June 10, 2021 • 48 mins
Today, Chuck and Josh go down a 90s rabbit hole with another in their classic toy series. This time, they tackle the odd sensation that was POGs.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's
lingering somewhere out there, and this is the stuff you
(00:21):
should know. It's POGs. It's POGs. That's right. That's other
theme song. Way. Actually, I think it's a little more
extreme and in your face than that. Yeah. You know
who is a big pog enthusiast is friend of the show,
Jesse Thorne of the Maximum Fund Network. I did not
(00:42):
know that. I've heard him talk about it. I mean
he's he's the right age for that wheelhouse and uh,
I've heard him talk about it on Judge John Hodgman
and with great enthusiasm. And Mom always like, what are POGs?
I've never even heard of these? Because I'm an old Yeah,
I mean i'd heard the word before, but I had
(01:03):
no idea what really they were, what you did with
them or anything. Okay, so a little before your time too, then,
oh yeah, a lot after my time. I mean you
had to basically be ten eleven, maybe twelve, I'll give
you thirteen between and nine four very specific niche window.
(01:26):
But these things were so big that it's just like
if you were a kid in the nineties kind of thing,
like you played POGs, Like everybody was playing with POGs
for like two years, and it was kind of like
the definition of a flash in the Pan fad. Yeah,
and we should think how stuffworks dot Com mental floss. Uh,
first we feast dot com. That was a good article.
(01:49):
It was pretty good. And then military dot Com for
a little cherry on top at the end. That's great.
We'd like to thank the military industrial Complex for the
cherry on top as a whole. So, Um, you're a
child of seventies. I'm a child the eighties. We had
our own thing. But again, this is a thing of
the nineties. And with POGs, um, it's like if you
(02:14):
I'm trying to think of a fad that was like
big when when we were young, and I really honestly
can't think of anything, not nothing akin to this. I mean,
like I want to say Nintendo maybe the original any yes,
but I would hardly call that a flash in the Pan,
you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, POGs to
me represent something different because they were they had two functions.
(02:37):
They functioned as kind of trading cards of sorts, but
it was also a game. Uh. And if you're listening
and frustrated already, we should say very quickly that POGs
these little circular discs, and we'll get into, you know,
the ins and outs of them, and this is our
one shot at explaining it right here. And there was
(02:59):
a played around them, which we will get into as well,
but they also functioned as things that kids would were
just obsessive about trading, like you have a a Pope
John Paul Park and I really want it, so I'm
gonna trade you my McDonald's pug and my I don't
even know what was popular in the nineties, but yeah,
that was probably be about it. There definitely were I've
(03:21):
seen pictures of them on the internet. Sure that means
it's real. I don't know if anybody went to the
trouble of photos shopping that, but I guess it's possible.
We should question everything we see on the internet, I guess.
And this also crosses over with The Simpsons because very
famously Millhouse traded Bart's soul away for a set of
(03:42):
POGs in one episode. That's right, and it comes full circle, Chuck,
because there were a lot of Simpsons POGs as well. Oh,
I'm sure can you name the character of um that
were on the POGs that Millhouse traded for? Do you know? Yes?
What alf h there were Alpha's back and pog form.
(04:06):
That's pretty funny. Yeah. So what I was trying to
get out earlier was like there was like this, um
the POGs were like a huge, huge flash in the
pan fad that just burned white hot and then just
went away very quickly. But the thing that makes them
interesting is not so much that there were some you know,
neat to year trend in the nineties, but that they
(04:27):
were actually based on a much older game, and that
that was actually based on a much older game as well,
and that it was just almost like this the most
recent iteration of this idea for a game that just
keeps popping up every few hundred years and makes you
wonder when it's going to pop up again in the future. Yeah,
which I think make is a good distinction that makes
(04:49):
it kind of cooler and more interesting then Definitely your
average Furby or unless there were ancient Furbies that we
don't know about, they've yet to be discovered. A kettle
hy Yeah, that's a movie you have. Furbie was discovered
ancient Furbies. Those things were kind of nineties too, right,
They were after our time, I think, so. I don't
(05:09):
know much about Furbies, but this is, you know, this
is in a long line of our sort of pop
culture toys Forgotten Toys episodes. Yeah, now that you mentioned it,
we probably should have saved this one for Christmas. Yeah,
we'll find something else. So we were talking about how POGs,
this game, these little discs that you you play with,
were based on a much older game. And uh, it
(05:32):
turns out that there was a person, a woman who
was a teacher and a guidance counselor in Hawaii at
um Way, a Lua elementary school in Oahu who in
to gather around children. I noticed that you guys are
playing a little rough on the playground. That dodgeball has
(05:52):
been coated with um tar and broken glass, and I'm
not very happy about that. I want you guys to
try something different. Let's try something that my grandparents used
to play and that I played when I was a
little kid your age, and it's called milk caps. I'm
gonna show you how to do it. And she introduced
these kids to this game of milk caps, and you
(06:13):
would think it would be kind of snoozy, but I
think this demonstrates just how engrossing but also simple the
game of poggs actually is that this old timey game
captured these school kids attention and then just spread like wildfires.
It's been put. Yeah, her name was She's got a
(06:33):
great name. Her name was Blossom Galbiso, fantastic name. And
this is like you said in and sadly she passed
away in so she, I guess got to see some
of the light, bright burning of kind of what she
brought to the forefront of the children's She did playgrounds,
(06:55):
she did. I've seen interviews with her, and um, there
were plenty of photos of her, like people knew where
this came from as it was going on to maybe
she didn't see it die off, which would be kind
of really nice. Oh, yes, last to live. It would
be really nice, actually, it would be. Yeah, she burned
(07:15):
bright and hot and short like her creation. Should we
do we go back to Japan or should we talk
more about this? And then? Yeah, I think we should
talk more about milk caps and then take it back
from there, because um, she used to play this as
a kid, and I think she was born in nine
and so say she was playing this in late fifties,
early sixties. But like I said, her grandparents. I guess,
(07:38):
like she said through me, her grandparents had played it
as well. So this game of milk caps was just
like POGs. They were, um, you would use these little
cardboard discs, and they were called milk caps because they
were actually the caps that you would get on a
bottle of milk. They would use a cardboard cap to
seal the bottle of milk, and and I think they
(08:00):
would put like a rubber thing around it to hold
the cardboard cap on. But for all intents and purposes,
the cap was this little cardboard disc and it would
have like the dairy's name on it and the information
and probably like you know, the latest day. It could
be sold by that kind of thing. Um. But when
you took these things off and you stacked them up
into a pile, you could make a pretty good game
(08:22):
out of them, a game called milk caps, right, And
we'll get to the exact game play in a second.
But they were playing with milk caps mainly. Uh. They're
on MAUI from or I'm sorry in a wahu from
these milk caps from Maui, the Leia Khala Dairy who um,
you know they were they were sending this milk all
over the place. They were actually packaged by a or
(08:46):
getting packaging from a Canadian company that were actually manufacturing
these caps, and they were making the milk. It was
just fine. Sure, they did a great business. But then
they decided to make a new drink called Passion Orange
Guaba or Passion Fruit orange guava p o G. And
it was like, it sounds it's a little mixed juice drink.
(09:09):
It sounds amazing. It does, doesn't it. Yeah, I can't
wait to try it one day. I bet it's good.
So those little caps, you know, that's where they got
the name. It was Passion food orange guaba. So they
became known as pog caps. And even though you know,
as the years trickled on the very few years that
it burned white hot, there were many other caps. It
(09:32):
was sort of like the Kleenex, Like, everyone called him poggs,
regardless of where they came from. Right, I'm sure there's
plenty of people who played with POGs as kids and
had no idea that it was an acronym for passion fruit,
orange and guava. You know, I bet most kids didn't
know that. But because it was that dairy, Um, what
is it? Uh? I practiced saying it a bunch of
times because we just screwed up so badly on our
(09:53):
Hawaiian Overthrow episode. I would say cola, I think it is,
but I think the accents actually on the last syllable. Yeah.
But so this because it was a dairy, they were
just using milk caps for their pog juice as well,
because they're packaging it very similarly. But because people didn't
(10:15):
really buy milk and bottles anymore, the pog caps were
much easier to come by because everybody was drinking pog
because ostensibly it was just this delicious drink, so so
um exactly. So Blossom Galbiso and her Young Awards started
like bringing these caps in from school and then eventually
(10:35):
writing to Um the dairy and asking for them, and
then eventually writing to stand pack like you were saying,
and saying, do you have any more of these caps
that we can get? Because we're we we could use them,
and we don't. We drank so much pog we all
have diabetes now, but um, we still want to play,
but we just can't drink anymore. Pog that's right. And
Stampac I don't think I named it. That was the
(10:56):
Canadian packaging company, Yes, yeah, which is still around today.
Yeah yeah, I looked him up. You can buy all
sorts of lids. I cannot find those cardboard Paul inserts
any longer. But if you want some um to go
coffee lids, STAYM pack is your company to This episode,
by the way, is brought to you by Stampa. Uh.
(11:17):
Do they still have the pod juice? You can still
get that, right? I think it's like in a carton now. Yes, Um,
I could not find it anywhere. I don't know if
you have to be on the West coast to find it,
but you can make your own. It's just equal parts
passion fruit, quava, and orange. I've also seen that's best
served ice cold, and um, I bet it's good with
(11:39):
the vodka. I saw a recipe with vodka, yes, and
then also one with aquavite and rum, which sounds pretty great.
It does, And now I'm seeing it's on a big
box website that we dare not name. Okay, that is
not I don't think that that is Jlakla Dairy's version.
(12:01):
I think that's another company's because I saw that on
the same big box website and they can call it
pog Yes, and we'll get to y well, gosh, good point. Yes,
we see it full circle on this big box website.
All right, I think we should take a break. This
is too much intrigue even for me to take. Uh.
(12:22):
And then we'll come back after this and talk about
it's more ancient traditions. Right after this. Boo, yeah, all right,
(12:48):
so we're back. We got Bloss. It's early nineties. Blossom
Galbiso is worried about violence on the playground, introduces these
kids to this sort of antiquated silly game and they
love it, they do. But how did this thing get
to Hawaii to begin with? I can I can tell
(13:08):
you how it got there. I can actually tell you
the date, Chuck. Let's hear it. February a ship called
the City of Tokyo spelled t ok Io arrived in
Hawaii um with nine hundred Japanese immigrants aboard looking for
work in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii. And that was
(13:30):
the first Japanese immigrants in the modern age who showed
up in the late nineteenth century and began this huge
influx of Japanese immigrants. And you might say, well, what
the heck does that have to do with milk caps?
And I would say, calm down, subtle down, I can
tell that, uh, And then I'd I'd wait a little
while until I had gotten to the to the point
(13:50):
where I feel like you have calmed down, and then
I would proceed with It's actually based Milk Caps is
based on a Japanese game that these Japanese immigrants presumably
brought with them because it was that popular in Japan.
That's right. It was called Manko, Emmy and Ko, and
it was a card game in Japan that came about
(14:11):
in the Kamakura period from about five three b c e.
That's pretty old. And so what happens in that game
as a player puts down a card and then their
opponent tries to flip that card over by throwing their card.
It sounds really difficult because it sounds like it's just
one card that you're throwing it another single card. It's
(14:34):
way harder than pog and if you flip the card over,
you get both of those cards again. Not like POGs
in in one way in the gameplayway, which we'll get to,
but Minko was very much like Pog and that these
little uh cards actually had symbols of cultural icons in Japan.
They had warriors on there and wrestlers. They were not uh,
(14:58):
they were cardboard later on by I think they were
like wood or ceramic or clay earlier on. Yeah, and
when they were a game called I think mang Ghetto, Uh,
they were made of clay. And they actually more resembled
pog chips um or disks before than they did than
Manko did, because Manko turned them into like what looked
(15:19):
like I think they are considered the predecessor of trading cards. Um,
these Manko cards, right, So, but before that, when they
were little clay tablets, they were little disc shapes and
they had like pictures and everything on them, so they
seemed more like POGs then than they did by the
time they arrived in Hawaii. But again, just trying to
flip over a disc by throwing another disc at it,
(15:41):
it seems really difficult to accomplish to me. It definitely does. So.
Um what the kids in Hawaii did with this game
of Manko was they They turned it into this milk
cap game using milk caps, which were widely available to them,
and rather than one milk cap trying to overturned another
old cap, you just stack a bunch of them together
(16:02):
and try to overturn as many as you could. Blood easier,
way easier, so much easier that like you could really
get the interests of some like six twelve thirteen again
is as high as I'm going to um year old
kids attention, you know, Yeah, And it probably matters about
(16:22):
your family and birth order, because if you're I could
see maybe if you're a fourteen year old only child
getting into it, But if you're fourteen and you've got
a nine year old little brother or sister, you're gonna
make fun of their POGs. Yeah, if you're a what
was it a Juliet, right, you're allowed to play POGs
(16:43):
at fourteen? No? No, no, that's what child, Poor little Juliet.
So she's got this game going, Blossom has got this
game going, or I guess they called her Miss Albiso.
And there was a man named al In Rapinsky who
saw dollar signs. It is crazy because, like we said,
(17:06):
stand Pack was making these bottle caps in Canada and
he said, you know what kids are really like in
this game. I'm really curious how he had his fingers
so on the pulse. That's what I'm saying. He was
in California and this is just going on in Hawaii,
and it's not like Hawaii and California don't communicate at all,
or didn't in the eighties or early nine. Well, it's
(17:26):
it started to come over. And when it did start
to come over to the mainland, it definitely started in
California first, so right, but I have the impression that
he brought it over to the main land, that he
found out about some hot trend that had just started
in Hawaii and got in on it from California. That's
my take on it. Well, you know, it doesn't help
is every article I read says he somehow caught wind
(17:48):
right exactly. He might have gone over their own business
or something. Who knows, what's what all these kids doing
throwing these bottle caps all around? That's yeah, either that
or else somebody told them about it and he was like, wait,
what are you what are you talking about? I want
to know more about it. He was a guy who
had a real nose for potential. Like he was the
man who bought the patent for a little leather protectant
(18:11):
um that was called trying on I think at the time,
but he turned it into arm all. He was the
guy that brought the world armor all. He didn't invent it,
but he figured out how to market it and turn
it into something huge. Um. Remember that non wrinkle spray
you could spray your clothes and it would get the
wrinkles out. I think it was called wrinkle Free or
something like that in the eighties. He marketed that just
(18:35):
a bunch of like interesting stuff. So he found out
about POGs. He caught wind of it one way or another.
I bet I know how it happened how. I bet
he went to Hawaiian business is always kind of keen
to his you know, goings on around him because he's
always looking for that next million dollar idea. And he
saw the first fist fight breakout with these kids over
(18:57):
a set of POGs that they wanted to trade or
or a winner take all game. And he saw this
bloodthirst and was like, I can make money off of that. Yeah. That,
And then he did the other thing he was well
known for. He ran over and broke up the fight
by spraying both of the combatants with armor all and
they just slipped right off of one another and couldn't
land a single punch, And when they got wrinkled up,
(19:18):
he sprayed then with Wrinkle's great story. So, yeah, you're
probably right, because that is kind of what the ultimate
destiny of poggs was, and he was largely responsible for
that because um if if blossom Galbiso was the mother
of poggs. This guy was the father of pos. He
was the guy who and as far as I know,
you know, they were not in any way meritally related
(19:40):
or anything like that. They were just related by POGs.
But he took it and just introduced the world to it,
um just as this marketing guy. And he actually formed
a group called the World Pog Federation within I think
a year of Blossom gal Beasts introducing this for the
(20:01):
first time to her students in Hawaii. The World Pog
Federation had been created by Alan Rapinski and his his company. Yeah,
and he did something very very key to this story
or in this story, uh kind of when you mentioned
about Jakala and the fact that they did not have
great financial gain from this, it's because Rapinsky saw the
(20:23):
writing on the wall and said, hey, why don't you
sell me that brand name, that Pog brand name, because
like who cares? Like you don't care, right, you're just
pumping out this juice. You can still pump out that juice.
And they said sure, and they sold them the Pog
brand name, and that was it. They were sort of
cut out of. Uh. I mean, I guess for a
(20:45):
little while they still people were maybe buying their stuff
a little more than usual to get these Pog caps,
but that they weren't like getting juice. Uh No pun
intended from you know, from like the rights to sell
these things. They were as a matter of fact, from
what I from what I can tell, I think I
saw in like an l A Times article or something
(21:06):
from the nineties that they got Yes, so it wasn't
like entirely like you know, this l A businessman fleeced
some Hawaiian dairy farmers entirely like they were cut in.
But I think the big thing is like that as
far as the dairy was concerned, they had no real
(21:28):
role in this other than accepting, you know, some money
and that for a few years. I guess, sure, yeah, sure,
And that's a bit of a it was ultimately a
misstep on their part. But Rapinsky, you know, he's very
much credited with, you know, introducing this to the world,
but he's also credited with making this thing burned so
(21:49):
hot that it was just inevitable that it was going
to last a very very short time. And a lot
of people kind of say, you know, that was a
screw up. He shouldn't have done it like that. But
I also had the quesssion that he knew that this
thing no matter what he did. It's not like POGs
were always going to be around, that they were the
new baseball cards or anything. So I think he came
along I was like, we need to get as much
(22:10):
money as we possibly came out of this because it's
not going to last for very long. And he proceeded
to do that. Yeah, So he created the pog man,
the mascot. Like he said, they started having these tournaments everybody.
I mean, I was not kidding about Pope John Paul.
I think they bought like fifty thousand the Catholic Church
(22:30):
POGs when the Pope came to New Jersey to give
them out. Um Bill Clinton was on one. They had
altruistic campaigns had that Dare the Dare Not to Do
Drugs campaign started making POGs, and of course the major
chain restaurants got involved in Del Taco and Taco Bell
and McDonald's, Disneyland, everybody, anything that you could put on
(22:53):
a pog because you know, these kids are holding these
things and tradeings these these things. It was like liquid
gold to an advertiser because they were everywhere and kids
were fighting, like literally fighting over them. So anyone and
everyone tried to get an image on a pog cap,
even if it wasn't the official, like licensed one. Yeah.
I mean like if you released a movie during the
(23:15):
pog era, you probably made POGs for especially if I
was a alph. Yeah. Um, there's there's a set of
pulp fiction ones that are pretty cool. Yes, there are.
I would think that would be just on a bubble.
I would think so too, but nope, it was they.
I've seen it with my own eyes. Well that somebody
(23:35):
could have photoshopped him, but um, Jurassic Park had a
set of hologram ones that were pretty cool. I think
somebody tried to sell them for a million million dollars
on EVA, and I don't believe they actually got a
million dollars for him people. I think that's probably about
how it went, because you know, people want POGs to
(23:57):
be worth a lot more than they are, and they're
just not. I mean, it's too recent, there's too many
of them. Um. When I saw that seemed legitimately like
about a hundred dollars was a Stucy one, which was
super cool. It's like silver shine, Yeah, and then it's
got like the reggae colors on it and everything. It's
a pretty cool pog, to tell you the truth. Yeah,
(24:19):
I don't even know if I would have been in
the wheelhouse. Like I think a lot of this depends
on and we'll get to this in a second, like
you're you're playing at school some but then the schools
try and shut it down because it's very disruptive. So
then you have to live in one of those great
neighborhoods where there's thousands of houses and kids are just
all over the place. And you know, as I've said before,
I grew up in the woods on two acres of
(24:41):
land with nary another child in sight except for my brother.
So I think it kind of depended on that kind
of after school trading in the cul De sact thing
that I never got a piece of. No, you had
to play POGs with dirt friend, the pile of dirt
you named your friend. I did have dirt friends. Funny.
(25:02):
I wasn't trying to be funny. Okay, there is nothing
funny about that, chuck um mighty more from power rangements
were another big one. Oh of course, I'm sure those. Yeah,
that was a big deal at the time, very huge.
And then like so yeah, if you if you wanted
to brand the kids, this was a great opportunity to
do it. Now, legitimately you had to go through the
World Pog Federation because all these things were supposedly POGs,
(25:26):
and if you wanted to print your own pog it
didn't matter who you were. You had to go license
the ability to do this from Alan Rapinski and the
World Pog Federation. The problem is if you own the
license the trademark to a little cardboard disc that anybody
could make if they wanted to. Like, the technology is
(25:47):
really easy and low hanging to make these kind of
things that yes, it's going to be like a large
business like Taco Bell, who's just not going to be
bothered with a major lawsuit that will cost them more
than it would to license the rights to make POGs
and give them out as like, you know, some promotional tool. Um.
But any like, anybody who's even remotely interested in the
(26:09):
knockoff market just doving head first into POGs, and the
market became saturated really fast, not just with Rapinski's officially
licensed POGs, there are plenty of those, but also just
knockoffs galore. Yeah. There there's a couple of staggering statistics here. Uh.
It says here in California alone, at one point, POGs
(26:30):
we're selling ten million dollars a week in one state
and then uh and of course Jesse thorns from California,
so it may have been I mean, I know they
were nationwide and then worldwide, but I get the feeling
that California was a real pog hot spot. That's my
impression as well. But in nineteen well, I guess there
is pulp fiction year, um, three hundred and fifty million
(26:52):
POGs sold, so it was yeah, it was still going strong.
And ninety four yeah, yeah, so kids were trading gimp
uh gift boggs. That's exactly one that say like I'm
about to give medieval on. Yeah. So we we can
conclude then, Chuck. Since they were still going strong in Blossom,
(27:15):
Galbiso died. She did not have to see the end
of the pog trend. She she went out on top,
look at that detective work. Isn't that great? And they
buried her with a pog of the back of thing
Raimes's head. That's right, with a band aid on it.
You want to take another break, sure quickly, that one
(27:36):
of plug. Since we're talking pulp fiction, I had Jack
O'Briens e guist on and we talked to pulp fiction
and it's out in the world and it was a
great discussion. So if you like pulp fiction and movie conversations,
check it out. And Jack O'Brien too. Jack's the best.
We'll be right back. Okay, so we're back. POGs have
(28:11):
burned bright. They've started to kind of fizzle though, right yeah,
And you know I kind of hinted at it. One
of the reasons was that schools they had to clamp
down on the scene because there were fights over POGs.
Because if you play, uh, if you played playing for keeps,
(28:32):
that meant and we'll go over the full I guess
we kind of went over the game play. But should
we Yeah, you want to now? Yeah, I guess. So
the first thing you decide is are you playing for
keeps or not? Playing for keeps means that you go
home with the POGs that you collect from your friends
and you don't there's no gives these back ses, uh,
and those are those are serious games if you're ten
(28:53):
years old. You know, you know what's funny is you
just used two terms used for marbles, which bears a
striking resemblance to POGs as well, or at least the
way you play marbles and some of the rules involved. Yeah,
because you collect these things as a kid, and you
really if you have to give up that gimpo, Yeah,
you're really upset that you've you've lost that thing. So
fights would break out and schools start to have to
(29:14):
clamp down and literally banned it in quite a few
countries at one point. Yeah, because I mean, also, this
is a game of chance. We're going to tell you
how to play. In a second, it will become very
clear that's almost entirely luck. Um. And so it's gambling.
There's you know, if you're playing for chips and these things,
are you're playing for POGs? I mean, and these things
are coveted. Um. Yeah, little little kids don't necessarily deal
(29:39):
with loss like that, especially sudden, unexpected loss that they
hadn't really anticipated the consequences of. Um. And yeah, you
can get and fight to accuse people of stealing. It's
it was. POGs became problematic very quickly. But this was
also during the same era where Bart Simpson, you know,
touting that he was an under achiever, got t shirts
(30:02):
of Bart Simpson banned in schools. So schools were seemingly
a little stricter back then in the early nineties than
they are today, although I can't say that they are today.
It just seems strict now in retrospect. Yeah, I think
that's right. Um, And I'm gonna stop the people from
emailing you right now. Do you a favor, my friend,
(30:22):
because you said that it's basically luck and I guarantee
you there are some thirty something to early forty something
Paul enthusiasts they're really mad at you right now that
had their POG technique down that they claim was like
superior to their friends and that there was skill involved. Well,
(30:43):
I appreciate emails. You're saving me a bunch of time
replying to all those emails saying you are wrong, wrong, wrong,
because yeah, it is luck. So yeah, so let's talk
about how to play this right. So, um, when you
play pog, you need basically a flat surface and a
bunch of POGs. You need at least one other person,
and from what I was reading on the internet, it
(31:04):
seemed that that was usually how many people were in
a pog match. There's two on one right, each person
puts up the same number of POGs, and apparently the
ideal stack of POGs is twelve. So each person is
ponying up six POGs. Whether you coveted or not, I
don't know. That's only if you want to follow the
(31:25):
unofficial Pog and Cat Player's Handbook written by Jason Page exactly,
who probably knows what he's talking about, at least more
than I do. So I'm going with his number. So
you form a stack of POGs and um, you get
what your hands on. What's called a slammer up. You
got to say that part? Oh thanks man. So yeah,
if you look at a pog on one side, is
(31:47):
basically what you like is the design on the other
side through the blank or there's minimal design on it.
It's very clear that there's one side that's like the
face and you said their face up or down. You
put him face up. So you've got your stack with
Bill Clinton on top and the other stack with the
gamp on top, going head to head, and that is
(32:07):
how you start the game. Oh is it okay? So
my understanding was that they were all in one stack.
Oh no, no no, no, yeah, yeah, sorry chee okay, okay,
people are so mad at me right now. So then
so they put them up against each other. Then you'd
stack them on like all all on one. Yeah, okay,
so you've got a stack of twelve POGs. We should
probably edit and reduce this whole thing. I think this
is good. And then you take a slammer, and slammer
(32:29):
is basically a pog shaped object that it's almost like
a mini hockey puck. It's made of um, heavier material
than pog than like cardboard, so it's like um like glass,
like a heavy glass kind of thing, or rubber or
metal or something like that. I wonder if there are
restrictions on that. No, this is a free f all.
(32:50):
Man Pog was a free fall, which is why the
parents just didn't get it. You know why they couldn't
stand it. You could so you could bring in like
an iron slammer. I think so I saw that somewhere
that that it was frowned upon among players because the
metal would often dent at least the top pog, and
if that was your pog, you might be like, man,
that was what you do in my po right. Other
than that, I don't think that there were restrictions on
(33:13):
although you know, I'm sure informally there were a N
and zipper. But you you would take the slammer and
you would toss it down. Now here's the part where
you're referring to earlier that people were going to email
in about, because it does take some technique to slam
this thing down. Because if you miss, or if you
if you actually don't move the stack at all, that's
(33:35):
your turn. The other person gets their turn next. Um,
So it does take some technique to hit the stack
in the first place, but then also to scatter him
in a certain way, right, And it's the scattering that's
the most important part of playing pog. Yeah, and you
know what, I know we're gonna get emails. I guarantee you.
This is a game that had regional variations. It's just
got to be. It's one of those kids games where
(33:57):
one playground might play it slightly different than another their
playground as far as the rules go, absolutely, and that's
I'm gonna stand by that because I know we're gonna
get people that are going to contradict one another and
say that their version was like how they played it
was the right way. But until I read that book
by Jason Page, which I'm never gonna do. Oh, I
don't know, maybe somebody will mail it to you. So, yeah,
(34:20):
you slam this thing down and these, uh, this stack
of POGs, if you hit it right, is gonna kind
of scatter everywhere, like you said, And then some of
them will have flipped over with the face side down.
Some will remain face side up, and that is sort
of the key to the whole game. Yes, So the
(34:40):
ones you've the ones that have landed face side up,
you get to keep. If it was your turn. Now,
those might be your buddies POGs, they might be your POGs,
it doesn't matter. Then you take the ones that are
still face side however they were stacked up, I think
you're saying, and then you put them back into another stack,
and now it's the other player's turn, and you keep
going back and forth until all of the POGs have
(35:03):
been turned over and kept. And however many POGs you
turned over, that's how many you get to keep. And
you know, again whether it's your POGs or the other
person's POGs. Ideally it's everybody's pots. And then there was
another there's another variation I saw that seems to have
been pretty widespread. It was the poison pog. And these
were usually like kind of a Memento moriy kind of thing,
(35:26):
like scary skulls on fire and you know, like an
eight ball kind of thing um, and it would say
poison pog and the poison pog if you put one
of those in the stack, if you flip that one over,
then you got all the all the POGs in that
stack on that one turn. Okay, I didn't see that.
And this is another frustration, because I went to some
(35:47):
YouTube videos of like gameplay videos, and I saw several
that had described the game played differently than the others,
which leads me to think that there were variations. Because
I saw one person say that you get to keep
the POGs that are faced down, and that flies in
the face of everything I had heard from everyone else, right, Yeah,
(36:07):
and I think it just it's flipping it over from
the way it was before. I don't think it actually matters,
but but yes, you would want to you keep the
ones that you flip over, whether now they're face up
or down. Who cares, right? And then I saw another
where they said that you stack them every other one
is face up or down. But I didn't see that
(36:28):
verified anywhere else either, So yeah, I didn't run into
that one. Yeah, I just you know, people should say
like these were Michigan rules, you know, or something, right,
So you know that slammer the heavier object that you
throw onto the pog stack. Um, you can make them
out of all sorts of things, and they have different
They often had different like imagery on them as well.
(36:50):
But I saw one. I saw this in multiple places.
There was an O. J. Simpson one where it had
a picture of Jimpson's behind behind bars, so he was
in the slam so he was on the slammer as well.
That must have been a legendary slammer, because I did.
I saw that in a couple of plays. Slammer. I
wonder if he got a piece of that. I don't
(37:12):
think so, man, And I don't think he's legally allowed
to keep it even if he did. And then one
day he would break into a hotel room and steal
those slammers. That's where I'd give you the slammers. Get
him back, man. I saw a documentary on that robbery.
It was nuts. Oh really, yeah, I guess it was no, no, no,
I'm sorry it was that. Um what was that like
(37:34):
five part series on O J and the murders and
everything that did it? I don't remember. I know it
was just a documentary, I think, yeah, but the documentary series,
but yeah, they covered that robbery too, and it was
just just so casual and dumb and so casually dumb too,
you know, it really wasn't. So let's see. I think
(38:00):
we've explained how to play POGs about as thoroughly as
you possibly can, don't you think, So let's talk about
how they finally fizzled out. Well, you know, like I
said earlier that I think the banning on the playgrounds
and then the banning or or at school, and then um,
I think the US, Canada, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, the UK
and Australia all banned these pieces in schools, and so
(38:25):
that's gonna put a damper on something. If you're stuck
at dumb school all day and you can't have your
POGs and you're just limited to the hours between three
and six when mom and dad call you back to
eat dinner. Okay, on the one hand, but I also
saw a contemporary piece of journalism in the interviewed the
founder of um Trove USA, which was a big pog
(38:48):
maker at the time, and uh, he speculated that those
school bands actually increased pog sales and pro that, but
also probably prolonged interest because if kids have been free
to play these all the time, they would have lost
interest that much, that much faster. I mean, I think
ultimately that's what happened. It's it's like any or It's
(39:11):
like many kid fads that it just it becomes not cool.
You age out of it a little bit, and maybe
the kids below you weren't interested, and it just goes away.
I mean, I don't I don't think there's a smoking
gun here to you besides o j um. Uh. Yeah,
I would say, oh j is probably the culprit for
(39:32):
why bogs went away. Yeah, I think they said in
Boys Life Magazine. In the issue of Boys Life Magazine,
they basically said it was it was done and not
cool anymore. So, yeah, they compared it to things like, um,
what's that one where you chase a hoop with a stick? Yeah,
(39:57):
like that, and playing marbles and all these old time
he's fads. They included pog among them already. Boys I said,
then it probably meant it went out by exactly, it
was super out by then. So we kind of mentioned
Chuck that Holla Kala dairy um did not really benefit
(40:17):
from this, and they did financially, I'm sure cut of
all of that hundreds of millions of dollars that was
flowing to the World Pog Federation for a couple of
years definitely boosted their annual revenue, I'm sure. But if you,
you know, talk to most people and say what does
what does paug actually mean, they probably couldn't tell you.
(40:38):
And so in that respect, a lot of the articles
that I think both of us have seen about this
have pointed out quite rightly that you know that the
dairy really missed an opportunity to become like legendary or
become a part of the trend, and they were very
quickly separated. Poggs became their own thing in isolation with
with no boost whatsoever to the dairy. Now there's kind
(41:01):
of like this kind of retro nod to it that
that enough time has passed, enough people have written and
talked about it, that the dairy has been identified as
the source of of POGs originally, but it didn't happen
at the time, and in this kind of retrospective about
it is not really probably going to help the dairy
very much. It was just sad, yeah, and you know
why because they were a dairy, right, Like in this
(41:24):
one article that they spoke with this creative director at
a New York ad agency that was like, you know,
this is why you really need to pay attention to
what your consumers doing with your brand, Like if they
have off brand uses going on, you need to know
about to capitalize on it. And look at McDonald's and
like they're the perfect company with this stuff. And it's
just like, man, they were a dairy that in Hawaii.
It didn't they didn't. They weren't paying attention to that,
(41:46):
and they shouldn't have been expected to. I don't think sure, no, no,
and certainly not. And I think also it's one of
those things where the only way that they possibly could
have capitalized as if they had taken the gamble that
this is going to be an enormous bad which would
take a tremendous amount of foresight, and then also would
have had to have hired like a publicist like the
guy that was um interviewed or quoted in that article.
(42:09):
Like they would have had to have figured it out,
and then they could have possibly bungled it. It It would
have been a big, a big deal. But also, yeah,
they're they're like you said, they're just they're a dairy
and and that's not the way that they're thinking. But yeah,
and in hindsight, it's very easy to blame him. But regardless,
I mean it is it is a little sad that
they got kind of left behind, but I don't think
(42:30):
that they were any like worse for the wear from
not having been on the pog crest along with the
little caps a little mill. Uh, should we go to
our cherry on top here at the end. Yeah, thanks
to the U. S. Military for this cherry on top. Again. Yeah,
this is interesting because I had no idea about this,
and uh, I should talk to my brother in law
because he's certainly been stationed overseas. But um, so, the
(42:54):
Army and Air Force exchange service stores. These are you know,
let's say, if the military is a seas in the
Middle East or whatever, they're in Afghanistan and they set
up these sort of temporary on base stores. They started
issuing POGs, these little cardboard coins in November two thousand one.
Because they were lighter than metal coins, you could ship
(43:16):
them a lot cheaper overseas, and it was supposed to
be like a temporary thing, and you know, it said
how much it was worth, basically, but then they started
having uh, pictures on it and and comic book characters
and NASCAR drivers and stuff like that. People just can't resist. No,
But they were essentially POGs, and you know, I don't
see anything that they actually played the game, but they
(43:38):
functioned as currency for American service people in Afghanistan since
two thousand one until just recently. Yeah, and then this
um was it military dot com article, Yeah, where they
were basically you know, they interviewed a few people who
seemed a little like ver Clemp that these things are
phased out, because they were like this kind of weird
(43:59):
little part of their their tour that had that you
just wouldn't find anywhere else in the world. And the
whole reason the military adopted POGs overseas, at least an Afghanistan,
is because it's just so much easier to chip um
to ship them and to chip in. Using them requires
less effort to toss them into the pot. But the
(44:20):
like if you I think a hundred dollars and quarters,
I saw ways almost six pounds and a hundred dollars
in these little POGs. Ways, you know, a fraction of that.
So just in shipping costs alone, it made sense. But
apparently these these pog coins worm their ways into the
hearts of the U. S. Soldiers in Afghanistan. I love it. Yeah, well,
(44:43):
so long POGs, and so long the to the military
reincarnation of POGs. There are no POGs anywhere now in
the world at all. If you want to know more
about POGs, just start looking them up on the internet
and see what you think. And since I said that's
for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this slime Mold enthusiasts.
(45:07):
And it's not from you. I know there's a fellow
slime Old Enthusiasts I'm one of them. Do now, Hey, guys,
loved your slime Old episode. To figure it, I should
crawl out from under the leaf litter and get in touch. Uh.
It's pretty good, Huh. I got slime Olds about ten
years ago for a kid's lecture and started giving it
away so other people could play with these funky, chilled
(45:28):
out beings without having to fork over hard to earn cash.
You can drive them out on paper, cut them into
portions and pop them in the post, which makes things
very easy. Things kind of snowball quickly. I've now posted
it to this means mailed for our American listeners. Very nice.
I've now posted it to around twenty five countries. RAND
(45:49):
stands at the UK's biggest science fair, giving out thousands
of cultures, and I've gotten and I've got three thousand
about to go to Milan for an art exhibition. I
am been selectively breeding them. That's very awesome. He calls
them his pets. He said they're they're much better travel
than I am. He said, they're fantastic things for children
(46:09):
and adults to play with. Giving it a selection of
different foods, seeing what will go for as as a
firm favorite with school classes of all ages. Would you
like some guys? Yes, please, they're easy to keep the
same deal as everyone else. It's free and uh there's
a there's a website here. I don't know if this
is just for us or if it's for everyone. Well
(46:32):
let's say it and then um we can edit it
out if if he's like, no, please don't really say that. Okay,
it's either you're either gonna hear a long beep. Okay,
that censorship www dot tiny u r l dot com
slash slime manifesto and this has instructions in the backstory.
(46:54):
I bet that's for everyone. The only thing you got wrong,
Chuck is that it's www period. Oh yeah, that's right,
and we get mad at pet ants. Are you taking
a passive aggressive shot at me right now? No, it's
it's fully aggressive. Thanks to everyone on your team for
(47:14):
your brilliant episodes. My job as a microscopist means I'm
usually alone in the dark. Your podcast goes along way
to keeping me sane ish cheers. That is from Ian
hands Portman, and then he adds this little PostScript. I've
accidentally tasted uh fist a room several times. It's easy
to do when a half square meter of it is
(47:35):
hungry and gets loose in your bag. It tastes like
a compost heap smells, but with the added bonus of
being incredibly bitter. Wow, this is a great email, Ian,
Thank you for this. Yeah, and this is one of
the tops of all time. Frankly, has it all? It
hasn't something that we're already interested in as an offer
(47:55):
to give us something we're already interested for free. It's
British and includes accidentally tasting a live organism. Yeah. That
that could you know, creepily take over your household? Yeah,
or your body now that you've eaten it. That's right. Well, um.
Good luck to Ian surviving the slime Old tasting encounter.
(48:17):
I hope that you live long enough to send us
some free slime old because I will definitely take you
upon that for sure, for sure. Thanks again, Ian, And
if you want to be like Ian and be super cool,
you can send us an email to send it off
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For
(48:37):
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's
lingering somewhere out there, and this is the stuff you
(00:21):
should know. It's POGs. It's POGs. That's right. That's other
theme song. Way. Actually, I think it's a little more
extreme and in your face than that. Yeah. You know
who is a big pog enthusiast is friend of the show,
Jesse Thorne of the Maximum Fund Network. I did not
(00:42):
know that. I've heard him talk about it. I mean
he's he's the right age for that wheelhouse and uh,
I've heard him talk about it on Judge John Hodgman
and with great enthusiasm. And Mom always like, what are POGs?
I've never even heard of these? Because I'm an old Yeah,
I mean i'd heard the word before, but I had
(01:03):
no idea what really they were, what you did with
them or anything. Okay, so a little before your time too, then,
oh yeah, a lot after my time. I mean you
had to basically be ten eleven, maybe twelve, I'll give
you thirteen between and nine four very specific niche window.
(01:26):
But these things were so big that it's just like
if you were a kid in the nineties kind of thing,
like you played POGs, Like everybody was playing with POGs
for like two years, and it was kind of like
the definition of a flash in the Pan fad. Yeah,
and we should think how stuffworks dot Com mental floss. Uh,
first we feast dot com. That was a good article.
(01:49):
It was pretty good. And then military dot Com for
a little cherry on top at the end. That's great.
We'd like to thank the military industrial Complex for the
cherry on top as a whole. So, Um, you're a
child of seventies. I'm a child the eighties. We had
our own thing. But again, this is a thing of
the nineties. And with POGs, um, it's like if you
(02:14):
I'm trying to think of a fad that was like
big when when we were young, and I really honestly
can't think of anything, not nothing akin to this. I mean,
like I want to say Nintendo maybe the original any yes,
but I would hardly call that a flash in the Pan,
you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, POGs to
me represent something different because they were they had two functions.
(02:37):
They functioned as kind of trading cards of sorts, but
it was also a game. Uh. And if you're listening
and frustrated already, we should say very quickly that POGs
these little circular discs, and we'll get into, you know,
the ins and outs of them, and this is our
one shot at explaining it right here. And there was
(02:59):
a played around them, which we will get into as well,
but they also functioned as things that kids would were
just obsessive about trading, like you have a a Pope
John Paul Park and I really want it, so I'm
gonna trade you my McDonald's pug and my I don't
even know what was popular in the nineties, but yeah,
that was probably be about it. There definitely were I've
(03:21):
seen pictures of them on the internet. Sure that means
it's real. I don't know if anybody went to the
trouble of photos shopping that, but I guess it's possible.
We should question everything we see on the internet, I guess.
And this also crosses over with The Simpsons because very
famously Millhouse traded Bart's soul away for a set of
(03:42):
POGs in one episode. That's right, and it comes full circle, Chuck,
because there were a lot of Simpsons POGs as well. Oh,
I'm sure can you name the character of um that
were on the POGs that Millhouse traded for? Do you know? Yes?
What alf h there were Alpha's back and pog form.
(04:06):
That's pretty funny. Yeah. So what I was trying to
get out earlier was like there was like this, um
the POGs were like a huge, huge flash in the
pan fad that just burned white hot and then just
went away very quickly. But the thing that makes them
interesting is not so much that there were some you know,
neat to year trend in the nineties, but that they
(04:27):
were actually based on a much older game, and that
that was actually based on a much older game as well,
and that it was just almost like this the most
recent iteration of this idea for a game that just
keeps popping up every few hundred years and makes you
wonder when it's going to pop up again in the future. Yeah,
which I think make is a good distinction that makes
(04:49):
it kind of cooler and more interesting then Definitely your
average Furby or unless there were ancient Furbies that we
don't know about, they've yet to be discovered. A kettle
hy Yeah, that's a movie you have. Furbie was discovered
ancient Furbies. Those things were kind of nineties too, right,
They were after our time, I think, so. I don't
(05:09):
know much about Furbies, but this is, you know, this
is in a long line of our sort of pop
culture toys Forgotten Toys episodes. Yeah, now that you mentioned it,
we probably should have saved this one for Christmas. Yeah,
we'll find something else. So we were talking about how POGs,
this game, these little discs that you you play with,
were based on a much older game. And uh, it
(05:32):
turns out that there was a person, a woman who
was a teacher and a guidance counselor in Hawaii at
um Way, a Lua elementary school in Oahu who in
to gather around children. I noticed that you guys are
playing a little rough on the playground. That dodgeball has
(05:52):
been coated with um tar and broken glass, and I'm
not very happy about that. I want you guys to
try something different. Let's try something that my grandparents used
to play and that I played when I was a
little kid your age, and it's called milk caps. I'm
gonna show you how to do it. And she introduced
these kids to this game of milk caps, and you
(06:13):
would think it would be kind of snoozy, but I
think this demonstrates just how engrossing but also simple the
game of poggs actually is that this old timey game
captured these school kids attention and then just spread like wildfires.
It's been put. Yeah, her name was She's got a
(06:33):
great name. Her name was Blossom Galbiso, fantastic name. And
this is like you said in and sadly she passed
away in so she, I guess got to see some
of the light, bright burning of kind of what she
brought to the forefront of the children's She did playgrounds,
(06:55):
she did. I've seen interviews with her, and um, there
were plenty of photos of her, like people knew where
this came from as it was going on to maybe
she didn't see it die off, which would be kind
of really nice. Oh, yes, last to live. It would
be really nice, actually, it would be. Yeah, she burned
(07:15):
bright and hot and short like her creation. Should we
do we go back to Japan or should we talk
more about this? And then? Yeah, I think we should
talk more about milk caps and then take it back
from there, because um, she used to play this as
a kid, and I think she was born in nine
and so say she was playing this in late fifties,
early sixties. But like I said, her grandparents. I guess,
(07:38):
like she said through me, her grandparents had played it
as well. So this game of milk caps was just
like POGs. They were, um, you would use these little
cardboard discs, and they were called milk caps because they
were actually the caps that you would get on a
bottle of milk. They would use a cardboard cap to
seal the bottle of milk, and and I think they
(08:00):
would put like a rubber thing around it to hold
the cardboard cap on. But for all intents and purposes,
the cap was this little cardboard disc and it would
have like the dairy's name on it and the information
and probably like you know, the latest day. It could
be sold by that kind of thing. Um. But when
you took these things off and you stacked them up
into a pile, you could make a pretty good game
(08:22):
out of them, a game called milk caps, right, And
we'll get to the exact game play in a second.
But they were playing with milk caps mainly. Uh. They're
on MAUI from or I'm sorry in a wahu from
these milk caps from Maui, the Leia Khala Dairy who um,
you know they were they were sending this milk all
over the place. They were actually packaged by a or
(08:46):
getting packaging from a Canadian company that were actually manufacturing
these caps, and they were making the milk. It was
just fine. Sure, they did a great business. But then
they decided to make a new drink called Passion Orange
Guaba or Passion Fruit orange guava p o G. And
it was like, it sounds it's a little mixed juice drink.
(09:09):
It sounds amazing. It does, doesn't it. Yeah, I can't
wait to try it one day. I bet it's good.
So those little caps, you know, that's where they got
the name. It was Passion food orange guaba. So they
became known as pog caps. And even though you know,
as the years trickled on the very few years that
it burned white hot, there were many other caps. It
(09:32):
was sort of like the Kleenex, Like, everyone called him poggs,
regardless of where they came from. Right, I'm sure there's
plenty of people who played with POGs as kids and
had no idea that it was an acronym for passion fruit,
orange and guava. You know, I bet most kids didn't
know that. But because it was that dairy, Um, what
is it? Uh? I practiced saying it a bunch of
times because we just screwed up so badly on our
(09:53):
Hawaiian Overthrow episode. I would say cola, I think it is,
but I think the accents actually on the last syllable. Yeah.
But so this because it was a dairy, they were
just using milk caps for their pog juice as well,
because they're packaging it very similarly. But because people didn't
(10:15):
really buy milk and bottles anymore, the pog caps were
much easier to come by because everybody was drinking pog
because ostensibly it was just this delicious drink, so so
um exactly. So Blossom Galbiso and her Young Awards started
like bringing these caps in from school and then eventually
(10:35):
writing to Um the dairy and asking for them, and
then eventually writing to stand pack like you were saying,
and saying, do you have any more of these caps
that we can get? Because we're we we could use them,
and we don't. We drank so much pog we all
have diabetes now, but um, we still want to play,
but we just can't drink anymore. Pog that's right. And
Stampac I don't think I named it. That was the
(10:56):
Canadian packaging company, Yes, yeah, which is still around today.
Yeah yeah, I looked him up. You can buy all
sorts of lids. I cannot find those cardboard Paul inserts
any longer. But if you want some um to go
coffee lids, STAYM pack is your company to This episode,
by the way, is brought to you by Stampa. Uh.
(11:17):
Do they still have the pod juice? You can still
get that, right? I think it's like in a carton now. Yes, Um,
I could not find it anywhere. I don't know if
you have to be on the West coast to find it,
but you can make your own. It's just equal parts
passion fruit, quava, and orange. I've also seen that's best
served ice cold, and um, I bet it's good with
(11:39):
the vodka. I saw a recipe with vodka, yes, and
then also one with aquavite and rum, which sounds pretty great.
It does, And now I'm seeing it's on a big
box website that we dare not name. Okay, that is
not I don't think that that is Jlakla Dairy's version.
(12:01):
I think that's another company's because I saw that on
the same big box website and they can call it
pog Yes, and we'll get to y well, gosh, good point. Yes,
we see it full circle on this big box website.
All right, I think we should take a break. This
is too much intrigue even for me to take. Uh.
(12:22):
And then we'll come back after this and talk about
it's more ancient traditions. Right after this. Boo, yeah, all right,
(12:48):
so we're back. We got Bloss. It's early nineties. Blossom
Galbiso is worried about violence on the playground, introduces these
kids to this sort of antiquated silly game and they
love it, they do. But how did this thing get
to Hawaii to begin with? I can I can tell
(13:08):
you how it got there. I can actually tell you
the date, Chuck. Let's hear it. February a ship called
the City of Tokyo spelled t ok Io arrived in
Hawaii um with nine hundred Japanese immigrants aboard looking for
work in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii. And that was
(13:30):
the first Japanese immigrants in the modern age who showed
up in the late nineteenth century and began this huge
influx of Japanese immigrants. And you might say, well, what
the heck does that have to do with milk caps?
And I would say, calm down, subtle down, I can
tell that, uh, And then I'd I'd wait a little
while until I had gotten to the to the point
(13:50):
where I feel like you have calmed down, and then
I would proceed with It's actually based Milk Caps is
based on a Japanese game that these Japanese immigrants presumably
brought with them because it was that popular in Japan.
That's right. It was called Manko, Emmy and Ko, and
it was a card game in Japan that came about
(14:11):
in the Kamakura period from about five three b c e.
That's pretty old. And so what happens in that game
as a player puts down a card and then their
opponent tries to flip that card over by throwing their card.
It sounds really difficult because it sounds like it's just
one card that you're throwing it another single card. It's
(14:34):
way harder than pog and if you flip the card over,
you get both of those cards again. Not like POGs
in in one way in the gameplayway, which we'll get to,
but Minko was very much like Pog and that these
little uh cards actually had symbols of cultural icons in Japan.
They had warriors on there and wrestlers. They were not uh,
(14:58):
they were cardboard later on by I think they were
like wood or ceramic or clay earlier on. Yeah, and
when they were a game called I think mang Ghetto, Uh,
they were made of clay. And they actually more resembled
pog chips um or disks before than they did than
Manko did, because Manko turned them into like what looked
(15:19):
like I think they are considered the predecessor of trading cards. Um,
these Manko cards, right, So, but before that, when they
were little clay tablets, they were little disc shapes and
they had like pictures and everything on them, so they
seemed more like POGs then than they did by the
time they arrived in Hawaii. But again, just trying to
flip over a disc by throwing another disc at it,
(15:41):
it seems really difficult to accomplish to me. It definitely does. So.
Um what the kids in Hawaii did with this game
of Manko was they They turned it into this milk
cap game using milk caps, which were widely available to them,
and rather than one milk cap trying to overturned another
old cap, you just stack a bunch of them together
(16:02):
and try to overturn as many as you could. Blood easier,
way easier, so much easier that like you could really
get the interests of some like six twelve thirteen again
is as high as I'm going to um year old
kids attention, you know, Yeah, And it probably matters about
(16:22):
your family and birth order, because if you're I could
see maybe if you're a fourteen year old only child
getting into it, But if you're fourteen and you've got
a nine year old little brother or sister, you're gonna
make fun of their POGs. Yeah, if you're a what
was it a Juliet, right, you're allowed to play POGs
(16:43):
at fourteen? No? No, no, that's what child, Poor little Juliet.
So she's got this game going, Blossom has got this
game going, or I guess they called her Miss Albiso.
And there was a man named al In Rapinsky who
saw dollar signs. It is crazy because, like we said,
(17:06):
stand Pack was making these bottle caps in Canada and
he said, you know what kids are really like in
this game. I'm really curious how he had his fingers
so on the pulse. That's what I'm saying. He was
in California and this is just going on in Hawaii,
and it's not like Hawaii and California don't communicate at all,
or didn't in the eighties or early nine. Well, it's
(17:26):
it started to come over. And when it did start
to come over to the mainland, it definitely started in
California first, so right, but I have the impression that
he brought it over to the main land, that he
found out about some hot trend that had just started
in Hawaii and got in on it from California. That's
my take on it. Well, you know, it doesn't help
is every article I read says he somehow caught wind
(17:48):
right exactly. He might have gone over their own business
or something. Who knows, what's what all these kids doing
throwing these bottle caps all around? That's yeah, either that
or else somebody told them about it and he was like, wait,
what are you what are you talking about? I want
to know more about it. He was a guy who
had a real nose for potential. Like he was the
man who bought the patent for a little leather protectant
(18:11):
um that was called trying on I think at the time,
but he turned it into arm all. He was the
guy that brought the world armor all. He didn't invent it,
but he figured out how to market it and turn
it into something huge. Um. Remember that non wrinkle spray
you could spray your clothes and it would get the
wrinkles out. I think it was called wrinkle Free or
something like that in the eighties. He marketed that just
(18:35):
a bunch of like interesting stuff. So he found out
about POGs. He caught wind of it one way or another.
I bet I know how it happened how. I bet
he went to Hawaiian business is always kind of keen
to his you know, goings on around him because he's
always looking for that next million dollar idea. And he
saw the first fist fight breakout with these kids over
(18:57):
a set of POGs that they wanted to trade or
or a winner take all game. And he saw this
bloodthirst and was like, I can make money off of that. Yeah. That,
And then he did the other thing he was well
known for. He ran over and broke up the fight
by spraying both of the combatants with armor all and
they just slipped right off of one another and couldn't
land a single punch, And when they got wrinkled up,
(19:18):
he sprayed then with Wrinkle's great story. So, yeah, you're
probably right, because that is kind of what the ultimate
destiny of poggs was, and he was largely responsible for
that because um if if blossom Galbiso was the mother
of poggs. This guy was the father of pos. He
was the guy who and as far as I know,
you know, they were not in any way meritally related
(19:40):
or anything like that. They were just related by POGs.
But he took it and just introduced the world to it,
um just as this marketing guy. And he actually formed
a group called the World Pog Federation within I think
a year of Blossom gal Beasts introducing this for the
(20:01):
first time to her students in Hawaii. The World Pog
Federation had been created by Alan Rapinski and his his company. Yeah,
and he did something very very key to this story
or in this story, uh kind of when you mentioned
about Jakala and the fact that they did not have
great financial gain from this, it's because Rapinsky saw the
(20:23):
writing on the wall and said, hey, why don't you
sell me that brand name, that Pog brand name, because
like who cares? Like you don't care, right, you're just
pumping out this juice. You can still pump out that juice.
And they said sure, and they sold them the Pog
brand name, and that was it. They were sort of
cut out of. Uh. I mean, I guess for a
(20:45):
little while they still people were maybe buying their stuff
a little more than usual to get these Pog caps,
but that they weren't like getting juice. Uh No pun
intended from you know, from like the rights to sell
these things. They were as a matter of fact, from
what I from what I can tell, I think I
saw in like an l A Times article or something
(21:06):
from the nineties that they got Yes, so it wasn't
like entirely like you know, this l A businessman fleeced
some Hawaiian dairy farmers entirely like they were cut in.
But I think the big thing is like that as
far as the dairy was concerned, they had no real
(21:28):
role in this other than accepting, you know, some money
and that for a few years. I guess, sure, yeah, sure,
And that's a bit of a it was ultimately a
misstep on their part. But Rapinsky, you know, he's very
much credited with, you know, introducing this to the world,
but he's also credited with making this thing burned so
(21:49):
hot that it was just inevitable that it was going
to last a very very short time. And a lot
of people kind of say, you know, that was a
screw up. He shouldn't have done it like that. But
I also had the quesssion that he knew that this
thing no matter what he did. It's not like POGs
were always going to be around, that they were the
new baseball cards or anything. So I think he came
along I was like, we need to get as much
(22:10):
money as we possibly came out of this because it's
not going to last for very long. And he proceeded
to do that. Yeah, So he created the pog man,
the mascot. Like he said, they started having these tournaments everybody.
I mean, I was not kidding about Pope John Paul.
I think they bought like fifty thousand the Catholic Church
(22:30):
POGs when the Pope came to New Jersey to give
them out. Um Bill Clinton was on one. They had
altruistic campaigns had that Dare the Dare Not to Do
Drugs campaign started making POGs, and of course the major
chain restaurants got involved in Del Taco and Taco Bell
and McDonald's, Disneyland, everybody, anything that you could put on
(22:53):
a pog because you know, these kids are holding these
things and tradeings these these things. It was like liquid
gold to an advertiser because they were everywhere and kids
were fighting, like literally fighting over them. So anyone and
everyone tried to get an image on a pog cap,
even if it wasn't the official, like licensed one. Yeah.
I mean like if you released a movie during the
(23:15):
pog era, you probably made POGs for especially if I
was a alph. Yeah. Um, there's there's a set of
pulp fiction ones that are pretty cool. Yes, there are.
I would think that would be just on a bubble.
I would think so too, but nope, it was they.
I've seen it with my own eyes. Well that somebody
(23:35):
could have photoshopped him, but um, Jurassic Park had a
set of hologram ones that were pretty cool. I think
somebody tried to sell them for a million million dollars
on EVA, and I don't believe they actually got a
million dollars for him people. I think that's probably about
how it went, because you know, people want POGs to
(23:57):
be worth a lot more than they are, and they're
just not. I mean, it's too recent, there's too many
of them. Um. When I saw that seemed legitimately like
about a hundred dollars was a Stucy one, which was
super cool. It's like silver shine, Yeah, and then it's
got like the reggae colors on it and everything. It's
a pretty cool pog, to tell you the truth. Yeah,
(24:19):
I don't even know if I would have been in
the wheelhouse. Like I think a lot of this depends
on and we'll get to this in a second, like
you're you're playing at school some but then the schools
try and shut it down because it's very disruptive. So
then you have to live in one of those great
neighborhoods where there's thousands of houses and kids are just
all over the place. And you know, as I've said before,
I grew up in the woods on two acres of
(24:41):
land with nary another child in sight except for my brother.
So I think it kind of depended on that kind
of after school trading in the cul De sact thing
that I never got a piece of. No, you had
to play POGs with dirt friend, the pile of dirt
you named your friend. I did have dirt friends. Funny.
(25:02):
I wasn't trying to be funny. Okay, there is nothing
funny about that, chuck um mighty more from power rangements
were another big one. Oh of course, I'm sure those. Yeah,
that was a big deal at the time, very huge.
And then like so yeah, if you if you wanted
to brand the kids, this was a great opportunity to
do it. Now, legitimately you had to go through the
World Pog Federation because all these things were supposedly POGs,
(25:26):
and if you wanted to print your own pog it
didn't matter who you were. You had to go license
the ability to do this from Alan Rapinski and the
World Pog Federation. The problem is if you own the
license the trademark to a little cardboard disc that anybody
could make if they wanted to. Like, the technology is
(25:47):
really easy and low hanging to make these kind of
things that yes, it's going to be like a large
business like Taco Bell, who's just not going to be
bothered with a major lawsuit that will cost them more
than it would to license the rights to make POGs
and give them out as like, you know, some promotional tool. Um.
But any like, anybody who's even remotely interested in the
(26:09):
knockoff market just doving head first into POGs, and the
market became saturated really fast, not just with Rapinski's officially
licensed POGs, there are plenty of those, but also just
knockoffs galore. Yeah. There there's a couple of staggering statistics here. Uh.
It says here in California alone, at one point, POGs
(26:30):
we're selling ten million dollars a week in one state
and then uh and of course Jesse thorns from California,
so it may have been I mean, I know they
were nationwide and then worldwide, but I get the feeling
that California was a real pog hot spot. That's my
impression as well. But in nineteen well, I guess there
is pulp fiction year, um, three hundred and fifty million
(26:52):
POGs sold, so it was yeah, it was still going strong.
And ninety four yeah, yeah, so kids were trading gimp
uh gift boggs. That's exactly one that say like I'm
about to give medieval on. Yeah. So we we can
conclude then, Chuck. Since they were still going strong in Blossom,
(27:15):
Galbiso died. She did not have to see the end
of the pog trend. She she went out on top,
look at that detective work. Isn't that great? And they
buried her with a pog of the back of thing
Raimes's head. That's right, with a band aid on it.
You want to take another break, sure quickly, that one
(27:36):
of plug. Since we're talking pulp fiction, I had Jack
O'Briens e guist on and we talked to pulp fiction
and it's out in the world and it was a
great discussion. So if you like pulp fiction and movie conversations,
check it out. And Jack O'Brien too. Jack's the best.
We'll be right back. Okay, so we're back. POGs have
(28:11):
burned bright. They've started to kind of fizzle though, right yeah,
And you know I kind of hinted at it. One
of the reasons was that schools they had to clamp
down on the scene because there were fights over POGs.
Because if you play, uh, if you played playing for keeps,
(28:32):
that meant and we'll go over the full I guess
we kind of went over the game play. But should
we Yeah, you want to now? Yeah, I guess. So
the first thing you decide is are you playing for
keeps or not? Playing for keeps means that you go
home with the POGs that you collect from your friends
and you don't there's no gives these back ses, uh,
and those are those are serious games if you're ten
(28:53):
years old. You know, you know what's funny is you
just used two terms used for marbles, which bears a
striking resemblance to POGs as well, or at least the
way you play marbles and some of the rules involved. Yeah,
because you collect these things as a kid, and you
really if you have to give up that gimpo, Yeah,
you're really upset that you've you've lost that thing. So
fights would break out and schools start to have to
(29:14):
clamp down and literally banned it in quite a few
countries at one point. Yeah, because I mean, also, this
is a game of chance. We're going to tell you
how to play. In a second, it will become very
clear that's almost entirely luck. Um. And so it's gambling.
There's you know, if you're playing for chips and these things,
are you're playing for POGs? I mean, and these things
are coveted. Um. Yeah, little little kids don't necessarily deal
(29:39):
with loss like that, especially sudden, unexpected loss that they
hadn't really anticipated the consequences of. Um. And yeah, you
can get and fight to accuse people of stealing. It's
it was. POGs became problematic very quickly. But this was
also during the same era where Bart Simpson, you know,
touting that he was an under achiever, got t shirts
(30:02):
of Bart Simpson banned in schools. So schools were seemingly
a little stricter back then in the early nineties than
they are today, although I can't say that they are today.
It just seems strict now in retrospect. Yeah, I think
that's right. Um, And I'm gonna stop the people from
emailing you right now. Do you a favor, my friend,
(30:22):
because you said that it's basically luck and I guarantee
you there are some thirty something to early forty something
Paul enthusiasts they're really mad at you right now that
had their POG technique down that they claim was like
superior to their friends and that there was skill involved. Well,
(30:43):
I appreciate emails. You're saving me a bunch of time
replying to all those emails saying you are wrong, wrong, wrong,
because yeah, it is luck. So yeah, so let's talk
about how to play this right. So, um, when you
play pog, you need basically a flat surface and a
bunch of POGs. You need at least one other person,
and from what I was reading on the internet, it
(31:04):
seemed that that was usually how many people were in
a pog match. There's two on one right, each person
puts up the same number of POGs, and apparently the
ideal stack of POGs is twelve. So each person is
ponying up six POGs. Whether you coveted or not, I
don't know. That's only if you want to follow the
(31:25):
unofficial Pog and Cat Player's Handbook written by Jason Page exactly,
who probably knows what he's talking about, at least more
than I do. So I'm going with his number. So
you form a stack of POGs and um, you get
what your hands on. What's called a slammer up. You
got to say that part? Oh thanks man. So yeah,
if you look at a pog on one side, is
(31:47):
basically what you like is the design on the other
side through the blank or there's minimal design on it.
It's very clear that there's one side that's like the
face and you said their face up or down. You
put him face up. So you've got your stack with
Bill Clinton on top and the other stack with the
gamp on top, going head to head, and that is
(32:07):
how you start the game. Oh is it okay? So
my understanding was that they were all in one stack.
Oh no, no no, no, yeah, yeah, sorry chee okay, okay,
people are so mad at me right now. So then
so they put them up against each other. Then you'd
stack them on like all all on one. Yeah, okay,
so you've got a stack of twelve POGs. We should
probably edit and reduce this whole thing. I think this
is good. And then you take a slammer, and slammer
(32:29):
is basically a pog shaped object that it's almost like
a mini hockey puck. It's made of um, heavier material
than pog than like cardboard, so it's like um like glass,
like a heavy glass kind of thing, or rubber or
metal or something like that. I wonder if there are
restrictions on that. No, this is a free f all.
(32:50):
Man Pog was a free fall, which is why the
parents just didn't get it. You know why they couldn't
stand it. You could so you could bring in like
an iron slammer. I think so I saw that somewhere
that that it was frowned upon among players because the
metal would often dent at least the top pog, and
if that was your pog, you might be like, man,
that was what you do in my po right. Other
than that, I don't think that there were restrictions on
(33:13):
although you know, I'm sure informally there were a N
and zipper. But you you would take the slammer and
you would toss it down. Now here's the part where
you're referring to earlier that people were going to email
in about, because it does take some technique to slam
this thing down. Because if you miss, or if you
if you actually don't move the stack at all, that's
(33:35):
your turn. The other person gets their turn next. Um,
So it does take some technique to hit the stack
in the first place, but then also to scatter him
in a certain way, right, And it's the scattering that's
the most important part of playing pog. Yeah, and you
know what, I know we're gonna get emails. I guarantee you.
This is a game that had regional variations. It's just
got to be. It's one of those kids games where
(33:57):
one playground might play it slightly different than another their
playground as far as the rules go, absolutely, and that's
I'm gonna stand by that because I know we're gonna
get people that are going to contradict one another and
say that their version was like how they played it
was the right way. But until I read that book
by Jason Page, which I'm never gonna do. Oh, I
don't know, maybe somebody will mail it to you. So, yeah,
(34:20):
you slam this thing down and these, uh, this stack
of POGs, if you hit it right, is gonna kind
of scatter everywhere, like you said, And then some of
them will have flipped over with the face side down.
Some will remain face side up, and that is sort
of the key to the whole game. Yes, So the
(34:40):
ones you've the ones that have landed face side up,
you get to keep. If it was your turn. Now,
those might be your buddies POGs, they might be your POGs,
it doesn't matter. Then you take the ones that are
still face side however they were stacked up, I think
you're saying, and then you put them back into another stack,
and now it's the other player's turn, and you keep
going back and forth until all of the POGs have
(35:03):
been turned over and kept. And however many POGs you
turned over, that's how many you get to keep. And
you know, again whether it's your POGs or the other
person's POGs. Ideally it's everybody's pots. And then there was
another there's another variation I saw that seems to have
been pretty widespread. It was the poison pog. And these
were usually like kind of a Memento moriy kind of thing,
(35:26):
like scary skulls on fire and you know, like an
eight ball kind of thing um, and it would say
poison pog and the poison pog if you put one
of those in the stack, if you flip that one over,
then you got all the all the POGs in that
stack on that one turn. Okay, I didn't see that.
And this is another frustration, because I went to some
(35:47):
YouTube videos of like gameplay videos, and I saw several
that had described the game played differently than the others,
which leads me to think that there were variations. Because
I saw one person say that you get to keep
the POGs that are faced down, and that flies in
the face of everything I had heard from everyone else, right, Yeah,
(36:07):
and I think it just it's flipping it over from
the way it was before. I don't think it actually matters,
but but yes, you would want to you keep the
ones that you flip over, whether now they're face up
or down. Who cares, right? And then I saw another
where they said that you stack them every other one
is face up or down. But I didn't see that
(36:28):
verified anywhere else either, So yeah, I didn't run into
that one. Yeah, I just you know, people should say
like these were Michigan rules, you know, or something, right,
So you know that slammer the heavier object that you
throw onto the pog stack. Um, you can make them
out of all sorts of things, and they have different
They often had different like imagery on them as well.
(36:50):
But I saw one. I saw this in multiple places.
There was an O. J. Simpson one where it had
a picture of Jimpson's behind behind bars, so he was
in the slam so he was on the slammer as well.
That must have been a legendary slammer, because I did.
I saw that in a couple of plays. Slammer. I
wonder if he got a piece of that. I don't
(37:12):
think so, man, And I don't think he's legally allowed
to keep it even if he did. And then one
day he would break into a hotel room and steal
those slammers. That's where I'd give you the slammers. Get
him back, man. I saw a documentary on that robbery.
It was nuts. Oh really, yeah, I guess it was no, no, no,
I'm sorry it was that. Um what was that like
(37:34):
five part series on O J and the murders and
everything that did it? I don't remember. I know it
was just a documentary, I think, yeah, but the documentary series,
but yeah, they covered that robbery too, and it was
just just so casual and dumb and so casually dumb too,
you know, it really wasn't. So let's see. I think
(38:00):
we've explained how to play POGs about as thoroughly as
you possibly can, don't you think, So let's talk about
how they finally fizzled out. Well, you know, like I
said earlier that I think the banning on the playgrounds
and then the banning or or at school, and then um,
I think the US, Canada, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, the UK
and Australia all banned these pieces in schools, and so
(38:25):
that's gonna put a damper on something. If you're stuck
at dumb school all day and you can't have your
POGs and you're just limited to the hours between three
and six when mom and dad call you back to
eat dinner. Okay, on the one hand, but I also
saw a contemporary piece of journalism in the interviewed the
founder of um Trove USA, which was a big pog
(38:48):
maker at the time, and uh, he speculated that those
school bands actually increased pog sales and pro that, but
also probably prolonged interest because if kids have been free
to play these all the time, they would have lost
interest that much, that much faster. I mean, I think
ultimately that's what happened. It's it's like any or It's
(39:11):
like many kid fads that it just it becomes not cool.
You age out of it a little bit, and maybe
the kids below you weren't interested, and it just goes away.
I mean, I don't I don't think there's a smoking
gun here to you besides o j um. Uh. Yeah,
I would say, oh j is probably the culprit for
(39:32):
why bogs went away. Yeah, I think they said in
Boys Life Magazine. In the issue of Boys Life Magazine,
they basically said it was it was done and not
cool anymore. So, yeah, they compared it to things like, um,
what's that one where you chase a hoop with a stick? Yeah,
(39:57):
like that, and playing marbles and all these old time
he's fads. They included pog among them already. Boys I said,
then it probably meant it went out by exactly, it
was super out by then. So we kind of mentioned
Chuck that Holla Kala dairy um did not really benefit
(40:17):
from this, and they did financially, I'm sure cut of
all of that hundreds of millions of dollars that was
flowing to the World Pog Federation for a couple of
years definitely boosted their annual revenue, I'm sure. But if you,
you know, talk to most people and say what does
what does paug actually mean, they probably couldn't tell you.
(40:38):
And so in that respect, a lot of the articles
that I think both of us have seen about this
have pointed out quite rightly that you know that the
dairy really missed an opportunity to become like legendary or
become a part of the trend, and they were very
quickly separated. Poggs became their own thing in isolation with
with no boost whatsoever to the dairy. Now there's kind
(41:01):
of like this kind of retro nod to it that
that enough time has passed, enough people have written and
talked about it, that the dairy has been identified as
the source of of POGs originally, but it didn't happen
at the time, and in this kind of retrospective about
it is not really probably going to help the dairy
very much. It was just sad, yeah, and you know
why because they were a dairy, right, Like in this
(41:24):
one article that they spoke with this creative director at
a New York ad agency that was like, you know,
this is why you really need to pay attention to
what your consumers doing with your brand, Like if they
have off brand uses going on, you need to know
about to capitalize on it. And look at McDonald's and
like they're the perfect company with this stuff. And it's
just like, man, they were a dairy that in Hawaii.
It didn't they didn't. They weren't paying attention to that,
(41:46):
and they shouldn't have been expected to. I don't think sure, no, no,
and certainly not. And I think also it's one of
those things where the only way that they possibly could
have capitalized as if they had taken the gamble that
this is going to be an enormous bad which would
take a tremendous amount of foresight, and then also would
have had to have hired like a publicist like the
guy that was um interviewed or quoted in that article.
(42:09):
Like they would have had to have figured it out,
and then they could have possibly bungled it. It It would
have been a big, a big deal. But also, yeah,
they're they're like you said, they're just they're a dairy
and and that's not the way that they're thinking. But yeah,
and in hindsight, it's very easy to blame him. But regardless,
I mean it is it is a little sad that
they got kind of left behind, but I don't think
(42:30):
that they were any like worse for the wear from
not having been on the pog crest along with the
little caps a little mill. Uh, should we go to
our cherry on top here at the end. Yeah, thanks
to the U. S. Military for this cherry on top. Again. Yeah,
this is interesting because I had no idea about this,
and uh, I should talk to my brother in law
because he's certainly been stationed overseas. But um, so, the
(42:54):
Army and Air Force exchange service stores. These are you know,
let's say, if the military is a seas in the
Middle East or whatever, they're in Afghanistan and they set
up these sort of temporary on base stores. They started
issuing POGs, these little cardboard coins in November two thousand one.
Because they were lighter than metal coins, you could ship
(43:16):
them a lot cheaper overseas, and it was supposed to
be like a temporary thing, and you know, it said
how much it was worth, basically, but then they started
having uh, pictures on it and and comic book characters
and NASCAR drivers and stuff like that. People just can't resist. No,
But they were essentially POGs, and you know, I don't
see anything that they actually played the game, but they
(43:38):
functioned as currency for American service people in Afghanistan since
two thousand one until just recently. Yeah, and then this
um was it military dot com article, Yeah, where they
were basically you know, they interviewed a few people who
seemed a little like ver Clemp that these things are
phased out, because they were like this kind of weird
(43:59):
little part of their their tour that had that you
just wouldn't find anywhere else in the world. And the
whole reason the military adopted POGs overseas, at least an Afghanistan,
is because it's just so much easier to chip um
to ship them and to chip in. Using them requires
less effort to toss them into the pot. But the
(44:20):
like if you I think a hundred dollars and quarters,
I saw ways almost six pounds and a hundred dollars
in these little POGs. Ways, you know, a fraction of that.
So just in shipping costs alone, it made sense. But
apparently these these pog coins worm their ways into the
hearts of the U. S. Soldiers in Afghanistan. I love it. Yeah, well,
(44:43):
so long POGs, and so long the to the military
reincarnation of POGs. There are no POGs anywhere now in
the world at all. If you want to know more
about POGs, just start looking them up on the internet
and see what you think. And since I said that's
for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this slime Mold enthusiasts.
(45:07):
And it's not from you. I know there's a fellow
slime Old Enthusiasts I'm one of them. Do now, Hey, guys,
loved your slime Old episode. To figure it, I should
crawl out from under the leaf litter and get in touch. Uh.
It's pretty good, Huh. I got slime Olds about ten
years ago for a kid's lecture and started giving it
away so other people could play with these funky, chilled
(45:28):
out beings without having to fork over hard to earn cash.
You can drive them out on paper, cut them into
portions and pop them in the post, which makes things
very easy. Things kind of snowball quickly. I've now posted
it to this means mailed for our American listeners. Very nice.
I've now posted it to around twenty five countries. RAND
(45:49):
stands at the UK's biggest science fair, giving out thousands
of cultures, and I've gotten and I've got three thousand
about to go to Milan for an art exhibition. I
am been selectively breeding them. That's very awesome. He calls
them his pets. He said they're they're much better travel
than I am. He said, they're fantastic things for children
(46:09):
and adults to play with. Giving it a selection of
different foods, seeing what will go for as as a
firm favorite with school classes of all ages. Would you
like some guys? Yes, please, they're easy to keep the
same deal as everyone else. It's free and uh there's
a there's a website here. I don't know if this
is just for us or if it's for everyone. Well
(46:32):
let's say it and then um we can edit it
out if if he's like, no, please don't really say that. Okay,
it's either you're either gonna hear a long beep. Okay,
that censorship www dot tiny u r l dot com
slash slime manifesto and this has instructions in the backstory.
(46:54):
I bet that's for everyone. The only thing you got wrong,
Chuck is that it's www period. Oh yeah, that's right,
and we get mad at pet ants. Are you taking
a passive aggressive shot at me right now? No, it's
it's fully aggressive. Thanks to everyone on your team for
(47:14):
your brilliant episodes. My job as a microscopist means I'm
usually alone in the dark. Your podcast goes along way
to keeping me sane ish cheers. That is from Ian
hands Portman, and then he adds this little PostScript. I've
accidentally tasted uh fist a room several times. It's easy
to do when a half square meter of it is
(47:35):
hungry and gets loose in your bag. It tastes like
a compost heap smells, but with the added bonus of
being incredibly bitter. Wow, this is a great email, Ian,
Thank you for this. Yeah, and this is one of
the tops of all time. Frankly, has it all? It
hasn't something that we're already interested in as an offer
(47:55):
to give us something we're already interested for free. It's
British and includes accidentally tasting a live organism. Yeah. That
that could you know, creepily take over your household? Yeah,
or your body now that you've eaten it. That's right. Well, um.
Good luck to Ian surviving the slime Old tasting encounter.
(48:17):
I hope that you live long enough to send us
some free slime old because I will definitely take you
upon that for sure, for sure. Thanks again, Ian, And
if you want to be like Ian and be super cool,
you can send us an email to send it off
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For
(48:37):
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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