Ear rumblers assemble!

Ben can make a roaring, rumbling sound with his ears that no one else can hear. He never thought much about it — whether only he could do this, or whether everyone could do this — until he discovered a subreddit called Ear Rumblers Assemble: a whole community devoted to the mysterious and understudied ability to voluntarily tense one of the miniscule muscles in our ears. We go into Ben's ear with Dr. Anand Devaiah, and raise questions about how everyone experiences the world differently and the enduring mysteries of the human body. Show notes: r/earrumblersassemble (Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/top/?screen_view_count=10&t=month) Thanks to Reddit, a New Diagnosis Is Bubbling Up Across the Nation (KFF Health News https://kffhealthnews.org/news/cannot-burp-belch-syndrome-botox-esophagus-injection/) This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Dave Shaw. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

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

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• 1:20Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory.

• 1:31Amory Sivertson?

  Ben.

• 1:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Couple of years ago, I went to the Independent Media Initiative Conference in Austin, Texas. It was sort of this gathering of creators, podcasters, YouTubers, documentarians of all stripes. And I was kind of a fly on the wall, listening to a bunch of YouTubers talk about how they do their work. But these YouTubers started to talk about a subreddit that I had never heard of before in my life, and it was like a revelation.

• 2:08Amory Sivertson?

  Oh.

• 2:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  The subreddit they were talking about is called Ear Rumblers Assemble. Let's go to the subreddit for a second.

• 2:16Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 2:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I am going to...

• 2:19Amory Sivertson?

  Ear Rumblers Assemble?

• 2:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, r/earrumblersassemble.

• 2:24Amory Sivertson?

  A subreddit for those who can control their tensor tympani muscle.

• 2:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so I previously did not know what this was. I now do. You know, some of the smallest muscles in our whole bodies, Amory, exist in our ears, and this is one of those muscles. And when you control this tiny muscle, you hear a drumroll in your ear. It's hard to describe. It's in my ear. It's kind of all encompassing. It sort of sounds like a drumroll. It sounds like being underwater, and it sounds like, kind of like the rumble of a rocket liftoff.

• 3:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is a thing that I can do that I kind of didn't think anybody else could do. I thought I was special. Or, you know, maybe it's a thing that I assumed everyone could do, but that nobody really talked to each other about. I certainly never talked about it. So discovering this subreddit blew my mind.

• 3:27Amory Sivertson?

  Wow. You know, just the titles of the posts that are most recent at the time that we're recording this?

• 3:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 3:36Amory Sivertson?

  The overwhelming sentiment is, "This isn't just me."

• 3:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's people like me discovering this subreddit.

• 3:43Amory Sivertson?

  "I thought I was the only one. This is awesome."

• 3:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Amory Sivertson?

  "No freaking way, man." Like, this is incredible.

• 3:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know you're probably nervous now that you're in the presence of someone like me who can do this.

• 4:00Amory Sivertson?

  Man.

• 4:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  What questions... No, I mean, you know, honestly, it felt like that to me.

• 4:06Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, I get that.

• 4:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  It felt like this weird superpower that I didn't... I was like, huh, that's a thing I can do. That's weird.

• 4:11Amory Sivertson?

  Well, and you know what I imagine is kind of especially exciting about this subreddit? Is that this is, when someone can do something that most people can't do, it's a party trick, right?

• 4:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 4:21Amory Sivertson?

  But if this is a party trick that, this is in your head, I've never heard this. So I assume that other people can't hear when someone is ear rumbling, if that's the right term.

• 4:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm doing it right now. Can you hear it?

• 4:36Amory Sivertson?

  No. No, so it's like a party trick that you can never show anyone else. People just have to believe that you can do it.

• 4:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 4:44Amory Sivertson?

  And on this subreddit, other people believe because they too can do it.

• 4:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. Unlike my double-jointed butt, which is another different episode,

• 4:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  you cannot demonstrate it at a party.

• 5:00Amory Sivertson?

  That's right. That's right. Yep. Your double-jointed butt.

• 5:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  As you probably know, Amory, Boston is home to one of the most prestigious specialty hospitals in the world, Mass Eye and Ear.

• 5:13Amory Sivertson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  We reached out to them. We heard back.

• 5:17Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 5:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  A spokesperson from Mass Eye and Ear said they have, quote, "never seen this clinically."

• 5:26Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, boy.

• 5:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Producer Grace Tatter actually reached out to several medical institutions, and I do have good news, Amory. A doctor at Boston Medical Center did agree to see me.

• 5:40Amory Sivertson?

  Does this doctor believe before you even see them?

