October 31, 2025 • 36 mins
Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel - the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch - in fact, early true crime? A hit book - The Truth About Hansel and Gretel - said that historical records pointed to the story being based on fact. Are we too quick to dismiss the truth behind tall stories? Or are we always falling for tales that are too good to be true?
This episode discusses death by suicide. If you are suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available - for example, from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, or the Samaritans in the UK on 116 123
Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
having suicidal thoughts, Support is available, for example, from the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US. Fargo is a
(00:40):
town in North Dakota. It's also a classic movie from
nineteen ninety six, the blackest of comedies. A car salesman
attempts to swindle his wealthy father in law by paying
a couple of criminals to kidnap his wife and Demanda Ransom.
It ends up with five innocent people dead and one
(01:03):
of the kidnappers trying to dispose of his partner's body
by feeding it into a wooden chipper. Famously, the movie
starts with these words, this is a true story. At
the request of the survivors. The names have been changed
out of respect for the dead. The rest has been
(01:25):
told exactly as it occurred. Fargo isn't a true story.
The shoot was well underway when the directors, the Coen Brothers,
casually mentioned this to the cast. One of the movie's stars,
William H. Macy, was taken aback. You can't say it's
a true story if it wasn't, said Macy, Why not,
(01:48):
came the reply. In the movie, one of the hapless
kidnappers hides nearly a million dollars by burying it in snow.
It's a comically stupid idea. The landscape's generic and featureless
as far as the eye can see. How will he
ever find his way back to the spot. He won't,
(02:10):
and not just because he ends up in a wood chipper,
and none of the movie's other characters know the cash
is there. Hold on, though, if the movie is told
exactly as it occurred, does the money exist? Is it
still where the kidnapper left it? Undiscovered? In real life,
(02:33):
five years after the film was released, a young woman
turned up at the police station in Bismarck, North Dakota.
She had just flown in from Tokyo. It was the
middle of winter, but she was wearing a short black
skirt and thie high boots. She was clutching a simple
map that showed nothing but a road and a tree.
(02:54):
The police tried to understand what she wanted, but they
spoke no Japanese and her English wasn't great. They could
make out one word, though fargo. One policeman recalled, we'd
tried to explain to her that it was a fictional
movie and there really wasn't any treasure. The police weren't
sure if the message had got through, but they took
(03:16):
her to the bus station where she could catch a
greyhound to Fargo, several hours to the east, across a
vast and empty landscape. A couple of days later, they
got a call from another police department. In some woods
not far from Fargo. On a freezing cold morning, a
hunter had found the body of a young Japanese woman,
(03:41):
Taka Kokanishi's death was reported around the world. Cult film
sparked Hunt for a Fortune. You can't say it's a
true story if it wasn't, can you. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales, you must know the
(04:26):
story of Hansel and Gretel, made famous by the Brother's Grim.
A great famine sweeps the land. A poor woodcutter can
no longer afford to feed his family. One night, his
new wife persuades him that they must take his children
into the forest and abandon them. They set off early
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the next morning, the sun glinting off the chimney of
the woodcutter's cottage. Deep into the woods. The man builds
a fire to keep his children warm. Wait, hire, I
won't be too far away. You'll be able to hear
me chopping trees. But the sounds young Hansel and Gretel
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can hear don't come from their father's axe. He's tied
a branch to a tree trunk in such a way
that the wind will cause it to keep flacking. By
the time his children realize that he's gone, he thinks
they'll never find their way home. He doesn't realize that
the children overheard the plan. Hansel sneaked out in the
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dead of night to fill his pockets with pebbles, and
as they walked, he dropped them. By following the trail
of pebbles, Hansel and Gretel get back home. Their wicked
stepmother is furious that night she locks them in. The
Next morning, they set off again. Hansel has no pebbles,
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but he does have a hunk of bread, and so
instead he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. This time, when
the children try to follow their trail back home, disaster
birds have eaten all the crumbs. Hansel and Gretel wander
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the forest, starving and lost. Eventually they chance across a
house made from gingerbread and begin to eat it. There
comes a soft voice from inside. Nibble, nibble, little mouse,
who is nibbling at my house? A woman as old
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as the hills creeps out of the door. She invites
the children inside with the promise of more food. But
she's a wicked witch, and she captures them. She keeps
Hansl in a cage and forces Gretel to work preparing
food for her brother. When he's fattened up, I'm going
to eat him. The witch's eyesight is bad, so every
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day she asks Hansel to stick a finger through the
cage for her to feel how fat he's got. Hansel
tricks her. He finds a bone on the floor, and
every day he pokes that through the cage instead. Eventually
the witch loses patience. She announces she'll cook Hansel fat
or not, and secretly decides to cook Gretel too. This time,
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Gretel tricks her climb into the oven and see if
it's hot enough. Yet I don't understand. How can I
climb inside the oven? Replied Gretel, innocently. Stupid girl like this,
do I have to show you everything? Gretel shoves her in,
slams the door, and bars it with an iron rod.
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The witch howls as the flames consume her. Gretel lets
Hansel out of the cage, and the children again look
for the way back home. A magical duckling helps them
across a great body of water, and they arrive home.
Their wicked stepmother is dead, and their regretful father is
overjoyed to have them back. You live happily ever after.
(08:15):
Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale, much like the
tales I tell. But Hansel and Gretel is for children,
a warning about stranger danger. Or so it seems. The
tales I tell are for grown ups, and the tales
I tell a true Hansel and Gretel isn't true? Or
(08:38):
is it? The fairy tale of Hansland Gretel fascinated a
young boy growing up in the nineteen twenties near the
border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Georg Osseg's grandparents owned a
rare early edition of Grimm's fairy Tales, published in eighteen eighteen.
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It was beautifully illustrated with intricate drawings. Young Georg read
it and re read it until every page was seared
in his memory. Osseg grew up to be a teacher.
