0302 - Alpha

World's Greatest Con

Dog And Pony Show Audio

True Crime, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steve Shaw is an orphan who bounced around the globe. Mike Edwards is an Iowa choirboy who fulfilled every hope of his loving parents. They both see a world being defrauded by hucksters. They both apply to the Mac Lab study in St. Louis and are accepted. They both believe the other to be a liability in a long con. Can they coexist?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is World's Greatest Con, I'm Brian Brushwood.
0:08.0	The following two sentences sound absolutely incompatible, and yet, to the best of our
0:15.5	research, there is no question that both of them are absolutely true.
0:29.6	In the 1670s, Isaac Newton invented calculus.
0:38.5	In the 1670s, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented calculus.
0:45.8	For the next several decades, in journals, colleges and conferences, they battled out about
0:51.8	who copied who.
0:54.5	Each one of them was certain that the work they put into this mathematical breakthrough
0:59.2	was the foundation for the other.
1:02.3	And yet today, as I speak to you, we know this as an example of multiple discovery.
1:10.5	It's the concept in science and art that two individuals totally independent of each
1:16.0	other can come up with the exact same idea and publish it at the exact same time.
1:23.4	And it happens more often than you'd think.
1:25.8	In the 18th century, oxygen gets discovered by Karl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Prisly,
1:31.6	Antoine Lava-Swey, and others.
1:34.2	The theory of evolution gets independently advanced in the 1800s by both Charles Darwin and
1:40.1	Alfred Russell Wallace.
1:42.1	People are still debating that one to this day.
1:45.2	And according to the research of Robert K. Merton, these multiple discoveries, they're
1:49.9	not the outlier, they're the rule.
1:53.3	Okay, scientific discoveries.
1:54.8	I mean, those are just waiting to be discovered, right?
	...

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