Stuff You Should Know - What makes a genius?

Episode Date: April 27, 2010

When you hear the word 'genius,' names like Einstein and Mozart probably spring to mind. Defining what makes them geniuses, however, is much more complicated. Josh and Chuck discuss the many theories about genius in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Ahoy and welcome to the Love Boat. I'm Julie, your cruise director. With me is always is Isaac your bartender. How you doing? I just did the little-

Double guns. Double guns. Looking good. You're a genius. Thank you. For coming up with that. Thank you, you're a genius too, Chuck. Thank you.

Do you wanna know how we can call each other geniuses without cracking up? Well, I'm cracking up on the inside, but sure. Because we have no idea what constitutes a genius, do we? Right. We like to throw the word around as you were pointing out earlier. Oh, he's a genius.

Or he's a socialist, or he's a fascist. He's a genius. You should see the bathroom he designed. He's genius, you know? Yeah, it definitely is a word that gets slapped around a lot. But the way that we use the word genius now actually is kind of a throwback to its original meaning. In the Greco-Roman era, the word genius.

Back when everyone was wrestling? Yeah. Like you could be a genius at wrestling. Sure. Really what it described was somebody's natural enthusiasm, inclination towards certain activities. Not just your abilities, but how revved up you were. So somebody who was pretty good at bathroom design

would have been considered a genius at bathroom design. It's like the word vintage. People always think vintage just means old. But I think vintage specifically means like characterized by that person's best work. Like a tailor, their best five pairs of pants they made. Really?

I think so. I just learned that just now. I might be wrong. Thanks to you. Are we picking up Jerry's laugh because we're in a two foot by two foot space right now? Yeah, this room is not genius. No, it stinks of volatile organic compounds.

Well, we should say what they actually moved us for one day into an even smaller office. Like the Seinfelds, remember when Costanza, they kept moving him around because they didn't like him. We're eventually gonna end up in a storage closet like he did. I think we've arrived there. Yeah.

I'm sure it's lovely. It's just not for podcasting. Well, I'm a little lightheaded. So if this goes oddly, that's why it's the paint ears and the airplane glue. That's airplane glue is genius. It is. Yeah, we were talking about genius for some reason,

weren't we? Yeah, because this is about genius. Oh yeah, okay. Oh, so yeah, I was saying the original idea of genius was enthusiasm, throwing yourself into something what you were into, right? And then, thanks to a guy named Francis Galton, who, he was a pretty smart guy himself,

but he had a long history of just kind of missing the big picture with his ideas. He came up with eugenics. Sure. He was the first one to start attributing genius to intellect, he kind of narrowed it a little more. And eventually, this led to our idea of genius being quantifiable, e.g. through IQ tests.

Or G, which we'll get to. Nice foreshadowing. That was awful. Yeah, I'll just go ahead and say, I don't know how quantifiable it is. Well, it's not. And there's actually two pretty big reasons why quantifying genius is virtually impossible,

at least with our current understanding of the mind. And they are. They are. Well, the first one's pretty obvious. Genius is a very subjective thing. Some people think it's like an IQ higher than 140 or 175, I've heard. Which, you know, that's just a smart quantifying.

Quantify? Quantifier? And I'm clearly no genius. And the other thing is, like you said, it's a big picture thing. And science and medical inquiries, that kind of thing, is all about the detail. So it's really hard to analyze and study.

It's like studying intercessory prayer. How do you study that? How do you quantify happiness or prayer or genius, you know? Our colleague, Tracy V. Wilson. I like how she put it. Yeah, she did a good job just kind of getting rid of the crud that's often associated with genius. And just, if you have like crazy hair

and a big mustache and you know math, you're a genius. You got rid of all that. And for the purposes of this podcast, we'll adopt her description, right? Agreed. Which was that a genius is an extraordinarily intelligent person who breaks new ground with discoveries, inventions, or works of art, right?

