Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition About this episode For our annual pre-Holiday-Special-holiday-episode-about-a-holiday-toy we are jumping into one of the greatest games of all time, Trivial Pursuit (and we’re not just saying that because there’s an SYSK edition).
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0:35 Speaker 02 This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling, so his operation runs smoothly no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.
1:06 Speaker 03 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:16 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Gary's here, too. We're just rolling the dice and moving the pies.
1:27 Speaker 04 I call them pies, too.
1:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, because, I mean, it was like a pie piece. Yeah, I can't think of anything else you would call them. I think some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos.
1:37 Speaker 04 Yeah. Oh, I think they're officially wedges.
1:40 Josh Clark? Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game, so.
1:43 Speaker 04 Did you watch that video?
1:45 Josh Clark? Yeah.
1:45 Speaker 04 Oh, boy.
1:46 Josh Clark? We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. First, this is Stuff You Should Know. Second, we're talking about Trivial Pursuit. Arguably, one of the greatest board games ever created. And we're not just saying that because Stuff You Should Know has its own Trivial Pursuit edition. It's because it legitimately is such a great game.
2:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I played this game a lot when I was a kid. It was a family favorite. My mom really, really loved it.
2:13 Speaker 04 We were often a team together, my mom and I, so it's kind of one of my good childhood memories with her.
2:19 Josh Clark? I'll bet. Yeah, looking at the board and all, like, pictures of the board and some of the question cards and all that. Like, I was just overwhelmed with nostalgia because it was a huge thing in my family, too, playing Trivial Pursuit.
2:31 Speaker 04 Boomer City, baby.
2:32 Josh Clark? I love that game. Yeah, for sure.
2:34 Speaker 04 As it turns out.
2:35 Josh Clark? For sure. And what's funny is it indoctrinated us into everything that boomers like. Like, it was a really, like, huge cultural transfer from one generation to the other in that way.
2:45 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, I was a 12-year-old who learned about Gunsmoke and Richard Nixon through playing Trivial Pursuit.
2:53 Josh Clark? Yep. Yeah. And Spiro Agnew from Mad Magazine.
2:57 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
2:58 Josh Clark? So, we should probably start at the start, and that actually goes long before Trivial Pursuit was created. But not as far back as you would think. Like, in the United States, we did a live episode on game shows. That was really cool. And we talked about this some. But back, as far back to the 30s on the radio and then later on TV, quiz shows were like all the rage. And Americans had, like, fascinations with trivia and then got bored with it. And then came and found it again and then got bored with it. And back in the 30s, that was one of the peaks where everybody was super into it.
3:34 Speaker 04 Yeah. Quiz shows were for sure big. I think, you know, Olivia helped us with this. And I always kind of wondered about the word trivial because I thought that was a pretty genius. And we'll get to the name change because initially this was called Trivia Pursuit. And a lot of people called it Trivia Pursuit. But the change to trivial, I don't know. That was just something that made it a little cheeky, maybe?
3:59 Josh Clark? Yeah. Because you're not just talking about trivia, you're also poking fun at your own game. Like, you're putting all of this effort into something that doesn't really matter in the end.
4:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, I guess so. But I thought it mattered. When I was a kid, I was, now that I'm an adult, I'm like, Trivial Pursuit's kind of a fun name. When I was a kid, I was like, this is not trivia. These are facts and figures.
4:19 Josh Clark? Right.
4:19 Speaker 04 It was weird.
4:19 Josh Clark? Oh, I took it seriously, too, for sure. I loved Trivial Pursuit, too. But it was definitely in the vein of the people who invented this thing to kind of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the player, for playing it.
4:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure. So, pub quizzes were big in England before they were a big deal in the United States, where we call it just bar trivia, I guess. But they kind of hit it big earlier on. So the world of trivia was gaining steam through the 1960s. I think there was a Columbia student named Edwin Goodgold, who I think he wrote a book, right?
4:57 Josh Clark? He and another guy named Dan Karlinsky wrote a book simply called Trivia.
5:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:02 Josh Clark? But he's credited as one of like the early people to spread the whole concept of being quizzed about inconsequential, usually pop culture, questions to just show like how much you knew about your childhood. And that Edwin Goodgold thing, two things about him. He went on to become the manager of Sha Na Na.
5:23 Speaker 04 Really?
5:23 Josh Clark? Yeah.
5:24 Speaker 04 Oh, wow.
5:25 Josh Clark? And he wrote in Columbia University's, I guess their newspaper, he was one of their writers, he wrote that this is, that these trivia games that are like the hot new thing on campus are played by young adults who on the one hand realize they have misspent their youth, yet on the other hand, do not want to let go of it. And that was the whole idea. It was about all the stuff that you learned in your childhood from reading Superman comic books and listening to like gangster or seeing like gangster TV shows. Just from being a kid, that's what the whole thing was based on. And that kind of became a tradition too, that it was largely stuff in the past. A lot of it was pop culture.
6:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And that was the mid 60s. The mid 70s is when the pub quizzes really took off in England. That didn't start in the US till really after Trivial Pursuit. There was a time even where the TV show Jeopardy was not on the air because like you said, there was just a waxing and waning on interest in trivia. But Jeopardy came back in 84 and all of a sudden, you know, trivia started to be important in the United States again.
6:32 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuit's success revived Jeopardy.
6:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, I bet it did.
6:41 Josh Clark? Because it was a huge, huge deal, as we'll see.
6:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure.
6:45 Josh Clark? But the whole thing starts all the way back in 1979, in December of 1979 appropriately, because Trivial Pursuit and Christmas for its first few years of being out were synonymous with one another, essentially. Maybe synonymous isn't the right word, but they were. It was a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out about that.
7:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, and this is our pick. We kind of had a hard time deciding this year, but actually not really. It was a toss up, but we always do like a Christmas, you know, legendary Christmas gifts in pop culture history kind of episode. And this year we went with Trivial Pursuit because it was a big, you know, they, as you'll see, you know, rolling out a board game in October and November is a pretty smart move.
7:28 Josh Clark? For sure. And these two guys, they're two Canadians. I read an article about them that was contemporary to them. In the Toronto Star, it said that they come off like the two original hosers.
7:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:41 Josh Clark? Like even bigger hosers than Bob and Doug McKenzie is what they were saying.
7:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, they were a couple of hockey dudes, just hockey, beer drinking, Canadian, good old fashioned Canadian hockey playing. Or at least hockey watching. I bet they played too. They all played.
7:55 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think they definitely did. They certainly covered it. One of them, Scott Abbott, was a sports reporter for the Canadian press who I think his focus was on hockey. The other guy was Chris Haney. He was a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette. So these are a couple of late 70s, early 80s journalist dudes who wear mustaches and drink beer during their, their interviews on the news.
8:19 Speaker 04 And smoke.
8:20 Josh Clark? Yeah, and smoke during them too. Like this was, these were the guys who invented Trivial Pursuit.
8:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, Haney was a high school dropout. Abbott did have a master's degree in journalism from University of Tennessee. And he was living with Haney and his wife Sarah in their apartment in Montreal at the time. And as the legend goes, they're hanging out one day. It was kind of rainy. They were like, hey, let's play some Scrabble. They realized they didn't have some Scrabble. And then I saw a couple of different versions, kind of inconsequential, like whether or not he just dropped everything and went out and bought a Scrabble or whether just on his next shopping trip he did. But Haney would buy a Scrabble game, bring it back to play and was like, you know what? I bought like six of these things over the years because I just keep losing them or leaving behind or loaning them out or something.
9:07 Speaker 04 And like, what a racket. Like we should get into the gaming business.
9:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, that's how it was born. They just realized how many times he bought a Scrabble game and they were like, we could do that.
9:19 Speaker 04 What a story.
9:19 Josh Clark? We should say, yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that they would talk about doing is making a game because they realized that you could, that other people have made money off of it.
9:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:30 Josh Clark? Up to this point, their big claim to fame in their circle was having carried out a pyramid scheme.
9:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:37 Josh Clark? With a chain letter.
9:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:39 Josh Clark? That was actually successful in that they made money off of it.
9:42 Speaker 04 And they did.
9:42 Josh Clark? And they never got caught for it either. So up to this, so these were, that was this kind of, these kind of guys, right? And this particular idea though, kind of started to take shape really, really quickly. I think it was Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott, who was like, well, how about something with trivia? And remember at the time, like trivia was not a hot item.
10:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:06 Josh Clark? And also, as we'll see, board games were not a hot item.
10:08 Speaker 04 No.
10:08 Josh Clark? So they, these were like two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together and accidentally became a success. Or not accidentally, it ended up becoming a success. But it was like, they figured it out really quickly, didn't they?
10:20 Speaker 04 Some might say suspiciously quickly. And we'll get to that later, but as their story goes, in about 45 minutes time, and they're really specific about that. I'd never saw anywhere an hour. They always said 45 minutes. They got, you know, the game together. They got some construction paper. They started sketching things out. They based the, the design of the circular board on a ship's wheel with six spokes that corresponded to categories of geography, entertainment, sports and leisure, science and nature, arts and literature, and history. And you would roll the die. You would move in any direction you wanted, as long as it's only one direction. You get, you get this little circular pie crust.
11:05 Speaker 04 With six available pie slots.
11:07 Josh Clark? Right, not wedges.
11:08 Speaker 04 Not wedges. And the idea is you go around and you answer questions in the corresponding categories. And when you answer them on the center of each spoke, or I guess the landing point of each spoke, you would get to put in a pie piece. Once you have all those pie pieces in, you roll your way to the center, must have an exact roll, and then the other teams decide which category of question they want to randomly ask you. And if you miss, if you make it, you win the game. If you miss it, you gotta roll back out and then answer questions and eventually roll back in.
11:41 Josh Clark? Yes, well put.
11:44 Josh Clark? I am not one for boasting typically. But I will say that I once confirmed one, a game, doing all the things you just said in 20 minutes.
11:55 Speaker 04 Wow, by yourself?
11:58 Josh Clark? No, no, no, not by myself. I was playing a dude at work at the liquor store I was working at.
12:03 Speaker 04 I mean, were you on a team by yourself?
12:04 Josh Clark? No, no, no, just me.
12:07 Speaker 04 Okay, that's what I was asking. Not literally playing by yourself.
12:11 Speaker 04 Boy, Josh, I mean, oh, never mind.
12:13 Josh Clark? I mean, I guess if you were really honest, you could play by yourself, you know?
12:17 Speaker 04 Eh, you could sit around and read cards. I did that for a little while.
12:20 Josh Clark? That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll, you could move, you could ask yourself questions, answer them, and if you got it wrong.
12:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. Just talking to different voices. No, good try, Chuck.
12:30 Josh Clark? Right.
12:31 Speaker 04 Great guess.
12:32 Josh Clark? You kind of ruined my 20-minute anecdote, frankly.
12:35 Speaker 04 No, I want to dwell back on that because 20 minutes, I mean, I played a lot of Trivial Pursuit, and I don't feel like we ever got through a game in less than that standard 45 minutes it took to invent it.
12:46 Josh Clark? Yeah, yeah, it took, it took, it could take a while, especially if like
12:51 Speaker 04 They were dumb?
12:51 Josh Clark? We just had a lot of people who, yeah, didn't know trivia. But yeah, it would usually take. Yeah, 45 minutes, an hour, depending on how fast everybody was moving.
13:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:02 Josh Clark? Usually it took longer because the whole point was almost every question and answer would like generate a
13:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:09 Josh Clark? A quick conversation, or usually short conversations, sometimes longer.
13:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:13 Josh Clark? Exactly.
13:14 Speaker 04 And most of the times it was boomer parents like waxing philosophic about how great their stuff was.
13:19 Josh Clark? Right, exactly to that, too. But that was the point, and that's one of the reasons it became so popular is like it was really easy to have a party centered on trivial pursuit.
13:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I don't think we mentioned, you could have teams, I did sort of allude to that, but you could have, I mean, you could probably have as many people as you want on a team, but I think they suggested max of four, meaning a max of 24 players, and anything more than that would get a little unwieldy, but I feel like we were, and my family wasn't big, it was usually we were in pairs.
13:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, that was typically how it was done. So you could argue and be mad at one another when the other one insisted on the wrong answer.
13:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, and as a kid, I do also remember all of my family trying to nab me because I was the only one who really knew much about sports.
14:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, that was always my weak one, too, and that was always the one that would get picked for me if I ever made it to the middle.
14:12 Speaker 04 What was your category? Like, if you could pick your own final category, what would it be?
14:15 Josh Clark? It was usually history or entertainment.
14:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, I would say sports and leisure or entertainment for me.
14:23 Josh Clark? Yeah.
14:23 Speaker 04 Definitely not geography, still.
14:26 Josh Clark? Yeah, my worst was definitely sports and leisure, and I would, yeah, geography was probably second.
14:31 Speaker 04 That's because they didn't have maths.
14:34 Josh Clark? Right, only in the British version.
14:37 Speaker 04 So I mentioned the name change, that was Sarah, who was Haney's wife, Chris Haney's wife Sarah, is the one that said, no, change it to trivial instead of trivia. I think it was a pretty great switch, and I think that's a pretty good intro.
14:54 Josh Clark? Oh, okay, well, if that's the end of the intro, then Chuck, I think we have to put an ad break in here.
14:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, let's move along to act two, right after this.
15:17 Speaker 05 This is Colin Coward from the Colin Coward Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. 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. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.
15:50 Speaker 03 Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables Podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.
15:58 Speaker 06 I'm Ron Moore.
16:00 Speaker 07 And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.
16:08 Speaker 06 The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.
16:13 Speaker 07 We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.
16:20 Speaker 06 We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me. Pay it forward.
16:34 Speaker 07 If you work to give, you just see the world differently.
16:38 Speaker 06 I'm going to help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.
16:42 Speaker 03 To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.
17:02 Josh Clark? So Haney and Abbott, they were like, we're going to do this. And they came upon a great idea that they would visit a toy industry convention, like the big one in Canada. I think it was the Canadian Toy Manufacturers Trade Show. Can't remember what it was called. I looked it up, I couldn't find anything on it. But they went, remember, they were journalists. So they went as reporters, as if they were on an assignment to do a story on the toy industry, specifically the board game industry. So they used that cover to pick the brains of a bunch of people who... We're in the board game industry and one of the, well, they found out a couple of things very quickly. They found out that the board game industry was in a slump.
17:45 Josh Clark? They also found out that is a very, very closed industry. Where if you're a newcomer with an idea, just hit the bricks. Like they're not going to listen to you. That's not how the board game industry works. And they figured this out. So they decided that from going to this conference, they were going to have to do this themselves. If they wanted to get this, this game out there, they were going to have to, they couldn't just sell the idea. They had to make the game first. And that's what they said about doing.
18:10 Speaker 04 Yeah. They were like, we, we did a pyramid scheme. We're good at selling things that don't exist. So they enlisted a little bit of help. They got Chris's brother, John Haney on the team. And then a guy named Ed Warner, who was a friend, uh, who's a corporate attorney. And they formed the Horn Abbott Company. Uh, Haney's nickname was the Horn. And Abbott, in this case with one T was just a variation on Abbott's two T'd name. And they started selling equity to raise a little money through friends and family. So they, they sold 40 shares at a thousand dollars each, uh, to 32 friends and family members. And boy, you want to talk about an investment that paid off.
18:49 Josh Clark? For sure.
18:50 Speaker 04 Wow. Can you imagine? It'd be like one of the early, like Apple stock or Google stock.
18:55 Josh Clark? Right.
18:55 Speaker 04 You know?
18:56 Josh Clark? Very similar to that. Not quite as lucrative, but still pretty, pretty well. The people who bought several shares each were set for life, basically after the game hit.
19:06 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
19:07 Josh Clark? But at the time, um, Chris Haney told his mom she shouldn't invest.
19:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:13 Josh Clark? And this is his idea, his business venture. That's how much he believed in it, I guess. But, um, uh, there's a guy named Michael Worstlin. And so this iconic, really elegant, um, design for the package, the board itself, the cards, all that stuff. It was Michael Worstlin's work. He was 18 at the time.
19:33 Speaker 04 That's just amazing.
19:35 Josh Clark? And he didn't get a dime up front for it. He, he did this work for five shares of, uh, stock in the company of equity. And yeah, it was very smart, as we'll see.
19:45 Speaker 04 Yeah. So they managed to raise 40 grand. Uh, they got a $75,000 line of credit from a bank. And that was enough dough to start getting this game together in earnest. The one thing they didn't have, they had design, they had it kind of all ready to go. They needed 6,000 questions. And so I assume with some of that, what is that, like, close to 120 grand? They went to Spain in 1981 and they said, we're gonna go drink beer on the beach and write questions. We're gonna pack a bunch of, you know, dictionaries and encyclopedias and, and reference books and newspapers. And we're gonna go out there, we're gonna write it for the American audience.
20:30 Speaker 04 Some of this stuff's gonna be pretty obscure stuff. Some is gonna be, you know, some are gonna be a little easier. They wanted to kind of give it a little bit of variety. And finally, in November 81, registered Trivial Pursuit as a trademark. And then launched the genus, not genius edition. That same month is when that came out.
20:52 Josh Clark? Yeah, we should explain, because I've never understood it until I started researching this. It's called genus because genus, you know, like in taxonomy, genus is above species. So there's a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another, another way to interpret or another definition of it, it's general. It's not specific. And so the questions in here were not, they were very general. You didn't have to be like a specialist in anything to play Trivial Pursuit. And if you were, you're kind of handicapped because there was a bunch of other questions that had nothing to do with your specialist, or special, yeah, specialist, specialism? What is the word I'm looking for? Specialty. There you go.
21:36 Speaker 04 I picture someone behind you with a giant Y, like, dancing up and down.
21:40 Josh Clark? I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer.
21:42 Speaker 04 Oh, no, no, no, no. So. Toy Fair people were not too interested, at first at least. They got passed on from the bigs, Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley at the time, saying this is a really expensive game to produce. And I mean, that's something we learned a lot about in doing the Stuff You Should Know version is like, cost of production is obviously a big deal. I just never, we were like, you know, what if those pieces were like copper or something? And they were like, uh, no, they're gonna be punch out cardboard. But you guys are sweet.
22:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, we were like, well, what about plastic? They were like, eh, keep guessing.
22:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, Monopoly has all those solid lead figurines. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no.
22:23 Josh Clark? That can give you brain damage if you play too much.
22:26 Speaker 04 Uh, not to knock our, the team we worked with, because they were great. And the game turned out great. It's just, it's just how you make a game to make money.
22:33 Josh Clark? Yeah, we said it before and we'll say it again, like, they were the greatest bunch of people that I've ever worked with as a group. Like, as a group, they were as good as it comes. It was amazing.
22:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was pro, top to bottom enthusiasm, just a sheer pleasure.
22:48 Josh Clark? Yep.
22:49 Speaker 04 All right, so enough of that kissing up. They got about 1,100 games made, sold them to local retailers, regional Canadian retailers, basically, right before Christmas. And then this distributor of games, Cheepton Products, very smartly were like, hey, we'll put this thing together. My daughter, supposedly the vice president's daughter, really, really loved the game when she went away for a weekend and played it a lot. And he's, and it ended up being a great decision for them as well.
23:21 Josh Clark? Yeah, hugely consequential. And this was Christmas 1981. So this is the first Christmas that Trivial Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash, because they sold out of those 1,100 games so quickly that by the time the end of, by the time the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold 100,000 copies in Canada.
23:44 Josh Clark? And that's a lot. And it turns out it's even more than you think it is because at the time, a board game to be a best seller sold about 10,000 copies. So this little, this little
23:56 Speaker 04 Independent.
23:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, a very independent game created by a couple of outsiders sold 10 times more than you would expect it to sell as a best seller in this first year.
24:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was incredible. They were making everything in Canada, Canada at the time, except for the dice, 3,500 games a day, but they still couldn't keep up with the pace. In 1983, finally, a US company called Selcho and Richter, I guess, or Ryder?
24:27 Josh Clark? Ryder, yeah.
24:28 Speaker 04 Ryder. They licensed that game. They had real marketing money. Finally, they sold 1.3 million games in 1983 with that company. And one thing we haven't mentioned is this game was about double the cost of what a board game was at the time. 25 to 40 bucks, depending on where you went. That's up to $90 today.
24:51 Josh Clark? Oh, I saw 125 today.
24:54 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
24:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, I put $40 in for 1983 in West Egg and it said 125.
25:00 Speaker 04 It told me 90.
25:01 Josh Clark? Oh, God.
25:02 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
25:03 Josh Clark? Oh, no. Inflation calculations are now in question.
25:07 Speaker 04 Oh, God.
25:08 Josh Clark? It must be having a bad
25:08 Speaker 04 This is the worst thing that's ever happened to us. Our beloved West Egg. Well, either way, let's settle at 110.
25:15 Josh Clark? Okay, great.
25:16 Speaker 04 But either way, that was about double the cost of a board game. So it was no small thing to plunk down that kind of money on this big, heavy voluminous, voluminous game.
25:27 Josh Clark? Voluptuous, too. So you said heavy. Each game package weighed six pounds because they, they really pulled out the stops in their, the materials. And like, yeah, it was cardboard and yeah, it was plastic, but it was really, really well made, well manufactured, well designed cardboard and plastic put together. And again, the, the, just the look of it had such an elegant look. It just didn't, it did not look like other. Board games at the time was like, sorry, or trouble, or something like that.
25:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:58 Josh Clark? You know, whereas like wacky and there was like a cartoon explosion or something like that. Bunch of kids rolling dice on there. And that was a big deal, too. There was no kid, no person anywhere on the box. The only person who showed up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope, who, uh, who's quote, "What mighty contests arrive from trivial things," was on the box. So this whole thing is so highbrow that, um, it just doesn't even make sense. And yet, that made people want it all the more. It was a brand new thing. It was a revival of board games is what Trivial Pursuit was when it came out.
26:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, and it was, uh, I mean, it said for adults on the box, which, um, turned out to be a stroke of genius because I even remember, I read an article in Slate that kind of drove this home. But, um, I even remember, uh, kind of agreeing with what Slate was saying, which was like, as a kid in the eighties, um, especially for kids of the eighties who had like narcissistic parents who didn't show them much attention. It was, if you could play Trivial Pursuit and hang, it was a chance to sit at the, at the adult table for a minute.
27:07 Josh Clark? Yeah.
27:07 Speaker 04 And to like interact with your parents for an hour a day.
27:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, and maybe make some extra allowance in the bargain.
27:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, hey, you throw a little money on it, you never know.
27:16 Josh Clark? Exactly. So, um, this was Christmas 1983 that it blew up in the United States. And like when it blew up in the US, it like, it, it really just changed everything. Like you said, that first year, they sold 1.3 million games. They sold 20 million the next year in 1984. And by January of 1984, right after it started to come out in the United States, the New York Times reported that people in New York were trading cocktail parties for Trivial Pursuit parties.
27:49 Speaker 04 With cocktails.
27:50 Josh Clark? And I was thinking about it. Yeah, right.
27:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:52 Josh Clark? I don't think there's anything more insufferable than the New York Times reporting on what cool New Yorkers are doing right there.
27:58 Speaker 04 Right.
27:59 Josh Clark? This was a great example of that, the 80s version, too.
28:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure. They had great marketing early on with this new company. There was a marketing consultant they hired named Linda Pizzano, who would send these games out to celebrities who were featured in questions in the game. And she got letters back from some of them, and she would publish those. She got a letters from Pat Boone, Gregory Peck, and James Mason.
28:25 Josh Clark? The three, the trio.
28:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, the Boomers are just going nuts. And then, to really drive it home, there was a Time Magazine report that the cast of The Big Chill, the most Boomer movie of all Boomers, movies of all time, were unwinding between scenes, enjoying Trivial Pursuit, and looking back at the nostalgia of their younger days. And that's, it was, that was peak Boomer nostalgia Trivial Pursuit reporting.
28:52 Josh Clark? Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know
28:55 Speaker 04 It's good.
28:56 Josh Clark? that one of the characters lets her husband, I guess, impregnate, serve as like a surrogate sperm donor to her friend.
29:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:07 Josh Clark? And the only reason I know that is because there is a great Saturday Night Live skit about it.
29:13 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
29:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I guess that they show the, the, the wife who is like hanging out downstairs in the movie while they went upstairs or something like that.
29:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:24 Josh Clark? So in the Saturday Night Live one, like, she's just sitting there, like, reflecting, like, drinking tea and, like, thinking about how great and just beautiful this is. The, the sound coming from upstairs, they're like really getting into it, and she's getting like more and more concerned and worried.
29:40 Speaker 04 I think I remember that.
29:41 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was, I think it was Jan Hooks who was like the woman downstairs. That was a great sketch.
29:47 Speaker 04 Oh, that's funny. Well, that movie was very big in my house, and that soundtrack, I mean, I joke about it now, but that's literally the thing that introduced me to Motown.
29:55 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
29:56 Speaker 04 As a kid, yeah, listening to, I was 12 years old or whatever it was, listening to Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops and, you know, everyone else, Jeremiah was a bullfrog, which wasn't Motown. But if you want to hear a more in-depth conversation about that, you can listen to the Movie Crush episode featuring the wonderful and charming Janie Hadad Tompkins.
30:18 Josh Clark? Oh, nice. That was her pick, huh?
30:19 Speaker 04 That was her pick.
30:20 Josh Clark? Nice.
30:21 Speaker 04 Good movie, though. But now it suffers from anti-boomeritis.
30:25 Josh Clark? Oh, okay. So I should wait 10 years to see it?
30:29 Speaker 04 How do you feel about boomers right now?
30:32 Josh Clark? I'll wait 10 years to see it.
30:33 Speaker 04 Okay.
30:35 Speaker 04 All right. So 1984, well, I guess we should mention that book in 1983. A guy named Robert J. Heller wrote a book called How to Win at Trivial Pursuit. Like, that's how big it got. I think like 96 trivia games trying to cash in on Trivial Pursuit's success and people writing books like How to Win at Trivial Pursuit, in which Robert J. Heller said, "Why don't you just memorize all 6,000 cards?"
31:01 Josh Clark? That became kind of an urban legend. Like, your cousin's friend memorized all 6,000 questions.
31:07 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
31:08 Josh Clark? Yeah.
31:08 Speaker 04 That's funny.
31:08 Josh Clark? Yeah. And there were some other cute or interesting anecdotes, I guess, that kind of came out around the time. One was Ronald Reagan was reported on having played the game while he was waiting for the election results in 1984. And during the game, he got two questions about himself. And you can relax, he got them correct, both of them.
31:33 Speaker 04 Well, that's the only thing Reagan I can do is the one word.
31:37 Josh Clark? One of the, one of the facts I saw bandied about in some of the reporting, that was a great Reagan, by the way.
31:44 Speaker 04 Thanks.
31:45 Josh Clark? Was that either Ronald Reagan signed Clark Gable's discharge papers from the Army, or Clark Gable signed Ronald Reagan's?
31:53 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
31:53 Josh Clark? It depends on who you ask, yes.
31:54 Speaker 04 What, was one of them authorized to do so? Or are they just like, "Come over here, buddy. Sign this thing."
31:59 Josh Clark? No, no. Like, they just happened to be, like, that was, it just happened to be the luck of the draw, as far as the arrangement went.
32:06 Speaker 04 Like, they bore witness or something?
32:07 Josh Clark? No. I think, like, let's say it was Clark Gable who signed them. He would have maybe been, like, a higher up to Ronald Reagan.
32:14 Speaker 04 I got you, I got you.
32:15 Josh Clark? As Ronald Reagan was getting out. It happened to be Clark Gable rather than Colonel Joe Schmo.
32:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. I'm glad I complicated that. Very clean and cool story.
32:26 Speaker 04 Another fun little trivial factoid, and yes, I'm saying factoid, was that QE2, Queen Elizabeth II hosted in the first nerd cruise, it sounds like, because she hosted an eight-day Trivial Pursuit tournament cruise in, I guess, 85.
32:43 Josh Clark? And so at each Christmas, 1983, it was like you could not find that thing.
32:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:51 Josh Clark? In 1984, same, same deal. Like, it was really hard to find, but this time Selchow and Ryder had, like, learned their lesson and were, like, keeping up with supply a lot better than they were at the very beginning of this whole thing. And so at the, at the peak of this, I think it really peaked in 84, but that certainly continued on into 1985.
33:11 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
33:12 Josh Clark? In the spring of 1985, 15% of households in America had a Trivial Pursuit game in their house. I saw at some point it was 20%, one in five.
33:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think they, I think they're at about 80 million to date, games?
33:30 Josh Clark? Oh, I, I believe that. Totally.
33:32 Speaker 04 That's just a staggering amount of game. I mean, my mom's, you talked about how well it was made. My mom still has our, the OG from whatever, 48 years ago.
33:41 Josh Clark? Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed and like the parts where it folded and the rest of it's just fine.
33:46 Speaker 04 No, you can still read Richard Nixon on a third of those cards.
33:49 Josh Clark? Nice. There's a little, like, cocaine in the little folds and, like, tequila stains on some of the, some of the spots.
33:56 Speaker 04 Oh, not in my family, pal. So Trivial Pursuit is selling gangbusters. Abbott and Haney are rich dudes and also weirdly kind of celebrities. They, they were not shy. They, they loved to be on TV and to do interviews. They were in TV commercials. They were pitchmen for other brands like Amex and Diet Coke, and they would put that Trivial Pursuit branding on anything they thought they could make money of. And like you mentioned, those original investors did really, really well. There was an entertainment writer at the Toronto Globe and Mail named Susan, Susan Ferrier-McKay, who took out a bank loan to buy 10 shares early on. And in 1984, she bought a house and then she retired not too long after that.
34:42 Josh Clark? Yeah, and Worslin, the guy, the 18-year-old who did all the art, he founded a company called Worslin Group, all one word, that became Pretty Successful Marketers in Toronto, and he used his money from his shares to start that. So it definitely paid off. And then, yeah, like you said, the Haney's and Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott were just mega-rich from this. I mean, this game made hundreds of millions of dollars in the 80s, like 80s money. God knows what West Egg would convert that to. But there was a lot of money made off this, and you've got to think back, like, these were just a couple of dudes who had an idea and went with it. Although, there were people who were like,
35:25 Josh Clark? "Yeah, that's questionable whether you had that idea." Like, you kind of referred to earlier, right?
35:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, there were two cases, at least like two notable court cases. One was a lawsuit in 1994 from a guy, an Australian, named David Wall, who said, "Hey, in 1979, this Chris Haney guy picked me and my buddy up when we were hitchhiking, and we were in Nova Scotia. And while we were driving around, I told him about this idea for the game, like, really specifically. Like, my mom has pictures of the wheel that I drew and the pie pieces and everything. And the court were like, "Well, where are those documents?" And he was like, "I don't have those anymore." And they said, "Well, bring forward some witnesses." And he was like, "No one, no one's really coming forward."
36:16 Josh Clark? They moved.
36:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, they moved away. Haney said, or he said that Haney later offered him shares, like, "Hey, man, we're getting this game that you got, told me the idea for going, and I'm going to offer to buy you shares. This is a real thing." He refused. Had he bought those shares, he would have ended up a rich person as well. But in court, Haney was like, "I never met this guy, never picked him up." They awarded him initially, well, not awarded him, he got $0, but the judge ruled in Haney's favor and awarded them $1.2 million in court costs. This is after a 13-year legal battle, but they reduced that to $1 million because they said, "But you know what? Your big corporate attorneys came in and sued two of his witnesses,
37:02 Speaker 04 so we're going to knock off 200 grand and just make it a million."
37:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, imagine being that guy. You're like, you owe me tens of millions of dollars. And then 10 years later, you owe them a million dollars. Like,
37:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:14 Josh Clark? This is just some guy. He wasn't some like high-flying jet setter who had a bunch of money. I don't know what happened to him.
37:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, he had a hard, he didn't have the million bucks. I saw that. So they said they were looking to garnish his wages. And I was like, oh, man, this just gets from bad to worse.
37:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, but I mean, this is the one guy who said that. And like you said, he didn't come up with witnesses or any kind of supporting evidence. And yeah, it's just not clear what the deal was, whether he was just looking for a payday or if he did get ripped off. But as far as the court's concerned, he definitely did not get ripped off.
37:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, what I was trying to find out was they, you know, they said they sued two. First, the judge said there was no witnesses. Then I find out that they had sued two of the witnesses, which they considered like, you know, witness intimidation or something.
38:01 Josh Clark? Sure.
38:01 Speaker 04 So I'm wondering if one of those witnesses they sued was like the friend that hitchhiked with them. And I'm just, I couldn't find anything out. It's so hard to find out stuff about old court cases.
38:10 Josh Clark? Well, if it was like a David and Goliath thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad indeed.
38:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, what about the other one?
38:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, we'll move on because this one's getting really sad. The other one is the story of a guy named Fred L. Worth. And if you are into trivia, Fred Worth is essentially your Messiah. He is the original trivia dude who's been writing books on trivia, books like containing trivia for decades and decades now. I don't know if he's still alive, but if he is, he's probably still going strong. And he apparently had published a three-volume encyclopedia of trivia at some point. This was before Trivia Pursuit was launched. And he did something, you know how we've talked about mapmakers, like including like a fake town to basically protect their property, see if somebody ripped them off?
39:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:01 Josh Clark? He did something with trivia question. He included a trick question in his stuff.
39:06 Speaker 04 He did. And that, well, it didn't bear fruit, but it played out in his favor. It was a question on Columbo, the TV show with, what's his name?
39:18 Josh Clark? Peter Falk.
39:19 Speaker 04 Peter Falk. I almost said Robert Blake. I used to get those confused.
39:22 Josh Clark? No, that was Beretta?
39:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's the one who murdered his wife in real life.
39:27 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. Anyway, Peter Falk did not murder his wife, as far as I know, but he was Frank Colombo. And in the question, it was, the answer was Philip Colombo, like, what was Colombo's real name? And, you know, I don't know if anywhere else Philip Colombo had ever been printed, so it looked like pretty good proof to me. He sued for 300 million bucks, claimed that close to 1,700 of the questions were his. And a judge threw it out and said, first of all, this game is a lot different than that book. And at which time Worth should have said, that's not what I'm saying.
40:01 Josh Clark? Right.
40:02 Speaker 04 And then he said, but you can't copyright facts, no case. Which, I officially feel bad for Worth, because it seems clear to me that they took a lot of his questions.
40:12 Josh Clark? Uh, yeah. He, I mean, they said that they used his book for, for creating these things, like, they didn't deny that at all. But yeah, I guess it was just, their, their case was based on the idea that, like, a fact's a fact, like, this guy didn't, it's not a creation of his own.
40:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:28 Josh Clark? He found it, right? No, I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought that was like an ironproof defense, like,
40:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
40:35 Josh Clark? I tricked these people into putting this question in there and it didn't work out. I'm sure he was astonished when that came along, that ruling.
40:42 Speaker 04 I imagine.
40:42 Josh Clark? But also, just before we move on, Chuck, I just want to tell all of our hardcore Colombo fan listeners to just stop your emails right now. We know for a fact that Frank is not, as far as canon goes, Colombo's first name.
40:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:57 Josh Clark? Canonically, Colombo doesn't have a first name, or else his first name is Lieutenant. So Frank Colombo just happened to show up in a couple of screenshots that the producers of the show originally never intended anybody to be able to zoom in on.
41:11 Speaker 04 Boy, do you think there are any Colombo pet ants?
41:16 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, definitely.
41:17 Speaker 04 That listen to this?
41:18 Josh Clark? Sure. Yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck.
41:23 Speaker 04 So the 90s are now upon us and these guys are, they said they feel like rock stars, basically. They've got all kinds of money. Supposedly, John Haney, the brother that was brought in early on, they were talking about finances and he said, "We'll be great as long as we don't do anything stupid like invest in racehorses." So that's just what they did. Haney and Abbott invested in racehorses, but for Abbott it paid off. He spent 50 grand on a yearling named Charlie Bailey that ended up winning about $900,000 in total purses over the years.
41:57 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
41:58 Speaker 04 And lots of studding out for big money.
42:00 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
42:01 Speaker 04 And they both invested in, kind of built from the ground up, these two golf courses in Canada. And Abbott bought, he was a big hockey guy, so he bought the Brampton Battalion at the time before moving them north and changing their name. And they are from the Ontario Hockey League. And I think he might still own them?
42:23 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
42:24 Speaker 04 I think so. I mean, this article I found was from the late 20 teens, so...
42:29 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, probably then.
42:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. I don't see why he would have sold it.
42:34 Josh Clark? Oh, so they're now the Brampton Battalion, but they were the North Bay Battalion, right?
42:38 Speaker 04 No, no, no. They were Brampton and now they're North Bay.
42:40 Josh Clark? Okay. I always get North Bay and Brampton confused.
42:43 Speaker 04 I do, too.
42:45 Josh Clark? So, Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written by who, Chuck?
42:52 Speaker 04 A guy named Ron Rodriguez.
42:54 Josh Clark? No, it's Juan Rodriguez.
42:55 Speaker 04 Oh, is it Juan?
42:56 Josh Clark? Yeah.
42:57 Speaker 04 Okay.
42:58 Josh Clark? So, Mr. Rodriguez is what we're gonna call him from now on because his name is really hard to say, it turns out. He was a, he wrote, I think, a daily quota of 40 Trivial Pursuit questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked. And we kind of went through that, too, because we helped out putting questions together for our version. And you, they've asked for hundreds and hundreds of them and you're like, okay, well, we're done. They're like, okay, well, we're gonna use about a third of those. So we're gonna have to do this again a couple more times. And it was like, there weren't that many facts in all of the episodes of Stuff You Should Know, you guys. But we pulled it out. But I can feel Mr. Rodriguez's pain.
43:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure. There was a lot of writing. He said that he used the Dictionary of 20th Century World Politics, pop culture magazines. As his story goes, when he needed Rambo questions, he watched all the Rambo movies two times to come up with the best questions. And, you know, once you write them, they did, I think he had a partner, they had some researchers on the team, and they would fact check and do corrections and tweaks and stuff like that.
44:08 Josh Clark? Yeah, I should say, we didn't, we weren't actually writing the questions. We were coming up with the source material for the questions from the podcast.
44:15 Speaker 04 You just sitting there going, oh, no.
44:17 Josh Clark? Yeah. There's some writer at Hasbro's like, uh.
44:23 Speaker 04 As far as the nitty gritty goes, questions are, have a maximum of 45 characters. They prefer two lines, even though there can be three. They just visually thought the two-line questions looked better, so they, they tried to edit them down when possible.
44:38 Josh Clark? Yep. And then I think now, over the years, there's been about 300 editions published.
44:44 Speaker 04 Wow.
44:45 Josh Clark? And very early on, they stayed fairly generalist. Although, I mean, let me take that back. They went from genus to silver screen edition, baby boomers edition, and I think a sports edition. But compared to some of the additions that they've come out with now, those are still pretty generalist.
45:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:08 Josh Clark? So another one was Disney. Disney was the first tie-in that they had in 1985. And that was still pretty general. It wasn't like Donald Duck facts specifically, right? Weirdly, here's a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie-in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame, the TV show and movie.
45:31 Speaker 04 Oh, wow.
45:31 Josh Clark? Like, I'm gonna live forever, had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back in 1993.
45:37 Speaker 04 Was the first question, how long did the Fame people think they were gonna live?
45:42 Josh Clark? That's a great question.
45:44 Speaker 04 I couldn't have been very as these additions weren't as big though, right? There's no way.
45:49 Josh Clark? No, in that Slate article that you referred to, um, the author makes a case. They were basically saying, I think the whole premise was Trivial Pursuit lost its way. And this is written about 10 years ago or something. And, um, the premise or the, the thesis this author had was that it, it went from being general, where basically anybody could come along and try their hand at it, to increasingly more specific to where now you had to know everything there is to know about Harry Potter, or everything there is to know about the Lord of the Rings, or Friends, or The Nightmare Before Christmas, or that kind of thing. And that it, it just, it made it more and more narrow, narrowed the pool. So you have to have more and more additions to, to appeal to as many people as possible.
46:34 Josh Clark? Whereas if you just made more generalist versions of the game, then you were always going to appeal to the most people possible.
46:42 Speaker 04 You know, uh, uh, it's some of those versions are definitely not my thing, but I'm not gonna say it lost its way. I disagreed with that guy and like, if you want a Harry Potter edition, that's your jam, then like, I love it.
46:54 Josh Clark? Sure.
46:55 Speaker 04 In fact, I, I wouldn't mind a Friends edition now that I'm thinking of it.
