10th Episode Spectacular
Mike: I feel like we should do a little intro. So now Sarah wants to talk about our 10th episode and do some reflections on that. So we're going to take a quick break. Do you hate going to the post office? No, I'm kidding, I’m kidding. We have no break.
Sarah: Oh, thank God.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we circle back to things that we got wrong. But we're not doing that this week. We are doing a special 10th anniversary bonus content for not our 10th anniversary, but our 10th episode.
Sarah: it’s 10 of something.
Mike: It is 10 of something. And yeah, me and Sarah thought that it would be fun to just reflect a little bit on the 10 episodes so far. And how it's gone and then give our 13 loyal listeners a little bit more information about who we are and what our deal is. So, I am Michael Hobbes, I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for the New Republic and BuzzFeed and The Believer.
Mike: And I was thinking we could give our listeners a little bit of extra backstory about us because people keep being like…
Sarah: Who are you people?
Mike: Everyone who's listening to the show has been like, who is this woman? What is she talking about? I'm sure you're getting the exact same emails.
Sarah: I have not been getting any, ‘who is this woman’ emails? Are you getting swamped with ‘who is this woman’ emails?
Mike: I literally got one this morning. A friend of mine from Berlin was like, “Your show is good… who's this person that you're talking to every time?”
Sarah: Actually, the feedback I've been getting about you is all of my friends being like, Michael is so funny.
Mike: People have been saying that, too. They've mostly been saying your friend is delightful, who is she.
Sarah: Oh, okay.
Mike: I meant this as a compliment. I didn't mean it as a like, who the fuck is this woman? No, all my friends think that you're delightful, of course. So I thought we would do something like we could just ask each other a series of boring first date questions to find out a little bit more about each other. So, Sarah, do you want to tell us what is your life story?
Sarah: Oh, God.
Mike: List all of the things that brought you to this exact moment right now, go.
Sarah: Okay. Well, my first memory is of my mom telling me to put my hands over my eyes and then putting on a witch mask and telling me to look, and me screaming bloody murder and running down the stairs because my mom had been replaced by a witch. And I think that might've been in some way formative. That happened in the year 1990, I think, I don't know. I feel like my path to what we're doing right now relates to the fact that I tried to have a bunch of different careers and either I couldn't, or I hated them. And I ended up just deciding to event my own career out of little bits of various careers.
Mike: Okay. This date is going really well so far, keep going.
Sarah: Yeah, I know, don’t I seem fun? I grew up in a rural area, outside Portland, and then my family moved to Hawaii for five years when I was growing up, which I hated, Oahu.
Mike: Oahu. And why did you hate it?
Sarah: Because it was like the sudden shakeup, everything was different. I was eight, I had a hard time making friends at my new school and was just excluded and bullied. And there were like all sorts of family dynamics going on that I really wasn't, you know, old enough of an observer to really understand at the time, but it was just like a crummy stressful time for our family. And it was like, when I started developing the sense of like social ethnicness and apartness, which I think is really important to being a writer.
Mike: Oh yeah. I'm still developing mine, yes.
Sarah: You got to work on it every day.
Mike: Yes. It's like yoga. You just eventually get better at it, stretchier. Where did you go after Hawaii?
Sarah: We went back to Oregon. And the thing about being in Hawaii was that I think it made me doubtful of like meta narratives. Because the thing about Hawaii is that it's where you want to go, and you have a good time and everything's nice. I was very aware of my own unhappiness during the time that we lived there, and I was like, so this seems like bullshit. This idea that there are certain places that are better than other places and where you go to be happy, but like, I'm not happy, ergo, there is a flaw in this logic. And so we went back to Oregon, and I went to high school there and then I went to Bennington and tried to be a theater major.
Mike: Wait, what is Bennington?
Mike: It is a college in Vermont where you got to do whatever you want with other rich children. And so, I did. And then I had a classic sophomore year flame out, where you realize you don't know what you're doing or why you're here, and that you're a slightly depressed sponge. You're drinking all these jugs of wine all the time.
And I went back to Portland and went to state college, which is why neither of us are ever qualified to commentate on anything.
Mike: Yes. Just like Monica, we're losers who didn't go to real schools.
