JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Each week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Hrishikesh Hirway hosts the popular "Song Exploder" podcast. He is also a musician. His new album is all about how fleeting life's most important moments can be. It's called "In The Last Hour Of Light."
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HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I was trying to find a phrase that captured this sense of, like, this is a beautiful moment, and you know that it's not going to be here forever. Here's your last chance to bask in this and appreciate. Like, please appreciate right now how beautiful this is.
SUMMERS: Hirway spoke with Wild Card host Rachel Martin.
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RACHEL MARTIN: Do you think that there's order in the universe? Or is it all chaos?
HIRWAY: I think there is both. I think there is order in the universe, I think, because of the Fibonacci sequence.
MARTIN: (Laughter) No one's ever said that before. Guarantee. I don't know what it is, so just explain what it is.
HIRWAY: (Laughter) The Fibonacci sequence is where you start with one and then one, and then it's two. You basically add the number previous to get the next number. So...
MARTIN: OK.
HIRWAY: ...One plus two, three. Two plus three, five.
MARTIN: Yeah.
HIRWAY: Three plus five, eight. Five plus eight, 13. And it goes on and on and on.
MARTIN: I like that. That feels good.
HIRWAY: That's the Fibonacci sequence.
MARTIN: Yeah. That feels like a pattern.
HIRWAY: And it exists in nature. That pattern is in - you see it in the way that flowers' petals - the petals of flowers. There's all these ways in which nature represents this sort of mathematical...
MARTIN: Order.
HIRWAY: ...Idea.
MARTIN: Yeah.
HIRWAY: And I think it's so cool and so beautiful. And yeah, just the fact that we are walking around and talking and have brains and think. I mean, the - evolution is just so incredible. There's a level of order that exists in just all living things. And yet, it's also an accident.
MARTIN: Right. I mean, when we think about - I mean, there's so much chaos. There's so much obvious chaos. But when you say it like that, the chaos is exceptional to the order. I mean, the order is paramount. It's all so miraculous that it has to be ordered.
HIRWAY: It's miraculous. I mean...
MARTIN: Yeah.
HIRWAY: ...Right now...
MARTIN: Right.
HIRWAY: ...Some electrical impulse is happening in my brain, and it's moving my body. And I'm saying words, and the words are in an order that you can understand as an idea. Like, that's...
MARTIN: I mean...
HIRWAY: ...Unbelievable. Everything is unbelievable. We should all be walking around all the time, saying, oh, my God, I can't believe that any of this is happening.
MARTIN: We would be so tired if we did that.
HIRWAY: (Laughter).
MARTIN: Between that and trying to, like...
HIRWAY: But we would be right.
MARTIN: ...Seize every memory that's happening around us...
HIRWAY: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
MARTIN: ...We would be so tired (laughter).
HIRWAY: That is fair, though. Everybody should always be going around in awe of everything and desperate to remember it.
MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That's a good way to live.
SUMMERS: You can watch the full conversation with Hrishikesh Hirway on YouTube or the NPR app by searching for NPR Wild Card. Hirway's new album, "In The Last Hour Of Light," is out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
