SPEAKER_04: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Anyone who has listened to this show knows that I love stories from history. And one of the things I love the most is that a history story in and of itself has a certain value. But what's amazing is how much the current situation that you're hearing the story affects how it's understood. It's like adding a musical score to a scene in a movie. The mood of the current moment changes our interpretation of everything. This is all leading me to introducing you to a brand new history show that we have premiering today from Radio-Topia. It's produced and hosted by the immensely talented and recently mustachioed Jody Avrigan, who you may know from ESPN's 30 for 30 podcast and he was the host of the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast for many years. I'm a huge fan of Jody. I'm so excited he's joined the team. And so on this episode, I'll talk with him and premiere two episodes of his new podcast, This Day in Esoteric Political History. Hey, Jody. Hello there, Roman. So for context, we're talking on Friday, March 27th, each in our respective homes, me in California, you in New York City. And we're going to talk about your new show on Radio-Topia. That's right. I'm really excited to join Radio-Topia.
SPEAKER_03: I just want to confirm, though, I'm recording in my bedroom, which has two windows. You're recording in your bedroom, which I believe listeners learned in a previous episode has five windows. It has five windows. I live on the corner.
SPEAKER_04: My bedroom is on the corner of the house. And so it has five windows, which makes it very good for sun, very bad for recording, to tell you the truth. I thought both of those things. I got immediately jealous.
SPEAKER_03: And then I got immediately started to do the calculus of how is he making this room quiet? But it was brave of you to admit it was brave of you to admit as much on a national radio show. But anyway, the task at hand. Yes, I'm I'm joining Radio-Topia, which I'm incredibly excited about. We're doing a new show that's called This Day in Esoteric Political History. Basically, a couple of times a week, I'm going to get together with a historian, Nicole Hemmer, and we're going to have special guests along the way as well. And look at one item, one moment that happened on that day in political history. And the show is going to be short. It's going to be under 10 minutes each time. And we're just going to try and kind of pick a bunch of moments, big and small, that are either interesting stories, but I suspect we'll also have some things to teach us about this moment that we're going through right now. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've noticed in the conversation about coronavirus and even Trump,
SPEAKER_04: as we've been talking about Trump for the past couple of years, is we've been falling back on this idea that all this is unprecedented. And I think that helps describe the enormity of everything. But I don't think that description is very helpful beyond that. I think it's a much more useful approach to find little threads of connections that are precedented so that we can continue to learn and evolve and respond. And that's why I'm really excited about this day in esoteric political history. How do you see the role of the things that you will tell stories about and how they connect with the modern world?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think it's born of the very same instinct that I think a lot of people have had, and I've had both as a journalist and just as a human being, to find myself thinking long before coronavirus, you know, over the last four or five years or so, saying, man, this feels new. This feels unprecedented. It feels like we're in completely new territory. And I think like a lot of people, I have found myself turning to history more and more to get some guidance and get some guardrails. And, you know, I've come to think that there's kind of basically three main ways in which history can help us understand this moment. And one is to say, no, this isn't new. This has happened before. Look at, you know, this time, this time and this time when basically this exact thing happened before. And there's comfort in that. There really is. That's how to diminish the sort of seriousness of what's happening now, a given incident. Then there's the second category, which is, oh, no, this really is new. And there are moments like that. And I don't want to dismiss that, you know, but I think understanding when you need to raise the alarm and say, oh, my gosh, we are in uncharted territory. The third category is the one that I'm really fascinated by and I think I've really come around to and I think I want to try and explore in this show, which is things may be new. We may be in uncharted territory, but this moment is a product of history. The conditions that have built up in this country over the last 20, 30, 50, 100 years have led us to this moment. And that, I think, is the thing we don't talk about enough, how what we are feeling is completely new and unprecedented and sort of out of nowhere is actually a product of what has happened in this country. And it's almost inevitable, given the forces that have shaped politics in this country over the last few generations. Right. So we're going to play a couple episodes of this day in esoteric political history.
SPEAKER_04: One of the things I love about the name is when I was feeling the same need to sort of examine the world and put out a podcast by diving into history, I called it What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. I thought of that, too. Which is equally cumbersome.
SPEAKER_03: It just rolls off the tongue. Well, I also appreciate that you in Slack recently tried to, like, acronym it, acronymize it or whatever. TDI. And I saw that and I was like, no, we're not going to be doing that. TDI, PH. This day, maybe. Yeah. So this day in esoteric political history.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_04: So we're going to play a couple episodes of this day in esoteric political history. And the first one, could you tell us about what happened on this day and sort of tee up the story that we're going to hear first?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So on March 31st, we're going to be talking about March 31st, 1968, which is when Lyndon B. Johnson, a sitting president, incumbent president in an incredibly tumultuous year, in 1968, he announces that he's not seeking reelection. We're going to be visiting 1968, I suspect, a lot over the course of this series. This was obviously a big event when a president, only the second time ever that a president says he's not going to seek reelection. And it just sort of gives us a sense for what it feels like to be in the midst of a really tumultuous year. And I think we're certainly feeling that right now.
SPEAKER_04: OK, let's hear it.
SPEAKER_03: Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radio Topia. My name is Jody Avrigan. This day, March 31st, 1968, LBJ's surprise announcement that he is not seeking reelection. We're joined, as always, well, this is the first time actually, but we're joined by Nicole Hemmer of Columbia, Nikki. I'm very excited to be doing this series with you. And this is our first episode. Hi.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm really excited about it.
SPEAKER_03: So I know we call this show Esoteric Political History. We will hit all sorts of different types of stories. But this is obviously a big moment, a president announcing that he will not seek reelection. And I guess one thing is I can hear our more lefty listeners here in 2020, maybe a little hopefully saying to themselves, wait a minute, an embattled president in a moment of crisis. You can just announce that you're out, that you no longer want to run. How often does this happen?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it doesn't happen very often. Don't get your hopes too high. I think it happened one other time with Truman. And like LBJ, he had a little bit of extra time at the beginning of his term because he was a vice president who inherited the presidency. So let me lay out some of the basics of this story, and then we'll come around to kind of what we think it means and some more.
SPEAKER_03: But LBJ made this announcement at the end of a 40-minute address from the Oval Office. It was ostensibly an update about the Vietnam War. But then at the end of his address, he famously says, I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as president. He'd, as you mentioned, taken over for Kennedy after the assassination in 1963. He trounced Goldwater in the 64 election. What else? The Civil Rights Act, his domestic agenda. But by this point, Vietnam is really the thing that is sort of swamping his presidency, right? Yeah. It's something that I think is hard to wrap our minds around when we've been at war for 20 years now, and the wars that we're in just don't intrude in most people's daily lives.
SPEAKER_01: But Vietnam was a lot different. It was part of people's daily lives. They would listen to a 40-minute address from the president, and it affected everything that was happening in America at the time. Well, you know, I'm having conversations with my parents these days, and with this pandemic, they're sort of talking about how this is the first time in a long time since Vietnam where they have felt like there's an issue that is touching every American.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, the story of war, I'm sure we'll track this over the course of the show, but the story of war is that it's become more and more separated from the lives of daily Americans.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's such a good point because even something like the September 11 attacks, which I think most Americans had a really visceral reaction to, were localized, right? It was Pennsylvania, New York, and D.C., and the actual events were only taking place in small parts of the United States, whereas this is going to come to every city and town in America.
SPEAKER_03: So a little more about this announcement by Johnson. He had health issues. He had had gallbladder and kidney stone surgeries, heart issues. He actually died four years later. He had apparently come close to making this announcement in October, December, and January, and finally did it here. There's reporting that it wasn't in the advance text, so I mean, the circle of people who knew this was incredibly small, and it really did come as a shock. I heard some people even thought it may have been an April Fool's joke because it happened on March 31st. Right. I mean, I think that it was far too serious a speech for it to be an April Fool's joke.
SPEAKER_01: That would be a pretty messed up April Fool's joke. It would be. It would be. And things were pretty dire when it came to Vietnam at that point. I mean, just a few months earlier, the Tet Offensive had been launched, which really showed Americans that the war was not going their way, and also that military and political leaders weren't telling them the truth about the war. And that had a real effect on Johnson's approval ratings. Here he is starting up his bid for reelection, and his approval ratings at the time of the speech were something like 30 percent of people approved of him. It was really low.
SPEAKER_03: But then what happens when he announces that he's not going to seek reelection? All of a sudden, people love him. Once they know they don't have to put up with him anymore, Americans flip. They go from 57 percent disapproving of him to 57 percent of them approving of him.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that would not happen today. I mean, you look at approval ratings, and they're so steady and they're so dictated by polarization and partisanship that I don't think we will see swings like that that, you know, inherently mean people are crossing party lines in their approval.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's been the remarkable thing about the Trump presidency is how stable his approval ratings have been throughout. If you go back earlier in the mid-20th century, you saw wide ranges of approval, and you saw presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican, pretty regularly getting 70 percent public approval. So it was a very, very different time then.
SPEAKER_03: So in his remarks, he kind of hints at this thing that got me thinking about the fact that he has to focus on all of the challenges before him, and then he is also being asked to run for reelection, and he basically says, I can't do both of these things, so I'm going to try to do my job until the end of this year, and someone else can decide to campaign. What does it mean that we ask these presidents to campaign in their last year in this way? You know, the crises of the world don't care that it's an election year, they just show up and they can show up in the last year of a presidency as easily as they can show up in the first year. It's an extreme challenge to both juggle the presidency, which in the right hands is a full-time job, and then layer over campaigning on top of it.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard to do both really well and to not confuse the two. I mean, I think that's where people often get in trouble is when you have to deal with a major crisis, but now you also have to go speak to deep-pocketed donors at a $5,000 a plate fundraiser somewhere. Certainly, I think we have a president now who thinks he's at his best when he's in campaigning mode, and I think thinks of everything basically as a campaign.
SPEAKER_03: Has anyone ever tried to split these two? A little bit. So if we think about the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, he took his entire sort of reelection campaign and he sent all of his people to Chicago, and they were going to run the reelection from there and he was going to be governing in D.C.
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that kind of splitting, there's only so much that you can do, right? It's ultimately a fiction, but that's one attempt to do it. I want to wrap up with a kind of big question about 1968 and these other moments in history that feel incredibly tumultuous.
SPEAKER_03: So you look at 1968 and you say, goodness, you know, wars, riots, assassinations, presidents not running for reelection. Some of these are obviously linked to each other, but I guess I'm trying to figure out whether there are just these eras of overall instability where it's just one of those years in which big, messy, epic things are going to happen, maybe even if they aren't directly tied to each other. Do these things kind of tend to group? So that's a good question. The answer is sort of yes and no.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that the assassination of Martin Luther King led to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. But if we take a kind of bigger picture, look at things instead of looking just at 68, like look at the 60s as a whole. There had been a lot of fractures forming for the whole decade. Right. You had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had the whole world on the brink of nuclear apocalypse. You had the assassination of John Kennedy. You had the civil rights movement and racist murders and violence that were happening pretty regularly, urban uprisings. So by the time 1968 rolls around, a lot of the things that happen are kind of overdetermined because of all of these fractures that had been caused earlier. I remember in 2016, we had a few conversations on the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast, which I did during that election, that were basically, is this 1968?
SPEAKER_03: And I think what I'm realizing in retrospect was that, you know, 2016 was not our 1968. It was the beginning of the sort of process that you just described. And maybe now, four years later, we're having our 1968.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. If you think about all of the things people have pointed to as weaknesses in the American system revealed by 2016, we're now in a moment with a pandemic where all of those weaknesses are starting to cause even bigger and more catastrophic problems. Well, on that cheery note, we will end our first episode.
SPEAKER_03: That is it for today. Nicole, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Jody.
SPEAKER_01: This was fun. Now, how can you get in touch with us and be part of this show?
SPEAKER_03: You just need to remember one thing. This Day Pod. I'm quite proud of myself over the last couple of weeks. I have secured This Day Pod on every possible medium. So that is our website, thisdaypod.com. You can email us, thisdaypod at gmail.com, and our social handles on Twitter and Instagram. You can find those, This Day Pod. If you have any suggestions for future topics or dates or comments at all, do get in touch with us. This Day in Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radio-Topia from PRX. This was our first episode, so we want to thank everyone at PRX, including executive producer Julie Shapiro, for bringing us on board. This is a moment when I think we're all realizing the power and the need for community, so we just feel really honored to be on board and part of that community. Our researcher and producer is Jacob Feldman. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions, remixed by Jamison Isaac, aka Teen Days. Our artwork is by Kate LaRue. Next episode, we'll discuss something that's probably on your mind, pandemics, and the time 100 years ago when a president got hit with the flu while negotiating the end of a world war. My name is Jody Evergan. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you soon.
SPEAKER_02: With America's suns in the field far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or day of my time to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.
SPEAKER_04: We have the world premiere of another full episode of This Day in Esoteric Political History, and more conversation with Jody Evergan after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the Geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit Article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's Article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_04: The next place to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So could you describe the second episode, which is really relevant to the time we're in right now?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so our second episode, which is coming out on Thursday, April 2nd, we'll play it for people here now, is about when Woodrow Wilson got the flu in 1918 as part of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Actually, he got it in 1919 on April 2nd. This is where I should confess that we were originally planning this show to be about just elections. We thought this was going to be a tumultuous election year, and we thought we'd do stories from previous elections. And then we did sort of change a little bit when the coronavirus pandemic began to feel like, you know what, we want to make space for other stories in politics, other moments of crisis, other moments when this country has faced things like this. And so we've broadened the scope a little bit, and this is an example of a kind of thing that wasn't necessarily an election year, but obviously a moment when our politics had to react to a pandemic. And, you know, I think one simple reminder is that Wilson got the flu, the President of the United States got the flu, basically a full year after the pandemic had started. And it's a simple reminder that these things come in waves and these things go for a while. Yeah. Okay, let's hear it.
SPEAKER_04: Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radio Topia. My name is Jody Avrigan.
SPEAKER_03: This day, April 2, 1919, Woodrow Wilson has the flu. The influenza pandemic is sometimes called the 1918 flu pandemic. It started in spring 1918, but it was the second wave, as we are all learning, in the fall of 1918 that was the most devastating, with the disease spreading into 1919. That is when President Wilson reportedly caught the flu either right before or right after he arrived in Paris for another round of talks to try and bring an end to the First World War. We're joined, as always, by Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University. I'll lay out what we know and don't know about this moment in a second. But we should say right off the bat, Nikki, that there's a little bit of controversy about whether he actually had the flu or there were some other things going on. Yeah. So one of the things that people know about Wilson and his health is that he suffers a pretty serious stroke near the end of his presidency.
SPEAKER_01: So for a long time, historians talked about this illness as a mini stroke that he had had. But if you actually look at the set of symptoms that he had, including a really high fever, none of them really fit a stroke. And they all sound a whole lot like this pandemic that was ravaging the world at the time. Yeah. I mean, by all accounts, and we'll talk a little bit about what the ramifications of this were, but he was very out of it.
SPEAKER_03: He was fever-strick. He was sort of deteriorating rapidly over the course of these negotiations in Paris. One thing that's interesting is that it was underplayed at the time, I guess. There was these questions about whether it was actually flu. But did they try and cover this up or was it just that sort of reports were murky? Like, what did people know at the time?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So when this was first reported, it was just reported that he had a cold. And this probably isn't surprising. I mean, was it a cover-up? You know, they didn't often tell in detail the kinds of illnesses that presidents had at the time. There's a much bigger cover-up that will happen later in his presidency about his health conditions. But in this case, not wanting to scare people in the midst of both a war and a pandemic, they decided to just say, hey, it's a cold. He'll be fine. So I want to get to some of the sort of bigger questions around this, because for one, I mean, it's really kind of stunning how precarious of a situation this is.
SPEAKER_03: We have a leader at a meeting with all of the what is known as the Big Four who are negotiating the end of World War One. Wilson's doctor says, quote, the whole of civilization seemed to hang in the balance. Is that a doctor being a little dramatic when he's writing his memoirs? Or I mean, is this one of really one of those moments? This is really one of those moments. I mean, here it is after the most devastating war that the world really had ever seen.
SPEAKER_01: And now they're trying to figure out how to bring it to a close. And somebody like Wilson would have been the perfect person to have at that table. This is something he had been thinking about, how to win the peace for a really long time. And now he shows up at the peace table and he's kind of a mess.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And I mean, it's like it comes down to the fact that he just can't concentrate as well as he normally would. He just doesn't bring it. And it's a reminder that we elect these people and we're electing real people who have to go into real meetings with other real people. And what they say and how they behave in those actual meetings is just as important as all the policies and all the track record and all that stuff. It comes down to the sort of behavior in that moment. And I mean, there are sort of theories about the fact that World War One may have ended very differently had Wilson been on his A-game, in particular with regards to what happened to Germans. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that Wilson really wanted was a gentle peace with Germany.
SPEAKER_01: He was really worried about a vindictive peace that would be about score settling because he knew that they needed to rebuild a peaceful, functioning, cooperative Europe after this if they were going to maintain peace beyond the end of this. And, you know, it was something that normally he would have pushed for. I mean, the flu is part of it. He also gets delivered a pretty devastating blow in the midterm elections of 1918 where Republicans sweep. And so there's a sense the country doesn't necessarily want everything that Wilson wants. But I mean, Jody, you've had the flu before. Can you imagine going to this table with three other leaders of these countries and barely being able to sit up much less, you know, argue forcefully for the thing that you believe in?
SPEAKER_03: So one big question, I mean, this is sort of stating the obvious, but I kind of want to end on this note. But like, you don't get to choose when pandemics hit, right? And I think it gets to this larger theme that, you know, so much of a presidency is defined by things you can't plan for. And it's really about how do you react in that moment? And I mean, this seems like a perfect example of that. Yeah, I mean, the tendency at the time was the right thing to do is to downplay what's happening because people have just come through this horrifying war.
SPEAKER_01: The last thing that they need is to be told that there's this other invisible enemy that's going to kill millions of them. But of course, what we learn from it is when you don't have a handle on it, when you don't tell people what's happening, it actually just leads to even worse outcomes. And that's what happened. I mean, the press at the time was censoring news of this pandemic. And that's not the only reason that millions and millions of people died, but it was a contributing factor. So I guess one more question on the flu itself. I mean, if the public had somehow known, I guess this happens relatively late that he gets it.
SPEAKER_03: But I'm trying to imagine, you know, do these moments where like, oh, my gosh, a president got this. Do those break through? I mean, do those make a difference? I think they do make a difference in the sense that you see that no one has the power or the money to avoid it, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like it's one of those things that you can't negotiate your way out of. Like we're all vulnerable to it. I do think it's fair at the same time, though, that like seeing a president stricken with something like this can scare people, particularly at a time when they're already pretty scared. It can be destabilizing. There's this little meme or whatever you want to call it floating around around like people use this term of like we must protect so and so.
SPEAKER_03: And I think it was pre pandemic. But now people are saying, you know, we must protect pick, you know, Beyonce or whoever. But also, you know, politicians like we have to keep these people healthy so that they can do their jobs because their jobs have massive ramifications. Yeah, I mean, let's just put it out there. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is somebody people have been trying to wrap in bubble wrap since three years ago.
SPEAKER_01: And again, like it's been a powerful meme to say, like, do you want to be the person who gave this to a person who gave it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow. I hadn't really heard that free meme. But yeah, I guess that's something to think about. OK, we're going to wrap it up there. But first, a few other things that happened on this day, April 2nd, in other years in 1870, the first female candidate for president, Victoria Woodhull, announced her candidacy by writing a letter to the editor of the New York Herald. 1917, Janet Rankin was sworn in as the first female congressman. And in 1964, on April 2nd, Malcolm X gave his ballot or the bullet speech. So every once in a while, we'll give you a taste of other things that happened on this day. By the way, this is what we're doing on our social feeds as well, posting a few times a day about other things that happened. So make sure you check those out. All right, Nicole Hemmer, thank you as always. This was great. Thanks, Jody. This day in esoteric political history is a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX. Our researcher and producer is Jacob Feldman. If you have any ideas for an upcoming topic or a date, get in touch. You can let us know a specific date or just a rough topic that you want us to talk about and we can find a peg for it. You can email us thisdaypod at gmail.com. There's also a contact form at thisdaypod.com. Next episode, we're jumping to the more recent past 2008 Barack Obama and a comment he made about rural voters that may have said a lot about where politics was going over the next decade.
SPEAKER_04: We've been talking about this for a couple of months, and this was just going to be about the election and just use historical precedent to help describe the moment that we're in in terms of the election. And then coronavirus pandemic started and we decided to move up the launch date a week. And so how are you thinking about the stories you will be selecting over this season while this is going on?
SPEAKER_03: I do want to make space for stories, not just, oh, we're going to find stories of health crises or pandemics, but stories of just moments of national crisis. I think we are in a moment clearly of national crisis. I think we are going to enter a moment of what I've been thinking of as civic creativity or civic rearrangement. We're really going to have to think through how our society is ordered and what our norms are. And politics is a space in which we do that, and we've had to do that for better or worse. And so I think making space to talk about moments where we've done that, not just necessarily linked to an election year. That said, I will say that my co-host, Nikki Hammer, who's a political historian, when we were talking about making this change and expanding the scope a little bit, she pointed out and she was like, elections have never really been normal. Most elections are huge and most elections are kind of feel like they have crisis and so forth. And so even if we had stuck to just the election lens, we would have had plenty of big, huge moments where it felt like, oh, my gosh, our country is tearing itself apart or being torn apart. So, you know, I also do want to say, though, it's very important to me to also just find small moments and moments that just are interesting. And I think we can find lessons in those, even if we don't go out of our way to find big moments or big lessons and so forth. Just telling a good small story from our political past, I think will still resonate and I want to make space for the esoteric. It's not just going to be, you know, meltdowns and influenza and so forth. And we're going to find some some quote unquote fun and interesting stories as we go as well. And you're going to do some of that on your social media accounts and stuff like that, rather than just the podcast.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So on social media, we're going to be posting a few times a day, actually, about all the stuff that we don't get to. We only get to do one topic per day, but we've researched a ton. So just throughout the day and throughout the week on social media, Twitter and Instagram, we're just posting about so and so happened this day. So and so happened that day.
SPEAKER_03: And I will say we've already got that going. And I have found it really interesting. And some of the stuff is posted. I didn't post our producer post and sort of caught me off guard. Oh, my gosh, you know, on this day, we announced that we had a polio vaccine or on this day, the Navy SEALs were formed and just, you know, just little tidbits that make you stop and think and try your own little lessons or whatever. And so I, I'm actually pretty excited about the social media stuff we've got going on as well. Yeah. You were involved. You were in the Brian Lehrer show, and you're on FiveThirtyEight. You often react to things in real time and are the producer and host of these discussions. Have you missed that role during this period of time when things are happening? Or have you been happy to not be part of it in the direct conversation?
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I think both. I mean, I think anyone who is a journalist, when there's a big story and someone who you know, believes in the journalism has a role. It's been tough to for me to feel a little bit like I'm sitting on the sidelines. But I also think that stories like these, looking to history stories that kind of talk to a moment, but not necessarily about a moment.
SPEAKER_03: Are really important. And so I do feel like this is my chance to engage and my chance to contribute something. Going into this year, I sort of thought, well, do I want to cover this election again in the sort of day to day way I did for in 2016 and the three elections before that. And I basically decided, no, I mean, I like to sleep. I have a kid now. It was like 2016, you know, took a few years off my life. And so this feels like a good balance.
SPEAKER_04: This day in esoteric political history is produced by Jodi Avregan and Jacob Feldman. It's new from Radio Topi. A new episode comes out every Tuesday and Thursday. We'll have links to subscribe in the show notes and on our website. So I have one kind of self-serving public service announcement because people are not commuting as much. Podcast listenership is down by much less, like 5 percent or so. But the thing is, this is part of the economy that you can support without spending a dime. If you go through the 99 PI catalog and download or stream just one extra episode this week, that 5 percent decrease will be eliminated and we'll maybe even see an overall increase. Or, you know, you can go download and listen to the whole omnibus and pick one episode to send to friends. People seem to really like that at home episode I did a couple of weeks ago. So maybe send that one around. The point is, this is the thing where a free and joyful task could do a lot of good and keep the show healthy and strong. So thanks. If you do heed the call and listen extra and spread the word, you know, tag me on Twitter and I'll thank you personally. 99% Invisible is a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is physically distributed in multiple locations, but in our heart, it's still in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are proud member of radio topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative podcasts in the world. Find them all at radio topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 PI org run Instagram and Reddit, too. But you can peruse old episodes and share those episodes with your friends at 99 PI.org.
SPEAKER_06: Radio Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, look at you florist by day, student by night, student by day, nurse by night. Since 1998, Penn State World Campus has led the charge in online education, offering access to more than 175 in demand programs taught by our expert faculty. We offer flexible schedules, scholarships and tuition plans to help you reach your educational goals online. Penn State World Campus delivers on your time. Click the ad or visit world campus dot psu dot edu to learn more. That's world campus dot psu dot edu to learn more.
SPEAKER_05: When the weather app says rain. McDonald's app says make delivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. Participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than restaurants delivering the fees may apply.
SPEAKER_07: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today. Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's fruit loops.
SPEAKER_06: Just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's fruit loops. The same way you say studio.
SPEAKER_07: That's not how we say it.
SPEAKER_06: Fruit loops find the loopy side.
