Is the Uncanny Valley Real?

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote an essay that said the closer robots come to lifelike, the more they unsettle humans. His theory became the Uncanny Valley, and science has been evaluating it – and what makes something creepy - in recent years.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there
doing the robot, which means this is stuff you should know.

(00:22):
Robot stot. I knew i'd get a laughout. EA, sooner
or later? Did you do the robot? Can you do
the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot.
I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do
a pretty great robot, that's what you've seen. I can't
do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either,
and didn't really. If if you're claim to fame is

(00:45):
like a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe
take up some other hobbies as well, kind of round
that out. You don't want them to be the only
thing you're good at, right, because if you list that
on the dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah,
according to e Harmony, Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one,

(01:07):
don't you. Yeah, that's some issues with that whole Oh yeah, yeah,
we'll get to that. This is tad all right. Well,
let's start the at the beginning. Almost the beginning. Chuck,
let's go back to nineteen seventy, which was the beginning
of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah,
neither one of us were born yet I can finally
even say that I'm still not even born. It must

(01:29):
feel good. Yeah, okay, well, welcome to the club. I guess. Thanks.
And in nineteen seventy, we're not just going just anywhere
at nights seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy.
Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah, a lot
of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still, um,

(01:50):
there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably
it was a good time, good good time for Japan, right,
and one of the one of the things that was
going on in nineteen seventy. I could not, for the
life of me find what issue of this journal it
came out in what month, But at some point in

(02:12):
nineteen seventy there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic
journal called Energy, and at some point during that year
it published a article by a Japanese roboticist, and his
name is Massa Hiro Mori. Thank you, I have a
lot of practice, and uh, Massa Hiro Omori uh published

(02:36):
this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani gen
show is actually the full name of the whole thing.
And as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate
into English, right, and it took many, many years after
he wrote this article for it to be translated into
English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically,

(02:57):
Mori was this robotic cyst and he wrote this essay
and at the time he just put it out there
and went back to work, started teaching more and more roboticists.
The whole new generation of roboticists learned under him and
his his work just kind of sat there. Um unobserved
that article, i should say, and then in two thousand

(03:18):
five a rough translation of it was leaked out wasn't
intended for publication, and the world entirely changed, right because
Massa Hiro Morty had in his article put his finger
on something that no one had before in his capacities
a roboticist and a human and that was what we

(03:39):
call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah, so that's um the
idea that, uh, you're making a robot and we'll see
this apply some more than just robots. But in his case,
you're making a robot and you want to make it
look like a person um, which I guess not all roboticists,

(04:00):
some of them like the clunky jets and style robots
like Rosy. But I guess if you're Mori, you're you're
on the path to designing lifelike robots. And the closer
you get to that lifelike look, everything's going great. Everything's
going great, people are like, this is so cool, this
is so cool, and then all of a sudden, people
go oh like right as it approaches it's most or basically,

(04:24):
when it reaches its most lifelike capacity, that this whoever's
making it can conjure people are repulsed by it. Yeah,
which is something that most people who ever hear of
the Uncanny Valley are like, yeah, you know, that's I've
noticed that. That's happened to me before too. But the
thing is, Chuck, it doesn't it doesn't actually make sense, right, Like,

(04:46):
we know a robot is a robot. Yeah, so you know,
maybe you could be afraid that it's gonna like pick
you up and break you in two or something like
a cartoon, but that's different than being creeped out by
like why would we be creeped out by a robot?
And this is what Morey put his finger on, was
there's something to this and it doesn't make sense, and

(05:07):
he he didn't. It wasn't even just um this article
that he wrote. He created a graph as well that's
become quite famous that um really kind of gets the
point across more than anything else. Yeah, And he wasn't
even the first person to to go over this and
to put a put some thought to it. Freud of course,
because he'd like to think about everything. He thought about

(05:30):
a little bit. And before Freud, there was a a
Geman name anst yinched. Oh nice. I did not realize
that's how his last name should be pronounced. That's good stuff.
I think I put a tea on the end, but
the teas in the middle, yinch. Yeah, I think that's right.
I've been saying, Gentch. We don't. We'll have to look
that up. Then. I think you're no. I think of

(05:51):
the two of us, you're you got the German down. Uh.
And he had a little term called um heimlich uh
that he called it so like you know, different languages
had different names for it. Um and you go back
in time, all the way back to like the seventeenth century,
and people were and I guess you know, robots didn't
look super lifelike back then, but whatever their version of

(06:13):
life like was. Uh. In the sixteen hundreds, people were like,
I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah,
it's got a quill and it's writing things. But like
you said, Maury made this graph because he was a roboticist,
and he thought, you know, let's look at this on
a plotted out so we can stare at it. And

(06:33):
on the X axis he had human likeness. Then on
the y axis he had affinity, like whether or not
you like the way this thing looks. And just as
we're talking about um, the graph went up and up
as uh, things got more lifelike and people like the
way look And then at a certain point there's that
valley there's a big dip. Uh. That really just kind

(06:56):
of says it all right, And again this all makes
sense intuitively, but as we'll see, that's it's been very
difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's
confounded research thus far is because we were not even
sure what more meant by some of the words he chose,

(07:17):
at least as far as translating them to English. Right.
Um For example, boukimi. Right, it was translated in two
thousand five as uncanny, but um again that that original
translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out,
and so Uncanny Valley became, you know, the the way

(07:39):
we all think of it here in the West. But
boukimi more closely resembles something like eerie. Like I've seen
it explain that, Um, a word like boukimi means more
than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy. It's
not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi is
something that that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly. Um.

