The Fact & Fiction Gray Areas: 10 MORE Shocking Misconceptions Busted For Your Enjoyment-Part Two

Todd: We are back busting myths – those Top 10 things that Joe and I would have sworn by and would have died for; we are now realizing many of them aren't even true.

Joe: I feel dumber after the last episode finding out how many things I believe aren't true. But as far as myths go, they're usually structured as three big myths about one topic, and it blows our mind, and we figure out how to reanalyze life. It really changes the way we think. For these episodes, we are at the bottom of the crumb bag of myths; where you tilt up the bag, and you just eat all of the little pieces still there and you get a mouthful of just nothing but Cheeto dust and delicious crumbs. That's this episode. As far as myths are going, these are the delicious crumbs of myths that we were just putting into our mouths and being gluttonous about.

Todd: Let me kick us off with my top 5 on the list. There are so many of these, and I challenge everyone to go through this and read through all of them, and you're going to find another 10 that you like more than the ones that we put up.

Joe: These are going to be your next 10 dinner conversations. I swear you're going to be at work repeating these.

Todd: Yes, this makes you more interesting - I promise. Okay, my number five is in the religion of Buddhism. Now, I'm going to ask you Joe, what does Buddha look like appearance-wise?

Joe: He looks like that fat golden statue at the Chinese restaurant. Like he's got a robe and he's got a big bald head and you rub it for luck.  

Todd: Yeah, big tummy and everything. Well, the historical Buddha is not known to have been fat. The fat Buddha, the West developed that in the 10th century and it's about a Chinese folk hero by the name of Buddhi. The real Buddha is buff and in shape.

Joe: I recall very vaguely from reading Joseph Campbell that he fought people like he was a fighter, but like I didn't have a visual concept of that. I imagined literally, the little fat golden statue fighting monsters. And like, you know,

Todd: You started pretty strong there. I'm just going to go with some basics and cooking. I thought that when you are cooking a steak or a pork chop or something that when you turn up the heat to sear it, you’re sealing in the moisture. My grandmother taught me that, so I thought it was like the Gospel and apparently, it actually takes moisture out. I mean, that makes sense. It's a burning plate or, you know, pan. So I feel dumber for not knowing this, but it doesn't seal in anything. It takes the moisture out, browns it, and improves the flavor and texture.

Todd: Grandma was a liar. What else did she tell you? Did she tell you that you get pregnant by shaking hands with girls or anything like that?

Joe: Legit, one of the ones that I've held on to and I hate it it, is she told me that you have to clear your plate and that that builds healthy habits; You're being disobedient if you don't clean your plate and now, I know that's just called overeating. Wisdom from the older ages is not always wisdom.

Todd: My number four is there is absolutely no evidence that violent video games cause people to be more violent. There's no link. And the popularity of gaming has coincided with a decrease in youth violence. So it's actually the opposite.

Joe: That can't be possible because we have seen so many shootings lately. We did debunk that back in the Columbine shooting. The prosecutors insisted that violent video games are why they went on the rampage, but at least it's got to contribute to some of that violence, right?

Todd: There's just more violence in the world, but it's not from that. They also said that this awareness came from the 80s and into the 2000s. There was so much legislation passed and so much press on that, that it contributed to violence. We believed that if we made games less violent, but that stuff doesn't change the things that happen. It has no effect on it.

Joe: So, it was just another moral panic. That at least makes me feel better about letting my very young cousin play Grand Theft Auto back in the day. I've got a fun number 4 for anybody who liked watching the movie, Amadeus. Antonio Solari was the narrator and villain of that. And supposedly, he poisoned Mozart. That was frequently cited as the cause of Mozart's death was that he was poisoned. I went with it because it made me curious enough to discover why Mozart died, which is more interesting.

Todd: So the misconception was that he was poisoned, right?

Joe: Right. Everyone thinks it was a conspiracy, and his rival poisoned him. I went looking for the real answer, and Mozart basically died of strep throat complications. He had tonsillitis for a very long time. And so he caused an infection, which led to coughing fits and cerebral hemorrhages. 

Todd: Way less sexy than being murdered by one of your artistic rivals. Well, I'm going to give you another visual here. How would you describe the size and stature of Napoleon Bonaparte?

Joe: Our propaganda episode. Yeah, he was the master of political propaganda. I believe he was tiny. If I’m guessing, 5’2 and about 140 pounds.

Todd: Very good, but 5’2 was in French feet, which in English measurements, it is 5’7, which for the 1800s, was not a short person. It's not really even a short person nowadays, but at that time, that would have been average height or a little bit above. He wasn't a little guy.

Joe: I looked it up while we were talking. 5’9 is the current American average for height. So Napoleon was very close to the average for an American now.

Todd: Well, this is why they say it happened. He always was surrounded by his goons and his thugs, who were all selected based on how big and tall they were. So it wasn't that he was short, he just had these NBA basketball dudes around him. He had the tallest people in the world as his personal bodyguards, and comparably, he was short.

Joe: That's why when I become a dictator, all of my guys will be elite fighters from countries that have short people. Since we are talking about this, we did an episode once about martial arts and fighting in general, like we went into the science of how a hand is built to form a fist and punch other people. So I'm going to pick one off of this list that I already knew but I think is just so pervasive I wanted to bust it anyway. A black belt in martial arts does not mean somebody's a master; a black belt in martial arts means basically nothing. It was originally in Judo in the late 1800s, and it just means you have basic competency.

Todd: So it is the opposite; it is level 101 of the martial arts career.

Joe: Right. It is like entering the first grade, you've learned all the basics of everything, and now you can actually begin your career.

Todd: Getting down and dirty here, my number 2 is a body one, a sex one. Penis size doesn't correlate with race, hand size, or foot size. That is a myth. But, how long your fingers are might. So, if you're looking for a partner with a large penis, you want to focus not on their hands or their height but on how long their fingers are.

Joe: I need to wear extra-long gloves, that is what I'm hearing. If this was common knowledge, that would be helpful, but It's just going to look like I lost fingers in the war. Okay, well, I've got a number 2 here and it is something that has rippled out. And I knew of the story because I worked in different fields of security. There is the classic Kitty Genovese murder that happened in the 1960s. Supposedly it formed the grounds for a theory in Psychology where bystanders will do nothing unless they are put in a position of responsibility. Also known as the bystander effect. This is mostly true, but the false part is that its history got skewed. It was said to be some long, gruesome fight and 37 neighbors just watched and did nothing. It was such a bold story. That spawned different policing and different policies from state to state about things like bystanders and getting people to help, etc. However, this all stems from not reality. There were not 37 neighbors. In fact, witnesses only heard a brief portion of the attack and didn't know what was going on. Only 6-7 actually saw anything, and they didn't see the full picture; they didn't see the stabbing taking place. One witness called the police. So even that part is false, but the one who called the police said I didn't want to get involved, which they later attributed to all the neighbors. The bystander effect is real, but humans are not that horrible of people; we do not want to see people get stabbed; we will not just turn our back to go back to watching daytime TV. So that is such a big myth that I wanted to sneak that into the lower end of the countdown.

Todd: Joe wrote an article that went viral about Gladiators. You told me one time that the Gladiators are not like what we think about in Hollywood. Can you go down that myth for me?

Joe: Yeah, the article that went viral years ago was that Emperor Commodus was a complete and sane person and that the movie Gladiator totally had him wrong. They were like, yeah, he wanted power, and he was such a tyrant. But in reality, he was beloved. It's just that he was way too into sports and that's like he became a gladiator and made people come watch him be a gladiator even though he sucked at it. The reality was being a gladiator was much more like football. These guys did not want to kill each other. They were good at their jobs, they were good at being soldiers, they're good at fighting, but their goal was to draw blood without killing each other because it was good for the crowd. The crowd loved it. Many of the gladiators were oftentimes out of shape; if you're a big fat guy, it's easier to draw blood without hurting somebody than if you're very thin and easy to hit a vital organ. So, these guys were just these big hulking dudes, almost like sumo wrestlers, who would slash at each other and make a good show of it. Basically, like professional wrestlers.

Todd: And then go back to the brothel and have a beer and hang out. Well, my number 1 is one that I would have bet my life on. We're in the hottest part of summer now, one of everybody's favorite holidays is Halloween, right? What's the major danger that every parent has about their child going door to door getting candy from strangers?

Joe: I remember this from my own childhood, and I am scared of what you're about to tell me, but I remember coming home with a bag of candy. I dumped it out, and my dad would pick through the candy for razors, needles, poison etc. I found out later that he was actually just taking chocolate from the bag because that was his favorite, but mostly it was because kids get poisoned or hurt at Halloween.

Todd: That's absolutely right. They actually have police stations where you can come in for free, and they will scan your candy. And you can't accept apples because you can put more stuff in them. That said, there haven't been any confirmed deaths from tainted Halloween candy. This started as a myth in 1970 because family members poisoned their own kids with Heroin in their candy. Then it got all this press, but the only poisoning that has gone on during Halloween has been parents doing it to their own children.

Joe: That is so much darker.

Todd: I thought that was a slam dunk, one of the biggest myths that this country believes every year and will probably continue to.

Joe: Oh, man…it was another moral panic just because it was an interesting story. Okay, well, I will not be able to top that. That said, my final myth, some people might actually know. But I chose it as my final myth because it tells me more about humans and how we should approach life than it does about the myth itself. So here's the myth. Have you heard that Einstein failed a class in school?

Todd: Yeah. It was mathematics or something. It is where that ‘keep going even if you fail’ thing took more hold.

Joe: Exactly. If Einstein, who has redefined physics for us and how we see the world failed math, then I can come back from a failure. Now here's the truth of it. Einstein himself said, “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15, I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” He did fail his first entrance exam into the Swiss Federal polytech school. So, he may have failed a test, but he never failed a subject. I'm sure people who know Einstein’s history can come back and be like here's the exact reason why, but now he wasn't a failure at the subject. He just failed a test once, and then that story got so skewed because we like to believe that, you know, a genius of his caliber can fail at something. But here's the takeaway I have from it. He did fail something, but I don't take that and look at it and say, oh, if Einstein failed math, I could fail something I love and can come back from it. It tells me that most of our real-life failures are failures of interest. It's I wasn't interested enough in this subject, or I wasn't interested enough to pay attention. This literally happened to me. I failed geography one year in early high school. It was not because I was bad at geography; it was not interesting to me.

Todd: Right. And it's something you could have studied but just didn't care.

Joe: Exactly. I spent my time elsewhere. It was literally a question of time. I wasn't studying it. I wasn't even looking through the book. I was doing something else with that time and it wasn't productive. I think it was like video games, but I think that is a better lesson. That's honestly what we should be telling people is a failure of interest is a completely controllable factor. Einstein not knowing enough about math is a failure of subject mastery. We should be teaching that failure of interest is controllable as a factor and how to hold your interest in a subject.

Todd: Well, isn't this funny? We both studied these myths independently, and Joe came up with things like the Galaxy and 1800s history stuff, and I came up with penis size and Twinkies. This is a good representation of where we're at, mature-wise.

Joe: I will say, though, people are going to feel good hearing my takeaways of our myths, but they're going to remember yours. This has been fun. This has been like eating Halloween candy afterward without feeling poisoned. So I feel good about this.