Small Potatoes

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From WNYC I got my potato and I'm looking at it and I'm holding it maybe it should hold potatoes more it's you know It's a more. It's, you know, it's a potato.

It's washed.

I think it's a yellow potato.

It's washed.

It's not dirty.

It's a little dirty.

It's kind of baffling to actually think about a potato.

This could, uh, uh, what do you say about a potato. This could...
What do you say about a potato? Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. And I'm Lulu Miller.
And this is Radiolab. And today's episode is sort of a gauntlet thrown by our friend, our collaborator, our contributing editor.
Okay, guys. Heather Radke.
Okay, okay. Okay, okay, okay.
So I'm just going to tell you guys, this is some kind of experiment. It could be a failure, and then we just end and go have a lunch, okay? I love it.
It's not worth doing if there's not a potential for failure. Yeah.
Well, I appreciate that, you two. But in any case...
Hi! I'm in my pajamas! The person who's maybe, like, the embodiment of this experiment is this woman named Claire Dolan. I'm just staring because I don't know how to make coffee.
Oh, here. So, Claire is an ICU nurse up in, like, super rural Vermont.
How was your shift? My shift was busy and long. So we sent this really great producer

named Erica Heilman, who lives near Claire, to go and talk to her. Because right on Claire's

property, there's this place that ever since I first heard about it, I've been kind of obsessed

with it. It's this big old barn.
This is a shitty ass barn that was thrown up in the 1970s or 80s. It's got this old tin roof.
Peeling paint and falling off clabberts and boards. But inside, here we are at the entrance to the permanent collection.
Hanging on these pristine white walls, under glass on on top of pedestals, are... Matchboxes.
These ordinary... The pinwheel.
Tiny, tiny bells. Banal.
Dust and lint. I would say it's more lint than dust.
Everyday things. Many pulleys arranged together in a block and tackle.
Keys. An old thread spool.
Paper clips. Grocery cart.
All a part of what Claire calls... The museum of everyday life.

Wagon meals. Wheelbarrow.
But, I mean, but is it really a museum? Yeah, it's like a real museum. Like, she's got a permanent collection, and she's got, like, rotating exhibits that change every year.
And then she just, like, puts a ton of thought into these things. Like, for example...
The elegance of these furniture legs. She uses this, like, translucent gallery wire to hang furniture legs so that they look almost kind of creepily human.
Like they're showing off their legs and waiting for someone to notice. Or she'll light something.
These are gerbil wheels. Hamster wheels.
Hamster wheels. In such a way that it just grabs your eye.
It's exhibit magic. Yeah.
Yeah. And hundreds of people come every year to see this museum in a barn.
And, like, I know people who drive up from New York City, like, seven hours, and they, you know, they leave their homes full of just ordinary objects to drive up to rural Vermont to see a barn full of everyday objects. Why would people do that? Why would they like leave their house full of paperclips to have to drive hours to go see a barn full of paperclips? I mean, it's a reasonable question.
But I think it's because through her displays, you know, she has these like, you know, she has like wall labels full of beautiful text that like describes the history of an object or tells the story of a really specific object or an anecdote about the object. And she's able to show you that there's just more to that thing than you would think.
But like, how does she do that with a bell or a box of matches? Well, she kind of did it while we were sitting in the studio together. She just pointed at this cup, this little paper cup that we were both drinking out of.
Like if you think of the cup, right? It's an object that is made for the human hand. It echoes the shape of how your hand wants to curve around, and it has this incredible affordance of ministering to your thirst, right? Like you're able to drink things because you have a cup.
But it also has this elegant form, right? Like the interplay of positive and negative space. And then, you know, you think, okay, drinking out of a cup, how consequential is that? But, you know, I work in an intensive care unit in this little regional hospital in Vermont.
And, you know, I can't tell you, like, for someone who swallowing has been impossible or not allowed, you know, to finally, like the moment that they can grip a cup and take a drink is a profound experience and like a really important moment. Right.
Even though it's someone just sipping from a boring paper cup. Yeah, it's a dumb little cup.
All right, so I wanted to start with Claire because she kind of hits on this thing that I've just been kind of obsessed about for, I don't know, like maybe the last couple of years even. It kind of started at the beginning of the pandemic where I would call this friend of mine up and I would leave her these voice messages or I'd talk to her on the phone and I'd just be like, oh my God, I bought the wrong light bulbs and they're so fluorescent and I just wish I had those ones that are so nice and warm.
Or I would just be like, I just can't believe I have to do the dishes again. But then also, you know, like this may be more delightful version of the same thing, like the little curl on the back of my daughter's hair that's only going to be there for two weeks before it kind of turns into something else.
Riveting, riveting stuff, Radke. And of course it was not riveting, especially considering what was actually happening in the world, which was that there was this like massive pandemic and tons of people were sick and dying.
And so when I talked to her about those things, I had this kind of bit of shame about it because they're so fundamentally small. In proportion to the world on fire.
In proportion to the world. Yeah.
I would always say sort of guiltily, these are such small potatoes. But at the same time, you know, if you really think about it, most of our lives are actually just made up of these, you know, these small potatoes, like going to the dry cleaner or eating a ham sandwich or whatever.

