Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's lingering somewhere out there, and this is the stuff you should know. It's POGs. It's POGs. That's right. That's other theme song. Way. Actually, I think it's a little more extreme and in your face than that. Yeah. You know who is a big pog enthusiast is friend of the show, Jesse Thorne of the Maximum Fund Network. I did not know that. I've heard him talk about it. I mean he's he's the right age for that wheelhouse and uh, I've heard him talk about it on Judge John Hodgman and with great enthusiasm. And Mom always like, what are POGs? I've never even heard of these? Because I'm an old Yeah, I mean i'd heard the word before, but I had no idea what really they were, what you did with them or anything. Okay, so a little before your time too, then, oh yeah, a lot after my time. I mean you had to basically be ten eleven, maybe twelve, I'll give you thirteen between and nine four very specific niche window. But these things were so big that it's just like if you were a kid in the nineties kind of thing, like you played POGs, Like everybody was playing with POGs for like two years, and it was kind of like the definition of a flash in the Pan fad. Yeah, and we should think how stuffworks dot Com mental floss. Uh, first we feast dot com. That was a good article. It was pretty good. And then military dot Com for a little cherry on top at the end. That's great. We'd like to thank the military industrial Complex for the cherry on top as a whole. So, Um, you're a child of seventies. I'm a child the eighties. We had our own thing. But again, this is a thing of the nineties. And with POGs, um, it's like if you I'm trying to think of a fad that was like big when when we were young, and I really honestly can't think of anything, not nothing akin to this. I mean, like I want to say Nintendo maybe the original any yes, but I would hardly call that a flash in the Pan, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, POGs to me represent something different because they were they had two functions. They functioned as kind of trading cards of sorts, but it was also a game. Uh. And if you're listening and frustrated already, we should say very quickly that POGs these little circular discs, and we'll get into, you know, the ins and outs of them, and this is our one shot at explaining it right here. And there was a played around them, which we will get into as well, but they also functioned as things that kids would were just obsessive about trading, like you have a a Pope John Paul Park and I really want it, so I'm gonna trade you my McDonald's pug and my I don't even know what was popular in the nineties, but yeah, that was probably be about it. There definitely were I've seen pictures of them on the internet. Sure that means it's real. I don't know if anybody went to the trouble of photos shopping that, but I guess it's possible. We should question everything we see on the internet, I guess. And this also crosses over with The Simpsons because very famously Millhouse traded Bart's soul away for a set of POGs in one episode. That's right, and it comes full circle, Chuck, because there were a lot of Simpsons POGs as well. Oh, I'm sure can you name the character of um that were on the POGs that Millhouse traded for? Do you know? Yes? What alf h there were Alpha's back and pog form. That's pretty funny. Yeah. So what I was trying to get out earlier was like there was like this, um the POGs were like a huge, huge flash in the pan fad that just burned white hot and then just went away very quickly. But the thing that makes them interesting is not so much that there were some you know, neat to year trend in the nineties, but that they were actually based on a much older game, and that that was actually based on a much older game as well, and that it was just almost like this the most recent iteration of this idea for a game that just keeps popping up every few hundred years and makes you wonder when it's going to pop up again in the future. Yeah, which I think make is a good distinction that makes it kind of cooler and more interesting then Definitely your average Furby or unless there were ancient Furbies that we don't know about, they've yet to be discovered. A kettle hy Yeah, that's a movie you have. Furbie was discovered ancient Furbies. Those things were kind of nineties too, right, They were after our time, I think, so. I don't know much about Furbies, but this is, you know, this is in a long line of our sort of pop culture toys Forgotten Toys episodes. Yeah, now that you mentioned it, we probably should have saved this one for Christmas. Yeah, we'll find something else. So we were talking about how POGs, this game, these little discs that you you play with, were based on a much older game. And uh, it turns out that there was a person, a woman who was a teacher and a guidance counselor in Hawaii at um Way, a Lua elementary school in Oahu who in to gather around children. I noticed that you guys are playing a little rough on the playground. That dodgeball has been coated with um tar and broken glass, and I'm not very happy about that. I want you guys to try something different. Let's try something that my grandparents used to play and that I played when I was a little kid your age, and it's called milk caps. I'm gonna show you how to do it. And she introduced these kids to this game of milk caps, and you would think it would be kind of snoozy, but I think this demonstrates just how engrossing but also simple the game of poggs actually is that this old timey game captured these school kids attention and then just spread like wildfires. It's been put. Yeah, her name was She's got a great name. Her name was Blossom Galbiso, fantastic name. And this is like you said in and sadly she passed away in so she, I guess got to see some of the light, bright burning of kind of what she brought to the forefront of the children's She did playgrounds, she did. I've seen interviews with her, and um, there were plenty of photos of her, like people knew where this came from as it was going on to maybe she didn't see it die off, which would be kind of really nice. Oh, yes, last to live. It would be really nice, actually, it would be. Yeah, she burned bright and hot and short like her creation. Should we do we go back to Japan or should we talk more about this? And then? Yeah, I think we should talk more about milk caps and then take it back from there, because um, she used to play this as a kid, and I think she was born in nine and so say she was playing this in late fifties, early sixties. But like I said, her grandparents. I guess, like she said through me, her grandparents had played it as well. So this game of milk caps was just like POGs. They were, um, you would use these little cardboard discs, and they were called milk caps because they were actually the caps that you would get on a bottle of milk. They would use a cardboard cap to seal the bottle of milk, and and I think they would put like a rubber thing around it to hold the cardboard cap on. But for all intents and purposes, the cap was this little cardboard disc and it would have like the dairy's name on it and the information and probably like you know, the latest day. It could be sold by that kind of thing. Um. But when you took these things off and you stacked them up into a pile, you could make a pretty good game out of them, a game called milk caps, right, And we'll get to the exact game play in a second. But they were playing with milk caps mainly. Uh. They're on MAUI from or I'm sorry in a wahu from these milk caps from Maui, the Leia Khala Dairy who um, you know they were they were sending this milk all over the place. They were actually packaged by a or getting packaging from a Canadian company that were actually manufacturing these caps, and they were making the milk. It was just fine. Sure, they did a great business. But then they decided to make a new drink called Passion Orange Guaba or Passion Fruit orange guava p o G. And it was like, it sounds it's a little mixed juice drink. It sounds amazing. It does, doesn't it. Yeah, I can't wait to try it one day. I bet it's good. So those little caps, you know, that's where they got the name. It was Passion food orange guaba. So they became known as pog caps. And even though you know, as the years trickled on the very few years that it burned white hot, there were many other caps. It was sort of like the Kleenex, Like, everyone called him poggs, regardless of where they came from. Right, I'm sure there's plenty of people who played with POGs as kids and had no idea that it was an acronym for passion fruit, orange and guava. You know, I bet most kids didn't know that. But because it was that dairy, Um, what is it? Uh? I practiced saying it a bunch of times because we just screwed up so badly on our Hawaiian Overthrow episode. I would say cola, I think it is, but I think the accents actually on the last syllable. Yeah. But so this because it was a dairy, they were just using milk caps for their pog juice as well, because they're packaging it very similarly. But because people didn't really buy milk and bottles anymore, the pog caps were much easier to come by because everybody was drinking pog because ostensibly it was just this delicious drink, so so um exactly. So Blossom Galbiso and her Young Awards started like bringing these caps in from school and then eventually writing to Um the dairy and asking for them, and then eventually writing to stand pack like you were saying, and saying, do you have any more of these caps that we can get? Because we're we we could use them, and we don't. We drank so much pog we all have diabetes now, but um, we still want to play, but we just can't drink anymore. Pog that's right. And Stampac I don't think I named it. That was the Canadian packaging company, Yes, yeah, which is still around today. Yeah yeah, I looked him up. You can buy all sorts of lids. I cannot find those cardboard Paul inserts any longer. But if you want some um to go coffee lids, STAYM pack is your company to This episode, by the way, is brought to you by Stampa. Uh. Do they still have the pod juice? You can still get that, right? I think it's like in a carton now. Yes, Um, I could not find it anywhere. I don't know if you have to be on the West coast to find it, but you can make your own. It's just equal parts passion fruit, quava, and orange. I've also seen that's best served ice cold, and um, I bet it's good with the vodka. I saw a recipe with vodka, yes, and then also one with aquavite and rum, which sounds pretty great. It does, And now I'm seeing it's on a big box website that we dare not name. Okay, that is not I don't think that that is Jlakla Dairy's version. I think that's another company's because I saw that on the same big box website and they can call it pog Yes, and we'll get to y well, gosh, good point. Yes, we see it full circle on this big box website. All right, I think we should take a break. This is too much intrigue even for me to take. Uh. And then we'll come back after this and talk about it's more ancient traditions. Right after this. Boo, yeah, all right, so we're back. We got Bloss. It's early nineties. Blossom Galbiso is worried about violence on the playground, introduces these kids to this