A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.
For three weeks, Joe Biden said his forcefully as a human being possibly could say that he would not step down.
And for three weeks, it was this agonizing drip, drip, drip of people trying to get him to reconsider.
And it wrote us around the country, wondering if he was going to reconsider.
That by a steady stream of daily news stories that read tea leaves and applied electron microscopes to the tiniest scraps of evidence, looking for any minuscule signs indicating that maybe it could happen, maybe Biden would rethink things.
Democrats wondering what it might take to change Biden's mind.
Meanwhile, over in the other half of the country, in Red State America, at the Republican National Convention, people who had changed their minds and reconsidered firmly held convictions, were a big part of the festivities.
Donald Trump picked his vice president, a man who once said about him, my god, what an idiot, JD Vance.
Nikki Haley, who once called Trump unhinged, to Biden, seems to have reconsidered some of his most deeply held ideas about himself and his chances in this election.
We have stories of people rethinking some big, basic beliefs that they've taken for granted, trying to get a new attitude toward the world.
And we watch how that goes for them.
And WB Easy Chicago, it's this American life, I'm Iron Glass.
Stay with us. Aquan, Faded the Union.
While the people who'd rethought their feelings about Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, there was one guest for whom the rethink has been especially dramatic, and that's Sean O'Brien.
A lifelong Democrat from Massachusetts, Sean O'Brien is the head of the Teamsters Union, 1.3 million truck drivers, rail, air, all transportation, delivery workers, lots of jobs, the endorsed Biden in 2020.
And Sean O'Brien was at the RNC to give a speech, big speech actually, the keynote speech on the first night of the convention.
And I should say, the Teamsters Union president hasn't spoken to the RNC ever before in the entire history of the Union, because maybe this is obvious, Republicans have been in the party a big business.
And generally pretty opposed to organized labor.
So we chase, tells us how this played out.
Here's how weird it is that this guy, Sean O'Brien, is at the RNC in the first place.
President Biden, a Democrat, calls himself the most pro-union president in history.
There's reasons. He bailed out Union pensions, the Teamsters were pushing for that.
All his major infrastructure bills have included money and benefits specifically for unions.
He walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers.
He gave his first 2020 campaign speech from a Teamsters Hall.
Donald Trump has a record too, as a Republican president of rolling back regulations that protected unions.
Pointing Supreme Court justices who ruled against unions.
And of course hiring non-union workers, when he was a real estate developer, notoriously stiffing his workers out of overtime.
Because of them talk about loving American workers, obviously, that's politics.
But their policies are very different.
So when Teamsters president Sean O'Brien showed up at the Republican Convention this week, he felt like an outsider right away.
Or maybe he wanted to make the point that he was an outsider right away.
So I'm backstage. And the rehearsal the night before we came in, and they just wanted to show us the setup of the stage.
So they're telling Sean how to walk across the stage to the podium.
He's going to be the keynote speaker on night one.
And so they said, now you're going to do a dog leg right when you come out of the stage and come down.
But the gentleman said, you know golf, you know how you do a dog leg right?
I said, look, in my business, if you're a good golfer, you're a bad representative, I don't golf.
So he says just make like a little arc.
He's like, he's a bad example.
Here I am, hopefully delivering, you know, the most powerful speech for American workers.
And I'm debating what a dog leg is with the person.
So it actually, it was typical in the my nature.
I get distracted and start talking to him about how union officials shouldn't golf because they should be all working.
Sean O'Brien seems to be here to walk a fine line basically with what's next to radio show.
He's a 35 year teamster, truck driver.
He thinks O'Brien's just going to be part of the Trump campaigns, long running political theater, being a party for blue collar workers without making any actual policy that helps those workers.
To him, it's like, what's O'Brien going to get for this?
You know, the reality is Sean O'Brien is going to be their whipping boy.
They are going to use him and my teamsters union as their hood ornament as they drive their anti-union policy truck right over the top of working people.
And the reality is, Sean O'Brien is going to be their dancing show pony whether he wants to be or not.
And they're going to ride him until the election day because what they understand, what Trump understands, what the RNC gets by giving him this, this platform is, a lot of his members vote for Republicans.
This is making it okay. This is going, yeah, don't worry about your job.
Don't worry about any of that stuff.
