Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and this is Stuff you Should Know one of
Speaker 2: our Really, it's been a while top ten editions where
Speaker 2: we don't actually do top ten.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some people out there are like, what in the
Speaker 1: world are you talking about, And some people are like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, this reminds me of the old days,
Speaker 1: back in the two thousand and oh, I don't know, tens, eights, nine, thirteens.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, thirteen was lousy with top tens, I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we used to do all a lot of these
Speaker 1: top well not a lot, but we used to do
Speaker 1: top tens from the old House Stuff Works website, and
Speaker 1: it seems like they never had ten great entries. So
Speaker 1: we would just on the fly say oh, let's not
Speaker 1: do this one. But we were better now we're professional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we got together beforehand and said, well, let's just
Speaker 1: do these eight and Yeah.
Speaker 2: It feels weird to know ahead of time what we're
Speaker 2: not going to do rather than just saying it in
Speaker 2: the middle of recording. But I do feel like it
Speaker 2: is more professional.
Speaker 3: It's called growth, my friend.
Speaker 2: So we are not doing all ten. But there is
Speaker 2: one that I think really kind of introduces this concept
Speaker 2: out of the gate Chuck and it's concept. Oh oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I forgot to talk about the concept. We're talking today
Speaker 2: about bad business decisions. And you could call this the
Speaker 2: shot and fraud hour, because if you are kind of
Speaker 2: if you take a grim view of CEOs and captains
Speaker 2: of industry and all that, this is like a chance
Speaker 2: to really kind of poke fun at people have made
Speaker 2: some really terrible decisions over the years.
Speaker 1: Not all great decisions over the years. Sometimes they're bad.
Speaker 1: We're here to talk about eight of them.
Speaker 2: But hey, the games you never won are the ones
Speaker 2: you didn't start playing in that saying is that it?
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's it, but that that totally
Speaker 1: makes sense to me. So I'm saying, yes, okay, good,
Speaker 1: so you only missed the shots you don't take.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's much better than mine, But I like yours.
Speaker 2: I undermined our professional spiel at the beginning just now.
Speaker 2: So there's a pretty well worn story about how Alexander
Speaker 2: Graham Bell invented the telephone and went to Western Union
Speaker 2: and said, hey, you captains of Communication, you guys rule
Speaker 2: the world as far as long distance communication goes, I've
Speaker 2: got this neat invention, why don't you buy it from
Speaker 2: me for one hundred thousand dollars? And the heads at
Speaker 2: Western Union said, that is ridiculous. Nobody's gonna want this thing.
Speaker 2: Hit the bricks, and Alexander Graham Bell just went off
Speaker 2: and created his own phone company. And those patents that
Speaker 2: he received turned out to be what are widely considered
Speaker 2: the most valuable patents ever issued in the United States.
Speaker 2: And some pretty valuable patents have been issued like this
Speaker 2: is not we're not talking about some also ran patent.
Speaker 2: This is the patent of patents, right, you beat up
Speaker 2: the squatty potty oh by far, like by twice as
Speaker 2: valuable even maybe but probably more so. But it just
Speaker 2: kind of goes to show you, like it's easy to
Speaker 2: say haha at Western Union. But it also is a
Speaker 2: teachable moment, as Oprah would say, because if you dig
Speaker 2: into the story, you find that when Alexander Graham Bell
Speaker 2: invented the telephone, he didn't invent the telephone so you
Speaker 2: and I could pick up a receiver and talk to
Speaker 2: one another on either end. He basically invented it to
Speaker 2: be the radio. Before radio, the intent was for you
Speaker 2: to sit in a room and somebody on the other
Speaker 2: end of the telephone line in a different city perform
Speaker 2: a play or read a monologue, or play a symphony,
Speaker 2: and you were going to sit there and listen. You
Speaker 2: weren't supposed to talk back. That was the idea. So
Speaker 2: if you put it in that context, yestern Union doesn't
Speaker 2: seem so dumb anyway. So I think it's a reminder
Speaker 2: to keep in mind in most of these cases, hindsight
Speaker 2: is twenty twenty, and that there is a lot of
Speaker 2: exacerbating circumstances and that nothing's ever that one sided. But
Speaker 2: it's still kind of fun to think about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know what a great example of that
Speaker 1: hindsight being twenty twenty is.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go with this one is when.
Speaker 1: Excite did not buy Google just call it an audible.
Speaker 1: Everybody remembers Excite, or you may not, but if it
Speaker 1: sounds familiar and you look up the Excite logo, that
Speaker 1: you will immediately, probably if you were of a certain age, go, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember Excite. They didn't really stand out to me
Speaker 1: when I was researching this until I went and saw
Speaker 1: it and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember those guys.
Speaker 1: I did not ever use it. But Excite dot com,
Speaker 1: believe it or not, is still around and in one
Speaker 1: of what will be two a bit of serendipity with
Speaker 1: this episode releasing now, Excite is literally ending their email
Speaker 1: program this month.
Speaker 2: I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1: Is it really?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: I had no idea.
Speaker 1: Well, because what's funny is I made fun of Emily
Speaker 1: up until about a year ago because she's still paid
Speaker 1: for a MindSpring email.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: Yes, because she's like, I've had.
Speaker 1: This email for twenty years and like everybody's got it
Speaker 1: and I can't. Like she was locked in, she felt like,
Speaker 1: but she waited it out eventually because I think they
Speaker 1: may have stopped supporting it as well.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Oh, but they still kept taking her money, right.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know. Anyway, Excite. If you go to
Speaker 1: Excite dot com today, you will laugh because you will
Speaker 1: see what is a very old school looking internet site.
Speaker 1: It's like a list of it's a news scroll, like
Speaker 1: a list of headlines. It's got these little icons that
Speaker 1: I assume they pay to be on there because it's
Speaker 1: like Amazon, eBay, State Farm and Casper Mattress like prominent
Speaker 1: icons as if this website is the place to go
Speaker 1: to get to.
Speaker 3: Those other places.
Speaker 1: And then on the left rail you will see a
Speaker 1: list of things like email, which of course is going defunct,
Speaker 1: a bunch of redirects like weather it goes to acuweather
Speaker 1: sports goes to ESPN, and then entertainment, travel, finance, and
Speaker 1: games all goes to ask dot com.
Speaker 2: Wow, apparently Excite was that's today. I thought Excite turned
Speaker 2: into ask dot COMO. Apparently there's separate.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, they clearly like each other because they link
Speaker 1: four different things to ask dot com.
Speaker 2: And do you know, of course ask dot com started
Speaker 2: out as ask jeeves.
Speaker 3: Remember that I thought it was. I just couldn't remember
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 2: So these are search engines. Some of them were Yahoo
Speaker 2: apparently categorized the entire Internet by category strangely enough. But
Speaker 2: Excite supposedly was a search engine. It just wasn't super good.
