Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms The Metric Pirates & Joseph Dombey's Bizarre Tale (with Jake Johnson) About this episode Jake Johnson is an off-the-cuff kinda guy, form-fit for this week's SNAFU when Ed and Jake meet a man who loved taking off his cuffs...and tunic, and trousers. He also happened to be one of the preeminent scientific minds during the French Revolution, and whose ill-fated trip across the Atlantic culminated in a tassle with Caribbean pirates and, potentially, a sunk American metric system. This is the Joseph Dombey Affair.
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0:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, mad respect, bro.
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0:14 Speaker 00 It's not like I'm driving a Porsche. I'm like, dude, I got a car that can fit six kids, luggage and a dog. And you go, Jesus, you're winning.
0:25 Speaker 00 It doesn't go fast. And I will, I will say it's not that much fun to drive, but the lovely storage in that baby.
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2:23 Speaker 01 Welcome to Snafu, the show about history's greatest screw ups. I'm Ed Helms and today I am joined by a prolific actor, comedian, writer and director. He co-hosts the podcast, We're Here to Help, with fellow funny man Gareth Reynolds. But you likely know our guest as the voice of Peter Parker in Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, as Doug in The Minks, or as the beloved Nick Miller from the now-modern classic hit, New Girl. He was of course also my hilarious co-star in the film, Tag. Please welcome Jake Johnson.
2:56 Speaker 00 Thanks Ed. Nice to see you pal.
2:59 Speaker 01 We'll put in some applause and like, you know, roaring.
3:02 Speaker 00 Three to four minutes of hard applause?
3:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Standing ovation, sound effects. Jake Johnson's here! Yes. We of course became acquainted on the movie Tag, which was just a goddamn delight. How fun was that? I mean, we had our ups and downs on the production, but it was, it was a hell of a lot of fun.
3:23 Speaker 00 Apart from Renner breaking both his arms during a stunt?
3:28 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
3:29 Speaker 00 Remember that crazy day in the church?
3:31 Speaker 01 Of course. I remember that.
3:33 Speaker 00 Insane.
3:33 Speaker 01 Okay, so just for the listener, we're doing this scene where Jeremy Renner is chasing us and he's on, he does that Fred Astaire chair move where he's, you know, where you like stand on the back of a chair and then, and then let it fall down and then you keep going. Only the, the sort of bit was that this was a stack of like 30 chairs. So it was like 20 feet tall.
3:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was high up.
3:57 Speaker 01 And he, and he, and he sort of falls down, but in a controlled way, off on this stack of chairs and then keeps running. But, and he was wearing a harness to make the fall smooth and not harmful to his body. This, there was some malfunction. He landed on both his arms. Both of his arms broke.
4:20 Speaker 00 Yes.
4:20 Speaker 01 And he went to the hospital and was back on set that afternoon.
4:27 Speaker 00 Shocking.
4:28 Speaker 01 Still shooting. Do you remember that?
4:30 Speaker 00 And I'll tell you, we've talked about this, but there are certain things you've said that are not for Jake. Breaking your arms and returning to shoot a scene in Tag, not for Jake. If I break my arms.
4:42 Speaker 01 Not for Jake.
4:42 Speaker 00 I'm holed up for a while. I'm in a hospital room. I'm expecting visitors. I'm expecting a lot of you were so brave for doing that. I'm not going back to work. And then, do you remember he has to throw coffee, I think at me?
4:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:55 Speaker 00 Where I run by him and he throws, but he had to use his broken arm. And I was like, I would like to complain about the fact that I need to slide on the ground, but I can't do that. Cause he's throwing something at me with a broken arm.
5:09 Speaker 01 Cause he's doing another stunt with broken arms.
5:12 Speaker 00 With broken arms. That to me was really wild. Do you remember the scene in the church also, when it was you, me, Hannibal and probably Ham, but I'm not sure. And Hannibal farted on camera and then got upset with us when we laughed as if he were the ones not being professional. And said, come on, man, stay in it.
5:38 Speaker 01 I do.
5:39 Speaker 00 And I said, I can't.
5:40 Speaker 01 You can't.
5:41 Speaker 00 That's impossible to do.
5:43 Speaker 01 I do remember that. That was, that was pure sabotage. Oh my God. There were so many hard laughs on that set. So many ridiculous experiences. And then this is, this is like, I'll probably, we'll probably cut this because this is like some, some celebrity whining. But I remember being so excited because they're like, hey, we got a jet for the whole cast. And we're going to, that's how we're going to travel on this press tour. So we're all flying together and I'm like, ah, this is great. We get private airports, luxury jet. It was like a battered, old, like, uh, like a school bus with wings, literally.
6:24 Speaker 01 It was like a 1970s, like Southwest retired airplane.
6:31 Speaker 01 It was such a piece of junk. It was like, I mean, okay.
6:37 Speaker 00 Please don't cut that out.
6:39 Speaker 01 And I just remember being like.
6:40 Speaker 00 So good.
6:42 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
6:43 Speaker 00 This is tag.
6:45 Speaker 01 Just the disappointment. It's like we're getting to the end to the, we're at a private airport. Like this is gonna be so great, so fun and great. And then we get on and it's like, oh, these, the seats are torn, like there's rats running around in this airplane. What is going on?
7:04 Speaker 00 I would rather be on a Greyhound.
7:05 Speaker 01 It smells like cigarettes, like.
7:08 Speaker 00 He was a Greyhound of the sky.
7:09 Speaker 01 Plane hadn't been cleaned since people smoked on planes. It was Greyhound, it was a Greyhound airplane is what it was.
7:15 Speaker 00 That's great, I do, that's great stuff, man.
7:18 Speaker 01 Okay, so we have to get into the story. This is a really, uh, this is a fun one. It's pretty arbitrary how you wound up, uh, doing this story. I don't have, usually I try to connect the guests in some way. In this case, I was like, this is just kind of a funny story and I think Jake will like it. So I hope this story is for Jake. I love it.
7:41 Speaker 01 Today, we're heading back to the age of musket powder and doodle daddies. This story takes us to the late 1700s when America was but a mere toddler and growing pains were all but expected. Wildly enough, one of the most intriguing political stalemates of the time revolved around measurements for distance and weight. Yes, today, we're diving into the embattled and complex history of the United States' relationship with the metric system. Sounds boring, but it is not, it is not, trust me on this. More specifically, we're diving into the tragic story of French scientist and explorer, Joseph Dombey, and you will understand why very shortly. There's obviously the metric system and the imperial system.
8:25 Speaker 01 Here in the United States, we use the imperial system. There are two other countries that still use that. The rest of the world is all metric. Do you know those other countries? I mean, there's, I would be amazed if you do.
8:35 Speaker 00 No.
8:36 Speaker 01 Liberia and Myanmar.
8:38 Speaker 00 Never would I have guessed those.
8:40 Speaker 01 No, of course not.
8:41 Speaker 00 Gun to my head, I couldn't have found those two.
8:43 Speaker 01 And I'm not disappointed in you. I didn't expect you to know those things.
8:46 Speaker 00 I'll take it. So we're the only three.
8:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, uh, now, if it were up to Thomas Jefferson, we would have incorporated the metric system long, long ago. However, according to legend, the fault lay at the feet of neither Jefferson nor Joseph Dombey, but pirates.
9:07 Speaker 01 All right, before we go any further, here's why measurement standards actually matter. A shared system of measurement is the quiet backbone of civilization. It's how trade functions, science agrees on reality, and buildings don't mysteriously end up a few inches too short. Historically, though, measurements were a mess because they were often based on local customs, a king's body part, or whatever some royal person thought a foot should be that year. Back in 1495, King Henry VII of England tried to bring some order to the chaos by standardizing units like the bushel, peck, gallon, and quart. That would eventually become the imperial system that we use today, feet, pounds, and all that stuff.
9:50 Speaker 01 Fast forward a few centuries, and the 13 colonies win their independence from Great Britain, but they still need Britain as a trading partner, so America stuck with the imperial system. The problem was, everyone used it differently. A foot in Williamsburg might not match a foot in Philadelphia, and New York is like doing its own thing. They have the Dutch system. It's just like a total mess. In 1790, across the Atlantic and in the middle of their own revolution, France's National Assembly turned to their Academy of Sciences and basically said, "Please invent a measurement system that can survive chaos." That's cool.
10:29 Speaker 01 Which means, try to deduce an invariable standard for all measurements and weights, etc. This is like how the Enlightenment worked, right? This is sort of peak Enlightenment thinking. The idea was that nature is impartial. Kings get beheaded, governments collapse, but the planet is constant. It keeps spinning. So if you base your measurements on nature itself, they will outlast wars and revolutions and very bad political decisions. And that's how we arrived at the meter, which was named after the Greek word metron, meaning "measure, standard, or rule." This was, again, France's National Assembly.
11:11 Speaker 01 They defined the meter as 1/10 millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Then built everything else from there. Weight, volume, surface area, and the whole thing scaled up or down using a very simple decimal system, all based on the number 10. And this was really badass. Like, this system worked, it was very simple, and this got Thomas Jefferson really excited. So on July 4th, 1790, he brought the concept of metrication to Congress. Massive spoiler alert, Congress was like, nope, no thanks. Pass. Hard pass. Yeah.
