Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - Everyone & Corpse Flowers

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Comedian Negin Farsad joins Emma to meet a corpse flower and find love at a stinky speed dating event.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Coming up, stinky presents, smelly celebs, and the best way to find your soulmate. I'm Emma Choi, and this is Everyone and Their Mom. Hi, everyone. I'm Emma Choi, and welcome to Everyone and Their Mom, a weekly show from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. This week, we're talking about something stinky with Wait, Wait panelist, comedian, and my biological sister. It's Nagin Farsad. Hi, Nagin. Hello. Hey. Oh, my gosh. It's so good to be related to you. Yeah, I'm glad that we share the same mother and father. Well, I'm incredibly excited to talk to you about this big news, okay?

So it's corpse flower season in Michigan. So you know those flowers that only bloom once every few years and smell like rotting meat? Well, it's happening, Nagin. Get used to it. Oh, man. Yeah, aren't these like flowers just really big and tall and wide? They're big old guys and they smell so bad. You know what?

Let's just talk about it. Let's talk about it. The Amorphophallus titanium, better known as the corpse flower or the who farted flower, produces a blossom with a scent that's been likened to the smell of rotting flesh. And the corpse flower blooms very rarely, like once every five or ten years. And this year, it's popping off in Allendale, Michigan at the Grand Valley State University. People will line up to see this kind of thing. It's not like I really desperately want to smell the smell of rotting flesh,

but I really do want to give it a sniff. I know! The corpse flower is native to Indonesia, and it was gifted to the university by a former biomed professor. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Giving a terrible, terrible meat smell. And this is the first time the university

has seen it bloom, and this stank-ass flower managed to attract almost 2,000 visitors dying to see it in bloom. Hey, have you heard about that flower that smells terrible? We gotta check it out! Smells terrible? This is gonna be great! Okay, well, I'm looking at an image of it,

and it is, it's like, impressively large. Yeah, it's huge. It's like as big as a middle schooler, and it looks like something from a little shop of horrors. Like I think just in terms of the size, you've never seen a flower this size. So for that reason alone, I think I can see why people are lining up. Now I'm also seeing a gif of a man put his face inside the bloom and then jolt his head back because the whiff was too much for his senses.

Come to papa. Again, it's like, I don't want to smell something gross, but I kind of do. Some people were disgusted. One woman said she was pretty nauseous. Just to start off, can you introduce yourself to us? Yeah, my name is Christina Hipshire. I'm the greenhouse supervisor for the biology department at Grand Valley State University. We're located in Allendale, Michigan. So you're the person in charge of the greenhouses where the actual corpse flower we're talking about just finished blooming, right?

So I have to ask, on a scale of one to 10, how bad does it actually smell? You know, I didn't think it was that bad, but I probably got nose blind to it after a while. I kind of compare it to like roadkill on the side of the road that maybe has been marinating for a couple days. Interesting. Why does it smell so bad? What's inside that flower? So they want to attract flesh flies and carrion beetles. Those are the main ones. So that's why it smells like roadkill. It smells like rotting meat because they want to attract those specific pollinators.

Can you tell me about the moment you realized the flower was about to bloom? Yeah, I was actually gone for the day. What? Yeah, I had taken a vacation day and my boss had walked through the greenhouse and like took a picture and she's like, oh my god, Christina, this is a flower. Can you just tell us more about what it looks like? Yeah, so normally the plant looks like a big giant tree. It's got a green kind of speckled trunk, maybe more of like a palm tree look to it. Or like we got this year, you get the flower structure. And the flower is pretty cool.

So it has a beautiful dark burgundy color. It's like frilled, like a fan that's folded up. So beautiful. But that can get to be about three to five feet wide when it opens up. So like a small child could technically fit inside of it. Oh, God. And then when they release the pollens, it kind of like shoots out like silly string. Cool.

Which is pretty, pretty amazing. Would you have a corpse flower in your home? No. Megan, do you think that the corpse flower is confident or embarrassed about the way it smells? Oh, so here's the thing. In, I want to say, Russia, they started doing these tests of if you can pick a lover from your sweat smell. Oh, the pheromone test. Yeah.

Yes. pheromone test yeah yes and so the corpse flower shouldn't be embarrassed because there is gonna be there's gonna be a bee out there that wants to pollinate that disgusting smell man i wish we could talk to someone who was at that sniff test in russia oh my god wait we can sarah everts is a science journalist and the author of The Joy of Sweat. And she was there. At some point, you're going to smell the body odor of your date, and it's going to be a make or break moment. And so why not cut to the chase? I mean, you're basically an expert of BO, right? Yeah. If you Google my name, Google suggests stinks and sweats after it. So yes, that's embarrassing. But yes. That's harsh.

I know, right? We found out about this smell dating test in Russia and found out you were there. Yeah, I went to a smell dating event to see if I could find love in the armpit. Can you tell us more about that? Like what were the steps of this study? You show up and the first thing that happens is you're handed a wet wipe to take off any deodorant and perfume that you've put on. And then the organizers take you through some heavy duty calisthenics. Like you do HIIT exercises like burpees and, you know, squat jumps. Yeah. Once everybody's all, you know, moist, for lack of a better word, you're given these cotton pads and you dab your parts and then you put the cotton pad into a glass jar and it's numbered and only you know your own number and

the organizers know the number and you sniff them to find the ones that you like best. And then it's kind of like how, you know, Tinder works. If I pick you and you pick me, then it's a match. Did you find love? I got a match, definitely. And holy cow, she was glorious. Like it was this like, very beautiful woman. I'm, as it turns out, straight, but I would be happy to go on a date with this person. Should we be doing a bunch of hit cardio before a date instead of showering? Because my instinct is to get clean. There's certainly a lot of evidence that we use our nose when we date. The best evidence is this researcher called Klaus Vedekin, who did a t-shirt study

on straight men and straight women. And what he did was he gave a bunch of straight dudes t-shirts to wear and to get sweaty in for a couple days. And then he took blood samples from those guys. And then he also took the t-shirts and he gave them to a bunch of women to sniff. And it turns out that the odors that women liked best belonged to men that if they coupled up and produced progeny like a kid, that that kid would have a super strong immune system. This is unfortunately really not sexy at all. Yeah. Come sniff me and let's make a healthy, strong immune system baby. It's not the best pickup line at a bar. No, I am sure someone has tried it though. And I would like to be a fly on that wall. Okay. We're almost out of time, but before I let you go,

we have a quick game for you, if that's okay. Sure. Okay. Okay. So you're a smell genius and we want to play a game with you called Celebrity Smell Match. So we're going to tell you a celebrity and you're going to tell us your professional scientific opinion of what they smell like. Okay. Well, then, yeah, I'm all for it. Rihanna, what's that smell? Cherries and musk. So accurate.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson. What's that smell? I think he smells like a locker room with like a little eau de soap. Absolutely. Okay, different. Gwyneth Paltrow. Smell? She smells like some sort of like extract of a caterpillar that you apply to your face. Yeah, yeah.

I love that. Pete Davidson. What's he smell like? Dude, I don't know who Pete Davidson is. He's the SNL guy who's dating Kim Kardashian and kind of looks like if a tall toddler existed. Oh, him, yeah, yeah. Oh, God.

I think he wears Old Spice. I think that's pretty accurate. Okay, Abraham Lincoln. What's that smell? That guy smells like pure B.O. Yeah, they didn't have anything back then. Okay, last one. Kevin Bacon.

What's he smelling like? Obviously like a BLT. Yes, exactly. That was the only one with a correct answer. You're a winner. You did it. Thanks for coming on and talking to us about B.O. It is my pleasure.

It's pretty much like my favorite topic. Thanks for coming on and talking to us about BO. It is my pleasure. It's pretty much my favorite topic. Thanks for coming on the show, Nagin. I'm so glad this corpse flower taught us it's okay to just stink things up. Thanks for having me, Emma. Here's the craziest part of the podcast.

The credits. This show is brought to you by Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. This episode was produced by Hayley Fager, Zola Ray, Lillian King, Nancy Seichow, Sophie Hernandez, Simeone This, and the person who invented Trader Joe's Mochi Puffs. Thank you, person. Our supervising producer is Jennifer Mills, and our work wife is Mike Danforth. Once again, Lorna White, thank you so much for making us sound so freaking good. You make my life happy. Thank you to Christina Hipshire, Greenhouse Supervisor at the Barbara Kinshia Greenhouse at the Grand Valley State University for being the supervisor of the stank.

Oh, I thought it would be a lot worse. Dr. Sarah Everts, thank you so much for sharing your incredible snail date story and blowing my freaking mind. Who are you? We met before. You can find more fun facts about why we stink in her book, The Joy of Sweat. Thanks to broccoli for being a vegetable that also comes in the color white. Oh wait, that's cauliflower. Thank you to my co-hosts, comedian, wait-wait panelists, and cool middle school art teacher cosplayer, Nagin Versarsad. Do I win a corpse flower?

You can see Nagin Farsad headlining a Joe's Pub in New York City on May 21st and May 22nd and at Ralph's in Worcester, Massachusetts on May 6th. And you can see her on the internet at Nagin Farsad. N-E-G-I-N-F-A-R-S-A-D. I'm Emma Choi

and you can find me at WaitWaitNPR and on the roof. What am I doing up there? Okay, I'm done. This is NPR.