An argument for the sun

It can be hard to know how to interact with the sun. Some people have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum — either over-tanning or avoiding the sun entirely. But what would a middle ground look like? To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guest: Rowan Jacobsen, author of In Defense of Sunlight For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  All right. Sally?

• 1:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Helm?

• 1:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Host of Unexplainable. What do you got today? What are you working on?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  OK, well, first I want to ask you a question. When you think of the sun, what do you feel?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  I immediately go to Teletubbies. Is that weird?

• 1:26Speaker 03

  That's not what I expected. Tell me more.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  You know, the baby sun that waits up in the morning. It's like really creepy. OK, so I feel good. Warm, right?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Totally. Classic effect of the sun, yeah.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Makes me happy.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the sun is good. This feels like a simple question.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Well, OK, I'm going to just let you know that I read a whole book about sun and its effects on our bodies. And I learned from reading this book that the sun has just like all of these mysterious effects on our body. And there's a lot that we still don't understand. I mean, if you think about it, it's more bizarre than we give it credit for. It's like photons of light hitting us and ricocheting around.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Photons of light from 93 million miles away.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  That somehow make us happy when we go outside.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Among many other things. So I really, I wanted to get into all this with the author of that book, In Defense of Sunlight. His name is Rowan Jacobsen. And I have that interview for us today.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Amazing. Are you going to explain the sun?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  I'm going to explain the sun totally and completely, and you'll never have any questions about it again.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  OK, I want to. Can I hear it?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  You can.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Now?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Now.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Now?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Rowan Jacobsen, welcome to the show.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Thanks, Sally. Good to be here.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  All right, we're going to go deep down the rabbit hole together here. I want to first, though, can you just give me a little bit of a hint of the ending here? Tell me, after doing all this research, how have you changed the way that you relate to the sun?

• 3:09Speaker 04

  I think totally differently about sunlight and about light in general. People don't realize all the light that surrounds us is actually being absorbed by our molecules. So I started seeing light as this, you know, physical force that's interacting with my body in a lot of different ways. And like, what does that mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it both? But then, if you want to get really cosmic for a moment here.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I do, please.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Well, so all of the energy in our bodies was once light. All of that energy was sunlight. Came from the sun, came to the earth, usually got absorbed by a plant, and then made its way to us. So it's just sunlight taking different forms. And our entire consciousness is basically this flow of light transformed into different types of energy that is just moving through our bodies all the time. Over the past few decades, we've all been kind of trained to feel a little guilty when sunlight hits us. And that went away for me once I'd done this research. And it fixed my relationship with the sun, in a sense, you know?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's talk about the history of that a little bit, because you're right. I think a lot of us feel guilty about the sun because of skin damage, which we will get into. But you do, in your book, you take us back to a time when heliotherapy was actually all the rage. So tell us about that, like, starting in the 1800s, peaking in the 1920s. What did that look like?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  We are in a bit of a historical anomaly with this idea that sunlight is bad for us. That would have been a strange notion to most peoples throughout history, but especially this era, the heliotherapy era, which started in the early 1900s in both Europe and the US, and was really a reaction to two diseases that were rampant: tuberculosis and rickets. And both those diseases can be treated with sunlight. Rickets is a lack of vitamin D. And vitamin D is produced in the skin with the help of sunlight. And one of the things that vitamin D does is it helps to get calcium into your bones, so your bones get hard. Kids in the Industrial Revolution, who were never seeing the sun, had almost no vitamin

• 5:22Speaker 04

  D in their bodies, and they were all getting rickets. So they had soft bones. It's a really bad disease. Even bigger was tuberculosis, which, you know, back in the 1800s was responsible for like one out of every four deaths in Europe and parts of the US. And it can be a pulmonary kind that infects your lungs. And that's kind of like the classic consumption that we think of as, you know, like John Keats dying of consumption. But it can also infect the skin. It's like this flesh-eating bacteria, basically.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Oh, god.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  But that one can be fixed by sunlight.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Once scientists figured out that both rickets and tuberculosis could be solved by light, they didn't quite understand why at the time. But they're kind of like, maybe light's good for other stuff, too. And it actually, it got a little out of hand, where they started believing that light was probably good for everything. So, you know, we're familiar with this whole sanitarium era, where people would go up to the sanitariums in the Alps to take the fresh air.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Totally. I've heard of people going to the southwest. I do feel like I have a sense that back in the olden days, they were just getting sent off to take the outdoor cure kind of thing.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Exactly, the outdoor cure. First was the Alps, and then California was advertising itself as early as like 1870 as the sanitarium to the world, right?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  That's my home state.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Like, come to California.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Cure all your ills.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Totally, I believe it.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Well, that's the question. Like, did it help? Maybe it did help in some ways. Like, they were definitely kooks at a certain level.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  What did that look like? What were some of the kooky things they did?

