Bob Harris has won two cars and a lot of money playing Jeopardy on television. But he insists he's not that smart. What he is, he says, is somebody who decided when he was going to be on Jeopardy to take measures. I told my girlfriend at the time, hi. I'm rearranging the furniture now. And I need to make my house look like the Jeopardy studio. I set up low bookcases to be sort of like where the podiums were, about the same height. And I would stand there. I had a little homemade buzzer that I made out of a ballpoint pen and some masking tape. He got bright halogen lights. And he pumped up the air conditioning to make it feel like the inside of a TV studio. He placed a big picture of Jeopardy's host, Alex Trebek, in about the spot where the real Alex Trebek stands. I even tried to time my meals to when I would be eating at Jeopardy, so that my whole body clock would be exactly in harmony. So he played along with videotapes of the TV show. And he studied for months, memorizing all kinds of stuff, the guys who ran the United Nations in order, the presidents in order, rivers, the elements, British kings, the novels of E. M. Forster-- which include, by the way, Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End. The way to remember a lot of stuff is to build really big, goofy images. It takes an extra couple of seconds, maybe even a minute or two of thought, but then it stays better. So it's time well invested. I made this big picture in my head of a room with a view. OK, so you've got this nice, really big, like-- a friend of mine in Ohio grew up in this big mansion, so it's actually his living room in my head. So OK, it's a room with a beautiful view. And Howards End was the next one on the list that I just happened to have in front of me. And so Howards End, and you've got A Room With a View. I mean, how can you not have, like, Howard-- I have a friend named Howard. And so I made a 30-foot buttocks and stuck it in the window. So you have a room with a view of Howard's end where angels fear to tread. So the angels are in this room, and there's this giant 30-foot buttocks in the window. That's why the angels fear to tread there. Who really wants to be there, really? All I can say is, you do not want to know how he got Passage to India in there. Bob says that a third of the answers that he gave on television-- a third-- came from cramming information into his head with these weird pictures that he would create for himself. And one of his biggest wins came when-- thanks to brute memorization-- he knew the name of an old book called The Compleat Angler, which to this day he has never read, has only the vaguest idea what it's about. And one of his biggest losses came when he could not remember the poem, "Jabberwocky." And I was particularly frustrated because this was my father's favorite poem. And he recited it to me pretty constantly. And yet, when they asked me about it under pressure, I just completely choked. And so Brillig became my nickname, for some people. I wonder if the reason why you didn't remember it was because it wasn't part of your Jeopardy knowledge, but because it was part of your real knowledge. I think that's exactly right. I think there are a lot of times in the game-- most of the big mistakes I ever made were like that, where it wasn't in my Jeopardy notebooks, my study materials, the almanacs. It's funny. It's sort of like it was in the wrong section of your brain. Yeah, exactly. It was in my real brain, the one I walk around with that doesn't have much in it. Talking to Bob about all this, you realize that a show like Jeopardy, a quiz show, any quiz show on the surface seems like it's about facts, retrieving facts to win prizes. But what's really going on for the players is totally different than just retrieving facts. There's a whole inner world happening, an inner world that is not on TV at all, an inner world that actually may be a lot more interesting than what's in the program that's on TV. Well today, we dive in to look at that inner world, at the secret life of quiz shows. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three rounds. Round One, Gamester of Ireland is Fine. The round is about somebody who goes on to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and the most amazing thing he comes up with is not any fact, not any answer, it is the sheer courage to appear at all. Round Two, Dire Enigmas for Elite Fans, where we visit with some of the best quiz masters anywhere on an all-weekend, all-day, all-night quiz bender. Round Three, Girls in Need of a Safer Time. By the way, if you are noticing anything special about these round names, five points for you as you play along at home. Anyway, round three is an attempt to use quiz shows-- yes, quiz shows-- to change teenage girls. Stay with us. Act One, Gamester of Ireland is Fine. When Ronan Kelly went to talk to the guy in this next story, all he knew about him was that he had won a lot of money on a quiz show on RTE, which is the main television station in Ireland. And Ronan just figured that anybody who had won that kind of money must have some kind of story to tell. And anyway, the guy lived nearby. So Ronan got onto his bike with his recording gear, and he bicycled over to the guy's house. When he got there, he figured that the first thing they would do is watch the video of the guy on the quiz show. But although this man had won hundreds of thousands of pounds, he actually did not have the technology to do that. What you're about to hear is the story that Ronan put together for Irish radio about this guy. The guy is named Roger Dowds. When I got to Roger's house to watch the tape of his appearance, he didn't have a VCR. We had to go back to the radio station to watch it. Roger Dowds from Dublin. January 2001. Were you told to wave? Oh, yes. They made a big issue about waving and smiling and looking as happy as possible. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] from Dublin. And it's Fastest Finger first. Stand by your keypads, please. He was a contestant on the quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I should have put the word "unlikely" in there. Roger was an unlikely contestant, and you'll find out why as the program unfolds. Silence in the studio, please. This is your question. Starting with the largest, arrange these Mediterranean islands in order of size, starting with the largest. Crete, Cyprus, Sicily, Malta. Well, there was a phone number you could ring on RTE, obviously. And I rang many times, anyway, with no luck. And eventually, I got a call from someone to say I'd been short-listed. It was a couple of days before the show. You know, they said, oh, you're allowed to have five Phone-a-Friends. I don't have many close friends, so I got two of my brothers. I got someone I play table tennis with. I got the husband of someone I play badminton with, a friend of my brother's, I think. They were the five. And who got there quickest? Two right answers. But Roger Dowds beat it at 4.9 seconds. 4.9 seconds. Well done, Roger. There you go. You know, I wasn't one of these so-called professional quiz people. I'm not an outgoing enough person to be like that, really. People were astounded that I would think of going on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Now ladies and gentlemen, our next contestant is Roger Dowds. He works as a maintenance assistant in a nursing home. And he lives in Glasnevin in Dublin. And he specifically wants me to mention that his mother, Nora, is deceased, but would be very proud, indeed, to see him on this show. Why did you say that? Well, I still was getting over my mother's death somewhat at the time. She was about three years' dead at the time. And she had been such a part of my life. She probably was quite concerned about my future when she died. And if he won GBP 1 million, he says, he'd help the residents of the nursing home where he works to buy a place and run it however they please. And then he would love to have enough money-- You know, because you don't really believe you're going to be on, and you go through a lot of questions, what you might say in a circumstance, and I kind of said something very frivolous, expecting not to ever be saying anything. All right, good luck to you. Let's play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And for GBP 100, answer this one, Roger. In the 1968 cartoon, what was the color of the Beatles' submarine? Was it blue, yellow, green, or red? Yellow. OK. For GBP 100, yellow is right. You've got GBP 100, Roger. Financially, how were things at the time? Was that an interest for you? Yes, it was a factor. I never had full-time employment ever in my life. I was at the time working in this home. But I was only working part-time. And I might have done the odd little odd job, but I was on an extremely low income. So I suppose the money aspect could be significant to me and my position. It's not the other name. So Bill. Bill? That's my answer. For GBP 500? Yeah. You've got it. It's the Bill. GBP 500. Did you practice first? No, there wasn't time to practice. I didn't practice at all. I remember going in the day, and there were all the other contestants. And some of them were poring over quiz books. I just was trying to cope with being there. They made a tremendous day out of it. You were kind of treated like royalty. We were chauffeur-driven in. I think we got a very special lunch that no one else in RTE was getting. And I remember thinking, oh, something different is happening today, because I saw some of the people that I recognize who were actors in Fair City. And, I don't know, one or two-- someone who's in Sport in RTE, in addition to all these people. And I don't know whether I'm starstruck or not. No doubt about that one. You have GBP 1,000. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is the right answer. Now, you can never sit in the chair where Roger is sitting if you don't take those telephone numbers. They're 1550-717171 [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I'll remember that phone number for the rest of my life. Do you want to tell the audience what happened to you in Morocco, Roger? Well, I-- Well, no I don't. You're going to make me, anyway. I was there last month, in fact, in December-- I didn't really want to be distracted by anecdotes. Moroccan dirham, as they call the currency there. So being a bit shy and retiring, I wanted to get rid of them. And all I could find was an Irish-- Where does this sensitivity come from, this lack of confidence come from? I'm still trying to work that one out. Well, I was uncommonly close my mother. And I was reluctant to go out into the world and do things as a result. I was almost reclusive in kind of a way, because I didn't go out. I did go to college for a while, and it didn't work out. This is in your early 20s? Yeah, I was about 21 at the time. GAA fan, are you? Actually not particularly, but I had that answer before the counties came up. So I think I-- You're going with that? --have to go with that. Final answer, Kildare? Final answer. And it makes you worth GBP 8,000, Roger. My father, I suppose, was a little distant from us. It was hard to get any sense of what he expected from us. I sort of feel, in some ways, he was a bit childlike, so sometimes I felt I was fighting for my mother's affection with him. And we had this kind of slightly niggly, sort of relationship as a result. I suppose we were all a bit on our own little wavelength. I was so much younger than the rest, so I think that separated me a bit. I feel as it's a historical question, now I have a brother who's-- he is a bit of a historian. He studied history. So I think maybe I should phone him. It's my brother, Robert. Your brother Robert. OK. Robert. Hello. Hello, Robert. Yes, hello. Good evening to you. This is Gay Byrne on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Hello. And your brother Roger has made it to the hot seat. And he needs your help in answering a question, all right? Thanks very much. There are four possible answers to this