transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeartRadio.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Hello and happy Friday, I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1:
[00:14] Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey.

Speaker 2:
[00:16] We talked about Unearthed all week long this week.

Speaker 1:
[00:19] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[00:20] Which is pretty much just how Unearthed works now. I felt like I struggled a little bit pulling this one together. Yeah. For a number of reasons. One was that what I used to do, I would go through my whole bookmark manager of things I had bookmarked to potentially talk about in Unearthed. And I would go through them, and as I found ones that were interesting, I would write them up into the episode. And over the years, I have shifted to, I go through all of those links in the bookmark manager, and I make one file that's the stuff I'm pretty sure is gonna make it into the episode, and I make another file that is maybe stuff to go into the episode. But I don't actually start typing anything up until I have made a whole pass of all of the bookmarks.

Speaker 1:
[01:11] Gotcha.

Speaker 2:
[01:12] As I was doing that this time, I was like, wow, I am making good time with this. I am going through them at a good clip. I am on task and doing well. And then when I went to step two to turn this thing into like a more workable episode, I realized I had just miscategorized some stuff in my haste. The section that we had about smells, I thought was going to be longer than it was. I thought I had five or six things that were about smells. One of them I had noted as being about a first century cologne. No, it was about a dig of a first century site in the city of cologne that had nothing to do with aroma.

Speaker 1:
[02:02] I think that's a fair accident when you're quickly filing things.

Speaker 2:
[02:07] Zipping through stuff. A couple of the other ones just either turned out to be really confusing. One of them was something... All of them turned out to be simultaneously under the umbrellas of smells and updates. And one of them was something we actually really had talked about that exact thing before. It was not new information, so the smells section became short. I also, I have tried to be more aware of whether something that I'm reading might be generative AI created. And that's been the case for a while. And this is the first time that I have cut stuff from the episode, either because the AI disclosure, like there was an AI disclosure on the paper that made me go, oh, I don't, that was not okay. And then in one case, the entire conclusion, it was basically like, yeah, so we asked, we asked AI to write what the rules for this board game probably were. And I was like, that's, okay, I could, I could ask AI what the rules for the board game probably were. So I cut that.

Speaker 1:
[03:26] I'm trying not to climb on my AI soapbox and be really irritated.

Speaker 2:
[03:30] I have, so there have been times on the show before the development of large language model chatbots, where we have talked about things that were connected to something under the umbrella of AI or machine learning.

Speaker 1:
[03:47] Right.

Speaker 2:
[03:48] And a lot of them have had to do with like, there was one that was like with the permission of the traditional owners, drones being sent into caves, where there might be rock art, and an algorithm helping to detect rock art that the human eye might not be able to detect on its own.

Speaker 1:
[04:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:10] And that being like the preliminary step for the researchers to then like, look at that and work with the traditional owners to interpret the artwork. There are like uses of machine learning that are cool and interesting. But then when you get into things that are like, and so we asked a chat bot what the rules for this game might have been, I was out. I was like, nope, that's not, that's not what I'm here for.

Speaker 1:
[04:40] I mean, here's my thing. I don't love AI because of how much theft is done. But even on a bigger issue, I hope you don't want your kids to have clean water. Like, it's just, AI is really environmentally a disaster. And I know there are some companies in that space trying to figure out ways to mitigate it. But as they try to figure it out, a kajillion people asking Chad GPT for casserole recipes are doing so much damage. Like, I don't know that we'll ever catch up. So I get very frustrated.

Speaker 2:
[05:16] Yeah. One of the things that I'm frustrated by, well, there's the thing that is people either asking Chad GPT something that you also could have just put into a search engine and there would have been a high quality first result you could have read for yourself. There's that. There is the number of absolutely laughably wrong things that AI summaries of search results have presented me with. Being a person that plays video games, I have seen so many people show up in video game subreddits being like, I'm really confused about what to do. I asked AI and it said this and like what the AI has told them about the video game is flatly wrong.

Speaker 1:
[06:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:02] And human beings wrote a whole walkthrough. So that's what you could have done. So like all of that stuff is frustrating to me deeply. And like these are not good uses of technology. They're not good uses of the resource behind the technology. But then the fact that everything that relates to machine learning and algorithms and that like it's all been lumped together under the umbrella of AI. So it's really hard to like talk about any of these things. Yeah. In a way that makes sense. Because like sometimes there are things that are not using, like they don't have the electricity and water usage concerns that generative AI large language models do. But because they are lumped under the umbrella of AI, like people hear about them and immediately are upset. And all of it is the mess.

Speaker 1:
[06:58] It is.

Speaker 2:
[06:59] It is. The fact that models have been trained on work that was protected by copyright, that's a big mess.

Speaker 1:
[07:06] A problem.

Speaker 2:
[07:07] The fact that so many things that we have to use in our daily lives now have an AI layer that we cannot turn off or get away from, I hate.

Speaker 1:
[07:15] Yeah, same.

Speaker 2:
[07:17] I like how we just definitely veered into the... We didn't plan to have an AI conversation, but here we are.

Speaker 1:
[07:25] Here we are. I have lots of art thoughts when you're ready.

Speaker 2:
[07:29] Okay. I have two other things I had noted down, and then we will get to art. The first is the descriptions of the vial that contained fecal matter and essential oils. Yeah. Gross, number one. But the articles that I read about them, I felt that a number of writers used adjectives that were unnecessary and just made reading about it grosser. And I was like, I didn't need that evocative, additional word there. We could have just left that out. So I just tried to write that as straightforwardly, but also non grossly as possible. Another reason that this became a difficult thing to work on is that for some reason, for the first time in years of working on this, I just forgot to look at all of my unearthed sources for like a month. I think it was maybe when we came back from the holidays, I wrote up the unearthed for the fourth quarter of 2025, and then my brain just kind of checked out on unearthed. And usually it is something that I look at at least once a week, and I gradually create this list of links over the course of the quarter. But I just, I don't know, I forgot about it for more than a month. And I came to it and I had hundreds of articles that had kind of backed up. And in the course of going through them, I locked myself out of one of the websites that publishes things because I opened too many pages from them at the same time, and they thought I was a bot. So I've tried not to repeat that experience since that happened.

Speaker 1:
[09:26] Heavens. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[09:29] Do you want to talk about art?

Speaker 1:
[09:30] I do. First, we're going to talk about a thing that's not really art, but kind of art, because you mentioned painting closets.

Speaker 2:
[09:36] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:38] I used to be very like, why the heck would you ever paint a closet? And then I'm going to invoke our friend Lily once again.

Speaker 2:
[09:45] Oh, I love Lily.

Speaker 1:
[09:46] I adore her. We're going on a trip later this year. I'm very excited. When she got her house, we all were kind of like house planning to purchases and buying around the same time, like she and several of our other friends. So there was a lot of painting at each other's houses. And she was very insistent that we paint the closets. And I was like, this is a waste of time. You know what? Those closets are beautiful. And like when you look in them, and one is like this beautiful raspberry color that has like gold trim on it, it's the prettiest thing you've ever seen. I'm like, oh, we should all be painting our closets anyway. If you have the energy.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] Yeah. So friends of ours bought a house and they had some painting parties. Friends came over and helped paint. And what I remember was like I had painted, I had gone in slightly the wrong order. I had painted a bunch of walls that you would see if you opened the door to the closet. But then I realized I was like, oh, but this up over here behind me, like that also needs to be painted. And I had to kind of contort myself into a weird way. Yeah. And also try not to get onto the paint that I had already painted.

Speaker 1:
[11:04] Yeah, that's just it.

Speaker 2:
[11:05] Because I just had sort of neglected to think about this one part of the closet wall. But the process of painting the closet was also just sort of tedious and awkward enough that the idea of painting a room... I mean, it's totally possible that room had another purpose before it was used as storage. But the idea of painting, like, figurative elements and cinnabar colored bars on the interior of the closet, I was like, nope, that sounds like a little too much for me.

Speaker 1:
[11:39] Okay, now we have to talk about Salvador Dali.

Speaker 2:
[11:41] Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[11:42] Who I'll probably never do an episode on because I can't. Like, it's too much. I love.

Speaker 2:
[11:48] I love. He's made a lot of unearthed appearances.

Speaker 1:
[11:51] He has. He has. We did a really fun episode about him for Criminalia. This is not what I intended to talk about, but did you know that there was a dolly, an original dolly on Rikers Island for years?

Speaker 2:
[12:05] I heard about this somewhere. It might have been from you.

Speaker 1:
[12:08] It might have been me. That he had made this piece of art for the prison because he was supposed to do an appearance there for, like, their art program. And he was sick that day, so he made them a piece of art. It ended up getting stolen. We don't... It's lost forever. We don't know where it is. I have a weird follow-up that is... I will tell you later because I met someone who claims to know someone who was involved in the theft, even though they all got off. Anyway... Here's what I want to talk about, though. The scale of that painting that was acquired. Because one of the things, if you go to St. Petersburg, Florida, and you don't go to the Dali Museum, whether you are a fan of his work or not, you're doing yourself a disservice for two reasons. One, I have always contended that if Dali were not as outgoing and flamboyant as he was, and he wanted to just keep his life on the DL, he could have been a completely rich art forger.

Speaker 2:
[13:08] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] Because when he was young, one of the things he did to learn his skill and to learn technique was to make copies of famous pieces of work. And they are good copies. Like, he could whip... Like, we think about his work and it being, you know, his very surrealist stuff, but like, this man could paint you a fake saison and you wouldn't know the difference. He could paint you a Caravaggio and you wouldn't know the difference. But what really blows you away when you're in that space is the scale of some of his paintings. Like, Hallucinogenic Toreador, which is my, possibly my favorite painting on the face of the planet, will just rock you back. It's so big and there's so much visually to take in that now I'm like, I gotta go... Are they gonna display the... Because they have to, because I gotta go. I gotta go. And I'm trying to think of where they would put it, because it's not an infinitely large museum. Like, it's a good size, but I'm like, where do you even put something like that? They'll figure it out. It'll be beautiful. I can't wait. The second thing I wanted to talk about is that I'm really excited because I'm going back to Italy, not for a work trip, but with my best friend, because we're going through our art bucket lists. Like the things we want to see in person before we are no longer on this planet or, you know, able to travel. And one of my big, most of this is her list because I have been more recently than her. But my big thing that I'm doing on this trip is I want to compare the Caravaggio Judas-slaying Holofernes with the Gentileschi. I mean, I have looked at the images before, but I want to see them in person. You know, part of it is that, like, Gentileschi is, like, 20 years later than him. There's actually a slight familial connection between her father and Caravaggio. And she really, you know, took that concept of tenebrism and, like, went to a new level with it in some ways. But also, you know, he was a violent man, we know. Very, very prone to outbursts of violence. But I kind of chuckle because his version of that, the women look a little almost timid about what they're doing. Whereas we know, because we did an episode on Artemisia Gentileschi, that, like, there are actually two versions of that biblical story that she's painted. One is the beheading, one is the slaying. Those are the two titles and they're in different places. I think I'm gonna see the beheading. Hers, which we know was, has been considered over the years as a kind of a protest piece of art and a way to work through her feelings about having been sexually assaulted. Like, those women are, one of the women is like kneeling on his chest. Like, it is visceral. And so I cannot wait to see these two in person. That's just me wanting to talk about art. But here's the question I want to ask you, because you also have some cool travel coming up. Are you gonna go see the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum while you're in London?

Speaker 2:
[16:22] I don't know. We have not planned anything other than, we have plane tickets. We have a hotel for part of the stay, because we are going because Patrick is gonna be at an event. So that part of the hotel stay is purchased and our air travel is purchased. And once I bought plane tickets, I was like, all right, I got some other things that I need to work on right now. We will come back to planning this trip later. And I haven't decided what I want to do exactly yet. So we'll see.

Speaker 1:
[17:05] I mean, the British Museum is a great place to get lost for the day.

Speaker 2:
[17:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[17:09] There's a lot of interesting stuff. You can go, you know, pay your respects to the ghost of Mike the Cat. You can... I certainly have a list of interesting things that I like to do there. Are you going to go see the dinosaurs?

Speaker 2:
[17:23] I don't know what I'm going to do. I haven't decided anything.

Speaker 1:
[17:26] Oh, oh, because you'll have some time to yourself, right, while he's working in his event.

Speaker 2:
[17:32] Well, but the time that I have to myself, we won't be in London.

Speaker 1:
[17:36] Ah.

Speaker 2:
[17:37] So, yeah. Yeah. We really need to sit down and like look at things because because I bought plane tickets and then was like, all right, we'll figure out all the other steps later. And then we have not figured out other steps. That's fair.

Speaker 1:
[17:52] I bought the plane tickets for our trip to Italy, and then my best friend is handling most of the rest of it.

Speaker 2:
[17:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[17:59] And I'm like, bless you, you beautiful creature, because I'm, my brain cannot right now.

Speaker 2:
[18:06] Yeah, my trips outside of the United States, with the exception of our honeymoon for the last decade, have all been work trips. So there has not been a trip where we have left the country and I have needed to plan anything because Michael has been planning it. And you and I have been hosting it based on the work of Michael and Michael's team. And our honeymoon, Patrick basically planned it, but we also had, we went to Iceland and we had kind of a bucket list of things that we wanted to do while we were there. But then other than that, we did not plan things other than where we were staying each night. And we just explored.

Speaker 1:
[18:50] Kind of winged it.

Speaker 2:
[18:51] As we winged it. Yeah, like we had our lodging arranged and we had some things we definitely wanted to do. And then we just like explored Iceland, which was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:
[19:00] You can do that in London for sure. It's a ton of great places to eat.

Speaker 2:
[19:05] Yeah. We do need to figure out where we're staying. That's the thing that we should handle soon.

Speaker 1:
[19:11] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:12] But yeah, I don't know the rest of it yet. We did make one trip to Canada in that we flew to Buffalo, Niagara Airport to go elsewhere in New York. And because we were right there, we walked across the bridge into Canada and had lunch in Canada, and then we came back with the rest of the way to where we're going in New York.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] I can't wait to find out where all you end up going in London. I love that city so much. Yeah. There's so many great, great things to do there. Just great places to hang. Yeah. Great cocktail culture. Great, great fun. I've had great fun in that city.

Speaker 2:
[19:52] We'll figure it all out. Yeah. You know, as long as the world is still happening.

Speaker 1:
[19:59] Let's us go. Let's us go. I will say I just flew. We recently released an episode where we talked about the TSA and how easy-peasy it could be. And it was recorded. We put a note in front of that behind the scenes that we'd recorded it before the shutdown had ground everything to a halt and like Atlanta was having four and five-hour waits and whatnot. But I recently traveled for, we went away for my husband's birthday and we were like kind of white-knuckling it because we didn't know if things would be righted by then. We had a one-minute wait at security. It worked out. We got so lucky. So lucky. It was so easy for us that I almost felt bad. I had the early stage of it.

Speaker 2:
[20:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[20:49] Where it was like a two-hour wait, although I had a ticket that let me not do that. Like I had a sky priority. So I was not too bad, but I saw the early stages and I can't imagine the long ones. So my hat is off and my heart goes out to anybody that had to wait in those lines.

Speaker 2:
[21:07] Yeah. I had a trip that was similarly during the earlier stages. And it was, none of my issues had to do with TSA or wait times. There was a crew scheduling issue and so my flight there got canceled.

Speaker 1:
[21:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:29] And then there was weather and my flight home got canceled.

Speaker 1:
[21:33] It's just bad luck.

Speaker 2:
[21:34] It was just, yeah, yeah. And I fortunately had enough loyalty points to get a free hotel for the night that I was stranded in Raleigh. Anyway. Anyway.

Speaker 1:
[21:50] Wait, the airline didn't put you up?

Speaker 2:
[21:53] No, because it was weather.

Speaker 1:
[21:54] Oh, all right.

Speaker 2:
[21:56] They did compensate me for the canceled flight that was a staffing issue that was their fault.

Speaker 1:
[22:02] Gotcha. Gotcha.

Speaker 2:
[22:05] Anyway. Anyway. Whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope there are no canceled flights, and no delayed flights, and no long lines.

Speaker 1:
[22:16] Of any kind.

Speaker 2:
[22:19] Things are going as well as possible. We are recording in the midst of just continual global chaos, but also the joy of space flight.

Speaker 1:
[22:33] Thank you, Artemis II crew.

Speaker 2:
[22:34] Yeah. So, you know, I hope you're able to find some joy, have some good things going on. We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode. You will also have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.