This is on point. I'm Magna Chakrabardi. Ed Young is our guest today. For the past two

years, he's been one of the most prolific and relied upon journalists reporting on

COVID. That body of work at the Atlantic magazine won Ed two of journalism's highest

prizes, the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award. He's also been a frequent guest

on this program to help us better understand this first in a century pandemic. But that

is not why Ed is back with us today. The COVID pandemic was a massive disruption to everything

in the world, yes, and to a project that Ed was working on before the beginning of 2020.

He had been exploring something utterly, utterly different and Ed's with us now to talk

about it. So Ed, welcome back to the show. It is so good to have you back here again. First

of all, tell me what was that passion project that you had immersed yourself in before COVID

changed the world. Hi, Magna. I'm really good to be back and talking to you again. So the

project I was working on was a book called An immense World, which came out last week.

And it's about the sensory worlds of other animals, the incredible ways in which the creatures

that we share this planet with perceive the world around us. And the core of the book

is this idea that each species perceives the world in radically different ways. I could

be in this room with an elephant, a songbird, a turtle, a rattlesnake. In first, you might

wonder why I'm doing it in that space with all these animals. How did that happen? But

also you would understand that we would all be sharing the same physical space, but we would

be experiencing that space in radically, radically different ways. And that's what the book is

about. It's about going on this voyage through the senses of other creatures. So you do present

a thought exercise in more detail about what experiencing the world through those different

sensory windows would be like. And I'd like to go through that thought exercise in a moment.

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