Robert Krulwich

It's, um, I mean, it's always felt like music to me.

I remember, uh, when I first started working with Robert Krulwich Which was early, you know.

So I'd started Radiolab in 2002, and it was, I was sort of soldiering away in the dark for a while.

I was doing really s- insane sound design at that point.

Uh, this is likely in no small part due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Recognizing radio's growing popularity, he uses it to host his fireside chats.

These are radio addresses beaming directly into people's living rooms.

In them, FDR drops the formal, authoritative tone you'd expect from a president and speaks casually and informally about his ideals and America's future.

And the thought behind it is, if radio shows and movies about aliens introduce the idea to us, we won't be surprised when they finally arrive.

Ultimately, we won't know if War of the Worlds prepared us for a real alien invasion until a mothership shows up, but it did perhaps prepare us for something else.

A Radiolab host, Robert Krulwich, draws a comparison to it and to today's news practices.

News stations use fear to grab our eyes with teases and clickbait.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is Radiolab.

And today on the podcast, I wanna tell you about a guy who hears music in a way that is just extraordinary.

Simultaneously

... and he could parse it out?

And he'll be able to think the Jad side and then the Robert side.

Okay.

His idea? Get one of America's great animators to make a film showing what's going on in everyone's bodies right now.

So what are Harvard students seeing these days? Our Robert Krulwich thought you'd be as fascinated as we were.

This is what a human cell looks like in a textbook, dull and still.

But your cells are alive.