Hey there,
it's Ira here before the new episode starts in case you missed the little update We dropped in the podcast feed last week.
I'm gonna summarize it here quickly it's been a year
since we launched our this American life partners program and The good news is it's going great people who signed up as life partners.
I'll pay for almost 25 percent of our budget Which is huge and and sincerely thanks to all of you who signed up but looking ahead we need that number to be 50%.
That's what will protect us and keep the show going in the current environment where it is just harder to bring in advertising revenue and where the federal government no longer funds public radio,
which affects the stations who run our show and pay us money to run our show.
So here's my short pitch on why you might consider becoming a life partner if you haven't already.
I'm guessing that what you probably like about our show is that we find great stories.
Big and small with, you know,
feelings and funny moments and a picture of the world and everything else that makes a good story.
And what do I say is, the thing you like is surprisingly expensive.
For every story you hear in our show,
we run at many more stories that go nowhere that we abandon at different stages of the process.
And in the stories you do hear...
We labor over each step of making those as a team.
We do draft after draft.
We're adjusting how, you know,
people get introduced into the story and how the story unfolds and which parts to linger on and which to speed through.
Then, of course, there's fact-checking and scoring with music.