sort of antiquated silly game and they love it, they do. But how did this thing get to Hawaii to begin with? I can I can tell you how it got there. I can actually tell you the date, Chuck. Let's hear it. February a ship called the City of Tokyo spelled t ok Io arrived in Hawaii um with nine hundred Japanese immigrants aboard looking for work in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii. And that was the first Japanese immigrants in the modern age who showed up in the late nineteenth century and began this huge influx of Japanese immigrants. And you might say, well, what the heck does that have to do with milk caps? And I would say, calm down, subtle down, I can tell that, uh, And then I'd I'd wait a little while until I had gotten to the to the point where I feel like you have calmed down, and then I would proceed with It's actually based Milk Caps is based on a Japanese game that these Japanese immigrants presumably brought with them because it was that popular in Japan. That's right. It was called Manko, Emmy and Ko, and it was a card game in Japan that came about in the Kamakura period from about five three b c e. That's pretty old. And so what happens in that game as a player puts down a card and then their opponent tries to flip that card over by throwing their card. It sounds really difficult because it sounds like it's just one card that you're throwing it another single card. It's way harder than pog and if you flip the card over, you get both of those cards again. Not like POGs in in one way in the gameplayway, which we'll get to, but Minko was very much like Pog and that these little uh cards actually had symbols of cultural icons in Japan. They had warriors on there and wrestlers. They were not uh, they were cardboard later on by I think they were like wood or ceramic or clay earlier on. Yeah, and when they were a game called I think mang Ghetto, Uh, they were made of clay. And they actually more resembled pog chips um or disks before than they did than Manko did, because Manko turned them into like what looked like I think they are considered the predecessor of trading cards. Um, these Manko cards, right, So, but before that, when they were little clay tablets, they were little disc shapes and they had like pictures and everything on them, so they seemed more like POGs then than they did by the time they arrived in Hawaii. But again, just trying to flip over a disc by throwing another disc at it, it seems really difficult to accomplish to me. It definitely does. So. Um what the kids in Hawaii did with this game of Manko was they They turned it into this milk cap game using milk caps, which were widely available to them, and rather than one milk cap trying to overturned another old cap, you just stack a bunch of them together and try to overturn as many as you could. Blood easier, way easier, so much easier that like you could really get the interests of some like six twelve thirteen again is as high as I'm going to um year old kids attention, you know, Yeah, And it probably matters about your family and birth order, because if you're I could see maybe if you're a fourteen year old only child getting into it, But if you're fourteen and you've got a nine year old little brother or sister, you're gonna make fun of their POGs. Yeah, if you're a what was it a Juliet, right, you're allowed to play POGs at fourteen? No? No, no, that's what child, Poor little Juliet. So she's got this game going, Blossom has got this game going, or I guess they called her Miss Albiso. And there was a man named al In Rapinsky who saw dollar signs. It is crazy because, like we said, stand Pack was making these bottle caps in Canada and he said, you know what kids are really like in this game. I'm really curious how he had his fingers so on the pulse. That's what I'm saying. He was in California and this is just going on in Hawaii, and it's not like Hawaii and California don't communicate at all, or didn't in the eighties or early nine. Well, it's it started to come over. And when it did start to come over to the mainland, it definitely started in California first, so right, but I have the impression that he brought it over to the main land, that he found out about some hot trend that had just started in Hawaii and got in on it from California. That's my take on it. Well, you know, it doesn't help is every article I read says he somehow caught wind right exactly. He might have gone over their own business or something. Who knows, what's what all these kids doing throwing these bottle caps all around? That's yeah, either that or else somebody told them about it and he was like, wait, what are you what are you talking about? I want to know more about it. He was a guy who had a real nose for potential. Like he was the man who bought the patent for a little leather protectant um that was called trying on I think at the time, but he turned it into arm all. He was the guy that brought the world armor all. He didn't invent it, but he figured out how to market it and turn it into something huge. Um. Remember that non wrinkle spray you could spray your clothes and it would get the wrinkles out. I think it was called wrinkle Free or something like that in the eighties. He marketed that just a bunch of like interesting stuff. So he found out about POGs. He caught wind of it one way or another. I bet I know how it happened how. I bet he went to Hawaiian business is always kind of keen to his you know, goings on around him because he's always looking for that next million dollar idea. And he saw the first fist fight breakout with these kids over a set of POGs that they wanted to trade or or a