Stuff You Should Know - How License Plates Work

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

The first tags were required just a few years after the firs cars debuted, as a way to catch jerks scaring horses and running down pedestrians. A century on, they continue to protect both. Plus they��ve accrued some interesting history along the way.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, you know what that means, everyone. It's been a while since you've heard it. But after three long years, we're finally going to return to the live stage, starting, well actually ending, with Sketch Fest in San Francisco on February 3rd. And then on February

1st and 2nd, we haven't quite nailed it down, but it's going to be Seattle and Portland. Not sure of the order, but we were going to be putting all this information out on our social media channels, right? Yep. And on Friday, October 7th, tickets will be on sale for all three shows. And you can watch our social media handles for information and ticket links. How about that? That sounds great. Can't wait to be back on stage. We really, really missed it. Yep. And we'll see you guys in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, providing us with last minute facts and informations and tidbits.

And that makes this a banger of an episode of Stuff You Should Know. It's a banger. Is that how they say it? The Brits? Yeah. Is that your British accent? Was that your John Cleese? By way of Chicago. Can I make a quick announcement? Oh, goodness. Sure. It just occurred to me that I'm clean to announce this now, that I go into the recording studio in my basement, which is now full of my wife, Emily's business. Oh, yeah. Okay. Because you've known this for a while, Jerry, too. But Emily shut down her business, everybody. And rather than me trying to stumble through her thought process, she has... Here she is. No. She has her full statement on her website,

loveyourmama.com, and all the hand wringing that went into it. And she had a 20-year run. It was a great thing. And she's going to keep her website going, though, because she's going to still do... She said she's going to make things from... Only from things she can grow. Oh, nice. So the business itself is a, hey, I got to dominate the world because I'm ambitious type of thing. Yeah. I'm an independent woman of the 90s. That has gone away, but she's going to still do probably some face sprays and things like that, anything she can grow from her own herb garden on a very small level, very limited things. Nice. That's how you get the big bucks. She's got it figured out. There's limited editions. She's not retiring anything, but just big thanks to everybody.

She got a lot of support from the stuff you should know, Army over the years, both emotionally and by buying things every time we mentioned her. So it really meant a lot to her. And she wanted me to pass that along. That was very nice. And congratulations to Emily on a 20-year run. That is rather respectable for a small business. I think so. And we're all proud of her. And now I'm... The walls are closing up here in the basement, because she couldn't get rid of everything. We have two storage spaces and now our basement. So she'll be working on that, getting rid of that stuff for a while as well. I'll bet it smells amazing at least.

It smells better than it ever has down here. You know what? I'll bet it smells better than Chuck. A dirty old license plate. That's right. Especially one that says Sportsman's Paradise from Louisiana that they got out of the stomach of a shark and jaw. Right. Or Assman from New York City. Hey, it's the Assman. You got that straight. So by the way, since you brought up Seinfeld, I went back and started watching Larry Sanders show on HBO. Great. Maybe the greatest actually. Like on rewatching, I'm like, this is even better than it was years ago. And I've come to believe that Jerry Seinfeld is a twee impression of Gary Shandling.

That Gary Shandling is the legit OG and Seinfeld is just an aberration of him. I think Seinfeld would certainly own up to being influenced by Gary Shandling. He'd probably really punch me in the stomach for calling him twee though. No, he would just say, who are you again? That's right. And I'd just go home devastated. No, great show. But I think ahead of its time as well. Larry Sanders. Yeah, absolutely ahead of its time for sure. It's definitely worth watching. If you have HBO Max, it's all over it. And just go watch it and thank me later. I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And sorry, let me give it one more kudo. All respect to 30 Rock, but Larry Sanders is

easily the best sort of behind the scenes of a TV show movie set type of thing I've ever seen. Yeah, even better than the player because it was way funnier. Well, yeah, the player was great in some way though. Yeah, but it's no Larry Sanders show. Correct. So one more thing while we're shouting out TV shows. I also saw both of them are on Netflix and they're both horror TV shows and they are awesome. One is like straight ahead, scary to death horror, Japanese horror. It's Juwan the Origins. So you know the grudge? Yeah. So it was Juwan in Japan. And this TV show, it's like an eight part series, I think,

maybe six. It's like the origins that lead up to Juwan, like the grudge. It's amazingly well done. It's perfectly tailored to fit it just precisely. It's so well done. And then the other one is called Marianne and it's a French language witch story set in today's time, but it deals with like a 16th century witch, I think. And it's not quite as straight ahead scary, but it's really, really good. Nonetheless, it's very engrossing. You guys watch a lot of horror. Yeah. Yeah. Yumi has to just by proxy, but yes, I watch a lot of horror. I don't get to because Emily's not into it, but we've been loving The Bear. And of course, I shout it out a lot, but another shout out to Reservation Dogs. BJ and The Bear? No, The Bear. You don't see that? No, I haven't.

