Hello, and welcome to these short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Josh. But the three of us together, this is short stuff. It's so short. Yeah, and we should mention that, you know, Josh is in here with this guest producer. And he asked what we're recording on and I said the number twenty three, and he said, oh, I'm into that, and I said, well, I apologize because I'm probably gonna
make fun of it a lot. That's funny. So, Josh, then you're a is what they're called the number two, the number three, the letter R, the letter D, the letter I, the letter A, the letter N, and then because there's more than one, the letter S. And we know that's real because there's a Facebook page. Yeah. Facebook basically legitimizes everything. So we're talking about the number twenty three. Um, apparently a lot of people put some stock into this number. Yeah,
not just Josh. No, he's not the only one they made, are he does two? They made a very bad Jim Carrey movie called The Number twenty three. Did you see it or are you just presuming it was bad? I'm presuming it was bad from all the people that said it's bad. I have never seen it, and I presumed it was bad too, But I have gotten just desperate enough on like Netflix and Amazon Prime to let's try it. There's so much good stuff out there, and you're gonna
watch that? Is there? Oh? I don't know, does everything stink? I don't know if everything stinks. I don't want to say that, but I think I am at the number twenty three level right now. All right, Okay, let's follow up. I want to hear about it. All right, you got it? All right? So the number twenty three, Um, you've seen it on Michael Jordan's uniform. Uh. He picked it apparently because that was as close as he could get to half of forty six, which was his older brother's number.
I think his older brothers was would be exactly. Uh. And then of course since then, other people, um have tried to emulate Michael, like Lebron and so the other twenty three you see in basketball and even some other sports sometimes or a tribute to Michael Jordan's. Yeah, like David Beckham's twenty three when he went to Real Madrid was an homage to Jordan's two. So yeah, Organs the first.
Every other twenty three was an homage to Jordan's which is that's great, but that's not where the number twenty three ends. Actually, that's not where the number twenty three started. No, it's so well it did. It started elsewhere. Um, the number twenty three has been with us for as long as Arabic numerals have. But um, the obsession with the number twenty three. They've tried to trace back as far
as they can. And there's actually a guy who came up with a book, um that came out in two This guy's got one of the better names of herd in a while, Barnaby Rogerson. Yeah, and this book title is just out of hand. Rogerson's Book of Numbers Colon the Culture of Numbers hyphen from one thousand one Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. That's the end of the title. It has a colon and a hyphen. Yeah.
He should have ended that with a exclamation point, because I think you have to when you say the seven Wonders of the World. Yeah, I don't. I don't know anybody who says it like without an exclamation point. Yeah. So Barnaby Rogerson traces the obsession with the number twenty three to a little writer that was drugged out named william S Burrows. Yeah, the man who's shot a million bucks in his arm, says Matt Dillon. Really was that the thing? The quote? Yeah, it was from drug store Cowboy.
William S Burrows played an old aged heroin addict and and Matt Dillon said he must have shot a million bucks into that arm. So he watched that again instead of the number twenty three. Okay, all right, you got it. That's your assignment. Okay. So supposedly in nineteen sixty this story has many many holes, but uh and probably because of all the drugs. Burrows was in Tangier. Probably because of the drugs, and said he met a sea captain named Clark, not me, who said he had never been
in an accident in twenty three years. Later that day Clark sank his ship and died. Which that'll that'll perk your antennae up. And then supposedly later that same day, that night, Burrows heard a radio story news story about a flight twenty three that crashed in Florida, also piloted by Captain Clark. This all sounds very interesting until you realize that that didn't happen. Well, there was a flight twenty three. I didn't see whether it was piloted by
Clark or not. So it's possibly heard a story, um, from twenty seven years earlier. Yeah, but like maybe they were recounting the story or something like that, you know what I mean. Sure, And we also have to remember again he's hopped up on Smack right either way, I think Smack was just one of any at any given time going through his bloodstream. But um, he is usually the guy who is first credited with becoming obsessed with
the number twenty three. And he was you could say, fairly influential in the underground scene in the sixties and then into the seventies and so on. And one of his friends was named Robert Anton Wilson, and Robert Anton Wilson went on to co write, um, the very famous Illuminatus trilogy. Have you ever read any of those? I haven't, But that that's Josh's main interest. Okay, they're fascinating books,
they're wonderfully written, they're they're hilarious, they're engrossing, they're really interesting. Um. But he was friends with Burrows and so the number twenty three is a major foundation of the Illuminatus trilogy, which also draws from another kind of underground UM school
of thought. I guess that the in the sixties and seventies UM which is called Discordianism, which is kind of like a made up parody religion that actually makes a lot of sense, so much so that it kind of blurs the lines between reality and non reality when you when you look into it. And number twenty three is
a holy number for Discordianism. So if you kind of take all that together, Discordingism, the Illuminatus trilogy, and William S Burrows and put it all together, that seems to be where the kind of cult like um awareness or obsession with the number twenty three came from. All Right, So we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back and talk about more twenty three coincidences right after this.
So I should mention when I said that that's a guest producer Josh's main interest, I didn't mean in life. I just read as far as the number twenty three goes. He was like, yeah, I read Robert Anton Wilson. Yeah, So I thought it might be fun just to kind of tick through a bunch of the uh, the things you might find on Facebook page, where people are like, look man twenty three again. Uh. Darwin's Origin of the Species was released in eighteen fifty nine. You add up one, eight, five,
and nine and you get twenty three. That's one of the more interesting ones. Some of them are just pictures of like a truck with the number twenty three on it. Like there it is again. Those are a little but there are some, mister inter interesting coincidences that pop up when you look around, Like Kurt Cobain. Um, he was born in nineteen sixty seven, and if you add those up, it comes to twenty three. He died in And if you add those numbers up, they come to twenty three
as well. Okay, much more interesting than a truck with the number twenty three on it, uh for sure. UM. Conspiracy theorists will point to the nine eleven tragedy. You add up nine eleven UM to zero, zero and one and you get twenty three. That's a good one. Shakespeare was born and died on the same day, April, but years apart, obviously, Uh. Julius Caesar was supposedly, if you look at detailed reports, stabbed three times. That's not bad.
I like this one. Um, there's one called the birthday paradox. Have you heard about that? I did see that, and after reading it four times and not fully on understanding it, I just walked away in tears. It's it's really fascinating. I was like, oh, we should do one just on that, but it's actually too simple. So the birthday paradox is where if you get twenty three people into a room, you now have enough people to where there's a fifty fifty chance that two of them are going to have
the same birthday, which makes zero sense. Since there's three hundred and sixty five days in a year, you would think that you would need um that times two to have a figure I guess three. But no, because paradox, each of those twenty three people have the opportunity to be compared to the other twenty two people. You get a number way more than than twenty three, a number of comparisons way more than twenty three, and it turns out it's enough to have a fifty chance of having
the same birthday among two people. And has that been proven out? Yeah, oh yeah, it's mathematic it's it's mathematical. Yeah, no, it's very it's very well proven it's interesting once you look into just the probabilities of your like, oh, it makes way more sense. Okay. I took statistics in college. Actually, that was one of the maths that I took. I took statistics, chuck on two twa times. Did you get
an F and F and a D? Finally, yes, the last time I got a D because I had the same instructor all three times, and last time she's like, D just go just go away. Well, you're never going to get this. Yeah, you and I were Liberal arts guys. I was an English major and they before that class, they actually had a math class called Math for Poets was the nickname, and it was basically like the math class all English majors took because it was very simple arithmetic,
not bad. Um, let's get back to a couple of twenty three things. Oh yeah, Princess Leah Josh and the very first Star Wars film is held in detention block A A to three. Okay, And apparently in George Lucas's first film th h X eleven thirty eight, there is another twenty three in there, so some people might think that was that was his little way of giving a nod to that number. I would guess so, and George Lucas wouldn't be the only person who's a famous UM
of twenty yeah. Famous. One of the most famous, uh is John Nash, the guy who's the mathematician whose life was dramatized in A Beautiful Mind, both the book and the movie, which is a great movie if I remember correctly. But he was obsessed with twenty the number twenty three. UM. He said it was his favorite prime number. That's not
where the obsession ends. He also says that he or he said that he appeared on the cover of Life magazine once disguised as Pope John the three right and Pope John the twenty three really did appear on Life magazine, but it was him. John Nash was saying, well, that was me. Yeah, I shouldn't laugh. Uh. In the Bible, um, which is a book, the there is ah. I was about to call it a chapter, but I guess they
aren't called that the Book of Numbers and the verses. Uh, it's numbers twenty three If you look that up, what hath God wrought? That is also the very first message sent by telegraph in code by Samuel morrise In. So if you if you take all of this and you um, you look at it a certain way, it becomes plain that there's something very special about the number twenty three.
If you look at it a different way, it becomes plain that people have invested a lot of UM like mystical significance to twenty three that isn't actually there, that that it could be any other number, especially any other number that is within UM one to thirty, because a lot of people ascribe dates, you know, significance to dates.
I should say John Nash died on the twenty three of May in two thousand fifteen, and so that just proves it to people who are is obviously twenty three means something, but if it could also be fifteen or seven or three. There's a lot of like numbers that we ascribe a lot as significance too. And if you ask a cognitive psychologist what's going on, they will just basically say that our brains contain a mechanism for detecting patterns. We search out patterns how we make sense of things.
It's how we save brain energy is finding patterns so we can predict things and just make sense of the world around us. And sometimes we force patterns onto things that don't actually have any significance, that don't actually mean anything, and that could be things like the number twenty three popping up suddenly or randomly. Yeah, when you look at the clock and it's eleven eleven and you make a big deal about it, it's more likely that you just don't make a big deal about every other time of
day that you look at the clock. Exactly, Chuck, I got nothing else except for twenty three chromosomes. Hey, well with that short, stuff is out. Stuff you should know is production of iHeart Radios How stuff works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.