Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - High Fives

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why high fives are secretly incredibly fascinating. They also interview returning guest (and National High Five Day co-founder!) Conor Lastowka.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.Hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Check out Alex's new "explainer podcast" about all things MaxFun: https://youtu.be/6kNplapKs-w (It's uploaded to YouTube because he filmed his face while he taped it.)

Hey folks, as you know, if you've heard the past couple of episodes, this podcast is a new member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. Now that we're a few episodes in and we're up and running, I can share lots more about what that means because it's all awesome. It's all exciting. It's also very behind the scenes, very not at all obvious. So I made a mini explainer podcast about it. It's everything going on that I'm excited about. There's a link in the description of this regular SIF episode, so you can also hear that mini explainer show. Again, that's not a regular episode of the podcast. There's no need to hear it if you have no questions or are just not curious about this.

If you do have questions, or if you simply want to hear me be very excited and share a lot of behind-the-scenes stories, check out that explainer. I think it's cool. I think it's fun. I think you'll like it. Link in this episode's description. Thank you so much. And now, please enjoy another Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Known for being up high. Famous for being down low too slow. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why high fives are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, virtual high five through the Zoom. The high five. Oh, gosh. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, virtual high five through the Zoom. The high five. Oh, gosh. I just whacked my monitor. That's on me. That's on me. It's on tape, too. There's evidence. Yeah. What a fun topic. And we also we're going to have a special guest later because a past guest of this podcast is sort of an expert witness on this topic. But thank you to supporter Anjali S for picking high fives as a topic.

And what's our relationship to those? Katie, how do you feel about them? I like them, except when someone's like high five and then I try to do it and they're like too slow and they pull their hand away and then I fall forward into the mud. Yes, that happened to me in childhood as well. Only childhood. It hasn't happened recently. No, it's good. I like high fives.

I taught my dog how to give high fives. That's very good. How high does Cookie the dog reach? Is it all the way up? She can either do it sitting and then she just does, you know, normal high five. Or if she's really into it, she can stand up on her hind legs and give a high five. That, I mean, if you ever have video of it, you don't have to. No pressure.

Very excited about it. That's great. Even bigger fan of Cookie the Dog than before. High five skills are sort of a thing. Like, I know there's the prank down low too slow kind of thing, but I do remember being a kid and seeing Top Gun and they do that high five where they go high and immediately swing around to go low as a follow up. And we tried to do that as kids and we would just kind of bang each other's elbows, you know? Yeah, I like it when one of you is trying to do a fist bump, the other one's trying to do a high-five, and it's kind of this wet slap of failure.

I feel like the awkward high-five where it's not quite coordinated is one of the great joys in life. It is bonding, right? You do connect. Like, we were both weird just now and that's for us. Right. Like you both screwed up. You're both in a socially awkward situation and it does bond you. It's sort of, it's a very, very light form of trauma bonding, I think. Yeah. We share it. There's also with the emoji community, I have learned there is debate about which one is a high five. Because there's one where it's raised hands, and there's little action lines above the hands. But there's also one where it's folded hands together, which to me looks like prayer. But some people say that is the hands meeting at a high five. And the other one is called raised hands. There's no like high five emoji if you type that in.

I guess that's, I never thought of that. I always thought the raised hands were sort of like praise be to whatever entity that you praise. And yeah, the prayer hands, I guess I just see as prayer hands. Yeah, there's not really, there's like a wavy hand, but there's not really a high five hand. How would you even emojify that? Blew it. We're messing up. We did blew it.

When we have a whole bunch of stuff about the origin of this activity, it turns out there's an entire history of it. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. That's in a segment called, Oh, yeah. All right. Do, do. Take it easy, baby. Do, do. Read those stats all night.

Read those stats all night. These are the SIF podcast stats. Do, do, do, do, do, do. Katie, wonderful. We did it. Yes, I have joined the Alex Schmidt band. That name was submitted by Eric Germ, friend of the show. Thank you, Eric.

And he submitted that through the Discord channel for these and including a, hey, Katie, join in there, which is always fun. We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit yours to SifPod at gmail.com, but mainly through that Discord. It's really fun. We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit yours to sifpod at gmail.com, but mainly through that Discord. It's really fun. I enjoyed it. I like singing. I'm not good at it, but I like to do it. You fit right in in the band of this thing. And there's just a few numbers this week and then the takeaways. And the first one is three. Easy number three.

That is the total number of former players in Major League Baseball who have come out as gay. And that may sound random, but it will become significant. Yeah, it does. I also thought it was going to be like the three five or sorry, no, the high 3, which preceded the high 5. There's an old-timey baseball player named Mordecai Brown, whose nickname is Three Finger Brown, because he lost the other two fingers in an industrial accident. And then it made him able to pitch like no one else, because he only had three fingers, and so the ball did weird stuff. Wow. Yeah, that's so interesting. fingers. And so the ball did weird stuff. Wow. Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. So I guess he would do a high, high three and a three fingered pitch. That's incredible. I do. I do

love that when it's like, you know, you have something happen to your body and it's like, you know what? I'm going to roll with it. In fact, I'm going to make it my strength. Yeah. About 120 years ago, he said, I'm just going to dominate black and white photo times of the all white baseball league of this era. And that's what he did. Yeah. Fantastic. Good for him. in Montreal. So it's also in Canada, but it's an all-male league and three people have ever played in major league baseball and then also shared the information with the public that they are gay men. And they all did it after their playing careers. There's one minor league player who has ever been an active pro ball player and like told people they're gay ever. Hey, this is Alex popping in after we tape because there's a couple new breaking news stories. One of them is that another minor league player has come out in U.S.

baseball. He's Dominican pitcher Anderson Comas. He's now the second active minor league baseball player who has ever come out as gay and could make the majors. Who knows? Then in men's soccer, there's also a significant coming out. Jakub Jankto is on the Czech national team. He's also in top-flight club soccer in Spain, and I believe on loan now. But he is the first active men's international player to come out as gay. And last quick thing to say, as I edited this episode, I edited the shows, I realized we did not discuss gay players who are not male in sports. So I'm going to link about out-and-proud gay players in women's male in sports. So I'm going to link about out and proud gay players

in women's leagues in many sports, because it turns out this high fives topic and its history is super specific to gay male athletes. So don't mean to erase women's sports, but for our topic of high fives, we're going to keep on talking about male athletes. Wow. I mean, that's got to be because of the culture of suppression around people being gay. Yes. Yeah. And it's a very short list, so I can name everybody. It's three people ever. One of them, he announced this in December of 2022. So a couple months ago, former pitcher TJ House announced his engagement to his male fiance and shared that he's gay. He pitched in the 2010s for Toronto and Cleveland. Before that, in 1999, former outfielder named Billy Bean came out. He had retired a few years before.

It's also a different guy than a famous executive named Billy Bean. The Moneyball guy is Billy Bean, B-E-A-N-E. And then this gay former player is Billy B-E-A-N and is now like an executive with the league in charge of diversity and inclusion. OK, but he's got he's got the better one because he's got the correctly spelled bean name. So correctly as in the food, right? Yeah. Cool. Yes. Yes, exactly. And then the, and then the other player who has ever come out as gay is a former outfielder named Glenn Burke, who in 1982 became the first person in the history of baseball more than a hundred

years to tell the public that he is gay. And he had retired in 1979. and 100 years to tell the public that he is gay and he had retired in 1979. That takes guts, especially at that time period. I mean, it shouldn't have to, but yeah, in the 80s. Yeah. And especially he began playing in the mid-70s and was out to some friends and teammates already. So as early as 1976, there was at least like, there's at least documented verbal speech between people playing baseball saying one of them is gay. But 1976 is the earliest recorded instance of that. Yeah. It's just, it boggles my mind that we still even have the issues and hangups in our culture. Like now it's, it's just, I mean, what do you think about, like, you know, back in the seventies, people were trying to be like, Hey, you know what,

can I just like be myself please? And we're still like, Hmm, I don't know if I'm just going to let you live your life. Yeah. Like I, like this guy, TJ house is, it can't be the only gay player in the league when he was playing, but he couldn't tell people until a couple months ago. It's tough. It's just a tough thing. Yeah. And this feeds into high fives because the next number involves this guy, Glenn Burke, who came out in 82, retired in 79. The next number is the date, October 2nd, 1977.

is the date, October 2nd, 1977. And October 2nd, 1977 is probably the date when Glenn Burke invented the high five. Wow. Oh my gosh. Here we go. Glenn. So was he, okay. Was he a pitcher? What position did he play in baseball? Great question. He was an outfielder and he celebrated with another outfielder on his team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, by offering a high five and then his buddy taking it. Okay, I can kind of see that for an outfielder because you got to like reach your hand up a lot to catch the ball. And so you're reaching your hand up that motion, you're like, and then it's like, wait a minute, and then everything clicks. And then it's like, wait a minute. And then everything clicks. No joke. Specific sports situations where something is elevated or goes high seems to have contributed to this. Because we'll talk later about another potential origin story involving the Louisville Cardinals men's college basketball team.

And it was guys who were famous for jumping and dunking who started high fiving. It was like who were famous for jumping and dunking who started high-fiving. It was like an up thing. And then this high-five invention came out of a home run, which is the ball going, you know, all the way up into the air as far as possible. Not to take away from these sports players who probably kind of modernized the high-five, but I got to imagine that throughout history, like, you know, we did do it before then. It just never like caught on as much, probably during like ancient sports, which I guess could be hunting. Like we were hunting stuff. Uh, and then just like, Hey, I'm throwing a projectile at this, uh, lion. Oh, and now I give a high five. Like it had to have happened a few times before. It's true. Like this, this isn't an invention in the sense that it's sort of the first

significant famous one that got people to repeat it. But I'm confident there's dudes who were drawing paintings of Arak on cave walls and then went out and did some sort of weird thing when they celebrated killing one on the ancient plains, the prehistoric plains. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Did you ever do this when you were a kid where you like do some kind of weird thing, like weird movement with your hands or your arms and you're like, maybe I'm the first human to ever do this thing.

And then you like turn around three times and then wiggle your arms in a specific way. It's like, I'm the first one to do that. No, just me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would do it with verbal stuff too. Yeah.

When I was a kid, I guess this is vaguely a cigarette advertisement, but when I was a kid, we listened to the Jack Benny radio show from old, old times on tape. And they had a bunch of wall-to-wall ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes. And then I just started saying different versions of those words over and over again. And I started alphabetically running through like, A-yucky strike, bucky strike, cucky strike. And then eventually I got to F and my parents freaked out. But that's just like weird exploring what things can be that you do if you're a weird kid like me. Oh, man. I love how Lucky Strikes propagandized a child into doing advertisement for them.

But yeah, I mean, it's yeah, I feel like there is this human urge to just like create a new body movement or do something especially with like children I think it's just like I'm gonna see how I can move around you see it in animals too like baby animals just like like hey what if I do this kind of stepping around and then oops I fell over but it was worth it and just like that kind of experimentation. And I don't know, it charms me somehow that the proliferation of the high five is like relatively modern. Like we just, it feels so good to do a good solid high five. The fact it's like just a few centuries old. It's like, huh, really?

A few decades. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. A few decades old. But truly. Yeah.

It's kind of physical creativity and in a way that sports can do and dance can do. And, you know, and so this is it's all part of it. But and it's purely fun. The high five does not help you win more games. I'm sure there's psychological skin touch reasons why it improves morale and helps you win games. But it's not like an action on the field. You don't get points. I feel like it is a transfer of baseball energy from player to player, like just smacking it in there. Like I got good, I got good ball energy today. Smack. Now you do too. I'll bet if you, if you interviewed me in like, let's say 1995 or six, and you asked me like, what are things I, Alex, know about the world?

One of them would be LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. And then another thing would be if you have a basketball from an alien planet and famous basketball players touch it in the movie Space Jam, their powers transfer into the basketball and then can be absorbed by aliens. Those were two of the main things I knew at that time. I knew that if you took a baseball hat and you put some stuff in it and then you shuffled that stuff around, it was lucky somehow. I wasn't sure exactly why, but it made the players play better. That'll do it. Yeah, that's facts.

And the primary reason that I would agree to go to baseball games with my family when I was a little kid, because I had no interest in baseball, was I was really hoping they would have the tiny baseball bats and give the mini bats out. Oh, and were these San Diego Padres baseball games? Yeah. the tiny baseball bats and give the mini bats out. Oh. And were these San Diego Padres baseball games? Yeah. It's not a great baseball team. It's not.

I'm not going to say it's a winner. Also, our mascot is a monk. Sure. So there's not. Standard mascot? Yeah. Yeah. It's. They try. They try.

They try. I am excited for you to find out how many dudes they signed in the last year or two. They might be good this year. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I'd love it if they updated the mascot to be a little more like intimidating. And now he's just like this swole monk with muscles.

It's like his tunic is sort of slightly parted so you see his abs it's like the weirdest conservative american paintings of jesus that you can find online like all those where he's just really big for no reason yeah yeah exactly except he's got the little monk haircut which he does the current one does where it's like the i guess the French Franciscan monk thing. I'm not exactly sure what it is. A tonsure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The little the little ring of hair. And then you shave the rest of your head, which is a great look.

It's a it's a look. And speaking of the Padres, their rivals, the Dodgers, maybe invented the high five. We think this is the most plausible origin story. And the key source for this story is a journalist named John Mualem. He wasn't the very first person to cover it, but he did a piece for ESPN, the magazine, and also ESPN.com in 2011. And then they did a short documentary after that, too, featuring him. He kind of spread the news widely and reinvestigated or investigated a lot of it. So thank you, John Mualem. I'm just like, was the whole documentary on high fives?

Yeah, it's about 10 minutes, so it's not huge. Okay, because I'm thinking a full length Ken Burns treatment where you have like civil war letters like, my dearest Martha, the boys have discovered quite a new thing that I'd like to try out with you if I ever return from this godforsaken war. And it's just like panning across an old black and white photo of people high-fiving. I want that. I have wonderful specific news about this short, which is that this specific game we're about to talk about was not televised. And according to the Dodgers, there's no footage of any of it. So the documentary short is showing you a black and white photo of before this event happened. There was one weird photographer who

managed to kind of get it. And you're basically looking at Ken Burns photos of it in the doc. It's great. You see the wind up. You see their expression of like, you know, like that pre sort of like, I'm about to high five you. Back in the day, they called this high fingered five. But we do nowadays drop the fingered portion of the name. Did they, did they immediately, I guess that's a legit question. Did they immediately start calling it a high five or did they call it like a, uh, Jimmy two slap? Like what, what did they

call it? They, they pretty quickly called it the high five. Some people called it the high five handshake. Uh, but yeah, like, like the guys doing this didn't say any words about it in that moment, but then it got called that pretty quickly. The free flying flange. Ooh, that feels great. I'm going to title the episode that. No one will know what it is. Yeah, because this is October 2nd, 1977. It is the final game of the 1977 baseball regular season. The Los Angeles Dodgers are at home. Glenn Burke is an outfielder for the Dodgers. He's waiting to bat when his teammate, Dusty Baker, hits Baker's 30th home run of the season.

Sorry, such good names. Dusty Baker, Billy Bean. God, like, why don't we have names like that anymore? I am. I'm realizing this is sort of a Alex shares baseball treasures with Katie episode. That is great. Like, in the early 1900s, there was a guy named 10 Million who played baseball. Oh, come on.

His first name was 10 and his last name was Million. That's so good. It's great. I hope, was there someone named like Rusty Crotchet or Jimmy? There was a guy, there was a guy named Rusty Kuntz and it's spelled K-U-N-T-Z

and people read it as a dirtier thing. I'm not, these are all real. These are not riffs. They're great. I just want to sit here and brainstorm like old timey baseball player names right now. But I guess that's a new podcast that we should do. Yeah, it's a, I've written a little about it for 1-900-HOTDOG as well. It's a sport with a rich history of guys being weird. It's an incredible document of how weird guys have been since the late 1800s.

And this is like a little weird in a good way. It's joyful fun. What happens is Dusty Baker hits his 30th home run of the season. That means their team is the first team ever to have four guys hit at least 30 home runs ever. Like they're now sort of the best hitting team ever in a sense. Wow. So whole team goes wild celebrating. And here's Mualem's story, quote, Glenn Burke waiting on deck, thrust his hand enthusiastically over his head to greet his friend at the plate. Baker, not knowing what to do, smacked it. Baker said, quote, his hand was up in the air and he was arching way back. So I reached up and hit his hand.

It seemed like the thing to do, end quote. Fantastic. I love it. I mean, it was destiny. It just sort of came together. And there's one more fast number here before the takeaways. It is the exact same date, October 2nd, 1977, because that is when the second ever high five happened. And it's because like basically Hollywood magic happens here. Baker hits his huge home run. Burke invents the high

five. Here's the next part of the story. After Baker's home run and Burke high fiving him, quote, Burke then stepped up and launched his first major league home run. And as he returned to the dugout, Baker high-fived him, end quote. So now you have a pattern. I feel like that's sort of really inventing it, like doing it a second time and knowing what you're doing. But it was these guys hitting magical back-to-back home runs on the last game of the season. I want to see a movie about that, where it like, like with the first high five, like, what was that? What was that, Dusty? Like, well, gosh, I don't, golly gosh, I just, I don't know, but it felt right.

And then, and then, you know, the whole build up to the success. And it's like, you know what this calls for, right? A flying phalange. I mainly want to write this movie so we can put funny words in their mouths. Great. I do. Weird synonyms and old timey stuff. It's great.

That brings us into the first takeaway for the main episode here, which is the origin, origin of this. Because takeaway number one. The low five existed long before the high five. Interesting. There's a traceable lineage going probably back to the 1920s of Black Americans developing the low five. Oh, interesting. So then like that sort of explains a lot of this high five origin, especially because I know the listener can't see both Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker are black Americans.

And so when they high-fived, it was partly inspired by decades of slapping skin and low-fives by other people. Right. Decades of high-five technology innovation. Just guys in lab coats really slowly, painstakingly trying new ones. Taking notes, nodding, notes on a clipboard, like, yes, okay. Yeah. And because the key source here, it's a book, it's called Word from the Mother, Language and African Americans. And that was published in 2006. It's by Geneva Smitherman, who's a professor of English and of African American studies at

Michigan State University. And she says that regardless of whether Glenn Burke did invent the high five, Professor Smitherman says giving five and giving skin were Black American practices since at least the 1920s. And the original just giving five was done with each person's hand and arm extending out from waist level. Yeah. I mean, I feel like that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's still a thing.

Yeah. It's like a much, it's a much more exhilarating handshake. Exactly. Yeah. It's the same way the high five is cool. They were like, what if a handshake had like joy to it and action and great. Yeah. And people were doing that as early as the 1920s. They also varied it up and gave five below that level,

and they called that a low five. Before we invented the high five, waist level was giving five, and below waist level was the only low five. But now that we have the high five, anything below that we call a low five for the most part. I see. I like the idea that there's this full sort of 180 degrees of fives that can be given. Yeah. Oh, now I'm thinking of that Vitruvian man drawing where there's all the different angles of his arms around him.

Maybe that was Da Vinci's actual intent. you know maybe that was da vinci's actual intent the lost the lost uh italian or latin that he wrote on that was these are all the manners in which one may deliver a five but then like the part of the drawing for the high five is torn off or missing or something like we must reunite this lost knowledge and then glenn burke is putting parchment together like oh hey i like the idea that this is some kind of like da vinci code esque situation where they they had to fight some kind of cult that was like anti-high five or something wanted to suppress the truth there's like a painting of Jesus giving a high five that was, that was banned by the Vatican.

And then like, we find out that the monks who have been surreptitiously covering this up started a baseball team in San Diego. They wanted to be monitoring the league, making sure. I knew there was something sinister there. Yeah. And like, and this practice, too, there's other variations I think people know of or have seen. The oldest words for them are five on the black hand side, which is slapping the backs of your hands together.

There's giving five on the sly, which is slapping five around and behind your back. And there's written evidence of Black people innovating this coming up with it as early as 1938. There's a book by musician and celebrity Cab Calloway called Hapster's Dictionary, where they wrote this down and described it. So it goes way before the high five, the low five. That is so fantastic. Yeah. And it, I think, explains how in a moment of inspiration, Glenn Burke could think of one variation, right? Like he didn't totally invent the practice of slapping hands together at all, especially

in the middle of a sports game where he was kind of needed to focus on hitting soon and stuff. But yeah, but the exuberance of it, right? Like of probably very, there's a lot of adrenaline. You just won. You're extremely excited. It calls for something of, uh, with a little more energy, a little more, a little more dynamic action. Yeah, exactly. And that, uh, that's also how the high five, like, I don't really remember this, but it turns out in the early 1990s, the white American community perceived the high five as kind of taking the world by storm in the early 90s.

And it's because white people were not doing this decades old black practice of slapping five. I see. And so Smitherman says, like, white people felt like the whole idea was coming all at once in the form of the high five. like the whole idea was coming all at once in the form of the high five. And she says in particular, there was a landmark culturally, uh, 1991 situation where current president George H.W. Bush gave somebody a high five and people were like, what is that? Oh, we should have ended it then. That, that, that feels like that just made it uncool. Oh yeah.

I'll bleep all that out. Sorry. I'll just fill in somebody different. And then U.S. President Dwayne The Rock Johnson. I'll just make it more fun somehow. He's fun. So that's the origin of this. And then as far as Glenn Burke's story, that's the next takeaway here takeaway number two the story of glenn burke inventing the high five got squashed by an anti-gay cover-up oh wow oh my god the media and the dodgers and and pretty much everybody like it was known who came up with this but it was also known glenn bur was gay. And then that's a lot of why this story was out there, but didn't really reach anybody until 2011 when John Mualem wrote about it for this huge business, ESPN. always the way we're just like, oh, here's a cool thing. Oh, the person who came up with it is not in the in-group. Well, we got to rewrite history. Yeah. People either just didn't bother

thinking about where it came from or guessed it was other stuff. Because I feel like especially young listeners will not remember how impossible it was to talk about homosexuality until like 10 years ago in the U.S. maybe. I don't know how long. Yeah, it was really bad. And also, you know, it's I mean, obviously, we still have problems in American society, big ones when it comes to the LGBTQ community and acceptance and everything. But yeah, it was it was just like it was so ridiculously taboo

and it was it's frustrating that there are these stories right where it's like one way it could have gone would be like hey you know what we all love this thing uh we love high fives uh here are some amazing things that uh gay people have. Maybe we're wrong about gay people. Maybe they're normal people and their accomplishments should be celebrated. No, it was like, oh, this was done by a gay person. We got to cover it up. Exactly. Yeah.

Like even apparently once Burke was out, he was particularly celebrated in the gay community and he had moved to the Castro in San Francisco. But he was particularly celebrated as an indicator that a gay person could be masculine and athletic. And because there were stereotypes of gay people only being like fey and wishy-washy. And no, like a gay person could also be an athlete. But apparently that was especially rejected as an idea by some of the straight community. They said, no, we can't tell anybody about that. No. And, you know, and then also the idea, it wasn't like, oh, you can be gay and be exhibit sort of feminine characteristics. You weren't allowed to do that either. It was like, you know, you are only allowed to be if you're, you know, a man, you're only allowed to be masculine in this very, very narrow sense. And that's what we called freedom.

