[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. Starting with a quick announcement, but a fun one: our merch store, which we're calling Camp Radiolab this time around because there's this great camp-inspired t-shirt, is open for one more week. Head on over to Radiolab.org/shop sometime before July 29. You can get that aforementioned t-shirt as well as hats and sweatbands and other summer gear—water bottle. Once you are decked out in all that Radiolab swag, take a pic, tag us on Insta or Twitter, yeah, just show off your nerdy summer self. We'd love to see it.

LATIF: Again, that is Radiolab.org/shop for all your summer gear needs, which you will need because it is hot! I am sweating. You may be sweating. You may not be able to think about anything other than the next time you can get in a pool or a walk-in freezer or something. But let me ask you about something you are probably not thinking about, which is how are those new year's resolutions from seven months ago, how are you doing with those? I ask because the episode you are about to hear, which is an oldie—it's called You v. You—it's all about this kinda struggle. This struggle between the prudent well-planned version of you that you imagined in the past, and then the impulsive, instant-gratification-chasing you of this moment right now. And if you, like me, are a kind of living, walking mockery of your own imagination of yourself from the past, maybe this episode will help. Who knows? Either way, I hope you enjoy it. Here it is: You v. You.

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, from the top, you ready?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yep.

JAD: Hello.

ZELDA GAMSON: Hello, hello.

JAD: How are you doing?

JAD: We're going to start things off today with this lady.

ZELDA GAMSON: Zelda Gamson. Welcome to our little spot.

JAD: It's beautiful.

ZELDA GAMSON: Thank you.

JAD: She's 80 years old, and these days Zelda lives a quiet life by the sea.

ZELDA GAMSON: On Martha's Vineyard.

ZELDA GAMSON: Did you have some coffee?

JAD: She visits with her grandkids, does some gardening ...

ZELDA GAMSON: We have a birdfeeder, and it is the bird show of the world.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: But life for Zelda wasn't always so calm. Back in the '60s when our story begins, she was a very different kind of lady. She even went by a very different nickname. Just ...

ZELDA GAMSON: Z. [laughs] Okay. I was a smoker 30 years.

JAD: Wow.

ZELDA GAMSON: I started when I went to college in 1954.

JAD: At first it was just a cigarette here and there.

ZELDA GAMSON: Letting the bad girl out a bit. And then I got hooked, really. And I couldn't stop. Went to graduate school, smoked, got my dissertation, got my degree, smoked ...

JAD: And somewhere in the fog she meets ...

MARY: Hi.

ZELDA GAMSON: My friend Mary.

JAD: Also a smoker.

MARY: Love smoking. Made me feel very elegant.

ZELDA GAMSON: [laughs]
MARY: We were very good friends.

ZELDA GAMSON: We were part, in the early '60s, of the Congress on Racial Equality.

JAD: Together they'd organize protests.

ZELDA GAMSON: Well, we would demonstrate.

JAD: And the two of them would even go undercover to fight ...

MARY: Housing discrimination.

JAD: And the backdrop to all of this social change ...

MARY: Smoke.

ZELDA GAMSON: Smoke.

MARY: Yep, you got it. I mean, our houses were filled with these ashtrays.

JAD: How much were you smoking at that point?

MARY: Probably smoked a packet a day.

ZELDA GAMSON: I was a worse smoker than Mary. You know, I was sometimes up to two packs a day.

JAD: Wow.

ZELDA GAMSON: You know, I had kids. I was pregnant.

JAD: You smoked while you were pregnant?

ZELDA GAMSON: I did.

JAD: Wow.

ZELDA GAMSON: Yeah. I feel so guilty about that.

JAD: So, at a certain point Zelda and Mary decide they want to stop.

ZELDA: Yeah.

MARY: Yeah.

JAD: Now Mary, who'd never been as badly addicted as Zelda, it wasn't easy ...

MARY: It was agonizing.

JAD: But eventually she's able to do it. Zelda ...

ZELDA: No. I thought sometimes that I could stop and so I would ...

JAD: Over and over she'd throw out her cigarettes ...

ZELDA: Okay. Done.

JAD: But then ...

ZELDA: Then I'd be around somebody with cigarettes. Oh, F.

JAD: Any reason that she'd give herself.

ZELDA: Cancer, my kids, the smell, the fact that I could die.

JAD: It always lost out to the urge.

ZELDA: And I'd always start smoking again.

JAD: And this is how it would go. Resolve, failure. Resolve, failure. Okay, so this is not the most unusual situation in the world, but the question you want to ask right now is—like—how do you get out of this?

ROBERT: You know, you want to do something badly, but then another part of you says no I don't want to do that. So it's you against you, what do you do?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...

ROBERT: The little deals that you make when you are stuck.

JAD:  With yourself.

JAD: Okay, so before talking with Zelda it just so happened that I went with Adam Davidson ... 

THOMAS SCHELLING: Hi.

JAD: ... one of the Planet Money guys to visit this fellow Nobel Prize-winning economist named Thomas Schelling who's written a whole lot about the seemingly simple idea of ...

THOMAS SCHELLING: Commitment. Arranging it so that you can't compromise. I'll give you an example.

JAD: Here's one from Ancient Greece.

THOMAS SCHELLING: Xenophon the Greek who was being pursued by a huge army of Persians had to make a stand on a hillside, and one of his generals said I don't think this is a good location to make our stand, there's a cliff behind us, there's no way we can retreat if we need to.

JAD: And Xenophon told his General, "Exactly."

THOMAS SCHELLING: Welcome the cliff.

JAD: In fact, he said, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna march our armies so that their backs are directly to the cliff, that way That way ...

THOMAS SCHELLING: The Persians will know that we can never retreat, we are bound to fight to the death.

ROBERT KRULWICH: You're really binding yourself, you're not binding the other side.

THOMAS SCHELLING: Yeah, it's—it's attempting to influence somebody else's choice by restricting your own choice.

JAD: But then we asked him what if your adversary isn't on the outside like the Persians, but rather, it was you?

THOMAS SCHELLING: Hmm.

JAD: How do you do what Xeonophon did to yourself?

THOMAS SCHELLING: Yeah I—I began smoking when I was 17 years old, I—I did quit several times but I always went back.

ROBERT: Ooh.

JAD: But he did tell—he did give us suggestions.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: One in particular that was so awesome to use your favorite word.

ROBERT: I hate. I ...

JAD:  So diabolical that we just didn't think anyone would ever do it. That is until we met Zelda.

ZELDA GAMSON: Yup.

JAD: Fast forward a few decades.

ZELDA GAMSON: 1984.

JAD: Mary and Zelda now live in different parts of the country.

ZELDA GAMSON: I happened to be going to a conference in Vermont and Mary picked me up at the airport ...

MARY: Right.

ZELDA GAMSON: And I was smoking when she picked me up.

MARY: Which was curious because nobody smokes anymore.

ZELDA GAMSON: She said, "Why Zelda, are you still smoking?"

MARY:  And Zelda said ...

ZELDA GAMSON: Yeah, and don't tell me to stop!

JAD: [laughs]

ZELDA GAMSON: I was very belligerent.

MARY: Yes.

ZELDA GAMSON: [laughs] So I went to the conference and smoked ...

JAD: And were they guilty cigarettes?

ZELDA GAMSON: Nope. They were delicious.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: But what Mary said was starting to worm its way into her brain.

ZELDA GAMSON: Are you still smoking?

ZELDA GAMSON: Still smoking?

ZELDA GAMSON: Still smoking?

ZELDA GAMSON: Still smoking?

ZELDA GAMSON: And when she dropped me off at the airport I said, "Okay Mary," as if she had been putting pressure on me, which she wasn't at all. "If I ever smoke again I'm gonna give $5,000 to the Ku Klux Klan."

ROBERT: What?

MARY: Did she say $5,000 to the Ku Klux Klan?

ZELDA GAMSON: Correct.

JAD: This was Schelling's suggestion.

THOMAS SCHELLING: It can work.

JAD: But he didn't think anyone would ever do it.

ZELDA GAMSON: $5,000 to the Ku Klux Klan. It just came out of my mouth. You know how horrible they are, right?

JAD: Sure.

ZELDA GAMSON: So heinous.

JAD: But her and Mary made a deal.

MARY: A pact.

JAD: If Zelda smoked she'd have to tell Mary to send the KKK her money.

ZELDA GAMSON: Take it out of my savings or something.

JAD: And you were really serious, you were going to do this?

ZELDA GAMSON: But I have to say after I made this pledge to Mary under my breath I said but I can't be responsible if she smokes again.

JAD: What? If she smokes again?

ZELDA GAMSON: If she smokes again.

JAD: Who's the she in that sentence.

ZELDA GAMSON: Me.

JAD: You? What does that mean?

ZELDA GAMSON: Well, that means that a part of me—the part of me that was smoking and might pick up smoking again was an alien part.

JAD: You're saying you were two people at that moment?

ZELDA GAMSON: Yeah.

JAD: And she ...

ZELDA GAMSON: Z. Didn't really want to stop smoking.

JAD: She.

ZELDA GAMSON: She, yeah.

JAD: After the pact Zelda says that often when she would fall asleep ...

ZELDA GAMSON: I would dream of myself smoking ...

JAD: And she'd wake up ...

ZELDA GAMSON: In a terrible sweat ...

JAD: Reach for her cigarettes, but every time she says this other thought would just rush into her mind.

ZELDA GAMSON: The KKK.

JAD: Robes burning, crosses, lynches.

ZELDA GAMSON: Oh God!

JAD: And she'd throw the cigarettes down.

ZELDA GAMSON: I couldn't!
JAD: The idea of them having her money ...

ZELDA GAMSON: I couldn't imagine it.

JAD: Sounds like you really backed yourself up against a cliff.

ZELDA GAMSON: I did.

JAD: Zelda had found a thought that was hotter than the urge.

MARY: And she didn't smoke again.

JAD: Never again?

ZELDA GAMSON: No. That was it. Cold turkey.

JAD: Wow.

ZELDA GAMSON: Look at this. There's a picture of me on a cruise that Bill and I took.

MARY: Here she is.

ZELDA GAMSON: It's a profile picture of me.

MARY: Look at the cigarette.

ZELDA GAMSON: I look gorgeous there. That's the best picture ever taken of me.

JAD: Now, if we are many people on the inside—and we've talked about this on the show before—how—like—our brain is literally divided into these camps that sometimes wrestle, fight. Well the problem ...

THOMAS SCHELLING: I think the problem is ...

JAD: According to Thomas Schelling, is that these selves ...

THOMAS SCHELLING: Never exist simultaneously. We're never at the table together. The one who's in charge never confronts the other. I guess that makes it hard to compromise.

ROBERT: Although, you know, there's another way to think about the problem.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Things that are offered right now have so much more power than things that are offered in the future.

ROBERT: This is David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist, and he says, you know, really, you can think about this whole thing as a battle about time.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: We'll make all sorts of very poor economic decisions.

ROBERT: Now versus later, really ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: If something is offered right now, versus later. When you look at the neuroimaging, it becomes clear that there are different parts of the brain that are—that are battling this out.

JAD: And the now parts are always stronger.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes. Here's the key. What she's doing in the case of the cigarettes is she's saying "I know that I want to win this long-term battle, but I'm having a heck of a time doing it. But if I can make the long term plan tied into a different immediate feeling of disgust, then all I have to do is have the disgust battle the—the desire ...

ROBERT: I see, so she's—what she's done is she's turned this battle into a present tense battle on both sides. I want a cigarette now ...

JAD: Versus I hate the KKK now ...

ROBERT: Now ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Precisely.

ROBERT: So it's a now versus now thing.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: And I think that's the only way we ever win these long term battles is give them some sort of emotional salience. Some reason why they matter to us right now, otherwise it will never work.

JAD: And there are a number of ways of doing this. Here is how Thomas Schelling did it.

THOMAS SCHELLING: 1980. Gather my children together and I said, I quit, and that they should never have respect for their father again if I return to smoking.

ROBERT: And he never—he never did?

JAD: Yeah, that was it for him.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: The thing I—the thing I like about—about those two stories is that like there's the case where, like, okay say you've got these cells battling in your head, you've got the now part, the later part, and the later part is weak, in this case the later part found a way to trick the now parts. And this has a name, this kind of approach, it's called the Ulysses contract, in the Iliad ...

