A program taped before live audiences in Seattle (thanks to public radio station KUOW) and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. A taxonomy of different kinds of advice—and stories that illustrate why advice is so rarely taken.
-
Download Control-click (or right-click) Tap and hold to download
- Transcript
Prologue
When Adam and Jamie were kids, Jamie would always ask for Adam's advice, but he didn't want to hear what Adam would say himself. Instead, he wanted Adam to pretend to be an Israeli commando he once knew, named Yakov. Yakov seemed to know things that Adam didn't. But still Jamie wouldn't take the advice. Which raises the question: What would it take? When we give advice, we witness the the puniness of reason when compared with the vastness of human inertia and emotion. (6 minutes)
Act One
Sleepless In Seattle
What if you asked people for advice and actually took all the advice that everyone gave you? As an experiment, writer Sarah Vowell tried exactly that, when she recently solicited advice from many different people about insomnia. (15 minutes)
Act Two
Advise And Consent
Host Ira Glass talks with his mom—a clinical psychologist—about why people seem to rarely take the advice others give. Then advice columnist Dan Savage, author of the syndicated column and book Savage Love, gives the audience some advice that hopefully might save lives. (24 minutes)
Song:
“Recorded live in Seattle” by Black Cat Orchestra
Act Three
Guided Meditation
Forget all the self-help seminars you've ever heard of or attended. Writer Cheryl Trykv leads the audience in Seattle in a guided meditation, to end our program with epiphany, epiphany, epiphany. (10 minutes)
Related
If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these
Act Three: Post-It Not
Comedian Kurt Braunohler makes a wrong choice, for his own amusement.
Act One: Campaign Diaries
We hear campaign diaries from author Michael Lewis, who is on the campaign trail for the New Republic magazine.
Act Four: Graveyard Shift
One Halloween, David Sedaris decides to skip all the fake monsters and ghosts and zombies and visit the real thing: dead people, in a morgue. (14 minutes)David’s latest book is Happy-Go-Lucky.
Staff Recommendations
I'm From the Private Sector and I'm Here to Help
Nancy Updike goes to Iraq to try to figure out what it's like to be a private citizen working in the middle of a war zone.
Five Women
A different kind of #MeToo story, about several women who worked for the same man.