How To Do Everything - Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Episode Date: January 1, 2025Ringing in 2025: Mike and Ian knock out a New Year's resolution with the help of filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg, and a listener calls in to settle a high-stakes bet on the sturdiness of honeybees. Also, th...e world's northernmost towns are in the middle of months-long darkness. To learn how to survive it, we call an astrophysicist who spent six months in complete Antarctic darkness.You can email your burning questions to howto@npr.org.How To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! featuring exclusive games, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Heena Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Do you make resolutions in January? We do. Specifically, we make pop culture resolutions.
We also check in on what we resolved to do this last year. Did we catch up on all those
classic movies or finally write that novel? Find out on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast
from NPR.
This is How to Do Everything. I'm Mike.
And I'm Ian. Coming up, writer, director, and actor Jesse Eisenberg joins us to answer
all of your how-to questions. But first...
Hey, Maureen. What can we help you with?
Well, let me take you back. About two weeks ago, I'm sitting out on my back porch with
my husband and a girlfriend of mine, Caitlin. And she works for this hyper local honey place
here in Atlanta.
And she is only about a mile from my house
and she accidentally left a key at her office.
And she just made some offhanded comments.
It's like, oh, wouldn't it be so nice
if the bees could just fly over my key
and I wouldn't have to go get it.
Yeah.
And so I am thinking immediately, well, this is ludicrous
because it would take an insane amount of bees to do this. So I'm imagining like a lot
of bees in this huge mass, like a swarm of bees carrying this key. So I asked her, how
many bees do you think this would take? And she's like, oh, well, you know, a house key
is small. Like, imagine if you could just stick their little feet to the key and then they could all fly up, right?
Then maybe it would only take like seven bees.
And I'm thinking, no, this is like a 50 bee situation.
Like a ton of bees.
And every single person I have asked
seems to think it would take less than 20 bees.
My husband was like five beess, Caitlin says seven.
So I've dug my heels in pretty hard
and I have come to y'all for some answers.
Okay, we have someone on the line
who can definitively answer this question,
but we should say in the time since we talked to Maureen,
this question has taken over her friend group.
People are placing money bets.
We have a range of guesses for what the possible answer is.
The stakes are very high.
It could tear them all apart.
So let's get the answer.
Dr. Traynor, can you start by telling us how you're qualified to answer Maureen's question?
Sure.
So my name is Kirsten Trainor. I'm a honeybee
biologist at the State Institute of Bee Research here at the University of
Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Wow. So I spend my whole day working with
honeybees. So what do you think Dr. Trainor? What's the answer? It's not
so easy to answer because honeybees normally wouldn't coordinate to move a
key. You wouldn't need to get quite a
bunch of them to work together. But honey bees do have a really cool behavior that they carry out
their dead. And a honey bee, so one honey bee can pick up another honey bee and carry her out of
her hive. And a honey bee weighs about a hundred milligrams. So if we look at how much a key would weigh, which I looked it up online, it's about 0.25
ounces, which is 6,700 milligrams. So you would need about 67 bees coordinating together to move
a house key. 67 bees. Okay. When you say that they will fly out, they're dead, move out the dead,
what's the explanation for that behavior? Sure. So a honeybee hive is 20 to 40,000 individuals living together in a hot, humid environment
where microbes would normally flourish.
And so having decaying dead individuals in your hive is not a wise decision because they
have the potential to make the others sick.
And so they, on a nice warm winter day when it's warm enough to fly, they will carry out all
their dead. And so if it's been snowing, you will actually see a trail of dead bees in front of your
hives. And this is a good sign because it means the colony is still alive and well and strong
enough to carry out their dead. And it's just with the with the dead bees, it's one to one, one bee
carries one bee. So I'm not sure how you'd get all 67 bees
to work together to move one key.
That would be another trick.
But theoretically, it would be about 67 bees.
Is there anything that they collaborate on?
Yeah, they collaborate on a lot of things.
So the bees will cluster in this winter cluster,
and that leaves their entrance undefended.
And a honeybee hive is of course warm and dry and quite cozy.
And so field mice, um, if a beekeeper hasn't put a mouse excluder on the front of their hive, we'll try and sneak in and chew their way through the comb.
That's undefended down below.
And then come spring when the bees notice, Ooh, we have an unwanted
visitor living in
the bottom of our hive, they will sometimes sting that mouse to death and they can't carry
it out because it's too big.
So they'll remove the parts they can and then they will propelize and entomb the rest of
the mouse, the skeleton, so that it doesn't make the hive sick.
Oh, yuck.
What?
Yeah, they basically mummify anything too big that they can't move.
Whoa.
How, wait a minute though, you said the parts they can't remove, what parts can they remove?
Well, beekeepers have actually tested this.
I think in American Bee Journal, there was actually a beekeeper who had attached mice, dead mice
on the bottom of the hive to see how quickly they remove them.
And they chew off their fur and anything that they can remove with their mouth parts they
will.
But of course, the skeleton, they can't break apart.
And so that they propelize and entomb.
So it's like a little…
So propolis is a…
Go ahead.
A propolis bees gather from tree buds.
It's an antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal substance
that plants produce to protect the new buds on the tree.
And the bees collect that and will mix it with beeswax
and they'll use it as an antibacterial doormat
and for other things in their hive.
They basically, they make a mouse sanitizer themselves.
They do.
Correct.
All right.
Thank you, Dr. Traynor, for helping settle this for Maureen.
This is fantastic.
You're very welcome.
I hope it's been useful.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Our mailbox, thanks to you, is overflowing with emails desperate for help, and our resolution,
our shared resolution, is to clear it out.
So joining us now to answer as many of your questions as we can get to is a very qualified
expert.
It's Jesse Eisenberg.
He's a writer, director, co-star of the new film, A Real Pain.
So Jesse, we thought we'd just throw a bunch of these how-to questions at you, see what
you can do for our listeners.
Great. Okay, great. But I didn't prepare anything. Is that okay?
That's not a problem.
Totally okay. So we'll start off with this question. This is from Sharon. Sharon says
she can't resist the urge to over comment in many situations. When someone
asks her a question, she starts talking, but doesn't know when to stop and often finds herself
going on longer than she should and regretting later the things she said. Do you have any advice
for Sharon? Yeah, I'm worse. Yeah, my advice would advice would be, uh, God, what would my advice be? No,
I mean, you can't take advice from somebody who's far worse at it than you are. Maybe some kind of,
I was going to say maybe some kind of self-hatred so that, you know, you could, it'll stifle you
more, but actually self-hatred for me makes me ramble on further because I'm trying to apologize
for the initial thing that I said and then apologize for the apology. So actually, maybe self-love, Sharon.
Maybe find some self-love and then you won't feel the need to kind of ramble like I am
now.
Do you, do you, Jesse, have an experience or a memory of a specific time that woke you
up in the middle of the night when you remember like, oh man, why did I keep talking like
that? Yes, yes, but that's each night. And yes, it's when I've said something that I worry offended
somebody, what I find myself doing is walking around the streets in New York or biking around
the streets, screaming what I said. Like, I once said something that was mean, I was 10 years old,
and I said a mean thing to somebody else and it just
So destroyed me that still I find myself on my bike
Still yelling the thing. I can't even say it here. It's too traumatic later
Because yeah, I felt so embarrassed because it wasn't me. I don't know who it was
I mean it was me but it didn't feel like me
Anyway, and my wife and I always joke that yeah
Each one of us will walk around saying the thing
that we feel guilty for saying about 10 years ago,
just blurting it out on the street.
Wow, okay, so, but as a kind of therapy,
that doesn't work, I guess,
because it still sticks with you.
Right, so this concept of trying to help this person
immediately took a nosedive into making things worse.
Okay, good. But at least we also brought up trauma for you, so we at least accomplished that. help this person immediately took a nose dive into making things work.
But at least we, we also brought up trauma for you. So we at least accomplished that.
The hours are long, but it doesn't pay anything.
Here's a question from Tyler and this is a holiday related.
Tyler is every year sends out Christmas cards,
but worries the great effort that they put into the Christmas cards is not appreciated
by the people who receive them. So Tyler wants to know the minimum effort they can make in those
Christmas cards. I guess the minimum thing they can say to make people feel thought of without
doing too much work. Got it. A noble pursuit and a great aspiration from Thailand. You know, I don't know, I have
these kind of very ambivalent feelings about receiving Christmas cards from families where
they all talk about the things they did this year. Yeah. I'm like, I have such deep shame
about my life. And so does my wife, who's like a my wife is like an amazing, amazing
woman who should feel nothing but great feelings about herself.
And yet both of us just kind of marvel at the confidence that families have by putting
these things out.
And I'm such a cynical person.
So I assume when I'm getting these cards with their family achievements, I'm assuming this
is a family that's about to get a divorce because this must be a bandaid for the thing
that's happening darkly, darkly underneath the sky.
Okay.
Skeletons of the cloud. So I darkly, darkly underneath the sky. Okay.
I have a little bit of a cynical attitude.
However, when I read them and I kind of get rid of like this, my cynical knee jerk reaction,
I find that to be actually quite sweet and lovely that the family is creating this kind
of sweet tradition.
So this is all to say to Tyler that actually maybe people are appreciating it more than
you suspect.
You've come to the conclusion that they don't. But I guess I would investigate that more.
Okay.
There's something, this is touching to me. I mean, I feel like two thirds of our questions
so far have circled back to just finding self love.
Exactly. Unexpectedly, and at the same time, I haven't slept in 24 hours. So perhaps that's
where I am right now. Pete Slauson All right, let me try, let me find another question here that is,
again, shouldn't have any trauma associated with it.
Jared Slauson Okay.
Pete Slauson This is from a listener named Reagan. How do I get this, the mildew smell
out of jeans? Do you have any good laundry hacks?
Jared Slauson Sure. I mean, as a person who kind of struggles every day to just get out of jeans. Do you have any good laundry hacks? Sure. I mean, as a person who kind of struggles
every day to just get out of bed, I think, no, I'm kidding. Wait, how do I get the mildew smell
out of jeans? I don't know. Don't people freeze their jeans? I don't know what that does, but
maybe give it a whirl and then baking soda. Let me ask you this question. How clean, again,
this is not meant to be a personal question, but do you regularly?
Clean your refrigerator and freezer like is your freezer in pretty good shape. I do clean my refrigerator and freezer I yeah, I just like cleaning my house so much. I don't know it gives me actually a sense of
Control and comfort and I just love it so much and after my kid goes to sleep. I I clean the house and my wife is
and after my kid goes to sleep, I clean the house and my wife is happy with me.
And so it has all these wonderful ripple effects.
And to that point, I clean the refrigerator
and it's just a very comforting part of my day.
Yeah, okay.
So it's a way to,
it's kind of a meditative practice of yours.
Yes, and I like a clean fridge.
Yeah.
I used to do a really dumb thing,
which is that I would take out everything in the fridge,
including the shelves, and go inside of fridges.
And I really liked it.
I liked that small space,
and I liked that it was kind of fun to do,
and the slight danger of it, with the fridge lock.
And so I'm really familiar with the fridge
and how to take out shelves and, you know,
because I did it recreationally for a while.
When you say use as an adult, you would enter?
Yes, only in my 20s and 30s.
That's right.
What?
And the flexibility required.
I had big bridges.
It's incredibly fun.
And for people listening, it's incredibly fun. Do it with another person.
Put all the stuff on the counter, and get in that fridge.
Hey, just interrupting the interview real quick
to say, absolutely do not get in that fridge.
That is a terrible idea.
Whatever you do, don't get in that fridge.
I just have to, we just have to kind of explore this.
So do you just push and the door and
it opens or does it, are you ever trapped in there?
I've never been trapped.
Okay.
I've never been trapped, but I will say there, the immediate feeling is, is, is claustrophobia
and terror.
It would seem that that would, that makes sense. That fits.
But it answers a question we've long held, which is, does the light turn off when you
close the fridge?
And I know the answer to that.
I don't want to reveal it today.
Yeah, but I just want to say you can find out.
Okay, if you go in.
Good.
Can we do one more?
Is that all right?
This is from E. Wayne Williams.
Call him Wayne.
Wayne wants to know advice about telling someone they have food in their facial hair.
Wayne was traumatized 30 years ago by seeing someone with a ramen noodle flapping around
in their mustache and didn't know what to say.
Okay, I have a great solution for this.
My wife thinks it's odd but lovable, but I am just constantly picking food out of her
teeth. I just reach my dirty paws
into her mouth and take that spinach and I find there's something very sweet and affectionate of
just if especially if it's in the guy's beard just take it just take it. Don't be appreciative. It's
a sweet moment between two people. We never touch enough and you know what we could use some self-love.
There we go. We've done it. We've done it.
Yeah.
I'd like to create a theme at the beginning of this game I never played before.
I can carry it through.
Well, Jesse, thank you so much for all your help today.
This is an absolute honor and I'm so happy that you guys are doing this show.
For anyone listening who's heard what Jesse has to say, we want to tell you, please don't
get in your fridge. Don't go in there.
It is one of our founding principles as a podcast. We want to bring you quality programming
and we want you never to get inside a refrigerator.
That's right. That's right.
It's dangerous. It's right. That's right. It's dangerous. It's cold. Jesse Eisenberg
is a he's great. You love his movies. Terrific director. He's terrible at
suggesting places to go inside.
Hey, if you have a question you'd like us to answer, you can send it to us. We have
one show left. What episode left to answer your questions.
Send them to us at howto at npr.org.
One episode left this season.
We will be coming back after our break.
So if your question was, how do I save this pinnacle of podcasting?
How do I save this show?
It's going away.
That question is unnecessary.
Don't worry about it.
We're already coming back.
It's been solved. But any other question, send it to us at howto at npr.org. And if you're
still considering it, please don't get in the fridge.
The northernmost town in Alaska, a town full of refrigerators you should never climb into.
That town is in the middle of two months of darkness.
The sun set there on November 18th and it won't come up again until January 22nd.
We were curious what it's like to live in that kind of darkness and to see if somebody
who's done it might have some tips to help. Danny Barkatz is an astrophysicist who wintered over in Antarctica.
Danny, can you tell us what your experience was like?
Sure. I guess the easiest way to put it is that in 2006, I earned a year's worth of salary
in one day and one night.
All right, so that's one way to put it.
And essentially, I did that
by wintering over at the South Pole, which means you get one day that lasts six months,
and then one night that lasts six months.
What is the feeling on that last 24 hours of daylight when you know you're about to
enter this six month without ever seeing the sun?
So that, I mean, that's a good question. But the reality is that because the transition
is so smooth, it's such a smooth transition from daylight to darkness. Here you're used
to the transition being rapid, right? When the sun sets, it's dark and it's getting darker
and it's really quick. At the South Pole, you have to realize that that transition,
instead of being over the course of one hour,
it's over the course of one month.
I hadn't even fathomed that,
that there would be this month where every,
I guess day is the wrong word, but every 24 hours,
it's a little darker than it was before
until finally it's black.
Exactly, yeah, because the sun, when it's up, right,
instead of going up and then down, up and then down,
it's essentially just turning around you.
And over the course of three months,
it just spirals up until its highest elevation.
And then it's gonna spiral down, spiral down, you know,
until March 21st.
And on March 21st, if it's not cloudy,
it eventually crosses that line of the horizon.
And all right, well, good luck.
Six months of darkness.
I didn't realize this,
but no planes will risk landing in the dark in Antarctica.
So I guess at the very end of that daylight period,
those six months, the last plane takes off and you do not
have a choice. You cannot after two months decide, you know, I can't take this anymore.
It's even a little bit worse than that because the planes don't wait for the dark periods. The
planes are really limited by the temperature at the South Pole. So the last plane will leave
around February 10 and will not come back until the first
week of November or when the temperature gets above 50 degrees, minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
You see, I made that mistake.
At the South Pole, because the temperature never reaches zero, we don't even say, oh,
it's minus 40, minus 50.
We say, oh, it's 50.
Because everybody knows it's minus 50. Right. Oh, wow. And so
in reality, although the night's time, the winter night's time is six months, obviously,
the time when you are isolated, when you don't have a contact is a little over, is a little
nine months, it's close to nine months. And so that last plane leaving, you're right,
is a really big moment. And I remember it super clearly because
when that last plane leaves, you're like, did I really make the right choice?
This is the right life choice that I'm making. Thinking about this town in Alaska and other
towns that are entering this period where the sun is not going to come up. Did you come up with
certain techniques or ideas of how to handle it that we might want
to pass on to people there?
I mean, so I felt like I needed newness.
Things were always routine, right?
It's the same weather, it's cold, dark and windy, same people, the same buildings, the
same everything.
And so anything that sounded quirky or new or fun, I would just say, all right, let's give it a try.
One quirky thing we read about is the 300 Club.
Are you in the 300 Club?
Yeah, I am, of course, right?
The 300 Club, do you want me to explain
what the 300 Club is?
Yes, please.
What we do is we, when the temperature outside
drops below minus 100 Fahrenheit, what we do is we have a sauna, which is a
really nice thing, we have a sauna, we push the sauna temperature to plus 200
Fahrenheit and so then you go in the sauna and you warm up and you warm up
and you get your body really really warm and you have to mention you do
this without any clothes on.
You get the sauna really, really warm on.
And when you think you can't stand it anymore,
because plus 200 Fahrenheit is quite warm.
But when you think you can't stand it anymore,
you wait another five minutes
until you get your body temperature really warm.
And then just with shoes on,
because you really can't step on ice without anything.
So just with shoes on, with everything else, no clothes, you go outside.
And so you go from plus 200 to minus 100, and that's 300 degrees Fahrenheit difference,
therefore the 300 club.
And you go outside and you might think, well, you guys are crazy, that must be terrible,
you must be really cold.
And that's the amazing thing.
Your body has an amount of heat capacity, so it actually accumulated heat. And to my own exhilarating surprise,
I went outside and you actually don't feel cold. Wow. And for three, four minutes, you
can actually walk around outside. Don't run, because if you run, you're going to breathe
in really cold air and burn your lungs. So you walk gently outside, and so your brain is telling you something is wrong.
You should be cold, and yet your body is okay.
And to me, it was actually so incredible and so mind-bending to say that your brain should tell you you're cold,
but your body was okay, that I just, you know, said, all right, let me go back for another roll.
I just did it a second time.
Well, that does it for this week's show.
What'd you learn, Ian?
Well, I learned that bees will take, uh, go to extreme lengths to get a
mouse out of their hive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
Cause gross.
You know, you hear about people who have a mouse in their house and so they get a cat
to take care of it.
Yeah, sure.
Sounds like you could also just fill your home with bees.
You'd bring in a beehive in your house.
Honestly, you don't even need the hive.
You could just have the loose bees and that way they're ready to strike.
Oh, the classic honey trap.
I mean, there's, you know, Tom and Jerry, except it's actually 60,000 Toms.
Yeah, yeah.
Who are willing to sacrifice their own lives
to get this mouse out of there.
That is not as funny of a cartoon.
Yeah, especially when the bees start tearing off
parts of the mouse to remove it.
Again, only the parts they can carry.
How to Do Everything is produced by
Henish Ravastava with technical direction by Lorna White. Our intern is Father Time.
Great work, Father Time. Happy New Year, Father Time. 2024 was fantastic. Get us
your questions at howto at npr.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks. Happy New Year. Well, I think we got to call Maureen back and get her the news.
Okay.
I love it.
Hello?
Hello, Maureen.
Hello.
Hey, it's Mike and Ian calling.
How are you?
I'm so happy to hear from you all.
And here is Caitlin.
Hi, guys.
Hey there.
Hey, Caitlin.
Well, we have, we have a little bit of a problem.
We have a little bit of a problem. Jared Sussman Hello, Maureen. Maureen Hello! Jared Sussman Hey, it's Mike and Ian calling. How are you? Maureen I'm so happy to hear from y'all. And here is
Caitlin. Hi, guys.
Jared Sussman Hey there.
Pete Slauson Hey, Caitlin.
Jared Sussman Well, we have an answer.
Maureen Hey!
Jared Sussman Okay.
Maureen Okay.
Jared Sussman Do you want to restate what your guesses are?
Maureen Okay, my original guess was 50 bees.
Jared Sussman 50 bees.
Maureen Mine was seven.
Maureen And Carl's, my husband's was five. It would take 67 bees to carry a kid.
Congratulations, Maureen. I can't handle this.
This is amazing. This is the best news I've had in a while. Well, Katelyn, you can still lord it over Carl, who-
This is true.
I was closer than Carl.
And we know someone who guessed three.
Yeah.
I was much closer than her.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think we were all a little low except you.
Except me?
Yeah.
It's my perfection.
Now you're just spiking the football, Maureen.
Come on, Maureen.
I know.
Act like you've been there before.
Don't go in the fridge.