Juggling: What the Heck

shower of rain and fire, this is really dangerous. Can you juggle? No? But I want to after this. My brother learned, of course. Of course. I'm sure he's born knowing how to juggle. He came out of the womb juggling. Now. He learned back when I like in high school and mastered it pretty quickly and now and he can still juggle some. I think it's one of those things will once you learn sort of the basics, you can always do it, because apparently a lot of it comes down

to muscle memory, which is to say motor memory. Yeah, and in true Chuck fashion, I tried to learn to juggle for about an hour and never finished. Did you like see any progress over that hour? Yeah? I could. I could do the little one hand juggling two balls with one hand thing, okay, But I did a lot of chasing the ball. That's a problem, which apparently, if you're a beginning juggler, you're gonna be throwing the ball further and further away from you, just naturally chasing the ball,

and they call it chasing it. So what do they suggest? They suggest that you learned to juggle close to and facing a wall, because that way you can't move forward, or you'll just keep hitting your head and you'll scratch your face up on the brick and quit juggling. This is a Jonathan Strickland joint of tech stuff. It's reeks of Strickland. It does like even if the byeline hadn't been on there, I would have been like, this is Stricklin.

But I remember when this one was made. It was right when I got here, and like he there's a video embedded of Strickling teaching you how to juggle. It smells, it reeks of bald head cream and bowling shirts. Yeah, and it also has an illustration by Marcus who clearly always wanted to be a comic book illustrator because the guy who's in the graph on how to juggle is just totally ripped. Yeah, like a comic book here. I remember, Marcus, it seems like a million years ago. It was so

juggling history. How long people been juggling? Uh, chuck. People have been juggling since at least tomb exactly. They found uh in Egyptian tombs, um hieroglyphics showing women toss juggling. And there are many kinds of juggling, by the way, and we're mainly going to talk about toss juggling, which is throwing something up in the air, throwing more things up in the air than you have hands. Yes, that's toss juggling. And there are, like you said, a bunch

of other kinds. But if you're a toss juggler, you probably don't consider the other kinds real juggling. You're like, those are cool and everything, but that's not real juggling. Yeah. I asked my friend, our friend Brandon Ross from the Stuff You Should Know Art Department, a juggler, very good juggler, and Uh I sent a message to him and did not hear back. In time. I was like it sayesn't here that modern jugglers poopoo things like taking a bite out of the apple and like some of those old

school tricks. That is that true or not? And I didn't hear back from him, so maybe, well, you know, it was on Facebook, okay, so he'll get to it when he gets to it. So anyway, we're in ancient Egypt to be exact. That's right. There were jugglers in Greece and Rome and India and Thebes and Thebes in Europe, and uh, I think four BC was when it was actually written down that people were juggling. Yeah, supposedly in the Talmud, a rabbi named Shimon ben Gone Maliel. Yeah,

I think I probably nailed that. Probably he could juggle eight torches at once. That's hard to believe because world records today are like seven I think for clubs, is it seven? I think so, yeah. But I mean, if if this rabbi was juggling eight torches, that sounds like it maybe pumped up a little bit throughout the years, you know, like it was two and then it was like, oh it was eight. Although this was the time of miracles, you know, like enough oil to keep it going for

eight days a siege. Why not a rabbi who could juggle eight torches. It seems kind of paltry by comparison. Good point um. Through the Roman era, apparently that jugglers were actually held in high esteem, but then they kind of went down into pooper a little bit hilarious because people associated with them like like magicians, as con artists. So I don't know if it was like, hey, look at what this guy's doing while someone else is picking their pocket, but that's kind of what it seems like

it might have been going on. Yeah, apparently you were a con artist. Like you said, everybody knows that you can't trust a juggler a juggalo, well at the right at the at the at the time, that's how people thought of jugglers. This seems to be during like the Holy Roman Empire in the West, right then the medieval era hits and suddenly jugglers start to become a little a little less threatening and actually a little more clown like. Like Initially they seem to have been not revered necessarily,

but I thought of in fairly high esteem. Then they went the opposite direction, and then they came back as clowns. I wonder how many like um behind closed doors, how many like emperors and kings tried it out after seeing it in the door, or just like morons with it, yeah, and then had someone's head chopped off out of frustration. They took the chuck route. Although I didn't behead anybody,

but during the medieval era you could. If you found a juggler, you probably also found something of a minstrel or performer and all around entertainer who probably traveled from town to town, maybe asking people to bring out there dead for some side work perhaps, and then juggling corpses, that's right, which must have been a sight to see. And then in the seventeen hundreds they became more of a circus act. And in the late eighteen hundreds of

