233: Starting From Scratch

Speaker 1 Support for this American Life comes from Capella University. Sometimes it takes a different approach to pursue your goals.

Speaker 1 Capella is an online university accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. That means you can earn your degree from wherever you are and be confident your education is relevant and recognized.

Speaker 1 A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more about earning a relevant degree at capella.edu.

Speaker 2 Things are just starting to look up for Jorge when the thing with the TV happened. He'd just moved moved to a new town, started his life over, found some work, got a place.

Speaker 2 Years of searching around and vagueness were ending.

Speaker 2 He'd moved to New York City, which was scary, and locked into an apartment that real New Yorkers told him was a find. A little studio in the East Village, one room, good location.

Speaker 1 Cheap.

Speaker 2 And then one night he's sitting at his table, watching The Bachelorette on TV.

Speaker 2 And it's the episode where The Bachelorette has whittled it down to four guys that she's going to pick one from eventually. And she's in New York City visiting one of the potentials.

Speaker 3 And, you know, she goes out to dinner with his family. And they're, you know, they eat.
And, you know, they've got the shifty-eyed sister.

Speaker 3 And, you know, like, everybody's family acts the exact same way, you know. Right.

Speaker 3 And then they get in the limousine and

Speaker 3 they decide to go back to his apartment. Now, like, now I'm...

Speaker 3 Now I'm on the edge of my seat. Because, you know, I just moved, I moved to New York.
Like, it's it's an enormous city.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 3 I would be so excited if I could recognize a street. I would be so excited.
It would just make me so happy. And so

Speaker 3 I'm totally excited.

Speaker 3 So they get out of the limo, and he hugs her in the street, and they pan, and they show a building. They show an awning.

Speaker 3 And it's my awning.

Speaker 3 It's your building. It's my building.
It's the awning to my building. It says the address.
It says the street. It's, you know, it's possibly the only place in New York I actually know.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And then the, and then he opens the door and she comes in and it's my lobby, you know?

Speaker 7 There's my lobby.

Speaker 3 There's the row of mailboxes, you know? And I'm just like, I'm out of my chair and I'm can't talk. I'm like, you know, like pointing at the TV.

Speaker 2 Like, and if it were me, I would think, like, are they here right now?

Speaker 4 Like, in the building?

Speaker 4 You,

Speaker 3 you're too smart. I mean,

Speaker 3 I was, you know, I was, I couldn't think.

Speaker 7 I was just like, ah!

Speaker 4 You know, it was, you know what I mean? I was just like, it was, you know, I was just flabbergast. It just couldn't be happening, you know?

Speaker 2 He watches him take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Jorge goes on the fifth.
They walk down the hall to a door. And then Jorge realizes something else.

Speaker 3 You know, he doesn't just live in the city as me. He doesn't live in the same street as me.
He doesn't just live in the same building as me. He basically lives in my apartment.

Speaker 3 He lives in the exact same apartment. It's the exact same layout.

Speaker 2 So basically, so the camera goes inside this apartment and you see your apartment, basically.

Speaker 3 A much better version of my apartment. His is much better.

Speaker 3 The walls are wider. The place is cleaner.
The furniture is nicer. He has a half wall.

Speaker 3 He's got a half wall.

Speaker 7 A half wall with them brick glasses.

Speaker 8 It's like drywall, you know?

Speaker 3 But it seems like it has like some sort of like countertop kind of thing on it.

Speaker 2 And at that moment, Jorge gets this flash. He is not really doing all that well.
His apartment is a kind of dump compared to this guy who's on TV.

Speaker 2 Plus, he's watching Trista Wren, the bachelorette, on TV, looking uncomfortable in his apartment on national TV. In fact, she bails on the guy.

Speaker 3 She leaves the apartment and they cut to like that that that head-on interview, you know, and she's just looking into the camera and she says,

Speaker 3 I've dated guys with really bad apartments before.

Speaker 3 I can't judge him on that.

Speaker 3 I have to find out why he feels like he can live in an apartment like this.

Speaker 2 She ditched him because of the apartment?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wait, he lost out on the bachelorette because of the apartment.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And it was your apartment?

Speaker 3 But better.

Speaker 2 Over the next few days, it all sort of goes to hell for Jorge. He's depressed.
His new life does not seem so shiny. His New York friends console him.

Speaker 2 Look, they say, the Bachelorette had never seen a New York apartment before. She does not know how people here live.
This means nothing.

Speaker 2 Which helps him for a while until one day, Jorge picks up the New York Post, and right there is an article about his neighbor, Todman, the guy from The Bachelorette, getting busted for cocaine.

Speaker 3 Third paragraph.

Speaker 3 Todman's fate on The Bachelorette was sealed the moment Wren set foot in his squalid Avenue A studio apartment.

Speaker 3 Do you understand the weight of that? Squalid. Squalid Avenue A studio apartment.

Speaker 2 So this isn't just like people from outside New York.

Speaker 3 This is the New York Post. Nobody knows New York apartments, like the New York Post.
These guys have been in the most squalid New York City apartments. It's squalid, you know? It's squalid.

Speaker 3 Squalid, squalid. You know,

Speaker 3 there's not that many definitions for squalid.

Speaker 3 There's not many ways to look at the word squalid and think, hmm, maybe they mean kind of hip, you know?

Speaker 4 You know.

Speaker 2 Somehow, without ever meaning to, Jorge had the experience that a person would have if he actually went onto one of the reality shows and then got booted off the show.

Speaker 2 National television came into his apartment and then kicked him off the island by proxy. It was like collateral damage to a reality show.

Speaker 3 You know, I never, I didn't want to be, I didn't want America to judge me and tell me my apartment sucked, you know.

Speaker 3 I didn't want that. But at that moment when I was, you know, when they came into my building and they opened that door and it was my apartment,

Speaker 3 I thought I was, you know, I thought that I was hot. I thought that it was, you know.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like

Speaker 3 you know

Speaker 4 what was it

Speaker 4 you lose you lose you lose you lose you know

Speaker 2 Jorge says that if he hadn't just moved to New York City if he hadn't just started this whole life it would not have been the kick in the stomach that it was Which brings us to today's radio program.

Speaker 2 From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
Today on our show, starting from scratch.

Speaker 2 Stories of people in that period of their lives when everything is up for grabs, they're starting over, everything is tenuous. Act one,

Speaker 2 Puppy Love, the business model.

Speaker 2 Act two, making money the old-fashioned way.

