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Did you know that The List Show has shared around 7,500 facts with our YouTube audience
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since we premiered in 2013? Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com
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Thanks to Kevin Geetrix for asking us to tally up our total number of facts. Here's how we came up with that number
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If you add up all the List Show episodes, you get 8,121 facts
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Subtract 500 from our 500 Fun Facts video, which was basically a Greatest Hits episode
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and you have 7,621. about 1% of those are repeated facts, and that means using a fairly generous definition
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of facts that includes things like debunked life hacks, that we've shared around 7,545
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facts over the years. Or I guess make that 7,546. And that's just the first audience
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question about The List Show that I'm going to answer today. So you just heard our intro song and Balooie writes, where does the opening and closing
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song come from? It is written by Jason Widener, who's a really great composer, but we don't actually know
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if it has a name. So if you have an idea for what we should call it, leave it in the comments
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A number of viewers, including Rick Seiden and Apophis324, asked for updates on old mental
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Plus video folks like John Green and Elliot Morgan. We really loved working with John over the years
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He stepped away to work on some other projects. For example, he and Hank are doing this amazing charity fundraising thing
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where they're trying to raise $25 million for Partners in Health in Sierra Leone
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We popped a link in the description in case you want to donate. And Elliot and Craig are also up to some really cool things
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They are posting on their own channel, so you guys should check that out too. Related
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Tover Yonder writes, Is there really a Meredith? I think it's fake. Fun fact, there is a Meredith
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She's real. I've met her. And actually, we asked her for a comment about this question
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And Meredith said, Yes, Meredith is indeed real. After an amazing eight years of working on this channel, my work concluded at the end
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of last year. But it has been so much fun writing for and learning with the most amazing audience on YouTube
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I guess that makes sense. Or is that just what the lizard people want us to believe
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On to the next. Next, Sherlock Sensai and B.G. Philbin asked questions about the set and how we choose items
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for it. Also, everybody's screen names are really good. It's kind of a mix of stuff that we brought ourselves and that we bought, and I would
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say that it definitely reflects my personality. I wanted this set to have kind of like a library meets curiosity cabinet kind of vibe, so a
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lot of this stuff reflects that. So let's point some things out
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This is a vintage viewfinder from the 1940s It mine I bought it at the Brooklyn Flea Many of these books are books from my personal collection One that isn on the set but maybe should be Hold please
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It's the Christopher Pike book, Fall Into Darkness. If you know, then you know
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This is a Death's Head moth. I really love Silence of the Lambs, which I saw when I was way too young
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My family was on a vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, and my parents thought I was asleep, but
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I was actually awake. watching The Silence of the Lambs. And now it's one of my favorite movies
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My husband actually got it for me for Valentine's Day one year
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which is really romantic. Anyway, tell me in the comments what movie you saw when you were way too young
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And then of course, can't forget my children, Pearl and Ollie. They're my babies. Okay
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Trevor PC Harkenrider writes, is Erin McCarthy, host of Mental Floss List videos
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related to Caitlin Dowdy of the YouTube channel Ask a Mortician. They share similar facial features
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Does anyone else agree? So Caitlin and I are not related. I think it's just the bangs. But I have
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read her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and it's great. So I would highly recommend it
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Grovermatic Road. When is the next Life Hacks Tested video coming out? I'm not sure. We actually
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have a couple ideas in mind. One of them involves setting things on fire, so it's a little complicated
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logistically, but hopefully we will have one someday. Arswani wrote a number of questions
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Is there a list you wish you had not done? Is there a list you have been unable to do but really want
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to? And I love the Mental Floss Big Question special issue. Will you make more like that
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First of all, I'm so glad you enjoyed the magazine. So much hard work went into it
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and we were so excited to do it, so I'm happy that you enjoyed it. We're certainly
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hoping to do it again, fingers crossed. Is there a list you wish you had not done
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I feel pretty good about all the lists that we have done. I will say some are more challenging than others, and the one that comes to mind is
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the fossil facts video. First of all, we were shooting in the Big Bone Room, which is one of the coolest places
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you could ever possibly go, but we only had it for a set amount of time
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And then also, I can't say the scientific names of dinosaurs to save my life. Malareciad..
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Crossvalia webrensis. Crossvalia? Malarelia, nope. It was a high pressure situation for me personally
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And then the last question, is there a list you have been unable to do but really want to
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We actually really, really want to do a list of party hacks
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It involves setting a cabbage on fire. We just can't find a place
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that will let us set things on fire Trey Bansaw wrote How do you guys screen comments that be good content or do you pick at random So basically if a bunch of people are commenting on one thing we kind of pick that out
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but sometimes we just kind of see something that piques our curiosity and then we'll let
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that guide us. The thing that makes it a little complicated is that we have to run it by fact check and
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so sometimes things don't pass fact check and so then, you know, it becomes complicated
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But that's my answer. High Asconi wrote, what's your favorite silly fact
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I have so many. One of my favorites is that cats can't taste sweet things, which you would never know if
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you hang out with my cats because they want to eat every cupcake I've ever had
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But ultimately I think I always come back to lobsters pee out of their faces because
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it has everything. It has lobsters. It has pee. It has faces
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You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to
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did you know that lobsters be out of their faces? Also, if you wanna know how to tell male lobsters
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from female lobsters, that does not go over well at a Clambake. I don't see a name on this one, but someone asked
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how do you come up with the list that you comprise and how do you decide on which list to air once selected
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So a lot of our ideas come from brainstorms. So the staff will get into a room together
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and we are a bunch of weirdos, and so there are a lot of ideas that come from that
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And then, how else do we come up with ideas? Sometimes our videos correspond to like big anniversaries
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or something, but a lot of the times we just release them in the order that we write and record them
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Wenzel Says, who we've actually featured on other videos, asks, what's a list of a few
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of your favorite list show lists? It's like the inception of questions
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Okay, so I would say the Teddy Roosevelt list, because I'm a Ted head and I'm biased and
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also we made a podcast. Download it. Subscribe. But then also Amazing Yard Sale Finds I think was really fun
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I know it definitely made me look at all the junk I have in my apartment differently
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And then I think my other favorite was the fossil facts episode because we got to leave
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the studio and go to a place we'd never shop before that also happened to be really cool
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even if I could not ever say Monty Python River Sleisis. In 1985, Australian scientists discovered the fossil of an ancient python in Rivers
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Lee, Queensland, Australia, which they named Monty Pantheoshibus. Solex555 asked can I have a job I don know if this was a serious question At the risk of taking a joke question seriously I thought you might be interested to know some
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of the backgrounds of some of the people who work at Mental Floss. So I, for example, came from a magazine background, but I've been with Mental Floss for like
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seven years, which is a really long time. That's crazy. Some of our staffers came from the publishing world like me, either websites or magazines
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Some of them came from the freelance video world. Some of them came from book publishing
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And one of them came from the sunsetter Awnings Dynasty. That would be Justin Dodd, ladies and gentlemen
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The sun used to make our outdoor deck and patio space so hot
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Chloe Lind asked us about our fact-checking process. So our fact-checker, the wonderful Austin Thompson
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is like the most thorough person in the universe. And he actually wrote us a little statement that I would like to read to you
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we truncated it because in typical Austin fashion it was pretty long. So first he starts with looking
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for the source cited by the script's writer. So every time we write a script we have source links
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embedded in it. He doesn't trust websites simply citing a primary source because it's easy for
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misinformation to get cited in one place and then continually be cited by other sources which is
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something that the entire internet deals with. As he says it's about digging deeper into research
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until you hit the bottom. Newspapers.com is a great newspaper archiving tool
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for example. Oh, he also shared a trick for tracking down quotations because as we all know
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there are so many misquotations online. So he picks a small and unique string of words
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to search for rather than the whole quotation, which helps find sources that might have misspellings in them
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and helps him figure out what part of the quotation might be real versus parts that have somehow floated
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into the supposed quotation over the years. In reality, it is a much more complicated process than that
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and Austin is such a huge part of our team. We would be factless without him
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That's maybe not quite true, but we wouldn't be certain of our facts without him
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That's true. Baking Frog asked, what list have you found most fascinating
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For me, it's actually the very first one that we did, which is common things that science hasn't figured out
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It's fascinating that there are things we do every single day like laugh or cry or dream
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and science hasn't zeroed in exactly on why those things happen. That's what I like
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Our next episode is back to our regularly scheduled weirdness. We're going to talk about strange old predictions from the past for the 21st century
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If you have a favorite old prediction from the past about how people thought we'd be living today
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leave it in the comments. That'll be out next Wednesday, February 5th. It's part of our commitment to release a new video every Wednesday in 2020
