272 Tragic Tale Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
How did a failure to colonize Panama lead to the formation of Great Britain? And

Marcia Smith 0:07
more importantly, how do they keep raisins in cereal boxes from falling to the bottom? Wow, answers

Bob Smith 0:13
to those and other mysteries coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith. You

Bob Smith 0:35
announcer, welcome to the off ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. In the interest of lifelong learning, we tackle very important subjects, like, how

Marcia Smith 0:49
do they keep raisins in cereal boxes from falling to the bottom of the box?

Bob Smith 0:54
This is a mystery of life. I guess we should start with that. Marcia, what is the answer to that? Well, is it the construction of the cereal box? No,

Marcia Smith 1:02
no, you know the rule of popcorn physics, correct? No,

Bob Smith 1:07
I don’t know that. Didn’t

Marcia Smith 1:08
you learn anything? I don’t remember that in physics class.

Bob Smith 1:11
Now, all right,

Marcia Smith 1:12
that is unpop popcorn falls to the bottom of the bowl and has saved many a molar. And why? For obvious reasons. Why? Well, they do that because their mass is much smaller than a popped kernel, so they just drop to the bottom of the bowl. What does that have to do with raisins? Well, I’m getting to that Bob. I was just talking physics, all right. So what about the raisins? According to General Mills, and they should know, they only add the raisins to cereal after half the box has already been packed and settled a bit. Oh, is that right? Yeah, they don’t put them in right away, so they put them in halfway through finished the box, and then during transit, the boxes get jostled a bit around and the raisins get distributed.

Bob Smith 1:57
So this is, like their learned experience over the years. This is the best way to do it. Yeah, so they’re

Marcia Smith 2:02
not all sitting at the bottom. I never thought of that. And there you go. Another enlightenment from your wife, Marcia Jones Smith, on

Bob Smith 2:10
the off ramp, you’re welcome. Okay, all right, a little bit of history today. Marcia, how did a failure to colonize Panama lead to the formation of Great Britain? I don’t know. Okay, I’m gonna tell you the story Marsh Scotland tried to colonize Panama. That’s hard to believe. I can’t imagine all these Scottish people down there in Panama. But this was in 1698, and it happened in the infamous Darien Gap. You’ve done stories about that, yeah, it’s awful. People try to go through there on foot. They still are, and it’s a jungle. Well, this was the era of exploration. Spain was king. They had colonies all over South America, making it rich with gold and silver. England was beginning to establish the North American colonies, and Scotland wanted to be in on the action. Their plan was for a Scottish colony to control an overland route connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. So in 1698 a fleet of five ships sailed from Scotland carrying 1200 settlers, including families. They met with malaria, yellow fever, food shortages and conflicts with the Spanish. And within nine months, most of the 1200 men, women and children died and the colony was abandoned. That sounds horrible. Unfortunately, news of that disaster didn’t reach Scotland in time for the second fleet of 1000 people to leave heading for Panama, and they met the same fate. In total, more than 80% of the 2500 people died. So how did that lead to the formation of Great Britain? That’s the question. The scheme was funded by nearly half of Scotland’s national wealth, and its failure ruined the Scottish economy. Wow, many Scottish elites saw union with England as the only way to survive financially. So that’s how a failed colony in Panama led to the formation of Great Britain and Europe.

Marcia Smith 3:59
That was in the 1600s 1698,

Bob Smith 4:03
three countries that were Great Britain originally were England, Wales and Scotland, and then Northern Ireland joined later. Okay,

Marcia Smith 4:08
Bob, what is considered the rarest color? The rarest

Bob Smith 4:12
color? Well, I think it was purple, wasn’t it?

Marcia Smith 4:16
That’s right, yeah, purple, particularly in nature, not many animals have any purple highlights at all, and historically, the color has been associated with royalty due to its rarity. Yeah, so hard to make, that’s right, difficult to produce. In the days before synthetic dyes, it was very hard to do so you had lots of bucks if you could have a purple robe, which I like to have at all times. The rarity stems from the fact that naturally occurring compounds that absorb the wavelengths of light needed to create purple are very scarce,

Bob Smith 4:51
and a young man who came up with that dye became very wealthy because all of Europe went crazy over this dye that created purple. Yeah, okay. Marcia, beware of foods with mystery ingredients always. Do you remember there was something called Olestra with zero calories that was introduced in the 1990s it

Marcia Smith 5:12
sounds familiar. It sounds like one of those wacky sugar substitutes. That’s right,

Bob Smith 5:16
and here’s what happened. Food for thought. In 1996 PepsiCo launched a line of potato chips fried with the fat substitute called Olestra with zero calories. Sounds like progress. So far, so good. One problem, while Olestra had zero calories, it caused fecal incontinence. Oh, dear God. That means you cannot control when you need to go to the bathroom. To do number two, so that fat substitute was discontinued. It went away.