Speaker 2 In that act, the story of a man, a limo driver in fact, who begins each day from scratch with just a few bucks and builds it to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands by the end of the day.

Speaker 4 Act three,

Speaker 2 the first starting from scratch. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein revisits a possibly familiar tale of a man, a woman, a garden, and a snake.

Speaker 4 Stay with us.

Speaker 2 Support for this American life and the following message come from AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 2 There's nothing like knowing someone's in your corner, especially when it really counts.

Speaker 2 Like when your neighbor shovels your driveway after a snowstorm or your friend saves you the last slice of pizza. Staying connected matters.

Speaker 2 That's why AT ⁇ T has connectivity you can depend on, although proactively make it right. That's the AT ⁇ T guarantee.
Terms and conditions apply. Visit ATT.com slash guarantee for details.

Speaker 9 This message comes from Capital One.

Speaker 9 Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees, just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

Speaker 9 It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms apply.
See capital1.com slash bank. Capital One NA, member FDIC.

Speaker 10 Hey, everybody, I'm Chuck and this is Josh and we host the Stuff You Should Know podcast. We've been podcasting for 17 years now and we've got a pretty great catalog close to 2,000 episodes deep.

Speaker 8 Yeah, we talk about anything and everything, like the time Nazis invaded Florida or whether boycotts work. We even did a pretty cool one on the periodic table once, if you can believe it.

Speaker 8 So there's something for everyone. That's right.

Speaker 10 And that's why we're here to invite you to check out stuff you should know. We think it'll be right up your alley.

Speaker 8 And you can find us on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2 Just American Life from Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun, Act 1.
Puppy Love, the Business Model.

Speaker 2 Okay, you know there are mom-and-pop grocery stores, mom-and-pop newspapers, but could you throw everything away, change your life, start your life over, and create a mom-and-pop cable network?

Speaker 2 Molly Fitzsimmons' own father tried, and she has the answer.

Speaker 11 Some people's fathers quit their jobs and become teachers. Some maybe retire early and start a new hobby like model building.

Speaker 11 My father, after turning over the reins of the business he'd owned and operated for 25 years, started a cable channel from scratch.

Speaker 11 It was February 1995, and he was looking for something new to do, but he didn't know what.

Speaker 11 Then came the OJ trial. He just had back surgery, and the day they sent him home for bed rest happened to be the day that the trial began.

Speaker 11 During the long breaks in the action, he would flip through the channels.

Speaker 5 There was so much downtime in the trial, I had a chance to see everything that was on television all day long for weeks.

Speaker 11 You mean you just surfed around while...

Speaker 5 The slow points of the trial were most of the day, and I spent the time surfing around daytime television and seeing what it was

Speaker 11 what it was was mostly soap operas talk shows reruns game shows things that my father had no interest in my father is a problem solver and this was a problem so i thought something else is necessary there's a need for a parking place on television.

Speaker 5 If you don't want to watch something that is there,

Speaker 5 you could have the TV set on and it'd be playing something that didn't bother you and

Speaker 5 would hold the place until your favorite show or what you chose to watch.

Speaker 11 For my father, like for a lot of people, simply turning off the television isn't an option.

Speaker 11 So he's stuck flipping through a bunch of shows that he hates, waiting for the OJ trial to come back on when a little light bulb goes off in his head.

Speaker 5 I recalled

Speaker 5 my wife and I walking to lunch on a Friday in downtown Cleveland, walking into a building where the Animal Protective League had

Speaker 5 puppies up for adoption.

Speaker 5 And the crowd of people standing around these puppies included men in three-piece suits and women in fancy outfits and shoppers, moms with kids in strollers, the UPS man,

Speaker 5 and they stood together smiling and chuckling and even sometimes addressing one another

Speaker 5 in the middle of a big city building, all because they were puppies.

Speaker 5 The puppies made them feel better.

Speaker 5 And so,

Speaker 5 my thought jumped to: if television needs some other kind of programming, what would be wrong with one channel out of the hundreds that there are that showed nothing but puppies all day, all night, every day?

Speaker 5 The initial idea was all puppies all the time.

Speaker 5 You turn to the puppy channel and you would see 24 hours a day, seven days a week, footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, acting the natural comedians and cuties that they are,

Speaker 5 with no people,

Speaker 5 no talk,

Speaker 5 accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music, would be the puppy channel concept.

Speaker 11 What are you looking for here?

Speaker 5 I'm looking for Ted Turner's letter, where he very nicely refused me in writing this time.

Speaker 11 My father's home office in Clearwater, Florida, is all decked out with family photos, artifacts from his years in the ad business, and an entire wall of file cabinets, which house the complete puppy channel archive.

Speaker 11 What's that?

Speaker 5 This is a demo that is on the way to being the pilot show.

Speaker 11 He shows me a banker's box filled with videotapes and pulls out the one-hour pilot he made early on in the puppy channel development. It's professionally packaged.

Speaker 11 There's a close-up of a puppy on the cover with the word woof and two exclamation points. Okay, so it's a really

Speaker 11 cute cover.

Speaker 11 Let's put it in.

Speaker 11 When's the last time you watched this?

Speaker 5 I think it's been years since I watched this.

Speaker 11 You may recognize this voice.

Speaker 11 It's my dad.

Speaker 11 He also wrote the the lyrics.

Speaker 11 The scene fades up to a family of old English sheepdog puppies playing and barking in a wood-paneled suburban den somewhere. with mellow guitar music in the background.

Speaker 11 After a couple of minutes, the scene changes to a corgi puppy running in circles on the snow-covered lawn. Soon, border collies are fighting over a sock on somebody's linoleum kitchen floor.

Speaker 11 It's exactly what you'd expect from my dad's description of the puppy channel. And what's so surprising is that it really is nothing more than that.

Speaker 11 Throughout the hour-long pilot, puppies waddle around and sniff things. Puppies wrestle and nuzzle each other adorably.

Speaker 11 It's a soft-focused world of indescribable cuteness.

Speaker 11 Occasionally, my dad's singing interrupts a relaxing instrumental soundtrack.

Speaker 11 Wait, this is your voice, right? Puppies are everywhere.

Speaker 4 Puppies go anywhere.

Speaker 5 Watch the puppy channel now for puppies on TV.

Speaker 11 That's like the

Speaker 5 themes of the

Speaker 5 third puppy channel theme.

Speaker 11 Oh, look at that one. With the big ears flopping up in the air.

