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Give it a listen right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of pilot radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's chose to be Chuck Bright and Gerri, so it's. Just moonwalked right in this joint, can you moonwalk now? I think everybody at the Bell House on June 30th knows I can moonwalk, cannot I didn't moonwalk, but I think you could just based based on my moves. You could you could make the assumption that I'm an awesome moonwalker.

I've seen your moonwalk. It's, you know. Herky jerky, you know, it's that kind of moonwalk that guys like us do. I don't understand. You know, you kind of it kind of simulates the moonwalk.

You know what I mean? It's a it's an echo of a moonwalk. I wouldn't call it smooth and floaty. Oh, I would. Yeah, now I know.

And it's not a great moonwalk, right? I never learn the moonwalk because I didn't try to practice the moonwalk.

More than like once, then I was like, I can't do that. Oh, yeah, oh, I just bailed on it like my brother practiced and got OK at it, I'm surprised he didn't like yes.

Teach it as a class for free children in need.

Now, he got he got OK at it. But I just I don't know if I think I bail on things that aren't easy for me. Well, that's definitely a candidate for that. Um. Yeah, I think that's a trait I have. I don't like to spend a lot of time on something that I don't think I'm good at. I'm not one that's like no, man. I'm going to try to moonwalk until I learn it. I was like, maybe I just am not a moonwalker.

Don't you? Didn't you say you baylon books too, that don't capture your attention at this point in your life? Was that you? I don't think I said that, but I will not even say that. OK, but I. So you well, you work your way through a book. Well I'll give it a. Fair shot. It's been a while since I bailed on a book, though, because I usually just pick good books I like that I know are really good, right?

I don't know how long I give a book.

How long do you give a book?

Uh, I will give a book to pages. Yeah, but like three or four times, right? Like, what am I missing, let me try that again. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I just wrote a book called Headful of Ghosts, which is pretty neat. It's like a psychological thriller. Oh, yeah. Uh, I haven't read a fiction book in forever. And then right now I'm either I'm reading the right stuff, The Wolf Classic.

And I think Tom Wolfe might be the greatest reporter of all time. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. I don't think there's anybody better. Our buddy Joe Randazzo. Oh yeah. Of at midnight fame. People are like, wait a minute. I thought he was at the Onion. No, he said at midnight he used to work at The Onion.

Uh, he just recommended the book, which I'm really interested in, that I wanted to tell you about. OK, because it sounds like it's right up your fourteen ninety one alley. OK, called sapiens. All right. A brief history of humankind. Oh that sounds neat. By Yuval Noah Harari. Love that guy.

And the. It has a pretty remarkable thesis, which is that humans can humans didn't kill each other off because they can cooperate in large numbers, because we have an ability, a unique ability. Animals don't have to believe in things that exist only in our imagination. Huh? Like government and money and God. Right. And he said all of these things allow us to cooperate like we talked about in our money episode. Yeah, it's like money has that paper has no value.

We just all agreed. So it's essentially fiction, right? The whole concept of money. Right. It's just something we've all agreed on. And he said it's this cooperation by believing in these fictional things that is the only reason that humans didn't kill each other off like, you know, any other weird species. Yeah, I've got to check that out. They sound super interesting. Thanks. He said it was amazing. So and thank you for relating that.

Yeah. I want to maybe you should read it and just tell me about it, OK?

Because I'm still I've never read 49. You know, I'm and I'm a fiction reader. I try to try to read nonfiction and I don't know, I just like a good fictional yarn more. I'm quite the opposite. Like I told you, I want to be a civil war buff and got one of those huge books that's supposed to be great and I just can't do it. Like the moonwalk, you know, like fiction, I do like it, it's just so much of the time I'm reading for work.

That I think you would enjoy fiction as a break? Well, that's why I read Head of Ghosts, right? I was like, I'm reading a fiction book. I need to just, like, read something different and use my imagination again. And it worked. It was like it had an effect on me. What was that? What was it, yeah, what was it about? It was about a girl who may or may not be possessed and like how her family unravels around her.

Is it like purplest?

I don't know that it's, you know, like easy to read.

Dean Koontz and. Oh, no, no, it is a little more literary than that, OK?

And I do I wish I I'm sorry to the author who who wrote the book. I don't remember the dude's name, but he does a good job. I'm sorry to Dean Koontz and John Grisham all of a sudden they know they know what they are. Those guys know what they are already in cahoots with. That guy is imagination's fantastic Jayann. I always assumed that he was better than Stephen King because he could finish his story. I've never read a Stephen King book.

What I don't read a lot of that stuff.

OK, I read one Dean Koontz book in my early 20s and one night, it's the only time I've ever done that.

Well, yeah, that was a good thing about it, because you can go through it like crazy.

Started reading it like eight or nine and I stopped at like five in the morning. But each one is way different than the others. Yeah. I mean really different. Like the guy's got a great imagination. You should read some of Stephen King's work, like I know he is. He's he's so unfairly. I was actually talking to Hodgman about this the other day. Yeah. He's like very unfairly criticized as a hack, but he's actually.

Oh yeah. A lot of people like Stephen King sucks. But if you just because he's so prolific and because he very famously has trouble finishing a story. Oh, really? Yeah.

But he's like nobody can get inside the mind, like the dark side of a person's the average person's mind better than Stephen King. Yeah. He's just a he's a great storyteller, aside from the ending part.

So what's the The Shining is probably the one I should read.

Probably not, because you're so used to Kubrick's shining right.

And it's just so radically different. And that's the big one, right. That's a big one. I've never read the stand. I would start with the short stories. They're fantastic. All right. Those who can finish, it's the. What do you mean not finish like this amazing build up.

And then the resolutions like so he finishes. You just mean it's OK. Well, right. It's not left unfinished. It's the resolution is the payoff is not so great. Yeah. Interesting. And it's still fine.

But he's so good at building things up that it's almost it would be almost impossible to finish it. I don't know if we should call this beginning book, talk with Josh and Chuck or padding the episode. You want to talk moonwalk?

Yeah, we needed a little something. This is a short one. Well, you were saying that you were like you just couldn't do it. Yeah. This is let me let me tell you how I approach the moonwalk. All right. My left hand was covered in a white glove with sequins sewn on then my mom made for me.

Did you really wearing the Thriller jacket? Wow. Little black pants. Yeah, that's how I moonwalked wow. I was still not that great adits you were you were in. I mean, this is so in my wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't. I mean I listen to pop music, but I was also influenced by my well he's now my brother in law. But the general, the general started dating my sister when I was 12. Okay.

So like he was always around. Yeah. And he was like, you're twelve years old. You need to listen to the Allman Brothers and Leonard Skinner and Molly Hatchet and Blackfoot and the Atlanta Rhythm Section Black.

The Doobie Brothers. Yeah. Like heck yeah. Yeah. But I also listen to American Top 40 every week. So I mean I was in MTV, I was glued to. Sure. So you can't be glued to MTV and not like Digest in just some of that stuff. Sure. But I was never I never own parachute pants or sequined anything but so that was the only sequin thing I ever owned.

But that's very sweet that your mom did that. I think so, too. It was a very sweet gesture. But I think one of the other reasons the moonwalk spoke to me and I didn't realize it until researching this article, Chuck, that I was also super into breakdancing at the time. Yeah. And the moonwalk is actually not a breaking move. It's a pop and move. But for all but actual breaking and popping dancers, it was the same thing.

Yeah, I don't I don't see how to pop and move. I saw that in the article. I couldn't put it together because it's is so herky jerky. Right. And a good moonwalk. It's so smooth and buttery.

Well so Lokken is herky jerky, right. Well no popping is too pop. Is that like. Yeah, but it's also I wish we could see it. This is really not good for audio, but it's also so, you know, the one where you hold out one hand and make a wave, the wave goes through your body.

To the other hand, the classic coffin is it? Yeah. And I was like, oh, OK, I'll. But the worms poppin wrong, the worms and braken move, I clearly don't know. But the average person who's who's doing these dances is probably Poppen Lockin and Braken. Yeah. It all kind of worked at the same time. Yeah. And I know we covered break dancing some in the hip hop episode but we should do it total break dance like give it its full do.

OK, and we're going to call it the total break dance episode.

But we, I mean we got to cover some of it here because there's, there's, there's such a basis of it in the moonwalk or the moonwalk has such a basis in it.

But the moonwalk goes even further back then poppin and locking, which we'll talk about in a minute. It goes all the way back to the 30s. Yeah. So we take a break. Oh, man. Yes.

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Not look at those cowboys. There are black cowboys. I taught them how to do everything that Kobe's. Kobe, Kobe, Kobe. Kobe made people feel as confident as he was. How do you dress? He's like, you know, like a casual gangster from Alea Studios. This is California Love.

Listen to California Love on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast, your future stuff, you you know. All right.

Just just taught me how to moonwalk and I'm great at it. Yeah. And this I can't hear with. That's called the wave. The wave is where you stand up at a baseball game. So what is this? I don't know.

I mean, people that don't know what Josh is doing right now, he's probably frustrated, but it's that, you know, that move you do where you wave the one arm and it goes to your body and the other arm waves and then you pass it to your friend. Yes.

That's a Poppen move, is it? Yeah. Know body pop. It clearly doesn't. I don't know what popping means. I think the name is a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, probably. All right. And by the way, people. We might as well get to this, I'm not going to be able to gush much about Michael Jackson because I am one of the people that thinks he did bad things in his private life. So if you don't hear me talking about how awesome he is, that's why.

Yeah, I have a hard time separating the art from the artist. Well, let me throw it out there. And if you believe that, how could you. Yeah, I'm unconvinced at this point. All right. But I mean, seeing my own a. Yeah, that's a good one. Get on. A bunch of people like that would seem to me covering my own a speaking for myself. Anyway, if you hear a little bit of like callousness in my voice, that's what's why.

So going back in time, it was not invented by that man. It was like he said, it goes back to the 1930s. If you look on the YouTube's, they're like history of the moonwalk. You will see a nice video that shows the evolution of this dance. Yeah, starting with Cab Calloway in the 1930s doing something called The Buzz, the great bandleader, jazz big bandleader. He remains an accused of anything. He was also awesome in the Blues Brothers.

Oh, yeah. Wow. He was still around for that. That's right. I forgot about that about 50 years on. Yeah.

So in the 1930s, he did something called The Buzz and it was a little more herky jerky and not as smooth. Then there was something that this article mentions called the camerawork, which I looked into or the collegiate walk. Yeah. That like Sammy Davis Jr. did in this video. I don't think it looks anything like the moonwalk.

Not really. I think going forward, first of all.

Right. Which is a big one. And it's cool. It's a cool move. Sure. James Brown. Sammy to do it. Sam, he's like, all right, I'll do it. Sorry, I'm laughing. Awesome. So could you imagine being in that audience? Man Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown on the same stage.

I know. Who do we have now? Bieber and whoever else I don't even know him, Bieber and Bieber. The nightmare group.

Yeah, so sorry, man.

We sound old, you know, old because we trash Justin Bieber like you just seen a jerk. You know, he really has done a lot of stuff to say to earn that, yeah, it's not like he's some, like, super nice guy. People are just unfair to. Right. Like, look at some of the videos and, like, peeing in a bucket in a restaurant. Do you ever see that one? No, I heard about that one.

That Toronto. OK, well, I think he's just too much wealth and not enough guidance and and probably too much booze and stuff. I think maybe he might be somewhat reformed now, but. Oh, really, I think he's grown up a little bit, but I don't follow it that closely. I see just the pee in the bucket thing. Yeah.

I mean, that was enough to turn me off forever when I'm back. Just enjoying it back.

Good luck. So we were talking about the camel jaywalker, the camel walk. So you were saying it doesn't look like a moonwalk. In fact, it looks kind of like a reverse moonwalk. Sort of. But the the point is, it was it's somebody's Sammy Davis Jr. floating. Their feet are floating a little bit. They appear to be floating while they move. Yeah. All right. So it's related to the moonwalk, right? I'll give you that.

The one that's like dead on, though, is Bill Bailey in 1955, full on moonwalks on the stage in 1955 at the Apollo.

Yeah, and there's a great video and it's at the very end of the video. But I urge you to not just skip to the end because you've got two or three minutes of some sweet, sweet tap dancing. Yeah. Which I didn't realize how much I loved until I saw this guy.

And he was supposedly trained by Mr. Bojangles himself. Really? Yeah. That was a real person. Yeah. I don't remember his name, but it was Bojangles. Yeah. I love tap dancing. I did not watch that. Sounds like man. That's amazing. You should go see Gregory Hines. Is he still doing it? Probably. There's no way. He's just like I'm done tapping. Yeah. It was all tap was life for that guy.

Yeah. I mean that stuff's amazing. And what's the guy's name. I can't remember Mikhail Baryshnikov one night. Well I did see that movie. Yeah. Um, know there was a guy, Savion Glover. Oh, I know who you're talking about. Like, much more recent. Yeah, like I mean, mean tap dancer. Yeah. Like he just shout insults while he was.

You look stupid, but watch me dance.

It's a Bill Bailey in 1955, like logit moonwalked and it's hard to say like he's the guy that invented it because dance like any art form is just borrowed and changed and morphs along the years. Yeah. To where. I don't know that anyone can specifically say like Bill Bailey might have seen it from someone else. I've been like, that's a hot move. Yeah. He seems like the type of talent that he could have come up with that himself.

Yeah, sure.

But what's weird, Chuck, is that that's apparently where it went and died, like he created the moonwalk and it stopped with him for a while. Sure.

No, if you go back in the history of it, the people who popularized the moonwalk didn't know that he had done that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean.

So simultaneously, there's also some movement that's similar called the ER Walk, but it's mime. Yeah. Like Marcel Marceau is walking against the wind, very famous mime routine where his feet are floating. It's called er walking and it's strictly mime. Right. Yeah.

The difference between that in a moonwalk is that they're stationary and acting like they're walking forward. Right. And the wind is blowing them but they're not going backwards. It's but it's also not part of a dance either.

Correct. Some minds don't dance.

This is but this is a weird little thing that I didn't realise. There was apparently a mime. There is a period of the 70s where mimes were cool. Did you know that? Yeah, I mean, there was I remember watching Shields and Yarnell as a kid on television, major network TV.

I was all brainstem at the time because I was totally unaware of that. Yeah, mining was a big deal in that. Like, I would practice that. OK, OK, a little bit. No, not for years, but yeah, I practice mining. What a bizarre period of American pop culture. Oh yeah. Shields and Yarnell. This mime couple had a or they two dudes are now a man and a woman. I think they were married OK that they, they had their own TV show.

Oh yeah. Shields ya know, watched apparently by a lot of people including you. Sure. It was also watched by a dude named Jeffrey. Daniel. Yeah, man, Jeffrey. Daniel was a great dancer. Probably still is. He is. Not only was he on solid gold, he was in the band Shalamar with Jody Watley. Yeah, Jody Watley. And Shalimar was created by the great Don Cornelius of Soul Train. All right. I believe Danny died four years ago.

Yes, he did. And, uh, Gary Mumford was the original singer. And then on album number two, Gerald Brown took over, like you said, with Jody Watley. Mm. Of. Shalimar fame, I guess, and then later on her own fame. Yeah, she was she had her own solo career for sure. And in this guy, Jeffrey Daniel. Right. So Jeffrey Daniel was dancing in the sheets. Remember that hit? Yes.

The great Footloose soundtrack song, Dancing in the Streets.

Doo doo doo. And that was the 80s, the 80s stuff.

They, you know, came around in the 70s with more disco. It was super.

Just going to start with it. But the the Jeffrey Daniels, who is in Shalimar, who's also a solid gold dancer, he had a pretty awesome move called the back slide. Yeah. And when you watch him backslide, he's he's moonwalking. Yes. Total total moonwalk. It totally is. And later on, he was interviewed like, where did you get this? Where you know, where you know, where did you come up with the idea?

He was like, I was super into Shields and Yarnell. Yeah. I'm so miming influence the back slide, which is we'll find out in a second. Directly led to the moonwalk. We'll get to that finally after this. I'm John Horn, host of the podcast Hollywood, the sequel. On every episode, we're challenging producers, actors and directors to tell us what's broken in Hollywood and how they'd fix it. Here's producer Ava DuVernay on ending systemic racism.

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You know, you should know.

All right, Chuck, we're back. Yes, Jeffrey, Daniel, I watched that interview that's on the YouTube. It was on a British talk show called Soccer AM of the twenty seven.

Yeah, they had him on soccer. And apparently it's not just about sports, but they have like comedy bits and pop culture stuff. OK. Uh. So he was surprised on that show, they showed the clip of of Bailey right in the 50s, and he was like, what's that?

It's like I never even seen that. He was surprised to see that someone was legit moonwalking. Yeah, you know, whatever, 50 something years earlier.

Yeah, the same move. Yeah. It's not like that's kind of close. Like maybe the camerawork or the buzz, like Cab Calloway. It was a moonwalk. It was the moonwalk. But that's what I'm saying. That's what's so bizarre is that this guy invented the moonwalk in 1955 and it began and ended with him and it took mimes getting a TV show to create the moonwalk, as we understand it today.

Well, they could radically different about it.

Talk about chaos theory. You know, I'm saying, though, like other people could have influenced the mimes that knew about Bill Bailey, like, I guess I guess that's entirely possible.

But Marcel Marceau is doing the ER walk as far back as the 30s before Bill Bailey. Was he around in the 30s, from what I understand? OK, which is weird because, well, he was pretty old when in the 70s when he hit it big.

So, yeah, I think then he was doing it in the 30s because that's what this article says. And I didn't find anything. Yeah. Said the 30s. I didn't find any footage of him from the 30s, like all of it seemed to be from the 70s and early 80s.

Well, the heyday of mimes also. I was curious why people hate mimes. Uh, did a little research. And of course, there's no definitive thing. There's nothing like a phobia now. But everything I saw came down to a few things. They look like clowns and clowns. We did a whole episode on that coulrophobia and the silent thing seems to bug people. Yeah. And then just the notion that they're, you know, they'll get up all in your face in a park.

Yeah. You're out just enjoying your day. And a man will come up and be like, you know, to start doing they're like intruding upon you to do their act. Yes. I don't even know is I don't even know if that's the case. Do your act over there. Oh, it is. Believe me. Yeah. Mine, very intrusive.

Like to start static and I finish it. Uh, so back to Jeffrey Daniel.

He's dancing on Soul Train. He's dancing on solid gold. There's another couple of dancers name Jiron Casper candidate. Yep. Great name. And Derek Cooley Jackson Jr. X. So in another cool name. And they were moonwalking around or backsliding around. And so all these dudes were basically kind of laying the foundation for what the moonwalk would come to be. It got like even if you watch Baily's, it's a legit moonwalk, but it's not as smooth as Daniel ended up doing it.

Yeah. You know, right. Like when you see him on solid gold and be like that's one of the smoother moonwalks you'll ever see.

And he probably debuted it for the first time in American history on TV.

On Top of the Pops in 1982, that's the one I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, that's so smooth. So he thought he was cheating. Yeah. They're like, is the floor oiled or something?

Like, what is that kind of witchcraft we're watching? Right. It blew everybody away, right? Yeah.

But everybody no one knew who this guy was really. He was a solid gold dancer at the time. Everybody knew who Michael Jackson was. Sure. So in about a year later, almost exactly a year later, NBC broadcast the special called Motown 25.

Yeah, big retrospective. And it was a huge, huge thing. Diana Ross did her first appearance with the Supremes since 1969. Oh, wow. Marvin Gaye played. I need to see that there was a battle of the bands between The Temptations and the Four Tops who won? Stevie Wonder. I'm sure everybody was like a soccer game.

Yeah. And a Michael Jackson comes out.

Right. And people like whosay. I mean, he was pretty big at the time. Of course he was. He was huge, but so was Marvin Gaye in The Four Tops. And Stevie Wonder. Oh, yeah. Michael Jackson comes out and brings the house down.

And one of the reasons he brought the house down was because he was doing Billie Jean, which, when the thing came out, was the number one song in America. But during the dance, he did the moonwalk. And it was the first time basically anybody who'd seen had ever seen the moonwalk.

Yeah, like like no one in America watching this NBC special had been watching Top of the Pops. Yeah, they made it scene stuff on solid gold here and there. But it was definitely like a mind blower for because it was such a widely watched special. Yeah. For sure. Um. Well, here's the deal, he was taught the moonwalk. Depends on who you ask. Some people say he sought out, Daniel said, you teach me.

Other people say no, it was Casper candidate or Coulis Jackson. But from what I gather, it sounds like all those guys eventually worked with him right over the years. It's like either choreographer's or choreographer's backup dancers. So he learned it from some or all of those people. Yeah, like Daniel choreographed, like his smooth criminal video and coulis. And Casper are the dudes who, like, lean with him on that very famous, like, crazy sideline that he did in the video.

Does he do one of the lean moves? Yes, the crazy sideline, I think, is what it's called. Can I say what happened to me yesterday? What did you do? Well, I was looking at videos on how to moonwalk, tutorials to see if I could get it. And when you watch it slow down and broken down, it's like, oh, well, I get it. It's not that complex. Right. But it's hard to master.

And we'll get to all that coming up. OK, like, I'm sure we're going to bumble our way through a description of how to moonwalk.

We always do, but we're going to try. But then I started following into that little YouTube vortex of videos and I saw this guy saying, here's how you do the lean you are. And I was like, I want to know how to do that, because it's cool. It is. It's like an illusion. It is like you're like it's a camera trick, obviously.

Well, it's not. It's real. Yeah.

You got strong ankles, right. And there's a guy in it. Well, I don't. And there's a guy named Robert Hoffman who it turns out this guy is great. He does his dance tutorials and he's kind of funny and and does it in such a way that it's interesting to watch. And so I encourage everyone to go watch Robert Hoffman's tutorial on how to do the lean. And he kind of explains it fully explains the illusion and how to how to do it well.

And I look at it, I'm like, oh, man, you're about to fall over, right? And then he pulls it back. And I thought, I'm going to practice the lean because that'll be like I've always wanted to know how to dance, but I'm just not good at it. Yeah, but I want to get like the lean down at least so I can pass that out. Right. That part is just like standing in place. Yeah.

But you know, you shouldn't even do a dance for his while you're having a conversation so slowly, slowly just start to leave.

So you're about to go over that back into place and be like, what if you're totally right because I don't go to dance parties anymore anyway. What am I talking about. Just regular parties. Yeah, I would be in the office one day in the kitchen and I'll just do my lean.

Always going to go, oh my God, you go over. He said back. Oh, man. All right, so where are we.

So we were talking about how there's a there's a discrepancy over who taught Michael Jackson the moonwalk. Correct. The thing is, is Michael Jackson never claimed to have invented the moonwalk. People just assumed he had. Right. Because he was huge at the time. And he also later said that he didn't know what he what his dance routine was going to be for Billie Jean, for this Motown special. I don't know if I buy that. So a lot of people say, well, obviously he just did the spur of the moment or whatever.

No, totally untrue. He employed choreographers and including those three guys, like you said, all three of them worked with him as choreographers. Right. And he also, as far as his sister Janet, I think says they went to see Shalimar at Disneyland. Yeah. Before this and saw Jeffrey Daniel doing the backslide and said, dude, you got to teach me that. Right. Here's some money. Teach me the moonwalk. Yeah. Oh, wait, it's not called the moonwalk yet.

And he also said that he never called it the moonwalk, that it was actually the media that came up with that. He adopted the name.

Sure. Surely some. I mean, obviously someone named it. Some, yeah. Some AP reporters like are named. Yeah.

There's me for what it's worth, Daniel said, besides Shields and Yarnell, that the the Electric Boogaloo is. Yes. Is who inspired him as well. And I looked up those guys, they're the ones who originated body popping.

Yeah. And they were a dance group and I was looking at one of them.

I was like, let's rerun. OK, you're talking about walking. Yes, it is rerun.

Yes. He was huge.

And he was a member of the lockers, which was at one point. The Electric Boogaloo is now those are two different. We'll know at one point they were they were merged, OK, and then then that's where poppin and locking came from, because poppin and locking are two different types of data originally there, the electric boogaloo lockers, OK, and then I guess they diverged at one point.

OK, maybe they were like, I want to lock, I want to pop.

Well, the dude who invented locking it was good friends with rerun. Yeah. And like if you think of rerun dancing, like those twists in the jumps in the suspender stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's lock. And they totally missed and they were on that dance squad, the lockers. It was Don Campbell who invited. And locking up rerun and then Tony Bazil, the girl who sang Mickey oh, Mickey, yeah.

So if you don't know who rerun is, you know, like what in the world are you guys talking about?

What you oldsters, um. Oh, yeah. It was a TV show called What's Happening about these three friends in south central L.A. in the 70s. Great show. Very funny. And Rerun was one of the characters played by the great Fred Barry, who was in the lockers and the Electric Boogaloo Locker. Yeah. And just go watch, go type rerun dancing. What's happening? Yeah. And what you're watching is Pure Lockin, one of the great TV theme songs of all time to you.

Now, if you throw away. He's really. Yeah. What instrument was that like a klezmer or something. I have no idea. It's weird. Yeah. But is a great one. The if you throw in that there are movement there that wave and the worm. Yep. You've got pop and lock in and braken. Yeah. What people think of as breakdancing. That's right. Amazing.

Like we are singing the other day about how in our lifetime is people our age and there's a range but we've seen like. A complete like to complete at least two new complete art forms created in hip hop music and that in breakdancing created out of whole cloth. Mm hmm. It's amazing. And a new sports. Like what? Like, you know, X Games and snowboarding and skateboarding. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like we've, like, seen these new things created.

And you always think that, well, music is what else can you do right now? Well, I wonder this, I guess techno and all that stuff that was created as well. Sure. Um, jazz. Well, that was before us a little bit.

No, it's true. I just think it's pretty neat to look at. Oh, no, I know what you're talking about to you.

You're like, oh, there's grunge. Well, grunge is an offshoot of like rock and roll or whatever.

But yeah, no, I mean, these are completely new art forms. Yeah. That some people still think are a fad, which is funny really. Well, you know, you hear like old curmudgeons like rap is going to be a fad. Now rap is a brand new art form is here forever. Yeah. And it changes and morphs and is you know. Yeah. Amazing. It's neat.

So we did a hip hop episode. You mention that.

Yeah, it was good. I thought for, you know, a couple of schmoes like us and we did a pretty decent job. Agreed. Um, all right. So do we need to explain how to break dance? I want to hear you explain it now. I can't even moonwalk. Oh yeah. What I say. Break dance. Break dance. Yeah. Yeah. We need to say how to moonwalk. OK, so go ahead, take it away.

Well you're the one who does it so well. All right. All right. All right. You ready? Yeah. So you start first of all, you want to take off your shoes and put on some socks and a nice slick floor. Yeah. Don't try to do it on like a pine bark.

No, maybe pour yourself a vodka gimlet. Yeah, well, that's the that's the drink of the moonwalker.

So you you are on a slick floor wearing socks and you stand straight up and down. Right. And you take your right foot and you put it out in front of you with your foot flat on the floor. OK, OK. Bend your left knee and go up on the ball of your left foot. OK, ok. Now holding yourself in place with just the ball of your foot, all of everything is on whatever foot. You have the ball of whatever foot you have up.

Yeah, take a sip of that gimlet. All right. Maybe another one to you. I need one now and then you drag your foot back the foot that's on the floor. And as you drag your right foot back past your left, you drop your left and you drop your left heel and raise your right. That's right. And then you repeat the same process and you're floating. There's the moonwalk, a.k.a. the back side. You're pretty square if you call it the moonwalk these days, where the title, this episode moonwalk because we wanted everybody to know what we were talking about.

But it's called the back slide.

OK, that is correct. And I watched the tutorial, which the guy who did the tutorial actually wasn't great at it. Um, like he had it down, like how to teach you. But when he did it, I was going, yeah, it's not great.

Was Debro now cut? That would be great. I just think the guy had the wrong shoes on personally.

Uh, but I bet that's what he blames it on. The thing he stressed for a good moonwalk is a long stride. Which is where you're lacking, if I can be honest. Oh, am I doing it too, too short?

