Big Little Questions

Transcript

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Speaker 8 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 8 All they have left is a life raft and each other. This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan.

Speaker 8 Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

Speaker 2 Hey, it's Latif.

Speaker 1 Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to play for you just a tiny bit of a chat that I had with our executive editor, Soren Wheeler.

Speaker 1 Because I had this kind of burning question that I wanted to ask him, and it actually ended up inspiring why we decided to play this episode for you today.

Speaker 10 All right.

Speaker 11 Okay.

Speaker 13 Why are we really here?

Speaker 1 Okay, I wanted to bring you here today because you are one of the few people at this show who has been around for longer than I have. You started as an intern in what year, Saarin?

Speaker 13 2007, I think.

Speaker 2 2007. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you know how many episodes of Radiolab you have worked on?

Speaker 13 It's got to be north of 400. No.
Not that I totally made or but that I had something to do with.

Speaker 1 Wait, how many shows have we even made?

Speaker 13 Oh, probably.

Speaker 16 This is a show.

Speaker 17 How many episodes?

Speaker 13 I think probably around 500 or something.

Speaker 17 Wow. You know, okay.

Speaker 13 I mean, there's sometimes it was like a rerun with an update or with a bunch of

Speaker 17 little things.

Speaker 18 And of those, you've worked on the preponderance.

Speaker 13 Is this some preamble to you suggesting that it's time for me to leave?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's time for you to move on. This is a coup.

Speaker 16 You've all gotten together and decided that, you know.

Speaker 1 No, but like, so my question for you, put simply, is,

Speaker 1 why do you stick around? What after so long? Do you still get joy from doing this? And

Speaker 1 where does that joy come from?

Speaker 19 Where does the joy

Speaker 13 i i mean i i guess it does feel like um

Speaker 13 we kind of get to do anything

Speaker 13 like so many shows are you know kind of have to be in a box like crime or sports or this or that but you know for us it could be we we get to do like i don't know hockey and then um some weird thorny legal issue and then black holes and then

Speaker 16 like academic publishing.

Speaker 13 But actually the thing that keeps you going, the real joy like week to week is is that for each and every one of those things there's always something you didn't know like or didn't understand like or you thought you knew and then you realized you didn't or you'd never even thought you wanted to know something and then all of a sudden you do like sometimes thinking back over the last 17 years

Speaker 22 it just feels like a fever dream of of questions like she swam up right next to me and then came up and looked directly at me.

Speaker 13 Like, can a whale say thank you?

Speaker 11 Right, right.

Speaker 13 Or how can your mom also be your aunt?

Speaker 25 Do you enjoy your bowel movements? No. Have you ever thought about killing yourself? No.

Speaker 13 Do we lie to ourselves?

Speaker 26 Why were you laughing?

Speaker 27 I don't know.

Speaker 16 Can animals laugh?

Speaker 13 Where does morality come from?

Speaker 16 Why is there this group of butterflies that are thriving in an artillery range?

Speaker 13 What makes someone successful?

Speaker 16 Why can't you sell your blood?

Speaker 13 Could we ever cheat death?

Speaker 16 Why do vegetables spark in a microwave?

Speaker 13 Can you think without words?

Speaker 28 Why do we sleep?

Speaker 29 How can you be a scientist and not know the answer to that?

Speaker 13 Does time slow down with your falling?

Speaker 16 Can we make a living thing? Can babies do master one wrong?

Speaker 14 Eels?

Speaker 16 How does crypto make?

Speaker 14 How big can last?

Speaker 16 And how fast can you play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Those are a lot of questions that are...

Speaker 2 Why was Ted Kaczynski so angry?

Speaker 31 Oh, you're still going. All right.

Speaker 11 Okay, keep going.

Speaker 17 I don't know. You could.

Speaker 13 You could keep going. You could.

Speaker 13 And that does feel really good to think about all the different things that there's already a radio lab for.

Speaker 1 Also, to me, it's actually a fun challenge to find little nooks and crannies where it's like, oh, we've never even gone, we've never even gone close to this before.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And sometimes, you know, the answer comes, you just keep wondering things.

Speaker 13 The answer comes from somebody on staff or you get a pitch that has a new question in it that you've never thought of before.

Speaker 16 Although, you know, there was, I have to say, like

Speaker 13 one of my favorite things was there was a moment where we were all sitting around and realized, you know, we're asking all these questions or we're always looking for questions, but like people are always actually asking us questions too.

Speaker 13 And so we're just like, looked in the email inbox and we're kind of like, oh my God, there's a treasure.

Speaker 16 Treasure some weird ones.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 There's some great ones.

Speaker 13 So like, I think it was like 10 years ago we did a thing where we were like, let's just. take those questions

Speaker 13 and make a show and just take all these listener questions and just hit go and we've actually done several of these now we call them like our stupid question shows but i think that first one was like 10 years ago or something like that and it's just right there's something about those shows that's really fun i mean they're listener questions which is cool right but it's also just like it just hits the spirit of what we do in some kind of other way and i don't know those are those are some of my favorite shows yeah i agree Okay, so right after having that conversation with Sorin, it was like, okay, we need to play our original stupid questions episode.

Speaker 1 We call them internally stupid questions, but it's like a tongue-in-cheek thing. We don't actually call it that.
The episode was called Big Little Questions.

Speaker 1 Before we get to that, I just wanted to say something that maybe you're tired of hearing, but

Speaker 1 it's true is the reason we keep saying it. We are an independent nonprofit show.
For us to keep doing what we do, to keep asking these questions that seem small, but are actually big, we need help.

Speaker 1 We need your help. We need your support.
And the best way to do that is to become a member of the lab. The way to do that is go to radiolab.org slash join.

Speaker 1 If you do that as a member, you will get a bunch of great stuff. You will listen to the show with no ads.

Speaker 1 We actually put up a bunch of bonus content for our members, including, you know, extra little conversations, nuggets that sort of fell out.

Speaker 1 If you sign up before the end of the month, we have a very special gift for you. Everyone on staff is pretty excited about it.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but for now, enjoy this romp of listener questions.

Speaker 1 Big little questions.

Speaker 11 Have fun.

Speaker 15 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 24 You're listening

Speaker 24 to Radio Lab.

Speaker 14 Radio Lab from From Reinab.

Speaker 20 W-N-Wise.

Speaker 32 Re-Wind.

Speaker 17 Hey, I'm Jad Abun Rod.

Speaker 16 I'm Robert Kolwich. This is Radio Lab.

Speaker 21 And today,

Speaker 33 we're going to hit the phones. Hello.

Speaker 20 Hi, can I speak to Mark? Starting with this guy, Mark Morrison. This is me.
Hey, Mark, this is Jad calling from Radio Lab. Hey, Jad, good to hear you.

Speaker 20 Got a hold of him at his home in Olympia, Washington.

Speaker 27 I'm hanging out on the front porch because kids are running around.

Speaker 11 So you might hear some traffic. Okay, gotcha.

Speaker 20 All right, maybe we should just jump in. Maybe you should just tell me the story.
Okay. So um I was DJing a wedding um out in Lacey, which is the next town over.

Speaker 20 It was a hot like late spring kind of feeling like summer kind of day.

Speaker 35 And uh we were in a a little uh rented facility that had like windows on all sides and all of a sudden the power starts flickering and it starts raining really hard.

Speaker 36 Okay.

Speaker 6 Then

Speaker 35 trees are falling over.

Speaker 37 The wind is gusting.

Speaker 34 And the sky turns to night.

Speaker 34 And this is like 3.30 in the afternoon.

Speaker 20 So Mark takes off, goes back home.

Speaker 34 My in-laws are visiting in town to hang out with the new baby.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 34 we open up the curtains, turned off all the lights, and we're just kind of marveling at the insane power of this storm that's happening.

Speaker 37 My wife is sitting on the couch.

Speaker 34 My two-year-old is watching Charlie Brown or something on the iPad. And then all of a sudden, there's just a loud snap, like the sound of a whip cracking or like a two by four being snapped in half.

Speaker 34 And about a foot and a half to two feet in front of my face, right next to my mother-in-law and the baby, there's a little sphere of light

Speaker 34 white light just a little orb the size of like maybe an orange or a grapefruit kind of blurry edges around it floating in midair as bright as like the sun like the bright it lit up the entire room wow we all screamed

Speaker 20 everybody in the room in unison and mark says this sun orb just sort of hovered in front of his face kind of going wom wom wom wom

Speaker 34 for maybe a second, when all of a sudden,

Speaker 20 poof, it was gone.

Speaker 37 Yeah,

Speaker 20 that's some X-File right there. Yeah, none of us had any idea what the heck happened.
Well, did you go around the room being like, did you guys see that?

Speaker 10 Did you see that? Yeah, everybody saw it.

Speaker 37 Everybody thought.

Speaker 37 My mother-in-law thought that I had like taken some kind of like fireworks and thrown it up in the air.

Speaker 39 It's like, what did you do? Like,

Speaker 34 I didn't do anything. So, what I did was I started trying to Google it, and there's, you know, I mean, imagine trying to Google that.

Speaker 20 You're not going to find anything.

Speaker 42 What did you type into Google?

Speaker 34 Sphere of light floating

Speaker 34 indoors.

Speaker 37 I didn't get very far.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 43 But

Speaker 43 I just wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Speaker 20 And so, what Mark did is he sat down on a computer and he typed up this email

Speaker 20 basically saying like what the hell is this thing and then he sent that email into the void

Speaker 21 which would be us which is us

Speaker 20 yes to our email inbox and uh you know it sat around for a while uh because we tend to get these kinds of questions

Speaker 45 a lot Are there more stars in the universe or grains of sand on Earth?

Speaker 44 A lot.

Speaker 46 A lot.

Speaker 45 Is it cleaning beneath the sticker of the apple?

Speaker 3 Why do some birds walk and others hop? How do do fish hear?

Speaker 33 Why are horses special?

Speaker 21 We get things like.

Speaker 47 What's up with traffic jams?

Speaker 20 Random questions like.

Speaker 13 Helium is a finite resource. Why are we wasting it on balloons?

Speaker 21 Out of poop questions.

Speaker 45 Why is different animals poop shaped differently?

Speaker 42 Yeah, a lot of poop.

Speaker 47 What happens when you flush a toilet on the equator?

Speaker 20 And they just sort of pile up. We sort of put them in this bucket and then feel guilty about not answering them.
And over the years.

Speaker 21 Well, they keep coming, so the bucket gets fuller and fuller

Speaker 20 and fuller.

Speaker 21 So finally, today we decided, okay,

Speaker 21 let's just dump the bucket out.

Speaker 20 And so we're going to try and answer some of these questions today, a bunch of us.

Speaker 36 Hello?

Speaker 20 Beginning with a question about the orb. Can I speak to Martin, please? You're talking to him.
Try and answer Mark's question. I call up a guy named Martin Uman.

Speaker 43 Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida.

Speaker 20 Thank you. Is this still a good time to chat?

Speaker 43 It is about the only time because I'm going to go to dinner in about 10 minutes.

Speaker 20 All right, excellent. So we'll just jump right in.

Speaker 14 All right.

Speaker 50 How long are we going to talk?

Speaker 24 Well,

Speaker 20 so I told Martin the story, thunderstorm boom, glowing orb boof, glowing orb gone.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 20 So maybe I'll just put the most basic question to you. Like, what is that?

Speaker 6 Well, that observation is not uncommon, and it's generally called ball lightning.

Speaker 10 Ball lightning.

Speaker 30 Yeah, that's what it's called.

Speaker 20 And according to Martin, ball lightning is timeless.

Speaker 43 Ancient Greeks described exactly the same thing. In the 19th century and 18th century, they used to commonly come down the chimney, come out the fireplace.

Speaker 11 Oh, wow.

Speaker 20 But now, says Martin, we are living in an electronic world, and so these balls of lightning sometimes come out of a wall socket, sometimes out of a telephone.

Speaker 54 They happen in airplanes, they happen in submarines.

Speaker 14 Whoa.

Speaker 20 That actually has been reported? Yeah.

Speaker 43 Lightning strikes outside an airplane and a ball comes through the windshield and floats down the whole plane.

Speaker 10 What?

Speaker 20 If I'm in that plane, I'm thinking...

Speaker 43 You're going to hope you have your diaper on, right?

Speaker 10 Where are your depends?

Speaker 43 Anytime you've got electrical stuff going on, you can make a ball of fire like that.

Speaker 20 So do we know anything about what causes what it is exactly? Is it just another form of lightning that somehow manages to ball itself up and hang around?

Speaker 37 Well, probably.

Speaker 20 Martin is actually one of the few people who has studied ball lightning in the lab. He actually got funded by DARPA to try and figure out how it works.

Speaker 33 Wasn't quite able to.

Speaker 20 He says what's likely happening is that when a bolt of lightning strikes, it might hit something.

Speaker 42 Soil, Oil, water, tree.

Speaker 20 Whatever it is, some substance.

Speaker 43 Gets lit up and somehow forms itself into a sphere, like a balloon or a bubble or something.

Speaker 20 Like if you imagine, lightning hits some dust, shocks the dust, changes its chemistry so that it forms some kind of spherical scaffolding, and then the lightning sticks to the scaffolding or something.

Speaker 52 Maybe that's what's happening, but you can't prove it.

Speaker 6 I mean, there's some theory which indicates that that might happen.

Speaker 54 But if you go in the laboratory and you try to make it, you can't make it.

Speaker 43 So can't prove it.

Speaker 54 And

Speaker 52 if you get a book on ball lightning, or you get my book and look at the chapter on ball lightning,

Speaker 43 you'll see probably a list of 50 different theories that people have come up with

Speaker 43 from all the way to

Speaker 43 black holes and discontinuities in time-space and things that are just, you know, completely almost out of this world. So they remain a mystery,

Speaker 43 but

Speaker 43 a well-observed mystery.

Speaker 43 Did you know that people don't have any good maths for how lightning gets started in a cloud?

Speaker 11 Really?

Speaker 10 I didn't know that.

Speaker 43 We don't know how lightning can get started. It shouldn't be able to.

Speaker 42 It shouldn't really be.

Speaker 20 Based on what? But the math says there's not a lot of stuff.

Speaker 43 Based on all the measurements that have been made of the conditions in clouds.

Speaker 27 Huh.

Speaker 10 So you say.

Speaker 43 The world is full of things that aren't understood.

Speaker 52 Almost nothing is understood.

Speaker 10 We're floundering around.

Speaker 20 Do you find yourself thinking about ball lightning and then suddenly just tiptoeing into an existential crisis about

Speaker 20 how little we know of the world?

Speaker 52 Well, that's how I make my living is trying to uncover

Speaker 50 little more bits by little more bits.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 52 yeah, there's lots that isn't on about everything.

Speaker 21 Next up, producer Tracy Hunt goes on a field trip

Speaker 21 to some very hallowed ground.

Speaker 32 Right, I think I finally reached the library.

Speaker 55 The New York Public Library.

Speaker 11 The New York Public Library.

Speaker 55 Within its white marble walls is stored the sum of man's wisdom.

Speaker 21 Which, in its glory days.

Speaker 15 Okay, son, right here in the Grand Hall is like beautiful chandeliers all over the place, these gorgeous columns was filled with seven floors of stacks, millions of books in every field of human endeavor, row upon row upon row of shelves, miles of shelves, close to 50 centuries of human thinking and experience.

Speaker 21 And every year, millions of visitors like Tracy would walk through these hallowed halls

Speaker 21 with questions fueled by curiosity, the desire for truth, for knowledge, for wisdom, people trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Speaker 45 I came here to ask him a question about Catnip.

Speaker 17 Catnip.

Speaker 16 Yes, Catnip.

Speaker 16 Why?

Speaker 45 Why Catnip? Oh, I should back up. So we actually got like 500 questions from our listeners.
So I thought it might be a good idea to take some of them to the library.

Speaker 27 Hi, Rosa.

Speaker 45 So I met up with this woman.

Speaker 12 Nice to meet you.

Speaker 56 I'm Tracy.

Speaker 45 Nice to meet you, Rosa. And she walked me into this office.
There's about like, I don't know, 12 people sitting at their desks.

Speaker 47 Why don't you just introduce yourself to me?

Speaker 49 Okay, sure. So my name is Rosa Lee.
I manage Ask NYPL, and I've been in this department for about five years.

Speaker 45 Ask NY What? Ask NYPL. It's 917-ASK-NYPL.
I'm putting the phone number out there.

Speaker 45 And if you call them and you ask them a question, it's their job to answer it. Yes.

Speaker 49 So we are like a call center. So our typical day starts with questions.

Speaker 45 And like in a typical day, how many phone calls do you get?

Speaker 49 Typical day about

Speaker 8 150 to 200.

Speaker 45 And Rosa was telling me that most of the questions they get are, what will the weather be like this weekend?

Speaker 49 Very boring. Hey, my library card expired, or I want to renew this book.

Speaker 45 But you know, also they get some weird ones. We take them all.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 So I got a list right here. And in the past, they've gotten things like, what kind of apple did Eve eat? Is it proper to go alone to Reno to get a divorce?

Speaker 45 Any statistics on the lifespan of the abandoned woman do camels have to be licensed in india what is the natural enemy of the duck can i get a book telling me how to be a mistress of ceremonies at a musical orgy what does it mean when you dream you're being chased by an elephant

Speaker 45 and and do they answer all those they'll try to so you know i was maybe a little dismissive for a few of them i mean all the questions of course are very important we welcome all questions please this by the way is bernard bernard van marsevine he has been working for ask nypl since about 2001 and so the question though he he did answer my catnip question, which is, do large feline species like tigers and lions have the same reaction to catnip as domestic cats?

Speaker 57 Yes. All cats like catnip.

Speaker 22 Apparently tigers, at least.

Speaker 45 But, you know, I had all these questions, so I actually had them pick one that they thought was super interesting. Yeah.
Which one did you pick to answer?

Speaker 22 Let me get the exact word out.

Speaker 22 So, yeah, so here we go.

Speaker 48 Could you play a meaningful game of frisbee on the surface of Mars? Yeah. And yeah, I really like that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that was a good one.

Speaker 22 And I think the word that makes it like just really shine is

Speaker 15 meaningful.

Speaker 45 So the first thing he does.

Speaker 48 If you want to get me kind of doing some searching, you know, again, back of the envelope kind of stuff here.

Speaker 45 And he, I guess I was a little disappointed that we didn't bust out any like books.

Speaker 22 I'm just looking up Frisbee aerodynamics.

Speaker 45 He literally just turned to his computer and started Googling.

Speaker 22 How does a frisbee behave here on Earth? The spin of the Frisbee, of course, the lift, drag.

Speaker 45 So he looks all that stuff up.

Speaker 30 Let's see.

Speaker 45 Then he looked up like aerodynamics.

Speaker 48 On Mars. On Mars.

Speaker 15 It's very thin, the air there.

Speaker 45 Because the air is so thin on Mars, you wouldn't get that spinning, lifting thing that you always get at frisbees.

Speaker 48 It might not have the same sort of hovering effect that Frisbee does here on Earth.

Speaker 42 It probably would be more like just throwing a ball.

Speaker 45 It would just go

Speaker 22 10 feet away, 15 feet away.

Speaker 20 I don't think that that counts as a meaningful game of frisbee.

Speaker 45 But, but you know you could you could still throw it back and forth but meaningful

Speaker 48 to me the the question is like you're playing frisbee on mars i mean that's just that's just inherently meaningful

Speaker 48 i mean you know growing up i remember seeing uh

Speaker 48 you know rebroadcasts of uh you know like the astronauts on the moon

Speaker 27 while you're looking that up you might recognize what i have in my hand is the uh playing golf and handle for the contingency sample return. It just so happens to have a

Speaker 27 10-year six iron on the bottom of it. In my left hand, I have a little white pillow that's revealed to millions of Americans.

Speaker 48 And I'm sure that they were not playing like, you know, PGA golf.

Speaker 27 But I'm going to try an old sand trap shot here.

Speaker 37 They got more dirt than ball inside.

Speaker 42 They were just, you know, amateur duffers, but

Speaker 15 they were golfing on the moon.

Speaker 27 Ready to die, one more.

Speaker 27 Miles and miles and miles.

Speaker 48 I mean, to me, that's pretty great.

Speaker 47 That's pretty impressive. So

Speaker 42 the venue

Speaker 48 kind of makes the whole endeavor meaningful, I think, in its way.

Speaker 33 Thanks to producer Tracy. Oh, wait.

Speaker 45 I actually did ask them my dragons question.

Speaker 24 Oh, oh.

Speaker 33 Well, then, next up:

Speaker 21 Tracy Hunt

Speaker 21 and Dragons.

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Speaker 79 This is Irish Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office.

Speaker 79 It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what. Let's try and do that.

Speaker 79 We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling, and you get to see people everywhere adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in.

Speaker 79 If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life, every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 11 Hi, this is Christina.

Speaker 46 Hi, this is Tracy. Hi.

Speaker 11 Oh, hey, hey, are you calling back?

Speaker 45 This question is from Christina Hartquist.

Speaker 80 I'm a native of Nevado out in Northern California.

Speaker 80 And I was born and raised here. So, yeah, love this place.

Speaker 45 And you, and what was your question to us, if you remember what it was roughly?

Speaker 80 Yeah, so I came across this article about these creatures called olms that I guess were being, you know, washed out of these caves in Eastern Europe.

Speaker 56 What are they called?

Speaker 80 Ulms, the O-L-M, these sort of like blind cave-dwelling amphibians. They're totally white.
Their skin is translucent, very like otherworldly.

Speaker 80 And the article touched on the idea that folklore thought that these little creatures were actually like dragon babies being pushed out of these caves where these huge dragons live.

Speaker 80 So I started digging into it a little bit.

Speaker 80 And of course, you can only find so much on the internet, but there was this idea of dragons being a sort of like a universal myth across, you know, different disparate cultures.

Speaker 45 And Christina started to wonder why it seemed that so many cultures all over the world all have myths about dragons.

Speaker 23 What is it about like humans that caused them to believe in these like huge, scary, fire-breathing animals?

Speaker 20 Is that true that cultures all over the world have dragons?

Speaker 45 Well, sorta. You have the northern European dragon that we're all familiar with.

Speaker 45 Then there's the Chinese dragon, which is a little different. It doesn't have wings, doesn't breathe fire.
Then there's other dragon-looking sort of things, the nana bolele.

Speaker 45 Among the Besoto people in southern Africa. There's the Amaru associated with the Incan Empire.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 81 I think there's no doubt that we have fabulous, awesome creatures like dragons in almost every culture in the world.

Speaker 45 So this is Adrienne Mayer.

Speaker 81 I'm a research scholar in the classics department at Stanford.

Speaker 81 And what I'm most interested in is what sorts of things found in nature might have led pre-scientific people to believe that dragons or monsters or other fantastic creatures really existed, at least in the past or even maybe in the present.

Speaker 45 Adrian actually wrote a book called The First Fossil Hunters that lays out this theory that a lot of the stories were actually based on people finding old fossils and bones.

Speaker 81 Fossil bones or teeth or claws or footprints embedded in stone.

Speaker 21 So they'd see a set of old bones that they couldn't explain with any modern creatures. So the creature they go to is this dragon-shaped thing.

Speaker 62 Yes.

Speaker 81 But... I do want to point out, though, that we can never know for certain which comes first.
The observations of mysterious traces of unknown animals or the stories of dragons.

Speaker 81 We don't know which comes first.

Speaker 45 She says it could be that the story about the dragon was already there, and then when they found some bones, they just sort of applied those bones to the dragon myth.

Speaker 20 Well, if the dragon came before the bones, where did it come from?

Speaker 46 Well, there's another theory.

Speaker 81 Some scholars have said they're like monsters of the id. They arise from from ancient memories of very real predators that were faced by our ancestors.

Speaker 81 Basically, dragons are composites of these creatures that used to eat us and hunt us and kill us, like crocodiles, saber-toothed tigers, and lions, cave bears, gigantic serpents, snakes, pythons, condors, giant raptors.

Speaker 45 So you can take like the scaly skin of the crocodile, the claws of the saber-toothed tiger and its saber teeth, the wings of these raptors, put them all together.

Speaker 21 Foe says, All the old terrors rolled into one.

Speaker 42 Like,

Speaker 19 boom, together.

Speaker 45 Yeah, they tap into all those fears that are

Speaker 45 already inside of us.

Speaker 21 In theory, I'm going to go for that one.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I like that. That works.
That feels like an answer.

Speaker 83 Well, you know, like, they're very powerful. I mean, they could be very scary.
They could be very destructive.

Speaker 83 But what's kind of magical in Game of Thrones is that the intimate scenes also melt your heart and bring you closer to these creatures that should be, you know, burning your face off.

Speaker 45 Okay, so I should admit that I actually just used this whole dragon thing to talk to this lady from Game of Thrones.