Oh, wait a minute. It's about the Chicago restaurant. I tried and I was like... It's very stressful. No, it wasn't even that. It was very boring, I thought. Oh, that's interesting because it's like the most adrenaline fueled show on TV. I know. It's really weird, but I was like, I could not be more bored than I am right now, but I get what you're saying. It was a weird juxtaposition because I know I was supposed to be feeling intense and I was just like, this is... I don't like it. No, you'd also done some heroin. Say what? You'd also done some heroin, that probably. I couldn't stay awake. No, I definitely did not do any heroin. It was just that show was extremely boring to me. All right. Again, I mean, if you like it, that's great.

I'm not trying to tell you not to. I'm just, that was my take on it. So I'm glad we ate up some time because Chuck, this was my pick, license plates. And it turns out it's a little more boring than I had anticipated. I like this stuff. I do too. I do too. And there's some interesting stuff in there, but something this sweeping, a global worldwide phenomenon that's been around for over a hundred years, you would think there'd be a little more like crazy stuff associated with it. And there's just not. I mean, Ed helped us out with this and he did, God bless him, his best work trying to find anything to make this interesting. And he finally did. And we found some other stuff too, but it's just not as engrossing as I thought. It's kind of like the bear.

That grudge show, that is so funny too. I was watching that the other day. It's hysterical. I disagree. I think you're selling this short. I think I thought this was really interesting considering it's a show about letters and numbers on a piece of metal on the back of a car. Okay. Point made. And also, I should say, this was also a listener request. A.J. and Tracy in Pittsburgh-ish, Tracy said. They requested this one not too long ago, a few weeks ago. And man, that's the kind of turnaround time we have here at Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. And we know it's them because their license plate says, P-T-S-B-R-G-I-S-H. That's pretty great. The great new show.

You just did that off the cuff too, man. I'm impressed. Well, there's too many characters in there, but everyone gets a joke. Okay. So what country do you think invented the license plate, Chuck? Had to be the United States with industry and automobiles. You would think so, but no. As a matter of fact, the French had us beat by a good decade, a full decade. Not that kind of rough decade where it could be anywhere from like six to eight years. A 10-year stretch. There was actually one guy who kind of originated them. He was the prefect of the Paris police force. His name was Louis Le Pen.

And in 1893, he said, Hey, we're starting to get more cars on the road. And I think we need to kind of regulate them a little better than we are, which is to say we're not doing that at all. Yeah. So they came up with all kinds of stuff, plates, driver's test, driver ID, speed limit, stuff like that. And the US, as we do, looked to the French for all things. And in, I believe, New York was the first US state to require a law. And this was in 1901, April 25, that basically said, All right, here's the deal. You need to put your initials on your car somewhere. They need to be three inches tall, but otherwise, go wild. It's up to

you how you want to do this. If you want to make them out of little Garfields that no one will understand for many years, you do that. And the New Yorkers did it. And I think that this sort of customization allowed for some kind of creative New Yorkers to do different things, everything from wood to leather, and I'm sure all kinds of crazy fonts. Sure, definitely. Like a lot of people just went to the hardware store and bought house numbers. Some people just painted them directly on their cars. And the one thing I saw is, this is so early, there's so few cars on the road that this was not like a revenue generating move. They were actually using it like you had to put your own initials on the car so that if you

terrorized a horse or drove up on the sidewalk or did donuts in the middle of Times Square, they would know who did that. And that's the kind of usage that cars were getting. There were a lot of like jerks driving cars initially. And that was a way to kind of reign their behavior in. Yeah. And then the 10 year mark, like you talked about in 1903, is basically at the point when they said, all right, we got to start issuing these things because this initial, we didn't really think out this initial plan, because people have the same initials, there's a lot more cars, and we can't go around just looking for every GRL in New York to find out who was terrorizing the horse.

Yeah. Gary Larson, wait, Gary Regis Larson. Well, it depends on if you're doing a monogram. Okay. So it could be Gary Larson Regis. I could have been correct. What's the deal with that? We should do a short stuff on monograms. Oh, great idea, buddy. Great idea. So 1903, that was kind of like a watershed year for license plates in the United States. And also I realized, I'm sad to realize that it was a rough decade from 1893 to 1901. It wasn't a full decade. But 1903, that's why I thought it was a full decade, because it was just such a huge year where all these other states said, yeah, we're going to get

on board. First, it was Philadelphia, not a state, but it's in Pennsylvania, kind of near Pittsburgh-ish, if you think about it. And they were the first city to issue official license plates. Cleveland was technically the first city in the whole country, even before New York, to require license plates, but they didn't issue them. Philadelphia was the first city to actually issue them in the US. Right. And apparently, Pennsylvania likes to say they, you know, that makes them the first state to do so. Technically correct. But the state of Massachusetts was the first state to do a statewide program. And not just the city of Philadelphia. So, and this is kind of the cool thing, and put a pin in this as for collectibles later on. But

Massachusetts did the thing that a lot of other states did, was they started at one, and they just started working their way up. And apparently, the Highway Commission, Highway Commission member named Frederick Tudor got license plate number one, and that they still, his ancestors years later, still have that number. Yeah. And Frederick Tudor ties in with our transcendentalist episode, because his father was the ice king, the guy who harvested ice on Walden Pond while Thoreau was there, and shipped it all over the world. So, very cool. Strange, surprising tie-in, Chuck. Should we go over what we like to call our bulleted list?

I love them. They're so great. They're just packed with information, no frills, you know? Man, I used to do a lot of those on the old Halstaff works articles. I think Katie, my editor always used to make fun of me, because I used to do bulleted lists so much. They get the point across, and you can absorb them so easily. I love bulleted lists, buddy. You didn't do them a lot, though. You were into the pros. Yeah. I'd like to hear myself talk, but I respect a bulleted list. It is funny, personality-wise. I'm definitely a bullet list personality guy. I made this bulleted list. It's in my personality as well.

I actually took paragraphs and broke them into bullets. I know. So, I'm bullet, too, okay? I can hang out with the bullet people, too. Did you do the bullets as little movie slates, or was that some accident on my end? That was an accident on your end, but a happy accident it turns like. Yeah, when I printed this out, instead of little round bullets, they're little, you know, movie clappers, movie slates. I don't know how I did that, but I'll try to recreate it. I didn't know it was even possible. Anyway, what do we got here first?

Hit the first one. Oh, okay. So, the first slogan on a license plate was Idaho potatoes, which is pretty cool. I mean, that would hang around for a while, but they actually embossed a brown potato that took up most of the license plate, and it looked a lot like poop, and it didn't stick around very long. I think that was just a one-year thing. Something that has stuck around is the longest slogan streak in the United States, and it's one of my favorite license plates because of this. It started in 1936 in the great state of Maine, the great state of Maine,

vacation land. Also, the title of our friend John Hodgman's book, one of them. And it's been on Maine's license plate since 1936, every year since then. That's quite a streak. That's far and away the longest streak. I think the next longest is like 1947, and I can't remember which slogan it is. I just love that slogan. It just sounds so welcoming. Vacation land. Yeah, and the fact that it's like one word, two, it's just pretty. Yes. They nailed it right on the head, right out of the gate, basically.

Absolutely. What else? Florida had a grapefruit. Used to have a grapefruit on their plates starting in 1935, but it just took a year because it looked like the sort of the cartoon bombs, the little black circle with the fuse coming out of it. It looks very much like a grapefruit now that you think of it. Yeah, and that license plate became known as the bomb license plate. So that was long before the bomb meant something good, and they just, they took it out of circulation. And actually there's something that, that wasn't an error, like that was intentional, but they didn't mean for it to look like a bomb. There was a straight up

controversial error that happened in 2021 in Ohio where they issued the brand new license plate, this beautiful license plate, and there was a banner being pulled by the Wright Brothers airplane, but after they announced it and it printed 30,000 of these things already, some people pointed out on the internet, I think on Twitter, that they had the airplane backwards on the license plate. And you can tell it looks like a box kite. It does, and it looks like the way that they had it originally, you can understand how they got it like that, but they just didn't check their work. And then North Carolina, you know, North Carolina and Ohio have been going back and forth

about which place actually was the birthplace of aviation. They went on Twitter and they said, y'all leave Ohio alone. They wouldn't know because they weren't there. Oh, burn. Yeah, it was pretty good burn actually, but that was very recent controversy. One of the most interesting things about license plates. The first vanity plates, 1931. Great state of Pennsylvania once again. Yeah. What else? I think in 57, they standardized the size nationwide, which is six but 12 unless you were riding a motor scooter or a motorbike. And those are the cutest plates of all. I love those

things. Yeah, and those aren't standardized apparently. They're just supposed to be smaller, I guess. Yeah, like something that doesn't look dumb on the back of a motorcycle. Right, not oversized. You know, you want it to be proportionate. And then 1971 was a big year too, because that was when 3M started supplying reflective sheeting to license plates. Like in leading up to that time at night, you were pretty much SOL. But now you could shine some headlights on these new fangled license plates and they would just glow right back at you. And you could see who was driving recklessly in front of you, right? And that actually is going to be kind of controversial as we'll see in the coming years starting after 1971.

But I say we take a break and we'll get back to all that right after. How about that? That sounds great. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because

I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're

going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, if you look at all of the license plates in the United States, the fonts that are actually like the string of numbers or if it's vanity plate, like the actual like word or abbreviation, whatever, those look remarkably similar across the United States. But they're not quite the same. I saw somewhere that there's like four different characterizations or four different types and they're characterized by just little changes like the edges are squared or rounded, that kind of thing. But they're remarkably similar. And supposedly there's, the reason for that is there's one company in the US that supplied all of the dyes for the

embossing for many, many years. Yes, the John R. Wald Company. And Ed points out that he got a lot of this information from a couple of a few different websites of license plate collectors. And usually we pride ourselves on like super legit sources. And it's not to say these aren't, but for an episode like this, this about as legit as you can get. But he does point out that these collectors are really, really serious people about their collecting. So it's probably more verifiable than just about anything that we ever look up. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. I agree because there is a lot, there's a real dearth of information out there. There's like a list of 10 interesting facts about license plates and they're copied and pasted everywhere

all over the internet, basically. But Ed did turn up something really interesting about European plates, right? Yeah. And sort of to back up this story, we should talk briefly about its predecessor in Chicago. When they started making plates in Chicago early on, they realized pretty quickly that people could fake their license tags. So they started making, they started issuing numbers to people, like just the metal numbers they had to mount on their own because they were making these metal numbers basically in a way that was unique enough to where they were, like you couldn't pick it up at your local hardware store. Right. So you could spot the fakes. And this came back later in Europe in the 1970s in Germany

when a left-wing radical group called the Red Army Faction was doing car bombings and kidnappings and bank robberies and all kinds of bad things. And they were using fake, you know, they were faking their license plates, those cool, cool European license plates that are shorter and longer and just as James Bondy as you can imagine. Yeah. Because when they flip up, there's a machine gun behind them. Or an oil slick. Sure. It's funny because I think a lot of Americans think European plates look super cool. And I've talked to some Europeans that think American plates look cool with the graphics and stuff. So maybe it's just a grasses greener thing. But I think those European plates

are awesome. I'm all about the American plates I have to admit. Okay. So anyway, they were faking these license plates, getting away with it. And they realized that the font that they were using, DIN 1451, was really uniform. And it was, you know, I mean, like a lot of fonts, if you take the leg off of an R, you've got a P. Right. But this was sort of that to the extreme where it was really easy just to sort of remove certain strokes, to come up with other letters and still have the plate look believable. Yeah, you could just put like black or white electrical tape over it. And the problem was Germany did use that same font, DIN 1451, throughout the entire country. And so the Red Army faction had the whole country so nervous and scared that the government was

like, we need to come up with a new font for our license plates. And they set a calligrapher and design professor named Carl George, one word, Hofer. And he created something called Effie Schrift, an entirely new font from scratch in just a few months in the, I think the summer of 1978. And you took German in high school. You gonna say the word? No, not even practicing. I was like, I probably shouldn't say this on the podcast. I had to, yeah, it's tough. I had to break it down. And even with my German experience, I mean, it is a long word. I didn't count the letters, but it looks like the German alphabet, basically. It looks like the American alphabet. Have at it, buddy. So I'm going to say it's Fellschungser Schwerende. Oh, geez. Well, that was close.

That was close. Fellschungser Schwerende Schrift. Very nice. Yeah, that's it. I think that's right. And the first word before Schrift, that was all one word, isn't it? It's quite a word. Yeah, it's a long word. And it means from what I understand in German, either fraud preventing or falsification hindering. And then Schrift means font. So it's a falsification hindering font. And the way that Carl George Hoeffer came up with this font or the way that he made it difficult to forge is he added what are known as serifs or serifs. I think it's serif, right? And it's serif. I had never known what a serif was until I started researching this episode. Yeah, I never knew. Are you kidding me?

No. So a serif for those of you who are like me, like how I used to be. It was so recent, I can remember. I can really identify with you guys. But a serif is like a little extra flourish on a letter that gives it a little extra pop, a little oomph. So if you draw a letter I, and then you make crossbars at the top and bottom, those crossbars are technically serifs, right? Yeah. And just let me explain. The reason I was shocked was because of your past history in publishing and newspaper things. And as a writer, and serifs and sans serifs is just something I would have thought you would have known by. Never bothered to go figure it out. I walked around knowing I did not know what a serif was,

or that serif was even necessarily a thing. You're a serif guy though, right? And I think it's sans serif, and this is why Chuck, because sans in French means without. So I think it's serif. I knew that sans meant without. Oh, okay. I just never put the two together. Yes, this is all very embarrassing all of a sudden. I thought admitting this would just kind of make the episode move along more smoothly, but it stopped in a track. There's a spotlight on me. I'm sweating quite a bit, and I'm really very uncomfortable. And we took an ab break too recently ago to just go to it. Right. I'm really sorry. This all surprises me, because you're a very much a sans serif guy. Is that right? Yeah. I mean,

aren't you sort of Calibri or like, what's your font? Yeah, Calibri is my font. Calibri on 10 point. See, I'm Times New Roman 14 point all the way, as you know. So I'm looking at serifs all day long all the time. What's funny is Calibri 10 point is way more bullet listy than Times New Roman on 14. So it's funny, we kind of cross over to one another side in different places. Yeah, it's funny whenever you do live shows. I had to like your tiny little font. I just, who reads 10 point font? That's so tiny. I know, but you say paper, which is great. Yours is so big, the front row can follow along with the episode. You can see it so clearly. We should settle at 12, which is I think the standard, right? Yeah, it's still too big for me. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

I'm challenging my eyes. All right. Sorry to tease you about the serif stuff. I forgive you. But the point is, he added these serifs basically here and there to make it to where it was really hard to replicate. Yeah. And again, he basically churned this out in a few months because Germany was in like this emergency state because the Red Army faction was terrorizing literally the country. And then by the time it was ready for production, I guess the Red Army faction had been largely broken up and they just shelved Effie Schrift until I think the mid 90s for almost 15 or so years. That's crazy. It just went away. But luckily, they already kind of had it. So when the European Union started to try to

standardize license plates across the whole EU, Germany stepped up and said, hey, we've got this really great font called Effie Schrift. What do you guys think about this one? They were like, what's the Effie stand for? And Germany said, don't ask. Yeah. Yeah. It's 22 letters long if you don't want to know. I mean, it looks Icelandic almost. Yeah. So now we come to the very scintillating part of the episode where we talk about tag fees. There are not standardized tag fees across the country because states handle this is not federalized. At least not yet. And Ed used New York as an example because Ed lives in New York and but most states are about the same and that you can usually pay a little bit of extra money

anywhere from, well, $10 is the low, which is Virginia, which we'll get to that in a second. All the way up to like 60, 75 even. I think Washington DC is about the most expensive at a hundred bucks. At least it was recently to get a specialty plate. Wow. Which one do you know? Which plate? Yeah. Which specialty plate is a hundred bucks in DC? Is it the taxation without representation one? Well, I think that actually may be for vanity, which, you know, we should point out those are two different things, especially plate can be, you know, support the ASPCA or support veterans or, hey, I'm a teacher or I'm a firefighter or this is an antique car, like any of those sort of standard things you can pay extra for.

But then you can also obviously get to your vanity plate, which you're going to pay even more on top of that. So I was looking up cool specialty plates around the country. And there are some neat ones. I found, I think, a popular mechanic slide show. Montana has this really cool one. It's just black and white, mostly black field with some white here there. And they have a T-Rex skull on theirs. It's like it supports the museums in the state. Florida has a great one. It's got a space shuttle taking off with, you know, on the rockets and all the boosters and all that stuff. And it's to commemorate the Challenger in Columbia disasters. It's very good looking. And then California has one that supports its museums.

And I guess Charles Schultz is a state lent Snoopy out just to help drum up money so you can get a Snoopy license plate in California. Yeah. And that's the whole deal is usually some of this money goes toward these organizations and not just like in the coffers of the state. Since you brought up California, I can say that we used to love trying to spot, when I live there, the old blue, for my money, the coolest license plate ever, the blue with yellow letter California license plate from the 70s that used to see on chips all the time. Yeah. And you would occasionally still see those out in LA. And it was always kind of a cool thing. I think they have that. You can get it to throwback. I guess I saw it as like the 1965

edition. And like, so, you know, there's so many people into like hot rods and stuff out in California, they're like going crazy for that because it makes their car look that much more authentic. I love it. I would totally get one. So vanity plates, like you said, they're a different thing. They're going to cost you a lot more depending on where you are. And did you see that HuffPost slideshow that I sent? Yeah. Like I was literally laughing an hour or so after last looking at it. Like just could not stop laughing. There was one. Can you guess what my favorite one was? No. There was one, I think it was either Minnesota or North Carolina. And it was J is Lord as in Jesus is Lord. But that took up all of the spaces on the license plate.

So it was one word, J-I-S Lord. And like, I could not stop laughing about that yesterday because I'm sure the guy who got a Jesus is Lord license plate gets so mad when you point out what else it looks like. And if you haven't just sounded out J-I-S Lord all one word. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those are I think well intended that turned out to look like other things kind of like ass man on Seinfeld. And that was a very popular one in Florida that was true, at least Snopes said so. And I'm not going to spell this one out. You just got to use your imagination folks. A-5-5 and then remember there's a big orange in the middle that looks like an O. Yeah. A-5-5 and then that symbol and then R-G-Y which just just write it down.

I mean, they had to like slip past them. They just because there wasn't an O in there, they use the orange for the O. Surely the people were just like they didn't think anything of it, right? It's very creative. I saw it. I think a medium article, I can't remember who wrote it, but the author was talking about how like some DMVs will like use urban dictionary and like scroll the internet and like try to figure out what people are saying and these things to decide whether to deny or approve them. Especially these days. And actually we'll get to that in a second on free speech. But with vanity plates, there are certain rules. Obviously you're not supposed to say naughty dirty things even though people try and get by it in creative ways like we just mentioned.

Even accidental. You're not allowed to use like an O, the letter, I'm sorry, like the, in fact, some states don't even use the letter zero or the letter O because you can interchanged those to make it look like the other to get around the no profanity thing. And then as far as vanity plates go, and I was shocked at this number or this list of Virginia being number one in vanity plates, but it's by percentage, which makes a lot more sense. Because when I went to California for the first time, when I was I think 18, I had never seen so many vanity plates in my life as an LA. And I was like, this is crazy. And I thought kind of dumb, but that's your thing. That's your thing. But Virginia has 16.19% of their plates. And it's because they're cheap there.

It's only 10 bucks. Right. And I think New Hampshire was next, followed by Illinois, Nevada, Montana, and Texas was the lowest at 0.5%. And then Canadians, we don't want to forget about you, Ontario leads the way with 4.9%, 5.9%, followed by Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and then the lowest was British Columbia at 0.59%. They don't care. There's some sociological study just begging to be designed through that. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I can see it in there somewhere. Texas is just like, yeah, we don't care. We're from Texas. Right. So the whole thing with vanity plates and your ability to say whatever you want and the state being able to deny you from getting a plate that you want brings up in the

United States free speech issues because you are paying for this and you're displaying it on your car. It's like you are saying this. That's automatically protected by the First Amendment, but it's a little fuzzy, Chuck, because the state is issuing this thing that you're saying whatever you want to say on. And in some way, you're repping them as well or they're wrapped on the license plate. So they may or may not want to be associated with whatever you're saying. Yeah. And when it's come to the courts, they have generally sided with people like Ed gave the example. There was a license plate issued in North Carolina that said White Power, W-Y-T-E-DASH, I guess, P-W-R or P-W-E-R. P-O-W-R. Oh, it was the full word.

Yeah. So, you know, free speech, yee-haw. And courts generally side with, and I think when it becomes dirty words and stuff is they get a little more involved. Yeah, definitely. So you can't do things like that, but I don't know. It's interesting. So, I saw it goes both ways. They don't necessarily as a rule side with the individual. Like there was a woman in, I want to say New Hampshire or Vermont maybe? And in the 90s, I think she requested SHT-H-P-N-S. The second part is happens. And her whole thing was like she had it as just a reminder. She went through a really terrible year. And she had it as a reminder that like, you know, this stuff happens. You just kind of get through it or whatever. And the state was like, no, those first three letters are dirty.

And I think the Supreme Court ruled in the state's favor. They're like, yep, that's dirty. You can't have it. And she was like, this is so like, think about context and nuance guys. And they were like, no. And she could not have her SHT-H-P-N-S license plate. I wonder if anyone has SYSK fan. Oh man. If they do, I want to hear about it. Because mine says SYSK host. Right. And mine says SYSK HST. Right. And Jerry says, me so. Nice, man. No, of course, mine doesn't say that. But it's funny. I did have, and I think I mentioned this on an episode at some point, one of my pickup truck that I still have has 666 on the plate by accident, which I thought was kind of funny. Sure. Yeah. I'm sure they would give you 666 if you wanted it, but it's way funnier when it's

accidental. 666 or LSD, those accidental ones are hilarious. Yeah. It is interesting though, the question of what is allowed, because I could see some like religious conservatives saying they don't want someone to be able to say Hail Satan on their plate. But I mean, surely that's free speech, like the courts would decide on the favor of the car owner in that case. I would think so because it's free speech in that you're just saying what you want to say, but it's also religion. You can certainly make an argument and I could see them, I could see the state being like, okay, fine. I think it tends to be, like you said, where it's a foul word according to the state and or like a straight up hate speech or a racial slur or

something like that. Sadly, in the United States, some people try to get license plates that have racial slurs and they tend to be like out of hand and I don't really think a court would side with that person. I now have a new goal in life. I just realized I want to get an old full size Woody station wagon from the 60s or 70s and I want the license plate to say Hail STN WGN. WGN. Not Hail Satan, Hail Station wagon. Oh, nice. Very nice. But it looks like Hail Station, Hail Satan. I'm so bad at that. I would be like Hail Stan Wang. So that happened to me in LA a lot. I would be like, I don't even know what that means. Yeah, no, I'm with you. That's like very unclear sometimes. Yumi is actually really good at it and she admitted last night that it

was because she practiced so much as a kid because there was a game show on I think in the 80s called like bumper busters or bumper buddies and the whole game show is you guessing what a license plate says. I'm not kidding. That was it. Wow. I just kept waiting for like the next round to come up and nope, that was all they did. That's really funny. Yeah. And also while we're on it, Chuck, just real quick, I got to shout out that medium article that I was talking about. It's the never ending free speech fight over vanity license plates by Zara Stone. It's a good article. All right. How about we take a break? Okay. I'll dream up a couple of more great vanity plates, even though Hail Station wagon, I think I just came up with something great. I think it's wonderful.

And we'll talk about whiskey plates and who makes these things right after this. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird.

Fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I mentioned whiskey plates before we took a break. And whiskey plates have nothing to do with whiskey or the whiskey industry. It is because W is whiskey in the NATO alphabet. And they just call them whiskey plates in Minnesota. But there is an interesting tie in that you get a W at the front of your license plate if you have been, basically you've had your license revoked because of a DUI? Yeah, but they revoke it so hard they take your license plates too. Right. But they can't take your car because other people in your family might need to drive that car. So what they do is they give you a plate with a W at the beginning that basically tells everybody, hey, I have had my license plate revoked because of drunken driving. Yeah. And Minnesota is not the only state to do this. Ohio has their own one. And they, I guess, very unironically use scarlet letters for theirs. No joke. I have family members with that. Do you really know way? With that plate, yeah.

That's amazing. So apparently judges weren't using them as much as they, as much as the legislature wanted. So the legislature changed the law saying that judges had to use them for, I think, starting in the 2000 teens. So, yeah, I guess you're probably seeing a lot more scarlet letters on cars in Ohio these days. Yeah, I didn't know what it was. And this is, I don't want to be too specific, but when I was in Ohio visiting Emily's family, I remember walking up the driveway to a family function. And I think my father-in-law was like, check it out. Look who's got the scarlet letter. Uncle Glug Glug. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I wanted to ask about it. And I, but I was confused whether I should or not after that rope injury story that I failed to ask you about. So now I'm like all shaky and nervous all the time when you mentioned stories. I'm like, should I ask or not? So another thing that's happened over the years is people have gotten themselves into trouble for being a little too clever for their own good by having a license plate that says no tags or no plates or something like that.

Because when a cop files a report for a car that doesn't have license plate, this is generally what they would write, no plate or no tags. So it gets filed as, you know, a violator. And then all of a sudden you're getting pulled over. And this is, you know, verifiably happened before. There was a case in the late 70s of a guy who got a lot of fines because of stuff that he didn't do because he was like, hey, I got a no plates vanity plate. Okay, so I want to defend this guy, Robert Barber. He did have a no plates vanity plate, but it was accidental because he was applying for vanity plates and you have to put your top three choices. He wanted boating, sailing, and then if these two weren't available, he didn't want a vanity plate, so he unwisely wrote no plates in the third. Oh, it was a mistake. And the DMV, totally humorless, always looking out for dirty words, just said, great, this guy wants a no plates license plate. Let's give it to him. Yeah. Well, of course, what was it, boating and sailing? That's not going to be on there. I guess he was just rolling the dice.

Jimmy Christopher Cross owns those in every state. He does, very famously. So also, Chuck, there's a longstanding rumor that I think we should put to rest that prison inmates in the United States make the license plates in this country. True, false, it's false. Well, no, I was about to say myth or busted and I combined false and myth. So I think I just kind of coined a new term. You don't have to say false or myth anymore. You can just say false. It is true, actually. I don't think across the board, but a lot of times prison inmates still do make license plates. And, you know, it's part of the sort of little to no wage labor system that the prisons take advantage of in this country.

Yeah. So thanks to the 13th Amendment, you cannot enslave a person unless they're being jailed for a crime. So most license plates, I believe it is most, Chuck, are produced in the United States by slave labor, incarcerated prisoners. And because you can't say, well, I'm going to fire you and you're not going to get any wages because you're not paying them anyway. They coerce them into working in other ways, like removing their ability to see family, maybe putting them in solitary, basically punishing them if they won't work for free. And that's how the United States gets most of its license plates. And even worse, it's not just the Bureau of Prisons running this. They usually contract with an outside company who uses slave labor legally to produce these license plates from which they make a profit when they give them to the state. Yeah.

It's a terrible, terrible thing. And it's something that needs to be changed, but that's not on just about anyone's radar, I think, as far as changing laws goes. Well, it became kind of a joke, like, yeah, you're making license plates, you're going to jail. Yeah, especially the ones in New Hampshire where the license plates, they live free or die. Well, speaking of that, and we're not going to go over the whole process of how they're made because it's not super interesting. But I looked and there was a thing on Reddit where a guy went through, I think there was a, or maybe he just did it on its own and made a map of the states that still have embossed plates. Rather than the just sort of printed on aluminum that we have now in Georgia, ours are not embossed any longer. Even though Jerry Wildis, she's got an embossed plate from like 20-something years ago still. Back to the podcast.

And hangs onto it. But from what I could tell, and I lost count because the picture was really small, and then other people chimed in after. This was in 2019, saying like, hey, now Kansas is not embossed anymore, so it looks like it's about roughly half and half of states that are still embossing. And just one little fun note about this, I did not know. We got it, and I know the Vermonters out there are just waiting. I will not forget about you because Vermont is the only state that has debossed license plates. Oh, nice. It is not raised lettering, it is depressed.

So depressed in Vermont. Very, very cool. So if you want to kind of take a little nostalgic trip, I found out by accident, there's a titlemax.com post. It's called 50 Years of License Plates in the US. And you can see 50 Years of License Plates state by state. And if you choose like the decade you were a kid and just go, you know, scroll down, it's like being back on the road again at age 10, like the back of your parents car. It's pretty great. Yeah, I mean, I remember when they, as many people do, when they started just including little logos like the Georgia Peach.

And it wasn't just the straight up letters and numbers. And I remember thinking like, wow, is this the future here that we're looking at? Well, speaking of the future, so they went from embossed or deembossed to flat printed license plates. Now, apparently, there's some disruptors out of Silicon Valley because that's where they come from. And they've come up with digital license plates. And some states are starting to be like, yep, you can do that. So for a fee, I think it's like $14 a month or $250 for four years, something like that. This company keeps your plate up to date.

You can have it personalized a little bit and it looks super cool. You know, especially if you have an electric car, you could do worse than putting a digital plate on the back of it. But obviously, not everybody has $250 for four years, and I think that's in addition to all of the normal fees that apply for a license plate, too. That's right. And speaking of fees, that's something that you would not be able to collect, but people get really into collecting license plates. And there are a couple of different ways. One is a little, well, I'm not going to say that. One is just collecting license plates, physical license plates, maybe all of them through history in your state.

Maybe all of them throughout the whole country over the years, or just once you think are super cool. And, you know, rare ones like any collectible are going to go for a lot more money. You can also buy big lots of them on eBay for not much money. But the big money comes in collecting the actual ownership of a tag number. Because if you remember earlier, we mentioned license plates in many states started at one and worked their way up. There's a lot of rich people with way too much money, I guess. Yeah, way too much. That want to pay a lot of money to have like eight as their license plate, and they will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that.