Speaker 2: And there's a story out there, Chuck that the search
Speaker 2: engine was purposefully not super good because these search engines
Speaker 2: used to be called web portals. That was, you would
Speaker 2: go to Excite first search what you're searching for, and
Speaker 2: then hopefully while you were there taking a bunch of ads.
Speaker 2: So the longer you stayed on Excite before leaving and
Speaker 2: going off into the Internet, the better it was for
Speaker 2: Excite's bottom line. So their search wasn't that great. And
Speaker 2: that is an explanation from one of the people who
Speaker 2: who was part of this deal for why Excite passed
Speaker 2: on Google.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they weren't just a search engine.
Speaker 1: They were a they're like what they are today still,
Speaker 1: they were an aggregator. They had new scrolls and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. It was almost like a a front page
Speaker 1: of a newspaper that you would go to.
Speaker 2: Right, but a really like super low fi newspaper.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Google comes around. This is nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 1: Larry Page and Sarah Gibrinn said, all right, we got
Speaker 1: this thing. It's basically like an algorithm essentially at this point,
Speaker 1: and we could sell it to you Excite for a
Speaker 1: million bucks. And then they balked and they said, all right,
Speaker 1: how about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars And they said, no, well,
Speaker 1: we're Excite. Why do we need you this weird search
Speaker 1: engine that isn't even really a search engine yet? And
Speaker 1: I think this is one clear example of hindsight being
Speaker 1: twenty twenty because no one could have predicted what Google
Speaker 1: would become.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And so the CEO of Excite, George Bell,
Speaker 2: is known as the guy who passed up on buying
Speaker 2: Google for less than a million dollars. Right, But he's like, hey, hey, hey,
Speaker 2: I'm not some dummy like these guys wanted to gut
Speaker 2: Excite search engine and put in the Google search algorithm instead,
Speaker 2: And I was dedicated to my engineering team. They had
Speaker 2: worked really hard to create the search engine that I
Speaker 2: thought was perfectly fine, and I wasn't about to completely
Speaker 2: poison our culture for Google. And Google's people said no, Actually,
Speaker 2: what happened was we made a bake off between their
Speaker 2: search engine and our search in it, and their stuff
Speaker 2: came back with terrible stuff. Our stuff came back with
Speaker 2: really good stuff, and they were like, this is too good.
Speaker 2: People are going to immediately leave Excite, so we don't
Speaker 2: want your your algorithm. Those are the two competing stories
Speaker 2: for why this didn't happen. Amazing, It is amazing bad
Speaker 2: business decisions still though, sure, absolutely all.
Speaker 1: Right, where should we go next? We might not even
Speaker 1: get to eid everybody. That's how exciting these episodes are
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with Kodak.
Speaker 2: I was gonna go with Kodak too.
Speaker 1: Everyone that grew up in the pre digital revolution remembers
Speaker 1: Kodak as the photograph company, the film paper Company, the
Speaker 1: film stock company. Founded in eighteen eighty out of New York,
Speaker 1: they controlled ninety percent of the film market into the
Speaker 1: late seventies and about eighty five percent of the camera
Speaker 1: market and employed about sixty thousand people. And in the
Speaker 1: mid seventies there was a engineer there named Steve Sassin
Speaker 1: who basically figured out digital photography. He was experimenting with
Speaker 1: something called a charged couple device a CCD, and he
Speaker 1: figured out how to translate an image into ones and
Speaker 1: zeros and built the very first digital camera. It was
Speaker 1: a one hundred thousand pixel image, which is pretty cute
Speaker 1: this point zero one megapixels.
Speaker 2: It's a little grainy.
Speaker 1: And went to the bosses and said, hey, like, this
Speaker 1: is the future, guys, this is what we should do.
Speaker 1: And Kodak said, oh, well, I'm not so sure about that.
Speaker 2: So yes, there were some people in Kodek that were like,
Speaker 2: this is dangerous man. We're like, our money is in
Speaker 2: print photographs. Our money is in regular cameras, and there
Speaker 2: was another group in Kodek that was like, this guy's right,
Speaker 2: Steve Sassin's right, this is the future. And they did
Speaker 2: invest billions of dollars in developing a digital camera whole outfit,
Speaker 2: and those conservative forces managed to keep it back, keep
Speaker 2: it back, and then finally, by the time Kodak joined
Speaker 2: the digital camera revolution, they had been passed by. So
Speaker 2: not only did they miss the digital camera revolution despite
Speaker 2: having invented it, they also wasted billions of dollars on
Speaker 2: their digital camera division that never got to really get
Speaker 2: a good start, So it was just a complete waste,
Speaker 2: Like this is this is a genuinely bad business decision, Chuck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they had the disc camera, remember those. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was the big Kodak product that was. It wasn't digital,
Speaker 1: but it was a little film wheel. It was a
Speaker 1: disc and it was a little flat camera. I remember
Speaker 1: that was all the rage, so I wanted them.
Speaker 3: It was a very big deal.
Speaker 2: I see that now. Yeah, that does kind of take
Speaker 2: me back. Yeah, did you have one? No, Fisher Price
Speaker 2: made one. Did you have that one?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't have either either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you and I had similar upbringings. We didn't get
Speaker 1: the best toys.
Speaker 2: No, but apparently those Then the early nineties, when digital
Speaker 2: cameras came out, they were like one thousand dollars, but
Speaker 2: they could only store like eight pictures at a time.
Speaker 2: Like you could take eight pictures and then you had
Speaker 2: to plug it into your computer and up though those
Speaker 2: eight pictures, format the disc and then start over again.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: God, bless you early adopters, but it usually pays, in
Speaker 1: my experience, to wait a little bit on the tech
Speaker 1: to figure itself out. For sure, like the first flat
Speaker 1: screen TVs. Remember how expensive those were?
Speaker 2: Oh my god. But it's the early adopters who drive
Speaker 2: the prices down because sure they are buying these things,
Speaker 2: you know what I.
Speaker 1: Mean, Hey, I mean they walk the righteous path.
Speaker 2: So, just to wrap it all up, Kodak ended up
Speaker 2: laying off fifty thousand employees and in twenty twelve they
Speaker 2: they filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. And they're still around.
Speaker 2: But they basically make printer cartridges and motion picture film stock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is also not used very often anymore. Nope,
Speaker 3: poor Kodak, Poor Kodak. Time for break.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say the same thing, man, we are
Speaker 2: really sympatic of this episode.
Speaker 3: All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 4: I was going to say that too.
Speaker 2: Okay, Chuck, I'm going to pick one and I'm in
Speaker 2: the big wheel. Okay, it landed on Western Union against
Speaker 2: we're gonna have to go over that one break in.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, all right.
Speaker 2: So Western Union now, we won't do that. Let me
Speaker 2: just move at one space to this JC penny one.
Speaker 2: How about that?
Speaker 3: Ooh all right, I.
