Ralph Leighton

speaker

164 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 29 May

Ralph Leighton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · The Vanishing Mr. Feynman (Update) · 29 May 2026 podcast

I usually would teach math because that's where the demand is, but they let me teach a geography class.

And so Feynman says, oh yeah, what do you know about geography?

And I said, oh, I know every country in the world.

I listen to the shortwave radio.

I can tell you, oh yeah, you know every country in the world.

Whatever happened to Tanutuva?

Now, to me, Tanutuva sounded a little too made up, and I almost was tempted to say to him, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.

I was very skeptical, but we went to his Encyclopedia Britannica, which he loved and could recite for you the jacket categories, almost like a wrapper.

And in the back was an atlas.

And there we saw the Tuva or Tuvinskaya Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Tuva A.S.S.R.,

whose capital was K-Y-Z-Y-L, and that did it.

As he said, any place that's got a capital spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L has just got to be interesting.

And at the time, we had no idea how interesting it would be.

The stamps were great.

We wanted to know, can you still see scenes like on those stamps today?

And we had no idea about this throat singing that they did.

Only when we got into our research, driving around Southern California and going to university libraries, we came across a book that said that in Tuva, they have a method of singing in which a single voice can produce two notes simultaneously.

And we go, whoa.

Little did we know that it was physics.

As I later learned, for him, the journey was the destination, as the saying goes.

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