Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Petra Peccadillo About this episode Tracy expands on her frustration with coverage of the Petra find. She then discusses selecting topics for Unearthed! that delight her, and Holly shares a personal unearthing.
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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 Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby 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. You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can
1:20 Tracy V. Wilson? depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
1:35 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.
2:08 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy P. Wilson.
2:21 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:23 Tracy V. Wilson? This week was unearthed week in a behind the scenes sense. Most of this, these two installments of unearthed were written back before the holidays. Because I wanted to take some time off at the end of the year. I had gotten all of the unearthed ready to go. And then the plan was that I would return to the office on the 6th of January. I would go through the news and see what had come out between in, you know, the mid-December, mid-late December timeline and January. And I would add in anything that needed to be added in. That actually worked really well, but what also happened was I just entirely forgot
3:06 Tracy V. Wilson? anything that I had written prior. So I was coming at it, reading it as though someone else had written it. And in some cases, finding truly hilarious typos that I had made back before the holiday. Like when I typed walrus ivory as walrus Ivy.
3:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Which I found very funny. There were some things that came up in the news that I wanted to include, but I became so confused about what the researchers were actually trying to say that I was like, I can't put this in there. Like there was one, there was some research about the domestication of maize. And I just couldn't figure out what the results were. Even going to the original paper, the results are just incomprehensible to me. Anyway, Petra.
4:06 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, we determined mostly during ad break time when Holly and I were just discussing things and stuff that was cut out on the episode, uh, that I found this deeply annoying.
4:21 Tracy V. Wilson? But, but Holly, you do not totally understand my annoyance at it.
4:26 Holly Frey? I understand your logic for being annoyed. I 100% get that.
4:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay. Yeah.
4:32 Holly Frey? But I, I think, like, to me, it's not annoying because I understand the way that they're just trying to like shorthand recognition of the site for readers that are not maybe steeped in historical knowledge.
4:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, uh, like, I absolutely understand that the role of a headline writer is to write a headline that will get people to read the thing. Like, that's the purpose. And I think it's probably possible to write a headline that alludes to Indiana Jones without making it sound like that Indiana Jones is the only important thing about Petra, because some of the headlines that were about this read like Indiana Jones filming, like tomb found at Indiana Jones filming location. And that was like the sum of the, the sum of the headline.
5:30 Holly Frey? Right.
5:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, which makes it sound like that could have happened on the back lot somewhere.
5:36 Holly Frey? I, yeah, I see that. I will say this, though. I don't know, and maybe I'm just lacking creativity in this moment. I'm not even saying that's a good headline, but I am saying that I don't know how you would shorthand what Petra is.
5:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
5:51 Holly Frey? In a headline that would make people understand what it is.
5:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
5:55 Holly Frey? Cause it is. Super cool and super weird and beautiful.
6:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I don't think we have an episode on Petra. And I don't think prior hosts did a Petra episode either. Uh, it's definitely not one I remember seeing in the many times that I've been looking at old episodes for some reason. Um, but Petra has been used as a filming location in a lot of films.
6:23 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:24 Tracy V. Wilson? And, uh, often it's supposed to be this like mysterious, almost incomprehensible place. Um, and so it's, uh, it's, that's sort of become connected to like the popular conception of it. I think probably of all of the many movies that have been, um, filmed there, probably Indiana Jones. Like most cultural sticking power, if that makes sense.
6:56 Holly Frey? Yeah, I mean, if you said Mortal Kombat Annihilation filming site, I don't know that most people are gonna be like, I know exactly the place you're talking about.
7:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I think maybe The Mummy Returns a little more memorable than that, just in part because of how the mummy became its own kind of cultural.
7:17 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, not to the, like, just the juggernaut of Indiana Jones. Um, anyway, the, uh, I saw headlines that were almost exclusively referencing Indiana Jones numerous times. Uh, before I actually saw an article that, uh, I was like, oh, this find is actually interesting without even the, the connection to Indiana Jones. Um, and then I was like, okay, I'll put it in Unearthed, but I'm gonna comment that I'm annoyed by the reporting.
