JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this …

ROBERT: … is Radiolab.

JAD: Yes, and today we have three very different …

ROBERT: … but equally awesome journeys, I like to call them.

JAD: Yes, journeys. Questions. Three different questions.

ROBERT: They're questions, really.

JAD: Yes, that we're going to investigate. And, to get us started, well, just take it away.

ROBERT: It's something you do every day. You don't think about it very much, but when you do it in New York City strange things happen.

JAD: What is the "it?" What are you talking about?

ROBERT: No, it's a tease.

JAD: Tease? But are you going to tell me what "it" is?

ROBERT: Well, I can tell you that "it" all started with this guy.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: How about this?

PAT WALTERS: That's good.

ROBERT: A writer who's been on the show a few times.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: I'm Frederick Kaufman, the author of Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food.

ROBERT: We brought him in to tell us a story about poop. So Fred told us that the first thing we had to do ...

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: That North River Sewage Treatment Plant.

ROBERT: ... was we had to go to North River Wastewater Treatment Plant.

ROBERT: So let's go there and just cross over.

PAT WALTERS: It's just over on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

PAT: Usually? How often do you come here? [laughs]

ROBERT: So our producer Pat Walters and I, we went up there.

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: Why wasn't I included in this adventure?

ROBERT: You weren't—I don't know. Walters just muscled his way into position.

JAD: Walters! Again!

STEVE ASKEW: Hi. How are you doing? How are you?

PAT: Anyway, we went up there and we ended up talking to this guy Steve.

PAT: Pat. Hi.

STEVE ASKEW: Hi Pat. How you doing? I'm Steve Askew. How you doing?

PAT: This is Robert.

STEVE ASKEW: Hi Rob. How are ya? Have a seat. Have a seat.

PAT: He's like the superintendent of the plant up there.

ROBERT: Steve is basically the eliminator. He eliminates a very significant portion of New York City's poop.

STEVE ASKEW: We have a—I think it's a really neat job.

ROBERT: Consider the glory of this position.

STEVE ASKEW: It's pretty exciting because again, you really get to see this ...

PAT: Because Steve's at the beginning of a process that I think we all kind of know the outline of. But the details, and the places that New York City's poop in particular end up taking you are truly astonishing. So the first thing that we learned is that in New York City, this whole wastewater treatment thing? It happens on an almost unbelievable scale.

ROBERT: How many gallons do we ...?

STEVE ASKEW: About—citywide, about 1.3 billion gallons.

ROBERT: Every ...?

STEVE ASKEW: Every single day. That's 7.45 pounds per gallon. That's, you know, seven billion pounds.

ROBERT: But until 1986, we dumped pretty much all of it into the ocean or straight into the Hudson River.

STEVE ASKEW: 1986, that's like yesterday. You know, you can imagine the west side of Manhattan before 1986, all the sewage went into the river.

JAD: Unprocessed?

ROBERT: Unprocessed.

STEVE ASKEW: Just went straight into the river untreated.

JAD: That blows my mind.

PAT: Yeah, it was not a good situation. But by 1986, the city had built several treatment plants, including this one, which happens to be the biggest.

ROBERT: It's a very impressive building with trees on top and soccer fields. And I watched it get built. It's right near my neighborhood. So kids played soccer up there.

JAD: They played soccer on top of the poop place?

ROBERT: Yeah!

JAD: Did you have any sense of what lies inside that building?

ROBERT: No! I had no—oh, no.

STEVE ASKEW: We're gonna walk according to the process, all right?

ROBERT: In the walking tours I've had of New York City, this beats everything.

ROBERT: So we're gonna enter through the doors marked "Exit." That's always a good way to start.

STEVE ASKEW: Right. That's always a good one.

ROBERT: So imagine park land on top, and a kind of open framework, sort of like a parking garage.

PAT: And we're, like, up on the top level, with the treatment plant itself underneath us. And Steve walks us over to this manhole cover, opens it up and ...

STEVE ASKEW: ... come here and look down and see ...

PAT: And we look down.

STEVE ASKEW: That's where the water comes in.

ROBERT: Well below the highways, I mean, there's this ...

STEVE ASKEW: It's like a river.

ROBERT: ... river of everything.

PAT: It's this roiling, brown torrent way below us.

STEVE ASKEW: The bottom of that channel is a hundred feet down.

PAT: And so the first thing Steve has to do is, like, get it up out of there.

STEVE ASKEW: We pump it up a hundred feet, and it cascades down through the rest of the process, ultimately back to the river.

PAT: And at this point ...

ROBERT: It becomes a series of waterfalls.

ROBERT: Sounds like Niagara!

STEVE ASKEW: Yeah. That's exactly right.

PAT: Pouring down below us through this eight-storey staircase of pools, almost like terraced lakes.

STEVE ASKEW: Look how high that is. Each part of the process is lower.

PAT: And each pool has its own job. Starting from the top there's, like, one room where they just skim the oil off the surface.

STEVE ASKEW: Fats, oils and greases float to the top and we skim them off.

PAT: Sewage flows down again.

STEVE ASKEW: So we're gonna walk down ...

PAT: ... into this enormous wide open space.

PAT: This is impressive. This feels very, very big.

STEVE ASKEW: It's a big, long gallery. Yeah, yeah.

PAT: Like a huge rectangular lake.

PAT: An indoor lake, kind of.

STEVE ASKEW: That's correct.

PAT: Of warm sewage.

STEVE ASKEW: So if the air temperature is—is cold enough, the vapor condenses on the cold concrete and it rains inside the building.

ROBERT: Really!

STEVE ASKEW: If it's really cold ...

ROBERT: It rains? Or you mean drips.

STEVE ASKEW: Call it whatever. It condenses and comes down in droplets. That's the definition of rain. And it'll all be soaking wet in here, 'cause it's raining. And if it's really cold, that vapor freezes and we'll have snow on the floor. All right?

ROBERT: You've got a real climate thing going on here.

PAT: Meanwhile in the lake, the sludgy stuff kind of settles down to the bottom and gets sent along down to another level, to the next step. And as you go down deeper and deeper, eventually you get to this one room that's, like, weirdly, kind of beautiful.

ROBERT: It had a kind of dome-like top, and there was—there was a big pond in front of you.

STEVE ASKEW: It's frothy, it's alive. It's got a nice light tan color to it.

ROBERT: The pond was brimming with life!

STEVE ASKEW: So now it becomes a biological process.

PAT: One that is spookily similar to what happens in our own stomachs.

STEVE ASKEW: We heat it to 98 degrees, lo and behold, it's coming from humans.

PAT: And this is where they add a bunch of bacteria to the sewage.

STEVE ASKEW: The sewage is actually food to this bacteria.

PAT: And then Steve adds other bacteria to eat those bacteria.

STEVE ASKEW: They're eating each other. The acid formers eat the complex proteins and carbohydrates, and the methane formers eat the acid formers and then ...

ROBERT: It's a huge cannibal fest, everyone's eating ...

STEVE ASKEW: Everything's eating everything else.

PAT: And not just bacteria.

ROBERT: There were little mayflies and bugs crawling on the surface. And everywhere around the room there were enormous populations of ...

ROBERT: Spiders?

STEVE ASKEW: Spiders.

ROBERT: Spiders.

PAT: They're all over the place!

STEVE ASKEW: Spiders eat the—the midges. The midges eat the sludge. The spiders eat the midges, and if this was an outdoor plant, we'd have birds eating the spiders. It's a whole ecosystem. That's exactly right.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: So New York City has, in its waste treatment plant, a rainforest filled with animals.

PAT: But of course, the product of all this ...

ROBERT: If you go through that door, which it says ...

STEVE ASKEW: You're gonna smell something.

PAT: ... is disgusting.

PAT: Oh, yeah. Oh! It's so bad, I just want to smell more of it.

PAT: 'Cause what you're left with is this thick soup of, like, super-concentrated sewage.

ROBERT: How much do you smell? You smell it on—I have it on my tongue.

STEVE ASKEW: Oh, yeah. No, it smells. No, no, it smells. Let's get out of here.

PAT: And once you have that soup, you take that ...

STEVE ASKEW: We put it through a centrifuge where we mechanically spin it.

ROBERT: A salad spinner?

STEVE ASKEW: Well, it's kind of like the spin cycle in your washing machine.

ROBERT: And it basically sweats out all the additional moisture.

STEVE ASKEW: And what I'm left with is, like, real concentrated, like, 30 percent solid. It's like moist soil.

PAT: A ton of it.

STEVE ASKEW: There's 125 million gallons of it.

PAT: And if you want to, like, try to picture that in your mind—I did—that much sludge, that's what this stuff is called, would fill the Rose Bowl. I'm not even a football fan, but just, like, picture a big college football stadium filled with this concentrated sewage sludge. And that's what Steve's left with at the end of every single day. Which leads to the obvious question.

STEVE ASKEW: What do I do with that stuff?

PAT: And this is where the story takes a really strange turn.

ROBERT: This is where things got a little, how would you put it?

PAT: Got a little emotional.

ROBERT: Emotional.

PAT: Mike, can you hear me?

MIKE SCHARP: Yeah. I can hear you, Pat.

PAT: Ended up tracking down this guy named Mike.

MIKE SCHARP: Mike Scharp.

PAT: Who was hired to answer this question. Like, what do we do with New York City's processed sewage sludge? He says for a while ...

MIKE SCHARP: They hauled it 103 miles out in the ocean and dumped it.

PAT: Just like before. But ...

MIKE SCHARP: Eventually what happened was ...

PAT: In 1988, the government ...

MIKE SCHARP: ... banned all ocean disposal of waste.

PAT: And because New York City had been dumping so much of this stuff in the ocean for so long, the EPA said not only do you have to stop dumping in the ocean, you have to find something good to do with some of it.

STEVE ASKEW: Beneficial reuse of biosolids.

PAT: This is our sewage guy Steve again. And he says you can use the sludge as ...

STEVE ASKEW: Fertilizer. You can use it as fertilizer.

PAT: Steve told us that lots of cities do this.

STEVE ASKEW: There's a product—you can go to Home Depot and buy a bag of Milorganite.

PAT: What's that?

STEVE ASKEW: Milorganite is biosolids from Milwaukee.

PAT: So when you buy a bag of Milorganite and spread it over your tomatoes, you're actually using treated poop from the people of Milwaukee.

STEVE ASKEW: They've marketed it for retail sale.

PAT: And this is basically where Mike comes in. It was his job to sell our sludge.

MIKE SCHARP: So off I went.

JAD: Is this, like, a thing he does?

PAT: Yeah, he'd done it in other places for other towns. But this time it didn't go the way it usually does. He doesn't remember exactly who he approached first, but state ...

MIKE SCHARP: Alabama.

PAT: ... after state ...

MIKE SCHARP: Ohio.

PAT: ... after state ...

MIKE SCHARP: Indiana.

PAT: ... said no.

MIKE SCHARP: I can remember one state, and I won't even mention who but, you know, the comment was made, "You're not going to get New York City here. Don't even think about it."

STEVE ASKEW: There were towns that would accept biosolids from every city in the planet except New York City.

MIKE SCHARP: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama.

STEVE ASKEW: We don't want New York City biosolids.

PAT: Oh, like ours is worse?

STEVE ASKEW: We don't want city slicker biosolids.

PAT: The objections were all over the map: the sludge will have toxins in it, or disease, or, like, who knows? You know, it'll have the city in it. Even though technically when they tested it, it was no different than the sludge from anywhere else.

STEVE ASKEW: It's the same stuff.

PAT: But ...

MIKE SCHARP: Illinois.

PAT: ... over ...

MIKE SCHARP: Kansas.

PAT: ... and over again ...

MIKE SCHARP: Kentucky.

PAT: ... he hears the same thing.

MIKE SCHARP: Don't think you're ever gonna get New York City permitted here.

PAT: I feel a little—I haven't even lived here that long and I feel insulted.

STEVE ASKEW: Yeah. No, so it's—it's, if you're a resident of New York, it's us. It's a collective effort here. You know ...

MIKE SCHARP: There was a prejudice against New York City versus almost any other sludge in the country.

PAT: And I should mention that at a certain point, Mike started offering to give this stuff away for free. And still, nobody wants it. Until ...

MIKE SCHARP: It was kind of just one of those flukes of life.

PAT: ... he got to Colorado.

MIKE SCHARP: I got lost coming out of the airport.

PAT: Huge thunderstorm.

MIKE SCHARP: Thought I was going north, ended up going south.

PAT: And all of a sudden he's ...

MIKE SCHARP: Yeah, about 75 miles east of Denver.

PAT: You went—you went pretty far south!

MIKE SCHARP: Like I said, I was lost in a big thunderstorm, and went to the first town and found a hotel. So ...

PAT: Anyway, next morning he wanders down to the coffee shop, gets to talking with some guy, and telling him, "I've got all this sludge in New York City, and I just want to put it on a train and bring it out to the farms in Colorado."

MIKE SCHARP: His response is, "You're going to do what?"

PAT: Typical reaction.

MIKE SCHARP: "You're gonna put something from New York City on a railcar and haul it all the way here?"

PAT: But then he paused and said, "Keep talking."

MIKE SCHARP: And we talked about the concept.

PAT: And before Mike knew it, he'd found a place that would accept New York City's unwanted sludge.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Fertilizer's fertilizer. That plant doesn't care what—what it comes from.

PAT: This is Wayne.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Wayne Shultz.

PAT: He ended up running the operation in Colorado.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Our track out there would hold 17 train cars.

PAT: And this is how the New York City poop train began. A couple days before Earth Day 1992, several thousand tons of New York City sludge left the Big Apple, headed for Lamar, Colorado, 1,600 miles away. But it wasn't exactly an immediate success.

