Maggots, Monkeys, and Mars

Prefer to read? Check out the Audio Transcript

Mary Roach: When the researcher said, if you put your ear really close to the body, you can hear the maggots, you can actually hear the maggots feeding, you know, and instead of going like, no, thank you. I’m like, oh, wow. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network.

And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we talk to what we hope are fascinating guests about interesting topics, not always about the topics that everyone else is talking about. And part of the point of the Progress Network and What Could Go Right is that there are stories and solutions and ideas out there that point in a different direction than the daily diet of dyspeptic news, or dystopian news, as the case may be. That there’s a lot more to the human story that we allow for in the narrow band of whatever we call the public conversation.

One of the things that we sort of all know intuitively, but again, don’t pay as much attention to, is that there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot that human beings do that is quirky and odd and fascinating that we may not even think about unless we come up against it.

And today we’re going to talk to somebody who has made a delightful and incredibly interesting career of writing about these pockets of human existence and human activity that are all around us all the time, but we probably don’t look at otherwise. And I think it is important, not just because it’s entertaining, but important because it alerts us to there’s a much richer tapestry of human existence than we often allow ourselves to be aware of or think about.

And the more that we can add that to the mix, I think the more the urgency of certain absolute problems is brought into perspective. So, who are we going to talk to today, Ms. Varvaloucas?

Emma Varvaloucas: We are talking to Mary Roach. She has written, I believe, seven books now. Gulp, Grunt, Bonk, Stiff, Fuzz, and Six Feet Over.

So we are going to learn a little bit more about Mary Roach and how she sees humanity in the world.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s speak with Mary.

Mary Roach, it is such a pleasure to have you with us today. You are who I want to be when I grow up. You’ve managed to write this incredibly eclectic series of books, animated, I suppose, or at least I hope, or at least it would appear, only by your endless, boundless curiosity and passions to delve into questions of what we do and how we do it that most people just gloss over.

Like, we take it as part of the noise and you’ve looked at how soldiers deal with strange and perplexing aspects of combat and what might happen in the wonderful and cold and odd world of space as we begin to enter it. So maybe on that note, we could begin with the space question, because separate from Elon Musk’s sudden emergence as a fixture of the American right, or at least the MAGA forces of the United States, he is certainly part of the emerging space economy.

We talked a long while back with Ché Bolden, who’s the son of the former NASA administrator and is himself sort of probing questions of space and space governance. And I wonder what you feel about the whole kind of emerging world of space, you know, there’s. Clearly, SpaceX has been doing some extraordinary things as a outsource contractor for NASA. One of the things that Elon doesn’t like to talk about, that he’s essentially a government contractor.

But I wonder if like your earlier work about space, how this frames your sense of where we go in the next 10 to 20 years as we clearly are moving more and more into space?

Mary Roach: I mean, the book Packing for Mars, people think that it’s about colonizing Mars, which, you know, I understand because Mars is in the title.

Well, it’s really, it’s a book about the physical and psychological challenges of being in space, living in space, not transforming, not terraforming and actually living on another planet, but the very incredibly long trip to get to Mars and the situation. of being, you know, confined in a tiny space with people maybe you didn’t choose to be with, and the psychological aspects of that, and also the physical changes in the human body.

We evolved for life with gravity, a certain amount of gravity, and you take that away, either all of it or some of it, and things start to happen, and some of those are risky, and some of them are merely unpleasant. That’s what that book is about.

Zachary Karabell: While we’re doing this recording we have a bunch of people stuck up in the space station, right?

They’re going to be there for, I mean, I’m kind of fascinated by this one of just, I guess they’re going to be there for six months longer than expected. And they’re just twiddling their thumbs waiting for it. So it’s more of that question of, are we going to be confronting more and more about questions of the human body and how we deal with all that?

Mary Roach: Yeah. You know, I think about those guys that are stuck up there and it’s hilarious to me that people would think of being like, Oh my God, we’re stuck in space. Just ’cause it’s such a phenomenally incredible experience to, to be in space. I mean, one of the things I remember, I, I spent a lot of time going through old transcripts, NASA mission transcripts from the Apollo program and the Gemini program, but specifically Apollo.