Speaker 2: Like this one because it really kind of gets to
Speaker 2: the bottom of some tricks that clothing retailers use. So
Speaker 2: actually all retailers do, but some clothing retailers are particularly
Speaker 2: guilty of it.
Speaker 1: That's right. We were talking about the clothier jcpenny, which
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve hired a shiny new CEO named Ron Johnson,
Speaker 1: who had made quite the name for himself in business
Speaker 1: in retail as Two things. First, the guy who hipped
Speaker 1: up Target. Oh yes, okay, remember growing up Target was
Speaker 1: like whatever Target was not, you know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a kmart thing. And then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: Tarja was like this cool, hip, awesome place is because
Speaker 1: of Ron Johnson's efforts largely gotcha. Then he went to
Speaker 1: work at Apple, and he is the guy he was
Speaker 1: their VP of retail. He's the guy who basically oversaw,
Speaker 1: you could say, invented the Apple Store and the Genius
Speaker 1: Bar and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, So I mean like he was legit. J. C.
Speaker 2: Penny was like, come save us, Like we're really flagging,
Speaker 2: Like even compared to some of these other retailers that
Speaker 2: do the same thing, like TJ. Max or Walmart or whatever,
Speaker 2: we're getting no love whatsoever. So Ron Johnson came in
Speaker 2: and looked around and he's like, this industry is shameful.
Speaker 2: Like basically what he'd walked into was an industry of
Speaker 2: clothing retailers that would sell items that were say a
Speaker 2: ten dollars item for ten dollars, but on the price
Speaker 2: tag would it would say that it originally started out
Speaker 2: as like fifty dollars or something, right, And yes, at
Speaker 2: one point they charged fifty dollars for it, but it
Speaker 2: was so that they could later mark it down in
Speaker 2: a sale that probably took place the day after that
Speaker 2: thing arrived and was sold for fifty dollars. So that
Speaker 2: means there were some suckers out there who actually paid
Speaker 2: fifty dollars for that ten dollars shirt. But the way
Speaker 2: that they got you was by not only marking it down,
Speaker 2: but having a reason to mark it down. They would
Speaker 2: have sale after sale after sale, hundreds of sales, different
Speaker 2: sales in a year, and it still wasn't working. And
Speaker 2: Ron Johnson was like, this is desperate and we shouldn't
Speaker 2: do this anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were coupons even and people, you know, Americans
Speaker 1: eat that stuff up. If you hear half off blowout
Speaker 1: sale this weekend, your mouth starts water in a little
Speaker 1: bit and you think, wait a minute, I can get
Speaker 1: something that should cost twice as much for half as much,
Speaker 1: or I can bring in this coupon and get two
Speaker 1: things for one thing.
Speaker 3: It's unbelievable, and we still fall.
Speaker 1: For these tricks. We all do. So he said, no,
Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. We're gonna just basically out ourselves
Speaker 1: and say, you know now we're gonna do is it's
Speaker 1: called fair and square every day is our new pricing system.
Speaker 1: It means you don't need a sale, you don't need
Speaker 1: a coupon our stuff. It's just going to be inexpensive
Speaker 1: all the time. And people hated it right away. People
Speaker 1: started complaining they love their sales, they love their deals.
Speaker 1: He would call them on the phone personally. He wouldn't
Speaker 1: do that and say, you dummy, don't you understand you're
Speaker 1: paying the same price. It's just cheap all the time. Now,
Speaker 1: people didn't understand that. They didn't want to hear that.
Speaker 1: I saw one person that said that he seemed to
Speaker 1: almost have a disdain for his customer base because he
Speaker 1: behind closed doors were saying, they're dumb and they need
Speaker 1: to be educated, and like, how can these dumb dumbs
Speaker 1: not understand that cheaper clothes every day is a better situation?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the studies have found that people will pay
Speaker 2: more for a cheaper thing if they think it's more valuable.
Speaker 2: Then they would pay for the same thing if it
Speaker 2: were marked. They would pass up something that was actually
Speaker 2: the same thing at a lower price.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the reason why is because a ten dollars shirt
Speaker 2: seems cheap and maybe cheaply made and probably just not
Speaker 2: a good But a fifty dollars shirt that you can
Speaker 2: buy for ten dollars was valuable to begin with. And
Speaker 2: then yes, not only is it a deal, you could
Speaker 2: make the case that it's a steal. And people love that.
Speaker 2: Like you said, there's a thread, a vein of America
Speaker 2: that is crazy for that kind of stuff. And Ron
Speaker 2: Johnson found out the hard way that when you go
Speaker 2: up against that vein of Americans, you lose every time.
Speaker 2: And he lost pretty big in seventeen months.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got two words for you, my friend. Outlet mall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that really says it all about America. Yeah, but if
Speaker 1: you don't even know how they operate. But it's got
Speaker 1: to be something like this with outlet malls, right, very much.
Speaker 2: But also there's a lot of them that are like
Speaker 2: crypto outlet malls. They're not outlet stores, they're just regular
Speaker 2: stores in an outlet mall. It's b s If you're
Speaker 2: a developer of an outlet mall and you're letting stores
Speaker 2: in there that are actually not selling their outlet stuff
Speaker 2: but there's just a regular store, you're at fault. It's
Speaker 2: on your your hands. Blood is on your hands.
Speaker 1: So what this got Ron Johnson was what is known
Speaker 1: as the worst quarter in retail history, which was a
Speaker 1: store to store thirty two percent drop.
Speaker 3: Wow quarter over quarter.
Speaker 1: That that's just a death nail for him. He only
Speaker 1: made it, I believe seventeen months, and that was it
Speaker 1: and they came back in and said, hey, we're gonna
Speaker 1: go back to our fake pricing scheme, and people loved it.
Speaker 2: I'm sure Ron Johnson was like, that's all right, thanks
Speaker 2: for the multimillion dollar golden parachute at everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh man, he made He supposedly made like four
Speaker 1: or five hundred million dollars in Oh Michael Stock God.
Speaker 3: So he didn't even need this job.
Speaker 2: No, I'm sure he just wanted to show all this
Speaker 2: loser Americans what the deal was.
Speaker 3: He still got a job.
Speaker 1: He's doing something else like two years after this, like
Speaker 1: why is this guy working? Go go retire on your
Speaker 1: island or something.
Speaker 2: So there's a there was an ad that jac pennyc
Speaker 2: came up with like that ran very It was very
Speaker 2: short run intentionally, but it basically pleaded for their customers
Speaker 2: to come back. They're like, we know we made mistakes,
Speaker 2: We're getting back to our roots. We love you, please
Speaker 2: come back again. Like they were begging their customers to
Speaker 2: come back. And apparently it worked because this is another
Speaker 2: common theme that we'll see and I think this is
Speaker 2: a good segue into the New Coke debacle. Ooh, when
Speaker 2: you take away something that people love but have come
Speaker 2: to take for granted. Yeah, they will not only fight
Speaker 2: for it, they'll come back for it and droves when
Speaker 2: you give it back to them.
