Speaker 1: Welcome to Part Time Genius, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Guess What Mango? What's that? Will? All? Right? So I
Speaker 1: know we both love Mr potato At least I remembered
Speaker 1: that you loved Mr potato Head. Did you remember that
Speaker 1: I love Mr potato Head? I did not remember that
Speaker 1: at all. Yeah, big fans, big, And you know who
Speaker 1: invented Mr potato Head. It was George Learner, created back
Speaker 1: in nineteen So my favorite thing about Mr potato Head
Speaker 1: was that it was initially just a bag of like
Speaker 1: base parts, and kids would supply their own potatoes to
Speaker 1: jab these face parts into it. Right, that is exactly right.
Speaker 1: You could use any like use your imagination here. You
Speaker 1: could use carrots, turnips, or really any root vegetable that
Speaker 1: you want to But potatoes were chosen. This was interesting.
Speaker 1: Actually I didn't know exactly why. But one, they're cheap.
Speaker 1: Of course, they were affordable, and they were available year
Speaker 1: round on plus. I guess you could argue they're funnier
Speaker 1: than Mr turnip Head, but I don't know that. It
Speaker 1: seems debatable. But the craze then took off when Hasbro
Speaker 1: made this big TV commercial for the product and they
Speaker 1: sold it was something like four million dollars worth of
Speaker 1: these toy parts within a few months. Now, that was
Speaker 1: a fortune then. And the interesting thing though, is that Mr.
Speaker 1: Potato had actually wasn't the first potato toy on the market.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew this. I did not
Speaker 1: know that what was before it. Well, it was the
Speaker 1: first with three D pieces, so they added a D
Speaker 1: to what was being done out there in the world.
Speaker 1: It was competing with these these potato head toys at
Speaker 1: the time that we're using two D pieces, like more
Speaker 1: like paper product type stuff, and so you would stick
Speaker 1: these just onto the vegetable. But what's interesting is that
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty one, this was a full eighteen years earlier,
Speaker 1: So think about this, like potato toy technology was not
Speaker 1: fully evolved yet. But the Soviet Union, of course they
Speaker 1: had to be first. They launched this guide for kids
Speaker 1: on how to play with potatoes. So basically it was
Speaker 1: like this. It was a pretty delightful guide on how
Speaker 1: you could use a pen knife and match dicks and
Speaker 1: you could turn a bunch of potatoes into these little playthings.
Speaker 1: And so there's this illustration on how to make two
Speaker 1: little potato kids and have them see sawing on this
Speaker 1: bigger potato. And then there was another one on how
Speaker 1: to turn five or six potatoes into a race car
Speaker 1: with a tiny potato driver, or this little potato man
Speaker 1: walking his potato pig on a string leash. It's it, honestly,
Speaker 1: it is a pretty delightful guide. So but but you know,
Speaker 1: seeing this charming guide made me think of how much
Speaker 1: joy potatoes bring the world, whether it's through ridiculous Soviet sculptures,
Speaker 1: this is not this is real megati potatoes. But we
Speaker 1: there's now more than ever we need potatoes to bring
Speaker 1: the world joy or a bag of supersized fries, which
Speaker 1: I know you and I are both big fans of.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember this in college when
Speaker 1: you thought you were a vegetarian and yet then you
Speaker 1: realize that the potatoes had been cooked in and animal fat.
Speaker 1: But but I thought we'd make a whole show about potatoes.
Speaker 1: I am all about this. Let's five in ye ai
Speaker 1: their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson,
Speaker 1: and as always I'm joined by my good friend man
Speaker 1: guess how Ticketer on the other side of that soundproof glass,
Speaker 1: wearing a shirt that says am my readings. I think
Speaker 1: it says taters over haters. Is that what it says? Yes,
Speaker 1: I don't know what that means, but I love it
Speaker 1: and I feel like I need one as well. That's
Speaker 1: our good pal Ramsey. So some ango, what's up this week?
Speaker 1: So I want to apologize to the listeners for this tease.
