Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Illicit Objects

Episode Date: August 8, 2017

Rob Walker and Josh Glenn have a long history of getting writers to share stories about their objects, but when they told me the would be curating an audio collection of stories, and asked if I wanted to collaborate I said absolutely. So here we have it. A ToE/Project Object collaboration: storytellers sharing 100% true tales of objects that for one reason or another they might be reluctant to display in their living room – but that have a personal value or significance that makes them worth keeping, even if squirreled away. Find more stories about illicit objects here.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Illicit Objects. fame that I once had. But it's also quite embarrassing and this is the first time I've ever let anybody hear it, other than the person I recorded it for who's a kind of well-known director. His father's actually an incredibly famous Hollywood director. You would have seen his films but I can't say his name. Well, about 12 years ago, I was in the US for a conference and a contact told me that Frank S***ler's son was looking for a woman with a sexy voice to do some voiceover work for an erotic film.

She gave me his phone number and told me to call, which I did, late at night, from a phone box in New York. I was nervous, excited. It was important that my voice sounded sexy. I resolved to keep it low and deep, to keep my natural whiny, upward intonation completely out of the conversation. Hello? Is that... Yeah. intonation completely out of the conversation. He'd been expecting my call and I think he liked my voice. He asked me to make a 20 minute improvised recording of sexy sighs, moans and utterances. I expected him to offer me a lot of money, but he didn't. He offered me very little, in fact, but that was fair enough. I was an unknown in Hollywood, and I thought it would lead to bigger things. I also thought it would be easy, but it wasn't. All of you ever tried to fake

sexual pleasure for more than a few minutes without repeating yourself? Or sounding cliched or insincere? Just touching myself. I've had writer's block plenty of times, but this was different. There seemed to be nothing I could do that would make me sound less boring. So in the end, I had to resort to... ...with, um......the......the... My God, it took ages. to resort to m*******ing with their j*******s. My God, it took ages.

I was very tired when I was finished. I sent it to him and he said it was very good, but then I never heard back from him. Perhaps he had other priorities, but my fear was that sexier, less whiny voices had come along. I felt rejected, both sexually

and artistically. Talking about it now brings those feelings back. Was it my voice or my technique that was a turn-off? Perhaps I'll never know. That's the Australian radio producer Natalie Kestucher. She made this piece for a project called Illicit Objects. Illicit Objects is a series of true tales of objects that for one reason or another, the owner might not, let's say, want to display in the living room.

So stolen objects, things connected to sex, drugs, or malfeasance, weapons, hard evidence of unlawful behavior, the gloriously shameful, the exquisitely offensive. It's stuff that tells a story that's maybe not appropriate for polite company. So it's totally appropriate for this project. That's Rob Walker, one of my favorite writers slash thinkers slash schemers and my fake cousin. And Rob has a long history with objects.

You know, I always tell people we're sisters. So yeah, I do have a long history of object related stuff. And that's partly sort of the flip side of my professional like journalistic work, which is often about advertising and design and consumer behavior and material culture. But so, you know, what about the other half of that, the personal side of everyday things, the stories that come from us, from regular people? And for these personal projects, I usually work with a partner, which is Joshua Glenn. You know Josh. He's been on your show. Yeah, he's the guy who's obsessed with book clubs, and he most recently shared his obsession with the spy thriller from the 1980s, The 20th of January, a book about how the Russians get a guy elected president. Yeah,

Josh has many interests, and luckily for me, he's also got some object obsessions of his own. So now we've gotten together to do this. We're co-editing this project, Project Object, which is a themed series of nonfiction stories about objects people own under different kind of themes and rubrics. And we're doing this all on Josh's site, highlowbrow.com. So, you know, we've gotten already contributions from people like Luke Sont and Lydia Millett, Virginia Heffernan, Alexis Madrigal, Mike Watt, and even Benjamin Walker. Yeah, I did one for the Political Objects series a few months ago on my Where's the Beef 45 record collection. And that was a lot of fun. Yeah, so that's an example of us tricking you into giving us great

material. But so now we're doing the Illicit series, and that means these stolen or illegal or otherwise sort of scandalous things. And the exciting thing is that for this series, these are all written pieces, but this is the first time we've done a number of audio stories

as well. So that's what Natalie's piece is. And I'm really curious why you decided that you had to go for audio and what you expected to come of it. Well, we wanted to cash in on the podcasting boom, of course. No, we're interested in audio. I'm interested in audio. And for the Illicit series, that seemed like the one to use to experiment with this form. Because, you know, audio is like a really intimate, quiet medium. And, you know, someone speaking right into your ear.

This is why I agreed to running all your illicit objects for this episode of The Theory of Everything. But can you just quickly ID the next two we're going to hear, Rob, and then we'll come back in. First, we're going to hear from Shelby El-Etmani. And she's a producer in New Hampshire who works for EF Outbound and the Mortified podcast. She's done a bunch of other radio work. And then we're going to hear from Nicole Pasulka, who is based in Philadelphia. She's also a writer, art, activism, queer culture, criminal justice for places like The Believer in New York and so on. And the person you'll hear her talking to is Daniel Soleil, a writer, filmmaker in Brooklyn, who's helped edit the piece. Anyway, I don't want to say what their subjects are, but I think we'll hear, or what

we'll hear is what happens when you just throw out a premise to a talented person and an illicit object. What does that mean? What could it mean? And these are two really different answers. Evil is a force. I think it lies in power or the belief of power. And I think that evil itself can find strength in fear. I have a candle that's supposed to ward away evil. It's tall and purple, and it scares the hell out of me. I keep it on top of my bookshelf next to a box of Freud-themed banana candies and a metronome. And even though it's collecting dust, it stands out among the rest of my stuff with a bold command in bright yellow. Go away, evil. The problem, I admit, is partially semantic.

Go away, evil is strong, but vague. Where does the evil go? Does it disappear completely, or does it just go away from me? Go away, evil. But mostly, I'm just sort of freaked out by the whole idea of making things happen without direct action. Evil is treating people like they don't matter. Evil is a callous disregard

for other people's feelings. I bought it in a little magic shop in the East Village when I was 22 and drowning. I was sick on the pill and had a boyfriend who made me believe his moods were my fault. I wasn sick on the pill and had a boyfriend who made me believe his moods were my fault. I wasn't me anymore. I needed an escape. So, naturally, I turned to magic. The store had rows and rows of colorful candles to choose from. Find love. Find money. Keep good health, make your dreams come true. And then I saw it. Go away evil.

I imagined myself free from the evil in my life. I didn't know what it was then that was bothering me. I just knew it had to go. And I didn't care how or where, just away. Go away evil. I picked it up, put it down, picked it back up again. It felt risky, dangerous. It felt just right. Go away evil. So I bought it. And for the first time in months, I felt strong again. But then days went by, then weeks, then months, and I still hadn't lit the candle. I just couldn't light it. I'm not a spiritual person. I don't really believe in God. But one time my father told me his head split open when he was a baby,

and the only way they could fix him was to go to a sorceress in the souk because he'd been cursed. Go away away evil. Did they mean to hurt him? Or were they just so desperate that they didn't care with all that energy went? Did it really matter? What if this candle had the same power? Were my problems really so bad that I needed to hurt others just to make myself feel better? Evil is the absence of compassion. I think at the root of it to hurt others just to make myself feel better? Evil is the absence of compassion.

I think at the root of it, it's a lack of regard for other beings or your surroundings. So I keep it on my bookshelf next to those Freud-themed banana candies and the metronome, idle, unlit. I keep it like a memento from a place I hope I'll never go to again. I'm scared to find out what evil I possess.

All right, so do you want to see it? Do I? Yeah, let's, uh, why don't you take it out? Okay, here. Um, bam. How old is that? I don't know. Old. I mean, it was a part of more, obviously. They're very dusty. It's been in my pocket for two months. I know that these mushrooms are good because I've taken a lot of them and this is what basically what's left.

Yeah, no, it looks like the last remaining bit of a bunch of good times. And now it's just like one lonely good time sitting there. They're old, so they won't be as good, but they'll still be good. Because I ate one of the stems like fairly recently. Is there any part of you that feels weird recording yourself speaking about mushrooms, about carrying them around with you? I think it's a general attitude of like, this person is foolish. You're not supposed to do drugs in your 30s. That's an experimentation thing. It's like, okay, for like young people to do it. You have to become a grown up person and like you can't it's a little tragic because you really need them in your 30s I don't

take a lot of them but I specifically love to take a little bit of them and just feel awesome and then sometimes I really take a lot of them it makes me just so happy and not in the kind of like stoned or drunk happy way where you're like kind of blacked out your problems. But more in like a like here, let's think about how you could be more less judgmental towards people in your life. But don't worry, you're not like bad. Everything is OK. But let's do some personal growth like, listen to Fleetwood Mac. Those are two different things? It can all be happening at the same time.

