Bird people and deep space shrapnel

Two mysteries we can't stop thinking about: Is lightning actually caused by cosmic rays? And why don't birds play chess? Articles featured: “What Causes Lightning?” by Charlie Wood (also featured on The Quanta Podcast) and “Empire of flight” by Antone Martinho-Truswell. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:38Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini in Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini in Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  And that's us, Noam and Meredith.

• 1:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Jazz hands.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Jazzing it up. All right. So do you remember the great archive scramble of 2025?

• 1:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  The...

• 1:32Speaker 02

  When we had to save all our show ideas?

• 1:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, yeah. All of our oldest messages we'd sent each other on the team were going to disappear.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Show ideas, books we'd found, our favorite science articles.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Then you scrolled through that whole thing, right? Like years and years of messages and you put them into this ridiculously huge Google Doc?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Wasn't the most graceful solution, but we saved it. I was actually just scrolling through this the other day and there's so much good stuff in there, way more than we could ever make into episodes. So it got me thinking that we should just shout out some of this great work.

• 2:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, some of our favorite science writers, our favorite articles, and point listeners to where they can find them.

• 2:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  That sounds awesome. Let's do it.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So today for you, Noam. I picked an article by Charlie Wood in Quanta Magazine.

• 2:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, love Quanta.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  And this is just like an example of some of my favorite science writing. The kind of writing that takes something every day, takes something ordinary and just makes it extraordinary.

• 2:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  So his article is called What Causes Lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting.

• 2:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if lightning is ordinary.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  It's true. It's a pretty, it's of the like everyday phenomena. It is pretty extraordinary.

• 3:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes, it is already, let's be fair to lightning, it's pretty cool.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  I love watching thunderstorms.

• 3:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  So believe me, already a lightning fan.

• 3:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  But this article blew my mind and it's because we know what lightning is, but we don't know what triggers it.

• 3:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Classic unexplainable.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Classic unexplainable frame there.

• 3:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, what actually is lightning? I feel like you're saying we know what lightning is.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Science knows what lightning is.

• 3:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if I would be able to tell you what lightning is other than electricity.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  It is electricity.

• 3:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  A form of static electricity. So the same as rubbing on a balloon and then shocking yourself, but just at a wildly bigger scale. And in this case, the static electricity comes from ice and water droplets and hail inside the like giant thunder cloud itself that through all the turbulence and updrafts is rubbing against each other and building up this giant electric charge.

• 4:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that's lightning.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And that's lightning. But there's a problem. There's just not enough energy in the cloud. Like there needs to be enough electric force to literally like break apart the molecules of the air and release, as Charlie puts it, like an avalanche of electrons that crash across the sky.

• 4:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  There's this threshold that we need to get over and there's just not enough energy in clouds to get over that threshold.

• 4:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Where is it? Is it not Zeus?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  It is perhaps not Zeus.

• 4:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  But it it might be cooler.

• 4:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Apparently, there's a whole generation of scientists who are using tools designed to look at things like solar flares and deep space explosions, and they're pointing them at thunderstorms.

• 4:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Incredible.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  And they started to see bursts of freaking gamma rays inside thunderclouds.

• 5:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  What?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  So like, what is that even?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, well, like, gamma rays are on the electromagnetic spectrum, like, they're a type of light. So if you go past the visible spectrum, more and more energy, higher frequency, past ultraviolet light, more intense, more intense, past X-rays, you start getting into like the most energetic type of light, these gamma rays. And gamma rays are so intense, scientists usually see them when something really big happens, like a supernova explodes.

• 5:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And they're happening in thunderstorms, even when there's not a visible lightning bolt, thunderstorm clouds glow and flicker with gamma rays.

• 5:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  And you're saying glowing and flickering, but this is not stuff we see, right?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Because it's way past the visible spectrum.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Way, way more energetic than the visual spectrum. So it's associated with lightning, but even when there's not lightning that we can like see from the ground, thunderstorms are roiling with this like high powered light energy.

• 6:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  One astrophysicist in the article, Joseph Dwyer, at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that really, really fast electrons, electrons going close to the speed of light could be crashing into atoms in the air, releasing the violent gamma ray burst of light, and then that crashes into more electrons, causing this feedback loop that doesn't just trigger a single subatomic avalanche, but a whole bunch of overlapping avalanches. So that piling of avalanches gets you over that threshold and like sparks the the lightning bolt.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  But there's another theory that lightning is triggered by a kind of deep space shrapnel that comes from like super massive black holes and dying stars. And that Charlie writes, I love this line, cosmic rays, this like deep space shrapnel, he writes, travels billions of light years across the universe and slams into the Earth's atmosphere. And that could be the thing that's tipping lightning over the edge and causing

• 7:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, hold on, hold on.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I know, right?

• 7:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Deep space shrapnel is one of the coolest things I've ever heard.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  I mean, my band name, right?

• 7:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Great band name. Deep space shrapnel here is cosmic rays?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Cosmic rays, yeah, which are, you know, bombarding us all the time.

• 7:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so that's like radiation coming from these ancient distant supernova explosions, right?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Supernova explosions, supermassive black holes, dying stars. It's sort of like the debris of a really, you know, bombastic universe that is flying all over the place and can come from billions of light years away.

• 8:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And what this is saying is that there's not enough energy in the cloud system itself, but these rays that are coming in from outside are tipping it over the edge. Like the cosmos is throwing a match onto a pile of wood or something like that.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could be. And this is also still a theory. Like, it could be...

• 8:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  I like that theory.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  I know, right? See what I'm saying? Cooler than Zeus.

• 8:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, it does feel a little like Zeus throwing the thunderbolts, but whatever.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. So like, the actual mechanism is still a mystery. It could be one of these theories. It could be all of these theories. It could be different for different clouds. Could be something else entirely. But I know I will never look at thunderstorms the same way again after reading this article.

• 8:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  So you should definitely go check out this article, Quantum Magazine, Charlie Wood.

• 9:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  And you can learn more about like the history of lightning science. You can learn more about scientists strapping gamma ray detectors onto planes and flying them into the scariest storms on earth.

• 9:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  There's also these like wicked cool videos of scientists actually sparking lightning in the sky with rockets.

• 9:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  We're the Zeus.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  We are the Zeus. So you should definitely go check it out.

• 9:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can we put like a link in the show notes or something?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely throw that in.

• 9:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  So now it's your turn, Noam.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I want you to find an article and bring back something cool, something you recommend.

• 9:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Uh, there is an article that I've been thinking a lot about that I have been wanting to talk about on the show for a while, actually.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 9:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  It is a piece about birds.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  And a different evolutionary track they could have gone down, but didn't, that might have made them a lot more like us.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Bird people.

• 10:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Bird people.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  After the break.

• 10:14Speaker 03

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• 12:54Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 13:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, Mara.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Noam.

• 13:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  I have found this article that I really, really, really loved and never got a chance to talk about, so this is a great chance.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  This is the time. Shoot your shot, man.

• 13:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so it's from AEON.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  AEON Magazine, spelled A-E-O-N. And it's from this zoologist named Anton Martino Truswell. He's also an author. He wrote this book all about bird cognition called The Parrot in the Mirror.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  So like how birds think?

• 14:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  How birds think and how they got to be the way that they are. And his article starts with this kind of big, basic question, which is, why haven't birds developed complex culture like we have?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Which is like, on the surface, it's kind of a weird question, right? Like, why would they have developed complex culture? I don't, I don't look at birds and immediately assume like, they should be playing chess.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  There's no like Real Housewives of Cockatoos. I mean, that would be dramatic.

• 14:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  It would. It would definitely, it would involve a lot of singing, I guess. But Anton says that birds have a lot of the basic advantages that we have. So they've got complex brains, they've got strong relationships between parents and children, they communicate with their voices, which is really useful. And unlike other non-mammals that are smart, like octopuses, you know, birds have long lives. So this is really huge, because like, octopuses, they have these really short lifespans. Their parents die when they give birth. So

• 15:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  octopuses are basically born orphans. But birds live a pretty long time, like, long enough to have overlapping generations, like, to have grandparents.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  And these are all things that are underpinning how cultures emerge?

• 15:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I think this is stuff that... In a vacuum, we think, might lead to culture. They have all the things. They have the brains, the communication, the family structures, the lifespans. But they don't have what we have. They don't have art and philosophy and The Sopranos.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  They don't tweet?

• 15:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  They don't. Well, they do tweet. But he answers this by looking at why certain traits develop, to begin with. So if you think about evolution, right? It's not something that looks ahead and goes, this species needs this type of fix to get better. Over time, certain traits that help animals survive and have babies tend to spread. And when species are under a lot of pressure from their environment, if there are predators, or if it's cold, or if there's not a lot of food.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Evolution ends up feeling like some type of gravitational pull.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that is a metaphor that Anton uses throughout his piece, which I find particularly sticky. I really like thinking about evolution as gravity. And he sees culture as this huge advantage that humans developed. It's what allowed us to pass down our knowledge from generation to generation, to develop language and writing and technology and take over the planet for good or bad.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  And we developed it at a certain point because we were vulnerable, right? We had to work together as a species to fight off predators and disease and the cold and all kinds of things. Being vulnerable wasn't the only thing that allowed us to develop culture. But Anton basically argues that it was a big factor. And he says, "Birds never got there." Right? He says, "Some biologists talk about birds as a near miss when it comes to culture."

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 17:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  He says, Peter Godfrey Smith, who's this famous scientist and philosopher, who works on octopus intelligence. He's often wondered why birds never got to culture. And when Anton last talked to him, Peter asked him, you know, you study bird cognition. Why have birds never got there?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And Anton basically writes that he thinks it's because birds had an even bigger advantage, which was flight.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Interesting. So that meant that they didn't have the vulnerability that pushed them to find other solutions.

• 18:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, they were still vulnerable, obviously. Like, you know, I guess unless you're the absolute top of the bird food chain, there's still another bigger bird trying to get you.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  But yeah, flying opens up this whole dimension of space. You know, if a predator is coming, you don't have to hide. You don't have to be strong. You don't have to outsmart them. You just fly up. It's not a perfect solution, but it is like, as far as solutions go, it is a very, very good solution. And when you think about how animals' lives are just basically all about finding food and running away from predators, if you have the ability to fly, it's like you are, you are golden.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Check and meet.

• 19:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. So his idea that he puts forward in this article is that flight might have solved so many of the problems that birds were facing, that culture never even was a possibility. Right? They were almost gravitationally pulled down this different evolutionary path. Because culture is like, very hard.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  It is something that requires brain size, you know, ability to manipulate the environment, all that, and lots of environmental pressure.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  And what I think he's saying is that birds had the former. You know, they had the raw materials, the brain size, the communication, and they didn't have the latter. They didn't have the same type of vulnerability that necessitated this type of adaptation.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  It's like the raw materials, but they need to come together. They almost need to get like forged in a crucible of vulnerability.

• 20:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, a crucible of vulnerability.

• 20:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  That feels like our lives. We're all living in a crucible of vulnerability and we have culture. We're still in the crucible.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  But we're surviving.

• 20:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  But we're surviving.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  One thing I'm kind of wondering is, I've seen videos of crows on snowy days sledding down rooftops again and again. Like, obviously, I mean, it could be an anthropomorphic lens, but it looks like they're having fun. It looks like that could be, you know, a sport. Could it be the case that we're just missing where the bird culture is?

• 20:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is a very good point. Like, first of all, you're right, crows are super smart. And, and there's this one experiment that I love where this scientist wore a particular kind of mask all the time. And when he did, he trapped and released crows. And then the crows that had been released, they alerted other crows. And then some crows that had never been trapped, learned to be afraid of the guy in the mask. And then apparently, future generations of crows learned to be afraid of this mask. So there's definitely

• 21:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  some type of intergenerational transmission. Anton says this is not full, complex culture, right? This is not economics. This is not The Sopranos. This is not baseball. But I was thinking about this when I was reading the piece. I think there, there is a certain anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism? Is that even a?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 21:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'll go with yes.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I get it. Yeah.

• 21:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's a sense in which it has sort of an anthropocentric view of like, why didn't they get to culture? But you want to ask sometimes, like, well, is culture the end all be all? So your question is valid, which is like, well, maybe this is crow culture. And do we need to say that one is lesser than the other?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I feel like.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Flight is such an old trait, much older than what we consider like what it sounds like you're defining culture.

• 22:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, yeah, way. I mean, on the order of hundreds of millions of years rather than like hundreds of thousands of years.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like hard to define. It's hard to think about what culture is outside of the context of humans. And then I feel like this is adding like an extra layer of complexity on top of that because it's positioning it with biological evolution. That's really interesting.

• 22:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, okay, so I think that what Anton is doing here is not necessarily providing an airtight historical explanation of exactly why this happened. I think this is more like a provocative idea, right?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  We often tend to think about evolution as directional. I shouldn't say we, but there maybe there is a common misconception that evolution is directional and it ends with us, you know, like the the march. What is it? The march of progress? What's the thing called?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  With the like different apes to standing man?

• 23:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, the apes walking up to be humans. But I don't know, I take this as sort of a shift in perspective that there are other ways to be wildly advanced. You know, just think about sharks, right? I know you did this episode about when trees first showed up hundreds of millions of years ago. And I remember from that episode that they were like, oh, yeah, when trees showed up, there were sharks and they were kind of the same as they are now. Like sharks just

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 23:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  found this evolutionary niche and it's been great for them. And evolution isn't about getting to culture or intelligence. It's about adapting to your environment in a particularly useful way to you.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always interesting to think about like, we're all on the same evolutionary journey. It's just that, you know, sharks figured out what they needed to do hundreds of millions of years ago.

• 24:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, we became humans within the last couple hundred thousand years.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 24:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  We have been so wildly vulnerable for our evolutionary history.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  And who knows what's going to happen to us now. But when I think about what Anton is putting forward here.

• 24:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  It just makes me feel small in the best way. You know, it sort of makes me feel like that similar feeling of looking up at the stars and feeling really small in this huge, expanding universe. But instead, it's like looking out at the species and feeling small, like looking at this enormous family tree of evolution and seeing all these other species that found their really good homes. You know, that that got sucked into these gravitational pulls that Anton talks about, where there's no need to keep evolving because that's where they are. They're fine there for a long time. And, you know, honestly, I'm comparing this to the feeling of looking up at the stars.

• 25:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  But one of the things that I really loved about this article, and, you know, the thing that really stood out to me, that I didn't get to talk about much, was this metaphor of gravity, of evolution as gravity. And thinking about the evolution of our species on Earth in a similar way to the evolution of the universe, and how gravity is shaping everything in the universe, and evolutionary gravity is shaping it on Earth. I don't know, it is a metaphor that sits with me in a really nice way, that makes me feel small and humble and in awe of the world in a really nice way. So that's the thing that I'm excited for listeners to get from the article when they go and check it out, this sort of long meditation on evolution and gravity.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  I mean, some questions are the big questions, like, are we alone in the universe? How did it all begin? You know, the things that folks have been pondering for, you know, human history. But what I really like about these two articles is that they're questions that I would have never thought to ask.

• 26:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I definitely never would have thought birds were as advanced as they are. And I also never would have thought to ask, like, what triggers lightning? I mean, I guess I always want to know what it is, but I never thought about what triggers it. And asking that question, which I never would have thought to ask, allows me to now understand that there might be, what, cosmic trapnel coming in and starting it.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I hope our listeners find these articles as interesting as we do.

• 26:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, and listeners, please send us articles.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 26:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  Send us your favorite stuff, your favorite shows, your favorite movies, your favorite unanswered questions you found out there.

• 27:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you want to check out either of the articles we talked about on the show, the first one is called "What Causes Lightning: The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting." You can find it at quantamagazine.org, and it's by Charlie Wood. The other article is called "Empire of Flight." It's from Aeon Magazine. It's by Anton Martinho Truswell, and you can find it at aeon.co. This episode was produced by Meredith Hadnot. We had editing from Melissa Soa, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, who is me, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Joanna Solotaroff, Valerie Schenkman, and Sally Helm are the fact that there are five

• 27:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  teams in the big four men's sports leagues that are clothing-related, but only one is not leg-related. Let me know if you can guess which one.

• 28:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  And Bird Pinkerton could barely keep up with Flapton as he scurried down the passageway. And after turning what felt like 100 corners in total darkness, they suddenly stopped. Flapton turned toward her and said, "Welcome to the Resistance."

• 28:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Bird and me. And if you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]. Or if you'd like to support the show, you can join Vox, become a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 29:35Speaker 05

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