September 18, 2026 • 40 mins
Dragons are like mermaids in that they're not real. And that's about where the comparison ends. Learn all about dragons today.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Chuck here with episode 7 of the S-Y-S-K,
not S-U-S-K, like we get in emails, Stuff You, Y-O-U,
Should Know playlist. Because we're getting weird, everybody. This episode's
on dragons. Dragons, colon, as real as mermaids.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
See what we did there?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck
Dragonslayer Bryant. And, well, that's it. It's just the two
of us. We can make it if we try, Chuck.
Just the two of us. Dragons and us.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
And the great Bill Withers.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Was that Bill Withers? I can't even say it with
a straight say. We just had the same conversation like
two months ago. I'm not doing it again.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh, about Bill Withers?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yes. Yeah, I didn't realize that that was a Bill
Withers song. It was a good song. Lean on Me, though, man,
is just, whoa. I cannot take it.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Grandma's Bed.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
What is that? Is that a Bill Withers song? I
did not know that.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
It's good. He's great. And we probably had this exact
same conversation.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I don't know if we had that one or not.
But you know who else I like? Who's a little
bit like Bill Withers? Not quite as cool, I guess,
if you're like a cool person. But George Benson was
amazing and still is. I think he's still around. You
ever listen to his stuff?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, but now I'm realizing that I, maybe I should
just not correct myself and let people be, send in
a bunch of emails.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Oh, I love that. I love that. When we get
a million of the same emails.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
It's grandma's hands. I was getting it, John Denver's grandma's
feather bed kind of just was in the ether. So Gotcha.
Because we just talked about John Denver, about karaoke.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Grandma's bed. Grandma's hands. The follow-up to Use Me Up.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So dragons.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, let's talk about dragons. Let's have a pleasant conversation
about dragons, shall we, Chuck?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah. Dragons aren't real. And you'll notice by the title
of this episode, which is dragons colon as real as mermaids.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Mm, yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
And it's funny because I think the week before this
comes out, Mermaids is our pick for the— Selects? The
select episode, so it aligns perfectly.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
That is perfect.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
The dragons aren't real.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, okay. Please stop saying that because you're crushing my dreams. Sorry.
So when we talk about dragons, we have to say
right here at the outset that there's a lot of
different kinds of dragons.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And typically when you think of like the flying winged,
usually long, maybe scaly.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Fire breathing.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind of serpentine tail.
Sometimes it's even pointy like the devil.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Which we'll see why. That's considered a Western dragon. And
that is its own thing that kind of evolved from
a number of different traditions. But there's also the Asian dragon, which,
you know, has variations among different Asian countries, but it
generally seems to be kind of the same ancient Chinese thing.
(03:30):
that's a totally different thing, and it evolves on its
own in isolation as well. And so because you've got
these different traditions of dragons that seem fairly similar in
a lot of ways, there's a lot of people out
there who say, wow, this is astounding. Every culture in
the world has some sort of tradition of dragons. And
(03:51):
that's kind of true, but throughout this episode we'll see
that's not really accurate. Nowadays it seems that way because
we have overlaid the idea of dragons over everything, but
if you really kind of dig into the past and
look into the nuance of some of these things that
we term dragons, they're very different. So it's a lot
(04:13):
more accurate to say that every culture in the world
has mythical beasts, some of which share a lot in
common with with our modern conception of dragons. And that's
probably where our modern conception of dragons came from was
all these different ideas of it in the ancient past.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, there's a book called An Instinct for Dragons written
by an anthropologist named David E. Jones about dragons and
dragons throughout cultures and across cultures. And there's a theory
he's got going, which is humans evolved and primates evolved
(04:50):
with a fear of three predators, basically, snakes, cats, which
are big cats, house cats, and eagles. And that a dragon,
it sort of makes sense that every culture sort of
has something like a dragon, because in folklore and myth
and storytelling, you might combine the three scariest things into
(05:12):
one super scary thing, and that is a dragon.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Right. And you might say, like, well, wait a minute, like,
I think eagles are kind of cool. I'm not at
all scared. Sure. Number one, have you ever been around
an eagle when it was loose? I'll bet you'd be
kind of scared of it because those talons are serious.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Or one that dive-bombed you?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Exactly. More to the point, though, or more to, I
should say, David Jones's point— this would be this fear,
this innate fear that humans have would be based much
more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys
and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of eagles,
like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the harpy
(05:50):
eagle in the sloth episode because they can mess a
sloth up. They can mess a monkey up too. So
this guy's premise is like we have these ancient fears
of these things and as we evolved and became humans
and started telling each other stories, these things combined, like
you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which
was basically the sum of all of our most primal fears.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah. And then, of course, if you look at ancient cultures,
they always had sort of mythical stories and folklore to explain,
you know, everything from weather phenomenon to things like volcanoes.
And if they happened upon maybe dinosaur bones or whale
bones or then a story might go along with that
(06:33):
to explain it away. Like, you know, this was clearly
some huge lizard-like creature or maybe a snake-like creature, and
there was probably a story around it and why they
should fear it or usually some sort of a sacrifice
that they needed to make, you know, sort of in
lockstep with those stories. But that's just sort of another
theory on maybe how the dragon might have come about
(06:55):
as far as folklore goes.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and
we should say no one has a widely accepted answer
for this, which I love as always. Sure. But that
it was the bee, that the description often in ancient cultures,
they used to use like riddles and exaggeration and metaphor
(07:18):
to discuss and talk about and describe actual things. A
description of a bee, or I should say a swarm
of a bee, is what actually became the dragon in mythology.
And at first, you're just like, that doesn't make any
(07:38):
sense at all. But some of the points that these
people made, there was a journal article in it. I
think like a journal on Tolkien studies or something like that.
But they say that a bee swarm moving together... It
doesn't necessarily resemble a dragon, but it makes a lot
more sense along those lines than it does when you're
talking about an individual bee.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
It does in a cartoon.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Exactly. It can make an arrow to point in a direction,
you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. And
then another one is that the fire, the idea of
a dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the feeling
of like your skin burning from a bee sting or
the intense pain. And then lastly, in the Western tradition,
(08:22):
a lot of dragons protect like mounds of gold or treasure.
And that this is a metaphor for honey and gold,
like the honeycombs that ancient people would have used. basically
considered gold, not just, you know, food, but also it
was used as medicine as well. So if you kind
of put all that together, it seems like a pretty
(08:45):
interesting theory, at least. It makes a lot more sense
than a bee, you know, when you really kind of
dig into it.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, totally. The word itself is, well, you can look
back to the Iliad when Homer wrote about the D-R-A-K-O-N,
the dracon, which supposedly is the first known use of
the word. And ancient Greek sort of has some confusing
(09:12):
etymology behind it. But basically, Homer uses that word to
describe snakes.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Like unequivocally.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah. And not, you know, huge flying fire-breathing snakes, but
just snakes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah. He even says, no, I'm just talking about snakes, everybody.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Not dragons. Don't get ahead of yourself. These are snakes.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And, I mean, they say that, like, he points out
that he's talking about snakes because he even says a chimera,
which is, I think, the head of a lion, the
goat body, a serpent tail, and bat's wings. He even
says the serpent tail, the back portion of the chimera,
is a dragon. So he's talking about just regular old
snakes for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah, and other writers and other classical stories did the
same thing, whether it was Dracontus or Draconis, using all
these words sort of interchanging. with other words for snake.
But then we go to the history of, not the history,
but just the history of animals. And that's the first
sort of scientific take on the Dracone, which is an
(10:14):
enemy of the eagle because an eagle as a bird
of prey would eat snakes, obviously. And different people got
a little more specific in later writings as to what
kind of snake. But it's still just snakes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So over time, like that's where the word dragon came from.
It was a word for snake. That's it. And then
over time, as people started to exaggerate here or there,
conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors that aren't
found in snakes but saying that they were. And they
all kind of put that under the umbrella word for
(10:48):
snake's dragon. It seems like the legend or the myth,
the mythical version of dragons started to kind of plump
up and grow. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
And this is a point Ed, the Grabster, put this
together for us. But Ed points out something I kind
of never really considered. Back in the day, in the
classical period, writers were writers. They weren't like, hey, I'm
going to write only about natural history and I'm only
going to write fiction and myth and storytelling like writers
(11:19):
just wrote. So there were people that wrote natural history
tomes and also myth and storytelling legends. And so a
lot of this stuff could get kind of mixed up
and confused, exaggerated. Mistranslation is a huge, huge deal. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
And a lot of this is sort of where the
sort of myth of the dragon came from.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I just think of, like, some writer getting confused what
they were working on that day, and now we have
the myth of dragons.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
You know?
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It's like, was this real or not? I can't remember.
Who cares?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So, yeah, like, you really hit upon something really important. Mistranslations,
or a different way to put it is lazy translation,
have really kind of changed our idea of what people
were talking about in the ancient world. And I can't
imagine how much nuance and understanding has been lost. Oh, sure.
(12:10):
probably dumb in a lot of ways ancient people seem
compared to how they actually were because of this tradition
of like um people translation that was passed down over
the year people yeah that's very cute and the the
reason why it's kind of lazy translation is it seems
(12:32):
like anybody who came across an ancient text or a
text in another language um who's translating something into english
is And they seem to be describing anything even remotely dragon-like.
Any mythical beast, anything that might have wings, anything with
a serpent tail, anything that breathes fire. Boop, dragon. It's
a dragon. And then now, those of us who have
(12:54):
a certain... compartmentalized idea of what a dragon is, everything
was a dragon. And now we've reached that point where
it's like, this is how we got this idea that
every culture has dragons. No, we just kind of lazily
translated what other cultures were talking about into dragons along
the way. Right.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I think that is a great first act.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Thank you. Thank you. I'm bowing.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I'm throwing roses at your feet.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
And we're going to take a little break, Aruni, and
be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
So the rose petals i sent you arrived in time
just in time thank you for throwing them and not
saving them for something.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Else I also realized I just went all Ned Flanders
with the break-a-rooney. I've never said that before in my life.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
I liked it, though. It was refreshing. We need that
kind of wet-behind-the-ears, you know, wholesomeness right now, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, in year 14?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
No, not just us. I mean the world.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Okay. You know? Yeah, up with Flanders.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, up with Flanders. That's right.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So my favorite thing always about Flanders is when he
would be really buff. Like every time he took off
his shirt magically.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
I know.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's hilarious. This is so funny. He ascribed it to
a healthy dose of vitamin church. Right. Oh, man.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah. All right.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Where were we here? Giant snakes.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah. We talked about them. We were talking about mistranslations
were a big problem. And I think a good place
to start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, the Sumerian legends wrote about something called the Usum, U-S-U-M,
also called dragons or, you know, at least referred to
as dragons now. And these were kind of like you
said at the beginning. These were just sometimes just large monsters,
large scary things, and not necessarily a dragon, but was
sort of just translated as dragon.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah, and I should say Sumer, not Sumeria. But these
were like their gods that they were talking about. These were,
you know, like the goddess of water who gave birth
to the world. Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology
that explained, you know, where they came from, where the
(15:42):
world came from, where the sun came from. And we,
along the way, translated that to dragons. Right.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
So luckily there are scholars who have learned to speak Akkadian,
I guess the world's oldest spoken language, A-K-K-A-D-I-A-N, not the
Canadian group that the Cajuns come from. This is different.
So we understand now that there's much more nuance, much
(16:12):
more detail to it. But I think the upshot of
this is that there were conceptions of like, fire breathing
and like flying serpents and like potentially malicious, malevolent, evil,
mythical beasts that would resemble kind of what we would
understand as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
And, you know, this course goes straight to the Bible
as well in Revelations. There's a lot of talk about
the archangels, archangels battling a great dragon. In this case,
the dragon is Satan. But again, this is sort of
a translation, like Satan was always sort of the serpent,
at least in Genesis, it first appeared as a serpent.
(16:56):
And so, in the end, Satan is also a serpent,
but spelled, you know, with the D-R-A-K-O-N, like the ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Oh, is that right?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah, but there's, you know, I mean, not in the
King James Version and stuff like that, obviously.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
But again, you know, pre-translation. And, you know, there were
sort of renderings of this, of the big war for heaven,
and this is when we see, you know, kind of
what we would see later on, which is metaphor for
good versus evil in a big battle.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So that's what William Blake's Paradise Lost is about, right?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I've never read it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I haven't either. I'm just familiar with it from that
movie Red Dragon.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
About the Silence of the Lambs prequel, I think.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh, sure.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah. He's like, do you see.
You remember when Ralph Fiennes has got poor Philip Seymour
Hoffman strapped to that wheelchair? Oh, man. And he's showing
him crime scene photos.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I had a spoiler coming. Didn't love that movie. It
was okay. But that shot of that burning wheelchair and
body going down the parking deck is one of the
most sort of chilling images I've seen in movies.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
I know. The thing that chills me about it, though,
is it's an antique wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest
thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate those.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
You don't like those, huh?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
No, I think we just talked about it recently. And I,
for the rest of my life, I will be creeped
out by those things.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
I'm going to get you one. Slide whistle with this Christmas.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Next Christmas, you're just.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Going to get an ancient wicker wheelchair.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
I don't want to be wasteful, so I won't throw
it away and I'll just have to live among it.
It's going to be terrible. Like I'll never get used
to it either.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
You could make a.
A life-size chuck dummy put it in there and set
it on fire and roll it down a parking oh.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I wouldn't do that i'd make a life-size version of
chuck and just talk to you be like listen i
got a lot of stuff to say to you that's
even creepier but you're gonna sit there and listen to
it i'll be wearing nothing but an apron.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Just like a real doll with a big fake beard
oh man OK, so, yeah, good versus evil is sort
of how a lot of these tales and folklore play
out and also incorporating stuff that you would see time
and time again in literature later on. Like there's a
dragon that lives out by itself near a village and
(19:21):
it's a greedy, vengeful dragon. And we need to appease
this dragon with sacrifice once a year or else it
will come down and like rain fire upon everyone.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, so all of this stuff, like this idea, this
Western dragon that you're describing, that's taken from Beowulf, I believe,
the dragon that killed Beowulf. I always thought it was
a Norse legend, but apparently it's English, Old English. It's
just set in in the Netherlands or in Scandinavia in
(19:49):
the Norse I think I don't remember exactly where it's set.
It's just set there. It's not written by them. But
that dragon was malevolent, and I believe it was guarding treasure.
I think the reason it went berserk and Beowulf had
to kill it was because somebody stole one of its
golden goblets, a.k.a. honey, because they're really talking about a bee.
(20:10):
But so you have an idea of a greedy, murderous
dragon that protects treasure and Like that comes from an
ancient tradition, but that's a pretty standard feature of dragons
like you were saying.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah. So all this is going on for many, many,
many years. Finally, the rubber kind of meets the road
as far as Western dragons are concerned with the legend
of St. George, who was a Christian saint, a real
Christian saint, maybe a real person who may have been
a Roman soldier. who was tortured and killed for converting
(20:47):
pagans to Christianity. This is circa 4th century AD. And
because of stories getting passed around like a game of telephone,
the actual first name of that story when it was
told was St. Theodore, but it was really St. George.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So I saw that they're both possibly... known as dragon
slaying saints.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It's not necessarily like George took that from Theodore. They're
both known for having slain a dragon. But what's interesting
is if you see St. Theodore depicted with his dragon,
it's very clearly a crocodile. And the origin story of
either one, but particularly St. George, is that there is
a town in modern day Turkey or possibly Palestine, I'm
(21:34):
not 100% sure, but in what would have been called
Anatolia back then where they had the spring like this
town got their water from the spring and it was
guarded by a giant massive crocodile and that the townspeople
would sacrifice a sheep to sometimes two a day basically
to distract the crocodile so they could go get the
(21:56):
water and then get out of there. And then they
ran out of sheep. So they said, well, what comes
after sheep? How about maidens? So they started throwing maidens,
sacrificing maidens, literally throwing them to the crocodile to distract
it so they could get the water. And eventually they
came upon the king's daughter. They drew straws to see
what maiden would go next. And St. George apparently arrived
(22:18):
just in time to slay the dragon, a.k.a. the crocodile.
But that's this idea that that's where this story of
somebody slaying a dragon could have been rooted in reality.
That over the years, this massive crocodile, which was so
fearsome and so murderous and killed so many people, was
converted into a dragon over the years. And so St.
(22:39):
George slew the dragon. And that's where that came from.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
And there was a real crocodile that lived by a
real spring. Right. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, I thought so too. I love it when something
that seems totally legendary is rooted in some sort of fact.
It's just people embellished or exaggerated over time. Totally.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Uh, if you want to go with the sort of
real great first image of what we think of as
a Western dragon, uh, you can go to 1260 AD, uh,
in an illustration in a medieval, uh, bestiary called MS
Harley 3244. Uh, Great title. I think Ed said it
(23:16):
was probably a catalog designation.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, I think the real title is Peraltus' Theological Miscellany.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, which is, that's an actual great title.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yeah, I like MS Harley 3244.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
It's cool looking though. You can, if you're near a
laptop or something, you can look this thing up and
it is, you know, you look at it and this
is exactly what you think of as something from like
Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. Yeah,
it's like, it's a dragon.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's how a scene starts, you know?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So, oh, sorry, I see what you're saying. Like the
dragon that shows up in there specifically, the red one?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, no, I just mean sort of the dragon that
we all think of in sort of literature and folklore.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Like this is clearly that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah. And supposedly it's the first one from around 1260.
Did you say that? Yeah. So, and yeah, when you
see it, you're like, yes, this is probably the basis
of the Western dragon as we understand it. And it
would have spread to Europe which it did I think
that was English it was by a guy named William
(24:20):
Peralt and I believe he was English so it would
have spread from England to the rest of Europe and
that that kind of set the stage for at least
the visual version of the Western Dragon from that point
on thanks to England Dan right I think we said
English Dan it's England Dan oh is it English Dan
(24:40):
makes way more sense yeah England Dan's a little weird
yeah But hey, England Dan was a little weird.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
But your nickname is America Josh.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Sure. How about All-America Josh?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Should we take a break now and talk about Asian dragons?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, let's. All right.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
We'll be right back with a kinder, gentler dragon right
after this.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Okay, so Chuck, you mentioned something. You said kinder, gentler dragon.
It's true. Western dragons are generally, in the tradition, murderous, greedy,
wealth hoarding, Jerks.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Boo.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Who may be pure evil personified.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
An Asian dragon, which everybody has seen, at the very
least in like a photo of a street parade. Yeah.
Or in some sort of like a Chinese silkscreen or
something like that. An Asian dragon is typically much more
benevolent than that and usually is associated with rain and water,
(26:11):
that kind of thing. And so when you see those,
like a dragon being paraded around where it's a bunch
of people like under like a dragon costume, that's actually
based on a very ancient rain dance, essentially a ceremony
to invoke rain because these dragons were associated with that.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And this is far, far, far older than in the West.
I think in about 6,000 BC, there were people in
China that were carving little dragon jade figurines. And there
was art back then, I think as far back as
400 BC, where it's clearly some kind of dragon. But again,
(26:52):
supposedly independent from the sort of evolution of the Western dragon.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah. And so all of this was based on some
of the early Chinese religion It was based on animism
and not just Chinese, but a lot of ancient religions
are based on animism where like an inanimate object is
symbolic of like a larger thing or like the god
(27:20):
of wind or the god of rain. And so these
ancient dragons were considered gods of rain. And there were different–
there's different types. There's different kinds. But again, like the
fact that they are generally– um beneficial to humankind rather
than harmful i think is is it's it's interesting it's
i wonder what that says about the two different cultures
(27:42):
if anything you know that dragons are harmful and they're
going to kill you and they're going to steal all
your gold or they're going to bring the rain that's
going to grow the food that saves your family you
know where did that diverge or did it just they
just don't have anything to do with one.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Another yeah that's interesting um Sort of a side note,
I've been playing video games some during the pandemic, which
I'm usually not a big gamer. But I've been playing
a game lately called Ghost of Tsushima, which is you
play a samurai warrior that's sort of traveling through Japan
in ancient times.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
And it's really interesting to compare that to like the
analog for the West would be like Red Dead Redemption
in the Old West with gunslingers.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
And it's just such a different... game design and everything.
It's the, the one in Japan is, or the ghost
of Tsushima is so peaceful. It's one of the most
beautiful games I've ever seen. And instead of like a
map telling you where to go, you press a button
and the wind guides you. And if you see a Fox,
you follow the Fox up to a shrine and you,
(28:44):
and you pay your respects to the shrine. And it,
it doesn't really get you much other than it's not
like you get like a million points or something for
doing that. It seems like they really tried to honor
Japanese traditions in so much of this game. And the
motivations are always pure. Like even when you're slicing guys
up with your katana, it's because you're rescuing some old
(29:08):
lady in a village.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Whereas the other game is just like, hey, just go
and just pillage and murder and do awful things.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Shoot them up, yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
It's really interesting. I'm much more enjoying this game.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Well, you said something that struck a memory in me
about dragons. There's a commonality between Asian dragons, particularly Chinese dragons,
which are called long or lung, L-U-N-G, and Western dragons.
And typically they live in isolated areas away from everybody.
(29:39):
And in Asia, the chinese dragons usually live in old
ruined temples like that's where you'll find them dwelling oh
interesting there are plenty of those in that game exactly
so are there dragons in that.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Game not yet but now i'm kind of wondering oh.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah look out it's pretty early because i did run
across a japanese type of dragon that um That is malevolent,
not very nice. I don't remember the name of it,
so I guess be on the lookout for all of them.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Interesting. Yeah, so far there's nothing supernatural. It's Mongols that
are the bad guys. I gotcha. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
And then there's another type of Japanese dragon I ran
across called Ryu. And this one actually bears a lot
in common to the intelligent Western dragon in that it
writes poetry.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah, it uses shed scales from its belly as paper.
And I don't know what it uses for ink, but
I think it uses its tail as a pen, a quill.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
The blood of a virgin?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Writes poetry. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
It's like that was a sweet story.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
It's super nice except for that one thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Oh, if we could just get it some ink.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There's something else I think people should look up here
if you're looking up images, which is an artist named
Chen Rong, C-H-E-N-R-O-N-G. Yeah. A very famous painter in Asia
of dragons. And this was like 13th century AD. And
if you look up some of this stuff, it's really,
really neat looking.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah. About the same time as Peraltus' Theological Miscellany was
done with that first Western dragon, Chen Rong was making
these just amazing works of art. I think one of
them's in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Oh, cool.
It's called like Nine Dragons or something. But it reminded
(31:26):
me of the artwork in the original Scary Stories to
Tell in the Dark series.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I never read that.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Dude, that artwork in there is just amazing. But it
has like all these weird kind of splotchy clouds of ink.
And Chen Rong makes use of that as well. It's
really kind of startling how closely the two resemble. I
wonder if the artist from... Scary Stories of Telling the
Dark was inspired by that in some way.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I bet. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
No. No, that's not ripping off at all. I don't
know why you'd even say that. Why would you even
bring ripping off up?
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So we should probably talk about famous dragons at this
point because we've thrown a couple out, like the one
from Beowulf, who apparently doesn't even have a name.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I mean, you know, there are so many stories in
literature about and movies, obviously, that have had dragons throughout
the years. Certainly Tolkien in the mid-1930s when he wrote
The Hobbit. This was a really evil dragon and, you know,
drawn from that Western sort of influence of evil dragons.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Smaug, right?
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Yeah, S-M-A-U-G. Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s was a
very big sort of I don't know how much dragons
had fallen out of the sort of pop culture eye,
but it really brought it back in if it did
fall out. Because in the game, there were different kinds
of dragons. There were a couple of different sets who
(33:04):
were indicated by different colors. Red, green, black, white, and blue,
I think, were evil. And then there were the bronze, brass, silver,
and gold, which were, for the most part, good. And
they all had different things they could do and different
temperaments and Something that we talked a little bit about
is the fire breathing thing. There are lots of different
theories as to how that came about. Maybe the tie
(33:26):
to Satan with fire early on when they were just serpents.
Perhaps they were drawn spitting venom and that could have
looked like fire.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
But there's always some sort of breath emitting weapon going on,
it seems like.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah. Over time it's translated into, um, I think like
the white dragon in Dungeons and Dragons blew like basically ice,
like cold. Um, some dragons, uh, uh, blew out electricity, um,
which you would think would be kind of new, but
apparently the Leviathan, which is mentioned in the Bible is
(34:01):
a sea dragon, basically supposedly spit electricity out. Um, But
there's something weird coming out of the dragon's mouth that's
probably going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, you don't want to test that.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
No. And we were saying also that the first visual
depiction of the dragon shows up in Harley 3244. The
first mention of the dragon in like a story, like
a fictitious story, supposedly comes in Spencer Edmonds' The Fairy Queen.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, and then it shows up after that a little
while later in Marie Catherine Dolnois' The Green Serpent. And
then it just kind of takes off from there.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
You know, you have a connection to Pete's Dragon, right?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I do. My friend Toby was a producer on Pete's Dragon.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah, for the remake, obviously.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yes, which was really, really good. good and, and touching and,
and tear jerking a little bit.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I never saw the remake. I need to check that out.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It's, it's very good. They did a really good job
with it.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Uh, but you know, if you haven't seen the movie
rain of fire, just stop what you're doing and watch
that because that is the King daddy of all dragon movies.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
I have not seen that. Do we, should we pause,
come back and finish the episode after?
Speaker 3 (35:21):
It's great. It's one of those movies that, um, I
don't know how well it did at the box office.
I don't think super well, but it's one of those
that has really become sort of a cult classic since
then with McConaughey and Christian Bale. It's so over the
top and just so fun. It's really, really good.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So it's kind of like the Pacific Rim of dragon movies?
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Or Starship Troopers of dragon movies?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Oh, man, that's another great movie.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
There's also Puff the Magic Dragon. Don't forget him.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
God, the saddest song of all time. My mom taught
my daughter that. It's the worst.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah. It has nothing to do with pot. So just,
you know, forget that, hippie.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
It's just sad.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
It is a very sad one. And then also I
think our younger listeners would be really mad if we
didn't mention Dragon Ball Z. Right.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
And there's, you know, I didn't watch Game of Thrones,
but I know there were little trained dragons in that one.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
That grew.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah. And Chuck, it's just so satisfying to look over
all of the different depictions of dragons that you see
and all the differences and all the similarities and realize
that all of them are talking about bees. Yeah. You know? Totally. Yeah.
You got anything else? I got nothing else.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
There's dragons.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Well, if you want to know more about dragons, head
out to a ruined temple or maybe go search for
gold in a cave and you might encounter one yourself.
And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mails.
This is a story about corn and poop. Oh, God.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Hey, guys. Here's my corn story. One I've repeated often
throughout my lengthy life. I just turned 70. Woo-hoo.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Nice. Happy birthday.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
So this is from Mary. Mary's 70. Well, not happy birthday,
but happy decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I think birthday still works.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
No, but it wasn't her birthday necessarily.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Happy decade turning? I don't know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Yeah, like when you hit 70 or 60 or 50. Sure.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
No, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm just
saying it's a new thing.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
It's a rich history of saying happy, the song, happy
decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
What song is that?
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Happy, happy decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Is that a Bill Withers song?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
You made it another 10 years. Lean on me.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
That's good. You guys see Jay's hands there.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Man, I think I awkwardly got my way out of
that really awkward sentence.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
You did. It was really good.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I grew up in Houston, Texas, guys. One blazing hot
summer day when I was about three or four, I
was out in the driveway standing around kind of checking
out the neighbor kid who was in her driveway, who
was about two. It's hotter than the blazes. Her name
was Bianca. She was younger than me and still in
the diaper phase of life, but it was so hot
she wasn't wearing a diaper or anything else. Nature called
(38:12):
to Bianca and voila, a couple of little poos were
deposited on the cement. Being a curious child, I went
over to check it out and lo and behold, they're
in the poop. Embedded securely but definitely visible were corn kernels.
Unmasticated yellow against the brown corn kernels.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right. Yeah, no, we got it. Just the corn kernels.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Thusly, I've never been able to look at corn nor,
God forbid, eat corn literally in any form ever since.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
I could see that happening if it hit you in
just the right way, especially at a certain age.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yep. She says, not even corn pone. Which I had
to look up. I didn't even know what corn pone was.
It's like cornbread, I think.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah. Not even corn pone? Good God, how have
you lived 70 years without corn pone?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
A great emotional scar was born that day. The only
benefit of that experience is that whenever I want to
gross anyone out, I just pull out the corn and
the poop story. All adults hate it. All children are
gleefully grossed out by it. Love your show, guys. Especially
when y'all wander off topic and then wander back. I
think in the chili pepper episode, y'all wandered over to
(39:19):
Yoko Ono, which was interesting. And that is from Mary
Foy in Issaquah, Washington.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well, thanks. Well, yeah, I guess thanks in quotes. Mary,
for that one.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
But thank you also for listening to us. If you
want to write in and kind of gross us out
like Mary did, we're always up for that kind of thing.
You can take your best shot. Send it off to
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey everybody, Chuck here with episode 7 of the S-Y-S-K,
not S-U-S-K, like we get in emails, Stuff You, Y-O-U,
Should Know playlist. Because we're getting weird, everybody. This episode's
on dragons. Dragons, colon, as real as mermaids.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
See what we did there?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck
Dragonslayer Bryant. And, well, that's it. It's just the two
of us. We can make it if we try, Chuck.
Just the two of us. Dragons and us.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
And the great Bill Withers.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Was that Bill Withers? I can't even say it with
a straight say. We just had the same conversation like
two months ago. I'm not doing it again.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh, about Bill Withers?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yes. Yeah, I didn't realize that that was a Bill
Withers song. It was a good song. Lean on Me, though, man,
is just, whoa. I cannot take it.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Grandma's Bed.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
What is that? Is that a Bill Withers song? I
did not know that.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
It's good. He's great. And we probably had this exact
same conversation.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I don't know if we had that one or not.
But you know who else I like? Who's a little
bit like Bill Withers? Not quite as cool, I guess,
if you're like a cool person. But George Benson was
amazing and still is. I think he's still around. You
ever listen to his stuff?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, but now I'm realizing that I, maybe I should
just not correct myself and let people be, send in
a bunch of emails.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Oh, I love that. I love that. When we get
a million of the same emails.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
It's grandma's hands. I was getting it, John Denver's grandma's
feather bed kind of just was in the ether. So Gotcha.
Because we just talked about John Denver, about karaoke.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Grandma's bed. Grandma's hands. The follow-up to Use Me Up.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So dragons.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, let's talk about dragons. Let's have a pleasant conversation
about dragons, shall we, Chuck?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah. Dragons aren't real. And you'll notice by the title
of this episode, which is dragons colon as real as mermaids.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Mm, yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
And it's funny because I think the week before this
comes out, Mermaids is our pick for the— Selects? The
select episode, so it aligns perfectly.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
That is perfect.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
The dragons aren't real.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, okay. Please stop saying that because you're crushing my dreams. Sorry.
So when we talk about dragons, we have to say
right here at the outset that there's a lot of
different kinds of dragons.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And typically when you think of like the flying winged,
usually long, maybe scaly.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Fire breathing.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind of serpentine tail.
Sometimes it's even pointy like the devil.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Which we'll see why. That's considered a Western dragon. And
that is its own thing that kind of evolved from
a number of different traditions. But there's also the Asian dragon, which,
you know, has variations among different Asian countries, but it
generally seems to be kind of the same ancient Chinese thing.
(03:30):
that's a totally different thing, and it evolves on its
own in isolation as well. And so because you've got
these different traditions of dragons that seem fairly similar in
a lot of ways, there's a lot of people out
there who say, wow, this is astounding. Every culture in
the world has some sort of tradition of dragons. And
(03:51):
that's kind of true, but throughout this episode we'll see
that's not really accurate. Nowadays it seems that way because
we have overlaid the idea of dragons over everything, but
if you really kind of dig into the past and
look into the nuance of some of these things that
we term dragons, they're very different. So it's a lot
(04:13):
more accurate to say that every culture in the world
has mythical beasts, some of which share a lot in
common with with our modern conception of dragons. And that's
probably where our modern conception of dragons came from was
all these different ideas of it in the ancient past.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, there's a book called An Instinct for Dragons written
by an anthropologist named David E. Jones about dragons and
dragons throughout cultures and across cultures. And there's a theory
he's got going, which is humans evolved and primates evolved
(04:50):
with a fear of three predators, basically, snakes, cats, which
are big cats, house cats, and eagles. And that a dragon,
it sort of makes sense that every culture sort of
has something like a dragon, because in folklore and myth
and storytelling, you might combine the three scariest things into
(05:12):
one super scary thing, and that is a dragon.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Right. And you might say, like, well, wait a minute, like,
I think eagles are kind of cool. I'm not at
all scared. Sure. Number one, have you ever been around
an eagle when it was loose? I'll bet you'd be
kind of scared of it because those talons are serious.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Or one that dive-bombed you?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Exactly. More to the point, though, or more to, I
should say, David Jones's point— this would be this fear,
this innate fear that humans have would be based much
more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys
and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of eagles,
like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the harpy
(05:50):
eagle in the sloth episode because they can mess a
sloth up. They can mess a monkey up too. So
this guy's premise is like we have these ancient fears
of these things and as we evolved and became humans
and started telling each other stories, these things combined, like
you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which
was basically the sum of all of our most primal fears.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah. And then, of course, if you look at ancient cultures,
they always had sort of mythical stories and folklore to explain,
you know, everything from weather phenomenon to things like volcanoes.
And if they happened upon maybe dinosaur bones or whale
bones or then a story might go along with that
(06:33):
to explain it away. Like, you know, this was clearly
some huge lizard-like creature or maybe a snake-like creature, and
there was probably a story around it and why they
should fear it or usually some sort of a sacrifice
that they needed to make, you know, sort of in
lockstep with those stories. But that's just sort of another
theory on maybe how the dragon might have come about
(06:55):
as far as folklore goes.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and
we should say no one has a widely accepted answer
for this, which I love as always. Sure. But that
it was the bee, that the description often in ancient cultures,
they used to use like riddles and exaggeration and metaphor
(07:18):
to discuss and talk about and describe actual things. A
description of a bee, or I should say a swarm
of a bee, is what actually became the dragon in mythology.
And at first, you're just like, that doesn't make any
(07:38):
sense at all. But some of the points that these
people made, there was a journal article in it. I
think like a journal on Tolkien studies or something like that.
But they say that a bee swarm moving together... It
doesn't necessarily resemble a dragon, but it makes a lot
more sense along those lines than it does when you're
talking about an individual bee.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
It does in a cartoon.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Exactly. It can make an arrow to point in a direction,
you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. And
then another one is that the fire, the idea of
a dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the feeling
of like your skin burning from a bee sting or
the intense pain. And then lastly, in the Western tradition,
(08:22):
a lot of dragons protect like mounds of gold or treasure.
And that this is a metaphor for honey and gold,
like the honeycombs that ancient people would have used. basically
considered gold, not just, you know, food, but also it
was used as medicine as well. So if you kind
of put all that together, it seems like a pretty
(08:45):
interesting theory, at least. It makes a lot more sense
than a bee, you know, when you really kind of
dig into it.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, totally. The word itself is, well, you can look
back to the Iliad when Homer wrote about the D-R-A-K-O-N,
the dracon, which supposedly is the first known use of
the word. And ancient Greek sort of has some confusing
(09:12):
etymology behind it. But basically, Homer uses that word to
describe snakes.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Like unequivocally.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah. And not, you know, huge flying fire-breathing snakes, but
just snakes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah. He even says, no, I'm just talking about snakes, everybody.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Not dragons. Don't get ahead of yourself. These are snakes.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And, I mean, they say that, like, he points out
that he's talking about snakes because he even says a chimera,
which is, I think, the head of a lion, the
goat body, a serpent tail, and bat's wings. He even
says the serpent tail, the back portion of the chimera,
is a dragon. So he's talking about just regular old
snakes for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah, and other writers and other classical stories did the
same thing, whether it was Dracontus or Draconis, using all
these words sort of interchanging. with other words for snake.
But then we go to the history of, not the history,
but just the history of animals. And that's the first
sort of scientific take on the Dracone, which is an
(10:14):
enemy of the eagle because an eagle as a bird
of prey would eat snakes, obviously. And different people got
a little more specific in later writings as to what
kind of snake. But it's still just snakes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So over time, like that's where the word dragon came from.
It was a word for snake. That's it. And then
over time, as people started to exaggerate here or there,
conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors that aren't
found in snakes but saying that they were. And they
all kind of put that under the umbrella word for
(10:48):
snake's dragon. It seems like the legend or the myth,
the mythical version of dragons started to kind of plump
up and grow. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
And this is a point Ed, the Grabster, put this
together for us. But Ed points out something I kind
of never really considered. Back in the day, in the
classical period, writers were writers. They weren't like, hey, I'm
going to write only about natural history and I'm only
going to write fiction and myth and storytelling like writers
(11:19):
just wrote. So there were people that wrote natural history
tomes and also myth and storytelling legends. And so a
lot of this stuff could get kind of mixed up
and confused, exaggerated. Mistranslation is a huge, huge deal. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
And a lot of this is sort of where the
sort of myth of the dragon came from.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I just think of, like, some writer getting confused what
they were working on that day, and now we have
the myth of dragons.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
You know?
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It's like, was this real or not? I can't remember.
Who cares?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So, yeah, like, you really hit upon something really important. Mistranslations,
or a different way to put it is lazy translation,
have really kind of changed our idea of what people
were talking about in the ancient world. And I can't
imagine how much nuance and understanding has been lost. Oh, sure.
(12:10):
probably dumb in a lot of ways ancient people seem
compared to how they actually were because of this tradition
of like um people translation that was passed down over
the year people yeah that's very cute and the the
reason why it's kind of lazy translation is it seems
(12:32):
like anybody who came across an ancient text or a
text in another language um who's translating something into english
is And they seem to be describing anything even remotely dragon-like.
Any mythical beast, anything that might have wings, anything with
a serpent tail, anything that breathes fire. Boop, dragon. It's
a dragon. And then now, those of us who have
(12:54):
a certain... compartmentalized idea of what a dragon is, everything
was a dragon. And now we've reached that point where
it's like, this is how we got this idea that
every culture has dragons. No, we just kind of lazily
translated what other cultures were talking about into dragons along
the way. Right.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I think that is a great first act.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Thank you. Thank you. I'm bowing.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I'm throwing roses at your feet.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
And we're going to take a little break, Aruni, and
be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
So the rose petals i sent you arrived in time
just in time thank you for throwing them and not
saving them for something.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Else I also realized I just went all Ned Flanders
with the break-a-rooney. I've never said that before in my life.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
I liked it, though. It was refreshing. We need that
kind of wet-behind-the-ears, you know, wholesomeness right now, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, in year 14?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
No, not just us. I mean the world.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Okay. You know? Yeah, up with Flanders.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, up with Flanders. That's right.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So my favorite thing always about Flanders is when he
would be really buff. Like every time he took off
his shirt magically.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
I know.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's hilarious. This is so funny. He ascribed it to
a healthy dose of vitamin church. Right. Oh, man.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah. All right.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Where were we here? Giant snakes.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah. We talked about them. We were talking about mistranslations
were a big problem. And I think a good place
to start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, the Sumerian legends wrote about something called the Usum, U-S-U-M,
also called dragons or, you know, at least referred to
as dragons now. And these were kind of like you
said at the beginning. These were just sometimes just large monsters,
large scary things, and not necessarily a dragon, but was
sort of just translated as dragon.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah, and I should say Sumer, not Sumeria. But these
were like their gods that they were talking about. These were,
you know, like the goddess of water who gave birth
to the world. Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology
that explained, you know, where they came from, where the
(15:42):
world came from, where the sun came from. And we,
along the way, translated that to dragons. Right.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
So luckily there are scholars who have learned to speak Akkadian,
I guess the world's oldest spoken language, A-K-K-A-D-I-A-N, not the
Canadian group that the Cajuns come from. This is different.
So we understand now that there's much more nuance, much
(16:12):
more detail to it. But I think the upshot of
this is that there were conceptions of like, fire breathing
and like flying serpents and like potentially malicious, malevolent, evil,
mythical beasts that would resemble kind of what we would
understand as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
And, you know, this course goes straight to the Bible
as well in Revelations. There's a lot of talk about
the archangels, archangels battling a great dragon. In this case,
the dragon is Satan. But again, this is sort of
a translation, like Satan was always sort of the serpent,
at least in Genesis, it first appeared as a serpent.
(16:56):
And so, in the end, Satan is also a serpent,
but spelled, you know, with the D-R-A-K-O-N, like the ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Oh, is that right?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah, but there's, you know, I mean, not in the
King James Version and stuff like that, obviously.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
But again, you know, pre-translation. And, you know, there were
sort of renderings of this, of the big war for heaven,
and this is when we see, you know, kind of
what we would see later on, which is metaphor for
good versus evil in a big battle.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So that's what William Blake's Paradise Lost is about, right?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I've never read it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I haven't either. I'm just familiar with it from that
movie Red Dragon.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
About the Silence of the Lambs prequel, I think.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh, sure.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah. He's like, do you see.
You remember when Ralph Fiennes has got poor Philip Seymour
Hoffman strapped to that wheelchair? Oh, man. And he's showing
him crime scene photos.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I had a spoiler coming. Didn't love that movie. It
was okay. But that shot of that burning wheelchair and
body going down the parking deck is one of the
most sort of chilling images I've seen in movies.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
I know. The thing that chills me about it, though,
is it's an antique wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest
thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate those.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
You don't like those, huh?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
No, I think we just talked about it recently. And I,
for the rest of my life, I will be creeped
out by those things.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
I'm going to get you one. Slide whistle with this Christmas.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Next Christmas, you're just.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Going to get an ancient wicker wheelchair.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
I don't want to be wasteful, so I won't throw
it away and I'll just have to live among it.
It's going to be terrible. Like I'll never get used
to it either.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
You could make a.
A life-size chuck dummy put it in there and set
it on fire and roll it down a parking oh.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I wouldn't do that i'd make a life-size version of
chuck and just talk to you be like listen i
got a lot of stuff to say to you that's
even creepier but you're gonna sit there and listen to
it i'll be wearing nothing but an apron.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Just like a real doll with a big fake beard
oh man OK, so, yeah, good versus evil is sort
of how a lot of these tales and folklore play
out and also incorporating stuff that you would see time
and time again in literature later on. Like there's a
dragon that lives out by itself near a village and
(19:21):
it's a greedy, vengeful dragon. And we need to appease
this dragon with sacrifice once a year or else it
will come down and like rain fire upon everyone.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, so all of this stuff, like this idea, this
Western dragon that you're describing, that's taken from Beowulf, I believe,
the dragon that killed Beowulf. I always thought it was
a Norse legend, but apparently it's English, Old English. It's
just set in in the Netherlands or in Scandinavia in
(19:49):
the Norse I think I don't remember exactly where it's set.
It's just set there. It's not written by them. But
that dragon was malevolent, and I believe it was guarding treasure.
I think the reason it went berserk and Beowulf had
to kill it was because somebody stole one of its
golden goblets, a.k.a. honey, because they're really talking about a bee.
(20:10):
But so you have an idea of a greedy, murderous
dragon that protects treasure and Like that comes from an
ancient tradition, but that's a pretty standard feature of dragons
like you were saying.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah. So all this is going on for many, many,
many years. Finally, the rubber kind of meets the road
as far as Western dragons are concerned with the legend
of St. George, who was a Christian saint, a real
Christian saint, maybe a real person who may have been
a Roman soldier. who was tortured and killed for converting
(20:47):
pagans to Christianity. This is circa 4th century AD. And
because of stories getting passed around like a game of telephone,
the actual first name of that story when it was
told was St. Theodore, but it was really St. George.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So I saw that they're both possibly... known as dragon
slaying saints.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It's not necessarily like George took that from Theodore. They're
both known for having slain a dragon. But what's interesting
is if you see St. Theodore depicted with his dragon,
it's very clearly a crocodile. And the origin story of
either one, but particularly St. George, is that there is
a town in modern day Turkey or possibly Palestine, I'm
(21:34):
not 100% sure, but in what would have been called
Anatolia back then where they had the spring like this
town got their water from the spring and it was
guarded by a giant massive crocodile and that the townspeople
would sacrifice a sheep to sometimes two a day basically
to distract the crocodile so they could go get the
(21:56):
water and then get out of there. And then they
ran out of sheep. So they said, well, what comes
after sheep? How about maidens? So they started throwing maidens,
sacrificing maidens, literally throwing them to the crocodile to distract
it so they could get the water. And eventually they
came upon the king's daughter. They drew straws to see
what maiden would go next. And St. George apparently arrived
(22:18):
just in time to slay the dragon, a.k.a. the crocodile.
But that's this idea that that's where this story of
somebody slaying a dragon could have been rooted in reality.
That over the years, this massive crocodile, which was so
fearsome and so murderous and killed so many people, was
converted into a dragon over the years. And so St.
(22:39):
George slew the dragon. And that's where that came from.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
And there was a real crocodile that lived by a
real spring. Right. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, I thought so too. I love it when something
that seems totally legendary is rooted in some sort of fact.
It's just people embellished or exaggerated over time. Totally.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Uh, if you want to go with the sort of
real great first image of what we think of as
a Western dragon, uh, you can go to 1260 AD, uh,
in an illustration in a medieval, uh, bestiary called MS
Harley 3244. Uh, Great title. I think Ed said it
(23:16):
was probably a catalog designation.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, I think the real title is Peraltus' Theological Miscellany.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, which is, that's an actual great title.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yeah, I like MS Harley 3244.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
It's cool looking though. You can, if you're near a
laptop or something, you can look this thing up and
it is, you know, you look at it and this
is exactly what you think of as something from like
Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. Yeah,
it's like, it's a dragon.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's how a scene starts, you know?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So, oh, sorry, I see what you're saying. Like the
dragon that shows up in there specifically, the red one?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, no, I just mean sort of the dragon that
we all think of in sort of literature and folklore.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Like this is clearly that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah. And supposedly it's the first one from around 1260.
Did you say that? Yeah. So, and yeah, when you
see it, you're like, yes, this is probably the basis
of the Western dragon as we understand it. And it
would have spread to Europe which it did I think
that was English it was by a guy named William
(24:20):
Peralt and I believe he was English so it would
have spread from England to the rest of Europe and
that that kind of set the stage for at least
the visual version of the Western Dragon from that point
on thanks to England Dan right I think we said
English Dan it's England Dan oh is it English Dan
(24:40):
makes way more sense yeah England Dan's a little weird
yeah But hey, England Dan was a little weird.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
But your nickname is America Josh.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Sure. How about All-America Josh?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Should we take a break now and talk about Asian dragons?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, let's. All right.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
We'll be right back with a kinder, gentler dragon right
after this.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Okay, so Chuck, you mentioned something. You said kinder, gentler dragon.
It's true. Western dragons are generally, in the tradition, murderous, greedy,
wealth hoarding, Jerks.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Boo.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Who may be pure evil personified.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
An Asian dragon, which everybody has seen, at the very
least in like a photo of a street parade. Yeah.
Or in some sort of like a Chinese silkscreen or
something like that. An Asian dragon is typically much more
benevolent than that and usually is associated with rain and water,
(26:11):
that kind of thing. And so when you see those,
like a dragon being paraded around where it's a bunch
of people like under like a dragon costume, that's actually
based on a very ancient rain dance, essentially a ceremony
to invoke rain because these dragons were associated with that.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And this is far, far, far older than in the West.
I think in about 6,000 BC, there were people in
China that were carving little dragon jade figurines. And there
was art back then, I think as far back as
400 BC, where it's clearly some kind of dragon. But again,
(26:52):
supposedly independent from the sort of evolution of the Western dragon.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah. And so all of this was based on some
of the early Chinese religion It was based on animism
and not just Chinese, but a lot of ancient religions
are based on animism where like an inanimate object is
symbolic of like a larger thing or like the god
(27:20):
of wind or the god of rain. And so these
ancient dragons were considered gods of rain. And there were different–
there's different types. There's different kinds. But again, like the
fact that they are generally– um beneficial to humankind rather
than harmful i think is is it's it's interesting it's
i wonder what that says about the two different cultures
(27:42):
if anything you know that dragons are harmful and they're
going to kill you and they're going to steal all
your gold or they're going to bring the rain that's
going to grow the food that saves your family you
know where did that diverge or did it just they
just don't have anything to do with one.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Another yeah that's interesting um Sort of a side note,
I've been playing video games some during the pandemic, which
I'm usually not a big gamer. But I've been playing
a game lately called Ghost of Tsushima, which is you
play a samurai warrior that's sort of traveling through Japan
in ancient times.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
And it's really interesting to compare that to like the
analog for the West would be like Red Dead Redemption
in the Old West with gunslingers.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
And it's just such a different... game design and everything.
It's the, the one in Japan is, or the ghost
of Tsushima is so peaceful. It's one of the most
beautiful games I've ever seen. And instead of like a
map telling you where to go, you press a button
and the wind guides you. And if you see a Fox,
you follow the Fox up to a shrine and you,
(28:44):
and you pay your respects to the shrine. And it,
it doesn't really get you much other than it's not
like you get like a million points or something for
doing that. It seems like they really tried to honor
Japanese traditions in so much of this game. And the
motivations are always pure. Like even when you're slicing guys
up with your katana, it's because you're rescuing some old
(29:08):
lady in a village.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Whereas the other game is just like, hey, just go
and just pillage and murder and do awful things.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Shoot them up, yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
It's really interesting. I'm much more enjoying this game.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Well, you said something that struck a memory in me
about dragons. There's a commonality between Asian dragons, particularly Chinese dragons,
which are called long or lung, L-U-N-G, and Western dragons.
And typically they live in isolated areas away from everybody.
(29:39):
And in Asia, the chinese dragons usually live in old
ruined temples like that's where you'll find them dwelling oh
interesting there are plenty of those in that game exactly
so are there dragons in that.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Game not yet but now i'm kind of wondering oh.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah look out it's pretty early because i did run
across a japanese type of dragon that um That is malevolent,
not very nice. I don't remember the name of it,
so I guess be on the lookout for all of them.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Interesting. Yeah, so far there's nothing supernatural. It's Mongols that
are the bad guys. I gotcha. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
And then there's another type of Japanese dragon I ran
across called Ryu. And this one actually bears a lot
in common to the intelligent Western dragon in that it
writes poetry.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah, it uses shed scales from its belly as paper.
And I don't know what it uses for ink, but
I think it uses its tail as a pen, a quill.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
The blood of a virgin?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Writes poetry. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
It's like that was a sweet story.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
It's super nice except for that one thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Oh, if we could just get it some ink.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There's something else I think people should look up here
if you're looking up images, which is an artist named
Chen Rong, C-H-E-N-R-O-N-G. Yeah. A very famous painter in Asia
of dragons. And this was like 13th century AD. And
if you look up some of this stuff, it's really,
really neat looking.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah. About the same time as Peraltus' Theological Miscellany was
done with that first Western dragon, Chen Rong was making
these just amazing works of art. I think one of
them's in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Oh, cool.
It's called like Nine Dragons or something. But it reminded
(31:26):
me of the artwork in the original Scary Stories to
Tell in the Dark series.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I never read that.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Dude, that artwork in there is just amazing. But it
has like all these weird kind of splotchy clouds of ink.
And Chen Rong makes use of that as well. It's
really kind of startling how closely the two resemble. I
wonder if the artist from... Scary Stories of Telling the
Dark was inspired by that in some way.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I bet. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
No. No, that's not ripping off at all. I don't
know why you'd even say that. Why would you even
bring ripping off up?
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So we should probably talk about famous dragons at this
point because we've thrown a couple out, like the one
from Beowulf, who apparently doesn't even have a name.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I mean, you know, there are so many stories in
literature about and movies, obviously, that have had dragons throughout
the years. Certainly Tolkien in the mid-1930s when he wrote
The Hobbit. This was a really evil dragon and, you know,
drawn from that Western sort of influence of evil dragons.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Smaug, right?
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Yeah, S-M-A-U-G. Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s was a
very big sort of I don't know how much dragons
had fallen out of the sort of pop culture eye,
but it really brought it back in if it did
fall out. Because in the game, there were different kinds
of dragons. There were a couple of different sets who
(33:04):
were indicated by different colors. Red, green, black, white, and blue,
I think, were evil. And then there were the bronze, brass, silver,
and gold, which were, for the most part, good. And
they all had different things they could do and different
temperaments and Something that we talked a little bit about
is the fire breathing thing. There are lots of different
theories as to how that came about. Maybe the tie
(33:26):
to Satan with fire early on when they were just serpents.
Perhaps they were drawn spitting venom and that could have
looked like fire.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
But there's always some sort of breath emitting weapon going on,
it seems like.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah. Over time it's translated into, um, I think like
the white dragon in Dungeons and Dragons blew like basically ice,
like cold. Um, some dragons, uh, uh, blew out electricity, um,
which you would think would be kind of new, but
apparently the Leviathan, which is mentioned in the Bible is
(34:01):
a sea dragon, basically supposedly spit electricity out. Um, But
there's something weird coming out of the dragon's mouth that's
probably going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, you don't want to test that.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
No. And we were saying also that the first visual
depiction of the dragon shows up in Harley 3244. The
first mention of the dragon in like a story, like
a fictitious story, supposedly comes in Spencer Edmonds' The Fairy Queen.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, and then it shows up after that a little
while later in Marie Catherine Dolnois' The Green Serpent. And
then it just kind of takes off from there.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
You know, you have a connection to Pete's Dragon, right?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I do. My friend Toby was a producer on Pete's Dragon.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah, for the remake, obviously.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yes, which was really, really good. good and, and touching and,
and tear jerking a little bit.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I never saw the remake. I need to check that out.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It's, it's very good. They did a really good job
with it.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Uh, but you know, if you haven't seen the movie
rain of fire, just stop what you're doing and watch
that because that is the King daddy of all dragon movies.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
I have not seen that. Do we, should we pause,
come back and finish the episode after?
Speaker 3 (35:21):
It's great. It's one of those movies that, um, I
don't know how well it did at the box office.
I don't think super well, but it's one of those
that has really become sort of a cult classic since
then with McConaughey and Christian Bale. It's so over the
top and just so fun. It's really, really good.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So it's kind of like the Pacific Rim of dragon movies?
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Or Starship Troopers of dragon movies?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Oh, man, that's another great movie.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
There's also Puff the Magic Dragon. Don't forget him.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
God, the saddest song of all time. My mom taught
my daughter that. It's the worst.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah. It has nothing to do with pot. So just,
you know, forget that, hippie.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
It's just sad.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
It is a very sad one. And then also I
think our younger listeners would be really mad if we
didn't mention Dragon Ball Z. Right.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
And there's, you know, I didn't watch Game of Thrones,
but I know there were little trained dragons in that one.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
That grew.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah. And Chuck, it's just so satisfying to look over
all of the different depictions of dragons that you see
and all the differences and all the similarities and realize
that all of them are talking about bees. Yeah. You know? Totally. Yeah.
You got anything else? I got nothing else.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
There's dragons.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Well, if you want to know more about dragons, head
out to a ruined temple or maybe go search for
gold in a cave and you might encounter one yourself.
And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mails.
This is a story about corn and poop. Oh, God.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Hey, guys. Here's my corn story. One I've repeated often
throughout my lengthy life. I just turned 70. Woo-hoo.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Nice. Happy birthday.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
So this is from Mary. Mary's 70. Well, not happy birthday,
but happy decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I think birthday still works.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
No, but it wasn't her birthday necessarily.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Happy decade turning? I don't know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Yeah, like when you hit 70 or 60 or 50. Sure.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
No, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm just
saying it's a new thing.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
It's a rich history of saying happy, the song, happy
decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
What song is that?
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Happy, happy decade turning.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Is that a Bill Withers song?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
You made it another 10 years. Lean on me.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
That's good. You guys see Jay's hands there.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Man, I think I awkwardly got my way out of
that really awkward sentence.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
You did. It was really good.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I grew up in Houston, Texas, guys. One blazing hot
summer day when I was about three or four, I
was out in the driveway standing around kind of checking
out the neighbor kid who was in her driveway, who
was about two. It's hotter than the blazes. Her name
was Bianca. She was younger than me and still in
the diaper phase of life, but it was so hot
she wasn't wearing a diaper or anything else. Nature called
(38:12):
to Bianca and voila, a couple of little poos were
deposited on the cement. Being a curious child, I went
over to check it out and lo and behold, they're
in the poop. Embedded securely but definitely visible were corn kernels.
Unmasticated yellow against the brown corn kernels.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right. Yeah, no, we got it. Just the corn kernels.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Thusly, I've never been able to look at corn nor,
God forbid, eat corn literally in any form ever since.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
I could see that happening if it hit you in
just the right way, especially at a certain age.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yep. She says, not even corn pone. Which I had
to look up. I didn't even know what corn pone was.
It's like cornbread, I think.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah. Not even corn pone? Good God, how have
you lived 70 years without corn pone?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
A great emotional scar was born that day. The only
benefit of that experience is that whenever I want to
gross anyone out, I just pull out the corn and
the poop story. All adults hate it. All children are
gleefully grossed out by it. Love your show, guys. Especially
when y'all wander off topic and then wander back. I
think in the chili pepper episode, y'all wandered over to
(39:19):
Yoko Ono, which was interesting. And that is from Mary
Foy in Issaquah, Washington.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well, thanks. Well, yeah, I guess thanks in quotes. Mary,
for that one.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
But thank you also for listening to us. If you
want to write in and kind of gross us out
like Mary did, we're always up for that kind of thing.
You can take your best shot. Send it off to
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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