Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go, a corridor of the mind, lined with shelves,
Speaker 1: cluttered with clues, stocked with books. I haven't been here
Speaker 1: in a while. I was looking for my copy of
Speaker 1: Five Acres and Independence. It's gotta be somewhere. M I'm
Speaker 1: glad to see my collection of eighteenth century almond axes
Speaker 1: still here. Huh. Mid twentieth century political posters. Damn, it's
Speaker 1: getting dusty though. The cupboard of board games weird. What's
Speaker 1: the stack of twigs doing here? Jeez? Hello, good afternoon, ma'am.
Speaker 1: Have you ever wished you own the sum of human knowledge?
Speaker 1: The library that never closes? Oh? Are you have a library?
Speaker 1: This is a library. This is the last archive. Didn't
Speaker 1: you see the big breast sign outside? I don't get it.
Speaker 1: What are you selling anyway? Twenty nine volumes, twenty eight thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty pages, forty four million words of text.
Speaker 1: When in doubt look it up. Oh okay, really sorry, thanks,
Speaker 1: but it seems so cruel. But mister, I've already got
Speaker 1: one right here. I've had it for a very long time.
Speaker 1: Step across the threshold to my family's front door. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, the day of the Encyclopedia arrived, I
Speaker 1: was six up. Till then I had experienced only a
Speaker 1: few exciting deliveries. Remember there was no Amazon then. Not
Speaker 1: much got dropped off by truck, at least not at
Speaker 1: our house. Once we got a new refrigerator, a truck
Speaker 1: pulled up, two guys rolled it off on a little
Speaker 1: rolling cart, wheeled it into our yellow kitchen. Mostly I
Speaker 1: remember using the cardboard box that the fridge had come
Speaker 1: in to build a fort That was pretty fantastic, But
Speaker 1: the Encyclopedia was even better than the fridge. My mother
Speaker 1: unpacked the volumes from brown boxes and lined them up
Speaker 1: on a shelf in the living room. Twenty two big, fat,
Speaker 1: important looking, very serious books that would look like leather binding,
Speaker 1: cream colored and gold leaf edged pages like a Bible,
Speaker 1: color photographs, maps, and the thrill didn't end there. Every
Speaker 1: year would get another shipment updates. You were supposed to
Speaker 1: go back into the original volumes and insert new pages.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the updates came with stickers they were supposed to
Speaker 1: place over the outdated information. I really didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of books that Encyclopedia set really was the superstar
Speaker 1: of our family library. I loved everything about it, the smell,
Speaker 1: the fanciness, the way they lined up like a regiment
Speaker 1: of soldiers, all there on a shelf in the living room,
Speaker 1: next to our stack of board games Monopoly, sorry, Clue.
Speaker 1: The encyclopedia. It was like this box with no bottom,
Speaker 1: endless knowledge. Encyclopedias for decades were sold one by one,
Speaker 1: door to door. Knowledge doesn't often travel in quite that
Speaker 1: way anymore, hand selling a knock on the door. How
Speaker 1: did that start, how did it work, why did it end?
Speaker 1: It seemed important to understanding how we gain access to
Speaker 1: knowledge today. So I asked a world class expert, a
Speaker 1: wizard at the art of selling a walking library, and
Speaker 1: I would just knock on their door, and I'd have
Speaker 1: the little card with me and I'd say, Hi, this
Speaker 1: is Myrin Taxman from Encyclopedia Britannica. You sent in for
Speaker 1: some information, and I was in the area here, so
Speaker 1: I thought I'd stop by and show you what we have.
Speaker 1: Myron Taxman started selling encyclopedias in Chicago in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties when he was twenty two. He's old encyclopedias for
Speaker 1: nearly thirty years in Florida. Now, I bet a lot
Speaker 1: of x Encyclopedia salesman lived there. But back in Chicago
Speaker 1: in his heyday, Taxman loved his work. He adored it,
Speaker 1: Myron Taxman. He's like a character in a short story
Speaker 1: by John Updyke or maybe Kurt Vaughnegut, Except you cannot
Speaker 1: make this guy up. You know, if I had a
Speaker 1: call Sunday night, why not? So you go out for
Speaker 1: an hour and make as say, a taxman is so
Speaker 1: good at selling that after talking to him for a while,
Speaker 1: should confess that that's pretty sure. I'd buy just about
Speaker 1: anything from this guy. But you can't sell something you
Speaker 1: don't believe him. And he believed in encyclopedias. He believed
Speaker 1: in bringing the sum of human knowledge to American households,
Speaker 1: door by door by door, we would bring out what
Speaker 1: we call the giant broadside. Well, the giant broadside was
Speaker 1: a life size picture of the whole full set of books.
Speaker 1: And you threw that out right in front of him,
Speaker 1: right under their feet, so they couldn't even move their feet.
Speaker 1: I picture the giant broadside is a folded up cardboard display,
Speaker 1: oh the size of a dining room table. The Texan
Speaker 1: would unfold like an accordion and lay out on the
Speaker 1: floor like a magic carpet. And then the real was
Speaker 1: you brought out a nice leather bound, gold filled sample
Speaker 1: of Britannica, and then you've did a little presentation with that.
Speaker 1: You put it in their hands and so they could
Speaker 1: hold it and play with it. That feeling it made
Speaker 1: my mouth water just hearing Taxman talk about the feeling
Speaker 1: of holding that sum of human knowledge in your hand,
Speaker 1: playing with it. I want that feeling back. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the third season of The Last Archive. The show about
Speaker 1: how we know what we know and why it seems
Speaker 1: lately is if we don't know anything at all. I'm
Speaker 1: Jill Lapoor. The first season of The Last Archive was
Speaker 1: a who Done It? Who Killed truth? I would back
Speaker 1: over the last century to look at forces that undermine
Speaker 1: people's ability to get the facts and to get to
Speaker 1: the bottom of things. The second season uncovered the history
Speaker 1: of doubt, from rational skepticism to mindless conspiracy theories. I
Speaker 1: met frauds and hucksters and fakes people peddling nonsense. So
Speaker 1: for two seasons, the first two years of the Pandemic
Speaker 1: mind You, I told a lot of stories about the
Speaker 1: origins of a lot of problems that got to be
Speaker 1: a little depressing. This season is the antidote my survey
Speaker 1: of solutions. This season is all about common knowledge, common
Speaker 1: in the sense of ordinary, ordinary knowledge held by ordinary people,
Speaker 1: ordinary things that people agree on, and common in the
Speaker 1: sense of communal shared held in community as a public good.
Speaker 1: Is that kind of knowledge still possible? Knowledge that we
Speaker 1: all have, knowledge that we all agree upon. That feeling
Speaker 1: of holding an encyclopedia in your hands, it's priceless. Encyclopedias
Speaker 1: are very old. They've been around for thousands of years.
Speaker 1: For all but the last few centuries. They existed only
Speaker 1: in manuscript, copied by hand, and they were for scholars,
Speaker 1: a tiny number of philosophers. Encyclopedia Britannica had been first
Speaker 1: published in Scotland in seventeen sixty eight, a product of
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, with its faith in education and reason and
Speaker 1: the diffusion of knowledge. I think of all the other
Speaker 1: projects that got started then, libraries, public schools, self government.
Speaker 1: All these years later, it's still called Encyclopedia Britannica, but
Speaker 1: really it ought to be called Encyclopedia Americana. By the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteenth century. Most of its sales were
Speaker 1: coming from the United States, where striving self made Americans
Speaker 1: really loved its democratic ethos knowledge for all. Eventually the
Speaker 1: company itself moved to the US. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: compile knowledge, it's another to spread it. To take that
Speaker 1: knowledge stored up in universities and make it common, make
Speaker 1: it ordinary. Britannica came up with a very American way
Speaker 1: of diffusing knowledge, peddling it house by house. This is
Speaker 1: the part that really fascinates me. Even before most Americans
Speaker 1: had telephones or electricity, you could get in a way
Speaker 1: hooked up to this huge network of information encyclopedia companies.
Speaker 1: Though they didn't invent this method of door to door sales,
Speaker 1: Bible salesman did. The Bible runs as level as we
Speaker 1: have three plans on it cash cod and also they
Speaker 1: have a little Catholic on the plan. Which parent plan
Speaker 1: would be the best varu the ABSC. It was awfully
Speaker 1: easy for selling encyclopedias to fit right into this niche
Speaker 1: evangelical capitalism. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, Britannica
Speaker 1: was owned by Sears Roebuck, the department store company, with
Speaker 1: a giant mail order catalog seers trained a salesforce that
Speaker 1: would grow to more than two thousand strong to sell
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia's door to door. The house to house salesman symbolizes
Speaker 1: in a way the function evolve salesman, which is to
Speaker 1: bring good or servidus of the attention of the consumer
Speaker 1: and to help the consumer buy. Like Bible salesman, Britannica
Speaker 1: salesman work from scripts. Mostly they learned these scripts from
Speaker 1: each other and from the best salesman. There's no plays
Speaker 1: and gentleman to make sure things are rolling, will rolling.
Speaker 1: They learned those scripts from Myron Taxman. That's him in
Speaker 1: an old Britannica training video. This is going to be
Speaker 1: air Advanced Door Approach clinic for people working leads to
Speaker 1: start out with giving the basic door approach, which is
Speaker 1: the company door approach. Is everybody here know the company
Speaker 1: door approach? I'm sure you do. Encyclopedia salesman, like Bible salesman,
Speaker 1: knocked on the doors of families. They've gotten leads on.
Speaker 1: A lead is the name or addresser phone number of
Speaker 1: someone who might likely buy the stuff you're selling. Bible
Speaker 1: salesman got their leads from church attendance lists. Britannica generated
Speaker 1: its leads from places like newspaper contests. One place Britannica
Speaker 1: generated leads was from a radio quiz show. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about what better way to find nerds than to
Speaker 1: invite people to submit questions to a quiz show, Wake
Speaker 1: Up America trying to bombard the board of full experts
Speaker 1: with the toughest question who can think of? That show
Speaker 1: was called Information Please, and it was broadcast nationally from
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty one. And if your
Speaker 1: question stumps are all of experts, you'll receive a complete
Speaker 1: twenty four volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The show's
Speaker 1: title information Please was a reference to what you'd say
Speaker 1: back in the day when you picked up the telephone
Speaker 1: and wanted information. You could ask the operator for someone's
Speaker 1: phone number, or the weather were the capital of Botswana?
Speaker 1: Who was a very old version of Siri, a secular oracle. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Information please. The radio show it was a blast Na
Speaker 1: me I present our master of ceremonies, mister Clifton Clifton Fataman.
Speaker 1: The quiz show's host was the books editor of the
Speaker 1: New Yorker He was also on the board of Encyclopedia Britannica. Gentleman,
Speaker 1: we're all I'm beginning with the following creston, Where does
Speaker 1: this line occur? Hey, nonny nonny? Hey none in Shakespeare?
Speaker 1: I suppose it weren't. Then I lose. The premise of
Speaker 1: the radio quiz show was if you submitted that question
Speaker 1: and no one on the panel answered it correctly, if
Speaker 1: you stumped the experts, you would get a free Encyclopedia Britannica.
Speaker 1: But there was also a sneaky thing going on, because
Speaker 1: if you submitted a question and it never even got asked,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that what you got was that your
Speaker 1: name would be sent to Encyclopedia Britannica and would be
Speaker 1: given to one of its salesmen as a lead. He'd
Speaker 1: be given to a salesman like Myron Taxman. Hi, Myron
Speaker 1: Taxman from Encyclopedia Britannica. Here's my business card. Someone in
Speaker 1: your family indicated an interest in our products, and I
Speaker 1: stopped by to go over that with you. May I
Speaker 1: step in, As I said, Myron Taxman was not your
Speaker 1: average salesman. He didn't just hook me, He hooked everybody.