And there’s this moment where one of the astronauts, I think it was Gene Cernan, on the way to the moon says, is like, I forget how he phrases it, but basically they should have brought some crossword puzzles. Like the idea that you could be bored on the way to the moon, you know, you’re going to the moon, you’re going to walk on the moon and, and, and everything about what you’re doing is new and unknown to all but a handful of people. And you’re like, God, boring. Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

And if you get to, when people invariably, like, the first moments, when you look at when astronauts first arrive at the International Space Station, there’s this moment where they come from the shuttle, it used to be the shuttle, now it’s various capsules, some of them SpaceX, sometimes the Russian one.

But the moment they’re let out of the capsule into the ISS, which is a pretty big, comparatively big space, there’s this moment where they’re just like, wahoo, they’re like flying around and just bouncing off the walls and having a great time. But apparently after, you know, like the thrill of being weightless wears off surprisingly fast and, and it becomes routine, which is kind of amazing to me. I spent a little bit of time being weightless, you know, a total of about two minutes and I can’t imagine that becoming routine, but we humans get used to stuff and get bored easily. So on a, you know, a mission to Mars, I would love to go to the moon, but I, Mars is, is not for me.

And, and, you know, that to spend time on Mars will be kind of, I guess, sort of like what, where, The United Arab Emirates and places in the Middle East are heading because of climate change where basically you will be always confined. You’ll be always indoors in an air conditioned climate. The extent to which you miss the feeling of a breeze, you know, the variety of color, um, I mean, it’s hard to describe, you know, the astronauts, cosmonauts would talk about, you know, on some of the earlier science.

You know, like Mir and some of the earlier space stations that were up for a long time, they would talk about how they’d just hang out in the greenhouse where they were doing experiments, you know, just because they’re like watching little onion bulbs grow just because it was the only growing, living, green thing.

There was this one guy, he described these plants, he said, they are our love. You know, they beome very, very attached to them. So it’s a very unusual place and environment to put a human being. There’s a book that came out, A City on Mars, I think, by Zach and Kelly Wienersmith.

And it’s all about, I mean, I recommend that book because it’s just a reality check on all of the not so thrilling things that, you know, are going to have to be dealt with and figured out.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m going to think about that in the future. Like, does space sound that cool to you? It’s kind of like sitting in your air conditioned home for, you know, 24/7, 24/7, 24/7, which, yeah, not the best.

Mary Roach: The psychology of it is similar to if you look at some of the journals of Antarctic explorers. I mean, in Antarctica, you’re not, you know, you’re, you’re isolated and confined in a different way, the environment. is so harsh that you basically can’t go very far. So you are stuck in your little hut or your tent or whatever.

And the interpersonal relationships that develop are predictable and horrible. There’s something called irrational antagonism, which is this person that, you know, when you met them, you thought they were perfectly nice and perfectly, yeah agreeable and, and yeah, no problem with them. And then, you know, fast forward six months when you’ve been stuck with them in a small space with no ability to leave and no ability to distract yourself really, that you find yourself annoyed by the way they, they sip their tea or the way they take their boots off.

And just like this, this hatred develops that, you know, that’s tough. It’s not just unpleasant, but when you’re in a small space that happens to be a space capsule, you know, a transit to Mars, you know, you’re depending on those people with your life. So you, to develop a situation where people want to kill each other is not good.

So that is one of NASA’s big concerns about a Mars mission. Obviously the astronauts will be training together for a long time before they go, so hopefully some of these personality conflicts and things will work themselves out. But you can’t, you know, then they do simulations too. They put people in boxes in the parking lot in Moscow, and then they, you know, or somewhere in Hawaii, and they just lock them up for 500 days and do experiments on them.

It happens all the time.

Zachary Karabell: So my kids used to like, would you go to Mars? Would you go to Mars as a thing? And it was like a big one. And my refrain was usually like, I think maybe like, going to Mars as an end of life thing, mid 90s if I ever live that long, where I can’t do anything physical, and the idea of just being confined and having to read and being able to do nothing else, maybe that could be really appealing, but only at that stage in life.

Mary Roach: One scenario for a Mars mission would be to send people at the end of life, partly because the radiation that they’ll be exposed to on the way, cosmic radiation, solar radiation, is quite a heavy load. So you would send someone, you know, the thinking being, if you’re exposed to that radiation, you’re going to develop, the cancer won’t develop for 10 or 20 years, probably. So yeah, you’ll probably be dead by then anyway, so, so, you know what, an elderly crew, a bunch of senior citizens actually makes a certain amount of sense to send to Mars.

I think about, you know, those final years and also, you know, if you’re bedridden, to be floating would be nice. You wouldn’t have bed sores.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Mary Roach: You know, mobility, it’s much easier to get around when you don’t weigh anything. If your, you know, if your joints are all creaky and you don’t weigh anything, you don’t feel any pain.

So I would sign up for that, for that reason alone, just, it would be more comfortable and, right, you’re just going to read and, and it’s something more interesting than, you know, sitting around on your phone.

Emma Varvaloucas: You could go to a nursing home in Massachusetts or on Mars in 30 years.

Mary Roach: Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: So.

Mary Roach: Exactly.

Emma Varvaloucas: Mary, I wanted to ask you, if people haven’t, you know, read any of your work, if they haven’t read any of your books, they’re, they’re probably getting a taste of it by now, that, I kind of view you as like pulling the, the curtain and kind of unveiling like the corners of life.

I was watching your TED talk today to prep for this podcast, which is about orgasm. And you have a story in there where you’re talking to a woman, I think in California, who can think herself into an orgasm. And you end up asking her if she can demonstrate it for you. And so you go out onto this park bench and she’s like, okay, here’s the display, right?

And as I was thinking about that, I was like, is there anything that weirds you out? Or is it like a lot of the stuff that you write about, it weirds you out, but you plow on anyway? Or is it like you, you see the weird and you’re like, yes, like more, I want more weird.

Mary Roach: I always want more weird because I know I want to keep my readers surprised and I feel like I can take a big dose of weird and then I can sort of mete out like little incremental doses of weird for the reader so that I can create on the page a sense of how surreal something is with like, for example, the book that the TED Talk is based on is Bonk, which is a book about the study, studying sexual physiology to bring sexual response into a laboratory, which is kind of an awkward and surreal undertaking. You know, and I, and part of doing that book, I was trying to find people who were coming into a laboratory and having sex.

It doesn’t happen. You know, Kinsey and Masters and Johnson did a fair amount of that to document the whole human sexual response. I wanted to kind of get at the awkwardness of that experience. And, and the researcher was like, well, You know, this was a study being done in London, an ultrasound, four dimensional ultrasound study. And I was like, I’d really, you know, like to be there when you do this. And he’s, he’s like, well, if you can provide some brave volunteers, I’d be happy to do that.

So, you know, if your organization can provide some volunteers, so my organization had to call its husband. I’m like, We have to go do this. You know, so, you know, early on, he said, Oh, sex research, sign me up, you know, not realizing this was going to involve having sex in a imaging laboratory while some guy is holding an ultrasound wand to my belly.

I mean, it was just the most unbelievably awkward thing that I put my husband through and myself, but he, for, for my husband, it was like, this is just really awkward and embarrassing. For me, it’s like, this is going to be great to write up. This is going to be great scenes for readers. So I’m thrilled, even though it was, first of all, terrible sex, second of all, incredibly awkward.

The, it just was a really fun, it was a hilarious scene to write up because, you know, the researcher’s trying to make us feel comfortable, you know, and he’s talking to my husband, he’s like, Oh, and how many children do you have? Well, you know, we’re, we’re like, Ed is behind me, we’re, you know, in me, and the researchers and Ed says to him, Oh, and you, how many kids do you, you know, how many kids do you have?

And the researcher’s like, You know, you can cum now. Um, just the one child. You know, it’s just, it’s weird. Just juxtaposition of casual conversation and sex.

Zachary Karabell: That’s really funny. How bout them Yankees?

Mary Roach: Yeah exactly! Exactly. And I’m taking, I’m actually taking notes, which is not what, you know, what a man wants during sex, someone with a notepad taking notes. So to answer your question, has there anything, there’s never been a situation where I’ve thought this is too weird for me. Yeah, no, I guess I’d have to say no.

No, I mean, the body farm was a scenario that’s a forensics facility where they studied decomposition of human remains in different scenarios, like the trunk of a car versus the backseat of a car, sand versus mud, et cetera. How does that affect the timeline of decomposition, which is important when you’re trying to solve a crime?

You know, you want to figure out how long has this person been dead? So when did the crime, when was it committed? So that’s a, not just visually, but olfactorily, bizarre and extreme setting, but again, I was just, I, I knew that it was just to describe that place and, and what it was like and what was going on I just knew would be a really fun scene to write and really interesting for my readers. So when the researcher said, put your, you know, if you put your ear really close to the body, you can hear the maggots. You actually hear the maggots feeding, you know, and instead of going like, no, thank you. I’m like, Oh, wow. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: What do they sound like?

Mary Roach: Kind of like Rice Krispies, snap, crackle, pop, just a little very quiet version version of that.

I learned something recently that I didn’t know then, I’ll share with you guys, I haven’t mentioned this anywhere, if the person who’s dead had been on cocaine, the whole process, the maggots reproduce more quickly. Like you, you have to, you, everything, they’re feeding faster. They’re all kind of hyped up, which affects, well, it’s important if you’re the criminal investigator and you’re like, we want to figure out, you know, where the, you know, cause you look at the life stages of the maggot to determine, you know, how long has this body been lying here?

So if the maggots are like chomping, like crazy, cause they’re tweaked out, then this all happens more quickly. So it’s important to know if you do go into that career.

Zachary Karabell: Look, one of the things that’s great about your work too, is I mean, it’s one thing to say nothing creeps you out and you go into this sort of the body decomposition lab. You’re just writing about it. There’s a whole bunch of people, like this is their career. Like, this is what they do, you know, day in, day out for X number of years.

Yeah. I always wonder about the, like the first date conversation. Oh, so what do you do? Kind of thing. And I’m, I’m sure it’s actually a pretty good screener. Like most people have a generic enough career that it takes like a second or third day before you realize you either like this person or don’t. If you’re buying in on day, day one to, I study body decomposition. If the person’s like, yeah, it’s probably a good sign for the future.

But I wonder, I mean, like stepping back for a moment because of this. So one of the premises we have of this podcast and The Progress Network is we spend a lot of time paying attention to a lot of things that may matter, but, but as a result, we spend far less time paying attention to a lot of other things that probably also matter.

And it creates a very warped perspective about the nature of human reality and what’s actually going on in the world because you know we have a very limited number of public narratives about politics or sports or science or and and then there’s all this world of human beings doing kind of weird fascinating stuff that we never talk about and you’re the perfect, Let’s look at all the weird fascinating stuff that human beings do that we don’t look at enough.

Does doing that and looking at all these quirky people who do kind of fascinating stuff, some of it very highly skilled, right? The softball, you know, podcast question, does that make you more optimistic about human beings and human nature, about this kind of, this, All these people doing these things?

I mean, look, I don’t think you fall into most of the professions you write about. It’s not like Plan B. I mean, maybe it is Plan B, but it’s a really interesting Plan B. Anyway, I’m just wondering how that shapes your sense of kind of humanity.

Mary Roach: Anytime I step out of my bubble, which is Northern California, and I go out into the world, some guy who, you know, has spent his whole career studying chewing, you know, say, and this is, and he’s so excited to share with me that, you know, if you, if you bite down on a peanut, right, you’re biting hard.

And then the moment when the peanut gives way, there’s this reflex to, to stop pushing down because otherwise you would break your teeth and it happens all automatically. And the human body is just amazing that there was a name for that reflex. And I forget what it is. It’s in one of the books, but this guy’s passion for this obscure reflex of chewing, you know, and he’s, he’s studied chewing and he has all these techniques in this lab and you just, you fall in love with these people, be partly just, they’re so, the, the passion they have for science and for understanding and for helping people is, is so moving to me.

I’m endlessly encouraged and filled with hope, just, just meeting these people and, and spending time with them and, and hearing about what makes them excited, and just getting away from my world, which lately, right now is just, I can’t get away from politics and from climate change and from everything I fear is coming down the pike. And so it’s this incredible antidote for me to go out and spend time in a lab with people who are, you know, figuring out a way to keep human organs for transplant, you know, keeping them not just a matter of hours, but a matter of days or weeks. And like, think of how many organs that would make available and standing in this lab with this human heart that’s beating on a machine.

And they’re, you know, they’re just, it’s, it’s inspiring and it’s a good thing.

Emma Varvaloucas: Mary, I’m going to ask the opposite to that question, which is, is there anything over the course of your many books and all this research and meeting people that you wish you had never learned? Like you’re like, No, my life could have gone out, gone on without that knowledge.

Mary Roach: Yeah, it’s, I’ve kind of recovered now, but there was a period of time, this was Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, which is a book really just, you know, everything from the nose to the ass, this weird tube we have with a different set of rules, it’s full of bacteria and there’s weird things, squishy things going on.

It was a book about all of that. And this was again in the same lab with the, not the chewing guy. It was chewing related. And it was this whole, they broke down what you do when you eat. Okay. And it was, you know, you’re, first of all, you’re taking this bite and you’ve got to reduce it and then form, put it into the swallowable state. That’s actually a technical term.

You put it in the swallowable state and they broke it down with all the things, the way that the tongue moves and interacts with the palate and the teeth. For like months afterwards, I would see people in restaurants and I’m like, I know what’s going on in their mouth. And it was disgusting and I think about myself and I think about saliva and everything I learned about saliva.

And it just felt like, you know, people should have sex in public and eat in private because it’s so gross. Like, I’m so like, ew, we do this thing all the time.

My husband and I, I infected him too. He’ll be in a restaurant and go, look, it’s like people are chewing. It’s so weird. They go in a public place and they put food in their mouth and they mix it with saliva and then they swallow it. It’s so weird. So yeah, sometimes it does affect me and same with like the sex book, there’d be times when I was researching that book where I, you know, I would be, you know, in intimate moments kind of going, Oh, is this the part where the earlobes swell?

You know, there, cause I would, I had studied the entire, you know, sexual response cycle according to Masters and Johnson, all this, you know, stuff like, Ooh, the plateau stage and now we’re at my, and you, you, it takes you out of the moment. And it’s um, I don’t recommend it. I just don’t recommend it. Just never look too closely at bodily processes.

Just, just, just let them happen, is my advice.

Zachary Karabell: You’ve written at least two books that touch directly on death, right? You’ve written a book, Stiff, about cadavers and a book, Spook, about the afterlife and ghosts, or people’s attempts to.

Mary Roach: Yeah, people’s attempts to prove that or disprove it.

Zachary Karabell: To find proof, you know, proof of, of all that.

And I mean, there are, you know, great stories, some of them humorous. I think there’s a less humorous aspect of Stiff, which is our, our very kind of antiseptic late 20th century, particularly in the West, attitude about bodies and death and dying. What did these say to you about contemporary attitudes about death?

Did they make you feel like we’re really at sea with this? And there’s also, there’s a view of pre modern, you know, societies until the 20th century had a much more organic way of dealing both with spirits and with bodies. And these areas that you’ve looked at are kind of the unintended consequences of trying to make both invisible, not real, not part of our story.

Mary Roach: Our society has, to my mind, come a long way toward a healthier relationship with death. I think that there’s so many more options now in terms of what you, not only what you do with remains, yours or someone else’s, but how you say goodbye and form a tribute. There’s a new generation of morticians. A lot of them are women and they are far more open to allowing the family to plan a memorial, do it in a meaningful way.

I have a friend whose dad was an oceanographer and she just planned this whole service out on the pier where he used to work and people, and it was, it was meaningful to the people who worked with him and knew him and loved him. In other words, it wasn’t, as opposed to like, when my mom died, she had outlived all of, most of her friends, and she wanted a Catholic, you know, the full, the whole enchilada, the whole mass.

So there were some priests up there who hadn’t seen her in, I don’t know if he’d even met her. So it was a completely generic eulogy that he, it wasn’t a, we, we didn’t participate. We weren’t invited to say anything. It was just a mass and it was, nothing said was personal or was in any way about her.

It was generic. And I, I felt that that, I mean, it was what she wanted. She wanted a Catholic service mass. But, and, and part of it is, I guess, on me, I should have, you know, taken the reins and set up some sort of memorial, although it wasn’t hardly anyone left to go to, it would have been just my brother and me standing around.

But, you know, I look at the difference between that kind of, to me, meaningless, although to her, I suppose, meaningful ceremony, and then more recent memorials that I’ve attended where people are invited into a home and sometimes invited to take something meaningful. One of the, on the bookshelf behind me here is a, there’s a book from a friend of, a friend of mine died. He loved to read and what his, his mom did at his memorial was invite everyone to take one of his books. And one that would maybe have meaning for you, which I, you know, I love that. So I, also, it’s a really good book, but it’s also just always makes me think of Eric.

I mean, when I wrote Stiff, it was right around the time of Six Feet Under and also CSI. So all of a sudden you turn on the television and there were bodies everywhere. You know, there were bodies on the slab. There were bodies in funeral homes. And I think a little bit of the taboo kind of dissolved around that time and has continued to dissolve.

And, and there’s now been laws passed in Washington, Oregon, several other states allowing composting of human remains, which people find really meaningful. The one chapter I got the most mail, email about, in Stiff was about a woman in Sweden who was trying to devise machinery to basically render the body ready for composting.

In other words, you don’t, she didn’t feel like you could just stick the whole body because it would under, underground, it would rot. You needed to break it into smaller pieces so there was more surface area exposed to oxygen. So it would actually compost in a way that you could then take that material and, and plant something and have a plant that would grow with the remains of your family member or friend or loved one, as they say.

People really responded to that. And they’d like, how can I do this? They want to do something more meaningful than embalming in a fancy coffin that some dude in a dark suit kind of pressured you to buy. That whole Jessica Mitford American way of death scenario where it was taken away from us, you know, and they, they’d come at you when you’re in a very vulnerable state. And there was just a lot to my mind wrong with that.

And there are so many more options now legally and, and in terms of businesses that people, I mean, you can have your loved ones remains put into a dildo. You could have them fired into space. You can have them put in a duck decoy. You can, whatever you want to do, you can do now.

And I think that’s healthy. I mean, there are those that don’t. I mean, when this book came out in the UK, one of the reviewer for, I forget which paper said, stiff success in America is a sign of cultural, what did he say, cultural decay? Something like that. I mean, there are those who’ve.

Zachary Karabell: Pun unintended on that one.

Mary Roach: Yeah. Cultural decay, cultural rot. So not everybody agrees with me. I don’t know. I like to chip away at those taboos. I like transparency. I like, because if something’s taboo, there’s guilt and shame involved, and that’s never good for anybody.

Emma Varvaloucas: So I just wanted to talk a little bit about Fuzz, which is your latest book, before we run out of time. I would just love to hear a story from it. Like there I was in, you know, dot, dot, dot.

Mary Roach: I spent some time in India with a wildlife, human wildlife conflict is what the book is basically about. People and animals kind of getting in each other’s way.

And I have a chapter in India. Well, there’s three chapters set in India. The book is set up by crime. So there’s manslaughter, there’s breaking and entering, there’s jaywalking, there’s thievery. And mugging was the, the monkeys do, uh, these monkeys are kind of amazing. Uh, and I, I wanted to get mugged to see what that was like.

I went for this walk. There’s this, you know, it’s this town that has a lot of monkeys. You see them kind of come out around dusk, running around the tops of rooftops. They’ll come into the, I was sitting in a restaurant. You know, and all of a sudden on the rafter, there’s a monkey, the waiters have a, like a monkey stick.

They don’t hit it, but they, you know, come at it because otherwise they’ll just, they will come down to your table and take your food. But I, I, I wanted to have an interaction with one of these macaques. And so I walked up this trail, I’m walking with a bag of bananas. At one point, I see in the distance, it was kind of like when, you know, the people who are going to rob the stagecoach, they’re hiding, and then they like come out, like this head pops up from behind a rock, I’m like, uh oh, and this monkey comes towards me, and they’re fairly, you know, they’re, when they’re aggressive, they’re kind of scary. They’re not tiny.

And, and so this monkey comes towards me, and I’m kind of holding, and I’m, I’m holding the bag of bananas. I’m not offering it. And I’m kind of making eye contact, like, what are, what are you going to do? And then now this other one comes out from behind and grabs the bag. They’re like working, they’re like a team.

It was kind of amazing. And they got the bananas.

Zachary Karabell: Good for them, man.

Mary Roach: You know, it happened very fast. I think it’s like, like any mugging, it’s the surprise element, you know, like a smash and grab. You don’t even know what’s going on. It’s like the window’s broken. They grabbed your bag and it’s like, what just happened?

Zachary Karabell: I wondered on Fuzz, what, kind of, your observations were during, let’s say, March of 2020 till later in the year, because one thing that a number of people remarked on and even observed, you know, personally, was the minute there was a dramatic slowdown, shutdown of a lot of human activity in even in urban areas, how quickly various forms of local wildlife just kind of appeared.

Mary Roach: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: Like they clearly had been there all along. It’s not like they got born in March and then they’re suddenly they’re there in July. It’s just suddenly there were these animals in places where there weren’t before, whether it was the middle of Manhattan, whether it was New Delhi, whether it was, you know, fish in Venice.

And I just wonder like what you were thinking at that time too about this, because it was wild how quickly the sort of the animal world reappeared in the urban world. Just all it took was a vast diminution of activity.

Mary Roach: The book was pretty much done during COVID, so I wasn’t really clocking that. I wasn’t tracking that.

