nod to monica who is the current researcher. >> monica blair. >> monica blair, yes. brian asked me to come here and talk a little about what goes into creating a prep for the show and then to reflect a bit about the way this influenced my time as a graduate student. i was doing this while i was writing a dissertation, how it influenced my scholarship and most importantly for, if there are grad students out there, my job prospects. i'll start by saying one of the most exciting and sometimes anxiety producing parts of being the research for "backstory" is being handed a topic you know absolutely nothing about. this, in fact, was the case for the climate change episode that we're going to reflect on a little bit. i am not an environmental historian, never had a course in it. how do you wrangle the history of something you don't know about, write a 10 to 20 single space page prep? >> with picture of a polar bear standing on what looked like by then an ice cube. i think it had been a shelf of ice at one point. >> humor is the only way to get through climate change. to wri