Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today is going to be one of our invention episodes,
Speaker 1: the first of a series. In fact, we're going to
Speaker 1: be doing a couple of episodes on the history and
Speaker 1: invention of document duplication. And I think this is a
Speaker 1: fantastic subject for our show because one of our favorite
Speaker 1: things to do is, uh, look at something that is
Speaker 1: so mundane that you don't even notice it's there anymore,
Speaker 1: and rediscover what's strange about it. And I think documents
Speaker 1: are a wonderful example of that, because documents are kind
Speaker 1: of it's the fish asking what is water? Situation? We're
Speaker 1: Documents are such a fundamental part of our our culture
Speaker 1: and our our economic and legal lives that we we
Speaker 1: don't even stop to thing in what life would be
Speaker 1: like without them. Yeah, just for many of us in
Speaker 1: a given day, Just think how many documents we create
Speaker 1: or we abandon or delete. Uh, you know, we create
Speaker 1: them for matters that are serious, but also matters that
Speaker 1: are trivial, work related, personal. Um. You know, we'll just
Speaker 1: we'll just create a new document at the drop of
Speaker 1: a hat. But but just even considering like the basic
Speaker 1: idea of document duplication, which we're going to be covering. Uh,
Speaker 1: just you think about like sending an email, I send
Speaker 1: you an email of a document, and uh, a copy
Speaker 1: of that document is saved for my purposes, and then
Speaker 1: if you respond to me, uh, that probably also has
Speaker 1: another copy of the original document at the bottom. Um.
Speaker 1: So all of this it just occurs without us putting
Speaker 1: any effort into it at all. You know, It's funny
Speaker 1: how much that in particular connects to something we'll talk
Speaker 1: about later in this episode, which is that early mechanical
Speaker 1: processes for document duplication, we're often very focused on replicating
Speaker 1: outing correspondence. This is a thing that was incredibly important
Speaker 1: for for business and legal and personal purposes all throughout
Speaker 1: the years. You wanted to have a copy of a
Speaker 1: letter that you were going to send to somebody else
Speaker 1: so you could remember what you said. Uh, And that
Speaker 1: just happens automatically now because of course we're we're sending
Speaker 1: most of our messages digitally. Yeah. Absolutely, So first of all,
Speaker 1: let's just back up and just think about the document itself. Um,
Speaker 1: and we've touched on some of this before, just talking
Speaker 1: about the history of of writing and language. But a
Speaker 1: document is essentially human thoughts committed to a medium via
Speaker 1: writing and or drawings, And in this way such thoughts
Speaker 1: can be recorded, clarified, preserved, and passed onto others across
Speaker 1: space and time, in many ways, transcending what is possible
Speaker 1: via merely spoken language. Right, and there's there's actually a
Speaker 1: great little description that I I'd like to borrow from
Speaker 1: Arthur C. Clark's two tho one of Space Odyssey. In it,
Speaker 1: uh Clark is describing the music of Mozart playing on
Speaker 1: the spaceship Discovery and refers to them as quote, the
Speaker 1: frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for
Speaker 1: twice a hundred years. One of the interesting things about
Speaker 1: Mozart is Mozart goes back to a time where we
Speaker 1: don't even have original recordings, so we we don't have
Speaker 1: audio recordings of anything that Mozart would have been present
Speaker 1: for the playing of in his own lifetime. All that
Speaker 1: we can get is Mozart's music through documents written as
Speaker 1: sheet music and translated to people who would reproduce it
Speaker 1: years later. Yeah, So the the amazing thing about documents
Speaker 1: in general is that, you know, while translation is often required,
Speaker 1: we can still essentially take documents from centuries or millenniago
Speaker 1: and kind of you know, resuscitate them, rehydrate them so
Speaker 1: that these desiccated thoughts can come to life again and
Speaker 1: resonate once more inside of living human brains. The document
Speaker 1: is a code that allows you to briefly hatch the
Speaker 1: virus of someone else's thoughts from a different time and place. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So documents have been with us for a very long time,
Speaker 1: dating back to the late fourth millennium BC and Mesopotamia
Speaker 1: at least. While some scholars believe writing may have spread
Speaker 1: from culture to culture, the majority see it as a
Speaker 1: situation of independent invention in the various major civilizations of
Speaker 1: the ancient world, as it becomes increasingly important to record
Speaker 1: trade data, laws, histories, and more so. In other words,
Speaker 1: the advancement of these civilizations requires the use of documents now,
Speaker 1: as humans possessed neither perfect document recall or unlimited memorization
Speaker 1: storage space. One of the things about official documents like
Speaker 1: this is that their use often necessitated duplication. Now, to
Speaker 1: illustrate this, I thought we might go back a good
Speaker 1: years for an example from the Neo Babylonian period. Um.
Speaker 1: The source I was looking at here was Neo bab
Speaker 1: Bolognian record Keeping Practices by Heather D. Baker, published in
Speaker 1: two thousand threes Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions. In this
Speaker 1: the author discusses the importance of duplication in these ancient
Speaker 1: documents systems, um and and and to be clear once more,
Speaker 1: the Neo Babylonian period here we're talking about b C
Speaker 1: through b C, so we're not going back super far
Speaker 1: in the written record, but we're still going back quite
Speaker 1: a ways. What did they do? How did they make
Speaker 1: copies of their important documents? They did not have photocopy
Speaker 1: of machines yet, right, So she points out that first,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's linguistic evidence for the use of
Speaker 1: copies various words that concern um the duplication of documents.
Speaker 1: And then we of course have examples of surviving copies
Speaker 1: from ancient times as well. Though she contends that the
Speaker 1: use of copies is probably underrepresented in the archaeological record,
Speaker 1: and specifically with this example, with these examples from this
Speaker 1: time period, we're talking about private contracts a lot of
Speaker 1: the time inscribed on pillow shaped tablets, pieces of clay,
Speaker 1: complete with info, signatures and dates. Okay, so you'd have
Speaker 1: like a clay tablet and you'd make inscriptions in it,
Speaker 1: indentations or markings in it. That would be a record
Speaker 1: of some kind of transaction usually right, and she writes
Speaker 1: quote whatever form they took, private archival documents were written
Speaker 1: and kept primarily as proof that an obligation existed or
Speaker 1: have been discharged, or as evidence of title to property.
