Radiolab - Small Potatoes

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

An ode to the small, the banal, the overlooked things that make up the fabric of our lives.Most of our stories are about the big stuff: Important or dramatic events, big ideas that transform the world around us or inspire conflict and struggle and change. But most of our lives, day by day or hour by hour, are made up of … not that stuff. Most of our lives are what we sometimes dismissively call “small potatoes.” This week on Radiolab, Heather Radke challenges to focus on the small, the overlook, the everyday … and find out what happens when you take a good hard look at the things we all usually overlook.Special thanks to Moeko Fujii, Kelley Conway, Robin Kelley, Jason Isaacs, and Andrew SemansEPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Heather Radke, Rachael Cusick, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Erica HeilmanProduced by - Annie McEwen and Matt KieltyOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Annie McEwen, Matt Kielty, and Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Emily Krieger and Diane Kellyand Edited by  - Alex NeasonEPISODE CITATIONS:Audio -Check out Ian Chillag’s podcast, Everything is Alive, from Radiotopia.Museums -Learn more about The Museum of Everyday Life, located in Glover, Vermont, here.Newsletter - Heather Radke has a newsletter all about small potatoes. It’s called Petite Patate and you can subscribe at HeatherRadke.substack.com.Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Heads up, today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go. Oh, wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yup. I got my potato. Uh, and I'm looking at it and I'm holding it. Maybe it should hold potatoes more. Uh, it's uh, you know, it's a potato, it's washed.

I think it's a potato, it's washed. I think it's a yellow potato. It's washed, it's not dirty, it's a little dirty. It's kind of baffling to actually think about a potato. This could, uh. Yeah, what do you say about a potato? Change the plot, sir. Four, six, even seven potato? Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. And I'm Lula Miller.

This is Radiolab. And today's episode is sort of a gauntlet thrown by our friend, our collaborator, our contributing editor. Okay, guys. Heather Radke. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, so I'm just going to tell you guys, this is some kind of experiment. It could be a failure, and then we just end and go have a lunch, okay?

I love it. It's not worth doing if there's not a potential for failure. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, you two. But in any case... Hi, I'm in my pajamas. The person who's maybe like the embodiment of this experiment is this woman named Claire Dolan. I'm just staring because I don't know how to make coffee.

Oh, here. So Claire is an ICU nurse up in like super rural Vermont. How was your shift? My shift was busy and long. So we sent this really great producer named Erica Heilman who lives near Claire to go and talk to her. Because right on Claire's property there's this place that ever since I first heard about it I've been kind of obsessed with it.

It's this big old barn. This is a shitty ass barn that was thrown up in the 1970s or 80s. It's got this old tin roof. Peeling paint and falling off clabbered boards. But inside. Here we are at the entrance to the permanent collection. Hanging on these pristine white walls, under glass, on top of pedestals are. Match boxes. These ordinary.

The pinwheel. Tiny, tiny bells. Banal. Dust and lint. I would say it's more lint than dust. Everyday things. Many pulleys arranged together in a block and tackle. Keys. An old thread spool. Paper clips. Grocery cart. All a part of what Claire calls the museum of everyday life. Wagon wheels. Wheelbarrow. But I mean, but is it, it's really a museum? Yeah, it's like a real museum. Like, she's got a permanent collection

and she's got like rotating exhibits that change every year. And then she just like puts a ton of thought into these things. Like, for example, the elegance of these furniture legs. She uses this like translucent gallery wire to hang furniture legs

so that they look almost kind of creepily human. like they're showing off their legs and waiting for someone to notice. Or she'll light something... These are gerbil wheels. Hamster wheels. Hamster wheels. Yeah. In such a way that it just grabs your eye.

It's exhibit magic. Yeah. Yeah. And hundreds of people come every year to see this museum in a barn. And like, I know people who drive up from New York City like seven hours, and they, you know, they leave their homes full of just ordinary objects to drive up to rural Vermont to see a barn full of everyday objects. Why would people do that? Why would they like leave their house full of paperclips

to have to drive hours to go see a barn full of paperclips? I mean, it's a reasonable question. But I think it's because through her displays, you know, she has these like, you know, she has like wall labels full of beautiful text that like describes the history of an object or tells the story of a really specific object describes the history of an object or tells the story of a really specific object or an anecdote about the object. And she's able to show you

that there's just... More to that thing than you would think. But like how does she do that with a with a bell or a box of matches? Well, she kind of did it while we were sitting in the studio together. She just pointed at this cup, this little paper cup that we were both drinking out of. Like if you think of the cup, right? It's an object that is made for the human hand. It echoes the shape of how your hand wants to curve around.

