The “extreme” beat: whale hearts, mudslides, and more
What’s the slowest heartbeat on the planet? What’s it like to live with zero sunlight?
If you’ve ever picked up a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, you know that people are drawn to extremes, be they geographical, philosophical, or biological.
So this week, we’re cracking open the Outside/Inbox to answer your questions about the outer limits of life on Earth. We’ll learn about how landslides are way more common than you might think, why frogs are practically undead, and how researchers stay motivated through an Antarctic winter.
Submit your own question (the weirder the better) on Instagram, via email at outsidein@nhpr.org, or by calling our Outside/Inbox hotline: 1-844-GO-OTTER.
Question 1: How low can an animal’s heartbeat go?
Question 2: What happens to your body if you get ZERO sunlight?
Question 3: Is climate change making landslides happen more often?
Question 4: What is a “wet-bulb” temperature?
Featuring: Carmen Possnig, Kira Mauseth, Corina Cerovski-Darriau, Daniel Vecellio, and Avikal Somvanshi.
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Credit: Nate Hegyi
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradis, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon
Editing by Taylor Quimby with help from Justine Paradis
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Taylor Quimby: I'm going to jump right in. Ready. Jumping.
Nate Hegyi: Jump.
Taylor Quimby: So I was thinking recently about the versatility of the word extreme.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's a great word. Yeah. Extreme heat.
Taylor Quimby: Extreme sports.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, man, that was extreme.
Taylor Quimby: Your fingers and toes are literally your extremities.
Nate Hegyi: They're pretty extreme. They're pretty amazing.
Taylor Quimby: It's the name of a band.
Nate Hegyi: They better have had some extremely awesome music.
Taylor Quimby: What was one of their hits? Hold on. Oh, they did more than words.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. [sings a bar] I remember them.
Taylor Quimby: So the reason I was thinking about this word is because a couple of months ago, we asked listeners for their extreme questions on our social media feeds. And today we are opening up the mailbag to answer them.
Nate Hegyi: That's right. I'm Nate Hajji here with producer Taylor Quimby. Hey, and this is the outside inbox Extreme Edition.
Taylor Quimby: I think you have to say that like a movie trailer guy.
Nate Hegyi: Extreme.
Taylor Quimby: That's pretty good.
Nate Hegyi: That's good, right? I got low.
Taylor Quimby: So the benefit of a good prompt, Nate, is that it can go in a lot of interesting directions. But our first couple of questions today I think were probably inspired by the fact that right now we in the Northern Hemisphere are at an extreme angle, planetary speaking, i.e. it is winter.
Nate Hegyi: I don't think anybody describes winter that way. That's a that's a good one, though. An extreme angle.
Taylor Quimby: You never you never look at the sun in winter when it's like really yellow and it's stretching over.... And you think like, what an extreme angle that's coming in at.
Nate Hegyi: Oh yeah, I'm in Alaska right now and that is the sun is incredibly low, just hovering along the horizon. So maybe I'm giving you too much crap. That's actually a good way to explain Winter.
Taylor Quimby: So first up, a question related to winter that you answered with producer Jessica Hunt.
Jessica Hunt: Today's question is from Elisa via Instagram.
Listener: Hello. Outside in How slow can an animal's heartbeat get without it dying? So how many beats per minute are needed to keep an animal alive? And how does this change with hibernation and other behaviors? Thank you.
Nate Hegyi: I guess she's not talking about like when animals go into deep, deep hibernation, because I always thought their hearts just actually stop like frogs that are frozen in ice.
Jessica Hunt: Nate! That's the whole....
Nate Hegyi: Is that the answer? Let me do it a different answer. Let me do a different answer. Sorry. I just watched Planet Earth. That is a very good question. So, Jessica, I'm going to let you take it away.
Jessica Hunt: So the size of an animal is generally what determines how often its heartbeats or its beats per minute BPM. Small animals lose heat through their skin faster than big animals do, so they need to produce energy and heat at a faster pace and then redistribute it repeatedly through their body as it disperses. So they have a faster breathing and heart rate. The hummingbird at 1000 beats per minute. Take a listen.
