620: To Be Real

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

Ira Glass

It's actually very few.

That's Chana Joffe-Walt, one of our producers. But this week, when she came into the studio with me, she did call this one correctly. What else could I say?

Ira Glass

Chana tried to reach the guy, but never talked to him. She actually heard about this story in a tabloid newspaper, The Daily News, under this headline--

Ira Glass

In fact, in that same month as the drag performance, Chana went to a preschool end of the year ceremony and performance, a kindergarten stepping up ceremony, a middle school graduation, a middle school talent show, and a magic after-school program performance.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio program, that is what we aspire to. That is where we're heading. We are leaving behind the obligatory, the half-baked, the phoned-in, the superficial. We leave behind the meh. And we turn our backs on the word "meh" because the word "meh" is meh itself. And instead, we have stories of people seeking out what is real, what is true in some places you might not expect that. What you find, what you feel, what you know to be real. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb.

You probably heard a few weeks ago North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, one powerful enough, news reports said, to reach Alaska with a nuclear warhead. And it was big news. People were shocked, North Korea being on the verge of being able to nuke us. Which was strange to one of our producers here at our show, David Kestenbaum. He used to be a reporter for National Public Radio.

Ira Glass

How did we get here? All of us, David included, were not being real with ourselves about what was going on with North Korea. To remedy that, and to get some answers about how we let this happen, David turned to a trusted source on iTunes.

Quick warning. There are a couple curse words in his story and in one other story in today's program that we have unbeeped here on the internet version of our program. If you don't want to hear those words, maybe you're listening with kids, there is a beeped version at our website. Here's David.

David Kestenbaum

Back when I was covering this stuff, we reporters all had a short list of people we would call to comment when there was news. And often, this thing would happen. When the interview started and we were recording, the person would get super serious because, you know, nuclear weapons. The world could end. The thing is, that is not how a lot of them actually talked about this stuff. The way they actually talked off mic was more like this.

David Kestenbaum

This is from a podcast called Arms Control Wonk. It's helped me understand North Korea in a way that I never had. It was started by Jeffrey Lewis. He's a nuclear policy expert and also director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He says, frankly, he was tired of all the formal diplomat speak.

David Kestenbaum

That is the kind of microanalysis Jeffrey and the people he works with do-- not just with Kim Jong Un's ears. Whenever there are new photos of a missile or there's been a nuclear test, they dig through the data in a really smart way. I've even gotten attached to the theme song, which has this upbeat time bomb thing going on. It's from a German punk band.

David Kestenbaum

One of the things they spend a lot of time trying to sort out on the podcast is what is real. It can be hard to tell. North Korea will put out some propaganda video saying, "Another successful missile launch." But if you look closer, it is not always what it seems. Here's a clip from the podcast where Jeffrey is talking to one of his grad students.

David Kestenbaum

Launching a missile from a submarine would be a big deal because, if they can put a nuclear weapon on a sub, it's harder to destroy. And they might be able to sneak it closer to US shores. So the video gets posted online and Jeffrey says, looks pretty impressive.

David Kestenbaum

But the grad student, Dave Schmerler, looks at this and thinks something doesn't seem right. So he just starts googling submarine launch footage. And one of the first things he finds on YouTube is this thing that looks very similar. And I mean very similar. Jeffrey showed me the video clip so I could compare.

David Kestenbaum

The other one is an old video of a US missile launch.

They took our footage.

David Kestenbaum

You can see why it would be easy not to take them too seriously. The thing that Jeffrey has noticed about North Korea's claims, though, is that there is always some truth to them. Like, OK, maybe they didn't launch a missile from a sub, but they're working on it. And maybe that wasn't an actual hydrogen bomb they tested, but it was probably something else worrying.

In listening to this podcast, you realize how relentlessly the North Koreans have been working at this stuff over the years. It's this running audio diary of North Korea's military program. Missile test after missile test. This is from 2014.

David Kestenbaum

I had always imagined we'd figure something out. We'd reach some agreement with North Korea, or we'd do something before things got this bad. How did we get here? This was a half hour discussion, but I'll distill it down for you.

Jeffrey says our best chance to stop this was probably in the late '90s. This was before North Korea had nuclear bombs. Jeffrey points out it's always easier to get someone to give up something that they don't have yet. The US-- this was the Clinton administration-- and North Korea had negotiated something called the Agreed Framework.

North Korea would shut down its nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium for bombs. In exchange, they would get two new nuclear power plants, a different type that would make electricity and would be harder to get plutonium out of for bombs. North Korea would also get fuel oil to tide them over until the new reactors could be built. And we'd try to resume normal economic and diplomatic relations. But some Republican members of Congress felt like we were appeasing what was a brutal regime, so ending sanctions was a nonstarter. We were slow in fulfilling our part of the deal. Oil shipments were late. There were also delays building the new reactors, which were to be paid for mostly by South Korea and Japan.

On the North Korea side, it looked like they might still be working on a bomb. In 2002, the CIA said North Korea was building centrifuges, big spinning tubes that could enrich uranium. They certainly had them by 2010, when a US weapons scientist, Sig Hecker, was invited over for a visit. The North Koreans actually had him over a bunch. They took him to this huge building as long as a football field. It was filled with centrifuges. This is from a talk he's given.

David Kestenbaum

Jeffrey Lewis says, looking back, we should have found some way to make the agreement work.

David Kestenbaum

There have been attempts at negotiation over the years, but usually the US has insisted that North Korea give up its nukes, basically wanting to go back to those days before North Korea had a bomb. North Korea, understandably, has said no. Jeffrey says Kim Jong Un believes that, as long as he has nukes and missiles to launch them, no one will mess with him. And he's kind of right.

When North Korea did its first nuclear test in 2006, it was basically a dud. Jeffrey says his reaction at the time was, they are the worst ever at this. But they've gotten better and done more tests since then.

North Korea has been pretty clear about what it wants to be able to do with its bombs. A few years ago, North Korea released this propaganda photo. It was taken inside some military facility. And in the background, on the wall, was this map. If you zoomed in, you could see these lines that terminate at cities in the US, presumably the ones North Korea would like to be able to strike with nuclear missiles. The photo is well-known in analyst circles. It's sometimes called the Map of Death. And then earlier this year, North Korea released an even more remarkable photo-- Kim Jong Un posing with this shiny thing.

David Kestenbaum

If that's an actual bomb, he says it's small enough to fit on a missile. This picture, of course, merited an entire podcast and included a rant Jeffrey delivers in lots of them about denial.

David Kestenbaum

Jeffrey says, through all this, we have kind of underestimated the North Koreans maybe because they seem so goofy. Or maybe because it's easier to do that than to admit the truth.

David Kestenbaum

Earlier this month, when North Korea, for the first time, tested an actual intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach Alaska, it was all over the news. Everyone was kind of freaking out.

David Kestenbaum

But regular listeners to the podcast kind of knew it was coming because just two months ago, North Korea had tested a missile that went pretty damn far-- 1,300 miles up into space and back. So when the ICBM test actually came, I figured Jeffrey's reaction would be a shrug. Like, we told you so. But he was kind of shocked, too. Even though he knew it was coming, just the reality of it was shocking.

David Kestenbaum

It seems like North Korea might just keep doing this-- setting off bigger and bigger atomic bombs, launching huge missiles. Talking to Jeffrey, I realized I had this question. What exactly does North Korea want?

David Kestenbaum

And that is the impossible spot we are in. This is a government the United Nations Human Rights Council says is guilty of crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape. The list goes on. Kim Jong Un's people are starving. They're cut off from the outside world. We just ignore all that? Invite him to the White House for a state dinner? Jeffrey comes down firmly on one side of that question.

David Kestenbaum

After nuclear weapons came along in World War II, there were two views. One was that, hey, these are just bigger bombs. But the other view was, no, these are an entirely different category of weapon. You build them precisely so that no one will use them. Which is a strange idea, but it's worked so far, and presumably it would be the same with North Korea. In a way, where you stand on this issue comes down to the question, how crazy do you think Kim Jong Un is?

Jeffrey says he does not stay up at night worrying about North Korea launching a nuclear missile at a US city. From everything he's seen, Kim Jong Un seems to be pretty rational. Ruthless and determined to stay in power, but rational. All the tests seem well-planned out, like the countries before that have pursued nuclear weapons. The Map of Death, him posing with the disco ball, that all seems very calculated, an attempt to show the world and the people of North Korea that he is in charge and he's not going away.

Jeffrey says the real people in danger here are probably not us. It's the people stuck living in North Korea. That is another thing nuclear weapons can do. They change the diplomatic calculus in a way, I think, that means the bad guys sometimes win.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is one of the producers of our program. The podcast Arms Control Wonk does seem to have at least a few listeners in North Korea. Their episode "Another North Korean Nuclear Test" was downloaded five times from there.

[MUSIC - "MARROW" BY ANI DIFRANCO]

Coming up, Jon Ronson gets real with people who are specifically paid not to get real. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, To Be Real. We have stories about people breaking through the polite, boring, everyday fog of social acceptability and polite denial of things that none of us really want to face and getting real.

Ira Glass

We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Lie Becomes the Truth.

A couple of weeks ago, when we did an episode of our show on magicians, researching what's going on in that world, I was fascinated by a few magicians who take the premise of magic, that it's all about deception, and try to stand that on its head to get to something utterly real, unfaked, emotional, truthful.

There are two magicians in particular I was interested in. The first was David Blaine, who I think you might know who this is. He's been doing TV specials for 20 years. And I was hanging around Blaine one night at dinner at a restaurant, and there was this moment where a friend of his said to him something like, David, you've told me that some of your tricks these days aren't even tricks, like when you eat glass. And Blaine was like, yeah. And he picks up the nearest wine glass at the table-- this was not his glass; somebody else had been drinking out of it-- and he poured their wine into another glass on the table. And then he raised the wine glass to his mouth and bit off a chunk of the glass. And then he chewed, like, really big chews, like, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. And it took a little time, actually, like, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. And then he took a huge drink of water and he swallowed. And then he opened his mouth to show us, you know, all gone.

It's not a trick. He just eats glass, grinds it down to little specks, I guess, and swallows it. He said the inside of your mouth gets a little cut up, but it's not too bad. And there's a scene that they filmed for Blaine's most recent TV special where he's sitting in a dentist chair and he talks to his dentist about what this is doing to his teeth.

Ira Glass

The dentist peers into Blaine's mouth.

Ira Glass

Blaine turns to the camera crew.

Ira Glass

And this is the kind of magic Blaine's been cultivating for years now. He still does card tricks and all kinds of regular closeup magic, but he's also doing a bunch of effects that are like eating glass. There's no trick to it. He just really does this stuff. It's real. He was sealed in a box suspended above the Thames River for 44 days. He lived in a block of ice for over 60 hours. He held his breath for 17 minutes underwater and then explained his techniques for doing it in a Ted Talk. He works on these things for years, trains his body to do this stuff.

And then this funny thing happens. Because he's a professional magician, which is to say his job is to deceive people, when he's actually doing these incredible physical feats that aren't tricks, people often think they are. Like he's caught a bullet in his mouth on stage-- a real bullet fired from a real gun. He caught it in this metal cup that he held in his mouth, filmed the bullet traveling in slow motion, filmed his friends seeming actually upset with him for even trying this, and still some people think, nah, that's not real.

And there's this one moment. There's a video of this online, where Blaine makes use of this confusion over what is real and what is not real kind of brilliantly.

In the video, Blaine is sitting down at a little table with Ricky Gervais, the comedian and actor. And just before what I'm about to play you happens, David Blaine has shown Ricky Gervais how to do this famous trick called "needle through arm." And to be clear, that's a trick. You're not actually putting a needle through your arm. And David is like, I'm going to teach you to be a magician. And then he does the trick with Ricky Gervais' arm. So Ricky Gervais can see how you can make it look like a needle is going through your arm.

OK. Then Blaine picks up a needle roughly the size of a knitting needle and starts to push the tip of it into his own arm.

Ira Glass

OK, just to be completely clear here, Blaine is actually pushing a needle through his arm for real. There's a way to do this. He's taught himself.

Ira Glass

So Blaine loves getting that reaction from people. But interestingly, he says, when he does these physical feats, when he catches the bullet, when he holds his breath under water, when he lives in a box for weeks, he says in those moments, he feels like he's just as bare, in front of the audience, as Ricky Gervais is in that video.

Ira Glass

Researching that magic episode, I went to see a lot of magic. David Copperfield, Penn & Teller, Criss Angel, Derren Brown, Mac King, Dan White. And my favorite thing I saw was done by a magician who, like Blaine, is trying something different with magic than most magicians do and going for something that is more real.

The magician's name is Derek DelGaudio. He's a close-up magician who gets awarded those prizes where magicians vote on who's the best in the world. He's invented a bunch of diabolical ways to shuffle and deal cards that give him incredible control of where cards are in the deck and let him do some mind-blowing stuff. But his new show isn't about that at all. I talked to him about it.

Derek's a baby-faced guy in his early 30s with a careful, precise manner on stage and off. A guy who is especially interesting to talk to when he starts complaining about stuff which he does entertainingly and well. For instance, this is him talking about how people view magic.

Ira Glass

What he means by that is that most magic shows aren't about anything. They're just a series of amazing tricks. You do a trick. They applaud. You do another trick. They applaud. You do another trick. They applaud. And this is the thing he's trying to do differently in his new show, which is up in New York right now, called In & Of Itself. He's tried to create a show that is more than just tricks, more than people wondering how'd he do it. He's tried to create a show that's about something.

To achieve that, Derek doesn't even get to the first trick till eight or nine minutes in. And over the course of the show, he tells a series of stories that are sincere and personal in this way that you almost never see in any magic show. There's a story from his childhood about him and his mom. And another about something a guy said to him in a bar years ago. And another about the brief period of his life when he worked as a hustler dealing crooked poker games. All these stories are about people not seeing him as he really is.

And when I say he's trying to make a show that's about something, that's what the show is actually about. It's about what it's like when people do not perceive who you really are. And my favorite moment in the show is this moment where everything he's doing comes together-- where what he's saying and the magic and what the audience goes through. And it really does feel like he's invented something new. And it gets to the kind of raw feeling David Blaine talks about wanting to achieve in his shows through very different means.

Here's what happens. Before the show, when you walk into the theater, there's a wall of cards printed with the words "I am." And then, under "I am," just different things that you might be. A baker, a gardener, troublemaker, truth-teller, the one that got away, extrovert, con artist, idealist, over 1,000 different cards. And you pick the one you feel describes yourself best and you walk to your seat. And 90 minutes later, at the end of the show about whether people see you for who you really are, Derek says to anybody who took the exercise of picking a card seriously--

Ira Glass

It's not a big theater, about 150 seats. And on this particular night, over 100 people stand. And then Derek walks into the audience, walks up to each of those people one at a time, looks right in their eyes, and tells them what they chose.

Ira Glass

Boy Scout.

Ira Glass

Black sheep of the family.

Ira Glass

A good Christian. Watching him do this, when he tells the people sitting on your row, and the row in front of you, and the row behind you how they see themselves, it makes you look at them differently. Like, no kidding. These people who showed up on a weeknight with their backpacks and their work clothes, and suddenly you get this glimpse of something so private. It stops feeling like a room of anonymous strangers. They look different.

Ira Glass

A ninja.

Ira Glass

A good parent.

Ira Glass

A ray of sunshine.

Ira Glass

A wallflower. Derek told me these moments, when he walks up to people and stares in their eyes and tells them something about themselves, it's everything he was hoping the show would do. Something about those moments is not about magic. It isn't about the trick. The magic is all in service to this very human thing that's happening.

Ira Glass

This was a young woman, maybe in her 20s. Derek hesitated. Then he said it. A failure.

Ira Glass

The woman teared up and sat down. It's the sort of moment, watching it, all you can think about is her and her life and what that must be about. What you do not think is, how'd he do it?

Ira Glass

Act Three, Fly Girl. Quick warning to listeners about this next act. It's about the pornography business. There is nothing explicit in what's about to be said. In fact, it's not about sex at all. But it's about porn, so if you're listening with kids, take this as your heads up.

The porn business is a world of fakiness-- fake bodies, fake excitement, people acting out other people's fantasies. But I heard about this one huge arena in that business where things get very, very real. I heard about it from Jon Ronson, who's on our show now and then. For over a year, he's been working on a podcast that traces how one man changed the porn industry when he aggressively applied modern internet technology-- I mean, keywords, search term optimization-- to porn, at a set of websites, including the most popular porn site in the world-- 75 million visitors a day-- called PornHub.

In his podcast, Jon Ronson documents all kinds of things that happened to all kinds of people because of how PornHub and this man and free porn changed pornography. And one big, obvious consequence of the success of PornHub and other free online sites is that so much pornography is given away for free. The people who make porn videos have a much harder time making a living. And one way he learned that they supplement their income is by creating custom videos. Here's Jon.

Jon Ronson

I've been on porn sites for a year, and nearly everyone I spoke with, performers and producers and crew, is also in the bespoke porn business now. They construct custom films to the detailed specifications of individual fans, contouring into life entire porn films for just one viewer. These are producers like Dan and Rhiannon of Anatomik Media. They're a married couple in their 40s, upbeat. They love their work.

Jon Ronson

Dan pulls out his laptop and deliberates on which videos to show me.

Jon Ronson

That really is all it is-- a woman becoming exasperated because there's a fly. And to make matters worse, she has misplaced her flyswatter.

Jon Ronson

They play me another. A woman sits in a kid's paddling pool. She's wearing a tank top and shorts and swimming goggles. She's chewing gum. And then it begins. Huge industrial-sized tubs of condiments are poured over her head. Mustard, relish, soured cream. Gallons of it.

Jon Ronson

It's like someone being slimed on Nickelodeon.

Jon Ronson

In this case, Dan and Rhiannon know a little about the man who asked for this. Well, they know one thing about him. He owns a restaurant in Georgia, where presumably he deals with mustard and ketchup every day and has to avoid situations like this.

Then Rhiannon gives Dan a look and says they really should play me the stamp video, which turns out to be the most intriguing of all because it raises so many questions. The client is a man in Norway that Dan and Rhiannon call Stamps Man.

Jon Ronson

The video fades in on a book of stamps lying on a living room floor. Three young women enter wearing school uniform. They complain about it being hot outside and wonder if they should take a shower. Then they notice the stamp collection, and one thing leads to another.

Jon Ronson

One of the women starts stomping on the stamps.

Jon Ronson

After several months emailing Stamps Man, we finally managed to convince him to tell us his story. It turns out that, after years obsessively collecting stamps and spending way too much money on it, he started to feel depressed and isolated. So he went to see a psychologist who told him stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby because it's so solitary. And so now he pays porn people to destroy his stamps. He says he's had 10 books of stamps, and he's been destroying them in this way one at a time. And he's only got one book left, he says. He's deciding which custom producer to send it to. And after that, he's all done.

I thought I was done, too. I thought I'd learned all there was to learn about custom videos. But then I heard one more time from Dan and Rhiannon. Something had happened. They'd just received an email.

Jon Ronson

The email was requesting a porn star to sit cross-legged on the floor, fully clothed, and say into the camera, you are loved. Things are bad now, but they won't always be. Suicide is not the answer.

Jon Ronson

Dan and Rhiannon decided to shoot it anyway and send it to him.

Jon Ronson

It's the day of the shoot. Dan and Rhiannon and the porn performer, Riley Reyes, convene at the location. It's a sitting room in a mansion. There's a window facing a mountain and the valley and, probably because of all the recent rains in LA, everything outside is verdant. It looks like heaven from a film.

Riley is 28. She's wearing bright pink jeggings and a bright blue tank top.

Jon Ronson

Dan and Rhiannon aren't charging the man. I'll call him Milo. They're not charging him for obvious reasons. And also because he still hasn't responded to their email. But they are paying Riley just like they would in a normal custom shoot. Riley is nervous.

Jon Ronson

I think it's safe to say that most people needing comfort wouldn't reach out to custom fetish porn producers, who the outside world might think of as cynical operators. But having been here a year, it makes so much sense to me. Custom producers are kind of like a family of outsiders themselves, and they often respond to their clients in the most sincere and heartfelt ways.

Jon Ronson

Soon they'll send this video to Milo, even though they've heard nothing from him. It's a leap of faith. Everyone's just hoping that he doesn't do this to get off on it in some way. Everyone is also hoping that the reason why he's gone quiet is just because he's regretful or embarrassed or he's changed his mind. But then the video will arrive, and he'll watch it and maybe, in some small way, it will help.

Ira Glass

Jon Ronson. That story produced by Lina Misitzis with original music by Joel Ronson. The brand-new podcast that it's part of, an audible original series called The Butterfly Effect, will premiere at the end of July. You can preorder right now at audible.com/butterflyeffect.

[MUSIC - CHERYL LYNN, "GOT TO BE REAL"]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Stephanie Foo. Our staff includes Elna Baker, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chace, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Jonathan Menjivar, BA Parker, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Woo. Our senior producer is Brian Reed.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

David Blaine is touring with all kinds of physical feats like we talked about in Act Two today. To see when he's coming to your town, davidblaine.com. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, I told him, the way I see it, I won't have to start thinking about, your know, Botox or any other aging stuff for a couple of years, at least. And he said--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.