Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - Everyone & School

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Emma gets ready for a new school year by revisiting lessons from Everyone & Their Mom! We learn how rats help each other, how dolphins say hi to their friends, and what to do if you see someone you know but aren't sure if you should say hi.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi guys, and welcome to another glorious episode of Everyone and Their Mom, a weekly show from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. And hey, guess what I'm super pumped about this week? It's almost time to go back to school! But before we start a new school year, let's take a listen back and brush up on some of the lessons we learned last semester in Everyone and Their Mind. Turns out, we actually learned a lot, even though my brain feels super empty. First things first, let's talk rats. A few months ago, we had a burning question. We heard about something unbelievable, and we wanted to know if it was real.

Luckily, the well-known rodentologist Dr. Bobby Corrigan came on the show to school us. Bobby, are rat kings real? You know, I don't think they're real. I've never met a fellow scientist that says they're real either. I've dealt with a lot of rats. I've slept in barns with rats and I've never seen a rat king where all the tails are tied together. and I've never seen a rat king where all the tails are tied together. Do you think theoretically it could happen? Yes. I think where it may have some little bit of science is that, you know,

rats might have frozen to death inside a wall someplace in some winter spot, and they get together and they do hug or mugger. It's called huggering- muggering, where they all huddle together to share a body warmth. Maybe they died like that, and maybe those tails at that point were entangled. But if they were to get entangled easily like that, they would never survive to the point they are. You said the term hugger muggering. Is that a scientific term? Well, it's a behavioral term to describe, you know, part of their success, Emma, is they have two secrets to success. One is they're not nitpicky about their food. If they have to eat pizza every single night, it's fine by them. They're not going to complain or anything,

right? So they take in whatever they have to take in. I've even seen rats in Central Park eating earthworms, you know, because the litter baskets were so clean at that time. So the other secret, in addition to that, is they get together in these groups and they can fit into small spaces. You can get a whole family of rats, which is about 12 to 15 rats, into a basketball. You can fit them in one basketball, all those rats. And to do that, they hugger mugger into that tight, tight space. And it enables them to survive by not needing a big cave or something. Yeah. I just love the word hugger muggering.

Yeah. Yeah. It is a great term. I use it all the time is let's hugger mugger and talk about things. I love that. Yeah. Well, you love, okay, so that's something because when I think of a rat, I think, oh man, I don't love that. But you love rats. Can you tell me something that would make me fall in love with rats?

Well, actually, the first thing you could do that's very quick and it wouldn't take long is get a rat pet. Get a rat pet. Okay. And you would see that rats as a species, whether in the wild or whether they're your pet, they're very loving. You know, they're very gregarious. And rats exhibit acts of kindness. Certain rats will go over to other rats with a piece of food. You know, if that rat is, say, an old rat and it can't move or bound or compete for

the food, rats will bring food to that animal to sustain it. Yes, I know. So it's these kinds of kindness, just like we exhibit when we bring food to friends and families and what have you, or whatever we do to help others. Yeah. Do they have little rat thank you cards that they send back to the rats who help them? Yeah, you know, I would love to see that, you know, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Well, we made a game for you. Are you up for playing a little game? Sure, let's go. Awesome, cool. So you are a rodent lover, and you're also a rodent controller. So we wanted to play a game we're calling Snuggle, Marry, Kill, okay?

Okay. So we'll tell you a rodent, and you tell us if you want to snuggle it, marry it, or kill it. And it seems like you will never choose kill. Probably not. Great. So that makes sense? Yes. Let's do it.

Okay, cool. Field mouse. Snuggle, marry, kill. I'd snuggle. Snuggle. Possum. Snuggle, marry, kill. I would probably Marry

I'd marry a possum Are they just more loyal and trustworthy? Yes, and even though they're kind of Gross looking to some people and everything They're terrific parents And know how to take care of a family I love that Husband material, great

Okay, the rat from Ratatouille, Remy Snuggle, marry, kill Alright, so cute, how can you not want to snuggle with Ratatouille? You have to snuggle from Ratatouille, Remy. Snuggle, marry, kill. All right, so cute. How can you not want to snuggle with Ratatouille? You know, you have to snuggle with Ratatouille. It's Patton Oswalt, baby. Let's do it. Pizza rat, snuggle, marry, kill.

Well, I'm going to give an exception here because it's stealing food. It's, you know, running around with some of the foods that we use. It gives an image of, you know, if there's a pizza around, it's going to get it. So I'd probably have to maybe think about not tolerating that, maybe even killing that animal. I know. Dr. Corrigan. I know. Are you kidding?

I know. But here's the important point, Amber. We cannot let rats and mice inside our restaurants or anywhere around our food. So the message is we have to stop that. Draw a line right there. But he's a provider. He's the pizza winner for his family. You're telling me you don't want to marry someone like that?

Well, I do the way you described it, but no, no, no. We got to stop that. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Corrigan. This was, I feel like I am a new rat lover. I'm going to make an Instagram fan page. Good, good. We'll make you a junior rodentologist. And as you walk about, you have a new respect for my hope. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was so fun.

Okay. Man, talking to Dr. Corrigan truly changed my life. Now when I see a rat, I give it a respectful nod first and then I scream. Hey, remember the time we had one of my actual real-life professors on the show? And we asked her to come talk about, you guessed it,

witches and dolphin pee. My name is Arianne Sajafourous. I am a historian of early America and I taught Emma last semester in a class on witchcraft and magic in the Atlantic world. Yeah, you were my professor, which was an awesome class, loved it. And you know, just throwing this out there, would you say I'm your favorite student of all time? I mean, you're up, you're up there. You're up there. Would you say I'm your favorite student of all time? I mean, you're up there. Nice. Definitely my funniest student of all time. Nice. Okay, that's better than anything else for

me. I'm going to take that. Well, okay, go with me here. I was talking to a friend and we're wondering, did witches slash healers in the early modern period, the olden days, the 17th century, whatever, taste pee to diagnose people? I think they did. There's a story about like you can taste pee to tell if somebody had diabetes. If the pee tasted sweet, then that was one way of knowing that the person had diabetes. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Well, let me back up a little bit because I didn't contextualize.

So this week we're talking about the study. These scientists found out that dolphins like swim through each other's urine and like taste it to recognize each other. And for some reason, just like made me think of our class because I know we talked a lot about like bodily fluids and witchcraft, right? Yeah. So like this isn't an example of like diagnosing somebody, but it does have to do with sort of healing or causing illness. There are these things, I don't know if you remember when we talked about witch bottles. Yes. Yeah. There would be these jars and people would fill it with various things. So pins, nails, fishhooks, tacks,

fingernails, human hair, human teeth, blood and urine. And like, depending on what you wanted to accomplish, it would sort of influence what specific things you put in the jar. And then you would bury it in the ground. And the idea was that if you were sick because of a curse that a witch put upon you, by burying this jar filled with like human excrement and other things upside down in the ground, you would sort of push the curse and the illness back onto the witch. It's pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah, it's pretty gross. And now I'm wondering, does this mean that dolphins are practicing witchcraft, you know, by like using each other's bodily fluids? Yeah, it seems like back in like the early modern age, like they had a much higher threshold for like super gross stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's like if you think about it, they couldn't bathe as often as we do. They didn't have like, I don't know, the kinds of like soaps and shampoos and whatever else we use and um they were like living most people were living in greater proximity to nature like close to their animals and their their livestock and so things just got kind of gross and and i imagine how much it must have smelled that That's something I think about quite often. Yeah. Yeah. So we smell like a potion of smells and disgusting things. Yeah. I mean, they just like think about it like you had to work all the time. You didn't have showers. You didn't have air conditioning. Imagine in the summer, like working in the sun all day in a farm, like filled with horse manure,

getting sweaty planting things. Yeah. If you don't mind, we have a game that we want to play with you. Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Okay, great. Okay, so we have a game we are calling How Magic Is It? So you're kind of an expert on magic. So we're going to give you something magical. And on a Yelp review scale of one to five stars, tell us how magic it really is okay five stars most magic yeah okay first one magic the gathering how magic is it three three stars okay um harry potter how magic is it i like harry potter five stars five stars yeah how about a ouija board how magic is that two stars because i don't get it i used to have a ouija board and How magic is that? Two stars, because I don't get it. I used to have a Ouija board, and nothing ever happened unless I did it myself.

Two stars. Okay, that's generous. Magic Johnson. How magic is he? Very, very magic. Five stars. Five stars. Ten stars, if I could. Yes. Saying Bloody Mary three times into a mirror trying to get her to appear. How magic is it? That's pretty magic.

Charms. Saying things. Wanting things to happen. Five stars. Five stars. Nice. How about the trick when you make a quarter appear behind someone's ear? How magic is it?

One star. One star. We all know you're hiding it in your hands. Where's the mystery? Yeah, Dad. Stop doing that trick to me. I want some mystery. I want things I can't explain in my magic. Exactly. Some David Blaine stuff, I guess.

Yeah. Lucky Charms being magically delicious. How magic is it? I really like Lucky Charms, so I'm going to say five stars. Five stars! Five stars. That is a good cereal. How often do you get to eat marshmallows for breakfast? Exactly. Well, whenever you buy the cereal, which is great. Okay, last one. Just like dolphins in general. They're such weird freaks. How magic are they? Dolphins are big time. Magic dolphins are off the charts, like 10 star. 10 stars. Greater than Magic Johnson. Yeah. Dolphins, 10,000 stars. 10, 10 stars greater than magic johnson oh yeah dolphins 10 000 stars

10 000 stars to the dolphin well awesome thank you so much for coming on our show this was so fun i think we can all agree that the worst part about going back to school is the threat of an oral presentation. You know, when you have to let the whole class stare at you for 10 minutes while you say the most boring things you've ever said in your whole life. Luckily, former presidential speechwriter Sarah DePerry stopped by with some tips on writing the perfect speech. So just to start off, will you introduce yourself to us? Sure. My name is Sarada Perry, and I am a speechwriter formerly for President Obama. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, this is maybe a weird question, but when you're writing for Obama, do you do an impression of him to get into his voice? How to like get into his voice? Like how do you get into his voice?

Yeah, there's an element of that. So the idea of getting someone's voice is not really about how they talk. It's actually about how they think. And so when I started working for President Obama, the way, you know, it's not like he's got a ton of time to hang out with his speechwriters, you know, we're not like shooting the breeze with Barack Obama. So the way I kind of did that was that I sort of absorbed everything that he wrote, said, you know, I was watching, you know, all the late night interviews with Jimmy Fallon, like I was just inhabiting the mind and soul of Barack Obama, which is exactly as creepy as it sounds. But sort of like the best way to do it. Yeah, that's so funny. Was there a part when you started dreaming as President Obama? I wasn't, I didn't like have dreams that I was him, but I did every morning sort of wake up

and look at the news and whatever the news was, I never thought, hmm, what does Sarada think about that? I thought, what would Barack Obama think about think about wow i just you kind of like reorient your entire worldview to to be through his lens in a way yeah it's like method speech writing you're always in character i like that method yeah i mean speaking of his voice i feel like obama had a really memorable or has a really memorable way of talking like he had a little bit of dad humor. Were you like responsible for that? Or like, were you like tuning in to like finding the right places to make a joke? We definitely did our best to insert dad jokes.

I'm actually pretty good at dad jokes. And so and like, I figured out kind of his, you know, his kind of brand of that particular humor. And he often just ad-libbed it, honestly. You know, he kind of read the room and see something funny and then just sort of react. Okay, improv. Yeah, that's great. Right, exactly, exactly. Well, this week we're talking a lot about graduation since it's graduation season,

and specifically about graduation speeches, which is why we wanted to talk to you. Have you ever written a graduation speech before? So many. Really? They are not my favorite speech to write. Oh my gosh. But yes, I've read many. Why aren't they your favorite speech to write? So many reasons. So many reasons, Emma. So one is that a commencement speech is a speech about anything. There is no topic. There is no argument to be made. Speakers often make it a speech about everything, which then means it's a speech about nothing. And I think that's just a really hard place to be. And it can be hard to persuade speakers that they don't

need to dole out every single piece of life advice they've ever received or every lesson that they derived from their climb up the tech startup ladder or whatever the hell they did. I think it can be challenging to help people really stick to a plan. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of people, when they don't know what they're doing, just fall into a bunch of cliches. Yes. I feel like a lot of speakers want to just say the thing that will make them sound the smartest or the funniest. What they need to do is say the thing that is the truest to them, right? What's the one thing you can say to these people? So it sounds like your job is inspiring people to inspire others. Do you have to give yourself an inspiring speech to give other people inspiring advice so they can

give other people inspiring advice too? The circle of inspiration? Yeah. I will say I think that whenever I'm working on a commencement speech, the most inspiring sort of step in my work is to call up the university or college, whatever it is, and get information about students. And sometimes I'll even talk to students. That is always a really great experience. I'm a college student. What would you ask me if you were trying to get an

idea of what I wanted? Yeah. So depending on what I was going to you for, it might just be sort of the basics. So tell me, where do you guys hang out on a Saturday night? Who is the toughest professor? Who's the professor that everybody wants to get into that class? All the sort of the color that will inform, especially the beginning of the speech. So that when the speaker starts, they're kind of issuing what we call how-to-hells. As in, how the hell did he know that? Yeah. Well, okay.

So we have a draft of a commencement speech our friend Hari came up with. It's just off the dome. Like, it's kind we have a draft of a commencement speech our friend Hari came up with. It's just off the dome, like it's kind of a first draft, but we were wondering if, since you're professional, can you give them some notes on it? All right. Okay, cool. I'll read it to you. So feel free to stop me if you like see something that you want to workshop or praise or something that needs work, okay? Okay, okay. I want you to know that the future looks bleak. And I know that between global warming, a global pandemic, and the possibility of nuclear war, it almost feels like what you've done here is a waste. How are we doing so far? And now let's just all go throw ourselves into the Pacific Ocean. Okay, you're not going to like this next part then. Okay. So the next part goes that perhaps

if you're graduating from college, that the money you spent is absolutely worthless. And this could have been the time spent preparing for the apocalypse to come. What would you think about that apocalypse reference? Oh, so I actually think that then whatever comes next is actually important. So what comes next? Okay. So what comes next is, but I want you to know that there's something good that comes with the end. And that is, if the world does end, you will not have to pay back your loans. Where is he supposed to go next? He's got to go somewhere else. Some version of, but seriously, folks, like for all of this, for all of these really hard challenges,

there is no generation better positioned to try to fix this disaster than you all, than the one that's in college right now. And, you know, as President Obama always said, you're not encumbered by these old ideas. And so every generation before us has at least tried, and that is kind of your inheritance. You've got to pick up the baton and keep going. Thank you, Sarita. I feel so inspired to change the world. But before we do that, we have bigger things to handle. We all know that going back to school isn't just about classes. It's also about seeing all the people you know, but not that well. So when you see them in the hallway, it's like, are we going gonna say hi to each other right now? Are we not? Well, a while back, I called a person like that from my life to talk about why we stopped saying hi to each other. Because we all know that there's no better

solution to an awkward situation than a direct confrontation on public radio. Uh, yeah, just to start off, can you introduce yourself to us yeah my name is chris do you need like a background or is that that cool like uh yeah do a little background um what else i'm from new york uh living in new york right now um doing a summer internship excited to be here sweet okay so um just to put this out there you don't know why we're talking to today right no clue okay cool so um can you just can you tell our listeners how we know each other like how we first met um yeah we've we've had uh multiple friends of friends. So I think it's mostly just been like,

well, I'd say the biggest thing is we share a house at school. You know, we share a like cafeteria, laundry room, all kinds of like living space. It's like living in the same apartment. So I think we run into each other a lot there and have mutual friends. Yeah. And it's weird because like we definitely know each other and we live on the same hall

at school and like we've seen each other like coming back from the bathroom in our towels. But I noticed that we sort of stopped saying hi to each other. Have you noticed that? Passively, yes. Not actively. Yeah. Why do you think we did that? Because I feel like we know each other enough to say hi, you know? I don't know. There's definitely no intentionality there.

I'm for sure not blaming you. I'm just like, I want to dissect this. I think it's a weird phenomenon when you, like, know someone, but you, like, don't say hi. this I think it's a weird phenomenon when you like know someone but you like don't say hi yeah I mean I I don't I'm trying to think on my end I I would say there's not much thought process going on this is my end I I think it's like yeah who knows yeah do you think this conversation is enough to get us to say hi to each other all the time now I hope so yeah well okay I feel like when we see each other on campus again or I mean we're both in the city so if we see each other we should make like eye contact and do one deliberate wave and then separate our ways what do you think I mean i think we should be at like high in conversation level now i think i think we're really elevating our our level here to be honest how long how long of a

conversation are we catching up on our real level like am i telling you about like what's going on in my life or am i just saying what i had for lunch yeah i think i think we've like definitely elevated to like at least like 10 to 30 seconds of conversation. That's huge. What I'm hearing is that the ultimate solution for when you don't know if you should say hi to someone, you just have them on your podcast, talk about it in a very real level and then go from there. I mean, that won't work for all of us. But for you, I mean that won't work for all of us but for you that sounds like a great solution yeah

well Chris thank you do you want to end this conversation just by saying hi to each other hey hey Chris what's up you know nothing much awesome well now that you're all up to speed on your everyone and their mom lessons, sharpen those pencils, skim through the spark notes of that book you're supposed to read,

and go accidentally call your professor's mom. And good luck, have fun, and thanks for stopping by. Happy school year. And here's the most educational part of the podcast, the credits. This show is brought to you by Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. This episode was produced by Haley Fager, Zola Ray, and Nancy Seichow, with help from Oja Lopez, Blythe Robertson, Lillian King, Sophie Hernandez-Simeonides, and Boobs McGee. Can I say that? Boobs McGee. Our supervising producer is Jennifer Mills and our Pinterest inspo board is Mike Danforth. Once again, Lorna White, thanks for

our sound. We like it and we love you. Thanks to all our guests for being the best teachers around. I'm going to put an apple on your desk, teachers. I'm Emma Choi, and you can find me at Wit Wit NPR and Fiddling on the Roof. Is that what that show is about? I have not seen it, but I know I should. Okay, that's it. This is NPR.