Speaker 1: We had a few I guess like a month ago
Speaker 1: or and thank them for being so patient because you
Speaker 1: and I got to make an episode right before my
Speaker 1: dad passed away, and my dad just loved it and
Speaker 1: he's listening from the hospital, and you know, I had
Speaker 1: every intention of just plomming through and turning the show
Speaker 1: weekly again. But your parents are incredible and we are
Speaker 1: just so lucky, Like both our parents were so important
Speaker 1: in giving us love and support, and we got to
Speaker 1: go to this incredible college and then we chose the
Speaker 1: dumbest possible career and I'm just grateful that we get
Speaker 1: to do this. So so thank you for making time
Speaker 1: this week to talk about potatoes whatever ridiculous topics. So
Speaker 1: where do you want to start? Do you want to
Speaker 1: talk about how the universe might be shaped like a
Speaker 1: Pringle ship or how the Alaskan gold rush h during
Speaker 1: a desperate miners used to actually trade gold for potatoes
Speaker 1: because it was so nutritious. Or what are you gonna
Speaker 1: start with these? That's there's some good teases there I
Speaker 1: feel like should be considered. But I'm actually going to
Speaker 1: start with a fact about France back and then seventeen
Speaker 1: hundreds when the potato mango it was actually declared illegal.
Speaker 1: M okay, yep. So potatoes came to Europe by way
Speaker 1: of the Spaniards, who themselves had brought the vegetables back
Speaker 1: from the Inca Empire in South America, of course, and
Speaker 1: immediately there's this real distrust of the vegetable. Distrust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean partially because potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this fact, and partially
Speaker 1: because they grow underground, so people are weirdly suspicious of
Speaker 1: them and at the time they're mostly fed to pigs. Wait. Wait, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've done like a word search and found that potatoes
Speaker 1: aren't aren't found in the Bible. That they are not. No,
Speaker 1: I did the full search. No, I actually just read
Speaker 1: through it. I should have done a search all but
Speaker 1: I just kind of read through the whole thing. I
Speaker 1: didn't find it once. So anyway, basically nobody will touch
Speaker 1: these things, even hungry commoners. And then potatoes get blamed
Speaker 1: for things like when leprosy spreads, of course everybody blames
Speaker 1: it on the potatoes. And in all this mayhem, the
Speaker 1: French Parliament decides to ban the vegetable. Now this was
Speaker 1: around seventy and the potato is actually banned until seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy two, So good twenty four years of no potatoes.
Speaker 1: So I've actually read this thing in medtalphilast years ago
Speaker 1: that early farmers would plant potatoes on Easter and sprinkle
Speaker 1: them with holy water because they wanted the plant to
Speaker 1: grow safely and not be dangerous. But how do potatoes
Speaker 1: make their way into favor in culture? So there's this
Speaker 1: army officer, Antoine Parmentier, and he gets captured by the
Speaker 1: Prussians in the Seven Year War and so basically he's
Speaker 1: fed potatoes at this prison, and he doesn't notice any
Speaker 1: ill effects, like he's supposed to get leprosy and get
Speaker 1: all sick and all these other things. He stays healthy
Speaker 1: pretty much the whole time. But also he notices that
Speaker 1: France at the time has stopped exporting grains, and the
Speaker 1: Prussian army actually uses potatoes as a replace he spent
Speaker 1: for it in their diet. So Permentier looks at all
Speaker 1: of this, and as he learns more, he realizes that
Speaker 1: potatoes don't take that much effort to grow. So when
Speaker 1: he's released back to France, he starts this campaign to
Speaker 1: rehabilitate the potatoes image. He throws these dinner parties where
Speaker 1: he serves all these potato courses to celebrities, like then
Speaker 1: Franklin came to one of these things. He gives potato
Speaker 1: flowers to Marie Antoinette, and she then popularizes these things
Speaker 1: by wearing them in a hat. So people start getting
Speaker 1: curious and you know, trying to figure out what's going
Speaker 1: on with this leprosy fruit, which is the potato. But
Speaker 1: then he pulls off his greatest stunt, which I haven't
Speaker 1: even mentioned yet. So what's his greatest stunt. He plants
Speaker 1: a potato patch. He puts a ring of armed guards
Speaker 1: around it, so everyone starts thinking of them as like
Speaker 1: this luxury. I mean, this really is pretty smart. I
Speaker 1: think of them as this, you know, very valuable thing.
Speaker 1: But then he quietly tells the guards to accept bribes
Speaker 1: and allow people to start stealing the potatoes. So in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy two, all these peasants steel potatoes and treat
Speaker 1: them like this precious food. And then the Paris Faculty
Speaker 1: of Medicine finally declares the potato edible and makes them
Speaker 1: legal Again, isn't that amazing? French science is just on
Speaker 1: top of it. I know what they're doing. So its
Speaker 1: Parmentier like famous in France for doing this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess kind of and he, you know, the potato
Speaker 1: helped France get through some difficult famines, and Louis the
Speaker 1: sixteenth rewarded him for his work, actually declaring how important
Speaker 1: Parmentier was keeping the masses fed. And when he died,
Speaker 1: Parmentier's casket was actually placed in a plot circled with
Speaker 1: potato plants, and in the middle there's this bronze statue
Speaker 1: of him handing a potato to a commoner who's standing
Speaker 1: below him. So, just so you know, I would also
Speaker 1: like a statue of me handing out potatoes to commonders,
Speaker 1: just so I can remembers like a man of the people. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I kind of expected this. So there's already one in
Speaker 1: the works. I've started up paying thing and in installments
Speaker 1: so that it will be ready. It's going to be
Speaker 1: very expensive. But anyway, enough about Parmentier. What fact are
Speaker 1: you going to start with? I've got one about baseball.
Speaker 1: So you've heard of the old baseball trick where a
Speaker 1: first baseman might walk up to the picture and fake
Speaker 1: hand in the baseball, but actually he keeps the ball
Speaker 1: in the glove and when he walks back to the
Speaker 1: bag of the base runner steps off the base tick
Speaker 1: lead he sort of tagged them out. Yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's like this old trick that mostly
Speaker 1: gets used. I don't know, I feel like in kids
Speaker 1: movies about baseball, Like you remember this Rookie of the Year,
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the greatest films of all time.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, it is a very Rookie of the
Speaker 1: Year play. But but this minor league catcher for the
Speaker 1: Williams Sports Bills, his name is Dave Bresnahan, he was
Speaker 1: completely obsessed with this trick play. And this was in
Speaker 1: the late eighties, and Bresnahan was actually obsessed with a
Speaker 1: variation of that trick using a fake base ball. I
Speaker 1: love that anybody was obsessed with this trick. But anyway,
Speaker 1: how does that work? Yeah, so in this case, the
Speaker 1: catcher replaces the ball in his glove with the potato,
Speaker 1: because you know how people always confuse like baseballs for
Speaker 1: potatoes always, So the way the trick works is that
Speaker 1: the catcher accidentally throws the potato into outfield like it's
Speaker 1: an error. And then you know, when the base runner
Speaker 1: tries to steal home, the catcher shows that he actually
Speaker 1: has the baseball hidden his glove the whole time and
Speaker 1: tags him out. And do people they actually did this
Speaker 1: in baseball games. So according to the l A. Times,
Speaker 1: which is where I read about the story, I guess
Speaker 1: a few people got away with it in their earliest
Speaker 1: days of baseball. It was called the Tator trick um
Speaker 1: and anyway, So so Presenthan decides he's going to pull
Speaker 1: off the Tator trick in a real game, and he
Speaker 1: goes all out. He pays an artist to carve a
Speaker 1: potato and paint seems on it like it's a real baseball.
Speaker 1: He even picks the perfect game. He wants to do
Speaker 1: it against the Phillies farm team in reading because the
Speaker 1: Philly fanatic will be there and that means still be
Speaker 1: more of a crowd, and he starts trying to lay
Speaker 1: the groundwork. Like in games before the big one, he
Speaker 1: starts trying to pick off players at third, so he's
Speaker 1: kind of getting this reputation as a catcher who picks
Speaker 1: off players. Anyway, the big day arrives and in the
Speaker 1: sixth inning he gets into the perfect situation. There are
Speaker 1: two outs and a man on third, and Presidenthan knows
Speaker 1: this is his moment, so he comes up with this excuse.
Speaker 1: He tells the Empire that the webbing on his glove
Speaker 1: is off and he needs to replace his glove, and
Speaker 1: then he walks the dugout, grabs this ridiculous carved potato,
Speaker 1: and then walks back. So does anybody notice that he's
Speaker 1: doing this? The whole team like, I don't think the
Speaker 1: manager new, But the whole team starts laughing, and they're
Speaker 1: having a hard time like controlling themselves because they know
Speaker 1: what's up. And Presidenthan himself is trying to keep it together.