Yeah.

And I think that there's something kind of important about just how massive a part of our lives these things are.

And so, taking a cue from Claire, I want to do a whole show about ordinary everyday things that make up so much of our lives. This sounds like a terrible idea.
This sounds like the most boring episode. No, it's not going to be boring.
Or it's not the goal isn't to be boring. It's that it'll just incidentally be boring.
No, it's not gonna it's not gonna be boring at all. I think it's it's it's sort of a challenge because the truth is that you guys are kind of obsessed with big stories.

You know, submarines and death and wars and Arctic seals or whatever. And I guess I want to see what happens.
What we're missing, really, when we only look at these kind of big grandstand, you know, like marquee parts of the world. I feel like you're asking us to commit a cardinal sin.
Like it's like literally every story finding storytelling impulse we have is to go big, big, big. Yeah, but what's more fun than committing a sin? So I have a series of stories for you today about people wrestling with the routine, the ordinary, the seemingly boring stuff of life, and finding out what you can see when you look hard at something that we just generally overlook.
Including... It's nice to have potatoes.
A man who's been asked to just look at a potato... In terms of what it actually looks like, you don't really often think of what a potato looks like.
Without knowing why. Oh, God.
Okay, we are really leaning into the premise. All right, so I'm glad you guys are all the way in and super excited about this.
I wouldn't go that far, but all right.

We're here.

We're here. You have to be here.
Continuing to be here. Yeah.
All right. So, again, kind of inspired by Claire, I thought we could kind of go through this like we're in a museum.
So it's like a set of exhibits or maybe, if you please, a platter of small potatoes. Okay.
And I thought I would have you kind of read each title of each piece like it's the, you know, like a... Placard? The wall text.
Okay. Great.
Okay. Okay.
Lily, you want to do it? Yeah, sure. Exhibit one.
First early potato. Achine Lennon, Alexandrine Poussard, Artichaut Jaune, Aspasy.
The light at the end of the tube. Okay, so this one comes from our producer, Matt Kilty.
So, let's go. All right.
We begin at sunrise. Okay.
Sunrise? Matt, I know when you wake up. It's not sunrise.
Okay, fine. Mid-morning, how about?

We're up.

I spend way too much time looking at Twitter on my phone.

In bed.

In bed.

I'm going to eventually get up, open the blinds.

Whisk away the shades.

Throw them open.

Oh, yeah.

And the day begins.

Go make coffee.

Love that part of the morning.

The best.

And are you in your pajamas? Eh, depends. But okay.
Make some oatmeal. Do a little bit of reading.
Go to the bathroom. Open the tiny little medicine cabinet.
And... Matthew, we have a problem.
Staring me in the face. Look at the tube, Matthew.
Is... Look at it.
Okay, so we got an extremely flat, shriveled, flaccid, crinkled tube of toothpaste. And it's just like, okay, crud.
Here we are again. Again? Yeah, yeah.
It's the moment that we all have to face where the toothpaste tube is out of toothpaste. Yeah, and that's a real bummer because it feels great to brush your teeth.
It does feel nice to brush your teeth. And also we all need to because we're humans living in society.
It's an essential part of American life. So, okay, so this is the thing that I wanted to explore with you today, which is that moment, that small potato of when you are holding an empty tube of toothpaste because.
It looks empty. But is it empty? That is the question, Heather.
Because even though it looks like you might not have any toothpaste, I think we all know there's some toothpaste in there. And thus begins a journey.
Day one. What will we do? Okay, so you got your empty tube.
And unless you're one of those people who's like stocked up with toothpaste. And the moment something gets a little bit challenging in your life.
God forbid there's a little bit of a hurdle in front of you. You just throw away your toothpaste.
For the rest of us, at least those of us who aren't using those stupid little clips with our toothpaste tubes, for the rest of us... Opportunity knocks.
Go ahead. Open the door.
I'm going to get it. I'm going to get that toothpaste.
Oh, God. So you start pushing.
Pushing forward.

Okay, here we go.

With your fingers, wherever you can, pushing towards the top.

I've got to start rolling them from the bottom here.

You roll the toothpaste.

Tiny, tight turns.

I use the, you don't use the counter as part of this?

No, just these hands.

But after like a couple minutes.

Oh, God.

You do get to the point where.

There we go.

You've done all you can do.

I'm going to put my thumb right near the cap. I'm going to push.
And then all of a sudden, you can see there's this big gush of toothpaste. No problem.
And it is one of life's little tiny joys, a little delight. Right, because you're kind of getting something from nothing.
Yeah, it's like water from a stone, which this is the thing, and I don't think people realize this, is once you've taken that step, you can actually go so much further. Like to the grocery store to buy a new tube of two things.
Shut up, Heather. No, you can get to...
I don't even know if I know how to actually describe it exactly, but have you seen... Have you ever seen that episode of Seinfeld? It looks like we're going to need some gas.
Where Kramer's test driving a car, and he's in the car with the salesperson. How much gas do you think is in there right now? Well, it's on E.
They're running out of gas, which in and of itself is like a total small potato. And...
Ever been completely below this lunch? They decide they're going to see how long they can go on empty. Oh, I never felt so alive.
Basically, they're going to try and glimpse at what empty truly means. So what I am proposing to you, Heather, is to join me on this near empty tube of toothpaste and to see what's on the other side.
But don't we know what's on the other side of empty? You might think you do, but until you actually make that trip. Yeah, you're right.
All right. I guess.
You have no idea. I feel like.
And so. Day two.
Aren't we a happy little boy?

Get back on top, baby.

Plenty of pace. Gotta be a little frugal.
Oh, God, that's too much. But mostly.
Day three. It's a thrill a minute.
Day four. Oh, my God, there's so much too bad.
Day five. There you go.
Day six. Brush away.
Seven. Oh, yeah.
Eight. Pop it open.
Day 9. This is going to be...
We're getting low. Oh, God.
Let's give it a shove. Come on.
Come on. All right.
I'm just going to point out that this is where I quit. For what it's worth.
Like you've already gotten a new tube? By this point, I've bought a new toothpaste. Yeah, but you don't have to buy a new tube.
But my question is why haven't you? Because it's obviously... It's because I forget.
I just, I forget. I don't remember, I don't think about brushing my teeth until I have to brush my teeth.
But probably in part because you're not, there's still toothpaste there. And sure, it's getting harder.
It's getting tougher to get the toothpaste out. This is where you separate the boys from the men.
This is where you actually cross the threshold. This is where you enter into a new realm of empty.
What's on the other side? The dividing line of what you thought was empty and this new empty? Well. Day 10.
Fuck. There is greater pain.
Ah, there's... There's also...
Day 11. Oh my god, I love it.
Greater pleasure. Okay.
The 12th day. The 13th.
I can just get the tooth. There's ingenuity.
Get the bristles in to the nozzle. Craftiness, cleverness.
The mastery of tools, Heather, is what lies beyond. Day 14.
Confronting the toothpaste again. It turns into kind of a nightmare.
And then eventually... Day 15.
Well, eventually you run out of it. Eventually there's nothing left.
Yeah. And for me, that is when I take the toothpaste tube, and I take a pair of scissors, and I cut the tube open.
Open it up.

Take the toothbrush, open up.

And then you can put your brush into the inside of the tube and you can kind of scrape up whatever little tiny bit of toothpaste

is still kind of caked on the walls.

Okay.

It's like you've eaten the chicken and now you're sucking on the bones.

Yeah, you're like pulling out the marrow and yeah, that's it. And does that, how does that, I mean, having never experienced it myself, is that a moment of satisfaction or is it a little bit of a letdown? It's like, it's a little embarrassing.
Why? Because I mostly just can't remember to buy toothpaste because I'm a child.

But I don't know.

It's also like it feels like an honorary death.

The tube is finished.

It has been fully sacrificed.

And that's it.

But remember, my sweet child, with death comes life. You can refuse? Thanks so much.
No. Day 16, I go to the store.
Are you like a cinnamon guy? I prefer the mints. Winter mint, peppermint.
Yeah, spearmint. And then you come home.
Yeah, and I do always love the packaging. I love the box, the rectangular long box.
That's very satisfying. Popping it open.
And then getting to hold a big, fat tube of toothpaste. You grab your brush.
You got your new tube. Okay.
It's nice and plump. Yeah, like a fat little pillow.
Oh, all right. Okay, here we go.
But wait. Given everything that happened, is there any part of you that feels compelled to sort of ration it out to take to only take a little oh god no no it's just like the bouncy is there exactly but i do feel like underneath all of it, there is this sadness.

Hmm.

Well, what's sad about it?

Well, it's just like, it's like the routine of it all.

Of where, where you're like caught in this weird dance with a tube of toothpaste.

That's a part of a routine of brushing your teeth.

It's like one of the many other routines that make up your daily life.

That feel like you have no

choice in them. They just exist.
And I don't know, you feel like,

you feel like Sisyphus or something with the boulder,

just pushing the boulder over and over and over again.

And the fact that that's what so much, I think,

I feel like so much of your life is that that's what feels so sad.

Right. Right.

It's like you could measure life in empty tubes of toothpaste or piles of dust that you swept up. And that feels like not a very satisfying way to measure a life.
Yeah. Push the boulder.
Squeeze the tube.

Push the boulder.

Squeeze the tube.

Push the boulder.

Squeeze

the tube.

Hey, what do you say about a potato?

All right, so this is Jim McEwen, the brother of our producer, Annie McEwen.

And this is day five with his potato.

It's a very, it's a handsome shape. Feels good in your hand.
It's got a nice weight. It's got little dimples, little imperfections.
Maybe it's an oblong shape. Ombloid oblong.
Kind of looks like a mango. All in all, a pleasing thing to hold.
Not a very interesting thing to look at for too long, but it just feels nice in your hand knowing that potatoes have sustained us for so long and continue to do so. Hope this helps.
Let me know what else I should be saying. We made it across the border with the potato undeclared.
Day 11 with the potato. Now in, where are we? New York State with the potato.
When we return a man and his potato on an epic journey. And also potatoes on a beach, potatoes by the billions, and potatoes on a

grave. If that appeals,

stick with us.

Great.

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Dive deeply into the wonders of the universe at Templeton.org. The potato has made it to Florida.

The humidity here is hard on the potato.

Day 12 with the potato.

It's looking more weathered, wrinkled, squishy.

The top is dented more. It's losing color.
It really looks like an old person. Hello, it's potato night.
It's happy Valentine's Day, potato. Day 14 with the potato.
I've been telling people about my potato. They're always surprised, and I say, you wouldn't understand, really.
It is a, you know, it's my friend. Okay, Lulu.
Latif. Radiolab.
We are back with Heather Radke. And her collection of small potatoes.
That she is force-feeding us. Come on.
No, we're only kidding. We are happily walking through this museum considering the unconsidered.
That's right. And so, okay, what's next? What's our next exhibit? I'm curious to see what you're going to serve us.
Curious. That's the mode.
That's the mode. All right.
Okay. All right.
Next up. Do you want to read the...
The placard. The exhibit text? Okay.
Exhibit two. Caesar, Calgary, Castellin, Santor, Ceres, Charlotte.
The whole potato in a grain of sand. Hello.
Hello. How are you doing? I'm good.
Good. How are you? So this small potato...
I don't know what it is, but I'm ready. ...comes to us from this guy named Ian.
My name's Ian Chilog. What else do you want to know? And I reached out to him because he makes this podcast that gets at the same small potatoes question, but in a totally different way.
So I make a show called Everything is Alive, in which I interview inanimate objects. Let's just start, settle in, have you introduce yourself for us.
My name is Lewis, and I am a can of Goto Cola. That's a store brand.
Go2, G-O-2, Cola. So every episode, Ian invites an actor to come on the show.
My name is Dennis. I'm a pillow, obviously.
And just be an ordinary, everyday thing. Yeah.
Like a chainsaw. Lamp post.
Or a towel. Pencil.
Or a toaster. My name is Emmy.
I'm a pregnancy test. And he just kind of interviews them about their lives.
I know that eventually, if everything goes according to plan, I'm going to get peed on. Yeah.
Yeah. The conversations are pretty much totally improvised.
Ian takes it really seriously, and the actor takes it really seriously. And so there's this feeling as you're listening that you're actually hearing a very personal interview between a great interviewer and, like, a stapler.
Like, I'll occasionally be talking to an object, and I'll realize that the whole time I had a question in my head that I didn't ask because I was afraid of offending the object. You know, like the same anxiety you have when you're interviewing a human.
Okay, so here's what we're going to do. I took this one particular episode that Ian did, which I really love.
And I'm going to play you some of that show where you'll hear Ian interviewing this thing. And then you'll also hear me talking to the person that he got to play that thing.
It's a potato, right? It's gotta be a potato. It's not a potato.
Okay. About what it was like to be a thing.
All right. Cool.
Okay, so here we go. My name is Chioki, and I am a grain of sand.
And tell me a little bit about sort of where you spend your days right now.

Right now, I am in an aquarium in some dude's house.

There's a couple of fish.

I think they're goldfish.

So what did you do to prep?

