Did you know that The List Show has shared around 7,500 facts with our
YouTube audience since we premiered in 2013? Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy,
editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com. Thanks to Kevin Greatrix for asking us
to tally up our total number of facts. Here's how we came up with that number:
If you add up all the List Show episodes, you get eight thousand one hundred and
twenty-one facts. Subtract five hundred from our five hundred fun facts video—
which was basically a Greatest Hits episode—and you have 7621. Figure about
one percent of those are repeated facts, and that means—using a fairly generous
definition of facts that includes things like debunked life hacks—that we've
shared around seven thousand five hundred and forty five facts over the
years. Or I guess make that seven thousand five hundred and forty six. And
that's just the first audience question about the list show that I'm going to
answer today.
So you just heard our intro song and Balouie writes, "Where does the opening and
closing song come from?" It is written by Jason Weidner, who's a really great
composer, but we don't actually know if it has a name, so if you have an idea for
what we should call it leave it in the comments. A number of viewers, including
Rick Seiden and Apophis324, asked for updates on old Mental Floss
video folks like John Green and Elliott Morgan. We really loved working with John
over the years. He stepped away to work on some other projects—for example, he
and Hank are doing this amazing charity fundraising thing where they're trying
to raise twenty five million dollars for Partners in Health in Sierra Leone. We
popped a link in the description in case you want to donate. And Elliott and Craig
are also up to some really cool things. They are posting on their own channels so
you guys should check that out too. Related: Tover Yonder writers,
"Is there really a Meredith?I think it's fake."
Fun fact: there is a Meredith, she's real, I've met her. And actually we asked her
for a comment about this question and Meredith said, "Yes, Meredith is indeed
real. After an amazing eight years of working on this channel, my work
concluded at the end of last year, but it has been so much fun writing for and
learning with the most amazing audience on YouTube." I guess that makes sense ... or
is that just what the lizard people want us to believe? On to the next:
Sherlock-sensei and BG Philbin asked questions about the set and how we
choose items for it. Also everybody's screen names are really good. It's kind of
a mix of stuff that we brought ourselves and that we bought, and I would say that
it definitely reflects my personality. I wanted this set to have kind of like a
library meets curiosity cabinet kind of vibe, so a lot of this stuff reflects
that. So let's point some things out: this is a
vintage viewfinder from the 1940s. It's mine. I bought it at the Brooklyn Flea.
Many of these books are books from my personal collection. One that isn't on
the set but maybe should be—hold please. It's the Christopher Pike book Fall Into
Darkness. If you know then you know. This is a death's-head moth. I really love
Silence of the Lambs, which I saw when I was way too young. My family was on a
vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, and my parents thought I
was asleep, but I was actually awake watching The Silence of the Lambs, and
now it's one of my favorite movies. My husband actually got it for me for
Valentine's Day one year, which is really romantic. Anyway tell me in the comments
what movie you saw when you were way too young. And then of course can't forget my
children, Pearl and Ollie. They're my babies. Okay...
Trevor P.C. Harkenride writes, "Is Erin McCarthy, host of Mental Floss list
videos, related to Caitlin Doughty of the YouTube channel Ask a Mortician? They
share similar facial features. Does anyone else agree?" So Caitlin and I are not
related—I think it's just the the bangs— but I have read her book, Smoke Gets in
Your Eyes, and it's great, so I would highly recommend it. Grovermatic wrote, "When is
the next life hacks tested video coming out?" I'm not sure. We actually have a
couple ideas in mind. One of them involves setting things on fire so it's
a little complicated, logistically, but hopefully we will have one someday. R
Swannie wrote a number of questions: "Is there a list you wish you had not done?
Is there a list you have been unable to do but really want to?" and "I love the
Mental Floss Big Questions special issue, will you make more like that?" So first of
all I'm so glad you enjoyed the magazine. So much hard work went into it and you
know we were so excited to do it, so I'm happy that you enjoyed it. We're
certainly hoping to do it again, fingers crossed.
Is there a list you wish you had not done? I feel pretty good about all the
list that we have done. I will say some are more challenging than others and the
one that comes to mind is the fossil facts video. First of all we were
shooting in the Big Bone Room which is like one of the coolest places you can
ever possibly go, but we only had it for a set amount of
time. And then also I can't say the scientific names of dinosaurs to save my
life. Mulla racy cross valley away princess
more alias nope. It was a high-pressure situation for me personally. And then the
last question, is there a list you have been unable to do but really want to? We
actually really really want to do a list of party hacks.
It involves setting a cabbage on fire. We just can't find a place that will let us
set things on fire. Trey bandsaw wrote, "How do you guys screen comments that'll
be good content or do you pick at random?" Um, so basically if a bunch of people
are commenting on one thing we'll kind of pick that out but sometimes we just
kind of see something that piques our curiosity and then we'll let that guide
us. The thing that makes it a little complicated is that we have to run it by
fact check, and so sometimes things don't pass fact check and so then you know it
becomes complicated. But that's my answer. Hiasconi wrote, "What's your favorite
silly fact?" I have so many. One of my favorites is that cats can't taste sweet
things, which you would never know if you hang out with my cats because they want
to eat every cupcake I've ever had. But ultimately I think I always come back to
"lobsters pee out of their faces," because it has everything: it has lobsters, it has
pee, it has ... faces. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to "Did
you know that lobsters pee out of their faces?" Also if you want to know how to
tell male lobsters from female lobsters— that does not go over well at a clambake.
I don't see a name on this one but someone asked how do you come up with
the list that you comprised and how do you decide on which list to air once
selected? So a lot of our ideas come from brainstorms. So the staff will get into
a room together and we are a bunch of weirdos and so there are a lot of ideas
that come from that and then...how else do we come up with ideas? Sometimes our videos
correspond to, like, big anniversaries or something but a lot of the times we just
release them in the order that we write and record them. Wenzelsays, who've we've
actually featured on other videos, asks: "What's a list of a few of your favorite
list show lists?" It's like the inception of questions...
Um, okay so I would say the Teddy Roosevelt list because I'm a Ted-head
and I'm biased, and also we made a podcast. Download it. Subscribe.
But then also Amazing Yard Sale Finds I think was really fun. I I know it
definitely made me look at all the junk I have in my apartment differently. And
then I think my other favorite was the fossil facts episode because we got to
leave the studio and go to a place we've never shot before, that also
happened to be really cool even if I could not ever say Monty Python or River
anysis. In 1985 Australian scientists discovered the fossil of an ancient
Python in Riversleigh, Queensland Australia which they named monthly pond ???
Solex555 asked, "Can I have a job?" I don't know if
this was a serious question. At the risk of taking a joke question seriously I
thought you might be interested to know some of the backgrounds of some of the
people who work at Mental Floss. So I, for example, came from a magazine background,
but I've been with Mental Floss for like 7 years, which is a really long time.
That's crazy. Some of our staffers came from the
publishing world like me, either websites or magazines. Some of them came from the
freelance video world, some of them came from book publishing and one of them
came from the Sunsetter awnings dynasty. That would be Justin Dodd, ladies and
gentlemen. The son used to make our outdoor deck and patio space so hot...
Chloe Lynde asked us about our fact-checking process. So our fact
checker, the wonderful Austin Thompson, is like the most thorough person in the
universe. And he actually wrote us a little statement that I would like to
read to you. We truncated it because, in typical Austin fashion, it was pretty
long. So first he starts with looking for the source cited by the script's writer—
so every time we write a script we have source links embedded in it. He doesn't
trust web sites simply citing a primary source because it's easy for
misinformation to get cited in one place and then continually be cited by other
sources, which is something that the entire internet deals with. As he says,
it's about digging deeper into research until you hit the bottom. Newspapers.com is a
great newspaper archiving tool, for example. He also shared a trick for
tracking down quotations, because as we all know there are so many misquotations
online. So he picks a small and unique string of words to search for,
rather than the whole quotation, which helps find sources that might have
misspellings in them and helps him figure out what part of the quotation
might be real versus parts that have somehow floated into the supposed
quotation over the years. In reality, it is a much more complicated process than
that, and Austin is such a huge part of our team, we would be fact-less without
him. That's maybe not quite true ... but we wouldn't be certain of our facts without
him! That's true. Baking Frog asked, "What list have you found most fascinating?" For
me it's actually the very first one that we did, which is common things that
science hasn't figured out. It's fascinating that there are things we do
every single day, like laugh or cry or dream, and science hasn't zeroed in
exactly on why those things happen. That's what I like. Our next episode is
back to our regularly scheduled weirdness. We're going to talk about
strange old predictions from the past for the 21st century. If you have a
favorite old prediction from the past about how people thought we'd be living
today, leave it in the comments. That'll be out next Wednesday, February 5th. It's
part of our commitment to release a new video every Wednesday in 2020. We'll see
you then!