Speaker 1: But but when the runner on third takes a lead
Speaker 1: and the pitch lens in his glove, he snaps into
Speaker 1: action and he makes the switch and he throws this
Speaker 1: potato to third, but in dead of overthrowing the potato
Speaker 1: past the third basement into the field, he accidentally underthrows
Speaker 1: it and it bounces and the potato breaks into three
Speaker 1: pieces and it lands right in for the third base umpire,
Speaker 1: but the player doesn't notice, and you know, he charged
Speaker 1: his home and Resonahan shows him the ball and tags
Speaker 1: him out, and then he walks to the dugout. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing, right, reson Han assumes if his team
Speaker 1: follows him, the other team will walk off too and
Speaker 1: the game will just move on and continue. So does
Speaker 1: this work? Not at all? The officials are super confused.
Speaker 1: His teammates stay on the field, and the meantime, the
Speaker 1: third base goes to inspect this you know, broken up potato,
Speaker 1: and when he realized what's happened, the officials just award
Speaker 1: the runner home plate. And then Reresonehan gets pulled from
Speaker 1: the game for his shenanigans and the next day he's
Speaker 1: fined fifty dollars and cut from the team. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that we have way more sad than I expected. That's
Speaker 1: a funny trick. Presdonhan actually didn't mind that much because
Speaker 1: he was not that great a player, and the fans
Speaker 1: loved it, so he became such a like fan favorite
Speaker 1: or this legend that the team ended up retiring his
Speaker 1: jersey at the sold out game and uh, and they
Speaker 1: charged a dollar for tickets where not only could you attend,
Speaker 1: but you also got a potato with your ticket and
Speaker 1: uh and actually the largest chunk of that potato he
Speaker 1: threw uh in that Phillies game is in a jar
Speaker 1: of alcohol sitting on display in a baseball history museum
Speaker 1: in California. So, like, I think the actually feels like
Speaker 1: he went out and end. Yeah, he came out on top.
Speaker 1: That's pretty fun. So what do you have this next? Alright?
Speaker 1: How about um a quick one from the Farmer's Almanac.
Speaker 1: I know you're a fan of the Farmer's Almanac. I
Speaker 1: feel like that's where my favorite of almanacs. Oh, definitely, definitely.
Speaker 1: So if you've got a knife with some small rust spots,
Speaker 1: you can actually use a potato to fix that. So
Speaker 1: how's that work? Do you like, use the potatoes sproper
Speaker 1: way the rust or what I mean? That would be
Speaker 1: one way, but according to the Almanac and had a
Speaker 1: few other online sources, it's actually even easier than that.
Speaker 1: So you just insert the knife into the potato, let
Speaker 1: it sit, and the oxalic acid and the potato will
Speaker 1: work on the rust and soften it so that it
Speaker 1: then rents his away. How great would it be if
Speaker 1: that was like the best way to clean all your utensils,
Speaker 1: Like you sad them into potatoes and leave them overnight
Speaker 1: to clean them. Be the best feeling. Just get to
Speaker 1: keep stabbing potatoes. I'd have so many potatoes around. Um.
Speaker 1: Speaking of a lot of potatoes, here's a trend I
Speaker 1: kind of want to bring back from two thousand twelve
Speaker 1: in Japan, and it's the McDonald's potato party. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've established you do love McDonald's french fries, I know,
Speaker 1: with sweet and sour sauce's. It's like one of the
Speaker 1: many works and loves I have. But about a decade ago,
Speaker 1: the McDonald's in Japan started running a sale kind of
Speaker 1: like the dollar menu, where large fries were suddenly deeply discounted,
Speaker 1: And so some teens ordered twenty three large fries and
Speaker 1: made a mountain of them on a bunch of trays
Speaker 1: and posted to social media. People just went crazy, I guess.
Speaker 1: And and this is according to give moto. The McDonald's
Speaker 1: Japan use a more polite form of Japanese, so even
Speaker 1: though it's not fancy, you're supposed to act with like
Speaker 1: a little bit more decorum, I guess. And the photo
Speaker 1: gets retweeted thousands of times, and people are angry that
Speaker 1: kids are acting silly and being a bother to the McDonald's.
