It’s human nature for each generation to criticize the generation that preceded it, often using them as a convenient scapegoat for all that’s wrong in the world. The current large target is my own generation, the Baby Boomers. I recently overheard a group of young people—mid-20s—complaining at length about their belief that the Boomers constitute a waste of flesh who never contributed much to society. Respectfully, I beg to differ; this is my response, along with a plea to ALL generations to thi...
Jul 06, 2025•23 min
Musings on science, philosophy, and the limits of human knowledge.
Jul 01, 2025•36 min
Short and Sweet: A challenge to our government and our politicians--all of them--to do their jobs. In good conscience, I can't NOT post this audio essay.
Jun 22, 2025•24 min
I read something the other day that had a reference in it to a new book that had just come out. The book’s called, “Sing Like Fish,” and it’s written by author and science writer Amorina Kingdon. Needless to say, I immediately ordered the book, and I have to tell you, I burned through it in three days. The subtitle is, “How Sound Rules Life Underwater,” which you can imagine, as a wildlife sound recordist, really caught my attention. Actually, a few things in the book caught my attention, includ...
Jun 06, 2025•31 min
On a warm fall day in eastern Nebraska, I met up with wildlife biologist Bethany Ostrom of the Crane Trust. As we talked, we took a long walk along the banks of the Platte River, watching as small grasshoppers by the hundreds boiled out from under our feet like popcorn, listening to meadowlarks and bobolinks calling from the scrubby brush along the river. The Crane Trust monitors the health and welfare of North America’s population of both migratory sandhill cranes, which number in the hundreds ...
Jun 06, 2025•24 min
Imagine a place right here on Earth—not on Mercury or Venus—where it’s not particularly unusual for the summer temperature to soar to 180 degrees Fahrenheit (82 degrees C). Now imagine a 20-meter or 60-foot-tall building in that hellish place where ice can be safely stored, completely frozen, for the entire summer. Oh—I should also add that the building has no electricity and is made out of mud, goat hair, ash, and egg whites. These buildings exist, and they’re called Yakhchals. They’re found in...
May 29, 2025•6 min
Every once in a while, an idea hits me that causes one of those stop-the-presses moments, usually caused by some triggering event—in this case, the senseless, ongoing attacks on and defunding of scientific research by a group of decision-makers who aren’t sure if there’s an ‘I’ in the word ‘science.’ They make me think of a line from the movie Armageddon, in which the Air Force general says to Billy Bob Thornton, one of the NASA executives, “You’re asking me to put the future of the planet into ...
May 18, 2025•15 min
I just got a package in the mail, which contains a signed copy of a brand-new book that just came out from science fiction author Rob Dircks, called “Sunnyside,” along with a cloth patch that I can sew onto a shirt or a baseball cap. The patch says, “HISTORY REPAIR TECHNICIAN: CORRECT THE PAST, PROTECT THE FUTURE.” I won’t give it away, but it’s related to Sunnyside. As you’ve probably already figured out, Rob is my guest my guest in this episode. I’m already halfway through the eBook version of...
May 05, 2025•37 min
Curiosity can lead to some weird and wacky places—how about Sopchoppy, Florida, home of the American Worm Gruntin’ Festival? But there’s more to this story than that. Have a listen.
Apr 02, 2025•8 min
HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED that every child, by the time they’re 13 or so, should have a good grounding in three specific skills. They should be able to read well; they should have a decent understanding of their individual rights, especially freedom of speech and the sanctity of a free press; and they should understand the scientific method and how it works. Science is real, and it is as accurate as anything can possibly be BECAUSE it is designed to be ferociously self-critical. What if our political...
Mar 18, 2025•20 min
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates underwater microphone arrays throughout the world's oceans, going them th ability to listen to goings-on below the surface. Many sounds capture by those hydrophones they recognize--but some, they don't. In this episode I'll share some of these mysterious sounds with you. What do YOU think they are?
Mar 14, 2025•9 min
To combat disease, we have the opportunity to go to the doctor and get a vaccine, which helps us create antibodies to resist disease. But how do we inoculate ourselves against a very different and insidious attacker--bias and disinformation? I'll tell you.
Mar 14, 2025•11 min
Anyone who has listened to more than two episodes of this program knows that I’m about as weird and geeky as they come. I’m a sucker for science and nature, and in spite of the fact that as a kid I would have rather looked for turtles and snakes in the vacant lots around our town than play sports, a fact that led to more than a few schoolyard brawls, my passion and curiosity have never left me—and hopefully, never will. One of the best things I ever built, one of the most magical, was something ...
Mar 09, 2025•17 min
One of the most effective yet most overlooked and under appreciated techniques for assessing the biodiversity of an environment is sound--the voice of the place. In this episode, I describe why sound is such a powerful and accurate indicator of bioacoustics health.
Feb 04, 2025•20 min
Jared Blake is one of the most important human voices in the natural world today. His unceasing commitment to exhort us all to slow down and listen to the voices of the natural world, to work hard to understand what we're being told, is a cause and effort to be celebrated. in this episode, Jared tells us about his months-long recording expedition to the American Southwest, and about the extraordinary, often eerie, voices he heard while in the wild.
Jan 07, 2025•37 min
Here’s a childhood question for you. And I should qualify that—for the most part I’m talking to people who were kids during the 60s, and who shared the books they read with their own children. Here’s the question: What do Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, Kenneth Robeson, Laura Lee Hope, and Victor Appleton have in common? Hopefully, you remember some of those names. The answer is that they’re all well-known authors to anyone who read The Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Doc Savage, the Campfire Girls...
Jan 04, 2025•8 min
Were you aware that deep in the Amazon Jungle of Brazil there lies an abandoned American town, built in the 1920s by none other than Henry Ford? Check it out.
Dec 19, 2024•12 min
Remember the movie, “Tombstone”? There’s a scene where Val Kilmer, who plays Doc Holliday, confronts the outlaw, Johnny Ringo. Doc says, “I’m your huckleberry,” which causes Johnny Ringo to go pale as a ghost, because he knows that people don’t generally walk away from a gunfight with Doc Holliday. But here’s the thing: that’s not what he said. The other evening, Sabine told me what he actually said, and that got me thinking about words—you know how I am with stuff related to language—and the ne...
Dec 19, 2024•6 min
A few months ago, I did an interview on the program with Sarah and Derek Solomon, who are safari guides in southern Africa. If you listened to that episode, you may recall that their work is pretty unique. First, in addition to doing traditional photo and wildlife viewing safaris, they also do sound safaris, usually at night. Their safari guests can’t see the animals, but they can hear them, thanks to special microphones mounted on the front of the safari vehicle and headphones at each seat. The...
Dec 04, 2024•8 min
As most of you know, I released a new novel reently called Russet. It’s my fourth book of fiction; all my prior titles have been about technology, history, photography, writing, sound recording, biography, and a few other genres. The book is doing well; it’s my first science fiction book, and I had a blast writing it. For the last six weeks or so, pretty much since Russet hit the shelves, I’ve been getting an unusual number of emails and messages from people, asking me how to write a book. Actua...
Dec 02, 2024•18 min
I had the opportunity today to sit down with someone who is truly an expert in navigating the turbulent waters of global geopolitics. He's an expert in one particularly troublesome region, a place that most of us are quite familiar with. Not only does he describe the kinds of threats that can be encountered there, but he also explains scenarios and techniques for dealing with them. This is a great episode--enjoy.
Nov 22, 2024•15 min
Jerry Berrier is a birder, a wildlife sound recordist, and an outspoken advocate for the natural world. And, he’s been blind since birth. In this episode he tells his remarkable story, and explains how his blindness, while clearly not an advantage in the modern world, does not slow him down.
Nov 22, 2024•38 min
I saw a story headline last week that inspired this episode. It told me that Elwood Edwards had died at 74. Don't know who he is? He received $200 to record all the original AOL sounds and inspired at least one really great movie. That got me thinking about other sounds from the more-or-less recent past, so I dove into my sound archives and found a bunch of them. And what I didn’t have, Wikipedia did, so hats off to them for being such an important archive in so many different ways. By the way, ...
Nov 22, 2024•15 min
A couple of months ago I was wandering around a small bookstore here in Vermont, where I ran across a book with the magnetic title, “Abandoned Vermont and New Hampshire,” by one Marie Desrosiers. I picked it up and started reading; the next day, I finished it. The book was so compelling that I found Marie online and sent her a message. A few days later we had a chat about her work, and she agreed to do an interview about the books she writes and the photographs of she makes of abandoned places—a...
Nov 21, 2024•16 min
Sabine and I just came back from a big, looping three-week road trip that took us as far west as the sand hills of Nebraska, where I wanted to record the sounds of the prairie in the early fall. But we also spent a lot of our time trying to see the country differently than we ever have. Because we’ve both lived in more than one country, we live by Mark Twain’s quote, that “travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrowmindedness.” We’re in a pretty weird political time right now, so we wanted ...
Nov 20, 2024•42 min
According to many sources, Apollo 11, which landed on the Moon in July 1969, drew the attention of the entire world. But subsequent missions to the Moon and other ambitions efforts by NASA and its partner agencies drew far less attention. How quickly the sense of awe and wonder wanes. We take computers for granted; our mobile phones are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything that got Apollo to the Moon—and trust me on this, the Apollo on-board computers were wondrous devices for the tim...
Oct 25, 2024•15 min
The best thing about doing this Podcast is that it forces me to constantly be on the lookout for topics and the people associated with them that might lead to interesting episodes. So, when I learned during a meeting of the Williston Historical Society that South Ridge, the neighborhood where I live in Vermont, yielded archaeological artifacts during the planning, site preparation, and excavation of the neighborhood, I got curious, and went in search of the archaeologists who I assumed were call...
Sep 25, 2024•31 min
Occasionally, in the course of developing topics and themes for this program, I run across a genuine treasure. So, full disclosure—as if you need me to tell you this—I’m a pretty serious, card-carrying geek of the highest order. I like science, I tend to geek out on it, and I’m always looking for new sources of knowledge about topics that most people don’t care much about. So, you can imagine my delight when I ran across Brian Malow. Brian is equal parts science enthusiast, educator, speaker, co...
Sep 23, 2024•49 min
What is it about that sound of a foghorn, or a bell buoy, or a whistle or gong buoy? For some people, like Dianne Ballon, these sounds are magical, and mystical, hearkening to a world that most of us don’t know. Dianne is a Maine-based artist who shares a passion for the sea—and most specifically, a passion for the devices whose voices warn fog-cloaked vessels about the presence of hazards. Not just foghorns, but also bell, whistle, and gong buoys. I came across Dianne Ballon while I was in the ...
Sep 23, 2024•37 min
The sun was barely above the horizon by the time I reached the meadow during my morning walk. The bright, flat light hit the tall grasses and wildflowers from the side, creating a silhouette effect that made them glow. But that wasn’t all: the horizontal light also backlit the dozens of orb weaver webs that stretched between the tall plant stems, bejeweled by the droplets of dew that had condensed on them as tiny, transparent, concentric strings of pearls. I was entranced by these gorgeous struc...
Sep 08, 2024•17 min
