So, Mary, what is the most embarrassing situation you've ever been in as part of your book research.
That's an easy one. That one, not surprisingly was for Bonk. The subtitle of that book is The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. So that is a book about the delightful awkwardness of taking sex, arousal, orgasm, all of that, all the physiological components of it, and putting it in a laboratory setting with a couple doing things and then somebody in a white coat taking notes. So I wanted to get at that central awkwardness of what I just described.
And I found this researcher in London who's doing something with four dimensional ultrasounds, so three D movies basically in ultrasound. It was a diagnostic tool, and he wanted to do one It was actually a penis and a vagina interacting, and I said, well, I would like to be there when you do that to observe, and he wrote back, well, if your organization can provide some volunteers, then I'd be happy to do that. So my organization asked its husband.
If you want to hear the rest of that story, you'll have to listen to the rest of the podcast. So on today's episode of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, we have the amazing Mary Roach on the show.
Hi.
I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I'm rarely embarrassed by my own science.
I am Kelly Wiener Smith, and my science has put me in loads of embarrassing situations or maybe gross and embarrassing.
All right, tell us quickly, what is the grossest thing you've done, ever done for science?
Oh? My gosh, all right, hands down. So I hate the smell of fish. And I worked on a project where we were trying to figure out what kind of impact the coal powered power plants on Lake Erie we're having on the local fish populations. These surveys happen every twenty years or so, and the way you do it is you essentially put a net into the water that gets sucked into these power plants, and the water is used to like cool things down, generate steam, blah blah blah.
But the fish gets smushed against the net and as the temperature of the water heats up, they all die. And so not all of them, but many of them. Some of the power plants pull the nets out and dump them into dump trucks which literally fill up halfway or more with dead fish, and somebody has to go in there, including in the middle of the summer, with waiters on, and like subsample and identify what species of
fish are in here? How many are in here? Do any of them look like they have fungle diseases and would have died anyway? So I had to like become very intimate with dump trucks full of dead fish under a hot summer sun. And that is the most disgusting thing I've done in my whole life. And I hate the smell of fish. And I still don't eat fish. I just can't. I just can't.
Sounds like a good job for your future robot research assistant.
Bringing the robot overlords on. That sounds great. I mean I learned a lot about fish identification that summer, but I would maybe give up that knowledge if I could have avoided that job.
Well, sometimes doing science means getting all mucky and dirty, and sometimes explaining science requires you to get in weird situations, sometimes scary, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes just downright on, but.
Always when they're explained by Mary Roach, absolutely hilarious. So let's just jump right into the interview. Let's not make people wait. On today's show, We're incredibly lucky to have Mary Roach. Mary has been my absolute favorite popsey author since I picked up Stiff as an undergrad in two
thousand and three. Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Packing from Mars, Gulp, Grunt, and Falls have all been New York Times bestsellers, and I have been at the bookstore the day each of them have been released so that I could get my copy as soon as possible. So if you've ever wondered, how many lasers does it take to keep birds away from the Vatican's flowers? Can you lower the national debt by doing a more thorough job of chewing your food? What's it like to go to the bathroom in space?
What happens at a body farm? Have scientists been able to find the soul? Or any other equally weird questions. We've got the Gael for you. Her latest book is Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law. Welcome to the.
Show, Mary, Hey, thanks, thank you so much.
Guys, I'm so excited to have you on the show. I got to talk to you once about cosmonauts and that was so much fun.
Oh yeah, the cosmonauts love those guys.
Yeah, they're special to start off. So one of the things that I love the most about your books is that their topics that I didn't know I was dying to learn about, and then as soon as I start reading, it turns out I was dying to learn about these topics. So let's get started with Fuzz. How did you pick the topic for the book Fuzz? What was the thought process there? And then in general, how do you pick your book topics?
I always wish that I had the really succinct and fantastic origin story for a book, you know, like that there was something in my past that triggered this passion that I had to spend two years down this rabbit hole that had meant everything to me. Is that like that? It's like I turned in a book and I would like to do another one. That means I need an idea for another book, and I don't have one. So it's this process of just sometimes looking back at things
that I've covered before or something I heard about. In this case, I had heard about lab up in Ashland, Oregon, the National Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, and there's a woman there who was an expert and published a paper on how to tell real versus artificial or counterfeit tiger penis, which is that this is used medicinally, sometimes for virility. And she wrote this paper on how to tell real versus
counterfeit tiger penis. And that's the thing I get kind of like that there's a scientist out there whose area of expertise is detection of counterfeit tiger penis because of course, you know, if somebody's smuggling this stuff in, you need to prove that it is an endangered species in order to arrest the person. So she needs to be able to tell is it real or not? And happily, it is almost always fake. It's usually cowerd deer penis, which is a lot bigger than a tiger penis.
Anyway, does she do it by morphology or genetics?
Oh, by morphology it is so easy to tell. Like a tiger piece you can't see because this is audio, but tiger pens is like it's a little tiny thing, you know, what a dear penis is.
But does either one actually have an effect on you know, male performance? Does it really matter if it's counterfeit?
Like most of these things, I think, you know, maybe kind of psychologically inspiring, but not the tigre penis that'd be a little depressing. Yeah. I don't think there's any peer reviewed controlled studies suggesting that any of these penises have any solid effect on male performance, but regardless, people smuggle them in and out of the country. I thought, oh, well, that's an interesting line of forensics. Forensics is interesting. Well, maybe I'll go up there and I'll talk to her,
which I did, and it was a wonderful morning. We had dried animal penises laid out on the table and I took some pictures, which is still on my phone, and every now and then the grandkids are like, what's on your phone. I'm like, no, no, no, no, there's a lot of stuff on my phone we can't look at because I'll have to explain. So I thought this is going well. And then I went in to talk to the director of the lab and I said, well, here's what I love to do, or that I need to
do with the book. I have to be on the scene. And I imagined, you know, going in when they rated a fake targer penis sweatshop in China, Like you know, we'd go in and there'd be these four people and they have to do this. They carve little barbs, because felines have barbs on there. The penis little sticky eppie things, sort of like get the rental car, you know, don't back up on this spikes, so somebody has to carve those. And I thought we'd be hunched over carving these penises,
and we'll go and it'll be this incredible scene. I had this whole scenario in my head, and then I'd find other things to write about. And then the guy goes, you know, legally, if it's an open case investigation, you can't go along. You just can't. It's the law. No. So that just shut me down. And so I went home and I was like, ah, damn.
But then I came across this book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, which made me think, this is a historical book, you know, about people used to put animals on trial that had misbehaved.
And I thought, what if the animals were the perpetrators? And I say perpetrators in quotes. Obviously animals follow their instinct, not laws. So what if we turn it around and what if the animals are not the victims but the perpetrators And then it turns out there's this whole area of science called human wildlife conflict, with conferences and experts and textbooks, And I had never heard of human wildlife conflict, had no idea people devote their lives to figuring out
how to coexist with wild animals. So that's a very long winded way of saying that's what happened. This is how I got my idea for the book.
I mean, it's a great story in general. I'd love to hear more about how you got into science writing. I mean, how did you identify this sort of opening in people's appetite that wasn't being completely served, or you know, this itch that people wanted scratching in a certain way.
Well, again, not through a longstanding passion of mine. I was one of those people who thought, in high school and in college, oh, science is boring. I want to be creative, which is so stupid. There's so much creativity in science. It wasn't something that I had thought about
in college or even when I first graduated. I was writing for the magazine of those Sunday paper here in the Bay Area San Francisco Chronicle, just general stories, kind of a little bit weird Mary Rochie but not science related. And my editor went to another publication called Hippocrates, which was more focused on health and medicine, but they still let me be Mary Roach and do kind of odd stories and which was fun. And then from there an editor from Discover magazine said, would you like to do
these weird Mary Roach stories for us? We are a science magazine. I know you're not a science writer, but why don't you do this? And I was like, okay, So I did that and those were the most interesting stories I'd done. And I loved writing about science. Since I don't have a science background, they tend to be not heavy science, you know, they're definitely science for people who have mistakenly thought that they don't like science or that they don't think science is interesting. I'm kind of
a gateway drug to science writing. I'm heavy on narrative and fun and quirk. For me, the science and the discovery of learning about these different fields is tremendous fun and really gratifying. But am I really a science writer? I guess so I don't know.
Of course you are.
You look at real science writers and you know, they just I can't understand their books.
I think you are the kind of science writer where people actually learn something because they make it to the end of the book, which I think is huge and like that's a real skill getting people to stay to the end of the book. Thank you, thank you, Yes, you're welcome.
That is my goal, even just to the end of the chapter. Man. I am always fighting for that, I really am. I'm always sort of policing my words and my sentences going in has been it's been a couple of pages, but since there's been anything really fun here or surprising, like let's punch it up, they're going to put the book down. I know they're going to put the book down any second.
I feel like it's an interesting activity when you're writing to figure out how long has it been since the funny thing that I said, and then trying to not like overdo it. Yes, Zach and I had a problem where a couple chapters we felt like we had gotten corny and we were just overdoing it. But you know, you want to make sure they come at a regular pace.
It's an art, and you guys do it so well, some really tough stuff that you're asking people to come along with you for and you managed to keep it fun, and that is extraordinary. Thank you.
I think we identified something really important, though, which is that a lot of science writing is done in a way that isn't actually that understandable, and yet a lot of people still love to consume it, which has always been something of a mystery to me. Like I read Stephen Hawking and I don't understand a lot of his books, and then people tell me like I loved A Brief History of Time, and I'm like, really, did you actually understand it? Did you just appreciate being in the presence
of what felt like a great mind. So I wonder what people are going for sometimes with those books, if they actually want to understand, if they just want to hang out with Stephen Hawking.
I do too. I don't have an advanced degree, but I don't feel that I'm a moron, you know, I'll pick up I don't know, Brian Green, maybe these are really gifted, super intelligent, successful writers, but I'm like, I don't know, or even like astronomy for people in a hurry Neil deGrasse.
Tyson astrophysics for people in hurry, yeah.
And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not following along I'm falling behind. Help me, I'm falling behind. And I know these books are huge sellers, and I'm always curious about that. How many people read it all the way through and really understand it in the way the author means it to be understood. I'd love to know that. Can we get Ai to give us an answer on that.
I actually threw out my copy of Hawkings's book because I realized I only had it on my shelf so that I could be the kind of person who looked like they could read that book. But I gotten through ten pages and I was like, this book being on my shelf is a lie, and so I kindly got rid of it.
But I'm glad to hear that. I mean no disrespect to mister Hawking.
Then, oh yeah, he's clearly way smarter than I will ever be.
Well, when you're writing your books, you dive deep into a topic, You talk to the experts. You must at some point pass over the threshold where you're something of an expert in the topic yourself. How do you keep hold of what the reader knows and what they don't understand, and what this must feel like to them the first time they're hearing about it. That's a real challenge something you pull off amazingly in your book.
That is always a concern that, over the course of the two or three years that I work on a book, have I actually learned enough that I'm assuming a level of knowledge on the part of my reader that doesn't exist because we are starting out at the same place, the place of just curiosity and near total ignorance. And then I'm moving along through speaking to researchers and experts, I'm actually getting to the point where I'm understanding things in a way that I now think, is it completely
unclear what I'm saying here? And that's a little stuff I do have. My editor at Norton is she's a poet and a novelist. She has no background in science. She's a good editor for me for that reason because she will sometimes just put a note in the margin, I Mary, you've lost me here, or I don't know what you're talking about. That is helpful. I'm so excited to talk to somebody who is an expert in their field, and when their field is something you know, it's a
little complicated, like you know, stem cells say. I mean, I'm so grateful to find somebody who can explain it to me, who has a sense of what I don't know, which is almost everything, and can then unpack it in a way that I understand. So part of what my job is is looking for those people who I'm going to then force to be an unpaid tutor for days
on end and for endless emails. So I'm not entirely clear on can you just explain that's so necessary to keep in your head where people are at and whether you've left them behind, because I get, let's be honest, left behind by a lot of science books.
I have this theory that Agatha Christie would be a great science writer because she seems to have this ability of like obviously understanding what's actually happening in her story and introducing the facts in a way that the reader to discovers them and unravels the mystery in an organic way. It seems to be sort of the same challenge to write a mystery novel and keep in mind what the reader knows and doesn't know. I find that impossible. I can't imagine writing a murder mystery.
Yeah, this is why I never read murder mysteries, or even when I see knives out I'm like, wait, wait, did she wait a minute? You know? And I'm always making my husband stop, we stop, stop, wait a minute? Is that? And he hates it. It's like, can't we just keep going with it? We just keep this going? No, but I don't know who's the guy? Is that the brother? Who? Or is that the wait? What? This is the same kind of thing you're asking people to keep in their head,
the facts that you explained three chapters ago. And it's easy for you because you learned it as the author I have in the book that I just turned in. There's a moment where I'm like, as we learned and forgot in chapter three, it's nobody remembers.
How did the conversations with the experts often go and has it changed over the like twenty so years that you've been writing, because you know, sometimes I'll try to interview someone and they'll go right over my and I'm like, no, no, no, bring it down. And some of them can and some
of them can't. And I also feel like the relationship with some of the experts has changed over time, as NSF keeps telling all the scientists that we are also communicators, and they feel like but they're not what is that like?
You get a sense of this in the first five minutes. I think of a conversation by phone or on zoom of whether a person's going to really be able to do that, And sometimes I just in my head, stop the ner. You know, I just asked one or two more token questions, and I thank the person and says, no, it never happened. You know. I will say, can we back up and can you explain whatever it is? And then the explanation is different but also incomprehensible for me.
So there isn't much to be done there. And that's why I just when I find someone who actually enjoys explaining things in an accessible way, I just want to You know, I can't kiss them because we are on the phone, but I'm just like, Okay, you're now going to be my guy for induced pluripotent stem cells. I'm going to be pestering you on and off for the next six months and not paying you for that. I'll send you a book. But what hasn't changed. No, I
think that's always been there. I mean I once was a sign to do a story I wanted to go. And you know those planes that fly into hurricanes. I had this idea that'd be a fun thing to do. And there was a hurricane hunter plane that was going into a certain kind of storm, not infect a hurricane. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that. And there was this meteorologist on board, and it was almost like
a form of hostility. He would not explain things in a way that anybody who's not a meteorologist could understand. And I kept trying to well, I what if I'm let's pretend I'm a sixth grader at a somebody's barbecue party and just talk to me like that, and he wouldn't, And so we got down. It was this in Monterey. We landed, and I called my editor and just said, forget it. You know, maybe you can pay my expenses, which aren't a lot from here to Monterey and we're done because nothing can't do it.
What a bummer. Yeah, I know, I love you are expecting someone to be a tutor approach. I was in trouble figuring out how much research I should do before I reach out to someone. And I think that's because early on I asked for an interview and they said, well, tell me what you want to ask me about and I sent them my questions and they said, Nope, these are not the most interesting things that I do. I will not be interviewed by you, and they like shut
me down. And I was like, oh, I mean I was hoping you'd help me understand this stuff, but okay. And so I also feel like some people I talk to it's almost like they don't respect the job of a popsie author, like NSF keeps telling every when you do these broader impacts, scientists can communicate, And I feel like a lot of scientists I've talked to now feel like, oh, if you're a scientist, you also can do science communication just as easily, Like you learn that along the way.
But it's a very different kind of writing. And so I feel like I encounter people who are very hostile. They don't feel like I've done enough. And then also people who are like, well I could do what you do.
I think to go back to your previous question, but not that there's anything wrong with the current question. To go back to your previous question. One thing that has changed for me over twenty years is that this is a wonderful thing when it happens. If I write to someone that I've never met, and I say, hey, you know, I saw that you're working on such and such. I'm working on a book, and I also at a little
bio at the bottom of my email. And when someone writes back and says, oh, I've read one of your books, or I'm familiar with what you do. Sure, happy to talk. I'd love to talk. I know that that's going to go well because they know the kind of weirdo that I am and the level at which I'm writing, and their enthusiasm suggests this is going to be just what I need. Another thing that's changed is a lot of times when you reach out by email, you just don't
get a reply. And I don't know if that's one of those people who hates science communicators, or it's somebody who doesn't check their email, or it's not a useful I don't know what it is. But there's a lot more of just never hearing back through, whether it's LinkedIn or a university email address. I think it's easier now for people to feel okay ignoring you because no one
who checks their email. Nobody checks their email anymore. You know, you got to text me, well, I don't have your number, so that's different.
There's a gentleman in my department who I often go to with really hardcore questions about like general relativity, and his attitude is, you're wasting your time. There's no way you could ever explain these topics to the general public. And then he gives me a really excellent explanation, which I rely on for the podcast, and he keeps doing it. So he's quite grumpy about it sometimes, but he's also excellent at it. And it seems to me that there's
this sort of conflict in a lot of scientists. They feel like, I just want to be left alone to do my science, but they also feel like, hey, the public should support us, and this is important, and I think it's vital that people do the kind of work you do, because not every scientist can be out there
explaining it to sixth graders. And I'm wondering, like, if you feel sort of any hostility from scientists or any sort of like, you know, weirdness that you're telling their story instead of them, What do you feel like is your relationship with the science community.
There, I do feel hostility from the people who respond to me and agree to talk. I think that usually goes well. There was a woman who on Amazon was very put off by Gulp, which is Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It's you know, the tube between nose and apple and all the weird things that go on in there. And she was very, very angry that I hadn't mentioned the mucus layer in the stomach. Basically, her feeling was that people like me are stealing science, making money off
of it, cheapening it, dumbing it down. I looked her up onpe my professor, and she had It was very mixed. There were people who are like, she's a really great professor and I learned a lot, and then there are people like, she's such a hater. I do not deserve that. D These are people who aren't reaching out to me. They're obviously talking about for the most part, behind my back.
I'm sure that that's out there. I don't get a lot of it directed at me through email or I don't read my Amazon review reviews anymore, and as I hope that you don't either. No, there was a reviewer who said the same kind of thing that making science successible, I was disrespecting it, or you know, that kind of reaction exists out there for sure. For sure, probably far more people than I want to believe feel that way about me, but they're nice enough to keep it to themselves.
I bet that's the minority opinion. But let's take a break and then when we come back, we will talk about animals getting in troule. So Daniel and I have this long running debate about whether or not Virginia or California is better, and oh, irobably going to fall on the California side, but I think Virginya is clearly better. But we were going to each ask a question about animal problems that are in our area. And I have tons of trouble with deer. We have like forty deer
in our hay fields last night I counted. And they are also in the roads, yes, and why don't they get out of the way what I'm driving towards them? So, yeah, what's going on with the deer and how do we get them out of the roads.
Yeah, the deer in the headlights phenomenon. When you think about animals not getting out of the way, an animal in the road sees a car coming at it and it perceives it as a predator, which makes sense, Like this thing is coming at me, I don't know. And so there's this thing flight initiation distance, which is how
long can I stay where I am? Maybe if I'm eating something delicious, how long can I stay here before I actually really need to get out of the way because I'm going to be hit or grabbed or eaten or whatever it is. But in general, the car hasn't been around that long the automobile, so the evolution hasn't kind of incorporated you know what, There's things going sixty miles per hour, so you need to update your sense of how quickly do I need to run? How quickly do I need to get out of the way. So
there's some confusion with that. I mean, pigeons are obviously really good at it. You can never hit a pigeon with your car, and I'm not saying that I try to do that. But the other thing going on is one of the ways that an animal can detect or a person for them, and the way we can tell how quickly something's coming at us is looming like it's getting bigger and bigger, Like how quickly is it getting
bigger and bigger? That kind of tells us how quickly it's coming at us, and animals are not with cars again because they are very fast pedestrians too. You know, the faster the car, the harder it is to judge. You know, how quickly is it coming at us? Deer active, you know, it's dusk and night, and when what's coming at you is just two pinpoints of light, all you can see is these two pinpoints of light. It's very hard to see is that looming? Is it getting bigger?
It just may look like two points of light, not chain. So you can imagine the deer looking at that, these two points of light going huh A couple points of light huh boo. By the time they figure out that there's a car attached, it's too late, and that is really bad for deer but also really bad for people because you know, if people often say, oh, what's the most danger people ask me, what are these the most
dangerous animal of all the animals that you wrote about. Well, first of all, I would say, you know, bacteria or virus is, but they're not really animals. So deer in terms of the number of people not because you hit the deer, but you swerved to not hit the deer and you hit a tree where you went off on cliff.
So deer are very very dangerous in that way. The other thing that happens is a deer's running across the road in front of you, and your eye is on that deer, and deer there's usually more than one, so you are looking at that deer, you hit the brakes, and then what you end up hitting is the deer behind that one that's also crossing at the same time.
That exact thing happened to me as a teenager.
Did you hit the second one?
I hit the second one, Yeah, exactly, went through the windshield. I like looked at it deep in the eyes forward bounced off.
Yeah, my god. Yeah. And it's terrifying, really dangerous when it's a tall animal like a moose or an elk, because you're just hitting the legs and you're knocking the legs out from under and the whole body and the antlers come crashing down on the roof and the windshield. So camels are a problem in the Middle East. A lot of broken necks. It's bad. It's bad stuff.
I was interested in the various ways that people have come up with to try to keep the deer off the road. Some of them were fairly hilarious, and I love that you introduced this topic with the woman who called into the radio show. Would you share that story.
With us, Yeah, Donna. Donna called it was I forget where this was a call in radio program and this woman called in and said, I have a pet pee. Why do they put deer crossing signs in these areas of high traffic? Why would you put it there that The guy's like, there's a silence, he goes. It sounds like you think that they're placing the signs. So it's like you shouldn't understand that you put the signs where the deer are crossing. It nothing. You don't just choose
where you're going to tell the deers. Exactly the tone of the DJs, there's a mix of incredulity and kindness. Donna, it sounds as though.
I appreciate the kindness though, I feel like that's part of what made it such a charming, funny story.
They put the sign right here, Let's like right before there's a curve, and it's a terrible place to tell the deer to cross.
If only we could tell the deer what to do. Well, these stories of like human animal interactions human wildlife interactions I think are really fascinating from like a public health point of view and in forest management point view and out here in the wonderful state of California. As of course, you know, we deal a lot with bears. My family goes camping a lot. Recently we had this experience where we went camping, and of course we had a bear bag.
We made a mistake of leaving one can of Seltzer in the backseat of the car, and there was a bear and it came in. It opened the car door and got the seltzer, crunched the seltzer, drank all of it, and didn't harm the car at all. It was incredible,
like it used its snout to like open the door somehow. Anyway, bears are very very smart, and I often wonder like it must be very challenging to design bear proof trash cans that are complex enough for bear to not be able to figure them out, but simple enough for humans to be able to do.
This is the problem. This is the problem if you go as I did. I was in Colorado, actually not California for this chapter, but at one point the researcher and I were walking down this alley where behind all the restaurants in downtown Aspen, these bear proof containers were either broken or not being used hardly because it's difficult. I mean, it's like reading a Stephen Hawking book. It's like, you know, harder than one of those you know press
while turning aspirin bottles. It was it required two hands. And you could imagine if you're some restaurant worker who's poorly paid, was middle of a shift running out with a bag of garbage, you know, not bothering to lock it again. And also one of the things that was being done well in an area near Aspen, not Aspen itself, was that they were holding educational talks for the people who worked in the kitchen. The patrons and the restaurant owners have been educated. You know, okay, fed bear is
a dead bear. Like this is what happens. The bears get used to being fed, they keep coming here. There's going to be a conflict and then the bear will be killed. But the people who worked in the kitchen, some of them didn't speak English. They hadn't been told why it's important to lock this container. So they were doing outreach in Spanish in this community, just so that people got it like, oh, this is why we do it, and it's a nice thing to do for the bears.
But yeah, they're very smart. The guy that I spent time with had done a study on bears breaking into minivans in Yosemite. They would break into other cars, but for some reason it was so they all knew there's a certain minivan and he wasn't sure, Like I said, is it the fault of the minivan maker? Are they not? Is there something about the doors that are easy to pop open? He said, it might be that, but I think it's more that a mini van is a place with lots of children and lots of spilled food and
crumbs and soda and a lot of nice smells. And the bears are like, that's the place for me, mm, the.
Same reason dogs like babies. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I've been to Aspen Center for Physics. Of course, is there an Aspen, And many times I've seen a genius theoretical physicist standing in front of one of those things and like unevil, you know, And it's like when you stand in a shower in a new hotel and you're like, how you turned this thing on? And what's hot and what's cold. It's like a new puzzle everything.
Oh my god, the number of times I called the fronts like I'm standing here naked, I can't take a shower because I'm too stupid to figure out your shower system exactly.
And the fancy or the hotel, the more obscure the system is. Let's look that they are have coffee, which sucks.
Probably bears could figure it out, though they'd be happily taking showers.
Pars could figure it out. The bears could figure out there also. And there was a guy from Colorado Fish and Wildlife or fish and Game, I forget what they call themselves there, but he was describing how, you know, up in the hills where there's a lot of delicious food for bears, natural and man made, they got a
lot of break ins. And he was describing how he came to this one place where the bear had literally just pulled the door out of the frame, just like like you know, incredible hulk style pulled it off, but then carefully just set it aside and leaned it against the wall, not like threw it over the deck or knocked it down, just sort of carefully laid it aside. I just I love that. I love bears.
I love megafauna in general. I wish we had more megafauna still in North America, you know, like.
The Giant's loss.
Yeah, the Giant's loss. Giant anything would be great. I once did a story on the Gippsland giant earthworm, which is this worm that is so this is the size of a forty five record around big. And I was like, I'm going to interview this woman who studies the Gippsland giant earthworm.
You're saying, this is an earthworm like the size of a fire hose.
Yeah, oh my god, it is definitely at least that big. And you can hear them moving underground. She goes stomping around on the field and you hear this this sort of gurgling sound as they moved through their tunnels. And she was able to pinpoint where it was dig with the shovel, and like we saw this glimpse of the giant earthworm like going away down the tunnel, and happily she didn't cut it in half. But anyway, any giant thing.
But I was going to say, getting back to you, you're talking about how it had broke in without to get the seltzer water without causing damage. And there are bears that kind of get a reputation. And again this was in Colorado. There's this one bear. It was breaking into cabins and going in and people would be like, you know what, he didn't touch anything. He just went
to the fridge. He took out the honey and the yogurt and the beer and shut the door on the left and everything was fo Yeah, And because of that,
no one wanted to call him in. And so there was this thought that maybe, you know, that these are the bears that don't get killed by fish and wildlife, and that maybe over time will select for bears that are mellower and better mannered, and that maybe one day bears will just be like you know, big raccoons, you know, just kind of bumbling around getting into the garbage.