winner take all game. And he saw this bloodthirst and was like, I can make money off of that. Yeah. That, And then he did the other thing he was well known for. He ran over and broke up the fight by spraying both of the combatants with armor all and they just slipped right off of one another and couldn't land a single punch, And when they got wrinkled up, he sprayed then with Wrinkle's great story. So, yeah, you're probably right, because that is kind of what the ultimate destiny of poggs was, and he was largely responsible for that because um if if blossom Galbiso was the mother of poggs. This guy was the father of pos. He was the guy who and as far as I know, you know, they were not in any way meritally related or anything like that. They were just related by POGs. But he took it and just introduced the world to it, um just as this marketing guy. And he actually formed a group called the World Pog Federation within I think a year of Blossom gal Beasts introducing this for the first time to her students in Hawaii. The World Pog Federation had been created by Alan Rapinski and his his company. Yeah, and he did something very very key to this story or in this story, uh kind of when you mentioned about Jakala and the fact that they did not have great financial gain from this, it's because Rapinsky saw the writing on the wall and said, hey, why don't you sell me that brand name, that Pog brand name, because like who cares? Like you don't care, right, you're just pumping out this juice. You can still pump out that juice. And they said sure, and they sold them the Pog brand name, and that was it. They were sort of cut out of. Uh. I mean, I guess for a little while they still people were maybe buying their stuff a little more than usual to get these Pog caps, but that they weren't like getting juice. Uh No pun intended from you know, from like the rights to sell these things. They were as a matter of fact, from what I from what I can tell, I think I saw in like an l A Times article or something from the nineties that they got Yes, so it wasn't like entirely like you know, this l A businessman fleeced some Hawaiian dairy farmers entirely like they were cut in. But I think the big thing is like that as far as the dairy was concerned, they had no real role in this other than accepting, you know, some money and that for a few years. I guess, sure, yeah, sure, And that's a bit of a it was ultimately a misstep on their part. But Rapinsky, you know, he's very much credited with, you know, introducing this to the world, but he's also credited with making this thing burned so hot that it was just inevitable that it was going to last a very very short time. And a lot of people kind of say, you know, that was a screw up. He shouldn't have done it like that. But I also had the quesssion that he knew that this thing no matter what he did. It's not like POGs were always going to be around, that they were the new baseball cards or anything. So I think he came along I was like, we need to get as much money as we possibly came out of this because it's not going to last for very long. And he proceeded to do that. Yeah, So he created the pog man, the mascot. Like he said, they started having these tournaments everybody. I mean, I was not kidding about Pope John Paul. I think they bought like fifty thousand the Catholic Church POGs when the Pope came to New Jersey to give them out. Um Bill Clinton was on one. They had altruistic campaigns had that Dare the Dare Not to Do Drugs campaign started making POGs, and of course the major chain restaurants got involved in Del Taco and Taco Bell and McDonald's, Disneyland, everybody, anything that you could put on a pog because you know, these kids are holding these things and tradeings these these things. It was like liquid gold to an advertiser because they were everywhere and kids were fighting, like literally fighting over them. So anyone and everyone tried to get an image on a pog cap, even if it wasn't the official, like licensed one. Yeah. I mean like if you released a movie during the pog era, you probably made POGs for especially if I was a alph. Yeah. Um, there's there's a set of pulp fiction ones that are pretty cool. Yes, there are. I would think that would be just on a bubble. I would think so too, but nope, it was they. I've seen it with my own eyes. Well that somebody could have photoshopped him, but um, Jurassic Park had a set of hologram ones that were pretty cool. I think somebody tried to sell them for a million million dollars on EVA, and I don't believe they actually got a million dollars for him people. I think that's probably about how it went, because you know, people want POGs to be worth a lot more than they are, and they're just not. I mean, it's too recent, there's too many of them. Um. When I saw that seemed legitimately like about a hundred dollars was a Stucy one, which was super cool. It's like silver shine, Yeah, and then it's got like the reggae colors on it and everything. It's a pretty cool pog, to tell you the truth. Yeah, I don't even know if I would have been in the wheelhouse. Like I think a lot of this depends on and we'll get to this in a second, like you're you're playing at school some but then the schools try and shut it down because it's very disruptive. So then you have to live in one of those great neighborhoods where there's thousands of houses and kids are just all over the place. And you know, as I've said before, I grew up in the woods on two acres of land with nary another child in sight except for my brother. So I think it kind of depended on that kind of after school trading in the cul De sact thing that I never got a piece of. No, you had to play POGs with dirt friend, the pile of dirt you named your friend. I did have dirt friends. Funny. I wasn't trying to be funny. Okay, there is nothing funny about that, chuck um mighty more from power rangements were another big one. Oh of course, I'm sure those. Yeah, that was a big deal at the time, very huge. And then like so yeah, if you if you wanted to brand the kids, this was a great opportunity to do it. Now, legitimately you had to go through the World Pog Federation because all these things were supposedly POGs, and if you wanted to print your own pog it didn't matter who you were. You had to go license the ability to do this from Alan Rapinski and the World Pog Federation. The problem is if you own the license the trademark to a little cardboard disc that anybody could make if they wanted to. Like, the technology is really easy and low hanging to make these kind of things that yes, it's going to be like a large business like Taco Bell, who's just not going to be bothered with a major lawsuit that will cost them more than it would to license the rights to make POGs and give them out as like, you know, some promotional tool. Um. But any like, anybody who's even remotely interested in the knockoff market just doving head first into POGs, and the market became saturated really fast, not just with Rapinski's officially licensed POGs, there are plenty of those, but also just knockoffs galore. Yeah. There there's a couple of staggering statistics here. Uh. It says here in California alone, at one point, POGs we're selling ten million dollars a week in one state and then uh and of course Jesse thorns from California, so it may have been I mean, I know they were nationwide and then worldwide, but I get the feeling that California was a real pog hot spot. That's my impression as well. But in nineteen well, I guess there is pulp fiction year, um, three hundred and fifty million POGs sold, so it was yeah, it was still going strong. And ninety four yeah, yeah, so kids were trading gimp uh gift boggs. That's exactly one that say like I'm about to give medieval on. Yeah. So we we can conclude then, Chuck. Since they were still going strong in Blossom, Galbiso died. She did not have to see the end of the pog trend. She she went out on top, look at that detective work. Isn't that great? And they buried her with a pog of the back of thing Raimes's head. That's right, with a band aid on it. You want to take another break, sure quickly, that one of plug. Since we're talking pulp fiction, I had Jack O'Briens e guist on and we talked to pulp fiction and it's out in the world and it was a great discussion. So if you like pulp fiction and movie conversations, check it out. And Jack O'Brien too. Jack's the best. We'll be right back. Okay, so we're back. POGs have burned bright. They've started to kind of fizzle though, right yeah, And you know I kind of hinted at it. One of the reasons was that schools they had to clamp down on the scene because there were fights over POGs. Because if you play, uh, if you played playing for keeps, that meant and we'll go over the full I guess we kind of went over the game play. But should we Yeah, you want to now? Yeah, I guess. So the first thing you decide is are you playing for keeps or not? Playing for keeps means that you go home with the POGs that you collect from your friends and you don't there's no gives these back ses, uh, and those are those are serious games if you're ten years old. You know, you know what's funny is you just used two terms used for marbles, which bears a striking resemblance to POGs as well, or at least the way you play marbles and some of the rules involved. Yeah, because you collect these things as a kid, and you really if you have to give up that gimpo, Yeah, you're really upset that you've you've lost that thing. So fights would break out and schools start to have to clamp down and literally banned it in quite a few countries at one point. Yeah, because I mean, also, this is a game of chance. We're going to tell you how to play. In a second, it will become very clear that's almost entirely luck. Um. And so it's gambling. There's you know, if you're playing for chips and these things, are you're playing for POGs? I mean, and these things are coveted. Um. Yeah, little little kids don't necessarily deal with loss like that, especially sudden, unexpected loss that they hadn't really anticipated the consequences of. Um. And yeah, you can get and fight to accuse people of stealing. It's it was. POGs became problematic very quickly. But this was also during the same era where Bart Simpson, you know, touting that he was an under achiever, got t shirts of Bart Simpson banned in schools. So schools were seemingly a little stricter back then in the early nineties than they are today, although I can't say that they are today. It just seems strict now in retrospect. Yeah, I think that's right. Um, And I'm gonna stop the people from emailing you right now. Do you a favor, my friend, because you said that it's basically luck and I guarantee you there are some thirty something to early forty something Paul enthusiasts they're really mad at you right now that had their POG technique down that they claim was like superior to their friends and that there was skill involved. Well, I appreciate emails. You're saving me a bunch of time replying to all those emails saying you are wrong, wrong, wrong, because yeah, it is luck. So yeah, so let's talk about how to play this right. So, um, when you play pog, you need basically a flat surface and a bunch of POGs. You need at least one other person, and from what I was reading on the internet, it seemed that that was usually how many people were in a pog match. There's two on one right, each person puts up the same number of POGs, and apparently the ideal stack of POGs is twelve. So each person is ponying up six POGs. Whether you coveted or not, I don't know. That's only if you want to follow the unofficial Pog and Cat Player's Handbook written by Jason Page exactly, who probably knows what he's talking about, at least more than I do. So I'm going with his number. So you form a stack of POGs and um, you get what your hands on. What's called a slammer up. You got to say that part? Oh thanks man. So yeah, if you look at a pog on one side, is basically what you like is the design on the other side through the blank or there's minimal design on it. It's very clear that there's one side that's like the face and you said their face up or down. You put him face up. So you've got your stack with Bill Clinton on top and the other stack with the gamp on top, going head to head, and that is how you start the game. Oh is it okay? So my understanding was that they were all in one stack. Oh no, no no, no, yeah, yeah, sorry chee okay, okay, people are so mad at me right now. So then so they put them up against each other. Then you'd stack them on like all all on one. Yeah, okay, so you've got a stack of twelve POGs. We should probably edit and reduce this whole thing. I think this is good. And then you take a slammer, and slammer is basically a pog shaped object that it's almost like a mini hockey puck. It's made of um, heavier material than pog than like cardboard, so it's like um like glass, like a heavy glass kind of thing, or rubber or metal or something like that. I wonder if there are restrictions on that. No, this is a free f all. Man Pog was a free fall, which is why the parents just didn't get it. You know why they couldn't stand it. You could so you could bring in like an iron slammer. I think so I saw that somewhere that that it was frowned upon among players because the metal would often dent at least the top pog, and if that was your pog, you might be like, man, that was what you do in my po right. Other than that, I don't think that there were restrictions on although you know, I'm sure informally there were a N and zipper. But you you would take the slammer and you would toss it down. Now here's the part where you're referring to earlier that people were going to email in about, because it does take some technique to slam this thing down. Because if you miss, or if you if you actually don't move the stack at all, that's your turn. The other person gets their turn next. Um, So it does take some technique to hit the stack in the first place, but then also to scatter him in a certain way, right, And it's the scattering that's the most important part of playing pog. Yeah, and you know what, I know we're gonna get emails. I guarantee you. This is a game that had regional variations. It's just got to be. It's one of those kids games where one playground might play it slightly different than another their playground as far as the rules go, absolutely, and that's I'm gonna stand by that because I know we're gonna get people that are going to contradict one another and say that their version was like how they played it was the right way. But until I read that book by Jason Page, which I'm never gonna do. Oh, I don't know, maybe somebody will mail it to you. So, yeah, you slam this thing down and these, uh, this stack of POGs, if you hit it right, is gonna kind of scatter everywhere, like you said, And then some of them will have flipped over with the face side down. Some will remain face side up, and that is sort of the key to the whole game. Yes, So the ones you've the ones that have landed face side up, you get to keep. If it was your turn. Now, those might be your buddies POGs, they might be your POGs, it doesn't matter. Then you take the ones that are still face side however they were stacked up, I think you're saying, and then you put them back into another stack, and now it's the other player's turn, and you keep going back and forth until all of the POGs have been turned over and kept. And however many POGs you turned over, that's how many you get to keep. And you know, again whether it's your POGs or the other person's POGs. Ideally it's everybody's pots. And then there was another there's another variation I saw that seems to have been pretty widespread. It was the poison pog. And these were usually like kind of a Memento moriy kind of thing, like scary skulls on fire and you know, like an eight ball kind of thing um, and it would say poison pog and the poison pog if you put one of those in the stack, if you flip that one over, then you got all the all the POGs in that stack on that one turn. Okay, I didn't see that. And this is another frustration, because I went to some YouTube videos of like gameplay videos, and I saw several that had described the game played differently than the others, which leads me to think that there were variations. Because I saw one person say that you get to keep the POGs that are faced down, and that flies in the face of everything I had heard from everyone else, right, Yeah, and I think it just it's flipping it over from the way it was before. I don't think it actually matters, but but yes, you would want to you keep the ones that you flip over, whether now they're face up or down. Who cares, right? And then I saw another where they said that you stack them every other one is face up or down. But I didn't see that verified anywhere else either, So yeah, I didn't run into that one. Yeah, I just you know, people should say