(08:05):
So bukimi probably more should be should have been translated
the Eerie Valley. But by the time an actual official
translation that um Mori signed off on came out in
two thousand twelve, the cat was out of the bag.
Everybody knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's
no way anybody who's gonna come back and be like, no, no, no,

(08:26):
everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley. Okay, right,
all right, And it may be one of those things
where we're so used to uncanny Valley now that it's
hard to imagine eerie Valley. But right, I think that
was the issue. Yeah, Like, nobody's gonna go along with that.
So this graph, like I said, it starts off on
that left hand side, and this is where you have

(08:47):
things that are super robotic. Um like you know, a
packaging robot in a factory, um that you know, apparently
most people don't have funness for I do because I
love mechanical processes, um right, right, Okay, So there's there's
part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the

(09:09):
kind of feeling that massa Hiro Morty was talking about.
He was like, yeah, yeah, you're interested in robotics and
robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching
how it's made. Right. What he was talking about was
more like how it resembles a human and then how
it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of

(09:29):
a human. Right. Well, in that case, it makes me
feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, Okay,
So that would be at about the origin of the graph.
It has no resemblance to a human really, and it's
not a listening any real affinity in you at all
as far as it looking like a human, right, but
lots of affinity as a thing that's just that's called props.

(09:52):
So you go a little bit further on the graph
and then you have things like um little stuffed animals
and uh no. C three po is is a common
one that's mentioned because C three p O UM, you know,
is built to look like a human. He does a
great robot. It talks like a human and acts like
a human. But when it comes to that face, and

(10:13):
as we'll see, the face is kind of the key
to all this um. For the most part, C three
po looks nothing like a human in the face. So
everything is still good and people love C three po. Right,
So if you're looking at the graph, C three p
o is going up in human likeness because he kind
of you know, he's got some some commonality there, and
we're feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness.

(10:37):
So it's he's going up. Okay, We're going everything's going
pretty well so far, right, Chuck, that's right, Okay, So
then we're gonna start hitting some areas where things start
looking a little more human, a lot more human, I
would say than c three p o, like say the
characters in mo Wanna or Frozen, uh picks our characters

(10:58):
that kind of thing where where they look like they're
supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but
they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse
at first glance for an actual human. Right, So they
have like bi a guys, small noses, things that make
them cute, right, And so our affinity for them is
going up as the human likeness is going up. Again,

(11:21):
things are going really well so far, that's right, because
in Mowanna and Frozen they look a little bit more
like people, and we like them a lot more for
that reason. And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere,
the whole thing, this line that's just been going up
very pleasantly, and a nice little slope just drops downward, right,

(11:42):
and it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below
the X axis into negative territory. And now this is
the Uncanny Valley, that's right, And that's why it has
that name because it's a valley, right, And this is
where those things like really really life like androids live,
or um corpses live, or zombies live. Because Maury he

(12:09):
he had the idea that if something's moving, is even
creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So
he actually created two lines on this graph, one for
things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate.
So if you look at this uncanny valley on the
inanimate line, the non moving line, you've got corpses are

(12:30):
at the bottom of it. But if you look at
the animate line, it's even it dips even further below
than the inanimate line, and at the bottom of those
are zombies. So dead people up and moving around and
saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far
as this graph is concerned. Yeah, and he Maria wasn't
the only one that um earns yinch that we talked about.

(12:52):
The German psychiatrists. Uh. He also talked about the fact
that if you are looking at something that should not
be moving and it moves. Um, I mean, I think
we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly
turns its head and looks at you probably one of
the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah,
it's about as creepy as it gets or um, have

(13:12):
you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few?
I'm not a fan at all. No, it is it
makes sense. You know, we've really kind of closed or
put a lot of space in between us and death,
way more than we used to have in like the
nineteenth century sit up with the dead. Sure, right, so

(13:33):
this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that.
But if you've ever been to uh an open casket
funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough,
like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something, your
brain is so anticipating that they it's about to start
moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and and
make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll

(13:54):
also be asked to leave the funeral. Well you shouldn't
be like giving a commentary about this out loud, but
you can. You know, you can do it to pass
the time in the funeral if you're looking to to
kill some time. Uh So, here's the thing with all this, Um,
we know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling,
but no one and all this research has been done,

(14:16):
and no one is exactly sure why this happens. So, uh,
Maury's essay and especially once it was translated, Um, a
lot of research started happening in this area. And uh,
it's problematic though, because there are there are a few
different problems. One is, well, it's it's subjective. This dependent variable,

(14:36):
whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective,
so it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically, right,
all right, So the number two is human likeness, right,
this is the independent variable. And if you have human likeness,
like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What

(14:58):
doesn't look human? But we haven't pinned that down. So like,
if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the
independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study correct.
And then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah.
The third one is, uh, you know, the original hypothesis.
It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really specifies

(15:19):
the shape of this curve, so it's still hypothetical, I guess, right,
Which means that so if you look at Mori's graph,
it was he just basically made a line, right, It
wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing
was really an essay more than anything else. UM. So,
researchers who are trying to seriously study the scientifically have

(15:42):
nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against,
which leads to uh put it puts them at risk
for what's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Greatest name fallacy
around and um it's it's based on the idea that
if you take a sharpshooter in Texas and have them
shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times,

(16:03):
some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn,
and then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws
the bull's eye around the bullets that he already sunk
into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
It's ignoring data like the ones where he missed the
barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're
looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could

(16:24):
do the same thing with the um data that you
get from testing the Uncanny Valley if you have no
model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they
would have done better if they would have just instead
of trying to prove something, uh, to maybe just research
and call it a thought experiment, you know, right, But

