198: How to Win Friends and Influence People
This American Life
01/05/25
•58m
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People climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them?
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- 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)
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Previous Episode
849: The Narrator
December 15, 2024
•58m
Banias is an 8-year-old kid living in Gaza. And she has a story to tell — many stories, in fact.
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- Prologue: While on the phone with reporter Maram Hamaid in Gaza, producer Chana Joffe-Walt gets interrupted by Maram’s daughter––Banias, eight, who grabs the phone from her mother and starts telling us about her life. The narrator arrives. (8 minutes)
- Part One: Banias, an 8-year-old in Gaza, tells us about her life––her friends, the games she plays, the things she cares about. Everything but the war going on around her. (25 minutes)
- Part Two: Banias talks about the war. (20 minutes)
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Next Episode
852: Pivot Point
January 19, 2025
•58m
People living in that in-between moment before everything changes.
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- Prologue: Kirk Johnson tells Ira about a strange choice he made during his family’s evacuation from the Sunset Fire in Los Angeles. (5 minutes)
- Act One: Editor Nancy Updike tries to make sense of this current moment by talking to a master of dark comedy, Armando Ianucci. (19 minutes)
- Act Two: As President Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, producer Valerie Kipnis talks to Ukrainian soldiers on the front line who wonder about what his administration could mean for them. (14 minutes)
- Act Three: Editor Susan Burton reflects on the ramp-up to an era that comes for so many of us. (9 minutes)
- Act Four: In the wake of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, producer Miki Meek talks to a woman on a very particular mission. (6 minutes)
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