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Guess what will What's that? And I go, so, did you know.
That Turkish delight is a real type of candy.
Like the stuff from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Yeah. I don't know about you, but I didn't try Turkish delight until I was in my thirties, and from the time I read that book to the time I was an adult, I thought it had to be the most delicious thing in the world, just the way that like that character Edmund craves it and he like basically sells out his family for it. Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean the word delight is in the name, so you figure it must be good, but actually what is it.
It was kind of a precursor to the jellybean. So if you imagine like no candy shell but that sweet gummy stuff inside, that's actually what Turkish delight is. And it can be flavored like rosewater, citrus, and it's really tasty. It's thought to a versionate in Turkey during the seventeen hundreds, and that's obviously why it has its name.
I feel like that's such a part time genius phrase to say it was the precursor of the jelly bean. I don't think you heard that on many other shows, you know. Actually I thought it was kind of ridiculous that Edmund would betray his family for some candy. Though, don't see what we do need to talk about that for.
A second, you know, I looked into it.
Well.
First of all, Edmund's kind of a slimy character, so I didn't feel that he wouldn't betray his family for it. But you have to remember the book is set during
World War Two, when candy and sugar were rationed. So when he asked the White Witch for Turkish delight, what he's actually asking for, and Gabe told me this, because I never would have figured it out on my own, is that he's asking for a taste of normalcy, and it's like a reminder of really happier time, Like h That's something reader is related to in nineteen fifty when the book was published, which you know, is just not something you think about when you're reading it today.
Yeah, and I guess that does make Edmund more more sympathetic, or at least I suppose it does. But you got to give c S Lewis credit for trolling generations of kids into craving this rare candy, and I know that wasn't his intention, but it's definitely what happened.
Well, Thankfully, there are lots of more important things we can credit C. S. Lewis for. Obviously, he's best known as the author behind the Narnia books, the first of which is celebrating its seventy fifth anniversary this year, but he was also an esteem professor at both Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention a poet, a theologian, and of course the best friend or maybe best frind.
Of me of J. R. R.
Tolkien. There is a lot to cover, so open up your wardrobes and less stuff inside.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and is always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketter and on the other side of that soundproof glass wearing a trucker hat. And I've never seen him in a trucker hat, but he pulls it off. He looks good and the hat says Aslan is my homeboy. That's our friend and producer Dylan Fagan. Now, megol I appreciate that you cleared up those misunderstandings I had about
Turkish delight. So here's yet another thing I've always gotten wrong about C. S. Lewis, and that's his nationality. So based on the settings and his books, I actually always assumed he was born in England, but he was actually Irish. So he was born on Dulfast on November twenty ninth, eighteen ninety eight, which means just a couple of weeks ago it would have been his one hundred and twenty seventh birthday.
I wish I had known, I would have brought party hats.
I'm telling you, Yeah, Well, I think Dylan has enough of a hat for us all today. But anyway, Lewis's parents were well off and well educated as well. His father was a solicitor, which is a type of lawyer, and his mom graduated from the Royal University of Ireland. This was back in a time when most women didn't attend college, so the whole family loved reading. But CS was a prodigy of sorts, like, he was reading and writing his own stories by the age of five.
So what kind of stuff was he writing?
Well, Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books had just come out, and CS and his older brother Warren were obsessed with these books, so they started making up their own stories about talking animals who wore clothes and lived in a fantasy land called Boxin and CS began writing these stories down, so some of these were actually published years later in a collection called Boxin the Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis. I'd love to read these things.
That is insane. I'm very curious about how readable those five year old stories are. It does sound like C. S. Lewis had this kind of idyllic childhood, though.
Well unfortunately it actually all came crashing down the summer before he turned ten, so his mother died of cancer tragically, and just a few weeks later his father packed him up and sent him off to the English boarding school his older brother attended. Losing his mom was hugely traumatic, as you might expect, and on top of that, he had the culture shock of being in a new country.
Aside from a brief stand at a school in Belfast in nineteen ten, he actually never lived in Ireland again, and people like me have mistaken him for an English writer ever since then.
I'm really glad we cleared that up so obviously, this whole time, we've been calling him CS, which is the only way I've ever known him. But it actually stands for Clive Staples, which is such a great name and it sounds like a soul singer, right. But CS never actually liked it, so he insisted that his family call him something else, and, according to his brother, Warren or Warne, as he liked to be called quote. In the course of one holiday, my brother made the momentous decision to
change his name. Dislike in Clive and feeling his various baby names to be beneath his dignity, he marched up to my mother, put a forefinger on his chest, and announced he.
Is Jackxie, Jacksie.
He's stuck to this next day and thereafter, refusing to answer to any other name, so to intimate friends, he was Jack.
So where did Jacksie come from?
I have no idea. There's a remember that he chose it in honor of a family dog that was hit by a car, but you know, we spent a lot of time digging into it and couldn't find solid proof that it's true. Either way, the nickname got shortened to Jack, and that's what his friends called c. S Lewis for the rest of his life.
Actually, well, I'm gonna be honest, I don't really like calling him Jacksie for the rest of this episode, so so why don't we stick with CS?
Yeah, that sounds like a good deal, all right.
So back to his story. CS was away from home and he's a studious kid who loves to read. He loves to write, but he has a tough time at boarding school because the other kids and even the headmaster actually pick on him for having an Irish accent. But that wasn't the only reason that he got bullied. I know this sounds sort of random, but you know how most humans have double joint in thumbs, right, Like, look
at your thumbs you can picture that. Well, Lewis and Warney both had only one joint on their thumbs.
That is so weird. But how did anyone even notice?
Well, apparently it's difficult to catch or throw a ball when you have a one joint in thumb. Then it's harder to grip objects in general. I wish both of us had that excuse now thinking about this, but fortunately we just aren't good at catching either way. But Lewis wasn't great at team sports, and he caught a lot of flak for it. So for the rest of his life he limited his exercise to running, swimming or biking, you know, sort of non thumb intensive activities.
Yeah, I've never thought to categorize those sports in that way, but I.
Will now no thumbs involved, So c has lewis defective thumbs actually didn't prevent him from joining the army though. During World War One. He did his training and became a low level officer. Then just a few months after he began university studies at Oxford, he was shipped off to France to fight. So he was wounded on the front lines about five months after that and returned to England where he got right back to doing what he did best and what he loved doing most, which was writing.
Now he wasn't writing novels or spiritual treatises though it actually came later on. Instead, in his early twenties, he mostly wrote poetry. In fact, the first book he ever published was a collection of poems assembled from his teenage years. It was called Spirits in Bondage and he released it under the pen name Clive Hamilton.
First off, it's so strange that he chose Clive Hamilton as the name instead of, you know, using Jack, which he's been insisting everyone call him by. But secondly, Spirits in Bondage is a pretty strange title.
Yeah, And I think readers felt that way as well, because they were not into it. And his second book of poetry also fled. So these early failures left a bad taste in Lewis's mouth and he rarely wrote poetry from that point on. So after the war, Lewis continued studying at Oxford. He was actually on scholarship there and he graduated a few years later with two degrees, and then he became an English tutor at the university in nineteen twenty five.
And to be clear, tutor at Oxford is different from like an SAT tutor, right, It's more like a professor who teaches students in very small groups. Often it could be one on one, and it's this like highly personalized discussion that Oxford's famous for.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Like it's definitely more prestigious than sort of like after school tutoring or something like that. And Lewis kept that position at Oxford until nineteen fifty four, at which point he became a professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, where he actually stayed until his death. So his career in academia sounds pretty straightforward. He was like,
clearly brilliant. He taught at the country's top school. But when it comes to his personal life, if things actually get a little more unusual, no, what do you mean by that? Well, during the war, Lewis befriended a fellow soldier named Patty Moore, and they made a pact that if either one of them was killed in action, the survivor would look after the other's parents. Louis of course
made it through the war, but Patty didn't. So Louis stayed true to his word and he took in Patty's mom, a woman named Janie Moore, as well as his sister Maureen. In fact, he cared for Janey for the rest of her life, and actually there are rumors that they had an affair, although most experts believe Louis broke it off when he became more devoted to Christianity and he sort of sounds like a soap opera, Yeah, it does.
And things get stranger. Louis's older brother also moves in with them. Warney began drinking heavily after his time in the British Army. He was actually up to three bottles of whiskey a day according to some reports. And well, I'm sure that all of that made for a difficult writing environment. That's actually the backdrop against which Lewis is writing some of his mo celebrated works, including the Narnia series.
But at the time most people didn't know any of this because Lewis was super shy and also very very private. He never talked much about his personal life or his feelings, even with his close friends, which isn't to say he was cold. He just always thought there was something more interesting to talk about than himself. As one of his friends at Cambridge put it, quote, Lewis was too shy to seem to want to be known, and too modest to think that anybody would want to know him.
Hm. That's interesting because you know, you think with that Oxford and Cambridge pedigree, you'd think he might be more pompous. And I mean, I will admit I do find some of his writing a little stuffy at times.
Yeah, but he really was unpretentious. And I have a funny story that illustrates just how down to earth he was, but I'm going to save that for after the break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're celebrating the seventy fifth anniversary of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with a deep dive into CS Lewis's life. If you're enjoying this episode, please share it with a friend
who loves the Narnia series as much as we do. Okay, well, so before the break, we were talking about how, despite moving in these highbrow academic circles, C. S. Lewis was a pretty humble guy, and it turns out that even extended to his wardrobe, by which I mean his actual clothes, not his furniture. Gabe found a bunch of stories about what a terrible dresser C. S. Lewis was. Apparently, his favorite outfit was an old tweed coat, a pair of
baggy flannel pants, and a beat up felt hat. According to one report, Lewis once lost his hat while on a picnic, only to find it months later under a bush with a bunch of field mice living in it. Actually, here's how his brother Warnie tells the story. Quote Jack once took a guest for an early morning walk on the Magdalen College grounds after a very wet night. Presently, the guest brought his attention to a curious lump of cloth hanging on a bush. That looks like my hat,
said Jack. Then joyfully, it is my hat, and clapping the sodden mass on his head, he continued his walk.
That's a very great story.
So in addition to not really caring about his looks or the condition of his hats, he also didn't care that much about making money. He didn't earn a lot as a tutor, and whatever royalties he received from his books, he gave a way to charity. And while his heart
was definitely in the right place. C. S. Lewis kind of had his head in the clouds about his finances, Like because he donated all his earnings, he thought he was exempt from paying taxes, which the government informed him was definitely not the case.
Yeah, sadly it doesn't exactly work that way. But all right, So we've covered a lot of Lewis's life so far, and there's one aspect that we've barely touched on, and that's his spiritual which, of course we feel like we need to get to given what he wrote in later years, and to talk about that, we need to discuss the other fantasy writing elephant in the room, and that's mister J. R. R. Tolkien.
So this is the bit I've been so excited about. I want to hear all the tea.
All right. Well, the TLDR is that Lewis and Tolkien had a long, complicated friendship. This is definitely one of those friendships where you just wish you could be a fly on the wall to hear this conversation. And the reason things were complicated is it because they were both fantasy authors with initials in their names. It's because they disagreed on some pretty big things, including religion. So the
two first met in nineteen twenty six. This was at a gathering for the Oxford English Department because Tolkien was also a tutor there. But they didn't become friends until the early nineteen thirties. They were both part of an Oxford literary group called the Inklings, and they'd gather every week in university offices or maybe at local pub and
they'd have these met meet to workshop their writing. And to describe the way these meetings went, I have to paint a totally cliche picture, but it's sort of the truth. So here it goes. They would sit in leather armchairs in front of a crackling fire, drinking brandy and smoking cigars, and they would just talk about story ideas for hours on end. Is that not exactly what you picture?
When I'm so perfect? I just the only thing you didn't describe was elbow patches.
I feel like right right on same same. Anyway, it wasn't long before Lewis and Tolkien bonded over a mutual love of fantasy and myth, but one of the biggest points of contention between them was their differing views on God. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and Lewis, who was raised Irish Protestant, became an atheist in his teens and remained one during his early career at Oxford.
That is so wild to think about if you know his writing, that he was like an atheist. Like I remember being in fourth grade and my friend Jeremy told me that as in the line of the Witch in the Wardrobe was supposed to be Jesus, and I remember thinking that is so ridiculous. I was like, read the text a little closer he's obviously a lion.
Well. The thing is Lewis is definitely known today as a theologian, but his spiritual journey was anything but straightforward. Like he once wrote about having a deep spiritual longing that he could never quite square with his disbelief. He referred to it as the God sized hole in his life, and it was his conversations with Tolkien that set him on the path to filling that gap. So in nineteen thirty one, Lewis and Tolkien went on a long walk
with a fellow inkling named Henry Victor. Dyson and Lewis had been struggling to make sense of his spirituality for a while at that point, and so during the course of their walk, the three men began talking about the relationship between God and myth. Tolkien expressed his belief that folklore and mythology were ways of articulating higher truths about the nature of reality, and that's how he viewed Christianity. It was a myth, but you know, a true one.
So to Tolkien, the message of Christianity was the truth about the world, and all the other ancient stories out there were attempts to express that same truth. Something about that struck a chord with Lewis, so much so that within two weeks of that walk, he announced that he was actually Christian.
Again.
I love the one.
I love that they go in these walks and just talk about God like that's a myth. Yeah. But also I love that something clicked with them, you know, like they about atheist and suddenly he's hearing about myths and he decides like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I'm in.
I'm totally in.
Yeah.
And it actually was notable in another way too. So not only did their conversation rekindle Lewis's faith, it also inspired not one, but two of the greatest fantasy series ever written, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. All that talk of myth making had the authors itching to write their own stories, the earliest drafts of which they presented to their fellow Inklings over the next few years. Once again, to be a fly on the wall just would have been wild.
I am curious. So were the other members of the club into the fantasy writing as you know, the same way that Lewis and Tolkien were, or were they kind of like rolling their eyes like, oh great, here we go with Elves again.
You know, I sort of wish it was the Lauderan. They were definitely into it, Like I think it helped that they were exactly and they were all well read writers themselves who loved classic fantasy stories like a Wolf and Tales of King Arthur. But Gay pointed me to this article in The Atlantic that shed some light on other reasons why they may have been so open to fantasy, particularly after their experiences in World War One. So here's
how the author James Parker puts it. Blown sky high by the psychic rupture of the Great War, the Inklings responded not with fragmentation and pessimism, but with a redoubled commitment to the world behind, the world freshly visible through this new rip in the fabric. It's pretty powerful quote there, So you know, rather than focus on the surface level ugliness that they were faced with, these guys chose to invent fantasy worlds where they could explore a broader view
of life. It's one of the reasons why their books remained so compelling, and it's also a big reason why they became such close friends. They shared a similar view of the world and of the role that writing and myths, play and making sense of the world. But you know, as we've alluded to, their friendship was rocky at times. Tolkien was a stickler for clarity and precision, and he
felt Lewis's Narnia books lack those qualities. In fact, Tolkien said that the series suffered from quote incoherent mythology.
So maybe he also didn't see the Lion as Jesus either, Like, like.
You're looking looking for some backup on that. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he got that reference. But you know, in addition to the writing, he had personal beef with Lewis two He looked a later in their lives, and Tolkien felt that Lewis had developed anti Catholic views, which offended him, and he didn't approve of a romance that Lewis struck up with an American divorcee. Still, the men never lost touch completely, and in public they continue to praise one another's work.
It is really funny and fascinating that fantasy, even in those times, provides this space for people to see the world as they want it to be, you know, like, and you see how absolutely comforting fantasy can be for like marginalized people today and how many people fall in love with these worlds. And it's amazing to think that these people who've suffered through a world war are now looking to or too world wars, are looking to fantasy to sort of make themselves whole and create a new world.
And that's really beautiful. But that's a great way to put it when you're talking about this, like it is interesting that you know, maybe it's just because Lewis is so humble or quiet, like it sounds like Tolkien is the one who's doing most of the complaining.
Well, if that's true, he may have actually regretted it. So after Lewis died of kidney failure in nineteen sixty three, Tolkien wrote a letter to his own daughter where he lamented the way loss scenes to pile up in old age. He said, referring to Lewis's death quote, so far, I have felt like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one. This feels like an axe blow near the roots.
They probably cared about each other more than they let on, But you know, speaking of his daughter, our family actually went to a Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library here in New York some years ago and it was full of Tolkien's drawings, including these Christmas cards he'd drawn and written for his children, and it was so fun and so weird and so elaborate, and it made me think that like having a talented fantasy writer as your dad and having him write you letters all the time could
be a really wonderful thing.
Not bad, not bad.
Yeah, you know that there's a lot we don't know or can't quite verify about the friendship of these two, Like there's an anne about C. S. Lewis that I'd heard about but was never able to verify before. And this actually comes from our friend Adam in college. He told me that Lewis had once thought about converting to Hinduism and that he had debated between becoming a Christian and a Hindu, and honestly, it just sounded so far fetched.
But we finally got the chance to look into the story this week and what I found was pretty interesting. So I'm going to share it with you, But first we got to take another quick break.
Man, you are dropping the teases in this episode. Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, man, it sounds like he did some detective work here. I love some good detective work. So tell me about the rumor. Is it true? Did C. S. Lewis almost become a Hindu?
Well, he definitely gave it some real thought. In fact, he thought long and hard about just about every religion out there, and he wrote about all of them. Most of us know Lewis for his children's stories or other works of fiction, but obviously a huge chunk of his writing was these scholarly essays and ruminations on theology, and the latter is where you can find Lewis's thoughts on
Hinduism and pretty much all the other religions too. So overall, I get the impression that Lewis explored as many different faiths as he could during his journey from agnosticism to becoming a man of faith. But as he explained in a nineteen forty five essay, he only considered two options for himself, Christianity and Hinduism.
And why do you think those two?
Well, it comes down to the kind of person he was and how he viewed the world. As you pointed out, Lewis came to his religious belief thanks largely to his connection with fantasy and myth. That was how he found his way into it. By seeing Christianity as the truest
expression of the stories he had grown up reading. Obviously, that's not usually how someone becomes a Christian, but that's what worked for Lewis because it was able to satisfy both sides of himself, which were the logical and the emotional aspects, or the rational and the artful or mathemagic as our pal Bob Pittman likes to say, but whatever you want to call it. Lewis was a clear cut
example of that dichotomy. So on the one hand, he was this rigorous scholar who could debate and reason with the best of them, And on the other hand, he's into Lewis Carroll and Norse mythology and he's writing about witches and talking animals. And Lewis believed that both sides were really important, Like to have a good story, or a good life, or a good religion, you needed both reason and emotion. And he decided that Christianity and Hinduism were the only religions that did that for him.
So what do he think those two had that other religions didn't.
Yeah, it's a good question, and I'll answer it with a soup analogy because that's how I.
Was hoping that.
Lewis said, there really aren't as many different religions as you might imagine, because they all fall into one of two categories. He saw them as thick or clear, and by thick he meant archaic or primitive religions, which he believed weren't moral enough. And then there were the philosophical, ethical, and universalizing religions, which he didn't see as spiritual enough. So for Lewis, Christianity and Hinduism were the only two religions that didn't go too far in either of those
directions and instead kind of fell in the middle. They appealed to both reason and imagination. And as he put it, quote, if there is a true religion, it must be both thick and clear, for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfill this condition are Hinduism and Christianity.
Yeah, I mean, I guess he's pretty clear on his opinion here, But what made him become a Christian and not Hindu? You know, that's where things get a little hairy. Lewis said, that Hinduism didn't fully meet his criteria because he saw it as existing only in two forms, the quote unredeemable savage religion that goes on in the village and that of the hermit who philosophizes in the forest.
But he felt Christianity was compelling to all different kinds of people, both the highbrow and the primitive alike, and I guess the middle brow as well. Now, obviously Lewis betrays his understanding of these religions and he's not doing his argument any favors by dismissing whole religions like that. But it is true that you could split any religion into a high and low version of itself, and also
how you practice it is really really wide. But I mean, if he believed that old myths and stories were all expressions of deeper truth, wouldn't that mean that all fates are equally viable.
Yeah, I mean he mixed different fables and mythology into his books. And if you look at something like the Narnia series, people call it a Christian allegory, but it also borrows from Greek and Roman mythology. There's Norse mythology in there, Germanic folklore, medieval romance. They're also European fairy tales. Also, Santa Claus shows up at one point, which nice apparently J. R. R. Tolkien very much disagreed with. That might be more than
incle hears he's talking about. Yeah, so I do think that this kitchen sync approach to world building is a big part of the series appeal right now. I can't speak for C. S. Lewis the theologian, but C. S. Lewis the artist clearly knew that if you want to communicate something true to the most people possible, then your best bet is to weave it into a story that's really universal.
Which makes sense and actually speaking of things that are universally enjoyed, what do you say we start today's fact off?
Yes, let's do it.
Did you know that CS Lewis shares his death date with not one, but two other highly influential figures. You've got Alvius Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, of course, and the thirty fifth US President, John F. Kennedy. All three men died on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, and as you might expect the deaths of those two British authors were overshadowed by the jfk assassination and initially received very little attention in the press.
Yeah, it is wild to think that C. S. Lewis overlapsed in time with Kennedy. Yeah, like I do not think about them in the same time period.
I'm the same way.
Okay, So here's one. Despite their differences, Lewis nominated J. R. R. Tolkien for the nineteen sixty one Nobel Prize for Literature, but according to the BBC, it was rejected because the Nobel Committee felt that Tolkien's work quote has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.
Oh that is rough, And I don't mean to ruin our chances of winning the Nobel Prize for podcasting. And I think they're talking about one of those maybe, But I got to say that is not a great decision. No, all right, Well we're on the subject of Lewis and Tolkien. Here's one thing they could agree on. They absolutely hated Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And this is true. They actually saw together in the theater. That's so funny
to it's amazing, I know. And as fantasy buffs, they took issue with how the Dwarves were depicted on the screen, so, as Lewis put it later, the movie Dwarves had quote bloated, drunken, low comedy faces. She went on to say that Dwarfs ought to be ugly, of course, but not in that way. I don't know what he was thinking. High comedy, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Now.
As for Tolkien, he agreed that the Dwarves had been done a disservice by Disney, and furthermore, he despised the idea of watering down fairytale concepts, calling Disney's work hopelessly corrupted and vulgar. So I really don't think they gave it high marks.
Yeah, I know. I wouldn't have thought of them as Dwarf purists, but I guess they are. So. For my next fact, I want to mention Lewis's wife, Joy Davidmanton. They were only married for a few years towards the end of Lewis's life before she died of cancer, and she was a really interesting figure in her own right. She was born in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, and she was both a musical and academic prodigy.
She read Lewis's books when she was in school and then began writing herself, and after she separated from her first husband in the late nineteen forties, she struck up a correspondence with Lewis, with whom she had shared a mutual friend. They finally met in person in nineteen fifty two when david Min traveled to the UK to work on a book about the Ten Commandments, and eventually she settled there with her two sons, hoping to keep them away from her ex, and Lewis, as he's kind of
wont to do, decides to support them financially. The couple married when Davidson's visa expired, and Lewis really seemed to think he was just doing this to help a friend. But later, when david Min was diagnosed with cancer, the relationship deepened, and after her death, Lewis published a memoir called A Grief Observed, in which she reflects on their love and how much her loss shook his faith.
Wow, that's sad, but you know also lovely all right. For our final fact, you remember how Lewis gave away the royalties from all of his books. Well, he also didn't think that his work would be worth much in the future. In fact, he once advised a fan not to invest too much in a first edition of The Screw Tape Letters, saying that they shouldn't pay more than half the original price because it was a used copy. And so, of course he was wrong about all of this.
His books have sold over one hundred million copies, including translations in over thirty different languages, and that first edition is worth many thousands of dollars today, So he definitely underestimated himself.
That is incredible. Well, I think, well, we've had a lot of good facts here, but I think the snow white fact and the fact that these two famous authors were increasingly annoyed at a Disney movie is the best thing I've heard all week. So it definitely gets the trophy.
Thank you very much.
Well, that does it for today's episode of Part Time Genius. But before you go, I'm sure you've heard us mentioned. We have a hotline where listeners call in and suggest ideas for the show. Sometimes they ask questions or anything else, and I want to share this incredible message we got recently from a listener named Christie.
Hi, my name is Christy. I promised there's a fun fact in this, but I also have the trauma dump. It's the one year anniversary of my mom's death. For two weeks before she died, she was in a coma and they thought that she was possibly able to hear us, but they couldn't confirm anything. So we had been playing music for her, and it was like music she liked and for contact. My parents met at a poison concert, so it's not like hospital music really, but we could tell.
And she was sleeping because her heart rate would change, and so she fell asleep, and I was like, I don't want her listening to like poison. How she's think. I just put on the podcast that I listened to when I'm going to sleep, which is your podcast. My mom loved cats, so I put on your Cat episode and immediately her eyes shot open, which did not happen very often. I got kind of freaked out. I told the nurse to turn the lights off. I thought the
lights were bothering her. That didn't make her close her eyes, So I was like, do you think just doesn't like the podcast? So we turned it off and immediately closed her eyes and heart rate went back to sleep. So the last thing my mom ever communicated to us was that she wasn't, but your podcast is the reason that we were able to find out that she could impact hear us and I am still a big fan, so thank you.
That's pretty fantastic. I love that so much. You know, it definitely took a turn, but the kind of turns with the humor that I would love to hear from our listeners, that is terrific.
Christy, yes, absolutely, And for fans and non fans alike, like Christie's mom, if you'd like to leave us a message, you can give us a call at three O two four oh five five nine two five. You can email us at high Geniuses at gmail dot com, or find us on Instagram and blue Sky at part Time Genius. We will be back next week, but in the meantime, from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the utter co host, Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super pretty, so I'm going to fix that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier, who I've also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more.
Dylan Fagan is in the booth. He is always dressed up, always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record and then mix the show after he does a great job. I also want to shout out the executive producers from iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry. We have social media support from Calypso Rallis. If you like our videos. That is all Calypso's handiwork for more
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's it from us here at Part Time Genius. Thank you so much for listening.