Stuff You Should KnowIt’s easy (and kind of fun) to laugh at the misfortune of CEOs and other high up business types when they bring it on themselves – so let’s do that now. Herein lies some of the worst business decisions ever made, hindsight being 20/20, of course.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you Should Know one of our Really, it's been a while top ten editions where we don't actually do top ten.
Yeah. Some people out there are like, what in the world are you talking about, And some people are like, oh my gosh, this reminds me of the old days, back in the two thousand and oh, I don't know, tens, eights, nine, thirteens.
Oh yeah, thirteen was lousy with top tens, I think.
Yeah, we used to do all a lot of these top well not a lot, but we used to do top tens from the old House Stuff Works website, and it seems like they never had ten great entries. So we would just on the fly say oh, let's not do this one. But we were better now we're professional. Yeah, so we got together beforehand and said, well, let's just do these eight and Yeah.
It feels weird to know ahead of time what we're not going to do rather than just saying it in the middle of recording. But I do feel like it is more professional.
It's called growth, my friend.
So we are not doing all ten. But there is one that I think really kind of introduces this concept out of the gate Chuck and it's concept. Oh oh yeah, I forgot to talk about the concept. We're talking today about bad business decisions. And you could call this the shot and fraud hour, because if you are kind of if you take a grim view of CEOs and captains of industry and all that, this is like a chance to really kind of poke fun at people have made some really terrible decisions over the years.
Not all great decisions over the years. Sometimes they're bad. We're here to talk about eight of them.
But hey, the games you never won are the ones you didn't start playing in that saying is that it?
I don't know if that's it, but that that totally makes sense to me. So I'm saying, yes, okay, good, so you only missed the shots you don't take.
Yeah, that's much better than mine, But I like yours. I undermined our professional spiel at the beginning just now. So there's a pretty well worn story about how Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and went to Western Union and said, hey, you captains of Communication, you guys rule the world as far as long distance communication goes, I've got this neat invention, why don't you buy it from me for one hundred thousand dollars? And the heads at Western Union said, that is ridiculous. Nobody's gonna want this thing. Hit the bricks, and Alexander Graham Bell just went off and created his own phone company. And those patents that he received turned out to be what are widely considered the most valuable patents ever issued in the United States. And some pretty valuable patents have been issued like this is not we're not talking about some also ran patent. This is the patent of patents, right, you beat up the squatty potty oh by far, like by twice as valuable even maybe but probably more so. But it just kind of goes to show you, like it's easy to say haha at Western Union. But it also is a teachable moment, as Oprah would say, because if you dig into the story, you find that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he didn't invent the telephone so you and I could pick up a receiver and talk to one another on either end. He basically invented it to be the radio. Before radio, the intent was for you to sit in a room and somebody on the other end of the telephone line in a different city perform a play or read a monologue, or play a symphony, and you were going to sit there and listen. You weren't supposed to talk back. That was the idea. So if you put it in that context, yestern Union doesn't seem so dumb anyway. So I think it's a reminder to keep in mind in most of these cases, hindsight is twenty twenty, and that there is a lot of exacerbating circumstances and that nothing's ever that one sided. But it's still kind of fun to think about.
Yeah, And you know what a great example of that hindsight being twenty twenty is.
I'm gonna go with this one is when.
Excite did not buy Google just call it an audible. Everybody remembers Excite, or you may not, but if it sounds familiar and you look up the Excite logo, that you will immediately, probably if you were of a certain age, go, oh, yeah, I remember Excite. They didn't really stand out to me when I was researching this until I went and saw it and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember those guys. I did not ever use it. But Excite dot com, believe it or not, is still around and in one of what will be two a bit of serendipity with this episode releasing now, Excite is literally ending their email program this month.
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Is it really?
No?
Oh?
I had no idea.
Well, because what's funny is I made fun of Emily up until about a year ago because she's still paid for a MindSpring email.
No.
Yes, because she's like, I've had.
This email for twenty years and like everybody's got it and I can't. Like she was locked in, she felt like, but she waited it out eventually because I think they may have stopped supporting it as well.
I'm not sure.
Oh, but they still kept taking her money, right.
Maybe I don't know. Anyway, Excite. If you go to Excite dot com today, you will laugh because you will see what is a very old school looking internet site. It's like a list of it's a news scroll, like a list of headlines. It's got these little icons that I assume they pay to be on there because it's like Amazon, eBay, State Farm and Casper Mattress like prominent icons as if this website is the place to go to get to.
Those other places.
And then on the left rail you will see a list of things like email, which of course is going defunct, a bunch of redirects like weather it goes to acuweather sports goes to ESPN, and then entertainment, travel, finance, and games all goes to ask dot com.
Wow, apparently Excite was that's today. I thought Excite turned into ask dot COMO. Apparently there's separate.
Oh okay, they clearly like each other because they link four different things to ask dot com.
And do you know, of course ask dot com started out as ask jeeves.
Remember that I thought it was. I just couldn't remember for sure.
So these are search engines. Some of them were Yahoo apparently categorized the entire Internet by category strangely enough. But Excite supposedly was a search engine. It just wasn't super good. And there's a story out there, Chuck that the search engine was purposefully not super good because these search engines used to be called web portals. That was, you would go to Excite first search what you're searching for, and then hopefully while you were there taking a bunch of ads. So the longer you stayed on Excite before leaving and going off into the Internet, the better it was for Excite's bottom line. So their search wasn't that great. And that is an explanation from one of the people who who was part of this deal for why Excite passed on Google.
Yeah, and they weren't just a search engine.
They were a they're like what they are today still, they were an aggregator. They had new scrolls and stuff like that. It was almost like a a front page of a newspaper that you would go to.
Right, but a really like super low fi newspaper.
Yeah. So Google comes around. This is nineteen ninety nine Larry Page and Sarah Gibrinn said, all right, we got this thing. It's basically like an algorithm essentially at this point, and we could sell it to you Excite for a million bucks. And then they balked and they said, all right, how about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars And they said, no, well, we're Excite. Why do we need you this weird search engine that isn't even really a search engine yet? And I think this is one clear example of hindsight being twenty twenty because no one could have predicted what Google would become.
Absolutely not. And so the CEO of Excite, George Bell, is known as the guy who passed up on buying Google for less than a million dollars. Right, But he's like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not some dummy like these guys wanted to gut Excite search engine and put in the Google search algorithm instead, And I was dedicated to my engineering team. They had worked really hard to create the search engine that I thought was perfectly fine, and I wasn't about to completely poison our culture for Google. And Google's people said no, Actually, what happened was we made a bake off between their search engine and our search in it, and their stuff came back with terrible stuff. Our stuff came back with really good stuff, and they were like, this is too good. People are going to immediately leave Excite, so we don't want your your algorithm. Those are the two competing stories for why this didn't happen. Amazing, It is amazing bad business decisions still though, sure, absolutely all.
Right, where should we go next? We might not even get to eid everybody. That's how exciting these episodes are I'm gonna go with Kodak.
I was gonna go with Kodak too.
Everyone that grew up in the pre digital revolution remembers Kodak as the photograph company, the film paper Company, the film stock company. Founded in eighteen eighty out of New York, they controlled ninety percent of the film market into the late seventies and about eighty five percent of the camera market and employed about sixty thousand people. And in the mid seventies there was a engineer there named Steve Sassin who basically figured out digital photography. He was experimenting with something called a charged couple device a CCD, and he figured out how to translate an image into ones and zeros and built the very first digital camera. It was a one hundred thousand pixel image, which is pretty cute this point zero one megapixels.
It's a little grainy.
And went to the bosses and said, hey, like, this is the future, guys, this is what we should do. And Kodak said, oh, well, I'm not so sure about that.
So yes, there were some people in Kodek that were like, this is dangerous man. We're like, our money is in print photographs. Our money is in regular cameras, and there was another group in Kodek that was like, this guy's right, Steve Sassin's right, this is the future. And they did invest billions of dollars in developing a digital camera whole outfit, and those conservative forces managed to keep it back, keep it back, and then finally, by the time Kodak joined the digital camera revolution, they had been passed by. So not only did they miss the digital camera revolution despite having invented it, they also wasted billions of dollars on their digital camera division that never got to really get a good start, So it was just a complete waste, Like this is this is a genuinely bad business decision, Chuck.
Yeah, but they had the disc camera, remember those. Yes, that was the big Kodak product that was. It wasn't digital, but it was a little film wheel. It was a disc and it was a little flat camera. I remember that was all the rage, so I wanted them.
It was a very big deal.
I see that now. Yeah, that does kind of take me back. Yeah, did you have one? No, Fisher Price made one. Did you have that one?
No?
Yeah, I didn't have either either.
Yeah, you and I had similar upbringings. We didn't get the best toys.
No, but apparently those Then the early nineties, when digital cameras came out, they were like one thousand dollars, but they could only store like eight pictures at a time. Like you could take eight pictures and then you had to plug it into your computer and up though those eight pictures, format the disc and then start over again.
Yeah.
God, bless you early adopters, but it usually pays, in my experience, to wait a little bit on the tech to figure itself out. For sure, like the first flat screen TVs. Remember how expensive those were?
Oh my god. But it's the early adopters who drive the prices down because sure they are buying these things, you know what I.
Mean, Hey, I mean they walk the righteous path.
So, just to wrap it all up, Kodak ended up laying off fifty thousand employees and in twenty twelve they they filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. And they're still around. But they basically make printer cartridges and motion picture film stock.
Yeah, which is also not used very often anymore. Nope, poor Kodak, Poor Kodak. Time for break.
I was gonna say the same thing, man, we are really sympatic of this episode.
All right, we'll be right back.
I was going to say that too.
Okay, Chuck, I'm going to pick one and I'm in the big wheel. Okay, it landed on Western Union against we're gonna have to go over that one break in.
Okay, okay, all right.
So Western Union now, we won't do that. Let me just move at one space to this JC penny one. How about that?
Ooh all right, I.
Like this one because it really kind of gets to the bottom of some tricks that clothing retailers use. So actually all retailers do, but some clothing retailers are particularly guilty of it.
That's right. We were talking about the clothier jcpenny, which in twenty twelve hired a shiny new CEO named Ron Johnson, who had made quite the name for himself in business in retail as Two things. First, the guy who hipped up Target. Oh yes, okay, remember growing up Target was like whatever Target was not, you know, it's kind of like a kmart thing. And then all of a sudden Tarja was like this cool, hip, awesome place is because of Ron Johnson's efforts largely gotcha. Then he went to work at Apple, and he is the guy he was their VP of retail. He's the guy who basically oversaw, you could say, invented the Apple Store and the Genius Bar and stuff like that.
Right, Yeah, So I mean like he was legit. J. C. Penny was like, come save us, Like we're really flagging, Like even compared to some of these other retailers that do the same thing, like TJ. Max or Walmart or whatever, we're getting no love whatsoever. So Ron Johnson came in and looked around and he's like, this industry is shameful. Like basically what he'd walked into was an industry of clothing retailers that would sell items that were say a ten dollars item for ten dollars, but on the price tag would it would say that it originally started out as like fifty dollars or something, right, And yes, at one point they charged fifty dollars for it, but it was so that they could later mark it down in a sale that probably took place the day after that thing arrived and was sold for fifty dollars. So that means there were some suckers out there who actually paid fifty dollars for that ten dollars shirt. But the way that they got you was by not only marking it down, but having a reason to mark it down. They would have sale after sale after sale, hundreds of sales, different sales in a year, and it still wasn't working. And Ron Johnson was like, this is desperate and we shouldn't do this anymore.
Yeah, there were coupons even and people, you know, Americans eat that stuff up. If you hear half off blowout sale this weekend, your mouth starts water in a little bit and you think, wait a minute, I can get something that should cost twice as much for half as much, or I can bring in this coupon and get two things for one thing.
It's unbelievable, and we still fall.
For these tricks. We all do. So he said, no, here's what we'll do. We're gonna just basically out ourselves and say, you know now we're gonna do is it's called fair and square every day is our new pricing system. It means you don't need a sale, you don't need a coupon our stuff. It's just going to be inexpensive all the time. And people hated it right away. People started complaining they love their sales, they love their deals. He would call them on the phone personally. He wouldn't do that and say, you dummy, don't you understand you're paying the same price. It's just cheap all the time. Now, people didn't understand that. They didn't want to hear that. I saw one person that said that he seemed to almost have a disdain for his customer base because he behind closed doors were saying, they're dumb and they need to be educated, and like, how can these dumb dumbs not understand that cheaper clothes every day is a better situation?
Yeah, because the studies have found that people will pay more for a cheaper thing if they think it's more valuable. Then they would pay for the same thing if it were marked. They would pass up something that was actually the same thing at a lower price.
Yeah.
And the reason why is because a ten dollars shirt seems cheap and maybe cheaply made and probably just not a good But a fifty dollars shirt that you can buy for ten dollars was valuable to begin with. And then yes, not only is it a deal, you could make the case that it's a steal. And people love that. Like you said, there's a thread, a vein of America that is crazy for that kind of stuff. And Ron Johnson found out the hard way that when you go up against that vein of Americans, you lose every time. And he lost pretty big in seventeen months.
Yeah, I got two words for you, my friend. Outlet mall. Yeah, that really says it all about America. Yeah, but if you don't even know how they operate. But it's got to be something like this with outlet malls, right, very much.
But also there's a lot of them that are like crypto outlet malls. They're not outlet stores, they're just regular stores in an outlet mall. It's b s If you're a developer of an outlet mall and you're letting stores in there that are actually not selling their outlet stuff but there's just a regular store, you're at fault. It's on your your hands. Blood is on your hands.
So what this got Ron Johnson was what is known as the worst quarter in retail history, which was a store to store thirty two percent drop.
Wow quarter over quarter.
That that's just a death nail for him. He only made it, I believe seventeen months, and that was it and they came back in and said, hey, we're gonna go back to our fake pricing scheme, and people loved it.
I'm sure Ron Johnson was like, that's all right, thanks for the multimillion dollar golden parachute at everybody.
Yeah. Oh man, he made He supposedly made like four or five hundred million dollars in Oh Michael Stock God.
So he didn't even need this job.
No, I'm sure he just wanted to show all this loser Americans what the deal was.
He still got a job.
He's doing something else like two years after this, like why is this guy working? Go go retire on your island or something.