One thing I talk about in the book or somebody was telling me about is, you know, cause this sense that. there’s cougars everywhere now, people think, in LA, because what there are now everywhere is those Ring cameras. So porch cameras are everywhere. So all of a sudden, people are sending around images of cougars that are coming up to their steps and sort of walking away or crossing the lawn.

And I said to the, you know, and there’s this, sort of, there was this hysteria of like, Oh my God, there’s so many more cougars. We have to do something. And the guy, the Cougar researcher, California Fish and Wild, Fish and Wildlife, he is like, you know what, there are the same numbers. You just, it’s kind of like with mammograms, it’s the technology that’s, it’s the detection technology, you know, that, that they’re always, he said they’ve always been there and it’s the middle of the night. They know there are no people around. When their people, when the people are gone, the animals come out. And that’s the same, whether it’s, you know, you go in your backyard at 2 a. m., my backyard anyway, there’s like seven raccoons crossing through. Just as soon as the people go away, the animals come out.

And with COVID, they were gone all the time. So the, and the animals just quickly realizing, first of all, there’s no people. And second of all, there’s food, there’s garbage, there’s, you know, let’s, let’s investigate. You are walking by a cougar. You have walked. You don’t know that they’re there, but they know you’re there. They’re very stealthy. And so, you know, you go, you go in the woods, they’ve seen you, you’ve never seen them.

And I remember talking to someone about after Chernobyl, just the amount, when all the people cleared out, the wildlife that’s been thriving there, despite the radiation levels, just it’s to become this weird, very dangerous wildlife preserve.

Emma Varvaloucas: That reminds me a lot of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

They’ve turned parts of it into a wildlife sanctuary and they’re trying to get tourists there now, which I’m like, Yeah, I would go to that.

Mary Roach: I would, I would totally go there. That’s really? They’re, they’re bringing tourists in? That, I want to go. Okay, that’s my next trip.

Zachary Karabell: On the next thing, where are your passions taking you now?

What’s the next project?

Mary Roach: It’s hard to describe because, well, it isn’t hard to describe, but it’s hard to describe properly. It’s called Replaceable You. So it’s, it’s all different bits and pieces of the human body that can be created, fabricated, but not, it’s not a cyborgy future thing. Some of it’s historical.

I spent some time in an iron lung, a working old Emerson iron lung from the polio era, which was trippy. So some of it, you know, there’s, there’s some, you know, pig organs, genetically manipulated pig organs in the mix, and I guess 17 different bits and pieces of the human body. Not, not, not in any way advocating replacing things, but just how challenging that can be, you know, and how strange and surreal sometimes.

Emma Varvaloucas: The pig organ part is interesting because that actually might solve, the hope, right, is that it might solve organ shortages in the future that like, well, there aren’t enough people that want to donate their organs, so maybe we can look to pigs.

Mary Roach: There’s a long way to go, but even if, you know, the, right now, there’ve been

kidneys, livers, and hearts that have all been transplanted. And the patients have lived a couple of months and that on the face of it doesn’t sound very hopeful. However, if you look at it as sort of a bridge, if it could buy someone time before they could get a human organ that’s a little bit closer, you know, it’s still, there’s still a ways to go.

But anyway, yes. Or if the genetic tweaks could create a scenario where we had more, you had, it would work for more than two months, that would certainly resolve the shortages. I would love it if just more people would agree to donate. Or if we did what they had, you know, in Europe, a lot of countries in Europe where you have to opt out, you have to, if you don’t want to donate your organs, if you’re eligible to donate them, you know, that you have, that you then have to fill out a form rather than here, where if you do want to donate, the onus is on you to take that step and, and fill out the form. So there’s so many simpler things that could help that process. It helped that scenario, but if the pig thing could work out, that certainly would, yeah, alleviate the shortage.

Zachary Karabell: So Mary, thank you so much for your, well, thank you so much for your work and your curiosity. I find it infectious. I find it inherently uplifting and it’s hard not to smile listening to all of your stories. Even if you cringe a little bit about something like ehh, but it’s kind of a ehh with a smile and, you know, that kind of eclectic boundless curiosity is vital, I think, because it’s so easy to lose perspective and balance if all you’re doing is like listening to the news or following the election or worried about climate change, like all real, all important, no question about it.

But then there’s also just a lot of other humanity living its life, some in ways that are like deeply impactful. What do we do with bodies? How do we deal with death? What’s the nature of spirits? How do we deal with wildlife? Some of which is just quirky, but the quirky, and it’s like we underrate the quirky by calling it quirky, right?

It’s quirky because it’s not the norm, but it’s certainly most of human life has lived not the norm. You know, the norm is, some abstract aggregate of a lot of experiences. But as you write about so well and examine so well, most of life or a lot of life has lived not the norm. You know, it’s, it’s the quirk, it’s the margins, it’s the weird, it’s the strange.

And I think, like, personally, that to me is uplifting. It is, there’s a lot more going on than we often pay attention to. And that’s really important that we pay attention to it. So I want to thank you for delving into all this, doing some of the things some of us don’t want to do, like, I don’t know if I want to be in the iron lung. I’m happy to read about your experience in it.

And I encourage all of you who are not familiar with Mary Roach’s work to become familiar with Mary Roach’s work. So thank you for taking the time today.

Mary Roach: Thank you so much. And thank you. That was well said. That was much better said than I could say it.

Certainly. Well, maybe if I had a piece of paper and I could write it down, but thank you so much, you guys. That was really fun.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you, Mary.

Zachary Karabell: I don’t know that I have a lot to add to that particular conversation other than the way we ended it, which is just the kind of the delight at the range of stuff that Mary looks at and the way she writes about it.

She’s also just a wonderful writer and she’s, it’s very vivid. You kind of feel you’re there with her. So she has a gift of not only kind of delving into these topics, but she’s really good at writing about them and bringing them to life. So, you know, truly one of the gifts of writing and books and bringing you into these places and sort of things you never necessarily thought to ask about, you’re like, Oh, right, there’s got to be someone who deals with animals jaywalking. Like, who is that? And who are these people? And what do they do? And what are the rules around it?

And all these different things that she looks at, you know, there’s just legions of people devoting their lives to figuring all this out. And again, I don’t know about you, but I come away from her work feeling very good and uplifted.

I think there’s a reason for that, you know, because she just kind of looks at where human passions are going rather constructively often.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I just think it’s undeniable fun, you know, and she has that aspect to herself as a person too. Like you just kind of get the sense like she’s having a good time and like she’s having a good time, so you’re having a good time, we’re just all having a good time.

I’m glad you mentioned her writing because her writing is spectacular. It’s funny. There’s so much flair to it. She put it in the podcast that she’s always trying to, like, dole out little surprises, which she absolutely does.

Zachary Karabell: Totally. And because she definitely has a knack for it. Honed or, or, or gifted, I don’t know, but she definitely does.

In many ways, this was the, the show, don’t tell aspect of some of what we’re doing, which is rather than talking about what we should be looking at or talking about how we’re not looking at things, a lot of her work is just, you know, There’s a lot going on, and I suppose you could say, like, sports writers are just writing about the love of the game, or the weird ins and outs of different people kicking balls, or catching balls, or throwing balls.

That probably, in and of itself, one of the reasons people are drawn to that as well, is that, you know, it’s just one aspect of what human beings do. They play, they live, they follow teams. It’s not all about politics, it’s not all about climate, it’s not all about the existential threats. So, I’m sure there are people who feel like, look, this is all just distractions from what’s really important, you know, the system wants, wants us not paying attention to the things that are really important, entertain ourselves to death, that kind of thing.

But I think respecting the degree to which there’s a lot more going on for humanity at any given time than the sort of narrow range of topics that we call our collective dialogue, the better we’ll be, or the more balanced we’ll feel.

Emma Varvaloucas: Absolutely. I have a follow up question to that, which is, are there still sportswriters? Because I thought they had gone the way of the music journalist.

Zachary Karabell: It’s tough. There’s not a lot of outlets and there are not a lot of them, but you know, there’s a few. And there’s a lot of AI generated sports writing content, which is annoying as all hell.

That’s a wrap. Thank you for listening. Please send us your comments.

Check out our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right? Conveniently named the same. Check out our shorter form podcast, The Progress Report, under the moniker of What Could Go Right?, where we look at some news of the week that you might’ve missed.

Thank you for Emma for co hosting, the Podglomerate for producing, the team at The Progress Network for providing the data and ideas, and again, send us your comments, send us your ideas, send us your suggestions.

We will try to respond to them and engage them accordingly. And we will be back with you next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you, Zachary. And thank you everyone for listening as always.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

Thanks for listening.