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Over the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, it’s not how you’d expect. Today we continue our yearslong exploration of what you can and can’t post online. We look at how Facebook’s approach to free speech has evolved since Trump’s victory. How TikTok upended everything we see. And what all this means for the future of our political and digital lives. Special thanks to Kate Klonick EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Simon Adler Produced by - Simon Adler Original music from - Simon Adler with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloome Fact-checking by - Anna Pujol-Mazzini Lateral Cuts: The Trust Engineers Facebook’s Supreme Court Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Wait, you're listening.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

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  All right.

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  Okay.

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  All right.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  From...

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  WNYC.

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  See?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  You're right in here.

• 0:21Speaker 04

  Awesome.

• 0:21Speaker 03

  You're gonna be speaking into that microphone.

• 0:23Speaker 04

  This guy?

• 0:24Speaker 03

  Uh, nope, the one closer here.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm Simon Adler. This is Radiolab. 12245, can you hear me, Kate?

• 0:31Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  And that...

• 0:32Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  ...is Kate.

• 0:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, Kate Klonick. I'm a professor at St. John's Law School.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  I've talked to her a bunch over the years. We did a couple different stories that felt like news at the time about Facebook's rules for what we can and can't post on their platform.

• 0:48Speaker 05

  Don't get me saying the F-word again, because last time my parents yelled at me.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Did they?

• 0:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were like, "Kate, you're an adult now."

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Oh, come on.

• 0:57Speaker 05

  "You're a serious person."

• 0:58Speaker 00

  I prefer to swear on the radio as much as possible. We covered the origins of these rules and just how complicated they can become. But beyond the specifics, what we were really exploring was how the ideal of free speech plays out in different spaces in our society. You know, from a good old public square, where anyone can say anything they want, to lightly-regulated broadcast TV, to straight-up private spaces. And we were asking, like, where does social media fit into all that? And you know, I kind of thought we were done talking about all this, but then...

• 1:38Speaker 06

  I'm happy we still have a show, too, I guess.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  ...this past month.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Jimmy Kimmel can't say that anymore. The late-night host taken off air indefinitely.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  As we all know, free speech was in the news again.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. That's censorship. That's state speech control.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  And these questions of who can say what, where, and how much pressure the government can or can't exert just felt fresh and vital all over again.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  And so I called Kate, yeah, to see how this is all playing out online.

• 2:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. And now it is a problem of, okay, how do we stop billionaires and authoritarian governments from twisting these platforms into censorship machines or political propaganda?

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Okay. [bleep].

• 2:38Speaker 05

  I know. That's kind of how I feel, too.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Well, I guess before we get into all of that, let's build a bit of a foundation first.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  So I guess, how has the actual practice of keeping stuff up and taking stuff down changed and why?

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Sure. So the main thing, the main thing from the last time we talked, that has really, truly changed from like 2020 to 2025, is the rise of TikTok. I mean, if you remember, like in two short years, it had basically caught up with 12 years of Facebook's growth. And I mean, TikTok has a different way that they run their content moderation.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Okay, how so?

• 3:28Speaker 05

  Well, when we spoke in these past episodes, and one of the assumptions of content moderation, when it was getting off the ground via Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, was that we don't want to censor people unnecessarily.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  And so you would keep content up until it was reported as being harmful. And then you would make rules that would limit and try to preserve voice as much as possible, as they put it. That was like the industry term for free speech, voice. There were limits to that, obviously. But generally, like, it was a keep it up unless we have to take it down type of thing. But that's not TikTok. TikTok comes from, obviously, China, and it comes from a censorship, kind of authoritarian CCP culture. And I mean, I believe the Chinese kind of approach to speech is very reflected in the algorithm that TikTok uses. It is not a default. Everyone should see everything. This is a free world, and people have a right

• 4:26Speaker 05

  to say whatever they want, even if it's a private platform. It is a, we get to determine what people see and say. And that that's it.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  So they're just taking tons and tons and tons of stuff down.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, no.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  OK.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  TikTok, it it prescreens such a volume of content that it determines to not be outside of certain political parameters. And so they're less likely to cause negative interaction effects, to put kind of an economic term on it.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  If I can put a stupid man's term on it, it's like they are choosing to push things up instead of pull things down.

