How To Do Everything - Gum, Frogs and Fred Armisen

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

On today’s episode from the archives, Fred Armisen helps a grad student set up her wifi router. Tips on how to keep your milk fresh using nature’s little creatures, and how to tie your hair up stress-free. Plus, we finally answer the burning question: does gum really stay in your stomach for 7 years?You can email your burning questions to [e-mail] 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 show outtakes, extended guest interviews, and a chance to play an exclusive WW+ quiz game with Peter! 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

Hey, it's Ian and Mike. This is How to Do Everything, and this is one of our classic shows, an archive show. We think it holds up. I guess you'll decide. So I don't know if you saw this video going around this week. This father is putting his daughter's hair in a ponytail in a very unconventional way. He's using a vacuum cleaner, specifically the hose attachment. He's sucking her hair into the hose attachment of a vacuum cleaner. And the best part is he has a rubber. band, a hair band, already on the hose attachment. So once all the hair is sucked in, he just pops it off, pulls off the hose, and boom, ponytail. Ponytail in a matter of seconds.

We wanted to try this out, so our producer Blythe has volunteered her head and hair. Yeah, we're here with the big industrial vacuum cleaner we got from the radio station. Blight, are you ready to go? I'm not particular about my hair, but this could be disastrous. So you're standing next to a shop vac, which has a hose. and that little attachment, that tiny little hard plastic attachment where your hair is about to be sucked into. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you think this is going to suck? Oh. Are you nervous? You seem really tentative about this. I mean, I'm on board. Essentially, you just asked if she was nervous, and she said, I agreed to do this. Right. Two unrelated facts.

Right. No, I am nervous. Okay. Miles is standing by. Miles turn on the vacuum cleaner. Yep. Can you start slowly, though? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to... Okay, it's... Okay, yeah, it's not that bad, unless you didn't start.

I just did a little bit. Okay, it's fine. He really had, like, one strand of hair in there. But it was, that's comforting. I mostly was vacuuming your sweater. I felt that, I felt that. Here we go. It's okay so far.

It just feels really weird. You almost have too much hair for this nozzle. So I'm afraid, I don't know if I'm getting... all of it in here, and there. Oh, my God, you look beautiful. It looks pretty good. It looks like a ponytail with bangs coming out. You have too much hair, I think, for that vacuum attachment.

We need a bigger attachment. I think this was actually what I had requested at my senior prom. Yeah, a lot of tendrils. I wanted a lot of tendrils. Yeah, that's what this is. Turn around, let's see. But most of your hair is in a pretty good ponytail. Yeah.

I think we call this the Blythe. Did it hurt at any point? You know, it didn't. Although I will say when I requested the vacuum, he said the last person who used it tried to vacuum up some weird liquid. So I'm now wondering, like, what the repercussions of this are. Maybe that weird liquid was moose.

Mm-hmm. Or bleach. This is How to Do Everything. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian on today's show, how to keep your milk fresh and how to name your Wi-Fi router. But first... We should let you know that this segment you're about to hear, the carry rule applies to it. That's the name for somebody who wrote in and told us that we need to warn you before a segment is too gross.

So I swallowed a piece of gum recently, and I've always heard that it lives inside of you for seven years. It takes seven years to digest. I don't know if that's true. So joining us now is our resident doctor, Dr. Peter Lechman. Dr. Lechman, is this true? So it sort of depends on what you mean. So you eat a piece of gum, and it's got different components to it. There's flavoring, there's sort of seasoning type of stuff,

and then there's the actual gum base, which is the mushy thing that you chew on. Your body immediately digest off all the flavoring and all the additives, but you're still left with this gum base. And this gum base will stick around. It's very difficult to digest. It would theoretically stick around forever if it stuck around, except that nothing sticks around. So everything passes through.

Now, there have been cases in the, even documented in the medical literature, of kids getting clogged up by their gum. So this has actually happened. There's three really good case reports that I found in the literature of, constipated kids who, these kids were swallowing five to seven pieces of gum a day. All right. Having chronic constipation actually got to the point where they were in a hospital, having procedures done to try to unplug them, and literally masses of gum the size of baseballs

were clogging up the sort of last mile. So if I'm a normal kid... Daily pooper? No, okay. So, yeah. And I swallow, you know, a piece of gum from time to time. That's no different than swallowing a chewed-up piece of food in terms of how it's going to stay in my body. It's exactly right.

So it's like eating a kernel of corn. You can watch it come out 36 hours later just with your gum, just like your gum would. Really, you brought up corn in this already gross conversation? Well, I was thinking about corn races. I don't know if you had enough boys in your family, but in a family full of boys, you had to find ways to occupy yourself. So one sport that we had were called corn races. Wait, you're kidding. No.

Do you know what you call the winner? No. The colonel. So the idea is the first one to get the corn? The first one to see the corn wins. But anyway, you could have the same game with multicolored gumballs, and you could have a race, but they would all come out. So I think we should keep this a secret from our children.

I think we should continue to tell them not to swallow gum because kind of stupid to swallow undigestable objects. But from a purely medical perspective, the odds of anything untoward happening are really, really unlikely. Well, Colonel Leckman, thank you so much for your time. I think I'm going to change my badge. Hey, if you have questions for us, we have answers for you, potentially. You can get us any how-to question at our email address. That's how-to at npr.

Again, how-to at npr.org. Again, how-to at npr.org. That's probably enough. Code Switch is one of Tom Magazine's top 100 podcast of all time, baby. Mm-hmm. They called our show, quote, a kind of cultural compass, never preachy, always curious, about the roots of inequality in people's lived experiences.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm biased, but we couldn't have put it better ourselves. And we are digging into all this every week. So make sure you catch the next episode of Code Switch on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the worst things you can encounter inside your refrigerator is spoiled milk. It's happened probably to everybody. But we have a solution.

On the line with us now is Albert Lebedev. He's a researcher at Moscow State University. So, Albert, we understand there's this old wives tale in Russia about how to keep your milk fresh. Well, I would say this is more Finnish style. In Finnish culture, they keep frogs in milk to keep the milk good. Now, you said they keep frogs, frogs in their milk in Finland. For Russia, it is not a custom, but we used to have a knowledge that if you have a frog in your well, it means that this water is acceptable for consumption.

That seems like, to me, that seems like a reason not to drink the water, or the milk, if I found a frog in it. Well, it's up to you. Anyway. Well, so why did they put frogs in their milk? What's going on there? They didn't do it intentionally. Simply, if they saw a frog, it means that you could drink this water. So now I can tell you absolutely definitely that the reason is that.

secretion of some peptides because frogs they had to fight microorganisms and the only weapon they have is this secretion so they secrete peptides and those peptides are absolutely fantastic compounds because it can be let's say anti-bacterial okay antifungal anti-tumor antiviral it can be analgetic and so and so force. So really it's wonderful protection of frogs. So let's suppose that you have this frog in your milk and it secretes the peptides

which are responsible for killing germs, microbes. Right. So that's why they keep milk as it was at the beginning for a couple of days. Well, Albert, shouldn't I just put this, I mean, couldn't I just put this frog? in my mouth, and just keep it there? I think it's a bit restless, I would say.

The activity of these peptides is enormous, so it's not good idea. Yeah. However, if you do some sort of dilution, I think it's fine. Well, if you, well, what particular intention do you have when you are going to

put it in your mouth? Well, it would seem like if these frogs with all these, you know, various peptides that are fighting things, antibacterial, antifungal. Why aren't we putting frogs in all of our food? But sometimes you don't need to kill anybody. I guess that's true. So, would it, I mean, would it be a good idea for me to grab a frog and leave them in, you know, my gallon of milk? I think you have enough preservatives and conservants in your milk nowadays.

Right. So you don't need to use something like that. And, in fact, this will be the drugs, the pharmaceuticals of the next generation, because those peptides can beat all the diseases, in fact. Yeah, all the things you mentioned, you know, antibacterial, antifungal, antitumor, I think you said. Right, right, right. Is there anything else like this in nature that is a cure for that many things? Frankly speaking, yes, this cocktail is something very extraordinary.

Because, as I mentioned, this is the only weapon. So, really, if you disturb the frog, it tries to secret as much as possible to protect. Even, for example, if a bird takes a frog, frog secretes a special peptide, which cause vomit reflex in the bird, and it cannot swallow the frog. Wow. So a lot of interesting things. Yeah. Well, Albert, thank you so much.

This has been fascinating. Yeah, yes. My pleasure. We got a note from Katie. She's a grad student setting up her Wi-Fi router, and she needs it to have a unique name. Fred Armisen. Do you have any ideas? School admin, like, so, you know, like, say, school admin, period.

This way it looks like they'll never know what's her. You know what I mean? Like it looks so boring and so like, well, that's obviously. That's if she wants secrecy. I don't know if that's her deal. You know, that's secure because it's just like, we don't want to have anything to. But that might not be what she's looking for.

It sounds to me like she actually wants it to look, sound kind of cool. I think she wants to express herself through the name of this wireless router. I would say, how about CBS fan, 2011. Yeah, that sounds good. So they'd be like, who is this person who loves CBS and why 2011? Yeah, okay, a college student who loves CBS. He loves CBS. What a great network.

And she's just like an open fan. I will say that in our building, there's one that comes up called Cat Party. And whenever people come over and they need to get on our wireless, they're like, oh, we assume you're cat party, Ian. Well, that's not us. Yeah. Well, I'll say this. If she's looking for a true, if she wrote, did she know that she was writing to me or any expert? Yeah, just any expert. If it's me and she really does want something, I would say, and this is a real one, Fred's best friend. Okay, I like that. Yeah. Fred's best friend is one word. That's nice.

Maybe she'll take that one. That does it for this week's show. What we learned today, Mike? Well, I learned that, I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I wonder if you could keep different things fresh by just putting different animals in them. I think you have to weigh the surprise of finding the animal in your food versus the freshness factor. Like, for example, if you're going to have like a bowl of cat and crunch, because that stuff goes soggy right away. But what if you put a cat in it? Yeah, Cat and Crunch. How to Do Everything is produced by Hina Shravastava with 10.

technical direction from Lorna White. Get us your questions at how-to at npr.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks. Thanks.