Yeah, apparently in the states, Delaware is the state that's craziest for this. There's a real secondary market where, yes, people pay six figures for a license plate number. And it's like, you know, when you buy a car, the plate gets transferred to you, so you can continue to keep this plate over and over again. So you're actually buying it from the person. And usually you get the car with it, but you're like, I don't care about the car, I'm just after the plate. But as crazy as Delaware is for their plates. And again, I think 700 grand is the most someone paid for a tag number six in Delaware. Pretty crazy.

In other countries, especially Dubai, the UAE, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, it's just insane the amount of money they spend on that stuff. I couldn't believe these numbers, but someone in New York apparently paid $20 million for a plate that said New York. Yeah, the kicker of that one is it came with the 96 Volvo wagon that it was attached to. I'm not kidding. Was it really a Volvo wagon? Yeah, somebody paid $20 million for a Volvo wagon. And then the one in the Brits, I believe they paid someone in... Is it Great Britain? Is it the UK? Is it England?

Yes. What am I getting trouble for? Just say UK. Paid 20 million bucks for an F1 license plate tag. So if you want to get gagged with the spoon, head on over to Lux Digital with an E after the X. And just read about the most expensive car tags ever, because you will find little gems like this. Said Abdul Ghaffar Kuri paid $9.5 million for one in Abu Dhabi because, quote, it's the best number. And then Lux Digital says, quote, by hanging one from his fenders, Kuri boldly let the world know that he was a man of confidence and prestige.

Someone actually wrote that down and was dead serious about it. Wow. Yeah. It reminds me that I'm number one hat on SNL. I don't remember that. Oh, you don't? Like, Will Ferrell's at this black tie dinner and he's showing up all the other men because he's wearing a mesh-backed I'm number one hat. It's just completely incongruous with everything he's trying to do, but he's showing everybody I'm number one.

That's pretty great stuff. I guess one final thing we put a pin in so we have to take that pin out or people say, what about the pin? As you mentioned, 3M making the reflective plates. Apparently 3M continually lobbies politicians to pass laws making people get license plates more often than they need to so they can get bigger government contracts for those reflective plates, reflective backing. And apparently even police departments are like, we don't need new plates this often. We shouldn't have to do this. Yeah, and 3M's like, come on, you're not paying for it. Your residents are.

Who cares? It's nothing to your residents. It's millions of dollars to us. Just do it. Like, they lobby for that, which is gross. In addition to using enslaved prison labor to create license plates, they're a lot more tawdry than you'd think at first glance. Agreed. So it turned out to be a really great pick, Tracy and AJ, thank you for the suggestion.

Chuck, thank you for turning this into an absolutely delightful episode and thank you for listening. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this, oh, this is a good one. This is a little bit on cultural appropriation because in the Mariachi episode, I talked about wanting a Charo suit. And said I would fear being accused of cultural appropriation and you said, nay to that. Nay. Wear it because people, you know, you're celebrating that culture. And we heard from a lot of people, and I'm going to read a couple of them from our Mexican friends who, and I'm not padding the results here, but literally 100% of our Mexican listeners roundly said, do it, dude.

We love it. And that would be awesome. Yeah, Mexican and Mexican American. Yes, of course. Hey guys, as a Mexican myself, I listened to the episodes about our country, knowing so much on the topic and you guys are always so spot on. Makes me love the podcast even more. With the Mariachi episode, I love Mariachi music and personally love singing Vincente Fernandez music. And I want to let Chuck know.

He should definitely dress at least once in that style. Mexican people love when other ethnicities love their culture and style. And I would say in Mexico, they would even encourage you to try on a Charo suit. Keep doing what you're doing. That's from Joel Hernandez. And then we received one from Jamie Kovazos. Kovarubias, great, great name. Actually, it's Jaime.

Okay, right. Not Jamie. Spelled J-A-I-N. Right. Mexican came to the US when I was 24 years old. I want to congratulate you on the preparation and pronunciation on the Mariachi app. You guys did a great job, especially rolling those Rs with your Spanish. Second, Chuck, you should wear a Mariachi suit any day and be a champ.

I was born and raised in Mexico and I feel proud when a person likes my culture. Makes me happy that someone's interested in anything regarding the great parts of Mexico, like food, music and its folklore and many other good things. I will not call it cultural appropriation because I feel joy when the world likes even a little bit of what I am and want to keep spreading the beautiful roots from Mexican culture. It actually works both ways, guys, because I live in the North Alabama area. After seven years, I probably call myself Southern now. You can ask any Mexican person if they feel offended if you wear a Mariachi suit. I'm confident they will encourage you to keep doing it. Then they highly encourage us to talk about in the future Mexican trio romantico music, which we're going to look into.

Not to poo-poo on anyone, but no one really scolded me, but the couple of emails that we did get that were like, hey, maybe think twice. We're from Caucasian people taking up the fight for our Mexican and Mexican American friends. Just laying that out there. Nicely put. Who was it in addition to Jaime? Who's email you read? That would be Joel Hernandez. Jaime and Joel, thank you so much for writing in.

Everybody who wrote in, thank you very much. Regardless of what your opinion was, we appreciate it. We're always looking for good emails regardless of what your opinion is. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.