How License Plates Work

information out on our social media channels right yep. And on Friday, October seven, tickets will be on sale for all three shows, and you can watch our social media handles for information and ticket links. How about that? That sounds great. Can't wait to be back on stage. We really really missed it, yea. And we'll see you guys in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Harry's here too, providing

us with last minute facts and informations and tidbits. And that makes this a banger of an episode of Stuff You Should Not It's a banger? Is that how they say? At the brutes. Yeah, is that your British accent? That was that your John Klice by way of Chicago. M Uh can I make a quick announcement? Sure, it just occurred to me that I'm clean to announce us now that I go into the recording studio of my basement

which is now full of my wife Emily's business. Oh yeah, okay, because you've you've known this for a while, Jerry too. But Emily shut down her business everybody. Uh and rather than me trying to stumble through her thought process, uh, she has here. She is now. Um, she has it her full like statement on her website, I love your Mama dot com and all the handwringing that went into it, and uh, she had a twenty year run. It was

a great thing. And she's going to keep her website going though, because she's gonna she's gonna still do like she said, She's gonna make things from only from things she can grow. So the business itself as a hey, I gotta dominate the world because I'm ambitious type of thing. Yeah, I'm an into pet woman of the es that has gone away, But she's gonna still do probably some uh face prays and things like that anything she can grow from her own herb garden on a very small level,

very limited things she's got. It figured out that she's not retiring anything, but um, just big thanks to every She got a lot of support from the stuff you should know Army over the years, both emotionally and by buying things every time we mentioned her, so it really meant a lot to her. Uh and she wanted me to pass that along. That was very nice. And congratulations to Emily on a twenty year run. That is rather respectable for a small business, I think so, and we're

all proud of her. And now I'm the walls are closing up here in the basement right so because she couldn't get rid of everything, we have two storage spaces in now our basement, so she'll be working on that getting rid of that stuff for a while as well. I'll bet it smells amazing. At least it smells better

than it ever has down here, you know what. I'll bet it smells better than chuck a dirty old license plate, that's right, especially one that's a Sportsman's Paradise from Louisiana that they got out of the stomach of a shark and jaw right or asked man from New York City. It's the ass man. You got that straight. So, by the way, since you brought up Steinfeld, I went back and started watching um uh Larry Sanders show on HBO. Great,

like maybe the greatest. Actually, like I'm rewatching, I'm like this is this is even better than it was years ago. And I've come to believe that Jerry Seinfeld is a twee impression of Gary Shandling. Gary Shandling is the legit o G and Seinfeld is just a aberration of him. I think Seinfeld would certainly own up to being influenced by Gary Schandling. He probably really punched me in the stomach for calling him twee though. Uh No, he would just say will you again? That's right, and I just

go home devastated. Now, great show, but I think ahead of its time as well, Larry Sanders. Yeah, absolutely ahead of its time for sure. It's definitely worth watching. If you have HBO Max it's all over it and just go watch it and thank me later, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Uh, and uh, sorry, let's let me give it one more kudo. Uh, all respect to thirty Rock, But Larry Sanders is easily the best sort of behind the scenes of a TV show movie

set type of thing I've ever seen. Yeah, even better than the Player because it was way funnier. Well yeah, Player was great in some way though. Yeah, but it's no Larry Sanders show correct. Um. So one more thing while we're shouting out TV shows, UM, I also saw both of them are in Netflix, um. And they're both horror TV shows, and they are awesome. One is like

straight ahead scare you to death horror, Japanese horror. It's ju on the origins, so you know, the The Grudge, so it was Juan in Japan and this TV show it's like an eight part series, I think maybe six. It's like the origins that lead up to Juan, like The Grudge. It's amazingly well done. It's perfectly tailored to

fit it just precisely, so well done. And then the other one is called mary Anne, and it's a French language which story um set in today's time, but it deals with like a sixteenth century which I think, and it's not quite as straight a head scary, but it's really really good. Nonetheless, it's very engrossing. You guys watch a lot of horror. Yeah, yeah, you MEI has to just buy proxy. But yes, I watch a lot of horror. I don't get too because Emily is not into it.

But we've been loving the Bear and of course I shouted out a lot, but another shout out to Reservation Dogs b J and the Bear O the Bear Chuck. No, I haven't is the Oh wait, good, wait a minute that the Chicago restaurant I tried, and I was like, it's very stressful. No, it wasn't even that. It was very boring. I thought, oh, that's interesting because it's like the most adrenaline fueled show on TV. I know it's really weird, but I was like, I could not be

more bored than I am right now. But I get what you're saying. It was it was a weird juxtaposition because I know I was supposed to be like feeling intense, and I was just like, this is I don't like it, So say what, you've also done some heroin that probably that couldn't stay awake. No, I definitely did not do any heroine. It was just that show was extremely boring to me. But again, I mean, if you like it. That's great. I'm not trying to tell you not to.

