December 27, 2024 • 50 mins
Join The Wizard Of WEIRD this week as he presents an assortment of wonderment as only he can do!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. Now get ready for us Strange Things with
Joshua P. Warren.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:34):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yes, ready to be amazed by the wizard of weird.
This is strange when JOA Warren, I am Joshua You
warren't And each week on this show, I'll be bringing
you brand new mind blowing content, news exercises, and weird
(01:16):
experiments you can do at home, and a lot more.
On this edition of the show, here's a wild grab
bag of stuff to ponder. Mental manner. Now, this is
an unusual edition of the show because it's gonna be
kind of all over the place. That is, because when
(01:39):
you do a show like this professionally on a regular basis,
it really is a job that never ends. I mean,
I spend every waking hour of every day sort of
scanning the world around me, looking for ideas, topics to
talk about and explore experiments that I can do or
(02:00):
that you can do. I'm always thinking about something that
can come across well on the show, and especially because
as you know, this is not really an interview show.
I mean, occasionally, rarely I'll interview somebody, but for the
most part, I don't do interviews on this show because
everybody else does that I'm doing something different, and honestly,
(02:21):
I can say that for me, this job is kind
of a twenty four to seven job because even when
I'm sleeping, I'm vividly dreaming, and those dreams sometimes make
it into the show. So here's what I end up with.
I end up with thousands of notes all around me
all the time, whether they're on the phone or scribbled
on pieces of paper, just things that I think of
(02:45):
that are interesting to me, that I jot down and
say maybe at some point I'll find an opportunity to
talk about this on the show. And I sat down
just the other day and I was looking at a
bunch of these and I thought, you know, I'm not
sure that anything could tie all this stuff together. There's
no common thread that I can see other than the
(03:08):
fact that these are all things that I'm interested in.
So I said, you know what, let me just do
a show where I just take some of these things
that I have thought about that I think are interesting
and just toss it out there to you and get
your feedback. This is what I call mental manna, similar
to just those things that make you go hmm. And
(03:31):
so I'm not even sure where we're going to go
on the show, but let's just dive right into it
see what happens. One thing I believe we can all
relate to is something that was brought up recently and
a conversation that Bill Maher had on his podcast with
the actor Malcolm McDowell, who, of course is most famous
(03:53):
for playing the lead role in the Stanley Kubrick movie
at Clockwork Orange. They were talking about the way that
technology has developed, because both of these guys are up
there in years, and I believe it was Malcolm McDowell,
I'm not sure it may have been Bill Maher. One
of them said that, you know, television was the Internet
(04:15):
of its time, and now you see how things have
changed and how we've not only gotten into this you know,
internet age, but we also have this attention span that's
getting shorter and shorter because of how quickly information travels.
(04:36):
I mean, we're now sort of in I mean, look
in a text. Some people don't even write a full sentence.
They just basically put some symbols down there and some
leaps speak to get points across. It's almost like the
old days of telegraph even faster though, or the whole
Twitter mentality that's just you know, get it out there
in a line or two. Because you're so bombarded with information.
(04:57):
The attention span is so short that you know, I
remember when I was a kid, you would order something
and you knew that maybe it was going to show
up in a couple of weeks. Now you order something
from Amazon and it might be there the same day
or the next day. And so people get frustrated if
they have to wait a couple of weeks for something
(05:17):
because they order it from a normal person. And you know,
I was talking about the experiment that I've been doing
with the time camera and how that and this again
is probably a little more relevant to people who are
maybe forty years old or older. But you know, back
when you were younger, when people were still using polaroid cameras.
(05:40):
You know, you'd push the button this was would pop out,
and it was like a miracle because you could develop
your own film right there on the spot. And so
I've recently started working with polaroid again and I asked people, so,
how long has it been since you developed the polaroid photo?
They say, well, probably been twenty years, thirty years. And
(06:02):
I say, how long do you think it takes for
a polaroid picture to develop? And they usually say, like,
I don't know, two or three minutes. It turns out
it's ten or fifteen minutes. And when you wait for
a polaroid to develop now for ten or fifteen minutes,
it takes it seems like it takes forever. This is
just an example of how again I think art Belt
(06:26):
called this the quickening, this increase and the frequency of
all action and information and everything that you're thinking about
and interacting with and everything that you're expecting to come
to you. And it's getting faster and faster. Even in
the Internet. You may remember dial up internet. I mean,
if you had to wait around for internet that's that
(06:46):
slow these days, you would throw your computer out the window.
We expect things instantaneous, and you know what, we are
almost going to have instantaneous computing. You know, right now
they're working on quantum caning, and that should be basically instantaneous.
At some point there will be no delay whatsoever. Look
(07:07):
at the history of aircraft. How that aircraft, I mean,
it just keeps getting faster and faster. I don't know
how fast the Wright Brothers plane could go, but you
know now we're shooting off rockets into outer space to
go twenty five thousand miles per hour. I mean. And
if you follow that train of thought and you start
(07:29):
imagining that as civilizations evolve and develop, that things happen
faster and faster and faster, and then you imagine that
some of these UFOs that we see flying around are
from extremely advanced civilizations of some kind, then it would
(07:52):
kind of make sense that their aircraft could travel at
rates that are are mind boggling to us, almost instantaneous.
And you know that we think sometimes about like, well,
it's but there are still physical laws. There's no way
(08:14):
that a UFO could just teleport itself from here to
there or travel, you know, a thousand miles per hour,
accelerating from one to two seconds and all this kind
of stuff. It's it's physically impossible. Well, you know what,
a lot of scientists used to believe that breaking the
sound barrier was impossible as well. Have you ever seen
(08:38):
the movie The Right Stuff They dig into that. There
were people who thought that if you were in an
aircraft and you could somehow go faster than the speed
of sound, that it would just destroy everything. It was.
It was it was a wall that could not be broken,
and it seemed that way for years until finally Chuck
Yeger did it. So I'm thinking that maybe our understanding
(09:01):
of the laws of physics is not complete and that
these advanced craft can travel at these high rates of
speed because that it is part of the natural progression
of the evolution of civilization. And that's also why that
I've captured some of my most interesting UFOs by going
(09:22):
outside and using a high speed camera which shoots at
least one thousand frames per second, so that you can
actually capture things that are otherwise moving too fast for
the human eye to see the naked human eye. It
slows things down as you're actually videotaping it. And when
(09:44):
you consider however, that we have all these amazing tools.
It's like I saw some meme the other day, and
I can't remember exactly how it was set up, but
there was a sort of a googly eyed school teacher
there and the caption was teachers in the nineties, and
(10:05):
the teacher was saying, you're not always gonna have a
calculator on you, ha ha. Little did they know, right,
we pretty much always have a calculator. And that's probably
why people are, I would imagine, worse at math than
ever now, because I mean, how was the last time
you had to really read an old fashioned map and
(10:26):
memorize a route from A to B to C when
you're driving your car? I mean, you know, you just
punch it in and follow the Google the Google instructions
or whatever you use. So are humans, despite the fact
that we're becoming more and more advanced, are we individually
becoming smarter or dumber? And I guess you could say
(10:51):
the same thing collectively in a way, I mean, the
collection is made up of the individual. So are humans
becoming smarter or dumber? Look at what the ancient people knew,
and look at the things that they accomplished, the things
that they understood the time that they took to observe
(11:13):
the sky and memorize things and look for patterns, And now,
like I say, people can barely do math anymore. When
we come back from this break, I want to tell
you a story that's kind of funny, but it's about
something that annoyed me the other day when I went
to a restaurant and it kind of leads into something
you've probably heard about before, called the Peter principle. And
(11:34):
you know, the longer I live, the more I believe
in this thing called the Peter principle. Who knows what
we're going to get into on this show. Hey, you know,
do you like this show? Do you want me to
keep doing it? It's a free show. Here's what you
could do to help support this show, something that will
not cost you one single penny. It will only help
the show grow. Go to Joshua Pwarren dot com. There
(11:57):
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(12:19):
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Do that right now, help this show grow. I am
(12:42):
Joshua Pee Warren, and you are listening to Strange Things
on the iHeartRadio and Coach to Coach. I am Paranormal
Podcast Network, and I will be right back. Welcome back
(13:25):
to Strange Things, Oh the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast,
a m paranormal podcast network. I am your host, the
Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Warren, beaming into your wormhole
brain from my studio in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada,
where every day is golden and every night is silver.
(13:48):
Agiatato Zoom. And here in Vegas, out west, there is
a chain of restaurants in a few states I was
going to I thought about telling you the name of
the restaurant, and I've just decided not to do it
(14:11):
because I don't think this is worth causing any problems
for a business. You know, I say something on a
forum like this and a lot of people are going
to hear about it. But it's a chain, it's small chain.
There are fifty eight locations of this restaurant out west,
and I'm not even going to tell you the type
(14:31):
of food that they serve. That would give it away
in a heartbeat. But here's here's what's kind of interesting
about this type of restaurant. And you know, gosh, there
are thousands of restaurants in Las Vegas, a lot of
places to pick and choose from this particular place. It's
one of those establishments that's it's set up kind of
like a high class fast food restaurant. So what I
(14:53):
mean by that is when you walk in, you know,
it has the counter just like at McDonald's, where you
go up and you place your order, but then it
takes a long time for them to make the food.
You sit there with your number, and they also have
beer and wine, so you see what I mean. It's
like a little step up in some regards from like
(15:15):
your traditional fast food establishment. So I went in there
recently with my wife Lauren, and here was my plan.
Knowing that I was going to have to wait for
them to prepare the food a bit, I figured, well,
while I'm waiting, I will sit down and drink a beer.
So I walked in. I was going to go up
(15:38):
to the counter to order, and this young lady who
works there sort of rushed up and says, oh, you
can use the kiosk. Oh go okay. I said, well,
because you know how it is these days. I'm sure
you've seen the fast food kiosk with the touchscreens, even
though you're standing inside there and I'm talking to an employee.
Use the computer here, okay. And I said, well, but
(16:00):
here's what i'd like to do. I would like to
place my order and then sit down and drink a
beer while I'm waiting for the food to be prepared.
And she goes, yeah, okay, you could just just order
on the kiosk. And I said, so I can order
a beer through the kiosk, and she says, yeah yeah.
I was like, huh, that's surprising, because you know, I
(16:22):
usually it's I'm sure at some point I'm gonna have
to show an ID to somebody. I guess but and
I go, all right, fine, So I go over to
the kiosk. I order everything, get to the beverages. There's
no alcohol listed there, so I order everything except the alcohol,
and I say to her, excuse me, excuse me, there's
(16:42):
no place to order a beer, and she goes, yeah,
there isn't know there. So she comes over and she
looks and she goes, huh, okay, well you'll have to
go over there and order at the counter. Then okay,
that's what I was going to do. So then I
finish up my order on the on the kiosk for
everything else. Now I have to stay and in the
line behind some other people. And then when I get
(17:04):
up there in line, I say I would like just
to order a beer, you know, and they're like, okay, thanks,
have a seat, we'll bring it out to you. So
then I go and I sit down, and oh, I
would say, about eight minutes later my food came out,
(17:27):
and then like nine minutes later my beer comes out,
and I'm like, this makes no sense. I actually have
just been able to walk in there and be like,
I'll take the beer right now, here's my order. I'll
be over here, let me know when the food's done,
and I'm done with that beer by the time. Now look,
(17:48):
I know you're thinking, Josh, you're making a mountain out
of a mole hill here, But it's just an example
of the way that we are substituting technology for common
sense these days. It reminds me of this time I
was at an airport and I can't remember where I was,
but I same kind of thing. I went into a
(18:10):
bar and I ordered some you know, glass of wine
or something like that while I was waiting for a flight.
And then after I sat down, there was this man
behind me and he was every bit of ninety five
years old. Okay, this is one of the oldest looking
men I've ever seen. And he orders a beer and
(18:30):
the guy, who's like twenty five years old, says, I
got to see your ID. And the old man just
looks at him for a second goes, are you serious
and he says yeah, and he goes, well, it's in
it's in my in my suitcase. He's like sorry. He
makes this old man get down on his hands and
knees and open unzip his suitcase and pull through all
of his clothes to get just like, this is not
(18:52):
a rubber mask. And I know they're like, well, I'm
on camera. I'm on camera, and I have to do this. Okay, Fine,
that's probably what the Nazis said, that the guarding the
camps just following orders. I don't know. I think that
there should be a little more common sense used in
some of these occasions, on some of these occasions nowadays.
(19:14):
But when you start looking at the quality of businesses
these days, and you start thinking about the fact that
you know, there are people who are like my parents' age,
and maybe I'm just becoming a grumpy old man. You know,
I'm getting closer to fifty and so. And you might think, well, Josh,
(19:39):
you are always just mister optimist. You're always talking about
the power positive thinking. It's like, yeah, because that doesn't
come natural to me. I have to work on it.
That's why I need tools and I need techniques, and
why I share stuff with you that helps me, because
I'm not naturally the most optimistic person. I'll get back
to that a little bit later, actually, but it anyway,
(20:01):
when you consider that like people my parents' age, they
used to they'd get a job somewhere and they'd make
a career out of it. They'd be there for who
knows how long, maybe they'd be there for thirty years
or something like that, and they would retire and then
go off and maybe they can travel and make some
of their dreams come true. Now, people just they come
(20:22):
and go from like you go to a business, head
back to that business six months later, totally different group
of people. And all this reminds me of this thing
you probably heard of called the Peter principle, But do
you know what that really means and where that really
comes from. The Peter principle is a concept in management
(20:44):
that was developed by a man named Lawrence J. Peter.
That makes sense right, and he died in nineteen ninety.
He was a Canadian educator and he was sort of
a I guess you could say a bit of a
psychologist who studied how people organized their thinking. And he
(21:11):
developed this concept which observes that people in any kind
of a hierarchy tend to rise to quote a level
of respective incompetence. So what that means is that employees
are promoted based upon their success and previous jobs until
(21:32):
they reach a level at which they are no longer
competent as skills in one job do not necessarily translate
to another, and then they stay there. And he wrote
this book, the Peter Principle, along with another man named
Raymond Hole, and they kind of at first intended this
to be satire, but it rang so true that it
(21:56):
became really popular because it made a very serious point
about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within organizations.
So here's a nice little summary of exactly what it is.
Now think about this. The Peter principal states that a
person who is competent at their job will earn a
promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the
(22:21):
promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role,
they will be incompetent at the new level and will
not be promoted again. If the person is competent in
the new role, they will be promoted again and will
continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which
they are incompetent. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify
(22:48):
for promotion again and so will remain stuck at this
final placement, or what they call Peter's plateau. So you
could also just say, in a hierarchy, every employee tends
to rise to his level of incompetence. How many people
(23:13):
do you know out there who have reached Peter's plateau?
Is it possible that most of the people that you
encounter in this day and age are at Peter's plateau?
I kind of feel like that that makes perfect sense
to me. And because you know, the right thing to do,
(23:35):
I guess would be to go to this person and
be honest and say, instead of firing them or just
keeping them where they are, say you were doing a
much better job where you were before. So I know
that that's you know, it hurts people and it even
destroys them sometimes to think they're going to get a demotion.
(23:58):
But I think if you are demoted back to where
you were performing well, well, for one thing, you're gonna
be happier, You're probably gonna have more job security, and
you might even make yourself so valuable that you end
up getting more money for doing that position. So look,
(24:22):
I'm just tossing all this stuff out there as a
guy who has hired a lot of people for various
roles over the years. But when we come back from
this break, but also when it comes to leadership, you know,
where do you think this term comes from the Head
Haun Show. This guy's the head Haunt Show. I want
you to think about this during the break. What language
(24:43):
do you think that word honchho comes from. It's got
a really interesting story behind it. I'm going to tell
you that when we return. And then also I have
a tell a historic tale for you about something that
happened to the great Benjamin Franklin. They call it the
Cockpit Incident. I'm Joshua Pee Warren. You're listening to Strange
(25:05):
Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
Podcast Network, and I'll be back after these important messages.
(25:47):
Welcome back to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I'm your host, Joshua
Pee Warren, and this is the show where the unusual
becomes usual. Hey, here's another story for you real quick.
(26:08):
So there's this movie theater I like to go to
here in Vegas and it has a bar, and uh,
I think I just found one of the one of
the common threads in these stories. It's about me going
to bars and drinking. It's Las Vegas, and you know
(26:30):
they don't call it sin city for nothing. Everywhere you
go around here, you can drink and gamble twenty four
to seven. I mean the grocery store, the I mean
gas stations, and and if you're a smoker, I mean,
I think it's almost unheard of these days in our country,
(26:51):
but you can go into tons of bars and casinos
and smoke indoors to your heart's content. And I am
not a smoker, but I'm just letting you know that.
I mean, this is the most free place, perhaps you'd
say the freest place in the country. And yet at
this particular movie theater, a lot of times when I
(27:13):
go to see a movie, I will go to the
bar if they have one, and I will order a drink,
an alcoholic drink to take into the movie theater. So
there is at this one bar I walked up the
very first time. Actually, let me just put it this way.
There's this lady there. She's always the bartender at this bar.
(27:36):
So the first time I met her, I walked up
to her and I told her that I wanted to
get I think it was a glass of wine. So anyway,
so she gives me a glass of wine after she
cards me. And that's not common in Vegas to get carted,
so she looks at my ID and then then I
(27:57):
go to the movie. And then it was a long movie,
and it was kind of a boring movie, and I think,
like Lauren wanted to watch the rest of the movie,
and I didn't really care that much. So I go,
I'm gonna go get another glass of wine. So I
go back to the bar and I order from her
another glass of wine. She asked for my ID again
(28:19):
and I said, well, and we had just I had
like a long conversation with her. By the way, I
was like the only customer at the bar, and I said,
you got to see my idea again, and she goes yeah,
And I goes, what do you what do you think
I have an identical twin and even if I did,
he would still be my age. She goes, oh, sorry,
(28:43):
I gotta do it. The camera is watching me, all right.
So I had to take my ID out and show
it to her for my second drink. And since then,
over the years, I've gone back to this theater and
every time I go in, this woman always wants to
see my ID, even if I order, you know, two
drinks during one movie. Anyway, Yeah, common sense, I wish
(29:10):
do we just let computers and cameras rule every decision
that we make these days. So what language do you
think the word honcho comes from? Well, it actually is Japanese.
And from what I've found, during World War Two, when
(29:31):
a lot of Americans were serving in the Pacific, they
became aware that hancho was the Japanese word for leader.
And so if somebody were let's say a group of
guys were taken captive, then they would want to know
who the head honchho was. Who's the head leader in
(29:54):
charge of this group? You know, which may sound a
little redundant, but you know, there's different levels of hierarchy.
So this word made it back into the US. It
continued to become popular. So the head hot show is
just the top leader, and that's a Japanese I always
I love those kinds of stories where you dig into
the word origins. Well, let's move on to something else, now,
(30:24):
shall we. Now it's time for something completely different, maybe
not actually, you know, I'm talking about leadership and the
way that organizations are set up. And I don't, as
you know, I do my darnness to avoid talking about
politics on this show. You don't need to hear that here,
(30:44):
you get it everywhere else. But it is interesting to
think about the role that our government's played and why
that these governments are here, and what it says about
the world that we live in, because you know, there
(31:05):
was a one of the I guess one of the
popular writers back during the period of the American Revolution
was Thomas Paine, and he said that government is a
necessary evil. Government is a necessary evil. I've always thought
that was fascinating to think about that because there are
(31:27):
lots of people out there who believe that we are
actually living in a rung of hell. And that may
sound pretty extreme, but you have to realize, like, even
if your life is great, that doesn't mean there aren't
people out there who are not having a horrible experience
(31:49):
right now. But the one thing we all have in
common is that life is full of suffering, whether it's fntal,
physical or mental or emotional. I mean, like your body
he breaks down. Eventually, everybody that you know and love
is going to perish. They're going to be they're going
(32:10):
to be in the ground, or who knows what. And
it's sad. It's said, so is is this actually a
rung of of hell? And there. You know, there's a
passage from the Federalist Papers attributed to James Madison, and
he wrote, if angels were to govern men, neither external
(32:36):
nor internal controls on government would be necessary. Let me
read that again. He said, quote, if angels were to
govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would
be necessary. End quote, the implication being, well, but angels
are not governing governing men, and so we need some controls.
(33:00):
That this is the fact that we need government to
prevent humans, in theory from doing bad things. Means that
that is the tendency of humans, which kind of goes
back to the idea of original sin, that we all
are here because that we have something to learn. You know,
(33:25):
we have some bad baggage in our spirits and we
are here to learn to be better beings. And part
of that is it is dealing with suffering without flipping
out and doing something crazy, being able to handle it
and learn from it. I guess that's the idea. And
(33:51):
this reminds me a lot, for some reason, of this
incident that happened in the life of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin,
of course, was just one of the greatest geniuses who
ever lived. He was a beloved figure among the Americans
and the founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin he lived from seventeen
(34:14):
oh six to seventeen ninety, and you know, long life,
and so during that period of time he was extremely famous.
He was beloved. And you also have to understand that
during that period of time, America was one of the
(34:36):
British colonies. And so what that means is that people
who lived here, who grew up in most of the
seventeen hundreds, they thought of themselves as being a type
of Englishmen. They weren't because they were born here in
many cases, but because it was a British colony, they
(34:56):
thought of themselves as an extension of that. And Ben
Franklin he kind of idolized the English culture. He went
to England when he was a very young man, and
he ingratiated himself with the people there, and as he
got older, he was spending in many cases just as
much time in England as he was America. And when
(35:21):
tensions started to rise between America and Britain, which of
course would eventually culminate in the Revolutionary War, he was
doing whatever he could to try to alleviate some of
the pressure. He thought war would be a horrible idea,
because he was smart. By seventeen seventy four, though, there
(35:44):
was so much dissatisfaction with the British rule in America,
sort of growing that Franklin, who was then Postmaster of
the Colonies, he was in England and he was doing
everything he could to try to urge some compromise there.
And there was this one guy who just did not
(36:06):
like him, this Englishman named Alexander Wedderburn, and he disagreed. Well,
he didn't like Franklin's celebrity. He looked down upon Franklin
for being an American. He thought of him as being
kind of a redneck. And so he asked Benjamin Franklin
to show up for a meeting in front of all
(36:27):
these distinguished British politicians at this place they called the
cockpit because back in the day they used to have
cock fights there. So Franklin thought he was walking into
this room full of Englishmen just so that they could
talk about compromise instead that he got kind of ambushed,
and this guy, Alexander Wedderburn gets up on a pulpit
(36:50):
there and he just spends an hour talking about how
he does not like Benjamin Franklin. What a disgrace Benjamin
Franklin is. He literally says that, Okay, we got to
take a break. We come back. I'm gonna explain to
(37:10):
you why that I'm telling you this story. It's very
meaningful and it's kind of inspirational in a way. And
then also trivia question for you, where do you think
is the only place in the world where you might
find a wild red wolf. I'm Joshua P. Warren. You're
listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(37:32):
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network, and I will be right back.
(38:10):
Welcome back to the final segment of this edition of
Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host, Joshua P. Warren.
And never forget what comedian Stephen Wright said, half of
the people you know are below average. That is true.
(38:37):
That is true. Maybe maybe I shouldn't say half the
people you know, but half the people out there are
below average. Probably half the people you know. Hey, here's
some here's a quick mental manna tip. I found that
if you want your doctor to do a better job
(38:59):
and be very careful with you. They they do a
better job if when they start doing whatever they're gonna do,
you just scream really loud like ah. Now they're used
to hearing regular screaming, so you've got to take it
to eleven. And then they go, whoa, we got a
(39:23):
screamer here. And then they kind of wake up and
they start telling the rest of the staff, and everybody
takes really good care with you. Know, they're very careful
with you, So don't forget that lesson. Benjamin Franklin was
standing in this arena, so to speak, called the cockpit,
(39:47):
with this Englishman just absolutely telling him he was a disgrace.
The englishman said, quote, Franklin has forfeited all of the
respect of societies and of men, end quote. Throughout this
whole hour, they say that Franklin just stood there still.
I'm sure he was in shock. He was showing no emotion,
(40:10):
said he was conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of
any part of his body, his unchanging expression tranquil, placid.
And when this was over, Franklin, they asked Franklin if
he wanted to be cross examined and Franklin just said nope,
(40:31):
and he turns around and walks out the door. There's
no telling how damaging and this was to Franklin because
he had such admiration for the English and he thought
he'd sort of been adopted by them, and this just
hurt him to the very core because he admired the
(40:53):
English culture so much. But historians say that terrible experience
for him. That was the day when Benjamin Franklin became
a true American and that's when he left and he
went out and he started raising money left and right
(41:16):
and inspiring people and organizing things that would help to
create the American Revolution. And if Franklin had stuck with
trying to, you know, create some compromise with the English,
there may have never been a war. A lot of
people say, this guy, Alexander Wedderburn is possibly the man
(41:39):
who cost England America because of this one jerk. And
you know, Benjamin Franklin was never a president. Some people.
You know, I talked about Benjamin Franklin a while back,
and I said that, you know, Grizzly Adams named his
bear Ben after Benjamin Franklin because people were really into
the presidents. I wasn't insinuating that Benjamin Franklin was a president,
(41:59):
just that he hung out with all of the first
presidents and he was part of that culture. He very
easily could have been a president, and he probably only
was not a president just because he was too old
by the time all of that went down. My point
is that this terrible experience for this great man was
(42:21):
what was necessary in order for him to go out
and do something that was very, very difficult, but ended
up creating this wonderful country that I live in and
the freedom that I enjoy here. And this is again
(42:43):
the mystery of optimism, that you can't always just take
something bad at face value and just allow yourself to
stay down on the dumps. You have to look at
it as motivation for you to go out and do
something pausive. As they say, when one door closes, another opens,
no matter how bad it is. And that's how you
(43:05):
also kind of have to think about even dying. I mean,
even if this is some rung of hell or whatever,
we know we're going to die, and I suppose that
you have to be optimistic by having faith in a
rewarding afterlife. But you know what, even if you don't
(43:27):
even if you're an atheist and you don't believe in anything.
Mark Twain said, quote, I do not fear death. I
had been dead for billions and billions of years before
I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience
from it. End quote. So, hey, I guess whether you
(43:50):
believe in nothingness or in afterlife, there's the potential for
it to be positive when you move on. There is
also the potential that you've been a bad person and
you're not gonna like what happens to you next, which
is why you better avoid that and do the best
you can to be a good person. The mystery of
(44:12):
optimism isn't that funny? Again? It's like a big classroom.
You're supposed to maintain that mindset. I ask you a
trivia question before the break. Where do you think is
the only place in the wild where red wolves are found?
You know what a red wolf is. Let me just
tell you a red wolf. Its size is intermediate between
(44:37):
the coyote and the gray wolf. I'm looking at a
picture of one right now. Yep, looks pretty wolfy. And
you know it's even though they call it a red wolf.
I mean it's kind of a mix of kind of
reddish and grayish, maybe a little orangition there. Well, here's
the thing this surprised me. The only place where you
(44:58):
can find I'm looking right now at the official Wildlife
Federation site, the only place you can find confirmed wild
red wolves in existence is North Carolina, where I'm from.
I said, red wolves used to roam throughout the Eastern
(45:20):
Seaboard from Pennsylvania to Florida and as far west as Texas,
but today North Carolina's Albemarle Peninsula is home to the
only confirmed wild red wolves in existence. But listen to
this says that in uh, let's see here, in the
last decade, they have declined so much from one point
(45:42):
thirty down to fifteen wolves. There are only fifteen wolves
left there. If you look at the chart of extinction,
like I guess, conservation status status they are they are
one wrung before you start getting into the extinct territory.
(46:05):
So that's I guess that's not good unless they eat people.
I doubt that. So I just thought that was fascinating.
Who would have I'd never even heard of wolves in
North Carolina. Well, okay, I guess before the clock has
got us, uh, since I've had a little bit of
(46:26):
a drinking theme going on here. You know what a
mich alata is. Some people call it a mich aalata,
some people call it mik a lotta. They're very popular
in the American Southwest. It's a refreshing, low alcohol drink,
often called a Mexican bloody marry. It's made with tomato juice,
(46:48):
some spices, usually some hot sauce and savory seas seasonings.
But instead of vodka, it uses a cold Mexican style
beer and they are absolutely delicious in my opinion, And
usually they have some kind of salt or chili chili
(47:08):
pepper kind of stuff around the rim. Michlatta's. If you've
never had to meetch a lotta, go out there and
find a good bartender somewhere and say make me a
met you a lota, especially if you like, you know,
bloody Mary's. I was always wondering where did this come from, though,
like again, go back to word origins. The most popular
theory is that it was invented by a man named
(47:30):
Mikhail Esper. He was a member of this club called
the Club Deportivou Potosino in San Luis Potosi and Mexico
in the nineteen sixties. It said that he liked to
have his beer with limes, salt, ice, and a straw,
which resembled lemonade, and some club members began calling it
(47:53):
Michel's lemonade, which eventually became shortened to mikilada. Of course,
they say it also may have been doubly named because
in Spanish michela helata means my ice cold beer, So
(48:13):
I guess it may have worked on two fronts. But
I guess this guy, Michel espere uh, he was the
inspiration for the Mikilada. Well, I hope you've enjoyed that
selection of mental manna. Kind of all over the place,
but also sort of fun to go through and check
some of the things off I've been wanting to talk
about for one reason or another. All Right, my friends,
(48:36):
let's end the show on a positive note. Take a
deep breath if you can close your eyes. Here is
the good fortune tone. That's it for this edition of
(49:09):
the show. Follow me at Joshua P. Warren Plus visit
Joshuapwarren dot com to sign up for my free e
newsletter to receive a free instant gift and check out
the cool stuff in the Curiosity Shop all at Joshuapwarren
dot com. I have a fun one lined up for
you next time, I promise. So please tell all your
(49:32):
friends to subscribe to this show and to always remember
the Golden Rule. Thank you for listening, thank you for
your interest and support, Thank you for staying curious, and
I will talk to you again soon. You've been listening
to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
(49:54):
AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Well, if you like this episode of Strange Things, wait
till you hear the next one. Thank you for listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. Now get ready for us Strange Things with
Joshua P. Warren.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:34):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yes, ready to be amazed by the wizard of weird.
This is strange when JOA Warren, I am Joshua You
warren't And each week on this show, I'll be bringing
you brand new mind blowing content, news exercises, and weird
(01:16):
experiments you can do at home, and a lot more.
On this edition of the show, here's a wild grab
bag of stuff to ponder. Mental manner. Now, this is
an unusual edition of the show because it's gonna be
kind of all over the place. That is, because when
(01:39):
you do a show like this professionally on a regular basis,
it really is a job that never ends. I mean,
I spend every waking hour of every day sort of
scanning the world around me, looking for ideas, topics to
talk about and explore experiments that I can do or
(02:00):
that you can do. I'm always thinking about something that
can come across well on the show, and especially because
as you know, this is not really an interview show.
I mean, occasionally, rarely I'll interview somebody, but for the
most part, I don't do interviews on this show because
everybody else does that I'm doing something different, and honestly,
(02:21):
I can say that for me, this job is kind
of a twenty four to seven job because even when
I'm sleeping, I'm vividly dreaming, and those dreams sometimes make
it into the show. So here's what I end up with.
I end up with thousands of notes all around me
all the time, whether they're on the phone or scribbled
on pieces of paper, just things that I think of
(02:45):
that are interesting to me, that I jot down and
say maybe at some point I'll find an opportunity to
talk about this on the show. And I sat down
just the other day and I was looking at a
bunch of these and I thought, you know, I'm not
sure that anything could tie all this stuff together. There's
no common thread that I can see other than the
(03:08):
fact that these are all things that I'm interested in.
So I said, you know what, let me just do
a show where I just take some of these things
that I have thought about that I think are interesting
and just toss it out there to you and get
your feedback. This is what I call mental manna, similar
to just those things that make you go hmm. And
(03:31):
so I'm not even sure where we're going to go
on the show, but let's just dive right into it
see what happens. One thing I believe we can all
relate to is something that was brought up recently and
a conversation that Bill Maher had on his podcast with
the actor Malcolm McDowell, who, of course is most famous
(03:53):
for playing the lead role in the Stanley Kubrick movie
at Clockwork Orange. They were talking about the way that
technology has developed, because both of these guys are up
there in years, and I believe it was Malcolm McDowell,
I'm not sure it may have been Bill Maher. One
of them said that, you know, television was the Internet
(04:15):
of its time, and now you see how things have
changed and how we've not only gotten into this you know,
internet age, but we also have this attention span that's
getting shorter and shorter because of how quickly information travels.
(04:36):
I mean, we're now sort of in I mean, look
in a text. Some people don't even write a full sentence.
They just basically put some symbols down there and some
leaps speak to get points across. It's almost like the
old days of telegraph even faster though, or the whole
Twitter mentality that's just you know, get it out there
in a line or two. Because you're so bombarded with information.
(04:57):
The attention span is so short that you know, I
remember when I was a kid, you would order something
and you knew that maybe it was going to show
up in a couple of weeks. Now you order something
from Amazon and it might be there the same day
or the next day. And so people get frustrated if
they have to wait a couple of weeks for something
(05:17):
because they order it from a normal person. And you know,
I was talking about the experiment that I've been doing
with the time camera and how that and this again
is probably a little more relevant to people who are
maybe forty years old or older. But you know, back
when you were younger, when people were still using polaroid cameras.
(05:40):
You know, you'd push the button this was would pop out,
and it was like a miracle because you could develop
your own film right there on the spot. And so
I've recently started working with polaroid again and I asked people, so,
how long has it been since you developed the polaroid photo?
They say, well, probably been twenty years, thirty years. And
(06:02):
I say, how long do you think it takes for
a polaroid picture to develop? And they usually say, like,
I don't know, two or three minutes. It turns out
it's ten or fifteen minutes. And when you wait for
a polaroid to develop now for ten or fifteen minutes,
it takes it seems like it takes forever. This is
just an example of how again I think art Belt
(06:26):
called this the quickening, this increase and the frequency of
all action and information and everything that you're thinking about
and interacting with and everything that you're expecting to come
to you. And it's getting faster and faster. Even in
the Internet. You may remember dial up internet. I mean,
if you had to wait around for internet that's that
(06:46):
slow these days, you would throw your computer out the window.
We expect things instantaneous, and you know what, we are
almost going to have instantaneous computing. You know, right now
they're working on quantum caning, and that should be basically instantaneous.
At some point there will be no delay whatsoever. Look
(07:07):
at the history of aircraft. How that aircraft, I mean,
it just keeps getting faster and faster. I don't know
how fast the Wright Brothers plane could go, but you
know now we're shooting off rockets into outer space to
go twenty five thousand miles per hour. I mean. And
if you follow that train of thought and you start
(07:29):
imagining that as civilizations evolve and develop, that things happen
faster and faster and faster, and then you imagine that
some of these UFOs that we see flying around are
from extremely advanced civilizations of some kind, then it would
(07:52):
kind of make sense that their aircraft could travel at
rates that are are mind boggling to us, almost instantaneous.
And you know that we think sometimes about like, well,
it's but there are still physical laws. There's no way
(08:14):
that a UFO could just teleport itself from here to
there or travel, you know, a thousand miles per hour,
accelerating from one to two seconds and all this kind
of stuff. It's it's physically impossible. Well, you know what,
a lot of scientists used to believe that breaking the
sound barrier was impossible as well. Have you ever seen
(08:38):
the movie The Right Stuff They dig into that. There
were people who thought that if you were in an
aircraft and you could somehow go faster than the speed
of sound, that it would just destroy everything. It was.
It was it was a wall that could not be broken,
and it seemed that way for years until finally Chuck
Yeger did it. So I'm thinking that maybe our understanding
(09:01):
of the laws of physics is not complete and that
these advanced craft can travel at these high rates of
speed because that it is part of the natural progression
of the evolution of civilization. And that's also why that
I've captured some of my most interesting UFOs by going
(09:22):
outside and using a high speed camera which shoots at
least one thousand frames per second, so that you can
actually capture things that are otherwise moving too fast for
the human eye to see the naked human eye. It
slows things down as you're actually videotaping it. And when
(09:44):
you consider however, that we have all these amazing tools.
It's like I saw some meme the other day, and
I can't remember exactly how it was set up, but
there was a sort of a googly eyed school teacher
there and the caption was teachers in the nineties, and
(10:05):
the teacher was saying, you're not always gonna have a
calculator on you, ha ha. Little did they know, right,
we pretty much always have a calculator. And that's probably
why people are, I would imagine, worse at math than
ever now, because I mean, how was the last time
you had to really read an old fashioned map and
(10:26):
memorize a route from A to B to C when
you're driving your car? I mean, you know, you just
punch it in and follow the Google the Google instructions
or whatever you use. So are humans, despite the fact
that we're becoming more and more advanced, are we individually
becoming smarter or dumber? And I guess you could say
(10:51):
the same thing collectively in a way, I mean, the
collection is made up of the individual. So are humans
becoming smarter or dumber? Look at what the ancient people knew,
and look at the things that they accomplished, the things
that they understood the time that they took to observe
(11:13):
the sky and memorize things and look for patterns, And now,
like I say, people can barely do math anymore. When
we come back from this break, I want to tell
you a story that's kind of funny, but it's about
something that annoyed me the other day when I went
to a restaurant and it kind of leads into something
you've probably heard about before, called the Peter principle. And
(11:34):
you know, the longer I live, the more I believe
in this thing called the Peter principle. Who knows what
we're going to get into on this show. Hey, you know,
do you like this show? Do you want me to
keep doing it? It's a free show. Here's what you
could do to help support this show, something that will
not cost you one single penny. It will only help
the show grow. Go to Joshua Pwarren dot com. There
(11:57):
is no period after the p and right there on
the homepage you'll see a little section where you can
sign up for my free and spam free e newsletter.
You just put your email address in there, hit submit, Boom,
You're done, and you will instantly receive an automated email
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(12:19):
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that as soon as you sign up on the homepage
to my free and spamfreee newsletter at Joshua Pewarren dot com.
Do that right now, help this show grow. I am
(12:42):
Joshua Pee Warren, and you are listening to Strange Things
on the iHeartRadio and Coach to Coach. I am Paranormal
Podcast Network, and I will be right back. Welcome back
(13:25):
to Strange Things, Oh the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast,
a m paranormal podcast network. I am your host, the
Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Warren, beaming into your wormhole
brain from my studio in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada,
where every day is golden and every night is silver.
(13:48):
Agiatato Zoom. And here in Vegas, out west, there is
a chain of restaurants in a few states I was
going to I thought about telling you the name of
the restaurant, and I've just decided not to do it
(14:11):
because I don't think this is worth causing any problems
for a business. You know, I say something on a
forum like this and a lot of people are going
to hear about it. But it's a chain, it's small chain.
There are fifty eight locations of this restaurant out west,
and I'm not even going to tell you the type
(14:31):
of food that they serve. That would give it away
in a heartbeat. But here's here's what's kind of interesting
about this type of restaurant. And you know, gosh, there
are thousands of restaurants in Las Vegas, a lot of
places to pick and choose from this particular place. It's
one of those establishments that's it's set up kind of
like a high class fast food restaurant. So what I
(14:53):
mean by that is when you walk in, you know,
it has the counter just like at McDonald's, where you
go up and you place your order, but then it
takes a long time for them to make the food.
You sit there with your number, and they also have
beer and wine, so you see what I mean. It's
like a little step up in some regards from like
(15:15):
your traditional fast food establishment. So I went in there
recently with my wife Lauren, and here was my plan.
Knowing that I was going to have to wait for
them to prepare the food a bit, I figured, well,
while I'm waiting, I will sit down and drink a beer.
So I walked in. I was going to go up
(15:38):
to the counter to order, and this young lady who
works there sort of rushed up and says, oh, you
can use the kiosk. Oh go okay. I said, well,
because you know how it is these days. I'm sure
you've seen the fast food kiosk with the touchscreens, even
though you're standing inside there and I'm talking to an employee.
Use the computer here, okay. And I said, well, but
(16:00):
here's what i'd like to do. I would like to
place my order and then sit down and drink a
beer while I'm waiting for the food to be prepared.
And she goes, yeah, okay, you could just just order
on the kiosk. And I said, so I can order
a beer through the kiosk, and she says, yeah yeah.
I was like, huh, that's surprising, because you know, I
(16:22):
usually it's I'm sure at some point I'm gonna have
to show an ID to somebody. I guess but and
I go, all right, fine, So I go over to
the kiosk. I order everything, get to the beverages. There's
no alcohol listed there, so I order everything except the alcohol,
and I say to her, excuse me, excuse me, there's
(16:42):
no place to order a beer, and she goes, yeah,
there isn't know there. So she comes over and she
looks and she goes, huh, okay, well you'll have to
go over there and order at the counter. Then okay,
that's what I was going to do. So then I
finish up my order on the on the kiosk for
everything else. Now I have to stay and in the
line behind some other people. And then when I get
(17:04):
up there in line, I say I would like just
to order a beer, you know, and they're like, okay, thanks,
have a seat, we'll bring it out to you. So
then I go and I sit down, and oh, I
would say, about eight minutes later my food came out,
(17:27):
and then like nine minutes later my beer comes out,
and I'm like, this makes no sense. I actually have
just been able to walk in there and be like,
I'll take the beer right now, here's my order. I'll
be over here, let me know when the food's done,
and I'm done with that beer by the time. Now look,
(17:48):
I know you're thinking, Josh, you're making a mountain out
of a mole hill here, But it's just an example
of the way that we are substituting technology for common
sense these days. It reminds me of this time I
was at an airport and I can't remember where I was,
but I same kind of thing. I went into a
(18:10):
bar and I ordered some you know, glass of wine
or something like that while I was waiting for a flight.
And then after I sat down, there was this man
behind me and he was every bit of ninety five
years old. Okay, this is one of the oldest looking
men I've ever seen. And he orders a beer and
(18:30):
the guy, who's like twenty five years old, says, I
got to see your ID. And the old man just
looks at him for a second goes, are you serious
and he says yeah, and he goes, well, it's in
it's in my in my suitcase. He's like sorry. He
makes this old man get down on his hands and
knees and open unzip his suitcase and pull through all
of his clothes to get just like, this is not
(18:52):
a rubber mask. And I know they're like, well, I'm
on camera. I'm on camera, and I have to do this. Okay, Fine,
that's probably what the Nazis said, that the guarding the
camps just following orders. I don't know. I think that
there should be a little more common sense used in
some of these occasions, on some of these occasions nowadays.
(19:14):
But when you start looking at the quality of businesses
these days, and you start thinking about the fact that
you know, there are people who are like my parents' age,
and maybe I'm just becoming a grumpy old man. You know,
I'm getting closer to fifty and so. And you might think, well, Josh,
(19:39):
you are always just mister optimist. You're always talking about
the power positive thinking. It's like, yeah, because that doesn't
come natural to me. I have to work on it.
That's why I need tools and I need techniques, and
why I share stuff with you that helps me, because
I'm not naturally the most optimistic person. I'll get back
to that a little bit later, actually, but it anyway,
(20:01):
when you consider that like people my parents' age, they
used to they'd get a job somewhere and they'd make
a career out of it. They'd be there for who
knows how long, maybe they'd be there for thirty years
or something like that, and they would retire and then
go off and maybe they can travel and make some
of their dreams come true. Now, people just they come
(20:22):
and go from like you go to a business, head
back to that business six months later, totally different group
of people. And all this reminds me of this thing
you probably heard of called the Peter principle, But do
you know what that really means and where that really
comes from. The Peter principle is a concept in management
(20:44):
that was developed by a man named Lawrence J. Peter.
That makes sense right, and he died in nineteen ninety.
He was a Canadian educator and he was sort of
a I guess you could say a bit of a
psychologist who studied how people organized their thinking. And he
(21:11):
developed this concept which observes that people in any kind
of a hierarchy tend to rise to quote a level
of respective incompetence. So what that means is that employees
are promoted based upon their success and previous jobs until
(21:32):
they reach a level at which they are no longer
competent as skills in one job do not necessarily translate
to another, and then they stay there. And he wrote
this book, the Peter Principle, along with another man named
Raymond Hole, and they kind of at first intended this
to be satire, but it rang so true that it
(21:56):
became really popular because it made a very serious point
about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within organizations.
So here's a nice little summary of exactly what it is.
Now think about this. The Peter principal states that a
person who is competent at their job will earn a
promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the
(22:21):
promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role,
they will be incompetent at the new level and will
not be promoted again. If the person is competent in
the new role, they will be promoted again and will
continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which
they are incompetent. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify
(22:48):
for promotion again and so will remain stuck at this
final placement, or what they call Peter's plateau. So you
could also just say, in a hierarchy, every employee tends
to rise to his level of incompetence. How many people
(23:13):
do you know out there who have reached Peter's plateau?
Is it possible that most of the people that you
encounter in this day and age are at Peter's plateau?
I kind of feel like that that makes perfect sense
to me. And because you know, the right thing to do,
(23:35):
I guess would be to go to this person and
be honest and say, instead of firing them or just
keeping them where they are, say you were doing a
much better job where you were before. So I know
that that's you know, it hurts people and it even
destroys them sometimes to think they're going to get a demotion.
(23:58):
But I think if you are demoted back to where
you were performing well, well, for one thing, you're gonna
be happier, You're probably gonna have more job security, and
you might even make yourself so valuable that you end
up getting more money for doing that position. So look,
(24:22):
I'm just tossing all this stuff out there as a
guy who has hired a lot of people for various
roles over the years. But when we come back from
this break, but also when it comes to leadership, you know,
where do you think this term comes from the Head
Haun Show. This guy's the head Haunt Show. I want
you to think about this during the break. What language
(24:43):
do you think that word honchho comes from. It's got
a really interesting story behind it. I'm going to tell
you that when we return. And then also I have
a tell a historic tale for you about something that
happened to the great Benjamin Franklin. They call it the
Cockpit Incident. I'm Joshua Pee Warren. You're listening to Strange
(25:05):
Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
Podcast Network, and I'll be back after these important messages.
(25:47):
Welcome back to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I'm your host, Joshua
Pee Warren, and this is the show where the unusual
becomes usual. Hey, here's another story for you real quick.
(26:08):
So there's this movie theater I like to go to
here in Vegas and it has a bar, and uh,
I think I just found one of the one of
the common threads in these stories. It's about me going
to bars and drinking. It's Las Vegas, and you know
(26:30):
they don't call it sin city for nothing. Everywhere you
go around here, you can drink and gamble twenty four
to seven. I mean the grocery store, the I mean
gas stations, and and if you're a smoker, I mean,
I think it's almost unheard of these days in our country,
(26:51):
but you can go into tons of bars and casinos
and smoke indoors to your heart's content. And I am
not a smoker, but I'm just letting you know that.
I mean, this is the most free place, perhaps you'd
say the freest place in the country. And yet at
this particular movie theater, a lot of times when I
(27:13):
go to see a movie, I will go to the
bar if they have one, and I will order a drink,
an alcoholic drink to take into the movie theater. So
there is at this one bar I walked up the
very first time. Actually, let me just put it this way.
There's this lady there. She's always the bartender at this bar.
(27:36):
So the first time I met her, I walked up
to her and I told her that I wanted to
get I think it was a glass of wine. So anyway,
so she gives me a glass of wine after she
cards me. And that's not common in Vegas to get carted,
so she looks at my ID and then then I
(27:57):
go to the movie. And then it was a long movie,
and it was kind of a boring movie, and I think,
like Lauren wanted to watch the rest of the movie,
and I didn't really care that much. So I go,
I'm gonna go get another glass of wine. So I
go back to the bar and I order from her
another glass of wine. She asked for my ID again
(28:19):
and I said, well, and we had just I had
like a long conversation with her. By the way, I
was like the only customer at the bar, and I said,
you got to see my idea again, and she goes yeah,
And I goes, what do you what do you think
I have an identical twin and even if I did,
he would still be my age. She goes, oh, sorry,
(28:43):
I gotta do it. The camera is watching me, all right.
So I had to take my ID out and show
it to her for my second drink. And since then,
over the years, I've gone back to this theater and
every time I go in, this woman always wants to
see my ID, even if I order, you know, two
drinks during one movie. Anyway, Yeah, common sense, I wish
(29:10):
do we just let computers and cameras rule every decision
that we make these days. So what language do you
think the word honcho comes from? Well, it actually is Japanese.
And from what I've found, during World War Two, when
(29:31):
a lot of Americans were serving in the Pacific, they
became aware that hancho was the Japanese word for leader.
And so if somebody were let's say a group of
guys were taken captive, then they would want to know
who the head honchho was. Who's the head leader in
(29:54):
charge of this group? You know, which may sound a
little redundant, but you know, there's different levels of hierarchy.
So this word made it back into the US. It
continued to become popular. So the head hot show is
just the top leader, and that's a Japanese I always
I love those kinds of stories where you dig into
the word origins. Well, let's move on to something else, now,
(30:24):
shall we. Now it's time for something completely different, maybe
not actually, you know, I'm talking about leadership and the
way that organizations are set up. And I don't, as
you know, I do my darnness to avoid talking about
politics on this show. You don't need to hear that here,
(30:44):
you get it everywhere else. But it is interesting to
think about the role that our government's played and why
that these governments are here, and what it says about
the world that we live in, because you know, there
(31:05):
was a one of the I guess one of the
popular writers back during the period of the American Revolution
was Thomas Paine, and he said that government is a
necessary evil. Government is a necessary evil. I've always thought
that was fascinating to think about that because there are
(31:27):
lots of people out there who believe that we are
actually living in a rung of hell. And that may
sound pretty extreme, but you have to realize, like, even
if your life is great, that doesn't mean there aren't
people out there who are not having a horrible experience
(31:49):
right now. But the one thing we all have in
common is that life is full of suffering, whether it's fntal,
physical or mental or emotional. I mean, like your body
he breaks down. Eventually, everybody that you know and love
is going to perish. They're going to be they're going
(32:10):
to be in the ground, or who knows what. And
it's sad. It's said, so is is this actually a
rung of of hell? And there. You know, there's a
passage from the Federalist Papers attributed to James Madison, and
he wrote, if angels were to govern men, neither external
(32:36):
nor internal controls on government would be necessary. Let me
read that again. He said, quote, if angels were to
govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would
be necessary. End quote, the implication being, well, but angels
are not governing governing men, and so we need some controls.
(33:00):
That this is the fact that we need government to
prevent humans, in theory from doing bad things. Means that
that is the tendency of humans, which kind of goes
back to the idea of original sin, that we all
are here because that we have something to learn. You know,
(33:25):
we have some bad baggage in our spirits and we
are here to learn to be better beings. And part
of that is it is dealing with suffering without flipping
out and doing something crazy, being able to handle it
and learn from it. I guess that's the idea. And
(33:51):
this reminds me a lot, for some reason, of this
incident that happened in the life of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin,
of course, was just one of the greatest geniuses who
ever lived. He was a beloved figure among the Americans
and the founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin he lived from seventeen
(34:14):
oh six to seventeen ninety, and you know, long life,
and so during that period of time he was extremely famous.
He was beloved. And you also have to understand that
during that period of time, America was one of the
(34:36):
British colonies. And so what that means is that people
who lived here, who grew up in most of the
seventeen hundreds, they thought of themselves as being a type
of Englishmen. They weren't because they were born here in
many cases, but because it was a British colony, they
(34:56):
thought of themselves as an extension of that. And Ben
Franklin he kind of idolized the English culture. He went
to England when he was a very young man, and
he ingratiated himself with the people there, and as he
got older, he was spending in many cases just as
much time in England as he was America. And when
(35:21):
tensions started to rise between America and Britain, which of
course would eventually culminate in the Revolutionary War, he was
doing whatever he could to try to alleviate some of
the pressure. He thought war would be a horrible idea,
because he was smart. By seventeen seventy four, though, there
(35:44):
was so much dissatisfaction with the British rule in America,
sort of growing that Franklin, who was then Postmaster of
the Colonies, he was in England and he was doing
everything he could to try to urge some compromise there.
And there was this one guy who just did not
(36:06):
like him, this Englishman named Alexander Wedderburn, and he disagreed. Well,
he didn't like Franklin's celebrity. He looked down upon Franklin
for being an American. He thought of him as being
kind of a redneck. And so he asked Benjamin Franklin
to show up for a meeting in front of all
(36:27):
these distinguished British politicians at this place they called the
cockpit because back in the day they used to have
cock fights there. So Franklin thought he was walking into
this room full of Englishmen just so that they could
talk about compromise instead that he got kind of ambushed,
and this guy, Alexander Wedderburn gets up on a pulpit
(36:50):
there and he just spends an hour talking about how
he does not like Benjamin Franklin. What a disgrace Benjamin
Franklin is. He literally says that, Okay, we got to
take a break. We come back. I'm gonna explain to
(37:10):
you why that I'm telling you this story. It's very
meaningful and it's kind of inspirational in a way. And
then also trivia question for you, where do you think
is the only place in the world where you might
find a wild red wolf. I'm Joshua P. Warren. You're
listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(37:32):
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network, and I will be right back.
(38:10):
Welcome back to the final segment of this edition of
Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host, Joshua P. Warren.
And never forget what comedian Stephen Wright said, half of
the people you know are below average. That is true.
(38:37):
That is true. Maybe maybe I shouldn't say half the
people you know, but half the people out there are
below average. Probably half the people you know. Hey, here's
some here's a quick mental manna tip. I found that
if you want your doctor to do a better job
(38:59):
and be very careful with you. They they do a
better job if when they start doing whatever they're gonna do,
you just scream really loud like ah. Now they're used
to hearing regular screaming, so you've got to take it
to eleven. And then they go, whoa, we got a
(39:23):
screamer here. And then they kind of wake up and
they start telling the rest of the staff, and everybody
takes really good care with you. Know, they're very careful
with you, So don't forget that lesson. Benjamin Franklin was
standing in this arena, so to speak, called the cockpit,
(39:47):
with this Englishman just absolutely telling him he was a disgrace.
The englishman said, quote, Franklin has forfeited all of the
respect of societies and of men, end quote. Throughout this
whole hour, they say that Franklin just stood there still.
I'm sure he was in shock. He was showing no emotion,
(40:10):
said he was conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of
any part of his body, his unchanging expression tranquil, placid.
And when this was over, Franklin, they asked Franklin if
he wanted to be cross examined and Franklin just said nope,
(40:31):
and he turns around and walks out the door. There's
no telling how damaging and this was to Franklin because
he had such admiration for the English and he thought
he'd sort of been adopted by them, and this just
hurt him to the very core because he admired the
(40:53):
English culture so much. But historians say that terrible experience
for him. That was the day when Benjamin Franklin became
a true American and that's when he left and he
went out and he started raising money left and right
(41:16):
and inspiring people and organizing things that would help to
create the American Revolution. And if Franklin had stuck with
trying to, you know, create some compromise with the English,
there may have never been a war. A lot of
people say, this guy, Alexander Wedderburn is possibly the man
(41:39):
who cost England America because of this one jerk. And
you know, Benjamin Franklin was never a president. Some people.
You know, I talked about Benjamin Franklin a while back,
and I said that, you know, Grizzly Adams named his
bear Ben after Benjamin Franklin because people were really into
the presidents. I wasn't insinuating that Benjamin Franklin was a president,
(41:59):
just that he hung out with all of the first
presidents and he was part of that culture. He very
easily could have been a president, and he probably only
was not a president just because he was too old
by the time all of that went down. My point
is that this terrible experience for this great man was
(42:21):
what was necessary in order for him to go out
and do something that was very, very difficult, but ended
up creating this wonderful country that I live in and
the freedom that I enjoy here. And this is again
(42:43):
the mystery of optimism, that you can't always just take
something bad at face value and just allow yourself to
stay down on the dumps. You have to look at
it as motivation for you to go out and do
something pausive. As they say, when one door closes, another opens,
no matter how bad it is. And that's how you
(43:05):
also kind of have to think about even dying. I mean,
even if this is some rung of hell or whatever,
we know we're going to die, and I suppose that
you have to be optimistic by having faith in a
rewarding afterlife. But you know what, even if you don't
(43:27):
even if you're an atheist and you don't believe in anything.
Mark Twain said, quote, I do not fear death. I
had been dead for billions and billions of years before
I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience
from it. End quote. So, hey, I guess whether you
(43:50):
believe in nothingness or in afterlife, there's the potential for
it to be positive when you move on. There is
also the potential that you've been a bad person and
you're not gonna like what happens to you next, which
is why you better avoid that and do the best
you can to be a good person. The mystery of
(44:12):
optimism isn't that funny? Again? It's like a big classroom.
You're supposed to maintain that mindset. I ask you a
trivia question before the break. Where do you think is
the only place in the wild where red wolves are found?
You know what a red wolf is. Let me just
tell you a red wolf. Its size is intermediate between
(44:37):
the coyote and the gray wolf. I'm looking at a
picture of one right now. Yep, looks pretty wolfy. And
you know it's even though they call it a red wolf.
I mean it's kind of a mix of kind of
reddish and grayish, maybe a little orangition there. Well, here's
the thing this surprised me. The only place where you
(44:58):
can find I'm looking right now at the official Wildlife
Federation site, the only place you can find confirmed wild
red wolves in existence is North Carolina, where I'm from.
I said, red wolves used to roam throughout the Eastern
(45:20):
Seaboard from Pennsylvania to Florida and as far west as Texas,
but today North Carolina's Albemarle Peninsula is home to the
only confirmed wild red wolves in existence. But listen to
this says that in uh, let's see here, in the
last decade, they have declined so much from one point
(45:42):
thirty down to fifteen wolves. There are only fifteen wolves
left there. If you look at the chart of extinction,
like I guess, conservation status status they are they are
one wrung before you start getting into the extinct territory.
(46:05):
So that's I guess that's not good unless they eat people.
I doubt that. So I just thought that was fascinating.
Who would have I'd never even heard of wolves in
North Carolina. Well, okay, I guess before the clock has
got us, uh, since I've had a little bit of
(46:26):
a drinking theme going on here. You know what a
mich alata is. Some people call it a mich aalata,
some people call it mik a lotta. They're very popular
in the American Southwest. It's a refreshing, low alcohol drink,
often called a Mexican bloody marry. It's made with tomato juice,
(46:48):
some spices, usually some hot sauce and savory seas seasonings.
But instead of vodka, it uses a cold Mexican style
beer and they are absolutely delicious in my opinion, And
usually they have some kind of salt or chili chili
(47:08):
pepper kind of stuff around the rim. Michlatta's. If you've
never had to meetch a lotta, go out there and
find a good bartender somewhere and say make me a
met you a lota, especially if you like, you know,
bloody Mary's. I was always wondering where did this come from, though,
like again, go back to word origins. The most popular
theory is that it was invented by a man named
(47:30):
Mikhail Esper. He was a member of this club called
the Club Deportivou Potosino in San Luis Potosi and Mexico
in the nineteen sixties. It said that he liked to
have his beer with limes, salt, ice, and a straw,
which resembled lemonade, and some club members began calling it
(47:53):
Michel's lemonade, which eventually became shortened to mikilada. Of course,
they say it also may have been doubly named because
in Spanish michela helata means my ice cold beer, So
(48:13):
I guess it may have worked on two fronts. But
I guess this guy, Michel espere uh, he was the
inspiration for the Mikilada. Well, I hope you've enjoyed that
selection of mental manna. Kind of all over the place,
but also sort of fun to go through and check
some of the things off I've been wanting to talk
about for one reason or another. All Right, my friends,
(48:36):
let's end the show on a positive note. Take a
deep breath if you can close your eyes. Here is
the good fortune tone. That's it for this edition of
(49:09):
the show. Follow me at Joshua P. Warren Plus visit
Joshuapwarren dot com to sign up for my free e
newsletter to receive a free instant gift and check out
the cool stuff in the Curiosity Shop all at Joshuapwarren
dot com. I have a fun one lined up for
you next time, I promise. So please tell all your
(49:32):
friends to subscribe to this show and to always remember
the Golden Rule. Thank you for listening, thank you for
your interest and support, Thank you for staying curious, and
I will talk to you again soon. You've been listening
to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
(49:54):
AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Well, if you like this episode of Strange Things, wait
till you hear the next one. Thank you for listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Host
Joshua P. Warren
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