[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: So you—Jad, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a bat, or a rabbit, or me?

JAD ABUMRAD: Me—closer to you than the bat or the rabbit…

ROBERT: Because I—you couldn't really ever know what it would be like to be a bat, right? Because that—that’s just..

JAD: Or you for that matter…

ROBERT: That's true, you could never, because I never am completely sure what it would be like to be you, obviously, but there is a whole category in human experience called things, not only that you can't know, but things you kind of know you can't know.

JAD: The known unknowns…

ROBERT: The known unknowns…things you know you can't know but really, really want to.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Which is the name of our show: Things you know [but can't know] but really really want to.

JAD: That's what we're going to do this hour we're going to try to know the things that we know we can't know but want to, and maybe we’ll know a little bit more than we know right now…

ROBERT: Later.

JAD: All right, so our first story comes from our producer Tim Howard. It has to do with one of the all time great known unknowns, which is what does another person feel when they're feeling pain? How do you know what that person is feeling? Pain. Pain. Basically, that's what it’s about.

ROBERT: Bring it on.

JAD: [laughs] Here’s Tim.

TIM HOWARD: Well…

TIM HOWARD: Hi.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Hey, come on in.

TIM HOWARD: I—I got started with all this when I met this guy…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Yeah, I—I'm Justin Schmidt, I’m a research biologist…

TIM HOWARD: But he's really a bug guy.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: I like to try to get into the head of the stinging insect…

TIM HOWARD: He lives in—in Tucson Arizona and works in this one-story building on a residential street.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Right now we're in—in my laboratory at Southwestern Biological Institute.

TIM HOWARD: Could we—could we just take a quick, like, glance around?

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Yeah. Underneath those cabinets are 48 drawers of insect specimens so these are…

TIM HOWARD: Oh, wow.

TIM HOWARD: He's got wasps…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: That's Apoica, and it's a nocturnal wasp…

TIM HOWARD: That is terrifying, this one here…

TIM HOWARD: Different kinds of weird…

TIM HOWARD: What is this guy?

TIM HOWARD: Hornets…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: That's actually a flightless grasshopper…

TIM HOWARD: He’s got a lot of ants…

TIM HOWARD: Wow, there's some little furry…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Yeah those are velvet ants…

TIM HOWARD: They're huge!

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: If you pick up one of these things and get stung by it, it's going to feel like, “Oh my goodness, that could kill a cow.”

TIM HOWARD: Ok, so this all started for Justin back in the ‘70s when he was a grad student.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: …and I just thought, for a lark, I took a seminar course in etymology we—we had one entomologist in the whole university…

JAD: This is a course in bug science?

TIM HOWARD: Yeah, this was in Georgia, and he was outside one day in the field and he was trying to get a sample of…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: A harvester ant.

TIM HOWARD: A harvester ant. What does that look like?

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: They're about 1/3 of an inch long and they're bright red, pretty good-sized ants actually…

TIM HOWARD: …and he was trying to get one into a jar and…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: I got stung by one and I—I kind of went, “Oh, that’s odd.

TIM HOWARD: It didn't really hurt it first…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Okay, it sort of felt like somebody was using a dental syringe, a really fine needle, slowly injecting a little bit of water. It had this kind of crystalline feeling. It wasn't an immediate pain, this was a delayed thing, and so then I thought, “Oh, ok.” But after about a minute it started really hurting. I said, “Oh, this really hurts. So there’s this really deep, sort of, visceral pain, something was going in and tearing out your nerves, and your muscles and your tendons. What struck me was how dramatically different this was from anything that I'd experienced. From bumblebee, honeybee, sweat bee, yellow jacket, paper wasp.

TIM HOWARD: And once the pain subsided he thought, “Man I need to study that.”

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Yeah.

TIM HOWARD: You know, he had all these, kind of, higher level science questions about, you know, evolution of pain and insects and how different stinging insects developed…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: But the problem was, oh ok, pain. What do we do about measuring pain?

TIM HOWARD: If he was really going to get to the bottom of why one insect was more or less painful than another he couldn't do that with just words like, “More,” or “Less.”

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: I need numbers…

TIM HOWARD: With numbers, he could do all kinds of research not to mention it would make working with other bug scientists just a lot easier.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: And I started looking into this and found out, oh this wasn't anything new. Nobody really knows how to measure pain…

TIM HOWARD: Because, you know, no two people feel pain the same way…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Some people have higher pain tolerance than others…

TIM HOWARD: On the other hand that harvester ant was objectively way more painful than anything he'd ever been stung by.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Oh yeah.

TIM HOWARD: So Justin realized, “What I need is a universal insect sting pain scale.” So, Justin starts traveling all around the world and he's, you know, every time he hears about a bug, especially a stinging bug, he goes looking for it and…

JAD: In order to be stung by it?

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Well I don't like pain…

TIM HOWARD: Right.

TIM HOWARD: So, he says he's not trying to get stung, but it usually happens, and as far as he's concerned, that's a good thing. For example…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: I was petrified of this—this Synoeca, which I call the Warrior Wasp…

TIM HOWARD: A Synoeca is this black wasp with this metallic sheen…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: …down in Central America…

TIM HOWARD: …and they're known for this warning sound that they make with their nests… JUSTIN SCHMIDT: They have this big carton nest, carton being kind of paper, kind of goes [mouths sound]…

TIM HOWARD: Justin was there with another scientist, and they're tromping through the jungle and then they find a nest…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Here we are this nest…

TIM HOWARD: And it starts to make that sound…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Well, sure enough, we eventually got a kamikaze that came out and nailed me…

TIM HOWARD: Where—where did it sting you?

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Kind of on my forehead, and I just sort of sat on the stump and said, “Oh, this really hurts…” It—it hurt like a yellow jacket or a hornet, but it was just a whole lot more.

TIM HOWARD: And it kept hurting for an hour…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: And so, I, you know, recorded what the feeling was for this hour…

TIM HOWARD: So—but you're sitting there on a stump or something, and your forehead is throbbing and you're taking notes?

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Well, what else can you do?

TIM HOWARD: He—he talks about getting stung by something that makes him hurt so much that he just starts…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Screaming in pain…

TIM HOWARD: For like an hour and lying on the ground because that'll make the pain less, I guess…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: And my left hand is sitting here shaking, it’s trembling, you know, it's going up and down. And I said, oh, “Darn hand, stop that!”

TIM HOWARD: Now, with his other hand he’s taking notes about exactly how it feels.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: This left one is here flapping away and, in any case…

JAD: How many times has he been stung?

TIM HOWARD: He told me he's been stung by like 150 species, and probably about 1,000 times.

JAD: What?

TIM HOWARD: And he's used all those experiences to build up a scale…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Which, you could say is—is a five-point scale. Zero, one, two, three and four. Zero being that's essentially trivial…

TIM HOWARD: And four being…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: It really hurts…

JAD: But wait, how does he deal with the whole subjectivity thing? Because, like, your four is going to be different than my four.

TIM HOWARD: He did something pretty clever, which is that he took one sting as…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: A reference, the honeybee…

TIM HOWARD: Which is…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Ouch!

TIM HOWARD: Which I could—you can talk about with anybody, anybody's been stung by a honeybee…

JAD: Yeah.

TIM HOWARD: It also doesn't hurt too much and it doesn't hurt too little…

JAD: So it's like a midpoint…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Exactly, and—and a middle point, in this case, was easier than a top or a bottom, because I didn't know what the top or bottom was. There's no way to know what the top and the bottom is, so a honey bee was—was that, and so you give that a two.

TIM HOWARD: A two out of four. The prime meridian of pain. And every time he gets stung by new bugs he'll ask himself…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: Is it more than a honeybee, less than a honeybee, about the same as a honeybee? A whole lot more, a whole lot less…

TIM HOWARD: Then he gives that sting its own number. Dig this:

TIM HOWARD: 1.0: Sweat Bee. Light. Ephemeral. Almost fruity. 1.8: the bullhorn, a rare, piercing, elevated sort of bee, someone has fired a staple into your cheek. 2.0: A Bald-Faced Hornet, rich, hearty, slightly crunchy, similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door. 3: Red Harvester Ant, bold and unrelenting. Somebody's using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.

JAD: Ahh! This is his pain scale?

TIM HOWARD: Justin calls this his tongue-in-cheek version…

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: That was more fun.

TIM HOWARD: But yeah, these are some of those things that he’s measured.

JAD: And what's the—what's the worst, what's the top of the scale? The Bullet Ant.

JUSTIN SCHMIDT: It sends excruciating waves of burning pain that are undiminished for 12 hours and you get these pulsations, you get this—this pain crescendo that goes to you just about wanting to scream, and then it backs off a little bit so you say ah, kind of give you a little bit of a sigh of relief and then it ascends back up and it keeps doing this. These hills and valleys of—of ascending pain and then decreasing—even the decreasing to the lowest still hurts…

JAD: So this scale works for him I think he uses it to communicate with bug scientists?

TIM HOWARD: Yeah, yeah.

JAD: Well, all right, that's kind of cool, but I—I gotta be honest, I this is I'm wanting more right now because I—I like the scale but I'm thinking actually beyond bugs to like—let me just put my cards on the table, like childbirth ok, like we talk about, like, the gap, ok I know but we talk about the gap between, like, two people feeling pain and being able to share pain that's where the rubber meets the road…

ROBERT: Well it's used in a lot of marriages as a constant. “You don't know! You don't know what…”

JAD: Exactly. Thank you, Robert. Does Tamar use it the way Karla uses it?

ROBERT: I can't say on a recording. [laughs] No, not at all, really, never, I don't know, well that didn't cross my mind…

TIM HOWARD: Karla, who's a very sort of understating lady when it comes to this subject she'll be like “You have no idea. You don't even begin to know what you don't know about what we just went through.”

TIM HOWARD: Well that brings me to my second story.

PAULA MICHAELS: Can I—can I take it from the top?

TIM HOWARD: For this one we go back a few years.

PAULA MICHAELS: So we’re in 1948…

JAD: Who is this lady?

TIM HOWARD: This is Paula Michaels, she's a professor of the history of medicine.

PAULA MICHAELS: I teach at the University of Iowa.

TIM HOWARD: And she told me this story that takes place in New York at New York Hospital in 1948.

PAULA MICHAELS: Right, so there's James T Hardy, there's Carl T Javert…

TIM HOWARD: Hardy and Javert are doctors.

PAULA MICHAELS: And they're trying to test drugs, you know, what drugs are going to be useful to alleviate the pain of childbirth. And in this period there's a whole range of things that are being used.

TIM HOWARD: What are some of the ones that they're using?

PAULA MICHAELS: Well, like Morphine and Scopolamine. Demerol is a big thing.

JAD: Nice.

PAULA MICHAELS: …and Heroin, which to me sounds completely crazy.

JAD: They play around with crack too?

TIM HOWARD: They—they would have if they knew about it. The problem is they want to be able to test all of these drugs so that they can use them in a standard way, but they weren't actually sure how much pain women were really in and…

JAD: I guess you kind of have to know that in order to know how much drugs to give them.

TIM HOWARD: Yeah. They had no idea and it was a source of a lot of debate.

PAULA MICHAELS: Yes, one man, Grantly Dick-Read, a British physician basically said straight out, “It's in women's minds, not their bodies.”

TIM HOWARD: What?

PAULA MICHAELS: Childbirth is a completely painless experience, entirely psychological in origin.

TIM HOWARD: Wow, that is an incredibly bold thing for a man to say.

PAULA MICHAELS: Yes that's chutzpah.

TIM HOWARD: Now, Hardy and Javiert didn't take it that far but they wanted to get past the whole messy psychological part of childbirth…

PAULA MICHAELS: And eliminate that woman's subjective experience of pain from the calculation of whether these drugs are effective or not.

TIM HOWARD: And—and—and how are they going to do this?

PAULA MICHAELS: Well, their method is pretty crazy. They had this apparatus called a dolorimeter…

TIM HOWARD: It was this little wood box that had dials and knobs plugged into the wall, and then was connected by a wire to another part.

PAULA MICHAELS: What they called The Exposure Unit…

TIM HOWARD: That was like a heat gun with an aperture that can shoot out heat. Then they got some volunteers.

PAULA MICHAELS: Some of them were nurses. Some of them were the wives of obstetricians or other physicians.

TIM HOWARD: All very pregnant, and they told these women, “This might not be very pleasant, but by participating you're gonna be making childbirth just so much better for every woman to follow.”

PAULA MICHAELS: That's right.

TIM HOWARD: And the women were excited to help.

PAULA MICHAELS: And then when the woman went into labor.

TIM HOWARD: Hardy and Javert would show up bedside with the dolorimeter, and they'd wait for the contraction to finish…

PAULA MICHAELS: And then between contractions…

TIM HOWARD: During that pause they take the heat gun and they put it against the back of the woman's hand and they'd say to her, “All right, we want to know about that contraction, the one you just had, yeah, we want to know how much it hurt.”

PAULA MICHAELS: They'd say, “Is it more like A or more like B?” And then the woman would respond…

TIM HOWARD: “Guess B is closer.”

PAULA MICHAELS: And then they would say is it more like B, or more like C?

That was a way of then saying, “Ok, well that was a contraction of three dols.

JAD: Dol, what’s a dole?

TIM HOWARD: The dole is their unit of pain, their—their standard unit they use for everybody.

PAULA MICHAELS: And so, over the course of labor after every contraction they would repeat this process. Same drill.

PAULA MICHAELS: Is it more like A, or more like B?

TIM HOWARD: Again…

PAULA MICHAELS: A, B?

TIM HOWARD: And again…

PAULA MICHAELS: B or more like C…

TIM HOWARD: And again…

PAULA MICHAELS: Over the course of her whole labor…

JAD: So wait, on top of all the labor pains they're just cranking this heat up and up.

TIM HOWARD: Yeah.

JAD: Wow.

TIM HOWARD: In the case of one patient who insisted on going the distance…

PAULA MICHAELS: A pain intensity of 10 1/2 dols was measured…

TIM HOWARD: Hardy and Javert called this, “The Ceiling.”

PAULA MICHAELS: This is the most intense pain which can be experienced. Second-degree burns were inflicted upon the hands of this patient by the four tests made at levels higher than nine dols.

JAD: Second-degree burns, yeah I mean I like what these guys are trying to do but, wow, that is sadistic.

PAULA MICHAELS: It seems totally twisted, but it's in the name of science. It's for a greater good.

JAD: [laughs] Okay.

TIM HOWARD: Alright, so then the doctors, they took all of the data from all of the women and they start going through it looking for patterns, looking for things in common and then the most incredible part to me is that they converted all that information into a mathematical formula…

PAULA MICHAELS: Dolls of pain equals 10.5 -1.5 times contraction intervals in minutes.

JAD: What…

TIM HOWARD: Well, so they're saying if you tell us the amount of time between the contractions at any point in our labor we can tell you exactly how much pain the woman is in. No more mystery, there's no more wondering.

JAD: [laughs] Problem solved.

TIM HOWARD: The code is cracked.

JAD: And—and what happens, does this breakthrough sweep the medical establishment? I'm guessing it doesn't.

TIM HOWARD: Well, no.

PAULA MICHAELS: Other people could not achieve the same results that they achieved using the dolom—[laughs] don't know why I can’t…dolom. Dolorimeter. Using the Dolorimeter. They were not able to achieve the same results.

TIM HOWARD: When other doctors tried to do it that formula didn't seem to apply to the women that they looked at…

JAD: Shocker…

TIM HOWARD: Obviously, there's a lot of problems with the entire approach these guys had…

JAD: No.

TIM HOWARD: Yeah, I mean for starters they were trying to compare pain in the abdomen to, you know, like a burning sensation on the arm.

JAD: Yeah, I mean that's a—that’s like a translation problem.

TIM HOWARD: Yeah, well—I mean, in my opinion there's kind of a bigger translation issue happening…

JAD: Which is…

TIM HOWARD: In order to talk about a pain you're feeling you need to be able to observe it, and—and kind of stand apart from it in your own head, if that makes sense.

JAD: Sure…

TIM HOWARD: And, when you hear women talk about the pain of childbirth…

SARAH: Hello, my name is Sarah, I'm in Sacramento, California.

TIM HOWARD: We asked people to submit theirs through the Radiolab app, and when you listen to these different accounts…

SARAH: My experience with childbirth pain was…

TIM HOWARD: It sounds like there's a certain point where everything shifts, and one woman said it was at about like 7 centimeters dilated…

SARAH: And that's when you lose your mind, and you can't think, you can't talk.

TIM HOWARD: Suddenly the pain becomes so great…

SARAH: So, so bad…

TIM HOWARD: That there's no more reference point…

SARAH: I just remember…

TIM HOWARD: There's no more objective distance…

SARAH: …making these noises that were just unearthly…

TIM HOWARD: …and in these submissions, it's usually at this point in the story where the woman either draws a blank…

SARAH: Wow…

TIM HOWARD: Or resorts to some crazy analogy…

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Woman: I felt like there was a freight train bearing down on my vagina, from inside my body, and then I could almost hear it building, like [imitates train sound]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Woman 2: I felt like I was being dragged out to sea.]

TIM HOWARD: That's one I actually heard a couple times…

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Woman 3: Waves, waves of pain and it was kind of like that for—for Paula too.]

PAULA MICHAELS: I turned very much inward, in a way that—that made time feel like it stopped. I was drowning…

EULA BISS: In this lake of pain, and there was a horizon, and when the contractions were intense, I would swim toward the horizon.

TIM HOWARD: This is our third pain calibrator, Eula.

EULA BISS: I’m Eula Biss, I’m a non-fiction writer.

TIM HOWARD: I came upon a great essay that she wrote, called the pain scale. And, for me Eula kind of comes closest to finding a way to communicate pain.

TIM HOWARD: If—if I could say you have a relationship with pain, when did that—when did that start for you?

EULA BISS: Let's see about almost ten years ago, I think I was about 26.

TIM HOWARD: At the time Eula was a grad student in Iowa.

EULA BISS: And, I just woke up one morning in the fall and I had a terrible pain in the side of my neck, upper back, side of my face.

TIM HOWARD: She had no idea what it was.

EULA BISS: It was a burning pain…

TIM HOWARD: With his nauseating, tingling sensation.

EULA BISS: I've really never felt anything else like it in months past and it didn't go away and it was making it very difficult for me to sleep, it started to interfere with my thinking too, I couldn't concentrate.

TIM HOWARD: So one day she went to the hospital, and by this point she was a total mess.

EULA BISS: So I was kind of teary, and shaking and I said, “You—you need to give me something to help me with this.”

TIM HOWARD: And so the doc said, “All right, well, take a look at this thing up here on the wall. This is called the pain scale.”

EULA BISS: It had the numbers zero to ten, at one end it said No Pain at the other end it said the Worst Pain Imaginable.

TIM HOWARD: And the doctor says to her, “Okay, what number is your pain?” Eula starts to think about it.

EULA BISS: The worst pain imaginable is kind of vague, is this the worst pain you yourself can imagine? Or is it the worst pain imaginable on earth?

TIM HOWARD: Hmm.

EULA BISS: You know, this was around the time that I think a man had died being dragged behind a truck in Texas, and I—I remember sitting in the exam room thinking about that, and then I was trying to do some rudimentary mathematics. If being dragged behind a truck to your death is the worst pain imaginable, what—what proportion of that do I feel? And I thought you know a third of that seemed pretty significant to me.

TIM HOWARD: So, she says three, I guess, and the docs like, alright, and he does some tests he tries to figure out exactly what's going on, can't really, but since she said three anyway he's like, “All right, well, you know, have some Aspirin, go home.” And this happened a few times. She wasn't getting any better, so at a certain point she calls up her dad, who's also a doctor, and she starts complaining.

EULA BISS: …I was telling him how frustrated I was that—that the doctors didn't seem to be taking this very seriously, and he said, “Well, when they ask you to rate your pain what—what do you tell them?” And I said, “I usually say three.” And he said, “Well there's your problem.”

TIM HOWARD: Her dad tells her you should say eight, even if you're not feeling it, that's what you got to say. And Eula thinks, you know, this is ridiculous, why do we even have a pain scale if I'm not supposed to take the number seriously?

EULA BISS: And he said in part it's a tool that's meant to protect practitioners, because it's emotionally difficult to have someone say to you, “It feels like someone's jamming a red hot poker through my eyeball,” rather than “I've got a nine.”

TIM HOWARD: But then he made a suggestion, which I think is really clever.

EULA BISS: He suggested one scale where it would measure what you're willing to do to get rid of your pain. What would you trade for pain relief? Would you give up your sense of sight for five years? Would you relinquish your ability to walk?

TIM HOWARD: Did you come up with any answers at that point?

EULA BISS: I did. They were disturbing answers, you know. When my father asked, “Would you accept a shorter lifespan?” At that point in time I thought, yeah I would.

TIM HOWARD: How many years?

EULA BISS: I was thinking I'd take 10 years off my life.

TIM HOWARD: Wow.

TIM HOWARD: For me, that was basically the first time I felt like I understood her pain.

EULA BISS: But, you know I was 26 and life seems really long when you're 26. Now, I'm in a much different space—my pain is not nearly as bad as it was then so, now I'm not really in the bargaining mood anymore.

TIM HOWARD: I bet like how about a bad haircut? Would you take a really bad haircut? A mohawk?

EULA BISS: Huh, ok yeah, actually I would.

TIM HOWARD: [laughs]

TIM HOWARD: And these days Eula is kind of pessimistic about the idea that we're ever going to really have a useful pain scale.

EULA BISS: At the end of the day, I'm not sure pain is a quantity that is measurable.

TIM HOWARD: Thinking that kind of bums her out…

EULA BISS: Because part of me wanted to believe in the project of quantification.

TIM HOWARD: Why?

EULA BISS: I—I'm not sure. I think because not believing in it is a little bit lonelier. The idea that we cannot feel, cannot understand, and cannot imagine each other's pain is a really isolating thought.

JAD: By the way, what was her pain from? Did she get a diagnosis?

TIM HOWARD: Well her doctor tried a lot of stuff actually, they did a brain scan, they checked for a spinal infection, and ultimately…

EULA BISS: He said, “You know, unfortunately, we—we don't know what causes this. We don't know how to treat it. We don't know if it will ever get better, But we do know it's real.” And that was my final conversation with him, and he said, “Good luck out there.”

JAD: Thanks to producer Tim Howard, Justin Schmidt, Paula Michaels, and Eula Biss.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And we'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Hi guys, I just called, and I think I messed up, so I want to try it again. Okay? Okay. Hi, this is Clarice, I am a Radiolab listener in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and here are the credits: Radiolab is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I think that one was better. Thanks y’all. Bye.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we're talking about the things we know we cannot ever know.

JAD: But we want to know…

ROBERT: We want to know them.

JAD: And, you know, where this impulse gets very tricky is around the question of empathy.

Particularly in the sciences. Like, if you're a scientist and you're studying something like a creature is it right to think you can empathize with that thing? Is that the right approach? Human approach? Or is that arrogant? And in our next story that becomes a very sticky point for one particular scientist. Comes to us from one of our favorite producers, Lulu Miller.

LULU MILLER: Can you introduce yourself?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …award-winning author, fantastic husband,

LULU: Dad of the year.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Dad of the year. No, I'm Jeff Lockwood, I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming.

LULU: Jeff is an entomologist…

JAD: You mean, like a bug guy?

LULU MILLER:He's a bug guy, and mostly he studies crickets and grasshoppers. And this story involves a kind of cricket that's, well, different.

LULU: The Grilla…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah, the Gryllacrididae, yeah.

LULU: And are they related to katydids?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: When you think of a Gryllacrididae is like a cricket on steroids.

