Worth

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Shahib Al-Masawa Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim HowardFact-checking by - Michelle Soraka EPISODE CITATIONS: Books - Memoir of A Debulked (https://zpr.io/WJz2Ybvq3HmT) Woman by Susan Gubar Being Mortal (https://zpr.io/8J47trRcbjKh) by Atul Gawande Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (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

  Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasr. And today, we're resurfacing a quite provocative episode we originally reported in 2014. Now, that sounds like a long time ago until you start listening and you start to realize how many parallels there are between 2014 and this moment, right now. Outrageous healthcare costs, war in the Middle East, climate change. In every one of these cases, the specifics that they're referring to have changed, but the overall picture remains depressingly the same. Honestly, since it came out, I still think about these stories. I still remember them all the time, especially the last one.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  I would say this episode is one of my all-time top 10 Radiolab episodes. I hope you feel the same way, whether you are hearing it for the first time or hearing it for the 10th time. Here it goes. Worth.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Radiolab.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  From? WNYC.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Rewind.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Are you ready?

• 1:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  Feeling full of worth?

• 1:16Speaker 05

  I'm feeling full of value.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  Well, in that spirit, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 1:19Speaker 05

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  This is Radiolab, and today...

• 1:22Speaker 05

  Three very different stories that try to put a dollar value. Million is okay. One million dollar? Seven dollars. $10,000.

• 1:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say five bucks.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  One thing's...

• 1:32Speaker 04

  That seemed...

• 1:32Speaker 05

  Priceless. Priceless. Priceless.

• 1:34Speaker 06

  Is it really?

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Okay, so start at the top.

• 1:40Speaker 06

  Bring on the pressure.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  So tell... All right, we're gonna start the show with a story from our producer, Molly Webster.

• 1:47Speaker 06

  I don't remember any of it.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Who we might actually want to rename Molly Wongster, because she recently got herself into some serious numeracizing. Actually, it didn't start as a wonky thing. It started actually with some medical journals.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was... So that was interesting, because it was some of the most... Poetic writing I've seen out of doctors, ever. One journal article said like, "What would one more month mean to a 37-year-old mother who has four children?" Or, "What would one more month mean if you are a 67-year-old who's about to go traveling around the world?" People were just kind of like drifting these questions out there.

• 2:26Speaker 07

  All these questions seemed to circle around a seemingly simple story of the pricing of a drug, cancer drug.

• 2:34Speaker 06

  And the story, if you really want to tell it from the beginning, it begins with this guy named Leonard.

• 2:39Speaker 07

  Leonard Salz. I'm a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

• 2:43Speaker 06

  Which is here in New York, and it's one of the largest cancer centers in the country.

• 2:48Speaker 07

  I mean, we have 17 doctors here who treat colon cancer.

• 2:51Speaker 06

  Just for colon cancer.

• 2:52Speaker 07

  We treat a very large number of patients.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  It's a huge hospital, and one of the things Leonard's been noticing in the last, I don't know, decade, is cancer drug prices have just gone through the roof.

• 3:03Speaker 07

  I mean, we have drugs out there that are many hundreds of dollars per pill.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  Really? Yeah. Oh, just wait. Let's see, where does this start? It starts, it's June in 2012. Leonard Salz is at a conference, and at this conference is a pharmaceutical company called Sanofi, and they give a presentation about a new drug that they have.

• 3:22Speaker 07

  A drug called Zaltrap. And Zaltrap is a drug that, without getting into the science too much, targets the blood supply to the tumor.

• 3:32Speaker 06

  It cuts off the blood supply, which means the tumor can't grow.

• 3:35Speaker 07

  That's, that's the scientific hypothesis.

• 3:37Speaker 06

  So this new drug is presented, and they like present the data.

• 3:40Speaker 07

  And they showed that the survival difference-

• 3:43Speaker 06

  Between the people who got Zaltrap and the people who didn't.

• 3:47Speaker 07

  Was 1.4 months, or 42 days.

• 3:49Speaker 06

  In other words, if you take this drug, you could get 42 more days of life, on average, which means you could get three more days, you could get no days, you could get 42, or you could live another three years. Forty-two.

• 4:01Speaker 07

  Forty-two days.

• 4:02Speaker 06

  Down to the, down to the fine grain.

• 4:03Speaker 07

  Oh, please. I could show you some graphs that have been put up at meetings that show survival curves. Calculated out to two decimal places in terms of months. So I'm looking at the-

• 4:15Speaker 06

  That's like not a tenth of a month.

• 4:16Speaker 07

  A hundredth of a month. A hundredth of a month. That's a little over seven hours.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  What?

• 4:20Speaker 07

  Pretty amusing, actually.

• 4:22Speaker 06

  Why would you, why would you-

• 4:24Speaker 07

  It's pseudo-precision.

• 4:25Speaker 06

  Pseudo-precision.

• 4:26Speaker 07

  At any rate.

• 4:26Speaker 06

  Anyways, after the conference, the FDA approves the drug. And basically, once the FDA approves a drug, public insurance has to take it. And then the private insurance companies just follow suit, which means you get prescribed the drug and people pay for it.

• 4:41Speaker 07

  And what does the drug cost?

• 4:42Speaker 06

  That's the thing.

• 4:43Speaker 07

  It costs, uh-

• 4:45Speaker 06

  Roughly?

• 4:45Speaker 07

  Thirty thousand for a three-month course.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 4:49Speaker 07

  So-

• 4:50Speaker 06

  So Leonard's like, "Wow, that is expensive." And there was already another drug on the market, did the same thing, and it cost half as much. To put that in context, this is just one drug that's $11,000 a month. A normal cancer patient might take dozens of drugs.

• 5:06Speaker 07

  There are anti-nausea medicines that are sometimes used that are in the range of $90 to $100 a tablet. And you take a tablet once a day for three days. One needs growth factors to help support the white blood cell count, which you sometimes need in chemo. Those can be $5,000 every two to three weeks. If you need antibiotics to treat infections, those aren't cheap. And then you need a pharmacist to prepare it. They're labor-intensive. You need tubing and equipment and needles to give it. You need trained nurses to administer it. You need doctors to take care of the patients. And don't forget, there's a cost for a CAT scan or MRI. And then, of course, someone's got to pay for the real estate, the heat and the lights. None of those prices are figured into it. Okay? I'm just giving you the cost of the drug.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  So Leonard calls up one of his colleagues.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Uh, my name is Peter Bach. I'm a physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  Peter is the number cruncher of the group. He does the statistical analysis of, I don't know, the cost of care. And Len grabbed him and ran him through all the data.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  And we walked through the out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare beneficiaries, if they don't have additional insurance, 20 cents of every dollar they pay out of pocket.

• 6:15Speaker 06

  And that number sort of hit him because he realized for Medicare patients, they'd be paying something like $2,000 out of pocket every month for just this drug.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  It's 2,200, if I remember the number correctly.

• 6:26Speaker 06

  For a lot of Medicare patients.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  That's all of their money. Never mind other drugs. That's when I thought we should go public with it.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  Memorial Sloan-Kettering, they decide to boycott this drug.

