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Mike Carruthers
If your bingo has ads in it.
John Moores
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Mike Carruthers
Sorry.
Barry Enderwick
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Mike Carruthers
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Barry Enderwick
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John Moores
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Mike Carruthers
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John Moores
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Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know. Why do you get a runny nose when it's cold? Then come along on a fascinating tour of our solar system. We'll visit the moon and the planets Mars, Saturn and Mercury.
John Moores
Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. So when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the sun at a walking pace.
Mike Carruthers
Also, what would happen if you got hit by a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building? And the history of the sandwich and some incredible sandwiches you really should try.
Barry Enderwick
One example is a sophisticated club that among other things has peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham and it shouldn't work, but it actually does. It shouldn't be as good as it is.
Mike Carruthers
All this today on something you should know at this point, I think it's just become common practice that if you have a business and you sell online, Shopify is the way to go. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Whether you're selling holiday gifts or auto parts or gourmet food, it doesn't matter. Shopify is there to help you grow. From the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way up to the did we just hit a million order stage? Here's what I love about Shopify. It's not just a platform. They have these great tools that help you sell more. For example, they have the Internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. They have this thing, it's the Shopify Bundles app where you can create and sell product bundles with ease. So you sell more. They also have something called the Shopify Collective. You can curate products to sell from other brands brands you love, giving your customers more variety and your business more sales. Come on, it's time to check out Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.comsysk all lowercase go to shopify.comsysk now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.comSYSK Something you should Know Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something youg Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there. Welcome to Something youg Should Know. I want to start today with a with a question I bet you have asked yourself. And that is, when you go out in cold weather, why does it make your nose run? Well, it's perfectly normal for that to happen, and no one is sure of all the reasons why it happens. But here's what we do know. The nose is kind of a fancy air conditioner, and one of its jobs is to warm and humidify the air we inhale. When the air is unusually cold, the nose kicks into high gear to warm and humidify it. Blood vessels dilate, mucous tissues swell and secrete extra mucus, and this extra mucus results in a runny nose. In addition, as the newly heated, newly moist air is exhaled, the moisture in it condenses when it hits the colder outside temperatures and then drips out as fluid. There's not much you can do about it unless it becomes really severe. And apparently there is a prescription available from your doctor, but it's just normal. And that is something you should know. So you must know something about the solar system. I'm sure you learned in school that we have a sun and that planets revolve around the sun, that we are the third closest planet to the sun and the only one that supports life. So what would it be like to travel around the solar system? What would that experience be? Well, hang on. We're about to take a fascinating podcast tour around the solar system with John Moores. He's been a member of the science and operations team of several space missions, including the Curiosity rover mission. He's written nearly 100 academic papers in planetary science, and he's co author of the book Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and other adventures in space exploration. Hi, John. Welcome to something you should know.
John Moores
Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike Carruthers
So you've studied this, and I just want to get a sense of, like, what is the solar system like? I mean, is it quiet? Does it smell like something? I mean, before we start our journey here, what is it like?
John Moores
Oh, goodness. Each one of the planets is a different place, and some of the planets even have multiple characters. So I was really thinking and trying to understand recently this in terms of those five human senses. You know, what would it be like to actually be there? And what would it feel like as a human being?
Mike Carruthers
And how do we know that? We know this because nobody's ever been to Mercury or Saturn or Jupiter. So when we say, when you talk about what these places are like, how do we know what they're like?
John Moores
You're absolutely right there in terms of human cultural knowledge. We don't know about anything further than the moon where the Apollo astronauts were. But the great thing is that we've got these sort of robotic avatars, these spacecraft that have gone out and visited all of these other places, and they've brought back data. It's not data in the human sense, but we can kind of translate that so that we can sort of understand, you know, what it means to know what an atmosphere is composed of. We can imagine what that might smell like, for instance.
Mike Carruthers
What might that smell like?
John Moores
Well, one of the ones that I really enjoy and that I think sort of talks about, because we have a little bit of the human side and a little bit of the robotic side is the moon. And of course, the moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere, but we do happen to know what the moon smells like. We found evidence of these sulfur compounds in the surface with our robots. But then when the Apollo astronauts came in from a long day of walking around and doing things on the moon and dusted off their spacesuits, they could smell the sulfur. They said it smelled like spent gunpowder. And so you get that more visceral feeling that goes along with that data. It's a common point between the robots and the humans.
Mike Carruthers
So take me on a little tour of the solar system and start wherever you want, but just let's hop around and see what things are like, because I don't think I really have a very good sense of that and would love to.
John Moores
Well, why don't we start with some places that are a little bit more familiar? Like place like Mars, for instance. It's really, as Brian Cox likes to say, a dry and frozen version of our home. You can imagine being out under the Martian sky. You know, you can imagine looking at clouds. You can imagine watching the sunset. And it might seem at first like you're just in a very, very red desert. But there's some things that are weird. The sunset that you see, it's not a red sunset like we get on the Earth. It's a blue sunset, so you get that totally different color. And when you're out looking around, there's an extra bit of haziness. It's cold the pressure is low, so you need to have a bit of a spacesuit, you know, to keep yourself, you know, alive and to keep going. But when you look at the pictures of a place like this that we've taken with spacecraft, it really does remind you of home, which is really fascinating. And Mars is the most similar place. As you get further out and go and visit other planets, it gets more exotic and stranger.
Mike Carruthers
And it reminds you of home, because why? It has mountains and it's solid and it looks like it could be Earth. Kind of reminds you of exactly any.
John Moores
Pictures that anyone's seen of being in a desert. It's a lot like that in terms of the way that it would look. And there are other little touch points as well. You've got the fact that on Mars, the day is just a little over 24 hours long, so you could have the same sort of sleep and wake cycle that we have here on the Earth. And frankly, the 40 minutes. Who doesn't want 40 minutes back in their day every day?
Mike Carruthers
Right, well, great. What's the next stop on our tour?
John Moores
Venus would be a great place to go next. And Venus has this dual character to it. You've got this sort of hellish world down at the bottom of the atmosphere, intense pressure, intense heat. It's hard for robots to even go there and to live more than a few minutes. But there's some interesting things to find down there. We do know that Venus, perhaps in the distant past, was more like the Earth and was on a similar trajectory. So maybe there's evidence of that somewhere down there up in the atmosphere. Totally different story. Once you're 50 or 80 kilometers up, then you're actually sitting in the most Earth, like, environment in the entire solar system. You don't even need a spacesuit there. I mean, the sulfuric acid clouds would be bad for most fabrics. So you should have something to protect you from that. And a little bit of oxygen would be good because carbon dioxide is the atmosphere on Venus. But aside from that, the temperature is what you would know, the pressure is what you would know. And it's just a wonderful place to think about, just sort of floating there, you know, in a cloud city or, you know, in a balloon festival or something like that. It's just the kind of thing that grips the mind for me.
Mike Carruthers
I'm curious about what you said about robots can't exist for more than a few minutes because of the pressure. The pressure would just crush them.
John Moores
The pressure is not the most dangerous thing. It's the heat. And when you Put a robot into an environment like that with nowhere to dump the heat, it's kind of stuck. Eventually it overheats and it stops working as well. There are folks who are looking at trying to create electronics that work in that kind of intense, intense kind of heat where it's like the temperature of a self cleaning oven. But most of the proposals to visit the surface of Venus, imagine taking along something sacrificial, like a big block of wax, for instance. And when that block of wax melts, then the robots have nowhere to put their heat anymore and essentially they stop working because they're overheated.
Mike Carruthers
That's really interesting. And Mercury, can we go to Mercury?
John Moores
Certainly. Mercury is such a fascinating place and sometimes a little bit neglected. We only have seen the entire surface of Mercury in the past two decades, just from the way that orbital mechanics and our exploration has worked. And Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. And if you sort of count from sunup to sundown, it's about 176 total days. So when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the sun at a walking pace. And you could in a very long day, 176earth day, long day, you could walk all the way around the planet.
Mike Carruthers
So let me ask you this, let's pause our journey here. So when you watch science fiction TV shows or you look up in the night sky, it all looks very random. You see little specks of things, you know, as the spaceships on TV go by. But our solar system is very ordered in the sense that we have the sun and these planets orbiting around it. Where do they come from? Did they all come from the same place? Are they related at all? Or are they just rocks in the sky that orbit around the sun?
John Moores
Well, there is a family relationship here between all of the different planets in our own solar system. Back when the sun was forming, you had this disk of gas and dust, and it was warmer closer to the sun, and it was cooler further out. And over time this disk cooled. If you're far enough out, so around where Jupiter is, then you could condense out things like water ice. And there's a lot of water ice in this disk. So once you condense out a lot of water ice, that can suck up a lot of the rest of the gas. And you get gas giants in the closer part of the solar system. Closer.
Mike Carruthers
What is a gas giant?
John Moores
Sorry. Oh. So Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, these are planets that are mostly made of hydrogen gas. They don't have a solid surface the way that what we call the terrestrial planets do. The ones that are closer in the terrestrial planets, these ones are made up of rocks and these are places where, you know, water couldn't condense as ice, it was too hot. So instead you had to wait until rock could condense. And that's what made up these planets. So a lot of the variation that we see in the solar system is sort of dependent on what kinds of temperatures were present in that, you know, very early disk of swirling gas and dust.
Mike Carruthers
We are on a tour of the solar system and our tour guide is John Moores. He is author of the book Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. How much do you spend on wireless service? What's your monthly bill? I bet it's a lot, especially if you have several people in your house with their own phones. However much you're paying, I think you can do better with Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile offers Premium Wireless for $15 a month when you purchase a three month plan. Now I have Mint Mobile because, well, just do the math. There's how much you pay compared to Mint Mobile's $15 a month. And all plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. And you can keep your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan, bring your phone number and all your existing contacts with you. So let's get rid of your overpriced wireless and get Mint Mobile's deal and get three months of premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com something that's mintmobile.com something. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com something $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.
Barry Enderwick
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John Moores
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John Moores
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John Moores
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Mike Carruthers
So John, what about the sun? I mean, obviously we can't go there, but what is the sun? How long is it going to last? What does it do? What about the sun?
John Moores
Well, the sun is middle aged, so it's about four and a half billion years old. Now, based on what we know of other stars, it's likely to live to be about 10 billion years old. So we're right in the middle there. You're right. You couldn't stand on the sun, you couldn't get very close to it without having a lot of trouble. Even comets that go and swing around behind the sun don't always come out the other side. Sometimes they'll be broken up or vaporized. But essentially with the sun, what you've got is this sort of controlled nuclear reaction going on at the core. And that that heat and all that energy makes it out so that the surface is glowing. And it's just like being near a campfire or being near the burner on a stove. We get to bask in a bit of that heat.
Mike Carruthers
So what's the next stop on our tour of the solar system?
John Moores
Oh, if we were to travel around, let's go a little bit further out. Let's visit Jupiter, the biggest of all the planets. And when I think of this place, I think about that bottomless atmosphere, what it would be like to be in that atmosphere. And it's Jupiter, it's got a lot of gravity, so I would probably be falling down quite quickly. So the advantage there without that solid surface is you can enjoy the ride a little bit. You can look out towards the Horizon, which is 1500 kilometers away, about 1000 miles. And above the cloud tops, it would probably look something like what you would see on a high mountain on the Earth that sort of really deep blue, maybe even grading into black that you may have seen in pictures that climbers have taken in places like Everest. But rapidly as you go down, the atmosphere gets thicker. There's a couple of cloud layers that you would fall through as you were traveling, and there's not a ton of light there. It would be a little bit dim after you get down through those clouds. But just that feeling of interiority, just thinking about these vast spaces between those cloud layers, it's like being in some kind of giant fluffy cave, like some kind of moria type of place. And you couldn't go on for too long. Eventually it would get hot, it would get very dense, like we were talking about on Venus. And it would be a bad day for you or your machines.
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, I was out walking my dog last night, in fact, and saw this very bright star in the sky. And so I whipped out my phone. I've had that app that you can point at a star and it'll tell you what it was. And it was Jupiter, and it was really bright. Is it always really bright or it just. There's something about last night that made it bright.
John Moores
Jupiter is one of the brightest things in the sky. The planets do tend to be very bright in the night sky. So Venus, because it's very reflective and it's very close, tends to be the brightest of all of them. But we only ever see it as a tiny crescent if you were able to zoom in with a pair of binoculars and only ever sunset sunrise because it's close to the Sun. Mercury is the same way. They stick close to the sun, Whereas Jupiter and Saturn and Mars, we can see those later on in the night when it's fully dark. And of those, Jupiter is the biggest and the brightest.
Mike Carruthers
So whatever happened to Pluto, you know, that used to be a planet. Now it's not. So what is it and what happened?
John Moores
Ah, Pluto. Yes. It is technically now called a dwarf planet. Don't worry, it's still where it was. It's still doing its same orbit. Nothing has changed. It's just the way that planetary scientists and astronomers think about this body now. And what happened with Pluto was we found a lot of other things out near where Pluto lives in the solar system that look a lot like Pluto. And so it became a question of, are these all planets, or is Pluto and all of its kin something different? Is that a different kind of family? And the decision in the end was, yeah, they're a little bit different. They're their own thing out there. We call them trans Neptunian objects, things beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Mike Carruthers
Talk about Saturn because there's a planet that's kind of a show off. It's got the rings and it's pretty spectacular. What are the rings and what's Saturn like?
John Moores
Oh, Saturn is a jewel of the solar system. And there's just so many fascinating things in that system. The rings themselves, you're talking about this enormous structure made up of little snow particles, essentially like little bits of ice. You know, from the size of a snowflake up to the size of a house. And the whole thing is maybe a hundred thousand miles across from end to end, but is really, really thin, maybe 100ft thick on average. And all of these individual grains, all of these little snowballs and ice boulders, they're all orbiting independently. So they're all moving around Saturn as if they were all little tiny moonlets.
Mike Carruthers
So they're like little moons orbiting Saturn. Like our moon orbits Earth.
John Moores
Exactly. They're doing this sort of gravitational dance. And in that dance you get all of these waves and eddies and other things like we would see if we went down to the shoreline. And, you know, there watching over the show, is Saturn, which takes up a quarter of the sky. It's hard to imagine just how massive that would be in your sky if you were sitting on a ring particle.
Mike Carruthers
And when I think of Saturn and when I look at pictures, it seems to be very colorful. Is it just the light reflecting off the ice that makes it so, or what?
John Moores
It's a good question. There's still, I think, some debate as to exactly what causes the colors in these gas giants. Typically, we're looking at the cloud particles, and those clouds can be made of water ice, like we have on the Earth. But there are other chemical compounds that serve as ice and cloud particles on these giant planets, and they might be colored by other compounds. So you get these wonderful hues of yellows and reds, and each place is different. I'd say Jupiter's probably the most brightly colored. It's got the biggest variation. Saturn's a little bit more muted, more towards those yellows. And then when you get out further to Uranus and Neptune, more blues.
Mike Carruthers
When you look at and you take a journey through our solar system, which you've just taken us on, and it's pretty fascinating, but you get the sense that most of it is so inhospitable. Does it ever make you think, why us? Why Earth? Why is this so friendly to life and nothing Else is.
John Moores
It is interesting, right? An interesting way that the philosophers of science think about this. They have something called the anthropic principle in which the reason that the Earth is here and why does the universe have the physical laws it does. And they say that the reason for this is because if it didn't, if it was anything else, then we wouldn't be here to observe it and we wouldn't be able to even ask the question. It is a special place, the Earth. I have to say we haven't found anything quite like it out there in the cosmos, anywhere else. Something I find really fascinating just looking in our own galaxy where we have hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets. We now know more planets than there are stars out there is just how many different things there are, how many different ways of putting together matter and placing it at different distances from other stars and mixing things up. To me, it's a wonder there's not more places. And maybe we'll be lucky and find more places that have life like we have here on the Earth. But so many, so many ways for solar systems to go right, at least as far as human beings are concerned. And so many ways for them to go wrong.
Mike Carruthers
Well, this is really interesting. I've learned a lot. I feel like I know my neighbors better in the solar system. So thanks for taking us on a little tour. I've been talking to John Moores. He has been a member of the science and operations team of several space missions. He's written nearly 100 academic papers in planetary science. And the name of his book is Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. And if you'd like to read it, you can get a copy at Amazon. There's a link in the show notes. Thank you, John.
John Moores
Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be here.
Mike Carruthers
We have one more act for you this evening. I don't even need to say his name.
Barry Enderwick
Mr. Bob Dylan, a complete unknown, is now a Golden Globe in critics choice nominee for best picture. Bobby, what do you want to be?
Mike Carruthers
Whatever it is they don't want me to be.
Barry Enderwick
Timothy Chalamet astonishes as Bob Dylan in one of the best performances of the year. And critics rave. Edward Norton is absolutely fantastic.
John Moores
70,000 people are here and Bobby is.
Barry Enderwick
The reason for it this Christmas.
Mike Carruthers
They just want me singing, blowing in the wind for the rest of my life.
Barry Enderwick
Don't miss the movie. Critics are hailing five stars. To be honest, it's pure Cinematic magic.
Mike Carruthers
Turn It Down, Pay laugh.
Barry Enderwick
And named to AFI and the National Board of Reviews. Top 10 films of the year. Make some noise.
Mike Carruthers
BD track some mud on a Carpet.
Barry Enderwick
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John Moores
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Mike Carruthers
I bet it hasn't been more than a day or two, or maybe three, since you've had yourself a sandwich. Who doesn't love a good sandwich? So what makes a sandwich a sandwich? Where did they originate? I know I've heard something about the Earl of Sandwich having something to do with it, but is that the real story? Is a hamburger considered a sandwich? What about a hot dog? What makes a sandwich a club sandwich? Well, you're about to discover all of this and a lot more with my guest, Barry Enderwick. He's the biggest expert on the sandwich you are ever gonna find, and he has likely eaten more different kinds of sandwiches than probably anyone on the planet. He has a book out called Sandwiches of the all the best and most surprising things people have put between two slices of bread. Hey, Barry. Welcome to something you should know.
Barry Enderwick
Well, thank you for having me. Great to be here.
Mike Carruthers
So first, I guess I have to ask, why are you such a sandwich devotee? Why are you so into sandwiches?
Barry Enderwick
You know, sandwiches seem to cut across all cultures, cuisines. They've been around for a long time and they've got an enormous amount of flexibility to them, from their portability to what bread is used to what goes in between the bread.
Mike Carruthers
Well, that's a good reason. And you know, who hasn't had a sandwich? I mean, every. Everybody's had a sandwich. Where did they come from? Do we know? We've heard. We've all heard this story about the Earl of Sandwich or something, but. But you probably know the real story. So what is the real story?
Barry Enderwick
Well, the real story is we don't know where they came from, per se. I would say that John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, did an excellent job of getting his name on it. It's rumored that in 1762 or thereabouts, he was playing cards and was really into it and didn't want to get up. So he had meat between two slices of bread. His compatriots said, you know, I'll have what sandwich is having. And by 1777, there was a recipe in a book for a sandwich, so it didn't take long. But in my exploration of old sandwiches, I've. I've done a sandwich from China called the Rojia Mo. And it's, it was created around 200 BC and it's basically meat stewed in very warm spices, shredded and then put into a griddle cake that's mostly split all the way. And it looks very much like a sandwich. So I don't know that he necessarily invented it, but he certainly got his name on it.
Mike Carruthers
Well, and doesn't it seem that the sandwich was inevitable with or without him? Because sooner or later, and probably it did happen, that several people probably figured, you know, if we put this between two slices of bread, it would probably be easier to eat.
Barry Enderwick
Oh yeah, for sure. As long as bread's been baked. You know, I'm sure at some point when people started slicing it instead of tearing it, they probably started to put meat in between it or other things in between it and just sort of eating sandwiches that way.
Mike Carruthers
The modern sandwich, though, that we think of when we think of a sandwich, I mean, where did that come from? Was there a birthplace of the modern sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
No, I mean, it was the evolution basically from the early days when it really, really was literally just meat between bread. It's just sort of evolved and expanded over time to where we have these rather monstrous looking sandwiches available from different chain outlets now. So there wasn't, I wouldn't say that there was a magic moment where it happened.
Mike Carruthers
It just sort of grew and is it everywhere? Is there a sandwich? Can you get a sandwich almost anywhere on earth? Does every culture have something that seems like a sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
I would say that you could find a sandwich pretty much anywhere in any country. You'd be able to find a version of a sandwich. I would not say that the sandwiches that we're used to seeing here in the United States, like the sub shops and things like that, are necessarily in every country, but you can pretty much find a sandwich in just about any cuisine.
Mike Carruthers
And would you consider a hamburger a sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
I do consider it a sandwich. In fact, early menus used to call it a hamburger sandwich. And to me it's, it's, you know, you've got meat and other toppings between bread. That's a classic definition of a Sandwich, if you ask me.
Mike Carruthers
Right. Well, then so would be a hot dog.
Barry Enderwick
That's correct. I do happen to think that a hot dog is a sandwich. I have two reasons behind that. One is very unsatisfying and that is everything's made up. So if you want it to be a sandwich, it is. But the other more logic driven one is that if you look at the hot dog bun, the bun is almost equal thickness on two sides and a very thin hinge. So the hinge there is just there as an accommodation for the tubular meat. So it technically does fall into the category of sandwich, in my opinion. Now, if you say, hey, let's go get a sandwich and you show up and there's hot dogs, there's going to be a disconnect because people just don't think in that way. But I think technically it does fall into sandwichedom.
Mike Carruthers
So what is your favorite sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
Boy, that changes so often, depending on everything. Like how hot is it, how hungry am I? One of my favorite ones is a more recent one called the Tomato from Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. And it shouldn't be as good as it is. It's mind blowingly delicious. It's thick Texas toast that's buttered and griddled, slathered in mayonnaise. They call for Dukes, which has a bit of a tang to it because it's made with apple cider vinegar. Then you put down salted roasted sunflower seeds, thick slices of tomato, salt, pepper, way too much basil, way too much dill, and a squeeze of lemon. And it is. It shouldn't be as good as it is. It's revelatory. So I love that. I always love a good Reuben. Like that is like my go to. If I'm in a sandwich shop and I don't know what to get, that's always a solid move.
Mike Carruthers
Isn't it such a pleasure when you have not just a sandwich, but anything like that, where it shouldn't be as good as it is, and then you taste it and it's just like this. Like this present of. Wow. Wow. I wasn't expecting that. That was fabulous.
Barry Enderwick
Yeah. You know, one of the things I do on sandwiches of history is I do sandwiches of our history, where I try to capture recipes that are being passed down within families, aren't necessarily in a cookbook. And I had that same experience with someone sent in something from the Upper east coast northeast, where the grandfather would saute sardines and butter, then add maple syrup and then chili flakes. And there were a couple Other ingredients. And I thought, this is going to be horrific. And I tasted it, and it was the exact same thing. Like, how is this. This isn't just good. This is great. So you never know.
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, you lost me at sardines. I'm sorry.
Barry Enderwick
They're not for everyone. They're not for everyone.
Mike Carruthers
They are not for everyone. And I'm one of those people that they're not for.
Barry Enderwick
Not for.
Mike Carruthers
And was there ever a point in time because it seemed like sandwiches were fairly, I don't know, pedestrian until, with some exceptions, like some great deli sandwiches. But. But, you know, people didn't make exotic sandwiches at home. It was just, you know, peanut butter and jelly and, you know, ham and cheese or bologna and cheese. But at some point, it kind of got more involved. Like, maybe that was in the 70s or 80s where people started making, like, real sandwiches. Or is this just my imagination?
Barry Enderwick
I think you can. For me, when I look at the sandwich recipes, you know, I'm making sandwich recipes from the 1800s or early 1900s, World War II, you know, through the Depression, then World War II, and then after World War II, you start to see odd combos of things that kind of. It's almost a reflection of the optimism and, you know, feeling after World War II in the United States. One example is a sophisticated club that, among other things, has peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham. And it's.
John Moores
It.
Barry Enderwick
It shouldn't work, but it actually does. It works really well. But it's. You start to see these ingredients being put together that don't, you know, wouldn't have been put together previously. And I think that's reflective of how the nation was. And then it just went from there. Of course, today we have so much. So many different ingredients and so many different cuisines that we can access and infuse into the sandwich. It's just gone crazy. It's great.
Mike Carruthers
Yeah. I wonder if, like, every family has some sandwich that is a little off the mainstream, like, my dad used to eat. And I remember when he first showed me that or made one for me, and I thought, this is not. It's peanut butter, mayonnaise and lettuce.
Barry Enderwick
I've had that.
Mike Carruthers
It's great.
Barry Enderwick
And believe it or not, that's been in cookbooks, too. You know, one of the things that I grew up eating was peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches. And I thought my brother invented it. Turns out it's a lot of old cookbooks, but, yeah, no, I've done. I've done over a hundred sandwiches of our history where, you know, people say, my grandpa used to make this, my mom used to make this, and some of them are great and some of them are not.
Mike Carruthers
So what's a really not great one? I mean, you've probably tried like all kinds of sandwiches. So what's a really great one that you've tried?
Barry Enderwick
You know, I didn't care for the red onion and peanut butter sandwich. That didn't really land for me.
Mike Carruthers
That sounds horrible.
Barry Enderwick
But I mean that, to me that, that sounds like a depression error sandwich where it was you needed to eat something, these are the two things you had. You put them together and, and then that becomes just part of, you know, what you eat because that's, that helped you get through a rough time.
Mike Carruthers
And sandwiches historically, it seems for the most part contained meat, but now there's a lot of non meaty sandwiches.
Barry Enderwick
Well, actually there are sections in some of the older cookbooks. Especially in the early 1900s, there was a movement towards health for the first time ever. And so there's a fair amount of vegetarian sandwiches in those books as well. But they weren't necessarily focused on vegetarian. It would be a vegetarian cookbook maybe, but the sandwiches themselves would not be called Vegetarian within a sandwich recipe book.
Mike Carruthers
But I think people who are going to eat a sandwich, if you said, hey, let's go get a sandwich, but it's going to be a vegetarian sandwich, most people would kind of the air would go out of the balloon, you know, say okay, but I mean, not.
Barry Enderwick
If you're a vegetarian. But you know, like for example, that tomato sandwich that I referenced earlier from turkey and the wolf. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't absolutely love it. And I'm talking meat eaters. I'm a meat eater and it blew my mind. So I, I tend to, to not I, I tend to wait and see and, and kind of taste it and then get disappointed if, if, if need be.
Mike Carruthers
What's the deal with like these little dainty finger sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches, you know, you think they serve at Buckingham palace or something like those to me don't seem like real. They're sandwiches, but they're not. Like they don't fit the mold of a big hearty sandwich.
Barry Enderwick
Yeah, sandwiches. So what you're referencing is something called tea sandwiches. The other thing to consider is that sandwiches weren't always intended as the end all, be all of a meal. They were part of a, they were a course within a larger meal. And so you have these diminutive sandwiches that are small and Very minimal in their ingredients, you know, and not very hearty because they're not intended to actually fill you up. They're meant to accompany tea or to be sort of like a wet your appetite before we bring out the goose kind of thing.
Mike Carruthers
Why is a club sandwich called a club sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
Contrary to popular belief, it just evolved out of clubhouses in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So some people tend to think it's like chicken and lettuce under bread or something like that. And it's unfortunately, no, it's clubhouses. And it's funny to see them emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how varied they were relative to now. Like, some would have four slices of bread, some would have turkey, some would have chicken, some would have turkey and chicken. So it was, it was pretty interesting.
Mike Carruthers
Well, what is the definition of a club sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
I don't know if there's a hard and fast definition, but I think you, you have to have at least three slices of bread, you have to have bacon, you have to have turkey or chicken. But it can be, you know, open to interpretation. I just had a club sandwich at Fuller's Coffee Shop in Portland and they did it with chicken salad, which I had not had before, and it was delicious.
Mike Carruthers
What about the legendary peanut butter and jelly? Do we know where that started?
Barry Enderwick
Well, I know that the first mention of that in print was in the Boston Cooking school magazine in 1901. The original sandwich was a piece of bread, peanut butter, another piece of bread, jelly, and then another piece of bread, which actually was pretty tasty. That, that, that was kind of a nice change up on the regular peanut butter and jelly. But that's the first mention in print of peanut butter and jelly.
Mike Carruthers
And then. But yet it's, it's so simple and yet it's very, very popular. Certainly with kids. It's very popular.
Barry Enderwick
Oh sure, you get a little sweet, you get a little nuttiness. It's super easy. It doesn't go bad in your lunch bag as it sits there for hours. And it's tasty. To me, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I was a kid is almost like getting candy because it was so good.
Mike Carruthers
One non meat sandwich that seems to hold its own is a grilled cheese sandwich. People really have always enjoyed grilled cheese sandwiches and sometimes with tomato in it or whatever. But do we know the origins of that? Or again, it just seems like anybody could have figured that out.
Barry Enderwick
Yeah, it's hard to say pinpoint an exact origin on that. I just recorded yesterday Something called a cheese dream sandwich. And it was from a cookbook in 1912. It was basically a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't called a grilled cheese sandwich, but that's basically what it was. So it's hard to say when it was created or who created it, but it's been around for a long time. And it's a vegetarian sandwich.
Mike Carruthers
Give me some other interesting sandwiches and how they're made that. Because people can always rewind this and listen back and get the recipe just, you know, like, like what's a really cool sandwich to try that you, you think people would be surprised that it's so good.
Barry Enderwick
There's one from France called the pan bagnat. And it's basically you make this sort of nicoise salad, but with anchovy filets and tuna, and you dress it and you put it into this hollowed out loaf and you wrap it really tightly with saran wrap or cling film and you weight it down in the fridge overnight. And all that dressing soaks into the bread. It does. The bread is crusty, so it doesn't completely sog out and you just get this amazing, delicious sandwich the next day. So that is definitely one that, that's has stood the test of time because it's been around for quite a while. One more, One more. Okay. Well, I think the, the, the Reuben is a great example, particularly pastrami Reuben. You just basically have mustard, pastrami, sauerkraut, and then you griddle it. Oh, and Swiss cheese. And then you, you know, butter the outside and griddle it and get it nice and crispy and it's just delicious. You get a little sharpness from the, the sauerkraut. You get the richness from the meat, a little bit of spice from the meat, a little spice from the mustard on there. The nuttiness of the grilled of the Swiss cheese. The nuttiness of the Swiss cheese is fantastic. So that would be another one I'd recommend.
Mike Carruthers
Do you consider the, the tortilla wrapped food? Is that a sandwich?
Barry Enderwick
Not to me. To me, a tortilla is pretty uniform in thickness and it's wrapped around something as opposed to holding something. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, the closest it gets would be for me would be a taco. But a taco is more of a sling. That said, you know, got wonderful tortoise, many, many different kinds and they're delicious.
Mike Carruthers
What's another interesting piece of lore about sandwiches or some really, really horrible sandwich or something?
Barry Enderwick
Well, you know how I mentioned that Sliced bread was being sold in 1928, more people were buying it than baking it. Well, Fleshman's brothers had a dip in sales and they were concerned about it. So they got together with a marketing agency in New York and they came up with the Eat Fresh Yeast for Health campaign. And this manifested itself in different ways, but one of them was a recipe from 1936 for the yeast sandwich wherein you took a compressed yeast cake, added table sauce, which is Worcestershire sauce, mashed it up and put it between buttered bread. It just, it blows my mind that they actually convinced everyone to eat yeast like that. And it was terrible. Obviously made for a terrible sandwich. I've never eaten wallpaper paste, but I imagine that's what it's like.
Mike Carruthers
So here's a, you know, when is a sandwich not a sandwich? And that's an open faced sandwich because it defies the rule, but it's still called a sandwich. Why?
Barry Enderwick
I don't understand why. But I also figure, you know, if it's in a cookbook or in a section in a cookbook about sandwiches, I'm going to make it. I don't want to miss out on a possible delicious sandwich or horrible sandwich even. That was from back in the day. Just because it doesn't have a top piece of bread. That gets back to my whole like, you know, everything's made up, so why not just try everything?
Mike Carruthers
Right? Well and as you, as you point out, if it's in a cookbook, where else would you put it? If it's an open faced sandwich recipe, it's where else in the book would it go besides with the other sandwiches?
Barry Enderwick
Right.
Mike Carruthers
So every sandwich has bread and one food that is closely associated with bread is butter. So how does butter fit into the whole sandwich story?
Barry Enderwick
Up Until World War II, almost every sandwich in the United States started with buttered bread. Like without doubt, without an exception, everything was buttered. World War II comes along, butter gets rationed, margarine starts to make a, get a foothold. And then by, I don't know, 1950s 60s buttering, bread was not really done much at all. But it is still done to every sandwich in the UK and a lot of places in Europe. And it's interesting to make sandwiches of old. And people comment all the time, hey, what's with all this butter? And it's like, well, we used to do that, but we don't anymore.
Mike Carruthers
Well, this has been fun and you've made me kind of hungry. I've been talking to Barry Enderwick. He is kind of the quintessential sandwich expert, and he's author of a book called Sandwiches of the Cookbook, all the Best and Most Surprising Things People have Put Between Slices of Bread. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks again, Barry. This was great.
Barry Enderwick
Thank you. I appreciate it. This was a lot of fun chatting with you.
Mike Carruthers
It's one of those hypothetical questions you hear about that if someone drops a penny off the Empire State Building and it hit someone below, would it go right through their head and kill them? And the answer, according to a book that has a lot of these kind of questions, like the title of the book is Can a Guy Get Pregnant? But the answer is if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it hits someone in the head, it probably won't kill them. In fact, you might be able to catch it. It would be going at about 100 miles an hour, but the wind resistance would keep it from going any faster. However, if you dropped a ballpoint pen, that would be deadly because the streamlined design would minimize the resistance and that would probably kill you. And that is something you should know. I can't express how important and how helpful it would be if you would just share this podcast with someone you know. It's easy to do using the share function on whatever podcast app you listen to on and really it helps us so much to help grow the audience and get the word out about this podcast. Something youg Should Know is produced by Jeff Havison, Jennifer Brennan, and executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something you Should Know. There is a fascinating and unique podcast I'd like you to check out as I have it's called Only One in the Room. A few years back, Laura Cathcart Robbins attended a writer's retreat where out of 600 attendees, she was the only black one. So later she wrote about her experience and the article went viral because people understand what it feels like to be the Only One in the Room. Only One in the Room is for anyone who has ever felt alone in a room full of people. I bet you've had that feeling. Listen and you'll hear guests like Hilary Phelps, sister of Olympian Michael Phelps, sharing her story of her secret addiction, former Fox News reporter Christine O'Donnell, who was fired after one of her social media posts was taken out of context. Only One in the Room was named a top podcast by Reader's Digest, the Manual and Bustle magazines. Every week, Laura and her co host Scott Slaughter invites you to join them for an hour and lose yourself in someone's only one story. Check out only one in the room. Wherever you get your podcasts.
John Moores
Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists?
Mike Carruthers
Then you are going to love our.
John Moores
Hit podcast Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the magical millennial. And I'm the dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover. On our show, we are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures.
Barry Enderwick
You got this.
John Moores
No, I didn't believe that about a witch coming true.
Mike Carruthers
Well, I didn't either. Of course.
Barry Enderwick
I'm just cicada.
John Moores
I'm crying, I'm suicidal.
Mike Carruthers
You win that one.
John Moores
So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcast Summary: "A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich" Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers | OmniCast Media | Released December 23, 2024
Mike Carruthers opens the episode by addressing a common winter phenomenon: why our noses run when it's cold. He explains the physiological response of the human body to cold air:
Mike Carruthers [00:47]: "The nose is kind of a fancy air conditioner, and one of its jobs is to warm and humidify the air we inhale."
When exposed to unusually cold air, the nose ramps up its production of mucus to warm and humidify the air, leading to a runny nose. Additionally, the moisture from exhaled air condenses in colder temperatures, contributing to the phenomenon. Mike reassures listeners that this is a normal response, albeit sometimes inconvenient.
Guest: John Moores, a seasoned planetary scientist and author of "Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration."
Mike introduces John Moores, who shares his extensive experience in space missions and planetary science.
John begins by contemplating what it would be like to experience the planets through human senses:
John Moores [05:37]: "Each one of the planets is a different place, and some of the planets even have multiple characters."
He highlights the Moon's unique scent, likening it to "spent gunpowder," a smell reported by Apollo astronauts after returning from lunar walks.
Mars is described as a "dry and frozen version of our home." John points out intriguing differences, such as:
John Moores [07:51]: "The sunset that you see, it's not a red sunset like we get on the Earth. It's a blue sunset."
Mars' day is similar in length to Earth's, slightly over 24 hours, which he notes could allow for familiar sleep and wake cycles. The prospect of gaining extra minutes in a Martian day adds a humorous touch:
John Moores [09:14]: "I mean, you've got the fact that on Mars, the day is just a little over 24 hours long, so you could have the same sort of sleep and wake cycle that we have here on the Earth. And frankly, the 40 minutes. Who doesn't want 40 minutes back in their day every day?"
John describes Venus as having a dual nature:
John Moores [09:45]: "Venus has this dual character to it. You've got this sort of hellish world down at the bottom of the atmosphere, intense pressure, intense heat... But once you're 50 or 80 kilometers up, then you're actually sitting in the most Earth-like environment in the entire solar system."
He elaborates on the challenges of exploring Venus, particularly the extreme heat that hampers robotic missions.
Mercury's unique orbital characteristics are discussed, emphasizing its prolonged daytime:
John Moores [11:57]: "Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. So when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the sun at a walking pace."
John provides insights into the sun's lifecycle and its role in the solar system:
John Moores [17:57]: "The sun is middle-aged, so it's about four and a half billion years old... It's just like being near a campfire or being near the burner on a stove. We get to bask in a bit of that heat."
He explains the controlled nuclear reactions at the sun's core that sustain its glow and energy output.
Jupiter is portrayed as the solar system's behemoth with a mesmerizing atmosphere:
John Moores [18:50]: "Jupiter, the biggest of all the planets... it's got that bottomless atmosphere, what it would be like to be in that atmosphere."
He describes the experience of descending through Jupiter's cloud layers, encountering diminishing light and increasing density, akin to exploring a "giant fluffy cave."
Addressing the controversial reclassification of Pluto, John clarifies:
John Moores [21:37]: "Pluto is technically now called a dwarf planet. Don't worry, it's still where it was. It's still doing its same orbit."
He explains that the discovery of similar trans-Neptunian objects led scientists to reclassify Pluto, distinguishing it from the eight primary planets.
John delves into the philosophical aspects of Earth's uniqueness:
John Moores [25:24]: "They have something called the anthropic principle in which the reason that the Earth is here and why does the universe have the physical laws it does... is because if it didn't, then we wouldn't be here to observe it."
He marvels at Earth's hospitable conditions amid the vast array of planetary environments, pondering the rarity of life-supporting worlds.
Guest: Barry Enderwick, renowned sandwich expert and author of "Sandwiches of the Cookbook: All the Best and Most Surprising Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread."
Mike transitions to the second segment, focusing on the humble yet versatile sandwich.
Barry discusses the debated origins of the sandwich, acknowledging the popular tale of the Earl of Sandwich while presenting evidence of earlier versions:
Barry Enderwick [30:25]: "We don't know where they came from, per se... it's rumored that in 1762 or thereabouts, he was playing cards and didn't want to get up. So he had meat between two slices of bread."
He cites an ancient Chinese sandwich-like food, the Rojia Mo, dating back to 200 BC, highlighting the inevitability of combining ingredients between bread.
Barry affirms that hamburgers and hot dogs fit within the sandwich category, emphasizing their structural characteristics:
Barry Enderwick [32:58]: "Early menus used to call it a hamburger sandwich. You've got meat and other toppings between bread. That's a classic definition of a Sandwich."
Regarding hot dogs:
Barry Enderwick [33:12]: "Technically it does fall into sandwichedom."
He acknowledges the cultural disconnect but stands by his technical definition.
Barry traces the modern sandwich's evolution from simple meat-and-bread combinations to diverse and unconventional creations:
Barry Enderwick [37:00]: "You start to see these ingredients being put together that don't, you know, wouldn't have been put together previously. And I think that's reflective of how the nation was."
This trend mirrors societal changes and increased access to varied ingredients and cuisines.
Barry shares his personal favorites and surprising sandwich combinations that defy expectations:
Barry Enderwick [33:54]: "I have over a hundred sandwiches of our history where, you know, people say, my grandpa used to make this, my mom used to make this."
Highlights include:
Conversely, Barry mentions less successful attempts, such as a red onion and peanut butter sandwich, reflecting on historical necessity during tough times.
Discussing open-faced sandwiches and tea sandwiches, Barry explains their historical context and purpose:
Barry Enderwick [40:17]: "Sandwiches weren't always intended as the end all, be all of a meal. They were part of a course within a larger meal."
These smaller, delicate sandwiches were designed to accompany other dishes rather than serve as standalone meals.
Barry highlights the role of butter in traditional sandwiches and its decline post-World War II due to rationing:
Barry Enderwick [47:15]: "Up until World War II, almost every sandwich in the United States started with buttered bread... but it is still done to every sandwich in the UK and a lot of places in Europe."
Butter added richness and moisture, a practice that waned with the introduction of alternatives like margarine.
Mike concludes with intriguing tidbits, such as the physics behind dropping objects from skyscrapers:
Mike Carruthers [48:24]: "If you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it hits someone in the head, it probably won't kill them... but if you dropped a ballpoint pen, that would be deadly."
He encourages listeners to share the podcast and promotes other shows, ensuring a comprehensive and engaging wrap-up.
In this episode, Mike Carruthers expertly navigates two vastly different yet equally fascinating topics. From the intricate details of our solar system's planets to the rich history and cultural significance of the sandwich, listeners are treated to a wealth of knowledge and engaging conversations. Notable experts John Moores and Barry Enderwick provide deep insights, memorable anecdotes, and thought-provoking perspectives, making this episode a must-listen for curious minds.
Notable Quotes:
John Moores [05:37]: "Each one of the planets is a different place, and some of the planets even have multiple characters."
Barry Enderwick [33:54]: "I have over a hundred sandwiches of our history where... people say, my grandpa used to make this, my mom used to make this."
Mike Carruthers [48:24]: "If you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it hits someone in the head, it probably won't kill them... but if you dropped a ballpoint pen, that would be deadly."
This comprehensive summary encapsulates the episode's key discussions, insights, and memorable moments, providing a robust overview for both existing listeners and newcomers alike.