To see how this song and dance goes over, I pick my spot way up high in the stands and sit with some delegates.
I find Todd Gilman, the delegate from Michigan I know, and make him watch Sean O'Brien speech with me.
Todd's retired, a Navy vet.
He was in a union decades ago.
He got involved with the Republican Party just a few years ago.
He's organizing a county commissioner race now.
We're chatting. How's that going, those races or those campaigns?
I think you're going good.
Todd has never heard of Sean O'Brien and does not care about him, it seems.
All he knows about Teamsters is, where did the mafia bury Jimmy Hoffa's body?
We're waiting for O'Brien's spot in the lineup when suddenly an unannounced guest appears.
Oh, Trump's here. He's in the building.
He's got himself not scheduled to speak.
Shows up on screen with a dramatically bandaged ear.
It's the first time I did the convention, our first time seeing him in his first time in public since the assassination attempt.
The crowd is losing it. The camera's following him down the hall toward the convention room like he's a fighter headed into the ring.
Oh, look at his ear. He might be coming out.
You're a... You're a Teamster guy, might not be talking.
The crowd is jonesy for Trump, but Trump does not take the stage.
He sits in the audience and instead, the guy who appears on stage is...
Sweet Greenwood. Country singer.
He's going to be a pro-American and then...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Proud to be an American is Trump's theme song this campaign.
It's generally a signal he's about to take the stage.
To this time, the singer himself is here live, giving a sort of impromptu prayer benediction as images of Trump weaving and grimacing appear on screen turning the white swaddled ear from side to side.
The crowd sings proud to be an American with enthusiasm, the chance for Trump.
But Trump still does not take the stage.
Instead, this random guy limps out and stands there, one of the many regular Americans on the program who feel hurt by Biden's policies.
He's dubbed on screen as a grandfather.
You've got to feel for him.
The crowd is chanting, we want Trump right into his face.
And another rando with the same story of not being able to afford stuff, then Amber Rose, how to describe, model and influencer, talks about seeing the light and voting Republican.
Oh, she does have a forehead tattoo.
Overall, the vibes are way off.
Trump's still in the room.
People are clamoring for him to speak.
And then finally, the last speaker of the night, instead of Trump, it's the president of the Teamsters Union, the outsider guy, the person who doesn't necessarily belong here.
Is this the mob boss? There he is.
Is this the mob boss? All right, are you paid sense of telling me what you think?
He's probably a mob boss, if he's a Teamsters president.
Clearly, O'Brien has some assumptions about Union bosses to overcome with this crowd.
Greetings delegates and guests.
I'm Sean O'Brien, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
OK, big applause. It just gets bigger.
And I think we all can agree whether people like him or they don't like him, and light of what happened to him on Saturday, he is proven to be one tough S-O-O-B.
Biggest applause line of the night by far, like the catharsis of leading for Trump is satisfied by this.
A line that Sean will tell me he came up with right then, wasn't on the teleprompter, who's just feeling it.
My Michigan delegate Todd is cheering, along with his military buddy Bob from Wisconsin, Bob Leans over.
It's a huge, I mean, you can all these different people, the vote for Joe Biden, and their families did come and all your is speaking.
This could turn out to be a total butt kick in in November.
Now the teamsters are not endorsing Trump tonight.
Sean O'Brien has been quite clear about that, but Bob from Wisconsin is just hearing the teamsters throw their weight behind Trump.
He's not paying close attention to the specifics of what Sean is saying, really.
And as it goes on, the speech does get much more specific, and much less Republican convention sounding, basically.
He throws longstanding Republican allies, mainstays of the party, under the bus.
But for a century, major employers have waged a war against labor by forming corporate unions of their own.
We need to call the chamber and commerce and the business round tables what they are.
They are unions for big business.
And here's another fact.
I guess that's right. There is dares, right?
And into this, I wavered 100 percent correct.
It talks about major American companies, not as great examples of entrepreneurship, like at a typical Republican convention, but as great examples of corporate greed.
Companies like Amazon are bigger than most national economies.
Amazon is valued over $2 trillion.
What is sickening is that Amazon has a bid that any national allegiance.
Amazon's sole focus is on lining its own.
Say workers should get to choose what they want.
Communions hate it because they say workers then get the benefits of the contract without paying for it.
It undercuts their power.
