And
Speaker 1: so the reason that this isn't actually bunk is because
Speaker 1: your skin does undergo minute temperature changes when your mood changes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what they did was they basically calibrated the temperature
Speaker 1: of an emotion, your skin temperature when you're experiencing some
Speaker 1: emotion or a kind of neutral emotion, and figured out
Speaker 1: what color that creates in the thermotropic liquid crystals. And
Speaker 1: then they basically said, well, if your mood ring is
Speaker 1: this color, you're probably experiencing this emotion. So it's they
Speaker 1: cobbled together like a bunch of different things that are
Speaker 1: real and put them together in something that it's kind
Speaker 1: of real.
Speaker 2: That's right. I think it's kind of cool that they
Speaker 2: came up with an average on the color scale, which
Speaker 2: is green, based on your average body temperature. So that
Speaker 2: makes sense. And then you know, we can go through
Speaker 2: the colors here. Sure, green is normal. Like I said,
Speaker 2: if you go up on the scale you go to
Speaker 2: the bluish green, that means you're kind of relaxed. If
Speaker 2: you are blue, you are calm slash relaxed. And then
Speaker 2: if you're dark blue, if it really goes blue, that
Speaker 2: means you're feeling like really good. You're like maybe passionate
Speaker 2: about something a little romantic or super happy. And then
Speaker 2: it goes down the scale from amber to gray to black,
Speaker 2: from you know, nervous or anxious to very nervous or
Speaker 2: anxious to just really feeling super stressed.
Speaker 1: Right, and so again it kind of makes some sense.
Speaker 1: When you are feeling passionate, you're probably a little bit flushed, sure,
Speaker 1: and so your skin temperature is going to increase. When
Speaker 1: you're anxious, you actually start to feel a little bit cold,
Speaker 1: and your skin temperature decreases. I'm not sure if it's
Speaker 1: calibrated so accurately that you could divide it like that,
Speaker 1: but right, sure, it's possible. It's not like completely out
Speaker 1: of the realm of possibility. The point is it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter anymore because mood rings aren't really around.
Speaker 2: That's right, and there are a lot of other things
Speaker 2: that go into your emotional state beyond the temperature of
Speaker 2: your skin. So that's why I firmly land on it
Speaker 2: kind of works.
Speaker 1: I think that's great and another.
Speaker 2: For a teenager in the seventies to buy it exactly.
Speaker 1: Chuck delivered as verdict on mood rings, which means short
Speaker 1: stuff is out.
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