[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is sort of—no, this is Radiolab. This is definitely Radiolab.

ROBERT: Definitely Radiolab.

JAD: Although not like the podcast-podcast.

ROBERT: No, it's a participatory Radiolab.

JAD: Exactly. So this has been a big year for us.

ROBERT: Very, very big.

JAD: Our audience has grown a lot. A lot of new people in the family who've heard some of our recent stuff. Rhino Hunter, Darkode, Birth Story, stuff like we're super proud of. And we are super appreciative of the people who are listening, and more importantly, the people who are helping us to do this.

ROBERT: Because we think about you all the time. I mean, you're the point. Like, we come to work, we think, "Now, what can we tell? How can we tell it in a way that would grab you—you, the one listening right now, and hold you and keep you and make you say thank you." That's what we—you know, we want you, and we have your ears, which is a terrific—which makes us really proud.

JAD: Yes. And so what we decided to do to get you to maybe reflect on what Radiolab means to you is we're gonna present a little top three.

ROBERT: It's the top three Radiolabs that were the big hits.

JAD: In perpetuity, right? The most downloaded of all time.

ROBERT: Yeah. And because you never know when you do this sort of thing whether, you know, we kind of hope that some people will listen, but we never know whether a lot of people will listen or nearly a lot people listen, or damn, why didn't more people listen?

JAD: Yup. Yup.

ROBERT: But this is just something you just throw out there and you just hope against hope that you—and these are the three that the people who were out there listening just downloaded and talked about and exchanged, apparently. So they are the three most listened to.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: We can say that. Ever.

JAD: Exactly. And the reason we're doing this now is just to remind you that the way that we pay for this, the production costs come from your donations.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's how we pay for much of what we do.

JAD: That's actually what makes this thing go, a pledge of support.

ROBERT: So how do you do that? Well, it's pretty simple, really. You text the word 'radiolab'—that's one word, by the way, R-A-D-I-O-L-A-B to the number 69866. So text 'radiolab' to 69866. Or you could visit Radiolab.org, and then there's just a pledge button. You just hit it and all done.

JAD: Okay, number three.

ROBERT: Number three is the story of a pot.

JAD: This comes from the "Things" show. This is our third-most downloaded show of all time.

ROBERT: We're told about an adventure story which seems to be over, and then we say, "No, it isn't over. There's a whole second chapter. We could find out something that you forgot to ask." Well, this involved putting one of our people totally at risk. She had to go climbing up a vertical ...

JAD: No, this could have gone—this could have gone very bad. This could have gone very bad. But we decided to take it three, four and then seven steps farther for no real reason other than you want to listen to those kinds of stories that don't stop where you think they're gonna stop.

ROBERT: And what you're about to hear is a moment where weirdness pays off.

CRAIG CHILDS: Life seems very small. As it is day to day, and then you just have these moments that just open it up.

REGAN CHOI: Ah, a scorpion sighting!

CRAIG CHILDS: Into something much more complex and rich.

REGAN CHOI: Where is it?

JASPER CHILDS: Don't move your leg, Dad!

JAD: Our next story involves one thing, three people. Craig.

CRAIG CHILDS: I'm Craig Childs.

JAD: Who you just heard.

CRAIG CHILDS: I'm a writer and traveler from western Colorado.

JAD: Regan.

REGAN CHOI: I'm Regan Choi. I'm an artist and a mother and an educator.

ROBERT: You know each other?

REGAN CHOI: Oh yeah, we're married.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And finally, Dirk.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Dirk Vaughan. I was a street cop in mostly Denver.

JAD: Craig's unlikely best buddy.

DIRK VAUGHAN: I mean, if we would've been at school together I would have just beat the [bleep] out of him in the playground, you know?

ROBERT: [laughs]

CRAIG CHILDS: You know, we drive each other mad, but in the end we can still scramble around just fine.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Part of what joined us is we were in love with wilderness.

JAD: For years, they would take these trips together out into the wilderness of Colorado or Utah.

DIRK VAUGHAN: No maps, no GPS.

CRAIG CHILDS: No trails.

JAD: No campfires even.

CRAIG CHILDS: Dirk and I would go off for weeks in the desert together. I think the longest trip we took was a month out. Just wandering, looking for routes.

JAD: And it was on one of these trips that they made a discovery that I think it's fair to say still haunts them today, and recently almost killed one of our producers.

DIRK VAUGHAN: So we'd been out for a couple of days.

JAD: On this particular occasion, the three of them are together, and they're a couple days into a hike.

JAD: Where are we again? We're in Utah. Is that right?

REGAN CHOI: Yeah, Utah.

JAD: Think desert, but rocky.

REGAN CHOI: Slick rock, sandstone cliffs.

JAD: Canyon land. So they're hiking through all these canyons.

CRAIG CHILDS: And we actually split up. Regan said she wanted to set her own camp, and so she stayed in one canyon, and Dirk and I popped over into the next canyon over.

JAD: Really is that a normal thing, or were you guys fighting?

CRAIG CHILDS: No that's normal.

REGAN CHOI: We weren't fighting at all. It's one of the great things about being out together is that there's an ease with that.

ROBERT: So separating is part of the deal.

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah, and I think Regan was looking at Dirk and me, and saying "You guys are gonna go scrambling and get weird. I'm going to stay over here." I don't know if that was the case.

REGAN CHOI: Well, part of it was just that I was at least five months pregnant, and I was just starting to have a really hard time tightening my backpack, so that the weight wasn't all on my shoulders.

JAD: And she says while she was hiking, the pregnancy hormones were giving her bouts of vertigo. It was just starting to hit her, like, wow in a couple of months things are gonna be really different. So she needed some alone time. She set her own camp. Dirk and Craig meanwhile scale up this cliff face to get to the next canyon over.

DIRK VAUGHAN: And when we get very close to the top and there's a little flat area.

CRAIG CHILDS: This balcony of rock overlooking the canyon below.

JAD: This little ledge.

DIRK VAUGHAN: So we said well okay ...

JAD: Let's just sit here, have some lunch.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Break out the pipe.

JAD: Smoke some pot.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Exactly. So we sit down, and we literally both have, like, the first lungful.

JAD: When Craig decides to take his backpack off.

DIRK VAUGHAN: And he leans over ...

CRAIG CHILDS: And I notice as I'm bending over a round object underneath the edge of a boulder back under the shadow.

DIRK VAUGHAN: And he says "Hey, there's a pot under there." [laughs]

ROBERT: So is it straight vertically below you?

CRAIG CHILDS: I'm eye to eye with it.

ROBERT: Oh!

CRAIG CHILDS: And then I dropped to my knees and looked into this shadow, and there was this beautiful red jar.

JAD: Low and flat, covered in maybe 700, 800, maybe 1,000 years of dust.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's a kind that's called a seed jar, with just this narrow mouth on the top, and it had black paint design around the mouth. We're talking about early Pueblo people. Cliff dwellers. People who lived out in that desert a thousand years ago.

JAD: And as he looked closer, he could see that this particular jar ...

CRAIG CHILDS: It had a crack down the front of it. And it had two holes drilled around the crack, and then a piece of yucca twine had been used to tie the holes together.

ROBERT: Oh, so it was precious to somebody.

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah.

DIRK VAUGHAN: So they might have left it there.

CRAIG CHILDS: Maybe it was during a migration.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Thinking they would return at some time.

JAD: Maybe they were on the run.

ROBERT: Maybe someone was hiding it from other people?

REGAN CHOI: Yes.

CRAIG CHILDS: You don't know who it was, if it was male or female, or what clan, or any of those stories, but you know it was a human being in the same position that you're in right there, doing the same thing, the same gesture. You can see the hand reaching out and placing the object. You can imagine the hands, and the feet, and the people, and the sounds that they would make.

JAD: They stared at it for about an hour not really saying much. And then suddenly it just hits Dirk.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Oh.

JAD: Wait a second.

CRAIG CHILDS: We gotta move this thing. Somebody else is gonna find this.

DIRK VAUGHAN: It just felt like if we can just kind of luck into it ...

JAD: What's to stop some four-wheel-driving ...

DIRK VAUGHAN: Bipedal pillager ...

JAD: From doing the same?

DIRK VAUGHAN: Because it's an access route. I don't know, I felt sort of protective of it.

JAD: Because, you know, pot hunters were all over the southwest looting dig sites, and that jar would be worth a lot of money.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Tens of thousands of dollars at least.

JAD: He wanted to make sure they somehow didn't get their hands on this.

