Guess Who I Met Today?

Also, Episode 3 of Love Commandos out now

Good morning! Episode 3 of Love Commandos is out today wherever you get your Rough Translation podcast. If Episode 2 was a sweeping Bollywood epic, Episode 3 is a low-budget soap where the leads do their own stunts and the love songs hoot from a dented harmonium. The Love Commandos protect lovers, but will love survive the Love Commandos shelter? Find out in the next installment of… Love Commandos.

Vartika Sharma/NPR

I still have one more podcast episode to write (plus, I just learned, two bonus eps), so I’ll get right to it. On this post:

1. Optimism on Air

2. Amplifying the Average Joe

3. This is You, Part 2

4. Poll of the Week

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Optimism, Reconsidered

A few years ago, I found myself on a lawn sipping a beer from a plastic cup in conversation with a Ukrainian guy who was proudly not a fan of NPR. (He was a huge fan of the radio reporter Zoe Chace, and on that point we highly agreed.) As for my show? The stories were OK, he conceded, but the endings? Too “optimistic.”

On his lips the word (“ohp-tee-mee-steek”) was suggestive of some hyper-sweetened American beverage. Some stupefying combination of high fructose corn syrup and Manifest Destiny.

Optimism!! Tpff. I’d been accused of that sin before. Sometimes by my own kind. I’d always felt like a bit of an imposter in bars in Kabul or Kigali or Kyiv or other watering holes for international journos where the gin and vermouth was served up with a slice of cynicism, the flavor of which could range from resigned to apocalyptic. The general vibe was: “Look how shitty the world has shown itself to be today!”

In contrast, I sounded (to myself) more like a kid off their first field trip: “Guess who I met today!”

Your poll results (part 1)

Which brings me to the google survey I posted last month. ( For more about my journey to re-imagine this show for its post-NPR future, you can read here and here.) Hundreds of you responded to the poll, from all over the world.

I’ve talked about what I’ve learned in previous posts but I want to focus on this question: “What kind of interviewees would you want to hear more of? I gave you a list and also an “Other” box to write in your own.

After the available categories was a long line of “Other” responses the great majority of which were on the theme of “regular people”. I.e., not authors, not entrepreneurs, not celebrities, nor anyone else with a PR department working on their behalf. Just regular people. (A surprising 3 out of 4 of you also want to hear from global nomads, who are really just regular people who wander.)

So one question is, why? Why would you want to hear from ‘average Joes,’ as one of you put it? (Especially of the nomadic variety.)

(But actually first: can we dig up a better phrase than the baseball-hat-wearing “Average Joe”? Might there be a phrase you know of - either from another language, or another field of study - that would fit better here? In Russian, it’s just “Vanya,” but let’s avoid the Russian references for now. Add your suggestions - or your thoughts on this topic - in the comments below.)

Average Joes/Janes are Hard To Find

OK sticking with the average Joe thing for now. If you value the stories of regular people, and you’re clearly not alone, then why do so few podcasts, so few interview shows, deliver those stories?

One answer is, it’s expensive. It’s waaaaay cheaper to interview someone whose story you know than someone whose story you have to unpack. Regular people are easy to find. They’re all around us. They are our friends, our family, our mentors, our lovers. But really processing their story, investigating it, contextualizing it against the backdrop of historical changes and societal flux, giving it meaning for a stranger in another country… that is a super-expensive, time-consuming, collaborative process.

The second reason for the dearth of regular people on the air is: they can be boring. Right? I know that this is a bit blasphemous to say, but c’mon. We are busy. We are trying to keep our lives together. We’re trying to get by in this world. We want… takeaways. Cliff notes. Stuff that’s gonna get us through our day and our lives. Real people don’t come with Blinkist or other speed-reading apps. Finding that nugget, that takeaway, together, with another person, takes time. Sometimes we can know a person for decades and only figure out the lesson of their story after they’re gone.

But to me, that’s the sound of being in the field, meeting strangers, discovering lives so unlike and also like your own. Your answers to this poll, your call for more Average Joes, it makes me wish I could go back to my younger self in those bars and tell myself not to feel like such an imposter. To tell myself, if after a day of doing journalism I feel no closer to predicting the future, or telling you how a war is going, or an economy is doing, that’s OK. Let the big-numbers folks worry about that. But to come back from a day in the field and be able to tell someone’s story in a way that makes people look differently at themselves, or at the world? I mean call it optimism if you must, but that’s a job I can get behind.

Do you agree? Let me know in the comments. And lets go one step further: Who is one person you’ve met who has a story worth sharing? (And you can totally nominate yourself. And “met” can just mean someone you encountered or admire from afar.) Email me at gregorywarner@substack.com or leave a comment.

This is You, Part 2

A few weeks back, I wrote a post called This is You, where I attempted the role of mind reader and made some haphazard guesses in your direction. (It was a useful exercise, at least for me, especially as quite a few of you explained that I had woefully misread your interest in global nomads.) But I’ll be continuing to try to figure you out, and to that end, expect more poll questions in each post. (Also, though I’m no Nate Silver— case in point, my attempt last week which got 98% yes votes - writing polls is fun for me and reminds me of why I actually wanted to do this Substack, so I could not be the only one talking.) But still, thank you for filling these out. And thank you for getting the word out. Think of a friend who might want to be part of this journey with us.

Poll of the Week:

And say hi! Because if you’ve ever FELT like you were part of a community when you listened to Rough Translation episodes, now you’re actually part of that community, and you’re helping grow it from scratch. Just take it from new subscriber Ellie Davis: