will tell you, we can’t hope for a better future unless we learn from the past.
So tickle your brain, but don’t forget to share your knowledge with others! Trivia isn’t meant to stay with just one person—not only can it be used as a tool for learning from the past in order to help shape the future, but it can also be used to connect with one another. And if you’re socially awkward at parties like me, sometimes trivia was the only thing I felt comfortable talking about.
When Moxie started her podcast, I was intimidated by her. I had already been doing The Story Behind for a while, and I didn’t know many other hosts in the trivia and fun facts area, and certainly not a lot of females.
I also began to realize I was not the trivia buff I thought I was. I liked it and could research it, but Moxie ate, breathed, and slept trivia. She was the trivia podcast host I wanted to be, to be honest.
You would think that would make us “competitors,” but that’s not quite how podcasting works. I happily listened to her show, I got to know her online, shared her and her show with my audience, and roomed with her at a podcasting conference. I liked her instantly. She’s a weird human, just like me. Probably just like you, if you bought this book.
So, hello, fellow, weird human! If you are hungry for trivia and fun facts, I know you’ll enjoy feeding your curiosity with Your Brain on Facts, as I have.
—Emily Prokop, author of The Story Behind and host of The Story Behind podcast
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Why are we here? Not philosophically, but why are you hearing a voice in your head that corresponds to the lines and shapes I arranged in a Word document some months prior? We’re here because your teachers lied to you. They didn’t mean to. They did the best they could with the information they had, and goodness knows they work hard. Our history textbooks are riddled with highly believable misinformation called “cemented apocrypha” (by me, just now). By “cemented apocrypha,” I mean stories that have become fact: Columbus was trying to prove the world was round; George Washington could not lie about cutting down a cherry tree; Paul Revere single-handedly rallied the colonial troops; Napoleon was short and bitter about it. Some version of the story was published in a book, then got copied to other books, and before long, it was the only version going. Thus we weren’t taught that people already knew the world was round (Columbus, the annihilator of the people he discovered, thought Earth was smaller than scholars did); the cherry tree story first appeared in the fifth edition of a biography of George Washington (which left out Washington spending money lavishly while his troops starved in the snow); Revere wasn’t the only rider (and he never finished the famous ride); Napoleon was a little above the average height for his time (and was both a ruthless dictator and a champion of gender-equal public education).
I’ve always loved facts, be they funny, practical, or outright weird. That led to an appetite for “the real story behind” explanations. I know I’m not alone in this. Otherwise, no one would be watching Bill Nye: The Science Guy or Modern Marvels, National Geographic wouldn’t have its own channel, and no one would turn out for TED Talks. A love of knowledge isn’t the shameful trait it was when I was in school in the 1980s–90s. In fact, being a nerd went beyond being acceptable and to being co-opted as fashion. That created a perfect climate to surreptitiously educate people who would not have cared otherwise, to kindle their innate curiosity.
A fine selection of books, documentaries, YouTube channels, and trivia games filled my brain to overflowing. Facts would fall out. Not fall, leap! Unsolicited bits of information would jump out of my mouth unbidden in any and all situations. Customers at the grocery store where I worked didn’t want to hear that avocados have huge pits because the pits used to be distributed by giant sloths, and they definitely didn’t want to hear about the human suffering inherent to cashew production. I once befuddled a heated online argument by explaining the history of the phrase “Devil’s advocate” after someone used it. Trying to get through serious situations like traffic stops and funerals without dropping a few fact bombs is an agonizing struggle. Keeping my mouth shut and staying on-topic is like sprinting up six flights of stairs in high heels—exhausting and pretty much guaranteed to fail.
For the sake of everyone around me, I sought a safe way to vent all that cranial clutter. This was about the same time my husband turned me on to podcasts. More accurately, it was the time I finally relented to his efforts to get me to listen to a podcast. Prior to that, I didn’t know how people found something they liked, I worried I would be bored, and I had the ridiculous but surprisingly common misapprehension that I had to stop everything I was doing to listen. Once I tried it, I was hooked, subscribing to entertaining and educational shows by the dozen. Facts were flowing into my ears like never before. It only took a hot minute before I decided that making a podcast would be the best way to divert the nonstop flow of facts, as well as to provide me with a creative outlet, now that I had retired from a seven-year stint as a burlesque dancer.
Thus was born the Your Brain on Facts podcast. The great thing about podcasting is that there’s no barrier to entry, and anyone can do it. The downside of podcasting is that there is no barrier to entry, and anyone can do it. The first few episodes were rough because I wasn’t editing enough. The next several were worse because I was editing and tweaking too much. Eventually, though, I got out of my own way so the audience could actually hear what I was saying. Topics ranged from the origins of blue raspberry to what will happen when Queen Elizabeth II dies, from children stolen by the government to prolific voice actors, from moral panics to Scandinavian Christmas monsters. The beginning of the podcast’s second year saw me at a podcast conference several states away. Once I got over my first plane ride in twenty years, I found myself sharing a hotel room with a fellow fact-caster, Emily Prokop of The Story Behind. We got on like a house on fire, and a few shared cat videos later, Emily kindly put me on to her publisher.
It was time to write a book. One major hurdle in my research was that, as a rule, it was white men all the way down. History? White men from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson. Medicine? White men from Hippocrates to Dr. Drew. Literature? White men from Shakespeare to George R. R. Martin. The stories of women, LGBT people, and people of color have been relegated to the edge of our sphere. Every time a white male story gets repeated, a female, queer, or POC story gets pushed a little further away. White men made up 90 percent of the textbooks our schools gave us. To do my small part to correct this, I tried to turn the focus of the articles you’re about to read away from the “obvious” choices and toward the people whose stories aren’t often told.
The world is a buffet of knowledge, an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of information, especially in the age of Google. Unfortunately, this buffet has no sneeze guard, and sometimes the information gets befouled. Things get copied wrong, sources aren’t cited, and internet trolls deliberately mislead and obfuscate. Pains were taken to corroborate the facts in this book. If I found something that was interesting enough to be included, it had to be from a respectable source or be found from at least two sources that didn’t set off alarms of incredulity (or two sources that were not a flat-out copy and paste of one another, which happened even more than I’d expected).
I hope that this book fills your brain with new information, and that the facts contained herein ignite a curiosity in you to learn more. Don’t under-value your local library. It’s still one of the best places to grow a healthy mind.
Smorgasbord traditionally meant a small selection of breads and cheeses as an appetizer course. Meats, both hot and cold, were added over time and by the early twentieth century had come to be the main course.
