Sometimes, life’s biggest mysteries require one very specific person to answer them. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: 7-year-old Miles has lots of questions. More specifically, he has questions about the famous car chase from “The Blues Brothers” movie. We arrange for him to talk to stunt coordinator Gary Powell so he can get the answers he so desperately wants. (9 minutes)Act One: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld looks into why comedian Daniel Sloss’s comedy special has been responsible for so many couples breaking up. (17 minutes)Act Two: We hear from Kwaneta Harris, a former nurse incarcerated in Texas, who is constantly asked for medical advice by her neighbors. (17 minutes)Act Three: Producer Diane Wu talks to Juna, a young woman who is getting advice from someone uniquely equipped to guide her to the love life she wants. (12 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: Who is Miles and what are his questions?
My name's Gary Powell. I'm a stunt coordinator, second unit director in motion films. Name a couple movies. Ooh, Titanic, James Bond, Mission Impossible. Okay, Miles, your turn.
I don't have a job.
You could say your name, though.
Miles.
Miles is seven. Well, almost seven. And we arranged for him to talk to Gary because he had some urgent questions about car chases from movies.
And Gary, that's his particular set of skills. I drove the crane in Terminator, the bus in Harry Potter.
Wait, you drove the bus in Harry Potter?
I did. A little background. Miles loves cars. His mom says that before he could read, he could tell you make and model and sometimes year of any of their friends' cars. He draws cars, makes cars out of Legos. He brought one with him, actually. And he and Gary quickly got down to talking shop.
I do car chases with my, like, seven and eight cars.
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Chapter 2: How are car chase scenes safely filmed?
The one at the end?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a picture of it.
This is the thing he had questions about. The famous car chase at the end of the Blues Brothers. The whole thing is actually 11 minutes long.
I remember the first time I saw it. I fell over.
Because it was so amazing?
I mean, like, are those people billionaires? If they can buy 150 Dodge police cars only to crash them?
If you haven't seen the movie, it's a ridiculous, massive smash-up of cars. Miles had questions about how it was all done. And Gary Powell, world expert on car chases, said he was happy to help. Hey, Miles, should we just play through it? And whenever you have a question, you just say stop.
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Chapter 3: What is Daniel Sloss's Jigsaw analogy?
Well, today we have stories of very idiosyncratic experts, all of them with super specialized knowledge, giving life advice. We have one story about a comedian whose jokes have a strange power to change people's lives. Another story about a woman in prison who uses the skills she learned outside prison to make diverse solutions to all kinds of impossible problems.
And another where the expert's expertise includes the fact that she successfully had an affair. In each of these, you really think, who else could have helped them? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.
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It's This American Life, Act One, Ask Daniel. This one starts with someone who gets some advice, though, interestingly, when it begins, they're not looking for advice. Aviva de Kornfeld has this one.
David was in a situation that so many people find themselves in at one point or another. He was in a relationship that, by every metric, was pretty good. And yet, somewhere in the back of his mind, he found himself wondering if it was good enough. David was 24 and had been dating his girlfriend for three years at that point.
I don't know if you've ever went through this yourself, where you just have this slight, a niggle, you know? And you go, I don't know what the niggle is because everything's perfect.
And the niggle being like a little hint of doubt? Is that what that is?
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Chapter 4: How did Daniel Sloss's comedy special influence relationships?
And after a show up in Dundee.
This, he must have been about 50, 52 years old, guy came up to me and he went, hey man, just wanted to let you know I saw the show and I finally got these through and he showed me the first divorce papers. And I remember feeling like, oh, this is, this is something.
How long had they been married, do you know?
20, 20 years, I think.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Then there was the 19-year-old girl who brought her parents to the show in an attempt to make them realize they were miserable together. It worked. She asked him to autograph their divorce papers, which he did, happily. Then Daniel started taking the show abroad.
We're in Hungary and a guy had driven, I'm going to say like 800 miles from somewhere like in Russia with his divorce papers just to see the show.
So funny that people want to show you their divorce papers. It's like a cat bringing a dead, you know, bird to your doorstep. Like I made it for you.
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Chapter 5: Why is Daniel Sloss's message so impactful?
Two, do I waste the rest of my life My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they're willing to give up the one they are currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance and it is cancerous. I am very aware that this is not a particularly funny bit of the show.
Towards the end of the special, Daniel says, if you break up with someone after watching this, please let me know. He's been keeping a rough tally of his breakup stats ever since. To date, between the people who come up to him in person, the tweets he's tagged in, the DMs he gets on Instagram, he estimates that as many as 30,000 couples have split up after seeing his show.
The thing I don't understand is the stuff Daniel says in a special, most of it is not particularly novel. His jigsaw analogy isn't that far from a lot of the stuff you might find in a self-help book. Like the idea that you should be happy and whole on your own and you shouldn't settle. That's the thing people tell you about love.
So what is it about this guy and the way that he delivers this familiar message? Why is it so effective? I wanted to talk to some of the people who broke up after watching Jigsaw. And let me tell you, they were not very hard to find. I heard from over 50 people from all over. The U.S., the U.K., Australia, Italy, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates. I spoke with eight of them.
And there is a real fervor to Daniel's fandom. People speak about him breathlessly, with a kind of awe. They'll quote lines from his special like it's scripture or something. One person said she and her friends say, in Sloss we trust, as their motto. And there are a lot of people out there walking around with Puzzle Piece tattoos.
Most of the people I spoke with have watched a special over and over to fully absorb the teachings. Some returned to it in moments of doubt after breaking up with their partner. And what's crazy to me is that no one I talked to had had any immediate plans to break up with their partner when they first sat down to watch it.
I came away from those conversations with a couple of theories as to why Daniel's message hit so hard. And I want to tell you about one person in particular, Charlotte, because her story encompasses all of them. Charlotte watched Jigsaw back in 2018, shortly after it came out. She's from East London and, like everyone I spoke with, got together with her husband when she was super young.
She was 20, still figuring out who she was. And Charlotte, like the others, just kind of thought, I guess this is what it feels like to be in a long-term relationship. It was flat. Just flat. Charlotte had been with her husband for six years when she sat down one night to watch a special, alone.
I can remember sitting there and actually not touching my phone, not scroll on anything. I was absolutely hooked on what he was saying because... It felt like he was talking to me in a weird way. There's a part in the show where he said, you think that you're so special. You think you found your soulmate 30 minutes down the road. And I was like, oh, no.
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