
In this podcast, a story about a mom, a boy, and a home-made helicopter.
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Jad Abumrad
Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right.
Blake
Okay.
Jad Abumrad
All right.
Jennifer Babbage
You're listening to Radiolab.
Jad Abumrad
Rad Sharks from WNYC.
Commercial Announcer
And npr.
Jad Abumrad
Okay. Ready? Yeah. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert Krulwich
And I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad Abumrad
This is Radiolab, our Fun Drive edition. We're trying to prevail upon you, give you all the reasons we can think of to support public radio and Radiolab in particular. You know what, Robert? Why should we even say anything when I think it's more powerful when somebody who uses Radiolab, who uses public radio, can say it for us?
Robert Krulwich
Well, you have someone in mind?
Jad Abumrad
I do. I have a story here that came into our inbox. This is a true story where public radio. Are you ready for this?
Robert Krulwich
Okay.
Jad Abumrad
Literally saved a boy's life.
Robert Krulwich
What?
Jad Abumrad
All right, so I'm exaggerating a little, but it helped out in a pretty dire situation. And if saving lives, healing wounds doesn't make you want to support this service, then, well, frankly, I don't know what will. So, anyhow, the woman who wrote this we're just going to call her right now. Her name is Jennifer Babbage.
Robert Krulwich
And how would we be spelling Babs?
Jad Abumrad
Bab. Babs with an s or bab? Jennifer Babb, as in B, A double.
Robert Krulwich
B, D, A double bab.
Jad Abumrad
Yep. And it involves her and her son Blake. Blake.
Blake
Hello.
Jad Abumrad
Hi. Is this Jennifer?
Jennifer Babbage
Yes.
Jad Abumrad
Hey.
Robert Krulwich
This is Jad, and this is Robert here on the other microphone.
Jennifer Babbage
Hi, guys. Nice to meet you.
Jad Abumrad
Nice to meet you telephonically. Now, Jennifer, I understand you have. You have a son, right?
Jennifer Babbage
Yes, I have two children. My son is my oldest. He's seven and a half.
Blake
Blake.
Jad Abumrad
Blake. And so can you set the scene for the story you're gonna tell? Like what?
Jennifer Babbage
Well, let's see. So, Blake, he says when he grows up, he's gonna be an inventor. And what he likes to build most of all is airplanes. Airplanes and helicopters.
Robert Krulwich
Okay.
Jennifer Babbage
So the first ones he built were just, you know, he'd take a couple of pieces of Tupperware and lay them out on the floor in the shape of a plane. But lately he's been trying to build planes that actually fly. And so he made this airplane. He's sitting next to me now, and he's telling me it's more like a helicopter. He took a big cardboard box, cut out two long propeller blades that he duct taped together in the shape of an X. And the propeller, I have to say, the propeller is really cool. The propeller actually flies. So we have kind of a balcony on our house, and he stood up on the balcony and, like, flung it off, and it hovered in the air.
Jad Abumrad
Really?
Robert Krulwich
Oh, wow.
Jennifer Babbage
For a moment before falling to the ground.
Jad Abumrad
Okay, so you've done a bunch of tests with this propeller. You see that it can fly. And then, I'm assuming at a certain point, he takes it to the next step.
Jennifer Babbage
Yeah. So he's been learning about electricity and about motors and things, and he's got a couple of toys that have motors on them. So he's been trying to build an airplane that'll hook up to the motor. And he tried to attach his propeller, and it just fell over. Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
So the motor wasn't powerful enough.
Jennifer Babbage
Right. And so there's only one thing that we've got that's strong enough to power a propeller of this size, and that's a human being.
Blake
Yeah.
Jennifer Babbage
So what he did was, since the motor didn't work, he made out of duct tape, a harness system so that he could kind of climb inside the harness and hold on to the propeller.
Jad Abumrad
And is he going to twist the propellers Himself while he's flying.
Jennifer Babbage
Exactly. Grab onto it with his hands and just kind of like spin to make it fly. And so we have this rock wall that's about, I don't know, three feet high. And so he climbed up on the rock wall and spun it and jumped. And he said he hovered for a second.
Robert Krulwich
Really?
Jennifer Babbage
He felt it. He's saying he felt it. So it felt kind of weird.
Jad Abumrad
Hi. Hi, Blake.
Blake
Hi.
Jad Abumrad
So you felt like. So where did you jump from? You jumped from the wall. Hello? Hello, Blake, are you there?
Jennifer Babbage
Blake is. He's not a really big talker.
Jad Abumrad
Did you mom know any of this was happening at this point?
Jennifer Babbage
Yeah, I made a movie of it.
Jad Abumrad
So you were aware of his experiments in flight?
Robert Krulwich
Yeah.
Jennifer Babbage
Well, it's fascinating to watch, you know, to see how his mind works. He's learning, like I said, you know, every time, every iteration, he learned something from the way the one before failed. So that was, that was in the evening, that was like 8 o' clock at night. And the next day he's. Was it Saturday or Sunday? And he's fussing around in the garage and my husband and I were in the kitchen talking about whatever and Blake comes walking past with his harness system on and he walks through the, the doors to go into the backyard.
Robert Krulwich
Just walks right through.
Jennifer Babbage
Right.
Robert Krulwich
There's something slightly Calvin and Hobbesy about this.
Jennifer Babbage
So for whatever reason, this did not arouse our suspicion.
Robert Krulwich
Oh dear.
Jennifer Babbage
As it should have. You know, I don't know what we were talking about. And then, you know, two, three minutes later, we hear the cry. You know, the kind of cry that's not I'm scared or wham, hungry. It's the cry that means I'm hurt.
Jad Abumrad
Oh, now just to jump in here, Jennifer rings outside to the backyard where there's this maple tree. And she looks up and she sees.
Jennifer Babbage
Her son completely entangled in the tree.
Jad Abumrad
Looked to her like he'd climbed up to the top branch with the harness.
Jennifer Babbage
System on and then jumped and got.
Jad Abumrad
Twisted up and he was really, really bloody.
Jennifer Babbage
He had scrap the whole back of his leg this big like foot long gash and just like, oh my God.
Blake
Oh my God.
Jennifer Babbage
Just bleeding all down his leg. And my husband had to like push him up so that I could untangle the like ropey bits of the duct tape harness system to get him off and pull him down. So I, you know, carried him through the kitchen and put him on the couch in the living room.
Jad Abumrad
And she says she tried to turn him over so she could get a look at the cut. But he kept squirming and wouldn't let her see it.
Jennifer Babbage
And that was the moment it occurred to me to put on Radio Labs for something for him to listen to that would kind of capture his imagination. So he'd lie still, forget that his leg hurt him, and then I could look at it while he was distracted.
Jad Abumrad
What gave you that idea?
Jennifer Babbage
I don't know. The ipod was kind of sitting there, and I was like, okay, I'll put on Radiolab and he can listen to the bit about parasites.
Robert Krulwich
Parasites? Yeah. So when you press go or begin on your ipod, what happened?
Jennifer Babbage
Oh, he was instantly fascinated. He listened to the whole entire podcast, the whole 45 minutes or whatever it is. And, yeah, and I was able. I got his wound cleaned off. To get a child like that to stop moving, to stop twitching in some degree. Like, you should see him right now. He's sitting here, like, tapping his feet and playing with his spork. And you had his attention from the first moment.
Jad Abumrad
But it goes beyond that. According to Jennifer, after she'd been playing him the show for a few minutes, she paused it just shortly after a segment we made about a parasitic wasp.
Narrator
What it does is it flies around and it looks for a cockroach.
Jad Abumrad
That's the one. And she asked him, did you understand any of that?
Jennifer Babbage
And he repeated it back to me.
Robert Krulwich
Really?
Jennifer Babbage
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
Almost word for word.
Robert Krulwich
Maybe we should put Blake on, huh?
Jad Abumrad
Yeah.
Jennifer Babbage
Okay. Let me go get him. They are ready to talk to you, young man.
Blake
Hi.
Jad Abumrad
Hi.
Robert Krulwich
So we want to hear, like, what can you remember about the radio show?
Blake
The one about parasitic wasps?
Robert Krulwich
Yeah.
Blake
The parasitic wasp is flying around, then it finds the cockroach.
Narrator
Once it finds that cockroach, they fight.
Commercial Announcer
They tumble back and forth around and.
Blake
Around until the parasitic wasps mention a Stab it in the stomach, right in the belly.
Commercial Announcer
The cockroach twitches for a second, and.
Blake
Then it just falls over and it stings it.
Narrator
The stinger actually sort of threads its.
Blake
Way somewhere in the brain to a.
Narrator
Particular spot in the brain in a.
Blake
Way that it can control the cockroach. So when it recovers, it just stands up.
Narrator
And so now the wasp pulls it by the antenna, the cockroach's antenna, and.
Blake
Start pulling on it over till it is dead.
Jad Abumrad
Down, down, down, down.
Blake
And it lays eggs inside the cockroach. And then the eggs hatch.
Jad Abumrad
You remember the entire story?
Blake
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
Jennifer, too, is flabbergasted. She says she turned to him and was like, wow, Blake, what excellent listening comprehension you have. You do understand what you hear?
Jennifer Babbage
And he said, yes, but I don't understand when people are talking to me.
Jad Abumrad
You mean, like, he doesn't understand it when people talk at him or lecture him?
Jennifer Babbage
Yeah, and he's like. Right. Like, when I'm in trouble, I never understand what you're talking about. So I did have the thought that if only I had the means, I could record some of my lectures so that I could play them back, you know, with the right sound effects, so that he would have that same, like, intensity of listening to what I was trying to say. Oh, God.
Robert Krulwich
We could sell ourselves to mothers everywhere when they want their children to.
Jennifer Babbage
Mothers across America will be paying millions of dollars for these lectures.
Jad Abumrad
Which brings me to a really quick pitch. Public radio is all about making stories stick. That's what we try and do at Radiolab and all the shows try and do. Do you have lectures off the top of your head? Because if you give them to us, we could give them back to you in radiolabified version.
Jennifer Babbage
Well, let's see. There's. I guess there is. There's one thing, and this is. You know, this kind of gets at the whole climbing up into a tree with, like. You have to think things all the way through to the end.
Jad Abumrad
Jennifer says she said that to Blake millions of times. She's not sure if it ever gets through.
Jennifer Babbage
Think things through to the end.
Jad Abumrad
So we thought we would try and give her a new spin on it. I don't know if this is gonna work, but, hey, let's give it a shot. Here is our attempt to make a sticky lecture for Blake.
Jennifer Babbage
We have to think things all the way through. You have to think, think, think thing to think thing all the way Think, think, think all the way Think through, think, sing all the way to think, think stink all the way think stink.
Jad Abumrad
Blake, what your mom is saying is that when you want to have an adventure or invent something, don't just think about the beginning of it or what you think might happen in the middle in your mind. Take it all the way through to the end.
Jennifer Babbage
To the end. You know, it's okay to test your theories. You know, I encourage experimentation. The only way you're gonna learn is if you fail.
Jad Abumrad
She's not just saying that. I mean, take Thomas Edison, the king inventor. He tried to invent a battery, and.
Jennifer Babbage
He failed 10,000 times. But you need to think about the degree of failure. So you have to kind of consider what's kind of the best outcome and what's the worst outcome, and imagine that both of those things have happened. Like Imagine the scenario in your mind and what you would.
Jad Abumrad
Okay, let's do that. Scenario one, you're in the tree. This is a good one. And you spin the blade round, round, round and round and round and round, round and round. And it works. You're flying all through the neighborhood. So here's the question you gotta answer. What happens next?
Jennifer Babbage
What he hasn't thought is, for example, how's he going to land?
Jad Abumrad
So you gotta take it all the way through to the landing part. Now, let's play out the other scenario, the one where things don't go well. Let's say you jump out of the tree and you crash and you really hurt yourself. Well, think of how sad your mom would be, and your dad and your sister. In both cases, what you do is you make up a little movie in your head and you play it all the way through, and hopefully the good one will happen. The best outcome. But just in case, you'll now be.
Jennifer Babbage
Prepared so that you can mitigate the effects of the worst outcome. And I probably wouldn't say mitigate to my child, but.
Jad Abumrad
So we're going to do something with this lecture and send it to you. No, seriously.
Jennifer Babbage
Well, thanks, you guys.
Jad Abumrad
Thank you.
Robert Krulwich
Yes. And we have no, absolutely no connection to any kind of further experimentation of this kind.
Jennifer Babbage
You absolve yourself of responsibility.
Robert Krulwich
Blake is on his own. All right, Bye.
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Bye.
Jennifer Babbage
Bye.
Jad Abumrad
Bye, bye, bye. Now, I don't exactly know what to say here, but there is something about this story that just kind of like, gets to the whole point of why we do this. Yeah. That here you've got this kid who's obviously in a lot of pain, and he just sits still and listens to a story about parasites. You know, what we're trying to do here is tell stories that move you or keep you still in this case, but stories that draw you in and make you think differently about the world, even just a little bit, help us to do that. Here's how. Go to our website, Radiolab.org, click on the support button, and whatever you give, it goes right into the making of this show, and we really, really appreciate it. The Radiolab is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
Blake
Thanks for listening, Sam.
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Jad Abumrad
Extra Value meals are back. That means 10 tender, juicy McNuggets and.
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Jennifer Babbage
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California.
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And for delivery.
Date: November 3, 2009
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Guests: Jennifer Babbage & her son, Blake
This episode explores the story of Blake, a curious and inventive seven-and-a-half-year-old who, after attempting flight with his homemade helicopter contraption, finds himself injured and comforted by an episode of Radiolab. The narrative unfolds through interviews with Blake and his mother, Jennifer Babbage, revealing the powerful ways stories can comfort, educate, and mesmerize—even amid crisis.
Distraction & Comfort via Radio:
Struggling to get a look at Blake's wound due to his squirming, Jennifer puts on Radiolab to distract him. “I put on Radiolab and he can listen to the bit about parasites. ...He was instantly fascinated.” – Jennifer (08:29, 08:44)
Enhanced Attention:
The show calms Blake so Jennifer can clean his wound, and he listens to an entire 45-minute episode without fidgeting.
Amazing Recall:
When Jennifer pauses the show to ask if he understood, Blake repeats the segment (about parasitic wasps) nearly verbatim (09:28–10:49).
“The parasitic wasp is flying around, then it finds the cockroach.... And it lays eggs inside the cockroach. And then the eggs hatch.” – Blake (09:44–10:40)
Quote:
“But I don't understand when people are talking to me.” – Blake (11:01)
Parental Wisdom Remixed:
Using music and sound, the hosts repeat Jennifer’s mantra: “You have to think things all the way through to the end.” (12:37)
Inventorship & Risk:
Jennifer encourages experimentation, referencing Thomas Edison and stressing both learning from failure and imagining best/worst-case scenarios (13:34–14:28).
Practical Application:
Jad narrates imaginative outcomes—Blake soaring or crashing—highlighting the importance of considering consequences (14:23–15:00).
“In both cases, what you do is you make up a little movie in your head and you play it all the way through...” – Jad (14:47)
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|----------------------|-------| | 03:04 | Jennifer Babbage | “When he grows up, he's gonna be an inventor. And what he likes to build most of all is airplanes. Airplanes and helicopters.” | | 08:44 | Jennifer Babbage | “He was instantly fascinated. He listened to the whole entire podcast... and I was able—I got his wound cleaned off. To get a child like that to stop moving... you had his attention from the first moment.” | | 09:44 | Blake | “The parasitic wasp is flying around, then it finds the cockroach…” | | 11:01 | Jennifer/Blake | Jennifer: “You do understand what you hear?” Blake: “Yes, but I don't understand when people are talking to me.” | | 12:18 | Jennifer Babbage | “You have to think things all the way through to the end.” | | 14:47 | Jad Abumrad | “In both cases, what you do is you make up a little movie in your head and you play it all the way through, and hopefully the good one will happen… but just in case, you'll now be prepared...” |
Energetic, playful, and deeply empathetic, the episode beautifully showcases the blend of curiosity, risk, and learning inherent in childhood. Through Blake’s story, Radiolab emphasizes the power of audio storytelling to both captivate and comfort, illustrating how a well-told tale can soothe pain, foster learning, and perhaps even enhance parenting.
Summary by: [Radiolab Podcast Summarizer]