Because you can't just be a really smart person. You have to do something with it to truly be a genius. That's what makes a genius. It's not just intelligence. It's intelligence with creative energy. Well, the creative part is huge and we'll get to that. But it's, she goes on to say, and I agree that

they usually will change the way we look at the world or at least the way people in whatever field they're in, look at their field. They make a difference, they're difference makers. Have you ever heard of a guy named William James Sittis? No. He reportedly had the highest IQ in history. Around higher than Ask Marilyn of Parade Magazine.

As a matter of fact, yes. Ask Marilyn says hers is 230. Yeah, I want to know. She claims the highest ever measured. This guy supposedly was 250. Really? Yeah. Did he do more than a QA at the end of Parade Magazine?

Sadly, no. Really? Okay, so let me give you a little background on Sittis, okay? He was 18 months old when he started reading the New York Times. Okay, so far so good. All right. At two, he taught himself Latin.

Three, he taught himself Greek. Wow. He could speak more than 40 languages by the time he was an adult. Okay. He graduated cum laude at 16 from Harvard and became the youngest professor ever in the history of Rice University.

I imagine he was like 17 or something. Okay. He was a young guy. Wow. And then within, I think about a year at Rice, he dropped his position and spent the rest of his life working like menial jobs. He went from job to job, just doing normal labor.

So he's not a genius though. And he would not qualify as a genius by this definition. You have a 250 IQ, you're clearly a prodigy. You're an incredibly brilliant person. But if you don't contribute to humanity, what are you worth? You're like a Buddhist monk who goes and spends your life meditating in a cave.

We get so much email about that. Curse you. Sorry. But that's the point. And geniuses are incredibly valuable in society. I don't remember what podcast it was in. We were talking about Malthus and the idea that the larger the world population,

the more incidents of the births of geniuses happens. Right? And then the more geniuses you have, the further a long society is helped by leaps and bounds. Right. Well, if you think Mensa is a quantifier, then there's about three million geniuses in the US. But I don't buy that.

Right. Because Mensa standards, they accept people who, well, it's not just IQ, but standardized intelligence tests. Right. They accept people who score within the top 2% of those. So if you just extend that with basic math, 2% of the population in the US is like 6 million people, right? And then 30 million worldwide.

But I don't buy it anyway, because they don't even count the creative element. You know, Gina Davis is in Mensa. Yeah. Everyone always says that. And anytime you hear about Mensa, people go, you know Gina Davis is in Mensa. I think we had this conversation.

You brought up Renny Harlan and... Yeah, the pirate movie they made. Let's play the clip, shall we? No. OK, we won't. She already just... Let's get back to genius. She just spit baloney out of her mouth.

She's sorry. She shouldn't be eating baloney anyway. I did her a favor. You're right. So you want to talk about the brain? Is that where we're going? Well, let's get to it. I mean, like, if you're going to go in search of genius

with or without Leonard Nimoy, you are going to start looking in the brain, right? I love that show. The best, it's awesome. It's so super 70s. So let's go into the brain. Clearly we're going to find our answers here, right? Maybe.

No. No. But we should talk about it. The cerebral cortex, as we all know, is the largest and outermost part of your brain. And this is where the higher functions, like thought and reasoning happen, as opposed to lower functions,

like just basic survival, that kind of thing. Right. And the most basic stuff is found in your brainstem, which is how Mike the Chicken was able to live for so long. That's right. The cortex, the cerebral cortex is divided into lobes. And within those lobes, there are regions that help you handle specific tasks.

And we do know it has a big impact on how we think. But it's a little tricky to study, because one reason that Tracy pointed out, which I thought was really valid, is to get an MRI done. You're lying there in a tube. They can't actively study how your brain operates on a day-to-day basis while you're functioning.

Right, which is the great failing of the Wonder Machine. Yeah, I bet you they can solve that one day. Oh, they will, definitely. And by they, I mean people other than you, me, or Jerry. Some genius, perhaps. Precisely. But she did point out a cool study from Cal Irvine in 2004. And they did pinpoint that the volume of gray matter

in parts of the cerebral cortex has a greater impact on your overall intelligence than how large your brain is. Because we talked about that in the Einstein thing, right? Yeah, the gray matter, oh man, I know the white matter transmits. The gray matter is like problem solving, I believe. And white matter is used to transmit information. Right, but Einstein's brain was smaller

than your average bear's brain. It was, remember we talked about what happened to his brain? And what they finally found, the big distinction they found in his brain that was abnormal was that his parietal lobe was almost missing this fissure within it that most people have. So he had a very narrow fissure, and they- It was also wider than most.

So he had a big parietal lobe, which is responsible for sensory input, but it also handles things like mathematics, unsurprisingly enough. So he had a big parietal lobe with a small fissure in between it, which they theorized or meant that his parietal lobe could communicate with itself more efficiently,

more effectively. And a genius is born. By 26, Joshers, he proved that atoms exist. He figured out that light behaves as a particle and a wave. He developed the theory of relativity and the famous equation equals MC squared. By 26, where were you by that age? I wish I could remember, Chuck.

Right, me too. You were following fish around or something like that? Wide spread panic. Gotcha. Yeah, I was, I think I was living in New Jersey at the time, but I'd goofed around enough in Athens. I wasn't coming up with theories of relativity. Nor was I.

No, I've thrown a lot of darts. Some other interesting aspects of the brain is that it actually develops, it goes from thicker to thinner as we age. So it goes from undeveloped to the cerebral cortex thickening. Right. And then after adolescence, or maybe during adolescence.

I think during, yeah. It begins to thin, right? And what a study in nature, I think 2006, found was that kids whose brains thicken faster in youth tended to have higher IQs. Right. And the reason that this could be significant is that they, we tend to find intelligence

as an inherited trait or what appears to be an inherited trait. So this is a physical example of how intelligence could be inherited through organic structure of the brain. Right. So that's intelligence, but that's not genius. So we need to talk about the difference. But at the same time,

we can't even really describe intelligence. Yeah, that's true. Consider, let's talk about the IQ test, all right? Okay. The, our big arousal for the IQ test began in the mid 1920s. Right. When a psychologist named Katherine Morris Cox

published the early mental traits of 300 geniuses. And basically she went back from, and it was exhaustive. She used like 1500 sources and studied the work, the traits, the contributions of 300, actually 301, I don't know why she called it 300, but 301 great minds. Right. And then basically gave them an IQ test based on this

and came up and the highest rated one was a Johann Goethe. Very nice. Thank you. Did you know he had a theory of evolution like 75 years before Darwin? Really? Yeah. And he came up with human chemistry.

He was a smart guy, but he clocked in at number one at 250 or 210. Wow. Not bad. Sorry, not bad at all. But as his book came out and became, you know, the public became aware of it. It was like, hey, we didn't know about these IQ tests.

This is awesome. We can start measuring how smart people are. Right. Ironically, the earliest IQ tests were used to measure mental handicaps in children. Really? Yeah. But then they started figuring out,

hey, you can use this for gifted kids to find the gifted kids as well. And the Stanford psychologist mixed with the first guy who came up with the IQ test Benet, the two together formed the Stanford Benet IQ test that we used today. I know I've heard that. Have you ever had yours done?

No. I refuse to. I never will. I took one at one point, but it wasn't like the standard test. It was just some hack-need version. And I scored really high. That's the reason I know that it was pretty much BS.

No. Because I'm kind of smart, but not anything like I scored. I didn't, I don't put any stock into it. But Chuck, I guess that kind of underscores a really good criticism of IQ tests is that they may be standardized. They may be widely accepted,

but we aren't 100% sure that they measure everything. Actually, I wouldn't even say we're 90% sure they measure everything. No way. They measure mathematical aptitude, language abilities. What else? Well, yeah, sure, along with memory and spatial ability. Okay, but is that everything?

Well, no, in any standardized test, the word itself kind of says it all, it's standardized. Right. No standardized tests that you give different people can really tell you the same thing about all those different people. No, I can't. The very questions that the test asks.

Wow. These pain themes are really getting on top of me. The very questions that these tests ask actually can be biased. I heard of, I think an SAT, I hope it wasn't an SAT question. It's a little too easy, but some sort of standardized test,

it asks the question, which of these places would you go to buy milk? And it was like grocery store, convenience store, dairy or something like that. Well, you can buy milk at all those, Josh. Well, you can, but I mean, like for kids out in the sticks where there isn't a grocery store, but there's a convenience store,

that's where they go to buy their milk, but they miss the question because the answer was supposed to be grocery store. It's a pretty dumb example, but it's accurate. I mean, the very people who write the tests are biased in some ways. And IQ tests have been shown to skew against certain ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

Yeah, sure, same essay, any standardized test does. So boo. Boo to that is what I say. Okay. And the other thing too is that geniuses don't, like people can generally consider genius, don't necessarily score well on these tests anyway. No, that's true too.

So throw it out the door is what I say. I will say though, just while, we might as well give a little information on the IQ test. The standard score is 100 with the deviation of 16. So the average score of the general population will be between 84 and 116. Right, bell curve. Right, but no one knows what over that indicates a genius.

A widely accepted number is 140, but somebody just made that up at some point in time. Well, like I said, I read 175. And that's not to say that a really high score doesn't mean you're a genius. Like it could mean you're a genius. The IQ test is capturing something probably, but it's not capturing the whole picture,

I think is the point we're trying to make right here, right? Not at all. So let's leave the IQ test in our dust. Okay, maybe we should go with Steinberg's, I'm sorry, Sternberg's triark theory. I kind of like that. Yeah, there are some competing explanations of what components there are to intellect, right?

Yeah, Sternberg said that he thought human intelligence includes a few things. Thus the triark, creative intelligence. So the ability to generate new ideas, interesting ideas. Analytical intelligence, so you can examine facts, draw conclusions, that's pretty good. And practical intelligence, which means you can fit into your environment,

which I don't know about that. I don't know about that, yeah, but. I disagree, man. I went back and re-read that a couple of times and Tracy points out that there are a lot of critics of, practical intelligence. Everybody has that to a certain degree, and does that really count toward being a genius?

I disagree, I've met some people who, well, I mean, think about it, it's the classic example of somebody who's very book smart, but you should never let walk down an alley by themselves. And I've known many. Or by himself or herself. Many, many people like that. Sure, and then there's the super street smart ratso riso,

you know, who can make his way, and Tracy Midnight Cowboy. I'm walking here. Exactly. Who can make his way in the world, but you know, would probably do horribly on an IQ test. Sure. The very fact that there are those different polar extremes

means to me that there's something to that. That is an aspect of intellect. Right, and you remember I mentioned G earlier? I didn't want to leave people hanging in there, but the IQ test, they have come up with a unit, and they call that unit for intelligence G. Right, and that's actually IQ tests are under a larger umbrella of what's called psychometrics,

which is basically the study of an attempt of the measurement of intelligence, right? C. Yeah. Back in the 70s, there was a statistician named Carl Yorskog, Yoryskog, weird. And he figured out a way to measure intelligence that basically led to the appearance

of three different kinds of intelligence while we're on theories of intelligence, right? Okay, he came up with fluid intelligence, right? Yes. Okay, and this is basically coming up with new ideas on your own to solve problems. Crystallized intelligence is understanding already established techniques of problem solving

and being able to identify which technique will best work to solve a particular problem. Okay. And then there's visual spatial reasoning, which is kind of an aptitude at creating mental images in your head to solve problems. It's a very important part of mathematics, actually. Right.

So we have Yoryskog's ideas. We've got, what's your guy's name? Sternberg's? Hey, not my guy. Let's talk about Howard Gardner. And he has the feel good, we're all geniuses, kind of theory, right? Yeah, multiple intelligence.

He thinks there's seven types. Linguistic, logical, mathematic, musical, bodily, kinetic, I'm sorry, kinesthetic, spatial, which is always in there, intrapersonal and interpersonal. But that's like you said, it's a little too broad, is what a lot of critics say. It is. There's always a critic of each of these, it seems like.

One person comes out with something and people say, oh, I think that sounds good. And then another part of the camp says, no, I don't agree at all. Right. Isn't that the way with everything they've took? Yeah, pretty much. Mountain Dew Code Red is the greatest drink ever.

No, it's not regular Mountain Dews, way better. Good point. And then I guess another hallmark of intelligence, something that can be measured, is geniuses aptitude toward social awkwardness. Yeah, a lot of them are generally known as quirky, odd characters. They make up friends, as John Nash did.

Yeah, absolutely. Einstein was sort of a wacky guy. Yeah, he liked to stick his tongue out, he was zany. Yeah, that's what people always pointed to that picture. See, look how crazy he was. Got anyone else? Well, let's talk about studying that. Yes, Josh, a Purdue study, Purdue U,

saw 423 students, gifted students, and suggested that they were more susceptible to being bullied. So they're little Mammy Pambies, I guess. A little bit. Also, there was a study out of, was it Stanford? That it was a 20-year study, actually, that ended in 1940, that actually gave children

aptitude tests and personal adjustment tests, and found that there was a negative correlation between IQ and social adjustment. Right. So basically, it's quantifying what we all already know, that if you're a smart kid, you're going to eat mud several times in your life. I never ate mud.

That's why my IQ score was BS. Well, one thing that geniuses have in common, I think we can all agree on, that you need to have to be a genius, and not just smart, just creative intelligence. And high-waisted pants. Ha ha ha ha. Creative intelligence and high-waisted pants,

this is where it all comes together, to me. Right, yeah. I mean, when we talked about this earlier, like you can't, it's not good enough to just be smart, then you're just a really intelligent person. The leap between intelligence and genius is bridged by creative prowess. Yeah, that's how you break new ground.

Right. Why did you point at me? Because prowess was a horrible word. I like that. Thanks, man. The thing is though, Joshers, is that, this is another thing that you can't quantify and study necessarily.

So once again, it's hard to kind of pinpoint creativity and imagination. Although, the researchers do think that creative people have less latent inhibition, and I completely agree with that. Right, yeah, we've talked about that with the thinking cap episode. Was that it?

Yeah, where schizophrenics have low latent inhibition, and they take this extra stimuli, and their brain constructs hallucinations out of it. The idea was that creative geniuses who have low latent inhibition take this additional stimuli and use it in novel, creative ways. Right. Yeah, that's one way of looking at it.

There's also a quantifiable method, or a couple of them, to determine how much creativity a genius has lent to the world, right? Yeah. It was in that article, that time article you sent me. I thought that was kind of lame, to be honest. It is lame, but it's funny that this is the level that we're at to try to survey genius, right?

Yeah, was this the guy who wrote the book, Simon, Simonton? Yeah. Yeah, Dean Keith, almost said David Keith. What a great actor. What a chin. Dean Keith Simonton wrote a book called Genius 101, Creators, Leaders, Prodigies,

and he came up with a little notion that add up the number of times someone has been in a publication, has been cited in a professional publication in a field, or the number of times a composer's work maybe has been performed or recorded, and I just think that's stupid. I think there's one that's worse,

and that's counting encyclopedia references. That's awful. Because I think you can be a genius who is undiscovered. You may have written a thousand great compositions of music that you never show the world. No. Well, then isn't that the same thing as just holding menial jobs?

That's virtually the same thing as holding that stuff in your head. You have to share it with the world to be a genius, or else you're just some smart schmo. I don't know if I agree with that. Well, but I don't know if I do either. I think you can still be a genius in and of yourself. You can be a genius in a vacuum.

But not considered a genius by the populace. Right. Okay. Who wants to own you, you know? I guess that's a difference. The difference I see in the guy who wrote, or Gal maybe who wrote several great compositions that were never discovered,

and the guy who just got the menial jobs, is he didn't seem to have any creative genius going on. Yeah, he was able to just learn. He was book learning, good at book learning. Although, if you are trying to come up with a measure of creative genius, then counting encyclopedia entries does work, and it's a way to go. Right.

Malcolm Gladwell, should we talk about him? No. He is of the belief that, along with Galton, I think you were talking about with Eugenics, that practice is really what leads to genius. Hard work in practice, in practice, in practice. Which, I don't know about that either. What do you think?

I told you I'm not talking about Gladwell. Oh, really? All right. Moving on then. And those, well, fine, forget Gladwell. Let's talk about Erickson. Anders Erickson is a rival. They call him a friendly rival,

which I thought was kind of funny, of the Simonton guy I was talking about. They're conflicts end in tickle fights. Right. It kind of reminded me of the Goodwill Hunting, like Robin Williams and that other guy. Right. They were friendly rivals.

But he is popular for the 10-year rule, which has been around for a long time, but that's a notion that it takes 10 years, or 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to master a complex endeavor, and Gladwell is a believer in that. So Chuck, there's a guy named David Gallinson, too, who's kind of come up with at least a qualification

of creative genius, right? I didn't look him either. You didn't? No. Well, doesn't that kind of underscore, like, where the field of genius or intelligence research is right now, that we've just poo-pooed absolutely every sector?

Well, it's all over the place. Yeah. But yeah, say what he says, because I want to prove that he's one. He says that there's, actually, now he says there's three kinds. Originally, he said there's two types of innovators. There's conceptual innovators who think

in bold, dramatic steps, which Einstein would fall into. And do you know that among very smart people, he's considered kind of a flash in the pan? Really? Yeah, think about it. He did everything that he was going to do by age 26. After that, he just went around canoeing with Walter Matthow.

As Walter Matthow? Same thing. Right. And then there's experimental innovators, and they learn through trial and error over it. This would be the Thomas Edison's of the genius world. And then everybody started shouting at David Gallerson. Then he said, shut up, shut up,

and went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea that genius can also be expressed in a continuum over time, throughout a long lifetime of great contribution and work. That's my problem with it. What, everybody shouted at him, and he went back and was like, there you go. He was like, well, you can either get everything

done really early, or you can produce all your great work later in life. And they were like, but what about people do it all their life? He went, well, yeah, you can do that too. It's like so lame. So should we just list out some geniuses throughout history that people generally consider genius?

I didn't like this list either. But we don't like anything about this one, do we? George Washington's number 45? And who's number one? It starts at number two, and if one's Einstein, I'm going to literally eat this list. One was Einstein. I didn't copy paste all of them.

We have geniuses like Tesla's three, DaVinci, number two, Isaac Newton, number four, Hawking, of course, Michelangelo, Archimedes, Josh is eating his list. Warren Buffett is on there, not bad. Sure, they had to round it out and make it as approachable to all the readers they could. Aristotle, Picasso, Niels Bohr, Jefferson, Plato, Churchill, Benjamin Franklin,

I think I'd agree with that one. Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, Michael Faraday, Chuck Darwin, Rene Descartes, or is it Desplain, DePlain, Desplain? Descartes. Gary Kasparov, and I think Bobby Fisher was on there, both chess champions, I don't know. They're considered geniuses.

It's all subjective, though. It is completely subjective. I think we're going to end this with this observation. Genius is like pornography. It's impossible to fully define, but we know it when we see it, right, Chuck? Who was that? Souter.

Bruce Souter? Bruce Jenner. If you want to learn more about genius, I think there's more than just this article. There's a bunch of good genius articles on the site at howstuffworks.com. And there's also a bunch of articles on people that we've mentioned,

because we're doing a whole new series on painters, right? Yeah, we are. Also, in Van Gogh. Nice. You can type it in the handy search bar, of course. Since I said that, it means it's time for listener mail. Chuck, first.