And it has this incredible affordance of ministering to your thirst, right? Like you're able to drink things because you have a cup. But it also has this elegant form, right? Like the interplay of positive and negative space. And then, you know, you think, okay, drinking out of a cup, how consequential is that? But, you know, I work in an intensive care unit in this little regional hospital in Vermont. And, you know, I can't tell you, like, for someone who swallowing has been impossible or not allowed, you know, to finally, like the moment that they can grip a cup and take a drink is a profound experience than like a really important moment. Right, even though it's someone just sipping from a boring paper cup.

Yeah, it's a dumb little cup. Alright, so I wanted to start with Claire because she kind of hits on this thing that I've just been kind of obsessed about for, I don't know, like maybe the last couple of years even. It kind of started at the beginning of the pandemic where I would call this friend of mine up and I would leave her these voice messages or I'd talk to her on the phone and I'd just be like, oh my God, I bought the wrong light bulbs and they're so fluorescent and I just wish I had those ones that are so nice and warm.

Or I would just be like, I just can't believe I have to do the dishes again. But then also, you know, like this maybe more delightful version of the same thing, like the little curl on the back of my daughter's hair that's only going to be there for two weeks before it kind of turns into something else. Riveting, riveting stuff, Radke. And of course, it was not riveting, especially considering what was actually happening in the world, which was that there was this like massive pandemic and tons of people were sick and dying. And so when I talked to her about those things, I had this kind of bit of shame about it, because they're so fundamentally small.

In proportion to the world on fire. In proportion to the world. Yeah. I would always say sort of guiltily, these are such small potatoes. But at the same time, you know, if you really think about it, most of our lives are actually just made up of these, you know, these small potatoes, like going to the dry cleaner or eating a ham sandwich or whatever. And I think that there's something kind of important about just how massive a part of our lives these things are. And so, taking a cue from Claire, I want to do a whole show about ordinary,

everyday things that make up so much of our lives. This sounds like a terrible idea. This sounds like the most boring episode. No, it's not going to be boring. Or it's not the goal isn't to be boring. It's that- So it'll just incidentally be boring? No, it's not going to be boring at all.

I think it's sort of a challenge because the truth is that you guys are kind of obsessed with big stories, you know, submarines and death and wars and Arctic seals or whatever. And I guess I want to see what happens. What we're missing really, when we only look at these kind of big grandstand, you know, like marquee parts of the world. I feel like you're asking us to commit a cardinal sin. Like, it's like literally every story finding storytelling impulse we have is to go big, big, big.

Yeah, but what's more fun than committing a sin? So I have a series of stories for you today about people wrestling with the routine, the ordinary, the seemingly boring stuff of life, and finding out what you can see when you look hard at something that we just generally overlook, including... It's nice to have potatoes. ... a man who's been asked to just look at a potato. In terms of what it actually looks like, you don't really often think of what a potato looks like.

Without knowing why. Oh, God. Okay, we have really leaned into the premise. All right, so I'm glad you guys are all the way in and super excited about this. I wouldn't go that far, but all right, we're here, we're here, we're continuing to be here. Yeah. All right, so again, kind of inspired by Claire, I thought we could kind of go through this like we're

in a museum. So it's like a set of exhibits or maybe if you please, a platter of small potatoes. And I thought I would have you kind of read each title of each piece like it's the, you know, like a... Plackard. The wall text. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Little idea? Yep, sure. Exhibit one. First early potato. Achim Lenon, Alexandrine Poussard, Artichoke Jaune, Aspazie. The light at the end of the tube.

Okay, so this one comes from our producer, Matt Kilty. So, let's go. All right. We begin at sunrise. Okay. Sunrise? Matt, I know when you wake up, it's not sunrise. Okay, fine.

Mid-morning, how about? We're up. I spend way too much time looking at Twitter on my phone. In bed. In bed. In bed. But eventually get up, open the blinds. Whisk away the shades. Throw them open. Oh yeah.

And the day begins. Go make coffee. Love that part of the morning. The best. And are you in your like pajamas? Eh, depends. But okay, make some oatmeal, do a little bit of reading, go to the bathroom, open the tiny little medicine cabinet and Matthew we have a problem staring me

in the face look at the tube Matthew is look at it okay Okay, so we got an extremely flat, shriveled, flaccid, crinkled tube of toothpaste. And it's just like, okay. Crud. Here we are again. Again? Yeah, yeah, it's the moment that we all have to face where the toothpaste tube is out of toothpaste. Yeah, and that's a real bummer

because it feels great to brush your teeth. It does feel nice to brush your teeth. And also we all need to because we're humans living in society. It's an essential part of American life. So, okay, so this is the thing that I wanted to explore with you today, which is that moment, that small potato of when you are holding an empty tube of toothpaste because... It looks empty, but is it empty? That is the question, Heather,

because even though it looks like you might not have any toothpaste, I think we all know there's some toothpaste in there. And thus begins a journey. Day one. What will we do? Okay, so you got your empty tube and unless you're one of those people who's like stocked up with toothpaste and the moment something gets a little bit challenging in your life, God forbid there's a little bit of a hurdle in

front of you. You just throw away your toothpaste for the rest of us, at least those of us who aren't using those stupid little clips with our toothpaste tubes. For the rest of us. Opportunity knocks. Go ahead. Open the door. I'm going to get it. I'm going to get that toothpaste. Oh, god. So you start pushing.

Pushing forward. OK, here we go. With your fingers, wherever you can, pushing towards the top. I've got to start rolling it from the bottom here. You roll the toothpaste tiny tight turn I used the you don't use the counter as part of this. No just these hands, but after like a couple minutes Oh god You do get to the point where there we go. You've done all you can do and put my thumb right near the cap

I'm gonna push and then oh, yeah all the sudden You can see like this's this big like, gush of toothpaste. No problem. And it is one of life's little tiny joys, a little delight. Right, because you're kind of getting something from nothing.

Yeah, it's like water from a stone, which, this is a thing, and I don't think people realize this, is once you've taken that step, you can actually go so much further. Like to the grocery store to buy a new tube of toothpaste. Shut up, Heather. No, you can get to...

I don't even know if I know how to actually describe it exactly, but have you seen, have you ever seen that episode of Seinfeld? Looks like we're going to need some gas. Where Kramer's test driving a car and he's in the car with the salesperson. How much gas you think is in there right now? Well, it's uneat. They're running out of gas, which in and of itself is like a total small potato.

And have I been completely below this life? They decided they're gonna see how long they can go on empty. Oh, I never felt so alive. Basically, they're gonna try and glimpse at what empty truly means. So, what I am proposing to you, Heather, is to join me on this near empty tube of toothpaste and to see what's on the other side.

But don't we know what's on the other side of empty? You might think you do, but until you actually make that trip? Yeah, you're right. Alright. I guess. You have no idea. And so... Day two. Aren't we a happy little boy? Get back on top, baby.

Plenty of paste. You gotta be a little frugal. Oh, god. That's too much. But mostly... Day three. It's a little frugal. Oh god that's too much. But mostly. Day three. It's a thrill a minute. Day four. Oh my god there's so much toothpaste. Day five. Day six. Oh he's brushing away. Seven. Oh yeah. Eight. Pop it open. Day nine. This is gonna be real low. Oh God.

Let's give it a shove. Come on. All right, I'm just gonna point out that this is where I quit. For what it's worth. Like you've already gotten a new tube? By this point, I quit for what it's worth. Like you've already gotten a new tube? By this point, I've bought a new toothpaste.

Yeah, but you don't have to buy a new tube. But my question is why I haven't to, because it's obviously- It's because I forget. I just, I forget. I don't remember, I don't think about brushing my teeth until I have to brush my teeth, but probably in part because you're not,

there's still toothpaste there. And sure, it's getting harder. It's getting tougher to get the toothpaste out. This is where you separate the boys from the men. This is where you actually cross the threshold. This is where you enter into a new realm of empty. What's on the other side of the- The dividing line of what you thought was empty

and this new empty? Yeah. Well... Day 10. Oh, fuck. There is greater pain. Ah, there's... There's also...

Day 11. Oh my God, I love it. Greater pleasure. Okay. The 12th day. The 13th. I can't fucking just get the tooth. There's ingenuity.

Get the bristles in to the nozzle. Craftiness, cleverness. The mastery of tools, Heather... ...is what lies beyond. Day 14. Confronting... ...the toothpaste... ...again.

It turns into kind of a nightmare. And then eventually... Day 15. Well, eventually you run out of- Eventually there's nothing left. Yeah. And for me, that is when I take the toothpaste tube and I take a pair of scissors and I cut the tube open.

All right. Open it up. Take the toothbrush, open up. And then you can put your brush into the inside of the tube and you can kind of scrape up Whatever little tiny bit of toothpaste is still kind of caked on the walls. Okay It's like you've eaten the chicken and now you're sucking on the bones. Yeah, you're like pulling out the marrow and yeah, that's it That's it. And does that, how does that, I mean, having never experienced it myself, is that a moment of satisfaction or is it a little bit of a let down or?

Well, it's like, it's a little embarrassing. Why? Because I mostly just can't remember by toothpaste because I'm a child. But I don't know, it's also like it feels like... an honorary death. The tube is finished. It has been fully sacrificed. And that's it. But remember, my sweet child,

with death comes life. You can refuse? Thanks so much. Nope. Day 16, I go to the store. Are you like a cinnamon guy? I prefer the mints. Winter mint, peppermint. Yeah, spearmint.

