Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Jokes in Translation and the Wayback About this episode Holly shares her experience visiting the Meiji Jingu shrine. Tracy mentions that she never found out why the Triple Nickles used the spelling they did, and her use of the Wayback Machine for show research.
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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 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby
1:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:37 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:20 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.
2:23 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:25 Holly Frey? So we talked about the Meiji Restoration and the Meiji Jingu Shrine today, this week.
2:32 Tracy V. Wilson? That's a lot of stuff.
2:34 Holly Frey? It's a lot of stuff.
2:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:37 Holly Frey? And I, I really wanted to talk about it in part because I had such a very moving experience there.
2:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:43 Holly Frey? Which is kind of indicative to a lot of stuff you and I have been talking about on the show lately and the times that we're living in. But it hit me so hard while I was there that I just like kind of broke down. Because we mentioned at the end of the show that one of the things you can do is like, write a letter essentially, with your hopes and your wishes in it, and you tuck a little money in and you put it in their offering box. And like, in my letter, I was trying to convey, in a succinct way, the troubles of the world we're living in and how much I wanted all of us to pass through them and be in a better place. And it broke me. Like, I really was just like, I, I can't.
3:28 Holly Frey? To try to parse it in a simple way made it so oddly painful and moving. I'm getting very choked up just talking about it. That I literally, my best friend was like, are you okay, Brian? Who was not doing his letter, he was kind of standing around and enjoying the space. They were both a little like, this is not what we expected to happen.
3:47 Tracy V. Wilson? No.
3:49 Holly Frey? But it's what happened. It was really, really beautiful. But as a remedy to that, I will tell you about the spectacular car ride we had back to our hotel afterwards.
4:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
4:02 Holly Frey? We had a driver, I love this man with my whole soul. He does not speak English, but he ran all of his stuff through a translator and he told great jokes and he was really funny and really lovely. And one of the things that was really interesting that he talked about was the fact that a lot of Westerners will come to visit as tourists and they'll go to someplace.
4:27 Holly Frey? Like the Meiji Jingyu Shrine and their takeaway is that it's really a shame that Christianity got pushed into this country and, you know, somehow adulterated these beautiful religions that were already here and have existed for centuries. And he was like, listen, we have gods of everything in this country. So adding Jesus was not a problem. And I was just like, I don't know if this is the perspective of everyone, but it was so hilarious and sweet and funny. He was like, you know, we literally will worship the spirits of like pencils and leaves.
5:08 Holly Frey? So like, it's fine. It's not in conflict for us. We can incorporate all of it together. And I was like, that is a cool way to consider it. Cause I have often been that person that's like, why do you have to go shift everybody's cultural beliefs to match your own? But his being like, it's fine. It really doesn't change ours in any way.
5:29 Tracy V. Wilson? We've also talked about much earlier periods of Japanese history, when like all of the Christian missionaries were either expelled or killed.
5:40 Holly Frey? Right.
5:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Way earlier on from what we were talking about today. My experience in Japan recently has been playing the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows, which is set in Japan at the end of the 16th century. There are shrines all over that game. Uh, and there are, you, you, you do the thing in the game where you clap and you bow.
6:03 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:03 Tracy V. Wilson? You get a little shrine blessing. Sometimes though, you go to a shrine and it's, it's full of enemies. And you might end up having to kill all of them. And that's, it, it feels disrespectful to me.
6:19 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yeah.
6:22 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm not saying that as a criticism of the game designers. I don't know what their thinking was. I don't know what people in Japan's thinking was. But anytime I get into a fight in a shrine, I'm like, I don't like, this is what I'm doing right now.
6:34 Holly Frey? Am I supposed to be doing this?
6:35 Tracy V. Wilson? I feel, this feels a little bit bad to me.
6:37 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:38 Tracy V. Wilson? I have been thinking about, uh, doing something related to Japanese history, because I've been spending so much time playing this game. But number one, um, I'm not to the end of the game yet. And I just, I sort of, I don't want to pick something that then is going to be influential to the end of the game. And there are, it also, the game does overlap with some things that we have talked about on the show before. And so I would not want to repeat those things. So I was glad that you picked something out of a completely different era of Japanese history to talk about.
7:14 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, informed by my own curiosity and desire to know more about it. But it really is quite fascinating. There are shrines all over Japan. And I really do find the Shinto belief system very beautiful. And I, I just love the idea of, you know, there being many things we can appreciate and pay respects to. And I really love that driver who also sang with us.
7:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh.
7:46 Holly Frey? He told us, oh, you're gonna laugh. It's, it's not, I mean, they're charming songs, but you're, it's not gonna be what you think. He was telling us that, you know, for a long time, a lot of kids in Japan, because everything they got from the West in terms of television was dubbed.
8:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
8:04 Holly Frey? That there were many kids that he knew growing up that thought that Americans were all bilingual and could speak Japanese. And when American movie stars first started really doing stuff in Japan.
8:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
8:18 Holly Frey? You know, like promoting films and like going and doing interviews, they realized they had been so wrong.
8:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
8:24 Holly Frey? That those people did not speak Japanese.
8:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
8:26 Holly Frey? But his point was that what English he knows, he learned from 1980s television.
8:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
8:33 Holly Frey? And then we sang the theme to Knight Rider together and the A-Team theme together.
8:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
8:39 Holly Frey? I love that man. That was the best 45 minutes of my life that, that whole week.
8:43 Tracy V. Wilson? That sounds very fun.
8:44 Holly Frey? He was so charming and so delightful and really, really lovely. As, I mean, we met a lot of wonderful, wonderful people in Japan, but his, that was the best ride we had for sure. He was great. And really, really interested in like sharing their culture with us and talking about our perceptions of it and praise technology for translator apps because.
9:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
9:04 Holly Frey? You know, he and Brian were making jokes to each other through a translator app, which was the funniest thing on the planet to watch because they were both just belly laughing. It was the best. It was the absolute best.
9:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:15 Holly Frey? And it was nice because I had had my little breakdown at the shrine. So I liked having a, a big giggle moment.
9:21 Tracy V. Wilson? That's fun.
9:25 Holly Frey? Um, and I will always think about him talking about the spirits of pencils and how we'll, we'll worship that just like anything else. And I was like, I love you, man.
9:35 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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11:42 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
12:25 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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14:02 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the things that we talked about on the show this week was the Triple Nichols parachute battalion. I do not know the answer to why they went with the spelling N I C K L E S, which is not how we would normally spell the nickel coin. And I did not find a conclusive explanation for why that spelling was the one that they wound up with. I did again want to thank Josiah for submitting this topic because number one, great topic, very much appreciated. Number two, just as the email arrived, I was thinking about wanting to find a similar topic
14:46 Tracy V. Wilson? to cover on the show. Because while we do have topics that are about combat units or battles or aspects like that related to the military and warfare, I also really like the ones about units that are doing things that aren't necessarily what a person might initially think of in terms of the military. So things like smoke jumpers and the people sorting the mail and the people going on a test long distance bike ride. The women air force service pilots that we've talked about a number of times a long time ago, all of that. So yes, thank you so much.
15:26 Holly Frey? It's a super engaging story. I'm really glad you did this one.
15:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Thank you. Me too. I did have to do way more research than usual at the Wayback Machine at archive.org. If anyone is not familiar with the Wayback Machine, archive.org maintains an archive of websites. It does not have every single website in the world. It is possible for people to opt their website out of it. But it contains sort of snapshots of prior versions of websites. This is how, a very long time ago, when we
16:08 Tracy V. Wilson? We had been a part of a company called How Stuff Works and we had a website for the podcast. And eventually, after we were acquired by iHeartRadio, like iHeartRadio did not control that previous website. It did not belong to iHeart. It belonged to How Stuff Works. And so we lost access to it. And so for a long time, the Wayback Machine is how I would find old stuff related to old episodes of the show that had had some kind of something that was on the website that that I did not have saved on my machine anymore or whatever.
16:49 Tracy V. Wilson? It got used a lot in the research for this because there were a couple of things that seemed to have been reorganized or removed from government websites some years in the past. But then there were also quite a number of things that they disappeared in January or early February, presumably because they fell afoul of the executive orders relating to DEI. And I did not enjoy that. It made me angry. Every single time I followed a link from somewhere and it took me to a 404 page and
17:28 Tracy V. Wilson? then I put that same link into archive.org and I would find the exact same correct thing, but you know, on a page that's no longer actually there via the military, via a government website. It made me mad. Didn't like it.
17:48 Holly Frey? Yeah. That's some justified anger.
17:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I also went down kind of a rabbit hole with this episode. I did read the memoir by Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Biggs for this episode about, called The Triple Nichols, America's First All-Black Paratroop Unit. And he described the accident that we talked about briefly that happened at Eglin Field. He did not name specific like dates that that had happened in the memoir. So it took me a little bit to figure out exactly when this accident happened and a little bit more detail about what was involved.
18:30 Tracy V. Wilson? It was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been appropriately investigated or handled by the military. And so as I was looking into it, I was like, do I need to put in some FOIA requests for this?
18:43 Holly Frey? Right.
18:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, like, so that's the Freedom of Information Act. Had I done that, I definitely would not have gotten an answer by the time we needed to record the episode. So I don't really know if there is further information from the military about that accident and what happened. It was reported in, in the local newspapers immediately after it happened. I did not find any follow ups in newspapers about the results of any kind of investigation from later on, though.
19:16 Holly Frey? Right. Yeah, like I mentioned in an aside, I, I grew up not far from Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field, which is a little ways away, but they often work in conjunction. And I certainly don't recall ever hearing anything about it. I was there, of course, decades later, but there are a lot of, you know, historical markers and whatnot about many things that have happened in the area and specifically related to the bases. And I never recall ever seeing anything about it. Now, it's also possible that I, a self-involved and stupid kid, maybe just never noticed it.
19:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
19:48 Holly Frey? Uh, yeah.
19:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, my starting point had been lists of incidents associated with the, with the airfield. And I was not finding it on those lists, but also those lists were primarily about things involving an aircraft crashing.
20:09 Holly Frey? Right.
20:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, not what happened in this case, which was bombs being deployed in the wrong place.
20:16 Holly Frey? Yeah.
20:16 Tracy V. Wilson? So, yeah, I wish I had more detail about that. I don't know if maybe as some side project later on, I might be FOIA time. Uh, I don't know.
20:28 Tracy V. Wilson? But yeah, it was, it was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been handled appropriately.
20:35 Holly Frey? Do you need comedic relief from the sort of sadness of that?
20:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
20:42 Holly Frey? The general racism that's part of this episode?
20:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:46 Holly Frey? Listen, this is a big confession because, uh, as everybody knows, I'm a, I'm a military kid.
20:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:52 Holly Frey? I do not understand military division names.
20:57 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't either, honestly.
20:58 Holly Frey? Never grasped them. Like when we were doing the 3rd Battalion, 505th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne, what? And I know my dad has tried to explain this stuff to me before, but I'm like, this is so needlessly complicated and convoluted. Nobody needs this many names. I'm sure they do in some way. I'm sure there's justification in some, I never understand them. And like, when I meet people or I have friends who are really big fans of military history and they can just rattle these things off and they look at me like I am Princess Ding Dong that I don't grasp what all of these mean. I'm like, shrug. I don't know what to tell you, dude.
21:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
21:38 Holly Frey? Do you want me to tell you a lot of Star Wars details that you probably don't understand? Like I don't, I, it's just not something that has ever clicked for me.
21:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I got, uh, kind of in the weeds about exactly, exactly what's a platoon and how big is the platoon? But the word test platoon was used so consistently in the description of this that I was like, okay, test platoon has to be correct. Um, there was also, there were multiple different dates that came up in the creation of it. Like there were, we did not mention a lot of these dates in the, uh, in the episode because I found them a little bit confusing and they would not have added to the overall understanding of this. But, uh, there was a, a date for when the president ordered it, a date for when it was created, a date
22:29 Tracy V. Wilson? for when it was activated, which was another separate thing. Um, there were just lots of different dates and I had some similar, some similar, um, confusion about exactly what each of the different dates signified. Graduating from training, that I understood.
22:48 Holly Frey? Makes total sense.
22:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Departing for Pendleton, that makes sense also. Various dates associated with the creation of the unit, I found a little bit more confusing.
23:03 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:04 Tracy V. Wilson? So, yeah.
23:05 Holly Frey? I find these things confusing. I do my best, but I find them very confusing.
23:09 Tracy V. Wilson? So, whatever's coming up on your weekend, boy, do I hope it's as good as it can possibly, possibly be. I took a little time off for myself recently and was able to recharge a little bit, do some things that I enjoy, which is important to all of us in these times, to be able to keep ourselves going. So, whatever's coming up for you, I hope you have a little bit of that also. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and with something brand new on Monday.
23:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
24:02 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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26:06 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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