(16:45):
people are taking it seriously and we'll we'll talk about
some of this research right after this, chuck. Alright, So

(17:16):
we're back. And despite the fact that this is really
tough to study, it's not even established that it's a
real thing in everyone's mind. By the way, Um, there
there are people out there who are really studying the
Uncanny Valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One
of these people is at Dartmouth College psychologists. And I

(17:38):
didn't look up there mascot, the the the pub darts,
the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear
from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley. Um. And
she's done some research and has found that it's not
just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's

(17:59):
kind of all over the world. She studied tribes and
Cambodia and they have the same sensitivities to these things
that look human but aren't human. Uh. And they've even
found that and I think it kind of all comes
down to the eyes. But they found just looking at
the eye can be enough. Yeah, Um, somebody can tell
whether it's a human or not just looking at a

(18:21):
picture of the eye, right. Yeah. And that's where I
think people lose credibility. And and we'll talk about movies
and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never
get you can't get the eyes right, Like, you can't
put life in lifeless eyes? How are they try? Only
God can? Uh? And there was this other experiment where they, um,

(18:45):
you know, like where you can morph a face, uh
digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or White video. Yeah.
I think some people are creeped out by that even
but they would show this dull image and it would
morph into a human face. And basically they would have
people mark where they where they thought that it would
look more human than doll and it you know, it

(19:07):
landed about the mark as far as morphing into human,
which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily, but
just it's interesting. Offhand point is about where the Uncanny
Valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it
would be higher than that, but um, yeah, it's still

(19:27):
super interesting. Um. And you were saying that the eyes,
and that's what you're betting on is that it's going
to turn out to be the eyes, right. So, trying
to investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named
Angela Tinwell, and she basically says, like, yes, it's all
about the upper facial features and that we we detect those,

(19:51):
we we read those, and so if there's any anything
that's even just slightly off in like you know, the eyes,
or the brows or the wrinkles, that form um that
will lead to the uncanny valley that's the creeping part
or the smile too. She also says, well, yeah, and
all these things kind of come down to evolution, and

(20:12):
her point is like, you can't battle millions of years
of evolution that his honed are our dumb, little human
brain to detect something that's off about a face. Uh,
it's just too much to overcome. Basically, this other researcher
named Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana,

(20:35):
who actually he's basically like dedicated his career to this. Now. Um,
he found that certain kinds of people if you do
like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny Valley sensitivity,
some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the

(20:55):
Uncanny Valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious
people that makes total sense. Yeah, neurotic people, um, and uh,
people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. It's basically anything
that reminds you that, hey, you're super civilized and you

(21:17):
drive a car and you know how to play poker. Um,
but you're still an animal, just as much as that
ape over there is an animal reminder. Um. People who
are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go
off on the uncanny Valley as well. And then people
who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny
Valley as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that interesting

(21:39):
makes sense too, because they're probably just more prone to
be I don't know, just have a reaction to a
lot of things like this. Right. But but we should
say the science and all this, the fact that the
independent and the dependent variable are still not defined, the
science is this. This is like the scientific equivalent of

(22:00):
that backward over the head half court basketball shot. Yeah,
that's the level of science that these people are carrying
out at this point because they're they're a lot of
them sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again
doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how
can you do that? As my question, Well, yeah, I

(22:20):
mean because in each experiment, they're going to be using
different uh stimuli, um, different faces, whether it's a doll
or a wax figure or a c g I character,
And then they're gonna be doing different things and have
different expressions, and each person has their own subjective takes,
so it is very tough thing to kind of nail down. Yeah,

(22:43):
And I think some of them are actually trying to
form the basis of this field of study right now,
they're doing the groundwork. But I think some of them
also are like just chasing headlines, Like there's no better
way to get get into the media cycle with your
study than than releasing some five endings on the Uncanny
Valley people just love. Uh. One thing I thought was

(23:06):
interesting was, um, at Princeton they tried this with monkeys
and they found the same thing happened when they had
these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were
like it turned away. Um. It did make me think though,
like all the you've seen these situations where like an
orphaned animal has a a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I

(23:30):
know exactly what you're talking about, and they seem to
like that. But however, and this is a bit of
a spoiler, but um, towards the end of this article,
it points out that human babies don't have this reaction
at first either, and that it's kind of learned. So
maybe that explains it. Maybe with the animals, I know
you're talking about that that cage, Like, why are monkey mother?

(23:53):
It's super creepy? Is it? Black and white photo? Well, no,
I mean they do it. There's all kinds of animals. Well,
they'll they have like a fake tiger or a fake
duck or whatever, just so the animal will feed or
I mean it's usually an animal that that milks from
the mother, I guess. But um, it's a common thing
they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfeed animals. And

(24:14):
they're always creepy. Huh. Well, I mean to us, but
to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet give
me the teat. There's a T shirt maybe even a
band name sweet give Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, that
kind of falls into the long band named category. But

(24:34):
here's the thing is, not everyone agrees with this. The
whole thing like you said earlier, there's a man named
David Hanson and he's a roboticist as well, and plain
oh Texas, and uh. He did a very very basic study.
It was a survey where they showed images of two
different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions

(24:58):
and basically just asked, Hey, what do you think of
this and said I like them? Yeah. Can you see
why people have trouble with this study? Though? Yeah, he
said not one person said they were disturbed. Okay, sounds
good for the most part, though, Studies into the uncanny

(25:18):
valley or like, now, we we're finding something here, although
we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the
uncanny valley that Moriy just graphed out of his like
with freehand, Like if you if you've come across the
study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data,
we got to say, out of his butt. Maybe there

(25:43):
was another study Edward Schneider at Suny Potsdam in New York.
I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got
together characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey
Mouse to law Acroft and who is very attractive by

(26:04):
the way she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm
talking about playing tomb Rater. Oh I never played. Yeah,
when it first came out, you know, I played tomb
Rater and I was like, oh, I look at her
act kind of hut. She Well, she's she gets a
lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. That's true. That means, well,

(26:27):
she travels a lot, she's an independent person. Yeah, that's
what I meant. I was attracted to her mind in
her adventures. Uh So, anyway, they asked people in this study, Um,
how attractive do you think these characters are? Or how
repulsive do you think they are? And again there was
um a graph with a dip in it at a
certain point, as you would expect. Yep. Careful, careful, everybody.

