Ira Glass
Appearances
Consider This from NPR
The video game industry at a crossroads
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
Consider This from NPR
The video game industry at a crossroads
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
Fresh Air
Amanda Knox Is 'Free,' But Is That Enough?
I'm Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell real-life stories, really good ones.
Fresh Air
Amanda Knox Is 'Free,' But Is That Enough?
On the Embedded Podcast. No. It's called denying a freedom of speech. It's misinformation. Like so many Americans, my dad has gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. These are not conspiracy theories. These are reality. I spent the year following him down the rabbit hole, trying to get him back. Listen to alternate realities on the Embedded Podcast from NPR. All episodes available now.
Fresh Air
Amanda Knox Is 'Free,' But Is That Enough?
Surprising stories in your podcast feed, This American Life.
Fresh Air
Amanda Knox Is 'Free,' But Is That Enough?
Convicted of a horrid crime in a foreign land. Sentenced to 26 years for killing a roommate. Her pleas for innocence seemed more cold and calculating than remorseful.
Fresh Air
A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. All right, I'm just going to stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast. Chances are you know our show. So instead, I'm going to tell you we've just been on a run of really good shows lately. Some big epic emotional stories, some weird funny stuff too.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Amanda Knox / 'Adolescence' Co-Creator & Actor Stephen Graham
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Amanda Knox / 'Adolescence' Co-Creator & Actor Stephen Graham
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American life, surprising stories every week.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-26-2025 5PM EDT
I'm Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell real-life stories, really good ones.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-26-2025 5PM EDT
Surprising stories in your podcast feed, This American Life.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-09-2025 9AM EDT
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-09-2025 9AM EDT
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-09-2025 8AM EDT
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-09-2025 8AM EDT
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-25-2025 6PM EDT
I'm Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell real-life stories, really good ones.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-25-2025 6PM EDT
Surprising stories in your podcast feed, This American Life.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-11-2025 5PM EDT
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-11-2025 5PM EDT
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-11-2025 3PM EDT
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-11-2025 3PM EDT
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
Search Engine
Is it ok to just work all the time?
There were other people, but there weren't many of them who were sticking around and staying. I was generally the one who was staying the longest.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I didn't feel bad about it, and I didn't think anything of it. I just knew that that's what I wanted to do, and I was going to do it. I was willful.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
It was just, this is what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it. And I could feel that it was getting better. Like I could feel that I was getting better at it. And I had a vague sense in my head that maybe someday I would do a show. Like I did have that.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But then if I could have articulated to you what the show was, it would have been to kind of like, I don't know, stories about everyday people. Like it was very vague. What I did know is like I just, it felt like there was something vast there that radio could do that it wasn't doing. And so it felt like a process of discovery.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I remember one of the very first people, if not the very first person to write about This American Life was this writer named Bill McKibben. And he wrote a little one-page review that was in The Nation, which is a publication which I don't even know if it exists anymore. Maybe it does.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Anyway, and he said this thing where he said about the show, he said the thing that was interesting about it was the radio. He says, but what's interesting is it feels so new. And that always stuck with me, because it seemed new to me, too. It felt like, oh, this is just like a new way to do things.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Well, you know, one great thing about starting a new show is utter anonymity. Nobody really knows what to expect from you. This interviewee did not know us from Adam. Okay, well, what?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Right now, it is stretching in front of us. A perfect future yet to be fulfilled. And I feel like at this point, the sound of this American life has been around for decades, and lots of people have made their own variations on it. that I think people take it for granted and don't realize that it was new in its time.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
For somebody to narrate the way that I'm narrating in the show, nobody was doing that. We had to convince program directors to run the show. Because it was a weird way to talk on the radio at the time.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I'm your emcee. I'm your emcee, Ira Glass. Okay, the idea of this show, this new little show, is stories. Some by journalists and documentary producers like myself.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
All I'm picturing is, like, I think we could make this thing, and that would be interesting to do. Like, it's not, I didn't picture, like, here's where it'll be in five years or ten years or something. Like, I just thought, like, this seems like something a person could make, and I think I could make this. And honestly, like, I was scared that somebody else would get to the idea before I would.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
It seems so obvious to me that you could do, like, a show with sort of emotional narrative stories. Which when I look back on it, I guess that's kind of crazy because it was so hard to do. Do you know what I mean? What was hard about it in the beginning? I mean, what was hard about it in the beginning is every single part of it was new.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like even to produce that many stories so quickly every week was something I hadn't been in charge of or done before. like it was a show whose format had not existed before. And so every single person who was hired had to be taught the format of this thing, which had never existed and then taught how to make it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I remember like everybody who came to work for the show at the beginning said like, it took a year before they felt like they knew what they were doing. And so during that first year, there was a lot of like teaching people and here's how you do this and doing it over and over and over until people got the hang of it. And, um,
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yeah, and I remember it was like 10 or 15 years into doing that, that there were enough shows imitating us or the style of This American Life that we could just hire somebody and they would know how to structure a story in our style.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I think it was 48 new episodes. I think it's 48 because I've... I've looked at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's what I remember is 48. Yeah. Because we had nothing to rerun because we had never been on the air. And the way that we structured it is we knew at the beginning, this might be kind of rocky. So we weren't a national show for the first six months.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
We were a local show in Chicago and we were just making them to like learn how to make the show. And so we'd make a show every week and, you know, send it out in Chicago with the thought of, like, we're going to get good enough about this that in May or June or something will be good enough that we can send it out to the whole public radio system. This is pre-podcasting.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And basically, the way I remember it, it was four of us making the show, and we were either working or asleep. All the time. Yeah. And did that feel... What did that feel like? I mean, I remember it being okay with me. You know what I mean?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I remember there was a point, at some point in the first year or two, I remember lying in bed at my old apartment on Ashland in Chicago and staring up at the ceiling and thinking, wait, I signed up for this for how long? Like, wait, this is just going to go on forever? Like, we're going to do this?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I remember I asked one of the old NPR hosts, Scott Simon, who I had seen go from being like a reporter on NPR to a program host doing weekend edition with Scott Simon. So he was doing a weekly show, and we were doing a weekly show. And I remember running into him in year two or three and asking, how long will it be like this? And he really thought about it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
He's like, he paused and thought, and then he said, five years. it's going to be like this for five years. And he was right. For five years, it was you're working or you're asleep. I mean, I know that it wasn't just that, but that's... But kind of. But kind of, yeah.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I think there's a weird thing that people say when people say like, I love my work. Do you know what I mean? Like you said it earlier, and I always think it's like a little weird when people say like, I love my work. Because I think that when you're working that much, Like, you don't love your work. There are parts of it that you really enjoy.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But then making that much stuff, working for that many hours, you don't love it. It's oppressive. Like, it's both something that, like, you're into and that, like, really... fucked you up. You know what I mean? Like, like, like I've, I've compared it to like, like, oh, I like everything in my world I created, right?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like I hired all the people, I invented the format of the show, like every single part of it is, is a, you know, like I helped choose the color of the couch in the meeting room. When we moved there, you know, just like every part of it, you know, like I created. And so I can't complain about my life. And what it feels like is, I mean, I've said this before, but it's true.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
It's sort of like I get to go to this restaurant and they always serve me my very favorite meal, but I'm never, ever allowed to leave the table. You know, like it has that feeling.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And it's funny, like it didn't occur to me, but like then somebody pointed out like, oh, this feeling that you're having of being like, I'm really into this, this is very interesting, and I also hate it, is exactly what people raising children feel. Yes. Yeah, but that didn't occur to me until years later. Because I had no interest in raising children. I just really didn't think about it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I think part of that really was a kind of immaturity. I was like a kid who was like 14 who really loved making stuff. And then I just kept making stuff. Like, I was 18 or 19 when I started working at NPR. You know what I mean? Like, I was a kid. I had been doing magic shows four years before that at kids' parties. Like, I was a kid.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But then this seemed really interesting in the way that doing magic shows seemed really interesting. And then that part of my personality just really took over. And I really think that socially, like, I was really arrested for a long time. And it was only, like, Really, like, I think in my 40s that I came out of that and, like, started to, like, grow again.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Partly because I finally had, like, free time to be around other people. You know, we started the radio show when I was 36, so five years in, I was 41. And it was really, like, in my 40s where finally, like, I sort of experienced what a lot of people experience in their 20s and 30s where I would, like... have free time occasionally and, you know, spend time with other people.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And at that point, like, had somebody who I really loved and eventually got married to and, like, you know, just had... And we had a dog and, like, had a bunch of, like, the normal experiences that, like, a lot of other people have. But before then, I was totally content to be this separate person and to be somebody who very much... I was a lot weirder socially then. I was the sort of person who...
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
would sort of make my way through conversations with people, asking them questions and taking information, but very much in a kind of like, I wasn't letting myself get close to that many people. I didn't know how. I really had to consciously change the way I was. I mean, this is so personal, but it's true. I was much more of a weirdo.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I'd be interested for you to talk to some of the people I worked with at the beginning of This American Life and see if they would see it this way. But in retrospect, I definitely see it this way. I know what I consciously was. willed to happen in my personality, and it happened.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I don't think I suffered at all. I knew your project suffered. But I didn't suffer. Like, it's hard working 70 or 80 hours a week, but it's still just making a radio show. I know. That's not actual suffering. I'm not saying you were like a... No, but can I say, like, for me, yeah, there was no question. I never questioned it while it was going on. I don't question it in retrospect.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I feel like that's what I wanted to do. That's what I had to do. And I feel like there are narratives of other kinds of people who make stuff where, like, that's sort of romanticized. You know, people go off and they paint or they write and they do whatever it is. They write music, you know, like, and that's seen as a kind of positive thing.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like, I don't have a feeling about whether that's positive or negative. Like, I understand in retrospect it's not the path that most people chose or choose, but, like, I don't have a problem with the fact that I chose it. I felt like I liked it. I wanted it. I was going to do what I wanted to do, and that was what I was going to do. Like, I don't know. It was stubborn. Yeah.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yeah, but that doesn't feel like that's about the beginning of starting the video show. That feels more like what it's like now. Do I want to keep throwing myself into this machine that I built? How do you think about that? I find that very confusing, honestly. We're about to come up on our 850th episode, and there's a part of me where I feel like I really adore the people I work with.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I feel like this last year we've made shows that are as good as anything we've ever made. And shows that have been very excited to get on the air. Like, you know, you have that feeling of like, oh, that was a really good one. Oh, I can't wait to hear people hear that. I feel like I've felt that over and over this year.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But I did this exercise like a couple months ago where I had to pick out greatest hits episodes to create a greatest hits archive. And actually, like, I had never really gone through the archive of all 800 episodes to think about which ones of these are really so good.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I think that somebody today could, like, enjoyably listen to this show from 20 years ago or 15 years ago or 25 years ago, you know. And then when I see, like, the number of episodes in a year – Some years where I was like, like over the years, like as one home, we would make 26 or 28 or 30 or 34 shows a year. So out of the 30 shows we did that year, there are eight or 10 really wonderful ones
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
So let's say eight out of 30 shows. And then you think, I spent three-fourths of my year, I spent nine months that year on stuff that was just meh in retrospect. And then it makes you look at this last year. And I feel like actually this last year, our batting average was way better than that. Actually, we made a ton of great shows. But still, it's like, what's the point of...
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
of making like 900 of these, or 950, or 1,000. Like how many years left do I have in my life? And like haven't I kind of made the point of like, you know, this would be a nice way to do a radio show. You know what I mean? Like, do I need to be in there? And then also, like, there's all the ones that aren't as good, which kind of just some weeks stuff doesn't come together.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like the story you're hoping would work doesn't work or it's not as good as you hoped. And so then you feel like, all right, I'm going to make this as good as I can. But like, I know there's one great story in this show, but then the other is doing kind of, they're okay. And like, you know, just sort of like, it's just where you don't feel like, oh, this is why I'm doing this with my life.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
You know, like, yeah, like, and I don't know what to do with that. And, and, uh, And then also, if we're going to be really honest, like... something that's so personal is that like my partner now is just like so incredibly productive. And it's like, she's like, she has a new TV show that she's off filming right now.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But then after that, she has like a bunch of different movies that like she's written and other things she's being asked to direct. And I just feel like, well, watching her, I just say, well, wait, I could be doing more. I certainly could be, you know, doing more. Like more stuff or more? I don't know, just more stuff that I feel like super thrilled about.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I've had a few partners who really work was a huge part of their life and a main thing in their life in the way it is for me. But, yeah. But this is the first time I've been involved with somebody whose work habits are so close to mine. That's what I mean. Where she'll just work all the time if it's something that seems worth doing. Yeah.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And in fact, one of the things we'll do together is we'll have study hall together. We'll be like, well, let's get together, but we'll just kind of sit across from each other.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yeah, of course. That was the entire first five years, pretty much. Like, it seemed like I could be putting all this work into this thing and it could vanish. But honestly, that seemed fine to me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Oh, yeah. Like, who cares? Like, I would just, I would find something else to do. Like, I don't know. I just knew, like, not that many people knew how to edit tape and knew how to make a nice story for NPR. I knew if, like, if this blew up, I could just go back to all things instead of a morning edition. I'd be fine. It'd be fine. I'd find something else to do.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
In fact, like, in the early contracts for This American Life, we had never had to, like, clear rights for something. Like, I didn't know how to do it, and I didn't know—I wasn't smart enough to ask, like, a proper intellectual property lawyer, how do you do this? And so basically we would just write up contracts based on sort of common sense.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I remember if like David Sedaris would read a story on the show, we would get the rights to broadcast it and rebroadcast it for three years. And I remember thinking like, if this show lasts three years and we have to go back and renegotiate that contract, that would be a problem I would love to have. It seems so unlikely.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
It was from a place of terror. Okay. Yeah, like I didn't want the thing to be bad. Yeah. And that was terrifying. But I also felt like if this doesn't work out, if people don't like this show, if this isn't something... good, then that's fine. I had worked on a bunch of different shows and some had blown up.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I never started my own show besides The Wild Room, the local show that I did with my friends. But I had worked on a bunch of shows and some had blown up. And I don't know, everybody moved on. It would be fine. And so then it becomes stable. You enter a period where...
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
After five years, like, basically, like, it took that long for the finances of it to be solid enough and the audience to be solid enough that it was clear, like, okay, we're going to be fine. We're not running, running, running. We're just to get this thing going.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like, we were on hundreds of radio stations, and we had a solid audience, and we had advertising money, and we had carriage fees that stations would pay to run the show. Like, it was a financially solid, and from that point forward, the show has always been profitable every year.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
No, no, it would still be like 60 or 70 hours. You know, and some weeks more.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yeah. Like, why make something if it's not going to be special? Like, why bother if you're not going to try to make it, like, this is going to be amazing. If it's not going to be amazing, the world has enough stuff that's meh that you don't need to bother. Which is why, in retrospect, it's so disappointing to look back at, like, the percentage that are just kind of like, that was fine.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Recently? Yeah. Yes. And it's more just like do I continue doing it? Like I don't retrospectively regret any of it, but it's more just like should I keep doing this or should I find something else to do? And the math of that particular question is, I'm better at doing this than I am at probably anything else I would come up with, at least right away.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I've been practicing this one, so I can do this one well. And honestly, I went to the trouble with a bunch of people to get this show to the point where millions of people hear it each week. That's a hard thing to turn your back on. It's funded, it's stable, millions of people hear it every week. To turn your back on that, nobody gets that. Do you know what I mean?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
It's just an incredibly rare thing. If I leave it and give it to other people to run, Like, you know, I'm not going to find something that will have that big of an audience. And then I'll have to do what other people do, which is like I'll have to pitch things and get people to fund it and be in that world again. Right. You don't get to pick the color of the couch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And so it's hard to move from a situation where I work with a bunch of people and we have complete freedom to do whatever we want. There's no adult supervision above us. We really do whatever we think is best. And lots of people hear it and it's funded. It's so, so rare. So it's a hard thing to walk away from.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I literally don't even know what would be on the other side of it. It's like imagining what happens after your own death or something. Or, like, I remember before I traveled to a foreign country, I remember I was just, I had no picture of what it would be like. Like, I had seen pictures of other countries, but I really just hadn't, I couldn't form it in my head.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
30 years? Since 1995. But then the job was basically just a variation of every job I had since I was 19. Yeah. You know, like, I just got to do more interesting stuff. But it was still just basically, you go into the beginning of the week, you think, like, what could we possibly do that people would find fun to listen to?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
No. No. No, it could have been something else. But I happened to end up at a place at NPR in the 70s where like the things I could get obsessive about were in front of me. But it could have been something else. If I had ended up in a TV station, I would be on TV or making TV. I don't think I'd probably be on TV, but I'd be making TV.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
not a great father or have a very different relationship to your work. Yes. I really thought about that. In fact, with my wife, when we talked about should we have kids, one of the things that I felt at the time was like, I'm barely holding it together now without having kids. I don't know how I would be able to manage.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
If we had kids, I mean, at that point, the staff of the radio show, when she and I were considering this, was still pretty small. It was still seven people, which is a lot of people for a weekly radio show. But for like a super highly produced one, it was still like, you know, it was hard to get the show on the air. And so I didn't know how we would do it. Like, I just didn't know how to do it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
There came a point in my life after I was married and divorced that I grew up with somebody who had a little boy. And when we got together, he was... Five, he just turned six when we got together. And at some point we moved in.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I had the experience of living with somebody and her kid and really was very totally involved in the kid's life and just in the most everyday way that you can be if it's three people living in a small apartment and one of you is under 10. And so like doing some work with them and inventing games with them and just sitting around and doing stuff and watching TV and leaning on each other.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And just like, and I feel like I really, I had the experience anyways where I realized like, oh, I really did not picture what this would be like. Like when I pictured having kids, I pictured the kind of baby face that I'd seen friends go through. And I hadn't pictured this. And I feel like for the first time I felt like, oh, I totally get it in an emotional way.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like I understood in the abstract why people have children. before this, you know, like it's not that complicated of a thing to understand, but I didn't get like why it could feel good to me to do it. Like I really liked it. I really liked having kid in the house.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I really liked being one of the adults caring for that kid and looking out for that kid and thinking about that kid and having like a daily relationship. And his mom was like, should we have a kid? You know? And, um, It's funny, like, I mean, the real honest answer is I wasn't sure how I would manage that with my job.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I didn't want to be, I didn't want to have a kid if I was going to be absent.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
You know? What can I say? Like, if I had wanted it enough, I would have figured it out. And part of what you're trying to figure out is, like, would you have regrets if you had a kid? You should talk to somebody. who's had to make that trade-off about how they feel about that. Because I think that people do have really strong feelings about that.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, it's funny because Mike Birbiglia has a joke in his show, The New One. And I only know this because I helped him on that show. He's my friend. And the whole show is about him trying to figure out, should he have a kid? In the first half of the show, he's basically giving all the reasons not to have a kid. And then they have the kid. But one of the things he talks about is sort of like...
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Your work will be worse. And like he says, that's a problem. It's like your work will be worse. And he's like, and you can say it's not going to be, but it's going to be. That feels true to me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
and clothed and like protected from the cold well and loved and given your attention like like this like human being will want your attention specifically attention from you yes i think that reduces the amount of hours you can be like well that's true i don't know like i i think i'm not somebody to ask about this part of it you should ask somebody who knows better what did you make of what mike said
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But if his joke... You and I both know people who have kids whose work is amazing.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Let me think if that's the honest answer. No, I wondered about it, but not, I wondered about it. I wondered about it, but not in like a deep yearning way. Just in a curious way. Yeah. Like what would this have been like? And I guess that would have been kind of interesting, but I didn't, I don't know. Like, yeah, it wasn't, It didn't then lead me to a sense of regret and, oh, let's make a baby.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I just really hadn't thought about what the day-to-day experience is of living with a kid and just how nice it is. And, like, what is fulfilling about it and what you get back from it. I hadn't thought about what you get back from it. All I thought about is, like, what you throw into it. And what do you get back from it? Like, you, not one. I mean, part, I just really, like, love this kid.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And, um... I mean, everything I'm going to say is so corny, just like seeing him grow, seeing him learn new things, teaching him little stuff that then he can do. Um, just being just, I mean, it's funny, like I just remember the first time we were sitting on the couch and he just leaned himself against me to watch something. And it just was really.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
meaningful that there's like this person who like trusted me and was leaning on me and, um, and wanted to be close to me in that way. Like, yeah, like it. I mean, like this is like a really terrible, not analogous thing, but it reminds me of when I first had a dog. Like I had never had dogs. My ex-wife really loved dogs and always had a dog. And so we got a dog.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And really for the first few years, I really just saw the dog as a job. And like I would spend an hour a day easily like walking the dog, dealing with the dog, whatever. Walking the dog, for sure. And playing with the dog. And it really took me years before I understood the concept of like, oh, you're supposed to get something back from this. Like, it really didn't occur to me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I just really thought, like, because the dog would be affectionate with me, but I just thought, like, well, of course you're affectionate with me. Like, you don't know anybody in New York except me and her. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you don't know anybody. Like, I'm one of two people you know. Yeah, you have to be nice to me. But with this little boy, just very early on, it just got to me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I could see what I was getting back from it, and it felt like something big to get back from somebody.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I always really loved kids. I just hadn't had the experience of living with a kid. Did it change me at all? It did change me, yeah. It did change me. Like, it made me a lot more awake to what all the people in my life are going through who have kids. I think I was really insensitive about it. Like, I understood the idea of it, but I think I wasn't sensitive to the feeling of it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And it's just, like, such a weird combination of, like, labor and affection. And, yeah, like, it made me... In the way that going through something makes you just more awake to what everybody else is experiencing who goes through it. I'm glad I know that. I'm glad I know what parents are going through in a way that's more lived.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
On my part, I think that that makes me way more awake and sensitive to the people around me who are raising kids.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I really don't hold much value in the idea of what you leave behind. I don't think it matters because you don't exist anymore. Like, I have a very, like, I have, like, the most primitive... view of it that I can't defend, but I just feel like it really doesn't matter once I don't exist. I mean, maybe if I had kids, I would see that differently.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like I want the world to keep spinning and I want things to be okay for people. And I want, you know, I think the world not to head towards catastrophe because in just the abstract way, like I care about the people of the future and the way I care about anybody who I don't know, you know, but like, But really, like, who cares? Like, honestly, who cares?
