Transcript

Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 58 min · 11,454 words · 355 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published January 5, 2026 (58 min, about 11,454 words). It mentions 11 people, works and ideas, including MC Cher, Graham Nash, Alhambra, Stuff You Should Know, Penrose stairs.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: MC Cher, Stuff You Should Know
  2. – 10:00: Graham Nash, MC Cher, Technical College of Delft
  3. – 15:00: Graham Nash
  4. – 20:00: MC Cher, Jeda Umaker
  5. – 45:00: MC Cher
  6. – 55:00: Penrose stairs, Graham Nash, Journey to Infinity, MC Cher
  7. – 57:50: Stuff You Should Know

Notable quotes from "Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

  • Cubes and things with my poor artwork. But you know who is really good at this? MC Cher and this episode from December 2019 gets all into the life of the great artist and the title is MC Cher and his trippy art. I hope you enjoy it.
    about MC Cher · at
  • Whole thing's on YouTube. and it starts out or the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up MC Cher one day just to say, Mr. Cher, I think you're a really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say.
    about Graham Nash · at
  • All right. So, he goes to school at Technical College of Delft. not for very long. And then he went to the Harlem with two A's, School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam.
    about Technical College of Delft · at
  • Everywhere and they circle back on each other and it's just an impossible staircase. Actually called Penrose stairs.
    about Penrose stairs · at
  • In that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of his children appear in it.
    about Journey to Infinity · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Places & events

Full transcript with timestamps

Hi everybody. Uh Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm just sitting here drawing cubes and things with my uh poor artwork. But you know who is really good at this? MC Cher and this episode from December 2019 gets all into the life of the great artist and uh the title is MC Cher and his trippy art. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there and this is Stuff You Should Know the Arts Sea Edition.

It's Jerry Room Tone Roland. Yeah, I think that's make believe stuff. Room tone.

Yeah, she might as well be like, "Let me capture a few fairies in this mason jar first." I think it's the same thing.

We may need those in the final edit. Uhhuh. Parries. I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone. Room tone is uh you did this on film sets and in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently

while you capture the sound of the room. Mhm. So I guess you can What do you do with that, Jerry? Do you layer it in in case you need it or something?

Did you hear that everyone? She said she cleans up the background to every to everybody listening. It sounded like

There's something about it though. It's like being in church and getting the giggles. Like it's really hard, especially on a film set when there's like 50 people standing around

being completely silent, no one farting. I suspect it's strictly a power trip by the person calling for room tone. That's what I think.

I'm going to start doing that my house when things get out of hand. Room tone. Exactly.

See if that works. Don't make me bust out the room tone on you. Well, since we're talking to this No. No. I was going to say since we're talking about room tone, obviously the topic today is MC Cher

who was well known for going berserk anytime someone asked him to be quiet for room tone. You would trash chairs.

Mhm. Grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension. Just do all sorts of weird stuff. That's funny.

Did you think so? That was a joke just for you. Yeah. So he uh everyone knows Mcsher. If you've ever been to college or taken drugs

or sold drugs to somebody in college, then you probably seen hands drawing hands or

uh I mean that's not what the name of that one was, but it's called drawing hands.

Oh, is it? or uh the some of his more famous ones are the these impossible rooms like

stairs that lead to sideways stairs but you got to wrap your head around it in a certain way to even make sense of it all.

Right. Or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead back into the other stairs. It's just constant.

Or I'm a big fan of that uh one self-portrait he did in the with the sphere. Yeah.

The the mirror sphere. Mirror sphere. Yeah. It's cool. It is very cool. Um, I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure he did it exactly precise,

but the hand, if you look at the hand, it's really realistic. It's very pretty.

Yeah. I mean, I like this stuff. This is not my style as in anything I would put on my walls these days.

But I still think he's one of the like coolest, more innovative artist out there.

Yeah. And there's a great factoid that I hope we'll hold till the end. Well, not the end, but kind of where it falls in our

So, what does non outline? What does factoid mean again? Does that mean you've killed 10% of all the facts?

That's right. And this is just one of the 10% remaining. That's right. Okay. Gotcha.

So, um, one of the things, Chuck, about Mcsher that I found was that if you are impressed by his work, prepare to get exponentially more impressed as we talk about how he made those works, too.

That's the fact of the show to for me. Oh, okay. That's the factoid you're saying. Yeah. You got to hold on to that.

Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. Okay. I was just teasing it a little bit. I didn't know that's what you were talking about, although I should have guessed.

Yeah. So, uh, this is us talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about the artist being born.

Um, and in the case of MC Cher, whose name, by the way, was uh, Moritz, uh, Cornelius. I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there.

I think Cornelius. Sure. Esher. I nailed the last name. the last name. But I I misspoke on name.

Oh, you said nerm. So I nailed the last nerm. This is the point where the people say get to the point already.

Well, we are at that point. That's MC and then Cher born June 17th. Uh 1898, not 1989

as as the grabster put it. Yeah. I was like, man, he's like here's some numbers. He was born in Leu Warden, Netherlands. Uh, grew up in uh, Arnham, which is about 60 miles southeast of Amsterdam.

Is that right? Yeah. Okay. I mapped all this stuff out. Nice. It's all in kind of that general area.

You went on a little Google tour. Sure. Uh, and he signed even from early on uh, as MCE, he signed his paintings, although people called him Mock M- A Friends and Family,

right? Which didn't mean anything. Ed points out, but it's just like, you know, an affectionate term for Moritz.

