You're Wrong About - Rainbows with Lulu Miller

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Why are there so many songs about rainbows (and what’s on the other side)? A bridge between worlds, a map to a pot of gold, the centerpiece of a Lisa Frank trapper-keeper, and of course, an ever-changing symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, the rainbow has been a profound part of the human experience for thousands of years. For this early Pride Month episode, science correspondent and bisexual seagull Lulu Miller explains to Sarah the history of our understanding of rainbows: why they exist, what they are made out of, and what they have represented. Together they discuss the figures that have tried to pin down this natural wonder, the power of its spectrum of meaning, and the comfort and terror of the infinity it once represented. Digressions include the boring transcendence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the secret joys of trigonometry, and the best gay Hannibal Lecter. More Lulu Miller:https://radiolab.org/team/lulu-millerLulu on InstagramLulu's book Why Fish Don't ExistOriginal music in this episode brought to you by Magpie Cinema Club featuring Brendan LiuExcept for "Roy G Biv" from this episode of Lulu's WNYC show Terrestrials, which is written and performed by Alan Goffinski and included on The Bridge EPAnd also Spanish Flea by Herb AlpertEdited + Produced by Miranda Zickler:http://linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonsterMore You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchSupport the show

Well, he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day. You know, you start thinking about infinity as he get bounced around on there. Welcome to your wrong about the show where we are celebrating Pride Month with rainbows and Lulu Miller. Lulu, hello. You are a great legend of podcasts and a bisexual seagull. right here with us. That is my bio. I held out a fry and he flapped right over. Exactly. You shown a French fry on the moon. And here I am because a couple prides ago we did the very homosexual and bisexual seagulls, which I had such a good time with that everyone should listen to. So I thought,

yeah, I could bring you some more queer wares in the form of a rainbow. And you know, I feel a little sheepish about rainbows because I'm like, I feel like, I feel like, Part of what's so lovely about you're wrong about how it is, you know, you get into these, like, dark, twisted corners and maybe everyone thinks rainbows are just going to be puffy, frivolous candy. But we're big fans of puff and candy. Okay, but don't worry because I would argue rainbows, much like rats, are maligned and misunderstood. Inevitably, you know? Yeah. Like, for example, I feel like I'm like Larry King.

tonight, rainbows, do they really have a pot of gold at the end? Or is it all a bunch of Hocom? Let's listen to Leon and Des Moines. So, well, first of all, what are your associations with rainbows? Any and all quick gut? I freaking love rainbows. And, you know, the other day, and I don't think I even said this to you, I was driving to my mom's house and I saw a rainbow. And then I realized it was a double rainbow and it was also storming and there was a um what's the noun for a piece of lightning a bolt of lightning oh my god sarah and i saw a little lightning bolt next to the freaking rainbow lulu wow that i mean yeah the power the luck it was really cool it was like driving into a lead zeppelin cover

the amount of atmospheric things yeah that's great that's great okay so for you You, I don't know, when, when, what do you, I don't know, what do you, what do you think about with rainbows? Where do you usually, you see them in the wild? What do they stir in you? Well, I just, I just think they're great. And I think they often create a feeling in me of like, what did it feel? Because I was raised by two parents who like to explain things to me and generally did a

pretty good job. So with rainbows, they're like, well, it's because the, you know, there's like moisture in the air and it acts as a prism and it makes this big rainbow. And then you could have that demonstrated to you by the fact that like, you know, I mean, we didn't have this when I was a kid. But today, you know, you have the like shimmery window film that makes little rainbows or like a, you know, piece of nicely cut glass, you know, like a sun catcher or something, I guess. So it was like something that you could observe as a kid and be like, yes, I understand this is happening on different scales and having that information available. As opposed to like, It always makes me think now of like, what was it like for people before we knew the science of like, you know, thunder and rainbows and stuff to sort of deal with these kind of weather events, especially when your ability to survive was so dependent on what the weather was doing generally. Absolutely. Well, that's a great, that's a great place to start. So maybe we'll go back to at least some of the cultural associations, the indigenous cultural associations, the legends about rainbows before we had, you know, the.

sort of more modern physicists take. But I will say like culturally, you know, I'm just realizing there's a rainbow on the year wrong about logo. Isn't there? Yeah. No, there is. Yeah, exactly. It's the rainbow show. How did that get there? I don't know. It was something that might came up with back in the day. It was like probably like 2019 or something because our previous logo, real ones for a member, it was just like a stock image of like a hand giving the thumbs down on like a salmon background. and it was meant to emulate like Joaquin Phoenix and Gladiator, I think, which I haven't seen.

But I'm wearing he's a little gay boy who wants to execute hot men or whatever. And we had the logo for a while. And at a certain point, we were like, we might be outgrowing this logo. Yeah. Which looked more like it was, I don't know. I don't know.

And so the rainbow was like this, I think this idea that we both kind of intuitively recognized, I'm assuming, as like feeling more expansive and optimistic and that it's crucially going up, you know, and this idea. I always interpreted it as like, you know, if you have more information, it's like a positive thing because it helps you grow as opposed to being like, eh, wrong, you know. Right. Like, eh, you dumb. Yeah, I love that. Okay, expansive. Put a, put a pin in that word. We'll circle back. Oh, gosh, fun fact about rainbows. They're actually fully a circle. They're not just an arch.

It's just the horizon gets in the way. You know, I've seen a couple where it's, you're like, you can kind of see it. Have you seen that? I've never seen it. But I guess if you are in an airplane, you could see it or like on a mountain, you'd be able to see a little bit more. Yeah. I feel like I've seen a couple rainbows maybe when I was at an elevation that are like,

where you can kind of start to see that circle happening. Yeah. Yeah. I think. But like, I guess, I guess just culturally, I mean, they're often, I think they have become, you you know, unicorns, my little pony, you see them on a cereal box. They're a little like frivolous vibes. Well, and we also had the 20 teens when interestingly, we had the sort of like unicorns and rainbows coated sort of wave of, I guess, aesthetics. And yeah, it's hard to even define in

retrospect. It's kind of like, we kind of said something it was a unicorn if it was just like magenta. Yeah. Which is interesting. But like Lisa Frank, trap or keeper. Yes. Yeah. The little girl aesthetic and a big part of stickers, of course, as well. Stingers is rain. And the, what else? Of course, the, the best section in Fantasia with the Pegasuses. Oh, yeah. And everybody, they had the like rainbow falling in the water and then it colored the different parts of the water, different colors. And he could like dip them up, which was so cool. Mm-hmm. And very disappointing to not be able to do. Yeah, I think they're just, yeah, they've become like a part of cartoon aesthetic too.

And a little, but a little, I think a little frivolous, a little, you know, girlish, sugary saccharine. Yeah. Well, anything associated with little girls is considered to be dumb in American culture. Because of our view, yes, of young women. Okay. So, but rainbows historically were these things of huge power. So, like, interestingly in all kinds of cultures, you know, both. before they were connected, a rainbow was often seen as some kind of bridge.

It is brick shaped. It's bridge shaped and it's, you know, kind of goes from sky to Earth or looks like it does. And so in Norse mythology, rainbows were seen as like a literal bridge that you could, you know, bridge from the gods. You could like the gods could walk down to earth or you could walk up to the gods. like the Tawala of New Guinea side as a bridge to the dead, to the sort of afterlife. In Greek myths, Iris, the messenger for the gods, maybe like a hand-baden to Hera would pass usually messages, but usually warnings down the rainbow. Well, yeah, I mean, that's just practical. And I guess when you see a rainbow in the distance, like you do, because, of course, when I was a kid, you know, my dad would be like, oh, Sarah, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And then he'd be like, oh, my God, it looks like it's ending in our house. And then you'd be like, yes. Yeah. And then you're like, where'd it go? And he's like, I don't know. I guess it was in another house. And you're like, ah, these rainbows, they're hard to track. Yeah.

They're pesky. Right, of course, the leprechaun, the pot of gold. Like, though the leprechaun myth, I guess sort of was originally back in the 8th century. It was like a Celtic tradition of a water sprite. Wow. Yeah. That's a long timeline for lepricons. But they're so small.

They live longer. Yeah. And they, I guess, were originally much more like the horror movie Lepricon. They were like very sinister. Like their origin was in trying to drown a king. But then they're in the 19th century there. Well, maybe he had it coming, you know? I don't know.

Oh, I'm sure he did. I mean, a Celtic king in the 700s, props. But then he like got more sort of softened in the 19th century and his pranks became less deadly and more like, you stole the bacon. Or like. So you like an anti- Yeah, sure. Like a brownie helps around the house and he does a little mischief around the house.

He's like an little Irish poltergeist. Yes, totally. But then there was this sort of, I guess the idea of the pot of gold really kind of blossomed like when sort of Irish Americans were facing poverty. And it was this idea that like, maybe you could get some luck like this like need for a pot of gold. If you see the rainbow, you might have some gold. Like, where's that fucking leprecha? So it's the idea that when there's a rainbow, there's a leprechaun nearby and you got to find him and get his pot of gold somehow? That's, yeah.

All right. Is a pot the best way to carry gold because it feels like the pot is already a little heavy? That's a great question. Already pretty heavy. You know, he should have had. He was originally, he was a cobbler, so like he could have had a shoe bag. Right. Or a quilt.

Okay, but sorry, that was my leprechaun digression. But the point is like, for a long time. you know, for cultures all over the world, a rainbow was like a very powerful thing. And it could mean, you know, storms ahead or some kind of divine intervention. It was often a bad omen. Yeah. Well, that makes sense because I feel like it happens when like crazy weather is on the way a lot of the time. Yeah. And then another weird thing was like, again, in all, in a lot of not connected indigenous cultures, there was this idea that if you pointed out of a rainbow, your finger could rot off. Oh, no. Yeah. And just this idea of like, I think the point is like it's a powerful,

sacred thing. Be careful of how you interact with it. Right. And so I just, I just loved finding that out. Maybe don't put it on all those stickers. Yeah, because we've totally like, we've like drained that power out in a lot of ways and like stopped thinking about how they actually occur in nature, which you're right often is around a storm a very powerful often deadly thing so okay so that's kind of this idea that they were like this powerful bridge between worlds yeah well they really they are really and also between the present moment and the next and i imagine they also occur sometimes before weather events where people die so you know okay so meaning obviously is what you make out of it that depends on your culture your experience but we are here i want to move to the

the substance, the material of a rainbow, because regardless of what it means to you, there have been a lot of people, a lot of scientists, philosophers over the centuries, trying to really pin down what it is. Yeah. Which would be very difficult back in the day, I would imagine. Yeah, without a lot of tools. And they are these weird things because they're not quite like a tree. But they're not, like, they're out there because you can both.

point at it, but like, but then they're a little, like, it's very hard to understand, like, are they, basically, one of the debates was, are they out, is it out there or is it in here? Like, is it a product of the mind? Oh. Like a mirage or like a, even like a dream or is it like a tree, but then it's not like a tree because you get it like, it was like this pesky, people just weren't sure. Right. Now that you ask that, I'm like, well, what is it actually?

because it is like light, which is a product of the sort of range in which we see. So yeah. It's totally tricky. So that's, I'm going to, I mean, most of what I'm going to tell you today is going to kind of build us toward answering that. Great. Okay. What is it exactly? What's a freaking rainbow?

What is a freaking rainbow? Okay. So one of our first earliest heavy hitters to weigh in on the matter was Aristotle. Of course. Hello Aristotle. Yeah. And he was big team XOS in Greek for it's out there. Like it's out there.

I think it is matter. The rainbow is out there. The rainbow is out there. Was Aristotle Socrates a student? Does it go Plato, Socrates Aristotle? Sarah, you're probably going to know that more than me. I do know that he was publishing on rainbows in like the mid three. 300 BC times. Good for him. That's great. What was I doing back then? Practically nothing.

Now I need to know. I don't know the order. I always, okay. Yeah, look it up for me. I got a cat here. Yeah, it was So Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle. So Aristotle's the baby. Socrates top Plato, Plato, Aristotle. And then like, isn't one of them fake or something? I don't know. Okay. I guess no, to quote real genius in the immortal last words of Socrates, I drink what? Insert a little room shot there. Okay. Okay. So student of student Aristotle. Yeah. His basically his idea was like, important Greek dude was like, okay, I think here's what a rainbow is.

I think that this, I think sunlight is a pure white substance. and that should it hit a patch of impurities in the air like mist or dust or something, you know, an impurity of some sort, that the light gets tinted or muddied into these colors. And so for him, basically the idea of like you see a rainbow after rain because there's all this mist in the air. And so the pure white light gets muddied and like disguised and tinted. I mean, that seems basically accurate to my understanding. I think I'm on the same technical level as like a very smart person living over 2,000 years ago. Yeah. So my relationship to science.

It's a very good guess. And like it's devil in the details of the way in which he's going to be off is like the difference between so much of our modern technology. So he is close. Right. Because it feels like there's like these concepts that recur in these kinds of, you know, periods of science. where you're like, well, you're right about the outcome, but the logic by which you think that happened is a product of your times. Is that accurate for this? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's a stunning guess for the Times. It's a totally great guess. Yeah. Like, I guess we read Little

House on the Prairie and there's a part where everyone gets malaria. Yeah. And then someone is like, everyone who got malaria ate a watermelon. That's how this malaria spread. And it's like, well, yeah. No, but I mean, how. I mean, how. How are you going to know? But how are you going to know? I know. Yeah. Just take out the melon part.