LULU: Ok.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets.

LULU: First of all, he says, they're a little bulkier than your average cricket.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And they tend to have very strong jaws, very strong jaws.

LULU: And mandibles that are really sharp.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sort of like a serrated knife.

LULU: And most of all, they're vicious.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They all had to be caged separately. If you put them together they would—they would fight.

LULU: To the death?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah

LULU: Wow.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And so when I would go in in the mornings…

LULU: And reach into one of their cages, as soon as they saw him coming they'd fly into this…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Rage, it's really sort of a show-stopper. They'll sort of rear up on their hind legs…

LULU: Beat their abdomens on the ground.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Flare out their wings.

LULU: And then clamp onto his fingers.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They would draw blood.

LULU: Wow.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: So I used this—this glass probe on—on—on the big boy. At least until the point at which he snapped off the end of the glass rod.

JAD: Holy moly!

LULU: So the point is these creatures were completely alien to him, there's, like, nothing about them he can relate to. But, over time, the more he studied them the more he started noticing things that made them seem way less foreign.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Because I kept these…

LULU: For example, as soon—as he put one into a new cage it would make itself a little nest…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And once it has that little nest built that's home.

LULU: In a very real way, because by moving them around to different cages he soon realized…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …that they could differentiate their—their nests.

LULU: They can actually tell the difference between their nest and another.

JAD: Wait, how do they do that?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They secrete a pheromone, a chemical and each cricket is able to self-identify its own odor.

LULU: Wow.
JEFF LOCKWOOD: It gave me the sense, and I think there's something to this, that they had a kind of capacity to recognize self.

LULU: Oh, interesting.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: We don't see that much in insects, but they had what appears to be a capacity to say, “This is mine.”

LULU: And then he began to think differently about that crazy rage too, because if—if you think about it, here's this creature, it's completely vulnerable to attack…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They really don't have a very good defense for themselves, they don't excrete nasty chemicals, they don't sting, they can't fly so it's not going to go flying away either.

LULU: So, maybe that rage is their only strategy.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Which, again drew me into thinking that I understood them.

LULU: Perhaps these little guys were…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: More like me than—than many other insects that I'd worked with.

LULU: So he grew to really like them. But then, one day…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I've been working with this particular Gryllacrididae…

LULU: Trying to move him from one cage to another…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …and he was agitated, and had decided to go on the offensive, which involved trying to come out of the cage, so he was scrambling up the side of the cage…

LULU: And to keep him from getting out, Jeff slammed the lid down…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …because he was just at the edge.

LULU: …and caught him between the lid and the edge of the cage

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …and I you know quickly lifted the lid up and he fell back into the cage and I looked down at him, and what had happened was I had ruptured his abdomen...

LULU: A split right down his belly.

JAD: Geez.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And some of the the viscera and—and kind of globule of—of yellow fat that was leaking, out oozing out of his body, I—I felt guilt and then of course I—I felt sorry for an animal, but what really struck me was what he did next, which was curl his head downward toward his abdomen, pause for a moment and then began consuming his own innards. Consuming the viscera that that—that was oozing out of his body, and so he—was he was literally cannibalizing himself.

JAD: Wow, that is disgusting.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It was horrifying, I had sort of felt like I had come—I had come to know them, then this—this was just so out of the imaginable.

LULU: But the instant that word popped into his mind, unimaginable, he had this sort of Pavlovian reflex, and he thought of this guy, an old professor of his. Doctor LaFage.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: LaFage, he was one of my mentors at the Louisiana State University…

JAD: This is a teacher of his?

LULU: Yep, insect behavior.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: He was one of the younger family members when I was there. Mid 30s, slight of build, but incredibly intense.

LULU: He's kind of an expert in animal violence, and the thing he harped on over and over, the thing he was trying to pound into their brains was…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Objectivity. To separate one's emotions and interests from the object of study. And he had these wire rim glasses, and I—I remember if—if—if he would ask you a question…

LULU: Like, why does the Gryllacrididae do it's crazy war dance?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And you tried sort of reading in will and tension, mental states…

LULU: Maybe because it's angry, or scared?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: He would just drop his chin and look over the top…

LULU: And tear you apart.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: His job in the classroom was to make us good, objective observers.

LULU: And Jeff—Jeff stayed in touch with him over the years.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I wanted to be good at this.

LULU: As he set up his own lab…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: You know I—I had a stake in—in—in earning his respect.

LULU: And so that day, as he's watching the Gryllacrididae consume its own guts, he’s thinking ok, what was Lafage see in this?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: So my—my sense, through my research is that what this Gryllacrididae had done was perhaps to have detected the odor of its own fats, it sort of drew the conclusion that this must be something good to eat without sort of grasping that it was it's—its own self the smell of its own fat triggered a feeding behavior that that's highly adaptive, you know to feed on, fats are very hard to get hold of out in the world, and so when you smell fats it's, you know, it's you know it's like us and doughnuts, right?

LULU: Yeah, go for it.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It triggers feeding, yeah. It triggers feeding.

JAD: So clearly these things don't quite have a sense of self.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Right, so—so maybe they're not just like me.

LULU: Which is always Lafarge's point: Don't put the creature in your box, it doesn't want to be there.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It's sort of a moral danger almost to sort of not allow the organism to be what it is. It's almost to sort of possess it, or to own it, and to really treat the insects sort of with a with a with—with a deep respect, right, is oddly enough to treat them objectively. You know, he—he was one of the—one of the professors who actually engendered a kind of a good fear and he was the kind of person who you—who you wanted to please.

LULU: Is that better, a little louder?

TAMARA CARBONE: Yeah, maybe a tiny bit.

LULU: Is that okay?

TAMARA CARBONE: Oh that's great.

LULU: Great.

LULU: But then, years later, something happened that challenged Jeff's ability to do this. To be the kind of scientist that LaFage wanted him to be.

LULU: We're recording over here?

LULU: And there's really only one person who could tell us this part of the story.

LULU: Will you introduce yourself?

TAMARA CARBONE: Ok, my name is Tamara Carboni.

LULU: Tamara is actually not a scientist, she worked for the Louisiana State Museum, and back in 1989 she and doctor LaFage whose first name is also Jeff, were working together on this termite problem. The termites were getting really bad in the French quarter, and it was her job to preserve the historic homes, and Jeff was studying the termites.

TAMARA CARBONE: I never imagined that I would be fascinated by termites, but I was, so…

LULU: He made it…

TAMARA CARBONE: …fascinating, yeah, fascinating.

LULU: But then, one night, in July…

TAMARA CARBONE: July 25th.

LULU: …they met for dinner to talk about how the project was going…

TAMARA CARBONE: And we were walking home, well he was walking me to my house, around 10, 10:30 at night. And, I think it must have been raining or there was a threat of rain because Jeff was carrying an umbrella, and I could hear footsteps behind us, very determined sounding footsteps, and we got to a corner across from my house, and at that point this person came around us in front of us, and he said close your eyes and in the process of closing my eyes I saw the gun.

LULU: So she closed her eyes, and a second later she felt a tug on her purse.

TAMARA CARBONE: I could feel him take hold of the straps and I was not gonna resist and as I felt him do that I could hear Jeff say, “Don't do that.”

LULU: At that instant…

TAMARA CARBONE: I don't remember the shot at all, you know. I—I felt Jeff move, and I guess at that point I opened my eyes. This guy had already run, never took my purse, I saw jeff running toward my house, and I just ran after him. I had no idea he was shot, but he got onto the porch and he collapsed on his back. And, at that point he was gushing blood, and I was trying to get Jeff to understand that help was coming, and I kept saying, “You're gonna be ok, they're on their way.”

LULU: And did he say anything?

TAMARA CARBONE: He couldn’t talk. He just had this kind of stare. And I just watched him die.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The news came by a phone call, and it just seemed, you know, it was, you know, it’s become one of those—those classic unreal moments. Something about this you know must be wrong. It wasn't Dr. LaFage, he wasn't really killed. It seemed particularly hard to grasp.

TAMARA CARBONE: You know, one minute I'm with this vital person, and the next minute he’s dead.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sadness, anguish, confusion.

TAMARA CARBONE: I was hysterical, crying, I was in shock.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They never found his killer.

LULU: Never found out anything about him. Who he was, why he would do this?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It was just this seemingly senseless act.

LULU: …and that's how Jeff understood it for years. That it was senseless.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Senseless.

LULU: But over time, something odd started to happen, like with those Gryllacrididae, Lafarge started appearing in his brain, telling him that that word wasn't good enough. And he began to ask himself, again, how would...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …Doctor LaFage want me to think about this?

LULU: How would he think about his own death?

LULU: Ok, so I wonder if—if you do have the essay with you…

LULU: So he writes an essay…

LULU: Will you read the last four paragraphs of—of the essay?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I will. One, two, three, four. The year after I left Louisiana and came to Wyoming as a freshly minted PHD…

LULU: The first thing he does is he takes Lafage's attitude on violence.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: …that violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species…

LULU: That's not some evil, outline thing, but instead a baseline strategy for all animals, and in that light he looks at the actions of that night sort of dispassionately. First, he figures this kid was probably mugging them because he was poor…

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Hopeless, poor, angry…

LULU: Scared.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The woman became tangled in the strap.

LULU: Doctor Lafage, having his own instinctual reaction, stepped between them.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Said, “Don't hurt her, you—you can have the purse.” I could picture him doing this.

LULU: But, perhaps that action itself scared the kid.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The young man drew a gun, and fired point blank.

LULU: I showed the essay to Tamra.

TAMARA CARBONE: Yeah, well no. That’s not. I don’t think—I don't know if he stepped forward or not. You know, again my eyes were closed. I could feel some kind of movement. I certainly don't think he stepped—there wasn't enough space for him to step between us.

LULU: For Tamara, who's been over the event a million times in her head, doesn't add up so easily. First of all, when doctor LaFage spoke to the kid…

TAMARA CARBONE: It wasn't exactly a command, it was more like, “Don’t do that.” He was like, “Don't be an idiot. Don't do that.”

LULU: It wasn't really threatening, it was more like, look, logically let's not do this. And while she gets that the kid might have been scared, and not been intending to shoot…

TAMARA CARBONE: If he never ever could imagine himself shooting somebody he wouldn't have had a loaded gun. I can't relate to this person, I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them, I can't relate to that at all.

LULU: And over the years her friends and family coworkers tried all different kinds of ways to help her make sense of it. Nothing really helped.

TAMARA CARBONE: But there was someone that I worked with, my boss actually, who had been in Vietnam, and he took me aside and he said, you know, “You'll never understand this.”

LULU: You're not going to understand it.

TAMARA CARBONE: Yeah.

LULU: Like, don't even try?

TAMARA CARBONE: I don't think there's any sense to be made out of it.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: If we just stop there, and it—it's to say that—that it's somehow unnatural or inhuman, and in fact in a weird kind of way, it's profoundly human.

TAMARA CARBONE: There's no way I can understand it.

LULU: And in the end, the essay itself kind of falls short. And Jeff admits that.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It just isn't sufficient.

LULU: But he says there is a way of understanding this event, he just hasn't gotten there yet. But it is out there.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah.

LULU: It has to be.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Dr Lafarge would have, I think, said this as well.

LULU: But for the moment.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I think I can say that I—I understand another beings eating its own leaking entrails, at a—at a level that I can't understand one of my fellow beings, you know, pulling the trigger and—and—and—and killing a man that I love.

JAD: Thanks to producer Lulu Miller. We'll be right back.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today stories of known unknowns. Things we really want to know, but we know we can't know, but we still—we try, because we need to know it, even though we know we can't…

ROBERT: And, to switch gears ever so slightly here, I was trying to think where I have seen the most intense, almost, you know, literally theatrical uncertainty. And—and—and there happens to…I don't know, do you, do you know—do you like improvisational comedy? I have a…

JAD: I would like to be, but it's the experience of watching improv makes me uncomfortable.

ROBERT: Well, that's the thing. I'm going to introduce you to two guys who do something very interesting with that discomfort, because if you talk to—to true comedy nerds they will tell you there are two individuals who take this improvisational dare further than anybody else.

SEAN: Hello.

DAVID PASQUESI: Hello.

SEAN: TJ and Dave.

DAVE: Yep.

ROBERT: David Pasquesi and TJ Jagodowski.

DAVID PASQUESI: This is—this is us.

ROBERT: And this is Robert.

DAVID PASQUESI: Hi Robert.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Hi Robert.

ROBERT: Our producer Sean Cole and I called them up because we've been to their shows and…

SEAN: You have two fans here.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Well thank you guys, geez.

ROBERT: I've gone with my wife, with my sister, I’ve gone with people who went—couldn't stand it because they thought it was like so scary to them. I had one friend, actually, who wanted to bolt and I had like hold his hand—his leg down on the chair.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: That's a common reaction.

DAVID PASQUESI: Yeah.

JAD: Ok, so what—what do these guys do that’s so special?

ROBERT: Okay, in normal improvisation people come onto the stage and they ask for—they’ll go, “you—you're at a party.” And then they go, “You—you've got a—a french teacher.”

And you go—and then they…

JAD: They have to make up a scene about that—that scenario.

ROBERT: And then—and then it lasts for 5 minutes or so.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: Well these guys, they don't do that at all.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Thank you very much…]

ROBERT: They get up on stage…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And this is TJ Jagodowski.]

ROBERT: They introduce themselves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We are super happy to be here as we hail from Chicago.]

ROBERT: They do a little crowd work back and forth, with the audience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We’re very much looking forward to improvising for you, trust us this is all made-up.]

ROBERT: But then, lights go out.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: And when the lights come back up…

ROBERT: There's two guys on stage just looking at each other. And it looks like they’ve just suddenly woken up, and have no idea who they are.

DAVID PASQUESI: No.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: No.

ROBERT: They don't know if they're a man or a woman.

DAVID PASQUESI: No.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Not yet.

ROBERT: Where they are.

DAVID PASQUESI: Correct.

ROBERT: When they are.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: No assumptions.

DAVID PASQUESI: We're completely tabula rasa.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: From the very beginning it's understood that we're all just gonna find out…

ROBERT: Together.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Right.

ROBERT: And here's the thing. This is going to last unbroken for the next 50 minutes, this is like a one act play with characters and plot and they can't stop, can't break, and they have no idea what they're about to do. None.

JAD: So wait if they're—if they have no script, they had no plan, they got nothing. They don’t even know who they are, how do you even begin?

ROBERT: Well, I’ll tell you what it looks like. They just stand there and look at each other until…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You’ll bounce back, man.]

ROBERT: One of them speaks.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You’ll bounce back.]

ROBERT: And then it’s on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I don’t want to get into it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, you’ll bounce back. [audience laughs] Tough day.]

ROBERT: At this point, what do you know?

DAVID PASQUESI: All I know is we're friends. We're in some sort of indoor setting, I think it looked like that.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Males.

DAVID PASQUESI: Males.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Breathe it out, breathe through it. Right? Is that what they say?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Breathe into the area that’s bringing you the pain? Yeah. Yeah.]

JAD: And one of the—is one of the guys upset?

ROBERT: Yup.

DAVID PASQUESI: Something has just happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We can hear someone screamin’ from out here.]

ROBERT: I don’t know, some kind of fight?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hey look, you know, I say what I need to say, you know, that's what I do when it happens. You know what happens if you keep it in, you keep it in? Cancer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right, yeah. Yeah. Like Jackie Robinson.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, right, right.]

ROBERT: All right, so some kind of fight just happened, and one of these guys…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: …he is feeling like he just lost, I don't know why. I don't know who we are yet…

ROBERT: But they gotta…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: …keep going.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Did he look, did he look, like stunned. Did you get a good reaction?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, I mean I got—yeah, at first.]

JAD: So this fight was with a boss I think.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Well, we’re all rooting for you out here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Thanks. Thanks.]

JAD: Their boss.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, we’ll see what the fallout is.]

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Okay, now we know it’s a corporate environment without decent leadership.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We got no leadership. We got no leadership.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: No, right yeah. A little top heavy, if you ask me. A little top heavy!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, a little top heavy!]

JAD: All right, so two guys complaining about a boss.

ROBERT: Yeah, but right at that moment they both shout in the same direction. So…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: The geography of this setting…

ROBERT: Kind of crystalizes, because now we know that the boss's office is off to the right.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Yeah, there are facts that are revealing themselves now, literally, you know, blueprints.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, you know what, because you gotta ask yourself, you want the job or you want the story?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yup. Yup.]

DAVID PASQUESI: But, we still don’t know where it’s going.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I’m fine. I’m gonna be fine. Whatever happens, I’m gonna be fine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, you’d be great. You’re gonna be an asset to any corporation, or company, you know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I don’t know about that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, I do.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That’s nice of you to say.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It was heroic, you know. It was like you were ridin’ into battle for everybody.]

ROBERT: But then, there comes a moment…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You wore, you brought the banner in there, and that’s pretty—that’s pretty awesome.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hey, you know what, if you don’t stand, you know, because you’ll fall for anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right.]

ROBERT: And it’s right…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You know, and I know it’s a softball team.]

ROBERT: There.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: But, it starts somewhere. It starts somewhere.]

JAD: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: If I want, yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What he’s gonna play shortstop because he’s a [bleep] district manager?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right, you know.]

ROBERT: Suddenly it’s like [exhales].

TJ JAGODOWSKI: There is a little bit of an exhale of like, “All right, well now we know that. That—that does make sense with the things we’ve seen up till now.”

DAVID PASQUESI: And also the—I think the delight in, “Oh wow. It’s been that all along.”

JAD: Right, right.

DAVID PASQUESI: Because we’re just paying attention to what happened since the lights went up. Nothing else exists.

ROBERT: Right.

DAVID PASQUESI: So, one of the things that happened since the lights went up is when I mentioned something about cancer…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Cancer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Right. Yeah.]

DAVID PASQUESI: TJ said Jackie Robinson.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Like Jackie Robinson.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, right.]

DAVID PASQUESI: So that—that went in my brain.

ROBERT: And Dave says, the only way you’re going to get these kinds of moments, which are both surprising and obvious at the very same time is if the performers are genuinely as surprised at what just happened as the audience.

DAVID PASQUESI: And the only way that can happen is if we actually don’t know it. And so, the not knowing is where the—that’s the goal.

ROBERT: But, I mean, I assume you have the usual amount of self loathing that most people have, so…

DAVID PASQUESI: Probably more.

ROBERT: So why are you afraid that you will look for this story between you and nothing will occur?

DAVID PASQUESI: Please don’t bring up this question.

SEAN: Is that a constant fear?

DAVID PASQUESI: Yes, absolutely.

ROBERT: TJ says…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Before the show begins it is an absolute, like, maelstrom going on, in—inside me, personally.

ROBERT: But here’s the truly fascinating thing, the way they deal with that maelstrom, all that anxiety about what’s going to happen, is they tell themselves this story, that this thing that they’re creating, they don’t actually create it. They don’t make it happen.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: It’s already happening.

ROBERT: Without them…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: It’s all already going on, that’s—it’s not our job to make it.

JAD: It’s already going on? What?

ROBERT: All right, so—you know the moment I mentioned at the beginning, when the—when the lights dim, and they’re standing, just about to begin, they’d say at that moment the stage is literally swirling with all these characters…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Millions and millions of billions of its, all going on.

ROBERT: Billions of stories…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: All going on.

ROBERT: And the moment the lights come up one of those stories gets frozen in place and they just step in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: TJ Jagodowski: We…]

ROBERT: Here’s how TJ describes it in a documentary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: TJ Jagodowski: …believe that there is this thing going on, that the show is already going on, it is already in process and we pick it up at a moment somewhere within this progression, but that the show, itself, started a long time ago, we—we didn’t know it, and we don’t know which show we’re about to join already in progress, so we get to live it or physically represent it for 50 some odd minutes, and then we leave it, but it keeps on going, that the people that were represented, for that amount of time, go on to have marriages and divorces and children and buy property and maybe die a natural death, a long time in the future, or maybe die in some horrible accident soon after, soon after we see them.]

TJ JAGODOWSKI: To think of the show as it’s already all set, all I have to do is stay out of the way, takes a huge pressure off of having—I’m not a determining, active part in this, I’m along for this excellent ride that’s already excellent with a friend of mine, if I just listen and pay attention to him, and what the show is doing.

SEAN: And—and do you actually believe that—that the show is already going on before you get there and everything like that, or is that just, is that—is that a story that you tell yourself, or is that more of a…

TJ JAGODOWSKI: That is an excellent question.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SEAN: Thank you.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: And I don’t know the answer.

SEAN: Really?

TJ JAGODOWSKI: Yeah. I don’t know if—I don’t know if—if it’s going on before or after, I’m not sure about that. But I do know that right now this is happening. And it’s not our—of our making.

ROBERT: Just so you know, over the course of the hour they start playing all kinds of different characters, the show expands—expands, you meet coworkers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Have you been here the whole time?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah. I was on a—was on a call. Yeah.]

ROBERT: Eventually you meet the boss, and then the workers discover that the boss has been intentionally throwing…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We’re throwing…]

ROBERT: …softball games.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: …contests.]

ROBERT: Because they are playing clients. They don’t want to embarrass them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We’re throwing games.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Not always.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We’re bowing down.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Sometimes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Taking it up the fanny from Cottonelle because you need their business?]

ROBERT: So, the workers hatch a scheme to kidnap the boss…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Maybe tie him and put him in a van…]

ROBERT: So they can finally win a game…

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So we can’t show up at a game, screw up the batting order, things like that…]

ROBERT: And it keeps going on from there.

TJ JAGODOWSKI: You just respond honestly in these tiny moments. One little thing, on to the next little thing.

DAVID PASQUESI: It’s that step off the platform before the next piece of floor comes to be under that foot.

ROBERT: It’s like—it’s like a beautiful dare, sort of, the whole thing, and…

SEAN: It sounds like you’re talking both about life, and about the show, as a beautiful dare. Yeah.

JAD: I mean our—our tendency is to take what you guys do and transpose it onto other things. Do you think—do you do that? Do you think, how we perform is how people should live, or does that seem silly?

TJ JAGODOWSKI: It seems silly, and I agree with it. I do know that when I can get, you know, in the real world closer to the idea of what I do when I improvise, I know I have better days. When I don’t try to presuppose too much, try and predetermine too much, when I am taking things as they come in the moment I know I am living a less anxious life.

ROBERT: And when they’re up there, on the stage, in the lights, by themselves, with no plan...

TJ JAGODOWSKI: It’s the—it’s the best hour, all week.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So, he’s still—he’s still in his office.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: At large. He’s still at large.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah. Yeah, he’s loose.]

TJ JAGODOWSKI: It’s just so encompassing. There’s no more calm place in the world than— than doing a show with David at that time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Maybe we don’t need—need to make that many changes. Maybe we just do better.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I’m gonna miss you too. [audience cheers]]

ROBERT: Big thanks to producer, Sean Cole, and of course to TJ and Dave, to Alex Karpovsky, whose documentary we quoted briefly from, it’s called, Trust Us, This is All Made Up. And to Harrison George.

JAD: And to you, for listening. I’m Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We’ll see you next time.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[LULU: It’s hell every time I use that machine and you guys haven’t changed it. Hi, it’s Lulu and I’m calling with the credits. Okay, so Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell—Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster, Malissa O’Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Lynn Levy, and Andy Mills. With help from Derrick Clements, and Tracy Pennemenini.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Brooke, from Miami Florida. Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, and American Express. And from John and Kathryn Depps, in support of NPR’s new global headquarters and production center in Washington, DC. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live healthy, productive lives. At Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And the Union of Concerned Scientists. Science for a healthy planet and a safer world. More at Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org). Thanks, and have an awesome day.]

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.