Yeah. And and yeah, this this really lasted until pretty recently. Like when Mualim did this story, apparently it started as just looking into the origins of the high five. And he actually followed a prank false rumor that we'll talk about later before accidentally finding Burke's story. Because before that, U.S. media, they were really just uncomfortable talking about Glenn Burke because he was gay. And then by extension, they were uncomfortable talking about who came up with the high five. The Atlantic said that Burke, quote, talked freely with sports writers about being gay, though all of them ended up shaking their heads

and telling him they couldn't write that in their papers, end quote. Like he wasn't being averted about this at all. He was like, yeah, and I'm gay. And they said, we're just simply going to cover that up. We don't have the like bandwidth to deal with that as a beat writer for the Dodgers. Forget it. Like what, what weenies, like, I don't know, just like such, such cowards. And like, I don't know, such cowards and like, I don't know, it's just such a, such a infantile kind of way to respond to that situation. And yeah, I get like, it was quote unquote, the culture of the time, but I don't think that really excuses it. I don't think that really excuses it. It was a cowardly culture. Truly. And that, that extended to the Dodgers team front office and organization. And the biggest story about it is that allegedly the team tried to bribe Glenn Burke to marry a woman as like a sham marriage for PR, which is very old studio system of them, I guess.

But Burke wrote an autobiography and he said that the Dodgers offered him seventy five thousand dollars to marry a woman. Oh, my God. In older money, seventy five grand. And then when the Dodgers were asked about this after the book came out, they responded by claiming that, yes, they offered some money to Burke if he got married, but that it was in the context of like a friendly we could fund your honeymoon thing. Like we're buddies. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So super believable. Moving on. Great. And then, and then also like, I was sort of surprised discovering that the Dodgers even let Burke play when he told them about this. Like it was that bad of a culture, but they, they initially let Burke play when he told them about this. It was that bad of a culture. But they initially let him play until Burke did a thing where he formed a close friendship with Tommy Lasorda Jr. And Tommy Lasorda Jr. was the son of the Dodgers manager, Tommy Sr.

And the manager's the head coach. It's Burke's boss. He's friends with the son of. Lasorda Jr. was a gay man. the son of, um, Lasorda Jr. was a gay man. It's unclear whether Burke and Lasorda Jr. were romantic, but they were such close friends. And so outside of what was considered acceptable by the team that apparently, according to Burke one night, they considered pranking Tommy senior by coming to his house, dressed in drag, uh, as like a firm statement of their sexuality. But he said they didn't work up the nerve to ring the doorbell.

So they bailed and didn't do that. I think that's also it's like a good reminder that drag has been a huge part of history for, you know, the LGBTQ community. And it's very important. And, you know, it's just, it's like this idea that like, oh, what's going on with all this drag lately? It's like, we have a long history of drag shows, drag performances, and very important. Yeah. It's a whole thing. These things have roots. Yeah. It's a whole thing. These things have roots. Yeah. narrow, constrictive set of social rules. And so, you know, I think that has always been sort of like that. And so, yeah, just like the pearl clutching that we have today about drag performances

are really, really stupid. Yeah. And something funny about that phrasing, I'm imagining them trying to take the pearls off the drag performers. Give me, give me. Put a necktie on. Ooh, a necktie, but it's all pearls. That would be awesome. No, they made that drag too. No. Yeah, and it was transgressive to Lasorda Sr. He was like, okay, now I'm benching Glenn Burke.

As soon as Tommy Sr. found out about this friendship, he was hypercritical of Burke, benched him, and most likely orchestrated a trade. The year after this high five, 1978, they shipped Glenn Burke to the Oakland Athletics. And in exchange for an aging veteran who didn't totally make baseball sense, there was an argument for it, but not a strong one. And apparently this trade was a major blow to the Dodger team. Some Dodgers reportedly cried at their lockers because they were that affectionate toward Burke and liked him that much. And that ended up being the end of Burke's career.

He got limited playing time in Oakland. Oakland manager Billy Martin ostracized Burke and called him the F-word publicly in front of teammates, in front of the press. Jesus. And then after a knee injury and demotion to the minors, Burke just quit baseball. And he took up moving to the Castro in San Francisco, playing pickup softball for no money and saying he was happier. It was a better situation to be totally unpaid and especially helping teams of gay men defeat

the police department in softball games felt good, I guess. That's wonderful. That's great. Fantastic. Because he was still really good at sports. God, what a great American hero. Yeah, and he ended up having a relatively tragic end.

He got hit by a truck as a pedestrian. And then, I mean, this is just sad. The painkillers led to a drug habit after that HIV and passed away. But even though he was still very much alive in the 1980s, as early as 1980, the Los Angeles Dodgers were selling T-shirts depicting the High Five and putting it on the cover of programs. t-shirts depicting the high five and like putting it on the cover of programs and their their press material simply described the high five as a dodger salute after a good play but there was no mention of and this dodger player did it because he was gay they didn't want to talk about that fact of his life cowards yeah just fraidy cats just bad yep yep yeah but now you know and then i guess the silver lining is we're talking about it now.

And we're going to take a short break and then talk about an amazing story of discovering the origin of the high five with a special guest. Yay! I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, there's one last takeaway for the main episode here featuring a special guest and returning guest. The takeaway is takeaway number three. There are other plausible origins of the high five and a prank origin story accidentally

revived interest in Glenn Burke's story. And also I'll see if my guest agrees with that framing of the whole thing, but wonderful special guest. You may know him from the episodes about butter, gargoyles, bricks, or the U.S. interstate highway system. Wow. Four good episodes. And he's also a writer, producer for Riff Tracks. He co-hosts the very funny podcast titled 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. Please welcome returning guest Connor Listoka. Connor, hello. Hello. Hello. I think that butter butter bricks gargoyles interstate is like, that's what they tell you to make your password, your master password for things. Like don't use your anniversary.

Use like four words combined camel cased. So yeah, that is not my password. Yeah. Those are actually coincidentally all the images on my vision board. Very nice. Yes. Actually, coincidentally, all the images on my vision board. Very nice.

Yes. A brick, a butter sculpture of a gargoyle that looks like it's made out of bricks. Perfect. And we're taking it across the country, baby. We're doing it. High five stuff. I haven't talked high fives in a while now, but I used to do it quite a bit. Yeah. So there was a really joyful process researching this where I was telling people one of the

main sources is an article by John Mualem for ESPN, the magazine and their website from 2011. But in that source and other sources, I kept reading the name Connor Listoka. And I was like, hang on, that's my pal. And it turns out that among your many things and paths in life and things you've done, you've also helped co-create National High Five Day, which involved like a comedic story about where the high five could have come from, too. Yeah, comedic's a good way to put it. That's a nonjudgmental way to put it. That's certainly what we intended.

Yeah. what we intended. Yeah. Like another way is maybe like, yeah, you can tell people about describe it, but like you and your co-creator of national high five day came up with like a prank origin story of the high five. And then also upon being talked to by John Mualem, you guys said, oh yeah, it's made up like, like tell people it's made up. And, and he, from his story, it seems like he found Glenn Burke story by initially looking into this. Like, I feel like that really let people know the truth too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our story was essentially, we came up with this, you know, fake holiday in 2002 towards the back half of our time at University of Virginia. And there

weren't a ton of, you know, every, everyone knows that every day is something these days, but there wasn't a ton of those back into, you know, turn of the millennium. So it sort of got a decent amount of attention because it was like positive and we didn't have any like, um, you know, causes associated with it. It was just like, look, like go out and give someone a high five on the street. It'll make your day better and their day better. And so that like got a decent amount of attention. I think it eventually ended up in some sort of like repository of fake holidays that like, you know, morning zoo guys and like late night people would, would, would look at. And so for the first couple of years out of

college, there was a decent amount of time where like radio stations would want to talk to us, you know, to fill five minutes on the third Thursday in April every year. And so we were, you know, 24 years old. And this was like the most fun thing you could imagine just getting to do radio interviews every day. Uh, like, and they would do them like the week leading up to that. So it was really fun. But then they kept asking us like, Hey, like, you know, you invented this holiday. Like where did the, where did the high five even come from? And once you've been asked that question a dozen times over the course of a couple of years, you're like, we got to have a, we got to have a story instead of just saying, I don't know, like type of thing. And so, yeah, being like 24, 25,

it was like, well, let's just, let's just make something up because there was the story about Glenn Burke that had been repeated in like a Dodgers yearbook, I think like a, a media guide or something like that. And we had seen it reported on the site out sports type of thing. Yeah. And it said, you know, on that site, um,

it was like quoting from Dusty Baker, I think. And he calls it, you know, the first high five in baseball. Those are his exact words on that site. So that always gets omitted when they're talking about it. It's he invented the high five,

not just like, Oh, we were the first guys in major league baseball to do this. So were like listen this story is has one source it's vaguely reported and like we could make up something that sounds just as as credible as that and so we did and we like found a we we looked up a college that a uh a friend's mom had gone to which was murray state university which like you, they make the NCAA tournament in basketball every year. So like, but they're as a 12 seed. So it's like, they're a mid-tier college basketball team. And then we looked up, you know, around the time of that

Glenn Burke story, or maybe like a year or two before it, and found a guy who was like, all conference, second team, all conference. So he was good, but like, certainly not a household name. We're like, let's just say that guy did it. Cause then there'll be able to verify like that, like that guy did exist. Um, but he's obscure enough that like, I mean, not going to be a big deal. So we just like made up an utterly absurd story. If you read it about some, his dad and coming back from Vietnam and having some sort of, uh, you know, he was in the fifth battalion. So there was like a five associated with it and just like took it from there. I mean, sort of, you know, he was in the fifth battalion. So there was like a five associated with it and just like took it from there. I mean, it's absolutely obvious if

you're like reading it, like, oh, this is made up. And, you know, again, there was no social media then. So you couldn't reach out to this guy. If you said this to someone on 104.7 The Zoo, there was no reason for them to question you either that you were making a 104.7, the zoo, uh, there was no reason for them to question you either that you were making this up. So, you know, to us, it just was like, well, this is innocent. There didn't, there was no, uh, consideration for what that guy might think if it ever got back to him, which it did at some point in time, his wife wrote to us and said, this is not true. Like, first of all, he never even knew his dad so like that research uh you know that that hadn't that we hadn't we hadn't done any research but like you know so that was not true but

eventually she said to us like he does admit that he may have invented the high five just not in the manner you described which is just like you know head exploding type of thing because like literally a name pulled out of a hat of every u.s citizen and but he's you know so like a guy you know a barfly claiming he invented the high five would have just much credibility but so that was hilarious but we never heard from her about that claim she stopped writing to us so as far as we were concerned uh it was good harmless fun you know especially because we've gotten in touch with the guys or the guy's wife reached out to us. Um, but then when the ESPN article came out, it was just sort of like, uh, that, that was when it started to sort of take the turn of the guy

being like, did you ever think about how this was going to affect, uh, other people? And we're like, well, of course we didn't, we were 24. Um, stop me if you, if you'd want me to continue, uh, don't want to continue ranting unabated, but. No, no. And so like, you know, you read the article, you probably talked about it. It does sort of, he, he started that article by being like, here's the story about Mont Sleets, which these guys admitted was a total hoax. Yeah. That's how Mullen writes it. Yeah.

Which if I were a journalist and I learned about something that was completely false, I would probably leave it out of my article about the high five. You know, all you're doing by that is spreading, is spreading the hoax. And like, it has no business being in this article and there's no business, you know, us, uh, maybe warranting like a passing mention, uh, of like an admitted hoax. But, you know, we sort of became the villains of the whole piece, which was, you know, again, not not what we set out to set out to do. But because it's an amazing story and I yeah, I agree that like Mualem kind of framed it that way, that the story about Lamont Sleets. First of all, Mualem says there's just absolutely no relationship between Lamont Sleets and High Fives in real life. And then it's amazing you guys

reached his wife and like you say, needle in a haystack, that's someone who thinks they might have thought of it. That's amazing. But I do like, I really feel like, as you said, there's Outsports and a few other places that covered this Glenn Burke story, but that didn't really get any national traction. And then this Mualim story, him bothering to check into stuff like Lamont Sleets, led to his article in a 30 for 30 documentary short and like real attention on it in the end. Like, I feel like Mualim could have been kinder to you guys about what ended up helping and finding it, even though there was a prank there and like a trick, you know? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that I don't know if kindness was warranted. I just think it doesn't even once he talked to us, because that's a good lesson for any journalists out there, is that if you're interviewing someone like asking the question, are you making this all up? It's probably a good one to throw out there because he was the first person to ever say that. And we were like, well, yeah, I mean, uh, we are

like, yeah, good ace to keep up your sleeve. Um, but like, you know, the whole point of his article, you know, in the article, he's just like, you know, uh, you know what? It's probably hard to know. There's probably a lot of people who came up with this and there's no real answer here. And I feel like even, even after that, this story still just became, but here's what happened. Like, even though his, his article ends with ambiguity and there was another guy and, um, and then, you know, I think the, the 30 for 30 thing was a few year, year or two later based off that. And I think it was presented without any of that ambiguity. It was, here's the guy first high five, not in baseball, just like in general, because it is, you know, if that was the story, that's a great story.

Um, because I mean, it's not a great story, but it's a, it's a meaningful story. Um, certainly, um, absolutely. It's not a great story that he was treated poorly and sort of forgotten for a while but it instills it with some gravitas exactly right yeah and we've covered the ending of Glen Burke and then it wrapping back around

and then also when I reached out to you you sent a clip of one potential earlier high five as well and yeah this story we're pretty sure Glen Burke came up with it, but there is no footage. And there's these other loose possibilities, including a clip you sent in of Louis Armstrong

and Dean Martin doing like a weird high five on TV and before all this. Yeah, so I mean, so that existed. So I mean, what is your, what is your story? How does your story integrate that if that is a, you know, two of the most famous guys in the world doing that on TV? So like. where you have multiple people coming up with a relatively novel thing, probably because things have been leading up to that, sort of like how multiple people were working on the theory of evolution at the same time. Or the two Prefontaine movies that came out within a span of three months.

And all the Pinocchios we got last year. Yes, I 100% agree. year uh yes i i 100 agree um so like that's definitely a less satisfying answer than uh everyone wants an auteur or an inventor to do something um so you understand but like there's a clip there's a clip of two two guys high-fiving from a decade earlier so like what do you what should we all be talking about exactly yeah because the the rabbit hole of the parallels, like even before Armstrong and Martin, and maybe people skate over those names, Louis Armstrong and Dean Martin are both very famous. I'm sure tens of billions of people watch them do. We'll link the clip. It's a really weird, herky-jerky meeting of palms, but it's high five shaped. And then before that, there's also a very famous French film called Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. And it's from 1960. And there's a moment in the movie where two guys slap five in a pretty modern looking way. Like they just do it and it's not commented on or anything far as I can tell. But that's out there too. There's a lot of like hands interacting across visual media before this.

I've seen videos of a cat in a mirror high fiving itself. So who's to say? Where's his documentary? The other other thing with Lamont Sleets, you guys selected a college basketball player in, I think, Murray State's in Tennessee. And then in Mualem's story, he finds another possible parallel invention from college basketball in Kentucky from the same era. high five is october 1977 but then probably in parallel the louisville cardinals men's basketball team came up with it in the 1978-1979 season and in particular two players who were known for dunking they said like we should go up for our slapping five since we dunk so good like we're very elevated vertical people and uh and they were probably the source of the first nationally televised high five, because in the March, 1980 NCAA championship game, two of the guys slapped five high five. And the announcer said, quote, and they're giving him the high five handshake high five.

So like that might be the national origin of it. Like people seeing that on national TV and the big basketball game, you know, that's, that's that's like calling it uh i'm gonna eat a hamburger sandwich for lunch today yeah too yeah i mean i'm surprised that one doesn't get more traction just because there if there is you know a photograph of it but obviously those announcers knew what to call it at that point in time so right um um, right. Yeah. Right. There was already a word for it. Yeah. So like, so like, we don't know if they picked it up from earlier Louisville games or from Glenn Burke or like, like this, I can see, as you said, you guys, when you were coming up with high five day, you looked into if there was an answer and that it's, it's fuzzy and probable who did it.

And so, yeah, there's room to have fun with it. And then while Lamont Sleets, who played for Murray State, also his wife says maybe he really did come up with it. Who knows? That would be truly the greatest end to this of all time if he had some, you know, actual proof or had filed a trademark application that was denied in 1975 or something. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like, you know, that was sort of the whole reason that I was like at 24, I was like, let's just make up another story and see if we can get any traction because they all sound just as credible. I do think it's interesting that I think when there is some controversy where it's like, well, there was this hoax that can make something like a story, like the story of Burke, which has, I think, historical significance, whether or not he was the person to invent the high five.

I think it's like people like controversy. People like something where it's a bit like, oh, like like uncovering a hoax. People like something where it's a bit like, oh, like uncovering a hoax. And so I think it's interesting that that seems to be what kind of drove the research forward on this historical story and kind of resurfaced this story. It's like people like a bit of drama, a bit of controversy and that can help spark more interest in like a historical story. Yeah, definitely. And you have, you know, and the story has, you know, a couple of villains, you know, like me, I was a villain. Tommy, Tommy Lozardo was a villain in the, in the Glenn Burke story. So that's, um, that's, that's great. And, uh, but you know, we certainly didn't set out for, for controversy when we were making

up the story. It was, it was literally just something to talk to like, uh, um, you know, Wawa and the diesel on a 106.2 like type of thing. Those guys are in the Philly area, right? Wawa, come on. You know, I don't, I don't really know what to, to uh what to say about the role in it because when you set out to like make something up like that it certainly didn't intend to like demean anyone's uh other story but when you read and it's like this is ambiguous you're like well you know how is everyone just ignoring that because it is such a good story and i mean it's just a uh it's it's not a thread you want to keep pulling at because you don't want to be a just asking questions guy. But it is sort of just like, listen, it's not journalism if you're like ignoring something else or just saying that you like something because it's a better story.

That's like a cardinal sin of the profession. Yeah, because also like I'm curious, Connor, how you guys picked High Five specifically, because it seems like the Lamont Sleet story was a late stage action. The first thing was it'd be fun to invent a holiday and then somehow you settled on high fives. And then years later, it's like people keep asking us where these came from. But how did you pick high fives as a holiday topic? Brother, I mean, so this is sort of lost to, um, 20 years of history and also the circumstances surrounding it were undoubtedly like either at a bar or back at someone's house, like playing Mario cart. But it was one, one like step back from that. I had a friend who was running at Santa

Clara university. And he said one day he was just running, put up a hand to see if someone would high five him as he ran past and the guy did it. And he said, it was just a great day. Um, so later, later on at UVA, like just at a, you know, after $2 pitcher night or something, we were like, what if we like sort of took that and like made a whole day about it and set out on the, on the lawn and made that our table to like promote this day. And we thought that people would sort of react like, like we did like, we'll just like walk past it, but people were like really into it. Like in terms of like high-fiving, we had like signs that said like free lemonade, like no catch. There wasn't any like, you know, speech we were going to give you or cause you're going to recruit

you for. It was just like set up there and, and students were really into it. Like, um, so that was a lot of fun. And, uh, uh, yeah. So I think it was mostly, it was probably a drunken night that it resulted in, but it was like the rare thing that we had that in that state that got followed through on. And fortunately, like it ended up working out. When you said it was probably either a bar or Mario cart, those are two high five prone situations. That sounds right to me. Yeah. Yeah. This is so cool, man. I sincerely, I was researching and I kept seeing connor listoka and and national publications and i was like okay i should call connor it's i mean the the only other

thing that's interesting is that like um i wouldn't have my job if it wasn't for this because a uh riff track started at a at a film company that was called legend films um and that it they, they were like, they would colorize old movies, um, and sort of put them on DVD. And one of the movies they had colorized was reefer madness, like the 1930s, um, shock shock, uh, you know, anti-weed, uh, movie, the accurate documentary. Go on. Yeah. Very. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. They were there. It's as accurate as our Monts fleet story. So they had colorized that. And Mike Nelson, who was on Mystery Science Theater at Rift Tracks, had done like a commentary for it. So National Live 5 Day is on the third Thursday in April.

So it rotates what day is it on. The year that this story takes place is that it took place on April 20th. So this woman who worked at Legend Films was like the VP. She was like, it's 420. We want to sell our Reefer Madness DVDs. She was searching for like high, somehow like high. And like this date came out, she reached out to me because it was National High Five Day. I had like quit a terrible office job like three months before that and didn't have anything to do. So I get an email from a woman who has legend films like San Diego, California, which is where I lived in the signature asking me about national high five day. And I was like, Hey, look, like if you've got anything else like to do, like I, uh, I'm very, very free at the moment. So she, like, I came into like, just work as a PA

there. Um, and like everything else like led out of there. So it was just a very weird coincidence of her finding me and my email was attached to it. And she was like, this is really neat. So yeah, some people probably think I'm a dick for like making that up, but having your name out there attached to this weird thing,

it does have its benefits, you know, once every decade or so. It opened doors. Yeah. Yeah. And it came from the holiday, not the sleet story specifically. Incredible. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it came from the holiday, not the sleet story specifically. Incredible.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you're a jerk for inventing high five day also. I think that's cool. Really cool. Hopefully not. Yeah. That spread goodwill. I think people were mostly just upset about like picking a real guy and, you know, in a, in an alternate universe that could end up having negative consequences for that person. So I, you know, I understand that, but it was a, you know, it's hard for people to understand. Put some at the time and location of a crime, FBI arrests them. Yeah, right. Or just, you know, having weirdos, you know, get in touch with you is not a desirable outcome for most people, but, you know, it's not a great defense to say you were 25, but like a different time and a different person. So. And you were so immediately open about it when somebody asked like folks, like you said, journalists, just ask people if they're telling

the truth in a straight up way. It's like asking when you're, when you're buying drugs from someone and you ask them if they're a cop, cause they have to tell you it's a, it's fail, fail safe, you know, it's entrapment otherwise. otherwise yeah add it to your arsenal of questions yeah hey folks that's the main episode for this week welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the low five existed long before the high five. Takeaway number two, the story of Glenn Burke inventing the high five got squashed by an

anti-gay cover-up. And takeaway number three, there are other origin stories for the high five, and a prank origin story accidentally revived interest in Glenn Burke's story. Those are the takeaways, and I want to flesh out that last one a tiny bit, because again, special guest this week, Connor Listoka, he co-founded National High Five Day, which is a U.S. holiday now. And their website has information about the charitable work they do on each of those holidays. Connor says that his co-founder in particular has really spearheaded and led the mission to make this very silly holiday, National High Five Day, into a charitable event. Last year, their charity was CoachArt, which is a nonprofit that helps get arts and

athletics coaching to kids with chronic illness and the families of those kids with chronic illness. I will update on social media and in the Discord when I find out what the next charity is. It might be CoachArt again. That would be a wonderful cause. But your next National High Five Day is April 20th of 2023. Now, when I said those takeaways, I said that's the main episode. That's because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at MaximumFun.org, members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprising significance of Dusty Baker, the recipient of Glenn Burke's high five. He is his own whole

entire story. He's amazing. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 11 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include John Mualem's amazing reporting for ESPN, further coverage of those stories from places like Outsports.com, which was one of the first to be on it, and also The Atlantic. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca.

I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and Connor recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and Connor recorded this on the traditional land of the Manahoke people. And I want to acknowledge that in me and Connor's locations, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and please join the free SIF Discord. That is where we are sharing stories and resources about Native people and life and more. We're hanging out. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode?

In each week's outro, I'm using a random number generator to suggest a past episode of the podcast so you can enjoy something randomly incredibly fascinating. This week's random number is 65. Episode 65 is about the topic of labor unions. Fun fact about that, labor unions invented the clothing tag. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Please check out our special guest Connor Lestoka's, 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, which is a podcast about books they do not expect to like. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our Maximum Fun members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.