I'm just that was take on it. So I'm glad we ate up some time because Chuck, I I, this is my pick license plates. And it turns out it's a little more boring than I had anticipated. Like something I do too, I do too, and there's some interesting stuff in there. But something this sweeping, a global, worldwide phenomenon that's been around for over a hundred years, you would think there'd be a little more like crazy stuff,

you know, associated with it, and there's just not. I mean, Ed helped us out with this, and he did, God bless him, his best work, trying to find anything to make this interesting and he finally did you know, and we found some other stuff too. But it's just not as engrossing as I thought. It's kind of like The Bear, that great show that is so funny too. I was watching that the it's hysterical. Um, I disagree. I think

you're selling the short. I think I thought this was really interesting considering it's a show about letters and numbers on a piece of metal on the back of a car. Okay, point made. And also I should say, um, this was also a listener request a J and Tracy in Pittsburgh, Ish. Tracy said they requested this one not too long ago, a few weeks ago. And man, that's the kind of

turnaround time we have here at stuff. You should know. Yeah, and we know it's them because their license plates says PTS B R G I s H. That's pretty great, the great new show. You just did that off the cuff too. Man, I'm impressed. Well, there's too many characters in there, but everyone gets a joke. Okay, So what

country do you think invented the license plate? Chuck? Had to be the United States, with the industry and automobiles, you would think so, but no, As a matter of fact, the French had us beat by a good decade, a full decade, not that kind of rough decade. It could be anywhere from like six to eight years, a ten year stretch. The There was actually one guy who who kind of originated him. He was the prefect of the

Paris Police Force. His name is Louis Limpin, and in he said, Hey, we're starting to get more cars on the road, and I think we need to kind of regulate them a little better than we are, which is to say we're not doing that at all. Yeah, So they came up with all kinds of stuff plates, driver's test, driver i D. Speed limits, stuff like that, and the US, as we do, look to the French for all things.

And in I believe that New York was the first US state to require a law and this was in nineteen o one April that basically said, all right, here's the deal. You need to put your initials on your car somewhere. They need to be three inches tall, but otherwise go wild. It's up to you how you want to do this. If you want to make them out of little garfields that no one will understand for many years, you you do that. Uh. And the New Yorkers did it.

And I think that this sort of customization allowed for some kind of creative New Yorkers to do different things, everything from like would to leather and I'm sure all kinds of crazy fonts. Sure, definitely, like a lot of people just went to the hardware store and bought house numbers. Um. Some people just painted them directly on their cars. And like, the one one thing I saw is this is so early. There's so few cars on the road that this was

not like a revenue generating move. They were actually using it like you had to put your own initials on the car, so that if you terrorized a horse or drove drove up on the sidewalk, or did donuts in the middle of Times Square, they would know who did that. And that's the kind of like usage that cars were getting. There were a lot of like jerks driving cars initially, um, and that was the way to kind of rain their

behavior in. Yeah. And then the tenure mark like you talked about in nineteen o three is basically at the point when they said, all right, we gotta start issuing these things because this initial we didn't really think out this initial plan because people have the same initials. There's a lot more cars, and we can't go around just looking for every you know, g R. L in New York to find out who was terrorizing the horse. Yeah, Gary Larson. Wait, Gary Regis Larson. Well, it depends on

if you're doing a monogram. Okay, so it could be Gary Larson. Read just I could have been correct. What's the deal of that? Well, we should do a short step on Monica. The idea but a great idea. Um. So nineteen o three it was kind of like a watershed year for license plates in the United States. And also I realized, I'm sad to realize that it was a rough decade from to nineteen o one. It wasn't

a full decade, but um, nineteen o three. That's why I thought it was a full decade, because it was just such a huge year where all these other states said, yeah, we're going to get on board. First it was Philadelphia, not a state, but it's in Pennsylvania, kind of near Pittsburgh ish if you think about it. And they were

the first city to issue official license plates. Cleveland was technically the first city in the whole country, even before New York, to require license plates, but they didn't issue them. Philadelphia was the first city to actually issue them in the US. Right, And apparently Pennsylvania likes to say they you know, that makes them the first state to do so, technically correct, But the state of Massachusetts was the first state to do a statewide program, uh, and not just

the city of Philadelphia. Um so, and this is kind of the cool thing and put a pin in this as for collectibles later on. But Massachusetts did the thing that a lot of other states did was they started at one, and they just started working their way up and apparently the Highway Commission how a commission member named Frederick Tutor got license plate number one and that they

still his his ancestors years later still have that number. Yeah, and Frederick Tudor ties in with our transcendentalist episode because his father was the ice King, the guy who harvested ice on Walden Pond while they and shipped it all over the world. So very strange, surprising tie in, Chuck, Um, should we go over what we like to call our bulleted list? I love them. They're so great that it's just packed with information, no frills, you know, man, I used to do a lot of those on the Old