So there's a there was an ad that jac pennyc came up with like that ran very It was very short run intentionally, but it basically pleaded for their customers to come back. They're like, we know we made mistakes, We're getting back to our roots. We love you, please come back again. Like they were begging their customers to come back. And apparently it worked because this is another common theme that we'll see and I think this is a good segue into the New Coke debacle. Ooh, when you take away something that people love but have come to take for granted. Yeah, they will not only fight for it, they'll come back for it and droves when you give it back to them.
New Coke the end, pretty much. Yeah, So of course this has got to be in there. If you grew up in the eighties like we did, you remember a time where Pepsi threatened Coke a little bit, not literally, like doctor Pepsi didn't come up to mister Coke's door and say, listen, I'm going to take you up back and behind the.
Witch had and take care of you.
Sure, the company threatened Coke because their sales were doing pretty good.
It was a different taste. I think it was a little sweeter.
I don't even drink Pepsi, so I'm not really sure, but I think it had a sweeter taste. They were I don't know if they were winning the Coke Wars, but they are the Cold Wars, but they were. They were edging in on Coke's dominance.
It was Chuck. It was that choice of a new generation campaign. Yeah, that was what had done it. They got Michael Jackson, they got Madonna, they got I think Geraldine Ferraro did one of these commercials.
Like, that's advertising goal.
These were right, These were just internationally famous commercials, and so PEPSI had kind of come out of nowhere and was eating Coke's launch.
All of a sudden, Coke had do caucus big.
Mistake, yeah, dan Quayle.
So Coke was a little worried.
They saw their writing on the surpi riding on the wall, and they said, all right, under the behind closed doors, let's start rejiggering our our rest here that had been around, you know, since it was you know, sold in that very first pharmacy. Very very classic. That's a little hint of what's to come. Very classic, classic taste. And for a couple of years they're engineers, mixed up little batches. They did taste tests, they let people taste them. People are like, I like the taste of this better. And so in nineteen eighty five and April of eighty five, New Coke came out with a redesign, can redesign. You know, they kept their colors and stuff, and the I'm not sure if did the font completely change or was it just sort of a modified version of the old script.
I think the new was slightly different, but the Coke was the original.
Okay, but at any rate, they unveiled new coke and it was a tremendous not only a tremendous flop, but it costs a lot of anger and people hoarding their old coats, and people were just like, how can you change an American institution like this without even asking anybody?
Even though they had done testing.
They had done tons of testing, and the test came back roundly in favor of this new formula for coke. But Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink apparently pointed out that if you're doing it tastes tests, you're not sitting there drinking a whole can. You're just taking a little sip of something and comparing it to the sip of something else. And so it's possible that that new coke really tasted terrible if you drank the whole can. It was too sweet. The explanations I saw were more that it was psychological. People didn't like messing with their beloved coke number one, And I saw that kind of wrapped up in a quote from somebody that was that they said the biggest mistake Coke made was telling the public about the change to the recipe. Because people were like, you can't mess with my stuff. I don't care what it tastes like. And of course it's not going to possibly taste good because you're messing with my original coke. So people just kind of turned on it from the outside.
Well, like they think they should have just changed the recipe and just left it and not said anything.
This guy was saying, if you're going to change the recipe, they shouldn't have said anything, because that happens from time to time. But then the bigger problem was that you kind of touched on. They didn't stop and ask their customers, do you want a new coke? They they just made a terrible business decision based on fear of PEPSI getting some of their market share. All of a sudden, they went and completely rejiggered the formula. That was their response to that.
Yeah, and it didn't last long. It was less than three months later, a new coke was gone and they added Classic Coca Cola Classic I remember, and I didn't even drink a lot of soda back then, even but I remember it being just almost like this nationwide relief setting in. It was really a big deal, and it sounds so funny now if you're some kid who had you know, didn't live through this. It really like it was big, big news and sort of captured America's attention for a little while. And Coke Classic coming back was like an old, long lost friend reappearing at the front door. And eventually, of course, the word classic was dropped and they were just like, can we just forget about all of that and we're just Coke forever?
But they lasted for a while. There was many years where you differentiated by saying Coke Classic. Even after New Coke was long gone, you still referred to Coke as Coke Classic for a while, and then it finally went back to Coke.
I had to do it?
Uh, is it time for another message? Break?
Sure?
Okay? Chuck said, sure, all right, Chuck, you're up. What's next? What are we going to do next?
Well, my amigo, we are gonna go with the Blockbuster video.
Oh yeah, this is my favorite, I said, another boy.
The eighties was pretty rough on some companies that didn't see the riding on the wall because Blockbuster. You grew up in the seventies and eighties, well, you know, if you're a teenager at least in the eighties by that time. You spent a lot of time, We've talked about it before, browsing your early Friday evenings with your friends at Blockbuster Video, looking over over those shelves, reading the back of those boxes, the backs of the boxes, and standing by the door at that bin because you just could not get your copy of Excalibur. And some nerd walks up and dumps it through the slot and he grab it before it even hits that bin, and the employee says, you really not supposed to do that.
That was a great Blockbuster employee question.
You do it anyway, And block Buster ruled the video market except for you know the which I still love that the charming mom and pops I had a Oh yeah, this family at our church even ran their own little video store and that was a good business for a while, but Blockbuster eventually would gobble most of those up.
Yeah, to me, Blockbuster was the nineties thing. The eighties were mom and pop places where you'd actually rent the VCR when you also rented Beverly Hills.
Cop Yeah, video Shock, your video house, Yeah, video Barn.
And there's just asn't a side. I wonder I want to know if anybody out there knows what the name of this phenomenon is. But whenever I walked into a Blockbuster, that whole mental list of movies that I wanted to rent just vaporized.
Yea, and I like the test taker syndrome.
It would be like I had just walked into a building for the first time, let alone, like a Blockbuster video, like I had no idea what I was doing, totally in over my head, and I would invariably walk out with some movie that I just didn't really want to see, but I got to rent something, and I okay, yeah, pretty much. I spared myself that one. But yes, that's generally correct.
So you and then you get home and you're like, man, I went in there for gleaming the Cube and I walk out with Turner and Hooche.
That's exactly right. That was kind of the wrap up of it, wasn't it that that you remember after you get back home. It's the worst or it was the worst. It would be still the worst if Blockbuster were around, But it's not because of bad business decisions.
That's right. If you remember in the late nineties, that was a company called Netflix that said, hey, we're going to start mailing DVDs to people, so you don't have to go to the store. You can get on this thing called the internet and you can look up the movie you want, and you can order that DBD to be shipped to your house and then you can just drop it in the mail afterward. We failed to mention, by the way, I didn't know this Blockbuster was making about half a billion dollars a year in late fees.
Man, they were that was unconsonable.
That was a big part of their business.
But Netflix is like in those late fees, like you can keep these things for a long time, and they would eventually say, but you know what, maybe we should try And I think there was a merger idea right unless of a sale.
What do you mean or oh? With with Netflix.
Were they trying to merge with Blockbuster and say, hey, why don't you let us take over and start doing mailing stuff for you as well?
Yeah, that was the impression I had that Netflix wanted to kind of slide in and become part of Blockbuster and help Blockbuster do its own thing. And Blockbuster said no twice at.
Least Yeah for fifty million bucks, by the way.
Yeah, And Netflix, by the way, has valued at about two hundred billion today, so fifty million dollars was pretty pretty good price. And that's not just because Netflix was an unknown. Netflix had already shown that it was a proven success, but it hadn't been around long enough for Blockbuster to see the riding on the wall. They just thought. I think John any Coco Antioko, the CEO, considered not just Netflix niche, but the Internet was still niche in two thousand to this ceo. So Netflix Ogden went on their merry way, and Blockbusters just started to fall further and further and further behind.
Yeah. I was actually a member of the Blockbuster DVD mailing program when they finally got around to copying Netflix.
Really.
Yeah, I didn't jump on Netflix. I was like a Blockbuster loyalist. I was like, I'm gonna use their thing because it's the same basically, uh huh, And I don't I think maybe eventually when Blockbuster stopped, I did jump to Netflix DVD.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did.
But I mentioned in the first one of the first segments that there was a bit of serendipity, two bits of serendipity that Excite finished their email program this month. Netflix this week just announced the shutdown of their DVD side.
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Oh I'm not falling for that again. Twenty five years of those DVD mailings, they just shut it down. They said, they said that you can send them back up until September twenty eighth, and after that, we're not going to ask, which basically means keep what you got.
Oh yeah.
And not only that, but to liquidate their DVDs, they were they're selecting random customers and they're just sending them ten DVDs oh wow, and saying like, here have fun. Apparently er point five percent of their revenue these days, and just quickly to go over their moneys. They Netflix is a rough company to be invested in. I think I don't know much about this stuff, but they in November twenty one, they peaked at about three hundred and two billion. The next summer they crashed all the way down to like eighty something billion, I think three hundred and then now we're back up at like one eighty.
Yeah. I think that was when they they like basically doubled their their streaming fee, their monthly fee to stream. Everybody was like, forget to you. And then people come back, all right. So you were saying that Netflix was giving away their DVDs because they knew they need them, right, Great, that's such a wonderful thing to do. Blockbuster did the opposite of that, and I saw that it was very famously described as failing at failing because as it was clear that Blockbuster was doomed, and it was clear for years before anybody, actually before the last Blockbuster closed, rather than basically pumping all the money out to shareholders, which apparently is what a sociopathic corporation's supposed to do, they brought a succession of CEOs and to try to save the place, and those CEOs just spent hand over fist money that they wasted on these schemes that did nothing but waste money for Blockbuster to try to resurrect the brand. And then finally, after I think bankruptcy in twenty ten, it was bought for a song I don't even think it was a good song by Dish and they're still Blockbuster now. Dish is one of their on demand groups of channels is called Blockbuster at Home. So Blockbuster's still around, Chuck. If you're a Blockbuster loyalist, get yourself dish and you can watch on demand movies through Blockbuster at home.
Amazing.
It was was it the song Escape?
That's a bad song?
What song is that?
If you like aka the Pina Colada song.
Oh, that song is not only bad, it's morally reprehensible.
It's awful. And I just pointed this out to a group of friends this last summer who liked it, including Emily. I was like, you've never listened to the words of this song. Yeah, She's like, well, not really. I know the chorus. I said. It's about a guy that wants to cheat on his wife's so bad because he can't stand her that he puts a want ad to go find some new lady and he hits it off with her and it turns out being his wife.
Yeah, and they He's like, great things are fixed.
Yeah, exactly, man, because in the seventies that's all you needed. That in a little uh, you know, a bottle of I don't know, baccardy and some pills.
That's right. The seventies were great, but the people in the seventies were the worst.
All right, we got two more, which you're gonna pick? I know which one you're gonna pick.
You do not. All right, yes you do, let's go ahead and pick it for me.
We have well you're probably you're probably gonna say, Et, that's right, And.
Technically we have three left if you want to go for it. But okay, do we have three?
M h what else are we missing?
I can't say it'll ruin the surprise.
Well, we agree not to do that one though, you want to do it again?
No, No, we didn't do the AOL time Warner one.
Oh eh, okay, let's get that.
There is one thing I wanted to say about that, all right. At the time, in nineteen ninety nine, AOL was worth two hundred billion dollars, and I was like, Wow, that's a lot. How much is Apple worth these days? In twenty twenty three, Apple's worth two and three quarter trillion dollars? Wow, trillion dollars, that's how much that company is worth. More than one trillion dollars, almost three trillion dollars.
It's amazing.
And this is twenty four years later. That's that's how gobsmackingly much like just money has increased by then by now, So I just wanted to point that out. It's just insane, all right.
Well, ET, the movie.
Oh, one other thing. I want to go on record that we should do an episode on AOL and the beginning of the Internet because it is so interesting.
I mean talking about Excite and AOL. And I remember the first time I heard the word Google.
I literally remember that very first time.
Yeah, you remember, I used to say, like I'm feeling lucky.
It was a production manager named Kevin Edge. If anyone knows kevinun til Kevin had said Hi. He in a production office on a TV commercial in LA in the early early two thousands. He said the word Google and I went what And he went, It's a search engine. And I went, excuse me, Kevin, Kevin was great.
Did you say you mean a web portal?
Uh?
E T.
Colon the Extra Terrestrial. Very popular movie, some might say some I'd say it's a classic. Some might say that they still love Reese's Pieces because of that classic movie. Yes, so I said Reese's Pieces, I think, but you know what I mean?
Yeah, to me, that might be the greatest mass produced candy of all time. Oh what, I love Reese's Pieces. I can eat them by the by the bucket full. Unfortunately of them too, and they've but they've only been around since nineteen seventy eight. Did you know that?
Yeah, I mean I remember when they came out, my friend.
Okay, I was not quite aware. I was two years old at the time, give me a break, but I came seven. I was Candy Central, right, Yeah, exactly so. But yeah, by the time I was seven, I was like, give me these things. Yeah, in nineteen seventy eight when they came out, they actually did pretty good. Hershey's made them, and then they crested and peaked and then started to decline really quickly, and so Reese's Pieces appeared to have run their course. And people say quite reasonably that it's possible Reese's Pieces wouldn't be around anymore were it not for Et eating Reese's Pieces on screen. And the irony of the whole thing is that it was originally supposed to be Eminem's, and Eminems wouldn't bite. They said, we don't know what this ET thing is. We're not going to give you a dollar for it.
ET was based on a book.
There's either somebody describe it as a novelization. So it's possible that they made a book version of it.
Yeah, that's what it was.
Okay, Well, in that apparently in the original novel that was made from the movie, it's Eminem's that et eats, not Reese's pieces.
Oh okay, that's a nice little nugget. I read the novelization of Raiders at the Lost Ark.
How was it?
It was great?
Did it differ from the movie at all? Or was it just basically the movie and book form?
It is the movie and book form. But there's novelizations. I read a couple of them back then. They're always a little bit different, and they had extra details because it's a book, and it was kind of fun. I'm sure they still do that, don't they.
I think so maybe probably. I'm sure Marvel does. If you can make a dime off of it, Marvel does.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So depending on who you talk to, there are different stories.
I think this is one of those things where when something works out so well, everybody you interview later on was like, it was really kind of my idea, because Steven Spielberg is I saw the interview. The words came out of his mouth that he said, you know, my favorite candy was Eminem's, And so I thought when Eminem's passed, I thought, well, what's my second favorite can candy. It's Reese's Pieces. I saw other things say it was one of Spielberg's kids say that was his favorite. I saw others that said there was this guy named Steve Adler who was the vice president of merchandising for a company called MCA, the Merchandising Corporation of America, which was a subsidiary of Universal, And it was kind of like the early days of moving merchandising period, like Star Wars kind of busted it wide open a few years before. Oh yeah, so this is sort of a newish thing and like brand placement and getting money for that kind of thing. So Steve Adler was a merchandising VP at MCA, and he says that it was his kid who said.
