Radiolab - Apocalyptical

Episode Date: December 9, 2013

Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. In this new live stage performance, Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. C. C.

C. And NPR. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage. Your hosts for this evening. Jan Aberrat and Robert Crowell-Way. Okay, so Robert and I have been on tour for the last two months. We went to... City after city after city.

Something like 21 cities we went to. We were both like, yeah. Sick. Kick their asses, but it was so much fun. And the show was called Apocalyptic. It was about endings. Which is not the most obvious topic to choose, to invite people into a theater.

Hey, we're going to just tell you different stories that end really brilliantly. But these are, this is a series of ending stories. That's what we did that night. And we did it with some amazing musicians. And comedians. And video artists who were projecting beautiful images on these massive screens above our head.

And also, we had puppets. Enormous, beautiful. articulate, gorgeous puppets. And you can see all this. We are releasing a really nicely shot video of this entire performance at the same time as this audio podcast. Go to radio lab.org slash live.

You can watch the whole thing. You know, some of the best moments of the show were purely visual, so we'd encourage you to check it out. But what follows is the audio podcast version of that show, which we recorded live at the Paramount in Seattle. The show actually

begins with a radical rethinking of one of the most important ending stories that has ever happened on planet Earth, which is the story about the end of the dinosaurs. There's all kinds of dinosaur puppetry, beautiful stuff at the beginning, which we're going to skip over. But again, you can check it out at RadioLab.org slash live. We're going to jump to the part where we hear from scientists who have been forensically probing this moment and have a totally new way of thinking about it. Okay, we're going to start you off with a guy, well, the guy who started it off for us. It's a guy named Jay. Malash professor at Purdue University, and I study impact craters, among other things. Not only can Jay Malash create impact craters with his mind, but he and his colleagues

have been investigating this moment, almost as if it were a crime scene that happened, not 60 million years ago, but yesterday. And the story that they've put together, it's more than just interesting. It's frankly, it's frankly terrifying. And weirdly specific as it happens. Take, for example, the seemingly simple question of when. When did it happen? You don't mean like the year.

That would be a little too specific. No, I don't know if you remember, but Jay got even more specific than that. This was a casual question that I threw out. Listen to his answer. By the way, do we know anything about seasons? Was this a worm, a particularly worm? Actually, it was between, well, this is a bit of a stretch, but it was sometime between June and July.

Really? You can say that one so specifically? How would you know that? The reasoning is, We can, for example... This was the first surprise. It's kind of a controversial idea, but it basically goes like this. Jay says, scientists have found some pollen in rocks which date from that time, two different kinds of pollen.

And based on an analysis of those two kinds of pollen... We know that the impact took place between the flowering of the lotus and the flowering of the water lilies. Wow. Okay, so that's a lotus you see flowering on the left. It's a water leaf flowering on the right. You can see this if you look at our video. online. Fossils found at the impact site that had pollen from both of these flowers in the same rock would suggest that the impact did in fact take place. Somewhere between June and July. It's one of

those things in geology. We get a glimpse of a moment far, far back in time. So, let's go deeper into that moment. All right, everybody, let's collectively rewind our minds back in time, tens of millions of years into the past, 66 million years ago, to be precise. There they are majestic beasts, hanging out on the plains, eating their lotus leaves, sometime in June, June 17th, let's say, and everything on this day. Pretty much normal. This particular fateful day was no different than any of millions and of previous days as far as the dinosaurs were concerned. But if there were any astronomers at the time, which there weren't,

they might have had some inkling that something was coming because... Had they looked up? They would have seen a tiny little dot of light in the sky. Whereas planets, the moon, move with respect to the stars, this would have had a constant bearing. And the old seaman could tell you that if you see something constant bearing, constant bearing that's on a collision course with you.

And that thing, of course, is our asteroid. Zeroing in on the Earth. I want to say that we do know quite a bit about this asteroid. From the size of the crater and from the amount of certain minerals found at the impact site, we know that the asteroid was roughly six miles wide. And then again, roughly six miles long, which makes it approximately the size of Manhattan Island. Or Mount Everest. It's roughly the size of Mount Everest.

that is Doug Robertson, a geologist who knows quite a bit about this asteroid. And by the way, it has a name. It's the asteroids. It's called Baptistina. Baptistima. Why? Baptistina. I don't know. They name asteroids. On another subject, we do know that the Earth's moon was probably produced by a collision with something the size of Mars.

Whoa. I just threw that in because it's cool. It doesn't really relate to our story. We don't have the whole. evening here. Let's just stay to it. Okay. The dinosaurs are here on Earth. They're eating their leaves. Meanwhile, up in space, our asteroid baptistina is now hurtling towards the Earth. 20,000 miles an hour. Very fast. 20 times faster than a very fast rifle bullet. And scientists couldn't be sure what would happen mathematically, I mean, when a Mount Everest-sized bullet traveling at 20,000 miles an hour hits our atmosphere. The atmosphere is really just a very,

very thin skin over the rest of the Earth. So, scientists thought, all right, if we're going to construct this story, let's just take it piece by piece and first figure out what would happen when this big ball hurling through space slams into our atmosphere, which is made of gas, of course. So just to approximate, let's fire a bullet through some gas and watch what happens. Now here we basically showed a super slow motion video of a gun firing a bullet underwater. You can see it on our website radialab.org. It's very beautiful. See the bullet coming out and freeze it right there at the edge? Okay. Basically what you see is this bullet steaming through the water. By the way

we use water as an approximation for gas because in gas you would have this same effect I'm about to describe. Creating a wake behind it and the wake gets wider as it trails away from the bullet. And if you imagine this shape in three dimensions, really what you're looking at is a kind of a cone, like a funnel shape.

And inside the walls of the funnel, inside that cone, is nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Because it's in water, so you're saying there's, it's like a hole in the water. That's what I'm saying. There's nothing in there. It's a vacuum in there.

Because the bullet is shooting through the water. It pushes the water out of the way. And for a beat, the water doesn't have time to come back together. And so all you have is emptiness in there. Right there, what you're seeing, is a massive hole in the water created by a tiny little bullet. Now imagine that that bullet is six miles wide, and the hole that it's making is right above your head. Well, what does that mean if you're a dinosaur looking up? What would happen? Well, if you were in the right place, and this is going to be the wrong place in a second or two,

if you were in the right place to look behind the asteroid as it came in, you'd probably be able to see clearly through the space. What? Does that mean you would suddenly be looking at a nighttime hole in a daytime sky? Right. Whoa. And to be fair, Jay did tell us that, you know, you know, You would need special kinds of eyeballs to see this night hole in the day sky.

And the dynos didn't have that, so... Science! Still, I mean, just imagine what a last image that would be to see day and night come together in the same moment. But, according to Jay... You better not blink, because before you could open your eyes again, the asteroid would have hit the surface. And if you were in a position to see that, then... you're going to be engulfed by the violence that is just about to occur.

By the way, the audience was just laughing at a Dinos de los Mertos graphic that just came on the screens. So we know it was a big explosion, fine, that it was violent, fine. But I think we should be a little bit subtle about this, because obviously if an asteroid is the size of Manhattan and it lands on your head, you're not going to feel very good about that. But if Manhattan is hitting the planet Earth, that's a little bit like a pebble hitting an enormous beach ball. Yeah, and I can imagine that the little pebble size, relatively speaking, the pebble would create some damage in the spot where it landed.

