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The Story Collider

Searching: Stories about trying to find something

The Story Collider

Story Collider, Inc.

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Performing Arts, Arts, Science

4.4818 Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you think about it, science is one big act of searching. There's always something to look for, whether it's the answer to a hypothesis or the next Goldilocks planet. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers find themselves looking high and low. Part 1: Comedian Sam Lyons is determined to not get involved with his partner’s feral cats, until one goes missing. Part 2: In an act of desperation, Bhaskar Sompalli goes on a hunt to find free lab equipment to make his graduate school experiment work. Sam Lyons is a comedian, musician, actor, and Gilmore girls enthusiast - and not always in that order! He joined our Story Collider staff with an aversion to science, but the practice of sharing his own stories and helping other tellers with them as opened his eyes to how science is all around us, ready to embrace without strangling. You can likely catch Sam and his partner Emma feeding feral cats in an alley near you. Bhaskar Sompalli is an engineer and storyteller living in the bay area. After graduate studies in Tulsa and Chicago, he's worked on several technologies over the years; from fuel cells and batteries to semiconductors, and founded a battery startup. An optimist who is passionate about clean tech, he now works full-time on using hydrogen fuel cells and batteries to tackle climate change. He has narrated several of his personal essays on San Francisco's KQED NPR station. He is a writer whose first fiction novella Utopia Revisited 2050 is now out on Amazon as a paperback, and is currently working on his second novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

A science story, huh?

0:04.0

Is NYU scientist the...

0:06.0

I felt...

0:07.0

I was so...

0:09.0

And I just thought, well...

0:10.0

It was that golden moment.

0:12.0

Because science was on my side.

0:15.0

Hey, everyone.

0:25.2

Welcome to the story clutter, where true personal stories about science help us to discover how weird and wonderful it is to exist in this world and be a human.

0:33.4

I'm your host, Misha Gaiyowski, and this week our stories are about mystery and discovery.

0:38.1

Or, I mean, in less romantic terms, looking for things.

0:41.6

From a wild cat chase to secret tunnels, this episode is an adventure from start to finish.

0:47.1

Our first story is from Sam Lyons.

0:48.9

Sam is a comedian, musician, actor, and Gilmore Girls enthusiast.

0:52.9

He's also a story collector producer.

0:55.0

His story was first told at our team retreat last year

0:57.4

and was then recorded at St. Louis Public Radio's Public Media Commons.

1:02.1

His story is all about realizing you actually care for something

1:05.0

way more than you plan to.

1:07.3

Something deeply relatable if you've ever reluctantly fallen in love with someone or something,

1:12.3

despite your best efforts to remain impartial. Here's Sam.

1:20.7

You probably can't tell this by observing me, but growing up I was always an avid reader.

...

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