Games

SPEAKER_04: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_11: Listen to support it. WNYC Studios. SPEAKER_20: Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from America, author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_19: You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. SPEAKER_25: Rewind. SPEAKER_16: Okay. Three, two, one. Hello? This show we are about to do, it began... Hey guys, how's it going? ...with a conversation that we had with a friend of ours, Eric Simmons, and he told us about this moment that was kind of strange. SPEAKER_07: This is the San Jose Sharks actually, who... Is this a hockey team or a... Yeah, hockey team. Okay. And I'm pretty strongly identified with hockey to begin with. I play hockey, my dad has played hockey his entire life, and the Sharks started in the Bay Area when I was 10 years old. Sharks are my favorite, favorite creature by a long ways, and so I've rooted for them forever, and for like the last like six years, they've been really good. Every year they're picked at the beginning of the year to go to the Stanley Cup, maybe to win the Stanley Cup, and every year they fall short. And so in 2007, they were in the playoffs, the Sharks are the top seed, they're playing the eight seed, which also is Anaheim, which is probably their biggest rival, and they SPEAKER_07: lose. Oh. I remember driving home from the ice rink, it was probably about midnight, and it was a really pretty night out. Like the city lights, and they're like shimmering on the water, and there's always these tankers out like parked in the bay. There's like the silhouettes of the boats, and the Oakland coastline, and the San Francisco shoreline, and like this is everything that makes me happy in the world. SPEAKER_16: Eric says usually when he sees that view, no matter how he's feeling, he's like, okay, everything's gonna be good, it's gonna be fine, because that is one beautiful city. But that night... SPEAKER_07: I was so angry that I remember noticing this like beautiful scene and thinking, burn! I hate this. I hate everything about it. Burn down in flames. Like that's embarrassing. The fact that these guys that I don't know lost a hockey game in Dallas, that has the power to override everything I think I like about myself, and just turn me into this like drooling savage angry beast. I don't like that. You know what I love about that story? SPEAKER_18: Is it so typical, you know? Almost every sports fan has had a moment where you're like, I cannot believe my own emotions right now. Are you a burner? I mean, do you watch sports? SPEAKER_16: I'm not, no. I mean, I watch sports, but I don't get into that. I don't get into a darkness. I do. SPEAKER_18: There have definitely been times I've wanted to burn down New York. Have you ever asked yourself like, why? SPEAKER_16: Well that's the question. Right? SPEAKER_18: Yeah. For this hour anyway. Like why is it that something as trivial as a hockey game can feel like life or death? SPEAKER_18: Which probably doesn't happen to a lot of public radio people, but hey. Well it could. You shouldn't think that. Yeah, alright. And you know, if you widen the category a little bit and just said games, well then SPEAKER_16: you'd include everybody. SPEAKER_18: Alright, games. Everybody. There's a game that makes it more than a game. Yeah. Well let's find out. SPEAKER_18: This is Radiolab. I'm Robert Krowitch. I'm Chad Iboomrod. Stay with us. SPEAKER_17: Sports to me as a kid were vital. Sports were like, if everything else on the planet had disappeared except for sports, I would have been fine. If the church had gone away, if school had gone away, even if all my brothers and sisters had gone away, I liked them fine. But sports was the only thing that I really loved as a kid. SPEAKER_18: Can you introduce yourself? My name is Steven Dubner. And Steven is the author of Freakonomics. The books, the blog. And I've got my own ISDN line. SPEAKER_17: It's kind of an inside joke. SPEAKER_18: It's a fancy piece of studio equipment because now Freakonomics is also a radio show. SPEAKER_18: And the reason we called Steven up, and this is the honest truth, is that Soren Wheeler, one of our producers, overheard Steven telling this story in the men's room. SPEAKER_19: That's where I do most of my research for the show, actually. That's Soren. This is where I look for friends. In any case, Soren overheard Steven in the stall, got him to come into the studio and SPEAKER_18: tell it to us. Because this is a story about a boy, a hero, and a dad. SPEAKER_18: And how those three things can get a little intertwined. SPEAKER_17: I don't really know what happened. What I know is that when I came into being in 1963, I was the last of eight kids. SPEAKER_18: And Steven says already at that point, sports was family law. In fact, when it came to baseball? SPEAKER_17: No two people in the family, including my mother and father, so there were 10 of us, no two people rooted for the same team. And as it turned out, there was even a rule. No two people were allowed to root for the same team. Now, he says his dad actually assigned each of the family members their own baseball team SPEAKER_18: and told them, this is your team, only you get to root for this team. SPEAKER_17: So my dad was a Mets fan. My mom, I don't remember. But I had a sister who was a Red Sox fan. There was a Cardinals fan, a San Francisco Giants fan, an LA Dodgers fan. That was my brother, Peter. And I have no recollection of a time before I was a Baltimore Orioles fan. So I think what happened is Stevie was born. Here's another kid. We need another team. Who does he get? How about the Orioles? Wait, wait, wait. SPEAKER_16: Is this like the tooth fairy sticking a dollar under your pillow? Yeah. SPEAKER_18: How did he assign the Orioles to you? SPEAKER_17: Okay. So first of all, I should just say, like a lot of things in life as a very young, very obedient Catholic boy, I accepted this mystery without question. But here's my hunch. My father, I think, felt that it was a shame that he couldn't give more to his children, materially more and even more of himself. And so in my mind, the greatest gift he could give to each of us was our own baseball team. SPEAKER_18: But this is ultimately a story about more than just baseball. SPEAKER_17: My parents were both Brooklyn born Jews, kind of typical second generation American who before they met each other, while they were in their 20s, they both converted to Roman Catholicism. SPEAKER_18: What was the reaction from their parents? Oh, that was bad. SPEAKER_17: That was bad. The way that my grandfather discovered that my father had had converted was when some rosary beads slipped out of his pocket and fell onto the floor. So it was like my grandfather basically threw my father out of the house, literally declared him dead. Wow. Sat Shiva for him. SPEAKER_18: And so he says, when his dad met his mom, who was another Jewish convert to Catholicism, they were like two refugees who had found each other. Exactly. And so they left Brooklyn, went upstate, spent all their money on an old farmhouse in the country, leaving behind a past that was toxic. SPEAKER_18: But then when they got upstate, they found themselves a little out of place. We were these kind of farmers, Jewish Brooklyn, Jewish city people who were now upstate Catholic SPEAKER_17: farmer survivor types. We had no money, a lot of kids and my dad, he said his dad would often be upstairs, quote, SPEAKER_16: lying down for hours and hours, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to him at the time. He thought, come on, why isn't he down here with us? But now as an adult, he understands that his dad was not well. In fact, he was depressed. Yeah. Really depressed. SPEAKER_18: And how much did you know about your parents' backstory when you were growing up on the farm? SPEAKER_17: Can my knowledge be measured in negative terms? But it was plain to me that my father was a kind of diminished man, that he wasn't capable of doing all the things that other men were capable of doing. SPEAKER_16: So Stephen says he would go outside to the backyard and spend time by himself. Pretending to be the Orioles. SPEAKER_17: Recreating the games that had been played the day before in real life. SPEAKER_12: And here comes Frank Robinson. He's still spearheading the Orioles. SPEAKER_17: You know, one game could last me six, eight hours. And I would literally, I would literally play 162 game seasons. SPEAKER_17: I would be every batter on both teams and the announcers. SPEAKER_17: And you know, this thing about ownership and whether my dad did that on purpose or not, he did make me feel like if they failed, then they needed me to boost them up. SPEAKER_16: That kept him busy for a while. But then the play happens. SPEAKER_18: And everything changes. To explain, somewhere along the way, when he was 10, Stephen discovers football. Football was considered barbaric. SPEAKER_17: Worst of all, it was played on the Sabbath. But regardless, he fell in love with it. SPEAKER_18: I love the brute force of it. The fact that all these guys wore helmets that made them look kind of like, kind of like knights. And almost immediately, he latched on to a particular running back from the Pittsburgh Bears. SPEAKER_17: And that was Franco Harris. I discovered Franco Harris in his rookie season. SPEAKER_18: Read about him in Sports Illustrated. And from the beginning, everything about him just made sense. I came from a big Catholic family. He came from a big Catholic family. His family was kind of mixed. So was Franco's. SPEAKER_17: His dad was black. His mom was Italian. He was a very unusual guy, very kind of thoughtful and quiet. And I became a big Steelers fan because of him. SPEAKER_18: Which brings us back to the play. Saturday, December 23rd, almost Christmas, 1972. SPEAKER_17: The Steelers were about to lose to the Raiders. The Oakland Raiders have taken a 7-6 lead. Forty seconds left on the clock. We had the ball on something like our own 35. A fourth down and 10 yards to go. SPEAKER_17: Last gasp. SPEAKER_23: Hang on to your hats. Here come the Steelers out of the huddle. Gary Bradshaw at the control. SPEAKER_17: Bradshaw drops back to pass. Bradshaw running out of the pocket. SPEAKER_23: Looking for somebody to throw to. Fires it downfield. SPEAKER_18: Bradshaw throws and just as the receiver is about to catch it, he gets crushed. SPEAKER_17: The ball pops up. Goes falling through the air. SPEAKER_18: And right before the ball hits the ground, Frank O'Hara, his guy, zooms into the frame out of nowhere. SPEAKER_17: And catches it in full stride at his shoe tops. It's caught out of the air. SPEAKER_23: The ball is pulled in by Frank O'Hara. SPEAKER_26: Harris is going for a touchdown for Pittsburgh. SPEAKER_18: Franco runs 60 yards into the end zone. Time runs out. The Steelers win. SPEAKER_17: I don't even know where it came from. There are people in the end zone. Shortly thereafter, this play was dubbed the Immaculate Reception. You talk about Christmas miracles. SPEAKER_12: Here's a miracle of all miracles. SPEAKER_17: For me as a kid watching it, where my team won and my guy was like I was sealed for life. SPEAKER_16: In fact, this guy was so much his guy that when Steve would write his homework papers, he began signing the papers. Franco Dubner. SPEAKER_17: Wow. And I thought of myself as Franco Dubner, which I mean, I know it sounds funny now, but it's very natural. Like we're all named for saints to start with. I mean, my oldest brother was named Joseph. My oldest sister was named Mary. So you're named for saints. Explainly, Franco was my saint. SPEAKER_16: The following Thanksgiving, Stephen's parents drove off to a prayer meeting. Was part of this religious offshoot that they participated in called the Charismatic Christian SPEAKER_17: Renewal. Very fervent group, lots of speaking in tongues. It was strange and a little scary to me to see my parents speaking in tongues. SPEAKER_18: Stephen would sometimes go, but this time he didn't. So his parents drove off to the meeting. SPEAKER_16: In Albany. Kind of far from our house. And a few hours later, only his mother returned. SPEAKER_17: My mother comes home and tells us dad had an attack. SPEAKER_18: She told him in the middle of the meeting, he just fell over. He was in the hospital now, but he would be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. SPEAKER_17: So that's all I heard. I was a 10 year old kid. It's like, oh, my dad's coming home for Christmas. Cool. Great. And the football playoffs are coming up. SPEAKER_17: Month later. It was the 21st of December. SPEAKER_18: Almost exactly a year after the Immaculate reception. It was the last day of school before Christmas break. SPEAKER_17: It was a half day. We had grab bag Christmas gift exchange at school. SPEAKER_16: And race is home from school. Pretty excited. SPEAKER_17: Playoffs are coming up and my dad's coming home. And then my mother comes in and says, dad died. I'm going to go upstairs to lie down. SPEAKER_18: And that, that is when the dream began. Now he's not exactly sure if it was that night or maybe the next, but when he went to bed and closed his eyes, this is what would happen. I would go to the VFW hall in Albany. SPEAKER_17: This is a place his dad had taken him. Where Franco Harris was giving a talk. And I would invite him to come back to my house way out in the boondocks for spaghetti and meatballs. And in my dream, he would come back, he would eat the spaghetti. It wasn't terrible. And he'd say, Hey, you want to go out in the, in the yard and play some football. And we would go out and it's dark and it's just me and him. We're the Steelers against some other mythical team in the darkness. And we're playing on our field in our backyard. And I'm kind of embarrassed because our backyard is all lumpy with frozen cow hoof prints. Cause sometimes we'd stake the cow back there. And on the second to the last play of the game, it's like, we're behind by three points. Franco would turn his ankle in one of these cow hoof prints and then he'd hand the ball to me and he'd say, kid, you have to take it from here yourself. SPEAKER_16: What was the look on his face when he'd hand you the ball and give you the kid's speech? SPEAKER_17: You know Jesus on the cross face, Jesus on the cross because he's in pain. He's got a beard. He's kind of sweating and dripping and crying a little bit. And then I'd have to run it in for the winning touch. And the dream, but the dream would always fade there. I'd never knew if I made it or not. SPEAKER_18: And he says the next night he had the same dream. Exactly the same. SPEAKER_24: In the next night. The same. In the next night. The same. In the next night. SPEAKER_17: The same. Almost every night for about three or four years. In the next night. SPEAKER_24: The same. SPEAKER_17: So I, you know, I had that dream several hundred or maybe a thousand times. Yeah. And every time you woke up from that dream, I'm just curious, how did you feel? SPEAKER_17: What I remember feeling is that Franco Harris came to see me and that he couldn't win the game for me, but that he was on my side and he wanted me to win. Kind of period. SPEAKER_16: So if we were to stop this story right now, this would be a story like many others you've heard, boy falls in love with athlete, dreams of athlete, grows up, leaves athlete behind. But this is a different one. SPEAKER_18: Eventually after a few years, Steven stopped having the dream. He moved out of the house, went off to school, got married, became an adult, pretty much forgot about Franco. But then something happens purely by accident. SPEAKER_17: Living in New York, maybe, I don't know, 15, 18 years ago, I caught sight of him on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Franco had become a very successful small businessman and my heart just started to thump like it had when I was a kid. And I thought, I gotta, I gotta get to know Franco. SPEAKER_18: So he tracked down Franco's address, wrote him letters, then more letters. And to make a long story short, one day the phone rang and it was him. SPEAKER_17: He did agree to meet with me. I told him I'd like to write a book about a boy getting to know his childhood hero and trying to figure out what that person is like in reality. I was very careful in my mind that first day that I met him in Pittsburgh, say, don't tell him the dream, don't tell him the dream, because he will think that you were a frickin' lunatic, right? That first day I told him the dream. I couldn't. It's like, I don't know. What was his reaction? Was he horrified? He doesn't show horror. He's a very interesting fellow. He's got a really, he's got a really interesting manner. Very low key. SPEAKER_18: They did end up meeting a few times as Stephen wrote his book, but he says Franco was always really careful to keep him at arm's length, I would say. SPEAKER_17: And anytime they kind of got close, Franco would sort of disappear a little bit. SPEAKER_18: And in fact, toward the end of the book project, they make an appointment to meet. I get to Pittsburgh a couple days early, typical. SPEAKER_18: And Franco's not there. Actually, Stephen ends up standing in a parking lot waiting for him. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And then eventually, he heads back to New York. SPEAKER_17: And I guess I thought that somehow he had a lot to teach me, you know, about being a man, being a real, a real grown up, being a father. And he was polite. And just not really that interested. SPEAKER_18: And it was around this point that Stephen decided, you know, maybe that's what he was trying to tell me in the dream. SPEAKER_17: And in real life, too. That no one can save you but yourself. Part of his Messiah job was to persuade me that, you know, everybody's got to be their own Messiah. That was the message. SPEAKER_18: But isn't that disappointing to you? SPEAKER_16: This guy was your hero. You want him to be all these things. And he didn't want to be those things back. I mean, that must have hurt a little. SPEAKER_17: You know, look, Franco Harris didn't fall in love with, you know, me. He didn't want to be my best friend. But that aside, he is an exemplary human being. He's a really, he's a good human being. I think you can easily go too far. I think you can put too much of your emotional life in the hands of people who have, you know, who don't know you and have no responsibility for you. But I think sports fandom is a fantastic gift with almost immeasurable value. And my- Wait, but why? SPEAKER_18: I mean, really? I mean, I love sports, but I mean, it's just a running back. It's not the same. SPEAKER_16: What exactly about sports, it makes it, gives it an immeasurable value? SPEAKER_17: Yeah. It's a proxy for real life, but better. You know, it renews itself. It's constantly happening in real time. There are conflicts that seem to carry real consequences, but at the end of the day, don't. It's war where nobody dies. It's a proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes. I mean, heck, what's not to like about sports? SPEAKER_18: There you go. You just sort of, you just wrapped it all up in a little bow right there. That was awesome. SPEAKER_18: Stephen Dubner is the author of Confessions of a Hero Worshipper, and he is the host of Freakonomics. Check them out at FreakonomicsRadio.com. SPEAKER_16: We'll move on to other heroes, other sports and other puzzles in just a moment. SPEAKER_04: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, Sometimes Behave So Strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, The Lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says Sometimes Behave So Strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to Radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. 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SPEAKER_25: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? SPEAKER_21: You can almost see an equation. Again, I would say led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. SPEAKER_25: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_18: Hey I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolbich. This is Radiolab. SPEAKER_16: We're talking about, well what are we talking about? Sports. Sports. Games. Games. Yeah, you know what? What we're really talking about is a fundamental behavior of everyone on earth, including like wolves and cats. SPEAKER_18: Wolves and cats. That was your broadening more than I would broaden, but that's, you know, go with it. Well, come on. Like what do little wolves do? They don't play football. No, but they tussle. Yes. Do you mean like they play? Yes. SPEAKER_16: SPEAKER_05: Like human babies. Yeah. Okay. Babies and young children spend almost all of their time playing. Seems so natural we don't even think about it. So let's just go with that thought. SPEAKER_18: This is Alison Gocknick. She's a developmental psychologist. SPEAKER_05: At the University of California at Berkeley. SPEAKER_18: Big sports fan. Yeah. SPEAKER_05: Baseball. She's a professional. SPEAKER_18: Professionally though, she studies kids and she's got an interesting idea. She says if you look at kids, how they play over time, you see that at the center of their play there's this really interesting tension that exists. Tension of what kind? Well, you can actually hear it. So we'll get back to Alison in just one moment. Here's a four year old girl named Rosa. SPEAKER_18: Listen to her describe her imaginary friend to her dad. SPEAKER_08: And how does Hermione know Antarctica? SPEAKER_10: She was in the Antarctic for a bit before she moved to the moon. SPEAKER_21: What was she doing in Antarctica? SPEAKER_24: You know what she used to keep warm? SPEAKER_07: To keep what? SPEAKER_10: Warm. Warm? SPEAKER_10: You know what? SPEAKER_24: No. SPEAKER_10: She got leopard seals, skin and fur to make a coat. And then put buttons on. SPEAKER_08: And what prompted her to move from Antarctica to the moon? SPEAKER_10: She wanted a place higher. But now she's thinking she wants to move back to Antarctica. SPEAKER_05: In preschool children, you start seeing this wonderful flowering of pretend play. The children are becoming ninjas and princesses and superheroes. And at first, says Alison, this is what play is all about. SPEAKER_18: Inventing. Making up crazy psychedelic connections. Complete improv. SPEAKER_05: You get this period to just explore. Just innovate. SPEAKER_10: What did you eat on the moon? SPEAKER_09: House mice. House mice? Of course. SPEAKER_18: But if you fast forward just a couple of years, not four anymore, but six, six year olds, the vibe totally changes because now it's all about rules. The person who wants to be it is the freezer. SPEAKER_09: If the freezer attacks you, you're frozen. But then if somebody else attacks you, you're unfrozen. And like, these two are faces. Okay? So let's play. She's it. And she freezes. That's how you play freeze attack. With six year olds, it just sounds really different. SPEAKER_18: You hear a lot of this. No fair. A lot of yelling about what's allowed, what isn't allowed. Last time you started out with the ball. SPEAKER_05: In some ways I think the school age children are practicing being in a society. They're practicing having laws. They're practicing having rules. Nigel, no you don't. They're sort of developing a theory of sociology. Yes I do. SPEAKER_18: So you've got these two modes of play. You've got the three year old inventor who's like, okay, I'm just going to make this happen. SPEAKER_05: I'm going to create something new in the world. SPEAKER_18: Then you've got the six year old enforcer who's like, no fair. You can't just create what you want. The world is bigger than we are. SPEAKER_05: We need rules. And one of the things that's really interesting about the games that seem to stick is that the greatest games like baseball are games that let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. In other words, like a good game is a kind of weird, constantly shifting war between SPEAKER_18: the three year old and us and the six year old. I think she's probably correct because there are games which suffer from a lack of the SPEAKER_16: tension she's describing. There's one game in particular. Okay. I don't know whether you've played it lately, but we heard about it from this guy, Brian Christian. A writer. Yeah. Yeah. He was on a recent show talking about robots, but he also mentioned this little moment. Yes. It's a moment. SPEAKER_13: So yeah, at the world checkers championship in Glasgow, Scotland in 1863, it is James Wiley against Robert Martins. The two best checker players in the world. Wiley Wiley playing a 40 game series, all 40 games opened with the same three or four moves and all 40 games were draws. SPEAKER_11: Really? SPEAKER_13: Yes. Not only that, 21 of the 40 games are the exact same game, meaning that move for move SPEAKER_16: for move. They were precise duplicates of each other. SPEAKER_13: Start to finish. Every single move is the same. Yeah. And that's like a month of checkers. How exactly does that happen? SPEAKER_16: Well, see, these guys were professional checkers players. So they studied moves that other competitors had made. They would write them down, memorize them, and they became a kind of catalog. So at a certain point, every move you saw on the checkerboard, you'd think, oh yeah, that one. SPEAKER_13: Checkers had hit this point where the conventional wisdom about what was the proper move to play had gotten to this point where there was now basically a perfect game of checkers and with the world title on the line, both players played that perfect game over and over and SPEAKER_16: over. SPEAKER_13: They stuck to the script. So this was really rock bottom for the checkers community. I mean, yeah. SPEAKER_18: So there you go. That's why no one plays checkers anymore. Well, some people play checkers. SPEAKER_16: I played, I played checkers. What? No, you don't. Checkers is fine as long as you don't play it for too long or too well. I mean, if you're a lame checker player, you could play checkers forever. SPEAKER_18: Well, then what's the point? I mean, why would you play a game that's been gobbled up? It's dead. SPEAKER_16: But by the way, this thing that you just said killed checkers? Yeah. SPEAKER_13: This concept has a name. SPEAKER_16: It's called the book. SPEAKER_13: The danger is that the entire game stays in book the whole time. And that danger, says Brian, is not specifically confined to checkers. SPEAKER_13: Occasionally, very rarely in the chess world, you'll see two grandmasters play the exact same game that another pair of grandmasters played a year before. And they'll get boos and jeers all over the internet as a result. SPEAKER_18: Now chess, let me talk about chess. The book in chess is huge. It started in the 16th century and for hundreds of years, players were keeping track of moves and countermoves and counter, counter, counter, countermoves until by the 1950s. It was like a library. SPEAKER_15: It actually was a library. In the Moscow Central Chess Club. And who is this? SPEAKER_18: This is Fred Friedl. He's a chess analyst and one of the few non-Russians to have seen this room. Yes, it's a huge, musty room. SPEAKER_15: All these shelves and there were little boxes and the boxes contained little cards, index SPEAKER_18: cards. Each of these cards documented a particular game of chess from the past and for a while this was all a secret. SPEAKER_15: There were about three or four players in the world. All Russian. SPEAKER_18: Who had access to it. When one of these guys had a big game, they would go to this library and say, all right, I've got this opponent, he's a Polish guy, something or other. Give me all his game. SPEAKER_15: And suddenly you have a few hundred cards. Which you and your team could study. SPEAKER_18: This is how they prepared. By memorizing literally thousands of moves. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. But where Fred comes in, is in the 80s, he convinced the Russian Federation to put this online. Where anyone could study it and add to it. And suddenly this book explodes. Which is for some people, distressing. SPEAKER_15: People tend to boo me sometimes when I come into a chess tournament today. They will point to me and say, that's him, Frederick, the man who ruined chess. SPEAKER_18: Because here's the modern game. When two players sit down at one of these tournaments to face off, they've already consulted Frederick's database, which he's named Fritz. The chess players all call it Fritzie now. And because of Fritzie, they walk into these games with so much of the book in their heads that whole portions of the game are very checkers-like, very rote. SPEAKER_13: You'll see this if you watch grandmasters play speed chess. That's Brian Christian again. SPEAKER_13: They'll just hammer out the first dozen or so moves. With barely any thought. Out of memory, it used to be two, three, four, five, six moves. SPEAKER_15: No big deal. Nowadays it is 16 moves, 20 moves. There does seem to be a kind of creep that's happening. SPEAKER_18: The book is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But inevitably, in every chess game, there is a moment which puts the book in its place. And if you watch a game, is there a chess tournament coming up? Like a big one? SPEAKER_15: Yes. Next Thursday, I'm going to Romania, where some of the top players are playing. SPEAKER_18: If you watch a game, as I was able to do, because you can watch these games online. Okay, yeah, we're gonna watch a chess tournament online. SPEAKER_18: You will see that moment. Yes. Yes. And it's not like, you know, Jordan scoring 40 points while he has a fever. It's not like that. But if you know what to look for, it's quite profound. Okay, it's 8.30am. I'm here with my little man. Say hi. Hi. And somewhere in Romania, two grandmasters are about to sit down at a table to do battle. And I will watch it virtually. The match I watched was Magnus Carlsen, the world's top player, versus Hikaru Nakamura, the US champ. I call up Frederick to give me the play-by-play because I actually don't know much about chess. His program, Frisk, can tell you how many times each move has occurred in the entire recorded history of chess. SPEAKER_18: It's like his computer can look at the board and say, yeah, that move you just made? That has happened before, and I will tell you exactly how many times before. Hey, it started. Here we go. Move one. White moves its d4 to d5. SPEAKER_15: White pawn two squares forward. My database tells me that there are 1,775,000 games in which this occurred. Then move two. SPEAKER_18: Black counters with its pawn going from c4 to e6. Now we've got two pawns facing each other, middle of the board. And according to Fred's database, this exact configuration has occurred in 514,518 games. SPEAKER_18: So a million and a half down to a half million. Smaller. Yes. Move three. SPEAKER_15: White moves another pawn. SPEAKER_18: 335,000. Black, another pawn. SPEAKER_15: 149,000. SPEAKER_18: Moving smaller. Yep. White moves its knight. 114,000. Black moves its bishop. 91,000. Less again. Black pawn. Just have our first casualty people. SPEAKER_15: 2,428 games. What was that again? SPEAKER_18: 2,400. Oh, the black pawn responds. SPEAKER_15: 2,613 games. SPEAKER_18: White bishop flies across the board. SPEAKER_15: 2,125 games. SPEAKER_18: Black moves another pawn up. 1,200. White queen does a little thing. 381 games. 381. Getting lower. Yes. SPEAKER_15: Black bishop retreats. 19 games. 19. SPEAKER_18: 19. White moves another pawn. 11 games. Okay, black bishop retreats. 11 games. White bishop advances. We're down to 10 games. 10. Black bishop falls back even further. And we have 9 games. Black bishop takes white bishop. 5 games. White pawn retaliates, taking black bishop. Still 5 games. And then... White rook and white king switch places. SPEAKER_15: Now there are no more games. You have a position which has never occurred before in the universe. Ever? SPEAKER_18: No. SPEAKER_15: In the universe? Not in the history of this universe. SPEAKER_15: And this is what is known as the novelty. The novelty? The novelty, yeah. SPEAKER_15: And in chess notes, if you read chess notes, you will see... SPEAKER_18: That shortly after this move... SPEAKER_15: The annotator writes, out of book. SPEAKER_18: Out of book. Book. Yeah, out of book. SPEAKER_08: Bye bye book. SPEAKER_15: Which means... SPEAKER_18: No more book. SPEAKER_15: Both sides now are on their own. SPEAKER_18: And everyone we talk to who plays chess told us that when you get to that moment... You feel you're alive in a way that you're not normally. SPEAKER_18: That's Frank Brady. He's an author and a professor at St. John's. An international arbiter of the World Chess Federation. SPEAKER_11: You're totally in it. Your mind is in some ways not even operating. It's like you're back to being 3 again. SPEAKER_18: What are you saying? I'm saying this is one of the reasons we watch sports. For these kinds of zero moments. A position which has never occurred in the universe. At the same time, the zero is happening inside all of these rules which are like our lives. This is what Alison was saying. SPEAKER_05: Games let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. The Pacers can foul. For example, here's one. SPEAKER_18: 1999 Knicks-Pacers. Larry Johnson has the ball. Knicks are down by 3. Final seconds. He has no shot. The best you think he could do is tie. But he has no shot. And then somehow he twists, he shimmies, he moves to the left, throws it up. Johnson is fouled and hit! That was like, what? What? I mean that's in the rules but nobody could have imagined that. A position which has never occurred in the universe. SPEAKER_16: I mean I don't know about never but... You want to know mine? Sure. This is a hockey moment. It's Wayne Gretzky, early 90s. He's playing, shoots for the goal, the puck hits something, somebody, and starts flying through the air like a tennis ball. Wayne Gretzky turns around and whacks the flying puck out of the air. And up in the air, Gretzky scores! SPEAKER_18: What a shot by Wayne Gretzky! Smacked it out of the air? SPEAKER_16: Yep. The universe would have to be extremely old to have a previous version of that. SPEAKER_18: Frank, do you have a number one favorite novelty in chess? Well, my number one favorite would be Bobby Fischer's Game of the Century. SPEAKER_11: And when did that happen? We're jumping to 1956. Bobby is 13 years old. SPEAKER_18: And is he the Bobby Fischer of legend at this point or just a 13 year old kid? No, he's a 13 year old kid. SPEAKER_11: He got invited to this tournament. It was an all adult invitational tournament. SPEAKER_18: And Frank says all the world's best were there. And this was kind of Bobby Fischer's first official match in the big leagues, so to speak. And as of the scene, it was October. Warm Indian summer. We're at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, which is this big stodgy brownstone with lots of mahogany. And Bobby Fischer, in his t-shirt, sits down to play a fellow named Donald Byrne, a guy who looked the part. SPEAKER_11: A very urbane, sophisticated... Jacket, bowtie... He always had a cigarette between two fingers. SPEAKER_18: I imagine it would have been hard for him to take this kid seriously. Yeah. And he was not doing all that well. From the beginning, Bobby Fischer was making what looked like dumb errors. He was losing. For example, midway through the game... SPEAKER_11: Bobby made this move where he moved his knight to the rim of the board, which is usually, strategically speaking, is not the greatest place to move your knight. Because, you know, if your knight's shoved against the edge, it's boxed in. SPEAKER_11: And the knight could be taken. And people said, what? What is it? Did he blunder? Come on, kid. Yeah, this is crazy. SPEAKER_18: I mean, Bobby Fischer does something truly crazy. What? He leaps so far... Out of the book, in effect. The people are still talking about this move 50 years later. On the 18th move, he allowed Byrne to take his queen. SPEAKER_11: He just said, here, take my queen? SPEAKER_18: Now in chess... That's like crazy. Yeah, in chess, it's almost impossible to win a game if you lose your queen. SPEAKER_11: It's like, what? That's gotta be wrong. There must have been a stupid blunder. It seemed like maybe he was thrown in the towel. SPEAKER_18: So a crowd gathered... Scrum of people hanging around... To watch this kid get put in his place. And Byrne did what anyone would do in that situation. He took the queen. But maybe four moves later... Just at the moment you would think he would have Bobby Fischer in a stranglehold... Bobby started checking the king... SPEAKER_11: He was chasing Byrne all over the board... People began to see that there was some combination. But it was a long combination. And, you know... Twenty moves later, Byrne was done. SPEAKER_18: He was checkmated. And Frank says if you analyze the game, you see that it all began, and in a way ended, when he sacrificed his queen. It was a lost game from that moment. SPEAKER_11: If Byrne didn't take the queen, he was lost. If Byrne took the queen, he was lost. Wait, are you saying he essentially checkmated him twenty moves ahead of time? SPEAKER_11: Yes. It was unstoppable. It was forceful. SPEAKER_18: So it's like he wrote a new book. He stuck the guy in his book. Haha! I love that. So it's kind of interesting, you can start the game in book, so to speak. And you're kind of locked into a set of moves. SPEAKER_16: The game ends... Kind of the same way. The same way. That's destiny. But then in the middle, you just get a peak at something... Infinite. SPEAKER_18: Infinite. Although, we were wondering, is that middle space really infinite? We asked Frederick, if people played chess for hundreds and hundreds of years, inventing new moves into that empty space, would they ever fill it up? SPEAKER_18: And he said... SPEAKER_15: No. Because the number of chess games that are possible is vastly more than the number of atoms in the universe. More than... That is a silly little number compared to the number of chess games. What kind of a number is that? How many atoms are there in the universe? SPEAKER_16: 10 to the power of 82, the last time I counted. SPEAKER_15: No, 78. 10 with 82 zeroes. 10 to the power of 78, I think is more accurate. And there are more possibilities within a 40-move chess game? SPEAKER_18: 10 to the power of 120, approximately. And he says if he were to try to get all that information into Fritzi, his database... SPEAKER_15: We would have to dismantle an entire solar system just to store the information. SPEAKER_18: And he says you'd have to dismantle another one just to plug it in. SPEAKER_16: And what he says about chess, you could say that about hockey, you could say that about baseball, you could say that about curling. SPEAKER_18: But you could not say that about checkers, let's just be clear. So checkers aside, every game has this kind of strange thing. SPEAKER_16: It has a field of play. A small little box. It could be a board, it could be a field, whatever. And then you step into it and there's like a... SPEAKER_18: A solar system. SPEAKER_18: Thanks to Alison Gopnik, she wrote the wonderful book The Philosophical Baby and Frank Brady, who's the author of Endgame, Bobby Fisher's remarkable Rise and Fall. And also Brian Christian, who wrote the book The Most Human Human. SPEAKER_04: Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? Yes. Banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N-A member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. SPEAKER_18: I'm Robert Kralowitz. This is Radiolab. SPEAKER_16: That was the Tarantella opening. A little hay that we can... Oh, was it a little... No, it was fine. Was it good? It was good. I like the Tarantella. I can bring it down. No, no, no, no. We keep going. SPEAKER_18: So we're talking about sports. And games. And emotions. SPEAKER_16: And we just did a thing on rules and creativity. And now it's time to add yet another element to the mix. SPEAKER_18: Because what do you get if you put all those three things together? You get... Robert, you get a... Bring it. Do it. SPEAKER_16: Say it. You're a little energized here. You get a story. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Really good games are sort of story generating machines. SPEAKER_18: For example, here's Alison Gopnik again talking about a little teeny story that happens dozens of times a game in her favorite sport. SPEAKER_05: One of the great moments in baseball is always that that ball is going out there and the SPEAKER_06: guy is going out there with the glove. And it might end up in the glove and it might not. And he backs up against the stadium wall and he... either he gets it or he doesn't. SPEAKER_05: That wouldn't be nearly as much fun if he was just playing catch, right? That's a fantastic human drama. SPEAKER_18: So the question we want to explore now is... What kind of drama do you want? What kind of drama to you is most fantastic? I think you want the headphones the other way around. SPEAKER_19: That's our producer, Soren Wheeler. SPEAKER_16: How's that? Something like that. Who is out of the bathroom and seems to have made a new friend. SPEAKER_18: So set that up. Who's that guy? SPEAKER_19: So that's Dan Engber. SPEAKER_14: Senior editor at Slate Magazine. SPEAKER_19: And I brought him into the studio because he told me about this thing that had happened to him... SPEAKER_14: When I was watching the NCAA tournament. The basketball. The men's college basketball tournament. This was just last year. And I don't know anything about college basketball. It's a, you know, I have two or three sports that I can pay attention to. People have one or two or zero. But college basketball isn't one of them. SPEAKER_19: But there's this tournament on every year. It's kind of exciting. So he watches. Yeah. And what he does, since he doesn't really have any loyalties, he doesn't know who to root for. He just kind of, by default... SPEAKER_14: I just pick whichever team has the lower seed. Whichever is the worst team. Why do you do that? I have no idea. It came to a head when I showed up at a friend's house and they had the game between Butler and Michigan State on. It was a semi-finals. SPEAKER_14: And they were both seeded number five. So it's like your little system is... SPEAKER_19: Right. SPEAKER_14: I have no idea which team to root for. So I just was, I started rooting for whichever team was losing. And it was a close game. So Butler would make a run. SPEAKER_14: Then Michigan comes back. I start feeling sorry for Butler. SPEAKER_19: Every time one would go up, he'd switch to the other. And at a certain point, he's like, wait a second. This strategy guarantees that at the end of the game, when the buzzer goes, I'll have been rooting for the team that lost. Right. SPEAKER_14: I've actually created a situation where I'm guaranteed to be disappointed. You're guaranteed to be disappointed. SPEAKER_19: So Dan decided to figure out like, what the hell is going on? Why would anyone do this to themselves? Is that something that's actually been studied? Yeah. SPEAKER_14: So there's a small group of psychologists. That would be me. And me. Who are interested in this question. Underdogs. SPEAKER_08: Track a couple of them down. My name is Scott Allison. Nadav Goldschmidt. Two. SPEAKER_03: University of Richmond. University of San Diego currently. SPEAKER_14: So there are these studies that are just sort of hilariously simple, where you take a bunch of undergrads and you put them in a room. And we give them scenarios to read. SPEAKER_08: Like a paragraph of... Yeah. ...evolving, say, two competing teams. And there's almost no information. SPEAKER_14: The teams don't even have names. It's Team A and Team B. Team A is playing Team B in a game. You don't even have to tell them what sport. Team A is considered the better team and is more likely to win. Who are you going to root for? 80% of the students choose the underdog team. SPEAKER_19: 80? Yeah. In fact, a lot of times it comes out 90%. SPEAKER_14: 9 out of 10. Yes. In the absence of any reason to choose one or the other. It's almost universal. And... You can do this study in all different ways and the answer always comes out the same. You can describe it as two political figures. You know, running for election. Or you can talk about two businesses. SPEAKER_08: Mom and Pop's electronics store against Walmart. Or you can talk about two landscape painters who've painted pictures and are now trying SPEAKER_14: to... Landscape painters? SPEAKER_08: Yes. We gave participants a painting. Half the participants were told this painting was done by a successful established artist. SPEAKER_14: You know, so-so who has a gallery show downtown. SPEAKER_08: And the other half of the participants were told this same painting was done by a starving artist. First year art student. Who's trying to make it in the art world. Who only has one arm. Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_14: And people have this very strong bias in favor of the underdog painter. So what else do we have? SPEAKER_19: We've got landscape painters, unnamed sports teams, businesses, politics. SPEAKER_14: And my favorite, shapes. Shapes. Yeah. SPEAKER_19: What would an underdog shape be? SPEAKER_08: It's just a circle about an inch in diameter moving left to right across the computer screen. SPEAKER_14: Moving up what could be a hill. SPEAKER_08: Exactly. As the circle moves up, the circle slows down as it goes up the hill. SPEAKER_14: Nudging up and then dropping back a little bit and then nudging up and dropping back a little bit. Quivering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_08: And then along comes... A second circle that has no trouble getting up that hill. SPEAKER_19: Cruises past this low-poke circle. Zooms right past it. And sure enough, people have a real preference in some way or another. SPEAKER_14: They're really rooting for circle B. The Struggler. SPEAKER_08: We get people emotionally reacting to a geometric shape. SPEAKER_19: When they're sitting there, are they like, come on, come on, you can do it. Yes. SPEAKER_14: You're pulling for it, it's going to be like, Rudy, you know. SPEAKER_08: This is how deeply ingrained the underdog phenomenon is in us. At this point, like my question is... SPEAKER_19: Why? Exactly. Why do we do this? SPEAKER_14: Well, um... Well, I think that there are two different approaches to that why question. SPEAKER_19: One of them is this kind of what they call an emotional economics argument. And it goes like this. SPEAKER_03: If you know that you have an underdog and you have a top dog, so the top dog is expected to win, right? If you think of this like the way a gambler would think of it, like if you go with the SPEAKER_19: top dog, they're expected to win, so you're not going to get a big payout if they do win. Any animal emotional payoff. But you'll lose a lot if they lose. SPEAKER_18: Meaning you won't feel too good if they win, but you'll feel really bad if they lose. Yes. SPEAKER_19: But if you go with the underdog... It's the reverse. Right. They're expected to lose. So if they do lose, it's not that big a deal because you kind of figured that was how it was going to go. But if they win, you feel great. A significant emotional payoff. SPEAKER_18: So it's like betting on a long shot horse. You can put in five bucks, you're probably going to lose it. But if you win, you might get back like a hundred. Exactly. SPEAKER_13: That just does not feel at all like how I watch sports. SPEAKER_19: Well there's another argument, which is these guys say that maybe it's something about fairness. SPEAKER_08: Deep down we want to live in a fair society where there's an even playing field. And there's research that shows that fairness is a pretty deep instinct in us. SPEAKER_19: But I don't know. I mean like none of that seems to... I guess the thing is that this whole thing feels like a lot more basic. If you look back at like the stories we tell. This underdog story is ancient. The Iliad, the Odyssey, great epics from Asia, Africa. SPEAKER_08: That's all the same story. And so Scott says, you know, maybe we love the underdog because we feel like we are the SPEAKER_19: underdog. I mean in some sense just to be a living thing is to fight against the odds. Think about newborns. SPEAKER_08: You can't be any more weak and helpless and small. SPEAKER_19: You know, I mean, the baby. I guess that's true. But I don't know. I mean I don't remember being a baby and feeling like, but I do remember junior high. And I do remember feeling like I would never get a job. And I do remember feeling like there's no way that girl's ever going to like me. We need these stories just to make it through. SPEAKER_08: They're part of who we are as human beings. SPEAKER_03: There's actually a very interesting story about Haruki Murakami, the famous Japanese novelist. Yeah, author. He was awarded the Jerusalem Literature Prize. And this was in the midst or immediately after Israel invaded Gaza and there were more than one thousand Palestinian dead. In his delivery speech, he said the following, between a high solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a novelist who for whatever reason wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be? SPEAKER_18: Huh. Value would these works be? It's an interesting word. It's almost like he's saying like a story's job is it's beyond morality. It's beyond truth. Like its job is somehow to tell you that the world could be a way that we know inherently it never will be. I think that's what he's saying. SPEAKER_16: Or maybe he's really saying that I stand with the powerless and the powerful can take care of themselves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little weight to people who have no muscles of their own. I'm going to put a little pebble on the scale. SPEAKER_18: That's the job of the story. And I guess if the scale is always weighted in the wrong direction, then that's why we love the story because we need more pebbles. SPEAKER_19: Well yeah, but there's a question we haven't asked here. Which is what? Well, four out of five of us root for the underdog or the struggling circle, but that's not everyone. SPEAKER_14: One out of five people are like, screw that circle. I'm excited about the circle. You could probably do some interesting follow up studies on like, who are those psychopaths? SPEAKER_19: Yeah. And so you assume they're psychopaths. I do. SPEAKER_18: Actually oddly, we ended up bumping into a guy who falls into this group. It's Malcolm. Yeah. Hi. His name's Malcolm Gladwell. He's a writer for the New Yorker magazine. He's also written a bunch of bestselling books. SPEAKER_16: And in the middle of a conversation, unbidden by the way, he suddenly says, oh, I never SPEAKER_02: ever cheer for the underdog. SPEAKER_18: You don't? No. Why? Why not? SPEAKER_02: Because I'm distressed by the injustice of the person who should win not winning. The injustice of the what? Losing for the favorite. That is the most exquisitely painful situation to be in. So I remember as a kid, the first time I ever ran, I was a huge track and field fan. 76 Olympics, Dwight stones lost the high jump, even though he was so far and away the greatest high jumper in the world, because it rained. His technique required absolutely perfect footwork, and he would slip on the tarmac. And I just remember sitting there as a kid, and I was just devastated because I could feel his pain. Right? And his pain was so much greater than anybody else's. What's wrong with you? It's too painful if they lose. When Dwight stones loses the high jump, it is literally one of the most painful experiences of my young life. I can't, I thought about it from weeks afterwards. I just couldn't wrap my mind around how he must have felt going home. And ever since then, I was like, there's no way you could not cheer for the overdo it because they will suffer. Like, I mean, it's the only humane position because you were trying to end human suffering. This is as tortured and twisted the logic as I've ever heard. SPEAKER_16: SPEAKER_02: I mean, I always thought this was some, you know, rare evidence of my empathy that I felt. I'm so sorry to have brought you the news. Exactly. There is another part of this too, and that is that I have a deep distrust and unhappiness with luck. So I do not like it when the outcome turns on an unrepeatable sequence. So Georgetown losing to Villanova in, is it the 82 NCAA college basketball championships? There is no way. You could play that game 100,000 times and Villanova would still only win that one time. That just, that game, it did more than upset me. It outraged me. I mean, I just thought this is not, it's just not right. It is like a, it is a violation of everything. You shouldn't be able to shoot 78% from the floor or whatever the, I'd have forgot what the number was. The preposterous number they, and I just, you know, if I had been on Georgetown, I would to this, I would wake up every night out of the cold sweat to this day just thinking this is outrageous. Like, how did this happen? SPEAKER_16: It's so weird because you're a storyteller by trade. Like what if Hans Christian Andersen had woken up every morning and said, here, I have a great story. There's an ugly duckling and it just stays ugly because you know, why should it get lucky and be a swan? It's just an ugly duckling. SPEAKER_02: Robert, we're not talking about stories. I understand stories. To me, a game is not a story. To me, a game is, it is a contest between two parties according to certain rules. And when the, when expectations and rules are violated, some part of me takes offense. So I'm curious, how do you feel about the people who always root for the underdog, which SPEAKER_18: happens to be most people? Do you feel like that's the weaker position morally? SPEAKER_02: Is it weaker morally? I mean, there's a very unflattering interpretation of this. And that is that on some deep level, I think of myself as a favorite, not an underdog, right? You know, that's, like I say, that's an unflattering way of interpreting my motives. But you know, unlike many of my peers, I grew up in a tiny, tiny town and went to a kind of an exceptional high school where everyone left at 16 to go home and milk the cows. So it was like a situation where I did sort of grow up as the, if you had parents who'd gone to college, you were the over dog in my universe growing up. So I, you know, I do sort of, when I was in seventh grade and someone got a better grade than me, it was outrageous to me, right? Because no one should get her. Only my friend Bruce should get a better grade than me. You know, he's the only other person in the class whose parents went beyond the ninth grade or who had books at home or who had left the province of Ontario. So maybe there's something in that, that if you grow up in these impoverished environments where you're forced into a particular dominant role, right, you just, you come back to it again and again, long after those circumstances have changed. SPEAKER_18: That's Malcolm Gladwell, defender of winners everywhere. SPEAKER_02: I do hate when winners lose. It is true. SPEAKER_01: Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our cohost. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, Beketi Foster-Keyes, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascu-Tieres, Sindhu Nyanasanbandhan, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Ana Rasquette-Pas, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vignales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Beth from San Francisco. SPEAKER_22: Leadership support for Radio Lab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_00: NYC Studios is supported by On Being with Krista Tippett. I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI, and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.