But let's suppose that you are a leaf-eating mother-of-three hadresor living in New Zealand, right? And you're just at the moment that the asteroid comes in, you're on the, you're antipotal, you're on the other side of the planet. Would you have any idea that this was happening? That was the next question that we took to Jay. How much damage would this thing actually do? Well, we can do experiments. We can produce things, situations like this, in small quantities in the laboratories. Which brings us?

We're good to hear. To this guy. Peter Schultz, and I like to do impact experiments. Pete Schultz basically has every 13-year-old's dream job. He gets to blow shit up for a living. Basically what Pete does is he works at this place that you're seeing right here on the screen. This is the NASA Ames Laboratory in California. And the thing that they're putting together there in the middle frame, that is a giant three-story

tall cannon. What Pete does is he takes projectiles. So for example, you're going to see him take a little glass bullet over there and he's going to load it into the top of the cannon and then he's going to fire it right into a standup for planet Earth, which for him will be a sand pit. And lucky for us when we called Pete, he was just about to pull the trigger on this thing. So you're calling you on a day in which you are trying to re-experience the day? Actually, yeah, but I think we're going to survive. That's our plan.

Okay. Hold on. We're going to assume the position. We have to cross our fingers. Here we go. Here we go. We're going to fly our ready lights. That is gorgeous. That, oh my gosh. I think is that, you have instant playback? What does that happen? Oh, my gosh. is the sound of a man very happy with his explosion. You can see every piece of this of what's happening. So based on experiments like this,

people like Pete can figure out precisely what happened when the asteroid hit the Earth. They can quantify the explosion's power by basically leveraging up experiments like this. So according to Doug, the amount of energy that would have been unleashed when that thing came rushing in onto Earth is roughly this.

We hit the Earth with an explosion that's 100 million megast. tons. Sarah lip state. Sarah, our guitarist, kind of swung her guitar around, had a metal moment. Don't look at her wrong or she'll do that to you. Okay, so here's essentially how Doug broke that down for us. Two tons of TNT.

We're talking tons here, not megatons. Two tons of T&T will essentially do this. On one of the three screens, you see a 10-story building imploding. Two tons of T&T will take down a building. Now, 15,000 tons of TNT, that is what the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. On a second screen, we see archival footage of the atomic bomb. That chaos is 15,000 tons of TNT. Now, these days, according to Doug Robertson, a hydrogen bomb...

Current hydrogen bombs are typically of the order of 1 million tons of TNT equivalent. Now, 1 million tons of TNT equivalent, that's what we call a megaston. And if you remember, Doug said that the asteroid impact was the equivalent of 100 million megatons. So really what he's saying in concrete terms is that that impact was the equivalent of 100 million of those bombs going off all at once in the same spot. Which is a lot. That is true. That is true. However, it really depends on what you mean by a lot.

because I was doing a little googling and I was surprised to learn that 110 million megatons is not nearly enough to destroy the planet. To destroy the entire planet, you would need, you ready for this, 110 quadrillion megatons of TNT,

which is 100 million times 110 million megatons of TNT. So going back to your had resource situation, mother of three in New Zealand, if the thing came in antipodal to her, maybe she would feel the ground shake a little bit, but after a minute she'd be like, whatever, and she'd go back to eating leaves. She probably wouldn't notice it.

Well, no, no, no, because that's not what we were taught in homeroom by Mrs. McGrew, or whoever your teacher was. Here's the classic explanation. There was an impact, of course, and it kicked up an enormous amount of dust. You'll remember this. The dust then kind of covers the planet. It blankets the earth, makes the earth very cold, makes the earth very nasty. All the big plants die, the little plants get sick.

The dinosaurs get hungry. The dinosaurs get sick. And then gradually, you know, they get dead, deader and deader and deader from the earth. different things. 10,000 years, 30,000 years, 40, until you get like, oh, like 900,000 years later, you've got a shivering last dinosaur sitting there in the cold. And that's the end. That's the story we were told in school. Is a long, slow, wintry glass. Yeah. No, no. Why would we tell these good people that tired old story from Mrs. What is it, Mr. Magruder's? I made her

a Magruder tonight. Okay. Yeah. Let us offer up a completely different It's Scottish night tonight. Scottish, all right. We'll go with that. Let's actually flip the understanding completely. I think we should. Based on new science. So, all right, here's what we're going to do.

Keith, pull up that ballistics video that we showed earlier of the Red Sand. Can you sort of pull that up and blow it up to the three screens? And then, yeah, rewind it back. Thank you. Okay, so this is a six thousand frame a second video that you're seeing here. This is from Pete's lab. At this point on the screen, all you're seeing. a pit of red sand.

Now, what you see in the first few frames is you see the laser hitting right there. Red sand flying in the air, super slow-mo. And the next frame forward. Right there, you see some fire. You see a little bulb of fire erupt near the impact site. Right where the laser hits the sand, there's this little clump of flame, and we freeze on that spot. Now, scientists can now measure the temperatures in that spot right there. Oh, there it is.

And just to state the obvious, we know from those measurements, that that spot right there would have gotten very, very, very, very, very hot. You know, way beyond the temperature of the sun. I mean, we're talking temperatures maybe 20,000 degrees. Whoa. The sun's temperatures about 5,000 degrees. And if we're talking temperatures four times hotter than the sun, well, anything that's that hot is going to instantly, instantly turn to gas.

A very, very high temperature, high pressure gas. It's actually rock vapor, rock steam. So imagine, this thing comes barreling in, this asteroid. It doesn't just bounce off the earth. It plows into the earth. It goes into the surface. Two miles in, five miles in, seven miles in, ten miles in, 20 miles into the earth it goes.

All the rock that's plowing into is turning into a liquid and then into a gas. And now, watch what happens next. This is a basic physics experiment we're going to show you. On the screen you see a very lovely video, actually, of a hand dropping a metal ball into some sand. This is just a dude dropping a ball in some sand. Watch this right here. Ball goes in. And like a millisecond, after it makes impact disappears into the sand, a little spear of sand goes shooting back in the opposite direction.

Sort of a bounce back effect. Does this always happen, this, whatever this is? It's like Newton's love something. Yeah. Newton's love sand Okay No but what you see is you see this fine plume of sand You're shooting back in the opposite direction

As a sort of rebound, right? Now imagine that that ball is an asteroid And that sand over there, that's the planet Earth So Keith play that one more time We play the video again But this time as the ball drops It gradually morphs into an asteroid Thank you for those sounds

So you would get the same effect You would get the simple point is... It's just something we do. You wonder where we get all of our sound design? It's out of that man's mouth, that's where. So you would get that same bounce back effect of a fine plume shooting back in the opposite direction. But we know, we just heard Doug described that it would not be sand in this case. It would be rock gas.

This plume of hot gas expands upward and pushes right on through the atmosphere. into space. Some fraction hit the moon. Really? Some fraction of that hit Mars. Okay, so now you got this sneeze of rock vapor. It's out in space. Basic physics says that as it travels out farther away from the Earth, what's going to happen is it's going to start to cool down a bit.

And when it cools... It recondenses into little droplets that basically form glass very quickly. Little droplets of glass about the size of sand. Now, if you look at one of these little droplets of glass under a microscope, This is what it looks like, right there. On the screen, you see what looks kind of like a translucent snowball. That is actually a magnified image of one of these bits of glass that fell from space that day. Most of them didn't land on the ground.