Speaker 11 At some point while we're watching, my dad's wife Carol, who's been listening quietly to our conversation from the other side of the room, comes over and starts cooing at the television.

Speaker 11 Carol went with my father on most of the puppy channel shoots and actually had the idea for what became the big climactic final scene of the pilot.

Speaker 5 Here's a scene of all 10 of the dogs on a sofa and how they get off. Some of them are vigorous in getting off, some of them are a little reluctant.

Speaker 11 This was your idea, Carol?

Speaker 5 I thought it would be cute.

Speaker 11 It's not just cute, it's also suspenseful.

Speaker 11 Most of the puppies immediately jump or tumble off the couch onto the carpeted floor, but a couple of them stay up there looking sort of confused. It's a pretty long sequence.

Speaker 11 I glance around the room during it and realize that all of us are smiling, and we're watching with rapt attention to see if the two cowardly puppies will ever find their way down off the couch.

Speaker 11 One of the two finally does, leaving only one puppy left.

Speaker 11 And to give you an idea of the drama of the moment, let me put it this way. We all find ourselves talking to the TV.

Speaker 11 Come on, you can do it.

Speaker 11 Come on.

Speaker 11 You can do it.

Speaker 4 Come on!

Speaker 4 No, wrong way.

Speaker 11 Finally, after a good three or four minutes, the last puppy sort of half jumps, half falls off the couch, and all of us cheer.

Speaker 4 A moment, yes.

Speaker 11 Success!

Speaker 11 Nice, nice move into slow-mo there.

Speaker 11 The whole time my dad was doing the puppy channel, I could never decide if I thought the idea was genius or totally insane.

Speaker 11 And the thing that made it seem super smart was the same thing that made it seem kind of crazy. Namely, puppies.

Speaker 11 Suddenly my businessman dad was talking so much and so fervently about puppies, it was kind of weird. And my question was always, how would the puppy channel possibly make any money?

Speaker 11 When I asked my father this question, he was so convincing that I started to wonder why it's not on television right now. Here's how it would work.

Speaker 11 There'd be fees from cable operators, and there'd be product placements and sponsorships.

Speaker 11 You'd see a bunch of puppies tearing into a bag of puppy chow, for example, or a scroll across the bottom of the screen saying, this hour of the puppy channel brought to you by Milkbone.

Speaker 11 In focus groups, it did well. 37% preferred it to TBS, 41% to CNBC.

Speaker 11 And remember, my dad didn't need a huge audience to succeed.

Speaker 5 At the time we created the Puppy Channel, television channels with the tiniest little sliver of audience were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 5 Court Television sold one-third of its stock for $100 million, which presumably means the thing was worth $300 million,

Speaker 5 and their primetime ratings was one-tenth of 1% of the TV audience at that time.

Speaker 5 Based on our research, that even though the puppy channel would appeal to a very small segment of people, that segment would be big enough to make it a success.

Speaker 11 But even a small cable channel was a huge venture compared to anything my father had done before.

Speaker 11 By his reckoning, he needed to raise $17 million to get on the air, or he needed a big cable company to buy his idea.

Speaker 11 And so he and Carol started hustling.

Speaker 11 And after 25 years of being at the center of their own small, familiar world, they suddenly found themselves, in middle age, on the fringes of a much larger and stranger one.

Speaker 11 There were cable conventions.

Speaker 13 We had a little tiny booth way in the corner, and we had a million people coming around

Speaker 13 wanting to get get our video.

Speaker 11 And what was your role there?

Speaker 4 Dog.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 13 I dressed as a dog

Speaker 13 and painted my nose black.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and couldn't get this black out of the pores of my nose for days.

Speaker 11 Whose idea was it for you to wear a dog suit?

Speaker 13 I think it was your father's.

Speaker 13 Of course it was your father's. Would I have voluntarily done that? I don't know.
These are the things you do for love.

Speaker 11 Fortune magazine published a photo of Carol in her dog suit. The media loved the puppy channel.
There was an article about it on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter.

Speaker 11 There were favorable blurbs in Entertainment Weekly and USA Today.

Speaker 11 Everybody loved it. Everybody, except the ones who, at this stage mattered most.
People like Ted Turner, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch all got the puppy channel pitch.

Speaker 11 But my father couldn't make the sale.

Speaker 5 One of the TV professionals that we talked to was talking about the amount of space on a satellite, they call it bandwidth today,

Speaker 5 that it takes to have a commercial TV network shown.

Speaker 5 He said something like:

Speaker 5 You'd ask us to give up six mega schlocks of Goober Schnop to put just puppies on there?

Speaker 5 And the answer is yes, but if you are the guy who owns the six mega goops of schlachenach, you're maybe not going to give it up for puppies.

Speaker 4 But why?

Speaker 11 I mean, so he just he doesn't like puppies or?

Speaker 5 No, it's a foreign concept to want to go way far off the beaten path. The puppy channel is way off the beaten path.
It has no people. It has no talk.

Speaker 11 Usually when you describe this, you do mention that

Speaker 11 there would be no talk, and that seems to be a big part of what you liked about the idea.

Speaker 11 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 11 Why were you so interested in a channel where nobody talked?

Speaker 5 Having a human being in the picture talking about what the puppies were doing or talking about something struck me as against the concept originally of just having a quiet place on television that was all relaxing, all comfort, all easy and pleasure-giving in a very, very low-key way.

Speaker 11 One person my father talked to characterized the puppy channel as the antidote to television. And in the end, I think that's probably why it never worked out.

Speaker 11 My dad hadn't just imagined a new cable network. He'd imagined a new way to think about what television can be.

Speaker 11 What you'd get from watching the puppy channel would be very different than what you get watching the Food Network or QVC or Law and Order for that matter.

Speaker 11 In his business plan, along with all the spreadsheets and financial outlines, under the section titled Vision, it says only,

Speaker 11 to make television more helpful.

Speaker 11 And under Mission, to help people relax and feel better.

Speaker 11 My father conceived of the puppy channel as a refuge from regular TV, but implicit in this notion is the idea that regular TV is something you need a refuge from.

Speaker 11 And that's a tough sell to the people who make it.

Speaker 11 After five years of hard work, my father decided to pull the plug.

Speaker 11 I'm just going to put it out there and say, I think the world wasn't ready for the puppy channel.

Speaker 5 If there were a thousand television channels, the puppy channel might be in there.

Speaker 5 If there were 600 television channels regularly being

Speaker 5 sent out by the satellites, the puppy channel might be there. There's a number where the puppy channel fits in.
We just don't know what that number is.

Speaker 11 When we find out what that number is, I'll be there with my dad and we'll be singing this song.

Speaker 11 Take us out, dad.

Speaker 5 I love the little puppies,

Speaker 5 Pretty little puppies.

Speaker 5 I love the little puppies on the puppy channel. Every little pup on TV.

Speaker 2 Molly Fitzsimmons and her dad. Since we first broadcast this story, all the way back in 2003, we have obviously seen the incredible demand for cute puppy videos on YouTube.

Speaker 2 There's the puppy bowl on Animal Planet. There's Dog TV, a channel intended to be watched by dogs.
Molly's dad, Dan Fitzsimmons, died in 2016, but obviously was far ahead of his time.

Speaker 2 Maui says that he delighted in the fact that his idea, a cozy corner of the world for watching puppies caught in the act of being cute, flourished in all these other forms.

Speaker 2 Act two, making money the old-fashioned way.

Speaker 2 Well, now we bring you the story of somebody who starts from scratch every single day with next to nothing and tries to build it up to something.

Speaker 7 Mary Beth Kirshner tells the story.

Speaker 12 Every day, Joe plays this game. He starts with enough small bills to make change, lots of fives and ones.
Then the clock starts.

Speaker 12 It's 1.30 in the morning.

Speaker 6 I go out with almost nothing in my pocket in the morning.

Speaker 6 Sometimes I end up with thousands. Sometimes I end up broke at the end of the day.

Speaker 12 So how much do you have in your pocket today?

Speaker 6 I got $32 in my pocket today.

Speaker 6 By 6 o'clock, I should have at least a couple hundred dollars. And, you know, I take it from there.

Speaker 12 By 6 a.m., he means.

Speaker 12 Joe, who doesn't want me to use his last name, drives a Superstretch limousine in Las Vegas. Joe says he prefers starting in the middle of the night.
He doesn't like crowds or traffic.

Speaker 12 Here's how his game works. By driving his limo to and from the airport mostly, Joe slowly earns enough, a few hundred dollars, to play blackjack in the casino.

Speaker 12 And then pretty much the sky's the limit.

Speaker 6 Sometimes I end up with 10 grand, you know? One time I started out with like 32 bucks or $33.

Speaker 12 Like today?

Speaker 6 Like today, and I wound up with $84,000 at the Gold Coast.

Speaker 12 $84,000?

Speaker 6 $84,000.

Speaker 12 How do you turn $32,000?

Speaker 6 I try and build it up to like $1,000, and then I play with the thousand. I build it up to three, four and then you get on a run.

Speaker 12 Joe's a bit of a legend in Las Vegas gambling circles. I'd heard about him from a pawnbroker south of the strip who said Joe is a regular customer who came every month for about a year.

Speaker 12 Among the stories he told me which led me to Joe, that he'd never worked a day in his life, that he lived only on a trust fund until he was 50, controlled by his father who despised his love of gambling.

Speaker 12 On his 50th birthday, the legend went, Joe inherited $6 million. He instantly spent the first million on a house.
The remaining five, he gambled away. It took him five hours.

Speaker 12 Joe says not true, but based on the truth. He did inherit millions of dollars from his family and did lose a big piece of it gambling, but over years, not hours.

Speaker 6 People tell me, oh, look at the kind of life you lead, you know?

Speaker 6 I mean, one day I could have a million dollars, the next day I'd be broke but I love it I love the action I love the adrenaline I get an adrenaline rush from it one day you have a million dollars and the next day you're broke

Speaker 6 is that an exaggeration or really an exaggeration I mean I had days where I went in and I won like at the horseshoe I won $680,000 I started the day out with like 50 bucks in my pocket and I went out and I bought two homes with with some of the money and I ended up losing the other money then I needed money so I borrowed on the houses and then I lost the houses, I couldn't pay.

Speaker 6 I go up and down, you know, it's like a roller coaster.

Speaker 6 But I really enjoy doing it.

Speaker 6 I think without it, I'll just wilt away and

Speaker 4 die.

Speaker 6 See, this is one of the hotels the Barbary Coast won't let me in. If I go in there and sit down for two minutes, they'll tell me to get up and leave.

Speaker 12 Joe has a long history of winning big in the casinos. So much so, and this is clearly true, about a dozen of them in Las Vegas have kicked him out.
He says most of them think he cheats.

Speaker 12 Nobody could be that lucky, they say.

Speaker 12 Among the places where he's still allowed to play, none wanted their names mentioned or would allow me to record in their casinos today.

Speaker 12 So we were limited to taping outdoors, where most of Joe's game happens anyway.

Speaker 6 Sometimes you stand here for like half hour and nobody'll, you know, but nobody else knows. But as soon as they come out to take a cab, I approach them, you know?

Speaker 12 First stop, his favorite nameless hotel and casino, where the doorman lets him approach potential customers from the circular driveway out front.

Speaker 12 Joe tips the doorman for each ride he gets, so he gives Joe first dibs on every person who walks out the door.

Speaker 5 You guys need a cab?

Speaker 4 15 bucks?

Speaker 12 With the approval of the doorman, lots of people say yes.

Speaker 5 Isn't this a lot nicer than a cab?

Speaker 12 A lot nicer. Same?

Speaker 12 It's 2 a.m.

Speaker 12 with our first $15 coming in. Joe says he started waking up at these hours when he worked in New York operating vending machines and coffee carts, gambling in Atlantic City on the weekends.

Speaker 12 There too he says most of the casinos kicked him out. By the time he came to Vegas 14 years ago, he says he was ready to retire.
But he gambled full-time for the first eight years he was here.

Speaker 14 Well, he's not a dishonest man by no means. but you know, he's an opportunist.

Speaker 14 He's the type of guy, if there's an opportunity for him to, you know, to work the odds or make a dollar, you know, he'll make 10.

Speaker 14 He's one of them guys.

Speaker 12 George, please don't mention my full name either or where I work, is a casino manager in one of the few places where Joe now plays. We met in an empty hotel ballroom, far from the casino floor.

Speaker 14 They think he counts cards. He doesn't.
He's very good at knowing when the deck goes cold, when there's not a chance of winning.

Speaker 14 If I were to own a casino and have a thousand Joes walking around in my casino, I'd be out of business in short order.

Speaker 12 Well, maybe not. Joe walks away with his winnings, but then he always comes back for more play.

Speaker 12 And that combination, George says, does to Joe what it does to everyone.

Speaker 14 I see the numbers. There's not a player in this place, like any casino I've ever been

Speaker 14 that has won more than they lost never

Speaker 14 I'd say never

Speaker 12 When you see the cumulative numbers and that's one reason why Joe is driving a limo

Speaker 12 5 a.m. And we've got $180

Speaker 12 Joe has his eye on a group of guys who've clearly been out on the town for most of the night. Joe's hoping these four are looking to go to a strip club because he gets a kickback of $20 a person.

Speaker 5 Are you guys having fun?

Speaker 5 You want the radio on?

Speaker 6 Radio is optional. It's more money.

Speaker 5 I got anything you want as long as you got money.

Speaker 12 Joe tells me he also takes guys to the brothels a half-hour drive from Las Vegas and collects even more.

Speaker 6 We take people out there and we usually get 30. Now for the holidays, they're doing 40%

Speaker 6 of what the person spends. If a person spends $1,000, we get $400 kickback for bringing them out there.

Speaker 12 What do you mean for the holidays?

Speaker 6 Until December, they're doing like a special. Instead of 30%, they're giving us another 10%.

Speaker 6 Because I have pictures of everything in my trunk. I have a menu also.
You know, they have a menu of all the stuff you could do.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I love Vegas.

Speaker 12 As we drive, the stories keep coming. There was the day Joe won big at the racetrack and flew to London on the Concorde just for dinner.

Speaker 12 Or the two-day stretch he was playing $20,000 a hand at the Hilton and walked away with over a million dollars. These kinds of stories can't be confirmed, but I wanted to believe them.

Speaker 12 So he offers to show me what's in his trunk.

Speaker 6 See, this is about a half a million dollars in markers, right?

Speaker 12 Joe hands me a three-inch stack of receipts from casinos all over town, totaling about a half million dollars. Evidence, he says, he wants me to see that these can't all be lies.

Speaker 12 And what are those 20,000?

Speaker 6 Yeah, they loan you 20,000 to sit and play with. Ah.

Speaker 6 You know, if you lose, you got 30 days to pay it back.

Speaker 12 These are 20,000, 20,000?

Speaker 4 Yeah, they're all.

Speaker 6 They're all like... 25,000.

Speaker 6 What's this? This is my uncle in Forbes magazine. He made like close to a billion dollars.

Speaker 6 He's your uncle? Yeah, that's my uncle.

Speaker 12 Billionaire?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Later, when I look into it, that story checks out. As does the one about his aunt, who Joe says sits on the board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Speaker 12 He says she's the one who bails him out when he gets over his head in debt. Joe admits he's the black sheep in the family.

Speaker 6 How much do they give you? $41.

Speaker 12 It's 7.30 a.m. and we're up to $350 from the run to the strip club and five trips to the airport.

Speaker 4 We just keep going around and around.

Speaker 12 There's a brief lull. Joe says it's time to go into the casino.

Speaker 6 I'm going to go play a little blackjack. The only thing is, I don't know if they're going to let you

Speaker 6 if they want.

Speaker 12 The casino won't let me record his play of course but i watch i'm gonna play with a hundred dollars now okay

Speaker 6 i'm making fifty or sixty dollars in like 15 minutes or less

Speaker 12 Joe sits in front of a woman dealer with an empty table and he's got that look almost like a drinker who bellies up to a bar every night like he belongs there he signals the woman for cards and chips and quick quick shortcut hand signals.

Speaker 12 Each hand takes less than a minute. He plays a few and easily wins his $60 in 10 minutes or less.

Speaker 12 Before I know it, we're out again. 8 a.m.
with $410.

Speaker 12 He says it's getting to be peak time for airport runs.

Speaker 6 See, now it gets busy, you know, so I don't have a chance to really go in and gamble in all because I'm, you know, as long as I keep the cash coming in, if it's low, I supplement it with gambling.

Speaker 4 If it's not, I just, you know.

Speaker 12 But you wouldn't rather be gambling?

Speaker 6 I'd rather be working.

Speaker 4 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 12 What happened to your feeling about the gambling? I mean, you gambled.

Speaker 7 You did nothing but gambling.

Speaker 6 I just do it, you know, because I'm so hyper, I have to have something to do.

Speaker 6 You know, I used to sit, like, I was at the Flamingo one time, and I had about $40,000 in chips in front of me, and I was playing. I was playing like $2,000 a hand.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I told the doorman, if you get a good ride, like to a golf course, come and get me, you know? So, like, for $75.

Speaker 6 Anyway, he came up to the table and he told me I got a ride for $75. The people in the pit, they all think I'm nuts, you know.
I just stopped.

Speaker 6 I left, took my money, and I ran down to take the guy for $75. And here I am playing two grand the hand.
You know, I try and separate the two. One has nothing to do with the other, you know.

Speaker 4 I don't understand that.

Speaker 6 I know, nobody does, but that's how I am, you know.

Speaker 12 But do you understand that?

Speaker 6 I don't, you know, I just, gambling to me is gambling. Work is work, you know.

Speaker 12 10 a.m., and we've got $650.

Speaker 12 We've had three more airport runs, and the last customer just gave him a $25 tip.

Speaker 7 Only in America.

Speaker 12 But Joe says today, his game is subdued compared to the past. At age 54, he's had some heart trouble, and that's changed the stakes.

Speaker 12 A year ago, his daughter was home from college and noticed he didn't look well and called for an ambulance. Joe was having a heart attack.

Speaker 16 It was pretty scary, because you see, and I think he might have been in a casino,

Speaker 16 but I'm not sure.

Speaker 12 I guess that's enough to really get your heart rate up.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so I mean, if you ask me, I think he probably was, but he never told me for sure.

Speaker 12 Joe's daughter knew what she was doing. She's studying to be a doctor in medical school in the Middle East.

Speaker 12 I talked with her via her cell phone while she was working at a hospital in some remote spot in Israel. She asked that I not use her name, not even her first name.

Speaker 12 What did you tell your friends your dad did?

Speaker 16 Now or when I was growing up, because now even I don't, only a few people in my class really know of my good friends even.

Speaker 12 What did you tell them then?

Speaker 16 Then I would say, well, he's not really doing anything now, but he had real estate in New York. And sometimes I'd just make things up.
I'd say he's a chef.

Speaker 4 And so,

Speaker 16 but it was always funny because I was running joke between, you know, me and my dad.

Speaker 16 But when I was growing up, I just couldn't tell people because because nobody else had a dad like that and so I felt like I would they would either not believe me or I would sound ridiculous and they just wouldn't understand

Speaker 12 but he he I never had a problem with me saying to anyone you know what he does or that he gambles when Joe moved to Las Vegas his daughter was just entering high school He raised her practically as a single parent, starting from the time she was born when his ex-wife had a breakdown.

Speaker 12 It wasn't until they moved to Las Vegas that she says she really understood just how much her father gambled.

Speaker 16 I guess what always blew me away in the beginning is we would walk in and everybody would know him.

Speaker 16 And they would know me too because he would talk about me. And I would say to him, How do these people know you?

Speaker 16 I was amazed by that. And they would joke with him and they'd say, Are you back again? And they'd say, Well, what do you need today? Because he would go in sometimes and he'd say, I need a pool today.

Speaker 12 How much money does it take to build a pool?

Speaker 16 $20,000. I don't remember how.

Speaker 12 How long did that take?

Speaker 16 Literally 10 minutes, maybe. One, two, three, and that was it.

Speaker 12 But as much as she knows her dad's wins, she remembers the times when they were broke. Really broke.

Speaker 16 We would have to search for quarters on the floor.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 my uncle would, which is really funny.

Speaker 16 To buy a hamburger or something like that.

Speaker 12 Search for quarters on the floor in your uncle's house?

Speaker 16 Yeah, he would search we would pick them up and I would go and get a hamburger.

Speaker 16 But that was in the very beginning.

Speaker 16 I mean, even when things are really bad, he can always find a way out of it. And even I would be amazed.
I mean, because I heard say to him, There's no way. How are you going to do that?

Speaker 16 And he'd say, Don't worry,

Speaker 16 we'll find a way.

Speaker 16 And there's always a way. And he can just laugh about it.

Speaker 5 Which airline are you going to? Southwest. Southwest.

Speaker 12 It's noon, and Joe has $1,100. The limo business has been steady for hours.
It's a good time for business, but Joe wants to take a break to call his daughter.

Speaker 6 I talk to her like five times a day.

Speaker 12 It's late night in Israel. He just wants to hear about her day.

Speaker 5 Hi, honey, it's me. I just called to say hi.

Speaker 12 So what's happened since your daughter is gone?

Speaker 6 Well, that's when I started to work.

Speaker 6 I never worked while she was here.

Speaker 6 This is like filled with my void, maybe in a way. I just think about it.

Speaker 6 But I missed miss her so much.

Speaker 6 When I see her, it's like,

Speaker 6 it's the greatest feeling in the world.

Speaker 6 Hey, we're at the airport now.

Speaker 7 This is zero level.

Speaker 6 Oh, I'm going to go upstairs and see how busy it is.

Speaker 4 People are looking for rooms.

Speaker 12 It's 1:30 p.m. and we're up to $1,300.

Speaker 12 We've just dropped off yet another ride at the airport. And for a little variety, Joe says he's going to show me how he also sells hotel rooms.

Speaker 12 These are hotel rooms the casinos give him for free because he gambles so much.

Speaker 6 I gotta make it seem like I'm just uh

Speaker 6 you know walking casual.

Speaker 12 Joe's carefully checking out a middle-aged couple in shorts and tennis shoes. Just as he's about to approach them,

Speaker 12 we're interrupted.

Speaker 5 Hi, this Joe.

Speaker 7 Oh, how you doing, Dave? What's up?

Speaker 12 A lucrative job has come up. He says some high roller wants to charter his limo for three hours.

Speaker 6 For three hours? Did you tell him it's 75 an hour, though?

Speaker 12 Joe says these guys are seldom big tippers, but it's worth the gamble.

Speaker 12 This customer, a handsome mid-30s Middle Easterner, says, no recording, please. So Joe tells me to take a break, and he'll catch up with me when he's done.

Speaker 5 He says my family lost their homes when the Jews took over Israel.

Speaker 12 It's 5 p.m. And I have no idea how much money Joe has.
When we reconnect, he looks exhausted, but hyped up.

Speaker 12 Since I left him, he's finished with the charter, been to the casino to gamble, where he won $500.

Speaker 12 But there's more. He's anxious to tell me about how he's ended the day.
Tell me this again. So this guy at the end of the day, you thought this was going to be a bad thing.

Speaker 5 I said to him,

Speaker 5 where are you from?

Speaker 6 So he says, Lebanon. I said, oh, I said, I speak Arabic, you know? I said, I was born in Baghdad.
I was really born in Baghdad, Iraq.

Speaker 12 What Joe didn't tell the guy is that he's Jewish.

Speaker 15 I said, are you Muslim? He says, yeah, I says, yeah. I said, I said, oh, there's Jews.

Speaker 6 I said, what they're doing is terrible, you know, to the Palestinian. And then he just,

Speaker 6 you know, his adrenaline just started going, you know.

Speaker 7 And he just, so yeah, he wanted to go out with me tonight.

Speaker 6 He wanted to hire the car for five hours tonight.

Speaker 6 And then I said, no, I said, I'm too tired. I said, so he says, well, I'll call you tomorrow.
I said, fine, you know. He's like, buddy, buddy.
But he gave me 500 bucks.

Speaker 15 I said, all right.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's what I call it.

Speaker 7 A perfect day.

Speaker 5 You go out with like 32 bucks, you go home with two grand.

Speaker 12 As we take off, Joe's still hanging on to today's winnings in a wad of bills folded up like it's a double cheeseburger in one of his hands on the steering wheel.

Speaker 6 $230 he gave me as a tip.

Speaker 6 You know, which is not good.

Speaker 12 But think of it: if Joe just worked five days a week, making $2,000 a day and never lost it back, that'd be a half million dollars a year.

Speaker 6 It's a wonderful country.

Speaker 2 Mary Braith Kirshner, she's now a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute.

Speaker 2 Coming up, when the creator of the universe starts from scratch, that's in a minute, from Jagaga Bubble Radio, when our program continues.

Speaker 2 Support for this American Life and the following message come from ATT.

Speaker 2 Whether you're calling your parents to say happy anniversary or checking in with your kids before bedtime, staying connected matters.

Speaker 2 That's why ATT is connectivity you can depend on, although proactively make it right. That's the ATT guarantee.
Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 9 Visit ATT.com slash guarantee for details.

Speaker 1 Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace.

Speaker 1 Their AI-enhanced website builder, Blueprint AI, can create a fully custom website in just a few steps, using basic information about your industry, goals, and personality to generate premium-quality content and personalized design recommendations.

Speaker 1 And get paid on time with branded invoices and online payments. Plus, streamline your workflow with built-in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools.

Speaker 1 Head to squarespace.com slash American for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Speaker 1 Support for This American Life comes from EasyCater, committed to helping organizations order and manage food for all their business needs, with search tools to help accommodate dietary preferences and stay on budget, plus flexible payment by credit card or invoicing.

Speaker 1 EasyCater also offers employee lunch programs, tools to see and control food spend, and 24-7 live customer support, all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com.

Speaker 2 This is American Life.

Speaker 2 Easy Gonna program, of course, would use a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program is a rerun, starting from scratch.

Speaker 2 Stories of people starting over with all the vulnerability and rawness that comes with starting from nothing. We've arrived at Act 3.

Speaker 2 The first, starting from scratch.

Speaker 2 Well, before there was money or gambling or TV or puppies or even the idea of before,

Speaker 2 there was this story about when everything started from scratch. Here's Jonathan Goldstein.

Speaker 17 In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass.

Speaker 17 He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth, and yanked out tufts of his own hair.

Speaker 17 At one point, he tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them, and God had to step in.

Speaker 17 Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing.

Speaker 17 It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you.

Speaker 17 But it's a stranger who you have created, and he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created.

Speaker 17 And you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years. And yet, still, you have nothing to talk about.

Speaker 17 It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted.

Speaker 17 Before he created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now, he was still lonely.
And so was Adam.

Speaker 17 Then came Eve.

Speaker 17 Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village, and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way. Eve, mayor.
Adam, village idiot.

Speaker 17 And that is the way it was from the very beginning. Sometimes, when Adam would start to speak, Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart.

Speaker 17 But he would only say stuff like, Little things are really great because you could put them in your hand as well as in your mouth.

Speaker 17 Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing.
In her dreams, Eve danced in the tops of trees.

Speaker 17 Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies. And there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug.
And then she would hear snoring.

Speaker 17 She would wake up and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers, his dog food breath blowing right up her nostrils. Eve stared up at the sky.

Speaker 17 Adam draped his arm across her chest and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it.

Speaker 17 Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them. Except for God, Eve had no one.
She would complain to the Lord any chance she got.

Speaker 17 Adam is a nimrod, she would say, and the Lord would remain silent.

Speaker 17 God was the best in all that, and she loved the hell out of him, but when it came to trash talk, he was of no use.

Speaker 17 Adam was constantly trying to impress her. Look what I have made, he said one one bright morning, his hands cupped together.
Eve looked into his hands. She pulled away and shrieked.

Speaker 17 Adam was holding giraffe feces.

Speaker 17 I've sculpted it, said Adam. It is for the Lord.
He opened his hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck.

Speaker 17 On some days, Adam galloped about exploring. His hair was wiry, and when it got sweaty, it hung down in his eyes.
Adam was cute this way. On one such day, he saw a snake.

Speaker 17 Adam made the snake's acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back.

Speaker 17 Wow, that's smart, said the snake through gritted teeth.

Speaker 17 Their eyes locked, and in that very moment, the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was a lummix, and that as king of the earth, his reign would very soon end.

Speaker 17 There was a new sheriff in town, and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake.
He could tell all of this just by simply looking into his idiot eyes.

Speaker 17 I've seen you around with another one like you, he said to Adam. But instead of the dead legless snake between the legs, she has chaos there.

Speaker 17 That's Eve, said Adam, all animated. I named her that myself.
God made her from out of my rib. He showed the snake the scar on his side.
The snake looked at Adam in silence.

Speaker 17 The idea of Adam, Adam the Shlomiel, Adam the Fool, being God's favorite, was enough to give the snake a migraine.

Speaker 17 You aren't at all like I imagined, the snake said. I thought you'd be closer to the ground, more pliant, greener.

Speaker 17 I tried to explain to God that to make you bounced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don't know why I bother.

Speaker 17 Adam sat and listened wide-eyed.

Speaker 17 Eve hadn't the patience to sit and chat like this, so when the snake suggested they get into the habit of meeting meeting every once in a while to talk, Adam was very excited to do so.

Speaker 17 As they lazed on their backs staring up at the sky, the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world and that he used to pall around with God in the dark back before creation.

Speaker 17 He said that in the darkness it was a truer, freer time, that in the darkness was the good old days.

Speaker 17 He told Adam that back in the very beginning, he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place, but that God was just too stubborn to listen to reason.

Speaker 17 Make the earth out of sugar, I told him. Instead of stingers, give bees lips they can kiss you with.

Speaker 17 Adam didn't always agree with the snake. In fact, a lot of what the snake said went straight over his head.
But there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood.

Speaker 17 He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself, I sure could go for a good dose of snake.

Speaker 17 You would think that after all the time they spent together, the snake would finally find it within himself to start liking Adam, just a little bit, but instead, he only grew to hate him more.

Speaker 17 He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam's wife, Eve.

Speaker 17 From what he heard from Adam, she was hot and smart. Often he would imagine running into her and the instant synergy they would have.

Speaker 17 Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are, he would say, wrapping himself around her calf.

Speaker 17 The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, bucktoothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp.
Adam had the IQ of a coconut husk, but he was still human.

Speaker 17 The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed.

Speaker 17 Sometimes I'd think you were watching me, the snake imagined, saying to Eve, because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me. Ribbons made of raw pork intestines.
intestines.

Speaker 17 I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek at me from behind a tree. But all I'd see were the hedgehogs which mocked me.

Speaker 17 Come, my dear, let us eat from the tree of knowledge.

Speaker 17 On Eve's very first day, Adam had explained to her the rules of the garden just the way God had explained them to him. He had lifted his head up and had made his back stiff.

Speaker 17 He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1940s would. Another kind of woman, someone softer than Eve, might have found this charming.

Speaker 17 He explained that except for the tree of knowledge, every tree in the garden was theirs to eat from.

Speaker 17 I am a fan of the pear, Adam said. It is not unlike an apple whose head craves God.

Speaker 17 Tell me more about this tree of knowledge, said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it, the tree of knowledge.
It sounded very poetic.

Speaker 17 There's not much to tell, said Adam. If we eat from it, we will die.
From then on, Eve talked about the tree of knowledge all the time. It was tree of knowledge this and tree of knowledge that.

Speaker 17 It's like it wasn't a tree at all, but a movie star. Sometimes, she would just stand by the tree and stare at it.
It was on such an occasion that she met the snake.

Speaker 17 When Eve first caught sight of him, she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day.

Speaker 17 A booby that percolated her vomit to just beneath her tonsils, a dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature's cruelty, and a death-watch beetle that filled her with existential dread.

Speaker 17 But still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from 60 to 80% oilier than she would have ever imagined.

Speaker 17 Hi, said the snake. In the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It's fruity.

Speaker 17 We were told not to eat from that tree, or else we would die, said Eve.

Speaker 17 Die. What an ignorant thing to say, said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass in the side of his mouth.
If there is an escape hatch from paradise, then it isn't really paradise, is it?

Speaker 17 The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve.
He could see he was making an impression.

Speaker 17 All I'm saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake.
I could talk about it all day and you still won't get it.

Speaker 17 You have a right to at least try it, right? I'm not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble.
A nibble isn't really eating, is it?

Speaker 17 Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating. She looked at the tree.
The way the sun shined through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to nibble the fruit.

Speaker 17 Then the snake said, Think about it. Does God want companions who can think for themselves or does he want a bunch of lackeys and yes men? Wouldn't God want a few surprises?

Speaker 17 It would seem to me that God's telling you not to eat the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God.

Speaker 17 The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely.

Speaker 17 At least give it a lick.

Speaker 17 Eve looked at the fruit, then she looked at the snake.

Speaker 17 Then, slowly, She parted her lips and pushed out her tongue, all wet and warm and uncertain. She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit.
The snake smiled. Has anyone died? he asked.

Speaker 17 Now take a tiny little nibble. Just a speck.
Just to see.

Speaker 17 The fruit was squishy and tart.

Speaker 17 She smushed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes.
It was a bit like trying on new glasses. It was a bit like enamel nitrate popper.

Speaker 17 It was a bit like a big wet kiss on the lips right at first when you weren't sure if you wanted to be kissed or not.

Speaker 17 She felt a thousand little feet kicking at her uterus.

Speaker 17 The idea of her own nudity, as well as Adam's, had always felt more like a Nordic co-ed health spa thing. Now, with the fruit of knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing.

Speaker 17 Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks.

Speaker 17 Her thighs, the way they swished against each each other, were like scissors cutting through velour. With her lips still glistening in tree of knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam.

Speaker 17 The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass. And as she receded into the distance, he thought something along the lines of, no, that's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 17 Kiss me, Adam, said Eve. Taste my lips.
Adam, like any lummicks truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way, and thus he knew how to avoid it like the plague.

Speaker 17 But yet, there was also this: Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him. It felt like a very lucky thing.

Speaker 17 When he took her in his arms, he told her that he loved her with his whole entire heart.

Speaker 17 He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted.
Then it started to rain, and Eve began to cry.

Speaker 17 During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the garden more and more.

Speaker 17 A couple of times he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn't try too hard anyway.
He didn't want to bother God any more than he already had.

Speaker 17 When Adam met someone that he really liked, he would say, I so wish you could have been there. It didn't seem fair to him that he was the one that got to be in Eden.

Speaker 17 This sunset isn't bad, he'd say, but the sunsets in Eden, they burned your nose hairs. They made your ears bleed.
He couldn't even explain it right.

Speaker 17 When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God, he would say, and God was delicious. When you wanted him, you just grabbed him.
Now when he ate fruit, he can only taste what was not there.

Speaker 17 But it wasn't all bad. After Eden, Eve became much gentler with Adam.
After getting them both cast out, she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love.

Speaker 17 She knew it was the very least she could do.

Speaker 17 She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place.

Speaker 17 Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve had spent their early days in a beautiful garden, naked and frolicking, and the kids would say, Ew.

Speaker 17 The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam, lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time.

Speaker 17 They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled. Where's Grandpa's belly button? They all asked.

Speaker 17 He stared at the children. They were all his children.
And as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid.

Speaker 2 Jonathan Goldstein. This story appears in his book where he rewrites Bible stories called Ladies and Gentlemen: the Bible.

Speaker 2 His podcast Heavyweight is going to be returning this fall for a ninth season, now with Pushing and Industries. They already have some new episodes in the feed.

Speaker 2 You can find them wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 World Program is produced today by Wendy Door Door and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, David Kestenbaum, and Starlee Klein.

Speaker 2 Production help for today's show from Todd Bachman, Jane Marie, Aaron Scott, Alvin Melleth, and Ari Saperstein. Mixing help today from Catherine Ray Mondo.

Speaker 2 Our technical director for the show is Matt Tierney. Help on today's rerun from Suzanne Gabber and Stone Nelson.
Special thanks today to Mr.

Speaker 5 George Lara.

Speaker 2 Thanks also to Kevin Scully, Dave Dahlstro, and Tony Mancini.

Speaker 2 Some of the funding for Mary Beth Kirschner's story about the Gamboard came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's radio fund back when such a thing existed.

Speaker 2 Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our over 850 shows for absolutely free.

Speaker 2 This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr.

Speaker 2 Tori Malatea, who I have to say got all angry this week when I told him we were going to be putting a story about puppies onto the public radio satellite.

Speaker 5 You'd ask us to give up six mega schlucks of gooba schnapp to put just puppies on there?

Speaker 4 Well, yeah.

Speaker 7 I'm Ira Glass.

Speaker 2 Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Speaker 2 Next week on the podcast of This American Life. When Angela's family goes on vacation, her dad plans everything.

Speaker 2 One year, the plan went awry.

Speaker 12 I don't think I was particularly traumatized.

Speaker 4 Wow, you went like you got hit by lightning.

Speaker 12 Like, lightning's not personal. The lightning wasn't like, Angela, you're ugly.
The lightning was just doing its thing.

Speaker 2 When nature, fate, or the federal government mess with your plans, that's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.

Speaker 1 Support for this American Life comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change.

Speaker 1 Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions.

Speaker 1 Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about why people do the things they do.

Speaker 1 Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/slash podcast or wherever you listen.

Speaker 9 Support for NPR and the following message come from Texas Mutual Insurance Company.

Speaker 9 By investing in local communities and rewarding policyholders for prioritizing safety, they are building a more resilient Texas. More at TexasMutual.com/slash Texans Get It.

Speaker 9 Texas Mutual, Texans Get It.