• 5:09Speaker 05

  That's a perfect way of thinking about it. And they push things up that are very milquetoast, very like happy, make you feel good, very apolitical. And so this is basically down ranking or shadow banning. The idea that you're going to manipulate the algorithm to not delete the content, but not promote it. And in addition to that, the algorithm is constantly improving and iterating on all the behavioral signals that you give it. And so it's able to provide a very addictive and expectation meeting.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Product.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, product. I mean, there's no way I'm like, I almost said experience, but I'm like,

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  It's kind of, but it's not, it's, it's, I don't know what it is.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  I have a confession, which is that I've maybe spent five minutes on TikTok in my life.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  I don't have TikTok.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  You don't either.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Well, I have like rules for some of these things.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  OK.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Like, but, you know, I study online speech for a living, so it seems kind of crazy. But I like, I don't need to actually be on TikTok for TikTok to be all over my life. I see TikTok videos.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Constantly.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  They're cross posted. I don't need to actually be on TikTok.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Well, and on that, it is interesting that TikTok figured out how to make banal stuff compelling, because we were certainly told that, well, the reason Facebook wants to leave some of this stuff up is because it's the it's the highly emotive, highly reactive stuff that keeps people around. So what what did we have wrong there? Was this just like an adjacent path to the same outcome, which is keeping people on a platform?

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, I think that it's actually fascinating. You know, what they figured out is it is a format of video that people are are hooked by. And so it does not really matter. You will find yourself often watching things that you didn't know you were interested in. But like, you're just compelled by certain types of couples that like, look very different from each other, doing any type of like, interaction.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Fascinating. So it's like, Facebook figured out the sort of information that would keep you there. TikTok figured out how to package any information to keep you there.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Yes, that's like, one way of thinking about it.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, you know, but this is not new. I mean, like advertisers have been doing this forever.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Right? Like, this is, um, you know, it's just a very different business model. It is a very different product model.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  And it seems to then be a very different informational ecosystem you're creating. Because if you're pushing up everything that falls within certain bounds, and you're deciding what those bounds are, it becomes, uh, far more, like, is controlled the right word? What's, what's the word?

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's controlled, but it's also, in like, a certain way, is even more dangerous. Because like, the ultimate in censorship in American First Amendment law is really prior restraint.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Wait, sorry.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  Or, sorry, excuse me.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  What is prior restraint?

• 8:10Speaker 05

  Prior restraint is censorship before something goes up or is ever published.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Oh, so it's not redacted. It's that it was never printed.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  Exactly. That is the exact distinction. And it's important because the existence of this redaction, the proof that it was removed from Facebook, is actually evidence that censorship has happened, right?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Whereas with TikTok, you never even know what you missed. You never even know what you were kept from seeing. And that is really, unfortunately, what we're staring down at this moment. Because in the last five years, American social media has moved towards TikTok's approach to content moderation.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Well, OK, I didn't expect us to be talking about TikTok so much, but I'm glad we have. So if I'm telling the story of this, it's like, once upon a time, Facebook creates content moderation for everything, all these policies, all these rules. Meanwhile, TikTok is sort of lurking across the Pacific, eventually jumps over and Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley folks see they're doing it this very different way. When does that actually start to shift? Not just the way Facebook is thinking about its content moderation, but also maybe the way people are experiencing Facebook as a result?

• 9:46Speaker 05

  That is not as clear, but the biggest sea change is the one that you're thinking of.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  Which is the one that happened on January 7th of this year, 2025, when Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the fact-checking program.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  And that he was going to try to move towards a community notes-based system of content moderation.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  And I mean, I think that like it was and it wasn't a sea change.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  OK, well, and talk to me like, when we say Facebook got rid of its fact-checking, at its sort of height, what was Facebook's fact-checking?

