Chalkboards known for being dusty.

Famous for being scribbly.

Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun.

Let's find out why chalkboards are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey, hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcasts, all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, how's it going?

Yeah, it's good.

Good. It's good here too. This topic made me think about my whole educational history, but I am also an adult here in the present doing good.

I can taste and smell this topic.

And the topic is chalkboards and beyond all the sensory overload, Katie, what's your relationship to or opinion of chalkboards?

I mean, yeah, I don't know. Sensory overload is a word for it.

I remember the smell of the chalkboards, the smell, especially like when you would

like dust them up with the chalkboard erasers.

Of course, there was the unpleasantness of chalkboards sometimes, especially when you

get a piece of chalk that was really good, right?

And crumbled really nice.

That was the best thing.

But then you'd sometimes get like a bad one, like a stale piece of chalk and you'd try to

write on the chalkboard and nothing would come out and it'd make a horrible sound.

That was like maybe the worst feeling in the entire world. Chalk can make a bad

sound, right? Like there's the famous thing of fingernails on a chalkboard and that's supposed to be

the worst. I found a few studies that claimed that there's a set of hertzes of frequency that we

don't like, which fingernails on a chalkboard fall into,

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