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Middle of the show. I'm going to The Middle of the show. I'm going to

the middle of the gospel Everybody Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcasts.

Episode 3.08

I'm This is the You're Not So Smart podcast.

My name is David McCraney, and I would like to tell you a story about a horse.

In the late 1800s, in a time of ferris wheels and boater hats and vaudevillian stage performances,

in an era marking the early days of cinema, industrialization, and electricity,

a time when the telegraph, the automobile, incandescent lights, and vaccines were changing the world,

and the theory of evolution by natural selection was creating a paradigm shift in science and medicine.

A German math teacher gained international fame, claiming that he had taught a horse to read, spell, tell time, understand a

calendar, and yes, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

Music As the 19th century came to a close, math teacher, phrenologist, and amateur horse trainer, Wilhelm von Austin, gathered large crowds in Berlin and across Germany with his incredible stallion known as Clever Hans.

Crowds gathered so large that Austin, Hans, and those crowds all once appeared in the New York Times,

in a time when a horse act would need to be rather impressive to make it

into a newspaper across the ocean. News of clever Hans' incredible, almost human intelligence

wild people far and wide, so much so that Wilhelm von Austin and his horse would go on to change psychology forever.

Just not in the way he likely intended.

A key element of the clever Hans demonstration was the fact that Wilhelm von

Austin usually used some sort of placard or blackboard, a piece of paper or some other

...