He got a job in a Schaffenburg near Frankfort. He
spent his weekends hiking in the Spessart, a nearby range
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of low wooded mountains. One spring day in nineteen sixty two,
he was exploring a part of the woods he had
never been to before. A local farmer had told him
it was known as the Hexenwald, the Witch's Forest. I
hadn't been out for half an hour when suddenly I
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had a strange feeling. I felt as if I had
walked this path before. How could that be? Osseg thought
for a moment. Then it hit him. He realized that
he'd recognized the scene from an illustration in his grandfather's book.
Osseg compared the drawing with the view from the footpath.
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There could be no doubt the trees had grown, of course,
that the oaks, the spruces, and the beeches were all
in exactly the same configuration. The line of the hills
on the horizon was unmistakable. That illustration in hanslan Gretel
hadn't just come from an artist's imagination. It was a
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faithful depiction of a real place. What else about the
story might be real? Georg Osseg decided to do something
that no one had thought of before. He read the
fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as if it were
a factual report. That's a line from a nineteen sixty
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three book about Georgossegg. It was called devarhit Uber Hansel
and Gretel, the Truth about Hansel and Gretel, and it
caused a sensation. In the book, the author Hans Traxler
describes what Osseg did next. The illustration showed the path
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along which Hansland Gretel's father had taken them into the forest.
In the story, the children look back at the morning
sunlight glinting off the chimney of the woodcutter's cottage. The
sun rises in the east, so if Oseg followed the
path east would lead him to the woodcutter's cottage. Osseg
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walked east, and he found a newly built alto barn,
connecting Frankfurt with Wurtzburg. But what had been there before
the records must exist. Traxler describes how Oseg tracked them
down to the Reburn railway, maintenance depot. He leafed through
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the dusty files until he found a note of a
court decision from November fourth, nineteen fifty four, a dispute
over the compensation due from the Federal Motorway's administration to
a man called Georg Scheidhauer, who'd owned the land at
the east end of that forest path. The court awarded
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Scheidhauer eighteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty Deutsche marks for
his property, a half timbered house with a barn and
a garden with eighteen fruit trees. Osseg had found the
woodcutter's cottage. Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Gaeorg
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Osseg was now a man with a mission. He had
located the site of the woodcutter's cottage from hansland Gretel.
He had found the path along which the children had
been led. Next, he looked for the place where they'd
been abandoned. The story mentions that the woodcutter made a
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fire to keep the children warm. Oh forester would make
a fire in the thick of the trees, so that
must have meant a clearing. Oseg explored to the west
until he found one. In the story, the woodcutter ties
a branch to a tree so the wind will make
it swack and sound like an axe. Oseg spent two
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days inspecting every tree near the clearing until he came
across an old oak with a wound in the trunk
where a cord had been tied around it. He had
the tree felled and the cord radiocarbon dated it came
from the sixteen forties. What about the Witch's house? Did
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that exist and could Oseg find it? According to the story,
Hansel and Gretel crossed a body of water between the
witch's house and their own that could only refer to
the river Ashaff. Osseg got a map, divided it into squares,
and methodically searched each one. After two months, he found
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ruins of a building made from bricks. The footprint of
those ruins looked like it exactly matched another illustration in
his grandparents book showing the witch's four brick ovens. Osseg
grabbed his spade and started to dig. Within the foundations
of one of the ovens, he found the charred remains
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of a woman's skeleton. He brought in academic specialists who
concluded the woman was thirty five years old, and she
had been strangled before she had been thrown in the oven.
Osse dug some more. He found a broken hinge had
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the murderers forced their way in? He found a small
iron chest. It contained a hand written recipe for gingerbread.
But who had the murdered woman been? Oseg turned now
to linguistic analysis. In the Grimms telling of the tale,
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the witch speaks in a dialect which has distinctive roots
in the town of Vernegaroda. Oseg travels to the town
and searches through its records. He discovers reports of a
trial from sixteen forty seven. The year ties right in
with the radiocarbon dating. A baker called Katerina Schraderin is
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accused of witchcraft by a man whose proposal of marriage
she's spurned. Soon after another trial, Katerina has been murdered
and the man and his sister are accused. The man
is called Hans Metzler, his sister Greta. Hans and Greta
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oss Eg pieced together what had happened. Katerina was famous
for her gingerbread. Hans was a baker too. He had
wanted to marry Katerina to get his hands on her recipe.
When she turned him down, he and his sister went
to her house in the woods and murdered her. But
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they didn't find her recipe because she had hidden it
in the iron chest. So the story of Hansel and
Gretel was based on real events, albeit loosely. The protagonists
weren't abandoned children, they were cold blooded murderers motivated by greed.
And the woman who burned in the oven wasn't a
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wicked witch with a magical gingerbread house, but a talented
baker with a sort after gingerbread recipe. When Hans Traxler
published his book about georg Oseg, The Truth about Hansel
and Gretel, he was stunned by the response. What stunned
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him was that everyone took it seriously. I was sure
I'd hidden enough clues that it was all a great,
big fib. Traxler was a professional satirist, a writer and
illustrator for a satirical magazine. Gaeorg Osseg didn't exist, but
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the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Requests to
translate it came in from eighteen countries. Reviewers in Germany's
newspapers gushed about the thoroughness of Osseg's research and the
gripping way. Traxler described it the book of the year,
maybe the book off the decade, said one The newspapers
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in communist East Germany were just as impressed, perhaps because
they could blame capitalism for the murder, a criminal case
from the early capitalist era, A pined Berlina Zeitung. What
were the clues Traxler had left that had made the
whole thing up? Some were subtle. Katerina's gingerbread recipe, for example,
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Traxler had copied it word for word from a popular
cookbook by Dr Urtke. Other clues should have been harder
to miss. In one passage, Oseg recruits an eight year
old boy, fills his pockets with pebbles, and has him
walk down the path away from the motorway where the
woodcutter's house had supposedly stood. The pebbles run out before
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he gets to the clearing, but when Oseg fills his
own pockets with pebbles, he does have enough to cover
the distance. The book includes a diagram helpfully showing how
tall people can see further and hence leave more space
between pebbles. Hansel and Gretel were not children at all.
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Traxler describes Osegg as concluding, to put it scientifically, they
must have been the size of an adult scientific Indeed,
also very scientific was a photograph of Oseg's radio carbon
dating equipment. You don't have to look too closely to
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see that it consists of an upside down La Saigne tray,
a length of coax cable from a television, a child's microscope,
and some jars from the kitchen spice rack. Traxler was
bewildered that nobody picked up on this unsubtle clue. Real
apparatus to do carbon dating is the size of a train.
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He pointed out. Some of the images in the book
show Georg Osegg in action. It's Traxler himself in the
silliest of disguises, wire rimmed glasses and a fake mustache.
Traxler took a photographer to a Frankfurt construction site, where
they jumped into a ditch to shoot the excavation. At
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the witch's house, Traxler posed inspecting the side of the
ditch with a pastry brush. The photographer and I lay
on the ground laughing. But when the book was published
the joke was lost. Excited letters flooded in georg Osseg
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was invited to give lectures. A Japanese academic expressed earnest
interest in how the new field of fairy tale archaeology
could improve cross cultural understanding. Readers flocked to the scenic
woods of the Spessart, trying to decipher Osseg's descriptions and
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locate the witch's house for themselves. Schools hired buses and
took entire classes. One made the ten our journey from Denmark.
Hans Traxler started to wonder what had done in our
(21:23):
social media age. Mistaking satire for serious reporting is a
surprisingly common problem. President Trump once retweeted a news story
from the satirical website The Babylon Bee, without seeming to
be aware that The Babylon Bee is a satirical website.
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Twitter had suffered an outage, and The Bee jokingly reported
that the network had decided to shut itself down to
slow the spread of negative news about Joe Biden. Trump
wasn't chuckling at the joke. He was demanding to know
why Twitter had done this. How many voters also struggle
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to spot tricks and jokes when researcher from Ohio State
presented voters with a selection of stories from the Babylon
b They found that up to twenty eight percent of
Republicans thought the stories were real. Democrats were less likely
to be fooled, But the reverse was true when the
researchers tried stories from another satirical website, arguably one with
(22:30):
a different political perspective, the Onion. The researchers were looking
for ways to minimize the spread of misinformation over social networks.
In twenty nineteen, they ran an experiment. They flagged posts
on Facebook in one of three ways. The first type
of flag said that independent fact checkers had said story
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wasn't true. The second type said that other Facebook users
had raised doubts about it. Neither type of flag made
the studies subjects any less likely to share the story,
but the third type did. When a story was flagged
as being from a satirical website, people were less likely
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to pars it on. It wasn't a huge effect, but
it was something. Clearly Labeling satire as satire did seem
to prevent some people from sharing fake news. When the
truth about the truth about Hansel and Gretel finally emerged.
Some of Traxler's readers were not amused. An angry couple
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from North Rhine Westphalure sent me the petrol bill for
the trip that made to the spass art how uncomfortable
it was for me. Then Traxler received a letter from
a lawyer in herborn. If you want to do business
with a parody, then you have to label your parody
as such. I have therefore decided to bring the case
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to the attention of the public prosecutor. Or. As William H.
Macy would put it, you can't say it's a true
story if it wasn't. Hans Traxler was summoned to the
police station. Cautionary tales will be back soon. If you
(24:28):
want to do business with a parody, then you have
to label your parody as such, so said the irate
German lawyer. Facebook seems to agree. It has now rolled
out the flags on satirical stories. They join other algorithmic warnings,
from disputed claims on Twitter to suspected spam on emails
(24:53):
and texts. We're constantly assailed by people trying to fool
us because they want to influence our vote or part
us from our money. Any reminders to consider the source
of information have to be a good thing. And yet
I can't help feeling that the lawyer from Herborn was
being too dogmatic in demanding that parodies must always be labeled.
(25:17):
Phishing emails and troll farm tweets can be hard to spot.
Even for the algorithms, we can't rely on them being flagged.
We have to think for ourselves. A clever hoax can
act a bit like a vaccine, a benign way to
prime our critical thinking immune system, to make us more
(25:39):
alert against the threats that matter. And a hoax can't
work if it has to announce itself up front. What
does it take for a hoax to earn our indulgence?
I think there are three things. First, the hoax has
to be good. That means it must be plausible if
you're not paying attention, but obvious if you are. That's
(26:01):
harder than it sounds. Attempts at satire are often either
too clunkily apparent on the first read or too well
disguised on the second. Hans Traxler seems to have got
the balance exactly right. He was amazed by how many
letters he received from readers who'd spotted one piece of
nonsense in his account of gaeorg Osseg's research, But who
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hadn't then questioned everything else. Those letters said things like,
dear mister Traxler, I believe gayorg Oseg must have been
mistaken when he says he found the woodcutter's cord in
the tree twenty five meters above the ground, because the
tree had grown so much. You see, trees sprout from
the top, they don't push up from the bottom, so
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the cord would have been quite close to the ground.
Apart from that minor blemish, I found mister Osseg's work
to be excellent. Or the manuscript from Vinigeroda can't have
come from sixteen forty seven because it refers to a
famous event that happened in eighteen eleven. Otherwise, though, great job.
(27:07):
These are readers who really should have felt their spidey
senses tingling, and when they discovered they'd been had, they
must have been embarrassed at their gullibility. And that's a
useful feeling, because they'll resolve to think more critically in future.
The second requirement of a satisfying hoax is like a vaccine,
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it should do no harm. I'm not sure that's true.
About some satirical stories from sites such as the Babylon Bee.
According to the Ohio State Study, for example, twenty three
percent of Republicans believed the Bees story that US Representative
Illan Omar said being Jewish is an inherently hostile act.
(27:53):
You can reach your own conclusions as to whether this
is or is not a hilarious satire of the left
wing of US politics. But the point is she never
said it, and when people believe she did, real damage
is done to political discourse. But with hansland Gretel, what
are the worst things that happened? A couple from north
(28:16):
Rhine Westphalia spent some money on petrol, a teacher from
Denmark looked like an idiot for organizing an international study visit,
and a humorless lawyer from Herborn made the Frankfurt police
call in Hans Traxler for questioning, although I'm happy to
report that Traxler was cleared of any crime. The third
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and final ingredient of a good hoax is that it
has a point. It draws our attention to something about
which we're more credulous than we should be. When the
Cohen Brothers added that screen crawl to Fargo, saying this
is a true story. They were poking fun at a
trend that began in the nineteen seventies. Directors of gory,
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low budget drive in flicks discovered their gross more if
they added words like based on real events to the poster,
however loose the connection might be. Hans Traxler was inspired
to write about Hansel and Gretel by reading a best
selling book called Gerte Grabe Ungelerta Gods, Graves and Scholars.
(29:24):
It told of archaeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated the
site of ancient Troy in modern day Turkey and made
the case that Homer's epic poem the Iliad was based
on historical events. There was a craze for pop archaeology
books in Germany like Undi Biebel Hoch Derrich and the
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Bible is Right. Researchers prove the historical truth. Traxler wondered
if readers might not always be consuming books of this
genre with a sufficiently critical eye. He got his answer.
Both Traxler and the Coens are prompting us to ask
a deeper question. When we like to hear there's truth
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in what is it we really care about, because there
is a truth behind Hansel and Gretel, but it's nothing
to do with tracksless scurrilous nonsense about a murderous gingerbread baker.
In thirteen fifteen, incessant rain ruined crops across Europe. The
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Great Famine lasted for years. It's hard to be sure
of exactly what happened, but some harrowing accounts survive. In Bristol, England,
one writer tells of such mortality that the living could
scarce suffice to bury the dead, and some eat their
(30:55):
own children. In the Baltics, it was said that mothers
fed upon their sons. Perhaps it's no surprise that the
folklore of many countries has tailed, like hansl and Gretel,
about famine, child abandonment, and cannibalism. I said that Hansland
(31:18):
Gretel is a cautionary tale for children about stranger danger.
But perhaps these stories were also cautionary tales for parents
about unimaginable hunger and choices too awful to contemplate. But
(31:39):
what about Takako Kanishi. Doesn't her death show the risks
of dressing fiction as fact. Remember in two thousand and one,
Takako had turned up in North Dakota, inappropriately dressed in
the cold midwinter, clutching a map and asking for directions
to Fargo. The world's media reported that she seemed to
(32:02):
have believed the movie's claims to truth and hoped she
could find the hidden million dollars cult fill film sparked
hunt for a Fortune, said the UK's Daily Telegraph. It
was an astonishing story and the filmmaker, Paul Bursler wanted
to find out more. Soon after reading the news, he
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persuaded British television's Channel four to send him to North
Dakota with a cameraman and a Japanese actress. Bursler planned
to retrace Takako's final days to find the people who'd
encountered her and recreate some scenes. They checked into the
Quality Inn in downtown Fargo, where Takako had stayed before
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she died. Bursler spoke to the night clerk. It's funny,
he said, I was surprised when I heard how she
died looking for the ransom in the movie. She never
mentioned anything to me about Fargo or any other kind
of movie. She asked about seeing the stars, which I
thought was a little strange because it was November and
(33:08):
it isn't that outside in the middle of the night.
What about the policeman in Bismarck who told journalists how
they'd tried to explain to Takako that Fargo was a
fictional movie and there wasn't really any treasure. I'd never
seen the film Fargo, one of them explained, But another
officer in the station had seen it, and he told
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me there was money buried in this movie. And then
we started to think that she had this false impression.
Takako had never said anything about money to the police
either true, It wasn't unreasonable speculation. There's no obvious reason
why a Japanese woman would turn up in North Dakota
with a crudely drawn map asking about Fargo. But it
(33:53):
all turned out to have been a case of two
plus two making five. Bursler was now even more intrigued.
What was the real story. He flew to Tokyo and
tracked down Takako's former landlady. She told him Tacako had
been a normal, happy girl until one day everything changed.
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She started drinking heavily. It must have been man trouble.
The landlady thought Bursler discovered that on her last night
in the hotel, Takako had spent forty minutes on the
phone to Singapore. He found out the number Tacako had
called and dialed it himself. At the other end of
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the line was an American businessman. Yes. The man told
Bursler he'd known Takako when he lived in Tokyo. She'd
wanted to go with him when he moved to Singapore.
He'd said no. She was heartbroken. He was from Fargo.
Several weeks after Takako died, the police found out that
(35:01):
she had sent her parents a suicide note. She hadn't
come to North Dakota to seek her fortune. She'd come
and her life. The media thought Takako had been too
credulous about Fargo. Instead, there had been too credulous about Takako.
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The reports framed her tragic death as a cautionary tale
about gullibility, a warning to think critically even when a
story presents itself as true. That's exactly what it was,
but not in the way they'd imagined. Essential sources for
(35:47):
this episode were Hans Traxler's book The Truth About Hansel
and Gretel, an article about The Hoax by Jordan Toddarov
in Atlas Obscura and Paul Bursler's documentary This Is a
True Story. For a full list of our sources, see
the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
(36:07):
written and presented by me Tim Harford with help from
Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilly with
support from Pete Norton. The music, sound design, and mixing
are the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited
by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mea LaBelle, Carlie Miliori,
Heather Fein, Maya Kahinigg, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary
(36:30):
Tales is a Pushkin Industry's production
Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
having suicidal thoughts, Support is available, for example, from the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US. Fargo is a
(00:40):
town in North Dakota. It's also a classic movie from
nineteen ninety six, the blackest of comedies. A car salesman
attempts to swindle his wealthy father in law by paying
a couple of criminals to kidnap his wife and Demanda Ransom.
It ends up with five innocent people dead and one
(01:03):
of the kidnappers trying to dispose of his partner's body
by feeding it into a wooden chipper. Famously, the movie
starts with these words, this is a true story. At
the request of the survivors. The names have been changed
out of respect for the dead. The rest has been
(01:25):
told exactly as it occurred. Fargo isn't a true story.
The shoot was well underway when the directors, the Coen Brothers,
casually mentioned this to the cast. One of the movie's stars,
William H. Macy, was taken aback. You can't say it's
a true story if it wasn't, said Macy, Why not,
(01:48):
came the reply. In the movie, one of the hapless
kidnappers hides nearly a million dollars by burying it in snow.
It's a comically stupid idea. The landscape's generic and featureless
as far as the eye can see. How will he
ever find his way back to the spot. He won't,
(02:10):
and not just because he ends up in a wood chipper,
and none of the movie's other characters know the cash
is there. Hold on, though, if the movie is told
exactly as it occurred, does the money exist? Is it
still where the kidnapper left it? Undiscovered? In real life,
(02:33):
five years after the film was released, a young woman
turned up at the police station in Bismarck, North Dakota.
She had just flown in from Tokyo. It was the
middle of winter, but she was wearing a short black
skirt and thie high boots. She was clutching a simple
map that showed nothing but a road and a tree.
(02:54):
The police tried to understand what she wanted, but they
spoke no Japanese and her English wasn't great. They could
make out one word, though fargo. One policeman recalled, we'd
tried to explain to her that it was a fictional
movie and there really wasn't any treasure. The police weren't
sure if the message had got through, but they took
(03:16):
her to the bus station where she could catch a
greyhound to Fargo, several hours to the east, across a
vast and empty landscape. A couple of days later, they
got a call from another police department. In some woods
not far from Fargo. On a freezing cold morning, a
hunter had found the body of a young Japanese woman,
(03:41):
Taka Kokanishi's death was reported around the world. Cult film
sparked Hunt for a Fortune. You can't say it's a
true story if it wasn't, can you. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales, you must know the
(04:26):
story of Hansel and Gretel, made famous by the Brother's Grim.
A great famine sweeps the land. A poor woodcutter can
no longer afford to feed his family. One night, his
new wife persuades him that they must take his children
into the forest and abandon them. They set off early
(04:49):
the next morning, the sun glinting off the chimney of
the woodcutter's cottage. Deep into the woods. The man builds
a fire to keep his children warm. Wait, hire, I
won't be too far away. You'll be able to hear
me chopping trees. But the sounds young Hansel and Gretel
(05:09):
can hear don't come from their father's axe. He's tied
a branch to a tree trunk in such a way
that the wind will cause it to keep flacking. By
the time his children realize that he's gone, he thinks
they'll never find their way home. He doesn't realize that
the children overheard the plan. Hansel sneaked out in the
(05:32):
dead of night to fill his pockets with pebbles, and
as they walked, he dropped them. By following the trail
of pebbles, Hansel and Gretel get back home. Their wicked
stepmother is furious that night she locks them in. The
Next morning, they set off again. Hansel has no pebbles,
(05:56):
but he does have a hunk of bread, and so
instead he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. This time, when
the children try to follow their trail back home, disaster
birds have eaten all the crumbs. Hansel and Gretel wander
(06:16):
the forest, starving and lost. Eventually they chance across a
house made from gingerbread and begin to eat it. There
comes a soft voice from inside. Nibble, nibble, little mouse,
who is nibbling at my house? A woman as old
(06:38):
as the hills creeps out of the door. She invites
the children inside with the promise of more food. But
she's a wicked witch, and she captures them. She keeps
Hansl in a cage and forces Gretel to work preparing
food for her brother. When he's fattened up, I'm going
to eat him. The witch's eyesight is bad, so every
(07:02):
day she asks Hansel to stick a finger through the
cage for her to feel how fat he's got. Hansel
tricks her. He finds a bone on the floor, and
every day he pokes that through the cage instead. Eventually
the witch loses patience. She announces she'll cook Hansel fat
or not, and secretly decides to cook Gretel too. This time,
(07:26):
Gretel tricks her climb into the oven and see if
it's hot enough. Yet I don't understand. How can I
climb inside the oven? Replied Gretel, innocently. Stupid girl like this,
do I have to show you everything? Gretel shoves her in,
slams the door, and bars it with an iron rod.
(07:46):
The witch howls as the flames consume her. Gretel lets
Hansel out of the cage, and the children again look
for the way back home. A magical duckling helps them
across a great body of water, and they arrive home.
Their wicked stepmother is dead, and their regretful father is
overjoyed to have them back. You live happily ever after.
(08:15):
Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale, much like the
tales I tell. But Hansel and Gretel is for children,
a warning about stranger danger. Or so it seems. The
tales I tell are for grown ups, and the tales
I tell a true Hansel and Gretel isn't true? Or
(08:38):
is it? The fairy tale of Hansland Gretel fascinated a
young boy growing up in the nineteen twenties near the
border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Georg Osseg's grandparents owned a
rare early edition of Grimm's fairy Tales, published in eighteen eighteen.
(09:02):
It was beautifully illustrated with intricate drawings. Young Georg read
it and re read it until every page was seared
in his memory. Osseg grew up to be a teacher.
He got a job in a Schaffenburg near Frankfort. He
spent his weekends hiking in the Spessart, a nearby range
(09:25):
of low wooded mountains. One spring day in nineteen sixty two,
he was exploring a part of the woods he had
never been to before. A local farmer had told him
it was known as the Hexenwald, the Witch's Forest. I
hadn't been out for half an hour when suddenly I
(09:47):
had a strange feeling. I felt as if I had
walked this path before. How could that be? Osseg thought
for a moment. Then it hit him. He realized that
he'd recognized the scene from an illustration in his grandfather's book.
