The Memory Palace

Aug 27, 2019

Nate DiMeo was preoccupied with the past, and how we relate to it, from a very young age. For the last decade or so he's been scratching this itch with The Memory Palace, a podcast he created. He does things very differently than we do, but his show has captured the hearts of Radiolab staffers, past and present, time and time again. 

So we decided to get Nate into the studio to share a few of his episodes with us and talk to us about how and why he does what he does. He brought us stories about the Morse Code, the draft lottery, and then he hit us with a brand new episode about a bull on trial, that bounces off a story we did pretty recently.

More history on scrub bulls.

Follow @thememorypalace on Twitter.

This episode was produced with help from Bethel Habte. 

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

 

Other staff favorites:

Zulu Charlie Romeo

Notes on an Imagined Plaque

Snakes!

Outliers

 

Play Episode

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wait you're listening you're listening to Radio Lab radio from WNYC

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that means I'm one of two bowls wow that's amazing in the 1960s hey I'm Chad album Rod I'm Robert krulwich Radiolab females there's so much genetic similarity among them the effective population size is less than 50 so this despite there being nine million of them there's really only 50 cows out there like that's true of bananas to right it's like all bananas belong to one banana or a little while ago we got into the studio with

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Aaron wheeler who is our what is he executive he's managing editor managing editor and we were as you heard we were in the kind of conversation about cow genetic so reasons that will become clear later I was gonna see if I can see something about the milk production because Roxy the real reason that we were in the studio with Sauron was to talk to Steve here I am here I yeah I do this guy Nate demaio know I'm here he does a podcast called The Memory Palace been doing it for about a decade now and I'm here

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in marketplace where I used to work for many years so it's a little bit like coming back to high school I feel like I'm roaming down the Halls being like hey man where hey there used to be water fountain there every episode he tells a history story but it's done so personally and so carefully and so differently than we do it and we do it we just thought well we want you to hear what he does and from time to time it's something we do we want to present the the people that Inspire us and so

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so what we what we plan to do here is just give you a taste so we're going to play a few Nate demaio pieces we're going to talk about it right after and in the end he's going to debut a new one that he made kind of with us in mind that's where they will be cows again but before we get to that for me personally the one that really sort of just like made me have to sit down and just like just think for a while is when Robert sent me the Morris code thing you did for sure I was like God damn that was good there's not there's not a wasted decision

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in that entire piece and like as an editor I pretty much can say that about oh nothing else oh maybe nothing ever ever and so it's just it's just kind of perfect so you want to play it yeah play it unless you might not remember it that well it's which one is called distance oh here it is I think it's episode 44 so I'm going to hit play hopefully we'll hear something this is the Memory Palace and they de Mayo Samuel Finley briefs Morris spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint

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at and over at Yale in London at the Royal Academy he studied the works of the Masters to learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shut her out of me Royal and Shadow and crosshatch to learn how Rafael someone that spark of inner life with a single stroke of Pure White and the Dusky ochre of a noblewoman zai to learn how to create illusions of space and distance to learn how to conjure the ineffable

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through the mere aggregation of lines and dots and stretch canvas he learned how to paint in 1825 Morris is living in New Haven Connecticut with his wife Lucretia and two young sons in a third child was on the way do you any day one night a courier delivered a message the city of New York wanted to pay more as a thousand dollars to paint a portrait of the Marquis De Lafayette the hero of the Revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of the war and he would sit for morse

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if the painter can leave right away so he packed his easel and his brushes and his paints and close that we're good enough to wear when meeting a man like Lafayette

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and he kissed his pregnant wife and he left that night on another night a week later

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Morse was in his rented studio in Washington preparing for the arrival of the next morning of his distinguished subject he heard a knock on the door and there was a courier breathless and dirty from A Hard Ride on Hard Road handing him a note that was five words long your dear wife is convalescent

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he left that night he rode for six days straight on Horseback and in the backs of juddering wagons wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of October nights and when he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue

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he learned that his wife was dead