In a lot of cases, I might have an urge to like, bail on a party. Or eat food right now. Or go outside. And I just sort of tamp it down. But I think with mushrooms, I just, I'm like, why would I do that? I want to go outside right now. I'm going to go by. So the funny thing about these drugs is that I'm going to the woods to howl at the moon in a fishnet bodysuit.

And I'm like, I have a lot of new drugs. I'm going to do drugs all week. Like, I don't really I don't even really need. Do you want them? I don't even really need them. That's a very well I was going to say generous offer

but the listeners can't really see how much exactly is in that bag. What if the reason I'm still carrying them around is to give them to you right now and then you'll be tripping and you'll think to yourself like Nicole brought these mushrooms

all the way to me across many states, in and out of many houses. She carried them. That's the kind of thing that would make you feel really excited if you were on mushrooms. Nicole Pasulka and her bag of shroom remnants. I'm really fond of this one, Rob, but I have to ask, when you and Josh put out your call for illicit object pieces, were you expecting to get a lot of drug stories? Yeah, and we got a lot of drug stories, or we got a lot of drug pitches.

We had to raise the stakes a little bit on that. We couldn't just let people do stories about skull bonks or whatever. It needed to be more surprising. But what really turned out to be interesting was discovering what people considered illicit, which was much more ambiguous and surprising than we anticipated going in. And this is always what's fun about these projects, how people interpret the prompt. And we also have a bunch of written text stories that we're publishing for the Illicit series. So like Keo Stark wrote about a peep show token and Catherine Newman on this bottle of Vicodin that she's hoarded. Paul Lucas on a stolen corkscrew.

Katie Notopoulos has this insane copulating pigs figurine and and and william gibson josh got william gibson to do one on this incredible old racist book that he sort of inherited it's an amazing story among others but you couldn't get him to do the audio piece well for the audio piece for the audio pieces the one of the qualifications was they had to be able to produce the whole thing themselves we weren't doing um we aren't producing these these are all self-produced by the audio pieces, one of the qualifications was they had to be able to produce the whole thing themselves. We weren't doing them. We aren't producing these. These are all self-produced by the audio makers. So I don't think we wanted to approach William Gibson and say, hey, you want to learn how to podcast?

But maybe he's been thinking about that. How do you know that William Gibson is not just like building an extra walk-in closet and turning it into a recording studio right now. And you would have just given him that extra push. Yeah. Now that we have put ourselves on the audio map with this, I think we're going to have the confidence to do that and start just approaching various bestselling authors and giving them their big break. Well, let's listen to three more and then we'll come back.

Okay. So first we'll hear from Sam Dingman, who is a radio producer in New York. And as you'll hear, a former cab driver. Then Kalila Holt, who's a producer for the podcast Heavyweight. And I am still kind of amazed she was willing to share this particular story.

And then finally, Julia Barton, a longtime radio and podcast producer, editor. She is working these days on Malcolm Gladwell's popular new podcast, Revisionist History. All right, let's listen. On May 29th, 2007, my gross revenue from driving a yellow cab around New York City for 12 hours was $144.60. After subtracting the cab rental fee of $108 and the $34 tank of gas, I returned home, situated myself on the mottled microfiber of my Craigslist couch, and laid out my day's earnings before me on the coffee table.