Yeah. Is it Moritz? Probably Moritz. Moritz Cornellis Cher, but it could also go the way of Morris. So, is it Morates or Moritz?

I don't know. I wish I wish I knew. Well, what we do know is that uh and this we should put a pin in because it sort of plays a big part in how he pursued his art, but uh his dad had some money.

He was a rich kid. Yeah, for sure. which really helps as we'll see as he's drapesing around Europe on Dad's dime.

Slowly getting better at art slowly. Yeah, that's a good point because he uh was not great in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't, you know, he didn't have his second grade teachers falling over themselves about what a talented artist he was.

No. And apparently he also didn't consider himself much of an artist, although he engaged in art. like he he did produce art

from a very young age. He was terrible in school except at math and at drawing. Apparently when he was in grade school, primary school, he failed his finals. All of them except for math. And I read that his father noted in his journal with some affection that his son consoled himself by producing a linype of a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after after failing out of school. Well, and he he was somewhat adept at math early on, but um it's interesting his his work is highly mathematical as far as art goes, but later on in life when he was confronted with real mathematicians,

he would sort of be like, "No, not me, man. Like, I'm an artist. I'm not that kind of mathematician."

So, yes, but he was most of his friends were mathematicians. Yeah. For most of his career, he was mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people who really vibed on his work

and drugs. That came later. Okay, that came later when he got real popular. Um, but I saw that somebody made a a movie called Journey into Infinity. It's a documentary, a full-length documentary. I believe the whole thing's on YouTube. Um, and it starts out or the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, "Hey, I I called up MC Cher one day just to say, "Mr. Cher, I think you're a really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say. And he said, "I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a mathematician."

Oh, really? Yes. So, I'm going with Graham Nash's interpretation. Counter to this.

Spoke to him directly. Yeah. [gasps] Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. He uh I mean, not to spoil anything, but he died

uh in 1972 at just 73. So, you know, if he would have lived to his like mid80s, which is somewhat reasonable,

um [clears throat] he he would have been like alive in the 80s, which just seems so weird.

It does seem kind of weird, you know. Yeah, cuz he was he seems countercultural for sure, even though his him his personality was not very counterultural. No.

Um and he didn't really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are illegally making copies of my work. Right. um he he didn't exactly follow, you know, the the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was he was he was a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but he was also a very imaginative square.

That's right. I was trying to make a square joke, but it's not coming to me. Remember that show square peg square peg square? Yeah. Square pegs.

Sarah Jessica Parker. Was she in that? She was also in Girls Just Want to Have Fun. That's right.

I'm Yeah. And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring. Really? Yeah. She and her husband are co-starring in uh Plaza Suite. Neil Simon's Plaza Suite.

Very nice. Very excited about that. Oh, bet. Uh I'm trying to align it with the Bonnie Prince Billy show, but they're like a week apart

and I'm like I can't just stay in New York. Time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta and New York.

I know. I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy and come home because he didn't play much. But that's a story for another day. Uh, all right. So, he goes to school at Technical College of Delft. Um, not for very long. And then he went to the Harlem with two A's, School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam.

Uh, not Harlem, New York. Well, I think that's what the Harlem New York is named after, right?

Yeah. That's where Bonnie Prince is playing. He's at Town Hall, actually. Oh, is that right? Yeah, we played there.

That's right. We got our stank on that joint. Mhm. So, uh, his dad said, you know, because, you know, his dad had a lot of money and made money. And even though you want to support your kids, you want the you want to try and edge them into something. Sure.

If you're that kind of dude that that might be lucrative. So, he said, "Hey, you like to draw shapes. Why don't you go study architecture?"

And he did that for a little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But while at school there he had a very fortunate meeting uh by being mentored by one Samuel Jurin

Deiskita who would be his mentor who noticed some of his early art. I'm not sure how he saw it but he took one look at Cher's art and said you don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me and learn graphic design.

And so Cher did he became a graphic designer which he whether he knew it or not he had been his whole life up to that point. All of his work is very graphic in nature

and designy. Yeah, it really really is. But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know, 1920s was probably like, "Is that even a thing?"

Right. That sounds made up. Yeah. But well, his dad also, I don't know if you said or not, was a civil engineer. So, of course, he would be like, "You draw, just go do architecture."

Right. That's what I know. Civil engineering and there's architects in the world. Just go do the other thing that I I don't do. And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you got to make signs,

right? Or postage stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on. That's right. Until he made a little bit of dough.

So, uh, in the early 1920s, he started on his, uh, sort of, uh, rich kid journey, traveling around Europe uh, on his dad's dime

on a gap year that was really, really long. Very long. But on one of these trips, he went to a couple of places that would end up having a big influence on him.

Yeah. Uh one in Spain at the Alhhamra. Uh and then just traveling through southern Italy, through the countryside.

Yeah. He just fell in love with Italy. Yeah. But in Spain, this is this is one that didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated by these mosaics and uh tessillations

which are described as okay. They are repeating designs that interlock with one another, leave no space between one another, and that when you fit them together, they fully cover a plane,

which is harder to do than you would think. Yeah. Like if you've ever seen the escher uh fish

um sort of tessillation, the white fish and the black fish kind of working in one another.

Yeah, that's a perfect example. And and he would do this a lot later on if you've ever played Cubert.

Yeah, that's those cubes are tessellations. Sure. A certain kind. Y but uh he got really into this even though it wasn't like right away that he started doing these things. That sort of came a little bit later. But what he did do was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it.

Loved it. I mean like he he went to to Italy and was like this is my home. Yeah.

And he he was quoted at one point in time as saying like he never wanted to become an Italian among Italians. Yeah. He liked being a stranger. Um but he loved Italy.

Yeah. Which is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure what it means.

I think what he was saying was he's he he he likes being a visitor to Italy. Yeah. rather than there's a certain amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us. You know what I mean? Sure.

Whereas if you can be like that guy over there who we'll accept him. We're not going to throw rocks at him every time we see him or anything like that and we'll take his money and, you know, maybe even say hi to him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone. We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local.

Gotcha. That's what I think he was after. Clearly, I can identify with that. Uh well that kind of came through in his work too because if you'll notice uh even in these um before he started doing the like trippy uh three-dimensional hands drawing hands and stuff when he was doing country sides

he didn't do a lot of people didn't do a lot of faces people were very much in the background and nondescript

uh but even when you look at these when you say Italian still lives of countryidesh

what came to mind for me were these beautiful lush colorful recreations of a countryside. side.

Nope. Nope. When you look at these, they still look very much like in the Mcsher style that we all know.

Yeah. Like very clearly a lot of I love them, too. They're cool. Yeah. They're beautiful. They're black and white and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right? Yeah.

Um but they are beautiful in their way. Lovely. Even I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is something I would put on my wall. You're an art snob. You're like, "Oh, I only like early Italian landscapes." Oh man,

you take that save that trippy stuff for Graham Nash. I'm so ashamed. No, I think it's great. Chuck, you you have cult yourself.

Uh but they they are gorgeous. Um and then in 1923 he met his wife uh whose name was Jedha.

Jedha Umaker. That's right. Very nice. Thank you. Uh she was Swiss. I learned from the best.

They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss. And uh she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters. It's a very sweet story. I'm sure an MC Cher movie would be pretty cool.

I Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about the process of writing a script about MC Cher. It's from University of Texas. They wrote it in 2017. I can't remember the name of it but

just look up Oh, just some random stuff comes up. If you look up mosquito bootprint, which will come up later right?

But if you search that on Google, it brings up Have you ever done that? Have you ever been like, "I'm bored. I want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google." No.

And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It doesn't want to give you just randomness.

Sure. So, you have to trick it. So, maybe you'll you'll type in a weird word or the first three letters of a word or something like that and weird stuff will start to come. Well, if you type in mosquito bootprint, probably only like the first three of them pertain to McSher and the rest are just a random assortment of of links.

I remember early in the days of Google, uh we had a mutual friend who they did this what I thought was a very dumb game where they would try and find two words together that they would try and produce the fewest amount of Google results. Yeah.

And whoever could put two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember them doing that, but

I don't know. I don't remember who you talking about. Colossal waste of time, but I remember that some guy did like a TED talk about that or something. Yeah.

Oh, well, maybe I'm the dummy. No, no, no. It was I mean, look at me. I I like MCR's early work.

I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste? Yeah. You know, so he meets and gets married. Uh, she returns to Italy and they marry in 1924.

Do you mean Jeda Umaker? That's right. Uh she would become Jeda Cher. Jeda Cher.

And they had a son named Giorgio. Later had sons Arthur and Yan. And uh they were still just sort of traveling. And his dad was even though he was married, his dad was still footing the bill.

Usher's dad. MC Cher's father. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I was thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, how do you wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror? But if you're if you're

in the mirror sphere, right? How do you And then how do you draw it? Yeah. So amazingly, um the uh the the father Esher's father though, like what better way to spend your money than to just be like this is what you want to do with your life, son. You want to pursue art and live in beautiful Italy than like here this is what I want for you.

I mean that's like that's how it went down. That's awesome. That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in in a lot of ways.

No, totally. I agree. It's not like, "Hey, why don't you go, you know, take up heroin and here's a bunch of money for you to like lay around in a bea."

True. I I want to know more. I'm not I hope I'm not coming across as cynical, but I wonder if some of this was like he'll come around if I you know, to architecture or whatever.

Right. You kept waiting for the part where his father cuts him off. I I was His father apparently wouldn't like that.

All right. I know how you feel. I'm not trying to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm just saying like I had I started out thinking the same way you did and then something happened. I was like, "Oh, it was actually really neat of his dad."

It was It all seems above board. Yeah. So, World War II has a profound effect on Cher and his work uh in 1935. He learned that they were uh making his 9-year-old son, Giorgio,

march in fascist youth parades, and he said, "Pack your bags. We're going to Switzerland."

That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah. We're getting out of here. Marching for Mussolini.

Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet? No. Is it good? Is it as good as it looks? It's great.

Oh, I can't wait. It's great. Everything about it is great. See it. Do I need to see it in theater? It doesn't seem like one I have to see in the theater.

No. I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people. Although, by now it's probably thinned out.

Yeah. Uh, and I was laughing a lot and people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that.

Kind of one of those deals. Yeah. I mean, it's a movie about a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend. Don't tell me that. I didn't know that.

No, I had no idea. Hitler's on the poster. I know, but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh, get out of my brain.

Sorry. That really doesn't spoil anything. It's like Don't tell me anything. That's not some big reveal.

Um, so they go to Switzerland. I'll apologize. It's all right. I'll let It's really not a big deal.

As long as it's not a big spoiler. No, no, no, no. Of course not. um they go to Switzerland and he even though he did not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did not like cold weather,

uh so they moved to Belgium after a couple of years, which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland.

Belgium's nice. Sure. Uh in the 19 in May of 1940 though, the Nazis invaded Belgium and so they moved to the Netherlands in 1941

where the Nazis already were. Yeah. I guess they were like can't occupy it again.

Well, in its home, right? Uh, and they settled in Barn, which is about 23 miles southeast of Amsterdam.

I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it. B A A R N. Right. I like it.

It's probably Baron. Oh, yeah. I'll bet you just nailed it. I think so. But Dutch is very strange language.

But not strange, but just for my English dumb English ears. Supposedly, English is the strangest of all.

Yeah, I'm sure. It's just a hybrid mongrel language. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not a native speaker of it.

You know what is an interesting language is Welsh. Mhm. Because I'm watching The Crown and uh when Prince Charles starts coming around,

Prince of Wales. Yeah. There's people speaking Welsh. And I I was very ignorant about even knowing that

what it sounds like. What it sounds like and that it was still spoken and uh it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like of several different things.

It's all old Celtic stuff. Yeah, it's very unusual. G. GIC. Yeah, I think it's GIC. That's like the language group. One of the two.

Yeah. Everything I know about Welsh I learned from Super Furry Animals. Oh, yeah.

Cuz that guy's Welsh, man. I saw them blow Granddaddy off the stage one time. Oh, you saw him live.

Oh, I think you told me that. Melted my brain. It was so good. I'll bet. So, they're traveling around still, uh, even though they're settled in Baron. And, uh, they go back to Al Hamra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is.

No, it's a it's a 13th century Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain.

It's beautiful. It is very beautiful. And they built it in the Moorish style and then it was eventually like taken over by the Christian like royalty that

that explored the new world and all that stuff. Yeah. But this castle was done in these tiles that are renowned for being some of the most beautiful geometric like uh Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life.

Yeah. And they got to Cher. He'd seen him before, but it it was I guess he was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." But

the second trip that he went back with after they moved to from Switzerland, I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland. Um that's when he was like, I am obsessed with these now. These tessellations.

Started drawing them. Jedit did too. It says that they work together. So I'm not I didn't know that she was an artist.

Yeah, I didn't either. Uh but they uh World War II comes back around. Well, not comes back around. It never left, let's be honest. But uh Spain would devolve into civil war and so this meant that he was kind of stuck in uh in outside of Amsterdam for a little while longer. Yes.

He wasn't doing as much traveling. No, he was in the Netherlands and um he rekindled his friendship with uh Mosquita, his old mentor

uh who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquita was Jewish and he was taken away by the Nazis eventually. He was killed at um Ashvitz I believe with his wife.

Terrible. And their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to Cher. Yeah.

Like this is one of his dear friends and he had um a work a sketch of mosquitoes. when he went to his house to visit Mosquita, he found the door was open and they weren't there and they clearly been taken by the Nazis. And one of the the pieces of artwork that he gathered together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a Nazi bootprint on it.

And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search. Mosquito bootprint.

Did you Was there a picture of it? No, I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it was a sketch. Not that it was a sketch of what or anything like that, just that there was a sketch of mosquitoes that was that had a boot bore a bootprint and that Echer hung on to this his entire life. It was very important to him and he was not um uh a a very flowery like um like passionate man or anything like that. I get the impression that he and this is I'm talking about that he internalized a lot of stuff and I I think that him holding on to that piece of art was probably more significant than even it appears on the outside.

Yeah. And uh supposedly um hid some people from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation years and also during those same years did not exhibit or release any prints.

Wait a minute. I think you just said hid some people from a Jewish family. Or did you say hid some members of a Jewish family?

Well, people members of a Jewish family, but you said from I think. Yeah. I mean like they were from a Jewish family in

Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. He didn't hide them from the family. Right. Right. Don't tell a Jewish family that you're hiding over here.

No, that would have been weird. Uh so maybe we should take a break now. Oh, I I think it's unraveled.

Sort through who the good guys are. Yeah. All right. And I give Joshua shock. Okay, Chuck. So, World War II kind of comes and goes around Cher despite his best efforts to escape it. Mh.

Um, and it definitely had a mark on him, but one of the other things that that had a really big mark on him was having to move from Italy. Like you said, like he was married, had a family, his father was still supporting him. And every spring and summer, he would just tour the Italian countryside and visit small quaint towns, just be inspired to keep making these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art. Very beautiful. technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite. But you would almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life.

Were it not for him? Because in doing so, he lost his source of inspiration and was forced to kind of turn inward because he hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very inspired by his home country of the Netherlands. Um, so he had to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and start coming up with new subjects. And in doing that, the true Eshcher was was unlocked.

Yeah. Because early and like a lot of artists early in their career, they they kind of freeranged through different styles trying to find their own personal thing.

He had a very uh very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre. Doesn't fit with the rest of it.

Very John Wayne Gayy, right? But uh you can very clearly see if you look at uh Mosquito's work, the connection and the influence from him. Mh.

Um although Mosquito did a lot of uh sort of graphic portraits and things like that whereas Esher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces.

Yeah. Yeah. Um they were they were just kind of like almost afterthoughts. But early on he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. Uh when he did do like a a a sketch of a building, let's say, it would be from this really like tall odd angle looking down on it. Mhm.

Uh very severe angles and uh like a a horizon or trees that sort of go on into infinity, stuff like that that would become very much his style later on.

And Ed very astutely points out that there's something about his style that um I don't know how dark of a person he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity of these angles and a lot of his work that was just sort of um uneasy feeling,

right? It it didn't look like just some beautiful colorful Italian countryside. There was something kind of strange and uh unusual about it.