Marcia Smith 5:42
Another fad down the toilet. It’s used today to

Bob Smith 5:45
paint decks and lubricate power tools. Well, there was a mystery ingredient in potato chips in 1996 it’s

Marcia Smith 5:54
not that long ago. Bob in December 2023 Sally snowman retired from her job. What? That’s her name? Sally

Bob Smith 6:03
not Sally the snowman. Snowman. Sally snowman was her name, yeah,

Marcia Smith 6:08
okay. She was the very last what in the United States? Sally snowman was 2023 in

Bob Smith 6:15
2023 she wasn’t like, a telephone operator, no, okay, what?

Marcia Smith 6:19
She was the last lighthouse keeper. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, that she was the very last one, and it was at Boston light in Boston Harbor. All lighthouses in the US are now automated, and snowman served as a keeper of Boston light for 20 years before retiring. Boston light originally opened in 1716, wow. Sally was the 70th Keeper of the Light. 69 of them were, not surprisingly, men,

Bob Smith 6:47
so she was the only woman, yeah, the last and the only woman. Wow. It

Marcia Smith 6:51
was the honor of a lifetime for Sally, who said it was called something she had been dreaming about since she was 10 years old.

Bob Smith 7:00
That’s true. And that was, where was that again? In Boston. Well, here’s something that happened off Massachusetts, and it ended up in a movie. What famous ad libbed Movie Line was a jab making fun of some stingy producers. Can

Marcia Smith 7:14
you tell me the movie? The movie was Jaws, okay, oh, we’re gonna need a bigger boat. That’s it, is it? Yeah, this comes

Bob Smith 7:21
from britannica.com during production of jaws in 1974 when they were making the movie, the boat that carried much of the camera and lighting equipment was so small and flimsy the crew named it the SS garage sale. It caused enormous difficulties on the set, but studio producers refused to buy a larger one for that young director nobody had ever heard of before, Steven Spielberg, and things went wrong on the set, right and left. Whenever that happened, members of the cast and crew would joke, gonna need a bigger boat. Is that right? So when Roy Scheider had that one big scene where that big shark popped up, he had the cigarette in his mouth, he had lived you’re gonna need a bigger boat on a couple of takes. And they thought, let’s put it in the film. Oh, it’s the one everybody remembers. Was not even in the script originally, and it was based on a jab at stingy movie producers. That’s

Marcia Smith 8:17
funny. I didn’t know that part. Okay, Bob, do you remember your phone number growing up Hemlock, 77429, and mine was Custer, 36281,

Bob Smith 8:27
isn’t that funny how those things last in your brain? What

Marcia Smith 8:30
was that named after General Custer? Oh, yeah.

Bob Smith 8:32
I’m sure it was. You know, you had a Custer school there too in Milwaukee, yeah, yeah. I’m sure that was named after the the great general that was seen as the fatalistic hero. Well, the

Marcia Smith 8:42
whole country had a five digit number with an alphabetical prefix, right? But did you ever notice on the old phones, the old dial phones? I think we have one somewhere. Okay, pre digital phones, there were two letters missing, and you don’t know what they

Bob Smith 8:56
were do, no, I probably it was an M and N. Do they know those? No, some of the letters that seem like the other letters are similar. No, they were Q

Marcia Smith 9:04
and Z. Why and why you ask? See, I wrote that down here and why you there was only room for 24 letters to go with numbers zero through nine, and it was really hard to come up with exchanges that started with the letters Q and z, so they were dropped. So nobody ever got a phone number like Zorro 28282,

Bob Smith 9:28
isn’t that interesting? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 9:29
there was just not enough prefixes you could come up with z and Q

Bob Smith 9:33
words. In other words, they thought the words would be too sparse in order to use those

Marcia Smith 9:37
right, and they needed a lot of combinations.