Speaker 2 This whole thing was this.

Speaker 45 Her name is Paula Fearfield, and she makes all the dragon noises for Game of Thrones.

Speaker 20 Oh, she makes the dragons?

Speaker 21 Right. What did you ask her, I guess, is really

Speaker 21 what did you want to know?

Speaker 45 Well, I wanted to know, I wanted to know, like, how does she make these

Speaker 45 sounds?

Speaker 45 And it was really interesting because, you know, we're talking a little bit about uh come you know how dragons are composite creatures and she basically uses composites to make these noises oh yeah yeah yeah absolutely she takes noises from birds reachy shrieky bird sounds

Speaker 83 insects different kinds of reptilian recordings and stuff and is it always the scary animals well it depends on on what dragon that she you know which of the dragons that she's trying to actually um create a performance for i have sounds i might choose simply by certain personality traits that I might want to push forward.

Speaker 83 So in the case of Drogon.

Speaker 45 So

Speaker 45 on the show, there's Daenerys,

Speaker 45 who's dragon queen, and she has three dragons, and one of them is named Drogon.

Speaker 83 And she named that dragon after Caldrogo, her hot late husband.

Speaker 83 So Drogon is like her lover.

Speaker 45 He kind of has like a very affectionate sensual relationship with her.

Speaker 83 He's whistling at her all the time. He's looking at her butt and going, ooh, baby.

Speaker 45 And so in order to kind of push forward this sort of like dragon sexual tension, I guess, she uses the sounds of two giant tortoises, you know, mating.

Speaker 21 Oh, giant tortoises.

Speaker 15 What does that sound like?

Speaker 11 Well, um,

Speaker 45 you know, I'll just play it.

Speaker 24 Whoa, whoa.

Speaker 83 So the groan of the male actually became,

Speaker 83 with some work and, you know, adjustments and stuff, became the source, the basis for Drogon's purr with her.

Speaker 45 With Daenerys.

Speaker 85 How far did you carry me?

Speaker 45 Drogon, we need to return.

Speaker 45 My people need me.

Speaker 83 And the funny thing about the purr with Drogon was watching people watch it and giggling when they heard it, but not really knowing why.

Speaker 83 And to me, it's because it had that essence, that kind of sensual, sexual essence, that purr. So yeah, now I use from all kinds of things.
And, you know, I also used four

Speaker 83 dragonfly wings to

Speaker 83 make that kind of funny flutter of the thorns as it's moving, like especially on the end of his tail this year. As he moved through, there was like a chitter, and that was like dragonfly wings.

Speaker 11 Dragonfly wings? Yeah.

Speaker 32 Really?

Speaker 45 I was wondering if you ever had a question about dragons that you would like to have answered.

Speaker 83 You know, no, it's curious because I think the thing that differentiates the dragons from creatures and makes them slightly otherworldly is the fire thing. Where did the idea for that come along?

Speaker 24 That's a good question. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Where did that come from?

Speaker 81 Well, there are many theories about that.

Speaker 45 Actually, I took that question back to Adrian Mayer.

Speaker 81 The one that I like is connected to the devastating weapon called Greek fire.

Speaker 45 Which was this unquenchable fire.

Speaker 81 It can't be put out by water. In fact, it burns in water.
And so it was a naval weapon.

Speaker 81 And I believe that scholars have found that some of the nozzles for blasting Greek fire were shaped like dragons so that the boat looked like it had a dragon on board breathing fire at the enemy ships.

Speaker 11 Oh, that's so cool.

Speaker 81 And just stories of they had dragons that breathe fire would make it back to northern Europe. That's the best theory I've heard.

Speaker 20 Oh, that's interesting. So it's like if the dragon is a composite of all the things, creatures that have scared us, now we're part of that composite.

Speaker 21 Oh, it's our technology.

Speaker 21 Becomes part of the creature that frightens us.

Speaker 20 Thanks, Tracy.

Speaker 75 You're welcome.

Speaker 75 Who is.

Speaker 81 What is.

Speaker 28 What is...

Speaker 81 Who is...

Speaker 3 Anything coming to mind?

Speaker 10 What is...

Speaker 33 Say something.

Speaker 69 Three.

Speaker 28 It's a fedora.

Speaker 81 I should have known that.

Speaker 55 You should have known that. All right, we're going to take a break.

Speaker 1 Hey, this is letsev again um if you are enjoying this radio lab questions hour

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Speaker 16 Jad Robert,

Speaker 19 And we are back with more questions.

Speaker 20 Next one comes from producer Rachel Kusick.

Speaker 59 So this question comes from Liam Humberger from Denver, Colorado.

Speaker 38 I was browsing memes on my Instagram feed, and there was this meme where the picture was of a husband and a wife trying to go to sleep. The wife was looking away, and she was like looking irritated.

Speaker 38 And then the husband was looking like just kind of confused on the opposite side of the bed.

Speaker 53 And the caption was her, he's probably thinking of other girls.

Speaker 38 And then him, him i wonder if i've ever bought milk from the same cow twice

Speaker 59 what'd he say i wonder what yeah so he said i wonder if i've ever bought milk from the same cow twice so if i go to the store i buy a gallon of milk and then i go back maybe a week later i get another gallon of milk what are the odds that the same cow is in both of those gallons of milk i see

Speaker 86 i would say the answer is almost certainly yes 100%.

Speaker 59 That's Art Benjamin. He's a math professor.

Speaker 53 At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

Speaker 86 And I'm also a mathematician.

Speaker 20 And how is he so sure that it's 100%?

Speaker 59 Well, according to Art Benjamin, it all comes down to

Speaker 16 probability, statistics, and dare I say, calculus.

Speaker 59 So take a farm like Dale's here. Here we go.

Speaker 72 My name is Dale Matoon, Pine Hollow Dairy.

Speaker 59 Dale has about a thousand cows. And 20 at a time, these cows walk into a milking parlor.
They line up. It looks like a wishbone.

Speaker 23 All day and all night long.

Speaker 59 And they get hooked up with these black rubber hoses.

Speaker 23 The air you're hearing every once in a while is the guy putting a machine on a cow when he hits the button it turns on the vacuum and then he pumps the milk out of their udders into this big hose along the bottom of the floor.

Speaker 59 Running through the hose down into this line. And it's meeting up with all the milk from all the other cows.