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like, nobody needs to hear these radio shows that I made after I'm dead. Like, they're not designed for that. They're designed for the people who are around when they're made. And that's what they're made for. And there was something really, like, nice back before the internet. We'd make the radio show, and it would go out on the radio. And you could, like, buy a cassette, I guess.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But people didn't really do that. You know what I mean? Like, you could buy a tape, and we would mail you a tape. But basically, like for most people, like overwhelmingly, you would hear something on the radio and then you would never hear it again. And then it would get better in your mind, you know, like the show would improve with age.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And that was kind of cool to make something that was like it existed for a moment for you to share with somebody. like an intimate moment with another person. And it's okay for that to be all it is. Like it doesn't have to last for centuries. And I just think like death is a real thing and it's absolutely finite and I don't believe in an afterlife. And so that doesn't motivate me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yes. Yeah. Like, like the radio show is so much more successful than I ever anticipated it could be. Like, like it just, it just, uh, it's amazing. It's lasted this long and it's nice that people like it. And I feel lucky that, that I get a chance to work on it because it's, it's fun to make and also a pain in the ass and horrible sometimes, but fun also. And, um,
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Yeah, like, it doesn't need to be more than this. It's just a fucking radio show. You know what I mean? It's just a show. We're just making a show. Like, there's so much stuff that people are making.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I know, but like millions of people hear it, more people than I'll ever meet. Hear it. Like, it's already reached as many people as it ever needs to reach. Like, and if it reached a lot more, that would be okay, too. But, like, it reaches so many people. Like, I'm ambitious, and I embrace that. You know what I mean? Like, I'm ambitious.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But my ambition is I want to make something that's exactly the way I want it to be. And I want it to be something that'll reach a lot of people. But it doesn't have to reach everybody. Like, it doesn't have to be for everybody. It doesn't have to be everybody's taste. It doesn't have to be for people of the future. Fuck people of the future. They'll find some fucking way to entertain themselves.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
They don't need me. They're making more people who are younger than me who can do that. Like, plenty of smart, funny, capable people can make things for the people of the future. They don't need to listen to radio shows from the 1990s.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
That would even show more concern for the people of the future than I feel. But sure, that has so much dignity. Yes, my legacy is that I want to create space for the young people. Like whatever, they don't need my fucking help. They're going to be fine. Somebody who wants to make something will stand up and somebody wants to be on stage and it's totally fine. They don't need my help.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Sure. My name is Ira Glass, and I host the podcast This American Life and radio show This American Life.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, I really stumbled into working on the radio. I had no interest in radio at all. And when I was 19, I was just looking for some summer job in the media. And the local TV stations in Baltimore didn't have anything. And the local ad agencies didn't have anything. And the local radio stations didn't have anything. And somebody referred me to this place called NPR in Washington.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
So I drove an hour to get to DC. And I was able to talk my way into an internship would even be an exaggeration. It was 1978. They didn't have an internship program. I just talked my way into this place. And they let me work there for free for the summer. And I had never heard of them on the radio, nor had most people because it was 1978. NPR was only created in the early 70s.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like they had one afternoon news show that was not very well listened to, all things considered. No, they weren't even on a satellite. Like the way the show was distributed was on phone lines around the country. And then I just started working there and I just found I really liked it. and liked the people, and it was interesting making stuff for the radio.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And I had a couple of turning point moments, but one of them was that, not that first summer, but I got hired back for a real job the second summer by this guy whose job it was to invent new ways to do radio documentary.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
His name was Keith Talbot, and one of the things that he was doing, one of the many things he was doing, was working with this guy who would tell stories on the radio named Joe Frank.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And Joe was doing monologues on the radio at the time that were unlike anything I had ever heard. And Joe is an incredible performer and would put kind of like melodic, dreamy music underneath it.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like, I had never heard anybody tell a story on the radio, actually. And so I had never had the experience of listening to somebody tell some story where you just get caught up in the story and you're just like, what is going to happen? What is going to happen? And I remember sitting in NPR's old Studio 2 on the first floor of their original headquarters on M Street in Washington,
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
watching Joe record his narration. And I just remember thinking, like, I don't know what this is, but I want to do that. Like, whatever that is. Like, I just, I had never had the experience of, like, getting caught up in some story and realizing, like, oh, radio can do this. Like, I had no idea of that. And so for me, that was that, that was that moment.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I was just like, this thing that he's doing, I want to do. Like, I didn't come into being in... being on the radio by being a journalist. The thing that I liked when I was a kid was I liked Broadway shows, and I liked movies, and I liked comedians. I really didn't know anything about journalism.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
What I was interested in was, oh, it's a story, and it just gave me this feeling, and I wanted to find out what was going to happen. I just felt swept up in it. Then, if anything, the next decade of my life,
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And more it was me trying to figure out how to make something that was that, but they were true stories about real people, you know what I mean, who I could interview and making interviews into a thing that had that kind of feeling and just that kind of just pulled you in and pulled you forward and you just had to keep listening. Like, I just wanted to do that. I had that in my head.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I think the real answer is like right at the very beginning, like from the first time I was making, making anything. Like it just was interesting to me when parts of it would work and then the stuff that didn't work I wanted to solve. And then enough things, like really early on in the first year or two, even with like rudimentary skills, I was good enough that I could get decent interview tape.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And then I was good enough as an editor that I could shape it in a way that it would have a feeling to it. And a forward motion to it. And really early on, I was doing interviews and putting music underneath it. I did that. That was the style that my mentor, Keith, worked in. And I learned from him, actually.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
I mean, that part of this American Life sound really comes from me working with somebody else who taught me. And then... There's this novelist, Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours and he's written a bunch of other books. He said this thing in an interview that I saw where I felt like, oh, he really put a thing in a way where I've never thought that.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
But as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, that's definitely what I think. Where he said that he doesn't believe in talent. He said he thinks what happens is that a certain kind of person gets a sort of obsessive interest in how do I make this better. And that definitely just was, when I saw that quote, I was like, oh, that is exactly what happened to me. I wasn't that good.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
Like I was a terrible writer and I was a terrible performer in the air. But like I was just very interested in the like, I can feel that this could get better. Like how do you make this better? And just that was just very interesting to me.
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Is it ok to just work all the time?
And then I was lucky in that like NPR in the 70s and 80s was just like a place where it was encouraged to a small degree, not to a large degree, but there was like enough room in the system that you could just... experiment with stuff and get it on the air in front of lots of people. I was lucky to be in a place where I could keep trying different things and it was rewarded.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Yeah, I actually saw that once. It's just like giant letters, like 50 feet tall or something, two blocks long.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Laura Starczewski is one of the editors of our show. The actors were Veronica Cruz and Dave Shulansky.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Well, our visit to the Museum of Now was produced and edited by Nancy Updike and Rana Jafi-Wald. They also sit on the museum's board and construction committee and say that if we need to visit again, they can pull some strings for us. They promise they're going to stay on the board, even if the president decides to make himself the chairman.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Other people put together today's show via Ben and Michael Kamate, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howey, Valerie Kipnis, Seth Lynn, Tobin Lowe, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Ike Shreeskandarajah, Lily Sullivan, Amelia Schoenbeck, Christopher Sotala, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Eli Hagar, Tom Cartwright, Molly Mitchell, Liz Goss, Adam Cohn, Catherine Bettis, Alice Guerrero, Sonia West, Kat, no last name, you know who you are. Andrew Zitzer, Yo-Ai Shaw, Karen Ortiz, Annika Barber, and public radio station KCRW in Los Angeles, where I've been recording this week. They have been so nice.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Special thanks to Philip Richards, Sarah Sweeney, and Jennifer Farrow. Quick program note, we've been making these bonus episodes every two weeks for months now for our life partners. In the most recent one, a former producer named Alex Bloomberg begins a little tour of This American Life stories to cover the news, stuff...
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
I have to say there's like this weird time capsule of all kinds of feelings and events. If you want to hear those or hear the many, many non-news, very fun bonus episodes that we've made, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks to the program's co-founder, Ms. Tori Malatia.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
From WBC Chicago, it's This American Life. And I am joined in the studio by my coworker, Emmanuel Jochi.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Yes, a museum. One of the things that, you know, we've been talking about here on the staff, as you know, is it feels like there are so many things happening every day since President Trump took office, like federal agencies being gutted or, you know, a judge ordering the White House to turn some planes around and then...
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
seeming to ignore the court order or secret war planning being done on signal on people's phones and shared with a random reporter. Like there was so much happening so fast and you feel like, oh, did that really happen?
