Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know TV Moments That Changed The World About this episode Whatever you think of TV, you have to admit it has shaped the world (maybe more than the internet, according to Josh). There have been moments here or there in TV history where the world took a new course and we go over some of them in this episode.
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1:34 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:44 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is the first episode of the 20026.
1:54 Speaker 03 I thought that was already another episode out.
1:57 Josh Clark? Yes, this is the first one, Chuck. I think this comes out on 1/1.
2:01 Speaker 03 Really?
2:01 Josh Clark? 26.
2:02 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
2:03 Josh Clark? I'm pretty sure, yeah.
2:04 Speaker 03 I thought we had already crept into 26, but that's no matter because it's still 2.5 for us.
2:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's some weird time stuff that's going on. We're essentially straddling two years right now. And I'm wearing a silver space suit because of that.
2:21 Speaker 03 All that to say, if we're a little loose, it's because this is our last recording session of the year. And so we're closing this out, or opening up the next year, with a good old fashioned top 10 that's not a 10, like, just like the old days.
2:39 Josh Clark? That's right. We're finishing out 2025 in Stuff You Should Know Fashion, right?
2:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, just like we did in probably 2010.
2:46 Josh Clark? Yeah, probably.
2:50 Josh Clark? Chuck, if you'll allow me to begin.
2:52 Speaker 03 Oh, boy. It's just a classic old school opening.
2:55 Josh Clark? Chuck.
2:56 Speaker 03 Do you have a TV?
2:57 Josh Clark? Have you ever seen TV?
3:01 Speaker 03 I knew it was coming. Yes.
3:04 Josh Clark? It was either that or Webster's defines TV.
3:08 Speaker 03 Right, right.
3:09 Josh Clark? One of the two. I've seen TV too. Not only have I seen a TV, I've watched what's broadcast on TV as well, multiple times throughout my life.
3:19 Speaker 03 Same.
3:20 Josh Clark? It's funny, we chose this, Moments That Changed The World, TV Moments That Changed The World. And as you're kind of researching this, you realize like, for better or worse, man, TV is, like, it made modern culture more than anything else, I think, in the entire world. I would argue more than the internet.
3:41 Speaker 03 Ooh, interesting.
3:42 Josh Clark? I'm just gonna say it.
3:44 Speaker 03 All right. I'm not gonna argue. I'm not in an arguing mood.
3:48 Josh Clark? Well, people who disagree, just follow us on this journey into TV Moments That Changed The World. Maybe your opinion will be changed. Either way, I don't fall to you.
3:57 Speaker 03 All right, great.
3:59 Josh Clark? So let's start at the beginning when like the day that TV really kicked off in earnest. There was a day that this happened. It was April 30th, 1939 in Flushing, New York on Long Island. And if you are familiar with that date in that area, you may know that this was the 1939 World's Fair. And this is where TV got its start, where it was really kind of unveiled to the public at large.
4:25 Speaker 03 That's right. Not the 1940 World's Fair, HowStuffWorks.com, because there was not one.
4:31 Josh Clark? No.
4:32 Speaker 03 Uh, yeah, so you know, TV had been around for a bit, um, but it wasn't super widespread at this point. I feel like we talked about this a lot lately for some reason.
4:40 Josh Clark? Yes, stuff is just really clicking these days. I'm not, I'm not sure why.
4:44 Speaker 03 It really is, uh, but they had broadcast limitations. They could only broadcast, you know, for a limited number of miles, like out a limited number of miles. But by the time that World's Fair came along, they were like, hey, this is a chance to make a really big splash. Uh, the RCA Corporation, the Radio Corporation of America, which also then led the way in TVs. They were putting out some pretty good televisions at the point, but they were luxury items. Uh, and again, they didn't have like the most regular broadcasting going on, but they knew that this World's Fair was a chance to make a super big splash.
5:17 Josh Clark? Right. So yeah, this is where they were going to start selling TVs to the public. The problem is, is you can have all the TVs in the world, but if you don't have anything to watch on it.
5:26 Speaker 03 Good point.
5:26 Josh Clark? What, what are you gonna do? Nothing. You're gonna sit there like a jackass and look at a blank TV. So luckily RCA thought of this and they founded NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, to start broadcasting stuff. So they brought the whole thing together, the broadcasting and the TVs themselves. And they debuted it, um, on April 30th, 1939, when they, I think, created the world's first live television broadcast of Franklin Roosevelt, um, kicking off the 1939 World's Fair.
5:59 Speaker 03 That's right. Uh, and we did mention this one in another episode, but he was, you know, sort of the, the first president daddy of TV, granddaddy of TV. And like you said, he opened it up there and NBC had gotten there and they had their now antiquated TV technology all lined up. It was just pretty whiz bang at the time.
6:21 Josh Clark? Sure.
6:22 Speaker 03 And they sent signals through these mobile broadcasting trucks, which I mean, it's pretty amazing that in the 1930s, they had the technology to even accomplish that.
6:32 Josh Clark? Right.
6:33 Speaker 03 So it was pretty impressive still to this day and broadcast that signal out to about 2,000 viewers, which seemed like a big number at the time, I imagine.
6:44 Josh Clark? I'm still impressed with news vans.
6:47 Speaker 03 Oh yeah, sure.
6:48 Josh Clark? Of the time, which is our time.
6:51 Speaker 03 I'm impressed with news vans of today.
6:53 Josh Clark? That's what I mean.
6:54 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
6:55 Josh Clark? I didn't get it across very well.
6:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
6:57 Josh Clark? So one thing I saw, I was looking at pictures of this 1939 World's Fair, the RCA Pavilion. Apparently they built one of their televisions within transparent, I guess, glass or something like that, maybe plastic. So you could see the internal working parts so that people wouldn't think it was just some sort of trick.
7:16 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. Interesting.
7:17 Josh Clark? That's how new it was.
7:18 Speaker 03 Yeah. Oddly, since we're recording our Christmas episode, I feel like this pause before the next one is gonna include like jingle bells and things.
7:27 Josh Clark? Right.
7:28 Speaker 03 But it's not going to. We're just simply moving on to another one, which is Disney's Wonderful World of Color. I'm sure you, like I, grew up watching, I guess by the time we were watching it in the 70s, or me in the 70s and you likely in the 80s, it was called The Wonderful World of Disney?
7:46 Josh Clark? I watched Walt Disney Presents, I think is what it was for me.
7:50 Speaker 03 Oh, okay. So I guess, yeah, since I'm only a year older than you, I was watching The Wonderful World of Disney because this show had some title changes. But the reason we're talking about this at all, it's because of the advent of color television, which Walt Disney himself really got behind and was like, hey, I want to be the dude that kind of brings this to the masses.
8:12 Josh Clark? Right, because just like how you could have TVs but nothing to broadcast, you could have color TVs and if you weren't broadcasting in color, what's the point? And again, this was an issue for RCA and by then, of course, they had NBC and NBC was rolling pretty well.
8:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:27 Josh Clark? But Walt Disney's anthology series had started years before and it was on ABC. ABC wasn't broadcasting in color.
8:35 Speaker 03 No.
8:35 Josh Clark? So Walt Disney personally held a meeting with NBC and said, we, we want to do this.
8:42 Speaker 03 No.
8:42 Josh Clark? Apparently he told his team. He said that, um, he said, "Bellas, I want this deal. If necessary, I'll stand on my head in Macy's window."
8:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, and, and all the executives said, "Uh, you don't have to do that. It's a pretty good idea. So why are you, why are you being weird?"
8:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, but he was just that enthusiastic about the whole thing. But he personally went and pitched the idea to NBC. And the reason why, again, is NBC was the first network to broadcast in color. And so Walt Disney really kind of pushed this through because NBC would have broadcast in color either way, but Walt Disney wanted to do it in like high style.
9:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. Uh, and this is a, a TV show that launched in 1954 and ran for 34 seasons. Uh, obviously at first in black and white. And like I mentioned earlier, you know, the name changes. I guess they had one, you know, between My Birth and Your Birth. Uh, because it was initially called Disney's Wonderful World and then Magical World of Disney.
9:36 Josh Clark? Yeah.
9:36 Speaker 03 And then when the color debuted, he was like, "We really want to be sort of obvious with this. So let's call it Disney's Wonderful World of Color."
9:45 Josh Clark? Yeah.
9:45 Speaker 03 But we still haven't even said what this was. I mean, you mentioned anthology series. It was, it was like a variety show, uh, essentially. They had cartoons and stuff. Uh, I remember when I was a kid that the Davy Crockett, uh, TV show. Uh, and it says in, in this How Stuff Works article, it launched the Coon Skin Cap craze. And I, I have a picture of little five-year-old me with a, with a musket and a leather vest and a Coon Skin cap on my head. So I was into that.
10:13 Josh Clark? I had one too, but I don't have a picture of it, so I can't prove it.
10:17 Speaker 03 I can probably dig that up and throw it up on the Instagram, maybe to align with this. So I'll, I'll try and find that.
10:23 Josh Clark? You gotta.
10:25 Speaker 03 I got it.
10:26 Josh Clark? So there were also like a lot of documentary programming, right?
10:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:30 Josh Clark? You would think like, oh, okay, hard hitting frontline-esque documentaries. No, not at all. It meant that they would go and film stuff under various themes at Disneyland. They were essentially big ads for Disneyland. He used that big time. And I mean, they were well-produced and interesting.
10:47 Speaker 03 Sure.
10:47 Josh Clark? But they really went to that well quite a bit in every episode. Not in the first episode, though. Instead, the first episode, and this is the moment that changed the world as far as color TV goes. It was on September 24th, 1961. And it was, the episode was two parts. And the first one was an adventure in color. And it, it really was a bit of an adventure. Like, it was a bunch of little segments that really kind of showed off what you can do with color TV and just must have knocked the socks off, knocked the Coonskin caps off of all the little kids sitting at home.
11:22 Speaker 03 That's right. And it also featured something called the Spectrum Song, which kind of explained what was going on. Cause I guess they felt the need to explain color to people who had gone around their entire lives seeing real life in color. But I guess, like you said, it was a pretty whiz-bang thing to see, thing to see it on your TV for the first time. So they went to great lengths to probably over-explain that. And this is also when we got the debut of Professor Ludwig Von Drake from the Disney Duck World.
11:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, he was kind of an eccentric inventor. His self-written bio, bio was, he's an eminent psychologist, renowned color expert, etymologist, the most sought-after lecturer in the world.
12:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:11 Josh Clark? He is undoubtedly the outstanding genius of the century. So he was fairly egotistical, but he was also funny. And he became beloved, and this is where he came from. That first adventure in color half. And then the second half was a theatrical release featuring Donald Duck. Because all of these like Disney cartoons that we just, you know, take for granted today, you used to have to go to the theater to see them. But when you went to the theater to see them, they were in color.
12:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:37 Josh Clark? You saw them on TV, they're in black and white. Now you can see them in color on TV without leaving the comfort of your home.
12:44 Speaker 03 What was their deal with the ducks? So was that, I mean, I guess it's just like any other cartoon animal, but they really leaned into the ducks.
12:51 Josh Clark? It was a great excuse to draw something without pants.
12:54 Speaker 03 Ah, okay. That makes sense. I never got into any, I was a little old for like DuckTales and all that stuff.
13:00 Josh Clark? That was a good show.
13:01 Speaker 03 So like Donald Duck was my only, I guess, exposure, my only duck exposure, his little feathered fanny. Oh, sorry, sorry, listeners in England. I know what that means there.
13:12 Josh Clark? That's right.
13:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:13 Josh Clark? Nice catch. To be, to be perfectly honest, I was a little old for DuckTales too, but I still watched it.
13:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, you know, we all regress.
13:23 Josh Clark? I never progressed, I think.
13:25 Speaker 03 Oh, come on.
13:26 Josh Clark? So just like Disney probably promised RCA and NBC, like they started selling colored TVs like hotcakes, thanks to, in large part, the wonderful world of color. Disney's wonderful world of color, to be exact.
13:41 Speaker 03 That's right. And that feels like a great time for a break, huh?
13:44 Josh Clark? Yes, it does.
13:45 Speaker 03 All right, we'll be right back, everybody.
13:58 Speaker 04 Hello, hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with IBM's Anna Paola Assis about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI.
14:08 Speaker 05 AI now moves from somebody operating a system to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing, and where.
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14:28 Speaker 06 Hey what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The Odd Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
15:19 Josh Clark? All right. So you might think that we're going in chronological order. We are not.
15:23 Speaker 03 No.
15:23 Josh Clark? So we're going to go back in time a little bit from the debut of color TV, but after the World's Fair in 1939, two years after, and we're going to go to, you know, I never found out what network this was on. Did you?
15:40 Speaker 03 Hmm, no.
15:41 Josh Clark? That's silly.
15:43 Speaker 03 Let's just call it ESPN.
15:45 Josh Clark? Okay. So on ESPN in 1941, on July 1st, this is a moment that changed the world. Some people who are watching the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Philly, at the Philadelphia Phillies, essentially saw the first television ad ever.
16:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. It was either nine or 10 seconds long. It depends on the source that you cite, but it was pretty short. And all it was, and I know we've talked about this before because I have seen this before, and I can't think of any other reason why I would have.
16:15 Josh Clark? Right.
16:15 Speaker 03 But it is a scene of a Bull of a Clock face just sort of superimposed over a map of the United States, and it's had the phrase over, over the top of it like a Chiron, "The world runs on Bull of a Time." And about 4,000 people saw this ad, and I imagine they were like, What the heck is this? Why am I, why am I hearing about Bulova?
16:38 Josh Clark? And why do I suddenly feel like buying a Bulova watch?
16:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, probably.
16:43 Josh Clark? What's super quaint and sweet is that the ad cost Bulova $9.
16:48 Speaker 03 That's crazy. Even for the time, that's crazy.
16:52 Josh Clark? Yeah, even at the time, that's $195 today.
16:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:55 Josh Clark? So that was quite a sweet deal.
16:57 Speaker 03 Sure.
16:57 Josh Clark? And the, what it did was show like this is a, we can do this. We can advertise to people. And it's not to say that there were just no ads on TV before the Bulova ad, but they just followed a completely different format. So much so that the Bulova ad is pretty safely considered among historians as the first actual TV commercial.
17:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's for a couple of reasons. You did mention some other ads, but before that it was like, you know, this program is sponsored by whatever. And that was just the ad. It wasn't actual TV commercial in between content. The first ad, I guess if you count that stuff, was in 1930. The year TV debuted really, and it was a furrier. Man, it seems like it would have been from like 1830, but it was a furrier in Boston called IJ Fox Furriers, who sponsored the CBS Orchestra.
17:56 Speaker 03 It was a program called The Foxtreper. So that, you know, that's kind of how ads went up until 41.
18:01 Josh Clark? Yeah, and that was the radio format. It was essentially, they just took the format that had been pioneered on radio. Now they were doing it on TV. That's not really an ad. If you call that an ad, you're just being contrarian, right?
18:12 Speaker 03 Sure.
18:13 Josh Clark? There were still even other ads, but they were illegal because it wasn't until 1941 that the FCC started issuing licenses to run commercials on, on broadcast networks. But that means that the ads before them were illegal. I could not find any mention of what these ads were for, but I got the impression that they were just experimentation, networks kind of on the sly, figuring out how to do it as they went along. So again, Bulova is the first actual TV commercial that was legal and that was also produced with the intent, the sole intent, to sell a particular product on air. That was it. That space of air was filled up by an ad. That was the first time ever.
18:57 Speaker 03 That's right. And I know we've mentioned this before, but for those who... Aren't familiar with our canon, in the old days of Stuff You Should Know, our boss, Connell Byrne, who commissioned the whole show to begin with and changed our lives, thank you Connell, he came up to us at one point after we had been doing it a while and said, hey, people are running ads on podcasts now and we need to get into this. And we were like, no way, no how, we're not going to foul up our show by selling it. And then eventually he said, well, you know, if we can sell this thing, it'll make the company money. And on down the road, maybe this just becomes your job. I don't know if he said that, but the writing was kind of on the wall. And maybe this can just become
19:40 Speaker 03 the only thing you do here and you won't be writing articles for houseofworks.com anymore. And we went, hmm, tell us more.
19:49 Josh Clark? You make a good case here.
19:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:51 Josh Clark? Hey Chuck, real quick, speaking of our canon, so for all of you listeners out there, it's a little behind the scenes peek.
19:57 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
19:57 Josh Clark? We have like, I think, including short stuff, in the neighborhood of 2,300 episodes. It doesn't really get it across when you say 2,300. We have a ton of episodes in our back catalog and we, like, people write in all the time and they're like, you should do this episode. We're like, we did, like, seven years ago. And it's like, a lot of people just have no idea the episodes we've done. So we're trying to like, figure out how to get it out there better.
20:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. That's the reason we mentioned this. We've been sort of putting our heads together at iHeartMedia because like you said, a lot of people don't, you know, I think iTunes serves up about 300, but here's a little trick. If you're on your podcast player for iTunes on your iPhone, if that's how you listen, when you scroll down through like the first five episodes, there's a little button there that says, see all 2,000 plus episodes. And if you click on that, they're all there and you can scroll through. But, you know, a lot of people don't know that. A lot of other players don't, you know, who knows how many they display, but it's a frustration for us. And so it's just a gentle reminder that there are literally thousands of these episodes out there.
21:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, they're all also, I think you said on the iHeart Radio app and stuff you should know dot com has the vast repository and a pretty good search function. And one of the ways we figured out, like, we could probably, like, we could probably do a lot better about mentioning episodes, like, specifically when they come up in another episode, like, a new episode. But I feel like we're gonna have to do a lot better than we normally do, which is, like, didn't we do some episode on something related to this?
21:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:33 Josh Clark? We gotta figure it out, but we will, because there's just a bunch of great episodes just sitting there, waiting for people to discover.
21:40 Speaker 03 That's right. And with that, we move on to...
21:43 Josh Clark? Oh, wait.
21:44 Speaker 03 Yes?
21:44 Josh Clark? We have to do the Super Bowl comparison. You have to do it if you talk about the Bolivar ad.
21:48 Speaker 03 Do we really?
21:49 Josh Clark? Yes.
21:50 Speaker 03 All right. You take it away, then. I refuse to take part.
21:53 Josh Clark? So if you write or talk about the Bolivar ad, it's basically incumbent upon you to compare that ad cost, the $9 cost, to what it would have cost had they run it on a Super Bowl. And so for the 2025 Super Bowl, if Bolivar had run this, they would have paid $2.35 million for those 10 seconds.
22:13 Speaker 03 Amazing.
22:14 Josh Clark? Quite a deal.
22:15 Speaker 03 That's right.
22:16 Josh Clark? There, I just kept this from being sued.
22:18 Speaker 03 Uh, well, I don't even think we're even, I think we're supposed to say the big game, aren't we?
22:23 Josh Clark? It's, no, like, we're supposed to not buy into that.
22:26 Speaker 03 Oh, okay. I gotcha. All right, moving on to the next one on the list, uh, is the, that was a good segue, too, because we can't talk about, like, our old episodes and then say, also, there was a devastating tsunami in 2004 in the Indian Ocean.
22:39 Josh Clark? Right.
22:39 Speaker 03 Because that happened, and we, you know, if you're the, actually, you don't even have to be much of a certain age, but on December 26, 2004, there was an undersea earthquake, uh, about a 9.0 magnitude that, um, set off this incredible tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
22:58 Speaker 03 I mean, we've done episodes on tsunamis and earthquakes, and we've talked about all this before, but, uh, it was about 100 feet tall, traveling at 500 miles an hour. Not much advance warning and was one of the most devastating tragedies in human history. It killed close to 230,000 people in 14 countries. It also sparked the biggest rail disaster in history when it completely wiped out a train traveling along the coast of Sri Lanka.
23:27 Josh Clark? Mm hmm.
23:28 Speaker 03 And we mention all this because the only positive that came out of this was the media's reaction, which sparked the incredible amount of philanthropy and aid and giving in its aftermath.
23:42 Josh Clark? Yeah, because the, I was reading a study on this. It was called Media Coverage and Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami. It was by Philip H. Brown and Jessica Minty.
23:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:56 Josh Clark? And they said like the media coverage was unprecedented. Like it didn't, the world didn't forget about it in like three days.
24:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:03 Josh Clark? It was 24 hour coverage of this disaster for weeks on end, right? And because these, these images were broadcast around the world and because it was so mind bogglingly devastating, people just opened up their pockets.
24:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:21 Josh Clark? I saw 99 different countries donated and 13 of those countries had never donated for a natural disaster relief before. It got to everybody.
24:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. And there are, I think about 195 countries in the world.
24:35 Josh Clark? Yeah. Which is kind of like, do better, other 96 countries.
24:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. I imagine the countries that didn't give have their own issues, had their own issues going on, you know?
24:46 Josh Clark? Well, now I feel bad.
24:47 Speaker 03 No, don't feel so bad. But they have done studies, that 2006 study that you referenced, they said that the Catholic Relief Charities got a million dollars in three days, which would turn out to be small beans in the long run. But over three days, that's quite a haul. Save the Children got more than $6 million in four days. The Lutheran World Relief raised more money in a week than it does in a year. And the AP found that 30% of American families donated in the first two weeks. And just from the United States, there was about 1.6 billion and estimates around the world were about $14 billion raised.
25:27 Josh Clark? Yeah, and just to kind of go over the power of the media, one thing I left out here is that that same study found that one extra minute of coverage on television equated to an increase in internet donations by 16 to 20%. So like this, this, the impact, it's just essentially like a classroom lesson
25:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:48 Josh Clark? in the impact that media can have, the positive impact that media can have. And that's, I mean, that's, that is definitely something to TV's credit.
25:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:57 Josh Clark? You want to move on to, well, move backward to Vietnam?
26:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, again, we're jumping all over the timeline. And we're in Vietnam right now because I guess we should talk a little bit about pre-Vietnam and as far as media coverage go, because before that, World War II and certainly the Korean War, what you got as far as media coverage was highly sort of curated and regulated, government mediated film reels. You would get news updates, they would play in movie theaters. By the time we got to Vietnam, they had, you know, like handheld cameras you could literally take to the front lines. And it really changed the way war coverage went and as a result, the way, the way people
26:43 Speaker 03 felt about the war, because World War II, everyone was, they were pretty rah rah and you got these rah rah films. So morale was big in America, you know, they were like, hey, this is, this is great. We're fighting the Nazis.
26:54 Josh Clark? Right. Another huge factor was that by 1966, 93% of American homes had a TV. And just 13, 16 years earlier in 1950, it was 9%.
27:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:08 Josh Clark? So TV was firmly established in the American psyche. You remember in, in Wonder Years, whenever they sat down and had dinner, they always had the TV on showing Vietnam
27:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
27:18 Josh Clark? coverage?
27:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:20 Josh Clark? That's what it was like.
27:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure.
27:22 Josh Clark? And so the, the fact that everybody had TVs, the fact that now there was like cameras that you could easily allow a journalist to embed with, and the, the idea that the government really shouldn't control propaganda, shouldn't control the news like that.
27:41 Josh Clark? Created this this atmosphere where the broadcasters were willing to show like really heartrending, unflinching stories of what the soldiers fighting for the United States were doing in Vietnam and what was being done to them. And it really shaped America's view of that war.
28:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it definitely made the mood and how we saw the war like pretty dour. But people, you know, going into Vietnam, there were a lot of people already, like before even the coverage started, that were like, what are we doing in Vietnam again? It wasn't like World War II where the Nazis were trying to, you know, take over the world. And so, you know, this just made everything worse. But, you know, worse in a positive way because it was showing the reality of things. It wasn't government controlled. I'm sure there were, you know, just countless meetings behind the scenes in the Oval Office where they were like, we're getting crushed by the reality of this war and how it's being
28:44 Speaker 03 depicted in the media. I'm sure they were, you know, pretty upset about losing control of that narrative.
28:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, no, they definitely were. And later on, I think the Iraq War was another considered another television war. Certainly the Gulf War, the first one was. But in the government kind of learned from losing the control over the narrative in Vietnam, but they weren't able to regain control. And so the sentiment toward Vietnam and the United States kept getting worse and worse. And protests were getting bigger and bigger. There was like a very healthy anti-war movement. And essentially, because the public was feeling this way, their public sentiment was that way toward Vietnam. And because if you turned
29:31 Josh Clark? on the news, the evening national news, you would see like terrible coverage that was not flattering at all to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. Elected officials basically had no choice but to listen to people. And it definitely led to the earlier, probably an earlier withdrawal than the United States may have otherwise taken.
29:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you know, changed the way that it went moving forward because you know, the writing was on the wall at that point for the for the US government. They're like, we can't go back to World War II as much as they wanted to kind of control that narrative. The American people at that point would not have it moving forward. So it really kind of changed the whole relationship of how any kind of conflict is covered.
30:13 Josh Clark? It did. So now they've struck a balance between allowing reporters to embed and just relying on those national news reporters to disseminate the propaganda. Because if you watch embedded coverage, for the most part, it is fairly
30:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:28 Josh Clark? rah rah, even if it's not overtly rah rah because the the American public's a little more savvy than that. It's still nothing like the coverage was of Vietnam, from what I understand.
30:38 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, and just the way wars are fought now, there's not like a front line like you had back then. So I remember watching the Gulf War and it was just all those like, you know, black and white shots of bombing things from thousands of feet above, you know?
30:52 Josh Clark? Yeah. And then the beginning of the Iraq War, remember it was shock and awe?
30:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:58 Josh Clark? And it was like, it was produced essentially for TV, the initial attack on Iraq.
31:03 Speaker 03 It's so gross to, I don't know, I'm not going to editorialize, but to name something like that, like, hey, that sounds pretty, pretty awesome.
31:11 Josh Clark? You know, I think it was either Rumsfeld or Cheney who came up with that. And I'm not surprised either way.
31:16 Speaker 03 For sure. Uh, should we take another break?
31:19 Josh Clark? Oh, gosh, I wasn't expecting that. Sure.
31:21 Speaker 03 All right, we'll take another break and finish up with a couple of more moments that changed TV history right after this.
31:38 Speaker 04 Hello, hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with IBM's Ana Paula Assis about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI.
31:49 Speaker 05 AI now moves from somebody operating a system to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing, and where.
32:05 Speaker 04 Hear the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
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32:58 Speaker 03 All right, we're going to move on to another show, but we should mention that the original House of Works article included, of course, the moon landing, which was a huge TV event. But we covered all of that in which episode?
33:10 Josh Clark? We have an episode on that. It's called How Going to the Moon Works from 2019. And it was a really interesting episode that really covered in depth the lunar landing.
33:19 Speaker 03 That's right, part of the 2,300 episodes plus.
33:22 Josh Clark? That's right.
33:23 Speaker 03 But we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a TV show that we've talked about here and there before called Cops. Because Cops is, and I know I mentioned this in that other episode, whatever it was, it was a show that I used to watch with more regularity than I like to admit now.
33:39 Josh Clark? I think everyone watched it a lot.
33:41 Speaker 03 Well, it was never, and I'm not excusing it, but it was never like appointment TV. In fact, I don't even know when it came on. This was just in my younger channel surfing days where it was like you're surfing around. Cops was on, I would watch Cops. And I was never like, yeah, yeah, go, go. But, you know, I found it probably entertaining and amusing. And now that I'm a little older and no more of, you know, slightly embarrassed that they were sort of exploiting many times people who had mental illness and who were suffering through poverty and addiction. And so I'm not so proud of that, but I'll I'll admit that I watch my fair share of Cops.
34:20 Josh Clark? I watched it too. So Cops changed the world in two ways. And this, this moment was March 11th, 1989, which is when it debuted on Fox. This is just three years after Fox premiered, nine months before The Simpsons even premiered. Cops started on Fox and it helped make Fox the fourth network. It was just such a huge show right out of the gate. And they, the two ways that it changed the world is one, it set the groundwork for reality TV.
34:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
34:50 Josh Clark? You can make a pretty good case that it was one of the, it may be the originator of reality TV. There weren't scripts. There wasn't any star. There wasn't any narrative or plot lines. It was just like, here's some cops and here's a crime that they're going to fight. We don't have a script. We just generally know what's going on, which ostensibly is the, the basis of any reality show.
35:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think, you know what we should do an episode on at some point is, I can't remember the name of it now because it just came to me. But I think kind of the first real reality show was that one where they followed the American family around in the seventies, maybe?
35:26 Josh Clark? Wasn't it PBS or British or something?
35:28 Speaker 03 I think it was PBS. And then they, they made a fictional account of that as a movie, not like a few, four or five, six years ago, that was pretty good too. I think James Gandolfini was in it.
35:41 Josh Clark? Okay. I would have guessed Peter Sarsgaard as the dad.
35:44 Speaker 03 It was really good though. Anyway, that really kicked off reality TV. MTV's Real World didn't come out till 92, but Cops certainly laid the groundwork for kind of like trashy reality TV, you know?
35:55 Josh Clark? Right. Yes. The other effect that it had on the world was it really reinforced unfair racial stereotypes.
36:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:05 Josh Clark? Among white Americans toward black Americans, people of color in general in the United States. It was an enormous show. It drew like eight million viewers each week. That's a crazy amount of people.
36:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:18 Josh Clark? It peaked in the 90s, but even from the first episode, civil rights groups were like, whoa, wait a second here. Like, a lot of these criminals are black, and this is way disproportionate to reality. I thought this was a reality show. And the Cops producers, Barbara Langley Productions, were like, well, it's reality-ish, you know?
36:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:41 Josh Clark? Like, it's not the actual portrayal of reality. It's a skewed toward entertainment version of reality. So just settle down. And the civil rights groups were like, we're not settling down. That actually makes it even worse.
36:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, the cops loved it because they were portrayed as heroes. It was a great recruiting tool for police officers. And, you know, I guess we have some stats from The Marshall Project. They did a analysis in 1994. Most of the officers on balance were white. Suspects were more likely to be black or Hispanic. As far as the numbers go, they found that while sexual assault, robbery, and murders account for just 13% of all crime, in 1994 at least, it was 43% of what you saw in Cops.
37:26 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
37:27 Speaker 03 I don't remember a lot of sexual assault and murder, though. Like, everything I saw in Cops were like robberies and drug arrests, or just, you know, DUI, being drunk out in public, stuff like that.
37:41 Josh Clark? Or a dude hiding under a kiddie pool?
37:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, he was probably drunk or on drugs.
37:46 Josh Clark? Right.
37:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's what I remember. I don't remember, like, more serious crimes. So I was kind of wondering about that stat.
37:51 Josh Clark? Yeah, I don't remember that either. They also found that same study found that the show was far more likely to associate black and brown people than whites with violent crime. They were, black and brown people were 40%. There was a 40% chance compared to a 13% chance for whites. So it was like, it wasn't just civil rights groups like sensing there's something off about this, like people conducted actual studies and found also that a viewer of Cops was likelier to maintain the racial stereotype that blacks are typically criminals than a person who didn't watch Cops. So it had a really large impact. And yet despite that, this is 94 that that
38:35 Josh Clark? study came out. It wasn't until 2013 that Fox was finally like, okay, fine, fine. Yes. Okay, we'll cancel the show. We've made our money over 25 seasons. And thanks to civil rights organization Color of Change, Fox dropped it. And that was the end of Cops forever, right?
38:53 Speaker 03 No, no, no. It was picked up by Spike TV. They ran it until 2020. And then after 2020, with all the, you know, sort of light shined on police brutality, they said, you know, maybe it's just not so good to run this anymore. But Fox Nation stepped up and brought it back in 21, and it is still going and it's 37th season. The other thing it did was sort of create the, the idea of the Florida man. Because they started, I believe they debuted in Broward County and shot a lot there over the years. And they, they shot, I think they shot in more than 100 cities in the end, but a lot of their content was shot in Florida and kind of sort of reinforced this whole Florida man thing.
39:35 Josh Clark? Yeah, I don't know that that's skewed.
39:39 Speaker 03 Yeah. All right. Fair enough.
39:42 Josh Clark? Let's finish up Chuck on like a really happy moment. Well, depending on which nation you're from, the USSR or the United States. If you're from the United States, this is a really good high point for your country in 1980 and the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, to be exact. And there was this one event that America was really the unlikely winners in, and it was men's hockey.
40:10 Speaker 03 That's right. This is during the height of the Cold War. So the US and the Soviet Union, you know, those, it was just. It was all you heard about if you were a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. It was such a big deal. The Soviet Union won the Olympic gold medals in ice hockey in 56 and then 64, 68, 72, and 76. So they ran the Olympics basically from the mid 60s to the mid 70s. And then 1980 came along and you had a US hockey team. And first of all, the Soviets hockey team, I believe there was a player, Fetisov, who said later on, it was probably the best team that the Soviet Union had ever put together.
40:54 Speaker 03 So they were the Drago and we were a little rocky because the American team at the time, this is before they allowed pro players to play in the Olympics. There was a bunch of college kids and they were, I mean, to call them underdogs was a massive understatement.
41:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, and a lot of the credit goes to the coach of the Olympic men's team, Herb Brooks, who was the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers hockey coach.
41:20 Speaker 03 Kurt Russell.
41:21 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
41:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, he played him in the movie.
41:24 Josh Clark? I thought that was Emilio Estevez.
41:27 Speaker 03 Well done.
41:28 Josh Clark? So the United States did not, despite how it ended, they did not get off on a very good footing. There is an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden a few days before the 1980 Olympics. Same month and everything. And the Soviet Union and the United States played in this exhibition match. And the Soviets really, you could use the word walloped, pretty effectively in this case. The Soviets won 10 to 3. So it did not look like the United States men's hockey team was going to produce much in the Olympics that year.
42:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, you don't see a lot of double-digit scores in hockey. If you're not familiar with hockey, you know, you see a lot of like... Two to nothing, three to two.
42:16 Josh Clark? Right.
42:17 Speaker 03 Once you score over 10 goals, it's a big, big deal. So the Americans weren't even supposed to advance that much in the Olympics, but they had a bunch of comeback wins, had a lot of close calls that they won. And they got into the medal round and faced the Soviets, who up to that point in the Olympics had outscored their opponents 51 to 11. So on February 22nd, 1980, and I know I've mentioned this before, but I actually watched this match as a, I guess I wasn't even nine yet. It was right before my ninth birthday.
42:50 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
42:51 Speaker 03 I wasn't even that into hockey, but we were an Olympic family.
42:54 Josh Clark? Right.
42:55 Speaker 03 And I, I remember, I have a very distinct memory of being in my parents' bedroom, for some reason, which I usually wasn't much allowed in. Cause it was, I don't know, it was the seventies. It was like, don't go in my bedroom. But we had this little black and white TV. I guess my dad was watching other stuff out there on the larger console TV. But I remember being in their bedroom and watching this match on the little black and white TV and knowing as a little eight-year-old, like what a huge, huge deal this was.
43:24 Josh Clark? Yeah, and you said something that I think kind of applied to a lot of the nation. Hockey was not really a thing, nothing like it is now in the United States. Like you had to live in a place where your rivers froze over every year to like hockey. It was a very regional sport.
43:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:42 Josh Clark? And yet, like you said, the entire United States tuned in for this match because it was the evil Soviets.
43:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:48 Josh Clark? And like to our younger viewers or listeners, like you don't, you can't imagine what they told us about the Russians. Like essentially, if you were a kid in the seventies, eighties, probably sixties too, you were basically taught that if you ever crossed paths with anybody from the Soviet Union, they would slash your throat just as soon as look at you. Like that was essentially what people thought of the Soviet Union at the time. And vice versa. So it was the big bad Soviets, who were just this huge juggernaut of a team. And the Americans, the ragtag, underdog Americans, standing up to these, this evil empire. And that's why everybody tuned in.
44:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was, I remember very just having the distinct feeling, it was communism versus democracy, really.
44:34 Josh Clark? Right, right. Which is, yeah, which is, I think what happened in that, that Super Bowl, with the Falcons versus the Patriots.
44:44 Josh Clark? Same thing.
44:46 Speaker 03 Oh, man. My, my darkest day as a Falcons fan, maybe.
44:49 Josh Clark? That was rough.
44:50 Speaker 03 It was either that or losing to the Jets last week.
44:53 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
44:53 Speaker 03 Oh, man. I can't talk about it.
44:55 Josh Clark? Okay.
44:56 Speaker 03 Uh, very sad season ticket holder here. Um, so Americans, of course, came back and won. And I remember our, our goalie, Jim Craig, like skating around after wrapped up in the American flag. And that was my first, like, real taste of, uh, of like, understanding what it was like to be an American. And again, a different time where, you know, it was the Cold War and it felt like a real win for democracy in a weird way.
45:23 Josh Clark? Yeah. So, um, a lot of people, I think basically everybody calls that game the miracle on ice.
45:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:29 Josh Clark? And the reason why is because the commentator who was calling the, the hockey game, Al Michaels, who as far as I know, had only called one hockey game previously at the Sapporo Winter Olympics years before, he did a magnificent job. And as the, the time is running out in the third period, America staged a comeback and scored two goals. And they were up four to three with several seconds left. And remember, this Soviet team was good enough that they could score a goal and tie, uh, within a few seconds. So the Americans are just skating around the ice, trying to keep the puck away from the Russians. And Al Michaels is counting down the seconds. And I think with about four seconds left, and it became clear that the Soviets weren't going to be able to score a goal, he goes, "Do you believe in miracles?
46:10 Josh Clark? Yes." And if you watch it today, you just get just amazing chills. Just even the last, like, 30 seconds of that game, it's really neat.
46:19 Speaker 03 For sure. I wonder if, uh, before the game, Al Michaels was like, "It's a puck, Al. It's a puck. It's a match. It's not a game." Uh, and if anyone brings up icing, just you explain it.
46:30 Josh Clark? Right. Just pretend it doesn't exist.
46:33 Speaker 03 Exactly.
46:34 Josh Clark? So ESPN called it the most famous hockey game ever played.
46:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure.
46:38 Josh Clark? Sports Illustrated ranked it in 1999 as the top sports moment of the 20th century. It was a big deal. And again, I would, I would strongly urge you, if you don't go watch the whole match, watch at least the third period or watch the last couple of minutes and several minutes after that where they're, yeah, they're celebrating. It's just, you can just feel like the whole country going crazy.
46:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, pretty incredible. And if you're ever, you know, at a dinner party and a group of people and they're talking about when the US beat the Soviets for the gold medal,
47:08 Speaker 03 you can be the actually guy, because that was not the gold medal match. I think a lot of people remember it that way because it was such a big deal. But that was, I guess, a bronze round.
47:17 Josh Clark? Yeah.
47:18 Speaker 03 And the US went on to win that gold against Finland.
47:21 Josh Clark? Yep, two days later.
47:23 Speaker 03 Pretty great.
47:24 Josh Clark? Pretty great, everybody. So that's it. Those are the only moments that changed the world and the history of TV. All the rest of them were pretty ho-hum.
47:32 Speaker 03 That's right.
47:33 Josh Clark? Uh, you got anything else?
47:36 Speaker 03 Uh, I got nothing else, sir.
47:38 Josh Clark? All right. I think this is a pretty good start to 2026, don't you?
47:42 Speaker 03 I think it's great.
47:43 Josh Clark? Okay, Chuck said great. That means it's time for listener mail.
47:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know what? Let's, let's start off the year without a listener mail and just make a push to remind everyone that we're still kicking off pretty soon. In a few months, it'll be year 18 in April, and we always are still looking to grow the show. And we don't do it much, but if you could rate and review the show, that means a lot. If you could tell friends and family, like, hey, there's this podcast, it's been around forever and we like it. We may or may not be Golden Globe nominated. We don't know at this point because we're going to find out next Monday. But yeah, go out and spread the, spread the good word. And we look forward to seeing everybody on the road this year in the United States and Canada.
48:24 Josh Clark? Yeah, we're going to be on the road this, this month in January, also in April, and then Canada this summer. So you can get tickets and info at stuffyoushouldknow.com. And if you want to say Happy New Year or whatever, you can send us an email. We love that. You can send it to [email protected] .
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49:01 Josh Clark? Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
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