There's over 150 Republicans co-sponsoring right to work bills in Congress right now.
Trump has said he supports right to work.
Sean O'Brien continues to slam big business.
And I'm almost expecting him to talk about Bernie's millionaires and billionaires.
The applause in the rooms getting weaker.
These companies offer no real health insurance, no retirement benefits, no pay leave, relying on 100-of-funded public assistance.
And who puts the bill? The individual tax payer.
The biggest recipients of welfare in this country, the corporations, and this is rail corruption.
We must put workers first.
By the end of the speech, Todd's feeling about this guy he'd never heard of before.
He's knocking it out of the park.
I'm glad I stuck around him, listen to him.
Thanks. Thanks. When I talk to O'Brien after the speech in the lobby of the Grand Fist...
Support is not going to pass.
Wouldn't it make sense to figure out what could pass by partisan?
Do you think you've got people in that room to reconsider?
I know that for a fact. Because I've had the conversations.
I can give me an example.
I cannot, but stay tuned.
Now the very next day, the teamsters announced there was a new co-sponsor of the House version of the bill, a third Republican House member from Oregon.
Because of the speech, we don't know.
Rick Smith, the 35-year teamster with the radio show, watched the convention, watched the speech from his union president, and I called him afterwards.
I fear he did everything that I thought he was going to do.
Look, I don't think anybody remembers what he says tomorrow.
Other than Trump's a tough SOV, there may be a quote, but what they're going to remember is he was there for Donald Trump.
Rick saw Sean's speech as just another piece of the political theater playing out at the R&C.
More working man, Cosplay.
Like Trump's selection of JD Vance as vice president in his opinion, Sean O'Brien praised Vance in his speech.
Vance's brand is kind of made in America, economic populism.
He famously walked a UAW picket line in Toledo.
Yeah, I should go back to this idea that there are Republicans that support labor, you know, JD Vance walked a picket line.
Yeah, okay, he walked a picket line, but he doesn't support workers right to organise.
And I know he'll give it on something here or there, but ultimately this is a guy who's not a friend of labor.
And it seems simple to me.
These are the people who are going to put the final nail in the coffin of the labor movement.
And I think he gave them the kind of fodder that they can use.
It's like handing an axe murder or an axe and then being surprised.
Or what was Trump always say?
You know, about a snake biting you because a snake is a snake, right?
Yeah, it's a snake's nature.
Right. And this is, that's these people's nature.
O'Brien's response is maybe the snake is changing.
We can make them change.
Parties change. Can't get things done if that's your uncompromising approach.
I mean, look, you look at the weekend, the number of elected lawmakers started edging up very slowly.
And finally, of course, Joe Biden bowed out of the race.
But it took over three weeks for things to get to this point.
So what was I like? For the people who stuck their necks out and waited.
Well, Congressman Seth Moulton agreed to talk to me about all that.
He's a Democrat from Massachusetts, rising star on the party at a presidential run himself in 2020.
Former Marine who served four tours in Iraq.
In fact, he lit up a tune in the first company to enter Baghdad.
Years ago, he did a memorable interview on our program about this interpreter who he worked with and got close to in Iraq, went that up coming to the States and living in Moulton's childhood home with his parents.
Basically, he became part of their family, waiting to get asylum because of all the death threats against him, for collaborating with Americans.
Joe Biden took an interest in Seth Moulton back when Moulton first ran for Congress in 2014.
Biden was vice president.
Biden went to Massachusetts to do a rally endorsing him.
And they wrote in a car together where Moulton says the vice president offered him half of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
And he was not sure if you're supposed to say no to that offer from the vice president.
So he said, yes. Moulton's age and his military experience.
Moulton says Biden's torn him a few times.
He reminds him of a sunbow.
Moulton I spoke this past Monday, July 15.
Don't make the story of turning his back on Joe Biden.
Starts, of course, on debate night.
Well, I think like most Americans, I felt the debate was an unmitigated disaster for president Biden.
I mean, we all remember the times he couldn't keep his train of thought.
He lost his place. He seemed incoherent.
I thought one of the most remarkable moments was when he literally took our best issue, abortion and pivoted immediately to our worst issue, immigration.
I mean, you almost couldn't make it up.
I want to ask you a question that I worry might be a little awkward for you to answer.
And I hope you can answer it honestly.
The side of president Biden that we all saw on television that night during the debate.
During DC, you hear a lot of things, I'm sure.
Had you seen that side of him before that night?
Had you heard about that side of him before that night?
Is that something people talk about?
Yes. Yes, it is. I've seen the president fairly regularly as a member of Congress, although it does feel like his staff is hiding him far more than they used to.
But I've seen a dramatic change in particular over the last several months.
I saw him at the White House Christmas Ball and he looked older and frailer, but he was excited to see me, you know, quickly recounted things we've done together or whatnot.
Then I saw him most recently, just a few weeks ago, in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D.
Day. He was speaking with a small group of us and the change was pretty dramatic.
How so? Well, it was more like the things that we saw in the debate, not that bad, but more in that direction.
Like I came having a hard time summoning the words for things.
Yeah, more like that, yes.
But as someone who's been a very long time Joe Biden fan, as someone who's admired him, as someone who's been a mentee of his, it was hard to see and it was concerning.
To the point where, although I don't think there's a single American who expected what we saw the night of that debate, I wasn't entirely surprised.
So when we came back to the House floor the next day, everyone was sharing the same view.
I didn't speak to anyone who thought it was okay.
Other than Speaker Pelosi, who just said, well, I don't know that we can judge a campaign by one debate, but I really felt she had to say that party leaders are in a little bit different position.
But all of us in the rank and file thought it was a total disaster.
And I think most of us were clear that the only way forward for Democrats to have a chance in this election is to get a new nominee at the top of the ticket.
But the next few days, Milton says, he tried to call everybody he knew in the White House.
Anybody close to the inner circle to express his concerns about the president's performance and the path ahead.
That made a lot of phone calls and I got nothing in response.
Now, I'm not offended by that.
I don't want to come across as, you know, thinking that the White House should return my phone calls.
And given the circumstances, you'd expect some low level eight to just give me a call and say, we've heard your concerns.
Here's what we're doing about them.
But it was just a wall of silence.
What did that say to you?
It said to me that they're not taking this seriously.
We needed to hear a new plan.
And first, you just simply need to hear that they're being honest about the situation at hand.
But I wasn't hearing any of that.
When I came home to Massachusetts, I held a Zoom meeting with a lot of local Democratic officials.
And these are people who tend to be very establishment players.
They want to stick with the status quo by and large.
So I expected the majority of them to be in favor of Biden remaining on the ticket.
I'd say it was about 80% in favor of his stepping aside.
That was powerful as well.
It's five days after the debate before the first Democratic lawmaker calls for Biden to step down.
Day later, the second one does.
That same night, Moulton releases a very polite, pretty hegey statement saying, I have grave concerns about President Biden's ability to defeat Donald Trump.
And then going on to say, if the president can't demonstrate that he can do a better job prosecuting the case against Trump, quote, we should have all viable options on the table.
So that goes out. But then later that night, I showed my statement to a friend who was visiting a Marine.
And this great friend of mine who I trust for advice, he read it and he said, what do you try and say?
I said, well, I'm basically saying that he should step aside.
And he said, well, then why don't you just say it, Seth?
And I gave him this long explanation for why being polite was the appropriate thing to do here.
Really wondered if for somebody like you, if after making a statement like that, you're walking through the halls of Congress, you're going down to the floor.
Are you like a pariah or people not meeting your eye?
What's it like? Well, it was interesting.
I was very curious what would happen the first time I came back to Washington and walked out onto the house floor for votes that evening.
And it did seem like people were just avoiding me.
I think they didn't want to be caught in a conversation.
But it was totally different as soon as I walked into the cloakroom.
In other words, away from the reporters and the TV cameras.
And people had a lot of nice things to say.
He says he did try to lobby some of these colleagues.
So they should come forward publicly also.
And if you did, generally most did not.
And why not? Fear, best as you can tell.
They were scared of taking off the president and his team, going against the Democratic establishment, sticking their necks out.
Now, fear is not entirely unreasonable.
Michigan, Congresswoman Hillary Sculpton was kicked out of a Democratic party.
More folks back home who just want Biden to stay in the race, at least some guessing that they do.
And what is your read of the politics of this?
Like you're in a safe Democratic district or pretty safe Democratic district.
Is this good for you politically?
Like calls and emails and texts and stuff to your office?
Are they mostly people supporting you coming out and saying this about the president?
Interestingly, the calls and messages we've received from people in the district are very supportive.
It's just thank you for saying what we all saw.
There seems to be some kind of organized campaign nationally to attack me because a lot of the messages on social media, on Twitter and to our office that come from outside the district have been highly critical.
Wait, wait, do you think it's possible that your own party or your own president is organizing people to yell at you online?
I mean, that's pretty standard practice, I think.
I don't know if that's exactly what's happening right now or it's just self-organizing groups or even Twitter bots.
I don't really know. We haven't spent a lot of time digging into it.
For a lot of us reading news reports during the three weeks before President Biden dropped out.
As the days rolled on, and President Biden kept insisting that he didn't think he lost any ground in the race.
And he wasn't going to listen to anybody even himself on this.
The chances of him actually leaving the race seemed to get more and more remote.
But this past Monday, Congressman Moulton told me that for more heat-sat, the whole thing was still very much an open question, even after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
That photo was fist in there.
I mean, look, from my narrow perspective, in the phone calls I've received, it's intensified calls for President Biden to step aside.
It's going to be even harder for Democrats to win after that attempt at the assassination.
And so, how do we increase pressure on the White House?
I understand that you were on a phone call that President Biden was on this weekend.
What can you say about that?
He was a Zoom meeting, and he was speaking with the new Democratic Coalition.
And well, there are a few dozen of us on with him.
Now I'm not going to share details of a confidential meeting, but I'll just say that it was discouraging.
It left me on our public.
The majority are with me.
And so therefore, how does it feel?
It feels frustrating. Can I ask you, are you in a sort of perverse situation where when you watch the President now on TV, you're sort of hoping for him to slip up?
Like if he slips up, no, it'll speed on the path towards having to step down?
It's an interesting question.
No, I'm not hoping the President will slip up.
But I am hoping that something happens to push him over the edge, to just to make him realize to face reality here.
I think it's important to say, Ira, that I genuinely love Joe Biden.
He's been a great mentor to me.
He's consistently given me great advice.
I have nothing but good things to say about Joe Biden.
Is there some moment between you that especially stands out?
Do you think captures what it's like, or what it was like in the past between you and him?
The President Biden used to have me over for breakfast when he was vice president.
We'd sit at his residence and of course breakfast was always scheduled for about an hour and it would go for close to three.
He would regale me with stories from his time in the Senate and the lessons that he's learned about politics over the years.
I'd ask very serious questions, pose situations where I needed advice.
He genuinely took me under his wing.
He felt like he was invested in me personally.
Now there are hundreds of people in politics who know Joe Biden better than I.
I'm still relatively new to this whole thing.
But I like him a lot. I could tell that he cared.
Knowing him to the degree that you do.
Are you surprised that he won't give up?
He's incredibly tenacious.
I also know he's dedicated to our country.
There's a well-worn phrase in the Marines that they try to drill into you day after day in training, which is it's not about you.
That's my fundamental message to President Biden today.
Sir, this is not about you.
You're an amazing president.
You've been an incredible senator.
You've done so much for the United States of America.
And now the best thing you can do is to step aside and give us just a little bit better chance at defeating Donald Trump and winning this election.
Congressman Seth Motten from Massachusetts.
Again, we spoke on Monday well before the president decided to step down.
Coming up, typing with your pinkies, how it has the power to make you rethink everything about your own sister.
We have a true life example that's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
Just American Life, Marigold has today's program, the big rethink, stories of people reconsidering something fundamental about themselves and the way they see themselves and what happens next.
We've arrived at three of our show, act three.
Anything you can do, I can do backwards.
Okay, so in this time, a country defining decisions we close our show at today with yet another story of critical import about two sisters and their pinkies.
A story on the Baker stumbled on.
I was chatting with a friend of a friend, Zoe Kushlevsky, at a bar when she casually mentioned she was about to attempt to break the world record for a speed typing the alphabet using only her pinkies.
It took me a minute to process.
There's a world record for typing with your pinkies.
How do you even know that's a thing?
Where does that idea even come from?
And that's when Zoe said, my sister, I stole it.
Sisters, so twisted, right?
My sister has something and I want to take it from her.
Here's how it all started.
One day, Zoe's sister Eliza texted her this, lol, I don't know if you heard, but I broke a world record tonight.
Fastest time typing the alphabet backwards with my pinkie fingers.
lol, I did it in 6.31 seconds and the record is 9.65.
My next text were lol, what?
That so bizarre and cool that I can do it in 6.30.
I'm gonna ruin your night.
Wow, so it was sort of instantaneous your desire to take this record from her.
Yeah, I guess so. And I was joking, but it was coming from a true place of like, I really do bet I could do it.
Like, should I? No, I shouldn't, unless.
So Zoe opens her laptop and gives it a try.
Starts typing the alphabet backwards with her pinkies.
She's not great, but she's improving rapidly, and live texting Eliza is she gets better.
And she said if you keep practicing, I bet you can get it.
And I said, I think I could too, but I would feel like an asshole, lol.
She said, they have the same one for alphabet forwards, the record is 5.7 seconds.
And I said with pinkies, that would be kind of sick if I got forwards.
And Eliza's always racking up some new achievement, like she only came up with the idea to break the world record because she needed something to do after running her first half marathon.
Whereas Zoe, feels left behind in life.
She moved to LA to become a TV writer, but hasn't had the confidence to try yet.
And this leads me to the second thing you need to know.
The day Zoe got the text from Eliza, it was a big day for Zoe.
Just that afternoon, she had finished four months of treatment in a super intense eating disorder program.
Like I'm talking eating all my meals in the company of like a therapist, basically, or a nutritionist.
And now I was like, okay, like now it's time to work myself back into the real world.
Does it feel like she's like rubbing her life like in your face?
I for yes, I mean, for a few good minutes, I was like, I was just kind of like this, this was my, like I felt really proud of myself for getting through treatment.
I felt like I had just, I am completely fixated on my name.
Zoe and Eliza are step sisters.
When Zoe was eight, her dad met Eliza's mom.
And within a couple years, he lived with Eliza's mom and Eliza.
Zoe would visit every other weekend.
Zoe was already self-conscious about her weight.
Her dad was always on her about it.
And right away, she started comparing her body to Eliza's.
Eliza always just seemed to come naturally too.
She was always athletic.
She like ran track. I felt like Eliza was the daughter that my dad dreamed of.
For dessert, he might serve Zoe fruit.
Well, Eliza got pie. There'd be little critical comments.
Zoe's dad had been fat, lost weight his senior year of high school, and felt like it made life so much easier.
He thought he was helping Zoe.
But now sees how wrong headed all that was.
But as a teenager, Zoe decided that since Eliza was thin and got good grades and everything seemed easy for her.
How do you feel about that?
I'm excited for you. Thank you.
Yeah. Eliza congratulates her, but also says.
For me, I'm really over the whole record thing to be honest for me.
It was almost like nine months now since I did it.
So I'm very over. I'm just excited for you.
I don't really care anymore for my perspective.
I do what I say to do. So for me, it was just something fun to do.
So it doesn't really matter to me anymore, all the specifics.
I don't know. It just depends what it meant to you.
I think it could have been.
It was different for you.
But for me, I mean, it worked a while ago.
So it passed pretty quickly for me.
But for you, it might be different.
True, true. I felt like I could hear Zoe deflating on the call.
She went from cheering and laughing to being ashamed for even caring.
This was such a sister counterattack.
She seemed so harsh. But when I sat down with Eliza to talk about it, she was warm, self deprecating.
Like, come in, like, frazzled my hands up a little touch up on them.
So I played the call for her and just asked her, what was up with that?
How do you think he sounded this?
I agree. I mean, I think I sound defensive and defensive.
I think so. I'm like, I don't even really care.
But for you, it's different.
Oh, this matters to you, but it doesn't matter to me.
For you, it's better. Like, it's good.
Here's the thing. Eliza knew Zoe was reporting her.
And in good sister fashion, she'd said she was okay with it.
But she wasn't really. So she was flustered and uncomfortable.
And she had other feelings, too.
This itch Zoe has to take her down.
Eliza's noticed. And it doesn't feel great.
If you look at the story from her perspective, Eliza brings a world record.
And when she first texts her sister, hey, I did this cool thing.
Zoe's response is, fuck your thing.
And like, I guess I was just like, why is her first response like to compete with me and one of me?
And I was just like, instead of being happy for me, like, she saw it as this competition.
And her first response was like, I can do it better.
This is this cool thing that I tried to achieve.
And now you're trying to beat it.
Yeah, why are you coming after me?
Yeah. And I think it's the fact that her first text after was like, I bet I can do it faster.
Right? She didn't even say congratulations.
Yeah. So then it's like, if that's where this is coming from, like, that feels hurtful.
The entire way it was phrased was just doing it better than me.
Eliza didn't say any of this to Zoe though.
She felt like it was a dumb thing to get her feelings hurt over.
So instead she texted Zoe, I dare you.
Eliza says, Zoe always trying to one up her this way.
Eliza doesn't get it. You personally have never felt like you've been competing with Zoe.
Not competing, like, to me, it's like not even comparable.
I've always admired the fact that like, she's out in LA living her dreams.
And it just thought she is in a very different career path.
But I always think like everything she's doing there is amazing.
And she's married and she has a house.
Yes, Zoe is married. She lives in a nice house.
She and her wife have a great relationship.
Eliza hasn't yet checked off those big life boxes.
She's also, Eliza told me, the performer of the family.
The one who upstages her.
Plus Zoe's the oldest. She's actually the big sister.
Eliza's like, you win. I felt like she set the tone.
She was player one on the Wii.
She had to go to the bathroom first when we got home from the car ride.
Not in any resentful way just in like a, that was the pecking order.
You're the oldest sibling.
Like that felt right. So and I think she even said to me too.
I think she said she felt like there's a point where it flipped.
And like to her, I felt more like the older sister.
But that never happened for me.
I've always seen her as the older sister.
I still look up to her a lot.
I think I still really like to get her approval.
I don't know if she said, but like actually someone made a comment about that recently in our family that like I like to get her approval.
So to me, I've always looked up to her and admired her.
And I still do. She told me she had no idea that the day she texted Zoe about her world record was the day Zoe ended treatment.
And Zoe never said anything.
And she also had no idea that from the time they were kids, Zoe felt inferior to her.
Yeah, that's shocking to me.
Shocking. Yeah, I mean, like I just don't see myself in that role.
Like wow, like she's doing so much better.
I didn't realize she felt like that.
Eliza says that growing up she had no idea.
And Zoe thought Eliza was the favorite.
The daughter, their dad really wanted.
She never noticed that she got dessert and Zoe got fruit.
I mean, it makes me sad to think that some of that I think, especially now that we're older, I'm very aware of.
But I definitely again, wasn't as a child.
And it makes me sad to think of like Zoe going through all that and feeling very alone and me having no idea.
Like that is so isolating.
But then I also see it from your perspective because it's sort of like has nothing to do with you.
But it, like I don't see it from my perspective.
It does have to do with me.
I mean, even if it doesn't directly, like I wish I could have been there for her.
And like, yeah, I don't know why I wasn't.
But like, I don't know just like being younger and just not you seeing these things.
And maybe it's not something that I was primed to think about.
So I wasn't like even noticing.
I was like, I'm not going to be a child.
Since this whole pinky record thing, for the first time, Zoe and Eliza had started talking about all this directly.
They called each other compared notes.
Zoe was like, oops, I didn't say congratulations after you got your record, did I?
And Eliza was like, I had no idea you saw my job was cool.
And Zoe, who in one sentence will say she admires Eliza, and in the next say she's jealous, has realized that they're two sides of the same coin.
And how she feels about Eliza in any given moment has everything to do with how she feels about herself.
And she's being more generous with her.
It all looks different now to both of them.
Now, the baker, she's the co-host of the podcast, pretty sure I can fly with Johnny Knoxville.
Listen wherever you get your podcast.
Her story was produced by Lily Sullivan and edited by Nadia Riemann.
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Tori Melatia, you know, when he's in Washington, DC, he actually goes to the same yoga class that Joe Biden does, but the teacher is so overbearing, Tori keeps having to tell her.
Let's be respectful of the president, and push him gently in the right position.
I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, with more stories of thisamerican life.
I'm Eric Glass. I'm Eric Glass.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
I'm Eric Glass. I'm Eric Glass.
I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
I'm Eric Glass. I'm Eric Glass.
I'm Eric Glass. I'm Eric Glass.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
Back next week, with more stories of thisamericanlife.