nineteen hundreds, Vaudeville came along. Of course, any sort of skill like that was big in vaudeville. And I did not know this, but W. C. Fields was a juggler in the vaudevillion days. I didn't know that. Before he became just a drunk actor. And he's not the one who raped anybody, right, who was it? I think that was Fatty R. Fatty R Buckle. That's who it was. Yeah, same ara, same guys. I looked it up and I

ran across um the Hollywood Hell Club. So apparently before the brat Pack, before the rat pack, there was a group of like early early Hollywood guys, Harold Flynn who was a rapist. W. C. Fields, John Barrymore that just raised hell in um, Hollywood in like the twenties. Errol Flynn was a rapist, really accused rapist. I didn't know that. So then Vaudeville declines, Uh, circuses sort of decline a little bit for a while, and then jugglers started hitting

the streets or as Jonathan Strickland said, or become mathematicians. Yep, we'll get to the math connection, which is LEGiT's foreshadowing, but I don't know that. Like they formed their own stage shows, performed on street corners, or became mathematicians. Those were the three options if you were a juggler. Uh. And then, of course, um in the nineteen forties, I say of course because it's common knowledge that these are

when the juggling groups and conventions were formed. In Hell the International Brotherhood of Magicians Uh decided you know, at a meeting, Hey, guys like the jugglers got together and had a few drinks and said, I don't like being known as a magician. Yeah, you know, that's how the jugglers tell it. The magicians were like, get the jugglers. Yeah, and then they went threw down their smoke bomb when they were gone. So they formed and splintered off and

formed the International Juggling Association. Uh. And in nineteen sixty nine they started holding championships and competitions Summer of Juggling. And in two thousand Jason Garfield, a very famous juggler, formed the World Juggling Federation and said, ESPN, you need to put this stuff on TV. So once a year they put it on TV progress along with the spelling be and the dart competition. What else which I watched the other day? Um, log rolling, yeah, lumberjacking sure, uh

law and darting no that's illegal. No more, it's like cock fighting. Um so all right, let's get into it then. So we're actually gonna teach everybody how to juggle, like no kidding, yeah, and if you're really into this, like, we're gonna describe a lot of things visually, which is always a train wreck for us. Um So, I would recommend you do like I did and just get on the old YouTube and look up what Cascade juggling looks like. And they're four or five guys who have tons and

tons of videos. There's there's a few. There's one guy that I believe is kind of the gold standard for YouTube instructional juggling videos. His name is Adam Schomsky s H O M. S K Y. And like, I'm sure I watched him. That guy pops it into slow motion for you. There's like um like graphics when like he throws something straight up, you might not have caught it. So it says throwing straight up, he's good and he's just doing it for the love of juggling. You can tell.

I think they all do, I would hope. So I don't know if you make a ton of money it's a juggler these days, although there is, I should recommend it's gonna wait till the end. There's a great article on grant land dot com called Dropped by Jason uh fagone and he details a big, long story on Anthony Gatto, who may be the best juggler on the planet. He juggled for Circus a Oh, he had a bunch of the records until recently, Yeah, twelve world records. And he's

amazing dude. Um, but he quit last year to run a concrete resurfacing business after becoming disenchanted with the juggling scene, basically calling out all these kids. He stays saying, like, you film something a hundred times and only nail at once and then you upload it to YouTube. That's not the same. He basically his quote is if you can't do a trick in three tries, you can't do it. He said, you may have done it, but it doesn't mean you can do it. It's essentially what you're talking about.

This guy story is the prime US for office space. Yeah, basically, but he's amazing. If you watch Anthony Gotto juggling, like he will break the record for like, uh, let's say a number of balls in a rain shower and um, for the amount of time though he won't like do it for ten seconds, We'll do it for like ten minutes. And other jugglers are like, this dude is insane. How long he can keep all these clubs and balls and

torches or whatever in the air. That's really funny that you mentioned him, and what happened to him because I noticed his records were like all mid two thousand's, the most recent ones were, and I wondered what happened to Anthony Gotto? Now I know you give the finger. It's a really good article. Actually it's nick dropped on grant land dot com. Alright, so how do you juggle? So, Chuck,

here's how you juggle. Basically, you want to start with three balls, and if you have even half of a brain half, you will make sure that those balls are beam bags because bean bags are dead drops or they dropped dead. You're not gonna chase them all over the room. No, when they fall, they just stay put. Hacky sacks are good too, or you can buy, like my brother did, the Little um which are basically hacky sacks, a little juggling kit. Yeah, the Complete Klutz's Guide to juggling, isn't that?

I think it was Before the Complete Idiots Guides, there was something called like something for Klutzes and it would teach you, like things how to how to juggle in um. So anyway, you start with three bean bags, which in the juggling world what these are. Anything you juggled are called props and specifically, bean bag falls under the category

of balls. Even though they're not necessarily balls, they're still under the prop category balls because it's not a chainsaw or a torch exactly, club, which would fall under the category of clubs. Um So for most of the time we're gonna say balls. But just imagine as you're starting out, we're talking about bean bags. Okay, so you get three of them, chuck, Yes, you take two and you put them in a drawer to start. There's the first step to learning juggling. Take two of your three balls and

put them away. Yeah, And strickling and experts say you should literally start with tossing one back and forth to get your arc down because the key is consistency. You don't want to and you know, once you get good you can do all sorts of things, but you don't want to toss one being back up four ft and one three ft when you're first starting out. You want to kind of toss them all about the same. Yeah, And you need to learn your hand movements, which are

very important. Once you get hand movements down, you can do variations on the hand movements, but ultimately there's a basic hand movement that's a scooping motion. And um, the easiest one to start with to start practicing is the cascade pattern. Yeah, there's two main patterns, the shower and the cascade, which we've joked about so far about ten times. The shower is the one that you see on cartoons when someone's basically just throwing balls in a big circle

and a big loop. Beautiful, beautiful, very cool looking. The cascade looks kind of like fireworks if you like squint your eyes and use your imagination. I never thought about that. Yeah, Like as the balls go up and they are out, they're basically arcing outward across your body. Um, and it looks just kind of like you know, one of those big fireworks where like blows up and then like this kind of trails downwards slowly. That's ultimately what it looks

like to me. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. So the cascade, you move your hands in a figure eight and um, for the regular cascade, your right hand goes clockwise, your left hand is counter clockwise alternating these tosses. If you reverse that, it's called a reverse cascade. So the key here just remember you're using one ball still, but you're making a scooping motion. In towards your torso like in towards yourself, not away from your body, but in towards

your body, right in front of your chest. Your your feet are shoulder with a part because they always b when you do anything. And you're tossing the thing up into an arc in about just above eye level, that's your that's the one that you start with. And you usually start with your dominant hand, yeah, because that will just probably be easier because you're more used to throwing things with that hand. And I didn't see it anywhere, but I put two and two together in this article,

and it looks like. It looks like so it could be wrong everybody, but it looks like if you are doing a cascade of any kind, reverse cascade, any anything like that, whatever hand is going clockwise is the hand

that you throw in the highest arc above your eye level. Okay, so you've got your one bag and you you make a scooping motion with your right hand in a counter in a clockwise motion, and you toss the ball or yeah, you toss the ball in an arc just above eye level, and then it drops and you catch it in your left hand. And then now in your left hand, you toss it again, but this one should be slightly under

the arc of the first one. Yeah, it's moving into counter clockwise motion, so that eventually, when you add more balls and you have them all in the air, they're not just bumping into each other at the same place. The one from your clockwise motion hand is going higher and the one from your counter clockwise motion hand is following just beneath the arc of the first ball. That's right,

it's inside that ball's path. Yes. Uh, And you're gonna at first be very frustrated because you're gonna want to throw both of the balls at the same time when you're just starting out with the two, just to get used to the motion, because it's just that it's sort of like if you've never played drums, it's hard to make your right arm, your left arm, your right foot your left foot do different things. Yeah, it's a bit

of a brain trick. I think some people catch on quicker than others, obviously, But um, you want the two tosses to be distinct and separate. And one way to do this, Strickland says, is to count your tall like toss one, toss two, toss one, toss two, and then your little brother is gonna say, what are you doing in there? Shut up? Nothing? Toss one right, Um, so we might as well add the second ball. Now, are you ready? We've just been with one ball because that one.

Toss one is with your your clockwise hand. Toss two is with your counterclockwise hand. You catch the second one, your toss two with your clockwise hand. Toss one, toss two. You're still just with one ball. Here. Now we're gonna add too, So you have one in your left hand. You have when you're right we're doing a cascade, so with your right hand you're making a clockwise scooping motion. Yes, right, uh yeah, I got it right. I wish people could

see this one. So this is delightful. So, um, we're gonna throw the first ball, and as it reaches a zenith just above our eyes, we're gonna throw the second one just underneath the arc of the first one. Yeah. You know it's funny, is it. People that were walking by my desk all day saw me doing the same thing, because you kind of do it to yourself to be like, okay, I get I get the motion. Yeah, Like what is struggling saying here? And we were using no bean bags, No,

just imaginary ones. Exactly. I didn't drop a single one. I'm a great imaginary chuggler. So chuck um with with this toss one toss to Ultimately, what you're doing is, let's say it takes a second for you to throw one ball to your other hand. You throw the second ball about the halfway mark of that first throw. So every half second you're throwing a ball, is that the deal? If you're fast, you are. Ultimately you're doing that. But

it doesn't even necessarily have to be a second. Let's say it takes two seconds for it to go up and then down. So every second you're throwing, every half of whatever beat it takes for the ball to be tossed and then come down, you're throwing a ball, right, okay, okay, Which means that when you finally had the third ball in there, whoa, you can which let's go ahead and

do that now. Yeah, you want to hold two balls in one hand, obviously, and uh they suggest to hold the two and the dominant hand, although if you're having a problem um making that third toss, they say, sometimes switch it up and it may help to hold the two in the non domination because some people just want to hold one and you're really just throwing two with another one in your hand, or else you're throwing one and then two at once, which you don't want to

do either. Yeah, you're gonna be frustrated. It takes a lot of time in practice. Like, don't give up like I did when you didn't master it in one hour. Right, if you think that you're supposed to be mastering this as we're speaking now, just covered like six months of work. Now what you dmaster in a minute, though, is just clicking on YouTube and watching videos of jugglers. Again, I'm almost done. Yeah, okay, So with this cascade, you've got the third ball, and just remember that every half of

a beat that it takes, you're throwing a ball. You're constantly throwing a ball. The cool thing about the third one is when you start with two balls in one hand, you obviously start with that hand for tossing. You toss it up in the air. As that one arcs, you toss your left one, is that one actually toss your third one, And about the time you're tossing your third one, your first one's landing. That's right, and you've just done

what's called a flash of juggling. That's right. And if you have trouble catching at first, uh, don't worry about it. They recommend just work on the tossing. And if you drop the ball, and it's not a big deal at first. You just want to get that hand motioned down and uh, learn basically the motion of the cascade. Uh. And again, stand in front of a wall because you're gonna find yourself chasing the bean bag forward because you're tossing it

further away from you. But be careful. Let's start with chainsaws. Let's start with chainsaws, which, by the way, are modified their props. They're not using real chainsaws unless you're crazy. Well, they probably don't have the thing there like the Haunted House chainsaws. All right, well, after this break, we are

going to get into variations on the cat scade. All right, Josh, you've got the cascade down, try the reverse cascade, which is, like I said, just the opposite direction clock I'm sorry, counterclockwise for your right hand, clockwise for your left. You're scooping your hands inward instead of outward. I'm sorry you're scooping oward instead of inward, right, which sounds weird, but if you just do without balls, if you just do

your hands like that, it makes sense. Yeah, you can just kind of do it in your imagination and then just change directions. Yeah, and you wait a minute, I've seen guys do that, right, It will feel like natural. Yeah. The the only the only big differences here is with your the hand that you throw in a higher arc has changed, so your first throw is going to be at a lower arc than the second throws. And your

hands are moving in different directions. So remember the hand that's going in counter clockwise motion throws in the higher arc. And that's that's called Josh's law. Okay. Um, So while you're after you've mastered this, which will take a while, as we've said a hundred fifty times, um, you can start doing little tricks uh thrown in there because just a regular juggler is gonna get very far in life.

Where you really make your dough is when you start throwing in things like the half shower or the tennis move, which is uh. And you know, if you look all these up, it basically when you see jugglers just juggling regular and then there aren't does something crazy looking. That's what these moves are like we could describe them in detail, but it's really a lot cooler if you just go look. But when you're watching juggling, you go, oh, man, what was that? Look what that girl just did with her arm?

That was maybe a tennis move or or Mills mess invented by juggler Steve Mills, not my uncle Steve Mills. I don't think you can juggle or Burke's barrage or ruben Stein's revenge. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, these are all just complex arm crossing patterns as you're juggling. Different variations on that. Um. Another variation that I like, have you

seen this before? Bounce juggling. It's my favorite thing. Rather than throwing the ball something my favorite juggling okay yah, rather than throwing the balls up in the air to toss juggle the you throw the balls down on the ground and bounce themthing. There's this kid I saw on YouTube. If you just search bounce juggling, it's the first video. It's the thing, the first thing that comes up on YouTube. That guy. He starts out in profile, yeah, and you're like,

like his basement or whatever. Yeah, but then once he don't know how many balls he had going. He had quite a few. Yeah, And there's different ways of doing this. You can either lift bounce it by just sort of tossing it in the air and letting it bounce, or you can actually throw it at the ground, which is called a force bounce. And I even wrote the coolest two of them. Bounce juggling is really cool looking. Um.

There's clawing, which is basically palms down juggling. Um, so it's just the regular cascade, but yeah, you're like snatching him out of the air. Yeah, and it's like that's cool looking. You can do that solely, or you can just throw in a claw every now and then just delight your nieces and nephews at Christmas. There is the chop yeah, which I think this one is where you grab a ball and then throw it underneath your other arm. You throw it upboard underneath your other arm. Yeah, it's

like a diagonal quick diagonal move. And like I said it all you'll just notice if you're not a real juggler, if you're just watching in the park one day, they'll do some crazy arm thing. It's just I call it flair. Well, there is actually something called flair that's a type of juggling bartenders flare. Oh you know the movie Cocktail Bartender's Flair that was a type of juggling supposedly not a fan, Oh, I thought it was great. I haven't seen the movie. Yeah,

I haven't seen it. And are you a fan of bartending flair though? Hey, I'm a Jerry Thomas fan. So yes the answers, yes, all right, I like uh, I like a bartender to like grump at me and slide my whiskey down the bar. That's the best trick. I want to say. It's fine pretty much like all bartenders. Yeah, that's true. Yeah they do. They're doing God's work. So Jonathan Strickland says, generally speaking, if you have an odd number of props, you're gonna require a criss cross pattern.

If you have an even number of props, it's going to be two separate groups juggled in each hand. Yeah. I remember you said you could juggle with one hand kind of yea. So remember toss juggling is any kind of juggling where the more the objects, the number of objects you're juggling exceeds the number of hands are using. So if you use two balls in one hand, that's toss juggling, it still counts. So if you're if you're juggling four things, you're basically toss juggling separately with two

hands to two different things. So two bowling pins in each hand is toss juggling. I don't know if you could do clubs with one hand, can you? Yea, yeah, you're do it in columns and yeah. Yeah, that's that's some talent right there. That's how that's how most people do clubs is like one hand. I really I've just seen like the Cascade mainly. Mhm no, no, everytime I've ever seen clubs, it's like one handed to one handed juggling. You need to get out more. I guess I need

to go to the park. Yeah that they hang out there along with the Hackey sackers. Um yeah, well like you mentioned then, I guess if you're going to be juggling with one hand, you've got the fountain, which is the circular pattern, like if I had two balls and I was just throwing them in a circle, or the straight up and down which is the column right, and

that can be either synchronous or asynchronous. If you look up synchronous column juggler on YouTube, they're gonna be doing the exact same thing at the same time with both hands, which is pretty neat. I think asynchronous may be a little tougher though, just judging by the looks of it. Well, strickling makes the point that since you most people start out learning to juggle asynchronous lee, which is like that cascade is asynchronous. The hands aren't moving at the same time,

they're moving at opposite beats. Um that it's it's actually easier for people to do that to do asynchronous makes sense. I guess. Yeah. Even handed juggling, what is that called. That's the one thing in juggling that doesn't have a name where you're just juggling four things at once, or like an even number of things, and you're using both your hands, but you're juggling two clubs. There's no name for it. It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there's a name for it. Well, I don't know what it is.

You should name it after you at any at any term. Oh no, here it is numbers juggling. Okay, okay, So when you're doing numbers juggling, you uh, an even number of numbers juggling, you're just doing it asynchronous ly, probably to start. Okay, that was my point for my little tirade. I wonder how many angry jugglers we have right now, Oh, probably a lot. Uh. There's a couple of other kinds of juggling that are fun to watch, cigar box juggling and shaker cup. Um. You've probably tried the cigar box

thing with two boxes or whatever. And that's when you have any number of boxes. You're holding one in each hand, but then you have quite a few in the middle, and you'll toss them up and flip them and then catch them between the other two boxes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And the same sort of thing goes with the shaker cup. Um. Your cups are nesting inside one another, though, like cocktail cups, and you're you know, tossing those up and catching them.

And they probably was born out of bar tender flare. Yeah, probably so all right, we mentioned clubs um as an alternative. They look like the standard club looks sort of like a modified bowling pin. Yeah, like a slim svelt bowling pin. Yeah, a sexy bowling pin. Uh. They are European and American versions, and I think the European version is slimmer and sexier than the American go figure. And um, I think they're

a little more popular as well. Right, and the larger and is meant to fit into a Champagne coup the Europe. That's pretty neat. Uh. And I think you said that clubs also if you want to do like knives and torches, they call that a club as well. Yeah. I think there's like a few broad categories of props and the clubs that kind of thing, and then they fall under those subcategories like axes and torches andies out the n uh.

And then there's ring juggling. Of course they're very stable, um because of their gyroscopic properties, and so you don't even mention. Well, the point is though you can juggle a lot more rings at once maybe than you might be able to juggle a ball. Yeah, and that's pretty impressive to see as well. Yeah, and then there's this thing I found today called contact ring juggling. That's when you're not throwing rings, uh you really you're rolling them along. Well.

Now that's contact juggling with like a ball is when you're like doing the Harlem globe trotter thing and rolling it down your arm over your body and stuff. It's pretty cool. But the contact ring juggling is just just look it up. It's really cool. It's like, I mean, there's all different shapes, but the ones I've seen are mainly a figure eight um, and you're just manipulating them such that they look like it looks like an illusion, almost like one will be stationary and it looks like

the other ring is circling around it. Well it is, but uh, just take my word for Okay, contact ring juggling everyone go check it out. Very popular in Asia. It looks like they've mastered it. Okay, very cool. So let's see. You got a buddy and you both like to go to the park. Well, this is a big one. It's pretty cool. It's a thing. You've seen it. Yeah. Stuggling makes the point that juggling is kind of a

social thing populated by social creatures. Like there's lots of juggling clubs and that kind of stuff, and that um where you know, you and I think of juggling. It's like a solitary activity. No way. Man, If you get too good jugglers together, it becomes a feast for the mind and the eyes. We could add this to our live show Juggling us juggling, Yeah, all right, and tandem.

We have a lot of practice to do because what we could do Josh on stage, if we put a lot of work into it, is something called stealing and replacing. And that is when you basically will go up. If you're juggling four clubs, I'll go and steal one, or maybe steal two, and then three and then four, and then I'm the one juggling. But the juggling never stops, right, It looks as as a seamless synchronous pattern uninterrupted. If you're just like stop another person from juggling, it's just

being a jerk. Yeah. The point of it is that juggling. Yeah, I guess so, But you're still juggling the whole time you're doing that. That's right. The whole point of of juggling with two people and like stealing and replacing is that the balls. If you were able to ask these juggled balls what they think is going on, they you would say nothing, it's the same thing. We're doing the same pattern. Say, Chuck, hands were a little sweatier, right,

but what really happened was I replaced you. Yeah, that's one way to do it, or we could stand in front of each other like four ft apart and uh, you know, we're juggling the clubs and then tossing each other the clubs and we've got our little uh post stuff. You should now act all worked out? Yeah, what's cool?

So with stealing replacing, with with juggling balls, like I would stand facing opposite you and just kind of grab yours like you said, and just ultimately like take over your catches, and then I would be juggling and then you could steal it back and we could go back and forth. And definitely with clubs, I would be standing next to you and just basically kind of push you out of the way. Well that's if you're stealing and replacing.

If we're passing, then we're standing in front of each other and just throwing them back and forth to each other. And there's actually a pretty established way of um passing where it's called the three three ten where we do three pass is where every third toss I passed to you and you catch it, so you know we're in tandem and everything's going right, and then after three of those, you do every second toss. Then after three of those

you do. Every toss, you toss another one, and then by that last one, we're just like on fire, just throwing throwing ones back and forth between ourselves. Yeah, and we did mention combat juggling. That was not a joke. It is a thing, and I've seen I looked up these little competitions. It's when it's sort of like dodgebhile. You get, you know, ten jugglers on a stage and they all start juggling, and they all start to try

and thwart the other jugglers juggle while maintaining their's. So I would go up and throw mine in the air and try and knock yours out of your hand. But you can't, you know, get too crazy because you've gotta still juggle or else you're out. The way we've been describing this one, it feels like we've been replaced by impostors who listened to the show a lot and didn't know what topic to pick. Isn't that weird? I'm myself?

Are you yourself? No, I'm you? Oh god, weird. Well, we'll get to the bottom of this right after these messages and that Chuck comes to the darkest time. This is Josh actual. Yeah, Okay, yeah, I'm replaced. I replaced the replacement. Um Nope, still here saying bizarre stuff like I replaced the replacement. And we're talking about the physics of juggling fun fun, which is it's actually kind of straightforward.

It's stuff you would think of, but it's nice to put it into terms where we can say that we covered the physics of juggling. Like. So, the main factor acting on juggling, probably the most important part in the whole thing, is our good friend gravity. That's right. Uh. An acceleration due to gravity specifically is nine point eight m slash s to the second power, meaning nine point

eight meters per second every second. So when you drop something, speed is going to increase by nine point eight meters per second. And don't bother us, we're not including any kind of error resistance. We're in a vacuum to demonstrate all of our physics were always in a vacuum. Our little stuff you should know, vacuum part next to the way back machine. Um. So it's a constant acceleration and because of that, the only way to slow down your

pattern is by throwing something higher. Yeah, And so the more things that you add into your pattern, the higher you're going to have to throw because you have a constant acceleration downward acceleration after your toss um So that means you have to open up your pattern by throwing it higher up. The more stuff you have, because you simply would not have enough time to throw x amount of balls in the air. I mean, you can increase your hand speed somewhat, but at a certain point you

just can't do it exactly. They're gonna be bean bags everywhere. Another um factor is that it's not really a factor. It's more of a fact. When you're throwing your balls, you're throwing them in a parabola, which means that the only, uh, the only velocity that counts is the is the vertical velocity, the vertical acceleration. When you throw something up, you're exerting your own force upward and what's it peaks gravity is

pushing it back downward. That's right. It's gonna have a horror zonal velocity, but that's going to be constant, so there's no force acting on it unless there's no change in velocity. I guess with the column it's pretty much straight up and down. But generally speaking, you're gonna be have both. Yeah, it's moving horizontally, but there's no force pushing it. There's no change in I'm sorry, there's no change in acceleration. It's constant exactly, Okay. And then of

course the mass of your props also count. Yeah, which is why if you've ever seen the old trick where someone's doing a bowling ball with a tennis ball with a club, it's super impressive because it's much much easier to juggle things with the same mass. Yeah, because you're

just making the same motion over and over again. When you are juggling things with three different maths, meaning they have three different um, three different amounts of inertia or they require more different amounts of force to overcome inertiae um. Then yes, like you said, that's kind of impressive. It just requires that much more mental acuity. That's right. Is that all the physics. Now we get into the math.

I know this actually kind of interested me a little bit, despite the fact that it is math and I'm well known to not love it. But um. There was a mathematician who named Claude Shannon who posed a juggling theorem um that basically describes the relationship of of a cask or well, just of a juggle, right, keep saying juggle? Is that a thing? Did I make it up? No? I think it's a thing. I think it's called something else though, a juggle. Yeah, Oh, a flash, a flash,

there you go. That's a round of juggling, one single round where all three, year, all five, or all seven of your balls have been tossed once at least. But to the layman, it's called a juggle, right, so everyone

knows what I mean. Uh. And this is in parentheses F plus d um, and then that would be times eight right outside the parentheses equals v plus d in prinheses times in when F is the time the balls in the air, D is the time as a ball in the hand, H is a number of hands, V is time that the hand is empty, and in as

a number of balls being juggled. So basically what he's saying is, if you add together the amount of time the ball spends in the air plus the amount of time it spends in the hand, right, which is the full amount of time that that ball exists during a flash, multiply that times your hands to the number of hands. That's gonna equal the time your hand is empty, uh, plus the time the ball spends in the hand times the number of balls being juggled. I saw no reason

for this equation whatsoever. Like at first I was like, oh, that's that's pretty cool, and then I spelled it out to myself in a it's like the amount of time the balls out of the hand plus the amount of time the balls in the hand times the number of balls the what. I didn't understand what the point of it was. So Claude Shannon, please get in touch with us. Well that's why he did it so people would write

stuff about it. And well, the thing is, I guess the problem is that it says Shannon build the juggling robots. So I guess this formula allows robotics to happen. Yeah, and I saw the juggling robots, different robots that toss things and catch things, right, it's kind of cool. Okay. Yeah. So if if that's the point of the Shannon theorem, is that what that's called, sure the Claude's Claude's law, then then I understand it. And I take it back.

What if there's some Cloud's law that's something awful that we don't know about. I hope that's the case. And then there's site swapping um, which is another math application. It's sort of like a musical akin to a musical score to a musician, as a form of notation describing the juggling pattern, and is what jugglers use two UM. Basically, if you were going to write out your juggling pattern and send it to your buddy, you wouldn't say, take your right hand and blah blah blah. You would use

numbers to represent it. Which this actually does make sense. Yeah, this made a little more sense to me for sure. Yeah. And um, So, like a normal eball cascade is three three three. Each throw takes three beats, a zero is arrest on an empty hand, and a one is handoff from one to the other. And you can actually if you add them all together and take the average, you

can tell how many balls are in that pattern. Right, So in a three three three you have those together, that's nine divided by three because there's three different numerals and you've got three or four five one four one is also three, right matth that sounds pretty difficult the foe, you know, Yeah, the three three three makes intuitive sense to me, but that's you know, the four one five four five one four one. That's tough. Oh, man, is

anyone still listening? Noo? Can you hear the echo? I can. Uh. If you look at a juggler, you might notice that they're probably not looking at their hands like at the catching. The catching is sort of automatic. Uh, they're kind of looking sort of up at the arc um. And they have done experiments to see where um your eyes go um A. A. M. Van Santvoord and Peter J. Beck did some experiments that actually found that while the peak is important, if you see the first one hundred milliseconds

of the flight path, then you can juggle successfully. Yeah, which is pretty impressive. They found that jugglers are relying more on feel, sure then and then vision. That's why you can juggle blindfolded if you're really good. Supposedly some people can. I've seen it. Oh yeah, yeah, I bet Brandon Ross can. I could see that dude is talented, So, Chuck, we could probably keep talking about juggling for the next five years because there's a lot to it. Yeah, man,

this is just a primer. Hopefully you guys are inspired, or at least we're inspired. In the first maybe twenty minutes, the good part of this episode to go out and um and learn to juggle. I know I was, And while we hate ourselves, we don't hate ourselves that much. We're gonna end this one ye. So we think that you should learn about juggling. And you can start by typing that word in the search bar at how staff works dot com. Since I said search far, it's time

for listener mail. Uh. This is a really touching story, oddly enough, from Jennifer Grace. She's an actor in New York City who UM played a very long run of our Town on stage and had to go there without her husband at first because they were in Chicago and stuff you should know turned out to be the thing that linked them together before he finally moved to New York to join her. UM. They've been together for thirteen years now and they had their son, Emmett last fall,

and a month before Emmett turned one. UH Tom, her husband was admitted to the hospital and has been there ever since. UM. He has a very rare issue with his bone marrow that they finally UH diagnosed as a plastic anemia. So basically he has no immune system, which means you can't risk getting sick which means her son, their son, can't even visit him, which is just unbelievably sad. Um. She can visit wearing mask and gloves and gown, but they can't even touch each other, the husband and wife.

And this came on suddenly too right, Yeah, she said, it's pretty much the worst thing ever. I mean, they spent a lot of time even diagnosing this thing before they can I know, it's just so terrible, and they're

just really really great people. Um, she said, Uh, it looks like we will be going forward though with a bone marrow transplant because he has a brother who is a match and he does have a good chance of recovering with with this bone marrow transplant and a round of chemo followed by this transplant in the new year. She says, There's not a lot that I can give him by way of a Christmas present this year, given the circumstances, but I'm hoping that perhaps you would give

him a shout out on an episode. It's been a very special shared experience for us. It really brightened his day, so Tom dude. They also sent me a video of them playing a song together in the kitchen doing uh Springsteen song and it was just like they're the cutest couple ever and they're really great, and UM, I'm gonna plug their go fund me site because um, they didn't

even ask me to. That's why I'm plugging it. Uh. It is go fund me dot com slash F seven five nine z G and that will help out offset um their hospital builds a little bit. And there's really nice folks. Since Tom get better soon, man, I hope that operation goes great. Yeah, Tom, here's to you, buddy. And uh yeah, and keep us keep us posted, you guys. Yeah, please do, Jennifer, that would be great. Uh. And we should totally post that go fund me stuff too, Yeah

on social Yeah, yeah, we'll do that. Well. If you have a great story about how Chuck and I brought you together with your s O or helped you through a rough time or did anything good, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff First dot com and it's always join us at home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For

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