Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 280. “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” on the topic of Collections. About this episode Hear live journalism wrapped in a game show package and hosted by Stephen J. Dubner. In this episode, Tim Ferriss, Eugene Mirman and Anne Pasternak are panelists. The self-help guru, the comedian and the Brooklyn Museum director talk about brainwaves, sugar, stars and — thanks to fact-checker AJ Jacobs — barf bags.
Transcript 9,326 words · 15 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:29 Stephen J. Dubner? Hey, this is Stephen Dubner, and you are about to hear a special bonus episode of our new Freakonomics-inspired podcast, Tell Me Something I Don't Know. It is live journalism wrapped in a game show, and the idea, as with Freakonomics Radio, is to tell you things you always thought you knew but didn't, and things you never thought you wanted to know but do. The theme of this episode is collections, and our panelists are the dean of self-improvement, Tim Ferriss, Anne Pasternak, who runs the Brooklyn Museum, and Eugene Mirman, one of the smartest comedians on the planet, funniest, too. You can subscribe to Tell Me Something I Don't Know on iTunes, Stitcher, all the usual outlets. To attend a live taping or to appear on the show, visit tmsidk.com. That's for Tell Me Something I Don't Know.
3:13 Stephen J. Dubner? On social media, we're at tmsidk show, and as always, we're also at Freakonomics, too. Thanks for listening.
3:23 Speaker 01 Why do I read?
3:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Why do I have conversations?
3:26 Speaker 02 Why do I travel? Why do I have to go to school? Why do I pay attention?
3:29 Speaker 03 Why do I pay attention? Because I want to be amused.
3:32 Stephen J. Dubner? Because I want to get outside my comfort zone.
3:35 Speaker 01 But mostly.
3:36 Stephen J. Dubner? Mostly.
3:37 Speaker 01 Mostly because.
3:38 Stephen J. Dubner? Because I want to.
3:39 Speaker 01 Find out stuff.
3:39 Stephen J. Dubner? Find out stuff.
3:41 Speaker 02 Find out stuff.
3:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Because I want you to tell me something I don't know. All right, how's this? In Philadelphia, there is a collection like no other on Earth.
3:53 Speaker 01 We have the world's largest preserved human colon on display in the world. It is eight feet, four inches long. It's a foot and a half in diameter. At the time of death, it had 40 pounds of fecal material in it. We have the preserved conjoined livers of the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng bunker. We have the bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall. We are the only place in the world where you can actually go see pieces of Einstein's brain. We don't do normal very well here.
4:31 Stephen J. Dubner? Welcome to Tell Me Something I Don't Know. I'm Stephen Dubner, and that was Dr. Anna Doty of the Mueter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. Thanks to Dr. Doty for introducing the theme of tonight's episode: Collections.
5:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Tell Me Something I Don't Know is a podcast. It's also a game show. It's also live journalism, where contestants try to tell us their most interesting IDKs or I-don't-knows. To judge these IDKs, we put together a panel of remarkably learned people. Would you please welcome the author and self-experimenter Tim Ferriss, Brooklyn Museum Director Anne Pasternak, and one of our very favorite comedians Eugene Mirman.
5:47 Stephen J. Dubner? We're gonna start with Tim Ferriss. Here's what we already know about you, Tim Ferriss. Your first book, The Four Hour Work Week, was turned down by 26 publishers before becoming a gigantic bestseller. We know that your latest book is Tools of Titans and that you host a hugely successful podcast called The Tim Ferriss Show. Tim Ferriss, keeping in mind the theme of tonight's show is collections. Tell us something we don't yet know about you.
6:11 Speaker 04 Well, I have two adult collections that come to mind. The first-
6:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Wait, wait, wait. Adult collections?
6:17 Speaker 04 Oh, I'm getting there. The first is gourds from South America that are used for drinking something called yerba mate, which is my stimulant of choice. And the second is antique Japanese saddles, which I only reward myself with if I hit some major milestone or goal in my life.
6:35 Stephen J. Dubner? Ah. That's Tim Ferriss. Anne Pasternak, we know that before becoming director of the Brooklyn Museum, you ran the public arts group Creative Time, whose wonderful projects included the tribute in late 9/11 memorial and Kara Walker's Domino Sugar Factory installation. Anne Pasternak, we also know that you gave your daughter Paris the middle name 99. So Anne Pasternak, tell us something we don't yet know about you.
7:01 Speaker 05 Well, since the theme is collecting, I want you to know that when I was a small child, I wanted to be a cat, so I ate from my cat's bowl and I got found out because I was collecting tender vittles. And my parents discovered him under the bed and after wondering why the cat seemed to be starving to death.
7:18 Stephen J. Dubner? Very good. Our final panelist, Eugene Mirman. Let's see what we have on you. Eugene, born in Soviet Russia, moved to the States at age four, designed your own major at Hampshire College in comedy. Don't know whether that says more about you or Hampshire. We know The Village Voice named you New York's best stand-up comedian and that on Bob's Burgers, you are the voice of Gene, a character based on you. So Eugene Mirman, what are we missing? Tell us something we don't know about you.
7:47 Speaker 06 Um, I like to collect small failures.
7:52 Speaker 06 And the crown jewel of these failures is when I was in middle school, I received a negative eight on a math assignment.
8:02 Stephen J. Dubner? We are very, very happy to have you all here tonight. It's time to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Panelists, here's how it's going to work. When contestants come on stage to deliver their IDKs, you'll have a chance to poke and prod, ask any question you'd like. Once we've heard all the contestants, you will vote on a winner. You'll judge their IDKs on three criteria. Number one, does it surprise you? Is it something you truly did not know? Number two, is it worth knowing? And number three, is their IDK demonstrably true? To help with that demonstrably true part, I'd like to introduce our real-time human fact-checker. Would you please welcome New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs?
