0:00 On this day in 1946, the world was handed two very different scripts for its future, and almost no one noticed they were reading from the same play.0:10 Yesterday, we talked about the Model T hitting the road, a new kind of mobility for a new century.0:16 Well, on October second, 1946, as the verdicts were being read at Nuremberg, a different kind of vehicle was making its debut on American television screens—the very first soap opera.0:29 One was a reckoning with the past, the other, a glimpse of a future we would spend hours and hours watching.0:36 And the gap between what they thought mattered then, and what we can see so clearly now...0:42 well, that's where all the good stories are.0:45 This day, October second, is just brimming with these kinds of delightful contradictions.0:51 It's a day of profound beginnings and solemn endings.0:55 In 1933, the great American tragedian Eugene O'Neill, a man who practically specialized in plumbing the depths of human misery, decided to… write a comedy.1:05 A light, nostalgic, coming-of-age story called Ah, Wilderness!1:09 It premiered on Broadway on this day, and you can almost feel the collective sigh of relief from audiences who were probably thinking, "Finally, a night at the theater that won't leave me emotionally devastated." It was a departure, a surprise, a reminder that even the masters of one genre can find joy in another.1:31 But flash forward thirteen years, to 1946.1:34 The mood is… different.1:35 The world is still breathing out after the horrors of the Second World War.1:40 And on October second, in a courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany, the final verdicts are delivered for twenty-two of the highest-ranking Nazi officials.1:50 This wasn't just a trial.1:52 This was humanity attempting to draw a line.1:55 To say, "This far, and no further." It was a moment of immense historical gravity, an attempt to build a new kind of moral and legal foundation from the rubble of the old world.2:07 A verdict.2:08 An ending.2:08 Or so they thought.2:10 So let's stay there, in 1946, for a moment.2:12 Picture it.2:13 The world's attention, what there is of it, is focused on that courtroom in Germany.2:19 The headlines are stark.2:21 Twelve men sentenced to death by hanging.2:23 Seven given prison sentences.2:25 Three acquitted.2:26 It is a landmark in the history of international law.2:30 For the first time, leaders are being held individually accountable for crimes against humanity.2:36 It's a concept that feels obvious to us now, but it was RADICALLY new then.2:42 The idea that "just following orders" wasn't a defense.2:45 That sovereignty didn't give a nation the right to commit genocide.2:50 This was a moment of profound, world-altering significance.2:54 It was the world trying to write a new set of rules for itself.2:58 And on that very same day, October second, 1946, across the Atlantic, on the fledgling DuMont Television Network in the United States, a different kind of story was being broadcast for the first time.3:12 It was called Faraway Hill.3:14 It was, by all accounts, the first-ever television soap opera.3:18 The plot was simple: a woman from New York moves to a small town in the Midwest to be near her family after her husband is killed in the war.3:27 She falls in love with a married man.3:30 Drama ensues.3:31 Now, I can just imagine the scene.3:33 In one part of the world, a reckoning with history on a global scale.3:38 In another, a fictional woman grappling with her love life in a tiny town.3:43 It feels almost absurd to put them side-by-side.3:46 One is History with a capital H.3:48 The other is… television.3:50 Fluff.3:50 Escapism.3:51 And yet, this is what I find so absolutely delightful.3:54 Because both of these events, in their own way, were about building a new world.4:00 Nuremberg was about establishing the rules.4:03 The hard lines.4:04 The legal framework for what a civilized society would not tolerate.4:08 Faraway Hill was about something else.4:11 It was about exploring the messy, complicated, emotional lives of ordinary people.4:17 It was about creating a shared story, a daily ritual that millions of people would eventually participate in.4:24 It pioneered serialized drama on television, this idea that the story doesn't end.4:30 It just continues tomorrow.4:31 And the day after that.4:33 And the day after that.4:34 It was the birth of a media format that would come to dominate American culture for the better part of a century, shaping everything from consumer behavior to social norms.4:46 Who was more influential in the long run?4:49 The judges at Nuremberg, or the writers of the first soap opera?4:53 The question isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.4:56 And this impulse, this desire to shape our environment, to tell stories about ourselves, goes back so much further.5:04 Let's talk about wallpaper.5:06 Yes, wallpaper.5:07 Because the history of wallpaper is a secret history of class, technology, and aspiration.5:13 The earliest known wallpaper comes from China, around 200 BCE.5:17 They would glue rice paper to their walls.5:20 Simple.5:21 Elegant.5:21 But the idea traveled, as ideas do, along the Silk Road and into Europe.5:26 By the Renaissance, wallpaper was becoming a thing.5:30 Why?5:30 Because most people couldn't afford the giant, elaborate tapestries or the embossed leather wall coverings that the super-rich had.5:39 Wallpaper was the affordable alternative.5:42 It was a way to bring color and pattern and art into the home without being a duke or a bishop.5:48 And in 1599, the first guild of "dominotiers," or wallpaper makers, was founded in France.5:54 They had a union!5:55 For wallpaper!5:56 But my favorite part of this story comes from the 1680s, with the invention of flocked wallpaper.6:03 This is just brilliant.6:04 Flocked wallpaper was made by printing a pattern onto paper with a slow-drying adhesive, and then sprinkling powdered wool or silk—the leftover fluff from the textile industry—onto the glue.6:17 The result?6:18 A fuzzy, textured surface that was meant to look like… expensive velvet wall coverings.6:24 It was a cheap imitation.6:26 A fake.6:26 And the middle classes went absolutely NUTS for it.6:29 They loved it.6:30 They could finally make their parlors look like the chambers of a king, or at least, sort of like them if you didn't look too closely.6:40 The wealthy, of course, sneered at it.6:42 A "cheap imitation," they called it.6:45 But that's the whole point!6:46 Technology, even simple technology like this, has always been about democratizing luxury.6:52 About letting more and more people in on the story.6:56 It's the same impulse that drives us to buy a print of a famous painting, or a handbag that looks like a designer one.7:04 We want to cover our walls—and our lives—with stories about who we want to be.7:09 And the people born on this day!7:11 Oh, they are builders and storytellers, too.7:14 Christopher Wren, the great English architect, born on this day in 1632.7:19 After the Great Fire of London in 1666, he was the man who got to rebuild the city.7:25 He didn't just replace what was lost; he imagined a new London, a grander, more logical, more beautiful city rising from the ashes.7:34 He gave the city a new story about itself, written in stone and mortar.7:39 Or take Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, the German developmental geneticist born in 1942.7:44 She won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for figuring out the fundamental genetic mechanisms that guide the development of an embryo.7:53 She was reading the source code of life itself.7:56 Her colleague, Eric Wieschaus, said of her—and this is one of my favorite quotes ever—"When she wants to do something, she does it and does it right.8:06 If she lived in the Stone Age, she would have figured out how to make fire." That is the spirit of a true builder.8:14 The sheer, unstoppable force of human ingenuity.8:17 And then there's Wanda Jackson, the "Queen of Rockabilly," born in 1937.8:22 She was a teenager in the 1950s, singing this raw, powerful new music called rock and roll, in a world that was absolutely not ready for a woman to sing it.8:33 She toured with Elvis.8:34 She growled and snarled and sang with a power that was considered… unladylike.8:39 She was writing a new story about what a woman could be, what she could sound like, what she could do on a stage.8:47 She was flocked wallpaper in human form, a glorious, rebellious, and utterly authentic new creation.8:54 Oh, and it's also National Smarties Day.8:56 Of course it is.8:58 A day for tiny, chalky, sugary tablets of pure delight.9:01 It just fits.9:02 So here we are.9:03 We have Nuremberg and we have Faraway Hill.9:06 We have a legal verdict on the past, and a dramatic template for the future.9:11 In 1946, it must have seemed obvious which one was more important.9:16 One was about war and death and justice.9:18 The other was about… heartache in a small town.9:22 One was the end of a chapter.9:24 The other was the beginning of a commercial break.9:27 But looking back, from our vantage point, the lines get blurry, don't they?9:32 The Nuremberg trials didn't end the debate about international justice.9:37 They BEGAN it.9:38 The principles laid down in that courtroom are still being argued over, fought for, and violated, in conflicts all over the world today.9:47 It wasn't a final verdict.9:49 It was an opening statement in a debate that is far from over.9:53 It was the world trying on a new idea of itself, and finding that it was a difficult fit.9:59 And Faraway Hill?10:00 That silly little show that was probably shot live on a shoestring budget with wobbly sets?10:06 It wasn't silly at all.10:08 It was the prototype for a storytelling engine that would shape the American imagination for seventy-five years.10:16 Soaps taught us how to desire.10:18 They sold us products, yes, but they also sold us lifestyles, aspirations, and a particular way of seeing the world.10:25 They were the flocked wallpaper of the twentieth century, a mass-produced dream of love and drama and perfect living rooms that we could all tune into, every single day.10:37 They created a shared culture, a common text.10:40 What happened on the soap opera was, for millions of people, as real and as important as what was happening in Washington or on Wall Street.10:49 It was the story we told ourselves, about ourselves.10:53 So what does this teach us, now?10:55 Here, today?10:56 It teaches us to look at our own world with a historian's eye for delight and contradiction.11:02 It teaches us to pay attention to the things we dismiss as frivolous.11:07 Because the future is so often hiding in plain sight, disguised as entertainment.11:12 The technologies and stories that seem like trivial distractions today—the viral TikTok dances, the sprawling video game universes, the endless reality shows—these are the workshops where the next generation's values and aspirations are being forged.11:29 They are our Faraway Hills.11:31 They are our flocked wallpaper.11:33 We are still living in the world that Nuremberg tried to build, a world that struggles to hold power accountable.11:41 And we are still living in the world that Faraway Hill helped create, a world saturated with media, where our own lives are constantly being narrated and compared to the fictional stories we consume.11:54 The work of builders like Christopher Wren and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard reminds us that we are always living in a world that is being simultaneously rebuilt and re-decoded.12:06 And the defiant joy of a Wanda Jackson reminds us that the most powerful new stories often come from the people the old stories tried to write out.12:16 The real lesson of October second is to resist the urge to decide what's "important" and what's "trivial" in our own time.12:25 History has a wonderful, and sometimes terrifying, way of reversing those judgments.12:30 The most profound shifts in human society don't always announce themselves with the gravity of a courtroom verdict.12:38 Sometimes, they sneak in during the commercial break.12:42 Sometimes they're just a cheap, beautiful, imitation of something real, that ends up changing everything.12:49 The question is, what's the wallpaper in your room?12:52 What story is it telling?12:54 And is it a story you want to live in?