And then you come home. Yeah, and I do always love the packaging. I love the box, the rectangular long box. That's very satisfying. Popping it open. And then getting to hold a big fat tube of toothpaste. You grab your brush, you got your new tube. It's nice and plump.

Yeah, like a fat little pillow. Oh, all right. Okay, here we go. But wait. Given everything that happened, is there any part of you that feels compelled to sort of ration it out? To only take a little? Oh god no.

No, it's just like... The bounty is there. Exactly. But I do feel like underneath all of it there is this sadness. Well, what's sad about it? Well, it's just like, it's like the routine of it all, of where you're like caught in this weird dance with a tube of toothpaste that's a part of a routine of brushing your teeth.

It's like one of the many other routines that make up your daily life that feel like you have no choice in them. They just exist. And I don't know, you feel like Sisyphus or something with the boulder, just pushing the boulder over and over and over again. And the fact that that's what so much, I think, I feel like so much of your life is that, that's what feels so sad. Right, right. It's like you could measure life in empty tubes of toothpaste or piles

of dust that you swept up. And that feels like not a very satisfying way to measure a life. Yeah. the tube. Push the boulder. Squeeze the tube. Push the boulder. Squeeze the tube. And what do you say about a potato? All right. So this is Jim McEwen, the brother of our producer, Annie McEwen. And this is day five with his potato. It's a very, it's a handsome shape. Feels good in your hand. It's got a nice weight.

It's got little dimples little imperfections it's uh maybe it's an oblong shape umbloid oblong kind of looks like a mango all in all a pleasing thing to hold not a very interesting thing to look at for too long, but it just feels nice in your hand knowing that potatoes have sustained us for so long and continue to do so. I hope this helps. Let me know what else I should be saying. We got, we made it across the border with the potato, undeclared. Day 11 with the potato. Now in, where are we?

New York state with the potato. When we return, a man and his potato on an epic journey. And also potatoes on a beach, potatoes by the billions, and potatoes on a grave. If that appeals, stick with us. Great. The potato has made it to Florida. The humidity here is hard on the potato. Day 12 with the potato.

It's looking more weathered, wrinkled, squishy. The top is dented more. It's losing color. It really looks like an old person. Hello, it's potato night. It's Happy Valentine's Day potato. Day 14 with the potato. I've been telling people about my potato.

They're always surprised and I say, you wouldn't understand, really. It is a, you know, it's my friend. Okay, Lulu. Lotthiff. Radiolab. we are back with Heather Radke. And her collection of small potatoes. That she is force feeding us.

Come on. No, we're only kidding. We are happily walking through this museum considering the unconsidered. And so, okay, what's next? What's our next exhibit? And curious to see what you're going to serve up. That's the mode. That's the mode. Okay. All right.

Next up, do you wanna read the exhibit text? Okay. Exhibit two. Caesar, Calgary, Castellin, Santor, Ceres, Charlotte. The whole potato in a grain of sand. Hello. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good. Good. How are you?

So this small potato- I don't know what it is, but I'm ready. Comes to us from this guy named Ian. My name is Ian Chilog. What else do you want to know? Well, maybe- I reached out to him because he makes this podcast that gets at

the same small potatoes question, but in a totally different way. So I make a show called Everything is Alive, in which I interview inanimate objects. Well, let's just start, settle in, have you introduce yourself for us. My name is Lewis, and I am a can of Go2Cola. That's a store brand.

Go2, G-O-2, Cola. So every episode, Ian invites an actor to come on the show. My name is Dennis. I'm a pillow, obviously. And just be an ordinary everyday thing. Yeah. Like a chainsaw, lamp post, or a towel, pencil, or a toaster. My name is Emmy. I'm a pregnancy test. And he just kind of interviews them about their lives. I know that eventually if everything goes according to plan, I'm going to get peed on. Yeah. The conversations are pretty much totally improvised. Ian takes it really seriously and the actor takes it really seriously. And so there's this feeling as you're listening that you're actually hearing a very personal interview

between a great interviewer and, like, a stapler. Like, I'll occasionally be talking to an object, and I'll realize that the whole time I had a question in my head that I didn't ask because I was afraid of offending the object. You know? Like, the same anxiety you have when you're interviewing a human. Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. I took this one particular episode that Ian did,

which I really love, and I'm gonna play you some of that show where you'll hear Ian interviewing this thing, and then you'll also hear me talking to the person that he got to play that thing. It's a potato, right? It's gotta be a potato. It's not a potato.

Okay. About what it was like to be a thing. All right. Cool. Okay, so here we go. My name is Chioki and I am a grain of sand. And tell me a little bit about sort of where you spend your days right now.

