Live show, dead dinosaurs

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Speaker 9 Hey, it's Noam.

Speaker 10 Recently, Unexplainable recorded a live show at On Air Fest, which is this great live podcast festival in Brooklyn.

Speaker 10 It was our first live show, and we wanted to go behind the scenes on one of our favorite episodes all about dinosaur sounds. It was a super fun time.
We had a slideshow of dino pictures.

Speaker 10 We played some movie clips. I even wore this dinosaur mask, at least for the beginning.
It was way too hot in there. Anyway, we had so much fun.
We wanted to share it with you all.

Speaker 10 So here's the first live episode of Unexplainable.

Speaker 10 So this

Speaker 9 is our first Unexplainable live show. Thanks everyone for coming.
I'm Noam Hasenfeld.

Speaker 10 Appreciate you.

Speaker 9 Here with our supervising producer Meredith Hodenaut.

Speaker 3 Hello, hello.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 we are a science show about everything that scientists don't know. We like to say that we go all the way up to what we don't know and then we keep going.

Speaker 9 We kind of try to embrace that space of the unknown.

Speaker 9 We wanted to give you a bit of a look behind the scenes at the show about how we choose topics, how we make a show about the unknown without like kind of that core thing at the middle.

Speaker 9 And in order to do that, we wanted to give you something to sink your teeth into. So we wanted to give you a brief recap of one of our favorite topics we've done.
It's all about dinosaur sounds.

Speaker 9 And it originally came from a question from Meredith.

Speaker 11 Yeah, so last summer, I went to the drive-in to watch a movie. And the big blockbuster of the summer was Jurassic Park, World.

Speaker 11 domination, Dominion, one of that, the one with Chris Pratt on a motorbike all the time.

Speaker 11 And so as these like epic dinosaur roars were coming through my car speakers as I was watching through this movie, it made me wonder, how do we know what a dinosaur would have sounded like?

Speaker 11 We have a sense of what they would have looked like, right? We have fossils, we have their skeletons, we can tell sort of vaguely their shape, their size, the diversity, at least a little bit.

Speaker 11 But something as ephemeral as a sound, like you can't fossilize a sound. So I was curious, like, how would somebody go about recreating or guessing at what an extinct sound sounds like?

Speaker 9 Right. And it's a very tough question, but to start, we wanted to get on the same page.
So, if you can play that famous roar, this is from the first Jurassic Park.

Speaker 9 You're probably all familiar with it.

Speaker 9 You probably are aware, but they didn't just go and record a dinosaur for that.

Speaker 9 They used a bunch of sounds of animals that exist now. So they used tigers, lions.

Speaker 9 There was a great koala sound in there. There's dolphins.

Speaker 12 Baby elephant.

Speaker 9 Baby elephant.

Speaker 12 Classic.

Speaker 9 And there's like a couple other animals, but almost all of them are mammals, which is weird because dinosaurs are very much not mammals. They're reptiles.

Speaker 9 And it sort of gets at this tension of like, okay, what is a sound designer supposed to do if we don't know what dinosaurs sound like? Do they go for accuracy or do you go for feels?

Speaker 9 And that's something, you know, we were talking about in making the show.

Speaker 11 Yeah. A couple years ago, I went to this talk by the sound designer for the original Jurassic Park out of Skywalker Sounds.
And so what they did for like a pterodactyl cry, they actually took a

Speaker 11 box of floss and pulled out the floss real fast. So it made like a skee sound.
And that's actually the basis of the pterodactyl cry, and they warped it and affected it.

Speaker 11 But obviously, like, I mean, a box of floss is even further from a T-Rex than a baby elephant. So

Speaker 11 if like these sound designers are going for like the feels, right? What is a scientific approach of thinking through what a dinosaur roar could have been?

Speaker 9 Right. So

Speaker 9 it's really, really tough, obviously. So what scientists end up doing is they look at the closest living relatives for dinosaurs.

Speaker 11 So, does anybody have an idea of what could be the closest modern relatives of dinosaurs today? Birds.

Speaker 11 Birds, yes.

Speaker 11 You take off the giant T-Rex head, you take off the giant T-Rex tail, you let him keep his little arms or whatever, but it's similar to a modern-day chicken, as you can see at the bottom of the slide.