46:59 Speaker 04 I did today, the Friends edition, I think would be kind of fun for me, or a Seinfeld edition, cause I know those pretty well. But, um, I did today buy the, um, greatest hits edition, which is eight, uh, mainly eighties and nineties and a lot of pop culture. And supposedly that's like a Gen X feast. So I bought that today and hopefully I'll be getting it very soon.
47:21 Josh Clark? That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in the 900s and the answer is the moops.
47:31 Speaker 04 Right.
47:32 Josh Clark? It's got to, it has to.
47:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, God, we could probably write a Seinfeld edition, you and I could.
47:39 Josh Clark? Probably. They've come up some other pretty cool ones, too. One's called X. It's for, it's much more adult, edgy questions. I think it's for 18 and up. And it's a stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp an X onto your forehead in ink. And once you get five stamps on your forehead, you're out.
47:58 Speaker 04 Interesting.
47:59 Josh Clark? It is interesting. And then the weirdest edition I found, Chuck, was the EMS edition, Emergency Medical Services, came out in 2012.
48:09 Speaker 04 Wow.
48:09 Josh Clark? And it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy. It's just-
48:14 Speaker 04 Minor cuts, major cuts.
48:16 Josh Clark? Right. Yeah, I'd like to see some of those questions. I couldn't find them. And you can also play free online. There's a new version that came out this year called Trivial Pursuit Infinite. It uses generative AI to come up with questions.
48:31 Speaker 04 Ooh.
48:32 Josh Clark? And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch the new Trivial Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted by the lovable LeVar Burton.
48:42 Speaker 04 Oh, we love LeVar.
48:43 Josh Clark? Everyone loves LeVar.
48:45 Speaker 04 Who doesn't?
48:46 Josh Clark? No one.
48:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:48 Josh Clark? You got anything else?
48:50 Speaker 04 I got nothing else. I'm looking forward to playing. You know, I do have to say, I think I tried to play the original Genus sometime in the last, like, five or six years. It's been a minute, but I remember it didn't feel like it held up that well. And that's, that's probably due to the fact that it was written in the 80s and it was geared toward boomers.
49:10 Josh Clark? Gotcha.
49:11 Speaker 04 But it was still okay.
49:13 Josh Clark? Can you give an example of how it didn't hold up, or a general example?
49:17 Speaker 04 Well, just, you know, questions about Gunsmoke and Richard Nixon and over and over and over.
49:22 Josh Clark? I thought you were gonna say it was like deeply sexist or something like that.
49:24 Speaker 04 No, no, no, no, not like that. It just felt a little dated, question-wise. Like, hey, hey, I mean, supposedly the Masters Edition is the one, I think, The Gamer ranked in 2021. And Alistical and The Gamer said that the 2021 Master Edition was the best edition yet.
49:44 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
49:45 Speaker 04 But that Classic Edition has sold the lion's share of those 80 million versions.
49:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, pretty impressive stuff.
49:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:53 Josh Clark? I love these Christmas episodes, the pre-Christmas special, usually Christmas toy episode.
50:00 Speaker 04 Me, too.
50:02 Josh Clark? So, uh, happy holidays to all of you out there. And the next time you see us, we're going to be on that ad-free holiday special. It's coming soon. Uh, do you have a listener mail today?
50:14 Speaker 04 I do.
50:15 Josh Clark? Oh, great. Uh, well, since Chuck answered in the affirmative when I asked him if he had a listener mail, it's time for listener mail.
50:23 Speaker 04 Hey, guys. Loved your September episode on the history of music streaming. Uh, I grew up in the 90s. I can vividly remember, uh, being at my friend Ross's house, downloading Weezer songs off of Napster and burning pirated versions onto CDRs. Uh, as the title suggests, I'm an active musician now and I wanted to take a quick moment and give a shout out to the music streaming platforms that didn't end up in the episode, like Bandcamp and SoundCloud.
50:45 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
50:46 Speaker 04 Uh, I feel bad we didn't mention these and we just kinda went with the big corporate monolith. Um, as an independent artist, especially like how Bandcamp allows us to promote shows, discover, connect with other musicians directly, and the ability to customize the look and copy our releases, uh, look and copy on our releases page. Uh, it's made getting gigs and connecting with other indie bands so much easier. Uh, I also found it interesting how the preferred medium of the day has informed artist choices, um, has informed their choices when releasing music. In the 90s, albums were so much longer. He says, "I'm looking at you, Smashing Pumpkins."
51:20 Josh Clark? Hmm.
51:20 Speaker 04 Uh, because a lone CD could hold more than a vinyl LP or cassette. Today, there is so much music available at our fingertips. Musicians are releasing shorter albums, digital mixtapes, and a steady stream of albumless singles, all in an attempt to stay relevant and capture, uh, fleeting attention spans of listeners. I'm curious to see what happens over the next decade. Uh, thanks for your time and the years of parasocial education and entertainment. Uh, this is from Chris in Seattle, and we actually met and hung out with Chris.
51:49 Josh Clark? When?
51:50 Speaker 04 Many, many years ago in Seattle. Uh, he was a friend of our, uh, booking agent, at least at the time, um, Josh Lindgren.
51:57 Josh Clark? Uh huh.
51:58 Speaker 04 Well, he's still our booking agent. They were friends at the time, as far as I know.
52:01 Josh Clark? Oh, they're not friends anymore?
52:02 Speaker 04 Cause he, well, I don't know. I just didn't ask, but he, uh, I was, I was gonna text Lindgren and ask if he knew him, but they, he came to the Neptune show and I even rode in a car with him with Emily to some after-party he went to.
52:13 Josh Clark? Wowee.
52:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, so good to be back in touch with Chris. Yeah.
52:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for getting back in touch. I think that that's no longer parasocial, that's just social.
52:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're right.
52:25 Josh Clark? Well, if you want to be like Chris and remind us that we've hung out with you before, and also share some pretty great information and correct us for not shouting out independent version of something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff, you can send us an email to [email protected] .
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