question. The next voice you hear will be his. And Roger, you have 30 seconds, starting now. Robert, where did the Asgard land guns for the Irish Volunteers in July 1914? Was it Banna Strand, Scarriff, Howth, or Arklow? Howth. Thank you very much. You're sure about that? About 95%. I thought it might be that myself. So thank you. OK. Bye. Thank you very much. Bye. I'll go with that. Howth. Howth, final answer? Final answer. Could Roger be right in saying Howth for the answer? We'll take a break here. Come back to us after this. Thank you. Can you remember the day you decided that college wasn't for you or that college wasn't working out? Oh, I didn't feel part of anything there. And I had all sorts of essays and assignments that I was supposed to have done. And I hadn't started on anything. And just one day, I didn't go in. I was so lacking in resources to deal with things then that I couldn't tell anyone. I actually pretended for a whole term to go to college. I spent most of the days like a homeless person, walking around town. Whatever I did. I brought in my sandwiches just as I normally had done. And my brother, in particular, was trying to get me to go back. But it just didn't seem possible. It was simple as that. The question was, where did the Asgard land guns for the Irish Volunteers in July 1914? He had to check with his brother, Robert. Robert said Howth. He went with Howth. That was his final answer. And it means he's worth GBP 16,000. The next question is worth GBP 32,000, Roger. OK. Have a look at it. Who was the first person to run a mile in under four minutes? I couldn't believe my luck with this question. Sebastian Coe, Harold Abrahams-- You're shaking your head. Yeah, because I'm going to know it before I see any answers. Well, I think you arranged this question for me, because it just happens it's my namesake, Roger Bannister. I've always had an interest in athletics. And I'm quite sure about this one. Roger Bannister. 1954, I believe it was. Roger, don't confuse me with dates. I'm sorry. I felt I should be offering more information. Whatever about the angels, Roger. I think mama's looking after you as well, is she? Because you've just won GBP 32,000. The crowd seemed to get particularly enthusiastic at that point. They must have all those checks written out, do they? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. There's no writing involved. GBP 32,000. And you get to keep that. Nobody can take that from you. No matter what. No matter what, that's yours, OK? And you're right. Bannister did run the mile in 1954, not that we asked you. Did your mother encourage you to go out into the world? She did try to encourage me when I left college. She was always looking at courses that I might do. Because I used to do the garden at home or I did a bit of cooking at home, oh, will you do a cookery course? Will you do a gardening course? You know, just to see me doing something. But then I gradually-- as my parents got older, they started becoming infirm. And I did become more of a benefit, because I just became their chauffeur and stuff like that. Was it a time you felt good about yourself? I think I felt better that I had some little sense of duty in doing something. Because when I was first at home and my parents were still a bit active, I remember, literally, sometimes that people came in during the day and maybe they thought I should be out. And I'd actually literally hide under the bed-- a grown man in his 20s-- just to avoid having to explain myself. That must have made you so angry. I couldn't express anger. I was such a-- I don't know-- such a-- well, withdrawn from anger. I was angry in some way. But I didn't recognize it as anger. Well, I was so full of self-hatred. I didn't have any sense of self-esteem. So I think because of that I couldn't do things at all. I think I have nothing to lose. I shall go for Venus as my final answer. That's your final answer? Final answer. Venus, final answer. You had GBP 32,000, Roger. You now have GBP 64,000. The biscuits are from the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] cookery book. Tea and biscuits in Roger's house. The biscuits are on a plate bought by his family to support the Protestant side in the 1957 boycott, where Catholics boycotted Protestant businesses, and Protestants, like Rogers' family, bought things to keep those businesses alive. She compiled a cookery book, which seemed to go all around Protestant communities around Ireland. Roger felt isolated as a child. And the fact that he was part of a minority community only made that feeling of isolation more intense. But being a Protestant also got him out of the house. He travels miles to play racket sports in clubs that used to be exclusive to his church, something that's no longer the case, and he's glad of that. He goes out to play the organ at church services. And through the church community, he found work in a retirement home set up originally for Protestant residents. I mean, it has been a tremendous experience over the years. I met some very special people who have passed away because they were old. Well, my mother died at the end of 1997. And shortly after that a woman called Joyce [? Schultheis ?] came into the home. And she just was a tremendous-- excuse me crying-- but gift to me at the time. From the generation she came from, she was a person of rare understanding. You could tell her anything, and she was unshockable. And because of the slightly narrow environment I'd been living in, I felt things had to be kept secret and kind of hidden. Suddenly, I got this different perspective. I feel very strongly that it's Patrick Kavanagh. I think Louis MacNeice died earlier than 1967. So I'll go for Patrick Kavanagh as my final answer. Final answer? Final answer, Gay. No turning back. No turning back. We've gone to [? orange. ?] That was one of the most surprising pieces of thinking I've seen on this show so far. And it's won you GBP 100,000. Around the time I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionare, I