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August 27, 2024 13 mins

Hello, Puzzlers! Puzzling with us today: comedian, actor, and author Michael Ian Black.

Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.

Subscribe to The Puzzler podcast wherever you get your podcasts! 

"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas. 

Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.

The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions. 

Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, Buzzlers, Welcome to the Buzzler Podcast, the foaming pump
on your puzzling liquid soap Bottled. I'm your host, AJ Jacobs,
and I am here. What's today's guest? The awesome Michael
Ian Black, comedian actor, adult book author, children's book author,

(00:30):
founding member of the State and stella and many many
more things.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Hello Michael, Hello AJ. Let me ask you this, AJ.
When you start your puzzling, when the puzzling's about to begin,
do you ever exclaim let's get ready to puzzle, because
it seems to me that would be a terrific way
to begin.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I love it all right from now on, well at
least in this episode, I am going to do that.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
I bet you you could get Bruce Buffer to come
on here and utterer his trademark Let's get ready to rumble.
B Let's get ready to puzzle for probably not much
more than sixty or seventy thousand dollars. And it seems
worthwhile to me for you to make that investment.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Fair enough, because it actually I believe it is trademarked.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Right, I'm sure it is.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
I think you cannot say that on am I allowed
to say let's get it to puzzle. Maybe not without paying.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, we're weird. Al case law
settled this years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Oh okay, thank god for that first Amendment warrior. I
love them all right, Michael, Yes, I think you probably
know that blue jeans are usually blue, and a red
robin is usually red or at least partly red, not
fully red. But a black box on an airplane it

(01:50):
is not black. A black box on the device that
holds all the data usually orange, not black, because if
the worst happens, God forbid, you want to be able
to find that box email.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
That's why orange is the new black box.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
I love that show.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
So this, this puzzle is all about things like the
black box. We are calling it tentatively colorful things that
are not that color usually.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
That's a beautiful title and so easy to remember.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Thank you, Michael. Yeah, I spent a while on it.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
So I'm going to give you a hint to a
two word phrase, and that phrase like that black box
will contain a color, but it's an inaccurate color because
the object. Now, I do have one more thing to
say before we begin.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Yes, let's get ready to buddle. It works so well
I'm so pumped. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
All right, this waiting area for talk show guests usually
has white walls, not another color.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Well, as somebody who has appeared on various talk shows
and weighted backstage and various waiting rooms at comedy clubs,
I know that the walls are almost never green. It
is almost never a green room.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
You are correct, well done, and you are I mean,
you've been to some of the great green rooms of
all time. Like, how was Colbert's? Like, what is your
favorite green room? I mean, you've been to the top one.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, Colbert's actually is very good because I seem to
remember an excellent assortment of snacks, a gift bag that
had baked goods in it. And also there's a polaroid
where you take your picture and you put it on
the bulletin board where there's the pictures of all the
other people who have been in that green room. It's
very nicely appointed. The walls are white, the furniture is good,

(03:51):
and not a speck of green anywhere.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
We love.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
I feel this is the kind of inside show business
info that I eat up. And I hope, by the way,
I promised a little edutainment just quickly, I had always
heard it. They were called green room because originally a
study said that green was a relaxing color, so some
painted at green. Not much to that. There's also a

(04:15):
theory it could be from medieval theaters where they acting
actors were in the green which was actually like a
you know, a law field and a field before they
came on. Basically, no one knows. Oh, it could refer
to the nausea an actor might feel.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Before That was going to be my guess.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Oh, but do you feel nausea before performance?

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Well, I think at this point in my life I'm
so dead inside that I don't really feel anything.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's a good place to be jealous. All right, we
got another few.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
This term for aristocracy is incorrect because it turns out
aristocratic bodily fluids are the same color as peasants bodily fluids, but.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Not vulcans of the Star Trek universe, who, unlike human aristocrats,
do indeed have blue.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
Blood nicely done. And I had forgotten that that is good.
So they are, Yeah, they are aristocratic, if not aristocrats themselves.
And blue blood apparently comes from the Spanish, where the
aristocrats did not have to work in the fields. So

(05:35):
their untanned skin showed their superficial blue veins.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Right. I like that. I did learn something.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
I'm not sure it's true, but it is feels true.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Whether or not it is feels true, and that's more
important than whether it actually is true.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
I think, unfortunately in today's.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Media, that feelings don't care about your facts.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
Look sad.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
All right, we gotta tell who is it, Ben Shapiro?
We gotta tell him?

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (06:08):
All right, just a couple more we got.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
When you get fired from a job, it's usually in
a meeting or an email, and it does not involve
any fun colors whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
No, it doesn't, thankfully. Well, do you want to know
the last job I believe I was actually fired from. Sure,
I'm trying to think if there's been one since, but
I think this is the one and only time I've
ever been fired. It still upsets me to this day.
I was brought in to record the voice of Crush
the sea turtle in Finding Nemo, and I remember thinking

(06:44):
to myself, I have no idea why I have been
hired to do this. But when I was there, the
director was like, you know, we thought of like surfer dude,
and of course we thought Michael lean Black and I
was like, uh huh, and I didn't say this, but
my thought was why. And then he proceeded to demonstrate
how he wanted crush to sound, so I recorded it

(07:05):
that way, and then they ended up using his voice
for a crush.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
That is an outrage.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
It was an outrage. But I never did receive a
yellow slip. It was just, oh, pink slip. I mean,
I was just I was just cast away.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yes, the appropriate merit marine analogy.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
But that that is upset. I mean, first of all, yeah,
because you grew up in New Jersey, right, That's which
I guess has surfing.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
But sure South Jersey probably has some surfing.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Did they confuse you with I don't know who they.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Thought I was, but they brought me in and then
fired me.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
Well, I love it.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
One time I went surfing in my life was in
New Jersey. I took a surf lesson. I went out
with the surfboard, and you know, like my three or
third or fourth attempt. What happened is the way kicked
the surfboard directly into my throat and then and then
I basically crawled back to shore. And that was the

(08:10):
last time I ever seen.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Maybe they found that out and that's why you got
the pink slip. Yes, the pink slip is what firing
is sometimes called. Again, we're not one hundred percent shore
where it comes from. One theory is Vaudeville used to
give there. They're comedians of the pink, actual pink slips.
There's the talk of triplicate. Back in the day, you

(08:36):
had three forms. One was white, one was pink, maybe
one was yellow or blue. So that's another theory. All right,
I got one more, okay, and that is Nicole Kidman says,
points out we go to movie theaters because somehow heartbreak

(08:56):
feels good when we watch, as she puts it, dazzling
images on a huge one of these.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Right, so I imagined there was a time when this screen
actually was silver. It probably was at some point, right,
It no longer now it's what white. I guess more
than anything else it is white. Must have been a
silver screen at some point.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
You are right on both accounts there. This one is
pretty short. In the early years of motion pictures, there
was a projection The projection screens were literally coated with
silver or aluminium or metallic paint because it was highly
reflective and made a better picture.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Well done, well done, look at that.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
You got it?

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, I mean aside from the one slip of the tongue, oh,
the yellow slip, Yes, the yellow slip of the tongue. Now,
that would have resulted in no doubt a forfeiture of
turn where this a real game, right, But because we
both understood that it was merely a yellow slip of
the tongue, I'm assuming you're letting it slide. And for

(10:08):
that I thank you.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
I am not going to be like the director of
Finding Nemo. I am going through be kind and let
you stay for another episode.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
That is your reward.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
By the way, just a fun fact to finish off.
Green cards were initially green when the US government gave
them out. Then they changed to all sorts of colored white, beige,
but in twenty ten they went back to having a
little green, a touch of green. So green cards actually
do have some green. So you can rest easy. And Michael,

(10:47):
aside from not in Finding Nemo, where can people find
more of you?

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Well? So, I have a new TV show coming out
in August or September, I'm not sure which, but it
hasn't been announced publicly. Yet, so I can't say what
it is. So instead I will direct you simply to
my substack. Why not if you like reading things for free,
just go to Michael Leanblack dot substack dot com I
think is what it is, or substack dot Michael. I

(11:13):
don't know what it's called, but just look me up there.
I write about all kinds of things most days.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Well, I mean, Michael, that's the other thing. Michael is.
He is a I think I said last time, a
sextuple threat because he's a writer, actor, comedian, everything is a.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Modern dancer, radical feminist, poet, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I mean, you did write a feminist book, so and
I'm sure you've done poetry all right, So before we
wrap up, have a little extra credit. So these bureaucratic
forms are usually just boring, old black and white, not
this vibrant color. Come back tomorrow to find out what

(11:56):
it is and the interesting history behind that. Please, if
you have thirty four seconds, please go to your favorite
podcast platform and rate us or review us, because it
really helps get the word out.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Chew and a half stars.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
I mean, I can't tell you to do that, but.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Five is just so much easier, like you don't have
to adge.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Oh no, I was going for accuracy. I was not
going for okay, well, fair, or not anything else other
than accuracy.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
To a halt, Stars, don't listen to Michael, please, and
we will meet you here tomorrow for more puzzling puzzles
than will puzzle you puzzlingly.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
Hey, Puzzlers, your chief puzzle Officer Greg Pliska here with
the extra credit answer from our previous episode. We did
Hidden Ian's with Michael ian Black, where every answer is
a word with the letters I an hidden in it somewhere.
Your extra credit clue was another word for very smart
like you, very bright like you, or even radiant like you.

(13:03):
The answer is brilliant because you are brilliant. Thanks for
playing puzzles with us, and we'll see you here next
time for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly
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Greg Pliska

Greg Pliska

A.J. Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs

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