DIRK VAUGHAN: And so I thought well, let's hide it.

JAD: Craig was like "No."

CRAIG CHILDS: I said, "Absolutely not."

JAD: "The moment we touch that jar ..."

CRAIG CHILDS: It no longer is part of that story, it's now part of our story.

DIRK VAUGHAN: He's a purist.

CRAIG CHILDS: We do not move this thing.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Not move it, protect it. Let's cover it. I wanted to build a corral of stone around it to camouflage it.

CRAIG CHILDS: That's exactly what I'd be looking for. In fact, I wouldn't notice the seed jar, I'd notice the rock, and I would go "Ooh, somebody's hiding something."

DIRK VAUGHAN: Yeah, right.

CRAIG CHILDS: Dirk's looking at me going, "You and your Yoda crap."

DIRK VAUGHAN: Goddamn!

CRAIG CHILDS: And he says, "We could give this another 700 years of life."

DIRK VAUGHAN: Hell, it had been there probably 1,000 years.

ROBERT: Well, so how do you resolve this?

CRAIG CHILDS: I said, "You know, we'll come back tomorrow, and we'll just leave it for now."

JAD: Oh, so you left in a draw.

CRAIG CHILDS: We left in draw, and we actually hopped back over to the canyon to find Regan.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Regan's kind of this badass samurai chick. I thought well, oh yeah, I would be able to draft over into my side.

JAD: So they hike back up to that ledge, yelled out for her, and the next day she hiked on over to where they were.

CRAIG CHILDS: I remember her hitching up her pants pregnancy style, and kind of squatting down to get in there. [laughs]

JAD: What was your first thought when you saw it?

REGAN CHOI: Focus. And just being right there completely consumed in that moment. I think it went on for a long time because eventually they're like, "So, what do you think?" [laughs]

CRAIG CHILDS: I want to hear the truth, what we should do.

REGAN CHOI: Oh, you guys argued back and forth for at least an hour and a half, and I just ignored you for most of it, because I was just looking at the seed jar. I wasn't really thinking to be in the position of arbiter, but I just got fed up, and I was like, "That's enough, you guys. Leave it alone. It's part of an ongoing story, like, just give it up, leave it alone."

ROBERT: Ooh, and so ...

DIRK VAUGHAN: So she takes some pictures, and we—and we walk away.

JAD: And within a year of that moment ...

DIRK VAUGHAN: Everything just, like, went whirlwind.

JAD: Regan and Craig had a baby. Craig decides to become a writer. He writes a book, it becomes a bestseller.

DIRK VAUGHAN: I quit the business, and got divorced.

JAD: Everything changed. But even on that day, they knew.

CRAIG CHILDS: This will be the center of things we talk about for the rest of our lives. The seed jar. Yeah, the day we found the seed jar.

ROBERT: Do you think it's still there?

CRAIG CHILDS: I think it's still there. I think it is. The route is pretty complicated.

DIRK VAUGHAN: With that particular location, no. I'd say 50/50 tops.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Again, if only that were the end of the story.

CRAIG CHILDS: I would think it would be in the same view.

REGAN CHOI: No, he said he wouldn't ...

JAD: Yeah, we could've done the thing where you're just like "Oh, the narrative power of objects, meta, blah, blah." No, we were like, "Is the damn thing there, or did someone take it?" We got so curious about this that we convinced Craig, Regan and Dirk to go back ...

REGAN CHOI: Now they're here.

JAD: ... and check. And we sent our producer Molly Webster along for the ride.

MOLLY WEBSTER: Half the camp has just arrived. [laughs]

REGAN CHOI: We have been at camp for a while.

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah, we've been ...

MOLLY: I didn't realize when they were, like, giving each other hugs the first night at camp, and I was there with my recorder shoved in their faces, that, like ...

JASPER CHILDS: No, it was.

MOLLY: ... it was actually like a big moment.

REGAN CHOI: I guess this is a reunion trip. We haven't seen Dirk in ages.

MOLLY: Regan had said that one of the last times, now that people have kids and families, one of the last times they were together was this seed jar.

CRAIG CHILDS: What are you talking about? [laughs]

REGAN CHOI: Yay, we're so happy you're here!

MOLLY: And so they were really, really, really excited to, like, be together.

JAD: Wait, how long ago was this when they found the thing?

MOLLY: It was 11 years ago.

JAD: This was 11 years ago?

MOLLY: Yeah, so the kids were—Regan was five months pregnant, and the kid she was pregnant with is Jasper.

REGAN CHOI: Turn off the light, and come on out.

JASPER CHILDS: Coming.

REGAN CHOI: Come say hi.

MOLLY: He just had his 11th birthday.

JAD: Wow!

JASPER CHILDS: Can I bring my backpack out?

REGAN CHOI: Close the door, and come say hi.

JASPER CHILDS: Hi.

MOLLY: Hi! Hey man, I'm Molly.

DIRK VAUGHAN: I'm Dirk.

JAD: Dirk had never met their kids?

MOLLY: Well he had, but the last time he saw Jasper, Jasper was a baby.

JAD: Oh.

MOLLY: The other thing is, I'm just gonna say Craig and Dirk are like brothers from another mother.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Oh, yeah.

MOLLY: Like, they are like the bestest bromance I have ever seen. They love each other so much! So anyways, so we get there and we drop our bags, we go to sleep. And ...

MOLLY: Getting in the sleeping bag.

MOLLY: ... woke up, four wheel drove—or drive. I don't actually know how that goes—out into the mesas. Parked the cars, and then we hiked a mile and a half to the edge of the mesa.

JAD: Wow!

MOLLY: Basically, the entire landscape felt like they had just put me on a Bonanza set.

JAD: [laughs]

MOLLY: Like, it was like gnarled, warp-y trees, red sandy sandstone. You're on this mesa, and then it falls off into this canyon, and then there's like another mesa, and then that falls off into a canyon, and there's another mesa. And then that—it's just this unending landscape.

CRAIG CHILDS: Look, we're floating up here now.

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: And there's just—is it just like—whoosh?

MOLLY: There's no sound.

JAD: There's no cars in the distance?

MOLLY: No sounds, no nothing.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's infinite.

DIRK VAUGHAN: I mean, I know we came out the top and across when we went back to get Regan.

MOLLY: And basically, our objective was to go somewhere into this, like, canyon land.

CRAIG CHILDS: We dropped down to where Regan was camped before.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Yeah, yeah. And come along the ...

MOLLY: And somehow find a tiny little seed jar.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's weird to go back, because I like to think of it like, this is gonna change things if it's not there.

JASPER CHILDS: If we do not find the seed jar I'm going to be so mad!

CRAIG CHILDS: I like to be out in the world and just think about it. Just go okay, there's a seed jar sitting there under a boulder right now, and it will be there for the longest time. And it's just quiet. I can imagine the wind going around it, and more sand building up. And it's just this really nice thought of isolation and perpetuity.

REGAN CHOI: Hello!

MOLLY: I kind of want to hear it echo.

MOLLY: So we set up camp on the edge of a mesa, and then we all went to sleep.

JAD: What's the flute sound?

MOLLY: I don't know. Craig apparently has a flute in his bag.

JAD: [laughs]

MOLLY: Dirk calls him flute boy. It was weirdly appropriate. So anyway, so we wake up, like, first light.

MOLLY: Is today the day, guys?

CRAIG CHILDS: Today's the day we go find out if the egg is still there in the nest.

REGAN CHOI: Today's the day!

MOLLY: We start hiking. We go down this 800-foot descent.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Whoa. Whoa!

CRAIG CHILDS: Watch out for those rocks!

MOLLY: No femurs are broken.

REGAN CHOI: Let me strap this down. The Anasazi were some tough people.

MOLLY: We wind around this canyon.

REGAN CHOI: Moving on these cliff sides.

MOLLY: Through a saddle, around the back of another canyon.

JAD: How long did this hike take?

MOLLY: To get out there, it probably took six, maybe seven hours.

JAD: Wow!

MOLLY: We're going pretty slow. The kids were amazing, but also slow.

DIRK VAUGHAN: Goddamn it!

MOLLY: It was starting to bug Dirk, I think, is the way to say it.

MOLLY: Wow, it's really hot!

REGAN CHOI: The sun's straight overhead.

DIRK VAUGHAN: I think they'll end up having to park the kids somewhere.

MOLLY: Sure enough, at the end of the six-hour hike ...

REGAN CHOI: If you could leave your packs so that they've got extra water and snacks.

