Syndesiology (CONNECTIONS) with James Burke
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's peanut butter.

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Oh, hey, it's that friend that tells you about your new favorite show, Alleyward. And this week is a really exciting episode for me, interviewing one of my literal science communication writing and broadcast heroes, who you likely know from his years of hosting the Science History Program Connections, which looks at how events in history and science shaped our lives today. And it's always like an

an absolutely boggling journey through bonkers events that you'd never be able to dream up because they're just weirder than any fiction. And you may also remember this guest from his series, The Day the Universe Changed, or his coverage of the space program in the 1960s and 70s. But if you have ever seen footage, especially recently, of a man in

In the 1970s, walking into frame, delivering an impeccable soundbite about rocket engine combustion, and then casually pointing off to his right as a spacecraft shudders flames into the sky. You know his work. He's a science historian. He's a humble and very wry man. He's an icon. He's 86 years old.

He's funny and brilliant as ever. And he just came out with this new season of Connections on the platform CuriosityStream. And I want you to know they did not pay me at all to do this episode. It was my idea and I'm excited about it. And also a little secret that I have been keeping from you that I can finally tell you after about a year of behind the scenes. His producers out of the UK gave me a spinoff of his series and it's called Quick Connections with Ali Ward.

And that was a giant honor. And because we shot on different continents, I never got to meet him. So I gently begged the team who made our shows if I could interview him for Ologies. And they said, of course. And again, they did not pay me. Now, we will get to that in a moment. But first, a quick thanks to all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for always keeping the show going. You can join for as little as a dollar a month.

And thank you to each of you who's ever left me a review. I read them all. And I thank you with a somewhat dramatic reading of a new one each week, such as this one from MurrayBurry123 who wrote, Thank you for creating this lovely weekly brain escape from the stress and the sadness of the world. Hooray for science!

Oh, Marie, Marie, one, two, three, hooray for you. Okay, syndesiology, it's a real word, all right? It comes from the Greek for connections, and it has been used officially to describe the study of connected events. And the person who coined the term used this guest as an example, citing his research and writing on the topics of science history and how events cascade into new circumstances and how history is just a series of random and accidental events.

So he is the reason syndesiology as a term was coined. So after much recording, finagling, scheduling, time zone calculating, and honestly, on my part, some nerves and some deep breathing, I hopped on a virtual hangout and got a chance to ask a hero about it.

his journey into science communication, his writing process, rabbit holes, rough drafts, daily rituals, how to keep an audience interested, the importance of your own voice, the future of nanofabricators, the history of shipworms, animal pee, bridge collapses, Apollo missions, battlefield mysteries, and of course,

the backstory to that famous shot of him and the rocket. So please give a little bow to the one and only broadcast archetype and syndesiologist, James Burke.

Hello, everybody. Hi, nice to meet you. Well, I've seen you lots of times, so we sort of met. Likewise, obviously. It's really exciting to get to talk to you. Okay, sure, anything. Wonderful. First off, many, many people are quite envious that I'm getting to talk to you today. Most of my friends, family, and colleagues are.

I'm thrilled that I'm getting to chat with you, as am I. For me, I study a lot of different ologies, and I was wondering if you'd ever heard of the term syndesiology? Syndesiology? Mm-hmm. No, I can't think what it could mean. It comes from the Greek for connections. Really? And so it's been only used in the literature once or twice, but it is a study of how things are interconnected. My goodness. Thank you.

Thank you. So you are indeed a syndesiologist, I believe. Good. I'm glad I'm anologist of some kind. You're probably anologist of multiple kinds, but if there's one leader in that field, I'd have to say it's going to be you. I wanted to talk a little bit about what inspired you to do the work you do. If you had always seen

The connections and things, if you'd always wanted to go back in time and history and figure out the origin of events or objects, when did you start to see these connections? Well, I suppose early on, my mother field, if you like, was Old English. So I spent my early university years in the 9th and 10th centuries.

As well as the language, of course, you learned about what the language is talking about, which is the world at the time. I wasn't a historian in the classic sense of the word, but I was stuffed with history because of what I was reading. The great thing about history is it's not now, it's different. If you spend a lot of time doing what are essentially historical studies,

you can't help but notice the difference between then and now. Very different. And this interesting difference, I suppose, comes from that source. Early on in my life, I was born in Northern Ireland, and my parents cross-married, as it's called, in the disapproval of both sides. And after my father came back from the war, they thought it was a good idea to get out of there. So we came to England. So very early on in my life, when I was about seven,

I switched cultures and backgrounds and places and everything else. So this was the Second World War in the mid-1940s, and James was born in Derry, also called London Derry, in Northern Ireland, which is the westernmost port city. And it was a crucial location for naval and military presence during the war.

And at the end of the war, several dozen surrendered German U-boats or submarines wound up in Derry's Harbor. But yes, James's family picked up and left Northern Ireland to England, where James adjusted to new people and customs and accents. And of course, was the new kid at school. Then very quickly after that, by the age of 10 and a bit or 11, as lots of people did in those days, I went to a grammar school there.

one of those great schools founded in the Elizabethan period, with marvelous opportunities for anything you could possibly want to learn. So this was a spur, if you like, to look around

And that's what school did. I mean, anything you wanted to do at that school, you could do. And it made me what I am. So just a side note, in the UK, a grammar school doesn't just mean K through five, but it's a publicly funded but selective school for smart little dumplings who meet certain admission criteria. And James went to Maidstone Grammar School, which is about 90 minutes outside of London. And it's one of those just gorgeous schools.

red brick castle-like schools that have different houses and uniforms involving blazers embroidered with a golden crest on the breast pocket. I think it was founded about 1549. Oh, wow. Yeah. I ended up, obviously, I had to do military service because in those days you had to do two years in the military. And that was an exceptionally unusual experience, I've got to tell you.

And after having lived there, I went to the opposite end of the experiential scale because I went to Oxford. And after a few years at Oxford, it's time to decide what to do about life, which is a really boring thing to do. So I decided to opt out. Oh, really? So instead of doing what all my colleagues did, which was get jobs with major corporations as one did in those days in the 60s, I ran away to Bologna in Italy where I spent years

three of the happiest years of my life, mainly because Bologna is known as the food and sex capital of Italy. Quite different than a corporate life after Oxford. Somewhat, somewhat. So I had three wonderful years in Bologna, followed by another two wonderful years in Rome doing the same kind of thing, running

language school and teaching medieval English. And I think I met somebody, not quite in the street, but maybe at a party or over a ninth drink or something, who said, some pals of mine are coming out from England and they want to find someone to direct a movie. And I said, I haven't the faintest idea how to do that. He said, they don't know you haven't.

I said, "I've got some chutzpah, but not that much. So thanks, but no thanks." And he came back and said, "They said they don't care if you can't direct. Would you come and help? Could you speak Italian?" And I said, "Yes." So I joined this film crew from England and they said, "We're going to do a show about the mafia." And I said, "No, you're not." And they said, "Why?" And I said, "Well,

It doesn't exist. And they said, come on. And I said, you find anybody who says it exists, I'll be very surprised. So we went up to Sicily and we did this film on the mafia. And every single person we talked to said, mafia, what's that? What are you talking about? And we finally came back with this hilariously funny movie made up of many, many people saying, don't know, what, eh? And it won a prize. People said, well, you got a job. And I said, well, what did I do? And they said, do whatever you did, you can do it. So we did a few more films.

films, I remember one memorable one, five minutes long, called Why Doesn't the Leaning Tower of Pisa Fall Over?,

It's a great question. Is this film about why the leading tariff is? Answer, after five minutes, nobody knows. I just went on in the same vein, I think, foxing my way through. And after a while, I'd been in television long enough to be in television. So the BBC said, well, would you like a job? And I said, yes, because there was nowhere else to work at the time. And I found myself in television. And the job they had was a job in a science program. And I said, I don't know about science. And they said, great.

The whole point is, you know, the audience doesn't either. So if you understand what you're talking about, they will. Very clever. And from then on, it was downhill all the way. I mean, I suppose the biggest thing that happened to me after that was Apollo. My boss at this program said, what do you know about Apollo? And I said, fire one end, point to the other. And he said, no, don't be stupid. He said, well, I was approached by the bosses who said,

You're in the science division. You'll have somebody who knows about Apollo. So there was this additional consultant who had written the book on NASA's Apollo program, which ran from 1961 through 1972. And the later named Apollo 1 mission in 1967 resulted in the deaths of three astronauts during a fire in a test launch facility.

And then the Apollo 7 mission, about a year and a half later, successfully orbited Earth for 11 days. And it was the first flight with a crew on it of the Apollo program. And this was in 1968. And people, whew, they could dig it because it was groovy. It was culturally a blast and far out, technically also. So about six months later, I was ready. And Apollo 7 happened. And I stayed in the Apollo missions till the end.

I mean, you didn't have to do much, just do the program because the audience is inviting themselves. I mean, they've got colossal audiences around the world.

And so, quite unfair because Apollo made my career, not anything else. For me to say, you know, I did well after that, but I did because of Apollo. So the Apollo 8 launch was on Christmas Eve 1968. It was about two months after that Apollo 7 first crewed flight. And this saw astronauts go even further. They left Earth's low orbit and they cruised around the moon for about a week.

And it was the most watched television event in history at the time. But when the Apollo 11 rolled around in July 1969, 600 million people back then watched it live to see humans landing on the moon and bouncing around like happy bunnies.

16 million UK viewers tuned in for this all-night, 11-hour broadcast. And it really launched James Burke into the lives and the eyes of millions of people and into science communication history, which is why I was barely keeping my shit together during this interview. And then after Apollo, you couldn't fail, really, could you? I mean, my last audience was XXX million. Yeah. And they'd say, what would you like to do? Yeah.

And you'd say, well, I don't know. And I just said, the first thing that came into my mind, and they said, okay, how much? And I said, do I have to think about that? And they said, well, you know, there's plenty of money, which doesn't get said anymore. No, no, that's not something we hear. So that's when I started Connections, because I thought, I'll do this because it's more fun than not. It's about the things that surround you in the modern world, and just because they're there, shape the way you think and behave, and why they exist in the form they do.

and who or what was responsible for them existing at all. The search for those clues will take us all over the world and 12,000 years into the past because it's in those strange places and in those long-gone centuries that the secret of the modern world lies.

And it looked like a kind of detective story style, which might work. And the great thing that I had already learned in a few brief years in television was the most important thing to do is keep the audience wondering what's coming next. Yes. Because if they think they know, they'll switch off. And so it was really a matter of doing a number of programs that would be surprising in their content and in their direction and in their result. So I did Connections and they worked well.

because of those reasons, you know, surprise, whodunit kind of thing. And the interesting thing about doing connections was it struck me fairly quickly that the way to do it was backwards. Oh. I mean, if you're looking for unexpected links to keep the audience interested because they don't know what you're going to do next and they want to think they're better than you do and cleverer than you are and they'll get ahead of you, you keep them guessing. The trouble about coming forward through history is that

I mean, you start, you know, 1066, the Battle of Hastings, blah, blah, where do you go? Well, there are probably 50 ways to go from the Battle of Hastings. So choose one. Choose the strangest one. Just a quick aside. So the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 between the Norman army of what is now France and the English near the South England port town of Hastings, which is about 65 miles or just over 100 kilometers across the English Channel from the coast of France.

This took place over about a day, and the bodies of possibly 10,000 fallen soldiers are buried in a mass grave that somehow no one has found yet. But boy, howdy, some jabroni with a metal detector is going to come along and just hit a jackpot archaeologically one day. But this battle mattered so much because England lost, and William the Conqueror was like,

I'm your king now. Deal with it. And some people call this guy William the Bastard. Anyway, he reigned until he died about 20 years later. So yes, in a syndesiological way, you could follow the Battle of Hastings in so many directions, it would break your brain. And whatever that is, again, how many ways to go forward from there. And each time, you choose the most surprising route. Well, this is all very well and good, but it may not end you up A.

anywhere, of any point, of any value, of any interest in the future or the present, as I did many times. It's what encouraged me to turn it around and do it the other way. So if you decide, as I did in all the connections, but especially in this recent one, to go backwards from the future, then you start with something like the nanofabricator, which is a machine that is already operating at a very simple level. And what it does is put atoms together to make nanos.

Okay, so imagine giving a machine raw materials like dirt and water and then telling it to just scramble up those things on an atomic level to make you a sandwich or a sun bonnet or whatever. How does that relate to the time it takes for the machine to be able to make a sandwich?

the French aristocracy had an outbreak of syphilis. And how is that related to the guy who took LSD with dolphins? For more on that, you can see the delphinology episode about dolphins. And yes, we dive deep on all kinds of cetacean gossip.

But in the new series of connections with James Burke and me on CuriosityStream, he traces all that in an episode called The End of Scarcity. Oh, history. It's just so beautiful and inspiring. It's full of dark, juicy scandals and discoveries. It's gossip that actually matters. And it's more interesting than strangers making out on an island, if you can believe it.

So yes, James, who has not only hosted but also written and researched connections for decades, travels backward in his detective work. There's a limited number of ways you can go.

because five days ago, so to speak, there was no man-out fabricator. So where do you go? Well, the link is that there's something in an out-of-fabricator that was there, so go there. And each time you go back, you're really looking to solve a riddle. And what you do is you go back far enough to the point where you think you've got 50 minutes of program, each piece of which is about between four and five minutes.

because four or five minutes is enough. The audience says, "Okay, we've had enough of this." So you've got to be ready to move on. So if you go back that much, you end up with some weird choices, but which work because when you turn around and go back to the future, you've done the trip already. Yeah. This last one, I was able to do jolly things like starting with the Inca use of the potato and ending with

perovskite or virtually free energy. You spray it on the walls and the wall becomes an energy source. And genetic engineering had what to do with coffee? Or Frederick the Great's coffee police, because he didn't have any coffee and he had to import it. And of course, all kinds of people started making coffee on their own. And it was genetics. The 17th century shipworm was a little thing that bored holes in ships and helped them to sink.

And that story with avatars in the 21st century. So these are stories from his new Connection series in episodes with titles like Designer Jeans and Limitless Energy. One is titled, None of This is Real. And I enjoy that. My favorite one, Napoleon's Toothpick.

which ends with predictive analytics in the next century. And the last one would be Louis XIV's wig, which is what ends up with the nanofabricator. So they're going to hang on and see why on earth they should bother. And four or five links later, you've trapped them and they can't get out.

And it ends with whatever it ends with. And then you say, that's it, that's the end, goodbye, and disappear quickly. Okay, bye. The great thing about history is there are so many ways forward or backwards at any time. For a television program maker, all you have to do is look for the thing that's going to give everybody the most fun. And you come across extraordinary things. Can I tell you one? No. Yeah, of course, of course. I think the one that got me most of all

was a bridge disaster in which carriages fell off and people were killed. And the Royal Society set up a commission to discover why this has happened. - About what year was that? - Oh, I can't remember exactly, but it's something like 1802. - Okay. - Or 1830. Anyway, 'cause I did all the research on these programs three years ago, my dear, so I don't remember. - I meant like era-wise, but yeah, okay, 1800s. - Right, so the guy running the commission's investigation

was the secretary of the Royal Society, very, very big wheel. And one of his jobs was to run the Royal Society of Scientists, eminent harumphs. And one of the harumphs he invited into the society was a chemist nobody knew called Heropath. I bet you've never heard of him. No, I haven't. Good. Heropath invented stuff called

Wait for this, herapathite. Yeah. Well. Indeed. He was a modest, humble man. That's right. Now, the thing about this is, and this is why I thought this is something worth following, what Herapath was interested in was dog urine. Okay? You have my attention. With which he did various things. I won't go into too much detail, but the one that mattered to me was he put a couple of chemicals in, two chemicals, and it made dog's urine produce crystals.

Okay, all right. But when you turn these crystals sideways to each other, they block light out. And that's the beginning of what we call polarization.

And the straight thing out of there is sunglasses and polarizing and all kinds of stuff like that. And it's picked up by a young man called Land at Harvard. And the result of his work on polarization ends up on a camera, which sees the first sign of the Russian space effort. So from dog to your own to that was just too good. I couldn't believe it.

And it led me straight to the future because you go from U2 to a space race and there you are, bingo, somewhere in the future. How do you narrow these down? You must have so many. Do you have a notebook or a file somewhere? How do you choose? You can go anywhere. Well, you do. You do many scribbles. Yes, there's lots of sheets of paper with scribbles all over them and arrows pointing up, down, and then sideways. Right.

And after a while, these scribbled sheets of paper, down there next to me now, you throw them on the floor because it's the safest place to put them. I can't tell you. Now and again, you get a bit worried because too many scribbles and too many arrows going in too many ways, and they all look really good. That's the worst thing. Some of them look really good. Now and again, a program will totally fail, and it will do so easily because all the scribbles and arrows are pointing in extremely dull ways, so you just chuck it away. But

As to remembering it, no, I don't. When you've done this so long, I imagine it just really must change your frame of mind, the way you look at things. Do you feel like the more you've done this, the more connected you feel to other people? Or do you feel like the looking at history, the more aware you are of other people? No, no, no, not that. No, the former. I mean, if I've learned, if anything has happened to me over the years of doing this kind of stuff,

It's that I have become more and more interested in other people. Not to the point of bothering them, but nobody's boring. Nobody is boring. Everybody has something that is exciting. They may not know it, or other people may not have found it out about them yet, but if you look hard enough, you'll find it. I often wish there was something one could do, like an evangelist, that you could say to people, "Think about this and think about yourself and realize that you're enormously more than society has let you believe about yourself."

and it doesn't have anything to do with education or

I nearly said brains, but I take that back because everybody's got one. So James elaborated, noting that every person's brain has roughly 86 billion neurons. So be nice to it. Get rest. Don't huff paint when you're sad or bored. So it's all there to be used. And you just have to find that trick. You know, I'm fortunate in the sense that I found a trick for myself.

But the vast majority of people live lives of quiet solitude because they don't know how to trigger this extraordinary ability we all have. And how would you say it gets triggered? How do you find other people could trigger that? Well, if I knew that. I think if somebody said, how do I trigger it in me? I can't tell you. You just have to look at the world and see if there's anything more than it looks like.

I'm just looking across my room here and there's a clock on the mental shelf. And looking at the clock, I'm thinking, why would anybody want something like that? I mean, why would you want a clock? Why would you want to know what time is? What does it mean? Now, all I would say to people is look around and think like that about things. And you find that there will be some things that will be easier to think like that about. And that's something to do with what you've got.

But that's as far as I can go because that's, I mean, you know, who am I? No, that's a beautiful thing. At dinner parties, do you ask more questions or do people ask more questions of you? The dinner parties I like to be at is where everybody else does all the talking. I like holding forth to make a program or write a book.

because that attracts me. It's exciting to structure the thought and then put it on screen or, you know, you do it. Love it. Put it on screen or whatever. In a sense, I guess what I said just now about putting myself inside an audience, in a sense, you kind of have to forget the audience and make the program you'd like to make and then you have to hope they'll like it. Mm-hmm.

