Yeah, this is Jad Radio Lab. So what you're about to hear is a show we originally released about six seven years ago We decided to revisit it recently because it's been on our minds a lot Let's just I'll start it off and then I'll say more about it in a second. Oh wait listening to Radio Lab from WNYC Okay, ready? Yeah, all right.
Let's open the show today test test test on a sunny street corner in New Jersey So where are we now? We are on Washington Street, which is the main thoroughfare in Hoboken It's a nice day in Hoboken people are out and about after work. That's angry. What are you guys?
And we're here with a guy. His name is John Horton. I'm a science journalist. He's also a teacher And John is out today with our producer Lulu Miller doing what he often does To go up to someone he doesn't know.
We're doing a survey only take a minute at a minute I can give you ask them this one question. Here's the question. Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all? No, because of Greed and one-upsmanship to explain John's been asking this question.
Will humans ever stop fighting wars for years because for him this question It's not just about war. It gets something really basic. Do we feel we can change who we are? In case the first time I popped out of his mouth It was 2003 and a friend had asked him to give a talk at a church just a few days after the first invasion of Iraq And so here I was in this church and I remember that mood was very somber I was determined to try to make people feel that okay This is a setback but still you've got to believe that peace is possible and I tried to list all the reasons And as he was making his case and getting worked up You look at the 60 or so people within the audience who said all right How many of you here believe that war will end someday?
And I think one or two people raised their hands And John thought wait is this really who we are and so that's actually when I started reading as much as I can about all these things And dug up some surveys from the 1980s. We found was about 20 years ago People were asking this question. Do you think where we'll ever end taking surveys and granted? They were not the most scientific of surveys But what the results seem to indicate is that we used to be optimistic back in the 80s only one in three thought that war is inevitable Yeah, where is today?
Well humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all if you take that question to the streets of Hoboken as we did you'll find no no no About nine out of ten people say no Never no by the way We called up John again recently to ask him have the results changed because he has kept on doing the survey He said no Six years later, it's still roughly eight or nine out of ten people say no will never stop fighting wars same results Now depressingly the worst part is it when he asked him the next question. Why do you think this invariably he gets something like I think There's a human nature is to for greed and always want more. It's just People are big dumb animals and there's gonna keep fighting over useless energy in such a way people are and I don't think we're ever gonna learn Why do you say that I just think that it's too ingrained in our human nature So so so so we want to challenge that last day to engrain in our human nature that one Okay, we know some things have been handed down to us from our primary ancestors violence. Maybe who knows question is how ingrained is that?
Well, yeah, I mean if you think that we have inherited something. Yeah, what can we do about it? We stalker can we change if we make the right choices? Yeah, so we've got for you this hour three stories.
We're choice individual choice challenges destiny, right? Maybe we don't I'm jadaboom rod. I'm Robert Crowe which is radio lab stick around All right, so here's the thing this is now me in the present This show was initially inspired by an anecdote that I'd read about the New York Times This guy Martin Bunzel was telling a story of when he was 18 It was 1966 I believe he was sitting on a plane and a guy next to him said looks at the stewardess and then says oh Not another Negro stewardess or something like that and This guy Martin Bunzel who by the way is a plastic presser. He says thinking back on it Huh, that was an interesting thing because had that guy on the plane said that a few years earlier it would have been like Common place had he said it a few years later.
It would have been intolerable, but right then it was neither It was things were shifting and he said you know, it was like this guy was shouting through an open window between worlds That was his phrase He was shouting through an open window between worlds and that phrase totally lodged in my head And I've been thinking about that phrase a lot these days That's feeling that maybe the ground is shifting beneath our feet not quite sure and that's actually what brought us back to the show that feeling because each of the stories in This show kind of suggests that window between worlds So what we're gonna do is as we do the show after a couple these stories We're gonna check in real quick and see whether we feel like we've passed through this window into a new world Or whether we're still stuck in the middle and speaking of the world's bio you just said you just are Lulu Miller Briefly in on in that last few minutes. She at the time was our producer now Of course, she's become the superstar host of invisibility. Anyhow, so the show began with a familiar voice We've had on the show a couple times he's a neuroscientist spends most of the year at Stanford being a lab rat scientists doing the Biology in the lab, but in the summers summers my go and spend time in East Africa in the Serengeti studying wild baboons there Why is it working? I was just using the most post-skis interested in studying stress the effect that stress has on the body and turns out baboons Are a perfect source of data because they're always under stress You know the one thing we know about baboons and known forever is that they fight baboons constantly Not just metaphorically, but literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive male dominated hierarchical society because these animals hunt Because they live in these aggressive troops on the savannah parentheses just like we humans used to and thus we evolve very similarly They have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives Which is why he studies him so what's both he does basically he goes into the bush and he watches here a field note Some here's a floor them there and a whole shelf his office is covered with these field notebooks each one containing detailed notes Who groomed who and who's not getting along with who and who's messing around with who in the bushes?
He tells the following story of a particular moment in his baboon watching which completely Changed his life changed how he sees the world it happened about 30 years ago So he was a young guy just at a grad school studying his first troop my my first baboons the troop He really loved these were animals. I was very connected with the most ways. It was a pretty average group Yeah, your basic baboon troop the females were highly affiliated with each other They had a very stable ranking system the males meanwhile highly aggressive dumping on each other because that's just what males do right Oh, you're so he got okay mid 80s a big boom in tourism And they have wonders for the economy lots of new lodges lots of log expansions And there happened to be the next territory over the tours lodge and this one particular lodge He says they've gotten really big really fast and during the time the lodge greatly expanded their garbage dump Which means basically they just dug a hole out behind the lodge and each day a tractor came out with a leftovers and dumped it there so we're talking about here if you can nasally imagine is a big steaming pile of Trash half eaten food baking in the Sun smell wafting in the breeze for miles and miles and into the nostrils of baboons everywhere So it was not long before a troop of baboons not supposed to get one year by discovered the garbage and just started feeding on it And here they are eating leftover desserts and chicken whatever is fine Oh, a dump full of food must be to a baboon like like watering into heaven manna in the wilderness So this troop almost immediately shifted their entire behavior So they just slept in the trees above the garbage dump and instead of getting up at six in the morning to start foraging They would waddle down around two minutes of mine and the tractor would show up at nine o'clock and dump the food and they would have 20 minutes of sheer frenzy and Then they'd go back to sort of being couch potatoes And this is how it went for a while so they're over there living off a garbage and Somehow some of the males in my troop figure this out these males think we got to get in on this We've got to go over there and take their food What emerged was each morning a bunch of males would run a kilometer or so to the garbage dump and fight their way in So every morning there would be a showdown basically yeah They would come back with canine slashes and stuff like that But they'd also have drumsticks kicks hamburgers in this ritual says suppose he went on for years and then a few years into it I got word that there were a couple of baboons in this garbage dump troop And that looked awful and something was wrong with him some guys from the lodge had called him said Hey, you better get down here and look at this and when he got there what he saw was horrible animals with rotting hands walking on their elbows He just really bad so trying to figure out what this is about get veterinarians involved And we finally figure out his tuberculosis turns out some infected meat had been thrown in the dump and then eaten by the baboons And this was really bad news because while tuberculosis and people is a really slow-moving disease he be kills non-human primates in weeks And it's a nightmare of a disease for them in just a short time the garbage jump troop was completely decimated Not to mention that the tough guys in the Sibolsky's troop the ones that had gone to the dump every morning They got it to the same kind of rotting hands and they all die that That must have been really kind of tragic to witness this was not a good period for me These were my animals I had I had grown up with these guys But you know while Sibolsky was heartbroken now that half of the alpha males in his troop were dead He didn't notice some strange things started to happen Changes how do they change well grooming spiked? So you and I sit on a branch and I take little fleas out here for yes Well, you know usually when a female brooms a male the males and never reciprocate But suddenly they were even weirder you saw adult males sitting in contact with each other and grooming each other Oh, you know how rare that is be like if something in the middle of round five of a heavyweight bout Mike Tyson just decided to stop boxing and that's all his info Or comb even rolly fields here It would be like that if you were a bad Knowledgeist it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings or were photosynthetic or something up to then I had seen like 30 seconds of male Male grooming the course of 15 years, but at the time Sibolsky kind of wrote it off This was just some freak event that wasn't gonna last so he actually stopped studying even after that big investment I'm scientifically they were ruined by such a non-natural event removing half the study subjects You know as scientists it became less interesting to you know that was the rationale I was just too painful to go and watch these guys So I moved to the other end of the reserve about 40 miles away and started with a new troop there And for six years I would not go anywhere near this corner of the park as I just didn't want to be there Now fast forward six years and we come to the moment that really changed things for him really flipped him into a different way of thinking and it happened Kind of by accident So that six years later out there for the first time with who was soon destined to become my wife and Decided I wanted to kind of show her where I had grown up what part of the park Yeah, basically so went there and the troop was there and they were acting pretty much the same as before lots of grooming not so much fighting Isn't that nice and they're still like this great remnant true and he's sitting there with his wife It just pointing out all the different baboons on there Steve on there's a whoever and then it hits him this epiphanal Whatever wait a second there was only one male left we've been there at the time of the TV outbreak I'll follow this one one male stick with me for just one second and you will get the thing about male baboons first thing You understand is around puberty the males get a little antsy get itchy they're bored and they just pick up and leave So in a troop any of the adult males grew up someplace else which meant that these new guys that were coming into Sepulsky's troop were coming in from the outside from the old world order jerky real doggy dog world out there So you got to figure these new males are coming in with old expectations that they're gonna have to kick ass to be respected Which would mean that this whole kumbai situation should evaporate the moment these guys show up but it didn't It's stuck.
Oh my god The new guys are learning we don't do stuff like that here and if the new guys are learning a new way Well, that means the old way the violent way isn't the only way and this this floor Was one of those moments it will be one of the three or four best signs of my life The key question was how do these guys unlearn their entire childhood culture of aggression blah blah and somehow learn we don't do stuff like that around here Well, well, well, how do they unlearn something that was supposedly built in? Oh, well, he doesn't really know exactly Oh, but but but but here's supposed to use hunch here's a such and this is really cool It may have to do with that precarious moment when the new guy comes in now. Normally what happens in this sort of status quo Is it the new guy arrives and it's just a really bad experience for him It's awful I mean you look at them and you just identify with like freshman year in college or something They're completely peripheral every male who's higher ranking dumps on them and even worse this freshman baboon is completely ignored by the ladies You just said there's somebody groomed him. I got I went to sophomore year until somebody groomed him come on Why don't they go because they did some adult male would have attacked them Oh, so ladies came back while he's out there biting and clang and trying to scratch his way in what you've got here Is a cycle that has existed for a long long time But if you make one small change just remove the alpha male take him out of the equation Suddenly the females are more relaxed and more likely to take a social gamble of reaching out to somebody new the key thing is the females Both key things that it's all about timing if the females can get to the new guy early enough Everything's different.
It's remarkable and your typical true and it's three months on the average before the first female grooms you in this tree Six days get out six days as compared to three months Yeah, and world in which from day one as an adolescent male you're treated better something about the aggressiveness melts away The thing though is yeah that before we get too carried away We do have to ask the question just how permanent this change is as nice as it is So I explained this whole story that you've just told to a professor at Harvard named Richard Rangam Yep, Professor Rangam is here. He's an evolutionary biologist studies chimps particularly so I asked him Well, okay, you've heard the story about the baboons. What do you think? Yeah?
I know it's a nice example of the potential for some change clearly We should put boundaries on it, you know, lots of baboons have been studied across Africa and this sort of example has never been found in a natural context, but I mean I think these guys wild baboons that just happened upon a garbage dump It's just not a very natural context to have humans provide food that leads to several males dying But that means that I could imagine going on a helicopter all over Africa shooting all the alpha males and then giving all the ladies a chance to Create a different baboon culture and me what I guess I'm wondering is do you think In absurd situation like that that the baboonery might change its essential nature I don't think it'll change its essential nature I can see that there can be a cultural influence that may last a little bit of time But the larger influence clearly is the set off of genes that produce a particular kind of brain A baboon is basically a baboon until you get some kind of genetic change and that is something that supposedly has not seen there So Professor Rangam wants a genetic change to make sure that this is really real permanent. Yeah, but here's the thing I don't know if this constitutes a genetic change, but it has been 20 years Really? Yes 20 years in Sapolsky's original baboon troop is still operating in this peaceful mode even though dozens of new males have come and gone at this point And the idea that something that was thought to be so Unchangeable could change and change quickly and then stay changed as a result of something so airy and undefinable is culture Well that is called for Robert Spolsky dare I say it to hope absolutely, and it's not something that I do by Nature not a guy by nature. No, not at all in fact this story got him so hopeful He decided to send it to foreign affairs magazine, which is magazine read by a lot of politicians Yeah, and they went for it and so we had to ask him after it was published did anyone write you back?
No, basically not I basically heard nothing from anyone. No. Yes big yawning silence I I'm sure George Bush and Cheney read it each evening and the tremble of its implications But no basically as far as I can tell it was a huge waste of time for me to write it. Oh Well, we read it Thanks, my mother didn't even All right, so so seven years past as we've mentioned and so we decided that it was only right for us to catch up with Robert Sapolsky Hello, hello.
Hey, is the person next to taping? Yeah, no We're trying to close a window here to decrease some noise We found him in a very odd place actually for a baboon scientist in the library of the middle school with a bunch of kids outside How did that happen my wife now directs the musical theater? Productions so somehow I'm playing piano as a rehearsal pianist at this school. What's the musical?
We are doing Oliver this year really? Okay, so anyway, so I told Robert that we talked to Richard Rang reminded him that rang No, no baboons are hardwired to be a certain way and and circumstances never going to change them in the end. Yep Well, he and I uh, this isn't the first time we've disagreed. I think we probably had a we shall see sort of finish So what have we seen since you last talked to us?
So what's been happening? Yeah, what's been happening? Well, he says well There were a few possibilities here. There's one scenario where it could have turned into exactly what was being predicted there Which was that the troop would go back to being a typical highly aggressive baboon troop the other possibility is the one that I was always like dreaming of which is so you're a kid who's grown up in that troop and you've grown up on the Commune there and along comes puberty and it's time for you to pick up and you move to a different troop and what happens when the kids who grew up in this Baboon culture switched to other troops now suppose he admits that if just one baboon from the nice Jew went off to join the meanies He'd probably get his ass kicked, but he thinks that if you get two nice boons together They make a little bit of a team and it'll be kind of like a critical mass of niceness That just might spread and turn all the other guys nice in principle this like great unique Pacific culture in these baboons could be transmissible in theory of that.
Okay. Well, don't leave us hanging. I got what has happened Okay, so what actually happened is pretty damn grim Did they go back to me mean in some sense? It's really worse than that remember how this whole thing begins because there's a troop next to suppose He's true and maybe even garbage in a garbage now right well eventually suppose keys true because now the garbage now is open and available They went over there and began living at the tourist lodge and just living off of garbage now They just sort of squat with the garbage and essentially Stopped functioning as a coherent troop.
So this question of will they all become nice baboons eventually or will they all revert back to being mean Baboons that got totally trumped by the garbage situation There was so much food to eat for these baboons and it came so free and so available that the natural business of baboonery Just broke down a lot of the males wound up being killed by a game park rangers there because as per usual The sort of thing they got dangerous to the humans there because they got too habituated to humans so lots of males were killed The rest of the troop is just sort of fragmented So I never got to find out what would happen in the long run because the garbage got in the way again. Yep Exactly. That's not a really bad senior editor. Well So the troubling thing here for me is that you know There was a traditional baboon culture which was violent hierarchical there was this hint of a hope of a different baboon culture Which was grooming and happiness and we had a question about which one of those two would spread or last But the truth is they ran into some junk food and then they have no culture exactly which I had to say that sounds depressingly like America Yeah, I mean there's bunches of them still there I'm sure as we speak actually not as we speak but ten hours from now They'll be waddling over to get some leftovers They're probably not missing the culture that they had but yeah, those were my guys I had my last season out there four years ago and haven't been back since you know, it sounds like you need some a little You know a little picker upper to quote We would do anything for you anything Hill So you know You all are will Okay, oh god I just managed to get that stupid song out of my head For rehearsal earlier today.
Thanks a lot I see what you climb up here anything My name is Julie Rogers and I'm calling from a nice walk on the streets of Oakland Radio labs supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world More information about Sloan at www.sloane.org Hi Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by better help may is mental health awareness month and as someone who reports on mental health Who likes talking to people about their mental health and what they look to in science in the natural world in faith in friendship But wherever it may be to help guide them through the rough patches of life I just wanted to take a moment to say what seems to help people turn corners find relief get out of ruts And even flourish is having someone with you as much as we can feel private about our mental health struggles You do not have to go it alone So this may why not treat your mental health to a buddy and who better to talk to and a fully licensed mental health therapist with over 30,000 therapists available better help as someone you can talk to available at pretty much anytime that's convenient for you at the pushup button And because finding help you need often depends on the therapist client vibe Rest assured with better help you can switch providers at any time remember truly your mental health matters And you don't have to go it alone find support you need anytime with better help sign up and get 10% off at better help calm Radio lab that's better H E L P dot com slash radio lab Radio lab is supported by adio the aicrm for modern businesses close deals twice as fast prep for calls and minutes effortlessly spin up Handoff breeds that used to take hours get pipeline intelligence without building a single dashboard How ask adio adio is the aicrm that keeps teams ahead of the pack it connects to your email calendar calls product and billing data and more Creating a complete picture of your entire business while others are waiting through multiple tools to find information teams are using adio to surface insights And get answers on their go-to-market data instantly powered by universal context adios intelligence layer Adio searches updates and creates across your data to accelerate your workflow ask more from your CRM ask adio try adio for free by going to Adio dot com slash radio lab. That's a T T I O dot com slash radio lab Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question what happens if we refund tariffs why or grocery so expensive? And NPR we stand for your right to be curious because the force is shaping our world can be hard to see Follow NPR's planet money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works Hey, I'm jadaboom rod and i'm Robert kroop this is radio lab topic today choice and human destiny Yeah, with the way we are is that the way we're gonna stay ah very nicely put yes in the last section We were talking about baboons and their propensity to serious change which is a maybe or a maybe not we don't really know Yeah, well, no thousand years. Well, let's switch our ape we'll go to Oregonians Which is a rare subset of human being to set it up we were thinking a lot about Small groups on this show, you know because that's we are we are small group primates That's the phrase is sometimes used to describe us humans and it's a phrase that can carry some negative connotations As in we evolved in these small groups so we are predisposed to be small-minded No small is not always a bad thing and i tell you story now that it's a small group story It's just as a warning contains a moment or two It's a tiny bit graphic but we hope you'll stick with it because a really cool story takes place in a small town Like really small the kind of town where you can dial the wrong number and still have a conversation Because you know everybody so tell me where we are and uh Beautiful downtown Silverton essentially our downtown has not changed since the late 40s early 50s Oh, yes, it has but we'll get to that this is Stu Rasmussen He is our main character a little while back Stu gave myself and producer Aaron Scott a tour We theater on the corner the old hardware store on this corner This tour of his favorite place on earth Silverton, Oregon Which is about 40 miles from Portland about 40 years from Portland actually You know it's the town I grew up in and this is my image for what I want Silverton to be I rode my bicycle down the street and came to the hardware store to go in We're doing good then.
How are you? Is that having to a lot of people just honking away all the time? Oh, yeah, it's a small town everybody knows me If we're up to Stu this town would never change it would stay frozen in that quaint Norman Rockwell King decoded image from his boyhood the weird thing though is that that image in his head would probably never have included a guy like Stu At least do as he is now and if this is a show about change here is the story about a pretty radical bit of change Where you wouldn't expect to find it speaking of which can you describe where we are and what we're looking at? Oh, we're standing in front of the Palace Theatre on the corner of Oakland Water Street This is one of those gone with the wind theaters with the big marquee and the bulb lights and everything built in 1935 and in continuous operation ever since Stu pulls out some keys and opens it up He suggested that we do the interview here in the town's only theater even smells like a gilded age theater Which at 1 p.m.
still smelled like popcorn from the previous night and was filled with nothing a 200 empty red velvet seats Not what you expect in a small town theater. Oh, this is beautiful Thank you. You love yourselves right now sitting pretend we're watching the movie of your life Well, there's a dull movie hardly So the movie of Stu begins in 1975 he's 27 he's in a theater just like that seminal moment in my life Was when the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out Stu is in the projection spooft because that's his job he's changing the reels and at some point during one of the musical numbers He glances at the screen and it was like oh What was the oh here was this movie with a guy in drag on screen Is a sweet transvestite Transsexual Transylvania those are words that I never heard I watched that again and again Fast forward 10 years to now owns the theater just like his dad had before him He's an abstaining member of the town. He's on the Silverton City Council then on the library board and then He starts to transform and everyone will tell you it began with the nails I think I probably started having my nails down in 94 or 95 And I started out with very masculine nails without polish and square ends and then slowly grew them out Then I went into what I considered a masculine nail color of blue And then he says he gradually started to paint them red and then he put acrylic tips which got longer and longer This was the first test of the community.
Hello. Are you? I would be at the theater taking tickets. Can I have to be dressed as usual in its plaid shirt and jeans?
And with his hand would come out for their tickets and What in the hell are those? You can't miss it. You know you have a long finger dance. That's done as being long time Silvertonian one time when I had to give him my ticket That's Megan DeSello, she's 17 and he rips it and like his nails like went down the palm of my hand and just gave me the chills Yeah, I think probably his nails were the first thing most people noticed Kelpomer, veterinarian and city councilman born and raised here in Silvertonian.
Was there talk with people? Definitely talk, but it happened so gradually which is something you're here again and again. It happened to graduate You know first it was the nails and and then at some point in time He changed the focus of the movie theater and was really making a game attempt to get new releases down the theater Frequently, you know when there was a theme kind of movie he would get into costume My name is Ken Hector former mayor of the Sword Norton and very often the costume would be female attire This was step two of Stu's very careful transition according to everyone we spoke with for years after the nails He would quote promote that week's movie by dressing up one of the new Star Wars movies was out and it wasn't a coincidence You've stressed as queen of a dollar I love you. Whatever name is from the movie.
I'm here to go. Remember some years ago. There was a movie called my big fat Greek wedding That's John Bach also a lifelong Silvertonian that whole day he wanted around town in a wedding dress complete with a veil that of course got everybody Talking a lot of people laughed about it first. I don't think people put it together with This is on the web.
She's a registered nurse sexuality Transgender or any of those things. I think we thought he was just dressing up to go along with this Yeah, with his movies there was clearly a let's go by the movie theater tonight because we've got to know what Stu's wearing For Stu this was just the beginning of something he wasn't he wasn't just clowning around when did your gender complexities begin in probably 14 or 15 I think I was a shy young man and interfacing with girls my mother was a bit strange on that in the girls were evil and they would no girl was good enough for her son and Did you date at all not until I was out of high school so girls were kind of scary. It sounds like girls were scary Yeah, well everybody else went on dates. He says he would build computers from scratch and even today in his basement You'll find an entire electric shop.
Oh my god fun stuff our f-generators vector man lines or logic analyzer logic analyzer In any case to says the best that he can explain himself Gender wise it's just to say that when he looks in the mirror. He likes himself better when he's dressed as a woman I don't know how to describe it. It's just I can't understand it. I mean some people like to dress up and look like a cowboy or a lumberjack whatever You know, it's your mental image of yourself that you look in the mirror and you like so After the nails after dozens of episodes of socially simple cross-dressing Stu took the next step He began to perform some experiments like he would go to the lumber yard just to get some stuff I'll put pounds and nails or something all the while he would be wearing a padded bra under his flannel shirt Just to see what happens to this for you was like a test it was like a calculated test to absolutely gauge if it was possible If I could survive with breasts So when he was 52 he drove into Portland visit a doctor put up the sleep and the doctors made two small incisions One under each breast about an inch and a half or two inches long And they pulled back the skin on each side slid in an uninflated balloon and then pumped it up with water until the skin was stretched to the point That it was almost transparent.
Mm-hmm. That sounds very painful. Was it? Well, I was asleep at the time But when he woke up he was a different man Because he now had several pounds of new stuff hanging off his chest.
What were you thinking at that moment? I was thinking what have I done? It was like there's no going back I can remember being in Max Place downtown at a table and he was coming across the street with his breasts Prominently showing and it was the first time any of us realized that he had actually had surgery and when lady was going look Look and the other lady was going to look don't look you see still going across the street. Oh my god Look at Stu my god.
What does he do it? It's just sort of shocking there was a buzz around here Was the situation where he'd walk by and then heads would turn our choices would ensue? Yes, basically This is Victoria Sage Stu's longtime girlfriend. They've been together for 36 years So we would be walking in our local goodwill and would be a few miles away from each other and I would hear that used to be Stu Rasmussen like he had changed somehow Is Stu's just trying to fulfill that body image?
She's gotten his head But he's also gonna wait ask you to adjust to your body image of your mate. Has that been difficult? Hmm. No No, I'm sorry if you if you want to get kinky about it a man with this is kind of cool.
Huh? Okay, did the was there any concern? There was for me. Not so much for Stu.
I think Partly because he didn't hear as many whispers as I felt I did But I was concerned for the theater business not without reason a lot of kids in the town stopped coming to the theater Because their parents wouldn't let him ticket sales to the hit and it wasn't long before pickup trucks full of teenage boys would drive by the theater yelling slurs Oh, I don't know that I go so far as well. Yeah, I guess I guess In fact it is a slur I guess and so you get to this point in the sped up movie narrative of Stu this point right here Where even though he took it so slowly and was so careful. It's still easy to imagine things turning ugly I don't know. What was that movie about the boy that was uh, you know drug and beat to death because he was gay in a small town in the Midwest?
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, maybe a little extreme But according to Linda Webb Silverton's not so different from Laramie, Wyoming where Matthew Shepard lived. It's a small town very traditional very conservative You know you got a lot of rednecks in Silverton and so then it's been put so it's not crazy to expect a worse But here's the surprise and the whole reason we came here to Silverton The worst did not happen There was no redneck rebellion in fact the opposite happened something historic On January 5th 2009 the town of Silverton elected Stu mayor Silverton has elected the nation's first openly transgender mayor It's his first openly transgender mayor Well James doesn't mean he's here in the ear of this election takes to resmuse important as openly transgender as he runs his hometown in heels Speaking of heels this is in fact the sound of Stu's foreign shields pounding on linoleum as he goes to city council meeting Oh Harold couldn't be better. How are you?
Good no call us, you know city elitist or whatever But a mayor and a plunging v-neck sweater and a black mini skirt not what you would expect any tiny conservative Republican town So we want to know you know why did this happen here? So producer Aaron Scott and I walked around town for a couple days and we interviewed dozens of people including Guy named Ken Hector Stu beat out for mayor. He's a conservative Republican definitely not one of Stu's big fans It was just a difference in philosophy about I don't want to sound pretentious But you know as a mayor I think there's certain expectations about professionalism that you should exhibit he would come in with a Tight clinging top with cleavage down to here. You're almost pointing your belly button there.
Well a little bit higher Come on, you know when you're at the council meeting show some dignity here and just dress in the appropriate attire for the occasion Can't even try to get the city council to impose a dress code on Stu But when we asked him you know are you surprised that the town has embraced Stu and even gone so far as to elect a mayor He said no not in this case You know students a rarity in that you know There's a lot of people in this town who are extremely religious very conservative people were it a stranger who came into town suddenly I'm sure that the support and perception might even different But you're talking about a native son who grew up here And he said look Stu runs the only theater in town, so he's out there every weekend standing out in front of the palace Stater taking tickets everybody knows him not only that back in the day He used to be the cable guys, so he's literally been in everybody's homes He's still the guy you call if you have trouble with your computer So it might sound strange to you, but it's really not and that is when it hit me Actually under the right circumstances a small town can be like the most progressive place on earth And it's exactly because everyone's all up in your grill. You were forced to know people like for instance How long have you known Stu? Oh my goodness, I grew up with Stu I mean we I remember when Stu was like an altar boy the church with my brother This is Susie Seamus for a tire teacher Yeah, his parents and my parents were friends like a lot of folks in silver tin She's known Stu for so long and in so many different contexts that you can't do that New York thing with him Where you see someone on the sidewalk and you size them up instantly and think it freak no to her He's way too complicated for that you know to her he's Stu the altar boys do the computer game Yeah, I'd probably would call him a key to the city councilman's do the mayor or Just do just do just do whatever that's him, you know go on about your business Now to be clear a lot of the people we talked to he's back some of the same folks who said yes It was just two are still not happy about the situation No, I mean I don't think God's a cross-dresser They either felt it was morally wrong as in the case of this minister Tom Smith and Genesis 1 27 says so God created man in his own image and the or some folks like Linda Webb's husband John just felt like he takes it way too far It's right there. It's in your face.
He dresses kind of like a street walker. You feel that that's confrontational I do but most of the people who had objections it was a little more nuanced and went something like this Well, I personally did not vote for him for mayor because I didn't feel it was a good idea to have someone that looked like that Representing us but on the other hand he is a good man and he's got this town at heart in other words according to John Bob the problem really isn't Stu or the town it's the outside all those people out there who are gonna hear about Stu and then judge them Which is what makes November 25th 2008 such an interesting day Stu had just been elected mayor He'd squeaked it out by about 400 votes But he hadn't yet been sworn in when a group of Christian extremists from Kansas showed up in town and started marching up and down Main Street Yelling at people and at one point they even unfurled an American flag put it on the ground and stepped on it Just to show how offensive they found Stu. It's our duty to reach to everyone These folks hate Stu because they will not by any means warn him about the sentence taking to help So unpleasant and then bringing up signs that clean things like God hates overton God hates your mayor God hates fags your pastor is poor It's an abomination for a man put on women's clothes and beat the opposite sex a few folks from the town decided to start a counter protest We stood across the street from these people by large just a few guys at first now earlier Someone had to just all the guys ought to dress up his girls and all the girls had addressed up his guys Yes, he did it said his initial reaction was here right, but there he was an address First he says that at first he and the two or three other guys who had on women's clothing felt a little weird But then people just started coming it was just amazing a couple hundred people I mean men dressed like women just like men some of the people that I saw down there were surprising Because I had labeled them in my head as concerned and people drive by People with signs God loves so to God loves to costumes the time was really live The crowd just got getting bigger and bigger. What were you thinking at that moment?
From what understanding you were standing off to the side just watching what was going through your mind? Yeah, well, honestly, I tried to discourage people from even giving them the time of day saying don't give them any attention I couldn't get that to happen. They were so angry They came out to 200 people men and dresses grandmothers babies. It's just amazing That was the town that wasn't me.
Sorry. I got a little emotional that must have been a turning point for you the biggest one Yeah, props to Aaron Scott who did a huge chunk of the reporting for that piece and co-produced it with me We'll be right back. Okay, so that story was we did that about six maybe seven years ago And it just feels like the world is different now like with regards to transgender issues even the language we use I mean has changed it back then we said transgendered and now we would just say transgender But with Caitlyn Jenner in the news and all this stuff We just thought wondered like how things changed for stew in these last six seven years so We decided to send producer reporter Aaron Scott back to Silverton to sit down with stew and with Stu's partner Victoria Just to catch up. I mean it's been seven years since we'll be going on seven years six years since we ran the story the first time What has been going on in your world?
Well since the election that's been about it So the first thing he told me was that he got reelected after two years and then he was reelected again And then after six years as mayor he's now out of the game hell. Hello. Yeah I am truly enjoying my vacation and he did tell me the back when the story first aired things did get kind of nutty Well, you know, it's probably the most unusual phone call we've ever received or Victoria and I were sitting at home The phone rang and it was a fellow from New York City who said I was bicycling on Manhattan listening to the original radio lamp piece And he thought it would be really fun to do my life story as a musical And he did that fellow was Andrew Russell he put on a big production up in Seattle It got standing ovation the most surreal and bizarre experience in my life sitting in the not at our room at 400 Strangers watching as in song and dance my life goes by he can call me she and she can call me he and he can call me she And she can call me he and he can call me he and he can call me he and she can call me she when you refer to me by gender So there was this musical which seemed to do pretty well And then a movie producer called him up and said that he wanted to option to do his life for a movie And now Victoria says those whispers that they used to get those have turned into people wanting autographs Or stopping them in the shoe store and saying aren't you stew? Aren't you that mayor?
Can I get a picture with you? Well, sure. There's really no one's a big deal But one of the most interesting things for me was that a lot of that attention was at the beginning These days do says that you know It's transgender issues have grown in in the national news and on TV shows Stu says that back in Silverton the fact that he's transgender. It's become pretty much a passé So here we are He says it's just kind of routine now for him and everyone else Except he did say there's this one thing every time the story airs or re airs which it does from time to time When it when it goes the phone starts ringing and we can tell where it's from He says he gets these calls from people who are struggling with their own gender issues or trying to figure out how to come out to their families And people actually call your home phone.
Yeah, usually anonymously They won't identify themselves necessarily because they're still either closeted or not really ready to come out But they're saying thank you so much for being yourself and for telling your story to others so that I can you know I can validate my life from that. Thank you Does that ever get old? No for somebody who was in the position that I was and made the change and then to have other people either following along or Emulating it in one way or another is very gratifying because it validates my life and it says why you weren't a complete waste of time A lot more than a lot of people can yeah special Thanks to producer Andy McEwen for helping us on all the update parts of the show Hey, this is Tracy from Changshao who non-China radio lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about Sloan at www.slown.org Hi Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and as someone who reports on mental health Who likes talking to people about their mental health and what they look to in science in the natural world in faith in friendship Wherever it may be to help guide them through the rough patches of life I just wanted to take a moment to say what seems to help people turn corners find relief get out of ruts and even flourish is having someone with you As much as we can feel private about our mental health struggles You do not have to go it alone So this may why not treat your mental health to a buddy and who better to talk to and a fully licensed mental health therapist with over 30,000 therapists available better help has someone you can talk to available at pretty much anytime that's convenient for you At the push of a button and because finding help you need often depends on the therapist client vibe Rest assured that better help you can switch providers at anytime. Remember truly your mental health matters and you don't have to go It alone find the support you need anytime with better help sign up and get 10% off at better help calm That's better h e l p dot com slash radio lab Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive and if you are we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to See follow NPR's planet money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works Are we about to do? 3 2 1 hey, I'm Chad I'm Ron.
I'm Robert Crow which is radio lab today. We're talking about we'll change really what what looks like change So you remember back to the baboons when we started this program Yeah, the question we were asking them was will those baboons if they do enough generations? Will they create a new culture? Well, it's Nick.
Well, it's Nick. Let's hope that's hope But we don't know and the town that chooses a mayor is that town expanding the sense of possibility or is that so? Blip, that's okay, but now let's get really serious. There are indeed changes that do stick We're going to examine a rather startling example of it right now Yeah, but to do that we need an evolutionary biologist and we found one at Duke University.
Yeah, hello Who's this that's Brian hair and the first thing Brian here did was tell me another guy Demetri Baliah Demetri Baliah and Demetri Baliah was a very famous geneticist in Russia He was alive during World War II and doing genetics work, but after World War II He was a little spot of trouble. What do you do? Well because he was a real Darwinian he believed in evolution and genetics But thinking about evolution like a Darwinian evolutionist does that was not popular in Stalin's Russia Is popular the word or was that a death sentence? It was a death sentence So the writing was on the wall and he knew that he should probably take the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow quickly quickly And he went to Nova's a beers and the way that Demetri Baliah decided to hide his continued interest in studying Darwinian evolution was He would begin a fox farm where he would make for coats So what is Mr.
Baliah actually doing? What Dr. Baliah was actually interested in was to understand how does domestication happen? That's his question.
That's a dumb question. No, it's not a dumb question at all. He just could bring that No, think about a wild animal. It is impulsive.
It is aggressive. It growls. Was it a wolf? You're playing there?
That's a wolf that I've got there in the background. Now this is a domesticated version Okay, the nature of the animal has completely changed here And if you want to learn something about the nature of a creature how it can change? Domesticated animals are a wonderful place to start. So Baliah, he decided why don't I just experimentally domesticate some animals and his cover was that he was going to Make better fur coats.
When was this by the way? 1959. Okay, so Sputnik was up Russians were feeling good and he was making fur coats So to speak so to speak began one of the most exciting experiments in biology. So here's what the meat tree Baliah says He goes to a bunch of fox farmers.
He said okay I want to buy a bunch of foxes and he says well I gotta do is take this group of foxes and break them into two groups and one group I'm not gonna change them anyway, okay, so it's like a control line So one group is just normal fox normal, but the other line I'm gonna decide who is going to be allowed to breed and who is unfortunately going to be a fur coat So some of the foxes get to have puppy foxes of their own and some foxes become New so what he did in the test was marvellously simple you go or whatever assistance would approach in key where the fox was kept It's a little baby fox sort of a juvenile fox the experimenter would stand say a foot away and would just try to touch the fox I don't know how to run fox run, but if the fox would make this kind of sound and sort of cower in a corner like most foxes would do What is that? What's that sound? That's that is the sound of fox meets when it's right? Really?
Yes, right? So what happens if it makes sense sound well? They did not breed that fox in the next generation order but another way They kill that pretty much yes, that's just wrong But now every so often like maybe one out of every 20 foxes there would be a fox that would not run back would not So it wasn't afraid then they would choose that fox to breed in the next generation Yeah, and they did this over and over again generation after generation They would breed the nice foxes together get rid of the bad fox breed the next set get rid of the bad foxes breed the next set next set next set next set next set next set right right what happened in the end well eventually They had foxes that were attracted to humans now, Jack How long do you think it would take to get foxes from being wild ferocious animals to being animals who would lick your face after this kind of like How many years exterminating reading yes, I would think a long long time. I mean I like how many years how many years?
Well, it took wolves like thousands of years to become dogs I don't know I mean a long time well here's this ears a thing ten years is the answer what ten years Ten years ten years now here's the crazy thing what was exciting and surprising Was that these same foxes they actually show a whole suite of changes that he did not select for on purpose Like what do you mean physical changes these foxes as they became more gentle for some unaccountable reason their ears instead of pointing straight up Flip over that's right. It was a big accident that they now have floppy ears the tails on a fox which in a wild fox they're straight Now they have curly tails they have multicolored coats that are no longer just great tips of their paws lose color The teeth get smaller and their bones became very thin their bones got thinner Yes, so what happens to the skull and the face is it actually becomes more feminine the whole animal becomes more delicate and what puppy like well I'd that's uh, I don't know what to make it up. It's and it's not over this experiment has been going on It's now been 50 years 45,000 foxes later 45,000 Brian by way who was read about this and I got to see this for myself So he went to Nova's to be risk just to check it out I did I took the trans-siberian railroad Which you know two days of looking at green grass and there's like one species of tree And I think there was a butterfly that was kind of pretty it was a birch tree looking up a birch tree then mother Pretty much you got it you got it you got it you got it You got it so I show up and they had thousands of foxes giant buildings that are probably you know as long as a football field full of Just rows and rows of foxes and when you see them they actually wag their tail they whine like a puppy dog They're cute and cuddly and they love people and they don't bite so it sounds perfect except for the one thing I forgot to tell you is that when they're yapping excited to see you they cannot help but pee for joy As I do whenever I see you well you're saying though is it makes sense to me that they're getting nicer because they're reading them to get nicer But why is all this other stuff happening with their to their bodies what's going on? I well, you know, it's the unsatisfactory answer that problem.
Nobody really knows why Dah, but okay. I'm rolling in my end. This is to come to fit. So here's a synchronized sink evolutionary biologist at the University of St.
Andrews in Scotland and he has a notion why I bought this for what's going on here And this is just an hypothesis. Here's what he told me to get up to when a foxes a very very little itty-pity thing in embryo inside It's mother's woman very very very early embryo like two months old to become a fox that can survive in the world This little embryo needs to grow strong teeth. Yep. It has to grow fur.
Need the fur. Have bone strong bone Needs to grow glands. Yep, so grow hormones check and all of these things that you need as an adult fox all of them come from the same Founded population of cells in an embryo. Wow.
I didn't know that yeah They call the mural crest When the fox grows these cells they're doing these epic migrations these guys are like pioneers that are moving throughout the body and blazing these trails Some of them go out into the skin some of them go up into the cartilage of the foxes ears Some of them go into the jaw and form all these different tissues tail big parts of the nervous system major parts of the brain and The adrenal glands what's the adrenal then well? That's the most important one for our purpose the adrenal gland pumps out when to be afraid Run away run away that's the thing that makes the fox go Whatever that's the one that makes that sound so when you're breathing fear out of an animal Maybe what you're doing is you're slowing down the migrations of these cells They don't deliver the fear and they don't deliver all the other things that they usually do what you're focusing on what you as the Experimenter doing is saying I want the guys whose adrenal glands damage her quickly that might have the function of making the animal more tame But what you're doing is a byproduct of that is selecting for guys who don't get as many of those cells into their ears And don't get as many of those cells into their skin and don't get as many of those cells into their teeth So if you get some of the cells you need to make your ears firm and straight But not quite enough and your ear will go up to a certain point and since the cells aren't going to complete the deal the rest of your ear flops over really you haven't come is that why the dogs have a little floppy yummy because the cells have been slowed down to the point where they Don't finish the job. Oh, they were there they are literally arrested being go the argument is that actually when you select against aggression in animals You're changing the timing the rate of development such that the experimental foxes are actually frozen as juveniles They actually never really grow up. So then to domesticate a fox Just like to domesticate a wolf into a dog what you're doing is you're making them permanent puppies.
They're like Peter Pan kind of thing They say hey, so if we wanted to apply this to us, and we wanted to say breed a gentler sleeker human being We should just kill the football players. Is that the idea? No, I like football, but I mean like with the foxes you just eliminate the meanies Oh, the meat yeah with the same thing happened to us. That's where it gets really interesting Remember the professor we interviewed a few hours back a Richard random vividly well When we think about humans obviously we're getting you know just super speculative But he says if you choose to go back if we go back just 30,000 years and you look at the collection of skulls or the early versions of us from way back then you see some interesting Fox like changes well if you look at domesticated animals they have smaller teeth than the wild ancestors and in humans We've been getting smaller teeth over the last few tens of thousands of years just like the fox We've been getting more grass-ile bones that means to say that For a particular length of limb bone it becomes a little bit narrower just like the fun So it attempting to think that the same kind of processes been going on in humans as have been going on in domesticated animals Which is that there's been natural selection in favor of a kinder gentler human wait a second though Who's doing the selecting in the case of the foxes mr Bialof shot you if you were too aggressive who's selecting the who's domesticating the humans well one idea This means specifically suggested is that it was the growing tendency for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to settle down in Stable camps you mean like summer camps like Around the market I'm talking about communities if you are in a very small family group Well, then it pays to be big and strong in mean because if you're the biggest guy and you meet a smaller guy And he's got some potatoes you grab him eat his potatoes beat him up Yeah, and then move on to the next till you never have to see him again But let's say that as time passes human society grows a little bit you form camps You might have 30 or 40 people that way you can build bigger fires and you can catch more bunnies and you can defend against enemies But in this world if you beat everybody up you may not survive that one pitted against anybody else one-on-one The big strong mean guy has turned and we got a win when big strong mean doesn't win and we see this in some primates is when you can start to form Coagitions when you can start to have multiple individuals you say hey mean guy stop it Yeah, you're bigger than any one of us But you can't take on both of us or all three of us or our whole group now We've got other males in the community who aren't going to go away and I say okay We're gonna deal with this guy Maybe they deal with him by shouting him down Ostracizing him or even capital punishment and Richard Ryan's theory is that if that happens enough times to enough bullies who then can't have kids And spread their genes because they have the unfortunate condition of being dead then we've essentially bred out the more aggressive genes or we have Domesticated ourselves We're really talking about groups versus individuals here and so in a sense I think we're really talking about the beginning of society and a kind of rule of law in the way that we think of it And this pressure to be a little more gentle and to be a little bit more cooperative This hasn't gone away.
I think if anything we're being selected to work together more To be able to tolerate being packed in even tighter If you put 20 chips on a jet plane and try to send them across the Atlantic Let me tell you that only one or two would walk off that plane alive We do this all the time we take it for granted as human beings that big groups of people can get along with one I Do think that it's reasonable to imagine that humans have a future of Increasing self-domestication what I sense you proposing is that as the earth gets more crowded all the creatures on earth at least Ascension creatures have to start learning to live with each other to mark as they keep bumping into each other The winners will be the domesticated ones everyone will get more empathetic to each other because the feeling will you survive? I'm gonna get gentler and gentler and gentler to lambs literally lie down with lions you said it beautifully But you do believe it? Well, we may have to go through one of two ups and downs before we get there and of course there's something slightly alarming about the fact that One possible mechanism by which domestication has happened in humans is through literally execution of the more aggressive types But in the long term sure let's hope that all of us become more Flappy here more floppy is exactly We start working together Anyhow, we should go to break or not break just go to the big break just the break that exists between us and everything else Yes, let's listen to the way we end it all by I'm gonna take a to go going video out of turn video out is produced by Chad I'm Rod our staffing food thorn Wheeler Michael Raphael Owen Horn and we will help from adding Orion I'm a Jacob and Elva change battle. Thanks.
You feel here. I'm Brian here father to her and Scott and peppermint Dr Anna Kacoga dr. Arena playing enough and Chris me