How practicing curiosity could help the world around you (with Joe Hanson)
33:19 Share

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. So one of my favorite things in the world is talking to scientists. Over the past couple of years, I've gotten to talk to a variety of researchers across all sorts of different disciplines. And I think that my biggest surprise has been that there is no such thing as a boring topic, right? Like someone studies something like sharks or volcanoes or sex, you know it's going to be interesting. But then, you know, I'm going to be talking to a scientist.

When I talk to a scientist who studies something that I would initially consider very boring, like sand, it turns out that the really fascinating part about that is then who is the person

who spends years of their life trying to understand sand, right? How can you be the most passionate person about sand in the entire world? That ends up being fascinating and hilarious and amazing. And I get to ask them about that and discover why it is that they think this thing that I think is boring is actually so amazing. And then I often end up being convinced. All right, Dr. Sand, I see you.

So while I'm not personally a scientist at all, I was an English major. I wasn't a scientist, but I do really admire that curiosity that scientists approach the world with. I think there's something really beautiful about trying to find answers to questions that no one's asked before and then to share those answers with everyone else. I love that. And I wonder how we can all approach the world and each other with that kind of curiosity. Today's guest, Joe Hanson, he is all about that.

He's not only a scientist himself, but a world-renowned science communicator who makes videos that millions of people around the world watch and learn from. And here's a clip from Joe's talk about the process that he uses to make those videos, answering what seem like simple questions, but turn out to be big, exciting adventures. And in this case, Joe is talking about a video he made where he's trying to figure out what makes glacier ice so blue. Do you remember the first time that you tasted snow?

Do you remember the first time that you tasted 200-year-old snow? Well, I do. I licked it right off the wall of a cave made of ice, sitting underneath a glacier just north of Juneau, Alaska. And I've got to tell you, this was the purest, crispest, coldest H2O I've ever tasted. Of course, it wasn't snow anymore by the time that I tasted it. It was this gorgeous blue glacial ice.

Really, if you ever have the chance to lick a glacier, you really got to do it. Glacier ice is this color blue that almost defies description because it only occurs in these places, and you can really only compare it to itself. So around 200 years ago, much higher up that mountain valley, this ice fell as snow, and the atmosphere through which those snowflakes fell was very different from our own.

contained a full one-third less carbon dioxide than our atmosphere does. Now, those snowflakes were buried, like flurry after flurry, until eventually every last bubble of air was squeezed out from between those delicate little crystals, and it formed a solid mass. Yet somehow, that solid mass was still able to flow

and was buried and then carried along this journey by gravity and time in a frozen time capsule called Mendenhall Glacier. Until one day, that ice, that mountain of old snow, it crossed this little bump in the terrain and it created a void, a cave, and that's where it met me. And if I had known the incredible journey that this H2O had been on, I might not have drank it and turned it into pee,

Here we are. I was only able to see this because I was there, at the right place, in the right moment in time. And I'm sharing it with you today because it no longer exists. The same slow creep of gravity and time that brought all of that ice from the mountain down to my mouth, it does ensure that any ice cave has a short lifespan. But as they disappear,

These ice caves are usually replaced by others as the mass of that glacier sort of flows in behind it. It's this really beautiful cycle of deaths and rebirths of these temporary places. At least that's how the story has gone for thousands of years. That story is now different because this glacier is dying. It is melting faster than time and snow can replace it. Now, when I visited this cave, I didn't know that I'd be

giving its eulogy one day, I went there to make a video for my YouTube channel. My channel is called "It's Okay to be Smart," and I make educational videos that are viewed by millions of people around the world who join me on these little curiosity journeys as I tell really bad dad jokes. The video was about physics. It was about why glacial ice is this beautiful color blue.

And the answer is really, really cool. Now, it's not because of the same reason that the sky is blue. It's not because of light bouncing off of little particles. It's not reflecting the color of the sky or anything like that. No, it's way, way cooler than that. If you want to find out the very cool answer to where that blue comes from, do not go anywhere. We are going to have that answer for you later in the show. But first, we're going to take a short break and then we'll be back with our first guest to have ever licked a glacier. At least I think. I mean, maybe other people have, but they didn't tell me about it.

How to be a better human is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget.

Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Hello, hello. I'm Malik. I'm Jamie. And this is World Gone Wrong, where we discuss the unprecedented times we're living through. Can your manager still schedule you for night shifts after that werewolf bit you? My ex-boyfriend was replaced by an alien body snatcher, but I think I like him better now. Who is this dude showing up in every...

Everyone's old pictures. My friend says the sewer alligators are reading maps now. When did the kudzu start making that humming sound? We are just your normal millennial roommates processing our feelings about a chaotic world in front of some microphones. World Gone Wrong, a new fiction podcast from Audacious Machine Creative, creators of Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery. Learn more at audaciousmachinecreative.com.

Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much.

I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. And we're back. We are talking about science communication today on the show. And we have Joe Hanson with us. Hi, I'm Joe Hanson. I'm a YouTube storyteller. And my passion is teaching people about science. So let's start with the basics. How did you get into this in the first place? I used to be a scientist, a real one who actually did research and

And in that job, I dealt with some controversial issues like stem cells were in the lab. We're all concerned about funding. It became really clear to me as a scientist that there was a separation between the work that we were doing and how people viewed that work, how they understood it. So during graduate school, I took it upon myself to use my time on the internet for good instead of whatever I was doing before that.

And this is at the dawn of social media. And many of the tools we take for granted today really saw an opportunity to leverage these incredible tools for reach, these democratic information delivery devices, which maybe they might not be that anymore today. Yeah.

But to leverage these tools for getting stories about science in front of people, because I think that was the key that was missing. It wasn't that people didn't care about science anymore. It's that they're not watching television. They're not reading the newspaper. They're not getting it from the same sources that they used to. So it was a mission of taking science stories and science communication to these new places.

And I spent a ton of time on YouTube. And the moment that I had the opportunity to start making videos, turning a camera on and telling science stories that way, it's such a powerful tool to reach billions of people around the world that are hungry for this stuff. You know, it's really interesting to me to talk to you because you and I have a lot in common, but we come at it from really different sides because I am a comedian. I don't have a science background. And yet most of what I have done over the past decade

10 years is working with scientists and doing comedy that gets people to hear from scientists directly and learn about their work and make it more accessible and exciting. How do you take the stuff that makes such an intuitive sense to you and communicate it to people where it's maybe a little bit of a foreign language?

- You know, the journey to finding information, I think, is as important or more important than just the facts, just the stuff that you learn. That's the process, that's the passion, that's the fun, that's that wow moment, the light bulb, you know, that's, I think these fall under this great,

term curiosity that is thrown around everywhere, but I think we can actually maybe define it as that pleasure of discovering things that you didn't know before. Psychologist Dan Kahan actually researches how scientific curiosity changes people's worldview. And he has a definition for it that it's this disposition

to seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure. And I love that part because it is fun. So just the facts alone aren't enough to

Give us pleasure. That's cool. That wasn't fun. It's the discovery. It's the journey. It's it's getting in those moments where you're sitting in that place of not knowing and then giving that payoff of the discovery. I'm curious, something I know you're very passionate about, and that is obviously one of the biggest, most pressing issues for all of humanity right now is climate change. And yet it feels like.

There's a lot of fatigue or kind of like an immediate switching off for a lot of people when as soon as they hear the words climate change. So how do you actually go about getting people to care about this? Because this is something that I feel like you are really uniquely successful at. So I try to talk about climate change by talking about other things that we love and trying to embrace people's curiosity and wonder about the natural world and the things that

Make them create a relationship with those things. And if you create a relationship with those things, you love them, you like them, you want them to stick around. And then we can talk about what's threatening them and what you can do to save those things. But if we just talk about the doom of the future and how we're all going to be living on Kevin Costner's water world in a future of rising seas and burning suns.

then people will tune out. When you're doing something like telling stories and getting people to form an emotional connection and believe in climate change, you're reaching one person at a time. So how do you get them to go from, okay, I care about this glacier or I care about this river. How do you get from that to systemic solutions? So the kind of changes that make an impact. So passion is the key ingredient to action. You don't act out of apathy. You don't act because you don't care. Every individual person

is a small piece of what we need to do, what we need to change. The people in power who we need to urge to act in our best interests, and not just my best interests, my children's best interests, the people who this will really affect the most. These individual voices do add up and we have to keep remembering that. And I know it feels like a paradox. Again, it's like, who am I? This one little person, I can't do anything in the face of the most giant corporations on earth and governments.

but you can collectively and i think that's when you see the reach that these stories are able to accomplish

on places like YouTube, places like social media, the current avenues for science communication, you can see scale. Yeah, it kind of feels comparable to the idea that people are like, what am I, what could I as one person do? But then there are also people buying lottery tickets and you're like, well, your odds of winning the lottery are very low. But there's some sense of like, you believe that your individual action can affect something like that versus the bigger one. I don't know that that will happen. And the great part here is if...

The deal is anybody who wins that lottery, we're sharing it among the whole planet because we're saving the place, right? I mean. Yeah, the deal is this lottery. Okay, but you and I, we can joke about the idea of that. So what about for people who are listening, who are the regular people who might not be a scientist or a YouTube star, how can they cultivate scientific curiosity in themselves and in their everyday lives?

- Well, the first thing you can do is engage with science. Read as many science stories as you can. - Where do you go for that? Where are your favorite places to get science stories? - Well, my favorite place to get science stories is YouTube. I read a lot of books too. I mean, books are an ancient technology. I used to print them on paper. It's wild. But doing these things is a practice. Einstein has this famous quote where he talks about, "You should never stop questioning." But later on in those words, he talks about curiosity,

as a holy curiosity. And I asked myself, why would Einstein be talking about a holy curiosity? This was not a religious man. But I think he meant that we should treat it as a practice. So whatever your avenue of media that you best resonate with, whether it's quick Instagram videos or TikToks or unpacking these books full of the deepest questions in the universe,

The important thing is to make it a practice and a habit and a ritual. So however it happens perhaps isn't the most important thing, but that it's treated as a practice, as a ritual, as this holy curiosity. Well, okay, so I have a skepticism of that that I'm curious what your reaction to is because a lot of the people who are pushing the most dangerous stuff and believing the least scientifically accurate things

They, I think, would describe themselves as curious and are like, I am like doing my own research has almost become a meme of like, I'm being curious. I'm looking at the facts. I'm I'm watching the YouTube videos. And then they're coming to conclusions that are inaccurate and dangerous. So how do you make sure that you don't?

go down that path and become someone who is, you know, has these deeply held beliefs that are not based in fact or science. I think beyond curiosity, there are a couple of other key ingredients that have to be part of this big tasty dish that is scientific curiosity. Let me start with humility. The phrase, I don't know. How many times do we say that and feel good about it? But it is, I think, the most powerful phrase in science that

But the thing is, when scientists say it, they say, I don't know it. I think it means something different than it does to people who haven't, haven't worked and grown up in that system for the decades that these people have. We have to acknowledge in science,

most aspects of our lives, that there's so much more that we don't know than we do. I mean, we depend on people that know more than us for how many things in our lives, from keeping the lights on, to fixing our car, to building the airplanes that we ride around the planet in. I mean, we trust these people innately for some reason.

Why is that? I'm not sure I have the answer to that, but we know that we are humble and there's a ton we don't know about the world. And we allow other people that do know to guide the way. But the crisis there is that we have eroded trust in institutions. And I think by communicating from science, from scientists about the honest motivations and stories behind their work, we can restore the humanity behind these stories.

policies and rules and regulations and put a bit of humanity and humility back into that system. But the other ingredient is ignorance.

The other key part of science is that even when it fails, you learn stuff. What a great system. But again, not a system that a lot of people are used to. Failure is viewed in most aspects of our life as a negative. Stuart Feierstein has written about both failure and ignorance at length. Highly recommend his books on those subjects.

But the key is that scientists embrace this feeling. It becomes like curiosity, another positive feeling to sit on the edge of this ever expanding circle of knowledge with this black void of unknown in front of you and being like, this is great. You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to take a step. I run into this issue on my show sometimes.

Where I make, you know, I make kind of silly videos and they're kind of goofy. And then the jokes are a bit on the dad brand. But like spectacular dad brand jokes. Let's just, I won't let you be too humble on this. They are maybe dad jokes, but they're the highest level of dad jokes. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. People ask me, you know, who's your show for? Is it a show for kids? My answer is yes, but maybe not in the way you think. It's for...

fostering that childlike curiosity. And that is something that people of all ages can get in touch with because I think it's the purest place. I mean, that's what I'm trying to do is I don't always wrap up ideas neatly with a bow and a video to leave people with the most amount of certainty and everything is known because that's not how any of this works. So to get comfortable in these moments of we don't know, more research is needed.

We are all people trying to discover more about everything in our life. I'm applying that to science. I think there's something so profound about that, right? Is that it feels really good to hold forth. It feels really good to be like, I know the answers and let me tell you the answers. And I think it can be a really uncomfortable feeling to say,

I don't know the answer and I'm going to try and find out. And yet so many times that's the right answer, whether it's an emotional quandary or an intellectual quandary. So often the right answer is to be like, I don't know. What do you think? Let's try and figure it out together. But it's hard to do that. I think we're, especially in our society, that's not something that gets you a lot of credit or praise at first. It isn't.

Okay, we're going to take a short break, but when we come back, Joe is going to finally reveal what makes Glacier Ice blue. Don't think we were just going to leave you hanging and never tell you the answer. Stick around to find out. Warmer, sunnier days are calling. Fuel up for them with Factor's no prep, no mess meals. You can meet your wellness goals thanks to this menu of chef-crafted meals with options like Calorie Smart, Protein Plus, Veggie Vegan, or Keto. And Factor has fresh, never frozen meals, which are dietician approved and ready to eat in just two minutes.

That sounds like a dream come true. I cannot wait. So no matter how busy you are, you will always have time to enjoy nutritious, great tasting meals. Make today the day that you kickstart a new healthy routine. What are you waiting for? Head to factormeals.com slash betterhuman50 and use code betterhuman50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month. That's code betterhuman50 at 50%.

factormeals.com slash betterhuman50 to get 50% off your first box, plus 20% off your next month while your subscription is active.

I want to tell you about a new podcast from NPR called Wild Card. You know, I am generally not the biggest fan of celebrity interview shows because they kind of feel packaged, like they've already told these stories a bunch of times before. But Wild Card is totally different because the conversation is decided by the celebrity picking a random card from a deck of conversation starters. And since even the host, Rachel Martin, doesn't know what they're going to

pick. The conversations feel alive and exciting and dangerous in a way because they're vulnerable and unpredictable. And it is so much more interesting than these stock answers that the celebrities tend to give on other shows. You get to hear things like Jack Antonov describe why boredom works or Jenny Slate on salad dressing or Issa Rae on the secret to creativity. It is a beautiful, interesting show, and I love it. Wildcard comes out every Thursday from NPR. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

And we are back. OK, so before we demystify Glacial Blue, the whole team here at How to Be a Better Human would like to thank you for listening to the show so far this season. We'd love for you to tell us what you think by clicking on the survey in our show description or by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. Tell us, what do you like? What would you like to hear more about next season? We are very curious to hear from you. OK, and now back to this episode and back to that particular beautiful and unique shade of blue. Here's another clip from Johansson's talk.

So inside of that glacier are a bunch of water molecules, thousands at least. And they're in there, and even though it's a solid mass, they're vibrating. Molecules just vibrate. It's what they do. They're like amped-up TED speakers or chihuahuas or something. So water is this V-shaped molecule. You've got an oxygen right here, and then you've got two hydrogens up here, OK? Some of those water molecules are in there, and they're vibrating like this, and some are vibrating like this.

This is the glacier vibrating water dance. OK, so light vibrates too, because it acts like a wave. So if light comes along at the right color, at the right frequency or wavelength, it turns out it can be vibrating in sync with that water molecule, and that water molecule sucks it right up. That color of light is subtracted out. OK, so it turns out that one of water's favorite wavelengths to suck up when it's doing its little vibration dance

is around 700 nanometers. That is reddish orange light. If you take the white light of the sun, all the colors, subtract out red-orange, you're left with that beautiful blue color. You can only see this when you're deep inside of a glacier, as the light is passed through several meters of all these vibrating water molecules. And this is the same reason that the ocean is blue.

So, thanks to human activities from climate change, environmental pollution, to habitat loss, more of the natural world, living and non-living alike, is under threat today than at any point in our human existence. The entire time our species has been around. We're talking more birds, more ice, more forests, more islands, insects, mammals, just about everything.

But for every rhino or orangutan or coral reef or ancient tree or whatever famous and endangered thing that we've all heard of, there are tens, maybe hundreds that we never hear about. They're disappearing, but invisible and unknown. But it doesn't have to be this way. Okay, so Joe...

You do a lot in these videos, right? It seems like traveling to the very ends of the earth to find and lick a glacier is that's a lot more effort than most people are putting into their YouTube videos. So I'm curious, what's the most challenging question that you've tried to tackle or what's the hardest video that you've had to make? This might not be the answer you expect, but the hardest video that I've ever done was a seemingly simple question of why there's seven days in a week. I assumed.

Surely someone had written this down at some point, but how this critical system of planning our entire existence came into to be. It turns out there are hints and connections to, you know, ancient Egypt and, of course, the Greeks. The Greeks ruined everything. Various calendar systems that have evolved over time, astrology and very, you know,

quote unscientific ways of looking at the universe but all of these sort of amalgamated in times before writing and before records to create uh this strange system of seven days

where there was misinterpretations along the way. There was, uh, there was confusion. There was, there was religion and ritual mixed with early science. And the people are just like seven, fine, this will work. And we've just been doing it ever since. But it was an important lesson in the idea that there are things too old to know, to be sure of. And it also gave me

the opportunity to do a great impression of one of my favorite memes, which is Pepe Silvia conspiracy from Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I'm just super proud of that too. Okay. So that leads me to another question, which is how do you come up with the questions?

I mean, am I weird that I walk around every day asking myself these questions? I mean, I guess I don't take anything for granted about why plants are green or why the sky is blue or why there's seven days in a week or why there's 28 days in February or all these things that we just surround us in our universe. All of them have a story. I write things down all the time. All those shower thoughts that all of us have that we don't write down, well, I write them down and I make a living off of them.

It's interesting. I often have people ask me about, you know, comedy and stand up and how do you learn to be funny? And I say such a similar thing, which is that everyone thinks of really funny things or notices strange, unusual things every single day. It's just most people then are like, OK, it enters the brain and it leaves the brain. And for me, it's like, no, no, no.

I gotta trap that, I gotta pin that down and put that in my little notebook, put that in my app that then I come back to later on and think like, okay, so what is it that I thought was funny about that? What's interesting? And you're doing such a similar thing there.

Except the main difference is I was born funny, so I don't have to do that particular thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I have to work at it. Yeah, that is different. You know, that's that's some people are just born into greatness for the people who are fans of your work and who love what you do and are inspired by you. But but they don't necessarily want to be science communicators themselves. What are maybe three things that people can do to put.

the scientific process and scientific curiosity into their daily life. I know we talked about like the big principles, but what are some things that you could kind of do every day? I planted a garden. I think that's an amazing place, whether it's one flower in a pot or an elaborate native pollinator feeding buffet in your yard or garden box or whatever you can do, because that will bring nature to you. And I have discovered a

that live around me that I had no idea existed. And it came literally right into my yard. And it's fun. And I would read every day. The most incredible technology, I think more powerful than a YouTube video, is the ability to pound dead trees and put the thoughts of the smartest people in history together.

on little marks across those pages. And we live in a universe full of incredible ideas and information just waiting for us to go out there and take it. And tuning down my Twitter refreshing and tuning up my reading and just encountering as many of these ideas as I can, considering them,

All of us are only the amalgamation of the ideas that we encounter. None of us are being bestowed with magical knowledge by some little elves that sit under our desk or something. We can only be as good as the ideas that we encounter. Making a habit and a ritual out of reading in whatever format is another tool. I think sharing the stories that you learn with others,

And I don't mean, again, I don't mean this in the broad sense of being a science communicator, but exercising your passion. If you're excited about what you learn, one of the most fun things that you can do is go share that passion with other people. Even if it's just one other person, if it's your best friend, if it's your parent, if it's your children, to just be like, oh my God, did you know? I mean, that's such a fun moment and it's contagious.

and it will spread and you might make a difference in that person's life. And it's just fun. You get to be the nerd at parties and people say that they don't want to be that person, but they're a really fun person to have around. You never know when a game of Trivial Pursuit might break out. This is great. When it comes to climate change, what is something that you're optimistic about? I feel like you're able to keep a really positive view. And so I'm curious what's something that's making you optimistic about that. I'm optimistic about young people. Every time...

the demons of cynicism claw their way into my psyche. I see what young people are doing and saying, screw you boomers, get out of the way. We're going to fix the problem for ourselves with whatever's in their power of protest or action or policy, because boomers

They know as well as we know, but they know it more that this is ultimately the world that they have to inherit, the truth that they will have to exist in in the future. And that's really inspiring. We can all look at the politics and the inaction and the gridlock and wallow into a corner of depression. But then you see the people who aren't making that an option. The young people are saying no.

Action is the only option. And I'm happy to let them take the lead. We can get out of the way because I think they know the way. Something that I worry about for myself is, you know, with a podcast like this, we fact check the episode. We're really trying to be really conscious about not putting things out that aren't fully accurate. And I know that you're really worried about that and conscious of that in your own work, too. You really are, you know, trying to be keep these things safe.

So that they're informative and you're not putting things out that aren't 100% true. What do you do or do you worry about the kind of context that sometimes gets collapsed on the internet where work like yours is

is presented side by side with something that is not fact-checked and that is wrong. Or where like our podcast is next to something that is not only not fact-checked, it's completely inaccurate. I sometimes feel like 50 years ago, there was an obvious difference between someone handing you a newspaper and a person handing you a thing that they'd scrawled in pencil on the street. And now they're kind of presented side by side and they look very similar when you see them. So it can be harder to tell the difference. So I'm curious how you deal with that fear or if that's a fear for you at all.

i mean yeah there's a ton of stuff out there that people scream into the internet that has no basis in fact gets a lot of attention a lot of people to make a really good living at this you can't compete or correct every problem that you see you only continue to do the best work that you can under the most honest principles and for me that's scientific principles we have to avoid this issue of

what is called the Gish Gallop in rhetoric, where in a debate you can get bogged down by simply responding to the inaccuracies of your opponent. And then you don't get your argument out. You don't get your message out to the people. So there are people who use that against science and it is a weapon of communication. We have to avoid that temptation. But I think this really gets, again, at the root of part of this crisis of trust.

Because science is a system of natural selection of ideas. It's not trustworthy because it's institutions and universities and these places of power and prestige. I mean, that's part of it, but I don't think it's a positive. Science is trustworthy at its core because it is a system, a philosophy of...

correcting incorrect information by replacing it with better information. Even when things that don't hold up make it through the filters of peer review, re-experimentation and verification, these things happen.

Bad things make it through, but the natural selection of ideas takes over and makes sure that those ideas don't get reused because they don't provide any future opportunities for discovery. This is what makes science work. This is what makes it trustworthy. And I think we have to do the hard work of rebuilding the trust in that institution by reconnecting with the humanity behind it.

Because the old brick and mortar institutions, these ancient universities, these people speaking from ivory towers, science isn't trustworthy because of authority. And that has been part of the issue with the erosion of trust. We have to get back to the root of what makes the process work, what makes it exciting. That's such a perfect way to wrap this up. Well, Joe Hanson, thank you so much for making time to be on a show. It was really a pleasure talking to you. You too. Thanks so much. Thank you.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to our guest, Joe Hanson. Joe and many other changemakers recently attended Countdown, TED's summit addressing climate change. You can find out more about that at countdown.ted.com. And you can watch Joe's show, It's Okay to Be Smart, on YouTube.

On the TED side, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Abhimanyu Das, who's currently gish galloping around the office. Daniela Balarezo, who's reporting from inside a glacier. Frederica Elizabeth Josefa, who is designing a new length of week. Ann Powers, who's moving along with the magnetic poles. And Cara Newman, who is made up of a bunch of water molecules. From PRX Productions, our show is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, an expert communicator.

unofficial lab technician Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who is basically a scientist of audio. Have a great week, and listen, if you like our show, share it with another human. Support for this show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks Running.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.