Who Killed Charles Francis Hall? The Polaris Expedition's Arctic Whodunnit (with Jad Abumrad)

Jad Abumrad is the definition of inquisitive. As the creator of hit shows RadioLab and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, Jad has the innate ability to calculate idionsyncrasies, question the peculiar, and posit grand deductions. Perfect for this week's Murder Mystery of a SNAFU. Ed leads Jad on a tangled journey to the Arctic, where late 19th Century explorer Charles Francis Hall fell fatally ill. Was it the unforgiving tundra, or was there something more sinister afoot? Don your detective deerstalker alongside Jad as he tries to unravel this week's SNAFU WHODUNNIT! And watch this week's episode on the SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod http://www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  He's seen you in your underwear or something.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  He's got a piercing gaze.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know what I was saying. But, okay, this is obviously him pre-murder.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yes, this is not a picture of his corpse. This is Charles Francis Hall, pre-murder. I should have said that. I apologize.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  No, no, I was just timestamping, you know.

• 0:32Speaker 02

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• 2:07Speaker 01

  Welcome to Snapfoo, the podcast about history's most epic failures, faceplants, and fiascos, and more importantly, what those blunders tell us about us as a species. I'm Ed Helms, and today I'm joined by a true goat podcaster. You might know him from the iconic show he started Radiolab, or perhaps one of his many other audio accomplishments: More Perfect, Dolly Parton's America, or his newest show for Audible, Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, which covers the life, music, and activism of the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. He's an audio creator, whose shows have been downloaded more than 1 billion

• 2:51Speaker 01

  times, which is making my head explode. He's won three Be Body Awards, and he's also my good pal from way back when at Oberlin College. Welcome to Snapfoo, Jad Abumrad.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Ed, so good to see you. Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to go on whatever journey you're about to take me on.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I'm gonna take you on a very wild and wacky journey. But yeah, it is so good to see you. And I have to say, as someone who's known you for, gosh, like 30 years, I am insanely proud of everything you've done and accomplished. And I just wanted to express that.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Ed, that's so, that's so nice to hear from you. I mean, look, mutual admiration society, my friend.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Let's get into it, yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  I was just at our alma mater, Oberlin College.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  And they were, so crazily, my son, who is about to turn 16, he's really into Oberlin, and he might go to Oberlin. So we went there, and they gave a presentation, and you were all over the presentation.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, you are a big selling point now of Oberlin College. Not just you doing movie things, but you appearing at various places in the campus, playing banjo.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  It was really, I felt like I was hanging out with you as I was walking, walking the land there.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an extraordinary music conservatory, and yet somehow, they let me play banjos there.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Which doesn't really go with the whole vibe, but no, it's it's an incredible place and really a formative place. I also remember moving from from Oberlin after we graduated, there was just like a whole huge mass of students that moved straight to New York City. And you and I were among that mass migration. And I think you moved right to Brooklyn and I moved, I was in the Lower East Side for a year, but then I moved into an this big loft apartment in Williamsburg that we rented from your then girlfriend's sister's boyfriend.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, I completely forgot about that, Ed.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  That whole like loft situation.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  The loft situation was unbelievable. It's one of the most magical places that I've ever lived in my life. And it was a like 4,000 square foot loft. And we paid like $300 a month each. There were me and two roommates. And I remember right when we moved in, it was Thanksgiving. And we had no furniture. We just had this giant, like, industrial space and with a with a asphalt floor. And we built a dinner table out of a four by eight sheet of plywood. Do you remember this? You and and your girlfriend, who's now your, your amazing wife, and a bunch of our other friends all came over

• 5:43Speaker 01

  for Thanksgiving and we sat on the floor around this, this piece of plywood and had just one of those memorable Thanksgivings ever.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  You know, that it's all coming back to me. That's a that was actually, that was a kind of a charmed moment, not just in our lives. Because yes, I do remember us having Thanksgiving together. And we were all like babies. We were all like not, we didn't start our lives yet.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  It was at that moment.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to tell you that that when we were starting Snafu, and in season one in particular, we were still just trying to kind of find the sound and the voice. Radiolab for us was very much a North Star in terms of how you told a story, both in narration and with an interweaving interview. And I think it's fair to say that so much of what became documentary audio storytelling was massively influenced by Radiolab. I'm curious, like, in the way that that was such an innovation at that time, which now

• 6:49Speaker 01

  is so ubiquitous and feels so prevalent, what were your inspirations in creating Radiolab? What was the, not just the stories that, of course, were these beautiful, just kind of exercises in curiosity, but the actual production, the way that you crafted the auditory experience of Radiolab?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny to think back because it all feels so quaint and somewhat misguided. I mean, you know, at the aforementioned Oberlin College, I studied music composition at the conservatory. And I studied it at a time when you had a lot of kind of, as I think of them, sort of leftover lefties who were teaching this like really dissonant form of like Stockhausen and music concret and all of this stuff. And that's what I spent four years learning. So when I got out of school, I thought I was going to be a composer or a film person.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  That was what my sort of trajectory was, and that was what was in my ears. And then I tumbled sort of through the side door into journalism. And so when I finally started making a radio show, I had like only a few templates or a few inspirations. One was This American Life, which had just sort of wandered into and changed culture in like five years prior to when Radiolab started. And then I had heard some like weird audio documentaries from like Australia, because they have an amazing tradition. They do some very weird stuff there. And then I also then had Stockhausen in my ears.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And Stockhausen, for the listeners, is just a very avant-garde composer.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. He was the guy who would take like car horns and use them as music, you know? Which, again, like, that kind of way of working is so ubiquitous now, like, using the sounds of our world to make music. But he was the first one to do it. Literally, he would, like, record it on these giant reel-to-reels and, like, cut it up and then take tape pieces. And so, like, I had studied all that stuff. I had Ira in my ears. I had been listening around. And so Radiolab became a kind of fusion of all those things. And I didn't know any better at that point to, like, know, A, that I couldn't do it, or B, that there, like, that this wouldn't be a, that this was allowed, you know? It

• 9:18Speaker 00

  was just like, again, it was in that period right before the internet became ubiquitous, where suddenly you could hear everything.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Instantly. It was, like, right before that. So, yeah, it was like, I think I was just trying to make conversations sound like music.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. There's, yeah, there's a very playful quality to that. It's fandom is massive and for great reason. And I miss you on that show.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks, man.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Let's jump into today's snafu. Are you ready for this?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm ready.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Today's tale takes us north into the desolate, unforgiving expanses of the Arctic, where the success of a 19th-century scientific expedition to reach the North Pole was tainted by murder.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And the subsequent head-scratching whodunit.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Ooh, is this a mystery tale?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a, it's an adventure and it becomes a mystery.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  One of the reasons I want to discuss this with you in particular is because there's a sort of fun Radiolab-y science angle on this. Modern-day scientific analysis has revealed a clue that might unveil the culprit of this murder.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  The clue is actually a cute little birdie. Literally, it's a bird specimen brought back from the voyage. But we're gonna get to that all later. For now,

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  let's dive deep into the fraught and dangerous expedition of the USS Polaris and the unexplained death of its captain, Charles Francis Hall.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Let's start by getting to know our future murder victim, Mr. Charles Francis Hall. Born in New England in 1821, Hall's early life, growing up in Vermont and New Hampshire, was peaceful, like peak cottage core vibes. He reportedly didn't get much of a formal education. He apprenticed as a blacksmith in his teens, later moved to Cincinnati, in our beloved Ohio, where he became a businessman and a newspaper publisher. Let's take a look at this guy. As an adult, he was 5'8", 200 pounds and described as a bear-like man.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  With a large, bushy beard.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  He has a little bit of a Galifinovkis going on there.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  He does, you're right.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I would describe him as Galifinakish.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're very right. And I will say, in this, we'll kind of learn that his personality is quite complicated, but he seems quite jovial and like teddy bearish here.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, he seems like he knows something.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  He also looks, he's got like, he's seen you in your underwear or something.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  He's got, he's got a piercing gaze that can see through your clothes, I guess?

• 12:14Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know what I was saying. But, okay, interesting.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  No, I don't disagree. I think it's...

• 12:20Speaker 00

  This is obviously him pre-murder.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yes, this is not a picture of his corpse. This is Charles Francis Hall, pre-murder. I should have said that.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  No, no, no, I was just, I'm just, I was just timestamping, you know?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. If Hall's upbringing was bucolic and tranquil, his personality was anything but. He was emotionally volatile, capable of both passionate, grandiose expressions of hope and excitement.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  You can read his diary for proof of this. And also outbursts of extreme anger and even violence. His ego was definitely a bit inflated, if not delusional. Despite this, he was intelligent and studious, even if his interests could be a bit fanatical. I kind of feel like this describes a lot of...

• 13:09Speaker 00

  I was gonna say...

• 13:11Speaker 01

  People of this time period, right?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Like, they didn't have the tools, Jad. They didn't have the emotional tools to communicate.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And invent their feelings in a healthy way.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  No, I know.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  So we're about to trek into the great, the great north. The north is unforgiving. And for centuries, explorers like Sir Francis Drake had traveled north to chart the Arctic's geography. A lot of the time, these explorers were seeking the Northwest Passage, of course, which is the, the, at the time, a hypothetical route that connected the Atlantic to the Pacific over the north of Canada. But every expedition to find this Northwest Passage had failed up to this point. And the passage wasn't successfully discovered until much later in 1905. The exploits of these explorers fascinated Hall, and he became particularly fixated

• 14:05Speaker 01

  on Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition, which had occurred when Hall was in his mid twenties. I am curious what you think of, Jad. What is it in human nature that we are so continuously kind of beguiled by these grand, bold adventurers and explorers? Like, what is, what is that speaking to in us?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I think about this all the time. I recall in early Radiolab, we talked to Robert Sapolsky from, from, who's a primatologist. And he told stories of, of watching baboon troops for months, years at a time. And he would notice this pattern where you'd have a very tight knit troop. And then at some point, that troop would be sort of in a neighboring area to another troop. And they're leaving each other alone. They don't, they don't want anything to do with each other. And it's always this juvenile male baboon who's just like, what's going on over there? And just kind of starts creeping out to the edge. Hey, what's up, what's happening over there?

