Radiolab - The Cataclysm Sentence

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to our HR, and to the HR, and to the interview. This is so silly. All your answers will be purely confidential, except for the ones that we're going to broadcast to millions of people. Yes, this is very, very bad HR practices. Hey everyone, this is Lulu. And Latif. Okay, number five, it says here on our official questionnaire.

Starting point is 00:00:22 And today, what was your favorite bathroom to use? For a number two. I can tell you. We are talking to Radio Lab producer Rachel Qsick. That's me. In the actual physical live studio. In the physical studio. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Rachel has been a producer on the show for six years. Very uneventful six years. Totally normal six years. Yeah, nothing happened. She has made, I think of you, I mean, you worked on the G series, you've done, you know, you did the Queen of Dying, which totally blows up grief and these kind of emotionally intense stories, but you've also done some of the dumbest like, what, airplane first? What if the earth was made of blueberry. I could say in multitudes. Thank you very much.

Starting point is 00:01:05 You do. And we have brought you in here because we're going to play one of your all-time bangers. And I think it was the first episode that you really, like, there was a full episode that you'd done. Yeah, it was the first one where I was like, here's this little nugget. And let's, like, spend a whole hour staring at this nugget. And then the whole one where I was like, here's this little nugget and let's like spend a whole hour

Starting point is 00:01:25 Staring at this nugget and then the whole team then made like the chicken nugget pack, you know And and this episode is called what? Cataclysm sentence and we're doing this one today because it's great But also because we are we are suffering our own cataclysm over here. Yeah, which is that Rachel is Leaving us Leaving all of us you too listener. Yeah, I know which is that Rachel is leaving us. Leaving all of us, you too, listener. Yeah, I know, I know I'm leaving my grandma. I'm leaving a lot of people out at night now,

Starting point is 00:01:52 so but I myself am feeling my cataclysm of losing you guys and leaving the show, stepping out into new things that I don't even know, what it is waiting for me, but mostly moving geographically across the other side of the world. Two, Australia. Australia. Yeah. What is waiting for me, but mostly moving geographically across the other side of the world to Australia? Australia.

Starting point is 00:02:09 Where that's going to be really annoying to everybody who actually lives there. So in just a quick little before we play this episode, can you just talk a little bit about how it came to be and like what happened? how it came to be and like what happened. Yeah, so in the beginning of the episode, you'll hear like exactly why I bumped into the idea, but basically I ran into this question that then I brought to a meeting and I was just like, I don't know what it is about this, but I need us to think about it. And I was just like, I want to get this question asked through as many people as we can. And for some reason, the whole team decided, let's throw all of our love and attention into this.

Starting point is 00:02:49 And everybody is gonna take a little corner of it. They're gonna follow it into their deepest hearts content and call up the people they admire. Everybody rallied around it. Like dozens of phone calls over months. Like it just felt like the scene at the end of the movie where you get like lifted up. It's like, yeah, let's carry this through all the way. And then it was like

Starting point is 00:03:08 a whole year long thing. And then it came out in 2020. So like really days of the pandemic. Well, should we, should we take a listen? Yeah. And then maybe we'll ask you one thing at the very end. Yeah. Let's do it. All right. So here we go. Cataclysm sentence from 2020. Alright, so here we go, a cataclysm sentence from 2020. Before we begin, just wanna let you know, this episode contains a couple moments of explicit language. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio. From WNYC. Listening to radio lab radio from W and Y Okay, so this episode took the entire staff to put together but it really began with one of our producers

Starting point is 00:04:02 Rachel Qsik Rachel Kusik no much jet abam right Rachel Q. Sik. You're just having an agricultural cushion? No, much. Jet, I'm right. Just stretching, watching you eat a sandwich, living life. No, no, no. All right.

Starting point is 00:04:11 All right. Cool. All right, now that I've made a mess of my sitting area. So how did you, maybe to tip me back to the moment, you, where did you bump into this? OK, so I bumped into this idea because of this book that is in my hand. Right now, it's called Eating the Sun. And basically, I you bump into this? Okay, so I bumped into this idea because of this book that is in my hand right now. It's called Eating the Sun.

Starting point is 00:04:26 And basically I got pulled into this book because I was like, okay, eating. Eating. That's pretty much all I need. Just have like that title in anything and I'm like, I'm so excited to be a copy. You are the foodiest among us. I am the foodiest.

Starting point is 00:04:38 I love food so much. And so I thought this was gonna be about food and this book comes and each page is a different musing on science. Wunky, wonky, but I'll just read a few planetary motion What is heat milky solar galaxy system? So they're all kind of like university reflections? Anyway pretty early on on flipping these pages and on like page 17 I come across this thing with Richard Feynman and this prompt that he gave in a lecture series back in the 1960s and I was like wow that is perhaps the like coolest question I've ever seen this year.

Starting point is 00:05:11 Okay ready? Ready? Hold on hold on. Wait, wait, before you do that maybe just set up like who Richard Feynman is? Okay so Richard Feynman, this famous physicist, at the time he was like a whipper snapper of Caltech. I imagine there was a soundtrack. It's like, Stun love. Stun love. Every time he walked onto campus, he was like the hot shot. I think he was pretty attractive too. He was. He was a handsome guy.

Starting point is 00:05:32 He looks back hair. So he was famous yet not yet. No bill prize, but he was on his way to do it. He had just worked on the atomic bomb. Everyone knew who he was. But at the same time, he was exploding on Caltech's campus. Caltech was having a problem because physics was so boring at the time. They could not get anyone to come into an introductory physics class and get excited about it. So they tapped Richard

Starting point is 00:05:55 Feynman to redo the physics curriculum for Physics 101. And so he was like, fine, I'll do it once, but that's it. You take notes because I'm done after this. And so you just like took at redefining what physics should be as an introductory thing. So I actually went and found audio of this lecture. Oh, I think I've actually seen photos of this. Black and white, he's at the front of a classroom in front of a chalkboard. For two years, I'm gonna lecture you on physics.