(26:54):
So if you're if you're a robot designer, right, one
of the things like even back in his essay written
in nine seventy, Masahiro Morey said, um, there's there's problems
here with movement. There's problems here with the smile. It
has something to do with the face, right, Um, and

(27:14):
it's somebody else said I don't remember who it was,
but there's there always seems to be a lag time
between how realistic a designer can make a robot and
how realistic a an engineer can make that robot look right,
and that that disconnected. Maury's mind was a big part
of the on Canny Valley, but he also seemed to

(27:35):
focus on the smile on the eyes and one of
the things that's at stake, like besides this just being
like an interesting topic of discussion, like, there are actual
real world implications for this whole thing, right, Like, if
you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's
not going to freak people out, because the whole purpose

(27:58):
of robots is to interact with humans, and you want
them to interact with humans. I should say life like
looking at robots, right, because like four motor companies ever
gonna buy an android that looks human to just work
on an assembly line when they can get the same
thing that does the same job cheaper when it just
looks like a robotic arm or something. Right, the whole

(28:21):
purpose of a lifelike looking robots because that robot is
being designed to interact with humans. And if you are
going to run into this spot, some people say it's
not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a
cliff or a wall. So if you're gonna run up
against this, you want to figure out how to overcome
it because you don't want to creep people out with
your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a

(28:43):
lot of money, um to develop a robotic Walmart greeter
at every store because it's it's happening like this is
coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or
acterroid f depends on who you ask. I've also seen
he called Ellie, and she is out of this lab

(29:04):
by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is probably
the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like android,
it probably came out of this guy's lab, right, And
she is starting to get out there in the world.
She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from more
with PTSD, based on the idea that they might share

(29:28):
more with a robot that they knew was just a
robot than they would an actual human. Um. She's in
a play. She stars as an android, right. And then
there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah, Casper
is a robot boy with a great cause created to

(29:50):
help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. If
you look up photos of both of these giminoid, f
uh looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great,
great work. Casper looks terrifying, right, and so Casper is creepy.

(30:10):
But that's not his purpose at all, right, his purpose
is to like teach kids with autism how to connect.
But if he's repelling them through this uncanny valley, he's
defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishi Gurro
and say, hey, we have this great cause, can you
make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares?

(30:32):
Right exactly? I wonder if Casper has been um effective,
you know, I don't know. I don't know. Now I
feel bad I didn't look into that. Well, I just
I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly.
It's kind of like, no, he's not finished, get back
to the drawing board. Either that or and this is

(30:54):
what Morey said, like go the other way, like just
make him not um he himan at all, just cute
or approachable. So the robotists are not the only ones
who are facing this chuck. There is a a pretty
powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in

(31:15):
overcoming the uncanny Valley, or at least figuring out if
it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yeah. Um, Hollywood
has a sort of a rich history of getting it
wrong when it comes to creepy c g I characters. Um.
Pixar had their very first short film. Actually it's called

(31:35):
Tin Toy, uh, a little five minutes short, and they
showed it to this you know, this proceded toy story
and everything. Yeah, it was actually kind of like the
outline of toy stories plot. Yeah, but they showed it
to test audiences and they made the mistake of making
the baby Billy look too realistic, and everyone loved Tin

(31:57):
Toy and everyone hated Billy. Yeah have you seen it?
Yeah yeah, yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and he
has the antagonist, but he he struck some chord with
viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike. And
they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixarre.
This is very early on in their history. And um,

(32:20):
they they learned from it. Actually they're like, Okay, note
to self, don't try to make any of these characters life. Like,
let's go a different direction, and so they came up
with those um exaggerated features that we've all just come
to know and love. Yeah, which was a great, great
direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of

(32:42):
success with that model. Right, you can make the case
that it may have saved the company because other companies
and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah.
One of the first big photo real computer animated movies
was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within. You should never
have a colon in your movie title, by the way,

(33:03):
that was the first mistake. But this one was from
two thousand one and based on the video game, and
it was off putting to a lot of people, and
it was a big, big bomb for Columbia Pictures. And
but this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established,
before Maury's essay was translated, so reviewers didn't quite know

(33:25):
what to say. Now they would just say we've tumbled
into the Uncanny Valley again, but they would say things
like Peter Traver's great reviewer from Rolling Stone said, at first,
it's fun to watch the characters. Ellipsis ellipsips But what's
an ellipsis is that two of them, couple of them.
But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a

(33:46):
mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the
mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah, so he's describing
young Canny Valley. He just didn't have the name of
it yet. Um. And then a couple of years later
the Polar Express, which became I think even more famous
than Final Fantasy as far as the Uncanny Valley goes.

(34:09):
But again, it's like you said, you know, the reviewers
didn't know how quite to put their finger on it,
and I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done,
but I know that polar Express used similar um software
and hardware to what roboticists are using now, where it's
like motion capture, but rather than translating the motion to

(34:33):
the robot, it's translating the motion into like a digital
three D rendering of the character. Right, So polar Express
was really really expressive, but not quite there, so it
fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley, and um, I
think David Germaine of the Associated Press uh compared the

(34:56):
kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the Children
from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want.
It's not at all what the studio wanted, and I
think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah,
there was another one of uh. And these are all,
by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemecas he really had
his He went all in on this technology. I don't

(35:19):
know why. I think he just I think sometimes you
as an artist, you can get so wrapped up and
the coolness of wow, look what we can do now
that you don't step back and look at what you're doing, like,
should should we be doing this? Because he also had
a part in the Bowolf movie in two thousand seven

(35:41):
that was a huge bomb. Um in The New York
Times said this about that people who are meant to
be enraged, who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths,
just look a little out of sorts. When it was over,
I felt relieved to be back in the company of
un creepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad and then uh,
just the Adventures of Tintin. Yeah, I really liked Tintin,

(36:03):
though I did too. I think Spielberg, I mean, there
is that Uncanny Valley a little bit, but the story
in the movie were so good he overcame that. I
think I was about to say, I think Spielberg has
come the closest to to overcoming that chasm of anybody.

(36:23):
But did he do it through good storytelling or through
the eyes I I don't know. I don't know if
it I don't know if it was a combination of
the two. Um, I don't know, but it is extraordinarily,
it's an extraordit. So you know those that that that
stuff you'll see every once a while, which somebody does
like what Beavis and butt Head would actually look like

(36:44):
in real life or what Charlie Brown was in real life. Right,
So it's still has kind of got a cartoonish quality
to it. It's the same thing with the Tintin movie.
But it was like it was as if you were
living in a dementia and where humans looked somewhat cartoonish.

(37:04):
Is that making any sense or does that just make
the whole thing even harder to understand? No? I get that.
So so he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying
to nail what humans look like. I'm going to take
you to another world where these people live and if
you lived in this world, you would look like this too.
It's it's weird. It's like he he bridged an uncanny
valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built

(37:27):
a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. I think
the biggest example in recent years was, or the one
that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did
you see that? The Star Wars movie? I haven't a
seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for
a seen the first six, I guess, but none of
the two new new ones. Uh. Well, in Rogue One,

(37:50):
they completely bring back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who
was played by the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought
him back as a character in this movie and in
the theater like when he when it first happens, he's
got his back to you and it's sort of in
the shadows and you're like, oh wow, like that's pretty cool.

(38:13):
And I didn't know that they would do that, but
they they got too comfortable, I think, and uh showed
too much and gave him too many lines and too
much light, and then it became uncanny Valley. Oh yeah,
for sure. I think about poor Peter Cushing's family having
to see that. Yeah, I don't know how often they

(38:34):
just weep during that that movie. Well, I'm curious about
like life rights and image rights and stuff like that,
if they had to get that cleared. I don't even
know that. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Cushing was
famously mellow that he would have taken a draw off
his DUBI and been like, that's whatever, man. Yeah, I
think he spent the last year of his life on
his weed farm in northern California. What about this Mars

(38:58):
Needs Moms. I had never ever heard of that movie,
and so I went and watched the trailer and it
still was like, I have no idea what this is. Yeah,
you know that comic strip bloom County. Well, you know,
I'm a huge, huge life along bloom County fan. Okay,
so Burke, so maybe you know how to say the
last name. It's Berkeley breathed, her breathed, But I don't

(39:21):
know if I've ever heard it said out loud breath.
It sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley brother,
the person, the guy who did bloom County. He wrote
a book, a children's book, called Mars Needs Moms, and
basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so
the Martians came and kidnapped human moms and it was
up to the human kids to go get their moms

(39:42):
back from Mars. Right, pretty cute little premise, but they
took it and ran it through z Mecha's nightmare. Mill
Um Image Movers Digital was the was the trade name
of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear of
this place, right, And this was like the Apex or
the what's the opposite of the Apex? The Valley, I guess,

(40:04):
so the deepest part of the c g I Valley
of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what what the
stuff that they created? It was so off and just
so spectacularly and colostly off that when I guess Disney
came along and bought this company that came in looked
around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie is

(40:27):
that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are
doing here is wrong, um, and you're all going to jail. Yeah,
here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer and
it didn't look any worse than any of the other
ones to me, and in fact I don't know the
character's names, but there's a kid and then there's this
one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy
looked pretty good. Actually, I thought. I think this was

(40:49):
a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad, and
I think it was the last straw the end of
all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this
is the same company that had created um Polar Express,
the Nightmare Factory, and a Christmas Carol did not do
very well either, So yeah, I think it. It definitely

(41:10):
bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. I but
I thought this was as bad as it got. If
you ask me, I totally saw what what Disney saw
with this one. Anytime something is marked as the thing
that killed the thing, right, it's always just the last thing. Yeah,
you're right, you know, yeah, but it could have also
been the thing that saved the thing had they gotten

(41:32):
it right. You know, that's true. So, like I said,
Mariy was like and every time I say Maury, now
unless I say it like Morty just saying Maury, think
I think of the Whigs, Salesman and Goodfellas is like
give me my money and ray leodis this in their
laughing because Morey's to pay falls off. Imagine that guy

(41:55):
is the guy who came up with the young Canny Valley. Okay,
it gives a full different spin too, right, So Maury says, um,
you just don't even try. Guys like you're never going
to be able to do this. Even if you can,
We're so far away from it. And this is the
vy he was saying it, and it still holds true.
Now we're so far away from this that that just

(42:18):
maybe put your put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example
he gave was say, like a prosthetic hand, right, rather
than trying to create a lifelike prosthetic hand, that that
was in danger of creeping people out, which is the
opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants when
they're walking around the prosthetic hand. He said, you know,

