Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords CastingWords CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Are we talking like 30, 60%? Yeah, it's basically about 50% across pretty much every country. And then 36,000 and below, we're talking. So yeah, we're looking at like 46% or so.
So that's not a huge difference. What comes down to is about half the people play the lottery. Wait, that itself is half of people play the lottery? But play the lottery means what?
One ticket in the past 12 months? Yeah, it's played in the last year. Although if you look at Massachusetts, it's the state where we have sort of the highest spending. It's about $800 per person per year.
So the average person's buying two lottery tickets a day. That's probably not evenly distributed. I don't think, I don't know, unless my wife has been seeking off buying way more lottery tickets than I think. Wait, the average Massachusetts citizen is buying $800 of tickets per year?
Or the average person who is buying a ticket? Right, so the total amount spent, if you divide by the number of people in Massachusetts, you get $800. $800 per year. Per year, yeah.
So let me ask you this. Let's just pretend that Angela and I have decided that we think playing the lottery is a bad idea. Let's pretend. Let's just pretend that, okay?
But then, let me introduce, let me just say, well, let's say the expected value is very low, right? Relative to what I can do with a dollar, $10 elsewhere. But what about the entertainment utility? Has anyone ever measured that?
Do we have any idea? I mean, the measure of entertainment utility is that people keep doing it and they seem to do it very gladly and in great quantity. But people could be buying tickets because it's fun or they could be buying tickets because they are legit thinking that they are going to win the lottery and that, you know... All right, well, let's say this, Mr.
Math Teacher, let's say that Angela and I change our mind. We think, hey, we're going to play the lottery because we think we can win because we know a smart guy named Ben Orland who's a math teacher who's interested in the lottery and he can help us not cheat but cheat. So what are some things that we could do to increase our chances of winning? For instance, I've read that, let's say you have a pick of numbers that go from zero to 100, that if you pick numbers above 31, let's say, that at least if you do win, that you'll have a bigger payoff because so many people play their birthdates, for instance.
Does that work? Yeah, this is true. So if you pick certain numbers that show up on fortune cookies or numbers that are birthdates, it's not a good idea to pick those because if you win on that number, you're going to be sharing with all the other people who have that fortune cookie. Steven, you mentioned you must have expected value, which is sort of the, you know, someone who's taken a probability class or a math class.
I think these assumptions of expected value is sort of what you should be looking at. So right now, for example, there's the Mega Millions just went up to the highest thing it's ever been. It's $1.6 billion right now. The expected value is basically just the long-run average.
If you're to buy tons and tons and tons of tickets, how much would the average one be worth? So for Mega Millions, there's only about 300 million possible tickets. It's worth $1.6 billion. So the average ticket should be worth more than $5 and it only costs two.
So in theory, it sounds like a good idea. The problem is if you go out and buy a ticket, you're going to just lose your $2. Why don't you just buy every possible combination? Right, so this is very hard to do with Mega Millions.
This actually happened in 1993, sort of early days of state lotteries. Virginia had a prize that went up all the way to $28 million because no one had won it for a while and there were only $7 million tickets for a dollar each. And so there was actually a syndicate of a group of people in Australia who said, okay, we'll just buy them all. That's easy money right there.
Which sounds like easy money, but it's not that easy to go and buy $7 million lottery tickets. Oh, you mean, oh, that's right. You have to go to like so many delis, right? And like each one.
So what they did to this team in 1993 is they placed a lot of big orders with grocery store chains and convenience store chains. But even that didn't work out that well for them. There's actually one chain that had to return $600,000 to them for tickets they weren't able to print. And so by the time they're drawing 7 million tickets out there, they actually only purchased 5 million of them so there was a 2 in 7 chance they were going to wind up losing all that money.