Starting point is 00:06:21 I'm gonna lecture from a point of view that you are going to be physicists. It's not the case, of course, but that's what every professor and every subject does. So assuming that you're going to be physicists, we're going to have a lot to study. Now, typically, the way that physics 101 used to be taught. There's 200 years of the most rapidly developing batch of knowledge that there is. People spent, like, an entire semester of physics learning about the history of physics. So much in fact that you might think that you can't learn how to do it in four years,

Starting point is 00:06:50 and you can't. You have to go to graduate school too. They didn't learn anything kind of poetic. So Feynman before he launches into his lecture, he's like, what should we teach first if we're going to teach? Look, I could teach you about the history of these equations and the formulas. I'm not just showing how they work in all the various circumstances. But he doesn't.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Instead, Feynman opens his entire lecture with this question. If in some cataclysm, or out of the scientific manages to be destroyed, but only one sentence is to be passed on to the next generations of creatures. What would be the best thing? The thing that contains the most information, and the least number of words? So that is the question. So if the world ends and all information is gone,

Starting point is 00:07:44 but we can only pass on one sentence to the next generation. There's a little scrap of paper fluttering in the post apocalyptic breeze. Yes, but it has to be the least amount of words with the most amount of information. So I can't give you like a textbook, you know? There has to be one thing that's concise and can unlock the universe. Like what would you write on the paper? Well, yeah, what would you do to like pass the baton

Starting point is 00:08:05 to the next generation with the simplest thing that you could possibly think up? Oh, that's quite such an interesting question. Did Feynman and that lecture have an answer? Yes, he said. I believe it is the atomic hypothesis. It is the atomic hypothesis or the atomic fact or whatever you want to call it.

Starting point is 00:08:23 That, well, things are made out of atoms, little particles that move around or in perpetual motion, attract each other and, oh, son, this is a fact, but we're proud being squeezed into one another. Period. So, this is his sentence that would be on the paper fluttering in the breeze. Yes. That would land in the hand of a little alien child, and he would expect that to be the thing that they used to in the breeze. Yes. They would land in the hand of a little alien child and he would expect that to be the thing that they used to restart their civilization.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Yes. Which, if you are like that little child, you're like, what the hell? I was supposed to do it this evening. So what? I just wanna know how to build a fire, you know? Okay. But the thing that I love about Feynman's answer

Starting point is 00:09:02 is that once you begin to pick it apart, it just begins to grow. We'll see. And grow. What is it in there on the summer? Of information about the world? If just a little imagination I'm thinking is a blood. I've talked a lot of physicists this week to understand what the hell the atomic hypothesis

Starting point is 00:09:19 is. Okay. Come with me. We have please. Okay. So let's just take a part by part. First part. Well, things are made out of atoms. Like, ship, tube, computer, everything.

Starting point is 00:09:30 The air, the trees, and ceiling wax. The bike coffee, slash, slush, thrush, slash. And I just feel so good. So much that you're just feeling, yeah, you are atoms. You, me, and everything there is. Atoms are the ingredients. The building breaks of the whole universe. That's part one. Part two. Atoms. Atoms are all moving all the ingredients. The building breaks of the whole universe. That's part one.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Part two. Atoms. Atoms are all moving all the time. The continuous jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around, whatever, whatever. That's really important because once you start to figure out that atoms are in motion, you begin to figure out things like... Let's look at heat.

Starting point is 00:09:59 Temperature. With an atomic eye, so to speak. There's also pressure. Electricity is a source of energy. Electricity, all these things have to do with how fast atoms are moving, how many atoms are moving, what parts of atoms are moving. So from there, you're like a hop and a skip away from like

Starting point is 00:10:14 the power of these. Dimensions, helophones, the electrical grid. Cassius pressure drives this plane forward. Understanding flight, weather patterns, there are metric pressure, 30.04, it's steady. So that's part two. OK.

Starting point is 00:10:28 Part one tells you what matter is. Part two tells you basic things about that matter. Part three. Happens. A tractor, and some of this is a path. But we're proud being squeezed into one another. Is basically how atoms interact with each other. And once you understand that, it is huge.

Starting point is 00:10:47 Because in this last part, it is basically all of chemistry. Once you start understanding how atoms come together to make molecules, you can start putting molecules together to make things like petitions, antibiotics. We're fully all vaccine. Vaccines. Gasoline and air mixed together, form an explosive mixture. You can start putting molecules together to make things like penicillin, antibiotics, with folio vaccine, vaccines, gasoline and air mixed together, form an explosive mixture.

Starting point is 00:11:09 You can build things like a combustion engine, but copper top battery, batteries, all sorts of plastics, rubbers, business super bell tires, sneakers, asphalt, concrete, steel, donation builder, but also money, balloons,

Starting point is 00:11:21 or the essence of life. You can start to understand things like proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, money, balloons, or... The essence of life. You can start to understand things like proteins. A meenoacin. Fadiacin. Carbohydrate. Vitamins. DNA. To me, like, this is what makes the sentence so cool,

Starting point is 00:11:33 because... ELECTRICITY is a story. Everything. It's in there. Everything you need to know about the natural world. And how to manipulate it. Hmm. But do you feel like... Oh, sorry.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Also chocolate chip cookies. I think about a world that chocolate chip cookies. You would not know. Is there anything else on there? Chocolate cookies were the big... No, I don't think you really responded properly, but that was the finale. So...

Starting point is 00:12:04 Well, you know what? I'm going to take your chocolate chip cookie inspiration and follow it. Okay. Because what is a chocolate chip cookie? It is flavor, which I'm sure we could sort of reduce to nothing but the sparking electrons on a certain membrane in the tongue or something. But really what chocolate chip cookies are, I hope you'll agree, is the that momentary ecstatic feeling you feel and the sense of joy and well-being

Starting point is 00:12:34 and then the subsequent crash, right? Yes. So, all of these things are, do you feel like they are reducible to atoms? Yes. Do you feel like love is explained by the atomic hypothesis? Do you feel like the complexities of human interactions, morality? No, that is where it falls short.

Starting point is 00:12:53 Everything that's physical in our world can be described by atoms, but like music. Like you can't look at the atomic hypothesis and create like Mozart. Right. Or you can't like learn how to be a good partner with the atomic hypothesis, you know? Right.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Like there are these big gaps that you just are missing. I think that, and thus adore opens. Mm-hmm. Don't you want to hear? Don't you want to hear the musician answer? Do Fimins exercise? Mm-hmm. Or I suddenly want to hear who's the sort of

Starting point is 00:13:26 great philosopher of chocolate chip cookies and so we music for a category I don't know I mean it's really louder is it like a little like dust bowl is quiet you know it starts small like a like a tone and then it then it's two tones and then it's more, and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it expands and feels kind of primal, but also hopeful, maybe? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:13:54 As you were talking, that did remind me of a thought that I had when I came across this in the very first place. Because it does, when I think I came across it like a year ago, when I was feeling like everyone, like the political conversation was just especially, what's the word when you think that the sky is falling? Like chicken little isk where it's like everything is falling apart. Like everything.

