Hey, everybody. We are very excited to be going back out on the road in early February to Seattle, Portland's and San Francisco. That's right, February first, second, third, the future. We're gonna be in those fabulous towns on stage for the first time in three years. Chuck. That's right. Tickets are on sale now, go get them, come see us, and you can get those tickets at link Tree slash s y s K Live. That's l I n K t R dot E slash s y s K Live. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, across the country. Even, what a time to be alive, What a time to be alive listening to Stuff you Should Know? Uh? Yes, and should we can? We start off with a little shout out to our colleagues. Yes, for sure, our buddies that stuff they don't want to to know, did something big, huh. They wrote a book like we did. And we are very proud of these guys are colleagues. We've known our friends for so long now mm hmm. And what do they cover? They cover conspiracies, but not like trust me. It's not like this big pro conspiracy thing. No. No, they do a lot of um ripping the lid off of the crack pots. It's a good way to say thank you. Well. What they do is they apply critical thought and critical thinking, which is one thing that's missing a lot when it comes to conspiracy theories, right exactly, because they're all smart dudes and they're pretty down to earth, um and they have a great podcast, and now they have a great book and it's um an eponymous book. Stuff they don't want you to know is the name of the book and the podcast, and I think it just published, Chuck. So that means that you can get it everywhere. I mean everywhere. You can get it at like Eagle Eye Books in Atlanta, you can get it at UM, the Corner Shop, Amazon dot com. Uh, you can get it everywhere in between the stuff they don't want you to know in hardcover because it just came out hot off the presses. As a matter of fact, when you pick up this book, you should probably be wearing other myths because it is that new. That's right. I can't wait to get my own copy. If you're into history, for into reading about proven conspiracies and uh not a bunch of goblody cook then highly recommend. I'm sure you can't wait go check it out. Um, so we're talking today about fake cities, right, yeah, like rock Ridge, rock Ridge, do you get that? No, Oh, it's Blazing Saddles. The name of the real town was rock Ridge. But they at the end of Blazing Saddles Cleveland Little comes up with a g enius plan to build a fake rock Ridge for when the bad guys come in and then they'll blow it up. So well, that's that's sort of kind of what we're talking about today. Yeah, I was gonna say that that, Um mel Brooks like really did his research because there's a there's a lot of reality in that people have done that kind of thing many times over the years, many times, and some are cooler than others. For sure. I can't wait to talk about the Seattle thing that's really cool. Well, which one is not cool? Let's start with that. Well, I don't know about not cool, but possibly not even didn't even really happen. Is in the seventeen hundreds there was a Russian, very famous Russian military leader named Gregory Timken because he's Russian. It's not Gregory, right, it's Gregory with an eye. I don't see a lot of that anymore, hey, greg Although it did have a friend in high school. His last name was Griggs though, all right, I take that back. Yeah, that's way different. But supposedly, as the story goes, they built under his guidance what we're called, um what was called a Potemkin village in order to impress Empress Catherine the Second as she came through town and like, here, look at this great fake town that she would think is real. And then they would supposedly strike the set and then go build it down river, and then she would see and I guess believe it was a different place and like, look, how great we're doing kind of thing. But then I believe, after more digging, historians have said, I don't think they actually did that. It was probably more of a let's get this place all cleaned up for her visit, and somehow history kind of changed that. Yeah, which is I mean, I buy that he was one of Catherine the great favorites of the court, so um, it's possible that he would have gone to all that trouble to please her. Um. Regardless of whether it happened or not. Potemkin Village is now like a whole term for any kind of fake facade that's used generally as some sort of propaganda. The fact that it was kind of like Catherine the Great um centric kind of leads to that that extension of government propaganda. And and there's a very famous North Korean village that's frequently referred to as a Pattempkan village to yeah, the peace village. How are you going to pronounce that North Korean name? I'm going to pronounce it as such Jong Dong. I think that's it. Uh. They also call it propaganda village, while they don't call it that, but other people call it that. Um. But you know the famous d m Z there the Demilitarized Zone, you can you know, you can see this very clean, lovely, modern, prosperous area of North Korea right there from the d m Z. But you know, as far as people speculate, there's really it's kind of just fake. There's nothing there. There's no people, there's no nothing. Yeah, And if you look like closely at it, there's no glass in the windows. Even like it's as far as pattemp and villages go. It's a halfhearted effort if you ask me. The Nazis did this too in World War Two too, you know, disgusting effect as well. Right, Yeah, they did an altered version of it. They took a real village UH and dressed it up in a way for that that suited their propaganda needs. But there was a place called UH. I think it's thair sheen stopped, but that might be wrong. So it was a it was a depot essentially, it was a sorting place for um Jewish Germans and um Jews from other countries the Germany had invaded there were shipped to this place and then they were sorted out and basically sent to different death camps around Germany. So so many people passed through this that even for the short time they were there, conditions were so bad ad that they would um, they would die while they were there. Plenty of people died. But the this thing was such a focal point, It was such a crux of this Nazi death machine that um, if it were you know, revealed for what it actually was, the Nazis plans would have been revealed to the world. So when the Red Cross said we want to see this place that we want to make sure everybody's being cared for appropriately. Um, the Nazis kind of started scrambling there, like give us two weeks. You know. It's funny as I was going to say, give us three weeks. You're you're way more aggressive on your schedule than I. Totally, that's very appropriate. Uh yeah, you know, they cleaned it up. They brought in apparently rose bushes. They changed the hospital to a library. They changed the gymnasium or as you would say in Germany, ga nasium into a place of prayer for the Jewish people. They shipped out out anyone who didn't look well basically, and only people who looked healthy and were in good health remain. And you know, they put a town square and made it look like a really lovely thing with swings and sandboxes and even a phony restaurant. And uh, what I didn't see was how it worked. It worked perfectly. The Red Cross came and we're like, oh, this is delightful, and left and then everything just got right back to business after that. So it served its purpose, Like it fooled the Red Cross into going back and telling the rest of the world like, no, the Nazis aren't running death camps. Come on, everybody relaxed. They've got a restaurant and rose bushes. So we know this only because of post World War two history, right. Um. The thing that I saw that makes it just just the the uey gouey evil topping on this horrible Sunday is um. They build it to the rest of the world as a spa town that elderly drewman Jews could go live in in peace and safely. Just when you think you've learned all the bad stuff the Nazis did, Yeah, here comes another one. I've never heard of this before. Surprising. Yeah, and I just wanted to reiterate, Chuck, I hate Nazis. I hate Nazis of today. I hate the Nazis back then. If you're a Nazi, I hate your guts. You can't stand you. You're You're terrible. You're on record. I'm with you. I'm on record too, So I feel like Chuck, Um, you can kind of swing the whole thing back around. It's not necessarily for propaganda, but um, there's there's decoy cities that were essentially created to um well to to act as decoys during wartime. Right yeah, and this was I think this was the initial seat of the idea for this topic. Maybe I don't think anyone said anything in or maybe they did. But the more I started kind of poking around, I was like, wow, there's been a lot of times in history where for one reason or another, a fake city was built old and once I started sort of unpeeling that onion, I was like, wow, there there's been all kinds of fake cities, and decoy cities was a big part of it in World War Two, uh, specifically in Britain what they did at first, it started out as something called a que site, which is when they just said, hey, let's put up like a fake factory or something that will divert uh. The German bombs that way and they'll waste some ordinances and they'll we'll get them off track and confuse them, and more importantly, they won't be bombing the real factories. Uh. And this was I believe the idea of someone named Colonel John Turner. And they said, well that bully to that, sir, that works so well, why don't you go out and build seven fake cities? And he went huh, And they said, hey, it only has to look like a city from a guy throwing a bomb out of a plane, so you don't have to get too fancy. Yeah, that was like a stroke of genius when they figured out, like, yeah, you don't. You can just do like the rough edges of it, because they remembered that they were hiding from bombardiers who were looking for cities that were undergoing blackouts, so that you know, there wasn't supposed to be much of the city visible at all. They would look for maybe somebody had left their door open accidentally, or someone had forgot to extinguish a street light, something like that. So they were able to just kind of make a few structures, put some scaffolding together, and then light it randomly here there, um, and all of a sudden you had the impression of, at least from you know, ten thousand feet or however high up you are when you drop bombs on British cities, um, that it looked like there's your target right there. And it actually worked to great success. It really did work, and they ended up being I believe the first site was called Starfish and so they ended up calling them Starfish Cities just from that first one. But initially they were called special fire sits or s f sites, And part of that had to do with the fact that after the bombing run would go through, they would go through and set little fires and set off a little explosions on their little fake scaffolded city. Uh so again, so the bombardier would look down and say, we got them. Look at that. Look at that beautiful, big firetown there. Yeah. And even more to the point, successive bombardiers that came the next night or whatever would be like, oh, that was the target. They hit it, and now that's where I'm gonna drop my bombs too. Beautiful. Yeah, it really was. And here's the thing though, you said they actually worked, uh and I bailed on you, but I'm back with numbers. They built two hundred and thirty seven of these uh starfish sites or starfish cities, and I think the estimates are they diverted about seven hundred bombing raids and potentially saved about three thousand lives. Pretty great, big success. So um as, Yeah, it was extraordinarily successful. But the British weren't the first um to come up with this idea and leave on little wasn't even the first to come up with it. It was actually our friends, um Leigh Francais uh in Paris. They decided in World War One that they were sufficiently concerned about German zeppelin bombing raids, which has got to be the slowest most just you know, terrible bombing well probably not terrible, but definitely the slowest bombing um around. So they said, we need to we need to find a different site and build a replica of Paris. And the whole idea was to like really rebuild a replica of Paris with the champsi Lisse and the Arc de Triomphe and um, like you don't I don't know if they had plans for an Eiffel Tower. Surely they did, but um they had it in three sections, and the first section they worked on was the industrial section, and eventually that that came to be the only one that was completed. But it sounded like it was pretty amazing. Yeah, I mean they had they were I would love to see pictures of this thing. Did you see pictures? It's pretty cool. I mean, how how to scale was it? It was giant, so they made it life size, but they used you know, um Chinsey materials, so they used like really kind of you know scaffolding like a skeleton of a giant building like that would serve as a like a fake industrial building. And then they would put some sort of like um opaque canvas over it or an opaque covering up subsort, and then light it from inside, so to a bombar deer, it looked like a glass ceiling industrial UM building at night. So they were doing stuff like that. They had UM they had like a little platforms that moved along that were carrying lamps, so it looked like trains moving around the area. Uh. They did it to to really great effect. UM. And apparently the only reason they didn't move on with the rest of the plan was because the French military got good enough at UM shooting down zeppelin's that the Zeppelin attack stopped. The Germans were like, you should probably figure out something faster than a zeppelin to to drop bombs from. Yeah, the difference is like, why are we building these fake cities. Look how slow that thing is. Somebody just shoot a flaming arrow that way, Yeah exactly. We can all just move to the left at our leisure and we'll all be all right. Well, all of this it's funny. Um ed helped us out with this one, and he kind of started out with a section that we're not going to cover about, like movie backlots. But I'm sure all of this stuff, I mean, in World War two and beyond was influenced by the fact that they're like, oh, wait a minute, we're making movies now where we build fake cities. It's a great effect. Like it ain't that hard, right exactly. I mean, it's just I guess it's it must just be one of those ideas that's out there where it's like, we needed a new city, but we don't want to build a whole new city, so let's just build a part of a city, just enough to kind of fool people from a distance. Yeah, the whole backlock thing, bat backlot thing is pretty. It's pretty. It's got its own interesting um story itself. The thing is is, if you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, they had a they had a fake barbershop there. Oh, they had a fake Victorian mansion there. It's like, if you really step back and think about it, you're like, who cares? But for some reason, there's something really engrossing about that kind of stuff. Oh I love it, alright, So that's a good set up there. You ready to take a break, I am, Chuck. Let's take a break right now, all right, and then we'll talk about Seattle stuff you should know, Nash stuff you should know. And speaking of Seattle, Chuck, we're gonna be in Seattle. Had a feeling you're gonna work a live show promo into this. Yeah, we're gonna be in Seattle on February one at the More Theater. That's last February. And this is actually happening to This isn't something we forgot to edit out, like these shows are going on come hell or high water. That's right, We're going to Seattle, to a real city. But one of the cooler stories I think in this episode is the fake city that Boeing built in Uh. This was Boeing was building B seventeen bombers at what was called Plant Number two, and that was a very dangerous place to work in World War Two and for obvious reasons. So they said, all right, here's what we're gonna do instead of building because what you typically do with like a decoy factory or que site or whatever is build something, you know, fifteen miles away. And they said, why don't we just build, like, build something that looks like the real thing. Fifth females away, they said, why don't we just shield our real thing by building an innocuous faketown on top of the factory. And that's exactly what they did they did. Have you seen pictures of this, Oh yeah, this is super cool. It's all about what it looks like from overhead. So again they didn't need to build everything exactly life size and exactly with great material. They built cars out of plywood, and the grass was like dyed burr lap and stuff like that. The trees were these weird kind of surrealist approximation of trees um. So when you were walking among this stuff, you're like that car is um cut off in half lengthwise, or that house is like all it is is like the top, you know, third in the roof. It's weird, but from overhead it really did a good job disguising it. And they would send Boeing workers up there once in a while, like hang laundry or sunbathe, or walk along the sidewalks and just to give the impression. And I was thinking about I'm like, that is a really dangerous thing to have your employees do yeah, so like, hey, if you're gonna take a smoke break, go up there. Yeah. But at the