I love Reese's Pieces, and that kid was me exactly. So that's how it ended up. Like Hershey said no, sorry, Eminem Mar said no, we're not gonna We're not gonna spend a million dollars. That was the deal. Universal said this this alien that everybody's gonna love. We're just sure of it is going to eat either Eminem's or Reese's pieces. It comes down to who wants to pay a million dollars in advertising, like spend a million dollars in marketing in return for basically being part of the ET marketing blitz. Who wants to do that? And Eminem said, no, we're not going to do that, and Reese's said, let's give this a try. There was There's a guy named Jack Dout who is a business development VP, who was basically the person who decided to take that risk and spend a million dollars, which at the time there's a lot of money. We're talking about nineteen eighty eighty one eighty two dollars, so it's worth like two and a half million dollars today at least. And like ET is, this is where the hindsight is twenty twenty thing kicks in. Like they didn't see a script. Nobody knew what ET was. Aliens up to that point were not lovable or huggable. They were creepy and weird. So there really was a risk that Jack daw took and he can take a victory lap for making that decision.
Yeah, and ET is.
You know, the rest is history, as they say, because ET is now a top thirty all time grocer domestically for the United States the Green Grocer. I went down the box office Mojo rabbit hole out of curiosity because it's just littered with avatars and Avengers and stuff like that and e t if you kind of dig in. It is the number two all time movie that is not a franchise movie. Nice, so not bad, second only to Titanic. Oh, okay, and guess what, Barbie's already at number fifteen all time.
I know that's pretty great and then amazing. I finally saw Oppenheimer too. My god, it's a good movie.
Yeah, how are your ears?
They're fine. I saw it in like RBX or RPX or DMX or something like that, where like it shakes the seats and everything. I'm like, this is unnecessary.
It's loud.
Yeah. Also, just for you movie trivia buffs, if someone asked you a trivia question about non franchise box office Titanic, then et and the number three all time movie non franchise.
Passion of the Christ.
What Yeah, Wow, big movies like three hundred and something million bucks.
But that's I mean, that's considering it even was boycotted by lots of churches around the world, and that still made that mon Well, maybe why no publicity. No, there's such a thing as bad publicity.
That's right.
The swings you don't take are the ones that you missed the most.
All right, let's finish up here with a little quick we'll go through this quickly. Monday night football set the TV landscape for you. In the nineteen sixties, there were three main networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. ABC was in last place. There was also a fledgling network from Howard Hughes, which I didn't realize called Hughes Sports Network.
That was ahead of his time, very.
Much ahead of his time, and even though they showed like bully and stuff. But at one point the National Football League decided, you know what, there's Pete Roseus, a commissioner back then, very forward thinking guy. He said, I think we should have a prime time football game. How about Friday night? And they said, no, that'll mess up high school football. And he said Saturday night and they said no, there's actually a law against that because college football.
I forgot about that.
So he said, all right, we already played on Sunday. He said, how about Monday night and they said, no, one's going to care. They played the first Monday night game in nineteen sixty four, but it was not televised, and then they had I think CBS and NBC had because CBS had the NFL, NBC had the AFL before the merger in nineteen seventy, and they each tried their hand at Monday night games a couple each during sixty eight, sixty seven through sixty nine, but none of those are televised, and they finally got together and said, these things need to be on TV.
Yeah, so they started putting them on TV. And apparently one of the reasons why is because you said, you know, some of those Monday night games, the early ones weren't televised, but people still went to them. They turned out like aces. So it was very obvious that there was a market for this, so putting it on TV wasn't It was not a no brainer. It was still very risky, but there was there was reason to think it might take off. So I think CBS and NBC, since they already had a relationship with the NFL, they got first first refusal from Peter Roselle. Yeah, and NBC said that would mean we're preempting Carson and apparently we're too afraid to even bring it up. So no, we're passing on that.
No, Carson, have you killed?
CBS said, are you crazy? We're getting great ratings with the Doris Day Show and laughing, we can't, we can't get rid of those for some football game. And ABC just was like, you know that that nerdy kid in class that has their hand up so high it's about to be dislocated from their shoulder and they're just waggling in their seat. That's what ABC was doing. And finally Peter Roselle is like, guess ABC, you can have it.
That's right, and uh, you know it turned out to be a very big deal.
There's a guy named Rune Hardly there that kind of spearheaded this project for ABC Sports flashio graphics, more cameras, more camera angles and slow mo and stuff like that, like using all this sort of newer technology more than they had before.
You have to say, and.
The biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for the next three minutes. The biggest change was they all of a sudden had three a three person broadcasting team, which had never been done. It was always just a color commentator and a play by play person, but in this case they had the play by play guy and Keith Jackson only there for one year, then replaced by Frank Gifford, and then Dandy Don Meredith was the color guy. Very he was an actor, former Cowboys, QB. Handsome, just great in the color position.
And then people who don't know what you're talking about, what the color position is?
Oh, well, the play by play is the is the person that goes. And then he takes the ball on the four yard line and cuts it outside and runs it down to the three tackled hard by number eighty five. And then the color guy comes in and says, I gotta tell you, man, the way they're playing tonight, it looks like they're pretty inspired. I don't know if the cheerleaders are getting them all pumped up or what.
Oh that's great. Okay, Then who was Cosel?
Well, Cosell was Cosell. He was. We should do a full podcast on him. The guy is a is a legend, an amazing broadcaster. You know, was fired in disgrace at one point. But yeah, quite quite a story. But Cosell was just he he was sort of a cerbic and he would make fun of players and people and teams and.
Oh he was the Dennis for mill Time.
Well much better.
But you know, Cossel was very famous for sort of verbally sparring with Ali and going toe to toe with Ali in interviews, and just a great broadcaster while he was doing his job, and he was the third sort of wild card, and he and Don Meredith would go at it and when when Gifford came in, that was really a solid team and they it was a huge hit. I think it's still one of the highest rated TV series period on television.
Yes, and it's one of the longest running too, although it started in nineteen seventy, right.
Yeah, did we even say what day was it was?
Well, it was a Monday in nineteen seventy It was.
The Browns Jets and the Browns won thirty one twenty one, I know that.
And it's been going ever since then. So this thing's been on for fifty three years, but it's it's a baby compared to some of the longest running TV shows in America. General Hospital started in nineteen thirty six, Guiding Light came the year after. Sesame Street's been on even longer. So it's old, but there's older just f yi, Yeah.
For sure, and it bears pointing out The reason they went with the Jets was because the guy from ABC was like, we have to get Joe Namath on TV for this first game, because Joe Namath was a huge football star with the AFL and then when they merged in the NFL and just a huge presence. He was a sex symbol.
And a Brady Bunch.
It was like he and Burt Reynolds were like the two hot guys of the moment and they had to get Namoth in there.
So that's why they went with the Jets.
Smart, Well, you got anything else, I got nothing else? What's our episode on Monday Night football? Everybody? So if you want to know more about all this stuff, we would say head on over to How Stuff Works. You can read the mystery one we left out. And by the way, this was written by our very own Dave Ruse, So hats off Troy Ruse for that. Thank you.
We just have to email Dave separately and make fun of him for calling Reese's Pieces peanut butter and chocolate candies. Yeah that was or not?
That was written by somebody who's clearly never had Reese's Pieces.
I mean, technically you make and say that candy shell is Nope.
Chocolate, Nope, not at all. There's not a drop of chocolate in Reese's pieces.
Well, I don't mean the ingredients, but is it? I mean, isn't it known as a chocolate jop?
No, it's a candy coated peanut butter candy peanut butter confection.
What about M and MS? Is that a chocolate chow?
Totally?
No, it's a candy coated chocolate inside, and then sometimes there's an additional inner nugget of peanutter. God knows what now. But originally all kinds of stuff, it was candy coated chocolate. This is a candy coated peanut butter candy.
I mean, I know what it is. I just didn't know if that was the thinnest proximation of chocolate. Nope.
Well, I think we already kind of kicked it over to house to fork, So that means, of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.
Hey, guys, Love Love Love Love. The show started listening when I was working my very first job after graduation during the pandemic. Spotify kept prompting me to try to listen to stuff you should know, and I thought the title was condescending. It first. I truly thought the podcast would be telling me about the stuff I already should know at this point in my life, like, oh, here's how to fold laundry, or here's how to do your taxes. The joke's on me, though, because I think one of the first episodes I listened to was about Satanism.
Why don't you know about that? All? Right?
Exactly at this point wherever I started to get into something, i'd do a quick search on the podcast first to see if you've covered it before checking out Google. You two are great teachers to make every single topic of hoot. So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into sailing and I saw you.
I haven't even skimmed the surface.
I think you should look into sailing guys, because it's really interesting. Sneak preview. The wind is technically pulling, not pushing your boat.
Yeah, Buck pester Fuller said, the wind sucks instead of blows.
See, you can't teach you anything. You know that stuff already.
You may taught me that, so I got a head tip her.
Yeah. Well, and he taught her, and he taught us all about the geodesicdom.
That's right, and synergy Chuck.
That's right. Oh all right, that's from Sam and Sam sailing reeks to me of one of those that we would flay a little bit at and just get crushed by sailing enthusiasts.
Yes, but maybe we'll do it anyway.
Well, yeah, why spare sailors. We've done it for chess players, European football players, everybody.
Soccer surfers.
Right. If you want to get in touch with this like Sam did and suggest some topic that you know about that you'd like us to ruin for you, you can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