Osseg compared the drawing with the view from the footpath.
(10:08):
There could be no doubt the trees had grown, of course,
that the oaks, the spruces, and the beeches were all
in exactly the same configuration. The line of the hills
on the horizon was unmistakable. That illustration in hanslan Gretel
hadn't just come from an artist's imagination. It was a
(10:30):
faithful depiction of a real place. What else about the
story might be real? Georg Osseg decided to do something
that no one had thought of before. He read the
fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as if it were
a factual report. That's a line from a nineteen sixty
(10:51):
three book about Georgossegg. It was called devarhit Uber Hansel
and Gretel, the Truth about Hansel and Gretel, and it
caused a sensation. In the book, the author Hans Traxler
describes what Osseg did next. The illustration showed the path
(11:12):
along which Hansland Gretel's father had taken them into the forest.
In the story, the children look back at the morning
sunlight glinting off the chimney of the woodcutter's cottage. The
sun rises in the east, so if Oseg followed the
path east would lead him to the woodcutter's cottage. Osseg
(11:32):
walked east, and he found a newly built alto barn,
connecting Frankfurt with Wurtzburg. But what had been there before
the records must exist. Traxler describes how Oseg tracked them
down to the Reburn railway, maintenance depot. He leafed through
(11:53):
the dusty files until he found a note of a
court decision from November fourth, nineteen fifty four, a dispute
over the compensation due from the Federal Motorway's administration to
a man called Georg Scheidhauer, who'd owned the land at
the east end of that forest path. The court awarded
(12:13):
Scheidhauer eighteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty Deutsche marks for
his property, a half timbered house with a barn and
a garden with eighteen fruit trees. Osseg had found the
woodcutter's cottage. Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Gaeorg
(12:45):
Osseg was now a man with a mission. He had
located the site of the woodcutter's cottage from hansland Gretel.
He had found the path along which the children had
been led. Next, he looked for the place where they'd
been abandoned. The story mentions that the woodcutter made a
(13:06):
fire to keep the children warm. Oh forester would make
a fire in the thick of the trees, so that
must have meant a clearing. Oseg explored to the west
until he found one. In the story, the woodcutter ties
a branch to a tree so the wind will make
it swack and sound like an axe. Oseg spent two
(13:29):
days inspecting every tree near the clearing until he came
across an old oak with a wound in the trunk
where a cord had been tied around it. He had
the tree felled and the cord radiocarbon dated it came
from the sixteen forties. What about the Witch's house? Did
(13:51):
that exist and could Oseg find it? According to the story,
Hansel and Gretel crossed a body of water between the
witch's house and their own that could only refer to
the river Ashaff. Osseg got a map, divided it into squares,
and methodically searched each one. After two months, he found
(14:14):
ruins of a building made from bricks. The footprint of
those ruins looked like it exactly matched another illustration in
his grandparents book showing the witch's four brick ovens. Osseg
grabbed his spade and started to dig. Within the foundations
of one of the ovens, he found the charred remains
(14:38):
of a woman's skeleton. He brought in academic specialists who
concluded the woman was thirty five years old, and she
had been strangled before she had been thrown in the oven.
Osse dug some more. He found a broken hinge had
(14:59):
the murderers forced their way in? He found a small
iron chest. It contained a hand written recipe for gingerbread.
But who had the murdered woman been? Oseg turned now
to linguistic analysis. In the Grimms telling of the tale,
(15:21):
the witch speaks in a dialect which has distinctive roots
in the town of Vernegaroda. Oseg travels to the town
and searches through its records. He discovers reports of a
trial from sixteen forty seven. The year ties right in
with the radiocarbon dating. A baker called Katerina Schraderin is
(15:43):
accused of witchcraft by a man whose proposal of marriage
she's spurned. Soon after another trial, Katerina has been murdered
and the man and his sister are accused. The man
is called Hans Metzler, his sister Greta. Hans and Greta
(16:15):
oss Eg pieced together what had happened. Katerina was famous
for her gingerbread. Hans was a baker too. He had
wanted to marry Katerina to get his hands on her recipe.
When she turned him down, he and his sister went
to her house in the woods and murdered her. But
(16:36):
they didn't find her recipe because she had hidden it
in the iron chest. So the story of Hansel and
Gretel was based on real events, albeit loosely. The protagonists
weren't abandoned children, they were cold blooded murderers motivated by greed.
And the woman who burned in the oven wasn't a
(16:59):
wicked witch with a magical gingerbread house, but a talented
baker with a sort after gingerbread recipe. When Hans Traxler
published his book about georg Oseg, The Truth about Hansel
and Gretel, he was stunned by the response. What stunned
(17:21):
him was that everyone took it seriously. I was sure
I'd hidden enough clues that it was all a great,
big fib. Traxler was a professional satirist, a writer and
illustrator for a satirical magazine. Gaeorg Osseg didn't exist, but
(17:42):
the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Requests to
translate it came in from eighteen countries. Reviewers in Germany's
newspapers gushed about the thoroughness of Osseg's research and the
gripping way. Traxler described it the book of the year,
maybe the book off the decade, said one The newspapers
(18:04):
in communist East Germany were just as impressed, perhaps because
they could blame capitalism for the murder, a criminal case
from the early capitalist era, A pined Berlina Zeitung. What
were the clues Traxler had left that had made the
whole thing up? Some were subtle. Katerina's gingerbread recipe, for example,
(18:27):
Traxler had copied it word for word from a popular
cookbook by Dr Urtke. Other clues should have been harder
to miss. In one passage, Oseg recruits an eight year
old boy, fills his pockets with pebbles, and has him
walk down the path away from the motorway where the
woodcutter's house had supposedly stood. The pebbles run out before
(18:51):
he gets to the clearing, but when Oseg fills his
own pockets with pebbles, he does have enough to cover
the distance. The book includes a diagram helpfully showing how
tall people can see further and hence leave more space
between pebbles. Hansel and Gretel were not children at all.