7:57 Tracy V. Wilson? There's a, it seems maybe not all the time, but there've been a lot of times there's been like one particular news story that gets, is being reported over and over and over again in the same way. And that way starts to annoy me. Or in this case, from jump annoyed me.
8:14 Holly Frey? Right.
8:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
8:17 Holly Frey? I get it.
8:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
8:17 Holly Frey? We all, we all have our peccadilloes.
8:19 Tracy V. Wilson? We do, we do. Maybe there will be a future Petra episode. I don't know. I don't know. A lot of the things that we talked about this time, and part of it is just my own selection bias, because I was working on this in the late December time, a time that is very busy trying to get ready to have some time off. Also, a number kind of stressful things happening in the world going on.
8:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I tended toward the things that just struck me as delightful more than the ones that are horrifying.
8:58 Holly Frey? Right.
8:59 Tracy V. Wilson? And I mean, some of the things that we talked about are things that are either horrifying or related to horrifying things in history. But I was also just like, man, I love talking about the cat kneading on a piece of pottery as it was drying. I love all the things that were about bread.
9:22 Tracy V. Wilson? I love all of the things that were about, you know, these letters. I, even though I don't love the sexism that Ada Lovelace was having to deal with.
9:30 Holly Frey? Right.
9:31 Tracy V. Wilson? The, the tone of the letters being like, hey, just curious. My husband wants to know.
9:40 Holly Frey? I'm, I'm just a foolish lady. I don't know anything. By the way, here's a complex math equation.
9:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Here's, here's something incredibly complicated that I'm asking you about.
9:51 Holly Frey? I kind of want there to be like, um, this, as soon as I saw that in your outline, my brain was like, there needs to be like a TV series called Miscellaneous 19. And it's like. All of the secret things Ada Lovelace was doing to try to like, do all of her projects without ruffling any feathers of people that might be confused by her being a woman who was, you know, incredibly smart.
10:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:19 Holly Frey? Anyway, that's just the show that now runs in my head for free.
10:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I would watch that. That's
10:24 Holly Frey? miscellaneous nineteen.
10:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Sounds very fun.
10:29 Tracy V. Wilson? I want more William Blake distracted doodling.
10:33 Holly Frey? Yes.
10:36 Holly Frey? I love William Blake.
10:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:38 Holly Frey? I also like that we got some Bram Stoker.
10:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:41 Holly Frey? Have you happened to read that short story?
10:44 Tracy V. Wilson? No, I did not.
10:46 Holly Frey? It's super creepy.
10:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, really?
10:49 Holly Frey? It's about, it starts out sort of like, it seems sort of sweet. It's like, there's a man talking to children about murder and death and what all of that means. And then the children, it kind of takes a turn and the kids are, are not the good guys. I'll tell you that.
11:07 Holly Frey? But it's quite lovely. I'm in a very Bram Stoker place right now.
11:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
11:11 Holly Frey? Because the new Nosferatu came out.
11:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
11:16 Holly Frey? So I, of course, went on Christmas Day, as you do.
11:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
11:19 Holly Frey? Which I quite enjoyed.
11:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
11:21 Holly Frey? Some people are not loving it. It's a little too sexy. They weren't ready.
11:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
11:25 Holly Frey? Some people in our theater were not ready. There was a group of like 20 something dudes that were not prepared for the sex and they kind of giggled nervously through the whole thing.
11:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
11:34 Holly Frey? And I was like, oh, oh, babies. Vampires inherently have a lot of sexual connotation, but
11:40 Tracy V. Wilson? This is reminding me of the time that I saw The Watchmen in an IMAX theater. And
11:49 Tracy V. Wilson? there were some folks behind me who were unprepared for the full frontal male nudity.
11:55 Holly Frey? Yeah, in IMAX.
11:57 Tracy V. Wilson? In IMAX, yeah.
11:58 Holly Frey? But anyway, that, having seen that again, has now like sent me down all of the, the rabbit holes of Dracula and Nosferatu. And I revisited Powers of Darkness, which is the English translation of the Icelandic translation of Dracula that is quite different in some ways, which really may actually be
12:22 Holly Frey? The Icelandic translation of the Swedish translation of Dracula, which may have been changed by Bram Stoker himself. Anyway, I'm in the midst of a whole Bram Stoker moment. So I was very pleased that Jibbit Hill came up, although I was not sure how to pronounce Jibbit Hill.
12:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and I just, I think that's right. I don't know. So often I don't, we've talked about pronunciations on the show. In my opinion, they are one of the hardest things.
12:49 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
12:50 Tracy V. Wilson? About the show. Because we are typically, like, we're trying to get a native speaker of something, saying it correctly. And sometimes there are native speakers of something that are not saying it correctly. We don't really have a way of knowing that. Sometimes there's like a bunch of differences regionally in how someone says a thing. Sometimes we just do our best and we get it wrong. And that was one that I didn't even think to look up, whether, like, how people pronounced the G.
13:25 Holly Frey? Right.
13:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Which is a thing.
13:33 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fans' experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:56 Speaker 03 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
14:04 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
14:10 Speaker 04 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
14:16 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
14:20 Speaker 04 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
14:24 Speaker 03 What the fans' experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
14:27 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
14:30 Speaker 05 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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15:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter,
16:21 Tracy V. Wilson? and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:41 Speaker 06 Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November, now in paperback."
17:15 Holly Frey? I have my own personal unearth.
17:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, tell me.
17:18 Holly Frey? If you want it, please. So as you may recall, as we were talking about sewing back when we recorded before you left in one of our behind the scenes, I mentioned a sewing magazine.
17:34 Tracy V. Wilson? And a pattern.
17:35 Holly Frey? With a, it's really multiple patterns of like
17:38 Tracy V. Wilson? The sound is so cute.
17:38 Holly Frey? Koala siblings that I have been looking for. And I even said, like, if anybody knows where this is. And you have been out, so I have been doing QA on everything in the last couple of weeks while you were gone. And when we got to that, I was like, I'm going to go search it again. And I, I did, still didn't find anything. And then I just started putting weird nonsense words, semi nonsense words together, right? Like koalas, Christmas, vintage, which turned up a lot of one particular pattern that is not this.
18:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Not it.
18:14 Holly Frey? But was like a pattern you would buy like in a pattern envelope, not from a magazine.
18:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
18:19 Holly Frey? And then I was doing some version of that. I don't remember what the exact key string I did. And it did not turn up the pattern, but it turned up an image of a magazine that did not have the koalas on it. And it was an Etsy listing, but bless this Etsy seller who had clearly keyworded it and also had scanned in pictures of most of the primary items within the magazine. And I'm paging through and I'm paging through and I'm paging through. And then there were Kirby and Katie. So I have, it's not in my clutches yet. It's gonna come like
18:57 Tracy V. Wilson? It's on the way.
18:58 Holly Frey? Tomorrow while I'm out of town on a business trip, but it's coming. And then I'm gonna make, and I, I, it was also the first time in, I don't know, 30 plus years that I saw it. Because like when my mom passed, she was a little bit of a sewing hoarder. I come by it honestly. And I specifically looked for this magazine and I could not find it. And so I had this image in my head of what it was, and there it was. And it was the same. It was in the McCall's Creative Crafts Christmas Bazaar magazine of 1983. I was two years off on my guests when we talked about it. But it's as cute as I remember.
19:36 Tracy V. Wilson? So good.
19:37 Holly Frey? It's both of the koalas, plus their koala baby sister, plus their koala baby sister's little bitty koala plush. Plus a blanket that you applique that goes with them, plus their duffel bags I talked about, plus a train made of felt. Like I'm obsessed. I'm making these things. It's gonna be like. If anybody wants to follow along, I'm sure my Instagram will be full of koala plush things for the, for the foreseeable future. Cause you know, I'm gonna make them seasonal outfits. They're gonna have Halloween costumes. I don't know how I'm gonna integrate them with all of my Star Wars stuff, but I will. They're, yeah. I, my inner child has become so healed over finding this one thing.
20:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:21 Holly Frey? Even more than I would have anticipated.
20:24 Tracy V. Wilson? This is really reminding me of something that I read while I was out on the break, which was a story about somebody trying to find a story they had read when they were a child. And for years, doing a very similar thing of like searching, like once search became a thing that you could do, searching, trying to find this story, trying to find the story, trying to find the story, failing to find the story. Um, and doing this sort of every year and the, uh, this person chronicled the whole, the whole thing, uh, in a piece on Substack called 12th Night Till Candlemas, the story of a 40 year book quest and of its remarkable ending.
21:06 Tracy V. Wilson? And it was very similar of like trying to find this story remembered from childhood and just not being able to do it. And the person, uh, who did finally, uh, finally find the story and said, hey, by chance, is this the story, um, was, uh, was a librarian.
21:28 Holly Frey? Librarians to the wind, man.
21:29 Tracy V. Wilson? This is what, uh, librarian, this person also had two different experiences where, I think it was two different experiences where, uh, somebody was like, is this it? And the thing that was like, is this it was, uh, an AI generated thing that was not it.
21:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, but librarians, amazing librarian found it.
21:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, using sort of a similar process to what you just said of like, kind of tweaking the search terms and winding up in the right place. So good.
22:00 Holly Frey? Kirby and Katie come in everybody's way.
22:02 Tracy V. Wilson? So exciting.
22:03 Holly Frey? I'm so stupidly excited.
22:06 Holly Frey? My husband was just like, you are crying. And I was like, I know, like bless him. He has had to have me, I'm gazing at this picture on my phone until it comes. That this person, and I just keep showing it to him and he's like, uh huh. I've, I've seen the felt train. That's great, babe.
22:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
22:24 Holly Frey? I don't, I don't even understand why I'm so excited about it. I just am.
22:29 Tracy V. Wilson? I really love this.
22:32 Tracy V. Wilson? If folks are wanting an update about whether I have seen the six triple eight movie, I have not yet.
22:38 Holly Frey? Oh yeah, I was wondering.
22:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I did not get to watch it while I was at my parents' house. And then when I got home. I had a number, like, we had a number of adult household things that we wanted to do around my, around the house I was home. We got a fraction of those things done. And I got sucked back into a video game that I used to play a long time ago, and I spent a long time playing the video game. And I can't play video games right before bedtime because it interferes with my sleep. I have to
23:09 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:10 Tracy V. Wilson? do something else.
23:11 Holly Frey? I can understand that.
23:12 Tracy V. Wilson? And so I would turn off video game, and I would see if there was maybe a little something that I wanted to, like, watch a short episode of television or something. And whenever I would open Netflix, the thing it would show me would be like, you might enjoy this movie, the six triple eight. And I'd be like, I can't start a movie now. I'm going to bed.
23:31 Holly Frey? You're like, I might enjoy that movie, but now is not the time. Thank you.
23:34 Tracy V. Wilson? So at some point, I will watch it, but I still have not. So, yeah.
23:40 Holly Frey? Oh.
23:43 Holly Frey? All of the updates on the things we discussed three weeks ago.
23:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yep, yep. So whatever's coming up on the next couple of days for you, whether it's your weekend, whether you gotta go to work, whatever, I hope everything is going great. We're just a couple of weeks into the new year. I hope the new year is treating everyone well. We'll be back tomorrow with the Saturday Classic. We will have something brand new on Monday.
24:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
24:30 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 and Partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
25:01 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.
25:38 Speaker 06 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
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26:36 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Previous Unearthed! Year-end 2024, Part 2 Next SYMHC Classics: Peter Roget Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated