Ian Chillag
Appearances
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Okay. The one we're not sure about is from Sky, and it says, Hey, Mike and Ian, just had a quick question. How do you end a podcast season? Looking forward to the answer. Feel free not to mention my question and show by example instead. Thanks, Sky.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Hey, Clementine, what can we help you with?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Why yawning is contagious. I wonder this all the time. Where does this question come from, Clementine?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
How many kids do you think were infected with this one yawn?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Did you, were you one of the yawners, I guess?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Yeah. Has she yawned at any point during our conversation?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I really want to figure out this, too. So we are going to do our best to help you out, Clementine. And I guess we're going to do our best to help the entire fifth grade.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I think it's a good idea. We should give you the opportunity to nap right now. You don't even have to press stop. We'll bring in some soothing music. Hina, can you bring that up? Perfect. It's unsettling, really, to think about our thousands upon thousands of listeners who've all fallen asleep at the same time around the world.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Those of you who listen to the show while driving, we're sorry about the accidents we've just caused by forcing you to go to sleep. Double check your insurance. Hopefully it covers collisions. Okay, I feel like this has been a sufficient nap. That's good.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
She's the scientist who discovered that chimps recognize each other by their butts. So Dr. Kret, why are yawns contagious?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
with my colleague or when i present the results people always become really itchy yeah no i'm the top when we started talking today when we started talking about yawning i said i had to stifle a yawn just from talking about it and just now when you started bringing up scratching the top of my head itches and i've been resisting the sense that you're wearing those headphones and that maybe they're
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Wow. I feel like it has been hard for me not to yawn during this conversation. If you out there listening find yourself having to yawn, let us know. I'm curious if this is contagious across a podcast.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Maybe we'll find like a peak yawn moment in the episode. Also, let us know where you are because I want to see the furthest away yawn that we are personally responsible for. Oh, we can map it out. Yeah, we'll do a yawn map.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Is it like, yeah, I mean, I guess like in a pack of animals, if there was a danger, one would want to send the signal.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I realize vomiting is also contagious. Like when you see someone vomit, you often have to vomit.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
And it makes sense because I guess if someone in your pack had ingested something poisonous and threw up, you would probably be eating with them.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Well, that feels good. So I'll read you this other one. This is from Ed. What can you do to make your podcast funny? Like you would have a clue, Ed. That's definitely... That's a heckle, right?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Yeah.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
A couple that that on their first date, if their heart rates synchronized, they're more likely to, I guess, want a second date.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Well, I learned that yawning has a real function. Yawning calms your mind, makes you more attentive, so you're more ready to deal with danger. The theory is we evolved to spread yawning around so that it shares those benefits with our friends and family around us.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
It seems cocky that while a lion was approaching you, you would be so bored by it.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Yeah, if you want to make a lion feel bad, just yawn in its face.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I learned also that the faces we make, the expressions on our face, they serve a purpose. Like when you scrunch up your face when something's gross, you're actually closing your face holes to keep gross things from getting in. Yeah. Or when your eyes get wide and your mouth agape because you're scared, that's actually so you can get more data about the scary thing to help fight it.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
That makes so much sense.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
It would be a great idea for anybody out there starting a bakery, right there at the counter, just have an axe murderer. He doesn't have to murder anybody. He just has to scare people so that they are ready to take in the flavors you've worked so hard to create.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Our intern is Monica Turner. Monica, great job with the dinosaurs.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
And keep your eye on the Wait Wait Instagram feed, at Wait Wait NPR, for details on ways Mike and I and Hina are going to be popping up in between seasons. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. And there's Hina.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Thanks.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Of every comedian in the world, Patton, you are the most likely to end up hugging a heckler at the end of the night.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I think that's what we have. That is our ammunition. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
And I'm Ian. On today's show, the final show of this season of How to Do Everything, a fifth grader asks us to investigate how her substitute teacher made the whole class yawn.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
That's interesting. Yeah. Because, you know, people always say you sound different to other people than you do to yourself.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
You might listen back to this episode of How to Do Everything and think, that's so weird. That person has the same question I have. That person who's definitely not me.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
We've got somebody on the line. I would say the perfect person. We have the perfect person on the line to help.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
So, James, what Mary was asking, is this something you think about?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Melancholy Chewbacca.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
With Trump, does it change? Because he's a person who I first saw you doing five years ago now, four or five years ago. He's changed. Are there things about your impression of him that have changed that you're aware of?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Being able to do that, right now, it's such a necessary impression that we need on Saturday Night Live and in the world. Do you have any absolutely useless impressions that you've been thinking about or working on?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
So we're a how-to show. We get questions from listeners and we do our best to answer them. But we recently got a couple emails where we think we're being heckled. You think you're being heckled.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I don't know. Yeah, me neither. Okay, thanks to the many, many of you who painstakingly counted dinosaur moans in our last episode. The winner, the first one of you to get us the answer was Alicia from Pennsylvania. And it was painstaking.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Or whatever Alicia said. Great job. You have an ear for dinosaurs.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
And in the time between seasons, we're going to try something new with some of you. Keep your eye on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me's Instagram feed. It's at Wait Wait NPR. We'll have some announcements, some details about a little thing we're going to do between seasons.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
One of them is clear, clearly heckling us. The other one could possibly be a good faith question, but we think we're being heckled.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
One episode left this season. We will be coming back after our break. So if your question was, how do I save this pinnacle of podcasting? How do I save this show? It's going away. That question is unnecessary.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
We're already coming back. It's been solved. But any other question, send it to us at howtoatnpr.org.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
The northernmost town in Alaska, a town full of refrigerators you should never climb into. That town is in the middle of two months of darkness.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
We were curious what it's like to live in that kind of darkness and to see if somebody who's done it might have some tips to help.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
What is the feeling on that last 24 hours of daylight when you know you're about to enter this six month without ever seeing the sun?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I hadn't even fathomed that, that there would be this month where every, I guess day is the wrong word, but every 24 hours, it's a little darker than it was before until finally it's black.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I didn't realize this, but no planes will risk landing in the dark in Antarctica. So I guess at the very end of that daylight period, those six months, the last plane takes off and you do not have a choice. You cannot, after two months, decide, you know, I can't take this anymore.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Um, thinking about this town in Alaska and other towns that are entering this period where the sun is not going to come up, did you come up with certain techniques or ideas of how to handle it that we might want to pass on to people there?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
OK, we have someone on the line who can definitively answer this question. But we should say in the time since we talked to Maureen, this question has taken over her friend group.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Well, I learned that bees will go to extreme lengths to get a mouse out of their hive.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
You know, you hear about people who have a mouse in their house, and so they get a cat to take care of it. Yeah, sure. Sounds like you could also just fill your home with bees.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Honestly, you don't even need the hive. You could just have the loose bees, and that way they're ready to strike. Oh, the classic honey trap. I mean, there's, you know, Tom and Jerry, except it's actually 60,000 Toms. Yeah, yeah. Who are willing to sacrifice their own lives to get this mouse out of there. That is not as funny of a cartoon.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, especially when the bees start tearing off parts of the mouse to remove it.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Our intern is Father Time. Great work, Father Time. Happy New Year, Father Time. 2024 was fantastic. Get us your questions at howtoatnpr.org. I'm Ian.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Happy New Year. Well, I think we got to call Maureen back and give her the news.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
The stakes are very high. It could tear them all apart.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
It would take 67 bees to karaoke.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Well, Caitlin, you can still lord it over Carl.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Now you're just spiking the football, Maureen. Come on, Maureen. Act like you've been there before.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
67 bees. Okay. When you say they will fly out their dead, move out the dead, what's the explanation for that behavior?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
And it's just with the dead bees, it's one to one. One bee carries one bee.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Is there anything that they collaborate on?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
They basically, they make a mouse sanitizer themselves.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Happy New Year, everybody. Our mailbox, thanks to you, is overflowing with emails desperate for help. And our resolution, our shared resolution, is to clear it out.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse, we thought we'd just throw a bunch of these how-to questions at you, see what you can do for our listeners.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Totally okay. We'll start off with this question. This is from Sharon. Sharon says she can't resist the urge to over-comment in many situations. When someone asks her a question, she starts talking but doesn't know when to stop and often finds herself... going on longer than she should and regretting later the things she said. Do you have any advice for Sharon?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
And I'm Ian. Coming up, writer, director, and actor Jesse Eisenberg joins us to answer all of your how-to questions. But first... Hey, Maureen. What can we help you with?
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
The hours are long, but it doesn't pay anything. Here's a question from Tyler, and this is holiday related. Tyler every year sends out Christmas cards, but worries the great effort that they put into the Christmas cards is not appreciated by the people who receive them. So Tyler wants to know the minimum effort they can make in those Christmas cards.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I guess the minimum thing they can say to make people feel thought of without doing too much work.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Okay. This is touching to me. I mean, I feel like two-thirds of our questions so far have circled back to just finding self-love.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Good. Can we do one more? Is that all right? This is from E. Wayne Williams. Call him Wayne. Wayne wants to know advice about telling someone they have food in their facial hair. Wayne was traumatized 30 years ago by seeing someone with a ramen noodle flapping around in their mustache and didn't know what to say.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
It is one of our founding principles as a podcast. We want to bring you quality programming, and we want you never to get inside a refrigerator.
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HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
That's right. It's dangerous. It's cold.