Speaker 1: He was a star and Britannica knew it. That's why
Speaker 1: they used him to train other salesman. Myron Taxman is
Speaker 1: a family man. He's on the go, Andie cares about
Speaker 1: other families like the hus and I want a lot
Speaker 1: of awards for top salesman for the month and this
Speaker 1: and that. So I didn't really have to fight for
Speaker 1: the leads. They wanted to give me the leads and
Speaker 1: give me as a misnomer because you had to buy
Speaker 1: these leads. So a lot of the leads were like
Speaker 1: ten dollars a lead. So who's getting paid for the leads?
Speaker 1: Britannica to help subsidize their advertising to make the leads.
Speaker 1: So then was it a little like Glengarry glen Ross,
Speaker 1: like fighting over the good leads? If you don't know
Speaker 1: about it. Glengarry glen Ross is a play David Mant
Speaker 1: wrote about real estate salesman. He was later made into
Speaker 1: a movie starring a very young Alec Baldwin. Absolutely when
Speaker 1: I saw that, when I saw Glen glen Ross, I said, wow,
Speaker 1: this is us. The leads are weak leads A week?
Speaker 1: You a week? Okay, I'm guessing there was less swearing.
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia Britannica. But still a leads, a lead Taxman. He'd
Speaker 1: get the leads, buy the leads, and then he'd go out.
Speaker 1: He still had to find a way to make it
Speaker 1: in the door though. In that training video he made
Speaker 1: he laid out some rules of the road. Number one,
Speaker 1: don't make the mistake of giving a price in the doorway.
Speaker 1: Don't do it. I'd rather walk away. Number two, don't
Speaker 1: make a one legged pitch. It's death in our business.
Speaker 1: Don't pitch. The wife would out the husband, or the
Speaker 1: husband would have the wife the full or the house
Speaker 1: the better. Most of the selling happened, Taxman said when
Speaker 1: he first stepped through that doorway, across that threshold and
Speaker 1: gave the warm up. But it was good if you
Speaker 1: had the children there, because then you could get them
Speaker 1: involved and actually they would help with the sale. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: it was the wife that wanted the books more than anyone,
Speaker 1: because she'd be the one that would have to schlept
Speaker 1: the kids to the library all the time. And she know,
Speaker 1: now I don't have to go to the library. I have,
Speaker 1: you know, the encyclopedias here. When Taxman had gathered the
Speaker 1: whole family together, not just the husband and the wife,
Speaker 1: but the kids too. He'd tell everyone where to sit.
Speaker 1: He didn't like sitting on the couch. That was too comfy,
Speaker 1: too likely people would stop paying attention. The kitchen table
Speaker 1: was better. People were more alert, ready to do business.
Speaker 1: And then after we sat down, I would start really
Speaker 1: schmoozing with them. Oh, you have such a lovely house.
Speaker 1: I was always a detective when I walked in the door,
Speaker 1: and I would look around to see if I saw
Speaker 1: a trophy at golf trophy or pictures that they had
Speaker 1: kids playing football, and that really, to me made the sale.
Speaker 1: There were years in the United States when encyclopedias sold
Speaker 1: like Honestly, you could sort of say they sold like encyclopedias,
Speaker 1: because that and not hotcakes, was the measure. Owning a
Speaker 1: Bible was a mark of faith, a testament. Owning a
Speaker 1: set of encyclopedias became a mark of aspiring to belong
Speaker 1: to a community of knowledge, a democracy of knowledge. But
Speaker 1: by the end of the nineteen sixties, the door to
Speaker 1: door encyclopedia salesman had become a punchline. You can hear
Speaker 1: exactly how in this Monty Python sketch from nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: I want to come in and steal a few things. Madam,
Speaker 1: Are you an incertelopedia salesman? No, madam, I'm a burglar
Speaker 1: burglar people, I think you're an incertetopedia salesman. Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: not open to all. Let me in. Please, I'll let
Speaker 1: you in your solm me instetpedias. I won't. When i'm all,
Speaker 1: just come in Ransacklefla honestly probably shops none at all. All. Right,
Speaker 1: back in the US, it was getting to be no joke.
Speaker 1: Sales methods got so aggressive that in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: the Federal Trade Commission intervened, ordering Britannica to stop deceptive
Speaker 1: and aggressive sales tactics. Taxman told me this wasn't really fair,
Speaker 1: that Britannica was being punished for the sneaky methods of
Speaker 1: other companies. And I believed him, But then again, I
Speaker 1: am a sucker from iron Taxman, and so we are
Speaker 1: a lot of other people. After he'd got the family
Speaker 1: sitting down at that kitchen table, not the couch, after
Speaker 1: he'd done a schmoozing about their golf game, the kid's
Speaker 1: hockey team, after all the warming up was done, he'd
Speaker 1: begin to close in on the deal. When do you
Speaker 1: know that you've you've got him? It's something you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of an innate feeling when they start
Speaker 1: looking at one another and oh, what do you think
Speaker 1: hattie as looked very nice? And they'd write the check
Speaker 1: right there for the first installment fifty dollars to start.
Speaker 1: Then they'd have to pay monthly with interest. Predatory, yes,
Speaker 1: but still an encyclopedia isn't say, a stationary bicycle or
Speaker 1: some other useless thing you might get swindled into buying.
Speaker 1: People who grew up with these books talk about how
Speaker 1: the encyclopedia changed their lives, like comedian Steve Harvey, Well, mommy,
Speaker 1: I finally got the money together help us to educate ourselves.
Speaker 1: They bought an encyclopedia set Britannica, and everything you wanted
Speaker 1: to know was in that encyclopedia. And that's all you
Speaker 1: can know. If you want to look up something about elephant,
Speaker 1: and they had two pages on elephants, that was what
Speaker 1: you knew about the elephant. Harvey's not the only one.
Speaker 1: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had a thing for encyclopedias.
Speaker 1: She grew up in the Bronx Her parents had moved
Speaker 1: there from Puerto Rico after her father died when she
Speaker 1: was nine years years old. Her mother, Selena, who worked
Speaker 1: six days a week, saved up for Britannica the most
Speaker 1: beautiful thing in the laurel. Now the encyclopedius today are online.
Speaker 1: They're not selling them as books anymore. And I actually
Speaker 1: know there's some value sometimes to online reading, and I
Speaker 1: kind of like you, but I love the encyclopedias and
Speaker 1: things that I could feel in my hands and turn
Speaker 1: the pages, so to Mayor says, Britannica more or less
Speaker 1: saved her life, opened the door to a world of knowledge.
Speaker 1: Myron Taxman believed that same thing in my heart. I
Speaker 1: know anyone that would buy these books, even if it
Speaker 1: just melt, made them feel better that they had this
Speaker 1: beautiful set of books on the shelf, and that was
Speaker 1: one source you could go to that you could find
Speaker 1: out about everything and anything that happened in the world.
Speaker 1: Britannica really was a kind of common knowledge. Knock knock,
Speaker 1: it's a library. Tell me about caterpillars, capillaries, the Caspian Sea.
Speaker 1: It's all there, established, verifiable, illustrated, a library that had
Speaker 1: taken years and years and thousands of people to create
Speaker 1: and produce. Look up influenza and you'll find reliable, accurate information.
Speaker 1: Think about how hard it is now to find reliable
Speaker 1: and accurate information on the Internet, or in the thousands
Speaker 1: of years before the encyclopedia. Think of all the rumors
Speaker 1: and exaggerations and ignorance and misunderstanding and misinformation that characterized
Speaker 1: human communication across time and distance. I mean, Britannica was
Speaker 1: not a perfect solution by any means. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it wasn't free. Also, it wasn't public. Britannica commercialized and
Speaker 1: privatized a body of knowledge. Why bother to go to
Speaker 1: your local public library when you could own these books
Speaker 1: in your own home. Also, there was something missing. More
Speaker 1: on that after the break. My family never owned Encyclopedia Britannica.
Speaker 1: They're too expensive. We owned instead one of its many cheaper,
Speaker 1: down market competitors, an encyclopedia set called World Book. My
Speaker 1: mother saved up for our World Book Encyclopedia set by
Speaker 1: collecting SNH Green stamps, those little coupons you got whenever
Speaker 1: you bought gas or groceries. They worked like cash. You
Speaker 1: could trade them in to buy stuff. Of course, you
Speaker 1: know that you can get everything from color television to
Speaker 1: motor boats with green stamps. But now, well, just look
Speaker 1: at this. You could buy Britannica with green stamps too,
Speaker 1: but you needed a lot more stamps. Those World Book
Speaker 1: encyclopedias were about the nicest thing we owned, but my
Speaker 1: mother didn't trust us with them. They had to stay
Speaker 1: in the living room or on a special shelf. None
Speaker 1: of us kids was ever allowed to take them into
Speaker 1: our bedrooms. Our mother was worried we lose them, or
Speaker 1: I guess maybe tear them, or I don't know actually
Speaker 1: what you're so worried about out But you can hear
Speaker 1: any entries. How different World Book was from Britannica, who
Speaker 1: was geared more towards kids than to college professors. Consider
Speaker 1: just for one example, Britannica's entry for the topic of needles.
Speaker 1: The raw material of needle manufacture consists of Sheffield crucible
Speaker 1: steel drawn down into wire of suitable gauge. World Book's entry,
Speaker 1: written more for kids, starts this way. The next time
Speaker 1: you pick up a sewing needle, remember that this little
Speaker 1: piece of steel with a fine point at one end
Speaker 1: and an eye at the other has passed through the
Speaker 1: hands of seventy workmen and undergone twenty two processes in
Speaker 1: its Manufacture World book was smart to target kids. Britannica,
Speaker 1: with its lofty style and dense prose, was at risk
Speaker 1: of being left in the dust. But Britannica had a
Speaker 1: secret weapon for reaching kids. Britannica made educational films in
Speaker 1: the nineties sixties. In nineteen seventies, Thomas G. Smith worked
Speaker 1: for Encyclopedia Britannica Films, which was really starting to take off.
Speaker 1: What happened was it In nineteen fifty seven Sputnik was launched,
Speaker 1: and America was very embarrassed and we felt we would
Speaker 1: had fallen far behind the Soviets. The day Soviet scientists
Speaker 1: jauntily drop kicked the first Sputnik around the world, the
Speaker 1: average American was shocked, bewildered, and was entful. Sputnik is
Speaker 1: a product of higher education, of instructors who teach much
Speaker 1: of the physics and mathematics in high school that we
Speaker 1: teach in colleague. After Sputnik, Congress passed the National Defense
Speaker 1: Education Act. It wanted American children to catch up to
Speaker 1: close any knowledge gaps between the US and the Soviets.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden there was tons of money for
Speaker 1: educational films. Thomas Smith again. Encyclopedia Britanica films, which are
Speaker 1: sort of been a small company, suddenly got this big surgeons.
Speaker 1: It could practically sell the films for nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the schools would just buy them and the photo government
Speaker 1: would paid for it. So suddenly they were producing a
Speaker 1: lot of films. It was kind of like the Myron
Speaker 1: Taxman pitch, but on a jumbo scale and fueled by
Speaker 1: the anxiety of the Cold War. Don't want your children
Speaker 1: to fall behind. Don't just buy encyclopedias, fund the films.
Speaker 1: Our survival may depend on degrees and graduates. We are
Speaker 1: not now equipped to produce. Unlike written Encyclopedia entries, Britannica's
Speaker 1: films spoke to kids on a kid level. Smith was
Speaker 1: perfect for this job because he was learning to make
Speaker 1: films in real time as he went, and because he
Speaker 1: was young, not much older than his audience. When I
Speaker 1: first began, I was very inexperienced. I was in my
Speaker 1: early twenties, and I grew with experience longer I was there,
Speaker 1: and then I joined them as a writer, and I
Speaker 1: wrote my first film for them, and they had nobody
Speaker 1: to produce it. So as I started working on and
Speaker 1: that was food from the Sun. With a special camera,
Speaker 1: we can see that this beansprout must push through the
Speaker 1: soil to grow. Smith shot part of the film in
Speaker 1: his basement. You don't learn all that much from these movies.
Speaker 1: Nothing that would directly help you beat Soviet kids at math?
Speaker 1: Would you get? I think is a kind of curiosity
Speaker 1: about the world. How does that thing work? Why is
Speaker 1: it built that way? Where did this idea come from?
Speaker 1: A good teacher? Can you use a film to promote discussion?
Speaker 1: That's the way they should be used. And see the film,
Speaker 1: then you talk about the subject. At least that's what
Speaker 1: we hoped. I think there were some teachers would just
Speaker 1: run the film and go out and have a smoke.
Speaker 1: I had those teachers. So you let me just say
Speaker 1: thank you to every teacher who showed me a film
Speaker 1: or a film strip while they went out for a
Speaker 1: smoke or a cup of coffee or any kind of
Speaker 1: a much deserved break. Sure, educational films can be dead boring,
Speaker 1: but sometimes that's reassuring. Sometimes the idea that hey, here
Speaker 1: is a caterpillar, and here is how it turns into
Speaker 1: a butterfly. It's good stuff to know, and good stuff
Speaker 1: for kids to know. Grown ups want them to know.
Speaker 1: There's beauty in the ordinary. The films are different from
Speaker 1: an encyclopedia entry, no reading required. Also, they're not the
Speaker 1: sum of human knowledge. They're invitations to knowledge. There's something
Speaker 1: democratic about this move too. Not here's the gospel of
Speaker 1: all known things. But here's a way to think, here's
Speaker 1: how to consider, here's a way to do an experiment,
Speaker 1: here's how to inquire. Smith made Britannica films for more
Speaker 1: than a decade. One of his last is a film
Speaker 1: about the Solar System. At this point he was a
Speaker 1: master of the form. Also maybe just a little bit
Speaker 1: ready to stretch it. This last film of his it
Speaker 1: was only seventeen minutes long, but it takes you on
Speaker 1: a tour of the Solar System through the black of space,
Speaker 1: past each planet, as if you were traveling in a spaceship.
Speaker 1: At night, the temperature becomes cold enough to make iron
Speaker 1: little as glass. In the black sky, we see the
Speaker 1: neighboring planet Venus. That film proved to be Smith's ticket
Speaker 1: out of educational films. George Lucas Star Wars, George Lucas
Speaker 1: saw Smith's Solar System film and loved its special effects.
Speaker 1: Lucas hired him. Smith worked for years for Lucas's company,
Speaker 1: Industrial Light and Magic. He worked on Et and Poltergeist.
Speaker 1: On Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, He shrank the kids.
Speaker 1: We're all the size of buggers. So there it is
Speaker 1: your historical through line from Sputnik to Honey, I Shrunk
Speaker 1: the Kids. During the time that Smith worked for Britannica Films,
Speaker 1: his special effects were part of a bigger initiative trying
Speaker 1: to keep Britannica up to date with the latest scientific discoveries.
Speaker 1: Britannica had been the leading encyclopedia company for centuries, but
Speaker 1: by the time Smith was making those films, a few
Speaker 1: problems had begun to crop up. Updating the encyclopedia had
Speaker 1: been a problem for a long time. Britannica had, in
Speaker 1: its earliest days, tried to publish new editions every few
Speaker 1: decades or so, but that got harder and harder. The
Speaker 1: warrior always was that a new edition would be out
Speaker 1: of date by the time it was printed. It just
Speaker 1: took so long to produce. In nineteen thirty eight, Britannica
Speaker 1: had instituted a policy called continuous revision, that is, updating
Speaker 1: parts of the encyclopedia every year instead of issuing a
Speaker 1: holy new edition. In nineteen seventy, Warren Priests, Britannica's editor,
Speaker 1: said that the job had gotten pretty near impossible. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the only problem. It wasn't just that the world
Speaker 1: was getting more complex. It was also that more voices
Speaker 1: were speaking out against the whole idea of the encyclopedia,
Speaker 1: objecting to the very enterprise of something like a one
Speaker 1: stop shop for all knowledge. Britannica's editor, though, waived that
Speaker 1: criticism aside, we are essentially a Western alow a world encyclopedia,
Speaker 1: essentially a Western encyclopedia. Britannica really was very Western. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the sum of all human knowledge. It dropped its
Speaker 1: net only in one ocean of knowledge. Still, it kept
Speaker 1: trying to get bigger. In nineteen seventy four, Britannica issued
Speaker 1: the first new edition in over forty years, Britannica three
Speaker 1: twenty eight volumes, more than four thousand contributors for more
Speaker 1: than a hundred countries. Putting it together, it cost thirty
Speaker 1: two million dollars. It's the one Encyclopedia your kids won't
Speaker 1: outgrow Neil Britannica three. One size fits all. Britannica three
Speaker 1: had been reorganized, was still limited, written mainly by white
Speaker 1: men and mainly about the Western world. But it was bigger,
Speaker 1: and it was new, and it generated tons of sales.
Speaker 1: Myron Taxman, Encyclopedia salesman, was thrilled, Oh that was unbelievable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did that change your pa? Which did it bring a
Speaker 1: new business? It brought in a tremendous amount of new
Speaker 1: business because even people that had the old set wanted
Speaker 1: to get the new set, just like you know, I
Speaker 1: have an old car, you want to get the new car.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that year we made a ton of money.
Speaker 1: Was a real easy sale. I mean that was like
Speaker 1: shooting ducks. And then somewhat abruptly, the duck shooting era
Speaker 1: came to an end. Personal computers have a lie and
Speaker 1: they're available now at best Buy. In nineteen ninety a
Speaker 1: set of Encyclopedia Britannica cost about fifteen hundred dollars. For
Speaker 1: that money, you could just about buy a computer, which
Speaker 1: likely came with some kind of an encyclopedia as a
Speaker 1: CD ROM. I asked Myron what he'd say when people
Speaker 1: told him they didn't need an encyclopedia because they were
Speaker 1: getting a computer. You know, there's nothing like having a
Speaker 1: book in your hand, and that you could get the
Speaker 1: browsing factor when you're looking at something and find other topics.
Speaker 1: And this was the beauty of it. But it started
Speaker 1: getting harder and harder. Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: encyclopedia sales fell by half. Even Britannica's TV ads featuring
Speaker 1: this super annoying teenager couldn't save the business. My folks
Speaker 1: make sure I get a good breakfast. They got me
Speaker 1: a computer, a video camera, a compact displayer. But the
Speaker 1: problem is, hardly any of this stuff can really help
Speaker 1: me with my school work. There is something you could
Speaker 1: have which would help you a lot. It's the new
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia Britannica. Just call this toll free number and we'll
Speaker 1: send you this free booklet telling you everything you need
Speaker 1: to know about your key to the Information Aid. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, Britannic could finally put all its content
Speaker 1: on cd RAM, conceding to the Information age. But that
Speaker 1: cd RAM cost twelve hundred dollars. You could get Microsoft,
Speaker 1: cd ROM, Encyclopedia and Carter for a fraction of that knowledge.
Speaker 1: It seemed was getting cheaper and cheaper, at least cheaper
Speaker 1: to buy. It wasn't get cheaper to produce. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six, Britannica laid off its entire door to door salesforce. Taxman,
Speaker 1: who is undauntable, took it in stride, put me out
Speaker 1: of business. I had four kids, a couple in college.
Speaker 1: Taxman became an insurance broker, and after a while he
Speaker 1: retired and moved to Florida, enjoyed himself. Britannica for a
Speaker 1: while anyway, kept on printing encyclopedias. But nineteen ninety six
Speaker 1: that was the start of the Internet, and on the
Speaker 1: Internet the sum of human knowledge would come knocking the
Speaker 1: library that never closes, a whole different kind of door
Speaker 1: to door public, free, democratic, inclusive, interactive, but also much
Speaker 1: more room for error and misinformation. Knowledge on the Internet
Speaker 1: could be faked. After the break will jump to hyperspace.
Speaker 1: It was incredible, unbelievably, blindingly thrilling in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: to ponder all that the Internet could do might do
Speaker 1: link everything to everything else, hyperlink hyperspace, information moving at
Speaker 1: the speed of light, and it didn't take long for
Speaker 1: a few very clever people to figure out that you
Speaker 1: could use this thing, this worldwide Web, to create a bigger,
Speaker 1: better encyclopedia for everyone. All that promise and excitement it
Speaker 1: led to a gazillion projects eager to add your expertise
Speaker 1: to an article on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that's
Speaker 1: one of the world's most visited websites. Wikipedia is the
Speaker 1: one project that realized all that giddy early promise of
Speaker 1: the Internet. It's vast, it's open, it's free, and for
Speaker 1: the most part, it's reliable. Anyone can write an article,
Speaker 1: anyone can edit it, and so long as a subject clear,
Speaker 1: there is a certain bar of notability, any person, place, thing,
Speaker 1: or phenomenon can get an entry. I looked up sewing
Speaker 1: needle on Wikipedia. The sewing needle used for hand sewing,
Speaker 1: is a long, slender tool with a pointed tip at
Speaker 1: one end and a hole or eye to hold the
Speaker 1: sewing thread. This entry first appeared in two thousand and
Speaker 1: four and has been edited more than three hundred times
Speaker 1: by more than a hundred users, adding details and illustrations,
Speaker 1: repairing broken links, correcting facts. The next major breakthrough in
Speaker 1: needle making was the arrival of high quality steel making
Speaker 1: technology from China in the tenth century, principally in Spain,
Speaker 1: in the form of the Catalan furnace, which soon extended
Speaker 1: to produce reasonably high quality steel in significant volumes. Wikipedia
Speaker 1: isn't just say Britannica online. Its history is totally different,
Speaker 1: and so is its relationship with the idea of the expert.
Speaker 1: The whole venture relies on a notion of community, a
Speaker 1: community of knowing. What's weird to me is that it
Speaker 1: came in a way how to the dice throwing role
Speaker 1: playing game Dungeons and Dragons. On the early Internet, you
Speaker 1: could play Dungeons and Dragons like adventure games together in
Speaker 1: what were known as MUDs, multiple user dungeons. This will
Speaker 1: be lost on you if you've never played D and D.
Speaker 1: But there is just a D and D vibe about Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: there's no denying it. Jimmy Wales played a lot of
Speaker 1: these games when he was in graduate school. Wales got
Speaker 1: very interested in how people navigated around the Internet early on,
Speaker 1: which were with these things called web directories. Think of
Speaker 1: it like picking up your phone and asking the operator
Speaker 1: information please, or like using the Yellow Pages, a telephone directory.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, Wales started something called Newpedia and
Speaker 1: he hired a guy named Larry Sanger as his editor
Speaker 1: in chief. Sanger was finishing a PhD in philosophy. In
Speaker 1: its first year, nupedia posted about twenty articles, which is
Speaker 1: not a lot. That's because unfortunately their peer review process
Speaker 1: took forever. Also, Sanger was Nupedia's only regular employee. Everyone
Speaker 1: else was part time or a volunteer. So then Sanger
Speaker 1: got the idea to use this pretty new thing, a wiki,
Speaker 1: which would allow editors to post changes directly. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, Wikipedia was born. But in the end
Speaker 1: it wasn't Sanger who became the face of this project.
Speaker 1: It was the guy who is still the face of Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales. Here he is explaining his role at a
Speaker 1: TED talk in two thousand and seven. And then there's
Speaker 1: monarchy and that's my role in the community. So I
Speaker 1: was describing this in Berlin once and the next day
Speaker 1: in the newspaper that the headline said, I am the
Speaker 1: Queen of England, and that's not exactly what I said.
Speaker 1: But Wales became king of Wikipedia because he and Sanger
Speaker 1: had a falling out. Sanger wanted Wikipedia to be mostly
Speaker 1: written by experts, and Sanger made the rules, one of which,
Speaker 1: as The Atlantic Ones pointed out, was that if an
Speaker 1: article could conceivably have gone in Britannica, it was encyclopedic
Speaker 1: and permitted, but if not, it was not encyclopedic and
Speaker 1: to be deleted. Wells though he disagreed, he told that
Speaker 1: Ted Crowd he didn't want Wikipedia to be like Britannica
Speaker 1: at all. In nineteen sixty two, Charles van Doren, who
Speaker 1: was later a senior editor at Britannica, said the ideal
Speaker 1: encyclopedia should be radical, it should stop being safe. But
Speaker 1: if you know anything about the history of Britannica since
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, it was anything but radical. Sanger was
Speaker 1: more or less forced out of Wikipedia. He went on
Speaker 1: to become a fairly ornary critic of it. He wrote
Speaker 1: a book arguing that Wikipedia needs experts. Originally, the notion
Speaker 1: was Wikipedia was going to be paired with another website
Speaker 1: called Newpedia, which was going to actually vet the articles
Speaker 1: and post them as being expert approved. But that sort
Speaker 1: of approve of process fell by the way and Wikipedia
Speaker 1: just went on, you know, all by itself. Wikipedia, in
Speaker 1: other words, had something of a rocky start, but then
Speaker 1: it started getting bigger, and it also started getting better.
Speaker 1: As of twenty twenty two, Wikipedia is the ninth most
Speaker 1: visited website in the United States and in the world.
Speaker 1: Britannica has a website, Britannica dot com. It's way back,
Speaker 1: somewhere in the eight hundreds. Wikipedia exists in more than
Speaker 1: three hundred languages. Each is a separate version, Britannica not
Speaker 1: so much. Britannica in the last print edition has got
Speaker 1: sixty five thousand articles. Wikipedia today has got more than
Speaker 1: six million. Wikipedia is not perfect, but lately you won't
Speaker 1: hear a lot of arguments against the notion that Wikipedia
Speaker 1: is about the best thing on the Internet. It's like
Speaker 1: what people say about democracy, that it's a terrible form
Speaker 1: of government except for all the other ones. Wikipedia a
Speaker 1: terrible encyclopedia by except for all the other ones. You know,
Speaker 1: it's that same kind of problem. Jessamine West is a
Speaker 1: librarian and a Wikipedia supereditor. She's got the best vantage
Speaker 1: on what's great about Wikipedia and what's still tricky about it,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know, think about democracy, right, like
Speaker 1: democracy slowly gets better, But it used to be women
Speaker 1: couldn't vote, people of color couldn't vote, and now they
Speaker 1: can and is democracy fixed? No, but it's better, you know,
Speaker 1: and you still have to kind of fight for it
Speaker 1: all the time. And that's the struggle. Wikipedia realizes on
Speaker 1: volunteer editors, which means it's only as good as the volunteers.
Speaker 1: Early on, a lot of the volunteers were guys who
Speaker 1: are online all the time, a certain sort of geek.
Speaker 1: So for a long time, for years, nearly everyone writing
Speaker 1: articles was a man, an English speaker, and white, just
Speaker 1: like the people who wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica, except maybe
Speaker 1: with fewer advanced degrees. And some of these Wikipedia guys
Speaker 1: were either creepy or juvenile or both. Not all of them,
Speaker 1: of course, but there were these crazy dark alleys where
Speaker 1: some guys wrote endless entries about stuff that interested really
Speaker 1: only them. Porn stars in Pokemon is essentially you know,
Speaker 1: you want to see some really good Wikipedia pages, look
Speaker 1: at those. These first generation Wikipedians, like every Wikipedian, were
Speaker 1: also editors, vetting new content, especially content posted by people
Speaker 1: who were new to Wikipedia. Editors are great, but these guys.
Speaker 1: They were not always great editors. Still, the editing eventually
Speaker 1: got a lot better. Also, Wikipedia developed new rules requiring citation.
Speaker 1: I think really the footnote saved Wikipedia. I once submitted
Speaker 1: an entry about a dead and long forgotten poet. It
Speaker 1: took nearly a year from my submitted entry to clear
Speaker 1: all the editorial hurdles. I loved that I was a
Speaker 1: new Wikipedian and hadn't been tried and tested yet. I
Speaker 1: love that people all over the world fixed up my article,
Speaker 1: challenged my citations and made it better. Jessmine West has
Speaker 1: been a Wikipedian for so long. Her articles are so
Speaker 1: good that she earned a kind of promotion. You can
Speaker 1: get this weird little status that's called what's called auto patrolled,
Speaker 1: which means when you make an article, you write an article,
Speaker 1: you write an article from scratch. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: go through a whole bunch of hoops before it's kind
Speaker 1: of live on Wikipedia and everybody can see it, which
Speaker 1: means that it doesn't go through What I see is
Speaker 1: the dude gauntlet of people who are like this lady
Speaker 1: scientist isn't important, and you're like your opinion, sir. Maybe
Speaker 1: the part here that isn't important the Dude Gauntlet. That
Speaker 1: kind of thing raised a lot of questions about who
Speaker 1: was doing what on Wikipedia. Scholars started studying it quantitatively
Speaker 1: and concluded that over the first ten years of Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: one percent of its contributors we're responsible for nearly eighty
Speaker 1: percent of its content. But is that at all surprising?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Wikipedia is so huge that to
Speaker 1: write good articles and make good edits, it's just going
Speaker 1: to make sense that a very tiny fraction of Wikipedia
Speaker 1: users are doing most of that work. That's not okay
Speaker 1: when that tiny fraction is the dude Gauntlet, a group
Speaker 1: of people who have in common not that they are
Speaker 1: good editors, but that they are men. But what if
Speaker 1: that tiny fraction is a broadly diverse group of people.
Speaker 1: West is especially proud of a Wikipedia project called Women
Speaker 1: in Red. If there's a link that goes to somebody
Speaker 1: who's not in Wikipedia yet, it's a red link, and
Speaker 1: then once that link goes to an active page, it's blue.
Speaker 1: And so Women in Red is like, let's look at
Speaker 1: all these women who have red links, and let's write
Speaker 1: articles about them. And it's a huge project. People are writing,
Speaker 1: you know, pay dozens of pages about women every day
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia. The way West thinks about Wikipedia, it's like
Speaker 1: we're just in a sweet bought here in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: where this is actually working. For all the misinformation and
Speaker 1: insanity on Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and whatnot, Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: in this iteration, anyway, is actually working during the whole
Speaker 1: of the pandemic. For instance, it was just an incredibly
Speaker 1: reliable source of information about COVID, and I think mainly
Speaker 1: because it requires citation, because it favors reliable sources, because
Speaker 1: it's constantly updated, because it can be corrected. West is
Speaker 1: eloquent on the subject of embracing imperfection, of knowing that
Speaker 1: figuring out what's true and what's not is endless work.
Speaker 1: He can't take shortcuts. There's always gonna be people who
Speaker 1: sort of crab about things, and I think you see
Speaker 1: that on any topic. And so some of it's just
Speaker 1: deciding about your outlook. Some of it's deciding how you
Speaker 1: want to get involved, if it's a way that is
Speaker 1: useful for you. And some of it is I think
Speaker 1: the scales fall from your eyes understanding that everything's perfect,
Speaker 1: but if you can understand how a thing is imperfect,
Speaker 1: that allows you to make the corrections using your own
Speaker 1: human brain and your own human eyeballs to get the
Speaker 1: knowledge out of it that you want. A few years back,
Speaker 1: Jessamine West solved something known as the neck beard hoax.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I love this story so much. Online,
Speaker 1: citing Wikipedia, people started quoting something Louisa May Alcott had
Speaker 1: said trash talking Henry David Threau. Allegedly, Alcott had said
Speaker 1: to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the rose neckbeard will most assuredly
Speaker 1: deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue and perpetuity.
Speaker 1: So neckbeard, right, it's a derogatory term for you know,
Speaker 1: a type of internet man or internet beard. Have her
Speaker 1: sorry that you know you've got this weird kind of
Speaker 1: slobby beard, and it probably implies a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: things about you. Is the is the kind of Internet
Speaker 1: zeitgeist about it, And a lot of people would bolster
Speaker 1: their negative opinions of neck beard Havers by saying that
Speaker 1: Louisa May Alcott used to dish on Thorow's neck beard.
Speaker 1: They'd always provide some kind of a citation because they
Speaker 1: had to. I was like, well, that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem that sounds weird, and so I looked,
Speaker 1: because it's Wikipedia, right, I was like, well, where does
Speaker 1: that fact come from? Drop down to the bottom comes
Speaker 1: from some sixteen volume Emerson collection of Letters. I was like,
Speaker 1: oh god, this is the worst. But I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: I bet I can find that online. Probably. So she
Speaker 1: did what any good research or any good archivists, good librarian,
Speaker 1: good citizen would do. She tried to find a reliable
Speaker 1: original source for this quote. She called up scholars, other archivists,
Speaker 1: other variants, Emerson experts, no Alcott on Throw's neck beard.
Speaker 1: Wherever she looked, she couldn't find it. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's not there. So she went back to Wikipedia, and
Speaker 1: then I went looking to like who made that edit
Speaker 1: which you can find, and what other edits they made,
Speaker 1: like two or three kind of jokey bs edits like
Speaker 1: around the same time, and then they were never seen
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia again. And that quote was like an Internet
Speaker 1: darling for years, years because people love it, right, because
Speaker 1: it reinforces feelings or stereotypes that they already have. And
Speaker 1: so I was just like, well, hack with this, went
Speaker 1: into the page, deleted that sentence, you know, wrote a
Speaker 1: little edit Summary, which is another part of Wikipedia where
Speaker 1: you can tell why you did what you did. And
Speaker 1: I was like, this never happened. Never happened, So she
Speaker 1: corrected it defended the neck beards. Wikipedia in the end is,
Speaker 1: I think exactly what Encyclopedia Britannica wanted to be, at
Speaker 1: least at first, the perfect instrument of the Enlightenment, the
Speaker 1: universal diffusion of knowledge through the collective exercise of human
Speaker 1: reason and the enthusiasm for discovery, observation, discernment, and judgment.
Speaker 1: I asked my Rentaxment about it. Do you use Wikipedia? Oh, oh, constantly.
Speaker 1: A matter of fact, I just gave them a donation.
Speaker 1: They're always you know. I like Wikipedia. Actually I use
Speaker 1: Wikipedia constantly too, and like my Rentaxment full disclosure, I donate.
Speaker 1: I also worry it can't last, because it does cost
Speaker 1: a lot to keep it going, servers people's labor, and
Speaker 1: yet it's still free, and so I worry it'll get
Speaker 1: screwed up because so much that involves so many people
Speaker 1: so often get screwed up. But I'm grateful that for now. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. I learned that Wikipedia is sewing needle page
Speaker 1: for centuries Japan has celebrated something called the Festival of
Speaker 1: Broken Needles Harry Couyoh, where people lay their broken needles
Speaker 1: to rest with thanks. According to Wikipedia's entry about it,
Speaker 1: Harry Koyoh began four hundred years ago, has a way
Speaker 1: for housekeepers and professional needle workers to acknowledge their work
Speaker 1: over the past years and respect their tools. Practitioners went
Speaker 1: to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples to thank their broken
Speaker 1: needles for their help and service. So I guess this episode,
Speaker 1: this whole season of The Last Archive really is a
Speaker 1: kind of festival of broken needles. My chance to say
Speaker 1: prayers of thanks for all the wikipedians and their tools,
Speaker 1: their facts and rules and sources and footnotes and talk
Speaker 1: pages and edit pages, and prayers of thanks to everyone
Speaker 1: else who's doing this good work with their tools, teachers, librarians, farmers,
Speaker 1: scientists stitching together with their needles the fabric of common knowledge.
Speaker 1: The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and
Speaker 1: Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research
Speaker 1: assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta.
Speaker 1: Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
Speaker 1: and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider
Speaker 1: subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
Speaker 1: a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
Speaker 1: across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
Speaker 1: for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
Speaker 1: pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember
Speaker 1: to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts.
Speaker 1: Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. I'm Jillapour