September 19, 2023 • 51 mins
It’s easy (and kind of fun) to laugh at the misfortune of CEOs and other high up business types when they bring it on themselves – so let’s do that now. Herein lies some of the worst business decisions ever made, hindsight being 20/20, of course.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and this is Stuff you Should Know one of
our Really, it's been a while top ten editions where
we don't actually do top ten.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah. Some people out there are like, what in the
world are you talking about, And some people are like,
oh my gosh, this reminds me of the old days,
back in the two thousand and oh, I don't know, tens, eights, nine, thirteens.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Oh yeah, thirteen was lousy with top tens, I think.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, we used to do all a lot of these
top well not a lot, but we used to do
top tens from the old House Stuff Works website, and
it seems like they never had ten great entries. So
we would just on the fly say oh, let's not
do this one. But we were better now we're professional. Yeah,
so we got together beforehand and said, well, let's just
do these eight and Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
It feels weird to know ahead of time what we're
not going to do rather than just saying it in
the middle of recording. But I do feel like it
is more professional.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
It's called growth, my friend.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So we are not doing all ten. But there is
one that I think really kind of introduces this concept
out of the gate Chuck and it's concept. Oh oh yeah,
I forgot to talk about the concept. We're talking today
about bad business decisions. And you could call this the
shot and fraud hour, because if you are kind of
(01:38):
if you take a grim view of CEOs and captains
of industry and all that, this is like a chance
to really kind of poke fun at people have made
some really terrible decisions over the years.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Not all great decisions over the years. Sometimes they're bad.
We're here to talk about eight of them.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
But hey, the games you never won are the ones
you didn't start playing in that saying is that it?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I don't know if that's it, but that that totally
makes sense to me. So I'm saying, yes, okay, good,
so you only missed the shots you don't take.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, that's much better than mine, But I like yours.
I undermined our professional spiel at the beginning just now.
So there's a pretty well worn story about how Alexander
Graham Bell invented the telephone and went to Western Union
and said, hey, you captains of Communication, you guys rule
(02:33):
the world as far as long distance communication goes, I've
got this neat invention, why don't you buy it from
me for one hundred thousand dollars? And the heads at
Western Union said, that is ridiculous. Nobody's gonna want this thing.
Hit the bricks, and Alexander Graham Bell just went off
and created his own phone company. And those patents that
he received turned out to be what are widely considered
(02:56):
the most valuable patents ever issued in the United States.
And some pretty valuable patents have been issued like this
is not we're not talking about some also ran patent.
This is the patent of patents, right, you beat up
the squatty potty oh by far, like by twice as
valuable even maybe but probably more so. But it just
(03:17):
kind of goes to show you, like it's easy to
say haha at Western Union. But it also is a
teachable moment, as Oprah would say, because if you dig
into the story, you find that when Alexander Graham Bell
invented the telephone, he didn't invent the telephone so you
and I could pick up a receiver and talk to
(03:37):
one another on either end. He basically invented it to
be the radio. Before radio, the intent was for you
to sit in a room and somebody on the other
end of the telephone line in a different city perform
a play or read a monologue, or play a symphony,
and you were going to sit there and listen. You
weren't supposed to talk back. That was the idea. So
(03:58):
if you put it in that context, yestern Union doesn't
seem so dumb anyway. So I think it's a reminder
to keep in mind in most of these cases, hindsight
is twenty twenty, and that there is a lot of
exacerbating circumstances and that nothing's ever that one sided. But
it's still kind of fun to think about.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, And you know what a great example of that
hindsight being twenty twenty is.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
I'm gonna go with this one is when.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Excite did not buy Google just call it an audible.
Everybody remembers Excite, or you may not, but if it
sounds familiar and you look up the Excite logo, that
you will immediately, probably if you were of a certain age, go, oh, yeah,
I remember Excite. They didn't really stand out to me
(04:46):
when I was researching this until I went and saw
it and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember those guys.
I did not ever use it. But Excite dot com,
believe it or not, is still around and in one
of what will be two a bit of serendipity with
this episode releasing now, Excite is literally ending their email
(05:06):
program this month.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Is it really?
Speaker 4 (05:11):
No?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, because what's funny is I made fun of Emily
up until about a year ago because she's still paid
for a MindSpring email.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
No.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yes, because she's like, I've had.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
This email for twenty years and like everybody's got it
and I can't. Like she was locked in, she felt like,
but she waited it out eventually because I think they
may have stopped supporting it as well.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Oh, but they still kept taking her money, right.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Maybe I don't know. Anyway, Excite. If you go to
Excite dot com today, you will laugh because you will
see what is a very old school looking internet site.
It's like a list of it's a news scroll, like
a list of headlines. It's got these little icons that
I assume they pay to be on there because it's
(05:59):
like Amazon, eBay, State Farm and Casper Mattress like prominent
icons as if this website is the place to go
to get to.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Those other places.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
And then on the left rail you will see a
list of things like email, which of course is going defunct,
a bunch of redirects like weather it goes to acuweather
sports goes to ESPN, and then entertainment, travel, finance, and
games all goes to ask dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Wow, apparently Excite was that's today. I thought Excite turned
into ask dot COMO. Apparently there's separate.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Oh okay, they clearly like each other because they link
four different things to ask dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
And do you know, of course ask dot com started
out as ask jeeves.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Remember that I thought it was. I just couldn't remember
for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So these are search engines. Some of them were Yahoo
apparently categorized the entire Internet by category strangely enough. But
Excite supposedly was a search engine. It just wasn't super good.
And there's a story out there, Chuck that the search
engine was purposefully not super good because these search engines
(07:09):
used to be called web portals. That was, you would
go to Excite first search what you're searching for, and
then hopefully while you were there taking a bunch of ads.
So the longer you stayed on Excite before leaving and
going off into the Internet, the better it was for
Excite's bottom line. So their search wasn't that great. And
that is an explanation from one of the people who
(07:32):
who was part of this deal for why Excite passed
on Google.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Yeah, and they weren't just a search engine.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
They were a they're like what they are today still,
they were an aggregator. They had new scrolls and stuff
like that. It was almost like a a front page
of a newspaper that you would go to.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Right, but a really like super low fi newspaper.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah. So Google comes around. This is nineteen ninety nine
Larry Page and Sarah Gibrinn said, all right, we got
this thing. It's basically like an algorithm essentially at this point,
and we could sell it to you Excite for a
million bucks. And then they balked and they said, all right,
(08:16):
how about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars And they said, no, well,
we're Excite. Why do we need you this weird search
engine that isn't even really a search engine yet? And
I think this is one clear example of hindsight being
twenty twenty because no one could have predicted what Google
would become.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Absolutely not. And so the CEO of Excite, George Bell,
is known as the guy who passed up on buying
Google for less than a million dollars. Right, But he's like, hey, hey, hey,
I'm not some dummy like these guys wanted to gut
Excite search engine and put in the Google search algorithm instead,
And I was dedicated to my engineering team. They had
(08:57):
worked really hard to create the search engine that I
thought was perfectly fine, and I wasn't about to completely
poison our culture for Google. And Google's people said no, Actually,
what happened was we made a bake off between their
search engine and our search in it, and their stuff
came back with terrible stuff. Our stuff came back with
really good stuff, and they were like, this is too good.
(09:17):
People are going to immediately leave Excite, so we don't
want your your algorithm. Those are the two competing stories
for why this didn't happen. Amazing, It is amazing bad
business decisions still though, sure, absolutely all.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Right, where should we go next? We might not even
get to eid everybody. That's how exciting these episodes are
I'm gonna go with Kodak.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was gonna go with Kodak too.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Everyone that grew up in the pre digital revolution remembers
Kodak as the photograph company, the film paper Company, the
film stock company. Founded in eighteen eighty out of New York,
they controlled ninety percent of the film market into the
late seventies and about eighty five percent of the camera
(10:04):
market and employed about sixty thousand people. And in the
mid seventies there was a engineer there named Steve Sassin
who basically figured out digital photography. He was experimenting with
something called a charged couple device a CCD, and he
figured out how to translate an image into ones and
(10:24):
zeros and built the very first digital camera. It was
a one hundred thousand pixel image, which is pretty cute
this point zero one megapixels.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
It's a little grainy.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And went to the bosses and said, hey, like, this
is the future, guys, this is what we should do.
And Kodak said, oh, well, I'm not so sure about that.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So yes, there were some people in Kodek that were like,
this is dangerous man. We're like, our money is in
print photographs. Our money is in regular cameras, and there
was another group in Kodek that was like, this guy's right,
Steve Sassin's right, this is the future. And they did
invest billions of dollars in developing a digital camera whole outfit,
(11:08):
and those conservative forces managed to keep it back, keep
it back, and then finally, by the time Kodak joined
the digital camera revolution, they had been passed by. So
not only did they miss the digital camera revolution despite
having invented it, they also wasted billions of dollars on
their digital camera division that never got to really get
a good start, So it was just a complete waste,
(11:31):
Like this is this is a genuinely bad business decision, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, but they had the disc camera, remember those. Yes,
that was the big Kodak product that was. It wasn't digital,
but it was a little film wheel. It was a
disc and it was a little flat camera. I remember
that was all the rage, so I wanted them.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
It was a very big deal.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I see that now. Yeah, that does kind of take
me back. Yeah, did you have one? No, Fisher Price
made one. Did you have that one?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
No?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, I didn't have either either.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, you and I had similar upbringings. We didn't get
the best toys.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
No, but apparently those Then the early nineties, when digital
cameras came out, they were like one thousand dollars, but
they could only store like eight pictures at a time.
Like you could take eight pictures and then you had
to plug it into your computer and up though those
eight pictures, format the disc and then start over again.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
God, bless you early adopters, but it usually pays, in
my experience, to wait a little bit on the tech
to figure itself out. For sure, like the first flat
screen TVs. Remember how expensive those were?
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Oh my god. But it's the early adopters who drive
the prices down because sure they are buying these things,
you know what I.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Mean, Hey, I mean they walk the righteous path.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
So, just to wrap it all up, Kodak ended up
laying off fifty thousand employees and in twenty twelve they
they filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. And they're still around.
But they basically make printer cartridges and motion picture film stock.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, which is also not used very often anymore. Nope,
poor Kodak, Poor Kodak. Time for break.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I was gonna say the same thing, man, we are
really sympatic of this episode.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
I was going to say that too.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Okay, Chuck, I'm going to pick one and I'm in
the big wheel. Okay, it landed on Western Union against
we're gonna have to go over that one break in.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Okay, okay, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
So Western Union now, we won't do that. Let me
just move at one space to this JC penny one.
How about that?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Ooh all right, I.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Like this one because it really kind of gets to
the bottom of some tricks that clothing retailers use. So
actually all retailers do, but some clothing retailers are particularly
guilty of it.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
That's right. We were talking about the clothier jcpenny, which
in twenty twelve hired a shiny new CEO named Ron Johnson,
who had made quite the name for himself in business
in retail as Two things. First, the guy who hipped
up Target. Oh yes, okay, remember growing up Target was
(14:38):
like whatever Target was not, you know, it's kind of
like a kmart thing. And then all of a sudden
Tarja was like this cool, hip, awesome place is because
of Ron Johnson's efforts largely gotcha. Then he went to
work at Apple, and he is the guy he was
their VP of retail. He's the guy who basically oversaw,
you could say, invented the Apple Store and the Genius
(15:00):
Bar and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Right, Yeah, So I mean like he was legit. J. C.
Penny was like, come save us, Like we're really flagging,
Like even compared to some of these other retailers that
do the same thing, like TJ. Max or Walmart or whatever,
we're getting no love whatsoever. So Ron Johnson came in
and looked around and he's like, this industry is shameful.
(15:22):
Like basically what he'd walked into was an industry of
clothing retailers that would sell items that were say a
ten dollars item for ten dollars, but on the price
tag would it would say that it originally started out
as like fifty dollars or something, right, And yes, at
(15:43):
one point they charged fifty dollars for it, but it
was so that they could later mark it down in
a sale that probably took place the day after that
thing arrived and was sold for fifty dollars. So that
means there were some suckers out there who actually paid
fifty dollars for that ten dollars shirt. But the way
that they got you was by not only marking it down,
but having a reason to mark it down. They would
(16:04):
have sale after sale after sale, hundreds of sales, different
sales in a year, and it still wasn't working. And
Ron Johnson was like, this is desperate and we shouldn't
do this anymore.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, there were coupons even and people, you know, Americans
eat that stuff up. If you hear half off blowout
sale this weekend, your mouth starts water in a little
bit and you think, wait a minute, I can get
something that should cost twice as much for half as much,
or I can bring in this coupon and get two
(16:38):
things for one thing.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's unbelievable, and we still fall.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For these tricks. We all do. So he said, no,
here's what we'll do. We're gonna just basically out ourselves
and say, you know now we're gonna do is it's
called fair and square every day is our new pricing system.
It means you don't need a sale, you don't need
a coupon our stuff. It's just going to be inexpensive
(17:01):
all the time. And people hated it right away. People
started complaining they love their sales, they love their deals.
He would call them on the phone personally. He wouldn't
do that and say, you dummy, don't you understand you're
paying the same price. It's just cheap all the time. Now,
people didn't understand that. They didn't want to hear that.
(17:22):
I saw one person that said that he seemed to
almost have a disdain for his customer base because he
behind closed doors were saying, they're dumb and they need
to be educated, and like, how can these dumb dumbs
not understand that cheaper clothes every day is a better situation?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, because the studies have found that people will pay
more for a cheaper thing if they think it's more valuable.
Then they would pay for the same thing if it
were marked. They would pass up something that was actually
the same thing at a lower price.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And the reason why is because a ten dollars shirt
seems cheap and maybe cheaply made and probably just not
a good But a fifty dollars shirt that you can
buy for ten dollars was valuable to begin with. And
then yes, not only is it a deal, you could
make the case that it's a steal. And people love that.
Like you said, there's a thread, a vein of America
(18:16):
that is crazy for that kind of stuff. And Ron
Johnson found out the hard way that when you go
up against that vein of Americans, you lose every time.
And he lost pretty big in seventeen months.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, I got two words for you, my friend. Outlet mall. Yeah,
that really says it all about America. Yeah, but if
you don't even know how they operate. But it's got
to be something like this with outlet malls, right, very much.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
But also there's a lot of them that are like
crypto outlet malls. They're not outlet stores, they're just regular
stores in an outlet mall. It's b s If you're
a developer of an outlet mall and you're letting stores
in there that are actually not selling their outlet stuff
but there's just a regular store, you're at fault. It's
(19:01):
on your your hands. Blood is on your hands.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
So what this got Ron Johnson was what is known
as the worst quarter in retail history, which was a
store to store thirty two percent drop.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Wow quarter over quarter.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That that's just a death nail for him. He only
made it, I believe seventeen months, and that was it
and they came back in and said, hey, we're gonna
go back to our fake pricing scheme, and people loved it.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
I'm sure Ron Johnson was like, that's all right, thanks
for the multimillion dollar golden parachute at everybody.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah. Oh man, he made He supposedly made like four
or five hundred million dollars in Oh Michael Stock God.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So he didn't even need this job.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
No, I'm sure he just wanted to show all this
loser Americans what the deal was.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
He still got a job.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
He's doing something else like two years after this, like
why is this guy working? Go go retire on your
island or something.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So there's a there was an ad that jac pennyc
came up with like that ran very It was very
short run intentionally, but it basically pleaded for their customers
to come back. They're like, we know we made mistakes,
We're getting back to our roots. We love you, please
come back again. Like they were begging their customers to
(20:17):
come back. And apparently it worked because this is another
common theme that we'll see and I think this is
a good segue into the New Coke debacle. Ooh, when
you take away something that people love but have come
to take for granted. Yeah, they will not only fight
for it, they'll come back for it and droves when
you give it back to them.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
New Coke the end, pretty much. Yeah, So of course
this has got to be in there. If you grew
up in the eighties like we did, you remember a
time where Pepsi threatened Coke a little bit, not literally,
like doctor Pepsi didn't come up to mister Coke's door
and say, listen, I'm going to take you up back
(20:59):
and behind the.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Witch had and take care of you.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Sure, the company threatened Coke because their sales were doing
pretty good.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
It was a different taste. I think it was a
little sweeter.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I don't even drink Pepsi, so I'm not really sure,
but I think it had a sweeter taste. They were
I don't know if they were winning the Coke Wars,
but they are the Cold Wars, but they were. They
were edging in on Coke's dominance.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
It was Chuck. It was that choice of a new
generation campaign. Yeah, that was what had done it. They
got Michael Jackson, they got Madonna, they got I think
Geraldine Ferraro did one of these commercials.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Like, that's advertising goal.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
These were right, These were just internationally famous commercials, and
so PEPSI had kind of come out of nowhere and
was eating Coke's launch.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
All of a sudden, Coke had do caucus big.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Mistake, yeah, dan Quayle.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
So Coke was a little worried.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
They saw their writing on the surpi riding on the wall,
and they said, all right, under the behind closed doors,
let's start rejiggering our our rest here that had been around,
you know, since it was you know, sold in that
very first pharmacy. Very very classic. That's a little hint
of what's to come. Very classic, classic taste. And for
(22:11):
a couple of years they're engineers, mixed up little batches.
They did taste tests, they let people taste them. People
are like, I like the taste of this better. And
so in nineteen eighty five and April of eighty five,
New Coke came out with a redesign, can redesign. You know,
they kept their colors and stuff, and the I'm not
(22:32):
sure if did the font completely change or was it
just sort of a modified version of the old script.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
I think the new was slightly different, but the Coke
was the original.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Okay, but at any rate, they unveiled new coke and
it was a tremendous not only a tremendous flop, but
it costs a lot of anger and people hoarding their
old coats, and people were just like, how can you
change an American institution like this without even asking anybody?
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Even though they had done testing.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
They had done tons of testing, and the test came
back roundly in favor of this new formula for coke.
But Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink apparently pointed out
that if you're doing it tastes tests, you're not sitting
there drinking a whole can. You're just taking a little
sip of something and comparing it to the sip of
something else. And so it's possible that that new coke
(23:26):
really tasted terrible if you drank the whole can. It
was too sweet. The explanations I saw were more that
it was psychological. People didn't like messing with their beloved
coke number one, And I saw that kind of wrapped
up in a quote from somebody that was that they
said the biggest mistake Coke made was telling the public
(23:47):
about the change to the recipe. Because people were like,
you can't mess with my stuff. I don't care what
it tastes like. And of course it's not going to
possibly taste good because you're messing with my original coke.
So people just kind of turned on it from the outside.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Well, like they think they should have just changed the
recipe and just left it and not said anything.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
This guy was saying, if you're going to change the recipe,
they shouldn't have said anything, because that happens from time
to time. But then the bigger problem was that you
kind of touched on. They didn't stop and ask their customers,
do you want a new coke? They they just made
a terrible business decision based on fear of PEPSI getting
(24:27):
some of their market share. All of a sudden, they
went and completely rejiggered the formula. That was their response
to that.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah, and it didn't last long. It was less than
three months later, a new coke was gone and they
added Classic Coca Cola Classic I remember, and I didn't
even drink a lot of soda back then, even but
I remember it being just almost like this nationwide relief
setting in. It was really a big deal, and it
(24:56):
sounds so funny now if you're some kid who had
you know, didn't live through this. It really like it
was big, big news and sort of captured America's attention
for a little while. And Coke Classic coming back was
like an old, long lost friend reappearing at the front door.
And eventually, of course, the word classic was dropped and
they were just like, can we just forget about all
(25:16):
of that and we're just Coke forever?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
But they lasted for a while. There was many years
where you differentiated by saying Coke Classic. Even after New
Coke was long gone, you still referred to Coke as
Coke Classic for a while, and then it finally went
back to Coke.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
I had to do it?
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Uh, is it time for another message? Break?
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Okay? Chuck said, sure, all right, Chuck, you're up. What's next?
(26:05):
What are we going to do next?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Well, my amigo, we are gonna go with the Blockbuster video.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Oh yeah, this is my favorite, I said, another boy.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
The eighties was pretty rough on some companies that didn't
see the riding on the wall because Blockbuster. You grew
up in the seventies and eighties, well, you know, if
you're a teenager at least in the eighties by that time.
