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Okay. 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is when mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This. Is Trainer Game? Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.
This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.
Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book?
Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch?
Unlock your child's imagination. Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco. Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals, like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires.
Keeping a forest fire-resistant is synonymous with keeping a forest healthy. And we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management. It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. Um This is Our American Stories, and our next story is about a gem.
It turns out diamonds haven't always been rare stones. Since 1870 when huge diamond mines were discovered in South Africa, soon after that discovery, the British financiers behind the South African mining effort realized the diamond market would be saturated if they didn't do something about it.
So in 1888, they set two audacious goals. One, monopolize diamond prices by creating De Beers mines. The beers would then be able to stabilize the market by creating both the supply and the demand. for diamonds worldwide. Tom Zollner is a journalist and professor who lives in Los Angeles.
He wrote the book The Heartless Stone, a journey through the world of diamonds, deceit and desire. Here's Tom. with the story of that journey. My name is Tom Zollner, and when I was 32 years old, I entered into what is a fairly common rite of passage for. a man in America, I asked somebody to marry me.
and I gave her a diamond engagement ring. Because that's just what you were supposed to do. And I knew very little. about diamonds. I studied up on it as best I could.
which wasn't very deep. And I learned that there's this tradition out there that you're supposed to spend two months of your salary as a benchmark, sort of a sliding scale. For was expected and I wanted to do what was expected.
So um I figured out what I could afford and I bought a her name is Anne, was Anne. I bought her a diamond ring. I say was because the engagement broke up and I was made the owner of a used diamond ring. And I learned wow. There's really not a lot to do with this.
I didn't want to let go of it for emotional reasons and I also learned if I was just going to sell it back on the used market that there really is no used market. And As the ring just sort of sat there in the back of my closet, I began to wonder more and more about it, and it might have been a way of channeling the grief over the lost relationship, but. I began to look into diamonds in a way that was a little bit deeper and a little bit different than That I did when I was researching what to buy. I wanted to know, well, where did this come from? And so this took me on what you might call a quest.
It lasted for 18 months and in that time I went to 16 different countries on the globe. to try and understand where diamonds come from, and why we hunger for them.
So I'll tell you just a little bit about where I went. First, I went to a place called the Central African Republic. which is a diamond-producing nation at the heart of Africa. It's one of the poorest countries on the globe. It produces It ranks number 10 in terms of diamond production among all countries, and yet it is.
Poverty of some of the worst kind, political instability of some of the worst kind. And those two things, unfortunately. go together. I went out to the backcountry and learned how diamonds are mined. for guys who are making less than a dollar an hour.
To comb through the soil, very dangerous work, sometimes in violent conditions, to find. These pieces of carbon which are brought up to the Earth's surface through. These volcanic tubes of what's called the kimberlite. And so you find them in the river bottoms. It's some of the most primitive mining imaginable.
Some of these diamonds. emerging from such miserable conditions still find their way to uh the US market. I went to Angola, another nation in Africa, of course, which has been racked with. had been wracked by civil war, largely funded through the the smuggling and the sales of diamonds. Uh I went to India, which is the uh headquarters uh the the state uh the Indian state of Gujarat uh polishes the majority of diamonds uh in the world and I saw the conditions in some of these factories where child labor is used to uh get the diamonds into the glittery shape that uh Westerners have expected.
I went to Russia to see the birthplace and still the headquarters of the synthetic diamond industry. a way that uh machines have been built to recreate The heat and the pressure and the Earth's mantle that create the diamonds in the first place. And then I took a long look at the marketing history of the diamond. The way that these shiny pebbles have been sold. uh to Western consumers through the genius.
And I say that word With a certain amount of respect, but also advisedly, the genius of the corporation called De Beers Consolidated Mines. which uh cornered the market and South Africa Uh in the uh eighteen nineties, thanks to the uh The scheming of an Oxford graduate named Cecil Rhodes, for whom the Rhodes Scholars are named. Cecil Rhodes founded the De Beers Corporation and hit upon the insight that the way that you create high prices for these uh for these little minerals is that you just simply create artificial scarcity in the market, which is uh what he did and what De Beers continues to uh try and accomplish, even though it no longer dominates the market as it did today.
So it was not only a hive of artificial scarcity, it was also a marketing factory. It was the De Beers Corporation that created this idea out of whole cloth and invented custom that a young man is supposed to spend two months of his salary on. His sweetheart's engagement ring. That turns out that it sounds like something from Charles Dickens, but it's actually a complete marketing fable. And it was also out of the De Beers idea factory with the help of a New York ad agency.
called J. Walter Thompson. This idea of the eternity of a diamond, the poetry. surrounding this trinket. Um I looked back at some of the ads that were created in the in the Great Depression.
to convince American men that this is what they needed to do, just to spend money even in the midst of a depression. And the ads all centered around the idea of temporality and of mortality and of the idea that this diamond is going to survive you. It's almost rather morbid. But this was a successful advertising strategy and it was out of this notion that your diamond will last beyond you, that the that the brilliant. A slogan was coined, a diamond is forever.
The diamond engagement ring. How else could two months' salary last forever? A diamond? is forever the beers.
So Just to give respect where respect is due, there is something chemically. Unique about a diamond. It's as it goes on the Moz scale of density, it is a 10 out of a 10 scale. almost no other mineral, in fact no other mineral. has the ability to slow down light.
Within the chamber of its interiors. This is why a diamond sparkles so well. Uh the speed of light at One hundred and eighty-six. 1,000 miles per second has slowed down to 77,000 miles per second. Within a diamond, which is why it sparkles.
And when you polish it in a particular configuration, the Uh the effect is is is is really dazzling. Um I I have no issue with that. Um but uh slow down the light. Um, in some ways, it is a metaphor for the diamond itself. It is a Oh, a chamber of slow light and emptiness, because at the heart of the diamond which was my conclusion.
Is mythology. The mythology that society has spun around it and the individual mythologies that we put around diamonds. The story we tell about them, which is in fact. and its most prominent feature, the story of our engagement. The story of our marriage, one of the most mysterious and frightening and lovely and potentially heartbreaking things that we get to do.
The genius of Tabirs and the diamond industry was that it was able to set up a toll booth. Right at the entrance. to this adventure and this for me is the true legacy of the diamond. And at the heart of the the book uh that I wrote called The Heartless Stone. And you've been listening to Tom Zollner, journalist and professor, his book, The Heartless Stone, The Story of the Diamond, here.
on our American stories. 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is where mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. Peggy. It's Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.
Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book? Dream? Nope.
It came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch? Unlock your child's imagination.
Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco. Come for the Black Friday seasonal savings. Stay for the award-winning reporting. For a limited time, access to the Washington Post is just 99 cents. That's unlimited access to all of the posts for only 99 cents every four weeks.
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Mm-hmm.
