The Cataclysm Sentence

Welcome to our HR exit interview. This is so silly. All your answers will be purely confidential, except for the ones that we're going to broadcast to millions of people. Yeah, this is very, very bad HR practices. Hey everyone, this is Lulu.

And Latif? Okay, number five, it says here on our official questionnaire. And today, what was your favorite bathroom to use for? Number two? Oh, I can tell you.

We are talking to Radiolab producer Rachel Cusick. That's me in the actual physical live studio, in the physical studio. Rach has been a producer on the show for six years.

Very uneventful six years, totally normal six years, yeah, nothing happened. She has made I think of you. I mean, you worked on the G-series. You've done, you know, Dying, which totally blows up grief and these kind of emotionally intense stories. But you've also done some of the dumbest. Like, what airplane farts? What if the earth was made of blueberries?

I contain multitudes. Thank you very much you do, and we have brought you in here because we're going to play one of your all-time bangers. And I think it was the first episode that you really like, there was a full episode that you had done. Yeah, it was the first one where I was like, here's this little nugget, and let's like, spend a whole hour staring at this nugget.

And then the whole team then made like the chicken nugget pack, you know? And this episode is called What cataclysm sentence? And we're doing this one today because it's great, but also because we are, we are, we're suffering our own cataclysm over here.

Yeah, which is that Rachel is leaving us, leaving all of us you too, listener.

Yeah.

I know I'm leaving my grandma, I'm leaving a lot of people out right now. But I myself am feeling my cataclysm of losing you guys and leaving the show. Stepping out into new things that I don't even know what is waiting for me. But mostly moving geographically across the other side of the world to.

Australia, Australia, yeah, where that's going to be really annoying to everybody who actually lives there.

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

And everybody is going to take a little corner of it. They're going to, like, follow it into their deepest heart's content and call up the people they admire. Everybody rallied around it, like dozens of phone calls over months. Like it just felt like the scene at the end of the movie, where you get, like, lifted up.

And then it was like a whole year long thing, and then it came out in 2020, so like early days of the pandemic. Well, should we? Should we take a listen? And then maybe we'll ask you one thing at the very end, yeah, let's do it all right.

So here we go, cataclysm sentence from 2020. Before we begin, just want to let you know this episode contains a couple moments of explicit language. Yep, wait, you're listening?

Okay.

Rewind.

All right, hello, okay. So this episode took the entire staff to put together, but it really began with one of our producers, Rachel Cusick. What's happening? Rachel Cusick? Not much.

Just stretching, watching you eat a sandwich, living life.

All right, cool, all right now that I've made a mess of my sitting area. So how did you maybe take me back to the moment?

You, uh, you, where? How did you bump into this? Okay, so I bumped into this idea because of this book that is in my hand right now. It's called Eating the Sun. And basically, I got pulled into this book because I was like, Okay, eating, eating, that's pretty much all I need, like that title in anything.

And I'm like, I'm sold, send me a copy. You are the foodiest among us, I am the foodiest. I love food so much.

And so I thought this was going to be about food. And each page is a different musing on science, wonky, wonky, but I'll just read a few.

Planetary Motion What is heat milky solar Galaxy System? So they're all kind of like university reflections anyway. Pretty early on, I'm flipping these pages and on like, page 17. I come across this thing with Richard Feynman and this prompt that he gave in this lecture series back in the 1960s.

And I was like, Wow, that is perhaps the like, coolest question I've ever seen this year. Okay, ready, wait, wait, wait. Before you do that, maybe just set up like who Richard Feynman is.

Okay, so Richard Feynman, this famous physicist at the time, he was like a whippersnapper of Caltech. I imagine there was like a soundtrack. It's like, stayin alive, stayin alive.

Every time he, like, walked onto campus, he was like the hotshot. He was pretty attractive, too. He was. He's a handsome guy with like slicked back hair, so he was famous.

He had not yet won the Nobel Prize, but he was like, on his way to do it. He had just worked on the atomic bomb. Everyone kind of knew who he was.

Caltech was exploding on Caltech's campus. Caltech was having a problem because physics was so boring at the time. Like they could not get anyone to, like, come into an introductory physics class and get excited about it. So they tapped Richard Feynman to redo the physics curriculum for Physics 101. And so he was like, Fine, I'll do it once, but like, that's it.

You like, take notes because I'm done after this. And so he just like, took at redefining what physics should be as an introductory thing.

So I actually went and found audio of this lecture. Oh, I think I've actually seen photos of this black and white. He's at the front of a classroom, in front of a chalkboard. For two years, I'm going to lecture you on physics.

I'm going to lecture from a point of view that you are all going to be physicists. It's not the case, of course, but that's what every professor in every subject does. So, assuming that you're going to be physicists, we're going to have a lot to study now, typically the way that Physics 101 used to be taught.

The most rapidly developing batch of knowledge that there is. People spent like an entire semester of physics learning about, like the history of physics. There's so much, in fact, that you might think that you can't learn all of it in four years, and you can't. You have to go to graduate school, too.

They didn't learn anything. Kind of like poetic. So Feynman, before he launches into his lecture, he's like, Well, what should we teach first if we're going to teach? Look, I could teach you about the history of these equations and the formulas.

But he doesn't. Instead, Feynman opens his entire lecture with this question. If, in some cataclysm, all of the scientific knowledge is to be destroyed. But only one sentence is to be passed on to the next generations of creatures.

What would be the best thing, the thing that contains the most information in the least number of words? So that is the question. So if the world ends and all information is gone? But we can only pass on one sentence to the next generation.

There's a little scrap of paper fluttering in the post-apocalyptic breeze. Yes, but it has to be the least amount of words, with the most amount of information. So I can't give you like a textbook, you know, it has to be one thing that's concise and can unlock the universe. Like, what would you write on the paper?

You have to pass the baton to the next generation with the simplest thing that you could possibly think of. That's an interesting question. Did Feynman, in that lecture, have an answer? Yes, he said. It is the atomic hypothesis.

It is the atomic hypothesis, or the atomic fact, or whatever you want to call it, that all things are made out of atoms. Little particles that move around or in perpetual motion attract each other when they are some distance apart, not being squeezed into one another, period. So this is his sentence that would be on the paper, fluttering in the breeze. Yes, that would land in the hand of a little alien child. And he would expect that to be the thing that they use to restart their civilization.

Yes, which if you are like that little child, you're like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this piece of paper? So what? I just want to know how to build a fire, you know?

But the thing that I love about Feynman's answer is that once you begin to take it apart, it just begins to grow. You'll see and grow. There's an enormous amount of information about the world if just a little imagination and thinking is applied. I've talked to a lot of physicists this week to understand what the hell the atomic hypothesis is.

Okay, come with me. Yeah, please. Okay, so let's just take it part by part.

First part, Well, things are made out of atoms, like ships, shoes, computers, everything.

Like coffee slash, seltzer slash, sandwich that you're just spilling. Yeah, you are atoms, you me and everything there is. atoms are the ingredients.

The building bricks of the whole universe, that's part one, part two, atoms, atoms are all moving all the time.

They're continuous jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around one another. That's really important. Because once you start to figure out that atoms are in motion, you begin to figure out things like, let's look at heat, temperature with an atomic eye, so to speak. There's also pressure. Electricity is a source of energy, electricity.

All these things have to do with how fast atoms are moving, how many atoms are moving, what parts of atoms are moving. So from there, you're like a hop and a skip away from like.

Steam engines telephones the electrical grid. Gaseous pressure drives this plane forward, understanding flight weather patterns. Barometric pressure 30.

04 It's steady, so that's part two, okay, part one tells you what matter is.

So let's talk about that matter. Part three. Atoms attract each other when they are some distance apart, but repair being squeezed into one another is basically how atoms interact with each other. And once you understand that, it is huge.

Because in this last part is basically all of chemistry. Once you start understanding how atoms come together to make molecules, you can start putting molecules together to make things like antibiotics.

Vaccines.

You can build things like a combustion engine, batteries, all sorts of rubbers, tires, sneakers, concrete.

What else balloons? Or you can start to understand things like proteins, fatty acids, vitamins, DNA. To me, this is what makes the sentence so cool, because everything.

Is in there everything you need to know about the natural world and how to manipulate it?

But do you feel like, oh, sorry? Also, chocolate chip cookies? Think about a world without chocolate chip cookies? You would not know.

Is there anything else? Chocolate chip cookies. I don't think you really responded properly, but that was the finale.

I'm going to take your chocolate chip cookie inspiration and follow it, because what is a chocolate chip cookie? It is flavor, which I'm sure we can reduce to nothing but the sparking of electrons on a certain membrane in the tongue or something. But really, what chocolate chip cookies are?

I hope you'll agree. Is the that momentary, ecstatic feeling you feel, and the sense of joy and well-being, and then the subsequent crash, right? Yes, so all of these things are.

Do you feel like they are reducible to atoms? Yes, Do you feel like love is explained by the atomic hypothesis? Do you feel like the complexities of human interactions? No.

Morality, No. That is where it falls short. Everything that's physical in our world is explained by atoms. But like music.

Like, you can't look at the atomic hypothesis and create Mozart, right? or you can't learn how to be a good partner with the atomic hypothesis. You know, right? Like, there are these big gaps that you just are missing.

I think that. And thus, a door opens. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. don't you want to hear?

The musician answer Do Feynman's exercise? Mm-hmm. Or I suddenly want to hear, who's the sort of great philosopher of chocolate chip cookies? And so.

Dun-dun-dun cue music.

What's the music for a cataclysm? I don't know, I mean, it's, is it really loud, or is it like a little like dust bowl? And it's quiet, you know? I think it starts small, like a tone, and then it's two tones, and then it's more, and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it expands. And it feels kind of primal, but also hopeful.

Maybe I don't know, as you were talking. That did remind me of a thought that I had when I came across this in the very first place. Mm-hmm, because it does.

When I I think I came across it, like a year ago, when I was feeling like everyone, like, the political conversation was just especially. What's the word when you think like the sky is falling like chicken little-esque, where it's like, everything is falling apart, like everything apocalyptic? Yes, it felt like everyone felt doomed, and I was like, if the world actually was falling apart around us.

What would be the only thing that we have to show for it? Like, what is a way to like? Bring what Feynman thought back in the 60s and bring it to today? When it does kind of feel like everyone thinks the sky is falling. Yeah, I should say quickly that the two of us had this conversation many months ago, back when the world was a very different place.

How does it resonate? I mean, tell me a little bit more how it resonates with you personally. I mean, this is coming from a place that I think I'm like, pretty lucky to have this thought, because I'm definitely, like, very lucky in a lot of ways. But like, I think I'm just like a hopeful person. And I often like, love spending time with older people in my family and like feeling like before they go. I need to get like whatever wisdom they have, because like, once they're gone, it's gone, you know? And so when I think about that, I'm like, I just want to, like, pull all the goodness out before, like something goes wrong and preserve it.

Who are you talking about, whose brains for you personally, are you trying to do that with? I mean, I think about it. I was talking to my friend and they're like, why do you only hang out with old people? Because I just like I think most people like, even because I'm 24, but like someone who's 30. I think they have, like, seen more of the world than I have, and I would rather spend time with someone who's.

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

I will take on that moniker, What do you? I just? I mean, none of my business, but I'm suddenly curious to know what? What kinds of questions do you sit with your grandma and you ask her just general questions?

Or what do you have more specific things you wonder about with someone of her age? So my mom died when I was six and so, like, one thing that seems to motivate, I think a lot of that curiosity is. Like my older siblings, I was the youngest of five who lost her. And they all have these like, very concrete memories. That, like, when I think about it. It's like I arrived on the scene right after she left the scene, like when my memory finally started to kick in. It's like, right when she left. Do you remember anything about her?

There are a few memories that I know for sure are mine, and then after those few, like, I think, on one hand, I can count ones that I know are mine. And so a lot of the times when they talk about these things. Like these birthday parties that she used to throw. Or like her laugh or the like music she'd play in the minivan. I don't actually remember any of those things. For myself, I mean, how do you feel that? Then? Do you try and just ply anecdotes from your older siblings? I don't know, like, some of it.

I feel like a little sad that I have to ask for those things. And so sometimes I just like, hang back and let them talk. And then I feel a little bit jealous. But then I also do go searching for them. I call my grandma once a week and she told me this one story the other day that I just thought was so funny. It was this sense of humor of my mom that I didn't even know existed.

And there's some little surface that I just felt my thumb go over and I never knew it was there. And I just want to feel all the textures and memories of people because I know how easily they just go away. I think I like walk through the world, collecting things, like I'm like a little stick collector, like I want to collect all the sticks I can. Because I know what it feels like to feel like I'm empty handed.

So what began as that conversation with Rachel about the cataclysm sentence? And what could you give? What's the simplest thing you could pass forward for the next person to hold on to? Well, what happened is that really? As a staff, we got interested in that idea.

Kind of got fixated on it, actually, and so what we did?

We started calling people.

Dozens.

And dozens of people artists, writers, philosophers, historians, chefs, musicians, and we. We asked them if, hypothetically, the world would end and everything was lost, all our knowledge gone. What would be the most important information, in the least amount of words, that you would convey to the next set of people? What would be your sentence? We're going to play you a bunch of the answers that we got.

We can't play all of them because that would take four hours, so we're just going to play you a selection. And that's coming up right after this break.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. And today we are answering one question If the world ends tomorrow, what would be the one sentence you would leave for the next generation of humans or creatures, or aliens, or whoever comes next? What would be your cataclysm? Sentence would pass on the most amount of wisdom and the fewest number of words?

We, you will die, and that's the most important thing. Writer Mortician Caitlin Doty. And I think most people get that they're going to die, but I don't think what most people get is that. The fact that they're going to die is the most important thing that will ever happen to them. Humans are one of the few creatures that understand death and understand live their whole lives with the knowledge of their deaths. And so it's this conflict within us. We live in these shitty, decaying bodies, but we feel so special and we feel so important.

So how do you reconcile those two things? It's hard to reconcile them. So you have to create, you have to transcend, you have to have religion, you have to have communities, you have to have art. Those are created by our fear and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with death.

Okay, oh so, let's talk about fear. Esperanza Spalding, musician and wolf enthusiast Okay, here we go. Here's your parallel from the ecosystem when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park. At first, the thinking was, we're just doing this because we don't fully understand yet all the ways that this species is important. But we know that it is and has been absent, and we finally have this opportunity to reintroduce them into Yellowstone.

So, of course, all the biologists were studying this, and the first thing that happened was all the game who hadn't been subjected to any threats. All the sudden, they all became more alert and more responsive, and they stopped grazing constantly in the exact same part of the river. They had to move more because now there was this threat of the wolf, so what happened is they started moving more.

They started grazing higher up in the hills, where they are less likely to be picked off in the low grasslands. So the banks of the river get firmer, which means.

Beavers can come in and start to build their dams. Also because the game is not grazing. In the same area, trees that previously had been chewed up in their early sapling stages start growing so songbirds return. All these species of birds come back into yellowstone that had been absent because they didn't have the right canopy cover. And because the beavers come in, that creates more pocket environments for other animals, and that brings in more big predators who are eating what the beavers are attracting. So, basically.

This one species who have become dominant and very comfortable and at the top of their food chain. Just the presence of them. Having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear completely change the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem.

So maybe it's like, Hmm, maybe it's like just that. The willingness to respond creatively to fear without trying to eradicate the source of the fear.

My name is Cord Jefferson and I'm a television. Okay, I wrote down a bunch of different things that I then erased. And then I sort of settled on one that I thought was definitely going to be my thing. Which was about race and racism. And I like, I had that sentence all prepared, which was race isn't real unless you make it real. At which point it will become the biggest problem in the whole world. And then I started thinking that, you know what? Sort of? Even bigger than racism, and to me like, even bigger than racism, is just general fear. And my personal history is that my mother is a white woman who married my father, who's a Black man, and they disowned her. And so I never met my grandparents. I would send them letters, which they would return until I stopped sending them when I was 10 or 11. And I just. And I saw how much that devastated my mother and how much it sort of ripped her family apart and sort of estranged her from her brother. For a while. And it was, yeah, it was just sort of in a way that I remember thinking like this, this is so pointless, like, it's just so stupid. Like, I remember thinking, like, what could anybody in my family do?

That would make me, you know, hate them forever, and it's like, you know, skin color was just so insignificant to me. And I think that fear shapes everything from geopolitics to just even people's unwillingness to try new things. And to to go new places, and to travel, and to ski, and to go out and meet people. And it causes so much conflict, and it causes so much aggression and hate that I think that, you know, I believe sort of racism is wrapped up in that. But fear, I think, is our bigger problem.

My sentence is.

The only things you are innately afraid of are falling and loud noises. The rest of your fears are learned and mostly negligible.

Meryl Garbus I lead a band called Tune Yards. Fear is very.

Um, what's that word compelling as a motivation? Um, it's very essential to who.

Things, Um, we needed to be vigilant, and if we weren't, then we died. But I do think that it's a choice. So I thought, wanting to communicate as much as possible with this one sentence, that it would be good to sing this sentence.

Evolving over millennia, we learn to fly, we learn to fly, we're nourished by the fruits of these rivers, inspired by each other's music. But we failed as a species, injured the very hands that fed us when we chose fear.

It.

Reminds me of this thing called Do nothing farming that a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka came up with. And he kind of went against all of the established customs of rice farming in Japan. And decided to just kind of, like, pay attention to how things work without any intervention. So he said that he was inspired by an empty lot full of grasses and weeds, and how productive that actually was. And so he went about farming without flooding the fields. He just threw the seeds on the ground, kind of when they would naturally fall on the ground in the fall, he didn't use fertilizer, he just grew kind of ground cover. And then he threw the stalks back on top. When he was done, and he just kind of had to do everything at exactly the right time.

That it would happen naturally, but this farm was more productive and more sustainable than neighboring farms. All of human effort is meaningless, as he puts it, so he says, humanity knows nothing at all. There's no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.

Writer Jenny Odell Now here we go, Writer Maria Popova. We are each allotted a sliver of space time, wedged between Not yet and no more which?

Doesn't.

Somehow we went from bacteria to Bach, we learned to make fire in music and mathematics, and here we are now. These walking wildernesses of mossy feelings and rambled thoughts beneath this overstory of 100 trillion synapses that are just coruscating. With these restless questions, Why, Professor Allison Gopnik? My sentence would be single word why?

I'd want to show that we loved it here, you know? Animator Rebecca Sugar. We have, you know, evidence from Pompeii. Pompeii's place in history is quite unique in that, in one day, it was completely hermetically sealed. In other words, time stood still.

We have all of these physical examples. Serentius the Baker gave a party for his brother Neo, who was just elected magistrate. That humans have loved being here. Their friends came and drank all night. That we're having a great time.

So maybe the greatest message a person could leave is to just.

This is the atrium of a typical Roman house. Leave behind some record of how you were living the family life revolved around this area, you know, leave behind your nest. And evidence of how you were in it with the people that you loved.

You will find that you have small rooms, the cubicles, the triclinium or dining room, which we find back there could be. The thing to leave is, you know, some evidence of my nest? Mother would have got up and the servants would have gone into her cubicle and done her hair.

And maybe the ultimate goal would be to just devote oneself fully to creating the life that feels the best on this world in the time that we have.

Have toilet stalls where two people could sit together next to one another, you can have a conversation. It's a fabulous idea. Why did we not learn from this? Why are we wasting time that we could be spending with our friends?

Why are we wasting that time?

All right bathroom break.

We'll be back in a sec.

Fineman says Again, we pick back up with writer Nicholson Baker and producer Simon Adler. All things are made of atoms dash, little particles that move around in perpetual motion. Attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

I like it.

But think of you, there was the the cataclysm happened, and the creature that inherited the Earth was a super intelligent form of seal. You know, there's beaches and they're just covered with these seals, and they're still making those strange seal noises, but they're actually intensely verbal creatures, and somehow.

Some particular seal gets this thing that comes zapping down from the sky. Which is a which is a voice from the deep past, or the recorded essence of brilliant scientific knowledge, which is, all things are made of little things. And they and they push against each other, and they sometimes they push back when they squeeze well.

What is that very bright seal going to do? I mean, what, what is that, how and how? It's going to help them more quickly invent an atomic bomb, but is that where?

Is that where we want the seals to go really fast? No, we want it, we want them to look. They're busy figuring out how to better get around the beach, get along with each other. Maybe build some kind of nice slide so they can zoom down and fly off and have some fun.

There's a lot these bright seals can do. They have a big future ahead of them. So what I would substitute is something that would maybe help them. That was very helpful to me. Which is that you that you know more than you can say. It's a it's a crisp way of saying that language is great.

And and you know, I'm in the language business and I try to create sentences that are momentarily diverting and all that. But language is a tiny, tiny part of the knowledge that we actually have. And not just because there's musical knowledge and the knowledge of colors and fragrances and other things that are inarticulable. But because the knack of knowing how to put words together, the knack of knowing how to say in a condensed form. A truth is something that involves a feel and nimbleness. A sort of a set of dance moves that nobody, no matter how good you are at slinging sentences, nobody can articulate. Step by step, backwards into this world, the understructure of what allowed him or her to say this thing that involved words. So look at what is around you and see who knows how to do things and then learn from that. And the way the person describes how he does things may actually be completely inadequate.

You're going to have to watch.

We know more than we can say. That, I think, is the most useful piece of scientific helpfulness, I guess, that you could give.

The moon revolves around the Earth, which is not the center of the universe, far from it, but just one of many objects, large and small, that revolve around the sun. Which, in turn, is one of countless stars, mostly so far away that they're invisible even on the clearest night. All traveling through space on paths obeying simple laws of nature that can be expressed in terms of mathematics.

Oh, and by the way, there is no God.

Writer James Glick And up next is the artist Lady Pink. Okay, so I would like to say God is a female. And I would also love to leave behind a mural, something like one of Michelangelo's awesome depictions of God coming in, and, you know, grandiose and glorious and absolutely gigantic mural. But as a female, and I think I would like to do her as one of the great aliens.

Do you know what I mean? One of the big-eyed aliens with those big, big heads and those big bug eyes like that, with real sexy lips and then a little bit of eyelashes with. Kind of looking like the Virgin Mary, or like the Virgen de Guadalupe wearing the long gown and the blue veil thing. And, you know, holding her hand up and a little bleeding heart with worshippers at her feet. And because she would be so gigantic, at three, four stories, that's like at least 40 feet, 30 feet, you know, very large figure. She would be looking down at you.

You never understand hell, though, until first you understand the great love, mercy and grace of God.

They are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Baby, when I met you, there was peace on earth. I think that a lot of my childhood, I was thinking a lot about surviving the apocalypse. You know, how could I do that? How could I be good enough? I liked the texture of life.

I liked the idea of being in the back of the station wagon and driving down the street and seeing my neighbors mowing their lawns or riding their bicycles. And the idea that they would all disappear or not be survivors of whatever that apocalyptic event might be, was just jolting.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. I was so selfishly along the way, hoping that maybe I could get past certain thresholds so that I could experience them before they were gone. Like being able to drive, because I really wasn't sure whether cars were going to be around later. So I remember really hoping that I could make it to middle school so that I could have a locker, because I thought lockers were really cool.

I just thought, like, okay, if I can have a locker and then later drive, then those two things. Like, if we can just get past those things, then I'll be a little bit more relieved to see the end come. Maybe we'll meet again some sunny day.

Everything is connected to me. That feels like a sentence that contains an element of scientific truth, but also inspires us to believe in it. Because I do think that whatever we leave behind needs to contain something about it that would inspire the finder of it to believe in it.

Okay, up next, hello, hello, can you hear me?

Yeah, hey.

Hi everyone, bring back Rachel Cusick. So you and producer Jeremy Bloom talked to someone? Hi Rachel, we talked to this guy, Jaron Lanier.

Do you want to know anything about me or is the name enough? I would love to know about you? Give us a fun fact. So, Jaron, I'm a computer scientist. He is basically like the godfather of virtual reality and was pretty instrumental in getting the internet off the ground.

I also write books, and I also play music, and, most notably, on a large variety of very unusual musical instruments. Do you have any instruments near you right now? Oh, a couple thousand.

So this whole project is like, reach out to people you find inspiring and asking them if they have any inspiring things to say. And the reason we reached out to Jaron is because he helped create these huge advances in technology. But the other reason we talked to him is because he actually knew Richard Feynman, really. how did he know him?

Well, so how honest do you want this to be? I want it to be as honest as you want it to be. Well, he said. This was back in the late 70s, I was 16 or 17, living in New Mexico.

And what happened is my first serious girlfriend was someone I met over a summer. She was visiting from California, and I followed her back to California, where it turns out her dad was the head of the physics department at Caltech. And after a while, she dumped me and there I was.

Oh, no, what was I to do? I'm still there and so I just hung out more and more with people in the physics department. Do you remember where you were when you first saw Richard Feynman?

Sure.

I was being walked down a hallway by my friend Cynthia.

And he was in there, explaining something to a small class of people with his hands, primarily, he talked with his hands a lot. And she said, There's the famous Feynman. And of course, my very first thought is, Oh damn, he's like the smartest person alive, and he's also handsome.

And he's happy and he's graceful, like, fuck him. Oh, I can't say that on the radio, I'm sorry.

Oh my god, this guy's just like, it's not fair, this guy just has too much going for him. But Jaron says as he got to know him, he was just fun and funny.

The two of them would talk about physics and just about life. He played percussion, he played drums, they'd play music together, which was great.

His primary approach to life was to seek joy. Do you remember him asking you about cataclysms ever? I definitely remember that topic in that conversation.

Because, remember, in those days, we were in the thick of the Cold War.

And in school, you were trained to hide under your desk in case there would be a nuclear, you know, attack. And which, of course, everyone knew, would be a futile gesture. And so this question, it was like a little glimmer of hope, like in the face of absolute annihilation. Where hiding under your desk will not help, where hiding in some basement will not help.

Where you won't survive this is at least it's applying imagination towards what you possibly could do. Maybe you could leave a message for the future. We talked for a while about how much Jaron really loved this question. Because, like he and Feynman and these other physicists, they'd hang out and kind of talk about this question for hours.

And they would debate about what was the best thing to write down on this piece of paper. Partially because it was fun, but also because it felt important to have an answer. But then, when we asked him what he now would write down as his cataclysm sentence, you personally, Jaron, what would you do?

He took a deep breath and then said, I would give them nothing.

Huh, like nothing, nothing, zilch.

Does he mean like the paper fluttering in the breeze that lands in the hand of the next person would have nothing written on it? He means like, there's just no piece of paper at all. Yeah, that seems kind of sad to me, like, why wouldn't you want to leave them something?

Well, what is that? Let's see, Jaron's like, let's just say you do. Leave behind a sentence about the basics of math and physics.

Or Agriculture and medicine.

Or biology, or public health, that sort of thing, it's redundant. Like all of that kind of information is just the stuff that's out there, waiting to be discovered in nature anyway. So we don't have to do anything.

If people apply themselves, they'll rediscover all that stuff, so it's not like we're special. Letting them get it in their own good time might be better for them. So what have we actually added? Perhaps we've only taken away?

Taken away because giving some highly evolved science fact kind of scared him. Because Jaron thinks, like, you never really know how those are going to unfurl in another world. I mean, look at Feynman's sentence. It gave us all of these cool things that we talked about at the beginning, but it also gave us.

The atomic bomb.

Don't wait, duck away from the windows fast, the glass may break and fly through the air and cut you. I mean, Feynman and others in his generation who'd come of age working in the Manhattan Project were put in an absolutely impossible moral puzzle.

Where bringing the war to an end decisively was a great good, and the other side in the war had been the darkest evil. All of that was clear, and yet, in the big picture, it was just impossible to know if they'd done the right thing. And that cloud of doubt still hangs over science today.

For example, Jaron says, I was very involved in the birth of the internet. Look at the internet. That started as this amazing gift to people, so that we could connect in this way that we never had before.

But as we now know, it spreads disinformation. There's every economic incentive to be terrible, and the incentives to be decent are far, far weaker. And I still have this incredible feelings of guilt and uncertainty about whether we just screwed things up terribly.

In a way that might take centuries or millennia to fix. Or something like, there's just this haunting, this feeling of like, Oh, my God, what have we done? Was it the right thing?

So we suggested, like, what if it wasn't a piece of science, but like a piece of wisdom? Something you would kind of like, find inside of a fortune cookie? Well, that becomes a very interesting exercise, and what you realize is whatever little words of wisdom you can pass along.

Because the whole terms of the game is that they'll be isolated, they'll take on this outsized preciousness. They won't be surrounded by context, and almost anything you can say will become distorted and somewhat useless. If it's overemphasized in that way, which is to say nothing we can do is helpful.

Let's just lay back, let's be modest. What if you were on the other side of that, like, what if you were on the other side of the cataclysm? And you discover that you're not going to get anything at all?

Well, I mean, if there's nothing given, how would I even know that there was nothing given? I don't think I'd even be aware that there was something to have feelings about. That's fair, I don't know. I feel like sometimes when you like, walk into like an empty field or something.

Like, you're looking for something, if you're kind of feeling lost, okay? So there's people in the future and they find our ruins. And then there's some big plaque that says, We have decided to leave you no information, you will learn nothing of us.

If these next people might turn out to be wiser than us, or if they don't and they extinguish themselves, then the next generation? After that. At some point. If some kind of cycle of cataclysm and civilization continues, at some point there will be some civilization that's wiser than us and won't annihilate itself. And let's just not screw with these people, let's just give them a chance to come about naturally, and they will eventually.

But that's an optimistic viewpoint, too. Like, if we seem to keep like exploding ourselves, how do you have faith that we'll get there ever?

Just because of the reality of randomness, what does that mean? I love that phrase, but I have no idea what it means. It's a little bit, it's like a version of evolution.

Like, let's just assume that there's not just going to be one cataclysm in another cycle. But we'll keep on going through these things. Until just through the grace of randomness, we get some civilization that comes up that's got its act together enough to not have another cataclysm. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's like some kind of faith in the far future that we'll finally get it together.

So that was basically his answer. Trust the math. But if you today had to go back to you as a kid, we kept pushing him. Would you have a specific sentence that you would share with a younger?

You, oh gosh. And each time, is there a sentence that you would say to start us in a more optimistic light? He pretty much didn't budge.

No, except when Jeremy asked him this one question If you could leave music for the next society, would you? Wow? That is a really interesting question.

So, you know, one of the things about music is that it's an incredibly important part of our lives. It's part of every time we have a wedding or a funeral, It's incredibly important to us. And yet, until very recently, with the appearance of recording technologies, it was lost generation to generation. I play all these weird instruments.

He demonstrated for us, there's a kind of flute played by the Sami people, the Finland, and part of it is this.

Feeling of being able to at least move and breathe like people did in the past. This is an instrument from Laos, so you get a little bit of connection with them, but of course, you don't really know.

This is a contrabass flute if you could leave an instrument for the next society.

That maybe could say something about our society, would you? That was called a tarhu? I don't know, that's a very hard question. This is a kind of Turkish clarinet.

I'd have to think about that one a lot.

A Middle Eastern instrument, possibly choose the piano, I hate to say.

Why the piano? The reason the piano fascinates me is it's kind of a digital button box, like a computer, but it transcends being a button box because on a piano you hit the key.

And then you send this hammer flying, and the only thing you can tell the hammer is how fast to fly. So you would think it shouldn't be very expressive and yet.

Different pianists sit down and have touches on it that are distinguished. I believe there's a bit of a mystery left there.

Okay, to round things out, just so happened that somebody that I really wanted to talk to for this episode, Hi.

Long time no see. How are You? is a composer who plays the piano. You're like everywhere this month. Her name is Missy Mazzulli.

She is very busy at the moment, she has two operas opening pretty much at the same time. Her work's been performed by orchestras all over the world. And we asked her to come down to our station at WNYC, where we have a piano. Do you want water or anything?

Yeah, he was going to get me water. Okay, great, also a rachel. Okay, because, you know, going back to the whole conceit of this thing.

One of the questions that I had at the very start of this was, if we gave this Feynman cataclysm sentence challenge to a musician, what would happen? We can start talking just in a Yeah, we can start.

So you came up with a musical answer to this question? Yeah, I call it the primordial chord is my name for it. That's cool. So going along with this idea of setting, you know, humans 2.0?

Or the next version of creatures up for a better existence? I wanted to create something that would point them in that direction, so I wanted. There's a couple things about this chord that I hope will do that, so this is a chord that has to be played by three people.

You cannot play this chord by yourself unless you have six arms, which maybe these creatures will have. But you know, you need three people to play it, and why did you pick three people? That's a good question.

I think that's what I felt could fit at a piano, and I chose a piano. Because it's generally the biggest instrument that we have general access to in New York City right now, and I wanted it to. It has the biggest range of musical instruments that we use every day.

There is music that is maybe higher and lower.

It's the largest instrument here in the world, fits into the range of a piano, so this chord encompasses the whole range of the piano. We use the lowest note, we use the highest note.

And it also has all 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale in it. Interesting, and they're also that's going to sound like chaos, it's not, though.

This is it's ordered, I've ordered it so that it hopefully does not sound like chaos.

Anything can happen, I don't know, I so want to hear it now, I know.

So do I? Can we do it? Can we play it? Let's go do it. So we had to get up and go over to the studio where the piano is.

Okay, so we are here in CR5, or, as we like to think of it, John Schaefer's studio. There's the big grand Piano to our left. We're going to follow your lead here, Missy.

Okay.

So Missy pulled out the sheet music, the primordial chord, Oh my god, okay, so if you imagine a page of orchestral score.

We've all probably seen one at some point. You've got the lines running horizontally across the page. The page was mostly blank, except for and it looks insane. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 notes.

Yes, you get 13 little circles all stacked up in a vertical line, looking kind of like a rocket about to take off. And you have three clefs, so each one is one human.

Yes, so each grand staff is one human being playing one piano. Okay, how long did it take you to come up with this? It took me a shockingly long time.

Because I kept fiddling around with it, playing with the resonance, sometimes I would come up with something and I felt that it was too dissonant. It's also a challenge to come up with a chord that includes all 12 of these notes.

So all 12 of those spread out over this huge range, that still has a sort of consonant feeling to it. It's interesting when you look at the chord, this giant chord, which contains all the notes in a scale.

She's arranged it so that you can see in the chord all of these kind of musical molecules. Like, Oh, those three notes in hand, number four, that's a major triad, these two notes in the bass.

That's a tritone interval. Look at that in the upper register. That is a diminished chord. If these words don't mean anything to you, it's fine, the point is if you zoom into this chord.

You see all of these harmonic universes ready to spill out. That's why she calls it the primordial chord. Should we do it, let's do it. We can sit down, maybe.

Okay, is that okay?

Maybe Rachel and I will get like, half a cheek, okay, together we'll be a cool bunch. So Missy sat in the center of the piano bench. I was sort of hanging off the left side.

Half a cheek, Rachel was hanging off the right side, half a cheek. Okay, perfect.

So far, so good. Okay, so Jack, I'm going to set you up, I'm going to just play it for you.

These are your four notes. Okay, okay, okay.

Perfect, perfect.

And these are your five notes one, two, three, four. Okay, I'm going to have to like, Is he rolling over there?

Yep, okay, that sounds pretty good here. I need you to show me one more time. I'll show you a million times.

So.

Okay, yeah, okay, so we'll just build it low to high, okay.

Should we build it sequentially, or do we want to try like a?

So let's see if we can. Okay, there's like an upbeat and then there's one, two, three, four. okay, okay.

All right.

One, two, three, four.

This is it welcome to the rest of your life. You're just stuck here, holding this chord on the piano.

I'm afraid to let go now. This is a big response. The weight of the world, all right.

Okay, that was awesome, guys, that was cool.

I feel like I got the best part, I got the base. Everything I do sounds good down here. see, I like mine up here, it's really nice.

See, I feel totally safe between the two of you, just like hanging out in the middle. I feel like I'm the foundation of this new society, yeah, but I give us hope I'm the glue.

See, we all need each other, that's the point. It is. It's like a full human being. What if we could play it as quiet as possible?

Sing with me.

And the world's all right with me.

Someone's already found us.

Okay.

Lulu, watch it finish Rach from the future now, okay, so did you ever do the prompts? What would you write on the scrap of paper to toss into the post-apocalyptic wind? There are so many times in this job where I'm like, Thank God, I'm not you.

I call up these people and I ask these things of them. And I would never feel like I had all this information and knowledge that they have, especially this one. I worked on it for an entire year and I would constantly ask what my sentence would be and I would not have an answer for you. So when you've thought about it and now you have an answer, so when we can put that question to you right now, for this exact moment.

So I was thinking about this sentence that I had heard that, Ram Dass said. Which is like, we're all just walking each other home. That's beautiful, like we're all headed towards the same grim place, and we're all headed towards different places in our lives. But all we have is like each other in those moments, and keeping each other company. And like making us discover new things, and, yeah, like making us bump into ourselves. And you know, there's just thinking about, like walking on, like a quiet little road home from school or something. And like, every single person in your life has gotten you a little bit closer to that door, that's really beautiful.

I have to pick my head up out of my head because I'm so, like, throttled by that. That's so beautiful and I think it's the most beautiful thing when I think about this team and like everything that it means. And also just like who we are to each other. Like it is engraved in my soul, as if there's a tattoo of this exact feeling in me.

But that moment in the episode early on, when, like, I'm just talking about this feeling that I had as a kid and this like sense of loss. And then from there you go to, like the sound of the phones being dialed up and this like cluster of like, hello, hi, like, is this who? And that feeling of like everybody just pitching in. It almost felt like all of those people transported back to, like childhood me and were like, giving me this like beautiful gift, and it's so special.

I just think like, this show is this like huge gift in my life, so special to have a place, just like bring you closer to yourself.

Did you hear anything in particular, listening on this second time around differently? Was there anything that stood out to you? Yeah, it's funny that you ask that because I listened back to it for the first time in years. And I think about it. When I, like, before I had listened, I was like, Okay, this is a pandemic story.

This is a grief story, this is about destruction. And then I listened to it with the kind of mindset of leaving and moving and being like, Oh, I'm the person on the other end of the cataclysm. Like walking in, like, I think I had been. Before making the story, I was feeling the need to gather all the sentences, and now I feel like the person who's receiving all of them.

Like the person picking it up on the other end of the cataclysm. And it's like I was able to listen to it last week with just like, Oh, oh, this is like what I get to like, start a new life with these sentences. And the ones that stood out to me now are like, I love all of them still. But the ones that stood out to me now are way different than the ones that I listened to. With grief and loss in mind, rather than like, starting a new whoa.

And now I'm like, wow, I have this like wealth of beauty and wisdom in this little episode for me to, like, start with. I'm like, starting at the monopoly, like Square one, like, here we go, all right, I guess you say goodbye, Rachel.

Goodbye.

Yeah, I'm an Irish. Goodbye. Can you just like, cut this this like episode right here? Just drop it off the face of the earth?

We're reaching for death in the end of the candle, trying something that's already found us.

Yes, this won't be the last time you hear Rach. She's got a great story coming down the pike and, if we're lucky, even more. After that. Production, this episode by the entire Radiolab team with update help from Sarah Kari. Special thanks.

There are a few of them, so bear with me our friends over at the former podcast Nancy producers Zakiya Gibbons and Jeremy Bloom. Frances Sanders and her book Eating the Sun for kicking this whole thing off. CalTech for letting us use original audio of the Feynman lectures on physics.

The entirety of the lectures are available to read for free online at feynmanlectures.

Caltech.

Edu, That's f-e-y-n-m-a-n. Lectures.caltech..edu. We also want to thank all of the musicians from all over the world who, after the pandemic set in, recorded themselves in their homes and sent us the audio. And also, good old Alex Overington used that to make the giant primordial chord that you just heard their names are....

And I'm from Canada.

All right.

And before we let you all go for good, I just wanted to give a shout out to a podcast called You're Wrong About. It's a wonderful podcast that does deep dives into histories. If you aren't already in love with it, go find it. I was lucky enough to join on their most recent episode. To do a deeper dive on some of the stuff we talked about in the Seagulls episode and actually share a bunch of stuff.

We left out about the history of scientific suppression of queerness in nature. And it ends with a really special, little emotional dollop. So go check that out. You're wrong about. Enjoy it wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much.

Bye.

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the media.

Do you understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here? And maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.