Pod Insights Radiolab Making a Monster About this episode Episode one of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.
Rodney Fox went into the ocean one summer day in 1963. He came out barely alive, his body torn apart by a great white shark. At the time, it was one of the worst shark attacks ever survived.
After he recovered, he was pulled back into the shadowy world he feared most. Again and again and again. That shark attack left behind a question that still lingers, for Rodney, and for all of us: When you can’t see the thing that scares you, what kind of monster does your mind create? And how do you fight past it?
Special thanks to Surekha Davies, Asa Mittman, Scott Poole, and Maria Tatar.
EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Rachael Cusickwith help from - Pat WaltersProduced by - Rachael Cusick and Pat WaltersSound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloomwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Diane Kellyand Edited by - Pat Walters
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 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 Wait, you're listening.
0:03 Speaker 01 Okay.
0:04 Speaker 00 Alright.
0:05 Speaker 01 Okay.
0:07 Speaker 00 Alright.
0:08 Speaker 02 You're listening to Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 00 Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 02 From...
0:12 Speaker 00 WNYC. See? Yep.
0:23 Speaker 03 December the 8th, 1963 was the exact date.
0:29 Speaker 03 I was just drifting in really quietly with my gun in front of me.
0:36 Speaker 03 And I was just caressing the trigger and I was just about to pull it.
0:52 Speaker 03 It's a funny thing, you know, I thought I'd been hit by a train.
0:58 Speaker 03 And I don't know, I'd never been on a train. But it was such a big, powerful whack. Knocked the mask off my face. Knocked the gun out of my hand. Thumped me into the bottom. And then I was being hurled through the water faster than I'd ever, ever, ever swam.
1:22 Speaker 01 This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.
1:24 Speaker 04 And I'm Latif Nasir. And that voice was Rodney Fox.
1:28 Speaker 01 Who our producer, Rachel Cusick, talked to. Why, Rach?
1:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I went to go visit Rodney because for people like me who love the ocean, his story is something that I try to tell myself would never happen. But it did.
1:45 Speaker 03 Of course, it couldn't be a train. I had to be a shark, a big shark. And instinctively, I gouged around its head with my fingers. And my arm went into its mouth, over its teeth, and ripped. And the shark seemed to...
2:04 Speaker 03 let me go. And I fell out of its mouth, where my chest was, in its teeth. And I instinctively pushed it away.
2:14 Speaker 03 And then I realized I'm still holding my breath 60 feet underwater.
2:21 Speaker 03 And I'm gonna drown.
2:25 Speaker 03 So I headed straight up towards the surface.
2:31 Speaker 05 Rodney makes it to the top, takes a huge gasp of air, but then...
2:36 Speaker 03 I looked down and there, through pink water, which I realised was my blood, there was this great big head. These big white teeth coming with a mouth wide open, straight towards me. And...
2:53 Speaker 05 Just before the shark got to him.
2:55 Speaker 03 Bang and crash.
2:56 Speaker 05 It turned, grabbed these fish Rodney had tied to his belt, and dragged Rodney back down.
3:04 Speaker 03 Deeper, deeper and deeper.
3:07 Speaker 03 And then a miracle happened, the line snapped.
3:13 Speaker 05 And Rodney began floating up towards the surface.
3:17 Speaker 03 Like a leaf drops down from a tree in a waving sort of a way.
3:25 Speaker 05 Rodney gets to the surface, there's blood everywhere, and he shouts for help.
3:29 Speaker 03 He yelled out "Shark, shark!", and a boat came over. They dragged me into the boat and raced me to shore.
3:36 Speaker 05 So the reason I went to go talk to Rodney is because this Friday is the 50th anniversary of the movie... There is a creature alive today. Jaws. Who has survived millions of years of evolution. The original summer blockbuster, but also a movie that taught the nation, if not the world, to be terrified of sharks. It lives to kill. It's the seed that bloomed countless nightmares.
4:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I mean, like, I'm in the ocean all the time. Like, I'm a volunteer lifeguard, I do open water swimming, I surf. Like, an absurd amount of my life is built around the ocean. And, and I realised, though, like, the only, the only time I think about sharks is when I think about shark attacks. And, and I didn't know anything about sharks. And so I called you guys up, because you're kind of the only ones who answer these kinds of calls that I make. And, and I was like, "Let's do some shark stories."
