The Mysteries of Lightning, The Science of Sweat, Cooking with Grass

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Vroom.com. Few things are more devastating than a loved one that's gone missing. From Wondery, The Vanished is a podcast where host Marissa Jones tells stories of missing persons that have gone overlooked. Listen to The Vanished podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Good morning.

Jane is off this weekend. I'm Tracy Smith and this is Sunday Morning. Lightning. A flash of light streaking across the sky.

Who hasn't marveled at its stark beauty? But lightning, as we all know, can also be deadly. And even though science has come a long way since Ben Franklin and his first lightning rod, we still have only a limited understanding of this most humbling of natural phenomena.

David Pogue this morning offers us a snapshot. Some people think of lightning as dangerous. It was right there. It just sounded like it was a bomb going off. It was total confusion.

I didn't understand what had happened. And some think of lightning as beautiful. You can watch this storm just move across the valley below and just capture bolt after bolt.

Coming up on Sunday morning, the art and the science of lightning. He became a household name as Uncle Jesse in the classic 90s sitcom Full House. But all these years later, John Stamos still has a full house and a full heart.

You want a clap? After more than four decades in showbiz, John Stamos is setting the record straight. I think people thought I was out doing a lot of things with a lot of women that I wasn't. Really, even during those days when people saw you as the ladies man, Lothario, out on the town. You know, I would just be, I would fall asleep too early to get in any trouble.

The real John Stamos, ahead on Sunday morning. Here in these dog days of summer, with high temperature records being set almost daily, we've asked Faith Sehle to delve into the many secrets of sweat. Birds don't do it. Bees don't do it. Most animals can't do it, at least not the way we do.

It's sledding. It helps explain why we're human. Not only is it an essential evolutionary adaptation, it keeps us alive when the temperature climbs.

Later on Sunday morning, we ask why we're so squeamish about getting a little sweaty. Ben Mankiewicz is in conversation with Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham. Dr. John LaPook introduces us to a virtuoso violinist with quite a story to tell. David Martin has the latest on the suspicious death of the Russian mercenary who defied Vladimir Putin. Luke Burbank checks out some tasty cuisine that's truly all the buzz. Plus, a story from Steve Hartman, commentary from Charles Blow of the New York Times, and more on this last Sunday morning of the month, August 27th, 2023.

And we'll be back in a moment. Casey Shane was murdered in the middle of an August night, shot point blank while idling in his Dodge pickup truck in North Indianapolis. There was no physical evidence, no known motive, and no one coming forward with information. Except one woman, who swears to this day she saw Leon Detroit Benson pull the trigger. Leon Benson was sentenced to 60 years in prison, all because one person swore they saw something. But what if she was wrong?

And what if we could prove it? From Wondery and Campside Media comes season three of the hit podcast Suspect, co-hosted by me, Matt Scher, alongside attorney Lara Bazelon. This is a story of a botched police investigation, the dangers of shaky eyewitness testimony, and a community who feared law enforcement with good reason. Listen to Suspect, five shots in the dark, wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all eight episodes ad-free on Wondery Plus.

Find Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So how much do we really know about the celestial spectacle we call lightning? David Pogue is here to illuminate. Oh, it's coming right for Sierra Vista.

Let's hope it holds together. Oh, there it is. There's a little something. Hi Storm. Arizona photographer Lori Bailey is tracking a lightning storm. I have to admit, I enjoy feeling that the atmospheric energy when you get close to lightning, it's kind of a natural hive. It's not easy to photograph something that's visible for only a few millionths of a second. Let's see that again. It occurs to me you have three cameras going.

I do. How are you going to go click, click, click in time to catch the lightning? This sensor is what clicks the shutter because Lori's brain is just too slow to say there's the lightning. But there's more to this profession than automated camera triggers and a lot of patience.

You also need... That last little thing, right? Luck. You can do everything right and still not have the cards fall in your favor. When conditions do go her way, the results are spectacular. She posts them online.

When people say, what do you do? I study lightning. Oh really?

And there's always a story. Philip Bitzer is a lightning physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I remember when I was in first grade, my parents explained that lightning happens when clouds rub against each other. I'm guessing the science is a little more elaborate.

That's not too, too far off base. There is something that rubs and sort of connects to each other. It's not two clouds rubbing together. Inside a storm cloud, millions of tiny ice crystals collide with slushy hail droplets. The ice crystals blow upward with a positive charge.

The slush droplets drift downward with a negative charge. Eventually, an electrical discharge results in a bolt of lightning. It usually stays inside the cloud or hops from cloud to cloud.

But the bolts that most interest people are the ones that shoot down to the ground or seem to. When we talk about misconceptions, does lightning go up or down? And it starts with stuff that comes out of the cloud, but that stuff that comes out of the cloud, it's so dim you don't make it out with your eye.

But the part that you see actually comes from the ground and goes up to the cloud. A lightning bolt is about the width of your thumb, as bright as a hundred million light bulbs, and five times as hot as the surface of the sun. It will superheat the air right around it, and eventually that superheat will cool off and relax into this acoustical wave that we all know as thunder. So you can't have thunder without the lightning. You know what's fun about interviewing a lightning physicist? You can get to the bottom of all those traditional lightning tropes, like lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

So it absolutely does. And often what will happen is a single lightning flash, it can hit three to five times in the same place. Or lightning always strikes the tallest point.

That's another misnomer. It doesn't have to hit the tallest object. I often say lightning's already traveled a couple miles from the cloud to the ground.

At that point, it's going to go where it wants to go. We think of lightning striking as being very rare. People always say, you know, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than... Somewhere around 45 times every second around the world, you'll get lightning. 45 times a second. All told, about 1.4 billion bolts hit the Earth each year, numbers that are expected to rise as the planet warms.

And about a quarter of a million times a year, lightning hits people. I remember the sound. It just sounded like it was a bomb going off. It was almost deafening. And my vision was slow motion. In 2015, a sudden storm interrupted a school soccer game in North Carolina.

Can you put your head down? Teacher Shauna Turner sought shelter in the doorway of this shed. But when lightning struck a nearby light pole, millions of volts coursed through the ground and into her body.

I love to watch them run. Like the vast majority of human lightning strikes, it was an indirect hit. At that point, right when the sound was, I was thrown to the ground. Within about a minute, my arm, it felt like it was boiling in my arm. It eventually went to where my feet were tingling. And within the first couple of weeks of class, I couldn't remember some of my students' names. Lightning strikes often lead to memory issues, heart problems, and even personality changes.

After all, your brain and your heart are electrical systems. There was one instance where I went to call on a student's name and I couldn't come up with it. So I just turned to the board and, you know, tears rolling. I was trying to keep it away so my students didn't see it, trying to choke it back.

And he came up to me and he hugged me and he said, you can call me anything you want. There wasn't much doctors could do. All I kept hearing was, this is the strangest thing I've ever seen, or what you're describing doesn't make sense.

Eventually, she found a group of lightning survivors on Facebook. That's when I started to figure out that I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only one having these symptoms. I wasn't crazy. This is called the invisible disease.

They cannot see the neuropathy and how my feet go from burning hot to freezing cold, and sometimes I can't even walk. The group gets together twice a year, and Turner has never missed a meeting. Oh, I love you. I needed this so bad. Now, if you want to minimize your chances of getting hit by lightning, go indoors or stay in your car. When thunder roars, go indoors.

There's a reason why we say that. Still, the biggest threat isn't lightning hitting people. It's lightning starting fires. Most forest fires are caused by humans, but most damage is done by lightning-caused wildfires, usually because when lightning happens, it's not near a campground where you know it happened.

It happened in some remote location that you may not know that the fire started right away. Thunder and lightning were the weapons of Zeus, the most powerful god of all. We may no longer believe that Zeus hurls lightning down from Mount Olympus when he's irritated, but there's still a lot we don't know. Everybody thinks lightning, well, you must understand that happens all the time, and yet we don't.

I mean, I guess it's hard, right? Like, you can't really put a lightning bolt on your desk. Right. The stuff that we see only lasts for maybe a millisecond. Our best hope is to build instruments. In fact, Philip Bitzer himself helped develop a lightning camera that's on the space station at this moment. And we're sitting above the Earth, looking down, just looking for these little blips of light sitting on top of clouds. Is there any practical value toward mapping the lightning and how it happens, or is it just kind of neat? We know that lightning will ramp up as a precursor to severe weather often, and so we can watch the lightning activity start to increase or start to jump. We've also been able to use it to help aviation. We can route planes around storms that are electrically active. This is where I got a grasp on all the symptoms from the strike, so I'm holding onto the lightning bolt. Back here on Earth, Shauna Turner is still fighting to recover from her lightning strike eight years ago. I mean, obviously the brain damage will never get any better, but I've learned how to do other things to assist with it. So I'm not going to let it stop me.

If I let it stop me, it wins. And in Arizona, two days after our visit, photographer Lori Bailey got some of that good luck she'd been chasing. Oh my goodness, giant bolts! Oh baby, wow! Oh my goodness, that was fantastic!

This is where you feel alive and where you feel the energy of Mother Nature. It happened yesterday. Come on down! Television game show host Bob Barker, who served for half a century as host of First Truth or Consequences. All right, let's go! Start right now! Come on, let's go!

And then... Here's the star of The Price is Right, Bob Barker! The Price is Right died at his home in Los Angeles. Off screen, Barker earned a name for himself as a passionate animal rights activist. Bob Barker, come on down! When he received a lifetime achievement award at the Daytime Emmys in 1999, he famously concluded his remarks saying, It has been suggested that since this is a lifetime achievement award that I should say something profound. And I shall. Help control the pet population.

Have your pet bathe anew. Thank you everybody! The legendary Bob Barker was 99 years old. You've heard the expression cooking with gas. Luke Burbank introduces us to some folks cooking with grass. Welcome to High Cuisine, the world's largest cooking competition show.

If you've turned on the TV lately or maybe found yourself in a certain high-end kitchen somewhere in America, you might have noticed a new green on the menu, one you might even be able to smell before you taste it. There is a revolution taking the cooking world by storm because of this star ingredient. Pot. Weed.

Chronic. Now that cannabis is legal in some form or another in more than half of the states, some of its top chefs are finding ways to integrate it into their recipes. Suffice it to say, the pot brownie has come a long way.

There is such a huge bridge from the brownie to where we are today. We're cooking racks of lamb. We're making intricate desserts. We're doing 10-course tasting menus that are strain specific. Now there's different levels of extractions and distillates that you can use in order to achieve the effect without the flavor or with the flavor. Chef Miguel Trinidad is known for his time on the Vice show Bong Appetit.

These days he hosts semi-clandestine, semi-legal pop-up dinners through his company 99th Floor. Dinners in which everything is infused. Where actually is the cannabis?

It's in many different stages. In the demi for the steak, we took some of the beef fat and infused that and then put that back into the demi. Here is some cannabis butter. This has been cooked extremely low temperature for a long time because I wanted to draw out a lot of the terpenes without making it taste too weedy.

Terpenes are the chemical compounds in cannabis that give it that characteristic funky smell and taste and can make it a challenge to cook with. Even for noted Portland cookbook author Lori Wolf. Learning how to cook with it is kind of learning how to cook with a really dreadful tasting spice. Wolf has written five cookbooks on the subject, earning her the title back in 2017 of the Martha Stewart of Edibles. When Wolf and other chefs cook with cannabis, they say the key is to be extremely precise with the dosage going into, say, a butter board that's actually made with canna butter.

Cheers. And Wolf says the key when eating infused food is to be very patient in waiting for the effects to set in lest you go on a trip you didn't mean to buy a ticket for. Because it can take two, it can even take three hours on occasion depending on when you've eaten, what your metabolism is like. For me it's about the delicious meal and the cannabis is like extra. Back in Brooklyn, Tiffany Span is attending her second 99th floor cannabis dinner in two weeks, which she'd found out about on Instagram naturally. Can you feel the vibe shift as the night goes on and people are starting to enjoy themselves? People talk to each other. Everyone started loosening up because I could see the whole table.

So yeah, people do start to get louder and happier. As the night wore on, Chef Trinidad's dinner moved into full swing. A parade of sumptuous plates were served.

The music of Wu-Tang Clan bumped through the speakers. It truly was a meal for both the body and the soul. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous egg strokes at an absolute beauty. That's F. Murray Abraham as the envious composer Antonio Salieri in the classic film Amadeus. The performance earned him an Oscar. And as you're about to see, it rarely leaves his side. Ben Mankiewicz is talking with the sometimes controversial, often contemplative, F. Murray Abraham.

You need some more light? F. Murray Abraham's Academy Award, like its owner, is a bit of a character. Was that a squirrel? That was a hamster. This golden pet doesn't gather dust in a display case. It's a traveling companion.

Hello. I hide him on the stage just for fun. And it's in the trash can, he's in a suitcase, he's in a drawer somewhere. Here's what surprised me about F. Murray Abraham. He laughs a lot. Here's what didn't surprise me. He's dead serious about his craft.

I can't imagine not acting. My work is my salvation. And he's still delivering.

You're blaming me for your situation? That's rich. As a sexist yet charming patriarch in The White Lotus. And I get older and older, but the women I desire remain young.

Natural, right? Or an ill-fated drug dealer in Scarface. I'm doing the talking here, not you. You need to watch my back, watch my back. Or in the role that won him his pet Oscar. A composer bitterly jealous of Mozart in Amadeus.

And music finished as no music is ever finished. One key to his success, says Abraham, is a six-decade career spent believing in his talent. The only way to become great is to believe you're great. And that takes a certain degree of arrogance.

But a truly great actor has to have a sense of humility as well. And that balance, it took me a lot of years to discover that. This will be a discovery to many of you. The F in F. Murray Abraham. He F-ing made it up. My father's name was Farid. He was Syrian. So I put the F up there in his honor. But also, like you sensed, that added this tiny little whisper of mystery.

Yeah, I guess so. Murray Abraham doesn't seem to have a ring to it. Born into a blue-collar family in Pittsburgh, Abraham had asthma as a kid. So they moved to El Paso.

Cleaner air beckoned. So did trouble. I was kind of a hoodlum. We got in fights and we stole cars. Very easily you could have had a different life.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And I took speech and drama. And the teacher was named Lucia P. Hutchins. And she introduced me to Shakespeare.

She saved my life, I think. I started acting. I won a state contest. I won a scholarship. Went to college on that scholarship. One hundred dollars.

After college, he moved to New York, where the serious actors were. And where the underwear ads were. A limp waistband? No, it's our new super band! When you land a Through the Loom ad, and you're the leaf, I mean, do you call your folks? No, they call you. I saw you on television. Movie roles soon came. Small ones.

But Abraham made them count. Five seventeens closer and they're in uniform. A good cop and all the president's men. Police! Put your hands up! A bad one in Serpico. Frank, why don't you go up there and check it out? Why don't you?

I got the wrong clothes. I'll take your sharpener. When he wasn't looking for work, he was perfecting that distinct style of speech. You grow up in El Paso, speaking Spanish a lot of the time. Yep. So, where is this accent?

What is this? I realized that my accent was going to be in the way, because I began to listen to myself. I began to listen to records by Gilgood and Olivier, because I wanted to do Shakespeare. If there be any good thing to be done that may to thee do ease and grace to me, speak to me. And I realized that my accent was wrong.

It was in the way. So I began to study what they sounded like, and I began to imitate them. Oh, love!

Well, of course in Italy we know nothing about love. It all came together, the accent, the way he carries himself, the confidence that leaps off the screen, when director Milos Forman cast him as Salieri, the villain in Amadeus. That was Mozart. Wolfgang. Amadeus Mozart. Salieri was the part of parts. Abraham beat the odds, then beat Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney, Sam Waterston, and his co-star Tom Holtz, to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1985.

The winner is F. Murray Abraham. I was wearing my lucky socks that night. You were? Yeah. Do you ever go online? Do you ever watch that moment?

I do. It was a pretty good speech. It would be a lie if I told you I didn't know what to say because I've been working on this speech for about 25 years. The Oscar came with fame and offers to work, but not the kind of offers Murray expected or wanted. I felt like that award for that performance demanded that I do something equally good, equally as prestigious and as honorable, and all the stuff that was being offered was just terrible. So I started doing theater.

Theater for 90 bucks a week. Did that cost you, you think? Yeah, I think it did. I think it absolutely did.

You realize that you need the arrogance to support yourself, otherwise you're going to get beaten down, so that when you finally do become successful, you become super arrogant and a little bit impossible to get along with. There's also been some controversy. He was fired from the Apple TV series Mythic Quest last year after allegations of sexual misconduct. In a statement, Abraham said this is a sincere and deeply felt apology. He said he told jokes, nothing more, adding, I have grown in my understanding from this experience.

It's been a difficult last year for Abraham. He lost the person who's been by his side for much of his life, his wife, Kate, who died last fall. Half of this statue belongs to my beloved wife, Kate.

Thank you. You strike me as just grounded about the mistakes that you made in your career and about what went well. I'm going to guess being married for 60 years had a great deal to do with that. It's absolutely. Well, my marriage is the rock of my life.

It's as simple as that. She never lost faith. And there were some hard times, baby. She supported this family for years. The luckiest day of my life was meeting Kate.

Give you one? A few minutes later, we got to talking about the vocal exercises Abraham, now 83, does every single day. And with old woes, new wail, my dear, time's waste. He recites from memory various Shakespeare sonnets. Clearly, Kate is still on his mind. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.

Abraham admits it's hard being in the house without Kate. The good news is the work keeps coming. Does it feel any different now to be part of an ensemble cast like White Lotus in your 80s than it did to be in your early 40s making Amadeus?

That's really a very hard question to answer. I believe that I haven't changed that much in terms of who and what I think I am. But I really believe in the dignity of acting.

So you're going to keep at it, I take it. My dream is to die on stage. Last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary leader who led a failed rebellion against Vladimir Putin, died in a suspicious plane crash. As national security correspondent David Martin tells us, his death, however shocking, was hardly a surprise. When the plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin fell out of the sky Wednesday, no one doubted for a moment Vladimir Putin was behind it. CIA director Bill Burns had predicted as much weeks ago. Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback, so I would be surprised if Prigozhin escapes further retribution for this.

When Prigozhin wrote away a free man after leading a short-lived mutiny against the Russian military, Burns knew it was only a matter of time. Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold. Putin runs Russia like the godfather of a crime family, littering the landscape with violent deaths, mystery illnesses, and dubious suicides.

More than two dozen by U.S. count. My son died yesterday and he was killed by a little tiny nuclear bomb. Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had defected to England, died in 2006 after drinking tea poisoned with a radioactive substance called polonium. It took ten years for investigators to trace it to Russian intelligence agents. The conclusion that the Russian state was probably involved in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko is deeply disturbing. Theresa May was British Home Secretary then.

She was Prime Minister when it happened again in 2018. Another defector, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, were nearly killed by nerve agent while sitting on a park bench. Once again, the trail led back to Moscow. It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. What does it take to get on Putin's hit list?

He's got a very low tolerance level. If you cross Putin, the likelihood is you're going to die. Leon Panetta was director of the CIA and secretary of defense in the Obama administration. One way or another, he ultimately takes care of the problem, whether it's an open window or whether it's poisonings or whether it's some kind of gunshot in the middle of the night. One of his most vocal critics, Alexei Navalny, is in prison now.

But before that, he nearly died after being poisoned by the same nerve agent Putin's spies had used in England. Does he really care whether the finger of suspicion points at him? In some ways, I think deep down, he takes pride in the fact that people know that he's going to get back at them. His idea of the perfect crime is one where you actually know who did it.

You just can't do anything about it. That's exactly right. In his mind, that basically makes clear to Russia and to the world that he is in total control of what goes on in Russia. Steve Hartman this morning has the story of a school bus driver who really takes his job to heart. This may look like a normal family reunion, but as you'll soon see, Reed Moon of Zillionople, Pennsylvania is no ordinary patriarch. Good to see you. And this is no ordinary family. This is Annagale. Far from it. Bethany, here's DJ.

Handsome lad, that's Louis. How many kids do you have? I'll say 200. Maybe even more.

No, they're not biologically my kids. But emotionally, they surely are. That's how attached he is to the students who rode his school bus. A job he held for 27 years, even though it wasn't exactly his first choice. Reed sort of fell into the job.

Well, not sort of. He did fall into the job. In 1990, he fell off a roof working as a handyman. After that, he wanted a job closer to the ground. But ironically, he says no job has ever lifted him higher. It's his children. And being in a position where you can love kids every single day is a lovely position to be in. He just made everybody feel safe and loved and cared for.

Do anything he possibly could to help somebody. I don't really have a teacher that I remember. I remember my best driver. So many kids feel the exact same way that more than 20 of them had Reed, who is also a pastor, officiate their weddings. A bond so strong that even though Reed retired years ago, former students gathered recently for one last ride. And they're finding their assigned seat.

Right here in the front. That they had 20 years ago. And now their child is sitting on their lap.

And that kind of feeling is a wonderful thing. And as for his secret to fostering all this. So we only had two rules on the bus. Show everyone love and respect. Love and respect to everybody. It's a lesson they carry with them. Love and respect.

And on them. Got a love and respect tattoo? I'm convinced that when you love and respect people, most of the time that's what you're going to get back. Get back. Have a good day, Mr. Man.

By the busload. Thanks, Rosie. Have a great day at school, honey. Hey, Michelle. Michelle. Can you shout, Uncle Jesse? That's it. You said it. You said Uncle Jesse.

Starting tomorrow, use the toilet, just like the rest of us. John Stamos may be best remembered as Uncle Jesse in the hit sitcom, Full House. Hard to believe, but this heartthrob from the 90s has just turned 60. John Stamos, one of our Sunday best. Let's start with a big question.

Why not? Do you feel like you're having a moment? I hope I am, but then if you have a moment, then that moment has to end, right, or something. I'm happier than I've ever been.

You want me to clap? Truth is, John Stamos has a lot to be happy about. In the past four decades, Stamos has become something of a fixture in our lives. He's the heartthrob who won't ever break your heart.

The friend who won't ever let you down. And from here to Broadway, someone who's been called one of the truly underrated actors in the game. These days, he's also a husband and a father.

He married actor and model Caitlin McHugh in 2018, just before the birth of their son, Billy. It was the end of what he says was maybe one of the longest childhoods in history. I went into becoming an adult kicking and screaming.

And when you have the whole world going, you look 20 in a year then. I didn't have any of those tent poles that say you're an adult. I was just skating through. You didn't have to grow up.

I didn't have to. I had a Peter Pan syndrome, which is dangerous, you know. The boy who didn't want to grow up was born in Orange County, California in 1963.

John Stamos was the first of Bill and Loretta Stamos's three children, and even as a kid, little John seemed destined for the stage. And did you dream of being a star? I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be famous so bad. And then once I got it, I loved it.

I still do. You know, these people go, Oh, I hate being famous. I hate taking pictures. If you see me somewhere, ask for a picture.

I'm happy to do it. Because it's what I wanted my whole life. Every time I turn around, you're yelling at me.

Now, if that's how it's going to be, I'm back out on the streets. He skipped college to try his hand at acting and landed a role as Blackie Parish on the long-running soap General Hospital. Stamos was a star with a reputation as a ladies' man. There was a long time when I felt like, I need to be this lothario, because people were living vicariously through me, which I thought. And maybe they were. I wasn't that guy. I mean, there were moments, but I think people thought I was out doing a lot of things with a lot of women that I wasn't. First of all, the thing that saved me most was I would go to bed around 8 o'clock at night.

I was always asleep. But his star really took off in 1987, when he was cast as Uncle Jesse Katsopoulos in the TV series Full House. Hey, look alive. Uncle Jesse's here. So Full House.

Full House comes along. I'm not going to lie. It was very difficult, a lot of it, a lot of it was. Why? Because it just wasn't where I saw myself.

I mean, the reviews were like, this show won't last till Thanksgiving. Gently now, gently, there we go. This is great.

We should be mothers. Oh, yeah. And now I'm so proud of it. Now I'm really happy that I did that show.

I'm glad I did it, obviously. Whatever his feelings about Full House, it made John Stamos a next-level star and gave him a best friend in co-star Bob Saget. This was Saget's toast at his friend's 50th birthday bash. You deserve so much happiness, and you are so full of love, and you are such a great person, and the talent and the looks, everybody resents, but you are just, you know, you're just a heart, and I just love you very, very much.

The two were practically inseparable, and when Saget died in January 2022 after a fall in a Florida hotel room, Stamos was shattered. I don't know what else to say about other than, obviously, you know, I met one of the biggest influences in my life was Bob. I wouldn't be who I am without Bob. My parents, that's obvious, but him, you know, he was there for everything, all the good, all the bad. He was my brother. He was the brother that I always wanted. This is Bob's guitar that his wife gave to me.

You can only play dirty songs on here. John Stamos is a collector. His home is filled with photos of heroes who became friends. The surgeon concurs with my assessment. Hey, don't worry, boss.

I'm not one of those I-told-you-so kids. He's also collected a few screen credits, like a long-term part on the hit series, ER, and more. With looks, charm, and a star on the Walk of Fame, it always seemed like Stamos had the perfect life, but his first marriage to model actress Rebecca Romijn ended in divorce, and as he says in a new memoir coming out later this fall, he had other dark days as well. Have you pretty much worked steadily since General Hospital? Has there ever really been a dry spell? Yeah, I think there was a time. I think I'm in a dry spell right now.

I haven't worked in a couple days. That's how you look at it. That's how actors look at it. Yes, of course, there was times. I don't want to labor on it, but in my first marriage, I think I was consumed with her and not my own career, and I just kind of let things go. I felt like I've done it.

That was my thing, too. For the longest time when I was not sober, I was fuzzy, I thought, I've done it all. I don't want to kill myself, but I didn't care if I died. You didn't care if you died? I said, I've done it all. I've died.

If I die tomorrow, it's okay. What was I thinking? I hadn't done it all. I still haven't done it all, not even close. And he got something of a wake-up call in 2015 when he was arrested for driving under the influence. You know, that fateful night of, I got in my car, I thought I could drive, and I couldn't. And I just have flashes in my mind about driving in circles, and people were driving near me, and the roller went around, Uncle Jesse, pull over. You know, Jesse, you're driving.

And then I went to rehab, and it was the hardest thing ever. My friend said, you know, your mom was really worried about you. He said, my mom would call him and say, I'm worried about John Edward. I thought I was fooling everybody. That's the thing, too. Anyway, that was that.

So when that happened, I said, I can't screw this up now. I have to stay with this. And here's something you might not know about John Stamos. He's a hell of a drummer.

He's been playing with the Beach Boys and co-founder Mike Love since the 1980s. You two have gotten close over the years. I mean, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but what- He asked me to be in his wedding. Not in my wedding.

He married- Officiate. Caitlin and I. Yeah, yeah. You know how they say, don't meet your heroes? I'm glad that I met him, because he's everything that you want Mike Love to be.

And maybe, after a few decades of figuring it out, John Stamos is everything he wants to be, too. So what's the future look like? I don't know. I don't know.

More kids, I hope. But I'm not looking too far in advance. I'm just thinking about, no. Because the next moment might be something, you know, gone. Right? And this moment's pretty great. This is a great moment. Winnie the Pooh said something like, today is my new favorite day. Making these new memories, and it's, you know, my new favorite day. Today is my new favorite day.

It's been called nature's air conditioning. Faith Salie this morning sweats the details. We've all felt it. At first comes the trickle, and then comes the flood. It's embarrassed us.

Even torpedoed a presidential campaign. Your opponent. But when was the last time you were grateful for sweat? Why do you think we are so squeamish when it comes to sweat? It is utterly out of our control. Think of most other bodily fluids.

Ping or other things. Tears? Tears, right? You can usually hold those back to go to a private place to release them, but sweat? No way.

You have zero control. Sarah Everts is the author of The Joy of Sweat. Why do humans sweat? Well, we sweat so that we don't die. Even just a few degrees up is a fever, so we have to keep our body temperature in a very tight window, and sweat is how we do it. During this summer of record-breaking heat, Everts says no other body function is so essential, yet so misunderstood. What's in our sweat?

Everything. It's not just salt, because we source sweat from blood. Anything that's circulating in your blood comes out in sweat, so our blood is very, very salty. You have lactic acid or vitamins, hormones.

It sort of reveals our secrets. The myth that you can detoxify by sweating it out dates to the ancient Greek doctor Galen, who mistakenly thought that the body excreted superfluous serums as sweat. Detoxing by sweating is just not a thing.

Like, the way our body works is, you know, you filter the bad stuff in your blood out through your kidneys, and that goes out in pee. Another mechanism to cool the body is sweating. To understand perspiration, first, you need a little science lesson. The glands remove water from the blood and then secrete it through the pores onto the surface of the skin. Those are called eccrine sweat glands, and we have between 2 and 5 million of them all over the body. How do you measure sweat glands? Well, I'm going to measure your sweat glands today. We have got our little sweat inducer here. Andrew Best teaches biology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. So this is going to go for five minutes, assuming the batteries don't die.

Okay. He's been collecting data to study why there's such a variation in sweat gland numbers. Your sweat glands can double in size, kind of like a muscle. You work out a muscle, it gets bigger, sweat glands do that, too, and they can increase how much sweat they make by about 50% as you acclimatize. Best says our ability to sweat has played a fundamental role in our becoming human.

I don't think that's widely appreciated, but it's up there with walking on two legs. While humans have sweat glands all over, most mammals only have them on their paws, hands, or feet. It's linked with the fight-or-flight response. Having a little bit of moisture on your fingertips gives you better gripping. This evolved in early mammals tens of millions of years ago to give mammals that ability to have a little extra traction in a moment of panic. And that ancient response still kicks in today when we find ourselves perspiring when we're nervous. Not only did sweaty hands and feet help us escape our predators, Best says that we have sweat to thank for empowering us as hunters. As sweat glands evolved to spread over increasingly hairless bodies, our meat-eating ancestors could chase down their prey without overheating. So an animal could outrun us, but we could out-sweat it.

Yes. And therefore outrun them over a longer distance. It's why today we can run marathons. Humans are among the rare mammals who sweat to cool themselves. Other animals use, well, different means. For example, dogs and many furry animals use their tongue and saliva. They'll lick themselves and evaporate the heat off that way.

But as you can imagine, when you have a big bunch of fur, it's not as efficient cooling. Some animals will urinate on themselves. So like seals, for example. Vultures poop on their legs.

It's very watery poop. Bees vomit on themselves, right? So the next time you're on the subway or a bus and you're grossed out by your fellow humans sweating away, just be glad that, you know, it's just sweat because they could be peeing and vomiting and licking themselves to stay cool. Everett's calls sweating a human superpower because of its astonishing efficiency as a cooling mechanism. So what about it's not the heat, it's the humidity? Why don't we feel like we're cooling off if we sweat when we're in a humid place? You know, if you're like in a desert, you often don't even notice that you're sweating. And that's because there's very little water in the air around you. And so that as your sweat is evaporating away, that is being whisked off. When you're in a humid environment, that means effectively that there's like a lot of water molecules in the air. And so if you have like a layer of sweat, it's harder chemically for the evaporation to happen, right? Because there's just so much space for water in the air. It gets harder to cool down when there is a lot of humidity around. Dry idea. And as for the saying, never let them see you sweat, you can thank the antiperspirant advertising for that.

We buy more than $80 billion worth of antiperspirants every year. It's okay to be anxious, as long as you don't look anxious. Dry idea, never let them see you sweat. There it is.

It's done. I did let them see me sweat, all in the name of science. Ah, you're dripping a little bit. I'm dripping. You're a good sweater. Thank you.

Yeah. With about 103 sweat glands per square centimeter, it turns out I have low sweat gland density, according to Best. But my glands did produce a lot of sweat.

And Everts reminds me not to feel bad about that. I kind of think we all need a sweat pep talk. It is this amazing thing that has allowed humans to live anywhere in the world. It also keeps us from dying. Sweat is a miracle. It is.

I really wish we would all find a lot less shame and a lot more joy in sweat. He's been called one of the greatest violinists of his generation, but there's a lot more to his story. Dr. John Lapook introduces us to virtuoso Augustin Hadelich. It's not every day you get to see an 18th century violin up close. So 1744 is when it was made.

So not quite 300 years. That instrument is in the loving hands of Augustin Hadelich. It's, I think, natural to feel like some affection even though it's a piece of wood that we feel this affection to our instrument. In the rarefied world of classical music, Hadelich stands out. At 39, he's a superstar soloist with the globetrotting itinerary and critical acclaim to prove it.

The New Yorker magazine has called him an artist with no evident limitations. So central is the violin to his life that not playing it is not an option. After a day or two or three, my fingers stop twitching and I just have to play something and I feel much, much better. After more than 30 years of playing the violin, it almost becomes something that you need, you know?

It's a dependence. About how old were you when you completely fell in love with it? Maybe I was eight years old, seven or eight years old. By then, he was a child prodigy, giving concerts in his native Tuscany. By 11, he was performing with orchestras. For him, it was just part of being a kid. Your parents give you a violin and you're like, great, you know? You take lessons and you never really think about why do you play music, why are you a musician?

And I think I maybe tackled that question earlier than I would have otherwise. Hadelich had to tackle that question at age 15 when a fire broke out on his family's farm. He suffered extensive burns and his chances of survival were unclear. It was really very, very serious, but once it looked like I would make it, then I started thinking a lot about, but I probably won't be able to play the violin and the piano anymore. His right hand, the one that holds the bow, was burned, but he regained use of it through surgery and therapy.

His left hand, crucial to any violinist, was somehow spared. Looking back at it, did it give you a different relationship with music? Did it give you a different perspective? Before this fire, I was a child. There wasn't a need to really answer tough questions about what music means to me.

There was no reason to ask myself that question. But then once I, if you realize, you might lose it. That's, I think, when I realized, how important it was to me. Sitting just feet away as Augustin Hardelich breezes through Bach, you'll realize something too, the mysterious power of music to uplift and inspire. Nobody knows exactly why we play music at all.

We get no evolutionary advantage from making music. For some reason, it's something that affects us very, very deeply and makes us feel things that are actually quite hard to put into words. COVID hammered that home when this virtuoso accustomed to selling out concert halls serenaded social media audiences instead. He says the pandemic pause gave him a new appreciation for the joy of live music. I think I cherish the moment on stage playing for audiences even more than before.

There's a special feeling in the air, and you somehow hear the music more and experience it more intensely. So, yeah, I'm loving every moment of it. Tomorrow marks a moment in history, the anniversary of the pandemic. Tomorrow marks a moment in history, the anniversary of a speech truly for the ages.

Our commentary is from columnist Charles Blow of The New York Times. Sixty years ago, on August 28, 1963, the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, an estimated 250,000 people descended on Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That day, Martin Luther King Jr. took the stage and delivered one of the greatest speeches of his life. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. It is a beautiful speech.

It doesn't so much demand as it encourages. It is a great American speech, perfect for America's limited appetite for addressing America's inequities, both racial and economic. I have a dream today. It focuses more on the interpersonal and less on the systemic and structural. King would later say that he needed to confess that the dream he had had that day had at many points turned into a nightmare. In 1967, years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, King would say in a television interview that after much soul-searching, he had come to see that some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a solid realism. We have moved from a struggle for decency, which characterized our struggle for 10 or 12 years, to a struggle for genuine equality. In his The Other America speech delivered at Stanford University, King honed in on structural intransigence on the race issue. We must come to see now that integration is not merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure. The night before he was assassinated, King underscored his evolving emphasis on structures saying to a crowd in Memphis... All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.

As we remember the March on Washington and honor King, we must acknowledge that there is no way to do justice to the man or the movement without accepting their growth and evolution, even when they challenge and discomfort. I'm Tracey Smith. Thank you for listening, and please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning.

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