October 21, 2021 • 46 mins
Harry Houdini was a master magician. He was also a movie star. And an inventor. And an aviator. Listen and learn all about the late great illusionist.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio because I am, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck, Brian over there,
and Jerry's here. She's invisible but here. And this is
(00:22):
the Mystery Magic Podcast hour a k A. Stuff you
should know. I feel like we haven't covered much magic
related stuff, have we not nearly enough? Oh? Yeah, you
into it? Yeah? I find it interesting for sure. Um,
and I think magicians are pretty cool people typically. Um. Yeah,
(00:43):
you know Toby, our friend Toby he um he and
I were talking about um working on a magic podcast,
kind of like a magic skeptics podcast, a couple of
his good friends, and they're just they're just cool dudes,
chill people, interesting, very witty, sharp, not pink boys at all.
(01:04):
You guys should totally do that. This is years and
years ago, said that Chip. Well, he's a big movie producer. Now, yeah,
that's magic podcast. No, thank you. Well, I'm glad to
know that you found some cool magicians. Yeah, are you
not familiar with cool magicians? No? I mean the magicians
I know about are decidedly uncool. Oh, I see, like
(01:27):
Ben Stiller and arrested Development instiller and arrested Development. Yeah
he was Job's rival. Oh right, you know, I forgot
about that kind of a white snake thing going on.
I think I'm thinking mainly about the time I went
to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and I felt
like one of the cooler people there, which is unusual. Okay,
(01:49):
full of a lot of people. I don't mean like
fonds cool. I mean cool in the in the fact
that they're like interesting, they are sharp, they're quitted. Uh. Um,
they will take your wallet from you if you're not careful.
That kind of cool, you know what I mean? Okay?
Was Judini cool? Uh? In a lot of ways? He
(02:10):
was very cool? Um, the band in a lot. No,
that's pretty they were very cool. Um in a lot
of ways. I think he was cool in some other ways.
He wasn't necessarily super cool. But I think overall you
could say, yes, Houdini was cool in the sense that
a good magician is cool. Yeah. This is one of
(02:30):
those guys where I did a little digging to see
if if we needed a like, see if he was
some monster in his personal life. I didn't see anything
like that. I think he was a pretty intense guy
and maybe and I'm sure a man of the time,
but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me. Uh.
And we should mention big thanks to boy a bunch
(02:51):
of things. History dot com, Smithsonian Magazine which is always great,
PBS New Yorker, and of course the great Harry Houdini
dot com. Yes, there's also a couple of other sites
that I got some stuff from, like, um, wild About
Harry is a good Houdini site, And there's this, Uh,
there's this some documentary series by a site called Timeline,
(03:14):
and the one I saw was hosted by Alan Davies.
It's called Life and Magic of the Real Harry Houdin
and Houdini and it was just like this, you know,
hour long, pretty cool little documentary. I thought it was
very neat. I got like good info from that too.
It's on YouTube too. Well. I was, Uh, I was
into Houdini when I was a kid for a short time,
(03:34):
and I think that it was probably just because it
was a short time where I was, And I think
a lot of kids go through a magic phase, uh,
whether it's going to a trick shop and getting a
fake deck or learning your first dumb little card trick
that's not very good, but you think it's awesome. It's
just something that I feel like almost every kid goes
through a brief little magic phase and sometimes it sticks
(03:56):
and you become super cool. Evidently that's right, exactly. So there,
I saw a couple of things that seemed to support
that he wasn't a monster by the way, chuck Um.
One of them was that he would go to like, um,
the children's ward in hospitals and perform magic for the
kids and beat them up take their money. Yeah. But
I mean, like, if you think about it, that's not
(04:17):
something that just anybody does, you know, Like that's that's
time he could be do spending doing something else. Um.
He was like almost almost pathologically devoted to his mother
m making sure that she was well taken care of.
I think also one of the I saw that that
was like a possibly a driver of his ambition as well,
(04:39):
that he wanted to be Mom's favorite, an impressor more
than any of his siblings because he was one of six. Yeah,
and also that his father was never much of his success,
which will get to and I think I think those
are definitely the big drivers. But he himself called himself
a mom's boy, like he used those two words together. Yeah. Yeah.
There's a famous picture of him with his his wife
(05:00):
Bess and his mother and he's got like his arms
around both of them and he calls them my two
girls or my two sweethearts or something like that. So
I mean, like, I know, hats off the best for
being like, all right, let's go with it. We're gonna
go with it. I'm definitely not gonna try to probably
that one LuSE it's not gonna work. So we're just
gonna go with it. And I say, good for her,
(05:21):
all right, Well should we get into it. Yeah, let's
because you said something about his father, and I think
that that's an important thing to understand about Houdini um
from the get go, is that he was essentially born
into poverty and it just got worse as he got
older because his father was a rabbi, and if there
is such a thing, his father was a failed rabbi.
He couldn't make it as a rabbi. I know that was.
(05:44):
I was surprised to see that because all like everywhere
I looked, it would continually say like, boy's dad just
couldn't make the rabbi. Racket work, and I kind of,
I don't know, I kind of naively assumed that if
you were sort of giving up a life of trying
to a make you know, money as a capitalist for
a living by going to the church and being a
(06:06):
steward of the church, then you would at least do Okay,
you'd think so. But I think that means that he
was so charmless he couldn't even muster up a congregation
to to to surround him. So he was a hard
luck kind of guy. And as a result, Harry uh
was was raised in poverty, had to go to work
from a very young age, and also like missed out
(06:27):
on a formal education as a result too, And so
those things kind of converge to also, I think kind
of drive him to prove himself that yeah, maybe he
didn't go to school and maybe he was born poor,
but he could still be a superstar, he could still
amaze people, he could still be um idolized. Basically. Yeah.
His his dad's name was Meyer Weiss, his mom was
(06:50):
Cecilia Steiner Wights, and he was born Eric E. H
R I C. H Viights in March of eighteen seventy
four in Hungary. Uh In Budapest, but he when he
was four, he came over and joined the family in Wisconsin,
and his dad did manage to have a small congregation
(07:10):
in Wisconsin, I think in Appleton and Uh they changed
immigration officers changed the name to Vice with two s
is instead of an s z, and Eric went by
Airy E h R I E. The only reason I
mentioned Airy is because that comes into play later when
he takes on the name Harry is sort of an
Americanized version of that name. So that's where the Harry
(07:34):
came from. Um. Yes, he uh, he was. He started
working I think uh and when he was still single digits,
but he started performing also around the same time too.
When he was nine, he made his debut as a
trap He's artist, Eric the Prince of the Air nice
and he was always a rather short stature. I think
(07:54):
he topped out at five point five ft five inches
five point five um, but he was extremely fit. He
decided early on that he wanted to be very athletic
as much as he could be, so he really like
he was doing things like you know, when he moved
to New York a few years later. Um, he was
doing things like running five miles around Central Park every day,
(08:16):
which is super commonplace today, but you know in the
eighteen late late nineteenth century, that was weird. Yeah. I mean,
like god knows what kind of shoes he was wearing
for that kind of thing, but he would do that
kind of stuff. So he was short of stature, but
also very athletic um self taught to Yeah. So, like
you said, they eventually landed in New York um after
(08:38):
you know, his again, Rabbi Weiss was not doing so well,
so he was kind of always on the move trying
to find somebody to listen to him, and they eventually
get to New York and in eighteen nine one, which
would have been uh, what's the math there? S sixteen
is seventeen ish. We were trying to figure out before Ghostbusters,
(09:00):
no no, I was trying to figure out how old
he was. Uh, he's like sixty or seventeen when he
teamed up with this buddy, Jacob Himan. I'm sorry him,
himman him, Why did that look weird on the paper?
You may be having a stroke. I hope not. The
brothers Houdini is what they called themselves, and Harry again
(09:22):
is what he went by because of Airy and then
as far as Judini goes, his favorite French magician's last
name was Robert Houdin, so he threw an eye on there,
and all of a sudden, he's Harry Hudini for evermore. Yeah,
I think so. I saw in that documentary that somebody
told him that adding an eye to a name in
French means that you're saying you're like that person. So
(09:45):
he was saying Hohodini, like he's like Hudin Houdin hudan
Um who was his idol for at least while he's
growing up. And then apparently later on he kind of
turned on him and exposed all of his secrets after
the guy had died, which was actually not cool. It
not cool. And there I think there was also a
tradition of the eye name on those kind of acts
(10:05):
like yes, but I think he may have started that.
Oh really, I'm not sure, but he was the blond
niece and right right, um, I think as far as
magic goes, he may have been the the originator of
that because I saw some of like one of his
other um uh contemporaries who who helped kind of train
him was last name Heller. There was a haller like
(10:28):
there was no other eyes that I saw interesting. Yeah, alright,
so he kicked off the big eye crazy that's still
going crazy today. It is the iPhone. Um. So he
I think his dad died in Uh. Harry is eighteen
at this point, and he does a very unusual thing
and that he actually leaves his mom behind along with
(10:51):
his brothers, which was a big deal for him, like
you said, because he was a self professed mama's boy.
And he took off on the road doing his act
kind of through New York, through the mid West. I
was doing okay, he was performing kind of all around.
It was a bit of a grind, uh with with
Hyman still sounds weird and not because of what you think. Uh.
