From My Heart radio, it's the Hey Pal podcast, hey, pal, we are going to be talking sports. We're so starved for sport. I literally just fought the UPS guy and filmed it.

So I'm going to put it online. We're going to be talking entertainment. Julian Edelman, it's football movies who's advancing between Jerry Maguire and Water-borne.

I think you've got to go, Waterboy. We've got it upset. Who should we call next? Dave.

We're calling everybody new episodes of Hey Pal every Tuesday on the Radiolab Apple podcast or work your podcast.

It's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere. And I should know my mom's the speaker of the House. My friends are all in the same boat. Daughters of the D.C. elite. When are this close to power?

There's nowhere to hide. But in here, no one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as storm alloy. You see, I'm a bit of a hacker. Join me and my friends. Four daughters in D.C., a new 12 part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Lethal It Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Dogs for Free and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, check here on a Saturday bringing you're my select pick for the week from January to 20, 15 January 15th.

That is, uh, it is one of our famous colon episodes juggling colon.

What the heck learn all about juggling right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles Doublecheck Bryant, there's Jerry just doing a little tandem juggling with my bra. That's what we're doing right now. Yeah. Yeah. Wish you guys could see this because I'm pretty good Kaskade right now. Oh, look at this half shower or shower. And that was a good one, bro.

17 balls at once. Yeah. Jerry, come on.

Like these torches on fire. Wow, man. Half 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 is born knowing how to juggle.

Yeah. Came out of the womb juggling. Yeah. Now he learned back when like in high school and mastered it pretty quickly. Yeah. And now he can still juggle some. I think it's one of the things. Well once you learn sort of the basics you can always do it because apparently a lot of it comes down to muscle memory.

Yeah. 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 see any progress over that hour. Yeah, I could, I could do the little one hand juggling two balls with one hand thing. OK, but I did a lot of chasing the ball.

That's a problem, which apparently if you're a beginning juggler, you're going to 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 learn to juggle close to and facing a wall.

Yeah, 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 reeks of Strickland.

It does. Like even if the byline had been on there, I would have been like, this is Strickland. Yeah, but I remember when this one was made, it was like right when I got here. And like he there is a video embedded of Strickland teaching you how to juggle. Yeah, it's smell. 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, yeah, the guy who's in the graph on how to juggle is just totally ripped. Yeah. Like a comic book hero.

I remember Marcus, that seems like a million years ago it was so juggling history.

Mm hmm. How long people been juggling?

Uh, Chuck, people have been juggling since at least 1994.

DC toome. Exactly.

They found in Egyptian tombs hieroglyphics showing women tost juggling. And there are many kinds of juggling, by the way. And we're mainly going to talk about tost juggling, which is throwing something up in the air, throwing more things up in the air than you have hands.

Yes, that's tost juggling. And there are, like you said, a bunch of other kinds. But if you're a tossed 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, our department clearly a juggler, a very good juggler. Yeah. And I sent a message to him and did not hear back in time.

I was like, it says in here that modern jugglers poo poo things like taking a bite out of the apple. And like some of those old school tricks, it's pretty cool things like, is that true or not? And I didn't hear back from them. So maybe crickets.

Well, you know, it was on Facebook, OK, so he'll get to it when he gets to it. So anyway, we're in ancient Egypt. Nineteen ninety four B.C., to be exact. That's right.

There were jugglers in Greece and Rome and India and Thebes and teebs in Europe. And I think 400 BC was when it was actually written down that people were juggling. Yeah. Supposedly in the Talmud, a rabbi named Schyman. Ben Gamaliel. 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, yeah, is it seven? I think so, yeah, but I mean, if if this rabbi was juggling eight torches, that sounds like it may be pumped up a little bit throughout the years. Gotcha. You know, like it was too.

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. I was during a siege. Yeah. 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. Just 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 is doing while someone else is picking their pocket. Right. 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. Sure. Everybody knows that you can't trust a juggler, a Juggalo.

Well, 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 air hits and suddenly jugglers start to become a little a little less threatening and actually a little more clown like.

Yeah, like initially they seem to have been not revered necessarily, but thought of in fairly high esteem. Then they went the opposite direction and then they came back as clowns.

Right. I wonder how many, like behind closed doors, how many, like emperors and kings tried it out after seeing it in the court, just like morons with it.

Yeah. And then had someone's head chopped off in frustration. They took the chucker out, 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. Yeah. Who'd probably traveled from town to town, maybe asking people to bring out their 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 1990s, hundreds vaudeville came along and 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 and the vaudevillian days, I didn't know that either 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 or fatty. Battlestar Buckel. That's who it was. Yeah. Yeah. Same here. Same guys. I looked it up and I ran across the Hollywood Health Club.

So apparently before the Brat Pack, before the Rat Pack, there was a group of like early, early Hollywood guys.

There were Errol Flynn, who was a rapist, W.C. Fields, John Barrymore that just raised hell in Hollywood. And like the 20s, Errol Flynn was a rapist, really accused rapist.

I didn't know that. So then vaudeville declines. Circuses sort of decline a little bit for a while. And then jugglers started hitting the streets or as Jonathan Strickland said, or become mathematician's.

Yeah, we'll get to the math connection, which is legit as foreshadowing. But I don't know that, like, they form their own stage shows performed on street corners or became mathematician's. Right. Those are the three options if you were a juggler. And then, of course, in the 1940s, I say, of course, because it's common knowledge that these are when the juggling groups and conventions were formed and held, the International Brotherhood of Magicians 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 judges were like, get the.

Is what it was. Yeah. Yeah. And then they threw down their smoke bomb. Yeah. And they were gone. Yeah. So they formed and splintered off and formed the International Juggling Association. And in 1969 they started holding championships and competitions, summer of juggling.

And in 2000, Jason Gaffield, a very famous juggler from 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 bee and the dart competition, what else? Which I watched the other day, log rolling. Yeah, lumberjacking, sure. Uh, laun darting. No, that's illegal. No more. It's like cockfighting. Um, so.

All right, let's get into it then. So we're actually going to teach everybody how to juggle, like. No kidding.

Yeah.

And if you're really into this, like, we're going to describe a lot of things visually, which is always a train wreck for us. Yeah. So I would recommend you do like I did and just get on the old YouTube and look up what Kaskade 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.

Yeah, his name is Adam Shamsky, as they show him as Kawhi and like I'm sure I watched him. That guy pops it into slow motion for you. Yeah. There's like, um, like graphics where like he throws something straight up. You might not. I caught it. So it says throw it straight up.

He's good, OK. 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 as a juggler these days or fame. Oh, although there is I should recommend it's going to wait till the end, there's a great article on Grantland Dotcom called Dropped by Jason Fagone and he details a big long story on Anthony Gado, who may be the best juggler on the planet.

He juggled for Cirque de Soleil.

Oh, he had a bunch of the records until recently. Yeah, 12 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 these days saying, like, you film something a hundred times and only nail it once and then you uploaded 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 doesn't mean you can do it. It's essentially what you're talking about.

This guy's story is the premise for office space.

Yeah, basically. Yeah.

But he's amazing.

If you watch Anthony Godo juggling like he will break the record for like, let's say, the number of balls in a rain shower.

And for the amount of time, though, he won't like do it for ten seconds. He'll do it for like ten minutes. Right. And other jugglers are like this dude. It's insane how long he can keep all these clubs and balls and torches or whatever in the air.

That's really funny that you mention him and what happened to him, because I noticed his records were like all mid 2000s, the most recent ones were. And I wondered what happened to Anthony Gado. Now, I know he gave the finger. It's a really good article, actually. It's dropped on Grantland Dotcom.

All right. 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 bean bags because bean bags are dead drops or they drop dead.

You're not going to chase them all over the room? No. When they fall, they just stay put. Yeah. Hacky sacks are good, too. Or you can buy like my brother did the little, which are basically hacky sacks, a little juggling kit.

Yeah. A complete klutzes guide to juggling, isn't that.

No, sure. There are many. I think it was before the Complete Idiot's Guide. There was something called like something for klutzes and it would teach you like things how to how to juggle the required dexterity. Yeah. Interesting.

Um, so anyway, you start with three bean bags which in the juggling world, what these are, anything you juggle are called props. Specifically beanbag falls under the category of balls, even though they're not necessarily balls still under the category balls because it's not a chainsaw or a torch.

Exactly.

Club which would fall under the category of clubs. Right. So for most of the time we're going to say balls. But just imagine as you're starting out, we're talking about beanbags. OK, OK, 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. Yeah. Take two of your three balls and put them away. Yeah, and Stricklin and experts say you should literally start with tossing one back and forth to get your arc down. That is 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 beanbag up four feet in one three feet when you 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. Yeah, and the easiest one to start with to start practicing is the cascade pattern.

Yeah, there's two main patterns. The shower in the Cascade, which we've joked about so far about 10 times. The shower is the one that you see on cartoon's 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.

Yeah, I never thought about that. Yeah. Like, as the balls go up and they are out there basically asking outward across your body. Yes. And it looks just kind of like, you know, one of those big fireworks where, like, blows up and then like just kind of trails downward slowly. Yeah.

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 four, the regular Kaskade, your right hand goes clockwise, your left hand is counterclockwise, alternating these tosses. If you reverse that, that's called a reverse cascade.

Right. So the key here, just remember you're using one ball still, but you're making a scooping motion in toward your torso. Yeah, like in toward yourself, not away from your body, but in toward your body.

Right in front of your chest. Your your feet are shoulder width apart. Yeah. Because they always should be.

When you do anything and you're tossing the thing up into an arc in about just above eye level.

Yeah.

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. Right. Yeah.

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 of reverse cascade, anything like that, whatever hand is going clockwise is the hand that you throw in the highest arc above your eye level. Oh, ok.

OK, so you've got your one bag and 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. Yeah. 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 in a counterclockwise motion so that eventually when you add more balls and you have a ball 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 counterclockwise motion hand is following just beneath the arc of the first ball. That's right.

It's inside that ball's path. Yes.

And you're going to at first be very frustrated because you're going to 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. Yeah, because it's just that sort of like if you've never played drums, it's hard to make your right arm, your left arm, your right foot in 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 tossers to be distinct and separate in one way to do this, Stricklin says, is to count your toss like toss one toss to toss one, toss two, and then your little brother's going to say, what are you doing in there?

Shut up. Yeah, nothing.

That's one. So we might as well add the second ball. Now, are you ready?

We just open with one ball. Yeah. Oh, wow. Because that won't toss.

One is with your your clockwise hand. Yeah. Toss two is with your counterclockwise hand. You catch the second one, you toss two with your clockwise hand toss one toss to. You're still this with one ball here. Now we're going to add two.

OK, so you have one in your left hand. One 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 that right. I wish people could see this. So this is delightful.

So we're going to throw the first ball and as it reaches its zenith just above our eyes, we're going to throw the second one just underneath the arc of the first one. Yeah. You know, what's funny is if people were walking by my desk all day, saw me doing the same thing, because you kind of do it to yourself to be like, OK, I get I get the motion.

Yeah. And why is Strickland 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 juggler.

So Chuck, 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.

Yes. You throw the second ball at about the halfway mark of that first throw. So every half second. You're throwing a ball. Is that the deal if you 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. Yeah.

So every second you're throwing every half of whatever beat it takes for the ball to be tossed and then come down. Yeah. You're throwing a ball, right. OK, OK. Which means that when you finally add the third ball in so you can which let's go ahead and do that now. Yeah. You want to hold two balls in one hand obviously and they suggest to hold the two and the dominant hand. Although if you're having a problem making that third toss they say sometimes switch it up and it may help to hold the two and the non dominant.

Yeah.

To begin, some people just want to hold one and you're really just throwing to 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 going to be frustrated. It takes a lot of time in practice. Yeah. 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. No, no, we're not free. It's covered like six months of work.

But now what you can master in a minute, though, is just clicking on YouTube and watching videos of jugglers. Again, I'm almost done.

Yeah. OK, so with this Cascais, you get 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. Sure. You toss it up in the air as that one asks, 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 it first, don't worry about it. Yeah, 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 motion down and learn basically the motion of the cascade and again, stand in front of a wall because you're going to find yourself chasing the the beanbag forward because you're tossing it further away from you. Yeah, but be careful. Start with chainsaws, don't 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. They're like the haunted house chainsaws. Right.

All right. Well, after this break, we are going to get into variations on the cascade.

Her with the Meana Brown is a weekly podcast brought to you by Cynical Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.

I'm your host, Amena Brown.

And each week I'm bringing you hilarious storytelling and soulful conversation, centering the stories of black, indigenous, Latino and Asian women. Each week we are going to laugh, consider and reflect upon the times. Join me as we remind each other to access joy, affect change and be inspired.

Listen to her with Amina Brown on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts in ravenous pandemic, a ruinous recession, protest, riots, racial strife, police brutality and yes, Donald Trump.

America in 2020 feels like Apocalypse Now again. I'm John Heilemann. And in hell or high water.

I'll explore this moment in a series of raw and real conversations with the people who shape our culture. Hell and High Water is a podcast from the recount.

Listen to Hell and High Water on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Josh, you've got the cascade down and try the reverse cascade, OK, which is, like I said, just the opposite direction. I'm sorry, counterclockwise for your right hand, clockwise for your left. You're scooping your hands inward instead of outward, right? Oh, I'm sorry. You're scooping outward 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're like, wait a minute, I've seen guys do that. Right. It'll feel like natural.

Yeah. The only the only big difference is 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 throw. That's all. OK, and your hands are moving in different directions.

So remember the hand that's going in counterclockwise motion throws in the higher arc and that's that's called Joshes law, John.

OK, um, so while you're well, after you've mastered this, which will take a while, as we've said 150 times, you can start doing little tricks, uh, thrown in there because just a regular juggler is going to 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 and, you know, if you look all these up, it basically when you see juggler, it's just juggling regular and then they're armed and crazy looking.

That's what these moves are. Right. 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 our arm. That was maybe a tennis move or Mills mess invented by juggler Steve Mills. Yeah, not my uncle Steve Mills.

I don't think he can juggle or Berk's Biraj or Rubenstein's revenge. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, these are all just complex arm crossing patterns as you're juggling different variations on that.

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. OK, got. Yeah. Rather than throwing the balls up in the air to toss juggle the you throw the balls down on the ground and bounce them. Oh listen, 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's good.

He starts out in profile. Yeah. And you're like, what's the big deal? Like his basement or whatever. Yeah. But then once he I don't know how many balls he had going, you 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 got the force bounce. Right.

And I even wrote coolest exclamation point. Two of them bounce juggling is really cool looking.

Um, there's clawing, which is basically palms down juggling. So it's just the regular Kaskade. But yeah, you're like snatching them out of the air. Yeah. It's like that's cool.

Look and you can do that slowly or you can just throw in a claw every now and then just to delight your nieces and nephews.

Yeah. At Christmas there is the chop. Yeah. Which I think this one's where you grab a ball and then throw it. Underneath your other arm, you throw upward underneath your other arm. Yeah, it's like a diagonal quick diagonal move. Yeah. And like I said at 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. Sure. It's just I call it flare.

Well, there is actually something called flare. That's a type of juggling. It's really bartender's flare.

Oh, yeah. The movie cocktail. Yeah. Bartenders flare. That was a type of juggling, supposedly not a fan.

Oh, I thought it was great. I went to the movie and yeah. I haven't seen it. Are you a fan of bartending flair though? Hey, I'm a Jerry Thomas fan, so yes.

The answer is 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. I pretty much like all bartenders. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, they do it. They're doing God's work.

So Jonathan Strickland says, generally speaking, if you have an odd number of props, you're going to require a crisscross pattern. If you have an even number of props, it's going to be two separate groups juggled in each hand. Yeah.

Remember, you said you could juggle with one hand? Kind of, yeah. 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 you're using.

That's right. So if you use two balls in one hand, that's toss juggling still counts. Yeah. 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. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you 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. Oh, really, I've just seen, like, the Cascade mainly. Hmm. No, no, every time 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 hacky sack. 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 Synchronoss column juggler on YouTube, they're going to be doing the exact same thing at the same time with both hands. Right. Which is pretty neat. I think asynchronous maybe be a little tougher, though, just judging by the looks of it.

Well, Strickland makes the point that since you most people start out learning to juggle asynchronously, which is like that Cascade is asynchronous, the hands aren't moving at the same time, they're moving at opposite beats. Yeah, um, that it's actually easier for people to do that. To do asynchronous. Yeah. Since I guess. Yeah I do, I do. 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 joggling.

OK, OK. So when you're doing numbers juggling you an even number of numbers juggling, you're just doing it asynchronously probably to start. OK, that was my point. One of my little tirade. I wonder how many angry jugglers we have right now. Oh probably a lot. A couple of hundred. There's a couple of other kinds of juggling that are fun to watch.

Cigar box juggling and Shaker Cup. You've probably tried the cigar box thing with shoeboxes, 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. Your cups are nesting inside one another though, like cocktail cups and you're, uh, you know, tossing those up and catching them.

And they're probably was born out of bartender flair. 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, svelte bowling pin. Yeah, a sexy bowling pin.

There are European and American versions and I think the European version is slimmer and sexier than the American go figure. And I think they're a little more popular as well right now. The the larger and is meant to fit into a champagne coupe. That's that's the European one.

That's pretty neat. Uh, and I think he 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 so a few broad categories of props and then all the clubs, that kind of thing, and then they fall under those subcategories like axes and torches and categories at the union.

And then there's ring juggling.

Of course, they're very stable because of their gyroscopic properties. And so don't even mention properties.

Well, the point is, though, you can juggle a lot more rings at once.

Maybe then you might be able to juggle a ball.

Yeah, that's pretty impressive to see as well. Yeah. And then there's this thing I found today called contact ring juggling. It's when you're not throwing rings, you really do.

Oh, you're rolling them along. Well, now that's contact.

Juggling with like a ball is when you're like doing the Harlem Globetrotter thing and rolling it down your arm and 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 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 just take my word for it, OK?

Contact ring juggling everyone go check it out. It's very popular in Asia.

It looks like. OK, they've mastered it. OK, very cool. So let's say you got a buddy and you both like to go to the park. Oh this is a big one and pretty cool. It's a thing. You've seen it. Yeah.

Strickland makes the point that juggling is kind of a social thing populated by social creatures. Like there's lots of juggling clubs. Sure. Kind of stuff. Oh yeah. And that where, you know, you and I think of. Juggling is like a solitary activity, no way, man. If you get two 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.

In 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 will 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 a seamless Synchronoss pattern, uninterrupted if you just like, stop another person from juggling and just being a jerk.

Yeah, the point of it is that combat. Chuckling Oh, yeah, I guess so. But you're still juggling the whole time you're doing that. That's right. The whole point of juggling with two people and like stealing and replacing is that the balls, if you were able to ask these juggle balls what they think is going on, yeah, they would say nothing. It's the same thing we're doing the same pattern. They'd say Chucks 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 feet apart. And, you know, we're juggling the clubs and then tossing each other the clubs. Right. And we've got our little post stuff. You should now act all worked out.

Yeah, it's kósa with stealing, replacing 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 steal it back and we could go back and forth indefinitely 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 it with a 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 of passing where it's called the three three ten where we do three passes, where every third toss I pass to you, 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 are 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 dodgeball, 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 theirs.

So I would go up and throw mine in the air and try and knock your heads out of your hand. But you can't, you know, get too crazy because you've got to still juggle.

Right. Or else you're out.

The way we've been describing this one, it feels like we've been replaced by imposters who listen to the show a lot and didn't know what topic to pick.

Right? Yeah. And that weird. It is weird. I myself. Are you yourself now. I'm you. Oh God. Weird. Well, we'll get to the bottom of this right after these messages.

Hi, this is Melanne Verveer and this is Kim Mazzarelli and we're co-hosts of Senecas Conversations on Power and Purpose, brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.

We're launching a brand new season of this podcast, which brings you fascinating conversations with leaders like two time gold medalist, author and activist Abby Wambach and actor, producer and entrepreneur Justin Baldoni, among many others. Listen to Senecas conversations on power and purpose on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Sam Adams. And I'm Amy Nelson. We're the hosts of Eyharts newest podcast. What's her story with Sam and Amy? Amy and I met on a business trip three years ago. Since day one, we've talked about everything from growing our families to growing our companies. We've basically been in an endless conversation about how it all works and sometimes how it doesn't. We talk about the juggle of parenting and work and also about how we both want to make a lot of money, but also be the best moms possible.

We've also bonded over our love of women's stories. We all know the stories of industry titans like business and jobs, but the stories of women remain incomplete.

So we ask the questions that no one else even touches from closing deals while pregnant to winning Olympic medals while losing on pay equity to my personal favorite, falling in love with someone who's not your husband on a book tour. So listen to what's her story with Sam and Amy on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And that church comes the darkest time is this Josh actual? Yeah, OK, yeah, I'm replaced, I replaced the replacement.

OK, um, no, I'm still here saying bizarre stuff like I replaced the replace. All right. 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 in the terms where we can say that we covered the physics of juggling. That's right.

So the main factor, acting on juggling, probably the most important part in the whole thing is our good friend gravity.

That's right. And acceleration due to gravity specifically. Right, is nine point eight M. S to the second power, meaning nine point eight meters per second every second. Right. So when you drop something, it's speed is going to increase by nine point eight meters per second. And don't bother us. We're not including any kind of air resistance. We're in a vacuum. Yeah. To demonstrate all of our physics. We're always in a vacuum. Right.

Our little stuff, you should know, vacuum part next to the Wayback Machine. Yes.

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. Right, because you have a constant acceleration, downward acceleration after you toss. 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.

Yeah. But at a certain point you just can't do it. Exactly. They're going to be bean bags everywhere.

Yeah. Another 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. Yeah. Which means that the only the only velocity that counts is is the vertical velocity, the vertical acceleration. When you throw something up, you're exerting your own force upward. And once it peaks, its gravity pushing it back downward. That's right, it's going to have a zonal velocity, but that's going to be constant.

So there's no force acting on it exact unless you change in velocity. I guess with the column, it's pretty much straight up and down. But generally speaking, you're going to be have both, right? 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. OK, 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. Yeah. When you are juggling things with three different maths, meaning they have three different three different amounts of inertia or they require more different amounts of force to overcome inertia. Yeah. Then yes, like you said, that's kind of impressive. It just requires that much more mental acuity. That's right.

That all the physics and 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 there was a mathematician who named Claude Shannon, who proposed a juggling theorem that basically describes a relationship of of a castle or, well, just of a juggle. Right, keep saying juggle is other thing, yeah. Did I make it up? No, I think it's the 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 or 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.

And this is in parentheses F plus the. And then that would be times eight, right? Yeah. Outside the princes equals V plus the in parentheses times in when F is the time the ball is in the air. D is the time is a ball in the hand. H is a number of hands. V is time that the hand is empty and N is 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?

Yeah. Which is the full amount of time that that ball exists during a flash. Multiply that times your hands, the number of hands that's going to equal, the time your hand is empty, plus the time the ball spins in the hand times the number of balls being juggled. I saw no reason for this equation whatsoever.

Yeah. Like, first I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. And then I spelled it out to myself and it's like, yeah, 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. Yeah. I didn't understand what the point of it was so called. Shannon please get in touch with us.

Well that's why he did it so people would write stuff about it, you know.

Well the thing is, I guess the problem is that it says Shannon build a juggling robot. 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. OK, yeah.

So if that's the point of the Shannon theorem, is that what that's called. Sure.

The clods clouds law, then then I understand it and I take it back.

What if there's some clouds law that something awful. That we don't know about. I hope that's the case. And then there are 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 to basically if you were going to write out your juggling pattern and send it to your buddy, right.

You wouldn't say take your right hand and blah, blah, blah, you use numbers to represent it, which this actually does make sense. Yeah, this may be a little more sense to me for sure.

Yeah. And so like a normal three ball cascade is three three three each throw takes three beats. A zero is a rest 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 add those together. That's nine divided by three because there's three different numerals and you've got three or four or five.

One four. One is also three. Right. Matt, that sounds pretty difficult, the four or five one four one, you know, yeah, the three three three makes intuitive sense to me, but that's, you know, the four one five four or five one four one.

That's tough. Oh, man. Is anyone still listening though? Can you hear the echo again?

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, right.

They're kind of looking sort of up at the arc and they have done experiments to see where your eyes go. A M. Van Sant Vord, Peter Gebek 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 than an invision. That's why he can juggle blindfolded. If you're really good. Supposedly some people can. I've seen it. Oh yeah. Yeah I bet. Brandon Raschein. 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 were inspired in the first maybe 20 minutes. The good part of this episode. Yeah. To go out and and learn to juggle. I know.

I was. Yeah. And while we hate ourselves, we don't hate ourselves that much. All right. We're going to end this one. Yeah.

So we think that you should learn about juggling and you can start by typing that word into the search bar. HowStuffWorks Dotcom. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

This is a really touching story, oddly enough, from Jennifer Grace.

She's an actor in New York City who 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 link them together before he finally moved to New York to join her.

They've been together for 13 years now and they had their son Emmett last fall and a month before Emmett turned one time, 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 aplastic anemia.

So basically, he has no immune system, which means he can't risk getting sick, which means her son, their son can't even visit him, which is just unbelievable. He said 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, and 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. It's a good brother 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 an episode. It's been a very special shared experience for us. It really brightened his day, said Tom Dood.

They also sent me a video of them playing a song together in the kitchen doing Springsteen song.

And it was just like the cutest couple ever. And they're really great. And, um, I'm going to plug their Go Fund Me site because they didn't even ask me to. That's why I'm plugging it. Uh, it is. Go find me dotcom f seven five nine ZG and that will help out offset their hospital bills a little bit. And they're just really nice folks and to time get better soon. Man I hope that operation goes great. Yeah.

Tom, here's to you buddy. And uh. Yeah.

And keep us posted you guys. Yeah. Please do Jennifer. That would be great. 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 can 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 Suay Escape podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know and you can send us an email to Stuff podcast, that HowStuffWorks dot com. And it's always joined us at our home on the web stuff. You should know Dotcom.

Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio is at the radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. From My Heart radio, it's the Hey Pal podcast, hey, pal. Hey, Pop with Gerard and Dave, we are going to be talking sports. We have Julian Edelman on our podcast today. Julian, it's football movies who's advancing between Jerry Maguire and Warner.

I think you've got a good waterboy. Oh, we've got it upset.

We're going to be talking entertainment.

Jeremy Piven, I shouldn't tell the story, but I'm going to anyway, I. I'm going to call my pals. Are you going to call your pal?

I'm going to call my pal. Zendaya Tiffany Haddish. Joe Buck. J.J. What? Mr. Kevin Hart. Odell Beckham. Junior. Snoop Dogg. The dogs definitely, you know, hail. Mark Cuban, if you had to quarantine with one person you didn't know, who would you quarantine with? Am I still married? That's the answer.

Who should we call next, Dave? We're calling everybody.

It's the Apple podcast, new episodes every Tuesday on the radio, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Kristen Holmes. I've covered campaigns, Capitol Hill, the White House and everything Washington for CNN. But nothing tops the importance of this upcoming election. And my job is to help you make sense of it all. Welcome to Election 101. For the next 10 weeks, we'll figure out the electoral process together. I'll talk to experts, historians and some of you will address the safety of mail and voting, inform you of deadlines and make sure you know all your options.

You'll learn why voter registration is different from state to state and even from person to person. I'll help you figure out how to watch the debates a little more closely and how to get a better read on what the candidates really stand for. Yes, this election year is different and this is a different kind of podcast. Election one. One was created to help you learn how to make the most of your vote this November. Listen to election one to one every Wednesday on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.