The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything

Turns out it's not 42

Welcome to The Brown Barge. I’m Spencer. This essay is the fifth in a six part series about my favorite podcast, Mystery Show. Mystery Show, which explores mysteries that can’t be solved using the internet, aired for six episodes between May and July of 2015. To celebrate the eighth anniversary, I’m re-listening to each episode and writing an accompanying essay. The first essay in this series was featured by Substack! In that essay I used the mystery of a disappearing video store to explore my mom’s mysterious illness and the way that our brains turn us all into liars. You can find that essay, along with the rest of the series here. 

Mystery Show’s fifth case, Source Code, revolves around one question: how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal? You don’t need to have listened to the episode or read any of the previous editions to enjoy this essay. All you need to do is ask yourself:

Is this the real life or is this just fantasy?

Welcome to the league

I had my first encounter with giants while sipping beer at a college house party. The party was a kegger that could’ve passed for a deleted scene from the 2002 film Van Wilder, and the giants weren’t from a mythical realm, they were just extremely tall humans. 

As you may have guessed, these extremely tall humans were basketball players. This was in the fall of 2005 at a ranch house with a pool in the backyard, located a few blocks from the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville. The first giant who entered the room was David Lee. David had just been selected by the New York Knicks a few months earlier. David is 6’9” and played 12 seasons in the NBA. The next giant was Al Horford. Al is also 6’9”. He would go on to be drafted in 2007 by the Atlanta Hawks and just finished his 16th NBA season. The last giant was Joakim Noah. Joakim is 6’11”. He was picked by the Chicago Bulls in the 2007 draft and he played 13 seasons in the NBA. 

I am not friends with any of these guys. I saw them once at a party. Yet I know all of their heights off the top of my head, along with the heights of hundreds of other random basketball players. Or at least, I thought that I knew all of these heights until I re-listened to Mystery Show’s fifth episode, Source Code, and started to think about height in a completely new way.

But how tall are you shaven?

Mystery Show’s fifth case comes from David Rees. David is a cartoonist, artisanal pencil sharpener, TV host, and podcast creator. He is also friends with Mystery Show’s host and detective Starlee Kine. After watching the film Source Code, David was struck by how “sometimes in the movie Jake Gyllenhaal looked kind of short and other times he looked really tall.” This discrepancy bothered David enough that he went to the internet to answer the question: “how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal.” 

But instead of finding a simple answer David stumbles upon “an international debate.” In this debate “disputants from all over the world” argue about Jake’s height by extrapolating from photos of Jake standing next the rapper Xzibit¹, relaying first hand encounters with Jake, and claiming that Jake’s height can’t be truly known until such time as they can “see him shaven.”

After spending hours combing the archives of this debate, David is left with a range for Jake’s height that “goes from five feet nine inches to someone saying he's six feet five inches,” as well as a newfound knowledge of something called max morning height.² Unable to make further progress, David hands the case over to Starlee with instructions to get “word from Jake himself.”

This is the second Mystery Show case that boils down to finding a celebrity and asking them a question. In the first celebrity case Starlee attempted to get in touch with Britney Spears through hidden mutual connections and chance encounters. Starlee reprises these two investigative methods in her search for Jake.

First, Starlee goes to Twitter, asking her fellow New Yorkers to send their Jake-sightings. Immediately the tips start pouring in:

One person had seen him in her spin class. Someone else said it was just the two of them in her coffee shop the other morning. She reached for the sugar and there he was. Another girl was ordering a burger when Jake walked by outside. She was so startled that she threw the burger away, just chucked it in mid­air.

I laughed out loud at the image of this woman throwing her burger into the air at the sight of Jake. 

These reports give Starlee a good idea of Jake’s whereabouts, but while Starlee put out a call to the Twitter sleuths she forgot to send out an APB to her friend Dan. This proves to be a critical error. Dan had just spent half an hour watching Jake talk to a group of people on a New York City sidewalk that is just “five minutes by mad dash” from Starlee’s house. If only Starlee had told Dan about her quest she could have easily made it to that sidewalk, measuring tape in hand.

Having missed this golden opportunity to solve the mystery, Starlee starts to chase down hidden connections. This turns out to be surprisingly easy. One of Starlee’s friends, Jeb, produced the movie Source Code—the very film that set this chain of events in motion. Jeb tells Starlee that he’s supposed to get dinner with Jake in a week and will ask Jake how tall he is. 

Mystery solved? Not quite. 

When Jeb asked Jake his height at the dinner “Jake had been intrigued, but wouldn’t give a number.” Starlee is upset that she “had failed, at the very moment when success seemed most guaranteed,” and equally dismayed at her inability to turn off the faucet of Jake-sightings pouring into her Twitter mentions. Despite these constant Twitter updates the case goes cold, leaving David to ponder “the unknowability of certain things in the age of information.”  

Height is not something that we usually think of as unknowable. Sure, people may lie about their height, but we typically think of height as a fixed objective fact about a person. And yet sometimes even the things we think are fixed can be fuzzy.

To be (7 feet), or not to be (7 feet)

As I stood next to Joakim Noah, I thought: “this is how it feels to stand next to a seven footer.” A seven footer is an almost mythical being in life and basketball. A 2011 Sports Illustrated article estimated there were about 70 seven footers in the U.S. at that time, and an article from a couple of years ago puts the number of seven footers in the NBA at 23. But getting an accurate count of seven footers is actually quite tricky. Even in the NBA. 

To illustrate, let’s go back to Joakim Noah. I knew at the time that I stood next to Joakim that his listed height was 6’11”. But listed heights aren’t always accurate, especially in college. The best source for accurate NBA player heights is the NBA Draft Combine, an annual event where NBA hopefuls gather to undergo a series of drills, measurements, and tests. In 2007, when Joakim participated in the combine, the NBA took two measurements of players, one without shoes and one with shoes. Without shoes, Joakim measured in at 6 feet 10 and one half inches. But with shoes on he made it up to seven feet. 

So is Joakim Noah seven feet or not? 

As I pondered this question alongside Mystery Show’s own height related mystery I started thinking about the Hollow Face Illusion. This famous optical illusion tricks us into seeing a mask with a concave nose as a normal face. Look at the center of the photo below.

Both faces seem normal. Sure the lighting is different, but, at least to my eye, the features of both faces appear to be protruding out. And yet, as you can see when the box is turned, one side is actually concave. In a physical sense, the way that our eyes are interpreting this sensory information is incongruent with the reality of the world. 

The Hollow Face Illusion opens up a window into a way of understanding the brain as a prediction machine. According to the Bayesian Brain Theory, also known as the predictive coding hypothesis, we do not passively receive and process external sensory information. Rather, we actively predict what we will encounter and then match these predictions with the actual sensory input. If our predictions don’t match the sensory input then we update our model of the world to better predict what will happen in the future. 

Sometimes our predictions of the world need to be very accurate. If I’m foraging in the woods and I come across a mushroom I better be sure that what I’m eating won’t kill me. But if I’m hanging out at a party next to Joakim Noah, I don’t really need to know his height precisely. My mental model is that he is very tall, that if I talk to him I will need to crane my neck up, that if I want him to hear me in a loud environment I will need to shout. 

To me a rough mental model is sufficient. But I am also not detail oriented, at least when it comes to the external world. My own mental posture is to get the big things right and not sweat the small stuff. That is why I wouldn’t last a day as an artisanal pencil sharpener. David Rees, on the other hand, needs to have precision in his life, and so he must know precisely how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is. Starlee, being a good friend and tenacious detective, won’t rest until she brings David that precision. 

Predicting our futures

Starlee’s previous methods have failed to get her directly to the one person who can answer this mystery: Jake. That leaves Starlee no choice but to take over the investigation.

Through her connections, Starlee finally gets Jake on the phone. The conversation unfolds in a playful, almost flirty, manner. Jake dispenses “the worst piece of advice anyone has ever given”³ but still seems unwilling to directly tell Starlee how tall he is. After delivering a clue that he is taller than his sister, Jake casually throws out a perfect example of the way that our prior experience shapes how we perceive reality:

As any younger sibling would tell you, they [older siblings] always do sort of feel taller than you. It really is about what we project onto other people. There are days when I'm sure I seem taller than I am, and there are days when you wake up and you're just like ‘ugh, man.’ It's cold out, or there's something going on in your life, and you're shorter, I think.

Jake is objectively taller than his sister. And yet sometimes his brain looks at this fact about the external world and still reverts to an earlier state, where his sister was taller than him—a prediction that was once correct but is now false. This detail of the conversation gives us a tiny window into the mind of Jake Gyllenhaal, a younger brother who is still trying to make his own mark on the world.  

After another digression about the film Innerspace and the relative heights of Dennis Quaid and Martin Short, Jake does eventually reveal his precise height:

Five foot eleven and one half of an inch.

When Starlee delivers this news to David, someone whose commitment to precision led him to a life as an artisanal pencil sharpener, he tells Starlee “that’s the best possible answer.” When Starlee asks why this answer is so satisfying to David he says: 

Because it's like, it could have been so easy for him to say, ‘yeah I'm happily six feet’…So I admire in the spirit of our inquiry, which was to get some hard facts, that Jake Gyllenhaal gave us that half inch of significant digit.

This significant digit is important to David. But to me such precise measurements of the world are far less interesting than high-level theories. That is why I spend my time re-listening to old podcasts and pondering theories of the mind.

It is cliché to say that truth is stranger than fiction, but I think that statement is true. I would also extend this to say that reality is stranger than perception. The Bayesian Brain Theory doesn’t reject objective reality, but it does suggest that our experience of reality is filtered through the predictions that we make about the world. These predictions help us to navigate the world, to stay alive, to pass on our genes, to pursue happiness and joy in our own weird ways. These predictions demonstrate the power of our brains, and yet they also illustrate our limits. 

We have come quite a way during the 300,000 years that Homo Sapiens have roamed our planet. But, despite our evolution, we’re still just a bunch of animals making our way as best as we can through a chaotic world, grappling with the big questions in life.

Questions like: how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal?

1. “A celebrity of known height” according to David’s investigations.

2. According to David’s research “people are tallest in the morning, and then as the day goes by ­ and this is true for myself ­ you slump more and more, you're getting more and more tired, you're getting beaten down by the world.”

3. The advice is “when you try to destroy your career, it only brings wonderful things.”