Rainbows with Lulu Miller

Well, he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day, you know. You get you start thinking about infinity as you get bounced around on there. The show where we are celebrating Pride Rainbow And Lulu Miller. Lulu, hello. You are um a great legend of podcasts and a bisexual seagull right here with us. That is my bio. I held out a frag and he flapped right over.

Exactly. You showed a French fry on the moon. And here I am because a couple prides ago we did the we did the very homosexual and bisexual seagulls. Mm-hmm. Okay, it's such a good time way that everyone should listen to. I thought yeah, I could bring you some more queer wares in the form of

A rainbow. And you know, I feel a little sheepish about rainbows because I'm like so I feel like s part of what's so lovely about you're wrong about is, you know, you get into these like dark twisted corners and maybe everyone thinks rainbows are just gonna be puffy, frivolous, candy. But we're big fans of puff and candy. Okay, but don't worry because I would argue rainbows, much like rats, are maligned and misunderstood. Inevitably, you know? Ja. Like for example I feel like I'm

Larry King. Tonight, rainbows. Do they really have a pot of gold at the end? Or is it all a bunch of hokum? Let's listen to Leon and Des Moines. Um, so well first first of all, what are your what are your associations with rainbows? Any any and all quick gut. I frickin' love rainbows. And you know, the other day, and I don't think I even said this to you, I was driving to my mom's house and I saw a rainbow and then I realized it was a double rainbow and it was also storming and there was

Um, what's the noun for a piece of lightning? A bolt of lightning. Oh my god, Sarah. And I saw a little lightning bolt next to the frickin' rainbow. Wow. That I mean the power, the luck. It was really cool. It was like driving into a Lud Zeppelin cover. Amount of atmospheric things. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay, so for you, I don't know, when when what do you I don't know, what do you

What do you think about with rainbows? Where do you usually you see them in the wild? What do they stir in you? Well, I guess I just think they're great and I think they often create a feeling in me of like, what did it feel'cause I was raised by two parents who like to explain things to me and generally did a pretty good job.

So with rainbows, they're like, Well, it's because the you know, there's like moisture in the air and it acts as a prism and it makes this big rainbow. Um, and then you could have that demonstrated to you by the fact that like You know, you I mean, we didn't have this when I was a kid, but today, you know, you have the like shimmery window film that makes little rainbows or like a, you know, piece of nicely cut glass, you know, like a suncatcher or something, I guess.

Um, so it was like something that you could observe as a kid and be like, Yes, I I understand this is happening on different scales and having that information available. Um, as opposed to like it always makes me think now of like, what was it like for people before we knew the science of like, you know, thunder and rainbows and stuff to sort of deal Yeah. With these kind of weather events, especially when your ability to survive survive was so dependent on what the weather was doing generally.

Absolutely. Well that's a great that's a great place to start. So maybe we'll we'll go back to at least some of the cultural associations, the indigenous cultural associations, the legends about rainbows before we had, you know, the sort of more modern physicist take. But I will say, like culturally, you know, I'm just realizing there's a rainbow on the Year Wrong about logo, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's the rainbow show.

I don't know. It was uh something that Mike came up with back in the day. It was like probably like twenty nineteen or something, because our previous logo Real ones will remember was just like a stock image of like a hand giving the thumbs down on like a salmon background and it was meant to emulate like I didn't know that. Waquin Phoenix and Gladiator, I think, which I haven't seen.

a little gay boy who wants to execute hot men or whatever. Um and we had the logo for a while. And at a certain point we were like, we might be outgrowing. Yeah. This logo. Yeah. Which looked more like it was fr I don't know. I don't know. It and so the rainbow was like This I I think this idea that we both kind of intuitively recognized, I'm assuming, as like feeling more expansive and optimistic and that it's crucially going up, you know.

Um and this idea. I always interpreted it as like, you know, if you have more information, it's like a positive thing because it helps you grow as opposed to being like eh, wrong, you know. Right. Like eh, you dumb. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Expansive. Put a put a um pin in that word. We'll circle back. Uh oh gosh, fun fact about rainbows, they're actually fully a circle. They're not just an arch. It's just the horizon gets in the way. Yeah.

No, I've seen a couple where it's you're like you can kinda see it. Have you seen that? I've never seen it, but I I guess if you are in an airplane you could see it or like on a mountain you'd be able to see a little bit more. I feel like I've seen a couple of rainbows maybe when I was at an elevation that are like where you can kind of start to see that circle happening.

Yeah. Yeah. Um but like I guess I guess just culturally, I mean, they're often I think they have become, you know, unicorns, my little pony, you see'em on a cereal box. They're a little like frivolous vibe. Well and we also had the twenty eighteens when interestingly we had the sort of like unicorns and rainbows coated sort of Wave of I guess aesthetics and It's hard to even define in retrospect. It's kinda like we kinda said something was unicorn if it was just like magenta.

Yeah. Yeah, which is interesting. But like Lisa Frank, Trapper Keeper. Yes. Yeah. The little girl aesthetic and a big part of stickers, of course, as well. It goes. And the uh what what else? Of course the um the the best section in Fantasia with with the Pegasus is

Oh yeah. And everybody. They had the like rainbow falling in the water and then it colored the different parts of the water different colors and you could like dip them up, which was so cool. Mm-hmm. And very disappointing to not be able to do. Yeah, I think they're just th they yeah, they become like a a a part of cartoon aesthetic too. And a little but a little I think a little frivolous, a little, you know, girlish, sugary, saccharine.

Yeah. Well anything associated with little girls is considered to be dumb in in American culture. View, yes, of young women. Um, okay, so but rainbows historically were these things. of huge power. So like interestingly in all kinds of cultures, you know, before they were connected, a rainbow was often seen as some kind of bridge. It is brick shaped. It's bridge shaped and it's you know, kind of goes from sky to earth or looks like it does. And so in Norse mythology

Um rainbows were seen as like a literal bridge that you could, you know, bridge from the gods. Uh you could br you could like wal the gods could walk down to earth or you could walk up to the gods. Like the Tuala of New Guinea, saw it as a bridge to the dead, um, to the sort of afterlife. In Greek myths, Iris, the messenger for the gods, maybe like a handmaiden to hera, would pass usually w messages, but usually warnings down the rainbow.

Well, that that yeah, I mean, that's just practical. And I guess when you see a rainbow in the distance like you do'cause of course when I was a kid, you know, my dad would be like, Oh, Sarah, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and then he'd be like, Oh my God, it looks like it's ending in our house. Yeah. And then you're like, God, where'd it go? And he's like, I don't know. I guess it was in another house. And you're like, ah, these rainbows, they're hard to track.