Nate Hegyi: It sounds like a flat tire. That's so fast.
Jessica Hunt: Yeah, it's just constant. Yeah. So the inverse would mean that for larger animals, there's a slower heartbeat. The largest mammal, the blue whale, for example, has a heart the size of a sofa, and their heartbeats per minute have been recorded as low as two per minute. And that's the slowest heartbeat of any warm-blooded mammal.
Nate Hegyi: Whoo! Wow. That sounds like someone banging a huge drum. That's cool.
Jessica Hunt: Amazing. Both big and small animals sometimes employ a survival strategy that causes the heart rate to drop. And that's called torpor.
Nate Hegyi: Torpor.
Jessica Hunt: Both the hummingbird and hibernating animals like the black bear experience. Torpor, which is involuntary. Not only does the heart rate drop, but so does body temperature, the breathing rate and metabolism.
Nate Hegyi: What brings torpor on?
Jessica Hunt: So for black bears, it's the shortage of food and length of day. So it happens in winter. Their heart rate drops from an average of 55 down to about 14 beats per minute.
Nate Hegyi: That is really slow. Wow.
Jessica Hunt: But hummingbirds experience torpor to conserve energy every night, and they can vary the level from shallow to deep torpor. Their heart rates drop from that super rapid 1000 beats per minute that we heard to as slow as 180 to 50 beats per minute on a cold night.
Nate Hegyi: That's about as fast as a human being's heart.
Jessica Hunt: Yeah, but like you alluded to earlier, there are animals who can put their heartbeat and respiration on pause all winter without dying. It's called rumination, and it's essentially hibernation for cold blooded animals.
Nate Hegyi: I would like to go into rumination during the winter. That would be nice. Just skip winter. Wake up when it's nice and sunny.
Jessica Hunt: Exactly. And that's what happens to frogs, specifically the wood frog and spring peepers. They overwinter by burrowing into mud or leaf litter and staying there. Apparently dead. No breathing and zero heartbeat. Wow. What they do is they flood their cells with glucose, which is basically a concentrated sugar solution, and it acts like antifreeze in their bodies and their bodies freeze. Not solid frozen, but about 70%.
Nate Hegyi: It's like. It's like a frog-shaped ice cube.
Jessica Hunt: But then come spring, they defrost. It can take, like, an hour, and then they hop on their way. Normal heart rate, 40 to 50 beats per minute.
Nate Hegyi: Flash unfrozen too!
Jessica Hunt: Turtles are also able to slow down their heart rates to almost nothing. Normally, a turtle's heart beats about 40 times a minute when they're basking in the sun in the summer. But during the winter, when they're buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake or in the woods, their heartbeat drops to about one beat every 10 minutes.
Nate Hegyi: So real slow makes sense for a turtle. Yes.
Jessica Hunt: And then the same with snakes. Did you ever think about snakes and winter?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. I just always assumed they just go away.
Jessica Hunt: Yeah, like they just disappear. No, they gather, like, literally a clump of hundreds and thousands of snakes in a den beneath the frost line, and they go dormant, all like bundled up together to conserve energy and protect themselves from the cold.
Nate Hegyi: I never, ever want to see that in. In real life. That sounds terrifying
[mux]
Nate Hegyi: So that was producer Jessica Hunt and me talking about heartbeats.
Taylor Quimby: I really don't think I give my heart enough credit for beating.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, I think about that a lot.
Taylor Quimby: Like, I don't have a gratitude journal, but I think about starting one all the time. And if I do, I'm going to start with a little gratitude for my heart.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, heart kept going today. That's great. Good job. Heart.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Okay, so moving on. We have another producer, Felix Poon, this time with a question about darkness or light, depending on how you look at it.
Felix Poon: So we've got a seasonally appropriate question from Kathryn, who just recently moved to Portland, Oregon, and is worried about a dark and rainy winter.
Listener: So we know that seasonal affective disorder is a thing. But what if humans lived in an environment in the far north or far south where it's dark for months at a time? Do they experience health issues besides seasonal affective disorder?
Felix Poon: So to answer this question, I really leaned into the far south part of Kathryn's question. As in the farthest south you can get. So I called up a researcher named Carmen Possnig.
Carmen Possnig: I spent a year in Antarctica, and there I was working for the European Space Agency looking at how humans adapt to extreme environments.
Nate Hegyi: That sounds like a pretty cool job.
Felix Poon: So Carmen was basically experimenting on the small team of people stationed at the Concordia Research Station, where the sun drops below the horizon for four full months. She drew their blood and made them do cognitive and fine motor skill tests.
Nate Hegyi: What did she find?
Felix Poon: Well, a lack of sunlight really screws up your circadian rhythm, changes your heart rate, your blood pressure. It throws off hormone levels like cortisol and melatonin, and that makes it harder to sleep well. So everyone's really tired all the time and their cognitive and motor skills really declined. Wow. Carmen also says people get depressed or get easily aggravated at the station, and so they do try to break things up by having this Midwinter festival on June 21st, which is halfway through the dark period.
Carmen Possnig: And everybody is celebrating that from this moment on. In theory, the sun is coming closer again in theory.
Nate Hegyi: Still a long ways to the solstice. To the next solstice.
Felix Poon: Yeah, exactly. Carmen says it's actually more depressing after that because you're only halfway there and there's no big festival to look forward to anymore.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, pretty much feels like winter every year for me after the holidays.
Felix Poon: So the big caveat here is that they weren't just dealing with no sunlight. They're also dealing with less oxygen because of the high altitude and also the impacts of extreme isolation. So to get some insight on an environment that's closer to our listener, Kathryn in the Pacific Northwest, I spoke to Kira Mauseth: Kira is a clinical psychologist at Seattle University, and I asked her about seasonal affective disorder or SAD. Mm hmm. She said that less sunlight means less vitamin D, which you need for a good immune system. Less sunlight also means less serotonin, which is one of those happiness hormones. We need to feel good. But Kira says that's sad. Isn't just about sunlight.
Kira Mauseth: Things that are associated with sun around exercise and getting out and moving that also have positive physical and mental health effects.
Felix Poon: A lot of those sad symptoms come with just being more sedentary and not going outside. Plus, there's the holidays, which stress a lot of people out too.
Nate Hegyi: So, Felix, what's someone like Katherine to do? I mean, like I've heard of sun lamps.
Felix Poon: Yeah, Kira did mention sun lamps, and she says to get one with a UVB bulb, because UVB light is what your body needs to make vitamin D. But she says you might want to consult your doctor about any family risk factors related to skin cancer. That's a good point. But if your symptoms aren't really about sunlight and maybe have more to do with exercise or getting outside, then Kira says you should focus on other changes like being active, increasing your connection with people, not isolating yourself. And so in the Pacific Northwest, that means getting the right gear to go outside even when it's raining.
Nate Hegyi: Felix This reminds me of one of our recent outside episodes where we shared 13 tips on how to thrive this winter.
Felix Poon: Yeah, so I asked Kira and Carmen to share with me how they lean into the darkness and become friends with winter.
Kira Mauseth: Our family is a big snow family. We ski. We're out in the in the woods, in snow all the time.
Carmen Possnig: During the wintertime, you have this wonderful night sky and you can go out at around noon and you have the Milky Way and galaxies and nebulas and auroras. And it's actually really, really beautiful and quite a good substitute, I think, for sunlight. A lot of tiny suns.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. Auroras would definitely be a great substitute for sunlight, I think.
Felix Poon: Totally.
Nate Hegyi: That was producer Felix Poon And Hey Taylor, have you ever used a sad lamp like one of those fake sunshine lamps?
Taylor Quimby: I did, actually. I bought one some years ago. The thing that you have to be careful with sad lamps is that. Yeah, in order to get the effect that is actually backed up by science, you have to be, like, super close to the lamp, like your face has to be, you know, maybe like six inches away from it. And you have to be like that for, like, 30 minutes.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, you're kind of sitting right next to it and it's very bright. Christine just got me one for Christmas. And when we turned it on, we were both like, Oh.