started going to a counselor, who I'm still going to. I think she's helped with sort of relieving me after the awful self-hatred. Why did you decide you needed her? I got very friendly with quite an elderly man. And as I said, it was the summer just before I went to school. Oh, sorry, college. And I used to go and visit him. And unfortunately, he started abusing me. And although I was 18, I suppose I was 12. I hadn't had sex education of any kind. I didn't really consent to anything, but I allowed this to happen for about a year, I don't know, because I suppose in some way I valued his attention. And finally-- because I'd never not confided in my mother-- so I did eventually confide in her about this. And it was a very difficult thing for her. She was used to kind of sweeping things aside, putting them under the carpet. I lost a little bit of something with my mother that day. I'm sorry. I missed that. You what? I kind of lost a little bit of something with my mother. I idealized her so much. And she was so wonderful. And did you go back to the elderly man? I went once. But I didn't-- I remember going once to the door and talking to him. And I made up some outlandish story and, well, lies. So as a result of that, he kind of didn't want to have anything more to do with me anyway. I suppose I pretended I'd gone off with someone else. Did he think there was something else in what you were doing? How do you mean? Sorry. Well, did he see it in the same way as you did? Or did he see it as something else? Did he see it as abuse? Or did he see it as a relationship? No, he probably saw it as a relationship or something. I don't think he would have had any sense of the abuse I was feeling. At that point, I think I could have let anyone do anything to me. I had so little self-esteem, I suppose I couldn't-- It's like as if I became mute, and I couldn't shout stop. I'm very sure I know this one, Gay. I couldn't believe the audience's response. I thought they were going to collapse. They're really behind you. Yeah, yeah, extraordinarily so. I explained the situation earlier, Roger. You have GBP 125,000. You walk now, there's the check. I have it. You could walk now with that. If you go for this and get it wrong, you lose GBP 93,000. That's a bit drastic, all right. Yes. But I do know a bit about birds. And that is my final answer, Gay. Final answer. Final answer. You had GBP 125,000, Roger. You now have GBP 250,000. The whole audience had won it, themselves. Imagine having to take home a cartload of money. I want to shed a few tears now. All that was going through my head was that Gay Byrne, himself, had lost a lot of money. Don't start crying on me at this stage. The next question is worth half a million pounds. I don't feel I want to look at it, actually. Look at it. Now, what did you think of that? What does a vexillologist study? I didn't think much. A vexillologist study? Is it-- I think my brain had seized up. I couldn't come up with anything. --flags, or skin diseases? Vexillologist. And if you look at me and say, funnily enough, Gay, I know the answer-- Funnily enough, I know the answer-- You were fairly entertaining, weren't you? Yeah, I was surprised how many people thought I was entertaining. No, I'll have to be quite honest to you. Were you disappointed you hadn't got an easy one? Well, I couldn't believe my luck up to that. I was carried on in the tide of wanting to keep going, just not even to do with the money, just I was enjoying being up there in some way. So I didn't want to stop. What's the word? I shall retire now, or whatever I should say. To get all this positive feedback from other people was extraordinary, to feel I was worth something and people could admire me. It says, pay Roger Dowds GBP 250,000. Take it with our blessing and our thanks. You've been a lovely, lovely competitor and played extremely well. You deserve it. Thank you very much. Enjoy. Thank you. Enjoy your [INAUDIBLE]. And did friends and family deal differently with you afterwards? Not enormously. Well, I think they admired me for having done it. I'm the youngest of my family, and I think maybe I was always seen as very vulnerable or sensitive. And maybe they felt the less reason to be worried about my future. So what has that future been for Roger? What did he do with the hundreds of thousands? Well, he uses it as an income to supplement part-time work gardening and house minding. It also allows him time to visit elderly people and do messages for them. I was persuaded that I absolutely had to get an alarm for the house. I went on a nice, organized cycling holiday in France, I remember. And I went skiing. I'd never been skiing. The main thing Roger got from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire wasn't the money. It was self-confidence. Well, I think I'm a lot less shy than I was, perhaps. I have more sense of well being within myself. I don't have the awful self-hatred. In his modest house with his very modest car outside, Roger has one luxury to show for his night on the tele with Gay, a piano organ. Ronan Kelly's story about Roger Dowds, from the Irish radio program, Flux on RTE Radio 1. It was a winner of the Third Coast International Audio Competition, which is where we heard of it. Since this show aired, Roger Dowds has picked up another award. He won a gold medal for Ireland in tennis at the Outgames, a competition of gay and lesbian athletes in Montreal. Coming up, can quiz shows save the world? One woman believed yes. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program we choose a theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Secret Life of Quiz Shows. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Dire Enigmas For Elite Fans. Every winter, there is this event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some of the country's very best puzzle solvers go up against the very best puzzle writers. It's called the MIT Mystery Hunt. And what it is is a series of puzzles-- word puzzles, number puzzles, scavenger hunts, picture puzzles, puzzles which don't even have a name. And eventually what all this leads to-- this takes all weekend or longer-- what it leads to, the final answer, it leads you to a coin hidden somewhere on the MIT campus. This is a team competition. The teams are made up of MIT students, and also elite puzzle solvers who fly in from around the country for the event. One of our producers, Lisa Pollak, joined them for last year's contest. She was following a team called Dr. Awkward. And for those of you who are playing along at home, Dr. Awkward is spelled, D-R period Awkward, A-W-K-W-A-R-D. Give yourself two points if you noticed that that is a palindrome, spelled the same forwards and backwards. Here's Lisa. When you hang out with a puzzle team, you hear a lot of stories like Dave Dickerson's. When Dave was just a kid, he got this book. He'll never forget the title. Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles. Actually, the title might have just been Puzzles, but that's what the cover said. Dave was obsessed with this book. The puzzles were harder than any he'd ever seen, but he couldn't put them down. And I even remember when I saw one of the clues-- not an elegant clue by modern standards-- but it said, damn, I'm trying to fix these socks. And the answer was darn. The darn socks. You know, needle and thread. And I thought, I get that. And I solved it. It was the first clue I had actually solved. And I thought, I can do this. I had never been challenged this much in my life. And I didn't realize I could do it. Not only could Dave do it, he found it impossible to stop doing it, which is how, almost 30 years later, he ended up here, standing in an MIT classroom with the rest of the Dr. Awkward team, warming up for the mystery hunt. And by warming up, I mean they were plugging in their laptops and setting up a snack table. This was an experienced team with about 45 people on the roster. And as far as brainpower goes, they were an intimidating crew-- crossword champs, PhDs, a guy handing out DVDs of his recent appearance on Jeopardy, two guys whose T-shirts I needed help deciphering, and this man, whose nickname I'm still trying to figure out. Ucaoimhu, spelled U-C-A-O-I-M-H-U. And it's from my real name, Kevin Wald. You split it up as KEV-IN W-ALD. Ald is an archaic form of the word "old," so you take an old-style "W", which is two "U's." You take "Kev" the way it's in the original Irish spelling, which is C-A-O-I-M-H. And you put it in the two "U's," so you get Ucaoimhu. We're definitely a dangerous team. There's no question about it. That's Dave again. He's the person who invited me to hang out here. And he warned me that the puzzles I'd see his team solve that weekend wouldn't be what most of us imagine when we think of puzzles. Mystery hunt puzzles are so elaborate, so complex, that lots of times they don't even have instructions, just a page of words or pictures or numbers arranged in some cryptic way, which means you've often got to solve a puzzle just to know what puzzle you're trying to solve. So for example, the first puzzle hunt-- or maybe one of the first-- the guy who did it did a puzzle in Linear A, which is an old language. I think it's older than Greek, a very, very primitive, ancient language. And he didn't tell anyone it was Linear A. And he took the only two books on Linear A out of the MIT library. People solved it anyway. Hey, everybody! How you doing today? That's right. The mystery hunt started with an opening ceremony put on by last year's winning team. They're called The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight. That's the way the hunt works. The group that won last year's hunt designs and runs this year's contest. Dozens of teams pack the lobby of an MIT building. And though they were competing, from what I could tell the mood seemed pretty friendly. The Evil Midnight Bombers kicked things off with a skit. Then all the teams headed off to various locations around campus, and the solving began. So what do you do with FNTLLLLLLSNN? Those ?] just might be an index to something else. It might not even be an index to something in this round. That's Jeremy and [? Tripp, ?] two Dr. Awkward teammates, standing at a blackboard a few hours into the hunt. Now I'll be honest, as a spectator sport, competitive puzzle solving has some problems. Most of the time there wasn't much to see, just people huddled in small groups around laptops and conferring over printouts, batting around one idea after another until they hit on an answer. The third one is Gilligan's Island. Who's writing this down? Things seemed to be going pretty well. The blackboard was filling up with answers and new puzzles kept coming. But there were some stumpers, too. And that doesn't look promising. So look at last letters. The name of this puzzle was Continental Divide. It was one of those no-instruction puzzles. There was a sheet of paper with a bunch of pictures of DVD movie covers on it. And the covers were arranged in a grid, six boxes across and five down. The bottom right-hand box was empty. All the titles on the covers were blacked out. Finding those was the easy part. It turns out all the films had a city, state, or country in the name. Raising Arizona, Road to Singapore, The Tailor of Panama. And so on. The answer, everyone agreed, had something to do with those place names, but what? Were they trying to put a title in the missing box? Spell a sentence from a combination of letters? I watched for more than an hour as at least a dozen different people tried together to figure it out. Annapolis, Dallas, Essex, Cancun. All of these in this column do not end in vowels. They plotted the names on a map. They typed them into a spreadsheet. They put them in a grid and they color coded them by continent. No pattern was too absurd to consider. Arizona Iced Tea, Singapore sling, Panama hat. I still think we might be able to get drinks out of them. India pale ale. India pale ale and-- OK, yeah. These are drinks across. Oh, my God. They could not have been more wrong. I like the idea from half an hour ago where we were mapping these things to letters. The answer ended up having something to do with DVD country codes. But they didn't know that yet. For now, despite all the work, they weren't getting anywhere. At times I couldn't believe they were actually doing this for fun. But for puzzle people, the struggle is part of the fun. It's not in vain, because they know that somewhere out there there's an answer. I mean, somebody can say something in the next 15 seconds that will just break this whole thing wide open. That's Eric, a veteran of the team. And what he's talking about there, that flash of insight, that aha moment when something suddenly becomes clear, that's the payoff. An observation that nobody else saw, seeing through the problem. And that's difficult to do. And I'm not going to do it on every puzzle. I'm not one of the geniuses around here. But I am able to contribute something, and I'm just waiting for that to happen. You don't have to solve a puzzle to have an aha moment. The puzzles, if you're a puzzle person, are a pretty reliable way to get them, as opposed to real life, where, as a team member named John pointed out to me, most problems don't come with their own answers. You know, it's very different trying to figure out, why does my daughter hate me? And how can I help her? Because there's no solution to that. Versus, OK, what are those numbers in the background of the evil video? Are they trying to say some message there? This you get the joy of, OK. At least you got the answer, and you know that you got the answer. It is right now 1:23 in the morning. And we're in the sixth round. We've got tons and tons of puzzles in these rounds. When I caught up with Ucaoimhu, the Dr. Awkward team had been solving puzzles for 13 and 1/2 straight hours. The desks were covered with empty food containers. And the classroom was starting to smell like a dorm room whose residents hadn't showered in a while. Some team members had gone home to sleep. And a night crew with fresher brains had shown up to relieve them. But Ucaoimhu, like a lot of the 20 or so people here, had been there since the start. How are you feeling right now? Right now, I'm feeling tired. And I'll probably leave within the next hour or so. Fortunately, what I'm working on now is a nice, gentle kind of puzzle. And by a nice, gentle kind of puzzle, what Ucaoimhu meant was a grid that looked kind of like a crossword puzzle, only with no blacked-in squares, no numbers, and no clues. I repeat, no clues at all, just empty boxes. Oh, and in the background, a red cross, like on an English flag. And yes, they solved it. I stuck around that night watching until 6:00 in the morning. And what struck me about the whole scene was how matter of fact everyone was, like there was nothing out of the ordinary here, as if this was the most normal thing in the world, men and women, some college students, but plenty with spouses and kids at home, staying up all night in a college classroom solving puzzles. But the next day, as the hunt stretched into its 30th hour, I caught up with Dave, the guy who invited me here. And he told me that, as a puzzle person, he was constantly being reminded that the rest of the world doesn't work this way. Just the other day, he'd gone into a bar. And when the female bartender came over, he told her about this cool new anagram he'd heard, how if you take the phrase, a dream within a dream, and rearrange the letters, you get, what am I? A mind reader. This didn't go over so well. The bartender-- apparently finding this fact neither interesting nor charming-- just looked at Dave like he was weird. Dave told me that years ago, while he was working as a greeting card writer for Hallmark in Kansas City, he actually got in trouble for doing this kind of thing. My mentor came to me and said, Dave, we have to talk. And he said, Dave, you're using too many literary allusions in your casual speech and people are complaining. Wait, wait. In your speech, not in your greeting cards? Right, right, just in my everyday speech. I knew better than to use obscure allusions in greeting cards, goodness gracious. I asked my supervisor, what the hell does that even mean? And he said, I was just told to tell it to you. Dave started obsessing about this. He wasn't even sure what the problem was, so he began keeping track. One week, every time he had the urge to say something at work, he wrote it in a notebook instead. By the end of that week, my notebook was full of the most random crap. None of it was a literary allusion. Maybe, Dave thought, the problem wasn't him. He'd recently been transferred from the humor department to the serious writing staff. And he was surrounded by all these new people who probably just didn't understand him. I was still doing lunch with the guys from humor. That was what I felt was my real home, and I could be myself there. And so I was at lunch with them maybe two or three weeks later, and one of the guys, as we were going to lunch, said, you know-- and it was a cluster of us, five or six of us, all heading toward the lunch room. And one of the guys said, you know, we do a lot of monkey cards. And yet-- You mean cards with pictures of monkeys? Yes, yes, more or less, because what he actually said was, and yet, they're all illustrated with chimpanzees. And chimpanzees aren't monkeys, are they? And I said-- because I had done a report on this in fourth grade, and because it was something of an obsession of mine, monkeys, apes, and so on-- was I said, actually, chimpanzees are apes, along with orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons. And in fact, one of the weird things about Planet of the Apes is they don't have any gibbons in them. The orangutans that they claim are orangutans look like gibbons. And the way you distinguish apes from monkeys is apes have no tails and they're not exclusively arboreal. And there was this pause. And I said, actually, there's a whole subset of other animals that are like monkeys called prosimians. And they include the lemur, and the tarsier, and the kinkajou, and the galago-- also called the bush baby-- and they're really goofy looking. And boy, if they had a Planet of the Prosimians, I would totally watch that movie. And there was a further pause. And one of my friends said, oh, Dave, hey, speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat's ass that I give? And I thought, oh, that's my problem. I inform people against their will. So what you're saying is that the thing that can be very annoying in the real world is the same thing that makes you really good at solving puzzles? Yes, yes. Although I also feel obliged to point out that perhaps the more important point-- as far as I'm concerned-- is the thing that makes me annoying in the regular world is not annoying here. This environment is one of the only places where I can say something like that and not worry that I might be irritating someone by saying it, that even if it's not relevant, people at least understand the impulse. On a puzzle team, Dave can be himself only better. And I think this is true for a lot of people whose talents require the right context in which to shine. Think about it. A boxer without a boxing ring is just a guy punching people. In a puzzle competition, a guy with a mind for obscure facts can be a star. Yes. Good job, guys. Good work. Lisa Pollak. The 2007 MIT Mystery Hunt was won in 38 hours and 14 minutes by none other than the Dr. Awkward team, whose members immediately began planning for this year's hunt, which was won two weeks ago by the team, Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight. If you'd like to try some of these mystery hunt puzzles yourself, you can find them all by Googling MIT Mystery Hunt. And God have mercy on your soul. Act Three, Girls in Need of a Safer Time. Robin Epstein remembers the ad. There was a hospital nursery full of babies. And one baby girl tosses off her pink knit cap. It lands on the floor. This inspires other little baby girls to do the same. Pink hats come flying off of heads. Finally, the first little baby girl raises her little baby fist into the air, as Helen Reddy sings, "I Am Woman." Please, don't stand up in your cars. This was an ad for the Oxygen Network, all-women's network, just about to go on the air, February 2, 2000, which Robin found completely thrilling. It was this really wonderful moment of, here we go. It sort of heralded our arrival, and the birth of the network, and the excitement behind it. And it felt like it was something really to cheer for. Robin had just gotten a job on a brand-new show on this brand-new network. It was a quiz show for teenage girls called Clued In. Robin was going to write all the questions in the quiz. And she did this with a real sense of mission. It just seemed like a fantastic idea for a show to me, which was to get teenage girls on a quiz show and to show the world, really, how smart they were. Show the world and show other teenage girls? Absolutely. And I wanted to show that these were the girls that you should be looking up to, that there were, in fact, role models that you weren't seeing. Right, and they walk among us. They're everyday girls. That's right. Yeah. Did you know about these studies at the time that-- I think the researcher was named Gilligan. Yeah, Carol Gilligan. Absolutely. Yes. I think it was basically until the age of 11 or so, girls in class, they are constantly raising their hands. It's important that they look smart. They want to impress their teachers. And so they're constantly all about giving the right answer, and reading, and researching, and whatnot. And then there's something that happens to these girls at age 12 or 13 where it inverts. And suddenly, appearing smart is not important at all for the majority of them. And when you began this show, did you know about that research? And did you believe it? I absolutely knew about the research. I didn't buy it. I thought, no way. I mean, sort of based on my own experiences in school, I was in a public school, but a lot of my friends were really smart girls. And we were all sort of very pleased with being high achievers and doing all this stuff. And I just thought, that research is a crock. You know, where is this woman going? What schools? How many girls did she actually interview? Welcome back. Welcome back. I'm Ian Kesler, and it's time to get Clued In. And just describe what the early shows were like, what kinds of questions there were, how people would respond. Right. So in the early shows, we would ask a range of questions. And I thought that there was a baseline of things that clued-in people should be aware of and should know. All right, here's the question. When stocks rise, it's a bull market. What animal symbolizes a market decline? Allison. Chicken? No. Good guess, but that wasn't it. Janine. A bird? No, that's incorrect. Do you want to give it a shot, Jacqueline? No. No, you don't? You don't want to embarrass yourself? All right, so actually it's a bear. It's a bear market. OK, don't worry about it. So is that pretty typical? Yes. There started to be a creeping sensation that the questions were way, way too hard when she came out with chicken. That's where I thought, oh, OK, we have a problem. Here we go. 500-point follow-up, same category. What losing presidential candidate lost the use of his hand in World War II? Three seconds. Emily. Teddy Roosevelt? No. Anybody else want to give it a shot? Come on. Bob Dole. Bob Dole. Yeah, World War II. With the girls out there not able to get answers, not able to get these answers, did you ever feel a little guilty? You know what I mean? Like you're doing them a disservice, you're making them look bad. Oh, absolutely, every day. It was one of these things where, when they had the blank stares and they were not ringing in on their buzzers, I would sort of sit there and I just had my hand on my forehead, sort of looking down, and just feeling like, what have I done? Like I have put them in this position. It is my fault that they can not answer, that in fact, not only am I not showing that girls are smart, I have put on the air that girls are stupid. That's really good. And actually, Lauren, that's wrong, too. So you don't get any points. I'm sorry. All right. Jasmine, are you ready? Here's your first question. Now, this is a show on a network for women-- Yes. --and it's aimed at girls. Yes. Why is the host a guy? Yeah, that is a great question. We actually auditioned scores of women to be hosts of the show. There was one girl who was possibly a good fit for the show. And? And she was not really pretty enough to be on TV. Are you serious? Mmm-hmm. She was good, but she wasn't just pretty enough? Yes. Even on this sort of pro-woman network? Even on the we-love-you-for-what's-on-the-inside network. Yes. And what did you think when you saw that go down? Did you just feel like, OK, well, whatever, it's television? Yeah. I mean, we were TV people, and so there-- and the assumption also was that if we wanted teen girls to be interested, maybe we give them a little eye candy. And the host that we chose sort of had a passing resemblance to Matt Damon. He was like a Matt Damon type. And here's the question. What amendment gave women the right to vote? Kocey. There you go, [? Kocey. ?] It's all you. Eighth? Ninth? 14th? 15th? Eighth? Three seconds. Ninth? Eighth? Ninth? Say Ninth. The Ninth. No, wait. No, no, she didn't say it. She said Ninth. I'm going to guess 14th. That's incorrect. Actually, it's the 19th Amendment. 19th Amendment. None of us deserve the right to vote, because we don't know that. That's true, exactly. So nobody gets the final question. None of us deserves the right to vote. Yes, exactly. So the girls can't answer most of the questions that you designed for the show. What do you do? You dumb down questions. You give them things that anyone of any age, of any mental capacity could possibly answer. Jesus is known as the son of whom? Fane. God. God, that's right. So you're up to 4,000 points. Abby, you've got 3,250. Which one do you want to go with? All right, I'll take This Spells Disaster. This Spells Disaster. Here's the question. Without fumbling, who can spell her first name backwards? Katie. There you go. She's on the board. Yeah, that wasn't one of my prouder moments as a question writer. Which one would you like to go with? I'll take Sign Me Up, please. Sign Me Up, all right. This is actually a physical challenge. We want to see who can get an autograph on their arm from the cutest boy in the audience. All right, Rachel, here you go. Here's a pen. You've got 15 seconds. Go right now. 15 seconds. Come on, cheer for her. 15 seconds. So in this one, they're running through the audience with pens. And isn't this pretty much exactly the kind of boy crazy culture that you were trying to not encourage? Yes. This was pretty much exactly the opposite of what we were trying to show with the show. And that did kind of made me sad that here are these-- they're the ones who are on air and who should be the role models. And it was pretty disappointing to realize that, even though we were trying to find them and to show this, we were failing at it. What would be your dream car? Um, I guess my dream car would be a Mustang. A Mustang. Like a new one or an old one? Whatever. Like, I probably-- And so, when you got into this, your whole idea was, like, OK, let's show how smart girls are. And at the end of this experience, how did you feel? I felt girls are dumb. Girls are dumb. Girls are dumb. Just listen to yourself. I know. This experience remains one of these things that I'm not entirely sure how to explain. I do think women are smart. But the lesson of what I saw versus what I want to believe is very different. But is it possible the girls were smart but just not smart in a way that could be made apparent in a trivia quiz? Yes. I just think that, for a lot of it, the girls seemed much more interested in just sort of showing this really superficial side to themselves, that it was all about sort of what they looked like, and it was all about how they were presenting themselves, as opposed to what was more on the inside, or what seemed like good things to achieve. I wonder if just in the end your mistake was you just thought more people were like you than really are. And that's the mistake that runs the world, basically. Yeah. I mean, I think that's probably the case. Probably not many other girls were spending their weekends playing Trivial Pursuit with their friends. But I no longer feel like it is mine to try and improve the quality of girls. That was maybe an idealistic something that I had in my 20s. Because you don't think they need it or because you think it's hopeless? Because I don't-- I'm not sure it's possible. Yeah? Yeah. I'd like not use the word, "hopeless," but hard, certainly. And I don't know what can. I think there's just-- I mean, I think that there can be a role model, per se, that maybe could have this influence. But it's not a game show. Certainly coming up with a quick fix, or a quick answer, or ringing in for something at the buzzer doesn't seem like the long-term solution. Robin Epstein in New York. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself. Bob Harris, the Jeopardy champ that we heard from at the beginning of our program, has written a memoir about how he won and then lost on Jeopardy called Prisoner of Trebekistan. Our website, where you can find our free weekly podcast, absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. And the show that we originally had been planning for this week, with the theme, Tough Room, which includes a visit to the very tough room that is the editorial offices of The Onion, will be here next week. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has this announcement, that I believe will come as a great relief to mothers everywhere. I no longer feel like it is mine to try and improve the quality of girls. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.