Episode 623
with Amanda Montell, Laurie Kilmartin, and Lizzie No
Writer and podcaster Amanda Montell (Sounds Like a Cult) unpacks her new book The Age of Magical Overthinking, which looks at our cognitive biases, like why some of us worship celebrities or believe in the power of manifestation; stand-up comedian Laurie Kilmartin gets stoked about her son going to college, so she can start dating again; and singer-songwriter Lizzie No performs "Deadbeat" from their newest album Halfsies. Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share what truths our listeners are struggling to accept.
Amanda Montell
Writer, Linguist, & Host of "Sounds Like a Cult"
Amanda Montell is a writer, linguist, and podcast host living in Los Angeles. She is the critically acclaimed author of three nonfiction books, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, and The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. She is also a creator and host of the hit podcast, Sounds Like A Cult. Amanda’s books have earned praise from The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Kirkus Reviews, and more. Cultish was named a best book of 2021 by NPR, was shortlisted for several prizes including the Goodreads Choice Awards and getAbstract International Book Award, and is currently in development for television. Sounds Like A Cult won “Best Emerging Podcast” at the 2023 iHeart Radio Podcast Awards and was named a best podcast of 2022 by Vulture, Esquire, Marie Claire, and others. Amanda’s essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in Baltimore, MD and holds a degree in linguistics from NYU. Website • Instagram
Laurie Kilmartin
Comedian & "Cis Woke Grief Slut"
Laurie Kilmartin is a comedian and an Emmy-nominated/WGA Award-winning writer for CONAN. She has also written for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, The Late Late Show, and Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. She has performed standup on CONAN, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Comedy Central and Showtime. Her standup special, “45 Jokes About My Dead Dad” made Vulture’s list of Top Ten Comedy Specials of 2016. Festival appearances include Just for Laughs, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Moontower Comedy Festival. Laurie has written two books, Dead People Suck and the New York Times bestseller Shitty Mom. She and fellow comic Jackie Kashian host a popular podcast about standup comedy called The Jackie and Laurie Show. Her new album, Corset, was released at #1 on the iTunes charts. Laurie was recently seen on Apple TV’s Gutsy Women series, being interviewed by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Her new one hour comedy special, “Cis Woke Grief Slut” dropped on AppleTV, Amazon Prime and YouTube in January 2024. Website • Instagram • Twitter
Lizzie No
Rising Star in Folk Music
Singer-songwriter and guitarist Lizzie No burst onto the indie folk scene with her 2017 debut Hard Won, praised by Billboard for being "simultaneously understated and fervent." After a dizzying five-year span, including appearances at AmericanaFest, the Newport Folk Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and SXSW, as well as tours with Iron & Wine, Son Little, and Adia Victoria — Lizzie No found themselves at the forefront of a new vanguard of genre-defying artists. Their new album, Halfsies, searches for freedom from the constraints of categorization, the depths of their own personal despair, and from an increasingly violent and nightmarish American cultural and political landscape. Rolling Stone calls it "a daring leap forward that's bound to make new fans." Website • Instagram
-
Luke: Hey, Elena.
Elena: Hey there. Luke. How's it going?
Luke: It's going great. I'm dog sitting. Hey, standard black poodle, who I have in the studio with me. And I think the listeners are going to be able to hear a difference because of the enthusiasm I'm going to bring.
Elena: Because you have so much joy to have this amazing dog in your house.
Luke: And also because it's time for us to play station location identification. It's really both of those things. Are you ready? Woof, woof. Okay, this is where I quiz Elena on. Somewhere in the country, live wires on the radio, and, she's got a guess where I'm talking about this city. Was the home of William Buffalo Bill Cody and his famous Wild West show. They had their winter quarters in this place. This is where the performers and animals would rest up and get ready for the next touring seasons. Are their their off season location?
Elena: Oh, now that makes me think it might be somewhere kind of warm and not ranch.
Luke: Well, that's what I'm surprised to read that. Don't let that fool you, because I would have figured it'd be in Florida or something.
Luke: So the place, it probably gets pretty cold in the winter still.
Elena: Okay, so, is it Cody, Wyoming?
Luke: Oh, you're. I wouldn't say generally in the kind of in the right part of the world. During World War Two, the city was known for its canteen, where millions of servicemen and women were served free food and drinks as they passed through on troop trains.
Elena: Well, I don't know where that is, but it sounds like a wonderful, cool place. It must be on some kind of railroad. Yeah, it goes across the country.
Luke: It's on a Platte, but not the South Platte.
Elena: Is it? North Platte, North Dakota.
Luke: North Platte, Nebraska.
Elena: Nebraska. North Platte Braska.
Luke: Fourth time's a charm. That's where we're on the radio. And KPNE shout out to people tuning in from North Platte. All right, so we get to the show.
Elena: Let's do it.
Luke: Take it away.
Elena: From PRX It's Live Wire! This week, author and podcaster Amanda Montell.
Amanda Montell: Despite living in this time when seemingly everything is knowable, the world only seems to be making less sense, and we are often trying to Google our way out of pain.
Elena: And comedian Laurie Kilmartin.
Laurie Kilmartin: And people always go, oh, you never stop being a mom. I'm like, oh yeah, watch me. Some people would say, I never started being a mom. Those people are my son.
Elena: With music from Lizzie No and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello.
Elena: And now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke: Hey, thank you so much, Elena. Thanks to everyone tuning in all over the country for this week's episode of Live Wire. We have a great show in store for you. And of course, we've asked listeners a question, as we like to do each week. The question is, what is something you can't admit is true despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't care how fact based you think you are. We've all got these, I don't know, hobby horses, these hills that we persist with for some reason, these bugbears. There's a lot of evidence to the contrary. We're going to hear your responses to that question coming up in a minute. First, though, it's time for the best news we heard all week. This. This is our little reminder at the top of the show that there is some good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news you heard all week? Texas news okay.
Elena: Texas in July. News where it's hot and sizzling and all you want to do is eat breakfast tacos.
Luke: Sure.
Elena: This actually takes place outside of Amarillo. Couple of weeks ago, the Wild West Wildlife Rehab center got a phone call, and the rescuer who was on call, at the time was named Kristy. And the person on the phone told Kristy something that they probably hear a lot of. We found a baby bird. It looks like it was really recently hatched. There's no mama anywhere. Maybe it's an owl question mark. And so Kristy went through the regular protocol. Can you find a box or something that you can put it in to keep it warm and safe? And that's where things got a little interesting, because the woman that Kristy was talking to on the phone said, oh, well, we've already put it in a warm tortilla. Because it turns out this family was swim in and cook it out, and they were using the grill. And when they found this baby bird, the human mom got worried that the baby bird was maybe getting too cold. She ordered the grill master to just, you know, put a tortilla on the the grill and warm it up. And then that's what they wrapped the baby bird. And and Kristy was like, okay. And so she sent a dispatch rescue person out right away. And guess what, Luke? What the tortilla really worked like. It kept the baby bird really warm. It made it back. And now you can do it. Turns out that it's not an owl. It's a baby Mississippi kite. And it's got this cute little beak. It's white and fluffy, and it's at the rehab center now. And you can donate to its care. And you also can donate. And this is kind of worth noting, there's kind of a Texas wide effort right now to help and rehabilitate the 1600 injured and orphaned birds that were either injured or orphaned as a part after Hurricane Beryl. So, go ahead and look up this amazing story at the Wild West Wildlife Rehab Center in Amarillo. And there's also a lot of links so that you can donate to the medicine, the doctor's appointments, the food and the supplies of birds that didn't get a chance to get wrapped in a tortilla.
Luke: That's a great story. Now, from, an animal being wrapped in a food product to an animal who may have turned a Rolex watch into a food product. It's the story of James Steele, who is a 95 year old guy living in England, out on his family's farm and back in the 1950s, when he was just starting out in life. He was in his early 20s. He saved up a bunch of money from working at his dairy farm, receive about 100 GBP, which was a lot of money then to buy a Rolex watch. It was a Silver Air King Rolex. And he this thing was the pride and joy of James Steele. As a 20 year old British dairy farmer. He would go around and show it to everyone. He was showing it off so much that at some point it broke and it fell into a field that he was riding his tractor on, and he went back looking for it and could never find it. And, you know, you've ever lost anything really valuable like that, you know, you're just going to move heaven and earth. They could not find this watch and they figured, oh, a cow probably aided at some point. It's probably what happened. Like it's in the stomach of a cow. And we know Elena. They have a lot of stomachs. So yes.
Elena: Yes, I think something like 600 of them.
Luke: Yeah. Just kiss that watch good bye. And that's what James Steele did for the next 50. What what is math the next 75 years? You know, that was how the story could have ended. But then 75 years go by and James Steele's son thinks, why don't we get a metal detector person out here, to see what they can find? And so they get this guy named Liam King out there with his metal detector, and they're not even looking for the watch. They're looking for other, like, Roman coins and artifacts this farm has been in, in the family and in the world for so long that it's the kind of place that if you go around with a metal detector, you're just going to find some very old stuff, potentially. And sure enough, what do they find? They find this Rolex, watch, this er, king Rolex watch. From 1950, the James had been had been mourning for like 75 years.
Elena: And James is still alive. He's 95 years old and he's getting his watch back.
Luke: And he refuses to part with the watch because he is worried about losing it again. He is apparently just wearing it or carrying it all the time. Said, no, it doesn't work. Currently, he doesn't care. Like some people on the internet, this has become a big story. I guess in like the vintage watch community, people are offering to try to repair it or whatever. I don't think he's ever letting it out of his sight again.
Elena: He's like, listen, man, I'm 95. I want every second with this watch, even if the watch itself can't track those seconds. Right.
Luke: Exactly. And also, just for the record, it is still up in the air. If this watch passed through a cow or not, like, that's, that's a that'll be a mystery for the ages because there's no way to know. But the watch is back in James's possession. So that's the best news that I heard all week. You. All right. Let's welcome our first guest on over to the program. Her debut book, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, was a sensation and launched her on a path that we can only guess will eventually lead to complete media domination. Because she's also the co-host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, which is super popular, and Booklist calls her newest book The Age of Magical Overthinking, refreshingly entertaining and informative. Take a listen to Amanda Montell. We recorded this at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Hello, Amanda.
Amanda Montell: Hello there.
Luke: Welcome to the show.
Amanda Montell: Thank you very much.
Luke: You start this book by writing, the machine is malfunctioning, and we're trying to think our way out of it. What's the machine?
Amanda Montell: The machine is a few things, and, I mean, that sentence was a bit symbolic, but I was trying to make the point that, you know, we're living in the information age. We have access to an unprecedented glut of of information, of data true and false at our fingertips every single day. And that can create the impression that everything is knowable. And yet, despite living in this time when seemingly everything is knowable, the world only seems to be making less sense. And we are often trying to Google our way out of pain, consume our way out of pain. Click on Instagram ads to to resolve issues that really are often resolved in much simpler, more embodied ways. And so yeah, I am a textbook overthinker. Thoughts spiral. And so much of this book was inspired by that very quandary of like, why, when living in this time, when information has been democratized, does behavior seem to be more senseless than ever?
Luke: I can directly track my emotional health to how much stuff I'm buying on Instagram. Yup. And the problem is, when I recently set up the whatever shop thing, it's been sending it to my girlfriend's house, so she's just getting massive shipments of my emotional unawareness. It's like, do you have a bunch of seeds coming from something called Seed sheet? Because now I'm a gardener, apparently.
Amanda Montell: Yeah.
Luke: Another thing that you say early on in this book that was kind of news to me, was you write that our minds are resource rational. Meaning what? Versus, like rational? Rational? Yeah.
Amanda Montell: Meaning that we are making decisions the best ways that we can, considering our limited time or limited cognitive resources. We don't make decisions the way that a computer does. We are so governed by impulses and emotions and these cognitive biases, which are the which is the theme of this book. I dedicate every chapter to a different cognitive bias, a sort of psychological shortcut that we developed naturally in order to make sense of the world enough to survive it. But these decision making shortcuts are now clashing with the culture that we've created to produce a great deal of existential turmoil without our really noticing that that's what's happening.
Luke: Yeah, it's really fascinating in the book the way that you you take these flawed ways of thinking that we're that we're applying, and then you sort of give examples of that. I want to talk about Taylor Swift. I will talk about the world's worst bank robber. We're talk about, a weird Instagram doctor all in a moment, though. First, we've got to take a very short break here on Live Wire from we're talking to Amanda Montell. The new book is The Age of Magical Overthinking Notes on Modern Irrationality. More Live Wire in just a moment. Stay with us. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX, we're at the Alberta Rose Theatre here in Portland, Oregon.
Luke: We are talking to Amanda Montell, the writer and podcaster, about her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. Let's talk about the Halo effect and Taylor Swift, who some in the listening audience may have heard of. How does how does the the the halo effect apply to somebody like Taylor Swift?
Amanda Montell: Yeah. So the halo effect is the first cognitive bias that I cover in the book. And it is responsible for so many of the cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we're seeing in society right now. The halo effect describes our tendency to admire one quality in a person, and then jump to the conclusion that they must be perfect overall. So we like a pop star's music. We jump to the conclusion that she must be nurturing, worldly. Maybe that she cares about us as much as we care about her. Maybe that she aligns politically with our values, even though there's little evidence to suggest that's true. Or perhaps we enjoy an influencer sense of style. We might jump to the conclusion that they're educated or as updated on current events as they are on style trends. And we make these conclusion jumps to, find role models. It's a deeply ingrained decision making strategy that has been within us since a time in human history when you would be in a small community and you would clock someone with big muscles or intact teeth and jumpy teeth, or any teeth at all. But we would jump to the conclusion that perhaps they were a skilled fighter who had avoided disfigurement from battle, or that they were a strong hunter and thus a good person to align with for survival purposes. But we're now mapping that halo effect onto these modern parasocial relationships with celebrities that have little to do with survival. And those dynamics are proving increasingly negative for both the celebrities and the stans who worship them.