• 5:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll get to that. I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 5:47Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 5:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  From WBUR Boston's NPR, this is Endless Thread.

• 5:52Amory Sivertson?

  And today's episode?

• 5:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ear Rumblers Assemble.

• 6:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, Amory, by the time we found a professional who might cut through some of the potential skepticism about whether or not this is indeed a thing, I was pretty excited to roll up to Boston Medical Center with producer Grace Tatter to see Dr. Anand Debaya. We immediately hit it off, he and I, starting with checking the room for a good, quiet spot to record.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  It's a decibel meter.

• 6:28Amory Sivertson?

  Ah.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 6:30Speaker 07

  Oh, that is really cool.

• 6:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sound nerdiness is great. Anand is technically an otolaryngologist. They specialize in noses, throats, heads, and necks, and of course, hearing and ears.

• 6:43Amory Sivertson?

  Audio person after our own hearts.

• 6:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  When did you first hear of this phenomenon that, like, I think we're, for the laypeople, we're calling ear rumbling?

• 6:51Speaker 06

  Unofficially, I had noticed it in myself when I was able to do this with my ears.

• 6:56Amory Sivertson?

  Hey, we got a rumbler.

• 6:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  We got a rumbler. He can do it, too.

• 7:03Speaker 06

  My first encountering this was as a kid. And the first time that I plugged in an electric guitar into an amplifier, and I realized that my volume was way too loud.

• 7:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 7:21Speaker 06

  And my ears did this thing, and then I could, I figured out that I could control that when the sound around me was really loud when I was playing in bands and things, and I could dampen that sound. And so I thought that was something that everyone could do, and I was very wrong.

• 7:37Amory Sivertson?

  Wow. This is like a form of ear protection for people who can rumble?

• 7:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know, that's how Anand used it. That's not something that I did, but the important thing is, like, you know, we are legion. He and I, we're the same. Anand really didn't start figuring any of this out, though, until he started seeing patients.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  People were coming to me saying, "I have this strange sound."

• 8:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Anand estimates that about 10% of people in the world can do this.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  The studies that have looked at this, you know, range anywhere between 10% to 40%. So I picked the low end of it because it seems like it's the right place to land for something that's very difficult to study. But I should probably adjust higher because two of us sitting here on microphones can do this, and one of our colleagues here who's not on the microphone also can do this, so it makes us...

• 8:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, also an ear rumbler?

• 8:35Speaker 06

  Yes, that's right, yeah.

• 8:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  She's nodding. So, Amory, of the four people in the room, sorry, Grace, the Boston Medical Center spokesperson who helped us organize this interview, Kirsten, she wanted to sit in on it because she too is an ear rumbler.

• 8:52Amory Sivertson?

  I love that. I love that you reach out to, like, Mass Eye and Ear, the otolaryngology, you know, establishment of prestige, and get nothing. And then you reach out to Boston Medical Center, and the person that you reach is like, "Ooh, I'm a rumbler. Yes, let's make this happen."

• 9:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. Rumblers assemble.

• 9:12Amory Sivertson?

  That's right.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  You may notice, perhaps, and, you know, I know people too, that if, when you do this, you're flexing your eyes a little bit, or maybe your palate a little bit. You can... You're doing it right now, aren't you?

• 9:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory, have you ever seen me squint a little bit while we're talking?

• 9:34Amory Sivertson?

  I'm sure you have. I can't say that, like, in my memory, I'm going, "Oh, yeah, sometimes he gets a little squinty."

• 9:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  When you're telling me something I don't want to hear, blocking you out.

• 9:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I would never, I would never rumble you into the background.

• 9:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Interestingly enough, Anand had made a video of the inside of his ear while it is rumbling, and brought it to us.

• 10:04Speaker 06

  See that?

• 10:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's sort of like contracting or something?

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Exactly. Exactly. Pulls it in, relaxes it. Yeah.

• 10:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's like a, it's like a contraction in the drum.

• 10:14Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. And it's that contraction that gives you the rumbling sound.

• 10:19Amory Sivertson?

  How deep is this muscle? Like, to film that, what did he, did he have to use a tube going down his ear, a tiny tube or something?

• 10:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  So it is technically behind the eardrum, so you actually can't see it in the video, but you can see how it's making the eardrum contract.

• 10:39Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 10:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't have Anand's video on hand, but I'm going to show you a video like it.

• 10:45Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 10:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  So take a look at this.

• 10:49Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, we're going in the ear.

• 10:53Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, it's waxy. Oh, gosh. Okay. It looks like a semi-translucent pale balloon that's contracting, almost like a heart beating.

• 11:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so here's a more detailed description of what is actually happening.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  It's a contraction of this teeny little muscle inside the ear that connects to the first of the three ear bones that conducts sound from the outside to the inside of the ear, the tensor tympanic, and it connects to this bone called the malleus. The malleus is that first bone that connects to your eardrum, and it receives sound, and it starts the transmission process.

• 11:37Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, just like I said.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  So when you do ear rumbling, what you're doing is you're able to contract that little muscle that tenses and relaxes.

• 11:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm playing the tympanis.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm playing the drums.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  You are. You are. You're playing your own drums. Exactly.

• 11:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  So for most people, this muscle in the ear, the tensor tympanic, Emery, contracts when they're startled. It could be that this is kind of like a built-in volume knob. You know, you dial the volume down when it contracts and back up when you relax again.

• 12:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it's like a damper pedal, if that reference makes sense to anyone.

• 12:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, make the piano quieter.

• 12:18Amory Sivertson?

  Uh huh.

• 12:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  But like, here's some complexity to that, right? Like, I don't experience that, for whatever it's worth. When I, like, do that, like, I was just doing it now while I was talking, and my talking didn't get quieter.

• 12:36Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, you can do it while you're talking.

• 12:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  I can. It's difficult. I'm doing it, and I'm doing it again right now. But it's difficult to do them both at the same time. But I don't experience the world as becoming quieter when I do this. And we just, we still don't know a lot about this tiny muscle and like, why it does what it does. It's complicated, and we haven't done like, a million, you know, we haven't done a bunch of studies on this. So whatever its purpose, most people experience this contraction involuntarily. But people like me, and Anand, and Kirsten from the Boston Medical Center, we can control it. And a lot of the posts on Ear Rumbler's Assemble subreddit are like, you know, "Oh my god, this is awesome." But some of them are, by the way, more concerned. Like, is this okay?

• 13:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can my ears get stuck this way?

• 13:25Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  For me, there's been that fear a little bit that it's like, because it's so hard to do, I worry sometimes that if I do it too much, something will happen, something bad will happen. Anand says it is totally cool to play those tympanis.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  There are a small percentage of people that they'll have this rumbling for other reasons, but that's usually coming with other symptoms, and it's not what this community is experiencing. And I can't speak for the whole community, because I don't want to...

• 13:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Obviously, yeah, sure.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Pretend like I know every person that has posted on that subreddit. That wouldn't be fair of me. But yeah, the vast majority of people that can do this, it is unique and special, and again, celebrate it. It's great.

• 14:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, Emery, you know a little bit more about the mechanics here. You've seen the video, you've heard the names of some of the pieces of the body involved. Tensor tympanic muscle, like tympanic drums, malleus, or mallet, or hammer-like part.

• 14:32Amory Sivertson?

  Right.

• 14:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  So after the break, we are gonna take a journey to the center of my ear, and for the first time possibly in history, we are gonna figure out a way to let the non-rumblers hear what the rumblers hear.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine-to-five job?

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• 15:43Speaker 01

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

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  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

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• 16:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Emery, somewhere between 10% and 40% of the population, we think, can ear rumble. But we still know very little about what all these people, whether it's 10% or 40% or whatever percent, what they have in common.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  I think it's partly because it's a very select group of folks that know that they can do this, that have even heard it. And so you've got the percentage of people that can do it. Then you've got the percentage of people that understand that that's unique. Then there's a percentage of people that are curious about it. And I think it's that combination, that sort of diminishing numbers of people and understanding why that might be impactful, is the reason why. That's not to say it's not impactful. In fact, we've raised a number of questions here, right, that don't have a good answer, or at least I'm not aware of a good answer.

• 17:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Emery, you talked about this a little bit before, you know, when Grace reached out to a bunch of specialists about this, and only three got back, and all of the ones who did get back actually had disability. What does that make you think about?

• 17:51Amory Sivertson?

  The people who don't experience it, they probably don't think that this is very consequential. Like, okay, you can rumble your ears, and I can, and I have a double-jointed butt, so what?

• 18:05Amory Sivertson?

  Like, they don't, they're not seeing it as a medical emergency or even a higher stakes phenomenon.

• 18:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Maybe it makes sense that the people most interested digging into this can do this. But Anand thinks there's a lot we could learn from taking a closer look at ear rumbling.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  If you take 100 people that have this ability, and you can control for the different things that make people different, and you could understand if there was maybe a trend towards, maybe their hearing is better, maybe it's worse. Maybe they have other qualities of their hearing that you wouldn't expect.

• 18:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Anand sees a lot of musicians who really need to understand how their ears are working and how hearing works. And a lot of these people can have incredible hearing. They can hear tones or assess the quality of the sound in a way that other people can't. What if a lot of these musicians with exceptional hearing can also ear rumble?

• 19:06Speaker 06

  I mean, you could look at any family of musicians and be able to see these characteristics play out. My gosh, just look at, like, the Marcellus family alone.

• 19:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 19:15Speaker 06

  I mean, just to give one of many examples, you know, of people that have an incredible level of talent, yeah.

• 19:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Winton's brother's name, I forget.

• 19:22Speaker 06

  Branford and the others, yeah.

• 19:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  You should see if either of them can rumble.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  We may have to reach out to them. I think this is a real good reason to make an introduction. I would love that. You and I can maybe work on this.

• 19:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, sounds good.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Have any actual studies been done where they, you know, the ear rumblers have actually assembled and all taken hearing tests to see if there are, like, if there's anything else in common about the way you rumblers hear the world?

• 19:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  I would say like, not really that we know of. And this all reminds me of, you know, this other sort of complicated thing when you start to think about how we experience the world. You know, none of us can really know how each other feels or experiences even simple things, right? Like, when you get down to it, you and I can like, agree on like, the color blue or what a piano sounds like, maybe. But like, even those kinds of ideas are complicated, which I brought up to Anand.

• 20:26Speaker 06

  I think it's a great sidebar. And in fact, not really a sidebar at all. Let's take a great example of some people that have autism.

• 20:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 06

  They perceive the world in a very different way than we do. And it's just different. You know, we have to figure out, or they have to figure out, how we all communicate, how we see the world in a different way. And some of these folks have incredible talents that we can't, I'd say, other people can't really fathom, right? So I think there's a lot of truth to that. And we can see examples, not just in, say, autism, but in other places that we see, that we see people that are different in ways that amaze us. And I think that that's a big part of it.

• 21:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Anand feels like this Ear Rumbler's Assembling subreddit is actually a beautiful thing that can enrich our understanding of human experience.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  That's where the sort of culture of this, the people that have gathered together in different spaces to talk about it is pretty fascinating, to be honest with you.

• 21:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's literally inside your own head.

• 21:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Until you talk to other people about it.

• 21:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you could get a message to the Ear Rumbling subreddit, what would your message be? What would you want them to know, people who have been comparing notes on this kind of thing?

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Say that it is great that you're sharing, and it's great that you're comparing. And there is so much more to be learned by communicating with one another than to be isolated. So I am delighted that people are online talking about these things and about their own experience. And as long as they understand that, in general, this is a very, very unique thing and very benign, that's great.

• 22:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  There have actually been cases, Amory, where subreddits about specific conditions have led to real medical breakthroughs. Do you remember when we were talking about no burp syndrome?

• 22:38Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, yeah. There are people who can't burp.

• 22:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly what it sounds like, the inability to burp.

• 22:45Amory Sivertson?

  That's so frustrating.

• 22:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're chuckling about, but apparently it's really painful. This, this thing didn't even have an official name until 2019. Now it is formally known as retrograde crycoferen Jesus dysfunction. And I say it, Jesus. A lot of doctors didn't even know this condition existed, much less know how to treat it, until a no burp subreddit brought thousands of people with this condition together. Gastroenterologists actually credit Reddit with raising awareness of the condition. You know, way more people are getting a procedure now that really helps with that syndrome. There's an interesting article about this from KFF

• 23:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Health News from a few years back that we can link to in our show notes.

• 23:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  So you're a believer, which I appreciate, but if any part of you, or any part of our listeners, still doubts that I can ear rumble, Amory, you know what Dr. Anand had to do.

• 23:53Amory Sivertson?

  Gotta go inside your ear.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Yep. Very nice. Looks great. I can see little movements. I can see a little movement of your eardrum. Yep. Bonafide rumbler.

• 24:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm a bonafide rumbler. Woo-hoo.

• 24:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Bonafide rumbler, Amory. I'm gonna get my patch and my bumper sticker.

• 24:19Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, you guys need all like, well, Ear Rumbler's Assemble is pretty good, but I

• 24:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  That is good.

• 24:24Amory Sivertson?

  I was thinking like, let's get ready to rumble.

• 24:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  One last thing that we should do, Amory, is, you know, for, for the remaining 90 to 60% of people who exist in the world, and it sounds like maybe you're one of them, or you, maybe you haven't discovered yet that you can rumble.

• 24:48Amory Sivertson?

  I don't know. As we've been, you know, recording this, there have been a couple moments where I've just been like, maybe if I just, if I squint, or if I just think really hard.

• 24:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. Use the force.

• 25:00Amory Sivertson?

  I can't. I was just trying. I can't do it.

• 25:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. Well, I've got a present for you. I want you to listen to this. And, and I want all the people who can't hear rumble to listen to this, so that you can get a sense of what it sounds like in these rumblers' heads.

• 25:22Amory Sivertson?

  You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like, like when you're, like, almost like when you're going over a slightly bumpy road in a tunnel.

• 25:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm. That's good. I like that.

• 25:36Amory Sivertson?

  Or it's like, yeah, it's like a low wind in your ears. And you enjoy this sensation?

• 25:44Amory Sivertson?

  I'm sorry. I didn't mean that to sound judgy. Like, is it, is it a pleasurable thing for you? Because this, to me, is a little like, it's almost like the first time I tried to use noise-canceling headphones, back when those were a newer phenomenon. And it made, it made me kind of feel a little ill.

• 26:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  I would describe this as the opposite, because unlike, noise-canceling headphones are like removing a physiological ability that you have that's always on, right?

• 26:14Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, but it was the same sort of like wind in my ears, like pressure in my ears that listening to this just created for me.

• 26:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  But I think the difference is that this is flexing a muscle, whereas that is like removing the ability to do something that you have, right?

• 26:32Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 26:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is like sense the world around you. And this, it might remove your ability to sense the world around you a little bit, because you're like creating a sound that you're going to hear other stuff less well. But I actually don't experience that. I hear stuff fine while this is going on in my head. But it's, yeah, I would say it's neutral. It's just like a thing I can do, and sometimes I do it, you know? It's, it doesn't like immediately result in relief or anything like that. But it's any other kind of muscle that you can flex, like being able to like, use your brain to make your body do something, I would say is pretty satisfying in general. And so it has that level of satisfaction.

• 27:17Amory Sivertson?

  Wow. Props to Paul Vikes, sound designer and production manager, for creating that.

• 27:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Here's what's interesting, though, right? Like, we are talking in this episode about this, a little bit about this idea of a unique human experience versus a shared human experience, right? And where this complexity is, where it's like, we all perceive the world in a way as individuals, and then we also try to share with each other how we perceive the world. And we cannot always be sure that how we perceive the world is actually the same. So we discovered that somebody on our team, our other sound design powerhouse, Emily Jankowski, can also ear rumble. And she put together a different sound for us to listen to that

• 28:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  doesn't actually sound like my ear rumble.

• 28:20Amory Sivertson?

  It sounds pretty similar to me, but I'm guessing to your very rumble, your rumbly, rumbly ear, this sounds very different.

• 28:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're, in some ways, they're different pitches, I think, which is maybe like an important piece of this. But Emily sounds a little bit more contained, whereas Paul's sounds a little bit more like fully wrapping around my head.

• 28:48Amory Sivertson?

  What, what instructions did you give Paul specifically to create this sound?

• 28:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God. I don't remember.

• 28:56Amory Sivertson?

  Because it's not just a, like a timpani drum roll, which sounds...

• 29:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I said, I said rocket launch, timpani drum roll, a fast drum roll, so fast that, like, not that it's impossible for a person to do it, but it's like at the upper edges of their ability.

• 29:16Amory Sivertson?

  Whoa. Well, congratulations on your rumbly ears. This is wild.

• 29:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. I mean, who knows, right? Like, does this matter? I don't know. But what I will say is that it matters to me as an ear rumbler to know that other people can do it, and that we do have this like shared experience, actually, that I didn't even know was a shared experience. And so...

• 29:40Amory Sivertson?

  And it matters to me as a non-rumbler who just thinks it's cool when we can do something with our, with our bodies that other people can't do, or the idea of people coming together to share in this phenomenon and feel less alone in their ability. It's beautiful.

• 30:06Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 30:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw, mixed and sound design by Paul Vikes.

• 30:20Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, Emily Jankowski, and our senior managing producer, Suma Tijoshi.

• 30:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  And also thanks to Philippe Fournier, an audiologist at Université Laval, also in ear rumbler, by the way, for helping us understand more about this phenomenon.

• 30:37Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and a Q-tip, which you should never use to clean your ears, even though we all use Q-tips to clean our ears. And I'm not gonna stop.

• 30:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet or the inside of your ear, you can hit us up at [email protected].

• 31:01Amory Sivertson?

  No inner ear pics, please. I don't want them.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform, or is it your employer?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology's connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't, monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call management.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 32:56Speaker 03

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• 33:30Amory Sivertson?

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