Behind the Scenes of Throughline

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Speaker 2 First, we have the music come in for the cold open.

Speaker 3 Then sprinkle in some sound design to beat your interest, a little appetizer for your ears.

Speaker 2 And then some news tape to give you a little more context on what's happening.

Speaker 3 America's Viking 1 spacecraft landed on Mars early this morning and sent back two sharp pictures of the red planet. Or maybe it's a voiceover.

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Speaker 2 I'm Rand Abdel Fattah.

Speaker 3 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

Speaker 2 And you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 2 Today on the show, behind the scenes of, well, this show.

Speaker 3 Okay, so some of you listening have been with us since day one, and some of you might have just heard about the show.

Speaker 3 But whether you're a die-hard fan sleeping in a through-line t-shirt every night, or maybe a new listener just trying to tune out the post-election news, here on this show, the team is always trying to tell stories that are informative, insightful, and entertaining.

Speaker 2 So for the episode today, we're taking you behind the scenes of the show, telling you how it was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a little bit about how we make our special through line sauce.

Speaker 2 The through line riz, as the kids say.

Speaker 3 Or cringe, which is what my nine-year-old would say.

Speaker 3 Anyways, we're going to give you a special behind-the-scenes look where you hear from us and from people on our team about the show and some of the episodes we made.

Speaker 2 By the way, these behind-the-scenes conversations and more already exist for our Through Line Plus subscribers.

Speaker 2 So if you're not supporting us yet, but you want more Through Line in your life, sign up now. You can find out more at plus.npr.org slash Through Line.

Speaker 3 Coming up, the origins of Through Line or Through Line's Through Line.

Speaker 4 One of those.

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Speaker 4 Part 1. Through line.

Speaker 10 So today, we thought it would be kind of fun to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how the show got started.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's our origin, the through line origin story.

Speaker 3 It all began. No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 4 Okay, no.

Speaker 10 So, yeah, it's like once upon a time.

Speaker 4 We got to cue the music. Six years ago.

Speaker 3 So, no, okay, so it starts in, I think it was October of 2015. I was brought to NPR by Guy Ross, who was the host of TED Radio Hour at the time.

Speaker 11 It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Speaker 9 I'm Guy Ross.

Speaker 3 To work on a new show he was developing. And I had never worked in journalism or podcasting before.

Speaker 3 I had only worked on music for TED Radio Hour. And a guy, I think, wanted to take a chance on me and brought me in to work on a pilot for a new show.
And it was a really kind of a top secret project.

Speaker 3 They sat me kind of in the corner of the sixth floor, I think, or the fifth floor where we were at the time at NPR headquarters. And I was just trying to figure out how to make a podcast.

Speaker 3 We had done interviews and we're just trying to figure it out.

Speaker 3 And I was kind of keeping to myself. I wasn't talking to anyone.

Speaker 3 I think for the first three or four days, I went and looked at the names of the different people that were sitting around me. And I saw one name.
And the last name was Abdul Khatta.

Speaker 3 And I was like, that sounds like an Afghan name. Or maybe Iranian name.
That's kind of on you. You know, I was like, oh, I wonder who this person is.

Speaker 3 And a few days later, someone started sitting at that desk and it was run.

Speaker 3 And I was like super intimidated to talk to you. I was like, who is this? You like, you dress.
I don't know. I thought you kind of dressed.
You're a mipster. You're a Muslim hipster.

Speaker 10 This is so, it's so funny because, like, legit, like, nobody in my life has ever, ever, ever, ever told me that my fashion or I was like, anything.

Speaker 4 I thought you were like two cool persons. Cool enough.
And I was like,

Speaker 3 I was like, no, I was like, should I go up and say hi to her?

Speaker 4 I'll take it. I was like, no.

Speaker 3 She's probably going to be like, who the hell are you?

Speaker 3 And I don't know how or who approached who first, but eventually we started. talking to each other and like became friends

Speaker 3 and honestly i don't even remember how we became friends. Yeah, we were just suddenly friends.

Speaker 10 It's like, yeah, I think we just started having lunch together and talking. Like, for a little context, I had been at NPR for a few years at that point.

Speaker 10 I'd been kind of jumping around, working on different pilots for podcasts and things like that. And eventually, by the time that Ram Ting got there, I was sort of like ANSI to also do something new.

Speaker 10 And, you know, once we got to talking, it was crazy fast how quickly we started talking about the idea for what would become Through Line.

Speaker 10 We were just sort of naturally talking about history a lot, talking about religion and politics and, you know, all the things that are supposedly off-limits to talk about.

Speaker 10 Those were like our natural first topics of conversation. And I think partly it was because we both have these, you know, immigrant backgrounds and coming from the Middle East.

Speaker 10 There was just a lot of like shared history of like personal history for us.

Speaker 10 And we had the idea of doing something

Speaker 10 that was like creatively different, experimental, and sound that would also help, you know, explain the present through stories from the past.

Speaker 10 And we had no idea how you actually take an idea and make it into like a reality, but we decided to bring the idea to my boss at the time and we got our shot to make a pilot episode.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, we kind of got a shot.

Speaker 4 Like, remember, all we got was like, okay, yeah, putting a little rosy. I know, I know.

Speaker 3 Basically, he was like, Your boss Izzy's a nice guy. He was a nice guy.
He still isn't a really nice guy. And he was kind of like, Yeah, you can use the studio if you want.

Speaker 3 And let me know if you need a little couple bucks to rent a studio time or whatever.

Speaker 3 And we kind of went off, and probably he didn't have any idea like what we were about to do, but we just started, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 3 We started just making it honestly on our space the other thing we had left out is that by this time the pilot i was working on became how i built this

Speaker 3 from npr it's how i built this a show about innovators entrepreneurs idealists and the stories behind the movements they built and run is now kind of like under the table working on how i built this like producing for the show because are we allowed to say this on the yeah we're gonna say this because this is so long ago now uh because i you know i was working working on it and run was like like she like she said looking for something new or whatever and i was like yeah let's work together on this thing we were we were buddies and we both started producing we're basically the first two producers and also casey herman who's still there now we're basically producing that show like the first year and having a blast i think working together that was the other thing that like brought us together like we were in the studio together we were like doing all the things and so we were also

Speaker 3 making what would become through line on the side. We were going and doing interviews at like places.

Speaker 10 we're acting like i think you know how they say fake it till you make it we were definitely faking it like at that point yeah we were like what is this even going to sound like i mean just figuring out what are we going to sound like we we were never hosts before so it was like we were learning as we went everything we definitely had some interviews that

Speaker 4 you know i wouldn't want to revisit

Speaker 10 but honestly it was just sort of a process of like all right you just gotta like keep at it listen figure out what sounds good like what is this gonna sound like what is this gonna be and then we eventually ended up with like the first pilot episode which was actually not the first episode that is in the feed

Speaker 3 and here is where begins a passion story that is equal in power in Islam to the passion of the Christ in Christianity Takes three weeks to travel.

Speaker 10 It was an episode that ended up being called The War of the Worlds.

Speaker 10 And it was about the history of the Sunishia divide in Islam. It came from like a personal place for both of us.
And we were like, you know what?

Speaker 10 Let's really infuse ourselves into the show so that they don't think anybody else can host it other than us.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, we're producers.

Speaker 10 And, you know, in terms of the production side of things, we had that covered, but we wanted to make sure that nobody would kind of step in and host instead of us.

Speaker 10 And to Ramteen's credit, you know, he was like, hell no, nobody's going to come in and like chair in this show into something else. Like, we came up with the idea, we're making it.

Speaker 10 And it was really just like the two of us doing everything for the first like year.

Speaker 10 And then we,

Speaker 10 at one point, were working on another pilot because they wanted us to do a couple more pilots to really get some experience under our bed.

Speaker 3 Before you say that, you should talk about what happened when we played.

Speaker 10 That's right, that's right. So, before they told us to go off and make more pilots, we had to actually play this first pilot episode, War of the Worlds, for my boss at the time.

Speaker 10 So we like booked a studio at NPR headquarters. We like dimmed the lights and we sat in there with my boss and just played it.

Speaker 10 And around maybe 40 or 45 minutes, however long it was later, he, you know, we turn on the lights and he's like, wow.

Speaker 3 like there's something here like this is really good the quote is i did i don't i remember the quote he said this is the future i just heard the future of npr future of NPR. Future of NPR.

Speaker 3 Future of NPR.

Speaker 3 Which was like.

Speaker 4 Is that what he said? Yeah. He's like, this is the future of NPR.
Yes. I heard him say that.
I think it was so like, I would say, it was so nice.

Speaker 3 Cause like how we had no idea what he was going to say. And he's not like a BSer.

Speaker 3 Like he, if he didn't like it, he wouldn't have been mean about it, but he would have not responded like that if he had been like, oh, and this is a guy who worked, you know, had worked on Radio Lab, like working with them in the past.

Speaker 3 I've been at WNYC. He had like a lot of experience.
So if he didn't think there was anything to it, he wouldn't have said that.

Speaker 4 So it was like really exciting.

Speaker 10 That was so validating because otherwise we were just sort of like in our little like, you know, keep in mind, we're working on this like in the evenings and on the weekends, like in between our day job of making a hypothesis.

Speaker 10 And so.

Speaker 10 You know, this was like super validating for us because we were like, okay, it's not just us who thinks there's something here.

Speaker 10 Like an outside perspective is actually telling us like, no, there's something here.

Speaker 10 And then that set the ball in motion for us to make a few more pilot pilot episodes over the next year and a year, year and a half or so.

Speaker 10 And I remember we were working on one episode about the history of U.S. North Korea.

Speaker 10 And Lawrence Wu, who is still a producer on the show to this day, overheard us. And he was at the time, I think, an intern on how I built this.

Speaker 5 And he was like, yo, what are you guys talking about?

Speaker 10 Hey, what are you all talking about? We were like, oh, we're working on this like show that we're hoping will get green lit and he's like really

Speaker 10 can i work on this you know what i want in and lawrence just jumped into the trenches with us and started like booking and researching and doing all this stuff and so it was the three of us that at that point just working on this what had begun as you know kind of a pipe dream and it was It was a lot of long nights, a lot of work.

Speaker 10 A lot of work went into those early years, even before the show went out into the world. Kind of crazy to think about it.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 You're listening to Through Line, where we go back in time

Speaker 8 to understand the present.