Speaker 59 And then it goes from that room into another room where it gets cooled down.

Speaker 20 This is the milk out.

Speaker 23 Put your hand on this pipe.

Speaker 56 Oh my gosh, it's cold. There's condensation on it.

Speaker 87 Very cool.

Speaker 59 Once it's cooled down, it goes into this rocket ship-looking thing outside called a milk silo, where all the milk from Dale's farm is just hanging out together.

Speaker 87 Silo gets filled up and up and up and up until it's full.

Speaker 23 We're sending out over 8,000 gallons of milk today on a tractor trailer.

Speaker 59 This truck comes along, picks up that milk, and it stops at another farm and another farm and another farm until that truck is full.

Speaker 46 Right full.

Speaker 59 It goes to the processing plant.

Speaker 59 And once you're at the processing plant, all that milk is just mixed around even more with milk from all the cows in the region.

Speaker 53 And one second, look, I still have my

Speaker 86 back of the envelope that had the calculation here.

Speaker 59 Here's where the math comes in.

Speaker 86 There are about 90,000 drops of milk in a gallon, and oh, I don't know, 100,000 cows who are contributing to a particular processing plant.

Speaker 59 When you run the odds of a drop of milk from any one cow getting into any particular gallon.

Speaker 83 That's probably the case.

Speaker 53 Every gallon of milk contains most of those cows contributing.

Speaker 59 And here's the thing, in one drop of milk, you could probably have a bunch of different milk molecules from a bunch of different cows.

Speaker 86 And so one glass of milk might have, you know, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of different cow molecules in my glass of milk.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 82 That's crazy. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 59 So going back to Liam's original question, Art's argument is that when you're drinking a glass of milk, there's like so many different bits of milk from so many different cows.

Speaker 86 Then it's probably the case that after just two glasses of milk, you're almost certain to have a cow that was represented in both of them.

Speaker 59 So you're bound to run into at least a little bit of one of those 100,000 cows again.

Speaker 86 The point being that every glass of milk has, you know, has thousands and thousands of different cows contributing to it.

Speaker 20 A little bit of 10,000 cows in every glass. In every glass of milk.

Speaker 11 I love that.

Speaker 44 I don't know that I do.

Speaker 20 No, it's great. It's like you're enjoying the collective efforts of this entire species almost.

Speaker 21 No, no, I think it should be the product of one or two cows whom you can picture in your head and maybe pat on the nose. Thank you, you could say.

Speaker 59 Yeah, I don't know. I'm with both of you.
I feel like it weirds me out, but I also think it's kind of cool at the same time.

Speaker 20 Well, you know, but come to think of it, what happens if you drink a glass of milk in New York, get on a plane, fly to Atlanta, then have another glass of milk?

Speaker 20 Are you getting the same 10,000 in each glass, or are they a different 10,000?

Speaker 59 Yeah, so I tried calling around a little bit to answer that question, and it seems like no one really wants to pay to ship milk that far.

Speaker 59 And so, basically, a different processing plant might mean a whole different group of cows.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 59 If you really want to figure out exactly which plant your milk is coming from, you can go to whereismymilkfrom.com. Really?

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 59 And you input the little code on the top of your carton and see how often that number comes up again. Each processing plant has its own code.

Speaker 52 Coming into so many stores.

Speaker 16 Thank you, Rachel.

Speaker 59 Thank you.

Speaker 59 And just a big thanks to dairy farmer Dale Mattoon over at Pine Hollow Dairy.

Speaker 53 Are you a big milk drinker?

Speaker 11 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 56 How often do you drink milk?

Speaker 58 Oh, well, I have my cereal in the morning.

Speaker 88 I have a glass or two for lunch and a glass or two for dinner. Probably two glasses each

Speaker 29 meal. If I don't drink milk, I don't feel good.
Like if I go away on vacation and a lot of times you go to the cow gives you milk.

Speaker 30 Cartons and cartons of milk.

Speaker 30 How, now,

Speaker 30 brown cow.

Speaker 30 How now, brown cow. How now?

Speaker 30 Brown now.

Speaker 30 How now, brown cow.

Speaker 33 All right, this next one came from a couple. Hello? A married couple.
Hello, is this Marie? Yep. This is Matt Kilty, calling from Radio Lab.
How are you?

Speaker 11 I'm good. Thanks.

Speaker 89 I have you on speakerphone and back is right here.

Speaker 33 Oh, hey, Zach. Hi, Matt.
How's it going? Good. Good.

Speaker 33 So, Zach Marie, it was years ago, actually, they sent us an email about what I think is like one of the most confounding, perplexing, mysterious devices that you can find inside anybody's home.

Speaker 33 Okay, so the microwave. I guess what I'm wondering is how, one, why were you microwaving peppers?

Speaker 33 And two,

Speaker 33 do you remember the moment this happened?

Speaker 10 I know what it is.

Speaker 89 I know exactly what happened.

Speaker 33 Okay, so quick scene set. Portland, Maine, a kitchen around dinner time.

Speaker 53 I think we were like cooking a tomato sauce.

Speaker 33 Zach was on bell pepper duty.

Speaker 90 Trying to take a shortcut, stick them in the microwave to make them a little warm or soft or something.

Speaker 89 And then I said, oh, Zach, don't put those in the microwave.

Speaker 30 They'll spark.

Speaker 33 And Zach was just like,

Speaker 43 you're crazy.

Speaker 35 Hogwash it all.

Speaker 6 I don't believe you at all.

Speaker 16 And he's like, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 90 I remember seeing it as a kid.

Speaker 33 You said there was a couple times her mom put some peppers in a microwave and they sparked. Yes.

Speaker 54 My first thought was that my memory was wrong.

Speaker 39 That's what I thought. I was that your memory was wrong.

Speaker 33 Like, there must have been a piece of metal in the microwave and you just don't remember that.

Speaker 39 And that's what was sparking up because vegetables wouldn't do that.

Speaker 33 And this is going back and forth and yes and no and sparks and nothing until...

Speaker 39 I think it was like we have the we have the ability to find this out and

Speaker 35 prove that it's wrong.

Speaker 33 So that was like five years ago in the past. So we decided that we would actually do our own experiment in the present to get to the bottom of this.
Do green peppers spark in the microwave?

Speaker 33 Laserati. First things first, I actually went and bought a microwave.
Hey, how's it going? Off a guy on Craigslist. Alright, yeah, so 50 bucks? 50 bucks.
50 bucks. All right.

Speaker 42 Our baby.

Speaker 33 Then carried it like

Speaker 33 eight blocks back to work. Holy shit.

Speaker 33 Also, bought a bunch of crochets because we're going to do more than just a peppers test. And for reasons I'd rather not get into, decided not to start with the peppers.

Speaker 45 Baby carrots.

Speaker 56 Baby carrots is little carrots.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 33 Producer Annie McEwen.

Speaker 15 So we're going to kitchen. Really?

Speaker 48 Yeah. Couldn't tell.

Speaker 11 Carrots?

Speaker 24 Okay.

Speaker 33 And as the great Ronko says of infomercial fame.

Speaker 57 I don't know who the great Ronko is. Great Ronko.

Speaker 82 Set it.

Speaker 55 Set it and forget it.

Speaker 33 Alright, two minutes. Let's see what happens.

Speaker 33 And all of a sudden,

Speaker 33 this little yellow spark just shot out from one of our slices of carrots.

Speaker 56 That was crazy.

Speaker 82 This little spark.

Speaker 57 Oh yeah, there.

Speaker 33 You see another one?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I just saw a little flash. Wow.

Speaker 57 A little tiny spark.

Speaker 57 Ready?

Speaker 16 Mmm, carrots.

Speaker 85 Carrots.

Speaker 56 Okay, next.

Speaker 36 Kale.

Speaker 36 Set it for kale.

Speaker 33 This is where it gets a little crazy because the kale. Oh!

Speaker 11 There.

Speaker 33 Same thing. What?

Speaker 85 Boom, boom, boom.

Speaker 47 Sparks. Smoke.
It's their smoke. Let's have it.

Speaker 81 Jesus. Delicioso.

Speaker 47 That is smoke.

Speaker 33 We're gonna try blueberries.

Speaker 24 Ready?

Speaker 82 Set it.

Speaker 11 Whoa.

Speaker 11 It's on.

Speaker 33 We started to draw a bit of a crowd in the studio. What?

Speaker 57 Why was electricity coming out of the blueberry?

Speaker 11 Alright, up next.

Speaker 45 Crepes. Crepitos.
Crepes. Crepititis.
Crepe minis. Ready? Ready.

Speaker 33 Time cook.

Speaker 20 You said it.

Speaker 20 Whoa, my God.

Speaker 11 We can't go.

Speaker 33 Alright, what's up next?

Speaker 47 Okay, jumbo franks.

Speaker 2 Oh shit, I got turkey franks.

Speaker 40 Set it. Spread it.

Speaker 11 Oh, oh, I saw one. Oh, oh, my god.

Speaker 11 Um, okay, pepper.

Speaker 20 You said it.

Speaker 33 Okay, both red and green bell peppers. Green was crazy.

Speaker 26 Hey, Pepper!

Speaker 33 We also threw in diced up tomatoes, pears, decked with gourd.

Speaker 85 Are we gonna get fireful things?

Speaker 33 And also,

Speaker 33 a flaming lip city. There we go.

Speaker 1 Who needs fireworks when you've got a CD in the middle?

Speaker 82 This is crazy!

Speaker 45 Stop, stop. Alright, what's up? Yeah, because I don't want to, yeah, is it going to, it looks like it was on fire.

Speaker 47 Is it smoking in here?

Speaker 45 Yeah, it's definitely smoking.

Speaker 56 Whoa, that smells really bad.

Speaker 1 All right, let's take a break.

Speaker 45 Yeah, we want to keep the door open.

Speaker 33 What did you say to Marie after the peppers sparked in the microwave?

Speaker 53 I think I was, I don't know, I was probably speechless.

Speaker 50 I said, I was, I can't believe that you're right about this.

Speaker 33 And Marie, did you say anything in return?

Speaker 89 Probably something to the effect if I told you so.

Speaker 33 So pepper sparking the microwave, that was settled. But then there was the debate about.

Speaker 39 Marie doesn't believe my understanding of how microwaves work.

Speaker 44 Why?

Speaker 52 Maybe it's just that pepper has a lot of moisture in it.

Speaker 33 Zach, maybe it's you put the pepper in the microwave. All that water gets really hot.

Speaker 50 The skin acts as like tinder and that lights on fire quickly.

Speaker 90 But Marie, we always have peppers in our house, and I think that the green ones taste a little bit metallic.

Speaker 33 To To her it's like maybe these peppers just have like some little bit of metal in there that's sparking. Yeah.

Speaker 6 So is your next step to find the appropriate scientist?

Speaker 33 Oh yeah yeah I'm definitely gonna try and put this case to bed.

Speaker 21 Yeah just give us one moment.

Speaker 33 So ended up tracking down this woman. Is it Caroline or Carolyn?

Speaker 9 Is it Caroline? It's Caroline.

Speaker 48 Caroline. Okay.

Speaker 33 Her name is Caroline Ross.

Speaker 9 I'm a professor in the Department of Material Science and Engineering in MIT.

Speaker 33 An experienced microwaver?

Speaker 9 I've done it with

Speaker 9 roast potatoes.

Speaker 33 Oh, you've seen sparks?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I've seen sparks from roast potatoes. Huh.

Speaker 33 All right, so yeah, maybe we should just like...

Speaker 33 So I asked her, in the case of the peppers or, you know, the roast potatoes or the grapes, like all the different food that we tried, like, what happens in a microwave that makes the food just go like,

Speaker 33 right? So let's say I got some pieces of pepper, put them in the microwave, I press start.

Speaker 16 Like, what?

Speaker 17 What happens next?

Speaker 9 Okay, so there is a gadget in the microwave oven that produces the microwaves. It's called a magnetron, and it's an interesting thing in itself.

Speaker 33 Okay, quick side note. It's basically like this hunk of metal that makes the microwaves.
But Caroline told me this really cool thing, which is it actually used to be used in World War II for radar.

Speaker 9 That was in the 40s. And in...
In 1945, there was an engineer at Raytheon who was working on these devices. And he found that some candy bar he had in his pocket got hot.

Speaker 33 It was like, oh, this cooks food. And so eventually a magnetron got thrown inside of a metal box and thus was born the microwave.

Speaker 9 So it's an interesting thing in itself but it produces a beam of microwaves and they bounce around inside the microwave oven moving at the speed of light.

Speaker 33 What are they pounding into the pepper or maybe not pounding but like shooting into the pepper?

Speaker 24 They're being absorbed. Absorbed.

Speaker 9 They're being absorbed and these microwaves

Speaker 9 they are the right kind of frequency to cause the molecules in food to oscillate back and forth.

Speaker 24 Oh.

Speaker 9 You've put a pepper in there. So the pepper's got a lot of of water in it.
It's got other things as well.

Speaker 9 And those molecules start absorbing the microwaves and dancing back and forth and hitting each other and heating up. And then that bit gets even hotter and even hotter.

Speaker 9 And eventually it could burst into flames.

Speaker 33 But that is not what we're seeing with our pepper or any of the food in the microwave. It's not.
No, because as Caroline explained to me, a flame is very different than a spark.

Speaker 9 So one thing to keep in mind is that the pepper is fairly conductive. It's got all this water in it.
We know that water can conduct electricity. And the water isn't pure.

Speaker 9 It has a lot of salts dissolved in it, minerals, things like that.

Speaker 9 In that sense, it's a little bit like a piece of metal. Metal, as we know, absorbs microwave energy rather well.

Speaker 51 As we all know. Yes.

Speaker 9 So.

Speaker 33 Okay, so let's say you get these pieces of pepper in a microwave and they're, you know,

Speaker 33 heating up. Now the thing is, the microwave, like the wave itself...

Speaker 9 It has an electric field which oscillates back and forth at rather a high frequency.

Speaker 33 So when these microwaves shoot into these pieces of pepper, what happens is this electricity starts swishing back and forth through the bits of pepper.

Speaker 9 So there's a current flowing.

Speaker 33 And as more microwaves are absorbed into these bits of pepper, you can get quite big currents. Currents so big that they start to create this electric field around the food.

Speaker 9 And that electric field builds up and up and up and eventually it's big enough to cause the air

Speaker 9 to glow around the food.

Speaker 33 Because now there's actually electricity coursing through the air.

Speaker 9 Like a fluorescent light bulb.

Speaker 33 And Caroline says at this point you can start to see.

Speaker 9 These glowing balls of gas floating.

Speaker 33 It's actually the air turning into plasma.

Speaker 9 Now back in the center of the microwave are our little bits of pepper where there's still this electrical current swishing back and forth through those bits of pepper. And if you have sharp corners.

Speaker 33 Like the actual corner of a pepper, even on the skin, like these tiny microscopic little points, the electricity in the pepper, the electricity in the air.

Speaker 9 Can get concentrated at those sharp corners like a lightning rod.

Speaker 33 And at those corners, the electricity will just build and build and build until.

Speaker 9 You get a mini lightning bolt.

Speaker 33 And then Caroline said, everything in the microwave just sort of calms down.

Speaker 9 Until the electric field builds up again and it does it all over. Letting loose these mini lightning bolts.
So it's a very dynamic process.

Speaker 9 You've got things being ionized, you've got things recombining, you've got charge flowing, you've got light being emitted, things get hot, there's a big current flowing, all for that tiny fraction of a second.

Speaker 9 A lot of quantum physics in there.

Speaker 33 And then we hear a little ding, and then

Speaker 9 we're done.

Speaker 76 And then we're done.

Speaker 33 But I just had one last job to do.

Speaker 1 How are you two doing? Okay. Good.

Speaker 33 Okay, all right. So I think I called up Zach and Marie, told him everything I learned about their sparking pepper.

Speaker 33 And that even though both of them didn't have the exact theory, like Zach was right, water is an important part. Marie was, you know, kind of onto something with this metal thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 33 It feels like it's almost like a little bit of like a marriage of sorts, part and the pun between both your ideas that

Speaker 33 kind of

Speaker 33 is what is happening inside this black box. Right.

Speaker 16 So yeah.

Speaker 91 So I think we were, we had some, some of the elements there.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Um,

Speaker 83 so that's uh, that's about it. Okay, excellent.

Speaker 33 Oh, um, there was one thing that I actually thought was kind of interesting. And all these questions we were getting in, there was like this tiny little pattern of married couples sending us in

Speaker 33 arguments that they got.

Speaker 33 There was one couple that was like, uh,

Speaker 33 they were arguing about the nutritional value of microwaving a potato. Um, There was another couple that sent in a very long email about how they'd been debating about how we perceive color.

Speaker 52 We've actually had a similar dispute.

Speaker 75 Yeah, that's true. Oh, over color.

Speaker 89 Was the couch?

Speaker 26 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 There was a couch that we had.

Speaker 90 There was some sort of like drab tone that I thought was green and you thought was brown. Gray.

Speaker 6 Gray, okay.

Speaker 91 Yeah, I think I've, yeah, we had that couch for like between different houses and different combinations for probably probably like five or six years and maybe seven years, ten years.

Speaker 91 And a lot of life in it.

Speaker 91 And I was, yeah, I always thought it was gray. I still do, but apparently, you and your sister thought it was green.

Speaker 91 You like lived together for years and just never realized you're seeing something completely different.

Speaker 50 Like,

Speaker 91 what do you mean, our green couch? I have no idea. We don't have a green couch.

Speaker 21 Producer Matt Gildee.

Speaker 33 Why do humans have two feet?

Speaker 45 When are we going to be able to fax a pencil?

Speaker 12 Little waves go through the little headphone string and

Speaker 85 this world all about.

Speaker 82 What are we here?

Speaker 26 What are we doing here?

Speaker 12 What is happening?

Speaker 82 What is happening after this?

Speaker 26 After this live?

Speaker 56 Where do we go from here?

Speaker 36 Where did it go?

Speaker 26 How does that work?

Speaker 26 I have no idea.

Speaker 26 I have another question. I don't know.

Speaker 56 Why? Where are you?

Speaker 26 I wanna know.

Speaker 12 I am curious to learn more. I don't know.

Speaker 26 Who knows? When you get the answer, let me know.

Speaker 32 Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont. And here are the staff credits.

Speaker 32 Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebum Rod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.
Dylan Keith is our director of sound design.

Speaker 32 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 32 Harry Fertuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Guterres, Sindhu Nianusambum Dum, Matt Gilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Carrie, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 32 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleman.

Speaker 92 Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio.

Speaker 92 Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 92 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Speaker 64 Radio Lab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests.