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SPEAKER_05: Listen to support it. WNYC Studios. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_12: Wait, you're listening? Okay.
SPEAKER_08: All right.
SPEAKER_11: Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab.
SPEAKER_08: Radiolab. From WNYC. See?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I don't know the program. Well, let me just do the thing. Yeah, let's just try. Yeah, do the thing and then let, because I'm still like, I don't quite get it. Okay, great.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Luthif. Lulu. Radiolab. Lulu, you have been out there making your chart-topping new series Terrestrials. I've been down in the musical nature children's trenches.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's right. And you were out in the world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: So I've been doing some other stuff. I've been sort of keeping myself busy. So what I wanted to tell you about one of the projects that I did, which is a few weeks ago, our executive producer, Susie Lechtenberg and I went to Denver, Colorado, and I moderated a conversation with the one and only literal rock star David Byrne.
SPEAKER_10: What was getting the call to do that like?
SPEAKER_12: Oh, man, it was, it was, well, first let me say, if you happen to not know who David Byrne is, he was the frontman of and co-founder of the band Talking Heads. You know, you've probably seen him like on HBO or on Broadway.
SPEAKER_10: His music is in your head. For sure. For sure. Yes.
SPEAKER_11: Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for being here.
SPEAKER_12: So the reason that they asked me to do an event with him was that he created this immersive theatrical, it's like a happening. I don't know. It's an event. I don't know what you call it.
SPEAKER_11: Tonight to celebrate the world premiere production of Theater of the Mind and experience many years in the making. It was an article about it.
SPEAKER_12: And it basically just said it's like the headline was take a trip through David Byrne's head, which is basically what it is. It's like a giant warehouse where you walk through and like hear things and see things
SPEAKER_10: and hear things and see things.
SPEAKER_12: And then it's also very kind of it involves a lot of neuroscience. I'm sensing why they called Mr. Latif Nasser.
SPEAKER_10: And now it is. That's right.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Our moderator for this evening. Please welcome to the stage Latif Nasser.
SPEAKER_12: So basically it was this it was a live conversation. There were 900 people in this giant ballroom. And I was on stage with David Byrne and the neuroscientist Talia Wheatley from Dartmouth College. Wow. Wow. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. So what I want to do today is play for you and for everyone some of that conversation. You don't need to have seen the show for it to make sense. The vast majority of the people in the audience had not seen the show. Instead, what we've got planned for tonight is something a bit different. There's sort of two reasons I'm playing it. One is because it feels like a throwback to very early old school radio lab when every episode was about neuroscience. But also, like I found this conversation like I found it sort of unsettling. It kind of makes this argument, I think, both David and Talia do, where it's like you're not perceiving what you think you're perceiving. You're not seeing what you think you're seeing. You're not hearing what you think you're hearing. You don't know what you think you know. But also, that's none of that is necessarily a bad thing.
SPEAKER_10: Well, that's how I'm taking it.
SPEAKER_12: But there's another way to take all of this that I think Talia and David both will kind of gift to you in the course of this conversation. So here we go.
SPEAKER_12: So to start, Talia, I'll actually rope you in in a moment. But first, I just wanted to get off the top the origin story of this show, Theater of the Mind, which is the reason why we are all here. David, just tell us what is Theater of the Mind and how did it start?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, in 2011, I think it was, I read a story in a magazine called New Scientist about an experiment that a lab in Stockholm did. And their paper was called Being Barbie. And Barbie. Barbie, like the doll. They were exaggerating a little bit. But basically, it was the experiment, the subject, is embodied in the body of a doll. You felt like you were doll size. What they found interesting was that being that size changed your relationship to everything. How far away you thought things were, how big you thought things were. That those things weren't constant, but they were based on your body image. And if you thought you were small, then things looked big. But I read this and didn't use a Barbie doll. Barbie dolls are anatomically...
SPEAKER_12: Not human beings? Yeah, not really human beings.
SPEAKER_02: You can't really be embodied in a Barbie doll. So unfortunately, for those of you who were hoping such a thing.
SPEAKER_12: If you were hoping.
SPEAKER_02: I read this and my first thought was, I want to do this. I want to experience this. So I wrote to them, kind of cold, and wrote to them and said, I would love to present your experiment in an art gallery in New York. So that one person at a time, visitors to the art gallery, could experience what you're doing. Much much later, I got a response that was a little bit fantastical and very imaginative, but it was not really a yes. I'm going to put it aside, but didn't forget it. And I, just as an amateur enthusiast, I read more books and things about neuroscience and psychology and things, and began to kind of collect other things. Oh, that thing sounds like it would be fun to do. Or that sounds like it would be really amazing to experience. But that changed the way I see things. I started collecting a thing. I ran into the woman, Mala Goncar, who became my writing partner on this. And we both saw science as being a very creative endeavor, very much akin to the arts. So we thought, what if we could present more of these things and not just one, and make a whole little project out of it. So we dreamed and collected things and kept at it and started doing workshops. And eventually we did sort of a smaller version in Menlo Park, California. That's Silicon Valley. And it included some of the experiences that are in the present show, but it also included some other ones that were more kind of social and psychological and things like that. And we discovered that some of those things didn't... They worked as science. The results were valid in the way people responded, but they didn't work as an audience experience. Because they were boring?
SPEAKER_12: Like what... Well... You want me to go into one of these, right?
SPEAKER_02: All right. Tal, you're familiar with this one, I think. One of them was based on the work of a guy named Alex Todorov, who does a lot of work on faces, face recognition, how you determine what people are expressing with their faces. He did one where you would be shown very quickly two images of politicians.
SPEAKER_02: They were real politicians, but you didn't know them. They weren't well-known politicians. They were from different regional areas. You weren't told what party they were from. You weren't told their names. Anything else, you just saw these head shots. And you were asked, tell us which one you think is going to win. And then we'd go to the next one, and the next, and the next. You tally up the average of all the people, and it could be as high as 70% matched the election results. Oof. Yeah, woof. Woof. That was the audience reaction, too. It was like, I didn't decide that. And it was just like bad news. It was bad news. It sort of undermines your faith in democracy a little bit.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all of that undermines your faith in democracy. It makes you feel like, oh, is that what we are? Is that the way we are? Really, that's what you're telling us here? I realised, you know, there's another way to do this. So we had to – it's valid science, and it's interesting work, but as a show, it did not – it didn't work.
SPEAKER_02: So we learned that, and we also learned that what we were doing and the way we were presenting it was much more – it needed to be more theatrical than just a series of experiences. That led us basically to where we were. It turns out a friend of Charlie's, who was just standing here –
SPEAKER_12: Charlie Miller, who's a producer for Theatre of the Mind.
SPEAKER_02: Saw that version and mentioned it to Charlie, and eventually Charlie tracked me down, 2018 maybe, and Charlie said, I'm interested in your show. I want you to come and look at a possible space. It was a grow space that had been busted. Amazing. They'd been busted for looping, which means they're selling small quantities to the same people over and over and over again, which you're not allowed to do. And it was kind of sort of a crime scene.
SPEAKER_12: God bless you, Denver. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: We walked into the space, which kind of was big enough, and the police had saw the top off the safe. Oh, wow. As many of you probably know, that business is all cash business. How did we get here?
SPEAKER_12: What are we talking about? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: All right. Anyway, long story short, I came back again. We looked at other places. That one didn't work out. And eventually, script rewrites. We had a director, Andrew Scroville, who did an incredible job, an incredible creative team. Right.
SPEAKER_12: And kind of just for those of you who, just to give you the bare bones of what the show is, so it's exactly as David said, it's a theatrical experience, a series of rooms you go through where each room, they're sort of based on different neuroscientific research. And so I saw the show last night. When I went through the show, there was one of the experiments that sort of caught my ear, and I wanted to play it for everybody tonight. It involves a gorgeous piece of orchestral music. Shall we do it? Yeah. Okay. Can we play the tritone?
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
SPEAKER_12: So that was it. Okay. And we will play it again. But before we do, I want you to listen to the notes carefully and pay attention to whether the notes are going up, whether they're ascending or going down, whether they're descending. If you hear them going up, I want you to raise your hand. If they're going down, put your hand on your heart. Okay. And Talia and David, you do it too. Can we ask people to close their eyes?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right. So you're not influenced by what your neighbors think.
SPEAKER_12: Everybody close your eyes. Close your eyes. Close my eyes. Okay. Let's play the tritone again.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. So again, up if it's up, on your heart if it's going down.
SPEAKER_12: Okay. Now everybody open your eyes.
SPEAKER_04: Whoa. Nice. Okay. I think it's probably...
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of extraordinary. 50-ish maybe?
SPEAKER_12: A little more on heart maybe? Okay. Now let's do it. I'm going to play it one more time. Now like actively try to hear the other thing. And if you can, raise your hand. Okay. Okay. Let's play the tritone again.
SPEAKER_02: You can flip from one to the other. I can flip. Wow.
SPEAKER_12: I could not flip. Okay. Okay. So Talia, I know this is not exactly your area of expertise, but what just happened? And is it just that all the people who didn't hear what I heard need to go to an audiologist or something?
SPEAKER_04: I didn't hear what you heard. Okay. Yeah. So what you just heard was a pair of shepherd tones, half octave apart. And the shepherd tone is really interesting because it's the same note played in all the octaves at the same time. So imagine you're at a keyboard and you're hitting all of the Cs. And then that's a shepherd tone C. And then you're hitting all of the F sharps. That's a shepherd tone F sharp. Now and you might know this, if you're sitting in front of a keyboard, the middle octave kind of sounds to our ears as that it's the louder of the octaves. And as you go further away from the middle to the ends of the keyboard, it gets quieter. And that's really helpful because that orients us to where we are in pitch space so we can tell whether things are going up or down. But remember that shepherd tones are all of the Cs at the same time. So there is no help from where you are on the keyboard. And if you think about it, any given C is up from one F sharp and down from another. And all the one F sharp is up from another C and down from C. So it's a perfectly ambiguous stimulus. There is no right answer. So our brains don't really like ambiguity. We want answers to things. So all of us, all of our brains are trying to resolve what was going on. And there's no right answer. But people have a tendency to go one way or the other. And you can use conscious control. Some of us can use conscious control to flip it, but it's hard. But we all have a natural tendency to go one way or the other.
SPEAKER_12: David, I'm curious, as a musician, well, first of all, the fact that you've heard this now so many times, but also as a musician, are you hearing this different from the rest of us? No, not at all.
SPEAKER_02: I think I'm as susceptible as anyone else. For me, what is incredibly interesting about this is that what we just saw, that the audience gets more or less split. And you realise what other things are we not experiencing the same? Are we seeing things different? Are we tasting things different? What else that we don't even know about?
SPEAKER_12: Talia, how do you become one person who goes one way or the other? I mean, this is where, for me, it gets really psychologically interesting and deep, because
SPEAKER_04: it's not random. It's based on your experiences. So it's based on the sounds you hear in your daily life. So there are actually, parts of the country tend to go one way, that another part of the country goes another way. And it's the accents that you're hearing. It's the languages that you're hearing. It's the music that you're steeping in. Your experiences are tuning your brain. Your brain wants to adapt to the environment it's in, and so it wants to fit. And so it's constantly, continuously in flux. We are the sounds we hear. We are the music we listen to. Just as we are the books we read, and the films we watch, and the conversations we engage in, our minds are constantly changing and adapting. We're continuously in flux.
SPEAKER_12: Well, okay, so there is actually another experiment that you do with your students at Dartmouth. You want to do it right here, right now? Sure.
SPEAKER_04: This is fun, too. Okay, so I'm going to show you.
SPEAKER_12: Okay, so at this point during the show, we did this thing with the audience where we flashed them two images. Okay.
SPEAKER_04: A pair of images, okay? And they are very similar.
SPEAKER_12: It looked like they were identical pictures of a big red barn in a lush, green wooded area, right? And they looked identical. Okay.
SPEAKER_04: But they're not perfectly the same.
SPEAKER_12: And Natalia told us that there was one non-trivial difference between these two images. And I want you to try to spot the change from one image to the other.
SPEAKER_04: And I want you to raise your hand as soon as you spot it. Okay. All right. Yeah, don't shout out what it is. Don't shout out what it is. Yeah, just raise your hand when you see it.
SPEAKER_12: So and we went back and forth. So it'd be like image A, image B, image A, image B, image A, image B. And you're just literally going, flashing back and forth, back and forth. And as you're looking at it, your eyes are kind of like racing around trying to like To be like, where's the gorilla?
SPEAKER_10: Where's the orange flower? Yeah, totally. Yeah, okay. And it was like, okay, raise your hand if you see it.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, three hands are up. Four, five, six, seven, eight, ten. I'm gonna say 20.
SPEAKER_12: And like people would like raise their hands slowly, like in this 900% audience. 30.
SPEAKER_04: Come on, keep trying. People would slowly raise their hand as they saw it.
SPEAKER_04: All right. What are we up to? About 25%? 30%? If you have not seen it yet and you are very frustrated, know that it took me way longer.
SPEAKER_12: It took me literally the entire dress rehearsal to figure this out. Okay, we're about half the room now.
SPEAKER_04: All right. Shall we give them a hint? Yeah, give them a hint.
SPEAKER_04: All right. Look at the tree branch.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I love that. Oh, that's so delicious. That oh, okay.
SPEAKER_12: Off of the tree branch was another branch that had like leaves and bright red berries and like it was like a huge thing.
SPEAKER_04: How could you miss? It's not like it's subtle, right? How could you miss that? And the reason that it's surprising to us that we miss it is because we walk around and our brains deliver us this beautiful image of seeing all of this room all at once, all colour out to the edges, all perfectly detailed. That's not actually how we see. First of all, there isn't colour in the world. That's our brains painting colour onto the world based on wavelengths of light. And we don't see detail all around us. That's our brain constructing it based on a lot of assumptions. How we actually see is our attention picks out some details, details, details, details with our eye movements four times a second or so. And from that little bits of information, we paint out the entire thing. That's an amazing hallucination. It's an amazing construction of reality that our brains do this and do this so well that you have to create these kinds of visual illusions just to see like the man behind the curtain, right? Who's creating this Wizard of Oz? Because we don't see all this. We just see that. And why some people got it faster than others. If you got it right away, it's because you just got lucky. You just happened to look at just the spot that changed. And others of you are like, huh, huh. And then you're trying to do it like methodically, you know. That's why it took so long, because that's how vision works. But aren't we lucky that we have brains that create these beautiful images for it?
SPEAKER_12: David, how long did it take you to be forever?
SPEAKER_02: It took me a really long time. OK, we're going to take a quick break.
SPEAKER_12: When we come back, the conversation will go from our individual ways of perceiving the world to what that means when we interact with each other. That's in just a minute.
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SPEAKER_09: Talya from WNYC. Find on the media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_12: We're back. Picking up again where we left off in the live convo I had with David Byrne and Talya Wheatley on stage live at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Talya, your research sort of takes this even a step further. So if we're all perceiving the world differently and then we're interacting with one another, how does that play out? What happens next? You have a few examples of this from your own research, from your colleagues' research.
SPEAKER_04: Right. Well, it's not the case that we see, we all see the world differently. I think things just couldn't get off the ground if we were all completely different. We kind of cluster together. Some of us see the world more similarly than others. And that's important. We've known for a long time, by the way, that people cluster together. I mean, your friends probably are around the same age as you, probably the same gender as you. People kind of cluster. Girls want to be with the girls. It's an old talking heads reference if you get that. But demographics only goes so far, right? I'm not friends with all the girls. Our inner circle is like four to six people big. So how do we choose who those people are? And it turns out that friends' brains are remarkably similar. They process the world in remarkably similar ways. We took people who were friends, and we took people who were friends of friends. So these are people that are not directly friends, but they have a friend in common. And we took people who are three degrees separated, friends of friends of friends. And we scanned their brains while they watched comedy clips, music videos, politics, science, nature, all sorts of things. And we found that friends' brains were in sync. They weren't watching them together. They were in the scanner independently, and they'd never seen them before together. But they were processing those video clips in the same way. And people who were friends of friends were a little less similar, and people who were friends of friends of friends were even more dissimilar. And we just did a study, actually, where we got people who had just come off the bus to Dartmouth College students before they met each other. And we put them in a brain scanner, and we scanned their brains. And then we waited until the social network got stable, and they had found each other. And lo and behold, we could take their brain activity when they were strangers, and we could predict who's going to become friends, who's going to become friends of friends, and who's going to become friends of friends of friends. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: It's pretty cool. Thanks. Does Facebook know about this?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: No, but there was a study. There's a study. It wasn't mine, but they used our technique. This was about a month ago that it came out, where married couples, it predicts married couples' satisfaction with their marriages, how synchronised they are, how similar their brain activities are. So opposites attract, but if you want the long haul, it's similarity all the way down.
SPEAKER_12: So, interesting. So, OK, so actually we're sort of magnetically pulled and kept there to people like us.
SPEAKER_04: Yes. It makes us feel connected. It's about common ground. When we're with our friends, it's effortless. We're in sync. We're literally in sync. And then we can have a conversation and go on a collective road trip all over the place. And it's fun, right? It's wonderful. It's so easy. Comfortable. It's comfortable. Being in sync, I mean, when we're at a music concert, I think what's great about live music performance, and I'm so glad, my partner and I just went to a live music performance, and it'd been so long because of COVID. But you're there with everybody just bopping together and tapping, and it's just the best, right? It just feels right. So yeah, synchrony is great, to an extent.
SPEAKER_12: David, have you ever been to a live concert?
SPEAKER_02: I've experienced that same phenomenon on the stage, yes, playing together with other musicians. You give up a little bit of yourself in order to synchronise with other people, but you gain something else. You really feel this kind of lifting. And the audience feels the same thing. They're participating in that too. So it's this ecstatic, wonderful, communal thing. But it also can be used for whatever ends you want to use it for. In the military, they drill people, march them back and forth, and that marching helps cement them as a synchronised unit, and helps people act as a team, which you want, and
SPEAKER_02: if you're a military thing, you want them to do that. You want everybody to act in sync. But it can be used to kind of direct people to do things like that. And so one could say that music and that kind of synchronised behaviour is neutral, but you have to, yeah, so be careful how it's being used.
SPEAKER_12: Have you seen any of that dark side in your research? Or in, yeah, what, I don't know, what other?
SPEAKER_04: Sure. I think, well, I think what happens when you take it to the extreme, so it feels good, and we want to find the people that we're in sync with. And that- They're so great. It's just so great. And you think about, like, music is the foundation of ritual. You think about the songs that we sing at rituals, like Happy Birthday to You, or Dayenu at Passover, or what have you. It's always songs that we can all sing together in unison and feel that bond, right? It's all a good thing. But if you take it to the extreme, what you get are echo chambers. If you are only looking for people who think like you, who synchronise with you, then you play that out and you get these bubbles, right? And you get stagnation. You get people being derivative because they're just playing the same things. And so you've got to, I think there's a human drive to synchronise and be as one and communal, and that's great. But you also need a kind of countervailing force that's going to not let it get too far. So you need the people that have the unpopular opinions, that don't synchronise, that have an independent voice, just to pull that out so that we don't totally get in our own heads and in this bubble. You've got to keep trying to get out, to change the key, to change the story.
SPEAKER_12: Do you know any weirdos like that, David?
SPEAKER_02: Weirdos like who? Like what?
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I don't know. She's talking so abstractly. But that does seem, it actually does seem like a thing you do well. You don't kind of just find the beat of everybody else's drum. You kind of find your own. And you're well known for, for example, I read, I think it was in Pitchfork, there was a line, it was like, David Byrne would collaborate with anybody for half a bag of Doritos. There's some truth to that.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. But, I love collaborating.
SPEAKER_12: But also with people who are not necessarily the people whose brains light up in exactly the same, maybe people across, you know, different kinds of musicians, across generations, like you collaborate with high school kids, you do all kinds of different things like that.
SPEAKER_02: I love that experience of kind of getting out of my comfort zone. But I, at the same time, I realised that part of that collaboration is finding that place where you can kind of synchronise them and find something in common. So it's a little bit, a little both. A little bit of both. Yeah. I'm also aware that, yeah, I go to concerts and I participate in them.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes when everybody's moving en masse, I find it slightly frightening. Even when I'm the one singing. Really? I find it going, oh, this is a little bit too much power here. Wow. You know, you go, can I subvert this? Or what do you do? So what do you do?
SPEAKER_02: Make a joke or something. Yeah. Loosen things up a little bit.
SPEAKER_12: A joke that only half the people in the audience will get. Yeah. Yeah. Can you, like, are there collaborations like that? You feel like you have especially moved you or that have been momentous for you?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, myself? Yeah. Well, this show, my co-writer, Mala, her writing is much more poetic than mine. Mine is more kind of everyday, like everyday speech. Lots of um's and ah's and hey, hey. All that kind of stuff. Hers is much more poetic. But together we get some kind of balance between the two that I think in the end I thought I would have never ever come up with that by myself.
SPEAKER_12: Please tell me that there was a moment where you were writing a very logical everyday sentence and then she was like, stop making sense. But OK. What, because these issues that we're talking about, these are non-trivial problems. Like the echo chamber, the collective blind spots, these are real problems that are making it hard for us to exist as a democracy if you have a relative who you've ever talked about vaccines with or something. You've felt this on a real level. What is the hack here? What's our way out of this? Talia, please.
SPEAKER_03: Thanks.
SPEAKER_04: No pressure. No pressure. I think it's trying to get, as you said David, get out of your comfort zone. Trying to make sure you have connections with some people who don't necessarily see everything the same way you do. I love it when students are thrown together with roommates from different backgrounds. I think we don't do enough of that. We just gravitate towards our friends because it's just easier. But that's problematic. I think if we try to listen to different music on occasion, try to understand. If you're a liberal, try to understand. Try to find a conservative that you don't think is absolutely crazy. Because there's a point of view there that isn't necessarily nuts. And vice versa, obviously. I think trying to break out of that kind of bubble that you might be in is really, really important. But it's getting increasingly challenging, especially the way we absorb our news and get our information.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Well, what about you, David? Do you have any thoughts about... Because I feel like you've done it in your career. You keep breaking the form you just made. Yeah. I'm not sure I could recommend that to everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, there's certain aspects of society where we want reliability and not something, our store doesn't sell that anymore. Because I felt I wanted to do something different. Yeah. The surgeon is like, I'm trying a new site-specific thing here.
SPEAKER_12: We don't want that.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. One thing I've learned is that no matter how smart we think we are, we're all susceptible
SPEAKER_02: to this stuff.
SPEAKER_12: But I do think, just having seen the show and still starry-eyed from it, I do think that's one of the beautiful things about the show, which is not spoiling anything. I do think it's a kind of tribute to intellectual humility. It's about how at the very most basic level of the machinery we are born with, you know, a lot less than you think you do. And even that you have sort of based your, the parts of you that you've based your whole sense of self on, those aren't as concrete as you kind of wish they were.
SPEAKER_02: Exactly. And the tricky part is that let the audience feel, and everyone else, that this is not a bad thing. This changeability and malleability and sometimes the unreliability is not entirely bad. It sounds like you're delivering bad news, but it actually allows us the possibility of change. Because if we weren't malleable, we'd have one idea, one point of view, and stick with it to the end of our lives. And that would be kind of terrible.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I think we get, can I respond? I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I know as a neuroscientist that our brains are constantly changing, but I think we, that comes in tension with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the stories other people tell us about who we are. Because stories by design are made to stick. A good story sticks, right? The best success a story could ever have is being handed down generation to generation unchanged, right? And so we get stuck, I think, in these stories about ourselves that don't respect the fact that we are actually changing and capable of change. And so I think one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is to shake off an old story, a story that maybe fit us 10 years ago or maybe when we were kids, but doesn't define us now. When I go home to visit my parents, I love my parents, I don't know if they're watching. They love me, but they have a story about me that got stuck when I was like age 12. And at age 12 I was kind of a lazy, unmotivated mess. And so every time I come home, I'm that kid, you know? Like that's how they see me. And they love me despite it, but that's how they see me. And it doesn't really matter what I've done with my life since then. I'm still that 12-year-old lazy, unmotivated mess. And I internalized that for a really long time, you know, until actually after I got tenure at an Ivy League school, right? And then I thought, yeah, there's data here. I don't think this story fits me anymore, you know? I love imagining the scene of the tenure committee interviewing your parents and they're being,
SPEAKER_12: she's just a lazy unmotivated mess. There is a thing, we are almost out of time, but there was one thing that was just so great that Talia said, and this will, it just is the perfect ender to an evening like this about applause. Do you want to?
SPEAKER_04: Sure. Well, this doesn't happen all the time. But sometimes when applause goes on a really long time, like when you're waiting for a band to come back for an encore, the crowd will spontaneously synchronize. The drive to synchronize with our neighbours is really, really strong. And so this weird thing happens where we start off all sort of asynchronous smattering of applause and then it's like this, right? So just throwing it out there. I don't know how long the applause is going to go on there, but it might just happen.
SPEAKER_02: Have you noticed that? It just... Especially when, yeah, what Talia says, when it's like, it has to go on to it because you're
SPEAKER_02: trying to bring the band back. Right. So there's a prolonged...
SPEAKER_12: And it's like, it's almost as if we do it together at the same rhythm, that'll bring them out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we are basically out of time here. I just... First of all, I wanted to thank these two wonderful folks. Thank you.
SPEAKER_12: Thank you, David, for putting on... I mean, years in the making, this gorgeous show that I hope all of you get to see. Not to mention, I guess you did a few other things before that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Talia, for helping us make sense of this machinery we all have in our heads that none of us understand, apparently. Really appreciate it. And thank you all for coming. And now it's actually kind of an experiment what you're gonna do when you applaud. But thank you all so much. And I hope you have a great night.
SPEAKER_12: I forgot my phone.
SPEAKER_01: So, I don't know who I am, but that might allow me to kind of fly through the rest of
SPEAKER_10: my life like a kite and have better encounters and take more risks and change. Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. That I'm not the person who always does this. I'm not the person who always has to wait for someone else to approach me. I could... Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Maybe there was one time when I did... Sure. Maybe.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, let's do it. Let's try it. Yeah. Kite is the feeling I keep having. It's a kind of revisioning of feeling untethered instead of that feeling swirling. It's kind of liberating. That's cool. Okay. Anything else from now? Last thing I need to say, I think, is a big hat tip for pre-production research to Susie
SPEAKER_12: Lechtenberg. And as well, special thanks to everybody at the Arbutus Foundation and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as well as Bowen Wong and Heather Radke. Bowen, Heather.
SPEAKER_10: Cool. All right. See you next time.
SPEAKER_12: I mean, to the extent that we can see one another, you get what I mean. Catch you on the flip side.
SPEAKER_00: I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this
SPEAKER_06: 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.