Are they checking to see if someone is home first? I feel like I'd feel different if I came home and was like, oh, my yogurt is on the counter, a bear must have been here, or if I was like, there, well, it was eating my yogurt.
Yeah. Yeah. They prefer to come in when no one's there, but sometimes they don't know there are stories of a bear coming in grabbing a chicken off the dining table while people are eating, or somebody like they're sitting at home and a bear comes through the door and they
run and lock themselves in the bathroom. They are sometimes coming in when you're there, and when it's dangerous is often if the person has a dog and the dog is you know, of course, freaked out, and the dog's going after the bear and the bear is in freak out defensive mode, and if the person tries to come between the dog and the bear, and they can redirect the attack onto the person, So that's a bad schoys.
Well, what do you think more broadly about this interaction between humans and wildlife. A lot of people feel like, oh, we have to protect the humans. We should get rid of the bear. It's like, this is why we hunted a lot of megafauna to extinction. But you know, the bears were there first. Right in my neighborhood. People worry about their cats because there's coyotes in the neighborhood and I'm like, well, you know, coyotes live here. We moved in and brought our cats.
People are funny about it. Oh, it's so cruel to keep a cat inside. I've had cats as indoor cats. They're fine with it. You're just projecting on your cat. A cat doesn't give it. It wants food.
And a lap, and the birds are happy if your cat stays.
Inside exactly, the birds are happier. Yeah.
So, speaking of the cats, I've talked to a couple different people who do animal control work, and nobody wants to see someone out there like shooting the feral cats, because we all like have warm and fuzzy feelings about the cats, even though they're killing the birds, they're killing the rodents, and so there are a lot of popular programs where the cats are captured, spaine or neutered and then released again, where they're still of course being ecological menaces,
but you hope that the numbers don't grow. And it seems like they were doing something similar with the monkeys that you studied in one of the chapters. Can you tell us about the monkeys and also what it was like to get rubbed by a monkey?
Sure? But I did one on the topic of cats first here. The program in New Zealand is really interesting Predator Free New Zealand twenty thirty, which is an attempt to rid the island of stoats rats. What's it's like a weasel, a long, tubular, fierce, vicious thing. So cute possums that's the other one. So they're non native species and you know New Zealand has flightless birds, so that's like easy pickens if you're a stout. And the possums,
you know, strip the trees and do other things. So there's this desire in order to preserve the native species. Is there's a program by using poisons to eliminate predators, but there were also and again these were brought in. The cats were not native, and there's a ton of feral cats in New Zealand. They brought them in thinking they can get rid of the rats. I think it was. Anyway, if you're going to do predator free New Zealand, you rationally should also be getting rid of the feral cats.
But that is a flashpoint and you can't do that. So that's interesting.
Yeah. Culture, it's so interesting how you know, human emotions sort of make all of this much more complicated. Like I think the macaques, they're in a culture where you're not supposed to kill animals, and.
So well, the macacus. Yeah, I mean in India, not just macacs, but elephants as well. Some of the nuisance quote nuisance animals are also representations of gods hanuman Is and the monkey gods. So if you go to a honumon temple in India, there's monkeys everywhere and people are on the one hand fed up with macaques because they break into houses and they steal things and they're very aggressive. But on the other people are feeding them. It's like
making an offering. So they hang around urban areas and temples and are fed. At the same time, they are despised and the poor people who are the animal control types are completely fed up. It's an intractable problem because people are encouraging them. Also, there's not reliable garbage pickup. I was in Delhi, but also in other cities. It's so there's a lot of food for them and they're
very smart, you know, like bears. I was staying at this hotel in Jaipor and around dusk you look at the rooftops and all of a sudden, the monkeys are coming out and the monkeys. You know, we were in a restaurant and this monkey just all of a sudden is on the rafters and is dropping down onto tables, and the waiters have you know, a stick handy to just threaten the monkey and get to leave. They're everywhere. It's hard to get approval for any kind of control
because of the religious overtones of a monkey. To hire monkey catchers. I mean what's done is to capture them and take them to this big area south in the southern part of Delhi used to be a quarry, this big chunk of land, and so they're captured and brought there. But it's very hard to get somebody to take the job of monkey catcher because you're harassing a monkey, and that's people are not comfortable with that. They're not comfortable
with killing them. They're not even comfortable with birth control efforts which have been going on just because it's a god. I mean it's not literally a god, but it's too close for comfort, and so it's a big problem.
Yeah, So what's going on in this region where it's all just the monkeys, Like the monkeys are in charge. It's like some monkey kingdom.
I went there, I got in there. It is. It's monkey central. They feed them. It's concentrated in certain areas it's an old quarry, but it is all overgrown. It's actually a lovely place to be a monkey. It's just a wild space, but there are villages close by, and the monkeys are really good at climbing right up over the wall and harassing people in the village. There was a guy there is like, you cannot even eat a ROTI there's a monkey wall that's coming to you. They're not being kept in very well.
I think there's a lot of things that we do when it comes to animal control that makes us feel good, but isn't actually changing anything. I think when you move animals from one place to another, so you know you yes, you mentioned that the monkeys get out. I think a lot of times you move an animal and they've spent their whole life getting used to an area they know where the food is, and now you've dropped them as
an adult into an area they don't know. And it seems like in the book you discovered that that's a problem.
Well, it may be effective for the town from which you removed them, but you've now put them in an area where they're going to figure out where's say it's a bear, where's the closest town that has a restaurant or that has houses with cat food or just attractants, as they say, and they're going to start doing the same thing there. So you've just kind of moved the problem. That's an issue for the control agency or the wildlife
folks who decided to do the relocation. If that bear gets into any kind of situation where it's becoming aggressive and it hurts or kills somebody in that new town, Now you the wildlife agency that moved the bear, that translocated the bear, now you are liable, so you're open to a lawsuit. And that has happened. There have been some big payouts in situations where that bear that they know is got habituated to food, they know that's a high risk bear, and they've moved it and something happened,
So that's also a consideration. It works a little better in a younger bear that hasn't gotten set in its ways, but it's very expensive also to do, and the sense is among some of the wildlife control people that it's done in cases where there's a lot of publicity. In other words, you're not going to kill that bear because you're going to get a lot of heat and anger from the public. So it looks good to do that, but it doesn't always work in terms of what the
bear's behavior is in the new place. And it's also not necessarily a nice thing to do. As you mentioned, this is an animal that knows food sources, knows the terrain in the place that it is, so you're now taking it and putting it somewhere else. There were researchers that looked at the survival of it was either raccoons or squirrels that had been trends. I think it was squirrels that had been translocated, and very few of them survived. They put radio collars on them. They'd find like a
piece of radio color. All that remained of squirrel sixty.
Seven, probably torn apart by the local squirrel gangs. Right, it's not happy exactly the person come eating their exactly. I mean, I know we feel that way. Whenever Virginians moved to California. We're like, hey, you know, that's why I left.
That's why I left.
Stop eating my nuts exactly.
All right, Well, let's take a break, and when we get back, we're going to ask Mary about some of the most extreme situations that her work has put her in, So, Mary, what is the most embarrassing situation you've ever been in as part of your book research?
That's an easy one. That one, not surprisingly was for Bonk. The subtitle of that book is The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. So that is a book about the delightful awkwardness of taking sex, arousal orgasm, all of that, all the physiological components of it, and putting it in a laboratory setting with you a couple doing things and then somebody in a white coat taking notes. So I wanted to get at that central awkwardness of what I
just described. And I found this researcher in London who's doing something with four dimensional ultrasound, so three D movies basically in ultrasound, which is something that surgeons could use, say if you were working on a cleft lip and you wanted to get a sense of how that lip is moving before you did the surgery. And he had I think there was a Pearne study that he had done with an erecting penis and looking at before surgery.
What am I dealing with? It was a diagnostic tool and he wanted to do when it was actually a penis and a vagina interacting, and I said, well, I would like to be there when you do that to observe, and he wrote back, well, if your organization can provide some volunteers, then I'd be happy to do that. So my organization asked its husband, and my husband is such a good sport, you know, he had said, oh, sex research, sign me up. You know. He was like, well, I
don't know whatever. I really put the emphasis on, Let's go to London and I'll pay for a nice hotel and we'll, you know, we'll go to see some plays. I think Jeremy Irons is in something right now, and it'll be really fun and we have to, you know, have sex in front of a guy. I look back now on that and I think, how did that even? I guess I'm just really committed to getting good material. Material would be fun to write up, fun for the reader.
I knew that that was going to be really fun to write and also really not fun to do.
So you went through with it?
Oh yes, oh yes, yes I did.
Yeah, and your marriage survived.
It's a very fun scene. It's only a couple of pages. It's only a couple of pages. It's funny because my editor goes, Mary, I don't you know, she has a thing about what people need to take you seriously as a science writer. You know, this is science writing. It's just for people to respect you. And so she was like, I don't know if this scene should really be in here, And then my agent read it and goes, Mary, you need more detail in this scene. So I think I
hit it just about right. We're going to leave that as is.
I think that's why we take you seriously, because it's like she is actually willing to like get involved in this stuff and be a data point in a study.
Yeah.
Yeah, physics is so much less embarrassing and relieved.
How about scary? Have you ever signed up for something thought this is a great idea, and then when you were in the moment, thought this was a bad idea.
There were things that I did and that I didn't really think about it till later that it was probably a stupid thing to do. For example, and the leopard chapter in the book, this is a section of the Middle Himalayas where leopards actually do prey on people, children, old people, easy targets. And as we'd come into this area, the researcher had sort of done this death tour of see this bus stop. An old gentleman was taken waiting sitting there, see this field. So it was like this
tour of maulings. And so I at one point it was a nice evening and I said I'm going to go out for a walk, and nobody wanted to come with me. So I went out for a walk and then the sun went down more quickly than I thought, and that's the hour at which all these attacks happened. And I was walking back thinking, this is really stupid of me, and it was spooky because of what I knew as I was doing it, but then sort of looking back just like that was really stupid of me,
but not terrifying. I sometimes put myself in a situation that my husband will go like, well you did what I did. The story before it's on. This is years ago, and I wrote for Salon dot com and I did a story about bashful bladder paruresis, which is a condition you know men at the urinal they can't start to pee, and it can be extreme. There are people who bring a self catheterization kit when they travel just because they just if anybody's close, they can't I don't think this
is a woman problem much. But anyway, the way that these folks get help is similar to if you're afraid of spiders. You know, it's a progressive the spiders closer, it's in the room, and eventually it's you know, two inches away. So there's a treatment that is where you're somebody's pea buddy, where you know, they drink a lot of water and then you're like out in the living room and they're like, okay, I'm gonna pee. Now I'm
in the bathroom. You're like, okay, I'm in the living room, and then you get sort of closer to them and to the point where you or I was outside the bathroom door and I'm like outside the bathroom door and the guy's like, okay, I'm doing and I'm peeing. So anyway, I was like, wow, I really helped this guy and this is great and it's an interesting story. And my husband's like, where were you this afternoon some rando guy's house who's peeing and I'm standing outside the door and
he's like, did you know this person? No? I don't know. You know, there's a Google group whatever it was back then where I just posted something and somebody said, yes, you can help me and be my pea buddy. So I'm just always like, ah, that sounds great, that'll be really interesting.
Is there data to suggest that this sort of like protocol works in the long term?
Yeah, it does it. I forget the term in psychology for phobias. You start small. He just kind of incrementally increase somebody's exposure and so like I'm the spider. He wrote to me later and he said he was very grateful. He said, you know, I have a girlfriend now and I'm able to go to the bathroom off the bedroom and pee in the middle of the night. I could never do that before. I'm like good, Oh yeah, I know.
Imagine having Mary Roach be your like pe that's in the bar.
Yeah, that was something good that came from my writing or my research. Anyway.
Well, you mentioned that you sometimes have people who don't respond to interview requests. I wonder if there's ever an interview you really really wanted, that you pushed for, that you were persistent in going after until you got it. How do you convince somebody to talk to you if they're not sure about it.
Oh? Yeah, First of all, I just feel that enthusiasm helps a lot, and sometimes enthusiasm takes the form of sending a second and even a third email. It doesn't always work, but people respond, I think to you know, if you're that curious and interested and enthusiastic about their research, and that is appealing for people. And I think people like to talk about their work. You know, maybe their
family doesn't want to hear about it anymore. And to have somebody say I'm super interested in what you do and I want to see and observe and learn about it, I think that that goes a long way. Also, I think people don't like to say no three times, so you know, persistence pays off. Also, it just wear them down to a stub. Just keep at them. I've done all's work. I mean, they're definitely people who and it's often something but the nature of their work, they don't
want any attention in the media. They don't want to And I think more so now with you know, with social media, and if just one person twists what they do and gets on social media and everybody piles on, I totally understand why that's a scary thing and why you want to avoid that. So that's become harder for me. Any lab where work is done with animals, that's very
hard to get in. I had a situation with my last book where the university said no. They didn't really say why, they just said no. And then the guy who runs the lab said, it's my lab. You're going to come to my office and we're going to talk, and then we're going to walk across the hall and we're not going to go to the animal lab. But yes, you can come, and they can't tell me what to do.
But you know, he was familiar with my work, and that was he's been there long enough that he didn't give it what the people in the public affairs office had to say. But often there's reasons why people are wary about an outsider coming in and writing about what they're doing. And I completely understand that.
I have friends who are climate science researchers and they're very concerned about how they're portrayed, and you know, the nuances are crucial in that field.
Yeah, the other thing that I do, as I will tell them you can fact check this to make sure I have it right, and I will never send the material to the person, but I will get on the phone and read it and I'll say stop me if something's wrong, And that works really well. If you give it to them, they'll go in and rewrite it.
I made that the same you.
No, so that doesn't happen. But just reading it to people, I'm always very nervous to do that. That's always a scary thing to do. But when it goes well and somebody actually likes the way you've portrayed their work, and then that's very gratifying. That's a good day.
It's terrifying to write about somebody else's expertise and then send it to them for review and you're like waiting to hear back. I know that.
Yeah, Yeah, that's why I do it on the phone.
Yeah that's smarter. Yeah, that's I think what I'll do in the future. So we are just about out of time, and I want to respect your time. Are you allowed to tell us what your next book is going to be about? Or is that top secret until it comes out?
Oh? No, I can tell you. It's called Replaceable you. So it's all kinds of bits and pieces of the human body and replacement elements. Some of it's historical, some of it's current. You know, it's my usual Mary Roach wandering ding that approach.
I cannot wait? Is it coming out soon?
September? So almost a year. The lead time is quite long these days for books.
Yeah, so it's painful suppending a manuscript and waiting a whole year, I know.
And I have the sense that everything is out of date. You know, I've already done one round of Has anything changed? Surprisingly? Things change slowly, you know. You have this sense that their new discoveries every month, and it's like, well, yeah, there's probably not gonna happen for another five to ten years, you know. So it's okay, but it does feel like it's hard to be up to date in anything when you're turning it in.
I wouldn't write about AI right now because I feel like that year would be a huge cheerfook would be out of date. The second hit the shelves.
Yeah, exactly, how does anybody write about AI? I don't know.
All right, Well, thank you so much, Mary, This was so much fun. I will be a little bit more careful with the deer and Daniel. You need to not talk with Seltzer water anymore.
Was it even flavored Seltzer water?
It was, yes, watermelon?
Yeah, are you sure it wasn't stuff that the kids had like ground into the rug beforehand. Seltzer, Why would they go for that?
I think the Seltzer water was a read Harry.
Yeah, all right, we'll be more careful, Daniel.
Thanks you guys. I was so much fun.
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