People climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them? Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Ira Glass talks with Paul Feig, who, as a sixth-grader, read the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People at the urging of his father. He found that afterward, he had a bleaker understanding of human nature—and even fewer friends than when he started. (9 minutes)Act One: David Sedaris has this instructive tale of how, as a boy, with the help of his dad, he tried to bridge the chasm that divides the popular kid from the unpopular — with the sorts of results that perhaps you might anticipate. (14 minutes)Act Two: After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. diplomats had to start working the phones to assemble a coalition of nations to combat this new threat. Some of the calls, you get the feeling, were not the easiest to make. Writer and performer Tami Sagher imagines what those calls were like. (6 minutes)Act Three: To prove this simple point—a familiar one to readers of any women's magazines—we have this true story of moral instruction, told by Luke Burbank in Seattle, about a guy he met on a plane dressed in a hand-sewn Superman costume. (13 minutes)Act Four: Jonathan Goldstein with a story about what it's like to date Lois Lane when she's on the rebound from Superman. (13 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: How did Dale Carnegie's book influence friendships?
What is the fundamental difference between them and everybody else? We answer that question today in four simple lessons that will change your life forever. or possibly won't. Lesson one, to make a friend, be a friend. David Sedaris has an instructive tale of how, as a boy, with the help of his dad, he tried to bridge the chasm that divides the popular kids from the unpopular.
Lesson two, stay in touch. Yes, my friend, you can learn so many things about being a better friend, a better spouse, a better business person, if you would simply imitate recent U.S. diplomatic and foreign policy. Lesson three, people like you if you put a lot of time into your appearance. In that lesson, we hear the story of how a simple Superman costume changed one man's life for the better.
Lesson four, just be yourself. Jonathan Goldstein demonstrates how to be bested by the most popular, most handsome, most powerful man in the world and not feel bad about it. Stay with us if you care about your future. This is American Life. Today's show is a rerun. How to make friends and influence people. Lesson one, to make a friend, be a friend.
Well, writer David Sedaris tells this story about the popular crowd and how easy it is to enter. This was recorded for a live audience. This story begins on Labor Day when David was a kid at the Raleigh Country Club in North Carolina.
I was in the snack bar listening to a group of sixth graders who lived in another part of town and sat discussing significant changes in their upcoming school year. According to the girl named Janet, neither Pam Dobbins nor J.J.
Jackson had been invited to the Fourth of July party hosted by the Pyle twins, who later told Kimberly Matthews that both Pam and Mike were out of the picture as far as the seventh grade was concerned. Totally, completely out, Janet said. Hoof. I didn't know any Pam Dobbins or JJ Jackson, but the reverential tone of Janet's voice sent me into a state of mild shock.
Call me naive, but it had simply never occurred to me that other schools might have their own celebrity circles. At the age of 12, I thought the group at E.C. Brooks was, if not nationally known, then at least its own private phenomenon. Why else would our lives revolve around them? I myself was not a member of my school's popular crowd.
but recall thinking that whoever they were, Janet's popular people couldn't begin to compete with ours. Then I worried that our popular crowd couldn't compare to those in Charlotte or Greensboro, not to mention the thousands of schools located in other states. What if I'd wasted my entire life comparing myself to people who didn't really matter?
Try as I might, I still can't wrap my mind around it. They banded together in the third grade. Ann Carlsworth, Christy K. Moore, Deb Bevins, Mike Hollowell, Doug Middleton, Thad Pope. This was the core base of the popular crowd, and for the next six years, my classmates and I studied their lives the way we were supposed to study math and English.
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Chapter 5: What was Paul Feig's experience with social skills?
Sometime after 1 in the morning, Lois showed up at my place full of apologies. She had gone over to sit with me, but I had already left. She spent the whole night talking with Superman. She said that he's been really depressed. I've never seen him like this, she said. I'm actually a bit worried. He's obsessed with the emptiness of the universe.
He said that after we broke up, he went looking for God, literally looking for God, zipping across the universe, and he came back with nothing. I wasn't in the mood for a big Superman is a man of constant sorrow routine, but she was clearly on a roll, and I didn't have the heart to stop her. I never realized how obsessive he can be, she said.
He told me there was once a certain way I flipped my hair that so beguiled him he spun around the earth reversing the moment 75,000 times. I never knew that. I felt myself almost throw up. He's just so intense, she continued, and this planet can be so cold. Did you know that on Krypton, when two people fell in love, they became inseparable, and they learned to move together in unison?
They even had special clothes they wore. He said that on Earth, these kinds of garments had names like fundies and were only sold in the pages of pornographic magazines. Superman says the Earth is a sick, sick place.
My fear wasn't that Lois would get back together with Superman, because by this point I knew it was only a matter of time before she would, but that she would describe the summer we spent together as the most miserable, depressing, and disgusting time of her life. I already knew how it would infuriate him. I could hear him making stupid jock jokes with her.
You don't need supervision to see through that sap, he would say. After she went home, I decided to take a walk and clear my head. I did so while cursing Superman until there were tears in my eyes. I had only walked a couple of blocks when I ran into Clark Kent. I had been introduced to Clark at a couple of Lois' soirees, and although I hardly knew him, he was someone I really liked.
He possessed what I felt, from my citified point of view, was genuine small-town warmth, and I just enjoyed being around him. He told me I looked terribly sad. Terribly sad. People didn't say stuff like that anymore. Having him call me terribly sad instead of depressed or bummed made me already start to feel a little bit better. He asked me if I wanted to grab a beer, and I said sure.
I told Clark all about the evening, and he listened to me. That was all I really needed just then, to be listened to. How do you know she'll go running back to Superman? asked Clark. You should hear the way she talks, I said. Do you have any idea how much Superman can bench press? Superman once went back in time and beat up Hitler. I mean, who can compete with that?
Clark started laughing so hard, people at the other tables turned around to look at us. I was on a roll. With his laughter egging me on, I told him all the things that over the last few weeks I wished I had said to Superman. You're such a phony, I said. You have this idea of what it means to be human, but it's a parody." Humans feel pain, and you don't understand what pain is.
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