Taylor Quimby: I'm told that like, it's best as a ritual that you start literally in the morning and you can just keep your eyes closed and you can just do your 30-minute lamp soak.
Nate Hegyi: I'll try that. I'll put it next to the bedside table and either curse you when I wake up at five in the morning and blast myself with white light, or I'll be like, Oh, I feel pretty good. We've got to take a break. But before we do, just a quick reminder that this show is listener powered. You are the solar panels that keep the podcast lights on. And if you can spare five bucks a month to keep outside and sounding as charged up as possible, please head on over to outside and radio dot org and donate now.
Taylor Quimby: It works better than you are the turbines that spin... This podcast round and round?
Nate Hegyi: You are the coal powered plant...
Taylor Quimby: You are the geothermal vents...
Nate Hegyi: You are the anaerobic digester that keeps the podcast lights on.
Welcome back. I'm Nate Hegyi here with Taylor Quimby for another edition of the outside inbox.
Taylor Quimby: And since we are opening mail, I was hoping that we could read some of the comments that came in after we tried a new segment recently called this, that or the other thing.
Nate Hegyi: Yes, We asked folks, what is your biggest roadblock to eating more sustainably? Jonas wrote in to say that his biggest hurdle is just money. Nicola from Montreal, Canada, says mental health plays a factor. He's got low motivation and creativity in the kitchen.
Taylor Quimby: And Caleb wrote in from Minnesota to say that his biggest roadblock is dietary restrictions. He has celiac disease, which means any gluten whatsoever is super dangerous for him. He's also got issues with chicken and sugar. And so he wrote, quote, As a result, I have decided that eating sustainably is not something that is going to be my cause. Adding more thought and restriction to my already restricted time-consuming diet, I just can't.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, well, I hope that our segment left folks feeling like there are things that they can do to make a difference. Like climate action isn't a zero sum game or a popularity contest. I really appreciate that. Caleb went on to say he focuses on sustainability in other ways, taking public transit, mending his own clothes and stuff like that.
Nate Hegyi: That's a great skill. Being able to mend your own clothes. I need to up my sewing game.
Taylor Quimby: I have repaired a hole before.
Nate Hegyi: Yes, I've done that once. The the awkward crotch hole and a pair of jeans that wears out.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Yeah, you got it. You got to do something about those. You can't just, like, slap duct tape over it. Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Anyways, let us know what other iconic sustainability debate you think we should tackle on the next, this, that or the other thing? Now, getting back to extremes... This next question is all about a disaster that is both commonplace and sometimes very, very extreme.
Listener: Hi Taylor. This is Phil from Portland, Maine. My wife and I recently went on a hike and we're noticing a landslide probably happened with in recent years.
Taylor Quimby: Any experience with landslides or mudslides, Nate?
Nate Hegyi: I've been watching the recent coverage on California. Of all those mudslides, like I literally was just watching that on Twitter and they look terrifying. Yeah.
Listener: How often does it still occur? Why does it happen? Are there any notable events? Well, climate change makes them happen more often. Thank you.
Nate Hegyi: It's a lot of questions.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, it's like five questions. It's a lot So the first thing I learned is that a landslide is a very broad category of thing. You know, say you have a Rocky Mountain path, right? And there's maybe some loose gravel that's kind of slowly tumbling down that path, maybe ten feet a year. Yeah, that is technically a landslide.
Nate Hegyi: Hmm. It's a pretty small landslide.
Taylor Quimby: It is. So, you know, you can see how they really run the gamut. You know, they can be wet, they can be dry. They can go so slow you can't see it. Or they could be going as fast as a city bus. Wow. And according to research geologist Corina Cerovski-Darriau, landslides are probably way more common than you and I might have realized.
Corina Cerovski-Darriau: They happen often. They happen in all 50 states annually. They cause billions of dollars in damage and on the order of 25 to 50 people, unfortunately, each year in the U.S. alone.
Nate Hegyi: So so the next part of Phil's question was why do they occur? Right.
Taylor Quimby: Well, Corina is part of the US Geological Survey's landslide disaster assistance team, and she told me that one big reason no surprises here is just gravity, right? Like, take a slope between 25 and 40 degrees, put some vaguely round objects on it, rocks, and you are liable to see some slight edge. But another way to think about landslides is that they are often what we might think of as a secondary disaster triggered by some other type of event.
Nate Hegyi: Right. Like like a huge rainfall or, I don't know, like maybe an earthquake.
Taylor Quimby: Exactly.
Corina Cerovski-Darriau: The landslides are typically triggered by water. Be that rainfall or changes in river or lake levels, earthquakes, volcanoes and humans.
Nate Hegyi: Wait, how do humans start a landslide besides, like hiking on a trail?
Taylor Quimby: Well, the main sources of human-caused slides would be things like construction, road cutting, mining, and things like that.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Taylor Quimby: Our listener Phil asked about notable landslides. Well, the deadliest landslide in recent U.S. history was called the Oso mudslide. Technically, this is what is referred to as a debris flow. These are the mudslides that we hear in the news. And it killed 43 people in Washington State in 2014.
Nate Hegyi: I remember that one. I remember that one. Yeah, it was massive.
Taylor Quimby: There had been a month and a half of abnormally heavy rains and basically, an entire hillside caved in and just created this huge river of mud.
Corina Cerovski-Darriau: Essentially, it would have covered. I believe it was 700 football fields, ten feet deep.
Nate Hegyi: That one made international headlines like everywhere.
Taylor Quimby: I think it did.
News clip: Grim morning at the site of a giant mudslide north of Seattle. The local fire chief says searchers...
Taylor Quimby: But one you might not have really heard about in this way happened in 2017 when there was a huge series of landslides after Hurricane Maria.
Corina Cerovski-Darriau: Hurricane Maria triggered over 70,000 landslides in Puerto Rico.
Nate Hegyi: 70,000. That's a lot.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. And another type of secondary disaster we hear about are mudslides that take place after wildfires, which can strip slopes of vegetation that hold water in. And those areas can become much more prone to landslides, which I think gets us to Phil's last question about landslides and climate change.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it definitely does. I mean, like, you know, severe wildfires have been exacerbated by climate change and poor forest management.
Taylor Quimby: Right. So it's likely that certain places are going to see more landslides because of extreme weather that has been exacerbated by climate change. That being said.
Corina Cerovski-Darriau: The flip side of that, these prolonged droughts might actually decrease the risk from deep seeded landslides. These really big, large landslides that don't respond to a single intense rainstorm. It's like a whole season of rainy weather.
Taylor Quimby: But regardless of climate impacts, a global database of landslide events shows one of the biggest rises is coming from those human-caused activities. We talked about mining, construction, etc., which is really terrifying. Yeah.
[mux]
Taylor Quimby: You know, we couldn't have a show that's all about extremes without talking about extreme weather, which I guess is like, of course, it's so commonplace now that it feels weird to call it extreme, but of course it's still extreme.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it's just the new I'm not going to say that it's not the new normal. We have the power to be able to curb the worst of the climate crisis. Yeah. I said that so convincingly.
Taylor Quimby: All right. All right. So, again, staying on the extreme weather beat for this last question, which you talked about with Justine Paradise.
Listener: This is M’ris from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I was wondering if you could explain wet bulb temperatures and events.
Justine Paradis: You know, when it's summer in, say, Arizona and people say, oh, you know, it's hot, but it's not too bad because it's a dry heat.
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Justine Paradis: Yeah. That's because in dry heat, sweating actually makes you feel a lot better.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Like, sweating is the way we cool our bodies. We sweat. The water evaporates off, our skin temperature drops.
Justine Paradis: But if the air is super hot and humid, so saturated with water and your sweat can't evaporate, sweating doesn't work as well.
Daniel Vecellio: Humid heat stress is really, really dangerous because we have a limited capacity to evaporate sweat off of our bodies.
Justine Paradis: That's Daniel Vecellio. He's a bio meteorologist who studies climate change and human health. So a wet bulb temperature helps illustrate the dangers of extreme heat by looking at temperature and humidity together. Sort of like how wind chill combines wind and temperature to better illustrate the dangers of extreme cold.
Nate Hegyi: So when does humid heat get dangerous?
Justine Paradis: Well, there are different numbers out there. In 2010, researchers came up with one theory for the upper limit of what the human body can take. 95 degrees at 100% humidity, but.
Daniel Vecellio: That had never actually been empirically tested.
Justine Paradis: So that's what Daniel and his coauthors did. They studied people doing physical activity under various conditions to test heat stress in practice. And they found that people started experiencing heat stress at much lower levels. So at about 50% humidity and 88 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nate Hegyi: That honestly doesn't seem that high. 88 degrees.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, it's a way lower bar than the theoretical limit.
Daniel Vecellio: The real answer is probably somewhere in between those two numbers.
Justine Paradis: And that's partly because the critical environmental limit is going to vary depending on the individual age, health, history, what your body is used to. Mm hmm. And we should point out that when people die during heat waves, it is not always caused by overheating directly. Heat stresses out a lot of your systems and it can trigger a preexisting condition, for example.
Nate Hegyi: Let's go on to our second question. Sam in Concord asked If people already experience wet bulb limits in some parts of the world and how people adapt culturally. So, Justine, where do we see these extreme humid heat conditions?
Justine Paradis: Well, that depends on what we're talking about. The higher limit.
Daniel Vecellio: As of 2010 had not been really seen across the entire world.
Justine Paradis: But 88 degrees, relatively humid. That is more common. And yes, some parts of the world do see heat waves more often and will be more likely to see future wet-bulb limit type heat. And that's places like the Middle East, Pakistan and India.
Avikal Somvansh : As Indians, we have been living with high heat conditions throughout and it was already a difficult thing to do. Now, this additional heat is actually pushing us to the brink.
Justine Paradis: This is Avikal Somvansh. He is a data scientist and urban ecologist in New Delhi. Avakov told me that we have to stop thinking about heat waves as episodic events and rethink how we live, especially in cities.
Avikal Somvansh: In India, working-age men are dying. These are the men who are actually blue-collar workers and are forced to work during the peak heat hours during the day.
Justine Paradis: One tool that people use is passive design. So that could mean the way we design not just buildings, but also city streets.
Avikal Somvansh: If you look at the old cities of India, the roads were narrow and they were winding because they didn't want the sun to hit the roads where people were walking. But that has kind of disappeared in the modern design.
Justine Paradis: To tackle climate-driven heat. Will also need more tools beyond urban design. We'll need to rethink how we structure our lives. So think about siestas cultures that take breaks from work and school during the hottest part of the day. Air conditioning is another way we adapt. But since air conditioners generate lots of waste heat and often are running on fossil fuel-generated energy, they're not an ideal solution. These systems changes. We need to start considering them now because, as Daniel Fazio said, climate-driven heat impacts are not a future problem. They're already here.
Daniel Visilio: He is already the number one killer weather-related killer of people in the United States before the United States are even thinking about reaching the thresholds that we found.
Taylor Quimby: Okay. Well, did you learn anything about Extreme's name during this show?
Nate Hegyi: They're becoming more and more commonplace.
Taylor Quimby: Unfortunately, I don't know if this is something that I've learned listening to this show, but it is something that I think about, which is that human beings are capable of extreme adaptability.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was I was in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I was thinking about that as I watched everybody just walking around and light jackets and negative ten degree weather. And you're just like, how can you do this? They just adapted. And by the end of the trip, I kind of adapted. I was able to walk around with a lighter jacket than usual in cold weather. So it's it's pretty cool.
Taylor Quimby: I'm resisting the parental urge to say that's ridiculous.
Nate Hegyi: And I've lost two fingers from frostbite. But I look cool. So it's worth it.
This episode was produced, reported and mixed by Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradise, Jessica Hunt and Felix Boone. Editing by Taylor with help from Justine Paradise. Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Music for this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by Break Master Cylinder Outside and is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.