• 15:10Speaker 00

  And then inevitably, his old troop leaves and then he joins a new one. And that, that becomes this, you know, exchange. But it's always the young men. And you don't want to get too deterministic about this, but. It does seem to me like a way that nature has written in a mechanism by which to expand the gene pool. And maybe in people like the fellow you're about to tell us about, that's just an instinct that got turned up too loud and run amok or something. I don't mean in a sexual sense, but I mean in like that wanderlust, that desire to discover the world. It feels to me like it's something, it's kind of, in a way, one of the most beautiful parts of humans, but also sometimes one of the most toxic.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, you're right. It carries both.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  It carries both, right?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  The human instinct to explore contains multitudes.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Indeed, indeed.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Let me give you a little background on this John Franklin expedition that became Hall's obsession. In 1845, the British Royal Navy commissioned this Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Unfortunately for Franklin and his crew, the ships became trapped in the ice and contact was lost. Their fate remained unknown.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Wait, was it, sorry, I'm just processing this late. Was it called the HMS Terror?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  That is not an auspicious name.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  If I'm like a steward, I don't want to get on that boat.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Okay, and bad things befell the HSS Terror?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they got trapped in the ice, their fate was unknown for many, many years because they just never returned. And multiple search expeditions went out and continued well into the 21st century. We now know that all 129 crew members, including Franklin, died from exposure, scurvy, hypothermia, and apparently also even cannibalism. I'm not sure if they died of cannibalism, or if they were cannibalized upon death. I would hope it's the latter. I hope they didn't get eaten to death. That would be awkward for everyone.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, my god. Wow. Okay. So this is the, this is the, this is the fellow, or the expedition of the fellow whom Hall admired.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And was it like, like, that guy failed, but I will, I will succeed where he failed?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Kind of. There certainly was that, because the Northwest Passage had not been discovered, and the North Pole had not been, had not seen human at all. But also, there was this obsession with that Franklin expedition itself. No one knew what happened to them. And by 1860, most organized search efforts had fizzled out. Hall, however, was obsessed. He felt certain that he could uncover what happened, even though the entire frickin' British Royal Navy was unable to do so. Remember what I said about Hall's ego being a bit inflated?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in 1860, at the age of 39, Hall joined a whaling ship going north. His intention was to hitch a ride to Baffin Island, located in present-day Nunavut, Canada. And from there, continue westward in a much tinier craft to investigate Franklin's fate. Of course, because this is snafu, his plan went to shit. And this isn't even the main story. This is all still, we're still in the preamble, but...

• 18:41Speaker 00

  So I assume the clue that you have, you have not yet dropped the clue?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  No, but I'm so glad you're paying close attention. I have not yet dropped the clue.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  So a storm destroys his boat, and illness kills his guide, and Hall was stranded for the winter on Baffin Island. Ever the optimist, he decided to be productive and use this time to learn from the local Inuit culture, and their incredible ability to survive and even thrive in this unbelievably harsh landscape, which he came to love. He befriended an Inuit couple, Ipirvik and Takalituk, and wound up staying on Baffin Island for two whole years, immersing himself in the culture and learning their language. By 1862, he was truly a...

• 19:29Speaker 01

  An Arctic badass, well-trained in the sort of trades of living in that climate. And he even discovered artifacts belonging to explorer Martin Frobisher, another seeker of the Northwest Passage. Yeah, he was there for a full two years.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And then finally returned to the United States in 1862. And now he's just hooked on exploration. In 1864, he launched a second expedition, reaching King William Island, where Franklin's crew had been lost, and recovered bones and small artifacts belonging to the crew from this site. And this expedition lasted for five years. And his passion for this region only deepened. He wrote, quote, "The Arctic is my home. I love it dearly. It's storms, it's winds, it's glaciers, it's icebergs. And when I'm there among them, I seem as if I were in an earthly heaven or a heavenly earth."

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Interesting. This guy's, yeah, he has all the things, the good and the bad, all rolled in.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, it's truly unbelievable what some of these explorers in the 19th century put themselves through again and again. Like Ernest Shackleton, you know, went on multiple expeditions. And it's just, it's really incredible.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  We're just so soft compared to what they went through back in the day.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I don't know, I feel like I could have done it. You probably could have. I mean, I don't know why you had to say "we." But...

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Speaking personally, I wouldn't have lasted five minutes.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  How would you do up there?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  I would be terrible. I mean, you know, Carla, as you know, is a Texan. We vacation over there, we go to visit her family there. And every time I go to Texas, it's 85, 90 degrees. Hot, but not obscene. I mean, I'm from the Arab world, I should be able to handle heat. But I get heat-stuck every single time.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  And, yeah, and I end up having to lie in a dark room. And she'll always be like, "Oh, my little orchid. You need just the right environment to thrive." So I, which is to say, I don't think I would have lasted long in the Arctic.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  The orchid jad would have withered in an Arctic climate.

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• 24:13Speaker 01

  All right, back to Hall. It wasn't always heavenly for him in the Arctic. He did learn the hard way that leadership is an innate quality that few harness with grace, especially in desolate lands where temperatures average minus 33 degrees Celsius or minus 22 Fahrenheit.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Man, I remember getting off the plane in Cleveland one year.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Yes, I was just gonna say like, in Oberlin, it sometimes touched those icy, icy depths. And it was, it was actually kind of like amazing from a physics perspective, just to like, snot would come out of your nose and then freeze instantly.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yes, carry on with, with Hall.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  We're in 1868, and it's the tail end of this second trip. And one of his crew members, Patrick Coleman, allegedly called for a mutiny, or that's what Hall claimed. Coleman was never actually able to kind of make his case because Hall shot him with a gun and just killed him.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Which is not my go-to conflict resolution strategy. So you'd think murdering, murdering someone would, would come with some kind of consequences, but Hall just got away scot-free on this because the incident occurred beyond Canadian territorial boundaries. British authorities, who governed Canada at the time, declined to pursue the matter and instead deferred it to the United States. The US was like, eh, we don't really give a shit. And it just went completely unprosecuted. And Coleman's murder never besmirched Hall's record in any way.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  So Hall was celebrated for his research and on this second expedition, having documented more about Inuit culture, oral histories, and Arctic survival skills than any previous traveler. And he soon found himself hobnobbing with the elite, and he earned himself a very cushy gig leading a third expedition. Actually, I would not describe it as cushy, a gig, leading a third expedition. This one was major. And it was also where our snafu story really kicks into gear.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Backed by $50,000 from the US Navy, which is about 1.3 million today, he set sail from New London, Connecticut. On July 3rd, 1871, aboard the USS Polaris, aiming to be the first to reach the North Pole.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Why Connecticut? But you know what? That's probably a detail that we shouldn't dwell on. Okay, so he's on his way to the north.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  This is my problem is I will ask you a series of questions which will digress us and no, I'm in now, so.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  I love it though, Jad. Honestly, like your curiosity is my fuel. I just, and I can answer your question. You're saying, "Why Connecticut?" It's because so much of the maritime world was rooted in the whaling industry, which is all up and down the Connecticut coast and of course Massachusetts and Long Island. I don't know why this particular expedition left from New London, but I do know that so much of shipping and whaling and all maritime activity was rooted in the area.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Don't you think when someone options the story you're telling, if they haven't already, they should? This scene of him leaving and like the gathering of the crew, the motley crew that's going to be aboard the vessel that launches to the North Pole, that feels to me like an instant scene in a movie.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Oh, we're about to get there. I'm so glad you said that.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the perfect setup. Yeah, because this trip is about to go real sideways. But before we get into the timeline of Hall's third expedition, let's lay out our rogues' gallery of potential suspects, very Agatha Christie style here.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  The crew was made up of 25 people, Americans, Germans, a Dane, a Swede, and two Inuit families, including the MVP duo, Ipirvik and Takalituk, who we previously met.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Oh, gotcha. Okay.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Plus their son. Yeah. So now technically Hall was the captain of this expedition. In practice, he really had no sailing experience. He wasn't so much of a great boat guy. So a man- By the name of Sidney Buddington was brought in as the actual steady maritime adult in the room. He and Hall were friends from Hall's first whaling voyage. This was bound to go off without a hitch, right? Sort of like, it's not clear who's captain. Then there's George Tyson, the assistant navigator. Fun fact, he was originally offered the captain gig before Buddington, but had to decline because of another job he'd already booked. When that fell through,

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Hall brought him on as second in command. So yeah, now there's a third guy who's like, captain level, but not actually in the captain role.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  See, this is role clarity. Always a good thing to have on a ship.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  You gotta lay it down, of course. All right, over in the German corner, we have Emil Bessels, chief science and medical officer, plus his assistant Frederick Meyer. Hall did not want Bessels on board, but American authorities insisted, which is, you know, always comforting when your boss says, "I didn't hire this guy, but we're stuck with him."

• 29:40Speaker 00

  They insisted for, is there a story behind why? Maybe it's not important, but why did they insist?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I think he was a very prominent, you know, researcher and scientist and for whatever reason, those funding the expedition were like, "This is the guy we want for research purposes."

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  The US government also intentionally stocked the crew with primarily whalers instead of polished naval officers, figuring these men were used to the brutal northern waters, and they could handle the Arctic a lot better, which makes a lot of sense. If you're going somewhere so aggressively frozen, you want people who kind of think of frostbite as just like,

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Just like Tuesday.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  A mild fever. But at the same time, like, they're not rooted in the same sort of disciplinary hierarchy of a naval command.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  What a motley crew.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's quite an odd assortment of folks. And it's, and there's one tiny issue here.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Wait, did you tell me about the Dane? Was there a Dane? Did you introduce me to the Dane? Or did I miss that?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I did say a Dane. And I love that you're asking me about that, and I don't have more information on him.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. We can cross off the Dane as the, as one of the, like,

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Oh, you're too good. You were, you already eliminated someone. Anyhow, okay.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  All right, so. So, obviously, we have a sort of disparate international contingent here. And, and so it's no surprise that cliques formed very quickly along national lines. Tyson reported insolence and disaffection, which is a 19th century term for these guys are super toxic.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Some of the crew stole alcohol from storage. One of the thieves stealing shots like a frat boy was Captain Buddington, who was also talking a lot of shit about Charles Francis Hall behind his back. It's a mess. And the German contingent, which is led by Emil Bessels, the researcher, he did not jive with Hall at all. They, they thought he wasn't up to snuff as the expedition leader. Buddington and Tyson were constantly butting heads because nothing says harmony like two men with captain experience, one technically in charge and the other technically not in charge, just arguing all the time, way into the Arctic Nights.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  This sounds like a whole soup of, of trouble. Yeah, and we have, this is like, this is just like the status. This has nothing to do with the hardship of the coming expedition. This is just sort of like baseline, which is kind of foreboding. Now, at least Charles Francis Hall had a Pürvik and Takla Tuk. They were his ride or dies. So despite all of this sort of internal conflict, Hall led the Polaris to about 82 degrees north latitude. Now, this was farther north than any non-Inuit crew had ever reached at this time. Then things really started to deteriorate in October as the sun set for winter.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  It doesn't just set at night. In October, it just sets for the season.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  It's like in Game of Thrones, you know, winter is coming, winter is coming.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's getting dark for a long, long time. And this is when the Polaris gets trapped in an ice floe.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  That crew, that crew that you just introduced me to is not going to do well in this situation.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  You're very intuitive, Dad.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  You've got, uh, just followed some big fat breadcrumbs you laid out for me.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. So they're stuck and it's dark.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  So it's the October freeze. Uh, Hall, um, they're, they're just stuck in, in the ice. And, uh, Hall and a subsection of the crew took off dog sledding towards the North Pole, mainly on a reconnaissance mission, maybe looking for kind of like openings in the ice or just other possibilities or, or more just sort of data about where they are. Uh, Hall wanted to get as far north as he could, but after two weeks and 80 kilometers, which is insane, they traveled 80 kilometers by dog sled just on this ice in, in October. And they're forced to turn around, possibly due to weather, uh, concerns. And despite this setback, Hall returned in very good spirits.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  He shook off, uh, the icicles on his eyelids and sipped on a nice, fresh, hot cup of warm brewed coffee. And he did his best to settle back into the rhythms of the ship until

• 34:26Speaker 01

  he became violently ill.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Delirium set in and he vomited all over the place.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  The chief medical officer tended to him as best he could. He treated Hall with a syringe of quinine, which I guess is typically used for malaria. I don't think malaria was a concern in the Arctic, but anyway, a few days later, November 8th, Charles Francis Hall is dead.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  So what do they do now? Well, the crew buries Hall in the frosted tundra of northwest Greenland, a place literally called Thank God Harbor.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Is it really?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  It's a good, good final resting spot, I guess.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Now, according to an 1877 article in the journal Nature, Hall's death was considered a freak accident. Yeah, okay, nature. Totally not suspicious at all. Don't worry, we're gonna circle back. Anyway, now Captain Buddington was totally in charge because someone had to keep this Arctic train wreck going. They still had an expedition to complete, and they were hell bent on doing it. What do you think? If you're Captain Buddington in this moment, who by the way, had been relentlessly raiding the liquor storage and was reportedly drunk a lot of the time.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  How do you bring your crew back around in this moment?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  It's a little bit like when you have a plumber come over and he's like, and he looks at the plumbing that the last guy did. And he was like, who, this guy, like, that guy was terrible. I'll be, I will take care of that. I don't know what that guy was doing. So I would imagine Buddington just, you know, was like, thank God that that's over. Now the real captain is here. And maybe the crew, they're so starved for a sense of purpose and direction and clarity. It sounds like they had no clarity. Maybe they went along. I mean, what are they gonna do at that point? They're all probably delirious, you know?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Well, thanks to the pack ice, the crew was forced to hunker down there in Greenland in what would eventually become named Polaris Bay. And they were, they had to just hunker down until the following year. Sometime between spring and fall, they set sail again. But by the fall of 1872, gale-force winds sent the Polaris crashing into an iceberg, badly damaging the ship. Now, keep in mind, the Arctic sun had set once again, not to rise again until spring, leaving them in pitch black darkness.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  So they have been out there for now, well over a year.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Stuck in ice, freezing, and they've gone through a long, dark winter, a brief summer, and then they're now in a second, long, dark winter?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And, and now they've crashed into an iceberg. So naturally, Buddington is freaking out. He orders everyone off the ship. They shoved food, supplies, and dogs onto the ice floe. This seemed like a good idea, but it turns out the Polaris wasn't sinking. She was just damaged. And after 19 crew members had, had offboarded, including Tyson and the Inuit families, the Polaris got caught up in high winds again, and a strong current broke it free from the ice floe, and it just disappeared.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  You mean the boat just left them behind?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  It just drifted off into the dark. And, but there are a lot. Captain Buddington and a lot of the crew are still on board, but 19 people, including Tyson and Ipiric and Toklatuk, are stuck on the ice.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are you thinking if you're one of those guys?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  It's funny. It was sort of comedic imagining the boat on its own leaving, but now you have like a crew that's been divided, which makes me just like sad for everyone at that point. The people on the ice are just like, fuck. Where like, at that point, you know you're gonna die. And it's just a question of when and how. And then the people on the boat are, you're, I don't even know what they're thinking.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  They're probably just like, peace, peace out, guys. Sorry, but we're, we're free now.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess we're moving, so, all right.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  You know, I, gosh, what, what a, what a, that's brutal.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so here's the insane thing. The Inuit family, Ipiric and Toklatuk, they were part of the stranded group of people, and they had the skills. They became literal godsons. They built igloos, they hunted seals. Now, they're just on floating ice. They're not on land, but they live on this floating ice.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  For... A very long time.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And they burned one of their boats for firewood, which turned out to be a very bad decision. But they did not die in this moment.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, Buddington was able to halt the Polaris drift by running it aground somewhere near Greenland. I guess it was, it just was not navigable, the boat. It's sort of drifting, but he was able to run it aground. And the captain and the remaining crew hunkered down until the summer again.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  At which point they were able to use smaller boats to sail south and eventually reach New York. And they were, they survived and they were okay. Now, back to this, these 19 people stuck on the dwindling ice flow. So on April 30th, 1873, a sealer vessel called the Tigress, uh, this is like, you know, just a guy who hunts seals, erupted from a thick fog, appearing in the nick of time after six months.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And over 1,800 miles of drifting. And six months later, they were saved. And in the end, they all survived.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  They just happened to be like, they happened to come on the one little patch of ice where these, these people were marooned.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this sealing vessel just came right up on them and found them.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  That is a freakish coincidence. That's amazing.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  It is amazing. It's totally incredible. Um, they all survived, of course. So it turns out everyone in the entire expedition survived, except of course, for Charles Francis Hall. Uh, and the expedition became a media sensation in the U.S. Some of the rescued crew questioned the circumstances of Hall's death, recalling that in his delirium, Hall claimed that someone had poisoned him.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  But who?

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• 43:08Speaker 09

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• 43:39Speaker 01

  I'll point back to something way back in the very beginning, if you'll remember, a little bird that had been preserved for research purposes was a clue.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Was a clue. Okay. Who would be handling the bird? Okay, so the most salient characters in the tale that you've just told me are Buddington, because he's a, and Hall, of course, but he's the unfortunate subject of the murder. Buddington is the sort of disgruntled number two who's now in charge, so clearly he has a motive. The Inuits seem delightful, but they also seem like, you're like, maybe? Because it is always the case that the least likely ends up being the culprit. So there's

• 44:31Speaker 00

  a part of me that thinks, could the Inuits, the two Inuits, and I forget their names, Tukla Tuk and?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Apirvuk.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Apirvuk.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Apirvuk.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Apirvuk, yes. And I don't know why, there's nothing that you've told me that would lead me to think that they were the culprits.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I will tell you, it isn't the Inuit people.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Wait a second. Could it be the German scientist, Hessen?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Bessels, Emil Bessels.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Emil Bessels.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Hold that thought, Jed.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. Because somehow, science bird, maybe, I don't know. I don't know the connection exactly.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  All right.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  But.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  You're on the right track. Despite a rather tragic voyage in lots of ways, the Polaris was actually considered a successful expedition. They returned with tons of scientific and navigational and meteorological data to satisfy the Navy and the broader American scientific community. Several of the scientific specimens collected during the expedition were even kept and studied at the Smithsonian. The man who collected some of those specimens, however, is our person of interest.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  And that is the expedition's chief medical and science officer, Emil Bessels. Let's take a look at Bessels. Here's an 1880 photo of...

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Whoa, this could have been taken that wow. I just need to stare at that picture for a while.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks like an REI model.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, this could have been taken any time in the last two centuries. Like this, wow.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  He might have had a pretty cool fur parka, but he sure as hell didn't get along with the gruff and bear-like Charles Francis Hall. This was something that had come up in the very beginning. Hall didn't even want him on the expedition, but, but he was sort of forced to have him along. Several crew members spilled tea after the fact. Hall and Bessels were always at each other's throats, with Bessels running point as the main villain in the sort of German clique on the boat. And remember that store of liquor on board, the one that Buddington and the rest of the crew were stealing from? Well, Bessel was the one who insisted that that even be on board in the first place for scientific purposes,

• 46:50Speaker 01

  or so he said. Hall never wanted it there. Hall was furious that there was liquor on the ship at all, or alcohol of any kind, and I imagine he resented Bessels for how much trouble the alcohol was causing once the expedition got underway. Like I said before, Hall's death wasn't considered suspicious at the time at all. But here's the catch. The guy who gave the cause of death as, quote, "natural causes" was none other than Emil Bessels, which is awfully convenient. Medical professionals in the States agreed with him, and this is of course because they didn't have a body to examine at all. They just kind of took his word for it. And Bessels lived the rest of his life under no suspicion.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  He was honored as a top scholar. He was even bequeathed a room in the Smithsonian Castle in Washington DC to conduct more research on his Polaris findings. Bessel's claim of natural causes, however, would not last forever. Okay, so now cut to much later. Now, in 1968, Arctic historian and Dartmouth professor of English and American literature, Montzi Loomis questioned the circumstances around Hall's death while doing research for a biography on Charles Francis Hall. According to a newspaper article in the New York Herald

• 48:13Speaker 01

  dated September 21st, 1873, so back closer to the time of the expedition, the Royal Inspector of North Greenland, H. Crerup Smith, was quoted as saying, "The jealousy of some of Hall's subordinates, taken in connection with the whole affair, leads me to the conclusion that there was foul play. I think the body of Captain Hall, which I have no doubt is still in a state of preservation, should be sought after and exhumed."

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Whoa, that's why. Okay, sorry, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I keep wanting to jump ahead, but this is fascinating.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Well, no, so now let's do jump back ahead to, uh, back to Loomis.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Loomis is our Dartmouth guy, right?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yes. So now we're back in, in 19, in the 1960s with Loomis. Loomis and his team did just that. They traveled to Hall's resting place in Greenland. They pulled samples of his hair and fingernails, which were still, it very much intact and like frozen, he was very well preserved, uh, which is a little creepy. Uh, and they had these hair and fingernail samples analyzed. And guess what they found? A shit ton of arsenic.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  So all of the vomiting and delirious visions that had been reported around Hall's death, uh, modern medicine knows these are textbook examples of arsenic poisoning. It's obviously hard to accidentally drink arsenic.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  So someone, very likely vessels, must have slipped it in. Going back, is there any particular moment in this story where it might have been convenient to dose Hall with arsenic?

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Well, given the way that the tail unfurled, I would say it was the moment after the 80 kilometer and then back bobsled ride back to the boat where he finally got that steaming cup of coffee.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yes, a nice yummy cup of coffee, which Hall noticed was a little sweet and apparently arsenic has a sweet taste to it.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Because at that point, I mean, if you've been on the ice for that long, I mean, your faculties, your skepticism is out the window. You're like, oh my God, just give me anything warm at that point.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  A hot cup of coffee after 80 kilometers on the Arctic tundra? Are you kidding me? You're just gonna, yeah, you're gonna guzzle that down.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Okay.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  That is a theory that Hall died from arsenic poisoning and it technically remains unproven. But let's run with it for a minute. So this is where our little bird friend comes in. Remember him from the beginning?

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  So recently, a member of the bird division at the Smithsonian, yes, the Smithsonian has a bird division, was cataloging several of Vessel's specimens from the expedition. Now, some of them were little birds called the Plectrophynax nivalis, or more colloquially known as the snow bunting. They're very cute little creatures. Let's take a look.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Wow. What does that say? 1872? Wow. And these are little Arctic birds?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that just live up there. They found these Vessel samples in the Smithsonian collection and she realized that the palm-sized bird specimens also contained a lot of arsenic. Now, the same kind that had been found in Hall's system. According to the researcher, arsenic was a major component of taxidermy during the late 19th and 20th centuries since it helped to prevent decay on long voyages. So it doesn't take a genius to deduce that Vessel's almost definitely had a stash of arsenic onboard the Polaris.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Mr. Snowbunting for that extra bit of confirmation. Large amounts of arsenic in Hall's remains suggest he may have been poisoned gradually, not just by that single cup of coffee.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Loomis's analysis indicates two weeks' worth had entered his system before he died.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Coffee was just the first dose, and then there was a lot of subsequent doses.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I don't know is how long that that dog sled expedition was. So if that if that was fairly short, I mean, dog sleds are fast, so they could cover a lot of ground. So if if that was just like a couple of days, he may have been getting poisoned for a while.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow. Okay.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Where do things stand for you right now? Do you think Vessels did it? Are you are you still feeling skeptical?

• 52:50Speaker 00

  I mean, you have a man who who uses arsenic for his science. You know, a lot of arsenic in the murder victim. I believe that's still circumstantial evidence, right? It isn't like it isn't like a direct link. But if anything else that that you've I think this puts him ahead of and also there was motive, clearly. Yeah, I would have to say I'm interested in a potential twist that you may be about to reveal, but at this point, I think it's got to be him.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  You're right that that it's not this is not something that would hold up in a court of law, but there is a lot of evidence kind of pointing in the right direction. There's another interesting detail that that I learned, which is that both Ipirvik and Taklatuk were on the record saying that Hall was very afraid that he would be poisoned and and that they had spoken up about that upon the return. That wasn't taken seriously.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  I feel bad for even just entertaining the thought that they may have been involved. But unless you want to tell me they were.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  How dare you.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  How dare I?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  So we're adding to the drama. There is more. Ship navigator George Tyson recalled overhearing Hall four days before he died, warning that Vessels might be trying to kill him. Hall got so paranoid that he even had other crew members taste his food and drink first. Okay, so now we've got the arsenic and we've got crew members on record saying that Hall was frightened of vessels poisoning him. But do we have a motive? Apart from them just like not liking each other?

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Is there, is there anything like a juicy motive here? What kind of beef did they really have? Well, it turns out there was a lady.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Involved. So that romance might have been at play here. In two, in 2016, a mere 10 years ago, archival research revealed that Hall and vessels had both been vying for the attention of Veni Reams. Now, Veni Reams is a well-known New York sculptor and something of a socialite. She's famous for the Lincoln bust in the Capitol Rotunda. She is the sculptor who, who made that.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Really?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Vessels recorded his admiration for her in his journals and Hall wrote letters to her from the Polaris, displaying her gifts in his quarters.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. She was, of course, back in New York.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yes, she was back in New York, just sculpting away.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could see that that would be a thing that would simmer for a long time during the voyage. And then Hall gets on his bobsled and, and takes off and Vessels is left to his own thoughts and is stewing jealousy and, uh, cause it sounds like Hall had an actual relationship. Vessels did not, right? So now you, now you do have a specific, I'm jumping to conclusions that maybe I shouldn't, but now you have a specific motive.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  It does appear that love was in the mix and you are correct. Vessels and Reams never united post-voyage. Vessels? Continued to claim his innocence, asserting in 1873 that Hall could have died simply from apoplexy. He also started to refer to the voyage as the Hall-Bessel Expedition. So, a lot of ego going into this, this whole thing as well. So, we may never have a concrete conclusion to the mystery behind Hall's death, even though, in my opinion, the discovery of arsenic in the bird is pretty damning. Bessels himself passed away not long after

• 56:44Speaker 01

  from a stroke, or potentially heart failure, or potentially just karma came back and just whacked him.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  You know, wow.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  But he was only 40 years old in 1888 when he died, and only one of his volumes about the expedition was ever published, even though he had planned three. Meanwhile, Hall, bless his icy little heart, went down in history alongside the Arctic legends who had inspired him.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Jad, that is the full saga. Ambition, ice, murder, and unrequited love. Poetic, cold, and a little bit absurd.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  That has, that story has all the things, Ed. Like, that is, that is, that is something. I liked how you kind of, right at the Connecticut moment, you sort of, you spun it into a, a sort of clue knives out whodunit kind of situation. They lived large back then, you know? They explored large, they, they poisoned large, they beefed pretty large. It's a, it's a, I feel like our lives are soft and small by comparison, although maybe we're better for it, you know? That's quite a tale.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  What I love about this story, and what I loved about it for you in particular, was how science is part of the murder mystery. And I, I always loved how, you know, Radiolab episodes would unpack a narrative, whether it was a mystery, whether it was even a science-based narrative. Very often, science was part of the-

• 58:26Speaker 01

  If not the sort of mechanism of discovery in Radiolab episodes.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  It speaks to the power of science, both from just a research standpoint. I mean, here's a guy at Dartmouth, this Loomis professor, he's just writing a biography. And it turns out, oh, I've got reason to suspect he was murdered. We're going to go dig him up and run these tests on him. And lo and behold, all this new evidence emerges.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  And there's just no end to what we can learn when science is applied in the right ways and with creativity.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. What I was thinking about as you were talking was the way science has changed over the years, right? There was a period in the 19th century, really in the precise moment that this story is unfolding, where what it meant to be a scientist, it was this kind of like the era of the gentleman scientist, where they would get on a boat and sail to a new land and they would collect species and then they would create these cabinets of curiosities of butterflies and birds and, you know, all kinds of marsupials. And there's something sort of imperial about it.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  There's such an abundance and they're grabbing from the land and really collecting and trying to outdo each other. But on the other hand, there is just this kind of wonderful sense of openness and discovery of like, the world is full of things that might seem magical, but we, through inquiry and a method, will demystify them. And we can, there's a sense of like, a naive sense that we can know everything.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  And it's interesting to juxtapose that in a split screen in your mind to where we are now, where there's, science has never been.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  More robust and there's so much, I mean, my mother, just as a personal example, has been studying one protein for 40 something years at this point.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  In what capacity as a?

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  As a biologist. She discovered, or not discovered, I mean, it was there, but she kind of came to know this protein, brought it to the world's attention and has been studying it every day for 40 years. And like, that's what science is now. It's just like unbelievable rigor and dedication and discipline. And yet you're in this like Maha moment in which science kind of hold on the truth has been a bit marginalized. But, you know, I say to myself, I don't know, I'm spinning myself into a cul-de-sac here. I say to myself, you know, science was always one way of knowing the world and it's not the only way. And now all the different ways have to compete. And maybe that's, maybe that's where we are.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Very well said. I think, yeah, that the, the sort of magic of, of science is getting confused with the, the magic of wellness stories that make you feel good. Wellness narratives that grossly oversimplify and just kind of give us that endorphin rush. But good science, hard science, disciplined science also provides that. It's just a lot harder and it's a lot harder to consume. Well, Jad, is there anything that you're up to in this moment that you want to share with us or coming up to know about?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Ever since I began my podcast voyage, I have been asking sort of, you know, going through all these different sort of phases of it. I'm at a place now where I was like, you know, what else can these stories that we tell, what can they do? And I've begun to think about how like storytelling can help in like, say, a hospital environment. So I'm doing some research at Vanderbilt to create a closed podcast storytelling network in hospital waiting rooms to see what would it be like if the patients who are sitting in the seats, the caregivers who are, who are, who are moving through the spaces, if they could all tell stories to each other. And like, say you sit in a seat, you're waiting for a scan, like in a cancer center.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  What if you could hear the story of the last person who sat in the seat and then? Tell a story to the next person who's going to sit in that seat. So creating ways to share stories across time and space. So I'm doing some research at Vanderbilt to see if something like that could work. I mean, we'll see if it turns into something, but that's, it's been like, it's like a cool offshoot of the kind of work I've been doing for 20 something years. And then I have a project that's come, what I'm doing with a dear friend who, who teaches journalism in Montana. We've been teaching this class of students to do audio obituaries of people. Like obituaries are this form that barely exists anymore and, and we're trying to re,

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  like Frankenstein it back into existence, but in, in audio. And so that project's coming out in a couple of weeks and, you know, otherwise making some music, trying to keep busy, you know, like all of us.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Oh, that's very, very cool, Jad. I'm excited to hear about both of those things.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Thanks, my friend. And I just, I'm so excited to see, you popped up into my, into my feeds. There you were playing banjo with Rihanna Giddens and I was like, fucking hell, Ed Helms, living the dream. It's amazing, just amazing to see all the things that you've been doing and it's, yeah, man, it's just really cool.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, buddy. Well, it's so, so damn fun to just hang out with you a little bit and, and walk you through this, Snafu, and thanks so much for being on.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Oh, man, this was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal From Dan Welsh, Megan Halsin, and Caroline Johnson.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.

• 1:05:58Speaker 10

  Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, be 21. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.