• 6:53Speaker 04

  The kooky thing was, they went too far. So they would purposely get sunburns. Companies like General Electric made these UV lamps. You could get sunburned in the comfort of your own home. And everyone bought these lights. They would hang them over their kids' cribs, right? For health.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Irradiating children as they slept. So it was truly, truly kooky.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  I mean, were they on to something in that early era? It sounds like there is some truth to the idea that it helped with rickets, certainly, and possibly tuberculosis, too. Like, were they right? Were they wrong? A mix?

• 7:27Speaker 04

  The doctors who were running these heliotherapy clinics up in the Alps, they were noticing that all these patients, not only did their tuberculosis go away, but they just got healthier in general. They seemed more robust, they had more energy. And we now know the reasons behind a lot of those factors. Like, a moderate dose of sunlight will reduce inflammation throughout the body, it'll lower your blood pressure, it'll generally improve your metabolism. So there's these sort of like low-level, general effects on the body that are positive in almost every way. But that only requires a moderate amount of light. So they were going too far. When doctors started realizing, but wait a minute, we actually think that ultraviolet

• 8:12Speaker 04

  light might be a cause of skin cancer. The pendulum swung hard in the other direction. The messaging sort of got stronger and stronger and stronger after World War II, like, stop frying yourself, you know?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Right. Fair enough.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  It does sound, though, like part of what was going on might be that they didn't know that UV light would cause skin cancer, which of course is something that we now think about. You know, it's very top of mind when we think about the sun. Tell me, how did that discovery unfold? And how did it change the way that people relate to the sun?

• 8:44Speaker 04

  The researchers just started to realize it in the 1930s, kind of in the same era. And that was, I think, part of the issue, is it's the exact same era that people were like. Let's lie out in the sun for 10 hours for our health. They were doing tests with UV and mice and realizing that ultraviolet light was looking like one of the major, if not the major, cause of skin cancer. And suddenly worrying that all these people were getting way too much exposure in their lives.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  I mean, doctors start to realize that sun is affecting people's risk of skin cancer. Then they see the rates go up. I assume this must be the time when the public messaging that I'm really familiar with is born, when dermatologists do start to get the word out that we should protect ourselves from the sun. But tell me about that. How does that message get shaped and how does it take hold?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Really, like 1980 is the sort of pivot point. And before that, the sunscreens that were out on the market were really not there to protect you from skin cancer. They were there to help you get a great tan, right? They weren't even called sunscreens. They were called, you know, suntan lotions. That was the focus in the 60s and 70s is sunscreen that blocked UVB, the rays that cause burning, so that you could stay out in the sun longer to get more tan, right? It did not block UVA, which at the time, they didn't think was a cause of skin cancer, but it would make you nice and tan. So then, skin cancer rates are still going through the roof, especially in Australia, which is one of the sunniest places on earth.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  So 1980, Australia starts its Slip, Slop, Slap campaign, with Sid the Seagull doing the public messaging.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Slip, slop, slap. Slop, slap. Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Okay, I love it. I love Sid the Seagull. I'm obsessed with him. What, I mean, does this work? Do people slip, slop, slap and problem solved?

• 10:43Speaker 04

  It was super successful. So then that pretty much got copied around the world, variations on that. And sunscreen's also changed. So the broad spectrum sunscreens hit in the 1990s mostly that blocked both UVB and UVA. And those are much more successful.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  And it does feel like somewhere along that trajectory, the tide really did change. And we did land in a place where the message that sun can be dangerous got out there. I think it's really, really out there.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  But as that was happening, there was some other stuff happening too. Some other corners of science where the benefits of sunlight were becoming clearer and clearer. So let's dive into that a bit. And I want to start with a scientist that you talk about in your book, Pele Linkfist. He is an obstetrician in Sweden, and it's back in the 2000s. He's investigating a strange pattern that he had noticed among his patients. So tell me about that. What did he find?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, Pele Linkfist is an obstetrician in Sweden. And one of his specialties is blood clots. And blood clots tend to be more common in women when they're pregnant and right after they've given birth. He had noticed that less inflammation meant less blood clots. And he had a hunch that that was because of vitamin D. And he found this great dataset called the Melanoma in Southern Sweden Study, which had tracked like 40,000 Swedish women for like 20 years. It tracked all their health metrics, including how much sunlight they got, because the focus was melanoma. So they were trying to figure out what raised your risk of melanoma. So they tracked all of their sun-seeking behaviors, I think is what they called it.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Okay, that sounds perfect. What did they find?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  So he looked at the data and it turned out, it was true. Like, the women who spent the most time in the sunlight had higher vitamin D, lower risk of inflammation, and fewer blood clots.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Wow. More sunlight, fewer blood clots.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  More sunlight, fewer blood clots. So then he started looking at other factors. And it turned out it wasn't vitamin D. Like, the connection with actual sun exposure was stronger than the connection with the vitamin D levels.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's something going on that's not just vitamin D, something mysterious in the sunlight.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Right. And he had no idea what it was. But he noticed it for blood clots, then he noticed it for diabetes. And so then he looked at the same dataset just for all-cause mortality. And the sun seekers had significantly less mortality than the sun avoiders. The sun avoiders were twice as likely to die from any cause as the sun seekers. So he published a study and there's sort of like a notorious line in there now where he says, "Sun avoidance seems to be a risk factor for mortality a par with smoking," which upset everybody. But he wasn't even looking to make a statement. He was just like laying out the data.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Why did it upset people?

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Well, the implication that avoiding the sun was like as bad as smoking for your health was not the message that, you know, the powers that be had been like pushing for several decades. At that time and to this day, the official, you know, the official advice is do not ever expose yourself to sunlight without protection. So sunscreen or clothing, the proper amount of sun exposure, or UV in particular, to get is zero, right? So this was, this was one of the first papers that really sort of flew in the face of that recommendation.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it sounds like we're kind of tracing some swings here. We had the heliotherapy era where everyone started to feel like as much sun as possible is good. Then we swung in another direction where the public health message became largely, the sun's dangerous, stay out of it, make sure you protect yourself from it. And now there's like some cracks in that. And some people's beginning to suggest that maybe there's a middle ground, something, something sort of more in a gray area in terms of whether the sun is good or bad for us. What hints do we have that there are benefits of the sun that we didn't really understand, that science hadn't explained?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  So that was sort of the next, next stage in this story. There had been a guy named Robert Furchcott. He was working with rabbit aortas, because, you know, why wouldn't you?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  He just had some? He happened to have some in his lab?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  He was trying to figure out what, yeah, like what made blood vessels contract and dilate.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Had a jar of rabbit aortas on the windowsill in his lab. And it had been a cloudy day. And then suddenly, the clouds cleared and the sunlight hit the jar with the rabbit aortas in it, and the blood vessels dilated. And he thought, what the heck? And then some clouds came and they contracted. And he called the effect photo relaxation. There are a lot of nitric oxide researchers out there trying to figure out how it worked, because it seems like if you could master that, you could like really improve cardiovascular health.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Nitric oxide. Okay, what is that? What does that mean?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Nitric oxide is a very simple compound. It's just, you know, a nitrogen and an oxygen put together, but it dilates blood vessels. It tells the muscle in the blood vessel to relax.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Which, I mean, that's good, right? That lowers blood pressure.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  It lowers blood pressure, which is, and cardiovascular disease, number one cause of death in the world by far. It's the biggie. So anything that lowers cardiovascular disease is a huge win for public health.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Like, what hints do we have that there are benefits of the sun that we didn't really understand, that science hadn't explained?

• 16:29Speaker 04

  So that was sort of the next, next stage in this story. It's after Pele Linkfist's papers, a dermatologist in Scotland named Richard Weller and some other colleagues of his discovered was that the skin actually produces a bunch of nitric oxide when hit by sunlight. The more sunlight that hits your skin, the more nitric oxide will be released into your bloodstream, the more blood pressure goes down.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Wow. So he's discovered a way that standing in the sun can improve your heart health, which again, it's kind of a surprising finding to me, the idea that light is doing all that. And I mean, this has huge implications, right? What are, what are the implications of that for our health?

