Okay, all right. So um, hi everybody. It's Elise and Lulu and we are here because we wanted to test if you can tell our voices apart yet. Ready? And also who am I?

You're Elise. No, I'm really okay.

Um, so we wanted to give you a podcast bonus. Um, this is a really neat story about echolocation. There was no room for it in our show, but we wanted to share it with you.

So it's about echolocation and trying to learn it. Um, and again, echolocation is this.

It's a technique that's used by an increasing number of people who are blind. They listen to how those clicks bounce off the world around them and from the sound of the clicks coming back.

They can make sense of the world in very, very real and specific ways. The technique was popularized by the man who is on our show this week, Daniel Kish.

And Lulu, you talked to a woman who tried to learn this technique, but had some unexpected complications, right? Right.

So Elise, would you like to know a really great way to make a good clicking sound? Yeah. All right. We'll just do what Daniel Kish told Julian Bell.

Imagine leaking peanut butter off the roof of your mouth.

Oh, and as soon as I did that, I got my click. Thank you, peanut butter.

Julian Bell has been blind since birth and first heard about echolocation when she was 38 years old and the mother of two boys. Up until that point, she had spent her whole life getting around unfamiliar places on someone's arm.

I really didn't feel that I had any other option, even though there were blind people that I knew who traveled more independently than I did.

But quite simply did not have the emotional ability to manage that my anxiety would be too high. She said she felt too nervous with a can or a guide dog.

Physically, I would be like serious butterflies like when you're about to go on stage or you're about to do something really scary.

But when I'm honing onto someone's arm, it was like the world returned. Yeah.

In fact, it was her husband's arm. She fell in love with first. His arm literally reached out and rescued her when a careless boyfriend had left her alone and terrified one night in college.

The feel of his arm is quite unique in a sense. I'd never get it confused with anybody else, you know.

And Thomas, her husband, loved having her on his arm too.

It was quite a nice feeling to have her on my arm. It sort of brought us closer together.

Which would eventually make Daniel Kish's echolocation lessons. Hello.

A problem. Hi. Hi.

This is Daniel Kish, the aforementioned expert clicker who Julian hired to give her echolocation lessons after she happened to hear about him on the TV one day.

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