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
And I don't know what our staff, we've been talking about how we just want to like grab a hold of these things and just put them in a place where we can look at them together, just preserve them like a museum, a museum of now.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Fine. Because today on our show, we have other historical artifacts of this exact moment we are living through. As you'll hear, the people in these stories, over and over, they seem sort of dumbfounded at what they're suddenly seeing and dealing with in America today. We were too. Stay with us.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
It's It's American Life, today's show, The Museum of Now. And let's take a little stroll, shall we, through the museum? Watch out for the construction right there. There's some stuff. Yeah, we're just starting to build out our collection here. All right, let's begin with this exhibit, a multimedia exhibit.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
This is actually the hold music that people all over the country are hearing when they try to reach the Social Security Administration. The agency sends out payments to some 70 million people every month. The agency says that it is getting way more calls than usual right now.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Elon Musk and all the talk of rooting out fraud and kicking dead people off of the rolls seem to be freaking out millions of senior citizens. So more of them are calling. Audits, by the way, show that lots of dead people are not getting checks. That is not a thing. Wait times were long even before this. But right now, a fourth of the callers basically get a busy signal and have to try again.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
If you call and you do get put on hold, there is a callback option. But one of our coworkers decided to stay on the line to see how long it would take.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Yeah, there's nowhere close to that. They finally picked up at one hour, 39 minutes.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
So that is like a piece of rock about the size of a football, yellow on one side.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The worker who did finally pick up the phone, I will say, was super nice, very helpful.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Okay, next, walk with me down the hallway here to this next exhibit. Okay, stop right there. Here we have a short video. As you can see, it's playing on a loop. It was posted on X by the Secretary of Homeland Security. Eight seconds long. Security cam footage plays over and over.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
And to help you understand what you're looking at, Aviva de Kornfeld has the story of the five days that led to this video for the woman who was in it. What happened in those five days caught this woman completely off guard. Because as far as she knew, or as we know now, what happened to her hadn't happened to anybody else at that point. Just three weeks ago.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Something else there, like there was a question underneath the question that they were trying to get the answer to.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Tobin Lowe is an editor on our program. Question two, how old are your kids? So there's a particular piece of small talk that happens all the time that for some people is like the most normal thing in the world and for others is a super delicate minefield.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
This story that you're about to hear is about a couple for whom it is a minefield and how one day a question like this comes up and it goes completely differently from how it's ever gone before for them in a spectacularly wild way. You'll hear what I'm talking about. Chris Benderev tells the story.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Right. You're both man. Yes. But one of you is really the man. Yes.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Then, when Dobin would tell them that it was his husband who was the handy one, he felt like he was just giving them ammunition to put a picture of their relationship that just bugged him. Like they were being sized up into familiar categories. Would you view as the husband? Would you view as the wife?
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
In the closet. For Tobin, that means middle school and high school.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Chris Penderiff. Coming up, a question about a 400-year-old play and a personal question underneath that question. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
This is American Life from Ira Glass. Today's program, the question trap. What we're talking about today is those questions that can seem benevolent, innocent, harmless, innocuous, could not hurt a fly. But underneath, they're really asking something else or quietly making a point about something else. We've arrived at question three of our program. Question three, how's your mom?
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
So we spotted this next thing we want to play you in an academic journal. It was originally a paper in Medical Anthropology Quarterly written by an anthropologist named Janelle Taylor who adapted it to read here on the radio. This one question that Janelle Taylor is writing about, it kept showing up all the time in her personal life.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
And she says as an anthropologist, she knows when lots of people are asking the same question over and over, it means something. And she wrote this essay to think through what is underneath that question.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because it's like this innocent question and then really like underneath it, it's like there's a bomb waiting to go off, actually. Like there's so many feelings.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
What a day on our program. Questions that contain other secret questions inside of them. Questions that are wolves in sheep's clothing. In all kinds of situations that we've all been in. In dating, in talking to strangers, in dealing with the saddest things that ever happened to us. And more. I'm WBEC Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Janelle Taylor. She's a professor at the University of Toronto, teaching medical anthropology. Her mom, Charlene Taylor, died in 2019. Janelle is collecting this essay and others she's written about dementia into a book. You can find a link to the original academic article that she wrote at our website. Dec 4. Can I help you?
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Okay, here's one last example of a question that has another question lurking behind it. The question goes like this. If Matthew scored an average of 15 points per basketball game and played 24 games in one season, how many points did he score in the season? That's a question from the SHSAT, which is a standardized test given to middle school students in New York City.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
A high score on the SHSAT will get you into one of the eight top public schools in the city. Wonderful schools. A low score will keep you in the regular public school system, where your school may be assigned by lottery. So the question lurking behind that math question is, are you good enough? Are you good enough to go to the best schools? And maybe from there to the best colleges?
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
And from there to all the advantages you get from that kind of education, including a higher income, maybe a better job, all sorts of stuff. Kind of a big scary chasm opening up in the earth behind that innocent little math problem. For five years, Milo Kramer tutored kids who wanted to leap over that chasm and into those eight elite high schools. It first made Milo feel good.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
This recording is from a one-person show that Milo did this fall about the kids they tutored. I worry a little that it's going to be hard to get across over the radio what's so special about this show. Most of it is songs, songs about the kids that Milo tutored. These very funny and heartbreaking portraits of these middle school and high school kids and Milo's relationship to them.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Like, for example, the boy who takes a lot of pleasure denouncing God and the Democrats.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Milo is not a great singer. They would tell you that themselves. Or a skilled musician. But they've written songs in secret since they were the age that these kids are, that they're writing about. And there's just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they're doing. It kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
And of Milo's reactions to them, when a girl from Queens named Dana, who's better at math than Milo, and probably should be a scientist or engineer someday, tells Milo that if she does end up in college, she wants to study theater. Milo, who's broke and struggling and wanting to do theater, sings...
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Lots of the songs in the show are about the kids' anxieties, about school and this test and all the pressure they feel from their parents. And they're about Milo trying to figure out not just how to teach them, but what they possibly could say to comfort them. Faith, for example, is a terrible reader.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Our radio show today is about questions. And to close out the show, I'm just going to play you one more thing. This is one full song from Milo's show about a question that a student faced. It's an essay question.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Milo Kramer in the one-person show School Pictures, recorded at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. School Pictures is running at Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis from February 5th to March 2nd. It's going to come back to New York in the fall. If you want to hear more songs from the show or book the show for your town, go to milokramer.com. That's Kramer with a C, milokramer.com.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Our program was produced today by Zoe Chase. The people who put together today's show include Jendayi Banz, Sean Cole, Michael Kamate, Bethel Hopti, Khanna Jaffee-Walk, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Safia Riddle, Lily Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Chris Rosenthaler, Marisa Robertson-Textra, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Help on today's rerun from Henry Larson and Angela Geropassi. Original music for The Comedian's Story by Ryan Rumery, who also helped mix the show. Special thanks today to Lauren Kessler. Her book is Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
Also thanks to Galia Walt, Michael Rosenthal, Diana Taylor-William, Mike Taylor, Pat Taylor, David Johnson, Rachel Jackson, Tom O'Keefe, and Jolie Myers. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX.com. the public radio exchange. Just a quick word about our Life Partners subscription program. We continue to make bonus episodes for it.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
The latest one this week, I went back to listen for the first time in decades to one of the original pilots for our show. Two co-workers, Julie Snyder and Aviva de Kornfeld, listened with me. It was so much less good than I thought it was going to be. And of course, your help. keeps our program on the air when you sign up. To join, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
That link is also in the show notes to this episode. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Jory Malatia. You know, he kind of hurt my feelings this morning. We ran into each other. He asked, how am I doing? I started to answer.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, there's more stories of This American Life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
On an hour street in Brooklyn, one neighbor takes it on himself to get everybody to move their cars two times a week when the street cleaner comes through. He does this week in, week out. We hear about that and about other people who choose to live in their own ever-repeating Groundhog Days. For Groundhog Day, next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
This American Life Today show is a rerun, The Question Trap. And instead of four different acts today, what we're going to do is we're going to present the show as four questions. Here's the first one. Question. Tell me how you feel about this. So Tobin, who you just heard, is one of the editors here at our show.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
And really the idea for today's program came out of a conversation that happened at a staff meeting. And what happened was we all got talking about these kind of question traps, where it seems like somebody is asking about one thing, but the question is a proxy for trying to figure out something else. Tobin will explain more.
This American Life
823: The Question Trap
The question started right after Tobin and his husband moved to the Bay Area and got a house together. Tobin's family was pretty excited about this. They all lived within an hour. And they brought meals over for weeks. His mom bought them shades.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Ryan started going blind when he was 18, so it's been a long time now that he can't see. And one night he flies to Chicago for this work thing and gets to his hotel room and he wants to call his wife back home in Canada to let her know that he's arrived safely. So all he needs to do is find the phone.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Tig Notaro. Tig Notaro. And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Taylor Dayne.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
I should probably describe what is happening here. Taylor Dane, in a sequined mini dress, is singing to Tig. Tig is sitting on this stool on stage. Her arms are crossed. She's looking sort of skeptical. And Taylor's trying to win her over.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
So he goes to bed, doesn't call his wife, sleeps. And in the morning he wakes up to the sound of something curious, a phone ringing. And Groggy, he follows the sound and finds somehow now there is a phone in this room.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
So it's around here in the song that Taylor does start to win takeover.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
They're laughing because she busts out vintage Michael Jackson moves.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Coming up, David Rakoff's seven-step process for grating cheese, David Sedaris, and other highlights from the show that we did on stage and beamed into movie theaters back in 2012. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. This American Life, Myra Glass. Today on our program, The Invisible Made Visible.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
We're bringing you stories from the episode that we did on stage all the way back in 2012 in New York and beamed into movie theaters all over North America and Australia. Half of that show, I have to say, was way too visual to ever put on the radio. There was dance. There was animation. There was a short film by Mike Birbiglia starring Terry Gross from NPR's Fresh Air. You can see this.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
It's two hours long. We've organized it so you can skip the stuff that you've already heard and just go straight to see the stuff that you have not seen. It's fun. It's free. Go to thisamericanlife.org. We now have arrived at Act 3 of our program. Act 3, stiff as a board, light as a feather.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
In our bodies, blood moves, cells appear and cells die off, proteins form and are consumed, all invisibly to us until the moment that something goes wrong and we see the effects. This next story from our live show is from David Rockoff.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
She doesn't believe him that there was no phone, but this is kind of par for the course when you're married to a blind guy.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
A wall. Where the bed should be is now a wall. He feels for the sofa. The sofa's right where it should be. The wall behind the sofa is right where it should be, right there in place. He feels along the sofa again, inches towards where the bed should be, and yes, it's still a wall.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
So at this point, David Ratkoff walks away from the microphone and just when it seems like he might walk off stage, like he quit, he turns. Thank you.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
He was in a part of the room that he hadn't encountered the night before. This was an alcove. on a side of the bed that he just never discovered.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
The mistake that he made the night before was this. When he was Marcel Marceau-ing the walls, he got three-fourths of the way around the room and got to the last wall. And he didn't actually feel all the way along that wall until it met another wall. Basically, he went a little ways down that wall, felt that the bed was behind him,
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
And when he realized that the bed was behind him, he figured he was done. He stopped feeling that wall. He just assumed that the wall continued for another eight feet or so. But it didn't continue. It stopped. And there was this alcove.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
You just live inside the mistake. This kind of thing happens to him a lot, way, way more than you would think. Two weeks before our interview, he got lost in another hotel room, this one in Los Angeles. He couldn't find the door to get out of the room. He says that during the decade that he slowly went blind.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
How did I end up in this job? How did it happen? He came to me over and over, walked up to me in restaurants and on the street, saying the same thing over and over again.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
You mean my speaking voice? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. Do, do what you want, c-c-c-come on.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Next week on the podcast of This American Life, we present the Museum of Now. Filled with artifacts of this particular moment our country is living through. Like, for instance, the transcript of a judge who's questioning an executive order that seems to be based on statements that are completely untrue.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Or a piece of a street near the White House that construction workers are tearing up because it had been painted with the words, Black Lives Matter.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
That's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
To state the obvious, sometimes it is just a lot easier to see things. Clears a lot of things up. And today on our radio show, we have all kinds of stories of people trying to take things that are normally invisible to them and make them visible. I'm talking about unspoken feelings. I'm talking about people's secret lives.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
I'm talking in a very literal way about me and the other people doing stories on today's radio program. As people on the radio, usually we are invisible, but today we are bringing you excerpts from the show that we did on stage today. in front of people in New York City and then beamed into movie theaters all across the United States and Canada and Australia.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Some of the stuff on the show, in fact, a lot of the stuff on that show was way too visual to put on the radio. But the rest of the show consisted of stories from David Sedaris and David Rakoff and Tig Notaro and others. We have a really nice show for you today from WBEZ Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Thank you. This American Life, Myra Glass.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Today's show is a rerun from years ago. That one does a bear hit in the woods. So let's go to the first story that I'm going to play you from the cinema event that we did. The guy who you just heard, actually, Ryan Knighton, he has this story that is not about what is invisible to him as somebody who can't see. It's about being invisible. Here he is, Ryan Knighton.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
So Ryan can shuffle cautiously around until his knees graze into things, and that's how he finds a sofa, which orients him.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
He says that as he moves around any new place, he doesn't exactly draw a map in his head. He says that it's more like wandering around in a first-person video game, one where nothing is visible until he touches it. So he figures, okay, let's see what is on the other side of this coffee table that he's found. And he edges forward in the room. And I find there's a desk.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
Brian Knighton. He's the author of the books Come On Papa and Cock-Eyed.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
This, by the way, is the band OK Go playing a song on handbells with the audience. They were all playing bells on a special app they downloaded to their phones for the live show for this song. Act 2, Groundhog Day. So some people are supposed to stay invisible, out of our lives, not pop up during our daily routines. And specifically, the people I'm talking about are famous people.
This American Life
464: Invisible Made Visible
We are not supposed to run into Angelina Jolie at the CVS. But sometimes that kind of thing happens. Tig Notaro has witnessed it.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. I think we all have people in our lives who we love, but there's no talking to them. They have their way of seeing things or doing things, and it's hard to take. And no matter how you try to talk it out, it goes nowhere.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Coming up, somebody's going to need to say, as promised, you were right, I was wrong. Which can be such a powerful thing in any relationship. That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today, 10 things I don't want to hate about you, about Zach Mack and his year-long bet with his dad. We arrived at the end of December.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Zach's family is not doing well, and there's still the bet.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
It doesn't get solved, even if they also want things to change. We're devoting our entire show today to a story like that. It's from Zach Mack. He's a reporter. And the story is about him and his dad and how they both wanted to mend a rift that had grown between them that lasted for years, but they couldn't figure out how until Zach's dad offered a very surprising way out.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Zach Mack. He's a producer at Vox Media. This story was a collaboration with NPR's Embedded podcast, which, if you haven't heard them, you should check them out. They have lots of documentary stories like this. David Kestenbaum and our staff worked on the story here. The staff who worked on it there were producers Dan Gurma and Ariana Garib Lee. Editing by Luis Trejas.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Katie Simon is Embedded's showrunner. Some original music in this episode was composed by Peter Leonard. Fact-checking by Greta Pittinger and the Embedded staff and Christopher Sertala on our staff. MBR's Embedded is releasing a three-part series about Zach's bet with his dad.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
That gets into material that we did not have time for here, including some revealing conversations with his dad's friends and some more interesting stuff from Zach and his dad. It is available now. You can find Embedded wherever you get your podcasts. Well, today's episode was produced by Lily Sullivan.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
The people who put together today's show include Fia Bennett, Michael Kamate, Aviva de Kornfeld, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Halle, Rana Jaffe-Wald, Seth Lin, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Frances Swanson, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor, Sara Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Avery Truffleman.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
If you like our show and you want more of our show, we've been cranking out bonus episodes every two weeks. This week, the bonus episode is interviews with my cousin, the composer Philip Glass, including one where he sits at a piano and he explains what he hears when he listens to his own music. to get that and all of our bonus episodes. We've been trying all kinds of stuff.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Become a life partner. When you do, you also get ad-free listening. You get the special archive of our 100 greatest hits episodes that show up right in your podcast feed for your convenience. How do you get all this? It could not be easier. Go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Thanks, as always, to our show's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. Fun fact about him, he has never seen a panda. He told me he's going to a zoo this weekend to do just that.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, more stories of This American Life.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Brandon's first girlfriend dumped him because he was too obsessed with sports. So when he met Cecilia, he tried a new tactic. They were out, and a friend asked him about the Celtics. And he was like, I'm not that into sports anymore.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
And then he had to live with that lie. Lies that make no sense. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station. Bye.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
That's going to be our whole show today. His dad's unusual solution and how it played out That's all I'm going to say for now. From WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. And with that, I turn things over to Zach.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Coming up, Zach calls his mom, who has some news of her own. Stay with us. Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform with features like design intelligence, combining two decades of design expertise with AI technology.
This American Life
854: Ten Things I Don't Want to Hate About You
Design intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across their entire online presence. Head to squarespace.com slash American for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
That is such... It's real. It's very true. But, like, what a funny thing to say to a bunch of kids.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
But then the teacher kept going. He wasn't done. He got very specific and said, OK, you might stay in touch with a few friends from high school.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
That is a very thorough and vivid and not inaccurate picture of the future that it's amazing that he went into that much detail.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Lily Sullivan is a producer on our show. Special thanks to Lily's sisters. This song is one of their dad's favorites. He used to play it for them on the piano when they were growing up.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Coming up, a one badly tuned instrument on one song at one concert can change your life. That's a minute with Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
This is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Today's program, if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away. We have stories about small moments between people that suddenly change how everything looks. We've arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, what's with these homies dissing my girl? In his early 20s, Mike Comete wanted to be a professional musician.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Because he's actually one of the producers on our show, Chris Bedderev. And he says he remembers the other kids in class kind of shrugging this off. Like, yeah, whatever. But he couldn't. Did you think it was true?
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
He was trying his absolute hardest to make that happen until one day it all came undone. Weirdly, right in front of Weezer, Mike tells what happened.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Before this moment, Chris hadn't bothered picturing what the future was going to be like very much. He had a vague sense that things were going to get better and better. But now, thanks to this random speech by this otherwise forgotten teacher, he realized the future he was facing... It's going to get...
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
In fact, his senior year approached. His graduation day approached. Chris says that this tiny two-minute speech by this teacher totally colored how he was seeing it. He loved his friends.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Mike Kamate. He is one of the super skilled people who work here at the show doing audio mixes and adding music to our stories. Diane Wu produced this story. Here is Mike playing guitar and singing with Julia, whose full name, by the way, is Julia Nunes. This is a song they used to cover together years ago.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
In this last act, we turn from small personal moments to big news that the whole world experiences, but that hits some people very, very personally. You probably saw the headlines in reports that a couple weeks ago, after his family ruled Syria for over 50 years, the president-slash-dictator Bashar al-Assad was run out of his own country very suddenly.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Assad ran a government that did not tolerate dissent. He used chemical weapons against his own citizens. He spent much of the last 13 years brutally crushing an uprising. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed, tortured, disappeared. More than half the population was displaced in that conflict. Six million Syrians fled the country.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
So when a rebel coalition forced Assad out two weeks ago, Syrians all over the globe had their world turned upside down. And a few of us here at the show called around to see what that's been like for them. Diane Wu put together this story.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Chris actually tracked down the health teacher recently. And of course, he had no memory of making that speech. Though he said it was exactly the kind of thing that he might have said. And in fact, he did remember saying it at some point to his own kids.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
This teacher said that he would like to believe that he meant it in a kind of nice, cherish these special times sort of way, and he was horrified at the thought that this made Chris or any other kid feel bad for the rest of high school. But it just goes to show you how somebody can say something off the cuff that can accidentally turn somebody else's world completely upside down.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
We asked listeners if they ever experienced this, and hundreds responded. Some of the sentences that were said casually to them, that later, alone, they obsessed over, It's not your glasses that aren't even. It's your face. You must have been surrounded by some pretty insensitive people growing up. No, no, you're the only circumcised one in the family.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Diane Wu is a producer on our show. This story was co-produced by Hany Hawasli.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Our program was produced today by Lily Sullivan. The people who put together today's show include Fia Bennett, Dana Chivas, Sean Cole, Cassie Halle, Hana Jaffe-Wald, Henry Larson, Seth Lynn, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Sertala, and Matt Tierney. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
This is not a setting where Chris was used to learning anything important, much less having his whole world rocked by something somebody said. He was 15, in health class, in San Juan Capistrano, California. As Chris remembers it, it was the beginning of the period. Class was just beginning to settle down. The teacher was also the school's basketball coach.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Barry. Special thanks today to Natalie Sullivan, Kim Sullivan, Sarah Kim, Steve Sopcich, Erin Marie Kamate, Dave Burns, Todd Johnson, Leanne Victorine, Darian Woods, and Yezen Abu Ismail.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
To become a This American Life partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia. You know, he invented this new appetizer where you put a hot dog in a handful of straw. What's he call it?
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
I'm a hurt glass. Back next week, more stories of This American Life.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
And one last one said by a childhood acquaintance at a funeral. Jenny, little Jenny, you're the one that nobody liked. In Chris's case, the teacher's comment obviously stayed with him. How old are you now? I am 38. And how many friends from high school are you in touch with?
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
So the guy was right?
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
These days, Chris is married. One child.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Yeah. And in fact, now that you are married and have children, is your life tedious and narrow and boring?
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
What a day on my program. If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away. We have stories about the things that people say that unravel your world, turn it upside down, shake it like a snow globe. Pick your own metaphor for this. Some of these offhand things that people say are completely accurate. Others are the exact opposite.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
And it can be really hard sometimes to tell which is which. We have real life case examples, including somebody who thinks his life was completely upended after a single brief real life encounter with Weezer. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
Okay, so hey, this is Ira talking now in the break. And I'm here in the break to give you this little talk that I feel a little ashamed of, but I'm also going to do, which is to remind any last-minute shoppers out there that you can give a This American Life Partners subscription as a holiday gift. Bye. Bye. Bye.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
So if you know somebody who might like that and you need a last-minute present, sign them up at thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. It is also a gift to us here at our show, of course, because all these subscriptions help us keep making the show. Okay, that's all I have to say about that. Back to today's episode. This American Life, Act 1.
This American Life
850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away
The world has turned and left me here. So let's kick off this show about people saying things that unravel your picture of the world with this from Lily Sullivan.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
In the car, he realized how upset his son August was about that. But they drove, looked at wind speeds and wind directions, made a guess about where it might be safe, booked a hotel, and things were feeling a little calmer in the car.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
That's August, asking Kirk to tell a story from his childhood, which he does sometimes. Kirk grew up with chickens, goats, and animals.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Nancy Updike is the producer on our show. The stage version of Dr. Strangelove, which by the way stars Steve Coogan in several different roles, is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre in London through January 25th and will be in Dublin from February 5th to February 22nd. Act two, the view from the dugout.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
So one of the things that seems likely to change once Donald Trump is again in the White House is U.S. policy toward Ukraine. His vice president, J.D. Vance, has called for an end to aid to Ukraine and described a peace plan that basically lets Russia keep the territory it's gained. Donald Trump has been vaguer about his intentions, but he's been a skeptic of continued aid.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
He has said many times that he was going to end the war in 24 hours. We wonder what it's like for Ukrainian soldiers who depend on U.S. arms right now to see all of this at this pivot point and how they're imagining what's going to happen next once Trump takes office. Our producer Valerie Kipnis spoke with a bunch of people on the front lines.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Valerie Kipnis is a producer on our show. She reported this with help from Anastasia Mazova. Coming up, the power of a simple photograph in a moment of uncertainty. That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
What was the moment you realized, oh, this is not the right story for this moment?
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Pivot Point. On this weekend, before a new presidency begins, we have stories of people living in the strange and often unsettling in-between moment when you know things are right on the cusp of big, big changes. We've arrived at Act 3 of our program, Act 3, period, peace.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
So when we were discussing this week's theme as a group here at the radio show, one of our co-workers, Susan Burton, started talking about a year-long pivot point. It lasts 12 months. that many of our listeners have either gone through, are in the middle of now, or will go through. Quick heads up, Susan described some bodily stuff in here. Here she is.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Susan Burton is an editor on our show. At four, since you've been gone. So I showed it is about people at a pivot point, and one entire community in that situation is Altadena, California. It's one of the towns around LA that's so devastated that for most of the last week and a half, nobody was allowed in. It's been surrounded by National Guard with barricades.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
And he and his wife MJ were trying to pretend that things were going to be fine when they really had no idea at all and were scared they were not going to be fine. When his brain searched for a story to tell the children, this one with the horse is the one that popped up.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
One of our producers, Miki Meek, talked to somebody who stayed at her house. The fire stopped about a block away. And in the first days of the fires, came up with a mission for herself.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
These kind of moments, when you feel the earth shifting underneath you, and you just have to figure out what you're going to do in this new reality. That's what our show is about today. people at different pivot points in their lives between what was and what's about to happen. I'm WBEZ Chicago. This is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Mickey Meek is a producer on our show. Well, our program is produced today by Emmanuel Jochi.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
People who put together today's show include Fia Benin, Dana Chivas, Michael Kamate, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howley, Lana Jaffe-Walt, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Captain Ray Mondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Shipp, Laura Stercheski, Lily Sullivan, Chris Rosenthaler, Marisa Robertson-Texter, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to The actors performing the English translations for The Ukrainians in Act 2 of our show today were Alexander Foreman and Ross Pella. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
To become a This American Life partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show that are going to show up right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. Your subscription also helps keep our program going. Thanks this week to life partners Cici Chen-Ming Fei and Colette Spriggans.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. He's been taking a figure drawing class. His drawings are pretty good, except for the hands. He does the shoulder, upper arm, forearm, all great, and then gets to the end of the arm, and it's always, we can't quite put a finger on it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
When Kirk and his wife MJ evacuated their house in LA on the second day of the fires, they could see the flames up the hill from their backyard. They packed the car full, got their seven and eight year old kids inside with a family cat, hit the road. And Kirk started recording.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
This American Life, Act One, Who's Laughing Now? So we start today with this story about somebody who's been thinking a lot about one particular pivot point that the world might go through. Nancy Updike went to meet him.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
He records his kids a lot and just had a feeling like this is an important moment.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
He's been on our show before, talking about his experiences in the Iraq War, among other things. He thinks of himself as somebody who can usually handle a moment of crisis. But he admits he made mistakes in the car. He didn't bring the family tortoise, an animal he says his kids have ignored for over a year. It lives in a giant crate outside the house.
This American Life
849: The Narrator
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? Next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.
This American Life
849: The Narrator
Hey there, it's Ira here, in the break. A little embarrassed to be saying these next words, but I'm going to say them nonetheless. You can give a This American Life Partner subscription to anyone you want as a holiday gift. What that means is that your loved one will receive bonus episodes. We've been doing a new bonus episode every other week. They'll get the program without ads.
This American Life
849: The Narrator
In other words, without somebody interrupting the way I am right now. And your support allows us to keep making the show possible. If there's somebody in your life that that would be right for, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. Here's Hannah.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
This is her older sister, Johanna. Johanna's eight in third grade. Again, Mae, six, first grade. And Johanna, as the older sister, is very aware of the things that make Mae upset.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Especially, she says, when it comes to what Mae is wearing.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
You're scrunching your fist as tight as they can go.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Meanwhile, May and Johanna's mom, Megan, was trying to get them both dressed and ready for school.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
John Mulaney, Chloe Fineman, Richard Kind, and Fred Armisen. They're the stars of All In, Comedy About Love. The cast is going to change soon and star other great people. The show is written by Simon Rich. It runs through February 16th on Broadway, New York City, at the Hudson Theater.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Coming up, how do you get a wild animal that hates your guts to turn the other cheek, especially if it doesn't have cheeks? That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
This is American Life from Ira Glass. Today on our program, try a little tenderness. We have stories of people putting aside aggressiveness and anger and disappointment in other human beings and reaching out in kindness. Instead, we've arrived at our tour program, Act Two, The Gladiator, starring Ruffled Crow.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Aviva de Kornfeld brings us this story about a person who tried to be considerate and where it got him.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
What had happened? How'd these two little kids work this out so quickly? Well, me and Johanna explained. It went down like this. Mae marched herself to Johanna's room and banged on the door. Johanna opened the door. And Mae has been working on not giving in to her anger, not taking the low road, but instead using words, saying what she wants, which she did now.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Aviva de Kornfeld is the producer of our program. Act 3, you'll spank me later for this. So in this show today about tenderness, we turn now to comedian Josh Johnson, who's been thinking a lot lately about when tenderness is called for and when the opposite of tenderness may actually be the right way to go.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
When you punched her butt, did you punch her like you were super mad? Or did you punch her kind of soft by then because you were sort of half over it?
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Josh Johnson. Check out his YouTube channel, Josh Johnson Comedy. Tour dates, videos, and albums are at joshjohnsoncomedy.com. Act four, the feels on the bus. There are, of course, so many people who believe that being tenderhearted is not a good way to live in this tough and unforgiving world. For some people, it's a matter of principle. They think it works out better for everybody that way.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Eckhart Carrot has this short story about someone like that.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
It's funny, I wonder if it worked because she was sort of nice about it. Like you came to her all mad and then she didn't get mad back. Instead, she greeted your anger with niceness.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
May's six years old, in first grade. And she's the kind of forthright kid who, when we sit down for an interview, before I can get to any of the things that I want to ask her, she launches into a few get-to-know-you questions of her own. Hi, May.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Have you ever heard of this phrase, turn the other cheek?
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
It's something that I think Jesus said. He said that if somebody slaps you on your right cheek, like, you know, like slaps you on the cheek of your face, he says turn the other cheek and offer the other cheek as well. Even if somebody's mad at you and does something unreasonable, you shouldn't get unreasonable yourself.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Edgar Carat, reading the title story from his collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories. If you want to get a short story in your email from Edgar once a week, you can sign up for that at his Substack at Edgar Carat, that's Carat, K-E-R-E-T, .substack.com.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Our program is produced today by Ike Streets, Kandaraja, and Henry Larson. The people who put together today's show include Jindaye Bonds, Angela Gervasi, Tobin Lowe, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Francis Swanson, Christopher Sotala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abderrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to the team at All In on Broadway, director Alex Timbers, producers Micah Frank and Greg Noble, also Scott Rowan and Allison Ebling, Wagner Johnson Productions, O&M, and everybody else at the Hudson Theater. Also thanks today to Emily Woodbury and Griffin Dunn.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
And in this case, your sister turned the other cheek, but it was her butt cheek that she turned.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange to become a This American Life partner. which gives you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show that'll show up right in your podcast feed. Go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. It's a great deal. It helps us out. That link is also in the show notes.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Thanks this week to life partners Stacey Dixon, Dan Evans III, Matthew Rotz, Sarah Reen, Elon Saratovsky, and Joe Thorne. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. You know, he's been throwing out all of his old CDs, every single one. But he is such a Bono fan. He looks at the package, Joshua Tree, Octoon Baby, and screams.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, more stories of this American life.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
You got to love me, squeeze me, tease me, please me. Got to, got to, now, now, now, got to try a little tender love for me. You got to do the things that you want to do.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Next week on the podcast of This American Life. So June is 29, never had a boyfriend, and she has a theory about why. Then she meets somebody who tells her she doesn't know what she's talking about. She needs to rethink the entire thing from the ground up. What she tells her, and can you change your whole life in one conversation?
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
We find out next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
But it wasn't just Johanna who led them to a quick, peaceful resolution. Both girls agreed that if Mae hadn't asked for what she wanted at the door, if she just punched Johanna, Johanna would have punched back. It would have escalated. Johanna admits she's not always so calm and reasonable with Mae. But this time, it was clear how to handle her, and Johanna knew exactly what to do.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
I think that's true. Yeah. Like you didn't say no to her.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
Well, today on our show, in these noisy, aggressive times where the people rising to power in this world seem to come in hot, lots of fiery tempers and scrunched up fists and twitchering legs, we pause for a moment to remember there is another path.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
We have stories of people turning the other cheek, pausing, and trying against all odds to see the good in each other, giving themselves over to the feeling in that old Otis Redding song. Stay tuned for a hard-boiled detective, for crows with a vendetta, for righteous spankings and non-spankings, for John Mulaney, and for a bus driver who thought he was God.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
From WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
We discuss favorite colors, and then she moves on to... What's your middle name? I'm glad you're asking me that. My middle name is... We move on to last names, and soon she's instructing me on the pronunciation of her last name.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
This is American Life, Act One. So there's an entire genre of movies and other stories where tough guys who've been through it all and seen the worst in people decide they're going to soften, try a little tenderness, help somebody out who needs the help. This happens in old westerns, sci-fi films, spy stories. And there's a story like that on stage right now on Broadway in New York.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
And I saw this a couple weeks ago and thought this story would be perfect for the radio. And the director and producers and writers said yes. The show is called All In. And it stars John Mulaney, Richard Kine, Fred Armisen, and Chloe Feynman. And what they're doing is they're performing a set of short stories on stage by the writer Simon Rich. He's been on our show a few times with his stories.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
And let's get right to it. This story is one of the stories in their show. It's called The Big Nap.
This American Life
851: Try a Little Tenderness
The story I was there to talk to Ms. Jenski about happened this fall, at the beginning of the school year. In St. Louis, where she lives, it was hot out.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches the question, how do entrepreneurs get created? And at some point, he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Professor Adia doesn't argue with any of this, but he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else. making contacts, learning the business.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Even Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Lytton Engineering, who let them use equipment that they didn't know themselves yet.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Jobs' garage.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Sarah Koenig. We first ran this story back in 2009. Sarah's dad, Julian Koenig, died five years after that. He was 93. George Lois died a few years after that. These days, Sarah is the host of the Serial podcast. She worked as a producer at our show for a decade before that. Coming up, Peter Sagal, long before Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his lost years in Havana.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This is American Life from Hourglass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Origin Stories, where we go back to figure out where things came from. We arrived at act two of our program, act two, Silent Partner.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
So years ago, Sean Cole visited Chad's Trading Post, a restaurant filled with frilly knickknacks in Southampton, Massachusetts. It's a restaurant with a very distinct origin story.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Pino Adia has tried to find mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much. He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody. The Apple and Hewlett-Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories like it.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Google, for example. They did not start in a garage. The founders began working on their search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford. They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998. They already had investors, and they were just in the garage for five months. But in 2006, Google bought that garage as a company landmark.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage. It is a garage, a literal garage. Hewlett Packard started in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Mattel Toy Company, the Wham-O Toy Company.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company magazine. He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true. For instance, when eBay began... A story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiancée could buy and collect PEZ dispensers more easily. Not true.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005, where two of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chinn, shot some video, and then tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
The family kept Chad's memory alive for a while in a new restaurant called Chad's Good Table, 10 minutes away. But then they sold off that restaurant. These days, his memory is honored by four different boys who have been named after him. Act 3, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me. Now, this origin story.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Our public radio colleague, the host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Mr. Peter Sagal, used to be a playwright. And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright, his most successful play, he says, was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Back in the 90s when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie. And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15 had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened. Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance, growing up film, half politics, about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the 50s.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
And eventually this film did get made. It did. It did. It finally got made a bit later, and I'm just going to play a clip here from it.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
So that's a clip from the film. You want to just let people know the title of the film?
This American Life
535: Origin Story
I have to say, I watched the movie last night. I watched Dirty Dancing 2.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
So how does a film go from political coming-of-age drama to Dirty Dancing to Havana Nights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story. Peter writes his film. He turns it in. They ask him to make it more like, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing?
This American Life
535: Origin Story
He says each draft got worse and worse. Even he didn't like it. Finally, it was shelved. Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film Dirty Dancing teamed up with Lawrence Bender to make a sequel, and somebody thought of Peter's old script.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
All the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where, really unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure at the climax of the dance contest. And then later, in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Can I ask you what it was like for you to watch the film? For you to sit in a theater and watch the film? It was fine.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Act four, Bill Clinton's seven-year-old brother. So reporter Mary Wittenberg spent years writing about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and then settled in Georgia in the United States in 2006. Many of her stories focused on the older brother, nine-year-old Bill Clinton Haddam. His dad was a big fan of the former president.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seemed to have settled in. But his little brother, Ige, was still struggling to understand his own origin story, to get his seven-year-old brain around who he was and where he came from. At some point, Mary had spent so much time with these two boys that she was more than a reporter. She was more like a member of the family. Anyway, here's Mary.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
In the article that you wrote for Fast Company, you point out that our attachment to these kinds of mythic creation stories is so strong that we have even exaggerated the Christopher Columbus story
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Mary Wiltenberg. She wrote about Ige, Bill Clinton, and their family for the Christian Science Monitor. Today shows a rerun, and Ige is now 23. He still talks to his mother in Swahili. You can read more of the family stories at marywiltonberg.com.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Well, the program was produced today by Lisa Pollack and myself, with Alex Bloomberg, Sean Cole, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Alyssa Shipp, and Nancy Opdyke. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from J.P. Dukes. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Help on today's rerun from Michael Kamate, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rumery.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Our website, thisamericanlife.org. Thanks today to Bob Fokenflik, Matt Holtzman, and Hank Rosenfeld. Pino Adia's research paper about garages and entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show was done with Christopher Ryder. Dan Heath, who I also talked to at the beginning of the show, is now host of the podcast, What It's Like to Be.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week on our program and says, I never said that. I would never say that. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Next week on the podcast, This American Life, Daniel Sloss is a comedian. And after one of his shows, a fan walked up, told Daniel that he ended his marriage after watching Daniel's special. Even showed him the divorce papers. Then it happened again. And again. Fans got in touch to say they'd broken up with their partners after seeing Daniel's show.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
The comedy routine powerful enough to end your marriage. Listen if you dare. Next week on the podcast, on your local public radio station.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
What a day on our show. Origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life. Act one of our show today, Madman. Act two, Silent Partner. Act three, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me. Act four, Bill Clinton's seven-year-old brother, Stay With Us. This American Life Today show is a rerun, act one, Madman.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas, a fight over who really came up with those ideas. Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad, Julian.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
This is a promotional video that Hewlett Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started a company that is still one of the largest technology firms in the world.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
A few years ago, Jennifer LeMessurier was watching this PBS cooking show. And this chef, David Chang, started talking about MSG.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Of course, lots of people believe MSG is bad for you. It gives you headaches, a food hangover. That idea's been around for decades. I grew up hearing this. Maybe you did, too. But Jennifer knows this is a myth. In fact, the very next segment on the show is science and food writer Harold McGee saying just that.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Quote, others have suggested that it may be caused by the monosodium glutamate seasoning used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Lily Sullivan is one of the producers of our show. Fact two, baby's got bank. Okay, I know how unlikely this sounds, but we now have another old guy basically pranking the world right before he dies, but on a scale that gets hundreds of thousands of people involved and excited and talking about this guy's plan that he set in motion for years and years. Stephanie Fu explains.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
So the first thing she did was look up Dr. Kwok to get the whole story from him. What she learned was Dr. Kwok had been a researcher and a pediatrician in Maryland, and he was dead. She found an obituary from 2014.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
So instead, she traced the history of how this letter blew up, led to all these other things, by reading subsequent issues of the New England Journal of Medicine and newspapers from the time and other documents. She wrote a paper, published it in an academic journal in 2017. And then, after that, she gets his voicemail on her work number. She's a professor at Colgate University.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
The confusion makes sense because, remember, there was a Dr. Robert Homan Kwok, the one in his obituary she read. So who is this guy on the phone?
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
He makes this little joke about how he keeps his phone in his pocket right by the thing that electrifies his pacemaker.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Okay, what? Right? This message was just the beginning, the very odd beginning of a story that we're going to continue in just a minute. You will hear more from the mysterious Dr. Steele. Because this letter to the editor, I don't know, is it possible that this is the most impactful letter to the editor in the history of letters to the editor?
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
It launched an entire MSG scare that lasted for decades. Even today, 42% of all Americans think that it's bad for you. And it's not. Since the 90s, the FDA has listed MSG as perfectly safe for its intended use, like vinegar, salt, pepper. Today on our show, we have three stories like this one, where people throw words out into the world that take on a totally unexpected life of their own.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
And in all these stories, the words wreak havoc for years. I'm WBC Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. It's It's American Life. Today's show is a rerun. Act one, humor is not the best medicine. Okay, so where we left off, it was the voicemail on Jennifer LeMessurier's phone from this retired surgeon where he says, okay, I'm the guy. I made up a fake name.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
I wrote a letter and it set off 50 years of completely needless panic over MSG. Call me. Lily Sullivan explains what happened next.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Jared Marcel. He produces WNYC's local news podcast, NYC Now, new episodes every Saturday. Ian Dilley, the racer who got cheated out of his victory, wrote about this in Bicycling Magazine. That's how we heard about the story. He has a book called The Cyclist's Bucket List. The other racer, Mike Friedman, now runs a nonprofit teaching kids about bikes called Pedaling Minds.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Today's program is a rerun, and when we reached out to Mike, he said he regretted replying, I don't know, when Jared asked him why he did it. He said he does know why, and it was self-doubt. He wrote us in an email, quote, In the heat of the moment, I made a poor decision and paid for it with my character, honor, integrity, and self-respect. Today, as I write, I feel selfish.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
My apologizing to him when I did, so long after, is inherently a selfish act. But the only way to truly free my heart was to admit it. He said apologies are powerful, and they do matter. Our program was produced today by Diane Wu.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
The people who put our show together include Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chase, Dana Chivas, Sean Cole, Aviva DeKornfeld, Neil Drumming, Jared Floyd, Damian Grave, Miki Meek, Stone Nelson, Catherine Raimondo, Ben Phelan, Nadia Raymond, Robin Simeon, Alyssa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Sertala, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Updike. Our managing editors for today's program are Susan Burton and David Kestenbaum.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Help on today's rerun from Angela Gervasi. Special thanks today to Ptolemy Slocum, Chuck Long, Chris Bateman, David Goldenberg, Veronica Simmons, Astrid Lang, Brandon Copley, and Michelle Solomon. Jennifer LeMessurier, who you heard at the beginning of the show, has a book, Inscrutable Eating, about Americans' perceptions of Asian food, with the whole chapter on MSG.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 850 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. You know, I called him earlier today, and when I called him, I don't know.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Micah was killed in a hit-and-run.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
At the time, Jennifer was a Ph.D. student, very interested in the way people talk about race and Asian Americans. So to hear that there was once this letter that led Americans to freak out about the dangers of an ingredient commonly used in Chinese food, an ingredient that was later proven totally harmless, Jennifer wanted to see that letter.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
So she went into the stacks, found this old journal from the 60s. And there it was, a letter to the editor from a doctor titled Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.
This American Life
668: The Long Fuse
He runs through the symptoms that he's observed. Then he runs through the possible causes for this strange numbness and eliminates them one by one. Soy sauce, no. Cooking wine, no. And then it gets to the sentence it's going to live on for a half century.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Casey's autistic. She says it's puzzling, neurotypical people and how much they lie. She's not alone.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I've decided to start translating a lot of NT chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of, hello, I want you to see me as friendly. So I am making friendly noises.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She remembers when she realized just how widespread lying is for neurotypical people. She was a teenager, and she says she was heavyset from a heavyset family.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Dana Chivas is a reporter on our program. Liz Flock is still a reporter, but now she spent years reporting her stories. Her latest book, The Furies, which she traveled to Syria multiple times for, is out in paperback. Coming up, an American dad makes an impassioned argument for more unnecessary lies. Also, Masha Gessen. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
This American life from Ira Glass. Today's show, that's a weird thing to lie about. We have stories today of unnecessary lies, outrageous lies that make you wonder why lie about that in the first place. We arrived at act two of our program, act two, bully pulpit. There's a particular kind of lie that somebody who's been on our show a few times, Masha Gessen, wrote about a few years ago.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And when I read what they wrote, I realized, like, oh, I had not thought about this as a specific way that a person can lie that is, like, different from all the other ways a person can lie. It's a kind of lie that President Trump does a lot. He kicked off his presidency with one of these lies.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
In the very first minutes, on the very first day of his very first term, you may remember that he insisted that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than they were. Even their photos clearly showed that he was wrong.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
In fact, for anybody who had watched the inauguration, which was a lot of us, like it was just right there. We had just seen it.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Let me ask you to read. You write about this very enjoyably. Let me ask you to read this passage. I'm going to hand you a copy. Let's start here and continue up here. We'll skip this a little bit, and then we'll keep going.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I have to say since reading that passage in your book a few weeks ago, I feel like it's like you gave a name to something that I had known was there but hadn't put a finger on what it was. Like I hadn't named to myself. This is a particular phenomenon, a particular way of lying that Donald Trump does.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And since I read that, I feel like I see this kind of power lie or bully lie from Trump and from his team come up in the news over and over. So, for example, Ukraine started the war with Russia. USAID sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas. China controls the Panama Canal.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
That's something that Elon Musk claimed without presenting any evidence at all in an Oval Office press event. Where he also suggested that Social Security may be sending out checks to people 150 years old. Also without evidence. Seems to be flatly untrue.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Masha says these kind of lies, these bully lies, are different from the kind of lies that we've been used to in American politics for most of our history. Where the two sides, you know, argue back and forth. Present evidence. Try to convince each other. Or try to convince voters, at least. The bully lie is different. It doesn't try to convince you. It doesn't present evidence.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It just tells you to pick a side. So when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the Potomac, when he called the president of Ukraine a dictator without elections, he didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case. He wasn't interested in rebuttal.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's asserting control over reality itself and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I don't know if it's worth complicating this analysis with this example, but I was actually able to think of one instance of the Democrats doing the kind of bully lie that Masha writes about. And it's a big one that we all just lived through. It seemed like it was done more out of desperation than anything else and not part of a daily pattern of making false claims with no facts behind them.
This American Life
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The thing I'm talking about is Joe Biden and his advisers concealing how he had aged in office. I talked to Masha about this. Like that basically was making everybody in the country choose either you accept what we're telling you about Biden or you're against us.
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The reason Masha is so aware of what that feels like is that they grew up in Russia, left, came back, then fled when it became impossible for them to keep living there under Vladimir Putin. Masha says the bully lie is significant because it's not a traditional part of American politics. But it is a very standard tactic of authoritarian leaders around the world and in history.
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I've just actually written and reported a ton about this. I wrote a book about Putin and another one about Russia's recent turn to totalitarianism. Authoritarian government, just to remind you, is basically a government run by one person, a strongman leader who holds all the power, which, of course, is different from our system of checks and balances.
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Masha wrote about the bully lie in their book about Donald Trump's first term. The book is called Surviving Autocracy. That's what I asked him to read from a little earlier. In that book, Masha argues that Donald Trump does lots of things that we normally see from authoritarian leaders, not just the bully lies. And I think it's worth talking about it for a little bit here.
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Now, of course, she's used to it. When I talked to her, she was just about to go to a conference where she knew people who barely remember her would be saying, so great to see you, and not mean a word of it. And she's okay with that. She ignores it, moves on. But she tries to keep things more strictly truthful. So you never lie?
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I found it eye-opening to see it laid out point by point. And I just want to say, if you like the president and you think talking about him this way is just way, way out of line, just stay with me. We talked about that. I feel very aware that people who like the president may hear you say the word autocrat and just think it's nuts.
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And you're just looking for any alarmist thing you can say to make him look bad. Can I ask you to make your case for a skeptical listener? What are the things that Donald Trump does wrong? that usually we see from autocrats and not from kind of just like regular American politicians who might lie and do whatever it is that they do?
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Like what are the things that he's doing that are more typical for autocrats?
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Right. You're making me think of him deciding to weigh in and ban congestion pricing in New York City from the White House.
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And saying, I'm the king. Gone with the king. Right.
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That is actually almost the definition of an autocrat. Acting like you have ultimate and unchecked power. And there are other specific things, Masha says, that Donald Trump has done in the last few weeks that are standard moves for an autocrat. Number one, punishing press outlets who don't do what he says.
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Trump kicked the Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office on Air Force One and at major events after they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America like he wants. Autocrats go after their enemies. Donald Trump has been going after so many enemies. Former aides, he fired Justice Department officials who prosecuted cases against him.
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And this week, even went after the law firm that is giving advice to one of those officials, taking away their security clearances, which make defending that official harder. That is very autocratic leader. And then there's Donald Trump's basic campaign message. Make America great again.
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What do you make of all the things that Trump has been saying lately about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal and Gaza?
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Just like out loud trolling, I'll say a noisy thing, it'll get a headline, and who cares?
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You are serious. There are certain things that they do. For example, they pick some group in society to be like, these are the people who we hate, who are ruining things for the rest of us. That's one thing they do.
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And then another thing is that they call to some sort of golden age. Yeah, that they're going to recreate in the future. And then you're saying another one is just, we're going to expand...
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And the something greater is a country that's expanding its borders?
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OK. So obviously nobody knows what's coming next. But if you see Trump as a kind of autocratic ruler and you worry about him taking more power in that way, what are the things you'd be looking for next? Like what are the markers of it going further?
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I have to say, if that's your philosophy, I find it so interesting to think about what are the very few examples where you do let yourself lie, where you feel like that's the right thing to do. What are those?
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Masha Gessen. Their book about Donald Trump and his autocratic tendencies is called Surviving Autocracy. These days, they're an opinion columnist at the New York Times. They recently wrote in the Times... Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people.
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But those of us with experience can tell you most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe underwater because you're submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually in bad literature and bad movies.
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Just this week, lawyers nominated for top positions in the Justice Department, including Solicitor General, were asked if the president could ignore or disobey a court order. And they hedged. They did not say that he should obey. Vice President Vance said earlier this month that judges should not be allowed to control what the president does. Act three, in defense of unnecessary lies.
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Well, it's been nearly a whole hour talking about far-fetched lies that do not seem to make the world a better place at all. Our tone, I'll admit, has been skeptical, sometimes incredulous. In this act, we turn that around. I present one of our co-workers here at the radio show, Ike Shreeskandarasha.
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That is obviously a very hard example to argue against. She told me another one where her dog pooped all over her car and she was late to a meeting. And when she got there, she did not tell the truth about why. She didn't want to gross anybody out. Also, none of their business. Otherwise, she almost always picks honesty.
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Ike Sreeskandarajah is one of the producers of our show. By the way, his friend Charles, who Ike lied to about Karl Rove, Charles told her amazingly that he never thought that that was true. He lied to Ike about believing it and also about telling others just to amuse himself.
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When kids picked on their nieces about their weight, they came to her crying and asked, am I fat? And she says it was really hard not to say the kinds of lies that people said to her when she was their age. But she didn't. She said, let's talk about your body and being fat. Is there something wrong with being fat?
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Our program was produced today by Diane Wu. The people who put together today's show include Jendayi Bonds, Michael Kamate, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rumery, Lily Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Switala, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry.
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Special thanks today to Andy Carvin, Anna Stracheski, Anna Cajada, Natasha Nelson, Ira Kramer, Eric Garcia, and Matt Miller. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. I know you. You're living your life, doing stuff. You need something to listen to. What are you going to listen to? Go to our website. You can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. That is still happening.
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Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. Have you heard he is doing a one-man show based on the children's book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar? It opens this way.
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I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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She gave me this example. When she worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant. A naked picture of her was on his work computer. And still, he denied it, kept lying.
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Honesty, she says, is the only way to vulnerability and intimacy, which, you know, of course. I was very curious how she does not lie at work. I definitely do most of my lying on the job. Not here on the air, of course, where everything I say is deeply, thoroughly fact-checked. but just around the office, just white lies.
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I don't understand how you get by without a little pretending now and then in a workplace. I don't actually understand how you would get things done. Casey has none of that. Okay, let me ask you about a lie that I tell all the time at work. Okay?
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At the end of pretty much any interview I ever do, I thank the person and I tell them how great they were, even if they were not great, even if they were not good talkers, even if they were not able to describe the thing that we'd hoped that they would describe. That is what I say because it seems to me to be such a vulnerable thing to ask people to, like –
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come and talk in an interview and they don't know how it's going to go and it's just kind of a nerve-wracking thing that it seems just kind to say you did a good job.
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I wasn't expecting you to really say something so actually useful. I'll do you the favor of being honest about that.
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One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today is that we're doing a whole episode of our show about inexplicable lies. Lies that you just think, like, why lie about that? In your experience, what percentage of lies are unnecessary lies?
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Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for doing this.
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I know that it's a vulnerable thing coming in and speaking honestly. Thank you. And I really appreciate you doing that. No, I can genuinely say that you were great. You were very straightforward and you spoke in a real way about what you really think, which is what we want.
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What a day on our program. Lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes. Seriously, we have some fun stories for you. I'm WBEC Chicago. This is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us.
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It's just American life. Act one, the real L word. Okay, so to kick things off today, we're going to revisit some recent historical events. I think that's all I'm going to say for now. Dana Chivas tells what happened.
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Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of autistic people writing about this exact thing. Here's somebody who posted saying, I recently realized that a lot of things I'd always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people, neurotypical people. Like, they say it knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie because they don't expect others to believe it.
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For example, here's some things that I always thought were weird, inexplicable lies. And then there's a list. It was great to see you. Let's do this again soon. I hope you have a great holiday. You are so funny. I love your hairdo. Where did you buy that dress? I need to get one too. Oh, wow. That's very interesting. See you later. They continue.
Throughline
Birthright Citizenship
This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. All right, I'm just going to stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast. Chances are you know our show. So instead, I'm going to tell you we've just been on a run of really good shows lately. Some big epic emotional stories, some weird funny stuff too.
Up First from NPR
Trump's 'Liberation Day', Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Mistaken Deportation
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
Up First from NPR
Trump's 'Liberation Day', Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Mistaken Deportation
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.
Up First from NPR
Global Markets Plummet, Wrongful Deportation Deadline, Second Measles Death
This is Ira Glass. In Lily's family, there's a story everybody knows by heart.
Up First from NPR
Global Markets Plummet, Wrongful Deportation Deadline, Second Measles Death
So what happens when Lily's mom tells her this story is not true? This American Life, surprising stories every week.