Lulu Miller

0:01She finally looked at me and was just like, what are you doing here? Your questions aren't going to bring him back. I didn't have an answer. And I remember driving back like, I didn't have an answer. This microphone is too powerful and I have not grown up enough to hold it. And at that time, I was just like, I want out. I should never do this. I'm messing with people's lives. I'm making people feel worse. I don't belong here.

0:34From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:41On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, writer and radio host Lulu Miller talks about the conflicts in her career and about going deep into reporting. Literally smelling the pocket notebooks in his archives that I eventually visited that had been, like, collecting the sweat near his heart. Like, I got intimate with this guy.

1:13Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning journalist, an essayist, the co-host of Radiolab, and the founder of the podcast Terrestrials. She's also the co-founder of Invisibilia, the groundbreaking NPR show that explored the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Lulu is also a prolific writer, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Catapult. And her first book, Why Fish Don't Exist, was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, The Smithsonian, and so many others. Known for her curiosity, her rigor, and unmistakable voice, Lulu's work blends science, philosophy, and personal storytelling in ways that make us rethink what we think we know about the world and about ourselves.

2:11Lulu Miller, welcome to Design Matters. Oh, Debbie, it's so nice to be here. So, Lulu, I want to start with this question. It was very bewildering to me, actually. Is it true that your least favorite word in the world is cerulean? I hate it. I can't believe you found that random interview. Yes, I think cerulean is like the epitome of everything wrong with words. I think it is this overly fancy, showy word for something that we all have access to, a beauty we all have access to, the sky. The color is one of my favorite things that is out there. And then this word, to me, it's just too fancy. And I get that maybe in a sort of the way it sounds, it kind of sounds like pools and it's like cerulean.

3:05I do get little images in my head, but I just think it's too fancy and it just makes people feel bad who don't know what it means. And I hate that word when I see it. Do you hate the color? I love the color. I think it is one of the best colors. And that's probably why I feel so passionately about the word. And like if I hear someone using it, I try not to be judgy, but I judge. Who are you trying to shut out with that word? And what pedestal are you trying to put yourself on top of? I really have beef with that word. Well, in the four-color printing process, we have a bunch of different colors.

3:44one of which is a word that I hate, but I also hate the color, which is cyan. Very, very close cousins of cerulean. Yeah. Why do you hate that? Why do you hate the word? The name is so cyan. Really ugly, ugly word. Well, to me, cyan, I don't know. The Y gives it a little shimmer. Like, I like the cyan. Anyway, it's so weird, these associations we bring. But I love that you have words that you love and hate. I do, too. And it's fun to be able to talk to that with somebody that doesn't think I'm weird. Lulu, you grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Your father was a science professor. Your mother was a professor of humanities.

4:29Not a surprise. You started writing at a very young age. And I read that you did this by taking reams of computer paper, this sort of old school continuous accordion sheet with tearaway perforations on the side from your dad's computer to his printer and wrote for hours without ever tearing the paper. So this long sheet of paper would emerge with your writing. How long did the accordion paper get? I mean, it would be these questions are so great. It would be longer than the bed I was lying on. And I would write on my stomach. I would I would go into my parents' bedroom when they were out doing other things and just feel like the queen bed was this like massive pool of, you know, like a horizon, like anything was possible.

5:19And then the paper itself would feel like sledding, like I could go anywhere. And, you know, I'm still doing it. I mean, right here, I still kind to do a version of it. I always write, I'm just holding up these notes. And like I add, some words get big and some get small. And I think it was just this feeling of, I can take this story wherever it goes, you know, and they were usually when I was little, they were just like wild things about talking animals and, oh, you know, a bat and let's, oh, here's a sunken boat. Let's get the bat. If it got on the steering wheel of the boat, could it lodge it out of the mud and take it down the river and just kind of keep doing this mix of my imagination and then physical reality and just keep being seeming where those two things with kind of the imagination with the constraint of physical reality would go and there yeah there is just there's something so inviting about that literal white page and the and words being able to in moments become drawings and then go back to words and uh yeah it's like I'm getting chills right now thinking about it just because it felt so delicious and fun, like a really neat way to just kind of escape.

6:28I was really fascinated by that bat story, mostly because somehow in that story, your dad is able to catch the bat in Tupperware. Yeah, yeah. So that one, I think, was inspired by this bat that flew into our house. And my dad went up on a ladder to get it in Tupperware. And we all, my mom and sisters and I ran out. I I don't know why we were so afraid of the bat, but it was some instinctual like human fly. They're not rodents, but whatever, flying thing response. But then we left him there and he was like screaming, hub, hub, hub, because he hadn't brought up a top or a piece of paper. So then there was this angry bat in the Tupperware.

7:08And then finally, I think my mom went back in and got him a top and then he took it out. Yeah, I learned from your book that we'll talk about in a bit about the fact that bats aren't rodents, but we'll talk about that later. But it is a fascinating fact. When you were seven years old, you went on vacation with your family to Wellfleet. And there, standing in a marsh, you asked your father if he knew the meaning of life. What did he tell you? Yeah. He kind of took a big, what I believe to be delighted pause. And then he kind of chuckled and said, you know, there is no meaning. There's no magic.

7:51There's no point. There's no plan. There's no destiny. There's no God. There's no heaven. Just like, just stamped out everything, including meaning. I mean, which was really like interesting. He just is kind of, and then he went on this tirade about how we're just, we're no different than the ants right below our feet. And we're just kind of walking around. Evolution happened to have put us here on the planet. And if you look at the whole timeline of evolution, we're this tiny pinch that's just here at this moment and will probably be gone soon. And things like cockroaches and horseshoe crabs will probably outlive us.

8:24And we're not any more important to the world or the planet than anything else. And we're just it's all kind of random. And then I think he paused and said, actually, we might be less important to the planet than many things like ants that, you know, at least decompose particles and sometimes aerate the soil. And I don't see us doing much of that. So, yeah. Did that mean that he didn't think that anything mattered? He walks around and says stuff like that all the time with kind of and not in a depressive way, in a very like delightful nihilist carpe diem sort of way. And in a sort of like playfully provocative way, he certainly says that.

9:06And I certainly believed that for a long time. Although watching him, I think things really do matter to him. I think people matter to him and making people feel good matters to him. I think ceramics, he got back into throwing pots in his retirement matters to him. I think humor matters to him. You know, you see things that matter, but he would say no. It's a big concept to share with a seven-year-old. And you described your father's answer to your question as a kind of thunderbolt. What did it feel to be handed that truth at seven? I mean, it felt normal. Like, I mean, now that I have an almost seven-year-old, I think that I am taken aback of, like, not even that it was harsh, but how declarative it was.

10:02Like, it was its own kind of certainty and its own kind of dogma, which I, just being such a daddy's girl, like, believed and didn't question for a long time. But at the time, it felt like, oh, like it was the spiritual truth that I then just needed to. I mean, and a part of me still believes it. Like, I haven't totally shaken it at all. So I think it just felt like, hmm, OK, well, that feels like truth. And somehow, if I abide by that, I'll get to a place where I'm like this guy who loves his family and loves his work and doesn't really care what people think of him. and is weird and funny and seems to be pretty happy.

10:48So it felt like a key. It felt true. Thereafter, you've written about how many of the big questions that you asked your parents about life were met with a mix of nihilism or ambiguity. and it seems looking at your timeline that this is also when you started to feel questions about what it meant to be happy or depressed. You started to see a therapist. Do you think that had any correlation? Oh, yeah. I don't think it made me depressed or like anything like that, But I do think that when I got to my lowest, and I feel so much more comfortable talking about this now that I've written about it, but like once I would feel suicidal, which now I'm like, oh, I believe about 50 % of people feel that at some point.

11:46I don't think it's as scary of a thing to say as I used to. But yeah, like once I felt like, oh, life is too hard or humanity is too hard on people and I don't have any hope that we're going to change because I don't have faith. I don't have a religious system. I don't think that evolution necessarily guarantees any kind of moral evolution. And if I just feel small and not good at changing the world and not good at feeling happy, and I just feel sad about the way certain people are being treated and I don't have hope in our species. Yeah, then some days I would want to leave the planet and leave existence.

12:22And I would think about that's when I would think about it. That's when it would rise up and be like, there's no point. It doesn't matter. And I think I would always remember feeling like, oh, well, if I'm someone who came out, who evolution spat out with thinner skin and life hurts, then I guess like if nothing matters except maybe our sensory experiences and it feels painful to be alive, then maybe I'll just take myself out. And that was kind of, that's when it would come back up. It was like right when I'd be at the edge. And then this thing felt like a neon sign saying go over, you know, like it didn't, I couldn't find a chain link fence.

13:02I couldn't find a reason not to. Although I guess obviously I did because spoiler alert, I'm still alive. Well, you described feeling at that time that you had a parable-sized hole in your heart. And you have spoken candidly about trying to end your life when you were 15. After you left the medical facility, when you recovered, you've written about how your body was probably crying for help. But your words and your brain were still smiling and laughing and reassuring that you were fine. If not more. Yeah. Yeah. I did that, too, as I was growing up. I went through quite a lot of really terrible, abusive experiences, but always wanted to be the happy girl, wanted to make sure no one thought that I was damaged or that I was anything but as perfect as I could possibly pretend to be.

13:58Yeah. For you, was that a survival mechanism? Did you feel that you were less than people if you weren't happy or smiling all the time? I mean, I was horribly embarrassed because like word got out and I wasn't allowed to go on this art trip I was so excited about because the school thought I was too much of a risk. And I think I wanted a I didn't want anyone to have to worry about I didn't want any of my friends or adults to like think that I was a concern. I think that was like the biggest thing is like I wanted to show that like, OK, this community of people knew about it in my school. And after that moment, I just wanted to project like, I think I don't know.

14:45I think, OK, you know what I think it partly was because I don't have that much faith in or any belief in an arc that bends toward good. And because I saw humans doing such pain, I knew how to make people feel good. I did know how to do that. I think I learned how to do that in my family. I enjoyed, if I'm doing anything, I enjoyed making people feel good. Not saying the kinds of things that make spikes come out, saying the kinds of things that like ease the little scared animal person out and seeing what a difference that made with my oldest sister, who was just like horrifically bullied to the point of dropping out and just how differently she could be if you were kind to her or not.

15:24It's just simple. But I really wanted to make people feel better. And so I think I just wanted to double down and go back to that and be providing jokes and be providing an ear. And I'm not a thing you need to worry about. I want to worry about you. I'm just more comfortable in that space. And I felt like that's one of the few things I know how to do that I think I can bring that's good. And so I just wanted to get back there as quick as possible and then have more people later in my life have no clue I'd ever been that low. That felt important to me for so long. It doesn't anymore. Well, I found it really, really, I don't know that ironic is the right word here, but really quite compelling that you didn't want anybody to worry about you, but you were worrying about everyone at that time.

16:14What were you worrying about? I mean, probably I was just worrying about the exact equal and opposite response in somebody else. I think I was just worrying about someone feeling alone in their room. I mean, probably just kind of the image of my oldest sister just like at a period in her life where she was so lonely and had basically no one who understood her. That was kind of the formative concern of just not wanting someone to feel that awful, not wanting someone to feel that alone. And I think that was like an initial driver. And I should say people totally worried about me. Both of my sisters worried about me.

16:54My mom worried about me. I think my dad did in his way. Like I was being cared for. And I was so lucky in so many ways. It's just, you know, sometimes you just come out all misshapen and oversensitive, even when you have lots of resources. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting to think about the fact that you're worrying about other people. You don't want them to worry about you, but they're worried about you and not wanting to let you know that they're worried about you in an effort for everybody to protect each other and be cared for. At 16, you finally found a therapist. You've stated the charade finally stopped.

17:36And I'm really curious, what did she help you understand that no one else was able to up until that point. Monica Meehan McNamara. Let's shout out her full name. She was so great. She just helped me understand that you can have a dark thought and it doesn't have to set off a red siren. I mean, that was one of the biggest things was it was like the first place after all that where I was still really tangled on the inside. I could feel her concern and her care, but I also could feel like her curiosity to get to get beyond just like it was OK to have these hard thoughts. And that just felt like part of living.

18:16And and she really didn't care as much about like the symptoms so much as what was going on on the inside. And she talked to me like an adult. And I think it was just like this this space. I could be really real and feel someone being really curious about me. At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally? Oh, I wanted to be a novelist through and through. That was the dream. I didn't know if I could, but that was like, I wanted to just stay in my pajamas all day, get my little cup of coffee, see the world for a moment, and then disappear into that same imaginative space that we talked about, the perforated paper dreaming up a story.

18:57And I think, again, I just wanted to minimize interactions with the real world because they stressed me out, they made me sad, and they drained me. And I was intimidated. And so my dream life was to, like, curl away from it all day. But you majored in history when you went to college. I did. I felt like I had a real lack of understanding of the broader world and how we got here. And I had taken a few classes in high school, but in my high school you could drop history really early, so I did. And I had done all this art. And then I was in college. And I think I took a couple, I think maybe I took a philosophy class and it was so heady and intimidating that I was like, okay, I don't even understand all these different kinds of like criticisms of ideas.

19:44I just want to learn about some facts before I'm out of here. And so, yeah, I majored in history in a way because I felt like I should. No one told me that, but I just felt like I needed to learn more about the world. After college, you moved into a basement apartment in Queens. Sounds swanky. Very. Four of us in a three-hour. Oh, yeah. I lived in a railroad flat with two other people. It was challenging. You began working as a woodworker's assistant. I think at that point you also had some interest in sculpture. Yeah. So also, similarly, in college, I majored in history, but I took as much studio art as I could.

20:24And I was doing that the whole way through printmaking, painting, pottery, and then woodworking. And I just loved the smell of it. I loved building. Like I built a chair and I built this really weird standing light. And I think it just felt so satisfying to work with my hands. And so when I, you know, I wasn't very good, but I had some familiarity with the tools. And so I got this job off Craigslist for this guy, Rob Day, who had submitted to the Brooklyn Design Show. And he got his spot, but he got in based on tiny models and he'd never built the real ones. And so he hired me for like a year basically to build out this line.

21:02And we built a bunch of tables and a bench and a credenza. And I just learned from him day after day. He was in a shared communal space in Brooklyn and we had the radio on all day in that studio. And that was like truly how I fell in love with radio. And you fell in love with This American Life and Radiolab. Yeah. I mean, of course. Yeah, it was 2005 and they just, I mean, my parents had listened to NPR all the time as a kid, but I hated it as a kid. I was like, public radio sounds boring. Get on Jammin' 94.5. But this was like, it was so, it just sounded so different to me. But the news shows too, Brian Lehrer, Leonard Lope, like just the morning news, I think I was absorbing information.

21:46That's when I realized I loved listening. Like I just loved it. This American Life popped out as just this place with all this humor and irreverence and wild stories that were real. And then Radiolab just felt like this, you know, it was early days of experimenting with sound in that way for journalism. And there were just these like stories with these musical pockets of wonder, the kinds of questions you're kind of told to stop asking. And here were these two adult men debating things with scientists. And it was just this beacon. I was like, I want to reside in there. I want to go there. Although you had no previous training in radio journalism, you wrote what you've described as a deranged formal intern love letter to Radiolab in order to trick them into giving you a job.

22:38Yeah. So did you write like, Dear Jed, Dear Robert? Who did you write it to? Do you remember any part of it? Yeah. I mean, I wrote it to the whole team. team. I could probably find it. I'm sure I have it somewhere. But yeah, I mean, basically, I said, like, I have fallen in love with your show. I know you do not need me. I can tell based on your website that you are like a kitchen well stocked with incredible chefs. I know my line was like, and sometimes too many chefs in the kitchen is a problem. But sometimes a chef walks by and sprinkles like a little hand of cilantro that brings everything together.

23:14I could be your cilantro. Let me be your cilantro. And that was and then they I remember because they called me cilantro for like years. Yeah, that was my moonshot. You began volunteering one day a week and while still working for the woodworker. You said they dropped you out of the nest really quickly. Oh, so quick. How? In what way? I mean, it was this tiny little shop. It was just three of us up in the old WNYC building where we were up on the 27th floor and the bubblegum pink walls. And, you know, they were doing, I mean, the one I really remember, we were doing a show on self-deception. And the psychologist had done a survey of things that people might lie to themselves about, like if they enjoy their own bowel movements, and if they've had rape fantasies, and if they've had X, Y, Z, like all these things.

24:00And I took the survey out to Times Square and asked people on the street to answer the questions. I'm turning fuchsia right now. Like it was so, it was, and, but I just did it. I mean, I just was like, they were like, oh, just go do that. And there was no like, it'll be scary. You'll be okay. They're like, oh, just go do that. Come back with some tape. Some people say yes. Some people say no. And so I was just like, okay, sure. Great. And then like, you know, put on the head, like just freak out for about half an hour in Times Square and put on the headphones, take this like, you know, super invasive shotgun mic out.

24:36And, you know, and I remember going out with another reporter, Sally Herships, and she just was great at it. She was more experienced. And then my trick was like, just pretend you're Sally. Whenever you do this, just pretend you're Sally. You're not Lulu, you're Sally. And she'd go up. She'd be curious. She'd ask. She didn't do a whole lot of disclaiming and apologize. She just did it. And I would just pretend to be her. So it's stuff like that. Where on the continuum did people fall on the liking or not liking their bowel movements? I mean, a surprising amount of people answered that they did.

25:10I mean, a ton of people were like, Oh, I don't know. But a ton of people, I mean, you can go back to that episode and listen to the tape. A lot of people answered honestly about stuff that felt taboo. And I think even felt more taboo then when there wasn't as much like TikTok and a poop emoji, even just like normalizing that. I remember it being shocking and funny and yeah. Yeah. One of the first episodes that you worked on was with Robert on the episode Detective Stories. And I believe the first interview you did on your own was the show about an elderly man who had begun having musical hallucinations.

25:52Yeah. Were you involved at all in finding the guests or coming up with show ideas in addition to working on putting them all together? Yeah. I mean, I was always pitching, and I wouldn't say any got through until I'd been there for a couple years. But I kind of liked to think of myself as a bottomless well of bad ideas. Like, I would just pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. And I had bands. I wasn't allowed to pitch synesthesia anymore. more. We've still never done a show, but part of me is like, you know, as hosts, maybe I should bring that back. But I remember I kept pitching this story about cowbirds who lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and it got a no, no, no, no, no, no, no for years until I kind of finally found an angle that had a human story and a question about how we moralize on nature.

26:42But yeah, that, and so I think I was always trying and then just learning by watching a million pitch meetings, like what got through. And it was basically when Jad was surprised. Like you just see his eyes and he started asking like all these little follow up questions. And it was when things didn't live too much in a cerebral land, like they brushed by it, but they didn't stay there. And it was when the narrative just was so strong that he just started asking these really human stories. And so I don't know, I just learned to watch which kind of pitches got that reaction and just tried again and again and again to craft them so they would get that.

27:22You learned how to make radio at a time when listeners couldn't pause or rewind or fast forward. Did that change impact the kinds of stories you were creating at Radiolab at that time, both before being able to do that and after? Was there any significant change in the way that the radio was being made. I mean, I still think about the lack of pause button in every story. So in a way, maybe I haven't evolved with it. But I remember Jad once saying, like, you know, this story has to be a freight train. Someone turns on the radio and just like, it's whizzing by and you want to get on no matter where you turn it on.

28:05And so that would mean basically the narrative and the tape was so interesting. You just want to ride on if you hopped on in the middle. But it would also mean you can't have something like so technical that you'd have to go back to reread it essentially you know those stories like especially the early days they did just have this engine i am just furiously thinking about how to not waste someone's time like i'm furiously thinking about how to whittle whittle whittle until not that it's necessarily the cuts are as fast it's not that but it's that like maybe you have a very eerie long part that's really slow but then it's like juxtaposed i don't know I still almost create as though there isn't the rewind button because I think of that as a good narrative pressure.

28:54Like I want someone to not want to press any button to press the like, yeah, to go to a different podcast, which I think. So I learned how to create in a time when you couldn't really press the buttons. And now I like what you just said. And now I'm trying to create in a way that makes you forget you have buttons. You worked at Radiolab for over five years. How did working there and working with the people that you did, some of the most brilliant people in radio and podcasting, some of the real pioneers, how did they influence your sense of rhythm and moral tension and the various other important aspects of creating stories that have meaning?

29:36Probably the two biggest things are one, it taught me at least in conversation and in interviewing to go for the question you're actually wondering about. and like I just saw time and time again someone making this move that the part of me growing up that was like afraid of hurting or or afraid of bothering or not wanting to take up space or whatever like all that coached me to be one way in space conversationally and then I would see all these different interviewers who are working on the show just ask the person what they really wondered and like how dignifying that is and also how many different ways there are to be direct Like, you know, it can have a little edge or it doesn't have to and you could be really efficient with your words.

30:24And some people like me still just take a second to wind up, but there can be directness in it, too. And like, I think it just taught me that this move that I had kind of incorrectly cordoned off as confrontational or always negative or aggressive or something, that just being direct, like, that's often so dignifying. And it often gets you so quickly to the most interesting spaces. And it's often like a real, you know, there can be some confrontation. There can be some challenge. But most of the time, like, that is the kindness. And that was a revolution. I mean, that was like a revolution for me about how to be with people as a journalist, as a reporter, as an interviewer, but as just also as a person.

31:06I still have to remember that when my headphones aren't in and I'm not in the theater of it all, I still default to I bite my tongue and I go to being polite. But I try, you know, so that was a real revolution. And then I think in terms of craft, it's part of why I was barking about the word cerulean. Like, I think mostly about Jad as the person who, you know, because he would sit with me and we'd move parts of stories out and we, you know, we talk about stuff a lot. So I think of him as kind of the real mentor for me. But like, he didn't want to sound smart. And he didn't care. Like when pitches or stories got into that space where they're just expounding, and you can hear almost like a flatness, there was just a low tolerance for that.

31:50And I think he wanted to be deep. He wanted to, like, take a narrative and have it lead you into bust up some belief or, you know, lead you somewhere deep. But he didn't want to do it in a way that was off-putting or exclusive. And so I think it honed this dive to be deep without talking about ideas in a way that excludes people. You left Radiolab to go to the University of Virginia to fulfill your, quote, dream of getting an MFA in creative writing before you felt like you got too old and had never tried. Yeah. But you were also in deep recovery from heartbreak at that time. How did that impact your decision to leave Radiolab and go back to school?

32:37So the breakup, the me cheating leading to a breakup happened about a month into the program. So I left. Ah, okay. So it wasn't like the clean line of, oh, I'm hurting and I'll go. But I think it was since I was little, I'd wanted to spend time creating fiction. But the reason that that, I think, drive came back and arose in me while I had this dream job, it was like 2010. Radiolab was one of the only podcasts like you were around. Radiolab was around. There were just a few of us out there who got to make our money doing it, earn our living doing it. But I had had this experience out when I was reporting on this story, actually the cowbird one I mentioned, where I'd found that human tie-in.

33:19And it was about a man who died fighting a fire he had set to protect the warbler that the cowbird was parasitizing. and I went out to tell that whole story of who they thought was the bad guy and they thought it was the cowbird but then it was us by preventing forest fires and then I talked to the family and the brother and sister and the mom of the guy who had died and the mom was in this kitchen in Michigan and and she was just like and the power went out there was this very eerie interview and she finally looked at me and was just like what are you doing here like your questions aren't going to bring him back.

33:53And I don't think I had a good answer. I think I was like, in my heart, I wanted to do a story about cowbirds and having there be a human drama attached to it was a way to make it interesting. I didn't have an answer. And I remember driving back like 14 hours to New York through this thunderstorm, just thinking like, I don't have an answer. I don't have the backbone. I don't have the ethical compass to be doing this work. This microphone is too powerful, and I have not grown up enough to hold it. And at that time, I was just like, I want out. I should never do this. I'm messing with people's lives.

34:30I'm making people feel worse. I don't belong here. I was so ashamed of myself, honestly, that I just was like, I can't do journalism. There are journalists who are tough, who have that ethical, but I don't have it. So I left, and I just wanted to go back to hiding out as I saw it in fiction. And then the breakup happened right at the beginning. And I just spent these two years in many ways. It was so dreamy. It was the first. I had a front porch. I had space. Like, I loved Virginia. I loved the wilderness. I loved hiking and swimming in the rivers. But it was a very lonely time, too. I wasn't very good at writing fiction.

35:04I would write these stories and see nobody moved in the workshop, including the professors. I think you called it the flatness on the faces of your classmates. Yeah, I mean, it was just like, yeah, I could. And then, you know, then the problem of I have so I admire people who can write a novel. Like, for me, staying in my head was like precisely the wrong prescription for what I needed right then. I felt shame about my journalism at Radiolab, that moment, that kind of moment. I felt shame about my breakup, which I had caused by cheating. And then I just burrowed into my head where I was met with, like, anger and more shame.

35:44And it was a very, I mean, parts of that experience were wonderful, but, like, it was, I think I learned pretty rapidly. You're not finding a way out in your head. A topic that had been coming back into your consciousness at that time was a story you had heard back when you were first working at Radiolab. You were getting a tour of the back rooms at the California Academy of Sciences and heard about a taxonomist named David Starr Jordan who had lost thousands of fish specimens he discovered and named and tagged back in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. What intrigued you most about this particular story?

36:32I'm chuckling because it's just like that me had no idea what a big part of her life this random old taxonomist would become. But yeah, he just felt like such a parable for the human condition. We are born into chaos to the life, you know, this picture my dad painted, the meaninglessness, the evolution, what works. You know, we're blown onto this planet and chaos will keep having its way with us and tornadoes will come and earthquakes will come. and destroy any order we try to make. Like that is just what will happen. That is like our lot. And yet humans keep trying to do beautiful things and build palaces and build technology and all, you know, build sanctuaries and order the world to make it better or to make it beautiful or to make it better for them or whatever.

37:23And we never, we just keep doing it. It's like in the face of these ultimately doomed odds. We're all going to die. Everything we make is going to get destroyed. And so for me, like we all live that in our lives all the time. But he had such a, like to me, it was just comically proportioned that he was a taxonomist. His job was literally to create order in the world of fish. He spent years compiling this lab and all these specimens and then an earthquake destroyed it. And it's not just that it destroyed it. it separated the names from the specimens. Like it felt reverse biblical, reverse Genesis, like your knowledge, your order is ripped off.

38:05If it was me, I'd give up. And he just, he just invents this technique of tying the label to the fish with a sewing needle. And that felt like there was something comical to me in it. Like, did you ever read those spy versus spy comics? Like the, it would be like, one would do one thing and then one would get bigger and one would do another. That's what it felt like to me. It was just like man trying to outsmart chaos. And to me, it's just chaos is going to win. And so I don't know, when I first heard about that, he felt foolish. He felt like Icarus in a way, like he was flying too close to the sun.

38:40He was flying too close to the earthquake. Like my thought was, okay, you're going to sow it to a fish, but then something else will happen, a fire or like whatever, you know, a flood or decay K itself will erode that thread. So he stuck in my mind. But then he, at first glance, when I first saw him, I kind of felt sure about what he was. And then, yeah, and then in that time in my life when I was just really not sure what to do and how to move forward, I just started thinking about him. And I started realizing he's not a parable. He's a person. I literally just wondered what happened to him. And I wanted to write like a one-page essay and find out what happened.

39:21What happened to him? What happened to his collection? You ended up writing a 35-page single-spaced essay. What set this fire in you? Again, I think it was like the belief that I was going to write this one-page prose poem, Man vs. Chaos, find out, was he a cautionary tale or did things end okay. I think I was kind of hoping for his demise, but also hoping not. I don't know. And then I found his, he had written so much. He was so prolific. And I found his autobiography, which was this huge honking double wide thing with all these charming moments. And no one had really written about him. So he wasn't someone who there was a lot of discourse about.

40:03He felt like my own little person to explore. And almost like radio, it was just like there was all this tape. There was all this writing. And then I could kind of excise the gems. And then his story crashed into all these things. Like it crashed into the eugenics movement in a very startling, massive way. It crashed into a potential murder story. And then it ultimately crashed into this existential story about fish in particular, this idea of taxonomy, but also more broadly. It took me years to understand it, but I read in Carol Kasich Yoon's book about this idea that fish as a meaningful category had been killed by scientists.

40:44And that had happened in the 80s. And I'm like, why do I not know that fish don't exist? Why does every serious scientist thinks fish don't exist, but I don't know that. And that feels connected to this guy. And I don't know, there were just like these, all these little threads that I wanted to understand. And that felt important for my understanding of the world that we are all trying to hack our way through. And so, yeah, it just, I think it spiraled because of how rich the primary source document trove was, and then how many weird things seem to be waiting in the wings that I could like research myself to.

41:22I want to describe David Starr Jordan a little bit, the good parts for our listeners. He sailed around the globe for decades, persistently in search of new fish species and to find new clues to reveal more about what he referred to as nature's hidden blueprint. And he worked so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover one-fifth of the fish known to man in his day. One-fifth. It's just incomprehensible to me. He also did have a controversial life filled with a lot of bad decisions, both scientific and personal. And these have impacted how the world views him and has diluted his scientific contributions in many ways.

42:11You didn't know about these sort of bad decisions prior to finding his autobiography. Did his autobiography in any way describe what he was sort of the more end of his life stories in any kind of objective way? Or was he just very happy with who he became? And that was that? Oh, he was so happy. He is he is an expert in protecting his self image. If anything, he does reveal that. I mean, he talks about how his colleagues would comment upon how, you know, basically, I don't have it exactly right, but it's like, no matter how things got down or went wrong for me, I always whistled as though I didn't have a care in the world.

42:57Like, his positive self-regard was almost impenetrable. Once I learned more about him, I could see these little, you know, he had a very antagonistic relationship with Jane Stanford, one of the founders of the founding mother of Stanford University, where he would go on to become the first president and have a huge influence there. And, you know, there's like statues of him and buildings were named after him and stuff like that. But he would blame like he there's this little dig in the night he writes about the 1906 earthquake. And Stanford's campus at that time was totally decimated in a very symbolic move.

43:32The welcome arch crumbled and there's all this stuff. and he manages to like blame it on Jane Stanford. There's this little thing where he's like, because she was in a haste to create so much, there weren't the proper steel rods or whatever. And so like I see him kind of like gaslighting other people now that I know more about the story. Trumpian actually. Yeah, yeah. So he doesn't reflect on any failures unless there's like a backdoor brag in it. It's like I didn't do that talk. I know literally there was one where he said I didn't get that award because I wanted to give it to a kid more needy than me.

44:06Or I didn't do this talk because I had too many requests to accommodate. So like he just, he's a marvel. I think at some point I called him like an acrobat of twirling anything negative about him into something positive. It's almost breathtaking to watch. Your book about David Starr Jordan and so much more, titled Why Fish Don't Exist, A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. Took almost a decade to finish. And it came out in 2020, smack in the middle of COVID. That didn't stop it from becoming a national bestseller. It was chosen as a best book by the Smithsonian, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post.

44:50It was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Congratulations on all of these accolades and achievements. Thank you. All that being said, you write in the book how you started it from a private, desperate place, looking for some moral instruction. What kind? Yeah, I mean, I was looking for a different way to be in relationship to chaos and to the reality that we don't matter and how to move forward on one of those dark days where everything feels ruined or you've made a mess. Like, how do you surmount those feelings of shame that can make you just want to give up either at what you're doing or the relationship you're in or life itself?

45:48I think I felt so unsure of how to have, how do you basically, I think the moral guidance I wanted was how do you stay humble and have sort of an accurate self view of how small we are in the face of everything and still have like enough will to push forward? And so that's what I was searching for in Davis R. Jordan because he kept doing it. We didn't even mention that an early collection was literally struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. This man's life was plagued by chaos and he just always kept going. He always bounced back. And so I kind of wondered how he did it. That's what I was searching for.

46:26I mean, I think for me, the real learning came when I stopped treating him like a sort of parable. and when I just looked around at like what his story had led to which ended up being the eugenics movement he was a huge player in it a huge not just a part of it in the way that many science stories were in the early 20th century but a huge player in starting a eugenics research institute in convincing wealthy people to sign on to the idea and powerful people to sign on to the idea and therefore his sort of love of ordering fish turned into a belief that you could order humans and that there were certain people, particularly those with disabilities or who, you know, didn't have access to books and couldn't read.

47:08And he had all these beliefs about what was in the blood. And instead of killing them, his humane idea was that you could sterilize them so that they wouldn't carry on. His sober seeming, his scientifically backed language and his charm and his skill as a communicator got all kinds of people to sign on to these ideas and to these policies, which are still with us in some form in certain ways, but really resulted in the sterilization of tens of thousands of people starting around 1907, 1908, all the way up until the 70s. And I think when I just at that time, when I started reading the book, I just didn't know about the American eugenics movement.

47:46I didn't know about the ways in which Nazis were inspired by certain things we did or we were inspired by early sort of like texts by Germans. And I just didn't know. I just didn't know about the whole history here and how we had like eugenic state fairs and competitions and sterilizations. And there are still laws on the books allowing some of this. Absolutely. With different language, instead of saying unfit, they'll say unable to give informed consent. You know, there's different words for the same idea. And it was that moment where his me wanting to read him like a moral text, it just jumped.

48:23And then I sort of like woke up and became a reporter and was like, oh, there are people living today who were sterilized, who were impacted by him. And I think it's kind of like when I started to go report out the living legacy of eugenics and meet people who are affected and talk to them about the ways that they engage in community care and find their own will to live despite such horrific violence. Like, that's where I actually found something. It was like those people that actually taught me something. You wrote early in the book, you shared that initially there was so much that you admired about David Starr Jordan and his devotion to the hidden and the insignificant, his absurd walrus mustache, his steel backbone, the gritty resolve that prevented him from crumbling in the face of whatever misfortune came his way.

49:12And there were many. As the story unfolds, you do share your many, many discoveries of really nefarious and terribly, terribly troubling behavior. Did that impact how you felt about writing a book that was largely about him? I was too far in. I mean, the chuckle comes from would I have selected him and spent so much time just waltzing. I mean, literally smelling the pocket notebooks in his archives that I eventually visited that had been like collecting the sweat near his heart. Like I got intimate with this guy. And did you feel betrayed when you learned? Yeah. Or I just felt, I guess a little because, yeah, in particular, that line of his as a young naturalist, he had learned from this sweet old, you know, citizen scientist neighbor friend of his to care for the hidden and insignificant.

50:11Like, ignore the showy roses. Notice the dandelions and the buttercups. Like, you will learn more about the blueprint of life from that. And he took that to mean, like, you should care for the hidden and insignificant. And like, what a great guiding light. How do you go so wrong with that? And then literally create policies that want to get rid of the hidden and insignificant and not listen to them when they opposed him, too. We can all have bad ideas, but I also think his sin really started to come when he dug in and didn't listen to all the opposition. His stubbornness was his undoing. But yeah, of course, I think I felt betrayed and I also just felt angry and let down.

50:49I was like, oh, he doesn't have a, he's just another a-hole. I have nothing to learn from this guy about how to go on. I mean, his method is be a bulldozer of confidence and self-delusion and don't listen to anyone around you and don't care about the violence you enact on people. So that's not really going to help me. Like, I don't want to walk in that path. I think it was more just, I was just feeling like still lost. Like, oh, he had nothing ultimately to offer in that department. But I don't know. I don't feel, no, I'm grateful. I learned so much about our country and other lessons about how to be in the world that like if I hadn't followed his story, which turned out and I like a good twist.

51:31So I was actually happy he ended up in a weird way from a narrative point of view, going back to like Radiolab and just pure storytelling, keeping people hooked. The fact that he was dark, like that's an interesting thing to study because then you can ask how and he's not a villain. He's not evil. He's a person who had really good influences early on. So what went wrong? And like that to me is a very interesting thing to study. One of the stories embedded in Why Fish Don't Exist is the importance of naming things, both in science and beyond. And I'd like to read one of my favorite paragraphs in your book, which I think will give our listeners a real sense of your poetry, but also of the science.

52:16So here goes. There's an idea in philosophy that certain things don't exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin. The thinking goes that these concepts do not sit out there on some ethereal plane waiting to be discovered by humans, but instead snap into being when someone invents a name for them. The moment the name is uttered, the concept becomes real in the sense that it can affect reality. We can declare war, truce, bankruptcy, love, innocence, or guilt, and in so doing, change the course of people's lives. The name itself is a thing of great power then, the vessel that drags the idea from the imaginary to the earthly realm.

53:05Before the word, however, the thinking goes, the concept is largely inert. Yeah. As someone who does a lot of work in branding, which is about positioning reality in a way that you want people to see it and then giving it a name, this was revelatory, truly revelatory. And it goes all the way back to the way in which humans have named religions and have named their gods. And if you think about so many of our wars, most of them are about a god that we've named that may or may not exist or land that we've declared has borders which don't really exist. So I've been thinking about this now just obsessively, you know, how our naming something somehow gives us this entitlement to own it.

54:13Yeah. And alchemizes it. I think of like these experiments we did in chemistry class where you put the one thing in and it catalyzes it. And then suddenly you have something concrete in this clear solution. And that name, like tons of people have written about this in other ways, but just this idea that like the name itself is the catalyst to make an idea concrete enough to bludgeon people. It's not always bad. It can also really help people. But it becomes concrete enough to have impact at the level of like bruise and blood. It's weird. And it is, I think I see it around all the time now. How did researching the dandelion influence the way you think about hierarchy and certainty and mattering?

55:04That's a metaphor I love. You know, that's a word, a principle for me that's done a lot of good. I came across it years actually before I had worked on the book. And there was this, I think it was a Dutch company that operated on this idea called the dandelion principle. It was founded by a dad whose son was on the spectrum. And his idea was like his son was having all this trouble getting work. And his idea was that these certain qualities that many workplaces deem hard to work with, I think, could be really valuable in another context. And so he kind of it was sort of like an agency that helped people on the spectrum get work by showing the ways in which like everything that is making them considered like a weed is actually a valuable.

55:48It's kind of like a crass metaphor, but it's helpful. And he would, you know, for people designing airports, like they could work with folks who are on the spectrum to kind of tell in a quicker way, like, is this pathway too small? Because they're more sensory, they have like more sensory awareness. And like, they might be great at this, you know, so this idea that something we consider a weed or a problem may actually be this valuable herb is like the broad dandelion principle. And it's all about just how fully you're considering this organism and realizing that value is always defined from the outside and that like any organism, be it human or plant, has intrinsic value.

56:28And it's just thinking about how. I make the point in the book that that's something the eugenicists absolutely failed to consider, among many other things like morality. But also even if you want to create a supposedly strong, enduring race, you're going to want to include diversity in there. So they forgot about that scientific principle, too, if they wanted to do it. Mix things. But with the dandelion principle, I think it just that idea I talked about in relation to these two women, Anna and Mary, one of whom had they both been separated out by the state and put in an institution as a result of the eugenics policies.

57:04And one of them had been sterilized. Anna had been sterilized. And, you know, she had been seen as this weed, something to be plucked from the race. I mean, David Starr Jordan literally wrote a book on eugenics called The Human Harvest. And he thought about it like weeding, like planting, you know, and she talked about her scar. Like she has this state-sanctioned stamp of the fact that she has, it was believed to have no value and to have to look at that every day. And that was the idea. And then, of course, like meeting her and meeting her within her community where she's bringing the receptionist at her apartment building all these drawings.

57:39And she's hooking up her friend with this guy who she didn't want to date because she didn't feel like dating. But she, you know, and she's bringing, not that you have to bring light or be cheery to have value in existence, but in this particular instance, she's bringing so much value. She's strengthening the thread of society, which was exactly what the eugenicists believe she wouldn't be able to do. And it's just because they failed to consider her value. And it's like just this baseline, four-year-old could get it, philosophical principle. The value is in the eye of the beholder. And so to me, the dandelion principle just kind of really brings that together that obviously in some yards are considered weeds, but you use dandelions for herbs and certain teas and they can help with all kinds of eyesight and blood flow and things like that.

58:23So to me, it's a nice metaphor. And then dandelions are everywhere. And I just sort of feel affection and also like a reminder to keep considering value because why do it too? I'm judging people who use the word cerulean left and right. And I should check myself. So, Lulu, there's probably another 24 hours of questions that I could ask you about your book, and I'd still love to be able to do that, but I don't think it would be fair to do that to you here. and there's a bunch more that I want to talk to you about but we haven't covered one really important topic in the book that you hinted at earlier in our conversation and the realization that led to the book's title and then also sort of the ultimate irony to David Starr Jordan's life and the question is tell us why you titled the book Why Fish Don't Exist because it's true it's actually true Yeah.

59:20So basically, if you think about this is just a discovery made by ichthyologists, fancy word for fish scientists who are studying the biology of fish and the evolution of fish and how they're all related and where we fit in that tree of life. And the better and better scientists got at looking at that, analyzing DNA and all kinds of other things, they have come to realize that fish as a scientific category is not real. It's like a gerrymandered category is the best way, I think, to think about it. And specifically, if you were to take something like a salmon and a lungfish, which is one of those kind of big lobey fish, and a cow, and you look at them, you know, you would think the lobefish and the fish were closely related.

1:00:00But the truth is the lobefish and the cow are much more closely related. And so if you want to— Because of their lungs, is that right? Because of their lungs and because of what's going on in the inside and where they are actually on the tree of life, like when they came, when they split off. Cows and lungfish are far more closely related. And so if you want to keep all fishy things together in the ocean, like scaly, swimmy, fishy looking things, you can totally do that and you can call them fish. But you also need to include cows and birds and you and me and, you know, every vertebrate. So if you really want to keep using the word fish accurately, it would be a synonym for vertebrate.

1:00:38But if you care about making scientifically meaningful categories, fish just is not one in the way that something like reptiles or mammals really is. So the more scientifically accurate and useful thing to do is to say that fish don't exist. It is not a meaningful category. There's much more nuance there in the ocean. And for me, when you accept that, and it literally took me years of reading, interviewing and drawing diagrams to get it. I think I get it now. But once you accept that, it's kind of this invitation or maybe like a stop sign, a fish shaped stop sign. to think twice about every other category out there that you are have been told is is definitely real and you know in the eugenics movement that would be like crude terms like unfit you are unfit to carry on you are unfit you know declared with this scientific sobriety but anything and and and so for me it's just this reminder that like the categories we make nature has no hard lines we're constantly drawing categories over them whether they be colors or groups of people or things in the water.

1:01:49And it's just this reminder to investigate, like, is this category serving me? Is it serving the people trapped within it? Are the people within the category asking that you look closer? Or maybe it's about building shapes. I don't know. Like, it's just this big reminder, like, if something as basic and simple and not complex-seeming as fish isn't meaningful or real, what else do I have wrong? As I was reading your book and trying to wrap my mind around this, I was telling people about it, and I was using your example about people on a mountaintop and plaid and so forth. But I also realized the hubris that went into deciding that everything in an ocean is considered some type of fish, well, then wouldn't it mean that everything not in the ocean would be one giant species?

1:02:44Like, that's what it means. That's what this is. Yeah. And that example is mish, that like anything on a mountain, a mountain man, a snake, an eagle and a goat, those are all mish, you know? Right, right. They're mish because they're wearing or they're plish and they're wearing plaques. Yeah, right, right, right. And so, yeah. And I mean, I get it. And like people thought whales were fish for a long time and didn't know what sharks looked like really because like i get it we didn't we didn't invent the goggle until just a few decades back like we didn't see that world as much i get it why we would lump it together in this kind of unknown but yeah that's like it's as absurd as saying that yeah the goggle fact by the way i learned in our radio lab shark series, which we just did a week.

1:03:33We didn't do a shark week because that would be infringing on branding. So it was a Radiolab week of shark. And our reporter, Rachel, was the one who brought that to our attention. Like, wow, we haven't had goggles even for like a century. And that was so pivotal to some of your realizations at the end of Fish Don't Exist, Why Fish Don't Exist. It's true, the snorkel goggles, really. Yeah. You returned to Radiolab as one of the co-hosts in 2020. So you were coming out with a book and rejoining your family at Radiolab at the same time. What was it like to return to the show? Was it a hard decision to make?

1:04:15It was not a hard decision to make. I got the call that Robert and Jad were both kind of, Robert had stepped aside and Jad was getting ready to and they were thinking about new co-hosts and would I want to? And I was sitting in a parked car in Lincoln Park. It was like a, yeah, it was like a beacon. It was like, come home. And I had been away at that point for basically a decade. And I think I had along the way grown that backbone or whatever, you know, that sense of self. I had grown enough of a compass that I felt, I mean, I wanted to do journalism and I had been doing journalism. I had sort of already returned, but I think it was like, yeah, it was a dream.

1:05:02It was the show that got me into the medium. It was the show that told me I could still ask these kinds of questions as an adult and hunt for these kinds of stories where like our beliefs about the world are broken, which feels very sacred and urgent to me. And it's like a room full of nerds and And it's like the nicest team in the business. It was a dream. Yeah, really. I came upon a conversation that you wrote about, and I don't know exactly where it came from. I can look in my notes if it's something that you think is important. And it's you talking in first person. I left Radiolab kind of when that feeling came to a head where I was just like, I'm not cut out for this.

1:05:45I'm not courageous enough. I'm not X, Y, and Z enough. I'm too worried. I talked about it once with Jad from Radiolab, too, and I was thinking about coming back to radio or not. And I was like, if I have that voice, maybe I'm not meant to do this. And he said, no, that voice is what makes you good at it. That voice is the moral compass. I'd be concerned if you didn't have that voice. So it's useful to just realize that this is part of the job. It is just part of the job. and these questions have had to balance all these things and realizing you can bring in editors and colleagues. You don't have to go through it alone.

1:06:22It is what makes it better. And I wasn't sure if that was the conversation you were referring to earlier in our conversation today, or if that was something separate that you had with Jad as you were considering coming back to the show. Yeah, it was a little bit before. It was a couple years before. It was when I was leaving kind of this fiction world and actually deciding to go to NPR and work on what became Invisibilia. And it was that was the moment where I was like, I have left journalism, but I'm very intrigued about going back in, but I don't think I should. And I remember talking to him.

1:06:58I was living in Virginia at the time and really not in a confident place at all. Very unsure of the path ahead for anything in my life and just consumed by worry, like consumed. And yeah, and it was very liberating. He said exactly that. Like just if that worry wasn't there, I'd be worried. You know, that worry is the sound of your compass. That's great. And it felt like I had thought that worry cast me as exactly the wrong person for the job. And he was there spinning it to say it was right. And I still believe that. And I listen to it when I feel it coming up. And I think the other big thing is realizing you don't have to keep those worries private.

1:07:41Like they're not some symptom that you're doing it wrong. Those are exactly the things to like surface immediately and bat around with a big team. And the joy of collaboration also after writing a book, which was lonely. And I feel like I am in my collaboration era. I love it so much. That really helped me turn a corner on like what I'm what I think my calling is what I think I'm supposed to be doing on earth. And now I really I mean, I just love it. I love I feel so lucky. I mean, this is like such an honor to talk to you. But God, do I love being on the other side more? It's so fun. I feel the same way.

1:08:20Yeah, the same way. I only have a couple more questions for you. In my research and prep for today's show, I discovered you said something when Why Fish Don't Exist was first launched, first published. You stated this, I've just written my first and likely only book called Why Fish Don't Exist. You proved that inaccurate when you published your second book, a children's book titled Truckee Roads last year. What was it like to go from writing about such heady philosophical topics to creating a children's book? It was so fun. It was great. It was, I mean, watching it come alive with the artist, Huys Skip, who is just amazing, and then getting to take it out, you know, and also like describing it was so much easier.

1:09:11We spent weeks trying to figure out how to describe why fish don't exist. Never really got there. And then, you know, Truckee Roads is like, well, it's about trucks and also roads. But it was it was so fun. And getting to do the readings that I've done with kids is just such a delight. And there's an invitation at the end for kids to make up their own trucks and hearing what they invent is so great. And like it just writing it, it just kind of spilled out and it was inspired by this character my son made up because he loved trucks. And so it just kind of spilled out. I originally wrote it just for him.

1:09:50So the writing was like easy. It was done. I polished it a little and then I just got to have this incredible artist bring it to life. And so that it just was smooth, easy, fun, great. A very different journey. One of the things I thought was so fascinating about both of your books, there is a thread between them. They both include the phenomena of naming deeply embedded in the book DNA. Like they both are about creating language for objects. A hundred percent. And playing with it and seeing where, yeah, and they're kind of like busting up categories because it's just a very simple, the book is basically like naming different kinds of trucks, which was the kind of book my son just could not get enough of, excavate or whatever.

1:10:38But then playing with that a little and making up, you know, a tow truck versus a tow truck when the second one is a feed. Yeah, but it's like a truck taxonomy. Yeah. And actually, I am I'm supposed to hear back this week, but there might be a third book, which is another children's book, which is also about naming and categories. And this one is called The Book of Balls. And it's about different kinds of balls. It's about different kind of balls. But it's the same. It was watching my second son grow up and he was a little bit slower to language. And so he like ball was one of the only words he had for years.

1:11:15And we were like a little worried. But then we started to just see how many things were balls. So it's like all the balls at the gym, but also buoys and also pearls and also our doorknobs and like designed things and streetlight globes. But also, oh, my gosh, the Earth is a ball and the sun is a ball. And why does the universe crave a ball? And there's so many spheres. And so it's like it's playing with that. It's funny, as much as I'm wary of categories, that didn't start as a book. That just started as a list in my notes app of like everything he was calling a ball for years. and just noticing what words show us, what they blind us to.

1:11:55And I love that intersection between language and nature. I think it's infinitely interesting. You've recently launched another podcast. While you're doing Radiolab, you're now also, you've created it, you're hosting it. It's called Terrestrials. What motivated this new direction? So Terrestrials is our it's our family friendly show all about the strangeness right here on Earth. It's basically a nature show that is kid friendly. It came out of this really cramped moment where it was COVID and I has newly moved to Chicago, a city I didn't know that was cold. And I had two kids and our apartment.

1:12:36It was just everything felt cramped and everything felt dark. And I had like a lot of the stories I had reported over the years at Invisibilia and early days of Radiolab and even when I was first back. Like I'm interested in why things break down. I'm interested in hard stuff. Like a lot of them dealt with death or disability or violence or eugenics. Like I'm drawn to that. I want to understand those stories. But I think I was really missing nature. I was missing Virginia. Like I missed a lover, honestly. Like I was really heartsick and feeling stuck. I needed a shaft of light. Like I needed somewhere where I could think about nature, where I could get into nature in my mind.

1:13:17And we had during COVID, there were all these requests at Radiolab, there were all these requests coming in for listeners to create a kid-friendly feed. Because sometimes Radiolab is like, behold, the wonder of fireflies. And sometimes it's like, here's this horrific murder. Like it just it takes. So parents understandably wanted just kid friendly stuff to listen to with their kids. And so we had created that feed and we saw there was interest. There was hunger. And so I think I basically I made an episode without telling anyone because I always like to communicate in content. I don't like to communicate in ideas.

1:13:50I don't like to tell an idea before I've done it. So I like made this pilot episode that was a real life story of an octopus that escaped from a tank and slid down a drain pipe and returned to the ocean. And it's true. And it really happened. And the way it did it in the wonderful writer, Cy Montgomery, had written a children's book about it. She told me the story. But along the way, you get to learn like how it did that. And the fact that maybe not like not just wings can be convergently involved, but intelligence itself might be. And they maybe increasingly scientists think that octopuses have a real kind of intelligence.

1:14:25And yeah, it just came out of this desire to like alongside the harder, more complex stories to also have like when I feel stuck, I go to nature. I really do. And it opens me up. And I was just feeling stuck. Like I was watching where the world was going politically. I was watching climate change and COVID. And I was like, I don't know about human stories. I need to see how nature is doing things. I need to see places where nature is defying our expectations to it. And it was kind of, in all honesty, like at the very end of Why Fish Don't Exist, I say this whole tirade about, if you approach the world with more doubt, you'll see a more wild and beautiful world where everything's reverberating with possibility.

1:15:11which like fine pretty words but show me that world and so this this podcast is episode by episode trying to show a world where every episode breaks our expectations of how creatures are supposed to work and like we have stuff on symbiosis we have stuff like we have all kinds of different stuff but then the twist was making it for kids having my own kids I think showed me I had never babysat I just wasn't a kid person until I had them and I was like oh their brains like they have a high standard. I think I had looked down on children's entertainers and I still struggle to be like, I'm a children's entertainer.

1:15:44My wife's like, how am I going to still be attracted to you without that you're a clown? But they have a high bar. You have to like actually be, you have to have a good plot and you got to make them laugh. And they have really open minds. That's my favorite part. Like they don't, and I start every episode with a minute before I tell you what the thing is, because I don't want you to walk in with any expectations. And I think of that minute as like unscrewing the cap on the word. Maybe the episode's about an octopus, but maybe it's about a tree stump. But I don't want you to know that until you've thought a little about what it's like to be that creature.

1:16:21Anyway, it came out of that. And then the twist of making it for kids' brains. In many ways, I've found just like my dream creative soulmate, which is Alan Gafinski, who does all the songs and the music. And he'll write an original song or two for every episode. I sing on some of them. And like what that has opened up, like he is such a creative genius and he's so generous. It's not patronizing kid music. Like it's kind of decent. And it like it's more than decent. It's really good. It's really good. Yeah. And I can say that because he that's not me. That's that's him. And like he wears his heart on his sleeve, but he's also really silly.

1:16:59And he just he hadn't been in radio. So for him, it's really new. And it's like this way to play. He'd been a social worker. He'd been doing really different kinds of work. Fun fact about him. He used to hold the Guinness World Record for the longest hug. He's just like a he's a compassionate dude and a genius and like pushing down that fourth wall and playing in a space that's musical. And increasingly, I'm like, Alan, can I sing on this one, too? Like, anyway, there's just something that's been very incredibly vitalizing about playing in that space. So, yeah. So that's going to Lulu. My last question isn't really a question from me.

1:17:40OK. It is a question nonetheless. Earlier in the show, we talked about how you shared your fears about returning to radio with Jad Abumrad and how he helped you understand your strengths. And I've interviewed Jad for this podcast twice, and I've gotten to know him a little bit through mutual friends over the last years. So I reached out to him and I wanted to ask him what he thought might be a good question for you, given how well you know each other. And so he responded as follows with two questions. What would I ask her? I don't really know how to phrase this as a question, but Lulu, she's two things at once.

1:18:27She's one of the most joyful people you will ever meet. I think if you were to interview anyone who's worked with her, they would say that. She's also somebody who has dipped into periods of real darkness. She's written about this and why fish don't exist, that she had periods in her life where she really struggled. I've always felt like her creative engine and her approach to the stories that she tells somehow lives at the fault line between those two states. My questions are this. Are there stories or approaches that she embarks on now that she wouldn't have 10 years ago? And how has being a host and also being a parent played into that evolution?

1:19:11she's so freaking smart i know it's so lovely to be seen a lot of the time i'm making the work to survive i mean like terrestrials itself i mean hopefully the kid the kids don't have to feel this but that it's it's driven from needing to see a world that is less grim than the one that keeps showing itself it's like needing to see that there are ways to live harmoniously and ways to mend the world. It's like, if I don't find those, I won't be okay. So he's right about that. I mean, I do think like, just the uncool of it all, making a kid's show, singing on the radio, all that is something I wouldn't have done 10 years ago, because I would have cared more about perception.

1:19:56And now I just care about how good it feels to do it, and to find out those stories and make it with a team, like, I care. I think I care more about the process than I ever have. And I guess the other, I mean, so the other, it was like, you know, I'm even catching myself. I said, like, I don't want the kids to feel that burden in the show or whatever. But in a way, like, being a parent has made me see kids as full people. And when did my depression set in? Around seven. Like, actually, I do want this to be extending a hand in a subtle, like, not laborious, labored way, but in a subtle way that says, just as the world might feel like it's closing in with no magic or hope, like there is some and it's right here on earth if you look close.

1:20:41Like it's, there are other ways to be. And they worked for millions of years. And maybe we can draw design inspiration there. Being a parent also has made me think more about the future. And I think one of the things I'm reporting on now for an adult book I'm working on is trying to look at different ways that we can mend the world through community care, maybe through some mutual aid, just different ways that that's done in human societies and plants and animals. And I think that topic would have felt way too daunting to take on 10 years ago. And now it feels like urgent and exciting. Lulu Miller, thank you so much for making so much work that matters.

1:21:23And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you so, so much. Thanks for having me. You can listen to lots more about and from Lulu on the podcast Radiolab and Terrestrials. You can read more about her and about the world in her truly remarkable book, Why Fish Don't Exist. This is the 20th year we've been podcasting Design Matters. And I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, We can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions.

1:22:07The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.