Starting point is 00:14:14 Yes, it felt like everyone felt doomed. And I was like, if the world actually was falling apart around us, what would be the only thing that we have to show for it? Like what is a way to like bring what fine men thought back in the 60s and bring it to today when it does kind of feel like everyone thinks the sky is falling? Yeah, I should say quickly that the two of us had this conversation many months ago, back when the world was a very different place. How does it resonate?

Starting point is 00:14:41 I mean, tell me a little bit more about how it resonates with you personally. I mean, this is coming from a place that I think I'm like pretty lucky to have this thought because I'm definitely like very lucky in a lot of ways. But like, I think I'm just like a hopeful person. And I often like love spending time with older people in my family and like feeling like before they go, I need to get like whatever wisdom they have because like once they're gone, it's gone, you know?

Starting point is 00:15:03 And so when I think about that, I'm like, I just wanna like pull all the goodness out before like something goes wrong and preserve it. Who are you talking about? Who's brains free personally? Are you trying to do that with? I mean, I think about it. It's talking to my friend,

Starting point is 00:15:16 they're like, why do you only hang out with old people? Because I think most people, like even if, because I'm 24, but like someone who's 30, I think they have like seen more of the world than I have. And I would rather spend time with someone who's... Oh my God, your 24-year-old friends are talking about 30-year-olds as if they're old people? Well, a lot of my young friends don't want to look towards older people because they

Starting point is 00:15:35 think this is a mess and we are the future and we need to do this. And I totally agree with that in a lot of ways, but I also think why start from scratch, if there could be something pulled out of the dumpster that like might be helpful. And so like my grandma, like my grandma and I, she's like the most important person to me in the world. So that's like one person. But like every like, like you or like Robert or like, oh, like, people.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Oh, people. Thanks. That's my. I will take on that moniker. What do you, just, I mean, none of my business, but I'm suddenly curious to know, what kinds of questions, do you sit with your grandma and you ask you just general questions

Starting point is 00:16:15 or do you have more specific things you wonder about with someone the purge? Well, it's like pretty specific, I saw my mom died when I was six. And so one thing that seems to motivate, I think a lot of that curiosity, is my older siblings, I was the youngest of five who lost her, and they all have these very concrete memories. When I think about it, I arrived on the scene right after she left the scene. When my memory finally started to kick in,

Starting point is 00:16:45 it's like right when she left. Do you remember anything about her? There are a few memories that I know for sure are mine. And then after those few, like I think on one hand, I can count ones that I know are mine. And so a lot of the times when they talk about these things, like these birthday parties that she used to throw, or like her laugh or the music

Starting point is 00:17:06 she'd play in the minivan. I like, I don't actually remember any of those things for myself. I mean, how do you feel that then? Do you talk to your, do you try and just apply anecdotes from your older siblings? I don't know, like some of it, I feel like a little sad that I have to ask for those things. And so sometimes I just like hang back and let them talk. And then I feel a little bit jealous. But then I also do go searching for them,

Starting point is 00:17:27 like sometimes with my grandma, like my, I call my grandma once a week. And like she told me this one story the other day that I just thought was so funny. Like it was this like sense of humor of my mom that I like didn't even know existed. And that just felt so, it was just like meeting a different side of her

Starting point is 00:17:43 that I had no idea it was there. But it was just this like little angle of like a diamond gem. There's some little surface that I just felt my thumb go over and I never knew it was there. And I don't know, I just kind of want to feel all the textures and memories of people because I know how easily they just go away.

Starting point is 00:18:09 I think I walk through the world collecting things, like I'm a little stick collector, I want to collect all the sticks I can, because I know what it feels like to feel empty-handed. So what began as that conversation with Rachel about the cataclysm sentence and what could you give, what's the simplest thing you could pass forward for the next person to hold on to? Well, what happened is that really as a staff, we got interested in that idea. Kind of got fixated on it, actually. And so what we did... Call from private father. We started calling people. Hello. Hello, is this Mr. Nick Baker?

Starting point is 00:18:56 This is indeed Hang on one. Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. And dozens of people. Hello, Meryl. Yeah. Artists, writers, philosophers, historians, chefs, musicians.

Starting point is 00:19:06 So I sent you an email. And we asked them. That asked you a question. Findman's question. If hypothetically the world would end and everything was lost, all our knowledge gone, what would be the most important information in the least amount of words that you would convey

Starting point is 00:19:22 to the next set of people. What would be your sentence? We're going to play you a bunch of the answers that we got. We can't play all of them because that would take four hours. So we're just going to play you a selection. And that's coming up right after this break. Okay, I'm Chad Abumrod. This is Radio Lab. And today we are answering one question.

Starting point is 00:19:47 If the world ends tomorrow, what would be the one sentence you would leave for the next generation of humans, or creatures, or aliens, or whoever comes next? What would be your cataclysm sentence that would pass on the most amount of wisdom in the fewest number of words. We asked this question to a bunch of artists and writers and scientists, all sorts of people. We got all sorts of answers. We're going to play you a selection of those answers now, starting with, for me, it's something like, you will die, and that's the most important thing. Writer, Mortician, Caitlin Doty. And I think most people get that. I think most people get that they're going to die, but I don't think what most people

Starting point is 00:20:29 get is that the fact that they're going to die is the most important thing that will ever happen to them. Humans are one of the few creatures that understand death and understand, live their whole lives with the knowledge of their deaths. And so it's this conflict within us, we live in these shitty decaying bodies, but we feel so special. And we feel so important,

Starting point is 00:20:57 so how do you reconcile those two things? It's hard to reconcile them, so you have to create. You have to transcend. You have to have religion. You have to to transcend. You have to have religion. You have to have communities. You have to have art. Those are created by our fear and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with death.