ROBERT: Make that the Odyssey.

JAD: There's a moment where Ulysses and his men have to sail past the island of the Sirens, and Ulysses knows if they hear the Siren's song they're dead ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Sailors were so attracted to these melodies that they would steer towards them and crash their ships into the rocks and die. So, on his way there, before the music started, he came up with a plan, he had his men lash him to the mast with ropes so that he couldn't move and he had them fill their own ears with beeswax, and he said, "No matter what I do, no matter how I'm gesticulating or shouting like a crazy man just keep rowing, just keep going."

JAD: And so, when they got to the sirens Ulysses ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN: He goes nuts, and he's screaming and yelling and telling the men, "Go towards the women! We don't want to pass this up", and of course the men have beeswax in their ears, they're not swayed by the Sirens' song.

JAD: Because he had planned for this.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: The present tense Ulysses ...

JAD: By using his men and the rope had literally bound ...

DAVID EAGLEMAN:  ...the future Ulysses ...

JAD: ... to the mast, because he knew that guy would be weak.

ROBERT: We can just move off ocean the for just a moment. 

JAD: Gone. Get out of here ocean.

ROBERT: [laughs] Radio. What a weird medium. Anyway ...

JAD: [laughs] 

ROBERT: Anyway, what if the bargain you strike isn't just about something, you know, very small and now like this puff of smoke, what if it's a deal that you have to do that will decide what you're going to do every day of the next 40 years.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: What then?
JAD: Well, this brings us to a story from our producer Pat Walters, ready?

PAT WALTERS: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Okay, set it up.

PAT: Okay.

PAT: Okay, I'm in Chinatown.

PAT: About a year ago.

PAT: Corner of Pell and Ma.

PAT: My friend Jenny posted something on Twitter, it said: Overheard, "I flipped a coin and I lost my life."

JAD: I flipped a coin and lost my life?

PAT: Yes.

JAD: And what's Twitter?

PAT: [laughs] 

JAD: No, I mean she—she actually heard someone say this?

PAT: Yeah, she was just like—she's a reporter, she was just chatting with the guy and he—and he said that to her. 

PAT: I flipped a coin and I lost my life.

JAD: Wow, what was the context?

PAT: Well, she was getting a massage in Chinatown.

JAD: And how would that phrase come up in the middle of a massage?

PAT: I don't—I honestly don't know.

JAD: But she's a reporter did she—didn't she ask?

PAT: She didn't—I ...

JAD: She didn't say, "Get your hands off me, man, and tell me the story ..."

PAT: I don't know exactly what went down, but I asked her what the situation was, she said that she basically didn't know anything. But ...

JAD: She just heard that ...

PAT: She heard it and she told me that it was at this place that was either at one of seven different addresses that she gave me so I just wandered around.

PAT: Do—do you know of some place around here called Health Trail—massage place?

VOICE: I have no idea.

PAT: No?

PAT: Wandered around to several different addresses ...

PAT: Damn.

PAT: And eventually I found this tiny little store front.

PAT: There's a little sign with some feet. Hello.

PAT: Kind of hidden.

VOICE: Oh, you want to see my—my son?

PAT: And I found the guy who said the thing.

PAT: Hi.

DENNIS: Hi.

PAT: How are you?

PAT: His name is Dennis.

DENNIS: Dennis.

PAT: And I just asked him, "Tell me about this coin flip."

PAT: Can you tell me—can you—so when did this happen?

DENNIS: Well it happened about four years ago. I was 26 and my brother was 21.

PAT: Both of them had gone to college, Dennis for photography, his brother for art. And they come out of school with these big dreams.

DENNIS: Seeing new places, meeting new people, making a life and making money.

PAT: But that hadn't really worked out.

JAD: Yeah.

DENNIS: No job for me.

PAT: They're having a hard time finding jobs and they ended up living at home with their dad.

DENNIS: Yeah, with my dad. So basically I'm just staying at home, taking pictures. And my brother ...

PAT: He's just working at a restaurant.

DENNIS: No life either.

JAD: So this is basically post-college flail.

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: Like they're stuck.

DENNIS: Stuck in the middle of the road. That's what happened to us.

PAT: One day their dad comes up to them and says, "Look guys ..."

DENNIS: "One of you guys gotta take over for me."

PAT: I need one of you, I don't care which one of you, but I need one of you to take over the family business.

DENNIS: My father is getting old he has decided either both of you come out, or one of you come out.

JAD: Oh, so one of them now has to carry on his—his thing.

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: But what does his dad do?

PAT: He runs this massage parlor.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: Sons were not interested.

KAI WU: So yeah. Neither of us want—really wanted to do it.

PAT: That's Kai.

KAI WU: Kai Wu.

PAT: Dennis's little brother.

DENNIS: Because touching people's foot is some kind of disgusting, right?

KAI WU: You know there's always a hairy guy, or like some girl with, like, busted toes.

DENNIS: Disgusting and annoying. Facing his father for twenty-four hours, seven days a week.

KAI WU: Yeah, a little more than I can take. Like, I love my dad. [laughs]

DENNIS: But you just don't want to follow your dad's footstep.

PAT: But their dad says, "Get over it. This is about family."

DENNIS: Keeping the business alive. Keeping the technique he has alive in the whole Chinatown. I don't think any massage place or any therapy place would have my father's technique.

JAD: It's a special kind of thing?

PAT: Yeah, it's this, like, deep tissue, acupressure ...

DENNIS: It's painful.

PAT: ... type massage.

DENNIS: I don't know if Jenny told you that.

PAT: No.

DENNIS: It's really, really painful.

PAT: Anyhow, they're sitting at home and this question is kind of like silently hanging over them for days and weeks. 'Til one day, they're at a friend's place having some tea talking about their dad and Dennis looks up at his brother and says ...

DENNIS: Let's make a bet.

KAI WU: Let's do the tea leaves thing.

JAD: The what?

KAI WU: Let's see what the—what the tea leaves say.

PAT: Well, Dennis says when you're drinking loose tea the Chinese way you put the leaves right in the bottom of your cup and you pour the water over them and usually the leaves float up to the top flat on the surface of the tea. But every now and then ...

DENNIS: Every ten cups you might see the tips is floating and the rest of the body is inside the water.

PAT: So like the stem, sort of?
DENNIS: Yeah, yeah.

PAT: And then the leaf is hanging down?

DENNIS: Yeah.

JAD: You mean, like, every so often instead of the whole leaf being on top of the water the leafy part just falls to the bottom? And then ...

PAT: Yeah, and just the—the tip of the stem is touching the—the surface of the water, almost like it's hanging down from the surface of the water.

JAD: And this is rare?

PAT: Yeah.

DENNIS: So when you get that, it means it's good luck.

PAT: And is that like a traditional ...

DENNIS: It's for the old people that was doing it, that's how we understand it when we was kids. So we just decide okay, whoever get that ...

PAT: Whoever gets the most lucky tea leaves.

DENNIS: Win. Whoever win you're out. You don't need to work for my dad. Whoever lost followed my father footstep.

JAD: They trusted their whole future to this?

PAT: Yeah.

KAI WU: It was—it was like a spur of the moment thing.

PAT: It—it was.

KAI WU: Yeah, we didn't—yeah we didn't really plan anything.

DENNIS: It's like sometimes people just flip a coin. Like they can't figure out which way should they go so they just flip a coin. When he pour—pour the hot water in they were, like, rolling around like a small tornado inside, they were spinning.

PAT: And then ...

DENNIS: Once it's done ...

PAT: Each cup has a layer of tea leaves on the surface, and Dennis notices ...

DENNIS: I was like whoa, look at it.

PAT: That he'd gotten one.

DENNIS: One piece. I was like wow. It was, like, incredible.

PAT: Then he looked over to his brother's cup.

DENNIS: Oh my God.

PAT: Way more of these lucky leaves.

KAI WU: It was pretty obvious that he lost.

PAT: It wasn't even close?

KAI WU: No. [laughs]

PAT: Do you remember if he was, like, angry or?

KAI WU: He looked like he was deep in thought. I remember thinking, like, damn!

DENNIS: It was—like, it was the worst thing in my life.

PAT: And it basically was. Because now he was bound by these tea leaves to go and work for his dad.

PAT: What happened? Did you ...

DENNIS: The first day I come here to work I don't feel like touching anybody's foot. So he forced me to touch the foot.

PAT: Did he have to like grab your hand and ...

DENNIS: He would just sit down, take off his shoes without washing his feet. Okay, that's kind of disgusting so—he just tell me to try to work on it.

PAT: His dad eventually said, "Practice on your friends."

DENNIS: I was like, "Oh God, no. They still hate me right now for giving them all the pain."

PAT: When that was gone, do you remember, like, what was going through your head? Were you like, "What am I doing?" Did you feel like you were on the wrong track?

DENNIS: Well, uh, I don't know how to explain it ...

PAT: Here's the funny thing, Dennis says that there came a point ...

DENNIS: After a month working on my father's feet it don't feel disgusting anymore. I feel kind of like it.

JAD: He likes it?

PAT: Yeah.

DENNIS: I don't know why. It just, like, making me. It seems nice to work on people. I don't know how to explain. I just start falling in love with this job.

PAT: Yeah.

DENNIS: I don't know how else it happened, I just started working here seven days a week. It has become part of my life. Wake up in the morning. Come here. Work. Go home. Sleep. Come in and work. So it's—it's become part of my life. You know—I got a day off, I don't know where to go. I'm just staying home. I may come back out here and work. That's what happens. It's just—I—I think that's how falling in love is. You don't know how it's happened, when it's happened, it just happen. It was a good lose, I was thinking. I love this job.

JAD: So it sounds like he made this deal with fate and just got lucky.

PAT: No.

JAD: No?

PAT: Kai has a slightly different read on the whole thing.

PAT: Well, so if he had won would you have to do it?

KAI WU: No.

PAT: No?

KAI WU: No.

PAT: Kai says the whole tea leaf deal was really about Dennis.

KAI WU: I think at that point in the back of his head he wanted to do it. 

PAT: Just an excuse.

KAI WU: I think he was just looking for a sign ...

PAT: I have to ask him, because ...

PAT: And when I did ask Dennis, he didn't really agree with his brother.

DENNIS: Well, it is, how you say ...

PAT: But he didn't entirely disagree either.

DENNIS: Not that because I wanted to do it, it's kind of I am using my brother to push me to work for my dad.

PAT: What do you—what do you mean by that?

KAI WU: I don't think he wanted to make his own decision.

DENNIS: It might be better to just work for my dad but I don't want to face him. So if my brother just push me, okay I'll be facing him.

PAT: Ah.

DENNIS: That's—that could be what happened.

JAD: So he just needed a push. All right.

ROBERT: What a wimpy thing to do though, you know, when you think about it.

JAD: Why is that wimpy?

ROBERT: Well, I mean he—he wanted to be a masseuse, you know and ...

JAD: He didn't know what he wanted.

ROBERT: No, he knew, and he set up his brother to make him do it.

JAD: No. No. If—if you call it wimpy.

ROBERT: I call it wimpy.

JAD: I call it powerfully wimpy. Muscularly wimpy.

ROBERT: Meaning what? What does that mean?

JAD: Meaning that—oh I got one for you, I'm gonna lay this—you ready for this? Maybe the new strength is understanding your own wimpiness. What do you think about that? Oh, I just tied—I just tied you into a philosophical knot right there, buddy. You're going to be thinking about that one for years.

ROBERT: I'm thinking about it, I'm overthinking about it now and I ...

JAD: Just take it in, take it in. The complexity ... [laughs]

ROBERT: Can I speak now?

JAD: No, David's gonna say something.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: This is who we are. I mean, that's the reality on the ground. We're just weak, we need help, and I actually think this gives—this gives us a new way to think about and understand virtue. I think it gives us a much richer view of human nature.

JAD: Thanks to Pat Walters, our Chinatown correspondent, and to Thomas Schelling, who's written many, many books, including The Strategy of Conflict, and to Adam Davidson from the amazing Planet Money team, and to David Eagleman.

LATIF: Something to note since this story aired is that Thomas Schelling passed away in 2016 at the age of 95, and Mary Belenke passed away in 2020 at the age of 87. David Eagleman released a new book in 2020 called Livewired. You should check it out. It's a great read.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Bowen Wang. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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