Best of Design Matters: Lulu Miller

Introducing Lulu Miller

0:00This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in August of 2025. She 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 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.

0:33I'm messing with people's lives. I'm making people feel worse. I don't belong here.

0:39From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:46On 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.

1:18Lulu 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,

1:49Why 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. Lulu Miller, welcome to Design Matters.

The hatred of cerulean

2:19Oh, 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

2:49for 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. I 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.

3:20Do 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. Oh yeah. Who are you trying to shut out with that word? And what pedestal are you trying to put yourself on top of? Yeah, I really have beef with that word. Well, in the four color printing process, we have a bunch of different colors, one of which is a word that I hate,

3:52but 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.

4:05Really 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.

Childhood writing and nihilism

4:27Lulu, you grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Your father was a science professor. Your mother was a professor of humanities. Not 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.

4:57So this long sheet of paper would emerge with your writing. How long did the accordion paper get? I mean, it would be long. 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 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. And then the paper itself would feel like sledding.

5:29Like I could go anywhere. And, you know, I'm still doing it. I mean, right here, I still kind of 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

5:59and 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 words being able to, in moments, become drawings and then go back to words. And, yeah, it's like I'm getting chills right now thinking about it just because it felt so delicious and fun,

6:30like a really neat way to just kind of escape. I 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 don't know why we were so afraid of the bat, but it was some instinctual, like, human fly,

7:01they'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 and 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,

7:33you 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? 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, there'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,

8:04including 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. We happen, you know, 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 we'll probably be gone soon and things like cockroaches and horseshoe crabs will probably outlive us and we're not any more important to the world or the planet than anything else

8:34and 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

9:05and in a sort of, like, playfully provocative way. He certainly says that and 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.

9:37It'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.

10:08Like, 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. Um, so I think it just felt like, hmm, okay, well, that feels like truth.

10:39And 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. So 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.

11:13And 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 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

11:44talking 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. I 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

12:15and 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, and 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,

12:45like, 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. I couldn't find a reason not to. Although I guess, obviously, I did, because, spoiler alert, I'm still alive. Well, you described feeling

13:17at 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

13:48really 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. Yeah. 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

14:18to 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,

14:26A, 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, okay, 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, I think, okay, you know what I think it partly was? Because I don't have that much faith in

14:57or 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

15:27differently she could be if you were kind to her or not. Like, it'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, like, 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

15:58I'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. What 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

16:29someone 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. My mom worried about me.

17:01I 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

17:32and be cared for. At 16, you finally found a therapist. You've stated the charade finally stopped. And I'm really curious, what did she help you understand that no one else was able to up until that point?

Finding radio at a woodworking shop

17:47Monica 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 beyond. Just like it was okay to have

18:18these hard thoughts and that just felt like part of living and she really didn't care as much about 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 space that could be really real and feel someone being really curious about me.

18:41At 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. And I think, again, I just wanted to like minimize interactions with the real world because they stressed me out, they made me sad and they drained me and I was intimidated.

19:13And so my dream life was to like curl away from it all day.

19:20But 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. I just want to

19:50learn 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. Oh yeah, I lived in a railroad flat with two other people. It was challenging. You began working as a woodworker's

20:21assistant. 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 and 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

20:52and 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 and 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.

21:22And 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 Lopate, like just the morning news, I think I was absorbing information. That's when I

21:52realized 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

22:23was 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, internal love letter to Radiolab in order to trick them into giving you a job. 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

22:53the whole 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. I could be your cilantro, let me be your cilantro. And that was, and then I remember because

23:23they 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

23:54and the psychologists 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.

24:06And 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, 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

24:36and put on the headphones, take this like, you know, super invasive shotgun mic out. And, 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

25:07people fall on the liking or not liking their bowel movements? I mean, a surprising amount of people answered that they did. I 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 it 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

25:38and funny and 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. 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, that was, I was always

26:09pitching 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. We've still never done a show, but part of me is like, you know, as hosts, maybe I should bring that back. But, and I remember I kept pitching this story about cowbirds who lay their eggs in other birds' nests and it got a

26:39no, 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. But 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.

27:11And 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. You learned how to make radio at a time when listeners couldn't pause or rewind or fast forward. Did that change impact

27:41the 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, this story has to be a freight train. Someone turns on the radio and it's whizzing by and you want to get on no matter where you turn it on. And so that would

28:12mean basically the narrative and the tape was so interesting you'd 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,

28:43but 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. like 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

29:14I'm trying to create in a way that makes you forget you have buttons.

Leaving Radiolab and writing fiction

29:18You 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? Probably the two biggest things are one, it taught me at least in conversation

29:50and in interviewing to go for the question you're actually wondering about and I just saw time and time again someone making this move that the part of me growing up that was afraid of hurting 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 were working on the show just ask the person what they really wondered and like how dignifying

30:20that 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 and 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

30:50and 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 I 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

31:21so 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

31:52you can hear almost like a flatness there was just a low tolerance for that and 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 that excludes people you left Radiolab to go to the University of Virginia to

32:22fulfill 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 did that how did that impact your decision to leave Radiolab and go back to school so the breakup the me cheating leading to a breakup happened about a month into the program so I left okay so it wasn't like the clean line of oh I'm hurting and I'll go but I

32:53think 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

33:24and 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 force 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 she was just like and the power went out and there was this very eerie interview and she finally looked at me and was just like what are you doing

33:55here your questions aren't going to bring him back and 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 like backbone I don't have the like ethical compass to be doing

34:26this 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 I'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 they're journalists who are tough who have that ethical like they 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 you know the breakup happened right right at the beginning and I just spent these two years in many ways it was so dreamy

34:57it 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 I 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 admire people who can write a novel like for me staying in my head

35:28was 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 and 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

35:59a topic that had been coming back into your consciousness at that

Discovering David Starr Jordan

36:05time

Discovering David Starr Jordan

36:06was 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

36:36story I'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 and with us and tornadoes will come and earthquakes will come

37:06and 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 and we never we just keep doing it it's like in the face of these ultimately doomed

37:36odds we're all gonna die everything we make is gonna 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 not it's not just that it destroyed it it separated the names from the specimens like it felt reverse biblical reverse genesis

38:06like your knowledge your order is ripped off if 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

38:36is gonna 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 he was flying too close to the earthquake like my thought was okay you're gonna sew it to a fish but then something else will happen a fire or like whatever you know a flood or decay 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 in that time

39:07in 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 what happened to him what happened to his collection you ended up writing a 35 page single spaced essay what set

39:38this fire in you again I think it was like the belief that I was going to write this one page prose poem man versus chaos find out was he a cautionary tale or did things end okay you know I think I was kind of hoping for his demise but also hoping not I don't know and then it just you know 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

40:09he 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

40:39years 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 and 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

41:10of 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 I 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

41:41species 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

42:11world views him and has diluted his scientific contributions in many ways you 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

42:42he is an expert in protecting his self-image if anything he does reveal that I mean he talks about how his colleagues would would would comment upon how you know basically I don't have it exactly right but it's like no matter how how things got down or went wrong for me I always whistled as though I didn't have a care in the world like 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

43:13relationship 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 the welcome arch crumbled and there's all this stuff and he manages to like blame it on Jane

43:43Stanford there's this little thing where he's like because she was in a haste to create so much

43:53other people now that I know more about the story 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 or 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

44:23positive it's almost breathtaking to watch your

Why Fish Don't Exist

44:28book 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 was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the

44:58American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize Congratulations on all of these accolades and achievements 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

45:29to 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 I think I felt so unsure of how to have how

45:59do 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 enough will to push forward and so that's what I was searching for in David 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

46:29was searching for I 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 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

47:00therefore 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 and 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

47:31to 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 I just at that time when I started reading the book I just didn't know about the American eugenics movement I didn't know about the ways in which Nazis were inspired by certain things we did or we were inspired by early texts

48:01by Germans and I just didn't know about the whole history here and how we had eugenics state fairs and competitions and sterilizations and there 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 and then I sort of like woke up and became a reporter and was like oh there are people living

48:32today 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 taught me something you wrote early in the book you shared that initially there was so much that you admired

49:02about David Star Jordan and his devotion to the hidden and the insignificant his absurd walrus mustache steel backbone the gritty resolve that prevented him from crumbling in the face of whatever misfortune came his way and 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

49:33you 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 like 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

50:04guess 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 like ignore the showy roses notice the dandelions and the buttercups like you will learn more about the blueprint of life from that and

50:28what 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 moral stubbornness was his undoing but yeah of course I think I felt betrayed and I also just felt angry and let down I was like oh he doesn't have a he's just another a-hole I

50:59have 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 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

51:29country and other lessons about how to be in the world that like if I hadn't followed his

51:39point of view going back to like radio lab 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

52:10both 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 so 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

52:41instead 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 truth bankruptcy love innocence or guilt and in so doing change the course of people's name itself is a thing of great power then the vessel that drags the idea from the imaginary to the earthly realm before the word however

53:12the thinking goes the concept is largely inert yeah as someone who does a lot of work in branding 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

53:42and 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

54:12something somehow gives us this entitlement to own it yeah 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 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

54:42to 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 that's a metaphor I love you know that's

55:12a word a principle for me that's done a lot of good I I came across it years actually before I had worked on the book and there was this I think it was 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

55:42so he kind of it was sort of like an agency that helped people on the spectrum get work by showing the ways in which everything that is making them considered a weed is actually a valuable it's kind of like a crass metaphor but it's helpful for people designing airports they could work with folks who are on the spectrum to tell in a quicker way is this pathway too small because they have more sensory awareness so this

56:13idea that something we consider a weed or a problem may actually be this valuable herb is 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 and 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

56:44create 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 yeah 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 both been separated out by the state and put in an institution as a result of the eugenics policies and 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

57:14the 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 and

57:45she'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

58:15beholder 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 so to me it's a nice metaphor and 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 Lulu

58:46there'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

59:02important 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 so basically if you think about this is just a discovery made by ichthyologists fancy word for fish scientists

59:32who 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 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 to think about it and and specifically if you were to take something like a salmon and a lung fish which is one of those kind of big lobey fish and a cow and you look at them you

1:00:02know you would think the lobe fish and the fish were closely related but the truth is the lobe fish and the cow are much more closely related because of their lungs and because of what's going on

1:00:22and 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 but if you care about making scientifically meaningful categories fish just is not one in the way that something like

1:00:53reptiles 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 is 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

1:01:23shaped stop sign to think twice about every other category out there that you have been told 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 declared with this scientific sobriety but anything 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 and

1:01:54it'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 just 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

1:02:25this I was telling people about it and I was using your example about people on a

1:02:36deciding 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 like 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 or

1:03:06and so yeah and I mean I 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

1:03:36our radio lab shark series which we just did a week we didn't do a shark week because that would be infringing on branding so it was a radio lab 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

1:03:59the snorkel goggles really yeah

Returning to Radiolab

1:04:02yeah um you returned to radio lab as one of the co-hosts in 2020 so you were coming out with a book and rejoining your family at radio lab at the same time what was it like to return to the show was it a hard decision to make it was not a hard decision to make I got the call that Robert and dad were both

1:04:29and they were thinking about new co-hosts and would I would I want to and I I was sitting in a parked car in Lincoln Park 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

1:05:00to 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 it 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

1:05:27the nicest team in the business it was a dream yeah really I came upon a conversation that you wrote about or 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 radio lab kind of when that feeling came to a head where I was just like I'm not cut out for this I'm not courageous enough I'm not X Y and Z enough I'm too worried I talked about it once with Jad from radio

1:05:58lab 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 a balance all these things and realizing you can bring in editors and colleagues you don't have to go through it alone it

1:06:28is 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

1:06:58I'm very intrigued about going back in but I don't think I should and I remember talking to him I 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

1:07:29it 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 and I think the other big thing is realizing you don't have to keep those worries private like 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

1:07:59was lonely and I feel like I am in my collaboration era I love it so much that really helped me turn a corner on what I think my calling is what I think I'm supposed to be doing on earth and now I mean I just love it I love I feel so lucky I

Children books and categories

1:08:36published you stated this I have 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

1:09:06come alive with the artist who is just amazing and then getting to take it out you know and also like describing it was so much easier we 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 you know but it was so fun and getting to do the readings that I've done with kids is just

1:09:37such 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 so 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

1:10:07a 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

1:10:25language 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 and but then playing with that a little and making up you know a tow truck versus it's like a truck taxonomy yeah and actually I am I'm supposed to hear

1:10:55back 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 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 ball was one of the only words he had for years and we were a little worried but then we started to just see how many things were balls

1:11:26so 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 everything he was calling a ball for years and just noticing what

1:11:57words show us what they blind us to and I love that intersection

1:12:09while you're

Creating the podcast Terrestrials

1:12:11doing 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

1:12:41apartment it 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 invisibility on early days of Radiolab and even when I was first back 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

1:13:11like I was really heart sick 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 and we

1:13:28to create a kid friendly feed because sometimes radio lab is like behold the wonder of fireflies and sometimes it's like here's this horrific murder 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 tell an idea before I've done it so I like made

1:13:58this 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 Simon Montgomery had written a children's book about it she told me the story but along the way you get to learn how it did that and the fact that maybe not just wings can be convergently involved but intelligence itself might be and maybe increasingly scientists think that octopuses have a

1:14:29real kind of intelligence and 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 needed I did I was like I don't know about human stories I need to see how nature is doing things I need to

1:14:59see places where nature is defying our expectations to it and it kind of in all honesty like at the very end of why fish don't exist I say this whole like 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 which like fine pretty words but show me that world and so this podcast is episode by episode trying to show a world where every episode breaks our expectations

1:15:33twist 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 my wife's like how am I going to be attracted to you that you have a high bar you have to have a good plot and you gotta make them laugh and they have really open minds

1:16:04that's my favorite part 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 unscrewing the cap on the word maybe the

1:16:22that until you thought a little about what it's like to be that creature anyway it came out of that and then the twist of making it for kids brains in many ways I found my dream creative soulmate which is Alan Gofinski 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 what that has opened up he is such a creative genius and he's so generous it's not patronizing kid music it's

1:16:53kind of decent it's more than decent it's really good and I can say that that's not me that's him and he wears his heart on his sleeve but he's also really silly and he just he hadn't been in radio so for him it's really new and it's this way to

1:17:15him he used to hold the Guinness World Record for the longest hug he's just like 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

Art at the fault line

1:17:41my last question isn't really a question from me okay 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 we 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

1:18:11to 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 okay 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 she's one of the most joyful people you will ever meet I think if

1:18:39she'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

1:19:09and how has being a host and also being a parent played into that evolution she's so freaking smart I know it's so lovely to be seen a lot of the time and making the work to survive I mean like terrestrials itself I mean hopefully the kids don't have to feel this but that 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

1:19:40see 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 kids 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 and 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

1:20:11think 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 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

1:20:41it's closing in with no magic or hope like there is some and it's and it's right here on earth if you look close like 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

1:21:11ways 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 and 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 radio lab and terrestrials you can

1:21:43read 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

1:22:01I'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 the 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 Wyland