Speaker 1: And some people are just stunned to see that many
Speaker 1: fries in one place. But the biggest chorus around these
Speaker 1: photos is this argument that if you order that many fries,
Speaker 1: you have to eat them or is disrespectful. And I
Speaker 1: would agree with that, but but did this become a trend? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like potato parties started popping up all over the place,
Speaker 1: and some kids saw the twenty three fry order as
Speaker 1: a challenge, obviously, so in Okinawa, some kids ordered forty
Speaker 1: large fries. At the McDonald's near Okayama Station, a small
Speaker 1: group of kids ordered sixty large fries, and that photo
Speaker 1: got retweeted tens of thousands of times apparently, And so like,
Speaker 1: you know, the kids are supposed to finish these fries,
Speaker 1: and they actually do, like like I think it takes
Speaker 1: them about three hours, but the employees get super upset.
Speaker 1: Apparently the fries took up a whole large table on
Speaker 1: their own, and then all the people watching these kids
Speaker 1: house these fries take up another large table, so you know,
Speaker 1: it felt like they were losing business. And and one
Speaker 1: employee from the restaurant took to Twitter and just asked
Speaker 1: for it to quote please stop, please stop. That said,
Speaker 1: if you are handing trays and trays of fries over
Speaker 1: to kid, you've got to expect there's gonna be a
Speaker 1: little chaos. When you said the three hours, though, the
Speaker 1: only thing I could think of is like, while the
Speaker 1: fries are delicious, after about thirty minutes, if they're sitting there,
Speaker 1: they go from really good to pretty gross pretty fast.
Speaker 1: I wonder they must have just kept ordering them rather
Speaker 1: than ordering a bunch at one time, because I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'd have to see how that works. But how did
Speaker 1: the trend finally die down? So McDonald's just up the
Speaker 1: price on the fries to their regular price and it
Speaker 1: kind of stopped really soon after that, which is a
Speaker 1: pretty simple fix. Yeah, alright, so here's a weird. When
Speaker 1: I was watching this little documentary about potato chips and
Speaker 1: ed her from hers potato chips, and he said that
Speaker 1: if they still made potato chips the way they used
Speaker 1: to this was about fifty years ago when the company started,
Speaker 1: they would have to charge twenty five dollars a bag bag.
Speaker 1: Why why is that? I mean, that's just how much
Speaker 1: the industry has automated since then. It's actually kind of
Speaker 1: amazing to to watch how it all works. So when
Speaker 1: a truck full of potatoes goes to the Hers factory,
Speaker 1: the trailers pulled onto a scale where the potatoes are
Speaker 1: then weighed, and then it lifts the potatoes and dumps
Speaker 1: the potatoes onto a conveyor belt, and the whole process starts,
Speaker 1: kind of without humans. The whole thing is starting there,
Speaker 1: and instead of watching to see which potatoes are colored
Speaker 1: green and which ones are good, this computer sorts all
Speaker 1: of this out and the imperfect potatoes and chips are
Speaker 1: all weeded out along the way. Ed Her actually says
Speaker 1: that when his mom was involved in the business and
Speaker 1: used to supervise the bagging of these chips, they would
Speaker 1: bag five the ten pounds of chips every hour, and
Speaker 1: now with fewer people, more computers on the line, they
Speaker 1: bag five to six tons of potato chips every hour,
Speaker 1: which is insane. That is amazing, you know. Speaking of
Speaker 1: potato chip bags, here's a quick interesting one. So people
Speaker 1: absolutely hate that potato chip bags are over. In fact,
Speaker 1: Korean college students in two thousand fourteen protested this fact
Speaker 1: by taking a hundred sixty potato chip bags, finding them
Speaker 1: together with plastic and tape, and using them to build
Speaker 1: a raft to float across the river. And apparently plus
Speaker 1: people watched that feet But um, the question remains, why
Speaker 1: do potato chips have so much air in them? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And do you do you have an answer to this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is intentional. It is called Slackville, and that's the
Speaker 1: industry term. Sasically, those bags are pumped full of a
Speaker 1: little extra nitrogen to both keep the chips preserved, but
Speaker 1: also because if the bags are packed with air, they
Speaker 1: won't get mishandled and you won't end up with a
Speaker 1: bag full of crumbs. It's basically a way to protect
Speaker 1: you from getting a half bag of like fully round chips.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting. I guess we always assume that it's
Speaker 1: just too to you know, be cheap or cheat us
Speaker 1: out of a certain number of chips or something. But
Speaker 1: that's pretty interesting. All Right, We've got a couple more
Speaker 1: facts to go, but let's pause for just a quick break.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about
Speaker 1: a really important summer topic, potatoes, of course. So Mango,
Speaker 1: we've each got one fact ago, what do you want
Speaker 1: to close with? Well, I know you're probably a little
Speaker 1: late to celebrate this, but I want to point out
Speaker 1: to you that in two thousand eight, the UN declared
Speaker 1: it the International Year of the Potato. Okay, well, we're
Speaker 1: just what fourteen years behind celebrating this historic event that's
Speaker 1: never never too light, It's okay, Well, it's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting why the UN decided to do this. Uh As,
Speaker 1: as they put it, they wanted to shed new light
Speaker 1: on a hidden treasure. And part of the reason is
Speaker 1: that growing potatoes is surprisingly efficient in combating hunger. Because
Speaker 1: potatoes aren't really traded across borders, because they're so easy
Speaker 1: to grow across climates from low to high altitudes, and
Speaker 1: because they're not really globally traded like most cereal crops,
Speaker 1: they offer a lot of food security and farmers don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about the prices fluctuating because of global markets.
Speaker 1: Apparently that year, places like Peru encouraged locals to use
Speaker 1: potato flour to reduce the reliance on wheat imports, and
Speaker 1: both the Chinese and Indian governments leaned into potato production
Speaker 1: to feed their growing populations. And I kind of like that,
Speaker 1: after all that time, the UN finally gave the potato
Speaker 1: it's due in this giant report. I agree. I kind
Speaker 1: of like that to So how are you going to
Speaker 1: close this up? All? Right? Well, I was torn. There
Speaker 1: were a couple of facts I was looking at, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna save one of them for this. I think
Speaker 1: we need to do a follow up with nine more
Speaker 1: great facts about potatoes, because there's they're just so many.
Speaker 1: But how about a fact about couch potatoes? So unlike
Speaker 1: most etymology, which can be pretty frustrating because the origins
Speaker 1: are always, you know, pretty murky, we've dealt with that
Speaker 1: on on several topics before. There is an exact start
Speaker 1: date for the word couch potato. It first appeared in
Speaker 1: print back in nineteen seventy nine that you're both you
Speaker 1: and I were born. This was in the l A Times,
Speaker 1: while referencing afloat on a parade route. According to the
Speaker 1: article quote the couch potatoes will be lying on couches
Speaker 1: watching television as they are towed towards the parade route.
Speaker 1: According to the excellent site Today, I learned a man
Speaker 1: named Tom Lacino was the first to coin the phrase.
Speaker 1: He had this good buddy named Bob Armstrong, and they
Speaker 1: had already started this little group called the boob Too
Speaker 1: Uber's and it was kind of this ridiculous protest against
Speaker 1: the California health craze at the time, and the boob
Speaker 1: tubers were basically committed to sitting in front of the
Speaker 1: TV and snacking instead of jazz er sizing or whatever
Speaker 1: the fad was at the time. So after recruiting their friends,
Speaker 1: they launched this float in the Duda Parade. None of
Speaker 1: this sounds real, uh, this joke parade to parody the
Speaker 1: Tournament of Roses Parade. But one day in Latino called
Speaker 1: up Armstrong and when his girlfriend answered the phone, he asked, Hey,
Speaker 1: is the couch potato there, And apparently she looked over
Speaker 1: saw her boyfriend just planted on the couch and started laughing.
Speaker 1: And after that they rebranded as the couch Potatoes and
Speaker 1: tried to trademark the word but it actually became too
Speaker 1: popular in pop culture for them to protect the mark.
Speaker 1: I had actually never heard the story before, you know,
Speaker 1: doing the prep for this episode. So that is so
Speaker 1: funny that there's actually a person who invented that phrase.
Speaker 1: Tom Latino, I think you deserved this week's trophy for
Speaker 1: best Fact, but since I don't actually know you, I
Speaker 1: think will you should accept this award in his honor.
Speaker 1: All right, I guess I'll do that. Thanks so much, Tom,
Speaker 1: I appreciate it, buddy. That's it for this week's Part
Speaker 1: Time Genius. Will be back with more very important facts soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite show.