You spent a lot of time, We've talked about it before,
browsing your early Friday evenings with your friends at Blockbuster Video,
looking over over those shelves, reading the back of those boxes,
(26:40):
the backs of the boxes, and standing by the door
at that bin because you just could not get your
copy of Excalibur. And some nerd walks up and dumps
it through the slot and he grab it before it
even hits that bin, and the employee says, you really
not supposed to do that.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
That was a great Blockbuster employee question.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
You do it anyway, And block Buster ruled the video
market except for you know the which I still love
that the charming mom and pops I had a Oh yeah,
this family at our church even ran their own little
video store and that was a good business for a while,
but Blockbuster eventually would gobble most of those up.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah, to me, Blockbuster was the nineties thing. The eighties
were mom and pop places where you'd actually rent the
VCR when you also rented Beverly Hills.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Cop Yeah, video Shock, your video house, Yeah, video Barn.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
And there's just asn't a side. I wonder I want
to know if anybody out there knows what the name
of this phenomenon is. But whenever I walked into a Blockbuster,
that whole mental list of movies that I wanted to
rent just vaporized.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yea, and I like the test taker syndrome.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
It would be like I had just walked into a
building for the first time, let alone, like a Blockbuster video,
like I had no idea what I was doing, totally
in over my head, and I would invariably walk out
with some movie that I just didn't really want to see,
but I got to rent something, and I okay, yeah,
pretty much. I spared myself that one. But yes, that's
generally correct.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
So you and then you get home and you're like, man,
I went in there for gleaming the Cube and I
walk out with Turner and Hooche.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
That's exactly right. That was kind of the wrap up
of it, wasn't it that that you remember after you
get back home. It's the worst or it was the worst.
It would be still the worst if Blockbuster were around,
But it's not because of bad business decisions.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
That's right. If you remember in the late nineties, that
was a company called Netflix that said, hey, we're going
to start mailing DVDs to people, so you don't have
to go to the store. You can get on this
thing called the internet and you can look up the
movie you want, and you can order that DBD to
be shipped to your house and then you can just
drop it in the mail afterward. We failed to mention,
(28:45):
by the way, I didn't know this Blockbuster was making
about half a billion dollars a year in late fees.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Man, they were that was unconsonable.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
That was a big part of their business.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
But Netflix is like in those late fees, like you
can keep these things for a long time, and they
would eventually say, but you know what, maybe we should
try And I think there was a merger idea right
unless of a sale.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
What do you mean or oh? With with Netflix.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Were they trying to merge with Blockbuster and say, hey,
why don't you let us take over and start doing
mailing stuff for you as well?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, that was the impression I had that Netflix wanted
to kind of slide in and become part of Blockbuster
and help Blockbuster do its own thing. And Blockbuster said
no twice at.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Least Yeah for fifty million bucks, by the way.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, And Netflix, by the way, has valued at about
two hundred billion today, so fifty million dollars was pretty
pretty good price. And that's not just because Netflix was
an unknown. Netflix had already shown that it was a
proven success, but it hadn't been around long enough for
Blockbuster to see the riding on the wall. They just thought.
I think John any Coco Antioko, the CEO, considered not
(29:53):
just Netflix niche, but the Internet was still niche in
two thousand to this ceo. So Netflix Ogden went on
their merry way, and Blockbusters just started to fall further
and further and further behind.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah. I was actually a member of the Blockbuster DVD
mailing program when they finally got around to copying Netflix.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Really.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah, I didn't jump on Netflix. I was like a
Blockbuster loyalist. I was like, I'm gonna use their thing
because it's the same basically, uh huh, And I don't
I think maybe eventually when Blockbuster stopped, I did jump
to Netflix DVD.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
But I mentioned in the first one of the first
segments that there was a bit of serendipity, two bits
of serendipity that Excite finished their email program this month.
Netflix this week just announced the shutdown of their DVD side.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh I'm not falling for that again. Twenty five years
of those DVD mailings, they just shut it down. They said,
they said that you can send them back up until
September twenty eighth, and after that, we're not going to ask,
which basically means keep what you got.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
And not only that, but to liquidate their DVDs, they
were they're selecting random customers and they're just sending them
ten DVDs oh wow, and saying like, here have fun.
Apparently er point five percent of their revenue these days,
and just quickly to go over their moneys. They Netflix
is a rough company to be invested in. I think
(31:22):
I don't know much about this stuff, but they in
November twenty one, they peaked at about three hundred and
two billion. The next summer they crashed all the way
down to like eighty something billion, I think three hundred
and then now we're back up at like one eighty.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah. I think that was when they they like basically
doubled their their streaming fee, their monthly fee to stream.
Everybody was like, forget to you. And then people come back,
all right. So you were saying that Netflix was giving
away their DVDs because they knew they need them, right, Great,
that's such a wonderful thing to do. Blockbuster did the
(32:01):
opposite of that, and I saw that it was very
famously described as failing at failing because as it was
clear that Blockbuster was doomed, and it was clear for
years before anybody, actually before the last Blockbuster closed, rather
than basically pumping all the money out to shareholders, which
apparently is what a sociopathic corporation's supposed to do, they
(32:24):
brought a succession of CEOs and to try to save
the place, and those CEOs just spent hand over fist
money that they wasted on these schemes that did nothing
but waste money for Blockbuster to try to resurrect the brand.
And then finally, after I think bankruptcy in twenty ten,
it was bought for a song I don't even think
it was a good song by Dish and they're still
(32:47):
Blockbuster now. Dish is one of their on demand groups
of channels is called Blockbuster at Home. So Blockbuster's still around, Chuck.
If you're a Blockbuster loyalist, get yourself dish and you
can watch on demand movies through Blockbuster at home.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
It was was it the song Escape?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
That's a bad song?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
What song is that?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
If you like aka the Pina Colada song.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Oh, that song is not only bad, it's morally reprehensible.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
It's awful. And I just pointed this out to a
group of friends this last summer who liked it, including Emily.
I was like, you've never listened to the words of
this song. Yeah, She's like, well, not really. I know
the chorus. I said. It's about a guy that wants
to cheat on his wife's so bad because he can't
stand her that he puts a want ad to go
find some new lady and he hits it off with
her and it turns out being his wife.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, and they He's like, great things are fixed.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, exactly, man, because in the seventies that's all you needed.
That in a little uh, you know, a bottle of
I don't know, baccardy and some pills.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
That's right. The seventies were great, but the people in
the seventies were the worst.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
All right, we got two more, which you're gonna pick?
I know which one you're gonna pick.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
You do not. All right, yes you do, let's go
ahead and pick it for me.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
We have well you're probably you're probably gonna say, Et,
that's right, And.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Technically we have three left if you want to go
for it. But okay, do we have three?
Speaker 3 (34:16):
M h what else are we missing?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I can't say it'll ruin the surprise.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Well, we agree not to do that one though, you
want to do it again?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
No, No, we didn't do the AOL time Warner one.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Oh eh, okay, let's get that.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
There is one thing I wanted to say about that,
all right. At the time, in nineteen ninety nine, AOL
was worth two hundred billion dollars, and I was like, Wow,
that's a lot. How much is Apple worth these days?
In twenty twenty three, Apple's worth two and three quarter
trillion dollars? Wow, trillion dollars, that's how much that company
(34:50):
is worth. More than one trillion dollars, almost three trillion dollars.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
And this is twenty four years later. That's that's how
gobsmackingly much like just money has increased by then by now,
So I just wanted to point that out. It's just insane,
all right.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Well, ET, the movie.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Oh, one other thing. I want to go on record
that we should do an episode on AOL and the
beginning of the Internet because it is so interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
I mean talking about Excite and AOL. And I remember
the first time I heard the word Google.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I literally remember that very first time.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, you remember, I used to say, like I'm feeling lucky.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
It was a production manager named Kevin Edge. If anyone
knows kevinun til Kevin had said Hi. He in a
production office on a TV commercial in LA in the
early early two thousands. He said the word Google and
I went what And he went, It's a search engine.
And I went, excuse me, Kevin, Kevin was great.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Did you say you mean a web portal?
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
E T.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Colon the Extra Terrestrial. Very popular movie, some might say
some I'd say it's a classic. Some might say that
they still love Reese's Pieces because of that classic movie. Yes,
so I said Reese's Pieces, I think, but you know
what I mean?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, to me, that might be the greatest mass produced
candy of all time. Oh what, I love Reese's Pieces.
I can eat them by the by the bucket full.
Unfortunately of them too, and they've but they've only been
around since nineteen seventy eight. Did you know that?
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yeah, I mean I remember when they came out, my friend.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Okay, I was not quite aware. I was two years
old at the time, give me a break, but I
came seven. I was Candy Central, right, Yeah, exactly so.
But yeah, by the time I was seven, I was like,
give me these things. Yeah, in nineteen seventy eight when
they came out, they actually did pretty good. Hershey's made them,
and then they crested and peaked and then started to
(36:50):
decline really quickly, and so Reese's Pieces appeared to have
run their course. And people say quite reasonably that it's
possible Reese's Pieces wouldn't be around anymore were it not
for Et eating Reese's Pieces on screen. And the irony
of the whole thing is that it was originally supposed
(37:10):
to be Eminem's, and Eminems wouldn't bite. They said, we
don't know what this ET thing is. We're not going
to give you a dollar for it.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
ET was based on a book.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
There's either somebody describe it as a novelization. So it's
possible that they made a book version of it.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah, that's what it was.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Okay, Well, in that apparently in the original novel that
was made from the movie, it's Eminem's that et eats,
not Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Oh okay, that's a nice little nugget. I read the
novelization of Raiders at the Lost Ark.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
How was it?
Speaker 3 (37:43):
It was great?
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Did it differ from the movie at all? Or was
it just basically the movie and book form?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
It is the movie and book form. But there's novelizations.
I read a couple of them back then. They're always
a little bit different, and they had extra details because
it's a book, and it was kind of fun. I'm
sure they still do that, don't they.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
I think so maybe probably. I'm sure Marvel does. If
you can make a dime off of it, Marvel does.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
So depending on who you talk to, there are different stories.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I think this is one of those things where when
something works out so well, everybody you interview later on
was like, it was really kind of my idea, because
Steven Spielberg is I saw the interview. The words came
out of his mouth that he said, you know, my
favorite candy was Eminem's, And so I thought when Eminem's passed,
(38:33):
I thought, well, what's my second favorite can candy. It's
Reese's Pieces. I saw other things say it was one
of Spielberg's kids say that was his favorite. I saw
others that said there was this guy named Steve Adler
who was the vice president of merchandising for a company
called MCA, the Merchandising Corporation of America, which was a
(38:57):
subsidiary of Universal, And it was kind of like the
early days of moving merchandising period, like Star Wars kind
of busted it wide open a few years before. Oh yeah,
so this is sort of a newish thing and like
brand placement and getting money for that kind of thing.