Yeah, OK, long stride, Josh OK.

I didn't realize you'd had so many formed opinions about my role. Uh, that foot that you're keeping flat.

Yeah. Needs to be so, so flat to to create the illusion. Right. What am I doing. I'm not talking about you now, ok. Your foot was pretty good and flat. Yeah. It's your stride. I pretend like it's dead.

Like my foot is dead. Oh it's going to drag it. Uh and then when you when you go to switch feet he said you really just snap on both real hard to create that illusion. Yeah. Like a good a completely synchronized simultaneous snap up and down with those two feet. Right. Your long stride. Keep that foot flat. Keep that vodka gimlet flowing. Yeah. And you're going to be moon walking in no time. And then you can also because what you're doing, it's supposed to look like you're walking while you're moving backward.

You're walking forward, but moving backward.

Yeah, that's the definition of the moon. So you can you can like, add your arms swinging.

Sure. Lean like tilt tilt your body forward a little bit if you're real good. Michael Jackson used to like move his head up and down in rhythm to his walking or whatever. Yeah. And he adds to the effect totes shalimar. I feel like I can and should try it try right now. Well, I'm not going to do it now.

You know, I'm a dog again. Nope. Are you anything else. And you go get some cocktail onions. Those are great Gibson onions. Oh is that it. Gibson I'm thinking of. Yeah but that's what is the lime juice. Yes. Roses lime. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you want to know more about vodka gimlets you can type that word in the search bar, howstuffworks dot com and synthetic gimlets. Time for listening.

Email before listener mail. This is when we call this correction time. We need like lullaby music. We do. So, you know, we have corrections on the show from time to time. This is sort of a big one because we really goofed on the Gettysburg Address episode. And boy, did we hear about it. Remember how I said I wanted to be a civil war buff? I don't anymore. You had a rough start to your career as a civil war, but they're not nice people.

As it turns out, no one on the Internet is a nice person. No, I was I was just very surprised that people got angry that we messed something up. No, no. Not just like so what do we mess up? We said 50000 dead. It was 50000 total casualties. Is that what it was? So we messed up and said mistake casualties for dead when in fact casualties is dead, missing or wounded. OK, and then we also said that what we were talking about, the percentage of the army like it was this much, a percentage of like twenty five percent.

Yeah. Of the union army and about a third of Lee's army. Right. But it was just for the army fighting in that battle, not the total union army and the total Confederate army. And we very specifically were like, oh, we were, huh? Yeah, this is for the entire army. So we got a little excited and a little ahead of ourselves. Well, clearly, we're the most evil people of the century. Yeah.

So very sorry about that. Civil war buffs, you know. Now, don't ever contact Chuck again, please. All right. Listen to me now. Yeah, um, I'm just going to read this one. Hey, guys, great podcast. Especially like how you pointed out some of the the bogus studies on how to do good research. I especially liked how you guys pointed out the pressure when you're an understudy to do studies that support the current theories of your employer without getting into a ton of detail.

I've been there and I left research altogether because I became pretty disillusioned with it all. One thing you did not mention is that entire industries get directed based on the results of a few initial studies, the sexiness of the studies aside, which is what you talked about. The researcher does a good job and does not show anything or has a negative study. Their funding is often at stake. For my personal experience, this is the largest basis for bias.

Whoa, that was a mouthful. It's hard to say when you're missing the truth. Check. Um, research researchers become heavily vested in being right from a face perspective. If they see in a monetary perspective we don't really recognize. I realize this because the scope, the impact of the studies are usually small. But that researcher who suddenly lost all their grants is a pretty high price to pay for being ethical. I don't really have any answers to how to clean it up, but science is contrarian and by nature, anti consensus.

Instead, we have a system that rewards only rewards reinforcement. Good researchers have to be allowed to say we did this great study and found nothing without the fear of losing grant money. Hey, man, that's from Trevor.

Thanks, Trevor. That was very illuminating and enlightening, very area dite. Yeah, they say that Rudy. Really? OK, if you wanted to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. So that's why as podcast, you can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff. We should know you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuff you should know Dotcom.

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