(19:12):
Traxler describes Osegg as concluding, to put it scientifically, they
must have been the size of an adult scientific Indeed,
also very scientific was a photograph of Oseg's radio carbon
dating equipment. You don't have to look too closely to
(19:32):
see that it consists of an upside down La Saigne tray,
a length of coax cable from a television, a child's microscope,
and some jars from the kitchen spice rack. Traxler was
bewildered that nobody picked up on this unsubtle clue. Real
apparatus to do carbon dating is the size of a train.
(19:56):
He pointed out. Some of the images in the book
show Georg Osegg in action. It's Traxler himself in the
silliest of disguises, wire rimmed glasses and a fake mustache.
Traxler took a photographer to a Frankfurt construction site, where
they jumped into a ditch to shoot the excavation. At
(20:18):
the witch's house, Traxler posed inspecting the side of the
ditch with a pastry brush. The photographer and I lay
on the ground laughing. But when the book was published
the joke was lost. Excited letters flooded in georg Osseg
(20:38):
was invited to give lectures. A Japanese academic expressed earnest
interest in how the new field of fairy tale archaeology
could improve cross cultural understanding. Readers flocked to the scenic
woods of the Spessart, trying to decipher Osseg's descriptions and
(20:59):
locate the witch's house for themselves. Schools hired buses and
took entire classes. One made the ten our journey from Denmark.
Hans Traxler started to wonder what had done in our
(21:23):
social media age. Mistaking satire for serious reporting is a
surprisingly common problem. President Trump once retweeted a news story
from the satirical website The Babylon Bee, without seeming to
be aware that The Babylon Bee is a satirical website.
(21:44):
Twitter had suffered an outage, and The Bee jokingly reported
that the network had decided to shut itself down to
slow the spread of negative news about Joe Biden. Trump
wasn't chuckling at the joke. He was demanding to know
why Twitter had done this. How many voters also struggle
(22:05):
to spot tricks and jokes when researcher from Ohio State
presented voters with a selection of stories from the Babylon
b They found that up to twenty eight percent of
Republicans thought the stories were real. Democrats were less likely
to be fooled, But the reverse was true when the
researchers tried stories from another satirical website, arguably one with
(22:30):
a different political perspective, the Onion. The researchers were looking
for ways to minimize the spread of misinformation over social networks.
In twenty nineteen, they ran an experiment. They flagged posts
on Facebook in one of three ways. The first type
of flag said that independent fact checkers had said story
(22:53):
wasn't true. The second type said that other Facebook users
had raised doubts about it. Neither type of flag made
the studies subjects any less likely to share the story,
but the third type did. When a story was flagged
as being from a satirical website, people were less likely
(23:15):
to pars it on. It wasn't a huge effect, but
it was something. Clearly Labeling satire as satire did seem
to prevent some people from sharing fake news. When the
truth about the truth about Hansel and Gretel finally emerged.
Some of Traxler's readers were not amused. An angry couple
(23:39):
from North Rhine Westphalure sent me the petrol bill for
the trip that made to the spass art how uncomfortable
it was for me. Then Traxler received a letter from
a lawyer in herborn. If you want to do business
with a parody, then you have to label your parody
as such. I have therefore decided to bring the case
(24:02):
to the attention of the public prosecutor. Or. As William H.
Macy would put it, you can't say it's a true
story if it wasn't. Hans Traxler was summoned to the
police station. Cautionary tales will be back soon. If you
(24:28):
want to do business with a parody, then you have
to label your parody as such, so said the irate
German lawyer. Facebook seems to agree. It has now rolled
out the flags on satirical stories. They join other algorithmic warnings,
from disputed claims on Twitter to suspected spam on emails
(24:53):
and texts. We're constantly assailed by people trying to fool
us because they want to influence our vote or part
us from our money. Any reminders to consider the source
of information have to be a good thing. And yet
I can't help feeling that the lawyer from Herborn was
being too dogmatic in demanding that parodies must always be labeled.
(25:17):
Phishing emails and troll farm tweets can be hard to spot.
Even for the algorithms, we can't rely on them being flagged.
We have to think for ourselves. A clever hoax can
act a bit like a vaccine, a benign way to
prime our critical thinking immune system, to make us more
(25:39):
alert against the threats that matter. And a hoax can't
work if it has to announce itself up front. What
does it take for a hoax to earn our indulgence?
I think there are three things. First, the hoax has
to be good. That means it must be plausible if
you're not paying attention, but obvious if you are. That's
(26:01):
harder than it sounds. Attempts at satire are often either
too clunkily apparent on the first read or too well
disguised on the second. Hans Traxler seems to have got
the balance exactly right. He was amazed by how many
letters he received from readers who'd spotted one piece of
nonsense in his account of gaeorg Osseg's research, But who
(26:25):
hadn't then questioned everything else. Those letters said things like,
dear mister Traxler, I believe gayorg Oseg must have been
mistaken when he says he found the woodcutter's cord in
the tree twenty five meters above the ground, because the
tree had grown so much. You see, trees sprout from
the top, they don't push up from the bottom, so
(26:46):
the cord would have been quite close to the ground.
Apart from that minor blemish, I found mister Osseg's work
to be excellent. Or the manuscript from Vinigeroda can't have
come from sixteen forty seven because it refers to a
famous event that happened in eighteen eleven. Otherwise, though, great job.
(27:07):
These are readers who really should have felt their spidey
senses tingling, and when they discovered they'd been had, they
must have been embarrassed at their gullibility. And that's a
useful feeling, because they'll resolve to think more critically in future.
The second requirement of a satisfying hoax is like a vaccine,
(27:29):
it should do no harm. I'm not sure that's true.
About some satirical stories from sites such as the Babylon Bee.
According to the Ohio State Study, for example, twenty three
percent of Republicans believed the Bees story that US Representative
Illan Omar said being Jewish is an inherently hostile act.
(27:53):
You can reach your own conclusions as to whether this
is or is not a hilarious satire of the left
wing of US politics. But the point is she never
said it, and when people believe she did, real damage
is done to political discourse. But with hansland Gretel, what
are the worst things that happened? A couple from north
(28:16):
Rhine Westphalia spent some money on petrol, a teacher from
Denmark looked like an idiot for organizing an international study visit,
and a humorless lawyer from Herborn made the Frankfurt police
call in Hans Traxler for questioning, although I'm happy to
report that Traxler was cleared of any crime. The third
(28:38):
and final ingredient of a good hoax is that it
has a point. It draws our attention to something about
which we're more credulous than we should be. When the
Cohen Brothers added that screen crawl to Fargo, saying this
is a true story. They were poking fun at a
trend that began in the nineteen seventies. Directors of gory,
(29:00):
low budget drive in flicks discovered their gross more if
they added words like based on real events to the poster,
however loose the connection might be. Hans Traxler was inspired
to write about Hansel and Gretel by reading a best
selling book called Gerte Grabe Ungelerta Gods, Graves and Scholars.
(29:24):
It told of archaeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated the
site of ancient Troy in modern day Turkey and made
the case that Homer's epic poem the Iliad was based
on historical events. There was a craze for pop archaeology
books in Germany like Undi Biebel Hoch Derrich and the
(29:46):
Bible is Right. Researchers prove the historical truth. Traxler wondered
if readers might not always be consuming books of this
genre with a sufficiently critical eye. He got his answer.
Both Traxler and the Coens are prompting us to ask
a deeper question. When we like to hear there's truth
(30:08):
in what is it we really care about, because there
is a truth behind Hansel and Gretel, but it's nothing
to do with tracksless scurrilous nonsense about a murderous gingerbread baker.
In thirteen fifteen, incessant rain ruined crops across Europe. The
(30:33):
Great Famine lasted for years. It's hard to be sure
of exactly what happened, but some harrowing accounts survive. In Bristol, England,
one writer tells of such mortality that the living could
scarce suffice to bury the dead, and some eat their
(30:55):
own children. In the Baltics, it was said that mothers
fed upon their sons. Perhaps it's no surprise that the
folklore of many countries has tailed, like hansl and Gretel,
about famine, child abandonment, and cannibalism. I said that Hansland
(31:18):
Gretel is a cautionary tale for children about stranger danger.
But perhaps these stories were also cautionary tales for parents
about unimaginable hunger and choices too awful to contemplate. But
(31:39):
what about Takako Kanishi. Doesn't her death show the risks
of dressing fiction as fact. Remember in two thousand and one,
Takako had turned up in North Dakota, inappropriately dressed in
the cold midwinter, clutching a map and asking for directions
to Fargo. The world's media reported that she seemed to
(32:02):
have believed the movie's claims to truth and hoped she
could find the hidden million dollars cult fill film sparked
hunt for a Fortune, said the UK's Daily Telegraph. It
was an astonishing story and the filmmaker, Paul Bursler wanted
to find out more. Soon after reading the news, he
(32:22):
persuaded British television's Channel four to send him to North
Dakota with a cameraman and a Japanese actress. Bursler planned
to retrace Takako's final days to find the people who'd
encountered her and recreate some scenes. They checked into the
Quality Inn in downtown Fargo, where Takako had stayed before
(32:46):
she died. Bursler spoke to the night clerk. It's funny,
he said, I was surprised when I heard how she
died looking for the ransom in the movie. She never
mentioned anything to me about Fargo or any other kind
of movie. She asked about seeing the stars, which I
thought was a little strange because it was November and
(33:08):
it isn't that outside in the middle of the night.
What about the policeman in Bismarck who told journalists how
they'd tried to explain to Takako that Fargo was a
fictional movie and there wasn't really any treasure. I'd never
seen the film Fargo, one of them explained, But another
officer in the station had seen it, and he told
(33:29):
me there was money buried in this movie. And then
we started to think that she had this false impression.
Takako had never said anything about money to the police
either true, It wasn't unreasonable speculation. There's no obvious reason
why a Japanese woman would turn up in North Dakota
with a crudely drawn map asking about Fargo. But it
(33:53):
all turned out to have been a case of two
plus two making five. Bursler was now even more intrigued.
What was the real story. He flew to Tokyo and
tracked down Takako's former landlady. She told him Tacako had
been a normal, happy girl until one day everything changed.
(34:17):
She started drinking heavily. It must have been man trouble.
The landlady thought Bursler discovered that on her last night
in the hotel, Takako had spent forty minutes on the
phone to Singapore. He found out the number Tacako had
called and dialed it himself. At the other end of
(34:38):
the line was an American businessman. Yes. The man told
Bursler he'd known Takako when he lived in Tokyo. She'd
wanted to go with him when he moved to Singapore.
He'd said no. She was heartbroken. He was from Fargo.
Several weeks after Takako died, the police found out that
(35:01):
she had sent her parents a suicide note. She hadn't
come to North Dakota to seek her fortune. She'd come
and her life. The media thought Takako had been too
credulous about Fargo. Instead, there had been too credulous about Takako.
(35:21):
The reports framed her tragic death as a cautionary tale
about gullibility, a warning to think critically even when a
story presents itself as true. That's exactly what it was,
but not in the way they'd imagined. Essential sources for
(35:47):
this episode were Hans Traxler's book The Truth About Hansel
and Gretel, an article about The Hoax by Jordan Toddarov
in Atlas Obscura and Paul Bursler's documentary This Is a
True Story. For a full list of our sources, see
the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
(36:07):
written and presented by me Tim Harford with help from
Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilly with
support from Pete Norton. The music, sound design, and mixing
are the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited
by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mea LaBelle, Carlie Miliori,
Heather Fein, Maya Kahinigg, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary
(36:30):
Tales is a Pushkin Industry's production
Host
Tim Harford
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.