Bob Smith 9:41
Yeah, you’re right. Hemlock, that’s a poison. That’s something we all know from some Shakespeare and stuff. And yours was General George Custer,

Marcia Smith 9:48
honest to God, until probably a month ago, I thought it was custard 362,

Bob Smith 9:54
well, you’re from Milwaukee, that’s what you thought that. That’s all right, okay, I got another. Movie. Fact, this is interesting. Do you remember a scene in the recent 2023, movie, Barbie, in which Margot Robbie, who was the the actress, she stepped out of high heels onto the ground and her foot stayed arched. Yeah, you couldn’t stand flat on her feet. It was a joke, but it led some researchers to say, Hmm, did Barbie’s feet change over time? Sylee Williams, she’s an academic podiatrist at Monash University, the leader of this group. She and two other podiatrists teamed up with a friend who happened to be a lifelong Barbie collector, and they decided they would go through all of these Barbies, they examined the feet of 2700 dolls and used a measurement device to determine the angle of the feet to see if things had changed. Here were their findings in the early decades of the Barbie doll’s life, 100% of the dolls had arched feet. Yeah, that’s back when they were fashion dolls. Originally, they were fashion dolls. I remember in the last four years, only 40% had arched feet. They had flat out, right? Yeah. So it’s changed. I didn’t know it changed over time, and in a statement emailed to the New York Times, Mattel confirmed foot design was a deliberate part of Barbie’s evolution. When you started seeing her go skiing and scuba diving and other things, the feet started to angle differently. Well, as they started making dolls that were actually astronauts and scientists, they started changing the way the feet were. So it’s confirmed. It’s true evolution

Marcia Smith 11:31
of woman. I thought you’d find

Bob Smith 11:33
that interesting.

Marcia Smith 11:34
Oh, my god, yeah, I still see these women with six inch spikes, and their foots are totally distorted. I just don’t see the attractiveness, and that looks painful, and not that sexy. And

Bob Smith 11:47
heels look great to men. Okay, let’s move on. So they look sexy

Marcia Smith 11:51
to you. Oh, yeah, in those particular pointed high heels? Well,

Bob Smith 11:55
some of them are too severe, but overall, they always did look sexy. Okay, that’s why they do it. But once I discovered that women were having physical problems with this, I thought, well, that’s not worth it. There’s a lot of things in life that aren’t worth it, and I think that’s one,

Marcia Smith 12:07
oh, that’s absolutely not worth it. I knew several women with crippled feet. Okay,

Bob Smith 12:11
I’m ready to change the subject. Are you all right? Bob in 2024

Marcia Smith 12:16
the federal government received its largest ever tax bill payment in history. It was $26.8 billion

Bob Smith 12:26
Wow. Who paid it? $26.8 billion this is a tax bill. Somebody paid Yeah. Was this a somebody, you know? Oh, really, was this an individual, or was it a corporation?

Marcia Smith 12:37
Well, it’s a corporation, but somebody’s ahead of it. It

Bob Smith 12:41
wasn’t Mr. Microsoft. Bill Gates, was it? No, I don’t think it was Mr. Tesla Elon Musk, no. Okay. Who was

Marcia Smith 12:49
it? It was Berkshire Hathaway, an investment fund run by Warren Buffet, who said he didn’t mind paying such a large tax bill and hoped that the government would use it wisely and help overburdened Americans? Well, that’s great. That’s a pretty

Bob Smith 13:04
actually paying taxes.

Marcia Smith 13:06
Yeah, since Buffett took over the company, the company has paid 101 billion in taxes. But before he took it over, in 1965 they didn’t pay a dime. Oh, my goodness, yeah, which Buffett called an embarrassment? See,

Bob Smith 13:20
isn’t that nice? There’s somebody who is a billionaire who does pay taxes. I think it’s worthwhile, and I should do it. Yeah, that’s necessary,

Marcia Smith 13:27
and he’s the one. I don’t know the exact figures, but pointed out that his secretary paid a higher percent in taxes than he did at

Bob Smith 13:34
one point. That’s true. Yeah. Okay. Marcia, two food questions, what was the brand name of the sandwich cookies that Oreos imitated. Oh,

Marcia Smith 13:43
really. Oh, sandwich cookie was that like? Do I know this thing? Well,

Bob Smith 13:49
I’ve seen them before in the past, and I thought, What a stupid name to give to something that imitates Oreos. But it turns out, Oreos imitated

Marcia Smith 13:56
them. Was it like a peanut butter sandwich? No, they’re

Bob Smith 14:00
just like Oreos. Oh, I don’t know. Hydrox cookies never heard of Well, why would you use a name like that sounds like a wash detergent, but Hydrox was a successful sandwich cookie, and by the time Oreos debuted in 1912 Hydrox cookies had been on the shelf for four years, launched by sunshine biscuits, Hydrox featured a creamy center sandwich with two chocolate cookies while Nabisco is Oreos imitated the original, and they ultimately surpassed Hydrox in popularity, probably in part due to the name, which was a mashup of hydrogens on oxygen. What a terrible name, a terrible cookie name, yeah. But Oreos came along, and I don’t know what that meant originally, but for some reason that that survived. Okay, Hydrox, cooking, that’s just that sounds like a science experiment. Hydrox,

Marcia Smith 14:48
I have an AKA now, do you want to do it before or after the break?

Bob Smith 14:51
Let’s take a break, and we’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. Okay, we’re back. Hello, we’re back, and you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We do this for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and then we publish it on podcast platforms all over the world, where it is heard

Unknown Speaker 15:18
everywhere. Okay, all right,

Bob Smith 15:20
Marcia, aka is the next thing we’re going to do, right? All right, also known as Yes,

Marcia Smith 15:24
and the category today is Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Bob Smith 15:29
Okay, good. Okay. You ready? Yeah, I hope so. Okay, so

Marcia Smith 15:32
for instance, aka, also known as, if I said deranged, what’s the movie? Oh,

Bob Smith 15:38
my God, what is the movie? What is that movie? That’s the movie where, psycho, that’s it. Psycho,

Marcia Smith 15:44
that’s it. Okay, Bob, pigeons and crows, also known as the birds that’s right back, opening

Bob Smith 15:53
back, opening that was rear window, correct, to apprehend

Marcia Smith 15:57
a crook, to

Bob Smith 15:59
catch a thief. Very good boy. I’m surprised I’m doing so well here, of course, that’s the time. That’s the time you once like, when you’re on the golf course and you go, Hey, I hit that ball pretty good. And then the rest of the game goes down, and

Marcia Smith 16:10
here you go, you won’t get the last two now, imbalanced. You two song

Bob Smith 16:14
imbalanced. You two song imbalanced. Is that vertigo? That’s it. Okay, very

Marcia Smith 16:21
good. All right. And this one is infamous Duran Duran song, an

Bob Smith 16:27
infamous Duran Duran song, oh, gosh, I can’t think of it now. Well,

Marcia Smith 16:32
just go with infamous. Then,

Bob Smith 16:33
yeah, I’m trying to think of it infamous. Okay, I’m sorry, that’s the one I’m blanking on Yes. Okay, the answer is, notorious, notorious. Okay, did you see that movie? Oh, yeah, I saw almost all of those films. Yeah, I think, I think we did you and I and then the one I liked, which was very unusual, and they brought back, I don’t know, a number of years ago, and it was shot in one long camera scene. Oh, was that the rope?

Unknown Speaker 16:58
The rope, the whole movie was shot? No, yes,

Bob Smith 17:01
it was. It was, could they do that? Well, they basically set up a camera that they would push along, Dolly in and Dolly out, and then at the end of each reel, 15 minutes, is what a film reel would take, uh huh. They would push into somebody’s back at dark clothing, and it would go to black, and then they’d pull back out, and it was, have another

Marcia Smith 17:19
scene. Yeah, right, wow. I’d have to have to watch it again. Keep that in mind. At first,

Bob Smith 17:24
I was like, this is fascinating. And then after a while, it’s like, oh, here we go again. I want a master shot, or a close up, or something, anything. Oh, dear. Okay, Marcia, artificial intelligence is something that we talk about a lot. And ever since computers and the Internet, teachers were worried about students plagiarizing term, papers, exams, etc, right? Yeah. Well, guess what? Now, what the students who don’t plagiarize are having to deal with there is software out there that universities are buying that is supposed to catch artificial intelligence and it’s making errors. Oh dear, and students are being accused of plagiarizing plagiarizing papers, and they’re not. This is a story called having to prove that AI didn’t do your homework recently in the New York Times, and it starts with a story about a girl named lye barrel. She got a notification that made her stomach drop. She was into her sophomore year couple weeks, and she’d received a zero on an assignment worth 15% of her final grade. In a brief note, her professor explained he believed she’d outsourced the composition of her paper, and she had to prove that no she wrote this, her grade was restored after she sent a 15 page PDF of time stamped screenshots and notes from her writing process. She just started doing this automatically. Wow, and thank God she did. So there are all these AI detection software. Some of them have errors as high as 9% that’s pretty high when you’re trying to detect things. So too many good students are now having to defend their work when they didn’t do anything wrong. So students are saving multiple versions of drafts of things so they can turn them in if they have to. It’s making more work for everybody.

Marcia Smith 19:12
Don’t you think they should just have to do written work in class? Well,

Bob Smith 19:16
that would help. But you know, if you’re doing a research paper or a term paper, that’s kind of hard to do, so they call this AI detection software, and some schools have decided that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. Students now having to defend their work, saying no, I actually wrote that. Okay, Bob,

Marcia Smith 19:33
why was there red snow in Boston in 1935

Bob Smith 19:38
red snow? This wasn’t the in Boston, molasses? Was it? No, I remember that story, molasses story, yeah, okay, so there’s red snow in Boston. It had to do with something like a chemical thing or a something at a food processing plant or or what? No,

Marcia Smith 19:54
okay, tell me think about the year 1935

Bob Smith 19:58
Yeah, 1935 i. Get it. Okay? That doesn’t help me at all. Getting a little cranky, honey. I don’t understand what that means. Well,

Marcia Smith 20:06
it’s because the Dust Bowl wasn’t entirely confined to the actual Dust Bowl states which were Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico, okay, those states were all affected by the extreme drought that ravaged the Great Plains in the 1930s right? But some of the dust storms Bob that resulted were so extreme that the clouds reached cities more than 1500 miles away, all the way to Boston, and when it snowed, it came down red. That’s amazing. I didn’t know that from the red clay soil being concentrated in the atmosphere, huh? Isn’t that something? It

Bob Smith 20:43
is. And it brings to mind, there was a recent story that there’s a huge, huge amount of dust over Chicago recently, and it all came from the Great Plains, too, where there are problems right now with with

Marcia Smith 20:53
dry erosion. Yeah, yeah. And it’s not getting rained. Wow.

Bob Smith 20:58
So that happens, that kind of stuff that freak

Marcia Smith 21:00
you out. Oh yeah, comes the snow, mom. What is wrong with our snowman? Is all red,

Bob Smith 21:07
all right. Marcia, when Eggos brand frozen waffles were first introduced, what was their original weird name? What were they originally called?

Marcia Smith 21:18
I don’t have any idea. Frothels. What? How do you spell that?

Bob Smith 21:21
Froffles, F, R, O, F, F, L, E, S, meaning frozen waffles. Oh, god, that’s funny. When they were first introduced in 1953 and then later in the 50s, Froffles were renamed Eggo frozen waffles and became a toaster treat and it sounded healthier speaking of waffles, what ancient empire made the first known waffles. What civilization made the first known waffles? The Greeks, the Chinese the Romans,

Marcia Smith 21:49
I was going to say the wacky Romans, but no Ancient Greece. Ah,

Bob Smith 21:53
the Greeks made them by pressing dough between two iron plates with wooden handles and then holding that over a fire or an open hearth, and it was me that comes from the Smithsonian back to a goes. Did you know A merry go round motor helped automate the production of those waffles? No, because, you know, manually you make waffles. That takes a lot of work. So when they decided to come up with this, fraufles, or frozen waffles, it didn’t seem like it would be an easy thing to mass produce, but Frank Dorsa, who was up the Eggo company, he was an engineer. He built a giant rotating contraption equipped with multiple waffle irons mounted on a carousel powered by a merry go round engine, and as the waffles cooked and the carousel rotated, strategically placed employees would flip each waffle at the right time, and that’s how they began to crank out 1000s of waffles an hour. Oh, God bless. All right, Bob, a merry go round engine. I thought that was and a carousel of waffle irons. I love touring factories. That would be so much fun to see something like that. Yeah, yeah. Bizarre. Speaking

Marcia Smith 22:56
of food, what famous toxic substance was added to food and drinks because it was thought to have health benefits.

Bob Smith 23:05
What famous toxic substance thought it would have health benefits? Yeah, arsenic. Arsenic. Is it something like that? No, no,

Marcia Smith 23:12
it’s radium. Oh, my goodness, radium. That’s right after Madame Curie discovered the alkaline metal in 1898 and then she won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. The false belief that radium had health benefits began to spread, and it was added to everything from toothpaste and hair gel to food

Bob Smith 23:31
and drink. Oh, now you didn’t know that. Oh, my God, that’s terrible with glow in

Marcia Smith 23:36
the dark paints from radium still sold in the 1970s it was marketed as being good for any common ailment. Can you imagine, with radioactive water sold in small jars that shops claimed would aid nature and act as a natural Vitalizer? Remember, we did a story about Madame Curie notebooks and everything were radioactive. Still are, yeah, yeah. They’re expected to be radioactive for more than

Bob Smith 24:05
1500 years, centuries. Yeah, they’re in a they’re in a vault somewhere in France. We did

Marcia Smith 24:09
a story on that, but I didn’t know at the time that they actually put it into food.

Bob Smith 24:13
No, I didn’t either. That’s amazing. Speaking of food and bad ingredients, what food was thought to be poisonous in 18th century Europe, and why? I think you remember this. We’ve probably done this before. What fruit was considered poisonous? Actually, we think of it as

Unknown Speaker 24:27
some vegetable today. Oh, tomato. Okay,

Bob Smith 24:30
and it really wasn’t poisonous. What was the problem? They dubbed the fruit the poison apple. I don’t know. The real problem wasn’t the tomatoes. It was the pewter plates wealthy families served them on. Oh, the acidity in the tomato leached the lead from the plates, which led to lead poisoning.

Marcia Smith 24:50
Yeah, for sure. Isn’t that interesting, the combination of tomato on lead plates

Bob Smith 24:55
on pewter plates, yeah, and the lead would be leached into the food. Oh, gosh. Right? And there we go, and we have lead pipes that are still being torn out of cities and schools. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 25:04
All right, Bob, the first gold rush in America was not in California. It was in Carolinas. That’s right, 1799 in North Carolina. That’s right, that’s

Bob Smith 25:14
that’s what fire on the mountain? That song by the Southern band, Marshall Tucker band did fire on the mountain. That was about the gold rush in the Carolinas. I

Marcia Smith 25:23
didn’t know that. Yeah. Do you know who it was started by? Who

Bob Smith 25:27
started that gold rush? Yeah, I

Marcia Smith 25:29
don’t know. Was a 12 year old boy. Conrad Reed, the 12 year old son of a hessian Revolutionary War deserter named John Reed. He found, check this out. Bob, a 17 pound gold nugget, wow, in little Meadow Creek outside Charlotte. We ought to pay more attention when we go visit relatives. At first, not knowing what his son had stumbled across. The Elder Reid used the rock as a door. Oh, I think I heard about this. Yeah, his home’s front door. And it wasn’t until 1802 when he took the rock to a local jeweler, that he began to grasp the enormity of the sun’s discovery. Although he sold the nugget for far less than it was actually worth. Wow,

Bob Smith 26:15
but it was a doorstop. That’s how big it was. Well, pound, holy cow gold nugget that is mind blowing. That’s amazing.

Marcia Smith 26:26
All right, time for quotes now, okay, quotes on leadership. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity. And lastly, one of my favorites, Lao Tzu, a leader’s best quality is when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, We did it ourselves. Oh, that’s a good one. I like that. And look at the ancient wisdom from

Bob Smith 26:54
the Chinese Yeah. So you you make people think they did it themselves. That’s a good leader. You don’t take credit for it yourself, empower others, let the people take the credit for themselves. That is a good leader. Yeah, isn’t Yeah. And we’ve had bosses like that, very good bosses who always spread around the credit and then ones who didn’t, ones who made it. It was all about them. Yeah, guess which ones you

Marcia Smith 27:15
liked? But more importantly, who was more effective? Yeah, the ones

Bob Smith 27:19
that that empowered others were more effective. You’re right. Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed this half hour of fun. I’m Bob Smith, I’m Marcia Smith. Join us again when we return in another week with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on the off ramp. The off ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at the offramp, dot show at.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai