The Leap: The Volcano Whisperer

When St. Vincent’s La Soufrière volcano threatened to erupt, geologist Richie Robertson was the scientist the islanders trusted.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Flora Lichtman?

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• 0:46Ira Flatow?

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• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:20Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, it's Flora Lichtman, and this is Science Friday. Today in the podcast, we have the next episode in The Leap. This is a series I made with the Hypothesis Fund. And we're taking you to an erupting volcano where a scientist faced some tough choices.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  People of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and residents in our blessed land, I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated as the

• 1:50Speaker 04

  Let's deal with the elderly. Those were children. Those were children at the front, please.

• 1:57Flora Lichtman?

  In April 2021, La Suffreire volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent started exploding.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  The long-dormant La Suffreire volcano erupting Friday. Holy, it's really erupt.

• 2:11Ira Flatow?

  Thousands evacuating as ash rains down on the island of St. Vincent.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  If you're listening to this, or if they're not listening, get the message to them.

• 2:19Flora Lichtman?

  The volcano had been rumbling for months, but to get people evacuated in time, one scientist was tasked with predicting exactly when the volcano was going to blow. Good morning, Professor.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  Professor Robertson.

• 2:32Speaker 06

  From Professor Robertson. One of the foremost authorities in the Caribbean.

• 2:34Flora Lichtman?

  Professor Richie Robertson. He's a volcanologist, the former director of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center, and a world authority on La Cefra volcano. He's got an important job and a fancy title, but this is how the people on St. Vincent see him.

• 2:51Speaker 07

  Richie's a real Caribbean boy. He feels like one of us.

• 2:55Flora Lichtman?

  That's Stacy Edwards, Richie's colleague. They've known each other for a long time.

• 2:59Speaker 07

  There are no airs about him. He's very, we would say, very rootsy. He struggles to put on ties. I mean, he's just very rooted in the Caribbean in terms of his personality, his style, and his heart.

• 3:16Flora Lichtman?

  And when his island needed someone the most, he was the one who stepped up. A born and bred Vincentian who struggles to put on ties, but was willing to put everything on the line to keep his community safe.

• 3:30Speaker 08

  There is no way you could monitor a volcano without a certain element of risk.

• 3:34Flora Lichtman?

  It's just part of the job.

• 3:35Speaker 08

  Yes, it is.

• 3:40Flora Lichtman?

  This is The Leap, a new series about gutsy scientists who are risking their reputations, their careers, and even their lives to uncover something new.

• 4:03Flora Lichtman?

  When you think about the occupational hazards of science, stuff comes to mind. Toxic boss, difficulties raising money, running a lab, getting tenure. But the list typically doesn't include getting burned up in a pyroclastic flow, or whether your interpretation of data could mean life or death for thousands of people in your community.

• 4:25Flora Lichtman?

  But that is Richie Robertson's brand of science. So how did he find himself here in this perilous, high stakes job?

• 4:32Speaker 08

  This is an amazing story, really, given what I end up actually doing.

• 4:36Flora Lichtman?

  Richie's career traces back to one formative moment in his life, another eruption of the same La Sufrière volcano. It was 1979, Richie was 18 years old, in school, in the art track. He had no plan to go into science. He'd barely taken a science class when La Sufrière started exploding.

• 4:54Speaker 08

  A volcanic eruption is really a big deal on a small island. It's a big deal, full stop, because if you see a volcano erupting. And when I say an eruption, our volcanoes erupt explosively. So when they erupt, you can't help but see them.

• 5:08Flora Lichtman?

  La Sufrière volcano looms large on St. Vincent. I mean, it's literally the highest peak on the island, but it's also a central character in the island's story, like a sleeping giant that occasionally wakes up and kills scores of people and destroys their homes. But in 1979, most people on the island had never witnessed an eruption firsthand, including Richie.

• 5:31Speaker 08

  So the day of the eruption was a religious holiday. It was Good Friday, and so it was a public holiday. But that Good Friday, you woke up, and what got you awake was the sound of the roaring mountain. And as you went outside, what you saw was a mushrooming cloud that just kept rising. And it appeared like if it was alive. It looked like a cauliflower shape that constantly expanded. I mean, that itself was impressive.

• 5:59Flora Lichtman?

  Richie lived far enough away to be safe, but his grandmother lived in the north, much closer to the explosion. So Richie and his dad hopped in the car to bring her to safety.

• 6:09Speaker 08

  And of course, you went towards this thing, which is frightening and also, you know, exciting. You're a young person, it's exciting, it's amazing. As you moved towards the north, what you saw was, was the whole country was on the move. It's like- There were people who were walking, there were people with a little bundle, people on the back of donkeys, people who were in cars, and they were heading away from you. So you were heading towards this plume, and people are moving away. So again, extremely exciting.

• 6:37Flora Lichtman?

  The town where Richie's grandmother lived, Rose Hall, was pretty close to the volcano.

• 6:42Speaker 08

  Close enough that by the time you get to Rose Hall, you almost feel like you could touch the plume now, and it's still expanding. And the whole village is in uproar, you know, people are trying to get out. So we went to collect one person, it was an open vehicle, we went to collect one person. And when we went out, the entire back of the vehicle was filled with people and whatever belongings they had. The vehicle was rammed packed with people, you could barely, there were almost people jumping onto it that couldn't hold.

• 7:09Flora Lichtman?

  Richie also volunteered in the evacuation shelters. He was a member of the cadets, a kind of youth national guard, and was dispatched to help. At one point, 18-year-old Richie was running a makeshift church shelter in charge of dozens of adults, adults who were stressed, displaced, and arguing over their cramped living quarters.

• 7:27Speaker 08

  All of those kinds of issues, never having done to them before, okay? So I then had another experience, now I saw what the volcano, the effect it was having on people.

• 7:36Flora Lichtman?

  At the same time, the cadets were called in to help the scientists monitoring the volcano. The instruments needed to be watched every minute of the day, and Richie volunteered to take some shifts.

• 7:45Speaker 08

  I was then at the Belmont Observatory, looking at the drums, they had showed us certain things that if we saw, we had to wake them up and that kind of thing. So I then had that to see.

• 7:56Speaker 08

  I guess as a young person, if you wanted to get an introduction to how things operate when a volcano goes boom, I mean, that was it.

• 8:04Flora Lichtman?

  While Richie was getting this intensive education in disaster response, he discovered that the people at the center of it were scientists. They held the knowledge that all Vincentians were desperate to know what was happening with the volcano, what might happen next.

• 8:20Speaker 08

  And in fact, because they became so important, we all in Saint Vincent got to hang on the words of the scientists. We call them all kinds of things, and we used to call them ologists. So everybody was an ologist, you know, because we've heard for the first time about these people that we call volcanologists and seismologists and geologists, these were people that we had never heard about before. And I was amazed, you know, when they speak, they just seem to have so much knowledge. They just seem to know everything about the volcano.

• 8:49Flora Lichtman?

  But there was something else Richie noticed.

• 8:52Speaker 08

  What I noted was that all the scientists and all the professionals who were advising us were from outside of St. Vincent. I didn't see anybody who was a Vincentian who was advising the government, who was advising them, telling them. And for some crazy reason, I decided that I would become that person.

• 9:10Flora Lichtman?

  Why did it feel so important to have a Vincentian doing the advising? Like, why was that? Why were you like, yeah, that needs to change?

• 9:18Speaker 08

  I guess at the time, I'm, I guess I'm, I was a young person. I was, to a large extent, given what I was doing at the time, I was very patriotic. I was, I was, you know, I was in Cadiz, I was in all these organizations, these youth organizations. So I always had that kind of very nationalistic mindset. And I'm, I'm still, to a large extent, very, very patriotic, you know? I've, I've traveled all over the world and I tend to relation saying that the only passport I have is a Vincentian passport.

• 9:44Flora Lichtman?

  1979 was historic for St. Vincent, politically too. A few months after the volcano erupted, St. Vincent gained independence after nearly 200 years of British colonial rule. It was a time when a lot of Vincentians felt patriotic, and Richie did too.

• 10:00Speaker 08

  As a young Vincentian, I felt that, you know, if we had this system that was having such a big effect that we obviously would have to deal with, that we really needed to have the capacity to deal with it locally.

• 10:13Flora Lichtman?

  Richie decided in that moment to make a complete left turn in his life.

• 10:20Speaker 08

  So I decided then that I would switch from being essentially an art student to becoming a scientist

• 10:28Speaker 08

  who was a professional that understood volcanoes because I needed to help people in St. Vincent deal with the future ones.

• 10:34Flora Lichtman?

  But unlike 99.9% of 18-year-olds who wake up one day with a random career idea, Richie actually did it.

• 10:44Flora Lichtman?

  He switched to the science track. He got a PhD in geology. And in a twist of fate, beyond his control, when La Soufriere volcano woke up again, he was the scientist in charge. Almost exactly 42 years after that audacious decision to switch paths, he was exactly where he dreamt he'd be.

• 11:03Speaker 08

  I don't think I thought that I would actually end up being exactly in the position that you thought that you should be. I mean, it's surreal in a sense. I mean, you can't write that script.

• 11:18Flora Lichtman?

  If you were writing the script, the next act would start in the year 2020. It was December. By then, Richie was the director of the Seismic Research Center and was in charge of monitoring the volcano, when suddenly it puffed back to life.

• 11:34Speaker 08

  There was an observation by a guy who lived in the same the same raw soil where my grandmother lived. In fact, a guy who's actually a distant relative of mine. He woke up the morning and he started to see white steam emitted from the volcano. And usually you cannot, you should not see steam from the volcano.

• 11:50Flora Lichtman?

  So Richie dispatched a local team to look into it. And that team climbs up the volcano.

• 11:56Speaker 08

  And while they had this summit, they called me and they tell me what they were seeing. Immediately, as soon as they told me what they were seeing, I realized what was happening. The volcano was in fact erupting.

• 12:06Flora Lichtman?

  La Soufriere volcano was slowly oozing out new magma, creating a kind of pancake or dome in the crater. It was in a gentle phase of its eruption, but Richie knew that could change.

• 12:18Speaker 08

  Soufriere is one of the volcanoes that ramps up very fast. So I told them, get off the volcano as quickly as you can. If the volcano is erupting, you should not be where you are. And we then mobilized a team to go to the island as quickly as possible.

• 12:32Flora Lichtman?

  So Richie, who was based in Trinidad at this point, is dispatched to St. Vincent with a small team. It's peak COVID. So there's all these complicated restrictions. And in fact, he quarantines at the very observatory he volunteered at 42 years earlier. This time, his scientific objective is predicting the future. He needs to figure out exactly when the volcano is going to transition from this gentle dome building stage where the magma is confined to the crater. To the explosive stage where it starts shooting magma out onto the flanks of the volcano.

• 13:07Speaker 08

  Where people were living. So it's key, once the explosions happen, you need to physically get people awake. Because if they stay there, they're more than likely going to die.

• 13:18Flora Lichtman?

  The trickiest part was getting the timing right. Richie had to give the government 24 to 48 hours of notice. That was the sweet spot.

• 13:26Speaker 08

  Because if you said it was going to explode and it doesn't explode within a certain time and you have moved people, what will happen is that the people will go back. And it's a chance that when they go back is when it would actually explode.

• 13:40Flora Lichtman?

  Predicting something's going to happen in 24 hours seems difficult to me. Like, how do you, do you check a bunch of boxes? Or how do you do that?

• 13:48Speaker 08

  There's not a fixed set of boxes that you tick, but there are set of signals that you would expect to see. Certainly in terms of the seismic instruments, in terms of the gas. There's a set of things that would indicate to you that fresh magma is getting close to the surface. And once you get to that stage, you get a good estimation of why it's likely to happen in the short term.

• 14:10Flora Lichtman?

  Which is what scientists do all the time. Capture data, integrate that data, draw a conclusion. It's just that in Richie's case, that science meant life or death for 20,000 people.

• 14:22Speaker 08

  And remember, there was a little bit more pressure on me personally because I'm not just any scientist. I'm a Vincentian scientist. And I think the Vincentians would not have been very impressed if we had gotten it wrong. So there was a lot of pressure to basically make the right call.

• 14:42Flora Lichtman?

  There was also a lot of pressure to make sure Vincentians heeded the call when it came.

• 14:49Flora Lichtman?

  And while that wasn't strictly Richie's job as a scientist, he and his collaborators at the Seismic Research Center made it their mission to build trust before the volcano blew.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  Trust is critical.

• 15:02Flora Lichtman?

  This is Stacy Edwards again. She's the manager of education and outreach at the Seismic Research Center.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  If the public does not trust you as the, the agency or the entity giving that information, then they're going to do their own thing. And it's even doubly, triply, I don't know, quadruply important in these social media times when everybody is an expert.

• 15:23Flora Lichtman?

  Making sure Richie became the expert that people trusted was a big focus for Richie and Stacy. And the fact that Richie was a local with only a Vincentian passport cut both ways. On the upside.

• 15:36Speaker 08

  I sounded like them. So you tend to have a certain affinity to people that sound like you. It's a natural human thing. You know, you you hear an accent, they sound like where you come from. You know, you you hear them even more. So I think that helped.

• 15:49Flora Lichtman?

  But it also wasn't that simple.

• 15:51Speaker 07

  They still have to prove themselves, huh? Many in the context and this kind of global South countries where some people may have a perception that if it's outside of the Caribbean, it has to be better. If it was made outside of the Caribbean, if the person was trained outside of the Caribbean, it it must be better, right? And I think that's all part of a kind of colonial legacy and mindset. In the Caribbean, our countries are relatively new. And I think coming out of that kind of of legacy, it means that you have to work extra hard to ensure that you're maintaining that trust, that we are the authority, we know what we're doing, you need to listen to us. Because it's easy to hit, to pay attention to voices from outside.

• 16:34Flora Lichtman?

  So while Richie was monitoring the volcano for signs that it was going to start exploding, he was also doing regular public dispatches.

• 16:41Speaker 07

  Hi Richie, how are you doing?

• 16:43Speaker 08

  Hi, good morning, Stacy. I'm fine.

• 16:45Flora Lichtman?

  Keeping the public informed. The latest updates with Nasu Freya.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Well, it's continued to do what it has been done for the last, since it started for the last week.

• 16:53Flora Lichtman?

  For many months, the volcano didn't do much. And then in early April, things started to change.

• 16:59Speaker 09

  Professor Robertson, we've had some increase in activity, particularly this afternoon. And.

• 17:04Flora Lichtman?

  There was a series of earthquakes, a seismic swarm, and that can be a key indicator that the volcano is going to go explosive. Richie knew he was going to have to make this call soon, and he felt he needed one more instrument on the volcano to get the data he needed.

• 17:18Speaker 08

  What was called a multi-gas meter that detects different kinds of gases coming out from the volcano. Because we were concerned about whether sulfur dioxide, which is one of the things that we expected to come out just before an explosion happens.

• 17:32Flora Lichtman?

  It was a key piece of data. But to get that meter in place, Richie and the team had to go on to the volcano. A volcano that was in transition, a volcano that could start exploding anytime.

• 17:45Speaker 08

  So yes, we were on the volcano because we took a calculated risk that we needed to get additional information to tell us when the explosion was going to happen.

• 17:54Flora Lichtman?

  Talk me through the risks of going going on to erupting volcano. Like, what are the risks of that?

• 18:02Speaker 08

  Apart from dying?

• 18:03Flora Lichtman?

  Well, how could you die? Tell me all the ways.

• 18:05Speaker 08

  Wow, it's a very, it's a really, really bad way. There are no ways. If the volcano is exploding, what essentially it does, it's breaking up masses of hard rock and essentially pelting it, ejecting it into the atmosphere. If you're on the volcano itself at the summit, the fragments of rock that could fall on you, on your head, the very least they will do is give you a serious headache. The worst they could do is they could, they could basically squash you into the ground. So you have problems with falling rocks. You have problems with the fact that you also going closer to the way the gas concentrations are such that you

• 18:47Speaker 08

  could actually be harmed by gas. So those are the falling rocks, the gases. But one of the most dangerous things from exploding volcanoes is the things that they call parclastic density currents. Another name for them is a glowing avalanche. It's like a hot, rapidly moving, and when I say rapidly moving, moving faster than a hundred, hundred, two hundred kilometers per hour, shooting down the mountainside. It strips everything off the mountainside, all the trees, all the grass. So if you're on the volcano at the time when it explode, and one of those things come down it, you would end up in the sea as a, as a charred remain. So, so, so, yeah, it's not, it's not for the weak hearted.

• 19:29Flora Lichtman?

  Do you have, do you have family, kids? Like, were there people who were like, please do not do this?

• 19:36Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, hopefully they don't listen to this podcast and they don't hear anything that I get up to. No, I don't, I, I try to minimize the extent to which they are aware of some of the risk I take. Yeah. I, I don't think they, I don't think my daughters would like the fact that I take so much risk. Yeah. I, yeah. They don't need to have that in the details. I, I take calculated risks and they don't need to, they don't need to worry about that.

• 19:59Flora Lichtman?

  That day in early April, Richie and crew got dropped on the volcano via helicopter. They've got thermal suits on and gas masks, and they're lugging a bunch of heavy gear, a couple 12-volt batteries like you have in your car, solar panels, pipes. They'd have to make a couple trips from the landing spot to the top of the volcano, when suddenly, they got a call from the observatory.

• 20:20Speaker 08

  We got the call that something was happening, and not the helicopter. They had told the helicopter to come back for us.

• 20:26Flora Lichtman?

  The observatory registered more earthquakes. It was another seismic swarm. Remember, this is a key indicator that the volcano could start exploding at any second. What were you thinking when you heard that?

• 20:38Speaker 08

  That we need to get out of the mountain as quickly as possible.

• 20:41Flora Lichtman?

  They jumped in the helicopter and got off safely, but Richie was determined to get this instrument on the volcano. When the earthquake stopped, he went back to put the meter in place. After he got off the volcano, the earthquakes picked back up, and things didn't quiet down again.

• 20:57Speaker 08

  Anything that we didn't finish, that was it. We didn't come back after that.

• 21:01Flora Lichtman?

  That was it? That was your last window?

• 21:02Speaker 08

  That was the last window, yes.

• 21:04Flora Lichtman?

  You snuck it in?

• 21:05Speaker 08

  Yes, we did. We did, just barely.

• 21:07Flora Lichtman?

  Just barely?

• 21:13Flora Lichtman?

  At this point, things were getting tense. It was crunch time for Richie, and you can hear the urgency in his voice and his dispatches to the public.

• 21:21Speaker 07

  What should people be doing now?

• 21:24Speaker 08

  They should really make sure that they know exactly where they are. You're in the orange zone, red zone. What's your plan? What's the community plan? What's your individual?

• 21:31Flora Lichtman?

  A few days later, he'd seen enough. He told the government he thought the eruption would happen soon.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated as the red zone.

• 21:47Flora Lichtman?

  And then Richie had to wait, and that was agonizing.

• 21:51Speaker 08

  Because, once you had made the call, the then-challenge comes is that questioning whether or not it's the right call or not. It's kind of a funny thing. You don't really want it to go explosive because you know what's going to happen when it goes explosive. It's going to damage things. It's going to mess up the country. It's going to cause a lot of harm, make life difficult for a lot of people, which is what it did. But... You want it to happen also because if it happens scientifically is interesting to look at, but also it justifies your existence in a sense.

• 22:20Flora Lichtman?

  All these emotions were swirled up. The dread of the destruction coming, the thrill of seeing it erupt. And scientifically, it's kind of what you live for as a volcanologist. And then the overwhelming worry was the evacuation call correct?

• 22:35Speaker 08

  For me personally, I think that was some of the most difficult time in the entire eruption, actually.

• 22:42Flora Lichtman?

  But it didn't last long.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  The volcano has spoken.

• 22:47Speaker 08

  The volcano is erupting. There is another explosive eruption ongoing.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  A big ball of smoke.

• 22:52Speaker 08

  I don't know if I can hear it rumbling, but you actually hear the volcano rumbling.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Look at that. And what we're seeing there is a huge plume of ash. Wow.

• 23:04Flora Lichtman?

  Lhasa Frere volcano exploded the day after Richie called it. He got it right. Many people had already been evacuated by the time it started spewing lava. The rest were on their way. No one died. But there wasn't time for a victory lap because even though 20,000 people were evacuated from immediate harm, there was other fallout from the eruption.

• 23:26Speaker 08

  You just had tons of ash being ejected. After a while, we couldn't see anything.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  There's a lot of ash everywhere.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  It's like snow. Car got stuck here. Trying to get the car out.

• 23:36Speaker 08

  My feet were literally sinking inches. The entire landscape was bed in white, gray ash.

• 23:47Speaker 08

  You're basically living through this doomsday kind of landscape, you know, fire and brimstone kind of thing.

• 23:55Flora Lichtman?

  At one point during the eruption, rocks started dropping from the sky.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Stones dropping now. Stones dropping. Bigger stones dropping now.

• 24:05Speaker 08

  The ash was so bad that the power system shut down. So on midnight on Saturday, the entire island went black. No power. And of course, the entire country is in panic mode.

• 24:18Flora Lichtman?

  You can hear it in people's voices from interviews during this time, including Richie's.

• 24:24Speaker 08

  You see films of people in war zones. This is being a war zone right now with the volcano, so we shouldn't be here. But, but yeah, I mean.

• 24:30Speaker 10

  Yo, this is like a twilight zone. It's very, very scary, yo.

• 24:36Speaker 08

  I can't believe this is my beautiful hometown.

• 24:42Speaker 07

  It's a very emotional time. There's uncertainty, you're not sure when the eruption is going to end.

• 24:49Speaker 07

  You know, many people had to leave their homes and all of this is happening within the background of the pandemic.

• 25:00Flora Lichtman?

  The volcano spewed ash for days. People were sequestered in their homes. And just like in 1979, people in St. Vincent were hanging in the ologist's words.

• 25:10Speaker 08

  We started to go on every morning. So every morning at a particular time, people would tune in live and they would get an update about what was happening.

• 25:18Speaker 11

  This is NBC from studios at Richmond Hill in Capital, Kingston.

• 25:22Flora Lichtman?

  But this time, the experts weren't from somewhere else.

• 25:26Speaker 08

  Of the Coast Guard.

• 25:28Flora Lichtman?

  Richie and many members of his scientific team were local to the Caribbean. And Vincentians all over the country shouted them out for what was a relatively smooth response to a huge disaster.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  I've seen some comments on social media. People are commenting the team in terms of the evacuation order. They say the team did a good work. So it seems that people are giving you all, you know, good props.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  I mean, we thank people for that. You know, it's hard, it's the hardest thing to make into a position of what's happening.

• 25:58Speaker 08

  In terms of responding to the crisis, managing the people, managing the situation, which is really, really hard, it didn't overwhelm the system. It was, it was done like if, okay, oh, we have volcanic eruptions every day.

• 26:11Flora Lichtman?

  And by making something so dangerous feel manageable and under control, Richie didn't just earn the public's trust, he earned their pride.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  He really became a rock star for a little while.

• 26:23Speaker 08

  I got kind of famous. In fact, it got to the stage where people would, you know, like a celebrity, they would ask you for a picture with them, a selfie and an autograph. And yeah, I used to run from people after that.

• 26:41Flora Lichtman?

  It's pretty rare for a scientist to become a national treasure.

• 26:46Flora Lichtman?

  But in Richie's case, it makes sense. Because it wasn't just about him. He became a symbol for something bigger.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  I think it is super important for people, for us, I should say, because I'm from here, for us to see models where we are solving our own problems. And we don't need to depend on somebody who's from a bigger country or somebody who is white or somebody who has more money or whatever to solve our problems.

• 27:20Flora Lichtman?

  Richie proved what he felt was true all along. That if incentives could handle it, they could take care of themselves. The risks he took along the way weren't just in service of people, but this idea. Because on a small Caribbean island, this version of self-determination, handling hazards, is especially meaningful.

• 27:42Speaker 08

  As we speak now, a hurricane has just passed through my homeland, and that's a routine thing. We are small islands over a large area of space, and we're impacted by lots of hazards. We have a lot of issues to deal with. And really, we have to find a way in which we could live sustainably here.

• 28:01Speaker 08

  And the only way we could do it is trying to find ways of solving our own problems in our own ways.

• 28:08Flora Lichtman?

  What did it feel like for you to sort of be fulfilling your destiny?

• 28:11Speaker 08

  Well, I still pinch it myself, yeah. I keep saying I could have, you know, I could have died the next day and I could have feel that, you know, I lived the, I fulfilled my destiny in life, can you?

• 28:41Flora Lichtman?

  The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist. Editing by Said Tijon Thomas Jr., Zhao Van Gei, and David Sanford. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks to Rod Stewart. And thank you, too, for listening.

• 29:15Flora Lichtman?

  Iris is back tomorrow on the podcast with a story about using CRISPR gene editing to speed up the process of breeding some of our favorite foods, like, think moving genes from the eggplant to the tomato.

• 29:27Speaker 12

  The modern tomato has took hundreds of years to develop from the wild species, and now we can do it basically in one generation.

• 29:34Flora Lichtman?

  That's tomorrow on the podcast.