Okay, well then what happened? Well, what happened is two weeks went by and the state knew that they'd sold the winning ticket but no one could find it because they had 5 million tickets they needed to look through. And then about two weeks later they surfaced it and they did win the money. The state lottery commissioner was furious and issued this sort of like a villain at the end of a heist movie as though he knew he'd been beat but he swore he would never get beat that way again.
And actually since then it's become much harder to do those kind of all purchases and most states have passed laws against that and if you wanted to try it on millions right now if you could do it it would be great to get all 300 million tickets but there's just no feasible way to do it. Mike, come on, Ben Orlin is telling us that pretty much a lot of people love to play the lottery and it's not what we expect in terms of income. What more can you tell us about that? So here are a few things that are more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery.
Giving birth to identical quadruplets, getting killed by a falling coconut or having a vending machine fall on you and the kicker, you're more likely to be elected president of the United States but we've already shown that anyone, anyone can do that. Thank you Mike and Ben Orlin, thank you so much for playing. Would you please welcome to the stage Kate Sicchio? Kate is an assistant professor of dance and kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Kate, why don't you tell us something we don't know please? Sure, I can tell someone's emotional state when they're using their smartphone just by looking at them without seeing what's on their screen or what they're reading. How? By how hard they're weeping?
No. Without looking at their face and without seeing what's on their phone. Correct. And like from their body posture?
Is it from that? Getting there, yeah. Does this have to do with what you do professionally? Yes.
You are a professor of dance and kinetic imaging. What is kinetic imaging? We'll start there. So kinetic imaging is like media arts.
That is a way more impressive word for it because I've always thought media arts and kinetic imaging. Right. Absolutely. So you observe their movements and because you're a dance professor you can tell how they're feeling?
Yeah. Oh. All right. Bingo.
So in choreography we have different tools of analysis and in particular there's this thing called the Lablan effort graph and what it does is it allows you to look at movements in sort of like three different categories. One is time. So like is the movement sudden or sustained? One is space.
Is the movement direct or indirect? And another is the force. Is it strong or light? And when you combine these three things you start to get gestures.
So like a strong, sudden, direct movement is a punch. Right? So when I punch my phone you know I'm feeling... I know you're angry.
I wouldn't have figured that out without my kinetic imaging degree. But that's the thing. Like with a phone I mean how much range is there when people are on their phone? Right.
So one of the things we do a lot on our phone is we do things like mindless surfing. Well that gesture is what we call a flick. So it's indirect and light and sudden. Right?
And that means that yeah you're not really being conscientious you're not paying that much attention you might be bored. So what does sadness look like on you know an iPhone in terms of my using it? Usually sadness is like light but it's usually more sustained. Right?
And it's usually indirect. So not quite a flick. Right. Not quite a flick.
One of my favorite ones is Tinder. So when we're using Tinder we're doing this really careless gesture and of course that's where you meet people to hook up not someone you're going to care about in the future. So do that gesture again because that's good for radio. And give me something that's the opposite of that.
Right. So another app that I use is one called Hotel Tonight and in order to book your hotel That sounds not that unlike Tinder to me. They go together. But to book your hotel you have to do a very direct sustained movement.
It's much more of a commitment to get your hotel room than to find a date. And so you have to actually trace the shape of a bed on the phone. So it's this really direct movement that you have to do in order to purchase. Are there practical applications of this observation?
Yeah I mean I think that you could make things more direct and more sustained so people would think about it more. Like maybe we want news apps to be more like that so people are actually careful about what they're reading and thinking about what they're digesting in terms of content. Mike Mon, Kate Sikio is saying that you can tell how people are feeling by looking at how they interact with their phones. True?
Yeah so we hear that Tinder is a hookup app right because it takes so little effort and you're just swiping left and right. Now that may be true at the beginning of a relationship but it doesn't tell us a ton about what it takes to get into a relationship because by the time people are able to actually meet and hook up they will have had to have engaged in some more committed behavior like texting, phone calls, etc. And so what appears is that it's not necessarily the result of how much effort someone takes throughout the time to get together physical or otherwise but rather it's how the relationship starts. And so something that may indicate what that means for us the Atlantic has reported that couples who cohabitate before marriage tend to be less satisfied with their marriages and are more likely to divorce.
So the issue with Tinder may not be the human movement overall but rather what the human movement says about the desire for commitment from the very beginning of the relationship. Angela does that make sense to you? I mean I think that when you say that people who live maybe I'm taking this personally but anyway why would someone who lives together with another person be more likely to is it divorce? Is that the fact?
Yeah so as a certified non-marriage counselor I think the idea is that if things start out without a deep level of commitment then the research shows that we're less likely to stick to it. Now you're the person that studies grit passion and perseverance so I'm not going to fact check you on whether people stick with things or not. Well okay so I'll just say this whenever you find a correlation like people who drink Diet Coke live whatever you have to worry as a scientist that like lots of things are correlated with this decision to live together and those may be the things that are driving the marriage you know statistics also. So what we really need is an experiment where half the people get assigned to live together before they get there and half the people like to the left right and then half the other then we'll know.
Speaking of spurious correlation though I do think it's important to know that the number of people who die becoming tangled in bedsheets almost perfectly correlates with per capita cheese consumption. Mike thank you so much for that and Kate thank you for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. We're going to take a quick rate when we return more guests will make Angela Duckworth tell us some things we don't know and our live audience will pick a winner. If you would like to be a guest on a future show or attend a future show please visit Freakonomics.com we will be right back.
Welcome back to Freakonomics Radio Live Tonight we are playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know My name is Stephen Dubner our fact checker is the great Mike Maughan and my co-host is the psychology professor and author Angela Duckworth Before we get back to the game we have got some frequently asked questions for Angela Duckworth Are you ready to go? I'm ready to go. You are best known for having written the book Grit The Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League have a new mascot called Gritty What's that you were doing? Okay that's 100% not my idea It's like awful Have you seen it?
It's like an orange alien No I had nothing to do with it Do you know if the people who invented and named Gritty are fans of yours? I do not They have not been in touch Do you think it's a dereliction of royalty issue? I am not suing the Philadelphia Flyers for their use of the word gritty because I don't think I Can you own a word? I don't think you can own a word can you?
Do you own Freakonomics? I do own Freakonomics Angela I know you're working on a new podcast about the work of the Character Lab which advances the science and practice of character development Why a podcast? So I think it's the case that people like these things that they're listening to where they get to actually talk to people like Stephen Dubner and I thought maybe there are a lot of parents out there and teachers who would like to talk to me about the science of how kids grow up to thrive And lastly family grit question Can you give an example of something particularly ungritty that someone in your family has done? Well okay A certain person would like throw themselves into various projects like metal detecting and then like stamp collecting and then vending machines and you know weight lifting and like one thing after the other and when you do that then you're not being gritty I didn't know vending machine was a hobby It can be It can be Short lived it turns out in this case Angela Duckworth ladies and gentlemen thank you so much It is time now to get back to our game Would you please welcome our next guest Philip Barden Philip is a professor of evolutionary biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as well as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History So that sounds very promising What do you have for us?
So what does a hell ant and an iPod have in common? May we in turn ask you what the hell is a hell ant? Yeah well that's a whole Yeah okay So that's a decent question So I work on fossil ants That's my niche That's about as my obvious as you might think you could get Turns out there's many fossil ant species that are our fossil dinosaur species If that helps And among the oldest fossils that we know about about a hundred million years old tracked in amber are these ants called hell ants And they have all these bizarre adaptations that we don't see in any modern ants and in fact no modern insects So what we see is these big side-like mandibles that shut out of their face and come up towards the forehead The mandibles, the jaws The jaws, yeah exactly The jaw, the mouth parts And so modern ants have mouth parts that articulate horizontally So if you take your arms and you kind of go to hug somebody sort of like that This would be if you took and put your elbows together and you kind of went to jut yourself in the forehead with the tips of your fingers Those are hell ants, right? And so hell ants it turns out Dolesky who's this Russian paleoentomologist named the genus for the first time in the 90s Hato-Mermex Hato meaning Hades and Mermex which is Greek for ant and the common name is hell ants Why hell ants other than it was you know It's a real spooky cool Oh, it's a badass name for a species of ant Exactly, yeah Hato-Mermex It just sounds really And really truly I mean there are 13,000 species of modern ants and this sort of breaks the mold And your question was what do a hell ant and an iPod I should say one other thing which is that there are some hell ants that also have horns that come out of their forehead We named one last year We named it after Vlad the Impaler And the reason is this We CT scanned it We looked through X-ray imaging and found that these ants actually look like these sequestered metals into the middle of this paddle And so what we think is happening is to prevent themselves from running themselves through their own forehead They're actually capturing prey and puncturing them and drinking their hemolymph which is insect blood So that's why we named it after Vlad the Impaler Were they the size roughly of modern ants?
They were about a centimeter, yeah So like your pinky So how is it possible that an ant that tough didn't make it? Well this is a good thing I'll just give it to you So one of the reasons why we think that hell ants went extinct is potentially because and they are extinct and all their close relatives are extinct because they're too specialized They effectively painted themselves into a corner Some of the evidence that we have strongly suggest that they specialize on prey that also went extinct So this is an interesting thing in evolution where we get into these scenarios where your adaptations work really, really well until all of a sudden the bottom drops out and they don't And they actually persisted for about 21 million years We know about them from Amber in Myanmar, France, and Canada So what they have in common with the iPod is they were too specialized and we don't need them anymore Perfect, nobody buys iPods anymore Okay, so there are species that went extinct because you're arguing of over-specialization Like they were tough There were certain prey that they could beat up but otherwise they weren't good enough to go on But what about what good is the platypus for? Is that not a specialized thing and why is it still around? Well, so anything that is around today is working, right?
So we always think about evolution as being this sort of game of winners and being the best or whatever and it's really just the best in that moment in time in that particular slice So everything, including humans today If you put two humans two billion years ago there's no oxygen in the atmosphere So it came over, it's hard In fact, something like oxygen turns out to be another thing that sort of changed the game So the earliest life on our planet oxygen was catastrophic for it There was no oxygen in the atmosphere And then when we start to get photosynthesis all of a sudden having that adaptation of being anaerobic that is surviving without oxygen becomes really terrible And now we have this big massive extinction event because of something like oxygen And so now, of course, we all love oxygen But it turns out that wasn't really the case in the beginning So let me ask you a human-centric question I don't think about humans So are we over-specialized or are humans the opposite because we can learn anything? Humans are incredible generalists That's one of the reasons why we are highly, highly successful And in fact, I'm just bringing back to ants Some of the most And the reason why I bring back to ants is because, you know, they are Because you said ants Yeah, because I said ants It's my comfort zone But really, they are tremendously successful and in many places they outweigh the biomass of all vertebrates including humans in some environments And the most successful ants are also generalists, right? So they can capitalize on all kinds of resources They don't rely just on one particular food source, right? And humans are very much the same way Although we have some other kind of funny things going on You know, this culture thing Culture, yeah And the ability to rapidly pivot Aren't modern ants said to be quite social?
They are, they're all used social Exactly, yeah And do you think that part of the hell ants problem was a lack of some kind of socialization? This is a great question So we thought about this We really thought that maybe it was that the earliest ants really weren't social or were in a social degree and they were actually outcompeted by their highly, you know communistic sort of counterparts who are alive today And in fact, what we found is that that's not the case The earliest ants, including hell ants are highly social There's no such thing as a solitary ant All 13,000 species today and all 700 fossil species as far as we know all were social So for example if you look at all the different amber deposits in earth history starting about 100 million years ago ants never make up more than 1% of all insects in amber and yet we find many aggregations of them together We calculate it on the back of a napkin We're not mathematicians But we figure that it's something like one in a trillion You'll find 20 worker ants in one piece when you have less than 1% abundance Are high or low income ants more likely to buy lottery ants? Let me ask you this. Will science and technology allow you to bring back the hell ant?
And if so, whose picnic would you send it to? Oh, this is a great question. So not biologically, no, but in fact, where I am now, we have some great industrial design students. We have CT scanned these, and we're now modeling them.
We're digitally bringing them back to life to figure out how the mechanics of these will work. That's cool. Yeah, this is a great T.F., by the way, for NGIT, where I work now, and I do not have tenure, and I'd like to have tenure. And we're also printing and constructing giant molds that are motorized, so we can use these for outreach for taking the schools and museums, potentially for museum exhibits also, because we really don't think about insects as part of the fossil record, but they are, today, 75% of all species that exist are insects.
Mike Mon, Philip Barton's been telling us about the extinct hell ant. What do you have to add? So I think a lot of people here misunderstood. When you say hell ant, we all think about our ant from hell who's always trying to set us up.
That's just your ant from hell. So ants have lost a lot of things over the years. They lost the impaler. They don't have lungs.
They don't have ears. They can't swim. They do have two stomachs. It's interesting to see, though, that, like, ants have lost a number of things.
We, as a culture, have lost many things, some good, some bad. We've lost answering machines, pagers, Velcro wallets. We no longer have decent politicians. We've lost my space, which was a terrible tragedy.
And if you haven't yet lost Nickelback, do yourself a favor. Thank you, Mike and Philip Barton. Thank you so much for playing something out now. Great time.
Please welcome our final guest of the evening, Liban Grijalva. Liban works in data analytics here in New York. He is a memory athlete and currently holds the title of fifth best memory in the United States. I'd like to apologize to our audience if we can only get the fifth best memory athlete in America.
But, Liban, that sounds awesome. I can't wait to hear what you have to tell us, so the floor is yours. All right. So have you ever been sitting in your living room on the couch and you remember that you need to get something from the kitchen?
Why does walking from one room to another cause you to forget? Because you are, like, place memory, right? Like, you are activating the memory representation in one place and that has all these cues and then you go to another place and those cues are absent? That's basically it.
It's something called the doorway effect. Oh, that's really good. What happens is, when you're sitting on your couch, you are thinking of something and you inadvertently kind of, maybe you're looking at the TV or you're looking at the shop and that idea somehow gets tethered to that location. So as soon as you walk to the next room, when you're no longer looking at that, you seem to have forgotten what that is.
And what happens is as soon as you sit back down on your couch, it just comes right back to you, which is actually what memory athletes do in a way. We use a technique called the memory palace where we place information we want to memorize in specific locations in different rooms and then we're able to recall them later on like that. And you said it's called the doorway effect? The doorway effect, yes.
You mean you pass through and you lose it? Yeah. Hey, can I just ask you, my thought before Angela figured it right out was I thought of something, I think it was Arthur Conan Doyle once said about how the memory is like an attic and if you fill it up with junk, then when you have something valuable to put in it, you don't have room. And what it made me think of is if you walk into another room, you're just hit with all the new stimuli there and they somehow hurt your being able to summon the memory because there's like only so much RAM that we all have going on.
That's not an issue? Actually, I love Sherlock Holmes so I know that quote really well and what I thought was really interesting was that he's saying that your brain has a limited amount of space which, believe it or not, I mean, as far as these memory athletes are concerned, we can pretty much memorize a large and large amount of space. I don't think anybody, if there's any scientific studies, to show that there is a limit, like this person has hit the limit of all they can memorize. So while it's sort of true, I don't know if that's exactly it.
Just a side observation, you say the phrase memory athlete as if we think that is athletic. It takes training, right? Yeah, no, hey, I'm not saying it's not, but I'm curious, was that said originally in just and it got real or? No, that's a very good question.
I mean, mnemonist is another name for it, but I guess, yeah, we just call it memory athletes or mental athletes. So I want to know more about this like thing that you do. So can you give me some examples of things that you've memorized or competitions that you've been in? Sure, so there's lots of competitions all over the world every year and basically people like myself get together and they try to memorize as much information in the shortest amount of time possible.
So some of the events are, let's say, memorizing hundreds of random digits, binary digits, names and faces, abstract images, lines of poetry, and one of my particularly favorite events is basically memorizing the order of a shuffle deck of cards in under five minutes if possible. So it's basically after all these events, scores are tallied up and then you get, you know, a champion. So you're obviously very good at this. I'm curious, do your fellow competitors, do you all pretty much use the same methods?
They pretty much do. As I mentioned before, the memory palace is the main technique that we use, which is an ancient Greek technique where you basically construct places in your mind. So like at a smaller level, you might imagine your apartment as a memory palace. You might imagine your front door as a location number one and you walk through and your living room would be location number two, your kitchen could be location number three, the bathroom number four and finally your bedroom number five.
So what you've done is you created a mini journey that you can close your eyes and walk through it. So on a much larger scale, this is what memory athletes do. We just have hundreds and hundreds of palaces and like different ones, yeah. Are they real or are they imagined palaces?
So they can be either one. Like I tend to like to use real locations. Like I just came back from Ecuador. So on my trip, I tried to stop in a few different museums and stuff like that and try to build memory palaces along the way.
But I also used to play a lot of video games, first person shooters. So I would actually take the environments in the game and also turn those into memory palaces. Basically anything you can imagine yourself in. It's so much easier though, it's real places.
Like humans are really good at navigation. So it's pretty easy to build palaces wherever you go. So you actually go to new places in order to create memory palaces from them afterwards. Yes.
Yeah. And usually I will take notes or I take photographs in different places. It makes it so much fun too because you could actually close your eyes and be in these places. Like a lot of times when I'm memorizing in competitions, it's so strange, but also really relaxing to be able to walk through all these places in your mind.
So why do you do this? I actually admire this. Very gritty. But what do you get out of it?
And do you think you'll still be doing this 10 or 20 years from now? So I originally was a magician, so I would do a lot of stuff with cards. And obviously as magicians, we pretend to memorize deck of cards to do tricks, but then I found out people were actually memorizing them and I thought to myself, well, as a magician, somebody who loves cards, I have to be able to do this. So I started training myself to just do that.
But it turned out it was so much fun to actually be able to do this. Just being able to achieve faster speeds. Like the first time I ever memorized a deck of cards for a magic trick, it took me three hours. Now it takes me 32 seconds.
I mean, the sheer amount that you can cut down is just so interesting. Even like at four years of competing, I'm still finding there's things about the brain It's just a bunch of people sitting there with headphones and dead silence as they run through. So just imagine how exciting it will be to listen to people and see in a memory competition. So basically what it is, is the technique is, I already mentioned the memory palace.
In my mind, I have a location that I'm set to go and I want to memorize. Cards are abstract. It's hard for you to remember them because they have no real meaning. So what we do is we turn every card into somebody or into something that's more meaningful.
So in the technique that I use, I've turned every card into a person and an action associated with it. So let's say the 10 of hearts is Homer Simpson. Because why? So originally, this is the heart part.
Building the system requires things to sort of make it up. Here's an easy one. So the six of hearts is Michael Jordan and that one makes sense because Michael Jordan won six championships and I say he's got a lot of heart. So it's very easy for me to memorize that.
The ace of spades is James Bond and I think of the highest card in the deck as being James Bond when he plays poker. So some of them are easy to associate. Okay, so each memory athlete creates their own mnemonic for each card, correct? Yeah, so basically there's slight variations.
So my system uses two cards. So let's imagine that. So I mentioned that the ace of spades is James Bond and the 10 of hearts is Homer Simpson. So if I was memorizing, if the cards were in that sequence, let's say ace of spades, 10 of hearts, I would take my first location, let's imagine the front door and I would take the first card, the ace of spades and imagine James Bond standing at the front door.
But the second card is the 10 of hearts, Homer Simpson. But it also gets confusing because later on when I'm remembering it, I'm like, wait a minute, was it James Bond and Homer Simpson or Homer Simpson and James Bond? So what we do is we modify the technique to create a hierarchy. So the first card is the person, the second card would be an action.
So it would be James Bond drooling, which is an action that Homer Simpson does. So if it was the other way around, if it was 10 of hearts, ace of spades, it'd be Homer Simpson drinking a martini. And you do all that for 52 cards in how many seconds? So my current competition best is 34 seconds.
My personal best is 32 seconds. What do you think you can do right now? I'm not sure. I'm a little bit out of practice, but...
So do you shuffle them? Or do we shuffle them? Yeah, you can. I feel like we should shuffle them.
So we'll do about half the deck only because regurgitating 52 cards might be a little boring. All right. Let's see. I'm going to try to go through a few of them and see what we get.
Angela, should we narrate a little bit because it's very dramatic? There's a man on stage looking at cards. You're making this so hard for him. I know.
Okay. Okay, great. So you can verify that I got them right. So first, I'll say the cards and I'll say what I'm looking at.
So the first card should be the Nine of Spades, which would be a girl that I know named Lily. The second card should be the Seven of Spades, which would be a samurai sword. Then it's the Ace of Hearts, which is Johann Sebastian Bach with the Nine of Diamonds drinking tea. The next card would be the Six of Diamonds, which is a friend of mine called Six, who is freezing, so it should be the Five of Hearts.
Then it's Oldboy from the film Oldboy, so it should be the Seven of Diamonds followed by the Ace of Clubs, which is hanging upside down. Then it should be the Four of Diamonds followed by the Six of Spades, I believe. Then the Queen of Spades, Six of Clubs, Nine of Hearts, Five of Clubs, Eight of Hearts, Two of Hearts, Homer Simpson, so it should be the Ten of Hearts, doing yoga, which is Queen of Diamonds, followed by Clint Eastwood Spray Painting, so it should be Ace of Diamonds, Four of Hearts, followed by Sharon with Sheep, so it's Three of Spades, Jack of Hearts, followed by, ooh, this is Reggie Miller doing, so it's the King of Spades. Is he eating spinach, Five of Spades?
Jack of Spades, Five of Spades. That's it. Jack of Spades, Five of Spades. Is that all right?
So that was remarkable. I've read about people who do exactly this and somehow, and it's impressive obviously when you read it, but that was absolutely remarkable. Thank you. Thanks for doing it for us.
Can I ask you this? Which is more important to you, beating the four memory athletes who are ranked higher than you or beating yourself? Actually, when I first started, I didn't know any of the memory athletes, so I thought to myself, I'm going to come in and I'm going to try to beat everybody because at the time, the U.S. wasn't very well ranked among the world, like the top countries were, I think, China and Germany, but by coincidence, the same time that I started competing, two other friends of mine, well, now they're friends, but two other athletes started competing as well, and they were so, so great that right now, the number one guy in the U.S.
is also the number one guy in the world, so the U.S. now holds the record for being the best country with a memory athlete, as it were. America's great again. I have a question for you, Levon.
What does this phenomenon, the original phenomenon you were talking about, the doorway effect, or just the way you've learned to control memory or to build memory, what does this suggest for people with memory loss? Is there anything clinical-ish, therapeutic-ish that it suggests? Well, that's kind of interesting because at the same time, people make the joke a lot of times that I should never forget anything, and if anybody who knows me knows that I have a pretty average memory when I don't pay attention to things, the reality of it is that these techniques are so specialized that this is what I use for deck of cards, right? I could practice this for hours and be really, really fast at deck of cards.
It won't translate to being fast at numbers. I would have to specialize and train just at numbers. I teach a class, and what I try to tell people is basically, you practice these things and when you understand them, you're able to use them in your day-to-day life. So it's a really great way to kind of stay in shape, but unfortunately, these techniques are very, very specialized for what it is you want to use.
There's no magic key that if you practice this, it'll improve your general memory. Mike Mon, Liban Grijalva, has not only showed us how to memorize part of a deck of cards, but told us a lot about memory and memory athletes. Care to tell us if everything checks out? So for years, golfers and cheerleaders have been mocked mercilessly for calling themselves athletes.
You've just handed them an amazing gift. A couple of substantive things. We learned from Colin Kammer on this podcast a while back that one of the keys to memory is curiosity because it enhances the encoding process, which is one of the three stages of memory, which are encoding, storage, and recall. So this idea that we've talked about of the doorway effect happens when we change locations and therefore remove triggers that help us in the recall stage.
So it's encouraging to know that we're not crazy when we walk out of a room and forget what we were doing. Interestingly, like all things in life, it turns out that to increase your memory function, you're supposed to get sleep, exercise, and eat a healthy diet. So in other words, it's probably not worth doing what it takes to improve your memory. Mike, thank you.
And Levon, thank you so much for playing Comic-Con now. And can we give one more hand to all our guests tonight? I thought they were fantastic. Thank you.
It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. Tough one. So good tonight. Would you please take out your phones and follow the texting instructions on the screen?
So who will it be? Colin Drolmack with In Praise of Pigeons. Ben Orlin, who told us about lottery misperceptions. Kate Sikio, using choreography training to spy on people.
Philip Barden, the unfortunately over-specialized hell aunt. Or Levon Grijalva with memory and the doorway effect. While our live audience is voting, let me ask you a favor. If you enjoy Freakonomics Radio, including this live version of Tell Me Something I Don't Know, please spread the word and give it a nice rating on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you so much. Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thank you so much to all our guest presenters tonight who I thought were just awesome. Each of you will receive this brand new limited edition Freakonomics Radio lapel pin.
Lapel not included. And our grand prize winner tonight, thank you so much for telling us all about pigeons. Colin Geromach. To commemorate your victory, we'd like to present you with this certificate of impressive knowledge.
It reads, I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Angela Duckworth and Mike Vaughn, do hereby vow that Colin Geromach told us something that we did not know for which we are eternally grateful. That's our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you didn't know. Huge thanks to Mike and Angela, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play Tell Me Something.
Thank you so much. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we revisit our conversation with Richard Fahler, who helped create the field of behavioral economics and, for his trouble, won a Nobel Prize. I will say that I found the whole thing to be pretty emotional, partly because, you know, of where I came from, intellectually. What was the original thinking behind behavioral economics?
We don't think people are dumb. We think the world is hard. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. And before then, we'll be slipping a few bonus episodes of Freakonomics Radio live into your feed with co-hosts Alex Guarnaschelli, Christian Finnegan, Manoush Zomorodi, and featuring enough useful facts to get you through a whole holiday season of family gatherings.
Hope you enjoy. Tell Me Something I Don't Know and Freakonomics Radio are produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Allison Craiglow, Harry Huggins, Zach Lipinski, Morgan Levy, Emma Morgenstern, Dan Zula, and David Herman, who also compose our theme music. The Freakonomics Radio staff also includes Greg Rippin and Alvin Mellon.
Thanks to our good friends at Qualtrics, whose online survey software is so helpful in putting on the show. And thanks to Joe's Pub at Public Theater for hosting us. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or on Freakonomics.com. If you'd like our entire archive ad-free along with lots of bonus episodes and sneak peeks, please sign up.
Sign up for Stitcher Premium. Use the promo code FREAKonomics for 1-1-3. Thanks, and good night. That was appropriately awkward.
Nicely done. Stitcher.