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Huge, because, you know, as we're talking about, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer. So if you could reduce blood pressure even modestly, you could save millions of lives. And skin cancer, and this is surprising to a lot of people, it doesn't kill very many people. It's not a big killer. It's not one of like the top 40 causes of death. Cardiovascular is number one. If you took that research seriously, then you had to sort of ask the question of trade-offs. Like, yes, sunlight raises your risk of skin cancer, but if it lowers your risk of heart disease, then how do we, how do we pick, right?

• 17:55Speaker 03

  So we've now talked about ways that sunlight can affect your heart health. We've seen some evidence that it might affect all-cause mortality, so it might just make you healthier in general. But we still haven't really talked about the theory that I would have had coming into this conversation about what sunlight is doing for you that's good, which is vitamin D, which I've heard so much about. Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, being in the sun gives you vitamin D. I've seen and taken vitamin D supplements, which I did learn is not actually a vitamin. What is it?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  It's not a vitamin. It got misnamed back when they discovered it in the 20s. It's a hormone. And it's used in tons of different ways by the body. We used to, 20 years ago, think it was like the magic bullet, that was like the wonder drug that could cure everything, or it could at least prevent disease across the board. And that was because when we looked at levels of vitamin D in people's blood, the ones who were deficient in vitamin D had higher levels of every disease you can think of. Cancers, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, depression, diabetes, dementia, you name it. Raise vitamin D and you should have lower levels of all those things. The easiest way to do that would be to tell people to go out in the sun, but we didn't

• 19:15Speaker 04

  want to do that because we didn't want to raise people's risk of skin cancer. So, so instead, the advice was stay out of the sun, but take vitamin D supplements. But there's been huge clinical trials to prove that worked. And they have across the board failed to show that these vitamin D supplements fix any condition whatsoever.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Wow. What did science feel when those results came out? It sounds like a real upending of the conventional wisdom.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  It was, except it turns out conventional wisdom is really hard to upend. You can upend it in practice, or in theory, but in practice it's really hard. But that was another big mystery. Like, how could that be? If people with naturally high levels of D have lower rates of all these diseases, then how come raising that D artificially with pills makes no difference?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  And how come? What do you think?

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Any guesses?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  I mean, my guess is that it has to do with sunlight.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Oh, you know.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  So D was just a marker for sun exposure. And D is a really, really accurate marker for sun exposure. You get more sun, you're going to have higher levels of D. So that, that, that D readout in people was really just saying, these people with lower diseases are getting more sunlight. So probably D is part of the, the reason for the beneficial, like, properties of sunlight. But it seems like it's gotta happen through your skin for some reason. There's something different when you're taking it orally. We, we tend to do this where we learn a little bit about something and we boil it down to one very simple formula like, oh, D good, take D pill, you'll be good.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  And then we get surprised when it turns out the body works in incredibly more complicated ways than that. So this seems to be one of those cases.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  What, what do we still not know about how sun is affecting our bodies? What are the big mysteries that remain?

• 21:17Speaker 04

  I, I think we are probably just scratching the surface.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  After the break, Rowan and I go further down the rabbit hole here and deeper into the science of light itself.

• 21:38Speaker 06

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• 23:16Speaker 03

  Light, you may recall, comes in different wavelengths, carrying different amounts of energy.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  As we talked about at the beginning, different wavelengths of light penetrate different depths into the body. But some of those wavelengths of sunlight, those photons of light are bouncing around your body like, you know, pinballs until they finally meet a molecule and get absorbed. And we know that those interactions are really important. But certainly if you change your light diet, what I like to think of as a light diet, it's going to change that. Like, if you're indoors, you are getting a completely different dose of photons, kinds of photons and amount of photons than if you're outdoors.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  So what the heck is all that doing to our bodies and, and to our minds?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have some kind of cool charts in the book that show the different wavelengths of different kinds of light. And the compact fluorescent light is weird. It's like this spiky, strange graph. And something like fire has this sort of beautiful gradual going up and including lots of red light in it. But I do want to ask you about that red light, because this is something I've like seen out there in the world, is people with those red light masks on their face or different red light devices who seem to feel like they're trying to correct this imbalance that you're talking about, right? They're trying to get a different, new kind of photon that comes specifically from red light. What do we know about that? What do we know about red light therapy or infrared light