11:49 Speaker 00 Pass, don't fully get it, pass. You're a smart guy, TJ, but it's a pass for us. We are gonna, uh, they sound like executives. Congress was Hollywood executives when you tried to pitch original IP.
12:01 Speaker 01 Nah, pass. We're big fans of you, and we also love this idea. We think this idea has legs. And we honestly, do you ever get this one? Can't wait to see that movie. I can't wait to see that movie.
12:14 Speaker 00 That's what they said to Thomas Jefferson.
12:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, we've got something too similar. We can't do too, ah, it's like, it's just, no, no, no, you guys don't get it. The metric system replaces the, yeah, but does it?
12:27 Speaker 00 This is a brilliant idea, honestly. The people above me are no, but I'm a yes. But let's just think of another, come back in a couple of weeks with something new, but let's just keep this one as it is.
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15:09 Speaker 01 Congress said no to Jefferson, but he didn't give up. He had friends in high places, and as the former ambassador to France, he noticed that their system really seemed to be clicking along pretty well. So by 1793, the history gets a little fuzzy. It's unclear whether Jefferson officially placed the order or if France was simply eager to export their own shiny new system abroad. But what is clear is that France sent one of their brightest minds, physician and botanist and overall badass explorer, Joseph Dombey, carrying two precious artifacts to the United States. A metal rod measuring exactly one meter.
15:49 Speaker 01 This was like a standard that could then be used as a sort of master standard. And a small copper cylinder weighing precisely one kilogram, also to be a standard. But as Dombey will soon learn, nothing invites disaster quite like crossing the Atlantic with priceless objects and a calm sense of optimism.
16:11 Speaker 00 Well, this comes to the pirates.
16:14 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, it's about to get piraty. So Joseph Dombey set sail for Philadelphia in January of 1794 from the port of Le Havre off the northern French coast. He was aboard a brig owned by a merchant stationed in New York, Joseph Lapine. We actually have a picture of Joseph Dombey. Let's take a look.
16:36 Speaker 00 That guy wasn't striking at 20.
16:39 Speaker 01 I feel like he's distinguished. I'm just worried he's not wearing any clothes.
16:43 Speaker 00 I feel like it was his choice. I know this as a fact. He was wearing no bottoms during the thing and the artist kept saying, Joseph, do you want to put something on? And he goes, this will do. And they go, it's just the top half. You could wear a tie. This'll do.
16:59 Speaker 01 We could even put a blanket over. It's drafty in here.
17:02 Speaker 00 I said, this'll do.
17:05 Speaker 01 Okay, Joseph, I mean.
17:07 Speaker 00 So I'm distracted by your genitals and so I'm asking you to put shorts on. This'll do. Okay, let's just do it.
17:18 Speaker 01 This was supposed to be a full body sculpture. I'm just gonna do a bust.
17:22 Speaker 00 Exactly. Also, Joseph, can you not make direct eye contact with me while I'm sculpting? Because you're intimidating me. You want to smile a little bit or something less scary and menacing? Because you're naked.
17:35 Speaker 01 He's actually a pretty badass guy, as we will find out. Old Joey Dombey, he wasn't just a scientist, he was a seasoned transatlantic explorer. Unfortunately, he had also spectacularly bad luck. He spent two years in Peru, collecting specimens, plant specimens for France, only to have his ship captured by the British and the plants seized. Then he tried again in Chile on a joint venture with Spain, which ended up in a dispute and the Spanish team confiscated all his work, so. Third time's the charm, right? Well, no, because after smooth sailing across most of the Atlantic, they reached the Caribbean. And that's when everything went sideways.
18:20 Speaker 01 On February 12th, a fierce tropical storm knocked the ship off course, damaged it and left it taking on water. So they limped to the nearest port, Guadalupe, which is a French archipelago in the Caribbean, about 1,400 miles southeast of Florida. If you had made it this far on a journey and then just got your ass kicked by a crazy storm and wound up on this like beautiful tropical island, would you maybe just be like, this is where I stay?
18:47 Speaker 00 Ed, you know my answer.
18:51 Speaker 00 Guys, we made it. And they go, but this isn't, it is. This was always the goal. Really? Now I'm going to take my clothes off and hope somebody sculpts me? We're home, boys. We made it. I will never get on that sea again. This is it. Our, our story has in fact changed.
19:11 Speaker 01 But there's very little here. There's coconuts.
19:14 Speaker 00 What do you mean very little here?