Yeah. They're tri they're pesky. They're pe right, of course. The leprechaun, the pot of gold, like though the leprechaun myth, I guess, sort of was originally back in the eighth century. It was like a Celtic tradition of a water sprite. Wow. Yeah. That's a long timeline for leprechauns, but they're so small, they live longer. Yeah.

And they I guess were originally much more like the horror movie Leprechaun. They were like very sinister, like their origin was in trying to drown a king. Um but then they're in the nineteenth century Well maybe he had it coming, you know. I don't know. I'm sure he did. I mean a Celtic king in the seven hundreds, props. Um but then he like got more sort of softened in the nineteenth century and his pranks became less deadly and and more like you stole the bacon or like um

See like a an anti Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Like a brownie helps around the house and he does a little miskiff around the house. He's like an ir little Irish poltergeist. Yes, totally. And but then there was this sort of I guess the idea of the pot of gold really kind of blossomed like s when sort of Irish Americans were facing poverty and it was this idea that like maybe you could get some luck, like this like need for a pot of gold. If you see the rainbow, you might

Might have some gold. You're like, where's that fucking leprechaun? So it's the idea that when there's a rainbow, there's a leprechaun nearby and you gotta find him and get his pot of gold somehow. Ja. All right. Is a pot the best way to carry gold?'Cause it feels like the pot is already a little heavy. It's a great question. Already pretty heavy. You know, he should have had. He was originally, he was a cobbler, so like he could have had a shoebag. Right.

Okay, but and but but sorry, that was my leprechaun digression. But the point is like Yeah, that was good. You know... for cultures all over the world, a rainbow was like a very powerful thing. And it could mean, you know, storms ahead or some kind of divine intervention. It was often a bad omen. Yeah. Well that makes sense because I feel like it happens when like uh crazy weather is on the way a lot of the time.

Yeah. And then another weird thing was like again in all uh in a lot of not connected indigenous cultures, there was this this idea that if you pointed at a rainbow, your finger could rot off. Oh no. Yeah. And just this idea of like i I think the point is like it's a powerful sacred thing. Be careful of how you interact with it. Right. And so I just I just loved finding that Maybe don't put it on all those stickers. 'Cause we've totally like we've like drained that.

power out in a lot of ways and and like stop thinking about how they actually occur in nature, which you're right, often is around a storm, a very powerful, often deadly thing. So Okay, so that's kind of this idea that they were like this powerful bridge between worlds. Okay. Well, they really they are really. And also between the present moment and the next. And I imagine they also occur sometimes before weather events where people die. So, you know. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so meaning obviously is what you make out of it. That depends on your culture, your experience. But We are here. I want to move to the the substance, the material of a rainbow because Regardless of what it means to you, there have been a lot of people, a lot of scientists, philosophers over the centuries trying to really pin down what it is. Yeah. Which would be very difficult back in the day, I would imagine. Yeah.

Yeah, without a lot of a lot of tools and and they are these weird things because they're not quite like a tree. But they're not n like they're out there because you can both point at it but like But then they're a little like it's very hard to understand. Like, are they basically the one of the debates was are they out is it out there or is it in here? Like is it a product of the mind? Oh. Like a mirage or like a

even like a a dream, or is it like a tree? But then it's not like a tree because you can't like it it was like this pesky people just weren't sure. Right. Now that you ask that, I'm like, well, what is it actually? Because it is like light, which is a product of the sort of range in which we see. Mm-hmm. So... Yeah. It's totally tricky. So that's I'm gonna, I mean, most of what I'm gonna tell you today is gonna kind of build us toward answering that. Great. Okay, what is it exactly?

What's a frickin' rainbow? What is a frickin' rainbow? Okay, so one of our Of course. Hello, Aristotle. Yeah. And he was big team XOS din, Greek for it's out there, like it's out there. I think it's I think it is matter. Rainbow is out there. The rainbow's out there. Was Aristotle Socrates a student? Does it go Plato, Socrates, Aristotle? Sarah, you're probably gonna know that more than me. I do know that he was publishing on rainbows in like the mid 300 BC times.

Good for him. That's great. I don't know. What was I doing back then? Practically nothing. Now I need to know. I don't know the order. I always Okay. Yeah, look it up for me. I got a cat here. Yeah, it was Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle. So Aristotle's the b the baby. So Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle. And then like isn't one of them Yeah. I don't know. Okay. I guess no to quote real genius in the immortal last words of Socrates, I drank what?

Yeah. Okay. Let's insert a little rim shot there. Okay. Okay, so student of student. Aristotle. His basically his idea was like Important Greek dude. Important Greek dude was like, Okay, I think here's what a rainbow is. I think that this I think sunlight is a pure white substance and that should it hit a patch of impurities in the air, like mist or dust or something, you know, an impurity of some sort. Yeah. That the light gets tinted or muddied into these colors. And so

For him, basically the idea of like you see a rainbow after rain because there's all this mist in the air. And so the the pure white light gets muddied and like disguised and tinted. I mean that seems basically accurate to my understanding. I think I'm on the same technical level as like a very smart person living over two thousand years ago. Yeah.

It's a very good guess. And like it's devil in the details of the way in which he's gonna be off is like the difference between so much of our modern technology. So he is close. Right.'Cause it feels like there's like these concepts that recur in s in these kinds of, you know, periods of science where you're like, Well, you're right about the outcome, but the logic by which you think that happened is a product of your time. So is that accurate for this? Yeah.

Oh absolutely. I mean it's a stunning guess for the times. It's a totally great guess. Yeah. Yeah. Like I guess we read Little House on the Prairie and there's a part where everyone gets malaria. And then someone is like, Everyone who got malaria ate a watermelon. Get that's how this malaria spread. And it's like, well Yeah. No, but I mean how how are you gonna know? But how are you gonna know? I know yeah. The w the just take out the melon part and

And maybe when you go to go eat watermelon you get bitten by a mosquito, you know? Yeah. Um so that was his idea. It was like tinted, muddied, changed, dirtied, something like that. It's been adulterated. Adulterated. Adulterated light.

And so then, you know, throughout that kind of that idea is gonna stick for centuries for a long time. That's pretty much the way but there was a person who doesn't get as much Credit in the rainbow history, as I think he should. Mm. Who is a per a medieval Persian scholar, Nasir al Dun Al Tusi. And this guy was like Da Vinci pre Da Vinci. Like he was an intellectual giant. And you could do a whole year wrong about him. I don't know a ton, but I just did kind of like s a deep dive.

Ooh, I would love to do a math year wrong about. I would be so out of my depth. But this guy is like okay, let me send you can I send you just what he looks like'cause he was um See cute too. On the seven hundredth anniversary of his death, he got a an Iranian stamp. And uh he just uh yeah, well let's just picture him because he's uh okay, wait, let me uh he's so smart and so ahead of his time. And it's just I just want to like consider him for a brief moment. Okay, so let's give him a face.