And maybe when you go to go eat watermelon, you get bitten by a mosquito, you know. Yeah. So that was his idea. It was like tinted, muddied, change, dirtied, something like that. It's been adulterated. Adulterated. Adulterated light. And so then, you know, throughout that kind of, that idea is going to stick for centuries for a long time.

It's pretty much the way. Right. But there was a person who doesn't. get as much credit in the rainbow history as I think he should. Who's a medieval Persian scholar, Nassir al-Dun al-Tusi. And this guy was like Da Vinci pre-Divinci. Like he was an intellectual giant. And you could do a whole you're wrong about him.

I don't know a ton, but I just did kind of like a deep dive. Oh, I would love to do a math you wrong about it. I would be so out of my depth. But this guy is like, okay, let me send you. send you just what he looks like because he was um to cute too on the 700th anniversary of his death he got an iranian stamp and uh he just uh yeah well let's just picture him because he's uh okay wait let me uh he's so smart and so ahead of his time and it's just i just want to like consider him for a brief moment okay so let's give him a face and i'm kind of thinking about this guy for a totally

different reason right now which will be worth the digression i hope oh yeah i'm always willing to Well, yeah, he looks like Michael Gambone or like, he looks like, wait, who's the main Roy, Logan Roy. Oh, yeah, he's got Logan Roy. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, but maybe a little younger. He looks exactly like Logan.

Oh, fabulous beard. Which, yes, is very hot to me. Yeah. Everyone knows that Brian Cox. would be sexy to go on a rubber boot hunting weekend, we all know this. Yes, okay. So have you seen him as Hannibal Lecter?

It's like the most overtly gay portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, which I think is saying something. In my opinion, I will take other analyses. Okay, so, so, okay, so I'll do Nasir Al-Tusi. So he was born in 1201. And like he is going to basically become the forefather of trigonometry. And then he's also going to be huge in astronomy. He publishes all these star charts, these astronomical atlases that will be used for hundreds of years.

And he's like also does all this stuff on ethics. So he's just. He's just inventing math right now. Yeah. He's just inventing math and he's doing it by watching the world. Like he figured out a lot of this stuff by watching stars and observing them. That's really cool. And you know what?

I always kind of liked trigonometry. Did you like trigonometry at all? I think that's a fun one. I did. I was going to say, I did. What did you like about it? Well, I guess that it's like an actual thing that I care about, which is triangles and how tall things are. Yeah.

And it was like, it felt like a secret code. It was like puzzle vibes. It was just like, you do this, you do this. And then it works. There's something satisfying. Yeah. Whereas Calc suddenly got so abstract that it kind of started to short circuit me. And I never got.

that far. Yeah. After that was when my school let you quit math. And I was like, thank you. Good night. Cool. Great. Love a hypotenuse. It's been fun. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he's just this like incredible thinker and he's doing it at a time of incredible upheaval. So he's like for about a decade he's working in this place that sounds incredible. It's like an intellectual castle. It's like a library across to the castle called Alamut. And there's all these visiting scholars and he's teaching. And then comes the Mongolian invasion. Yeah. And they smash it. They smash the castle.

And it's at this point, Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulegu. And anyway, but okay, it's making me think about institutions getting absolutely smashed by like, like, dictator. Yeah, like, right now. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, like, science getting like totally smashed. So, but so then instead of just like crying and bemoaning the state of the world, this guy, our guy, Alde and L2C, our astronomer.

what does he do? He joins Khan's army. He like joins the army, but then he ends up getting really close to him and convincing him to build an even fancier scientific observatory castle thing. God, how did he work that though? How do you like sign a lot and be like, hey, I mean, I realize it would take a while. Is it like a dread pirate Roberts type situation? Yeah. And he, yes. And he like, I guess stroked his ego enough to be like, this will be such a good. like you built it. Anyway, so then he built an even, but so just instead of being like, you hate science, he was like, I think you really love science. And then he built this incredible observatory. And that's where he observed all these planetary movements, which helped him

write this thing called the two-seat couple, which like talks about how a circle moves and then a circle looks like a line. I'm not quite sure. But that helped him pave the way for the realization that the earth is not the center of the world. And those observations, many scholars believe, made their way to a guy named Copernicus. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. So this is a man who is like not afraid to look at the scary, like just like hard to understand stars, things like that.

He's like, listen, Gagis Khan, you can't stop science. You can't. None of us can. Yeah. Okay. So what are we talking about today? Rainbow. So he also, you know, he's this like, I'll think about anything.

Stars. Cool. Trigonometry. Great math. Cool. Colors. Let me take on colors. And he basically starts like flirting with.

idea that maybe there are actually infinite colors. And because, like, infinity is this notoriously hard concept. Yeah. I don't know. I feel terror when I think about it, but so do a lot of people. Yeah. You know what I've always thought about when I think about infinity? No, tell me.

There's this quote from, I think, in the Amy Tan book about one of her characters as, like, a sixth grader being terrified by the thought of infinity and also being equally terrified by the antithesis of it, which she invasions is like the universe coming to an end, and the image is something like like a frayed tennis ball bouncing off a wall. Yeah, right? There's something really dreadful about that in a great way. Here's what I think about a lot, and I might have mentioned it before on this show, but I really love 2001 a Space Odyssey. I really love it when movies are boring, which to be clear, I think it is trying to

be on purpose. God bless it. I really love the dawn of man stuff. And I love the middle part, which I think I, I for one, did not really remember until I watched it more recently, which is like this man traveling boringly on a commercial flight to the, you know, airport just outside the moon, the moon base, and then traveling to the moon. And the thing that he's dealing with is a secret project because they found this monolith on the moon, which is the same one that we saw. In the first sequence, which shows up and then, you know, early man or, you know, Lucy figures out how to use weapons. And it's like this big, big moment, as you would imagine. And it's also like interesting on the subject of innovation, because I feel like as you're talking about this, like there's this very sort of like American history book way and also I'm sure, you know, very British way of teaching history that's like, and then one man out of all the men.

One man who happened to be well-bred and well-educated and well-connected thought of something. And he thought, by jinks. And that's how science works, as opposed to, like, a lot of people in different places noticing things, you know, often somewhat simultaneously. Or, you know, innovation sort of layering on innovation in a way where, like, nothing is entirely one person's idea, I think, most, if not all of the time. But you know, but this is how it works with the apes Yeah. In the movie. Yeah, what I like about the boringness of it all is, well, A, I just think that it's kind of nice to be forced to sit and look at things for that long.

It's not that long, but it feels longer. And that also that the middle part is then we're going to the moon to see this monolith where these guys in space suits like stand in front of it and take cheesy pictures of this monolith they found. And then this high-pitched ringing starts. And the premise of that, apparently, is that, which I don't think you could necessarily figure out just by watching it, is like, what if the monolith is like a baby gate that's been placed there on the moon to tell the aliens or something, somebody, God, question mark, aliens, God? same diff as far as the movie's concerned that humans have like figured it out enough to get to the moon and that we're ready for the next thing and I guess I don't know

I guess I love that idea for some reason because it implies this sort of like I don't know this idea of this almost if I keep calling it a baby gate it's because I'm envisioning it as like alien mommy out there being like look at you and like watching humanity grow Like you think you've traveled so far.

Right. And we've just gotten to the bottom of the stairs. And we're still at the bottom of the stairs. And there's also something so nice about that because Earth is really special and it's where all our stuff is. And there aren't really other planets like it that we're ever going to be able to get to before we destroy this one. You know? And so I don't know. I think it's just like we have, there's a sort of maybe like spasming capitalist idea right now of like, well, we'll,

we'll just get a new, hotter, younger planet. You know, it'll all be fine. And it's like, no, we're little babies. We barely understand the universe we're in. Like, we're at the baby gate and we need to really, you know. Yeah. I don't know. I just think it's so nice that everything is so much bigger than us.

I'm at a moment in my life where humanity is behaving so badly that I'm like, it's so great that we're, that we know so little about the shape of things. Yeah. So in that way, does the concept of infinity, this greatness of space and time and even knowledge? Like, is it comforting or what's your... You know what I think is that I think infinity is scary because it so alludes our perceptions. And maybe at this moment, I'm like, it's so great that there is so much truth and reality out there that alludes our ability to perceive it. Because our perceptions as humans, we're really having so much trouble. Yeah. Like our intentions keep like returning us to the same messes. If the universe were within our perceptions, it would be really tiny. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Or something. I don't know. It's just nice. And it's it's humbling and I don't know. Anyway, that's my digression. Everyone give 2001 a space odyssey a try. It's also as my mom and my ninth grade English teacher would have, you know, a movie that can envision no role for women in the future aside from being steward. And that's also very true. Maybe some of, maybe that eighth was a girl. Probably not, but I can think so. Can I do one more digression in the digression in the digression? Yeah. Yes. Always.

Okay. So you talked about the tennis ball thing and the, this is what's called the golden mean. Yeah. Okay. So the fear of the opposite infinity of infinity, which is like the teenst speck of everything, maybe you could argue is that. Yeah. And that, that, that, that, reminds me I just wanted to read a poem by Marie Howe. Yeah. Because she writes about this, that, that it's often called like the spec is often called the singularity, which is just like before we were this infinite thing. We were like everything pressed together. And I just think it's a really beautiful reframe of that terrifying opposite of. Okay, so I'm just going to read it. Yes. It's not very long. Okay. So Marie Howe, it's called this, it's called the singularity.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? So compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money, nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember? There was no nature, no them, no tests, to determine if the elephant grieves her calf

or if the coral reef feels pain, trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French, would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that when Earth was sky, an animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all, nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules remember it what once was? Before anything happened, can our molecules? Remember? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun yet. Only a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot brimming with is, is, is, is, all everything home. I love that so much. Isn't that beautiful? Yes, that's so beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't

know, I feel that. And like, I don't, what if, because like, there's all these things that kind of as you're telling the rainbow history that started off as folklore and then often, you know, and often, too, science is like, no, that's insane. Right. Right. But often as like, as well, there's, there's, you know, some kind of finding where it's like, yeah, this thing that people always said. And often that, like, indigenous people always said and that then, you know, colonizers were like, no, that's silly. We're going to act in ways that will kill us and all of you too. And that, of course, science then later supported as having, you know, as being proven by things that we didn't have the ability to conceive or analyze. Sarah, don't steal my ending. Oh, I won't. I won't. I can't. I'm backing

away. I recently touched an electrified fence without really thinking about it. It was very low voltage. It was around a bunny paddock, but I was looking right at a sign that. that said, do not touch electric. And I was like, I'm just going to rest my hand. I would not have lasted long in the past. What did you feel? Very little. Okay.

You know? But enough enough to jump back? I was like, oh, shit. That's the feeling of I'm not supposed to be touching that. Okay. But anyway, but my thought hearing that poem, and this is like me bearing my soul to you. Love it. That's what, you know, this show is about.

is that like what if in some far off scientific finding there's evidence that, you know, love is not just a pro-social impulse that we need to feel in order to raise young and, et cetera, and protect ourselves from predators and each other. And also I think us talking about coyotes, I've thought about that a lot and really come to the conclusion that like as much as we like to visualize ourselves as being alone, we really thrive in packs. And I think a lot of our trouble has come from not knowing what group we belong to or having any group that we belong to. Yeah.

And craving a group, missing it. Yeah. And then creating groups out of, you know, hate or whatever. Or whatever we can find. And apparently, you know, mutual fear is like, we'll put you together as a group quickly. But then, you know, but then the goals that you have will be destructive. and the sort of anyway, that's a whole conversation. Wait, but what were you saying love?

What if love wasn't about lions? But what if love? What if love is like not just all those sort of practical things that of course makes sense, but also this sort of like collective atomic memory of this time when we were all one thing, you know? That's so beautiful. Why the heck not? It might be. It might be.

And that feeling of reunification, like those little molecules. glimmering and welcome each other back. I like it. I like that. I'm thinking a lot lately about just sort of like what it means to approach life as a universalist and to see all religions is like, yeah, you know, because like I think that like the same way that we can't conceive of the universe, it's, you know, any kind of faith that isn't based on controlling other people, I think is you can see them all grasping at the same thing. Yeah. That might be getting too much into my personal spiritual journey.

But we're talking about rainbows. I mean, it's inevitable probably that we get here. No, but I think that, like, I mean, I personally have had in the last five years or so a massive, like, absolute change in what I think the job of a reporter is, which was going into it, I mean, I now admittedly going into it, I didn't have any journalistic training and I came into it through a weird side door of loving story. So for a long time, I was like, the goal is to find a story, find an amazing story, find a story, find the story, make it. And then like as I came to come up around incredible reporters and people who really kind of did go to J school and do think about it

in other ways, I came to see how like story is often the enemy because, you know, stories about like cutting off details and disfiguring reality to make a nice narrative. Right. That actually like I do think increasingly my job and I'm not good at it, but what I'm at least trying to do now is to like capture more and more complexity and then just like present that in a digestible way. So obviously there's, but I do think and that that's why I like to go back to, you know, just like what have religion said?

What have traditions said? Like science doesn't have a monopoly untrue. to really do good science. Let's look at all kinds of different things. And so I do think, you know, people always talk about braiding indigenous wisdom. And I think that's just such a profoundly amazing way to like get a deeper and more accurate understanding of nature and science. So I think your you, you, you church dreams. Your universalist vibe is, it's like it's not just good for spirituality, but I think it's very good for.

science, like very, very good. Ooh. Yeah. Nice. Okay. But so, okay, but so you, but the concept of infinity is where we kind of left off. So this idea of like a lot of people, especially before we even had it well termed linguistically and mathematically, like it was this idea that was, that was frightening.

Like, you know, Aristotle, I guess apparently like absolutely rejected the idea of an actual infinity. He believed you could count forever. Like he was like, okay, maybe there are infinite numbers, but I think the universe is finite. So he was like a strict, as I understand a strict finitist. And there's just this idea of like thinking about infinity has really broken a lot of people. Yeah. And there's a very famous case of this scientist George Cantor.

He like was obsessed with a certain kind of infinities, this idea of like infinite infinities. And he basically glimpsed that truth. He published on it. But he really broke him. Like he went mad. This is like when he, before acid had been synthesized and he had to just do it yourself over years of study. Yeah, you just had to think about.

And it's sort of apocryphal that he took his life. It looks like he probably died of a heart attack. But in an asylum. Well, and also there's so many other things to, you know, drive a person beyond the point of no return if there's, you know, no real mental health availability. But infinity doesn't help. It doesn't. And the George Cantor thing, like a.

I actually couldn't find these notes, but a while back I looked into him. And I did. I was like, I had watched this documentary called, it was a BBC documentary called Dangerous Knowledge. And it was about like knowledge that drove scientists mad. So many people watched that thinking it would be about sex somehow. And then it was a math documentary. Yeah. No, and not at all. And that's that one, that documentary kind of makes it a little bit too much look like it was a suicide. And I think that was a misstep. But then I looked into the stuff and it's like he was tried. He was read. He was. writing these letters, like, trying to, he's like, I want to stop thinking about this. It is, but I can't. And so I think there was like, the heart attack may have done him in, but he really ended up in an asylum and thinking about infinity was really a torment, but like an addiction. So anyway, my point is, thinking about infinity is hard. Aristotle didn't want to do it. George Cantor went mad.

But our guy back, Nassir Aldina, Al-Tusi was just like, bring it on. I want to think about it. Well, he's probably writing around on a Mongolian pony all day. You start thinking about infinity as he get bounced around on there. You do. And you look at the stars. So he was, I think, really ahead of his time. Not only did he like predict the Copernican shift or pave the way for that idea.

He also was like, I think that there are in colors, there are like infinite pathways of mixing them. And he just was like more into this idea of sort of there might be infinite colors in the rainbow. But the idea it didn't really take off. It didn't get traction. Aristotle with this idea of like this more kind of rigid idea about light and and rainbows took hold for a long way. But he was, I don't know. I just want to give him his due because he was kind of ahead of his time. So, okay.

So then we jump ahead. We're going to get there. We're coming to the end of our scientific story. Don't worry. Look, I'll go on whatever. I'll go on like an Indiana Jones itinerary of scientific story with you. Don't worry about it. Great.

All right. Well, pull out your rope because we are swinging to 1665. England, a plague sweeps the land. And everyone kind of had to go into lockdown. I don't know if you remember anything about that. You know, we had we had a cable and stuff. Yeah, it was different. And I mentioned that they didn't.

They did not. Yeah. And so a young, a young man named Isaac Newton, not yet a sir. I knew Newton was going to turn up. Hello. Here he comes. Here he comes. Walking down the street.

Just the busiest virgin. That chavre did me. Hates Isaac Newton. An apple didn't fall on his head. Here comes Isaac Newton. Don't try and jump in his bed. I'm sorry to make so many jokes about him being a virgin. I guess don't know that much about his life.

I'm feeling like he probably was at this time. He's a young man. He's crashing for lockdown. He goes home as many a millennial did to live with his parents. Yeah. In the English countryside. It's hard to picture him without a wig. It is hard.

I wonder if... Because we've only seen him in a big curly wig, right? Young Isaac Newton. What did you look like? He was very attractive, from what I remember, of depictions of him. Quite the bro. I wonder if the milkmaids were all over Isaac Newton and he was like, let go of me. He kind of looks like, you know, more like kind of like Kate Winslet as a young, as a young.

As a young. Anyway, but so he, yeah, okay, so he's just like in the English countryside. No, yeah, no cable, no Tiger King for him to watch. So he just is like, I don't know, I picture him like tinkling the hipsichord and playing backgammon. And one day he is just fumbling around with a prism. I would imagine so. Now, did you B.YOP? I did get a prism.

And wait, I think not to name names because I didn't see which cat might have done this, but I think Werner probably knocked it off the table. So wait, let me look real quick. Classic. Okay, here it is. This is like a classic triangular prism. Great. Yeah. Now can you, I don't know if you have a window in your room. Yeah, I'm right in front of, I'm right in front of a window. It is a very cloudy day though. Okay. So we might not get it, but see if you can just just angle it for a second and see if you get any action.

Mm-hmm. Or just describe what you see. Yeah. Well, I get, I'm not able to like bounce light through it right now, but if I just sort of like look into it, I can just sort of see little. little reflections of details of my surroundings with little rainbows all over them. Oh, great. Really? You know what I mean? Good. Okay. Well, not like rainbows all over them, but like this sort of, this cast of like rainbow color. Like I'm looking into it and I can see the tree that's outside my window through it and there's like rainbow colors in the sky that I can see through the leaves. That's great. Okay. You know, faintly. Yeah, that's very cool. And I don't know if that's sort of, you know, historically accurate, but that's okay. Well, when you say rainbow colors, what, what colors if you had to, if you had to, like, name them? What do you see? Well, I've had a little practice in there yet. I would say

descending from top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Oh. You know, kind of subtly. Yeah. Some rogy biving around. Okay. Got it. Okay. Didn't we add or remove one or something, though? You have been, you, you are hallucinate. You are You have been sold alive, young Sarah Marshall. Okay, but we'll get to that. So, okay, but, but, but, yeah, myth bust it. Myth about to be busted. But, okay, so Isaac Newton.

It's a very violent thing. Yeah, he was, he was doing that. And, um, and he saw those colors. And then he eventually twisted it in such a way. And it was a bright enough direct sunlight day that he also got those famous, like, just little rainbows on the wall, you know, like a little rainbow. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been able to do that with this one. but it was probably, you know, sunnier at the time. So, okay, so many people, by the time Isaac Newton has done this, many people have seen, you know, rainbows come out of prisms or chunks of glass. And the theory, again, of why went back to Aristotle,

this idea that the prism like the mist was tinting, changing, muddying. What was your word? Ooh, adulterating, yeah. Yeah, adulterating, dirtying, pure sunlight. And so that the rainbows on the wall, they were evidence of change. They were evidence of impurities. of the light being changed or disguised.

And he thought, okay, well, if that's true, then if I take a second prism and I pass the rainbow parts through a second prism, you'll get even more tinted light. So maybe you'll get different colors or darker colors. I'm not sure what exactly, but it will change it even more. Why does he have prisms? Do we know what are they for as like a household item or is it a school thing? Oh, that's a great question. I don't know.

I have no idea. That's interesting. All right. We'll return to that in a future show. The listener can write in and tell us. So he takes a second one. And again, if Aristotle's right, it should get tinted even more. But then what happens?

Any guesses? Oh, my God. I don't know. Does it make a, does it cancel it out? Yeah. Yeah, it goes back inside. The rainbow disappears. Interesting.

And so what he... The first man in 19. 1900 years to put two prisms next to each other. Although I guess that glass making is a relatively recent thing. Anyway. Yeah. So basically what he realized is, look, when I see the colors of the rainbow, this is not evidence of impurities.

This is evidence of the light's ingredients. These are the colors that make up a beam array of what appears to be pure white and light. But for some reason, isn't. like when those all smoothie together, they make white light. Yeah. God, that's cool. Yeah.

It was a really great. And that's like, and that is a wild leap to make too. Totally. Totally. And like the way that I've heard we, he has not yet figured out that it's waves, but just to jump ahead for a second. Like the way that I've heard it described is that like what a prism does or what a little raindrop does up in the sky, which is how you get rainbows. Is that like the lights coming down.

It has all these different colors in. side. Red is kind of these slower waves. Violet are these faster waves, medium greens and stuff, yellows. And they're all kind of like a shopping cart is like the ray of light is like a shopping cart full of colors. And when that shopping cart hits a corner, like hits a prism, hits a curb, all the ingredients just kind of the oranges and the red apple, you know, whatever, they all toss out. They just like, they break out because the different speeds like spill out at slightly different angles. That's wild that we can do that. Yeah. You know, who would think that you could use a piece of glass and disrupt a light wave to that extent? And then put it back to put it back in.

Yeah. Yeah. And so he, so he this like will eventually, I mean, this will pave the way for massive breakthroughs in technology, development of lasers, fiber objects, even telescopes will get, all kinds of things will get better. But there's one last thing he needed to do, which was count the colors in the rainbow, which you already, you did for us. And so what he eventually, he kind of at first was like maybe five, no, no, I think it's seven. And that's how we get Roy G. Biv, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo violet. Okay. But the thing, the little, like, my favorite part of this is, like, he didn't get there because he was, like, closely squinting through a magnifying glass or using rulers. He just was, like, seven's a really pretty number.

That is so him. It's so classic Newton vibes. Because there's how many notes in a traditional Western classical scale? Oh. Do remi phasolati. Do is that seven? Seven. And at the time, there were seven known planets.

And there were seven known metals, gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, lead. Now there's over 90, but in Newton's day. There were how many days in a week? seven oh my god how many continents were like called it that time seven so it just seven how many C's seven yeah and so it was like this science it was like this nature this mystically pure number like he he just there's just this idea that there were like these accordances like things move in seven and so he was basically like musical scale seven color seven that feels good that feels it's got to be seven it's got to be seven and that thing like

like was just pressed into text. I mean, like, I was taught Roy Giffin for sure. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I was taught it in school, but it was like my parents taught it to me as like basic human knowledge. Yeah. And that it just is, those are the seven colors that make up the rainbow that make up light. Case closed. Case not closed.

Oh, my God. We got to reopen the case. So we did a terrestrials about for kids about these concepts. They weren't, didn't go into all that stuff. But we did. Alan, my amazing collaborator and friend and musical genius, made this little thing about Roji Biv. Okay, so I'm just going to play you this. Okay, so this is the moment of discovery, and this is like the industrial lie getting printed into our minds.

Rage red, red, magenta, Cephone, only line, The point of the The point is this handy way to remember colors in the rainbow that was maybe so handy it just like got Sometimes things are too handy. Yeah, yes. Because the truth is sometimes less catchy. Also, I was never totally clear on the difference between indigo and violet if I'm being honest here. Same.

I think that's a big. I think indigo is like a bit of an emperor's new clothes. Like, is that a thing? But, but so, so this goes on and it's kind of this idea that like light has been, we have cracked the rainbow. We have literally cracked it open, seen its insides, it's seven colors. Cool. But then there were like a lot of painters and poets and like stoners all over the world

who weren't fully convinced that this was accurate. So Keats very famously wrote this poem, like, being like, how dare. Like, he basically accused Newton of having killed the magic of the rainbow. Oh. And there's a line about how he, like, dared to, quote, unweave a rainbow by, like, reducing it into these cold colors. And then Gerta had all these kind of poetic theories about, like, well, when I feel purply, the purple is different than the purple I see.

Like, no colors come from feelings. and then Turner, the storm painting guy, like, painted all these rainbows with all these tons of colors as kind of like a F you. And just people being like, how do we know my blue is your blue? And are we so sure like colors are concrete and like, really, how is my blue? Your blue? These are worthwhile questions, for sure. Yeah.

And the only way we can determine is by describing our blues to each other probably. A hundred percent. And so then along comes another bro, a big bro of 10 kids in a British, family. He's a med student named Thomas Young, another Brit, and he's like, you know, doing your classic, he's dissecting the eyeball of an ox, as you do. And he's wondering about like how, how eyes focus and process light for science or if you're Salvador Dali, either one. Yeah, exactly. Or no, Benuel, who did the eyeball slicing maybe. I don't know. Ooh, one of those dudes. One of those, yeah, but wondering like, what's the connection between, of course, a painter would

wonder that. What is the connection between the colors out there and what I perceive? And this eye seems to be the medium, you know, through which the interface through which all those things happen. It was both of them. They both did the eyeball movie. Good talk. And so Thomas Young eventually devises an absolutely ingenious experiment that we are not going to go into because that is too complicated. It's the double slit experiment, which is a whole quantum mechanics realizing that light is both a particle and a wave and it's like a total universe changer. But a long... Yeah, come back and explain that one to me on another show because I would like to hear more about how light works and stuff. Yeah, I would too, but you might need somebody else because

I have done like a whole piece about quantum mechanics and I still don't understand it. But light is not just part. What you need to know is light behaves like a particle and like a wave, like an ocean wave, like a sound wave, like a one-won-wow. And that's the big, insight there is that rainbows, that the colors within a beam of light coming from the sun are oscillating at all these different waves. And the way that our eyes process those waves and send information to the brain is that we perceive those wavelengths as different colors. And so the low, long, slow waves we tend to see as red, the middle kind of medium waves we see as greens and the really fast ones we see as violet. But also,

on every rainbow on either side. Our way is light we cannot see ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, things like that. That's just like, uh, and where we divide it into colors. Like the waves are just like the ocean. They're just like some big ones, some medium ones.

Where we divide it depends on the person, where we draw the line. And so the poets, the painters, Nasir al-Dun-Tusi, our guy, this idea that like the lines are subject. objective. Like there aren't seven concrete colors. There are really, there are really infinite colors in the rainbow. God damn. And so sort of like what colors we see, where we divide the lines, which ones appear strong, which ones we happen to see maybe because of associations or moods. Like the little conclusion there is that, you know, all those long ago traditions were right that like the rainbow science. It is a bridge. It's out there and it's in here. It's like a.

bridge between worlds. It's a bridge between an inside and outside kind of being, like a thing, which I think is why they are so, like, slippery and wonderful. Wow. So that's the, that's the story of the rainbow. That was so good. And once we figured it out that the rainbow, that the colors of light are, that are waves and are these kind of infinite colors, then we could like discover new elements based on what frequency of waves they were emitting or refracting. So like helium, thallium, gallium, cesium. And we could discover new things in space because we figured out stars emitted radio waves that we couldn't see. We could invent like the radio technology passing information over radio waves. Technologies like LASIC. So like once we figured out that,

it's just been, you know, it's like so much that we can do. Wow. And I think in a real way like, you know, this rainbow again that we see is so frivolous was like the sight of serious scientific contention that finally like rumbled and built to insight that that truly like really, really freaking transformed our world just by people wondering what that pretty thing was in the sky. And this phenomenon that we kept being confronted with and trying to understand and that drove us toward all these other realizations maybe. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. So that's My rainbow, okay, I have to end end, I have a choose your own adventure of three options. Okay. Oh my gosh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Option one is like, so this sat, I don't know if you are experiencing this, but in, I got into radio because I hate like visual judgments. I think it's a

sacred thing to just be voices. But increasingly they're like make videos, post Instagram reels and do the things. I will never find it necessary for people to see my face while I'm saying something. Yeah. For them to listen to me say something, you know. Okay. But I've been. like fighting, fighting, fighting that. But then I finally, on this piece, I gave in to like a music video about the concept of infinite color. So I could show you that. It's a minute long. Well, that's a really good reason to give on into something. Yeah. I was like, you can't beat them. Let's really join them. So there's that. That's door number one. Door number two is we could do a little

pride coda just about the rainbow becoming the on the flag, the rainbow being the pride, the gay private leg, the queer pride flag. Or we could do a little. a butterfly coda of just that butterflies are shady as hell. All right. Well, I want to have a link to the Infinite Color video. And I think we have to end on the Pride Coda. And then if we have time, I want just one little tiny butterfly fact on top, please, perhaps. Okay, perfect.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So the Pride Coda is like, how did this rainbow become a part of the queer pride flag, become the queer pride flag? So there have been, you know, different emblems of queer pride throughout the era. There was, you know, a time where the pink triangle, which was on the Nazi uniform, was reclaimed as like a gay pride thing. There was, I guess, Oscar Wilde had a whole green carnation situation. There were other things.

But in 1978, we're in San Francisco. And Harvey Milk asks his friend, Gilbert Baker, a gay activist. And also someone who's very big into tailoring, seamstressing. What is a male seamstress? A seamster, I guess. A seamster. And a female teamster is a teamstress. So there's going to be a big gay pride parade.

It was called like the Gay Freedom Day parade. And he was like, Gilbert, you love fabrics. You're always sewing things for our drag queen friends. Like, can you just make some kind of fun? flag for a banner basically for the parade. And I guess he'd made banners for Harvey Milk before that were just like, you know, whatever. Gay rights now. Just it. Like that kind of thing. And he was like, but can you make us like a thing? And so Gilbert Baker worked with this woman who would call herself the tie-dye queen, Lynn Sogerblum, who was very good at like colors and fabrics. And they

came up with the idea of, well, let's use a rainbow. And, and, the reason why was, yes, it's beautiful and also it represents the diversity of sexuality and genders in the queer experience, but mainly the fact that it was found in nature. Because queerness is natural. And this idea that it's like this thing that encompasses the beauty, the celebration and the diversity and naturalness of queerness. And so each color had it, originally it had eight colors. It now has six, but it also used to have like this. this great pinky magenta pink and a very cool turquoise, which they then took out because of like it was hard to reproduce those with dyes or something. But each color had its own symbolic thing for like something it expressed about the queer experience.

So pink was like for hot sex or just sex, but you know, hot sex. Indigo was about serenity and they each, I can do all the colors if you want or not, but they each had a different thing. That's beautiful. Yeah. And so with Lynn Sogerblum, he felt very strongly he wanted all the dyes to be natural, organic dyes. And so they did this like extensive dyeing practice and they had something like 30 people working on those first few flags. And they stitched them all together. And Gilbert Baker was like, oh, I don't want to make this in my house.

I want to go make it in this queer community center because it's like the day it will be born. And he didn't know it was going to catch on. there were other flags, other things, but it caught on. And I think really took on big power because there's only a few months later that Harvey Milk was assassinated. And like he had been the one to request, you know, let's have these flags. Let's have a parade. So then it just, it really took off. And then, you know, I think some people are like, eh, rainbow's tacky.

I don't care. But. And then it just continues to evolve. And in 2017, in Philly, they added for a queer pride parade there, they added the black and brown stripes. for LGBTQ people of color who are sometimes left out of the experience. And then a year later, it became the progress pride flag, which you've probably seen, which has that like arrow, which also has white, blue, pink, and black and brown stripes also for trans individuals, communities of color. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve. And it's still like, you know,

again, we think of rainbows as like cheesy and happy, but it is this, apparently Gilbert Baker when he made it, he had been noticed, a couple years before had been the American bicentennial. It's been in 1976. And so there were American flags everywhere. And he had been really thinking about flags and how they express like a peoplehood and a power. And I was just, I don't know if you saw this news, but a year ago, like there was a ordinance that came down from the federal government to like paint over all rainbow roads and sidewalks. And the big, like, rainbow road outside the Pulse nightclub, which had been this memorial got in the middle of the night, got painted over black. And I feel like it's just this, it's still a symbol like the flag is evolving and I'm sure it'll continue to evolve and all kinds of people.

I've heard people be like, oh, we need to redesign the rainbow flag. It's ugly or whatever. But I think it's like, I don't know, just the power, the cruelty of that act and then the sort of resistance of people kind of guerrilla. painting the rainbow back in Orlando is is a beautiful thing. And yeah, that's the rainbow. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, I mean, you know, and of course, I think for a lot of people in, you know, maybe more Biden administration years, there was this feeling of like, yes, it's so great that we're painting pride flags on things in a way to avoid, you know, making real infrastructural change. But Then I think like when those got taken away.

Yeah, right. The rainbow washing. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, wait, no. Right. Don't stop doing that. Yeah.

It's not walk it back even farther. That was my feeling. I would take rainbow washing over rainbow blackening out. Right. Painting over. And I feel like kind of a, I don't know, a common. And I, you know, I don't, coming from many different motives. But I feel like people have also complained like, oh,

if you put like so much on the flag that at a certain point like isn't it just sort of I don't know this this kind of gripe that I feel like I've seen of like at what point is there there too much inclusivity I don't think that people are really saying that out loud but sort of I don't know acting as if there's a little bit of absurdity to it and I think what you're saying is making me realize that that's exactly the point is to like yeah have a flag that is trying to have so much stuff on it and an acronym that, you know, as, I don't know, again, like, I feel like people have been making this joke since the 90s, the like, LGBTQ too many letters. Right.

And it's like, but that's the point is that it's too many letters. Yeah. Is that there's too many letters to say. And that's a good thing to be attempting to say too many letters, you know. And that like a lot of the resistance to the change in the flag is like, but it wasn't that way. It's just change. Change. We don't like change.

Right. We keep finding more colors. I even had a little of that reaction. It was like, oh, the rainbow, it was so simple. So, but then, like, if you really... Well, yeah, because everybody gets attached to things they remember, and that's okay. But yeah. But then if you really look at it, it's just like, I do like how it's like this arrow.

Like, it gives it a little arrowhead. It gives it some like, yes, the beauty of nature, but also, like, we got to fight. Yeah. And the work is not done. Yeah. But I guess it's like if your symbols are getting busier, then that means that you're trying to embrace more, you know? And that's to, I don't know, to, I think that like the American left is like a complicated thing to be a part of because there's a lot of young people coming from pretty fundamentalist backgrounds who have yet to get out of the mindset of purity and punishment.

And you can see, you know, and Portland is famously a place where if you want to have one of the worst experiences of your life, like live with a community organizer is the joke. And it's, you know, I think there's a lot of truth to it. And like, right, like there's a lot of like lefty community. that I have lived in and experienced the gossip of. And yet I would like, I would always pretty much choose them over any alternative, you know, because I think that the kind of like there's a lot of toxicity that emerges inevitably gets in human relationships between people who have been through a lot.

And yet if you have sort of a basic social goal of like ultimately coming back to wanting to be more expansive and wanting to embrace more and wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to build community rather than find ways to police it and who gets to have one, then like, I don't know, I think it's okay for people, especially who have changed their minds about a lot of things in life, which is difficult work to do to, like, struggle with how to live those values. Like, it's inevitable that people are going to struggle with that. And yet it's better to struggle to live good values than to just embrace horrible ones.

No one's ever going to convince me of that. I have been a proud resident of Portland, Madison, and West Philly. All right. I'm irretrievable. Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. And like I do think, but I do think inclusivity, which was the original rainbow and which we have now learned is inherent in the rainbow, infinite ways, infinite colors.

And is the move in the progress pride flag like it or not aesthetically? Like it is just about showing making sure all the colors are. are shown and represented. So maybe really what the flag needs, if we really were to respect the rainbow, maybe it just needs to be a sequence. And it's like reflecting all the infinite colors of the light. QED. Beautiful.

Lulu, you're so great. I love you. I love you. You're so great. Thank you. What are you up to and where can people find you? And what kind of stuff are you making for the folks? Well, definitely come check out Terrestrials, which is the podcast I make for kids and families.

You don't have to be a kid or have a kid to listen as long as you don't mind me occasionally singing. And it's all about nature. We did do a rainbows episode that's called The Bridge. But another one the queers might like is one we just put out called the Forest Fairy that stars a certain indigo girl named Amy Ray talking about aphids. Very cool. That one's really cool. She was incredible and it leads us to like all the kind of secret harmony. It leads us to something about it leads us to the fact that plants are talking, which is incredible.

And yeah. Yeah. So I do that podcast about nature. And then I also am on radio lab where we are doing science stories all the time. And I'm working slowly chugging away at a second adult book that's all about biomimicry. That's so exciting. Which may be finished someday or may not. But either way.

I don't know. I think that the work you do reminds me and so many people so often just kind of like what kind of a world we're living in in the best way possible, you know. Oh, and I asked you for a little butterfly fact. May I have one? Oh, yes. Okay. Let me decide. Or I take an aphid fact as well, actually, now that those have come up. Affids are so cool. Oh, okay. I'll give you, okay, I'll give you an aphid fact that is great. So you know how we're often taught that you need a male and a female? to have a baby. They're trying to legislate that one, I think. Yeah. Afids can reproduce without males. They can make all female societies where they reproduce. And that is called pathogenesis, where the females in a pinch or just like for most

of the year, they can just reproduce without males. They basically like shoot out clones of themselves and become these big, wonderful communities of daughters and sisters and cousins and grandmas and hang out. And some of them dance, the ones we're talking about Willie Aphibus. are also called boogie-wogie aphids and the dams. And I just think what I love about that is like nature is, it's what you were saying with infinity. It's so much wilder than we think.

It's like, yeah, in many species you do need a male or female. But like, you don't have to. And we've seen that in the California condor. And we've seen it in certain snakes. Like in a pinch, there is a pathway to create new life. Like that is, I think more people need to be talking about parthenogenesis. Like the fact that that can happen. Yeah. That alone is amazing. Like the pathway is there evolutionarily. Yes, in bugs, yes, even in vertebrates, in birds and in reptiles. And so I just think like that is so wild. And like I just, why is ever not just like walking around every morning like parthenogenesis can happen? So that's your a fit fact. I mean, I know some people who are doing parthenogenesis. He just have to pay a doctor a bunch of money to give you some hormones.

and harvest your eggs and stuff. But it's, you know, it's, it's, so it's, we're getting there. And I'm just, um, I'm just so excited for everything that you're doing. And I love being on this planet with you. Oh, thank you. I love being on this planet with you. Thank you. I can't wait to hear whatever is coming from here next.

That isn't me. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Our episode, the original music you heard in this episode was brought to you. by Magpie Cinema Club featuring Brendan Liu.

We have a new bonus episode coming soon also on Patreon and Apple Plus where Chelsea Weber Smith and I are going to read your doll mail. Emails you sent us about the things you've made dolls out of

to be clear, not mail from dolls. Although I cannot be certain that any of those emails were not sent by dolls now that I think about it. Thank you to the people who helped make this show,

Miranda Ziegler is our producer and editor. Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. Thank you to our amazing guest, Lulu Miller. Please check out all of her work wherever you can find it, and especially on terrestrials. You can find her website and more information about her books in the show notes. And most of all, thank you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.