Listener supported WNYC Studios. Wait, you're OK? You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC, all relative, if you can rewind your mind back to a time when your life wasn't dominated by Alan Funt and Candid Camera, like, how did how did this start?

So I first I unlike a lot of people, I did not grow up watching Candid Camera. I had never heard of Candid Camera when I was a kid.

You've never heard of Candid Camera? No.

Well, how have you heard of the Declaration of Independence? That ringing the bell? Did Allen Funt, right? No, but it's sort of he's up there and it's a very noticeable cloak.

He is actually. No, no. A founding father in a way of a different sort.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. When you least expect it, you're expected you're the one today just to set that up.

So there used to be a time in our media history where, like, the line between show and life was really clear. But along came a guy named Alan Funt who muddied that line in a way that was fascinating and would vitamin A. But in fact, spiritually speaking, I think those bite marks are on all of our butts.

So check your tush and listen to the story from our producer. Lots of Nassr. So I first heard about Candid Camera a few years ago. And I when I did, I just dove in deep, like I just binged all of I watched every single clip I could get my hands on.

And then that's around the time when I found out that it started as a radio show, which was even more interesting to me because I was like a radio show. I was like, like, how does that even make sense? Like, what is that even what would that be?

So I called up one of the few people who have studied us. That's right.

So I'm Jacob Smith, an associate professor at Northwestern University's School of Communication and the director of Northwestern Master's in Sound Arts and Industries.

And it turns out there's this kind of wonderful, kind of creepy back story. Do you just want to start with World War Two? Yeah.

So during World War two, Alan Funt was working in the Signal Corps, like Al Gore is known as the nerves of the arm, the kind of communications arm for the armed forces at that time.

So Funt, he's a few years out of college. By this point, he is stationed in Oklahoma at Camp Gruber and his job there is to make radio shows for the Armed Forces Radio.

One of these shows is called The Great Booth.

The grape grippy, the grape buth, yeah, basically the show worked like this, Funt would get your station at the camp to come into his studio and talk about their grapes, about like their barracks and about the food and about, you know, their girlfriend is cheating on him back home or whatever, you know, things that were bothering them.

Things not a very good idea for morale. Oh, I think it's a great idea for her, really. I would imagine it would bring the soldiers down.

It would bring them down, but maybe it would bring them together. Fair enough. Anyhow, so he's bringing these soldiers into his little recording studio. And one of the things that he found was that as soon as the red light would go on to indicate that recording was going on, they'd clam up, they would get tongue-Tied.

This idea is actually called Mike, right? Mike. Right, Mike. Right.

And he tells these stories about how it was amazing to see these soldiers who would go out into battle without maybe blinking an eye, but break into a cold sweat at the thought of sitting in front of a microphone.

So what's he what does he do? Well, so his solution was to disconnect the red light and record them secretly. So basically, he'd bring them in and say, OK, let's just do a practice round. Let's just talk over the things, the kinds of things you will talk about. It's just for practice. And then when then finally they were ready to start, he's like, nah, nah, I already got it.

He would get better material when they didn't know they were being recorded.

Would they be OK with that said? Well, you would get permission afterwards.

So is that a lie? No, I don't think it's a lie anymore. It's a sort of truth deferred, you might say.

But according to Jacob Smith, funned was like, this is a great trick.

Yes. You know, the red light goes off in the great booth, but a red light goes on in funds' mind.

And so after the war, he pitches this idea as canted microphone, the kind of microphone which goes on the air on ABC in 1947, the program that brings you the secretly recorded conversations of all kinds of people as they react in real life to all kinds of situations.

No one ever knows when he's talking and that kind of like a mini me, me, me, me, me tomorrow or.

All right, so this is Sunny Fox, and he was one of the original guys to work with Allen on Candid Microphone. I can. It just so happened when he came into our studio.

We managed to catch him on our candid microphone. Can you hear me?

I can. That is tepid water. Tepid water. I'm sorry. The water's not, you know, not to my life. Up to snuff. Yeah. Yeah.

And my standards. Why is my throat so tightly?

That's the tepid water. Now all of a sudden it's not. So bourbon would have helped.

All right. OK, we're here to talk about much more exciting things, I think. So when you were working with Allen on Candid Microphone, what was he like? Like, how did you see him?

Like, Allen was a very able, very bright young guy. He had a face of an man, these big chipmunk cheeks, rather short and a little plump, probably about five, ten.

And he could charm you when he wanted to try me right out of your shoes.

Or he could be wildly maniacal, overwrought person. I mean, he had this huge temper, Tony says, when they were just starting to show sometimes Allen would get so mad that he would throw things sometimes like throwing pencils at other producers.

Well, there were only four of us.

And the secretary, that was it. That was the core of what we did. And we all had to do everything.

I mean, Allen, the man with the hidden microphone, might even get around to you someday. That man was Allen. Allen was the arbiter, obviously, of whether we did something or didn't know what was like.

What was the goal for the show?

The goal was to allow us to reflect people as they are in their unguarded moments. We try to bring in the real McCoy on Candid Microphone.

That's what fascinated funned the beauty of everyday conversation.

We go out of the studio into the world, everyday life, capturing candid glimpses of people like you, what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls bugging the backstage.

So what we would do is every day Sunny and crew would go to their office in Manhattan, this two room office, sit down at their desks and think up ideas separately, scratching our heads and say, Allen, what about this?

I got to shave every day. If I don't shave, my wife gets right after me.

Like, what if we bugged a barbershop or a magazine stand? Oh, maybe that's something we could, you know, work with our friends or green restaurant or shoe store. I don't know.

We're so what they do is they take this big clunky portable recorder. It was like a suitcase.

It would, I think maybe sixty pounds. But they put a handle on top and said it's portable.

He says that they would lug around this massive suitcase to wherever it was they were recording and they try to hide it so that no one would see it, so they could record this tape, which they did in all these different locations, including.

The women's bathroom, I don't know what to say to them. I really don't.

But by and large, the tape they gathered was disappointed to discover that it was the most uninteresting garbage you could imagine.

Yeah, it was frustrating. It doesn't have, you know, the nice shape, the rise and fall, the climax that is going to keep listeners hooked now.

That presented us with a knee problem, they had a half hour show, prime time that they needed to fill. Here's how desperate I was. I was having a date. Your first date with a young woman? Yeah, I bugged my car and try to see how she would sound on a first date.

She found out about that was not amused.

And that was the last one. How did it go, though? I was not very interested.

You got to that point where anything was you was so desperate to get stuff you did unlikely things like that.

So here they had this show that was supposed to be about real people, real talk, everyday conversation.

But it turned out that sucked. So then the question became, how can we mix it up? How can we stir it up? How can we change this into something more spectacular?

And that's what Allen Funt added. A little wrinkle. It's something that Jacob Smith is called. I was calling it the real. So the basic idea of the rule is that instead of just letting people yammer on which didn't seem to work, you got to get in there, you got to juice the action to get that right shape.

The man with a hidden mic had a good one when he dropped in the helicopter. Would you start to hear in Candid Mike is like these strange situations like he he would go into a tailor shop with a microphone up his sleeve and he would ask the guy, I have to have a suit of clothes made up.

A kangaroo. Kangaroo. That's right. Oh, you can handle that. Like, here's another one. Play the moaning Trump.

This is Sunny's favorite. He says that one day they called a mover to come over to their office to move this truck or tamper with it now and inside the trunk.

The mover didn't know this was a guy and his job was to sound eerie, to basically moan every time the mover tried to move that trunk.

Just be very gentle with the. Oh, what it never mind. Just just take it and make that noise.

I want to forget it. I'm laughing now. We've been trying to get rid of this thing since. I don't know what a day. Never mind. Delivered to one hundred and eighty. Give us a slip. What do you mean a slip.

I want to have a signature on it that I want to have to sign for that they got from the film got off such great moments.

The classic format that worked for Alan was getting people into situations. I was on a day where they were frustrated. Oh, it's none of your business. What makes that kind of noise? There's no noise. You don't hear anything? Me? I don't hear anything. Come on. We've been waiting since last night. Let's get this thing out of here.

And it just keeps going and going and going. It gives me the creeps to the animals with. I don't know. Oh, come on, don't be silly.

Never mind what it is. Just driving them nuts.

What's in the trunk until finally he is your twenty dollars.

They look for another trautmann, they lose their temper and we get to the music. That's the climax, that's the closure now the whole thing has a shape, it starts slow and then crescendo, crescendo, crescendo, boom.

He's inventing this new kind, a new format of entertainment. It sounds totally obvious, but this is basically like reality TV in a nutshell. Like this is one of the first times where you have that familiar hybrid of this highly artificial and constructed situation.

But then inside of it, a snippet of life.

We've all been there, situations where we've been frustrated, where we don't understand what's going to situations where we bewildered to Funt would start pushing this format, tweaking it, changing it, trying out new permutations.

And sometimes it's very much like a fly on the wall.

You know, these these kind of poignant segments of listening to Thomaston together, a wife trying to wake up her husband starting the clock rang 15 minutes ago. I have. Yeah, that one's kind of beautiful.

Uh, it's a pretty dramatic Hilty. So intimate is what's so incredible.

Right. It's got a lot to do today. It's supposed to be in early in this one funned. Got the wife to be in on the gag.

Come on, darling. You can't use the bathroom stall. And what if you're up? But now they have this really a long way. Would you please get up? No, please go away. Tom. I think it's take a technicality, feel good if you don't get lost. I don't like you talking to me that way once and for all. I want to get up out of the. All right. All right. Well, that's a good move.

It's very late. It's nine o'clock. Nine o'clock.

So, you know, get this beautiful backstage glimpse of everyday life, but where do we stop?

And obviously, it did prompt letters, a few hisses and catcalls. Have you heard the one where I was just listening to it the other day where we're a listener writes in to complain about that one? Yeah. Yeah. That was actually really cool. Yeah, but tell us tell us about it.

Well, so one lady took us at our word and wrote us a few well-chosen ones that really made our ears burn.

She's writing in to complain that this was, you know, crossing a line. So what Funt does is he goes up to her door to talk to her, but he goes with a hidden mic.

I with the American Broadcasting Company. And I wonder if I could have just a couple of minutes of your time. That's right. There you go. It's a letter the other day about one of our program called a Candid Microphone, and I gather from your letter that you don't like it very much. No, I don't. Well, what are some of the things you find objectionable about it? But I don't like it because I think it's snooping outand out taking outand out snooping right.

In your letter, you said you said a little instead of a little more strongly, you said you thought were a bunch of dirty sneaking spies. Well, I suppose at the time when I was listening to the program, I felt that way. You get these people in their homes extemporaneously. I heard that when talking about being what was it you went into the man's bedroom? Oh, you mean the one where where the wife awakened the heart, awakened the husband.

And there was the poor fellow who needed no use talking or speaking for the public. They sort of put him in a bad light, don't you think? Well, you may have something here, but don't you think it's funny to sound a man makes when he awake and yes, they're funny, but there only for him now in his own bedroom. And I'm sure he doesn't enjoy having the whole world know about it. Do you? Well, did you or do you think most people are nervous and self-conscious in front of a microphone?

Not anymore. I think most people take the microphone very nicely. Do you feel you talk about the same way of, you know you know, you were talking to your microphone right now? Yes, I would be no different whatsoever. No different. Well, let me show you, this is a microphone. And what you just said is ready to go out from coast to coast. Does that make any difference to you at this point? They say the way the line are coming in here and talking to you this way.

Do you think we took an unfair advantage of you? I think so. At the moment, this conversation may not be worth a nickel, but would you like to have it on the air? Yes, you would want that one, because I want the whole world to know my opinion on this program. Oh, my God, that's amazing. She just switched. Exactly. And you can hear in her voice this weird tension, right? I have this one adviser.

Her name is Jill Lepore. She has this idea. I'm bastardising it. But to put it crudely, like we all kind of have these two drives, one drive for privacy. We don't want people in our bedrooms listening to us. That is the height of creepiness. And then on the other hand, we have this drive for publicity. It's exciting to be the star and it's exciting to have people pay attention to you. And these two drives the drive for privacy and the drive for publicity are sort of competing in us.

So coming up, that tension, well, it just takes off literally.

Actually, little takes up. Yes. And gets super interesting. That's after the break. I'm Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Stay with us. This is Josh Laroche calling from Los Angeles. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at W w w dot Sloan dot org Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a science foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

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Remember the great courses plus dotcom slash radio.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radio Lab. Let's get back to our story from a producer, a lot of Nassr about Alan Funt, the man with a hidden microphone where we left off. He had just made a radio show called Candid Mic.

Well, so it did. In fact, people like this program, was it a hit?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It moves pretty quickly to television and the camera with Alan Fun in the spring of 1949. The show premieres on NBC. Welcome to the Candid Camera program and the show.

It's the exact same premise set up weird or frustrating situations. Try and catch people's reactions.

But when the show goes out on TV and here's the man who gone, according to Jacob Smith, it just doesn't catch on. A lot of viewers think that it's mean spirited, that the subjects are being somehow mistreated. There were critics who were very unnerved and upset by it. There were people, certainly. But what did the critics say? Oh, man, I made a list here of of a whole bunch of the criticisms from the 40s and 50s.

And they're great. They're like so like they're so sweeping.

So, OK, so so there is this one guy in The New Yorker, this is in 1950 who said and I love this, I love this for my money.

Candid Camera is sadistic, poisonous, antihuman and sneaky.

There was another hold on. There was another kind of great string of adjectives. Let me just find it. There's so many of these here. Another guy, a different guy from The New Yorker, he he found Allen Funt course nagging, suspicious and misanthropic.

And to make matters worse, zests fully so well.

But I mean, I think that becomes kind of a PR problem that he has to fix. And according to Jacob Smith, it was not a small problem. No. When it first aired and even all through the 50s, the show it's on and off doesn't really get its audience moves around different networks. And all the while, he's tweaking it and changing it, adapting it. And in the early 60s.

He hits on something. A second little tweak that would make all the difference Font's term was the reveal, the reveal. Now he's done it here and there, but by 1962, he locks it in. You start to see this thing happen over and over at the end of segments. It's it's so commonplace now that it seems crazy.

Someone even had to invent a classic reveal is let's say the gag is in a diner and they're serving this guy a tiny little teacup. What does it make up? And he wanted a big coffee mug and they serve him this tiny little teacup. And he's like, what? What's going on? I have a cup of coffee. So this guy gets pissed off and previously funned would have let that keep going.

But now, right as the guy is about to blow funned either walks out himself or he sent someone out and they they kind of grab the guy and they're like, see the camera and they show him the hidden camera on camera.

And as he's looking at that hidden camera and he's like, oh, the camera zooms in on his face.

And Jacob Smith says that sometimes fun would would even actually have to hold the people in place for that very moment because one of their first reactions are to turn away or to cover their face. So he would sometimes have to physically restrain them and turning them towards the camera so that they can capture that one fleeting moment. And in that moment, you see so much on their face.

They're angry, they're embarrassed, they're ashamed, they're confused. They don't know how to feel.

And then right at that moment, Funt says the magic words, smile, you're on Candid Camera and it's all everything's absol all decided OK, everything is OK.

And then, of course. But when you least expect it that you're the star today and smile, you're on Candid Camera. Yeah, here I am. I'm telling you something, something hocus-pocus. You're focused here.

It's your lucky day. Lucky day.

That's interesting. So it went from being like who you've been to. You're like Oh thank you. Fun.

Yeah. And this works much better I take it. Yeah, I was hugely successful.

It was one of the top rank shows from basically all of the early 1960s. Millions, if not tens of millions of people watched it. And I think part of the reason why was that without that sort of meanness, they had bled out the meanness and people could now sort of freely see it as what it really was, which were these kind of little peepholes into human nature. Like the first one I ever saw was the the elevator sketch.

Do you know the elevators, you know, to walk me through. Oh, the elevator sketch.

It's just really simple. It's really simple. And it's so beautiful.

The gentleman in the elevator now is a cat. It's the basic setup is guy walks into an elevator, there's a hidden camera.

He doesn't know it is a fella with his hat on in the elevator.

He is like everybody else wearing his overcoat and a hat, and he stands in the middle of the elevator. And then all of the other people in the elevator who we later learned are Confederate.

They they take off and take off their hats and one by one by one, one hat off to hats off, five hats off.

You're watching him through the open elevator door. And he's just sort of standing there awkwardly. And then he just sort of little by little, hesitantly, he just takes off his hat and then holds it in front of his chest.

And how do you think we could reverse the procedure? What then?

All of the people around him, they put their hats back on then and he sort of is looking around and like it's almost it's happening at somewhere between conscious and subconscious level.

And then he sort of just puts his back on. It's really funny.

It's really this guy wasn't in on it. He was not even on it.

He clearly just was trying to to fit in in this weird way.

It's interesting, though, like, I never watched the TV show when I was young, but it's weird. Like when I was seven, we still we would say all the time, like, smile, you're on Candid Camera, even though I'd never seen the show.

So it was like the idea of the show was like in a way way bigger than the actual show.

Yeah, it kind of became a meme, but but it was less about kind of investigating human behavior and more about vanity in this weird way.

It was like this idea that you, this tiny sliver of your private life could be excised and then broadcast to the world.

And that idea, that idea would get away from Alan Funt and it would go all over the world and then it would come right back and bite him in the butt in this really funny and strange way.

What happened? Well, OK, it starts like this. Hi. Hi, how are you? Come on in.

We'll start the story with this woman. Oh, we are now Marilyn Funned, the ex-wife of Alan Fund. And we're on. Do you want me to start when we're on the plane? OK, so it's February 3rd, 1969, New York Airport.

That's Marilyn Funster. Alan Funds daughter, Juliette Fund.

My mom, my dad, my baby brother and I are on a flight straight flight to Miami, and I'm about one and a half, so I don't have any personal recollection of it. But she says she knows this story because it's like family law.

So we were in first class and we're on the flight, a largely uneventful flight.

Thank you so much for playing with us for about the first 20 minutes, maybe an hour.

Who knows? There are about one hundred miles or so offshore. And, you know, they get their meals, you go to the bathroom and all of a sudden.

A man stood up in the back of the flight and he took out a knife and he put it to the throat of one of the flight attendants, and he walked her all the way down the center aisle and into the cockpit.

Passing every passenger on the flight. I did hear noises which were a little bit different in the back. That's Fred Weaver, retired Eastern Airlines pilot.

He was one of the flight crew. And next to him. Yes, sir. Co-pilot Lowell Miller, they were expecting breakfast. You know, I hear the knock on the door and I just open the door and I turned around to see who it was. There she is, a flight attendant with the hijacker behind her with the knife up against her throat. He was agitated saying Cuba, Cuba. He also was saying that his friend had a bomb in the back of the airplane.

I do right there that I said, oh, here we go. The stewardess was walking around talking with all the passengers, asking them if anybody knew how to speak Spanish.

That's Jim Zachy was back in coach. It was 11 years old at the time.

I didn't think much of it until until the announcement came on the loudspeaker.

The pilot gets on and says, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, we have some gentleman up here that want to go to Cuba. So. We're going to Havana. And then came the part of the story that I've been told was the waiting, the frozen silent, staring at each other waiting portion. But then this one woman a few rows away began to recognize my father.

And she began to look and look back and forth to other folks and point a little bit, and there was a slow building of her certainty, and then all of a sudden she pulled it up and said, wait a second, we are not being hijacked.

It's a candid camera stunt plane and I'm quoting him. The plane went absolutely crazy. Everyone started laughing.

People began cheering. Oh, look here. He's pulling this stunt, stamping their feet.

The tension drift off of the end. Everyone's so relieved, people were lined up with their air sickness bags to get autographs from my father.

So then they relaxed. And through all of this, my dad is begging, no, I know it's not me. I'm not involved. We are being hijacked.

And they said, come on, Alan, we are with you. So Alan Funt is trying to persuade people he's not getting any purchase. He sees a behind him. He sees a priest.

Right. He runs over to the priest and said, Father, will you please help me convince these people, tell them this is no joke. This is not a stunt maniac is for real and was a guy.

Say, you, kid, get me Alan.

Oh, no, you don't just want to see a guy with a clerical collar and everything. Oh, no, you don't have it. Right, right, right.

Meanwhile, where is the hijack? Terrifying people up in the cockpit.

Oh yeah. He stayed in the cockpit, but eventually at some point he hears this kind of commotion from first class. And so he does open the door and he pokes his head out and.

Everybody begins to applaud and they've got and we're not totally sure about that last detail might be an embellishment, but what seems clear is that around this time, Allen Funt is starting to feel kind of trapped.

He'd been so successful at bugging the backstage at mussing up the line between private and public in real life and showbiz that he couldn't when he needed to. He couldn't reassert that clear line. I was worried that he was going to come up with some idea to try to mitigate the situation and deal with it.

Actually, what she says ended up happening was he got so frustrated that he decided to just deal with the hijackers himself. Yes. So he starts formulating a plan to grab the guy and not come to the floor.

And my mother's saying, don't you do anything, you idiot. I have two babies on this plane. Leave it alone. Sit down. So he's going to be like Zorro.

Yes. Apparently, the flight attendants had to tell him to sit down.

What happens now? Well, you took it to the point where now the plane is landing in what I think the people in the plane think is Florida. People in the front of the plane is Cuban. Is Cuba correct?

When we taxied in to the terminal, we're greeted as the plane is opened by Cuban military officers.

I saw Cuban soldier. He had a gun in his hand and he had bandoliers, you know, with lots of bullets on it.

And they've been circling the airplane. And it seems at this point, everyone on the plane for maybe the first time with like.

Oh, everybody really got it, that it was a hijacking that was finally the reveal just really late and the story goes when they're getting off the plane, when these Cuban soldiers are escorting them off the plane.

He was standing at his seat and through a twisty aspect of human psychology, all the passengers were filing down the aisle past him. They began to take their feelings out on him and they became angry at him.

And each one of them had sort of their own grab bag of curses for him, as if he had tricked them, as if he had set them up in some way.

And the last person in that line turned to my father and said. Smile, my ass. That's it happened, smile, my ass was closing remarks on the business.

Smile, my ass.

To me, the meaning of this scene is that here's a man who he has helped create a situation where people in some kind of peril don't know that they are in peril, that they've been blinded by the device that he created, it suggests that's the beginning of something blurry, which didn't used to be as much.

You know, it's funny, like when I hear that plane scene, it's like I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of confusion, because what we have now is like, actually way more confusing, I think.

Yeah, because we all have these cameras. So we're always taking these candid pictures of ourselves.

But like obviously in theory they're candid, but they're not really candid because we've taken like four of them and the one we choose, we put a filter on.

And I think it's interesting nowadays what Jacob Smith talks about as being interesting, which is that that's producer Matt Kielty.

Again, he was sort of off mike as we were hashing this out.

Now, what becomes fun to look at isn't looking for people in their faces. They make when they find out that they're on camera, it's like poking and pulling apart. People who know that know that they know that they're on camera.

What I do when I read people's Facebook pages and Twitter, like Twitter is like I'm I'm trying to figure out what they were thinking when they crafted that sentence and how they want to represent themselves and present themselves to the world.

You're trying to figure out what part of that post is real. Yeah, exactly.

Well, what he's really saying is that is that everyone who becomes an Allen front and the and the people on the plane, like the confusion, is very basic. Like if you're going to go on Facebook, then you're a little bit of an Allen fund. If you're going to go on Twitter, you're going to do that. Then you're producing these shows. Then if you're actually trying to figure out how the other people are reacting to you and how you read them or how they're reading you, yeah.

Then you're a little bit like you're stuck on the plane because you don't know what's real and what's so. Yeah, in a way. If you split out in front and half, as opposed to the showman and the audience, now everyone is in the showman and the audience, I could both part.

Yeah, it's like I think we're Alan fronting ourselves.

Yeah. We go to the stage you get. Smile, you're on Candid Camera. Enormous thanks to our producer, Latif Nasser, also coproducer Matt Kielty, and a special thanks to the front family. They couldn't have been more accommodating and more generous.

Also, Jim, Zach and the Eastern Airlines Employees Association.

I just want to close by wishing our producer, Lynn Levy, a heartfelt thanks and good luck as she walks down the hall to work with our colleagues at Studio 360.

We love you, Lynn. And that's it, I'm Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Thanks for listening to the message. Hey, this is Juliet Santa reading the credit. This is Jacob Smith from Northwestern University. Hi, my name is Jim Zach and I was asked to read you the credits text. So here we go. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff include Ren O'Farrill, David Gabal, Dylan Keith, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Andy M.

Lateef and Healthy Padget Arean, Molly Webster, Storen, Wheeler and Jamie York with help from Simon Adler, Alexandra Lee Young, Abigail Cheal and Alexandra Brennan are fact checkers. Are even Dasher and Michelle Harris. That's it. OK, smile. You're on Radiolab and this message.