Pod Insights Something You Should Know The Real and False Promises of AI & What They Really Ate at the First Thanksgiving About this episode How many photographs have been taken worldwide in the history of photography? And how many just this year? These are a few of the fascinating facts that begin this episode that I know you’ll end up repeating at upcoming holiday parties that will make you sound so interesting! Source: John Mitchinson author of 1227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (https://amzn.to/4fP4vaX).
To hear it said, artificial intelligence is the greatest thing in the world or the beginning of the end of civilization. So, what’s the truth about AI? What can it do and what will it never do? That is what Arvind Narayanan is going to tell you, and he is someone to listen to. Arvind is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy. He was named one of Time magazine 100 most influential people in AI and he is co-author of the book k AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (https://amzn.to/3Z9RBiv).
What did they eat at the first Thanksgiving? No doubt you’ve heard stories about the first Thanksgiving but a lot of what we were told just isn’t true. In fact, many of the foods and traditions of Thanksgiving came much later. Here to set the record straight on that famous dinner held by the Pilgrims and native Americans is Leslie Landrigan. She has been writing about New England history for over 10 years – and she is author of the book the book Historic Thanksgiving Foods: And the People who Cooked Them, 1607 to 1955 (https://amzn.to/40NW23s)
Anyone who owns a printer has wondered why the ink cartridges cost so much to replace. The answer is a bit complicated and kind of interesting. Listen as I explain https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/printers/why-is-printer-ink-so-expensive-a2101590645/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:32 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, some fascinating facts you never knew, including one weird one about Wild Bill Hickok, then a top AI expert on the amazing things AI can do, and the false promises, the things AI cannot do.
0:48 Speaker 02 These ideas about AI developing an agency of its own and deciding to do stuff, these are pure sci-fi scenarios. Based on the way that AI is currently built today, those speculative scenarios really have no basis in reality.
1:03 Mike Carruthers? Also, the real reason printer ink is so expensive, and a look back at what they really ate at the first Thanksgiving.
1:11 Speaker 03 One of the things that they always ate and ate to excess is pumpkin. Pumpkin was hugely important. New England was the pumpkin dominion, and the first American folk song was written in 1620, and it was about how they ate too much pumpkin all the time.
1:26 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know. I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time, and there's always that little mystery, is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived... Not so beautiful, cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.
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3:14 Speaker 04 Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
3:27 Mike Carruthers? You know, I don't know why, whether it's because I have this job or I have this job because I like to do this, but I love to uncover fascinating facts about things that I never knew before. And I have uncovered some and would like to share them. And these first facts are all about photography. In 2024, by the time this year is over, an estimated 1.94 trillion photographs will have been taken worldwide. Globally, we capture 5.3 billion photographs daily. That's 61,400 per second. The average American takes 20 photos a day.
4:11 Mike Carruthers? And there are now approximately 14.3 trillion photographs in existence.
4:19 Mike Carruthers? And now to completely change the subject, you've heard of Wild Bill Hickok, right? The cowboy? Well, Wild Bill Hickok had a brother, and you know what his name was? Tame Bill Hickok. When George W. Bush was president, he and Saddam Hussein both had their shoes made by the same Italian shoemaker. And there is a Mexican language, it's called Zook, but the language died out in the mid 20th century. Only two people on the planet can speak it, and those two people are feuding and refuse to speak to each other. And that is something you should know.
5:02 Mike Carruthers? There is so much talk today about artificial intelligence, AI. And my sense is that AI has been around long enough that the people, the experts who talk about it, presume we all know what it is and how it works. But I'll tell you, and maybe it's just me, but my understanding of AI is pretty elementary. I get it, but I don't really understand how it works, or what it does, or what it doesn't do on any kind of deep level. In other words, there's a lot more about AI and the different kinds of AI that I don't know compared to what I do know, and I suspect I'm not the only one. So, given how much AI seems to be creeping into our lives, I wanted to find someone who
5:45 Mike Carruthers? could help bring us up to speed on the latest in what AI is, what it does, and what it cannot do. And here to do that is Arvin Narayanen. He's a professor of computer science at Princeton and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy. He was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI, and he's co-author of a book titled AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference. Hey, Arvin, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:19 Speaker 02 Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.