So Steve Adler was a merchandising VP at MCA, and
he says that it was his kid who said.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
I love Reese's Pieces, and that kid was me exactly.
So that's how it ended up. Like Hershey said no, sorry,
Eminem Mar said no, we're not gonna We're not gonna
spend a million dollars. That was the deal. Universal said
this this alien that everybody's gonna love. We're just sure
of it is going to eat either Eminem's or Reese's pieces.
(39:41):
It comes down to who wants to pay a million
dollars in advertising, like spend a million dollars in marketing
in return for basically being part of the ET marketing blitz.
Who wants to do that? And Eminem said, no, we're
not going to do that, and Reese's said, let's give
this a try. There was There's a guy named Jack
(40:02):
Dout who is a business development VP, who was basically
the person who decided to take that risk and spend
a million dollars, which at the time there's a lot
of money. We're talking about nineteen eighty eighty one eighty
two dollars, so it's worth like two and a half
million dollars today at least. And like ET is, this
(40:23):
is where the hindsight is twenty twenty thing kicks in.
Like they didn't see a script. Nobody knew what ET was.
Aliens up to that point were not lovable or huggable.
They were creepy and weird. So there really was a
risk that Jack daw took and he can take a
victory lap for making that decision.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, and ET is.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
You know, the rest is history, as they say, because
ET is now a top thirty all time grocer domestically
for the United States the Green Grocer. I went down
the box office Mojo rabbit hole out of curiosity because
it's just littered with avatars and Avengers and stuff like
(41:03):
that and e t if you kind of dig in.
It is the number two all time movie that is
not a franchise movie. Nice, so not bad, second only
to Titanic. Oh, okay, and guess what, Barbie's already at
number fifteen all time.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I know that's pretty great and then amazing. I finally
saw Oppenheimer too. My god, it's a good movie.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, how are your ears?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
They're fine. I saw it in like RBX or RPX
or DMX or something like that, where like it shakes
the seats and everything. I'm like, this is unnecessary.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
It's loud.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah. Also, just for you movie trivia buffs, if someone
asked you a trivia question about non franchise box office Titanic,
then et and the number three all time movie non franchise.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
Passion of the Christ.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
What Yeah, Wow, big movies like three hundred and something
million bucks.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
But that's I mean, that's considering it even was boycotted
by lots of churches around the world, and that still
made that mon Well, maybe why no publicity. No, there's
such a thing as bad publicity.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
The swings you don't take are the ones that you
missed the most.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
All right, let's finish up here with a little quick
we'll go through this quickly. Monday night football set the
TV landscape for you. In the nineteen sixties, there were
three main networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. ABC was in
last place. There was also a fledgling network from Howard Hughes,
(42:36):
which I didn't realize called Hughes Sports Network.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
That was ahead of his time, very.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Much ahead of his time, and even though they showed
like bully and stuff. But at one point the National
Football League decided, you know what, there's Pete Roseus, a
commissioner back then, very forward thinking guy. He said, I
think we should have a prime time football game. How
about Friday night? And they said, no, that'll mess up
(43:01):
high school football. And he said Saturday night and they
said no, there's actually a law against that because college football.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
I forgot about that.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
So he said, all right, we already played on Sunday.
He said, how about Monday night and they said, no,
one's going to care. They played the first Monday night
game in nineteen sixty four, but it was not televised,
and then they had I think CBS and NBC had
because CBS had the NFL, NBC had the AFL before
(43:31):
the merger in nineteen seventy, and they each tried their
hand at Monday night games a couple each during sixty eight,
sixty seven through sixty nine, but none of those are televised,
and they finally got together and said, these things need
to be on TV.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, so they started putting them on TV. And apparently
one of the reasons why is because you said, you know,
some of those Monday night games, the early ones weren't televised,
but people still went to them. They turned out like aces.
So it was very obvious that there was a market
for this, so putting it on TV wasn't It was
not a no brainer. It was still very risky, but
(44:08):
there was there was reason to think it might take off.
So I think CBS and NBC, since they already had
a relationship with the NFL, they got first first refusal
from Peter Roselle. Yeah, and NBC said that would mean
we're preempting Carson and apparently we're too afraid to even
bring it up. So no, we're passing on that.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
No, Carson, have you killed?
Speaker 2 (44:30):
CBS said, are you crazy? We're getting great ratings with
the Doris Day Show and laughing, we can't, we can't
get rid of those for some football game. And ABC
just was like, you know that that nerdy kid in
class that has their hand up so high it's about
to be dislocated from their shoulder and they're just waggling
in their seat. That's what ABC was doing. And finally
(44:50):
Peter Roselle is like, guess ABC, you can have it.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
That's right, and uh, you know it turned out to
be a very big deal.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
There's a guy named Rune Hardly there that kind of
spearheaded this project for ABC Sports flashio graphics, more cameras,
more camera angles and slow mo and stuff like that,
like using all this sort of newer technology more than
they had before.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
You have to say, and.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
The biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for
the next three minutes. The biggest change was they all
of a sudden had three a three person broadcasting team,
which had never been done. It was always just a
color commentator and a play by play person, but in
this case they had the play by play guy and
Keith Jackson only there for one year, then replaced by
(45:41):
Frank Gifford, and then Dandy Don Meredith was the color guy.
Very he was an actor, former Cowboys, QB. Handsome, just
great in the color position.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
And then people who don't know what you're talking about,
what the color position is?
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Oh, well, the play by play is the is the
person that goes. And then he takes the ball on
the four yard line and cuts it outside and runs
it down to the three tackled hard by number eighty five.
And then the color guy comes in and says, I
gotta tell you, man, the way they're playing tonight, it
looks like they're pretty inspired. I don't know if the
cheerleaders are getting them all pumped up or what.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Oh that's great. Okay, Then who was Cosel?
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Well, Cosell was Cosell. He was. We should do a
full podcast on him. The guy is a is a legend,
an amazing broadcaster. You know, was fired in disgrace at
one point. But yeah, quite quite a story. But Cosell
was just he he was sort of a cerbic and
he would make fun of players and people and teams and.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Oh he was the Dennis for mill Time.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Well much better.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But you know, Cossel was very famous for sort of
verbally sparring with Ali and going toe to toe with
Ali in interviews, and just a great broadcaster while he
was doing his job, and he was the third sort
of wild card, and he and Don Meredith would go
at it and when when Gifford came in, that was
really a solid team and they it was a huge hit.
(47:07):
I think it's still one of the highest rated TV
series period on television.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yes, and it's one of the longest running too, although
it started in nineteen seventy, right.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Yeah, did we even say what day was it was?
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, it was a Monday in nineteen seventy It was.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
The Browns Jets and the Browns won thirty one twenty one,
I know that.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
And it's been going ever since then. So this thing's
been on for fifty three years, but it's it's a
baby compared to some of the longest running TV shows
in America. General Hospital started in nineteen thirty six, Guiding
Light came the year after. Sesame Street's been on even longer.
So it's old, but there's older just f yi, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
For sure, and it bears pointing out The reason they
went with the Jets was because the guy from ABC
was like, we have to get Joe Namath on TV
for this first game, because Joe Namath was a huge
football star with the AFL and then when they merged
in the NFL and just a huge presence. He was
(48:11):
a sex symbol.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
And a Brady Bunch.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
It was like he and Burt Reynolds were like the
two hot guys of the moment and they had to
get Namoth in there.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
So that's why they went with the Jets.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Smart, Well, you got anything else, I got nothing else?
What's our episode on Monday Night football? Everybody? So if
you want to know more about all this stuff, we
would say head on over to How Stuff Works. You
can read the mystery one we left out. And by
the way, this was written by our very own Dave Ruse,
So hats off Troy Ruse for that. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
We just have to email Dave separately and make fun
of him for calling Reese's Pieces peanut butter and chocolate candies.
Yeah that was or not?
Speaker 2 (48:50):
That was written by somebody who's clearly never had Reese's Pieces.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
I mean, technically you make and say that candy shell
is Nope.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Chocolate, Nope, not at all. There's not a drop of
chocolate in Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Well, I don't mean the ingredients, but is it? I mean,
isn't it known as a chocolate jop?
Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, it's a candy coated peanut butter candy peanut butter confection.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
What about M and MS? Is that a chocolate chow?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Totally?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
No, it's a candy coated chocolate inside, and then sometimes
there's an additional inner nugget of peanutter. God knows what now.
But originally all kinds of stuff, it was candy coated chocolate.
This is a candy coated peanut butter candy.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
I mean, I know what it is. I just didn't
know if that was the thinnest proximation of chocolate. Nope.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Well, I think we already kind of kicked it over
to house to fork, So that means, of course, everybody,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Hey, guys, Love Love Love Love. The show started listening
when I was working my very first job after graduation
during the pandemic. Spotify kept prompting me to try to
listen to stuff you should know, and I thought the
title was condescending. It first. I truly thought the podcast
would be telling me about the stuff I already should
know at this point in my life, like, oh, here's
how to fold laundry, or here's how to do your taxes.
(50:05):
The joke's on me, though, because I think one of
the first episodes I listened to was about Satanism.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Why don't you know about that? All? Right?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Exactly at this point wherever I started to get into something,
i'd do a quick search on the podcast first to
see if you've covered it before checking out Google. You
two are great teachers to make every single topic of hoot.
So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into
sailing and I saw you.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
I haven't even skimmed the surface.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
I think you should look into sailing guys, because it's
really interesting. Sneak preview. The wind is technically pulling, not
pushing your boat.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah, Buck pester Fuller said, the wind sucks instead of blows.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
See, you can't teach you anything. You know that stuff already.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
You may taught me that, so I got a head
tip her.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah. Well, and he taught her, and he taught us
all about the geodesicdom.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
That's right, and synergy Chuck.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
That's right. Oh all right, that's from Sam and Sam
sailing reeks to me of one of those that we
would flay a little bit at and just get crushed
by sailing enthusiasts.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Yes, but maybe we'll do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Well, yeah, why spare sailors. We've done it for chess players,
European football players, everybody.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Soccer surfers.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Right. If you want to get in touch with this
like Sam did and suggest some topic that you know
about that you'd like us to ruin for you, you
can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and this is Stuff you Should Know one of
our Really, it's been a while top ten editions where
we don't actually do top ten.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah. Some people out there are like, what in the
world are you talking about, And some people are like,
oh my gosh, this reminds me of the old days,
back in the two thousand and oh, I don't know, tens, eights, nine, thirteens.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Oh yeah, thirteen was lousy with top tens, I think.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, we used to do all a lot of these
top well not a lot, but we used to do
top tens from the old House Stuff Works website, and
it seems like they never had ten great entries. So
we would just on the fly say oh, let's not
do this one. But we were better now we're professional. Yeah,
so we got together beforehand and said, well, let's just
do these eight and Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
It feels weird to know ahead of time what we're
not going to do rather than just saying it in
the middle of recording. But I do feel like it
is more professional.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
It's called growth, my friend.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So we are not doing all ten. But there is
one that I think really kind of introduces this concept
out of the gate Chuck and it's concept. Oh oh yeah,
I forgot to talk about the concept. We're talking today
about bad business decisions. And you could call this the
shot and fraud hour, because if you are kind of
(01:38):
if you take a grim view of CEOs and captains
of industry and all that, this is like a chance
to really kind of poke fun at people have made
some really terrible decisions over the years.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Not all great decisions over the years. Sometimes they're bad.
We're here to talk about eight of them.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
But hey, the games you never won are the ones
you didn't start playing in that saying is that it?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I don't know if that's it, but that that totally
makes sense to me. So I'm saying, yes, okay, good,
so you only missed the shots you don't take.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, that's much better than mine, But I like yours.
I undermined our professional spiel at the beginning just now.
So there's a pretty well worn story about how Alexander
Graham Bell invented the telephone and went to Western Union
and said, hey, you captains of Communication, you guys rule
(02:33):
the world as far as long distance communication goes, I've
got this neat invention, why don't you buy it from
me for one hundred thousand dollars? And the heads at
Western Union said, that is ridiculous. Nobody's gonna want this thing.
Hit the bricks, and Alexander Graham Bell just went off
and created his own phone company. And those patents that
he received turned out to be what are widely considered
(02:56):
the most valuable patents ever issued in the United States.
And some pretty valuable patents have been issued like this
is not we're not talking about some also ran patent.
This is the patent of patents, right, you beat up
the squatty potty oh by far, like by twice as
valuable even maybe but probably more so. But it just
(03:17):
kind of goes to show you, like it's easy to
say haha at Western Union. But it also is a
teachable moment, as Oprah would say, because if you dig
into the story, you find that when Alexander Graham Bell
invented the telephone, he didn't invent the telephone so you
and I could pick up a receiver and talk to
(03:37):
one another on either end. He basically invented it to
be the radio. Before radio, the intent was for you
to sit in a room and somebody on the other
end of the telephone line in a different city perform
a play or read a monologue, or play a symphony,
and you were going to sit there and listen. You
weren't supposed to talk back. That was the idea. So
(03:58):
if you put it in that context, yestern Union doesn't
seem so dumb anyway. So I think it's a reminder
to keep in mind in most of these cases, hindsight
is twenty twenty, and that there is a lot of
exacerbating circumstances and that nothing's ever that one sided. But
it's still kind of fun to think about.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, And you know what a great example of that
hindsight being twenty twenty is.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
I'm gonna go with this one is when.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Excite did not buy Google just call it an audible.
Everybody remembers Excite, or you may not, but if it
sounds familiar and you look up the Excite logo, that
you will immediately, probably if you were of a certain age, go, oh, yeah,
I remember Excite. They didn't really stand out to me
(04:46):
when I was researching this until I went and saw
it and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember those guys.
I did not ever use it. But Excite dot com,
believe it or not, is still around and in one
of what will be two a bit of serendipity with
this episode releasing now, Excite is literally ending their email
(05:06):
program this month.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Is it really?
Speaker 4 (05:11):
No?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, because what's funny is I made fun of Emily
up until about a year ago because she's still paid
for a MindSpring email.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
No.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yes, because she's like, I've had.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
This email for twenty years and like everybody's got it
and I can't. Like she was locked in, she felt like,
but she waited it out eventually because I think they
may have stopped supporting it as well.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Oh, but they still kept taking her money, right.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Maybe I don't know. Anyway, Excite. If you go to
Excite dot com today, you will laugh because you will
see what is a very old school looking internet site.
It's like a list of it's a news scroll, like
a list of headlines. It's got these little icons that
I assume they pay to be on there because it's
(05:59):
like Amazon, eBay, State Farm and Casper Mattress like prominent
icons as if this website is the place to go
to get to.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Those other places.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
And then on the left rail you will see a
list of things like email, which of course is going defunct,
a bunch of redirects like weather it goes to acuweather
sports goes to ESPN, and then entertainment, travel, finance, and
games all goes to ask dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Wow, apparently Excite was that's today. I thought Excite turned
into ask dot COMO. Apparently there's separate.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Oh okay, they clearly like each other because they link
four different things to ask dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
And do you know, of course ask dot com started
out as ask jeeves.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Remember that I thought it was. I just couldn't remember
for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So these are search engines. Some of them were Yahoo
apparently categorized the entire Internet by category strangely enough. But
Excite supposedly was a search engine. It just wasn't super good.
And there's a story out there, Chuck that the search
engine was purposefully not super good because these search engines
(07:09):
used to be called web portals. That was, you would
go to Excite first search what you're searching for, and
then hopefully while you were there taking a bunch of ads.
So the longer you stayed on Excite before leaving and
going off into the Internet, the better it was for
Excite's bottom line. So their search wasn't that great. And
that is an explanation from one of the people who
(07:32):
who was part of this deal for why Excite passed
on Google.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Yeah, and they weren't just a search engine.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
They were a they're like what they are today still,
they were an aggregator. They had new scrolls and stuff
like that. It was almost like a a front page
of a newspaper that you would go to.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Right, but a really like super low fi newspaper.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah. So Google comes around. This is nineteen ninety nine
Larry Page and Sarah Gibrinn said, all right, we got
this thing. It's basically like an algorithm essentially at this point,
and we could sell it to you Excite for a
million bucks. And then they balked and they said, all right,
(08:16):
how about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars And they said, no, well,
we're Excite. Why do we need you this weird search
engine that isn't even really a search engine yet? And
I think this is one clear example of hindsight being
twenty twenty because no one could have predicted what Google
would become.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Absolutely not. And so the CEO of Excite, George Bell,
is known as the guy who passed up on buying
Google for less than a million dollars. Right, But he's like, hey, hey, hey,
I'm not some dummy like these guys wanted to gut
Excite search engine and put in the Google search algorithm instead,
And I was dedicated to my engineering team. They had
(08:57):
worked really hard to create the search engine that I
thought was perfectly fine, and I wasn't about to completely
poison our culture for Google. And Google's people said no, Actually,
what happened was we made a bake off between their
search engine and our search in it, and their stuff
came back with terrible stuff. Our stuff came back with
really good stuff, and they were like, this is too good.
(09:17):
People are going to immediately leave Excite, so we don't
want your your algorithm. Those are the two competing stories
for why this didn't happen. Amazing, It is amazing bad
business decisions still though, sure, absolutely all.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Right, where should we go next? We might not even
get to eid everybody. That's how exciting these episodes are
I'm gonna go with Kodak.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was gonna go with Kodak too.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Everyone that grew up in the pre digital revolution remembers
Kodak as the photograph company, the film paper Company, the
film stock company. Founded in eighteen eighty out of New York,
they controlled ninety percent of the film market into the
late seventies and about eighty five percent of the camera
(10:04):
market and employed about sixty thousand people. And in the
mid seventies there was a engineer there named Steve Sassin
who basically figured out digital photography. He was experimenting with
something called a charged couple device a CCD, and he
figured out how to translate an image into ones and
(10:24):
zeros and built the very first digital camera. It was
a one hundred thousand pixel image, which is pretty cute
this point zero one megapixels.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
It's a little grainy.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And went to the bosses and said, hey, like, this
is the future, guys, this is what we should do.
And Kodak said, oh, well, I'm not so sure about that.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So yes, there were some people in Kodek that were like,
this is dangerous man. We're like, our money is in
print photographs. Our money is in regular cameras, and there
was another group in Kodek that was like, this guy's right,
Steve Sassin's right, this is the future. And they did
invest billions of dollars in developing a digital camera whole outfit,
(11:08):
and those conservative forces managed to keep it back, keep
it back, and then finally, by the time Kodak joined
the digital camera revolution, they had been passed by. So
not only did they miss the digital camera revolution despite
having invented it, they also wasted billions of dollars on
their digital camera division that never got to really get
a good start, So it was just a complete waste,
(11:31):
Like this is this is a genuinely bad business decision, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, but they had the disc camera, remember those. Yes,
that was the big Kodak product that was. It wasn't digital,
but it was a little film wheel. It was a
disc and it was a little flat camera. I remember
that was all the rage, so I wanted them.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
It was a very big deal.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I see that now. Yeah, that does kind of take
me back. Yeah, did you have one? No, Fisher Price
made one. Did you have that one?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
No?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, I didn't have either either.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, you and I had similar upbringings. We didn't get
the best toys.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
No, but apparently those Then the early nineties, when digital
cameras came out, they were like one thousand dollars, but
they could only store like eight pictures at a time.
Like you could take eight pictures and then you had
to plug it into your computer and up though those
eight pictures, format the disc and then start over again.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
God, bless you early adopters, but it usually pays, in
my experience, to wait a little bit on the tech
to figure itself out. For sure, like the first flat
screen TVs. Remember how expensive those were?
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Oh my god. But it's the early adopters who drive
the prices down because sure they are buying these things,
you know what I.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Mean, Hey, I mean they walk the righteous path.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
So, just to wrap it all up, Kodak ended up
laying off fifty thousand employees and in twenty twelve they
they filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. And they're still around.
But they basically make printer cartridges and motion picture film stock.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, which is also not used very often anymore. Nope,
poor Kodak, Poor Kodak. Time for break.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I was gonna say the same thing, man, we are
really sympatic of this episode.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
I was going to say that too.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Okay, Chuck, I'm going to pick one and I'm in
the big wheel. Okay, it landed on Western Union against
we're gonna have to go over that one break in.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Okay, okay, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
So Western Union now, we won't do that. Let me
just move at one space to this JC penny one.
How about that?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Ooh all right, I.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Like this one because it really kind of gets to
the bottom of some tricks that clothing retailers use. So
actually all retailers do, but some clothing retailers are particularly
guilty of it.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
That's right. We were talking about the clothier jcpenny, which
in twenty twelve hired a shiny new CEO named Ron Johnson,
who had made quite the name for himself in business
in retail as Two things. First, the guy who hipped
up Target. Oh yes, okay, remember growing up Target was
(14:38):
like whatever Target was not, you know, it's kind of
like a kmart thing. And then all of a sudden
Tarja was like this cool, hip, awesome place is because
of Ron Johnson's efforts largely gotcha. Then he went to
work at Apple, and he is the guy he was
their VP of retail. He's the guy who basically oversaw,
you could say, invented the Apple Store and the Genius
(15:00):
Bar and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Right, Yeah, So I mean like he was legit. J. C.
Penny was like, come save us, Like we're really flagging,
Like even compared to some of these other retailers that
do the same thing, like TJ. Max or Walmart or whatever,
we're getting no love whatsoever. So Ron Johnson came in
and looked around and he's like, this industry is shameful.
(15:22):
Like basically what he'd walked into was an industry of
clothing retailers that would sell items that were say a
ten dollars item for ten dollars, but on the price
tag would it would say that it originally started out
as like fifty dollars or something, right, And yes, at
(15:43):
one point they charged fifty dollars for it, but it
was so that they could later mark it down in
a sale that probably took place the day after that
thing arrived and was sold for fifty dollars. So that
means there were some suckers out there who actually paid
fifty dollars for that ten dollars shirt. But the way
that they got you was by not only marking it down,
but having a reason to mark it down. They would
(16:04):
have sale after sale after sale, hundreds of sales, different
sales in a year, and it still wasn't working. And
Ron Johnson was like, this is desperate and we shouldn't
do this anymore.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, there were coupons even and people, you know, Americans
eat that stuff up. If you hear half off blowout
sale this weekend, your mouth starts water in a little
bit and you think, wait a minute, I can get
something that should cost twice as much for half as much,
or I can bring in this coupon and get two
(16:38):
things for one thing.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's unbelievable, and we still fall.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For these tricks. We all do. So he said, no,
here's what we'll do. We're gonna just basically out ourselves
and say, you know now we're gonna do is it's
called fair and square every day is our new pricing system.
It means you don't need a sale, you don't need
a coupon our stuff. It's just going to be inexpensive
(17:01):
all the time. And people hated it right away. People
started complaining they love their sales, they love their deals.
He would call them on the phone personally. He wouldn't
do that and say, you dummy, don't you understand you're
paying the same price. It's just cheap all the time. Now,
people didn't understand that. They didn't want to hear that.
(17:22):
I saw one person that said that he seemed to
almost have a disdain for his customer base because he
behind closed doors were saying, they're dumb and they need
to be educated, and like, how can these dumb dumbs
not understand that cheaper clothes every day is a better situation?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, because the studies have found that people will pay
more for a cheaper thing if they think it's more valuable.
Then they would pay for the same thing if it
were marked. They would pass up something that was actually
the same thing at a lower price.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And the reason why is because a ten dollars shirt
seems cheap and maybe cheaply made and probably just not
a good But a fifty dollars shirt that you can
buy for ten dollars was valuable to begin with. And
then yes, not only is it a deal, you could
make the case that it's a steal. And people love that.
Like you said, there's a thread, a vein of America
(18:16):
that is crazy for that kind of stuff. And Ron
Johnson found out the hard way that when you go
up against that vein of Americans, you lose every time.
And he lost pretty big in seventeen months.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, I got two words for you, my friend. Outlet mall. Yeah,
that really says it all about America. Yeah, but if
you don't even know how they operate. But it's got
to be something like this with outlet malls, right, very much.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
But also there's a lot of them that are like
crypto outlet malls. They're not outlet stores, they're just regular
stores in an outlet mall. It's b s If you're
a developer of an outlet mall and you're letting stores
in there that are actually not selling their outlet stuff
but there's just a regular store, you're at fault. It's
(19:01):
on your your hands. Blood is on your hands.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
So what this got Ron Johnson was what is known
as the worst quarter in retail history, which was a
store to store thirty two percent drop.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Wow quarter over quarter.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That that's just a death nail for him. He only
made it, I believe seventeen months, and that was it
and they came back in and said, hey, we're gonna
go back to our fake pricing scheme, and people loved it.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
I'm sure Ron Johnson was like, that's all right, thanks
for the multimillion dollar golden parachute at everybody.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah. Oh man, he made He supposedly made like four
or five hundred million dollars in Oh Michael Stock God.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So he didn't even need this job.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
No, I'm sure he just wanted to show all this
loser Americans what the deal was.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
He still got a job.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
He's doing something else like two years after this, like
why is this guy working? Go go retire on your
island or something.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So there's a there was an ad that jac pennyc
came up with like that ran very It was very
short run intentionally, but it basically pleaded for their customers
to come back. They're like, we know we made mistakes,
We're getting back to our roots. We love you, please
come back again. Like they were begging their customers to
(20:17):
come back. And apparently it worked because this is another
common theme that we'll see and I think this is
a good segue into the New Coke debacle. Ooh, when
you take away something that people love but have come
to take for granted. Yeah, they will not only fight
for it, they'll come back for it and droves when
you give it back to them.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
New Coke the end, pretty much. Yeah, So of course
this has got to be in there. If you grew
up in the eighties like we did, you remember a
time where Pepsi threatened Coke a little bit, not literally,
like doctor Pepsi didn't come up to mister Coke's door
and say, listen, I'm going to take you up back
(20:59):
and behind the.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Witch had and take care of you.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Sure, the company threatened Coke because their sales were doing
pretty good.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
It was a different taste. I think it was a
little sweeter.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I don't even drink Pepsi, so I'm not really sure,
but I think it had a sweeter taste. They were
I don't know if they were winning the Coke Wars,
but they are the Cold Wars, but they were. They
were edging in on Coke's dominance.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
It was Chuck. It was that choice of a new
generation campaign. Yeah, that was what had done it. They
got Michael Jackson, they got Madonna, they got I think
Geraldine Ferraro did one of these commercials.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Like, that's advertising goal.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
These were right, These were just internationally famous commercials, and
so PEPSI had kind of come out of nowhere and
was eating Coke's launch.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
All of a sudden, Coke had do caucus big.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Mistake, yeah, dan Quayle.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
So Coke was a little worried.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
They saw their writing on the surpi riding on the wall,
and they said, all right, under the behind closed doors,
let's start rejiggering our our rest here that had been around,
you know, since it was you know, sold in that
very first pharmacy. Very very classic. That's a little hint
of what's to come. Very classic, classic taste. And for
(22:11):
a couple of years they're engineers, mixed up little batches.
They did taste tests, they let people taste them. People
are like, I like the taste of this better. And
so in nineteen eighty five and April of eighty five,
New Coke came out with a redesign, can redesign. You know,
they kept their colors and stuff, and the I'm not
(22:32):
sure if did the font completely change or was it
just sort of a modified version of the old script.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
I think the new was slightly different, but the Coke
was the original.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Okay, but at any rate, they unveiled new coke and
it was a tremendous not only a tremendous flop, but
it costs a lot of anger and people hoarding their
old coats, and people were just like, how can you
change an American institution like this without even asking anybody?
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Even though they had done testing.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
They had done tons of testing, and the test came
back roundly in favor of this new formula for coke.
But Malcolm Gladwell and his book Blink apparently pointed out
that if you're doing it tastes tests, you're not sitting
there drinking a whole can. You're just taking a little
sip of something and comparing it to the sip of
something else. And so it's possible that that new coke
(23:26):
really tasted terrible if you drank the whole can. It
was too sweet. The explanations I saw were more that
it was psychological. People didn't like messing with their beloved
coke number one, And I saw that kind of wrapped
up in a quote from somebody that was that they
said the biggest mistake Coke made was telling the public
(23:47):
about the change to the recipe. Because people were like,
you can't mess with my stuff. I don't care what
it tastes like. And of course it's not going to
possibly taste good because you're messing with my original coke.
So people just kind of turned on it from the outside.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Well, like they think they should have just changed the
recipe and just left it and not said anything.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
This guy was saying, if you're going to change the recipe,
they shouldn't have said anything, because that happens from time
to time. But then the bigger problem was that you
kind of touched on. They didn't stop and ask their customers,
do you want a new coke? They they just made
a terrible business decision based on fear of PEPSI getting
(24:27):
some of their market share. All of a sudden, they
went and completely rejiggered the formula. That was their response
to that.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah, and it didn't last long. It was less than
three months later, a new coke was gone and they
added Classic Coca Cola Classic I remember, and I didn't
even drink a lot of soda back then, even but
I remember it being just almost like this nationwide relief
setting in. It was really a big deal, and it
(24:56):
sounds so funny now if you're some kid who had
you know, didn't live through this. It really like it
was big, big news and sort of captured America's attention
for a little while. And Coke Classic coming back was
like an old, long lost friend reappearing at the front door.
And eventually, of course, the word classic was dropped and
they were just like, can we just forget about all
(25:16):
of that and we're just Coke forever?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
But they lasted for a while. There was many years
where you differentiated by saying Coke Classic. Even after New
Coke was long gone, you still referred to Coke as
Coke Classic for a while, and then it finally went
back to Coke.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
I had to do it?
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Uh, is it time for another message? Break?
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Okay? Chuck said, sure, all right, Chuck, you're up. What's next?
(26:05):
What are we going to do next?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Well, my amigo, we are gonna go with the Blockbuster video.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Oh yeah, this is my favorite, I said, another boy.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
The eighties was pretty rough on some companies that didn't
see the riding on the wall because Blockbuster. You grew
up in the seventies and eighties, well, you know, if
you're a teenager at least in the eighties by that time.
You spent a lot of time, We've talked about it before,
browsing your early Friday evenings with your friends at Blockbuster Video,
looking over over those shelves, reading the back of those boxes,
(26:40):
the backs of the boxes, and standing by the door
at that bin because you just could not get your
copy of Excalibur. And some nerd walks up and dumps
it through the slot and he grab it before it
even hits that bin, and the employee says, you really
not supposed to do that.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
That was a great Blockbuster employee question.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
You do it anyway, And block Buster ruled the video
market except for you know the which I still love
that the charming mom and pops I had a Oh yeah,
this family at our church even ran their own little
video store and that was a good business for a while,
but Blockbuster eventually would gobble most of those up.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah, to me, Blockbuster was the nineties thing. The eighties
were mom and pop places where you'd actually rent the
VCR when you also rented Beverly Hills.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Cop Yeah, video Shock, your video house, Yeah, video Barn.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
And there's just asn't a side. I wonder I want
to know if anybody out there knows what the name
of this phenomenon is. But whenever I walked into a Blockbuster,
that whole mental list of movies that I wanted to
rent just vaporized.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yea, and I like the test taker syndrome.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
It would be like I had just walked into a
building for the first time, let alone, like a Blockbuster video,
like I had no idea what I was doing, totally
in over my head, and I would invariably walk out
with some movie that I just didn't really want to see,
but I got to rent something, and I okay, yeah,
pretty much. I spared myself that one. But yes, that's
generally correct.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
So you and then you get home and you're like, man,
I went in there for gleaming the Cube and I
walk out with Turner and Hooche.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
That's exactly right. That was kind of the wrap up
of it, wasn't it that that you remember after you
get back home. It's the worst or it was the worst.
It would be still the worst if Blockbuster were around,
But it's not because of bad business decisions.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
That's right. If you remember in the late nineties, that
was a company called Netflix that said, hey, we're going
to start mailing DVDs to people, so you don't have
to go to the store. You can get on this
thing called the internet and you can look up the
movie you want, and you can order that DBD to
be shipped to your house and then you can just
drop it in the mail afterward. We failed to mention,
(28:45):
by the way, I didn't know this Blockbuster was making
about half a billion dollars a year in late fees.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Man, they were that was unconsonable.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
That was a big part of their business.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
But Netflix is like in those late fees, like you
can keep these things for a long time, and they
would eventually say, but you know what, maybe we should
try And I think there was a merger idea right
unless of a sale.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
What do you mean or oh? With with Netflix.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Were they trying to merge with Blockbuster and say, hey,
why don't you let us take over and start doing
mailing stuff for you as well?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, that was the impression I had that Netflix wanted
to kind of slide in and become part of Blockbuster
and help Blockbuster do its own thing. And Blockbuster said
no twice at.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Least Yeah for fifty million bucks, by the way.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, And Netflix, by the way, has valued at about
two hundred billion today, so fifty million dollars was pretty
pretty good price. And that's not just because Netflix was
an unknown. Netflix had already shown that it was a
proven success, but it hadn't been around long enough for
Blockbuster to see the riding on the wall. They just thought.
I think John any Coco Antioko, the CEO, considered not
(29:53):
just Netflix niche, but the Internet was still niche in
two thousand to this ceo. So Netflix Ogden went on
their merry way, and Blockbusters just started to fall further
and further and further behind.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah. I was actually a member of the Blockbuster DVD
mailing program when they finally got around to copying Netflix.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Really.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah, I didn't jump on Netflix. I was like a
Blockbuster loyalist. I was like, I'm gonna use their thing
because it's the same basically, uh huh, And I don't
I think maybe eventually when Blockbuster stopped, I did jump
to Netflix DVD.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
But I mentioned in the first one of the first
segments that there was a bit of serendipity, two bits
of serendipity that Excite finished their email program this month.
Netflix this week just announced the shutdown of their DVD side.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I know that's what prompted this episode.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh I'm not falling for that again. Twenty five years
of those DVD mailings, they just shut it down. They said,
they said that you can send them back up until
September twenty eighth, and after that, we're not going to ask,
which basically means keep what you got.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
And not only that, but to liquidate their DVDs, they
were they're selecting random customers and they're just sending them
ten DVDs oh wow, and saying like, here have fun.
Apparently er point five percent of their revenue these days,
and just quickly to go over their moneys. They Netflix
is a rough company to be invested in. I think
(31:22):
I don't know much about this stuff, but they in
November twenty one, they peaked at about three hundred and
two billion. The next summer they crashed all the way
down to like eighty something billion, I think three hundred
and then now we're back up at like one eighty.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah. I think that was when they they like basically
doubled their their streaming fee, their monthly fee to stream.
Everybody was like, forget to you. And then people come back,
all right. So you were saying that Netflix was giving
away their DVDs because they knew they need them, right, Great,
that's such a wonderful thing to do. Blockbuster did the
(32:01):
opposite of that, and I saw that it was very
famously described as failing at failing because as it was
clear that Blockbuster was doomed, and it was clear for
years before anybody, actually before the last Blockbuster closed, rather
than basically pumping all the money out to shareholders, which
apparently is what a sociopathic corporation's supposed to do, they
(32:24):
brought a succession of CEOs and to try to save
the place, and those CEOs just spent hand over fist
money that they wasted on these schemes that did nothing
but waste money for Blockbuster to try to resurrect the brand.
And then finally, after I think bankruptcy in twenty ten,
it was bought for a song I don't even think
it was a good song by Dish and they're still
(32:47):
Blockbuster now. Dish is one of their on demand groups
of channels is called Blockbuster at Home. So Blockbuster's still around, Chuck.
If you're a Blockbuster loyalist, get yourself dish and you
can watch on demand movies through Blockbuster at home.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
It was was it the song Escape?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
That's a bad song?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
What song is that?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
If you like aka the Pina Colada song.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Oh, that song is not only bad, it's morally reprehensible.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
It's awful. And I just pointed this out to a
group of friends this last summer who liked it, including Emily.
I was like, you've never listened to the words of
this song. Yeah, She's like, well, not really. I know
the chorus. I said. It's about a guy that wants
to cheat on his wife's so bad because he can't
stand her that he puts a want ad to go
find some new lady and he hits it off with
her and it turns out being his wife.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, and they He's like, great things are fixed.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, exactly, man, because in the seventies that's all you needed.
That in a little uh, you know, a bottle of
I don't know, baccardy and some pills.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
That's right. The seventies were great, but the people in
the seventies were the worst.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
All right, we got two more, which you're gonna pick?
I know which one you're gonna pick.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
You do not. All right, yes you do, let's go
ahead and pick it for me.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
We have well you're probably you're probably gonna say, Et,
that's right, And.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Technically we have three left if you want to go
for it. But okay, do we have three?
Speaker 3 (34:16):
M h what else are we missing?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I can't say it'll ruin the surprise.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Well, we agree not to do that one though, you
want to do it again?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
No, No, we didn't do the AOL time Warner one.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Oh eh, okay, let's get that.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
There is one thing I wanted to say about that,
all right. At the time, in nineteen ninety nine, AOL
was worth two hundred billion dollars, and I was like, Wow,
that's a lot. How much is Apple worth these days?
In twenty twenty three, Apple's worth two and three quarter
trillion dollars? Wow, trillion dollars, that's how much that company
(34:50):
is worth. More than one trillion dollars, almost three trillion dollars.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
And this is twenty four years later. That's that's how
gobsmackingly much like just money has increased by then by now,
So I just wanted to point that out. It's just insane,
all right.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Well, ET, the movie.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Oh, one other thing. I want to go on record
that we should do an episode on AOL and the
beginning of the Internet because it is so interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
I mean talking about Excite and AOL. And I remember
the first time I heard the word Google.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I literally remember that very first time.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, you remember, I used to say, like I'm feeling lucky.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
It was a production manager named Kevin Edge. If anyone
knows kevinun til Kevin had said Hi. He in a
production office on a TV commercial in LA in the
early early two thousands. He said the word Google and
I went what And he went, It's a search engine.
And I went, excuse me, Kevin, Kevin was great.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Did you say you mean a web portal?
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
E T.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Colon the Extra Terrestrial. Very popular movie, some might say
some I'd say it's a classic. Some might say that
they still love Reese's Pieces because of that classic movie. Yes,
so I said Reese's Pieces, I think, but you know
what I mean?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, to me, that might be the greatest mass produced
candy of all time. Oh what, I love Reese's Pieces.
I can eat them by the by the bucket full.
Unfortunately of them too, and they've but they've only been
around since nineteen seventy eight. Did you know that?
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yeah, I mean I remember when they came out, my friend.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Okay, I was not quite aware. I was two years
old at the time, give me a break, but I
came seven. I was Candy Central, right, Yeah, exactly so.
But yeah, by the time I was seven, I was like,
give me these things. Yeah, in nineteen seventy eight when
they came out, they actually did pretty good. Hershey's made them,
and then they crested and peaked and then started to
(36:50):
decline really quickly, and so Reese's Pieces appeared to have
run their course. And people say quite reasonably that it's
possible Reese's Pieces wouldn't be around anymore were it not
for Et eating Reese's Pieces on screen. And the irony
of the whole thing is that it was originally supposed
(37:10):
to be Eminem's, and Eminems wouldn't bite. They said, we
don't know what this ET thing is. We're not going
to give you a dollar for it.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
ET was based on a book.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
There's either somebody describe it as a novelization. So it's
possible that they made a book version of it.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah, that's what it was.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Okay, Well, in that apparently in the original novel that
was made from the movie, it's Eminem's that et eats,
not Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Oh okay, that's a nice little nugget. I read the
novelization of Raiders at the Lost Ark.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
How was it?
Speaker 3 (37:43):
It was great?
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Did it differ from the movie at all? Or was
it just basically the movie and book form?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
It is the movie and book form. But there's novelizations.
I read a couple of them back then. They're always
a little bit different, and they had extra details because
it's a book, and it was kind of fun. I'm
sure they still do that, don't they.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
I think so maybe probably. I'm sure Marvel does. If
you can make a dime off of it, Marvel does.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
So depending on who you talk to, there are different stories.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I think this is one of those things where when
something works out so well, everybody you interview later on
was like, it was really kind of my idea, because
Steven Spielberg is I saw the interview. The words came
out of his mouth that he said, you know, my
favorite candy was Eminem's, And so I thought when Eminem's passed,
(38:33):
I thought, well, what's my second favorite can candy. It's
Reese's Pieces. I saw other things say it was one
of Spielberg's kids say that was his favorite. I saw
others that said there was this guy named Steve Adler
who was the vice president of merchandising for a company
called MCA, the Merchandising Corporation of America, which was a
(38:57):
subsidiary of Universal, And it was kind of like the
early days of moving merchandising period, like Star Wars kind
of busted it wide open a few years before. Oh yeah,
so this is sort of a newish thing and like
brand placement and getting money for that kind of thing.
