The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  So we have adopted a Fertility God of the Week. First came Anahiti, Iranian goddess of fertility and agriculture. Then it was Baal, the god of fertility worshipped by Canaanites. After that, Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess of fertility and marshes. We don't actually worship these gods, and we have yet to sacrifice any small mammals to them, or even offer up our ficus tree. But we do like memorizing their names. It gives us something to do.

  "Who is it this week?" Julie will ask.

  "This week we've got good old Earth Mother."

  "Oh, yes. Earth Mother."

  "And unlike other female fertility goddesses, she doesn't undergo periodic sexual intercourse with a male god."

  I also bought Julie a stuffed rabbit, because in the section on Easter, I learned that rabbits are a symbol of fertility. The Easter bunny was imported from pagan rituals, and did not actually have much interaction with Jesus.

  "You know, some cultures believe that flagellation promotes fertility," I say, as we read in bed one night.

  "I'm gonna have to pass on that one."

  "Just one whip?" I say.

  "No thanks."

  I lightly whip her with the comforter, just for luck.

  Fillmore, Millard

  The thirteenth president was born in a log cabin. Why doesn't poor Millard ever get press for this? Lincoln hogs all the log cabin spotlight.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott

  In 1920, after marrying Zelda and publishing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote: "Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."

  Jesus. That one stops me. What a sad quote. I find it particularly haunting because I've had that same feeling. During those few times in my life when I've been exceedingly happy, I've only gotten stressed out because I figured that my happiness would be fleeting. Fitzgerald's life didn't end so well--a spiral of drunkenness and commercially unsuccessful novels and a heart attack at forty-four. Not a good role model.

  Fleming, Ian

  He not only wrote the Bond books, but also the flying-car novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And it's there you can find the line that summarizes Fleming's philosophy of life: "Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes' otherwise you'll lead a very dull life." Huh. That's actually moderately profound. It's not quite Ecclesiastes, but it's pretty good advice. A much better way of thinking than Fitzgerald's, anyway.

  fondue

  Legend has it that this dish originated during a Swiss truce in the 16th century, when the Protestants brought the bread and Catholics brought the cheese. Or the other way around--no one's sure. It's a nice story. Sort of Reese's Peanut butter cups, but with more war and religion.

  fowl

  Technically, the term "duck" should be used only for a female. The proper term for a male duck is "drake." So Daffy Duck's true daffiness: gender identity disorder.

  French literature

  I e-mail my favorite high school teacher to tell him about Operation Britannica. I figure I've done him proud. He agrees to meet me for lunch.

  My butt has barely touched my chair at the Chat 'n' Chew diner when he starts in on me. "You know, this is a ridiculous project. A complete waste of your time." Oh boy. He's got the same tone as when he handed me back my paper comparing James Joyce to prop comedian Howie Man-dell. I've just gotten a D minus, but this time it's my life.

  Mr. Bender was my English teacher in sophomore and junior years. Now, fifteen years later, I call him Steve, even though every time I say it, I feel like I'm playacting as an adult. Steve--a large, bearded man who looks a bit like Abe Lincoln without the sunken cheeks or stovepipe hat--was the cool, funny English teacher. He told us stories of his former life as a stand-up comedian alongside Eddie Murphy. He could play a mean ukulele. And he introduced us to surreal filmmaker Luis Bunuel, which was like catnip to our fuzzy rebellious high school brains. Since I graduated, Steve had gotten into Buddhism, which at this very moment he is using to attack my endeavor.

  "From the Buddhist position, you're actually dumber," Steve says. "You're taking an original, pure mind, which is a crystal reflection of the soul, and you're making it dirty and crusty, so you won't be able to see anything. You're cluttering your mind."

  "I disagree," I say, as I desperately try to flag down a waitress. Any distraction--a list of daily specials, perhaps--would help my cause. But the waitresses are as hard to find as Indonesia's glory-of-the-sea cone shell (fewer than a hundred known to exist).

  "Being a Buddhist, my relationship to knowledge has changed. It's more about genuine inquiry than about the accumulation of facts."

  "Why can't I have both?" I ask. "Like, did you know that Daniel Defoe went bankrupt thirteen times? That's a good one for your English class, huh?"

  Steve shakes his head. "You're probably retaining a huge amount of superficial knowledge, and since we live in a superficial culture, you will impress people with your facts. But what about wisdom?"

  "I'm not up to the Ws yet," I say. It's my cheap, fallback answer, and Steve is disappointed. I seem to have disturbed his Buddhist calm. In an effort to deflect any more attacks, I get Steve talking about Buddhism. He tells me how much he loves meditating. He says he's attracted to Buddhism because it's peaceful--Buddhists don't kill people.

  "Actually, they do!"

  This is an exciting moment. I get to correct my former teacher. I tell Steve that the prime minister of Ceylon was shot by a disgruntled Buddhist monk. And that's just one example. Steve nods. He knows all about that, and isn't impressed. I am failing to see the big Buddhist picture.

  "Do me a favor and read Bouvard and Pecuchet by Flaubert. I think you'll find it very relevant."

  When your high school English teacher gives you an assignment, it's best to follow it, even if you've already got a 33,000-page book weighing down your nightstand. So I picked myself up a Penguin Classics edition and dipped into this almost-forgotten novel.

  Steve was right. This was relevant. Way too relevant. I was dismayed to learn that Gustave Flaubert had stolen my life a full 150 years before I was born, and was taking great delight in mocking it, the absinthe-drinking schmuck! In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert tells the tale of two 19th-century Frenchmen--bumbling, sexually inept, and dumb as hunks of Camembert--who decide they want to learn everything. They begin to read obsessively. They are enamored of chemistry, so they set up an experiment--which ends up blowing up their house. They read up on medicine, only to become quack doctors who almost kill their patients. Same story with politics, religion, philosophy, and on and on. These two would make a nice buddy comedy starring Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. Just as disturbing, Flaubert ridicules some of the very same insights I've had. Remember Absalom? I noted to myself that he should have gotten a crew cut so he wouldn't get his hair stuck in the tree. Flaubert says he should have put on a wig. I console myself that my crew cut observation is much more clever.

  I know what Flaubert's saying. He's saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He's saying that you can't learn the secrets to life from reading textbooks. And I know that he and Mr. Bender have a point. At face value, my quest teeters on the absurd. Still, it is a quest--and that in itself is has some merit. I've never embarked on a quest. Who knows where it might lead, what I might discover?

  In fact, I like to think of Bouvard and Pecuchet as heroic. At least they're trying to do something instead of sitting around eating pastries, ignoring basic hygiene, and persecuting Jews, which is what your average 19th-century Frenchman did. And some of Bouvard and Pecuchet's so-called comical ideas--that women should be emancipated, that light indoors will one day be stored--turned out to be not so comical after all. Nice going, hommes.

  I hate Flaubert, that superior bastard. Why should the pursuit of knowledge be the monopoly of so-called experts? Hooray for dilettantes. And anyway, earlier in the F section I learned that Flaubert was in love with a woman but didn't tell her about
it till thirty-five years later. Which leads me to the conclusion: what the fuck does he know?

  Freud, Sigmund

  I've never been a big fan of Freud's. I think I know why--if I may indulge in a little self-analysis. When I first read Freud's theories, I was a freshman in high school, and I wasn't having an awful lot of sex. By which I mean no sex at all. So the idea that sex was the driving force in human behavior just increased my already dangerous level of frustration. It was like a color-blind person reading that the meaning of life lay in the joys of multihued flowers. No, I preferred Marx. Not that I'd had much experience with factories or proletarians or chains, but at least I could use Marx to take a self-righteous stance against my parents, those oppressive, bourgeois tools. As for Freud, I took great joy in repeating a quote I read somewhere: "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it purports to be the cure." That was nice. A dismissal of an entire system of thought with a single witticism. Brilliant!

  Those early prejudices die hard, so I'm still not much of a Freudian. But if I had to choose one doctrine of Herr Doctor's to embrace, I'd have to go with the Oedipal complex. That just might have some validity. In fact, now seems as good a time as any to lie back on my couch, rest my head against the analyst's napkin, and dissect my lifelong competition with my dad.

  It began early. Every night when I was a kid, we played the same game: a modified version of handball that involved my wall, my cantaloupe-sized green Nerf ball, and my bed (the obstacle that made the game interesting). We called it, imaginatively enough, Wall Ball.

  The game took on enormous importance to me. I would practice with my Nerf ball--whose name, by the way, was Seymour--for hours after school. My dedication would have impressed Bjorn Borg. It was monotonous work. Thump, thump, thumping that ball against the wall, trying to land it in the hard-to-reach corner by the radiator. The only enjoyable break in my regimen came when the ball semiaccidentally rolled into my sister's room across the hall, eliciting a glass-shattering shriek. With good reason, actually. I had developed the habit of drooling on the Nerf ball for good luck (don't ask). So Beryl would be doing her Spanish homework and all of a sudden this spongy green moist thing would roll up against her ankle--well, it couldn't have been very pleasant.

  When bedtime rolled around, Dad would come to my room and we'd play two or three games. To me, it mattered. I threw tantrums to rival John McEnroe, if not Caravaggio. I would shout and scream and use whatever bad words I thought I could get away with--"retarded" being a particular favorite. If there was a Wall Ball referee, I would have kicked him in the shins.

  Thanks to my rigorous practice schedule, I'd occasionally win a game. My dad would congratulate me, seeming genuinely happy for me. And I'd take the opportunity to do something mature, like pump my fist and shout, "I am the Wall Ball king!"

  If we weren't feeling athletic, my dad and I had another option for competition--a board game version of hockey. I liked this game a lot, mostly because I had invented it. And since I was the inventor, I was also the expert on the rules. Interestingly, the rules turned out to be remarkably flexible. Especially when my father was winning.

  "When the puck bounces off two walls at a forty-five-degree angle, you actually have to roll a nine or it's automatically my turn," I'd say.

  "Is that so?" my father would say. He never argued. He just went along with it, happy to be interacting with me.

  As I've gotten older, my dad and I have continued to play games, though we've moved on to those invented by other people: croquet, Boggle, Scrabble. I've become a slightly better sport. I no longer throw things, and I've phased out "retarded" in favor of more mature words, like "dammit."

  I think I now know why I've had this thirst to beat my father. It's not--sorry, Dr. Freud--fear of castration or desire to have sex with my mother. And it's not that my dad is particularly competitive with me. You won't find him bouncing a basketball off my forehead as Robert Duvall did to his son in The Great Santini. No, it probably stems from cognitive dissonance that started in my childhood. Namely, this dilemma: on the one hand, I believed quite firmly that I was the smartest boy in the world, but on the other, here was a person in the same apartment who was clearly far smarter than me. Here was a man who knew all the answers. Who knew why the fridge was cold and what made the Lexington Avenue subways run and how far dirt went down. Here was a man who made the smartest boy look dumb. This caused plenty of confusion and frustration in my prepubescent mind--which still lingers today. I needed some area where I could clearly reign supreme; I hoped Wall Ball was it. And if not, then maybe hockey or croquet or encyclopedia reading.

  frigate birds

  I find out my fellow Esquire editor Andy is looking for a writer to interview Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy! I plead with him for the assignment. How could I not? I mean, Jeopardy!--the pot of gold at the end of my project. And Alex Trebek! The world's most famous know-it-all.

  "I'm a big Trebek fan," I tell Andy. "Huge Trebek fan." Andy--who eventually relents--is no moron. He knows I'm reading the encyclopedia and have an ulterior motive: me versus Trebek. A knowledge showdown.

  Truth is, I have conflicted feelings about Trebek. On the one hand, I love Jeopardy! and respect the way he runs the show with stern colonel-like authority--not a moment wasted on buffoonery. On the other hand, I want to pop Trebek in his smug Canadian mouth. I mean, this is the man who pretends to know every potent potable and every presidential pet, who oozes faux sympathy for mistaken contestants with his famously condescending "sorry," who pronounces "burrito" as if he went to kindergarten with Fidel Castro and "Volkswagen" as if he grew up on the banks of the Rhine. Plus, my friend who writes about TV says that in real life Trebek is kind of rude. All the better. This will be my chance to expose him for what he is: some guy with a ridiculous mustache who reads the answers off the cards. That's right, folks: he has the answers already!

  That was the plan, anyway. But if I was hoping to impress Trebek with my superior intelligence, things didn't get off to the best start. The day after I flew to Los Angeles, I drove my rented compact to Trebek's Beverly Hills mansion and rang the bell.

  Trebek's son answers, and tells me his dad is out back, waving vaguely in the direction of the yard. The yard in question is an elaborate landscape, with lots of trees and walls and bushes and paths, and after a brief walk, I run into a Mexican gardener. "I'm looking for Alex Trebek," I say. He waves me back. I pass another Mexican gardener, who waves me even farther back. I get to a third Mexican gardener. He is on his knees, a look of intense concentration on his face as he digs a hole. By this time, I'm getting a little frustrated. "I'm looking for Alex Trebek," I say, a bit too sharply. I am about to clarify with a "Donde esta Senor Trebek?" but I don't have a chance.

  "You found him," says the gardener. He stands up, takes off his thick soiled glove, and comes to shake my hand.

  This is not good. As an experienced journalist, I probably should have been able to pick out Alex Trebek inside the perimeter of Alex Trebek's own property. But in my defense, Trebek is wearing a baseball cap, his hair is grayer than I thought--and where the hell is his mustache? Turns out he shaved it off a few years ago. Okay, a little more research might have been advisable. It's about five seconds into my alleged know-it-all showdown, and I'm feeling about as clever as, say, Jennifer Love Hewitt on Celebrity Jeopardy.

  I'm not sure what Trebek thinks of my lack of reporting skills, but he's cordial enough not to dwell on my them. "Let's go to my office," he says. We enter the house, which has a blue-and-yellow Jeopardy! rug the size of a large surfboard in the entry hallway. His office walls, as you might imagine, are lined with books--Russian textbooks, Civil War tomes, the illustrious Encyclopaedia Britannica itself. As you also might imagine, the books are well organized into thematically linked sections. This is a man who, according to press reports, puts his dress shirts on light-colored hangers and his sport shirts on dark-colored ones.

  I ease into the interview with some small talk--gardening,
rental cars, that sort of thing. And when he's feeling comfortable, I hit him with my real question: if he's so damn smart, how would he do as a contestant on Jeopardy!

  Well, Alex says, he'd do okay among senior citizens, but against someone my age, he'd get his butt whipped. Just doesn't have the recall anymore. "I flew from New York to Los Angeles recently," Trebek says, "and I entertained my first serious thoughts about coming down with Alzheimer's. They brought out the food and I said, 'Oh, this is my favorite vegetable.' And I looked at it, and I looked at it, and I looked at it, and I could not come up with 'broccoli'. And that's when you realize that, hey, you're starting to lose it. But so what? It's not important. Knowing everything is not the most important thing."

  Alex Trebek showing signs of early senility? And he doesn't even care? What kind of know-it-all nemesis is this?

  As we talk, I'm confronted by a Trebek I never expected. No prissy milquetoast, he goes out of his way to swear like Uncle Junior on The Sopranos ("bullshit" and "asshole" are two favorites). No cold-blooded Spock, he tells me he's an impulsive romantic--he left military college after four days to chase a girl.

  I won't say that Trebek is entirely without pretension. Occasionally the pompous side of him peeks through--he tells me that he speaks English, French, some Spanish, and that he can "fool around in other languages," which strikes me as very annoying for some reason. He also uses the word "escarpment" in casual conversation. And he relates to me an elaborate pun he once made on the names of Edith Cavell and Enos Ca-bell, a moderately well-known British nurse and first baseman, respectively. But overall, he's a decent guy.

  About halfway into our interview, Trebek tells me the following story.

  "I was at a college tournament in Ohio recently, and I was telling the audience about my trip to Africa, and I got teary-eyed. I started to cry. This is kinda dumb. I'm in front of three thousand people and I'm getting weepy talking about Africa."