6:21 Mike Carruthers? So, on a very fundamental, simple level, what is AI?
6:27 Speaker 02 AI is an umbrella term for a loosely related set of technologies. You have, on the one hand, generative AI like ChatGPT. On the other hand, you know, you have self-driving cars and you have predictive AI, AI that's used in the criminal justice system, for instance, to make enormously consequential decisions about people, AI that's used in healthcare. These types of AI generally have very little to do with each other. And it's true that some types of AI, notably generative AI, are rapidly advancing. But we should be careful about, I think, the snake oil salesman in the AI world, who like to just slap the AI label on whatever tech product they're selling to try to get us to think that it is some remarkable technology
7:12 Speaker 02 that's going to solve all our problems for us.
7:15 Mike Carruthers? So you mentioned some different kinds of artificial intelligence just now. Can you, can you go through and just explain what each one of them does? Or is that just too complicated to do?
7:26 Speaker 02 Oh, not at all. And I, you know, I would say to listeners that if someone tells you it's too complicated, you know, you should be skeptical. They're probably trying to hide something. But in broad strokes, so let's take a couple of different types of AI. So what's happening in ChatGPT is that it's simply a machine, and some of you may have heard this, a machine for predicting the next word in a sequence of words. What is the most likely next word? And it turns out, and this was largely a surprise to AI researchers as well, that the way for AI to be really good at predicting the next word in a sequence of words is to have some quote-unquote "understanding of language,"
8:06 Speaker 02 of grammatical rules and patterns, and understanding of facts about the world. Because if you have a, you know, a sentence like "the capital of France is blank," it helps to know what the capital of France is so that you can complete that sentence with a high-probability word instead of a low-probability word. Right? So it turns out that's, you know, really the secret behind it. And it's, it might seem a little bit disappointing to hear that that's all it is. And in a sense, that's all it is. But I think it is truly remarkable that developers are able to create something useful with this really brute force approach.
8:45 Mike Carruthers? And so when it's predicting the next word in a sequence, where is it, where is it getting the info, where is it pulling from? To come up with that word.
8:56 Speaker 02 Chatbots have been trained on essentially all of the text on the internet, approximately speaking, and a lot of books and so on. So that's what it's pulling from, right? So what it, what training means is that it has learned the statistical patterns that allow it to say, for example, you know, something you should, the bot would know that no is a likely next word because there are many discussions of this podcast online. And so it has learned that statistical pattern. And so that's primarily what it's learning from. To a lesser extent, these bots learn from their conversations with us, but it's not in the way that a person would learn. It's not automatic. There's a cumbersome process by which companies have to filter these chat conversations and feed that back
9:41 Speaker 02 into the training data. But to a first approximation, it's learning from text on the web.
9:46 Mike Carruthers? And so now talk about predictive AI and what that is and how it's different and how it works and all that.
9:54 Speaker 02 Sure. Yeah. So predictive AI, on the other hand, is statistics that we've had for a century almost, that's been rebranded into quote unquote AI. So this is used, for example, in the criminal justice system to determine if a defendant should be jailed before their trial, you know, which could be months or years away. It's used in healthcare to detect sepsis in a hospital context, for instance, by looking at various indicators. It's often used in hiring to try to predict which employee might be a fit for the role or who's going to be a good employee and that sort of thing. Now, what's happening
10:36 Speaker 02 in all of these cases is that the system is just picking up crude statistical patterns. So in criminal justice, you know, the system learns that younger defendants are more likely to reoffend if they are released before their trial and so recommends treating them more harshly. So these kinds of, again, fairly crude statistical patterns that, you know, we've known how to do for a long time, but it's not the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT. It is not something that's advancing quickly.
11:06 Speaker 02 And it is something that I think we should be pretty skeptical about.
11:10 Mike Carruthers? But all it's doing is it's predicting based on the past, right? I mean, that's pretty much it.
11:15 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's making decisions about the future based on the past. So no matter how accurately it works, I think, you know, kind of on a fundamental philosophical level, we should think about, is this a just way to treat people, right? Should you deny someone their freedom in the criminal justice system because of the behavior of people like them in the past? So that's, yeah, something that's deeply questionable as well.