Speaker 3 It was a lot of work. We had a lot of champions on the inside, people who really supported us.
Totally.

Speaker 3 Nigery Eaton, of course, Anya Grundman, folks here at NPR really support us, and the teams that we were working on support us. But it was a long journey that really was born out of our friendship.

Speaker 3 And I think the thing I hope folks that are listening to the show still hear that, because I think it, the show wouldn't have not existed if we weren't friends first, I think, and really like enjoyed working with each other because it was really hard.

Speaker 3 But I really wanted to do it for you. And I think you really wanted to do it for me.
And that was,

Speaker 3 I think, the thing that sustained. the show through that difficult, I mean, sustained our effort through that difficult time and sustains the show to this day.

Speaker 3 So hopefully listeners can really hear that.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, I'm getting all emo.

Speaker 3 I'm getting all emo on y'all, but it's true.

Speaker 10 It was just really no, it's true because when you're, when you're like, you know, and you hit obstacles, we hit a lot of obstacles along the way.

Speaker 10 And it's really hard to keep yourself motivated in the face of like setbacks and also have like daunting amount of work on your plate.

Speaker 10 Like I was about to curse, but I'm keeping it, you know, PG over here. But, you know, it's like, it's really hard to kind of sustain that passion.
And I think.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think our connection is, it's foundational to everything.

Speaker 10 And I think we've been lucky, you know now over the last like few years to expand the team with other people who are able to like really believe in that same vision that we had at the beginning it's like kind of wild actually i think right for both of us to to think that like people now believe in the show enough that they want to come and want to like take it to the next level like we're constantly trying to push ourselves in terms of the sound of the show, in terms of the ideas of the show, in terms of all kind of everything about the show.

Speaker 10 We want it to just be a reflection of the way that the team is evolving too.

Speaker 10 And so a lot of the great ideas and the way that the show evolved has been a reflection of the people who've come onto the team.

Speaker 3 That's thanks to all of you who listen, who are listening to this now. We had no idea this many people would listen or be passionate about this show.

Speaker 3 And we're really grateful to all of you for listening.

Speaker 4 Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And hopefully hearing about the origins of this show, I don't know,

Speaker 3 give you a little bit of entertainment, give you a little break from your day.

Speaker 2 We hope you enjoyed our conversation. And in a way, it's kind of like a how I built this episode: turning our pipe dream into the show it is today.

Speaker 3 Coming up, what it takes to find and produce a story with people that have lived through a historical event.

Speaker 6 This is Michael Cummings from Savannah, Georgia, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 6 I appreciate the connections that you both make from the past to help us understand the present and hopefully look for a better future.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

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Speaker 12 Part 2. Living history.

Speaker 3 So a lot of what we do at Through Line takes us to faraway places in the distant past. But sometimes we get to tell stories about living history and get to talk to the people who were actually there.

Speaker 13 We were in our red truck and we were coming back from a trip from the ocean and all of a sudden we came upon these big yellow caution signs that said caution PCB chemicals spilled along roadways.

Speaker 2 PCBs, otherwise known as polychlorinated biphenyls, are man-made industrial chemicals used in factories. They're highly toxic, can cause skin lesions, and are associated with several kinds of cancer.

Speaker 3 I saw it on the side of the highway.

Speaker 3 It looked greasy.

Speaker 3 It was substance there that I knew that shouldn't be there.

Speaker 3 What happened next turned a small rural North Carolina community into the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, a movement that seeks to ensure an equitable and healthy environment.

Speaker 3 for everyone. Helicopters flying all over.
I just couldn't believe it.

Speaker 3 As we approached the landfill, there were Powell Patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were going to meet us or what.

Speaker 2 In this next conversation, you'll be hearing from producers Lawrence Wu and Devin Katayama about the making of our episode, Two Miles Down the Road. Here's Lawrence.

Speaker 7 So I wanted to ask you, W now, how'd you find this story and why'd you pitch this?

Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah. So basically, when I think about pitches, I kind of just take time to sit quietly and try to think about like, what in the world is going on? What are like the big stories?

Speaker 11 How am I feeling about the world?

Speaker 11 And I kind of just follow my interests. And I think a lot of us producers on the show do that.
And so one thing that came to mind was this term environmental justice.

Speaker 11 It's a term that I've been hearing for a really long time that, you know, to some degree I reported on as a reporter in my previous job.

Speaker 11 but it's a term I also feel like carries a lot of weight and means like a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Speaker 11 And so, like we do on this show, you kind of just start like, what is the history of X? What is the history of environmental justice?

Speaker 11 And so, I originally thought of doing this whole episode where we kind of look at the very beginning decades ago and bringing it all the way up to, you know, how it's become such a messy, interesting, important topic today.

Speaker 7 You were talking about,

Speaker 7 you know, what made the story so compelling was the people that were involved in the movement.

Speaker 7 And I think that's one of the cool things about this episode, working on this with you, is that, you know, we talked to people who have this lived history.

Speaker 7 And so, before we get more into that, how'd you find these guests? How'd you track them down?

Speaker 7 You know, because they're not, it's not like they're our typical scholar historian with their, you know, their university email out there.

Speaker 11 Right, right, right, right. Well, that's actually, so that's one of the cool things about this story, like you said.
And we don't do too many stories, you know, more modern, more recent history.

Speaker 11 So, a lot of our

Speaker 11 people who we talk about are long gone, but in this particular case, you know, they're still around, they're still like advocating for environmental justice issues.

Speaker 11 So, they're easy to find in that they're still writing, they're still spokespeople, and they're from a really small town.

Speaker 11 I mean, Warren County itself is a pretty big county, but Afton and the place where this happened is really small. So, I kind of just followed the trail.

Speaker 11 The 40th anniversary of this event happened in 2022.

Speaker 11 And so I knew names of people who had been on panels, who had recently talked about this. And I found a local reverend there who was on one of these panels, reached out to him.

Speaker 11 He was very quick to respond to me.

Speaker 3 And if this means that we have to bodily stand in front of trucks, bulldozers, road scrapers, even give up our lives so that someone else can live many years in the future.

Speaker 3 I say it is our duty to sacrifice that.

Speaker 11 After I got Reverend Willie T. Raimi's contact, it was really easy to find most of the people who are in this episode.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it just sounds like he's just super connected in terms of that local network.

Speaker 11 And like everybody in the area knows of each other, right? So it's one of those,

Speaker 11 you find one person, it's really easy to find the rest. Except, I will tell you, I had trouble finding the Ferruccios, who are very much important and featured in this episode.

Speaker 11 So that was kind of an interesting story, finding them.

Speaker 3 In 1977, Deborah and Ken Ferruccio made a big decision. They decided to leave Ohio and move to a small town in Warren County, North Carolina.

Speaker 15 I moved here because I was looking for a rural community and a beautiful environment.

Speaker 3 I kind of tagged along

Speaker 3 and here I am.

Speaker 7 Well, yeah, so I actually don't know how you found them.

Speaker 11 So, yeah, so the Fruit Shows,

Speaker 11 just a little bit of background.

Speaker 11 They are really part of the core group of folks who found out that a landfill was going to be built nearby and they really started organizing just a few people, which blossomed into hundreds of people later on.

Speaker 11 So they were hard to find.

Speaker 11 They had recently done a podcast of their own about this event in Warren County, about this landfill being built. So I knew that they were out there doing stuff.

Speaker 11 And I contacted them through their website for the podcast or for the work that they were doing. And I still didn't hear back.

Speaker 11 And it was getting to the point where I had researched it enough to know I couldn't do this story without them, without hearing how it kind of formed at the very beginning.

Speaker 11 And I think I reached out to

Speaker 3 a

Speaker 11 spouse of their daughter.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 11 Yeah. Who was, I think I got the email from like some, I think he was a professor somewhere on the East Coast.
I can't exactly remember where.

Speaker 11 And he wrote back really quickly and said, I think that they would be really happy to hear from you. And from there, it just took off.
And I guess they weren't checking their emails from the website.

Speaker 11 And there really wasn't any other contact information that I could find, except for one old email in some public notes from way back when, some public record for Deborah.

Speaker 11 But yeah, after that, they were very responsive.

Speaker 7 It just goes to show, like, part of the work is also just being persistent. You have to find, if one email works, you have to find phone number or friend of a friend of a friend.

Speaker 11 Totally. I feel like we've been running into that a lot lately, like just trying to track people down, book people.
Book people, yeah. It gets messy when it gets international.

Speaker 11 We've been doing a lot of that lately. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So on the topic of the guests that were featured on this episode, they obviously lived through this history.

Speaker 7 You know, they were part of this one event that kicked off an entire movement spanning decades now.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, oftentimes we're speaking to a historian and they're telling us things that they've been researching for decades and decades.

Speaker 7 But it's a different experience talking to someone, you know, that has lived through that moment. They were actually there on the ground.

Speaker 7 So what makes it different from our typical kind of interviews that we do?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 11 It's kind of fun, but it's also kind of tricky. For one, you're telling somebody's story, so this is somebody's very personal perspective, things that they went through.

Speaker 11 You know, so some of the context, the greater context, the reflective context that we get from some of our more academic guests can be lost. But what you gain is something very personal.

Speaker 11 And in this case, like we just needed to know what organizing looked like people.

Speaker 7 The old-fashioned way, word to mouth, door to door,

Speaker 7 church to church friend to friend

Speaker 7 cousin to cousin brother to brother sister to sister family to family

Speaker 11 but it's also tricky because you got to fact check right like the things that they're saying for the most part i mean some things you don't have to fact check like how they're feeling but there's a lot that you have to double check and and make sure like did this meeting happen on this day were these people at this particular meeting who spoke who they said they heard from?

Speaker 11 And so that's what made this episode a little bit tricky. Like, we had great story, we had great

Speaker 11 facts that they provided. And one of the things that I really relied on here was the local archives of local newspapers.

Speaker 11 And this is something that I hadn't really done in my career that I really loved for this particular episode, because NPR has access to a database of old newspaper archives.

Speaker 11 And the local Warren Warren County publications were invaluable. They provided so much like play-by-play,

Speaker 11 not only like dates and things that the governor was saying and things like that, but actual play-by-play of the residents.

Speaker 4 Like this is where local

Speaker 11 media really thrives and why it's really important.

Speaker 11 were kind of the record that I followed for the most part or fact-checked against.

Speaker 11 And then, you know, what also makes it special is the fact that you can hear a lot of different people's perspective about this event.

Speaker 11 Often, when we're doing stories that are millennia old or centuries old, it's hard to get multiple perspectives.

Speaker 11 You know, we might get multiple things that happen to groups of people, but we don't always get that personal touch.

Speaker 11 And so, with this particular episode, and actually, you dealt with a lot of the people's stories because you dealt with the section related to the actual protest that kind of was a convergence of a lot of people.

Speaker 11 It's just kind of, I don't know, it's cool to have that.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I would say just like it was really fun working on the part where it's going through the protests from that morning to the months the years after that and for me i think one of the great joys you were talking about you know people's personal experiences like one of my favorite stories in this episode was um the protesters they're put in then it's not a jail but they're basically detained and they're hungry yeah and basically some women uh really kind women across the street you know fried up some chicken and started throwing it over the fence And it's just such a scene.

Speaker 3 So what the ladies did is they got some of these young guys to throw it over the fence. So we would be in the yard and say, chump me a biscuit or can I have a thigh or

Speaker 3 let me have a breast. And over the road and over the fence, the food would come and we ate.

Speaker 7 And so I'm curious to know, you know, what are some of your favorite stories that some of the guests told that might not have made it onto the episode?

Speaker 11 I think that guy who told that story about the chicken being thrown over the fence, Walter, he also told us that Dolly Burwell, who's one of the main activists who we feature in this episode, that his mom babysat for Dolly while she was at protests and organizing and things like that.

Speaker 11 And I think that like, for me,

Speaker 11 First off, of course, like everybody knows each other in this area, but also like this is such a space and town like people are also helping each other out, throwing chicken over fences or babysitting and everybody's kind of connected in some way.

Speaker 11 So finding those little connections I think was really fun.

Speaker 11 And then like, I mean, this made it in the episode, but one of my favorite anecdotes was Reverend William Raimi, who's one of the early organizers who kind of gets called upon to help figure out like how they're going to organize at the beginning.

Speaker 11 He kind of goes into this barn at midnight with this small group of people and he's asked to come and he doesn't really know.

Speaker 11 He's a black reverend in a very white space, white town, meeting white people in the barn at midnight. He kind of tells us this story about how he's getting to the barn.

Speaker 3 Now, Reverend Raimi, unsurprisingly, didn't like the idea of meeting people who he didn't know in a barn at midnight,

Speaker 3 but he was also curious. And I go into the barn

Speaker 3 and I look around,

Speaker 3 and there is nobody there that looks like me.

Speaker 11 And how there's this old bulb just hanging from the barn ceiling. I mean, he's very much a storyteller in this sense, and like he doesn't know what to expect.

Speaker 11 And then he kind of learns, like, hey, we need to get our act together. How are we going to do this thing?

Speaker 11 So, those kinds of stories are the kinds of stories that you get when you talk to the people who've actually lived through these experiences. I kind of wanted to ask you one question.

Speaker 11 So, you produced part three, which was the day of the main protests. And it's this iconic moment for this event.

Speaker 11 It's really what got all the headlines and national press and pictures when you look back on that. Like that's the time that the media was paying attention was when the protests happened.

Speaker 11 So how did you go about producing it? Because I know we had some personal stories. I also know there was some raw video from that time.
So what was that like for you?

Speaker 11 And how did you go about doing it?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, that whole section, I mean, it's just one scene after another, right? So it starts very quiet.

Speaker 7 it's the morning they're all gathered at the church they're gonna go out and sit on this march and then quickly escalates to them confronting police or kind of state troopers and then another scene follows so i just thought of it as scenes contain scenes i mean for me just producing it's it's moving to see like this is how an event this is how a community rallies together to really fight for a change and this is how it's done your bodies have to be your physical personhood has to be out there on the streets, lying near the ditch where the dump site is.

Speaker 7 All these things, like, it's really just empowering to hear and just, it gives you hope.

Speaker 7 I'm not a super optimistic person, but just listening to the different, you know, the different guests retelling that day, especially on the day of the protests.

Speaker 7 And on the more kind of technical side, the production side, because I have all these different perspectives from the guests, I was able to kind of mix them in and weave them together.

Speaker 7 So it really feels like they're just, they're all building on each other, telling just one story together.

Speaker 3 I'm sure it was there to intimidate us.

Speaker 3 And I felt, my God, we're going to war here.

Speaker 3 Helicopters flying all over. I just couldn't believe it.

Speaker 3 As we approached the landfill, there were powder patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were going to beat us or what.

Speaker 13 What we were seeing was State Highway Patrol and National Guard police cars just parked.

Speaker 16 They went way down the road.

Speaker 3 We were met by the commander of the Highway Patrol. If you do not cease this on off the back,

Speaker 3 you will be arrested. If we did not turn around and go back, we would be arrested.

Speaker 7 I mean, it's definitely one of my favorite episodes to produce on just on that aspect alone.

Speaker 7 Because like you said, we don't get a lot of opportunities to speak to guests who've lived through, you know, a really important moment.

Speaker 11 Did you see some of the things that they were describing or the people who they were describing in the news, like in some of the footage too?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. So that was also really cool too.

Speaker 7 It was definitely really helpful to watch these old local news for TV news footage because it was exactly how everyone was describing it.

Speaker 7 It's like the one mile or two mile march to the site, confronted with policemen wearing, you know, helmets, batons, people sitting, you know, just civil disobedience.

Speaker 7 There was even images of the bus that they would put them and detain them and drive them away.

Speaker 7 And so, yeah, that was really great to have access to.

Speaker 11 Yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting because like so much of history,

Speaker 11 you know, historians and people, we kind of just fill in some of the gaps, you know, in some ways.

Speaker 11 And when you can actually see the history happening and then also get told it reflectively, like years, decades later, it's, it's kind of cool.

Speaker 7 Well, it was really great working on this episode with you. Me too.
Thanks so much for chatting. I'm glad we got to talk about this episode.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Lawrence.

Speaker 2 Now you know a little bit more about how the sauce is made. and how rewarding it can be to make an episode like two miles down the road.

Speaker 3 And for an episode like this, and really every episode on Through Line, there are a bunch of drafts and different iterations before it reaches your ears.

Speaker 3 And for every good story in an episode, there are at least five more that could have made the cut.

Speaker 2 Coming up, how we decide which stories get greenlit and which stories end up on the cutting room floor.

Speaker 2 Hi, this is Kamiar Marashi from Novato, California, listening to ThruLine. I love your show.
I've been listening to it for years. It's informative.

Speaker 2 It provides all sorts of interesting facts and information that I would have never known about. And I really get an enjoyment listening to it while I'm driving to the ocean to go kayaking.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 This message comes from Sattva, official mattress and restorative sleep provider for Team USA, who won 231 total medals at the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024.

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Speaker 4 Part 3.

Speaker 12 The Better Story.

Speaker 2 In this next conversation, we're taking you behind the scenes of our 2023 episode, Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines, looking at the rise, fall, and resurrection of a Filipino political dynasty.

Speaker 17 As of the 21st of this month,

Speaker 17 I signed Proclamation number 1081, placing the entire Philippines under martial law.

Speaker 16 Marcos' goal was to stay in power. The only way he could stay in power was to declare martial law and make himself dictator, which is what he did in 1972.

Speaker 3 In the episode, we looked at how Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos rewrote and even invented histories to make their authoritarian rule appear preordained and even divine.

Speaker 3 It's a technique still being used today by their son, Philippine President Bongbong Marcos.

Speaker 2 We'll let producers Anya Seinberg and Christina Kim take it from here.

Speaker 14 So today, we're going to take you behind the scenes of an episode that got released back in May 2023. And I have my fellow producer Anya Steinberg here to chat with me about it.
Hey, Anya.

Speaker 12 Hey, Christina.

Speaker 14 So where should we start with this?

Speaker 12 Since this episode was your idea, how about you tell us about where that idea came from?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so this was an episode I actually pitched because right before joining Through Line, I was the race and equity reporter at KPBS.

Speaker 14 And one of the last stories that I was able to work on was was actually when Bong Bong Marcos won the presidential election. It seems like foreign news and I was a local beat reporter in San Diego.

Speaker 14 So you wouldn't think that that was a story I was gonna cover, but there's such a huge Filipino diaspora all over the United States, especially in California and in San Diego.

Speaker 14 So I had the opportunity to like talk to Filipinos. in San Diego about their reactions to this election.
And it was divided. There was folks who were just like, this is appalling.

Speaker 14 So many of my family members were tortured under this regime, or, you know, my family immigrated out of the Philippines in order to like escape the Marcos dynasty.

Speaker 14 But on the flip side, you know, there was also folks who had very fond memories of Marcos, even though, you know, he was a dictator for multiple years.

Speaker 14 They thought that the country was actually better run under Marcos.

Speaker 14 And they also believed that Bong Bong Marcos should have the opportunity to prove himself, that he wasn't just a replica of his father. So it was divided.

Speaker 14 And the more I talk to people, the more I realize like, this is an important story that is truly an American story. This isn't just foreign news.

Speaker 14 This impacts people who are living in the United States.

Speaker 14 And there's so many lessons we can draw upon about narratives, about why people are drawn to certain political figures, what motivates them, and kind of the divisions, right?

Speaker 14 Because just the way the Philippines is divided, I see those same divisions playing out here in the United States, you know, with our politics.

Speaker 12 Right, right. There's so many parallels between these two stories.
And I feel like one of the things that drew me to it was just this idea of history repeating itself.

Speaker 12 Like, I remember when we were first talking about this before you pitched it, you said something along the lines of, you know, his father was a dictator and now he's the president.

Speaker 12 And this is within like a generation's worth of time.

Speaker 4 How can that happen?

Speaker 12 And that question itself is just a fascinating story to work from.

Speaker 14 That's right. So I was lead producing this, but we were in the trenches together from like day one.

Speaker 14 And I know in the beginning, like we together pretty much learned the entire history of the Philippines at some point, like pre-colonial. And we were trying to

Speaker 14 whittle down the story. And we did decide to focus exclusively on the Marcos.

Speaker 14 So, you know, something that we talk about in the episode is that the Marcoses come to power in large part because they are excellent myth makers.

Speaker 14 They are so good at controlling the narrative and creating a compelling story, you know, about their rags to riches ascension, about them not being elites and thus more relatable.

Speaker 14 And then, as we hear onward, like to more grandiose myth-making,

Speaker 14 Fernand and Imelda campaigned with pizzazz.

Speaker 14 Fernand gave rousing speeches.

Speaker 11 There are still a thousand rivers to be crossed.

Speaker 14 Imelda serenaded crowds with love songs.

Speaker 14 And they even had a motion picture made.

Speaker 14 So what we did with this episode and what I know we did together so well is tell it in a quote-unquote melodramatic fashion, in this kind of larger than life way.

Speaker 14 And we were really, really focused on finding those stories. And as a result, we found too many stories.
And we like to start all of our episodes with what we call a cold open.

Speaker 14 And that was the part that was assigned to you, Anya. And what we do with cold opens is we want to intrigue you.

Speaker 14 We want to give you like a really good little story, a little entree in before we kind of tell you what the episode is about. And then we continue in with our parts one, two, and three.

Speaker 14 But Anya, you were given the cold open for this one. And

Speaker 4 what happened? What happened?

Speaker 12 It was a daunting task. I actually wrote and produced a very different cold open than what finally aired as part of the episode.

Speaker 8 It happened around 1971

Speaker 8 in South Cotavato on the island of Mindanao.

Speaker 12 Mindanao is part of the Philippines. On Mindanao, the lush emerald green jungle butts right up against white sand beaches.
Back in 1971, deep in the rainforest and high in the mountains, hid a secret.

Speaker 8 A group of about 24 individuals were found,

Speaker 8 and this was the discovery of a so-called Stone Age cave-dwelling people.

Speaker 18 They are going to see Momo Daka Dewata Tasadai, the bringer of good fortune to the Tasadai.

Speaker 18 That is their name for Monda Elizalde.

Speaker 8 According to most accounts, Manuel Elizalde stumbled upon these people.

Speaker 12 At the time, Manuel Elizalde was serving in the Philippine government under President Ferdinand Marcos as a member of his cabinet.

Speaker 8 He got tipped off by a local who had sort of mentioned some interaction with this community that had lived kind of further in the inland.

Speaker 8 You know, these folks had never had contact with modern civilization. They didn't have the same dietary practices or agricultural practices.
They were, in fact, foragers.

Speaker 8 Their tools were incredibly rudimentary. So, what they were found with was suggestive of them being so far back in time.

Speaker 8 It's such a profound and almost ambitious way to describe a people, and it was feeding this idea and frenzy that people wanted to believe.

Speaker 18 On the island of Mindanao, a last frontier of the Philippines, a forgotten people engage in man's oldest struggle. They are fighting for the right to exist.
They are fighting for their lives.

Speaker 8 People were drunk on the Tasadai.

Speaker 8 Huge international attention flooded in surrounding the Tasadai.

Speaker 8 My name is Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, and I'm an assistant professor of of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. International reporters were interested in the discovery.

Speaker 8 And so this kind of fantastic event was this anthropological phenomenon for intellectuals, for the political community, for random citizens who would just sort of see that, you know, this was quite the marvel to perceive.

Speaker 12 The Tasadai had lived apart from civilization for so long that this level of attention was dizzying, maybe even harmful, to a point where Elisalde and the Philippine government started to wonder if this golden age of research had to come to a close for the Tacedai's own good.

Speaker 8 So, in a few years, the Marcos administration would actually call off all visits and say no one was allowed anymore into this place.

Speaker 8 And so, Elisalde created this reservation that reportedly kept the Tasadai safe from any further scrutiny, investigation, or research visits.

Speaker 12 And there, the Tacedai would stay, cordoned off from the rest of the world, free to live as they always had until

Speaker 8 1986.

Speaker 8 A journalist accompanied by a Filipino researcher actually entered into the reservation only to discover that these 24 cave-dwelling people were in fact not of the Stone Age, but were likely paid by Elisalde and his team to act as though they were from the Stone Age.

Speaker 8 And all of the pieces started coming together that what was in fact perhaps perceived at first as this anthropological phenomenon was really a hoax.

Speaker 12 Within the blurry story of the Tassidae, one thing is clear.

Speaker 14 The Tassidae had a purpose.

Speaker 8 They were fabricated for a reason.

Speaker 8 I mean, one has to really see it in this larger trajectory that the Marcoses were really creating for themselves.

Speaker 8 This narrative arc that would be essentially, you know, tied back to the Stone Age and brought up, you know, to 1971 with them.

Speaker 8 To have a peoples that are coming out of the shadows of hundreds of years of colonization, the ravages of World War II, into this new decolonized experiment, only to discover perhaps the most untainted,

Speaker 12 peaceful peoples.

Speaker 8 I think that really creates this romantic notion of the Philippines at the time that Marcos and Imelda for sure are able to capitalize upon.

Speaker 8 For me, as a historian looking back, I would say, actually, this was a great great ruse, but it was a wonderful distraction.

Speaker 14 Okay, so if you've listened to the episode, we all know this is not how the episode started. We actually did decide to begin with the Filipino folktale of Malacca Samaganda, which I mentioned.

Speaker 14 Those are the kind of Adam and Eve of Filipino folklore.

Speaker 3 The sky told the tired bird to build its nest on one of these islands. Once on land, the bird was struck by a bamboo stalk that was blowing in the breeze.
Annoyed, it pecked at the bamboo.

Speaker 3 And when the bamboo split, the first Filipinos emerged from these bamboo stalks.

Speaker 16 The first man, Malakas, which means strength.

Speaker 3 And the first woman, Maganda, who was beautiful. And that's how the world began.

Speaker 14 And in the end, we did decide to do that because that's who Marcos and Imelda Marcos, his first lady, modeled themselves after. So it was just kind of a more clear through line, if you will.

Speaker 14 But we really love the story of the Tassadai. So we did try to make it work.
So thank you, Anya. But Anya, you know, you sound designed this and you made it.

Speaker 14 So can you tell us a little bit about what you were thinking and what this story was?

Speaker 12 Among the team, I think cold opens are the most notoriously difficult to produce. I think we could all agree on that.

Speaker 14 I agree. They're the most changed every time.

Speaker 12 They have a lot of work to do, and especially for an episode like this, there was a lot of things that I was holding in my head going into the script that I was like, oh my gosh, this is overwhelming.

Speaker 12 Like, number one, we have to tell the listeners that we're going to the Philippines. And some listeners might have never heard of the Philippines.

Speaker 12 So, we have to tell them a little bit about what that place is like.

Speaker 12 What are the people like that lived there? When did it become the Philippines? Just like any sort of background that seems like necessary for setting up where we're going.

Speaker 12 And then we're trying to introduce these larger themes that we're going to kind of unspool and unravel throughout the episode of like myth building and melodrama.

Speaker 12 We have to introduce the family, the Marcoses, and talk a little bit about what was going on at the time, but not too much because we don't want to spoil. what's going to come next.

Speaker 12 And so when I sat down to make it, I think a place where I start a lot with cold opens is like, how am I going to take people to this scene? How am I going to build a story?

Speaker 12 Because you want to suck the listener right in. You want to have sound design.
You want to have music. You want to have archival.

Speaker 12 And so I immediately went to YouTube and I was just watching all these documentaries of when in the 1970s they found, discovered, quote unquote, the Tacitae. And these were like fascinating movies.

Speaker 12 I probably watched hours and hours of them because it's just all these people flying over the jungle discovering these mythical, supposedly untouched by civilization group of people.

Speaker 12 And so it was an interesting historical moment to look back on and realize that this documentary is essentially fake, but nobody knew it when they were making it.

Speaker 14 I remember like going. and watching some of those videos with you and some of these documentaries.
I mean, this wasn't just Filipino documentary makers. This was the entire world.

Speaker 14 Like National Geographic was there. U.S.
newsmakers were there. And the tone and the way in which they talk about these people was already very telling.

Speaker 14 The fact that there's this like primitive people that had been untouched by, you know, Western society or the modern world, there was a real colonial gaze to the way that these documentaries you were looking at.

Speaker 14 were even talking about these people, which I know added an additional layer to you, right? That's like an additional layer to the story.

Speaker 14 It's like, from whose perspective do we hear about these people? And what does that tell us about power? And how do we contextualize that in the story? So there was a lot going on in this cold open.

Speaker 4 There was a lot going on.

Speaker 12 And I wanted to start the open in a way that you didn't know where it was going to end up.

Speaker 12 I didn't want to say, you know, there was this made-up group of people who lived in the jungle in the Philippines. It was a lie.

Speaker 12 Like when the cold open starts, I'm basically framing it so that you think, you're also tricked. You think that this is a real life discovery that happened in the 70s of these,

Speaker 12 I think Kathleen Gutierrez says, so-called Stone Age cave dwelling people. Like you're there.

Speaker 12 And then as you discover that it's all a lie, like I built it in a way so that you're discovering it while I'm discovering it at the same time.

Speaker 14 You know, we had discussions about this early on. That's interesting because

Speaker 14 what we were trying to say, and again, it was too complicated for a cold open was,

Speaker 14 even a lie can have real life consequences. A lie has a life of its own and the life that it leads is real.
And there was so much nuance there that I know we both loved.

Speaker 14 But even though it didn't work for the episode, it still really works for, I think, the story we were trying to tell. And you did such an amazing job at it.

Speaker 12 It was such a pleasure to work on this episode with you and really fun to look back on it. Thanks so much for chatting.

Speaker 14 Thanks, Sanya.

Speaker 2 Now, every time you listen to a new Through Line episode, you can wonder how many other actual cold opens were there.

Speaker 3 And the answer is a lot.

Speaker 3 But I promise you, the one you're getting in the episode is always the best possible one.

Speaker 2 That was our final behind-the-scenes conversation for this episode. But it doesn't have to end for you.

Speaker 2 If you want more behind-the-scenes conversation and how we think through episodes and topic ideas, and just so much more, you can sign up for Through Line Plus, which also helps support our work here.

Speaker 2 You can find out more at plus.npr.org/slash through line.

Speaker 3 And a quick note to listeners: Reverend Willie T. Raimi, who you heard from in our environmental justice episode, actually passed away in June 2024.

Speaker 2 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randab Dilfatta.

Speaker 3 I'm Ramanteen Arab Louis, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 16 This episode was produced by me and me, and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim.

Speaker 11 Devin Katayama.

Speaker 2 Sarah Wyman.

Speaker 1 Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Johannes Durgei, Nina Puchalski, Puneet Matiwala, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Voiceover work in this episode was done by Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 3 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josephine Nyunai.

Speaker 2 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Speaker 3 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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