Starting point is 00:21:23 Okay, oh, so let's talk about fear. Esperanza's Balding, Musician, and Wolf enthusiast. Okay, here we go. Here's your parallel from the echo system. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park, at first, the thinking was, we're just doing this because we don't fully understand yet all the ways that this species is important, but we know that it is and it's been absent and we finally have this opportunity to reintroduce them into Yellowstone. So of course, all the biologists were studying this like crazy conservation biologist and

Starting point is 00:21:51 the first thing that happened was all the game who hadn't been subjected to any threats. They were at the top of the food chain. All of a sudden, they all became more alert and more responsive. And they stopped grazing constantly in the exact same part of the river. They had to move more because now there was this like threat of the wolf. So what happened is they start moving more. They start grazing higher up in the hills where they're less likely to be just, you know, picked off in these low grasslands. So what happens is the banks of the river band get firmer, which means the flow of the river becomes stronger, which means

Starting point is 00:22:28 beavers can come in and start to build their dams. Also because the the the game is not grazing in the same area, trees that previously had been chewed up in their early sapling stages start growing. So songbirds return. All these species of bird come back into Yellowstone that had been as it, because they didn't have the right canopy cover. And because the beavers come in, that creates more pocket environments for other animals, and that brings in more big predators who are eating what the beavers are attracting. So basically, this one species who had become dominant and very comfortable and at the top of their food chain,

Starting point is 00:23:06 just the presence of them having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear, completely change the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem. of the ecosystem. So, maybe it's like... Hmm... Maybe it's like just that, the willingness to respond creatively to fear, without trying to eradicate the source of the fear. My name is Cord Jefferson and I'm a television writer and producer. Okay. I wrote down a bunch of different things that I then erased, and then I sort of settled on one

Starting point is 00:24:05 that I thought was definitely going to be my thing, which was about race and racism. And like I had, that sentence all prepared, which was, race isn't real unless you make it real at which point it will become the biggest problem in the whole world. And then I started thinking that, you know, what sort of even bigger than racism.

Starting point is 00:24:25 And to me, like even bigger than racism is just general fear. And my personal history is that my mother is a white woman who married my father, who's a black man, and they disowned her. And so I never met my grandparents. I would send them letters, which they would return. And until I stopped sending them, when I was, I think, I was about 10 or 11.

Starting point is 00:24:50 And I saw how much that devastated my mother and how much it sort of ripped her family apart and it sort of estranged her from her brother for a while. And it was, yeah, I was just sort of, in a way that I remember thinking like this is so pointless, like it's just so stupid. Like I remember thinking like what could anybody in my family do that would make me hate them forever.

Starting point is 00:25:16 And it's like, the skin color was just so insignificant to me. And I think that fear shapes everything from geopolitics to just even people's unwillingness to try new things and to go new places and to travel and to ski and to go out and meet people. And it causes so much conflict and it causes so much aggression and hate that I think that, you know, I believe sort of racism is wrapped up in that, but fear I think is our bigger problem. My sentence is, the only things you're innately afraid of are falling and loud noises. The rest of your fears are learned and mostly negligible. Meryl Garbis, I lead a band called Tuneyards. Fear is very, what's that word?

Starting point is 00:26:18 Compelling as a motivation. It's very essential to who we are and it makes a lot of sense because we did have to run from things. We needed to be vigilant and if we weren't, then we died. But I do think that it's a choice. So I thought wanting to communicate as much as possible with this one sentence that it would be good to sing the sentence. Evolving over millennial, we learn to fly, we learn to fly, we're nourished by the fruits of the earth. Inspired by each other's music, but we failed as a sad song. She's injured the very hands that fed us when we chose fear. As a ruler, when we could not grasp, being mere fractals in one collective being.1日目の中で、1日目の中で、

Starting point is 00:27:28 1日目の中で、 1日目の中で、 1日目の中で、 1日目の中で、 1日目の中で、 It reminds me of this thing called do nothing farming. I'm not going to be able to do that. without any intervention, so he said that he was inspired by an empty lot full of grasses and weeds and how productive that actually was. And so he went about farming without flooding the fields. He just threw the seeds on the ground kind of when they would naturally fall on the ground in the fall. He didn't use fertilizer, he just grew a kind of ground cover, and then he's through the stocks back on top when he was done. And he just kind of had to do everything at exactly the right time that it would happen naturally,

Starting point is 00:28:47 but this farm was more productive and more sustainable than neighboring farms. All of human effort is meaningless as he puts it. So he says, humanity knows nothing at all. There's no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort. RIDER GENIODEL Now? Here we go.

Starting point is 00:29:14 RIDER MARIA POPOVA We are each allotted a sliver of space-time wedged between not yet and no more, which we fill with the lifetime of joys and sorrows, immensities of thought and feeling, all deducible to electrical impulses coursing through us at 80 feet per second, yet responsible for every love poem that has ever been written, every symphony ever composed, every scientific breakthrough measuring out nerve conduction and mapping out space time. I mean, it's astonishing that we're not, you know, spending every day in marvel at the improbability that we even exist.

Starting point is 00:30:08 You know, somehow we went from bacteria to Bach. We learned to make fire and music and mathematics. And here we are now, these walking wildernesses of mossy feelings and rambled thoughts beneath this overstory of 100 trillion synapses. That are just co-ascading with these restless questions. Why? Professor Allison Gopnik. My sentence would be single word. Why? ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"]

Starting point is 00:30:45 ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"]

Starting point is 00:30:53 ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] ["Pompay"] I'd want to show that we loved it here, you know.

Starting point is 00:31:06 Animator Rebecca Sturger. We have, you know, evidence from Pompeii. Pompeii's place in history is quite unique. And that in one day, it was completely, himedically sealed. In other words, time stood still. We have all of these physical examples. The rendius the baker gave a party for his brother, Néo, who was just elected magistrate.

Starting point is 00:31:31 That humans have loved being here. Their friends came and drank all night. That we're having a great time. So maybe the greatest message a person could leave is to just... This is the atrium of a typical Roman house. Leave behind some record of how you were living. The family life revolved around this area. Leave behind your nest, an evidence of how you were in it

Starting point is 00:31:57 with the people that you loved. You will find that you have small rooms, the cubicles, the triclinium or dining room which we find back there. Maybe that would be the thing to leave is, you know, some evidence of my nests. Mother would have got up and the servants would have gone into her cubicle and done her hair. And maybe the ultimate goal would be to just devote oneself fully to creating the life that feels the best on this world in the time that we have. August 24th. But actually I think the greatest thing to come out of the ruins of Pompeii is that they had toilet stalls where two people could sit together.

Starting point is 00:33:03 Next to one another, you can have a conversation. It's a fabulous idea. Why did we not learn from this? Why are we wasting time that we could be spending with our friends? Why are we wasting that time? Alright, bass and break. We'll be back in a sec. We pick back up with writer Nicholson Baker, and producer Simon Adler. All things are made of atoms, dashed little particles that move around in perpetual motion,

Starting point is 00:34:16 attracting each other when they are a little distant apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. I like it. I mean, I think it's got a certain lilt. But think of you, there was the cataclysm happened. And the creature that inherited the earth was a super intelligent form of seal. You know, there's beaches, and they're just covered with these seals and they're still making those strange seal noises, but they're actually intensely verbal creatures.

Starting point is 00:34:55 And somehow, some particular seal gets this thing that comes zapping down from the sky, which is a voice from the deep past or the recorded essence of brilliant scientific knowledge, which is all things are made of little things and they push against each other and they sometimes they push back when they squeeze. Well, what is that very bright seal going to do? I mean, what is it? How it's going to help them more quickly invent an atomic bomb. But is that where we want the seals to go? Really fast?

Starting point is 00:35:39 No, we want them to... Look, they're busy figuring out how to better get around the beach, get along with each other, maybe build some kind of nice slide so they can zoom down and fly off and have some fun. There's a lot these bright seals can do. They have a big future ahead of them. So what I would substitute is something that would maybe help them, that was very helpful to me, which is that you know more than you can say. It's a, it's a crisp way of saying that language is great. And, and you know, I'm in the language business and I try to create sentences that are

Starting point is 00:36:26 momentarily diverting and all that but language is a tiny tiny part of the knowledge that we actually have and not just because there's musical knowledge and the knowledge of colors and fragrances and other things that are Inarticulable but because the knack of knowing how to put words together, the knack of knowing how to say in a condensed form, a truth, is something that involves a feel, a nimbleness, a sort of a set of dance moves that nobody, no matter how good you are at slinging senses, nobody can articulate, step by step backwards into this world, the under structure of what allowed him or her to say this thing that involved words.

Starting point is 00:37:15 So look at what is around you and see who knows how to do things. And then learn from that. And the way the person describes how he does things may actually be completely inadequate. You're going to have to watch. We know more than we can say. That I think is the most useful piece of scientific helpfulness, I guess, that you could give. The moon revolves around the earth, which is not the center of the universe far from it, but just one of many objects large and small that revolve around the sun. Which in turn is one of countless stars, mostly so far away that they're invisible,

Starting point is 00:38:40 even on the clearest night, all traveling through space on paths obeying simple laws of nature that can be expressed in terms of mathematics. Oh, and by the way, there is no God. Writer James Glick, and up next is the artist Lady Pink. Okay, so I would like to say God is a female. And I would also love to leave behind a mural, something like one of Michael Angelo's awesome depictions of God coming in and you know grandiose and glorious and absolutely gigantic mural, but as a female.

Starting point is 00:39:25 And I think I would like to do her as one of the great aliens. Do you know what I mean? One of the big, I'd aliens with those big, big heads and those big, bug eyes like that with real sexy lips and a little bit of eyelashes, with kind of looking like the Virgin Mary or like the Ville and the Wadalupe wearing the long gown and the blue veil thing and you know holding her hand up and a little bleeding heart with worshipers at her feet and because she would be so gigantic at the three or four stories that's like at least 40 feet, 30 feet, you know very large figure she would be looking down at you. I would say that a lot of my childhood, there was peace and hot blood.

Starting point is 00:40:45 I would say that a lot of my childhood, I was thinking a lot about surviving the apocalypse. You know, how could I do that? How could I be good enough? Writer Jenny Hallowell. I liked the texture of life. I liked the idea of being in the back of the station wagon and driving down the street and seeing my neighbors mowing their lawns or riding their bicycles, and the idea that they would all disappear or be not I was also selfishly along the way hoping that maybe I could get past certain thresholds so that I could experience them before they were gone, like being able to drive,

Starting point is 00:41:45 because I really wasn't sure whether cars were gonna be around later. So I remember really hoping that I could make it to middle school so that I could have a locker, because I thought lockers were really cool. I just thought like, okay, if I can have a locker and then later drive. Then those two things,

Starting point is 00:42:07 like if we can just get past those things, then I'll be a little bit more relieved to see the income, maybe. I'll meet again some sunny day. Everything is connected. To me, that feels like a sentence that contains an element of scientific truth, but also inspires us to believe in it. Because I do think that whatever we leave behind

Starting point is 00:42:43 needs to contain something about it that would inspire the finder of it to believe in it. Because I do think that whatever we leave behind needs to contain something about it that would inspire the finder of it to believe in it. ... ... Okay. Up next. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hey. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Bring back Rachel Kusik. So you and producer Jeremy Bloom talk to someone.

Starting point is 00:44:19 Hi, Rachel. We talked to this guy, Jaren Limeer. Do you want to know anything about me or is the name enough? I would love to know about you. Give us a fun fact. So, Jaren. I'm a computer scientist. He is basically the godfather of virtual reality and was pretty instrumental in getting the internet off the ground.

Starting point is 00:44:37 I also write books and I also play music and most notably on a large variety of very unusual musical instruments. Do you have any instruments near you right now? Oh, a couple thousand. So this whole project is like reach out to people you find inspiring and asking them if they have any inspiring things to say. Right. And the reason we reached out to Jaren is because he helped create these huge advances in technology. But the other reason we talked to him is because

Starting point is 00:45:10 he actually knew Richard Feynman. Really? How did he know? Well, so how honest do you want this to be? I want it to be as honest as you want it to be. Well, he said this back in the late 70s. I was 16 or 17 living in New Mexico and what happened is my first serious girlfriend was Someone I met over a summer she was visiting from California and I followed her back to California where it turns out Her dad was the head of the physics department at Caltech and after a while she dumped me and there I was What was I to do? I'm still there.

Starting point is 00:45:45 And so I just hung out more and more with the people in the physics department. Do you remember where you were when you first saw Richard Feynman? Sure. I was being walked down a hallway by my friend Cynthia. And he was in their explaining something to a small class of people with his hands primarily. He talked with his hands a lot and he said there's the the famous Feynman and of course

Starting point is 00:46:18 my very first thought is oh damn he's like the smartest person alive and he's also handsome and he's happy and he's graceful like fuck him. I can't say that with the radio, I'm sorry. You can say it. Like I was like, oh my god, this guy's just like, it's not fair, this guy just says too much going for him. But Jiren says it's got to know him. He was just fun and funny. The two of them were talking about physics and just about life.

Starting point is 00:46:41 He played percussion, he played drums. They played music together. Which was great. His primary approach to life was to seek joy. Do you remember him asking you about cataclysm ever? I definitely remember that topic in that conversation, because remember in those days we were in the thick of the cold war. Duck and cover.

Starting point is 00:47:11 And in school you were trained to hide under your desk in case there would be a nuclear. You know, it's a tack. And of course everyone knew would be a feudal gestion. So this question, it was like a little glimmer of hope, like in the face of absolute annihilation, we're hiding under your desk, we'll not help, we're hiding in some basement, we'll not help, where you won't survive. This is at least, it's applying imagination towards what you possibly could do. Maybe you could leave a message for the future. We talked for a while about how much

Starting point is 00:47:46 Jaren really loved this question, because like he and Feynman and these other physicists, they'd hang out and kind of talk about this question for hours, and they would debate about what was the best thing to write down on this piece of paper, partially because it was fun, but also because it felt important to have an answer. But then when we asked him what he now would write down,

Starting point is 00:48:07 it says, Cataclysm Sentence. You personally, Jaren, what would you do? Wow. He took a deep breath and then said, I would give them nothing. Huh, like nothing, nothing? Zilch. Does he mean like the paper fluttering in the breeze

Starting point is 00:48:25 that lands in the hand of the next person would have nothing written on it? He means like there's just no piece paper at all. Yeah. That seems kind of sad to me. Like why wouldn't you want to leave them something? Well, what is that? Let's see.

Starting point is 00:48:39 Jaren's like let's just say you do leave behind a sentence about the basics of math and physics or agriculture and medicine or some sentence about biology or public health. That's sort of thing. It's redundant. Like all of that kind of information is just the stuff that's out there waiting to be discovered in nature anyway. So we don't have to do anything. If people apply themselves, they'll rediscover all that stuff. So it's not like we're special. Letting them get it in their own good time might be better for them. So what have we actually added?

Starting point is 00:49:09 Perhaps we've only taken away. Taking away because giving some highly evolved science fact kind of scared him because Jiren thinks, like you never really know how those are going to unfurl in a world. I mean, look at Feynman's sentence. It gave us all of these cool things that we talked about at the beginning, but it also gave us...

Starting point is 00:49:30 The atomic bomb. Don't wait. Talk away from the windows fast. The glass may break and fly through the air and cut you. I mean, Feynman and others in his generation who'd come of age working in the Manhattan Project, were put in an absolutely impossible moral puzzle where bringing the war to an end decisively was a great good, and the other side in the war had been the darkest evil. All of that was clear, and yet in the big picture,

Starting point is 00:50:06 it was just impossible to know if they'd done the right thing. And that cloud of doubt still hangs over science today. For example, Jiren says, I was very involved in the birth of the internet. Look at the internet. That started as this amazing gift to people so that we could connect in this way

Starting point is 00:50:23 that we never had before. but as we now know. It spreads disinformation. There's every economic incentive to be terrible, and the incentive to be decent are far far weaker. I still have this incredible feelings of guilt and uncertainty about whether we just screwed things up terribly in a way that might take centuries, or millennia to fix or something like There's just this haunting this feeling of like oh my god What if we done was the right thing? So we suggested like what if it wasn't a piece of science, but like a piece of wisdom something you would kind of like find inside of a fortune cookie

Starting point is 00:50:59 Well That becomes a very interesting exercise and what you realize is whatever little words of wisdom you can pass along, because the whole terms of the game is that they'll be isolated, they'll take on this outsized preciousness. They won't be surrounded by context. And almost anything you can say will become distorted and somewhat useless if it's over emphasized in that way, which is to say, nothing we can do is helpful. Let's just lay back. Let's be modest.

Starting point is 00:51:30 Let's. If you were on the other side of that, like what if you were on the other side of the cataclysm and you discover that you're not going to get anything at all? Well, I mean, if there's nothing given, how would I even know that there was nothing given? I don't think I'd even be aware that there was something to have feelings about. That's fair. I don't know. I feel like sometimes when you walk into an empty field or something, you're looking for

Starting point is 00:51:52 something if you're kind of feeling lost. Okay. So, there's people in the future and they find our ruins. And then there's some big plaque that says, we have decided to leave you no information. You will learn nothing of us. If these next people might turn out to be wiser than us, or if they don't and they extinguish themselves, then the next generation after that, at some point, if some kind of cycle of cataclysm and civilization continues, at some point, there will be some civilization

Starting point is 00:52:21 that's wiser than us and won't annihilate itself. And let's just not screw with these people. Let's just give them a chance to come about naturally and they will eventually. But that's an optimistic viewpoint too. If we seem to keep like exploding ourselves, how do you have faith that we'll get there ever? Just because of the reality of randomness. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:52:44 I love that phrase, but I have no idea what it means. It's a little bit, it's like a version of evolution. Like, let's just assume that there's not just going to be one cataclysm in another cycle, but we'll keep on going through these things until just through the grace of randomness, we get some civilization that comes up that's got its act together enough to not have another cataclysm. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's like some kind of faith in the far future that will finally get it together. So, that was basically his answer. Like say nothing, have faith, trust the math. But if you today had to go back to you as a kid, we kept pushing him.

Starting point is 00:53:26 Would you have a specific sentence that you would share with a younger you? Oh, gosh. And each time... Is there a sentence that you would say to start us in a more optimistic light? You pretty much didn't budge. No, I have... Except... When Jeremy asked him, I don't accept. When Jeremy asked him this one question,

Starting point is 00:53:45 if you could leave music for the next society, would you? That is a really interesting question. So, you know, one of the things about music is that it's an incredibly important part of our lives. It's part of every time we have a wedding or a funeral. It's incredibly of every time we have a wedding or a funeral. It's incredibly important to us. And yet, until very recently, with the appearance of recording technologies, it was lost, generation to generation. I play all these weird

Starting point is 00:54:16 instruments. He demonstrated for us. There's a kind of flute played by the Sami people of Finland. And part of it is this... Feeling of being able to at least move and breathe like people did in the past. This is an instrument from Laos. So you get a little bit of connection with them, but of course you don't really know. This is a contra-based flute. If you could leave an instrument for the next society, but maybe you could say something about our society, would you? That was called a tar who?

Starting point is 00:55:06 I don't know, that's a very hard question. This is a kind of Turkish clarinet. I'd have to think about that one a lot. I think I'd... The... Ud. A Middle Eastern Instrument. Possibly choose the piano, I hate to say.

Starting point is 00:55:30 Why a piano? The reason the piano fascinates me is it's kind of a digital button box like a computer but it transcends being a button box. Because on a piano you hit the key and then you send this hammer, and the only thing you can tell the hammers how fast to fly, so you would think it shouldn't be very expressive, and yet... Different pianists sit down and have touches on it that are distinguished. I have touches on it that are distinguished.

Starting point is 00:56:07 I believe there's a bit of a mystery left there. Okay, to round things out, just so happened, that somebody that I really wanted to talk to for this episode is a composer who plays the piano. Her name is Missy Mizzouli, she is very busy at the moment, she has two operas opening pretty much at the same time, her work's been performed by orchestras all over the world and We asked her to come down to our station at WNYC where we have a piano. Do you want water or anything? Yeah, he was gonna get me water. I agree. Also, Rachel. Okay, because you know going back to the whole conceit of this thing One of the questions that I had at the very start of this was

Starting point is 00:57:06 If we gave this fine-man cataclysm sentence challenged to a musician What would happen we can start talking just in a in a in a yeah, let's we can start oh so So you you came up with a musical answer to this question. Yeah, I call it the primordial chord up with a musical answer to this question. Yeah, I call it the primordial chord. Oh, cool. Is my name for it? Oh, that's cool.

Starting point is 00:57:27 So, going along with this idea of setting, you know, humans 2.0 or the next version of creatures up for a better existence, I wanted to create something that would point them in that direction. So I wanted, there's a couple of things about this cord that I hope will do that So this is a cord that has to be played by three people You cannot play this cord by yourself unless you have six arms, which maybe these creatures will have But you know you need three people to play it and why do you pick three people? That's a good question. I think that's what I felt could fit at a piano

Starting point is 00:58:03 And so and I and I chose a piano because it's generally the biggest instrument that we have general access to in New York City right now. And I wanted it to, and has the biggest range of musical instruments that we use every day. There is music that is maybe higher and lower, but in general, like most music you hear in the world fits into the range of a piano. So this chord encompasses the whole range of the piano. We use the lowest note, we use the highest note,

Starting point is 00:58:34 and it also has all 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale in it. And interesting. There are also... It's gonna sound like chaos. Not though. This is its order. I've ordered it so that it hopefully does not sound like chaos. Anything can happen.

Starting point is 00:58:56 I don't know. I so want to hear it now. No, it's alright. We do it. We plan it. Let's go do it. So we had to get up and go over to the studio where the piano is. Okay, so we are here in CR5 or as as we like to think of it, John Schaefer studio.

Starting point is 00:59:11 There's the big grand piano to our left. We're gonna follow your lead here. Okay. Okay. So Missy pulled out the sheet music. This is the primal real core. Oh my god. Okay. So if you imagine a page of orchestral score, we've all probably seen one at some point.

Starting point is 00:59:28 You've got the lines running horizontally across the page. Page was mostly blank, except for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen notes. Yes. You get thirteen little circles all stacked up in a vertical line, looking kind of like a rocket about to take off. Um, and you have three little claps. So each one is one, one human.

Starting point is 00:59:51 Yes. So each, each grand staff is one human being playing one piano. Ooh. Okay. How long did it take you to come up with this? Took me a shock in the long time. Because I kept fiddling around with it playing with the resonance, sometimes I come up with something and I felt that it was too dissonant. It's also a challenge come up with a chord that includes all 12 of these notes. So all 12 of those spread out over this huge range that still has a sort of, you know, consonant feeling to it.

Starting point is 01:00:25 It's interesting when you look at the chord, this giant chord which contains all the notes in a scale. She's arranged it so that you can see in the chord all of these kind of musical molecules, like, oh, those three notes in hand number four, that's a major triad. And these two notes in the base, that's a tri-tone interval, and then, okay, woo, look at that. In the upper register, that is a diminished chord. And if these words don't mean anything to you, it's fine.

Starting point is 01:00:58 The point is, is if you zoom into this chord, you see all of these harmonic universes ready to spill out. That's why she calls it the primordial court. Should we do it? Let's do it. Okay. So as we, as we can sit down, maybe, okay. Okay.

Starting point is 01:01:14 Is that okay? Yeah, we just sit and then, and then maybe Rachel and I'll get like half a cheek. Half a button. Yeah. Okay. So Missy sat in the center of the piano bench. I was sort of hanging off the left side, half a cheek. Rachel was hanging off the right side, be a pool. Okay. So Missy sat in the center of the piano bench, I was sort of hanging off the left side, half a cheek. Rachel was hanging off the right side, half a cheek.

Starting point is 01:01:29 Okay, cool. Perfect. So far so good. Okay, so, Jack, I'm gonna set you up. So I'm gonna just play it for you. I'm gonna just play it for you. Is your four notes. Love it.

Starting point is 01:01:40 Okay. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. And then these are your five notes. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, I'm gonna have to like, is he's rolling over there? Yes. Okay. That sounds pretty good here. And then very little, you show me one more.

Starting point is 01:02:01 No, not that. See you in a million times. Okay. I can't even show me one more. No, I'm okay. See you in the meantime. So. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we'll just build it load to high. Okay, should we build a sequentially? Do we want to try like a foam? Oh, we tried it.

Starting point is 01:02:16 Let's try all together first. Okay, let's try all together first. And then we'll build load high. So let's see if we can. Okay. So there's like an upbeat and then there's one, two, three, four... Hit! Okay.

Starting point is 01:02:27 Two. Okay. All right, one, one. One, two, three, four. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room.

Starting point is 01:02:56 I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to be a stops forever. What if we have to go to the bathroom? This is it. This is welcome to the rest of your life. Just stuck here, you're holding this cord on the piano. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:34 I'm afraid to let go. Yeah, this is a big respect. The weight of the world. Already and. Oh, that was awesome guys. That was so cool. That was so cool! That was so good! Oh my god!

Starting point is 01:03:47 That was so good! I'm so proud of you! It feels like the end of the movie, that's that feeling. It really does. I feel like I got the best part, I got the bass, it's just like, everything I do sounds good down here. See, I like mine up here, it's really nice. See, I feel totally safe.