Speaker 1: New Coke the end, pretty much. Yeah, So of course
Speaker 1: this has got to be in there. If you grew
Speaker 1: up in the eighties like we did, you remember a
Speaker 1: time where Pepsi threatened Coke a little bit, not literally,
Speaker 1: like doctor Pepsi didn't come up to mister Coke's door
Speaker 1: and say, listen, I'm going to take you up back
Speaker 1: and behind the.
Speaker 3: Witch had and take care of you.
Speaker 1: Sure, the company threatened Coke because their sales were doing
Speaker 1: pretty good.
Speaker 3: It was a different taste. I think it was a
Speaker 3: little sweeter.
Speaker 1: I don't even drink Pepsi, so I'm not really sure,
Speaker 1: but I think it had a sweeter taste. They were
Speaker 1: I don't know if they were winning the Coke Wars,
Speaker 1: but they are the Cold Wars, but they were. They
Speaker 1: were edging in on Coke's dominance.
Speaker 2: It was Chuck. It was that choice of a new
Speaker 2: generation campaign. Yeah, that was what had done it. They
Speaker 2: got Michael Jackson, they got Madonna, they got I think
Speaker 2: Geraldine Ferraro did one of these commercials.
Speaker 1: Like, that's advertising goal.
Speaker 2: These were right, These were just internationally famous commercials, and
Speaker 2: so PEPSI had kind of come out of nowhere and
Speaker 2: was eating Coke's launch.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden, Coke had do caucus big.
Speaker 2: Mistake, yeah, dan Quayle.
Speaker 3: So Coke was a little worried.
Speaker 1: They saw their writing on the surpi riding on the wall,
Speaker 1: and they said, all right, under the behind closed doors,
Speaker 1: let's start rejiggering our our rest here that had been around,
Speaker 1: you know, since it was you know, sold in that
Speaker 1: very first pharmacy. Very very classic. That's a little hint
Speaker 1: of what's to come. Very classic, classic taste. And for
Speaker 1: a couple of years they're engineers, mixed up little batches.
Speaker 1: They did taste tests, they let people taste them. People
Speaker 1: are like, I like the taste of this better. And
Speaker 1: so in nineteen eighty five and April of eighty five,
Speaker 1: New Coke came out with a redesign, can redesign. You know,
Speaker 1: they kept their colors and stuff, and the I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if did the font completely change or was it
Speaker 1: just sort of a modified version of the old script.
Speaker 2: I think the new was slightly different, but the Coke
Speaker 2: was the original.
Speaker 1: Okay, but at any rate, they unveiled new coke and
Speaker 1: it was a tremendous not only a tremendous flop, but
Speaker 1: it costs a lot of anger and people hoarding their
Speaker 1: old coats, and people were just like, how can you
Speaker 1: change an American institution like this without even asking anybody?
Speaker 3: Even though they had done testing.
Speaker 2: They had done tons of testing, and the test came
Speaker 2: back roundly in favor of this new formula for coke.
Speaker 2: But Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink apparently pointed out
Speaker 2: that if you're doing it tastes tests, you're not sitting
Speaker 2: there drinking a whole can. You're just taking a little
Speaker 2: sip of something and comparing it to the sip of
Speaker 2: something else. And so it's possible that that new coke
Speaker 2: really tasted terrible if you drank the whole can. It
Speaker 2: was too sweet. The explanations I saw were more that
Speaker 2: it was psychological. People didn't like messing with their beloved
Speaker 2: coke number one, And I saw that kind of wrapped
Speaker 2: up in a quote from somebody that was that they
Speaker 2: said the biggest mistake Coke made was telling the public
Speaker 2: about the change to the recipe. Because people were like,
Speaker 2: you can't mess with my stuff. I don't care what
Speaker 2: it tastes like. And of course it's not going to
Speaker 2: possibly taste good because you're messing with my original coke.
Speaker 2: So people just kind of turned on it from the outside.
Speaker 1: Well, like they think they should have just changed the
Speaker 1: recipe and just left it and not said anything.
Speaker 2: This guy was saying, if you're going to change the recipe,
Speaker 2: they shouldn't have said anything, because that happens from time
Speaker 2: to time. But then the bigger problem was that you
Speaker 2: kind of touched on. They didn't stop and ask their customers,
Speaker 2: do you want a new coke? They they just made
Speaker 2: a terrible business decision based on fear of PEPSI getting
Speaker 2: some of their market share. All of a sudden, they
Speaker 2: went and completely rejiggered the formula. That was their response
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it didn't last long. It was less than
Speaker 1: three months later, a new coke was gone and they
Speaker 1: added Classic Coca Cola Classic I remember, and I didn't
Speaker 1: even drink a lot of soda back then, even but
Speaker 1: I remember it being just almost like this nationwide relief
Speaker 1: setting in. It was really a big deal, and it
Speaker 1: sounds so funny now if you're some kid who had
Speaker 1: you know, didn't live through this. It really like it
Speaker 1: was big, big news and sort of captured America's attention
Speaker 1: for a little while. And Coke Classic coming back was
Speaker 1: like an old, long lost friend reappearing at the front door.
Speaker 1: And eventually, of course, the word classic was dropped and
Speaker 1: they were just like, can we just forget about all
Speaker 1: of that and we're just Coke forever?
Speaker 2: But they lasted for a while. There was many years
Speaker 2: where you differentiated by saying Coke Classic. Even after New
Speaker 2: Coke was long gone, you still referred to Coke as
Speaker 2: Coke Classic for a while, and then it finally went
Speaker 2: back to Coke.
Speaker 3: I had to do it?
Speaker 2: Uh, is it time for another message? Break?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 2: Okay? Chuck said, sure, all right, Chuck, you're up. What's next?
Speaker 2: What are we going to do next?
Speaker 1: Well, my amigo, we are gonna go with the Blockbuster video.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, this is my favorite, I said, another boy.
Speaker 1: The eighties was pretty rough on some companies that didn't
Speaker 1: see the riding on the wall because Blockbuster. You grew
Speaker 1: up in the seventies and eighties, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're a teenager at least in the eighties by that time.
Speaker 1: You spent a lot of time, We've talked about it before,
Speaker 1: browsing your early Friday evenings with your friends at Blockbuster Video,
Speaker 1: looking over over those shelves, reading the back of those boxes,
Speaker 1: the backs of the boxes, and standing by the door
Speaker 1: at that bin because you just could not get your
Speaker 1: copy of Excalibur. And some nerd walks up and dumps
Speaker 1: it through the slot and he grab it before it
Speaker 1: even hits that bin, and the employee says, you really
Speaker 1: not supposed to do that.
Speaker 2: That was a great Blockbuster employee question.
Speaker 1: You do it anyway, And block Buster ruled the video
Speaker 1: market except for you know the which I still love
Speaker 1: that the charming mom and pops I had a Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this family at our church even ran their own little
Speaker 1: video store and that was a good business for a while,
Speaker 1: but Blockbuster eventually would gobble most of those up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to me, Blockbuster was the nineties thing. The eighties
Speaker 2: were mom and pop places where you'd actually rent the
Speaker 2: VCR when you also rented Beverly Hills.
Speaker 1: Cop Yeah, video Shock, your video house, Yeah, video Barn.
Speaker 2: And there's just asn't a side. I wonder I want
Speaker 2: to know if anybody out there knows what the name
Speaker 2: of this phenomenon is. But whenever I walked into a Blockbuster,
Speaker 2: that whole mental list of movies that I wanted to
Speaker 2: rent just vaporized.
Speaker 3: Yea, and I like the test taker syndrome.
Speaker 2: It would be like I had just walked into a
Speaker 2: building for the first time, let alone, like a Blockbuster video,
Speaker 2: like I had no idea what I was doing, totally
Speaker 2: in over my head, and I would invariably walk out
Speaker 2: with some movie that I just didn't really want to see,
Speaker 2: but I got to rent something, and I okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: pretty much. I spared myself that one. But yes, that's
Speaker 2: generally correct.
Speaker 1: So you and then you get home and you're like, man,
Speaker 1: I went in there for gleaming the Cube and I
Speaker 1: walk out with Turner and Hooche.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. That was kind of the wrap up
Speaker 2: of it, wasn't it that that you remember after you
Speaker 2: get back home. It's the worst or it was the worst.
Speaker 2: It would be still the worst if Blockbuster were around,
Speaker 2: But it's not because of bad business decisions.
Speaker 1: That's right. If you remember in the late nineties, that
Speaker 1: was a company called Netflix that said, hey, we're going
Speaker 1: to start mailing DVDs to people, so you don't have
Speaker 1: to go to the store. You can get on this
Speaker 1: thing called the internet and you can look up the
Speaker 1: movie you want, and you can order that DBD to
Speaker 1: be shipped to your house and then you can just
Speaker 1: drop it in the mail afterward. We failed to mention,
Speaker 1: by the way, I didn't know this Blockbuster was making
Speaker 1: about half a billion dollars a year in late fees.
Speaker 2: Man, they were that was unconsonable.
Speaker 3: That was a big part of their business.
Speaker 1: But Netflix is like in those late fees, like you
Speaker 1: can keep these things for a long time, and they
Speaker 1: would eventually say, but you know what, maybe we should
Speaker 1: try And I think there was a merger idea right
Speaker 1: unless of a sale.
Speaker 2: What do you mean or oh? With with Netflix.
Speaker 1: Were they trying to merge with Blockbuster and say, hey,
Speaker 1: why don't you let us take over and start doing
Speaker 1: mailing stuff for you as well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the impression I had that Netflix wanted
Speaker 2: to kind of slide in and become part of Blockbuster
Speaker 2: and help Blockbuster do its own thing. And Blockbuster said
Speaker 2: no twice at.
Speaker 3: Least Yeah for fifty million bucks, by the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And Netflix, by the way, has valued at about
Speaker 2: two hundred billion today, so fifty million dollars was pretty
Speaker 2: pretty good price. And that's not just because Netflix was
Speaker 2: an unknown. Netflix had already shown that it was a
Speaker 2: proven success, but it hadn't been around long enough for
Speaker 2: Blockbuster to see the riding on the wall. They just thought.
Speaker 2: I think John any Coco Antioko, the CEO, considered not
Speaker 2: just Netflix niche, but the Internet was still niche in
Speaker 2: two thousand to this ceo. So Netflix Ogden went on
Speaker 2: their merry way, and Blockbusters just started to fall further
Speaker 2: and further and further behind.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was actually a member of the Blockbuster DVD
Speaker 1: mailing program when they finally got around to copying Netflix.
Speaker 4: Really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't jump on Netflix. I was like a
Speaker 1: Blockbuster loyalist. I was like, I'm gonna use their thing
Speaker 1: because it's the same basically, uh huh, And I don't
Speaker 1: I think maybe eventually when Blockbuster stopped, I did jump
Speaker 1: to Netflix DVD.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did.
Speaker 1: But I mentioned in the first one of the first
Speaker 1: segments that there was a bit of serendipity, two bits
Speaker 1: of serendipity that Excite finished their email program this month.
Speaker 1: Netflix this week just announced the shutdown of their DVD side.
Speaker 2: I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm not falling for that again. Twenty five years
Speaker 1: of those DVD mailings, they just shut it down. They said,
Speaker 1: they said that you can send them back up until
Speaker 1: September twenty eighth, and after that, we're not going to ask,
Speaker 1: which basically means keep what you got.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And not only that, but to liquidate their DVDs, they
Speaker 1: were they're selecting random customers and they're just sending them
Speaker 1: ten DVDs oh wow, and saying like, here have fun.
Speaker 1: Apparently er point five percent of their revenue these days,
Speaker 1: and just quickly to go over their moneys. They Netflix
Speaker 1: is a rough company to be invested in. I think
Speaker 1: I don't know much about this stuff, but they in
Speaker 1: November twenty one, they peaked at about three hundred and
Speaker 1: two billion. The next summer they crashed all the way
Speaker 1: down to like eighty something billion, I think three hundred
Speaker 1: and then now we're back up at like one eighty.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that was when they they like basically
Speaker 2: doubled their their streaming fee, their monthly fee to stream.
Speaker 2: Everybody was like, forget to you. And then people come back,
Speaker 2: all right. So you were saying that Netflix was giving
Speaker 2: away their DVDs because they knew they need them, right, Great,
Speaker 2: that's such a wonderful thing to do. Blockbuster did the
Speaker 2: opposite of that, and I saw that it was very
Speaker 2: famously described as failing at failing because as it was
Speaker 2: clear that Blockbuster was doomed, and it was clear for
Speaker 2: years before anybody, actually before the last Blockbuster closed, rather
Speaker 2: than basically pumping all the money out to shareholders, which
Speaker 2: apparently is what a sociopathic corporation's supposed to do, they
Speaker 2: brought a succession of CEOs and to try to save
Speaker 2: the place, and those CEOs just spent hand over fist
Speaker 2: money that they wasted on these schemes that did nothing
Speaker 2: but waste money for Blockbuster to try to resurrect the brand.
Speaker 2: And then finally, after I think bankruptcy in twenty ten,
Speaker 2: it was bought for a song I don't even think
Speaker 2: it was a good song by Dish and they're still
Speaker 2: Blockbuster now. Dish is one of their on demand groups
Speaker 2: of channels is called Blockbuster at Home. So Blockbuster's still around, Chuck.