$2.60. I ordered a 99-cent cheeseburger for delivery from the nearby McDonald's. You can do that in New York. Stole one of my roommate's beers from the refrigerator and lay down to consider my options. There weren't many. I'd been at this for five months now, and days like this were becoming a routine occurrence. And this wasn't how I'd envisioned it. Surely I'd convinced myself I'd establish a cadre of regulars who'd book me ahead

of time for their travel to the airport. Every time they had to pass through the city, I imagined, they'd call me on my Motorola Razr flip phone, and I'd glide back and forth from the airport. WFUV's soothing selections of adult album alternative thrumming the speakers of my Crown Victoria, a wad of bills growing fat in my pocket, the parking lot poker games in the None of this had transpired, of course. At a weekly take of somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 after expenses, I was behind on the rent, had declared financial hardship on my student loans for the third time, and kept falling asleep in the middle of important conversations with my girlfriend about the direction of our relationship. She was

rightly concerned about the direction of my life. Then came the crash, literally. A woman in a Jeep Wrangler at the corner of 79th and 5th. Her baby screaming. The Crown Vic spinning. My head spinning. The adult album alternative abruptly scrambled into static. Two days later, I sat across a desk from an angular administrative assistant in the lobby of a startup bedecked with palm fronds and vitamin water. One month later, I was on a deck in Cape Cod with my girlfriend's parents in a gimlet at Twilight. One year later, it was April 15th, and I was flipping through my run sheets,

adding up what I'd earned in my brief stint as a taxi man. About $2,000. I stared at the 1099, and the static poured back in. The cardboard hamburger flavor. The crummy engine of the Crown Vic. Complaining about every rotation of the tires, fighting forward motion with every turn. Every day at lunch under the palm fronds,

it was like none of it had ever happened. So I decided to pretend that it hadn't. I ripped the 1099 into eight neat pieces and threw it away. No one would be the wiser. Except, possibly possibly for me I don't know I guess not a lot of people come in with underwear to frame uh yeah

why are you saying that like a question I am Annalise Razik and I am your mother. For your 12th birthday, you and I and Bob took a vacation to Paris. Bob is what we called your mom, who's my grandma yeah and she rented us an apartment which had a combo washer dryer in it one evening we put our clothes in to wash that was going to wash and dry overnight and when we got up in the morning everything was still soaking wet you had put all of your underwear in there so the only thing we absolutely had to have was a pair of underwear for you. You had no underwear. And I was trying to figure out what to do.

And Bob said, oh, I have an idea. Put it in the microwave. I thought Bob was kind of a genius. I was like, of course, the microwave. So we put your little gingham checked underwear with the lace in the microwave. We're sitting there chatting and all of a sudden I went, do you smell something? And I remember I leaned out from the chair at the table where I was sitting and looked and I see smoke coming out of this microwave. And the underwear are on fire inside the microwave.

They burned in this, like right in the center of the butt. And I just felt like it was so pretty. I just couldn't throw them away because I thought it was so artful. So I ended up packing them in my suitcase and bringing them back and then got this brilliant idea that we should frame them and give them to Bob. She loved it. She just thought it was the funniest thing and she hung it in a place of honor in her house in the dining room. So whenever we were there for Thanksgiving or anything we would eat our meals under your underwear. My most embarrassing pair of underwear, I feel. They're really like dorky. They look like a grandma pair of underwear.

Well, I don't know. I feel like they were the perfect color in terms of matting and framing them, you know, because they had a little pop of color and then some lace. You were like, oh, this will be funny, but like easy for you to say when it's not your underwear. That's horrible of me. I'm a terrible mother. I didn't even think of that. But look, at least I didn't bring it to your school. Why? That's not like an at least. Like, why would you bring it to the school? I don't know. Bob passed away nine years ago, and so we inherited the underwear.

And they are in our dining room now. After Bob died and we had the memorial party, the underwear were proudly displayed. Do you remember that? No, I blocked it out apparently. You did because there were well over a hundred people. The little box in the back of my underwear drawer is pink, like it could contain Pepto-Bismol tablets. But it doesn't. The first time I just knew, I was riding a bike along a hot, dry riverbed in Tucson, singing. Have reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland. No one tells you exactly how it happens, and yet you get it.

A little ping in the groin, a tiny stab. I rode home, took a shower, walked to the Quick Trip, bought a pint of Haagen-Dazs, came home, and ate the whole thing. I slept all afternoon. A couple of days later, I bought the pink box with the pregnancy test inside. It indicated human chorionic gonadotropin in my pee. The line turned into a distinct cross in the little panel. No one forgets that. Four years later, we had just moved to a new town. I was hacking away at vines in the yard when one breast swelled up and then the other,

like cartoon balloons, boing, boing. I was filled with dread, sweaty brow, new job, new home, no car, a child that still wanted to be carried. I went to the drugstore, pink box, cold beer, came home, peed and left the thing to sit. No cross this time. I was just stressed. The stick told me it would be okay. A few months later, a gynecologist had his hand up my crotch. He couldn't help but giggle as he twiddled the horrifying lump in my guts.