Right now I am in an aquarium in some dude's house. There's a couple of fish. I think they're goldfish. So what did you do to prep? Ian is anti-prep. He was like, don't research sand. Okay, so that's Chioki Ianssen, the human. And I was like, bet. Let's go.

He's the director of the Community Media Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. And I might read that you're also like the voice of NPR or something. Oh, yeah, I'm the voice of underwriting for NPR. So you like read the ads? Support for NPR comes from NPR stations. Oh, nice. Yeah, sounds familiar. Anyway, he's also a philosopher.

He studied philosophy and he spent most of his career teaching philosophy. Mostly German idealism and Africana philosophy. So when Ian called him up to see if he wanted to be a grain of sand, Shioki was pretty psyched because he had an idea about sand that came from his years as a grain of sand. Shioke was pretty psyched because he had an idea about sand that came from his years as a philosopher. Yes, yeah. So it's like I wanted to take really seriously the notion of a grain of sand

to having its own existence and subjectivity. Do you know how old you are? Not exactly, no. I think it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of years. Like, I mean, I wasn't always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, like, do you know about the myth of Sisyphus? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like...

Do you know about the myth of Sisyphus? Yeah. Yeah, that's a funny one to me because... Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity. But really, the boulder would eventually erode... I mean, 100,000 years or so, it would be like a little pebble, like, just like stick it out. Sisyphus will be done in no time, you know?

You know? Eventually it's just gonna be sand. Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus, after some time, would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder. So, yeah, so he's cursed for eternity, but really, it's he just needs to get through, I don't know, 50,000 years or something.

Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that'll show the gods. It's funny to think about a man serving out his eternal curse, and what it is is very easily pushing a marble along the ground. Yeah. It ultimately ends up worse for the boulder

than for Sisyphus. Oh, for sure. The boulderoulder than for Sisyphus. Oh, for sure. The boulder is destroyed while Sisyphus lives on for eternity. See what I mean? And yeah, and like, and is Dizzy the whole time? I don't know. And how good is, like, and how good is Sisyphus in conversation. So when I was talking to Chokhe, I was really curious if having spent so much time as Sand,

if he had a new perspective on Sand. But actually he was like, no, not at all. I mean, I think it's more like I think about people differently. The entire existence of the grain of sand is perceiving things and thinking things. And so what it's doing really is working to understand humanity. Yeah, I mean, I think that if there's one difference between them and I, sorry, I'm just having trouble with the pronouns. You know, we're doing this interview and I'm a grain of sand.

But that's not really the way that I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, we are sand. Okay. So you see that there's the kind of mass noun thing happening. And it's weird to talk to you because you don't have a mass noun thing or you don't seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So you save yourself that you're a person, right? Yeah, yeah, I would say I am a person.

So, like, why aren't you a grain of person? Like, why do I not consider myself as, like, a fraction of all of humanity? Yeah, like, that makes more sense. Yeah. It just seems to me like if you recognize the degree to which you owed your existence to other people, you might also be nicer to other people.

Yeah, I read this thing that there are seven quintillion, 500 quadrillion grains of sand in the world. So, like, all of that you consider is you. I mean, I'm not saying there's a psychic connection or whatever, I'm just saying that when I think of what I am, I am the sand in the aquarium, or we are the sand. And when I'm on a beach, we are the sand on the beach. I have to say, I find the beach, at least just like sitting on the beach, boring.

Do you find it boring? Yeah, so I don't really experience boredom. All of my existence is observation and reflection, so I'm never bored. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I've noticed that humans have a kind of problem with a, well, I say a problem with boredom. They have a problem with time, right? Because it seems to me that boredom reveals a fundamental anxiety that many humans have about their lives in the first place. A constant kind of

question as to where is this going? What should I be doing? And so then there's not really a willingness to kind of sit and just be. Which, I recommend. You should really try it sometime. Do you want to just, do you want to try it? Do you want to just sit and be right now? Oh man, that sounds great. Let's do it. I have to say I'm already starting to feel uncomfortable. I think this is great. I'm sorry. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. I'm in the Fort Myers Florida airport and I went through security. Day 15 with the potato. And they checked my bag and he went right for the potato and he took it out and he looked at me and said it's a potato and then the nice man gave me back my bag with the potato and now

we go to Chicago and then to Ottawa so then the customs they that's the the last leg is the toughest one but we made it through with a nice man saying, it's a potato. So that was good. Okay. Potato, uh, back on home soil here. Let's go. You can't have my potato. As much, you can try, but you can't take it. Potato lives on. Okay. All right. Uh,, okay, exhibit number three. Reine Blanche, Reine de May, Eikenacker, Rodion Rose, Rohan. One billion years of solitude. Take that, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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

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

And I was hoping to find earlier evidence of animal life, earlier evidence of complex multicellular life. And so I started out. But first Roger had to get the rocks that were that age, which just so happened to be deep in the Australian outback. Yeah, that's right. I spent months in the desert with a field hand. We would walk out every day up to 20 miles in 95-degree heat

in gorges and slot canyons with sledgehammers and chisels to break the rocks up. So how big of a rock do you end up with? Oh, fist-sized chunks, carrying them on our backs all the way back to our base camp, bag them up, put a number on them, and ship them back to America. Anything alive would have been microscopic. So you need to analyze the rocks closely back in the lab. So he has to get them back to Harvard, which is where he worked. And once he has them there, he has to take each one of these rocks.

And cut it into little slices so you can shine light through this thin sliver of rock. And then you can look at it under a microscope, see if there's any little single cell fossils in the rock. So Roger is staring into this microscope day after day, rock by rock, slice by slice, hoping to discover something unexpected, something novel, something weird. So how long are you looking into the microscope, looking for something weird? Two years. Two years?

You spent two years looking into the microscope? We collected a lot of rocks. And after two whole years, 600-something whatever days, I discovered nothing. Oh my gosh. Found nothing. He realized this entire period of Earth's history. It was supremely uninteresting.

As far as you could tell, there were no great events, no dramatic evolution of life, no ice ages, no giant volcanoes, no shift in the chemical composition of the sea or the air. For close on a billion years. Nothing happened. But inspired by his work, this has now become a famous period in time in art's history. It's called. The Boring Billion. I think I have a hard time wrapping my brain around what a billion years would have felt like.

A billion years is an incomprehensibly long time. Imagine it. It's a year and then a billion of them. It's incomprehensible. It almost makes me angry then that you're just giving it, you have the largest frame that you could possibly be looking into and there's nothing there. Like that just feels maddening to me. Well, it's strange. You know, the rest of Earth history seems to have been dynamic and

full of change. The atmosphere got oxygen in it. There were snowball Earth events when the Earth froze over completely several times. Radical originations and extinctions of organisms. Lots changed fast. But the rocks I was looking at seemed to record none of that. There were bacterial communities in the ocean. The only life on land at that time would have been a little layer of cells in damp places. But the climate, the chemistry of the oceans, the activities of life,

they're all interacting with each other and stabilizing each other for close on a billion years. It's uncanny. I think what's so cool to think about is like, when you think of the history of life on Earth, you just kind of imagine like conflict and change and like things that struggled and things that fought. And there's just something weirdly comforting about knowing that for a billion years, Earth was like, it's okay. We don't have to change anything. Like, let's just keep things the way they are. It's kind of working right now.

And that is remarkable in a way. Do you ever feel guilty for calling it dull or boring when you look back on that paper? No, not a shred of guilt. I feel no remorse. And let's say this, I don't work on that interval of Earth history anymore. I'd had enough. I work on much older rocks now.

And I'm also an astrobiologist. So I also ponder questions about is there life elsewhere in the universe? And... Not like that boring stuff that you were working on earlier. Well, the universe is vast and boredom may be a feature of life in the universe. We don't know. Maybe that's exciting. Alright, we gotta take a quick break, and we'll be back in just a billion years.

Annie, I have my potato again. Day 25 with the potato. Tonight with the potato. Ah, the potato is getting old, older every day. It's drying, it's parched, it has little barnacles on it. I still do like the shape. I feel that I enjoy the simplicity of it and it's sort of a comfortable feeling because the potato, I don't have to explain myself to it and it's fine with me, I think. But I think we understand each other. We don't have to explain myself to it and it's fine with me, I think. But I think we understand each other.

We don't really have to say anything sometimes. But it's sad the potato won't always be here. Sad it can't always be this way. But it is hanging in there pretty good. Okay, bye. All right, Lulu. Latif. Radiolab.

We are back with contributing editor Heather Radke, taking us to starchy places we would not otherwise have gone ourselves. And I'm actually sort of surprising myself to the degree that I'm enjoying it. Well, I only have one more, so I'm so glad that you got a little bit on board at least here at the end. I'm on board. I'm on board the potato express here. Okay, so I'm gonna say this is a pretty potato-y potato. So if you can just read our last exhibit text here. Okay.

Exhibit four, potato, c'est moi. I feel like I need to read that in a Miss Piggy voice. Do it, please do. Yeah, hold on, hold on. Exhibit number four. Captain Vandale, Colonel Cannebnebec, Carpondy, King. Potato, say what? Okay, that, I was not, I can do better.

That's so good. I could do better. A friend of mine on my way here when I was talking to you, he goes, you should introduce yourself as the Spudstead. I'm like, I'm sure they're gonna love that. We do love that, we love it. Okay, so for this next story, Heather actually let me join in on the conversation with this guy here.