Starting point is 01:03:59 The weather's between the two of you, just like hanging out in the middle. I feel like I'm the foundation of this new society. Yeah, but I give us hope. And I'm the glue. See, we all need each other. That's the point. It is. It's like a full human. What if we can play it as quiet as possible? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:18 Because we're humble. Our next humans are humble. Ready? Let's go. Two, three. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down.

Starting point is 01:04:54 I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to let you down. I'm gonna die! I know I'll go right here. It's already fun to stay. Okay.

Starting point is 01:05:35 Lulu, lots of rage from the future now. Okay, so did you ever like do the proms? Like what would you write on the scrap of paper to toss into the Post-apocalyptic win? There's so many times in the shop where I'm like thank God I'm not you like I call of these people and I like ask these things of them and I would never feel like I had all this Information and like knowledge that they have and especially this one like I worked on it for an entire year And I would constantly ask like what my sentence would be and I would not have an answer for you.

Starting point is 01:06:07 Well, good thing is three years later, and you've thought about it now. You have an answer so when we can put that question to you right now for this exact moment. I was thinking about this sentence that I had heard that Ramda said, which is like we're all just walking each other home. That's beautiful. Like we're all just walking each other home. That's beautiful.

Starting point is 01:06:25 Like, we're all headed towards the same grim place, and we're all headed towards different places in our lives. But all we have is like each other in those moments and keeping each other company and like, making us discover new things. And yeah, like, making us bump into ourselves. And, you know, there's just thinking about like like walking on like a quiet little road home from school or something and like every single person in your life has gotten you a little bit closer to that door. That's so beautiful.

Starting point is 01:06:55 I think my hat up out of my hand. I'm so thrilled by that. That's so beautiful. And I think it's the most beautiful thing when I think about this team and like everything that it means. And also just like who we are to each other. Like it is engraved in my soul as if there's a tattoo of this exact feeling in me, but that moment. And the episode really on when like, I'm just talking about this feeling that I had as a kid and this like sense of loss. And then from there, you go to like the sound of the phones being dialed up.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And this like cluster of like, hello hi, like, oh, there's this hoot, uh-uh. And that feeling of like everybody just pitching in, it almost felt like all of those people transported back to like childhood me. And we're like giving me this like beautiful gift. And it's so special. I just think this show is this huge gift in my life. I think it's so special to have a place and just like bring you closer to yourself.

Starting point is 01:08:09 Did you hear anything in particular listening on this second time around differently? Was there anything that stood out to you? Yeah, it's funny that you asked that because I listened back to it for the first time in years. And I think about it when I like, before I had listened, I was like, okay, the first time in years. And I think about it when I, like, before I had listened, I was like, okay, this is a pandemic story.

Starting point is 01:08:28 This is a grief story. This is about destruction. And then I listened to it with the kind of mindset of leaving and moving and being like, oh, I'm the person on the other end of the cataclysm, like walking in. Like I think I had been before making the story. I was feeling the need to gather all those sentences, and now I feel like the person who's receiving all of them, like the person picking it up on the other end of the cataclysm,

Starting point is 01:08:53 and it's like I was able to listen to it last week with just like, oh, oh, this is like what I get to like start a new life with, these these sentences. And the ones that start out to me now are, like I love all of them still, but the ones that start out to me now are way different than the ones that I listened to with grief and loss in my end, rather than starting a new. Whoa.

Starting point is 01:09:17 And now I'm like, wow, I have this wealth of beauty and wisdom in this little episode for me to start with. I'm starting at the monopoly like square one I just got $200 like here we go All right, I guess why you you say you say goodbye Rachel. Oh Goodbye, yeah, I'm an Irish goodbye. Or can you just like cut this this like episode right here? Just drop it off the face of the earth. Yeah. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.

Starting point is 01:09:47 Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.

Starting point is 01:09:55 Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.

Starting point is 01:10:03 Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Yes, it's this won't be the last time you hear it. She's got a great story coming down the pike. And if we're lucky, even more after that. Production this episode by the entire radio lab team with update health from Sarah Kari. Special thanks, there are a few of them, so bear with me. Our friends over at the former podcast Nancy, producers Zakia Gibbons and Jeremy Bloom, also Ella Frances Sanders and her book Eating the Sun for kicking this whole thing off. Caltech for letting us

Starting point is 01:10:29 use original audio of the Feynman lectures on physics. The entirety of the lectures are available to read for free online at Feynmanlectures.caltech.edu. That's F-E-Y-N-M-a-n lectures.caltech.edu. We also want to thank all of the musicians from all over the world who, after the pandemic, set in, recorded themselves in their homes and sent us the audio. And also, good old Alex Overington used that to make the giant primordial cord that you just heard. Their names are. Push up our thankful pharaoh on Iran

Starting point is 01:11:05 Claire James, Boston, Massachusetts, So in Los Badges, Iran The Afghan and I'm currently living in Belgium Amelia Watkins, Sons of her, K-Bad Matthias Marcus Kovacic, Germany Hi, I'm Curtis McDonald and I'm from Canada Silarium Morgchano, North East Italy, Brian Harris, Richmond, Virginia

Starting point is 01:11:21 Sasquian Lankorn, the Hague, the Netherlands This mead burner from Brooklyn, New York. Also thanks to the three musicians who didn't ID themselves Sam Crittenden in Brooklyn, Barnaby Raya in the UK, and Ceeavash Kammkar in Iran. All right, and before we let you all go for good, I just wanted to give a shout out to a podcast called You're Wrong About.

Starting point is 01:11:43 It's a wonderful podcast that does deep dives into histories. If you aren't already in love with it, go find it. I was lucky enough to join on their most recent episode to do a deeper dive on some of the stuff we talked about in the Seagulls episode. And actually share a bunch of stuff we left out about the history of scientific suppression of queerness in nature. And it ends with a really special little emotional dollop. So go check that out. You're wrong about, and it ends with a really special little emotional dollop. So go check that out, you're wrong about, enjoy it wherever you get your podcast. Thanks so much!

Starting point is 01:12:10 Bye! Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, the Kedi Foster Keys, W. Harry Forkthuna, David Gabel, Maria Pazkutietas, Sinden Yana Sambunbeng, Matt Kielte, Annie McEwan, Alex Nisen, Sara Kari, Anna Vaskutbas, Sarah Sandbach, Aaron Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Sachi Kita-Gimomoki.

Starting point is 01:12:44 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. I'm in Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Radiolab - The Cataclysm Sentence

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