The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 30: The Politics of Genetics, Virtual Reality, and a Sound Castle in New Jersey

Episode Date: May 13, 2016

As scientists learn more about how genes affect everything from hair color to sexual orientation and mental health, we’re faced with moral and political questions about how we allow science to intervene in the genetic code. In this episode, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of the new book “The Gene: An Intimate History,” talks with David Remnick about the intimate and global implications of modern genetic science, and speaks frankly about his own family history of mental illness. Plus, we visit the studio of a leading sound-effects artist, and a virtual-reality team struggles to make a V.R. experience that lives up to the hype. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Virtual reality seeks to allow us to interact with the computational world as a seamless thought sphere. Hi, my name is Reggie Watts, and you are listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. And I'm here to talk to you about virtual reality. Virtual reality should be a lot of fun. Virtual reality. Virtual reality should. be weird and colorful, emotional, demoralizing, not distracting every single human being

that has ever been born and has died. Something really strong and sincere, candy bar that really satisfies, yet feels as though I'm being healthfully rejuvenated. Well, a thought sphere is human consciousness, whether it's synthetic or organic, collective consciousness, continues to evolve collectively agreed upon as functioning in a certain way.

Virtual reality should never, ever be not in existence. Virtual reality should never at all costs, nor ever, or ever try to never, in avoidance of trying to, become stronger than what it is. Never, ever should it, never would it? It's already strong enough. Never, ever would be. Should virtual reality be about, subject matter like fruit, small people, or rock formations.

To me, that's kind of the point. Whoa, the endlessly four-dimensional Reggie Watts, comedian, musician, and virtual reality connoisseur. I'm David Ramnik on this New Yorker radio hour. We're going to get a couple of different opinions on virtual reality today. If you follow technology at all, you've probably heard virtual reality hyped to death. And when it finally does arrive, will it be anywhere near as big as anyone says? I don't know, but we're going to look into it. Now, I don't think you can possibly overhype the work of Siddhartha Mukherjee.

His book about cancer, the emperor of all maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. And for really good reason, it's a huge sweeping book that it's as, well, it's as good as science book as I've ever read. It really is. And his new book out just this week is called The Gene, an intimate history. And if anything, it ups the ante. Every aspect of the life sciences today involves genetics. And our understanding of what it means to be human is largely based on the principle of the gene.

Mukherjee seems to engage all of it. I'd like to begin as the book begins, which is personally. You have mental illness running in your family. There's no other way to put it, and you've got a cousin who suffers from mental illness and two uncles who did as well. Do you worry sometimes about your own mental health? And how big an issue was this, your family history,

when you were getting closer to your now-wife, Sarah? It's an enormous looming issue, obviously, in your book and in your life. I began to discover it as a child myself. Like most Bengali families, my family had elevated denial to a high museum-grade art form. So we didn't talk about it very much. one of my uncles lived with us. He was quite ill mentally, so he had to live with us.

So it was there in your face, but not talked about why we would have a grown man living in your family, unemployed, unable to carry a job, often unable to carry out a full conversation. And then, of course, I knew later when my cousin first visited, it was also clear that he was quite ill. I describe an episode in which he comes in, we're about to go see a film, it was actually Spider-Man, if I remember correctly, one of the first early release had just come to India, and he couldn't be found anywhere. And he had gone into the bathroom upstairs, and he was curled up in the bathroom,

and my grandmother had to pull him out of the bathroom. So that was clear. And then the final piece of it became clear over time, and that was when I figured out that the other uncle, who had died. All of these are, of course, blood-related. They're related to my father's side of the family. And he died in a kind of manic episode.

He died in what was clearly a manic episode. And, you know, he was a larger-than-life figure in the family. He was so big. My grandmother used to call me by his name, which was at first I thought it was a slip of her tongue. But in fact, she was actually living that fantasy that I had been reborn as him. He died several years before.

I was born. So all of these pieces were sort of loosely floating around the great unspoken in the Mukherjee family until I began to study medicine, basically, and realized that this was the reality of the illness that had run through the family. There was a genetic component to this illness. Sid, you call the gene one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of all of science. It seems to me that our pretty recent genetic knowledge coming out of the human genome Project and all the rest, is maybe even greater both in its potential and its dangers than the splitting of the atom. And in fact, I draw a formal analogy between those two moments.

The splitting of the atom really opened up the possibility of controlling energy and matter. So that opens up an immense technological possibility, full of promise and perils, the promise being nuclear technology, the peril being Fukushima. But the genome also opens up that idea of promise and peril. So the promise being the curing of deadly diseases, the early diagnosis of breast cancer, the capacity of being able to predict in our children, those that will carry devastating mutations that will make them potentially have lives of extraordinary suffering. But the peril is also questions like identity.

