Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

The McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the Internet for a snack. Snack wrap is back. Oh, wait. You're listen k. Alright. K. Alright. You are listening to RadioLab. From WNYC. WNYC. See? Yep. Hey. This is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nasr. A little while back, Lulu and I had we were basically starstruck because we got to sit down with a living musical icon. Oh. Oh. I believe it. I'm not I'm so great to catch you. Goodness. Oh my god. I can't believe it. Yo Yo Ma. Yo Yo, of course, is a famous cellist, kinda the famous cellist. He's won 19 Grammy Awards, produced more than 90 musical albums. But the reason we were sitting down to talk to him was I'm a newbie at podcasting. We got together with our friend, producer, and host, Anna Gonzalez, and they made a whole podcast series called Our Common Nature. And we loved the podcast so much that we wanted to sit down and talk to the two of them about why they made it. Yeah. So the idea for the podcast started with Yo Yo. Right? Like, he'd been doing these outdoor performances for about a year. And he was basically trying to reconnect to nature himself Mhmm. And bring music outside of the concert hall, playing in locations that you wouldn't musician kind of to whoever was around. And at a certain point, Yoyo wanted to get this to more people. He decided he should have somebody on the ground with him with a microphone, making recordings, making stories. And at some point, he and his team came to me and they asked, do you wanna be that person? Do you wanna be on the ground with a microphone making recordings with me? And I was like, yes, please. That sounds amazing. Well, I was so happy to meet Anna because she also works with children. You may recognize Anna's voice because she's also a producer on our sister show for families, Terrestrials. She has this wonderful podcast with children, and and actually, I never grew up. So I started from a child's point of view. You know, I we've all pestered adults with the question why at a certain age. Yeah. Usually around two or three years old. Why? Why daddy? Why mommy? But I think I never stopped. And then, of course, in the natural world, which I came to later, although I think the fascination was there always, I think who hasn't looked out in the night sky and wondered what's out there? I mean, just all of that that Yoyo just said made it so fun to go with him because he is this great combination of childlike wonder, you know, just having fun playing such a people person and then would, like, prank me by, like, saying, like, oh, I wanna say something important and then, like, make duck sounds into …