4:35 Speaker 04 And then you came back with a, with a school of stories.
4:40 Speaker 05 I brought back quite a haul.
4:41 Speaker 01 Brought back so much. We were like, you know what? We're not doing a shark episode.
4:47 Speaker 04 We're doing a week of shark, a non trademark infringing week of shark, completely different than Shark Week, of course.
4:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely. It's a different thing. We have got a shark story coming every day this week, starting this morning. Some are scary, some are beautiful, some are adorable. We got sharks that fly.
5:07 Speaker 04 Sharks that glow in the dark.
5:09 Speaker 01 Sharks that might cure cancer.
5:13 Speaker 04 And we're going to start with the great white shark. Not only the shark from Jaws, it's also the shark that attacked our guy Rodney Fox at the beginning of this episode.
5:23 Speaker 05 Yeah. And, and the reason we're actually starting with Rodney's story and the story of this shark is not just because it's my literal drop dead nightmare, but because his story and how he responded to this attack afterwards, it is intimately tied up in our collective fear of sharks.
5:41 Speaker 04 Okay. So, so go on. So go on.
5:42 Speaker 05 Okay. So Rodney gets to the hospital and the doctors are like, dear God, this guy is a mess. I actually got to see the wetsuit he was wearing at the time. There's just a giant slash, like someone took a bread knife and sliced him in half. Rodney had lost a huge amount of blood.
6:04 Speaker 03 Every rib in my chest broken.
6:06 Speaker 05 The tendons in his hand were severed.
6:08 Speaker 03 Lung punctured as well.
6:10 Speaker 05 I mean, he really almost died.
6:14 Speaker 05 But obviously he's, he's here. He didn't.
6:16 Speaker 03 I woke up. I didn't know whether I was in heaven or hell. Thank goodness the walls weren't painted black.
6:22 Speaker 05 He was alive, but he was in really rough shape.
6:24 Speaker 03 I had a temperature of 105. I couldn't lift my head off the pillow.
6:28 Speaker 05 He was in a ton of pain.
6:30 Speaker 03 Horrific. It was just unbelievable.
6:32 Speaker 05 Says he would just lay there in bed, his eyes fixed on this big clock on the wall.
6:38 Speaker 03 And you could see the second hand tick, tick, tick. I was watching this tick. I remember that so much.
6:49 Speaker 05 He was in the hospital for a week, then two, then three. And then at some point he had what I would consider to be a kind of a baffling thought.
7:01 Speaker 03 Of all the things in the world, I love my family first and I would never give up diving.
7:08 Speaker 05 I want to get back in the water.
7:10 Speaker 04 What? Why?
7:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, so Rodney had always loved the ocean. He would go fishing with his dad and his dad would always just be pulling these fish out of the water. But when Rodney was like 10 or 11, he decided he wanted to see what was down there for himself.
7:28 Speaker 03 I decided I'd heard about masks and I made my own mask.
7:32 Speaker 05 This was before you could just go to the store and buy a pair of goggles. So Rodney found like a tube from a tire.
7:38 Speaker 03 And I got some glass.
7:40 Speaker 05 Strapped it around his face.
7:41 Speaker 03 It was the wrong size for my head. It was rough as guts.
7:44 Speaker 05 And he jumped in.
7:48 Speaker 03 I saw my first beautiful fish underwater, a box fish.
7:55 Speaker 05 It was little, like the size of a softball.
7:58 Speaker 03 Really boxy body and a tiny little tail.
8:02 Speaker 05 It was just sort of levitating in front of him.
8:05 Speaker 03 And colors, the colors were so bright.
8:07 Speaker 05 Orange with like iridescent blue stripes and spots all over it.
8:12 Speaker 03 And it was so cute. And I just never forget that first sight from underwater.
8:16 Speaker 05 Just imagine that when you've never seen a YouTube video of the ocean, there's no blue planet, no David Attenborough, Jacques Cousteau was still years away from doing his thing.
8:27 Speaker 03 We really didn't know very much about the oceans.
