Bookmarks 2026

Hi, I'm Callie. I'm a co-founder of Apostrophe Podcasts alongside Terry, Debbie, and Sydney. We're a family business that brings you a family of podcasts. We also have a subscription option where you can listen ad-free, hear bonus episodes like my sit down with Terry to ask him burning questions, or extended versions of Under the Influence episodes. Just visit the link in the description to subscribe. Here's a show.

If you want to understand the world today, you need to go back to the 90s. From the internet boom to the rise of reality TV, the 1990s changed the way we lived. I'm Kathy Kinzora. On my podcast, History of the 90s, I go inside the stories, events, and trends that defined a decade. From the fall of communism to the rise of grunge. If it happened in the nineties, you'll hear about it on History of the nineties, wherever you stream audio.

Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Winters in Northern Ontario can be long, and this past winter could arguably be the coldest, the windiest, and the longest in decades. So, we decided to head a little south and book a two-month stay in a home on Airbnb to be near our daughters. Such a smart decision. A clean, quiet, and roomy home away from home.

We still had to work on the podcast while we were away, but the home had plenty of space. We even managed to squeeze in a few dinners out and on our days off, and we explored antique stores in the area. And you know what? It got us thinking, we could have hosted our home on Airbnb while we were away, making use of a place that would otherwise be sitting empty, and doing it on our own schedule and maybe having a little extra income coming in while we're away.

Somebody somewhere must love this much snow. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash hook. You could argue there is nothing more important to your health than a good night's sleep. More than 350,000 sleepers agree, and I am number 350,001. Why? Because we all sleep on Canada's best mattress, a Douglas mattress. Named Canada's best mattress by Canadian Living, by the way.

Not only is it comfortable, but the Douglas mattress is built with premium cooling gel foam for all season comfort. And it's made in Canada. Starting at only five hundred and ninety nine dollars and including free sleep accessories with each mattress purchase. You can't go wrong. Don't wait. Sleep better on a mattress made by Canadians for Canadians. Visit Douglas.ca slash under the influence and get your Douglas mattress today. Sleep well and support Canadian Maid.

This is an apostrophe podcast production. Of big news student Alcasselser will

As a writer, I am in love with words. I love the impact they can have, how shadings of different words have slightly different temperatures, and how a surprising verb can make a sentence not only memorable, but quoteworthy. When I write, I always have my Thesaurus and dictionary close by, and often I'll look up the meaning of an everyday word and actually be surprised at its origins.

You have to wonder how their meanings have changed so drastically over time. For example, the word nice used to mean silly, foolish, and simple. The word awful once meant something was worthy of awe. That actually makes sense. Full of awe. Awful. Who knew? And naughty used to mean you had nothing, or naughty. Every year, the Washington Post publishes the winning submissions to its annual contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. Here are the winners.

Coffee. The person upon whom one cough. Flabergasted to be appalled over how much weight you've gained. Abdicate, meaning to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. Esplanade. To attempt an explanation while drunk, Willy nilly, an adjective meaning impotent. Funny. Negligent, a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your negligee. Limp an adjective meaning to walk with a lisp. Gargoyle, a gross olive flavoured mouthwash. Flatulence.

An emergency vehicle that picks you up after you've been run over by a steamroller. Q. Wiley Coyote. BOLDERDASH A RAPIDLY RECEDEDING HARLINE I resemble that remark. Pokemon, a Rastafarian proctologist. And lastly, Circumvent, the opening at the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Welcome to our annual bookmarks episode. We read a lot of books to research under the influence. But every season, there isn't enough room to include all the great stories we find. So this episode is dedicated to those stories that didn't fit into our regular shows. Sometimes they are surprising, and many times they are words to live by. One day, when I was in university studying radio and television back in the Jurassic period.

The professor was talking about what all of us in that room had in common. He said, we all love movies, we all love television, we all love radio, we all love great writing. Everybody was nodding yes. Then the professor said, And we are all terrible at math. And all 40 of us couldn't argue with that, which made me laugh. But it's true, creative people are, generally speaking, bad at math. But I'm intrigued by math.

As a wise man once said, your fear is your task, and my task is understanding math. On that note, a book I read not long ago is titled The Grapes of Math, subtitle How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Author Alex Bellos. As someone who directed humorous commercials for a living, I've always believed that eleven is the funniest number. 10 is a round number, a prime number. Eleven is one too many.

If I said there were 11 angry florists outside your door right now, it's funny. If I said there were 10, it's less funny. It just is. Alex Bellow shares my view, sort of. In his book, he says the number 11 is powerful. For example, it is an essential element of KFC's corporate mythology. Its fried chicken is seasoned with Colonel Sanders' original recipe of 11 different herbs and spices.

The reason? The number 11 represents going one better, an extra ingredient beyond the ordinary. 10 is the order of things, 11 is exploring the possibilities beyond. I know what you're thinking. The numbers all go to... Eleven. Look, right across the board. Eleven, eleven In most of the amps go up to ten. Exactly. Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder? Well it It's one louder, isn't it? Exactly my point. Now, numbers are an important part of branding.

As Bellows says, a classic example is Levi's 501 genes. It's not Levi's 500 genes, it's one better. It suggests a little extra button here, a little extra bit of sewing there, a mystical added element of the world. That's not to say round numbers don't have juice. An anti dandruff shampoo was searching for a memorable name. It came down to two choices, either zinc twenty-four or zinc thirty one.

When both names were tested, respondents overwhelmingly chose zinc 24. So much so they were willing to pay 10% more for it. When that decision was analyzed, it was determined that people prefer the number 24 because they are more familiar with the number from their school days. In math class, 3 times 8 equals 24 and 4 times 6 equals 24 was drilled into your head. The number 31 wasn't. That means we process the number 24 more fluently, and therefore it gives us the feeling that we like it more.

In another experiment, two names for a brand of contact lens were tested: Solace 36 and Solace 37. The tagline on the packaging said six colors, six fits. Respondents overwhelmingly chose Solace thirty six, because in their minds they did the math. Six times six equals thirty six. The name and the tagline were arithmetically related. The pleasure rush from subconsciously doing the math makes us feel good, and we misattribute the buzz as satisfaction with the product. Math is intriguing.

I just finished reading Graydon Carter's excellent memoir, When the Going Was Good, subtitled An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair for twenty five years, and I was a subscriber for all that time. The book details his rise through the magazine business, and it's full of delicious tales from overseeing the celebrity-rich Vanity Fair pages.

He makes some interesting points along the way. To begin with, he is honest about his failures. He says, sheer ignorance of the trials ahead is often a blessing. So very true. If you knew the tripwires and all the obstacles awaiting you in the future of a big job or a new company, you would probably run for the hills. But not knowing keeps you going.

He also says that underdogs want to bite the ankles of overdogs. Very true. It's one of the reasons people are drawn to small feisty brands that are in a battle with the Goliaths. Graydon Carter also never wanted his advertisers to feel unappreciated. He would write a thank you note to every advertiser, and it would be clipped to a hand-delivered copy, and he did that for every single issue for twenty-five years.

Vanity Fair averaged over 200 pages of advertisers per issue. Never underestimate the value of appreciation. In the many amusing and scandalous tales he tells in his book, there was one in particular that made me laugh out loud. During the golden age of magazines, the budgets were enormous. Graden and his Vanity Fair editors all had company cars and drivers, first-class airfare, clothing allowances, and seemingly unlimited expense accounts.

Before he worked at Vanity Fair, Graydon wrote for Time magazine. One writer there, a friend of his, was called into the office of the executive editor. The Pope was coming to America, and the religion correspondent had fallen ill. The editor assigned Graydon's friend to cover this story, all because the friend was the only practicing Catholic within earshot.

The writer didn't want the assignment. On the spot, the writer made up a story about how he had planned to take his family on a fall vacation to Maine for the week. The editor said, Go cover the Pope and send your family on vacation, you can expense the cost of their holiday. Now the writer had a problem. He had to cover the Pope's visit, and he had to expense an imaginary trip to Maine.

When he got back from covering the Pope, he had a printing company produce a fake letterhead that said, Whispering Pines, along with a fake main address. Then he created, in granular detail, the bills for his family's imaginary vacation. He submitted the expense report, and it was duly paid. Sometime later, he found the receipt from the printer that had produced the fake letterhead and hotel bills. So he decided to submit that receipt too. And time paid the expense too funny.

When we come back, the difference between fear and danger.

If you're enjoying this episode, you might also like Striking Images, Matchbook Advertising from our 2020 season. We tell the story of how the US Army used matchbook ads to spread the word of rewards for information about Osama bin Laden. You'll find the episode in our archives on your favorite podcast app. As you may know, the Apostrophe Podcast Company is a family business. But did you know our family also owns a retail store in the lovely village of Burke's Falls, Ontario?

We're heading into our fifth season with our little brick and mortar cottage store by the beautiful Magnetowan River. And now we're considering taking the next logical step of an online store presence. Which could be overwhelming, except Shopify makes it easy. That's why well-known brands like Untucket and Heinz use Shopify. We can start with our choice of hundreds of ready-to-use templates and build a beautiful online presence from there.

And it's comforting to know Shopify is always available to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer service. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.ca. That's shopify.ca. And in case you didn't get that, it's shopify.ca.

Not long ago I wanted to build a fancy box at our cottage so that we could store firewood in. You know the rule. Measure twice, cut once. Well, I measured twice and cut about 15 times. Now all my good lumber is. is Firewood. I wish I had used TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit is an online and mobile marketplace that connects you with skilled, reliable local freelancers across Canada. They're called

Taskers. You can search for a tasker in your area based on cost, skill set, availability, and past client reviews, so you know exactly who's showing up and you'll have confidence that they know what they're doing. Unlike me. From handyman to yard work to home repairs, TaskRabbit gets the job done. Get ahead of your to-do list with fifteen dollars off your first task at taskgrabbit.ca or

On the TaskRabbit app using promo code Influence. Taskers across Canada book up fast, especially for same-day tasks. Get$15 off your first task right now with promo code INFLUENCE at taskrabbit.ca or with the taskrabbit.ca code influence.

In a book titled How I Built This by Guy Raz, who also hosts a terrific podcast by the same name, Raz interviews successful entrepreneurs. He also quotes French novelist Victor Hugo, who wrote in 1862, One withstands the invasion of armies, one does not withstand the invasion of ideas. So very true. Every banana republic knows its one brave idea away from collapse. It also holds true for entrepreneurs and marketers who revolutionize their industries with ideas that can't be ignored.

Braz also quotes James Fallows, who writes for The Atlantic. Fallows was talking about the fact we are all really bad at differentiating fear from danger. We're scared of flying, but we have no problem whipping down the highway at 110 kilometers per hour, even though you're 86 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. The odds of dying in a plane crash are one in ten thousand, three times less likely than choking on food.

We are afraid of sharks, but not of bathtubs, yet one person dies in a bathtub incident every day. Sharks only claim one per year on average. Therefore, Fallow says, bathtubs are 365 times as frightening as sharks. And that's the problem we all have differentiating between fear and danger. We're more relaxed around things we're more acquainted with, like bathtubs.

Shark encounters are so rare it turns them into mysteries, which in turn becomes uncertainty, which ripens into fear. And we fill that gap in our knowledge with worst case scenarios. All of which means we should have bathtub week on the Discovery Channel, not Shark Week.

My latest book is titled Against the Grain, subtitled Defiant Giants Who Change the World. I write about people who had a great idea, but were dismissed by superiors, ridiculed by colleagues, mocked by competitors, and in many cases these brave people lost their reputations, their jobs, and their livelihoods. Some came close to losing their sanity, but in every single case their idea was right and revolutionary. One of those people was Ignas Semmelweiss.

Born in Hungary in eighteen eighteen, Semmelweiss grew up to become a doctor and was the chief obstetrician at the Vienna hospital, the largest maternity hospital in the world at that time. It had two large maternity clinics. One was run by doctors, the other by midwives. Over time, Samelweiss noticed an alarming statistic.

Five out of every 1,000 women died when delivery was performed by midwives, yet the death rate was ten to twenty times higher when delivered by doctors. It didn't make any sense. The deaths were due to what was then called childbed fever. It was a leading cause of death among women, second only to tuberculosis. Semmelweiss was determined to find the cause. The doctors claimed the fever was related to lactation, therefore unpreventable. Semmelweiss didn't buy it.

He started to analyze every variable. He wondered if bad air was being inadvertently piped into the doctor's clinic, but that wasn't the case. In the midwife clinic, women gave birth on their sides, whereas the doctors had women give birth on their backs. Semmelweiss had the doctors switch to side position births. Still, the doctor delivery deaths piled up.

When a woman died in the doctor's clinic, a priest would walk the hall ringing a bell. Semmelweiss wondered if the sound was terrorizing the women. He had the bell silenced. Still, no change. Semmelweiss cross-referenced 64 more correlations. It revealed no abnormalities. Exhausted and frustrated, Semmelweiss took a short leave of absence. When he returned, Semmelweiss learned that a young colleague of his had died.

While performing an autopsy, the colleague had nicked his finger with a scalpel. A few days later, he died of a high temperature and infection. In other words, the man had died of childbed fever. That was an epiphany to Semmelweiss. He wondered if some kind of matter from cadavers had entered his bloodstream. And if so, maybe the doctors were the ones spreading the fever. After all, doctors performed autopsies, not midwives.

The Vienna Hospital was a renowned teaching hospital, and one of the best ways to teach was with autopsies. Doctors were performing the postmortems, then walking directly into the maternity ward to deliver babies. So Semmelweiss instituted a policy that all doctors had to thoroughly wash their hands and scrub under their nails before entering the delivery room.

The doctors rebelled. They were insulted, offended, outraged that a doctor, a person trained to save lives, could possibly be responsible for killing patients. The doctors dismissed his theory. The problem was that Semmelweiss knew he was right, but couldn't isolate the scientific basis. The concept of germ theory was still two decades away. His contract with the hospital was suddenly terminated. He applied for teaching positions at other hospitals, but was denied.

He applied for grants to further investigate his theory, but was turned down over and over again. Then he was socially shunned. Thank you. Women continued to die at the Vienna hospital, and it enraged Semmelweiss. He began writing heated letters to prominent doctors in medical journals. They called him unbalanced and crazy. The ridicule began to take a toll on his mental health.

His wife and best friend schemed to take him on a tour of a new medical facility, but it was really an insane asylum. When Samel Weiss realized what was happening, he put up a fight. was beaten by orderlies, sustaining cuts and bruises, and was put into a dirty straitjacket. His wounds became infected, and two weeks later Semmelweiss, the father of infection control, died of sepsis, the very infection that had been taking the lives of women at the Vienna hospital.

It is a remarkable story that Samelweiss was so mocked and ridiculed and shunned, and all he wanted doctors to do was wash their hands. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Today, Semmelweiss is revered in the medical world. Hospitals and universities have been named after him. Ignaz Samelweiss relied on his instincts, and with instincts you know before you know why. He was two decades ahead of medical theory, but he was right all along.

There is one more thing named for him, the Semmelweiss reflex. It refers to the propensity to reject new ideas if they challenge established theories, even if the evidence is compelling. When we come back, the surprising links between Bond and the Beatles.

Read another fun book recently titled Love and Let Die by John Higgs. It lists the surprising parallels between the Beatles and James Bond. Don't believe it? Listen to this. For starters, Doctor No, the very first Bond film, and Love Me Do, the very first Beatles record, were both released on the very same day, October 5, 1962. Two British cultural phenomena unleashed on the world at the same moment. Both Goldfinger and A Hard Day's Night were released in 1964, both by United Artists.

Both are on the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Best British Films of the 20th century. Both were nominated for Oscars. Both had soundtracks that hit the top of the charts, with the Goldfinger theme nudging a hard day's night off the number one spot. Both the song Goldfinger and A Hard Day's Night were produced by George Martin. And in Goldfinger, Bond says drinking improperly chilled champagne was as bad as listening to the Beatles without Earma.

That's very harsh, James. Anne Fleming's nickname for her husband Ian was Thunder Beetle. Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who produced the Bond films, were offered a hard day's night, but turned it down. The Beatles didn't think a Hard Day's Night was as good as a Bond film, so their next movie, Help, leaned more into adventure and villains.

As a matter of fact, track one of the Beatles' original help album begins with a hat tip to the Bond theme, played by guitarist Vic Flick, who played the original Bond theme. Help was filmed in the Bahamas and Fleming's Thunderball was being filmed nearby around the same time. John Lennon's two books released in sixty four and sixty five were published by Jonathan Cape, Fleming's publisher.

McCartney, Lennon, and James Bond all got married in nineteen sixty nine. John Lennon married Yoko in Gibraltar. Sean Connery married both his wives there. Both James Bond and Paul McCartney were declared dead in nineteen sixty seven. Both were a hoax. Bond had Spectre and the Beatles had Phil Spectre. McCartney wrote the theme song for the Bond film Live and Let Die, and George Martin produced it.

Actor Christopher Lee is on the cover of McCartney's Band on the Run album, and Lee also played the villain Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Barbara Bach played a KGB agent in The Spy Who Loved Me and later loved and married Ringo Starr. Tomorrow Never Dies is a play on the Beatles song Tomorrow Never Knows. In Quantum of Solace, actress Gemma Arterton's character is named Strawberry Fields.

Billie Eilish and her brother learned to write songs by listening to the Beatles. Eilish's theme song for the Bond film No Time to Die won an Oscar. Ringo handed her the award for Record of the Year at the Grammys. Lastly, at Glastonbury 2022, both Billy Eilish and Paul McCartney performed, meaning two Bond themes were played on the same stage that year.

Love and Let Die is a fun read about the most successful band of all time and the most successful movie character in history. World domination, same old dream.

Books are barbells for the mind. If you want to be a good writer, read. I fear there won't be enough time to get to all the books I want to read. There are so many great ones out there. Look what we found in those pages today. Numbers have deep meanings. 11 is the funniest number, and at the same time, it's a number that means to go above and beyond. And isn't it interesting we prefer numbers that hearken back to the math drills of our youth?

There is a vast difference between fear and danger. We run from fear and accept danger daily. That's a weird Homo sapien quirk. The heart truly is a lonely hunter. Entrepreneurs and people like Ignaz Semmelweiss are brave souls with big ideas who face unrelenting pushback until they are proven right and sometimes change the world. And one more big thing we learned today, always double check those expense reports. when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly.

This episode was recorded in the Tearstream Mobile Recording Studio. Producer Debbie O'Reilly, Chief Sound Engineer Jeff Devine, theme music by Casey Pick, Jeremiah Pick, and James Aiton. Tunes provided by APM Music, follow me at Terry OINFluence. This podcast is powered by ACAST. Terry's Top Slogans of All Time. Number five. Pen Tennis Balls. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. See you next week.