Before we do anything. Before anything? Yes. Okay. We should probably plug our new Facebook page. Yeah. We were on Facebook for a while. This is nothing new to us,

but we streamlined our stuff. We had a fan page and a regular page, and it was always strange. We consolidated, and we're actually active on Facebook now. Yes, we are. So we... Yes, we are.

We have a, our brand new Facebook page is stuff you should know. Just type that into these handy search bar at Facebook. Or I think it's facebook.com slash stuff you should know, maybe. I'm not positive, but it's easy to find. And also, buddy, we're tweeting. You are tweeting.

I have tweeted twice. Yeah, you're 68 and you're tweeting. I know, I feel like a modern child. Right, if you want to follow us on Twitter, we have our Twitter name as S-Y-S-K podcast. Right? Yeah, so that would be at... Isn't that how they do it?

Yeah, look at you go. S-Y-S-K podcast. And we'll be saying funny things as well as sending out links to cool stuff. And, you know, we're active now. That is true. So check us out, will you? Yes.

On with the show? Yes. All right, Josh, Listener Mail. For goodness sakes, Listener Mail. I'm going to read a couple of quickies here from a young boy named Sam. And from a trucker named Annette. Annette took us to task.

Oh, no, what? I will read it first. Annette says, Hi, Chuck and Josh. I am a over the road truck driver and love your podcast. Over the road? That's what she says. I would love for you guys to come along with me

into the 21st century regarding truck drivers. I've been driving for almost 13 years and guess what, I'm a woman. In fact, I have two sons, y'all's age. When you talk about truck drivers, as in the McDonald's podcast, you always talk about big burly guys. Well, I may be big and probably more surly than burly,

but I'm definitely not a guy. Don't forget us lady drivers. Nice. Love, love, love the show. And how could we forget? I mean, large Marge was a huge factor in Kiwi's big adventure. And that was Annette.

That was Annette. And I told her that I would read this as our pennants. Annette, I'm making the blow your horn sign for the tractor trailer. So if you're hearing this right now, to your horn. Awesome. Hope she didn't just cause an accident. This is from Sam.

And Sam was just another cute little kid, and I like these. I saw that. Lots of caps. Yeah. Hi, Chuck and Josh. I'm Sam, blank, because I'm using your last name substitute. I'm 11 years old. You guys helped me get through many boring tasks

like dog poop pickup, my least favorite chore. Sure. I think it's mine too, actually. That in the cat box. I just stopped as an adult. I don't pick up dog poop anymore. You just don't go into the yard? I just watch where I'm walking in the yard.

OK. I think the funniest podcast was the Twinkie podcast. You guys make me laugh in my bed when I listen, also in the supermarket. So he listens when he goes to sleep and when he's grocery shopping. Or I guess when his mom is grocery shopping, or dad, or two dads.

I don't know, kids today are pretty independent. Yeah, you're right. I think you guys are the funniest people in the world. That is true. I have a few suggestions like, what do's cat got your tongue mean? And other phrases mean. You love improper English.

I do. Also, riot control. That really cracked me up. I was an 11-year-old kid, know what riot control is. And Legos. So he wants to know about cat got your tongue, Legos, and riot control, and trading cards, and football. So could you please, please read my shout out on the air?

And here's my shout out. And this is in all caps. I told you, mom, I would get my email read on air. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. So that's from Sam W. And he said, I thought Josh looked like Chuck and Chuck looked like Josh. But that changed when I saw your pictures on the site. Yeah, we get that a lot.

Yeah. Well, not that I look like you and you look like me, but that we look like different people. Oh, OK. That's always the case with the voice. Yeah. I'm much uglier than you would think. That is not true.

You are a lovely, handsome man. Thank you. All right, well, thanks, Sam. Keep on shopping. And Annette, keep on trucking. If you have an interesting email that you want to roll the dice and see if we'll read it on the air, cost you nothing in this digital age.

You can send us an electronic mail. Just address it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready.

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