Luke: Right. We're talking to Amanda Montell about her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, here on Live Wire. This week, what is proportionality bias, and how does it apply to someone called the manifestation doctor?
Amanda Montell: Yes.
Amanda Montell: Proportionality bias is our. I always feel like I'm doing a pop quiz. I'm like, I know, and you like, flip the flashcard and you're like, good job.
Luke: Channel your inner Tracy Flick. Therefore.
Amanda Montell: Yes. Proportionality bias is our penchants to believe that big events, or even just big feelings must have had a big cause. And this is the bias that powers so much conspiratorial thinking. But in this chapter, I argue that ideas of manifestation are their own kind of conspiracy theory in a sense, because they are a similar misattribution of cause and effect with a positive spin. So the way that proportionality bias might show up in a conspiracy theory is the idea that, you know, a pandemic strikes this unbelievably overwhelming global tragedy that couldn't have been the result of a bunch of small random misfortunes. Surely a government engineered it on purpose. That's the only way it makes proportional sense to us. Or, you know, Princess Diana's death. What an incredibly enormous calamity that could not have been just a freak accident. The British government must have killed her. You know, we jumped to these conclusions because we want to infuse some kind of cosmic logic into events that otherwise don't make sense. And I argue that manifestation falls into this same category because it's this same idea with, a positive spin that if only you vision board your little heart out or bathe your crystals just right, or practice the law of attraction just so, then you will yield wealth and romance and success, whatever that means to you. And that can be quite positive. I mean, there's evidence to suggest that your attitude and your mindset can affect outcomes. But I noticed that during Covid lockdown, there were so many manifestation guru types who would arrive on people's for you pages saying things like, hey star breather, well, what if you start breathing? Yeah, I'm seeing like, you know.
Luke: It's definitely David Bowie.
Elena: So yeah.
Luke: Yeah, it should have been.
Amanda Montell: Yes, it should have been, you know, a white woman in palazzo pants with a bindi being like, if you sign up for my $25 a month bespoke manifestation course, then surely you will be able to prevent Covid or, you know, bring on all of these, these positive things to your life. And, that sort of dogmatic capitalistic application to manifestation emerged in a big way during Covid lockdown and in the worst of cases, sent many down a conspiratorial rabbit hole because their proportionality bias, which is so deeply ingrained, set them up to do so.
Luke: Two words MacArthur Wheeler.
Amanda Montell: I am so glad you're asking me about this, man. He is not famous enough. MacArthur Wheeler was this very silly bank robber who got the idea that if he put lemon juice all over his face, it would obscure his features to security cameras because he heard that, lemon juice can work as invisible ink.
Amanda Montell: Which it does.
Luke: If anybody was, like in the Cub Scouts, we did a lot of, like, with the lemon juice.
Amanda Montell: Yes. You should try robbing a bank. Yeah. So he indeed, went and tried to steal some money from two Pittsburgh banks, and he was caught rather quickly, and he landed in an almanac for being so, so silly in his criminal activity. And that caught the attention of a social scientist named David Dunning, who wrote a study that then blew up in sort of cultural commentary. He coined this phenomenon, called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which many interpreted as this idea that the people with the least amount of expertise on a subject are most likely to overvalue their knowledge, and this phenomenon.
Luke: Called a murmur of anecdotal experience. Like if anyone's been home for the holidays, you're like, that checks out. The person who knows the least is the most common.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, but I'm going to rain on your parade because we all get very smug when the Dunning-Kruger effect is brought up. We're like, surely if I know what it is, it can't apply to me. But as soon as I began looking into the Dunning-Kruger effect, I found an interview that David Dunning did with McGill University, 20 years after the original publication of his study, where he was like, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa. Actually, we all overvalue our expertise actual, you know, scholars might do so over a narrower range. But what's really going on is this phenomenon called overconfidence bias, which shamefully applies to almost all of us. Studies reflect that the majority of participants will rate themselves as above average in things like cooking, driving, and sex. Even though.
Luke: Okay, but what if you really are?
Elena: Well, we'll need a follow up lead.
Luke: And you've never had any complaints.
Elena: About your cooking?
Luke: About any of it. No. That was hey, like, that really made my blood run cold when I read that part of the book where it's like, it can't be more than 50%. [Amanda: Yeah.] It can't. We can't all be better than average at these things.
Amanda Montell: Yes, but no one wants to do that controlled experiment. Do it. It's like you try it. Now you try. Any who, science. But. Yeah. So I went into that, into that chapter hoping that I would get to feel very supercilious. And instead it was an invitation, like all of these chapters, to humble myself. I thought, like, I can't be overconfident. I'm a reasonable person. But as it turns out, all it all comes back to this incredible amount of self focus that is prevalent in the social media age especially. And there's an egocentricity in this idea that everything is knowable. You know, sometimes people will, ask me questions like, you know, what is the excuse? The best fact checker you have is right between your ears. And that's not the case. You know, like multiple people can read the same article and see different things. A disheartening study that I cite in this book is, this piece of information that science literacy does not actually make us better at discerning real facts. It just makes us better at using science to defend our existing beliefs. Which is sad, but, but at the same time, while we're not very good at convincing other people to change their minds, we're pretty good at changing our own minds. And so I wrote this book again, going in hoping to feel smug about my own decision making, in the end, feeling really humbled and in the end, really feeling like all I want to do is create more skepticism of my own irrationality and compassion toward other peoples.
Luke: This is Live Wire radio from PRX. We're talking to the writer and podcast host Amanda Montell about her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Irrationality. Now, Amanda, I'm so appreciative that you've spent so much time kind of sifting through things that are both true and not true, because I think you're going to be the perfect person to help us out with this little exercise we want to do. Okay. Of course, your book tackles the topic of cognitive bias and some of the reasons why we humans believe things that turn out to be false. And what we're wondering is if you could help us try to separate fact from fiction. Oh, God. Widely spread facts. And by the way, I'm doing that in air quotes for people listening on the radio right now. Facts. Here's what we're going to do. We call this little game check. Please. I'm going to tell you a widely spread fact. If you tell us, if you think that it's true or not.
Amanda Montell: Oh dear God. Okay.
Luke: All right. We're going to start off pretty easy. Froot Loops are the same flavor regardless of the color of the Froot Loops.
Amanda Montell: That's got to be true.
Luke: That's absolutely true. Yeah. It comes in red, orange, yellow, green, purple and sometimes a blue hoops, depending on which country you're buying them in. And they all taste exactly the same. And also I didn't realize into this until I was looking at this little quiz. It is spelled f r o o t fruit.
Amanda Montell: I love that.
Luke: I just never took the time to even look at how they were spelling.
Amanda Montell: It'd be funny if they spelled Loops l u i p s.
Luke: We can. We can either call these fruit or loops legally. Okay, this is a good one. True or false? Napoleon was short.
Amanda Montell: Okay. Define short because as a 5'1" person I think everyone is tall.
Luke: Well, in the way that we you know, I think in the popular sort of idea he was he was not very tall. And that's why some of us will talk about shorter people, particularly shorter men having a quote on quote Napoleon complex. There's a lot of running this idea that he was not a super tall person.
Elena: Maybe not.
Luke: You're exactly right. He was actually not that short compared to other French people at the time. And here's an interesting thing. He was five foot two in the French way of measuring height. I didn't know there were different ways of doing this. There was, but in the sort of English way of measuring is the way we think of it. He was five seven, which was taller than the average Frenchman at the time.
Amanda Montell: I feel like this is a perfect example of lore rather than misinformation. Like, this is a cultural story that we tell ourselves as a framework to understand archetypes, personalities. And I think it's okay. I think it's appropriate to continue believing this myth.
Luke: Okay, what about this?
Elena: I love that.
Luke: This is something that may be true or maybe false, but it's something people have wondered for years. Is it true that 90% of dollar bills have trace amounts of cocaine on them? Everybody was wondering when they came to the theater.
Amanda Montell: I would say probably false.
Luke: It's absolutely true. At least as of a 2009 study, apparently, they can get contaminated by people using them to snort cocaine. But also currency counting machines at the bank can pass a lot of cocaine between the various denominations.
Elena: Those coke head machines.
Luke: Yeah.
Amanda Montell: Sharing is caring.
Luke: Yeah, right. Tell your probation officer it was the machine.
Amanda Montell: It was the banks.
Luke: Okay. How about, this one? A chicken can live with its head cut off. Can a chicken live with its head cut off temporarily?
Amanda Montell: Yeah.
Luke: It's true, you're right. Ish. Chicken brains are concentrated in the back of the skull. And so chickens live a few seconds after their heads are cut off, and sometimes maybe even a few minutes. But in 1945, a U.S. bird dubbed miracle Mike the headless chicken famously lived 18 months after its head was removed. Oh.
Elena: Oh, there's a commemorative statue to Mike in Fruita, Colorado. [Luke:I want to be clear.]
Luke: [Elena: Ax blades] Elena has not seen the script.
Elena: No, I'm just the mic head.
Luke: She just knew that off the top of her head.
Elena: Yeah. That. You want to know how he ended up dying? Do you have it written [Luke: cocaine] yeah, yeah. So, there's just a regular farmer in Colorado cut at an angle that spared the brain stem so that Mike could stay alive, and they fed him with an eye dropper and started driving him around to attraction, to attraction, to attraction. And one day, they left the eye dropper back at the other hotel, and he died. Wait 18 months. He was in time magazine. He was like a superstar.
Luke: In related news, Trump has found his vice presidential candidate. So. That's probably a good place to wrap it up. Amanda Montell The Age of Magical Overthinking.
Luke: That was Amanda Montell right here on Live Wire. Be sure to check out her latest book, The Age of Magical Overthinking. Of course, each week on Live Wire, we like to ask our Live Wire listeners a question talking about confirmation bias and other ways that our brains kind of trick us with. Amanda Montell had us wondering what is something you can't admit is true, despite all evidence to the contrary? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What are you seeing?
Elena: Here's one from Sharon that really hits home. The truth that Sharon will never admit is true is that quote, I will never read all of the books in my house. Ooh, doggy. That's me. Like, I sometimes I don't I mean, I don't want anything to happen to like, the grid or whatever, but occasionally I think about, like, you know, are you prepared for the apocalypse? I'm like, well, at least I'll be able to get some of these books ready.
Luke: But you got to be careful that you know where your eyeglasses are, because we learned anything from that Twilight Zone episode.
Elena: That's right. And then you won't have your eyeglasses.
Luke: He breaks his eyeglasses, even though he has found himself in the position where he has nothing but time to read all of his books. Yeah. If you look around my house, the only books on the shelves that I have reliably actually finished are the ones for Live Wire.
Elena: Well, hey, I mean, I think that's a test of it to use a radio host, because as an author, I think I talked to many people in interviews who had not finished my books.
Luke: Well, I can tell you that none of the other books, the recreational reading. I haven't finished any of those. What's another truth that one of our listeners just can't seem to admit is, in fact, the case.
Elena: Casey can't seem to admit that kids these days don't know the song "Hey Ya." The reason for that, Luke, is because that song is 21 years old. It can vote, it can drink, it can almost rent to car. Hey ya, I also, do kids these days know what a Polaroid picture is and why you should shake it like one.
Luke: I don't, I don't even know, but I mean, I feel like the news has been coming fast and furious of things turning like 20, that if you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me, I would tell you, hey, I came out four years ago.
Elena: Yeah, yeah, I think it was on my 40th birthday. I think it came out, but no. Ho ho ho ho ho.
Luke: All right, one more thing. That is true, but our listeners have a hard time recognizing that.
Elena: Mike can't admit that it's true. That, quote, the DVD collection I invested a large portion of my young adult income in is now worthless. [Elena: Sorry, I.]
Luke: Would I would listen as a as a person who's firmly in middle age, I would I would push back on that. I bought a DVD Blu ray player like a year ago.
Elena: You did?
Luke: Yes. Because I wanted to watch a particular documentary film that I could only find on DVD. It's called Street Wise. It's actually about Seattle in the 1980s. Oh, cool. And I was riveted. And there was something about the kind of physical nature of watching it on this DVD that added to my experience. So I would say, let's not write the DVD off quite so quickly.
Elena: That's a lot better than the other day. I, for my Elvis book, had to watch a VHS of an Elvis impersonator competition. I couldn't find anyone in my life who had a VHS player. I went to the public library. They had one VHS player. I went to put my headphone in the headphone jack, and it didn't work because headphones were different back then, so I had to listen to it full blast and very embarrassed in front of all of the other library patrons.
Luke: In the little media area. Were you ever like in that little Formica booth?
Elena: Correct? Yep.
Luke: That was where I would go and watch all of the things that my parents wouldn't let me watch when I was a kid at home, like they had a VHS tape of all of the collected music videos of Wham! At the Greenwood Public Library in Seattle, and I would sit there on summer afternoons watching the video for Club Tropicana, for Careless Whisper, for the whole thing.
Elena: "Careless Whisper" video was literally Stevie.
Luke: Yeah, that's why you needed to be in that little alcove. All right. Thank you to everyone who sent in a response to our listener question. We've got another one for next week's show coming up in just a moment. In the meantime, our next guest is a comedian and New York Times bestselling author who's written for Conan and also the white House Correspondents Dinner, among many other gigs. She's performed on pretty much every late night TV show, and now she's got a new one hour comedy special coming out, and it is titled, and I'm just reading what is on this script here, this woke grief slut. It's the name of the new special by Laurie Kilmartin, who joined us on stage at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon.
Laurie Kilmartin: Yeah, let's hear it for the band, guys. Right on.
Laurie Kilmartin: I do, I do, I'm very, you know, health conscious. I did my BMI. Has anyone done the body mass index tests? Yeah. Boo is right. It's horrible. You input your height and your weight into a graph, and then the number tells you how much you should hate yourself. My number is 27, and that puts me in the overweight category. Right. So I started thinking, well, maybe I should try Ozempic. Okay. Because I've never been skinny and I've never had chronic diarrhea. And I can have them both with one shot. But then I remembered my ancestors came here from Ireland, fleeing the famine. And I stand before you five generations later, a solid size 14.
Laurie Kilmartin: Thank you. Thank you.
Laurie Kilmartin: 12 at Old Navy. Guys? Am I ever weight or am I a gosh darn American hero? You guys are like a little of both. I do have a child. I have one son. He is 17 years old. And yeah, it's an exciting time because I kind of feel like my shift is almost over and people always go, oh, you never stop being a mom. I'm like, oh, yeah, watch me. Some people would say, I never started being a mom. Those people are my son. But I was I was at the doctor's recently, and I have, like a health condition. And the doctor goes, this could be genetic. So make sure your son, gets an MRI when he's 40. Like, I don't think I'm going to be alive when he's 40. I hope not. It's going to be pretty hot. I don't want to be 81 in 200 degrees, I just don't. So what I did is I set up at gmail. I scheduled it to go to my son in the year 2046 to remind him, and then I was like, why stop there? So when he's 50, he's going to get an email about a shingles vaccine. And then in 2096, just a short note from me. See you soon. Yeah. Yeah. My son is Hispanic, and, ever since January 6th, he's making fun of me for being white. Like, if I get mad at you, like, oh, mom, you're going to storm the Capitol excited and empty the dishwasher. I'll be like, no, I'm going to call the cops. I like to outsource my racism to city workers. Oh, that was on the edge. All right, guys, it's going to be it's going to be a rocky. Six more minutes. Yes. You know, we've always been like this. When he was little, he gave me the little kid classic. He goes, I didn't ask to be born. And I'm like, yeah. And if you had, I would have said no. By the way, your dad and I were using a condom that night. So not only did you not ask, you bypassed security.
Laurie Kilmartin: I don't know.
Laurie Kilmartin: Are there parents and kids that were that were home during lockdown like missed out on school? Clap if you have you had those. Yeah. Yeah. There's this are those kids are real weird now. And they're starting to roll out. Heads up, everybody else. I am a single mom. Are there single moms here? Yeah. All right. I'm glad they seeded you a part. So you couldn't. You couldn't talk and connive. That's good. I told my son, I go, listen, when you go away to college next year, I'm going to start dating. So, you know, heads up. There's going to be some awkward Thanksgivings in your future. And then recently, my son goes, I don't know if I want to go to college. And that's like, oh, just, just a reminder, I will be having sex with men in your bedroom.
Laurie Kilmartin: And all over the house, honestly. And if you don't want to see that, you should live in a dorm. And it should be out of state because I'm going to be loud. Okay. I will I will pay the extra tuition. Get out. And here's the thing I want to date. I want to date guys my age. I've dated younger once, and I'll never do it again because, I was in my 40s and I dated a guy who was 25 very, very quickly. One night, one night of a date. And, it was the greatest night of my life and the worst night of his life. We were both, texting our friends the next day for different reasons. Like, I was like, I hooked up with a 25 year old, right? And he was like, she had a C-section.
Laurie Kilmartin: I saw the scar pick me up. I do want to. I do want to date a guy my age. I'm in my 50s and I've been feeling it out on the apps. And, divorced men in their 50s are not well. Sorry. Something is amiss with this cohort. And here's my theory. Gen X men are the last generation of American men to play high school sports with no concussion protocols. All right. No helmets. No flashlights in the pupils. All right. Just hit in the head. Called the gay slur, sent back out on the fields. And now they're all grown up and they're on the loose. These horny, brain damaged, man sized, shaken babies.
Laurie Kilmartin: DMing in all caps.
Laurie Kilmartin: Do you know Joe Rogan? Oh. No see a neurologist. Listen, I tell you, though, I am a terrible girlfriend, Diane, because I'm a stand up comic. If I'm dating you, I will make jokes about your junk on stage. It's my art. And if you. If you ask me not to, I'll add that to the joke. I make men sign a total disclosure agreement. And if they don't say you get the heck out of my son's bedroom. This is a sacred space. All right. You guys have been a lot of fun. Thank you so. Much. Thank you guys.
Luke: And that was Laurie Kilmartin right here on Live Wire. Her latest comedy special since Woke Grief Slut, is available now. I'm Luke Burbank. That's Elena Passarello. We have to take a very quick break, but don't go anywhere when we come back. We are going to hear some really lovely music from singer songwriter Lizzie No. So stay with us. This is Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. Before we get to our musical guest this week, a little preview of what we're doing on next week's show. We are going to have friend of the program, Dave Hill by. He is the comedian and actor and musician and also book writer. His latest book, The Awesome Game, attempts to answer what Dave thinks is the ultimate sports question, which is why is hockey so incredibly awesome? And why is it maybe not more popular here in the U.S.? It is popular, but not as popular as Dave would like it to be. We're going to test Dave's hockey expertise in a game about hockey romance books, which it turns out are very popular. Maybe hockey has a ways to go, but the romance books about hockey doing great here in the US of A. Then we're going to hear some music from Julian Saporiti, aka No-No boy. He's going to mix some of the really important history of our country, along with some really amazing music. And we will want to get your answer to our listener question. Elena, what do we asking the Live Wire listeners for next week's show?
Elena: We want to know what, in your opinion, is the most awesome game?
Luke: Okay, so we know what Dave Hill thinks, or at least from that preview you heard you have an idea, but we want to know what you think the most awesome game is. If you've got an answer, send it on into us via social media. We're pretty much everywhere listed as Live Wire Radio. This is Live Wire from PRX. Our musical guest this week burst onto the indie folk scene with their 2017 debut, Hard Won, and since then they've been busy touring the country, including stops at the Newport Folk Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and South by Southwest. They played with Iron and Wine, Sun Little and Adia Victoria and Rolling Stone calls their latest album, Halfsies a daring leap forward that's bound to make new fans, and we are delighted to say we are among those new fans. Lizzie No joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Check this out.
Lizzie No: Well. Hi.
Luke: Hi, Lizzie. I have been enjoying this album happily so much this week in preparation for having you on the show.
Lizzie No: Thanks for listening.
Luke: We have to, address the, harp in the room because folks are listening on the radio. They may not be able to see, but you are holding a very, very sizable harp, which actually looks pretty heavy, too.
Lizzie No: It gets heavier every day.
Elena: Right. It's not like a floor harp, like we sometimes see that's resting on the floor. You're actually holding this up with your right arm, and then it's strapped around your left shoulder.
Lizzie No: What it's resting on. I recently learned that the chiropractor is a couple of vertebrae in my back.
Luke: What is it, like, traveling with that thing?
Lizzie No: I feel like a child who has to bring a special lunch to the field trip, and I'm very embarrassed. Like, can we please bring this on the plane? I know, it's awful. It's huge. It's going to take up the space of three suitcases, and I really need it. Please let me on.
Luke: The title of the album, Halfsies, where does that come from?
Lizzie No: Okay. I had undiagnosed PTSD for years, and I if you have that experience as well, you'll know that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a very vivid memory and then there's just nothing. And for years I was like, I just don't have a great memory. I remember, like, half my life, and not, like, not like distinct parts. Right? It's not like I know this story and not that one. It's like I know 50% of that little memory, 50% of that one. And we put it together.
Elena: So that's the halfsies it's half a half of a memory.
Lizzie No: And then trying to put it together and get free. That's the goal.
Luke: Yeah. Like was that realization something that helped you then figure out a path out of that 100%.
Lizzie No: And it helped me title the album because I had made the album before I got this diagnosis, and I was like, I feel like I'm getting towards something and all of these songs, some little gap in my mind. And then I found out and it started to click.
Luke: Cool. I'm curious how the songs came together on the record. Did you were you trying to create a record or did you just realize, oh, I've got a bunch of songs like how what was the creation of it?
Lizzie No: Like a lot of it happens in 2020 when I was locked in my house. A lot of you might have also been at home spending a lot of time at home.
Luke: I was here doing the show for the record.
Lizzie No: So I weirdly had a lot of time to sit and think, and look at birds and think about flying and, and have insomnia. And so a lot of these songs came out of dreams, you know, waking dreams and sleepy dreams.
Luke: All right. Well, let's hear one of those songs. What are we going to hear?
Lizzie No: We're going to hear Deadbeat.
Luke: All right, this is Lizzie No on Live Wire.
[Lizzie No plays "Deadbeat"]
Luke: That was Lizzie No, right here on Live Wire. Be sure to check out her latest album, Halfsies, which is out now. That is going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests Amanda Montell, Laurie Kilmartin, and Lizzie No.
Elena: Laura Hadden is our executive producer, Heather De Michele is our executive director, and our producer and editor is Melanie Savchenko. Leona Kinderman and Evan Hoffer are our technical directors, and our house sound is by Daniel Blake. Trey Hester is our assistant editor and Becky Phillips is our intern. Our house band is Sam Tucker, Ethan Fox, Tucker Alvez, and A Walker Spring who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Molly Pettit and Trey Hester.
Luke: Additional funding provided by the Marie Lam from Charitable Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week, we'd like to thank members Taylor Bacon of Portland, Oregon, and Kathleen Flaherty of Beaverton, Oregon. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Livewireradio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week.
— PRX —