• 6:42Speaker 07

  Now, that-

• 6:43Speaker 06

  Is that- I mean, I'm just stopping you because when you guys made that decision, was that- that feels like a big deal?

• 6:50Speaker 07

  It did feel like a big deal, and it felt like a big enough deal that we decided to write the op-ed piece in the New York Times.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  They write an op-ed in the Times that basically says, "Look, this is crazy. $11,000 a month for a drug that maybe gives you 42 more days of life?"

• 7:04Speaker 07

  Is that worth it? And a little less than a month after the op-ed piece came out-

• 7:09Speaker 06

  The company that makes Zaltrap-

• 7:10Speaker 07

  They went to individual doctors' offices, sent representatives, and said, "We are offering a 50% discount."

• 7:18Speaker 04

  They cut the price in half, just like that?

• 7:20Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 7:21Speaker 06

  Nationwide, or like, just in this area?

• 7:23Speaker 07

  Nationwide.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  It was sort of incredible.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  We reached out to Sanofi to talk about the price of Zaltrap, and they declined to comment, but in a statement that they released when this whole Zaltrap thing happened, they said that they incur so many costs for researching and developing and bringing a drug to market, that that is what their pricing is based on. Leonard doesn't disagree.

• 7:48Speaker 07

  We need these companies. They're the ones developing the drugs.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Which aren't easy to develop. I mean, Leonard gave us just one example.

• 7:55Speaker 07

  If we talk about colon cancer-

• 7:56Speaker 06

  He says, "For years, there was only one drug on the market called 5FU."

• 8:00Speaker 07

  5FU was patented in August of 1957. It was from 1957 until 1996 that a second drug came along.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  That's how long it takes to develop a good drug, or-

• 8:13Speaker 07

  In that interim, there were over 70 drugs that were tried and failed.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  I feel like I don't give it enough credit, because that just astounded me.

• 8:20Speaker 07

  It's very, very hard.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  And that, according to Leonard, is one of the reasons why prices are just going to keep going up.

• 8:27Speaker 07

  But sooner or later, this system is going to fall apart. And at what point does society say, "Hmm, there isn't an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system."

• 8:40Speaker 06

  It's funny, because I had this interesting reaction to the word "society," because all of a sudden, I thought, like, why is- not, not like a, you know, crazy death panel way, but I thought, "Why, why is society involved in my conversation with my doctor about if I want to take this drug that may give me another month and a half of life?"

• 9:03Speaker 07

  Why is society involved? Because you're not paying. Unless you have hidden resources I'm aware of, probably couldn't afford $10,000 to $15,000 a month in drug bills. Someone else has to pay that.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  Obviously, he says, it's your insurance. I mean, say you're part of a policy that has 1,000 members.

• 9:23Speaker 07

  Let's say that the premium for that is $100. So we got $100, 1,000 people, we got ourselves $100,000. Okay? So we now have $100,000 to take care of that 1,000 people.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  For that month.

• 9:40Speaker 07

  For whatever amount of time. If now one person comes up with a healthcare cost, let's say it's for a month, that is $100,000 in that month, everybody else is in trouble. There's no money left.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  So, they write this op-ed saying, like, prices are too high and the drugs are not that great. And sort of the next notable wave is, there was this, there's this journal called Blood, which is really big to anybody that works in a community that has like-

• 10:10Speaker 07

  It's a journal called Blood?

• 10:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 07

  How did we not know about this when we made the Blood show?

• 10:14Speaker 06

  Oh, I knew. Just kept it in here.

• 10:17Speaker 07

  Anyhow.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  So, yes, there's this journal called Blood, which is basically like the, the journal for anybody that works in a field that has to do with blood. And what happens is, like, 100 doctors get together and they co-sign an editorial, which basically says, "We totally agree with everything you guys are saying, but we have an even bigger issue." You know, with Zaltrap, you're talking about an expensive drug that maybe doesn't really do that much. It's kind of easy, even though it had never been done before, to say, "We're not going to use this." What all of these doctors in the Blood editorial are saying, what do you do when you have a really expensive drug, but it's really, really good? It's like a drug you actually want to take.

• 10:58Speaker 07

  Is that like a, like a "one day in the future, we will face this" kind of question?

• 11:02Speaker 06

  No, that is like a "now, today" question.

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Important new medicine approved this year. Everyone I talked to pointed me to this new drug. Called Sovaldi. It's known as Sivaldi.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Sivaldi. Why many in the medical community are calling the new medication. A blockbuster.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  Sovaldi came on the market last December. So that's December 2013. That's correct. This is Bruce. Bruce Moll, I'm the editor of Commonwealth Magazine. He's written about Sovaldi, and here's the basic story, right?

• 11:33Speaker 06

  It is a drug that treats. Hepatitis C. Which is caused by a virus. And the disease itself goes to work on your liver. It inflames it, it scars it. It can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis, it can be fatal. And for the longest time, the treatments that they had just really weren't that great, or they just had wretched side effects. But along comes Sovaldi, and it's one pill, 12 weeks. You take it with some other antiviral meds, it is a super simple treatment option. And the side effects are very minimal. Like this, it was like kind of like the savior drug. And so a lot of doctors start to prescribe it. In the first half of 2014, 70,000 people in the country, in the United States, were

• 12:17Speaker 06

  treated, and it had a 95% rate of cure. In other words. Holy cow, that's big. The virus was eradicated. That's very big. But, in fitting with our story. This drug costs $1,000 a pill. Whoa. For like one, one pill that I take. One a day.

• 12:43Speaker 06

  Which, as you can imagine, it angered a lot of people with Hep C. In total, it costs $84,000. And if you think about the fact that in 2014, we know at least 70,000 people got this drug. Then you're starting to talk about serious money. Wait, I wanna, I, I just wanna say that I, that I, I just times out 70,000 times 84,000, and I got something with seven zeros in it, it's 588, and then there's seven zeros, which is like, a bi- five billion dollars? Yes, yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  The big question is how states will pay for what could be upwards of.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  And so we have a situation where states are basically having to ration. Yeah. Say in Massachusetts. Most of the insurers currently are requiring some.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Some liver damage before you can take the drug.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  Similar restrictions are happening in other states. Florida, it's happening in Oregon, Illinois.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  The doctor says the only option may be to wait until you're even sicker.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  And then there's Arizona, out of the entire state. Public insurance only approves 180 people for treatment.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Well, just 180?

• 13:52Speaker 06

  Just 180. Now, when I talked to a representative of the company that makes the drug.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Greg Alton, executive vice president for corporate and medical affairs for Gilant Sciences.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  He says, "You've got to keep in mind, this is not a chronic care situation. This is a..."

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Cure. Here, you're actually curing a person of a disease. We're talking about 12 weeks of therapy, period. That's it, and you're done, and you've cured somebody.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  So he says, "This is a one-time deal. This is like one-time $84,000, and then you're done. Think about all the years you'll live without having an illness. Then you'll see..."