same time, if the if the building is gonna get bombed, whether they're up there in the building, I guess it doesn't really matter. So it's more good point, no more dangerous than working inside anyway. Yeah, that's a really good point. I didn't think about that. Uh. Yeah, they had, um, I think kind of the more ingenious things because obviously they're seeing it built, uh from way way high up where the bombers are, it couldn't look out of place, like in relation to everything else around it, So they couldn't just like stick it down there in any old order. They had to align the street grid with generally what was going on around them. And it's it's really cool. There's a cool website that has a lot of really great pictures of like and you know it's the time too, so this like super cool lady in like standing at the street corner. They got a little cheeky with the street signs Burlett Boulevard and Synthetic Street, so I think they ended up uh having a little fun with it, maybe a little. Somebody thought in the middle of World War two to put joke signs up. At least, that's pretty great, right. Um. Also, Chuck, I heard that those streets were so well lined up you could get on in the middle of that fake suburb on top of the Boeing building and drive straight through all the way to Portland's and then on to San Francisco, where we'll be on February two and very nice. So um, yeah, the whole Boeing thing, Luckily it never worked out. The whole reason that they did that was because they were on the West Coast in Seattle and they were worried about Japanese bombing raids that never happened. Um, obviously, I think it's possible. I mean I know that we in our book. I think on our chapter about Coma Kaze. This is a really book forward episode, isn't it. Um. The Japanese Actually there was a battle in the United States, but it was in Alaska. So I don't think the Japanese ever came to the West Coast, did they. Well no, I was just kind of kidding, like I think they would have known if there was, you know, a bunch of plane circling overhead, and they were just like, we just can't find where it's working. Just keep smiling, just keep pretending we're in a sober Uh. Sometimes the project. Uh, it seems like a lot of these I think they're well intended and they get off on the right foot and then it ends up being scrapped for one reason or another. But you know, it makes a great point. If you're the United States Military and you want to build some big facility somewhere, you you want to build it away from things, obviously, so it's a little more secretive. But you can't build it too far from stuff because you need workers, and you need equipment and shipping and construction and all the things that being close to things provide. So uh with the town of apix floor to a p I X, which will explain what that means in a minute. This was in Palm Beach County in the nineteen fifties, where they bought up ten square miles in what was at the time kind of rural western Palm Beach. There weren't a lot of people around then because they wanted to build a factory. They were developing liquid hydrogen is UH fuel, and they're like, let's develop this fuel, will build this factory in another place nearby and we'll build a pipeline. Uh, And it just kind of never fully came to fruition, I think because they realized it was too expensive to ship liquid hydrogen that way. Yeah, they figured out it was cheaper to just put them in refrigerated trucks and drive them. So they actually did create the liquefaction plant to produce the hydrogen for the rocket fuel UM, but they just never went on to do UM the full project, which was built a worker's village to support the plant. And the whole idea was they were just going to say, this is a nilizer plant, and this is a basically, you know, a suburb, suburban town that's sprouted up around the fertilizer plant, just filled with normal people. Nothing to see here. This is a pix Florida Welcome and goodbye. But what does APIs stand for? This sort of the funny I'm not sure why they did this, but go ahead. So it was actually technical designation that that had to do with the project itself, Air Products Incorporated Experimental. So a pix UM you just remove the E and replace it with the X. You got a pix right and ED. Actually UM had a little editorial comment that I thought was pretty interesting, and he's like, I don't why would you possibly name the town like a technical term from the very project you're working on, the super secret rocket fuel. And he said that his wife Meg pointed out that, um, it actually worked pretty well, or it could work well, because if you heard people talking about a PIX, you just assume they were talking about that town of Florida and maybe not consider searching much further into what was actually being discussed when they were actually talking about the rocket fuel. Go Meg, Yeah, I thought so too. I think it's the first time we've heard from Meg, right, yeah, alright, I love it. Uh. This it's interesting. This is kind of functioning as a top ten in a way because we move on to yet another sub topic, which are paper towns. And I had never heard of this before. This is so cool. I need to talk to my buddy Rad, the cartographer out in Montana and see if he puts any uh trap streets or copyright traps in his work, because they were initially called trap streets. And this is when a map maker a cartographers drawing a map, and they even knew early on. They're like, hey, listen, anyone can just go out and print copies of these and then sell them. I did all the hard work, and now they're just going to sell these maps as their own. So they started putting trap streets, like made up streets in there. It's sort of like the brown Eminem's and the Van Halen writer. So they would know if they saw a map with their trap street that there was copyright infringement. Man, what a great analogy you just made the brown Eminem's. Yeah, that's the person I thought of. So, um, they're the This one particular story centers on aglow or a glow. No one on the planet has any idea exactly how to pronounce it. New York, Upstate New York and the cat Skills and uh, there was a firm that was basically two guys from what I could tell uh in the twenties who were making maps and they created that town, which is a an amalgam um an amalgam okay of their of letters from their name. So aglow Um New York is just it's one of those paper cities that didn't exist, and it was meant as a copyright trap, like you were saying. But the reason that Anglo New York is probably the most famous paper city is because it managed to fall um backwards into reality. It went from a fake town on a map to a real town in upstate New York in a weird roundabout way. Yeah, but we should say town very much in quotation marks, because there was not a lot going on there. There are a couple of ways the story went down, and the one I saw that seems most reliable is kind of the second one. But apparently there was a fishing lodge that was built after this map was drawn with a fake town name on it, the paper town, and they saw that it was near this place, so they just named it after it. They said, all right, that's the closest town. So this is now the Aglow Lodge farms fishing lodge. And the New York Times ended up reporting on it and said that some of the first guests there, one of them was a map publishing firm and official from a publishing firm, and said the owner said you should put this place on the map. Even though that was like a New York Times contemporaneous piece, I don't know if that's super accurate. I think the other ones is a little more accurate. Not only is that questionable. It's it's very confusing to like was the map was the map publishing executive one of the guys who created Aglow, New York? As the trap is it is it did things really come that full circle? Was it somebody from Rand McNally who would later use it to their advantage. I've got a lot of questions about was it a minotaur? But the second version um is, really it's not that much different. There's uh, somebody who decided to open a general store on the spot where that was marked Aglow. And the other thing about this too is the fact that this town became real in a certain way means that there was the monumentally coincidental fact that they happened to have the type of map that have been created by that firm that made up Aglow. Because remember, no other map is going to have that town. It's a copyright town that just one firm's maps would show. So they happened to have that firm's maps two when they decided to figure out where their general store was or their fishing latch was, and so they named this general store the Anglo General Store. But the weird thing about it is where Rand McNally comes in in this story. Yeah, and I will just in defense of that, I will say it was an s O gas station map. So I think those things were kind of everywhere. Uh that was my interpretation. Yeah, but I'm just pointing out it wasn't some like weird obscure map. It was a it was a pretty heavily it was a map in the rotation, you know. So they built this general store, Rand McNally comes along. They publish a map, uh, you know, seemingly using the other map because Aglow was on there, and they got sued but they said no, no, no, no, no, you can't sue us, like this is a town now that I'm standing in front of the ago. They had a press conference in front of the Anglo General Store. They didn't they didn't really, but they probably should have and said, you know, this is a real place. And you know, they ended up winning that case because of that, and at various times over the years, Aglow is sometimes on maps. Sometimes it's on Google Maps, sometimes it's not. I think the fishing lodge is there, but it doesn't go by that anymore. No, but it's there still. I mean, there is a fishing lodge there, but there is no the building of the general stores there, but I don't think it's a general store anymore. Right, I've seen both. I've seen that you can find the general store still. Yeah, I've seen that the fishing lodge and the general store there, which is kind of like putting both both UM stories together, and I guess they don't have to be mutually exclusive. I also saw mentioned that at its peak, UM a little mini town sprang up around either the general or or lodge or both, that there was a gas station, two houses. Um there, there was something happened. It came up out of the map, the map became reality. It's such a great story. And there's an author named Tom Green. He's a y a author. I've not heard heard of him and read his stuff, but he he wrote a book called Paper Towns that were Aglow figures into it. So apparently UM teens will show up once in a while and be like, I'm an aglow so by this stuff. They don't want you to know. Book by the stuff you should know book by Paper Towns. Yeah, I didn't even think about it. That's another book. It's another book by Rand McNally Atlas. If you've only if here's my advice. If you're a a person of a certain age who was literally never used a real map in your life and only interacted with digital interfaces by by an Atlas. By wrote Atlas, it's kind of fun. It's good to have around in case, you know, in case that it all goes down the tubes and we're all feral wandering around the country. I was road tripping with Emily recently and kind of reminiscing about, Yeah, I remember when you sat the pull over on the side of the road and get out the map and say, well, I think you can take this to this to this to get to that. Yeah, it was fun. It was a good sense of adventure that has now been ruined by technology. But also I've said before and I'll say it again, I think that, um it made people smarter in some ways, um than than today. Yeah. Again, I think we talked about like balancing your checkbook or something like that. You had to do that. Oh no, it was keeping bowling scores by hands, right. It's it's the same kind of thing, like having to stop and figure out where you are and where you're going and then how to get there on a map. So much different than like take a left in a hundred and eighty feet um, and I'm not like, I'm not mad about that. I use ways every time I drive that I don't know where I'm going. Yeah, but there's there's a qualitative difference in what your brain is doing when you're using ways and when you are looking at a paper map and figuring out yourself. Yeah, like I like knowing where the best breakfast burrito is in the next down I'm going to and the old rand mc now I didn't show you that. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's let's take a break. Okay, a question, breakfast burrito. We'll finish up after this. Stuff. You should know, stuff you should know, so UMO. One of the other reasons that people make fake towns is not to just um act as decoys, but instead to use for testing, often weapons testing. Probably the most famous fake town that has been used to test weapons is in Nevada. The Nevada is in Nevada, Nevada, Nevada, Nevada. You're right, the Nevada Test Site, UM, which in the fifties until the mid sixties I believe, was where we set off I think seven hundred plus nuclear bombs and we would often build little towns and be like, k boom, did you see what happened to that town? And yeah, I'm only a few miles from it, because that's what happened with I've've seen it called survival town. Probably the most famous one is the one where they actually shot a bunch of footage the Apple To test site, uh in ninety five, where they gathered six thousand people to watch from six miles away. I believe the army was about two to three miles away. And they built, you know, they built a bunch of stuff. They built some houses, built some buildings. They had a away station, some trailer parks, some cars, apparently a propane tank station. So they built a little bit of infrastructure. And this is the one, if you've ever seen, the very famous footage. And part of the reason they did this was to be able to show Americans like and scare them, say, here's what will happen to you of the you know, those mannequins dissolving into fiery blast right before your eyes. And by the way, you call your senator and tell them you want American defense spending doubled. Basically, very well known footage, but um one of these houses that it's called the bell And Building was manufactured by a company Bellon Manufacturing, who did steel panels. Uh. It was only six feet away and it survived very famously. The blast And was a legit, you know, tourist attraction for a long time. It may still be. Is it still there, Yeah, still is. There's a couple of houses that are still there that survived. One was a two story colonial or two stories something, um, yeah, colonial with a brick fireplace and chimney on the outside, and a lot of it survived. The other one was an all all straight up brick house, um, which I believe was the inspiration for the Commodore song. Brick house, that's right. And the one of straw did not make it. No, But if you looked inside those houses, they had like mannequins dressed up, some of them dressed to the nines frankly. Um. They had like frozen food, canned food in some cases fresh food. They had stuff, infrigerators, they had like they had oh yeah, that's right. That was the third one, right, yeah, fourth one? Okay? Um? Oh yeah, no yeah, what was the third one? Thet I don't know what's happening in my aging mind. Um, but the if you looked to see like the before and after, I have to say the mannequins fared pretty well. They got bounced around, they definitely weren't standing up anymore afterward, but they weren't like vapor either. Right. It's just great the test work. Our buddy Van Nostrin said he went to that site really one of the more amazing places he's been. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. Japan did something kind of similar with Project Ichiban and that this was post Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they're like, hey, we want to see like what radiation does to people and what radiation sickness might do. So they built a village that could actually be moved around. It was built on wooden skids, so you could move this village around two different uh, you know, and subject it to different levels of radiation to see what would happen. I think that was actually American built umulated to Japanese village. Yeah, because they're like, WHOA a lot of people died of radiation sickness. We weren't expecting it. I guess so because it was built on the Yucca Flat and that in Japan. It's a outside of Nagao, I know, big big with by me. So um. There are other cities that are built for testing not nearly as much destructive stuff as like a nuclear bomb. And there's one of the University of Michigan in ann Arbor, Um called m City, and it's basically like uh fake drive around town, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, No, I don't think anybody knows what I'm saying. Let me just rephrase that. It's like it's the it's like a um, it's like a town, a fake town that's really um car centric. It's like Los Angeles but in Anna Arbor, right, but fully like it's it's only fake in the sense is that there are fake buildings that no one lives there, like they really because what they're doing is there. Uh it's all in partnership with I believe, initially Forward, but I don't know who all is involved now to test driverless car, so they the streets have to be really real and the stoplights, like it has to really function as a real city if you want to really test driverless cars out. Yeah. I saw they even have like you know, crash test dummies as pedestrians and stuff to make sure the things stop when they're supposed to. It's pretty cool. And there's an app where if you are testing at m city, you will have access to an app that lets you like control different conditions around the fake town Truman Show. Yeah, I guess so, but you can use it on your phone. I don't know if they can really make it rain, although I bet you they can. I'll bet they can at the very least make the streets wet. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's a road condition. I mean, that's legit right. So that reminds me of something I went to when I grew up um in Toledo called Safety City. Oh, I think I've heard about this. It's so amazing. You you take your big will um and you go to Safety City, which is a small miniature fake town with like intersections and a railroad crossing and traffic lights, and you learn like what all the stuff means, like what do you do at a yield time? And you get to ride around on your big wheel like you're in a car driving around town. It was one of the better experiences of my young life until you that's amazing. Uh, there's another one that seems really creepy uh in every way, but it's hasn't come to fruition and it really isn't creepy. I think it's just the fact that it's called the Center Capital T Capital C and it's this billion dollar future fake city. Uh. That's they've been planning missing out since twelve. Uh. It's Pegasus Global Holdings. That's also creepy sounding, although it's probably completely innocuous. Uh. And the Center for Innovation again Capital TC and I and Testing and Evaluation. So it's the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, sorry, C I, T E. UH. And what they're doing it seems like, or what they want to do eventually. It seems like there's all kinds of testing that could go on, but a lot of it has to do with energy savings and you know, transporting energy, um, getting water from one place to another more safely. Uh. It just seems like transportation. It seems sort of like a catch all of anything that you would want to use the city for without having to block off real streets and pay real money and suffer repercussions from real damage and stuff like that. But it does seem to have a real focus on sustainability, like like the some of the projects also include UM like you could test UM low and low loss transmission lines remember and like I can't remember what episode that Like that is a huge problem with creating a renewable grid. Is there so much energy loss over time? Like you could test that. You could also test driverless cars um And have you seen the die grammar the renderings of this city. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It is. There's like a whole highway that comes into town just like a regular city. There's a rural area, there's suburbs, there's like a downtown area. It looks like it's going to be really great. And I could whoever thought of building that. I think it's one of those if you build that, they will come kind of things. But it sounds like they're having trouble convincing people about the second part, right, I bet it will happen at some point, I hope. So, yeah, And it's not creepy at all. It just at all of like all the capital letters really free to me. Right, No, But that on top of the idea that if you went to this place, it would be like a Twilight Zone episode where there's no one there. You've got like a city and no one's in it. That's just so creepy. That's one of the reasons why this is so this whole episode is me and gross. There's just some creep factor that's lurking right under the surface. Yeah, it's it's the same creep factor from like an abandoned city almost. There's just something creepy about infrastructure with no one there. Yeah, So I just want to give a shout out one more um for one more thing on Florida. We were talking about APIs Florida and reminded me that down in Dade County there's something called the Arrow Jet Facility and it was a rocket testing site, a missile testing site, and there is a missile in an underground silo still there. It's obviously not armed or anything, but there's some really cool Urban Explorer pictures of this this missile, usually from the top down, but somebody went figured out how to get down to the bottom. So they're like standing at at the base of this missile. It's towering over them, but it's it's in this weird overgrown area outside of Miami. It's really cool looking. To check it out on the Internet. It's like the bomb and Savannah in the ocean. They saw it, found that right, No, no, but they know where this is. Oh yeah sure. Uh so the last it's kind of fake city has been used a bunch of times by the military and by UM as we'll see later. Uh the modern police forces a k a. The mini military UM. But you know training centers every everyone from the FBI to the c i A to the army has training centers all over the country where they have fake towns built tactical villages. Um. You know, if you ever seen like Jodie Foster walking through the CIA, or was the FBI, she was FBI FBI training where you know the bad guys pop around the corner of a fake house like this is more along those lines. Basically, Yeah, that was actually either said at or meant to be um Hogan's alley at Quantico UM. And yes, she didn't look behind the door. Remember I didn't look behind the door, so um. Yeah. There's also Fort Polkan, Louisiana used to have a like a Vietnamese village for training before shipping out to Vietnam and the sixties UM for Irwin in Barstow, where the drugs kick in. They had um Afghani Village basically UM built for the U S military to train at UM. And then you mentioned the mini military today's police forces. UM. In the sixties, the US built two different fake towns on military bases. I didn't see which, UM, but in the United States there were two what were called Riotsvilles, and that was like an informal term forum and it was a place where local police officers or law enforcement could travel to these bases and be trained in violently suppressing protests. UM. In like a fake town that that simulated a real world situation. Yeah, this is one I think we should do a full episode on for sure. There's a new documentary out called Riotsville, USA that popped up I believe in just September of this year. Was this year, I think, so it's pretty recent and this actually may have been where I got the idea. I might have seen an article about this. But it's really interesting because then we can get into the Kerner Commission, which was basically this you know, in depth study of history and data where they concluded that hey, um, social welfare funding is is necessary in this country. UM. And it wasn't just as simple as like, hey, there's racism, so we need social welfare funding. It's hey, the way this country went and when everything happened with industrialization and where people live and where African Americans were coming out of Jim Crow like, it all aligned in this terrible perfect storm and imperfect storm where uh, we need to help take care of people a little bit more. And this was all reversed, and I believe it was a Johnson administration said Oh, actually, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take We're gonna divert all the money we can towards making the United States military or i'm sorry, police forces more like paramilitary forces and train them in you know, standing down these riots where people are asking for you know, basic human needs, right right, And as Ed points out, the fact that these two riots bills were built basically shows like no, it's essentially the official policy of the United States to like suppress protests brutally often rather than actually addressed like the actual issues that are causing unrest in the first place. So yeah, I think that we should, um, we should do an episode on that too. That's a great idea. Yeah, I want to watch that doc because I think there's just a lot more to it than an addendum here at the end of this one, for sure. And if only Riotsville, USA the documentary have been a book instead, that would have been the ultimate button anonymous episode, you know, it would have. I do want to mention a movie though, Joel Schumacher made a movie called tiger Land, which was the name of the training place in in Yeah, in Polk, Louisiana where it's sort of simulated an Asian jungle environment. Was Colin Farrell in tiger Land rated are coming to a theater ten years ago? Yeah? Or more? Um, well, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since Chuck evoked the name of Colin Farrell, that obviously means it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this a little more detail on our vinyl stereo exclamation, explanation and exclamation I make dear mrs stuff. You said in your episode on vinyl that stereo records are created by cutting the left right audio on the left right side of the record. Proove it's even more black magic ey than that. An old technology g WHI shellac records. The mono information was engraved from side to side with stereo. The mono information is engraved in the same way, and the side information is engraved up and down. Uh. This is then, I know, I mean that's still I mean, I can't even understand this. Uh. This is then turned into the left right audio using a process called midside decoding, which is basically duplicating the mid information phase, inverting it, and then adding it together with the mid and other side information. If that blew your mind as much as it did me when I got it explained, check out this article and this is uh. Uh just google sound processing mid side stereo and that will probably answer right. Ah. And that is from Marcus, who is also, by the way, not satisfied with our description of compressed digital audio. Sorry Marcus, but that is really interesting email. And it was one of those things like every once in a while we'll hear something from somebody and you just it almost like hurts in your guts that you didn't know that thing, or you didn't know it to that degree, you know what I'm saying, Like you almost want to go back and correct it somehow. Yeah, And we also should mention we got a few emails from other audio file uh people who also said, hey, you guys kind of glossed over the digital audio compression because there's a bunch of codex and ways of doing things. And uh, we also got a not very nice email where someone was like, you guys are playing your stuff wrong. Why bother? I didn't notice that one. But I mean, it's not like a how digital compression works episode. It was about final give us a break, everybody. Those were the people I was talking about when I made the disclaimer at the beginning of the episode, and they didn't listen to me. Yeah, that this, I'll send you the email. Then that nice guy he basically said, Josh, you Moneys will give away your records to someone who can play him right, Okay. Cool, And for the aspect of my record playing, so we're doing it wrong, but hey, we're living our best life and having a good time. Think as as my wife would say, Oh never mind, I'm not gonna say that. Okay. And that was from Marcus, right, that was from Marcus. Marcus was fairly kind about it. Cool. Thanks a lot, Marcus. Thanks for all the extra info. I mean, that's definitely something you can do to boost your chances of being on listener mails. Adding info that we just didn't know about in a nice way. Um, and if you want to be like Marcus and send us some extra info we didn't know about in a nice way, you can send it in an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. One