STBYM: Biophilia and Pokémon

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Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And Rob, you wanted to talk about Pokemon today. So you are going to have to be my Virgil leading me through the Pokehell and all the way to the Pokeparadise. Because as longtime listeners will know, every time this comes up on the show, I am lost in a dark wood when it comes to Pokemon. I do not have the Pokemon knowledge of my peers. Well, maybe I am the Virgil of Pokemon because I cannot enter paradise. I can only take you so far because I came into it really late as well. We were actually chatting off mic with our producer JJ earlier. And JJ is of the right age to have been properly brought up in the Pokemon world. world. And so we were chatting just a little bit about knowing your way around Pokemon and just the enormous pop culture shadow that Pokemon casts for, particularly for millennials and Gen Z, with strong signs that it's going to continue to play this role for younger generations as well. Like you can, people who grew up with Pokemon, they just talk about it, they can use it as reference points. It's like a language unto itself. Yeah. By the way, JJ, if we make a big Pokeblunder in this episode. Please do interrupt us and we can fill the listeners in with your insights. Yeah, so I'm not like somebody who's never encountered Pokemon before. My personal experience with it was basically at the same time as every other kid in America, I played the original Pokemon Game Boy game. I never finished it, but I played that when it came out when I was in like sixth grade. So I think this would be like 1998 or so. Yeah, so you were exposed to Pokemon, but your body built up a resistance to the infection, and then you were immune to it. Yeah, so I played part of the original Game Boy game, never finished it. I remember the one I picked, it was the green one, Bulbasaur, because it seemed more threatening than the other two. Okay. At least more than the water turtle squirrel thing. Because it needed to fight for you. You wanted a fierce Pokemon. Right. And it looked more, yeah, it was like a little cute but angry little turtle with plants coming off of it. So I picked that thing. I played part of the game. And then I basically never interacted with Pokemon again, except sort of secondhand. I had like, you know, friends in college who were playing Pokemon Nintendo 64 games. So I got a little bit of that by osmosis. But otherwise, I'm like not plugged in. I get it all secondhand. All right. Well, just a reminder for folks out there, and I realize most of you do not need to be reminded what a Pokemon is. I mean, Pokemon are everywhere. Again, it's enormous. We're, of course, talking about the Japanese pocket monster media empire that began as a 1996 Nintendo video game for the old Game Boy, the original Game Boy. and then shortly thereafter became a collectible card game as well and since then it has grown to encompass television shows movies toys even more video games more collectible card games there's a mobile game now and it's just generally secured uh you know its place is a major generational touchstone as we've been saying so what's the basic idea here well it's a fantastic world much like our own, but populated by a vast array of creatures called Pokemon or Pokemons. I'm not sure what the plural is. I think it's just Pokemon, isn't it? Is it just Pokemon? That sounds right. At any rate, the Pokemon or Pokemons or Pokemona, I don't know, they often resemble real and folkloric creatures. Not every Pokemon is based on an actual animal or plant, but a huge amount of them are. You also have ones that are, you know, we were talking about one off mic with JJ that looks like keys, obviously not biological in origin. And then there are ghost types that may or may not match up with animals. But for the most part, you're dealing with a vast ecosystem of fanciful creatures and or plants. Yeah. And Rob, I don't know if this has changed at all over the history of Pokemon, because I know we're now like many generations in. But what I remember from the original Game Boy game was you would collect these monsters from the environment and then you would make them fight each other. So there is, in one sense, kind of a almost a Darwin-esque, you know, collecting beetles from the forest sort of thing where you're looking for specimens. But then there's another element, which is just you're making them fight. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And this, my understanding is this is still very key to the whole thing. I mean, it's still one of the main things that you do in the video games. It is central to the collectible card game. Not all media, though, perhaps. Pokemon media depends heavily on it. There was a really cute kind of, oh, what's the word? Kind of a comfort show that I believe it was actually on Netflix called, let's see, Pokemon Concierge, where it's Pokemon's on vacation. and you're just looking after them and you're trying to prevent them from fighting or the main character is trying to prevent them from fighting. It's very sweet, very relaxing. You bring them champagne in an ice bucket. Maybe not champagne, but whatever champagne would be to a Bulbasaur, you might bring it to them. Okay. But yeah, I guess the other key things to mention are that most Pokemon go through a series of evolutions, typically, but not always, consisting of three phases. and then humans use pokeballs to capture them and make them fight each other yeah uh so as for myself uh and i think i may have mentioned this on the show before i missed out on pokemon as a younger person i think i theoretically could have caught the bug but it didn't officially make its way over to the u.s until 98 i would have been 20 at the time and i guess it just i wasn't in the place for it and i don't think i had any friends that had been infected with pokemon so So for the most part, I would hear about it, but I'm like, oh, I guess that's something kids are doing. And I'm not a kid right now. But I, of course, eventually became a parent. And my kid certainly got into Pokemon in a major way. And as a teen, they still seem to really enjoy the franchise. They're playing the current video game. I think they occasionally watch some of the media. And they still know their way around all of the Pokemon lore and classification. So if Pokemon business comes up on the podcast, I've covered them on the Monster Fact episodes before, I will generally ask them about it and say, hey, do I have this right? Is this Pokemon an example of such and such? And they'll be able to throw in on that. Also, alongside them, I have watched the occasional episode of the Pokemon TV show or one of the TV shows and found it engaging and weird. I watched 2019's Pokemon Detective Pikachu with them, and I was actually really impressed with that one. I've considered doing that one for Weird House at some point. And a real highlight was we got to visit the Pokemon store in Tokyo a couple of years back. and that was overwhelming and super cool. I ended up picking up a few of the stickers that they have there. I got one of the Pokemon Ditto and I have Ditto stuck to my work laptop right now. I have it covering the Apple logo so that it glows a little bit. Oh, nice. Ditto is a shape-shifting blob, by the way. Like the thing? Yeah. But cute. More like the blob, if the blob could form a human form. Yeah. But, you know, the thing could be cute if it copied a cute thing. If it wanted to. It never seemed particularly interesting. Yeah. But it could, I guess. That would have been a better strategy. Yeah. So today's episode is going to be less hyper-focused on Pokemon lore. And certainly, you know, we're not the individuals to really steer that ship. I'm sure there are any number of podcasts out there that are more capable of that. But instead, we're going to be talking more about interesting connections to be made between the Pokemon franchise's core elements and sometimes specific species, its popularity with our innate fascination with the natural world. We're going to be talking about its connection to biophilia. Now, to really get into this, I think it's illuminating to go back to the origins of Pokemon itself. I'm not going to go through the full origin story, but essentially I'm going to touch on a couple of individuals. There's Junichi Masuda, born 1968. He was one of the key individuals in the creation of the initial video game and I believe still serves as chief creative fellow at the Pokemon Company. I was looking at cited interview bits from him. I was looking at Pokemon from Bugs to Blockbuster by Simon Parkin from The Guardian back in 2013. And in that, in the quotations, Masuda mentions that as a kid in Osaka, he spent most of his time outside riding around on his bicycle and catching insects. Now, I don't know that he was making the insects fight, but of course, we also know, we've discussed before, There is the sort of the beetle sparring that also takes place in Japan or used to take place in Japan. I'm not sure what the hobby's current status is, but that is probably in the zeitgeist as well here. Yeah, I guess I was wondering about that because I could have imagined that even if the initial impulse to create the game was just being inspired by the kind of naturalist's instinct or the collector instinct, you know, like going out and finding beetles in the woods, that you might end up wanting to add fighting because it's a video game and you need like a conflict mechanic in the game. in conflict. I mean, nowadays we can point to examples of video games that are maybe less dependent on conflict, but certainly at the time, like, can you imagine a game that didn't have some sort of a battle or fight central to it? Yeah. Yeah. Let's see, another individual, Satoshi Tajiri, born 1965, also one of the founding partners, apparently had similar experiences on the outskirts of Tokyo, cataloging various creatures he found, writing them all down in a notepad that his parents had given him. And Parkin also shares in this article that when the original Red and Blue Pokemon game was released on Game Boy, I didn't really think about this connection, but the platform was towards the end of its life cycle. So there were still plenty of Game Boy games coming out because there were all these Game Boys out in the world, but it made getting coverage for the game a lot more difficult. The industry was moving on to newer technology. So it's interesting to just imagine, you know, any kind of property or franchise in its early goings, potentially having a challenge to establish itself because it's such a juggernaut today. That is weird to imagine. There was a time when like new games were still coming out for the Game Boy and yet there were PlayStations, you know, you were getting these three-dimensional games. Yeah. And that was happening at the same time. That is strange. Yeah. So Masuda and Tajiri, of course, had a great deal of passion for video games in general, as well as electronics. But it is such an interesting detail that part of the franchise's genesis was in the collection, cataloging and experience of the natural world. And through the Pokemon games, they, to a large extent, attempted to pass that experience on to children who, in many cases, certainly in Japan, but then in other markets as well, you know, certainly this applies to the U.S., you know, in the following years, you know, a lot of children just had decreasing ability to experience the natural world, to experience the organisms of the natural world and chronicle them in a way that we would seem almost hardwired to do. And this is where things tie back into the biophilia hypothesis. We've talked about this numerous times on the show before. This was a hypothesis that was concocted by the late E.O. Wilson, who lived 1929 through 2021. Wilson was an entomologist who was famous for studying ants, especially. Yeah. It is essentially, in Wilson's words, the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. And as related in Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon by Baumford, Clegg, Colson and Taylor, this was published in Science back in 2002, it can also be thought of as humanity's innate desire to catalog, understand and spend time with other life forms. So, of course, there is an irony in that Pokemon originally was a video game. So when you're playing it, you are interacting with an electronic device that is about as synthetic as objects get. But it would be that within that realm, within the video game realm of this handheld plastic and glass thing you are playing with, you are getting a simulation of cataloging the diversity of the natural world instead of just like, you know, having Mario run and jump on things. yeah i i don't know enough about any precursors to this in video games but certainly in the wake of the first pokemon game we can point to any number of of games where you're doing some sort of collecting and cataloging of natural organisms like just thinking of two games offhand that i spent a fair amount of time with in the past uh the fallout games or say red dead redemption these are both games where you spend a lot of time wandering around collecting things maybe you're collecting things to make, I don't know, to make something, essentially make a potion. But other times it's just about checking off a list. You're finding out what's in the world and then figuring out what you can do with it. Yeah. And so that is really interesting. I guess one of the big questions is, yeah, does this, is there something innate in us? Indeed, is the biophilia hypothesis correct? And we like, we really need to do this and we can trace it back to the fact that we are organisms in the natural world, and we have had to make our way through that world, understand how each of these organisms affects us in positive, neutral, or negative fashions. And then on top of that, with our human ingenuity, how to augment those parameters and turn a potentially harmful organism into a helpful one, and maybe vice versa. So the 2002 piece in question, it raises some interesting questions about this supposed relationship between Pokemon fandom and biophilia. They conduct a study in this, and this is one of those studies we have to point out. This is a small study. This doesn't concern a tremendous number of individuals. And certainly we're dealing with like one particular part of the world. and there are all sorts of limitations you would have to take into account here. But in it, the authors carried out a study of 109 UK school children ages 4 through 11, and they quizzed different age groups about both real-life UK organisms, organisms that would have been more or less in their natural habitat, and fictional Pokemon organisms. And what they generally observed in their findings is that kids started off with a stronger understanding of natural world organisms around them and less knowledge of Pokemon. But as they got older, the Pokemon knowledge kind of took over and took the place of the natural world wisdom. And there were some other, like they were talking about, okay, well, we divided them up into boys and girls and then the boys tended to know more about Pokemon and so forth. So you have to factor all of that into it as well. So the researchers here argue that on one hand, the findings demonstrate that young children in general just have a tremendous capacity for learning about creatures, real or fictional. And at age eight, the typical child could identify 80% of a sample drawn from 150 synthetic species, aka Pokemon, which, you know, we've all encountered this with kids. Kids will come up, maybe it is Pokemon specific. A kid will come up to you and start talking at you about Pokemon and it can be overwhelming. And you're like, no, thank you. I really don't need to hear all of this. But you have to admit, like, it's amazing that they have all of these facts in their head. Granted, there's all sorts of stuff they don't have to remember yet, but they have tremendous capacity for memorizing all of this stuff. I certainly see that with my own kiddo I mean granted you know there the Pokemon example but you know we also share a love for Dungeons and Dragons So you know both of us can rattle off some stats about the various monsters and with my kid, they also got super into herpetology years back. And so this does have, at least in their case, and I think in many kids' cases, there's also the real world component, like learning about the animals in your natural environment and then potentially other environments. Like we don't live by the ocean, but we know a number of oceanic creatures. And as a kid, I remember being really into that, like, oh, sharks are neat. I want to see a chart of all the different types of sharks. so that I can memorize them for some reason. And it can even spill over, I think, into things that are not animals, but maybe a little that you can certainly anthropomorphize to some degree, you know, like airplanes. Like when I was growing up, my dad was a big World War II buff and was often working on, say, a model of a World War II aircraft. And so for a while there, I could really rattle off a number of different makes and models of World War II planes, you know which are kind of like sharks of the sky well rob if i can observe something about your personality i mean you seem to me to be a person who has a very uh an encyclopedist's kind of uh framing i think you like to have uh you like to have lists and catalogs of things to like learn all of the items in the list and know all of the you know the names of the things on that list which I don't know knowing that about you I can see how that that also transcends just the biological realm I mean like that's a general impulse about like organizing knowledge but then when you bring it to the natural world it has this particular kind of taxonomy or or creature understanding principle behind it yeah yeah and whether we're thinking about it or not we are we are learning like a map of the ecosystem and ecosystems that we are a part of. Yeah. 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Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. now coming back to that 2002 paper uh the authors here argue that uh you know based on the children that they quizzed in their study uh they made an argument that quote conservationists are doing less well than the creators of pokemon inspiring interest in their subjects now granted we've had quite a while since 2002 and i think there have been efforts to sort of capitalize on the pokemon fandom to figure out new ways to get people excited about the natural world. And, you know, and I've done just a little bit of that on the show before doing like Monster Fact episodes, like here's this Pokemon, but it's, you know, it's clearly based on this organism. And there's, there's a lot of fun to be had with that kind of connection making. Well, I mean, in the case of Pokemon, you can have the interest in the subject matter organized by the, by the medium itself. So it's like the fact that it's a game that's fun to play or a TV show that all your friends are watching, like drives interest in the subject matter that's being featured there. So I wonder if there was a similarly engaging game or TV show that just had the actual world creatures instead of the Pokemon, if you would not see a similar increase in knowledge. Right, right. Like for instance, nobody out there is just, for the most part, I think learning a list of all the X-Men characters. We learn them also because they have stories and they have connections to each other. And all of this makes, you know, becomes a cat's cradle of fascination. And the same, of course, can be said of the natural world. So the authors here stress something we already mentioned before, that a lot of this might have to do with an increased distance between individuals in the natural world. As we live our lives more removed from nature, our knowledge of it falls away. And then presumably that's when something like Pokemon comes into play, giving us a whole host of imaginary creatures to throw our cataloging mental faculties at. You know, after all, we've arrived in a cultural place, particularly in large urban settings, where knowledge of natural world organisms doesn't highly illuminate the world that we're interacting with. We're not IDing creatures we see, you know, creatures we avoid, creatures we eat, creatures we utilize in other ways. So there's an argument to be made that instead we end up cataloging the fictional creatures that we engage with in our entertainment, which live within a pervasive array of captivating video games, card games, media, and shared imaginary worlds. This is, I think, worth stressing as well. We talked about Pokemon ever so briefly in our episodes about imaginary friends and imaginary worlds. And I would observe this between my kid and one of their friends where when they were hanging out, they would just make up a whole bunch of stories about Pokemon and like tell them to each other. Like they had a whole, and it was largely divorced from the actual Pokemon fandom world. This was about like armies of Pokemon marching against each other or something. What were the big rivalries? Oh, it had to do with, with Pikachu. Um, they, they decided that they didn't like Pikachu and Pikachu was like the ultimate enemy. It's kind of like, you know, Pikachu was the superstar of Pokemon, and I guess still is. You know, he's the poster child. Is Pikachu backlash? Yeah, yeah. And I think they were like, you know, Pikachu's not the best. Clearly, these other ones are the best. Ironically, one of the ones they thought was actually the best was Pichu, which is a lower, less evolved version of Pikachu. But yeah, they were big about championing these other creatures over Pikachu. Yeah, this is the one I've heard described as there's a Pikachu baby now. Yes, yeah, essentially a Pikachu baby that is cuter, has everything Pikachu brings to the table except even cuter. It's like Pikachu crack, really. It's just super refined. It's the baby Yoda of Pikachu. Yeah, exactly. We live in an era where you've got to have a baby version of everything. Mm hmm. But I in general, though, I think this is an interesting way to sort of self-analyze some of the at times useless seeming trivia that we can accumulate. I don't know about you, Joe, but I will occasionally find myself in this situation where hopefully I'm not called out on it, though that has occurred as well, where I'll at least realize, oh, I have a fairly expansive catalog of, say, B-movie actors in my head. But then I may still struggle to remember some vital piece of information about my actual life. Oh, yeah. And you're like, why does that happen? Like, why, you know, people may encounter that with Pokemon specifically. Like, maybe you forget your anniversary, but you remember all the Pokemon ghost type evolutions. Like, what's going on there? I think this is an extremely common experience that people find, for whatever reason, they have an easy time remembering information that is not as important. and a harder time remembering things that are more meaningful and more important. Yeah. I don't think I don't have an overarching theory of why that is, but maybe it's just some types of information are easier to dwell on. I mean, I do think that information is easier to retrieve when you retrieve it often. So, you know, if you find yourself, I don't know, if something is less stressful to think about or easier to think about. maybe more entertaining you will your mind will keep going back there whether for you know with external stimulation like you're watching a movie again or reading about something again or you're just thinking about it again but i've had the same experience not so much with i don't know if i know catalogs of pokemon really but i you know find myself like wow i have a really good memory for quoting dialogue from movies verbatim. And I don't know why that is. And I wish that memory were better deployed to things that matter more in like my social and human life or in, you know, remembering things that are actually useful. Yeah. I mean, obviously we have to remind everyone that memory is complex and there are so many different factors going on. Like for instance, sometimes you are less likely to remember a vital piece of information if you know that, say your significant other is remembering that for you, or you suspect that they are. Your brain makes choices like this. Like, well, we don't need to hold on to that as tightly because that is held by someone else. And perhaps in any given relationship, someone's brain is like, you need to be the keeper of the Pokemon lore. This is more important than remembering when the water bell is dead. That's your job. Yeah. Remember Snorlax. But if we were to connect this to some sort of like, you know, important knowledge about the natural world, then it would be important. You know, it's like, OK, well, maybe this other person, maybe they know how to cook or they know how to hunt, whatever the case may be. But but clearly it's important for me to know what all the creatures are out there, what all the plants are and what their roles are in our use of the natural world. Yeah. So so, yeah, we might think about Pokemon fandom is something that kind of co-ops a natural inclination that might be better harnessed for naturalist and conservationist causes. But another way of loosely interpreting all of this is that perhaps Pokemon fandom lives comfortably alongside interest in the natural world and maybe can even inspire it. Because on one hand, like, yeah, there are more than, I think, more than a thousand Pokemon species easy at this point. And a lot of them, if not most of them, and I think it is most of them by a pretty significant degree, are based on real creatures, living or extinct, or they're based on folkloric or mythological entities that themselves are based to some degree on a combination of actual real-world organisms. Given the franchise's Japanese roots, you do seem more likely to see local creatures, creatures that people of Japan would come into contact with and have knowledge of. And the same can also be said for mythological and folkloric references. So there are various Pokemon that are clearly based on Yokai, but then you can expand that regionally. There are also Pokemon that are based on Chinese mythological figures as well. And, you know, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that, okay, if you have this game that is making kids think about these various bioforms, it could inspire interest in the things they're based upon, be they folklore, mythology, or biology. I asked my kid about this because, again, they're super into reptile and amphibian classifications, and they can rattle a lot of that off, certainly as well as they could rattle off Pokemon classifications. And I don't know, they seem to consider these to be two separate things, but acknowledge that there were some similarities in the databases, I guess. Now, in terms of to what extent the diversity of the Pokemon world matches up with real ecosystem diversity, I found a couple of interesting papers, both from the Journal of Geek Studies, both Brazilian in origin, and both published in 2017, but by different authors. There's one titled The Ethological Diversity of Pokemon, and this one was by Mendez et al. And the other one is Arthropod Diversity in Pokemon by Prado and Almeida. So in general, I'm not going to go through all the points in these papers, but in general, the findings seem to indicate that, first of all, arthropod representation in Pokemon is high and in general is in keeping with the vast array of arthropod diversity that we find in the natural world, where they account for something like 80% of all known living animal species and a sizable portion of the biomass. Yeah, I would think a huge portion of that would just be accounted for by insects alone. However, they note that the high number of crustacean-based Pokemons compared to chalicea-based Pokemons does seem to be at odds with the natural world and probably has more to do with the, quote, very frequent contact that Japanese people have with aquatic animals. Okay. So in general, and I'm not sure if this, my version of this actually matches up with the Pokemon database info, but it would seem to mean you're going to encounter more crab-based Pokemon or shrimp-based Pokemon and so forth than you would encounter spider-based Pokemon. I see. Okay. Hard to complain about that. Like, oh, they're giving us too many crabs. I can't stand it. Meanwhile, in the other paper concerning the fish, fish being the largest vertebrate animal group, they are also well represented. They say, quote, fish Pokemon are very diverse creatures, both taxonomic and ecologically, despite being a small group within the Pokemon universe with 801 species. They speculate that the diversity of habitat types and real life fish analogs is only going to increase as more Pokemon are rolled out. And they would have been since this paper came out. but they argued that it already constituted a kind of, quote, biological pocket world that matches up with the actual biological world in key ways. So kind of a fictional reflection of natural diversity. And so, I mean, you can base that, you can look at that in a number of ways. You know, it's like if you're creating a fantasy world, it's generally to some degree mirroring a real world. Like you can look at Middle Earth or Westeros. And yeah, there are a lot of clear analogs going on there. And the same would be expected of some sort of an imagined ecology, especially one that's not on an alien world, but a fictional version of our own world. But if the biophilia connection is certainly in play here, it makes even more sense that your imagined ecosystem would so closely match up, at least in broad strokes, with what is actually out there. So anyway, for my part anyway, I find all this interesting, this way that this big franchise, this thing that many people may just think of as pure fun, pure entertainment, and that's perfectly fine. But what if it does say something really essential about who we are and how we react and experience the natural world? That is interesting. I don't know if I'd ever thought of it that way. Can I shift to the more specific and ask you a question about fish Pokemon? Sure, sure. how do they fight? Do they fight on land? How does that work? I see like, you know, so you throw out your pokeballs and they fight and it's like in an arena or on grass. What if it's a fish? Does it just flop? I think sometimes they do flop for comedic purposes, but I think also these battles tend to be kind of like big anime battles, right? So, it's, again, they're not necessarily fighting each other with like mouth and talon. It's more like energy balls and stuff and lightning bolts and so forth. Does the fight take place within a kind of second psychic realm? Kind of, yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's sort of like that moment in Big Trouble in Little China where Lopan and Egg Shen are battling and they kind of do this video game thing where each one is controlling some sort of a force, different light warriors battling each other. It's essentially what's going on here. So, you know, no matter how, I guess it is a good reminder, yeah, no matter how interesting the natural connections might be in some of the cataloging and the diversity, when it comes down to the fighting, yeah, it's, I don't think there's much that really closely mirrors what actual organisms are doing. No I get you So even a fish out of water can emit rays Yes yes But like you said earlier though you earlier sometimes sleeping is the attack Sometimes flopping is probably the attack You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is... You can decide who takes home the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards Podcast of the Year by voting at iHeartPodcastAwards.com now through February 22nd. See all the nominees and place your vote at iHeartPodcastAwards.com. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at Audible.com. The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. All right. Do you want to get into the species named after Pokemon? Yeah. Yeah, because I think this is another interesting area to get into because it does kind of support this idea that, hey, you can certainly be into Pokemon and then you can actually become a scientist. You know, again, it's been a huge generational touchstone. And so we have various examples of people with varying degrees of Pokemon knowledge who then go out into the world as scientists, discover new organisms, name new organisms, and name them after Pokemon. mm-hmm uh yeah so rob when you asked me to look into this you referred me to a list maintained on the bulbapedia which is great this is sort of like the wookiepedia of the pokemon universe uh i i like that and i i wish i could have helped them name it because i feel like you've got a lot of potential there to call it like the codex pokemonicus or something yeah yeah i think it's this is like the sort of like fan generated version could be wrong on this And then the Pokédex is like the official listing and is also like the in-game catalog of Pokémon. It's the one maintained by the Empire. But yes. But yeah, so you've got people adding these things. So anyway, I did look some of these up and I've got some thoughts in general about how these naming conventions work out. Yeah, and this is going to be really fun. But first of all, I do want to make a quick note here about Pokémon creature names. This is not going to be new information for a lot of you out there. But some Pokemon retain or largely retain their original Japanese names. So like Pikachu, Mewtwo, Pichu, while others are changed at least a little and sometimes quite a bit for the English language market. So, for instance, Lizardon became Charizard. Kabigan became Snorlax. Purin became Jigglypuff. And one of my favorites, Yadon, I think that's the I may be mispronouncing the Japanese name, but he becomes Slowpoke. Slowpoke has an amazing life cycle. And my kid showed me a Slowpoke episode of the cartoon once that I thought was just super weird. It was like a stoner animation. So I was really impressed by that. But anyway, one of the main reasons for all of this is that sometimes the wordplay in Japanese just doesn't translate or they feel like, well, let's try a name that accomplishes the same thing, but in English. Yeah. Now, before we get into some of these species that have been named after Pokemon, I do have to take a little digression here to talk about the law. Many scientists have tried to name things after Pokemon, and the company that owns the Pokemon trademark has not always taken kindly to this. It is with a heavy heart that I must report that sometimes the lawyers are brought in about Pokemon naming. One example that I came across is described in a 2005 news article in Nature by Tom Simonite called Pokemon Blocks Gene Name. The lead of this article reads, quote, A cancer research institute has been threatened with legal action by the U.S. branch of Japanese video game franchise Pokemon after one of its researchers borrowed the company's trademark to name an oncogene. An oncogene is a gene that has the potential to cause cancer. I've also seen the gene in this story referred to as a proto-oncogene. So the origin of this conflict is that a group of cancer researchers led by Pierre Paolo Pandolfi of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, I think they first talked about this in a conference presentation in 2001. 2001, they were introducing the discovery or naming of a cancer gene that they called the Pokemon gene. So named because it came from a family already known as the POK genes, POK, letters POK. And then this particular gene was the POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic, which acronymed out pretty nicely to Pokemon. And so when this group published their findings and nomenclature in the journal Nature in 2005, some subsequent reporting, I think, seized on this delicious opportunity to run headlines like scientists discover Pokemon causes cancer. Oh, well, that was bound to happen, wasn't it? Pokemon USA did not like this. They got involved and threatened to sue the scientists unless they changed the name of the gene. the scientists involved protested that the name of the gene didn't have anything to do with the game or the cartoon it was just an acronym it was like the p-o-k-e-mon you know i guess it's questionable you could think they knew what they were doing or maybe you can think they didn't i don't really know but uh their claim was it's just an acronym from what this gene is but in response to that, I'm going to read from this 2005 article, quote, a spokeswoman for Pokemon USA told Nature that its image was at risk. Quote, we don't want our image undermined by associating Pokemon with cancer, she said. So this article notes that it is not the only time a researcher has been threatened with legal action over the name of a gene. For example, in 1993, the Velcro Corporation threatened to sue a scientist named Alfonso Martinez Arias of the University of Cambridge because he named a fruit fly gene the Velcro gene. I want to note that in looking this up, it seems to me like the Velcro Corporation is especially sensitive about use of the word Velcro. Like they've got this whole ad campaign about trying to get people to not use that word as a verb or as a generic noun. They're like, no, it's called hook and loop. velcro is the name of the company yeah i mean there's a certain amount of drift like that that is unavoidable you know it's gonna you're gonna call you know whatever the most prominent uh brand name is you're just gonna call it that you know it's like people asking for a coke when they're not really talking about a coca-cola it's just that you know this is what comes with having a successful franchise i don't know but i wonder if this is one of those cases of extremely aggressive intellectual property claims that are based on like lawyers telling a company that they cannot allow a certain kind of precedent to be set. Like you always have to pursue this aggressively or in the future, you may not be able to make claims that you want to. But anyway, it hasn't always happened with genes named after protected properties. There is a gene known as the Sonic Hedgehog gene that has escaped this fate. So hats off to Sega for being cool about that. But the legal threats worked in the case of the Pokemon gene, which is now known by the, some would say equally catchy name, ZBTB7. I mean, I don't want to get into the legal ins and outs here, but I mean, I can kind of see where the Pokemon lawyers are coming from here, right? I mean, if you're talking about something that is linked to cancer. Well, yeah, I certainly understand their perspective though i i think i just generally have an orientation that it it it's a bummer to be suing scientists about yeah yeah absolutely yeah and and i mean would it really have reflected poorly on on the pokemon brand i i doubt it uh but anyway uh there was another thing so this one i want to be careful in how i couch this because i did not find this verified by any reporting. So nobody, as far as I know, nobody tracked this down to the source to make a hundred percent sure this is true. But I found a seven-year-old Reddit post that claimed to be an entomologist trying to hold a contest to name some new ant species after Pokemon. And this post claims that they started to do this contest thing and then they contacted the Pokemon company to get their blessing to go through with this, you know, naming these species after Pokemon, and instead got some legal threats. That is what the post claims. They were told not to use any names. Again, don't have total confidence in the story because it's just a Reddit post. This could be anybody. But if true, that would be somewhat consistent with this other story. Yeah, yeah. And certainly when you're dealing with big companies like this, it's probably what somebody's job to go around and like make sure that the certain names and certain ideas are not being used by other people even if it's a case where if you went down like to the creative level they would be like oh that's why are you why are you causing a stir over this you know right exactly but that's weird because for some reason this has not been the universal fate of biological entities named after Pokemon, quite a number of them exist. And I truly don't know if it's because these other things like slipped under the company's radar and then it was too late for them to do anything about it or if it's because the company is cool with some associations and not others. I don't know why they'd be okay with a bee but not an ant. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, are you ready to talk about a few of these? Yeah, let's talk about some specific Pokemon. uh the first example is a species of wasp named after the pokemon known as weedle and i was looking at these images i was like i remember this guy it's okay so i at least made it far enough in the original game boy game to meet a weedle uh he's a little curious little caterpillar with a like a purple clown nose very adorable eyes little baby doe eyes uh looking up at you he's got a posture that's kind of like, you know, a kitten raising up on its back legs at you. Like, oh, please, you know, can I please have a treat? But then it's very cute in that respect. But then this cute little caterpillar has what looks like a knife blade for a tail and a metal spike on its head, a kind of conical spike like a party hat. So Weedle is viciously cute, but does have weapons. Yeah, I had to look this one up. This is not one I was familiar with. apparently Weedle evolves into Kakuna, which is a kind of chrysalis or a cocoon. Now I realize that's what the name means. And then this evolves into Beedrill. This is a bee or wasp like creature that seems to have spikes or drills for hands. And also a stinger, so it can like poke you numerous ways, I guess. Right, so the conical spike that's on this caterpillar's head in the evolved form, those are its hands. So it's like Edward's spike hands. Yeah. Yeah. So the species named after this Pokemon is a type of parasitoid wasp from Eastern Africa described in a paper by Nielsen and Buffington in the journal African Entomology in 2011. This paper describes five new species of the genus Stentorceps. This one is called Stentorceps weedoli. I don't know. If I didn't know it was named after the Pokemon, I might have thought that was like Weedlei, Weedlei or Weedlei. Anyway, why is it named after Weedle? Because like Weedle, this wasp has a spine jutting out of the middle of its head. Rob, I've got some images for you to look at in the outline here. You might be able to see, it's kind of hard to see, but there's a little, I think you can see a little spine sticking out of its head between the antennae here. Yeah, I see it. The species was found in Madagascar. I couldn't get a lot more information about its behavior or morphology, but this is what it looks like. It's got a horn, and as far as I can tell, no knife tail. Yeah, no drills for arms on this guy. Okay, how about some Pikachus? You ready? There are quite a few of these. I guess that would make sense, given Pikachu's popularity. I found at least four. I'm going to do these kind of rapid fire. One is called Dicranocentris Pikachu. This is a species of springtail found in Brazil. Springtails are a large class of six-legged arthropods, not insects, but they are hexapods. This species was named and described by Zisto and Mendonça, and I couldn't find a lot of info on it. No picture that I could verify, but it is a type of springtail named after Pikachu. The next species, this one has a little bit more to look at. This is called Hyperantha Pikachu. It is a species of jewel beetle from Brazil described in an article in Zooitaxa by Pineda and Barros in 2021. And here the authors have an etymology note in their paper. They say, quote, the specific name is an homage to Pikachu, a fictional monster which this species resembles in its yellow elytra with a black apical band like the ears of Pikachu. and so rob i've attached some pictures for you to look at in the outline here it is a beetle and the elytra refers to the the hard coverings of the hard coverings on the outside of the wings so you might it's kind of a shell that closes over the wings um and you can see there it is very yellow so it's a yellow and black beetle and i don't know do you see pikachu i see the pikachu colors I think this is Pikachu. I see Pikachu 100%. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. This is Pikachu as a flying insect. Next one is Alistra Pikachu. This is described by Lynn et al. In a 2021 paper in Zoological Systematics, this paper reports on 23 new spider species discovered from various places in China and India. Alistra Pikachu is a little tiny spider measuring less than 2 millimeters at most discovered in a cave in Guangdong province in southeast China. The authors say that it was named after Pikachu because it is yellow. And also in the same paper, the authors describe a pale cave spider that they name Sinopesa gollum. And they acknowledge, yes, this is a pale cave spider named after Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Okay. I couldn't find a picture of the gollum spider. The Pikachu spider, I don't feel as strongly about this one. It's like, okay, I guess it is kind of yellow. I guess you could call it a Pikachu spider, but not a strong a case to be made here, in my opinion. So the next one is Epicretinus Pikachu, named in a 2020 paper by Goncalves and Brescovitt. this describes 11 new species of spider from the genus epic uh epicratinus all found in brazil the authors here were going wild with video game names and other nerd references in naming these spiders so it's naming 11 spider species one of them is epicratinus zengif or zengif street fighter There's also an Epicretinus E-Honda. There's an Epicretinus Anakin and an Epicretinus Vader. Oh, wow. There's an Epicretinus Pikachu, of course. There's an Epicretinus Pegasus and Epicretinus Zelda. Nice. And then some other things I don't know. I don't recognize, but maybe they're from something. Epictinus Omega Rugal, Epictinus Ducan. I don't know what those are. Yeah, listeners, write in if you know what a Ducan is. Oh, and there's one, Epictinus Stitch? Is that Lilo and Stitch? It would have to be. Maybe it something more obscure from anime as well but that the connection I making Okay here where this one gets good about the Pikachu one In this case the name Pikachu was not chosen just because the spider is yellow or yellow and black They claim the inspiration is about a specific part of the anatomy. Quote, etymology. The specific epithet is a noun taken in apposition and is in reference to Pikachu, a fictional rodent and electrical creature. That's a great description. I love it, love it. A fictional rodent and electrical creature that appears in an assortment of video games, anime, etc., licensed by the Pokemon company. And then now they're speaking of the spider. The female epigenum resembles the face of Pikachu. Now, what does that mean? Well, the epigenum of a spider is the external genital organ of a female spider. It is a hardened plate on the underside of the female spider's abdomen, which has these openings that receive sperm from the male's pedipalps during mating. The epigenum often has distinctive markings that can help with species identification. And in this case, the authors think that this spider's genitals look like Pikachu's face. Rob, I'll let you be the judge. I've attached a view right below this in the outline here. I've got a ventral view of the female spider on the right. So you can see down on the abdomen. The genital plate is going to be near the top of the underside of the abdomen. Do you see Pikachu in this spider crotch? I want to see Pikachu in this spider crotch. I feel like I'm looking at a magic eye puzzle here. And I want to be a part of the magic, but I'm having trouble seeing it. I'm flipping back and forth between this and some pictures of Pikachu. you. I want to believe, but I'm having trouble, Joe. Well, I thought maybe you would see it. Okay, maybe I just want to make sure you're looking at the right place. So you're looking on the underside view of the spider near the top of the abdomen. You don't see a little thing that looks kind of like it has. It's like a yellow face with black bunny ears and black spots that could be eyes. Okay. Okay. Now that I'm looking more specifically. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can see it. I can see it. It's, yeah, that could be a Pikachu. All right. Okay. I think probably, though I'm not an expert on this, obviously, but I believe the things that we're interpreting as Pikachu's eyes here would be the holes that receive the sperm during mating. And the things that we're seeing that are the ears of the Pikachu, these are part of the coloration that we see on the rest of the abdomen. The plate, yeah. I think the ears are just part of the epigenome plate. Okay. All right. Okay. I've come around to this one. I do believe now. Okay. Pikachu face genitals confirmed. extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is... You can decide who takes home the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards Podcast of the Year by voting at iHeartPodcastAwards.com. now through February 22nd. See all the nominees and place your vote at iHeartPodcastAwards.com. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at Audible.com. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law One mysterious black club owner Had his own rules We didn't worry about what went on outside It was like stepping in another world Inside Charlie's place Black and white people danced Together But not everyone was happy about it You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform The KKK set out To raid Charlie Take him away from here Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. All right. Next one is the Charizard bee. In 2016, a researcher named Spencer K. Moncton published a paper in the journal Zoo Keys describing eight new species of bee in the subgenus Chilicola living in Chile. One of these species was given the name Chilicola charizard. Charizard's the little dragon with the tail on fire. Yes. pretty iconic. So the paper itself doesn't say why he chose to name this bee after a Pokemon, but I found a bit more detail in a press release from 2016. So I looked this up on Eureka Alert. The species is part of a family known sometimes as the polyester bees or as cellophane bees. These bees secrete a substance that they use to line the walls of their nest cells. I think they're primarily ground burrowing bees, or sometimes they might be stem burrowing. But they create these nest cells and they line them with this secretion that once it hardens, forms a smooth lining that people compare to clear plastic film or cellophane. So what's the similarity with Charizard? Like Charizard, the stem nesting Charizard bee is usually found around mountains, in this case, the andes uh so i had to get the detail that charizard the pokemon is found around mountains from this article i didn't know that because again i thought you get charizard at the beginning of the game but maybe it's in the wild too i don't know yeah i i know in the detective pikachu movie it's like in an urban in an urban environment but i guess that's not its natural habitat okay but it has some so the author claims it has some visual features in common uh rob i've got pictures of this bee for you to look at in the outline down below. You can compare this as I read through the features. Quote, long snout-like face, broad hind limbs. So Charizard, I guess, has like big legs, thick thighs. Yeah, big legs. So long snout-like face and broad hind limbs with antennae in place of horns. So Charizard has horns. The Charizard bee has antennae, of course. What do you think? I mean, I'll take it. I'll take it. But it does seem like maybe a little bit more of a stretch. This bee is very small, between four and seven millimeters in length. In life, it is not red or orange like Charizard. It's mostly dark brown, black, and yellow. But apparently when you preserve specimens of this bee in the lab, its yellow markings tend to turn orange, which Moncton said, quote, cemented the comparison. I feel like maybe he was trying to get there, but I don't know. I guess one of the things to keep in mind in all of these examples is like, otherwise, what are you naming these species after? You have to name them after something. And, you know, a lot of species end up being named after individuals or after, say, mythological figures and something like Pokemon. Or just after physical traits. Or physical traits. But, you know, there are also plenty of examples that are named after mythological figures. And, you know, this is the new mythology. These are the new things that we can name creatures after. And then, I don't know, it's also probably in some cases a little bit of the, hey, if I name this after a certain Pokemon, maybe more people will pay attention to my findings in the study. And, you know, you could maybe spin that and say, well, maybe you're exploiting the Pokemon. But, I mean, it's also coming back to what we were talking about earlier. Like, take the fascination people have with Pokemon and certainly the children have with Pokemon. And if you can get them a little more interested in the actual science that's going out there in the actual natural world, not only is that great, like that's in the original spirit of the generation of Pokemon. So I'm all for it. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say the same thing. I can't prove this. And I'm certainly not saying this with any negative implications. But my guess is that sometimes naming species after Pokemon could be a bid to get some attention. to the research. Yeah. Because, you know, of course, if you are just documenting in a kind of dry and standard way, if you're documenting 14 new species of bee or spider somewhere, that is useful information to the field, but it's probably not going to get noticed at all in the mainstream press or, you know, not a lot of people outside of the field are going to pay attention to it. But if you name something after a Pokemon, you instantly tap into a large fan base of people who are like, oh, I want to read about this. Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, as we've been discussing, it's just fun. So why not? In the name of fun, let's do it. Yeah. One more example, and this is not an exhaustive exploration. So if you want to find all of these species that are named after Pokemon, you can go to the Bulbapedia or I think there's a mainstream Wikipedia list where people have compiled these as well. Yeah. And there will be more after this publication, for sure. There will be more creatures discovered and named after Pokemon. But the last one we're going to talk about today is the Bulbasaurus genus. So this is a long extinct genus of quadrupedal vertebrate called Bulbasaurus. It obviously shares a name with the Pokemon Bulbasaur. Rob, again, this is a, I don't know exactly what all of its qualities are, but it's a little cute four-legged, cute but aggressive little four-legged turtle type thing that is sort of a plant type Pokemon. It's got like vines coming out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he has like a flower on his back. Yeah. Yeah. I have read conflicting statements in different sources about whether or not this actual extinct animal is named after the Pokemon. Some sources say it's just a coincidence. Others say it might not be a coincidence. I don't know if the researchers are being cute about this, but Bulbasaurus is a genus of the therapsid clade Dysynodontia, which means two dog tooth, named after the fact that Dysynodonts typically had two tusks or large protruding teeth, which look kind of like goofy vampire fangs from an old movie. You know, they're like big overbite tusks or fang teeth. Dysynodonts were a widespread successful taxon that thrived during the Permian era. The key species reported in this Pokemon genus is Bulbasaurus phylloxeron. I was reading about this in a short 2017 Discover article by Ian Graber-Steele called Part Turtle, Part Pig. Bulbasaurus was a stout survivor. So I'll cover a few facts from this article. The Bulbasaurus phylloxeron comes, the name there comes from two features. Bulbasaurus means bulbous lizard. This comes from the fact that the species had a large, you know, kind of, domed nasal protuberance, kind of a big old turdly beak with a raised area at the top. And then phylloxeron means leaf cutter, presumably what it did with its beak, because these were primarily herbivorous animals. The discoverers were German and South African researchers, and the first big fossil find was in South Africa. The article describes work by one of the researchers on the team named Christian Kammerer, who was comparing the fossils and decided that Bulbasaurus was an ancestor of a family of Dysynodonts called Geikids. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. It's spelled G-E-I-K-I-I-D-S. And these were also creatures that had these big keratinized noses. So like large honking noses up on the top of their snout. What were these big bulbous noses for? Obviously, this involves some inference, but a leading theory cited in this article is that they were kind of like antlers in a way in some animals, that they may have been a display that was used for species recognition and sexual appeal. So it is thought likely by many researchers looking at this, that the big bulbosaur turtle beak may have been hot. It may have been for attracting maids. like that looks good yeah well just looking at this uh artist uh interpretation of what they may have looked like i mean it's not you know it's not one-to-one with the pokemon but i can i can see some possible connections no matter how those connections ended up being stitched together all right uh well that's i think all we have to say about uh pokemon today uh but we'd love to hear from everyone out there because obviously we have a lot of a lot of listeners who have grown up with Pokemon or they've been exposed to Pokemon, certainly at different points in their life, you may have some feelings. You may have some thoughts. Write in with those thoughts and feelings. Also, if there are other species, even newly discovered, maybe there'll be a headline tomorrow about a new species that is now named after a Pokemon, write in with that. Let's talk about it. We can bring it up on a future Lister Mail episode. Just a reminder for everyone out their stuff to blow your mind is a podcast. We've been an audio podcast for quite a while. So you can find a vast archive of past episodes wherever you get your audio podcasts. Our current rhythm is basically, we do two core episodes per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And hey, if you are listening to us in audio form right now, of course please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts if you are not already subscribed if you think you're subscribed but you don't know maybe check maybe check and see if you just make sure and subscribe but also be aware that we have a new video version of our podcast same content same thing you're getting in the audio feed except with the video element added so we've got the cameras turned on you can see our heads talking while we while we have these discussions and you can get that on Netflix. If you go to Netflix, you can look up Stuff to Blow Your Mind and click Remind Me so you always get new episodes. That's right. Play us in bars. Whatever floats your boat. Okay. Is that everything? I have to leave that set. Okay. So, huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? After Montgomery Brawl. This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. 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