June 7, 2017 • 40 mins
Rats are our grossest of foes. They’re also geniuses. (Respect, rats.) Hear how they foiled Pablo Escobar; why Chuck E. Cheese transitioned to a mouse; and why tiny trousers are their kryptonite. Featuring AJ Jacobs.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what will what's that man go? So there's this
fact you always hear about Pablo Escobar. At the height
of his career, Pablo was bringing in eighteen billion dollars
a year. That's all cash. It was so much money
that he was spending a month just on rubber bands.
Rubber bands, I know. But here's what's crazier. He and
his accountant budgeted to lose ten percent of that. I mean,
(00:23):
Escobar expected to lose one point eight billion dollars and
the money was going to rats. Rats literal rats, Like
there were so many of them scarring around his warehouse
that he just accepted that the rodents were going to
eat his profits. And you think about it, right, this
is Pablo Escobar, the most ruthless kingpin in the world,
and he's happy to kill judges and police officers and
(00:46):
anyone that's threatening his business. But even he's like, there's
no way to beat rats. Let's just give them the
ten percent they deserve. That's how unstoppable rats are. I'd say, hey, there,
(01:13):
podcast listeners, you're listening to Part Time Genius. I'm Will
Pearson and I'm joined by my good friend Mangues show
Ticketer and today we're asking why have rats out smart
at us for so long? It's a good question, and listeners,
I know it sounds disgusting, but I promise you this
is going to be fascinating. We've packed this show with fun.
We'll have writer A. J. Jacobs on in a little bit.
We've got a part Time Genius quiz coming up where
(01:34):
a couple of our listeners can win some very big
and very important prizes. So who do we invite to
play in this episode? Mango? Today we asked for librarians
and only librarians, and I think next week we're looking
for accountants. That sounds right, yeah, and then I think
it's pastry Chef's name Kyle. And anyway, be sure to
follow us part Time Genius on all the social media
thing he's you know, Twitter, Facebook, if you want to
(01:56):
come on and compete. So let's dive into today's question, Ango,
what do you know about rats? Well, the first thing
I learned is that there are some great titles out
there about rats, including this book from the eighteen fifties
called The Rat It's History and Destructive Character. I have
to say that title does not sound pro rats. It
isn't it's this famous book in rat studies, and it's
(02:18):
great because you can tell that the author, James Rodwell,
has zero love for rats. Like one of the things
he does is to challenge the reader to say the
word rat slowly, just to confirm how terrible the word sounds.
He calls it the foulest word in British zoology. You've
got to try it. Um, yeah, it's it's not a
pretty sounding word, I'll give you that. I know he's right,
(02:40):
and it kind of sounds foul. So I got curious
and started looking up synonyms in the thesaurus, and I
realized there are no pleasant sounding alternatives for the word rat.
All right, give me something like, you know, vermin is one,
rodents nars. It doesn't even sound like a word, but
that's it. That's where the list stops. The only pleasant
(03:03):
term I could find for rats was track bunny. I know.
That's what subway workers call them when they see a
rat on the subway line. You know, treck bunnies is
almost a little too cute, I think, though, But I
I get what you're saying. Rats have a terrible reputation
and could use some rebranding. I don't know, maybe like uh,
like radio Shack rebranded itself the shack because shacks are
(03:25):
in right now, I guess the shack. Uh Yeah. The
fishing industry has done this with what they call trash fish,
so instead of calling it the slime head, they renamed
it the orange roughie. Or instead of the Patagonian toothfish,
which just sounds disgusting, we've got the Chilean sea bass. Yeah,
I mean they're there are tons of these. I think
my favorite is how the pil short goes by the
name cornish sardine. I'd never eat a pil shirt, but
(03:47):
a cornish starting I kind of want some, now, I know.
I just pictured it on like a tiny fork. So
that's what I'd love to do. Listeners, if you're up
for it, We're going to run a little contest to
come up with a new name for rats, something that
acknowledges the critters are gross but also deserving of admiration.
And to the top five geniuses who come up with
a rat replacement that's better than I don't know, uh,
(04:10):
sewer kittens, We'll send you a tiny wheel of cheese. Alright,
sewer kittens. Yes, Listeners, please write your suggestions for rebranding
the rat and we'll honor you on our Facebook page.
So just to get this out there, I'm totally creeped
out by rats, and it's because their germ elevators. We
all know that rats carry ticks and lice with them,
and throughout history they've carried diseases into food sources and
(04:31):
into people's homes. But they're also just creepy to me.
I mean, have you ever seen these videos of how
rats squeeze their bodies under door frames and through tiny
It's so gross. I know, that gelatinous body thing is
just so disgusting. Like octopuses can do that too. A
good sized octopus can squeeze through a hole the size
of a cherry tomato. And to be honest, as much
(04:54):
as I hate rats, I would be so freaked out
if my apartment had an octopus infestation, just a nest
of baby octopus hanging out under the saints. Do you
remember that Mitch Hedberg bit about how koalas would scatter
whenever you turn on the lights in his apartment. That
would be so much cuter than rats or octopus, I know,
so much more adorable. Here's something I never thought about.
(05:14):
I was reading this book Rats by Robert Sullivan, and
Sullivan makes this an analogy that if you see a
grizzly bear, you know you're in the wilderness, right, like
you never see a grizzly bear anywhere else. But what
we don't often think about is that if you see
a rat, it's also an indicator that humans are nearby,
right right. I mean, it's no secret that rats thrive
by following human populations around. I mean, if you think
(05:37):
about it, there really aren't natural predators to pick them
off in the city. It's basically just rats versus humans.
And just to be clear, while there are plenty of
rats out there today, we're really focusing on the Norway rat,
also known as the brown rat. Yeah, I we should
clarify why we're homing in on the Norway at well.
I mean, there are black rats too, which are smaller
and they tend to be located in warmer climates, But
(05:58):
the brown rats are really the common ones most of
us think about. I mean, you might have heard of
warf rats or street rats, or barn rats or sewer rats,
or even you've heard of all I've heard of all
of them. Keep me keep a list. These are all
just brown rats. I mean, the same rat goes by
all these names because they're so adaptable. Yeah, that's right.
I mean basically any rat you've been worried about, including
(06:19):
the ones that swim out of toilets. I know you're
looking at me skeptically, but every year there are ten
to fifteen reports of this in Portland, Oregon alone, So
you've got to imagine that a good number of rats
creep out of toilets across the US. I mean, Norway
rats are great swimmers, and of course they're not really
from Norway. Yeah. I guess it's just one of those
things where you want to blame another culture for the
(06:42):
new type of grossness, like how the Germans called the
German cockroach the Russian cockroach, and Russians call it the
Prussian cockroach, and everyone's happy to blame it on somebody else. Which,
by the way, the other part of that rats story
is that the scientists in England name the rats Norway rats,
even though they had come from Denmark, the Denmark part
of Norway. That's right. I mean he might have been
(07:02):
a little bit bad at geography, but at the time
Norway rats had not even yet invaded Norway. That's so weird.
The other thing Sullivan mentions is a rule of thumb
is that if you see a rat, it means there
are ten more lurking nearby. And if you see a
rat during the day, like on the subway tracks, then
you're really in trouble because there's definitely a problem. Like
rats love to roam at night. They don't want to
(07:24):
be seen, but if they're out running around, it means
the population is stressed because there's too much competition for food.
I never thought about it that way. Well, let's get
down to it. So we know people hate rats, and
we know they're lurking in bigger quantities than anyone sees.
But why are rats so hard to control? I mean,
one of the biggest reasons is that they populate so
darn't quickly. I heard this crazy thing that if you're
(07:46):
in a city at any given moment, you're not that
far from rats having sex. I can't even think. I'm
not going to tell you where I heard it. I
heard it somewhere. So but rats are really really good
at mating. When rats aren't eating, all their due ing
is having sex. I mean, there's there's no four play,
no berry White. It's just business. In fact, it's one
of the biggest reasons rats are so hard to defeat,
(08:08):
because a male Norway rat can have sex with twenty
different partners in six hours. And the math on it's baffling.
I mean, think about this, alright. So one pair of
rats can churn out fifteen thousand descendants within a year.
Each letter then has eight to ten rats, and if
the gestation period is only twenty one days, well that's
a lot of rats that are then also eager to
(08:30):
make this It's pretty gross, which makes you wonder why
we aren't all in the rat catching business. I know.
So while we're on the topic of rat sex, I've
got to tell you about my favorite study on the subject.
There's this well regarded scientists from Cairo, amd Chfique, who's
been dead for a while now, but he published this
experiment in European Neurology where he tested the effects of
(08:52):
various pant materials on the sex drive of rats. Let
me get this straight. He made tiny pants for rats.
He did the rats went topless, of course, but he
took seventy five million rats and had tiny trousers custom
made for each of them. One group were a cotton pants,
another war wool, another war a blend, and these rats
(09:13):
they didn't get any less frisky. They just continued to
get down. Except except for what, Except for the ones
dressed in polyester. I mean, this is an amazing part.
The ones outfitted in a polyester pants started losing their
sex drive, or their confidences or something else. So I
don't know. Maybe it's the chafing on their tiny rat
bits that made them lose interests, or just being forced
(09:35):
to wear polyester. But let me get this straight. What
you're saying is all we have to do to end
our war with rats and get them to stop reproducing
is to hire an army of tailors, have the millions
of brown rats fitted for polyester trousers, and then sit
back and watch the population blendle. That simple. Yeah, I mean,
Nicky Mouse doesn't have kids, and if Disney just switched
(09:56):
out his fabric and let his boys breathe a little,
maybe he could start the family. His mom is always
naging him about. Brilliant And now it's time for a
dramatic reading of America's foremost rat poet, Jack Handy, from
his volume Squeaky Poems Rhymes about my rat. Look at
(10:17):
her whiskers, look at her toes after you've rested, look
at her nose. Thank you? So ango, who do we
have on the line? So we have two librarians, Margaret
(10:39):
and Michael, going head to head in today's matchup. Now,
we wanted librarians and only librarians today because librarians are
known to be word people, and we will be playing
a word game before we uh, before we get to
that one, don't we introduce our two contestants. We have
Margaret on the line. Margaret is a librarian at m
I T. Margaret, welcome. You said that you actually appeared
(11:01):
without your permission in a calendar of librarians, a calendar
of fictional librarians. But you're not fictional. No, I'm real
at as far as I can tell. Michael, you are
second contestant, and I want you to tell us what
calendars you've appeared in. I've never appeared on a calendar. Well, okay,
librarian exactly, all right. Well Michael, you are in Brooklyn.
(11:26):
Tell us a little bit about what you do. Okay.
I'm a reference librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library. That's awesome.
And you also have a really interesting story though as well.
In addition to being a librarian, you've been an improv
comic now for whatever a decade, yes, thirteen years. My
specialty is working at the hospitals and nursing homes. I
(11:46):
per form at hospitals and I hope run an improv
workshop at a nursing home where the people themselves if
you improv, anybody's interested in joining or contributing. It's www
dot van ob doc work information. That's very very cool.
And I see, actually you do. One of your characters
is a librarian, so we are now speaking to people
(12:08):
that play two fictional librarians. Do either of you have
a favorite library in the world, I'm just supposed to
pick one um in terms of just like Pure Knock,
my soft soft best library experience I've ever had was
visiting the British Library in London where they keep because
they have like an enormous collection of historical manuscript and
(12:29):
I remember I think I went from a letter uh
signed by Queen Elizabeth, to a copy of the mc
mccarta to the manuscript for Persuasion resting on Jane Austen's
writing descument. It's just like I had to sit down
minutes and collect myself. That's pretty great. All right, Well, Mango,
what game are are two contestants going to be playing today?
(12:52):
So we're going to play a game called rat in
the middle, all right. So the rules of the game
are simple. Every answer is going to have the word
rat in it. So, for example, we could ask about
the second Star Trek movie because the word wrath and
wrath of con has the letters rat in it. We
thought it would be fun because your librarians and you're
used to the world of having to be rather quiet
(13:13):
in your spaces, we thought we could let you, guys
maybe chime in with animal noises if that works for you. So, um, Margaret,
you want to be our You want to be our Moor?
All right? Michael, you want to uh what what animal
would you like to pick? You want to you want
to coca? All right? There we go. Yeah, that and
(13:34):
that's it. That's more like it. There we go. Alright,
So we're gonna get started here. Remember you're playing for
a big prize. Whoever wins, we'll get a handwritten note
from us to your mom or your boss or someone
else who is important to you, uh, singing your praises.
So there's a lot on the line here. Okay, guys.
Question number one, I don't forget your noises, and when
(13:55):
we hear your noise, we will call on you and
you'll have a chance to answer. While this dinosaur had
over eight hundred teeth, it's more notable for the three
horns protruding from its face. I believe that was Michael
with the cauca. Alright, what's the answer? Michael? Well done?
(14:16):
I love how you emphasize the rat there, so alright.
Question number two? You ready to move, Margaret? I think
this one might be yours. This is a good one.
Elvis Presley was a practitioner of this martial art, and
in fact, in nineteen alright, hold on, I'll finish the question,
(14:38):
he shot a documentary called The New Gladiator, hoping it
would propel it into the mainstream. What do you think,
Michael Karate? Well done? All right? Answer answer? You're you're
still not in a calendar, Michael? All right? Here we go.
Number three. The b Boys and Markey Mark and the
(15:01):
Funky Bunch both had a hit song with this rat
word in its title? Was that a move I heard?
What do you think? Michael? Vibrations? That's absolutely right. Okay,
here we go. Alright, I'm going to skip to another
one here. All right, it's okay, This is okay. This
(15:24):
Sasha Baron Cohen character is known for being the sixth
There we go. What do you say, Margaret? Y are
well done? Alright? One more question here, question number five.
Lisa and Bart are obsessed with this violent Tom and
Jerry rip off on the Simpsons. Was that a sound? Okay?
(15:47):
Here we go, go for it. Show well done? Alright, alright,
man goes. So what's our final tally here? So we've
got Michael in first place with three points and Margaret
in second place with two points. Michael, our letter do
your mom will be in the mail shortly, and because
we don't want anyone's mailbox to feel too lonely, Margaret,
we're gonna send you a potato from Potato Parcel, the
(16:08):
world's premier site for sending a potato through the postal service.
Thank you both for playing. So One thing I found
surprising was just how new rat studies are. In fact,
I was actually thrown off by how new rats are
(16:30):
to the United States. Like historically they're documented in Southeast Asia,
then they move up to China, they invade Siberia and
they march into Russia and then they sneak onto ships
and move across the water with people. But and this
is hard to fathom, rats didn't even arrive in places
like Spain until eighteen hundred. That is pretty crazy. I mean,
you imagine rats have just always been around and part
(16:51):
of the cultural fabric. But it's true they only invaded
states like Montana and the nineties or yeah. And and
just to drive that point home, you know, j Otto
Been the dudes who studied birds. Of course, he also
studied rats and did rat paintings. And according to Sullivan,
when oddo Been showed his paintings to members of Congress
and we're talking about the early eighteen hundreds here, a
number of them mistook the rats for squirrels. Like these
(17:14):
were educated men, many who worked farms, and they couldn't
tell the rats from squirrel. It can be tough sometimes
you have to admit that. I mean, it's a little odd,
but but you're right. The government only started studying the
animals during World War two, back when we thought the
Nazis might harness rodents to spread disease all across Europe.
In fact, people who wanted to study rats before, they
(17:34):
had to do it on the sly. So take Elmer McCollum,
for instance. He was one of the pioneers at Johns
Hopkins in the early nineteen hundreds, but he started his
research with rats at the University of Wisconsin. But the
thing is he had to do it in secret because
and I'm quoting, the Wisconsin state legislature would not support
public expenditures on room and board of rats. A pest
(17:56):
to the Wisconsin I guess they paid tuition. I don't know,
but I thought it was a weird. That's so weird.
But what we've learned about rats in the last seventy
years is incredible, and it's basically that they're little geniuses.
Like they followed us across continents. They have this extraordinary
sense of smell their home bodies, like they really don't
travel more than sixty from their nest unless they have to,
(18:18):
in which they can travel great distances and tread water
for like three days at a time. They can be
dropped from heights of fifty feet without injuring themselves. I
mean that's five stories off the ground. And they're really adaptable.
Like if rats have been born in an alley that
serves Indian food, they'll have a preference for samosas and
curries and spicy foods. And they don't even eat that
(18:40):
much food, only like three to four ounces a day.
That's pretty adaptable. They're also super cooperative, like in one
study from two thousand, twelve rats were offered a chocolate
chip treat or the opportunity to free a fellow rat,
and over and over they freed the rat first, and
then they shared the treat. And in studies where two
rats had to press their own buttons at the same
(19:02):
time to release treats, they quickly learned to cooperate. And
this was the craziest to me. They're really sensitive, kind
of like humans. Like if one of them get stressed,
they bring that energy back to the nest and all
of the rats get stressed. That's so sweet. The other
thing I was reading about was just how suspicious they
are of anything new, which of course is why pest
(19:22):
control is so hard. Right, So we've established they're really
reproductive unless they're sporting polyester, and they're really smart, but
why haven't humans figured out a way to keep them
in check? Yeah? Well, one of the funny things that
keeps coming up in history is that we kind of
keep forgetting about rats until we're actually confronted with them again.
So it's kind of an out of sight, out of
(19:43):
mind thing. But as soon as we do see them,
we move super quickly. Right. So, in the nineteen sixties,
Ebony magazine did this spread of housing projects in New
York where the apartments were so dilapidated and drafty that
children were under thick blankets trying to protect themselves from
the cold. This wasn't at night, this was during the day,
and the public was largely unmoved by the scene. But
(20:04):
then people from the buildings started catching rats and bringing
them into courts and showing the rats to the press.
That's when the public opinion shifted. So and the odd
part is that this happens over and over. Like in
the nineteen thirties, the New York Times had stories about
the atrocious rat infestation on Rikers Island. You know, this
is the prison island between Queens and the Bronx. Well,
(20:25):
the rat problem was so bad that the guards bought
a dog to control the rats. You know what the
rats did, They actually killed the dogs. So it was
it was that bad, and pretty soon the officers on
the island were dumping poison and discussing bringing snakes onto
the island to deal with the rats. But New York
totally ignored the situation until the rats swam from the
(20:46):
island to this super exclusive summer community on Long Island Sound.
And you know, when these ultra rich beach goers saw
rats on their beach, they weren't having it. Yeah, that
makes sense, but let's get zen for a second. This
is actually one of the themes that keeps coming up
in Sullivan's book, and it's that exterminators have the cisphius
like task. They're given this enormous job of trying to
(21:08):
control the rodent population, but as soon as they stop
seeing rats, their budgets get cut, so no one wants
to admit they exist. And it's crazy because, like past,
controllers will work at five star hotels, and when they
do that, they have to work in disguise, or when
they introduce themselves at parties are on the first date,
they kind of have to tread carefully, and so you
(21:28):
you kind of come away feeling sorry for them, but
also with this tremendous sense of respect. Like the best exterminators.
They actually work as rats ares, and they're essentially archaeologists. Archaeologists,
What what do you mean by that? Like, the rats
won't travel far from home, but they will travel deep.
So a good exterminator actually sees those city and layers.
They study old maps, and so in New York, for instance,
(21:50):
a real student will decipher that a new sewer system
is built on top of a system from the eighteen hundreds,
and that might be built on one from the seventeen hundreds,
and that might be over where a stream used to be.
And while those places aren't really functional or even accessible
to humans anymore, there's no doubt that there's a rat
population that's made a home for themselves there, and as
long as they can still get to a food source. Well.
(22:11):
The other thing I think that's kind of fascinating is
how you were telling me that Sullivan almost compares catching
rats to think you said, fly fishing. Yeah, Like you
kind of have to know the rhythm of the rat
population and where they're flowing, and except that it's going
to take a while, and you've got to go in
with this mentality that the rats are going to come
to you. I guess I've never thought about rats being
so zen. Thank you now for another dramatic reading from
(22:40):
Squeaky Poems, Rhymes about My Rat by America's foremost rat poet,
Jack Handy. What more is a man need than a
Scotch and a rat and maybe a gun to rest
in his lap. So our guest today is one of
(23:10):
our favorite people in the world, right mango. Yeah, definitely
top forty. Oh, easily top forty. So for the past
several years he's thrown himself into these crazy experiments and
written about them, whether it was reading the entire Encyclopedia
Britannica from A to Z, living an entire year according
to the laws of the Old Testament, working to bring
his body to peak help through diet and exercise, or
(23:32):
working to build the world's largest family reunion. He's always
ready to dive in. Oh and he's a distant relative
of Michael Jackson, which he can tell us about A. J. Jacobs.
Welcome to part time genius. Thank you guys, happy to
be here. You're in my top forty two. Thank you.
This is so flattering. That's that's really what we were
fishing for there, to be honest with you. So wow.
(23:55):
So A j It's it's hard to believe it's been
over a decade since he wrote no it all. I
read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. But
I'm assuming you've managed to retain it all pretty much everything. Yeah,
and maybe one or two facts in the eight those
were earlier. No, unfortunately I've forgotten. I play a good
(24:15):
ninety nine point eight percent still is better than, you know,
better than when I started, so ver minus. Did did
you actually sit down and read every single entry, every
single page of Encyclopedia Britannica. I did. I did. I
started at A A A K, which is a type
(24:35):
of Korean music, as I'm sure you know, and then
I ended A D D Y W I E C.
So I read and that's the town in Poland right again,
not not too sure. So yes, I read the whole thing.
And I did it because my dad, when I was
a kid, he started to read the encyclopedia. He loved learning,
(24:59):
he loved read inc. But he only made it's the
middle of the beach like Bolivia or so uh, And
I figured, you know, why not try to finish what
he began and removed that black mark from our family history.
I like that you were worried about spoiling the reading
of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So is there anybody would even
know where to find a printed At this point, I
(25:23):
know it's true. I fell my kids and I'm like,
why are you talking about that mysterious encyclopedia? So a J.
One of the things I love reading in your books
is these stories of your wife's spinusmen and also her
beleaguered responses to things. And I was curious both what
project has been like the most difficult on your family
and if you've abandoned anything because it's been too hard.
(25:44):
As you know, the one about following all the rules
of the Bible as literally as possible, so I had to.
The Bible says no shaving, so I had this huge beard.
She didn't love that. She did not kiss me for
literally seven months. There was no physical contact. UM. I
don't know if this is appropriate to UH to your show,
(26:06):
but I'll just throw it out there. And but the
Bible says in Levinicus that you cannot touch women during
their time of months. And if you take it the
Bible really literally, you cannot sit in a seat where
UH a woman, a menstruating woman has that because the
seat becomes impure. And my wife found that offensive, so
(26:27):
she sat and everything apartment. I also love that you
actually stoned someone right as I did. So I was
in sort of the middle of the year. I was
getting very into it, so following everything and I looked biblical.
(26:48):
So I had the beard and a white robe and sandals,
and I was in Central Park in New York where
and a man came up to me and said, why
are you addressed like that? And I explained, well, I'm
trying to follow all the rules of the Bibles that
from the ten Commanders to sony adulters. He says, well,
I'm an adulterer. Are you going to stone rate? And
(27:11):
I said, well, that would be fantastic. So in recent
years you've been obsessed with genealogy and proving that we're
all related, and you even have a terrific podcast, one
of our favorites called Twice Removed where you focused on this.
It would have been some of the more interesting findings
from this obsession of yours. Yeah, this started because I
got the strange email from this guy who said, you
(27:33):
don't know me, but I'm your eighth cousin, and I
thought he was gonna, you know, ask, here's my bank
account in Nigeria, please lire ten thousand dollars. But it
turns out he's just part of this group that are
building these massive family trees that are trying to connect
everyone in the world, and the biggest one is literally
(27:54):
now a hundred twenty million people all connected. So I
found out this is exciting. As a I am Barack
Obama's relatives. He is my fifth grade aunt's husband's brother's wife,
seventh grade nephew, so we are very close brothers. What's
(28:14):
up next for you? A j What are you? What
are you thinking about? Now? I am Actually I've got
another book that I'm doing with Ted Books, and I'm
gonna take something normal, uh, something I use every day,
a cup of coffee, uh, and then I'm gonna go
around the world and try to thank everyone involved in
making that cup of coffee a reality, so the beans
(28:38):
and I hope, so, I hope. So I don't know,
we'll see it is uh, So I have to do that. Well,
since you've been, uh, the subject of so many studies,
we thought it was only appropriate for you to join
us in this episode to answer some questions about rats.
So are you up for this high stakes quiz? A J?
(28:59):
I am? I love rath alright, So what quiz are
we playing with A J? Today? We're playing a game
called Fancy Rats. And the good news for AJ is
it's a true false quiz. Right, Okay, here we go.
I think we have five questions for you, a J.
The first one true or false. The fannie pack was
(29:19):
originally invented by a rat fancier who often used the
pounds to sneak his lucky rat, Theodore into bowling alleys
with him. Is this true or false? Oh? Man, I
love it. I wanted to be true very much. And
I actually was at some party recently and like the
funkiest person there was wearing a fanny pack. So I'm
(29:39):
I'm hoping that we're seeing a resurgence the santy packs.
The HTR crap. I'm going to say that is weird
enough that it's got to be true. Oh, I wanted
to be alright. The second question, that's right? All right?
For one second question, true or false? Before he transitioned
to being a mouse and two thousand twelve, Chuck from
(30:02):
Chuck E Cheese was formerly a rat, an unusual mascot
for a children's arcade slash pizza parlor. What do you
think true or faults? Oh that's a good one. Oh
that's a good one. In I feel like I got
to go through again because you wouldn't do you wouldn't
do two falses in a row, and really tricky. You
(30:22):
guys are really tricky. Alright, you're right, true, I'm gonna
true even born a cigar chomping New Jersey rat and
initially went by the name Rick Rick the rat. Alright,
good job you are. You are one out of two
number three true or faults. In two thousand sixteen, researchers
(30:46):
discovered something that rat fanciers have long known that rats
laugh when tickled. I feel all I read that somewhere
not in the encyclopedia, So I'm gonna say, yeah, you're right. Yeah,
they giggle and ultrasonic volume that's too high pitched fris
to hear. Good job, all right, Number four true or
(31:06):
faults and fancy rat circles. The critter or pet that
changed your mind about rats is called a heart rat um.
And I do know this is the one of one
of the few facts I remember about raps is that
they do get bad tr because I think a couple
of years ago, didn't they find that it was probably
(31:28):
Gerbils who spread the black plague and that so go
onto something here a little that was my heart rap.
I'm gonna say true, Yeah, it's true, and uh, it's
odd because that phrase doesn't work for everything, like no
one talks about their heart. Bruce Willis, Look he's talking,
(31:48):
is my Yeah, I think that's mine too. Actually, So
you're on a roll here, a J. So with let's
see if we can finish strong question number five. Angelina
Jolie once had a pet rat named Harry, but gave
it up when it started chewing through too many of
her curtains. Well, I feel I used to work of
(32:10):
entertainment weekly and I feel I did a lot. Like
she had a vial of Philly Bob Thornton's blood. So
I don't know. I mean, maybe it's like, maybe it's
a vicious rumor, but I feel I've heard that. So
I'm gonna say true, true tries, which is our endless
(32:34):
admiration at the top thirty or so I think at
this point. So well, A J. We can't wait to
check out your your next book, and of course everybody
should check out your podcast. Twice removed, but thanks so
much for joining us today. Thank you, guys. I'm huge fans.
I'm so excited you're doing this podcast and honored to
(32:55):
be a part of and and ruin it by talking
about wife's rats nine situation. All right, so let's bring
(33:18):
this all home. Is their hope for humans in this
war with rats? So it seems like there are only
a few solutions because rats have been resistant to poisons
and they're really just so clever and one is and
this isn't happening anytime soon. But we could all turn
vegan because rats are not fans of raw vegetables. Yeah,
I'd say that's not happening anytime soon. Where we can
(33:38):
make a move to things like metal garbage cans, because
it all comes down to basically starving out the rats
and protecting our garbage, or by abandoning a place and
having them try to live without us, or what's what's
the other option? Well, this is kind of the best hope,
and that's birth control. You're saying, put them on the pill? Yeah, Like,
since the polyester pants, things seems like a stretch. This
(33:59):
might be the best option. And there's this new e
p A approved birth control for rats. It's been made
super sweet and really fat rich because rats have even
more of a sweet tooth than us. And it basically
spurs mouse a pause I know, which is the cut
ci term scientists used for rat menopause. But it triggers
it super early so that the populations can't breed. Poor
(34:21):
rats have hot flashes. Well, it's better than having them
in your cupboards, right, But that's the great hope for
now and how we'll finally win this battle against the
grossest of foes. Um. And actually there's one more school
of thought on this, and that is to do nothing. Wait,
that makes no sense. We were just going through hy
Rats are winning this war. Why would we ignore them? Well,
(34:43):
the thought is because rats are super sensitive. When we
kill a rat, it's peers tend to feel the danger
and start varying from their norm. And when that happens,
they ran into other rats and scrape it up. And
that's really where pathogens cross and diseases spread and mutap.
So if you can get their rat, he needs to
stay to themselves and sort of curb the diseases that's
(35:03):
kind of what scientists think might be the best you
can ask for. Anyway, if you're interested in the subject,
you should definitely read Robert Sullivan's Rats, which formed the
backbone of this episode. M All right, you know what
time it is, Mango, time for the fact off you
(35:24):
bet it is as to the part of the show
where we get to use the fascinating things we learned
in our research for this episode but didn't get a
chance to mention. And I kind of have a feeling
Mango intentionally held back a few just for this big moment,
So why don't you go first, Mango? So this one
is totally gross. Back in the eighteen fifties, gamblers in
New York City used to crowd into halls to watch
(35:44):
and bet on the sport called ratting. Ratting. Yeah, Like basically,
a guy would show up with a big, misshapen sack
full of rats, and when the ref said go, he
let all of the animals just spill out, and then
they let a dog go after them, and people would
bet on how many rats trained dog could kill in
a short period of time. So you got to imagine
this scene, right, people are betting and yelling in this terrier,
(36:06):
because terriers are just the best at this. This terrier
is going crazy while rats are running around, and it's
horrible and super popular and bloody. But discuss I know,
but that's not even the weird part, right. Ratting was
considered a man's sport because it was so vicious, like
a single dog could kill a hundred rats in six
minutes or something. But to expand the audience and make
(36:27):
it more palatable for women and children, they had organized
the same thing in the afternoons, but they'd replaced the
dog with a weasel. Oh of course, right, because that's
not gross at all. I know. They honestly thought watching
a weasel kill a bag of rats was more appropriate
for kids or something. But anyway, that that was America's
favorite spectator sport until baseball took over. Okay, that's that's
(36:49):
a gross way to start this one. Gets a good
job on this one, all right. So all this talk
of rats, maybe want to go to a place where
there are no rats, And it turns out that's what Alberta,
Canada is all about, and act, if we're being honest,
it might be the number one reason to go to Alberta.
Alberta is huge. It's actually bigger than France or any
country in the EU. But it's so committed to the
rat free bit that they've dedicated a rat patrol monitoring
(37:12):
the borders for rats, and anytime there's an infestation, they
bring in heavy machinery and dig out the entire nest
to eradicate it. So in big years they'll find maybe
two or three infestations across the region, but most years
they're not any that's kind of crazy. Uh So this
is a super simple one, but it makes me happy.
Did you know that male rats are called bucks and
(37:33):
females are called does? I did not know? I know.
And the best part of it is that you can
sing the sound of music song with new lyrics like
dough or rats. I get the idea. That's a good one.
That's a good one. All right. Rats are subject to
peer pressure. If they see a bunch of their friend
rats eating something on appetizing, they'll join into rapper tupac.
(37:54):
Shakur studied ballet in high school and started the nutcracker
as the mouse bringing some tupac. Well done, you get
a extra point for that one, alright. Fancy rat owners
practice something called road dentistry. You're not gonna believe this one.
So where they'll open up their mouths and let a
rat nibble and pick food from their teeth, they're basically
outsourcing the job of flossing to their pets. That's crazy.
(38:17):
You have to YouTube this. I'm not I'm not kidding.
It so gross. The owners will just lean back and
the rats get really deep in their mouths. It's because
rats have a grooming behavior where they'll clean each other's teeth,
and rat parents basically consider it the ultimate compliments. So
you have to YouTube it. Um well, I cannot top that,
So you win this week's fact Off. Thank you to
(38:39):
our listeners out there. Please send in your suggestions for
rebranding the Rat and we'll make sure you get a
fun prize out of it. And you know, well, there's
one last part of the show that we need to
deal with, the Part Time Genius Awards, And today I'd
like to nominate the author of the best book I
read last year, The Stench of Honolulu, of course, and
also America's pre eminent rat poet. That's right, Mr Jack Handy.
(39:00):
You'll be added to our Hall of Genius and we'll
be mailing you a certificate to hang on your fridge.
Congratulations Jack Handy. And in honor of Jack Handy, why
don't we read one last poem from America's greatest rap
poot to close the show. I think that's a fine idea.
The Middle Ages were the best of times to be
a rat. You could point to a man with plague
and say I gave him that. Thank you. Until next time,
(39:24):
we're Will and Mango for Part Time Genius. Thanks again
for listening to Part Time Genius. Be sure to subscribe
wherever you listen to your podcast, and because we're a
(39:45):
brand new show, if you're feeling extra generous, we'd love
it if you give us a rating on Apple Podcast.
Part Time Genius is produced by some of our favorite geniuses.
It's edited by Tristan McNeil, theme song and audio mixing
by Noel Brown. Our executive producer is Jerry Rowland. Our
res arch team is Gabe Bluesier, Lucas Adams, Autom white
Field Me Toronto, Austin Thompson and Meg Robbins. Jason Hoke
(40:06):
is are chief cheerleader.
Guess what will what's that man go? So there's this
fact you always hear about Pablo Escobar. At the height
of his career, Pablo was bringing in eighteen billion dollars
a year. That's all cash. It was so much money
that he was spending a month just on rubber bands.
Rubber bands, I know. But here's what's crazier. He and
his accountant budgeted to lose ten percent of that. I mean,
(00:23):
Escobar expected to lose one point eight billion dollars and
the money was going to rats. Rats literal rats, Like
there were so many of them scarring around his warehouse
that he just accepted that the rodents were going to
eat his profits. And you think about it, right, this
is Pablo Escobar, the most ruthless kingpin in the world,
and he's happy to kill judges and police officers and
(00:46):
anyone that's threatening his business. But even he's like, there's
no way to beat rats. Let's just give them the
ten percent they deserve. That's how unstoppable rats are. I'd say, hey, there,
(01:13):
podcast listeners, you're listening to Part Time Genius. I'm Will
Pearson and I'm joined by my good friend Mangues show
Ticketer and today we're asking why have rats out smart
at us for so long? It's a good question, and listeners,
I know it sounds disgusting, but I promise you this
is going to be fascinating. We've packed this show with fun.
We'll have writer A. J. Jacobs on in a little bit.
We've got a part Time Genius quiz coming up where
(01:34):
a couple of our listeners can win some very big
and very important prizes. So who do we invite to
play in this episode? Mango? Today we asked for librarians
and only librarians, and I think next week we're looking
for accountants. That sounds right, yeah, and then I think
it's pastry Chef's name Kyle. And anyway, be sure to
follow us part Time Genius on all the social media
thing he's you know, Twitter, Facebook, if you want to
(01:56):
come on and compete. So let's dive into today's question, Ango,
what do you know about rats? Well, the first thing
I learned is that there are some great titles out
there about rats, including this book from the eighteen fifties
called The Rat It's History and Destructive Character. I have
to say that title does not sound pro rats. It
isn't it's this famous book in rat studies, and it's
(02:18):
great because you can tell that the author, James Rodwell,
has zero love for rats. Like one of the things
he does is to challenge the reader to say the
word rat slowly, just to confirm how terrible the word sounds.
He calls it the foulest word in British zoology. You've
got to try it. Um, yeah, it's it's not a
pretty sounding word, I'll give you that. I know he's right,
(02:40):
and it kind of sounds foul. So I got curious
and started looking up synonyms in the thesaurus, and I
realized there are no pleasant sounding alternatives for the word rat.
All right, give me something like, you know, vermin is one,
rodents nars. It doesn't even sound like a word, but
that's it. That's where the list stops. The only pleasant
(03:03):
term I could find for rats was track bunny. I know.
That's what subway workers call them when they see a
rat on the subway line. You know, treck bunnies is
almost a little too cute, I think, though, But I
I get what you're saying. Rats have a terrible reputation
and could use some rebranding. I don't know, maybe like uh,
like radio Shack rebranded itself the shack because shacks are
(03:25):
in right now, I guess the shack. Uh Yeah. The
fishing industry has done this with what they call trash fish,
so instead of calling it the slime head, they renamed
it the orange roughie. Or instead of the Patagonian toothfish,
which just sounds disgusting, we've got the Chilean sea bass. Yeah,
I mean they're there are tons of these. I think
my favorite is how the pil short goes by the
name cornish sardine. I'd never eat a pil shirt, but
(03:47):
a cornish starting I kind of want some, now, I know.
I just pictured it on like a tiny fork. So
that's what I'd love to do. Listeners, if you're up
for it, We're going to run a little contest to
come up with a new name for rats, something that
acknowledges the critters are gross but also deserving of admiration.
And to the top five geniuses who come up with
a rat replacement that's better than I don't know, uh,
(04:10):
sewer kittens, We'll send you a tiny wheel of cheese. Alright,
sewer kittens. Yes, Listeners, please write your suggestions for rebranding
the rat and we'll honor you on our Facebook page.
So just to get this out there, I'm totally creeped
out by rats, and it's because their germ elevators. We
all know that rats carry ticks and lice with them,
and throughout history they've carried diseases into food sources and
(04:31):
into people's homes. But they're also just creepy to me.
I mean, have you ever seen these videos of how
rats squeeze their bodies under door frames and through tiny
It's so gross. I know, that gelatinous body thing is
just so disgusting. Like octopuses can do that too. A
good sized octopus can squeeze through a hole the size
of a cherry tomato. And to be honest, as much
(04:54):
as I hate rats, I would be so freaked out
if my apartment had an octopus infestation, just a nest
of baby octopus hanging out under the saints. Do you
remember that Mitch Hedberg bit about how koalas would scatter
whenever you turn on the lights in his apartment. That
would be so much cuter than rats or octopus, I know,
so much more adorable. Here's something I never thought about.
(05:14):
I was reading this book Rats by Robert Sullivan, and
Sullivan makes this an analogy that if you see a
grizzly bear, you know you're in the wilderness, right, like
you never see a grizzly bear anywhere else. But what
we don't often think about is that if you see
a rat, it's also an indicator that humans are nearby,
right right. I mean, it's no secret that rats thrive
by following human populations around. I mean, if you think
(05:37):
about it, there really aren't natural predators to pick them
off in the city. It's basically just rats versus humans.
And just to be clear, while there are plenty of
rats out there today, we're really focusing on the Norway rat,
also known as the brown rat. Yeah, I we should
clarify why we're homing in on the Norway at well.
I mean, there are black rats too, which are smaller
and they tend to be located in warmer climates, But
(05:58):
the brown rats are really the common ones most of
us think about. I mean, you might have heard of
warf rats or street rats, or barn rats or sewer rats,
or even you've heard of all I've heard of all
of them. Keep me keep a list. These are all
just brown rats. I mean, the same rat goes by
all these names because they're so adaptable. Yeah, that's right.
I mean basically any rat you've been worried about, including
(06:19):
the ones that swim out of toilets. I know you're
looking at me skeptically, but every year there are ten
to fifteen reports of this in Portland, Oregon alone, So
you've got to imagine that a good number of rats
creep out of toilets across the US. I mean, Norway
rats are great swimmers, and of course they're not really
from Norway. Yeah. I guess it's just one of those
things where you want to blame another culture for the
(06:42):
new type of grossness, like how the Germans called the
German cockroach the Russian cockroach, and Russians call it the
Prussian cockroach, and everyone's happy to blame it on somebody else. Which,
by the way, the other part of that rats story
is that the scientists in England name the rats Norway rats,
even though they had come from Denmark, the Denmark part
of Norway. That's right. I mean he might have been
(07:02):
a little bit bad at geography, but at the time
Norway rats had not even yet invaded Norway. That's so weird.
The other thing Sullivan mentions is a rule of thumb
is that if you see a rat, it means there
are ten more lurking nearby. And if you see a
rat during the day, like on the subway tracks, then
you're really in trouble because there's definitely a problem. Like
rats love to roam at night. They don't want to
(07:24):
be seen, but if they're out running around, it means
the population is stressed because there's too much competition for food.
I never thought about it that way. Well, let's get
down to it. So we know people hate rats, and
we know they're lurking in bigger quantities than anyone sees.
But why are rats so hard to control? I mean,
one of the biggest reasons is that they populate so
darn't quickly. I heard this crazy thing that if you're
(07:46):
in a city at any given moment, you're not that
far from rats having sex. I can't even think. I'm
not going to tell you where I heard it. I
heard it somewhere. So but rats are really really good
at mating. When rats aren't eating, all their due ing
is having sex. I mean, there's there's no four play,
no berry White. It's just business. In fact, it's one
of the biggest reasons rats are so hard to defeat,
(08:08):
because a male Norway rat can have sex with twenty
different partners in six hours. And the math on it's baffling.
I mean, think about this, alright. So one pair of
rats can churn out fifteen thousand descendants within a year.
Each letter then has eight to ten rats, and if
the gestation period is only twenty one days, well that's
a lot of rats that are then also eager to
(08:30):
make this It's pretty gross, which makes you wonder why
we aren't all in the rat catching business. I know.
So while we're on the topic of rat sex, I've
got to tell you about my favorite study on the subject.
There's this well regarded scientists from Cairo, amd Chfique, who's
been dead for a while now, but he published this
experiment in European Neurology where he tested the effects of
(08:52):
various pant materials on the sex drive of rats. Let
me get this straight. He made tiny pants for rats.
He did the rats went topless, of course, but he
took seventy five million rats and had tiny trousers custom
made for each of them. One group were a cotton pants,
another war wool, another war a blend, and these rats
(09:13):
they didn't get any less frisky. They just continued to
get down. Except except for what, Except for the ones
dressed in polyester. I mean, this is an amazing part.
The ones outfitted in a polyester pants started losing their
sex drive, or their confidences or something else. So I
don't know. Maybe it's the chafing on their tiny rat
bits that made them lose interests, or just being forced
(09:35):
to wear polyester. But let me get this straight. What
you're saying is all we have to do to end
our war with rats and get them to stop reproducing
is to hire an army of tailors, have the millions
of brown rats fitted for polyester trousers, and then sit
back and watch the population blendle. That simple. Yeah, I mean,
Nicky Mouse doesn't have kids, and if Disney just switched
(09:56):
out his fabric and let his boys breathe a little,
maybe he could start the family. His mom is always
naging him about. Brilliant And now it's time for a
dramatic reading of America's foremost rat poet, Jack Handy, from
his volume Squeaky Poems Rhymes about my rat. Look at
(10:17):
her whiskers, look at her toes after you've rested, look
at her nose. Thank you? So ango, who do we
have on the line? So we have two librarians, Margaret
(10:39):
and Michael, going head to head in today's matchup. Now,
we wanted librarians and only librarians today because librarians are
known to be word people, and we will be playing
a word game before we uh, before we get to
that one, don't we introduce our two contestants. We have
Margaret on the line. Margaret is a librarian at m
I T. Margaret, welcome. You said that you actually appeared
(11:01):
without your permission in a calendar of librarians, a calendar
of fictional librarians. But you're not fictional. No, I'm real
at as far as I can tell. Michael, you are
second contestant, and I want you to tell us what
calendars you've appeared in. I've never appeared on a calendar. Well, okay,
librarian exactly, all right. Well Michael, you are in Brooklyn.
(11:26):
Tell us a little bit about what you do. Okay.
I'm a reference librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library. That's awesome.
And you also have a really interesting story though as well.
In addition to being a librarian, you've been an improv
comic now for whatever a decade, yes, thirteen years. My
specialty is working at the hospitals and nursing homes. I
(11:46):
per form at hospitals and I hope run an improv
workshop at a nursing home where the people themselves if
you improv, anybody's interested in joining or contributing. It's www
dot van ob doc work information. That's very very cool.
And I see, actually you do. One of your characters
is a librarian, so we are now speaking to people
(12:08):
that play two fictional librarians. Do either of you have
a favorite library in the world, I'm just supposed to
pick one um in terms of just like Pure Knock,
my soft soft best library experience I've ever had was
visiting the British Library in London where they keep because
they have like an enormous collection of historical manuscript and
(12:29):
I remember I think I went from a letter uh
signed by Queen Elizabeth, to a copy of the mc
mccarta to the manuscript for Persuasion resting on Jane Austen's
writing descument. It's just like I had to sit down
minutes and collect myself. That's pretty great. All right, Well, Mango,
what game are are two contestants going to be playing today?
(12:52):
So we're going to play a game called rat in
the middle, all right. So the rules of the game
are simple. Every answer is going to have the word
rat in it. So, for example, we could ask about
the second Star Trek movie because the word wrath and
wrath of con has the letters rat in it. We
thought it would be fun because your librarians and you're
used to the world of having to be rather quiet
(13:13):
in your spaces, we thought we could let you, guys
maybe chime in with animal noises if that works for you. So, um, Margaret,
you want to be our You want to be our Moor?
All right? Michael, you want to uh what what animal
would you like to pick? You want to you want
to coca? All right? There we go. Yeah, that and
(13:34):
that's it. That's more like it. There we go. Alright,
So we're gonna get started here. Remember you're playing for
a big prize. Whoever wins, we'll get a handwritten note
from us to your mom or your boss or someone
else who is important to you, uh, singing your praises.
So there's a lot on the line here. Okay, guys.
Question number one, I don't forget your noises, and when
(13:55):
we hear your noise, we will call on you and
you'll have a chance to answer. While this dinosaur had
over eight hundred teeth, it's more notable for the three
horns protruding from its face. I believe that was Michael
with the cauca. Alright, what's the answer? Michael? Well done?
(14:16):
I love how you emphasize the rat there, so alright.
Question number two? You ready to move, Margaret? I think
this one might be yours. This is a good one.
Elvis Presley was a practitioner of this martial art, and
in fact, in nineteen alright, hold on, I'll finish the question,
(14:38):
he shot a documentary called The New Gladiator, hoping it
would propel it into the mainstream. What do you think,
Michael Karate? Well done? All right? Answer answer? You're you're
still not in a calendar, Michael? All right? Here we go.
Number three. The b Boys and Markey Mark and the
(15:01):
Funky Bunch both had a hit song with this rat
word in its title? Was that a move I heard?
What do you think? Michael? Vibrations? That's absolutely right. Okay,
here we go. Alright, I'm going to skip to another
one here. All right, it's okay, This is okay. This
(15:24):
Sasha Baron Cohen character is known for being the sixth
There we go. What do you say, Margaret? Y are
well done? Alright? One more question here, question number five.
Lisa and Bart are obsessed with this violent Tom and
Jerry rip off on the Simpsons. Was that a sound? Okay?
(15:47):
Here we go, go for it. Show well done? Alright, alright,
man goes. So what's our final tally here? So we've
got Michael in first place with three points and Margaret
in second place with two points. Michael, our letter do
your mom will be in the mail shortly, and because
we don't want anyone's mailbox to feel too lonely, Margaret,
we're gonna send you a potato from Potato Parcel, the
(16:08):
world's premier site for sending a potato through the postal service.
Thank you both for playing. So One thing I found
surprising was just how new rat studies are. In fact,
I was actually thrown off by how new rats are
(16:30):
to the United States. Like historically they're documented in Southeast Asia,
then they move up to China, they invade Siberia and
they march into Russia and then they sneak onto ships
and move across the water with people. But and this
is hard to fathom, rats didn't even arrive in places
like Spain until eighteen hundred. That is pretty crazy. I mean,
you imagine rats have just always been around and part
(16:51):
of the cultural fabric. But it's true they only invaded
states like Montana and the nineties or yeah. And and
just to drive that point home, you know, j Otto
Been the dudes who studied birds. Of course, he also
studied rats and did rat paintings. And according to Sullivan,
when oddo Been showed his paintings to members of Congress
and we're talking about the early eighteen hundreds here, a
number of them mistook the rats for squirrels. Like these
(17:14):
were educated men, many who worked farms, and they couldn't
tell the rats from squirrel. It can be tough sometimes
you have to admit that. I mean, it's a little odd,
but but you're right. The government only started studying the
animals during World War two, back when we thought the
Nazis might harness rodents to spread disease all across Europe.
In fact, people who wanted to study rats before, they
(17:34):
had to do it on the sly. So take Elmer McCollum,
for instance. He was one of the pioneers at Johns
Hopkins in the early nineteen hundreds, but he started his
research with rats at the University of Wisconsin. But the
thing is he had to do it in secret because
and I'm quoting, the Wisconsin state legislature would not support
public expenditures on room and board of rats. A pest
(17:56):
to the Wisconsin I guess they paid tuition. I don't know,
but I thought it was a weird. That's so weird.
But what we've learned about rats in the last seventy
years is incredible, and it's basically that they're little geniuses.
Like they followed us across continents. They have this extraordinary
sense of smell their home bodies, like they really don't
travel more than sixty from their nest unless they have to,
(18:18):
in which they can travel great distances and tread water
for like three days at a time. They can be
dropped from heights of fifty feet without injuring themselves. I
mean that's five stories off the ground. And they're really adaptable.
Like if rats have been born in an alley that
serves Indian food, they'll have a preference for samosas and
curries and spicy foods. And they don't even eat that
(18:40):
much food, only like three to four ounces a day.
That's pretty adaptable. They're also super cooperative, like in one
study from two thousand, twelve rats were offered a chocolate
chip treat or the opportunity to free a fellow rat,
and over and over they freed the rat first, and
then they shared the treat. And in studies where two
rats had to press their own buttons at the same
(19:02):
time to release treats, they quickly learned to cooperate. And
this was the craziest to me. They're really sensitive, kind
of like humans. Like if one of them get stressed,
they bring that energy back to the nest and all
of the rats get stressed. That's so sweet. The other
thing I was reading about was just how suspicious they
are of anything new, which of course is why pest
(19:22):
control is so hard. Right, So we've established they're really
reproductive unless they're sporting polyester, and they're really smart, but
why haven't humans figured out a way to keep them
in check? Yeah? Well, one of the funny things that
keeps coming up in history is that we kind of
keep forgetting about rats until we're actually confronted with them again.
So it's kind of an out of sight, out of
(19:43):
mind thing. But as soon as we do see them,
we move super quickly. Right. So, in the nineteen sixties,
Ebony magazine did this spread of housing projects in New
York where the apartments were so dilapidated and drafty that
children were under thick blankets trying to protect themselves from
the cold. This wasn't at night, this was during the day,
and the public was largely unmoved by the scene. But
(20:04):
then people from the buildings started catching rats and bringing
them into courts and showing the rats to the press.
That's when the public opinion shifted. So and the odd
part is that this happens over and over. Like in
the nineteen thirties, the New York Times had stories about
the atrocious rat infestation on Rikers Island. You know, this
is the prison island between Queens and the Bronx. Well,
(20:25):
the rat problem was so bad that the guards bought
a dog to control the rats. You know what the
rats did, They actually killed the dogs. So it was
it was that bad, and pretty soon the officers on
the island were dumping poison and discussing bringing snakes onto
the island to deal with the rats. But New York
totally ignored the situation until the rats swam from the
(20:46):
island to this super exclusive summer community on Long Island Sound.
And you know, when these ultra rich beach goers saw
rats on their beach, they weren't having it. Yeah, that
makes sense, but let's get zen for a second. This
is actually one of the themes that keeps coming up
in Sullivan's book, and it's that exterminators have the cisphius
like task. They're given this enormous job of trying to
(21:08):
control the rodent population, but as soon as they stop
seeing rats, their budgets get cut, so no one wants
to admit they exist. And it's crazy because, like past,
controllers will work at five star hotels, and when they
do that, they have to work in disguise, or when
they introduce themselves at parties are on the first date,
they kind of have to tread carefully, and so you
(21:28):
you kind of come away feeling sorry for them, but
also with this tremendous sense of respect. Like the best exterminators.
They actually work as rats ares, and they're essentially archaeologists. Archaeologists,
What what do you mean by that? Like, the rats
won't travel far from home, but they will travel deep.
So a good exterminator actually sees those city and layers.
They study old maps, and so in New York, for instance,
(21:50):
a real student will decipher that a new sewer system
is built on top of a system from the eighteen hundreds,
and that might be built on one from the seventeen hundreds,
and that might be over where a stream used to be.
And while those places aren't really functional or even accessible
to humans anymore, there's no doubt that there's a rat
population that's made a home for themselves there, and as
long as they can still get to a food source. Well.
(22:11):
The other thing I think that's kind of fascinating is
how you were telling me that Sullivan almost compares catching
rats to think you said, fly fishing. Yeah, Like you
kind of have to know the rhythm of the rat
population and where they're flowing, and except that it's going
to take a while, and you've got to go in
with this mentality that the rats are going to come
to you. I guess I've never thought about rats being
so zen. Thank you now for another dramatic reading from
(22:40):
Squeaky Poems, Rhymes about My Rat by America's foremost rat poet,
Jack Handy. What more is a man need than a
Scotch and a rat and maybe a gun to rest
in his lap. So our guest today is one of
(23:10):
our favorite people in the world, right mango. Yeah, definitely
top forty. Oh, easily top forty. So for the past
several years he's thrown himself into these crazy experiments and
written about them, whether it was reading the entire Encyclopedia
Britannica from A to Z, living an entire year according
to the laws of the Old Testament, working to bring
his body to peak help through diet and exercise, or
(23:32):
working to build the world's largest family reunion. He's always
ready to dive in. Oh and he's a distant relative
of Michael Jackson, which he can tell us about A. J. Jacobs.
Welcome to part time genius. Thank you guys, happy to
be here. You're in my top forty two. Thank you.
This is so flattering. That's that's really what we were
fishing for there, to be honest with you. So wow.
(23:55):
So A j It's it's hard to believe it's been
over a decade since he wrote no it all. I
read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. But
I'm assuming you've managed to retain it all pretty much everything. Yeah,
and maybe one or two facts in the eight those
were earlier. No, unfortunately I've forgotten. I play a good
(24:15):
ninety nine point eight percent still is better than, you know,
better than when I started, so ver minus. Did did
you actually sit down and read every single entry, every
single page of Encyclopedia Britannica. I did. I did. I
started at A A A K, which is a type
(24:35):
of Korean music, as I'm sure you know, and then
I ended A D D Y W I E C.
So I read and that's the town in Poland right again,
not not too sure. So yes, I read the whole thing.
And I did it because my dad, when I was
a kid, he started to read the encyclopedia. He loved learning,
(24:59):
he loved read inc. But he only made it's the
middle of the beach like Bolivia or so uh, And
I figured, you know, why not try to finish what
he began and removed that black mark from our family history.
I like that you were worried about spoiling the reading
of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So is there anybody would even
know where to find a printed At this point, I
(25:23):
know it's true. I fell my kids and I'm like,
why are you talking about that mysterious encyclopedia? So a J.
One of the things I love reading in your books
is these stories of your wife's spinusmen and also her
beleaguered responses to things. And I was curious both what
project has been like the most difficult on your family
and if you've abandoned anything because it's been too hard.
(25:44):
As you know, the one about following all the rules
of the Bible as literally as possible, so I had to.
The Bible says no shaving, so I had this huge beard.
She didn't love that. She did not kiss me for
literally seven months. There was no physical contact. UM. I
don't know if this is appropriate to UH to your show,
(26:06):
but I'll just throw it out there. And but the
Bible says in Levinicus that you cannot touch women during
their time of months. And if you take it the
Bible really literally, you cannot sit in a seat where
UH a woman, a menstruating woman has that because the
seat becomes impure. And my wife found that offensive, so
(26:27):
she sat and everything apartment. I also love that you
actually stoned someone right as I did. So I was
in sort of the middle of the year. I was
getting very into it, so following everything and I looked biblical.
(26:48):
So I had the beard and a white robe and sandals,
and I was in Central Park in New York where
and a man came up to me and said, why
are you addressed like that? And I explained, well, I'm
trying to follow all the rules of the Bibles that
from the ten Commanders to sony adulters. He says, well,
I'm an adulterer. Are you going to stone rate? And
(27:11):
I said, well, that would be fantastic. So in recent
years you've been obsessed with genealogy and proving that we're
all related, and you even have a terrific podcast, one
of our favorites called Twice Removed where you focused on this.
It would have been some of the more interesting findings
from this obsession of yours. Yeah, this started because I
got the strange email from this guy who said, you
(27:33):
don't know me, but I'm your eighth cousin, and I
thought he was gonna, you know, ask, here's my bank
account in Nigeria, please lire ten thousand dollars. But it
turns out he's just part of this group that are
building these massive family trees that are trying to connect
everyone in the world, and the biggest one is literally
(27:54):
now a hundred twenty million people all connected. So I
found out this is exciting. As a I am Barack
Obama's relatives. He is my fifth grade aunt's husband's brother's wife,
seventh grade nephew, so we are very close brothers. What's
(28:14):
up next for you? A j What are you? What
are you thinking about? Now? I am Actually I've got
another book that I'm doing with Ted Books, and I'm
gonna take something normal, uh, something I use every day,
a cup of coffee, uh, and then I'm gonna go
around the world and try to thank everyone involved in
making that cup of coffee a reality, so the beans
(28:38):
and I hope, so, I hope. So I don't know,
we'll see it is uh, So I have to do that. Well,
since you've been, uh, the subject of so many studies,
we thought it was only appropriate for you to join
us in this episode to answer some questions about rats.
So are you up for this high stakes quiz? A J?
(28:59):
I am? I love rath alright, So what quiz are
we playing with A J? Today? We're playing a game
called Fancy Rats. And the good news for AJ is
it's a true false quiz. Right, Okay, here we go.
I think we have five questions for you, a J.
The first one true or false. The fannie pack was
(29:19):
originally invented by a rat fancier who often used the
pounds to sneak his lucky rat, Theodore into bowling alleys
with him. Is this true or false? Oh? Man, I
love it. I wanted to be true very much. And
I actually was at some party recently and like the
funkiest person there was wearing a fanny pack. So I'm
(29:39):
I'm hoping that we're seeing a resurgence the santy packs.
The HTR crap. I'm going to say that is weird
enough that it's got to be true. Oh, I wanted
to be alright. The second question, that's right? All right?
For one second question, true or false? Before he transitioned
to being a mouse and two thousand twelve, Chuck from
(30:02):
Chuck E Cheese was formerly a rat, an unusual mascot
for a children's arcade slash pizza parlor. What do you
think true or faults? Oh that's a good one. Oh
that's a good one. In I feel like I got
to go through again because you wouldn't do you wouldn't
do two falses in a row, and really tricky. You
(30:22):
guys are really tricky. Alright, you're right, true, I'm gonna
true even born a cigar chomping New Jersey rat and
initially went by the name Rick Rick the rat. Alright,
good job you are. You are one out of two
number three true or faults. In two thousand sixteen, researchers
(30:46):
discovered something that rat fanciers have long known that rats
laugh when tickled. I feel all I read that somewhere
not in the encyclopedia, So I'm gonna say, yeah, you're right. Yeah,
they giggle and ultrasonic volume that's too high pitched fris
to hear. Good job, all right, Number four true or
(31:06):
faults and fancy rat circles. The critter or pet that
changed your mind about rats is called a heart rat um.
And I do know this is the one of one
of the few facts I remember about raps is that
they do get bad tr because I think a couple
of years ago, didn't they find that it was probably
(31:28):
Gerbils who spread the black plague and that so go
onto something here a little that was my heart rap.
I'm gonna say true, Yeah, it's true, and uh, it's
odd because that phrase doesn't work for everything, like no
one talks about their heart. Bruce Willis, Look he's talking,
(31:48):
is my Yeah, I think that's mine too. Actually, So
you're on a roll here, a J. So with let's
see if we can finish strong question number five. Angelina
Jolie once had a pet rat named Harry, but gave
it up when it started chewing through too many of
her curtains. Well, I feel I used to work of
(32:10):
entertainment weekly and I feel I did a lot. Like
she had a vial of Philly Bob Thornton's blood. So
I don't know. I mean, maybe it's like, maybe it's
a vicious rumor, but I feel I've heard that. So
I'm gonna say true, true tries, which is our endless
(32:34):
admiration at the top thirty or so I think at
this point. So well, A J. We can't wait to
check out your your next book, and of course everybody
should check out your podcast. Twice removed, but thanks so
much for joining us today. Thank you, guys. I'm huge fans.
I'm so excited you're doing this podcast and honored to
(32:55):
be a part of and and ruin it by talking
about wife's rats nine situation. All right, so let's bring
(33:18):
this all home. Is their hope for humans in this
war with rats? So it seems like there are only
a few solutions because rats have been resistant to poisons
and they're really just so clever and one is and
this isn't happening anytime soon. But we could all turn
vegan because rats are not fans of raw vegetables. Yeah,
I'd say that's not happening anytime soon. Where we can
(33:38):
make a move to things like metal garbage cans, because
it all comes down to basically starving out the rats
and protecting our garbage, or by abandoning a place and
having them try to live without us, or what's what's
the other option? Well, this is kind of the best hope,
and that's birth control. You're saying, put them on the pill? Yeah, Like,
since the polyester pants, things seems like a stretch. This
(33:59):
might be the best option. And there's this new e
p A approved birth control for rats. It's been made
super sweet and really fat rich because rats have even
more of a sweet tooth than us. And it basically
spurs mouse a pause I know, which is the cut
ci term scientists used for rat menopause. But it triggers
it super early so that the populations can't breed. Poor
(34:21):
rats have hot flashes. Well, it's better than having them
in your cupboards, right, But that's the great hope for
now and how we'll finally win this battle against the
grossest of foes. Um. And actually there's one more school
of thought on this, and that is to do nothing. Wait,
that makes no sense. We were just going through hy
Rats are winning this war. Why would we ignore them? Well,
(34:43):
the thought is because rats are super sensitive. When we
kill a rat, it's peers tend to feel the danger
and start varying from their norm. And when that happens,
they ran into other rats and scrape it up. And
that's really where pathogens cross and diseases spread and mutap.
So if you can get their rat, he needs to
stay to themselves and sort of curb the diseases that's
(35:03):
kind of what scientists think might be the best you
can ask for. Anyway, if you're interested in the subject,
you should definitely read Robert Sullivan's Rats, which formed the
backbone of this episode. M All right, you know what
time it is, Mango, time for the fact off you
(35:24):
bet it is as to the part of the show
where we get to use the fascinating things we learned
in our research for this episode but didn't get a
chance to mention. And I kind of have a feeling
Mango intentionally held back a few just for this big moment,
So why don't you go first, Mango? So this one
is totally gross. Back in the eighteen fifties, gamblers in
New York City used to crowd into halls to watch
(35:44):
and bet on the sport called ratting. Ratting. Yeah, Like basically,
a guy would show up with a big, misshapen sack
full of rats, and when the ref said go, he
let all of the animals just spill out, and then
they let a dog go after them, and people would
bet on how many rats trained dog could kill in
a short period of time. So you got to imagine
this scene, right, people are betting and yelling in this terrier,
(36:06):
because terriers are just the best at this. This terrier
is going crazy while rats are running around, and it's
horrible and super popular and bloody. But discuss I know,
but that's not even the weird part, right. Ratting was
considered a man's sport because it was so vicious, like
a single dog could kill a hundred rats in six
minutes or something. But to expand the audience and make
(36:27):
it more palatable for women and children, they had organized
the same thing in the afternoons, but they'd replaced the
dog with a weasel. Oh of course, right, because that's
not gross at all. I know. They honestly thought watching
a weasel kill a bag of rats was more appropriate
for kids or something. But anyway, that that was America's
favorite spectator sport until baseball took over. Okay, that's that's
(36:49):
a gross way to start this one. Gets a good
job on this one, all right. So all this talk
of rats, maybe want to go to a place where
there are no rats, And it turns out that's what Alberta,
Canada is all about, and act, if we're being honest,
it might be the number one reason to go to Alberta.
Alberta is huge. It's actually bigger than France or any
country in the EU. But it's so committed to the
rat free bit that they've dedicated a rat patrol monitoring
(37:12):
the borders for rats, and anytime there's an infestation, they
bring in heavy machinery and dig out the entire nest
to eradicate it. So in big years they'll find maybe
two or three infestations across the region, but most years
they're not any that's kind of crazy. Uh So this
is a super simple one, but it makes me happy.
Did you know that male rats are called bucks and
(37:33):
females are called does? I did not know? I know.
And the best part of it is that you can
sing the sound of music song with new lyrics like
dough or rats. I get the idea. That's a good one.
That's a good one. All right. Rats are subject to
peer pressure. If they see a bunch of their friend
rats eating something on appetizing, they'll join into rapper tupac.
(37:54):
Shakur studied ballet in high school and started the nutcracker
as the mouse bringing some tupac. Well done, you get
a extra point for that one, alright. Fancy rat owners
practice something called road dentistry. You're not gonna believe this one.
So where they'll open up their mouths and let a
rat nibble and pick food from their teeth, they're basically
outsourcing the job of flossing to their pets. That's crazy.
(38:17):
You have to YouTube this. I'm not I'm not kidding.
It so gross. The owners will just lean back and
the rats get really deep in their mouths. It's because
rats have a grooming behavior where they'll clean each other's teeth,
and rat parents basically consider it the ultimate compliments. So
you have to YouTube it. Um well, I cannot top that,
So you win this week's fact Off. Thank you to
(38:39):
our listeners out there. Please send in your suggestions for
rebranding the Rat and we'll make sure you get a
fun prize out of it. And you know, well, there's
one last part of the show that we need to
deal with, the Part Time Genius Awards, And today I'd
like to nominate the author of the best book I
read last year, The Stench of Honolulu, of course, and
also America's pre eminent rat poet. That's right, Mr Jack Handy.
(39:00):
You'll be added to our Hall of Genius and we'll
be mailing you a certificate to hang on your fridge.
Congratulations Jack Handy. And in honor of Jack Handy, why
don't we read one last poem from America's greatest rap
poot to close the show. I think that's a fine idea.
The Middle Ages were the best of times to be
a rat. You could point to a man with plague
and say I gave him that. Thank you. Until next time,
(39:24):
we're Will and Mango for Part Time Genius. Thanks again
for listening to Part Time Genius. Be sure to subscribe
wherever you listen to your podcast, and because we're a
(39:45):
brand new show, if you're feeling extra generous, we'd love
it if you give us a rating on Apple Podcast.
Part Time Genius is produced by some of our favorite geniuses.
It's edited by Tristan McNeil, theme song and audio mixing
by Noel Brown. Our executive producer is Jerry Rowland. Our
res arch team is Gabe Bluesier, Lucas Adams, Autom white
Field Me Toronto, Austin Thompson and Meg Robbins. Jason Hoke
(40:06):
is are chief cheerleader.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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