You're really very pregnant, he exclaimed. The doctor who did the second C-section, the one that took so annoyingly long, came to visit while the baby was sleeping. You don't want to do that again, he said, meaning get pregnant, give birth. You lost a lot of blood. It was alarming. Now the baby's bodies have expanded from new loaf of bread to gangly boys. Mine just ages.

Sometimes it signals a memory. A stab, the occasional boing. Once I got scared enough to buy a box with two tests. The test came clean, all ghosts and empties. It proved itself true. So, its companion just sits in the drawer. My unwrapped, unreliable guard against the unthinkable. Julia Barton, one of my favorite audio makers out there in the world. And I'm kind of curious, Rob, how you and Josh sort of determined that you wouldn't need to limit yourself to just asking professionals to participate in this project.

You know, everyone who participated, they were conversant in how to do this on some level. They may never have done anything quite like it before. The next piece we'll hear is Ramona Martinez, and she's a radio producer and artist in Virginia. She has radio experience, but she told me that she had never done a first-person piece before and never worked on anything that was really so much about and in her own voice, which I think comes through in a really good way, actually. And then on the other side, the last thing we'll hear is Andrew Leland's piece. And he's got plenty of experience, of course. He's a longtime friend of this project and other projects we've done.

Your listeners may know him as the host and the producer of The Organist. I've done stuff for him there. He's really great. And I just want to quickly point out that the subject of the last episode, the one before this one, Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Oh, yeah. You had an overlap on that, right? Yeah. It's amazing.

Same name. My show is called Private Ear. They're Private Ears because they also have an amazing piece with Trevor Poglin as well. But if you want to hear more, Lauren, you can check out the most recent episode of The Organist. I actually listened to those almost back-to-back without knowing. I was like, isn't this the same guy? That's great. But they complement each other really well.

It's really cool. So what surprised me about Andrew's illicit object piece was the object that he chose, which was not something that I would have ever identified as something that's illicit. But by the end of his piece, I think I totally understood where he was coming from, and I think the listener will, too.

Hi, my name is Ramona Martinez, and I have an artifact, a Civil War artifact. It's actually a hunk of Fort Sumter. And I was wondering if there's anyone there who might be able to look at it and tell me what it is. When Confederates finally abandoned Fort Sumter in 1885, it was in shambles. That spring, hours before Lincoln was shot, the American flag was raised once again. My ex-boyfriend helped reenact this moment, and at some point, he put this hunk of Sumter in his pocket. I don't know that anyone noticed it before he picked it up off the ground, but it's a historical artifact taken from National Park property. He brought it to me because he knew I'd love it. When I hold it in my hand, I feel electricity through the tips of my fingers. I wonder, is it a piece of the wall? Or shrapnel?

Am I feeling the pain and fear and joy of 150 years ago? I decide to find out what it is. I walk into a shop in Louisa County with the illicit hunk in my hand. I explain to a tall older man where I got it, and he makes a joke about how my axe should have gotten me a better gift. Check, check. But he seems to know what it is. Testing one, two, okay.

Okay. This is part of a crock pottery. And I'm going to show you some crocks, okay? Come on back. Come on back around the corner. See how this matches up with this? But it was this type of crock. This is a jug, and that's a crock, and it was crock.

They made bowls. They made all kinds of things. I mean, that's all they had to keep food in. If it had been a jug, probably wine or anything liquid. And here, you want to take that back? Do you feel anything when you hold it in your hand? Do I feel anything? I feel like I've got a rock or a stone.

You don't feel any vibrations? No, my gosh, no. No? No, it don't do anything for me. I feel like it's a talisman. It's a what? I feel like when I hold it, I feel things. Do you? A little bit.

But it could just be me projecting because of what I like, you know, the history. Yeah, I get like that when I read the Bible sometimes and think about the Lord. Yeah, I feel like it's similar. Cool. What's your name? Sonny. Sonny? Yes. I'm Ramona. Thank you very much, sir. I was thinking about taking this all the way back, but I don't think anyone would want it, do you? Yeah. You think they would want it? You get vibes, so keep it. I'll do that. I'll do that. Thank you so much.

God bless you. You too. Have a good one. You too. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. On the way home, I hold my hunk in my lap. Its curve fits perfectly in my hand while I clutch it.

A part of me is disappointed that it's not just a hunk anymore. But then I realize it's never been just a hunk. It's a perfect, perfect piece of my history. In every sense. Late at night, deep in the middle of an elaborate 48-hour bachelor party, there's a moment that stands out in my friend Josh's memory. We're standing outside a bar on M&Zav in Sheepshead Bay,

near Coney Island. I mean, I just have a picture in my mind of, like, you kind of standing in this, you know, weird vestibule or the opening of the bar, kind of looking down at your cane and the other guy looking down at it and insisting that it was a weapon. And then, like, four dudes in English trying to explain that it's not while horrible Russian club music is just drowning out anything for seconds.

The stick that the bouncer wouldn't let me bring into the club was an Ambutech aluminum mobility cane. It's silver with a black elastic loop for a handle, and it neatly folds up into five foot long segments. It's got a white tip and the bottom segment is red, which signifies blind guy, or at least give this guy some room to anyone who sees it. I was carrying it around because I have a degenerative retinal condition.

It's called RP and it's eating my vision from the outside in. RP also gives me severe night blindness, which makes it difficult to visit Russian night clubs or really any dark crowded place. The problem on that night was that the bouncer thought that my cane was a weapon. This had never happened to me before. I don't blame the bouncer. I'm sure fights break out at the New Cats Cafe. It makes sense that someone trying to bring a long aluminum stick inside will raise suspicion. But I think another reason the bouncer stopped me was because I wasn't using the cane properly. I'm legally blind, but not totally blind, and I don't use the cane the way

that you see real blind people using canes, tapping and swiping them across the ground to feel their way around their surroundings. But as my vision got worse, I had to push through the shame and embarrassment, the imposter syndrome I felt, whenever I used the cane, like I wasn't blind enough to deserve it, or that I was dressing up as a blind guy, some kind of permanent Halloween, using it as a ruse to cut to the front of the line at the airport. I recently decided to start using the cane full-time in public, wherever I go. And it was falling apart, so I finally sprang for an upgrade, a brand new graphite cane. This one has a soft golf grip handle and a weird fat tip shaped like a marshmallow. It's much sturdier than the old one, and I can tell you it'd make a far deadlier weapon. My old cane, the shitty tent pole, felt like

it'd break in half if I actually hit anything with it. But I can feel the weight and the power of this new stick in my hands every time I use it. It can do serious damage. Because I need it more, because I see less now, I've had fewer run-ins with museum guards or bouncers in the last few months. I think this is because I wield it with more authority. I'm better now at owning my status as a blind guy than I was that night at the bachelor party. Over time, despite my anxiety at the possibility of being held up by a bouncer, or hassled by a museum guard, or just being regarded with naked curiosity by someone sitting on a bench who watches me

carefully as I, the blind guy with a cane and dark glasses, somehow manage to leap gracefully over a puddle or a pile of dog shit. Despite all this, the cane has gotten me out more, not less. And this is something that my friend Josh has apparently always hoped for. I mean, look, man, you know, as long as I've known you were engaged, you were dating, then you were engaged, then you were married, and then you had a kid. Well, then you had a dog, then you had a kid, right? And so you were never really, as far as I knew you, like a guy going out really late at night and drinking until the sun came up anyway. But I figure, like, maybe this cane will make him stay out later. Because without the cane, it's not exactly like you were seeing dawn with me.

You know? With my new cane, I may not be able to see the dawn very clearly, but at least I'll be there to hear it. So that's it for the Theory of Everything Illicit Object crossover. Thanks to all of the audio makers who participated, and to Josh Glenn and Rob Walker, my cousin. Thanks so much for having me do this.

Thanks for making it happen. It's really great. We couldn't have a better audio partner to have done this with. And if people want to read more Project Object stories, the ones we've already published, the ones that are still to come in the Illicit series, go to highlowbrow.com slash projectobject. Check them out. They're going to keep running through the end of the year. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Illicit Objects.

The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Go to radiotopia.fm and subscribe to them all. Thanks to our launch sponsors, the Knight Foundation and listeners like you. And special thanks, as always, to Roman Mars, who made this whole thing real.

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