curious state

Movie trailers are a game of chess. Except in this game, millions of dollars are at stake with every move.

Dallas Taylor, owner of Defacto Sound and host of Twenty Thousand Hertz, gives us a peek behind the curtains where creativity and business live in a pressure cooker.

A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:

• How many trillions of minutes of TV are watched in the US every year (yes, trillions)
• The evolution of movie trailers
• Have movie and TV trailers become too epic?

A Quick Request

If you enjoy Curious State, would you mind sharing your favorite episode with a friend? It’s a great way to help the show grow and start fun conversations along the way.

There are so many incredible podcasts out there, and you’ve chosen to be here. That means the world to me. Thank you.

Credits

Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.

Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil 
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Digital Operations Specialist - Holly Hutchings
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Kamryn Lacy

The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.

Cyanide has made quite the name for itself. 

Take the Jonestown murder-suicide, for example—where cult leader Jim Jones called for over 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch. Cyanide also sits centerstage with a popular spy movie trope: the cyanide tooth. In case of capture, pop out the fake tooth that’s actually made of cyanide. Swallow it. And boom, a quick death is on its way.

But how exactly does cyanide kill you?

Let’s light up our gumshoe detective pipes and crack this case wide open with Neil Bradbury, author of A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them.

A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:

• Why cyanide causes your blood to turn bright red
• The fascinating way cyanide shuts your body down
• Why B12 can save you from cyanide poisoning

Did You Know?

From a murderer’s perspective, cyanide is typically given as either sodium or potassium cyanide crystals—which are often sprinkled in water.

Buy A Taste for Poison

Amazon | Audible | Bookshop.org

Credits

Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.

Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil 
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Digital Operations Specialist - Holly Hutchings
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin

The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.

In an age when eels were sometimes used as currency and castles pierced the sky, “thou” was all the rage. But over time, it disappeared from use. Where’d it go? And will it ever make a comeback? Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) helps us parse through the grammatical treasures of yore and solve the “thou” mystery once and for all.

A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:

• The searing insults “thou” provided
• The societal shift that ended “thou”
• What dead word Grammar Girl would love to resurrect

Did You Know?

“Thou” was used longest in areas farthest from London. It’s still used in a few regional dialects, including those in Yorkshire and Cumbria.

Credits

Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.

Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil 
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Brendan Picha 

The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.

Science is all around us. It's in our smartphones, the contours our of eyelids, the hidden rabbit nest in the backyard. But what if everything we’ve come to know about the world (and that the natural world knows about itself) disappeared? Could science itself go extinct? 

Alie Ward of Ologies stops by to set the scientific record straight, and share why science is more than a path to answers—it's a gift of questions.

A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:

• What animal species Alie discovered as a child
• Why we’re not the only species who experiences science
• Can you make music from spider mating dances?

Did You Know?

If human knowledge is a janky old car, science is the friend who’s happy to push us to the repair shop.

Credits

Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.

Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil 
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Brendan Picha 

The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.

Regret is our constant companion, tugging at our ears to remind us of our mistakes. Our follies. The kind of stuff we shove to the back of our brain fridge and hope it doesn’t stink up the house.

But what if regret isn’t what we think?

What if it’s actually the way to a happier, more fulfilling life?

Daniel Pink, the author of such insightful classics as To Sell is Human and A Whole New Mind, rolled up his sleeves and mined the deep, dingy trenches of regret. What he found just might change your life.

As part of the World Regret Survey, Daniel collected regrets from around 16,000 people in 105 countries to try to crack the code of what people regret. He put together his findings in his new book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. “The four core regrets operate as a photographic negative of the good life,” Daniel says. “If we know what people regret the most, we can reverse that image to reveal what they value the most.”

The curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:

• The four core regrets
• What a social experiment on a subway taught us about reaching out to estranged friends and family
• What we regret at a young age versus what we regret when we’re older
• How regret can become a compass for a well-lived life

Did You Know?

Silver medalists tend to be the least happy person on the podium. According to a study by David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University, they smiled one-quarter less than first and third place. While the gold medalist shines with happiness for their win and the bronze medalist is happy to have made the podium, the silver medalist is often plagued with “if only” regrets.

Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.

Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil 
Assistant Manager - Emily Miller
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Marketing Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Brendan Picha 

The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.