• 24:54Speaker 03

  and how it affects us?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, red light therapy, huge now. You see it in every clinic, even dentists are using it. It seems like it improves mitochondrial function. Mitochondria, big word, tiny little things that are in each of our cells. There's, you know, hundreds to thousands of them in each of our cells. And they're what create energy for the cell. And it looks like red and especially infrared light, when it hits mitochondria, it's kind of like scrubbing them clean. They, they make energy more efficiently after those red and infrared photons hit them and actually like knock off the rust, in a sense. But the interesting thing is that, you know, everyone's doing the red light therapy. They're putting like the crazy hockey masks on their faces.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  But red and especially infrared is a big part of the solar spectrum. So more than 50% of the, of sunlight is in the infrared.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I mean, I do feel like I'm hearing people, actually in the Maha movement, talk about getting more and more sunlight and how important that is. I know that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, he tweeted about like ending the war on sunshine.

• 26:07Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy. Jim, you're, you're Agent Secretary. And I try to hike every day because sunlight is medicine. It gives you vitamin D in your body.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Where do you think we are right now in the back and forth swing of our relationship with sun? Like, what's happening in this moment?

• 26:25Speaker 04

  Some of the Maha crowd seems to be, some of the first ones to really discover, you know, discover the sun as a rallying cry. But one concern that I have is that rather than doing the 300-page book that, that explores the nuances, you get the, you know, the quick tweet, you know, sunscreen causes skin cancer, the sun heals everything, you should go out in the sun. And it's kind of like, here we go again with heliotherapy.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I mean, you did mention sunscreen there. And I'm curious, where do you land on the question of whether sunscreen is important and how to think about it in your own life?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  I think sunscreen actually can be a great tool for helping people get outside more. The safe thing to say from all of this research that's been done is that it looks like indoor life is really unhealthy for us. I think probably like the, the push for wear sunscreen every day, you know, 24/7, 365, doesn't matter if it's summer or winter, doesn't matter what your skin tone is, doesn't matter what you're going to be doing that day, even if you're going to be just at, at your desk all day, you gotta wear sunscreen and reapply all day long. Because that was never really supported by any science. It was more of like a, just a public messaging thing. And most of the researchers I've spoken with, like, their message was, you really don't want to burn, never burn, burns bad.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  But I think the, like, those little, you know, garden variety, quick hits of sun exposure that we tend to get if we're just going about our day, those are going to come to be seen as a good thing.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  You know, you were saying at the beginning, Rowan, that stepping out in the sun now, you can almost feel it on a different level now that you know that the energy is bouncing around inside you. And you have actually a beautiful line in the book. You say, "We are lumps of mud animated by light and having a conscious experience of the universe." Tell me a little bit more about how all of this has changed your conscious experience of the universe.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  I like the way you put that because it really is. It's about the universe. And once you start thinking about light and, and how it enters you or how it affects you, then you're thinking about energy. Because light is just pure energy, no mass at all. And, you know, one of the rules about energy is that it's never created or destroyed. It's, it's just transformed. So since the Big Bang, no one knows how it arrived with the Big Bang. But since then, it's just been knocking around, transforming into this and that. And so everything that we are is some of that energy that goes back through the sun, all the way to the Big Bang. And we are just like this iteration of it on its journey to wherever.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  So I do think about that whenever I'm walking around and aware of the way that light is flowing through me. And it sort of helps connect you to, to the rest of everything.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  I think that's a really nice place to end. Rowan, thank you so much for joining us on Unexplainable.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Thanks for such a great conversation.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  If you would like to watch this episode, you can find our show Unexplainable on Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Shankman and me, Sally Helm. It was edited by Alex Coles and story edited by Joanna Solotaroff. Fact checking by Colleen Barrett. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala. Meredith Hodnot runs the show. Noam Hassanfeld and Kareem Karaya are rays of sunshine. And Burt Pinkerton shouted, "The guitar! I completely forgot about it." Also, this beak beeper is really driving me nuts. Anything you can do about that? Flaptin took the batteries out of the beeper and he got to work on Plati's guitar.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Burt and Noam. If you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We are at [email protected]. You are also welcome to leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen. That would be so nice and helpful of you. And if you are into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we'll be back soon with another episode about everything we do not yet know.

• 31:08Speaker 09

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, sensual jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Wilmo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com.

• 31:38Speaker 10

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/applewatchseries12.