8:46 Speaker 07 Thank you. Back to Stephen.
8:52 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. is host of the new history podcast Twice Removed from Gimlet Media. For his first book, The Know-It-All, he spent 18 months reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. So, A.J., that's a pretty good fact-checking credential. You have any weak spots in your encyclopedic knowledge?
9:07 Speaker 07 Honestly, I'm a little weak on the letter V. Kind of skimmed that one. So maybe don't ask me about Venezuela or Van Dyke. But other than that, I got you covered.
9:17 Stephen J. Dubner? Noted. Okay. It's time to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Tonight's theme, you'll recall, is collections, the things that we search for, the things that we organize, things we treasure. So would you please welcome our first contestant, Allison Amen.
9:39 Stephen J. Dubner? Hi, Allison. Nice to have you. What do you do?
9:40 Speaker 08 Hi. I am a lifelong and suddenly very happy Cubs fan. And I am also a novelist. I've written a short story collection and three novels, the most recent of which is called Enchanted Islands.
9:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Excellent. I'm ready. Our panelists, Tim Ferriss, Sam Pasternak, and Eugene Mirman are ready. Our fact-checker, A.J. Jacobs, has never been more ready in his life. So Allison, what do you know that's worth knowing that you think we don't know?
10:03 Speaker 08 Okay. So you've decided to forge an old master painting. You think that you need period-appropriate paints, maybe an aged canvas or an old frame. But you don't need any of these. What do you need?
10:16 Stephen J. Dubner? What do you need?
10:17 Speaker 08 And I know the answer.
10:18 Stephen J. Dubner? You kinda run a museum.
10:20 Speaker 05 Well, I'm not sure, but does it involve technology?
10:23 Speaker 08 Um, it does not, actually.
10:25 Speaker 04 Does it involve finding someone, you said not technology, but on Craigslist, perhaps in China, to do the dirty work for you?
10:31 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
10:32 Speaker 08 No, but you know, that's an excellent idea. Yeah, yeah.
10:35 Speaker 06 Does it involve driving over a real nice painting?
10:41 Speaker 08 I don't know if that would forge anything.
10:43 Speaker 05 Would it be convincing to an actual conservator?
10:45 Speaker 08 You'd, no, that's part of it, you actually don't need it to be convincing for an actual conservator.
10:50 Speaker 05 So, we're talking about a painting.
10:52 Speaker 08 Yes.
10:53 Speaker 05 It has to be a painting. It won't pass any chemistry, spectro, whatever test.
10:59 Speaker 08 Yes, spectroanalysis, yeah.
10:59 Speaker 05 No, none of that.
11:00 Stephen J. Dubner? Allison, you want to put us out of our misery?
11:03 Speaker 08 I will put you out of misery, yes, yes. Actually, the only thing you really need is a museum membership. And here's why. So, throughout the 80s and 90s, Englishman John Drew sold over 200 forged paintings to galleries and to private dealers. His business partner was a mediocre painter who often used vinyl paint and KY jelly. How did Drew fool all the experts? Well, he had provenances. Providence is the record of who has owned a painting since it left the artist's studio. Ironclad provenances are the only way to prove a painting is indeed by the artist whose signature is in the lower right-hand corner. But the providence itself can take many forms, several of which, it turns out, are pretty easy to fake.
11:44 Speaker 08 So, John Drew faked the providence of his forged art by donating forged pieces to museums fundraising auctions. Then he asked if he could do some research in the museum and gallery archives, and the institutions were only more than happy to let their generous donor come into the archives and do research. While he was doing his quote-unquote "research," he smuggled out catalogs, letterheads, stamps, and stickers from museums like the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Then he had down-on-his-luck friends sign papers claiming to own the paintings, and he doctored the old catalogs. So, he inserted the images of the forgeries into the catalogs to show that the paintings had a history. And then he snuck all the catalogs back into the museum archives. So now, whenever he wanted to sell one of the forgeries, museums and collectors were
12:27 Speaker 08 only too happy to line up and pay millions for these KY jelly paintings with their ironclad provenances. Genius.
12:40 Stephen J. Dubner? Anne Passanek, I have to ask you, that might work at the Tate or the V and A, but not at the Brooklyn Museum.
12:45 Speaker 05 Not at the Brooklyn Museum, because actually, we have our conservators actually analyze the materials to make sure they're not forgeries.
12:53 Speaker 08 Yeah, is that because of John Drew in the 80s and 90s?
12:55 Speaker 05 Very well, maybe, but actually, forgeries are on the rise, even with contemporary work. So, buyer beware.
13:02 Stephen J. Dubner? How was he caught?
13:03 Speaker 08 He was caught, actually, because the museums got wise to his KY jelly and vinyl paint. Yeah. The problem with these, as I'm sure you know, Anne, is that it's in no one's best interest to prove that a painting is false, right? It's not the owner's interest, not the museum's interest, it's not the conservator's or the expert's interest. And so, people are reluctant to come forward and expose it as a fake.
13:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Anne, does a museum like yours have tons of fraud insurance?
13:29 Speaker 05 I'm putting that on my checklist right now.
13:31 Speaker 08 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:33 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, before we finish up with Alison Aiman, let's check in with our fact checker, A.J. Jacobs. A.J. faux provenance is really the secret, Alison tells us, to selling forged artwork. What say you, sir?
13:44 Speaker 07 It definitely checks out. I was particularly taken with the fact that the forger used KY jelly in his paint. So, as a diligent researcher, I did some more work on that. Turns out, there are a surprising number of non-bedroom uses for KY jelly. It's used in a lot of Hollywood special effects, including the dinosaur venom in Jurassic Park and the aliens saliva in Alien. Also, it's recommended for fitting keys into tight padlocks. That is not a euphemism. That is just what it says on the internet. By the way, I just wanted to add one other, my favorite forgery fact, which is that Michelangelo was a forger.
14:28 Speaker 07 In 1496, he made a figure of Cupid, the Roman god, and then he put acid on the sculpture to make it look like it was ancient. And then, he and the dealer conspired to sell it to a cardinal. Maybe not the best idea.
14:44 Speaker 05 Oh, that Michelangelo.
14:45 Speaker 08 I knew there was something fishy about that guy.
14:47 Stephen J. Dubner? Alison Aiman, thank you so much for playing. Tell me something I don't know. Great job.
14:56 Stephen J. Dubner? Panelists, later you will be asked to rank all our contestants and pick a winner. For now, would you please welcome our next contestant, Susanna Dicker. Hi, Susanna, what do you do?
15:09 Speaker 09 I'm a linguist and a cognitive neuroscientist at NYU and UTEC University, and I also create interactive art installations with my collaborator, Matthias Ostrich.
15:17 Stephen J. Dubner? So, the floor is yours. What can you tell us?
15:20 Speaker 09 Okay, so you're at a party and just killing some time by striking up a conversation with a random stranger next to you. Now, under one scenario, you feel like you could walk into the sunset with this person and live happily ever after, right? There is also the alternative scenario where the conversation is actually an excruciating sequence of awkward silences, and you're just trying to find a moment where you can escape. So what are some possible factors that can contribute to us connecting better to some people than others?
15:47 Speaker 04 So, I'm thinking, just with your background in cognitive neuroscience, does it have anything to do with their visual resemblance to someone they know?
15:55 Speaker 06 Smiling, is one person smiling a lot? Like, maybe, not too much, not like weird?
16:00 Speaker 09 What about things like... Or like darting their eyes?
16:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:06 Speaker 09 No, what about if you think about what can go wrong in a long-distance phone call or a Skype conversation?
16:10 Speaker 04 Timing.
16:11 Speaker 09 Timing, yeah, so the delay, right? The delay can really mess you up, and that's because timing really is key.
16:16 Stephen J. Dubner? Timing is everything.
16:18 Speaker 09 It is. It's kind of like, you know, some people are better dance partners than others, and our conversations are also sort of like dance, because if you're just a fraction of a second too early, people will think that you're interrupting. If you're a little bit too late, then they'll think that you're not listening, or you haven't been paying attention, you're not interested. And our brains pick up on these cues, and they are doing this by virtue of our brainwaves that are sinking into their own rhythms, to the rhythms of our surroundings. And so then you can ask whether maybe, if we're feeling like we're on the same wavelength with another person, our brains are actually, literally, in sync with each other. And so to test this, we collaborated with artists, scientists, and educators
17:00 Speaker 09 in what we dubbed a crowdsourcing neuroscience data collection approach, where over 2,000 museum and festival visitors volunteered their brains and participated in the mutual wave machine, which is an interactive installation that translates brainwave synchrony into light patterns. So if your brains are more in sync, there is more light. And if there's no synchrony at all, there's complete darkness. And we found that people who are more connected to each other actually did indeed synchronize their brainwaves more often. And interestingly, there's also some social traits and some personality traits that predicted it. So if you're more empathetic, you're more likely to synchronize. And we found that just by virtue of giving people this feedback,
17:43 Speaker 09 this actually made people connect more to each other, especially strangers. So we may have accidentally created something along the lines of an empathy machine.
17:52 Stephen J. Dubner? How much variance is there? Like, you take the five or six of us on the stage. How much variance is there in brainwaves among, let's say, you know, in this case, six Americans?
18:02 Speaker 09 There is some brainwaves. So the basic rhythms are fairly similar. So we have different... Our brains kind of operate at different frequency ranges, and some are dedicated to different kinds of processing, right? So I'm speaking at a certain rate, and the brainwaves that are oscillating at that rate are following my speech. And that's going to be fairly similar among you. But you have some, like, basic rates that differ across people, just like heart rate might differ slightly.
18:28 Speaker 05 So how about if you have an engaged couple, and you said, "There's no light between you." So would that be advice to not get married?
18:38 Speaker 09 Right. So that's actually reversing the whole research process. I got that question a lot, right? So can you put this as a dating app or something along those lines? And we can't really use brain research as a diagnostic tool, at least not at the level that I'm investigating it. And we actually put disclaimers on our consent forms. Like, this does not give you any information about whether you should get divorced or married or any of that.
19:02 Speaker 05 So if there's a... Have we studied whether there's a correlation between, you know, people lighting up and then their timing being good in bed?
19:11 Speaker 09 I have not done that in research. I am not aware of people having done that research.
19:15 Speaker 06 You don't have people put on this machine and then have sex with each other at your...
19:19 Speaker 09 No.
19:21 Speaker 05 But they should, right?
19:23 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. Jacobs, Susanna and her colleagues built what she calls an accidental empathy machine. How legit is her story about brainwave synchrony?
19:33 Speaker 07 My skeptical fact-checking brainwaves, which I believe are my gamma waves. I wanted a little more double-blind, hardcore, scientific, gold-standard studies, which I couldn't find online. I'm rooting for it, but I don't see that it has been fully proved yet.
19:54 Speaker 09 I would agree, actually.
19:55 Stephen J. Dubner? So interesting. Thank you so much, Susanna Dicker. Great stuff.
20:02 Stephen J. Dubner? Would you please welcome our next contestant, Lizzie Redman.
20:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Lizzie, what's your story? What do you do?
20:12 Speaker 10 I run a nonprofit here in New York that teaches nutrition and wellness to children.
20:18 Stephen J. Dubner? All right. What do you have for us tonight, Lizzie?
20:20 Speaker 10 So I'm gonna start with a story. When Maria de Medici married King Henry IV in 1600, that's King Henry IV of France, the marriage took place by proxy, meaning that Henry stayed in France while the wedding took place in Italy. This in and of itself is certainly strange, but stranger still, in place of the absent king, a statue of the king in his likeness was set in front of the bride. That statue was made not of clay or wood, but rather of sugar, which was commonly used for sculpture-making during that time period.
20:58 Stephen J. Dubner? So you're telling us, or me at least, two things I didn't know. One, you can be married in absentia, but your main IDK is about sugar as a medium for sculpture, yes?
21:08 Speaker 10 Yes. So what's really interesting, many of us might think that cane sugar made its way onto Western tables by way of dessert, but it actually was as art in the form of these sugar sculptures.
21:22 Speaker 10 European noblemen imported sugar from North Africa during the medieval and Renaissance periods, and they took also from North Africa this practice of using sugar to make a paste that could then be turned into sculptures. And sugar made the perfect ingredient for this because of its whiteness and its preservative nature, but also even more importantly, it was desired for its rarity. So to display a statue of sugar on your table was to display your possession of something that was incredibly scarce. The rise of sugar sculptures during this time period can also be tied to the popularity of feast during the Renaissance period. Feast and sugar were about a display of wealth.
22:05 Speaker 10 One example of this happening is a feast that was held for Queen Elizabeth I in 1591 by a nobleman. Of course, among the entertainment was a series of sugar sculptures of castles, armies, and all manner of animals. Europeans did eat sugar at this time, but not in the way that we consume sugar today. Sugar was used as a medicine and also as a savory spice to be added to a meaty dish. It would be not until Europeans began producing sugar on their own in the colonies until sugar became something that would be a significant part of the common European diet.
22:43 Speaker 04 How was sugar used as medicine? To cure thinness?
22:47 Speaker 10 Right. Where people had a lot of different ideas about what was good for the body. Vegetables and fruit were actually believed to be bad for the body. When it comes to sugar, the sort of phrase of a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down is certainly at play here. So if you were going to take an herb, sugar was a preservative, so it would help to preserve the ginger or whatever medicinal thing that you were using.
23:15 Stephen J. Dubner? I like the era back when sugar was medicine and you had beer for breakfast. That just sounds like a good time.
23:22 Speaker 06 Do those sugar sculptures still exist today? Or were they eaten?
23:28 Speaker 10 I don't believe there's any from the 1100s through 1600s still in existence. The practice is still in place and there was an installation at the factory that I don't know, Anne, if you want to share about that.
23:45 Speaker 05 So Kara Walker is an extraordinary artist who deals with issues of race and history of the United States, also through a lens of slavery. And I had access to the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg before it was being demolished. And when I first walked in, there was about, I don't know, eight inches thick, the floors, some molasses, and the ceiling and the walls were just sort of bleeding, sweating molasses. And I called Kara and I said, I think this venue would be interesting to you. And the next morning, I woke up around 6:00 a.m. I had about 36 drawings from her. And actually, over a period of six months, every day practically, she had a new idea.
24:24 Speaker 05 And the final one was to create a giant sphinx that was both a sort of very strong, beautiful, but also stereotype of a black woman coated in white sugar. And it was a quite extraordinary sculpture that really dealt with race and how we deal with black women's bodies.
24:46 Stephen J. Dubner? And what happened to it once the warehouse came down, factory came down?
24:50 Speaker 05 Well, the materials were recycled, except for the sugar. And the only piece of it that still exists, because it was, you know, a temporary material, is one of the paws or hands.
25:02 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. Jacobs Renaissance Sugar Sculptures and Much, Much More, so interesting. What can you tell us?
25:08 Speaker 07 I looked into it and the list of sugar sculptures in some of these pieces is ridiculous. The one eyewitness wrote of seeing sugar sculptures in the shapes of snakes, adders, snipes, frogs, toads, worms, dolphins, whales, pikes, carps. I do have one quibble, which is that the upper class in Elizabethan times definitely did eat sugar, not just for medicine. Here's how one visitor described Queen Elizabeth. He wrote, "Her face is oblong, her nose is a little hooked, her teeth black, a fault the English seem to suffer from because of their great use of sugar."
25:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Lizzie Redman, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know.
25:53 Stephen J. Dubner? It's time now for a short break. When we return, more contestants and we make our panelists tell us something we don't know. If you'd like to be a contestant on a future show or attend a future show, please visit tmsidk.com. On social media, you can find us at tmsidk underscore show. And remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We will be right back.
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28:01 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.
28:52 Stephen J. Dubner? Welcome back to Tell Me Something I Don't Know. My name is Stephen Dubner. Our panelists tonight are Tim Ferriss, Anne Pasternak, and Eugene Mirman. A.J. Jacobs is our fact checker, and our theme, you'll recall, is collections. We'll get back to the game in a second. But first, earlier, we did a quick survey of our live studio audience to find out what they collect and why. And we've selected three of our favorite answers. Tim Ferriss, who do you have?
29:18 Speaker 04 No name given. And it reads antique kitchen utensils, period. My mother makes me, period. So that can be read a lot of ways.
29:28 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, Anne Pasternak, what do you got there?
29:31 Speaker 05 So this is by somebody with the initial CR. I collect ashtrays. Not sure why. I don't smoke.
29:38 Stephen J. Dubner? Oh. Is that a haiku? It's beautiful.
29:42 Speaker 05 Thanks.
29:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Eugene?
29:44 Speaker 06 Well, Tessa D. says, I collected corned beef cans because I liked the design.
29:54 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, A.J., Jacobs are factored tonight. I'm curious, are you now, or have you ever been, a collector of anything?
30:02 Speaker 07 Actually, yeah. As a kid, I collected airsickness bags from major and minor airlines. And I had a pretty good collection, about 50 of them. I recently donated them to the Airsickness Bag Museum. The museum has a curator, much like Ann. It's, um...
30:25 Speaker 07 We'll have words later. His name, in case you want to get in touch, is Steve "Upheave" Silberberg. That's his middle... I don't know if it's a given middle name, or...
30:35 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, let's get back to our game. Would you please welcome to the stage our next contestant, Chang Han.
30:47 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, Chang, would you tell us a little bit about yourself, please?
30:50 Speaker 03 Yeah. I'm a PhD student at New York University's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics.
30:55 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, Chang, wow us.
30:58 Speaker 03 In the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, the US suspected that the Soviet Union would violate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and secretly test nuclear weapons. So, in 1967, they launched the Vela satellites, which would collect data on gamma radiation pulses emitted by nuclear weapons tests. Later that year, the satellites detected a flash of gamma radiation unlike any emission from known nuclear weapons. In fact, the signal wasn't even coming from the Earth's direction. What were some of the proposed theories to explain this gamma ray burst? Was Bruce Banner involved?
31:38 Stephen J. Dubner? You're asking us, Chang, what was the actual cause of these gamma ray bursts that were feared initially to be, or what was the explanation?
31:48 Speaker 03 What were just some proposed theories? What did people come up with?
31:51 Speaker 06 Oh, well, people probably thought aliens were trying to say hi.
31:56 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, game over. Well done.
31:58 Speaker 07 There you go.
31:59 Speaker 06 If that wasn't one of the theories, I will be furious.
32:04 Speaker 04 Supernovas, some type of phenomenon.
32:07 Speaker 03 Those were definitely proposed, yeah, something related to that.
32:10 Stephen J. Dubner? So is this a trick question where everything that the panelists say is true instead of false?
32:15 Speaker 03 So far, they've been...
32:16 Speaker 06 Did some people think it was from a pair of shoes someone left in outer space?
32:20 Speaker 03 No.
32:21 Speaker 06 Ah!
32:24 Speaker 05 The birth of a new star?
32:26 Speaker 03 Uh, no. Not the birth.
32:29 Speaker 06 The death of an old star?
32:32 Speaker 03 Yeah. Okay, so hundreds of theories were proposed. Initial speculations about what caused the burst included secret weapons tests behind the moon, or some sort of unusual solar activity. But later, when astronomers realized that the bursts were coming from all directions, some of them proposed signals and transmissions from extraterrestrial civilizations, or even flashes from extragalactic alien warfare. The truth is, we still don't know exactly what causes these so-called gamma ray bursts. Thousands of observational and theoretical papers have been written on them, and now
33:12 Speaker 03 we think they occur when extremely massive stars explode, or when two compact objects, such as neutron stars or black holes, merge together. Astronomers now know that these gamma ray bursts are the most energetic explosions in the universe, and they come from distant galaxies far beyond our Milky Way. And during the millisecond to minutes that they last, they release as much energy as the Sun releases during its entire 10 billion year lifetime.
33:42 Speaker 05 Wow.
33:42 Speaker 03 And if one occurs near the solar system and is facing Earth...
33:46 Stephen J. Dubner? That's not good, is it?
33:47 Speaker 03 No, it's not good. It could cause...
33:49 Stephen J. Dubner? I'm no scientist, but the way you led us to that one...
33:52 Speaker 03 It could cause mass extinction. In fact, some researchers argue that a gamma ray burst actually caused a mass extinction millions of years ago on Earth. So while the US failed to find existential threat from the Soviet Union, and the search for answers about gamma ray bursts still continue today while past the Cold War, we did find a much more catastrophic possible end to life as we know it.
34:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Eugene, I have to ask.
34:26 Speaker 06 Yes.
34:26 Stephen J. Dubner? You were a child in the Soviet Union, and I'm curious if you perhaps were responsible for some of these rogue gamma ray bursts.
34:35 Speaker 06 Let me just say, I didn't want to make a big deal, but I was testing some weapons behind the moon.
34:43 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. Jacobs, gamma ray bursts that were not Soviet nuclear explosions. Instead, they were coming from outer space, but we still don't quite know why. Is Chang telling us what seems to be the truth?
34:54 Speaker 07 Yes, yes. Thank you, Chang, for giving me something else to worry about. We can add it to the list of the supervolcano under Wyoming, which is about to burst any day now.
35:06 Speaker 06 Do we have to be afraid of the supervolcano or just Wyoming?
35:11 Speaker 07 But I looked up, and there's a delightful list of other cosmic catastrophic events. There's the classic is asteroid collision, of course. And then some astronomers, I thought this was interesting. They say there's a 1% chance Mercury's orbit could be made unstable by Jupiter's gravitational pull and send Mercury hurtling into the Earth. So you got that. You got that going.
35:37 Stephen J. Dubner? Chang Han, thanks for playing "Tell Me Something I Don't Know."
35:44 Stephen J. Dubner? And now, let's please welcome our final contestant of the evening, John Earle.
35:55 Stephen J. Dubner? John Earle, what's your story? What do you do?
35:57 Speaker 11 I'm a writer and audio producer here in New York, and I used to live in Russia and was a journalist there.
36:02 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, very good. What do you have for us tonight?
36:05 Speaker 11 Okay, if in Russia I accuse you of knocking pears out of a tree with your dick, what am I accusing you of doing?
36:12 Stephen J. Dubner? Wait, wait, slow down.
36:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Eugene, I'm sure as a child in Soviet Russia.
36:20 Speaker 06 I feel like it's one of the phrases that my parents never used when I was a kid. So it's an accusation of some sort, is what you're saying?
36:29 Speaker 11 Yes.
36:30 Speaker 06 Good.
36:30 Speaker 11 It's a metaphor.
36:32 Speaker 05 Does it involve sex?
36:34 Speaker 11 No.
36:35 Speaker 05 I'm out.
36:36 Speaker 04 Does it involve exaggerating?
36:38 Speaker 11 No.
36:40 Stephen J. Dubner? Is it a common accusation, like, hey, there you go again, knocking pears out of the tree?
36:47 Speaker 11 It's not an uncommon accusation.
36:49 Speaker 05 Is there a female version of this?
36:52 Speaker 11 It applies to women, too.
36:53 Speaker 04 It is a, is it an insult or a compliment?
36:57 Speaker 11 It can be an insult, or it could be an observation.
37:00 Stephen J. Dubner? John, I think you've told us something we did not know plainly. I gather there's a little bit more to the story, though?
37:08 Speaker 11 No.
37:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Oh, that's it?
37:10 Speaker 11 It's just, it's an expression that means to do nothing, to be dicking around.
37:13 Speaker 06 Because there are better ways to get pears.
37:18 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, why do you think Eugene was unfamiliar with this well-known phrase?
37:22 Speaker 11 I think probably when his parents brought him here, they tried to protect him from this sort of language that I'm gonna be talking about tonight.
37:28 Speaker 04 Do you know how to say in Russian?
37:30 Speaker 11 Хую я груша колачу.
37:32 Speaker 04 All right, I need that for later.
37:34 Stephen J. Dubner? And is that standard Russian?
37:36 Speaker 11 It's mat.
37:37 Stephen J. Dubner? What is mat?
37:39 Speaker 11 Basically, there are two Russian languages. There's standard Russian, and then there's mat, which is the language of profanity. Here's how it works. So there are four really bad Russian words. There's хуй, ебат, беда, и бред.
37:54 Stephen J. Dubner? We just lost our Russian censorship license.
38:00 Speaker 11 And over hundreds of years, Russians have developed, literally thousands of variations on these words, that can mean anything under the sun. This means that Russians can have entire conversations using almost nothing but swear words. Entire plays and novels have been written in swear words. And they do this because Mott adds "oomph." So it's like in English, you could say "effing" before every word, except in Russian, they add "dicks," and "whores," and "vaginas."
38:26 Speaker 06 Colorful people.
38:28 Speaker 11 So, for example, you get words like "huyova," which means terrible, or "achuyena," which means amazing, and they both contain that root "hui," dick. But the real fun, in my opinion, is in Mott's huge collection of idiomatic phrases. There are literally, there are more than 10,000 by one estimate. So I can tell someone off by sending them to the dick. "На хуй послет." I can put my dick onto something. "Хуй позже," which means "to ignore it."
39:00 Speaker 11 Or I can throw my hands up and I can say, "Хуй знайет," "the dick knows."
39:06 Speaker 11 Which means that nobody knows.
39:10 Speaker 11 But here's why you should care about this. Because the Russian government, over hundreds of years, has tried to crack down on it, seeing it as a language of dissent and resistance to authority. So this means that if you take any period in Russian history and you look at the government's attitude towards Mott, it's a good barometer for the freedom of expression in general. And so when they crack down, you know that kind of more repressive times are coming. Case in point, a couple of years ago, President Putin's government banned Mott from concerts, from cinema, from public presentations. In fact, if I'd given this exact presentation in Russia, I would have been fined at least $40.
39:50 Speaker 06 That's not so bad. That's not what people are afraid of.
39:56 Speaker 11 So I think Mott is gonna be fine. I just want to reassure everybody, Mott's gonna be okay. It's gonna survive. It survived Stalin. I think the real question is, what's gonna happen to Russia in these new conservative times? And to that, I say, "Хуй знайет," "the dick knows."
40:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Of course it does, yeah.
40:21 Speaker 04 What are some of the most versatile vagina expressions?
40:25 Speaker 11 Ooh, you can say something is pizdata, which means it's great. That's from the word pizda, vagina.
40:31 Speaker 06 Would it roughly translate to pussy-tastic?
40:36 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, was the origin of mat having to do with prisoners? Or was it military? Do you know?
40:42 Speaker 11 I have a particular theory that I'm a fan of. And it's that mat and the word for mother, mat, are basically identical. So it was basically like a yo mama joke that became an entire register of Russian.
40:55 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. Jacobs, I'd love you to tell us more about mat and feel free, if you're capable, of telling us in mat.
41:04 Speaker 07 I am going to use English, but maybe I'll throw in some swear words. Putin's government, a couple of years ago, they banned lacy underwear.
41:14 Speaker 07 Yes, underwear with less than 6% cotton was supposedly bad for your health.
41:21 Speaker 07 And this was not, it received well. Some women went into the streets, actually in Kazakhstan, it was also banned in Kazakhstan. Women went into the streets, wearing underwear on their heads and chanting, "Freedom to panties." So there you go.
41:36 Speaker 04 This is what authoritarianism really looks like.
41:40 Stephen J. Dubner? John Earl, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know.
41:47 Stephen J. Dubner? And that concludes our round of Audience Contestants. I think we've all learned some amazing stuff tonight about collecting art and data and swear words. Let's please give all our contestants one more hand. Thank you so much.
42:05 Stephen J. Dubner? The panelists have been handed their score sheets. They will use a ranked voting system to pick their favorites. And the contestant with the highest overall ranking will be tonight's winner. He or she will join us back on stage to play the next round with our panelists. So panelists, remember, when you're ranking the IDKs, there are three criteria to consider. Number one, did the contestant tell you something you truly did not know? Number two, was it worth knowing? And number three, was it demonstrably true? So who will it be? John Earl with Russian cussin? Chang Han with gamma ray bursts from outer space? Lizzie Redman with her sugar sculptures of yesteryear,
42:47 Stephen J. Dubner? Susanna Dicker with Brainwave Synchrony, AKA The Accidental Empathy Machine, or Alison Amen with Forging Art for Fun and Profit.
43:00 Stephen J. Dubner? While the votes are being tallied, let me say this. If you enjoy Tell Me Something I Don't Know, please spread the word and give it a nice rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to tell me something I don't know, or if you want to come see the show live, visit tmsidk.com. You will see our dates in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Minneapolis. You can also find us on all the usual social media outlets at tmsidk show.
43:30 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, the panelists' votes are in. Once again, thank you so much to all of our contestants. Sadly, there can only be one winner. Our four runners-up, however, will each receive a cert certificate of impressive knowledge, which is suitable for framing. And tonight's winner of Tell Me Something I Don't Know with his IDK about Russian cousin, John Earl. Congratulations.
44:03 Stephen J. Dubner? All right. John Earl, what prize could we possibly give you as a reward for what you've taught us tonight? Well, do you remember what we heard at the top of the show about the Mutter Museum's very strange collection of human body parts?
44:20 Speaker 01 We have the world's largest preserved human colon on display in the world. It is eight feet, four inches long. It's a foot and a half in diameter. At the time of death, it had 40 pounds of fecal material in it.
44:32 Stephen J. Dubner? So unfortunately, John, federal law prohibits the transportation of calcified poop across state lines. But what we can give you, direct from the Mutter Museum's gift shop, is a plush replica of the colon itself. They call it the Megacolon, and we've got an image to show you here.
44:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, that is not only a conversation starter, but we're told it doubles as an airline pillow. So congratulations.
45:04 Stephen J. Dubner? John Earle, you also get to play, whether you like it or not, the next round of our game along with our panelists. We're calling it the reference round, and it works like this. The four of you will each have just a couple of minutes to come up with a good IDK about tonight's theme collections. But you get a reference book to help you out. And tonight, we are using encyclopedias. So what we've got here is a 12-volume Encyclopedia Britannica micropedia. We are going to give each of you now your encyclopedia, and you will each have a couple of minutes to come up with something from that book that we don't know, that's worth knowing,
45:45 Stephen J. Dubner? and that's true, that pertains somehow to collections. All right? Go.
45:53 Stephen J. Dubner? While they're working, we'll take a short break. When we return, we'll hear what they came up with. Our live audience will then choose the two best IDKs, and those two will go head to head in the final round of Tell Me Something I Don't Know.
46:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio, sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, "Let's circle back on this next week," and everyone nods, but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free.
46:59 Stephen J. Dubner? Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics.
47:17 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. The best investments are the ones you make in yourself, and no one knows that better than Southern New Hampshire University. With more than 200 online degree programs, no set class times, and low online tuition, Southern New Hampshire University is built to fit your life today and set you up for success tomorrow. Education is an investment. Why not make it a smart one? Apply for free at SNHU.edu/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing
47:59 Stephen J. Dubner? happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Welcome back.
48:39 Stephen J. Dubner? It's time for Tim Ferriss, Anne Pasternak, Eugene Mirman, and John Earle to tell us something we don't know about collections, based on their speedy reading of one volume of an encyclopedia. So first, John Earle, our audience winner, we're going to start with you. Tell us something we don't know about collections, drawn from your volume.
49:00 Speaker 11 Got it. Right, so I got to sausage immediately, but then I turned the page, and I got to sausage tree. So I'm going to tell you about sausage trees. Okay, it's a tropical tree, the only species of its genus. It grows 6 to 12 meters, 20 to 40 feet tall, and bears sausage-like fruits, which hang down on long cord-like stalks. It's native to Africa.
49:23 Stephen J. Dubner? Can you knock the sausages out with your dick?
49:30 Stephen J. Dubner? That's lovely. John O'Reilly, well done. Thank you very much. Eugene Mirman, who had a great volume of the encyclopedia, I understand. What'd you come up with there?
49:39 Speaker 06 Well, let me just read you this sentence from the entry "Asian Games." "In general, game foe performances were better than those of the Asian Games, but only two festivals were held."
49:58 Stephen J. Dubner? Anne Pasternak.
50:00 Speaker 05 So who here knows what a weak fish is?
50:04 Stephen J. Dubner? It is the opposite of a strong fish?
50:07 Speaker 05 It's a sea trout.
50:08 Stephen J. Dubner? So Anne Pasternak, you're telling us that a weak fish is a sea trout?
50:12 Speaker 05 That's right. Did you know that before?
50:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Did not know that. Did anyone out there know that?
50:18 Speaker 06 Nerd.
50:23 Speaker 07 And I will say this, of course, I remember that from the reading the encyclopedia. "The weakness of the mouth muscles is the reason for the name. It's the weakness of the mouth muscles, which often cause a hook to tear free, allowing the fish to escape."
50:38 Stephen J. Dubner? Oh, so the weak fish is the strong fish?
50:41 Speaker 07 Uh huh.
50:42 Stephen J. Dubner? By dint of his escape method?
50:43 Speaker 07 Yes, up is down, that's right.
50:44 Stephen J. Dubner? That is really nice.
50:45 Speaker 05 Was that in here, and I didn't read that part?
50:47 Speaker 07 That was in another source.
50:49 Speaker 05 I see.
50:49 Speaker 07 That will go unnamed. Wikipedia.
50:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Does it end with "pedia"?
50:54 Stephen J. Dubner? So I love that we're using Wikipedia to check the Encyclopedia Britannica.
51:01 Stephen J. Dubner? Tim Ferriss?
51:02 Speaker 04 All right, so here's the jump off point. So "nisei," Japanese likeness painting, "form of sketchy portraiture that became fashionable in the court circles of 12th and 13th century Japan." So along the lines of likeness paintings, there is a lesser-known genre. And in modern Japan, it would be called hentai, which is basically perverse. And if you really dig into Japanese comic books and anime and whatnot, you will find that there is this one type of scene that replays itself, which is tentacle porn. And this has been presented as something that is a new perversion, that is a recent development in Japanese comic books. But in fact, it has existed for more than 100 years.
51:47 Speaker 04 And there are people who collect woodprints and so on related to tentacle porn.
51:52 Speaker 05 I'm sure they're in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.
51:56 Speaker 04 The more you know. There you go.
51:57 Stephen J. Dubner? It is time now to stop this and for our live audience to vote. And in a moment, your voting instructions will appear on the screen. Tim Ferriss told us about what he liked to call Japanese likeness paintings, but was in fact tentacle porn. Anne Pasternak told us about weak fish are sea trout. Eugene Mirman told us something about Asian gaming. And John Earl told us about the famed sausage tree. Your two top choices will go on to the final round. So get out your phones, follow the texting instructions on the screen right now.
52:42 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, the live voting has closed. The votes have been tallied. And our second place finisher was John Earl told us about sausage trees, which means Tim Ferriss with tentacle porn takes the round with 33.9% of the vote. So Tim and John, the two of you, go on to the final round of Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Congratulations.
53:07 Speaker 04 Thank you.
53:07 Stephen J. Dubner? You're welcome.
53:11 Stephen J. Dubner? All right, here's how it's going to work. In a moment, we will reveal a topic that's related to tonight's theme collections. Then you'll each have a minute with no research materials, other than your own big brains, to come up with something that we don't know on that topic. What is our final round topic? Well, one of the most common things to collect are souvenirs, of course, memories of our travels. A.J. Jacobs, as you heard, collected barf bags. So using that as inspiration, the final theme tonight is airline travel. Tim Ferriss, John Earl, you need to tell us something we don't know about airline travel. We'll give you one minute.
53:53 Stephen J. Dubner? While they're thinking, let me remind you to visit tmsidk.com to keep up with everything we're doing, including our schedule of live shows and how you can attend or be a contestant. If you would like to suggest a theme for a future episode or recommend a panelist, give us a shout on Facebook or Twitter. We go by tmsidk underscore show. Okay, John Earl, our audience winner, and Tim Ferriss, one of our panelists. It's time to tell us something we don't know about airline travel. John Earl, you first.
54:27 Speaker 11 All right. So if you've ever been in an airplane, you know the emergency exit, right? And you probably wondered, like, what would happen if somebody in mid-flight, like, tried to pull at it? Could they open the door? The answer is no. That door cannot be opened because of the pressure in the cabin of the airplane. So you don't have to worry anymore. Nobody's going to open that door in mid-flight.
54:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Good to know. Doesn't that happen in movies all the time, though? So you're saying that movies are not factual? Uh, Tim Ferriss, you gotta tell us something about airline travel.
55:01 Speaker 04 Yes, so I will provide a travel tip when you're selecting your flights, in particular, international. There are different types of pressurized cabins. So you can choose specific planes, like the Dreamliner, that actually pressurized to the equivalent of much lower altitudes. And therefore, you end up feeling more rested and less fatigued and have less of a recovery period when you use those flights.
55:29 Stephen J. Dubner? A.J. Jacobs, I know you haven't had long, but have you found out anything about properly pressurized airplanes?
55:36 Speaker 07 Well, I did look into it a little, and it does seem there might be something to it. But you should keep in mind, we're all going to be obliterated by a gamma ray burst very soon, so it really doesn't matter.
55:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, it is time, on that lovely note, for our live audience to pick a winner. I think we'll go with a throat vote. Now, remember the criteria for all our IDKs. Is it something you did not know? Is it something worth knowing? And is it true? All right? So we're going to start with John Earl and his story about emergency exits not being able to open in midair. Let's hear what you think of John Earl's IDK.
56:25 Stephen J. Dubner? And so I'll now ask you to vote with your throats for what Tim Ferriss told us about finding the properly pressurized airline cabin.
56:36 Stephen J. Dubner? We don't even need the Electoral College for that one. Tonight's winner is John Earle. Congratulations.
56:45 Stephen J. Dubner? And that's our show tonight. Thank you so much to our panelists, Tim Ferriss, Anne Pasternak, and Eugene Mirman. Thanks to all our contestants, and especially to all of you for coming to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Thank you so much. Good night.
57:10 Stephen J. Dubner? On the next episode of Tell Me Something I Don't Know, we are taking a deep dive with marketing guru Seth Godin, comedian and author Faith Salie, and technologist Nicholas Negroponte. The theme: Under the Hood.
57:22 Speaker 12 One of the implications for science is that if scientists have nothing better to do than study what kind of cheese you should eat before you go to sleep, they need to find another line of work.
57:32 Stephen J. Dubner? That's next time on Tell Me Something I Don't Know.
57:36 Stephen J. Dubner? Tell Me Something I Don't Know is produced by Dubner Productions in association with Stitcher. Our staff includes Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, Ryan Gutierrez, Dan DeZula, Andrew Dunn, and Rachel Jacobs. David Herman is our technical director. He also composed our theme music. Thanks also to our good friends at Qualtrics, whose online survey software has been so helpful in putting on this show. You can subscribe to Tell Me Something I Don't Know on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can listen at tmsidk.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thanks for listening.
58:39 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.
59:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company: building the future of energy.
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