Mini-Stories: Volume 19

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:30depending on who you're asking. And we learn together that the most accomplished artists of the classical world have all agreed that I, your host, have the most beautiful feet that a person can have. Let's go.

0:47So I'm joined by our producer, Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. Roman, it is the most wonderful time of the year. Great to be here. It's a delight to have you. So what is the story you have for us today? So, Roman, I know I'm always comparing America to Canada, as resident Canadian guy on the show. Yes, I'm well aware. Yeah. Look, my New Year's resolution, I'm going to tone down the Canada stuff for next year on the show. I don't think you have to, but you do what feels right to you. Okay, okay. But I feel like I'm always making these comparisons that are like, this is better in Canada. This is better in Canada.

1:17One thing I do prefer in America is the electronic highway safety sign. Like a light board and it has text on it. And it's a thing that'll say like, left lane closed ahead. something like that, right? Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so why do you like the ones in the U.S. better? In Canada, the signs are always bland, right? They will say something like, don't drive drunk, and then it will also say that same thing in French, right? Okay. But to express the same message in the U.S., I have found there are often jokes. So let me give you an example. Pennsylvania, recently, they had a highway sign around the 4th of July that read, don't drive star-spangled hammered.

1:56Okay, here I can give you some other ones. These are all over the country. So in Mississippi, they ran a sign this year that said four eyes in Mississippi, two eyes on the road. That's pretty good. In Massachusetts, it's use your blinker. I like this one. In New Jersey, they have one that said slow down. This ain't Thunder Road. So a joke for the Springsteen dads. And this phenomenon, it's actually across the country. So, Roman, have you actually seen any of these? I don't think these are very prominent in California, but I'm enjoying these quite a bit. Yeah, they're fun. So I was curious about these.

2:29And it turns out it's a very involved process to put these up. I would imagine so. So tell me more. I actually found this out because I talked to somebody who writes these signs. My name is Matt Burding. I'm the press secretary at the Ohio Department of Transportation. What ODOT does is make sure that the snow is cleared in the wintertime, make sure that the roads are passable in the summertime. We also have a big role to play in safety projects across the state. Oh, wow. He has the modulation of an AM radio broadcaster. He's a good voice. Yeah, actually, he was a radio broadcaster for many years before he was at the Ohio Department of Transportation.

3:03So that's why. That makes sense. Wow. So Matt works at ODOT, Ohio Department of Transportation, and they have about 200 of these electronic highway signs. And Matt says their primary goal, it's to convey emergency information or information like left lane closed ahead. Right. But most of the time they don't have messages like this they need to share. So they have all of this free space on the signs. And Matt says a couple of years ago, ODOT started playing around with the funny signs and they kept doing it because, according to Matt, they just make a much bigger impact. Think about the Super Bowl and you watch the ads during the Super Bowl.

3:43Which ads are you most likely talking about Monday morning? You're talking about the ones that made you laugh or the ones that made you have an emotional reaction. I mean, that certainly makes sense to me. So where do these specific jokes come from? Like who writes the jokes? So, Robin, in Ohio, where Matt works, they actually have a writer's room coming up with these jokes. Of course. That's great. So, four times a year, they have a meeting. Everybody comes to this meeting with, like, a list of ideas. They debate them, and then they settle on a couple that are going to end up on the signs. I mean, sometimes I'll bring, you know, a couple dozen ideas, and 30 % of them don't fly.

4:20And sometimes you bring, you know, just a handful of them, and they all go. So, it just varies. Yeah, that sounds like every pitch room I've ever been in. I mean, 30 percent is a pretty good failure rate, honestly. I was going to say, yeah, if our pitch meetings went that well, I think we'd be having a really good pitch meeting. I know, exactly. But according to Matt, they're coming up with these jokes and there's a couple of parameters they have to work with. So obviously, first thing, it has to fit on the sign, right? Right. In Ohio, most of the signs are about 17 characters across three lines.

4:53So that's not nothing, but that's not an unlimited amount of space. So first thing, it has to fit on the sign. It also obviously shouldn't be offensive, shouldn't hurt anybody's feelings, things like that. But above all, it has to make everybody in the room laugh. Yeah, which is probably the hardest criterion of all because humor is subjective. Of course. Yeah. And Matt says part of how they correct for that is they always try to make sure they have people from different generations at each meeting. So he says they always make sure there's like a Gen Z staff person in there. There's a Gen Xer, you know, and if everybody's laughing, then it's probably going to work with the general public.

5:27There has to be someone there to tell you what cap means. Yes, exactly. That's super smart. So what kind of jokes work for that whole room? Matt told me there's a couple subjects that always tend to work pretty well. So the first one is holidays. So a couple of years ago, ODOT had this sign for the holiday season. It was visiting in-laws, slow down, get there late. Solid. One of them, for example, around Thanksgiving that we run every year is Turkey Says Buckle Buckle. It's goofy. It's one of those things that I can certainly hear a dad saying as he's driving with his family to grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner.

6:04And the kids are all probably rolling their eyes going, great dad. Awful joke. Yeah, it's on the sign. You guys are all buckled up, right? Second inspiration is local references. So you'll make a joke about a football game coming up. Be like, you know, don't be like Michigan. Drive defensively. I don't know. I'm just making up an example. I don't know if Michigan's football team is bad at defense. But you'll make some joke about a geography pun, right? A lot of states do this. And Matt says the ODOT team actually will steal signs from other states and then just update them with their own local references.

6:37I'm going to be honest with you. Look, we all talk to each other. So, you know, what's a good idea in Colorado is probably a good idea in Ohio, too. I don't remember which state it was. I want to say maybe it was Utah that did camp in the mountains, not the left lane. We don't really have mountains in Ohio, but we did camp in Ohio State Parks, not the left lane. I think Missouri does camp in the Ozarks, not the left lane. Matt says this is like part of the process is that states loves to steal from each other and like they'll meet up at a conference and they'll trade these jokes and be like, oh, that works.

7:10I could do this for mine. So you got geography, you got holidays. The signs that get the most attention, though, these are the ones in Ohio and across America that everybody seems to love. They are inspired by pop culture. So these are the signs that go viral. These are the signs people are posting on social media. Roman, could I share a couple of the pop culture jokes? I would be disappointed if you did not. OK, so here we go. Arizona, they ran this one around Christmas a couple of years ago. Yippee-ki-yay, sober drivers. Oh, my God. OK. So that's, of course, a Die Hard reference. Yeah, of course.

7:43The ultimate Christmas movie, yeah. More recently, Mississippi ran one that said, texting and driving, say, hi, it's me. I'm the problem, it's me. I mean, it's a simple one, but, you know, Taylor Swift was really big that summer. That makes sense. Yeah. And pop culture jokes are great because, you know, they're more relevant than your kind of dad jokey turkey gobble gobble jokes. But it's kind of high risk, too, right? Because not everybody is going to get the joke necessarily. Yeah, no, that makes sense to me. We don't all consume the same pop culture, especially today. Right. And that can be really alienating, right?

8:14So Matt actually has a perfect example of this where they tried a pop culture one and it just went wrong. Being in Ohio, if you know the movie A Christmas Story, very popular in Ohio because it was filmed in the Cleveland area. So one year we put on the message boards, life is fragile. Slow down. and we spelled out phonetically fragile because if you're familiar with the Christmas story, you know the scene where the dad opens up the, you know, gets the box of the big prize that he wins and like, you know, fragile, must be Italian. There are people who have not seen a Christmas story, believe it or not, who read that and were like, what in the world is ODOT trying to say here?

8:54You're driving down the highway at 70 miles an hour. We can't explain it to you. You just got to get it. And if you don't get it, then that's probably not a good message to run. So in general, people love these signs. You know, they're popular, they get shared on social media, but there is a problem. One group in particular really does not like them, and that group is the Federal Highway Administration. Oh no, those guys. Those guys. Well, the FHWA, they're in charge of highway safety for the United States. And in their opinion, these signs can be kind of a distraction. So a couple of years ago, they actually made New Jersey take down one of these signs.

9:33So the sign said, hold on to your butts, help prevent forest fires. Ha ha ha, funny joke. But what happened is people were actually slowing down to take pictures of the sign, which is obviously not safe. It's kind of working at cross purposes to what the sign is supposed to be doing. So they actually told the state, you have to take this down. That is disappointing. I get where they're coming from, though. Right. But earlier this year, the FHWA, they put out their national guidelines for highway safety. They update these every couple of years. And it was a little bit like mom and dad turning on all the lights at a party and telling everybody to go home because they included guidelines for what a highway safety sign should say.

10:16They said it should be informative. It should be sober. So here it is. This is the FHWA example of a good highway sign. They say unbuckled seatbelts equals fine plus points. Oh, no, that's dreadful. It's really dry. Yeah. So is that it? Is that the end for the funny highway sign? Well, the guidelines came out in January and suddenly there were all these newspaper stories that were saying like funny signs will be banned. You know, say goodbye to the highway signs. It's actually not quite what's happening here because these are guidelines. Right. Right. But Matt says it's really important to him to keep some humor in the signs because there's evidence of this.

10:54There's studies that show this when you're being entertained, you're more likely to retain these kind of messages. And it makes people think about their driving. So in that way, it does save lives. I don't think we're going to suddenly see a huge swing in fatalities or crashes because of these. But I think we are taking little bites at it and it's worth it. it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything extra. And I certainly don't think it makes it worse. So if it makes it better for even a handful of people, then I think it's worth that effort. Now, Roman, if you have an idea for a funny highway sign, I have some good news.

11:30You can share your pitches with ODOT. There's a website for it. And Matt says they consider every pitch that's sent in. Oh my God. If you enjoy the institution of the funny highway sign, you have an opportunity. it's at the website zerodeaths.ohio.gov so check it out I'm going to spend some quality time on this well thank you Chris this is delightful thanks Roman

11:57okay so we're here with 99PI producer Vivian Leigh what do you have for us this year? so I wanted to share a story that was one of the more interesting detours that I stumbled upon while reporting another story so you remember an episode that we did in early 2024 that's also in contention for the longest podcast title ever. It was called Warning. This podcast contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer or other reproductive harm. Of course. It's one of my favorite titles ever. So it's such a good title. Love it. And if other listeners missed that one, it was essentially about the history of this law in California that passed in 1986 that required all California businesses to put a warning label on any products that contain cancer-causing chemicals.

12:41And a big part of the reason why that law originally passed was because Jane Fonda was a huge proponent of that proposition. Yes. Yeah. I mean, she was the one who kind of rounded up a ton of these celebrities and, you know, they went on this bus and actually brought like a lot of good attention to this proposition. Yes, exactly. Chiffy Chase was there. It was a whole thing. But while I was researching that story, I found out that that victory might not have been possible if it weren't for the Jane Fonda workout tapes. Roman, would you care to hear more? Yes, absolutely. I want to hear more. OK, so Jane Fonda has been a huge progressive activist for literally decades.

13:23She's probably somewhere getting arrested at a climate rally as we speak. But back in the 1970s, Fonda was this huge anti-war activist. And doing that work, she met another fellow anti-war activist turned state assemblyman. His name was Tom Hayden. And Hayden and Fonda eventually got married. And together they realized that they needed to influence politics from within the system. So the mid-ish 1970s, they founded a political action committee called the Campaign for Economic Democracy. And one of the big goals of the CED, I call it the CED for short, was trying to get progressive new left candidates into local office.

14:06But the problem was that political action committees take a lot of money to run. This was a statewide organization that made a huge difference in California. This is Jane Fonda in an interview with Democracy Now. We elected people that are still serving in public office in California. And so we had to raise a lot of money because we had a lot of chapters and there was a recession. You see, the CED had to pay for, you know, field offices, staffers put on events, pay for political advertising, all that stuff that helps fund local campaigns. So Fonda was trying to solve this question of how to realistically keep the CED going financially, which was hard because Fonda and Hayden's politics were considered pretty outside of the mainstream at the time.

14:54But she says that she got an idea one day after she saw a story about a very controversial politician. I read an article that Lyndon LaRouche, that really bad but very wealthy guy, had a computer business that would fund people that would hold those signs at the airports. And I read an article that said that he supported all that with his computer business. So, Roman, do you know who Lyndon LaRouche is? I mean, I know the name. Like, I kind of know it. I mean, I kind of think of him as this, as I was growing up, this perennial presidential candidate. I know he was referenced on The Simpsons, which is probably why it's stuck in my head.

15:30Of course, yes. But let's say for purposes of this story, like, no, tell me more about Lyndon LaRouche. OK, so Lyndon LaRouche was a very prolific conspiracy theorist who spouted a lot of terrible anti-Semitic and homophobic and racist views. He also claimed that Queen Elizabeth controlled the world's drug trade. Anyway, so LaRouche is also known for unsuccessfully running for president eight consecutive times in a row. He actually holds the record for that. But as you can imagine, Roman running for president, even unsuccessfully, takes a lot of money. So Fonda read that he was able to fund his political aspirations privately through his computer consulting, software and printing businesses on the side.

16:12So I thought, OK, what business can I go into that could make money? And it was the workout. The workout. Wait, so the Jane Fonda workout. So did the workout exist already or her workout exist already? Or did she? OK, so yes. Okay, so a little bit of background on the Jane Fonda workout. Okay, please. So exercise is something that had been really important to Jane Fonda for a really long time. But in 1978, around the same time that the CED was getting going, she broke her foot while filming a movie. And she was looking for some new low-impact form of exercise that would be less taxing on that part of the body.

16:53And she ended up meeting an exercise instructor named Lenny Kasdan, who introduced her to these long total body workouts. and she fell in love with it. And she ended up opening a bunch of exercise studios and then eventually releasing the Jane Fonda workout book, which was wildly popular. And talk about how much money we're talking about here. You blew everyone away. How long were you on the New York Times bestseller? Two years. Two solid years. That is what caused the New York Times to start separating it out into categories because to have the workout book competing with, you know, Philip Roth or somebody didn't make any sense.

17:29I mean, two years on the bestseller list. That's really something. Yeah, it's a long time. How long was the 99PI book on the bestseller list for? On the bestseller list? I mean, it was like in the top 10 for like three weeks. So I was pretty proud of that. That's pretty good. That's still pretty good. But if it wasn't for her splitting out the list, we would not have ranked because we were on the nonfiction list and not competing with the fiction bestseller list. Interesting. Jane Fonda, thank you again for all of your work. But yeah, so, you know, eventually in the 1980s, like the early 1980s, Fonda was approached to bring her workout to this new fangled technology called home video.

18:08And she said that she was at first actually very hesitant to put out a workout tape. You know, she was a movie star at the time and she thought it would be terrible for her acting career. But she agreed to do it because, you know, A, nobody would ever watch it because this was such a new technology that she barely knew anybody who owned a VCR. And B, she thought it might bring some extra cash in for the CED. And that must have been even more successful because I didn't even know there was a book. You know, like so like me growing up, it was the Jane Fonda workout tapes. So it must have even eclipsed those.

18:40Oh, yeah, totally. She ended up selling over 17 million tapes. And it's actually thought that the Jay and Fonda workout tapes were so popular that they led to an increase in VCR sales. And Fonda says that pretty much all of that money went straight into the campaign for economic democracy. Wow. Well, that's incredible. I mean, in addition to like pushing VCR sales, did the tape sales actually move forward the politics of the CED? Like did it actually change California or world politics? Yeah. So the CED invested in, you know, a bunch of progressive causes in California, like investing in solar power, labor rights, anti-war initiatives, women's rights, of course, Proposition 65.

19:20But I think one of the biggest, most tangible successes of the CED was getting rent control laws passed in Santa Monica. And this is something that has actually had a lasting impact on the city, and it still exists today. Wow. So if you live in a rent controlled apartment in the city of Santa Monica, this is essentially because of Jane Fonda and the Jane Fonda workout tapes. Yes, exactly. And I actually do have a friend who lived in a rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica for like 14 years and he only just recently moved out to start a family. And when I learned about this, I texted him and I was just like, Brandon, if you ever meet Jane Fonda, you better thank her for saving you thousands and thousands of dollars.

20:02That's perfect. Oh, it's such a fun little side story. I'm glad we could take this little detour as a little bonus from your Prop 65 story, which people should go listen to if they haven't heard it. It's like one of my favorites of recent memory. Thank you. Awesome. Merry Christmas to me. Thank you, Vivian. Thank you, Roman.

20:28coming up why the ancient greeks who believed in a perfect version of everything were obsessed with feet and how the man who invented dynamite came back from the dead sort of to clear his name and ended up creating the most famous prize in the world that's after the break

20:51In October, we released an episode with the great Stephen Johnson, talking about his latest book, The Infernal Machine, all about how the invention of dynamite drastically changed the political landscape in the U.S. when it became the weapon of choice by domestic terrorists. Dynamite unleashed a new kind of horrific, violent, destructive power that the world had never seen before. Which was people being fully blown up. Like the physical damage to the body, there's all this kind of newspaper reports like we were not able to identify the remains of this other person. Like if you were right on top of a dynamite explosion, you know, you were reduced to small little pieces of human flesh.

21:29And that was something that had not really happened to the human body before. And it suddenly started happening all the time. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel, and it made him one of the richest men in the world. But it took a death in the family and a case of mistaken identity for him to truly understand what the public really thought of him. Author Stephen Johnson talked me through this amazing story. His brother died and a couple of French newspapers got confused and thought that Nobel himself had died. So he was put in the somewhat unusual position of getting to read his own obituaries in the paper.

22:06And they were not positive. And kind of the famous headline was, the merchant of death is dead. Yeah, and it gets worse because the first line of his obituary reads, Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday, which is a real gut punch. Yeah, yeah. You hate to read that if you're still alive.

22:37and so you know this whole career that he'd spent you know unleashing this explosive force on the world designed to help it modernize and build railroads and skyscrapers and subways and sewer systems all of which had happened and which had made him like one of the wealthiest people in the world at his you know alleged death what was remembered was that he had unleashed all this terrible catastrophic violence on the world, thanks to the political radicals who had stolen his technology and put it to nefarious uses. But that is definitely not how he is remembered today, because of one person. And so Nobel had developed before this point a long and during friendship with a peace activist named Bertha von Suttner.

23:20And she had argued to him that he should use his prodigious fortune in the service of the peace cause that was kind of on the rise at that point. And something in the accidental reading of his obituaries and the recognition that his legacy was likely to be very tarnished and his long conversation with Suttner led him to change his will and take the vast majority of his fortune to endow now the thing that is actually most associated with Nobel's name, not dynamite, but the Nobel Prizes. And most famously, the Peace Prize, which was a very unusual, it was one thing to have a kind of a scientific prize, a Nobel Prize in physics, and chemistry seemed to make sense and particularly made sense with something like chemistry, where Nobel had been a pioneer in chemistry himself.