Sarah: And I went to Portland State where I ended up hanging around for like seven years. And I started as a student and then I started doing an MFA program in fiction there, and it was something like the second year that program had existed. So there this nice, I've talked to people since then, who did these scary, competitive MFA programs. It sounded awful. And at this one, it was like, no one really expected anything of it. No one attached with it had done anything yet. Like people who went there are just starting to publish books at this point.
Because it was so young, and it was at a school that no one had heard of. So there was just this feeling of like being in a church basement for a lot of it that I think was very good in an MFA program. And stuck around and did a master's degree and then stuck around and taught and then realized that they weren't paying me anything and then adjuncting is terrible and soul destroying.
I had also wanted to leave Portland for a long time but had been afraid to because leaving your hometown is what all of those arena rock songs are about. So of course, it's complicated to do, and then started doing a PhD program in literature at UW Madison, and then was there for two months before I decided to become a lawyer and then did an internship at the Georgia Innocence Project for six weeks before I decided, oh fuck, I'm not going to be a lawyer. Because the legal system is...
Mike: Is bananas.
Sarah: What I imagine it's like is if you're a firefighter and you go to firefighting school and you're like, I'm going to fight fires. And it's your first fire and it's this building, this warehouse, and you're like, “I'm going to go in with my equipment and I'm going to put out that fire”. And then you get there, and the entire building is consumed and it's a flash point and it's a thousand degrees and your skin melts off. And you're like, “I am not going to go in that building. I am going to describe the building.”
And it was really not until then that I had really thought what if attempted to be a writer. It was what I had always done that had brought together everything I tried to do every job and career I tried to have, but had never had the sense of like, I'm going to go with my writing and do that. And that's my vocation, my identity. I was very afraid of not belonging to an institution in some way. Am I going to go be a free agent? Is that possible? Am I allowed, do I need an adult?
And then I think in the last couple of years have been, first learning how to do journalism and then rapidly feeling like, ooh, I don't feel great about this. Like I want some people to be doing it, but I don't think I want to be like an actual journalist. And then you asked me a few months ago, I wanted to do a dream project with you. So let's talk about how you got here. How did you get to this moment in time?
Mike: I grew up in Seattle. I went to an extremely mediocre college where I majored in journalism with a focus on PR. Which is still, I believe, on my LinkedIn profile in case I need to cash that in. And then I decided to do the least useful degrees imaginable. I moved to London after college to get a degree in legal and political theory.
Sarah: I did not know that.
Mike: Yes. And the only reason I did it was because I was gay as hell and did not know how to deal with it. And I thought if I was as far away from my parents as possible, I would be able to do gay stuff. And it was also extremely cheap. A master's degree in London was like 1/8th a master's degree in the states would have cost me. And I got subsidized housing right in the middle of London. And I basically just like wanted to cavort and be a gay, adult man for the first in my life.
Sarah: Well, that sounds like a really great decision, yeah.
Mike: I met my boyfriend a month into that and then had a really tumultuous and bad relationship for the entire time there. So, then I didn't actually get to do the fun, carefree, gay man in his early twenties’ life. I was just like fighting a lot about like money and stuff, it sucked.
Sarah: You got to have like a period of early twenties, like cohorting later on.
Mike: That was like what I did in my early thirties.
Sarah: As long as you did it, eventually.
Mike: Yes, I got there. I got like three months of a decade of my early twenties at some point. And then after London I moved back to the states. I worked at Microsoft. I hated it so I moved to Denmark because master’s degrees were free. And then I ended up living in Denmark accidentally for six years, got a job in human rights. And then I moved to Berlin and lived there for five years. And then, yeah, so I just started writing on the side and then became this weird writer dude and ended up getting a job at Huffington Post eventually.
Sarah: Yeah. And now you're a legitimate, weird, writer dude.
Mike: What was the first like person or event in the past that you got obsessed with and really went down a rabbit hole on?
Sarah: Tonya Harding.
Mike: Was it?
Sarah: Yeah. And that started when I was doing my MFA, and funnily enough, it started because I wanted to write this little quippy thing for an open mic. Because all of these people that just moved to Portland, all of these other MFA students. And I had been living there this whole time, and it was the time when Portland was becoming really like synonymous with Portlandia.
So, I wrote this thing being like, listen Portland used to actually be known for being full of crooks ,and talked about DB Cooper, and the Rajneesh Cult, and Tonya Harding, who I just have really not thought about at all the time I wrote that. And then it just stuck, you know, things just stick on you. And I just started thinking about it more and more, and just read about her and thought about her a lot. I watched her skating videos so much and just cultivated this love of her. And it was something that was, everyone who knew me at the time, saw as one of my most salient personality features that I loved Tonya Harding.
Mike: Interesting.
Sarah: Maybe this is something I tell myself to justify my intense emotional attachments to the people that I write about. But don't you think that like truly great historians are all ambiguously in love with at least some of the people they're writing about?
Mike: That is my relationship to everything I've ever written, is I just become this like weird asshole at cocktail parties who are like, what are you writing about? And then like a 22-minute speech follows. I'm like, the first thing you need to know about millennials is blahhh.
Sarah: You know what, all these people are like wandering around, bumping into each other, “What do you think of millennials?” I don't know, the conservative columnist say this, maybe this is what our generation should see itself as. We really need people to charge in and be like, no and here's why in 22 minutes.
Mike: We also need to be able to charge in on like Tonya Harding was not that bad, and like Marcia Clark was not that bad.
Sarah: Yeah. And so ultimately, I guess it was like defending Tonya Harding on the Borscht Belt before going to Madison Square Garden. Because I ended up locked in so many conversations with people, they'd be like, “Oh, Tonya Harding, isn't she the one who like clubbed that other skater on the knee?” And I would leap across the table and be like, no, first of all, she is magnificent. And then I just honed this speech and its argument, and also just accepted that she was a part of my life and I cared about her, and I accepted that feeling of attachment.
My mom, like recently, was like, “You know, I always thought that you were like obsession with Tonya Harding was a waste of time. And I wondered why you were wasting so much time trying to write about her”. And it was like her telling me that this relationship I had, she was like, you know, “I never thought you'd make it.”
Mike: It is like Judas.
Sarah: Well to me it was clear that we were going somewhere. And after, you know, being obsessed with her for three or four years, I finally became ready to write about her and got someone interested in me writing about her, which was The Believer. And I was able to write about it because it was the 20th anniversary of her, of the scandal.
Mike: It's like the funniest shit that we need excuses like that to talk about things.
Sarah: Yes. And it's completely insane and it's so arbitrary and it is just proof that we need to erect these imaginary boundaries about like what we feel ready to think about when. Because it's like something happening and even, or multiple of five number of years ago,
like that's why you talk about it. And if I have to like quickly to write some cultural criticism and I don't have any ideas, I'm like, I don't know what came out a multiple of ten or five years ago that's a movie that I like.
But yeah, that's why it took so long for me to place it and then I wrote it and like, to this day, you know, I feel like as my career continues, I'm going to have it. It was called Remote Control and it was in The Believer in January of 2014.
And I feel like as my career goes by, I'm going to have the relationship to that piece that Stephen King has to The Stand. It's like the thing he has the most fans because of that people most frequently tell him it is their favorite book of his. And he's like, “I wrote that in 1978.” And I feel like that piece is like the reader response that I got to was people being like, oh my God, she's not history's greatest monster. And you explained it in a way that I understood, and I was, oh, my God, you can do that. And you can do that in a way that last,s and then you don't have to do bar by bar.
Mike: Individual by individual.
Sarah: Yeah. And it was an amazing experience for me because I realized that writing could do that.
Mike: That is how I answer people when they ask who's this woman that you do the podcast with. I'm like, well, a couple of weeks ago she wrote one of the best essays I've ever read about Tonya Harding. And they're always like, ah, I read that essay, it's incredible, I've read it twice.
Sarah: No one reads anything twice these days, that is insane.
Mike: I know but this also, I don't know if you noticed, this is how we met. So after I read that article, I was like, who is this woman? And I Googled you and then I came across SarahMarshall.com, or I think you had a Tumblr at the time.
Sarah: I had a Tumblr.
Mike: I used Tumblr through my Tumblr account, with some pseudonym to write to you anonymously. And I was like, I never do this, but that essay is amazing. I just wanted to say I'm following your work, I like you, good luck out there. And that was it and then I think you posted it on your Tumblr with like ah thanks or something and I was like, ah, she saw it, it's incredible.
Sarah: I remember that, and I didn't realize that was you. That's so cool.
Mike: Yeah, because I do that like maybe once a year, that I'm like, this is so good that I'm going to like to put up like three minutes of effort to tell somebody that it's good.
Sarah: I think another takeaway should be that everyone should write more fan letters to writers, because writers, we're all toiling alone. And if you appreciate what someone writes, you should tell them, it'll improve their day. And then ultimately maybe you'll end up doing a podcast together.
Mike: Yeah, exactly that's the lesson. Do a podcast with every single writer that you like.
Sarah: Well, it's more like the parable of the Sower, right? Where you cast seeds everywhere, but only some of them are podcasts.
Mike: We should also talk about some of the general lessons that we've learned from our podcast now that we've done 10 episodes. What are the general lessons that we’ve taken away?
Sarah: I was thinking that there's something that I find interesting about the tone that I feel like we tend to fall into when we're talking about the people and things that we're talking about that makes me think of what I've recently learned is called beginner's mind. And it's an idea that I was sort of reaching for when I was teaching writing, but I called it accessing your inner four-year-old to my students, which is just being like, but why, but why, but why.
To me something I think is really valuable and reconsidering these stories is essentially coming at it with a lack of first values or assumptions and being like, well, why did we think that? Why do we assume that, you know, say that if a woman's testifying about sexual harassment in the workplace, she must've come forward? Even if she didn't like Anita Hill didn't and looking at the things, looking at the assumptions that underpin the stories that we think we know and being like why did we think that?
Yeah, I feel like one of the things that we keep coming back to is just how, anytime something achieves national attention and automatically becomes a narrative that's more simplistic than it could possibly have been, which is good for us. I think because it means we have infinity shows, but also bad for America, because I think we might be wrong about everything. What do you think about that?
Mike: I feel like it's going to be the rare thing where we look into it and find out that we're right about anything, because it seems like there's something about the old cliché of journalism is the first rough draft of history, but nobody ever goes back and writes the second draft. Right, we move on so quickly that what we're left with is the narrative that formed about an event in the immediate aftermath of it. The one that I cannot get over and we have to do a podcast on about is Columbine. Everything, like there was no trench coat mafia, those kids weren't bullied.
Sarah: Yeah. We always missed the most essential thing. And what we remember about Columbine was what newscasters heard about standing outside the school from the kids who could use the phones inside the school and call them. And then they reported, and the classrooms where students were hiding out, had TVs in them. And so, they saw them reporting these things on TV which made them think it was real. Yeah, and then they would call out and corroborate what they had seen on TV because they were like, well, you said that right, so that's true. Because it was on the news I was watching and it was on TV, so it happened. The TV news is telling the people at the scene of the school shooting what's going on and then they call, and they corroborate what the TV news is saying.
Mike: In one of my darker moments last year, I watched one of those miserable conspiracy theories, Sandy Hook videos that everybody's a crisis actor. And what's really interesting is the actual conspiracy theory of Sandy Hook is like all conspiracy theories totally incoherent. That there's about if you watch any one of those videos, they're long, they're like two hours long and there's like five different conspiracy theories in them. So, in the initial reports of Sandy Hook, there was a second shooter, and the cops were chasing after somebody who was running through the woods. And then part of the conspiracy theory is like, well, why haven't we heard about the second shooter? Why haven’t we heard about it ever again? And obviously it's just because some sort of false report, rumors fly in the wake of a large tragedy like that and never get confirmed.
Sarah: People are consistently wrong also about the number of shooters in a given incident.
Mike: It was probably like someone just jogging through the woods.
Sarah: Could have been a deer.
Mike: Or could have been deer but to me it illustrated the extent to which we really don't know anything for a very long time after these events happen. Like no matter what it is, right. Especially when it's breaking news, but also even things like Clinton Lewinsky, the entire narrative that we've put together is months later, the whole thing about Linda Tripp being at the center of it. That's not something we knew when the Starr Report came out. Right? Like that chronology was not in there. Well, to me, I think this is probably our bias as magazine journalists is that's what magazines do is you go back and you figure out what actually happened and you take the time to actually talk to people and like, let's start from the beginning.
Whereas what's interesting about the news cycle is the news you run with what you have, and I learned in journalism school, they call it the inverted pyramid that you put the most important fact first. And then the second most important fact and the third most important fact, oftentimes the way you end up telling a story is not chronologically. You end up telling it with these little factoids that are pulled out from space and then put in this weird order. And so, it's often very rare that people have an actual narrative of, okay, this all began with Linda Tripp, hearing her colleague talk about she had an affair with the President. She began taping.
That's not what you hear. You hear there's a woman that has accusations against Bill Clinton. This is the sixth accusation that he's had in his career. You get this like weird, truncated chronology, and then it's up to you to put it together front to back, but it's very hard for us to talk about things as stories at the time. It's like, we talk about them as fact, and then everyone fills in their own little stories and doesn't realize the extent to which they're doing a lot of assumptions and fill in the blanking by themselves.
Sarah: Yeah. And we tell stories and don't realize that we're telling stories. We were like, these are just facts that I have presented in no particular order and it's like, you're telling a story right now. I mean we do it unconsciously. It's amazing that I'm MFA programs need to exist although clearly, they do, because we tell stories so naturally as a species and it would still somehow have to learn how to do it as writers. I feel like it's just so funny how much of the time our brains are doing fill in the blank and we don't even realize it, like when I checked on, was Budd Dwyer killing himself on TV? I just assumed the same way that you assumed. I was like, obviously that would have been like an accidental live broadcast, and no one would have ever put that on TV on purpose and of course they did. And your brain just in a way that you don't even notice, it's like, I'm going to assume that the blank I don't know is like what I imagined to be a normal human behavior, which is to accidentally broadcast footage of someone killing themselves, but not edit into the noon broadcast for later that day. But that we do that typically with stories that we don't know entirely and most of us don't know any news story entirely because we don't follow it that closely as regular citizens. I assumed that Anita Hill had come forward. That was an astounding thing for me to learn that Anita Hill had not come forward, that all of this had been in voluntarily on her behalf.
Mike: Which seems like a central fact, it's weird. It's weird how important that fact is and yet no one ever tells it to you.
Sarah: No. And it's the same thing of like, no one starts the Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas narrative with, you know, long ago, a young woman named Anita Hill was trying to mind her own business in Oklahoma and got subpoenaed by the FBI.
Mike: Yeah. This is why I show my stories to my sources, which my editors hate, but there is a tendency of humans to fill in the blanks and other people's stories that I noticed I do this all the time. And I do this for a living and yet I still, without realizing it, fill in the blanks, you ask somebody, okay, how did you become a tennis pro?
Let me tell you, oh, I grew up, I was getting tennis lessons, blah, blah, blah. And then you write it up and then you show it to them. And they're like, no, I only played in one tournament. I told you I played in one tournament before I became a pro. And you're like no, you said tournaments. And they're like, no, I said one tournament, but my brain filled in that they had been doing tournaments for 10 years because that's what you do when you become a tennis pro you know, you have these narratives and these little heuristics in your head that you rely on to fill in the blanks. And like you said, you're not aware that you're doing them. And so, I think as an exercise, it's really useful to try to retell someone's story without getting any of the facts wrong. Like you hear a funny story from your friend and then you turn around and try to retell it without exaggerating anything, without creating any details without assuming anything.
It's really hard, dude, like you end up filling in the blanks and oftentimes people's lives, don't fit, people's lives include all kinds of extraneous detail, right. Of like, oh, you know, we moved from Minneapolis to Chicago while I was becoming a tennis pro and you're like, well, that's not convenient for the story. I want it to all be in one place. It's just easier that way. And our lives don't follow these trajectories and so whenever you fill in the blanks, most people's blanks in their story are weird, extraneous details that you, as an outsider, don't know
Sarah: Yeah, I am sure that we do that as a species old behavior that's a combination of defense mechanism and psychic resource and all sorts of things. And there's just this thing where if you need to take an upsetting event and like construct some kind of narrative about it, like that's how you put it in a box to be examined by top men to use the Raiders of The Lost Ark image. You know, it's like every terrifying thing that we encounter as people, we have to find a way to render it somehow inert, you know, and seal it up. And the way you seal up something as a narrative, you're like, well, this happened because of this and now it makes sense. And I feel like one of the crazy things about trials is that a successful defense narrative is one that makes coherent what a defendant has done.
And like the coherent story is very rarely the true story, because the true story never makes sense. People always behave in ways that don't really scan as a narrative. And you're like, but how, and it's like, I don't know the person who did this doesn't know why they did it. No one knows why any of us do most of the things we do. So, if you need a story that makes sense in order to like, understand that someone's guilt is mitigated or to acquit or to convict or whatever. Like if a story is the thing that you need to do that, then you're going to get lied to because legal professionals have to lie to tell stories that make sense to people.
Mike: I think all the time of when I started in Sydney, I had this professor who was 5’2. She was just like small and athletic and great. She always told us the story of how she lived in a big house with like six roommates. There was a weekend when all of them, for whatever reason were out of town, she was sleeping. She woke up with a man sitting cross-legged on her chest with a knife held above her. Basically, he had broken in and was like about to kill her or do something completely insane. And this little, tiny 5’2, mid-thirties psychology professor, leaps off the bed, throws him across the room and goes, fuck you, how dare you? I'm trying to have a relaxing weekend and she starts like kicking him in the face. And this guy is so shook that he's just like, ah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He runs out the back door and she's like, get the fuck out of here, bitch ass motherfucker and she kicks him out of the house, closes the door, locks the door, locks all the other doors and then starts crying.
Sort of the reality of this whole thing hits her. And she always told us about how in a trial, nobody would believe her. In any sane, logical description of this event, why would you a 35-year-old woman take on a man who's probably a foot taller than you, much stronger, why would you possibly do that? And she said, you should never act like, you know, how you would react in an extreme situation. This obviously was not logical. This obviously was not something she premeditated; how would I behave, if a man was about to murder me? We are incapable of predicting how we would respond in any extreme situation.
Whether that's like a plane is about to crash or someone we know was just murdered. We have no idea how we ever would react and yet we judge the way that other people act in these situations. A friend of mine just did jury duty and his case was a sexual assault case. And it was pretty open and shut, the guy did it and he said in the jury room, a lot of people were like, well, if she was assaulted, why does she send him Snapchats? Like two or three days and why does she send Snapchats to a friend that were like, oh, I bumped into my rapist today. She was being like jokey about this guy, and this was seen as, oh, she couldn't have possibly be raped if she was joking about it, which like, I've never been raped. I don't know how I would react.
I don't think it's fair to question or criticize how somebody would react if they got raped. It's pointless to try to predict the way that I would behave in that situation. And it's pointless to look at that situation and say like, oh, well, she couldn't have been raped if she's telling jokes. Like that's completely ridiculous.
Sarah: I think that to a large degree is based on our desire to believe that they're fewer rapes in the world than there are. There's just a lot of rape. This really haunted me when I learned it and I learned it this week, tangentially in research for snuff, Kim Wall, the Danish journalist who was murdered by the adventure entrepreneur and submariner guy. One of the last text messages that she sent to her boyfriend was I'm still alive, BTW. Because it's just this thing that women joke about like, when you're going to meet like a strange man, like, Mike got murdered, byeee. That is just something that we've integrated into our culture, it's not weird that someone would send those messages to their friends about their rapists. It's not weird that you would have to find humor in your fears or your trauma. It's just something that we don't want it to be legible human behavior.
Mike: I was thinking about that great Pamela Colloff story, about that guy in Texas whose wife was murdered. And the night that she was murdered, he slept in the bed where she was murdered. And this was like a huge piece of evidence in the trial that like, well, you had to have killed her because what kind of a psychopath would sleep in the bed where his wife was murdered that very night, like six hours afterwards. And so, whatever, 13 years later, 15 years later, he gets exonerated from DNA evidence. He didn't do it. That is just a weird thing that he did, and it seems completely insane.
Sarah: Hell, when I was a kid and my mom was away, I would sleep in her nightgown. You know, like people have all kinds of reasons for the things they do. It's weird, but it's like, it’s not suggestive of violence.
Mike: And again, how would I behave if someone I loved was murdered, I have no idea. I'm not gonna sit here and be like, well, that's pretty weird, isn't it? I'm sure that I would behave in completely baffling ways. I behave in completely baffling ways anyway.
Sarah: We're all super normal every day, always. I watched Faces of Death this week. That's a weird thing to do if I were ever to be framed for something that could be, you know, useful, who knows. In her spare time, she watched Faces of Death.
Mike: Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist? Would this like make you less likely to? Finding out how much journalists get wrong in the immediate aftermath of things.
Sarah: I don't think I've ever been interviewed by a journalist. Like I don't remember anything, it's interesting. I think it would depend on the context. I think the kinds of interactions with people that I'm most interested in having when I'm practicing journalism come in the form of stories where I feel like people have gotten things wrong in the past, and I'm able to come in and try and write that in some way. I think I'm practicing on a large scale, you're wrong about journalism and that's the only way that I've ever done it, which is why we started doing this. So, I think I tend to associate my work with the act of repairing the damage often done by other journalists, which is a little bit adversarial actually.
Mike: Throwing the gauntlet, Sarah.
Sarah: Bust slap. But it would depend, I feel like it would have to do with just how much I wanted attention for the thing that I cared about. Right.
Mike: Is that the only reason people talk to journalists because they want attention?
Sarah: Isn't that just a basic human need, fire and intimacy and attention and water. What about you?
Mike: I don’t know, I've been contacted by journalists to be part of things and I usually turn them down. Because I don't like giving over control. I am a weird person.
Sarah: And is it to comment on like millennials.
Mike: You know, when I lived abroad, people would be like, I'm doing a story about Americans who live abroad, who are interested in x. One of them was the, for like the New York Post.
Sarah: The New York Post is, you know, you can't trust them to make a sandwich.
Mike: I wanted to write back, like, fuck no, but I was just like, sorry. What are your other, I'm going to cut a lot of this out, what are your other reflections?
Sarah: I'm really happy that we've done 10 episodes and really 11 at this point. And I'm excited for our next 10 or 11. I do not know, what are you excited about that we have coming up?
Mike: I am excited for a lot of our special guests. I'm interviewing someone tomorrow who’s going to tell me about the Ebonics Scandal of 1996, which I'm totally obsessed with.
Sarah: And I am really happy about anything you're obsessed with because you can explain it to me in a way that makes sense and takes like half an hour.
Mike: And also, people that like actually know stuff. My friend of mine is obsessed with World War I. Not that we all talk about World War I all that much but when you talk about World War I, I lived in Germany for six years, you talk a lot about World War I when you live in Germany. So I also was obsessed with it when I was there. So I'm looking forward to having him on and having a big fight.
Sarah: I'm also excited about the guests we have coming up. I realized this when we had Rachel on last episode, we finished and I was like, wow, I didn't have to do anything.
Mike: Yeah, that was great.
Sarah: And there's something also really great about just asking people to come on and talk about something that they really care about. You know, this is another thing that I've realized about journalism is that people never get asked too much about something they really care about.
Mike: No one asks me about Brexit ever. If we ever did a Brexit episode, it would be like, it would clock in at like 4 hours and 45 minutes. Yeah, if you thought I was ranty about Anita Hill.
Sarah: I don't think you'd get ranty. I think that you're just like, your thoughts are caramelized to a, just a really delightful consistency and you talk like the way a sled dog runs, where you're just completely unconscious of anything around you. You're just like, and then, and then, and I'm going, you have to be able to talk in a joyful and energetic way about things that people are not convinced that they find interesting because really how one must talk about systemic issues of all kinds. Like people just turn off around those things. There's not the promise of narrative. There's not the promise of it being like a fun, saucy, kind of a romp but it is.
Mike: Saucy.