Episode 20: Nevada - “All for our Country”

Speaker 1 Hi, this is Bern from Nevada.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be singing Home Means Nevada, our state song.

Speaker 2 Home means Nevada, home means the hills, home means the sage and the pine,

Speaker 1 out where the trucky silver rewrills, out where the sun always shines.

Speaker 1 There is a land that I love the best, fairer than all I can see.

Speaker 1 Right in the heart of the golden west,

Speaker 2 home in the bada to me,

Speaker 2 home in the bada to me.

Speaker 2 I'm Janet Varney, and my name, John Hodgman. Welcome to ePlorbis Motto, the podcast that celebrates the official motto's nicknames Flora Fauna and more from around.

Speaker 2 Like that, Fauna? I love it.

Speaker 2 Flora Fauna and more from around the scraped, bruised, but intact for now Union of States.

Speaker 3 We are headed today to

Speaker 2 Nevada. She said it.
I didn't save your messages.

Speaker 3 I'm going to make, listen to me. I'm going to make a bold break from tradition and drop in a little listener bite

Speaker 3 right here at the beginning of the podcast. And you'll see why in just a moment.
Listener Ben says, I grew up in Las Vegas and can assure you, no one who lives there says Nevada.

Speaker 3 A little surprised that as in neighboring Arizona, Janet struggles with this.

Speaker 2 Oh, well.

Speaker 3 However, in the ensuing years, I have become a Spanish speaker, lived in Spain, wife is from Madrid. In Spanish, the correct pronunciation is Nevada.

Speaker 3 I now find myself pronouncing the state name as I learned growing up, but pronouncing Sierra Nevada. That also is very bad of me.
The mountain ranges in the U.S.

Speaker 3 and Spain with the Spanish pronunciation.

Speaker 2 In Spanish, the pronunciation is Nevada. Nevada.
Nevada. Nevada.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But in the state of Nevada, you say Nevada. Yes.
Now, there's a reason I'm sure that we both make this error.

Speaker 2 I am not an Arizonan, and I'm not a neighbor of this state by any means, but I want to say Nevada all the time because of the Thrilling Adventure Hour. That's correct.
That's correct.

Speaker 3 Mark Gagliarti, who plays the wonderful Croach, in the, and this is, we're giving you a very truncated version because if you don't know what the Thrilling Adventure Hour is, that's fine, but it's a lot to get into.

Speaker 3 But it's a serialized radio show, very funny, created by our friends Ben Akron and Ben Blacker. And there is a recurring character, very beloved in the Thrilling Adventure Hour community,

Speaker 3 called, that is a Martian Martian named Croach, and he is the friend and companion of Sparks Nevada, the Marshall from Mars, portrayed by the wonderful Mark Evan Jackson.

Speaker 3 As I said, Mark Agliarti is Croach, and he does say Nevada, and we sing Sparks Nevada.

Speaker 2 And the name of the character is

Speaker 2 Sparks Nevada.

Speaker 2 It's an embedded error that cannot be changed at this point. That's right.

Speaker 2 And is locked in our brains because when we think of Nevada, we think of our friends Mark Evan Jackson, Mark Agliarti, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Ben Akron, Ben Blacker, etc., etc., etc.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 But when we think of Nevada,

Speaker 2 we think of a state.

Speaker 3 It's true. It's true.
But Nevada or Nevada does mean snowy or snowfall in Spanish.

Speaker 3 And there are many beautiful mountain ranges across the state, including the Carson Range of the Sierra Nevadas, the Ruby Mountains, and more. And

Speaker 3 the Ruby Montañas.

Speaker 3 And in 2010, State Assemblyman Harry Mortensen proposed a bill to recognize the alternative pronunciation of Nevada. And

Speaker 2 that is why he was killed and put into the Concrete Foundation. Sorry.

Speaker 3 If I may, we're close.

Speaker 2 You're close. All right.

Speaker 3 The bill was not supported by most legislators, and it never received even one vote.

Speaker 2 As far as we know, Harry Mortensen is still alive and was not killed in

Speaker 2 his corpse is not dumped into the foundation of some new construction in Nevada. Correct.
Correct.

Speaker 3 So thanks for trying, Harry. Ben, thank you so much for that wonderful note.
John Hodgman, what do you think of when you think of that southwestern or western or midwestern?

Speaker 3 There's a lot of argument about what to call Nevada. I choose to say the southwestern state because it is a neighbor of Arizona.

Speaker 2 I would not say that it is a Midwestern state.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, maybe no one's saying that. Maybe they're just saying Western.
Maybe they just get rid of the South part. But what comes to mind for you? What are your experiences in Nevada?

Speaker 2 Now I'm thinking of Nevada as sort of the

Speaker 2 what's the name of Snoopy's bedraggled desert cousin, Spike? Spike. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I think he lives in Needles, California.

Speaker 2 Oh, in Needles, California. But he's a desert, he's a desert dweller, Spike, right? Oh, for sure.
He's got that droopy mustache. For sure.
Yeah. Nevada is like the cousin Spike of New England.

Speaker 2 I think of it as a Western state.

Speaker 2 Of course, I think of gambling. I think of Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 Tell me about personal experiences.

Speaker 2 What have you experienced

Speaker 2 in Nevada?

Speaker 3 Because it has to stay there?

Speaker 3 That's just one place in Nevada. I don't think that is a rule, a legal rule that applies to the entire state.

Speaker 2 Like most non-Nevadans, the only place in Nevada I've ever been is Las Vegas, and I've only been there

Speaker 2 two times.

Speaker 2 I went there once in about 2003 or 2004 with Jonathan Colton

Speaker 2 to record what we called a podcast, what ended up being just sort of an audio documentary of the Consumer Electronics Show.

Speaker 2 Oh, wonderful. We stayed at Mandalay Bay.

Speaker 3 Mandalay Bay, is that the one that you kind of like can, you know, is it sort of the, I can go through a tunnel and look at stingrays and like sharks and stuff in the middle of the desert?

Speaker 2 I think that might be one of the perversions. Okay.

Speaker 2 One of Nevada's many perversions

Speaker 2 of against nature is like, we're going to take this desert and we're going to build an aquarium here and we're going to put these fish underground in a desert.

Speaker 2 Yes, I do think that that was at Mandalay Bay. Okay.
I was going to say, and then I was like, I'm not going to say that because what happens at Mandalay Bay stays at Mandalay Bay.

Speaker 2 But because you're my pals here, you're my pal personally, Janet Verney, and all of my listeners, our listeners are pals. Yeah.
I'll say it's the first place I ever saw Torkin.

Speaker 2 First place I ever saw Torkin happen.

Speaker 2 That feels right. That's a good spot to see.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 we went to a bar, like, I guess it was a kind of a club in the hotel.

Speaker 2 And I saw someone twerking. I was like,

Speaker 2 old John, oh, little Johnny Hodgman, never seen anything like that before. 2003, 2004.

Speaker 2 Amazing. It may have been a little bit later because I remember trying to talk myself into the House of Blues, which was VIPs only.

Speaker 3 I am hoping you recorded that moment.

Speaker 2 And I think that I had to have been on the daily show as a guest at that point, which would have put this closer to 2006.

Speaker 3 Because also, if you thought of it as a podcast,

Speaker 3 I feel like that word was not even in circulation in like 2002, 2003. I could be wrong, but I feel like it was like 2007, 2008.

Speaker 2 Jonathan and I, Jonathan, you know, said to me in the early 2000s, there's a thing happening called podcasting. And he explained the whole idea to me.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And I was like, that's stupid, it'll never work. Because that's whenever Jonathan says that.
Many people say that. Yeah, but I mean, I have a history of saying that to Jonathan.

Speaker 2 When he first pitched me the entire idea of blue apron and all meal delivery services, I was like, that'll never work.

Speaker 2 And he's like, I guess I won't do it then.

Speaker 2 And then he pitched podcasting to me. And he was like, yeah, this is something that's happening.
And you automatically download radio shows to what was then your iPod.

Speaker 2 And I was like, no, because the pleasure of listening to radio is the live experience. I'm so stupid.
I was so dumb.

Speaker 2 And immediately, well, within a year or two after that, I was like, you know, not only did podcasting eventually become my career

Speaker 2 or a major part of it, but also a few years after that, I was like, well, look, as long as there's a buzzword out there called podcasting, let's you and I get into it.

Speaker 2 And we were friends with a guy named Mark Janot, who was the editor of Popular Science magazine at that time.

Speaker 2 And Jonathan had been doing some work

Speaker 2 and writing custom songs for them, actually. Sure.
So this was 2005 now. I remember this now.

Speaker 2 And I said, let's get popular science to give us money to podcast from, initially it was the E3 Expo, which was the big gaming expo in California. And then later at the CES.

Speaker 2 Consumer Electronic Show.

Speaker 2 And they said yes, even though they had no idea what a podcast was, and they didn't release it as a podcast.

Speaker 2 Like, we would just stay up all night editing it, send it to them, and they just posted it on their website. And it's probably still.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 That's cool. And I played some poker and I did okay.

Speaker 2 Also, that you know, the CES happens at the same time as the AVN awards, the adult video awards. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was a wild scene.

Speaker 2 And then, and then, of course, I didn't go back for years and years until maybe 2017 or 2018. I, of course, went for a literary festival festival in Las Vegas.
As you do.

Speaker 2 For a period of time, the Believer magazine, to which I was a contributor,

Speaker 2 had relocated to Las Vegas. And there's a big arts scene in Las Vegas that was coming up in the old downtown part of Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 And some friends of ours had started a bookstore there, and a lot of artists were moving there, and writers were moving there. It was really interesting.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's still as vibrant as it was, but it was really picking up at the time. And we stayed in the oldest hotel.
I want to say the El Cortez.

Speaker 3 That sounds right, but I don't know

Speaker 2 Vegas that way. El Cortez Hotel Casino.
I got it right. Well done.
And a very, very old school, old hotel casino in the older part of Las Vegas. And it was beautifully out of date and

Speaker 2 seamy, S-E-A-M-Y.

Speaker 2 Yes. And it was not seamly, it was unseemly.

Speaker 2 And Janet, I sat sat down at the Game of Thrones slot machine. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Which

Speaker 2 it was a sit-down slot machine. Like, it was an eight-foot-high screen, and there was a chair built into it.

Speaker 2 If this chair was not a replica of the Iron Throne, I do not know what they were doing there.

Speaker 2 I think it was just a regular, but it was like, it was a thing you had to get into.