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in fact she had died before The Courier knocked on his door and Washington in fact she had already been buried

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some morning while he was on the road while he was racing home to be by her side and sit with her while she got better

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Samuel Finley briefs Morse spent the next 45 years of his life trying to make sure no one would have to feel the way he felt that night ever again

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Samuel Finley briefs Morse

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spent the next 45 years inventing the telegraph to turn real space and real distance into illusion

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in developing Morse code

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dots and lines that could transmit the stuff of real lives and of dying wives

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that is such a great last line lost lies and dying while asshole well thank you fellas just think about the lushness of the writing like you're not just Galloping down a road like you you're in a blanket and it's night time and you're out of breath and you can you can see so clearly there are very few sentences Conjuring up so such a such a lot of paint you know the one that got me in that was the running through the fallen leaves when he's got

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back almost to his house that rendered the running through the fallen leaves to get to the door that one just a movie yeah took place in my mind in about yeah yeah well if I mean I'm kind of glad that you guys chose to play this one not I sort of forget about it sometimes but it sort of does seem to be a favorite of some folks I think in some ways just because I think that it's fun that it's so short but at the end of it folks want wind up moved and I mean some of that I think

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I just chalk up to the fact that you play the dying wives card and you can you can I think I can get you a long way but it's what I'm sort of trying to do to have you walking away feeling like oh I see where this guys coming from my I felt this way before Nate what have you always gravitated to history why yeah how did this happen yeah yeah go on with us I really I think that I'm not much of a history buff

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I really did not I like fiction a lot more I like I like movies a lot more but I have been fascinated with the past and how it works since I was very very young like it's been a preoccupation of mine like I you know I I've just very distinctly remember going on vacation to Colorado when I was four or five and hearing a Kenny Rogers song that was on the radio during one particular drive and then being like seven or eight and being really struck you know back home

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Providence you know two or three years later how how just powerful it was to just hear you know Lucille or whatever on the radio you know or Coward of the County or whatever it might have been and and really be brought back to that moment that something could feel so real you know right there in a different context and you know similarly I spent you know a lot of my youth sitting around my grandparents

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table listening to family stories and you know I like to you know both sides of my family our big story tellers and so you know I would hear the family lore sort of over and over again and I would hear the debate about you know the best way to tell the story that no no no the that's right so what you need to say first is that you know so dad was 8 and Yuri let's get this straight he wasn't 10 it's important that he was eight and that that's the

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the day that he decided to steal the car and drive it around the block and one of the stories that was told over and over again referred back to a time that my mom's dad was this kind of particularly during the Depression was his kind of jack-of-all-trades you know he he fixed car batteries and and did a number of things to kind of feed the family and one of the things that he did was drive a cab which I from what I understand it was essentially just sort of depression Uber it was some borrowed car that he would give people a ride in

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and he was driving up the hill up the east side of Providence on the way to Brown University I believe Waterman Street which is the steepest street these like struggling with his clutch and he's trying to just keep this car going up this hill and while he was doing that the passenger in the back seat put his feet on the floor boards and went through the bottom of the car and then we suddenly had to run along with the car like Fred Flintstone

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until they could get to say what they fell he says his with the bottom yes delete what a rare right through to the ground oh my God and so this is a story that was worth telling at Christmas or what not but I very distinctly remember being in high school in my first car in my Volkswagen Rabbit driving stick on that same Hill with like friends in the car being so sort of elated to be

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a teenager behind the wheel and and you know driving over to go to the record store and just feeling like young and alive and then realizing like oh shoot I don't know if I can get up this hill because I don't know if I can handle the clutch in this thing I'm already smelling the you know the burning clutch and engine was just like oh yeah this is that he'll you know here I am in my own youth having a moment on the same Hill so you have like the you have Whispers from the

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last exam time it's sort of like you've been there so long and your family's been there that every step you take is a step already taken in some way yeah anyway yeah is there any way we can get ourselves countered into another yeah which one so won't just like I don't even I think numbers might actually have the words numbers next to the file the other ones are all serious I could go 94 numbers yes you numbers yeah just it's 936 does that go just go ahead right here we go this is the Memory Palace I'm Nate de Mayo