Something about the the contrast of black and white definitely does it too. And he was such a master of shading that if something was stark and black and white, I mean, unless it was his earliest work, it was because he wanted it to look that way and to make it stark and kind of unsettling like that. But yeah, there's like a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff.

Yeah. And it's not something you can easily put your finger on, but it's definitely there.

Yeah. Like did you see uh the mummified priests? Yeah, that was creepy. And then one of his

But isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life to mummify pri them up like that in these little al coes?

Well, yeah, absolutely. Sure. He was just don't kill the messenger. And he would have sometimes skulls um featured in some of his work and stuff like that like the one of the eye believe called eye.

Right in the middle of the pupil is a skull staring back. Yeah. So he had little touches like that without going full like uh you know Lovecraftian,

right? Or Goya or something like that. I don't even Bosch. I don't know who that is.

Sure you do. I'm just kidding. Okay. I know those people. Okay. So, uh, his I guess this is where we get to the fact of the show for me.

Take it away, Chuck. Because folks, if you've ever seen an MCER print Mhm. and you thought, "Man, that guy could sure draw a print."

Imagine cutting that out of wood. Yeah. In reverse. In reverse. Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff were wood cuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph.

Yeah. So, a woodcut. If you've ever made a used a stamp or made a potato stamp as a kid,

you're basically Mcsher. Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving the stuff into wood as a negative image because then when you run ink over it and stamp it, you get the positive image

and it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard enough to draw and sketch this stuff right?

Much less cut it out of wood, right? So, so just take a step back and think about the Ashers that you've seen before. Imagine that they have they were originally carved out of wood.

Yeah. And now imagine that to get even more detailing because you can't adjust how much ink a certain part of the wood block gets. It's all going to get an even layer of ink. So to shade something, you have to do cross-hatching lines stippling something like that. But to get really detailed with shading, you need multiple blocks of the same image in the exact same size with different parts accentuated so that you can layer over. You can take the same paper and layer them on different blocks and line them up

so that you have layers to this image. That was the level of the wood cuts this guy was doing.

Yeah. Like that's sort of like a a t-shirt hippie. Exactly. screen printing like a fourcolor shirt,

right? You got to lay you got to put it on exactly in the in the spot that it needs to go each time, right?

Drag that ink across. Yeah. So it's not, you know, off by a centimeter, right? Cuz it would look bad.

So the wood cuts um especially as earlier wood cuts, you can tell they're wood cuts. They look like wood cuts. Yeah.

Some of them do not. There's some of the Italian countryside um that just are just Yeah. are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that they it's not a drawing that they're wood cuts, multiple blocked wood cuts is is pretty astounding. But like I was saying, to me, even even more difficult is making the lith lithograph.

Yeah, I I think I talked about this on some other episode. Um I know I talked about batiquing, but I also talked in industrial arts. We did uh offset lithography

in that social experiment high school you went to. Yeah, exactly. Uh we did offset lithography which um basically I mean that's the process today. I mean that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of everything is to do with offset lithography.

It was inh you remember it was in the um Etch a sketch episode. Oh that's what Ohio Art originally did was lithography.

Okay. Well this is a deep cut. This is pre like today you use like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet,

right? And these emulsions and chemicals. Uh back then uh it was drawn onto limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil and then used a chemical treatment uh to uh on the areas that basically water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built on that principle,

right? So the areas where you have written in grease uh do not hold that ink. Mhm.

Or is it the other way around? No, I think they don't hold the image. Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image just like the woodcut essentially.

Right. So, you've got this um attraction and repulsion interplay between ink, water, and grease.

Right. And when you put it all together on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading um that are kind of like a hallmark of some of Cher's more um well-known works like the hands drawing hands, right?

Yeah. That was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and grease pen and ink and um did it in reverse too because just like with a wood block you have to create the negative of it.

Yeah. Because the you want the positive image on the paper. You have a very special brain if this is if you can work this stuff out as an artist.

Yes. You know it's uh not saying that any kind of artist is any better or worse or smarter than the next.

But your brain just has to be wired a little bit differently to think in negatives like that. like a mathematician basically. Yeah, your brain has to be set up that way.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh but lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. Uh so later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create his prints after he's sketched and drawn this stuff out.

Smart move. And he would destroy the limestone. Well, he wouldn't destroy it. He would scrape it clean so he could reuse it.

Right. So that's the reason like if you want to buy an original Mcsher, good luck.

Well, there's there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made, right?

And apparently, but you're not going to get your hands one of those limestones.

No, but there are a couple of those left over, but he said that he wanted them, I think, cancelled is what they call it in his will,

right? where they intentionally damage it so that even if you got a hold of one of these things and you were like, I'm going to print me a brand new Eshcher.

Um there'd be like the like the the negative image of Snaggle Puss like comes through and like the the handdrawing hands picture.

Uh and he did not do many original prints from those original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did 10 of still life with uh spherical mirror. Mhm.

And so anything obviously anything you buy in a Spencer gifts is going to be a print anyway.

What? They told me it was an original. You mean bikini lady on Corvette? You could probably get the original of that at Spencer.

You probably could. The original negative. Um Bikini Lady on Corvette. Oh man. Remember those

Garfield with Lamborghini. The uh these lithographs. He would also layer those just like he did with the wood cuts,

creating uh multiple plates to layer on top of one another for shading and toning and stuff like that, right? Just amazing.

Yeah. I mean, I did it to make a monkeykey's t-shirt. I forgot you used to screen print, too. So did I.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, the monkeykey's t-shirt was screen printing. I think a I can't remember what what I did for a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that said like my name and something else.

Oh, that's right. So, you you screen printed in industrial arts. Yes. Okay. Like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screener?

Oh no. Oh no. Did you do that? Yeah. No. I mean I would have loved to. I wasn't good enough.

It's Oh, it's not hard. Yeah. But I mean you would draw the stuff or you would just

Oh, no. No. No. No. Would like burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through. No.

You did that for for a job? Sure. Well, like high school. No. This is This is college.

What kind of dough do you make doing that? Uh jack. Yeah. But it's fun. It's cool work. you know, you just listen to music,

beer and a few bucks pretty much. Hang out with some cool dudes and, you know, that's

Yeah. Yeah. I got you. Say no more. Good early college job. You know what I mean?

I I think it'd be cool. And I mean, there's a a very cool t-shirt, local t-shirt shop here that every time I go over there, cuz that's where our friend uh

the patch maker uh Katie Culp works, or at least she used to. I think she's got her own space now.

Oh, cool. But she shared a space with t-shirt dudes and anytime I'm in there, it's just a good vibe. You know what I mean?

It really is. Yeah. There a lot worse places to spend your time than a t-shirt shop.

Yeah. So, uh Oh, another thing uh we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was a whole different You had to do a separate stone for each color, right?

So, that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in black and white, right? Aside from the fact that he liked it as well.

Yeah. He seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying he was lazy.

No. But let's take a step back here for a second and examine the idea that you thought MC Yesher was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing all this stuff with a pencil. Yeah.

Now, really let it sink in that he carved these things in reverse out of wood or limestone. or limestone

and then use these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works of art.

It's amazing. It really is amazing. Truly astounding. Uh and like you said, there are a few of those stones and wood blocks uh that are owned by the Mcsher Foundation.

Snaggle puss on every single one of them and apparently they will they will display them occasionally uh along with his works,

right? which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the work of art and then going back and looking at that limestone and then looking at the work of art, it really kind of sinks in like, oh my.

Yeah. I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff. Me, too. They've picked up in recent years,

have they? Mhm. Yeah. It seems like he's being more appreciated uh as a truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.

Yep. In uh 2011, the record for highest overall attendance in the world out of all the museums in the world that year was at the Centro Cultural Banko de Brazil, which uh held their magical world of Cher exhibit.

Oh wow. 570,000 visitors, about 10,000 a day. Holy cow. Yep. So if you think lithography and wood cutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about mezzotent. uh that is sort of like wood cutting except you're using a sheet of copper

that starts out as a rough surface and then use these little tools to smooth out things that are going to be the image applying that ink and then wiping it off.

Right? So the places you smooth out are ink the ones that are going to be white on the paper or blank on the paper. Right? Um it's the rough edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole thing with ink, wipe it down. The smooth start parts come clean. The rough stuff um has the ink. And you can use this like this is this isn't like, oh, look, I made an X,

right? This is like incredibly fine um stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this and a meot tint. And that eye that you were talking about, the one with the skull, if you go back and look at that, that was a messotint. Yeah. So was dew drop.

Yeah. Uh very detailed cupped leaf. Uh showing a single drop of dew inside it with all kinds of cool reflections.

Uh but Echer called this the black art. Uh he only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking and uh I think he is just he he did a handful of them

and then moved on to the far easier wood cutting. Right. Right. [clears throat] He's like, "Oh, I came back, baby."

All right. We'll we'll take a break and then we'll come back and pick up uh with his life story again which is I believe we left off in what end of World War II.

Sounds right. All right. Okay, World War II is over. Uh MC Yesher was like a lot of people very rattled by that experience in Europe.

And uh at this point he still is not a super famous artist making tons of money. No, but he's more famous than than this makes him out to be. Like he he's he's got some renown in the Netherlands or exhibits. Yeah. Um but he's not anywhere anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he has been the last few decades since about like the late60s.

Yeah. College dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere. No. But the people who who most appreciate what he's doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like this is astounding. This guy is taking what we write out as formulas and turning them into art and making them precise. Yeah.

Like you could describe this work of art as a formula. That's that is what MC Cher was able to do. He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art.

Yeah. And uh you know remember what you said earlier. This is where we are in his life where he is um he is not in the Italian countryside.

He's been ripped from its bodice. So his muse is gone and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own um unique brain.

He's being forced into his own bodice face first. Uh this is where he starts with these tessillations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing uh the lizards and the birds and the insects as tessellations.

Uh really really cool stuff. Um his brother said, "Hey dude, you know what you should do is go talk to a crystalallographer." He's like, "If you want to talk detailed shapes in math." Yeah.

Uh and he does so and that taught him a lot. And then he learned about the 17 uh 17 wallpaper groups.

Yeah. Which is so dense that I you know how much do we even want to talk about it?

Well the the we'll just sum it up. The 17 wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that says every geometric pattern two dimensional geometric pattern falls into one of 17 categories. There's only 17 and they're called kind of half jokingly the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has geometric patterns on it usually, right? Um Echer couldn't understand it mathematically.

Yeah, it was proved out twice independently the that there are 17 wallpapers. Yeah, the mathematical proof.

One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the Alhamra apparently is the only place in the world that contains all 17 geometric wallpaper patterns

within its walls. Mhm. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, of course, this would appeal to Esher, but he didn't understand, he couldn't sit down and explain, like we can't what the 17 wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively. And as he became friends with mathematicians, uh, you know, about midcareer, um, he was apparently kind of amused to find like, you know, these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out and these formulas, and I just know it. It was almost like I was born knowing it.

Yeah. You know, I mean, I guess he was real cocky. Yeah. He wasn't really, though. I'm just kidding.

And I didn't get the idea either that he was like, "Take your math and shove it."

He was just a little more amused that like you've got these mathematical proofs and that uh like I'm drawing this stuff for my creative brain

on limestone. Yeah. On limestone, cutting it out of wood. Uh so I think he appreciated the way they coalesed. But uh and he was very like you said most of his friends were mathematicians I think later in life uh who did he roses?

Yeah. Roger and Lionel Pinrose which I love how it's described here. Father and son mathematician team.

Yeah. Yeah. You know those they wore matching dolphin shorts. Oh man. It's part of their uniform.

I wish people still wore those. Yeah. Did you ever wear those? No. They were a little before my time. Well, they were for joggers and runners.

Yeah. 2011 and Hooter. I forgot about that. Yeah, that is what Hooters waitress.

Orange dolphin shorts with uh bronze panty hose. Yeah. And then chunky white socks.

Yeah. And Reebok high tops. It was bizarre. It's an interesting look. Somebody put that together. And not a woman. Um do you remember there was a uh there was a Hooters airline.

What? Yeah. Wow. That kind of rings a bell. Yeah, that was very shortlived, I imagine,

I believe. So, it was pretty shortlived. Interesting, I guess. Yeah. So, you would get asked like, "What kind of drink and what style of chicken wing do you want?"

I bet they did serve chicken wings on those. Of course. But can you imagine being on an airplane and being forced to smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it?

Uh, that's like every flight I ever take. It's true. There's somebody with some stinky food. You know, if I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if it's okay if I eat first.

Like, if you bring food on Yep. I don't bring food on to a flight. Sometimes, dude, you just have to. Yeah. It's a long flight and

they run out of turkey wraps like in the first half a second. So, you just pull out your what?

My kungpow out of your pocket. You had just in case they're out of turkey wraps.

Not even in a container. It's just in my pocket. [gasps] Oh, goodness. So, uh, I thought this part was sort of amusing. Um, how orderly he always was with his art.

And he he tried to get into chaos a bit in, uh, this one work, contrast parenthesis, order and chaos parenthesis,

wherein he went and, uh, dug up a bunch of trash and said, "I will I will draw chaos." And it ended up being, if you go and look at it, there's like a broken bottle, broken eggshell, an open sardine tin, a broken clay pipe, and some other refues

drawn to like perfect or I guess wood cutter lithograph with perfect beautiful precision,

right? That was chaos, his interpretation of it. He just couldn't do it. He was very much preoccupied with chaos. He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quote. Quote, "We adore chaos because we love to produce order."

And he's like, by we, I mean me. Yeah sure. Sounded very much like an eye statement,

but he was he was very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that.

Yeah. And also as his career would uh progress this this these repeating patterns on a finite space. Um, if you've seen his Circle Limit series, that's where you'll find the fish or these demons and they start out with like one in the center and then there's a pattern all around and it as it gets closer and closer to the edge, they get smaller and smaller and smaller,

right? And you can just sort of imagine that there is no end, right? Uh, to these shapes

that they're just going infinitely around the sphere. Yeah. Perfectly. But again, you have to stop and remind yourself this is a two-dimensional image I'm looking at,

right? And then secondly, this is cut out of wood. But yeah, he apparently made a three-dimensional wood carving of his circle limit series later on in life. And I'll bet that's spectacular to see, too.

He made a what? A three-dimensional wood carving of it. Basically proving that his his two-dimensional drawing was accurate.

Yeah, because he made it in the three dimensions. That's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty. He was just showing off toward the end there.

Uh I like reptiles. Yeah, it's a good one. uh aside from his early countryside work that is far superior. Uh the tessillation of the lizards and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has uh the lizards being uh like crawling off of the page as a drawn image,

circling around, walking over some books, and then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image.

Yeah. Very neat. It's uh it's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or one another, but they're also three-dimensional, too. And that actually kind of jives with another quote he had um that I think really sums that style of art up. He said, "The flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me. You just lie there static and frozen together. Do something. come out of there and show me what you are capable of.

And he would shout it just like that. And then Jedha would back out of the room slowly.

Okay, dear. Use your teeth. Yeah. Uh and that sort of brings us too with the reptiles. Uh we we need to talk a little bit about illusion. Um because it started sort of early on. He was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards coming off the page,

or uh still life in street, which is a tabletop that blends into a street scene.

That's a neat one. Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one, too. Um or relativity, which I don't know. I mean, is there a most famous? Maybe hands.

It's between hands, self-portrait with sphere, and relativity. Yeah, relativity is the one with the the staircases.

Yeah. people going up and down stairs that don't go anywhere, but they go everywhere and they circle back on each other and it's just an impossible staircase. Actually called Penrose stairs.

Oh, really? Yeah. After the famous father and son mathematician Jean. And speaking of the Penroes, they um

Did I say math magician? I just invented something. Did I? That's amazing. Completely by accident.

Um the penroes that would be great. Math magician. Yeah, I bet that's something.

Four, right? But the Penroes apparently wrote they saw some of Cher's work wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like impossible stairs which came to be called Penrose stairs and uh Cher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody pointed out to him. So he created something called House of Stairs

or upstairs downstairs one of the two and um sent one of the original prints to the pen roses. So in a way their correspondence and inspiration for one another was like a set of impossible stairs in real life.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And [snorts] this is you know we were talking earlier about how his works somehow felt unsettling

and you know the subject matter as well when you think about these the the subjects walking in relativity

right clearly never getting anywhere. walking downstairs um sideways, all of a sudden I'm walking back into the same staircase I was just on. Right.

Like you imagine if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated, angry people,

right? And as a matter of fact, one of the um the one that you were just talking about upstairs downstairs, they um that was supposedly based on some a staircase in his school.

Oh, really? Which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't you think? Well, how so?

Uh, well, I mean, like these these students aren't going anywhere. They're not even human. They're centipedes with human faces.

Gota, and they're kind of trapped in this what you could definitely call like a um a a a purposeless existence in this building.

It's kind of a dark building. Interesting. So, he does finally achieve really great fame later in his life. uh like you said, he was holding exhibitions in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe. Uh but he did one in Belgium in 1950 that led to uh an article in the studio which was a art magazine and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote about him in Time and Life magazines which definitely propped him up a little bit.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Uh then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in 54.

Mhm. Uh, flash forward to ' 66, he was featured in um Mathematical Games column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner,

math magician. I I guarantee you that's a thing. Um, and that increased his and this was ' 66, so it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counterculture, right? And I guess uh who was it? Graham Nash.

Graham Nash. Mick Jagger sent him a fan letter. Nice and made the mistake of calling him by his first name.

Oh, really? Chester did not appreciate. Um Stanley Kubri tried to recruit him to make 2001 of Space Odyssey a fourthdimensional film.

Huh. Yeah. There's this interesting article called The Impossible World of MC Cher that Steven P wrote in the Guardian that has a lot of that stuff in it. But he was he was kind of like, "No, I'm good over here with my ma mathematician friends." Well, once he was featured in uh Scientific American, that led to the big daddy of them all. He got featured in Rolling Stone. And then after that, it was it was all over. He he was huge.

Yeah. Dorm room. Huge. Uh 448 works. Yeah. Uh then this doesn't count all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual final works,

right? And like we said earlier, he died in 1972 of cancer at the age of 73. And I tried to find more about his family, but there's not a lot out there like his sons and whether or not his I mean I guess his grandkids would

be contemporaries of ours. Yeah. I don't know. Like he was born in 1899. Well, great grandkids maybe.

Yeah. Okay. I guess if his kids were born in the 1920s. Yeah. Contemporaries of our parents maybe.

Sure. The oldsters. Yeah. Boomers. Hey, Boomer. Boomer. Okay. Boomer. Hey, Boomer.

Um, I can't even get that right. In that that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of his children appear in it.

Oh, really? So, if you want to know more about them, go watch that. I saw uh one picture of him where he looked a lot like our old uh colleague John Fuller when John had a beard.

Oh, yeah. He did, didn't he? Looked a little bit like him. Yeah. Was not expecting that.

Yep. So, there's Mcsher. That's right. Speaking of not expecting that, uh, Bikini Babe on

Corvette. Sure. And Hooters's a air line made appearances in the MCSER one. I just want to point out

uh if you want to know more about any of those things, go on to the internet and start searching. And uh since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Uh hey guys, I've been listening to your show since 2011. I even sent you uh I've even seen you on your first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a whole year to hear that on the podcast.

Oh yeah. Uh, that's how it works, you know. Sorry. It's not even guaranteed that it's going to be the show you saw.

Yeah. A lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons of live shows. Uh, we don't do that.

No. Yeah. And I honestly think the live shows are a little better in person. I don't think they make, as a fan of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the best just regular content.

I think most people think that, but we we just So, that's why we only put out the one,

right? Uh, so back to the letter. This show is so great. I would even save highinterest episodes for my son to listen to over the years.

Nice. Uh, you were one of the few people that can keep his attention. I never thought I would write, but as a science teacher, you said something recently that is so true. Some of the best science websites are children's science websites man.

Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell people to look up a child's definition for that word.

Uh, really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for all your work. And now I will have to figure out what to do now that I am finally caught up. Keep up the great work. And that is from Jenny with an I.

Thanks Jenny with an I. Hopefully you dot the eye with the heart. Maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. You remember that one?

Two curved lines top with topped and and uh I guess bottomed with a straight line.

I think I know what you're talking about. Here, I'll show you. Oh boy. Since we just dis Oh. Oh, sure.

That Yeah. Yeah. It almost looks like a a bent Roman numeral tube inside the heart.

That's a That's the reflection of light. That's where the light's coming from. It's beautiful. Thank you.

It's a Cher reference. I'll treasure that. Uh well, you're welcome, Chuck. I wasn't going to give it to you, but now I have to.

Just sign it first. Uh if you want to get in touch with us, you can uh go on to stuff you should know.com and look for our social links there. And you can also send us an email like Jenny with an I did. You can send it to stuffodcast@ iheartradio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

In order: 0:00 MC Cher, Stuff You Should Know; 5:00 Graham Nash, MC Cher, Technical College of Delft; 10:00 Graham Nash; 15:00 MC Cher, Jeda Umaker; 40:00 MC Cher; 50:00 Penrose stairs, Graham Nash, Journey to Infinity, MC Cher; 55:00 Stuff You Should Know.

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including MC Cher, Graham Nash, Alhambra, Stuff You Should Know, Penrose stairs, Technical College of Delft. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 58 min; the transcript is about 11,454 words in 355 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.