Speaker 11 Definitely not to scale. That would be a terrifying chicken.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 if you did say scale that up, the idea is that maybe dinosaurs just sounded like huge birds.

Speaker 9 And, you know, if you just take a chicken sound and you imagine what would just like a huge chicken sound like,

Speaker 9 it might get closer to a dinosaur sound. So we spoke to this paleontologist named Michael Habib, who you can see on the next slide.

Speaker 9 He described this sound as kind of like a honk, but it's not exactly a honk that I would have been familiar with. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Unlike any honk you've ever heard.

Speaker 9 Yeah, you can play this.

Speaker 3 It's a honk, but it's like a tuba honk.

Speaker 9 So it's like a pulse, a very low sound.

Speaker 10 Like just sort of like,

Speaker 13 yeah.

Speaker 3 Very different. Like that, yeah.

Speaker 9 One of my favorite moments in an interview is when a paleontologist starts imitating a potentially huge bird that sounds like what a T-Rex might have sounded like.

Speaker 9 But it's not just, it wouldn't just sound like a big bird, right? Because birds are a lot weirder than you think. They don't just make a sound.

Speaker 9 We normally make sounds with our larynx, which has one opening.

Speaker 9 Birds have something called a syrinx, which you can see on the right, and that has two openings, which allow them to make two sounds at once.

Speaker 9 So if you listen to a songbird, you might hear it's almost like harmonizing with itself, and it can create some of these really weird textures.

Speaker 9 Here's how Michael thought it could have sounded. Get to

Speaker 9 tubas

Speaker 9 and have them play two different notes

Speaker 9 as loud as they can. It's just this kind of war rumble.

Speaker 9 Okay, so it could be a big bird. It could be a really big bird with this really weird two sounds at once thing,

Speaker 9 but there's kind of a problem, right?

Speaker 11 Yeah, so obviously modern birds birds have been evolving for millions of years since dinosaurs went extinct.

Speaker 11 And like we know that they're a direct descendant, but we also don't know like what could have evolved in that intervening time.

Speaker 11 So we do know that there was a ancient duck that had the vaguest shadow of an impression of a syrinx in this fossil.

Speaker 11 So we do know that these syrinxes, these double windpipe anatomy, goes back really, really far, but we don't have that like missing fossil of like a dinosaur that has a syringe.

Speaker 11 So we, this is sort of like the end of the road of like following this bird as the modern descendants.

Speaker 11 But what, does anybody have any other guesses about what a different kind of modern relatives of dinosaurs today?

Speaker 3 Lizards? Lizards. We're getting there.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 More

Speaker 11 crocodile. We got it.
Crocodilians.

Speaker 9 We'll go for someone's.

Speaker 6 I mean, like, yeah.

Speaker 11 They look like they're already dinosaurs as you can see in this uh video we have queued up it's basically a dinosaur already

Speaker 9 oh how you do in the water too i want everyone to look at the mouth and the stomach area the stomach area is kind of underwater but uh the mouth is closed and then you see the vibration coming out of the water where the stomach would be So if a dinosaur is more like a crocodile, it probably would have made its sound with its mouth closed, which is very different from how Jurassic Park depicts it.

Speaker 9 It wouldn't like go up to you like we saw in that video. It wouldn't open its mouth and roar and have the sound that way.

Speaker 9 It might keep its mouth closed and it would emit this kind of like huge rumble.

Speaker 9 And we spoke to this sound designer who worked on this show, Prehistoric Planet, and he said he actually used a crocodile sound to sound design this scene of a Carnotaurus mating call, which we've got queued up here.

Speaker 9 And pay attention, sort of, to again, the stomach and the mouth.

Speaker 9 And this actually,

Speaker 9 when you make the crocodile sound so deep and low, it gets beyond the range of human hearing to an extent to something called infrasound, which I know you're

Speaker 11 your ears wouldn't vibrate, but your chest would, your legs would, your whole body would reverberate with these deep, deep, bassy

Speaker 11 bass notes, bass tones.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I mean, like what Michael said to us was like,

Speaker 9 the sound is too deep for your ear follicles, but just imagine your leg as like

Speaker 9 an ear follicle, right? Your leg is going to vibrate. That doesn't allow you to hear it, but it vibrates and you feel it.

Speaker 9 And then when you think about that, it's like, okay, even if we went back in time, tens of millions of years to when dinosaurs were around and we actually heard an actual dinosaur sound, there still would be just a ton of that sound that we wouldn't actually be able to to hear.

Speaker 9 It still would be unhearable to an extent for us, which is kind of wild because, like, it's unknown if we were there in the past, but it's also, as we can see, it's still unknown right now.

Speaker 9 Like, if we were going to get kind of as liberal, as creative as we wanted, we might go to big,

Speaker 9 two-sound, war rumble, two-bahonk, huge bird sound.

Speaker 9 Right. If we want to get a little more conservative, we could imagine it kind of in this crocodile realm, which is what they're doing in prehistoric planet.

Speaker 9 But ultimately, like we haven't found that fossilized syrinx in a dinosaur, and so we still really don't know what the actual sound would have been, even if we're maybe like closer.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and I mean, we could have ended at the episode right there. We could have just had this collection of sounds and best guesses and approximations, but

Speaker 9 I think like we tried. I think we wanted to.

Speaker 11 I just wanted to make a dinosaur, you know? Like, I wanted to know what it would be like to put all of these pieces together and make an unexplainable version of a T-Rex.

Speaker 11 So I made up this little sonic sketch, trying to like bring together all these elements.

Speaker 11 We can queue it up.

Speaker 9 Just kind of triangulating the dinosaur.

Speaker 9 Where's the chicken crocodile? Crocodile, maybe somewhere, not really sure.

Speaker 11 Yeah, so I gave this assignment to our sound designer, extraordinaire, Christian Ayala, who we have here today. He's going to come join us.

Speaker 3 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 9 So, Christian had the privilege of sound designing a potentially more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound, and he's going to...

Speaker 9 walk us through exactly how he made this sound, which you're going to get to hear at the end.

Speaker 9 Christian, how did you start thinking about this process of just sound designing a more scientifically accurate T-Rex?

Speaker 16 Yeah, so I, in a sense, I wanted to do the opposite of what we talked about the sound designers did for Jurassic Park and even what I usually do for some of our other episodes where I have to sound design, you know, sounds from things that don't typically have sound that we think of, like the end of the universe.

Speaker 16 For this one, I really wanted to keep it as physically plausible as possible.

Speaker 16 And just to preface, the technical things I did to all of of these sounds, and I'll go through each of the layers in order, is really simple.

Speaker 16 All I did was stretch them out to make them slower,

Speaker 16 bring them lower,

Speaker 16 and EQ them, which is bringing up and down certain frequencies. And I did this because I wanted, you know, to only do things that would physically happen to something when you made it bigger.

Speaker 16 So, for example, a chicken becomes a big chicken. And if we look at the next slide,

Speaker 16 we can hear what a chicken just normally sounds like

Speaker 16 and here it is processed with all the things I just explained earlier

Speaker 16 that's just stretching it out and making it deeper just to be clear like that's the the sound we just heard the

Speaker 9 right you just

Speaker 9 You didn't add anything else. It's just the same thing.

Speaker 16 Nothing. That's just raw chicken.

Speaker 16 And I think it's really really kind of a testament to like how directly descended they are from dinosaurs because like just this is already kind of close to like what we think of as a dinosaur.

Speaker 16 It's scary, but it's not quite there. But once we knew that we were adding, you know, bird sound effects to something, there was only one bird in our heart.
And you can see him on the next slide.

Speaker 16 And that's Sunny, our producer, Mandy's pet pigeon.

Speaker 11 Joins us for many a Zoom call.

Speaker 16 True. And this is what sunny sounds like being needy.

Speaker 16 Did the same thing, processed that in the same way. And this is Big Sunny with pants.

Speaker 16 You can hear there that there's a little bit of an echo.

Speaker 16 And I added a reverb so that it would kind of feel like the sound was reverberating within the T-Rex's, you know, chest cavity and through all of its tissue.

Speaker 16 And I just really wanted to bring that physicality of a dinosaur through some of the sounds. But moving on from birds, we also had to incorporate alligators that we learned of.

Speaker 16 It's already pretty much there.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I still needed a little bit of texture. And so I was racking my brain.
What is a like big bird that I could use?

Speaker 16 And I found this sample of an emu doing doing something called booming and it's a really interesting sound and I added it in and this is what it sounds like

Speaker 16 it really feels like a huge diaphragm you know reverberating back and forth within the the T-Rex and I wanted to affect the other sounds and make it feel like the rate of air going in and out was like being affected by this diaphragm.

Speaker 16 And so I did something called side chaining. And what that is, is I basically make the other sounds quieter in time with the peaks of this sound.

Speaker 16 So here is an example of that with the emu and the alligator sidechained together.

Speaker 11 What I love about what you did here, Christian, is like, it's not just layering up these sounds and like sort of putting them in a giant stack.

Speaker 11 You're actually like thinking about the chest cavity and what reverb that would do.

Speaker 11 You're thinking about this diaphragm and how that would affect the other sounds that are going in within this like one creature so that they're more than the sum of their parts.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think it's really important in all sound design to kind of, you know, give context to the sound, whether that's like putting it in a room or making sure that it sounds like it's coming from a singular creature or where it is in sonic space.

Speaker 16 And after I layered all these together, I had to think about the behavior of how the T-Rex would actually make these sounds. And so for that, I deferred to what Michael said in the episode.

Speaker 9 They might be doing open-mouth sounds with two different tones, and then could also do closed-mouth sounds via rumble, which means that they could rumble, and while your body's still shaking from the rumble, they could open their mouth and blast you with two

Speaker 9 non-infrasound but still very low notes over top of each other while things are still kind of shaking from the rumble, it would be,

Speaker 9 it could get real interesting.

Speaker 3 Real interesting.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's exactly what I did.

Speaker 16 I made a war rumble first with some inspiration from the tubas and with some tubas

Speaker 16 that he described. It takes a deep breath because, you know, you need air to make more noise, and then it open-mouth roars at you.
And so, this is what that final sound sounds like.

Speaker 10 Quick break from the live show. We'll get to that final, more more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound from Christian in just a minute.
And we'll also answer some questions from the audience.

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Speaker 10 Could you do that ogre roar of yours for my son?

Speaker 15 He's a roar.

Speaker 10 We're back with more of the Unexplainable live show at On Airfest, and our sound designer, Christian Ayala, is about to finally play his full, more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound.

Speaker 16 It takes a deep breath because, you know, you need air to make more noise, and then it open-mouth roars at you. And so, this is what that final sound sounds like.

Speaker 9 I feel like I really hear the chicken. Like I hear that like stretched chicken.

Speaker 16 Yeah, the chicken is kind of like the core of the sound. I felt like it, it, you know, like when you think of a dinosaur without feathers, you think of like the classic Jurassic Park sound.

Speaker 16 But then when you like try and break out of that and be like, okay, the dinosaur has feathers, that's in my head what that sounds like. Right.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 9 So, you know, Christian, I'm curious, talking about this being more scientifically accurate, right? But Meredith was saying, like, okay, you're not just layering these things on top of each other.

Speaker 9 And when we think of what a dinosaur would sound like, it wouldn't just have like... every one of these elements, right? It wouldn't have a crocodile and a bird and an emu, right?

Speaker 9 Do you think this is actually what a dinosaur sounded like?

Speaker 16 I don't think anybody could say what a dinosaur actually sounded like unless like we make some huge scientific discovery.

Speaker 16 But I think my goal here is kind of like, you know, as I said before, it's like the opposite of

Speaker 16 sound designers for like Jurassic Park. In those projects, your goal is to kind of service story and emotion.

Speaker 16 And this one, it's a kind of like representation of theory rather than kind of trying to like make you feel scared, although it's like kind of scary.

Speaker 13 You can do both. Yeah, you can do both.

Speaker 9 It's interesting, like a sonic representation of theory.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think the end goal and the process of it was very different than like what other people were able to explore.

Speaker 9 So zooming out a little bit past the dinosaur episode, just to our show in general,

Speaker 9 this is one example of some of the things that we do of

Speaker 9 taking on questions that maybe don't have very clear answers. We go on the journey, things like that.

Speaker 9 You know, Meredith, I'm curious for you, when we're thinking about how to design a show about the unknown, what do you think are

Speaker 9 challenges with that type of process and what are maybe unexpected benefits?

Speaker 11 Absolutely.

Speaker 11 I mean, I feel like this is the thing that we wrestle with the most editorially on the show is like, how do you make a satisfying narrative journey around something that isn't there, like around a blank space?

Speaker 11 And I think what we found over the last two years of making this show is that a clear motivating question is a journey in and of itself. We have a drive, right? There is a blank space to explore.

Speaker 11 And then there's everything that we do know along the way. So we learn about crocodiles, we learn about chickens, we learn about dinosaurs and what those best guesses would be.

Speaker 11 And then sort of looking towards the future, there's something inherently optimistic about everything that there is left to discover.

Speaker 11 And I feel like finding that hope and optimism and the idea that knowledge isn't fixed.

Speaker 11 It's something that's continuing to evolve and change is a really, I feel like one of our core values on the show.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, and when you say optimism, I mean, another one that we come back to a lot is humility. Absolutely.

Speaker 9 The idea that there isn't an answer is

Speaker 9 probably a value that people should be more comfortable with.

Speaker 9 You know, we were piloting this show in the first year of the pandemic, and it was at a time when science was rapidly trying to handle like things that were just moving really quickly.

Speaker 9 There were all these debates about like, okay, do masks work? Do they not work? Everyone's like on one side. We definitely know this.
Oh, here's a new study. It definitely doesn't.

Speaker 9 But like, if you are saying, okay, like science is about not knowing, science is about trying to be humble about what we do know, being a little patient, not assuming that everything has a clear answer, like it allows you to be open to the process of science.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 11 One of my favorite parts about this job is how much the premise of our show resonates with the scientists that we reach out to.

Speaker 11 They are excited that we're basing a show off of questions because that's what people on the forefront of discovering new things, they don't know what they're going to find.

Speaker 11 And it's really satisfying to be able to share that and see that resonate with the scientific community.

Speaker 9 You know, Christian, I want to ask you a question about sort of this like

Speaker 9 relationship of sound design to the unknown, right? Like

Speaker 9 when you are approaching sound designing something, Does it get you more excited to sound design things that are sort of unknown and mysterious? Or do you kind of like to be reined in a little bit?

Speaker 9 Like,

Speaker 9 where do you resonate?

Speaker 16 You know, I really enjoy sound designing, you know, stuff that doesn't have a set sound.

Speaker 16 But at the same time, that freedom is kind of paralyzing.

Speaker 16 You know, end of the universe, recently I had to sound design, you know, Jupiter Moving.

Speaker 3 That was really good.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but I'm like,

Speaker 16 at some point, I'm like, where do I start? How do I do this?

Speaker 16 And so.

Speaker 10 What did you end up using for Jupiter Moving?

Speaker 16 I ended up using some cellos groaning

Speaker 16 and some ship wood creaks. But like being reined in also,

Speaker 16 it feels more like a puzzle to put together. So like I got all these sounds, the chicken, the gator.

Speaker 16 And it's it's my job to kind of make it cohesive and find different ways with like either doing physicality or like very technical things with like trying to make sure that the frequencies aren't masking each other.

Speaker 16 And it just felt like a puzzle that like needed to be put together in the right way.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 9 Our editor, Brian Resnick, talks a lot about trying to inspire research.

Speaker 9 So if we sort of like paint the limits of the unknown, like if this is the empty box that we don't know, then maybe someone else can come along and solve it.

Speaker 16 And I just sort of feel like there's this cool relationship between like, okay, if by sound designing, we can maybe like inspire more research and maybe we end up inspiring the person that like finds the Syrinx fossil, right yeah like not only do I like hope that I would inspire somebody but what I really want is like for some dinosaur researcher to be like wait you're doing completely wrong this is how it's done and actually make something that is like actually based on a research and and that would further like research in general so yeah I mean, what I love so much of being such a sound-driven and sound design driven show is that I feel like it does give us the grounding of exploring the unknown.

Speaker 11 Like we're inviting listeners to sort of create these worlds in their heads with us.

Speaker 11 Maybe Jupiter moving across the solar system doesn't sound like a cello creaking, but we can take you there in a way that I feel like is very cinematic and engaging and can help you sort of embrace the epic scale of these unknowns.

Speaker 9 If anyone has any questions, we'd love to open it up for questions about the show, dinosaurs, the end of the universe,

Speaker 9 whatever, whatever.

Speaker 12 Episodes, yeah.

Speaker 18 Are there topics that you really want to get to, or you've been meaning to get to, or you've tried to get to, but you haven't quite cracked the storytelling yet? And what are those topics?

Speaker 11 I mean, for me, I am dyslexic, and I feel like a large part of how I view my role in sound design and working in audio is influenced by that.

Speaker 11 Something that I'm really excited to tackle is the idea of neurodiversity and creativity and how viewing the world from different perspectives can actually be a superpower rather than a learning disability.

Speaker 9 In the ASMR realm, what's your favorite sound?

Speaker 10 Christian. Intriguing.

Speaker 16 ASMR, I think,

Speaker 16 you know, just the classic

Speaker 16 flicking brush teeth.

Speaker 13 Like,

Speaker 3 yeah, it's, yeah

Speaker 11 it's funny

Speaker 11 we just did an episode all about the hidden ecosystems in our homes and our direction to Christian was to actually make anti-ASMR and make it as creepy as possible yeah

Speaker 16 creepy and close to your ears so it's that's what it means

Speaker 19 hey guys great show um this is my first time uh hearing it and i love it so thank you um two things one had you heard of someone trying to replicate a I think it was a

Speaker 19 the alternate human species Neanderthals the one where it's very nasal yes it's very unpleasant yeah there was one thing that was just like

Speaker 19 was that it right that's a little bit like the tubahanka yeah exactly yeah it just was very reminiscent of what you did here but the the second question is um I've read a lot about autism, like pretty extreme autism for children in particular, because you were bringing up the neurodiversity aspect.

Speaker 19 And I've heard that their experience is a lot of static, like actual visual static, but auditory static as well.

Speaker 19 And I was wondering if you've investigated that area of things from a kind of neurodivergence standpoint.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I haven't, we haven't come across that, but I think that's really fascinating. And something that we do talk a lot about is like the

Speaker 11 benefits of metaphors as a tool for understanding, and then also the limitations of metaphors. So like the idea of like static being a metaphor that we can use to understand these perspectives.

Speaker 11 But also I'm curious, like what are the limitations of what we associate with static?

Speaker 9 I also just on that note, you know, we did this series on the senses. We did like six episodes, you know, because there are six senses.
Spoiler.

Speaker 9 Our producer Mandy did this great episode on aphantasia where people in their mind's eye don't have images. And she spoke to this like wonderful artist who was investigating like, okay,

Speaker 9 what are the possibilities that are opened up in my art if I'm not actually restricted by images in my brain? So we try to definitely go down roads like that.

Speaker 12 Hello. Hi.

Speaker 15 This is a sound design question.

Speaker 15 Something that I watched recently that I found really fascinating. It put words to something I had never thought about but felt.

Speaker 15 It was a YouTube documentary about liminal spaces and sounds, things like advertising bumpers or jingles or the Disney Channel theme.

Speaker 15 Like, oh, we have to create this little in-between sound bumper in order to fill that space. And there was logistical reasons as to why that existed.

Speaker 15 I was curious if there are either things that you've created or things that you enjoy in sound design of that sort of liminal space-filling nature that you think about or that you're proud of having created.

Speaker 16 So we were, yeah, the bumpers.

Speaker 16 If you listen to our show, after the mid-roll ad break, we always come back with like a little radio static bumper.

Speaker 16 Um, and that's our place to put jokes or like little references that we like want to put in the episode that we, that is like would not be appropriate anywhere else in the episode because we're trying to teach things.

Speaker 16 Um,

Speaker 16 and and so, like, it, it almost is kind of like a meta piece of furniture that's sitting right there. Um,

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 16 you know, it's just really fun to like have developed a space, you know, editorially and in a sound design wise

Speaker 16 to just put random stuff and like personality into there that wouldn't be able to go anywhere else.