And I'm kind of thinking about this guy for a totally different reason right now, which will be worth the digression, I hope. Oh yeah. I'm always willing to try. Well he yeah, he looks like um Michael Gambone. Or like um he l he looks like uh uh wait, who's the main Roy? Logan Roy. Roy Roy. Oh he yeah, he's got Logan Roy. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. But maybe a little younger. Looks exactly like Logan. Oh fabulous. Spear. Um he

Which yes is very hot to me. Look, uh everyone knows that Brian Cox would be sexy to go on a rubber boot hunting weekend, w we all know that. Yes, okay. Have you seen him as Hannibal Lecter? It's like the the most overtly gay portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, which I think is saying something. In my opinion, I I will take other analyses. Okay, so so okay, so I'll do Nasir Al Duna Al Tusi. So he was born in twelve oh one.

And like he is gonna basically become the forefather of trigonometry. Uh. And then he's also gonna be huge in astronomy. He publishes all these star charts, these astronomical atlases that will be used for hundreds of years. And he's like Also does all this stuff on ethics. He's just inventing math right now. Yeah, he's just inventing math and he's doing it by watching the world. Like he figured

That's really cool. And you know what? I always kinda liked trigonometry. Did you like trigonometry at all? I think that's a fun one. I did, I was gonna say I did. What did you like about it? Well I guess that it's like And a actual thing that I care about, which is triangles and how tall things are.

Yeah. And it was like it felt like a secret co it was like puzzle vibes. It was just like you do this, you do this, and then it works. There's something satisfying. Whereas calc suddenly got so abstract that I that it kind of started to short circuit me. And I never got that far. Yeah. After that was when my school let you quit math and I was like, Thank you, good night. Great. Love a hypotenuse. It's been fun.

Okay. So he's just this like incredible thinker and he's doing it at a time of incredible upheaval. So he's like For about a decade he's working in this place that sounds incredible. It's like an intellectual castle. It's like a library across the castle called Alamut and there's all these visiting scholars and he's teaching. And then comes the Mongolian invasion. Yeah. And they smash it. They smash the castle. And it's at this point Genghis Khan's grandson, Hu.

Uh and anyway, and but okay, it's making me think about institutions getting absolutely smashed by like um Yeah, like great man. Yeah, okay, okay. So like science getting like totally smashed. So but so then instead of just like

crying and bemoaning the state of the world. This guy, our guy, Al Dun Al Din Al Tusi, our astronomer, what does he do? He joins Khan's army. He likes joins the army, but then he ends up getting really close to him and convincing him to build an even fancier observ scientific observatory castle thing. God, how did he work that though? How do you like sidle up and be like, Hey I mean I realize it would take a while. Is it like a dread pirate Roberts type situation? Yeah.

And he yes, and he like I guess stroked his ego enough to be like, This will be such a good like you built it anyway, so then he built an even b But so just instead of being like, You hate science, he was like, I think you really love science and then he built this incredible observatory and that's where he observed all these planetary movements which helped him

uh write this thing called the two sea couple, which like talks about how a circle moves within a circle looks like a line. I'm not quite sure, but that helped him pave the way for the realization that the earth is not the center of the world. And those observations, many scholars believe, made their way to a guy named Copernicus. Yeah. Okay. So this is a man who is like not afraid to look at the scary like just the hard to understand stars, things like that.

He's like, Listen, Gigas Khan, you can't stop science. You can't. None of us can.

Yeah. Okay. So, but what what are we talking about today? Rainbows. So he also, you know, he's this like, I'll think about anything. Stars, cool, trigonometry, great math, cool. Colors. Let me take on colors. And he basically starts like flirting with this idea that maybe there are actually infinite colors. Mm. And because like infinity is this notoriously hard concept. Yeah. I I don't know. I feel terror when I think about it, but so do a lot of people.

Yeah. You know what I've always thought about when I think about infinity is No, tell me. This quote from I think an Amy Tan book about one of her characters as like a sixth grader being terrified by the thought of infinity and also being equally terrified by. The antithesis of it, Wixie Invasions is like The universe coming to an end like and the image is something like like a frayed tennis ball bouncing off a wall. Yeah. Right? There's something really dreadful about that in a great way. Yeah.

Well here's what I think about a lot and I might have mentioned it before on this show, but I like really love two thousand one a space odyssey. Mm-hmm. I really love it when movies are boring. Um, which to be clear, I think it is trying to be on purpose. God bless it. Um, I really love the Dawn of Man stuff. And I love the middle part, which I think a l I I for one did not really remember until I watched it more recently, which is like

this man traveling boringly um on a commercial flight to the, you know, airport just outside the moon, the moon base, and then traveling to the moon. And the thing that he's dealing with is his secret project because they found this monolith on the moon, which is the same one that we saw um in the first sequence, which shows up and then, you know, early man or, you know, Lucy figures out how to use weapons and it's like this big

big moment. Hmm. As you would imagine. And it it's also like interesting on the subject of innovation because I feel like as you're talking about this, like there's this very sort of like American history book way and also I'm sure, you know, very British way of teaching history that's like, and then one man out of all the men, one man who happened to be well bred and well educated and well connected.

thought of something and he thought, bike jinx. And and that's how science works, as opposed to like a lot of people in different places noticing things. you know, often somewhat simultaneously, or, you know, innovation sort of layering on innovation in a way where like nothing is entirely one person's idea, I think, most if not all of the time. But you know, but this is how it works with a with the apes. Yeah.

in the movie. Yeah, what I like about the boringness of it all is well, A, I just think that it's kind of nice to be forced to sit and look at things for that long. Mm. It's not that long, but it feels longer. And that also that the middle part is then we're going to the moon to see this monolith

Where these guys in spacesuits like stand in front of it and take cheesy pictures of this monolith they found. And then this like high-pitched ringing starts. And the premise of that apparently is that which I I don't think you could necessarily figure out because by watching it, um, is like what if The monolith is like a baby gate that's been placed there on the moon to tell the aliens or some something, somebody God question mark. Aliens, God.

Same diff as far as the movie's concerned that humans have like figured it out enough to get to the moon and that we're ready for the next thing. Um and I guess I don't know, I guess I love That idea for some reason, because it implies the sort of like I don't know. This idea of this almost if if I keep calling it a baby gate, it's because I'm envisioning it as like alien mommy out there being like, look at you and like watching humanity grow. You think you've traveled so far.

Right, and we've just gotten to the bottom of the stairs and we're still at the bottom of the stairs. And there's also something so nice about that because Earth is really special and it's where all our stuff is. And there aren't really other planets like it that we're ever gonna be able to get to. Mm-hmm. before we destroy this one, you know? And so I th I don't know. I think it's just like we have there's a sort of maybe like

spasming capitalist idea right now of like, well, we'll just get a new, hotter, younger planet. You know, it'll all be fine. And it's like, no. We're little babies. We barely understand the universe we're in. Like we're so we we we're at the baby gate and we need to really, you know I just think it's so nice that everything is so much bigger than us. I'm I'm at a moment in my life where

humanity is behaving so badly that I'm like, it's so great that we're that we're so um that we know so little about the shape of things. Yeah.

So in that way does does the concept of infinity, this this greatness of space and time and even knowledge like Is it comforting or or what's your You know what I think is that I think infinity is scary because it so eludes our perceptions and maybe at this moment I'm like, it's so great that there is so much truth and reality out there that eludes our ability to perceive it because our perceptions as humans Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like our our our intentions keep like returning us to the same messes.

The universe were within our perceptions, it would be really tiny. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Or something. I don't know. It's'cause nice. It's and it's it's humbling and I don't know. Anyway, that's my digression. Everyone give two thousand one a space odyssey a try. It's also as my mom and my ninth grade English teacher

would have, you know, a movie that can envision no role for women in the future aside from being stewardesses. And that's also very true. Maybe some of maybe that ape was a girl. Ha ha Probably not, but I can think so.

So can I do one more digression in the digression? In the digression? Yeah, yes, always. Okay, so you talked about the tennis ball thing and This is what's called the golden mean. Yeah, okay, so the the fear of the opposite infinity of infinity, which is like the teensiest speck of everything, maybe you could argue, is that? And that i that reminds me, I just wanted to read a poem by Marie Howe.

Yeah. Because sh she writes about this that that it's often called like the speck is often called the singularity, which is just like For w we were this infinite thing, we were like everything. pressed together and I just think it's a really beautiful reframe of that terrifying opposite of okay, so I'm just gonna read it. Yes. It's not very long. Okay, so Marijo, it's called how it's called this it's called the singularity. Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?

So compact nobody needed a bed or food or money, nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept, for every atom belonging to to me as good belongs to you. for you. Remember? There was no nature, no them, no tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf, or if the coral wreath feels pain, Trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French.

We would wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that when earth was sky and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing. Loneliness. Can molecules remember it? Before anything happened, can our molecules remember? No noun yet. Tiny tiny dot. With issue. All everything. I love that so much. Isn't that beautiful? Yes, that's so beautiful. Yeah.

Yeah. And I I don't know. I I feel that. And like I don't what if'cause like there's all these things Like kind of as you're telling the rainbow history that started off as folklore and then often you know, and often too science is like, No, that's insane. Right. Right. But often as well, there's

But often as well there's there's, you know, some kind of finding where it's like, yeah, this thing that people always said and often that like indigenous people always said and that then, you know, colonizers were like, No, that's silly. We're going to act in ways that will kill us and all of you too. And that of course science then later supported as having, you know, as being proven by things that we didn't have the ability to conceive or analyze. Yeah. Out! Steal my ending. Oh.

I won't, I won't, I won't, I shan't. I'll I'm backing away. I recently touched an electrified fence without really thinking about it. It was very low voltage. It was around a bunny paddock, but I was looking right at a sign that said do not talk electric and I was like, Who's gonna rest my hand? It would not have lasted long in in the past. Um What did you feel? Very little. Okay. Enough to jump back? I was like, oh shit and that's the feeling of I'm not supposed to be touching that.

Okay. But anyway, but my thought hearing my thought hearing that poem and this is like Me bearing my soul to you that that's what you know this show is about is um that like What if in some far off scientific finding there's evidence that, you know, love is not just a pro social impulse that we need to feel in order to raise young and et cetera and protect ourselves from predators and each other. Mm-hmm.

And also I think us talking about coyotes, I've thought about that a lot and really come to the the conclusion that like as much as we like to visualize ourselves as being alone, we really thrive in packs. And I think a lot of our trouble has come from not knowing what group we belong to or having any group that we belong to. Yeah. And craving a group, missing it.

Yeah, and cre and then creating groups out of, you know, hate or whatever or where w whatever we can find and and apparently, you know, mutual fear i is like we'll put it. Quite the adhesive. Quickly but then you know, but then the goals that you have will be destructive and and the sort of anyway, that's a whole conversation. But what were you saying love? What if love within about lions?

But what if love what if love is like not just all those sort of practical things that of course make sense, but also this sort of like collective atomic memory of this time when we were all one thing, you know? That's so beautiful. Why the heck not?

It might be. And that that feeling of reunification, like those little molecules glimmering and welcome each other back. I like it. I like that. I'm thinking a lot lately about just sort of like what it means to approach life as a universalist and to see all religions as like Yeah, you know,'cause like I I think that like the same way that we can't conceive of of the universe. It's you know

Any kind of faith that isn't based on controlling other people, I think, is um you can see them all grasping at the same thing. Yeah. That might be getting too much into my personal um spiritual journey. But but we're talking about rainbows. I mean, it's inevitable probably that we get No, but I think that like I mean I personally have had in the last five years or so a massive, like absolute change in what I think the job of a reporter is, which was

Going into it, I mean, I now admittedly going into it, I didn't have any journalistic training and I came into it through a weird side door of loving story. So for a long time I was like, the goal is to find a story, find an amazing story, find a story, find the story, make it da da da And then like as I came to come up around incredible reporters and and people who really kind of did go to J school and do think about it in other ways, I came to see how like story

is often the the enemy because, you know, stories about like cutting off details and and disfiguring reality to make a nice narrative and right. That actually like I do think increasingly my job and I'm not good at it, but what I'm at least trying to do now is to like, capture more and more complexity and then just like present that in a digestible way. So obviously there's but I do think and that that's why I like to go back to

You know, just like what have religion said? What have traditions said? Like science doesn't have a monopoly on truths. To really do good science, let's look at all kinds of different things. And so I I do think You know, people always talk about braiding indigenous wisdom and I think that Just such a profoundly amazing way to like get a deeper and more accurate understanding of of nature and science. So, so I I think you're you're you You church dreams, uh you're universalist.

vibe is is all it's like it's not just good for spirituality, but I think it's very good for science. Like very, very good. Ooh. Yeah. Nice.

