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

Joe: This is kind of a special episode. My girlfriend suggested that we look into misconceptions because we start every episode with, you know, we bust myths about self-improvement, self-awareness, and just general life and what can help us. And there is actually a list online of common misconceptions, and they span subjects between sports, food, history, human health…everything.

Todd: This is very different because we're busted so many myths. We usually stick to two or three, which are a little more academic.

Joe: Usually, each myth is tailored to the narrative we're giving. So like, there will be three big myths about one subject. But today, instead of having apples with our meal, this is just applesauce; We are just going to go through and mash-up these myths and just have fun with it.

Todd: What's funny about these is a lot of them I'd bet my life on. Before I started the research, I thought many of these were true. I've taught them to younger people as the elder of my tribe.

Joe: I've literally quoted some of these, and it is painful to look at how many I thought were true. As a researcher, I pride myself on being able to tell people good and interesting information. So, these convince me that I'm horrible at my job and I need to stop immediately. So we're going to re-educate ourselves today, hopefully with a bunch of these myths, and we're going to be counting down a top 10. Todd picked out his top 10 favorite misconceptions, and I picked out mine too, and we're going to put the whole list up on our notes. If you want to kill an evening and just feel very dumb but also enlightened at the same time, go through this list. It's a lot of fun.

Todd: It was tough making a top 10. There were so many interesting things, but I think I figured it out. I tried to aim at ones I didn't think that you would care about, but that’s not very hard since our brains are so opposite. Let's see if we actually landed on the same ones. I bet maybe 1 out of 10 ten.

Joe: I'm going to say 3. I'll go high even though there are so many. I'll defy statistics and say that we're going to land on about 3 of these.

Todd: Well, I'm going to go first. This is my tenth myth, not my number one that I didn't know. What it states is legal tender laws in the United States don't require that a business or organization must accept cash for payment. It just has to be some kind of valid payment to the creditor. Now, what that means to me is you should be able to go into the mall and work to pay for that shirt you want to buy. You don't have to give them a credit card or cash, and I didn't know that was a thing.

Joe: I mean, they can accept any form of payment. Is that where the old phrase of ‘if you can't pay for the meal, then you have you washing dishes’ comes from? That is a legit currency they can request of you.

Todd: According to the law, yes.

Joe: That's a pretty good one. Now, my number 10 is a physics misconception - the idea that black holes have a negative mass or that they suck things in. A black hole can pull a substantial amount of matter around it, but it's already doing that. So to dumb this down for myself, black holes and objects can have the same mass; It's not like a vacuum in space like nobody put a Hoover out in space, and that's a black hole. It is actually just - here's a bunch of mass, and it's going to have the same gravity is everything. In fact, the black holes are at the center of most galaxies. Scientists put a telescope on the center of our galaxy, and we caught a very brief glimpse of the giant black hole that makes us spin around like a drain. It’s number 10, but it's also number one as far as galactic mysteries to me.

Todd: You went awfully geeky and awfully nerdy, awfully fast.

Joe: I want to remind everybody who they're listening to.

Todd: Just to show how polar opposite we are, my number 9 is about the junk food, Twinkies. There's been a misconception and rumors spread that at the end of the world, the apocalypse, whatever you call it, cockroaches and Twinkies will be the only thing that will survive. Because they have so many preservatives and additives that they can remain for decades. But in actuality, they have a shelf life of about 45 days. So Twinkies are not going to last forever.

Joe: Now, there is irony there because nobody suspects the cheeseburger from McDonald's to have an incredible shelf life, but if you set a cheeseburger and a Twinkie side-by-side, the cheeseburger will be there longer. There's video evidence of this. The cheeseburger will be completely the same and unchanged after several years, and the Twinkie will be dead after 45 days, apparently. My number 9, I am going to go with junk food too. Anyone listening to this will hear about this more in an episode later. It is the myth that the Hydrox cookie is a knock-off of Oreo. They came out in 1908, predating Oreo for at least four years and even outsold Oreo for decades. But the problem was the name sounded like a detergent.

Todd: Yeah, it sounds terrible, like you shouldn't get in your eyes.

Joe: So, purely by naming, Oreo started out selling Hydrox because hydroxide sounded horrible. They were related, and they were trolling each other. This was all just like an inside competition. So we are definitely doing an episode about this drama that was happening behind the scenes of these two cookie brands. But yeah, Hydrox is older than the original Oreo.

Todd: Interesting. Staying on food, spinach has been known to be high in iron and calcium, right? It's a known thing. But the myth is that raw spinach is supposed to be better for you, but it turns out that it contains high levels of oxalates, which blocks the absorption of iron and calcium. So when it's in your body, it doesn't help you get more of that – it does the exact opposite.

Joe: Okay, so cooked spinach is the way to go, then is what you're telling me.

Todd: Exactly. When you cook the spinach, it holds a lot lower levels of oxalates, and it's better for the digestive system.

Joe: It still doesn't improve the taste for me; spinach is still going to taste like slimy pennies to me. So, I believe we're on number 8, and mine is a three-part on the Middle Ages. The idea is that the Middle Ages was the dark period/The Dark Age. But the whole phrase ‘dark ages’ has been rejected by historians, according to this list. And honestly, it should because the big misconception is everyone died in their 30s and 40s. That was not true. It's just that the infant mortality rate was so high that it skewed the averages all down; it made it seem like everyone's dying young when honestly, if you make it out of your teenage years, you're probably going to make it your 60s or 70s. Also, they didn't think the world was flat; that's another dumb one. The Protestants created the myth to argue against Catholicism. So no one in their right mind thought it was a flat earth. We only do that in today's society. People thought Christopher Columbus's whole voyage was based around a flat earth, which is totally not true. Everyone knew it was not flat, and it was widely accepted as such. It was a dumb argument invented for one church to argue with the other.

Todd: My next is microwaves. Microwaves don't cook food from the inside out, and don't cause cancer. And they don't reduce the nutritional value of food. They actually preserve it better than conventional baking. And a quick one to pop in there is sign languages are not the same worldwide. Each country has its own language. There are between 138 and 300 different sign languages, and that shocked me. I've actually studied American Sign Language, but I kind of thought there was one for each continent. I didn't think there were hundreds of different languages for it.

Joe: I've got another deep, nerdy one for you. I should have known this one because it hits on two or three of my favorite corners of nerd culture. I have told people that George Romero's Night of the Dead invented zombies as a monster, a Trope. But that's not true. I thought and have told people that George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and all the zombie movies we have come from that mythology. It's not true. Romero said the ghouls were inspired by I Am Legend, another of my huge favorites. I know everything about that book, yet I've told people it stems from Haitian mythology, not the actual source. It wasn't until Dawn of the Dead that they were explicitly called zombies.

Todd: Well, I got two short ones here - you know the term for 420 for smoking weed? Well, it's said that it originated from a Los Angeles police penal code for busting people for smoking weed. But it turns out that in 1971 in California - San Rafael High School, a bunch of potheads would go out at 4:20 and smoke. So those very famous stoners in 1971, ahead of their time, started that phrase 420.

Joe: That is such an inside niche bit of information. That should have died on the vine as far as language is concerned. How is it that something awesome, like the phrase ‘electric lettuce,' didn't stick that well, yet 420 has? That makes me slightly upset, but still good information.

Todd: The next is the singer, Phil Collins, of the group Genesis. It was said that he had watched someone drowning and confronted someone in the audience because they let it happen; He confronted someone who's watched someone die. That's a myth. There is no truth to it. What he was talking about in this song is not vengeance but the pain he faced during his divorce. It was the biggest divorce settlement of all time. I did some research on this, and the album that was his number one selling album was called No Jacket Required, and all these songs that made his career came out of the pain of that divorce. Even more, a lot of the songs are aimed at trying to get his wife back. I thought that was very romantic.

Joe: huh…I had heard other musicians reveal when their album was just all about trying to make up with their significant other, so it doesn't surprise me. But it does make sense, and I can see why you'd want to like invented mythology to justify having such a heavy song in your album. So was that your number six?

Todd: I cheated…I worked a couple more in. Those are half ones, though, so those don't count.

Joe: Okay. We'll do a couple more of these, and then we'll save our numbers 5 through 10 for the next episode. So I'm going to go with a couple of legal ones because I think they're very important. I wanted these to come out first because they honestly could save a life. So one of them is you have to wait 24 hours before filing a missing-persons report. That is not true.

Todd: really? I watch all those murder documentaries; I could have sworn that was the truth.

Joe: Literally, cops will tell you that. Cops have told people to come back after a day due to this law, which is not true. Most counties don't have that, and most police precincts don't have that in the books. The general rule of thumb is when there is evidence of violence or unusual behavior, you can start an investigation promptly.

Todd:  But isn't that the most valuable time as the first 24 hours? It is still fresh and has more access to clues. They are still in transit.

Joe: Right, exactly. In the first 24 hours, you can get accurate information. You can find people while they're fleeing, and you can track down a car while it's still on the road. According to this list, 72 hours is the most critical in finding a missing person, so do not wait. You don't have to sit on your hands for 24 hours. My second half of this is another legal one, which is in those same murder documentaries, whenever somebody isn't read their Miranda Rights properly, they basically throw the case out dramatically. That's all bullshit. Apparently, if you aren't read your Miranda Rights, it just means that anything you said during your interrogation is admissible.

Todd: Well, I got into some religious ones, and I'm down to 7 and 6. This is from the religion of Islam. The Koran does not promise Martyrs 72 virgins in heaven. It doesn't. It does mention virgin female companions to all people who margin, but there is no number specified.

Joe: Huh. Robin Williams, with his joke about 72 Virginians, I know that's been such a myth for so long that I assumed it must be right. But yeah, that's wild.

Todd: The fact that you mentioned Robin Williams, he was trained at one of the best art schools in the world, Juilliard. That surprised me. He just seemed like a natural.

Joe: That can be a myth in itself. You and I have talked about the number of people who went to Juilliard, and we give them credit for being just naturally a genius and naturally good at something. Come to find out, they are trained at the best school on earth.

Todd: That was my seventh. I got one more. Do you want to go first?

Joe: Okay, we'll do our last two. For me, this one stems into science territory. When a meteor spacecraft enters the atmosphere, the heat of the entry is not caused by friction. I have thought my whole life that at high speeds, air becomes sandpaper and that it will burn up a spaceship like in movies. That is not true. It is just air compression; It's the compression of air in front of the object at high speed, causing the heat. I don't know why that one stuck out to me; I don't know why I'm even ending on that one. I should have ended on something motivational. So, what's your last one? So save us from my nerdiness.

Todd: We are staying in religion. Judaism – what is the fruit in the Garden of Eden?

Joe: Apples.

Todd: That's not true. The forbidden fruit mentioned in the Book of Genesis was never identified as an apple. It's depicted that way in Western Art. Jewish Scholars suggest that it probably was either grape, fig, or wheat. The original Hebrew text only mentioned tree and fruit - no apple. The Apple is just a Hallmark thing.

Joe: I am mad at you for ruining that one because eating a forbidden grape or wheat is not dramatic enough for me. That changes all of our symbolism. Apples have sort of this high shelf they sit on for storytelling. The apple on the cover of the Twilight series, etc. You've just destroyed all that by being…here's a handful of wheat and some grapes. Go eat that; we don't care anymore.

Final Thoughts

Joe: Well, that's going to do it for our first part of common myths we are busting. I'm afraid to say, people who aren't shocked by this are just quietly listening to you and I proving that we are, in fact, boobs and that we are easily gullible by these comments. Hopefully, that's not the case.

Todd: We just believe everything. People tell us this stuff, and we just take it and accept it.

Joe: Yeah, unfortunately.