JOHN STULP: Well, I think ...

PAT: The whole thing started out pretty small.

JOHN STULP: ... initially, there was just three or four farms that were using it.

PAT: This guy's one of the first farmers to start using it.

JOHN STULP: Sure, my name is John Stulp.

PAT: And John says he remembers early on ...

JOHN STULP: The public was invited to come out ...

PAT: And comment on what they thought about the biosolids.

JOHN STULP: And it conjured up some very strong emotions. One person said something that they were concerned if any of this got spilled out of the trucks transporting it onto the highway, that it would probably eat a hole in the asphalt and have to be treated like a nuclear disaster site.

MIKE SCHARP: And there were people who said their horse had died from biosolids.

WAYNE SHULTZ: I never heard the horse story, but I can tell you one about a cow.

JOHN STULP: You know, I think it's typical that people are always suspicious of something that's from far away.

PAT: But then, the farmers who were using it started to notice that it was kinda awesome.

WAYNE SHULTZ: I remember going to a farmer's field.

PAT: Not long after he'd started using the biosolids ...

WAYNE SHULTZ: The previous wheat crop was 40 bushel.

PAT: But after using the biosolids?

WAYNE SHULTZ: He cut 66 bushel wheat.

PAT: His crop increased by a third.

WAYNE SHULTZ: You never hear of 66 bushel.

PAT: John says they started to notice other little things about it, too.

JOHN STULP: We had a lot of trouble with an aphid called the Russian wheat aphid. But we saw an interesting thing with a couple neighbors east of me, that ...

PAT: When they put the biosolids on their field, it kept the aphids away. And it wasn't just aphids.

WAYNE SHULTZ: We have a big prairie dog problem out here.

PAT: One farmer told Wayne, when he put biosolids on his field, they ...

WAYNE SHULTZ: They packed up and moved across to the neighbor. And he thought it was the human scent.

PAT: And as word got out, Wayne started getting calls from all over the county.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Well, put me on the list. Put me on the list. I want some of that.

JOHN STULP: There was a waiting list.

PAT: Because as the New York City biosolids had gained acceptance in Colorado, other states had started picking them up, too.

WAYNE SHULTZ: I had a list of 50 farmers wanting the product.

PAT: And after a few years, they were getting a trainload pretty much every week.

MIKE SCHARP: We covered maybe 10,000 acres a year. And we had enough demand to cover—I mean, farmer demand, that we could easily cover 50 to 75,000 acres a year.

PAT: And here is what I think is the most amazing part of this whole story. You take a farmer like John, who accounts for a big chunk of those acres. John's growing wheat.

JOHN STULP: Yes. The hard, red winter wheat.

PAT: And the wheat?

JOHN STULP: Goes primarily into bread-type of products.

PAT: A lot of bread-type products.

JOHN STULP: With a pound of wheat, roughly just a rule of thumb is you get about a loaf of bread.

PAT: And if you do some quick math, he said you get about 2,000 pounds of wheat from each acre that you farm. So that's 2,000 loaves of bread per acre, times the 10,000 acres that the biosolids were on.

JOHN STULP: So just keep adding zeroes. And so we're up into the—around 20 million loaves of bread or something like that.

PAT: And that's each year. So we're talking hundreds of millions of loaves of bread, which means, John says ...

JOHN STULP: You may well have eaten a—a slice of bread that had a grain or two of wheat that come from our farm.

PAT: And so, like, in some small but very real sense, that's a slice of bread that we helped make with the stuff that we, like, make.

JOHN STULP: Biosolids from New York come from the bread that they ate that went into their sewer system and end up in their wastewater treatment plant and ended up in Colorado, and then, you know, the cycle begins again. The ultimate in recycling.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: This is a magical thing.

PAT: That's Fred again, the writer from the beginning of the story.

ROBERT: It's really going from—from a straight line, make it go away and never return, to a circle.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The end is in the beginning.

PAT: But it turns out that's not the end of the story.

WAYNE SHULTZ: ... since I turned off utilities and locked the doors.

PAT: Couple of weeks ago, we sent a reporter out to Colorado to hang out with Wayne.

REPORTER: All I'm seeing here is a bunch of empty buildings.

WAYNE SHULTZ: These are our buildings.

REPORTER: Empty. Everything's shut down.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Everything's shut down.

PAT: And what she found is that the circle had become a straight line again.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Wished I could have shown it when it was in operation.

PAT: Wayne told her that for a long time things were great.

WAYNE SHULTZ: At one time, the summer of '07, I had 26 employees. Everybody hoppin'. And it was slowly—New York had come in and well, you gotta cheapen up your price. We've got—somebody else will do this cheaper. And the economy, prices of diesel fuel, the railroad cost of transportation, just slowly it got down to four employees and myself. And all they have to do is send you a 30-day written notice and your contract's gone. That's what happened.

MIKE SCHARP: I remember the last day, our last load, which happened to be 20 years to the day of our first load showing up. Our first load showed up on Earth Day, 1992. And our last load showed up April 22, 2012. And we sat there and watched the last load be spread across the farm ground there.

WAYNE SHULTZ: Yeah. What New York does with it now, they go to landfills. They mix it with garbage and they bury it in landfills. Like I said, it's kinda sad to come in here and see it now. Nothing.

JAD: Wait, hold on a second. I mean, I obviously feel for Wayne and all those people who lost their jobs, but it sounds—it sounded to me a little nuts from the beginning, that we would put our—our bio—whatever it's called, on a train and put it all the way to Colorado. That's just—that must cost a lot of money.

PAT: Yeah, it's kinda nuts. I mean, it's costing, like, millions of dollars. And we've always put some of it in a landfill, it's just that now we put about half of it into landfill and half of it into, like, abandoned stripmines, and none of it goes to Colorado.

ROBERT: Well, how—how much would—are we saving by not putting it on trains and sending it across the country? Like, what's the ...

PAT: Well, like, so according to Mike and Wayne, it's about half as expensive to put it in a landfill as it was to send it to Colorado, which sounds like a lot. But if you add it up, if you add up the cost of—of sending all this stuff that we were sending to Colorado, and you add up the cost of the landfill and you do the subtraction, and you divide it across, like, let's just say, like eight million people? It cost—it would cost you, Robert Krulwich, about 25 cents a month to send it back.

JAD: That's it?

ROBERT: For a quarter?

PAT: For a quarter.

JAD: God, that's nothing, I would've expected the answer to be a lot more than that.

PAT: Me too.

JAD: Come on New York, do the right thing!

ROBERT: Can we store our own ...

JAD: Pride.

PAT: Pride.

JAD: Integrity, you know?

ROBERT: And integrity in—in the fields of Colorado?

PAT: Yeah, we could close the circle again.

ROBERT: Close the circle.

PAT: We'll be right back.

JAD: Yes, sir.

[ADAM: Hey, Radiolab, this is Adam in Toronto. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And for this next segment …

ROBERT: … we have a puzzle. Yeah, it's a puzzle.

JAD: Yeah. It's a puzzle. It's a—yes, it is a puzzle, and it comes from NPR's East Africa correspondent, Gregory Warner.

GREGORY WARNER: I prepared for this story by taking a jog through Nairobi.

JAD: Well, all right, so where do we start with this, Greg?

GREGORY WARNER: I think we should start in 1968. So 1968, summer Olympics in Mexico City.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Mexico City, thankfully a city of peace on the Olympic opening day.]

GREGORY WARNER: At 7,900 feet, one of the highest elevated Olympics, and that's difficult for runners, because there's less oxygen. And one of the big races that everybody's looking forward to is the 1500 meter between the 23-year-old American favorite, Jim Ryun …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jim Ryun, an American, number 300 …]

GREGORY WARNER: He's the world record holder. And this guy named Kipchoge Keino.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Kip Keino, of Kenya, number 565.]

GREGORY WARNER: Kip Keino, he's called.

JAD: Kip Keino.

GREGORY WARNER: They bill him as an untrained Nandi tribesman from Kenya. He's actually a policeman from a long line of cattle rustlers. And here's what you need to know about Kip. He's running three different races at this Olympics. Not only the 1500, but also the 5,000 meter and the 10,000 meter. If you include the qualifying matches, he'll be running six Olympic events in eight days.

JAD: Wow.

GREGORY WARNER: Six races in eight days, which would never be done today, was hardly done then. So, first up …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 10,000 meters.]

GREGORY WARNER: The 10,000 meter race. He's in the lead, two laps away from finishing, when he collapses. He falls off the track. He gets rushed to the Kenyan doctor, who's a German guy, who diagnoses him with a gallbladder infection, which turns out is incredibly painful. It actually hurts the most when you take deep breaths, like when you're running. And if you don't treat it, your gallbladder could burst. So basically, the doctor sends Kip to bed, says, “There's no way you can run,” but Kip, he runs the next race anyway. He ends up getting silver.

ROBERT: Wow.

GREGORY WARNER: He's sent to bed by the German doctor again, who literally says, “Okay, this time, you have to stay in bed. If you run any more races, you could die.”

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Back to the track for one of the most memorable events of the whole games, the 1500 meters.]

GREGORY WARNER: Three days later, it's the big match-up against Jim Ryun. And Kip, apparently he just leapt out of bed an hour before the race and he said something like, “If I die, I'm gonna die on the track.” So Kip Keino starts off …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're up and running. Three and three quarter laps of the stadium.]

GREGORY WARNER: He starts out dead last.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Keino running last and then moving up to the middle of the pack now.]

GREGORY WARNER: By the end of the first lap, he's in third.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Kip Keino third.]

GREGORY WARNER: In the third lap, he takes the lead.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Here comes Kip Keino, coming up with his teammate.]

GREGORY WARNER: He goes ahead, but that's okay for Jim Ryun. Jim Ryun's known to have the greatest kick in the sport.

ROBERT: Kick?

GREGORY WARNER: Kick. Right at the end of the race, every runner gives this extra boost. And Ryun's got the best kick in the business.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jim Ryun is beginning to move.]

GREGORY WARNER: So he's thinking …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The kick is beginning.]

GREGORY WARNER: … there's no way that Kip Keino, at altitude, suffering a gallbladder infection, can hold out against my kick. And in the final lap, it looks like he's right. He starts shooting up the field, gaining on Kip Keino, who is clearly in pain. He's sort of grimacing, gritting his teeth.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 300 yards left. The crowd's going mad.]

GREGORY WARNER: Lurching to the finish line. And even though he is in an ungodly amount of pain, even though pain is shooting through his entire body, amazingly …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Keino will never be caught.]

GREGORY WARNER: … he does not slow down. Jim Ryun never catches him, and he wins.

JOHN MANNERS: When he hung on, around that last turn, it was—oh, I was hysterical.

GREGORY WARNER: This is John Manners.

JOHN MANNERS: I am a semi-retired journalist who for many years had a specialty in covering the exploits of Kenyan runners, African runners in general.

GREGORY WARNER: He was watching that race …

JOHN MANNERS: … in a bar about 50 miles north of New York.

GREGORY WARNER: But as a kid, Manners actually lived in the part of Kenya that Kip Keino is from.

JOHN MANNERS: My people. [laughs]

GREGORY WARNER: And so when Keino won gold, it sparked a question for Manners that he would spend the next 40 years thinking about.

JOHN MANNERS: I wanted to find a reason why my people, as I chose to regard them, were great.

GREGORY WARNER: Because on that day in 1968, Kip Keino didn't just win a race. He ushered in an era of East African dominance in the sport …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's Kenya one, it's Kenya two, it's Kenya five.]

GREGORY WARNER: … that is almost hard to believe.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Kenyans have done it again. One, two, and three.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yep, it was, once again, the Kenyans, the eighth successive gold medal in Olympic history.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a world record. A world record.]

JAD: So 1968 was the beginning of the Kenyan dominance in running?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, but …

DAVID EPSTEIN: In the United States, we think of Kenyans as being good runners, but really, it's this one, tiny, small geographic swath…

GREGORY WARNER: … within Kenya where all the runners come from. That's David Epstein, he's a senior editor at Sports Illustrated. He wrote a book called The Sports Gene, and the geographic swath that he's talking about is in Western Kenya. It's a mountainous region, spread out, about the size of Massachusetts. And the people who live there are a particular tribe of Kenyans called …

DAVID EPSTEIN: … the Kalenjin.

GREGORY WARNER: Pretty small group of people.

DAVID EPSTEIN: This tribe accounts for about .06 percent …

GREGORY WARNER: … of the world's population. But, from this one, tiny tribe has come …

DAVID EPSTEIN: … this unbelievable fount of talent that I think is unparalleled in any other sport ever.

GREGORY WARNER: There's all kinds of statistics.

DAVID EPSTEIN: It sort of becomes laughable. You know, there have been five American high school runners who have broken four minutes in the mile.

GREGORY WARNER: The first was actually Jim Ryun.

DAVID EPSTEIN: But there's one high school in Iten, in Kenya, that had four sub-four milers at the same time. There's 17 American men in history who have run under 2:10 in the marathon. That's about four minutes and 58 seconds per mile pace. Seventeen American men in history. There were 32 Kalenjin who did it in October of 2011. So you start to look at these statistics, and it appears to be the greatest concentration of elite athletic talent ever. In any sport, anywhere in the world.

JOHN MANNERS: And that's the question. I mean, how does that happen?

GREGORY WARNER: That was John Manners' question 40 years ago.

JOHN MANNERS: Something has to account for this extraordinary set of numbers.

GREGORY WARNER: But what?

JOHN MANNERS: Well …

GREGORY WARNER: According to John Manners …

JOHN MANNERS: People talked a lot about altitude and the ability to process oxygen and what have you.

GREGORY WARNER: Other people have said it's because the Kalenjin have a high starchy diet. Or …

DAVID EPSTEIN: … because they run to school, that's a very prominent phenomenon. We know that the runners that come from the Kalenjin tribe that become great runners, they're much more likely to have run to and from school long distances, like 10k to and from school.

GREGORY WARNER: But …

DAVID EPSTEIN: There are millions of kids in Kenya who run to and from school …

GREGORY WARNER: … or who live at altitude. The problem with all of these is that these are not specific to the Kalenjin.

GREGORY WARNER: So, then you get the socioeconomic arguments. The salary of a runner is attractive. You know, 10 or 20 thousand dollars a year seems like a fortune worth striving for. But, the country's not so poor that it can't send competitors to the athletic competitions.

JAD: This is Malcolm Gladwell's argument, actually.

ROBERT: Very close.

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah.

JAD: That there's a—that there's a social pressure to it, that this is how you get out.

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, and there's so many role models. I mean, every village has some kind of champion.

ROBERT: Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: The problem with that argument—there's actually no problem with the argument. It makes sense, but it doesn't say how the Kalenjin got so good in the first place that they created these role models.

DAVID EPSTEIN: I mean, where did the role models come from?

GREGORY WARNER: So, the idea you're left with is, maybe there's something genetically different about them that makes them better than us. This is obviously a dangerous idea, and, in fact, when David Epstein was writing his book about sports and athletics …

DAVID EPSTEIN: I almost backed out of writing the book because I realized I was gonna have to address ethnic differences and gender differences. There were scientists who confessed to me that they were withholding data.

GREGORY WARNER: That they had studies that showed a genetic advantage, but they wouldn't show him because they were afraid that they'd lose tenure. But, he says you have to acknowledge the obvious.

DAVID EPSTEIN: One aspect of innate biology that clearly helps Kalenjin that's been studied by scientists is their body build. So the Kalenjin are what's called a Nilotic people. They're from—they have ancestry at very low latitude. I was criss-crossing the equator when I was visiting their training camps. And when you have your ancestry in a hot and dry climate, you evolve a certain body type for cooling. And we know this—we've known this for over a century. It's called Allen's rule, that organisms—not just humans—all organisms that evolve in hot and dry climates have a certain body type.

GREGORY WARNER: Namely …

DAVID EPSTEIN: Very long and thin limbs, so that there's a lot of surface area through which heat can dissipate. Their limbs get thinner the farther away they get from their center of gravity, so they have extremely thin ankles and extremely thin calves, which is particularly important because your leg is like a pendulum, and the more weight you have farther away from your center of gravity, the more difficult it is to swing. This has been tested in the lab, too, right, so you take a runner and put eight pounds of weight around their waist. It increases the energy they have to use to run at a given pace. But if you take that same eight pounds and put it in the form of two four-pound weights around their ankles, it's like over 25 percent the increase in energy they need to run at the same pace.

GREGORY WARNER: And so it gets you to this place where you think, well, I don't know, maybe Kalenjin from this area, maybe they have this built-in advantage.

JAD: Hm.

GREGORY WARNER: It's physics.

JAD: I don't know, somehow, like I, to sort of just peg it all on physics smells like an argument that I really don't like.

ROBERT: No, nobody likes it.

GREGORY WARNER: I don't think it's a question of like or dislike. I think it's just not the reason I watch the Olympics. I mean, you know, going back to Kip Keino, who overcame a gallbladder infection to break the Olympic world record in 1968, he didn't win because he had thin ankles. He won because of something which is the reason we watch sports, you know. It's that essence, the willpower or triumph over adversity.

JAD: Right, the triumph of the human over everything.

ROBERT: Yes.

GREGORY WARNER: And this is where I ran across a completely new, fascinating, and somewhat terrifying way of explaining why the Kalenjin are so good. And it's an idea that eventually led me to go to Kalenjin country myself.

GREGORY WARNER: That's a perfect way of beginning, a little cow hoot.

GREGORY WARNER: Once you get to Iten, which is in the mountains, the air is cool. There's a lot of cows, a lot of people. And at around 5:30, 6 a.m., all you hear is the pitter-patter of feet. And then, whew whew whew, all these people just pass you all of a sudden, and then, you know, you wait for a few more seconds, and then zoom zoom zoom, people pass you again, because everybody's running. I even started morning jogging when I was there. I'm not really a morning jogger, but I just kind of got into the flow. Anyway, while I was there, I met this guy. His name's Brother Colm O'Connell.

COLM O'CONNELL: Colm O'Connell. I'm Irish, of course. Came to Kenya in 1976.

GREGORY WARNER: Famous running coach who works with a lot of Kenyan runners. When I asked him this question—what is it that makes the Kalenjin so good?—this is what he told me.

COLM O'CONNELL: When you train an athlete to a high level, you need to remember that they live on the edge of injury. They live on the edge of overtraining. They live on the edge of pain.

GREGORY WARNER: Pain.

COLM O'CONNELL: Pain tolerance, yes yes.

GREGORY WARNER: Now look, to some degree, everybody who's a runner talks about this insidious, protean nature of pain, how it finds all the places. You become breathless and your lungs have needles. The best runners have to learn to mentally override these distress signals, to run despite the pain. He actually calls it “expanding your pain barrier.” But Colm O'Connell says for the Kalenjin, pain is something else entirely.

COLM O'CONNELL: Your ability to withstand pain. That, in a sense, in the Kalenjin tradition, made you a man.

GREGORY WARNER: Quite literally.

JOHN MANNERS: The central event in their young lives will come up when they are going to be initiated into the tribe.

GREGORY WARNER: That's John Manners again. Remember, he spent part of his childhood in Kalenjin territory, and he says when he was a boy, say, 12 years old, he would notice his friends had scars on their arms and legs.

JOHN MANNERS: Marks of having burned their arms and legs with hot coals.

GREGORY WARNER: He soon learned they were practicing for this initiation moment.

JOHN MANNERS: You know you're facing it for 10 years at least.

GREGORY WARNER: Because, as a Kalenjin teenager, boy or girl, you have to go through an experience which is so painful, it's a kind of theatrical orgy of pain. And here's what happens. First, you have to crawl naked through stinging nettles, which is like formic acid, you know, African stinging nettles are much, much stingier than the western stinging nettle. But then your fingers are squeezed together. Then you get beaten on that bony part of your ankle where it really hurts. But all that's just warm-up, because then, one morning comes the circumcision. Now, we have some idea of how circumcision works. Maybe, some of us are circumcised. So you perform it on a baby, and it's—it's one kind of experience. I've gone through that myself. I've seen it done. I've had to hold the legs also of my nephew. It's hard. But the Kalenjin circumcise somewhere right after puberty, so around age 13 to 17. The foreskin is not only cut, but it's tied into a bow. The more—the, the tied into a bow thing, I gotta stop there. I kind of froze. I don't really know how to describe it past there.

JOHN MANNERS: I believe either the top or the bottom of the foreskin is pierced, and then the head of the penis is pushed through the opening. And …

GREGORY WARNER: The thing is, it's not just the cut, actually.

JOHN MANNERS: When he undergoes the operation, he is obliged to be absolutely stoical, still, unflinching.

GREGORY WARNER: So, in some versions of this ceremony, mud is caked on the face, and then the mud is allowed to dry. If a crack appears in the mud—your cheek may twitch, your forehead may crinkle—and if that happens, a little crack will appear in the mud, and all the people around will know to immediately start beating you with large sticks. The worst part, though, is not just the beating. It's that, after that moment, if you don't make it through this ceremony, you get labeled a "kebitet," a coward. You're a pariah in society. You're not part of society. In the olden days, you didn't have access to the economic opportunities to afford what's called the bride price, which is what you need to get a wife. However, if you show yourself to be a true warrior, if you make it through this experience, then, hey, you get the rights of reproduction. You may even have two or three wives. So, Manners wondered—he's just speculating here—but maybe, if you have 2,000 years of this sexual selection of ensuring that the stoical, tough-guy types get to have babies, the sensitive types don't, maybe it's not just that the Kalenjin are built for speed, it's not just that they have the body type. Maybe they have some sort of innate ability, mentally, to persevere through pain.

JAD: Huh, and is that a cultural ability? Or would you say that all that selection has filtered into their DNA, in some way?

GREGORY WARNER: Well, so Manners says he isn't sure. And there's certainly no gene for stoicism that's been discovered, and any athletic success has to be ascribed to a host of factors. All right, so, I was in Iten, I was thinking about that question, and I met this kid named Elly Kipgogei. He's 19 years old. He's a self-described bookworm.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: From the very beginning, I never wanted to go through the traditional form of circumcision, because I knew the ordeal of it was so bad.

GREGORY WARNER: And actually what he said was, “Please circumcise me in the hospital. I want to do the cowardly way.” But his relatives said, “No, you'd shame the entire family, and if you don't do it …”

ELLY KIPGOGEI: “You're not a full man.” That's how they put it.

GREGORY WARNER: So, he felt like he had to just do it.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: It is so hard. There's beatings. You're supposed to stay for nine hours inside cold water. Then, early in the morning, around seven in the morning, circumcision. They use a sharp stick. I hope you understand that a sharp stick, so, it's just bad.

GREGORY WARNER: Now, he said the whole initiation ritual actually went on for a couple weeks. It was more than just the cut. And during the whole time, he was kept in a hut on the outskirts of the village. His face was powdered white like a ghost, and he was told, “Whenever you leave this hut …”

ELLY KIPGOGEI: “You are not allowed to walk.”

GREGORY WARNER: You're not allowed to walk.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: So you're supposed to run. Very fast. So you're running very swift. Having the pain.

GREGORY WARNER: And, before the circumcision, Elly was never a runner. Afterwards, when he was done with initiation and he was back in high school …

ELLY KIPGOGEI: I said, oh, let me give that a try. So, I could run, and I feel pain, I feel pain, I'm feeling pain, and I wanted to stop, then I realized, no, let me try to persevere, let me just try, let me try one more time. And two minutes later, I was at school.

GREGORY WARNER: Elly joined his track team, started running to school and during his lunchtimes.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: After training for two weeks and three weeks there, I became an expert, and I was known as the school athlete.

GREGORY WARNER: After how long?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: After two weeks alone. Two weeks alone.

GREGORY WARNER: Two weeks.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: That's how it began.

GREGORY WARNER: That's a crazy story. Is that really true?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah, it is true. So, probably my ability of running was a bit higher than the rest.

GREGORY WARNER: Turns out, Elly's mom was an accomplished athlete.

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, so you're saying you had some physical ability to run, but you just didn't really do it before.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah, I never realized that I can—I could run.

GREGORY WARNER: So, we didn't talk at all about women, but Kalenjin girls also go through an initiation rite of their own. Female genital mutilation.

JAD: The same type of ritual?

GREGORY WARNER: Not the same ceremony, but a similar type of stoical testing ceremony.

JOHN MANNERS: And to me this made no sense.

GREGORY WARNER: This is John Manners again.

JOHN MANNERS: Obviously, the women are not the warriors. They don't need to be brave. Why is it important for them to show courage during this operation? And when I asked this question of my Kalenjin friends many years ago, they were kind of astonished at the question, as though the answer should have been self-evident, and the answer they gave me was, a woman who shows cowardice during this operation might bear cowardly sons.

GREGORY WARNER: So, some Kalenjin might say that Elly actually got two things from his mom. One was his physical prowess: his speed on the track. The other was a mental ability to persevere through pain.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah. People usually say it's called a blessing. In Kalenjin, we call it peruto. Blessing is what you get from probably a forefather, probably a grandmother, so he or she blesses you with that activity. That's what they used to say. The blessing.

ROBERT: That's pretty interesting.

JAD: It's interesting.

ROBERT: Although we're using inheriting words or blessing words, what we're really talking about is the pressure of a culture that is simply choosing to deeply psychically reward certain behaviors and create expectations for those behaviors and create success around those behaviors. Those are all cultural, not biological things, but they—they are the equivalent.

JAD: I think it's both, and I don't know what proportion each contributes to the ultimate result. I—it's—I have no way of judging.

GREGORY WARNER: But whatever the mechanism, and whatever it is—it'll probably stay a mystery—of all the explanations out there for why this one group of people is so good at running, this is the first one that's made me want to run. Once I met Elly and talked to these runners in Kenya, you know, this is an embarrassing story because I don't run very fast, but I got to the gym, and I was on the treadmill, and I was like, I'm taking it up to seven, you know? Seven miles an hour. Like 7.1, actually, I went. And, you know, it's not like very fast, but that would usually be my end run. Like, at the last five minutes, I might do a 7.1, but I did the whole 25 minutes at 7.1. And I thought, why did I ever think that this was undoable before? Why was I staying at like 6.8? If we're trying to figure out what makes these runners so great, and our first answer is a totally scientifically factually true but somehow demoralizing absolute that puts one set of people over there and the rest of us over here, we all have our body type that we're born with, but then if the second explanation of this Kalenjin advantage may be just as inaccessible to the rest of us, but still it feels like a more egalitarian version of advantage. Even if we're talking about a very specific culture.

JAD: Yeah, I think if you run with this extreme pain for a month, after having been circumcised, and somehow that gave you a certain culturally troubling but also real relationship to pain, that feels like a fair advantage to me. Not that I would wish it on anyone.

GREGORY WARNER: Actually, even Elly does not wish it on his kids, when he has kids.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: The system is changing from the traditional format to the new format right now.

GREGORY WARNER: I mean, he's part of a new generation of Kalenjin. He says, for his contemporaries, the pain-free hospital circumcision is becoming slowly less of a stigma.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: And I can't imagine my son going through the same procedure as their father. So, my son or my sons won't go through the same procedure as I did.

GREGORY WARNER: But didn't—I mean, don't you want your son to be, to have the benefits of what you—?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: The benefits are only about the perseverance part of it. And the ability of perseverance you can get through many ways.

GREGORY WARNER: He tells himself he's gonna be able to pass on those Kalenjin values without resorting to the ancient rituals.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: I will teach him how to persevere.

GREGORY WARNER: And he thinks his kids will still be able to be champion runners, if that's what they want to be.

ROBERT: Thanks to Gregory Warner, NPR's East Africa correspondent.

JAD: Also, we should say thanks to Phia Bennin for production help on this piece. Thank you Phia. And thank you guys for listening. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: And we'll be right back.

[LISTENER: This is AJ Squillante calling from Chicago, Illinois. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Should we say our names?

ROBERT: Yes. Let's at least do that.

JAD: All right. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And we are back for this next story ...

ROBERT: I think Soren's gonna be doing the next story, isn't he?

JAD: Yeah, do you want to—do you want to carry it, Soren?

SOREN WHEELER: Sure.

JAD: Do it.

SOREN: So today, we have a story of an obsession that swallowed reporter Dan Engber pretty much whole.

DAN ENGBER: Yeah.

ROBERT: Of all the things to catch your attention, how did this happen to pop into your head?

DAN ENGBER: It happened to pop into my head because I was talking to a friend of mine who's an elementary school teacher, and we were discussing quicksand, as one does.

ROBERT: Oh, of course. [laughs]

DAN ENGBER: This elementary school teacher and I. And she just said, "You know, the kids in my class just don't even—they don't—they've never heard of quicksand."

SOREN: Like, second graders? Third grade? Like, what?

DAN ENGBER: Nine year olds?

ROBERT: Nine year olds? Well, that's like fourth graders.

SOREN: That's prime time for quicksand.

DAN ENGBER: Right. But so I went to her—I visited her class and I discovered that she was wrong. Almost all of them had heard of quicksand, but she was right insofar as quicksand was not important to them. In fact, they thought it wasn't scary at all. And I was like, "Well, what are you afraid of?" And they said, you know ...

CHILD #1: Zombies. The alien in Pacific Rim.

CHILD #2: Ghosts.

CHILD #3: When I was actually lost and riding.

CHILD #4: Being attacked by a dinosaur.

CHILD #5: That would be totally more scary.

SOREN: So we actually went and talked to some third graders, and while some of them said ...

CHILD #2: Well, I guess it's sort of scary, but ...

SOREN: ... most of them weren't scared of it at all.

CHILD #3: I don't think so. I usually don't think about it.

DAN ENGBER: They thought it was something that maybe their parents had been afraid of.

CHILD #4: My dad told me that when he was little, his friends always said, like, "Look out, that could be quicksand!"

DAN ENGBER: Your friends never say that to you?

CHILD #4: No.

DAN ENGBER: They would say people used to be scared of that, but it's not scary anymore. So that got me to thinking: what happened? Why is quicksand not scary the way it used to be?

SOREN: And with that simple question, Dan got sucked into a world he never even knew existed.

DAN ENGBER: So the next step was going to the internet, and within a minute I discovered the quicksand fetish community.

SOREN: The quicksand fetish ...

DAN ENGBER: Yeah.

SOREN: Like, fetish fetish? Like, sex fetish?

DAN ENGBER: Yes.

SOREN: Oh.

DAN ENGBER: So this—so in the quick—among the quicksand fetishists, there are so-called "sinkers." These are people who seek out quicksand in nature and want to jump in.

ROBERT: With another person and kiss? Or—or by themselves with no clothes on? Or where is the sex part?

DAN ENGBER: Some of them by themselves with no clothes on, some smaller group with another person that they can convince their partner to come with them.

SOREN: But they always have a rope with them, I hope.

DAN ENGBER: Oh yeah. Oh, if you go—if you go onto the sinkers message boards, there's a Google map which has sinking spots all over the world and each one is rated for, you know, thickness, depth, privacy, available parking nearby.

ROBERT: [laughs]

DAN ENGBER: I mean, it's a really—it's like a very thought through and wonderfully collaborative community.

SOREN: Wow!

DAN ENGBER: So there's sinkers in one hand and then there are the watchers. They just want to see people or animals sinking into quicksand. So they'll watch movies, and just find the quicksand sequence in the movie.

SOREN: And here's where Dan sunk even deeper, because he discovered that one of these watchers ...

DAN ENGBER: This guy Krypto ...

SOREN: ... had in the course of his fetishistic quicksand watching ...

DAN ENGBER: ... collated this—you know, this list of well over a thousand quicksand scenes ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's quicksand!]

DAN ENGBER: ... in film and television.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Quicksand!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Quicksand!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: In this part of the country? No way.]

SOREN: There were scenes going all the way back to the birth of filmmaking.

DAN ENGBER: I mean this is the greatest impetus for scientific research ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Why, I oughta take off your shoe and paddle you!]

DAN ENGBER: ... if you cue up, like, a fetishistic interest in the data.

SOREN: And Dan thought maybe this data can give us a clue about how the way we think about quicksand has changed.

DAN ENGBER: So I went through and I pulled out every feature film from the list, and then with information from the MPAA I figured out how many movies were being released every decade. And then I sort of computed a—like, what percent of movies had quicksand in every decade, going back to the first quicksand movie they have is from 1909. It's a silent film where a woman gets rescued from quicksand by some hooded monk.

ROBERT: [laughs]

DAN ENGBER: I'm unable to find this movie, but I'd love to see it. I don't know what it's about. But anyways, I started looking at the number of movies by decade, and at the beginning of the century, it's like one in a thousand movies. By the '30s, it's up to one in 500. And then in the '40s, one in 200. And then in the 1960s, all of a sudden it just shoots up. Like, one in 35, like, almost three percent of Hollywood movies have quicksand. The 1960s are just clearly a moment for quicksand.

SOREN: And Dan says it wasn't just the number of films. The quicksand scenes that showed up in the '60s were serious, dramatic scenes. For example ...

DAN ENGBER: Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole is, you know, pushing through the dust storm to try to save his companion who's being sucked under. That movie won seven Oscars. And then Woman in the Dunes came out, this, like, artsy Japanese, existentialist meditation.

SOREN: And for about the next 10 years, Dan says, you had all these serious films that featured quicksand.

DAN ENGBER: And then ...

SOREN: It fell off dramatically.

DAN ENGBER: In the 1970s, it's already fallen to something like one out of 75. And then by the 1980s, it's like one out of 130, and then in the '90s quicksand is mostly gone.

ROBERT: Huh.

DAN ENGBER: And I think also in the '80s, it had migrated into ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Perfect Strangers: Balki, help!]

DAN ENGBER: ... television.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Perfect Strangers: I'm stuck in quicksand!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Perfect Strangers: Boy, you have a one bad day.]

DAN ENGBER: Larry and Balki in Perfect Strangers are falling into quicksand. There's quicksand in My Little Pony. There's quicksand in Rainbow High. I mean, it's zany quicksand.

SOREN: Basically, Dan says, quicksand had become a joke.

DAN ENGBER: And so—and that's the end, I think, when quicksand's in, you know, Saturday cartoons.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SOREN: I think—I do think that adventure gags probably have a lifespan, so just for a gut check Dan and I decided maybe we should run this past somebody who knows the business.

CARLTON CUSE: I'm Carlton Cuse, and I'm a television writer and producer.

SOREN: And Carlton was actually the showrunner for the TV show Lost.

DAN ENGBER: And that's a show that by rights should have tons of quicksand.

ROBERT: Absolutely.

DAN ENGBER: I mean, they should be in quicksand all the time. They're on—they're stranded on a tropical island, it's an adventure show.

SOREN: But according to Carlton, whenever one of the writers would say, you know ...

CARLTON CUSE: Okay, so Kate goes running down a path, and then all of a sudden she falls into a pit of quicksand ...

SOREN: The rest of them would be like ...

CARLTON CUSE: Um, I don't know if we can really pull that off, so ...

SOREN: What is that? Like, what is it would make that not—I don't know.

CARLTON CUSE: You know, I just think a lot of people would sort of be rolling their eyes, and not—and not buying it.

SOREN: That is ...

CARLTON CUSE: I know, it sounds—it sounds kind of crazy because, you know, here you are making sort of a crazy show with smoke monsters and polar bears and time travel, and for someone to say, "No, no, no. But we don't believe quicksand."

SOREN: [laughs]

CARLTON CUSE: I know it's—but ultimately, you just sort of trust your gut, and just right now we're—quicksand is just not sort of, I think, the right metaphor for how we're all feeling.

DAN ENGBER: But in the '60s, it was.

ROBERT: Has someone speculated as to the reason why the '60s?

DAN ENGBER: Oh, I've speculated at great length. I mean, it's a fascinating moment because it's not just in movies.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: I believe that this nation should commit itself ...]

DAN ENGBER: So we're planning the moon mission in the early '60s.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: ... of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.]

DAN ENGBER: And this Cornell astronomer named Thomas Gold says "What if, when the Apollo lander descends to the surface of the moon, it just sinks into a lunar quicksand?"

ROBERT: I remember this.

DAN ENGBER: You do?

ROBERT: I remember Tom Gold saying that, too.

DAN ENGBER: Yeah. So right at this golden moment of quicksand, people are discussing real life quicksand on the frontier of that era.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martin Luther King: Now is the time ...]

DAN ENGBER: And then 1963, Martin Luther King ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martin Luther King: Now is the time ...]

DAN ENGBER: ... makes his I Have a Dream speech.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martin Luther King: ...to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice.]

DAN ENGBER: And he says now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daniel Ellsberg: This evening ...]

DAN ENGBER: And then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daniel Ellsberg: ... I came here to speak to you about Vietnam.]

DAN ENGBER: There was Vietnam.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daniel Ellsberg: I do not have to tell you that our people are profoundly concerned about that struggle.]

DAN ENGBER: You know, we now think of Vietnam as having been a quagmire, that's the rhetoric that's used now, but the debate in the '60s between Daniel Ellsberg and Arthur Schlesinger, they use quicksand and quagmire interchangeably. They just—Ellsberg will switch off in one essay. He'll call it a quicksand and then a quagmire. But the first use of that idea was to describe it as a quicksand, and then it kind of migrates from being a quicksand to a quagmire over the course of the late '60s, and early '70s. And now—I mean, more evidence. Now we call it a quagmire. We forgot that Vietnam was a quicksand before it was a quagmire. So on all of these levels, quicksand is just—you know, is part of these key moments of the 1960s.

ROBERT: Wow.

DAN ENGBER: So the question that—you know, that was just—I was obsessed with for a long time was: why did America fall into quicksand in the 1960s? My sense is that it had to do with just sort of a generalized anxiety about going someplace radically new. Anxiety about, you know, the hubris of traveling to the moon, anxiety about social upheaval, anxiety about the foreign entanglement of Vietnam and the state of geopolitics.

SOREN: But why—why would that—those anxieties manifest themselves in terms of, like, quicksand?

DAN ENGBER: Well, I think it's this idea that you're gonna get sucked in, you're gonna go too far, you're gonna get stuck in whatever new world you ventured into. And right now, there isn't that anxiety of exploration anymore. I mean quicksand in Shakespeare's time was always off the coasts of new continents. It had to do with the age of exploration, and then it became, you know, desert quicksand and jungle quicksand during colonial era. And I just think the world is ...

SOREN: And then it became the moon.

DAN ENGBER: Yeah, and then it became the moon, and ...

ROBERT: Well, look at all the real estate that's beyond the moon! Come on! I mean, you got, like, our solar system. You could have the quicksand of Jupiter.

DAN ENGBER: Yes, absolutely. I think if we're gonna land humans on some ...

ROBERT: Black holes! Isn't black—aren't black holes a kind of quicksand?

DAN ENGBER: Yeah. This is—this is my guarantee: if we're about to land humans on some planet, you know, beyond the moon, these thoughts of quicksand would re-emerge.

CARLTON CUSE: Oh, yeah.

SOREN: This is Carlton Cuse again.

CARLTON CUSE: And now we're gonna see this whole new chapter of Star Wars, and clearly ...

SOREN: It just so happens that the director JJ Abrams is working on a whole new Star Wars movie.

CARLTON CUSE: Yes. And I think in the context of some strange new world, I think the audience would totally buy quicksand there.

DAN ENGBER: Yeah, that's what I'm—that's what I'm hoping for. [laughs]

CARLTON CUSE: Yeah.

DAN ENGBER: I have another leading indicator of quicksand interest for you.

ROBERT: I have no idea what you're about to say. None. [laughs]

DAN ENGBER: So when I was a kid I played quicksand in the sandbox, but sandboxes disappeared in the 1990s in New York City at least. I don't know what the story was in the rest of the country, but this paper came out in the New England Journal of Medicine and it warned that there might be some asbestos derivative in sandbox sand. And the number of sandboxes in New York City went from something like 900 to 30 or 40 by the mid-'90s.

SOREN: Then those kids that you talked to in that class, they had not likely sat in a sandbox pouring water in the corner and worrying about it.

DAN ENGBER: Right. But sandboxes are back. The new imaginative play movement and playground redesign is just gonna have lots of sand and lots of water. And we want the kids mixing the water and the sand. So who knows? Maybe this is the—this is the front edge of quicksand coming back because kids are playing with water and sand in sandboxes in New York City.

ROBERT: Thank you, Soren.

JAD: Thanks, Soren, yeah.

SOREN: No problem. And I should say thanks to Dan Engber. He's a writer and a columnist at Slate Magazine, where you can find his article about quicksand.

JAD: Yes. And if you're looking to find out anything else about the stories you heard today, check out our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: And thanks.

JAD: Yeah.

-30-

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