And then eighteen ninety four, his younger brother replaced him
(11:14):
in just for a short while, because later that year
he would meet eighteen year old Brooklyn Knight to name
the villamina Beatrice Ronner or Bess, and she became his
magic partner. And you know, they called him assistants. She
would have been the one on stage, you know, looking
pretty and doing all the flourishes. And it's a tradition
(11:37):
and magic that I know, I don't want to use
word problematic, but it has changed in more recent years. Yeah,
but this is at the time when a magician's assistant
was a lady in a bathing suit. Yeah, basically, and
and Best was no exception to that, although if you
read some of the descriptions of some of the illusions
and tricks that they did together, she was just as
(12:00):
much a magician in her own right as he was. Um,
she definitely got her training from him. I think he
discovered her in a singing troupe. Um. But like like
she grew to be just as adapt at magic and
sleight of hand as her husband, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
It's interesting the things that have become boys clubs over
the years, and like magic is definitely one of them.
(12:23):
It's I mean that's changed a lot over the years,
but it always I mean, going to the Magic Castle
and you're in, you're mainly going to see male performers
and a bunch of old man dressed in suits. Uh,
it's just a fund It odd that it's something that
maybe just appeals to young boys. I don't know. My
sister wasn't into magic, and my brother and I were so,
but there's something too much of that is just like
(12:44):
the gender norms and expectations of society where it wasn't
like presented to your sister in a way that it's like, hey,
isn't this interesting? Like everything else. Yeah, there was a
documentary I saw. I'm sure I mentioned it before, um
years ago, about these like up and coming teenage magicians
who are all trying to make their way through competitions
(13:05):
to the Magic Castle to like a grand showcase, and
they follow these ones. There were there was at least
one girl that I remember, and she was good. Um,
but I mean she must have been thirteen fourteen at
the time and have been into it for years. So
clearly there's something you know that appeals to some girls too,
even if it's not directed towards them. He has a
(13:27):
great documentary. You gotta see it. And by the way,
since we're speaking of documentaries, you have of course seen
Love on the Spectrum, have you not? No, you recommended
that a few weeks ago. Just we'll just stop. I'm
gonna I'll give you about six hours. Okay, you just
go watch and we'll come back and finish recording. Okay,
all right, Well, then another three weeks you can bring
(13:48):
it up again. You you just have to see it. Okay,
I'll see it. It's like again, I'm giving you a
gift here. Oh did you make it? No? No, just
telling you about it as a gift as what I'm
and say. It's that sweet. Alright, well everyone watch Love
on the Spectrum and we're going to take a break
and we're going to talk about Houdini's eventual success right
(14:08):
after this. Alright, so we got Houdini, we got best together,
(14:32):
and now things can begin in earnest and they kind
of pick up together where what Houdini had started, which
was very small little venues, sometimes a side show UM,
sometimes a museum like a P. T. Barnum type museum.
If they were lucky, um, they were just kind of
there almost part of the woodwork or the furniture um
(14:54):
with other stuff going on. They weren't doing actual shows.
And if they were doing a show, it was a
small act in a larger circus. And it was a
grind from what I understand. Yeah, I mean travel back
then was not as still a grind, but it definitely
wasn't fun and they were on the road all the time.
(15:14):
And then finally in they met a man named Martin
Beck who was a big name and a big up
and comer in the vaudeville scene, which at the time,
I mean you think of vaudeville now is like these
kind of little shows, But at the time that was
kind of the peak of the touring world and the
live theater world. If you were doing vaudeville, that was
(15:36):
that was sort of top of the pops. And he
saw them perform in St. Paul, Minnesota and was really
knocked out. He did this one of his handcuff escapes.
And he also took these challenges. He was very famous
for people saying, hey, can you do this? Can you
get out of the ease? And uh it really you know.
He would do this in public and it would help
like promote his brand basically and get a lot of press.
(15:59):
And he was challenged with a pair of handcuffs from
Beck and he got out of those and Beck said, kid,
you got it being Omaha in March, and I'll pay
sixty bucks, which is about eighteen hundred dollars today. So
it was good money. And all of a sudden they
are killing it on the vaudeville circuit. Yeah, his his
(16:21):
um his cable to them said, I might proposition you
for all next season as well. So it was like
it was a big, big deal. It wasn't just that
one show. Was like, Okay, you've just made it to
the big time. And so all of a sudden they're
in with with Martin Beck, who basically is the king
of the Western Circuit of the Vaudeville of vaudeville, and
(16:43):
they're playing all over the place, making a lot more
money than they were before, playing fewer shows, um, putting
in fewer hours on stage, and getting compensated better for it.
They're like, all right, this is this is pretty great.
I can I can go with this? Yeah, And he
you know, I mentioned that when he would go to
these towns, he would do these challenges and stunts for
(17:05):
the public and the press. And one of the things
he did that would later come back to buy him
a little bit was he would always like the cops
would come out and he would you know, he would
have the cops lock them up and put him in
handcuffs and do all this stuff, which was great press
of course, but um, as we'll see later on in Germany,
that didn't go over so well with the cops. But
he he was known because of this is uh, the
(17:27):
king of handcuffs and also the celebrated police battler. Yeah,
I mean, and and not only did it kind of
drum up like attention in a new town where they
may not have heard of him. This guy shows up
to a police station, says, put me in jail, and
then gets out like in five minutes or something like that. Um.
But also the cops end up talking to the press
(17:48):
and they say, we have no idea how he did it.
So now you have an official endorsement that you just
got for free out of like the cops and the
local police, you know. So it was like it was
a very smart thing to do. And he would do
that from town to town to like you said, drum
up publicity and also to sell tickets. Like this would
be a way that his shows would go from you know,
(18:09):
moving ho home and then to sell out with one
of his publicity stunts. So he was really good at
that kind of thing, alright. So he's making all this dough.
He tries to get a tour together with Beck to
go to Europe because if you know, if you really
back then it wasn't if you can make it in
New York, you can make it. Make it anywhere. It
was if you could make it in Europe, you could
(18:30):
make it anywhere. And Beck was sort of, um, not
too high on that idea. So I think they had
a falling out, and Houdini put him, uh, put a
tour together for he invests for themselves to go kind
of run their own show, and they did. They went
to Europe and were equally as successful all over Europe
and the UK performing this you know, these feats of escape. Yeah,
(18:53):
and Russia too. He basically did a world tour over
the course of five years. He invested they just like
they still listen to it. We're gonna we're gonna try
to really kind of make this to the next level.
And he he took the same kind of um like
publicity chasing stuff from town to town that he did
in the US that served him so well. He did
(19:13):
the same thing in Europe too, and um he uh
he in bests like really kind of up the act
around that time, like they started coming with more and
more like grander illusions and tricks and stagecraft, and um,
the the European thing was a huge success in it
That's what catapulted him into like superstar and he became
(19:36):
an international star thanks to that, that five year tour. Yeah,
and that was in Germany. How I mentioned earlier, the
police there, I don't think liked the fact. You know,
the German police aren't known for their senses of humor,
and I don't think they thought it was super cool
that he would go over there and sort of uh,
not making fool of them, but I think they may
have some of them may have taken it that way.
(19:58):
So they police officer in Cologne, Germany accused him of
fraud at one point Houdini fired back that that is slander. Uh.
And then I think he had to go to court
and expose some of his tricks, which he wasn't too
wild about, but he had in order to get out
of it. He had to kind of expose how he
(20:18):
did some of these tricks. But it did work and
he did get out of it. Yeah, and now he
had an official court endorsement that he was no fraud,
he was an actual true magician. So and it was
a big deal too because Germany at the time was
under the Kaiser who ruled it with an authoritarian state,
or ruled an authoritarian state, and um to take on
Germany and then prevail like it took. It took khutzpah,
(20:42):
as his dad might have said, you know so. Um.
After that, they kind of go back to America. I
think in nineteen o five, after five years of touring
Europe a lot of money, yeah, a lot of money,
a lot more stardom. Um. This could have been a
really like easy time for he Best to just settle
down and say, you know what, we we've made it.
(21:03):
We're rich, we're good, we can retire forever. Um, let's
just live the good life. And they made some attempts
to that. I think Best really was ready to settle down,
and I think Houdini was like saying he would. So
they bought a brownstone at Harlem. There was a farm
in Connecticut they bought. Mom moved in with them, and
(21:23):
he was making the gestures of settling down, and then
he said, you know what, I've gotta I've gotta get
back out there. I'm getting stale. Yeah. I mean, I
think one of my big takeaways from reading about his
life it was that. And we'll get into some of
his inventions later, but he was really an innovator and
he was never content to um to just sort of
(21:44):
sit back and do the same old tricks. I think
he always wanted to invent new stuff, new gadgets and
new tricks to do for people. And I think it
was in nineteen o eight, uh that he had his
he developed his milk can escape, one of his more
famous uh because this is you know, he did a
couple of things where basically he was like, I might
die if this doesn't work, And those were always the
(22:06):
biggest tricks. Yeah, And like in that one, it was
a milk canon overside milk can, which is like a
giant metal can that a human could conceivably fit into
if they were very small and five ft five um
and it was filled with water, and he would get
in there and they would padlock the top and put
a curtain behind, put it behind the curtain, and then
you know, two minutes later he would ask, he would
(22:26):
tell the audience like try to hold your breath along
with me, and which just really raised the tension of
the in the theater um. And then like two minutes
later he would like come up from around the curtain
like soaking wet and like out of breath, but triumphant,
and everybody would just go nuts. Um. And then that
milk can. I don't know if it was his originally
or if he like innovated it from somebody else, But
(22:49):
he found out later that there were imitators doing the
same thing, and he hated that kind of stuff. He
hated imitators, He hated people like using his work, whether
they credited him or not. He just did not like
that kind of thing. But then that would push him
to innovate further. So he just abandoned the milk can altogether,
which had brought him so much success, and moved on
to like increasingly more dangerous things. Um. His greatest invention
(23:14):
was the Chinese water torture cell, which is kind of
similar to the milk can, but just even more nuts
and even more dangerous. Yeah, that's easily his most famous trick.
That's the one that you always see if you look
up Houdini's greatest tricks. It's it's like you said, it's
the same thing, but it's a clear tank of water.
And he is lowered from his ankles, um, I think,
(23:38):
sometimes cuffed, sometimes in a straight jacket, and uh, you know,
you can see him, and of course then they raised
the curtains so you can't see what's going on. Are
we gonna tell people how they how he does some
of this stuff? I'll tell you what. Since there's so
much to say about him anyway, we probably don't have time.
But there's a really great Gizmoto article It says like, um,
the secrets behind Houdini's ten Greatest Tricks. That really does
(24:01):
a great job of explaining it. I am. Oh, yeah,
I mean, let's just say this. Judini was very good
at things like getting out of handcuffs. He was a
master of like locks and lock picking. So he did
learn like tons and tons of skills. It's not to
say that if a magician has a trick and you
learn how to do it that they're not skilled. But
when it comes to some you know, these contraptions, they're
(24:23):
they're rigged. Of course it's not real magic. He didn't
purport to be doing real magic. Uh. He just wanted
to be a performer in de light audiences and he
did that. Yeah, sometimes the answer is really simple, like oh,
there's hinges or it's not really yeah exactly, like there's
a there. Like when you find these explanations, you're like, oh,
that's that's still pretty interesting that he was able to
(24:44):
do this, and and a lot of times like he would,
he would take longer purposefully than he needed to. He
could get out of these things in a matter of seconds,
but he might say, like take two minutes to appear, um,
just to keep the tension ratcheted up, make it that
much more amazing. But he also like some of the
slight of hand that he and Best would do. Um.
(25:05):
I read that his handcuff tricks. He was the guy
who started handcuff tricks um, like escaping from handcuffs. Um.
And when somebody came up and said, like, I had
these cuffs specially made for you, and I want to
see if you can get out of them, like he would,
he would ask to examine them, asked to examine the key,
and Best would just kind of be standing there looking too,
(25:26):
and she'd she'd make note of what the key looked like,
and then she'd slip away without anybody noticing, backstage to
their huge giant ring oh keys, find a key that
looks similar, and then like give Harry a kiss or
like like something like that, and they would exchange keys,
and then he would hand their key back to the
person and palm the key that they had been letting
(25:48):
him inspect and then managed to swap it out again
later on. So like the sleight of hand, and like
the trickery that was involved in and of itself, is
is masterful. Like I don't like if you if you
take actual magic out of the equation, I don't see
how this could be any less impressive, you know what
I mean? Yeah, I mean every time I've seen and
(26:09):
I haven't been to many magic shows, but like at
the Magic Castle, you want to be entertained and you
want someone to perform a good trick, no one in
the audience, I mean, you want the audience leaving going, boy,
how did they do that? Not? Was it was that real?
Were they conjuring the dark magic? Right? I enjoyed the
you know, the Magic Castle. I know I told this
(26:30):
on movie Crush. I don't know if I ever talked
about it here, But they have all these small parlor rooms, uh,
in addition to the big main room where the big
show is exactly, But the little parlor rooms what is
really what I enjoyed. They were very small, like not
many people in there, and that was just like good
(26:50):
old fashioned card tricks and stuff like that, where you're
just so well practiced, and those were just always the
most fun for me. The big shows. I could take
it early bit. Well, you would have liked who Deni's
early work because that's pretty much what it consisted of,
close up magic and card tricks. Yeah, it's like David Blaine.
I love all those early specials. But then when he
was like, let me go stand on this thing for
three years, and I didn't really care as much. You know,
(27:15):
he didn't like his three year standing phase. So, um
so he stood on a thing, right, Yeah, he stood
on a big tall thing. He did. I think he
was also frozen in a block of ice too. Maybe
sure it was the thing. Um So, so who did?
He's got like this whole he just keeps innovating and
innovating and like just wowing the public more and more
(27:36):
and he keeps going. Um but there's there's also like
these other things happening at the same time. Like the
earliest early twentieth century was like a really innovative time
if you think about it. One of the things that
came out of it was the beginning of movies, and
so who didn't He was like the kind of person
who was like, yes, I can use that to do magic.
All I have to do is perform one trick. Once
(27:57):
capturing on film, we can just show everybody in the film.
It's gonna be great because I'm like forty three now
and I'm I'm really starting to feel it, you know,
hanging upside down in a straight jacket from a crane
six stories up or underwater in a tank like that,
that wears on a person having to do at night
after night after night after night. Right, So he has
(28:18):
people exactly, So he was really well sometimes thousands, Like
he could draw a crowd, you know, at the height
of his stardom for sure. Um, but he like he
was very much drawn to film for that reason. One
of the big problems was is he was like zero
good at acting from whatever by all accounts, Yeah, he
was like me, zero good at acting. I've seen you act.
(28:40):
You took that beasting. I thought you actually got stung
by a b I was that was one good. I
wasn't zero good, Okay, if we're on a scale of
one to I was one. But man, it was better
than Houdini. Uh. But it was the beginning of movies,
and people would go see anything that you put up
on the silver screen. So he was a big star.
He was like one of Hollywood's big first action heroes,
(29:03):
and he, like everything he did, went at at full
bore and said, all right, here's what i'm gonna do.
I'm gonna start a production company and all these other
movie ventures, and none of those were super successful, but
he did have a brief stint as kind of the
big action guy of the day. Um, and these are
things that like, I think most people Judini aficionados of
(29:24):
course know all this stuff, but if you just know
Judini is a magician, you may not know that he
was a movie star or that he was a pretty
um advanced inventor. Because he's coming up with all of
these contraptions and machines himself to do these tricks. And
so he realized early on part of the problem with
(29:45):
that was if you want to safeguard something, you would
file a patent, But in order to file a patent,
you have to explicitly show how the thing works. So
he was caught in a between a rock and a
hard place magician wise, because he hated being ripped off,
but he didn't want to reveal these tricks to get
a patent on these machines. A lot of them. If
you look through his list of patents that he got
(30:07):
a lot of them he never even ended up using
or were abandoned kind of midway through the process of
getting them patented. Um. But he found a loophole in
performing these things on stage and getting them a copy
written as a live act. Right, So with a patent
you had to explain technically how the whole thing worked,
(30:29):
not the case with the copyright. Now, you just you
do a play and you copyright it and you're you're
you're good to go. And that's essentially what he did
with the Chinese water torture cell. He did a performance
in front of legendarily, I don't know if it's true
or not, but it's a pretty good story in front
of one single person on live on stage as a
(30:49):
one act play, and that enabled him to copyright it
in England. Yeah. I think he also copyrighted maybe the Metamorphosis,
um yeah, which was yeah, which he would just write
a play and then in the play this trick would
happen to describe the trick, but he didn't describe how
the trick to work. He just described, say, from like
(31:10):
the audience's vantage point, and then bam. It was copy written,
and anybody who tried that same trick would be infringing
on his copyright. Pretty smart. I think we gotta say
talk about that metamorphosis for a second though. It's worth saying.
So it was it turned himself into a butterfly. It was,
you know, he turned himself into Franz Kafka. That's a
(31:30):
very literary joke. UM. So he Best would be standing there,
Um helping him get into a sack, would pull the
drawstring at the top of the sack. He would get
into a box. The box would be chain trust padlocked, um,
and then Best would put a screen up, clap three times,
(31:50):
and then on the third clap, the screen would come
down and it would be Houdini standing there. He would
unlock the box and open up the the giant mail
bag and there was Best popped out. And we're talking
in a matter of seconds, a matter of seconds, this
thing happened, and that was the metamorphosis. And that was
a really good example of how good bestcot because apparently
(32:12):
they could trade places in reality with this trick. And
you can find out how it worked at his Moto article. Um.
But they had it down to where she could change
places with him in three seconds. You're doing Gizmoto a
big service here. Well, Gizmoto did the world a big
service by writing that article. So I'm just I'm just
paying it forward backward. I guess let's before we break,
(32:34):
let's talk a little bit about his aviation career. Can
we do that, because if you're thinking aviator Harry Judini,
the answer is yes. Because he was such a driven man.
He would uh in performer. The Wright brothers had proved
that you could fly, so he was like, I need
to get in on that, because what's better to draw
(32:54):
a crowd out in public than to do something like flying.
So he bought a by plane for about five grand
in Europe, which is a lot of money back then,
still a lot of money, but you know it's even
more because it's modern times, because of inflation. Uh. And
he took it to Australia, supposedly took out the first
(33:17):
life insurance policy for an airplane accident in the history
of the world, and uh toward Australia and was the
very first person to fly an airplane on Australian soil. Yeah,
that's pretty historic if you think about it. And that
was like another good example of there was this new
innovative thing going on and he wanted in on it,
so he went and did it and then on until
(33:39):
he didn't want to do it right once it became
kind of common place, he's like, oh, I'm done flying.
Yeah that was Houdini. Alright, So we'll take our last
break here and we'll come back and talk about his
battle with his spiritualists and his odd demise right after this. Okay, Chuck,
(34:15):
you promised a battle with the spiritualists, and I want
to hear about it. Even though I think we kind
of talked a little bit about Houdini and our Spiritualism episode,
and I know we definitely talked about yeah, there's just
no way. And I know we talked about his death
in our appendix episode. Not to give too much away, Yeah,
he's kind of appeared a couple of times. So he
(34:36):
hated the spiritualism movement. Uh. From the very beginning, it
seemed like, um again, he was a performer and a
magician who performed these really well thought out tricks, but
he m The idea from him was never I'm really
doing this stuff. It's I'm a I'm a master at
performing these escapes. He was really rubbed by the spiritual
(35:00):
us because he thought they were trying to con everybody
because they were by saying we're really doing this stuff,
and he's like, no, you're just performing like me. But
you're saying you're really doing it, and I don't like that. Yeah,
you're taking advantage of people's grief, probably fleecing money out
of them. Like there's a lot wrong with what you're doing.
(35:20):
And apparently so he was good friends for a brief
time with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote
the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, who was at least as famous
as Houdini by this time we're talking the early nineteen twenties,
if not more famous because of Sherlock Holmes. Um and
Doyle was a huge adherent of spiritualism, enormous, one of
(35:44):
the most gullible, smart people who ever lived. Um and
Judini really wanted to be friends with him, so he
kind of kept his sentiments about about spiritualism to himself,
and the Doyle's invited Hudini you over for a seance
because by this time Houdini's mom had died, and apparently
(36:04):
he feigned dead away when he got the news, like
he was in Europe at the time, and when he
woke up, he's just sobbing uncontrollably. I'm sure he still
went on stage. That was just what Houdini did, but
he took it rather hard. So when the Doyles like
invited him over for a seance, he went into it
open minded, hoping, you know, beyond hope. He would have
(36:25):
loved to have spoken to his mom. But also I
think he was already had the kernels of skepticism, like
in the modern sense of the word, growing inside of him,
and he really it really rubbed him the wrong way.
Like the whole thing started when his mother inhabited the
body of Mrs Doyle, Lady Doyle um and and made
(36:49):
the sign of the Cross, which a lifelong Jewish mother
would never do. And apparently it went downhill from there
and it really rubbed him the wrong way and he
really resented it, and that led to the following out
of his friendship with Doyle. But also like his all
out just war on spiritualism and spiritualists. Yeah, I mean,
(37:10):
he ended up in court. He testified in front of
Congress in support of a bill that outlawed fortune telling
in d c. H. And he specifically took on we
took on a lot of people, but um, Marjorie the
spiritualist Marjorie Mina Crandon was the wife of a Boston
surgeon and and pretty big in that movement. And he
(37:31):
got together with Scientific American magazine on a committee that
they formed and exposed her basically and even put out
a pamphlet forty page pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the trick
used by the Boston medium Marjorie. Yeah, dude, it was
a very specific title. It was a very public war
between them. At one point they had dueling stage presentations
(37:53):
in Boston which within days of each other. And Um,
Houdini finally got um so that he was part of
a committee for Scientific American who was looking to award
Bucks for evidence of actual mediumship you know of I guess,
um like actual information from the other side or whatever.
(38:16):
And he he saw to it that she didn't get
that she lost. But it was apparently a Harvard student
who ended up unmasking or he just wrote that pamphlet
suggesting how she was probably doing it. And then also
he added he added an act to his larger act,
which was kind of like a seance, and he would
explain how this was all being done, which is pretty cool.
(38:39):
It was cool. What wasn't cool was how he died.
Yeah is that here to say? And I'm sure I've
made fun of Jay Gordon Whitehead before, but I'll do
it again. Yeah. So here's what happened. He um, he
fractured his ankle in a performance doing the in thes
(39:00):
water torture cell. And that kind of started this run
of bad luck. Um, if you believe in that kind
of thing. So he fractured his ankle, he's already a
little bit hobbled. Um. His doctor said, you probably shouldn't
be performing right now. He said, no, no, no, I'm
gonna do it anyway. I'm on tour and he went
to Montreal and gave a lecture at McGill University where, um,
(39:21):
he invited these students backstage and you know the story
you've heard is true, like the hey, can you take
a punch to the stomach? I've heard you can? And
Houdini is laid up on the couch because of this
ankle says, yeah, I'm pretty good at that. And this guy,
Jay Gordon whitehead. And this is a quote. It says
abruptly delivered four or five terrible, terribly forcible, deliberate, well
(39:44):
directed blows, like just started wailing on his stomach. Apparently, uh,
he wasn't ready for it. He wasn't tightened up or
you know, didn't have those abs rock solid. And it
was decidedly uncool. Yeah, yes, not not just in cool,
not funds cool, not cool by any definition. Apparently. Um,
(40:05):
that same witness said that hoodin he was like, that'll
do with his response to that, yeah, and he tried
to play it off, you know, but he was like
that really hurt. And it just kept getting worse too,
like just that that. You know. Later that night he
had stomach cramps. The next day he was racked with
abdominal pain um and it was finally bad enough that
(40:26):
he went to a doctor and his doctor was like,
I think you might have appendicitis. You should go to
a hospital, and whodin? He said, never, I have to
perform tonight and went on stage in Detroit and gave
what came ended up being his final final performance I think,
on October nine. Because that doctor was absolutely right. It
(40:48):
was appendicitis, and he was in big trouble. Yes, it
was too late for him. Um, it was a rupture dependix.
He died on Halloween on October three, be first, with
Bess and a couple of his brothers at his bedside.
And what's really what's what the debate is. You know,
(41:10):
there was a lot of debate over the years about
whether or not he was murdered uh and had been
being poisoned by the Spiritualist, or whether the spiritual is
hired this kid to go beat him up uh and
wail on his stomach or whatever. Yeah, exactly, And I
think most people that really know have come out and said,
(41:32):
none of that stuff is really true. That's really probably
all speculation. But what the real question is is whether
or not it's possible and whether or not those punches
to the stomach actually ruptured his appendix, or did he
already have an appendicitis happening and this might have just
brought it to light or exacerbated it, or just maybe
(41:52):
maybe it was just ill timed all the way around. Yeah.
I think in our Appendix episode we landed on the
idea that no, it definitely didn't rupture his appendix. And
apparently there's a study UM that looked at twenty years
worth of pendicitis and could only find just a handful
of UM appendixes that were ruptured from like violence or trauma.
(42:13):
So it can't happen, but it's really rare. And even
Jay Gordon Whitehead Biff probably didn't rupture UM Houdini's appendix.
But what he did do was he gave Houdini a
good reason why his his abdomen would hurt right there,
and which would cause Hudini to just ignore it for
longer than he otherwise might have had it had it
(42:35):
been a mystery sensation that he couldn't attribute it to anything,
And so Jay Gordon might had probably did and at
least indirectly lead to Houdini's death. But it was a
neglected appendix or appendicitis that finally got him, and he
died of sebsis on Halloween in x in Detroit, of
all places. Yet uh so the kind of to put
(43:01):
a tag on the spiritualist thing UM. Before he died,
he told best, he was like, hey, listen, I've got
an opportunity here if I'm about to die, uh to
really prove this this spiritualism thing is really bunk, Because
I'm gonna try from the other side to get back
in touch with you. And you're gonna have to have
these seances and try and get in touch with me.
(43:21):
And and this is going to prove it once and
for all. And for about a decade after his death,
Best did hold a seance. It never worked, of course,
and she eventually quit. But the Magic Castle still has
Houdini seances, I think every year. Uh. I don't know
(43:42):
if you can just buy a special ticket or if
you have to be invited to that. I know you
have to be invited to get in period, but I
don't know. I don't know how you get into that seance.
You gotta know somebody who at least knows somebody who
knows somebody probably, um, I want to make fun of
the some that theory though one more time about spiritualism.
(44:03):
So there was a book called The Secret Life of
Houdini where the um the authors said that if one
were just suspect Hudini, a victim of foul play, the
section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit
mediums must be considered likely suspects. It's like something off
a history channel or something, you know. Yeah, and fun
(44:26):
to make fun of. Yeah, you got anything else about Houdini?
I got nothing else? All right? Well I don't have
anything else either, But there's plenty more to learn. There's
tons of websites dedicated to Houdini. There's like lots of
documentaries out there and there it's pretty cool to go
check them out. And also check out the gizmotor article.
And since I missaid, misspoke Gizmoto, it's time for a listener, mayo.
(44:52):
I'm gonna call this another correction. Okay, good they're rolling
in lately, Yeah, we're rolling in them. Hey, guys, just
listen to the latest episode on Mental Records. And we
heard from quite a few people on this one, by
the way. Uh, and as always it was great stuff. However,
I think Josh provided a bit of unfortunate misinformation and
claiming that sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism.
(45:13):
While this is a common claim, the evidence does not
support it. Uh. There are as always a lot of
different variables in the research on the topic. Notes that
there are so many different factors here to consider, but
the straight statement that sex offenders have been shown to
have the highest recidivum rates of any criminal is not
supported by the data anyway. There's a lot more research
out there as well, but I think that the statement
(45:34):
about recidivim rates reinforces the false belief among many that
sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. Keep up the
good work, Mike. Uh. And Mike's in a bunch of
links uh that I went through and um it appears
that as correct. Yeah, we got that one wrong. Huh.
So thanks to Mike and everybody who wrote in to
say it's not true, because we don't want to paint
(45:57):
anybody in an unnecessarily bad light. Agreed. Okay, if you
want to be like Mike, can get in touch of
this with the correction, especially a vital correction. We love
to hear those, and you can shoot us an email
to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
(46:17):
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio because I am, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck, Brian over there,
and Jerry's here. She's invisible but here. And this is
(00:22):
the Mystery Magic Podcast hour a k A. Stuff you
should know. I feel like we haven't covered much magic
related stuff, have we not nearly enough? Oh? Yeah, you
into it? Yeah? I find it interesting for sure. Um,
and I think magicians are pretty cool people typically. Um. Yeah,
(00:43):
you know Toby, our friend Toby he um he and
I were talking about um working on a magic podcast,
kind of like a magic skeptics podcast, a couple of
his good friends, and they're just they're just cool dudes,
chill people, interesting, very witty, sharp, not pink boys at all.
(01:04):
You guys should totally do that. This is years and
years ago, said that Chip. Well, he's a big movie producer. Now, yeah,
that's magic podcast. No, thank you. Well, I'm glad to
know that you found some cool magicians. Yeah, are you
not familiar with cool magicians? No? I mean the magicians
I know about are decidedly uncool. Oh, I see, like
(01:27):
Ben Stiller and arrested Development instiller and arrested Development. Yeah
he was Job's rival. Oh right, you know, I forgot
about that kind of a white snake thing going on.
I think I'm thinking mainly about the time I went
to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and I felt
like one of the cooler people there, which is unusual. Okay,
(01:49):
full of a lot of people. I don't mean like
fonds cool. I mean cool in the in the fact
that they're like interesting, they are sharp, they're quitted. Uh. Um,
they will take your wallet from you if you're not careful.
That kind of cool, you know what I mean? Okay?
Was Judini cool? Uh? In a lot of ways? He
(02:10):
was very cool? Um, the band in a lot. No,
that's pretty they were very cool. Um in a lot
of ways. I think he was cool in some other ways.
He wasn't necessarily super cool. But I think overall you
could say, yes, Houdini was cool in the sense that
a good magician is cool. Yeah. This is one of
(02:30):
those guys where I did a little digging to see
if if we needed a like, see if he was
some monster in his personal life. I didn't see anything
like that. I think he was a pretty intense guy
and maybe and I'm sure a man of the time,
but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me. Uh.
And we should mention big thanks to boy a bunch
(02:51):
of things. History dot com, Smithsonian Magazine which is always great,
PBS New Yorker, and of course the great Harry Houdini
dot com. Yes, there's also a couple of other sites
that I got some stuff from, like, um, wild About
Harry is a good Houdini site, And there's this, Uh,
there's this some documentary series by a site called Timeline,
(03:14):
and the one I saw was hosted by Alan Davies.
It's called Life and Magic of the Real Harry Houdin
and Houdini and it was just like this, you know,
hour long, pretty cool little documentary. I thought it was
very neat. I got like good info from that too.
It's on YouTube too. Well. I was, Uh, I was
into Houdini when I was a kid for a short time,
(03:34):
and I think that it was probably just because it
was a short time where I was, And I think
a lot of kids go through a magic phase, uh,
whether it's going to a trick shop and getting a
fake deck or learning your first dumb little card trick
that's not very good, but you think it's awesome. It's
just something that I feel like almost every kid goes
through a brief little magic phase and sometimes it sticks
(03:56):
and you become super cool. Evidently that's right, exactly. So there,
I saw a couple of things that seemed to support
that he wasn't a monster by the way, chuck Um.
One of them was that he would go to like, um,
the children's ward in hospitals and perform magic for the
kids and beat them up take their money. Yeah. But
I mean, like, if you think about it, that's not
(04:17):
something that just anybody does, you know, Like that's that's
time he could be do spending doing something else. Um.
He was like almost almost pathologically devoted to his mother
m making sure that she was well taken care of.
I think also one of the I saw that that
was like a possibly a driver of his ambition as well,
(04:39):
that he wanted to be Mom's favorite, an impressor more
than any of his siblings because he was one of six. Yeah,
and also that his father was never much of his success,
which will get to and I think I think those
are definitely the big drivers. But he himself called himself
a mom's boy, like he used those two words together. Yeah. Yeah.
There's a famous picture of him with his his wife
(05:00):
Bess and his mother and he's got like his arms
around both of them and he calls them my two
girls or my two sweethearts or something like that. So
I mean, like, I know, hats off the best for
being like, all right, let's go with it. We're gonna
go with it. I'm definitely not gonna try to probably
that one LuSE it's not gonna work. So we're just
gonna go with it. And I say, good for her,
(05:21):
all right, Well should we get into it. Yeah, let's
because you said something about his father, and I think
that that's an important thing to understand about Houdini um
from the get go, is that he was essentially born
into poverty and it just got worse as he got
older because his father was a rabbi, and if there
is such a thing, his father was a failed rabbi.
He couldn't make it as a rabbi. I know that was.
(05:44):
I was surprised to see that because all like everywhere
I looked, it would continually say like, boy's dad just
couldn't make the rabbi. Racket work, and I kind of,
I don't know, I kind of naively assumed that if
you were sort of giving up a life of trying
to a make you know, money as a capitalist for
a living by going to the church and being a
(06:06):
steward of the church, then you would at least do Okay,
you'd think so. But I think that means that he
was so charmless he couldn't even muster up a congregation
to to to surround him. So he was a hard
luck kind of guy. And as a result, Harry uh
was was raised in poverty, had to go to work
from a very young age, and also like missed out
(06:27):
on a formal education as a result too, And so
those things kind of converge to also, I think kind
of drive him to prove himself that yeah, maybe he
didn't go to school and maybe he was born poor,
but he could still be a superstar, he could still
amaze people, he could still be um idolized. Basically. Yeah.
His his dad's name was Meyer Weiss, his mom was
(06:50):
Cecilia Steiner Wights, and he was born Eric E. H
R I C. H Viights in March of eighteen seventy
four in Hungary. Uh In Budapest, but he when he
was four, he came over and joined the family in Wisconsin,
and his dad did manage to have a small congregation
(07:10):
in Wisconsin, I think in Appleton and Uh they changed
immigration officers changed the name to Vice with two s
is instead of an s z, and Eric went by
Airy E h R I E. The only reason I
mentioned Airy is because that comes into play later when
he takes on the name Harry is sort of an
Americanized version of that name. So that's where the Harry
(07:34):
came from. Um. Yes, he uh, he was. He started
working I think uh and when he was still single digits,
but he started performing also around the same time too.
When he was nine, he made his debut as a
trap He's artist, Eric the Prince of the Air nice
and he was always a rather short stature. I think
(07:54):
he topped out at five point five ft five inches
five point five um, but he was extremely fit. He
decided early on that he wanted to be very athletic
as much as he could be, so he really like
he was doing things like you know, when he moved
to New York a few years later. Um, he was
doing things like running five miles around Central Park every day,
(08:16):
which is super commonplace today, but you know in the
eighteen late late nineteenth century, that was weird. Yeah. I mean,
like god knows what kind of shoes he was wearing
for that kind of thing, but he would do that
kind of stuff. So he was short of stature, but
also very athletic um self taught to Yeah. So, like
you said, they eventually landed in New York um after
(08:38):
you know, his again, Rabbi Weiss was not doing so well,
so he was kind of always on the move trying
to find somebody to listen to him, and they eventually
get to New York and in eighteen nine one, which
would have been uh, what's the math there? S sixteen
is seventeen ish. We were trying to figure out before Ghostbusters,
(09:00):
no no, I was trying to figure out how old
he was. Uh, he's like sixty or seventeen when he
teamed up with this buddy, Jacob Himan. I'm sorry him,
himman him, Why did that look weird on the paper?
You may be having a stroke. I hope not. The
brothers Houdini is what they called themselves, and Harry again
(09:22):
is what he went by because of Airy and then
as far as Judini goes, his favorite French magician's last
name was Robert Houdin, so he threw an eye on there,
and all of a sudden, he's Harry Hudini for evermore. Yeah,
I think so. I saw in that documentary that somebody
told him that adding an eye to a name in
French means that you're saying you're like that person. So
(09:45):
he was saying Hohodini, like he's like Hudin Houdin hudan
Um who was his idol for at least while he's
growing up. And then apparently later on he kind of
turned on him and exposed all of his secrets after
the guy had died, which was actually not cool. It
not cool. And there I think there was also a
tradition of the eye name on those kind of acts
(10:05):
like yes, but I think he may have started that.
Oh really, I'm not sure, but he was the blond
niece and right right, um, I think as far as
magic goes, he may have been the the originator of
that because I saw some of like one of his
other um uh contemporaries who who helped kind of train
him was last name Heller. There was a haller like
(10:28):
there was no other eyes that I saw interesting. Yeah, alright,
so he kicked off the big eye crazy that's still
going crazy today. It is the iPhone. Um. So he
I think his dad died in Uh. Harry is eighteen
at this point, and he does a very unusual thing
and that he actually leaves his mom behind along with
(10:51):
his brothers, which was a big deal for him, like
you said, because he was a self professed mama's boy.
And he took off on the road doing his act
kind of through New York, through the mid West. I
was doing okay, he was performing kind of all around.
It was a bit of a grind, uh with with
Hyman still sounds weird and not because of what you think. Uh.
And then eighteen ninety four, his younger brother replaced him
(11:14):
in just for a short while, because later that year
he would meet eighteen year old Brooklyn Knight to name
the villamina Beatrice Ronner or Bess, and she became his
magic partner. And you know, they called him assistants. She
would have been the one on stage, you know, looking
pretty and doing all the flourishes. And it's a tradition
(11:37):
and magic that I know, I don't want to use
word problematic, but it has changed in more recent years. Yeah,
but this is at the time when a magician's assistant
was a lady in a bathing suit. Yeah, basically, and
and Best was no exception to that, although if you
read some of the descriptions of some of the illusions
and tricks that they did together, she was just as
(12:00):
much a magician in her own right as he was. Um,
she definitely got her training from him. I think he
discovered her in a singing troupe. Um. But like like
she grew to be just as adapt at magic and
sleight of hand as her husband, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
It's interesting the things that have become boys clubs over
the years, and like magic is definitely one of them.
(12:23):
It's I mean that's changed a lot over the years,
but it always I mean, going to the Magic Castle
and you're in, you're mainly going to see male performers
and a bunch of old man dressed in suits. Uh,
it's just a fund It odd that it's something that
maybe just appeals to young boys. I don't know. My
sister wasn't into magic, and my brother and I were so,
but there's something too much of that is just like
(12:44):
the gender norms and expectations of society where it wasn't
like presented to your sister in a way that it's like, hey,
isn't this interesting? Like everything else. Yeah, there was a
documentary I saw. I'm sure I mentioned it before, um
years ago, about these like up and coming teenage magicians
who are all trying to make their way through competitions
(13:05):
to the Magic Castle to like a grand showcase, and
they follow these ones. There were there was at least
one girl that I remember, and she was good. Um,
but I mean she must have been thirteen fourteen at
the time and have been into it for years. So
clearly there's something you know that appeals to some girls too,
even if it's not directed towards them. He has a
(13:27):
great documentary. You gotta see it. And by the way,
since we're speaking of documentaries, you have of course seen
Love on the Spectrum, have you not? No, you recommended
that a few weeks ago. Just we'll just stop. I'm
gonna I'll give you about six hours. Okay, you just
go watch and we'll come back and finish recording. Okay,
all right, Well, then another three weeks you can bring
(13:48):
it up again. You you just have to see it. Okay,
I'll see it. It's like again, I'm giving you a
gift here. Oh did you make it? No? No, just
telling you about it as a gift as what I'm
and say. It's that sweet. Alright, well everyone watch Love
on the Spectrum and we're going to take a break
and we're going to talk about Houdini's eventual success right
(14:08):
after this. Alright, so we got Houdini, we got best together,
(14:32):
and now things can begin in earnest and they kind
of pick up together where what Houdini had started, which
was very small little venues, sometimes a side show UM,
sometimes a museum like a P. T. Barnum type museum.
If they were lucky, um, they were just kind of
there almost part of the woodwork or the furniture um
(14:54):
with other stuff going on. They weren't doing actual shows.
And if they were doing a show, it was a
small act in a larger circus. And it was a
grind from what I understand. Yeah, I mean travel back
then was not as still a grind, but it definitely
wasn't fun and they were on the road all the time.
(15:14):
And then finally in they met a man named Martin
Beck who was a big name and a big up
and comer in the vaudeville scene, which at the time,
I mean you think of vaudeville now is like these
kind of little shows, But at the time that was
kind of the peak of the touring world and the
live theater world. If you were doing vaudeville, that was
(15:36):
that was sort of top of the pops. And he
saw them perform in St. Paul, Minnesota and was really
knocked out. He did this one of his handcuff escapes.
And he also took these challenges. He was very famous
for people saying, hey, can you do this? Can you
get out of the ease? And uh it really you know.
He would do this in public and it would help
like promote his brand basically and get a lot of press.
(15:59):
And he was challenged with a pair of handcuffs from
Beck and he got out of those and Beck said, kid,
you got it being Omaha in March, and I'll pay
sixty bucks, which is about eighteen hundred dollars today. So
it was good money. And all of a sudden they
are killing it on the vaudeville circuit. Yeah, his his
(16:21):
um his cable to them said, I might proposition you
for all next season as well. So it was like
it was a big, big deal. It wasn't just that
one show. Was like, Okay, you've just made it to
the big time. And so all of a sudden they're
in with with Martin Beck, who basically is the king
of the Western Circuit of the Vaudeville of vaudeville, and
(16:43):
they're playing all over the place, making a lot more
money than they were before, playing fewer shows, um, putting
in fewer hours on stage, and getting compensated better for it.
They're like, all right, this is this is pretty great.
I can I can go with this? Yeah, And he
you know, I mentioned that when he would go to
these towns, he would do these challenges and stunts for
(17:05):
the public and the press. And one of the things
he did that would later come back to buy him
a little bit was he would always like the cops
would come out and he would you know, he would
have the cops lock them up and put him in
handcuffs and do all this stuff, which was great press
of course, but um, as we'll see later on in Germany,
that didn't go over so well with the cops. But
he he was known because of this is uh, the
(17:27):
king of handcuffs and also the celebrated police battler. Yeah,
I mean, and and not only did it kind of
drum up like attention in a new town where they
may not have heard of him. This guy shows up
to a police station, says, put me in jail, and
then gets out like in five minutes or something like that. Um.
But also the cops end up talking to the press
(17:48):
and they say, we have no idea how he did it.
So now you have an official endorsement that you just
got for free out of like the cops and the
local police, you know. So it was like it was
a very smart thing to do. And he would do
that from town to town to like you said, drum
up publicity and also to sell tickets. Like this would
be a way that his shows would go from you know,
(18:09):
moving ho home and then to sell out with one
of his publicity stunts. So he was really good at
that kind of thing, alright. So he's making all this dough.
He tries to get a tour together with Beck to
go to Europe because if you know, if you really
back then it wasn't if you can make it in
New York, you can make it. Make it anywhere. It
was if you could make it in Europe, you could
(18:30):
make it anywhere. And Beck was sort of, um, not
too high on that idea. So I think they had
a falling out, and Houdini put him, uh, put a
tour together for he invests for themselves to go kind
of run their own show, and they did. They went
to Europe and were equally as successful all over Europe
and the UK performing this you know, these feats of escape. Yeah,
(18:53):
and Russia too. He basically did a world tour over
the course of five years. He invested they just like
they still listen to it. We're gonna we're gonna try
to really kind of make this to the next level.
And he he took the same kind of um like
publicity chasing stuff from town to town that he did
in the US that served him so well. He did
(19:13):
the same thing in Europe too, and um he uh
he in bests like really kind of up the act
around that time, like they started coming with more and
more like grander illusions and tricks and stagecraft, and um,
the the European thing was a huge success in it
That's what catapulted him into like superstar and he became
(19:36):
an international star thanks to that, that five year tour. Yeah,
and that was in Germany. How I mentioned earlier, the
police there, I don't think liked the fact. You know,
the German police aren't known for their senses of humor,
and I don't think they thought it was super cool
that he would go over there and sort of uh,
not making fool of them, but I think they may
have some of them may have taken it that way.
(19:58):
So they police officer in Cologne, Germany accused him of
fraud at one point Houdini fired back that that is slander. Uh.
And then I think he had to go to court
and expose some of his tricks, which he wasn't too
wild about, but he had in order to get out
of it. He had to kind of expose how he
(20:18):
did some of these tricks. But it did work and
he did get out of it. Yeah, and now he
had an official court endorsement that he was no fraud,
he was an actual true magician. So and it was
a big deal too because Germany at the time was
under the Kaiser who ruled it with an authoritarian state,
or ruled an authoritarian state, and um to take on
Germany and then prevail like it took. It took khutzpah,
(20:42):
as his dad might have said, you know so. Um.
After that, they kind of go back to America. I
think in nineteen o five, after five years of touring
Europe a lot of money, yeah, a lot of money,
a lot more stardom. Um. This could have been a
really like easy time for he Best to just settle
down and say, you know what, we we've made it.
(21:03):
We're rich, we're good, we can retire forever. Um, let's
just live the good life. And they made some attempts
to that. I think Best really was ready to settle down,
and I think Houdini was like saying he would. So
they bought a brownstone at Harlem. There was a farm
in Connecticut they bought. Mom moved in with them, and
(21:23):
he was making the gestures of settling down, and then
he said, you know what, I've gotta I've gotta get
back out there. I'm getting stale. Yeah. I mean, I
think one of my big takeaways from reading about his
life it was that. And we'll get into some of
his inventions later, but he was really an innovator and
he was never content to um to just sort of
(21:44):
sit back and do the same old tricks. I think
he always wanted to invent new stuff, new gadgets and
new tricks to do for people. And I think it
was in nineteen o eight, uh that he had his
he developed his milk can escape, one of his more
famous uh because this is you know, he did a
couple of things where basically he was like, I might
die if this doesn't work, And those were always the
(22:06):
biggest tricks. Yeah, And like in that one, it was
a milk canon overside milk can, which is like a
giant metal can that a human could conceivably fit into
if they were very small and five ft five um
and it was filled with water, and he would get
in there and they would padlock the top and put
a curtain behind, put it behind the curtain, and then
you know, two minutes later he would ask, he would
(22:26):
tell the audience like try to hold your breath along
with me, and which just really raised the tension of
the in the theater um. And then like two minutes
later he would like come up from around the curtain
like soaking wet and like out of breath, but triumphant,
and everybody would just go nuts. Um. And then that
milk can. I don't know if it was his originally
or if he like innovated it from somebody else, But
(22:49):
he found out later that there were imitators doing the
same thing, and he hated that kind of stuff. He
hated imitators, He hated people like using his work, whether
they credited him or not. He just did not like
that kind of thing. But then that would push him
to innovate further. So he just abandoned the milk can altogether,
which had brought him so much success, and moved on
to like increasingly more dangerous things. Um. His greatest invention
(23:14):
was the Chinese water torture cell, which is kind of
similar to the milk can, but just even more nuts
and even more dangerous. Yeah, that's easily his most famous trick.
That's the one that you always see if you look
up Houdini's greatest tricks. It's it's like you said, it's
the same thing, but it's a clear tank of water.
And he is lowered from his ankles, um, I think,
(23:38):
sometimes cuffed, sometimes in a straight jacket, and uh, you know,
you can see him, and of course then they raised
the curtains so you can't see what's going on. Are
we gonna tell people how they how he does some
of this stuff? I'll tell you what. Since there's so
much to say about him anyway, we probably don't have time.
But there's a really great Gizmoto article It says like, um,
the secrets behind Houdini's ten Greatest Tricks. That really does
(24:01):
a great job of explaining it. I am. Oh, yeah,
I mean, let's just say this. Judini was very good
at things like getting out of handcuffs. He was a
master of like locks and lock picking. So he did
learn like tons and tons of skills. It's not to
say that if a magician has a trick and you
learn how to do it that they're not skilled. But
when it comes to some you know, these contraptions, they're
(24:23):
they're rigged. Of course it's not real magic. He didn't
purport to be doing real magic. Uh. He just wanted
to be a performer in de light audiences and he
did that. Yeah, sometimes the answer is really simple, like oh,
there's hinges or it's not really yeah exactly, like there's
a there. Like when you find these explanations, you're like, oh,
that's that's still pretty interesting that he was able to
(24:44):
do this, and and a lot of times like he would,
he would take longer purposefully than he needed to. He
could get out of these things in a matter of seconds,
but he might say, like take two minutes to appear, um,
just to keep the tension ratcheted up, make it that
much more amazing. But he also like some of the
slight of hand that he and Best would do. Um.
(25:05):
I read that his handcuff tricks. He was the guy
who started handcuff tricks um, like escaping from handcuffs. Um.
And when somebody came up and said, like, I had
these cuffs specially made for you, and I want to
see if you can get out of them, like he would,
he would ask to examine them, asked to examine the key,
and Best would just kind of be standing there looking too,
(25:26):
and she'd she'd make note of what the key looked like,
and then she'd slip away without anybody noticing, backstage to
their huge giant ring oh keys, find a key that
looks similar, and then like give Harry a kiss or
like like something like that, and they would exchange keys,
and then he would hand their key back to the
person and palm the key that they had been letting
(25:48):
him inspect and then managed to swap it out again
later on. So like the sleight of hand, and like
the trickery that was involved in and of itself, is
is masterful. Like I don't like if you if you
take actual magic out of the equation, I don't see
how this could be any less impressive, you know what
I mean? Yeah, I mean every time I've seen and
(26:09):
I haven't been to many magic shows, but like at
the Magic Castle, you want to be entertained and you
want someone to perform a good trick, no one in
the audience, I mean, you want the audience leaving going, boy,
how did they do that? Not? Was it was that real?
Were they conjuring the dark magic? Right? I enjoyed the
you know, the Magic Castle. I know I told this
(26:30):
on movie Crush. I don't know if I ever talked
about it here, But they have all these small parlor rooms, uh,
in addition to the big main room where the big
show is exactly, But the little parlor rooms what is
really what I enjoyed. They were very small, like not
many people in there, and that was just like good
(26:50):
old fashioned card tricks and stuff like that, where you're
just so well practiced, and those were just always the
most fun for me. The big shows. I could take
it early bit. Well, you would have liked who Deni's
early work because that's pretty much what it consisted of,
close up magic and card tricks. Yeah, it's like David Blaine.
I love all those early specials. But then when he
was like, let me go stand on this thing for
three years, and I didn't really care as much. You know,
(27:15):
he didn't like his three year standing phase. So, um
so he stood on a thing, right, Yeah, he stood
on a big tall thing. He did. I think he
was also frozen in a block of ice too. Maybe
sure it was the thing. Um So, so who did?
He's got like this whole he just keeps innovating and
innovating and like just wowing the public more and more
(27:36):
and he keeps going. Um but there's there's also like
these other things happening at the same time. Like the
earliest early twentieth century was like a really innovative time
if you think about it. One of the things that
came out of it was the beginning of movies, and
so who didn't He was like the kind of person
who was like, yes, I can use that to do magic.
All I have to do is perform one trick. Once
(27:57):
capturing on film, we can just show everybody in the film.
It's gonna be great because I'm like forty three now
and I'm I'm really starting to feel it, you know,
hanging upside down in a straight jacket from a crane
six stories up or underwater in a tank like that,
that wears on a person having to do at night
after night after night after night. Right, So he has
(28:18):
people exactly, So he was really well sometimes thousands, Like
he could draw a crowd, you know, at the height
of his stardom for sure. Um, but he like he
was very much drawn to film for that reason. One
of the big problems was is he was like zero
good at acting from whatever by all accounts, Yeah, he
was like me, zero good at acting. I've seen you act.
(28:40):
You took that beasting. I thought you actually got stung
by a b I was that was one good. I
wasn't zero good, Okay, if we're on a scale of
one to I was one. But man, it was better
than Houdini. Uh. But it was the beginning of movies,
and people would go see anything that you put up
on the silver screen. So he was a big star.
He was like one of Hollywood's big first action heroes,
(29:03):
and he, like everything he did, went at at full
bore and said, all right, here's what i'm gonna do.
I'm gonna start a production company and all these other
movie ventures, and none of those were super successful, but
he did have a brief stint as kind of the
big action guy of the day. Um, and these are
things that like, I think most people Judini aficionados of
(29:24):
course know all this stuff, but if you just know
Judini is a magician, you may not know that he
was a movie star or that he was a pretty
um advanced inventor. Because he's coming up with all of
these contraptions and machines himself to do these tricks. And
so he realized early on part of the problem with
(29:45):
that was if you want to safeguard something, you would
file a patent, But in order to file a patent,
you have to explicitly show how the thing works. So
he was caught in a between a rock and a
hard place magician wise, because he hated being ripped off,
but he didn't want to reveal these tricks to get
a patent on these machines. A lot of them. If
you look through his list of patents that he got
(30:07):
a lot of them he never even ended up using
or were abandoned kind of midway through the process of
getting them patented. Um. But he found a loophole in
performing these things on stage and getting them a copy
written as a live act. Right, So with a patent
you had to explain technically how the whole thing worked,
(30:29):
not the case with the copyright. Now, you just you
do a play and you copyright it and you're you're
you're good to go. And that's essentially what he did
with the Chinese water torture cell. He did a performance
in front of legendarily, I don't know if it's true
or not, but it's a pretty good story in front
of one single person on live on stage as a
(30:49):
one act play, and that enabled him to copyright it
in England. Yeah. I think he also copyrighted maybe the Metamorphosis,
um yeah, which was yeah, which he would just write
a play and then in the play this trick would
happen to describe the trick, but he didn't describe how
the trick to work. He just described, say, from like
(31:10):
the audience's vantage point, and then bam. It was copy written,
and anybody who tried that same trick would be infringing
on his copyright. Pretty smart. I think we gotta say
talk about that metamorphosis for a second though. It's worth saying.
So it was it turned himself into a butterfly. It was,
you know, he turned himself into Franz Kafka. That's a
(31:30):
very literary joke. UM. So he Best would be standing there,
Um helping him get into a sack, would pull the
drawstring at the top of the sack. He would get
into a box. The box would be chain trust padlocked, um,
and then Best would put a screen up, clap three times,
(31:50):
and then on the third clap, the screen would come
down and it would be Houdini standing there. He would
unlock the box and open up the the giant mail
bag and there was Best popped out. And we're talking
in a matter of seconds, a matter of seconds, this
thing happened, and that was the metamorphosis. And that was
a really good example of how good bestcot because apparently
(32:12):
they could trade places in reality with this trick. And
you can find out how it worked at his Moto article. Um.
But they had it down to where she could change
places with him in three seconds. You're doing Gizmoto a
big service here. Well, Gizmoto did the world a big
service by writing that article. So I'm just I'm just
paying it forward backward. I guess let's before we break,
(32:34):
let's talk a little bit about his aviation career. Can
we do that, because if you're thinking aviator Harry Judini,
the answer is yes. Because he was such a driven man.
He would uh in performer. The Wright brothers had proved
that you could fly, so he was like, I need
to get in on that, because what's better to draw
(32:54):
a crowd out in public than to do something like flying.
So he bought a by plane for about five grand
in Europe, which is a lot of money back then,
still a lot of money, but you know it's even
more because it's modern times, because of inflation. Uh. And
he took it to Australia, supposedly took out the first
(33:17):
life insurance policy for an airplane accident in the history
of the world, and uh toward Australia and was the
very first person to fly an airplane on Australian soil. Yeah,
that's pretty historic if you think about it. And that
was like another good example of there was this new
innovative thing going on and he wanted in on it,
so he went and did it and then on until
(33:39):
he didn't want to do it right once it became
kind of common place, he's like, oh, I'm done flying.
Yeah that was Houdini. Alright, So we'll take our last
break here and we'll come back and talk about his
battle with his spiritualists and his odd demise right after this. Okay, Chuck,
(34:15):
you promised a battle with the spiritualists, and I want
to hear about it. Even though I think we kind
of talked a little bit about Houdini and our Spiritualism episode,
and I know we definitely talked about yeah, there's just
no way. And I know we talked about his death
in our appendix episode. Not to give too much away, Yeah,
he's kind of appeared a couple of times. So he
(34:36):
hated the spiritualism movement. Uh. From the very beginning, it
seemed like, um again, he was a performer and a
magician who performed these really well thought out tricks, but
he m The idea from him was never I'm really
doing this stuff. It's I'm a I'm a master at
performing these escapes. He was really rubbed by the spiritual
(35:00):
us because he thought they were trying to con everybody
because they were by saying we're really doing this stuff,
and he's like, no, you're just performing like me. But
you're saying you're really doing it, and I don't like that. Yeah,
you're taking advantage of people's grief, probably fleecing money out
of them. Like there's a lot wrong with what you're doing.
(35:20):
And apparently so he was good friends for a brief
time with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote
the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, who was at least as famous
as Houdini by this time we're talking the early nineteen twenties,
if not more famous because of Sherlock Holmes. Um and
Doyle was a huge adherent of spiritualism, enormous, one of
(35:44):
the most gullible, smart people who ever lived. Um and
Judini really wanted to be friends with him, so he
kind of kept his sentiments about about spiritualism to himself,
and the Doyle's invited Hudini you over for a seance
because by this time Houdini's mom had died, and apparently
(36:04):
he feigned dead away when he got the news, like
he was in Europe at the time, and when he
woke up, he's just sobbing uncontrollably. I'm sure he still
went on stage. That was just what Houdini did, but
he took it rather hard. So when the Doyles like
invited him over for a seance, he went into it
open minded, hoping, you know, beyond hope. He would have
(36:25):
loved to have spoken to his mom. But also I
think he was already had the kernels of skepticism, like
in the modern sense of the word, growing inside of him,
and he really it really rubbed him the wrong way.
Like the whole thing started when his mother inhabited the
body of Mrs Doyle, Lady Doyle um and and made
(36:49):
the sign of the Cross, which a lifelong Jewish mother
would never do. And apparently it went downhill from there
and it really rubbed him the wrong way and he
really resented it, and that led to the following out
of his friendship with Doyle. But also like his all
out just war on spiritualism and spiritualists. Yeah, I mean,
(37:10):
he ended up in court. He testified in front of
Congress in support of a bill that outlawed fortune telling
in d c. H. And he specifically took on we
took on a lot of people, but um, Marjorie the
spiritualist Marjorie Mina Crandon was the wife of a Boston
surgeon and and pretty big in that movement. And he
(37:31):
got together with Scientific American magazine on a committee that
they formed and exposed her basically and even put out
a pamphlet forty page pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the trick
used by the Boston medium Marjorie. Yeah, dude, it was
a very specific title. It was a very public war
between them. At one point they had dueling stage presentations
(37:53):
in Boston which within days of each other. And Um,
Houdini finally got um so that he was part of
a committee for Scientific American who was looking to award
Bucks for evidence of actual mediumship you know of I guess,
um like actual information from the other side or whatever.
(38:16):
And he he saw to it that she didn't get
that she lost. But it was apparently a Harvard student
who ended up unmasking or he just wrote that pamphlet
suggesting how she was probably doing it. And then also
he added he added an act to his larger act,
which was kind of like a seance, and he would
explain how this was all being done, which is pretty cool.
(38:39):
It was cool. What wasn't cool was how he died.
Yeah is that here to say? And I'm sure I've
made fun of Jay Gordon Whitehead before, but I'll do
it again. Yeah. So here's what happened. He um, he
fractured his ankle in a performance doing the in thes
(39:00):
water torture cell. And that kind of started this run
of bad luck. Um, if you believe in that kind
of thing. So he fractured his ankle, he's already a
little bit hobbled. Um. His doctor said, you probably shouldn't
be performing right now. He said, no, no, no, I'm
gonna do it anyway. I'm on tour and he went
to Montreal and gave a lecture at McGill University where, um,
(39:21):
he invited these students backstage and you know the story
you've heard is true, like the hey, can you take
a punch to the stomach? I've heard you can? And
Houdini is laid up on the couch because of this
ankle says, yeah, I'm pretty good at that. And this guy,
Jay Gordon whitehead. And this is a quote. It says
abruptly delivered four or five terrible, terribly forcible, deliberate, well
(39:44):
directed blows, like just started wailing on his stomach. Apparently, uh,
he wasn't ready for it. He wasn't tightened up or
you know, didn't have those abs rock solid. And it
was decidedly uncool. Yeah, yes, not not just in cool,
not funds cool, not cool by any definition. Apparently. Um,
(40:05):
that same witness said that hoodin he was like, that'll
do with his response to that, yeah, and he tried
to play it off, you know, but he was like
that really hurt. And it just kept getting worse too,
like just that that. You know. Later that night he
had stomach cramps. The next day he was racked with
abdominal pain um and it was finally bad enough that
(40:26):
he went to a doctor and his doctor was like,
I think you might have appendicitis. You should go to
a hospital, and whodin? He said, never, I have to
perform tonight and went on stage in Detroit and gave
what came ended up being his final final performance I think,
on October nine. Because that doctor was absolutely right. It
(40:48):
was appendicitis, and he was in big trouble. Yes, it
was too late for him. Um, it was a rupture dependix.
He died on Halloween on October three, be first, with
Bess and a couple of his brothers at his bedside.
And what's really what's what the debate is. You know,
(41:10):
there was a lot of debate over the years about
whether or not he was murdered uh and had been
being poisoned by the Spiritualist, or whether the spiritual is
hired this kid to go beat him up uh and
wail on his stomach or whatever. Yeah, exactly, And I
think most people that really know have come out and said,
(41:32):
none of that stuff is really true. That's really probably
all speculation. But what the real question is is whether
or not it's possible and whether or not those punches
to the stomach actually ruptured his appendix, or did he
already have an appendicitis happening and this might have just
brought it to light or exacerbated it, or just maybe
(41:52):
maybe it was just ill timed all the way around. Yeah.
I think in our Appendix episode we landed on the
idea that no, it definitely didn't rupture his appendix. And
apparently there's a study UM that looked at twenty years
worth of pendicitis and could only find just a handful
of UM appendixes that were ruptured from like violence or trauma.
(42:13):
So it can't happen, but it's really rare. And even
Jay Gordon Whitehead Biff probably didn't rupture UM Houdini's appendix.
But what he did do was he gave Houdini a
good reason why his his abdomen would hurt right there,
and which would cause Hudini to just ignore it for
longer than he otherwise might have had it had it
(42:35):
been a mystery sensation that he couldn't attribute it to anything,
And so Jay Gordon might had probably did and at
least indirectly lead to Houdini's death. But it was a
neglected appendix or appendicitis that finally got him, and he
died of sebsis on Halloween in x in Detroit, of
all places. Yet uh so the kind of to put
(43:01):
a tag on the spiritualist thing UM. Before he died,
he told best, he was like, hey, listen, I've got
an opportunity here if I'm about to die, uh to
really prove this this spiritualism thing is really bunk, Because
I'm gonna try from the other side to get back
in touch with you. And you're gonna have to have
these seances and try and get in touch with me.
(43:21):
And and this is going to prove it once and
for all. And for about a decade after his death,
Best did hold a seance. It never worked, of course,
and she eventually quit. But the Magic Castle still has
Houdini seances, I think every year. Uh. I don't know
(43:42):
if you can just buy a special ticket or if
you have to be invited to that. I know you
have to be invited to get in period, but I
don't know. I don't know how you get into that seance.
You gotta know somebody who at least knows somebody who
knows somebody probably, um, I want to make fun of
the some that theory though one more time about spiritualism.
(44:03):
So there was a book called The Secret Life of
Houdini where the um the authors said that if one
were just suspect Hudini, a victim of foul play, the
section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit
mediums must be considered likely suspects. It's like something off
a history channel or something, you know. Yeah, and fun
(44:26):
to make fun of. Yeah, you got anything else about Houdini?
I got nothing else? All right? Well I don't have
anything else either, But there's plenty more to learn. There's
tons of websites dedicated to Houdini. There's like lots of
documentaries out there and there it's pretty cool to go
check them out. And also check out the gizmotor article.
And since I missaid, misspoke Gizmoto, it's time for a listener, mayo.
(44:52):
I'm gonna call this another correction. Okay, good they're rolling
in lately, Yeah, we're rolling in them. Hey, guys, just
listen to the latest episode on Mental Records. And we
heard from quite a few people on this one, by
the way. Uh, and as always it was great stuff. However,
I think Josh provided a bit of unfortunate misinformation and
claiming that sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism.
(45:13):
While this is a common claim, the evidence does not
support it. Uh. There are as always a lot of
different variables in the research on the topic. Notes that
there are so many different factors here to consider, but
the straight statement that sex offenders have been shown to
have the highest recidivum rates of any criminal is not
supported by the data anyway. There's a lot more research
out there as well, but I think that the statement
(45:34):
about recidivim rates reinforces the false belief among many that
sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. Keep up the
good work, Mike. Uh. And Mike's in a bunch of
links uh that I went through and um it appears
that as correct. Yeah, we got that one wrong. Huh.
So thanks to Mike and everybody who wrote in to
say it's not true, because we don't want to paint
(45:57):
anybody in an unnecessarily bad light. Agreed. Okay, if you
want to be like Mike, can get in touch of
this with the correction, especially a vital correction. We love
to hear those, and you can shoot us an email
to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
(46:17):
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!