Speaker 1: And of course this is uh, this is not that
Speaker 1: far removed from our current use of documents. Um. She
Speaker 1: points out some extremely relatable reasons for duplication of such documents,
Speaker 1: though um and and again these are reasons for dul
Speaker 1: duplication that are largely still with us today. She brings
Speaker 1: up the division of inheritance between three parties, in which
Speaker 1: each party would require a valid document to demonstrate their
Speaker 1: entitlement to an estate portion. She um. Also, she mentions
Speaker 1: the idea of a person, say, inheriting three different pieces
Speaker 1: of property and then selling one of them off. This
Speaker 1: individual would need a copy of the original agreement to
Speaker 1: pass on to the buyer, but would need to keep
Speaker 1: the original document pertaining to the items they didn't sell off. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the tablet, the physical document, uh, provides a sort
Speaker 1: of authorization of how things are, how things should be.
Speaker 1: They give you legitimate claim to something beyond just saying
Speaker 1: this is mine, right right, you know, And and it
Speaker 1: creates a paper trailer, I guess in this case, a
Speaker 1: tablet trail. Um. But another interesting thing that that she
Speaker 1: brings up that I didn't even think about, because on
Speaker 1: one hand, okay, let's say talking about an agreement between
Speaker 1: two parties. Obviously both parties need to have a copy
Speaker 1: of the agreement so they can look at it and like, oh,
Speaker 1: what did we say about that property line or whatever? Well,
Speaker 1: let's look at the document. But another factor here is
Speaker 1: that and this is something explicitly stated in the records.
Speaker 1: According to Baker, two copies of an agreement are made
Speaker 1: because then neither party can alter the writing of the agreement,
Speaker 1: or rather you can alter it, or the other person
Speaker 1: can alter it. But each side has a copy of
Speaker 1: the original. So you know, you're not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to change things in your favor on both documents because
Speaker 1: you do not have possession of both copies. Two copies
Speaker 1: I guess keep both parties honest. I see, so if
Speaker 1: only one party had a contract, they could go get
Speaker 1: ascribed to make a new one that said something different
Speaker 1: and then say this was always the way it was,
Speaker 1: and all all you could do is say no, it wasn't.
Speaker 1: But you wouldn't have anything physical to point to write,
Speaker 1: she writes. Quote. As far as record keeping practices are concerned,
Speaker 1: it is impossible to determine whether a duplicate was prepared
Speaker 1: at the time of the original transaction or later, except
Speaker 1: when the particular phrase and she shares this phrase, uh
Speaker 1: is present, indicating a copy made from an older, damaged original.
Speaker 1: Now that this is I thought this was interesting because
Speaker 1: if you have points out that, okay, obviously some of
Speaker 1: the time you might be creating that duplicate copy the
Speaker 1: time that the original is authored. Like we're entering into
Speaker 1: this agreement, we need two copies, we need three copies,
Speaker 1: what have you. But then there are gonna be other
Speaker 1: cases where oh, well, we need to make a copy
Speaker 1: of this document for some purpose, or this document is
Speaker 1: broken or is decaying, or is something damaged about it,
Speaker 1: and we need to make sure that the information of
Speaker 1: on on that tablet survives, uh, the decay of the medium.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes we can't tell which type of copy
Speaker 1: something would be when looking at it. But it's not
Speaker 1: always necessarily clear whether something is the original or a
Speaker 1: copy made concurrent with the original, or a copy made later, right,
Speaker 1: except in some circumstances where there's some sort of linguistic
Speaker 1: clue and uh, and yeah, this this idea too, of
Speaker 1: the need for document duplication, because the media upon which
Speaker 1: documents are inscribed, they just inherently deteriorate. And and that
Speaker 1: is the case throughout most of human history, whether you're
Speaker 1: dealing with clay, tablet or um you know, some sort
Speaker 1: of oracle bones or certainly parchment um. You know, these
Speaker 1: are not things that can last forever. But in many
Speaker 1: cases we want the information to last beyond the lifestyle
Speaker 1: time of that particular physical medium. She also points out
Speaker 1: the documents were also copied in the course of scribal training,
Speaker 1: and the resulting duplications may have found their way into
Speaker 1: private archives. Oh that's interesting. It makes me wonder, if
Speaker 1: you know, because of course many texts that existed in
Speaker 1: the ancient world no longer survived that we don't know
Speaker 1: of any copies that exist, maybe they're buried out in
Speaker 1: the desert somewhere, but we don't have any that are
Speaker 1: available to us. And I wonder if some of the
Speaker 1: texts that came through from the ancient world and plentiful
Speaker 1: supply actually came through, maybe not because they were important
Speaker 1: in themselves, but because they were, like example, texts that
Speaker 1: people practiced copying text on. Now, in that same book
Speaker 1: that Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions from two thousand three,
Speaker 1: there's another author who touches briefly on duplication, and this
Speaker 1: is closs our Vinhof discussing documents kept by old Assyrian traders.
Speaker 1: And this is interesting because we we've talked I think
Speaker 1: we've talked about this on the show before in the past,
Speaker 1: where you have your dealing with with with with clay
Speaker 1: tablets here, but you also have you have envelopes around
Speaker 1: some of those tablets, stamped clay envelopes. Uh. So obviously
Speaker 1: there's only one way to get You're not gonna be
Speaker 1: able to get the original out of that, uh that
Speaker 1: that envelope. That envelope is sealed for a reason. You know,
Speaker 1: It's it's about sort of like binding the information inside it.
Speaker 1: H So In cases like this, you would need a
Speaker 1: duplicate of a copy that is sealed inside the envelope. Ah, Okay,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. I mean it would be much the
Speaker 1: same I guess as if you had a you know,
Speaker 1: it's like if your your grandmother gave you a gift
Speaker 1: wrapped for Christmas, and it was important to you to
Speaker 1: to to keep that gift wrapped within at within that package,
Speaker 1: but you also wanted to know what she gave you
Speaker 1: for Christmas, so you also had a copy of the
Speaker 1: toy that wasn't contained within that package, and you just
Speaker 1: kept the actual gift, uh wrapped the entire time. Doubles
Speaker 1: is better or triples is best? Actually yes, So these
Speaker 1: are just some brief examples, but I think they helped
Speaker 1: illustrate the fact that document duplication has been with us
Speaker 1: a very long time, and it was just necessary to
Speaker 1: ensure that documents documents could do what they needed to
Speaker 1: do within a given culture. Though. I think it's interesting,
Speaker 1: so while document copying has been with us since the
Speaker 1: ancient world, for all these reasons we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: I think it's also important to appreciate ways in which
Speaker 1: our thinking about documents has changed due in part probably
Speaker 1: two changes in technology that that make it easier to
Speaker 1: copy documents, and two changes in the say literacy rates
Speaker 1: within a culture, which also changed the way people think
Speaker 1: about documents. But I was reading a section from a
Speaker 1: book that I found really interesting. So it was a
Speaker 1: book called um Oral Tradition and the Written Record in
Speaker 1: Classical Athens by a scholar of classics at Oxford University
Speaker 1: named Rosalind Thomas. This was published Cambridge University Press in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, and so this is a section talking
Speaker 1: about how documents and copies of documents were used in
Speaker 1: classical Athens. This would have been in in Greece around
Speaker 1: the fourth to fifth centuries b C. And so this
Speaker 1: would have been a time when documents were available. There
Speaker 1: was some literacy in the culture, and documents were used
Speaker 1: and referred to, saying court cases and things like that,
Speaker 1: and for business. But it wasn't a document culture to
Speaker 1: the same extent that we might consider ourselves part of
Speaker 1: a document culture. It was a sort of halfway document culture.
Speaker 1: It was a proto document culture. And so the ways
Speaker 1: they thought about documents and copies were very different than
Speaker 1: the way we think about them. And so I wanted
Speaker 1: to mention a few things she he talks about that
Speaker 1: struck me as interesting. And so, during the fourth and
Speaker 1: fifth centuries BC, the use of written documents was increasing
Speaker 1: in various spheres of life. In Athens. You could argue
Speaker 1: this was a time of transition from a primarily oral
Speaker 1: culture to an increasingly document conscious culture. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: there were more books circulating during the late fifth century Athens,
Speaker 1: and this led to critiques by figures like Plato and
Speaker 1: other philosophers who believed that the spoken word had virtues
Speaker 1: that were lost in a literary culture. Actually, like Plato stress,
Speaker 1: for example, that a document used in court must be
Speaker 1: verified by the oral testimony of eye witnesses to its drafting,
Speaker 1: among other critiques not as much related to the legal system,
Speaker 1: having to do with memory and so forth. But from
Speaker 1: here Thomas goes on to say that we can actually
Speaker 1: tell from many clues that the ancient Greeks did not
Speaker 1: think about written documents and copying exactly the same way
Speaker 1: we do. And she points out that it's it's obvious
Speaker 1: that the significance of a doc hument often lay within
Speaker 1: its non written aspects, and that documents were sometimes treated
Speaker 1: not only original documents, but copies of those documents were
Speaker 1: treated as quote, iconic or material symbols more so than
Speaker 1: as a reference tool. And a great example here is
Speaker 1: comparing stone inscriptions versus originals written on what we might
Speaker 1: think of as paper or papyrus. Like the question is
Speaker 1: which is more authoritative. So you might have an original
Speaker 1: record of a statement that could be a treaty between
Speaker 1: two nations, or it could be a law issued, or
Speaker 1: it could be decree by a ruler, and you would
Speaker 1: have an original record of that statement that we could
Speaker 1: think of as a paper record, and then you would
Speaker 1: have copies of that statement made on stone that would
Speaker 1: be considered more the public version. Like you could have
Speaker 1: a steely that would have a copy of the original
Speaker 1: decree or treaty or something. And so we would assume,
Speaker 1: based on our type of document consciousness, that the original
Speaker 1: paper document is the more authoritative one and the stone
Speaker 1: inscription that's a copy of that document is the less
Speaker 1: authoritative one. But people in classical Athens did not necessarily
Speaker 1: agree with that. Of course, the process of copying from
Speaker 1: an original document to a stone inscription is a a
Speaker 1: lossy process. This is not fidelity or lossless copying that
Speaker 1: we count on today. This is copying done by hand
Speaker 1: and often with just blatant disregard for the actual wording
Speaker 1: of the original. There'll be all kinds of changes and
Speaker 1: mistakes and stuff introduced in fact at this time a
Speaker 1: lot of times, like spelling and punctuation and stuff might
Speaker 1: not even be standardized. But as evidence of this different
Speaker 1: kind of consciousness, Thomas cites orators from the period who
Speaker 1: quote documents and they will refer to the stone inscription
Speaker 1: copies of those documents, maybe as as the document might
Speaker 1: have year on a publicly visible steely rather than the
Speaker 1: archived originals of those documents. And also some political documents
Speaker 1: would like demand obedience specifically to the steely. It might
Speaker 1: say something like, it is this steely which will bind
Speaker 1: you to your oaths. So this you know, this stone inscription,
Speaker 1: even though it's a copy that might introduce changes from
Speaker 1: the original. Uh And Thomas also argues that our concepts
Speaker 1: of original and copy don't necessarily apply to thinking in
Speaker 1: classical Athens, like the Greek word for copy anti graphon
Speaker 1: appears to be used to describe both the archived original
Speaker 1: document and the publicly visible steely. So you might in
Speaker 1: this context just as well say that the earlier paper
Speaker 1: version is a copy of the Steely even though it
Speaker 1: was made before, and so the idea of a copy
Speaker 1: has no derogatory implications about the fidelity or authority of
Speaker 1: the document. And so from all this, Thomas argues that
Speaker 1: that an emphasis on verbatim accurate copying the kind of
Speaker 1: copying that we would depend on, Like if you know,
Speaker 1: if you're making copies of something in an office setting
Speaker 1: and the copies of that document make all kinds of
Speaker 1: changes to the document, we would consider that a problem.
Speaker 1: Like that's not even necessarily a poor copy. That is
Speaker 1: uh that I mean, it's it's a fraudulent copy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But Thomas argues that an assumption that a later copy
Speaker 1: is less authoritative that is something that tends to come
Speaker 1: with a more highly literate culture, and fourth or fifth
Speaker 1: century Athens had not really reached this point. Another thing,
Speaker 1: I wonder this is not a point that Thomas makes,
Speaker 1: but I was just thinking, so a lot of these
Speaker 1: documents in ancient Greece would have been attempts to record
Speaker 1: spoken decrees or agreements. So to take an agreement that
Speaker 1: had been made between two leaders in spoken form, or
Speaker 1: to record the spoken decree of a ruler or something
Speaker 1: and write that down, which I doubt would be a
Speaker 1: process of perfect fidelity even when first recorded. You know,
Speaker 1: so even the first writing down of this probably introduces
Speaker 1: some changes, and so does an emphasis on perfect copying
Speaker 1: also arise more when documents are uh, when their first
Speaker 1: instantiation is in written form, you know, when they leave
Speaker 1: the pin of the original author rather than the mouth.
Speaker 1: If that makes any sense, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so basically we could, we could. The question might be
Speaker 1: if you have UM written documents arising in response or
Speaker 1: as a way to support oral agreements, Uh, then yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. There may be this looseness in UM in
Speaker 1: the authority of of of copies. But then when you
Speaker 1: are depending primarily on the documents, then we see uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the the idea of the original document
Speaker 1: being key and the fidelity of the document being of
Speaker 1: of of prime importance. But there's another thing that Thomas
Speaker 1: mentions that struck me as really interesting about this different
Speaker 1: document consciousness. Uh. She points out that there was an
Speaker 1: assumption common to many people in classical Athens that, in
Speaker 1: order to show that a document was no longer enforced.
Speaker 1: The document was supposed to be destroyed or obliterated. And
Speaker 1: I think, wow, that is so interesting. That's in most
Speaker 1: context today that would not strike us as something to do, like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: there's a new system for logging into our timekeeping website
Speaker 1: at work. Better destroy the old instruction document. You know,
Speaker 1: you just don't use it anymore, right, But there was
Speaker 1: something about document consciousness at this time and place that
Speaker 1: suggested almost a kind of magical authority to say that
Speaker 1: the stone on which an inscription is made, or the
Speaker 1: sheet on which in an archive original of a of
Speaker 1: a document is is kept that like, in order to
Speaker 1: indicate that whatever is written on this document no longer
Speaker 1: holds true, you need to like smash or or in
Speaker 1: some way annihilate this document itself, rather than just say
Speaker 1: keeping it for your records but knowing that it is
Speaker 1: no longer in force. Yeah, this is interesting to think about. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's not without its parallels in
Speaker 1: in the modern world. I mean, obviously you can think
Speaker 1: of top secret documents that are burned after reading and
Speaker 1: so forth, sensitive documents that should be shredded or disposed of.
Speaker 1: I'm also that's more of a security question, then a
Speaker 1: question of like whether the content still hold true or not. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: one example that came to mind too was that of
Speaker 1: an invalid passport. Um the passports generally not destroyed, but
Speaker 1: at least with with US passports. I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's a different practice in other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: but you get that big hole punch through it, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is isn't quite destruction, but you know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of to say, like we have phil physically altered the documents,
Speaker 1: these documents are no longer valid. Well, that gives a
Speaker 1: hint to something that actually I think we'll come back
Speaker 1: to more in the sec End episode of the series.
Speaker 1: But the idea of documents security that say, when you
Speaker 1: live in a world like us, you know, this is
Speaker 1: a world in which copies of documents are scarce. They're
Speaker 1: laborious to produce because they have to be produced by hand,
Speaker 1: and so uh so there's gonna be naturally very few
Speaker 1: copies of most documents except maybe very widely circulated books,
Speaker 1: and even those they're expensive and they're costly to produce,
Speaker 1: their laborious they made, they're made by hand and all that.
Speaker 1: So the ancient world was a was a situation of
Speaker 1: global documents scarcity in a world of the exact opposite
Speaker 1: to just proliferation of uh infinite lossless copying of documents
Speaker 1: their digital means in which we live today, the main
Speaker 1: problems facing us are totally different ones. It's like, how
Speaker 1: do you keep either yeah, useless or unimportant documents from
Speaker 1: cluttering up your world, or keep sensitive documents from being
Speaker 1: distributed in ways that they shouldn't be now, um, Heather D.
Speaker 1: Baker in that Neo Babylonian paper reference earlier, Uh, they
Speaker 1: did mention, uh, some examples of document destruction. In this case,
Speaker 1: we'd be talking about the physical breaking of tablets. And
Speaker 1: if I'm understanding or correctly, um and it, it does
Speaker 1: get a little complicated when you're talking about breaking of
Speaker 1: obligations and also the breaking the physical breaking of tablets.
Speaker 1: But apparently the physical breaking of tablets sometimes aligned with
Speaker 1: the breaking of agreements. Um And by that it could
Speaker 1: also just mean like a debt is paid, and that
Speaker 1: there were sometimes stipulations that after a sale, for instance,
Speaker 1: of property, any copies of ownership documents that were not
Speaker 1: handed over to the new owner were to be broken
Speaker 1: were to be destroyed. So It lines up a little
Speaker 1: bit of what we're talking about here, like the physical
Speaker 1: document as being just sort of like this embodiment of
Speaker 1: of of of a contract. And then yeah, if the
Speaker 1: contract is broken or the debt is paid, etcetera, Well
Speaker 1: what do you do You need to destroy that? Otherwise
Speaker 1: someone might read that and think that somebody still owes
Speaker 1: somebody money. Well, you know, I guess we can still
Speaker 1: see echo even though this is not broadly what we
Speaker 1: do with the documents in our lives, you can see
Speaker 1: echoes of it in like I don't know, movie scenes
Speaker 1: or plays or something. In a story, when there is
Speaker 1: a significant invalidation of a contract, say a character will
Speaker 1: tear it up, if you know, or they'll or they'll
Speaker 1: burn an iou notice when the debt is paid or
Speaker 1: when it's forgiven or something. But that seems to be
Speaker 1: for kind of story purposes, all right. Well, generally, in
Speaker 1: these episodes, these invention episodes, we talked about what came before,
Speaker 1: and in talking about documentation um duplication technology. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: pretty obvious what came before. We've already referenced it, and
Speaker 1: that is uh that copies were made by hand. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was the way it was for a very long time.
Speaker 1: It's previously no. With the Neo Babylonian example, copies of
Speaker 1: a given document might be made at the point of
Speaker 1: generation of said document um or they might be made later,
Speaker 1: either as required for some purpose or simply to replace
Speaker 1: a damaged copy. Uh. And in that example as well,
Speaker 1: you know, we mentioned the fact that that scribes and
Speaker 1: training would also make copies as well. It is difficult
Speaker 1: to overstate the importance of this scribal labor throughout history.
Speaker 1: I mean, from the invention of writing up until the
Speaker 1: takeover by by mechanical means of producing copies. Making copies
Speaker 1: of documents was a major human labor endeavor, right, and
Speaker 1: the scribe was key to all of this because that's
Speaker 1: what a scribe historically did, or at least that was
Speaker 1: the core responsibility making copies. They were professional copymakers. And
Speaker 1: if we were today to destroy all copy making machines
Speaker 1: in some manner of but Lerry and Jahad out of
Speaker 1: Frank Herbert's done, then the scribe would be our ment
Speaker 1: at a human machine for the creation of copies and duplications.
Speaker 1: And so scribes were vastly important in numerous ancient cultures.
Speaker 1: You know, we we It makes sense, right, because documents,
Speaker 1: like we say, they become so important for all of
Speaker 1: the various functions that are going on within a given culture,
Speaker 1: within a given empire, uh in some of these cases,
Speaker 1: and so it becomes increasingly important to have scribes to
Speaker 1: handle these documents. And we have some some excellent examples
Speaker 1: of scribes at work, say in ancient Egypt, and we
Speaker 1: know many of them by name, uh, such as ms
Speaker 1: or Almos who work during the seventeenth century b C.
Speaker 1: E uh Amenotep, son of Hapu, who were during the
Speaker 1: fourteenth century BC and was later deified um, which I
Speaker 1: think underscores the importance here. Uh. The scribes such as
Speaker 1: this weren't essential for accounting for government functions and also
Speaker 1: the preservation and dissemination of wisdom. Uh. So you know,
Speaker 1: I think the Egyptian example here is a great one because, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it underlines that this was a specialized skill um in
Speaker 1: a given society, and scribes were in these case scribes
Speaker 1: were not made to serve in the army. The sons
Speaker 1: of scribes enter the profession as well. So it was
Speaker 1: it was very important that you like maintained the supply
Speaker 1: of scribes. Yeah, And I think it's also important to
Speaker 1: understand the pervasiveness of the influence of the scribe throughout
Speaker 1: all levels of a culture, because it's not just say
Speaker 1: the business world, like we've been talking about business contracts,
Speaker 1: business letters and and and those kind of financial and
Speaker 1: business arrangement documents, and also you know, political decrees and
Speaker 1: things like that. But scribes were equally important for copying
Speaker 1: religious texts. Probably one of the most copied texts by
Speaker 1: scribes in the history of the world has been the Bible,
Speaker 1: you know, copying and just other texts that people might
Speaker 1: want copies of, scribes made them all. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: a there's a wonderful level of this too in ancient
Speaker 1: each because you have the god thought. Thought was considered
Speaker 1: the god of scribes, but he was also the scribe
Speaker 1: of the gods. As Geraldine Pinch points out, in Egyptian mythology,
Speaker 1: he was the lord of wisdom and secret knowledge. He
Speaker 1: was the inventor of written language and of languages in general.
Speaker 1: He was quote the excellent of understanding, and he observed
Speaker 1: and wrote down everything that happened in the world and
Speaker 1: then reported it to the god Ray or raw each morning. Um.
Speaker 1: So he was paired with the library goddess Sesshat and
Speaker 1: together these two knew the future as well as the past. Uh,
Speaker 1: which is interesting. Here we have the you know, the
Speaker 1: roles of the librarian and also you know, the historian
Speaker 1: and the scribe here kind of mixing together and and
Speaker 1: becoming like all knowing, Like this is the center of knowledge.
Speaker 1: This is how we understand where we've been and where
Speaker 1: we're going. Wrote down everything that happened in the world. Well,
Speaker 1: he's a god, he can he can do that. He
Speaker 1: was also said to have written forty three books that
Speaker 1: contained all wisdom needed by humanity and uh, and he
Speaker 1: was also essential in enforcing matt the concept of law,
Speaker 1: order and balance. So, uh, you know, I think all
Speaker 1: of this helps just to drive home just how important
Speaker 1: the scribe is to a given civilization. I mean, it
Speaker 1: helps it function, It helps it know what it is
Speaker 1: as it moves through time. All the wisdom, if it's
Speaker 1: in forty three books, maybe, but they could be. We
Speaker 1: don't know how long the books are, right, I guess it.
Speaker 1: Like you know, you could think of these as magical books, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I might wait for him to come out and paperback. No. Um,
Speaker 1: So I think you know, in this we get the
Speaker 1: fact that the scribe was also sometimes but not always,
Speaker 1: something of an administrator as well. Um, there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of power creep that seems to occur with scribes
Speaker 1: at times. For the ancient Israelites, for example, scribes acted
Speaker 1: in positions that we would now associate with lawyers and
Speaker 1: judges and even journalists. Oh yeah, because I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess literacy and and power over documents in many ways
Speaker 1: becomes sort of like power over the culture in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and this is we'll come back to this, but
Speaker 1: it's worth reminding ourselves that the role of the scribe
Speaker 1: was was not only skilled, but it also had an
Speaker 1: impact on on the body, particularly on the eyes. I
Speaker 1: was looking back at a history of the mirror by
Speaker 1: Mark Pendergrast from two thousand nine. We looked at when
Speaker 1: we were talking about the invention of the mirror, and
Speaker 1: he had a tidbit about Jewish scribes. He writes, quote,
Speaker 1: Jewish scribes believe that they could improve weak eyes by
Speaker 1: taking a break from the scrolls and staring into a mirror.