I'll talk about that in a second. But there it is. I don't know about you, but I find that totally terrifying. Because that's, it looks like a little baptistina, right? Tiny little asteroid. Except now imagine trillions of these things in a cloud, in a cloud of shrapnel going out, out, out. away from the Earth. And what's going to happen next is that

it's going to start to lose momentum, that cloud. When it does, the Earth's gravity is going to grab back hold of it and say, come on back. And 90% of them come back to the Earth. Will this falling glass do harm? Yes. Because what happens is that the

glass out in space starts to spread out, like north and south and east and west, and eventually it will appear in the sky over New Zealand. It's now a global phenomenon. And you know, it's really hard to imagine what the Hadro's sort would have seen. But the thing to keep in mind is that these things that they're coming in, these bits of glass,

90-some odd percent are burning up in the atmosphere. So very few of them are hitting the ground. So from her point of view, probably would have looked like the greatest meteor shower anyone has ever seen with one significant bummer, which is this. When these little bits of glass come in, each one that burning, turns up is depositing a little bit of heat into the sky. And collectively, there's such a massive rain of these things coming in. Well, the heat would build up.

The sky would turn red. It would be getting hotter and hotter. And at a certain point, Jay wondered, well, how hot exactly would it have gotten? Like, how much heat exactly would have built up there in the sky and then started to radiate down? we calculated the amount of heat that would come down, a number, 10 kilowatts per square meter. And yeah, okay, well, we get this number.

Well, what does that mean? Well, I went home and I hooked up a current meter and tried to measure the amount of heat produced in my oven for different amounts of power. And I could get about 7 kilowatts per square meter in my oven on broil. And... Like 500 degrees broil, you mean? Yeah, but that wasn't quite enough. Not nearly. So Jay started measuring other kinds of ovens.

And I finally found out that the heat would be, in fact, like being in a pizza oven. A pizza oven is about right. Which means that if you were a terrestrial dinosaur anywhere above the ground on the earth on that day, you would have experienced some heat that is almost unimaginable. Maybe it started at 100 degrees because it was June, it was summer. But within minutes it would have been 300 degrees. 500 degrees. 700 degrees.

900 degrees. Estimates are on that day, temperatures topped out at something like 1,200 degrees. At that temperature, nothing can protect you. Your scales, your fur, whatever you got, it's not to be. Whatever you got, it's not going to do any good. Your blood will literally start to boil inside your body, and you will die. So essentially, according to this theory, the dinosaurs and everything else on Earth that day would have been incinerated. Doug thinks that's what did them in, not so much the impact, but all that ejecta that went up into the sky came down as glass rain and created that heat.

That's what did them in. And he would argue it didn't just do some of the men. or even many of them in. He would say it did all of them in all at once. There is zero evidence that any dinosaur made it through. And the crazy part of this theory is that Jay and Doug think that the whole process, from the impact to the glass rain to the incineration of all of these species on the planet, it would have taken a few hours.

His best guess, he thinks maybe two hours. I mean, that's less time than a business lunch. You try getting east, northwest, anywhere on Mercer Street at rush hour in two hours? Can't do that. I mean, if you think about it, that is less time than you will spend in this theater tonight. That means that you're saying that an animal that had been supreme on the planet for 200 million years disappears in a few hours completely? Yes.

Yep. That's what the evidence suggests. That's right. Well, you can consider the evidence, but also you could consider common sense. I mean, we've got a world filled with terrestrial dinosaurs. They were on every continent. They were even in Antarctica. And to say that they all disappeared in two hours, I mean, all, that suggests that there's none of them in out of harm's way, none of them in a cave somewhere, None of them in a grotto, none of them in a protected forest of any kind. I mean, the word all in that connection is just too much. I just don't buy it.

Well, yeah, I mean, the truth is that the science is never going to be so exact as to say, yeah, all of them disappeared, or it happened on a single day or on an afternoon. I mean, no tool that we have is that precise. But what Jay is saying is that it happened fast, very fast, nothing made it through, What I find interesting is that ultimately you don't need the ballistics or anything we've shown you so far to know that something major and sudden happened because you can see evidence of it literally etched into the earth. So here's the spot where we first found the Kiki Boundaries. You can see it really well out in Colorado, actually.

We sent one of our producers, Molly Webster, out there to meet a paleontologist named Kirk Johnson. They hiked over a couple of hills They found this one specific spot I'm like ready for a dinosaur to come around the corner And A new minute They started to dig A foot at this point? Turns out

For every three feet you get down 10,000 years in time See the earth has layers Kind of like a tree has rings And every three feet down you go You're going back in time about 10,000 years And when you go all the way down, all the way back to 66.09 million years

you will find this one little skinny strip of rock. That's the Kiti Boundary. That. This one skinny gray line. This gray, crappy... Oh, that... Now, in a very real way, that line that you're seeing, that represents the day the asteroid hit.

The day. Just above that line? That's a little bit after the day. Just below that line? There's a little bit before the day. The line is called the KT boundary. and what's cool is you can actually touch it. You can touch evidence of that moment.

In fact, Kirk, what he did that day was he took his finger and he dug a piece out and he handed it to Molly. This, I'm holding the KT. You're holding... You're holding the KT. Vanery. It's like, it's almost like chunks of coal. Yeah, but it's not. What you're holding is a dark gray mudstone.

It's a carbon-rich mudstone. And in that mudstone, you'll find all kinds of things. I mean, you'll find very rare minerals like iridium that probably came in on the asteroid and got smushed into that line. Those little glass balls I was talking about, those little hell balls. Well, if you get out a microscope

and you look at that rock, you will see them in there. We put up a funny cartoon of the little hellballs. They're all in that line. How thick do you think that line is? It's about an inch. Is, like, hidden in there is sort of the story of that day.

Absolutely. And here's the crazy thing. If this is the line right here, this little strip here. Robert traces a picture the KT boundary with his finger. And then you dig just below the line. You were going to find over and over again dinosaurs everywhere.

I mean, they're not going to be alive, of course. He starts putting some toy dinosaurs onto the line and making them move. I'm giving them a certain amount of energy, which I shouldn't. But they're fossils. And you will find dinosaur fossils from Europe and Idaho and Montana. This one says it was made in China. But if you just go above the line, you don't find any dinosaur. So below the line, scientists have looked everywhere above the line.

And they haven't... Well, everywhere they have looked anyway, they found nothing. It's a different world. That's the amazing thing. It's a different world. And it's pretty where you can go, this is one world, and that's another world. You're literally just pointing pinky to point your fingers spread. Yeah.

This is another moment where I would urge you at some point, not now, keep listening, but at some point watch the video of this performance because what Sarah, Darren, Glenn, and Keith do in this moment visually, it's pretty amazing. Before we go to break, I just want to give a very special thanks to the people who shared the stage with us. Sarah Lipstate from Noveller, Darren Gray on the bass and Glenn Cochie on the drums.

They're both from the band on Fillmore. We were so lucky to share the stage with those guys, along with Video Maestro Keith Scratch, who was doing the live video. And our brilliant puppeteer, Myron Gusser, Oh my God, that guy. It's so good. Check out all of them at radiolab.org slash live. You can see them doing what they do visually.

It's pretty worth watching. Anyhow, we'll be back in a second. Check, check. This is Keith Scratch, the video maestro for Apocalyptic. Radio Lab is supported by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform dedicated to providing a simple way to create a website, portfolio, or online store for business or personal use. Squarespace provides templates and drag-and-drop tools

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Amy. Give it up for Amy. Thank you. Hey, I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. We're continuing with our live performance of apocalyptic from the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington. We just heard a new theory about the end of the dinosaurs, a very sudden, fast, dramatic end. With a sudden musical, bam, at the very, very end. Now, for the next question. This is sort of the obvious next question, which is what made it through and how. Well, we did ask scientists that question, and here is what they told us. If on that day you were a creature in the ocean

And you happen to be within 300 feet of the water surface So if you imagine this room filled with ocean water We're talking about you guys up in the balcony Up there, it will not surprise you to learn You don't do very well There's a certain amount of heat And mostly there's acid rain pouring in So a lot of you will die

But down with the higher paying seats If you're below 300 feet, and this always happens to people with the better anyway, you do fine. And on land, it turns out, plain ordinary dirt is a very good insulator. If you've got 1,200 degrees on the surface, then about 3, 4 inches down, you would be comfortable there for several hours. Oh, just a couple inches. You only need a few inches.

So that means you could be a little worm, and if you squiggle down, you're okay, You could be a beetle squiggly down. You're okay. You could be a dinosaur tending to an underground nest. And if the nest is far enough below the ground, and a lot of them were, then the babies that hatch will have babies that hatch, will have babies that hatch. We will call their babies years later birds. And if you're an early version of a crocodile and you bury yourself deep enough into the mud,

you also get through, as do the plants, roots. A lot gets through, actually. And that actually brings us to what I, I find it be one of the coolest parts of the story. This is the part that involves all of us in this room. So it turns out on that day, as the fire was raging above on the surface, somewhere in a little hole in the ground happened to be a furry little animal. It has a distinction of being the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great.

Great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, because we were getting away with something, I didn't want to push it too far. All of a sudden it was just you and me. Yeah, though. There was a creature down there in a little hole, and when the dinosaurs got cleared away, this creature could step out of her hole. She could step out of her niche. She had more food, more places to roam.

She could populate the planet, ushering in the age of mammals, and now here we all are in Seattle. Oh, don't flatter yourself. It's not a straight line. It's a wiggly line. It's a wiggly line. But here's the problem.

We've never known anything about this animal that gave rise to all of us. We've never known what she looked like. We've never known, you know, how she spent her days. We've never known anything, because we've had no fossils of her. But recently, actually literally, as we were reporting this story, right in the middle of our reporting, a team of scientists led by a woman named Maureen O'Leary, who is herself a mammal, she took fossils that we do have, fossils of this creature's descendants,

and then using fancy algorithms, was able to cross-reference to traits to work her way back for the first time to a composite picture of what we, think our great-great-grandma look like. So now, Seattle, a radio lab exclusive. We present to you our great, great, great, great, et cetera. Here a giant rodent costume thing runs out onto the stage. All right, well, this is what she looks like, and we ought to point out certain anatomical features

that caught the scientist's admiration. First of all, she has very, very pink and fleshy ears, so show them that, and a pale, soft underbelly, It was of all of a very nice fur as Jad is now demonstrating. Could you show them your profile, just so they can see your head? Her skull is considered either rat-like or crocodile. You can go either way, but she does have enormous beady black eyes, a fleshy pink nose, and would you show them your teeth?

She's kind of proud of her teeth because they can tear flesh and they can rip lettuce. She is an omnivore. However, here was the issue. Here was the issue that we ran into. When we asked Maureen, the scientist who did this work, We're like, okay, now we've got an image of this creature that's amazing. What do we call her? What is her name?

This was Maureen's response. Its official name is the hypothetical placental mammal. What kind of a name is that? I'm suddenly feeling bad for this little creature. Well, it's not something that we thought of as we were sort of busily working on the paper. But then a funny thing happened. Our producer, Molly, was talking to Maureen, and she was saying, geez, this is such an awful name.

And Maureen says to Molly, well, you could name it. And Molly says to Maureen, wait, are you serious? And Maureen says to Molly. I don't know. Are you serious? So, we're like, hell yeah, we're serious. Let's crowdsource this, right? This is what mammals do these days.

We crowdsource. I mean, think of this opportunity. A little radio show gets to name the ancestor of us all. So we put out the call to the internet. We got a thousand. submissions in response great names like placentor Flacentor. First.

F-U-R-S-T-N-O-V-A. M-O-B-A. And after eight rounds of voting, the winning name was, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. On the screen you see the following letters appear, one after another. S-C-H-R-E-W-D-I-N-G-E-R. are. Schrootinger.

Shrewdinger. Shrewdinger. Shrewdinger. I can't even tell you what a crisis this was for the staff. This is such a bad day. And the whole experience made us wonder. Should we have died in that asteroid? Do we deserve to be here?

So if you're asking yourself what is the moral of our story, here's what we've shown you. We have a big, mighty species that died. that died. And then a smaller species, which is you and I, we take its place. So you've gotten death and you've gotten resurrection and you got it maybe in a single afternoon. So that's the argument we're making here. This is Jay Malashe's argument that it was

boom over. I mean, it is the suddenness of the whole over that is kind of unimaginable. I mean, like, there you are one day. You have evolved over millions of years to be this long-necked, beautiful creature, 70 feet from your nose

to your ass. and then... Tale, tale. And then in an afternoon, like on one Tuesday afternoon, suddenly you, everyone you knew, gone? Yeah, but there are other ways to think about this. The extinction, yes, was sudden, but in the grand sweep of time, it wasn't really an end. It was just a moment in a stream of endless change. Because everything we see around us, the tallest mountains, the size of oceans, the animals

about us that seems so different from ourselves, every catarrow. that we have in our heads that seems so permanent, blurs given enough time. Mountains erode and become hills, then beaches. Animals change in all kinds of ways. The only thing that's constant, that's always, is change. We like to think of ourselves we humans as somehow inevitable or crucial, pivotal.

At the past was a time when we were missing and the future will always have us in it. But that's an illusion, says this great science, writer Lauren Isley. We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, he says. Changelings who slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We've played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality. What we call reality, says Isley, is an illusion of the daylight, the light of our own particular day.

Just a couple of notes before we go on. That whole dinosaur thing about the sudden, fast end, that is just a theory. Verdict is obviously still out. In fact, in 2011, a team of scientists published a paper saying that maybe the asteroid that hit the Earth that created that devastation was not Baptistina, but another asteroid with a different name. But with the same size and dimensions and all that. So who knows?

Also, when I said to the people up in the balcony, if you were in the balcony, you might have been killed off by heat. I think that turns out to be a little bit wrong. If you had been in the shallow ocean on that day, it would have been acid rain and some other factors that would have done you in. Not so much the heat. Okay, so this is the part of the show coming up where we travel with a bunch of different comedians. Pat Nalswald, Simon Amstel, Ophira Eisenberg, Kurt Brownhuler. Actually, Kurt opened this particular show.

You can see his full set at RadioLab.org slash live. super funny. But on this night, we had two comedians, and so right at this spot, in the middle of the show, out walks a guy, one of the most talented mammals. He looks like, actually,

it's like someone with his finger in an electric socket, huge amounts of hair that are standing like out, you know, like he's got a halo. His name... Reggie Wong! We're just going to play his whole set.

It's a little Seattle specific in spots, but it's just, well... Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, hello. Hello, how how? I'm going to have been here. I'm going to return to the only one of the very

and the same time that's the last time that's here, I'm a bit of a protot, but I'm going to the manchered a pockitot and the car, gent. One swell, with a battal, so that's not going to be rifti and year I'm going to beauch and I agree

a mocha I'm not a lot of my man. And we're haklit that you maur

and they're Microsoft Thank you this is a moment that you have to take if you can and if you can't, you know, then you've lost it.

But once you have it, once you possess the moment, you can do so many things with it. A lot of people tend to just exist within it. Others pawn it off to moment brokers. Or if you're a big fan of moment chants, you can do that. Also, the moment glory blend of coffee single origin from Argentina is excellent. You can get that at most Bauhaus or participating Stumptown coffee roasters. So definitely check that out. Really stoked that we finally closed down that awful Bauhaus coffee and books.

