Oh.

It's got all of these different fibers on different kind of layers and you kind of, you do the rack, you move the big stick and then you kind of put them together and you push them together.

So in France, this guy Jacquard wanted to figure out a way to start to automate that process.

And so he invented what was called the Jacquard loom, and he made a series of punch cards, paper cards with holes punched in them that you could use to program the loom.

It was a computer program, effectively, and it automated what was a very highly skilled job.

This caused people to be very upset because being a master weaver was very well paid, but all of the sort of titans of industry We're basically interested in doing this the cheapest way possible.

It's actually really one of the first great examples of technological conflict in history.

I would have never guessed that.

What are some of the most quirky roadside attractions we should know about?

Well, I'll, I'll actually talk a little bit about the one that Ella just mentioned, called House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and I went there when I was 12 with my parents on a kind of classic American road trip.

We went to the Corn Palace, uh, in South Dakota, and Wall Drug.

And so on this trip we went to a place called House on the Rock, and it is, to my mind, one of the most bizarre, amazing, wild creations in the entire United States.

And to give a sort of quick description of what's in there, inside of this house, and house is really the wrong word, 'cause it takes about six hours to walk through the entire sprawling set of buildings kind of hidden in the forest, inside is, as Ella mentioned, the world's largest carousel with the world's most diverse set of carousel animals.

There is a sculpture of a squid fighting a whale that is the size of the Statue of Liberty.

That's inside the house.

And Dylan, what's your recommendation?

It was so interesting

... which was made to be like translated into every...

So we did a, a, a, the, the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

But it's like they're using this language, which is all sounds like do re sol, sol re, sol re do.

You can like already tell maybe why it didn't become a working language.

It had like seven syllables were the only kind of, uh, pieces.

But you could translate it into music and color, and so we did all of that stuff.

How does the idea of death animate your life and work, if at all?

This is make or break, but the right headphones and the right adapters, I'm so excited to hear about this 'cause I'm going to be adding to cart immediately.

It's such a simple little thing, and they're, they, these, the, the ones we got are, like, really cheap.

There's a bunch of different varieties of them.

They're not super high-end.

So on a lot of flights now, there's no seat back entertainment anymore, right? The, like, the screens are gone, and, and y- so you bring your own, uh, phone, or we bring a computer that's preloaded with a bunch of movies we've downloaded ahead.

There's like...

The kids know what they are.

[laughs]

For most of the 140 years since the invention of artificial cements presented the modern world with a new building material, Concrete has been used for structures above grade in the United States.

I came to the area in 2016 with a two-year-old and a baby on the way.

We needed more space, but I was also running away a little bit.

I think creative people think a lot about the birth of new ideas, but less about how they change over time or even how they end.

when they stopped being the thing that you loved at the start.

Creative people love to turn art into businesses, only to discover that running a business is very different from creating art.

Of course, I couldn't tell Blake any of this, or it's a sort of dispiriting perspective, at least a complex one.

Oh, this is where the party happens.

But lots of scientists were obsessed.

So people are starting to play with this, and they're starting to realize that certain metals move electricity better than other metals.

And so they realize that, oh, that's interesting.

We can kind of send a little shock, a little signal along a wire and move something from here to there.

And so people are starting to realize that this might actually come in handy, and there might be a way you could use this for practical purposes.

People figured out they could run wires from one place to another, then they could easily send little pulses of electricity between those places.

By using this new-found lovely creation of huge amounts of long, cheaply made wire, you could send a little electric signal, just a boop, (bell dinging) and you could send a message using that wire.

You could, you could have a way to just generate different lengths of electric signal, long or short, and use something called Morse code to basically send a message almost in real time, 'cause those electric signals are moving close to the speed of light.

But it was hard work and took a very long time to make very little.

You don't start to get to really revolutionary change until you're able to melt pretty large quantities of metal and start casting it in different shapes.

So that means basically being able to make a big bubbling pot of liquid metal (metal bubbling) and pouring it into clay or sand forms so that then basically you can kind of cast it into things like plowshares or cauldrons, like, you know, a big metal bucket to make soup in.

Hmm.

So that's exactly what some of this first usage was for.

It was for replacing the hemp ropes in mines, making it easier for people to get down deeper and also safer 'cause the, the wire was both stronger and actually took up way less space than say like a chain might.

And then used to sort of hold up bridges, like the Brooklyn Bridge used some of these- this early wire rope technology to help hold itself up and still does.

And what do they think happened?

So, over 5,000 years ago, uh, there was this guy.

This guy, we don't know his real name, but we call him Otzi the Iceman.

And he was walking along this glacier, and he had all his stuff with him.

He had stuff for making a fire.

He had, uh, different kinds of tools with him.

And one of the things he was carrying was this beautiful little ax.

That's what the Haya people were using to make these kilns.

Big deal.

This, uh, people who know it know it.

It's, it's the, one of the craziest places I've ever been.

It's got the world's, uh, a sculpture the size of the Statue of Liberty of a squid fighting a whale inside the house.

[laughs]

Um, so, you know, I was gonna go on a big trip, and Josh and I started talking and said, "How come there's not a great travel resource for these kinds of interesting, unusual places? Like, these are the best places you go when you take a trip." And so we started putting it together, and 16 years later, here, here we still are.