Speaker 1: Oh that kind of echoes the what the messages you
Speaker 1: get from hr saying remember to take a break every
Speaker 1: so and so minutes of staring at a computer and
Speaker 1: staring to a mirror instead. Now another example that I
Speaker 1: thought was was interesting about the importance of the scribe. Um.
Speaker 1: I was looking at um a PhD. Dissertation from one
Speaker 1: Seng Wing ma Um. He's a scholar of ancient China.
Speaker 1: Uh from It's from two thousand seventeen titles Scribes in
Speaker 1: Early Imperial China, and U notes that, first of all,
Speaker 1: scribal history in ancient China is less studied and understood
Speaker 1: because quote a group of highly educated intellectuals dominated the
Speaker 1: transmitted textual traditions in ancient China, and they portrayed scribes
Speaker 1: as corrupt officials manipulating the laws and documents to their
Speaker 1: own benefit. Now that the specific example that that this
Speaker 1: author brings up, though his concerns um the rule of
Speaker 1: the first Emperor Quin chi Huang from the work has
Speaker 1: covered in the work the Historical Records. This is a
Speaker 1: Han text also known as the Records of the Grand Historian,
Speaker 1: composed by Uh Simata. Quote. Things in the world, great
Speaker 1: or small are all decided by his Highness. His Highness
Speaker 1: even measures the weight of his paperwork by the she.
Speaker 1: One she equals thirty point thirty six ms Ma mentions
Speaker 1: um continues every day and night he has an allotment
Speaker 1: of work. He does not rest until he meets this allotment.
Speaker 1: So Ma summarizes this as follows quote. The passage tells
Speaker 1: us that the first emperor would never entrust his power
Speaker 1: to others. In order to achieve that, he ruled over
Speaker 1: the world of documents, which allowed him to extend his
Speaker 1: power without the restriction of time and space. His ambition
Speaker 1: is reflected in the quantity of his daily paperwork. So
Speaker 1: documentation is power. But Ma also stresses that no single man,
Speaker 1: even a great man, could have read all of the
Speaker 1: paperwork generated by an empire every day. He had to
Speaker 1: depend on scribes who accumulated this information and condensed it
Speaker 1: for his use. Uh. So this is also where I
Speaker 1: think the accusation of scribal manipulation and misused could potentially
Speaker 1: come into play. You have individuals with great power, They
Speaker 1: rule over a world of documents. They depend on scribes
Speaker 1: to handle these documents and also uh condense information for them. Okay,
Speaker 1: so here we're talking about a profession where on one
Speaker 1: hand you could think about them as faithful duplicators of
Speaker 1: existing documents. There's a record of documents somewhere, and they
Speaker 1: will make copies of it so that more people can
Speaker 1: have access to the information, or more people can keep
Speaker 1: copies or whatever. But that those literacy skills might skew
Speaker 1: into editing documents and summarizing documents and as sort of
Speaker 1: creating sense out of a out of a mess of documents,
Speaker 1: and that of course is a different kind of power altogether. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and you know, obviously we live in a
Speaker 1: world today that is that is run by documents and
Speaker 1: depends le on on data and documentation. But at times,
Speaker 1: like we we sort of we acknowledge it without actually
Speaker 1: acknowledging it. Like I just think, for instance, any police
Speaker 1: show you've ever watched, you know, there's always that scene
Speaker 1: where they're like, oh, I'm gonna go do a lot
Speaker 1: of paperwork on this, and you know there's some mention
Speaker 1: of all the paperwork that has to take place as well. Um,
Speaker 1: but but but sometimes it's with an air of like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's the system's bureaucracy, but but you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's still inherently part of the whole power system.
Speaker 1: And the you know, like the the physical process doesn't
Speaker 1: work without the data process. But of course that's crucial
Speaker 1: to any kind of work. Really, you gotta have a
Speaker 1: record of what you did. Yes. Now, before we get
Speaker 1: into mechanical duplication devices, I want to come back to
Speaker 1: eyes for a second. Here I mentioned, you know, the
Speaker 1: the the idea that the Jewish scry uh might have
Speaker 1: stared into mirrors to help relieve the straining on their eyes. Um.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of a point that I think we've
Speaker 1: mentioned on the show before, but it's one that science
Speaker 1: historian James Burke brought up in his book Connections, discussing
Speaker 1: the link between invention and social need. The basic here,
Speaker 1: of course, is that just because a new invention or
Speaker 1: innovation is technologically possible, it doesn't mean there's a high
Speaker 1: enough demand for it, etcetera sure, or that it's cost effective. Right. So,
Speaker 1: and in this he ends up talking about um, the
Speaker 1: use of spectacles uh, and also the importance of scribes
Speaker 1: in Europe. Writing quote. As the European economy picked up
Speaker 1: after centuries of invasion the Dark Ages, any device that
Speaker 1: would prolong the working life of aging scribes was to
Speaker 1: be welcomed. And he also points out that as Europe
Speaker 1: rebounded from the plague, there is a greatly increased demand
Speaker 1: for reproduced manuscripts, but the word for subscribes in Europe
Speaker 1: had been reduced by the plague as well, So paper
Speaker 1: prices were going down, but the cost of skilled scribes
Speaker 1: to copy books was expensive. Situation that arguably hastens the
Speaker 1: advancement of the printing press, which of course is pretty
Speaker 1: much like the technical technological advancement of the duplication of
Speaker 1: documents at the point of initial production, though with some
Speaker 1: important unique features. I mean, for example, you wouldn't the
Speaker 1: printing press was a revolutionary invention, so you know, in
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century, suddenly you could mass produce books and
Speaker 1: pamphlets and and things we might think of like newspapers today.
Speaker 1: But because of the sort of the ordeal of setting
Speaker 1: the type and everything and making it on a printing press,
Speaker 1: that was useful for mass produced items. And you still
Speaker 1: had this middle category of documents of things you would
Speaker 1: definitely want copies of, but maybe not thousands of piece
Speaker 1: of right, if it's a personal document between like two parties,
Speaker 1: three parties, etcetera, you're not gonna miss setting up the
Speaker 1: printing press to handle that would be would be overkill
Speaker 1: but if you are looking to say, take this particular
Speaker 1: bit of information, this particular document, and you want, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of people within a given city to
Speaker 1: have access to it, then that's where the printing press
Speaker 1: becomes essential. Uh. It is again like you said, mass production,
Speaker 1: mass duplication of a single document. Now for that middle
Speaker 1: category where you've got say a business or personal document
Speaker 1: that you want multiple copies of, but it doesn't rise
Speaker 1: to the level of of hiring out a printing press.
Speaker 1: There were some other mechanical duplication devices that came before,
Speaker 1: say the photo copier that we know of. So turning
Speaker 1: to mechanical duplication devices that work in that middle range,
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention a couple. One is something I
Speaker 1: found very interesting. It's known as the polygraph. And no,
Speaker 1: that is not the so called Lie detector test. This
Speaker 1: is a totally different polygraph. It was an early duplication
Speaker 1: device that was invented by an English engineer named John
Speaker 1: Isaac Hawkins who lived seventeen seventy two to eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: four or five. And um he also apparently created one
Speaker 1: of the first successful designs for an upright piano. UH.
Speaker 1: And there were also some very important design improvements to
Speaker 1: the polygraph that were contributed later by a guy named
Speaker 1: Charles Wilson Peel. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson owned several versions of
Speaker 1: the polygraph machine and was famously obsessed with it. Actually,
Speaker 1: so how did the polygraph work? Well? First of all,
Speaker 1: again we're not at the photo copying stage yet, so
Speaker 1: this is not a device that's designed to take an
Speaker 1: existing document and automatically produce a copy. Instead, this is
Speaker 1: a machine for duplicating copies of handwritten documents at the
Speaker 1: point of origin. The idea of the polygraph duplicator is
Speaker 1: pretty simple. So you take the normal physical work of
Speaker 1: writing a document on paper, and you use that work
Speaker 1: to produce two documents instead of one. In practice, this
Speaker 1: meant a machine consisting of two pens connected by a
Speaker 1: series of levers, springs, and hinges, and you would take
Speaker 1: one pin in your hand and write your letter out
Speaker 1: with it, and the motion of that pen would be
Speaker 1: transferred through the machine to the other pins. So it's
Speaker 1: literally a second pin connected to your first pen with
Speaker 1: all these little articulated gizmos on it in order to
Speaker 1: translate the minute motions of the pin in your hand
Speaker 1: to the pin that's writing on the second piece of paper.
Speaker 1: So ideally you dip your pen in the ink. Well,
Speaker 1: the other pen dips in it's ink. Well, you write
Speaker 1: your name, It writes your name on the second sheet
Speaker 1: of paper, and so forth. As you might imagine. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is a machine that requires very delicate design.
Speaker 1: Apparently took a lot of tweaking of the design before
Speaker 1: it worked really well. Uh. This guy, ap Peel, while
Speaker 1: trying to make the polygraph more usable, apparently complained that
Speaker 1: the He said that the problems with the machine are
Speaker 1: quote hid in impenetrable darkness. But eventually it was made
Speaker 1: into pretty much usable shape. And this was especially useful
Speaker 1: for situations that we mentioned earlier in which you need
Speaker 1: exactly two copies of a document, one for someone else
Speaker 1: in one for yourself. So this could be useful of course,
Speaker 1: if you're writing out contracts or something. But and technically
Speaker 1: it could be used for anything, but it was apparently
Speaker 1: especially popular for letter writing. Say, if you're a law office,
Speaker 1: or even if you're just keeping a personal correspondence, why
Speaker 1: might you need a copy of a letter that you
Speaker 1: were sending to somebody else. Well, obviously, so you can
Speaker 1: remember what you said. So imagine you get a letter
Speaker 1: from somebody who you wrote, maybe over a year ago,
Speaker 1: and it begins in answer to your question. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: But if you didn't have a copy of the letter
Speaker 1: you sent and you don't remember what you asked, you're
Speaker 1: in trouble there. So it's useful as a personal reference,
Speaker 1: but especially useful for a high stakes kind of correspondence,
Speaker 1: like in business or in a law office or something
Speaker 1: like that. And so this did prove very useful, But
Speaker 1: again it was only for producing duplicate copies of handwritten documents.
Speaker 1: At the point of origin. The machine would have no
Speaker 1: power whatsoever to uh to do anything with a document
Speaker 1: that had already been written, because it relies on the
Speaker 1: power of your writing hand as you right. Oh and
Speaker 1: one funny thing about copies of documents and and so forth.
Speaker 1: I found a note from the Monticello Archive website about
Speaker 1: the polygraph machine which states that quote the original American
Speaker 1: patent document, patent number x four five three, granted May
Speaker 1: seventeen to eighteen o three to John Jay Hawkins, apparently
Speaker 1: that they got his name kind of wrong, was lost
Speaker 1: in a fire in the patent office in eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: six and is no longer extent, So I guess they
Speaker 1: didn't have a copy. How but how many documents? So
Speaker 1: we know about this document that the original was lost,
Speaker 1: But how many documents from history were completely lost because
Speaker 1: there weren't any surviving copies and the original was destroyed
Speaker 1: in a fire or just moldered in a drawer or something.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean countless. You know that we
Speaker 1: we we frequently mentioned ancient texts on the show. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we have to state, oh, yeah, well, the actual
Speaker 1: writings of this particular philosopher or writer are lost to us.
Speaker 1: We only have the the mentions and reverberations of their
Speaker 1: thoughts in surviving worcs. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes we even
Speaker 1: know they did write something because other writers that we
Speaker 1: do have will quote them, but we don't have their originals. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Nowadays it you almost have to try and engineer that
Speaker 1: kind of scarcity and something. I can't think of something
Speaker 1: in terms of like um written document off hand, but
Speaker 1: you know there have been projects with say albums that
Speaker 1: have come out where you know you're gonna create the
Speaker 1: scarcity of saying there is only copy of this um etcetera.
Speaker 1: What are you thinking? Wu Tang. Well, I get that
Speaker 1: does come to mind, but I think there's there have
Speaker 1: also been some some some other attempts and any Yeah,
Speaker 1: you also get into because like limited editions of things,
Speaker 1: you know, signed limited editions, signed prints, so that even
Speaker 1: in an age of of duplication and you know, high
Speaker 1: quality duplication, uh, you'll have a certain amount of scarcity
Speaker 1: built into there and may and make the individual copies
Speaker 1: more meaningful. I guess now there's one other device I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about, because the polygraph was not the
Speaker 1: only mechanical method for the limited copying of handwritten letters
Speaker 1: at the time. There was another thing that was the
Speaker 1: so called letter press or the copy press or the
Speaker 1: letter copying press. So the copy press was widely used
Speaker 1: by clerks and in law offices in the late eighteen
Speaker 1: through all throughout the nineteenth century, especially to do about
Speaker 1: the same thing as the polygraph, to make copies about
Speaker 1: going correspondence, though technically the copy press was more versatile
Speaker 1: than the than the polygraphic could be used to copy
Speaker 1: anything written on paper, and the method worked like this,
Speaker 1: so you would take a document or page that you
Speaker 1: wanted a copy of, and then you would take a
Speaker 1: very thin piece of paper. I've seen it referred to
Speaker 1: as like tissue paper or onion skin paper, and you
Speaker 1: would moisten that tissue paper, probably with a brush or
Speaker 1: something like that, and then you would press the moistened
Speaker 1: tissue paper along with the handwritten original document in a
Speaker 1: gigantic wooden clamp. So imagine a big wooden board with
Speaker 1: like a screw or a press lever on top, and
Speaker 1: you would press this down on the stack of pages,
Speaker 1: and the pressure would cause some small amount of the
Speaker 1: ink in the original page to leak out and soak
Speaker 1: into the moisten tissue paper, creating a copy of the
Speaker 1: original document. And if you want to copy multiple documents
Speaker 1: at once, or if you wanted to copy a say,
Speaker 1: page out of a book while protecting the other pages,
Speaker 1: you could sandwich each document and the piece of what
Speaker 1: tissue paper it was being imprinted on between sheets of
Speaker 1: oil paper, which would prevent the water and ink from
Speaker 1: bleeding out to the other side. So you could actually
Speaker 1: make a stack of copies of documents out all at
Speaker 1: the same time with these oil oil papers in between them.
Speaker 1: This method was actually in use way back into the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century. One of the early models was invented by
Speaker 1: James Watt, the Scottish engineer who was behind important early
Speaker 1: modifications to the idea of the steam engine. Watts copy
Speaker 1: press dates back to about seventeen eighty. But I've I've
Speaker 1: read some accounts from these these early decades of the
Speaker 1: copy press that it often didn't work super well, especially
Speaker 1: with the ink available at the time. It's something that
Speaker 1: early users of the polygraph actually complained about, saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the copy made by the polygraph is so much more
Speaker 1: legible than copies made with the with the letter press.
Speaker 1: Because to read a copy made with one of these
Speaker 1: early press methods, uh, you know it was it would
Speaker 1: depend on all kinds of circumstances, like how much ink
Speaker 1: you actually got out of the original onto the copy paper,
Speaker 1: and I think you would often have to hold it
Speaker 1: up to the light in in order to read it.
Speaker 1: You know, the ink did not come through copiously. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this method worked better if you made the copy soon
Speaker 1: after the document was created, I think, because the ink
Speaker 1: had dried less. So you can still think of this
Speaker 1: as a method that favored copies produced roughly at the
Speaker 1: time of the documents origin. However, it does seem like
Speaker 1: you could sometimes use this to try to copy pre
Speaker 1: existing documents with varying success. And there were many different
Speaker 1: versions of the copy press, using different preparations of ink, copy,
Speaker 1: paper pressing method and so forth, and in in all
Speaker 1: these different forms, it was a popular method for copying
Speaker 1: documents all through the nineteenth century. Now, thing that comes
Speaker 1: to mind when you bring up the you know, the
Speaker 1: possible copying of older documents, uh, is that you're getting
Speaker 1: into situations where if you're removing any ink from that document,
Speaker 1: you are in effect damaging the original copy. So you're
Speaker 1: you're in this balancing act of how can I how
Speaker 1: can I copy that material without destroying or partially eroding
Speaker 1: the original. It's kind of like for as a kid,
Speaker 1: it's like if you have some silly putty in one hand,
Speaker 1: and you have you know, one of your your your
Speaker 1: parents newspaper in the other and maybe they haven't read
Speaker 1: it yet. You know, you you can make from experience, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can make some fun copies off of that newspaper,
Speaker 1: but you may you may render it um uh unusable,
Speaker 1: you may destroy the original um um article. And I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that your parent is going to accept the
Speaker 1: silly putty copy in its place. What did the Wizard
Speaker 1: of I'd say, I can't read his text bubble. Now, well,
Speaker 1: here you go, here's the copy I made on this
Speaker 1: silly Partty, don't hold it just by the top or
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's going to uh along gate. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna call it there for part one
Speaker 1: of the series. But in the next episode we'll be
Speaker 1: back to discuss more devices that came along for document
Speaker 1: duplication later on, as well as some of the challenges
Speaker 1: and changes we face in a world where we take limitless,
Speaker 1: lossless copying by digital means for granted. That's right, So
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you would like to check out other episodes Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind that you can find core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: podcast feed on Mondays, and that feed we do listener mail.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster
Speaker 1: fact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set asfide most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact that Stuff to Blow Your Mind Got
Speaker 1: carm Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.