It was just, what a terrible location, right? You know, right on a corner where you can see it really visibly. I don't like that. And I called the city comptroller and I just said, we need to get rid of it. And we need to get rid of many, many buildings because a lot of those buildings are so old up on Capitol Hill. It's just, it gets old. And so I'd like to replace them with new constructions, mostly glass, some contemporary metal. And I want to be able to see the architect's idea.

idea and then see them have to shave off about 40% of that idea by replacing a lot of the materials with cheaper versions of the original design. I enjoy seeing that, and I would rather see that than a coffee shop that promotes a type of communal living that can only happen in an area that it is located in. I just prefer it. That's what I prefer. That's just me. Sorry, guys. I love new buildings. Okay. Maire, my, ma'i. Okay.

So, obviously, as you know, Seattle is becoming Vancouver. And the thing is, like, I'm going to do a song that is about that so you guys can get a little bit more used to the Vancouver culture that is spreading down. Canada. Canada. Little Mr. Rogers. reference but Canada is the land of Maple Leaf. Okay, here we go. Any big fans of

anybody born after 1990? Okay, that's about the tonality you'd expect. Why is it always higher? I don't understand that. Okay, anyways, so you're gonna know this reference. This is from the old Buck Rogers series. Biggie Biggie, biggie, gig, bug. You know, that kind of stuff. So that's for you guys after 1990, so you guys can relate to what I'm doing on stage. And so I hope you like this.

This is definitely, definitely a song. If you're down in Ballard, and having a good time, it's because there's so much Scandinavian energy there that they just do it right. So when you're at the Sunset Tavern, and you're like, why isn't this turned into a glass tower? It's because the power of Norway.

It's Norway they're going to screw with that. You know what I mean? Like Norway at all. You know what I'm saying? There's Norway out of this. I mean, you're basically, you know what I'm saying? It's like a hot dog, you know? You think you want it, and you're like,

I don't know, probably not. But I'm pretty stoked. I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again just because we're in Seattle. I am pretty stoked about Vivachi being replaced by a Starbucks. I just think that it makes sense. It makes sense. Let the people who do it really well do it better.

You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm saying. So this song is going to be one of those songs where you're going to think to yourself, is this better than the original? Maybe. Okay, alright? It's called pastiche in lieu of originality. Here we go.

Hey, it's got to contain, when I need, you know, a sugar. When I want a coffee, I want it's tedious real burnt and I want to compensate with some sugar on top of that so it doesn't taste so shitty anymore, ocean, yeah. The thing is, I think using logic, I think, you know, obviously it is smart to name a company after a character from Battlestar, Galactica, but I just don't, it makes sense. And that's why I'm starting my own coffee business called Silons. Sylons coffee is the best coffee. I have a new movie coming out called Silence of the Lambs and it's a theme song

is done by Garfunkelan Oates. Of course you can probably guess what that song is called. The Sound of Silence and which is just and sometimes and sometimes it's the sound of silence. Okay so this song thank you. And for my next trick. It's been a pleasure. This is my last Radicchio Lab, and I am, in all seriousness,

that's a totally different show, but Radio Lab. It's been awesome, man. I mean, I discovered some really great friends the first time I did something for Radio Lab, and I continue to find great friendships and a love and passion for sound and science and knowledge and art. And so, I think that I'm lucky to be a part of it in a small way that I am. So thanks, Radio Lab, wherever you are. Okay, so this is a quick song. This song is a good one. We trust.

Do you do do do do do do do? Walking across this bearing plane lush for us. Baby, I can complain, but go tearing through the sky with the laser precision eyes, swooping down, taking praise. And knowing that, that shining little dot in the distance is not a super extra shiny star, all the astrophysicist dinosaurs would have said, But in that time, the strange large lizard family desserts made sounds and attacked each other in more coats and clothing.

But oh well, all of that got burned off, and the evidence of an actual intellectual society may not be apparent to us. Whoa, I know it happened to these stacks, moving at probably a top speed of three miles per hour. Or the aliens that donated genetic material to the hominance in order to create the society people that we are and thus explains our fascination for diamonds and goals because we've just kind of dug it up for their spaceships oh yeah no it no it no it no it no it no it no it no it no it no it makes no no no it no it makes I yes no well we'll say that's your one your Thank you so much for a

minute Oh And bears for We shall be sure This man Thank you so much Guys

Thanks Radio Lab Let's just take stock For a second Robert We did our Super Fast Radical Dino ending Reggie did his Reggie ending Which you never quite sure what he's saying

You know Can you imagine We have scripts and everything Imagine if I just want to All evening long It would be outer space Okay, so what's next? What's our next ending? We're ready for the pink ending now.

The pink ending. You mean like the color? Yeah, this is the one that answers, I think, the most basic question you could ask in a show like this. This asks, when did endings begin? It's a serious question. That's a weird one. When did endings begin? Wouldn't there always a, I mean, the moment you had beginnings, wouldn't that then imply an end? Because the beginnings have to do something, end? You'd think so. But if you think hard about the or. origin of the universe, I would propose that when the universe began, which by some interpretation

was a huge explosion of energy, was then condensed and cooled into matter, that that whole event came in without any notion of endings at all. When you get matter, when you get that condensation, you get a list of elements, which we can now turn to, in the periodic table of elements with which you are, I'm sure, very familiar and enjoy every evening before dining or sleeping. Keith here now puts the periodic table up on the screen. So if we look at this chart and we start up in the upper left hand side with hydrogen, and we move through it, the helium and lithium and beryllium and boron and carbon and on and on. As we move through the list, I can tell you that every one of the first 82 elements on this chart,

with two exceptions, which I'll mention in a minute, every one of these has a version of itself that goes on forever and ever and ever until the end of time. Every one of these you're saying is immortal? Is that what you're saying? Yes. Now, here's the thing. When we get to number 80, B. That's Bismuth. I would argue that this is where the universe invents endings. Really? What is Bismuth? It's a rock, kind of a shiny black rock. And you're saying this shiny black rock is where death begins? Yes. Yes, I would say that. That's a fair...

Why would that be? Well, because all the atoms at the bottom of this chart are a little heavier than the ones of the top, meaning they have lots and lots of neutrons and protons. Here Keith brings up an image of a bismith atom with lots of jiggling protons and neutrons. There's so many of them, as you can see, they're having a little trouble holding themselves together. And French scientists studying this atom recently determined that inevitably, inevitably,

something will happen to this atom. It goes something like this. Protones and neutrons fly off the atom, and amazingly Robert's, was perfectly timed in this case, with Keith hitting the button to do it visually, and that had never happened before. Whoa.

You timed that so well. Do that again, do that again. Okay, I don't know if I can do it twice. Well, no, you don't add sound effects. I've done the sign effects, and you do that. One more time. You made him angry. Stop it.

The point I'm trying to make, Keith, is that this atom, when it loses protons, it loses its identity. When an atom decays, this atom is no longer bismuth if it doesn't have the right number of protons. That's the way chemistry works. So you're saying, like, as it sheds its protons and neutrons, it's dying. That's right. Now, here's the cool thing. When we go back to the chart, to number 83, every element after it

Po at runfer, Rarif, dibsig, Mitz, and Rigg. Elements 84 to 118. Also, decay. So on the periodic table you see two teams, basically,

the ones at the top, they're foreverers. They go forever. And on the bottom, you have the ones that die. Right. That's correct. That's correct.

With the two exceptions I mentioned, I should say, 43 and 61, that's technetium and prometium. Nobody really likes those two. They're... I find them actually unnecessary. I'll tell you what, if they mess up the whole logic here,

let's just get rid of them. Let's get rid of them. Get them out of here. We just broke two holes into the table. Let me just say, when we've divided it up like this, now you can see that Bismuth is at the dividing line maybe of the universe, because this is like, this is where you see.

It's like the KT boundary with the dinosaurs. This is a... But for everything. For everything. But the cool thing is, Bismuth is pretty good for you. Really? Like people swat.

bottle little bits of bismuth every time they get tummyaches to do this all the time. You recognize this color, maybe? Screen fills the pink. The pink I mentioned? Yeah. Do you recognize the product associated with this color? You know this product? Peptobismal, yeah.

Yeah, but just say it right. Say it the way it should be said. Pepto, what did I say? What, bismol? No, no, say only the first syllable. Pepto biz. Are you applying that bismol stands for bismith? I don't have to imply it's true.

Pepto contains bismuth. I don't know, Robert. I was with you right. up until this point, but if I had to guess, I would say that Bismal is just the name of the dude that made Pepto B. Jake F. Bismal. No, I'm telling you that in each bottle of pink liquid, there are little black rocks, and that's just the truth. I don't know, man. I don't know. Let me just prove it to you right now. Prove it to me.

Here, Robert appears on the screen in chemistry goggles. In a laboratory suit with a chemistry teacher by my time, Gail Cornell from Brooklyn. And what you then see us do is we take tin tablets of peptobie, we mush them up with a mortar and a pestle, we add some water, we add some hydrochloric acid, we shake, add some aluminum, and you get to see little bits of black rock precipitate out of the peptobismal. Lots of them. I was surprised at how much black stuff is in there. And then I showed the test tube to Jad. Jad, look, you can't deny scientific fact that hiding inside every single Peptosmal tablet is pure. Pure, street-level grade crystal bismuth.

Inside Peptobie, you will find an element that not only cures tummy eggs. Fairlene introduces death to the universe. I think it's such a great element we should have a toast to bismuth. Yeah, let's have a toast. Okay. And we close the segment by both of us taking two big pine glasses, filling them up to the top with Peptobismol and chugging. You always did it faster.

Just by a hair. Hey! So a special thanks to Gail Carnot, my chemist, Sam Keen, who helped write this thing, Lauren Swarthout, who got us the lab connection, and Zach Fanon, who shot it, edited it, edited it, and re-edited it. In typical radio lab fashion. So now, we will pause. Only to do some bismith. This is Darren Gray from On Fillmore. And Radio Lab is supported by next issue, providing unlimited access to popular magazines like Wired, Vogue, Rolling, Rolling,

Stone, people, fitness, popular science, and over 100 more, all for a single price. Listeners can read as much as they want, all in one convenient app, and try one month free at nextissue.com slash radio lab. Hi, this is Kurt Brownler from the stage of the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab is supported by Tableau software, helping people see and understand their data. Tablo lets people connect to any kind of data and visualize it on the fly. Databases, spreadsheets, and even big data sources are easily combined into interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards. What is your data trying to tell you? For your free trial, visit Tablo Software at T-A-B-L-E-A-U software.com slash Radio Lab.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab, and we're going to go back now to the final segment in our show about endings recorded live at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. All right. We're going to close the show out. We're going to shift the mood a bit. We're going to close out this show and our tour with a very different kind of ending.

Yeah, because unlike dinosaurs, you know, dinosaurs have no idea what's ever going to happen to them. But in this story, we have an ending in which the enders can see what's coming. It's coming right at them. Not fast, but in this case, very slowly. So can you guys hear me easily? Easily. Easily. Okay, good. We want to introduce you to two guys.

Chris Jones and Dan Moran. They've both actors in Manhattan. Both been doing it. About 30, 40 years. 30, 40 years. Plays, movies, you name it. Done 540s, album films. Lottie Gosser's Pandemian Circus.

Julius Caesar on Broadway with Denzel. Moonstruck. The Cher movie? Yeah. A lot of Shakespeare, a lot of comedies. They've worked pretty much everywhere there is to work. As it happens, I know this story, because Chris, one of the actors,

is an old friend. We met in a high school musical, actually, many years ago. Oklahoma? You think everything is Oklahoma. I don't know. I don't know musicals. Anything goes. In any case. Our story for both Chris and Dan begins.

Ten years ago. Dan was on stage, big stage. Washington, D.C. I was doing a streetcar. As in streetcar named Desire. He was playing the lead role, Stanley Kowalski. You know the guy that Marlon Brando made famous for yelling. That guy.

And the woman playing Stella said it's really sexy how your left arm doesn't swing when you walk. It's kind of like animalistic. I said, oh, that's cool, so I used it. You thought, all right, if it works, it works. I'll just play the character that way as a guy whose arm doesn't swing. But after the show ended, I was walking down the street to Manhattan, I thought, why isn't my left arm swinging? What's going on?

Now, Chris, right out of around the same time, he was in Delaware shooting a film. A movie by M. Knight Shamelon. Kind of a great movie, if you ask me. Called The Village. There are marks on the door. I played Adrian Brody's father. And while getting ready in wardrobe one day,

he noticed that I had a slight tremor occasionally, difficult time buttoning buttons with my right hand I thought I had a pinch nerve in my neck and I went to see an orthopedic guy and he said you should see a neurologist. I went to a doctor and he said very gleefully

I think you've got Parkinson's why and he had to run a deficit of Parkinsonian he was pleased he was able to help me out he nailed it Now, Parkinson's, if you ask an expert, which we did, Cheryl Waters, Columbia University Medical Center.

Parkinson's is a very mysterious disease. I'm not sure what to think about it now, because it keeps evolving and changing. Some people, according to Dr. Waters, when they get the disease, nothing happens. Nothing. They come with tremor and they die with a little bit of tremor and nothing else ever happens. But in other cases, for some reason... It could wreak havoc. Because sometimes, and doctors really don't know why this is the case, sometimes the disease will just start to march through the brain. It'll begin deep down, low down, in the brain stem.

And then it will gradually inch its way upward. First it'll attack this little cluster of cells. In the middle of the brain, the control movement. And that's when you start to see the shakes. And then little by little, there's a progression. A progression up. A migration. To the surface.

To other areas of the brain. That control thinking. memory, concentration. And in those cases, the disease... It is inexorably progressive. So you got these different kinds of Parkinson's, one that sleeps, one that goes on the rampage. The problem is, when you're diagnosed,

you can never quite be sure which kind you got. Because... For the people in whom it spreads, it can take decades. When he said you have Parkinson's, did you feel like you were in trouble at the time? No, I was a joke. I was a joke.

This is nothing. I'm fine. In the beginning, Dan and Chris didn't really worry a whole lot about this because they didn't have to. In fact, Chris... When I first was diagnosed and was performing... He was doing a lot of Shakespeare. You know, if his hand ever started to shake a bit. It was always nice to have a nice big cloak or cape for me to wear it and hide my hand behind

so that the audience wouldn't see the tremor. Truth is, it didn't happen all that often. It wasn't much of a deal. Chris kept acting. Dan kept acting. And in both of them, their Parkinson's... seem to be the kind that stays asleep. For two years, three years, five years, seven years.

But then, after eight years, it just woke up. I just thought that it got harder and harder to move. Dan says he's not quite sure when it happened, but suddenly his limbs were aching all the time. And that easy control that you have over your body as you're walking down the street where all the limbs are moving together and you don't have to think about it. For him, that started to disappear.

He'd have to think about each leg, each foot independently. Left foot, one, right foot, two. Left heel, one, right heel, two. Chris, he would actually have these moments where he would try to move his arm, where his brain would basically say to his arm, move! But his arm would just sit there.

Stuck. Like it wanted to move, but it just somehow couldn't. freeze on stage. It was a nightmare. And as things progressed, Dan would have these moments in rehearsals where suddenly he would just go blank. I'd done this TV show on FX. I had one scene where I couldn't remember five lines. I just couldn't remember five lines. We'd shot all night on this. I'd go to my dressing room. When I do the lines, I'd come back out, I'd blow it. No, this isn't an easy situation for anybody, but if you're an actor, if you're somebody who has to inhabit a character with a different rhythm than yours, a different flow, use your body to do that, which is how you pay the rent.

For actors, Parkinson's is just awful because it kills their craft. Well, your face becomes a mask. So you haven't got your face. And without face, you don't have flow. The way I liken it, if you take a pebble and you throw it into a pool of water, it goes, and there's a way. ripple that goes, concentric circles go out from the impact. If you take me, my body, my self as an actor, and you throw a pebble into my pool, it goes thud.

There's no fluidity. There's no, it just stops. Once I opened up to the acting world, I had Parkinson's, my agents dropped me. the calls pretty much stopped coming, and that was that. But then one night, something happened. How did this idea come up? Well, it was my first idea, I guess. You're a brilliant idea.

Thank you, buddy. We should say that these two guys, Chris and Dan, they've actually known each other for years. The two of you met doing what? A month in the country. Which is a classic play on Broadway. And Dan explains it was late one night. night he was having insomnia, which is a usual side effect of the medication he has to take.

And he was just looking around for something to read. And he grabs this play off the shelf. Yeah, it's picked it up. It was a play by Samuel Beckett. End game. A play in one act. And he starts reading. Characters, ham, clove. I mean, this was a play that he knew. He had read it before. But that night, it seemed to talk to him in a way that was totally new. Their interior, gray light. Right from the start. started off with a guy shuffling on stage. Glove goes and stands under the window left.

Stiff, staggering walk. Shuffling around. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. And I said, oh yeah, I know shuffling. He thought, huh, I feel this guy. Can't sit, can't get comfortable. Seemed familiar to him.

And then on the next page... Hamsters. Another guy enters the scene. Very red face. Black glasses. Also in bad shape. This guy stuck in this wheelchair. I can't walk anymore.

He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes, his face, the glasses, puts them on again. So here you got these two guys. One can't sit, one can't stand. They're stuck in this little room with these two windows that look out. And outside those windows... Either due to an asteroid, a nuclear holocaust, what used to be green is now gray. Like a wasteland. Is there anyone alive out there?

Do you think of? No. No. Outside their window, they could... see the ocean, but it seems to have stopped moving. There are no waves. Now, in game, that's a term that comes from chess, and it refers to that moment in the game when there are just a few pieces and just a few moves left.

The last few moves before the inevitable outcome. It's not the end, it's the point right before the end, and it's the place where you become aware of the end for the first time. The dinosaur can't do that, but these two characters... They run out of everything, out of pain. The pain killer. Yeah, the pain killers are gone. Out of biscuits.

And they have that awful awareness. And now they have to deal with it. Like, here we are. What do we do? How do we fill up the time on this rock hurtling through space? The more I read it, it just felt like Parkinson's to me. Being locked in a room was my body. I'm not getting out.

There's no cure. I'm not getting out of this room. And then, on page three, one of the cats, a guy named Ham, stops what he's doing and he says, Enough. It's time. It ended. And yet, I hesitate. I hesitate to end. And Dan says something about that line, and yet I hesitate, I hesitate to end.

Just flipped a switch for him. Screw these people who won't hire me because I've got this fucking little disease. It makes me shake or talk funny. I don't need those people. No. Next morning he calls Chris. Chris described the call. You're sitting there and one day the phone rings?

Is that how is happening? He says, how'd you like to get together and take a look at Endgame? Chris remembers thinking, I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm up to it. It's a 70-minute-long play. It's got 12,000 words. The material is monumental. But they thought, no, no, no, just no pressure.

Let's just meet at each other's apartment. So one day, Dan would read one part, Chris, the other part. The next day they'd switch. They did this for almost a year, the two of them. in each other's living rooms, reading the play, back and forth, until finally they contacted the Beckett estate and got permission to put on one live performance in New York. We decided Chris is having more trouble with his movement than I am. I have more trouble with my speech than Chris is.

So I thought, well, why don't I take on the part with all the speech? And you got trouble with moving, so you do the part with all the movement. That makes sense. So you both leaned into your weaknesses? Yes. Well, so the obvious question is, why would two people in danger and in more danger over time, why would you decide to spend time staring at that danger straight in the eye? Like, that's just a weird thing to do.

It's the only way to do it. That's the only way to do it. I can't, like, go through the rest of my life being afraid of this fucking disease. When he said that, I didn't quite understand what he was saying, because if you are legitimately afraid of something, Why would it make you less afraid to stare at its details? That would make me more afraid. I don't know if it's about fear, really.

I think it's about knowing. Knowing what? Just knowing where you are, like where you really are, you know? It's like a kind of journalism in a way. Like I can imagine if you've got this thing that's been stealing from you for 10 years, it's stealing your body, it's stealing your craft. At a certain point you want to know, like, where am I? Am I past it?

Is the end already happened for me? Am I broken? or do I have something left? I mean, it's sort of like in one of the Beckett plays, not this one, but an earlier one, character waltz is on the stage, and he says the following two sentences, I can't go on, I will go on.

It's like those two sentences, contradiction, right? I can't go on, I will go on. It's almost as if Dan is trying to figure out which sentence is he? Is he the I can't? Is it done? Or is he the I will? Like, he's got something left.

And the only way to know that is to look at the thing that's posing the question. Yeah, but what if you put on the play and you find out you get the wrong answer? You find out, I can't. This is what Chris was worried about. The big issue for me was what happens to my sense of myself

if we get to the performance stage of this project. And it turns out that I couldn't cut it. And yet, they go on. After a year of reading this play back and forth in their living rooms, Chris and Dan decide, okay, it's time to find a performance space. Time to hire a director. Oh, they used to come dragging their asses into rehearsal

looking like, these guys aren't going to be able to go from here to there. That's Joe Gaphaffazi, Chris and Dan's director. Shaky and Wiggly, as I used to call him. He's known him for years. You did not call them bad. Oh, yeah, you know, because that's what they were doing. No, Joe says Dan and Chris were two of the best actors he has ever worked with, and oddly enough, in this case, their disease could be an asset.

I believe that, because they're halfway home. I mean, they could feel what Beckett's characters in this play were feeling better than anyone. I never felt for a moment this wasn't going to make the play better. If they could get through rehearsals. Easier said than done. Take the problem with a medication. Now, both of them, when they're peeking on their meds, they are sharp and they're clear, focus. But when the meds start to taper away, they get cloudy.

So the hope was if they were going to rehearse together, they'd have to time it just right so that they pop their pills at the right time and rise together, get clear, and then taper off together at the same time. The medication gives you about an hour and a half window. Might be just enough time to run a few scenes. Problem was... It wouldn't always work. Some days I'd walk in.

And Dan says, even when he timed it just right, sometimes the medication wouldn't take. I would be completely locked up. Chris would be right in the middle of the scene doing really well and then gets so tired he'd have to sit down. Didn't have much stamina. So it's like, let's just turn around, go home, or break out the mattresses. Which sometimes, Joe says, they actually did.

We'd lay around on the floor. You'd lay around on the floor? Yeah. I said, let's lay down. Why don't we lay down and do the lines laying down? That's actually a great exercise. Point is that a lot of times rehearsals were a bust, and as they got closer and closer to the performance day.

Dan would say, take me aside and say, you know, I've got to tell you, Joe. This is okay, but I'm scared out of my mind. You know, scared out of my mind. So it became terrifying. And I said, well, that's good. Since when shouldn't we be scared, right, Dan? And then he'd remind Dan of a basic law of the theater. Terrible rehearsals make great performances most of the time.

But they knew this was a very different situation. Very different. We're at 15. Oh, thank you, baby. Then came July 13th, last year. The people are coming. The night of the performance. Roosie?

You got our understudies? A couple minutes before the show, Dan calls for the so-called understudies and then runs to the back door to smoke a cigarette. I'm looking out of this door and having a cigarette where I looked out and had a cigarette many times before. Everything seems familiar, but I don't belong there.

I feel like I'm... Like, what am I doing? in here. He says he kept thinking, how did I think I could do this? I mean, I'm going to fuck it up. I'm going to forget lines. I'm not the character. I'm not, I'm not fully the character. I haven't rehearsed enough. I haven't had enough rehearsal time. And he says he actually walked out the door, got about halfway out, because he's, at that moment, he was thinking, you know, that, I mean, that question, can I or can I? I've got my answer. And I'm about to go out in front of hundreds of people and show them nakedly that I am broken, that I can't do this, that the end

has already happened. Then he thought, I've started this ball rolling, and I couldn't stop it. So, no. Just do what you have to do. Just start at the beginning, go until the end, and then stop. Okay, so the play begins with Dan in the middle of the stage. He's asleep in a wheelchair, covered by a sheet. Chris paces around behind him. sort of shuffles about, looks out those windows, mumbles. It started off okay. Chris was very worried about getting a laugh. First sound he makes, he gets a laugh.

Right from the start, the audience, God Beckett's humor. That was a great, great relief. But then, the thing, the thing is. Thing Dan feared most happened. In one of the big speeches of the play, he went blank. Oh my God. What's my next line? I lost a line. He says he stared down at his feet for 20 seconds, and then his wife Ruth fed him a line, and he went on.

That was one moment. But there was another moment. A series of moments, actually, that were entirely different. It began... Finished! It's finished. Just after Chris is opening monologue, his Dan begins to speak. Can there be misery loftier than mine?

I tried my damnedest to just stay with the story, moment by moment. Enough. It's time it ended. In the shelter, too. And yet, I hesitate. I hesitate to end. Yes. There it is. It's time and ended, and yet I hesitate. And Dan says as he was up there making that speech, that speech about how it's time to end, and yet he hesitates. A funny thing happened.

You know, my performance muscle started to take over. His body loosened up. His legs, his arms, his mouth. Suddenly they were under his control in a way they hadn't been for months. He can move them without thinking. It's quite remarkable. Cole, yes. Have you not had enough? Yes. We were able to do things on stage. Of what?

For this huge stretch of the play, it was like the disease was gone. That's always the way at the end of the day, isn't it close? Always. It's the end of the day like any other day, isn't it close? Looks like it. What's happening? What is happening? Something is taking its course.

And then? There we are. That I am. That's enough. It was over. Amazing. And then I remember walking backstage and Chris and I just burst into tears. We just started crying.

It was not so much about the release of doing it, but I think it had more to do with family. Our kids and our wives and some really good friends could see that there's still some kind of possibility. And I do believe that it was mixed with feelings of like, oh God, I'm going to miss this. For me, a lot of times when I commit to a project, one of the things that I'm sort of curious about is who will I meet in the person of me in this project? Who will I find in the room when I work on the material? And I was pretty proud of who I found on this one.

There's something in this story that that speaks to all the things. things we feel about endings. I mean, obviously, it hurts. It hurts to end. As Dan says, and this is a line that gets me every night. Oh, God, I'm going to miss this. But there's also something in what Chris says,

that if you stare unblinkingly at the truth, you sometimes find something in yourself that you hadn't seen before, which is in its way a new beginning. And so it's time. Yeah, it's time to end. You know, we've never quite figured out how to end this show

about endings, except maybe to follow Dan's simple advice. Start at the beginning, go until the end, then stop. Yeah. So, ladies and gentlemen, we've started at the beginning, we've gone to the end,

and now we will stop. I'd like to go on a little bit longer, just a little bit. All right, then, Reggie, take us out. This moment right here, this moment, no one had a better view of this moment than me, because I'm sitting there behind the desk. You get out from the desk, walk to the side,

of the stage, get the hyper-realistic T-Rex dinosaur, masterfully puppeteered by Mr. Myron Gousseau, and you guys have like a breakdance dance-off in the middle of the stage. 2,500 people just do not know what they're looking at because they're seeing Robert Crowe, which bust a move. I mean, like, bust a move in that, like, you know, young MC, like, 1995 way, bust and move. It's, like, it's amazing. It's so amazing, in fact, that you have to go to the website right now, RadioLab.org, slash live, and watch it. I also shot multiple videos from behind the stage. I was like, I can't believe I've seen this.

I can't believe I've seen this. It was so... It was the most joyful thing I've ever seen. And I want to thank you for that, Robert, for allowing me to watch you do that night after night. And for Reggie, for creating the music, and for Sarah Lipstate, Darren Gray, Glenn Cochie, Keith Scratch, it was just awesome.

It was awesome. That, plus the musical apocalypse, I will never forget those moments. I also want to thank our sound geniuses Jill Dubuff and Dave Sanderson and Delin Keefe and to our tireless, fearless, and fear-inspiring tour manager Melissa O'Donnell and to the woman without whom any of this would have been possible, our director, Ellen Hoare. Yes. I'm Chad Ibram Ron.

I'm Robert Krollich. Thanks for listening. Pit row one seat 10. Are you ready? Yes. Apocalyptic was performed live at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington by Robert Krollich. Jad Abamrod, Kurt Braunaller, Reggie Watts, Miram Gousseau, Glenn Cochie, Darren Gray, Sarah Lipstate, Keith Scratch, Keith Scratch. Our production team was Melissa O'Donnell, Tom Jeffreitz, Jill Duboth, Dave Sanderson, Keith Scratch, and Ellen Horn,

scenic and video design by Josh Higginson and Adam Schwitzer for Workhorse. Endgame by Samuel Beckett presented through special arrangement with George Burchardt, Inc., on behalf of the estate of Samuel Beckett. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Outback concerts, Nick Nusiforo, Ruth Kreska, Mary Beth, Coddle, Jim Burnfield, and Kendra Snyder.

Wow. All right. That was a minefield of proper nouns, and you got through it. Congratulations. Also, while we're in the thanking mood, I want to thank the NPR music team for so graciously agreeing to

videotape this performance for us. So thanks to those guys with the cameras these see floating around. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology

in the modern world. More information about sloan.org. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Radio Lab is hosted by Jad, Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster, Melissa O'Donnell, Jamie York, Dylan Keith, Lynn Levy, and Andy Mills,

with help from Matt Kelty, Kelsey Padgett, Ariana Wack, Damian Marchetti, and of course, Scott Brown, doing pro bono credit recitation tonight. That's you. You should know you're right Nick. Give it up for Scott Brown. Thank you.