My name is Matt Severson. I'm the director of the Margaret Herrick Library. The Academy Awards Library. Yes. Also, thanks to- Have you ever gotten to touch an Oscar? All the time, actually. Okay. Do. Okay. Do you get to like, have you ever gone?

Uh, many, many times. Okay. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Love it. Back to small potatoes. Okay, right. So I invited Matt to talk to us today, not about the Oscars or some super famous red carpet star, but instead about a lesser known but truly brilliant filmmaker named Agnes Varda.

That's our lady. Varda was a filmmaker and a photographer and an artist, and she died just a few years ago. I believe she was 90 years old when she passed away. She's known for being an important part of this French film movement in the 60s that brought the cameras out of the glossy film studios and into the streets with real people doing real things. And that had a huge influence on the way movies are made around the world today. But the thing I'm gonna tell you about happened much later in her career. In 2000 when she was in her 70s, she made this film called The Gleaners and I.

It was a documentary about the French tradition of gleaning, which is the act of salvaging what other people have discarded. And during the course of the film, Varda also looks at herself, her own aging body. The camera focuses on the white roots of her hair. And on her hand, which is wrinkled, has sunspots. And the most famous scene in the film happens in a field where there's been a potato harvest. There's all these potatoes that are in the dirt, which aren't good enough, and are there to kind of rot. And Varda is standing there watching as this man roots through the left behind potatoes, looking for the ones that are still good.

And he picks one up that is in the shape of a heart. It's yellowish-brown and dirty and it's big. And she kind of cries out. She's like, give me the heart. And she looks at it. She puts it in her bag and she starts looking in the dirt, sort of digging through the dirt for other heart-shaped potatoes. And she films her hands reaching out for them and picking them up.

And I met, if I could say, heart-shaped potatoes. And then I took them home. I found them beautiful. Here she is talking about it in a lecture years later. And this is the cheapest and the most modest vegetable. And its shapes gave us a message. It was this discarded object. It was worth nothing. But the shape invited her to keep looking at it gave us a message. It was this discarded object. It was worth nothing, but the shape invited her to keep looking at it

and to think about what it made her feel. And that hardship with this became important. After that film came out, Varda just kept looking at potatoes and thinking about potatoes. And three years later. At the Venice Biennale, one of the most important contemporary art shows in the world.

Ooh. Yeah. Varda is invited to do an art installation there. And you know, artists are always doing weird, provoking, disturbing art experiences that are making you think about God or the environment or death or whatever. Right. But Varda just shows up with a bunch of potatoes. Okay. The name of her exhibit is Pata-Tutopia, essentially potato utopia.

She took about 1,500 pounds of potatoes and put them on the floor. And then there's also a video installation on the wall. Three different screens showing a close-up of a potato, a far away shot of a potato, a slow pan across a pile of old, wrinkly, heart-shaped potatoes growing these long white roots. And they look kind of almost like gross or bizarre and also kind of beautiful, but they're almost not even identifiable as potatoes. Wow. But really, the crown jewel of this exhibit was actually, it's actually, well, Lulu's

never seen these pictures, so maybe we should just Google Agnes Varda, Venice Biennale. Yeah. Oh, yes, okay. Because mingling amongst all these, like, well-dressed, arty people with their sunglasses. Sorry, I got there. Okay. Okay. All right, so Lulu, why don't you tell us what you see? Okay. Okay. I see an older woman. She's got like grayish hair and some purple in it.

It's like a short, blunt cut, kind of. And she is in a giant potato costume. It's very, it looks really like a potato. And all you can really see is her head and her little hands poking out of it, kind of going like jazz hands almost like, here I am. And it's just, it is the color of a potato. There's creases, there's crinkles, and she is just a sweet, she looks like a sweet old lady in a potato. And in the potato costume is an audio rig, and so coming out of the potato costume

is her speaking all the names of dozens and dozens of different types of potatoes. No! So just listing kinds of potatoes in French? In French, in French. Oh, this is very surreal and wonderful, but what is it actually about for her? I have a quote actually. She said, utopia is the belief that by filming an old rotten potato, you can express the beauty of the world.

Looking at the potato is like looking at a face, at how different each person is, and giving everyone the right to be themselves, to look beautiful in my camera. That's very touching. It is, yeah. I mean, I think what Varda was doing, or kind of at least how people reacted to what she was doing,

she was looking at the potato, and she was sort of never not looking at the potato and she was sort of never not looking at it. She would look and look and look and look at it from all these different angles and look at a bunch of them and look at an old one and look at one that was rotten. And in this way, it was giving people permission. And maybe it's more than permission. It was saying, you should do this. You should look at these things that we overlook, and you should look for a long time, and you should see what is there. And if you do that, you're going to find a kind of endlessness. We have to give our affection to what is modest, what is unknown, what is not taken seriously.

And you know, I think that that mode of being, it was very powerful for a lot of people. People began sending her heart-shaped potatoes in the mail. They would leave heart-shaped potatoes on her windowsill. And ten years later, I still get in my mailbox heart-shaped potatoes. Some people drop one with a name or nothing. They know that I love them. So be ready to send me potatoes. For the rest of her life, people regularly just gave her heart-shaped potatoes. And when she died, people placed heart-shaped potatoes on her grave. And they still do, even today.

Did you put a potato on her grave? I did put a potato on her grave? I did put a potato on her grave. Yeah, as you were talking, I was full screen staring at a photo of one of these old heart-shaped potatoes and it is very like, it's such a tender feel. I mean, the skin of this potato looks, and I was holding my hand up next to it, my increasingly truly wrinkled hand, I just crossed 40, all the things, you know. The wrinkles in the potato are so similar to human skin wrinkles, like very, very,

just something similar geometrically is going on. And it is powerful to think like that is, that is worthy of attention, that is not a thing to be hidden, that is, that is worthy of affection. Affection not a thing to be hidden, that is worthy of affection. Affection for her, for the potato, and like, at least for me, the cord it's striking is like there's affection worthy here of these objects of which you might be one. Hello, it's potato night.

Day 40 with the potato. I've heard it might be the last one. And I don't think I feel very good about that. I think the potato is doing just fine. So I am holding the potato. I already feel better. It was a rough weekend, but not for the potato. I'm looking at it. I'm looking very close, very close.

It's shrunk. It's lost weight. Yeah, it's very close. It's shrunk. It's lost weight. Yeah, it's getting old. Still got its nice, what's that color? You know, like a very pleasing, tawny yellow, like a, like a, like a hay field in the fall after the hay's been pulled off of it, just where your eye can rest, that type of color. It's beautiful in its way. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just, if we could all be what we are, like how the potato is a potato, that would

be really good. It's a very interesting experiment. I'm emotional about the potato tonight. It's a good, it's just been a nice, you know, it's been an honor. Yeah, I'm gonna hold on to it, I think. I think that's all for now, I guess. And, sorry, one more thing. I thought it might want a bit of water, so I put a little bit of water on it to get it wet to see if it regained some of its vigor, you know.

And I told my girlfriend I was going to, you know, thinking of putting a little bit of water on part of the potato and if that was a good idea or not. And she said, I think that's enough with all that. But I put a bit of water on it. That's it for the show. We are going to read the credits while eating potatoes. What do you got Lulu? I got, I got sauteed ones and boiled ones.

Classic. What about you? I got someed ones and boiled ones. Classic. What about you? I got some French fried potatoes and some ghost pepper potato chips. Alright, let's go. Nothing like hosts eating. This episode was the brainchild of our contributing editor, Heather Radke, and she has recently launched a newsletter all about small potatoes.

It's called Petite Patate and you can subscribe at HeatherRadke.substack.com. This episode was reported by Heather Radke, Rachel Husek, and Matt Kilty. It was produced by Matt Kilty and Annie McEwen. Music and sound design also from Matt Kilty and Annie McEwen plus Jeremy Bloom. A lot of thanks on this one too. Okay, so first of all to Erika Heilman, who you heard at the top. She has her own podcast produced by Vermont Public Radio called Rumble Strip. It is so great. We've actually already featured one of her amazing stories here on Radiolab. If you want to start with that one, it is called Finn and the Bell. Claire Dolan runs the Museum of Everyday

Life in Glover, Vermont. MuseumofEverydayLife.org. Also to Ian Chilag, who gave us The Grain of Sand story. His amazing show is called Everything is Alive. So great. And it is part of the Radiotopia Network, which is itself a cornucopia of great shows. Go check them out. Actors you heard from that show, Louis Kornfeld, Canicola, Dennis Pacheco, The Pillow, and me Blotnick, The Pregnancy Desk. And Jim, dear wonderful Jim McEwen, brother to our very own Annie McEwen who gave his heart to a potato. And if you want more Jim, he's actually a writer and he has a novel called Fear Knock, Jim McEwen. Thank you. Special thanks also to Kelly Conway, Robin Kelly, Moeko Fuji,

Jason Isaac, and Andrew Siemens. I'm Lulu. I'm LaTiff. This is Radiolab. Big stories coming. Yeah, big, big potatoes. Only big potatoes from now on. Bye.

Oh, they're spicy and I ate so many so fast. Hey, I'm Liz Landau. I'm calling you from Washington, D.C., and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Aketi from Storrs, Connecticut. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.