MOLLY: ... the kids need a break, and so we sort of leave them in an alcove on the side of the canyon.

JASPER CHILDS: I want to come.

CRAIG CHILDS: Well, we'll scramble.

REGAN CHOI: Well, we'll figure out where it is, and then come get you, so you guys don't ...

JASPER CHILDS: Luckily I brought my book.

REGAN CHOI: Okay, bye guys.

MOLLY: And Regan's like "All right boys, you have your emergency whistles. Remember three times, but no joking."

REGAN CHOI: Okay, final ascent.

CRAIG CHILDS: Do you know if we went up that angle?

DIRK VAUGHAN: Yeah, we went up that diagonal there. I remember it really ...

CRAIG CHILDS: Okay.

DIRK VAUGHAN: ... really clearly.

CRAIG CHILDS: I'm all behind you.

MOLLY: So there was this—we were slammed up against this canyon wall. We needed to get over it, and the only way to do that was that there was a boulder sort of out in front of the canyon wall, and it created this skinny little chute. And we had to wedge ourselves into the chute and, like, go up it.

DIRK VAUGHAN: No, I think getting up on it.

MOLLY: Sixty feet.

REGAN CHOI: Take a breath there, Molly. Hold on, take a breath.

MOLLY: I would like to get off this plant.

REGAN CHOI: Okay.

MOLLY: I had to, like, put my back against one wall and my feet against the other.

REGAN CHOI: Push between the two walls.

MOLLY: And I had this moment where before I left Dylan told me not to die for Radiolab. So I paused and I was like "Okay, don't do this for Radiolab, do it for yourself."

JAD: [laughs]

CRAIG CHILDS: There. There.

MOLLY: Okay. Never doing that again!

MOLLY: By the time we get done with gnarly ascent, everyone is like, "This [bleep] seed jar is gonna be there, because no one else would do this."

JAD: [laughs]

MOLLY: That was really hard!

CRAIG CHILDS: Dirk says he's got the spot, so just head down that bend.

MOLLY: So Dirk and Craig are like, "Okay ...

DIRK VAUGHAN: This is it. We did that route. I'm absolutely certain we did that route.

MOLLY: ... the seed jar should be around here somewhere."

MOLLY: We're, like ,walking around giant tumbled boulders, looking under.

MOLLY: We've got, like, a quarter of a mile of canyon face to figure it out.

MOLLY: Just giant tumbled boulders.

MOLLY: Craig thinks it's to the left, Dirk thinks it's to the right.

REGAN CHOI: Anything, Dirk? No.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's so weird because ...

MOLLY: Does it look familiar?

CRAIG CHILDS: This is it. This is the spot.

REGAN CHOI: It's been 11 years.

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah, but I know this is the spot. I know it. Well ...

MOLLY: We don't see the spot.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's just getting trickier and trickier.

MOLLY: They were just going, like, really confused.

CRAIG CHILDS: We weren't that far down. We didn't ...

REGAN CHOI: We've been looking, I don't know for an hour?

MOLLY: And it all, like, looks the same, but just everything looks the same to an untrained eye, right? It's like Where's Waldoland, and we're trying to find Waldo. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

MOLLY: Go over and find Craig, get his thoughts.

MOLLY: I finally see Craig kind of far off down the canyon, standing by himself just staring at the ground. And I was like, "Hey. Like, any luck?"

CRAIG CHILDS: I went down and looked at what would have been our likely route up.

MOLLY: Yeah.

CRAIG CHILDS: Which is right up through here.

MOLLY: Yeah.

MOLLY: And he points to the ground, like, right where we're standing, and he says "I think it's, like, right here. I think, like, this was the place."

CRAIG CHILDS: I don't want to think about this particular possibility. See all that stuff I just walked across?

MOLLY: That went ...

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah. That's all fresh.

MOLLY: Oh, seriously?

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah.

JAD: Wait, what does that mean, "fresh?"

MOLLY: Well we were standing on this pile of really sharp rock. It was just all of these sharp little jaggedy knives. I mean, it sort of didn't look like any of the other areas we had been in.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's possible that the cliff has fallen here and covered everything. The top of that cliff.

MOLLY: If you looked above us to the top of the cliff, it was like someone has just taken a meat cleaver to it. It was just, like, sliced off.

CRAIG CHILDS: This whole thing broke off.

MOLLY: The entire cliff face had fallen off and annihilated everything, hundreds of feet in either direction.

CRAIG CHILDS: It's been totally destroyed!

JAD: Oh, no!

MOLLY: Yeah.

CRAIG CHILDS: I mean, it wouldn't have survived.

MOLLY: Even the giant boulder protecting it.

CRAIG CHILDS: Like, it's just been wiped clean.

MOLLY: It reminded me of, like, an iceberg calving. You see all those videos of, like, the front of the iceberg just all of a sudden just cleaves off.

JAD: Yeah.

MOLLY: That's exactly what happened on this cliff.

CRAIG CHILDS: So you're talking, like, 10,000 tons of rock falling here.

MOLLY: Just ...

CRAIG CHILDS: Boom! Yeah. I mean, that's not what I was thinking was a possibility. I'm not swallowing it just yet.

MOLLY: So he calls in Regan.

CRAIG CHILDS: Regan, come toward us.

MOLLY: And then Dirk comes wandering over.

DIRK VAUGHAN: It does kind of make sense, I guess.

CRAIG CHILDS: No, if the pot's been here for 700 years, it doesn't make sense at all it would happen the last 11 years. [laughs]

DIRK VAUGHAN: Well, no. I mean, it makes sense why it's not looking right. It was here. It was right in here. I know it was here.

CRAIG CHILDS: No! No, no, no. Oh my God!

MOLLY: Craig's like leaning against the wall. Dirk was like "Wow, man. I guess—I guess this must be it." And it was this real, like, they were grappling with something, and I was trying to figure, like, what they were grappling with. And Craig just kept talking to me, like, not actually about the seed jar, but about the place.

CRAIG CHILDS: This is where I remember Regan hoisting up her pants, pregnant, squatting. And Dirk and me on our knees looking in on this thing for the longest time. You know, it was very clear in my mind. To have the place itself gone, I'm fine. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, but Jesus! This is a different kind of sadness that I wasn't quite ...

MOLLY: Are you sad?

CRAIG CHILDS: Yeah. Yeah, this kind of sucks. If it was missing, if somebody had taken it, that would be a sad kind of like, "Oh, screw you people. Why do you do this?" This is—this is gravity.

MOLLY: Dirk's gone.

DIRK VAUGHAN: We should start moving.

MOLLY: Yeah.

REGAN CHOI: That's it. It's getting late.

MOLLY: All right.

CRAIG CHILDS: That's just too much of an irony.

REGAN CHOI: Why? I think it's perfect, it doesn't seem like an irony at all.

CRAIG CHILDS: Just let it go?

REGAN CHOI: You gonna break into song?

MOLLY: [laughs]

CRAIG CHILDS: [singing] Let it go.

DIRK VAUGHAN: [singing] Take a little taco, jig jig jig!

REGAN CHOI: She likes you, Dirk. She wants to hear what you have to say.

MOLLY: It is like a mountain goat.

ROBERT: So when we began this story, the assignment was, you know, go find the pot. If it's not there, there must be a story, if it is there, we'll have that story. But we had no idea that there would be a completely—like a whole canyon wouldn't be there. I mean, you just never know when you start these things what's gonna happen. And so—you know, plus we almost killed Molly. That's not quite fair, but still! This is what we do.

JAD: So just to reset for a second, I mean, like, these are the most-downloaded—three most-downloaded podcasts we've ever done—the stuff that you guys seem to have listened to and liked the most. So we're counting those down three, two, one, and also asking you to support the stuff we do, to support the production of this show, which you can do at any amount that makes sense at Radiolab.org. dot. It's super fast, okay? So, like, as you're listening, before you're listening, in the short moments when you hit pause, go to Radiolab.org. You can make a contribution there. You can also do it fast by just texting the word 'radiolab' to 69866, and then you'll get an auto link back.

ROBERT: What's that again?

JAD: Text 'radiolab' to—the word 'radiolab,' all lowercase, to the number 69866. And you'll get a link back which will tell you where you can make a contribution. This is how we do it. This is how we pay for the show. All right, let's move to number two, okay? This one began because I love football.

ROBERT: You do.