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Over a 20-year period, the savings that will accrue to the system by having a patient cured of hepatitis C.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  He also said, "It's important to understand that every hepatitis C sufferer is not going to hit the system at the same time. So all of the cost is spread out, right? Which is totally true, but I think there's like this bigger picture here. And Bruce points it out, too.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  It's sort of like a precursor of what could come, because these companies are developing drugs all the time. What if you could get a drug, but it was very expensive to treat diabetes?

• 14:59Speaker 06

  And then, you're talking tens of millions of people.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  An enormous segment of the population.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Even if just a fraction of them want a drug that's $1,000 per day? That's practically our entire US budget.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  What do you do in that case? A drug comes along like that and throws everything out of whack.

• 15:19Speaker 06

  This is the part where I really sort of got hooked in, where it's like, how do you answer this question? Is it that, you know, at a certain point, you just draw a line and you say, "Beyond this point..."

• 15:31Speaker 06

  We're not paying.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  But beyond what point?

• 15:33Speaker 06

  Exactly. I mean, that's the hard part. Like, how good does a treatment have to be for you to say, this is worth the price that it's been set at?

• 15:43Speaker 07

  I don't think we have rejected out of hand, but I don't think-

• 15:45Speaker 06

  I got into this a bit with Leonard. In the case of Zaltrap, they said, alright, 42 days, that much money, we're not going to do it. But would it have been different if it was 50 days? Or 100? Uh, is that enough? I'm sure you want to be talking in years, but I guess the question is, like, what would be a, is there a magic line for you?

• 16:01Speaker 07

  Um, um, if I, this is a, I can't personally determine it for everybody. I wouldn't presume to try. But ultimately, as a society, we're going to have to reach an understanding of what that cut point is. Because we can't afford not to.

• 16:22Speaker 06

  And the question that sort of bubbles out of this conversation is, what is one more year, or one more month, or one more day of life worth to us?

• 16:31Speaker 05

  Are we willing to pay $1,000 for an extra day of life? Well, what about $100,000 for an extra day of life?

• 16:36Speaker 07

  You know, people like to say, yeah, so what's the value of a human life? And the answer is, boy, that's a complicated question. But a really important one. Because nobody thinks it's infinite.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  He said that, and I was like, okay, it's not zero, and it's not infinite. Is there an answer, like, in the middle? And so, I started looking around. I don't know, I guess I was wondering, has anyone actually thought about this? And so I started looking around, and what I realized was that the World Health Organization actually, I mean, I guess they almost have a number, but it's a number per country. They have the recommendation that, that countries spend, it's going to get gobbledygooky, but just bear with me, that countries spend one to three times the GDP per capita, which is like, the gross domestic product per individual.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  So take the entire fat ball of money that is in a country and divide it per individual?

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Divide it by the individuals, and then you spend one to three times that on one more good year of life.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  And what would that be for us?

• 17:37Speaker 06

  So for the US, um, that's about 50,000 to 150,000.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Interesting. And is that, does that have any, any teeth?

• 17:46Speaker 04

  That recommendation?

• 17:46Speaker 06

  It legally doesn't have any teeth, but it has teeth in the sense that doctors in the US are actually going to start using this WHO number to evaluate medical treatments for cardiology. They said they were going to do this in a paper, and it was kind of very quiet, very subtle. But in other countries, this conversation is very loud, actually. It happens at the government level. They're also passing out surveys where they're asking citizens, what is your limit on how much you want to spend on one more good year of life?

• 18:19Speaker 04

  Have they done that here?

• 18:20Speaker 06

  As far as I know, no.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 18:24Speaker 06

  Because the last time we tried to talk about cost in medicine, it ended up in the whole- Death panels? Death panels. Death panels, or so-called death panels. ...thing. And I don't know, I just wondered- Right, into the mess of it. Hey, Times Square. If I actually tried to go out and ask this question in a very basic way, how would people respond? Excuse me, can I ask you a question? What is a year of life worth?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Wow, what a question. That's deep. Can I think about it? That's a tough one, but-

• 19:00Speaker 06

  I was really surprised at how seriously people took the question.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Man, what is a year of life worth?

• 19:07Speaker 06

  That was the first thing I noticed. Then the next thing was, no one could answer the question until I had answered like a million questions of theirs.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Am I going to die tomorrow?

• 19:15Speaker 06

  Yes. Where do I get that year? Do I get it at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end?

• 19:19Speaker 04

  How would I spend that year of life?

• 19:21Speaker 06

  Good, it would be a good year of life.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  A good year of life depends-

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Is this like a pie in the sky kind of answer?

• 19:26Speaker 06

  They wanted to know, would they be emotionally happy, alone, with friends or family? Where did they get the money? Could they borrow the money? Did they have to pay the money back? Were they dying? Was it an emergency? Were other people also trying to get money at the same time? Because then there'd be like a rush on the money in America.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting. Did you actually ever end up getting numbers?

• 19:46Speaker 06

  I did get numbers, but they were- At least $10,000.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  $15,000.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  Thirteen? Quarter million. $7. All over the place. Yeah, I would say five bucks. $10 million.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  $44,000.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  Interesting. One woman said 10 million.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  $10 million for a year? Irresponsible.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Well, you're asking me about my personal choice?

• 20:08Speaker 04

  $10 million?

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Not about a public policy question.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  What, do you have any way of parsing all this?

• 20:15Speaker 06

  No. I really, I honestly don't. Like, I think my biggest takeaway was like, no one punched me, which, which makes me feel as if people are ready, not ready, but willing to engage in this conversation. But I also realized I kept talking about things and I just wanted to be in the room with patients. Like, I just wanted patients in the room with me because it was like, we were all having this conversation that eventually will all be patients, I guess. But we were also having this conversation around, like, a group of people that weren't ever present. Like, they're not at conferences or not in research articles. And so that was when I started talking to patients.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Ah, well.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  I guess what is 42 days, what does 42 days mean in the sense of, is that something that you'd pay $50,000 for if you were, I mean, of course you would. That, it's like, I almost can't even ask the question, but I don't know.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Well, I, no, I think it's a good question. I think ethically, it would be to the good of patients and doctors to have this conversation.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  This is Susan.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Susan Gubar, writer of the Living with Cancer blog for the New York Times.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  Back in 2008, Susan went to the doctor. She hadn't been feeling well for a while. They thought it was some sort of bowel issue, but then the doctor walked into the room and said she had

• 21:38Speaker 03

  advanced stage ovarian cancer. Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed at a late stage, and it's, it's basically incurable. It can be handled, it can be managed, it can be kept at bay, and for longer periods of time now, we hope. But you're given a diagnosis of three to five years.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Wow, that is, you go from having unlimited time in your mind to three to five years in, like, a doctor's visit.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big shock. You sort of enter a zone.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Well, you're not quite aware of what you're doing.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  That day, the day she was diagnosed, she was told, "Pack a bag, get in a car, and drive to Indianapolis. You need surgery now."

• 22:27Speaker 03

  So I went the next day to Indianapolis. And the day after that, I had the debulking surgery, which takes out the ovaries and the uterus and the fallopian tubes and the spleen and sometimes the cervix and sometimes the appendix and sometimes the bowel.

• 22:43Speaker 06

  Holy shit. Are you serious?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's called the mother of all surgeries.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  And then, just like that, she was doing multiple rounds of chemo.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Chemicals that are used, they destroy all quick-growing cells. So, for example, you have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that, you know. You also can... I got terrible sores in my mouth. I have no idea why, but I know this happens to other people. But yeah, the other thing is this extreme fatigue.

• 23:11Speaker 06

  And Susan, who writes for a living, couldn't even read.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  I would look at a page and think, "Had I turned a page?"

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Chemotherapy, it really is toxic to the spirit, to the heart, to the mind. Just the normal aspects of life feel polluted.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  Have you ever had to think about cost?

• 23:36Speaker 03

  I was never informed of the cost of any drug or any procedure I was given, which really makes me think about how masked these costs are.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  Would you want to be thinking about cost while you're going through it? Or is it better to just say, "Here are your treatment options. These are statistical outcomes. Like, pick one, and then we'll deal with it on the other side."

• 24:04Speaker 03

  I think there's a kind of unspoken agreement among everyone that the insurance company or Medicare is going to pay. And if it's the government, that means our grandchildren are going to end up paying for all of this money. So yes, I guess to answer your question, I think it would be healthier to know what these things cost. On the other hand, I have to say, as a patient, I was so traumatized, I'm not sure I could have taken that information in. I was thinking about your "What It's Worth," "What's It Worth?" title, and I was thinking that the American individualistic, optimistic response would be, "Well, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Life is worth it, whatever it takes.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  But whatever it takes will not cure my cancer." So I think this question changes when you have incurable cancer. It becomes a different question, which is, "When is enough enough?"

• 25:03Speaker 06

  I remember when she said that, "When is enough enough?" I was just-

• 25:11Speaker 07

  I don't know that we are ready to say there's one magic line.

• 25:14Speaker 06

  thrown back to this conversation that I had with Leonard Salt, where he was saying that-

• 25:18Speaker 07

  We have to look at everything in terms of value.

• 25:21Speaker 06

  You need to think deeply about the kind of life you want to live. It's not just about how many days, it's about what kind of days.

• 25:30Speaker 07

  So if you told me that there was something that gave 72-day survival benefit, but it makes people feel nauseous for most of the time, is that worth it?

• 25:39Speaker 06

  When we're trying to draw this line as a society, before we figure out what we're willing to pay, we have to think about what we are paying for.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think we know what-

• 25:50Speaker 06

  For Susan, you know, six years ago, she decided that she was going to get chemotherapy because, in part, it would be more time with her daughters.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 06

  And suddenly, it's worth it.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think we're changed by the treatment, too.

• 26:07Speaker 06

  For now, Susan's cancer is basically under control because she's on this new drug.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  For two years and now a month, and I am counting.

• 26:18Speaker 06

  Okay, fair.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  I've been alive without a recurrence, without the cancer growing, by taking these pills every day.

• 26:27Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And I take them at home. They're not infused in the hospital through my veins, they're just pills. And it's made the last few years remarkably normal-like, the new normal.

• 26:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  But when these drugs stop working, and I've been told they will stop working, I'm not sure I would want to go back to chemotherapy.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  But I suspect I don't know until I get there.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Producer Molly Webster.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And now for the thank yous for that piece. We want to thank Stephen Hall and I want to mention Susan Gubar's book called Memoir of a Debalked Woman.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  And thanks also to Dr. Atul Gawande for all his help and his latest book.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Which is really, I really thought it was wonderful. It's called Being Mortal.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And thanks also to Nikki Haynes.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  And to Glenn Blumquist.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Radiolab will continue in a moment.

• 27:46Speaker 04

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• 27:56Speaker 06

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• 28:12Speaker 06

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• 29:16Speaker 06

  Radio Lab is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video, a text, or a group chat that never stops. And right now, AT&T has a deal that will keep the connection going. You can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade-in. It has the ultimate pro camera system and a big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. With the new iPhone 18 Pro at AT&T, you can call just to catch up, FaceTime whenever the time feels right, and keep the group chat lively. Learn how you can trade in your phone for the new iPhone 18 Pro at AT&T. Connecting changes everything. Required trade-in of $230 or more and eligible plan. Terms and

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• 30:04Speaker 06

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn

• 30:17Speaker 04

  with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radio Lab, and today... Well, we're still on the subject of worth, but this is a totally different take. Yeah, and this comes from our producer, Matt Kielty.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  So, next, a slightly different story about worth. A story that, rather than being about how much we value our own lives, is about how much we value someone else's. Right. And it starts with BuzzFeed writer Gregory Johnson.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  So, OK, maybe you should start with what has now become sort of the infamous wedding, wedding drone strike. Is that, was that sort of where it started for you?

• 31:00Speaker 07

  Yes. So, this strike happens in a very rugged part of Yemen, where there are no paved roads, no electricity.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  There's no running water.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  It's Thursday morning.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  December 12th, 2013, and...

• 31:12Speaker 04

  Early that morning, in a small village.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  A group of guys, roughly 50 to 60 people.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Including a soon-to-be-married man, pile into a bunch of cars, and they start driving.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  This is the convoy, the wedding convoy.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Now, in the lead car of this convoy was this man.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  His name is Abdullah Mohammed Al-Tayisi. We spoke to him through an interpreter in Yemen.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Abdullah told me it was his neighbor, who was the groom, to be married that day.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  And so, they were all driving up to the bride's village. Abdullah said they got there a little before noon, ate lunch, recited wedding poems.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  After lunch.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  They grabbed the bride.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  And just a few of her bridal attendants, a few females.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  And they start driving back to the groom's village for the actual wedding ceremony.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Abdullah said that ever since they'd left that morning, through lunch, all day long, they heard this...

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Humming.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  This sort of metallic whirring, this metallic thumping overhead.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  No one in the convoy could see it, but they knew what it was: a drone.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Some sound hearing all the day.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  It's nothing new for people in rural parts of Yemen by this point. They don't think anything of it.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  It's common to hear those sounds. Yeah, you usually hear it there. So, they keep driving.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  Basically, if you can imagine it, they're sort of winding through these waters, these desert, mountainous places. Yeah, the road, he said, is mountainous. They're all strung out on this rutted-out little dirt track.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Eleven cars, single file.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  Finally, they reach this little clearing.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Up near the top of this cliff, where they all slowed down and started to bunch together. Because apparently, one of the cars had gotten a flat. Some guys got out, fixed it, got back in their cars, and right at that moment...

• 33:05Speaker 06

  The sound shifts somehow, and then...

• 33:13Speaker 04

  The missiles start.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Four of them. In quick succession. The shrapnel is just flying everywhere. In a blink, it's over. People are trying to figure out what has happened. All the screaming, there's fires that are burning. And Abdullah...

• 33:32Speaker 04

  His car was torn up. He had shrapnel in his face. Two wounds in his face, one in the right hand, left thigh, one on in the back.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  And he says that, once he saw there was smoke, his first thought was, "Where's my son?"

• 33:51Speaker 04

  He was looking for his son. His son was there? Yeah, a young man who'd been a few cars back from him. He had the fourth car on the convoy. And he was married with two boys and one daughter. Abdullah said he could move, so he got out of his car and stumbled back toward the fourth car.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  To find his son. Yeah, he said he found him just next to the car. Before he died.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  No, he didn't talk to him. Just he looked at him and just passed away.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  So, it turns out that there are 12 dead. And typically what happens in Yemen is that as soon as someone is killed, they're buried very, very shortly thereafter. What happens here is something different.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  The people in the convoy take the bodies of the dead, and they take them back to Reda. This big town, where the drone strike occurred. There's a video I have. That's what you're hearing, where you see some men take these 12 dead bodies. And they line them up in the street on this bright blue tarp, and they sort of wrap them in these cheap blankets. And so, there's this huge crowd that just...

• 35:16Speaker 06

  gathers around to stare at these dead bodies who are laid out in the street.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  And at a certain point.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  This very tiny, very leathery old Yemeni who's sort of holding on to the back of a pickup with one arm.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  He stands over the dead.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  Sort of swaying over the bodies and just lecturing the crowd on what happened. He's just screaming at them and so.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  You can hear his voice.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  Start to go hoarse.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  And he's screaming, "An American drone killed these. It was a massacre. These people are on their way to a wedding. Why did this happen? Why were they killed?"

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Why did they target this convoy? Well, according to the US government, they had received intel that on that day, in this convoy, was an Al Qaeda operative.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  Named Shauqi Al-Baddani.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Who apparently had been planning attacks against the US.

• 36:21Speaker 06

  That's why they took the shot. And in fact, they say that he was wounded in this wedding convoy strike.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  And do we have any reason to believe that?

• 36:32Speaker 06

  I have no reason to believe it.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Greg spent weeks in Yemen, talked to survivors of the drone strike.

• 36:38Speaker 06

  Talked to people who were there. No one knows this guy.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  And Greg says the guy isn't really a member of either of the tribes that were involved in the wedding. And so to him.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  It makes no sense that he would be there.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  To him, this was a terrible mistake.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  But what really got me interested in Greg's reporting, which you can read on buzzfeed.com, highly recommend it, is that he goes really deep into the question of like, what the US did next? Because the question is like, what do you do in this case? How do you repair something like this? When you have two totally different cultures with two different traditions, how do you find a way to try to make this right?

• 37:19Speaker 04

  Can you? I mean, historically, do soldiers have an obligation to repair the damage they do?

• 37:26Speaker 06

  No, there's no obligation. But what's hap-

• 37:30Speaker 04

  And is we've actually created an obligation for ourselves.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Hmm, and Americans have?

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, this has a really long history, a history that's rooted. You mean like legal, legally? Yeah, yeah, yeah, a legal history.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Really?

• 37:42Speaker 06

  And there's a, there's a great law professor at Yale.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  What's his name?

• 37:46Speaker 06

  Uh, his last name is, is Witt. It's John Witt.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Um, that's me.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Uh, we ended up tracking down John Witt.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Hi Jed, how are you?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  To talk about how the US first started to try to right the wrongs in war.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  So what is the foundation story of all this? That starts with General Pershing in World War I.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  So 1917.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  The Great War ramps up, so we start shipping young men.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Over to Europe.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Specifically France, and in charge of these men was a man named John J.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Commander of American forces on the Western Front.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Stern man, handsome mustache, bit of a maverick.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  General Pershing's, you know, nickname was Blackjack and uh.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  When he first arrives in France with his troops, General Blackjack Pershing.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  He's got this problem, which is that he has Jeeps.

• 38:42Speaker 06

  So World War I is the first war in which the US is shipping a lot of automobiles.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  More than 100,000.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  For the soldiers to drive.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Cars, trucks, Jeeps.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And Jeeps are really great. They get his men from one place to another.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  From Paris, to Amiens, to, I don't know, Marseille.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  But they also run into French farmers' chickens and cows, children, sometimes just the farmers themselves.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Were these random collisions? Or were there no roads?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  I'm gonna bet there was some of everything. Sometimes it was probably just ordinary car accidents and sometimes, no doubt, a little French wine was involved.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  So this is Pershing's problem. He's trying to run a war overseas.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  And it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Hmm, and so Pershing has an idea, which he actually borrows from the Brits, and that is, he will use cash, money, to right our wrongs.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Well, and so he goes to Congress and begs for a statute. And Congress obliges really quickly. There's no sign this is a controversial thing.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  But it was a genuinely new thing because for the first time in the history of war, as far as we could tell, you had a state compensating individuals. Usually it's state to state. Here you have state to individuals. And so the US government starts systematically paying money for the loss of a non-American life in war. How much?

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Geez, I don't know.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation mentioning specific amounts. But whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Pershing wrote in his biography that the swift and prompt settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  So it seemed to work really well. And is this, I mean, is the idea here that like this is what we would do with the drone strike victims we talked about, that we'd pay them money? Well, it's actually, it's a bit trickier than that because the thing that Pershing got in World War I, it came with a catch.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  And that is that there's a combat exclusion.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  In case you just walked in, that's Gregory Johnson. And what he means is that this law, basically what it said is that we'll pay your claims if it didn't happen on the field of battle and it wasn't a combat situation. If it was combat and it was on the field of battle, then tough luck. That's just war.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  So if US soldiers were driving to a fight and they ran their car into somebody and they damaged that car or killed that person, those people would not be able to get compensation, whereas if the US soldiers were driving to a bar and got in an accident, they would be able to get compensation.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  But the problem is, once we get into these counterinsurgency wars.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Civilians are suddenly in the middle of the fray.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Charges have been made that troops killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians during a sweep. This is, in a way, the story of modern warfare. Air raid sirens are beginning to sound over Baghdad. President Karzai says he's delivering his. Final warning to the US after a US airstrike accidentally killed more than a dozen mothers and children. By the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting is happening in cities. So there's no difference really between the battlefield and where people live. And so the line between what's combat-related and what's not combat-related, it starts to get blurry.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  And so in 2003, in Iraq, what happened was there were actually people lining up. You know, there were civilian military operations centers. People started lining up outside of these, saying, "My family has been harmed. I want help."

• 42:09Speaker 04

  How many people, do you remember?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  If I had to guess, it was, you know, maybe around 80 people or so.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a ton of people.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  That's John Tracy. He was a military lawyer in Iraq in 2003. And before him, Marla Keenan. I'm managing director of Center for Civilians in Conflict. So when they came with a complaint, what sort? Is it like, "You ran over my chicken? Or you knocked out my windows?" No, no, no, no. Much more serious.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I think of cluster bombs. During the shock and awe campaign, one of the types of bombs that we were using, or the Air Force was using, what they call cluster munitions.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Basically, John says, Air Force planes would fly over these targets and drop hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little...

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Bombs, smaller than a Coke can.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  And a lot of them would land in maybe a parking lot or a field, and they wouldn't explode.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  So on a number of occasions, you'd have, mostly it was kids, right? Because the kids would see it and...

• 43:01Speaker 04

  They didn't know any better.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  They would just run over and kick it. And then that's when it would explode.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  That's when it would detonate.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Right. I had a lot of those, close to a dozen. And so that was a, that was a difficult one because, well, it's combat because the Air Force dropped it because they were, you know, bombing the city.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  But at the same time, days, weeks, even months have gone by, and this thing is just sitting in the ground. Couldn't we say it's not combat?

• 43:31Speaker 04

  And this was a real question that John had to ask his boss, and then his boss asked his boss.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  They eventually sent the question up to the Army Claims Service.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  And they said, no, it's combat. Meaning they're not going to pay.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Basically like we are in an armed conflict and this was an unfortunate incident, but an incident that happened during a lawful combat operation and therefore we're sorry. And that's basically it.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  So I said no to a lot of people. And so like in World War One with General Pershing, military officers, they started lobbying their bosses for an expanded system so they could start making more payments. And eventually the military does expand it. In fact, I talked to one of the military's top lawyers. Brigadier General Richard C. Gross, I go by Rich. I'm the legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he told me that around 2006, paying out these kinds of condolence payments actually became sort of a key part of military strategy. Absolutely. Even had its own acronym. MAWS, M-A-A-W-S. It's money as a weapon system, which, you know, I'm not sure that title resonates with everybody, but. Interesting phrase, for sure. Yeah, exactly.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  But it's the idea that money can be used to win hearts and minds that help bring the population over. And it just got me wondering, how much money makes a good weapon?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Well, I haven't, like, the US military hasn't given me access to a database or anything like that. But through FOIA's and interviews, I've seen different numbers.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Marla says that in 2006, the ACLU filed a FOIA request and eventually got their hands on hundreds of claims files. And in those files, what you see are a bunch of different numbers, but one that comes up again and again.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  $2,500.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  $2,500 by and large. Now, someone like John could have paid more, but that meant they'd have to run the claim up the chain of command. Exactly. So it was almost like there were these ceilings. $2,500 for a life, $1,500 for property damage. And then eventually the property damage amount got raised to $2,500 as well. And that that didn't make any sense to me, that somebody could get so much for a Toyota Corolla, but you weren't you were just gonna get the same amount for a lost life. Like, I can't get over, I mean, $2,500 seems like just such a nominal amount. And the practicality of that money of like, if you were to kill someone who is the the breadwinner of a family, that $2,500 would would not be able to support this family in any way.

• 45:58Speaker 06

  Right, but we're not actually trying to pay full compensation, right? Like, we're not trying to say, we think if this 20-year-old man had lived to be the average age in Afghanistan, then he, you know, that it would have been $60,843, right? Like, that's not the thing.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Do you ever, you know, we had people who were killed here in an attack. The federal government is one step closer to cutting its first checks to families of those killed and injured on September 11th. And those people have been compensated. The levels of compensation to the New York victims is is pretty high.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  The range of payments for a death claim ranged anywhere from $250,000 to just under $7 million.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Do you notice that?

• 46:46Speaker 06

  I do, um, I do, but.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  It is, to a large degree, comparing apples and oranges. That's general gross again. Because you're talking about a a legal system.

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Where a country is paying their own victims.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Versus condolences in a in an area where there's no legal obligation to make those payments in the first place.

• 47:07Speaker 06

  So that's a very different type of monetary payment.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Well, yes and no. Essentially, it's a person's life. And, I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that there's an empathy in the number that you come up with, in the amount that you pay for someone's life.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  I totally get what you're saying. The $2,500, I think it's any amount of money. If I told you 10, would you feel better about it?

• 47:32Speaker 04

  I'd feel a little bit better.

• 47:33Speaker 06

  You would?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 47:34Speaker 06

  What does it get you, though? In the end, $10,000 doesn't buy anything more back than what you lost.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  I don't know what 10,000 gets you exactly in Afghanistan, but my assumption is that it gets you a lot more than 2,500.

• 47:46Speaker 06

  But does that really help you? Is that really what you want?

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Is the money unimportant to you, really? It sounds like the money's really. I'm not a victim, so I don't know that I can answer that. To me, if it happened to my family--

• 47:57Speaker 04

  And at this point, Marla told us this story about how, before she got into this line of work--

• 48:01Speaker 03

  I had several friends who were journalists.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  One of those friends was a man named Chris Hondros.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a photojournalist. He was a photojournalist.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  And back in 2011, Chris was on assignment in Libya, moving with a rebel group, when they were fired upon, and Chris was killed.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  And Marla says, when she found out that happened--

• 48:19Speaker 03

  I wanted someone to explain to me why that happened. I mean--

• 48:26Speaker 03

  So--

• 48:28Speaker 03

  I just wanted someone to explain. I didn't, you know, like, I knew his family wasn't going to get any money. I knew that these guys that shot a rocket-propelled grenade at him weren't going to care. No one was going to explain, but I wanted that.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And the money then becomes an occasion for you to say, like, not just, "I'm sorry, but here's what happened." It's the "here's what happened" part?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  I think it's the token that's given with the apology and with the explanation.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  But it's the apology and the explanation that matter to you?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's why we call it amends, making amends.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  One of the things that is true of money damages generally is there are desperate effort to find some common language between the party paying and the victim. Some esperanto for communicating the meaning of what's happened in a language that the other side knows matters.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  That's how John Whit puts it.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Because we see it everywhere we look. We see not just apologies, sometimes not apologies at all, but we see the almighty dollar, which is both distressing, and also, we know it's meaningful.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  But the problem is, in order for that esperanto to work, it has to say the same meaning to both sides. Which, for John Tracy, wasn't really about the money at all. Or not just about the money. It was as much about the envelope that the money was in, or that there was a real person there to hand it to them.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  I wasn't the one who raided their house. I wasn't the one who killed their daughter. But most of them, they, you know, just wanted to look at somebody who's in a uniform and say, "You really messed with my life."

• 50:20Speaker 04

  And that opportunity is exactly what Abdullah Al Taisi

• 50:24Speaker 07

  ما هو ما هو الاعتذار ولا الدفع؟

• 50:27Speaker 04

  will never get.

• 50:28Speaker 07

  الدفع هو الاعتذار. ما يقال دفع الا باعتذار.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  His son was killed by a drone he never saw, operated by a man he'll never meet, on behalf of a country that still doesn't admit it was a mistake. And so the money he got

• 50:39Speaker 07

  مقتون عندنا بالدفعية لدوك مياها؟ لا كملها ما يكفي.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Which in the end, he says, was the equivalent of 30,000 US dollars, way more than anyone got in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, all he can do, without anything else to go on, is just compare amounts.

• 50:55Speaker 07

  ولا اذار جانا واحد وطلب مننا قال هذا احنا قادم نستلم في المقتول عندنا في امريكا ما اكمل هذا واعتذاروا لنا كان كنا خلاص. He can accept that only if, if, if, if he gives, you know, like the payment equal to those, you know, to like in America. How you can compensate someone who, who lost his son, for example, killed.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  If the payment was, if the payment was equal?

• 51:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Producer Matthew Keelte.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Big thanks to Gregory Johnson, writer-at-large for BuzzFeed, who started us off on this adventure when he brought us the initial story.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  And also thanks to BuzzFeed editor Steve Kandel.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And to Shaiib Almasawa for helping Matt organize that interview in Yemen, when the country's going through an awful lot of tumult and he was able to get interviews that we didn't think he could get.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to him. Coming up,

• 52:13Speaker 04

  that's next.

• 52:18Speaker 04

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• 52:20Speaker 06

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• 52:44Speaker 04

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• 53:20Speaker 04

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• 53:45Speaker 04

  OK, now it's my left ear. Hello, Zorn. How are you? Good. How are you doing? I'm good. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Rod.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  This is Radiolab. And so far, we've been talking about the value of our lives.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  And then the value of other people's lives.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Next up, the value of...

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  All of it.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  Everything. And by everything, of course, we mean... The value of nature. That's Carl Zimmer, science writer, regular blower of minds. So, we think of ecosystems as just kind of sitting there. Actually, they're doing things. They weren't doing...

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Doing them for us, we would have to pay to do them artificially. For example, cotton farms in South Texas. So, you know, the farmers are doing their thing.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  Like this guy.

• 54:32Speaker 06

  James Parker.

• 54:33Speaker 05

  Planting their cotton, they're collecting it.

• 54:35Speaker 06

  I farmed about, I don't know, usually five to six, 700 acres of cotton, so say 2,000 bales.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  They're doing what farmers do.

• 54:42Speaker 06

  I spend a lot of time on a tractor and you have to check your water every morning, every evening.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, they have all this extra help in the air.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  They have bats.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  How many bats are out there, you really don't know.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Flying all around. The bats eat the equivalent of 2/3 of their own weight in insects every night.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 55:06Speaker 06

  They eat all night long, all kind of bugs.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  A whole bunch of pests that would otherwise be eating the cotton.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Now, a few years ago.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Guy named John Westfall.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Did a calculation.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Just to see how this arrangement was working out.

• 55:19Speaker 06

  He came out to my farm and did a, did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him and those girls were out there all hours of the night, listening to what the bats were saying and.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Each year, the farmers collectively, they make about $4 or $5 million off of these farms.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Question was, how much of this is because of the bats? Because, you know, bats are natural pesticides.

• 55:40Speaker 06

  You know, the more they're eating, the less I gotta spray.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  And here's what the scientists figured out.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Out of $4 to $5 million, it was around $700,000 that you could ascribe to the bats.

• 55:51Speaker 06

  Uh, it's just beautiful.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  Wow. I mean, it does make me think that if you're those farmers, you should be compensating the bats somehow.

• 56:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, yeah. It does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value, that nature has that we generally just totally ignore.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  But we talked to a guy who didn't ignore it. Uh, my name is Robert Costanza. In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute limit. Yes. So the question was, what's the value of all of these ecosystem services globally?

• 56:26Speaker 05

  All the services on earth.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  You know, it's bugs eating leaves.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Worms turning the soil.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Beetles chewing tree stumps.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Coral reefs protecting cities during storms.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Everything. We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done around the country and the world. Like that bat study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms, they looked at.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  Tropical forests, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean, woodlands, temperate forests.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Goes on and on.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  Wastelands.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  This must be some Excel spreadsheet.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  It's it's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from hell.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It can get tricky. So Costanza and his colleagues took all these different studies, summed them together, did a whole bunch of math, and

• 57:04Speaker 01

  came up with a number.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  Which in today's dollars is 142.7 trillion dollars per year of services. And that's more than all of the gross national products of the world. And that's how valuable the services of nature are.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, let me ask you, like, I get I get the way this would work with a bat, like, the bat's eating the bugs, but like, how do you do it with like, with like a like a field or something like, do you just walk through and you're like, oh, that's 20 bucks of services, that's 50, like, how do you even figure out what the services are?

• 57:40Speaker 05

  Well, they they came up with a list. So it the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about, because different ecosystems provide different services. For example, a salt marsh.

• 57:56Speaker 06

  And we are in the water now.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yes, we're in the water.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  What is it? Wait, so a salt marsh, is it like the Florida wetlands, but salty? I suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  Salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yep, we're standing in about a foot of water here. We're quickly approaching high tide. We sent one of our producers, Simon Adler, to a nearby salt marsh.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Partially to Hazen.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Your boots are much more waterproof.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  But really, to talk to this guy. My name is Adam Welchel, and I'm the Director of Science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut. And Adam gave Simon a kind of inventory of Some of the services provided by coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that are provided over time.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  One of the things it does is it takes water that's coming in from inland, and it's laden with all sorts of pollutants, all sorts of bad stuff.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle. And then, very often, the marsh grass will suck up that water into the roots.

• 58:53Speaker 05

  And clean it.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  So you could ask very simply.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  How much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean?

• 59:01Speaker 06

  One second. Well, there is one other study I want.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Adam Welshell said that scientists in New England have already figured that out.

• 59:07Speaker 06

  Uh, for flood control, water supply protection, uh, pollution control. It's roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Then you gotta add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plate.

• 59:20Speaker 06

  $338 annually per acre.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  Then there are the bird watchers that buy lattes that support the local economy.

• 59:25Speaker 06

  $490 per hectare.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  And then there's habitat provisioning.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  The list goes on and on and on and on.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  You do get kind of obsessed with it and you start like, you start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously. Um, and, uh, it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  There's this galling element though, or this aspect, like when I first came across the.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  At this point, our producer, Tim Howard, jumped into the interview and you'll also hear our producer, Soren Wheeler, in just a second.

• 59:56Speaker 05

  I do feel like in an example like the salt marsh, which cleans water, that's all reliant on people being there that need the water. So if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  But Tim, haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get, like if you make the aesthetic argument, which is that nature should be, should be preserved for its own sake. There's a whole category of humanity that just doesn't respond to that argument. It's this becomes a way to talk across the aisle.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  But it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of a, a, a piddly value.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  It can't really be infinite value. I mean, what's that mean?

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  Like a mother's love. You don't think your mother's love is priceless? I mean, you know.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Okay. I, I totally accept that there is this sort of priceless aspect of nature. But if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make. If somebody comes to you and says, okay, you've got these lovely mangroves. Now, uh, it turns out that, that the, the sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aquaculture.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Because shrimp farms need lots of seawater, so it makes sense to put them by the sea.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  We're going to put in these farms. We're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in. Tax revenue. If you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving, that might be a really powerful argument. Now, into that kind of a discussion, you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there very quietly, doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things. In fact, they've done these kind of calculations. And in some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp. So it's stupid.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  It's just stupid, in a very basic sense, to wantonly replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Is that a hypothetical situation?

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  That's a conversation you have.

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  That's what we're asked.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  This is Glenn Marie Lang. She's an environmental economist for the World Bank. And she says very often, she finds herself in exactly this kind of conversation.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Particularly, you know, I work for the World Bank, so our primary clients are governments.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Philippines, Vietnam.

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  And when you're talking to a Minister of Finance and saying, you know what?

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  I know, jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  They'll say, well, yeah, that's true, but that means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget. So you've got to really make a strong argument about the benefits. That's really where the rubber hits the road.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's it.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Here's the counterargument. It comes from Doug McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money. And then we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  What do you do in a situation, he says, where, say, a bunch of rivers are running dry and they're, quote, "depreciating in value"?

• 1:02:57Speaker 06

  You know, by the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets. That makes me feel really uncomfortable.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  He says, just kind of a weird way to think about nature.

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  We had a proposal here in the state of California to make gay marriage legal. And economists had a look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California. Well, it's good to know that. I appreciate having that information in front of me. However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation, and I would say that when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state. They're thinking about a different set of values.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  On the other hand, I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these services, basically they don't get counted.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn Marie Lang. And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  The parable of the bees.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  We heard this first from writer J.B. McKinnon, who says, "The story begins..."

• 1:04:19Speaker 06

  In Mao County in central China, rural area, fairly remote.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Lush green mountains filled with apple orchards.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  And apple orcharding was the main business.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  And according to J.B., in the 1990s...

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  The wild bees of Mao County slowly started to disappear.

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  And there's a few different reasons given for that. It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one, because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market-based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples. So they started spraying pesticide.

• 1:05:01Speaker 06

  Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others. End result is the bees stopped buzzing in Mao County.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Which, if you are an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  As bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar, they are dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then you don't get fertile flowers. To turn into to turn into fruit.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  And obviously, if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  So what do you do?

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  You're an apple farmer and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers. And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand. In Mandarin Chinese, we say zhen gong chou fen. So basically, that means a manual pollination.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  This is Harold Thibault.

• 1:05:59Speaker 06

  I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper Le Monde.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao County. So he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car and

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  We drive for like five or six hours until we reach this village, Nan Xin.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Tiny little village.

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  Like only a few houses. And then we took a smaller road between the the fields. And we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the in the trees, like on the apple trees. Straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches, men and women that I've seen in in photos in any case.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Harold and his friend took pictures. And if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding a little brush.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  This little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen. And then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen. They dip their brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again. And then they dip the brush back in again and they paint again and then dip again and they paint.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  To make sure that that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  It was very strange to see humans doing the the job of the bees.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  God, what a pain in the ass that sounds like.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, the image of this of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world. World through environmental circles. And it, the message that it seemed to send was that, you know, this is what happens if you, if you lose biodiversity. You end up standing in the trees, doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  For free.

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  For free. Those people are just like human bees.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  But then this guy enters the story. This is Yin Sun Chen.

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, human bees.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Four years ago, he traveled to Mao County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County. But what he discovered weirdly was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  More production, more production. This can be confirmed. There, there are more production for hand pollination, uh, apple tree than a bee pollination apple tree. Humans are more efficient.

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  You mean the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:08:24Speaker 04

  A lot better.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Fruit production went up thirty percent.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  That's what the farmers told Yin Sun Chen, which is kind of.

• 1:08:30Speaker 06

  Amazing. The only word I remember, amazing. Because I think hand pollination can pollinate more thoroughly. Uh, they can pollinate every flower.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  And bees don't pollinate every flower?

• 1:08:42Speaker 06

  Bees are a little bit, uh, you know, they're a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  You're so polite.

• 1:08:49Speaker 06

  They don't like it if it's cold. They don't like it if it's damp. Uh, they don't like it if it's windy.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  In all those cases, bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  But send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom. And, and they're gonna do it. And there was the additional benefit of the people that you paid. They'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries, they'd spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are and this whole parable of biodiversity.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  And it turns out maybe the lesson's just the opposite. That actually, we don't need bees and maybe we never did.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that, that, uh, some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places. Uh, or that we might even do better to, to take care of those processes ourselves. Right, so. Let me find my notes about the wages exactly.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold Tabo told us that when he visited Nanchen.

• 1:09:51Speaker 06

  I talked with one farmer. His name is Zhang Zegao, he's thirty eight. And, uh, he said in his. The hand pollination might disappear in a few years.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.

• 1:10:10Speaker 06

  The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them. Basically, it's not efficient economically to do the hand pollination anymore. That's what a lot of farmers say.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Now they're likely thinking, damn, we need those bees back.

• 1:10:25Speaker 06

  Right, yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Problem is.

• 1:10:27Speaker 06

  There are no bees in those villages anymore.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  One farmer told Harold, beekeepers in other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used. As for when wild bees might come back?

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  Well, for this, we have no idea. It's very hard to make a prediction. If you ask the farmers, they're like, I don't know.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Here's where that story leaves me. It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go. Putting a value, even a precise and thoughtful value on a bee or on a pound of pesticide, you do it and you think you're smart. But then the value changes. The bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing, to being worth everything, all within a few years. This is what markets do. They swing back, forth, and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can. So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong. That's why economics is a dumb.

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  Well, no, no, I want to argue the other side for a second. Nowhere in this story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, you know what, the bees do have value. Here's the number. In fact, you know what, Carl, when we were talking to him, told us. You know, there have been estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees is $190 billion. So that's globally, right? But still, there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  But remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued more. Then bees go down, bees go up.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  I get it.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  You have to have a lot of numbers in your head.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  But here's what I like about this idea is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking. You can't just say, don't do that. I mean, that's the thing that like conservationists say, don't, don't, don't. But if you say, don't do that because here's the value.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Here's the loss.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, here's the loss. Well, then that actually gives the whole precautionary don't thing some teeth.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Except for this, that if you go business-y on nature.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  And you're wrong.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  There are irreversible abilities.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  That's how environmental economist Glenn Marie Lang puts it.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems, and what we produce. You smash your car, hey, someone can build a new one. If you lose the bees, in many instances, you cannot bring them back.

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  So the question we got to is, is there another way to think about the value of nature, I mean, a way that's not economic and therefore short sighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty, because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  The best I was able to do, thinking about this.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Writer J.B. McKinnon again.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  Was when it struck me that, in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diversity, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own, that we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we, as humans, are able to draw. And that when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves.

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  In a sense, we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to dream.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  J.B. McKinnon's book is called The Once and Future World. He's written many, but this one is my fave.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's reporting in The New York Times on this topic, is really what got us launched into this whole thing.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Nadler, whose production assistance was invaluable. That was him.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  Freezing his ass off in the marsh.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  I talked so long, he nearly died.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  His toes fell off, I think. Anyway. Thank you, Simon.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  Thank you, Simon. And thank you, guys, for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  I'm Robert Rolich.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan,

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  Matt Kielty, Mona Margaucher, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angela Mercado, and Sophie Sami.

• 1:15:40Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. 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.