(42:39):
maybe choose some like like would well sanded beautifully grained
wood in the shape of a human hand. It gets
the point across this is my hand. I lost my hand,
I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be
creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful. Looking, isn't it.
That was Maury's take, and a lot of people side
with him as well. As a matter of fact, you know,

(43:00):
I said, I think at the beginning that he was
already an established roboticist when he wrote The Uncanny Valley
in NINEV and he went on to teach a lot
of people roboticists or a lot of roboticists as well.
And um, that very famous robot uh a s m
o Asmo, you know, the one I'm talking about. He

(43:21):
was one of the first ones that could jog in place.
And he's kind of humanoid for sure, but very cute,
all white, shiny lacquer plastic. You've seen him before. Um.
He was created by one of Morey's students, who clearly
subscribe to Maury's theory that you you're not gonna you're
not gonna overcome the Uncanny Valley. So just make these

(43:43):
things exaggerated and non human like, and you'll you'll have
people love your robot. Yeah. I think that's a good tech. Yeah,
all right, we're gonna take another break here and then
come back and finish up with a little bit. We're
gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness,

(44:22):
all right, So I promised that we would talk about creepiness.
So that's what we'll do. The creeps such a great phrase.
Everyone says, it gives me the creeps. It's just such
a just It's one of those phrases that sums things

(44:42):
up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise. And um,
we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently because
he gets credit for using the creeps. Uh In David
Copperfield in people had had this feeling before, this sort
of pleasn't off you know what it feels like to

(45:02):
get the creeps. But they said things like eel like
or clammy. Not bad, not bad. But if you said
that thing makes me feel eel like today, people be like,
what the heck are you talking about? Right? I think
also you would use that to describe somebody who gave
you the creeps as well, like that guy is really clammy,
you know what I mean? Sure? Well, that means you're
touching them though, like like Peter Lori would be clammy

(45:25):
or eel like in some of his characters. You know,
Peter Lourie, how do you too? Um, So everybody understands
that there is such thing as the creeps, right, but
we don't understand why we get the creeps still to
this day, and again this is important and relates it
on Canny Valley because another way to put the creeps

(45:49):
is negative affinity. Remember affinity was the x axis, and
when the valley dropped down below the x axis, you
dipped into negative affinity. You dip into the creep the
creeps exactly right. So you talked about um Ernst yinch Yeah, yeah,
I get it. It was probably the first person to

(46:09):
actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness creepy himself.
I don't know. I think he was just kind of
a neat thinking man, right, So yinch Man, I like
saying his name a lot more now. He wrote an
essay in nineteen o six called on the Psychology of
the Uncanny and that's the English translation. Um. The German

(46:34):
word he used, like you said, is unheimlich, Is that right? Um?
Not unheimlich? Unheimlich Okay, better, thank you? Uh? He he
used that word, And unheimlich is a variation of the
word heimlich um, which is not just to say the maneuver,
It means something else entirely which is homie, we're familiar, right,

(47:00):
Unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign,
and very frequently is translated into uncanny here in the West,
here here in in England. Yeah, and he he has, uh,
he thought a lot about this. And one of the
things that he noted, which I think thought was pretty interesting,
was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating, um,

(47:24):
are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're
critical thinkers about the world. Right, So, uh that makes sense,
Like just they pay attention maybe a little more, Yeah,
or they're curious, like they're they're like, why am I
creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this,
rather than oh I'm creeped out him and then go
eat the whole thing at chips ahoy and hide under
the covers. Uh. He He also actually went even further

(47:48):
and said, it's it's possible that all of humanities knowledge
has been accrued over these millions of years from the
the people investigating what'spah this creepiness. It's a pretty weird
and neat theory of knowledge. Well, yeah, and speaking of theories,
there are a bunch of theories on creepiness, UM and

(48:09):
why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting.
The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we
talked earlier about evolution and UM, this one kind of
fits into that bucket. Uh. Basically a warning that we
have evolved to have in our brain. It says that
person is off, they are diseased. Even you don't want

(48:32):
to go near them, you want to avoid that pathogen.
It makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty pretty approachable. Um. There's
another one that I've seen that I think fairly recent,
and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when, um,
when they're trying to nonverbally mimic people and so, like

(48:55):
a robot doesn't do it, so we're like, oh, that's unsettling.
Or somebody who you would describe as clammy or eel
like maybe overdes it a little bit, like they're trying
to fit in. It's not natural to them and that
can give you the creep as well. That makes sense,
but it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a

(49:16):
unified theory of creepiness. It just seems to kind of
inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum. Yeah, there's another
one called violation of expectation. Um, this is like, you know,
you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life.
But if you go and you shake a hand and
you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetic,

(49:37):
can it may give you the creeps? Uh? And that
is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh, okay,
well it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's
just unexpected for me. And actually you said that was fleeting, right, Chuck.
So I think it was uniche or somebody who said
that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might

(49:59):
not of us the creeps later on, which will kind
of come into play later. Like Ernst n basically he
laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness and it
seems to have gotten a lot of it right right
out of the gate. Yeah. And like you said, if
it if it doesn't give you the creeps later, then
that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because

(50:22):
then you can change your expectation right exactly. Yes. Yes,
another one's mortality salience theory. Yeah, this one, MORI and uh,
Freud both subscribed to and it basically said that, um,
we when we encounter like a robot or an automaton
in Freud's day, um, they remind us of dead people,

(50:45):
which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how
we're going to die one day. And so all of
a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley right,
which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises
another of Unch's points. Um is uncanny nous inherent in
the object? Or is it inside the observer who's experiencing