JAD: Okay? I really like football. I happen to be surrounded by people who think I'm nuts for liking football, but I think football is a super interesting way of looking at this country. That was the hunch. And then one of our producers, Brenna Farrell, read a book by a woman named Sally Jenkins that played out that hunch in ways we couldn't have imagined. So our second most-downloaded podcast of all times is "American Football."

SALLY JENKINS: Organized football's really a creation of the 1860s and '70s in this country. It's a post-Civil War creation. Comes along just really a couple of years after, you know, the last great conquering armies settle the West.

JAD: Basically, she says, you had these kids whose parents had fought in the Civil War and then some of them had gone west to fight the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Apaches. And now those wars were winding down, which oddly enough created kind of an issue for young men at the time.

ROBERT: If you're a young student, say back east at a fancy school like Harvard, how are you gonna prove your own toughness? I mean, your older brother, your father, they maybe fought at Gettysburg, Battle of Little Bighorn.

JAD: What the hell have you done?

DAVID ADAMS: The American frontier experience was over. There was this feeling among a lot of intellectuals that—that American men were losing masculinity. They were being feminized, in a sense.

JAD: And so, according to historian David Adams, who you just heard, those kids were desperate for opportunities to man up.

DAVID ADAMS: There was this cult of manliness.

CHEER SQUAD: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

JAD: Around this time, says David Adams, you see a bunch of violent sports take off. And in particular, for our purposes, you see these kids at Harvard and Yale getting together and knocking the snot out of each other in this game that's kind of like rugby, but just more violent.

CONRAD CRANE: The game used to be basically brutality.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: The origin of football was such a profoundly different game.

JAD: Writer Chuck Klosterman, and before him historian, Dr. Conrad Crane.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: You know, a first down, instead of 10 yards, was only five yards.

CONRAD CRANE: You had three downs to get five yards.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: And basically all the teams did was sort of slam into each other and try to move the ball incrementally. It was almost as if every play of the entire game was a goal-line stand. You know, the metaphor people always use when discussing football of course is military. It's the idea of taking land and giving land. Well, the origin of football, that was even amplified.

JAD: There were formations and strategies and that kind of thing, but it was pure, like, right out of Napoleon's military playbook. I mean, where you—you concentrate your force.

ROBERT: Yeah, my shoulder next to your shoulder, next to his shoulder. It's like a line.

JAD: Yeah, you bunch up all—all your men, and then pierce the other guy's army.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: That was the basic idea.

ROBERT: And so you just end up with piles of guys.

JAD: Yeah, and inside those piles?

CONRAD CRANE: There's all kinds of things that go on in those scrums. I mean, there's kicking, there's biting, there's gouging.

SALLY JENKINS: Eye-gouging and crotch kicking, and ...

JAD: Wow!

SALLY JENKINS: Head-wrenching.

ROBERT: Remember, we're talking about Harvard boys doing this.

JAD: I have to work to imagine that because I think of Harvard and Yale now and I think of, like, I think of ...

SALLY JENKINS: Pencil-neck geeks?

JAD: Yeah, I don't think of those big guys.

SALLY JENKINS: Well, at the time they were the—I mean, there are all these wonderful stories about these chops that they would eat for dinner. I mean, they were drinking milk by the gallon, and Ivys were the great power of the time physically as well as intellectually.

JAD: But then along comes this school, this tiny little school founded in 1879 in the middle of nowhere, that if you're a football fan or just a fan of American history, kind of changed everything.

JAD: Where was Carlisle?

SALLY JENKINS: Carlisle was in Pennsylvania, right—very close to Gettysburg.

ROBERT: Well, let's go there. So—so tell me about—what is the—so when was it formed? And what was it ... ?

SALLY JENKINS: The Carlisle Indian School is formed by a former—well actually, he was an active military officer at the time named Richard Henry Pratt.

JAD: Big guy. Shock of white hair. Large nose.

SALLY JENKINS: Pratt had served gallantly, quite gallantly in the Civil War. And then he had actually served out west in Oklahoma Territory. He had fought American Indians himself.

JAD: And it was after winning a lot of those fights—too many of those fights really, we're talking 1870s now—that Pratt had a change of heart. And he—he suddenly became concerned about the very people he had just been fighting.

CONRAD CRANE: The fact of the matter is that Indians were in a very, very desperate situation. The bison were almost extinct. They were being pushed onto reservations and the population had fallen to—to its almost all-time low. Pratt and a lot of other policymakers came to the conclusion that something had to happen fast or Indians would literally become extinct. They would, in fact, become the vanishing race. And so Pratt ...

SALLY JENKINS: He comes to Washington with an idea.

JAD: His idea was to start a boarding school specifically for American Indian children that was kind of a radical experiment.

CONRAD CRANE: Children would be taken, removed for several years at a time. They would be stripped of their, what was called their "savage heritage" and they would be "civilized."

JAD: ... i.e. they would be white-itized.

SALLY JENKINS: It was—it was forcible assimilation. Pratt had a slogan, "Kill the Indian, save the man."

BARBARA LANDIS: "Kill the Indian, save the man."

JAD: That's Barbara Landis.

BARBARA LANDIS: Carlisle Indian School biographer.

JAD: We went up to Carlisle to talk with her and her colleague Cara Curtis. And they told us that Pratt basically made that pitch ...

BARBARA LANDIS: "Kill the Indian, save the man."

JAD: ... not just to Congress, but directly to American Indian families all over the country.

ROBERT: I want your son. Is that—how does that work?

CARA CURTIS: I want your children because ...

BARBARA LANDIS: White people are gonna keep coming and coming. They want to settle in your lands. They want to take your lands. And you need to learn how to deal with these people. So we need to teach your children how to speak English.

JAD: We need to teach them how to communicate with the white man, so that when the white man comes and tries to get you to sign away the Black Hills you won't fall for it again.

BARBARA LANDIS: And it was a convincing argument.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Well you know, back in those days you're talking about survival over here.

JAD: Would you mind introducing yourself?

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Okay, my name is Joe American Horse. I'm 79 years old, and I'm a grandson of Chief American Horse.

JAD: Joe lives near the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He's Lakota. And he told us the story about his grandfather who was a famous Lakota chief. In the 1890s, his grandpa led a delegation of American Indians to Washington.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Well, he went to Washington, DC. And he was down there, but he said there was a lot of people down there.

JAD: Joe says his grandpa had this moment where he was just stunned by how many white people there were. His phrase was, "They're like ants."

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: And pretty soon they're gonna come to our area. So he had the idea of trying to send his kids to school so they can intermingle or, you know, intercept, whatever.

JAD: Basically, Joe says his grandpa just had this realization.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: We can't—we can't go back. We got to go forward.

JAD: And it seemed to him Carlisle was the way forward.

JAD: So where we going now?

BARBARA LANDIS: This is our photo archive.

JAD: As kids were admitted, here's how it would work: they would come in, and they'd immediately have their picture taken on arrival. Then they'd be given an extreme makeover which would also be photographed.

BARBARA LANDIS: Okay, this is Tom Torlino.

JAD: Wow. So this is—this is Tom Torlino as he—as he comes in.

BARBARA LANDIS: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Barbara showed us a picture of a Navajo kid looking maybe 18 years old.

JAD: This is 1882.

ROBERT: This is when he arrives. So he's got kind of dark skin, high cheekbones.

JAD: He has long hair.

BARBARA LANDIS: Here you can see ...

ROBERT: Oh yeah, earrings.

ROBERT: He's wearing an elaborate necklace. Looks like it might be made of bone.

JAD: And he's wrapped in a blanket.

ROBERT: And then ...

JAD: And then here he is in a suit with clean-cut hair.

JAD: In the second picture, his hair is very short. Not long.

ROBERT: No blanket.

JAD: He's wearing a three-piece suit.

ROBERT: Sitting there with a cravat and a spread collar and parted hair.

JAD: Wow. It's like in a snapshot you have Tom Indian, Tom white man.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Like my Aunt Sophie.

JAD: Joe American Horse said his family saw that transformation firsthand.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Aunt Sophie was there in Carlisle for five years, and when she came back she looks like a white woman. You know, she had a real tiny waist and a bonnet and everything. And she can't speak Lakota.

JAD: She forgot.

JOE AMERICAN HORSE: Uh-huh.

JAD: But just think about this for a second. Just think about this. We spoke with one guy, Professor Eric Anderson who teaches at Haskell. He's also part Potawatomi. Just imagine the parents, he says, the first time they see their kids.

ERIC ANDERSON: Parents are seeing their students marched around in essentially the uniforms of what had not very long before, for many of the tribes, been the uniform of the enemy.

JAD: At the very least ...

ERIC ANDERSON: I think that would be startling.

JAD: In any case, according to Sally Jenkins, after the kids were re-cropped and re-dressed, Pratt would run them through a bunch of drills.

SALLY JENKINS: I mean, Carlisle was a little military academy. And the Indian kids were so unhealthy at first. They had been put on an unfamiliar diet. They had been sleeping indoors for the first time in their lives, and a lot of them were getting sick.

JAD: I mean, we know that in the 39-year history of the school at least 200 kids died of disease or poor health or even homesickness.

SALLY JENKINS: And so Pratt was constantly trying to get the kids outside. And at a certain point he had hired some teachers.

JAD: And Sally thinks that one of those hires ...

SALLY JENKINS: Probably one of the first dormitory masters.

JAD: This guy who had formerly taught at an Ivy League school, he showed the Carlisle Indian kids this game that the kids at Harvard were playing. Maybe he thought it would toughen them up, who knows? But suddenly they're playing football. Now keep in mind, this was, you know, at a point, we're talking 1882, where football's barely a thing. Not so many schools had teams.

SALLY JENKINS: There wasn't such a thing as a head coach back then. They were volunteer coaches who tended to be students or ex-students.

JAD: But the Carlisle kids self-organize, level the field, start to play. They even start to scrimmage some kids across town. And at one of those games, according to Barbara ...

BARBARA LANDIS: Stacy Matlock, who is a Pawnee student at Carlisle, later became a Pawnee chief, he broke his leg playing football, and Pratt said, "That's it. No more football."

JAD: Because in his mind he was trying to civilize these kids, and football was doing the opposite. But a short time later, says David Adams ...

DAVID ADAMS: Approximately three dozen Carlisle boys came into Pratt's office and they said, "We want to play football."

JAD: Do we know what they said exactly?

DAVID ADAMS: We don't have—we don't have the exact words, but Pratt says at one point—he says, "Well, they stood around my desk." I'm quoting here. "Well, they stood around my desk, their black eyes intensely watching me." He says, "The orator gave practically all the arguments in favor of our contending in outside football, and ended up requesting the removal of the embargo."

JAD: According to his memoir, Pratt was sort of bowled over by the eloquence and passion of the appeal. So he said, "Okay."

DAVID ADAMS: "You can play if you do these two things. One," he says, "never slug. People who are looking on will say, 'There, that's the Indian. Just see them. They are savages and you can't get it out of them.'" Okay. And the other one was, "You have to beat the best teams in America."

JAD: And at that early point in American football ...

SALLY JENKINS: Far and away, the most powerful team was Yale.

JAD: Which brings us to October 24, 1896.

SALLY JENKINS: It's—it's a raw fall day in New York.

JAD: They played in New York?

SALLY JENKINS: Yes, at the old Polo Grounds.

JAD: Apparently, there was about 4,000 people in the stands, including ...

SALLY JENKINS: A handful of newspapermen. New York newspapermen.

ROBERT: Really?

SALLY JENKINS: I mean, it was a big story.

ROBERT: How did they publicize it? What did they say?

SALLY JENKINS: Well, the newspapers became incredibly intrigued.

[REENACTMENT: On one side were the undergraduates of an old and great university.]

CHEER SQUAD E-I-E-I-E-I-O!! E-I-E-I-E-I-O!!

[REENACTMENT: They represent physically the perfection of modern athletics, and intellectually the culture and refinement of the best modern American life. On the other side ...]

CHEER SQUAD: [chanting] Who are we? Carlisle! Carlisle! Carlisle!

[REENACTMENT: ... was the aborigines, the real son of the forest and plain. The redskin of history, of story, of war, developed, or veneered, as the case may be by education.]

SALLY JENKINS: And if you read the newspaper stories, they're written as—they're written in this kind of bloodcurdling—shot through with Indian cliches, you know?

ROBERT: Here come the redskins.

SALLY JENKINS: Here come the redskins.

DAVID ADAMS: Right, right.

JAD: According to David Adams, in one paper ...

DAVID ADAMS: There is a reference to yodeling. The writer said that then the fans were yodeling "in that Indian fashion."

SALLY JENKINS: I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of a New Yorker in the early 1880s. Your contact with an American Indian was in a wild west show. It was theater. And here comes a football game, and all of these American Indian kids run onto the field. And there's literally an instance in one of the first games where someone in the audience says "Well, they look just like our boys."

JAD: Because of course, that's what Pratt wanted. Now one thing that was immediately clear to everyone in attendance when they saw the Carlisle players was that they were physically outmatched.

[REENACTMENT: "Their average weight is 164, exactly 20 pounds lighter to a man."]

SALLY JENKINS: The impression going in is that it'll be an absolute smear job.

JAD: Or at the very least, the odds were heavily against them. But three minutes into the game, in the midst of a big pile-up, a Yaley fumbles the ball. It comes squirting out. Carlisle guy picks it up, and runs the entire length of the field, 63 yards, and scores a touchdown. Now nobody had scored on Yale in seven games. They were furious. So what they do is they use their bulk to slowly push the pile down the field twice to take the lead. And with three minutes left, Yale is up 12 to 6, Carlisle has the ball. Carlisle running back charges the pile and gets clobbered, falls backwards. And just as he's about to hit the earth, he laterals the ball to a teammate who grabs it, runs around the scrum the entire length of the field and scores!

SALLY JENKINS: Carlisle scores a touchdown that would have tied the game. But it's called back by a referee, who was a Yale man.

ROBERT: Why?

SALLY JENKINS: The call was that the referee claimed that a whistle had blown the play dead.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: And what was the crowd's reaction?

DAVID ADAMS: Well, they were—they were furious.

SALLY JENKINS: Yes.

DAVID ADAMS: There was booing and hooting.

SALLY JENKINS: Everyone knew it was a terrible miscarriage of justice.

ROBERT: And some of the Carlisle players said, “Oh, we're gonna walk out of here. We are leaving this game.” But according to David, at the last moment Pratt runs down from the stands, comes onto the field and says, "Wait a second, wait a second. Wait. Don't forget rule number one. Be a gentleman."

DAVID ADAMS: Pratt did not want this game to end because of their tempers, even though they'd been wronged by that call.

ROBERT: So the Carlisle boys finish the game. And when they walk off the field ...

CHEER SQUAD Carlisle! Carlise! Carlisle! Carlisle! Carlisle! Carlisle!

JAD: They get a standing ovation.

SALLY JENKINS: Carlisle wins incredible respect and renown in the aftermath of the game. In fact, one of the newspapermen ...

JAD: After another Carlisle-Yale game where something similar happened ...

SALLY JENKINS: Wrote something to the effect of "Carlisle could beat 11 Yale men, but they couldn't beat 11 Yale men and a Yale referee."

ROBERT: Whoa! [laughs]

SALLY JENKINS: Yes. After the Yale game of 1896, Pratt is committed. Pratt believes that it's the greatest thing that can happen to his school. It is an instant way to do what he's been struggling to do for 15 years at the Carlisle school, which is to prove the value of these American Indian kids against their white peers.

JAD: To prove the value or to, quote, "civilize" them?

SALLY JENKINS: Well, both. To civilize them but also to prove that given education and equal opportunity, they were the equal of their—of their white peers. I mean, he was—for all of his forcible assimilation methods which were—remain extremely cruel and destructive, he truly believed in the concept of racial equality.

JAD: The complicatedness of Pratt and of the whole Carlisle idea kept smacking us in the face as we were putting this show together. I mean on the one hand, there were clearly students who felt that Carlisle was prison. In fact, Barbara Landis, when she took us on a tour of the grounds of the former Carlisle Indian School, she said that kids would even set fire to the buildings.

BARBARA LANDIS: Yeah, some did burn down, which is kind of typical on Indian campuses. A lot of fires and burning buildings.

JAD: Why?

BARBARA LANDIS: It's a form of resistance.

JAD: On the other hand, when we started looking around for original archival recordings of some of the earliest Carlisle players, pretty much the only recording we could find ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: This tape, we would like for it to be as much of your making as possible.]

JAD: ... was this oral history with a guy named ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Your name, your full name is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: Albert Andrew Exendine.]

JAD: Albert Exendine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: All right.]

JAD: The interview was done in the early '70s when he was 88. He entered the school ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: Just before 1899.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: You were 15 years old?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: Yes, ma'am.]

JAD: I can't really play you too much of this because the audio quality is really bad. But in the interview, Pratt comes up ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: R.H. Pratt. P-R-A-T-T.]

JAD: ... and Exendine talks about him with a great deal of affection and gratitude.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: We called him the father of Indian education.]

JAD: "We call him the father of Indian education."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: Oh, he was a wonderful man.]

SALLY JENKINS: So he's a tough figure, Pratt. He's got a very mixed legacy. I mean, I like to say Pratt was his country.

ROBERT: Hmm.

SALLY JENKINS: Whatever you think of him, he was his country.

JAD: So, okay. So 1896, he gets the bug. Like, he sees football's good PR.

SALLY JENKINS: Yes.

JAD: What happens next?

SALLY JENKINS: Well, he hires—he begins looking around for coaches, full-time coaches to come in and coach the team. And he winds up with a Cornell grad named Pop Warner. Glenn "Pop" Warner.

JAD: Now Pop Warner was an interesting guy.

ROBERT: Is this Pops right here?

JAD: Just to give you a visual ...

ROBERT: Whoo!

JAD: Whoo! Look at him!

JAD: Barbara and Karen showed us pictures. Looks kind of like Mike Ditka if Mike Ditka had Einstein's hair.

SALLY JENKINS: Pop's a little bit of an outlier. He's got these Texas roots. He's a bit of a rogue. Can be kind of vulgar.

CARA CURTIS: He liked to party a little bit.

BARBARA LANDIS: He liked to gamble, too.

CARA CURTIS: Yes.

JAD: Really!

JAD: And that is exactly what he does in spectacular fashion when he gets to Carlisle.

SALLY JENKINS: Because Pop Warner looks at his squad and he realizes that ...

JAD: Sure, they're fast, they got heart ...

SALLY JENKINS: But they're underweight and they're small.

JAD: Way small.

SALLY JENKINS: Yeah, while they might occasionally force a tie with Yale if they, you know, half killed themselves physically, they weren't gonna beat the Ivy Leagues on any kind of consistent basis without—without doing something different. And there was a very fine line between innovation and cheating.

ROBERT: [laughs] I see.

SALLY JENKINS: And Pop Warner starts exploiting that line absolutely as hard as he can. And he comes up with the trick play.

JAD: For example, 1903.

SALLY JENKINS: Pop Warner devises the hidden ball trick.

ROBERT: What is that?

SALLY JENKINS: The hidden ball trick is the quarterback takes the ball, and actually behind this huge pile of men tucks it under another guy's sweater.

ROBERT: Oh!

SALLY JENKINS: While the big pile of men is struggling in the mud in the center of the field not knowing quite where the football is but believing it's somewhere in the middle of the pile, here's this kid who squirts around the end with the football hidden under his jersey, and he's 30 yards downfield before anybody realizes it.

ROBERT: And how does he keep the ball from falling out of his jersey onto the ground?

SALLY JENKINS: I think they actually sewed the jersey so that the ball would stay in there without falling out.

ROBERT: So they made a cheating pocket?

SALLY JENKINS: They made a cheating pocket.

ROBERT: Was that legal? Did they—did they get a legitimate touchdown?

SALLY JENKINS: Was it legal, you ask? Pop Warner would have said there was nothing in the rule book against it. Another thing he does which actually works brilliantly, is he sews footballs onto the front of their jerseys—which were really bulky sweaters at the time. He sews leather football-shaped patches onto the front of their jerseys in order to try to disguise who's got the ball.

ROBERT: Really?

SALLY JENKINS: Against Harvard. And the Harvard coach goes insane.

ROBERT: Well, I would, too! I mean, to have a semi-pregnant player?

SALLY JENKINS: This is the kind of thing ...

JAD: That's amazing!

ROBERT: But Harvard did not take this lying down. Harvard retaliates by painting the footballs the same color as their jerseys. It's maroon everywhere. So when they held the ball against their chest, the ball basically—well, you can't see it.

SALLY JENKINS: I mean, they all broke the rules. American football is essentially a rule-breaking experience, as opposed to British football, which didn't have referees.

JAD: At least initially, British football ran on the honor system. But with American football, the refs were there practically from the beginning. And she says it was largely a response to the brutality of the game, but also to the kind of rule-bending that you saw from Pop Warner and the Carlisle Indians.

SALLY JENKINS: Every time Pop Warner came up with an innovation, the next year there was a rule against it. So immediately the Ivy League would get together and pass a rule and say, "Okay, no more of that." And that's how the rule book really burgeons in American football. And it's thanks to Pop Warner's sleights of hand.

JAD: And Pop Warner's greatest sleight of hand, and maybe the Carlisle Indians' most soaring moment—and I mean that literally—happened at a moment when the game almost disappeared. That's coming up.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[DAVID ADAMS: Yes, this is David Adams.]

[CONRAD CRANE: This is Conrad Crane. And I got an email message asking me to read credit text.]

[DAVID ADAMS: Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[CONRAD CRANE: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[DAVID ADAMS: More information about Sloan at www ...]

[CONRAD CRANE: www.sloan.org.]

[DAVID ADAMS: Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[CONRAD CRANE: Okay, there it is. Hope you can use that. Take care. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And getting back to our story on the Carlisle Indian School and the birth of the modern game of football, one of the most important moments in this story happens at a time when football—it was right on the edge of disappearing. Talking about 1905.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: This was the most violent year in football to this point. Nineteen people died on the football field.

ROBERT: Nineteen?

JAD: One-nine.

ROBERT: One death is a lot. But 19? That's crazy.

JAD: Yeah. Because what would happen is that Carlisle would try and do these things to sort of open up the game. The Ivys would consistently respond by making the game more about brute force, more about violence. And so you had all these deaths. And suddenly all the major programs were spooked. You know, Columbia pulls their—their football team. Harvard even thinks about doing that.

ROBERT: And so—and this is kind of odd—into the fray steps the President of the United States of America, Teddy Roosevelt. Because he was a fan, according to Conrad Crane.

CONRAD CRANE: He liked football. He liked the manly aspects of it, the tough aspects of it. But nobody liked people dying.

ROBERT: And then there was his kid.

CONRAD CRANE: His—his son was playing and getting beat up pretty badly as well.

JAD: Broke his nose, slit his eyebrow.

ROBERT: In one game he got knocked out cold. So after the violence of '05, the President calls the presidents of all these colleges and so on to Washington. And according to David Adams, he basically tells them ...

DAVID ADAMS: That the rules had to be rewritten. It had to become a little bit more safe at least, or it would be banned.

JAD: And out of that we see a couple of rule changes. First, the schools decide in order to loosen up the pile so to speak, they're gonna tinker with the down yardage ratio.

CONRAD CRANE: Instead of going from three downs to gain five yards, it becomes three downs to gain 10 yards. The ...

ROBERT: Three downs to get ten yards or four downs to get ten yards?

JAD: Four would come a couple years later.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: But the second rule change—which is maybe the most important for our story—is for the first time they legalized the ability to move the ball through the free-floating air that surrounds us all. Okay.

ROBERT: So where do we go? What's the next ... ?

JAD: So if I could—if I could place you in a moment, unless there's a moment before this you'd like to hit. I believe November 23, 1907.

SALLY JENKINS: Yes.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah.

SALLY JENKINS: Big moment.

JAD: Okay. Can you set the scene?

SALLY JENKINS: Well, the scene from the standpoint of broader American history, things have gone airborne.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ada Jones: Oh, you, flying machine.]

ROBERT: You mean Wilbur and Orville Wright?

SALLY JENKINS: I'm talking about not just them, but I'm talking about hot air balloons. There are aeronautical experiments happening, really all over the world—in France. Everyone is experimenting with flying machines. Things are going up in the air.

JAD: But not so fast with football, because when the rule committee had made that rule about forward passing they had also hedged a little bit, saying if you throw a forward pass and your receiver doesn't catch it you are penalized 15 yards, which back in the day was a monster amount. So nobody threw the ball. It was too risky.

ROBERT: But story goes, as soon as that rule got passed, Pop Warner goes back to his garage—it's always a garage of course—with a ball. And he starts experimenting. And he started thinking "Okay, what would be the most efficient way to toss this thing?"

CONRAD CRANE: People have to understand that the footballs in those days are not the footballs we have today with the nice, whatever, the oblate spheroid or whatever they call it with nice points and things. These are rugby balls.

JAD: Sort of imagine a deflated basketball.

CONRAD CRANE: They're thicker in the middle. They're not as well-shaped. They're really tough to get your hand on to throw right.

JAD: And in 1906, there's a tiny bit of tape in Albert Exendine's oral history where he talks about this. In 1906, he says Pop called all the players together. He tells them ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: "I think, boys, that you will have to learn to spiral the ball."]

JAD: He says, "I think you're gonna have to learn to spiral the ball."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Albert Exendine: "... to spiral the ball."]

JAD: Because if you throw the ball in a spiral it gets 10 times less air drag than if you throw it end-over-end.

ROBERT: Plus it's easier to catch.

JAD: Yeah.

SALLY JENKINS: They start experimenting with it a little bit in 1906, but they come out in 1907 as a throwing offense.

JAD: Which gets us to that game. November 23, 1907, Carlisle plays the University of Chicago. Last game of the season. We're in Chicago. And the Chicago team is arguably the best in the nation.

ROBERT: The best. I don't think it's even arguable.

JAD: Well, Carlisle's good at this point, though.

ROBERT: Yeah. But Chicago's like—Stagg Field, whoa!

JAD: Yeah. And there are 27,000 people in the stands.

SALLY JENKINS: Well, what happened was the Chicago players had decided to try to defeat Carlisle's innovative forward passing by just knocking the crap out of their receivers every time they came off the line of scrimmage.

JAD: And so Carlisle's greatest receiver, Albert Exendine, our guy, had been stymied the entire game, because the minute the ball was snapped the Chicago players would ...

SALLY JENKINS: Hit him and try to throw him down or knock him out of bounds. So Pop Warner said to Exendine, "Here's what we're gonna do. Next time they hit you out of bounds, sneak around the bench and get back on the field."

JAD: By some accounts, this was Exendine's idea. But whoever thought of it, on the next play

Albert Exendine, as expected, ends up out of bounds, but he keeps running.

SALLY JENKINS: He runs around the back of the bench.

JAD: Runs around the spectators, maybe around the band.

SALLY JENKINS: And comes back on the field.

JAD: Right at that moment ...

SALLY JENKINS: Hauser, the quarterback of Carlisle ...

JAD: Lets loose a vicious spiral.

JAD: Can I have you read something?

SALLY JENKINS: Sure.

JAD: Hold on.

JAD: This is Sally's description of that moment from her book, The Real All Americans.

SALLY JENKINS: For a moment, it was a frozen scene in a staged drama. The ball hung in the air, a tantalizing possibility. Could Exendine reach it? Would he catch it or drop it? Defenders wheeled and stared downfield. Spectators watching from the stands found that the breath had died in their collective throats. The spiraling ball seemed to defy physics. What made it stay up? When would it come down? In that long moment, 27,000 spectators, mashed together on benches and crammed on platforms, may have felt their loyalty to the home team evaporate in the grip of a powerful new emotion. They may have noticed something they never had before, that a ball traveling through space traces a profoundly elegant path. They may have realized something else, that it was beautiful. The ball struck its human target. Exendine caught the pass all alone and trotted over the Chicago goal line. The stadium exploded in sound and motion. It was the game breaker. The rest was just anti-climax. The final score was 18 to 4 for Carlisle. But the very next year, the Ivy League passes a rule that you can't leave the field and then come back onto it.

JAD: Oh, that's where that rule came from.

SALLY JENKINS: Yes. That's where that rule comes from.

JAD: And I've got to say that that description of the ball in the air is—is timeless, in a way.

ROBERT: Beautiful.

JAD: That's exactly why football is still beautiful at times.

SALLY JENKINS: That's—that's when—Carlisle in 1907 is when American football becomes the sport that you watch today.

JAD: Oh, wow. This is—is this the field?

BARBARA LANDIS: This is the field.

JAD: This is the field! Can we get out?

BARBARA LANDIS: Yeah.

JAD: After we'd spent an entire day looking at pictures of, you know, Albert Exendine and Pratt and Pop Warner and Delos Lone Wolf and Tom Torlino and all these Carlisle players, Barbara and Cara took us to the field where they practiced.

JAD: All right, so this is the Carlisle Indian School football field covered in snow. It's, like, 10 degrees out here. Really, really bright sun coming off the snow. And it's just empty.

JAD: And we just kind of walked around and tried to imagine all the stuff we'd just seen in photos.

ROBERT: It was a little bit like walking among ghosts.

JAD: Yeah. That's the sound of the flag blowing in the background. I remember standing on that field and having this thought that I couldn't quite articulate. But later, Eric Anderson, that professor from Haskell, who's a member of the Potawatomi Nation, he sort of put his finger on it. And he essentially said that, like, there's a lot of room on a football field. I mean, there's room for anger and war and violence, but there's also room for pride and a kind of coming together that's not a Pratt coming together, where one side gets erased, but it is a coming together.

ERIC ANDERSON: Yeah, there is a middle ground. Clearly, it's more than a game. The stakes are higher than that. You know, will we as Indian people be accepted on our own terms and also in our ability to meet you halfway? Will we be accepted through this as the vehicle? It's clearly more than a game.

JAD: You know why I like that ending as an ending? Not just because it's moody, but because I feel like it actually is where we're at right now as a show.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: We used to—you and I, we used to—at the ends of pieces, we used to, like, reflect and have thoughts and big thoughts and meaning. And we sort of, "Here's what it all means." We used to do that a lot. We don't do that as much anymore. I feel like now what we do is we create a space where someone else can have that conversation in their own head, you know? And I feel like that's actually ...

ROBERT: That's important.

JAD: That's actually what happens in that moment, is it is simply a space to appreciate this American story and all the complicatedness of it. And we're not gonna sort of talk about it. Like, what can we say at that point? And I feel like the most interesting stuff is happening inside the head of the person listening. I feel like that's where we want to get to.

ROBERT: That's really our job. Our job is to take something that's a puzzle or something that would be new to you, and just put it in your head deeply so there you go. Then you have to sort of muse.

JAD: So yeah. So this is the kind of stuff we're doing. We hope you dig it, and we hope you'll also support it right now at Radiolab.org. Just click the "Support" button. It's super fast. You can also text the word 'radiolab' to 69866 and we'll send you a link where you can click and support. So thank you.

ROBERT: So very quickly, we should now quickly take you to Ethiopia, where you did not expect to go. Because you never expect to go where we're gonna take you next, I wouldn't think, because we don't even know where we're gonna take you next. So this is the most listened to show we have ever, ever done.

JAD: We should also say it was a collection of stories on the topic of translation.

ROBERT: Right. But in this case, a particular word—and I'm talking to you seriously about this—a particular word, 'serious,' became a puzzle for the Secretary of State of the United States, for our reporter Gregory Warner, and for a brave guy standing in the back of a crowded room.

JAD: This is our most downloaded show of all times.

ROBERT: But before we go there ...

JAD: Yes. Take a moment to help us pay for the cost of making this show. The stuff that you get, it only happens because you help support it. And we hope you'll do that now. Radiolab.org, click the "Support" button. Whatever amount makes sense for you. Take, you know, literally 30 seconds to do that. It will come back to you. It literally comes back to you in the form of new stories like this one.

JAD: I hear—I hear the sound of a telephone. Hello?

GREG WARNER: Habari za asubuhi.

JAD: A story from Greg Warner.

GREG WARNER: Yes. Hi, Jad.

JAD: Greg is NPR's East Africa correspondent.

ROBERT: You are in—what time is it where you are?

GREG WARNER: It's—it's evening.

JAD: He's based in Nairobi.

GREG WARNER: Around 7:30 in the evening, which is embarrassing because I just told you "good morning" in Swahili, but I forgot how to say good evening. So ...

ROBERT: Oh. Okay.

JAD: So Greg, I mean we were just—anyhow. [laughs]

JAD: We called Greg up because he had written this article for this great website called Transom.org about being a foreign reporter and working with translators and all the mishaps, you know, when you have to go from one language to another.

GREG WARNER: But there's actually a really good example that I didn't use in the piece about the failure to communicate. I could tell you that story.

JAD: Sure, yeah.

GREG WARNER: So—so there's this word, and you wouldn't think of it as untranslatable, but it's the word "serious." And when you ...

JAD: Serious? Like ...

GREG WARNER: Serious. Like S-E-R-I-O-U-S.

JAD: Okay.

GREG WARNER: In my experience, when you hear this word "serious" in East Africa, it does not mean solemn or thoughtful or stern, it actually almost never has something to do with your mood. What "serious" tends to mean is, are you just talking to me or are you serious? Are you doing something? And usually doing is like some kind of transaction, usually financial. I've been asked by, you know, many East African officials, "Are you gonna be serious with me?" And it obviously means, "Are you gonna pay me a bribe?"

ROBERT: Oh!

GREG WARNER: Usually, I pretend to misunderstand at the key moment. I say, "Yes, I'm a very serious international journalist." And—but the story that I want to tell you, it took place a couple months ago.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: Good afternoon everybody. I'm really pleased to be back in Africa.]

GREG WARNER: Secretary Kerry ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: Addis Ababa.]

GREG WARNER: ... visited Ethiopia. And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: City of enormous energy and in a country ...]

GREG WARNER: ... just a few days before Kerry's visit, nine journalists had been arrested under this relatively recent anti-terrorism law that basically says that any criticism of the government is illegal.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I had a series of very productive meetings this morning with my foreign minister counterparts.]

GREG WARNER: And Secretary Kerry was giving this press conference.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I shared my concerns about a young Ethiopian blogger that I met last year, Natnael Feleke, who with eight of his peers have been imprisoned. And I firmly believe that the work of journalists, whether it's print journalists or in the internet or media of other kinds, it makes societies stronger.]

GREG WARNER: You know, he said all the things that you'd expect him to say. He said we believe that free speech and open dialogue is important to the economic development of the country, blah, blah, blah. But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: We remain committed to our partnership with Ethiopia.]

GREG WARNER: ... this comment was also wrapped up in a lot of praise of Ethiopia. And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I'd be delighted to answer a few questions. I'm not sure how that's—you can do that?]

GREG WARNER: ... then came time for questions. He took some vetted questions from the Ethiopian journalists, two more from the traveling press. And to Kerry's credit ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: You know, give this gentleman—I want to give him a shot. I know he was very impatient.]

GREG WARNER: ... he sort of—before he left the podium he was like, "You know what? We're just gonna try something different. We're gonna, like, call on an Ethiopian journalist.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I want to make sure we get a fair distribution.]

GREG WARNER: Kerry points at this one guy in the second row. Young guy in his 20s, boyish face, wearing a mustache.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: I've only two questions for you, sir.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I may have invited the hardest question of the day now. But one question. Fair enough? Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: So let me choose. You have raised the issues of Natnael Feleke, who is a blogger, and his friends.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: Yeah.]

GREG WARNER: And then this guy's like, "Well, every time a journalist is arrested, the US gives a statement about this, but ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: These things are ...]

GREG WARNER: ... this keeps happening."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Repeated—repeating very much.]

GREG WARNER: So then he asks his question.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Is it lip service or are you seriously concerned about the arrest?]

GREG WARNER: Is this lip service, or are you seriously concerned? At this point, everybody's just not looking at Kerry. They're all looking at this journalist who obviously had to take considerable personal risks in a place like Ethiopia in a crowd of journalists, including state-run TV stations, he's—this guy's on camera asking this extremely sensitive question about the arrested journalists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: We really demand a genuine answer from you. Thank you.]

GREG WARNER: And Kerry looks at him like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: Well ...]

GREG WARNER: ... you got to be kidding.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: When I stand up in public and I say something, I try to be serious about it. And I think the fact that I'm doing that is serious. And when I raised him by name in my comments today ...]

ROBERT: Kerry sounds to me like he's sort of insulted by the question. And—and yet ...

GREG WARNER: Right. So remember "serious," the word "serious" in East Africa can be translated very much as, "Are you doing something?" Preferably like a financial transaction, right? And so what this journalist is saying is, "Are you just talking about this or are you doing something?" Maybe threatening Ethiopia with withdrawing aid or withdrawing support. And Kerry says, "I am very seriously talking about this."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: We have previously called for the release of these individuals, and that is the policy of our government. And it's a serious policy. Thank you all very, very much. Appreciate it.]

GREG WARNER: And it seemed to me maybe—you know, you can judge, but it seemed like he was almost, like, "Look, I'm, like, the most serious politician that's out there. I mean, I lost the presidential race in 2004 in part because I was deemed too serious by the American public." You know, like, "What are you accusing me of not being serious?"

ROBERT: We put in a number of requests to speak to John Kerry or someone in the State Department but there was no response.

JAD: Do you think he was aware of the misunderstanding?

GREG WARNER: Who, Kerry?

JAD: No, this—this fellow.

GREG WARNER: Oh, yeah. No, I followed him out afterward.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Hey, man. Can you pronounce your name for me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: My name is Ananya Sori.]

GREG WARNER: He's a young guy in his 20s. He's an independent journalist.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Yeah, I used to work in different newspapers.]

GREG WARNER: And I was like, you know, listen what happened there—and I almost felt like some kind of cultural guide.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Because Americans think "serious" means, "I'm standing here. I'm not joking. I'm serious." But when Africans say "serious," and I'm using it generally, they say, "No, are you gonna not just speak, are you gonna do?"]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Yeah. That's—that's exactly my point. Are you going to take sanctions maybe?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Against Ethiopia?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Do you feel that that question puts you at risk?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Maybe. Who knows? That is the job description doing journalism in Ethiopia. [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Thanks so much.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ananya Sori: Thank you. Thank you. I'll give you a call.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Warner: Give me a call. My number is on there. Okay, yeah.]

GREG WARNER: So that conversation was about five months ago.

ROBERT: Do you know what his fate at all? I mean, have you found out whether—did he suffer for this question in any way?

GREG WARNER: No, but I have his phone number so I can give them a call and find out.

ANANYA SORI: Hello?

GREG WARNER: Hi Ananya, it's Gregory. Gregory Warner.

ANANYA SORI: Oh, Gregory. How are you?

GREG WARNER: I'm good. I'm good.

GREG WARNER: So I reached him by Skype. He told me that actually after that press conference, he did get strange calls to his home and some Facebook messages from people he didn't know telling him that he'd better rethink what he said.

ANANYA SORI: That I better line up with the current government direction. And that ...

GREG WARNER: They said you should line up with the government's priorities?

ANANYA SORI: Yeah.

ROBERT: These messages were from the government?

GREG WARNER: It's hard to tell. It has been reported that this Ethiopian anti-terrorism task force will wage social media attacks by getting people to send messages on its behalf.

ANANYA SORI: It was an anti-terrorism task force are the ones that send these kind of message.

GREG WARNER: And were they threatening?

ANANYA SORI: Yeah, some of them were, you know, insulting and that I would be punished accordingly when the time comes. And it might come one day.

GREG WARNER: A newspaper he founded got shut down after publishing one issue. And he was planning for a while to flee to Nairobi.

ANANYA SORI: To secure my safety.

GREG WARNER: Leave his wife and kid behind, and then maybe return, grab them, apply for asylum in the United States.

ANANYA SORI: You know, my mother and my older brother are based in US, Washington.

GREG WARNER: Oh, okay. Washington.

GREG WARNER: Like a lot of Ethiopians, he's actually got some relatives in the States.

GREG WARNER: Did they hear that you asked the question to John Kerry?

ANANYA SORI: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have heard that.

GREG WARNER: What did your mom say?

ANANYA SORI: She said please don't do that. It's not good. They might be, you know, targeting you. Things like that. You know, moms are like that, eh?

GREG WARNER: Yeah, moms are like that.

ANANYA SORI: Yeah.

ROBERT: So look, we could get your mom to call you and say, have you done the Radiolab? I know you like that show. You know, you listen to it all year. Do that. Just do that.

JAD: That's true. Well, what would your mom say?

ROBERT: What would your mom say?

JAD: I mean, if you're a person who listens to Radiolab and, you know, statistics have shown that most of the people who listen to the radio or to the podcast, nine out of ten people listen but don't pledge. What would your mom say?

ROBERT: But 100 percent of them have mothers.

JAD: Yes. And for those 90 percent, what would your mother say about listening but not supporting? Come on, do it for your mom. Radio ...

ROBERT: Be good.

JAD: Radiolab.org. Click the "Support" button or text the word 'radiolab' to 698660.

ROBERT: Oh, and by the way, in about a week's time, we have another surprise for you. But I'm not gonna tell you about it because after all, it wouldn't be a surprise.

JAD: Okay. Bye. Thank you.

ROBERT: Thank you so, so much. And we hope you do what you know you should do, and what we hope, expect you to do. And keep listening more than anything else. Just keep listening.

JAD: Yeah. Have a happy 2016.

ROBERT: Yeah.

-30-

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