Stuff You Should Know - Origami: Folding Goodness

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Origami is an amazing art that consists of making folds in paper to create something beautiful. Learn all about it today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, ya 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello everybody, we have a book coming out. It's called Stuff You Should Know, colon and incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things, and you can pre-order it now. That's right, it would mean a lot

if you supported this book. You're gonna love it, it's really great, it looks great, it smells great, it reads great. And how about this, why don't you support Indie Bookstores by going to IndieBound.org, or even better, why don't you support Black Owned Businesses, because we set up a little link, bit.ly slash s-y-s-k-b-l-m,

and order a book from those fine folks, why don't ya? That's right, so Stuff You Should Know, colon and incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is coming soon to change your life forever for the better. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant

right there, and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the Bold and Tuck edition. So Jerry's in her office now. Yep. I'm in the Stuff You Should Know studio. That's right, I'm in Florida. You're at your home studio, or A-home studio.

Right. There's eight of them. You're like Elvis. Which room is closest to me, baby? I'll just go in there. Why are we recording from today, man? And now Jerry is like a ghost, haunting the computer in here, recording it remotely.

Right, she's like... That's amazing. What's that? Yeah, she's like a ghost. You said it best. She just texted me two minutes in and said, your levels are good, so. That's great.

Go back to sleep, chairs. Sounds about right. So I was talking to Jerry earlier, and she just reminded me, we're talking origami today, she just reminded me that on my first trip to Japan, I brought her back a paper origami crane, and that she still has it. And I was thinking about that trip, Chuck,

because on that trip, Yumi took me to Japan. Remember when you guys liked each other, you and Jerry? Yeah, we still do. It's that crane that's keeping us friends. That's right. But on that trip, one of the places Yumi took me was Hiroshima, right? Sure.

And it is one of the neatest places I've ever been. I know I've talked about it before, but one of the things that you'll see there are just mounds and mounds of origami cranes. Yeah. Like cranes, like the bird. Basically the quintessential origami model. Not like building cranes,

this is not what they're building. You never can tell these days. Bob the Builder had a pretty good run for a while there, so it could have been. That's true. But apparently one of the reasons you see those cranes is because there was a little girl from Hiroshima named Sadako Sasaki.

Oh man, the story. Yeah, I know, it's very sad. So she was, I think, two when the US dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. And she was exposed to radiation at that tender young age and developed leukemia. And she died at age 12. But before she died, she started this project

of folding 1,000 paper cranes in origami, which was kind of this longstanding thing that was associated with good luck or honor or dignity. And hers was that if you, there's another one that if you complete 1,000 cranes, you have a wish. And so this little girl, Sadako Sasaki, her wish was for world peace.

But she died before she could complete the cranes, the 1,000 cranes. And that is upsetting, but to end it on a more heartwarming note, her classmates got together and folded the remaining cranes in her honor. And they were buried with her, which is at least a slightly uplifting ending.

Right. So when you go to Hiroshima today at this peace memorial that they've built, like a whole section of the city where the bomb went off has just been turned into this anti-nuclear, anti-war peace memorial. There's just tons of cranes that were created by school children kind of in honor

of Sadako Sasaki and for this wish for world peace. And if you stepped out of the studio and followed me into the living room, you would see 1,000 paper cranes that you me folded just for me too. You know who here at work has done that? Who? Guess.

You. No, no. Which one of your colleagues do you think would do this? I don't know, man. I honestly don't know. There's so many varied, complex, rich people that we work with that I can't even begin to guess. I'm gonna hazard a guess and say Ben.

I could see Ben doing that. What about the other Ben? Probably not. Pam, Peacock. Oh, okay, yeah. Makes sense, huh? Our graphic designer, who is an artist, obviously. And I asked Pam, actually,

if I could read her Facebook post when she completed it, because I think this is instructive on, and you tell me whether it jibes with Yumi's experience. Okay. Because it sort of is instructive on the art of origami, and it's more than just folding paper. It is meditative, and it can be relaxing, and healing, and all those things.

So Pam posted a photo of the final project and said, this is what 1,000 origami cranes looks like, and a pile on my coffee table. Tonight, I met the goal on August 2nd, 2018, to fold 1,000 cranes within one year's time. There were several reasons I wanted to take on the challenge, the meditative quality of folding origami, to practice dexterity and find motor skills,

the fun in making a flat piece of paper into something dimensional and new to make a whole bunch of something. There's a certain satisfaction in that. But the biggest reason was to cultivate more discipline within myself, to commit to a long-term, ongoing project, and see it through to completion is a big deal for me. And she goes on to say she has a pretty long history

about getting pumped up about a project, and then abandoning it. And she found, with two months left, she only had, I'm sorry, she had 500 left to go. So it took her 10 months. Well, I think she just took some time off. Sure, well, yeah, I mean, that's how you're supposed to do it. You're not supposed to just sit there and do it

in one fell swoop. It kind of misses a bunch of the point, you know? Yeah, she said that she went several months without it, realized she had a couple of months, and the clock was ticking. And she said, I made the decision to recommit and push myself instead of letting it go. Like so many other things,

I know I'll still struggle with those issues, but as an exercise growth, I feel like I've leveled up a bit and continue applying these strength and skills to my art, personal, and professional lives. Very nice. And she's like, and check out my finger muscles. That too. They're ripped.

Yeah, Yumi's middle name is stick-to-itiveness. So I don't think she benefited in that sense, but there's definitely like a meditative aspect to it. And like when she was doing it for me, it was like, I thought it was very sweet. And then the more I learned about it, the sweeter I realized how, you know, it was. It's a, I mean, to do that for somebody is pretty cool.

And to do it for yourself too, like Pam did is pretty neat as well. I think it was also for Yumi. She, yeah, probably. You know? Yeah, I'm sure she got a tremendous amount out of it too, you know? But it was one of those things where she just kind of worked

on it when she felt like it, you know? There wasn't any rush or anything like that. So it did have like kind of a meditative thing for her, for sure. I used to think stick-to-itiveness was a weird middle name, but when I saw it written down, like in the context of her name, it just, I don't know, it looked great.

You're like, I've been pronouncing that Alice all these years. That was so weird. So Pam said something that I saw other people mention too about origami is that it's transformative. Like she's taking a piece of paper and transforming it into something. And there's this really amazing, so there's a definite Zen quality

to origami paper folding, right? And there's a documentary out there called Between the Folds. And it's of course, of course, a PBS documentary. But it has this kind of Zen vibe to it too. It's really, really mellow and low-key. But some of the stuff they're talking about and showing in there is just nuts.

And I'll talk about it from time to time, but there's this one guy in there named Michael LaFos and he describes origami as a metamorphic type of art where like with painting, you're adding paint. So it's an additive kind of art with, sculpting from like marble. It's a subtractive art with paper folding and origami. You're taking the same thing

and it's the same thing that is the finished product. You're not adding to it or subtracting to it. It's still just a piece of paper, but you're transforming it into something else. And that is kind of the essence of origami itself. Yeah, this one was one that I was so sure that we had done it before because it's just smacks of stuff you should know.

We'd love to cover Japanese topics first of all, but I don't know, it just felt like surely we've done this. And I had to look, I looked probably five different ways just to make sure that we hadn't done it. You're like, what kind of smart way would we title this? Well, that's what I thought, that was my fear was that it would be like called folding madness or something stupid like that.

Did you search folding madness? No, I just made that up, but... What if that's the one that we already released this under? It did seem really familiar, but I think I'm probably just thinking about Bonsai maybe, which I think is similar in a way and not just because they're both Japanese disciplines, but I feel like the meditative quality

and the care and the precision and the spiritual aspect, I think they have a lot of overlap there. One of the big differences though, is that the origami doesn't involve plant torture, like Bonsai does. Well, in Bonsai doesn't, there's no paper torture involved, so. That's true, that's true.

So when we talk about origami, we're actually talking about this, that is technically a subset of this larger thing that actually grew out of origami and ended up forming this kind of umbrella art form called paper folding appropriately enough. But origami, everybody kind of associates that with Japan. And the weird thing is, is when we talk about origami,

which by the way, we haven't really said it, but it's taking usually one sheet of paper and folding it in certain ways, so that it becomes some other representation of something else or a shape or something other than that. But the point of origami is that this shape or this new representation of like an animal or a person or something,

it's all made just by a single sheet of paper typically and folding that paper, that's the whole key. Yeah, and one of the other keys is, is that you're not gluing things, you're not cutting things. It's really just folding. And it can be very basic. I tried my hand at it today just to make some very basic things.

And I definitely get the, I get the meditative aspect, although I was just doing it to try and do something sort of quickly for work and not in the style that you would normally do origami. I could see how if you applied that at your house, put on some good music, maybe turn the lights down a little bit,

shut the door, keep your family far, far away. And your animals far, far away. I could see how it could accomplish that goal for me. I might start doing it some. Hadn't thought about keeping the family far, far away because Yumi was, when she was folding that thousand cranes, I'd be like, what number are you on now? What number are you on now?

Every time she folded a new one. Yeah, I think she probably was just an autopilot. What you doing? Answering you. What you doing over there? Is this a crane too? Are you making another crane? Boy, I would, yeah, that would drive me nuts.

So we should probably go over a few of the terms. The term itself origami, they say comes from oru, which means to fold, pretty smart. And kami, which is paper. So oru kami apparently was the original term for it. And it's kind of, I guess, just became origami, which as far as I could see, it's not actually a word. It's kind of an offshoot of oru and kami.

Yeah, and if you go to, I mean, you can make origami out of anything. They talk about sticky notes and just copy paper, but you can actually buy kami, K-A-M-I online, if you want, or go to an art store these days. It might not be so easy to go into a store, but that's what it might be called. There are other kinds of paper that we'll talk about later,

but paper is what you need. If you want to be a paper folder, you don't need a bunch of other stuff, which is a very lo-fi art form. It's super cool in that way. And what you end up with is called a model. I guess you could call it an art piece or something if you're a little high flutin',

but they're really just called models. Yes, that's any finished origami product is called the model. There's also, so this article says you need two things for origami. You need a sheet of paper and some imagination. But I would beg the different. You don't even need imagination,

because there's so many what are called origami designs out there that are basically step-by-step illustrations of the different folds you need to make. So if you want to say make an origami donkey, as long as you have the paper in one of these designs, you don't have to have any imagination whatsoever. Yeah, and when I was first reading this too,

I thought, well, you need paper and fingers, but I realized that was quite ableist, actually. Boo. Because there is actually a style of origami from a British man named John Smith in the late 70s called Pure Land or Pure Origami that is very basic and was created in part so people who had some sort of physical impairment

could still realize the joy in the meditative qualities of folding paper. I saw that too. That was the one that appeals to me the most because it's so simple. Yeah, same here. Also, Chuck, did you know that the world's greatest archer was born with no arms?

I think we talked about that, right? I don't know. On the Olympic torch thing, no? No, definitely not. No, because I just saw it this past Sunday, so it's not possible we did. You just had a memory from the future. That's pretty impressive.

I'm in the Christopher Nolan movie. So I can't wait, but I have to say, man, I am very disappointed to see movies starting to come out and the trailer saying only in theaters. I didn't realize we were at that point again yet. Well, I mean, his new movie, Tenet, is one of the big ones back in the early spring when they were like, he's going to put it out in theaters,

even if he has to bump it a month or two. He's not going to do an at-home thing. He's not going to wait till next year. And I think they're doing pretty big time spacing and stuff, but I ain't going to a movie theater. No. And it's one of my favorite places to go. I know.

Like we talked about the other day in sneezing, how it's just so great to go see a movie in the middle of the day, you know? Yeah. Can you imagine seeing a movie now and you hear someone sneeze? I would be out of there so fast. I would just start crying on the way to the movie theater.

I would not be at all comfortable about that right now. So I think if, actually, I think we should probably take a break. We've been yammering for 15 minutes. No, we've made it through the first two paragraphs. So we'll come back after this and we'll talk about paper. Very key to origami. Right after this.

MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. OK, 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 will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, 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, 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. All righty, I teased paper. You did. Paper doesn't like to be teased. Paper did not like that. I thought about you earlier, by the way.

Sidebar, I was watching some old Mitch Hedberg stuff. And I immediately was like, oh, man, Josh would love these. Somebody wrote in to say, you guys, have you heard about, was it based on a listener mail? No, I don't know how. I think it was just in my feed on my Facebook page, and just, I don't know, it popped up. It was so good.

His joke about the belt and the belt loops. I don't know about that one. What is it? The belt is holding up the pants. But the belt loops hold up the belt. Who's the real hero here? That guy was priceless. So good.

So paper is what you're going to need if you want to practice origami. And China invented paper in about 105 A.D. But it was a luxury item. They weren't so much into folding it, or at least into artwork, they might have folded letters, or maybe they just scrolled at that point. I saw that they folded stuff into like paper, gold nuggets,

and then set them on fire as offerings to ancestors. So maybe pre-proto origami. Yes, definitely proto. But in the sixth century, Buddhist monks introduced paper to Japan. It was pretty rare and expensive here as well, and was used for special occasions and stuff like that. But as paper got a little more ubiquitous,

then they decided that they could start folding it in interesting ways, and it wasn't a waste. Right. And it was affordable, I guess. Yeah, as it became more affordable, folding became a lot more widespread. And as it became more widespread, people started doing kind of interesting things with it.

Like you're saying, at first it was just kind of reserved for special occasions like weddings, or there's one called the Slade, no, Shide, S-H-I-D-E. I was thinking of Shade. And it's like a zigzag pattern that they used to kind of denote like religious places or altars or something like that. And then somebody said, well, wait,

you can make a frog out of this. Check this out. And I think origami kind of took off. And that's how it stayed, at least in Japan, for several centuries, where it was, they knew how to make a kite. They knew how to make a box. They knew how to make cranes.

Cranes were huge. Sure. And in fact, one of the first books on origami was called Folding 1,000 Cranes. Let's see, Samba Zuru Oricata, 1,000 crane folding. So that was a big deal already, all the way back in the 18th century. But finally, in the, I believe, the 1930s,

I think around 1937, there was a guy whose name was Akira Yoshizawa. And you cannot talk about origami, or paper folding, or paper, or folding, or Japan, or shoes, without mentioning Akira Yoshizawa. This guy was, he single-handedly took what it was a centuries-old school children's craft by this time, by the 1930s rolled around, that had been static for centuries,

and said, I'm going to turn this into an art form. And he did. Yeah, big time. And by this point, it was widely referred to as origami, I think, in the late 1700s. It was still called Oricata. And that was from that book about the 1,000 cranes. But by this time, it was origami.

And he was a laborer for most of his life, and he was a hobbyist, as far as origami went. But he started writing out these diagrams, and basically, sort of these how-tos. And if you've ever looked at an origami book, or something online, if you don't know how to do it, there are these very simple, depending on the ultimate model that you want to end up with, these diagrams

that you can just follow along these lines and fold, and just kind of copy what you're seeing. And he was the first person to do this, and eventually published these in the 1950s in books. And it was a really big deal. Like, it was already a popular thing in Japan. Previous to that, it was actually in Spain, and some other parts of Europe, thanks to the Silk Road.

But it really, sort of, popularized it worldwide, I think, after his book. Yeah, well, even before then, I think there was a magazine that celebrated the New Year by commissioning him to do the 12 signs of the zodiac in origami. They put it on their cover. And so you can imagine, for Japan, everything that had to do with origami was like,

look at this kite that our kid made, and now it's hanging on our refrigerator, to the 12 signs of the zodiac. And these things actually look kind of like a monkey, and the fox looks amazing. And it's just, what this guy did is completely blew everybody away. And very shortly after that, he devised that system,

started having exhibitions around the world, and became like this revered master of origami, like the first true origami artist, the one who said, you can make an art form out of this. And he decided to live like this kind of poverty, I don't want to say poverty stricken, but he did- Poverty adjacent? Poverty adjacent life, very nice Chuck,

where he supported himself selling soup door to door. He sold something called Sukudani, which is like a kind of a seaweed condiment that you put on rice, he'd sold that door to door. And he just made enough money to support his habit of origami. That's what all he wanted to do. But what's amazing about him is he was like

the preeminent origami artist for decades. He made at least 50,000 different models. It's amazing stuff too. It is. Just look him up right now, Akira Yoshizawa. And he never sold a single one of them. He would lend them out for exhibitions, he would give them as gifts,

but he never made a dime off of his origami. Yeah, and he's one of those that his reputation reached a point where he literally could have gotten rich selling his models in the end. Oh yeah, for sure, but that's just, he just wasn't about that. I love it, very cool. Very, that's very origami-esque.

Oh yeah, totally. He's like, I'm not gonna sell this stuff. That's not the point. They were like, what about 10 grand for that rhinoceros? He was like, meet me in the back room. Meet me in the back room. Some of those animals, I mean, not just from him, but when you look up, kind of the most amazing origami in,

and there are a lot of animals and we'll talk about that, but it's really just astounding. It is astounding. One of the ways that he was able to take origami from a kite, and I know I keep going back to a kite, but that's one of the base forms. Kind of where it was at. Taking it from a kite to,

like he very famously made this gorilla. I think it's a gorilla that you almost always see in the background behind him. It's a, it's a, it's an ape. It's either a gorilla or a Tyrannosaurus rex. Other than you'd be like, yeah, it's either a gorilla or a car. Right, but when he makes something,

you can, you know exactly what it is. But one of the things about his particular kind of art was that it wasn't like every single detail is captured. People have taken it to that. Paper folders have gotten to the point where it's like that guy, Michael Lafoss, created a huge, easily two foot alligator, which is almost several meters,

at least by my estimation, out of a single piece of paper. And it has all of like the armor, the scaly armor involved. Like there's a lot of detail. That's not what Yoshizawa was into. His was much more expressive and almost impressionistic, but you knew exactly what it was when you looked at it. And he was able to do this through a technique

that he created called wet folding. Yeah, and wet folding is how you can round things out. You're obviously wetting the paper and that's how, or, you know, dampening at least, you don't want to get it too wet. And you can manipulate it a little more and you can round things out and make it look a little more like a sculpture.

But I really liked his style. It wasn't, because it didn't seem like, boy, I'm out to wow you and impress you with just something that's so detailed that it'll blow your mind. They were detailed, but it wasn't like that other guy that you were talking about.

Michael Lafoss. Yeah, which is, you know, they're both great, but it just seemed a little more intuitive and organic in terms of what Yoshizawa was doing, I think. His technique screams, oh, you like that? Not for sale. Yeah. Get out of my kitchen.

And why were you here in the first place? Exactly. They're like, I work for Time Magazine. But help yourself to some soup that I sell door to door. Exactly. So I guess we should talk about, you know, if somebody has, if someone's listening to this interest has been peaked and wants to know how to, how to fold them,

we should teach people, I think, Chuck. Yeah. Well, we'll tell you the basics at least. There are, you know, many, many, many types of folds, but you mentioned the kite base or the kite fold. And I said, that's one of the basics. And it is there. You can oftentimes start from a base,

which is just sort of your starting shape that's your point where you start and then get more detailed from there. And there is the kite base, the fish base, the bird base and the frog base. And those are listed in order of difficulty from easy to hard. There's a really great site called Paper Kawa'i.

It's spelled like Hawaii, but with a K, it means cute in Japanese. And the person who runs that site has made a huge depository of resources and instructional videos and diagrams and everything you could possibly want. But she says that there's 12 bases, or at least she instructs you on making 12 bases. So it gets even richer than those four.

Yeah, I mean, I got the picture that that was the four most basic original bases. Gotcha. And I was probably sure that there were more. So there's some types of models that tend to pop up more often than others. And animals are frequently created. And like I was saying, like it's not necessarily,

like you're going for ultra realism. It'd be impossible to make it ultra real. Because I don't know if we've said this yet. Like you're not supposed to use like scissors or glue or tape or anything like that. And some people still use scissors every once in a while, but definitely you don't use glue or tape. That's not what's holding these together.

These models are held entirely from different types of folds that you learned from doing origami. Like it's not just fold this direction, fold that direction. There's like reverse folds, there's sinks. There's all sorts of different and interesting stuff you can do to make the paper take a certain shape that you want it to.

And then also to hold itself in shape permanently from that point on. That's right. And there are a lot of ways that you can go about it. I would imagine that Yumi probably did it on like a coffee table or something maybe. Oh no, buddy, she'd do it in her lap. Oh, okay.

She can do it in the air. Yeah, I mean, that is, when you're at that point, then you're pretty skilled as an origami artist. If you are just using your hands and you are not putting it on anything hard, then that's pretty skilled. But I would say a beginner should probably use a desk or something.

Oh yeah. With a little help, maybe a clipboard if you want to do it in your lap. Sometimes people will use paper clips to help really get a nice fine crease in there. Yeah, I got the impression that that's allowed. Yeah, I mean, anything's allowed, come on. I mean, anytime you're talking about something

that Japanese people do, they're not gonna go in there and start screaming at you. Right. If you're like to do it right. You may be at risk of dishonoring your ancestors, but nobody's going to judge you personally for it. Yeah, but I would imagine a paper clip too might help if you don't have fingernails.

If you're a fingernail biter and you just have just stubby nubs like I used to, then you should maybe get a little paper clip out that might help you along. I've also seen like a wooden, a letter opener kind of thing. I've seen people use that to make a really tight crease or to poke a fold into another fold, that kind of thing. What?

Nothing. Did I accidentally get sexy or something? A couple of times, that's all right though. Poke, oh, you gotcha. I gotcha, let's just keep moving along. So, nothing to see here. We should talk to you about a few of the different categories of origami.

There are many, many categories that you can focus on if you want to kind of drill down into a specific discipline. One is called modular origami, and that is when you have, and I would encourage people, obviously not if you're driving, but to kind of look up pictures and follow along with a lot of these

because it really drives at home and it's also beautiful to look at. But modular is when you use different sheets of paper, but you're generally kind of making the same shape and then bringing those together to form some larger piece from those same shapes. Very beautiful. It really is.

And with modular, Chuck, that's one of the few types of paper folding or origami that uses more than one sheet. Right. Well, what's mind-blowing about origami is when you're looking at just about any type aside from modular, despite what it looks like, it's probably just one sheet of paper.

Yeah. It's just amazing. Some of the stuff that people are making is just ridiculously amazing. You've got action origami, which are kind of fun, because these little guys can move sometimes. Obviously it's gonna take human manipulation, they don't just move on their own.

Like you can't make a wind-up toy or anything like that, but you can flap a bird wings sometimes, a bird's wing, or you might be able to make a frog that jumps. Yeah, or remember the origami fortune teller, that little folded thing? Oh, sure. That you could learn who you're gonna marry or that kind of thing.

Oh yeah, what was that called? The origami fortune teller from what I saw. I mean, we didn't call it that in elementary school. No, and I could not find it. I could not find the name of it. I know what you're talking about. Oh, gosh, what was it? Yeah, those were always fun.

There's something called MASH mansion apartment shack house, but I don't think that involves paper origami, but it's a similar game. Yeah, Janet Varney plays that with her guests at the end of her JV club episodes, the MASH game. Sure. A lot of fun. So that's different from the origami fortune teller.

Yeah, has nothing to do with paper. Yeah, you always end up married to Rob Lowe somehow, if you're lucky. Well, that's called the fantasy game. Let's see, what else can you do with origami, Chuck? People make origami out of dollar bills. Yeah, I used to get those occasionally. If ever you work at a cash job,

like I worked at a convenience store, you're gonna get some Wiseacre that pays for cigarettes with a couple of cranes. Some Wiseacre. People make them out of sticky notes, like post-it notes is what most people call them. From what I saw, it basically just ends up being Pikachu every time.

Oh yeah. Because it's yellow and small, so yeah. Jewelry, if you can make jewelry origami. I think you can certainly buy that kind of thing on Etsy. And then one of the other styles that you see are schools is tessellations. I don't know if it's a school in and of itself, but it's kind of like modular origami

where it yields like kind of repeating 3D patterns. But it's typically made from just one sheet folded in just not so intricate ways. I saw one a 3D hydrangea pattern on this little sheet that the person in the pictures holding it covers about the top half of their hand, but there's I think at least a dozen little hydrangeas folded into it and repeating rows.

It's amazing. It's just, and then when you step back and you think that is one sheet of paper, somebody figured out how to fold perfectly because there's one thing that they don't tell you about origami that you figure out pretty quickly on your own, if you don't make the right folds in the right order, you just screwed up.

Like it's never gonna look quite right. Yeah, it's hard to undo a good crease. I think that's where scissors come in sometimes. Yeah, you know what I didn't do for this, which I usually do, I'm surprised. I'll do it later is watch a good YouTube of someone doing something pretty complex. Check out Paper Kawaii, she's good.

And it's also easy to follow too. Yeah, does she get super detailed and stuff or is it a little more basic? Both, it's basically everything you want. And then there's also like a lot of instructionals. Well, she teaches you basic shapes. I don't think she gets into like modular, but actually it's not true.

She does have modular stuff on there. She does it all basically, but she's also got a lot of stuff where like if you wanna make a little gift box to put your gift in, she's got instructionals on how to do that, so practical stuff as well. So you can put origami in an origami box as a gift. You could, that's pretty mind blowing.

It's amazing. What's neat though is all of her videos are set to lead zeppelin, so that adds like an extra layer. Does it, is it really? No. Okay, man, I was like, that'd be amazing. Especially if it was just really out of whack with what she was making too, that'd be great.

Yeah, I was just thinking maybe, I can't think of it now, come from the land of the ice and snow, what's that like? Immigrant song. Immigrant song? Yeah. Doon, do do do doon. Yeah, but none of the folding is keeping up with it.

The song has to start over, over and over again. Of course, if you're a fan of Blade Runner, you remember that has a nice origami motif, reoccurring motif in there with Edward James Almos's character. I have no idea what you're talking about. You've seen Blade Runner? Yeah, and I know the character, but what is that?

Oh, does he keep making origami stuff and he leaves it behind? That's right. Okay, that's right. And it plays a key role sort of at the end of the movie. I don't remember that. Yeah, it's good stuff. That is a great movie though. It sure is.

Did you see the second one? Well, I've seen all the versions of the first one and of course, yeah, I saw the second one. I thought the second one was really great. Yeah, it was very good. I loved it. And there's nothing that Ryan Gosling can't do. I know, right?

I saw him in a hotel lobby once and I just wanted to kiss his handsome face. Did you? No, I should have. Do you remember when we went to Upfronts once when we had our show on Science Channel? Yeah, it was fun. We looked over and there's Fred Armisen

and we waved like we were peers. And he waved back like, I don't know who you are, but hey, good to see you for the first time ever. The other funny thing, I don't know if you remember this on that trip was, and for people that know the Upfronts is where you, if you have a TV show or something coming out the next year or quarter, is it yearly?

Yeah. You gather at a place and all the press is there and you kind of just tell everyone what you're doing and they hopefully write about it. But we saw Michael Douglas and Matt Damon pass us walking down the sidewalk. And I was like, what are those guys doing together? And like little did I know what was coming.

Man, that was such a good movie. It was awesome. I'd like to see that again soon, actually. Yeah, it's on, if you get a free trial, the HBO on Amazon Prime, I think it's on there right now. Oh man, I gotta see that. Such a good movie. Let's see.

Technical origami, I think is where we left off. Well, yeah, because we had already talked about Pure Land, right? Yeah. And this technical origami from what I could gather is this just the worksheets that you get? Sort of the how-to or is it an actual style? It's kind of both.

So I think that the thing about the style is that the worksheets, the diagrams are not step by step. It is a picture of the paper with every fold in it. But it's like if you went through the whole process of making this incredibly detailed, very technically precise origami shape, and then unfolded it, but left all the creases in there,

and then took a picture of that, that's what the diagram is. But that doesn't say which one to do first? No. Ugh. Which I find very unnerving, because that means that there are people out there who can look at that and tell how to do it.

That's just by looking at that. Yeah, that's amazing. And so in that documentary between the folds, this is made back in 2008, I think, but they really kind of documented this tension between this push toward more and more technical origami and paper folding that's just pushing the limits and the boundaries

of what can you possibly do that started to use CAD and other computer programs to plot out what folds you needed to make and what order to make these really technical ones. And then on the other side of that, pulling the other direction are the artists who are just like, I just listened to like my hands of my imagination

and come up with these new folds. And there's this one French artist who makes masks and kind of almost Tolkien-esque from like a 70s illustrative version of like Lord of the Rings maybe, like witches and wizards and things like that. And it's very like free-form flowing. And they're like, when you get too technical,

you lose like the emotion, you lose the art side of it. And then this one guy made the case. His name is Long. I can't remember his first name, but he's just an amazing technical guy. And he said, you know, no, these technical people are figuring this out.

They're making studies of stuff that you could eventually incorporate into larger art. So it's good that it's good to have both. Yeah, I don't think there's a wrong way. I'm pretty sure his name is David Long. Check him out. He's just up to some amazing stuff. All right, well, let's take another break.

And we're gonna come back and finish up with a little bit on the kind of paper you might wanna get if you wanna try this out. Right after this. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

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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 will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, 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, 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. Hey, Chuck, I looked and we did not ever do an episode on paper unless we named it in a smart Alec way too.

What you're writing on? We did toilet paper. Do you want to do one on paper? Sure. Yeah, I think that'd be interesting. Totally. We did one on grass. We can do one on paper.

Oh, absolutely. And paper, like we said, is what you want to buy if you want to start practicing origami. And a commie or a koi paper is if you're not just, if you want to step it up from just copy paper or something like that and you go to an art supply store, this is a good place to start. It is designed for origami and paper folding.

It is very crisp, very thin. Holds its shape really well, very easy to fold. And it stays pretty robust. Like after you fold it, it stays pretty strong. Yeah, that's like if you go to a stationary store and you look for origami paper, that's probably what you're going to get is that commie paper. Yeah, it might have a nice pattern on it, usually square.

And you can get it in different sizes, from like sticky note size to granddaddy size. Yeah, there's also another kind of paper called washi that is this, it's like thicker, obviously handmade. It might still have some of the grains from the pulp still mashed into it. And it is much harder to fold and keep like a tight crease in, but it's much better for using

when you're doing like wet folding technique, which is where you, I don't know if we ever said, you dampen the paper. You don't get it wet, but you dampen it so that it folds more than creases. And then it'll hold that shape as it dries too. Yeah, and it said in the article, which by the way came from howstuffworks.com,

our old website, that it's very costly. And I looked it up and I saw some, and it seems to me like you can't, like if you want washi, it's coming from Japan. I saw some stuff on Amazon that they call washi paper, but it is not washi. Oh, gotcha. It's washi.

Yeah, it's more washi than washi. All right, dad. And it was 50 bucks for a roll that was 16 inches by 32 feet though, which is... Oh, okay. Like 50 bucks is a lot of money for paper, but 32 feet is nothing, you know, that's a lot of paper. Sure.

Yeah, that's nothing to see. That's a pretty good price on washi. That's what I thought. You just turned into granddad. Yeah. I pushed up my glasses as I said that. What about the foil? That's another thing that I thought was commie,

but they're two different things. Yeah, it's often called Japanese foil. It's just paper with a foil backing on one side and the foil comes in different colors. So it can really make your origami paper cream pop. Yeah. And you can bake cookies on it when you're done. And you said something earlier about how commie

might have like a pattern on one side or one color on one side and one color on another side. It actually fools a lot of people into thinking that they're looking at an origami model that's made from more than one type of paper. Sure. But it's actually just two-sided paper that's just still one sheet.

Like just remember this, when you're inevitably going and looking at pictures of origami today, most of that is just one big or small sheet of paper. And the other cool thing here at the end, which I think we should mention, and this is very, very neat, is it is art and it is a hobby and it is zen-like, but it has practical applications in the world at large.

Like when you think about manufacturing things that need to be folded into a small space, where better to look than an origami master to say like, hey, how would you fold this airbag into this thing or this solar array? Like how can we make this large thing small, even if only for packaging? And Yoshizawa was like, I've died.

Leave me alone. I've given up origami years ago. Didn't I tell you I hated money? Right. But what about $10,000? Is that the magic number for him? I guess so. Everybody's got a price.

He's been Yoshizawa. And origami's great for the classroom, for younger kids. It helps teach geometry and stuff like that. Really, really good stuff. I got one more sweet Yumi story with origami. Her dad is in the hospital, has been for a while, and he was in ICU for a little while. And thanks to COVID, we couldn't visit

and we couldn't even send flowers. Like they were super on lockdown, trying to keep everything out. So she folded some paper flowers and sent them to him. And he had him on his bedside or at his bedside with him, which he said he credits 100% for helping him get well. That's amazing. And they allowed that, huh?

They did. No flowers, but paper flowers is okay. Interesting. Yeah. Folded by human hands. Exactly. Very clean human hands, I can assure you. Sure, I mean, I'm glad they allowed it, that's great.

So by the way, Bob, where you're wishing you here stuff you should know, a good and healthy recovery and we'll see you home soon. Absolutely. Thanks, Chuck. If you guys wanna know more about origami, you can start looking it up, get yourself some paper. That's another thing we said that I think we should point out.

You don't have to have commie or washi or foil or anything like that. You can just, you can use copy paper to start if you want. Whatever's handy. Just go ahead and have some fun with it. That's the point, have some fun. And since I said have some fun, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm gonna call this sexy sneeze. I remember when we talked a little bit at the end of the sneezing episode about sneezes being linked to orgasms and sexual pleasure and arousal. Yes. Well, we heard from Darcy about that. She said, hey guys, I'm an avid listener,

been listening to all of your episodes and this is the first time I've ever thought I really should send them an email about this. I'm trying to keep it family friendly but in your discussion during sneezing was sneezing when becoming sexually aroused. In my case, my nose becomes very runny and I often do the my nose is running sniff thing

during amorous activities. I don't always end up sneezing but I can tell you that there's a direct link in my body from my nose to other areas. And she said, the uncensored version is, I know it's been a good time when my nose starts running. Anyway, just wanted to share my experience, keep on finding stuff to talk about

and I'll keep listening and that is from Darcy. And she did say I could read this and just use her first name. Thanks a lot Darcy, that's very brave of you. You're not even in an internet chat room and you're admitting it. And that's right. It's a way to go.

Interesting stuff. It really is. If you want to be like Darcy and write in something interesting about yourself, we want to hear it. You can send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.