Speaker 2 The old heads will

Speaker 2 understand this reference. It was like getting into the old Star Wars arcade video machine.
You sit down into it. Oh, sure.
And it had surround sound and video, and it was really fun and cool to play.

Speaker 2 And I was doing really, really, really well at it. Like, I think I was up almost $1,000 on this one.
Whoa.

Speaker 2 And when I was really high on Game of Thrones slots, I started to think to myself,

Speaker 2 they had a lot of voices,

Speaker 2 like character voices. And I was like, is that really Peter Dinklage?

Speaker 2 Right. Like saying, good chance, sir, or whatever.
Like,

Speaker 2 or is that a Peter Dinklage imitator?

Speaker 2 And I remembered that my, my, our, perhaps, our old friend Sarah Vowell had introduced me to Peter Dinklage long ago, and I had his email address, which I had not used in years.

Speaker 2 And from the chair of the Game of Thrones slot, I send a message to Peter Dinklage saying,

Speaker 2 so bizarre. Did you record new dialogue for the Game of Thrones slot machine?

Speaker 2 And before I left, he wrote back and he said, yes.

Speaker 2 It was him. It was him.
He recorded. I was like, you go get that bag, Peter Dinklage.
I'm so happy for you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So happy for you. Goodness.
But I did not get that bag because I squandered that grand

Speaker 2 right down to zero. Oh, no.
But I had a grand time. I mean, I didn't make a grand of money, but I had a grand time.

Speaker 3 Good chance, sir.

Speaker 2 Good chance. I mean, that's something that I might have said.

Speaker 2 I hope.

Speaker 2 I hope. But

Speaker 2 those two trips are my entire experience with Nevada. I've never been to Carson City, the capital.
I've never been to Reno.

Speaker 2 I've never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, nor have I ever shot a man. That's a quote from a song, if that upset anybody.
That's a Johnny Cash song.

Speaker 3 If anything, I would hope that whether it was a quote or not, people would just be pleased to hear that you'd never shot a man.

Speaker 2 Well, certainly not just to watch him die.

Speaker 2 Oh, if you had good reason. Different.

Speaker 2 I was reminded that in parts of Nevada, sex work is legal. Yes.
Not in Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 But it is the only place in the United States where sex work is legal, which is so bizarre. Like we are, you know,

Speaker 2 coming to this podcast and to life as a New Englander.

Speaker 2 where there are still strains of Puritanism.

Speaker 2 And of course, there's all of this obviously hypocritical, but still fervent evangelism, evangelicalism, or whatever you want to call it, Christian moralism suffusing our country, which is obviously a horse feces because you look at who gets elected in this country.

Speaker 2 But the fact that there is legal sex work anywhere in the United States is pretty astonishing to me. That's all.
So that's all I think about when I think about Nevada.

Speaker 3 Great. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But erase it because what happens, what I think about Nevada stays in my brain.

Speaker 2 That was just for you and me.

Speaker 3 It's just such a confusing policy.

Speaker 3 Okay. Well, I have spent a lot of time in various places in Nevada, but certainly

Speaker 3 Las Vegas is the one I have spent the most time. That being said, you would maybe not expect for the amount of time I've spent in Nevada that I would say I very much dislike.

Speaker 3 Las Vegas and would never pick it as a place to just go unless there was a very specific reason that I needed to.

Speaker 3 And most of the time I have been there has been for work. It's just not for me.
I've had a lot of good times there.

Speaker 3 None of those good times have anything to do with kind of what you go to Las Vegas for. Like, I'm not a gambler.

Speaker 3 I've definitely enjoyed Cirque de Soleil shows.

Speaker 3 I went and shot several episodes of a show I used to host with Paul Gilmartin and Claude Mann called Dinner in a Movie, which we normally shot in Atlanta in the late 2010s.

Speaker 2 Oh, do you mean Atlanta?

Speaker 3 Atlanta. Atlanta.

Speaker 3 And for some reason, we got to travel some with that show. And shooting dinner and movie in Las Vegas allowed me to create a sketch character who was a Celine Dion impersonator, which was very fun.

Speaker 3 I very fondly remember Paul playing this kind of Texas millionaire gambler who had a bunch of kind of gold chains on with his cowboy hat and he improvised that

Speaker 3 his gold necklaces were known as Texas spaghetti And I just thought that was such a great,

Speaker 3 I still remember it.

Speaker 2 I was crying with laughter.

Speaker 3 You forget. Came up with that off the cuff.

Speaker 3 I also

Speaker 3 like.

Speaker 2 It's going to drive you crazy when your friends have a really

Speaker 2 fast and so brilliant. So quick.

Speaker 3 So he's very, very quick.

Speaker 3 I have been, I think the only other place I have even gambled a tiny bit, again, with none to almost none happening in Las Vegas, is in Laughlin, Nevada, which is a small lure city

Speaker 3 on the water, kind of near-ish Reno. It is pretty old-timey, pretty folksy, and kind of scuzzy in its own way.

Speaker 3 And I was, I walked into kind of a shabby Riverside casino in Laughlin and just immediately got like a gushing nosebleed.

Speaker 3 I just

Speaker 3 felt like, oh, I'm not supposed to, I guess I'm not supposed to be here. This is intense.

Speaker 3 I do want to give a shout out to Meow Wolf in Las Vegas as well. I'm a big Meow Wolf head.
There has been some, I think there's been some kind of controversy about like whether or not

Speaker 3 artists have been compensated fairly. So, I'm keeping my eye on that.
But the work inside of Meow Wolf and the work by all those artists is stunning and it's so immersive.

Speaker 3 And I just absolutely love going to, I've been to each one except for the new Houston one.

Speaker 3 But, but, but that is a good example of that kind of like the version of immersive get lost in a weird place, Las Vegas that I kind of like and prefer to,

Speaker 3 you know, to, yeah, like, oh, it's a pirate ship that sends off cannons every hour on the strip. Like that's not so much for me.

Speaker 3 But I am glad that most places don't smell, aren't just full of cigarette smoke because that was also something that I, you know, I'd walk through a casino and just feel like I was dying back in the day.

Speaker 2 Apparently, Las Vegas is on a real downturn right now

Speaker 2 in terms of numbers of visitors.

Speaker 2 This is just something that popped up on my

Speaker 2 reading when I was trying to avoid reading a novel or whatever.

Speaker 3 I like taking the I-5. And one of the reasons that I've spent time in Vegas sometimes is that Vegas is a reasonable place to stop if you are, for example, driving to Colorado from Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 Like the I-15, the 15 is a handy interstate that can take you quite a ways. It takes you to St.
George, Utah, with a beautiful Snow Canyon.

Speaker 3 You can take it again further on into like sort of veer off and head into Colorado. You can head up to Salt Lake City.

Speaker 3 And so I have spent the night there because it's kind of the only place that it makes sense to when you need to take a little break.

Speaker 2 I'm just thinking, you know, that song, Route 66, Get Your Kicks. Yeah.

Speaker 2 On route.

Speaker 2 I just want you to write a song called The 15 is a Handy Interstate.

Speaker 2 Not sure. I just, it's just, I feel like.
I can do it. The 15 is a handy interstate.

Speaker 3 Anyway, I know I've been to Hoover Dam,

Speaker 3 but I don't remember it. Like, I've been there for sure with my dad.
That can't surprise anyone based on what we've talked about up to this point of just kind of

Speaker 3 being in historical places in the American West. But I can't, I wish I could remember Hoover Dam better.

Speaker 3 I feel like that's one of those things that you see pictures of or kind of know about enough peripherally that I'm afraid that I've just taken like images I've seen and implanted them as memories.

Speaker 3 So I can't even really talk about it because I feel like I might just be saying things that are untrue based on like, oh, I've seen video footage of Hoover Dam. It was great, but I was there.

Speaker 3 Ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 3 But I'm sure, but I do know that I have

Speaker 2 a remember.

Speaker 2 Took you to, like, took you to the

Speaker 2 fountain outside of.

Speaker 2 Listen.

Speaker 3 I'm surprised there's not a casino.

Speaker 2 This is the fountain that's at the end of

Speaker 2 Ocean's 11.

Speaker 3 Like the Bellagio.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 What if he told you that I was? I'm going to tell my kids this is the Hoover Dam.

Speaker 3 Wouldn't it make you laugh if there was a casino that was themed as the Hoover Dam?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 They'll stop at nothing.

Speaker 2 I'm into it.

Speaker 2 I mean, I am such a fan of artifice, of perversions of nature and artifice. I'm really surprised that I have not spent more time in Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 I might go. Well, maybe we'll do a show out there.

Speaker 2 I forgot that at the top of the El Cortez, how would you pronounce this name? Last name spelled G-A-U-G-H-A-N.

Speaker 2 Gahan? Gone? Gagan?

Speaker 3 I guess I would say gone because I don't know.

Speaker 2 Gone, daddy, gone. Like gone, daddy, gone.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Jackie Gone or Gagan or Gahan or whatever it is was the owner of the El Cortez and lived in a penthouse suite at the top of the El Cortez, which you can rent now. And I remember going to

Speaker 2 a cocktail party there. And it is preserved in amber like 1972.
It is so wild.

Speaker 2 That's fun. You can look up pictures on the website.
It is so beautiful. Like the kitchenette, it's like, I just like the kitchen.

Speaker 2 Just like the old, the old radar range. It's so gorgeous.
And the swans that spit water into the, into the tub, it's incredible. Oh, sure.
Sure.

Speaker 3 Sorry about that.

Speaker 2 Well, one of my questions was going to be. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Whenever it's handy on the 15.

Speaker 3 At the gone, daddy, gone suite is what I'm going to remember it as. Yeah, that's right.
One of my questions was whether or not you had visited Carson City.

Speaker 3 I have also never been to Carson City, the state capitol.

Speaker 3 What's interesting about that is, so to your point, sex work is not legal in Clark County, which is where Las Vegas is, in Washoe County, which is where Reno is, and in Carson City, which is not part of any county.

Speaker 3 It's an independent city.

Speaker 2 Whoa.

Speaker 3 Which I think is interesting.

Speaker 3 But yeah, much less commonly visited than another state capital that people don't, you know, it's just not a destination the way something like Las Vegas is.

Speaker 3 You mentioned that you

Speaker 2 motto of Carson City is proud of its past, confident of its future.

Speaker 2 It doesn't actually exude a lot of confidence.

Speaker 3 I love it. I love it.
Bless you, Carson City. Shout out to you.
Proud of its past?

Speaker 2 I may never test too much.

Speaker 3 Big in Japan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 Which, by the way, is great if you're big in Japan. We're going to get there someday.
We'll get there someday.

Speaker 3 So you've mentioned that you did a little bit of gambling

Speaker 3 when you were there.

Speaker 3 And you did a lot of bit of slotting.

Speaker 2 I mean, imagine how those creeps at the VIP-only House of Blues

Speaker 2 felt after they turned me away.

Speaker 2 If they could have seen just 12 short years later, Hodgman losing $1,000 at Game of Thrones slots while personally emailing with Peter Dinklage. They would have felt pretty bad about it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they would have.

Speaker 2 Felt pretty bad. They should have let me in.
I'm going to go back there. I wonder if it's still there.
Mandalay Bay House of Blues.

Speaker 2 No, it's just called the Torque Room now.

Speaker 2 No, that's not true. They're still there.
House of Blues is still there. I'm coming back.
I'm going to get in there.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I'm going to get in there.
Well, if you come back, I'm going to give you the opportunity to walk in with your head held even higher

Speaker 3 because I thought it was only appropriate to bring a little calculated risk to this episode of E Pluribus Motto in honor of these prolific gambling opportunities that do famously exist in the state of Nevada.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of unregulated gambling in Nevada all the way up until 1909 when it was declared illegal as kind of part of a nationwide, let's clean it up.

Speaker 3 But when mining and agriculture continued to, let's say, fizzle instead of sizzle in 1931, they just went ahead and legalized it.

Speaker 3 And that's also where we get those kind of fun quickie marriage, quickie divorce laws, although they have sort of evolved and changed a bit over the years.

Speaker 3 But I mean, marriage, the greatest gamble of them all.

Speaker 2 Whoa. That's right.
Right?

Speaker 2 That always pays off.

Speaker 3 Always pays. I am going to start you off, and I got to get out.
I want to get out a little pen and pencil here.

Speaker 3 I am going to start you off for this next portion of the podcast with 20 pieces of silver

Speaker 3 from the silver state.

Speaker 2 It is the silver state, right?

Speaker 3 That's exactly right. And I am going to give you a theme

Speaker 2 before

Speaker 3 you receive the answer to that theme. And we shall, as we could say, put those pieces of silver in jeopardy by deciding what you would like to bet based on only knowing what the theme is.

Speaker 3 So you will not know what the question is before you place your wager. You are working with 20 pieces of silver.

Speaker 3 And then you will give me, I will then give you the answer. Once you've made your bet, I will give you, you will give me the answer in a question form.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, I am going to give you your first theme, and then you're going to decide how much you would like to wager of your 20 silver pieces. Okay.

Speaker 2 Now, can I just keep the 20 pieces of silver?

Speaker 3 Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 And add it to my 20 pieces of silver and use it to betray Jesus Christ? Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 I'm not going for that. I got to gamble.
All right.

Speaker 3 All right. You got 20 pieces.
I'm ready. The first theme is silver.
Silver. How much would you like to wager?

Speaker 2 Two pieces of silver. Okay.

Speaker 3 Two pieces of silver. If you win, you'll get four pieces of silver.
Yeah, yeah. Double or nothing.

Speaker 3 You'll have, yeah. Here's your answer.
The discovery of this deposit in the late 1840s resulted in Nevada becoming the United States' first significant silver mining region.

Speaker 2 Which is the name of the deposit? It's a silver deposit. Okay, and I'm going to pose it in the form of a question.
Yes. What is the MGM Grand

Speaker 2 mine?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, I take it back.

Speaker 2 What is the sphere? Oh, we're doing Texas Back. What is the sphere? Oh, no.

Speaker 3 The deposit you can see from space, the sphere. I'm so sorry.
John Hodgman, you are down to 18 silver pieces.

Speaker 3 That is the Comstock load.

Speaker 3 The Comstock Load.

Speaker 3 There are other silver mining areas in Nevada as well. This was kind of the first big one that really created that first significant silver mining region in the United States.

Speaker 3 It is the second largest. Nevada is the second largest producer of silver in the United States.
Any guesses? No betting necessary. Any guesses as to what the first

Speaker 3 highest producer of silver in the United States is?

Speaker 2 Colorado?

Speaker 2 Alaska. Alaska.

Speaker 2 Also known as Alaska.

Speaker 3 Also known as Alaska. Next theme! John Hodgman, you have 18 silver pieces you're working with.
The next theme is ghost towns.

Speaker 3 How much would you like to wager?

Speaker 2 I'll wager.

Speaker 2 What do I have? 18?

Speaker 2 Let's do 8.

Speaker 3 Okay, eight pieces of silver on the line.

Speaker 3 Here is your answer. This is the name of Janet's dad's favorite ghost town.

Speaker 2 Can I?

Speaker 3 But wait, wait,

Speaker 3 because there's a clue hidden inside this answer, which is to say, I think you could still guess it, even if you don't have any idea what it is, which why would you?

Speaker 3 This is the name of Janet's dad's favorite ghost town, which reminds us that expanses of other precious metals, while not as abundant as silver, did exist in Nevada.

Speaker 2 Can I phone a friend?

Speaker 3 That was the friend me?

Speaker 2 I was thinking your dad.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he would think of you as an instant friend.

Speaker 2 Nevada ghost town, you say, huh?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Expanses of this other precious metal.

Speaker 3 Other precious metal. And maybe another word for expanse or

Speaker 3 an area.

Speaker 2 What is Gold Plains?

Speaker 3 I'm going to give you half of that. I'm going to give you four.
I'm going to give you, I'm not going to. I guess, yeah, I'll give you eight.

Speaker 3 So you've got your, you, you've got your, now you've got 18 plus eight. Is that right? I'm not good at Jeopardy.

Speaker 2 What is gold center?

Speaker 3 It's goldfield.

Speaker 2 Not gold points. Goldfield.
Goldfield.

Speaker 3 Goldfield. This is what my dad said when I asked him what his favorite ghost town in Nevada Nevada was.

Speaker 3 I love Goldfield because it's a ghost town that worked its way into the 20th century while most of the ones in the West had shriveled out by the 1890s.

Speaker 3 It has some well-preserved, multi-story buildings that are in my book.

Speaker 3 I hope you have a copy of Ghost Towns of the Mountain West, which has a very fine, no lack of modesty here, account of the town and some really fine photos by my photographer who was with me on the Nevada trip.

Speaker 3 John Hodgman, any guesses as to the name of that photographer? No bets necessary.

Speaker 2 Who is Nan Golden?

Speaker 3 The photographer with my father. And again, my dad was the one who wrote really fine photos by my photographer who was with me.
The answer is Philip Varney.

Speaker 2 He took his own pictures. He took his own picture that referred to himself in the classic dad fashion.

Speaker 3 That's correct. That's correct.

Speaker 2 Kirkfield, Nevada. Look, I'm not going to take your charity.
I bet eight. I lost eight.

Speaker 3 Okay, so we're down to 10?

Speaker 2 I'm I'm down to 10. But this is interesting.
Its peak population was in 1902. See? When gold was discovered there, and it soon became the largest town in the state with about 20,000 people.

Speaker 2 There you go. Okay, well, now I'm down to 10.

Speaker 3 You're down to 10. You only have a couple more to go, so just bear the bad.

Speaker 2 Oh, I'm going to lose it all before I'm leaving. Okay, okay, good.
All right.

Speaker 3 You're working with 10 silver pieces. Our next theme is desert.
How much would you like to wager?

Speaker 2 10.

Speaker 3 Oh, boy. What's going to happen when we get, if you lose it all right now? What about the final one?

Speaker 2 We'll go to a break and I'll go to the ATM. Oh, man.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right. This is what happened when I was playing Game of Thrones slots.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Here's your answer. I feel good about this one for you.

Speaker 3 The smallest and driest of the four deserts, which together comprise the North American desert, you'll find both Death Valley and Las Vegas located here.

Speaker 3 Death Valley, Las Vegas, Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 I'm not from the west.

Speaker 3 Inside of this desert.

Speaker 2 What is the desert of Maine?

Speaker 3 I thought maybe you would get this one.

Speaker 2 Is it... Oh, hang on.
What is the Mojave Desert?

Speaker 3 And that is correct. I did not hear the ticking of keys on the computer.

Speaker 2 Talk about what

Speaker 2 it stays in Vegas.

Speaker 2 One time.

Speaker 2 One time when I was perhaps at the height of my powers, I was invited to be the phone a celebrity friend for Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Speaker 2 That's exciting. And I was not invited to the studio.
They sent me a camera and a special computer to follow the taping from home for

Speaker 2 some reason. And they had a producer in my ear,

Speaker 2 and I would be watching along. And every now and then, they'd go, okay, they're going to go to you.
And then they would ask me the question.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I'm sitting here at an open on a a computer. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, it's the honor system. What is preventing me from just looking up the answers? Right.
And I realized that it was A, honor. Yeah.
And B, I was the only one who had it.

Speaker 2 Because every time I said, I don't know, they're like, oh.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The producer in my ear was like, oh, come on.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm supposed, I think that they just wanted me to look up the answers if I didn't know them off the top of it. It sounds like it.

Speaker 3 It sort of sounds like it does.

Speaker 2 They couldn't say that, right? So they're just like, here's an open, here's an open search page.

Speaker 2 No one can hear you typing.

Speaker 2 All right, I lost it all, so I'm going to go back to the ATM.

Speaker 2 But I want to come back and I want to talk more. I want more chance.
I'm hooked, Janet. I'm hooked.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay, I took out 100 silver pieces.

Speaker 3 Okay, you have a hundred silver pieces.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the next and final theme is a secret. I'm not telling you what it is.
So you will need to wager blindly.

Speaker 2 Okay. All right.
All in. This is how I feel.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, and it looks like this is our season sex tuple in honor of legalized sex work in Nevada. If you answer this correctly, you will win seven times your wager of 100 silver pieces.

Speaker 2 I've always wanted a sex tuple.

Speaker 3 The theme is mottos. And here is your answer.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 While there's no definitive confirmed reason this is Nevada's official state motto, one popular but apparently erroneous theory is that towards the end of the Civil War, the Union Army needed the wealth of Nevada to help win the war, and this motto reflected its loyalty.

Speaker 2 What is all for our country? That's correct.

Speaker 3 You have 700 silver pieces.

Speaker 2 I can't believe I finally learned the lesson of who wants to be a millionaire

Speaker 2 or who wants to be a sex tapillion

Speaker 2 silver rare.

Speaker 2 Silver air.

Speaker 2 But I looked it up as you were asking. Look at that.
Home means Nevada. The state anthem of the U.S.
state of Nevada.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's the anthem, excuse me. All for our country is the motto.
Home means Nevada is the anthem.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 We'll get to that.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 3 All for our country. All for our country.

Speaker 3 So, as I said in the question, slash answer, apparently, the erroneous theory is that towards the end of the Civil War, the Union Army needed that wealth of Nevada, all that silver, to help win the war, and that this motto, all for our country, was like in reference to, hey, take all of our money and wealth.

Speaker 3 But according to our friends at Wikipedia, who cite several historians, it was more about politics than money, which

Speaker 3 close cousins, close cousins, politics and money. But Nevada was admitted into statehood a mere eight days before the 1864 presidential election,

Speaker 3 which means that on Halloween of 1864, the union-friendly Nevada became another state to help the Republicans win, although it turned out that no such help was needed.

Speaker 3 I'm not reading from Wikipedia, by the way. These are my dulcet words.

Speaker 2 I love it.

Speaker 3 It turned out no such help was needed. Abe Lincoln won very easily, very handily without them, without Nevada.

Speaker 3 And I think actually there were not even really technically enough residents living in Nevada for it to qualify to become a state, but they looked the other way.

Speaker 3 And so, yes, they did vote for Abraham Lincoln. It was not necessary,

Speaker 3 but it was more about being on the side of the Union and all for our country, becoming a state so that they could support

Speaker 3 the Union.

Speaker 3 They were opposed to the Confederacy.

Speaker 2 They were choosing their voters.

Speaker 2 I didn't say it.

Speaker 3 What happens if Nevada stays in Nevada? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. So you're saying that Nevada was admitted to the union on October 31st? That's right.
Is that why its other nickname is the Spirit Halloween store state? That's exactly right.

Speaker 3 Which, based on you saying that Las Vegas is in a downturn, possibly many of those casinos will become the Spirit of Halloween.

Speaker 3 As tends to happen with large empty spaces.

Speaker 2 I hope so.

Speaker 3 The Battleborn State also is a nickname of Nevada. It came out of its proximity to the Civil War.

Speaker 3 And that nickname actually shows up on on the state flag, which we'll talk about in just a bit. Other nicknames,

Speaker 3 the sagebrush state, sagebrush is a plenty there and is one of the state symbols. That's a kind of

Speaker 2 brush.

Speaker 3 Kind of brush.

Speaker 3 Sagey kind of a brush.

Speaker 2 Some kind of plant. Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 The Great Basin State, which is, that's kind of talking about the northern part of the state. The desert state.
A lot of nicknames. Most ubiquitous is the silver state.

Speaker 3 What are you going to spend all those 700 pieces of silver on? The Game of Thrones thought machines?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm going to go right back to the El Cortez and stay in the Jackie Gagaging suite. Great.
Blow it all. Great.
I'm going to fly Peter Dinklage in to be my friend.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's going to be great. It's going to be great.

Speaker 2 Too busy being a brilliant actor. Ah, he's so brilliant.

Speaker 3 And we'll take a break in just a moment.

Speaker 3 But of course, before any of these nicknames were coined, before Nevada was given statehood, many indigenous tribes made their homes in the area now claimed by Nevada and indeed still call this area home.

Speaker 3 You can learn more about the Great Washo, Northern Paiute, Southern Paiute, Western Shoshone, and Fort Mojave communities at NevadasIndianterritory.com.

Speaker 3 And I also got acquainted with the Indigenous-run nonprofit org Tribal Minds, which, as you can read on their site, tribalminds.org, is a bridge organization connecting people and organizations and governments to each other, to resources, and to outside Indian country.

Speaker 3 We hold relationships with relatives across Nevada, organizing community and wellness and artistic space, creating the future we want to see in native Nevada for the next seven generations.

Speaker 3 It's a beautiful site. They're up to some good stuff.
So check it out.

Speaker 2 We'll do.

Speaker 2 Okay, we'll take a little break to let you, our listeners, delve deeper and go and visit tribalminds.org, where I, meanwhile, will be shoving all my silver pieces into the

Speaker 2 iron throne of

Speaker 2 Westeros.

Speaker 2 When we come back, we will talk about the shape of the state of Nevada, the flag of Nevada, and the Nevada seal.

Speaker 2 Unless I make Janet skip all of that so we can get straight to the UFOs, the ETs, and the cryptids of Nevada. All right, we will be right back.

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Speaker 3 It's ePluribus Motto. Remember us.
I'm Janet Interstate15 Varney.

Speaker 2 And take those numbers and reverse it because I'm John Area51 Hodgman. It's a handy little black site.

Speaker 2 Janet, I know we're going to talk about the state shape or whatever, but I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say, bring on the grays.

Speaker 3 Can you give me just a little bit more time before we get into little green men?

Speaker 2 Okay, no, they're not

Speaker 2 green. What I say.
They're not green. So they're, you know, in UFOG, it's understood that there are many different levels of aliens.
And

Speaker 2 there are the Nordics, and then there are the hybrids, and then there are the Greys.

Speaker 2 And the Greys are, you know, when you think of close encounters of the third kind, those little guys with the big eyes that are have gray skin, those are the Greys.

Speaker 2 And they're usually considered to be kind of like the worker bees of the alien population.

Speaker 3 I see. And they're associated more with Area 51 than like some of the other.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, insofar as that they are held captive there, yes. Okay.
Okay. All right.

Speaker 3 I sit corrected. I sit corrected.
But real quick, before we get into that, going clockwise, Nevada has Oregon to its northwest.

Speaker 3 Idaho to its northeast, Utah to its east, Arizona to its southeast, and California to all of its southwest and west.

Speaker 3 And for you, John, I will say obviously to its I don't know what to call it space north

Speaker 3 to its space north stars planets and UFOs up north yeah way way way up north John what would you say the state of Nevada looks like take a look scroll down and you will see the silhouette of the state of Nevada well it's very sharp Yes.

Speaker 2 To me, it looks like a shim that you would shove under the leg of a wobbly table. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think that's very fair.

Speaker 3 I think it looks like, just because of the way it's oriented, because it's sort of diamond-shaped-ish, but you kind of have that pointy side, the hard right-angle pointy side on the upper left corner.

Speaker 3 Something about the shape of that makes it kind of like a kite to me.

Speaker 3 Like a little flying kind of rectangle, like one of those diamond-shaped kites. But at the bottom of the kite, some little critter took a little

Speaker 3 teapot spout, little teapot spout-shaped nibble out of it.

Speaker 2 Right around the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, yeah. And then the nibble, I think, if you look more closely at the nibble, it's actually taken by noted land nibbler, the mighty Colorado River.

Speaker 2 The Colorado River. The Colorado.
The Colorado.

Speaker 2 The Colorado River. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So that's the state.

Speaker 3 All right. You know what? You've been very patient.
Would you like to tell us about Nevada's storied history of alien spacecrafts and government cover-ups?

Speaker 2 You You know, when we go to Monica Gallagher's wonderful Etsy page, and this is the person under the trade name of Lipstick Kiss Press, who creates all these wonderful posters of the cryptids of the various states, of course, there's the cactus cat, Cecil, the Walker Lake monster, the red-headed giants, the giant space clams, the helldogs of El Dorado Canyon, the Jarbridge monster, the spiteful mermaid of Pyramid Lake, which I love.

Speaker 2 I love that it's spiteful, the Tahoe Tessie, and the water babies of Pyramid Lake. They're all sound great to me.
But of course,

Speaker 2 top cryptids, top paranormal, top point of imagination in Nevada is Area 51. We're talking about aliens.
We're talking about crashed saucers.

Speaker 2 Now, we talked a lot about aliens when we talked about New Mexico, because supposedly the saucers crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. And where did they go?

Speaker 2 Well, they got carted away to

Speaker 2 a secret military Air Force base facility, they call it, right near the dry lake known as Groom Lake, called officially, unofficially, no one really knows for sure, but certainly in popular powerlands, Area 51.

Speaker 2 It's been referred to as Area 51 in a couple of official U.S. documents, but only fairly recently.
That was always an appellation

Speaker 2 given to it by a conspiracy theorist, one in particular, Bob Lazar. But officially, it is known as Homey Airport.
Oh, well, homey airport. Lighter-hearted.

Speaker 2 You know, it's just a homey airport.

Speaker 2 It's not a secret facility where we're harboring not just

Speaker 2 the craft, but also the corpses of the alien pilots of those craft.

Speaker 2 And it's sitting atop a secret transcontinental railroad line that goes all throughout, well, obviously from coast to coast and all throughout the country.

Speaker 2 The term Area 51 actually comes fairly late in the 20th century, and it was popularized, or it's credited with being popularized, by an interview by Las Vegas television news fixture George Knapp who interviewed a guy named Bob Lazar and Bob Lazar claimed to be a physicist who had worked at Area 51 what he then called a secret S-4 base in Nevada and eventually became known as Area 51

Speaker 2 where he had seen and handled alien technology and bodies. Bob Lazar, there is no record that he ever went to MIT.
There's no record that he's a physicist. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 He's been the focus of a lot of debunking campaigns,

Speaker 2 which Bob Lazar defenders would say that that's the government trying to discredit him so that they can continue to keep their secrets. But George and Half

Speaker 2 retains a certain measure of credibility. I mean,

Speaker 2 he's an investigative journalist to this day and is a serious journalist. And this is just a guy that he interviewed.
He retains a fascination with ufology and a weird connection.

Speaker 2 Well, I won't say weird because that's judgmental, but he retains a connection to Robert Bigelow,

Speaker 2 who is the owner of a series of budget hotels,

Speaker 2 a multi-multi-millionaire, if not billionaire, who also is a huge donator to both Trump administrations as well as Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 He's one of those strange billionaires who

Speaker 2 believes in both authoritative dictatorship and UFOs.

Speaker 2 Anyway.

Speaker 2 And he created his own Bigelow Aerospace because he wanted to create an inflatable hotel that would fly around in space and orbit.

Speaker 3 He had me at inflatable fucking pockets.

Speaker 2 An inflatable space station hotel.

Speaker 2 Bigelow aerospace went bankrupt in 2020 due to COVID. He also created a foundation for the study of scientific anomalies and abnormalities, primarily

Speaker 2 UFology. And I believe that George Knapp worked for him for a while.
But I'm kind of getting into the weeds.

Speaker 2 The idea of Area 51 is that this Air Force base, where they admit that they secretly developed like the U-2 aircraft and the Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 aircraft, where they secretly developed it for the X-Men, of course, they built aircraft that would go much, much higher than previous generations, and they looked weird too.

Speaker 2 And that's part of the reason why people seeing these aircraft when they shouldn't be seeing them extrapolated that they might be alien aircraft.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Which is better for security, for government security, it's sort of arguably better that you mistake it for something otherworldly so that Russia could like write it off and be like, these crazy people,

Speaker 3 instead of like understanding that maybe it was something more complex and governmental.

Speaker 2 Right. But, you know, Area 51

Speaker 2 Ophiles, shall we say,

Speaker 2 would say that, in fact, those might be U.S.-built aircraft, but they have been built by retro-engineering alien technology. I don't know.
I don't know about that. It remains super-duper top secret.

Speaker 2 You can't go there. It is extremely remote.
The closest town has a population of 50, and it is called Rachel, Nevada. which I would pitch to Ben Blacker and Ben Acker as being Sparks Nevada's sister.

Speaker 2 There you go. Yeah.
Rachel, Nevada's small economy is primarily based on alien tchotchkis and one hotel called the Lil Alien

Speaker 2 with just an inn

Speaker 2 and Rachel

Speaker 3 squeeze squeezing the as much juice as you can out of alien puns.

Speaker 2 I respect it. And Rachel Nevada being the only human settlement near Area 51 that is not a secretive Air Force base.

Speaker 3 Thank you for saying human. That implies there could be small alien villages in the area.

Speaker 2 We just don't know. But I mean,

Speaker 2 it's really, really remote. And it became the focus point of

Speaker 2 a movement in 2019 called Storm Area 51. They can't stop all of us.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I think there's a documentary out there on Netflix about that right now that has been suggested to me by the algorithm.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this guy named Matty Roberts,

Speaker 2 who worked a shopping mall in Bakersfield, California.

Speaker 2 Specifically, he was a vape kiosk retail clerk. So great.
Decided to post

Speaker 2 this idea that he could use social media to get essentially a flash mob of people to rush Area 51 and get in there and liberate the aliens.

Speaker 2 I love it. He came up with this idea after watching Bob Lazar and the documentary and Jeremy Corbel being interviewed on the Joe Rogan experience, of course.

Speaker 2 The Facebook post inviting people to storm Area 51 got millions of people saying, I will be there.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 At the end of the day, 1,500 people showed up. Mostly they hung around in Rachel and went to a concert called Alien Stock.
Great. 150 actually made their way to the back gate of Area 51.

Speaker 2 And I believe one was arrested and the rest just sort of took selfies and went home.

Speaker 3 The rest tried to talk their way in like a young John Hodgman into the House of Blues.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's exactly what happened.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 it leads me to another memory that I have, although it is an indirect memory, of Nevada, which is of the town Perrump, Nevada, which is in the southwestern corner of Nevada, right near the California border, which is the hometown and longtime broadcasting headquarters of Art Bell,

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 for years,

Speaker 2 in the 90s in particular, hosted a nightly overnight paranormal radio call-in show called Coast to Coast AM. It's still on.
Art Bell passed away in 2018.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 Coast to Coast AM is still on. It's hosted by George Norrie now.
It's still a paranormal talk show. But Art Bell

Speaker 2 was famous for popularizing

Speaker 2 in the late 80s and into the early 90s so many of the sort of paranormal contemporary American folklore that inspired and informed so much of the like the X-Files and stuff.

Speaker 2 So much of it, like, Art Bell was churning through all of this stuff, whether it was aliens or Bigfoots or the black-eyed kids, which is a very spooky urban folklore thing about, you know, sitting when you sit in a,

Speaker 2 there are these, these kids who have fully black eyes who try to get into your house and they come begging at your door. It's very scary.
Oh.

Speaker 3 I thought about Coast to Coast when you said that it was supposedly there's a coast to coast railway under the ground. Is that why it's called that?

Speaker 3 Because I never knew why it was called coast to coast. I just thought it was like from coast to coast, here tell me, you only hear about it.

Speaker 2 My understanding was

Speaker 2 he was the host of an overnight call-in political show before Coast to Coast that was just called West Coast AM.

Speaker 2 Oh. And so when he went national, they called it Coast to Coast AM.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay. But Art Bell, you know,

Speaker 2 master show person, master broadcaster, you know, a beautifully gravelly gravelly voice. And he would just open the lines.
He did not have a screener. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You can listen to a lot of the open lines episodes from the 90s on YouTube now. And I was listening as I was driving over here to the library in Blue Hill, Maine today.

Speaker 2 And he would just let people come on and be like, yeah, well, I hate to tell you, Art, but

Speaker 2 we're all going to die in fire in the year 2000. And Art Bell would be like, oh, no.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't want that to happen.

Speaker 2 He goes, yeah, well, this is how these things go. It's like, well, what's going to happen exactly? Well, uh, we're all going to die in fire art.

Speaker 2 It's like, well, what are you going to do about it? Well, I'm going to go to the middle of the country. I'm like, why? He's like, well, that's where you'll be safe.
He's like, how do you know?

Speaker 2 I don't know. He's like, all right, next caller.

Speaker 3 But so influential. You're right.
Just leaving it open for people to just come on and talk about their stuff and lonely people, I think, too, a little bit.

Speaker 2 He had two very famous, two very famous phone calls. George Knapp, by the way, hosts Coast to Coast AM from time to time.
But he had two very famous phone calls, one of which was

Speaker 2 the Mel's Hole call.

Speaker 2 Is that

Speaker 2 a guy named Mel called from Washington State saying that on his property he had discovered a bottomless pit that had strange qualities and weird noises came out of it.

Speaker 2 And people are still obsessed with it. He just went on and on about the bottomless pit.

Speaker 2 And then there was one where a guy called in, I don't think it was Bob Lazar, but it was another guy who called in saying he was calling from Area 51.

Speaker 2 Okay. And he was describing what he saw there and that he saw alien craft and so forth.
And then the call went dead. And then not only did the line go dead, but the broadcast went dead for 20 minutes.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 2 And then Art Bell came back on. He's like, well, I'm not really sure what happened there, but in the middle of the call.
Oh, that's delightful. But even that is not as spooky as what.

Speaker 2 This is just like, this is the greatest.

Speaker 2 I just have this such a strong memory of driving back from Amherst to Greenfield, Massachusetts. I had gone to the movies with my friend Charles Diggs, dropped him off in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 I was driving up 91 back to Greenfield in the western part of Massachusetts. And for some reason, I was picking up AM stations.
from all over the country.

Speaker 2 You know, there are these weird meteorological anomalies, and I was getting a station from somewhere in Illinois, and it was coast to coast a.m. I'd never heard it before.

Speaker 2 And Art Bell was on the line going, All right, well, it's Open Lines Friday or whatever. He's like, You know, we have some special numbers.

Speaker 2 If you are a first-time caller, call 1555, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 If you are a vampire, call

Speaker 2 1555-1234. If you are a time traveler, call

Speaker 2 1555-1235. And if you are an alien, call 1-555-1236.

Speaker 2 Hello.

Speaker 2 And just people would call in. He's like, we have someone on the vampire line.
Yes, hello. Oh, my God.
That's so great.

Speaker 2 And then he had one guy call and he's like, we have someone on the time travel line. He goes, yeah, hi, Art.
I'm sorry. I wasn't really sure which one to call because I'm, in fact, a...

Speaker 2 I am a time traveler, but I'm a time-traveling alien, so I'm not really sure.

Speaker 2 It's like, it doesn't matter. Just tell us your story.

Speaker 2 And then he had this guy call out. It's like, this is like, I was so excited to be listening to this.
It was so captivating.

Speaker 2 I never found this recording, but it was like this guy

Speaker 2 calls in the vampire line. He goes, and you're a vampire.
And he goes, yes, Art, I am a vampire.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 how often do you have to feed? And he goes, well, you know, I have to feed about once a month. Well, that's not very often.
No, no, it's

Speaker 2 kind of managed. And tell me about how you feed.
He's like, well, basically,

Speaker 2 you know, I'll be walking down the street and I'll see a potential victim and I'll just get

Speaker 2 I'll just get near them and then I'll absorb their energy. Oh.
And our bell goes.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you're not touching them at all? And he goes, no, no, I'm just absorbing their energy. Okay, okay, okay.
Well, I'll have to stop you there because

Speaker 2 what you're describing is you're a psychic vampire, which is a separate thing. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that wasn't clear.

Speaker 2 We are only looking for traditional blood-drinking vampires on this particular line. We will get to you another night, sir.

Speaker 2 Psychic vampires are real. I don't want to erase them, but

Speaker 2 I was just like, what? This is the greatest piece of improv theater that I've ever experienced. Oh, my gosh.
Oh, and of course, it's so terrifying because everyone who calls is like, you don't know.

Speaker 2 Normal. You don't know that that's not a time traveling animal.

Speaker 2 You just don't know. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And who had broadcast live from Perump, Nevada? And just thinking about it, I mean, I think that this is in part what inspires Welcome to Night Vale, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's just like the idea of a lonely guy at 2 o'clock in the morning in the mountains of the high desert just talking to weird strangers. It's just so captivating to me.
It is. It is.

Speaker 3 Nevada is a special state. I mean, it's strange and different.
And the only, I've never been to Area 51. I don't, I'm sure I've driven near it in some sort of ghost town capacity.

Speaker 3 Maybe it's the mother of all ghost towns of at least alien life, but

Speaker 2 it's still an active base. It's not a ghost base.
Yeah, but that's Area 52.

Speaker 3 Well, you don't know.

Speaker 3 The ghosts of the aliens are probably very busy at that base.

Speaker 2 It's still very much in the conversation. There are still

Speaker 2 people who have worked in the government until recently. Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 high-level secure positions saying, oh, yeah, no, they have aliens there.

Speaker 2 Like, it's part, like, there were hearings in congressional hearings in 2023 when a guy named David Frush, who had until the previous year been working for the Department of Defense, is like, I've spoken to people and I can, I will tell you where they, where the bodies are kept,

Speaker 2 but only in a secure facility.

Speaker 3 Art, I'm not sure I called the right line. I am a ghost, but I'm also an alien.

Speaker 2 This is to Congress.

Speaker 2 And there are all these declassified videos, Navy videos of unidentified, what they now call

Speaker 2 unverified aerial phenomenon or unidentified aerial phenomenon. It's a really fascinating field.
And I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 something is out there. I believe I believe that this is.

Speaker 3 I believe something is out there.

Speaker 2 The Navy has acknowledged there's something flying around out there that defies physics as we know it. So I don't know.

Speaker 3 I'm great with there being something out there. I want something out there.
I want to believe. Give me that Fox Mulder poster.
I don't know if I apply that to Area 51. I'll have to do some research.

Speaker 3 I will, by the way, recommend my partner, Brandon's podcast that he does with his friend, author Toby Ball, who is also of the Skeptics Strange Arrivals multi-season podcast.

Speaker 3 They do a podcast called More Like Ancient Phalians, which is

Speaker 3 taking apart episodes of the show Ancient Aliens, which basically says everything is aliens. Like everything.
Like anything you could possibly come up with.

Speaker 3 If you say like breakfast cereal, I'll be like, breakfast cereal technology was made by aliens. It's amazing.
They have had like 17 seasons Ancient Aliens has. It's a very fun podcast.

Speaker 3 I'm sure John Hodgman, if you will agree to be on it, will end up being on it because it's a joy. Dana Gould certainly was on it and has much to say about Art Bell as well.

Speaker 3 Let's walk away from aliens for now. Let's take on, we'll revisit some cryptid options.
Of course, we have to choose who our state cryptid is going to be. Will it be aliens? I don't know.

Speaker 3 Or will it be some of the other folks you named earlier when you went through that list? For now, let's take on a few more state symbols before we get to those cryptids and to those listeners.

Speaker 3 And if we're very lucky, someday, maybe cryptid listeners.

Speaker 2 You know what?

Speaker 2 This is our season two finale, but we're going to be keeping the Speak Pipe live.

Speaker 2 If you have accents from any of these states that we've covered, or any other states you want to audition for us, or talk about Nevada or any of the other states, I want you to please go to speakpipe.com/slash ePluribus Moto.

Speaker 2 But I also, if you're a time traveler or an alien or a vampire, blood sucking, please.

Speaker 2 Please. Or even a psychic vampire.
I hope you will call in and let us know your story and spook us and freak us out

Speaker 2 in honor of the Halloween spirit state.

Speaker 3 Yes,

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 3 sure. Yeah.
Speakpipe.com/slash eplurbus motto. The official flag of the state of Nevada is solid blue.
Up in the upper left corner, we see a little banner that says Battleborn. We have a star there.

Speaker 3 We have the word Nevada there or Nevada. We have sagebrush, little bundles of sagebrush.
And, you know,

Speaker 3 it's a pretty plain flag. I don't mind it.
I like yellow and blue.

Speaker 2 It's truly a solid blue.

Speaker 3 You know what? My first thought was when I saw that, whenever I see a solid flag like that, I think, oh, I couldn't spill a thing on it. Like somehow, if it has stripes or...

Speaker 3 God forbid, one of those crazy flags like Maryland, which I actually love, which looks like an optical illusion puzzle. Listen,

Speaker 3 if I, for some reason, am hoisting my flag, but I'm also eating a hot dog drenched in mustard and I spill a little mustard on there, maybe it's not going to show up as much.

Speaker 3 This thing has to stay pristine. This beautiful blue expanse has to stay pristine.

Speaker 2 It says battle born right on it.

Speaker 3 Battleborn.

Speaker 2 I never knew that that was one of the slogans of Nevada, Battleborn. And this is one of those state flags where I feel like I've never seen this in my life.

Speaker 3 Never seen it. Never seen it.
Let's take a look at the state seal. If you scroll down, you can see it.
What are we seeing when we look at the state seal? We see mountains. We see a quartz mill.

Speaker 3 We see a tunnel, a plow, a railroad train.

Speaker 2 That's obviously a

Speaker 3 telegraph lines. Yeah,

Speaker 3 snow-capped peaks, a rising sun, all surrounded by 36 stars. The state motto, all for our country.

Speaker 3 And one quick thing about this state, this very busy, I will say, state seal, and this is not the first time we've seen a plow with grain, nor is it the first time I think we've seen a lot of these items.

Speaker 3 There is a lot going on. There was a long-standing myth that says that Mark Twain was responsible for the original state seal having a mistake on it, like it was a prank.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 In that apparently, the smoke from the mill and the smoke from the train were shown blowing in opposite directions.

Speaker 3 And that this was a sort of like, hey,

Speaker 3 we're going to get him by having those in the wrong directions. There's no proof of that.
I can't, I didn't even see an image of that actually being a thing, but Mark Twain did live there.

Speaker 3 His older brother, Orion, was the first Secretary of State, really like the first and only Secretary of the Nevada Territory.

Speaker 3 And you can read all about this period of Mark Twain's slash Samuel Clemens' life in his book of essays, Roughing It.

Speaker 3 So, but anyway, so there was this long-standing myth that I guess has since been debunked that Mark Twain somehow had a hand in like, we'll do the CLC, but what we're going to do in it is

Speaker 3 we're going to have the steam and the smoke going in opposite directions as if there's something wrong with the wind. It's going to be great.
And apparently, that is that's just not a thing.

Speaker 3 And certainly, between 1917 and the present, anything that you see with a seal on it has smoke going in the correct direction. So you see the steam from the engine and the smoke from the mill are

Speaker 3 living in wind harmony going the right direction.

Speaker 2 Mark Twain himself an alien.

Speaker 3 Mark Twain an alien, of course. Yeah, he took his name.

Speaker 2 Of course. He took his name from when he worked as a young boy on

Speaker 2 a steam UFO.

Speaker 2 Mark Twain was what they would call call out when they were measuring

Speaker 2 how far above a cattle they were, you know, a cow that they were planning to mutilate

Speaker 2 was.

Speaker 2 How far down is that cattle? Mark Twain. Okay,

Speaker 2 beam it up. Let's mutilate it.
Then drop it.

Speaker 3 State color, silver and blue. State bird, mountain blue bird.

Speaker 2 So now the state color is silver and blue, but the flag is golden blue. What the heck?

Speaker 3 I know. Well, that's the same.
I guess that's kind of the sagebrush sprays of color. Maybe that's what we're after with bringing in that kind of golden yellow.

Speaker 3 They've got a state fish, a state dinosaur. Listen, we've talked so much about aliens, we don't have time to go through all of this.

Speaker 3 Shout out to the state reptile, the desert tortoise, that little guy and gal, they're endangered, so take care of our desert tortoises.

Speaker 3 The insect, the state insects, is the only one that I could see that was definitively voted in in 2009, a fourth-grade class from John R.

Speaker 3 Beatty Elementary School in Las Vegas, won a contest to name Nevada's official state insect. The students decided on the vivid dancer damselfly, partially because of its blue and silver coloring.

Speaker 2 Hold me close, you vivid dancer.

Speaker 3 I know. Oh, Miklos, you vivid dancer.
The soil, the, I might say this wrong, Oroveda series, Oro being gold.

Speaker 2 Oroveda series primarily. Orovada.

Speaker 2 Orovada like Nevada.

Speaker 2 Uh-oh.

Speaker 3 I think you're absolutely right. I should have thought about that and done my research.
I need a lot of research for this state, you guys.

Speaker 2 Is this soil very good for growing alfalfa, hay, winter wheat, barley? How did you know? I'm just wondering. It just seems natural.

Speaker 3 It sure is. Did you know that the state element is neon?

Speaker 2 Well, that surprises perfect sense because of the signs. Yeah.
All the light-up signs. They call it the city of lights.

Speaker 3 Shout out to the state animal, the desert bighorn sheep. I love these desert bighorn sheep.

Speaker 3 The fact that these giant sheep with their hooves are able to just prance about basically vertically in crazy hills and cliff tops and crags is extraordinary.

Speaker 3 If you've ever had a chance to see a bighorn sheep.

Speaker 2 They call them the vivid dancers of the Mojave Desert.

Speaker 3 They are. They're the vivid dancers

Speaker 3 of the Mojave. Beautiful, wonderful, strange, great creatures.
Two state trees, the single leaf pinion and the bristlecone pine. I put a picture of the bristlecone pine in here for you to look at.

Speaker 3 It's a magnificent tree. It's just beautiful.
It has a sort of bonsai quality. Bristle cone pines are known for being some of the oldest living things on Earth.

Speaker 3 Some of these trees are thought to be around 5,000 years old.

Speaker 2 Zowie, Zowie.

Speaker 3 Of course, they were brought here from an alien planet by aliens. If you watch ancient aliens, I'm sure they'll get around to the Bristol Cone pine.

Speaker 2 I can't wait to carve my initials into that Bristol Cone pine.

Speaker 2 Why can't I?

Speaker 3 No, please don't. The sagebrush is the state flower.
It has a, so Nevada has a state cocktail.

Speaker 2 Wait, before we get to the state cocktail, can we talk about something? Oh, yeah. I'm looking here, and it says it's the sagebrush state is one of its nicknames.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is another nickname is the sage hen state.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I didn't cover that one because there were by that time it was like 12 nicknames, but it's true that the sage hen is one of the lesser-known nicknames.

Speaker 2 But have you looked at this great, this, this greater sage grouse? I'll take a quick look.

Speaker 3 For you, I take a quick look.

Speaker 2 No, I'm not saying look at the, don't look at the Gunnison sage grouse, because that's just a dumb-looking bird.

Speaker 3 The greater sage grouse. Ooh, don't mind if I do.

Speaker 2 Very great.

Speaker 3 Are you wearing a white fox fur stole, you little thing?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this looks like one of the

Speaker 2 fancier Skexes from Dark Crystal. It does look like a fancy Skexes.

Speaker 3 It does. Oh, I really like it.
Well, Sage Hen state it is.

Speaker 2 Each spring males congregate and perform a strutting display. They puff up a large whitish air sac on its chest.
There it is.

Speaker 2 Make a soft drumming noise and struts around with his tail feathers displayed.

Speaker 3 I heard they might do an inflatable

Speaker 3 grouse neck that will float out into space and you can stay in it. It's like a little hotel.

Speaker 2 I love love the sage grouse. All right.
Anyway, go on to the cocktail.

Speaker 3 State cocktail is the PyCon. I'm going to say it's PyCon.
Could be Pecon. Pycon Punch, P-I-C-O-N.

Speaker 3 The Punch is a highball cocktail made with Amaro liqueur, soda water, grenadine, a splash of lemon, and a bit of brandy floating on top.

Speaker 3 The drink was created by Basque immigrants in the United States. In 2025, it became the official state cocktail.
I've never heard of it. I've never been offered one when I've been in Nevada.

Speaker 3 And while I'm sure there are Basque settlers in Nevada, this is a cocktail that became popular in a lot of different states. So I'm not, I'm actually not sure why

Speaker 3 it was so important that this become the state cocktail.

Speaker 2 It's very interesting. Does Nevada have a Basque community?

Speaker 3 But that's what I'm saying. It didn't say that on the Nevada website.

Speaker 2 It just sort of, yeah, it's a little odd.

Speaker 2 In northern Nevada, the pecan or pecon punch is served with ice in a customed stemmed glass produced by the Louis Picone Glass Company from a little town in Washoe County, Nevada called Sparks.

Speaker 2 Sparks, Nevada.

Speaker 3 It all comes back to Sparks.

Speaker 2 Picone Glass Company, and that is why

Speaker 2 I guess it is Nevada's state cocktail.

Speaker 3 Okay. Well, thank you for solving that for me.

Speaker 2 I don't know. It's interesting.
Things, everything's connected. I credit the aliens.
Well, I certainly do. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, this was a song that was written by alien Bertha Raffetto in 1932. I can only assume she's an alien.
It became the official state song in 1933.

Speaker 3 I'm going to be singing along with April Missouri's lovely kind of swingy arrangement.

Speaker 2 Here we go.

Speaker 3 I wish I'd practiced this more.

Speaker 2 Way out in the land of the setting sun where the wind blows wild and free.

Speaker 2 There's a lovely spot, just the only one that means home, sweet home to me.

Speaker 3 If you follow the old Kit Carson Trail until desert meets the hills,

Speaker 2 oh, you certainly will agree with me. It's the land of a thousand thrills.

Speaker 3 Home means Nevada.

Speaker 2 Home means the hills.

Speaker 3 Home means the sage and the pines.

Speaker 2 Out by the truckey, silvery rills,

Speaker 2 out where the sun always shines.

Speaker 2 There is the land that I love the best.

Speaker 2 Fairer than all I can see.

Speaker 2 Right in the heart of the golden west.

Speaker 2 Home means Nevada to me.

Speaker 2 And then there's a lovely little

Speaker 2 musical interlude, and I'm not going to say the second person that's going to be. Tap Dance Break.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But it's a very pretty song. And I wanted to make sure we covered it because it doesn't, it's all about the landscape of Nevada.

Speaker 2 And so there isn't really any kind of problematic, political, or like.

Speaker 2 I love that song.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's very pretty. It's very pretty.
I think it's delightful.

Speaker 2 But you know, there's a second unofficial state song in Nevada. Uh-oh.

Speaker 2 That was sung originally by alien visitors to Nevada. Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay. It goes a little something like this.

Speaker 2 Nothing ever happens on Mars.

Speaker 2 No sports or entertainment. No swinging bars.
We stand around.

Speaker 2 We stand some more on a planet named for a Roman god of war.

Speaker 2 Boring, boring, boring. Boring, boring, boring.
That of course is Eugene Livies.

Speaker 2 Nothing ever happens on Mars.

Speaker 2 From waiting for government.

Speaker 3 Waiting for government.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 3 What a joy.

Speaker 3 What a joy.

Speaker 2 Why don't we take a quick break?

Speaker 3 And when we come back, we'll talk about our choice for state cryptid, make that final decision. We'll enjoy some input from our wonderful listeners.
Plus, it will be time to rank the state mottos.

Speaker 3 e pluribus moto will be back right after this

Speaker 2 From the islands of Hawaii, all across our great nation, all the way east to the U.S. Virgin Islands, It's ePluribus Moto, Coast to Coast AM.

Speaker 2 It's three o'clock in the morning here in the high desert mountain. I'm John Hodgman talking to Janet Varney.
Janet, you say that you lived with a Bigfoot for seven years. Go on.

Speaker 3 I did, John.

Speaker 3 All I can say is the number one takeaway I had from being in a long-term committed relationship with a Bigfoot is that they prefer the plural to be Bigsfoot, which really surprised me.

Speaker 3 And it took me seven years to come to grips with the fact that I need to call him what he wants to be called. And the plural is Big Switzerland.

Speaker 2 All right, it's top of the hour. We do have to go to news.

Speaker 2 That was me imitating Art Bell and Janet Varney being an incredible improvisational comedian.

Speaker 3 Oh, no. Oh, no.
Now you've started it. So what we have on the line is we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight possible candidates.
They each have about five words they can say.

Speaker 3 They've each called into a dedicated line. They each each have five words or so that they can use to try to pitch themselves as the official state cryptid of Nevada.
We will be making that decision.

Speaker 3 First, I'm going to put on Tahoe Tessie. She is calling in from somewhere in the Tahoe region.
Tessie, why do you think you should be named the official state cryptid?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I'm a lake serpent in Lake Tahoe. Okay, that's.
And everyone loves me, and

Speaker 2 I might be a prehistoric sturgeon, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much, Tessie. Can't say that that was a ringing endorsement for yourself, but I'm glad everyone loves you.
Next up, who do we have on the line?

Speaker 2 Yeah, hi.

Speaker 2 Oh, do I need to turn down my radio?

Speaker 3 Could you turn it down a little bit? I'm having trouble hearing you.

Speaker 2 I'm a Jarbridge monster.

Speaker 3 Oh, hi. Hi.

Speaker 3 What do you look like?

Speaker 2 I'm a 30-foot cannibalistic giant, and I was part of the Shoshone folklore in Jarbridge, Nevada. But that's basically it.
I don't, that's it.

Speaker 2 Okay, all right. I'll take my answer off the air.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Hi, we're calling in together. We are the water babies and mermaid of Pyramid Lake.

Speaker 2 Now, excuse me, this line is only for spiteful mermaids. Are you the spiteful mermaid of Pyramid Lake?

Speaker 3 Sometimes, but I'm not feeling that angry today. Should I go?

Speaker 2 Oh, we'll have to move along.

Speaker 3 All right, thank you. And coming up, it looks like we have Cecil, the Walker Lake monster.

Speaker 3 Gonna be a tough, yeah, Cecil. How are you gonna distinguish yourself from Tessie?

Speaker 2 Oh, well, it's actually Cecil. True story, I was named after the 1962

Speaker 2 animated kid show Beanie and Cecil.

Speaker 2 I think they wanted a lake monster in Walker Lake, and so they picked me.

Speaker 3 Okay, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 If I could just, oh, oh, we have our first.

Speaker 2 Why am I getting scratched through the phone lines? This must be the cactus cat.

Speaker 3 Oh, the bobcat-like animal?

Speaker 2 Yeah, bobcat-like animal covered in hair-like thorns with particularly long spines from the legs and its armored branching tail.

Speaker 2 This must be one of the fearsome critters that were described in the famous book that we discussed in another episode, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by William T.

Speaker 2 Cox, in which we first learned of the wonderful squonk. This is the cactus cat.
Oh, God, I love the squonk. Um,

Speaker 3 hi, Janet, John. I'm one of the Lovelock giants.
I wasn't sure which line to call on.

Speaker 3 I was going to call on the giants line, but then I'm also a skeleton.

Speaker 3 And then I'm also a ghost. So I wasn't sure what the right number to use was, but I was found in a cave.
And again, I am a giant.

Speaker 3 Vote for me!

Speaker 2 All right, and the Lovelock giants also reputedly had red hair, and they were ancient foes of the ancient Paiute people. And in their folklore, they were giants who also ate people.
So, interesting.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 next up, it sounds like we have, oh my goodness,

Speaker 3 this is a rare development. I guess we have a spaceship that's also a clam.

Speaker 2 Yes, sir. Hello? Yeah, hi, I'm the giant space clam of Nevada.

Speaker 2 I'm a giant shellfish the size of a wagon, and I was observed

Speaker 2 in 1925 in Battle Mountain, Nevada, by a guy named Don Wood Jr.

Speaker 2 And I'm thought to have inspired Jordan Peale's creature in the movie Nope. All right, I'll take my answer off the air.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Okay, all right. And then finally, what?

Speaker 2 That sounds like a nice dog. It doesn't sound like a hell dog.
I thought this, I thought you were.

Speaker 2 This line is only for hell dogs of El Dorado Canyon.

Speaker 2 Scary dog, scary ghost dogs cited during the mining days. We're misunderstood.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, we'll get right back to you.
All right.

Speaker 2 Those are all of the cryptids of Nevada.

Speaker 3 Wow. Okay.
Well, we got to make a decision.

Speaker 3 What do we think should be the official cryptid? I can't get behind alien, anything alien because to me, that feels like it was not born of this

Speaker 3 or if it came in from elsewhere. So for me, I got to get rid of the aliens.
I'm not going to want to get rid of them, but I'm going to take them off the list.

Speaker 3 And also, and I regret this deeply, I cannot vote for the space clams, even though it's extraordinarily tempting.

Speaker 2 That was number one with a bullet, giant space clam.

Speaker 2 Of course, it also suggests space again.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem.

Speaker 3 I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 3 Is anyone singing out to you?

Speaker 2 Well, giant space clams are singing to me every night here in Maine.

Speaker 2 I'm often found wandering around the beach in the middle of the night in a trance.

Speaker 3 Tears streaming down your face due to the beauty of the music.

Speaker 2 I mean, is this, do we have to have a consensus here?

Speaker 3 Well, I don't know. I think, you know, usually with the show, we try to kind of settle on something.

Speaker 2 I got to give it to the greys. I'm sorry.
Paranormal. I mean, like, I understand that these are not

Speaker 2 traditional, like, unproven creatures. I think that in classic cryptozoology, I guess I got to give it to the

Speaker 2 lake monsters. Do you know what I mean? Those are the classics.

Speaker 2 I'm going with cactus cat.

Speaker 2 Cactus cat.

Speaker 3 All right. Give me that cactus cat.

Speaker 2 For a terrestrial cryptid, I'll go with cactus cat. Okay.
Especially since it comes from that wonderful book, the fearsome critters of the lumberlands or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But I still feel like the grays, in terms of paranormal, paranormal imagination, the grays have got it.

Speaker 2 But that's for that's aliens for a

Speaker 2 earth-borne encrypted cactus cat. But who's to say a cactus cat is an alien too? I mean, I love a lake monster.

Speaker 3 I love a lake monster. I got excited about the cactus cat, and I think we do have a vote from one of our listeners.
You will hear about that in just a moment.

Speaker 3 Let's visit some of the wonderful feedback and suggestions that we got, and some personal experience stuff we got from some of our wonderful listeners when they wrote in about Nevada.

Speaker 2 Here's something from Michelle Kay.

Speaker 2 Michelle writes: when when submitting photographic evidence to prove that Nevada is worth visiting, one would think to submit the most popular destination, Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 Most people would look at anything surrounding the city and think Nevada is a wasteland and nothing but dirt for miles.

Speaker 2 But as a native Las Vegan, I would be the first to say that even we in Nevada can feel disconnected and know little to nothing about anything north of Clark County.

Speaker 2 Luckily, I have family members that live in small towns in northern Nevada, and I've had the privilege of traveling past the city limits to enjoy more more that Nevada has to offer.

Speaker 2 Here are some photos that show a little bit of the mining history and small-town flair that you can find in my beautiful state. End quote.

Speaker 2 And Michelle shared some photos from the little mining town of Manhattan, Nevada, home to Michelle's great-great-grandparents in 1909.

Speaker 2 And now Michelle's family does a little grave decorating ceremony every year. Look at that.
This is lovely. It's so sweet.
Yeah, so wonderful. I love it.

Speaker 3 It's wonderful. It's wonderful.
You know who was going to be a fan of this for sure? Phil Varney. Phil Varney is on board for a little historic trip out to an old mining town.

Speaker 2 He loves it. And a grave decoration.
Dance on some graves. Loves it.

Speaker 3 Loves it. We also got a photo from Ashley T.
She sent some sprawl from the suburbs of Las Vegas. And from Caden D, we got this note.
I was born and raised in the Las Vegas Valley.

Speaker 3 While I haven't lived there in a hot minute, you best believe I still bleed battle-born blue.

Speaker 2 Triple B.

Speaker 3 Triple B. And then he shared a few tidbits.
Here are a couple I'm going to read. Nevada Day is a relatively big deal.
We didn't even talk about it. I'm so sorry, Kaylin.

Speaker 3 At least it was to my hometown of Henderson, which is pretty close outside of Las Vegas. I've been to Henderson many times.
I regularly

Speaker 3 walked in the Nevada Day parade as a kid, usually playing some kind of kazoo. Then afterward, my grandma and I would hand deliver a cheese ball to the mayor.
It was tradition.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 3 And my personal favorite Nevada crypto by far is the cactus cat. It's a cougar made out of cactuses.
What's not to like, Kaylin? I agree. I cast, I added my vote to your vote.

Speaker 3 What were you going to say, John?

Speaker 2 I just love the image of a child hand delivering a cheese ball. I know.

Speaker 3 I like to think of it as unwrapped and just in his little sweaty Nevada Day hand. So cute.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 cute, question mark.

Speaker 2 Catherine H. shared some info about Nevada's oldest restaurant, Kasale's Halfway Club.
It's pretty cute. What's the headline here?

Speaker 3 Just a little spot that's been in operation from 1937 with Italian immigrants John and Elvira Casale. So this is a little Italian family who made wonderful ravioli and

Speaker 3 did all kinds of wonderful stuff. And that restaurant is still in business today.

Speaker 3 Tradition. Mama Inez made it all the way to September of 2020 at the age of 93.

Speaker 3 But you can still walk through the door and have wonderful homemade raviolis, delicious, delicious lasagna made from scratch. Shout out to Casale's Halfway Club.

Speaker 2 As far as I can tell, it's about halfway between Fernley, Nevada, and Truckee, California.

Speaker 3 And that is the two little towns that we all think of.

Speaker 3 We all have been wondering what is in between those two.

Speaker 2 Oh, my gosh, but this place looks like a dream. And it looks like they've got a pecan punch

Speaker 2 on offer. Aha.
How about that? There There you go. Delightful.

Speaker 3 There you go.

Speaker 3 And finally, Ethan S. sent a wonderful, quote, Nevada dossier.

Speaker 2 Pronounced Nevada dossier.

Speaker 3 Dossier. Nevada dossier.
A Nevada-shaped report that he did when he was nine or ten. It's everything you could hope for.
We got a lot of construction paper, a lot of drawings of counties,

Speaker 3 a lot of

Speaker 3 hastily typed. no,

Speaker 3 it was careful, carefully typed information about the state of Nevada from when Ethan was a kid. I got to post this on our social media.
It is so cute.

Speaker 3 I feel like I could have done this entire episode just based off of Ethan's factoids and drawings from nine or ten-year-old him. So thank you for that, Ethan.

Speaker 2 But then we would have had to pay him 100 pieces of silver, and frankly, we wasted our silver budget already.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Ethan, and thank you to all of our wonderful listeners, whom I'm sure will be letting us know what we've forgotten to talk about vis-a-vis Nevada and every other state we visited so far but now it is time to rate the state motto that is we're gonna rank this motto all for our country on a scale of one to ten giant space clams Janet oh I'm so glad that's exactly what I was gonna say yeah

Speaker 2 okay good I disked my giant space clams earlier we had to put them in someplace we got to give them a little love right now so the motto again is all for our country what do you what how many giant space clams does you get janet

Speaker 2 i have my number if you want to say this You do?

Speaker 3 Well, I don't have a number, so I'm going to have to come up with one, but that's the problem, is that I just kind of don't have an opinion on this, which is tough because I do love space clams.

Speaker 3 I will say...

Speaker 2 Okay, I'm ready.

Speaker 2 We're going to do one, two, three, and then we'll say our number. Okay.
One, two, three,

Speaker 2 two giant space clams. Oh, six?

Speaker 3 I don't know. But there's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 2 That's an exciting number of space clams.

Speaker 3 I mean, the idea that it wanted to get in on the action and try to help, you know, the Union and abolish slavery, I don't know. That seemed like a pretty good reason to get in the mix.

Speaker 3 But it's a confusing, it's confusing.

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 it is confusing, and that's part of the reason why I give it two space clams.

Speaker 2 It's contrived.

Speaker 2 It was designed to rig an election. Uh-oh.
Essentially.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, some of my space clams are flying away.

Speaker 3 Where are you going?

Speaker 2 Space clams! It really has not a lot lot to do with anything that we associate with Nevada today or in the past. And it just feels totally fake.

Speaker 2 But the main reason I'm giving it to space clams is because in 1925, when pilot Don Wood Jr.

Speaker 2 in Battle Mountain, Nevada observed the eight-foot diameter floating jellyfish in the sky that he called a space clam, he said that it was hurt.

Speaker 2 And after 20 minutes, the creature began to pulsate and grow extremely bright. And this act appeared to grab the attention of another space clam, 30 feet in diameter, that pilot

Speaker 2 Don Wood Jr. felt was its mother.
So, in honor of the two giant space clams seen in 1925, mother and child space clams from beyond.

Speaker 2 In fact, I'm voting for the space clam as best gripped it again.

Speaker 3 I know, I know, because I can see, I can see.

Speaker 2 Now, I realize that it could be,

Speaker 2 they're beautiful creatures.

Speaker 2 If you get stunned by one, you just have to pee on the wound.

Speaker 3 I don't think clams sting you.

Speaker 2 And we don't know whether they're aliens or natural.

Speaker 2 The mystery is: are they aliens or are they natural beasts?

Speaker 3 So we know for certain they're real. We just don't know if they're alien or if they come from Earth.

Speaker 3 You know what? Unfortunately, all of my space clams flew away, leaving only those two space clams.

Speaker 3 And one of the space clams, as it flew away, gave me a different read on the motto, which I do enjoy, which is I didn't realize how sarcastic it could sound until that space, last space clam flying away said, all for our country.

Speaker 3 So thank you, six space clams, for quickly flying away, leaving us with only two space clams.

Speaker 2 Two space clams. All for our country.
All for our country.

Speaker 3 And all for our podcast, because that is it for Nevada, Nevada, which means it is the last of our states.

Speaker 2 We're literally Nevada, Nevada, Nevada, we're literally calling the whole thing off.

Speaker 3 We are.

Speaker 2 We are.

Speaker 3 At least for the season. What a ride, everyone.
Thank you for giving us those 10 states to spotlight. Again, you chose those states for us.
You made such wonderful choices. You made it happen.

Speaker 3 We love the diversity of all the different states that we talked about. And we're sorry to say this.

Speaker 3 Just temporary goodbye, a toutaleur.

Speaker 2 But it is not an adieu.

Speaker 2 It is a au revoir.

Speaker 2 Meaning, until we see each other again, until we resee each other. And indeed, let's stay in touch.
I mentioned we got that speakpipe going. Speakpipe.com slash e pluribus moto.

Speaker 2 Would love to hear from you, particularly if you've got alien encounter stories or if you yourself are a time-traveling alien.

Speaker 2 And we'd love to hear from you if you've got states that you highly recommend that you want to pitch to us that should be part of season three.

Speaker 2 We're really, really excited to get to season three soon. So start making your arguments.
Speakpipe.com/slash e epluribusmato.

Speaker 2 And of course, you can always email us at emailpluribusmoto at maximumfun.org.

Speaker 3 This show was hosted by John Hodgman along with me, Janet Varney.

Speaker 2 The show is produced and edited by Julian Burrell.

Speaker 3 Senior producer at Maximum Fun is Laura Swisher.

Speaker 2 Our theme music was composed by Zach Burba.

Speaker 3 Our show art was created by Paul G. Hammond, and there's some wonderful ePleuribus merch out there that Paul, of course, his wonderful designs are on there.
Check that out as well.

Speaker 3 I love my ePlurbus Motto t-shirt and I love my mug. Love, love, love.
Love the work that he did. Thank you, Paul.

Speaker 3 And thank you, Zach, because I also could just listen to our theme over and over again. It's such a delight and I can take zero credit for it,

Speaker 3 as is also true for John Hodgman.

Speaker 2 You can take zero credit for me, but I also love

Speaker 2 the theme song, Paul. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok and tell us more about the states we've talked about so far and what you would like to hear about in the future.

Speaker 2 And until then, and until season three comes out, remember our motto, which is:

Speaker 2 the larger creature looked similar in appearance to the smaller one, but it was approximately 30 feet in diameter.

Speaker 2 It grabbed the smaller monster with, quote, four sucker-like tongues, unquote, and took off into the air. This creature was the giant space clam's mother.

Speaker 3 Hope everybody sees at least a couple Bigfoot.

Speaker 3 See you next time.

Speaker 2 Au revoir.

Speaker 2 Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.