Ask A Genius 934: A badass with fruits and a knife
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/10
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right, I eat fruit with a knife because I’m a badass, or maybe because I don’t want to break off my old teeth.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m skeptical of the badass.
Rosner: Say again?
Jacobsen: I’m skeptical of the badass.
Rosner: I’m sitting here with a knife, just cutting on a peach. I don’t even use a spoon because spoons are impractical for a melon. I just slice it with a knife, then I stab it with a knife, and then I eat it off the knife like a Green Beret.
Jacobsen: Is it a butter knife or a steak knife?
Rosner: I don’t know. It’s this serrated knife. All our good knives fell apart. We’ve only got a big, long, serrated knife that’s good, and then this is our short, good, serrated knife. So, I don’t know.
Jacobsen: What makes eating fruit with a knife make you a badass?
Rosner: Because I’m not even using a fork or a spoon. I’m sitting here with a bladed instrument of death, and I’m just jamming it into my mouth with fruit on it, which is just —
Jacobsen: Quote, bladed instrument of death, unquote.
Rosner: Yeah.
Jacobsen: it’s much easier to kill with a knife than with a fork or a spoon.
Rosner: I’m either too tired, or that is a ridiculous statement.
Jacobsen: Okay.
Rosner: No, it’s completely true that if you took a list through the history of knife deaths versus spoon deaths, the ratio has to be well over 1,000 to 1.
Jacobsen: That’s like calling a candle a rounded knob of murder.
Rosner: And the candle is scented peach.
Jacobsen: It doesn’t make that much sense. It doesn’t fit.
Rosner: I don’t know. A spoon may be the easiest way to kill with a spoon — or at least maim — to scoop somebody’s eye out.
Jacobsen: You won’t scoop someone’s eye out, Rick. You’re not Jackie Chan.
Rosner: No, but I’m saying that the spoon is a terrible murder weapon. I guess you could stab with it. You could jam it into somebody’s mouth, and then you could hit the handle with the heel of your hand and jam it into the back of their throat, which would — I don’t know if it would kill them, but it would certainly injure them. One way to give someone a lobotomy is to use a little spoon-like tool and go over the top of the eye.
Jacobsen: Yes, they call it trepanation.
Rosner: Yeah, well, it’s a kind of trepanation. Trepanation is drilling a hole in the skull to let the evil spirits out or remove clotted blood if you have a fall. But through the back of the eye, eye orbit, and you poke a hole through that thing, and then, you jam your little spoon in there and scramble the frontal lobe.
Jacobsen: That’s a lobotomy.
Rosner: Is it a serrated tip of the spoon, or just a rounded spoon tip?
Jacobsen: Say again?
Rosner: Is it like a serrated tip of the spoon, so it’s a serrated spoon of death, or what?
Jacobsen: For the lobotomy?
Rosner: I’m sure it’s a specialized little thing that probably looks like a tiny scooping tool on the end, like the world’s longest Coke spoon, but I don’t know.
Jacobsen: Why did you want to talk about a serrated instrument of death?
Rosner: Well, I didn’t want to. I just wanted to do a brief topic here about how badass I am, eating fruit off a knife.
Jacobsen: I know your place. You have a worn-out Oral-B toothbrush on that desk, and that serrated instrument of death does not fit.
Rosner: So, yeah, I do have an Oral-B. I’ve got a Waterpik that I’ve had for probably four years, and I’ve never bothered to set it up, so I don’t know what that says. I’ve also, you know, my flossing. Well, I used to drive around. See, Oral-B has probably been bad for my oral hygiene because I used to drive around with just a regular manual toothbrush in my car, and I’d always brush my teeth while driving. But once I got the Oral-B, you know, I moved away from manual toothbrushes, and so now I don’t brush my teeth while driving, which is probably a good idea because since COVID, people’s driving has deteriorated.
Jacobsen: The toothbrush saved a life.
Rosner: Yeah, so, you know, I think if you get in a car wreck with a toothbrush in your mouth, the toothbrush might become a bristly instrument of death, and we could probably conclude this here.
Jacobsen: No, I won’t pick up on the serrated instrument of death because I am half asleep, and that’s hilarious. Have you ever had these conversations with Lance or JD?
Rosner: Yeah, I mean, kind of? I don’t know. You know, sometimes I’ll try to bring in a goofy topic. Mostly when I go goofy, it’s usually some sexual or scatological anecdote, you know, like that under Trump I sharted several times. I got very poopy, and, you know, my bowels were in an uproar, so I sharted once at the gym and managed to clean myself up without mishap, and I sharted the bed twice, which was a little more dire. So, you know, that’s the nature of, like, that, or, like, you know, the first porno I ever saw was a topless lady playing cards when I was nine years old that another kid brought to school. You know, stuff like that.
Jacobsen: What would you consider the best utensil ever made?
Rosner: So, you know, the screw and screwdriver are pretty great. You know, if you read about screws, they will tell you that they are an inclined plane wrapped around, you know, kind of wrapped into, made into a swirly thing. So, you know, when you screw in a screw, you’re working it in at an angle, but the final product is resistant to forces that want to pull it apart. A screw is stronger for pull-apart forces than the force it took to screw it in because you’re using that sloped leverage to work it in there.
Jacobsen: I don’t know. So screws are pretty good, but only good in the modern world because until, I don’t know, probably 150 years ago, screws had to be handmade. They couldn’t be machined. Somebody had to sit there with a file and make the screw shape. And that, like a screw from the 1700s, was a precious and labour-intensive thing.
Rosner: Sounds like sheer torture.
Jacobsen: Yeah. So before you could machine screws, I guess nails would be up there in terms of hammer plus nails. Before that, you had pegs, which make for elegant construction but are way too big and painful.
Rosner: I don’t know. What is the best instrument or implement ever created or invented?
Jacobsen: I don’t know. The serrated instrument of death has got to be up there. I would argue that only a few often exist — fork, spoon, fork, knife.
Rosner: 100%. I’m with Seinfeld on that one. And if you want to get more complicated, the smartphone is ridiculous. It’s transformed the world much more than the fork, maybe even more than the screw. The screw holds things together really well, but there’s a bunch of other ways to hold things together. So the screw has to take its place in the lineup of things that hold stuff together. But the smartphone is transformative.
Jacobsen: I don’t think the world changed that much when people became able to mass-manufacture screws. The pen and paper or whatever you’re writing on, papyrus or vellum or whatever, being able to write things down, ranks up there. You can make a permanent record, so you don’t have to keep some stuff in your head.
Rosner: So you could say that writing and the instruments of writing are hugely important.
Jacobsen: Do you want to wrap it up? Go ahead. Who’s the smartest person you’ve ever met?
Rosner: In practical terms, well, Chris Cole is very smart. But in terms of having smartness that kicked my ass daily, it’s Kimmel. Because he’s the boss that is too smart for your good, your stuff always has to be like, he can see through any of your bullshit and has exacting standards that he can live up to if he had enough hours in the day. You’re trying to give him — so yeah, Kimmel. And have I met — I don’t think I’ve ever met a Feynman. Somebody whose insight into the physical world is just super likely to be — you give him five minutes, and he’ll come up with a pretty reasonable analysis of just about anything. Feynman had a standing bet that you could give him any situation with a numerical solution, and he could get within 10% of the exact answer within five minutes. You could come up to him and say, the number of trees in the world, go. And he, in five minutes, could give you a number that would probably align with what somebody who knows the field of trees might be able to knock together in a couple of hours.
Jacobsen: Maybe that’s a bad example because that’s just guessing the number of trees. I don’t know. Here’s another one. Terminal velocity for a person thrown out of an airplane. He could probably come up with that answer within 10%, within just a few minutes. I don’t know if I’ve ever hung out with somebody like that. How about you? You’ve talked to all these high-IQ people.
Rosner: I’m not going to answer that question. You might be the smartest person I’ve ever met because you won’t answer that question. It’s an unreasonable question, and in a way, it’s wiser not to answer.
Jacobsen: Okay. I’d throw Corolla in there with Kimmel because their ability to think on their feet is quite similar. But Corolla went, you know, he’s still smart and entertaining, but his instrument kind of gut is now used in service of, I don’t know, he’s toting the libertarian barge.
Rosner: How long has he been toting it?
Jacobsen: Oh, for over a decade now. And then he got, you know, entangled with guys like Prager, which is, you know, I’ve never listened to Corolla and Prager together. Listening to Prager on his own, I found him to be just like a ponderous, pompous windbag and increasingly just a propagandist for right-wing nonsense. I don’t know whether Corolla can make Prager less of an a-hole to listen to. But I suspect Corolla’s entertainment and insight value is somewhat degraded when hanging with Prager.
Rosner: I don’t know. Should we wrap it up and look at it tomorrow?
Jacobsen: You woke me up because I was nodding off there.
Rosner: Okay, yeah, well, let’s do that.
Jacobsen: All right, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Rosner: Thank you.
[Recording End]
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