What if we learn, and we are going to learn, about maybe. be not one gene, multiple genes that govern sexual identity? What if we learn about genes that predisposed to illness but don't cause extraordinary suffering? What should we do about those? And the decisions to abort or not abort that would come along with it? That's right. And just to give you one example, this is not fantasy in India and in China based on very crude genetic diagnosis of whether you're a boy or a girl, that phenomenon is already in action and has skewed the selective abortion of, those diagnosed genetically as female, or maybe potentially some infanticized, has skewed the

gender ratio in India and China to something absurd, 700 women to 1,000 men in some parts of India and similarly in some parts of China. So in a sense, the tragic mistakes are already being made at an early stage. That's right. The tragedy is not tomorrow's tragedy. It is today's tragedy. In fact, it's yesterday's tragedy. Those societies have already been destabilized by genetics. Your readers know you well from your first book on cancer, and genetics as a part of your work as a researcher as well as the doctor, was the impulse to write this book on the gene and genetics. It's history, an intimate history, you call it,

propelled mainly by the family story, or you thought this was the next place to go as a science writer? Really, the three threads that come into this book. The first thread is the family story. It was undeniable. The second was cancer. So while this was happening in the background, while I was explaining to my would-be wife,

that there was this taint that ran through the family that we should know about it and talk about it. I was also training as a cancer researcher. Cancer is a genetic disease, a disease unleashed by mutations in genes, and we were trying to figure out what genes cause cancer, why they cause cancer. And the last thread was that in the last four to five years,

we have begun to invent technologies that allow us to change the human genome. And there's no other way to say it. That's the limit of the technology. What's called CRISPR technology? Chrisper is the forefront of them. There are waves that are following that. There's a whole family of technologies

that allow this to happen. But yes, CRISPR is the centerpiece of that. And my lab began to work on CRISPR to understand cancer genes. We're still doing a lot of work on CRISPR. And what does that mean? What are you actually doing? So what you're doing is that,

very simply speaking, exploiting an ancient, ancient bacterial immune defense system that was invented to cut up the DNA of invading viruses. Now, what's important about that is that it doesn't cut up that invading virus DNA at random. It basically identifies a specific series of sequences that the virus carries, the code in the virus. It targets it. It targets it and then chops it up like a pair of molecular scissors. But what was discovered in 2011, 2012, is that you could piggyback on that system and basically cut up any part of the human genome. That was number one. And number two is that the genome would try to repair itself. And in doing so, you could make it repair itself in whatever

direction you want. Now, what does that mean? That means that you could take a mutant cystic fibrosis gene and you could say, I'm going to use this bacterial system and re-engineer it, and now correct that mutant gene and make it the normal gene. And the cystic fibrosis disappears. The gene would disappear or be repaired and corrected. And not only would be disappeared and corrected, if you did this in, for instance, embryonic stem cell or an embryonic cell, it would disappear permanently from your genetic lineage. It would vanish. You have a great phrase that I have to think is a generative phrase for the book itself. At one point in the book, you call the human genome unsettlingly beautiful. What do you mean by that? I mean, the human genome, if you read it, if you were to put it in a book, I describe it as a 66 volume encyclopedia, right? So it would be 66 volumes of the full Encyclopedia Britannica set. Unique to each being. Unique to each being, that's right. But if you were to open that volume, it would be totally inscrutable. It would look like gibberish. It's written in a code that is not easily understandable to humans. It's written in four letters. And it's written continuously like this for three billion letters.

Now, what's unsettlingly beautiful about the human genome is that it takes that code, that simple code, A, T, G, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C.C, Cic, Cic, and it makes you and me out of that code. And obviously, there are certain things from the environment that we inherit, but it still creates this unbelievably complicated, adaptive, sly, beautiful creature that can paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And adding to the picture, adding to the picture of our fate as a physical being, as a mental being, is the factor of environment. Environment and random factors can change genetic outcome. Epigenetic switches can play a role in tripping off cancer, mental illness, many other diseases. Can you explain that?

That's a very important discussion because it can become very polarizing. Let me just take, for instance, the autism debate or the mental illness. with a littleness debate, you know, how much is gene, how much is the environment. So let me just explain some very important terms. The first distinction is obviously between genetic information, the code that's written in ACT, G, C, C, and so forth, and a term that's being thrown around very loosely now called epigenetic information. So let me, let me just explain. Epigenetics is a very simple idea. Epigenetics is a mechanism to alter that information without altering the sequence. So the sequence remains the same. So it does not change ACT, C, G, G, C, C, and so forth. But

You can package the DNA differently. So imagine, again, your genome is a long string. Well, you can tie knots in the string in certain places, and that would carry information if you tied knots along a certain string. You wouldn't change the string itself. All you're doing is tying three-dimensional knots. But it would alter outcome. It would alter outcome. In what way, for example?

For example, you know, if you were subjected to an acute starvation, it turns out that we now know that your gene sequence may not change when your body undergo starvation. But in fact, it's possible that your epigenase sequence, the way that the genome is knotted up, changes. At one point in your book, amazingly, your grandmother, who is not a scientist, blamed the stress of the partition of India for her own son's mental illness. And given what we know now about epigenetics and what you're just explaining, I wonder if in some sense, not just metaphorical, that she had a point. And we know that there's a point there.

We know that from formal studies, not the... ones that carried out with my grandmother, but formal studies, you know, the best example of that is that you take two identical twins and you ask the question, what is the incidence of schizophrenia in both those twins? And the incidence of schizophrenia is around 50%. So what does that tell us? It tells us, number one, that there's a strong genetic component. That's about 50-fold higher than the general population. So there's clearly a genetic component. But on the flip side, you could ask the question, why did the other twin, 50% of the time, not have the disease? Well, the answer is either it's because of some environmental trigger that was missing.

Maybe it was random chance, but still a random environmental trigger that was missing that made it possible in one twin and not in the other twin. And so the point of the book is that we're realizing that what we used to call fate or destiny is really a combination of random chance and environmental triggers impinging on the genome. That even comes to the point of sexuality. the book discusses the hunt for the so-called gay gene. What's the latest thinking on that? Because I know that that's come up any number of times in the last 15, 20 years. And how did the publicity around that debate

shape the course of gay rights in this country? So one question that we keep coming back to over and over again the book is that, you know, you might think naively that genetics is a scientific problem or a scientific question. The point here is that genetics is reorganizing in a radical way. the way we think about race, where we think about sexuality, identity, you know, transgenderism, all the stuff that is raging, the divisive debates that are raging in the political realm.

That are seemingly cultural debates. That are seemingly cultural debates, our political debates, are really debates about human beings and identity. And if there are debates about human beings and identity, then they have to be debates about genes. There's no, there's no, it's so facto, there are debates about genes. So coming to your question about the gay gene, as you know, it's a big deal in the 1980s and 1990s to figure out the extent to which sexuality was genetically determined or whether it was a choice. We know quite a lot about those answers. Now, well, the first thing that we know and the most important that we know is that if you look at, again, at identical twins, there is a strong concordance, which would clearly suggest that there is a genetic component. It must frustrate the hell out of you to listen to the current discourse about any number of these issues. whether it's identity or sexuality because it always seems to leave out the scientific component.

It's not only frustrating. It is dangerous. How so? Well, just to take the debates around race. You know, you in this last cycle of elections, the word race has been thrown around on a daily basis. Well, first of all, let's ask yourself, what do we know about race? Well, we know quite a lot, actually, about race in a genetic or biological sense. We know, for instance, that if you look genetically at intracial gender, diversity. That is, if you take Africa as a continent and you ask the question, what's the genetic

difference between a man from Namibia and a man from Egypt, say, that genetic difference we know is greater than the genetic difference between Africans and Europeans, not by a small amount, but by a vast amount. Why would that be? Well, that's just the way the human beings have evolved. The evolution of human beings allowed certain dispersals of humans, and race follows the lines of those dispersals. And so the intracial diversity within continents or so-called races exceeds the interracial diversity. And so therefore, you can actually say very little about what the word race means. So let me just finish up by one important comment. And this is the point that it's very important to drive home in this debate.

I can look at your genome and tell with quite a great degree of accuracy whether you were born, whether your ancestors were born in a particular place in Eastern Europe and what their racial geography might have been. The point is you can't do the opposite. In other words, you cannot take a racial geography, you can't say Eastern Europe, and make very much sense of the people who descend down that lineage, because it's so diverse. So as I say in the book, the genomic geographer goes home happy. The racist has nothing to ask for or to say for it. Well, let's go back to the idea of genetic engineering and our ability using CRISPR and things like it to potentially edit the human genome as we see fit. This is, as you've said, an enormously powerful moment in the

history of science, and yet we're in the midst of a presidential election, and this is not an issue that's come up, not once. Do you think our politics or anybody's politics are capable of grappling with something this consequential? Well, you know, it's being discussed in the sidelines, not by the candidates, but it's very much in the Zichai. So just to give you one example, there was a moratorium that's been placed in the United States against the interventions on the human genome in embryonic cells or embryonic stem cells or embryos using CRISPR technology.

So the scientists have said, you know, we don't know very much about this. Let's hold off until we figure out some of the ethical... It's kind of an intellectual and ethical break. It's an intellectual and ethical break. But just to give you one example, it's not clear whether the Chinese scientists are interested in that same break.

It's not clear where the Korean scientists are... someone is going to do proof of principle experiments in which they say in principle, in a human embryo, you can change the genome in a directional manner. You know, it's kind of creating a designer genome. But is there a human being alive who is not constricted by religious considerations, say, that wouldn't want to make the sleep? You have relatives that suffer from mental illness. I have a child with autism. I have to think that everybody we know, everybody, has something like this in their lives. Yes, but I'm the human being. I think, and maybe you are too. I think we should all be who are human beings who are so concerned

about what's happened in the past that we need to define moral red lines. But how will we be able to resist? How will we be able to resist? Considering the suffering that we both know in this room and that is in the world in general? I think we'll be able to do this by having a frank discussion about what those moral red lines would be. I propose in the book that it should be a triangle, that the triangle should be, on one hand, extraordinary suffering. So in other words, we need to decide what genetic illnesses, what genetic blemishes,

cause truly extraordinary suffering so that we're not, for instance, trying to make blonde babies or blue-eyed babies. No, but there's a great in between. We now live in a world in which there's a discussion of difference rather than suffering. So you have a community, for example, people who are deaf, argue that this is a different way, some of them, that this is merely a different way of being rather than an imperfect form of

quote-unquote normalcy. You have it with any number of conditions. Absolutely. And so the point being that as long as those debates are raging, and if they're illegitimate, if we find them even within the boundaries of reason, which, for instance, I do in the case of deafness, then those are open for discussion.

Are those national debates? Are they international debates? How are they conducted? Well, let's start with at least them being national debates. I mean, international, as I said already, you know, cultures like the Chinese, famously, the Chinese, flatly some scientists in China said, we don't want the moratorium. We don't care about this. We have different values. We don't think the embryo is that sacred, not because we're evil human beings, but because we just don't, our values are different, our systems of

belief are different. And most importantly, we want to cure terrible diseases. It makes you think, even if you're a child of enlightenment and science and rationality, that the responsibility inherited by discoveries like the atomic discovery or the genetic discovery is almost too much for the fragile human intelligence and moral structure to absorb sometimes. Well, I would hope not because we have to absorb it. There's no choice. There's no choice. I think we are facing right up to it.

This is a human debate. This is a debate that lies in the humanities as much as in the sciences. It lies in politics as much as in the sciences. You cannot say, oh, you know, scientists will solve that problem. You have to solve the problem. You have to find out that's why you need the vocabulary. You need the vocabulary of genes. You need to figure out what race means.

You need to figure out what epigenetics means. You need to figure out of this stuff. If you don't, you'll be left out of this debate. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, researcher, and one of the great science writers of our time. His new book is The Gene, an intimate history. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Dana Spiata is the author of four novels.

and a few months back published a terrific story in The New Yorker about a con artist. This month in the New Yorker's fiction podcast, which is a sibling or a cousin of the radio hour,

Dana Spiazza read a story by another writer, Joy Williams, and it's called Chicken Hill. It was a hot day, as all the days were, and Ruth was on her veranda eating a tuna fish sandwich.

She seldom mate tuna fish sandwiches because she found them an uncomfortable physical experience. After a few swallows, she felt as if she were having a heart attack. There was the tightness in her chest, her esophagus constricting, resisting passage, her oppressive baffled alarm. It was as if the splendid and courageous giant of the oceans were rising up in horror, disputing what had been done to it, and why should it not?

You can hear the whole story in Dana Spiazza's conversation with fiction editor Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker's fiction podcast, along with 100 plus episodes featuring Miranda July, Sherman Alexi, George Saunders, so many writers of our time. And you can find it in iTunes or anywhere you go for podcasts. In a minute, we're going to take a look at the state of the art in virtual reality. The almost sci-fi technology that exists now is mind-boggling, but now comes the much harder part figuring out what to do with it. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. And I'm Andrew Morantz. In 2015, a filmmaker named Chris Milk gave a TED talk about a project he created with the United Nations. The project was the story of a Syrian refugee girl named Sidra. My name is Sidra. I am 12 years old. I am in the fifth grade. I am from Syria in the Darra province in Hill City.

So it was a virtual reality project. virtual reality or VR, it's loosely defined because people are sort of still figuring out what it means and practice. But basically, VR is anything that you can play on a device where it totally takes over your field of vision and it tracks your head movement. So anywhere you look, there's something for you to look at in a full 360 degrees. So it's a machine. But through this machine, we become more compassionate. we become more empathetic, and ultimately we become more human. And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world.

Thank you. So there were some pretty grandiose claims in what he said, but basically the context for that TED talk is that there was this huge wave of VR hype that had kind of taken over Silicon Valley and L.A. The year before in 2014, Facebook had acquired a VR company called Oculus for $2 billion. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, the idea is to extend virtual reality capabilities beyond gaming into areas like communication and education.

When I started reporting on VR earlier this spring, I was trying to find the Orson Wells of VR. And the thing is, that person doesn't exist yet. Because even though the technology is there, the storytelling part is still coming into focus. One person who's been a theorist of this for decades since before it really even existed is named Janet Murray. She's a professor at Georgia Tech. Right now, we're at this really tantalizing moment with VR. We haven't invented the storytelling format that suits this medium.

Right now, it's just a technology. That is the equivalent of inventing the movie camera, but, inventing the movie camera is not the same thing as inventing the movies. In the late 90s, Janet Murray had this book called Hamlet on the Holodeck, which sort of became a cult classic in the tech world. The book argued that the future of storytelling was in interactive, immersive narratives. So stories that could include animation or video games or visual art, but it wouldn't be reducible to any one of those things. One team in Brooklyn is making some of the first steps toward that kind of narrative. They're working on this really exciting VR project

because it has a computer-rendered environment, but they're putting real people inside it. The project is called Blackout. James George is the creator, the technical director, the executive producer. He sort of does everything. So we're working on a virtual reality experience that takes place on the New York subway.

And in this experience, you're on the subway surrounded by strangers and the train breaks down. And the train drops into darkness and you're surrounded by suspicious murmurs, fear and confusion from people not knowing what's happening. You realize in that moment that in virtual reality, you can look at the different passengers and actually hear what they're thinking.

Blackout is very much still in development, but even right now, even when the people are blurry and the software is glitchy, it still feels like a cool superpower to be able to turn your head and look at a person, and all of a sudden hear their innermost thoughts. I shouldn't buy my nails. It's disgusting in a train.

Have I touched anything? Somebody does definitely smell one here. Or maybe it's just the train. All of the couples on this subway look exactly alike. There's two people over there that have the same face, just one has facial hair, and one doesn't. You're a homeless person. You never know the people that have the most don't ever want to give,

but the people with the littlest always giving and giving and giving and giving. Being able to look at someone and hear their thoughts, it's a simple kind of interaction, but it feels very cool in the context of real actors. Most of the things you see in VR that have real actors in them are just pre-recorded 360 video. So it starts playing and you can watch it, and it's in all directions around you,

but it's the same every time. What Blackout's trying to do is make something with real actors in it that's different depending on where you look or what you do or where you go within that. space. VR nerds like to talk about this as the passive versus interactive distinction. I talked to Justin Cohn, who is the founder of the media blog Motionographer.com, and he's been covering VR for a long time, and he's gotten very good at explaining the technical stuff. So what I think people have been searching for, especially in recent years, is some kind of holy grail that unites the best

of passive storytelling with the best of interactivity, the things we've learned from video games. So the team behind Blackout is taking some of the first steps around this new united pathway between these two worlds.

They are building a world that like a video game is fully interactive. It's a world you can walk around. But then they have these pre-recorded three-dimensional, real people that they've captured and put into this experience. And that is much more like filmmaking, right?

These are actors who are performing. And it may or may not work. I don't know. It may or may not be what they think it's going to be. But one thing's for sure, it's headed the right direction. So part of what the blackout team has developed in order to do this is a software and filmmaking technique called Depth Kit. Depth kit allows you to film in a way where you're catching people from every angle,

which means that a viewer is actually. actually the camera person. You're literally walking around inside of this movie. We think of it as a piece of science fiction software. Okay, so you're not literally inside the movie, but you are literally walking around these images of these actors. And in order to do that, you need to surround these actors with multiple cameras, and then you need to combine those shots into this full 3D stitching of that person. And then when you have this full 3D rendering of the person, then you plop her into this interactive world, and then the audience can walk around her

and she'll still look real. This is hugely important to Hollywood because Hollywood wants to create these experiences that extend the intellectual property they already have, right? So how cool would it be if in virtual reality you could interact with a live action ray from the new Star Wars movie? I'm fine with passive experiences.

I don't mind just sitting back and watching something, like, you know, I think Citizen Kane is pretty good, and that's totally passive. But if you do want interactivity, it's much easier to do it with computer animation. As soon as you start to use real people, it gets tricky. So the Blackout team is doing these things with technology like Depth Kit that have never been done before. And from the outside, that seems really cool. But the problem is there's no precedent for the kind of storytelling they want to do. They have to have all these really difficult internal conversations to try to figure out how to tell the story. They have these viewers who

will never have seen VR before. So how do you teach someone to watch VR as a form at the same time that you're letting them experience your particular story? The genuine thing we want to get these people to do is move through the space. And moving through the space becomes a metaphor for overcoming suspicion. So their original idea had been at a certain point a bunch of subway dancers called the Waffle Crew. They were going to jump up and freeze in mid-air. go, folks, do not blink your eyes. You might miss something. As a viewer, when you see that, you start to get the sense that you're in this altered

reality where all kinds of weird things are about to happen, like hearing passenger's thoughts. But when I visited them, they weren't sure anymore that the freezing in mid-air thing was the best way to do that transition. Right. So my worry is, like, the part with the waffle crew is very, like, performative. And learning the rules could be, I don't know, there are ways we could help them without being so on the nose.

There's different versions of when you enter a portal and you begin to learn the rules. And this is just very often happens in children's books or in sci-fi. I think we can just think about like what we want to do for that. And I just, I guess for me, because I always would prefer to do something that is a little more slower and exploratory. Like, you're right. But they could figure this out and it could be like they, and then they'll feel like they figured it out. Yeah. And that would be so wonderful.

Here's an idea. That would be a total successive that works. It's just. Hardy. That always felt really clunky to me. Oh, no. No. No, I'm just like, it's just dismantling.

No, no, I believe you, I trust you, I know, I want to listen. It's just dismantling so much of what we've been building that it's frustrating for me. I mean, but we get, we get, we get, we get, this is a pretty good description of life where like this is all media candles. At some moments, the people on the blackout team are really focused on pushing technical boundaries, and other times that all goes out the window and all they want to talk about is how to tell a good story. And that distinction can get blurred by all the VR rhetoric. There's so much conversation. around things like VR that are like, oh, you just get in there

and you just feel empathy for your fellow human being. And it's not really like that. It's a very strange, in a lot of ways, isolating experience. It's just you, right? Like, you're on your own with a headset strapped your face. There's been a lot of talk about VR as an empathy machine, and it's usually focused on things that are happening very far away. Yeah.

And this is like, we're literally across the street from the subway right now. The sort of suggestion is that we can do, a lot to understand those people and to take a moment to give them the benefit of it out. And Blackout is a moment where we create this paused time where you actually get to do that. And do you think that that is possible because VR is an empathy machine or because you guys are good storytellers? Hopefully the second one. Honestly, it's hard to say that it is anything.

It is a weird thing that you put on your face is the safe description of what it is. currently. So there, when he says it's just a thing you put on your face, I think what he's talking about is there's a difference between the hardware and what you use that hardware for. VR technology is already here. There's a huge amount of money being invested in it.

That's not going anywhere. But the blackout team also at the same time has to solve a different problem, how to tell stories in this new medium. And personally, that's much more interesting to me. Not just that we can make newer and cooler computer platforms,

but that this can become a whole new way to make stories and art. It might take a few years, but I'm really curious to see what the Orson Welles of VR comes up with. That's Andrew Moran's from the New Yorker's editorial staff. Now, Reggie Watts is, I don't know how to describe him. He's a beatboxer, a comedian, an actor, and he's also a bit of a virtual reality, umprasario. Earlier this year, he released a surreal comedy, VR experience called Waves. And he was in a movie about virtual reality called Creative Control. So he's the guy to help us really understand VR.

Well, the difference between reality, reality, reality squared versus virtual reality. I would say that reality, real reality, is much better than virtual reality at being real reality. It's the original reality. Orr. Nothing is better than real reality itself when it comes to reality. Real reality. It's just been around so long, so I'm like, oh yeah, right, here we are. Real reality is virtual in the classic sense.

Virtual reality is the complete immersion in technology seeks to simulate the sense, real space, space, and time. The single most convincing version of virtual reality, reality reality. Virtual reality is definitely full tech simulation. Reality reality is nature tech, life stuff, immersive nature. quest for life. Real reality, reality is... Some people would say that reality is a form of virtual reality.

Reality is incredibly elusive and something that's virtual. It's always better. Way better than the real thing. We are in a simulation, interpreting the reality that we exist in. Simulation. So in the future, virtual reality will become reality and we'll realize that, oh, that was the reality. We had to fight so long and so hard to get there.

Reggie Watts, the world. one-of-a-kind comedy and music performer. Now, let's stay for just another minute on this theme of entertainment in the digital age. But instead of technologies we might be using next week or next year, let's talk about some things you can enjoy right now. My colleague Monica Ratchits is the multimedia wizard of the New Yorker, and she's got some suggestions for us. Monica, what's the first one?

Well, the first one is from archive.org. This nonprofit archives a lot of things around the Internet, you know, documents, music, images, but for a while now, they've been really amping up their efforts to store software. So what would I find in there? So you're going to find operating systems, different applications, you know, the very beginning of Apple II software. So for a tech person, this is like going back in, it's like going back and hearing songs of the 50s. Songs from the 50s. This is real nostalgia here. Great duwap. But more than just storing tens of thousands of items of software, what they've actually done is they've created an emulator called JS Mess. So you can actually access video games.

and arcade games from decades ago. So you can get Pac-Man, no problem. You can get Pac-Man, and I just love going to this site and finding these weird little gems. So you find your technological childhood back there? Well, these were actually made before I was born, but it's still fun. What do you got here?

So what I have here is something called Mr. Dew's Wild Ride, which is from the Internet Arcade Collection on Archive.org. And let's do Player 1. Actually doing really well, huh? This is one of the dumbest games I've ever seen. It's so dumb. But it's actually, oh, okay. All right. All right, I just died. So what else you got?

The internet can be a frenetic, overwhelming place. And so sometimes you need a little bit of a break. And this website called cross-framed.com is a break from all of that. There are over thousands of selected clips from movies hosted on this website, and you get a random film clip every time you go to this site. And there's everything from classic films to little snippets from really popular films. This one I love from Ghostbusters, too. No. I like seeing the clips in isolation. It's a little bit mysterious, but I kind of like that mystery.

Do you end up going to see the full film after seeing the clip? Sometimes, yeah. And what I like about it is that it's like a little cinema espresso, right? I get a little culture fix in the middle of my afternoon. So who does this? So he's actually an anonymous guy. He's an anonymous contributor, and I reached out to him. And I was like, who the heck are you?

I really like your site. He's this designer in Portugal, who actually is just a huge cinema fan. And for years, he was calling little clips from movies and uploading them to a live journal. This was before YouTube even existed. And then a few years ago, he was like, you know what, maybe I should put this on a site. And he just uploads a new one, and now it's up to over 1,300 clips. You know, I think this is going to be very healthy for everybody. This is what people do instead of smoking cigarettes.

Exactly. Take a three-minute break and watch a movie classic. It can fix that way. And what's the third one? I recently saw this wonderful documentary at the New York Turkish Film Festival called Remake Remix Ripoff. The Turkish equivalent to Hollywood in the 60s and 70s was producing hundreds of films annually, but because of financial and governmental restrictions, which meant limited resources for filmmakers, coupled with the fact that there was actually no copyright law in Turkey at the time,

meant that all of these filmmakers were creating fantastic mashups and remakes and, and in some cases taking clips from contemporary Hollywood films and splicing them into their own films directly. And how do I get this? So you can see many of these films on YouTube, and one of the more popular ones is the man who saves the world, or also known as Turkish Star Wars. And we can see a clip of it here.

So here we're seeing a pilot who's wearing a motorcycle helmet. And a giant egg is floating through outer space. Look at that. They actually stole the reels of Star Wars from a local, theater overnight so that they could screen the Star Wars in the background and film their actors in front of the Death Star. Not in a million years could I have found this. For the few people that missed the Turkish Film Festival in New York and didn't go to the

Batman movie, you can get this all on YouTube without a problem. You can get much of it on YouTube without a problem, but the documentary will hopefully be on streaming soon. The New Yorker's Monica Ratchage. There's more to come this hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. What's happening today in the Republic of the United States,

Party continues to defy every rule of politics that we think we've known for generations. And yet it's happened before. I want my delegates to know that they are going to vote their conscience no matter what that rule is going to be this evening on issues of platform and the issues of the nomination. Next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Amy Davidson, who's one of the New Yorkers great thinkers and writers on politics, looks back at two moments in history. nominating conventions where political party went to absolute war with itself. That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Now we're going to take a little trip here with my colleague Henry Finder. Henry is the editorial director of the New Yorker and maybe a little less important, but very important to me, my editor at The New Yorker. And recently, he went out to New Jersey to visit someone in show business. Henry, who was it? His name is Marco Costanza. What does he do? What does he do?

He's a sound effects guy. A creaky floor or... I think I was reading a profile about somebody who's a big sound producer in Hollywood, and we heard that there is a person who has what he called a sound castle in New Jersey. Watch at what their movements are doing, and you do it in sync with them. So what kind of sounds is he making? Give us an example in a movie. Any effect you hear in a movie, it could be a punch, it could be a footfall,

it could be somebody being stabbed, it could be somebody drinking. It could be somebody drinking a cup of tea, but it's this giant space just heaped and heaped and heaped with things. A wall of little props. That is my command center right here. I don't know. This is like a child's, it looks like a round green. Oh, I don't know what kind of child you hang out with, but that's a dog toy, a cat toy.

That's a little bell in a guy. But you could use it as a teething ring, I guess, for a kid. So what's this thing here? You know what? This box is full of all little plastic toys and things. Okay. So I'll just take it down, and everything makes a little bit of a... This is a little like a... A little cat toy.

A toy. Chew doll, I don't know what. Or a child toy. It's a pig. This guy, his arms go crazy. That's a little... It's a lizard. It's a lizard. Figurine, which is only about five inches tall, and...

It's appendages, make a great noise. You got a syringe here? I have a lot of syringes. We're working on... This is a real syringe. Most of them are real. And that one doesn't have any needles protruding, and you're lucky.

Yeah. Biohazards right next to child's toys. So he's got a, for example, a lizard figurine, kind of chew toy thing. What sound does that make? It squeaks in just the right way. And sometimes there's a scene where you need something to squeak just like that. window in a horror movie or something. Yeah.

And this guy is an incredible demand. He's worked on more than 500 movies. He's had a career that spans 30 years. And he's worked on movies everyone's seen. Working on movies, like I say you've got ducks and they're walking on funny services. And in order for that to work, he had to equip certain gloves with actual dried duck feet. What we did is went to Chinatown. and you know how you see all the ducks hanging in the windows.

Yeah. Well, if you go into those stores, they'll have a box of or a bin of duck feet. So we took every one, 10 of them, and I, or actually, yeah, I got 10 of them. And we put these duck feet on each finger. So now that I've got more of a surface that have these little hooks,

so that you'd hear it on branches, you'd hear it on, you know, wherever they were stepping on the rock, it wouldn't be just like a single tap. It would be these sloppy feet that we were trying to create for dodo birds. Actual edible duck feet. Oh, yeah. they dried. He uses all sorts of very unconventional objects to make these everyday sounds,

or sometimes he makes these not so everyday sounds. With Hannibal Lecter, you have the challenge of producing the sound of Hannibal Lecter biting off somebody's face. Now, you might not know what that sounds like. It's not an everyday kind of sound. It's not a sound you hear every day now. Right. But you'd probably know if it didn't sound like that. You know, you just intuitively have that strong sense. You know, Life of Pie, the Ang Lee movie, you've got a kid who is on a raft and there's a giant tiger on the raft and he's in the middle of the ocean and a lot of adventures are going to befall him. All of a sudden, they're about to, either the tiger's going to launch or the kid's going to stab the tiger and the kid gets hit in the face with a flying fish.

Then all of a sudden they're in the storm of flying fish that are going over the bow and hitting them. The tiger's biting at them and it's like a cheap shot. shot. It comes out of nowhere and then it just scares you. So now we have to do a thousand flying fish in the water. So how do you make the sound of a flying fish? Well, uh, or being hit in the face by one? The first thing, well, that would be a shammie cloth or something that was wet. You don't, you have to use a fish or anything. You need something that's going to give you a wet sound because it's a, it's a, why, why not? It holds water. Okay. I mean, I can get your shammy cloth. I'll give you a quick demo. Okay. Let's do that. If you're just doing a little,

like impacts, knife into a body, in and out. Now, of course, if I was to do a larynx, I'd have to throw some celery or carrots in there, and then I would do a, you know, like a hand button, get through a little. I'm liking this Louisville slugger here. That's been in a lot of films, and I think when I first used it was on Goodfellas, and for them beating the heck out of someone in a trunk. And then they came back and said, nah, it was an aluminum bat. So I was like, okay, I had two, so we gave them a different quality sound after that.

Did it involve shemmy cloth? The knifing in the back sure did. This box that's marked magic. Yes. What's that? I used to do magic tricks as a kid. Mark of the magician. That's probably full of a lot of old tricks.

And when do you stop doing magic? I still make balloons. so I haven't given it up totally. So did you just like stumble into this business? Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, totally. I never knew what a folly was. I met people that were in the film business.

I was introduced and I was like, wow, you guys do this and you get paid for that? What, huh? What? I had the eye hand coordination being a magician. Yeah. I recently reread those famous passage in Proust where he talks about the Madeline

and how it cues these memories from his childhood in Cumbra. And looking at it again, though, it's about the madeleine. It's about the tea being poured, and he's dunking the madeline. He's soaking a little bit of the madeleine in the tea, and he's slurping the tea.

And we always focus on the sensory experience of eating the madeline, but it's also clearly the whole soundscape here. It's the sound of tea plashing into the cup. It's the sound of this little pressed cake dunking. They didn't have Dunkin' Donuts then, dunking into the tea. I mean, for him, there would have been that whole acoustic experience.

And you wonder whether that's also part of bringing back his childhood. What came to mind is when you said dunking, it was like, I probably could make the sound of that, the liquid absorbing into the cake or the cookie. How do you do that? I mean, I might have to get like a rice-crispy cake, maybe. Maybe a wet sponge squeeze, and then you have a little liquid, and then you hear the sucking up of the liquid through the sponge. That might give you that impression.

That's a great idea. I'm available. Marco Costanza, sound effects expert talking with the New Yorker's Henry Finder. Next week on the New Yorker radio hour, I'll talk with the TV host and writer Larry Wilmore about presidents making jokes and making jokes about the president. I'll ask Willmore about his controversial appearance at the White House correspondence dinner

and the way he chose to call President Obama the N-word. That's next week. Till then, stay in touch. We're on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. And why don't you sign up for our newsletter at new yorkeradio.org. So you'll know what's coming every week on the radio hour and on the New Yorkers podcast. Before we go, though, we're going to get out and enjoy the weather with playground purgatory. Is that your little guy over there?

Yeah, that's Sebastian. What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide. Oh, she's so sweet. I feel like I've seen you here before. I'm Anna. Yeah, you look familiar. I'm Sarah. This place is such a lifesaver.

Total lifesaver. We're here like every day, sometimes twice. Tell me about it. We were here for ten hours yesterday. I'm always so happy when I'm here, and never feel strange or despondent. Me too, so happy. The sound of all the kids laughing and screaming is so joyous. It doesn't sound like nails on a chalkboard at all. Never cried behind that tree.

Me neither. Tessa. Tess, come on over here and put on your coat, okay, sweetheart? It's chilly out, and you need to put your coat on, okay? Your coat needs to go on your body. The fabric needs to cover your torso to help you maintain a proper internal temperature or you'll die, okay? Pumpkin? Is that your little guy over there?

Yeah, that's Sebastian. What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide. Oh, she's adorable. Wait. Did I already ask you that? Did you? I don't think so. I don't know.

I feel funny sometimes. Sometimes, when I'm in the sandbox, I can feel myself sinking like something's pulling me down. I can feel the sand slowly suffocating me, and it feels good. We should totally do a play date sometime. Oh my God, it would be so great to do a play date. Maybe I'll buy us a bottle of Pito Grigio. Nothing wrong with moms playing a little play date, right? Nothing wrong at all.

Hey, I don't know if you're into it, but I bet I could dig up a little pot in the back of a drawer somewhere. It might be really old, but it could be fun. Ooh, no, that would be fun. Great. I could probably score a line or two of Coke if you wanted. We totally don't have to. Oh, I am definitely down for a bumper too. Is that applesauce on your shirt?

This, no, Tessa threw up on me. But applesauce or throw up, what's the difference, really? They're both just things that get on your shirt that you lose the will to wipe off after a certain point. I mean, either way, you're going to give yourself a haircut with a kitchen knife, right? Sebastian, share the slide, honey bear. We don't own the slide, okay? We have to share because if we don't, society will collapse and will be no better than animals. This playground and everything around it will deteriorate into a dystopian war zone.

And you know what dystopian war zones don't have? Slides. I love her outfit. It's so cute. I want to tear her arms off. Such a beautiful day here today. It's perfect. Not a cloud in the sky. Never is. I'm Anna, by the way.

Colin Nissen's Playground Purgatory was performed by Julie Sharbut and me, Sarah Nix. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. We are very sad to say goodbye this week to our kind and brilliant technical director, Paul Schneider, who's shaped the sound of this show since the beginning. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.