Speaker 9 And I'll just add, this isn't sound design as much, but we've started over the last couple months

Speaker 9 sneaking in a story about our producer, Bird Pinkerton, in the credits.

Speaker 11 So somebody called it a Lovecraft horror.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it just gets like every episode, I just put a little sentence about Bird, and she found like a spinning penny, took her into a hallway, then she fell into a hole.

Speaker 9 And like once in a while, listeners email us and they're like, oh yeah, what's going to happen to bird next?

Speaker 12 Like, I don't care about the rest of the episode.

Speaker 9 So that's, you know, we kind of like over time add, add things in that little way.

Speaker 19 What is your favorite unexplained fact and why?

Speaker 9 My personal favorite thing is that we don't know how bikes work.

Speaker 9 The reason I love this is because I did not know how to ride a bike until about three or four years ago. And I was like really embarrassed about this my whole life.

Speaker 9 I finally learned, I feel great about it. It's fun.
Everyone should do it.

Speaker 9 But then when I learned that, like, oh, scientists have no idea how bikes work, we know that they do work, but like mathematically, physically, there's like this theory of like a gyroscope, that's wrong.

Speaker 9 There's this other theory of like the wheels following the

Speaker 9 steering axis. That doesn't really explain it.
So ultimately, we don't know. And that just makes me feel a little bit better about my lack of biking ability.

Speaker 11 Yeah. My favorite

Speaker 11 episodes that we do is something that we like take something that we take for granted and then realize just how much awe and wonder there is in that we don't actually scientifically know how it came about or how it works.

Speaker 11 So I reported this story all about how we don't know how the moon formed. Like we actually have a very, very weird moon and it has affected every age and eon on this planet.

Speaker 11 So now, ever since having reported that episode this summer, every time I look into the sky and see the moon, I just feel like I have such a deeper appreciation for the celestial body.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I always go back to like how we don't know how we smell.

Speaker 9 You're like, how we don't know how smell works. Oh, yeah.
We do know how we smell.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we don't know how smell works.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 16 it's also funny because that's one of the only episodes I haven't worked on.

Speaker 16 But yeah, I think it always just gets back to me to like something that we do every day. And that's like integral to our experience.
We still don't know how that works.

Speaker 16 And I think that's also why, like, the Scents series also resonates with me and with other people so well. Because

Speaker 16 there's still unknowns about

Speaker 16 the way that we're perceiving every second of every day.

Speaker 9 Well, thanks everyone for coming. Thanks so much to Hon Airfest for supporting us.

Speaker 10 All right, that was our our first Unexplainable live show. It was produced by Meredith Hodenot, Christian Ayala, and me, Noam Hasenfeld.

Speaker 10 We had our incredible sound design from Christian, music from me, and fact-checking from Zoe Mullick.

Speaker 10 The original non-live dyno episode was reported and produced by me with editing from Catherine Wells, Brian Resnick, and Meredith. Richard Seema checked the facts.

Speaker 10 Manding Wynn kindly recorded her pigeon Sonny for us.

Speaker 10 And Bird Pinkerton made it to the central room of the octopus hospital the small doctor she'd been following turned to her i have to be honest with you he said i'm just an intern but the doctopus is ready to see you

Speaker 10 special thanks to michael habib julia clark and johnny crew who spoke to us for our original episode and thank you to on airfest jenny mills gemma rose brown brandon santos and marika ball damberg for their help with the live show

Speaker 10 and just a quick note jurassic park actually used floss to sound design pteranodons not pterodactyls. Both pterosaurs, but pteranodons don't have teeth.
The more you know.

Speaker 10 If you have thoughts about the show or ideas for more episodes, let us know. We're at unexplainable at vox.com.

Speaker 10 If you feel like leaving us a review or leaving us some stars on your way out, we'd really appreciate it. And if you want us to do a live show in your area, let us know.
We had a blast.

Speaker 10 We'd love to do more. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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That's your commercial payments of Fifth Third Better.

Speaker 20 This month on Explain It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness. We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Speaker 20 Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well? Why do we want that so badly?

Speaker 20 And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.