You Know Too Much

He emerged from a giant egg wearing a Windows 95 crop top.

Jordana Freydberg knows way too much about Eurovision scoring, the fifty-fifty split between expert juries and a public vote you can buy your way into, the “Big Five” who are grandfathered into the final by how much they pay the European Broadcasting Union, and the 1974 UK jury that famously gave ABBA’s “Waterloo” zero points.

Smash that rate button like a hungry trout smashing a stonefly.

Nick Parish knows way too much about fly fishing and fly tying — the Michigan Fly Fishing Club that radicalized him as the youngest member by three decades, why salmon flies aren’t eaten by salmon, the black market for polar bear fur, and the boring truth that you can catch a fish 20 minutes from your house. It doesn’t need to be hard.

Your willpower isn’t the problem. The system is.

Anthony Barrows is an applied behavioral scientist who knows way too much about the gap between what you mean to do and what you actually do. He calls it the intention–action gap, and he says almost every social program in the US widens it by design — hidden hoops, forms, stigma, and the psychological cost of walking into the office. Fix the system, not the person.

How to poop in the woods, professionally.

How do you poop in the woods — professionally? Shawnté Salabert knows. Host of the Gear Abby outdoor podcast, and living proof you can bury the lede — literally. She walks us through the whole business: bidets, Kula cloths, WAG bags, and the Cadillac of backcountry hygiene.

It all started when I found a Gucci sweatshirt at Goodwill.

Amanda Samuel started collecting vintage at 16, doing community service at a Long Island Goodwill — where she found a Gucci sweatshirt in a garbage bag for $5. Twenty-four years later, she can date a garment by touching the zipper. This week: side seams, invisible zippers, pinking shears, and how to read a piece of clothing like a book.

I went to a hypnotherapist to get past my gag reflex.

What’s the Venn diagram between endurance sports and competitive eating? Yasir Salem and the Tour de Donut. Yes, this exists — and Yasir tells us about ultramarathons, the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest qualifier, and the gag-reflex hypnotherapy that made it all possible.

My glute rep precedes me.

Suzy Hotrod on 20 years with Gotham Girls Roller Derby — the strategy, the bruises, the early-aughts bar-worker resurgence, and the community that made her give it everything.

I make beer to get people off their phones.

Nick Bonadies on what actually goes into a great beer at Belleflower Brewing in Portland, Maine — the water chemistry that can make or break a recipe, the Maine farmers growing his barley, the lambic process that takes years, and why beer’s real job is bringing people together.

The croissant is my Moby Dick. Erica Fair on twenty years of chasing gluten-free baked goods that don’t taste like sad cardboard — the flours that work, the croissant she can’t crack, and why she’ll occasionally gluten herself just to remember what a cinnamon roll is supposed to taste like.

I don’t know who I am when I start talking about Tetris.

D’LOURDES on Tetris — the iconic game she fell into at a Barcade, the ridiculous international licensing saga that played out behind it (three men, one Soviet government office, no signed contracts), and why fitting blocks into place is the closest she gets to peace.

A subculture that will kick your ass and melt your cold heart. Joshua “Tex” Teixeira on emocore — how a 1985 DC hardcore offshoot nobody meant to name became a lifelong treasure hunt for impossibly rare 7-inches, hand-made packaging, and a scene built on belonging.

A bowl of ramen changed my life. Sarah Gavigan on ramen — the umami science, the post-war history, why it's a cuisine and not a recipe, and how chasing one bowl turned into an obsession (and a Nashville ramen shop).

The best television show ever made.

Danny Robinson on The Dick Van Dyke Show — why it set the template for everything that came after, and what TV lost when it stopped being made like this.

Three Olympic gymnasts did absolutely nothing wrong, and they all ended up losers.

Wendy Jo Martling on the 2024 Paris Olympics floor final — the gogi, the inquiry, the four-second timestamp, and the moment on March 7th that turned heartbreak into something else entirely.

A show celebrating the deeply specific, oddly delightful, occasionally unhinged things people know way too much about.

Join Pamala Buzick Kim and Eva McCloskey to learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about that thing you didn’t know about.