11:40 Mike Carruthers? What about this whole idea, though? We hear about AI and people throw that term around so much that AI can, you know, fake things and it can create images of people that aren't real. It can replace, you know, actors in a movie. I don't, I don't get all that.
12:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, image generation AI has been advancing very quickly and over the last year or so, companies have been working on video generation AI. So yes, I think to some extent the hype around this is real. I think deep fakes are already a problem. Specifically, the thing I'm most concerned about is deep fake nudes. And this is affected from what I can tell, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, primarily women, as you can imagine, around the world. And I think we desperately need regulation to curb some of the damage here. Now, in the political sphere, there's also concern that deep fakes can be used to trick voters and
12:42 Speaker 02 that sort of thing. I'm less convinced of that. There has been a lot of alarmism about that. But I think something we should think about is that in a world where we're online and we have no easy way to tell what's real and what's not, what does that mean for the erosion of trust in the online environment and how easily that makes it for powerful people, politicians and others to evade accountability by claiming that even real videos are actually deep fakes. So we see that happening over and over, and that is something I'm worried about.
13:16 Mike Carruthers? There have been very prominent people who have sounded the alarm that AI is dangerous and we've heard things about how, you know, what if it develops a mind of its own? And there's all this stuff that's very scary sounding and I just don't know, is that real? Is that, you know, what is the big concern that people like Elon Musk and others have? What are they worried about? What's the problem?
13:41 Speaker 02 First of all, with Elon Musk and other, you know, CEOs of AI companies, it's a very self-serving thing to say, right? So this is incredibly powerful technology, you know, it's going to change the world, either bring about a utopia or destroy humanity. And we're the only ones in a position to ensure that this technology doesn't get out of control. We and many others in the AI community have spent a lot of time looking at the evidence behind these AI fears. And we've come up short, basically. So let's take some of the concerns that have been brought up, that AI could help bioterrorists, for instance, by finding information about how to create bioweapons. Now, the funny thing
14:25 Speaker 02 about this fear is that finding that information is not the hard part. For the most part, that's readily available on Wikipedia, right? And so if a chatbot, you know, makes it easier and makes it, you know, 10 seconds faster for someone to access that information, that's not the end of the world. And there have been concerns in cybersecurity, for instance, that AI could be used to hack critical infrastructure and that could bring about catastrophic risk. But here's the funny thing. If the ability to use AI to find bugs in software and attack systems that way, if that is a critical capability for hackers,
15:10 Speaker 02 then we've already lost. Because for the last 10 or 20 years, automated ways to find bugs have been readily available even before AI, yet the world hasn't ended. And in fact, it's turned out that these methods primarily help defenders over attackers. They help software developers because those developers can use these automated tools, including AI.
15:34 Speaker 02 To find and fix bugs in their software before they ship it out, before hackers even have a chance to take a crack at it. And we think the same thing is happening with AI and we think some of these fears are vastly overblown. And then these ideas about AI developing, you know, an agency of its own and deciding to do stuff, these are pure sci-fi scenarios based on the way that AI is currently built today. You know, those speculative scenarios really have no basis in reality.
16:07 Mike Carruthers? Yeah. So, quick break here. I'm speaking with one of the smartest guys I've ever met when it comes to AI. His name is Arvind Narayanen. He's one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI, and he's author of a book called AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed
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19:25 Mike Carruthers? So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So Arvin, because of your work, you're steeped pretty deep into AI. But for the rest of us, for people who, you know, we understand sort of what it is, but like, how do you think I could use AI or the average person could use AI in a way that would be really helpful?
19:54 Speaker 02 So it's not this one big thing that AI is gonna do for everybody. I mean, that might happen in the future, but so far I don't think there's been this one killer application. But it's a hundred little things. So in my work, for instance, it's been enormously useful in helping me write code. Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine going back to a time before I had AI assistance in writing code because it's just so much faster, but also more fun, frankly. And, you know, for lawyers, I'm hearing there are so many ways in which legal tech is making their lives better, making it easier to find information. Of course, it's not gonna replace a lawyer. There have been, you know, many overblown claims of companies building a robot lawyer and things like that. I think that sort of
20:36 Speaker 02 stuff is a little bit silly for now at least. But I think in every profession, you know, that involves basically dealing with knowledge in some way, AI can be a creativity enhancer or a way to automate certain mundane tasks in your everyday life. I think it can also be a good learning tool. There are pitfalls here because, you know, AI can hallucinate, that is, generate incorrect information and not even be aware that it is hallucinating. That said, again, once one spends a few hours learning to work around these pitfalls, I think it can be a very good learning tool. I use AI a lot for learning about new topics.