19:16 Speaker 01 There's
19:17 Speaker 00 Trees.
19:17 Speaker 01 There's fish everywhere.
19:20 Speaker 00 There's probably an animal or two. How should I know?
19:23 Speaker 01 I'm sure there's rum.
19:27 Speaker 00 Well, you know, everything that's on this island. I don't think so.
19:31 Speaker 01 Not yet.
19:32 Speaker 00 Not yet. But I'm telling you what, we're not leaving again. I know that for sure.
19:40 Speaker 01 Well, uh, Dombey is not, uh, deterred. He's still very eager to get to the United States.
19:48 Speaker 00 And what city did he want to go to again? Was it, did you say Philly? I mean, you imagine he's in the Caribbean and he's like, I have to get to Philadelphia.
19:54 Speaker 01 But have you been to Philadelphia?
19:56 Speaker 00 It's
19:57 Speaker 01 Joey.
19:58 Speaker 00 I'm, I'm telling you, Joseph. First of all, put clothes on. Second of all, don't worry about getting to Philly. It's, it's November, my king. It's cold, it's gnarly.
20:08 Speaker 01 Really unusual accent too.
20:11 Speaker 00 Shockingly tough, even the kids.
20:14 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, Dombe's perilous situation was about to get even worse because he felt dangerously ill. And now on top of that, this is even, if you're sick, I'm not getting back on a boat if I'm sick. But this is, Dombe is like determined, they couldn't even get the ship fully repaired. So it set sail again, still partially damaged. Then on April 1st, the ship was intercepted by British privateers.
20:41 Speaker 00 Can I say something about Joseph that I know is a fact now after hearing about him? And the fact that he has bad luck and he set sail again and the boat wasn't ready and pirates got him and he's naked in his sculptures. I wouldn't say he has bad luck. I think he makes bad decisions. I think for a super smart guy, he doesn't make the best life choices. The boat is not ready. The ship's not ready. They're going like this. I don't think it's going to get there. And he goes, I think we're ready.
21:13 Speaker 00 Not ready. Let's go. Not ready. We crashed into an island with your first idea, Joey. We're not ready. Let's go. You imagine the pirates getting on that and seeing him?
21:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, we're about to get there. This is actually quite interesting.
21:30 Speaker 00 Put your pants on.
21:31 Speaker 01 So the ship is intercepted by British privateers. And now these are essentially government sanctioned pirates. At the time, Britain legally outsourced piracy. If you robbed the enemy, the crown called it patriotism and took a cut. And at the time, Britain and France were essentially in perpetual conflict. And this made all French ships traveling the Atlantic legitimate targets. The pirates boarded Dombe's ship. He scrambled below deck, throwing his clothes off as he ran, apparently. So evidently he was wearing clothes.
22:03 Speaker 00 Did it say that?
22:04 Speaker 01 It does, because then he changed into the clothes of one of, of one of the Spanish sailors.
22:09 Speaker 00 Okay, add, add.
22:13 Speaker 00 He was trying to. He ripped his clothes off while he was being chased by pirates.
22:18 Speaker 01 No, before they boarded, he scrambled below deck.
22:22 Speaker 00 He's like, his first thought is you imagine working on that ship and not respecting your leader's choices. And you're like, back on the water? The boat's not ready. And then you go, you go, guys, these are government sanctioned pirates. And your captain goes, everybody take off your clothes.
22:41 Speaker 01 He doesn't tell the crew to take off their clothes.
22:43 Speaker 00 Joe, that's the wrong idea.
22:45 Speaker 01 He runs and hides and tries to disguise himself as a Spanish sailor because a lot of the crew was Spanish. And so he puts on their, the sort of like,
22:56 Speaker 00 That's interesting.
22:56 Speaker 01 I guess the, the, the less fancy crew clothing and he sort of hopes that he can fumble his way through because he knows a little bit of Spanish from his trips to South America. But the pirates were like, um, that's a pretty strong French accent in your, in your bad Spanish.
23:15 Speaker 00 Hey Joe, that's a bad decision. What you're doing is weird, my man.
23:21 Speaker 01 God, I wish you were on this boat. Like, we might have, we might have the metric system had it not been, if Jake Johnson had been on this.
23:30 Speaker 00 Hey Joe, we know you, we came to get you. What are you doing? And he goes, me? Joel, I'm one.
23:39 Speaker 01 Come on.
23:40 Speaker 00 Stop it.
23:41 Speaker 01 Come on, Joe. Are you good at, I remember Sid Caesar used to do those incredible, um, he could do like gibberish in a foreign accent. Uh, like, like whether it was German or Italian or French, he could like convincingly sound like he was speaking the language, even though it was complete gibberish.
24:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:01 Speaker 01 Are you capable of that? Is that one of your skills?
24:04 Speaker 00 No.
24:05 Speaker 01 No.
24:05 Speaker 00 Terrible. Are you? Do you have, I mean, you're a musician.
24:08 Speaker 01 I feel, I feel like it's something you could probably work on and get there.
24:11 Speaker 00 I couldn't do them all, but if I worked on it, I could do like two very specific ones where you're like, that's pretty good gibberish in that language. But I could not be somebody who does them all.
24:22 Speaker 01 The pirates very quickly identified Dombey and they brought him to be a prisoner on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The pirates looted the ship and before they could fulfill their plan of offering up Dombey for ransom to the French government, he tragically died while in captivity on the island.
24:42 Speaker 00 How'd he die? Do we know?
24:43 Speaker 01 I don't know what he was sick with, but he got sick somewhere on the passage and it just, it took him. I'm, I'm sure like, Like 18th century pirates also weren't, didn't provide the most hospitable accommodations. I'm not, I'm guessing it wasn't like Club Med.
24:59 Speaker 00 For sure.
25:00 Speaker 01 Where he was staying. So that, that all probably contributed. But this is where things get a little bit fuzzy. Some accounts suggest the pirates auctioned off the ship's most valuable cargo to parts unknown. Others claim they were spooked by paperwork linking those, uh, the meter and kilo measurement, uh, standards. Those were linked to Jefferson and so the pirates were like, oh my God, what do we do? But either way, the, the, those pieces vanished and for the moment they were lost to history. And it is thought that because those things didn't make it to Thomas Jefferson, uh, that that is why we didn't get the metric system.
25:43 Speaker 00 That's crazy.
25:45 Speaker 01 Our best shot at, at going metric sank into the crystal blue Caribbean.
25:50 Speaker 00 That's cool.
25:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:53 Speaker 00 That's a neat story.
25:54 Speaker 01 What would be different now if we actually had the metric system? Just, but other than our car speedometers.
26:01 Speaker 00 I don't know. I know that, um, my, I got a Rivian right now.
26:05 Speaker 01 Brag.
26:06 Speaker 00 Is Rivian a brag?
26:08 Speaker 01 Yeah. Mad respect, bro.
26:12 Speaker 00 By the way, you couldn't be more of a dad when a Rivian SUV is a brag.
26:21 Speaker 00 Where it's not like, I'm driving a Porsche. I'm like, dude, I got a car that can fit six kids, luggage and a dog. And you go, Jesus, you're winning.
26:32 Speaker 00 It doesn't go fast and I will, I will say it's not that much fun to drive, but the, the storage in that baby.
26:40 Speaker 01 Oh, get, you're, now I'm getting chubby. That is exciting.
26:45 Speaker 00 God damn, my king.
26:47 Speaker 01 Storage.
26:48 Speaker 00 What do you think would be different?
26:49 Speaker 01 Well, I actually think that it would have made a huge difference and I, and it's impossible to sort of know the counterfactual, like what, what it would be, but, but the metric system is so simple and it is so intuitive that I think it, it actually opens up a lot of, uh, construction and engineering to, uh, people that may not have benefited from, um, education. And so. Uh, I don't know. I like to think that had we adopted the metric system earlier on, we may have advanced more quickly. More people would have had more access to science and to engineering and we would be in a more interesting place. As it stands, we're still using the
27:33 Speaker 01 imperial system, obviously, and it's, it's so clunky. Like, it is, it's so hard. You have to use special calculators to figure out these, uh, these fractions of inches and feet and that there's no, it makes, it's, it's just so needlessly complicated. But let's get, let's actually get into the, the legacy of this a little bit because there's more to it.
27:59 Speaker 01 Jefferson soon became president, as we know, in 1801. Yet even then, he remained unable to make any progress metricating America. Finally, in 1866, the metric act came to be, legally recognizing the metric system in the US, though not going so far as to make it mandatory in any way. Um, and there's an interesting, interesting reason for that. Any guesses? We're right after the Civil War. The Industrial Revolution is like cranking. Basically, we're already knee-deep in the imperial system with like huge factories, railways.
28:36 Speaker 00 It's gonna be, it would be, it'd be a nightmare.
28:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, massive engineering projects. And there's no internet. Like, you can't just email people new, new, new plans or whatever.
28:46 Speaker 00 Also, once you get the ball rolling on something, you can't do a big shift. It just doesn't quite work with that many people to say like, "Hey, everybody, this is better. So everybody start doing this." You're like, "No way."