Speaker 2: If you're a Blockbuster loyalist, get yourself dish and you
Speaker 2: can watch on demand movies through Blockbuster at home.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 1: It was was it the song Escape?
Speaker 3: That's a bad song?
Speaker 2: What song is that?
Speaker 3: If you like aka the Pina Colada song.
Speaker 2: Oh, that song is not only bad, it's morally reprehensible.
Speaker 1: It's awful. And I just pointed this out to a
Speaker 1: group of friends this last summer who liked it, including Emily.
Speaker 1: I was like, you've never listened to the words of
Speaker 1: this song. Yeah, She's like, well, not really. I know
Speaker 1: the chorus. I said. It's about a guy that wants
Speaker 1: to cheat on his wife's so bad because he can't
Speaker 1: stand her that he puts a want ad to go
Speaker 1: find some new lady and he hits it off with
Speaker 1: her and it turns out being his wife.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they He's like, great things are fixed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, man, because in the seventies that's all you needed.
Speaker 1: That in a little uh, you know, a bottle of
Speaker 1: I don't know, baccardy and some pills.
Speaker 2: That's right. The seventies were great, but the people in
Speaker 2: the seventies were the worst.
Speaker 1: All right, we got two more, which you're gonna pick?
Speaker 1: I know which one you're gonna pick.
Speaker 2: You do not. All right, yes you do, let's go
Speaker 2: ahead and pick it for me.
Speaker 1: We have well you're probably you're probably gonna say, Et,
Speaker 1: that's right, And.
Speaker 2: Technically we have three left if you want to go
Speaker 2: for it. But okay, do we have three?
Speaker 3: M h what else are we missing?
Speaker 2: I can't say it'll ruin the surprise.
Speaker 1: Well, we agree not to do that one though, you
Speaker 1: want to do it again?
Speaker 2: No, No, we didn't do the AOL time Warner one.
Speaker 1: Oh eh, okay, let's get that.
Speaker 2: There is one thing I wanted to say about that,
Speaker 2: all right. At the time, in nineteen ninety nine, AOL
Speaker 2: was worth two hundred billion dollars, and I was like, Wow,
Speaker 2: that's a lot. How much is Apple worth these days?
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty three, Apple's worth two and three quarter
Speaker 2: trillion dollars? Wow, trillion dollars, that's how much that company
Speaker 2: is worth. More than one trillion dollars, almost three trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: And this is twenty four years later. That's that's how
Speaker 2: gobsmackingly much like just money has increased by then by now,
Speaker 2: So I just wanted to point that out. It's just insane,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 3: Well, ET, the movie.
Speaker 2: Oh, one other thing. I want to go on record
Speaker 2: that we should do an episode on AOL and the
Speaker 2: beginning of the Internet because it is so interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean talking about Excite and AOL. And I remember
Speaker 1: the first time I heard the word Google.
Speaker 3: I literally remember that very first time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you remember, I used to say, like I'm feeling lucky.
Speaker 1: It was a production manager named Kevin Edge. If anyone
Speaker 1: knows kevinun til Kevin had said Hi. He in a
Speaker 1: production office on a TV commercial in LA in the
Speaker 1: early early two thousands. He said the word Google and
Speaker 1: I went what And he went, It's a search engine.
Speaker 1: And I went, excuse me, Kevin, Kevin was great.
Speaker 2: Did you say you mean a web portal?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: E T.
Speaker 1: Colon the Extra Terrestrial. Very popular movie, some might say
Speaker 1: some I'd say it's a classic. Some might say that
Speaker 1: they still love Reese's Pieces because of that classic movie. Yes,
Speaker 1: so I said Reese's Pieces, I think, but you know
Speaker 1: what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, to me, that might be the greatest mass produced
Speaker 2: candy of all time. Oh what, I love Reese's Pieces.
Speaker 2: I can eat them by the by the bucket full.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately of them too, and they've but they've only been
Speaker 2: around since nineteen seventy eight. Did you know that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I remember when they came out, my friend.
Speaker 2: Okay, I was not quite aware. I was two years
Speaker 2: old at the time, give me a break, but I
Speaker 2: came seven. I was Candy Central, right, Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 2: But yeah, by the time I was seven, I was like,
Speaker 2: give me these things. Yeah, in nineteen seventy eight when
Speaker 2: they came out, they actually did pretty good. Hershey's made them,
Speaker 2: and then they crested and peaked and then started to
Speaker 2: decline really quickly, and so Reese's Pieces appeared to have
Speaker 2: run their course. And people say quite reasonably that it's
Speaker 2: possible Reese's Pieces wouldn't be around anymore were it not
Speaker 2: for Et eating Reese's Pieces on screen. And the irony
Speaker 2: of the whole thing is that it was originally supposed
Speaker 2: to be Eminem's, and Eminems wouldn't bite. They said, we
Speaker 2: don't know what this ET thing is. We're not going
Speaker 2: to give you a dollar for it.
Speaker 3: ET was based on a book.
Speaker 2: There's either somebody describe it as a novelization. So it's
Speaker 2: possible that they made a book version of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what it was.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, in that apparently in the original novel that
Speaker 2: was made from the movie, it's Eminem's that et eats,
Speaker 2: not Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's a nice little nugget. I read the
Speaker 1: novelization of Raiders at the Lost Ark.
Speaker 2: How was it?
Speaker 3: It was great?
Speaker 2: Did it differ from the movie at all? Or was
Speaker 2: it just basically the movie and book form?
Speaker 1: It is the movie and book form. But there's novelizations.
Speaker 1: I read a couple of them back then. They're always
Speaker 1: a little bit different, and they had extra details because
Speaker 1: it's a book, and it was kind of fun. I'm
Speaker 1: sure they still do that, don't they.
Speaker 2: I think so maybe probably. I'm sure Marvel does. If
Speaker 2: you can make a dime off of it, Marvel does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 3: So depending on who you talk to, there are different stories.
Speaker 1: I think this is one of those things where when
Speaker 1: something works out so well, everybody you interview later on
Speaker 1: was like, it was really kind of my idea, because
Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg is I saw the interview. The words came
Speaker 1: out of his mouth that he said, you know, my
Speaker 1: favorite candy was Eminem's, And so I thought when Eminem's passed,
Speaker 1: I thought, well, what's my second favorite can candy. It's
Speaker 1: Reese's Pieces. I saw other things say it was one
Speaker 1: of Spielberg's kids say that was his favorite. I saw
Speaker 1: others that said there was this guy named Steve Adler
Speaker 1: who was the vice president of merchandising for a company
Speaker 1: called MCA, the Merchandising Corporation of America, which was a
Speaker 1: subsidiary of Universal, And it was kind of like the
Speaker 1: early days of moving merchandising period, like Star Wars kind
Speaker 1: of busted it wide open a few years before. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is sort of a newish thing and like
Speaker 1: brand placement and getting money for that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So Steve Adler was a merchandising VP at MCA, and
Speaker 1: he says that it was his kid who said.
Speaker 2: I love Reese's Pieces, and that kid was me exactly.
Speaker 2: So that's how it ended up. Like Hershey said no, sorry,
Speaker 2: Eminem Mar said no, we're not gonna We're not gonna
Speaker 2: spend a million dollars. That was the deal. Universal said
Speaker 2: this this alien that everybody's gonna love. We're just sure
Speaker 2: of it is going to eat either Eminem's or Reese's pieces.
Speaker 2: It comes down to who wants to pay a million
Speaker 2: dollars in advertising, like spend a million dollars in marketing
Speaker 2: in return for basically being part of the ET marketing blitz.
Speaker 2: Who wants to do that? And Eminem said, no, we're
Speaker 2: not going to do that, and Reese's said, let's give
Speaker 2: this a try. There was There's a guy named Jack
Speaker 2: Dout who is a business development VP, who was basically
Speaker 2: the person who decided to take that risk and spend
Speaker 2: a million dollars, which at the time there's a lot
Speaker 2: of money. We're talking about nineteen eighty eighty one eighty
Speaker 2: two dollars, so it's worth like two and a half
Speaker 2: million dollars today at least. And like ET is, this
Speaker 2: is where the hindsight is twenty twenty thing kicks in.
Speaker 2: Like they didn't see a script. Nobody knew what ET was.
Speaker 2: Aliens up to that point were not lovable or huggable.
Speaker 2: They were creepy and weird. So there really was a
Speaker 2: risk that Jack daw took and he can take a
Speaker 2: victory lap for making that decision.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and ET is.
Speaker 1: You know, the rest is history, as they say, because
Speaker 1: ET is now a top thirty all time grocer domestically
Speaker 1: for the United States the Green Grocer. I went down
Speaker 1: the box office Mojo rabbit hole out of curiosity because
Speaker 1: it's just littered with avatars and Avengers and stuff like
Speaker 1: that and e t if you kind of dig in.
Speaker 1: It is the number two all time movie that is
Speaker 1: not a franchise movie. Nice, so not bad, second only
Speaker 1: to Titanic. Oh, okay, and guess what, Barbie's already at
Speaker 1: number fifteen all time.
Speaker 2: I know that's pretty great and then amazing. I finally
Speaker 2: saw Oppenheimer too. My god, it's a good movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how are your ears?
Speaker 2: They're fine. I saw it in like RBX or RPX
Speaker 2: or DMX or something like that, where like it shakes
Speaker 2: the seats and everything. I'm like, this is unnecessary.
Speaker 3: It's loud.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, just for you movie trivia buffs, if someone
Speaker 1: asked you a trivia question about non franchise box office Titanic,
Speaker 1: then et and the number three all time movie non franchise.
Speaker 3: Passion of the Christ.
Speaker 1: What Yeah, Wow, big movies like three hundred and something
Speaker 1: million bucks.
Speaker 2: But that's I mean, that's considering it even was boycotted
Speaker 2: by lots of churches around the world, and that still
Speaker 2: made that mon Well, maybe why no publicity. No, there's
Speaker 2: such a thing as bad publicity.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: The swings you don't take are the ones that you
Speaker 2: missed the most.
Speaker 1: All right, let's finish up here with a little quick
Speaker 1: we'll go through this quickly. Monday night football set the
Speaker 1: TV landscape for you. In the nineteen sixties, there were
Speaker 1: three main networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. ABC was in
Speaker 1: last place. There was also a fledgling network from Howard Hughes,
Speaker 1: which I didn't realize called Hughes Sports Network.
Speaker 2: That was ahead of his time, very.
Speaker 1: Much ahead of his time, and even though they showed
Speaker 1: like bully and stuff. But at one point the National
Speaker 1: Football League decided, you know what, there's Pete Roseus, a
Speaker 1: commissioner back then, very forward thinking guy. He said, I
Speaker 1: think we should have a prime time football game. How
Speaker 1: about Friday night? And they said, no, that'll mess up
Speaker 1: high school football. And he said Saturday night and they
Speaker 1: said no, there's actually a law against that because college football.
Speaker 2: I forgot about that.
Speaker 1: So he said, all right, we already played on Sunday.
Speaker 1: He said, how about Monday night and they said, no,
Speaker 1: one's going to care. They played the first Monday night
Speaker 1: game in nineteen sixty four, but it was not televised,
Speaker 1: and then they had I think CBS and NBC had
Speaker 1: because CBS had the NFL, NBC had the AFL before
Speaker 1: the merger in nineteen seventy, and they each tried their
Speaker 1: hand at Monday night games a couple each during sixty eight,
Speaker 1: sixty seven through sixty nine, but none of those are televised,
Speaker 1: and they finally got together and said, these things need
Speaker 1: to be on TV.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they started putting them on TV. And apparently
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why is because you said, you know,
Speaker 2: some of those Monday night games, the early ones weren't televised,
Speaker 2: but people still went to them. They turned out like aces.
Speaker 2: So it was very obvious that there was a market
Speaker 2: for this, so putting it on TV wasn't It was
Speaker 2: not a no brainer. It was still very risky, but
Speaker 2: there was there was reason to think it might take off.
Speaker 2: So I think CBS and NBC, since they already had
Speaker 2: a relationship with the NFL, they got first first refusal
Speaker 2: from Peter Roselle. Yeah, and NBC said that would mean
Speaker 2: we're preempting Carson and apparently we're too afraid to even
Speaker 2: bring it up. So no, we're passing on that.
Speaker 3: No, Carson, have you killed?
Speaker 2: CBS said, are you crazy? We're getting great ratings with
Speaker 2: the Doris Day Show and laughing, we can't, we can't
Speaker 2: get rid of those for some football game. And ABC
Speaker 2: just was like, you know that that nerdy kid in
Speaker 2: class that has their hand up so high it's about
Speaker 2: to be dislocated from their shoulder and they're just waggling
Speaker 2: in their seat. That's what ABC was doing. And finally
Speaker 2: Peter Roselle is like, guess ABC, you can have it.
Speaker 3: That's right, and uh, you know it turned out to
Speaker 3: be a very big deal.
Speaker 1: There's a guy named Rune Hardly there that kind of
Speaker 1: spearheaded this project for ABC Sports flashio graphics, more cameras,
Speaker 1: more camera angles and slow mo and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: like using all this sort of newer technology more than
Speaker 1: they had before.
Speaker 2: You have to say, and.
Speaker 1: The biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for
Speaker 1: the next three minutes. The biggest change was they all
Speaker 1: of a sudden had three a three person broadcasting team,
Speaker 1: which had never been done. It was always just a
Speaker 1: color commentator and a play by play person, but in
Speaker 1: this case they had the play by play guy and
Speaker 1: Keith Jackson only there for one year, then replaced by
Speaker 1: Frank Gifford, and then Dandy Don Meredith was the color guy.
Speaker 1: Very he was an actor, former Cowboys, QB. Handsome, just
Speaker 1: great in the color position.
Speaker 2: And then people who don't know what you're talking about,
Speaker 2: what the color position is?
Speaker 1: Oh, well, the play by play is the is the
Speaker 1: person that goes. And then he takes the ball on
Speaker 1: the four yard line and cuts it outside and runs
Speaker 1: it down to the three tackled hard by number eighty five.
Speaker 1: And then the color guy comes in and says, I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you, man, the way they're playing tonight, it
Speaker 1: looks like they're pretty inspired. I don't know if the
Speaker 1: cheerleaders are getting them all pumped up or what.
Speaker 2: Oh that's great. Okay, Then who was Cosel?
Speaker 1: Well, Cosell was Cosell. He was. We should do a
Speaker 1: full podcast on him. The guy is a is a legend,
Speaker 1: an amazing broadcaster. You know, was fired in disgrace at
Speaker 1: one point. But yeah, quite quite a story. But Cosell
Speaker 1: was just he he was sort of a cerbic and
Speaker 1: he would make fun of players and people and teams and.
Speaker 2: Oh he was the Dennis for mill Time.
Speaker 3: Well much better.
Speaker 1: But you know, Cossel was very famous for sort of
Speaker 1: verbally sparring with Ali and going toe to toe with
Speaker 1: Ali in interviews, and just a great broadcaster while he
Speaker 1: was doing his job, and he was the third sort
Speaker 1: of wild card, and he and Don Meredith would go
Speaker 1: at it and when when Gifford came in, that was
Speaker 1: really a solid team and they it was a huge hit.
Speaker 1: I think it's still one of the highest rated TV
Speaker 1: series period on television.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's one of the longest running too, although
Speaker 2: it started in nineteen seventy, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did we even say what day was it was?
Speaker 2: Well, it was a Monday in nineteen seventy It was.
Speaker 1: The Browns Jets and the Browns won thirty one twenty one,
Speaker 1: I know that.
Speaker 2: And it's been going ever since then. So this thing's
Speaker 2: been on for fifty three years, but it's it's a
Speaker 2: baby compared to some of the longest running TV shows
Speaker 2: in America. General Hospital started in nineteen thirty six, Guiding
Speaker 2: Light came the year after. Sesame Street's been on even longer.
Speaker 2: So it's old, but there's older just f yi, Yeah.
Speaker 1: For sure, and it bears pointing out The reason they
Speaker 1: went with the Jets was because the guy from ABC
Speaker 1: was like, we have to get Joe Namath on TV
Speaker 1: for this first game, because Joe Namath was a huge
Speaker 1: football star with the AFL and then when they merged
Speaker 1: in the NFL and just a huge presence. He was
Speaker 1: a sex symbol.
Speaker 2: And a Brady Bunch.
Speaker 1: It was like he and Burt Reynolds were like the
Speaker 1: two hot guys of the moment and they had to
Speaker 1: get Namoth in there.
Speaker 3: So that's why they went with the Jets.
Speaker 2: Smart, Well, you got anything else, I got nothing else?
Speaker 2: What's our episode on Monday Night football? Everybody? So if
Speaker 2: you want to know more about all this stuff, we
Speaker 2: would say head on over to How Stuff Works. You
Speaker 2: can read the mystery one we left out. And by
Speaker 2: the way, this was written by our very own Dave Ruse,
Speaker 2: So hats off Troy Ruse for that. Thank you.
Speaker 1: We just have to email Dave separately and make fun
Speaker 1: of him for calling Reese's Pieces peanut butter and chocolate candies.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was or not?
Speaker 2: That was written by somebody who's clearly never had Reese's Pieces.
Speaker 1: I mean, technically you make and say that candy shell
Speaker 1: is Nope.
Speaker 2: Chocolate, Nope, not at all. There's not a drop of
Speaker 2: chocolate in Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't mean the ingredients, but is it? I mean,
Speaker 1: isn't it known as a chocolate jop?
Speaker 2: No, it's a candy coated peanut butter candy peanut butter confection.
Speaker 3: What about M and MS? Is that a chocolate chow?
Speaker 1: Totally?
Speaker 2: No, it's a candy coated chocolate inside, and then sometimes
Speaker 2: there's an additional inner nugget of peanutter. God knows what now.
Speaker 2: But originally all kinds of stuff, it was candy coated chocolate.
Speaker 2: This is a candy coated peanut butter candy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know what it is. I just didn't
Speaker 1: know if that was the thinnest proximation of chocolate. Nope.
Speaker 2: Well, I think we already kind of kicked it over
Speaker 2: to house to fork, So that means, of course, everybody,
Speaker 2: it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, Love Love Love Love. The show started listening
Speaker 1: when I was working my very first job after graduation
Speaker 1: during the pandemic. Spotify kept prompting me to try to
Speaker 1: listen to stuff you should know, and I thought the
Speaker 1: title was condescending. It first. I truly thought the podcast
Speaker 1: would be telling me about the stuff I already should
Speaker 1: know at this point in my life, like, oh, here's
Speaker 1: how to fold laundry, or here's how to do your taxes.
Speaker 1: The joke's on me, though, because I think one of
Speaker 1: the first episodes I listened to was about Satanism.
Speaker 2: Why don't you know about that? All? Right?
Speaker 1: Exactly at this point wherever I started to get into something,
Speaker 1: i'd do a quick search on the podcast first to
Speaker 1: see if you've covered it before checking out Google. You
Speaker 1: two are great teachers to make every single topic of hoot.
Speaker 1: So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into
Speaker 1: sailing and I saw you.
Speaker 3: I haven't even skimmed the surface.
Speaker 1: I think you should look into sailing guys, because it's
Speaker 1: really interesting. Sneak preview. The wind is technically pulling, not
Speaker 1: pushing your boat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Buck pester Fuller said, the wind sucks instead of blows.
Speaker 3: See, you can't teach you anything. You know that stuff already.
Speaker 2: You may taught me that, so I got a head
Speaker 2: tip her.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and he taught her, and he taught us
Speaker 3: all about the geodesicdom.
Speaker 2: That's right, and synergy Chuck.
Speaker 1: That's right. Oh all right, that's from Sam and Sam
Speaker 1: sailing reeks to me of one of those that we
Speaker 1: would flay a little bit at and just get crushed
Speaker 1: by sailing enthusiasts.
Speaker 3: Yes, but maybe we'll do it anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, why spare sailors. We've done it for chess players,
Speaker 2: European football players, everybody.
Speaker 1: Soccer surfers.
Speaker 2: Right. If you want to get in touch with this
Speaker 2: like Sam did and suggest some topic that you know
Speaker 2: about that you'd like us to ruin for you, you
Speaker 2: can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.