21:17 Speaker 02 I haven't stopped using books for learning, but, you know, I can't ask a book a question and I can't summarize my understanding of a topic to a book and ask it if I have gotten it right. These are things that I can do with chatbots. So those are a few of the ways in which I've been using it in my own work and in my own life. And I think each person has to figure it out for themselves.
21:39 Mike Carruthers? And so when you say that, you know, it would be worthwhile to to use some of these tools and see what they can do, like what? Like if I type a question into Google, am I using AI or am is that a different technology? Like what are the AI tools or are they embedded into everything?
21:58 Speaker 02 There are broadly two different ways to use AI. One is you can use a specific AI app, you know, ChatGPT is the most well-known one. Or you can use AI that's embedded into the other apps that or other physical products that you use. And I think both of those are interesting and both of those are worth trying out. So specifically, if you do a Google search, there are relatively simple types of AI that have existed even in traditional Google search. But more recently, Google has started creating these AI overviews, which can often be wrong. So I think it's caveat emptor to, you know, actually verify that information. But I think it can be more enlightening
22:40 Speaker 02 to play with, you know, a standalone AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever people want to use and explore the kinds of things that it can do, as well as learn how, you know, it gets things wrong. And I think that's going to give you a much better understanding of AI's powers and limitations.
23:02 Mike Carruthers? And so I think when people use like ChatGPT or Gemini, there is an assumption that whatever it tells you is probably right. Is it probably right? What's the accuracy rate?
23:17 Speaker 02 That's a great question. We should not assume that whatever AI tells us is probably right. I think the accuracy rate varies greatly depending on the kind of topic. When I use AI with my kids, you know, when I ask it science questions, it's very good at explaining those things in a way that a five year old can understand, and almost never makes mistakes. But if you ask it questions on a very specialized topic, there have been papers looking at the accuracy of AI in the legal sphere or medical sphere. Right here, it's much more dodgy. And obviously, these are areas where accuracy is much more important. So one might wonder, you know, if it's going to sometimes make mistakes, should you use this tool at
23:59 Speaker 02 all? I would argue still probably yes, because I think it can still, you know, enable you to do things that would otherwise be very hard. So one example of this is when I'm exploring a new topic, I don't even know how to frame my question. And if I don't Know the right terms to put into Google search. I can't find the authoritative sources on that topic. But with chat pods, it's very easy. I just describe it in a fuzzy way in which I think of it in my head and it, you know, it rephrases it for me and then it gives me information about that topic. Sometimes it's reliable, sometimes it's not. So it's just a very different way of interacting with information. It's just really hard to understand it in terms of previous ways of interacting with information.
24:43 Speaker 02 I can't give you a number saying, you know, 90% of the time it's going to be right. It just really varies depending on one's use case. So I think, you know, each of us has to put a little bit of trial and error into adapting it for our own specific purposes.
24:59 Mike Carruthers? So where is the snake oil? What's the, what's the snake oil part of this that has you most concerned?
25:06 Speaker 02 Criminal justice, for instance, right? So I don't, I don't think, you know, we should be making decisions about people based on these statistical formulas. With some caveats, like I was saying earlier, if it's the judge who is empowered to make that decision, that's a different story. There is a lot of the snake oil in hiring. There are companies that claim that by analyzing a 30 second video of a candidate, of a job candidate, you know, not even talking about their skills for the job, but about their hobbies or whatever, that they can do video analysis and look at the candidate's, you know, facial expressions and body language and that sort of thing. And use that to drive a personality score, which companies should do their hiring based on. There's, there's so much more.
25:52 Speaker 02 There is AI for detecting which students in a school or college might be at risk of suicide or mental health difficulties. There have been investigations of all these kinds of AI tools and they barely work better than the flip of a coin. So I think these are the kinds of things we should be very suspicious of. And unfortunately, these are the kinds of things that are often used in order to make very high stakes decisions about people.
26:19 Mike Carruthers? Is it just a matter, though, of over time, it will kind of work itself out? It'll get better because the more people use it and the more practice it gets, basically, that the better it gets?
26:31 Speaker 02 For ChatGPT, yes. But here's the difference between ChatGPT and trying to predict if someone will commit a crime. You know, ChatGPT is just trying to do things like, you know, some typical thing you might use ChatGPT for is to translate text from one language to another, right? That's not like a fundamentally impossible task. It's something that humans can do. And AI over time is learning to do it better, right? Or write code or whatever it is. On the other hand, predicting, you know, what's going to happen in the future, no one knows. The universe doesn't know. It doesn't matter how much data you can throw at it. What we're seeing is that these technologies are not really getting better. They haven't
27:13 Speaker 02 got better in decades. And, you know, it should be common sense that we can't really predict the future, or at least not with anything close to perfect accuracy. And yet, a lot of companies are telling us to suspend our common sense because AI, right? And that's what we're trying to push back on.
27:30 Mike Carruthers? Well, I appreciate all you've said. It's helped me get a better understanding of what AI is and what it does and doesn't do. And I'm sure other people listening feel the same way. My guest has been Arvind Narayanen. He is a professor of computer science at Princeton and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy. And he is author of a book called AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And thank you again for coming, Arvind.
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31:12 Mike Carruthers? Most of us learned in school about the first Thanksgiving. How pilgrims and Native Americans came together for this big feast. And they ate turkey and pumpkin something or other, and they gave thanks. And I have to admit, I don't remember too much of what I learned about the first Thanksgiving. And in fact, I wonder how much of what I did learn was in fact fact or fiction. Here to talk about what really went on at the first Thanksgiving and how some of our customs around this holiday actually came later is Leslie Landrigan. She's been writing about New England history for over 10 years, and she's author of a
31:52 Mike Carruthers? book called Historic Thanksgiving Foods and the People Who Cooked Them, 1607 to 1955. Hi, Leslie, welcome to Something You Should Know.
32:02 Speaker 03 Thanks, Mike, I'm happy to be on.
32:04 Mike Carruthers? So it seems like there's always been this fascination about what they ate at the first Thanksgiving. I'm not sure why that is, but is it a mystery? Is it a theory? Do we really know what they ate?
32:17 Speaker 03 We know two things. We know that they had four deer that the natives brought, the 90 natives. And we know that the men went out shooting birds with the natives and the Englishmen. So birds, deer, probably shellfish, probably corn, that's what we know for sure. Lobster, maybe.
32:48 Mike Carruthers? And do we know why that first Thanksgiving, like how these people came together and did they call it Thanksgiving? Like what's, briefly as you can, what's the quick story of why these people came together?
33:05 Speaker 03 What's interesting to me, if you call the meeting of indigenous people and English colonists in, you know, the early 17th century to eat food in...
33:23 Speaker 03 Autumn. If you're going to call that a Thanksgiving, then the pilgrims in 1621 were not the first Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving would have been in 1607 in Pittsburgh, Maine, where a failed colony was established for about a year. But the circumstances were very, very similar. The two groups came together, basically, it was more of a state dinner than it was a Thanksgiving. They were negotiating alliances. They would trade with each other, and they would defend each other against common enemies.
34:04 Mike Carruthers? The food that they ate, which we'll get into very soon here, but is it the food that they always ate, or was this some real special kind of food?
34:14 Speaker 03 It was the food they usually ate. They may have dressed it up a little bit, and it would have been plentiful because of the time of year. But it was pretty much what they ate. I was going to say, one of the things that they always ate, and they ate to excess, and they have eaten it since 1620, and they're still eating it, is pumpkin. Pumpkin was hugely important. And you know how we call people in Wisconsin Cheeseheads? People used to call New Englanders Pumpkinheads. New England was the Pumpkin Dominion, and the first folk song was written in, the first American folk song was written in 1620, and it was about how they ate too much pumpkin all the time.
34:58 Mike Carruthers? And what was the, what was the magic of pumpkin, just because there were so many? I mean, that wasn't something that came over from England, right?
35:06 Speaker 03 Actually, they did know of pumpkin in England, and pumpkin pie was really popular. The Spanish had brought it over. And then it kind of fell out of favor. But it, it grew well. It, it was more resistant to deer, and insects, and fungus, and things like that. So I think it's, it was just its hardiness, and, you know, it kept for a while.
35:35 Mike Carruthers? In addition to a pie, what do you make out of pumpkin?
35:39 Speaker 03 You, they tended to stew it. They, they would do a lot with it, but mostly they'd chop it up and stew it and mix it up with other stuff. I don't know that it was terribly appetizing.
35:53 Mike Carruthers? Well, if you ever eat pumpkin, because my, we feed our dog pumpkin on recommendations of the vet, and it isn't much. I mean, without spicing it up, it doesn't really.
36:04 Speaker 03 No.
36:05 Mike Carruthers? It's pretty bland.
36:07 Speaker 03 It's, it's pretty nutritious, though.
36:09 Mike Carruthers? Right. That's why the dog eats it.
36:12 Speaker 03 Well, you know, the, the natives, they grew what was called the three sisters, the pumpkin or squash, beans and corn, which for some reason, having to do with amino acids or carbohydrates or something, I don't know, makes for a very nutritious diet.
36:30 Mike Carruthers? At the center of today's Thanksgiving dinner is typically a turkey. Was it their center of the table?
36:38 Speaker 03 No, it wasn't for a long time. They may have had turkey at the first Thanksgiving. Turkeys are, wild turkeys are really stupid birds. They roost in the same place all the time. So, you know, if you want dinner, you just go get yourself a turkey. But in, in fact, they were so easy to kill that they were obliterated from New England, uh, probably by the Civil War. Turkey, it was a part of the meal and it was something they ate, but chicken pie was, was the big thing for a long time. And it was a woman named Sarah
37:15 Speaker 03 Josepha Hale, who was a widow in, with five kids and needed money. So she wrote a book in 1827. It was a novel. I can't think of the name of it, but.
37:31 Speaker 03 She described a Thanksgiving dinner in New England, a classic New England Thanksgiving, which was really at the time only celebrated in New England. And the book sold well, and she got a job as the editor of what became Godey's Ladies' Book, which was this tremendously influential magazine. It was way more influential than Martha Stewart. And she, she was an American influencer, and she was the one who made turkey the centerpiece of the American meal. And she was also the one, she lobbied for a long time to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. And finally, Abraham Lincoln was the one who said, yeah, okay.
38:13 Mike Carruthers? So can you run down, without going into, you don't have to stop at any of them and go into any detail, we can do that later, but just like, what's the menu look like at these early Thanksgiving-y kind of dinners? What's on the menu?
38:29 Speaker 03 Well, for the pilgrims, it would have been something called nasomp, which was a native, kind of a porridge made with cornmeal and nuts, berries, and maybe a sweetener. They probably would have had striped bass, which was a fish that was easy to catch, and that was also sustaining them. Probably would have had shellfish. They would have had deer, probably. And I'm guessing a lot of different kinds of wild fowl.
39:10 Speaker 03 They, I don't know that they would have had dessert, but they did develop this thing called Indian pudding, which was cornmeal with milk and a sweetener.
39:21 Mike Carruthers? What about potatoes, stuffing, and gravy?
39:23 Speaker 03 Oh, potatoes. Well, in 1620, we're talking about that first Thanksgiving, that first alleged Thanksgiving, they would have known about potatoes, but the potato they would have known about was the sweet potato, which the Spanish had brought to Europe. And it was highly prized because it was believed to be an aphrodisiac.
39:49 Speaker 03 And it was a luxury item. So some of the pilgrims who were of the gentry would have been familiar with the sweet potato. The, but the sweet potato didn't come to America, I think, until 1764. The Irish potato didn't come to the United States until 1718, when a bunch of, there were four, five shiploads of Scots-Irish who came to Boston, and the Boston Puritans didn't want to have anything to do with them, so they sent them to the New Hampshire frontier. And in what is now Dairy, New Hampshire, they planted the first potato, the first Irish potato. And it was viewed as a food for the poor,
40:33 Speaker 03 for pigs, and for the Irish. You just didn't eat the potato. And the French hated the white potato even more. They banned its harvesting, or they banned the planting of the potato, because they thought that it caused leprosy. But then, during the Seven Years' War, around 1755 or so, there was a French pharmacist who was captured by the Germans, and while he was imprisoned, they made him eat potatoes. So after he got released, he got really interested
41:09 Speaker 03 in nutrition, and he rehabilitated the potato. And the French came to embrace the noble spud, and they served Thomas Jefferson french fries in Paris when he was minister to France. And Thomas Jefferson liked the french fries, so he served them at the White House when he was president. And that's how the white potato became a popular menu item at Thanksgiving.
41:42 Mike Carruthers? You said the sweet potato didn't come here until the 1700s, but I thought you said that they was, it was at the first Thanksgiving, which would have been before then, so help me un-
41:52 Speaker 03 No, no, no. They, they would have known about the sweet potato, but they wouldn't have had them here. It was, it was something, you know, it was like, a really fancy food.
42:01 Mike Carruthers? So there are some foods that, that I think of New Eng- as New England-y foods that are often associated with Thanksgiving. Were they, and those would be cranberries, apples, things like that. Were those there, or not?
42:17 Speaker 03 Oh, they would have had cranberries, definitely. The natives revered the cranberry. In fact, there is a, there are some Wampanoag people who live on Martha's Vineyard. And they, their Thanksgiving is the second, second Thursday, I think, in October. And it's Cranberry Day. And the kids get out of school and they eat cranberries. It was a very, very useful, was used as a dye, it was used as a sweetener, it had medicinal properties.
42:52 Mike Carruthers? Were the, were the early settlers here, the pilgrims, were they big on vegetables? Meaning, did they have like peas and celery and carrots and things like that?
43:04 Speaker 03 They would have eaten the three sisters, the pumpkins, the beans, and the squash. Celery is kind of an interesting vegetable because it didn't really come to America until the American Revolution, the 1770s. And it was, it was kind of a fancy food. But think about it, you're celebrating Thanksgiving in late fall and vegetables are mushy, but there's this nice green crisp vegetable.
43:40 Speaker 03 And for many years, it was the most popular item on US restaurant menus, next to coffee and tea.
43:51 Mike Carruthers? So, talk about the people, because you mentioned this, the one woman who was kind of the Martha Stewart of her, or bigger than Martha Stewart. But I imagine that there are other people in this story that kind of steer the menu a bit, or, or the legend of the menu, yes?
44:10 Speaker 03 Well, the people who stick in my mind are the first four women who cooked Thanksgiving. Because after that first winter, there were only four adult women left in Plymouth Colony. And there would have been some 48 others who survived and 90 Native Americans. So that's cooking for 140 people. Here are these four women who have to pluck all the birds that the men caught. They probably have to cut up the deer. They have no running water. They've got to cook outside. It just would have been a nightmare. I can't even imagine it. But I can tell you who they were. There was Mary Brewster, who was older.
44:55 Speaker 03 She was in her 50s and she was the wife of William Brewster, the spiritual guide. There was Susanna Winslow, who was the wife of Edward Winslow, who was one of the leaders. And those two were saints, which means they were the Puritans who came for religious reasons. So the other two women were Elizabeth Hopkins and Elizabeth Billington. And the Billingtons were bad news. Her husband, John Billington, was hanged for murder. Her son was a troublemaker who got lost and nearly started a war between the pilgrims and the natives.
45:39 Speaker 03 And she was whipped for slander. But the one who really interests me is Elizabeth Hopkins. Her husband was Stephen Hopkins, who was in a Shakespeare play. He had come over to North America one more time, one time previously, as an indentured servant. And his ship got wrecked and they lived on Bermuda for nine months and rebuilt the ship and went to Jamestown. And Shakespeare heard the story and wrote The Tempest. And so Stephen Hopkins, who came back to North America after returning to England, he was Stefano in The Tempest. He was the power-mad butler.
46:26 Mike Carruthers? So you have this image that we got in school of, you know, the Native Americans and the Pilgrims coming together as some sort of like community dinner and that they're all getting together and sharing their food. Is that what this was? Is it, was there a lot of, uh, let me help you cook that? Or here's how we do it here, uh, as Native Americans? Or was there that kind of relationship?
46:54 Speaker 03 I think there would have been. One thing I'm really unclear about is whether the Native women came because, you know, they might've brought some na somme or some cornbread or something. There were servants and there were children. And so I think everybody would have been pressed into service. They'd been working together for over a year. Uh, you know, the, the Pilgrims had things that the Indians wanted. Uh, guns, for example, or, you know, trade goods, pots.
47:33 Speaker 03 And the, the natives had something that the Pilgrims wanted, which was fur. There was a huge, huge market for beaver fur in Europe. And the, the natives taught the, um, the Pilgrims how to fish. So I, I think it would have been a cooperative effort.
47:55 Mike Carruthers? So the natives and the Pilgrims have this big meal together. But was this like a, a special occasion? They came together, had this meal, and then they went their separate ways? Or did these people mingle together all the time?
48:10 Speaker 03 No, they, they were, they intermingled a lot. As a matter of fact, Edward Winslow, who was the husband of Susanna Winslow, who cooked that dinner, he saved the chief's life at one point. Massasoit had some illness and Edward Winslow came and I think honestly, I think he fed him something like chicken soup and did something that to save his life. So, yes, and of course, Guanto, the, the native who greeted them.
48:44 Speaker 03 Taught them how to grow corn. So they were, they were, they mingled a lot.
48:50 Mike Carruthers? What else about this holiday, or the, or the first Thanksgiving, anyway, or the early traditions of Thanksgiving, do you find people still don't understand, or maybe is a bit of a myth, or, or anything like that?
49:05 Speaker 03 It wasn't really Thanksgiving until the 19th century. It was kind of forgotten. And the Thanksgiving was something that the English celebrated in England and here. It wasn't a harvest meal. A real Thanksgiving was getting the community together because you were thankful for something. It could be rain after a drought, or a military victory.
49:43 Speaker 03 So after the Battle of Saratoga and the Revolution, Sam Adams in Massachusetts declared a day of Thanksgiving. You could have Thanksgiving in April. You could have, your town could have a Thanksgiving. Thomas Jefferson actually declared Thanksgiving when he was governor of Virginia. And it didn't really become a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln declared it.
50:12 Mike Carruthers? But the idea of Thanksgiving, as you say, came later. So what did they view it as? When they came together, they're coming together, saying, hey, thanks for coming to our what?
50:24 Speaker 03 I think it would, I think it would have been like a state dinner. You know, they didn't sign any treaties, but that would have been the point of it.
50:34 Mike Carruthers? Well, it sounds like the Thanksgiving we have today, that we celebrate in our homes with our family and friends, is very different than that, those early Thanksgivings, and frankly, seems a lot tastier. But it is fun to hear, you talk about, you know, what those real Thanksgiving meals were like. I've been speaking with Leslie Landrigan. She is author of a book called Historic Thanksgiving Foods and the People Who Cooked Them, 1607 to 1955. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Leslie, thank you.
51:07 Speaker 03 Terrific. Thanks so much, Mike.
51:13 Mike Carruthers? Why is printer ink so expensive? A lot of people ask that question. And according to Consumer Reports, there are actually some good answers to that question. You might not like them, but they're good answers. For one thing, the engineering that goes into printer ink today is really expensive. Today's printers have to fire thousands of drops of ink per second, representing four different colors with tremendous accuracy, and that ink needs to be quick drying, water and smear resistant, and avoid making the page curl up. It also has to prevent the tiny little ink jets from getting clogged. All of that costs a lot of money. Turns out that a lot of ink gets wasted. Well, it's not wasted, but it's not for printing.
51:57 Mike Carruthers? Printers use ink in two ways. First, of course, the ink is used to print documents and images, but the ink jets also use ink just to clean the print heads. According to one expert, it's typical for an inkjet printer to waste as much ink on maintenance as it does on printing documents. Another reason is, in essence, you're paying off the printer. Think of the price of the printer as a down payment. It's theorized that some printers cost more to make than the price they sell for, but the printer companies make up the difference by marking up the ink. And that is something you should know. For a successful podcast like this, to stay successful, we always need new listeners,
52:41 Mike Carruthers? because, as you can imagine, listeners come, listeners go, and so we constantly need to attract new listeners, and you can help by telling people you know about this podcast and suggesting they give a listen. I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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