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maybe you remember I don't the goals of the CBS News special report which follows Mayberry RFD will not be presented tonight but will return next week at it regularly scheduled time over most of these stations the draft lottery the news came on maybe you were just going to watch Mayberry RFD and we're surprised maybe you had scheduled your whole week or more cancel plans got off work to be there in front of the set

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on December 1st 1969 are you listened on the radio in the living room with your folks like it was 1940 your father pacing like his father might have done in 1940

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your mom there with her brave face on a shun her cigarette growing long or you were listening on the little transistor radio propped up on the shelf above the sink and your dishwashing job with all the guys in the kitchen each of you hanging on every number the one older dude north of 30 keeping his mouth shut for once maybe you got in the car to listen because the reception was better he said but really you just want it to be out of the house away from your roommates or your girl or everyone

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just wanted to be driving maybe you remember

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I don't the news broke in and there was a reporter Roger Mudd from CBS he's young and handsome in the video on YouTube

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I didn't realize you'd ever been young and handsome tonight for the first time in 27 years the United States has again started a draft lottery and the famous first pick tonight a September 14th the first birthday that now is designated double 0 1 which means for 19 year olds born on September 14th beginning in January okay draft boards will induct those men born on September 14th

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performance the next birthday in Order April 24th and so on Down the Line this evening and so on Down the Line

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it was the first draft lottery since the fall of 1940 a little over a year before the u.s. entered World War Two but Washington knew where the whole thing was heading by then

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twenty million men ages 21 to 36 had to register had to have their birthday attached to a number one through 366 there was an extra number for a leap day babies so those numbers could be written on slips of paper so those 366 slips of paper could be put into 366 capsules and put into a bowl there was a big ceremony

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the Secretary of War was blindfolded with a Swatch of fabric cut from a chair used during the signing of the Declaration of Independence he drew a capsule from the bowl that had been stirred with the paddle made from a beam from the ceiling of Liberty Hall and handed it to the president in thousands of people united only by their citizenship by the various outcomes of cascading games of chance of timing and biological processes and happenstance that it meant each was born male

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and that particular day in the calendar during this narrow window of years would be sent off to war

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there was less ceremony 1969 there was no blindfold no relics to wrap that night in the spirit of the founding just carpet and curtain in the beiges and Browns a vietnam-era bureaucracy no president or Cabinet member to do the honors Nixon left the number of polling to Selective Service officials in their secretaries number 14

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September 14 0 0 1 and at least one young man from the president's youth advisory Council om ma RI Rhode Island there was supposed to be others but others refused said they didn't want to be used as props by the Nixon Administration

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but the numbers were pulled anyway drawn from Blue capsules drawn from a clear Bowl in full view of the camera so no one could call foul on the process at least and slips of paper were read out and stuck on bulletin boards printed date posted beside numbers listed in order of 0 0 1 2 3 6 6

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you just waited

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waited to hear your birthday called the date you know better than any other waited to hear it called out and posted beside what would be your draft number that would determine when you had to report for induction you even waited through commercials and here's the Norelco Santa with some new ways to say Merry Christmas give the Norelco tripleheader with a cord or in a rechargeable model give the inexpensive flip top 20 or the new battery Court

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and say Merry Christmas to the ladies with a lady Norelco shaver or beauty salon Norelco even our name says Merry Christmas

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February 29th and another night later there would be another lottery drawing letters this time it would determine the precise order in which men who shared the same birthday would have to report to be inducted those with the initials JSM before JJs or J RS or whatever later there would be a study as statistical analysis that suggested the drawing of dates wasn't truly random that the bowl wasn't stirred well enough that December birthdays weren't picked off in enough early enough

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but the numbers called on that Friday night in the winter of 69 with stand

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and so 850,000 men would wait hearts and throats me bouncing fingers drumming on steering wheels whatever that thing they would do when they were nervous was when they were waiting for something some game of chance to set the course of their life that might up and every plan they'd laid - whatever hopes they had harbored for their life might end their life

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that would go on to separate their generation into draftees and deferments and Dodgers was doing it already that night as they watched and heard their friends birthdays get called and we're glad it wasn't theirs does it stand around in the kitchen comforting A co-worker that the war would be over before his 37 mentee ever had to go to Vietnam hoping that was true or they knew already that the guy who pulled 224 was never going to have to make good on his promise to run to Canada

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they had to look their brother in the eye when he had 16

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you had 172

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there are sitting on the warm hood of a car in a field in a cold night their best friend his birthday they always remembered because it was Valentine's Day which meant he was number four

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and they got him good and drunk

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and so on Down the Line February 19th December 14th July 21st June 5th March 2nd October 31st May 24th April 1st March 17th November 2nd August 24th of May 11th October 30th December 11th May 13th December 10th July 13th December 9th August 16th August 2nd November 11 May 27th

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August 8th September 3rd July 7th November 7th December 22nd

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it's one of those times where I mean I wasn't around for Samuel morse's decision about me but this is when I was just sitting I was parked right in the middle of as I was pretty much everybody my age and I remember how it felt like being at the edge of a whirlpool

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you're standing there and just hearing this these numbers and

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I don't think there was anything any other time in my life where the social compact that I had made to be a citizen of this country in argument with a war in my case sort of no argument with the draft I thought the draft was sensible but the

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it's a strange strange Serendipity like that your soup you can do nothing but get sucked in or spit out were you watching TV when no I couldn't I was listening to the radio I was one of those people I couldn't listen to anyone else and I came up fairly early oh well you were by yourself when you yeah uh-huh yeah so I knew I was going to only when I and I had yeah I was called and everything what was your number 54 throat yeah

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so

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wow yeah I was alone at that time yeah that moment I think more alone than

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maybe I was prepared for but putting that aside it's just sort of amazing that you could not be old enough to know that in somehow deliver a version of it that feels so

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gorgeously true yeah this is kind of interesting form of translation here like you could translate yourself into a moment just based on details like Roger muds voice and his appearance yeah how did you did you did you come across a clip and think Hmm and it captured you order or was this sitting around the kitchen table your family telling stories yeah I mean it was a little bit is a little bit of that I remember talking to my dad about it once I remember talking to you know being a teenager during the start of the Gulf War and wondering if

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if you know I happen to you know our generation happen to you know have caught that you know fastball to the chin and wondering where that would lead and whether you know it was going to be the kind of defining thing for my generation that Vietnam had been for my dad's and so I do remember talking to him about it and remember His specific story and he had actually mentioned feeling like it hadn't been publicized that it was going to be on TV

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and so he woke up at the crack of dawn to get them you know that get the newspaper you know and ran down to the to the newsstand or the coffee shop or whatever and then flip through and was you know thrilled to find out it was you know 211 or something like that but then you know had a similar thing which actually I didn't he didn't tell me about until after this story which is he had he had sort of a similar situation where he met up with his buddies and they all like you know met like I'm not sure if this is true but whether

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he told me this or this is Just My Imagination Running Wild but I think that they went to the place where they played basketball and like you know hung out on the court and waited for everyone to assemble and then kind of said oh you're 73 or you're 85 or yo your 303 oh you know to you lucky so-and-so oh I'm nine and I'm probably going to have to be there in March and this story in a lot of ways is just wrestling with this thread that kind of shoots through the whole project to the Memory Palace of thinking about the ways that you know history

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three constrains or freeze us so my interest in telling the story is not only like oh here's a thing that is really fascinating that is worth putting into the memory palaces the thing worth remembering but the story is sort of explicitly about and this is one of the only Stars where I bring myself into it that like you might remember I don't that there's going to be a separation among listeners about what this story means but it is about that separation this is ultimately a story about the

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life's lottery in a way because he that phrase you repeat twice you might remember I don't in some sense you're saying you were chosen one one group of people were chosen by fate and another weren't ya and somehow the it's it's that well I remember here is like you could have numbers from 1 to 3 66 and Nate's on was saying my number is a mill you know like yeah exactly Millie is really interesting I thought they accomplishment of it was though to collapse that distance

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yeah I remember but I don't but then you deliver it in such a way that you just can get the same

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sort of sense of Terror and random deep Randomness and then also the collateral damage like the looking into a friend's I stuff is that's very hood of the car well I think that some I mean some of it is some of it is kind of those sorts of details evoke very specific things to me but that I know existed in 1969 like I can picture the inner the inner workings of of a kitchen you know at a restaurant and who the employees are and

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no the way they trash talk or the way they job or whatever it might be but you know in often cases like you know I don't know what you know it's the past in the past there is this unknown you know you know I really the past isn't have you ever run across the so we have a on our staff let the sure you know you know know well and one of his phrases and he was a history of science right he always he throws around the phrase that the past is a foreign country I don't think it's I mean I that is true for Nate

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that ain't no no I think that you're describing it in walking around it like it's your hometown know to me it might as well be Middle-earth like I think that there's an inherent kind of magical unreality to the Past like whenever you know I'm fascinated by the idea that just that there are a million books about Abraham Lincoln and I'm barely exaggerating but all you've got is the sort of kaleidoscopic understanding of this person that sort of once walked the Earth so I can know that Abraham Lincoln was a real guy

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I mean I understand that and of course there are material like he's incredibly consequential historical figure and there are there are you know people walking around today who are walking around because of the actions that he took but that said he lives in this sort of world of like dreams and Imagination there's this magic to the Past there's this there's this you know the past like you know it there's a sort of Link literal haunting you know that these are just sort of spector's

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and I find that alone really fascinating

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we're going to take a brief break but when we come back and it's got one more piece to play us do you guys want to hear a new one I have a new one that's here this is something that had been bouncing around in his head for a while until it bounced off of something that we did recently yeah so stick around we'll be right back

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my name is Patrick been catch and I'm calling from the beautiful kingdom of sos Heaney 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.tsiyon.org seeable nagulu

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Jad Robert Radiolab so we are talking to Nate demaio from The Memory Palace and he has one more piece to play which we will hear now yeah I I was realizing you know as often happens with these stories have this giant list of stuff that I will write down you know like oh there's this Italian immigrant woman once married a Zulu man who was on display in a dime store Museum oh maybe there's a thing that I can do with that at some point and

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I was realizing recently that on this list of stories was something that I had been wanting to do for a while like I had stumbled upon the the research of a guy at a Duke named Gabriel Rosenberg that was just like oh man there's clearly a story in there and it took me awhile as it always does to kind of Find the meaning and I won't spoil any of this but it has I was excited to play it for you guys in particular because I had just spent

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rent a fair amount of time listening to a long series that you guys did recently and I think that they kind of bump up against each other in a nice way cool should we play yeah maybe Kyle gets across and then the defendant was led into the courtroom on a rope

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he was met with laughter even from the jury

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he was charged with vagrancy and larceny highway robbery and disturbing the peace in the judge informed the jurors that though the death penalty was typically reserved for murder and treason the various crimes of which the defendant was accused were so serious there are harm was so Dreadful if he was guilty he would be executed

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the defendant didn't follow any of this he didn't speak the language he had no understanding of the Fate that awaited also he was a bull he was a male cow so that's why and I could have teased it out some more and played with your expectations a bit longer but at some point that would get kind of hacky not to mention confusing when I told you as a will now that the judge informed the jury that after being executed the defendant would be eaten and at that point it would be kind of disrespectful both to you the listener into the

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because his life was indeed at stake there in a makeshift courtroom in a ballpark in Waynesboro Pennsylvania in September of 1920 for it one of likely hundreds of Trials conducted during the 1920s and 30s in so-called courts of bovine Justice officials at the US Department of Agriculture wanted to encourage Dairy Farmers and cattle ranchers to purchase purebred pedigreed bulls with the goal of eventually eradicating also called scrub Bulls basically the mutts of the bovine world

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Leif was that purebred Bulls produce tears that produce more milk or had bigger more delicious bodies and so they came up with the idea of holding literal show trials in farming and ranching communities around the country in which a single scrub bull would be charged with Grievous crimes namely that being a less than maximally profitable food product or breeding machine was tantamount to theft and then over the course of the proceedings the jury in the gathered audience would become convinced that their own scrub

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bowls had to go it was a show in evenings entertainment all fun and games unless you were the bull and unless you peered behind the curtain

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the Department of Agriculture was far from the only scientific or governmental body promoting what it saw as the benefits of selective breeding

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you Genesis were also out to improve the human race by guiding evolution in part by ridding the human population over time of people with undesirable genetic traits or at least traits they believed to be genetic disabilities mental illness criminality alcoholism even poverty American scientists were at the Forefront of this movement as we're American state legislators 29 of which passed laws allowing the

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for sterilization of people they deemed unfit to breed the Fate that befell at least 64 thousand Americans in when eugenic principles were embraced by the Third Reich well

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anyway the app Department thought the latest in scientific thinking should be shared in the Heartland so a staff writer named Alice Stockwell Birch of the usda's Bureau of animal industry typed up a pamphlet titled outline for conducting scrubs higher trials it was written with a wit and imaginative flare the one would assume mr. Burch rarely got to deploy as a staff writer for the usda's Bureau of animal industry 23 pages that contain the entirety of scrub bull jurisprudence such as it was in

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out in easy-to-follow steps how you two could hold your own scrub bull trial such as the one convened in Waynesboro Pennsylvania in 1924 during the first weekend of fall held at 7 p.m. so farmers and breeders in Boy Scouts and Merchants in all of Franklin County it seemed could come out to see it hundreds seated in bleachers under electric lights on a purpose-built platform a glow in the center of the field there was music as per the pamphlet it was good to have a band on hand

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and both to entertain the attendees and assuming all went according to plan to play a funeral dirge after the verdict there was a judge a real one the booklet said this was better in real clerks and real bailiff people who knew their way around a courtroom who knew how to hit their marks when they live the defendant through the Gap in the bleachers to the place where he would stand in front of the bench in the jury box as the judge laid out the charges against him there was a script the judge would follow though he could improvise

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Isis he saw fear jokes in banter in local color were all strongly encouraged but when it got down to the bull he should stick to the script and lay it on thick

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that the defendant is one of the gang of robbers which operates in Franklin County it during the whole of its worthless career has been an ungrateful consumer of valuable per vendor that the defendant is an unworthy father of progeny and so on something's wrong optional a hearse with black bunting the funeral oration the clergyman to deliver it but there should be lawyers real ones and so there were in Waynesboro in Witnesses local breeders

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Farmers there to lend their expertise and backup the prosecution's claims that the defendant the bull right there rope looped around its neck it's soft ears forward its tail flicking electric lights reflected in its wide round eyes that bull had cost is owner countless thousands in lost wages was in fact a rank imposter a danger to the herd and by virtue of his nature a menace not only to the prosperity of his

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owner but also the community at Large

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the defense attorneys would argue this wasn't the Bulls fault that it was merely an accident of birth that had led him to sire offspring that would likely produce less milk on average than those sired by a purebred Bull T yield fewer pounds of dress weight according to the testimony of the butcher to an audience to whom dress wait was familiar terminology there were objections and sidebars gavels were gaveled Poitier's were oh yeah Aid there were examinations in cross-examinations

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arguments and closing arguments all the things required for a trial under the American judicial system

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except a jury of peers

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because who they are could truly judge that one scrub bull there to stand in for all scrub Bulls born to unpaid agreed parents

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who they are could truly determine that Bulls worth even the prosecution would concede he was merely being a bull doing both things but he was afforded no jury of peers to judge whether he did them well

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you might understand what bulnes is to a bull what is the field and the feed the buzzing fly

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the breeze the flicking tail what is a life well-lived

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in that notion might seem to absurd sure but more absurd than a bull on trial in the ballpark and the September evening in Pennsylvania because Eugenics was all the rage I am less sure

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this trial ended in a conviction as they all did

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it's one of the steps laid out in the pamphlet it ended in a barbecue which wasn't always the case sometimes it was a Weenie Roast one Bull in Minnesota was dragged along to trial after trial once in Indiana the executed bulla was placed in a Black Coffin and buried one time in July of nineteen Thirty One bull was convicted in a trial in front of 800 people in Neillsville Wisconsin but before he could be killed he somehow slipped away and ran off

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the trees and I propose we let this one scrub bull stand-in for all scrub Bulls though so a few of them exist now well into the 2000s they have indeed been bred and engineered and eaten out of the population but let's let this one go to run off into the trees let him keep on running to find a pastor some tall grass in a life worth living

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whatever that might mean

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it's nice yeah so I guess when you said that you were listening to something we did it was the intelligence series with yeah they have like Lou Miller's piece about what that has all the Eugenics stuff and yeah it's interesting Lee reminiscent of where she ends on the idea of variation and somehow justifies itself yeah but also you know I think I think that you know if you think about you know Lulu's peace you know you know I think that the cruelty of

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janek's besides you know the the obvious that it hinges upon the in the sense of you know science or scientists or or or the wealthy or the elite or whatever you know know what's best for the populace they would know what's best for you no specific people and that there is this unknowability that gets denied you know as as in Lulu's piece when you when you hear

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when you hear the activists and an historian you know talking about you know her experience in a with childbirth and the unknowability what that experience is going to be like the fears that she had that she brought to that over and over and over again you know in the case of eugenics you have both like well-meaning parents assuming that they you know have a comprehension of the subjectivity of their child and this is this is the way

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that you know parsley add a necessity both economic and just practicality you know this is the way that we you know as a species deal with other species that there are these Noble subjectivities there that's unknown or unknowable other creatures yet we you know constantly decide you know what's best for each individual you know each of them on an individual basis even ones that you know really well like your dog you know I puzzled

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so about my dog's happiness all the time having very little understanding what his what his or her happiness is you know I don't know what bonuses to a bowl I don't need you I don't need you to draw certain conclusion I'm not you know in this in this particular story not making a particular political statement about you know about eating them or not eating them or breeding them in certain ways or not but I think that there's real power in merely floating the idea merely you know like setting you know I almost sometimes

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of them as balloons like if you take you know the in this story we just heard if you take the idea of Nazism to merely you know announce the Specter of Nazism and then have it be a thing that hangs over this story in that floats you know floats above it it doesn't take much it just takes it just takes an invocation it just takes you know like a half a sentence it really does kind of allow you to make

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you know a story of depth hopefully you know out of a few kind of dots and lines

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huge thanks to Nate Mayo for joining us letting us play some of his stuff into radio Topia crew of which Nate is a part if you want to hear more memory Palace go to the Memory Palace dot u s of course look for the Memory Palace on iTunes or Google play or all the things because all in all there's more than a hundred and thirty years there's a lot there's a lot of them and also if

► 00:40:05

you got a Radio Lab dot org will list a couple that we really like that we didn't get to play in this podcast just yeah you can listen to those there or you can go to his so either way I think now either way go yeah all right and we should go to yes I'm Jedi boom run iberdrola chance for listening

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hello this is been calling from a vessel

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being North in the Puget Sound Waters of Washington state Radiolab was created by Jad Abner out and is produced by Sauron wheeler Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design Susie Legend Berg is our executive producer our staff includes Simon Adler Becca Bressler Rachel Cusick David gebel Bethel hap T Tracy hunt Nora Keller Matt kielty Robert krulwich any McEwen lot of Nasser sarek re re on whack Pat Walters and Molly Webster with help from Shima Olli I

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he W Harry Fortuna Melissa O'Donnell sara-san Bach and Neil Denisha our fact Checker is Michelle