like these were Michigan rules, you know, or something, right, So you know that slammer the heavier object that you throw onto the pog stack. Um, you can make them out of all sorts of things, and they have different They often had different like imagery on them as well. But I saw one. I saw this in multiple places. There was an O. J. Simpson one where it had a picture of Jimpson's behind behind bars, so he was in the slam so he was on the slammer as well. That must have been a legendary slammer, because I did. I saw that in a couple of plays. Slammer. I wonder if he got a piece of that. I don't think so, man, And I don't think he's legally allowed to keep it even if he did. And then one day he would break into a hotel room and steal those slammers. That's where I'd give you the slammers. Get him back, man. I saw a documentary on that robbery. It was nuts. Oh really, yeah, I guess it was no, no, no, I'm sorry it was that. Um what was that like five part series on O J and the murders and everything that did it? I don't remember. I know it was just a documentary, I think, yeah, but the documentary series, but yeah, they covered that robbery too, and it was just just so casual and dumb and so casually dumb too, you know, it really wasn't. So let's see. I think we've explained how to play POGs about as thoroughly as you possibly can, don't you think, So let's talk about how they finally fizzled out. Well, you know, like I said earlier that I think the banning on the playgrounds and then the banning or or at school, and then um, I think the US, Canada, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, the UK and Australia all banned these pieces in schools, and so that's gonna put a damper on something. If you're stuck at dumb school all day and you can't have your POGs and you're just limited to the hours between three and six when mom and dad call you back to eat dinner. Okay, on the one hand, but I also saw a contemporary piece of journalism in the interviewed the founder of um Trove USA, which was a big pog maker at the time, and uh, he speculated that those school bands actually increased pog sales and pro that, but also probably prolonged interest because if kids have been free to play these all the time, they would have lost interest that much, that much faster. I mean, I think ultimately that's what happened. It's it's like any or It's like many kid fads that it just it becomes not cool. You age out of it a little bit, and maybe the kids below you weren't interested, and it just goes away. I mean, I don't I don't think there's a smoking gun here to you besides o j um. Uh. Yeah, I would say, oh j is probably the culprit for why bogs went away. Yeah, I think they said in Boys Life Magazine. In the issue of Boys Life Magazine, they basically said it was it was done and not cool anymore. So, yeah, they compared it to things like, um, what's that one where you chase a hoop with a stick? Yeah, like that, and playing marbles and all these old time he's fads. They included pog among them already. Boys I said, then it probably meant it went out by exactly, it was super out by then. So we kind of mentioned Chuck that Holla Kala dairy um did not really benefit from this, and they did financially, I'm sure cut of all of that hundreds of millions of dollars that was flowing to the World Pog Federation for a couple of years definitely boosted their annual revenue, I'm sure. But if you, you know, talk to most people and say what does what does paug actually mean, they probably couldn't tell you. And so in that respect, a lot of the articles that I think both of us have seen about this have pointed out quite rightly that you know that the dairy really missed an opportunity to become like legendary or become a part of the trend, and they were very quickly separated. Poggs became their own thing in isolation with with no boost whatsoever to the dairy. Now there's kind of like this kind of retro nod to it that that enough time has passed, enough people have written and talked about it, that the dairy has been identified as the source of of POGs originally, but it didn't happen at the time, and in this kind of retrospective about it is not really probably going to help the dairy very much. It was just sad, yeah, and you know why because they were a dairy, right, Like in this one article that they spoke with this creative director at a New York ad agency that was like, you know, this is why you really need to pay attention to what your consumers doing with your brand, Like if they have off brand uses going on, you need to know about to capitalize on it. And look at McDonald's and like they're the perfect company with this stuff. And it's just like, man, they were a dairy that in Hawaii. It didn't they didn't. They weren't paying attention to that, and they shouldn't have been expected to. I don't think sure, no, no, and certainly not. And I think also it's one of those things where the only way that they possibly could have capitalized as if they had taken the gamble that this is going to be an enormous bad which would take a tremendous amount of foresight, and then also would have had to have hired like a publicist like the guy that was um interviewed or quoted in that article. Like they would have had to have figured it out, and then they could have possibly bungled it. It It would have been a big, a big deal. But also, yeah, they're they're like you said, they're just they're a dairy and and that's not the way that they're thinking. But yeah, and in hindsight, it's very easy to blame him. But regardless, I mean it is it is a little sad that they got kind of left behind, but I don't think that they were any like worse for the wear from not having been on the pog crest along with the little caps a little mill. Uh, should we go to our cherry on top here at the end. Yeah, thanks to the U. S. Military for this cherry on top. Again. Yeah, this is interesting because I had no idea about this, and uh, I should talk to my brother in law because he's certainly been stationed overseas. But um, so, the Army and Air Force exchange service stores. These are you know, let's say, if the military is a seas in the Middle East or whatever, they're in Afghanistan and they set up these sort of temporary on base stores. They started issuing POGs, these little cardboard coins in November two thousand one. Because they were lighter than metal coins, you could ship them a lot cheaper overseas, and it was supposed to be like a temporary thing, and you know, it said how much it was worth, basically, but then they started having uh, pictures on it and and comic book characters and NASCAR drivers and stuff like that. People just can't resist. No, But they were essentially POGs, and you know, I don't see anything that they actually played the game, but they functioned as currency for American service people in Afghanistan since two thousand one until just recently. Yeah, and then this um was it military dot com article, Yeah, where they were basically you know, they interviewed a few people who seemed a little like ver Clemp that these things are phased out, because they were like this kind of weird little part of their their tour that had that you just wouldn't find anywhere else in the world. And the whole reason the military adopted POGs overseas, at least an Afghanistan, is because it's just so much easier to chip um to ship them and to chip in. Using them requires less effort to toss them into the pot. But the like if you I think a hundred dollars and quarters, I saw ways almost six pounds and a hundred dollars in these little POGs. Ways, you know, a fraction of that. So just in shipping costs alone, it made sense. But apparently these these pog coins worm their ways into the hearts of the U. S. Soldiers in Afghanistan. I love it. Yeah, well, so long POGs, and so long the to the military reincarnation of POGs. There are no POGs anywhere now in the world at all. If you want to know more about POGs, just start looking them up on the internet and see what you think. And since I said that's for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this slime Mold enthusiasts. And it's not from you. I know there's a fellow slime Old Enthusiasts I'm one of them. Do now, Hey, guys, loved your slime Old episode. To figure it, I should crawl out from under the leaf litter and get in touch. Uh. It's pretty good, Huh. I got slime Olds about ten years ago for a kid's lecture and started giving it away so other people could play with these funky, chilled out beings without having to fork over hard to earn cash. You can drive them out on paper, cut them into portions and pop them in the post, which makes things very easy. Things kind of snowball quickly. I've now posted it to this means mailed for our American listeners. Very nice. I've now posted it to around twenty five countries. RAND stands at the UK's biggest science fair, giving out thousands of cultures, and I've gotten and I've got three thousand about to go to Milan for an art exhibition. I am been selectively breeding them. That's very awesome. He calls them his pets. He said they're they're much better travel than I am. He said, they're fantastic things for children and adults to play with. Giving it a selection of different foods, seeing what will go for as as a firm favorite with school classes of all ages. Would you like some guys? Yes, please, they're easy to keep the same deal as everyone else. It's free and uh there's a there's a website here. I don't know if this is just for us or if it's for everyone. Well let's say it and then um we can edit it out if if he's like, no, please don't really say that. Okay, it's either you're either gonna hear a long beep. Okay, that censorship www dot tiny u r l dot com slash slime manifesto and this has instructions in the backstory. I bet that's for everyone. The only thing you got wrong, Chuck is that it's www period. Oh yeah, that's right, and we get mad at pet ants. Are you taking a passive aggressive shot at me right now? No, it's it's fully aggressive. Thanks to everyone on your team for your brilliant episodes. My job as a microscopist means I'm usually alone in the dark. Your podcast goes along way to keeping me sane ish cheers. That is from Ian hands Portman, and then he adds this little PostScript. I've accidentally tasted uh fist a room several times. It's easy to do when a half square meter of it is hungry and gets loose in your bag. It tastes like a compost heap smells, but with the added bonus of being incredibly bitter. Wow, this is a great email, Ian, Thank you for this. Yeah, and this is one of the tops of all time. Frankly, has it all? It hasn't something that we're already interested in as an offer to give us something we're already interested for free. It's British and includes accidentally tasting a live organism. Yeah. That that could you know, creepily take over your household? Yeah, or your body now that you've eaten it. That's right. Well, um. Good luck to Ian surviving the slime Old tasting encounter. I hope that you live long enough to send us some free slime old because I will definitely take you upon that for sure, for sure. Thanks again, Ian, And if you want to be like Ian and be super cool, you can send us an email to send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,