So Steve Adler was a merchandising VP at MCA, and
he says that it was his kid who said.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
I love Reese's Pieces, and that kid was me exactly.
So that's how it ended up. Like Hershey said no, sorry,
Eminem Mar said no, we're not gonna We're not gonna
spend a million dollars. That was the deal. Universal said
this this alien that everybody's gonna love. We're just sure
of it is going to eat either Eminem's or Reese's pieces.
(39:41):
It comes down to who wants to pay a million
dollars in advertising, like spend a million dollars in marketing
in return for basically being part of the ET marketing blitz.
Who wants to do that? And Eminem said, no, we're
not going to do that, and Reese's said, let's give
this a try. There was There's a guy named Jack
(40:02):
Dout who is a business development VP, who was basically
the person who decided to take that risk and spend
a million dollars, which at the time there's a lot
of money. We're talking about nineteen eighty eighty one eighty
two dollars, so it's worth like two and a half
million dollars today at least. And like ET is, this
(40:23):
is where the hindsight is twenty twenty thing kicks in.
Like they didn't see a script. Nobody knew what ET was.
Aliens up to that point were not lovable or huggable.
They were creepy and weird. So there really was a
risk that Jack daw took and he can take a
victory lap for making that decision.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, and ET is.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
You know, the rest is history, as they say, because
ET is now a top thirty all time grocer domestically
for the United States the Green Grocer. I went down
the box office Mojo rabbit hole out of curiosity because
it's just littered with avatars and Avengers and stuff like
(41:03):
that and e t if you kind of dig in.
It is the number two all time movie that is
not a franchise movie. Nice, so not bad, second only
to Titanic. Oh, okay, and guess what, Barbie's already at
number fifteen all time.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I know that's pretty great and then amazing. I finally
saw Oppenheimer too. My god, it's a good movie.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, how are your ears?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
They're fine. I saw it in like RBX or RPX
or DMX or something like that, where like it shakes
the seats and everything. I'm like, this is unnecessary.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
It's loud.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah. Also, just for you movie trivia buffs, if someone
asked you a trivia question about non franchise box office Titanic,
then et and the number three all time movie non franchise.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
Passion of the Christ.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
What Yeah, Wow, big movies like three hundred and something
million bucks.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
But that's I mean, that's considering it even was boycotted
by lots of churches around the world, and that still
made that mon Well, maybe why no publicity. No, there's
such a thing as bad publicity.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
The swings you don't take are the ones that you
missed the most.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
All right, let's finish up here with a little quick
we'll go through this quickly. Monday night football set the
TV landscape for you. In the nineteen sixties, there were
three main networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. ABC was in
last place. There was also a fledgling network from Howard Hughes,
(42:36):
which I didn't realize called Hughes Sports Network.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
That was ahead of his time, very.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Much ahead of his time, and even though they showed
like bully and stuff. But at one point the National
Football League decided, you know what, there's Pete Roseus, a
commissioner back then, very forward thinking guy. He said, I
think we should have a prime time football game. How
about Friday night? And they said, no, that'll mess up
(43:01):
high school football. And he said Saturday night and they
said no, there's actually a law against that because college football.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
I forgot about that.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
So he said, all right, we already played on Sunday.
He said, how about Monday night and they said, no,
one's going to care. They played the first Monday night
game in nineteen sixty four, but it was not televised,
and then they had I think CBS and NBC had
because CBS had the NFL, NBC had the AFL before
(43:31):
the merger in nineteen seventy, and they each tried their
hand at Monday night games a couple each during sixty eight,
sixty seven through sixty nine, but none of those are televised,
and they finally got together and said, these things need
to be on TV.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, so they started putting them on TV. And apparently
one of the reasons why is because you said, you know,
some of those Monday night games, the early ones weren't televised,
but people still went to them. They turned out like aces.
So it was very obvious that there was a market
for this, so putting it on TV wasn't It was
not a no brainer. It was still very risky, but
(44:08):
there was there was reason to think it might take off.
So I think CBS and NBC, since they already had
a relationship with the NFL, they got first first refusal
from Peter Roselle. Yeah, and NBC said that would mean
we're preempting Carson and apparently we're too afraid to even
bring it up. So no, we're passing on that.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
No, Carson, have you killed?
Speaker 2 (44:30):
CBS said, are you crazy? We're getting great ratings with
the Doris Day Show and laughing, we can't, we can't
get rid of those for some football game. And ABC
just was like, you know that that nerdy kid in
class that has their hand up so high it's about
to be dislocated from their shoulder and they're just waggling
in their seat. That's what ABC was doing. And finally
(44:50):
Peter Roselle is like, guess ABC, you can have it.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
That's right, and uh, you know it turned out to
be a very big deal.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
There's a guy named Rune Hardly there that kind of
spearheaded this project for ABC Sports flashio graphics, more cameras,
more camera angles and slow mo and stuff like that,
like using all this sort of newer technology more than
they had before.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
You have to say, and.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
The biggest chain, man, if you could hold that for
the next three minutes. The biggest change was they all
of a sudden had three a three person broadcasting team,
which had never been done. It was always just a
color commentator and a play by play person, but in
this case they had the play by play guy and
Keith Jackson only there for one year, then replaced by
(45:41):
Frank Gifford, and then Dandy Don Meredith was the color guy.
Very he was an actor, former Cowboys, QB. Handsome, just
great in the color position.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
And then people who don't know what you're talking about,
what the color position is?
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Oh, well, the play by play is the is the
person that goes. And then he takes the ball on
the four yard line and cuts it outside and runs
it down to the three tackled hard by number eighty five.
And then the color guy comes in and says, I
gotta tell you, man, the way they're playing tonight, it
looks like they're pretty inspired. I don't know if the
cheerleaders are getting them all pumped up or what.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Oh that's great. Okay, Then who was Cosel?
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Well, Cosell was Cosell. He was. We should do a
full podcast on him. The guy is a is a legend,
an amazing broadcaster. You know, was fired in disgrace at
one point. But yeah, quite quite a story. But Cosell
was just he he was sort of a cerbic and
he would make fun of players and people and teams and.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Oh he was the Dennis for mill Time.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Well much better.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But you know, Cossel was very famous for sort of
verbally sparring with Ali and going toe to toe with
Ali in interviews, and just a great broadcaster while he
was doing his job, and he was the third sort
of wild card, and he and Don Meredith would go
at it and when when Gifford came in, that was
really a solid team and they it was a huge hit.
(47:07):
I think it's still one of the highest rated TV
series period on television.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yes, and it's one of the longest running too, although
it started in nineteen seventy, right.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Yeah, did we even say what day was it was?
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, it was a Monday in nineteen seventy It was.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
The Browns Jets and the Browns won thirty one twenty one,
I know that.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
And it's been going ever since then. So this thing's
been on for fifty three years, but it's it's a
baby compared to some of the longest running TV shows
in America. General Hospital started in nineteen thirty six, Guiding
Light came the year after. Sesame Street's been on even longer.
So it's old, but there's older just f yi, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
For sure, and it bears pointing out The reason they
went with the Jets was because the guy from ABC
was like, we have to get Joe Namath on TV
for this first game, because Joe Namath was a huge
football star with the AFL and then when they merged
in the NFL and just a huge presence. He was
(48:11):
a sex symbol.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
And a Brady Bunch.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
It was like he and Burt Reynolds were like the
two hot guys of the moment and they had to
get Namoth in there.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
So that's why they went with the Jets.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Smart, Well, you got anything else, I got nothing else?
What's our episode on Monday Night football? Everybody? So if
you want to know more about all this stuff, we
would say head on over to How Stuff Works. You
can read the mystery one we left out. And by
the way, this was written by our very own Dave Ruse,
So hats off Troy Ruse for that. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
We just have to email Dave separately and make fun
of him for calling Reese's Pieces peanut butter and chocolate candies.
Yeah that was or not?
Speaker 2 (48:50):
That was written by somebody who's clearly never had Reese's Pieces.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
I mean, technically you make and say that candy shell
is Nope.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Chocolate, Nope, not at all. There's not a drop of
chocolate in Reese's pieces.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Well, I don't mean the ingredients, but is it? I mean,
isn't it known as a chocolate jop?
Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, it's a candy coated peanut butter candy peanut butter confection.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
What about M and MS? Is that a chocolate chow?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Totally?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
No, it's a candy coated chocolate inside, and then sometimes
there's an additional inner nugget of peanutter. God knows what now.
But originally all kinds of stuff, it was candy coated chocolate.
This is a candy coated peanut butter candy.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
I mean, I know what it is. I just didn't
know if that was the thinnest proximation of chocolate. Nope.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Well, I think we already kind of kicked it over
to house to fork, So that means, of course, everybody,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Hey, guys, Love Love Love Love. The show started listening
when I was working my very first job after graduation
during the pandemic. Spotify kept prompting me to try to
listen to stuff you should know, and I thought the
title was condescending. It first. I truly thought the podcast
would be telling me about the stuff I already should
know at this point in my life, like, oh, here's
how to fold laundry, or here's how to do your taxes.
(50:05):
The joke's on me, though, because I think one of
the first episodes I listened to was about Satanism.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Why don't you know about that? All? Right?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Exactly at this point wherever I started to get into something,
i'd do a quick search on the podcast first to
see if you've covered it before checking out Google. You
two are great teachers to make every single topic of hoot.
So imagine my dismay when I started getting back into
sailing and I saw you.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
I haven't even skimmed the surface.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
I think you should look into sailing guys, because it's
really interesting. Sneak preview. The wind is technically pulling, not
pushing your boat.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah, Buck pester Fuller said, the wind sucks instead of blows.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
See, you can't teach you anything. You know that stuff already.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
You may taught me that, so I got a head
tip her.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah. Well, and he taught her, and he taught us
all about the geodesicdom.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
That's right, and synergy Chuck.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
That's right. Oh all right, that's from Sam and Sam
sailing reeks to me of one of those that we
would flay a little bit at and just get crushed
by sailing enthusiasts.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Yes, but maybe we'll do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Well, yeah, why spare sailors. We've done it for chess players,
European football players, everybody.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Soccer surfers.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Right. If you want to get in touch with this
like Sam did and suggest some topic that you know
about that you'd like us to ruin for you, you
can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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