For me, if I'm writing or researching and I get stuck, I always have to think, what's the truest that I feel about this? Or what's the truest impulse? Because typically the audience is feeling something along the same lines. The danger in that is you suddenly realize it's awful. It's boring. Shit. Well, I'm curious about your writing process because with so much of Connections, you've done so much of the research, so much of the writing. Do you have...

tips or hacks on how to get over writer's block? Do you have a process where you sit down at 7 a.m. with that same piece of toast and you write until noon? What's your process like? It's a little bit like that, yes. There's only so much time you've got.

and you have to use it properly. And that time obviously is eaten up by the rest of society doing things that requires your time. So it's a little bit like, yes, toast and on and finish at noon. Because at noon I gotta go do something or whatever. So I think you need that sort of discipline

Even if all it is, you're sitting down in an empty room looking around and feeling desperate because nothing has come to your mind. Which is often the case. Well, now that we are so much more connected via social media and via the Internet, how do you feel connected?

People relate to each other now that they have this digital connection, but less maybe in-person connection, especially the last couple of years. Well, I think first, I would disagree with you in a sense that although people spend maybe less hours together in company, they probably spend more time with more people in company on the net. And I think that's the key difference. It seems to me that when two people come together, one and one makes three. And what you're looking for is what the three is.

and sometimes the three will be something one of them produces and that turns into something they do or a book or whatever, or 101 makes three becomes something you do or whatever. I think public media, digital media, have made it immensely easier to be creative in the sense that I believe that creativity, the strongest trigger for creativity is 101 makes three. You can be very clever by yourself, but you can never be as clever as you can with somebody else.

That's a beautiful thing to remember because it's sometimes, especially if you're really trying to hunker down, you think, oh, I have to isolate and really work on this. But sometimes the best information and the best inspiration comes from going outside, looking around, having a conversation. Yes, yes. And sitting and saying sometimes to people, I'm stuck with this and I don't know what the hell to do. And they say, what's your problem? And you tell them and they tell you the answer or they say something that makes you realize what the answer is. I mean, the worst thing is to not tell anybody. Keep it to yourself. Yeah.

Agreed. I will say that in all the people that I've interviewed over the years, like hundreds and hundreds for this show and for Innovation Nation on CBS and some other shows, one piece of advice I hear a lot is to ask for help and to collaborate with people and don't sit on ideas thinking that you can perfect them in solitude just thinking about them. You have to do things

and get help if you need it. And as James Burke says, one plus one equals three, which is wonderful. Even in the last few years when we've been in quarantines and tough times, we get more work done and good stuff and creativity and we go further when we work together. So take it from us in DZologist.

an expert in connections. Togetherness, even online, could save us. And another thing saving people is the generosity of charities and foundations. And each week we donate to a charity of choice. And when we recorded this, just by chance, James, who now lives in France, happened to

to be experiencing a heating outage in his home due to some mechanical issue. And it just so happened that it was taking days for the repair people to come out. But living in the south of France, it's warmer there. He said he was fine with just a sweater and waiting it out. But this winter, many people in the UK, where it's much colder, are struggling through an energy crisis the last few years that have left them having to choose between heating or food.

So this week we're donating to the NEA.org. The National Energy Action is a fuel poverty charity, and they're working to ensure that everyone in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland is warm and safe at home by distributing energy bill help. So we will donate to them for some winter warmth. And that was made possible by sponsors of Ologies.

When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you, they mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision making. They're in to help you through all of it.

because together they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal housing lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, US Bank. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring.

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Sometimes you gotta stop and record the snoring. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it. And when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. So if you are thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient and flexible. I love everything about it.

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I've used BetterHelp. It has helped me through some really tough stuff in my life and has really taught me to stop, let myself relax, pet my dog, go to bed early, that I'm worth those things, I deserve those things, and it'll make my life better in the long run. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash ologies today to get 10% off your first month. So that's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash ologies. Grammy says it's okay to nap too.

This episode is brought to you by Merrick Pet Care. And y'all know I have a little dog named Gremmy, which is short for Gremlin. And y'all helped me name her. And there's nothing that we like more than seeing her happy, which means tasty dog foods. And Merrick has been crafting high quality dog food for over 30 years. They were founded in Hereford, Texas. And they're a great place to get your dog's food.

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Okay, now let's resume our biggest questions. Biggest questions for James, including the backstory of the most legendary shot in television history from the late 1970s from a Connections episode titled Eat, Drink, and Be Merry. I have to ask about...

Eat, Drink and Be Merry, the legendary shot of the 1978 episode at Cape Canaveral. That shot is known as one of the best shots in television history. And I was talking to my brother-in-law about it yesterday, and he started crying. He said that that shot is so beautiful, it brings him to tears when he thinks about it. ...had understood that certain gases ignite...

And the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely in the frozen liquid form until you want to ignite them. At which point you take the top off the flask, the gases evaporate, you apply a light and boom. Can you share any backstory? Did you rehearse for that? What was that moment like? Well, of course, we rehearsed like crazy. Mainly, I don't want to be rude, but mainly for the camera. I mean, if the camera didn't get it, there's no point in doing it.

So we had to be absolutely certain that the cameraman was as happy as possible. So he had to be in a place where he could shoot that shot without any fear or worry that anything would stop him doing a wonderful shot. And the same for the sound man. Sound was coming, as you know, usually from a distant NASA source, loudspeaker of some kind, and the sound man had to be happy about that.

So we spent a lot of time on the technicalities of how you recorded this stuff. Okay, so picture an overcast, cloudy day at Cape Canaveral, Florida. James is wearing beige slacks and a deep brown button-up shirt, buttoned a few buttons down. He's got kind of late 1970s wide lapels, and he's wearing thick-rimmed glasses and white

has wild salt and pepper hair kind of past the nape of his neck. And he's walking along this grassy expanse past huge monolithic research buildings and a retired Saturn rocket to a spot that's across from some water. And in the background is the launch pad with the towering Titan 3E rocket launch system. I mean, it was pretty clear what the shot was going to be. I mean, it was me in the foreground and it in the background. That's it.

And all I had to remember was when I pointed, I have to point off to one side because of parallax.

So we did lots of practicing of me pointing at the camera and saying, no, you idiot, not there. Turn slightly right. So he had to point not toward the rocket, but in a direction a bit off. So the shots for shortening would line his hand up with the rocket. And then with his back turned to the launch pad, he had to remember exactly where at that point in space to position his arm and do it on time. And they said, yeah, that's good. And that was it, really. And the rest of it was

How much can you remember to say with absolute accuracy before the moment when the thing lights up? And we figured I could probably do about 12 seconds without any doubt whatsoever. And I just didn't have to trip or make a mistake or anything because there's no chance to say, wait a minute. Hydrogen and oxygen. And so I stepped into the shot. If you release those two gases into a confined space with a hole in the other end of it. Turned, said 12 words.

And then, set light to them, you get... And pointed. That. And it lit. That.

And we stood there scared to death because then anything could go wrong. I couldn't be in charge of any more words. The cameraman could only go on shooting film at that thing. The sound man could do nothing about the noise it was making. And we just hoped that some dog wouldn't run through the shot and knock the camera over. So we had people looking out for dogs who might run in or whatever. And the thing went up and down.

And then finally the cameraman said, "Okay." And everybody sort of fainted. It was one of the scariest things I've ever done. I'm sure. So they knew before the film came back, like, "We got it. Everything was good." Oh yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course. They didn't have to check for a hair in the gate or anything like that? Well, there's no—you don't have any choice, really. If there's a hair in the gate, that's too damn bad. Yeah.

Just a PS. So a hair in the gate refers to this shard of broken film that can get caught between the film itself and the lens of a camera, which then ruins the shot. So when you're shooting on film after a scene or a setup, the camera department has to pause filming and has to check the gate and open up the camera and look for those little slivers of broken film or hairs in the gate to ensure that what they shot is not just garbage.

with a chunk of film in the foreground, which makes everyone so sad. They were not going to come back and say, let's do it again. Right. The NASA loudspeaker was a few yards away and pointing the other way because it was pretty noisy. And they were doing 10, 9, 8 as I was talking. So half of my brain was going 10, 9, 8, and the other half was going blah, blah, blah.

But we were all together at the time. Were you aware that that has gone really, really viral on TikTok and social media, that that clip and you, you've had an explosion in popularity? No, I see. I live in France and they don't know or care who I am, which is very good for you. And I've had some emails saying we saw this thing and it was, you know, we liked it.

And I even got somebody who told me that there was some large number of people having seen it. So a Twitter posting in May from the account Historic Vids garnered 15 million views, with millions more on TikTok accounts, 5 million on the BBC's YouTube archive, another 16 million on some random YouTube account. And most captions were like a variation on the sentiment that it's the single greatest shot.

in the history of television and that James Burke is everyone's hero. So what are these like 50 million plays and a newfound appreciation from younger fans? What do they mean to him? So he explains. But just making a difference in my life. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Well, when it comes to the new season of Connections on CuriosityStream, you now have a huge base of a new generation, new generations of people who are very familiar with you as this like absolute legend. When you were coming up with the episodes for this season, did you find that it was almost not more frustrating, but more inspiring because there's so much that's going on technologically and with futurism?

to kind of structure these episodes? Were you thinking about what this generation might be excited about? - Well, no, because first of all, they're gonna get what they get. They don't watch it, they don't watch it. - Good point. - Second of all, it was cheap, so I'm not even worried about spending money that the producers don't want to be spent. Because, you know, television has changed so much since the very first "Connection." You don't cross the world with a massive film crew to check on the spots on a New Guinea sand flea on a beach.

I mean, just don't do that because nobody will tell you you can do it. We had interesting and exciting things to do ourselves with the virtual reality technology, green screen technology, and a few other things that would allow us to do fancy pictures, but without going anywhere. I have had one or two notes saying, you do realize it's going to look as if you've only got one shirt and one undershirt.

And yeah, true. Sorry. But I think at my ancient age, I just wanted to make, I had the chance to make a half a dozen programs, starting in the future and going backwards to things like Napoleon's toothpick. And it's just too good a chance to throw away. Can you tell me the most frustrating shot of your career, the most frustrating shoot that you've ever been on? Something that was just one of those shoots that you remember like, ugh.

That one was tough. I remember once I was on a shoot where I had to change in a public restroom that was coin operated and I had to come up with my own quarter for it. It's like, come on, y'all. You didn't have a quarter? I had to borrow a quarter from someone so I could change in a very dirty bathroom. There are always those moments when you have the privilege of getting to go around the world or interview people you wouldn't have access to and let your curiosity kind of lead the way that...

There are so many wonderful moments, but there are those sometimes those moments where you're, you know, you're battling an ice storm in the middle of the night to get to a location so you could shoot something by sunrise and you're eating Cheetos for dinner. You know, people don't see those moments. But are there any moments that stick in your memory? No. No? That's good. Well, I think because it was all like that. I think I remember things being constantly going wrong. So I don't really remember one in particular, no.

I love this man. We've talked about obviously that August 77 shoot. Any others that you really thought like, how did I get so lucky to have this be my job or any that were just thrilling? Yeah, right. Okay. When Armstrong was walking down the steps. And voices in my ear were saying, what are you going to say? Say something. And I thought, I'll keep my damn mouth shut because the worst thing you can do in the world is talk over the man who says the first words on the moon.

And I was being shouted, I mean like shouting, you know, you're paid to talk. And I just kept crying because what could you do? And then he said, that's one small step. I nearly cried. So it does have its compensations, doesn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. It does. The power of shutting up. Who knew? The power of shutting up, exactly. On the topic of not shutting up, last week I recorded a solid 90 minutes of me reading you an audiobook of samples from books written by your favorite guests. But on the topic of literature... I've been curious about this. What are you reading?

Any books? I feel like if there's ever a person to ask, like, you got a good book recommendation, what are you reading right now? Anything in particular? I spend most of my time online reading, you know. And it's interesting, there's so much now in the world that you can access easily, that the idea of sitting down with a book and leafing through it slowly, slowly, is not as sexy as it used to be. So most of the time I do reading, which is very

oriented towards whatever project I'm working on. Do you fall victim to Wikipedia rabbit holes like the rest of us where you click on one thing, you click on the source, and you click on another before you know it's one in the morning? My life, my life. I am a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

As expected, which is one reason why the world is so enamored with you. I am very, very honored to get to talk to you and ask you all these questions that I've wanted to forever. You know, are you doing anything to celebrate the premiere? Did you have a glass of sparkling cider? Did you just go all out and stay out all night and get arrested? No, I didn't. I'm not even sure if it's...

been seen by anybody yet. So Connections with James Burke, the new 2023 episodes are up now on CuriosityStream and my spinoff Quick Connections with Ali Ward is also up on CuriosityStream and we've been waiting months and months for this to come out so I'm pretty stoked.

And self-promotion is absolute agony for me. I hate it so much. But I'm so proud of the shows and the team at Bigger Bang who made this show happen. And it's really been a career highlight for me and just such an honor to work alongside the absolute legend, Mr. James Burke.

who really should be Sir James Burke. Can we get on that? Can anyone send an email? Anyway, upon the release of these episodes a few weeks ago. But you didn't go out on a bender. No, ma'am, I didn't. Well... I'll stay in on benders. The night's still young. I'm so glad I got a chance to talk to you, and it really is an honor. Your work is amazing, and the curiosity and the wonder that you bring to it, and the humility and the energy that you bring to it is really...

I think what's carried the series and what carries every episode so much. So good work. Much too kind of you. Thank you. Wow. Well, I thank you so much for talking to me. And I hope that we didn't take up too much time. I hope you're warm enough. Are you warm enough? Yes, just about. Okay. I don't have another layer on now. How long has it been out? Is it only a couple hours or? Five days. Oh, yeah. No, this is the south of France. You know, they don't fix heaters quickly in the south of France.

And they say things like, we'll be right round, which means we'll give you a call in a couple of weeks. Oh, no. Yeah, so we're wearing pullovers and things. I hope you have some goose down. Something like that, anyway. And thank you very much for being such a nice interview. I loved it. I like your work, too.

So I guess do meet your heroes and ask them about dog pee and such. And again, that was James Burke of the series Connections with James Burke, which is streaming now a new season on CuriosityStream. And yes, I have a spinoff on there called Quick Connections with Allie Ward. We'll link those in the show notes. So I hope you enjoy it. Everyone works so hard to teach you weird things, and it was really a joy to make.

Okay, so we are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Allie Ward of 1L on both. Smallogies are shorter, kid-friendly episodes of classic ologies, but cut down to smaller size and cleaned of my filthy language so that they're classroom safe.

The Ologies Podcast Facebook group is admin by Erin Talbert. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director and did fact-checking and additional research on this episode. Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website and can make yours. And the one who makes all the editing connections is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, whose family name, she told me, dates back to the Battle of Hastings. I don't know if they killed anyone. Hopefully...

They didn't get killed. Anyway, Nick Thorburn made the theme song. And if you stick around till the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's again, no one paid me or put me up to making this episode. It was entirely my idea and suggestion. And it was my pleasure. But I hope you all enjoy the show if you tune in. Also, here's another secret. If you're going to any holiday parties and you're not sure what to bring, I highly suggest being the person who comes with like two 12 packs of LaCroix or sparkling water and a bag of ice.

It's cheaper than a bottle of wine, and you don't have to decide which one to pick based on what has a cool label. And everyone always needs water, especially folks who don't want to drink. I've been to parties where I'm like, why did no one do this? And then I'm like, I'm just going to do this next time. Also, another little secret at the end here is some audio from one of my Quick Connections episodes, just so you can get a little feel for it, because I thought it was fun.

Russia is at war with several countries at this time. And if you're involved in lots of wars, you need lots of metal, lots of weapons, and lots of money. So Russia, hungry for metal and gold, speedily digs a bunch of mines in the Ural Mountains.

In 1761, one geologist named Johann Gottlob Lehmann is studying the rocks in a Ural gold mine when he spots a funny-looking spiky red crystal. It's unlike anything he's seen before, and it looks like this, and it's called crocoate. Lehmann analyzes the crystal and finds that it contains lead, but there's also some other elements in there that he doesn't recognize.

Over the next few decades, crocovite serves very little purpose, besides being kind of an odd curiosity just for people who really like rocks. Then in 1797, one of those people, a French chemist named Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin, becomes determined to figure out what crocovite is made of.

He finds that when he mixes it with various different chemicals, it consistently produces brightly colored liquids and solids. And finally, during one experiment mixing crocovite and hydrochloric acid, Vakalin produces a network of gray metallic needles.

he's found a new element. And he calls it chromium, from chroma, the Greek for color, because of all those brightly colored chromium compounds that he produced during his experiments. And color these compounds did.

Chromium oxide paint, or viridian, goes on to be used in just a few paintings that you might recognize. It's used to paint the blinds and railings in Monet's The Balcony, the green shadows in the roof of Monet's paintings of the Guerre Saint-Lazare, and in all the vibrant greens of Van Gogh's A Wheatfield with cypresses.

And that's just a few of the famous paintings that owe their color to chromium. But it's a different use of the colorful chromium compounds that's going to take us another step toward our bionic future. In the 1870s, Italian biologist Camillo Golgi is trying to figure out what the cells in the nervous system look like and how they work.

Golgi believes that the nervous system is one long connected system of nerve cells, and he wants to prove that. But at this time, the nervous system is difficult to study because no one has managed to isolate the cells in tightly packed neural tissue. So Golgi comes up with a clever solution to make these tricky little cells visible.

He combines a bright red chromium compound, potassium dichromate, with silver nitrate, and he soaks the neurons in it. And this hardens the neurons, and it turns them black so they can be seen. And he calls the process the black reaction.

The problem is it only dies like a random 1 to 5% of cells per sample. And this enables Golgi to see individual cell structures, but it doesn't help him to understand how those cells interact with each other or even to prove that his theory about nerve cells being connected is correct.

Enter a brilliant young artist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, whose father is the local surgeon in their village and is desperate to get his son interested in medicine. One night in 1868, when Cajal is 16 years old, his father leads him into a local graveyard.

hands him his shovel and tells him to dig up a corpse, which they carry back to the family's barn. And there, under the light of gas lamps, the elder Cahal demonstrates father-son bonding and the art of dissection, explaining the intricacies of the body in detail.

Cajal is entranced. From this point on, anatomy becomes his favorite subject. He becomes obsessed with reproducing it in his art. And as his brother will later articulate in the eulogy at Cajal's funeral, he enters the castle of science through the door of art.

He enrolls in medical school, inspiring his father's pride, and it's there that he becomes interested in the field of histology, the study of tissues and cells on a microscopic level. It's while researching histology that he stumbles across Golgi's black reaction. And here comes one of those moments that will change the world in hundreds of really surprising ways.

Okay, thanks for listening. Stay safe out there. Bye-bye.