Ian is anti-prep. He was like, don't research sand.
Okay, so that's Chioki Ianson, the human. And I was like, bet.
Let's go. He's the director of the Community Media Center at Virginia Commonwealth University.
And am I right that you're also like the voice of NPR or something? Oh, yeah. I'm the voice of underwriting for NPR.
So you like read the ads? Support for NPR comes from NPR stations. Oh, nice.
Yeah. Sounds familiar.
Anyway. He's also a philosopher.
Yeah. He studied philosophy and he spent most of his career teaching philosophy.
Mostly German idealism and Africana philosophy. So when Ian called him up to see if he wanted to be a grain of sand, Chioki was pretty psyched because he had an idea about sand that came from his years as a philosopher.
Yes, yeah. So it's like I wanted to take really seriously the notion of a grain of sand having its own existence and subjectivity.
Do you know how old you are? Not exactly, no. I think it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of years.
Like, I mean, I wasn't always sand, right? Like, there was a time when I was a boulder. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so, you know, like, do you know about the myth of Sisyphus? Yeah. Yeah, that's a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity.
But really, the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, 100,000 years or so, it would be like a little pebble.
Like, just like stick it out, Sisyphus, you'll be done in no time, you know? Eventually, it's just going to be sand. Yeah, exactly.
And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus, after some time, would have a flat plain instead of a hill, and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
So, yeah, so he's cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through, I don't know, 50,000 years or something. Yeah.
Like he should, he should really stick to it. Um, and then that'll show the gods.
It's funny to think about a man serving out his eternal curse and what it is, is very easily pushing a marble along the ground. Yeah.

It ultimately ends up worse for the boulder

than for Sisyphus.

Oh, for sure.

The boulder is destroyed while Sisyphus lives on

for eternity.

See what I mean?

And yeah, and like,

and is Dizzy the whole time?

I don't know.

And how good is Sisyphus in conversation? So when I was talking to Chioke, I was really curious if having spent so much time as Sand, if he had a new perspective on Sand. But actually, he was like, no, not at all.
I mean, I think it's more like I think about people differently.

Oh.

The entire existence of the grain of sand is perceiving things and thinking things. And so what it's doing really is working to understand humanity.
yeah i mean i think that if there's one difference between them and I, sorry, I'm having trouble with the pronouns. You know, we're doing this interview, and I'm a grain of sand.
Yeah. But that's not really the way that I would think of myself.
I think normally I would just say, we are sand. So you see that there's the kind of mass noun thing happening.
And it's weird to talk to you because you don't have a mass noun thing or you don't seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So you say of yourself that you're a person, right? Yeah.
Yeah. I would say I am.
I am a person. So like, why aren't you a grain of person? Like, why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity? Yeah, like that makes more sense.
Yeah. It just seems to me like if you recognize the degree to which you owed your existence to other people, you might also be nicer to other people.
Yeah, I read this thing that there are seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world. So, so like all of that you consider is you.
I mean, I'm not saying there's a psychic connection or whatever. I'm just saying that when I think of what I am, I am the sand in the aquarium.

Or we are the sand.

And when I'm on a beach, we are the sand on the beach.

I have to say, I find the beach, at least just like sitting on the beach, boring.

Do you find it boring?

Yeah, so I don't really experience boredom. All of my existence is observation and reflection, so I'm never bored.
Wow. Yeah, I mean, I've noticed that humans have a kind of problem with, well, I say a problem with boredom.
They have a problem with time, right? Because it seems to me that boredom reveals a fundamental anxiety that many humans have about their lives in the first place. A constant kind of question as to where is this going? What should I be doing? And so then there's not really a willingness to kind of sit and just be, which I recommend.
You should really try it

sometime. Do you want to just, do you want to try it? Do you want to just sit and be right now?

Oh man, that sounds great. Let's do it.

I have to say I'm already starting to feel uncomfortable.

I think this is great. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
I'm in the Fort Myers, Florida airport, and I went through security. Day 15 with the potato.
And they checked my bag, and he went right for the the potato and he took it out and he looked at me and said, it's a potato. And then the nice man gave me back my bag with the potato.
And now we go to Chicago and then to Ottawa. So then the customs, the, that's the, the last leg is the toughest one, but we made it through with a nice man saying it's a potato so that was good okay potato back on home soil here let's go you can't have my potato you can try but you can't take it.
Potato lives on.

Okay.

All right.

Next to, okay, exhibit number three. Reine Blanche, Reine de May, Rique Nacqueur, Roignon Rose, Roan.

One billion years of solitude.

Take that, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Okay.

So for this one, reporter Rachel Cusick is going to take us from a grain of sand to a pile of rocks. A big old pile of rocks.
Rocks from between about 1 billion and 1.7 billion years ago. But also the man who uncovered their secret.
My name's Roger Buick. I'm an earth scientist

and an astrobiologist. All right.
Okay, Roger, I'm so excited. These days, Roger is a very accomplished professor over at the University of Washington.
But when he started studying these rocks, he was kind of like a baby scientist. Yes, it was after I'd finished a PhD, but before I ever got a university job.
So my future career hinged on finding something interesting in these rocks. Were you just hoping that this might be a big break or something? I certainly was.
Yes, it was a very poorly known time in Earth history. And I was hoping to find earlier evidence of animal life, earlier evidence of complex multicellular life.