House Stuff Works articles. I think Katie, my editor as used to make fun of me because I used to do bulleted list to get the point across, and like, you can absorb them so easily. I love bulleted lists. Buddy, you didn't do them a lot though you were into the pros. Yeah. I'd like to hear myself talk, but I respect a bulleted list. It is funny. Personality wise, I'm definitely a bullet list personality guy. I made this bulleted list. It's in my personality as well. I really

took paragraphs and broke them into so I'm bullet too. Okay, I can hang out with the bullet people too. Did you do the bullets his little movie slates? Or was that some accident on my end? There was an accident on your end, but a happy accident. Yeah. When I printed this out instead of little round bullets, there a little you know, movie clappers movie slate. Don't know how I did that, but I'll try to recreate it. I didn't know it was even possible anyway. Uh, what do

we got here? First hit the first one? Okay, So the first slogan on license plate was Idaho potatoes, which is pretty cool. I mean that would hang around for a while. Um, but they actually embossed a brown potato that took up most of the license plate and it looked a lot like poop. And it didn't It didn't stick around very long. I think that was just a

one year thing. Uh. Something that has stuck around is the longest slogan Sreek in the United States, and it's one of my favorite license plates because of this started in nineteen thirty six in the Great State of uh mean, in the Great State of Maine. Vacation Land also the title of our friend John Hodgman's book, one of Them. And it's been on Main's license plates since nineteen thirty six every year since then. That's quite a streak. That's

far and away the longest streak. I think the next longest is like nineteen and I can't remember which which slogan it is. I just love that slogan. It just sounds so welcoming vacation land. Yeah, and the fact that it's like one word too, it's just prints. They like nailed it right on the head, right out of the gate,

basically absolutely what else. Florida had a grapefruit. I used to have a grape fruit on their plates starting in nineteen thirty five, but it just took a year because it looked like the sort of the cartoon bombs, the little little black uh circle with the fuse coming out of it and looks very much like a grapefruit now that you think of it. Yeah, And that license plate became known as the bomb license plate, So that was long before the bomb meant something good, and they just

they took it out of circulation. And actually there's um something that that wasn't an error like that was intentional, but they didn't mean for it to look like a bomb. There was a straight up controversial error that happened in in Ohio where they issued the brand new license plate, this beautiful license plate um and there's a banner being

pulled by the right Butt Brothers airplane. But after they announced it and it printed thirty thousand of these things already, some people pointed out on the internet, I think on Twitter, that they had the airplane back backwards on the license plate. You can tell it looks like a box kite. It does, and it looks like the way that they had it originally. You can understand how they got it like that, but

they just didn't check their work. And then North Carolina, you know, North Carolina and Ohio have been going back and forth about which place actually was the birthplace of aviation. They went on Twitter and they said, y'all leave Ohio owned. They wouldn't know because they weren't there. Yeah, it was pretty pretty good burn actually, but that was very recent controversy. One of the most interesting things about license plates the

first vanity plates Great State of Pennsylvania once again. Yeah, what else I think in fifty seven they standardized the size nationwide, which is six, but twelve unless you were riding a motor scooter or a motorbike. And those are those are the cutest plates of all. I love those things. Yeah, and those aren't standardized. Apparently they're just supposed to be smaller. I guess, yeah, like something that doesn't look dumb on the back of a motors right, not oversized, you know,

you wanted to be proportionate. UM In the nineteen seventy one was a big year too, because that was when three M started supplying reflective sheeting to UM license plates. Like in leading up to that time, at night, you were pretty much s O L. But now you could shine some headlights on these newfangled license plates and they would just glow right back at you and you could see who was driving recklessly in front of you, right, UM.

And that actually is going to be kind of controversial, as we'll see in the coming years starting after nineteen seventy one. But I say we take an break and we'll get back to all that right after it. How about that It sounds great. Well, now we're on the road,

driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh can chuck it stuff you should know, all right, So, Chuck, if you look at all of the license plates in the United States, they the fonts that are actually like the string of numbers or if it's vanity plate, like the actual like word or abbreviation whatever, those look remarkably similar across the United States. But they're

not quite the same. I saw somewhere that there's like four different characterizations or four different types, and they're they're characterized by just little changes, like the edges are squared around it, that kind of thing. But they're remarkably similar. And supposedly there's the reason for that is there's one company in the US that's supplied all of the dies for the embossing for many many years, Yes, the John R.

Wald Company. And uh Ed points out that he got a lot of ins information from a couple of a few different websites of license plate collectors. And you know, usually we pride ourselves on like super legit sources, and it's not to say these aren't, but for an episode like this, you know, this about as legit as you can get. But he does point out that these collectors are really really serious people about their collecting so it's probably more verifiable than just about anything that we ever

look up, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure, UM I agree, because there is a lot there's a real dearth of information out There's like a list of ten interesting facts about license plates in there, and that's copied and pasted everywhere all over the internet basically. But um ed did turn up something really interesting about European plates, right, Yeah, and it sort of to back up this story, we

should talk briefly about its uh predecessor in Chicago. When they started making plates in Chicago early on, they realized pretty quickly that people could fake their license tags, so they started making UM they started issuing numbers to people, like just the metal numbers they had to mount on their own because they were making these metal numbers, uh basically in a in a way that was unique enough to where they were like you couldn't pick it up

at your local hardware store, uh, so you could spot the fakes. And this came back later in Europe in the nineteen seventies in Germany when a left wing radical group called the Red Army Faction was um doing car bombings and kidnappings and bank robberies and all kinds of bad things, and they were using fake you know, they were faking their license plates. Uh, those cool, cool European license plates that are shorter and longer and just as

James bondy as you can imagine. Yeah, because when they flip up, there's a machine gun behind them or in oils like. Um. It's funny because I think a lot of Americans think European plates look super cool, and I've talked to some Europeans that think American plates look cool with the graphics and stuff. So maybe it's just a grassy screener thing, but I think those europan plates are awesome. I'm all about the American plates, I have to admit. Okay.

So anyway, they were faking these license plates getting away with it, and they realized that the font that they were using d I N fourteen fifty one was really uniform, and it was you know, I mean, like a lot of fonts, if you take the leg off of an R, you've got a pe. But this was sort of that to the extreme where it was really easy just to sort of remove certain strokes to come up with other

letters and still have the plate look believable. Yeah, you could just put like black or white electrical tape over it. And the problem was Germany did use that same font d I n. Fourteen fifty one throughout the entire country, and so um the Red Army faction had the whole country so nervous and scared that the government was like, we need to come up with a new font for

our license plates. And they set a calligrapher and design professor named Carl George one word hoofer, and he created something called ffi Shrift, an entirely new font from scratch, in just a few months in the I think the summer of nineteen seventy eight. And you took German in high school, you're gonna say the word even practicing, I was like, I probably shouldn't say this on the podcast. I had to. Yeah, it's tough. I had to break it down, and even with my German experience, I mean,

it is a long word. I didn't count the letters, but it looks like the German alphabet basically looks like the American alphabet. I've had it, buddy, So I'm gonna say it's fell schumser schwer unders fell shun ser Schwerinda shrift. Very nice, Yeah, that's it. I think that's right. And the first word before shrift that was all one word, isn't. It's quite a word. It's a long word, and it means, from what I understand in German, either fraud preventing or

falsification hindering. And then shrift means font, so it's a falsification hindering font. And the way that um, Carl George Hoofer um came up with this font, or the way that he made it difficult to forge, is he added what are known as sir reefs or seraph's. I think it's Sarah, right, and that's Sarah. I I had never known what a Sarah was until really I started researching

this episode. Yeah, I never knew. Kidding me, no, So Sarah for those of you who are like me, like how I used to be, so I can remember, I can really identify with you, guys. But as Sarah is like a little extra flourish on a letter that gives it a little extra pop, a little oomph. So if you draw a letter I and then you make crossbars at the top and bottom, those crossbars are technically Seraph's right. Yeah, and just let me explain the reason I was shocked.

Was because of your uh, your past history and publishing and newspaper things and as a writer, and Sarah's and San Sarah's is just something I would have thought you would have never bothered to go figure it out. I walked around knowing I did not know what a seraph was, or that Sarah was even necessarily a thing I did know and is. I think it's sans serif. And this is why chuck, because songs in French means without, so I think it's Sarah. I knew that sans meant without, Okay,

I just never put the two together. This, Yes, it's all very embarrassing all of a sudden. I thought I thought admitting this would just kind of make the episode move along more smoothly. But there's a spotlight on me. I'm sweating quite a bit, and I'm really very uncomfortable, and we took an ad break too recently ago to just go to it. I'm really sorry. This all surprises me because you're very much a song seraph guy. Uh, Like you're like, yeah, I mean, aren't you sort of

calibri or like, what's your fint calibri? Is my font calibre? On ten point. See, I'm Times New Roman fourteen point all the way, as you know. Uh so I'm looking at Sarah's all day long, all the time. What's funny is Calibri ten point is way more bullet list ee than Times the Roman on fourteen. So it's funny we kind of cross over to one another side in different places. Yeah, it's funny whenever you do live shows like you're tiny, little fine, I just who reads ten point vont that's

so tiny paper, which is great? Yours is so big the front row can follow along with the episode. They can see it. So clearly we should settle at twelve, which is I think the standard. Right, Yeah, it's still too big for me. Yeah, all right, I'm challenging my eyes. All right. Sorry to tease you about the seraph stuff. I forgive you. But the point is he added the seraph's basically here and there to make it to where

it was really hard to replicate. Yeah, and again he basically cheering this out in a few months because Germany was in like this emergency state because the Red Army faction was terrorizing literally the country. And then by the time it was ready for production, I guess the Red Army faction had been largely broken up, and they just shelved Effie Shrift until I think the mid nineties, for almost fifteen or so years. It just went away. But

luckily they already kind of had it. So when the European Unions started to try to standardize UM license plates across the whole, Germany stepped up and said, hey, we've got this really great font called FFF shripped. What do you guys think about this one? And they're like, what's the FE stand for? In Germany said don't ask. Yeah, yeah, it's twenty two letters long. You don't want to know. I mean it looks Icelandic almost. Yeah. Um. So now we come to the very scintillating part of the episode

where we talk about tag fees. UM. There are not standardized tag fees across the country because states handle this.

It's not federalized, at least not yet. And uh Ed used New York as an example because Ed lives in New York and but most states are about the same and that you can usually pay a little bit of extra money anywhere from well ten dollars is the low, which is Virginia, which we'll get to that in a second um, although we have to like sixty even I think Washington, d C Is about the most expensive at a hundred, but at least it was recently to get

a specialty plate, which one do you know which plate? Yeah? That which specialty plate is a hundred bucks in DC is at the Texas without representation one. Well I think that actually maybe for vanity which you know, we should point out those are two different things. Especially plate can be uh, you know, support the A s p C A or support veterans, or hey, I'm a teacher or I'm a firefighter, or this is an antique car, like any of those sort of standard things. You can pay

extra four. But then you can also obviously get to your your vanity plate, which you're going to pay even more on top of that. So I was looking up cool Um specialty plates around the country and um, there are some new ones I found. I think a popular mechanics slide show Montana has this really cool one. It's just black and white, mostly black field with some white here there, and they have a t Rex skull on there's it's like supports the museums in the state. UM,

Florida has a great one. It's got a space shuttle taking off, um with you know, on the rockets and all the boosters and all that stuff. Um, and it's it's too um commemorate the Challenger in Columbia disasters. It's very good looking. And then California has one that supports its museums. And um, I guess Charles Schultze's estate lent Snoopy out just to help drum up money. So you can get a Snoopy license plate in California. Yeah, and that's the whole deal is usually some of this money

goes toward these organizations. Um, and not just like in the coffers of the state. Uh. Since you brought up California, I can say that we used to love trying to spot when I lived there, the old um blue for my money, the coolest license plate ever, the blue with yellow letter California license plate from the seventies that used to see on chips all the time, and you would occasionally still see those out in l A And it was it was always kind of a cool thing. I

think they have that you can get it to throwback. Um, I guess I saw it just like the nineteen SI the five edition and like so you know, there's so many people into like hot rods and stuff out in California. They're like going crazy for that because it makes their car look that much more authentic. I love it. I would totally get one. So vanity plates, like you said, they're a different thing. They're gonna cost you a lot more depending on where you are. And did you see

that huff Post slide show that I sent? Yeah, Like I was literally laughing an hour or so after last looking at it, like just could not stop lappy. There was one can you guess what my favorite one was? No, there was one. I think it was either Minnesota or North Carolina, and it was Jay is Lord, as in

Jesus is Lord. But that took up all of the spaces on the license plate, so it was one word j I s Lord And like I can't, I could not stop laughing about that yesterday because I'm sure the guy who got a Jesus Lord license plate gets so mad when you point out what else it looked like, um, yeah, And if you haven't just sounded out j I scored all one word. Yeah. I mean a lot of those are um I think well intended that turned out to look like other things kind of like asked man on Seinfeld. Uh,

and that was a very popular one in Florida. That was true at least, Nope said so that wash And I'm not gonna spell this one out. You just got to use your imagination, folks. A five five and then remember there's a big uh orange in the middle. It looks like an oh a A five five and then that symbol and then R G Y which just just write it down. I mean they had to like slip past them. They just because there wasn't an O and there,

they used the orange for the oh. Surely the people were just like they didn't think anything of it, right, very very creative. I saw it. I saw it. Um. I think a medium article. I can't remember who wrote it, but um the author was talking about how like some d m v s will like use Urban Dictionary and like scroll the internet and like try to figure out what people are saying in these things to decide whether

it didn't approve them, especially these days. Um. And actually we'll get to that in a second on on free speech. But with vanity plates, there are certain rules. Obviously, you're not supposed to say naughty, dirty things, even though people try and get by it in creative ways, like we

just mentioned. You're not allowed to use um like an oh, the letter I'm sorry, like the In fact, some states don't even use the letter zero or the letter oh because you can intersperse the or interchange those to make it look like the other to get around the no

profanity thing. Uh. And then as far as vanity plates go, and I was shocked at this number or this list of Virginia being number one in vanity plates, but it's by percentage, which makes a lot more sense because when I went to California for the first time when I was I think eighteen, I had never seen so many vanity plates in my life as in l A. And I was like, this is crazy and and I thought, kind of dumb, but that's your thing. That's your thing.

But Virginia has a sixteen point one nine percent of their plate and it's because they're cheap there. It's only ten bucks. Uh. And I think in New Hampshire was next, followed by Illinois, Nevada, Montana, and Texas was the lowest at point five percent. And then Canadians, we don't want to forget about you. Ontario leads the way with four point nine five nine percent, followed by Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and then the lowest was British Columbia at point five

nine percent. There don't there's some sociological study just begging to be designed through, right, you know, I'm not quite sure what it is, but I can see it in there somewhere. So yeah, Texas is just like, yeah, we

don't care, We're from Texas. UM. So the whole thing with vanity plate and you know, your ability to say whatever you want in the state being able to deny you from getting a plate that you want UM brings up in the United States free speech issues because you are paying for this UM and you're displaying it on your car. It's like you are saying this that's automatically

protected by the First Amendment. But it's a little fuzzy chuck because the state is issuing this thing that you're saying whatever you want to say on and in some way you're repping them as well, or they're repped on the license plate, so they may or may not want to be associated with whatever you're saying. Yeah, and when it's come to the courts, they have generally sided with people, uh like ed gave the example there was a license plate issue in North Carolina that said white power w

y T E DASH. I guess p w r R P w E R p O w r oh. It was the full the full word, so you know, uh, free speech ehaw uh. And courts generally generally side with uh. And I think when it becomes um, dirty words and stuff, as they get a little more involved, yeah, definitely can't do things like that. But I don't know, it's interesting, so, um, there's there. I saw. It goes both ways. They don't necessarily, as a rule, you know, side with the the individual.

Like there was a woman in I want to say New Hampshire or Vermont maybe, and in the nineties I think she, um, she requested s h T hp N S the second part is happens, and her whole thing was like she had it as just a reminder she went through a really terrible year and she had it as a reminder that, like, you know, this stuff happens, you just kind of get through it or whatever. And the state was like, no, those first three letters are dirty.

And I think the Supreme Court ruled in the state's favor. They're like, yep, that's dirty, can't have it. And she was like, this is so like think about context and nuance eyes and they were like no, and she could not have her s h T hp N S license plate. I wonder if anyone has s Y s K fan oh man that that's if they do. I want to hear about it, because mine says s Y s K host and mine says s Y s K h s T right uh, and Jerry says me so nice man. Um, No,

of course mine doesn't say that, but it's funny. I do. I did have, and I think I mentioned this on on an episode at some point. One of my pickup truck that I still have has six six six accident, which I thought was kind of funny. Sure, yeah, I don't. I'm sure they would give you six six six if you wanted it. But it's way funnier when it's accidental six six six or l S T. Those accidental ones

are hilarious. Yeah. It is interesting though, the question of what is allowed, um, because I could see some like religious conservatives saying they don't want someone to be able to say Hail Satan on their plate. Uh, But I mean, truly, that's free speech, Like the courts would decide on the favor of the car owner in that case. I would think so because it's free speech and that you're just saying what you want to say. But it's also religion.

You can certainly make an argument, and I could see them. I could see the state being like, Okay, fine, you know, I think it tends to be like you said, where it's a foul word according to the state, and or like a straight up like straight up hate speech or a racial slur or something like that. Sadly, in the United States, some people try to get license plates that have racial slurs and they tend to be like out of hand and eyed, and I don't really think a

court would would side with that person. I now have a new goal in life. I just realized, I want to get an old uh an old full side is woody station wagon from the sixties or seventies, and I want the license plate to say Hale st n w g N to b g N, not Hale Satan Hale station wagon. Oh nice, but it looks like Hale station Hale Satan. I'm so bad at that. Um I would be like Hale stand wang. So that happened to me in l a lot. I would be like, I don't even know what that means. Yeah, No, I'm with you.

That's a very uncle you mean is actually really good at it. And she admitted last night that it was because she practiced so much as a kid. Because there was a game show on I think in the eighties called like Bumper Busters or bumper Buddies, and the whole game show is you guessing what a license plate says. I'm not kidding, that was it. I just kept waiting for like the next round to come up, and Nope,

that was all they did. That's really funny. Yeah. And also, while we're on at Chuck, just real quick, I gotta shout out, um that Medium article that I was talking about, Um, the never ending free speech fight over vanity license plates by Zara Stone. All right, how about we take a break. Well, I'll dream up a couple of more great vanity plates. Even though hail station Wagon. I think I just came up with something. Breakin. It's wonderful, and we'll talk about

whiskey plates and who makes these things right after this. Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh can chuck it. You should know all right, all right, I mentioned whiskey plates before we took a break, and whiskey plates have nothing to do with whiskey or the whiskey industry. Uh. It is because W is whiskey in the NATO alphabet,

and they just call them whiskey plates in Minnesota. But there is an interesting tie in that you get a W at the front of your license plate if you have been uh if basically you've had your is it your license revoked because of a d U? I? Yeah, but they revoke it so hard. They take your license plates too, right, But they can't take your car because other people in your family might need to drive that car.

So what they do is they give you a plate with the W at the beginning that basically tells everybody, Hey, I have had my license plate revoked because of drunken driving. Yeah, and UM Minnesota is not the only UM state to do this. Ohio has their own one, and they, they, I guess, very un ironically use scarlet letters or there's no joke. I have family members with that. Do you really know why that? That's amazing? So apparently judges weren't using them as much as they they as much as

the legislature wanted. So the legislature changed the law, saying judges had to use them um for I think starting in the two thousand teens. So yeah, I guess you're probably seeing a lot more scarlet letters on cars in Ohio these days. Yeah. I didn't know what it was. And this is uh. I don't want to be too specific, but when I was in Ohio visiting Emily's family, I remember walking up the driveway to a family function and I think my father in law was like, check it out. Look,

he's got the scarlet letter, Uncle, glug glug exactly. Yeah. I wanted to ask about it, and I but I was confused whether I shoot or not after that rope injury story that I failed to ask you about. So now I'm like all shaky and nervous all the time

mentioned stories. I'm like, should I ask God on um? So. Another thing that's happened over the years is people have gotten themselves into trouble for being a little too clever for their own good by having a license plate that says no tags or no plates or something like that. Because when a cop files a report for a car that doesn't have license plate. This is generally what they would write, no plate or no tags, so it gets filed as you know, a violator, and then all of

a sudden you're getting pulled over. And this is you know, verifiably happened before. There was a case in the late seventies of a guy who got um a lot of fines because of stuff that he didn't do, because he was like, I got a no plates vanity plate. Okay, so I want to I want to defend this guy, Robert barber Um. He did have a no plates vanity plate, but it was accidental because he was applying for vanity plates and you have to put your three your top

three choices. He wanted boating, sailing, and then if these two weren't available, he didn't want a vanity plate, so he unwisely wrote no plates DMV totally humorouss always looking out for dirty words. Just great, this guy wants to no plates license plate. Let's give it to him. Yeah, well, of course, what was it boating and sailing? That's not gonna be on there. He I guess he was just rolling the dice. Jimmy Christopher Cross owns those in every

stage he does very famously. So um. Also, chuck. There's a long standing rumor that I think we should put to rest that um prison inmates in the United States make the license plates in this country. True false, it's false. Well no, I was about to say myth or busted. Uh, and I combined false and myth. So I think I just kind of coined a new term. You don't have to say false or myth anymore. You can just say false it is true. Actually, um, And I don't I don't think I crossed the board. But a lot of

times prison inmates still do make license plates. And uh, you know, it's part of the the sort of um, little to no wage labor system that the prisons take advantage of in this country. Yeah, so um. Thanks to the thirteenth Amendment, you cannot enslave a person unless they're being jailed for a crime. So most licensed plays, I believe it is most chuck um are produced in the

United States by slave labor incarcerated prisoners. Um. And because you can't say, well, I'm gonna fire you, and you're not gonna get any wages because you're not paying them anyway, they coerce them into working in other ways, like like removing their ability to see family, maybe putting them in solitary um, basically punishing them if they won't work for free. And that's how the United States gets most of its license plates. And even worse, it's not just the Bureau

of Prisons running this. They usually contract with an outside company who uses slave labor legally to produce these license plates, from which they make a profit that they when they give them to the state. Yeah, it's a terrible, terrible thing and it's something that needs to be changed, but that's not on just about anyone's radar. I think as far as changing laws goes, well, it became kind of

a joke, like making license plates you're going to jail. Yeah, especially the ones in New Hampshire where the license plates they live free or die. Well, speaking of that, um, and we're not gonna go over the whole process of

how they're made because it's not super interesting. But um, I looked and there was a thing on Reddit where a guy went through I think there was a h or maybe he just did it on its own and made a map of the states that still have embossed plates rather than the just sort of printed on aluminum that we have now in Georgia, arts are not embossed any longer, even though Jerry Wildest she's got an embossed plate from like twenty something years ago. Still back to

the podcast and hangs onto it. But uh, from what I could tell, and I lost count because the picture was really small. And then other people chimed in after this was in twenty nineteen then saying like, hey, now Kansas is not embossed anymore, so it looks like it's about roughly half and half of states that are still embossing. Uh. And just one little fun note about this, I did not know we gotta and I know the Vermonters out

there just waiting. I will not forget about you, because Vermont is the only state that has d BOSS license plates. Oh no, it is not raised lettering. It is depressed depressed in Vermont. Very very cool. So UM, if you want to kind of take a little nostalgic trip. I found out by accident, there's a title max um dot

com post. It's called fifty years of license Plates in the US UM and you can see fifty years of license plates state by state, and if you choose like the decade you were a kid and just go, you know, scroll down. It's like being back on the road again age ten, and like the back of your parents car.

It's pretty great. Yeah, I mean I remember when they, as many people do, when they started just including little logos like the Georgia peach, and it wasn't just the straight up letters and numbers, and I remember thinking like, wow, is this is this the future here that we're looking at? Well, speaking of the future, So they went from embossed or

d embossed too, flat rented UM license plates. Now apparently there's some disruptors out of Silicon Valley because that's where they come from, and they've come up with digital license plates and some states are starting to be like, yep, you can do that. So for a fee, I think it's like fourteen dollars a month or two fifty dollars for four years something like that. This company keeps your plate up to date. UM you can have it personalized a little bit, and it looks super cool. You know.

If you especially if you have an electric car, you could do worse than putting a digital plate on the back of it. But obviously not everybody has two hundred fifty bucks for four years. And I think that's in addition to all of the normal fees that apply for a license plate too, that's right. Uh. And speaking of fees, that's something that you would not be able to collect. But people get really into collecting license plates. Uh. And there are a couple of different ways. One UM is

a little well, I'm not gonna say that. One is just collecting license plates, physical license plates, maybe all of them through history in your state, maybe all of them throughout the whole country over the years, or just once you think are super cool. Uh. And you know rare runs UM, like innycollectible are going to go for a lot more money. Um. You can also buy big lots of them on eBay for not much money. But the big money comes in collecting the actual ownership of a

tag number. Because if you remember earlier we mentioned UM, license plates in many states started at one and work their way up. There's a lot of rich people with way too much money, I guess, way too much that want to pay a lot of money to have like eight as their license plate, and they will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that. Yeah. Apparently in the states, Delaware is the state that's craziest for this. There's a real secondary market where yes, people pay six

figures for a license plate number. And it's like, you know, when you buy a car, the plate gets transferred to you, so you can continue to keep this plate over and over again, so you're actually buying it from the person and use really you you get the car with it, but you're like, I don't care about the car, I'm just after the plate. But as crazy as Delaware is for their plates, um and again, I think seven grand is the most someone paid for tag number six in Delaware.

Pretty crazy in other countries, especially Dubai, the uae Abu, Dhabi, Hong Kong. There, it's just insane the amount of money they spend on on that stuff. I couldn't believe these numbers. But someone in New York apparently paid twenty million dollars for a plate that said to New York. Yeah. The kicker of that one is it came with the nineties Volvo wagon that it was attached to. I'm not kidding. Oh was it really Evolva? Somebody paid for a Volvo wagon? Uh? And then the one in UH and in the Brits

I believe they paid someone in is it Great? Britain? Is it the UK? Is it? England paid twenty million bucks for an F one license plate tag. So if you if you want to get gagged with the spoon, head on over to Lux Digital with an E after the X and just read about the most expensive car tags ever, because you will find little gems like this, said Abdul Gaffar. Kury paid nine point five million dollars for one in Abu Dhabi because quote, it's the best number.

And then the Lux Digital says, quote by hanging one from his fenders, coury boldly let the world know that he was a man of confidence and prestige. Someone actually wrote that down and was dead serious about it. Yeah, it reminds me that I'm number one hat on SNL. I don't remember that. Oh you don't like Will Ferrell's ad, like this black tie dinner and he's like showing up all the other men because he's wearing a mesh backed

I'm number one hat. It's just completely incongruous with everything he's trying to do, but he's like showing everybody I'm number one. That's pretty pretty great, pretty great stuff. I guess one final thing we put a pin in, so we have to take that pin out or people say what about the pin? As you mentioned three M making

the reflective plates. Apparently three M continually lobbies politicians to pass laws making people get license plates more often than they need to so they can get bigger government contracts for those reflective plates, reflective backing, and apparently even police departments are like, we don't need new plates this often. This is we don't shouldn't have to do this. Yeah, and three M's like, come on, you're not paying for it.

Your residents are who cares, it's nothing to your residences, millions of dollars to us, just do it like they lobby for that, which is gross. In addition to using enslaved prison labor to create license plates, there are a lot more tawdry than you'd think at first plans agreed. Um so turned out to be a really great pick, Tracy and a j Thank you for the suggestion, Chuck, thank you for turning this into an absolutely delightful episode,

and thank you for listening. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this. Oh this is a good one. Uh, this is a little bit on cultural appropriation because in the Mariachi episode, I talked about wanting a charro suit and said I would fear being accused of cultural appropriation, and he said, nay to that, Nay, uh wear it because people would you know, you're you're celebrating that culture, and uh, we heard from

a lot of people. Um, and I'm gonna read a couple of them from our Mexican friends who and I'm not I'm not patting the results here, but literally our Mexican listeners roundly said, do it, dude, we love it and that would be awesome Mexican and Mexican American. Yes, of course. Um, hey, guys, is a Mexican myself. I listened to the episodes, Um about our country knowing so much on the topic, and you guys are always so

spot on. Makes me love the podcast even more. With the Mariachi episode, I love mariachi music and personally love singing Vincente Fernandez music, and I want to let check no, chuck, no, you should definitely dress at least once in that style. Mexican people love when other ethnicities love their culture and style, and I would say in Mexico they would even encourage you to try on a chr os suit. Keep doing

what you're doing. That's from Joel Hernandez. And then we received one from Jamie Cavazos Cova rubious, great great name. Actually it's uh, it's himI, okay, right, not Jamie spelled Ji and right. Mexican came to the US when I was twenty four years old. I want to congratulate you on the preparation and pronunciation on the mariachi up. You guys did a great job, especially rolling those ours with your Spanish second Chuck. You should wear a mariachi suit

any day and be a champ. I was born and raised in Mexico, and I feel proud when a person likes my culture. Makes me happy that someone is interested in anything regarding the great parts of Mexico, like food, music, and it's folklore and many other good things. I will not call it cultural appropriation because I feel joy when the world likes even a little bit of what I am and want to keep spreading the beautiful roots from

Mexican culture. Uh. It actually works both ways, guys. Because I live in the North Alabama area, after seven years, I probably call myself Southern. Now you can ask any Mexican person if they feel offended if you wear a mariachi suit, and I'm confident they will encourage you to keep doing it. Uh. And then they imi encouraged us to talk about in the future Mexican trio Romantico music,

which we're gonna look into. Um. And not to poopa on anyone, but the couple of no one really scolded me, but the couple of emails that we did get that, We're like, hey, maybe think to ice, Um, we're from Caucasian people, Uh, taking up the fight for our Mexican and Mexican American friends. So just just laying that out there. Thanks nicely put And who was it in addition to him whose email you read that would be Joel Hernandez, Joel Him and Joel thank you so much for writing in.

Everybody who wrote in, thank you very much. Regardless of what your opinion was, We appreciate it, and we're always looking for good emails regardless of what your opinion is. You can wrap it up spanking on the bottom and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.