(51:06):
the creeps or uncanny nous? I think it's in the observer. Yeah,
I think it is, too, which would explain why it
can go away when you when you come to experience
it again, like this, when you go through that, when
you shake the same prosthetic hand again, it's not creepy
the second time. It might even be interesting, or why
some people might not experience it at all. Like someone

(51:29):
might sit there and see a doll and the doll's
head turns and looks at them, and they're like, neat,
how much for that doll? Which means you've just met
a serial killer? And then the dolls creeped out after that, Uh,
this one, I like the UM even though I can
never say this word for some reason, and throw po morphism, dehumanization, dichotomy,

(51:51):
which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the
robot until we realize that they don't have them. Right. So, like,
we're looking at this robot that looks like a person.
We're saying, oh, look, it's just like a human. And
they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling, and then
oh god, look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead.
Look at the eyes. They don't they don't have any

(52:12):
internal thoughts at all. They're not human. And then all
of a sudden, on Canny Valley, which is a little
bit about expectation too. I think there's a crossover a little,
I think, and so creepiness, I think, especially the modern
incarnation of creepiness. This is my These are my thoughts.

(52:32):
They seem to be They represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily,
creepiness I think UM was probably it's alerts us. We're
on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused
on that thing, right then. But we're also bound by
society not to just turn and run from anything that

(52:54):
could conceivably be a threat. You can also take it
a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking, it would
not make sense for us to turn and run from
every single thing that could conceivably be a threat before
we've identified it as a threat, because we would be
using up a lot of calories and energy, and we
would have to find more food than we do. Would
be inefficient. Right, So we're kind of bound socially to

(53:15):
stand in place until we identify something as a threat
or not, in which case, during this period, that's when
we experience creepiness. Yeah, and I think everyone has experienced this. Um.
Like you're in a coffee shop or something and like
some super creepy dude comes in, and if you're liking me,
you're just like, um, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna

(53:38):
keep my eye on that guy. I'm not I'm not
gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near the door. Sure,
you know, I might get my car keys ready, exactly right. Uh,
it is, it's this weird social contract, um, And you
know I feel bad for people that just inherently look
a little creepy. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So

(53:59):
the was these there were these researchers from Knox College
who did what they build is the first empirical study
of creepiness. And this is in two thousand sixteen. And um,
it was an online survey, very little heavy lifting, but
it was a pretty pretty cool survey. It was in
four parts, and UM. What they found overall was that, Yeah,

(54:22):
physical characteristics, physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to
creepy people do have an effect. They are creepy. Um,
as far as as the participants in this study are concerned.
So the first section said, hey, you know what, what
is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like,

(54:45):
you know, descriptions of them with forty four different behaviors. Right. Um.
And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of
twenty one different occupations. Um. The third section it said,
list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only
needed to it was open ended to. And then the

(55:07):
last section, um, the participants said whether or not they
agreed with fifteen statements about the nature of creepy people. Yeah.
And overall, again like they found like, yes, if you
have physical traits that people find creepy, like bulging eyes
or you lick your lips a lot, or you know,
your you arch your fingers and then just kind of

(55:28):
tap them together a lot. Okay, it's kind of creepy,
but the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily
in and of themselves. It's when it's in conjunction with
other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy. Right. Uh.
And of course, the one behavior they put in here

(55:50):
I think that was probably universally creepy was someone who
persistently steers the conversation towards a sexual topic, right, yeah,
you don't, you don't do that. They they also found
they also found of participants, and this is like, I
think eight hundred and forty one people of them said

(56:10):
that men were more likely to be creepy than women.
I think that's generally true. Um. I don't remember getting
the creeps a lot in my life by uh, strictly
from the appearance of a woman, right, but a lot
of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps.
But we we should say so. There's a website called

(56:31):
girl dot com g u r l dot com and
they went on to read it and found a thread
somewhere that they wrote a blog post about and now
we're reporting on it, so it's really come full circle.
But it was a threat about how women can be creepy,
and it was written by dudes, and um, there are
some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women, right,

(56:58):
Women that are too needy can be creepy. Women who
use baby talk too much, or who quote never leave
a guy alone. Yeah, I just I'm just gonna go
ahead and dump that right into the trash ben. That's
my only comment on that. Okay, what about e harmony?
I mean, if you come home and Glenn closes in

(57:21):
your kitchen boiling your pet bunny, well, that's a threat. Yeah,
that's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Although I
will say in Fatal Attraction, the the scene where she
is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening
to Mad and Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy.
I was trying to think of like a creepy woman,

(57:45):
and I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these
are creepy behaviors, though, you know, not like Glenn cost
Close walked into the room and you're like, oh, I
don't know about that, right, right, right, there's a difference
right there. There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just
doing creepy things. I think it is much harder for

(58:05):
women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a
single actual creepy woman I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. Uh,
e harmony. So we talked about Reddit. Now we're gonna
talk about e harmony. They had an article where they
wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to Avoid

(58:26):
the creep Zone, um, and their advice was for your
hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla,
don't like and even if you are an amateur taxidermist,
maybe don't put that down right. They said, it can
be attractive for a guy to have an off the

(58:46):
beaten path hobby, and one of the examples they gave
of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records.
But don't get weirder than that. Yeah, and if you
know taxidermy in and of itself, some people might say
a super creepy. We did an episode on that. Other
people might say, no, it's just just beautiful artwork. But

(59:07):
Norman Bates was in a taxidermy for a reason. In
Psycho it was unsettling. Yeah, you know, yeah, and so
um there the Knox people who carried out this survey,
the Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we
think it is. Here's creepiness explained. And what they explained

(59:28):
was what can be called is the threat ambiguity um theory. Yeah,
this this one, I think we kind of put a
cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did
like it. It's just basically where you are creeped out
by something because your hackles are raised right then, and
it's because you haven't determined whether that things a threat
or not. Right. There's another one though that I subscribe to.

(59:51):
I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness.
I think it covers everything. And it's called the category
ambiguity theory. Yeah. That was Now did David Livingstone Smith
make this up or was he just champion this? I
think he made it up because he wrote about the
Knox researchers and said, what they're talking about you can

(01:00:14):
call threat ambiguity category or threat ambiguity theory with category
ambiguity theory. He didn't cite anybody else, so it seemed
to be his own construct. Yeah, so this is the idea.
It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there
is some confusion, but it's not a threat like I
think this dude in the coffee shop is gonna kill me.

(01:00:34):
It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy,
and that freaks me out. And it's based on what's
called um essential is um right, where if you are
a member of a species of animal, whether human or
raccoon or tiger, there's something about you where there's some

(01:00:54):
collection or set of things about you that that are
totally unique to your species. It's something you possess because
you remember that species, and because you remember that species,
you possess these things, and it can be very difficult
to put your finger on it, but it's just one
of those things that you know when you see it,

(01:01:15):
or no, when you don't see it right, and there
are clear borders between these things. You either have this
essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're
lacking and you're missing it and something's really wrong. So
in this article he used UM the example of a
wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame
Tusso's um, I find that the ones and again with

(01:01:36):
the eyes, the ones that work the best, or the
ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah again Michael Jackson,
that's right. But the whole point with these wax dummies
with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around.
The facial expression is locked in. Um, the skin itself.
You know, you can only do so much. And Madame

(01:01:56):
Tussos and museums like that are the best of the best,
and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole
point with the Uncanny Valley is you can't get there
and say we're fine. It's that one per cent that
still gives people the creeps exactly. And that's and it
sums up everything, like the threat ambiguity could fall into this,

(01:02:18):
whether you're talking about robots, whether you're talking about a
half dog half lizard combo. Which living stone sites are
living stones smith sites? Yeah, a dessert would be creepy
when you saw it, But so things that are a
threat are creepy. But there's also things that are creepy
that aren't a threat. And this category ambiguity theory figured

(01:02:40):
it out. So if that's true, Chuck and David Livingstone
Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness. We
finally have the independent variable licked and massa hiro Morty's
Uncanny Valley graph and we can get to work. Is
he still around? Yeah? Yes, when that's happy about all this?

(01:03:03):
I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever,
gone off on his own little thing, and he's fine.
He wrote it in v after all, you know, I
mean most fifty years ago, so he's probably up there.
Uh you anything else? I got nothing else? Good ones? Yeah,
if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,

(01:03:24):
we should say this was based originally on a grabsto article.
But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,
come read that grab Sto article. You can type Uncanny
Valley and the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And since I said search bars, time for listener mail. Well,
and today it's a very special listener mail. This is
Josh edition because you picked out a very special one.

(01:03:47):
I love this one. I'm gonna butcher the dude's name,
but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay,
I'm gonna call this one email from a real Irish historian,
and it feels pretty good to come out of a job.
Yeah maybe, Okay, Hi guys, I'm a big fan of
the show. It's informative and insightful, and I find myself

(01:04:07):
interested in things that I never looked twice at before.
One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation
between the Native American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland.
I didn't realize that was a thing that you at all.
This is a story which isn't well known, okay, which
isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and
of course within the tribe. But it's a really good

(01:04:27):
story of solidarity between two groups of people, despite being
thousands of miles apart. Less than twenty years after the
Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of natives, the
Great Famine hit Ireland. During this time, as you know,
Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of
Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that
Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human uh. He goes

(01:04:49):
on to to give more examples, but just suffice to
say it was not good for the Irish people. During
the famine, words spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe.
They sympathy eased with the Irish people so much that
only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears, they donated
seven hundred and ten dollars during eighteen forty five to
send to Ireland as part of a relief fund. This

(01:05:12):
is estimated to be roughly sixty eight thousand dollars in
today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people
and after the famine the bond continued. In Cork, we
have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people,
and in nineteen ninety members of the tribe came to
Ireland and walked the Famine Walk in Mayo to replicate
the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord

(01:05:33):
for help. In nine in Irish Commemoration group walked from
Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and
raised seven hundred thousand dollars to help poverty in Africa.
These two groups continue to work together and to this
day our President has declared an honorary member of the
Choctaw tribe. Along with the Quakers, who fed Irish people

(01:05:54):
to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The
Choctaw tribe remained some of the unsung heroes of the
famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long.
I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle. Love
the show. Best of luck with yourselves, Uh, Roison kill
Roy fan, fantastic, great story. Thanks a lot, Roison. I'm

(01:06:14):
quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name,
because there's a lot of accent marks over letters there
normally aren't. Um, So I apologized for that, but I
nailed your last name. I'm positive of it. And Josh
Clark three and a half stars, not bad out of
three and a half? Right, remember what was star search
the four stars? Oh? I don't remember. I just just

(01:06:35):
now remember there was such thing as Starson. Uh. Well, okay,
well you take the in part, Chuck, since I took
listener mail. Oh geez uh, thanks for listening. Um Hey,
if you want to get in touch with us, you
can find Josh at josh um Clark on Twitter and
me uh in Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or

(01:06:57):
you can go to our official pages. Stuff you should know, podcasts,
what else? Uh, let's see if they want to send
us an email. Oh yeah, email us at stuff podcast
at how stuff works dot com and have a good day.
Is that what you say? That's good enough? All right?

(01:07:18):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com.