• 10:36Speaker 05

  OK, so not much, which is why this was really, which is why this was such a frustrating announcement. And it was frustrating that the media focused on it so much. The fact-checking was like a commitment to fact-checking because there had been so much clamor about miss or disinformation. But they were removing posts days after they were flagged. And like, it was very small. And so to watch it go on the chopping block was really more of a signal to a very particular person and to a very particular party that felt like big tech censorship was coming for them. And like, you know, we can get into a whole kind of conversation about whether or not that was reality-based, but that was kind of the complaint.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Right. And if I'm going to mount the best defense for conservatives about censorship by big tech, it would be that

• 11:29Speaker 00

  During the pandemic, there was sort of a party line as to what was an acceptable way to talk about the origins of the pandemic, right?

• 11:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  And?

• 11:37Speaker 05

  You can even go before the pandemic.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Okay, take it before.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  You can. There's a few things. And one of them was-

• 11:44Speaker 04

  There are serious questions for Joe Biden this evening, following the publication of emails allegedly belonging to his son Hunter-

• 11:50Speaker 05

  The Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

• 11:52Speaker 07

  Reporting lays out purported emails between Hunter Biden and Ukrainian businessman.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  New York Post, they broke the story and links to that were taken off Facebook and Twitter. That was absolutely censored.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  And what was the justification by Facebook?

• 12:07Speaker 05

  Well, that was happening a couple of weeks before the 2020 election. And so what had been the huge concern for Facebook and all these other companies was how social media impacted the 2016 election. And so they made a lot of big changes. And one of them was just kind of like, we're not going to allow things that could possibly be foreign influence to stay up, because this is exactly what we got yelled at in 2016. And so they kind of overcorrected. And I think in hindsight, it was a really hard call. And maybe probably the wrong one? And then you extend that to the Wuhan lab leak. Now, those were just insane,

• 12:49Speaker 05

  insane issues. And look at us, we're still talking about them today. It's not like they were that censored. Unlike going to, say, China, where it's like, you're like, oh, you know, Tank Man. And they're like, who?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Right? Because there are no photos of Tank Man.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  They are not published, right? And so it's not like, I just also-

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Point taken. Okay. Well, so then, like, what has changed then? If yes, there was some censoring going on and censoring of things in these sort of critical moments, like, would that not happen now? Is that the difference?

• 13:23Speaker 05

  I mean, I-

• 13:26Speaker 05

  My honest belief, I can't predict the future, but my honest belief is this administration would very quickly put the platforms in line. Yeah, I think that there would be no hesitation to do this because I don't think that this was ever about free speech. It was about their speech. And that is, that is really what you're unfortunately seeing right now. There is no recognizable free speech notions coming out of this current administration. And with the TikTok-ification of social media, people have seen the vector for power that is in content moderation.

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• 16:35Speaker 00

  Okay, so Kate, you were saying that TikTok has this fundamentally different approach to content moderation, that instead of reactively taking stuff down, they are proactively flooding the zone with happy-making stuff, that Facebook and X and others have taken notice and started adopting this approach, and that all this has happened as folks have begun to see that content moderation itself is, I think you said, a vector for power.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that basically what you're seeing is the power over what appears in your feed or doesn't appear in your feed, or the types of new content that are recommended, or the first commenters that you see on a video that you just watched. That type of control is an ability that we've never seen before.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  I remember when I was first writing about this in like 2017, 2018, presenting my research, one of the things that people were so concerned with was filter bubbles.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  Well, we're gonna be in these filter bubbles, fed to us by the algorithm. And as it turns out, that was one, very true, that that would happen. But also, even maybe more disturbingly, we don't even need filter bubbles anymore. People are just choosing platforms based on the types of content that they expect to find there.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  And in that way, so if we were gone from filter bubbles to... Platform islands where the owners of the platform get to push up whatever it is that fits whatever their ideological ends are. China and TikTok, it seems to be like milky toast stuff that's not going to rile you up, but it's going to keep your eyeballs on here. It feels a little bit like X, formerly Twitter, is the mirror image where it's like, we're just going to rile you up all the time. Is that right? And is that what we're going to just see more of, which is come to this platform island for emotion A, come to that platform island for emotion B?

• 18:39Speaker 05

  I think that that's exactly right. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's what we go to the movies for. That's what we turn into like certain types of things for, right? It's I don't in the mood for, you know, a horror film, so I don't go to a horror film. This, um, this kind of approach is much easier to moderate. People get much less upset.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 05

  And it's much cheaper because there is not as much reactive content moderation to do. You don't have to employ hundreds of people in call centers to review every report of something that's been flagged. And so this has kind of become the new standard.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  I remember one of the big questions, probably in the first piece we did, was this question of like, what kind of a space to consider Facebook? Because the First Amendment treats private spaces differently than public spaces. So it matters whether or not Facebook is more like a mall or a public square. And so given all these changes you've just mentioned, like, what is the metaphor now? I have one based on what you've said, but I'm curious what yours is.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  No, I mean, I've always liked the mall metaphor and it has a weird squirrely little place in First Amendment law in a bunch of cases. But I want to hear what you're, I kind of want to hear what yours is.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Well, to me, it's now, or certainly the direction things seem headed based on what you've said, is that it's now just, it's just broadcast again.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  And with broadcast, there is no free speech, right?

• 20:12Speaker 05

  No.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Like ABC, NBC, they can cancel a show at any time. They get to decide exactly what the evening lineup is. But with this, with social media, it's like, it's like a broadcast camouflaged as an organically generated thing.

• 20:28Speaker 05

  100%. You know, you can shadow ban or take down or limit the reach, but it doesn't even have to be that subtle. Like Elon Musk always showing up in my feed, even though I don't follow Elon Musk, is like having Rupert Murdoch in like the interstitial spaces before every commercial break at Fox News, you know, like directly telling me what I should think. That isn't subtle. Like, that is the other thing about this that is maybe the scariest part of the last couple of months, is that none of it even is super pretextual. Like, there isn't a lot of like excuses. We're not even hiding behind algorithms anymore. It is just the owner of the, of the, of the, of the platform saying the thing out loud

• 21:11Speaker 05

  and forcing everyone to see it if they're on his platform. You know, I think that if you're going to all of these different platform islands, the other thing is like, how do we change those? To use regulatory regimes to try to control how they speak is obviously a problematic thing by any type of measure. We don't want governments controlling speech for the exact reason of all of the authoritarianism we've just discussed. And so I think that there's, it's very hard.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Sorry, if I can jump in there though, but it does feel like, yeah, I'm not for, and have never been for, the federal government coming in and molding Facebook's content moderation policies.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Of course not.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  But if something no longer resembles a public square at all, and instead has become, to keep reusing my, my label, like a camouflage broadcasting network where it's like, yeah, these are individuals saying something that they believe in, but then that is being collated, amassed, and pushed out as a opinion-changing product by someone on high.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  I am okay at that point with there being some sort of regulation. It's not regulating maybe what people are allowed to post, but maybe how it's being aggregated. I don't know, there have to be some clever, somebody smarter than me who could come up with these sorts of rules.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  No, I mean, like every Western state has some type of media regulator specifically to avoid maybe like two or three people controlling all of media.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  Right? But all of a sudden, we're like on the internet and yes, there is an infinite amount of content on the internet. But is it so infinite? Like if there are, if we're talking about like the same three main places that people are going to for their news, people are going to for like their, for their daily interactions, people are going to, to feel like they're part of a conversation, their water cooler, their public square, whatever it is. If that is like three people and they're all friends of the president, like that's, that's a problem. And maybe even more importantly, journalists, they go to X, they go to Blue Sky, they go to YouTube, they go to TikTok.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  And they report things that are happening in those places as if they're real places that things are happening. But they're also controlled by these individuals. And so they're not reflective necessarily of real world, yet they are being reported on as if they were reflective of real world. Right? And so, um, I, I just think that what you see in the last five years is an industry, understand the power that it holds in content moderation, that it's so not a customer service issue, that it is actually like a huge, huge force for, for shaping public opinion. And that that has exponential value to political parties and governments.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  It's like as valuable as oil and guns, because how you push things, what you keep up, what you take down. I mean, this is how you can basically create, you know, the rise and fall of presidencies if you want to, or political parties. And they know how to market them to you, no matter how niche you are, and that's scalable. And so like, it's a way to make a lot of money and then it's a way to control a lot of minds.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  You know, I think one of the reasons you and I have gotten along so well over the years and have worked so well together in this now trilogy of stories is that we both had sort of an unorthodox approach to this. I mean, most people were saying that these Facebook guys were idiots, that they're bad, that they're causing lots of trouble, that we should just like cast scorn upon them.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  And you, and then me sort of following your lead, were more like, what if we actually try to understand this problem? And I guess now, with hindsight, I'm wondering, like, did we miss something here? Were we sort of played the fool?

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Um, you know, it wouldn't be the first time that someone has told me that in some way I'm a useful idiot to Facebookers in some type of capacity.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I didn't, I would say we would be useful idiots. So I didn't call you. I'm asking if we are, is the question.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  I feel as if a lot of people, and a lot of what we've said today, people will be like, of course, this is what happened. This is what we were saying would happen. But it wasn't fait accompli when we talked about it. It wasn't. Every single one of these solutions has the same flaw at the end of the day to it, which is that these are for-profit companies that do what they want to do. And things change as things settle. So, I don't know.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, so then, like, is content moderation sort of dead?

• 26:16Speaker 05

  I just, um, yeah, this is like a, this is like a very controversial thing. It really depends on what you mean by that question. There has been a lot of controversy around, like, are they going to invest in these huge cost centers of trust and safety? Are they going to care about this type of issue if they can TikTok-ify everything? And just send you down these rabbit holes of endlessly drooly, like, eye-glaze-over, like, WALL-E kind of scene where you're on the couch with your Slurpee, like, Barcalounger or whatever, like, watching things? Is that what they're, they're basically going to do? And are they going to have to keep moderating? And I mean, I think that, like, the answer

• 26:57Speaker 05

  is that we're going to increasingly see a automated content moderation system. It's going to increasingly not embody

• 27:06Speaker 05

  The edges of society and the the range of voice that we had at the beginnings of the internet. And that we are going to kind of see a productification of speech.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  I'd love to give you one, one, one more idea that I've been playing around with for a couple of years.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  If I was ever going to write a short sci fi story, it would be about the quote unquote, perfect piece of art. You step in front of it, it does a quick facial scan of you, pulls everything about you that it knows from the internet. And then it puts forward an image perfectly generated for you that will evoke a feeling. On Tuesdays, it's happiness. On Wednesdays, it's sadness. And so it's this visual tableau personalized to every person that evokes the same emotion. And once you have that, once you can control the emotions of people with the flip of a dial by putting something in front of them that's going to only peak that feeling for them, then you could just control everybody.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Well, I love that. Sounds like a Ted Chang story. But that's, you know, you should write that. Maybe you can ask AI to do it for you if you're really busy.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  This story was reported and produced by me, Simon Adler, with some original music and sound design by me. Mixing done by Jeremy Bloom. Of course, huge, huge thank you to Kate Klonick, as always. And yeah, we will be back next week saying some more things. Until then, thanks for listening.

• 29:37Speaker 12

  Hello, hello. Oh, I can hear myself.

• 29:41Speaker 12

  Kid Podcast crossover special.

• 29:46Speaker 13

  Hi, I'm from-- wait, hi, I'm Nora Sultan, and I'm from New York. And here are the staff credits.

• 29:53Speaker 14

  Radiolab was created by Jared Abumbrad, and it's edited by Soren Witter.

• 29:58Speaker 12

  Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Lulu Miller and Latif Masser are our co-hosts.

• 30:04Speaker 15

  Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, and David Gabel.

• 30:12Speaker 12

  Oh, so I just have to read that one name? Okay.

• 30:18Speaker 12

  Oh my god!

• 30:22Speaker 12

  All right, all right. Sin Duh Nai Sum Bada.

• 30:28Speaker 12

  Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, and Sarah Kari.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Oh, Sarah Sandback, Anisa Vitez, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young.

• 30:43Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, I see it. Do I sound like happy? With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol, Mezini, and Natalie Middleton.

• 30:56Speaker 12

  Guys, I know I'm family, so you don't gotta clap. It's all right.

• 31:02Speaker 16

  Hi, this is Laura, calling from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simmons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 31:26Speaker 08

  Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/BankGuy. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.