29:02 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, you just have systems in place that are very, very hard to, to undo.
29:07 Speaker 00 It's over. It's too late. Even if the systems are wrong, you're like, "We're pop committed."
29:12 Speaker 01 I still, I still think you can, I still think you can make the commitment and then account for the difficulty of the transition in some ways and, and just know that you're in for a tough slog, but that the other side is like so much better.
29:28 Speaker 00 If you can get there, but it takes a generation to sacrifice for the next generation.
29:33 Speaker 01 Pretty much, you're right.
29:34 Speaker 00 Cause you're like, then there's gonna be like some like older guy who's like, I can't wrap my head around the new stuff. And it's like, I know.
29:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:40 Speaker 00 Because you've been doing it wrong for 50 years, but I promise you it's gonna be better in a hundred years. And that person needs to go, I see the benefit in this.
29:48 Speaker 01 Exactly. It takes, it's a big ask.
29:50 Speaker 00 It's a big ask.
29:52 Speaker 01 Have you ever stayed in a hotel in Canada and you're like, what the fricking, the, the, thermostat? You're like, what?
29:59 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:00 Speaker 01 To get on my phone and do a trans, like.
30:02 Speaker 00 I hate it.
30:02 Speaker 01 I cannot get Celsius in my head.
30:05 Speaker 00 Confused by the simple like that. Well, that's what I was talking about on my Riving because it's in Celsius. So I'll go like, the temperature in my car is, I'll be like 13.
30:15 Speaker 01 You can change that, Jake. It's a Rivian.
30:19 Speaker 00 I don't know how to add.
30:22 Speaker 00 I'm the real Joseph Dombey.
30:24 Speaker 01 Somebody leave in the comments, instructions for Jake to change his Rivian from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
30:32 Speaker 00 But by the way, I have no idea what the temperature in my car is ever.
30:34 Speaker 01 By the way, Rivian's an American company. It's an American company.
30:38 Speaker 00 I, I believe me, I know, I don't get it and I hate it. I'll tell you the other thing that the one thing I'm glad that doesn't exist is that we don't do our weight in stone. That's something I've never been able to wrap my head around.
30:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a weird one.
30:51 Speaker 00 When people speak honestly, especially in like the MMA community or fighters where I'll be watching something and they'll be like, at that point he was eight, eight stone. And I'm like, you're measuring yourself in stones?
31:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:03 Speaker 00 There were, that can't be real.
31:05 Speaker 01 There are a lot of weird measurements. Remember horses are measured in hands? Like the height of a horse is like.
31:12 Speaker 00 There's like 30 hands or something like whose hand?
31:15 Speaker 01 What?
31:16 Speaker 00 That's not, hands are dead, doesn't make any sense. Or when people still to this day, they'll go like, it's about eight feet and they'll count their footsteps.
31:25 Speaker 01 Right, right.
31:26 Speaker 00 And they'll go one, two, I'm like, not your eight.
31:28 Speaker 01 You're not King Henry, you're not that's with different feet.
31:32 Speaker 00 What? You're not the center of it. I also hate the idea of stone of like, and then you think at one point there was one stone where they're like, this is the official stone that you weigh in.
31:41 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
31:42 Speaker 00 I'm like, I hate this idea of people being like, I lost, I lost a stone.
31:47 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
31:47 Speaker 00 And I've heard people say that and I have to go like, that means nothing to me.
31:51 Speaker 01 Hmm.
31:52 Speaker 00 I don't get it. I can't wrap my head around it. I don't know how many pounds a stone is.
31:57 Speaker 01 No.
31:58 Speaker 00 It also makes me feel like you live in a different century than me.
32:01 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. And I, I think there are a lot of like hands measuring horses. There are a lot of unusual metaphors that we use.
32:10 Speaker 00 That still exist.
32:10 Speaker 01 Or not metaphors, but, but sort of like, yeah, that still exists. A famous one, of course, is the size of a tumor. Right? We're always, there, there's no sort of constant reference point for that. It's just sort of like a grapefruit or a softball or a golf ball.
32:25 Speaker 00 That's exactly, yeah, it's about the size of a golf ball or a grapefruit. Uh, nothing in between.
32:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:32 Speaker 00 And by the way, at our most important diagnosis, you have a tumor in your brain.
32:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:37 Speaker 00 What's the size of it? It's about a grapefruit.
32:40 Speaker 00 Which, a baby grapefruit?
32:41 Speaker 01 Like a small one or a big one? It just grapefruit, like.
32:45 Speaker 00 Kind of, it's kind of, it's bigger than a golf ball.
32:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's bigger than a golf ball. We, and the next.
32:50 Speaker 00 Smaller than a grapefruit.
32:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. Can we say tennis ball? No.
32:53 Speaker 00 Can we say or, or orange?
32:55 Speaker 01 We don't recognize tennis ball in this hospital.
32:58 Speaker 00 By the way, that's insane. Can you imagine a real doctor will literally go on their little note sheets? The tumor is about the size of a golf ball. Are you nuts?
33:11 Speaker 01 I, it's, this is science.
33:13 Speaker 00 I don't like it.
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35:32 Speaker 01 In 1975, the Metric Conversion Act designated the metric system as the preferred system for US trade and commerce and directed federal agencies to convert to metric. Slowly but surely, we started making progress to catch up with the world, but clearly, adoption by the broader population remains totally voluntary and therefore extremely, extremely slow.
35:57 Speaker 00 Yes. Well, if it's not mandatory, the change isn't gonna occur.
36:02 Speaker 01 No, absolutely not. Do you want it to? Like, do you, are you pro metric? Even though, even knowing it would be a pain in the ass for a bit, like, would you?
36:11 Speaker 00 I'm gonna be perfectly honest, before this call, I don't think I've ever thought about it.
36:16 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. That's okay, I'm asking you.
36:18 Speaker 00 So, I can't, I can't say I'm pro. I would say, with the way my brain works and how slow it is with change.
36:25 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
36:26 Speaker 00 Oh.
36:27 Speaker 01 No, that's...
36:28 Speaker 00 Keep it as it is.
36:29 Speaker 01 I think that's a shitty take.
36:30 Speaker 00 I, I know, it's not a great take.
36:32 Speaker 01 I love you, but I think, like, you know, for the, for the good of humanity, like, metric is just better.
36:37 Speaker 00 So, if you were king, you would say, "We're switching right now."
36:44 Speaker 01 I would say, I would, I would put our best minds on, like, figuring out a transition.
36:49 Speaker 00 How do you find the best minds at, at this point?
36:52 Speaker 01 Well...
36:53 Speaker 00 The best mind back then used to take his clothes off for sculptures.
36:57 Speaker 01 (laughing)
36:59 Speaker 00 The best, the best mind, when pirates came, his first thought was, "I'm gonna dress up like a Spaniard."
37:05 Speaker 01 You're right, that the, that my idea is predicated on the assumption that we can locate the best minds. These days, that seems extremely hard.
37:14 Speaker 00 It's impossible.
37:15 Speaker 01 I feel like, in science, it shouldn't be that tricky, but, whatever. So, whatever happened to Dombe's mysterious kilo and meter rod?
37:24 Speaker 00 What a find.
37:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, we know where it is. It landed in the lap of an American surveyor, Andrew Ellicott, who became famous for his work on the street plan for Washington DC. Around 1952, the Ellicott family eventually realized...
37:41 Speaker 01 That they had something special, the descendants of Andrew Alakot. And they turned the pieces of plundered treasure over to the agency that would become the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
37:55 Speaker 00 That's cool.
37:56 Speaker 01 Which is a really kind of a cool sounding institute. I don't know. It's like people who really care about precise things.
38:04 Speaker 00 Ed, do you really care about precision?
38:06 Speaker 01 I think I do, almost involuntarily.
38:09 Speaker 00 You like it.
38:11 Speaker 01 I, I'm not like a tidy, fastidious person, but I do, I am like, I like, I'm crafty with like hobby stuff and I am very meticulous about, about sort of like things fitting and measuring properly. I'm also weirdly, and this is to my own detriment. I am weirdly obsessed with like clarity when people are speaking or trying to make a point with me, I get very frustrated if they're unclear. Or if they're like, or if they just drops, forget to sort of give me a piece of context. I'm like, how am I supposed to know? What do you mean?
38:49 Speaker 01 And it's, it's not rational or fair, but it's,
38:52 Speaker 00 No, just how you are.
38:53 Speaker 01 But I think it is, there is something about like, like the, like, precision in communication is like incredibly important to me. And I'm not even that good necessarily. I'm not like,
39:04 Speaker 00 But I understand what you're saying.
39:06 Speaker 01 It drives me nuts when somebody's unclear.
39:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally. That's neat. That's neat. What's different?
39:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is a weird thing.
39:17 Speaker 00 I mean, it's at least it's different from my life view. So that's why I asked, where you said like that museum sounded interesting. And I think for me, precision is the exact details of things being right. Never interested me. I love the in-between. I love the gray area. I love the, when things fall off the rails. If things are all going well and it all falls off, that's when I'm like, oh, excited.
39:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I hear that.
39:44 Speaker 00 I've just, as even as a kid, I've always liked, I'm like, oh, that's when things are fun for me.
39:48 Speaker 01 I feel that about you, Jake, and I will say it's an incredibly endearing aspect of you. I, I really, I admire that.
39:56 Speaker 00 I feel the same with you about yours, Ed. I admire that about you, truly.
40:00 Speaker 01 It might speak a little bit to how we approach comedy and storytelling differently. And I find acting and improvising with you to be like, So fun. Like, you're one of the most present people to improvise with. I always, I sort of can't believe the things you're clocking because it's so in the moment and in the space and, and it makes me, you'll clock the most random, specific things and it makes me laugh so hard and I, I love, it's truly a joy.
40:32 Speaker 00 I feel the same about you, but I feel, I, what's really neat about this moment is, what I like about you is I think we're playing very different games. And I like being in scenes with you because I'm like, like, for example, my podcast is very loose. We take calls. We have no idea what's happening. Everything is meant to be a mistake.
40:49 Speaker 01 I came on your podcast with no idea what was happening.
40:53 Speaker 00 No idea. And same for me on this one. And what I was like, oh, this is so ed to me.
40:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:00 Speaker 00 It's really interesting information where you've done a lot of work. You've prepared it. You have not bullshitted through a story. You have prepared and told all these different beats and you have moments where you're like, there could be an interjection here. Where I was like, oh, this is an ed formula and mine, we're here to help is such a Jake formula where it's, hey, you're here, we're recording you. Have a caller, come on, what are they saying? I don't know. Hopefully something goes wrong and then we've got 25 minutes.
41:28 Speaker 01 I also love that, and, and this is, I'm delighted to be sort of plugging your podcast in this moment too, because it is so funny and the premise, you, I think you told me like, a few minutes into the podcast, you're like, oh yeah, and by the way, we have to agree with the caller. Like, like we have to take the caller's side in this whole thing.
41:49 Speaker 00 We try to no matter what, be on their team. So they're our friend.
41:52 Speaker 01 And what I love about that, and what is so Jake to me about that is how ludicrously arbitrary that is. It's like, this is just a, this will make things interesting. This will mess things up. Like this will just, this will keep everyone off balance. This will make, this will make everyone have to like, like, condition their answer in such a ridiculous way that you can't, you can't rely on your tricks and your tools and your, whatever your instincts. It's like, no, no, we're gonna take. We're just gonna make this arbitrary rule. And it just makes like that by itself makes me laugh.
42:29 Speaker 00 Well, because if you were, if you were allowed to disagree, then a lot of us would come on and go, no, let me tell you how it should be.
42:36 Speaker 01 Sure.
42:37 Speaker 00 And I'm like, but if they're driving the train and all we're doing, if they're the star player on the team and it's our job to make sure they win, then you go like, their logic's crazy. But I have to be with them. It's like being on the ship with Joseph. It's being Joseph, uh, Dombey's, you know, right-hand man and being like, okay, my man, I can't tell you no. I wish you had pants on. But you want to dress up like a Spaniard? My man, me too. Me too. And then you're going, yo, this is, Jose, I am one. And they go, this is bullshit. And you go, hey, Joe, that was not the best plan, right? That to me is so joyful.
43:25 Speaker 01 Oh, Jake Johnson, uh, another damn delightful hangout with you. Thanks so much for coming on.
43:32 Speaker 00 I feel the same about you, Ed. I love you, buddy. Really fun.
43:35 Speaker 01 Right on. Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works.
44:16 Speaker 01 Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
44:56 Speaker 04 Pumpkin carving sounds fun, until you're elbow-deep in pumpkin guts. There's an easier pumpkin tradition: Reese's Pumpkins. No seeds, no giant kitchen knife, no pressure to create a masterpiece that's just gonna shrivel up on the front porch three days later. And if something goes wrong, just eat it. Every mistake is still pretty delicious. So this Halloween, skip the mess of pumpkin carving and stock up on Reese's Pumpkins.
45:25 Speaker 07 The Halloween party is at my place this year. It's my favorite party to host. With the lowest prices and the huge selection, Total Wine & More is my first stop. A bottle of wine for me while I'm preparing the snacks, ready-to-drink cocktails for the party, and beer for the friends who always end up on the couch. Between hosting and grabbing something to bring, I love getting the lowest prices. Now I'm ready for Halloween. Are you? Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21.
45:55 Speaker 02 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous Entering the world of a Former KGB Spy (with Jack Barsky) Next That Time the U.S. Decided to Nuke Space: Starfish Prime (with Chris Winterbauer & Lizzie Bassett of What Went Wrong) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated