A little over five years ago, we posted the first two episodes of the Unexplainable podcast on our feed. I barely remember the months leading up to it — they all blend together in my mind into one big flurry of scripts and edits and ideas — but what I do remember is the excitement we all felt.
My colleagues Brian and Noam and I had pitched a podcast about…everything scientists don’t know. Which might seem like a wild concept, but when we ran a pilot episode on Today, Explained all about dark matter — and how most of the universe is missing — it seemed like our audience was just as enchanted by these mysteries as we were. And so we got the green light to make a whole podcast about unanswered questions.
At the time, I was excited (and nervous) to put the show out into the world. I was excited (and nervous) to tell our audience more stories about strange, cosmic questions, but also stories about the mysteries hiding right in the middle of their face — literally, our second episode was about how much we still have to learn about the nose. I think we were all excited (and nervous) to see what people would make of the show.
Five years and hundreds of episodes later, we’re launching a brand new chapter in Unexplainable’s story: a video version of our show, available on Netflix. Don’t worry — you’ll still be able to listen to the show twice a week in audio, but you’ll also be able to watch video episodes on Mondays if you’re a Netflix subscriber.
We’re still going to showcase world-class journalists, scientists, and researchers as they try to track down answers big and small. But, now you’ll get to watch as science writer Riley Black shows me dinosaurs with comical little arms as part of a larger story on fossils, or as Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong introduces Noam to the hidden worlds animals can sense. But, most importantly, there will be the questions at the heart of every Unexplainable episode: What don’t we know? Why don’t we know it? And what are we doing to try and figure it out?
Preparing for this launch over the last few months, we’ve been, once again, in a flurry of scripts and edits and ideas, brainstorming and workshopping and just generally throwing ourselves into this new project. And I feel the way I did back at the beginning: so very, very excited (and maybe a little nervous) for you all to literally see what we have come up with.
—Byrd Pinkerton, host and senior correspondent, Unexplainable