Okay. But so okay, but so you're but the concept of infinity is where we kinda left off. So this idea of like A lot of people, especially before we even had it well termed linguistically and mathematically, like it was this idea that was that was frightening. Like, you know, Aristotle, I guess apparently like

absolutely rejected the idea of an actual infinity. He believed you could count forever. Like he was like, okay, maybe there are infinite numbers, but I I think the universe is finite. So he was like a strict, as I understand, a strict finitist. And there's just this idea of like thinking about infinity has really broken a lot of people. And there's there's a very famous case of this scientist George Cantor. He m he like was obsessed with the idea a certain kind of infinities, this idea of like,

Infinite infinities. And he basically glimpsed that truth. He published on it, but he it really broke him. Like he went mad. This is like when you before acid had been synthesized and he had to just do it yourself over years of study. Yeah. You just you just had to think about. And there's it's sort of apocryphal that he took his life. It looks like he he die probably died of a heart attack. But in an in an asylum.

And also there's so many other things to, you know, drive a person uh beyond the point of no return if there's, you know, no real mental health availability. But infinity doesn't help. It doesn't. And the George Cantor thing, like a whi I I actually couldn't find these notes, but a while back I looked into him and I did I was like I had watched this documentary called it was a BBC documentary called Dangerous Knowledge. And it was about like knowledge that drove scientists mad.

How many people watched that thinking it would be about sex somehow and then it was a math documentary? And that's that one, that documentary kind of makes it a little bit too much look like it was a suicide. And I think that was a misstep. But then I looked into the stuff and it's like, He was try he was writing these letters, like trying to f he's like, I want to stop thinking about this. It is but I can't. And so I think there was like

The heart attack may have done him in, but he really ended up in an asylum. And thinking about infinity was really a torment, but like an addiction. So, anyway, my point is: thinking about infinity is hard. Aristotle didn't want to do it. George Cantor went mad. But our guy back, Nasir Al Din Al Tusi, was just like, bring it on. I want to think about it. Mm-hmm. Mm. Well he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day.

You get you start thinking about infinity as you get bounced around on there. You do. when you look at the stars. So he was, I think, really ahead of his time. Not only did he like predict the Copernican shift or pave the way for that idea. Uh he um also was like, I think that there are in colors, there are like infinite pathways of mixing them.

And he just was like more into this idea of sort of there might be infinite colors in the rainbow. And the but the idea it didn't really take off. It didn't get traction. Aristotle with this idea of like this a more kind of rigid idea about light and and rainbows took hold for a long way. But he was I don't know. I just wanna give him his due'cause he was a kind of ahead of his time. So

Okay, so then we jump ahead. We're gonna get there. We're we're we're coming to the end of our scientific story. Don't worry. I'm look, I'll go on whatever I'll go on like a an Indiana Jones itinerary of scientific story with you. Don't worry about it. All right, well, pull out your rope because we are swinging to sixteen sixty-five. England s uh a plague sweeps the land. Mm-hmm. Everyone kinda had to go into lockdown. I don't know if you remember anything about that.

You know, we ha we had uh cable and stuff and it was different that they didn't. Yeah. And so a young a young man named Isaac Newton, not yet a sir. I knew Newton was gonna turn up. Hello. Here he comes. Here he comes. Walking down the street just the busiest version that she ever did meet. Hey, it's Isaac Newton. Fall on his head. I'm sorry to make so many jokes about him being a virgin. I just don't know that much about his life.

I'm gonna I'm feeling like he probably was at this time. He's a young man. He he's crashing for lockdown. He goes home as as many a millennial did to live with his parents. Yeah. It's hard to picture him without a wig. It is hard. 'Cause we've only seen him in a big curly What did you look like? He was very attractive, I from what I remember, of depictions of him. The brow crossed. I wonder if the milkmaids were all over Isaac Newton and he was like, Let go of me.

Kinda looks like um you know, more like kinda like Kate Winslit as a young as a young As a young. Um, anyway, but so he yeah, okay. So he's just like in the English countryside, no, yeah, no cable, no Tiger King for him to watch. So he just is like, I don't know, I picture him like Tinkling the harpsichord and playing backgammon. And one day he is just fumbling around with a prism. I would imagine so. Now, did you BYOP? I did get a prism and wait, I think uh

Not to name names,'cause I didn't see Wick Cat might have done this, but I think Werner probably knocked it off the table. So wait, let me look. Okay. Classic. Okay, here it is. This is like a classic triangular prism. Great. Yeah, can now can you I don't know if you have a window in your room. Yeah, I'm I'm right in front of I'm right in front of Ondo. It is a very cloudy day though.

Okay. So we might not get it, but see if you can just just angle it for a second and see if you get any action. Mm-hmm. Or just describe what you see. Yeah. Well, I get I'm not able to like bounce light through it right now, but if I just sort of like look into it. I can just sort of see little reflections of of details of my surroundings with little rainbows all over them. Oh. Great! You know what I mean? Good. Okay.

Not like rainbows all over them, but like this sort of this cast of like rainbow color. Like I'm I'm looking into it and I can see the tree that's outside my window through it, and there's like Rainbow colors in the sky that I can see through the the leaves. That's great. Okay. You know, faintly. Yeah, it's very cool. And I don't know if that's sort of, you know, historically accurate.

But that's okay. Well what when you say rainbow colors, what what colors if you had to if you had to like name them, what do you see? Well, I've had a little practice in there yet. I would say descending from top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. You know, kinda subtly. Yeah. Some Roy G biving around. Okay, got it. Okay. Didn't we add or remove one or something though?

You have been you you have you are hallucinat you are you have been sold alive, young young Sarah Marshall. Okay, but we'll get to that. So okay, but but but okay so yeah. Myth busted myth about to be busted Um Isaac Newton Very violent thing.

Yeah, he was he was doing that and um and he g he saw those colors and then he eventually twisted it in such a way and it was a bright enough direct sunlight day that he also got those famous like just little rainbows on the wall, you know, like a little rainbow. Yep. Yeah, I haven't been able to do that with this one, but it was probably s you know, sunnier at the time.

So okay, so many peop by the time Isaac Newton has done this, many people have seen, you know, rainbows come out of prisms or chunks of glass. Mm-hmm. And the theory again of why went back to Aristotle, this idea that the prism, like the mist, was tinting, changing, muddying, what was your word? Ooh, adulterating, yeah. Yeah, adulterating, dirtying pure sunlight.

Um and so that the the the rainbows on the wall, they were evidence of change. They were evidence of impurities of the light being changed or disguised. And he thought, Okay, well if that's true, then if I take a second prism And I pass the rainbow parts through a second prism, you'll get even more tinted light. So maybe you'll get different colors or darker col I'm not sure what exactly, but it will change it even more.

Why does he have prisms? Do we know what are they for is like a household item or a is it a school thing? Oh that's a Great question. I don't know. I have no idea. That's interesting. All right. We'll we'll return to that in a in a future. Show the listener can write in and tell us. So yeah. So he does so he takes a second one. And again, if Aristotle's right, it should get tinted even more. But then what happens? Mm. Any guesses?

Ooh, oh my god, I don't know. Does it make uh uh does it cancel it out? Yeah. Yeah. It goes back inside. The rainbow disappears. Interesting. And so what He the first man in nineteen hundred years to put two prisms next to each other. Although I guess that glass making is a relatively recent thing anyway.

Yeah. So basically what he realized is, Look, when I see the colors of the rainbow, this is not evidence of impedance. This is evidence of the lights ingredients. These are the colors that make up. a beam, a ray of pure what what appears to be pure white sunlight, but for some reason isn't. Like when those all s when those all smoothie together, they make white light. Yeah. God, that's cool. Yeah, it was a really great And that's like an that is a wild leap to make too.

Totally. Totally. And the like the way that I've heard we d he has not yet figured out that it's waves, but just to jump ahead for a second, like the way that I've heard it described is that like what a prism does Or what a little raindrop does up in the sky, th which is how you get rainbows, is that like the lights coming down, it has all these different colors inside. Red is kind of these slower waves, violet are these faster waves, medium greens and stuff, yellows.

And they're all kind of like a shopping cart, is like the ray of light is like a shopping cart full of colors. And when that shopping cart So cute. hits a corner, like hits a prism, hits a curb, all the ingredients just kind of the oranges and the red apple, you know, whatever, they all toss out. They just like well. They break out because of their the different speeds like spill out at slightly different angles.

That's wild that we can do that. Yeah. You know? Who would think that you could use a piece of glass and disrupt a light wave to that extent? Put it back to g put it back in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he this like will eventually, I mean, this will pave the way for massive breakthroughs in technology, development of lasers, fiber objects, t even telescopes will get all kinds of things will get better. But there was one last thing he needed to do, which was count.

Uh the colors in the rainbow, which you are the you did for us. And so what he eventually he kind of at first was like, maybe five. No, no, I think it's seven. And that's how we get Roy G. Biv, Red. Right, orange. Yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Okay, but the thing, the little like my favorite part of this is like he didn't. get there because he was like closely squinting through a magnifying glass or using rulers. He just was like seven's a really pretty number because So him.

Oh classic Newton vibes. So he'cause there's how many notes in a traditional Western classical scale? Doremi Vasolati. Seven. And at the time there were seven known planets and there were seven known metals. Gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, lead. Now there's over ninety, but a Newton's day. There were how many days in a week? Seven. Oh my god. How many continents were no like called at that time? So it just Seven. How many C's at the top? Seven seven.

Yeah. And so it was like this scien it was like this nature this mystically pure number. Like he he it just there's just this idea that there were like these accordances, like things move in sevens. And so he was basically like Musical scale seven colors seven. That feels good. That feels Gotta be seven. It's gotta be seven. And that thing like was just pressed into textbook. I mean, like I was taught Roy G fan for sure.

Oh yeah. I don't know if I was taught it in school, but it was like my parents taught it to me as like basic human knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. And that it just is those are the seven colors that make up the rainbow, that make up light, case clothes. Case not closed,

Oh my god. So we did a we did a terrestrials about for kids about these concepts. They weren't didn't go into all this stuff. Uh but we did Alan, my amazing collaborator and friend and musical genius, made this little about Roj Biv. Okay, so I'm just gonna play you this. Okay, so this is the moment of discovery and this is like the industrial lie getting printed into our minds. Right. the rainbow. All of them. All of them. Are these all the colours of the rainbow?

The point is it got like it was this handy way to remember colors in the rainbow that was maybe so handy it just like got Sometimes things are too handy. 'Cause the truth is sometimes less catchy. Also, I was never totally clear on the difference between indigo and violet, if I'm being honest here. Same. I think that's a big I think indigo's like a bit of a um Emperor's New Clothes like is that a thing? Um but but so so this goes on and it's kind of this idea that like

Light has been we have cracked the rainbow. We have literally cracked it open, seen its insides. It's seven colors. Cool. But then there were lights. A lot of painters and poets and like stoners all over the world who weren't fully convinced that this was accurate. So Keats very very famously wrote this poem, like being like

How dare like like he basically accused Newton of having killed the magic of the rainbow. Oh. And there's a line about how he like dared to quote unweave a rainbow um by like reducing it into these Cold colors. And then Goethe was like had all these kind of poetic theories about like, well, when I feel

purpley, the purple is different than the purple I see like no colors come from feelings. And then Turner, the the storm painting guy, like painted all these rainbows with all these tons of colors as kind of like a F you. And just people being like, How do we know my blue is your blue? And are we so sure like conc like colours are concrete and like really, how is my blue your blue?

These are worthwhile questions, for sure. Yeah. And the only way we can determine is by describing our blues to each other, probably.

A hundred percent. Um, and so then along comes uh another bro, a big bro of ten kids in a British family. He's a med student named Thomas Young, another Brit, and he's like you know, doing your classic, he's dissecting the eyeball of an ox as you do. And he's wondering about like how how eyes focus and process light. For science or if you're Salvador Dali, either one. Oh. One of those dudes.

One of those yeah, but wondering like what's the connection between course a painter would wonder that. What is the connection between the colors out there and what I perceive? And this eye seems to be the medium, you know, through which the interface through which all those things happen. It was Both of them. They both did the eyeball movie. Good talk. And and so Thomas Young eventually devises

an absolutely ingenious experiment that we are not gonna go into because that is too complicated. It's the double slit experiment, which is a whole quantum mechanics realizing white that light is both a particle and a wave. And it's like A total universe changer. Yeah, come back and explain that one to me on another show'cause I would like to hear more about how light works and stuff. Yeah, I would too, but you might need somebody else.

Because I have done like a whole piece about quantum mechanics and I still don't understand it. But light is not just part that what you need to know is light behaves like a particle and like a wave, like an ocean wave, like a sound wave, like a wow, wow. The big insight there is that rainbows, that the that the colors within a beam of light coming from the sun are oscillating at all these different waves.

And the way that our eyes process those waves and send information to the brain is that we like perceive those those wavelengths as different colors. And so the low, long, slow waves we tend to see as red, the middle kind of medium waves we see as greens, and the really fast ones we see as violet. Um, but also on ev on every rainbow on either side are we are is light we cannot see, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, things like that. That's just like uh um and where we divide it into colors.

Like the waves are just like the ocean. They're just like some big ones, some medium ones. Where we divide it depends on the person, where we draw the line. And so the poets, the painters, Nasir Al Dun Al Tusi, our guy. This idea that like the lines are subjective. Like there aren't seven concrete colors. There are real Right. Right. There are really infinite colours in the rainbow. God damn.

And so sort of like what colors we see, where we divide the lines, which ones appear strong, which ones we happen to see maybe because of associations or moods, like the little conclusion there is that, you know, the all those long ago traditions

We're right that like the rainbow scient i it it is a bridge. It's out there and it's in here. It's like a bridge between worlds. It's a bridge between an inside and outside kind of being like a thing, which I think is why they they are so like slippery and wonderful. Well. So that's the that's the story of the rainbow. Lulu, that was so good. And once we figured it out that the rainbow, that the colors of light

are that are waves and are these kind of infinite colors, then we could like discover new elements based on what frequency of waves they were emitting or refracting. So like helium, thallium, gallium, cesium, and we could discover new things in space because we figured out stars emitted rav radio waves that we couldn't see. We could

um invent like the radio techno passing information over radio waves, technologies like LASEX. So like once we figured out that, there's just been we, you know, it's like so much that we can do. Wow. And I think in a real way, like

you know, this rainbow again that we see is so frivolous was like the site of serious scientific contention that finally Yeah, like rumbled and built to insight that that truly, like really, really freaking transformed our world just by people wondering what that pretty thing was in the sky. And this phenomenon that we kept being confronted with and trying to understand and that drove us toward all these other realizations, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool.

Yeah. So that's my rainbow. Okay. I have for to to end end, I have a choose your own adventure of three options. Okay. Oh my gosh, okay. Okay. Option one is like So this sat I don't know if you are experiencing this, but in I got into radio because I hate like visual judgments. I think it's a sacred thing to just be voices, but increasingly they're like make videos, post Instagram reels and do things.

I will never find it necessary for people to see my face while I'm saying something. Yeah. For them to listen to me say something, you know? Okay, but I've been like fighting, fighting, fighting that. But then I finally on this piece I gave in to like um a m a m a music video about the concept of infinite color so I could show you that. It's a minute long. Well, that's a really good reason to give on into something.

Yeah. I was like, you can't beat them, let's really join'em. So there's that. That's door number one. Door number two is um We could do a little pride coda just about the rainbow becoming the on the flag, the rainbow being the the pride, the gay pride flag, the queer part.

As a matter of fact, Mm. Or we could do a a butterfly coda of just that butterflies are All right, well I wanna have um a link to the infinite color video and I think we have to end on the Pride Coda and then if we have time I w I want just one little tiny butterfly fact on top, please. Okay, perfect. Okay. Okay. Okay. So the the Pride Coda is like how did this

How did this rainbow become a part of the queer pride flag? Uh become the queer pride flag. So there have been, you know, different emblems of of queer pride throughout the the era. There was, you know, a time where the the pink triangle, which was on the Nazi uniform, was reclaimed as like a gay pride thing. There was, I guess Oscar Wilde had a whole green carnation situation. There were other things. But In nineteen seventy eight. Um, we're in San Francisco.

And Harvey Milk asks his friend, Gilbert Baker, a gay activist and also someone who's very big into tailoring, seamstressing. What is a male seamstress? Seamster, I guess. Seem stuff. And that and a female teamster is a Yeah. So there's gonna be a big gay pride parade. It was called like the gay freedom day parade. And he was like, Gilbert, you love fabrics, you're always making you're always sewing things for our drag queen friends. Like, can you just make some kind of fun?

flag for a banner basically for the parade. And I guess he'd made banners for Harvey Milk before that were just like, you know, whatever. Uh gay rights now, justice like that kind of thing. And he was like, But can you make us like a thing? And so Gilbert Baker worked with this um woman who would call herself the tie-dye queen, uh, Lynn Sogerblum, who was very good at like colors and fabrics, and they

came up with the idea of, well, let's use a rainbow. And the reason why was yes, it's beautiful and also it represents the diversity of sexuality and genders in the queer experience. but mainly the fact that it was found in nature. Cause queerness is natural and this idea that it's like this thing that encompasses the beauty, the celebration. and the diversity and naturalness of of queerness. And so each color

had its uh originally it had eight colors. It now has six, but it o it also used to have like this this great pinky magenta pink and a very cool uh turquoise. Mm-hmm. Which they then took out because of like it was hard to reproduce those with dyes or something. But um each colour had its own

symb like its own symbolic thing for like something it expressed about the queer experience. So pink was like for hot sex or just sex, but you know, hot sex. Uh Indigo was about Serenity and they each I can do all the colors if you want, or not, but they they each had a different thing. That's beautiful. Yeah. And so with um Lynn Sogerblum, they like uh he felt very strong that he wanted all the dyes to be natural, organic dyes.

And so they did this like extensive dyeing practice and they had something like thirty people working on those first few flags. Wow. And they stitched them all together and um Gilbert Baker was like, Oh, I don't wanna make this in my house. I wanna go make it in this queer community center'cause it's like the day it will be born.

Um and he didn't know it was gonna catch on. There were other flags, other things, but it it caught on and I think really took on big power because it was only a few months later that Harvey Milk was assassinated and like he had been the one to request, you know, let's have these flags, let's have a parade. So then it just it really took off and then, you know, and I think some people are like, eh, rainbow's tacky, I don't care, but

Um and then it just continues to evolve in in 2017. Um in Philly, they added for a for a queer pride parade there, they added the black and brown stripes for p for LGBTQ people of color who had like are sometimes left out of the experience. And then a year later it became the progress pride flag, which you've probably seen, which has that like arrow, which also has white, blue, pink. And black and brown stripes also for trans individuals, communities of color. And I'm sure it will continue.

to evolve and it's still uh like, you know, again, we think of rainbows as like cheesy and happy, but it is this um apparently Gilbert Baker, when he made it, he had been notic a couple of years before had been the American bicentennial. It's been nineteen seventy six and so there were American flags everywhere. And he had been really thinking about flags and how they express like

A peoplehood and a power. And I was just, I don't know if you saw this news, but a year ago, like there was a ordinance that came down from the federal government to like paint over all rainbow roads and sidewalks and the the big like Rainbow Road outside the Pulse nightclub, which had been this memorial, got in the middle of the night, got painted over black. And I feel like it's just this.

It's still a symbol, like the flag is evolving and I'm sure it'll continue to evolve and all kinds of people I've heard people be like, Oh, we need to redesign the rainbow flag, it's ugly or whatever. But I think it's like, um I don't know, just the power, the the cruelty of that act and then the sort of resistance of people kind of gorilla painting the rainbow back in Orlando is is a beautiful thing. And uh yeah, that's the rainbow.

Yeah. Yeah. And it it is, I mean, you know, and of course I think for a lot of people in, you know, maybe more Biden administration years, there was this feeling of like Yes, it's so great that we're painting pride flags on things in a way to avoid, you know, making real infrastructural change. But then I think like when those got taken away. Yeah, right. The rainbow washing. Yeah, yeah. It was like, wait, no, right. Don't stop doing that.

Yeah. Let's not walk it back even farther, that was my feeling. I would take rainbow washing over rainbow blackening out. Right. Painting over. And I th and I feel like kind of a I don't know, a a common and I and you know, I don't decide coming from many different motives. But I feel like people have also complained, like, oh, if you put like so much on the flag then at a certain point, like, isn't it just sort of I don't know, this this kind of gripe that I feel like

I've seen of like at what point is there there too much inclusivity? I don't think that people are really saying that out loud, but sort of I don't know, acting as if there's a little bit of absurdity to it. And I think what you're saying is making me realize that that's exactly the point is to like Yeah.

have a flag that is trying to have so much stuff on it and an acronym that, you know, as I don't know. It again, like I feel like people have been making this joke since the nineties, the like L G B T Q, too many letters. Right. But that's the point, is that it's too many letters. Yeah. Is that there's too many letters to say. And that's a good thing to be a attempting to say too many letters, you know? And that

Like a lot of the resistance to the change in the flag is like, uh but it wasn't that way. It's just change, change. We don't like change. Right. I even had a little of that reaction. I was like, Oh the rainbow, it was so simple. It was so but then like if you really Well yeah, because everybody gets attached to things they remember and and that's okay. But yeah.

But then if you really look at it, it's just like I do like how it's like this arrow like it gives it a little arrowhead. It gives it some like like yes, the beauty of nature, but also like we gotta fight. Yeah. And the work is not done. Yeah. But and I guess it's like if your symbols are getting busier, then that means that you're trying to embrace more, you know? And that's to I don't know, to I think that like

The American left is like a complicated thing to be a part of because there's a lot of young people coming from pretty fundamentalist backgrounds who have yet to get out of the mindset of purity and punishment. And you can see, you know, and Portland is famously a place where

if you wanna have s one of the worst experiences of your life, like live with a community organizer is the joke. And it's, you know, I think there's a lot of truth to it. And like a l right, like there's a lot of like lefty communities that I have lived in and experienced the gossip of and yet I would like I would always pretty much choose them over any alternative, you know, because I I think that the kind of

like there's a lot of toxicity that emerges inevitably just in human relationships between people who have been through a lot. And yet if you have sort of a basic social goal of like ultimately coming back to wanting to be more expansive and wanting to embrace more and wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to build community rather than find ways to police it. Um and and who gets to have one, then like

I don't know. I think it's okay for people, um, especially who have changed their minds about a lot of things in life, which is difficult work to do to like struggle with how to live those values. Like it's inevitable that people are gonna to struggle with that. And yet it's bet it's Better to struggle to live good values than to just embrace horrible ones. No one's ever gonna convince me of that. I have been a proud resident of Portland, Madison, and West Philly. All right. I'm irretrievable.

Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. And like I do think but I do think inclusivity which was the original rainbow and which we have now learned is inherent in the rainbow, infinite ways, infinite colors and is the move in the progress pride flag, like it or not, aesthetically, like it is just about showing, making sure All of the colors are are shown and and represented. And so maybe really what the flag needs, if we really were to respect the rainbow, maybe it just needs to be a sequence.

And it's like reflecting all the infinite colors of the light. Q E D.

Beautiful. Ha ha Lulu, you're so great. I love you. I love you. You're so great. Thank you. What are you up to and where can people find you and what kind of stuff are you making for the folks? Well, definitely come check out Terrestrials, which is the podcast I make for kids and families, but you don't have to be a kid or have a kid to listen, as long as you don't mind me occasionally singing.

Uh and it's all about nature. We did do a Rainbows episode uh that's called The Bridge, but another one the queers might like is one we just put out. called The Forest Fairy that stars a certain indigo girl named Amy Ray talking about aphids. Very cool. That one's really cool. She she was incredible and it leads us to like All the kind of secret harmony it leads us to something about it leads us to the fact that plants are talking, which is incredible.

Uh and yeah, so I do that podcast about nature and then I um also am on Radio Lab where we are doing science stories all the time. And I'm working slowly chugging away at a second adult book that's all about biomimicry. That's so exciting. Which may be finished someday or may not. But either way, you know, I don't know. I think that the the work you do reminds me and so many people so often just kind of like what kind of a world we're living in in the best way possible, you know.

Oh and I asked you for a a little butterfly fact, may I have one? Oh yes. Okay. Let me decide. Or I'd take an aphid fact as well, actually, now that those have Aphids are so cool. Um oh okay, I'll give you okay, I'll give you an aphid fact that is c great. So you know how we're often taught that you need a male and a female to have a baby? Mm-hmm. They're trying to legislate that one, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Aphids uh can can reproduce without males. They can make all female societies where they reproduce, and that is called pathenogenesis. Uh, where the females in a pinch or just like for most of the year, they just they can just reproduce without males. They basically like shoot out clones of themselves and become these big

wonderful uh communities of daughters and sisters and cousins and grandmas and hang out and some of them dance. The ones we're talking about woolly aphids are also called boogie woogie aphids and Um and I just think what I love about that is like

Nature is it's what you were saying with infinity. It's so much wilder than we think. It's like, yeah, in many species you do need a male or female, but like you don't have to. And we've seen that in the California Condor, and we've seen it in certain um snakes, like in a pinch. There is a pathway to create new life. Like that is, I think more people need to be talking about parthenogenesis. Like the fact that that can happen. Yeah.

That alone is amazing. Like the pathway is there evolutionarily. Yes, in bugs, yes, even in vertebrates, in in invertebrates, in birds, and in reptiles. And so I just think like that is so. Wild? And like I just why is everyone not just like walking around every morning like parcinogenesis can happen? So that's your aphid fact.

I mean I know some people who are doing parthenogenesis. You just have to pay a doctor a bunch of money to give you some hormones and harvest your eggs and stuff. But it's you know, it's it's So it's we're getting there. And I'm just um I'm just so excited for everything that you're doing. I love being on this planet with you. So thank you. I love being on this planet with you. Thank you. I can't wait to hear whatever is coming.

The original music you heard in this episode was brought to you by Lou. We have a new bonus episode coming soon also on Patreon and Apple Plus. Where Chelsea Weber Smith and I are gonna read Our doll mail. Emails you sent us about the things that dolls out of to be clear, not mail from dolls. Although I cannot be certain that any of those emails were not sent by dolls, now that I think about it. Thank you to the people who helped make this show. Miranda Ziegler is our producer and editor.

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