Short Stuff: The Number 23

There are people out there who believe that there’s something special about the number 23. Exactly what? Who knows. Exactly why? Because it pops up a lot. But does it? Who knows. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to these short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Josh. But the three of us together, this is
short stuff. It's so short. Yeah, and we should mention that,
you know, Josh is in here with this guest producer.
And he asked what we're recording on and I said
the number twenty three, and he said, oh, I'm into that,
and I said, well, I apologize because I'm probably gonna

(00:25):
make fun of it a lot. That's funny. So, Josh,
then you're a is what they're called the number two,
the number three, the letter R, the letter D, the
letter I, the letter A, the letter N, and then
because there's more than one, the letter S. And we
know that's real because there's a Facebook page. Yeah. Facebook

(00:46):
basically legitimizes everything. So we're talking about the number twenty three. Um,
apparently a lot of people put some stock into this number. Yeah,
not just Josh. No, he's not the only one they made,
are he does two? They made a very bad Jim
Carrey movie called The Number twenty three. Did you see
it or are you just presuming it was bad? I'm

(01:06):
presuming it was bad from all the people that said
it's bad. I have never seen it, and I presumed
it was bad too, But I have gotten just desperate
enough on like Netflix and Amazon Prime to let's try it.
There's so much good stuff out there, and you're gonna
watch that? Is there? Oh? I don't know, does everything stink?
I don't know if everything stinks. I don't want to

(01:27):
say that, but I think I am at the number
twenty three level right now. All right, Okay, let's follow up.
I want to hear about it. All right, you got it?
All right? So the number twenty three, Um, you've seen
it on Michael Jordan's uniform. Uh. He picked it apparently
because that was as close as he could get to
half of forty six, which was his older brother's number.

(01:50):
I think his older brothers was would be exactly. Uh.
And then of course since then, other people, um have
tried to emulate Michael, like Lebron and so the other
twenty three you see in basketball and even some other
sports sometimes or a tribute to Michael Jordan's. Yeah, like
David Beckham's twenty three when he went to Real Madrid

(02:13):
was an homage to Jordan's two. So yeah, Organs the first.
Every other twenty three was an homage to Jordan's which
is that's great, but that's not where the number twenty
three ends. Actually, that's not where the number twenty three started. No,
it's so well it did. It started elsewhere. Um, the
number twenty three has been with us for as long

(02:34):
as Arabic numerals have. But um, the obsession with the
number twenty three. They've tried to trace back as far
as they can. And there's actually a guy who came
up with a book, um that came out in two
This guy's got one of the better names of herd
in a while, Barnaby Rogerson. Yeah, and this book title

(02:55):
is just out of hand. Rogerson's Book of Numbers Colon
the Culture of Numbers hyphen from one thousand one Nights
to the Seven Wonders of the World. That's the end
of the title. It has a colon and a hyphen. Yeah.
He should have ended that with a exclamation point, because
I think you have to when you say the seven

(03:15):
Wonders of the World. Yeah, I don't. I don't know
anybody who says it like without an exclamation point. Yeah.
So Barnaby Rogerson traces the obsession with the number twenty
three to a little writer that was drugged out named
william S Burrows. Yeah, the man who's shot a million
bucks in his arm, says Matt Dillon. Really was that

(03:37):
the thing? The quote? Yeah, it was from drug store Cowboy.
William S Burrows played an old aged heroin addict and
and Matt Dillon said he must have shot a million
bucks into that arm. So he watched that again instead
of the number twenty three. Okay, all right, you got it.
That's your assignment. Okay. So supposedly in nineteen sixty this
story has many many holes, but uh and probably because

(04:01):
of all the drugs. Burrows was in Tangier. Probably because
of the drugs, and said he met a sea captain
named Clark, not me, who said he had never been
in an accident in twenty three years. Later that day
Clark sank his ship and died. Which that'll that'll perk
your antennae up. And then supposedly later that same day,

(04:25):
that night, Burrows heard a radio story news story about
a flight twenty three that crashed in Florida, also piloted
by Captain Clark. This all sounds very interesting until you
realize that that didn't happen. Well, there was a flight
twenty three. I didn't see whether it was piloted by
Clark or not. So it's possibly heard a story, um,

(04:47):
from twenty seven years earlier. Yeah, but like maybe they
were recounting the story or something like that, you know
what I mean. Sure, And we also have to remember
again he's hopped up on Smack right either way, I
think Smack was just one of any at any given
time going through his bloodstream. But um, he is usually
the guy who is first credited with becoming obsessed with

(05:08):
the number twenty three. And he was you could say,
fairly influential in the underground scene in the sixties and
then into the seventies and so on. And one of
his friends was named Robert Anton Wilson, and Robert Anton
Wilson went on to co write, um, the very famous
Illuminatus trilogy. Have you ever read any of those? I haven't,

(05:28):
But that that's Josh's main interest. Okay, they're fascinating books,
they're wonderfully written, they're they're hilarious, they're engrossing, they're really interesting. Um.
But he was friends with Burrows and so the number
twenty three is a major foundation of the Illuminatus trilogy,
which also draws from another kind of underground UM school

(05:50):
of thought. I guess that the in the sixties and
seventies UM which is called Discordianism, which is kind of
like a made up parody religion that actually makes a
lot of sense, so much so that it kind of
blurs the lines between reality and non reality when you
when you look into it. And number twenty three is
a holy number for Discordianism. So if you kind of

(06:10):
take all that together, Discordingism, the Illuminatus trilogy, and William
S Burrows and put it all together, that seems to
be where the kind of cult like um awareness or
obsession with the number twenty three came from. All Right,
So we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come
back and talk about more twenty three coincidences right after this.

(06:51):
So I should mention when I said that that's a
guest producer Josh's main interest, I didn't mean in life.
I just read as far as the number twenty three goes.
He was like, yeah, I read Robert Anton Wilson. Yeah,
So I thought it might be fun just to kind
of tick through a bunch of the uh, the things
you might find on Facebook page, where people are like,
look man twenty three again. Uh. Darwin's Origin of the

(07:15):
Species was released in eighteen fifty nine. You add up one, eight, five,
and nine and you get twenty three. That's one of
the more interesting ones. Some of them are just pictures
of like a truck with the number twenty three on it.
Like there it is again. Those are a little but
there are some, mister inter interesting coincidences that pop up

(07:36):
when you look around, Like Kurt Cobain. Um, he was
born in nineteen sixty seven, and if you add those up,
it comes to twenty three. He died in And if
you add those numbers up, they come to twenty three
as well. Okay, much more interesting than a truck with
the number twenty three on it, uh for sure. UM.
Conspiracy theorists will point to the nine eleven tragedy. You

(07:59):
add up nine eleven UM to zero, zero and one
and you get twenty three. That's a good one. Shakespeare
was born and died on the same day, April, but
years apart, obviously, Uh. Julius Caesar was supposedly, if you
look at detailed reports, stabbed three times. That's not bad.

(08:21):
I like this one. Um, there's one called the birthday paradox.
Have you heard about that? I did see that, and
after reading it four times and not fully on understanding it,
I just walked away in tears. It's it's really fascinating.
I was like, oh, we should do one just on that,
but it's actually too simple. So the birthday paradox is
where if you get twenty three people into a room,
you now have enough people to where there's a fifty

(08:44):
fifty chance that two of them are going to have
the same birthday, which makes zero sense. Since there's three
hundred and sixty five days in a year, you would
think that you would need um that times two to
have a figure I guess three. But no, because paradox,
each of those twenty three people have the opportunity to

(09:05):
be compared to the other twenty two people. You get
a number way more than than twenty three, a number
of comparisons way more than twenty three, and it turns
out it's enough to have a fifty chance of having
the same birthday among two people. And has that been
proven out? Yeah, oh yeah, it's mathematic it's it's mathematical. Yeah, no,
it's very it's very well proven it's interesting once you

(09:28):
look into just the probabilities of your like, oh, it
makes way more sense. Okay. I took statistics in college. Actually,
that was one of the maths that I took. I
took statistics, chuck on two twa times. Did you get
an F and F and a D? Finally, yes, the
last time I got a D because I had the
same instructor all three times, and last time she's like,

(09:49):
D just go just go away. Well, you're never going
to get this. Yeah, you and I were Liberal arts guys.
I was an English major and they before that class,
they actually had a math class called Math for Poets
was the nickname, and it was basically like the math
class all English majors took because it was very simple arithmetic,
not bad. Um, let's get back to a couple of
twenty three things. Oh yeah, Princess Leah Josh and the

(10:12):
very first Star Wars film is held in detention block
A A to three. Okay, And apparently in George Lucas's
first film th h X eleven thirty eight, there is
another twenty three in there, so some people might think
that was that was his little way of giving a
nod to that number. I would guess so, and George

(10:32):
Lucas wouldn't be the only person who's a famous UM
of twenty yeah. Famous. One of the most famous, uh
is John Nash, the guy who's the mathematician whose life
was dramatized in A Beautiful Mind, both the book and
the movie, which is a great movie if I remember correctly.

(10:53):
But he was obsessed with twenty the number twenty three. UM.
He said it was his favorite prime number. That's not
where the obsession ends. He also says that he or
he said that he appeared on the cover of Life
magazine once disguised as Pope John the three right and
Pope John the twenty three really did appear on Life magazine,

(11:15):
but it was him. John Nash was saying, well, that
was me. Yeah, I shouldn't laugh. Uh. In the Bible, um,
which is a book, the there is ah. I was
about to call it a chapter, but I guess they
aren't called that the Book of Numbers and the verses. Uh,

(11:35):
it's numbers twenty three If you look that up, what
hath God wrought? That is also the very first message
sent by telegraph in code by Samuel morrise In. So
if you if you take all of this and you um,
you look at it a certain way, it becomes plain

(11:56):
that there's something very special about the number twenty three.
If you look at it a different way, it becomes
plain that people have invested a lot of UM like
mystical significance to twenty three that isn't actually there, that
that it could be any other number, especially any other
number that is within UM one to thirty, because a

(12:18):
lot of people ascribe dates, you know, significance to dates.
I should say John Nash died on the twenty three
of May in two thousand fifteen, and so that just
proves it to people who are is obviously twenty three
means something, but if it could also be fifteen or
seven or three. There's a lot of like numbers that

(12:38):
we ascribe a lot as significance too. And if you
ask a cognitive psychologist what's going on, they will just
basically say that our brains contain a mechanism for detecting patterns.
We search out patterns how we make sense of things.
It's how we save brain energy is finding patterns so
we can predict things and just make sense of the

(12:58):
world around us. And sometimes we force patterns onto things
that don't actually have any significance, that don't actually mean anything,
and that could be things like the number twenty three
popping up suddenly or randomly. Yeah, when you look at
the clock and it's eleven eleven and you make a
big deal about it, it's more likely that you just

(13:20):
don't make a big deal about every other time of
day that you look at the clock. Exactly, Chuck, I
got nothing else except for twenty three chromosomes. Hey, well
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(13:41):
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