--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. and give first perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year. It was March 11th, 2020, one year ago today, when this novel coronavirus situation got upgraded to a pandemic.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was March 11, 2020, when it felt like something sort of irreparably changed in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The whole country kind of took a breath and realized that this was going to be for real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I was actually not hosting Today Explained that day.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was away from the job, and my intrepid reporter producer, Noam Hassentfeld, was filling in for me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it was quite a week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was my first full week, I think, guest hosting Today Explained.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then right halfway through it on that Wednesday, they were like, OK, everybody pack up. Everybody go work remote for maybe forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that how it felt in the office that day?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean, we were in this meeting to talk about how we would record with Vox reporters remotely, like maybe if we had to leave.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the next thing I knew, it was just everyone pack up your desks and get out of here in like an hour.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it might have felt weird in the office that day, but pretty soon it felt pretty weird all across the country later that night, right?
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I remember getting home and, you know, shifting from working in the office to working out of my closet while making a daily show, while having it be my first week hosting the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was kind of a lot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we finally got the episode out and I turned on the TV and I was watching basketball and I remember it was just kind of crazy.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like this jazz player, Rudy Gobert, he had been kind of joking about having coronavirus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was like touching all the microphones in the press room.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a video that surfaced on social media, Gobert can be seen getting up from his seat and touching the mouthpieces of several reporters' microphones and recorders.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the jazz were going to play the Oklahoma City Thunder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And right before the game started, they all came out and they were like, oh, no, we can't play this game, and the fans weren't sure what was going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The fans, due to unforeseen circumstances, the game tonight has been postponed.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are all safe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then within a couple hours, they suspended the whole basketball season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then next thing you know, like, Tom Hanks has coronavirus.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're not worried about it. They're not tripping, but they're going through the necessary health precautions, obviously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Donald Trump is, like, addressing the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it was just kind of this snowball. Like everything was changing really quickly.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good night, Vince.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: March 11th, 2020, a day a lot of us will never forget.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But also, I don't want this to be a bait and switch for people.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not the reason I asked you to join me on the show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The reason you're here today is because one year later, March 11th, 2021, you are again hosting something, but you're not the guest host.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are the host of a brand new podcast from Vox called Unexplainable.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I'm super, super psyched about this new show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a science show about unanswered questions, just diving straight into the unknown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this was an idea that grew out of one of our dear friends at Today Explained, Vox science reporter Brian Resnick and the science editor, Eliza Barkley.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean, Brian has been thinking about this idea for a really long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was doing some reporting on the replication crisis in psychology, which is basically this thing that happened over the last 10 years or so where a lot of psychological research had been shown to have sort of questionable methods.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he was like, maybe we need to be thinking about science a bit more humbly, a little bit more skeptically, you know, not assume that everything is so certain and set in stone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he started doing more reporting on intellectual humility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he and I started talking about this.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We made some great Today Explained episodes that were sort of related.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did one about proprioception about the sixth sense of how you know where your body is in space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you close your eyes, it's not like the world disappears.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's an impression of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's proprioception.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Proprioception is critical for that type of coordination where you can close your eyes and you can reach out and you can touch something.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because how else would you know where it is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we did one about moon poop, which I loved, about why we should maybe go back to the moon to get the astronauts poop to prove if life could exist in space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We brought life to this dead world for the first time in billions of years.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we just left life there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The answer to whether that life is still living or how long it lived while it was on the moon really points to some fascinating questions about the origin of life on Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then towards the end of the year, we actually ran sort of the pilot episode of Unexplainable that featured you and Brian talking a lot about dark matter.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, Brian and I were really excited to get this chance.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We worked also with another co-creator of ours, Bird Pinkerton.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the three of us made this episode about dark matter and Vera Rubin, this astronomer who convinced the scientific world that dark matter was real and somehow never won a Nobel Prize for it.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, when you first see it, I think you're afraid of being, you're afraid of making a dumb mistake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, that there's just some simple explanation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we ran that in the Today Explained feed and we got such great response from listeners via email and tweets.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we decided to make this a full show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we launched yesterday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I couldn't be more excited about it.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's coming up on the show?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are you guys working on?
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: Well, we're trying to hit kind of all areas of science.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: So we've got an episode on the replication crisis that I mentioned in psychology.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: That's going to come up in a couple weeks.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: We've got this really, really cool episode I'm excited about that Brian and Bird have put a ton of work into about something called ball lightning, which is basically when lightning forms as a ball and floats through windows and walls and just kind of sits there and then goes like poof and disappears.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And it's a real thing. Like, people see it.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: I hate it already. But scientists can't really explain what's going on.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And then we've got episodes on ancient DNA and how it's making us rewrite the history of humanity.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And then we've got one I'm really excited about that Bird is reporting on the twilight zone in the ocean.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: This is sort of like the middle distance in the ocean where it's not quite at the top. It's not all the way at the bottom.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And surprisingly, we know very, very little about what's going on there.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: Hmm.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: What have you discovered making the show so far when you talk to the scientists who are trying to answer these sort of questions about the unknown?
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: Yeah, I mean, I love approaching science in this direction because I feel like it's way too easy to think of science as just like a riddle with an answer.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And then you just kind of tie it up in a neat bow.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: You have your little snapple fact, you go.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: You know, science is just a lot messier.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And when you're expecting kind of neat, concrete answers to all your questions, you end up missing out on a lot of really interesting and honestly important scientific work that's out there.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: So you'll miss out on ball lightning because we don't have a really great explanation for it.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: You'll miss out on other things like unexplained infertility or why cancer sometimes just spontaneously goes into remission.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: There are a lot of these questions that we don't really know but are worth studying.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And when we've talked to scientists about this on the show, like when we were making our first few episodes, they were all just so excited that someone's finally making a show that doesn't expect to have everything neatly answered.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And we're excited, too.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: We're actually going to run the latest episode of Unexplainable in this feed, Today Explains feed, tomorrow.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: But before we do that, I thought we need to have a little bit of a send-off for you because you've contributed so much to our show, including the very last thing you and I ever worked on together, which, of course, was a song.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, that was one that I remember when you asked me to do this.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was like, how in the world are we going to fit an entire year's worth of stuff in like the most insane year that's ever happened?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How are we going to fit all of 2020 into one six minute song?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was the idea. The idea was this year has been so insane.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can't think of any other way to recap it, but some sort of musical.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I remember I wasn't planning to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was kind of planning to hope it didn't happen.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then one day you just sent me this recording of yourself playing this melody on the piano and singing the It's Been a Year melody on top of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I just loved it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was so good.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At that point I think we just had to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we spent 1 hours approximately writing the words to it 1 hours yes
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, our pal Christina Aminashan from Vox came by to lend some vocals.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, Christina did such amazing work on this song.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, we're going to play that after a quick break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before we do, thank you, Noam, for everything you've done on this show.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we're also excited about your new one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you so much, Sean.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: I really can't thank you enough.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: And everyone at Today Explained, it's just been like, it's been an incredible three years and I can't thank you enough.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: Noam Hassenfeld was a producer and a reporter and a guest host and a sports correspondent and a musical director at Today Explained.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: But now, he's the host of Unexplainable.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: You can and should find the show and subscribe for free episodes about all of the most important, unanswered questions in science.
--:-- Noam Hassentfeld: You're going to love it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos for them.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Today Explained team includes our engineer, Afim Shapiro, producers Will Reed, Muj Zady, Halima Shah, and Cecilia Lay, facts checked by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome Laura, music by Breakmaster Cylinder, and Noam.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jillian Weinberger is our supervising deputy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Quick break, and then we're going to play you a song.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is Adio?
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can go to addio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: on everything at Apple.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Terms and more at applecard.com.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news, we're still not in the clear
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can't even remember what life was like
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Back before we didn't need a mask to go outside
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can't even remember how it used to sound
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before the streets were quiet and we had to lock it down
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 2020, the year began on fire
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Australia was burning and Iran was looking dire
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you know you might forget it
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But back in the before time
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We thought we'd have to deal with Third World War time
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was only January
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The last time I went to a wedding
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we barely knew back then that the virus was already spreading
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Meanwhile, the end of the impeachment trial, finally
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It went the way you thought it would, except for maybe Romney
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The virus leaves China on planes and on ships
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The world watches closely as Italy gets hit
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Italians sang from their balconies
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then came the celebrities
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Imagine there's no heaven
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Easy if you try
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news, we're still not in the clear
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 2020 is canceled
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No Olympics and Costco took away free samples
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So long Coachella, goodbye in-person classes
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No European travel, we banned their white asses
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: COVID conspiracies, we got varieties
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bill Gates made it in a lab
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And 5G wants to kill your dad
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe it'll go away when temperatures are high
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe some disinfectant is worth the college try
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lockdowns, shutdowns, layoffs and a market crash
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mask on mask off, the stimulus won't help my rash
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're running out of TP
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're running out of PPE
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm scared of getting groceries
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm losing all my sanity
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When is this all gonna end?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels like everything's the same
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every single day blends into the next day
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're still not in the clear
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Late May, a wall starts to shatter
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More than half the country screaming
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A monumental protest movement started in the streets.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Statues start to fall and people protest the police.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Racist mascots fall and athletes protest in the bubble.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: John Lewis passed away but left us his good trouble.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Confederate flag lost again in this pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: While more and more people saw that racism's systemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But unity, it doesn't last.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It quickly gets politicized.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're shooting in Kenosha and everyone's still taking sides
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One step forward, one step back
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States staying right on track
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wait, wait, hold the phone, the president has got it
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He didn't want to wear a mask, but now he tested positive
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, he's gonna beat it, but he won't win the election
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even after RBG the court will not correct it
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Convinces half his party it's a steal without a reason
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tries to throw good ballots out but books the wrong four seasons
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fifty different lawsuits winding through the courts
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's losing and losing and losing and losing and losing and losing
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who cares?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now there's a vaccine
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And another new vaccine
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's actually happening
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's all predicted by Fauci
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you to the doctors
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to all the educators
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you to the nurses
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to grocery store workers
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And also all the drivers
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who now have my address
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for saving our election
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: God bless USPS
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news, we're still not in the clear
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news, we're still not in the clear
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can't even remember what it's like to be
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dancing with my friends and eating with my family
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can't even remember what normal was
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But give me more hugs in 2021
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after all the news
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're still not in the clear
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've given up so much
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But somehow we're still here
--:-- [Music starts again]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're still here
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
