June 16, 2022 • 53 mins
While the credibility of phrenology inevitably deteriorated over time, it was neither a completely original concept, nor, in some respects, a completely useless one. In the second part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore the ancient precedents of judging inner qualities based on outer appearance, as well as what modern scientists have to say about how phrenology, as imperfect as it was, helped establish some concepts that stay with the world of research today.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give it up for
our one and only. You know him, you love him,
Mr Max Williams, our super producer, So yeah, they call
me Ben. I'm as always immensely privileged to hang out
(00:47):
with Mr Noel Brown none other. I get a Mr.
Let's tie. It's like a let's an honorific. No, not really,
I guess it would be it was an honorific. Is
that just like a funny title, like like Nol the
bold or Nold the pedantic, Nol the dull. That's more
of an honorific. I have a Mr. Is just more
(01:09):
of like a prefix. Well, you know, uh, to quote
Quentin Tarantino in pulp fiction, we're Americans, baby, Our names
don't mean beepy. We're gonna come back around to Mr
t a little later in the episode today. And that
episode is in fact, part two of the Tangled Web
(01:30):
of Noggins, that is phrenology pseudoscience for the ages. Yes, yes,
it's a high quackery here Ridiculous History, and we are
having such a great time. We were. We were talking
recently folks about the history of our show off air
Noel Max and yours truly, and we wanted to give
(01:54):
some space real quick to super producer Max Max. You
had told us all fair in preparation for part two
of this episode that you had you had some stuff
you wanted to air. Yeah, I do so. Um, I'm
gonna turn to the left here. It's gonna be a
very visual thing. It's gonna be great for you know,
a podcast. If I scrolled back, I guess we'll see
(02:15):
the still poster over there anymore. Guess see that? Yeah?
It wasn't that a map of the lands between from
the sky or I'm still there? But I took down
the fallout perk tree. That's because yesterday I got a
new poster and I was so inspired by the Nancy
Wake episode that I got myself what Nancy Wake film
(02:37):
no War poster. It is from the artist. I found
it on red Bubble, which is called the Nable website.
It's the artist Tom Tom with with the ohs and
that spelled with zero. It is amazing and I love
it and I just wanted to give a little shout
out to that. Now I'm gonna put it back on
my wall. Classic internet artist name. Uh. The style is
sort of almost like a cell shading kind of video gaming.
(02:58):
Look to a new our depiction of Nancy Wake, and
she's wearing kind of a not a fedora. What do
you call that thing? Ben, It's like a well, it's
definitely a hat, Max. Yeah, hold it up again. Let's
look at this hat. So it's almost like, oh, it's
tough to tell because of the styling, but it's got
(03:21):
a big brim. You know, who would know? No, Holly
Fry would know. Ah, where's a Holly Fry on you one?
I love our dudes, but initially it was do they
really not know what a beret is? This is Holly Fry,
one of the hosts of stuff you missed in history class.
(03:44):
Holly is a fund of knowledge in many things, including hats.
But when we talked, Holly seemed very puzzled by Ben
in nold confusion. Look, I get it, this is a
stylized piece of art. But if you then look at
any photograph some Nancy Wake on which this art is based,
she is almost always wearing a beret, and she wears
(04:07):
kind of a stiff beret that's like off to one side.
But I really got confused when they mentioned the large brim.
I don't know what they think a hat looks like.
Do you think there's really any hope for these guys
on them ever figuring out what a hat is? You know,
(04:27):
I'm just gonna go with my favorite response in such situations,
which is, bless their hearts. This sub episode of Ridiculous
History was written and produced by Max Williams. Special thanks
to Holly Fry. Do you think Ben and Nole will
learn what a beret is? Let us know on social
media and we will see you in the rest of
(04:48):
this episode of Ridiculous History. I mean, but to me
it appears less of Fedora and more of a cabby
flat cap meets a beret is. She wears it well
(05:13):
and it goes along beautifully with her kind of beige um.
Would you call that a duster or sort of like
a like a like a like a waistcoat, not really
a waistcoat of a trench jacket. Trench coat. Yes, there's
some trench ery. They're all Hail the White Mouse. It
looks like almost like a summer hat with the brim
turned up. Anyway, we are point is, folks, we did
(05:36):
a deep dive with our research associate Zack Williams into
phrenology and we knew going in this was going to
be a two parter or so. If you have not
heard part one, uh just pause, check it out. There's
a lot of stuff that will apply, will give you
a moment maybe with a waiting room sound cute. I
(06:14):
love music. It's just slaps, you know, and the kids
are repurposing it into this vapor waves stuff, which I
also love. It's just it's good stuff. But yeah, agreed.
All right, so you've listened to part one, back with us.
We've got the band back together for part two of
Why was Fornology a thing? In the first part of
(06:35):
this series, Uh, no, you and I looked at the
origin and the rise of phrenology, and no, I think
you and I both were surprised by the at times
really progressive stance fornologists took, like the equality of the sexes.
That's something I wasn't expected. Yeah, it was. It's certainly
(06:56):
a mixed bag in that respect because some of the
proponents of spreading the gospel, if you will, a phrenology.
Certainly we're trying to make it inclusive for both of
the sexes. Uh, And there was sort of like a
women's liberation kind of bent to it, ways of using
phrenology to empower women and say, oh, women are actually
(07:18):
good at this stuff. Though sometimes even those things were
like they're better at maths or like organization stuff that
well seemingly progressive also kind of put them in a
box as well. But we were sort of inching towards
I think where most of today's episode is going to focus,
(07:38):
which is some of the really nefarious ways that that phrenology,
somewhat similarly to the idea of like eugenics, were used,
you know, to keep certain races uh down and certain
types of individuals down because of perceived proof, you know,
based on the shape and size of the parts of
(08:00):
their brain felt through the shape and size of the
parts of their skulls. Yeah, and in in part one
you and I gave a shout out to stuff they
don't want you knows episode on standardized testing, which has
surprisingly similar roots. Yes, yeah, prenology is not real science.
(08:23):
It is definitely a study in contradiction. And we saved
a particular bit of history that we thought would be
illuminating for us to kick off part two of this series,
and that is this. Yes, phrenology very much had a
dark side, but it's a dark side that is older
(08:46):
than phrenology. It's older than Dr Franz gall. You can
trace the d n A of phrenology all the way
back to another older pseudo science, physio agnomy. Physiognomy right, Yeah,
that one has a similar ring to cranioscopy, but it's
much much older. Apparently none other than Pythagoras, you know,
(09:10):
the theorem guy that the triangle guy, was one of
the early proponents of physiognomy. He would often physiognomize um
the the the young men who surrounded him and the
new he was, you know, mentoring and and then acting
as their their tutor or our instructor. Uh. And this
(09:30):
is according to the Roman historian Alias Gellius. And by
the way, a lot of the stuff here that we're
about to cover in this section comes from a fantastic
Wired article by uh Matt Simon from January twenty one.
Not going to read the headline because it gives away
(09:51):
some of the fun stuff to come, but definitely worth
a full read. And also the work of Matt Simon
in general, is is quite a solid agreed agreed, So
say we all, I love that you're bringing up Pythagoras
because this idea of seeing people who want to be
as students literally seeing them and then let's see Gillius
(10:15):
says that Pythagoras inquired quote into the character and dispositions
of men by an inference drawn from their facial appearance
and expression and from the form and burying of their
whole body. To me, that sounds like either a casting couch,
I know, or a family show or a vibe check,
Like what if they were a family show? But we
(10:36):
just did that doctor finger joke on the first part. Yeah, baby,
well I probably broke my finger as a result of
bad karma for that one. For anyone who um, obviously
we're not audio show. We just described a poster to you.
I am I am recording this episode with uh a
(10:58):
weirdly bent left ringing finger, and our own Mr Noel
Brown is a trooper because this man is recording while
moving houses. That's from the way to describe it as
like sort of a vacant white void, sort of like
where John Oliver broadcast from during the pandemic. I'm just
(11:19):
in you know, it's my same studio that I've been
in for years now, but devoid of all stuff except
for my little desk in my USB mike because I'm
still waiting on Internet to be hooked up in my
new place, but that should be any day now, Ben,
is your would you consider your finger? Is it sort
of a furled finger? Content? I almost want to take
(11:41):
my homemade splint off so you can see the the
the offensive geometry of my finger right now. But what
we're saying is we're going to power through because we
are so fast. Speaking of offensive geometry, let's go back
to Pathaker. Yeah, there we go like like he's just
He's just like, imagine you're going to You're You're like,
here is one of the great thinkers of my time.
(12:04):
Please Pythagoras, teach me your wisdom. And he's like, stand back,
let me check what you look like. Because the idea,
and we learned this thanks to Jody Jenkinson in a
wonderful essay called face Facts, A History of Physiognomy from
Ancient Mesopotamia to the end of the nineteenth century. The
(12:25):
idea here that Pythagoras is practicing is that if you
look like a certain animal. Then you have that animals
personality and characteristics and attributes as determined by the observer.
Like have you guys like no, have you ever have
you ever met someone and thought, if you were an animal,
(12:46):
you would be this animal? Sure, maybe someone was sort
of lupine features. There's actually a fabulous illustration in that
Wired article that I mentioned of of a gentleman with
sort of a broad skull uh and a slow opening,
pointing nose in a very small kind of chin and
mouth area um, posed next to an illustration of what
(13:07):
looks to be kind of a bloodhound uh. And the
the the delightful caption um from uh from Matt Simon
or whomever writes captions for for Wired says, according to
the theory of physiognomy, the man pictured would behave like
a dog because he looks like one Robb like teen wolf,
only without the sick ray bands. That was back when
(13:28):
ray bands were like affordable, you get them anywhere, and
then all of a sudden, like Luxotica bought them and
then they became this like bespoke item. Yeah, they're all
made by Lexotica, all the sunglasses. Check out our episode
on that. Also, I want to shout out, I love
the English language. Man, I want to shout out another
great word. Volpi v u l p I n E.
(13:51):
If you hear someone described as having a volpi face,
it means they look kind of like a fox. So, yeah,
like the Pokemon vulpis if I'm not mistaken, is is
it fox like Pokemon? That's correctly false into nine tails? Yes?
Do it? That sneaking enough and peaceful, and it's just
(14:17):
for you right now, there's still facts, even if they're tangents.
It's totally factual. It's totally we need to know about
the evolution of Pokemon. And I'm not going to talk
about anything after second generation because I do not know
all nine billion Pokemon. They have not That's where you
draw the line max second generation. That's when I call
(14:38):
second generation is the last time you could catch them
all in one game corre, you see the past generation,
but you could actually catch them all. It was actually
feasible after that. Now that doesn't that that that doesn't
count be catching all the Pokemon is a fool's air
And at this point it's not possible, is that what
you're saying? And I think by the third generation, you
couldn't catch like charmanders and Pika choose and stuff like
(15:00):
that anymore. I don't replayed them. But second, jan second
is worth that. I respect you. A man's got to
have a code and shout out to our ride or
die Mr Matt Frederick for the amazing performance in one
of our favorite sound cues. So we know basically that
(15:21):
this is judging people's appearance right with all the confidence
of the very incorrect. And it almost becomes a medical diagnostic,
like you could look at someone and say, hey, you
have you are obviously ill, or you are given to
(15:43):
being profligate or something like that. This practice, from from
the age of Pythagoras continues sporadically throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century it has what
pr folks will call a moment. It really like it
(16:06):
goes nuts. People are all about it. And a lot
of this is due to an Italian guy, Jean Batista
de la Porta, who legitimizes this study of physiognomy as
what he calls the product of natural science. He writes
a book called the Humana Physiogneumonia, and uh, he has
(16:29):
a lot of like I think his illustration is the
one that's in that Wired article. Nol Right, it's like
a lot of illustrations of human beings next to animals
that he thinks they look like. Obviously he's got his
thumb on the scale because he's drawing both of these illustrations,
and then he kind of makes some caricatures. These are
(16:52):
not photo realistic drawings of people. And you know, much
like where we have landed with phrenology. Uh, physiognomy was
also pretty fully discredited by the end of the seventeenth century.
But of course there are those who continued to grasp
on to the past and say, no, no, everyone else
(17:13):
is wrong. I know what's going on here. Uh So
in the eighteenth century you had a guy named Johann
Casper uh Lavader uh lavataire Um who was a an
evangelist kind of. For physiognomy Um, he actually published a
four addition um treatise. Is more than a treatise. I mean,
(17:33):
it's really like a like a tomb multi volume tome
on the subject. Saying, quote again from this Wired article, uh,
one could better love one's neighbor by classifying him according
to his facial features. Okay, is that really what you're
after to love one's neighbor by bye bye pigeon holing them,
like because they look like a pigeon. Perhaps I don't know,
(17:55):
there we go, yeah, you know, let me go. I
know we've got a lot of tangents here, but let
me go on on a tangent real quick. Let me
set up a soapbox, Noel max Fellow, ridiculous historians. I
have always objected to the old idiom in English. You
can't judge a book by its cover, because what do
(18:16):
you see at bookstores? What do you see at libraries?
You see books with covers. There's a reason those covers exist. Uh,
And and maybe it's a little personal at this point.
Maybe it's a little close because we just wrote a
book that's coming out in October for stuff they don't
want you to know. But anyway, yeah, absolutely correct. This
(18:38):
guy Lavatar is saying it's good to look at people's
faces and draw your own conclusions. He thought that the
more attractive a person was, again in his estimation, the
more moral, the more ethically sound, the better they were.
(19:00):
And uh, there's a really cool example that Matt Simon
uses by by way of comparison. Uh, like palmistry. He's
applying the um the assumptions of reading palms to the
assumption of reading faces. I've always kind of felt there
was a kinship between palmistry and phrenology. You know. Palmistry
(19:22):
is less about um othering and kind of like, you know,
figuring out how people's brains work. Uh, it's more about
like divining future events, you know, based on like the
layout in the lines and all that of people's palms.
A little more tied to like you know, astrology or
spiritualism and stuff like that. But I've always kind of
felt like that they were they were sort of a
(19:43):
kinship there. I think it's interesting how even to this
day they're like kind of echoes of these things in
terms of like they say that people with beards are
less trustworthy or people perceive them that way, or like
clean shaven people are more trustworthy. And then of course
there are much more race sho really motivated in the
negative way. I'm not sure what other way there is,
(20:04):
ways of examining people's faces and noses and saying, oh,
have you got nose that looks like this? You must
be from this particular ethnic group, and all of that stuff.
So there certainly are kind of like remnants of this
kind of thinking still active to this day. Absolutely. And
let's give a very dubious shout out to another character
in this conversation, Caesar Lombrasso. This guy Lombrasso is convinced
(20:37):
that you can look at someone's face, regardless of their age,
and tell if they are a criminal, if they are
destined to be a criminal. And this is something that
you and Max and I were joking about off air.
This guy is doing something that a lot of scientists
were doing in this age. He was grading facial features,
(21:01):
and somehow every time he found a positive attribute it
happened to be correlating with one of his own facial features.
And every time there was a negative attribute, it was
a facial feature that he himself did not possess. So
if he had a small nose, he would say, big
(21:23):
noses mean you are you know, like given to gambling.
If he had a weak chin, he would be like,
prognatic chins are you know? Those are for adulterers. It's
not super sound methodology, is what I'm saying. I want
to pop back to something I said in the last
episode where I made a blind stab in the dark
(21:46):
about the origins of the expression cut of your jib.
I got the jim. Yeah, I've got it too, but
I totally got it wrong in my mind. I'm like,
jib you know, usually refers to like liking the way
someone looks, so like the cut of their face or
their bone structure. That's not what it is at all. Yeah,
it's to see a naval term a jib, of course,
being like the sail or the mast I believe, are
(22:09):
part of a warship. And the term was used, I
believe popularized by Sir Walter Raleigh UM and the idea
of liking the cut of someone's jib referred to being
able to identify the nationality of the ship based on
the shape of their jib before you could actually see
the flag they were flying. So I just wanted to
drop that out there, correct my my past self, and
(22:29):
then then now we can move on. But it's awesome.
I'm really glad you brought this up because this stayed
with me and I want to give it a shout
out to one of the friends of the show on
Instagram who actually asked me nol to talk about this etymology.
You're right, the jib is a triangular sale that is
(22:52):
between the four top mast head and what's called the
jib boom. Uh. So it's weird triangle in the front
of the ship for sailing. And some have more than
one jib. But like you said, every country had its
own style of jib, and so you could see you
could see a ship and say, well, that's a Spanish
(23:14):
ship or that's a Portuguese ship. It didn't become an
idiom the way we use it today until eighteen twenty
four when Sir Walter Scott said in a book Scott
not Raleigh, thank you. Well, we got our Walters. We
got our Walters, we got our Walter. There's a lot
of just to keep in Saint Ronan's well this uh,
(23:37):
this guy Walter says, quote if she disliked what the
sailor calls the cut of their jib, and it's and
then later it becomes kind of phrenological, right, kind of physiognomic,
the idea, the idea that you could perceive something inborn
(23:58):
about a per soon or an object based entirely on
its appearance. So I would say, dude, this is the
perfect time. This isn't even a tangent cut of your jip.
We explained it. Uh, we gotta we gotta another idiomatic
for the people episode. I think this would have been
a real good one for that put put a pin
(24:20):
in that. For now. I think we're we're we're doing
another one. But lombroso much to your point. Been similarly
to to the way a psychic might rely on reading
someone's palm and the layout of the of the lines
and all of that to determine some future event or
some you know, prognosis about love or whatever it might be. Uh.
This gentleman believed he could tell whether someone was destined
(24:43):
for a particular lifestyle, for example, a life of crime,
based on the shape and arrangement of their facial features. Yeah.
He also said that criminals, again is classified by him,
were out of vistic, meaning they were evolutionary throwbacks. He
(25:04):
believed that criminals were closer to apes than they were
to human beings. And by apes, we mean like guerrillas,
because technically all of those are primates. Uh. He would
also talk at length because he was an avowed enthusiastic racist.
He would also talk at length about quote unquote savages,
(25:27):
and he thought anybody with anybody with the following features
and will read amount to you was given to being uncivilized, barbaric,
and criminal. He talked about oblique eyelids, which he called
a Mongolian characteristic. He also referred to the projection of
(25:49):
the lower face and jaws, something he classified as prognathism,
which he associated with people of African descent. Yeah, and
then he also had a lot of trash to talk
about noses spoiler alert, folks, noses that looked like his
are the best, and knows and knows is that it
(26:11):
don't look like his are the worst. He specifically was
pretty focused on nostril size, at the idea of larger
the larger the nostrils, the more inclined to uh raping
and pillaging you might be. Yeah, yeah, anyway, Thank goodness
he didn't steer history too far askew and that his
(26:34):
ideas were later debunked. So physiognomy surprisingly came very close
to changing the course of science and research in human history.
Charles Darwin almost this is a true story, Charles Darwin.
Yes that Charles almost did not hop on the HMS Beagle,
(27:00):
which meant he almost didn't write about evolution because the
captain of the beagle. A guy named Robert fitz Roy
was a fan of this learning about people via their
facial features thing, this whole debacle. Uh, and he loved
(27:20):
Lavatar And when he first met Charles Darwin, Captain fitz
Roy was like, I don't like your nose, though you might.
You kind of got a criminal nose. Bro, I don't
know if I want you on the ship. Follow your
nose right off this this vessel, sir. He believed that
the shape of Darwin's nose inclined him to be less
(27:43):
resilient on a long sea journey. Yeah, he was like, uh,
you got you got a low energy nose, my guy,
in the way that Darwin put it was. But I
think he was afterwards well satisfied that my nose had
spoken false beautiful. And also shout out to our pal
(28:04):
Jack O'Brien of Daily Zeitgeist. We always have him and
Miles Gray over to talk about weird historical flexes. Jack
is the guy who told us that Darwin prided himself
on eating a sample of every animal he discovered. Is
a hungry, hungry hippo. So we've got this setup. We
(28:24):
know now that phrenology is descended from older equally flawed
attempts at science. We tease this in part one, and
we wanted to give everybody a heads up because this
is uncomfortable for many people, but it's true. Phrenology was
(28:45):
used to justify some unclean, absolutely unforgivable stereotypes, and a
lot of it. Again, phrenology reached its heyday in the
United States. A lot of the converse Asian round phrenology
was used two perpetuate slavery. It was used to combat abolition,
(29:09):
which is interesting because you also mentioned in the last
episode been that it took off so well in America
because of our kind of attitude of like self determination
and like being able to kind of like you know,
become our best selves in the new world or whatever.
And uh, it was used to kind of bolster those
kind of feelings of like, you know, empowerment for the individual.
(29:31):
It was also used to completely disempower, disenfranchise, and in
fact enslave or at the very least, you know, give
a pseudo scientific um justification for enslaving other, you know, people,
including including indigenous populations, including the actual Americans who were
(29:52):
here long before the Europeans. So the US as an
institution in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, during the
height of phrenology, this institution was trying to justify the
continuation of slavery, although many many people were saying, hey,
(30:15):
every human being should be treated equally, right, didn't we
have a whole thing about the pursuit of happiness? Several
people said, and several pro slavery forces said, ass paperwork,
don't sweat it. Let's introduce and I want a really
nasty sound cue for this guy because I don't respect him.
Let's introduce Charles Caldwell. There it is double thumbs down
(30:43):
from Mr Max Williams, who Charles called who Charles Caldwell
was a key player in this pro slavery movement. He
used phrenology as a way to justify enslavement of human beings.
(31:04):
And he said that people from the African diaspora, no
matter you know which specific part of that huge continent,
details aside, he said, anybody who is somehow descended from
the African continent had to be enslaved, because he said,
I've looked at a bunch of skulls, I've I've rubbed
(31:26):
a bunch of bumps on a bunch of craniums, and
I went to Paris to do it. So believe me,
I went to Paris, studied the muse a different any gay,
I mean, come on, I know I'm the guy you
should listen to. And it was one of those confirmation
biased things where it was exactly the data or the
pseudo data or whatever you wanna call it, that folks
(31:48):
needed to justify their behavior. So in thirty seven he
put out a conclusion um stating that skulls of African
people um again, which is in a of itself, an
incredibly generalized view of a massive, very um diverse and
rich culture of of people. That the skulls, the skull
(32:12):
shape based on the study of phrenology, belied a certain
tamable nous, a certain need to be subjugated, a certain
passiveness that that really wanted to be um exploited like
like not exploited, like it was like this is what
(32:33):
this is what they want, this is what they're they're
made for the people in question here, which again incredibly
narrow view. It's absurd. First of all, it's completely self
serving to those who would have loved to continue to
own and exploit slaves for their own purposes for as
long as humanly possible. Yeah. Absolutely, And this unfortunately added
(33:00):
fuel to the fire of the pro slavery institutions, and
it gave slave owners and supporters of chattel slavery, it
gave them something that appeared to them very much like
quantitative AMMO. They felt like they could point to this
and say, oh, it's not me, these are just the facts.
(33:24):
You know, it's a very dangerous thing. You're probably wondering
at this point how phrenology was applied to Native American populations. Well,
we have more bad news for you. There's a guy
named Samuel Morton and uh, several other people. This was
a movement who used phrenology to justify things like the
(33:46):
trail of tears, to justify removing these communities from the
land they had lived on for thousands of years. No,
I'm thinking specifically about a book called Crania America, know,
which Morton wrote in eighteen thirty nine. And I want
to give a big shout out to Kate Tatowski, who
(34:08):
over at Vassar wrote phrenology and scientific racism in the
nineteenth century. Tatowski gives us a very um somber view
of Morton's actions. A lot of good articles that are
there on that blog for the archaeology department over a
Vasser highly recommend giving that a browse some good rabbit
(34:28):
holes to to fall into. But yeah, this was all
a way of using quote unquote science to determine that
another race was inferior. M Yeah, he said there are
natural differences. In his mind, there were four quote unquote
(34:49):
separate species, and he studied. He was like rubbing up
a bunch of skulls, right, and then he said, based
on my vibes, because vibes they were. This was not objective,
he said. He said, the minds of the Native American
populations are different than that of the white men. And uh,
(35:10):
he got cited in so much propaganda because there were
Western settlers right making their way toward what we call
California and the Pacific Northwest today, and they wanted to
hear good things about themselves, so they would read this
and they would say, oh, it's not me, it's the science. Yeah.
(35:32):
They referred to uh, these people in the Native American
people as um being quote adverse to cultivation and slow
in acquiring knowledge, so just basically completely character assassinating them
in just about every way. Yeah, I like that phrase
character assassination. Yeah. Another fan of Morton's work, President Andrew Jackson,
(35:59):
that as Yeah, so phrenology, that's the dark side. It
did a lot of bad stuff, and it supported a
lot of evil actions by people against other people. But
we do have to recognize that this is one of
the earlier trains of thought that led to some actual breakthroughs,
(36:23):
the recognization that different parts of the brain have different functions.
And this is really exciting to me. No, I mean,
of course phrenologists didn't ever figure out what those actual
(36:44):
functions were, but the concept the different parts of your
brain can do different things pretty amazing. Yeah, and and
like accurate, you know. And in the same way we
were talking about there were parts of the ground word
for phrenology that weren't like that far off. It was
just kind of taking something that ended up being true
(37:04):
to an iological conclusion. M m. Yeah. You know. Now
we we know that different regions of the brain control
things like motor skills or language or perception, right, nurse,
you know, was it appropri exception the sense of one's
body and space? That's right, Yeah, Like that's that's kind
(37:29):
of the root of a lot of modern day science.
We call it neuroscience, and that's where we take the
final act of phrenology. Here. Contemporary neuroscience continues to kind
of wrestle with some of the accidental progress made by phrenology.
(37:51):
You know what it reminds me of I was thinking
about this. I didn't want to tell you till we're
on air. But like alchemy, right, Alchemy a bunch of
people who thought they were learning magic, right, they thought
they were doing sorcery, and then they accidentally became the
predecessor of chemistry. I mean that how it goes, you know.
I mean it's this, you know, a trial and error
(38:14):
thinking you're pursuing one thing and then happy accidents lead
to another discipline entirely. Um. See that in technology, We
see that in you know, innovations of all kinds. Even
if the original thing is is entirely kind of gross
or bad, it doesn't mean that it can't lead to
interesting discoveries that can then be used in positive ways
down the line. Yeah, and this is this is pretty interesting.
(38:40):
There's a guy who has now appeared across several of
our shows still, the Harvard Psychologists Professor Edwin G. Boring.
We mentioned him in Standardized Testing as well, so old
Doc boring In he writes a book called History of
Experimental Psychology, and he says, quote, it is almost correct
(39:03):
to say that scientific psychology was born of phrenology out
of wedlock with science. I think that's so poetic. The
idea of being born out of wedlock is usually considered
kind of like a bad thing or in some way unnatural,
or like the idea of being a bastard or whatever.
You know, that's a negative term, being unholy or something.
(39:27):
But it doesn't mean that that person can't go on
to do great things. And it all goes back to
this understanding that physiological characteristics of the brain can influence behavior,
and that behavior can alter our physiology. You know, I'm thinking,
(39:47):
for instance, the best examples of mind over matter that
I have ever encountered have been London taxi drivers who
take a test called the Knowledge, which you know, doesn't
allow them to use Who's any sort of GPS or
any sort of maps. They have to keep it in
their head and over time, over decades, the physical structure
(40:08):
of their brain changes. You can also see this with
certain monastic orders. Your thoughts can alter parts of your brain,
and the principle is the same, the idea that the
mind is not a uniform thing but more kind of
a mix tape of these independent wait for it, faculties.
(40:31):
Dr gall loved calling stuff faculties. Yeah. For example, like
any sixty one. A French surgeon named Paul Broca, who's
also an anthropologist, demonstrated that by damaging a particular region
of the brain just about four square centimeters large, it
can actually make a person unable to speak coherently, but
(40:52):
it doesn't affect their comprehension of other people's speech. It's
the same way like you know, if you have like
a stroke, for example, it can affect your bill to speak,
but it doesn't mean that you can't completely understand what
others are saying. Like I think of the character and
breaking bad Um Hector Salamanca, who this isn't a spoiler
because you meet him at the beginning and he's already
liked this. Uh. He has some sort of events that
(41:14):
leads him leaves him um somewhat paralyzed and also lacking
the ability to speak, but he clearly can understand everything
that everyone is saying to him and can communicate with
a series of bell dings, a little yeah, exactly, a
little lobby bell that's sort of like wrapped around is
his wheelchair. And he can also do the thing where
he points to letter. He you know, does a series
(41:35):
of beeples depending on what letters someone's pointing to, and
he can communicate perfectly well. Another example of this in
history is the story of a New England railroad worker
named Phineas Gage. There is in fact a full episode
about this on our sister podcast, Stuff You Miss in
History class who got an iron bar like like like
final destination of the styles rocketed into his his his
(41:58):
his head, and it peers his brain right through his cheekbone,
exited to the top of the skull. Not only did
he live, but his sense of reasoning and language were
completely intact. But it did change kind of his dude,
it turned him to a pill. It's a true story.
I have been fascinated with this. I'm so glad we're
mentioning it. Before his injury, Phineas what snow around like swell, dude,
(42:25):
you know you could kick it. You cant hang with him.
He was genteel, he was amicable, but afterwards this guy
was like always down to fight. He was full of vices.
He was super irresponsible and flaky. He started cursing like
a sailor as the idiom goes, and his behavior was
so dangerous that women in the area were warned not
(42:49):
to be around him. Basically calling back to our etymology
reference that iron bar changed the cut of his jib
in a very real way. Yeah yeah, yeah. And this
guy named Antonio Demasio is a neuroscientists the University of
Iowa College of Medicine actually studied the Gauge case. Demasio
(43:11):
and his wife, who's also a neuroscientist, recently created a
three D image of Gauge's injury UM, and you know,
kind of mapped the bars path through his brain. They
found that it had damaged the same region of his
brain that had been injured in patients of THEIRS who
had very very similar results. Yea, and fun call back here.
(43:34):
In eighteen a lot of people came to examine the
case of Phineas Gauge, and one of those people was
a phrenology expert, a disciple of the Fowlers called Nelson
Sizer and Dimazio. Actually, Um had some pretty interesting things
(43:55):
to say about what parts of you know, the unit
working of the brain. Phrenologists got right. He had this
to say in an article from Smithsonian mag called Facing
a Bumpy History about phrenology. He said that the work
of phrenologists was in fact, quote quite astounding for their time,
(44:15):
but that they quote did not understand that even the
areas we have identified, quite different from their organs, are
interdependent parts of a larger brain system. Yeah, there are.
It's almost like fingers on a hand, right, Like your
fingers can move independently, but they're all part of a
larger superstructure. And you know, it's pretty amazing that people
(44:40):
could come up with these concepts, and it's also very
disappointing that they misdirected these innovations. Uh yeah, for a
long time. You can argue again, And I think I've
got harped on this in the last episode. By sheer
force of will and and enthusiasm and confidence, they probably
(45:02):
set back the course of science quite quite a few clicks.
I was trying. I was thinking about this as well. Man,
the the like, um, what do you call it? Meditation
for the day for me after we finished part one
was may I always have the strident confidence of the
aggressively wrong, Like it's like to espouse my crackpot theories
(45:28):
even if I'm not quite sure they're true. Right, let
me turn my correctness down to one and my confidence
up to a twelve. This science continues, though, science that
is in some ways um precedented by phrenology. There was
a recent study at the University of Oxford where researchers
(45:52):
use their own brain scanning software to ask empirically for
the first time ever, whether there is truly any correlation
between the bumps on your head and the aspects of
your personality, between the outside of this car you call
your body and the interior engine of your mind. And
(46:17):
this is pretty interesting. I think this is something people
are waiting for. What did they used m r I
brain analysis? Yeah, they use the kind of software that
does brain analyzes um of of of mri I UH
data and these the software would typically be used to
kind of do a cross section of the parts of
(46:39):
the skull, allowing analysis to be done on just the
brain UM. But what they did was they kind of
reverse engineer the software, at least reversed its instructions to
allow the skull to exclusively be mapped and UH and
and dissected electronically. Yeah, and what they and of course
(47:00):
proves that phrenology is a pseudoscience. It's quackery of the
highest order. But they they did find some pretty funny
associations when they were looking at these brain bumps, as
he said, hackey, their software. They said there was a
strong positive association between the trait a massiveness, the arousal
(47:22):
or feeling of sexual desire, and words. This means that, uh.
And again take this as it is. This is just
one study, folks, but we thought this was delightful. Uh
and and very funny. What they found in plain English
is that the more sexual partners a person has had,
(47:44):
the more likely they are to have verbal fluency in
a word naming task. Fascinating, weird, weird, They're just bombs this.
This topic just kind of keeps on going. I proposed, Ben,
there's there is there's some stuff in here that I
don't think we're gonna get to. But I do propose
(48:04):
that we end or at least come close to ending
um in stwards, wrapping up with something that we sort
of teeth. At the beginning of the episode, we promised
we were going to get back to Mr. T. And
that's t for Tarantino. Um. You may recall we spoke uh.
I believe we all gave him thumbs downs and booze uh,
Mr and Mr Caldwell, Right, yeah, yep, we're going to
(48:26):
Charles Caldwell. Yeah, we're going to Django, aren't we going
to Django? Charles Caldwell was a doctor from Kentucky who
was a big fan of slave ownership, uh and a
big fan of phrenology and and was a big reason
or it was he was the person to travel to
Paris and all that stuff to kind of, you know,
bring that medical fad uh to the masses here in
(48:48):
the United States in an effort to justify the barbaric
practice of slave ownership. And you'll recall the character of
Calvin Candy you may know from the memes. He's he's
the one that's got his pinky up and making that
little face, you know. Leonardo DiCaprio, I actually saw a
funny thing that miles of Daily Zeitgeis pointed out where
it was like an image of a poster you could
(49:11):
buy that's just that image, um. And he argued that
that image, devoid of meme text, is really just an
image of of an excited slave owner. He's probably just
talking about slave stuff. But you'll recall that that character
in the movie he he he breaks out a skull
of of what he describes as as an African man. Yeah, yeah, Candy, gentleman,
(49:34):
you will have my curiosity, but now you have my attention,
he said to phrenology, because again it made that character,
who was based on real people, feel good about the
evil things it was doing. And uh, Tarantino, excellent, excellent writer.
It's very much aware of this. Phrenology is thoroughly debunked. Obvious, Lee.
(50:00):
If you are rubbing people's skulls, you're not gonna learn
whether they are good at math or whether they are
talented linguistically. But it was so popular across the entire world,
not just the US, not just Europe. We're talking about India,
Australia and so on. And Candy, as you said, is
(50:25):
definitely based on Charles called Well. And you have to
wonder what called Well would have thought about Django Well.
I mean, aside from the bloody end revenge fantasy style
of of of his character and many of his compatriots,
I bet he would have been proud of the depiction.
(50:46):
You know, I think if he was the same version
of himself that he was in those days, I think
he probably would have been like, yeah, that was a badass,
because you know, he brings out that skull, he hacks
away at the back of it. He points to the
size of a particular region or ridge as being a
indicative of submissiveness. Umame ability. That yeah, tame ability. Another
(51:10):
one of those horrible things that we talked about called
Well himself actually espousing. So this was all real stuff
Tarantino pulled from history to you know, really flesh out
this character. And I think it's a It's a fascinating character,
absolutely abhorrent, but really well done and well played by
by DiCaprio because he just kind of despised the guy
from the moment he walks on the scene. But I
(51:30):
don't think he's doing anything that Carl himself wouldn't have
thought was like yeah, rights me also called well as
a as a traveler to the modern age, would have
been fascinated if we said this in another show. He
would have been amazed by the idea of moving pictures.
He would have freaked out when he knew you could
get sentnamon easily anyway, Uh, this is this is the
(51:54):
end of our series on phrenology. We hope that you
enjoyed it. And as Noll said, we are scratching the surface.
There are many, many, many other characters and events in
history that are oddly related to this strange, distinct pseudo science.
(52:15):
We can't wait to hear what you think. Thank you
so much for listening. Thanks also to our super producer,
Uh Noel, you gave him the street name smooth Head
Mr Max Smooth called smooth skull excuse me, which actually
if you, if you're a if you're a Fallout player
like I know Max is, I think that's what the
super mutants refer to humans as not smooth skulls, but
(52:38):
smooth skins, So it's appropriate there, Max Williams for the
whim and huge thanks to Max's bro, the very talented
Alex Williams. Long may you wander on your sojourn of
this fair uh country of ours. Alex, hope you're well
for composing this banging bob. Thanks also to Christopher Osciotis,
thanks to Eve's Jeff Coat, thanks to our awesome research
(53:01):
associate Zach Williams. Can't wait to have him on the
show one day soon and of course, of course thanks
to avowed for knowlogists Jonathan Strickland a k. The Quister.
Do you think he's going to hear that? I don't
think he'll hear We'll see you nice timebox. For more
(53:27):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give it up for
our one and only. You know him, you love him,
Mr Max Williams, our super producer, So yeah, they call
me Ben. I'm as always immensely privileged to hang out
(00:47):
with Mr Noel Brown none other. I get a Mr.
Let's tie. It's like a let's an honorific. No, not really,
I guess it would be it was an honorific. Is
that just like a funny title, like like Nol the
bold or Nold the pedantic, Nol the dull. That's more
of an honorific. I have a Mr. Is just more
(01:09):
of like a prefix. Well, you know, uh, to quote
Quentin Tarantino in pulp fiction, we're Americans, baby, Our names
don't mean beepy. We're gonna come back around to Mr
t a little later in the episode today. And that
episode is in fact, part two of the Tangled Web
(01:30):
of Noggins, that is phrenology pseudoscience for the ages. Yes, yes,
it's a high quackery here Ridiculous History, and we are
having such a great time. We were. We were talking
recently folks about the history of our show off air
Noel Max and yours truly, and we wanted to give
(01:54):
some space real quick to super producer Max Max. You
had told us all fair in preparation for part two
of this episode that you had you had some stuff
you wanted to air. Yeah, I do so. Um, I'm
gonna turn to the left here. It's gonna be a
very visual thing. It's gonna be great for you know,
a podcast. If I scrolled back, I guess we'll see
(02:15):
the still poster over there anymore. Guess see that? Yeah?
It wasn't that a map of the lands between from
the sky or I'm still there? But I took down
the fallout perk tree. That's because yesterday I got a
new poster and I was so inspired by the Nancy
Wake episode that I got myself what Nancy Wake film
(02:37):
no War poster. It is from the artist. I found
it on red Bubble, which is called the Nable website.
It's the artist Tom Tom with with the ohs and
that spelled with zero. It is amazing and I love
it and I just wanted to give a little shout
out to that. Now I'm gonna put it back on
my wall. Classic internet artist name. Uh. The style is
sort of almost like a cell shading kind of video gaming.
(02:58):
Look to a new our depiction of Nancy Wake, and
she's wearing kind of a not a fedora. What do
you call that thing? Ben, It's like a well, it's
definitely a hat, Max. Yeah, hold it up again. Let's
look at this hat. So it's almost like, oh, it's
tough to tell because of the styling, but it's got
(03:21):
a big brim. You know, who would know? No, Holly
Fry would know. Ah, where's a Holly Fry on you one?
I love our dudes, but initially it was do they
really not know what a beret is? This is Holly Fry,
one of the hosts of stuff you missed in history class.
(03:44):
Holly is a fund of knowledge in many things, including hats.
But when we talked, Holly seemed very puzzled by Ben
in nold confusion. Look, I get it, this is a
stylized piece of art. But if you then look at
any photograph some Nancy Wake on which this art is based,
she is almost always wearing a beret, and she wears
(04:07):
kind of a stiff beret that's like off to one side.
But I really got confused when they mentioned the large brim.
I don't know what they think a hat looks like.
Do you think there's really any hope for these guys
on them ever figuring out what a hat is? You know,
(04:27):
I'm just gonna go with my favorite response in such situations,
which is, bless their hearts. This sub episode of Ridiculous
History was written and produced by Max Williams. Special thanks
to Holly Fry. Do you think Ben and Nole will
learn what a beret is? Let us know on social
media and we will see you in the rest of
(04:48):
this episode of Ridiculous History. I mean, but to me
it appears less of Fedora and more of a cabby
flat cap meets a beret is. She wears it well
(05:13):
and it goes along beautifully with her kind of beige um.
Would you call that a duster or sort of like
a like a like a like a waistcoat, not really
a waistcoat of a trench jacket. Trench coat. Yes, there's
some trench ery. They're all Hail the White Mouse. It
looks like almost like a summer hat with the brim
turned up. Anyway, we are point is, folks, we did
(05:36):
a deep dive with our research associate Zack Williams into
phrenology and we knew going in this was going to
be a two parter or so. If you have not
heard part one, uh just pause, check it out. There's
a lot of stuff that will apply, will give you
a moment maybe with a waiting room sound cute. I
(06:14):
love music. It's just slaps, you know, and the kids
are repurposing it into this vapor waves stuff, which I
also love. It's just it's good stuff. But yeah, agreed.
All right, so you've listened to part one, back with us.
We've got the band back together for part two of
Why was Fornology a thing? In the first part of
(06:35):
this series, Uh, no, you and I looked at the
origin and the rise of phrenology, and no, I think
you and I both were surprised by the at times
really progressive stance fornologists took, like the equality of the sexes.
That's something I wasn't expected. Yeah, it was. It's certainly
(06:56):
a mixed bag in that respect because some of the
proponents of spreading the gospel, if you will, a phrenology.
Certainly we're trying to make it inclusive for both of
the sexes. Uh, And there was sort of like a
women's liberation kind of bent to it, ways of using
phrenology to empower women and say, oh, women are actually
(07:18):
good at this stuff. Though sometimes even those things were
like they're better at maths or like organization stuff that
well seemingly progressive also kind of put them in a
box as well. But we were sort of inching towards
I think where most of today's episode is going to focus,
(07:38):
which is some of the really nefarious ways that that phrenology,
somewhat similarly to the idea of like eugenics, were used,
you know, to keep certain races uh down and certain
types of individuals down because of perceived proof, you know,
based on the shape and size of the parts of
(08:00):
their brain felt through the shape and size of the
parts of their skulls. Yeah, and in in part one
you and I gave a shout out to stuff they
don't want you knows episode on standardized testing, which has
surprisingly similar roots. Yes, yeah, prenology is not real science.
(08:23):
It is definitely a study in contradiction. And we saved
a particular bit of history that we thought would be
illuminating for us to kick off part two of this series,
and that is this. Yes, phrenology very much had a
dark side, but it's a dark side that is older
(08:46):
than phrenology. It's older than Dr Franz gall. You can
trace the d n A of phrenology all the way
back to another older pseudo science, physio agnomy. Physiognomy right, Yeah,
that one has a similar ring to cranioscopy, but it's
much much older. Apparently none other than Pythagoras, you know,
(09:10):
the theorem guy that the triangle guy, was one of
the early proponents of physiognomy. He would often physiognomize um
the the the young men who surrounded him and the
new he was, you know, mentoring and and then acting
as their their tutor or our instructor. Uh. And this
(09:30):
is according to the Roman historian Alias Gellius. And by
the way, a lot of the stuff here that we're
about to cover in this section comes from a fantastic
Wired article by uh Matt Simon from January twenty one.
Not going to read the headline because it gives away
(09:51):
some of the fun stuff to come, but definitely worth
a full read. And also the work of Matt Simon
in general, is is quite a solid agreed agreed, So
say we all, I love that you're bringing up Pythagoras
because this idea of seeing people who want to be
as students literally seeing them and then let's see Gillius
(10:15):
says that Pythagoras inquired quote into the character and dispositions
of men by an inference drawn from their facial appearance
and expression and from the form and burying of their
whole body. To me, that sounds like either a casting couch,
I know, or a family show or a vibe check,
Like what if they were a family show? But we
(10:36):
just did that doctor finger joke on the first part. Yeah, baby,
well I probably broke my finger as a result of
bad karma for that one. For anyone who um, obviously
we're not audio show. We just described a poster to you.
I am I am recording this episode with uh a
(10:58):
weirdly bent left ringing finger, and our own Mr Noel
Brown is a trooper because this man is recording while
moving houses. That's from the way to describe it as
like sort of a vacant white void, sort of like
where John Oliver broadcast from during the pandemic. I'm just
(11:19):
in you know, it's my same studio that I've been
in for years now, but devoid of all stuff except
for my little desk in my USB mike because I'm
still waiting on Internet to be hooked up in my
new place, but that should be any day now, Ben,
is your would you consider your finger? Is it sort
of a furled finger? Content? I almost want to take
(11:41):
my homemade splint off so you can see the the
the offensive geometry of my finger right now. But what
we're saying is we're going to power through because we
are so fast. Speaking of offensive geometry, let's go back
to Pathaker. Yeah, there we go like like he's just
He's just like, imagine you're going to You're You're like,
here is one of the great thinkers of my time.
(12:04):
Please Pythagoras, teach me your wisdom. And he's like, stand back,
let me check what you look like. Because the idea,
and we learned this thanks to Jody Jenkinson in a
wonderful essay called face Facts, A History of Physiognomy from
Ancient Mesopotamia to the end of the nineteenth century. The
(12:25):
idea here that Pythagoras is practicing is that if you
look like a certain animal. Then you have that animals
personality and characteristics and attributes as determined by the observer.
Like have you guys like no, have you ever have
you ever met someone and thought, if you were an animal,
(12:46):
you would be this animal? Sure, maybe someone was sort
of lupine features. There's actually a fabulous illustration in that
Wired article that I mentioned of of a gentleman with
sort of a broad skull uh and a slow opening,
pointing nose in a very small kind of chin and
mouth area um, posed next to an illustration of what
(13:07):
looks to be kind of a bloodhound uh. And the
the the delightful caption um from uh from Matt Simon
or whomever writes captions for for Wired says, according to
the theory of physiognomy, the man pictured would behave like
a dog because he looks like one Robb like teen wolf,
only without the sick ray bands. That was back when
(13:28):
ray bands were like affordable, you get them anywhere, and
then all of a sudden, like Luxotica bought them and
then they became this like bespoke item. Yeah, they're all
made by Lexotica, all the sunglasses. Check out our episode
on that. Also, I want to shout out, I love
the English language. Man, I want to shout out another
great word. Volpi v u l p I n E.
(13:51):
If you hear someone described as having a volpi face,
it means they look kind of like a fox. So, yeah,
like the Pokemon vulpis if I'm not mistaken, is is
it fox like Pokemon? That's correctly false into nine tails? Yes?
Do it? That sneaking enough and peaceful, and it's just
(14:17):
for you right now, there's still facts, even if they're tangents.
It's totally factual. It's totally we need to know about
the evolution of Pokemon. And I'm not going to talk
about anything after second generation because I do not know
all nine billion Pokemon. They have not That's where you
draw the line max second generation. That's when I call
(14:38):
second generation is the last time you could catch them
all in one game corre, you see the past generation,
but you could actually catch them all. It was actually
feasible after that. Now that doesn't that that that doesn't
count be catching all the Pokemon is a fool's air
And at this point it's not possible, is that what
you're saying? And I think by the third generation, you
couldn't catch like charmanders and Pika choose and stuff like
(15:00):
that anymore. I don't replayed them. But second, jan second
is worth that. I respect you. A man's got to
have a code and shout out to our ride or
die Mr Matt Frederick for the amazing performance in one
of our favorite sound cues. So we know basically that
(15:21):
this is judging people's appearance right with all the confidence
of the very incorrect. And it almost becomes a medical diagnostic,
like you could look at someone and say, hey, you
have you are obviously ill, or you are given to
(15:43):
being profligate or something like that. This practice, from from
the age of Pythagoras continues sporadically throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century it has what
pr folks will call a moment. It really like it
(16:06):
goes nuts. People are all about it. And a lot
of this is due to an Italian guy, Jean Batista
de la Porta, who legitimizes this study of physiognomy as
what he calls the product of natural science. He writes
a book called the Humana Physiogneumonia, and uh, he has
(16:29):
a lot of like I think his illustration is the
one that's in that Wired article. Nol Right, it's like
a lot of illustrations of human beings next to animals
that he thinks they look like. Obviously he's got his
thumb on the scale because he's drawing both of these illustrations,
and then he kind of makes some caricatures. These are
(16:52):
not photo realistic drawings of people. And you know, much
like where we have landed with phrenology. Uh, physiognomy was
also pretty fully discredited by the end of the seventeenth century.
But of course there are those who continued to grasp
on to the past and say, no, no, everyone else
(17:13):
is wrong. I know what's going on here. Uh So
in the eighteenth century you had a guy named Johann
Casper uh Lavader uh lavataire Um who was a an
evangelist kind of. For physiognomy Um, he actually published a
four addition um treatise. Is more than a treatise. I mean,
(17:33):
it's really like a like a tomb multi volume tome
on the subject. Saying, quote again from this Wired article, uh,
one could better love one's neighbor by classifying him according
to his facial features. Okay, is that really what you're
after to love one's neighbor by bye bye pigeon holing them,
like because they look like a pigeon. Perhaps I don't know,
(17:55):
there we go, yeah, you know, let me go. I
know we've got a lot of tangents here, but let
me go on on a tangent real quick. Let me
set up a soapbox, Noel max Fellow, ridiculous historians. I
have always objected to the old idiom in English. You
can't judge a book by its cover, because what do
(18:16):
you see at bookstores? What do you see at libraries?
You see books with covers. There's a reason those covers exist. Uh,
And and maybe it's a little personal at this point.
Maybe it's a little close because we just wrote a
book that's coming out in October for stuff they don't
want you to know. But anyway, yeah, absolutely correct. This
(18:38):
guy Lavatar is saying it's good to look at people's
faces and draw your own conclusions. He thought that the
more attractive a person was, again in his estimation, the
more moral, the more ethically sound, the better they were.
(19:00):
And uh, there's a really cool example that Matt Simon
uses by by way of comparison. Uh, like palmistry. He's
applying the um the assumptions of reading palms to the
assumption of reading faces. I've always kind of felt there
was a kinship between palmistry and phrenology. You know. Palmistry
(19:22):
is less about um othering and kind of like, you know,
figuring out how people's brains work. Uh, it's more about
like divining future events, you know, based on like the
layout in the lines and all that of people's palms.
A little more tied to like you know, astrology or
spiritualism and stuff like that. But I've always kind of
felt like that they were they were sort of a
(19:43):
kinship there. I think it's interesting how even to this
day they're like kind of echoes of these things in
terms of like they say that people with beards are
less trustworthy or people perceive them that way, or like
clean shaven people are more trustworthy. And then of course
there are much more race sho really motivated in the
negative way. I'm not sure what other way there is,
(20:04):
ways of examining people's faces and noses and saying, oh,
have you got nose that looks like this? You must
be from this particular ethnic group, and all of that stuff.
So there certainly are kind of like remnants of this
kind of thinking still active to this day. Absolutely. And
let's give a very dubious shout out to another character
in this conversation, Caesar Lombrasso. This guy Lombrasso is convinced
(20:37):
that you can look at someone's face, regardless of their age,
and tell if they are a criminal, if they are
destined to be a criminal. And this is something that
you and Max and I were joking about off air.
This guy is doing something that a lot of scientists
were doing in this age. He was grading facial features,
(21:01):
and somehow every time he found a positive attribute it
happened to be correlating with one of his own facial features.
And every time there was a negative attribute, it was
a facial feature that he himself did not possess. So
if he had a small nose, he would say, big
(21:23):
noses mean you are you know, like given to gambling.
If he had a weak chin, he would be like,
prognatic chins are you know? Those are for adulterers. It's
not super sound methodology, is what I'm saying. I want
to pop back to something I said in the last
episode where I made a blind stab in the dark
(21:46):
about the origins of the expression cut of your jib.
I got the jim. Yeah, I've got it too, but
I totally got it wrong in my mind. I'm like,
jib you know, usually refers to like liking the way
someone looks, so like the cut of their face or
their bone structure. That's not what it is at all. Yeah,
it's to see a naval term a jib, of course,
being like the sail or the mast I believe, are
(22:09):
part of a warship. And the term was used, I
believe popularized by Sir Walter Raleigh UM and the idea
of liking the cut of someone's jib referred to being
able to identify the nationality of the ship based on
the shape of their jib before you could actually see
the flag they were flying. So I just wanted to
drop that out there, correct my my past self, and
(22:29):
then then now we can move on. But it's awesome.
I'm really glad you brought this up because this stayed
with me and I want to give it a shout
out to one of the friends of the show on
Instagram who actually asked me nol to talk about this etymology.
You're right, the jib is a triangular sale that is
(22:52):
between the four top mast head and what's called the
jib boom. Uh. So it's weird triangle in the front
of the ship for sailing. And some have more than
one jib. But like you said, every country had its
own style of jib, and so you could see you
could see a ship and say, well, that's a Spanish
(23:14):
ship or that's a Portuguese ship. It didn't become an
idiom the way we use it today until eighteen twenty
four when Sir Walter Scott said in a book Scott
not Raleigh, thank you. Well, we got our Walters. We
got our Walters, we got our Walter. There's a lot
of just to keep in Saint Ronan's well this uh,
(23:37):
this guy Walter says, quote if she disliked what the
sailor calls the cut of their jib, and it's and
then later it becomes kind of phrenological, right, kind of physiognomic,
the idea, the idea that you could perceive something inborn
(23:58):
about a per soon or an object based entirely on
its appearance. So I would say, dude, this is the
perfect time. This isn't even a tangent cut of your jip.
We explained it. Uh, we gotta we gotta another idiomatic
for the people episode. I think this would have been
a real good one for that put put a pin
(24:20):
in that. For now. I think we're we're we're doing
another one. But lombroso much to your point. Been similarly
to to the way a psychic might rely on reading
someone's palm and the layout of the of the lines
and all of that to determine some future event or
some you know, prognosis about love or whatever it might be. Uh.
This gentleman believed he could tell whether someone was destined
(24:43):
for a particular lifestyle, for example, a life of crime,
based on the shape and arrangement of their facial features. Yeah.
He also said that criminals, again is classified by him,
were out of vistic, meaning they were evolutionary throwbacks. He
(25:04):
believed that criminals were closer to apes than they were
to human beings. And by apes, we mean like guerrillas,
because technically all of those are primates. Uh. He would
also talk at length because he was an avowed enthusiastic racist.
He would also talk at length about quote unquote savages,
(25:27):
and he thought anybody with anybody with the following features
and will read amount to you was given to being uncivilized, barbaric,
and criminal. He talked about oblique eyelids, which he called
a Mongolian characteristic. He also referred to the projection of
(25:49):
the lower face and jaws, something he classified as prognathism,
which he associated with people of African descent. Yeah, and
then he also had a lot of trash to talk
about noses spoiler alert, folks, noses that looked like his
are the best, and knows and knows is that it
(26:11):
don't look like his are the worst. He specifically was
pretty focused on nostril size, at the idea of larger
the larger the nostrils, the more inclined to uh raping
and pillaging you might be. Yeah, yeah, anyway, Thank goodness
he didn't steer history too far askew and that his
(26:34):
ideas were later debunked. So physiognomy surprisingly came very close
to changing the course of science and research in human history.
Charles Darwin almost this is a true story, Charles Darwin.
Yes that Charles almost did not hop on the HMS Beagle,
(27:00):
which meant he almost didn't write about evolution because the
captain of the beagle. A guy named Robert fitz Roy
was a fan of this learning about people via their
facial features thing, this whole debacle. Uh, and he loved
(27:20):
Lavatar And when he first met Charles Darwin, Captain fitz
Roy was like, I don't like your nose, though you might.
You kind of got a criminal nose. Bro, I don't
know if I want you on the ship. Follow your
nose right off this this vessel, sir. He believed that
the shape of Darwin's nose inclined him to be less
(27:43):
resilient on a long sea journey. Yeah, he was like, uh,
you got you got a low energy nose, my guy,
in the way that Darwin put it was. But I
think he was afterwards well satisfied that my nose had
spoken false beautiful. And also shout out to our pal
(28:04):
Jack O'Brien of Daily Zeitgeist. We always have him and
Miles Gray over to talk about weird historical flexes. Jack
is the guy who told us that Darwin prided himself
on eating a sample of every animal he discovered. Is
a hungry, hungry hippo. So we've got this setup. We
(28:24):
know now that phrenology is descended from older equally flawed
attempts at science. We tease this in part one, and
we wanted to give everybody a heads up because this
is uncomfortable for many people, but it's true. Phrenology was
(28:45):
used to justify some unclean, absolutely unforgivable stereotypes, and a
lot of it. Again, phrenology reached its heyday in the
United States. A lot of the converse Asian round phrenology
was used two perpetuate slavery. It was used to combat abolition,
(29:09):
which is interesting because you also mentioned in the last
episode been that it took off so well in America
because of our kind of attitude of like self determination
and like being able to kind of like you know,
become our best selves in the new world or whatever.
And uh, it was used to kind of bolster those
kind of feelings of like, you know, empowerment for the individual.
(29:31):
It was also used to completely disempower, disenfranchise, and in
fact enslave or at the very least, you know, give
a pseudo scientific um justification for enslaving other, you know, people,
including including indigenous populations, including the actual Americans who were
(29:52):
here long before the Europeans. So the US as an
institution in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, during the
height of phrenology, this institution was trying to justify the
continuation of slavery, although many many people were saying, hey,
(30:15):
every human being should be treated equally, right, didn't we
have a whole thing about the pursuit of happiness? Several
people said, and several pro slavery forces said, ass paperwork,
don't sweat it. Let's introduce and I want a really
nasty sound cue for this guy because I don't respect him.
Let's introduce Charles Caldwell. There it is double thumbs down
(30:43):
from Mr Max Williams, who Charles called who Charles Caldwell
was a key player in this pro slavery movement. He
used phrenology as a way to justify enslavement of human beings.
(31:04):
And he said that people from the African diaspora, no
matter you know which specific part of that huge continent,
details aside, he said, anybody who is somehow descended from
the African continent had to be enslaved, because he said,
I've looked at a bunch of skulls, I've I've rubbed
(31:26):
a bunch of bumps on a bunch of craniums, and
I went to Paris to do it. So believe me,
I went to Paris, studied the muse a different any gay,
I mean, come on, I know I'm the guy you
should listen to. And it was one of those confirmation
biased things where it was exactly the data or the
pseudo data or whatever you wanna call it, that folks
(31:48):
needed to justify their behavior. So in thirty seven he
put out a conclusion um stating that skulls of African
people um again, which is in a of itself, an
incredibly generalized view of a massive, very um diverse and
rich culture of of people. That the skulls, the skull
(32:12):
shape based on the study of phrenology, belied a certain
tamable nous, a certain need to be subjugated, a certain
passiveness that that really wanted to be um exploited like
like not exploited, like it was like this is what
(32:33):
this is what they want, this is what they're they're
made for the people in question here, which again incredibly
narrow view. It's absurd. First of all, it's completely self
serving to those who would have loved to continue to
own and exploit slaves for their own purposes for as
long as humanly possible. Yeah. Absolutely, And this unfortunately added
(33:00):
fuel to the fire of the pro slavery institutions, and
it gave slave owners and supporters of chattel slavery, it
gave them something that appeared to them very much like
quantitative AMMO. They felt like they could point to this
and say, oh, it's not me, these are just the facts.
(33:24):
You know, it's a very dangerous thing. You're probably wondering
at this point how phrenology was applied to Native American populations. Well,
we have more bad news for you. There's a guy
named Samuel Morton and uh, several other people. This was
a movement who used phrenology to justify things like the
(33:46):
trail of tears, to justify removing these communities from the
land they had lived on for thousands of years. No,
I'm thinking specifically about a book called Crania America, know,
which Morton wrote in eighteen thirty nine. And I want
to give a big shout out to Kate Tatowski, who
(34:08):
over at Vassar wrote phrenology and scientific racism in the
nineteenth century. Tatowski gives us a very um somber view
of Morton's actions. A lot of good articles that are
there on that blog for the archaeology department over a
Vasser highly recommend giving that a browse some good rabbit
(34:28):
holes to to fall into. But yeah, this was all
a way of using quote unquote science to determine that
another race was inferior. M Yeah, he said there are
natural differences. In his mind, there were four quote unquote
(34:49):
separate species, and he studied. He was like rubbing up
a bunch of skulls, right, and then he said, based
on my vibes, because vibes they were. This was not objective,
he said. He said, the minds of the Native American
populations are different than that of the white men. And uh,
(35:10):
he got cited in so much propaganda because there were
Western settlers right making their way toward what we call
California and the Pacific Northwest today, and they wanted to
hear good things about themselves, so they would read this
and they would say, oh, it's not me, it's the science. Yeah.
(35:32):
They referred to uh, these people in the Native American
people as um being quote adverse to cultivation and slow
in acquiring knowledge, so just basically completely character assassinating them
in just about every way. Yeah, I like that phrase
character assassination. Yeah. Another fan of Morton's work, President Andrew Jackson,
(35:59):
that as Yeah, so phrenology, that's the dark side. It
did a lot of bad stuff, and it supported a
lot of evil actions by people against other people. But
we do have to recognize that this is one of
the earlier trains of thought that led to some actual breakthroughs,
(36:23):
the recognization that different parts of the brain have different functions.
And this is really exciting to me. No, I mean,
of course phrenologists didn't ever figure out what those actual
(36:44):
functions were, but the concept the different parts of your
brain can do different things pretty amazing. Yeah, and and
like accurate, you know. And in the same way we
were talking about there were parts of the ground word
for phrenology that weren't like that far off. It was
just kind of taking something that ended up being true
(37:04):
to an iological conclusion. M m. Yeah. You know. Now
we we know that different regions of the brain control
things like motor skills or language or perception, right, nurse,
you know, was it appropri exception the sense of one's
body and space? That's right, Yeah, Like that's that's kind
(37:29):
of the root of a lot of modern day science.
We call it neuroscience, and that's where we take the
final act of phrenology. Here. Contemporary neuroscience continues to kind
of wrestle with some of the accidental progress made by phrenology.
(37:51):
You know what it reminds me of I was thinking
about this. I didn't want to tell you till we're
on air. But like alchemy, right, Alchemy a bunch of
people who thought they were learning magic, right, they thought
they were doing sorcery, and then they accidentally became the
predecessor of chemistry. I mean that how it goes, you know.
I mean it's this, you know, a trial and error
(38:14):
thinking you're pursuing one thing and then happy accidents lead
to another discipline entirely. Um. See that in technology, We
see that in you know, innovations of all kinds. Even
if the original thing is is entirely kind of gross
or bad, it doesn't mean that it can't lead to
interesting discoveries that can then be used in positive ways
down the line. Yeah, and this is this is pretty interesting.
(38:40):
There's a guy who has now appeared across several of
our shows still, the Harvard Psychologists Professor Edwin G. Boring.
We mentioned him in Standardized Testing as well, so old
Doc boring In he writes a book called History of
Experimental Psychology, and he says, quote, it is almost correct
(39:03):
to say that scientific psychology was born of phrenology out
of wedlock with science. I think that's so poetic. The
idea of being born out of wedlock is usually considered
kind of like a bad thing or in some way unnatural,
or like the idea of being a bastard or whatever.
You know, that's a negative term, being unholy or something.
(39:27):
But it doesn't mean that that person can't go on
to do great things. And it all goes back to
this understanding that physiological characteristics of the brain can influence behavior,
and that behavior can alter our physiology. You know, I'm thinking,
(39:47):
for instance, the best examples of mind over matter that
I have ever encountered have been London taxi drivers who
take a test called the Knowledge, which you know, doesn't
allow them to use Who's any sort of GPS or
any sort of maps. They have to keep it in
their head and over time, over decades, the physical structure
(40:08):
of their brain changes. You can also see this with
certain monastic orders. Your thoughts can alter parts of your brain,
and the principle is the same, the idea that the
mind is not a uniform thing but more kind of
a mix tape of these independent wait for it, faculties.
(40:31):
Dr gall loved calling stuff faculties. Yeah. For example, like
any sixty one. A French surgeon named Paul Broca, who's
also an anthropologist, demonstrated that by damaging a particular region
of the brain just about four square centimeters large, it
can actually make a person unable to speak coherently, but
(40:52):
it doesn't affect their comprehension of other people's speech. It's
the same way like you know, if you have like
a stroke, for example, it can affect your bill to speak,
but it doesn't mean that you can't completely understand what
others are saying. Like I think of the character and
breaking bad Um Hector Salamanca, who this isn't a spoiler
because you meet him at the beginning and he's already
liked this. Uh. He has some sort of events that
(41:14):
leads him leaves him um somewhat paralyzed and also lacking
the ability to speak, but he clearly can understand everything
that everyone is saying to him and can communicate with
a series of bell dings, a little yeah, exactly, a
little lobby bell that's sort of like wrapped around is
his wheelchair. And he can also do the thing where
he points to letter. He you know, does a series
(41:35):
of beeples depending on what letters someone's pointing to, and
he can communicate perfectly well. Another example of this in
history is the story of a New England railroad worker
named Phineas Gage. There is in fact a full episode
about this on our sister podcast, Stuff You Miss in
History class who got an iron bar like like like
final destination of the styles rocketed into his his his
(41:58):
his head, and it peers his brain right through his cheekbone,
exited to the top of the skull. Not only did
he live, but his sense of reasoning and language were
completely intact. But it did change kind of his dude,
it turned him to a pill. It's a true story.
I have been fascinated with this. I'm so glad we're
mentioning it. Before his injury, Phineas what snow around like swell, dude,
(42:25):
you know you could kick it. You cant hang with him.
He was genteel, he was amicable, but afterwards this guy
was like always down to fight. He was full of vices.
He was super irresponsible and flaky. He started cursing like
a sailor as the idiom goes, and his behavior was
so dangerous that women in the area were warned not
(42:49):
to be around him. Basically calling back to our etymology
reference that iron bar changed the cut of his jib
in a very real way. Yeah yeah, yeah. And this
guy named Antonio Demasio is a neuroscientists the University of
Iowa College of Medicine actually studied the Gauge case. Demasio
(43:11):
and his wife, who's also a neuroscientist, recently created a
three D image of Gauge's injury UM, and you know,
kind of mapped the bars path through his brain. They
found that it had damaged the same region of his
brain that had been injured in patients of THEIRS who
had very very similar results. Yea, and fun call back here.
(43:34):
In eighteen a lot of people came to examine the
case of Phineas Gauge, and one of those people was
a phrenology expert, a disciple of the Fowlers called Nelson
Sizer and Dimazio. Actually, Um had some pretty interesting things
(43:55):
to say about what parts of you know, the unit
working of the brain. Phrenologists got right. He had this
to say in an article from Smithsonian mag called Facing
a Bumpy History about phrenology. He said that the work
of phrenologists was in fact, quote quite astounding for their time,
(44:15):
but that they quote did not understand that even the
areas we have identified, quite different from their organs, are
interdependent parts of a larger brain system. Yeah, there are.
It's almost like fingers on a hand, right, Like your
fingers can move independently, but they're all part of a
larger superstructure. And you know, it's pretty amazing that people
(44:40):
could come up with these concepts, and it's also very
disappointing that they misdirected these innovations. Uh yeah, for a
long time. You can argue again, And I think I've
got harped on this in the last episode. By sheer
force of will and and enthusiasm and confidence, they probably
(45:02):
set back the course of science quite quite a few clicks.
I was trying. I was thinking about this as well. Man,
the the like, um, what do you call it? Meditation
for the day for me after we finished part one
was may I always have the strident confidence of the
aggressively wrong, Like it's like to espouse my crackpot theories
(45:28):
even if I'm not quite sure they're true. Right, let
me turn my correctness down to one and my confidence
up to a twelve. This science continues, though, science that
is in some ways um precedented by phrenology. There was
a recent study at the University of Oxford where researchers
(45:52):
use their own brain scanning software to ask empirically for
the first time ever, whether there is truly any correlation
between the bumps on your head and the aspects of
your personality, between the outside of this car you call
your body and the interior engine of your mind. And
(46:17):
this is pretty interesting. I think this is something people
are waiting for. What did they used m r I
brain analysis? Yeah, they use the kind of software that
does brain analyzes um of of of mri I UH
data and these the software would typically be used to
kind of do a cross section of the parts of
(46:39):
the skull, allowing analysis to be done on just the
brain UM. But what they did was they kind of
reverse engineer the software, at least reversed its instructions to
allow the skull to exclusively be mapped and UH and
and dissected electronically. Yeah, and what they and of course
(47:00):
proves that phrenology is a pseudoscience. It's quackery of the
highest order. But they they did find some pretty funny
associations when they were looking at these brain bumps, as
he said, hackey, their software. They said there was a
strong positive association between the trait a massiveness, the arousal
(47:22):
or feeling of sexual desire, and words. This means that, uh.
And again take this as it is. This is just
one study, folks, but we thought this was delightful. Uh
and and very funny. What they found in plain English
is that the more sexual partners a person has had,
(47:44):
the more likely they are to have verbal fluency in
a word naming task. Fascinating, weird, weird, They're just bombs this.
This topic just kind of keeps on going. I proposed, Ben,
there's there is there's some stuff in here that I
don't think we're gonna get to. But I do propose
(48:04):
that we end or at least come close to ending
um in stwards, wrapping up with something that we sort
of teeth. At the beginning of the episode, we promised
we were going to get back to Mr. T. And
that's t for Tarantino. Um. You may recall we spoke uh.
I believe we all gave him thumbs downs and booze uh,
Mr and Mr Caldwell, Right, yeah, yep, we're going to
(48:26):
Charles Caldwell. Yeah, we're going to Django, aren't we going
to Django? Charles Caldwell was a doctor from Kentucky who
was a big fan of slave ownership, uh and a
big fan of phrenology and and was a big reason
or it was he was the person to travel to
Paris and all that stuff to kind of, you know,
bring that medical fad uh to the masses here in
(48:48):
the United States in an effort to justify the barbaric
practice of slave ownership. And you'll recall the character of
Calvin Candy you may know from the memes. He's he's
the one that's got his pinky up and making that
little face, you know. Leonardo DiCaprio, I actually saw a
funny thing that miles of Daily Zeitgeis pointed out where
it was like an image of a poster you could
(49:11):
buy that's just that image, um. And he argued that
that image, devoid of meme text, is really just an
image of of an excited slave owner. He's probably just
talking about slave stuff. But you'll recall that that character
in the movie he he he breaks out a skull
of of what he describes as as an African man. Yeah, yeah, Candy, gentleman,
(49:34):
you will have my curiosity, but now you have my attention,
he said to phrenology, because again it made that character,
who was based on real people, feel good about the
evil things it was doing. And uh, Tarantino, excellent, excellent writer.
It's very much aware of this. Phrenology is thoroughly debunked. Obvious, Lee.
(50:00):
If you are rubbing people's skulls, you're not gonna learn
whether they are good at math or whether they are
talented linguistically. But it was so popular across the entire world,
not just the US, not just Europe. We're talking about India,
Australia and so on. And Candy, as you said, is
(50:25):
definitely based on Charles called Well. And you have to
wonder what called Well would have thought about Django Well.
I mean, aside from the bloody end revenge fantasy style
of of of his character and many of his compatriots,
I bet he would have been proud of the depiction.
(50:46):
You know, I think if he was the same version
of himself that he was in those days, I think
he probably would have been like, yeah, that was a badass,
because you know, he brings out that skull, he hacks
away at the back of it. He points to the
size of a particular region or ridge as being a
indicative of submissiveness. Umame ability. That yeah, tame ability. Another
(51:10):
one of those horrible things that we talked about called
Well himself actually espousing. So this was all real stuff
Tarantino pulled from history to you know, really flesh out
this character. And I think it's a It's a fascinating character,
absolutely abhorrent, but really well done and well played by
by DiCaprio because he just kind of despised the guy
from the moment he walks on the scene. But I
(51:30):
don't think he's doing anything that Carl himself wouldn't have
thought was like yeah, rights me also called well as
a as a traveler to the modern age, would have
been fascinated if we said this in another show. He
would have been amazed by the idea of moving pictures.
He would have freaked out when he knew you could
get sentnamon easily anyway, Uh, this is this is the
(51:54):
end of our series on phrenology. We hope that you
enjoyed it. And as Noll said, we are scratching the surface.
There are many, many, many other characters and events in
history that are oddly related to this strange, distinct pseudo science.
(52:15):
We can't wait to hear what you think. Thank you
so much for listening. Thanks also to our super producer,
Uh Noel, you gave him the street name smooth Head
Mr Max Smooth called smooth skull excuse me, which actually
if you, if you're a if you're a Fallout player
like I know Max is, I think that's what the
super mutants refer to humans as not smooth skulls, but
(52:38):
smooth skins, So it's appropriate there, Max Williams for the
whim and huge thanks to Max's bro, the very talented
Alex Williams. Long may you wander on your sojourn of
this fair uh country of ours. Alex, hope you're well
for composing this banging bob. Thanks also to Christopher Osciotis,
thanks to Eve's Jeff Coat, thanks to our awesome research
(53:01):
associate Zach Williams. Can't wait to have him on the
show one day soon and of course, of course thanks
to avowed for knowlogists Jonathan Strickland a k. The Quister.
Do you think he's going to hear that? I don't
think he'll hear We'll see you nice timebox. For more
(53:27):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.