And so I started out. But first, Roger had to get the rocks that were that age, which just so happened to be deep in the Australian outback.
Yeah, that's right. I spent months in the desert with a field hand.
We would walk out every day up to 20 miles in 95-degree heat in gorges and slot canyons with sledgehammers and chisels to break the rocks up. So how big of a rock do you end up with?

Fist-sized chunks, carrying them on our backs all the way back to our base camp, bag them up, put a number on them, and ship them back to America. Anything alive would have been microscopic.
So you need to analyze the rocks closely back in the lab. So he has to get them back to Harvard, which is where he worked.
And once he has them there, he has to take each one of these rocks

and cut it into little slices so you can shine light through this thin sliver of rock.

And then you can look at it under a microscope,

see if there's any little single-celled fossils in the rock.

So Roger is staring into this microscope day after day, rock by rock, slice by slice. Hoping to discover something unexpected, something novel, something weird.
So how long are you looking into the microscope looking for something weird? Two years. Two years? You spent two years looking into the microscope? Oh, my God.
We collected a lot of rocks. And after two whole years, 600 something whatever days.
I discovered nothing. Oh, my God.
Found nothing. He realized this entire period of Earth's history.
It was supremely uninteresting. As far as you could tell, there were no great events, no dramatic evolution of life, no ice ages, no giant volcanoes, no shift in the chemical composition of the sea or the air for close on a billion years.
Nothing happened. But inspired by his work, this has now become a famous period in time in Earth's history.
It's called The Boring Billion. I think I have a hard time wrapping my brain around what a billion years would have felt like.
A billion years is an incomprehensibly long time. Imagine it.
It's a year and then a billion of them. It's incomprehensible.
It almost makes me angry then that you're like just giving it, you have like the largest frame that you could possibly be looking into and there's nothing there. Like that just feels maddening to me.
Well, it's strange. You know, the rest of Earth history seems to have been dynamic and full of change.
The atmosphere got oxygen in it. There were snowball earth events when the earth froze over completely several times.
Radical originations and extinctions of organisms. Lots changed fast.
But the rocks I was looking at seemed to record none of that. There were bacterial communities in the ocean.

The only life on land at that time would have been a little layer of cells in damp places.

But the climate, the chemistry of the oceans,

the activities of life,

they were all interacting with each other

and stabilising each other for close on a billion years. It's uncanny.
I think what's so cool to think about is like, when you think of the history of life on Earth, you just kind of imagine like conflict and change and like things that struggled and things that fought. And there's just something weirdly comforting about knowing that for a billion years, Earth was like, it's okay.
We don't have to change anything. Like, let's just keep things the way they are.
It's kind of working right now. And that is remarkable in a way.
Do you ever feel guilty for calling it dull or boring when you look back on that paper? No, not a shred of guilt. I feel no remorse.
And let's say this, I don't work on that interval of Earth history anymore. I've had enough.
I work on much older rocks now. And I'm also an astrobiologist, so I also ponder questions about is there life elsewhere in the universe? Not like that boring stuff that you were working on earlier.
Well, the universe is vast, and boredom may be a feature of life in the universe. We don't know.
Maybe that's exciting. All right, we got to take a quick break and we'll be back in just a billion years.
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Dive into the data at callohiohome.com. Annie, I have my potato again.

Day 25. The End It's drying, it's parched, it has little barnacles on it.

I still do like the shape.

I feel that I enjoy the simplicity of it,

and it's sort of a comfortable feeling because the potato,

I don't have to explain myself to it, and it's fine with me, I think.

But I think we understand each other. We don't really have to say anything sometimes.
But it's sad the potato won't always be here. Sad it can't always be this way.
But it is hanging in there pretty good. Okay, bye.

All right, Lulu.

Latif.

Radiolab.

We are back with contributing editor Heather Radke

taking us to starchy places

we would not otherwise have gone ourselves.

And I'm actually sort of surprising myself

to the degree that I'm enjoying it.

Well, I only have one more, so I'm so glad that you got a little bit on board, at least, here at the end. I'm on board.
I'm on board the potato express here. Okay.
So I'm going to say this is a pretty potato-y potato. So if you can just read our last exhibit text here.

Okay.

Exhibit four, Potato C'est Moi.

I feel like I need to read that in a Miss Piggy voice.

Do it.

Please do.

Please do.

Hold on.

Wait.

Exhibit number four.

Potato C'est Moi. Okay.
I was not, I can do better. That's so good.
I could do better. A friend of mine on my way here when I was talking to him, he goes, you should introduce yourself as the spud stud.
I'm like, I'm sure they're going to love that. We do love that.
We love it. Okay, so for this next story, Heather, actually let me join in on the conversation with this guy here.
My name is Matt Severson. I'm the director of the Margaret Herrick Library.
The Academy Awards Library. Yes.
Also, thanks. Have you ever gotten to touch an Oscar? All the time, actually.
Okay. You just.
Yeah. Okay, do you get to like, have you ever gone? Many, many times.
Okay. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
Love it. Back to small potatoes.
Okay. Right.
So I invited Matt to talk to us today, not about the Oscars or some super famous red carpet star, but instead about a lesser known, but truly brilliant filmmaker named Agnes Varda.

That's our lady.

Varda was a filmmaker and a photographer and an artist,

and she died just a few years ago.

I believe she was 90 years old when she passed away.

She's known for being an important part of this French film movement in the 60s

that brought the cameras out of the glossy film studios

and into the streets with real people doing real things.

And that had a huge influence

on the way movies are made around the world today.

But the thing I'm going to tell you about

happened much later in her career.

In 2000, when she was in her 70s,

she made this film called The Gleaners and I.

It was a documentary about the French tradition

Thank you. In 2000, when she was in her 70s, she made this film called The Gleaners and I.
It was a documentary about the French tradition of gleaning.

Which is the act of salvaging what other people have discarded.

And during the course of the film, Farda also looks at herself, her own aging body.

The camera focuses on the white roots of her hair.

And on her hand, which is wrinkled,

has sunspots.

And the most famous scene in the film

happens in a field where there's been a potato harvest.

There's all these potatoes that are in the dirt,

which aren't good enough,

and are there to kind of rot.

And Varda is standing there, watching as this man roots through the left behind potatoes, which aren't good enough, and are there to kind of rot.

And Varda is standing there watching as this man roots through the left-behind potatoes,

looking for the ones that are still good.

And he picks one up that is in the shape of a heart.

It's yellowish-brown and dirty, and it's big.

And she kind of cries out. She's like, give me the heart.
And she looks at it. She puts it in her bag, and she starts looking in the dirt, sort of digging through the dirt for other heart-shaped potatoes.
And she films her hands reaching out for them and picking them up. And I met, if I could say, heart-shaped potatoes.
And then I took them home. I found them beautiful.
Here she is talking about it in a lecture years later. And this is the cheapest and the most modest vegetable.
And its shapes gave us a message. It was this discarded object.
It was worth nothing. But the shape invited her to keep looking at it and to think about what it made her feel.

After that film came out, Varda just kept looking at potatoes and thinking about potatoes.

And three years later...

At the Venice Biennale.

One of the most important contemporary art shows in the world. Ooh.
Yeah. Varda is invited to do an art installation there.
And you know, artists are always doing weird, provoking, disturbing art experiences that are making you think about God or the environment or death or whatever. Right.
But Varda just shows up with a bunch of potatoes. Okay.
The name of her exhibit is Patatutopia, essentially potato utopia. She took about 1,500 pounds of potatoes and put them on the floor.
And then there's also a video installation on the wall. Three different screens showing a close-up of a potato, a faraway shot of a potato, a slow pan across a pile of old, wrinkly, heart-shaped potatoes growing these long, white roots.
And they look kind of almost, like, gross or bizarre and also kind of beautiful, but they're almost not even identifiable as potatoes. Wow.
But really, the crown jewel of this exhibit was actually, it's actually, well, Lulu's never seen these pictures, so maybe we should just Google Agnes Varda Venice Biennale. Yeah.
Oh, yes. Okay.
Because mingling amongst all these, like, well-dressed, arty people with their sunglasses. Sorry, I got there.
Okay. Okay.
All right. So, Lulu why don't you tell us what you see? Okay.
Okay, I see an older woman. She's got like grayish hair and some purple in it.
It's like a short, blunt cut kind of. And she is in a giant potato costume.
It's very, it looks really like a potato. And all you can really see is her head and her little hands poking out of it, kind of going like jazz hands almost, like, here I am.
And it's just, it is the color of a potato. There's creases, there's crinkles.
And she is just a sweet, she looks like a sweet old lady in a potato. And in the potato costume is an audio rig.

And so coming out of the potato costume is her speaking all the names of dozens and dozens of different types of potatoes.

So just listing kinds of potatoes in French?

In French.

In French. In French.
Oh, this is very surreal and wonderful, but what is it actually about for her? I have a quote, actually. She said, Utopia is the belief that by filming an old rotten potato, you can express the beauty of the world.
And looking at the potato is like looking at a face, at how different each person is, and giving everyone the right to be themselves, to look beautiful in my camera. That's very touching.
It is, yeah. I mean, I think what Varda was doing, or kind of at least how people reacted to what she was doing, she was looking at the potato and she was sort of never not looking at it.
She would look and look and look and look at it from all these different angles and look at a bunch of them and look at an old one and look at one that was rotten. And in this way, it was giving people permission.
And maybe it's more than permission. It's like it was saying, you should do this.
You should look at these things that we overlook. And you should look for a long time, and you should see what is there.
And if you do that, you're going to find a kind of endlessness. We have to give our affection to what is modest, what is unknown, what is not taken seriously.

And, you know, I think that that mode of being,

it was very powerful for a lot of people.

People began sending her heart-shaped potatoes in the mail. They would leave heart-shaped potatoes on her windowsill.
And 10 years later, I still get in my mailbox heart-shaped potatoes. Some people drop one with a name or nothing.
They know that I love them. So be ready to send me potatoes.
For the rest of her life, people regularly just gave her heart-shaped potatoes.

And when she died, people placed heart-shaped potatoes on her grave. And they still do, even today.
Did you put a potato on her grave? I did put a potato on her grave. Yeah, as you were talking, I was full screen staring at a photo of one of these old heart-shaped potatoes.
And it is very, like, it's such a tender feeling. I mean, the skin of this potato looks, I was holding my hand up next to it.
My increasingly, truly wrinkled hand, I just crossed 40, all the things, you know. The wrinkles in the potato are so similar to human skin wrinkles.
Like very, very, just something similar geometrically is going on. And it is powerful to think like that is worthy of attention.
That is not a thing to be hidden. That is worthy of affection.
Affection for her, for the potato, and like, at least for me, the chord it's striking is like, there's affection worthy here of these objects of which you might be one. Hello, it's potato night.
Day 40 with the potato. I've heard it might be the last one.

And I don't think I feel very good about that.

I think the potato is doing just fine.

So I am holding the potato.

I already feel better.

It was a rough weekend, but not for the potato. I'm looking at it.
I'm looking very close, very close. It's shrunk.
It's lost weight.

Yeah, it's getting old.

Still got its nice... What's that color?

You know, like a very pleasing, tawny, yellow,

like a hay field in the fall

after the hay's been pulled off of it,

just where your eye can rest, that type of color.

It's beautiful in its way.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it.

It's just, if we could all be what we are,

like how the potato is a potato, that would be really good.

It's a very interesting experiment. I'm emotional about the potato tonight.

It's a good, it's just been a nice, you know, it's been an honor.

Yeah, I'm going to hold on to it, I think. I think that's all for now, I guess.
And, uh, sorry, one more thing. I thought it might want a bit of water, so I put a little bit of water on it to get it wet to see if it regained some of its vigor.

And I told my girlfriend I was going to, thinking of putting a little bit of water on part of the potato and if that was a good idea or not. And she said, I think that's enough with all that.

But I put a bit of water on it.

That's it for the show.

We are going to read the credits while eating potatoes.

What do you got, Lulu?

I got sauteed ones and boiled ones.

Classic.

What about you?

I got some French fried potatoes and some ghost pepper potato chips. All right, let's go.
Nothing like host eating. This episode was the brainchild of our contributing editor, Heather Radke.
And she has recently launched a newsletter all about small potatoes. It's called Petite Patate, and you can subscribe at

heatherradkey.substack.com.

This episode was reported by

Heather Radke, Rachel Husek,

and Matt Kilty.

It was produced by Matt Kilty

and Annie McEwen.

Music and sound design,

also from Matt Kilty and Annie McEwen,

plus Jeremy Bloom.

A lot of thanks on this one, too.

Okay, so first of all, to...

Erica Heilman,

who you heard at the top. She has her own podcast produced by Vermont Public Radio called Rumble Strip.
It is so great. We've actually already featured one of her amazing stories here on Radiolab.
If you want to start with that one, it is called Finn and the Bell. Claire Dolan runs the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont.
MuseumofEverydayLife.org. Also to Ian Chillag, who gave us the grain of sand story.
His amazing show is called Everything is Alive. So great.
And it is part of the Radiotopia Network, which is itself a cornucopia of great shows. Go check them out.
Actors you heard from that show, Louis Kornfeld, Canna Cola, Dennis Pacheco, The Pillow, Emmy Blotnick, The Pregnancy Test. And Jim, dear wonderful Jim McEwen, brother to our very own Annie McEwen, who gave his heart to a potato.
And if you want more Jim, he's actually a writer, and he has a novel called Fear Knock. Jim McEwen, thank you.
Special thanks also to Kelly Conway, Robin Kelly, Moeko Fuji, Jason Isaac, and Andrew Siemens. I'm Lulu.
I'm Latif. This is Radiolab.
Big story's coming. Yeah, big, big potatoes.
Only big potatoes from now on. Bye.
Oh, they're spicy and I ate so many so fast. Hey, I'm Liz Landau.
I'm calling you from Washington, D.C. And here are the staff credits.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.