8:31 Speaker 05 So seeing this fish and all these other fish swimming around down there.
8:36 Speaker 03 It was like going to the moon. It still brings, you know, warm shivers to my, my, my heart.
8:45 Speaker 05 And then pretty much as soon as it was there, his goggles fall apart, water rushes in and it was gone.
8:52 Speaker 01 He got a glimpse.
8:53 Speaker 05 He had this little taste.
8:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:56 Speaker 05 But it got him hooked. Rodney started diving all the time.
9:00 Speaker 03 And we never knew what we were going to see.
9:03 Speaker 05 By the time he was a teenager.
9:04 Speaker 03 Goggles came for the first time and my mother, for Christmas, brought me my first pair of goggles. And ah, it was a new world.
9:13 Speaker 05 He started spearfishing with some friends, made a little club.
9:16 Speaker 03 It's called the Octopus Club.
9:17 Speaker 05 And by the time he was in his twenties.
9:19 Speaker 03 Twenty-three, twenty-four years of age.
9:21 Speaker 05 He's entering competitions.
9:23 Speaker 03 And we trained. We used to run around the block together. We used to do push-ups against each other.
9:28 Speaker 05 They'd practice holding their breath for as long as they could.
9:30 Speaker 03 And this is a really bad thing. At the time, I was driving an explosives truck. And to practice, I would hold my breath and count telegraph poles. I could have blacked out.
9:42 Speaker 00 I would not have wanted to be on the road behind you that day.
9:45 Speaker 03 No, no.
9:46 Speaker 05 Rodney says he loved the fishing and the competition, but really, it was all an excuse to just go down there and look at stuff.
9:55 Speaker 03 The beauty of the underwater scenery was so intense.
10:04 Speaker 05 And so after the shark attack, when people would come up to him and say.
10:08 Speaker 03 Give up diving and never go back in the water again.
10:12 Speaker 05 He thought, are you kidding me? And never see that beautiful world again?
10:18 Speaker 05 No way.
10:20 Speaker 03 My first day back in the water was only like four, three or four months after my attack.
10:29 Speaker 03 And it was the first outing by all the clubs again, down at a local beach where they were going snorkeling.
10:37 Speaker 03 My wife actually paddled me out on a big surfboard
10:43 Speaker 03 in the middle of all these other 10 or 15 heads of divers going up and down on this reef. And I went into the middle of them because I thought the shark won't be there. And I put my mask on. And the funny thing happened, the sun shining on all of the some riplets of the water was sending diamonds down into the sea. And I saw them as all the sharks. And I said, they're all coming at me.
11:12 Speaker 05 And so he pops out of the water.
11:13 Speaker 03 And I shook my heads and all the sharks went away.
11:18 Speaker 05 But this experience, this day, it really rocked him.
11:22 Speaker 05 He wants to be there. He loves the ocean more than anything.
11:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:25 Speaker 05 But he's still so afraid. He's in this like fight with his mind.
11:29 Speaker 03 If you look at the statistics of it, or how many people are actually killed or bitten per year, it's quite minimal to the amount of people that go diving out in the water.
11:42 Speaker 05 Like Lulu, if you had to guess for 2024 last year, do you want to guess like how many people died from shark attacks around the world?
11:49 Speaker 01 How many people died?
11:50 Speaker 05 Yes.
11:51 Speaker 01 I don't know, like maybe 970.
11:54 Speaker 05 Okay, so take that number and subtract 963.
11:59 Speaker 01 Seven. So seven. Seven people, seven singular people.
12:04 Speaker 05 Seven confirmed fatalities from sharks last year. So just to put that into perspective, these are a few of the things that will kill more humans than sharks every year.
12:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
12:16 Speaker 05 So at the beach alone, the things that are way more likely to get you at the beach are rip currents.
12:22 Speaker 01 Water itself.
12:23 Speaker 05 Water itself.
12:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
12:24 Speaker 05 Skin cancer, huge one. And actually, surprisingly, holes that little kids dig in the sand.
12:30 Speaker 01 Really?
12:30 Speaker 05 Actually, those holes are about as likely to kill you as a shark. And, and, and those are just at the beach.
12:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
12:36 Speaker 05 Zoom out a little bit.
12:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:38 Speaker 05 Lightning strikes.
12:39 Speaker 01 Are more than sharks?
12:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, 24,000 people a year, apparently. Selfies.
12:44 Speaker 01 That's so sad.
12:45 Speaker 05 It's a really bad way to go.
12:47 Speaker 01 Okay, so you're saying, you're saying like.
12:48 Speaker 05 Wait, sorry, one more, one more. The, the one stat that I just love as a New Yorker is that you are 10 times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than you are to be bitten by a shark.
12:59 Speaker 01 I kind of believe that. I get that. I get that. Okay. But, but, but, but, but, but, but.
13:04 Speaker 05 Yes, yes, yes.
13:06 Speaker 01 Sharks, man, like, they are so fast and so big and like, I can hear these statistics, but if we're at the beach and you tell me there are sharks in the water, I'm not gonna go in. Could it be analogous to a snake kind of fear where it's just like, or I don't happen to have it, but a spider fear where it's like you, we are, we come out ready to be afraid of these things because it would have served us?
13:36 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, according to the scientist I spoke to named Chris Low.
13:39 Speaker 06 Professor of marine biology and the director of the shark lab at Cal State Long Beach.
13:43 Speaker 05 We are kind of hardwired to quickly learn how to fear certain animals.
13:48 Speaker 06 They're land animals that we co-evolve with.
13:50 Speaker 05 But not sharks.
13:52 Speaker 06 Psychologists have done studies where they've shown babies pictures of snakes and spiders and they react with fear. Then they show them a picture of a shark and there's no reaction.
14:02 Speaker 05 Really?
14:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:03 Speaker 05 Chris pointed out the obvious fact that-
14:06 Speaker 06 We're not an aquatic animal.
14:07 Speaker 05 For most of human history, people had very few interactions with sharks.
14:11 Speaker 06 It was this beast that people were told about that they rarely get to see.
14:16 Speaker 05 And Chris says, when all you have are stories.
14:18 Speaker 06 What happens is it allows people's imaginations to take over.
14:24 Speaker 05 Like, we didn't have goggles until like, the 1950s. So, we didn't, we knew that things were taking us. We never actually ever saw these creatures. Like, the most we might see is the fin.
14:35 Speaker 06 We're given a few pieces of information and then we begin to develop this image of what these animals are like. We make the monster in our head.
14:45 Speaker 05 And in a way, that is exactly what was happening for Rodney. Like, yes, he had been attacked, but what he really feared was what he couldn't see.
14:57 Speaker 03 You have no idea if there's a shark within 10 meters or within 10 miles. And so you give the sharks the benefit of the doubt and you think they could be right there waiting for me. And it's really one of those things that you have to mentally overcome.
15:18 Speaker 05 Which is what Rodney's gonna try to do, right after we take a quick break.
15:38 Speaker 06 This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?
15:43 Speaker 07 Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.
15:54 Speaker 06 Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
16:11 Speaker 01 Lulu.
16:11 Speaker 04 Luthis.
16:12 Speaker 05 Rachel.
16:12 Speaker 01 Radiolab.
16:13 Speaker 04 And we're back with the story of Rodney Fox, a man who was brutally attacked by a great white shark, desperately wants to get back in the water, but is terrified of being attacked again.
16:23 Speaker 03 Seven or eight months after my shark attack, my wife took my young niece into the zoo, Logical Gardens in town, for a wander around. And as we were looking at the different animals, we came across the lion's cage. And as we walked up to the lion's cage, it started to roar.
16:49 Speaker 03 You know, lions, when they roar, it starts back at their tail and it goes right up through their body, up through their chests and out through their mouth.
17:01 Speaker 03 It's incredible. It really takes you over and shakes you.
17:06 Speaker 05 And it strikes Rodney like, oh, these lions are kind of man eaters, exactly like sharks.
17:12 Speaker 03 With his mouth wide open, big white teeth there.
17:15 Speaker 05 But when I can look at it in a cage, it feels safe.
17:19 Speaker 03 And I thought, well, maybe I could reverse the role. Maybe I could get in the cage myself and drop the cage over the side where all the sharks are. And I can have a look at these great whites and make up my own mind if I want to go diving with them again.
17:38 Speaker 05 And so, again, Rodney cobbled together some materials.
17:41 Speaker 03 A steel mesh that they made for putting in concrete.
17:45 Speaker 05 And built a shark cage.
17:47 Speaker 03 A two-man cage that we could stand in with little holes in the front that you could look out and maybe put your camera out from.
17:55 Speaker 04 Oh, so like this is the shark cage? Like that you see on National Geographic or whatever?
18:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. But actually Rodney is one of the first people to make and use a shark cage like that.
18:06 Speaker 04 Huh.
18:07 Speaker 05 So for him, this was like this original idea to overcome his fear.
18:11 Speaker 04 Huh.
18:12 Speaker 05 So Rodney has this cage and then he decides he wants to try it out. So he finds a boat, gets a crew together.
18:18 Speaker 03 And so we went out on this trip and.
18:21 Speaker 05 They took the boat out to this place called Dangerous Reef, for a reason. Great name. A little bit of a great white hotspot. They head out to these waters and eventually they see a fin. So Rodney rigs up this cage.
18:35 Speaker 03 Loaded over the side, jumped in the cage.
18:38 Speaker 05 And then
18:41 Speaker 05 he's just waiting, peering out
18:46 Speaker 05 into the dark water.
18:49 Speaker 05 Some fish dart by, the sunlight flashing off their scales.
18:56 Speaker 05 And then he says.
18:57 Speaker 03 I was looking and I just saw shadows.
18:59 Speaker 05 Drifting past the back of the boat.
19:02 Speaker 03 Just shadows down the end, now and again.
19:07 Speaker 03 And then all of a sudden I turned to my right and there's this submarine swimming past with eyes.
19:15 Speaker 03 And it swam only about three meters or 10 feet in front of me. And almost looked like it was manmade because it was so big.
19:27 Speaker 05 Rodney feels himself recoil.
19:29 Speaker 03 I'd moved to the back of the cage.
19:32 Speaker 05 And with his back pressed against the back of the cage, he looks at the shark for the first time.
19:39 Speaker 05 Just stares at it.
19:41 Speaker 03 This great big silver gray great white shark.
19:48 Speaker 05 And he's staring at it.
19:52 Speaker 05 He realizes the shark is not even really looking at him.
19:57 Speaker 03 It didn't take any notice of me in the cage at all. It just was more interested in the fish. And that certainly was a big help for me.
20:10 Speaker 05 After that first day in the cage, Rodney found that it got easier and easier to return to the ocean.
20:16 Speaker 03 Spent thousands of hours in the water.
20:18 Speaker 05 His fear of being attacked, it never completely went away.
20:21 Speaker 03 But if I had worries about sharks.
20:24 Speaker 05 He would just tell himself.
20:26 Speaker 03 Generally, sharks don't like humans.
20:28 Speaker 05 And he'd think about how indifferent that shark was to him when he was in the cage. And not only that, like how beautiful it was.
20:42 Speaker 05 And so pretty soon he started sharing that experience with other people. Like they would call him up and say they wanted to go out and see the sharks too. Because that was the only way you could see a great white shark.
20:53 Speaker 03 Nobody had filmed or photographed great whites underwater.
20:56 Speaker 05 So Rodney started bringing filmmakers out there.
20:59 Speaker 03 One from Italy and one from England.
21:02 Speaker 05 And more people want to see it and more people want to see it.
21:04 Speaker 03 And I got this call from Hollywood.
21:07 Speaker 05 Somebody working with a 27 year old filmmaker named Steven Spielberg.
21:11 Speaker 03 They were making a big budget shark film.
21:13 Speaker 01 Oh, the Jaws people call him.
21:16 Speaker 05 Yes, yes.
21:17 Speaker 03 Nobody knew it was Jaws at the time. They said they wanted to try and get some realistic footage in there. And I was pretty excited about this and they wanted to come out for six weeks.
21:28 Speaker 05 So Rodney brought them out and they shot hours and hours of footage. And then that crew, they went back to Hollywood. Fast forward a little while and the movie comes out. And as we all know, monster shark terrorizing beachgoers.
21:43 Speaker 05 Hunting them down, never giving up.
21:48 Speaker 05 But the weird thing is, when you watch the movie.
21:50 Speaker 06 You really didn't see a shark very often.
21:52 Speaker 05 You get an hour into the film without seeing a shark.
21:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, you really don't see a lot of shark footage in that movie.
21:59 Speaker 05 Chris Logan, the shark scientist from before.
22:02 Speaker 06 And I think that was actually the brilliance of the movie.
22:06 Speaker 07 The best monster movies always work by withholding the thing that you're supposed to be frightened of, and that really amplifies fear by causing this cognitive uncertainty. What is it? What can it do?
22:19 Speaker 05 This is Jeffrey Cohen.
22:20 Speaker 07 Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University.
22:24 Speaker 05 And he studies monster stories.
22:26 Speaker 07 Godzilla.
22:27 Speaker 05 Frankenstein.
22:28 Speaker 07 Vampire movies, you name it.
22:30 Speaker 05 And he says, in all of these stories.
22:32 Speaker 07 It's really when the monster is continually just at the edge of vision. Those are the moments that just keep you on edge. And that is one of the reasons I think Jaws is so effective. It waits.
22:47 Speaker 05 Instead of showing you the shark, you just hear that iconic score.
22:53 Speaker 07 And you very quickly learn in that film that the soundtrack takes the place in the monster.
23:02 Speaker 07 Once you see it, it's actually not quite as scary anymore.
23:07 Speaker 05 Which is kind of like the exact thing Rodney learned for himself when he went down into the cages and the thing he wanted to share with other people. And so when Rodney saw the movie.
23:16 Speaker 03 I was embarrassed. I had no idea at the time that it was going to frighten so many people out of the water. I didn't even tell people for 10 years that I really worked on it because I was totally against what I wanted to do. I wanted to get people to understand and like sharks better. This made them hate sharks.
23:38 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I mean, it's like he invented this whole contraption to see it more clearly and then ended up being complicit in this, this kind of like infection in our minds of seeing it as something so scary.
23:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, like he, he was able to kind of like paint this masterpiece of, of a shark. And then we kind of wiped away all of these beautiful details. And all that was left was this outline of this creature that just feels so ominous. And that's not actually the version of, of the white shark that Rodney knows. It's just kind of the one that got handed to us.
24:14 Speaker 05 And so I decided I needed to see the shark Rodney wanted us to see for myself.
24:27 Speaker 01 That's tomorrow on day two of our Week of Sharks.
24:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, join us as we come face to face with what I think still is one of the scariest things in the ocean. This episode was reported and produced by Rachel Cusick with production and editing by Pat Walters. Mixing help and sound design by Jeremy Bloom and it was fact checked by Diane Kelton.
24:51 Speaker 01 And one more thing, we want to give a huge thanks to everyone who supports Radiolab, especially right now, everyone who's a part of the lab, our membership program. Your support makes big projects like this possible and we are so grateful.
25:05 Speaker 04 And if you aren't a member yet or are thinking about giving more, uh, this is the perfect time to take the plunge because if you join or re-up now, you will receive a really cool gift.
25:18 Speaker 01 A limited edition Week of Sharks hat designed by the awesome Maine-based artist and surfer Ty Williams. It's so beautiful and fun and it gives you a chance to show the world you support public radio in the form of Radiolab.
25:32 Speaker 04 And support Sharks. It's available to everyone who joins the lab this month, even for as little as $7 a month.
25:39 Speaker 01 You can join at radiolab.org/join. Existing members, check your email for details and thank you so much.
25:46 Speaker 04 This is Swimming with Shadows, a Radiolab Week of Sharks.
25:50 Speaker 01 See you tomorrow.
25:56 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Teddy and I'm from Berkeley, California. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is created by Jad Aberrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lakith Nasara are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Rebecca Lacks, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nenasambandhan, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kauri, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vizza, Ariane Weck, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young. With help from Rebecca Rand.
26:38 Speaker 02 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pousol Matzini, and Natalie Middleton.
26:48 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Daniel Fu Madri. Leadership support from Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Terpentale Foundation. Foundational support from Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Eslang Foundation.
Previous It's Like ... Radiolab Next The Cage Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated