Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm a correspondent at Axios and co-host of Slate Money. I'm here today with Adam Chandler. He's the author of the new book, 99% Perspiration, A New Working History of the American Way of Life. And it's a book that looks at
What he says is one of the foundational myths of the United States, that hard work will lead to success, which is sad because I worked hard to bring you this podcast today. Welcome, Adam. Thank you for having me. I can't wait to talk about the foundational myth and maybe just talk about how we're feeling and how people are feeling right now about overwork. And that's all coming up after the break on Slate Money Talks.
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Adam, this show won't air for a little bit, but we were talking during the first week of the Trump administration, which is why I wanted to start off by asking you about something very important, which is Emily in Paris, the Netflix show.
Yeah, yeah. I only just watched it recently, years after everyone was like talking about it. I really enjoyed it, I have to say. It was very distracting. But you include Emily in Paris as like a foundational part of your book.
What's going on there? What does Emily in Paris teach us? Well, so like a lot of other people during the pandemic, in the early days of the pandemic, I kind of needed something to eat my brain. And the wanderlust of Emily in Paris was the answer to that. I was also writing a book about work. So what fits about Emily in Paris is that it's the story of a quintessential American go-getter,
who ends up in Paris working to advance her career and butts into an office culture there that is totally hostile to the go-gettery careerist mentality of Americans. And so that's the only reason why the show works as a comedy is because we have this image of Americans very much as this productivity-obsessed, grind-and-hustle culture, and Americans as sort of ambassadors of this culture, and the French as the opposite, this leisure-rich culture
life is for living kind of mentality. And so I really liked the show for it. My wife, also named Emily, was not into it and would leave the room every time I watched the show. No, it's so fun. Right away, they teach you the work lesson, right? Because I think in one of the earliest episodes, and you mentioned it in your book, she shows up to the Paris office at 8.30 a.m., like ready to go get them. And no one else comes to work until maybe 11. And then they work for like a half hour and then they go have fun.
Lunch. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. It is funny for those reasons because you are told to show up early for work. And it is, especially when you're new at a job, you stay late and you show up early and
And for her to sit outside her office for two hours, freaking out, thinking she's either gone to the wrong place or something else has happened is perfect. It's a perfect encapsulation of what it is. And, you know, in the book, I get into this idea a lot about what's the antithesis of the American grind mindset? What's an alternate universe that we could possibly picture or perhaps incorporate into our own working culture that would be a little less crazy, a little less insane and
and tiresome because we do work hundreds of hours more than most of the other industrialized countries, including France, hundreds of hours. They have an hour more for sleep, an hour more for leisure. They have all of these really alluring components of leisure baked into their lives. That sounds like it might be a better way to do the life
of, you know, a modern professional than we're doing where we're burnt out and we're angry and we're getting diminishing returns for our efforts. So that was interesting to me in talking to people who say, if you are at the office at seven o'clock at night, grinding a night out under a deadline, or just to kind of performatively be working and showing that you are devoted to it, that's not seen as smart or devotional or efficient in other countries. That's seen as
silly or inefficient or questionable behavior, you should be out of the office. And if you are still in the office, it's because
maybe the company is understaffed, or maybe you're just not good at your job. And so I think that that's an interesting parallel to draw because we often see staying late as a sign of devotion. But really, in other places, it's a question of institutional, either efficiency or, you know, perhaps bad practices. Yeah, it's interesting. And we had Bridget Schulte on Money Talks, I guess, last year. I love that conversation. Yeah. And her book's called Overwork, and she's all about
overwork and how it's not good for you, et cetera. But one thing I liked about your book that really got me thinking was –
even in Emily in Paris, yeah, she's a fish out of water and she is like a typical American works too hard. She's very successful. They doubt her at the agency at first, but she shows them with her magical Instagram posts and she gets all kinds of business for them. And in the end, yes, the Parisians are critiquing her American work ethic, but it pays off. And like
The people that are working till 7 p.m. often, like middle-class white-collar people that are grinding it out, there is a belief that hard work is going to pay off. And you are looked down upon at these jobs. I've worked to so many companies where there are those people that are like, I leave at 5. And everyone's like, they're not getting anywhere. They're not going to make it. And your book, you have so many great examples in it where this person works hard and they're not getting anywhere.
anywhere. I guess I want to talk about that more, the American abracadabra, the magical thinking you say that hard work and grit determines your fate. Is that just not true? Well, it's less true than it used to be, and it was never completely true. I don't have anything inherently against hard work. I try to work hard myself. However, when we look at
how many hours people are working and what they're getting in exchange for that work, it really is a bad equation. It really is something that we're seeing a lot of anger about. Because if you look at the economy's more than doubled in size since the late 1970s, American economy, we're 64% more productive as workers and our pay has only gone up 17%. If you're a person of color or someone without a college degree, your income and real wages has declined.
So those are real problems that really showcase what our grind mentality and our focus on the individual has kind of given us and led us down a path where instead of asking why structural obstacles like childcare or the cost of healthcare or education, housing, all of these big features of the economy that are kind of driving us into despair, we're
We focus on whether the individual has the character enough, the fortitude enough, the grit enough to overcome all these obstacles to succeed, because that's what America is all about. You know, and this trope is pervasive and it's very romantic, but
And it's written into everything that we do in American life. It's not just a cultural thing. It is something we teach people at a very young age. It's in our welfare policies. If you look at the way that we emphasize benefits and force people to recertify jobs, that they're looking for jobs and all kinds of other components of our social programs, you'll see that there's an element of deservingness that goes into how we help people here. And it imparts this sense of shame in needing help and not making it and not
being self-reliant, which is another part of the mythos of America. How did the pandemic reveal sort of the myth of hard work and individualism specifically, do you think? That's a great question. I think we had this really nice moment in the pandemic, and it's hard to say there were any nice moments of the pandemic, but...
We took really drastic actions to acknowledge that we were in a crisis by instituting eviction moratoriums and giving rental assistance and instituting the expanded child tax credit, which gave every parent $250, $300 per child in an acknowledgement that childcare is work. If you are staying at home looking after somebody, you should be paid for that job and it benefits the economy to do so.
And we saw child poverty go down. We saw all of these features of the economy benefit from the fact that we were investing in workers. People had unemployment insurance that was bigger than usual, and they paid down debt and got certifications and looked for better jobs instead of going back to the bad jobs that
didn't pay or didn't give secure hours or asked you to work in unsafe conditions. And that was a good thing, but we couldn't make that permanent. And when those protections expired, they kind of died with a whimper. And it's not a surprise to me that people were very upset about that.
And so what's interesting to me about that is a pandemic is a crisis. We were obviously in a huge moment there where things felt very precarious, but we're still in a crisis, you know, talking about the wage disparity and income inequality, but also the fact that
Medical debt is the top cause of bankruptcy in America, or baby formulas, one of the most shoplifted items. This is a tough environment that we're asking people to operate in without any social safety net really to speak of compared to our peer nations. And the pandemic kind of laid bare that inherent silliness of the argument about just hustle harder and you'll make it happen because...
look at where we are now. The economy, by most measures, is in great shape. We have low unemployment, stock markets booming, wages have gone slightly up, and there is no sense of optimism or happiness about where we are. There is this huge disparity in the lived reality of it and what some people are calling the vibes. What I really wanted to hone in on and the point you make is that there's this
over-emphasis again and again in the United States on the individual. The individual is going to make it on their own. The individual has to make it on their own. That's true success is you're out there, you're working hard and you get what's coming to you. And if you can't do that, it's your fault. And if you're not doing that, we're not going to help you. And you have some interesting examples. Tell me about the pioneer woman and the community she lives in.
In the book, I traveled around the country and one place I wanted to go was Oklahoma because there are so many different facets of kind of opportunity mythology there. You have Route 66, you have the Trail of Tears, which is another sad aspect of the way that people have been moved around.
and forced to move in the country, you have the Okies who headed west after the Dust Bowl. So I ended up on the Osage Reservation there, and I was basically learning about how they're trying to revive the Osage language because of the Indian boarding school program, which sought to force indigenous students to learn English and only speak English and give up their culture and become individualistic instead of communal. They are trying to revive now the language. And this is happening in a town that also hosts
the Food Network star Pioneer Woman, who is re-drummond. And she is part of this comically powerful force of
landowners in Oklahoma that the cousin is currently running for governor and they own plots of land that are 25 times the size of Manhattan and they wield political influence. And they also own Indian head rights going back a hundred years for the oil. What's Indian head rights? Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm in the weeds on this a little too much. So if you saw Killers of the Flower Moon, a big way that the Osage community made a lot of money was that they had been
sent to live on this barren part of Oklahoma by the federal government. And it ended up being extremely valuable land because they found a ton of oil under it. And what happened was they ultimately didn't allow the Osage people to spend the money. They had people who served as guardians for them, and they got paid in installments for the oil riches. And those are called head rights. And a lot of the head rights that belonged to the Osage community ended up in the hands of people who were preying on them.
and handling their finances, but also taking money off the side and doing shady tactics and dealings that you would expect.
And to this day, they still pay out Indian head rights for the oil. And some of those head rights, about a quarter of them belong to people outside of the community, including Pioneer Woman's family, who is part of this, I guess, kind of stylized version of American frontier life. The show that she stars in is all about what it's like to be someone who lives on the range, you know, making dinners and being active in her family and
And it's another version, sort of like Emily in Paris, where all of the troubles of life kind of disappear. Emily in Paris is a fantasy, and so is the frontier range life that Reed Drummond sort of portrays. And it's interesting to see why these shows are popular, in part because...
People need that real escapism to get away from the crushing realities that, you know, dinner isn't always going to be on the table the way it is, you know, at the piner woman's table. There isn't the time or energy to kind of devote towards leisurely pursuits. And that is something that is causing loneliness and strife and anger and
That's sort of why I think the escapist fantasies of those shows really stand out. But the pioneer woman, the whole thing, she's sort of like a proto-trad wife. She's out there. Yes. She's a pioneer. I mean, that sort of connotes individuality, ruggedness, getting it done. Yeah. But underneath that, there was this terrible history you're talking about of a community that had their wealth taken from them that went to
Yeah.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's a through line. That's a through line throughout history. You know, I think we have such a difficult time reckoning with our history because we focus so much on the idea that we are meant to be self-made people in American life. That is a cherished value, the self-reliance, the focus.
But now, if you look at history and you go back to colonies even and carry that all the way through to the frontier and beyond to the modern hustle culture, it's a myth and it's not true. America came alive singing songs to liberty and freedom and none of the feudal baggage of Europe where you're born into nobility, where you had the opportunity to rise up and be socially mobile on your own steam.
And at the same time, you have people like Benjamin Franklin, who was held up as this tinker, this classic American icon of...
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, again, another myth. But he lived in a time of slavery. He posted notices for runaway enslaved persons and profited off of that. And he lived in a time where the entire country was benefiting economically from unpaid work, from slavery. People who are working very hard. Yes. Very, very hard work. Yes. Zero, zero bet.
Exactly. So this carries all the way through. The frontier is another part of that mythology where we imagine a pioneer with a flaming towel working their way through the rugged wilderness to create civilization. But there are already people living there. And those movements westward were funded by big business. They were given government grants. They were given government subsidies. They were encouraged by federal funds and troops.
that cleared the land and fought native people on the land to clear it of people. So it wasn't as if this happened completely because of one person's individual grit. It was because of longstanding policies that created the environment to make that actually possible. But we leave that part out of it because it undercuts the myth. We like the idea of us being heroic, westward moving people. And this is something that
That even in Trump's second inauguration speech just this past week, we saw him reference the frontier and that mythology of traveling westward and civilizing the land. And that is something that we just can't shake despite the fact that we know on many levels it's just not true.
It's so interesting too, because setting ethics and morality and all that aside, setting it aside, the accomplishments of the United States, the things we achieve through these arguably, well, through these immoral, unethical acts, colonialism, et cetera, those were the result of hard work. That is true. But it was also a communal effort. Yeah.
It's also the work of a collective government, like doing things for a certain group of people it favors. But the fact that we downplay that piece of it means it just makes it so much harder to get
done for the good of any group of people now in the United States. Do you know what I mean? Like I write, I used to less lately so much about paid parental leave and how the U S is the only country that doesn't have it in the whole world, blah, blah, blah. And every time I used to write about this, especially back at the wall street journal, we used to get emails that were like, if you choose to have kids, you're on your own, do it yourself. Shouldn't get paid leave. Shouldn't get any money. It's that same attitude of individualism just holds back things.
things that would be good collectively for everyone, it endlessly frustrates me. So I'm glad to talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the title of the book, 99% Perspiration, comes from Edison. And I sort of wanted to pick on Edison a little bit because he's held up, again, in the sort of Benjamin Franklin model as this industrious, innovator, tinkerer, inventor type. And he was undoubtedly a genius and one of our best writers.
However, he didn't succeed because he just worked hard. He succeeded because he had high placed contacts in government and he had government research and subsidies and he had underlings and he had mentors. He had the benefit of mentors. And the modern day aspirant of Edison is Elon Musk, who again is held up as this figure of American success, of American achievement, despite the fact that he inherited a lot of wealth and
We paid for a lot of his innovation. He tells us all to work really, really hard. He has this crazy workweek formula that basically says 80 hours a week if you can, 100 hours a week is where the real good stuff happens. And people idolize him for that. They valorize him as this symbol of success and hard work and ingenuity. But none of that stuff happens without
our tax dollars without workers who aren't making the billions of dollars that he is, risking their own safety. If you look at a lot of the SpaceX safety records, there have been a lot of injuries and deaths at those facilities. And that gets written out of the story because the individual here is what we focus on, not the communities that supported it.
the initiatives, the teachers in the roads and all the things we hear about around campaign time, but also the tax dollars, just the things that we're actually paying for in terms of the innovation. And that's really disappointing because
If we focus less on the individual, we wouldn't see success and failure as a moral thing. It wouldn't be a force of character. It would be an institutional failure. And that's really what we're getting away from. That's why there's so much shame and anger and failure and needing help. And that's a lot of the extremism and xenophobia and racism we're seeing on display today is from people who I think feel
ashamed that they need help in this economy and have been made to feel as if they've been told to work hard all their lives, they're doing the right thing. And it must be someone else's fault that they're not getting where they're going. Okay. I think we should take a break. But when we come back, I want to ask you about, I think the story I found the most frustrating in your book, the one that was just like, I cannot believe this happened.
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The most frustrating story, the one that made me scream the most, was about Yaa Gyasi, who is this woman who came to the U.S. in the 1990s as a kid from Korea, grew up undocumented, and she couldn't afford college. She wanted to be a doctor, but she had to sort of like let go of that dream. And then...
She got this incredible opportunity. Can you tell us what that was? Yeah. It's one of those stories that just kind of, I don't know, rearranges your mind a little bit in terms of thinking about what we cherish in American life and when we talk about opportunity and success. Yeah, JC is a woman who arrived from Korea when she was nine years old, undocumented,
She lived as best she could in difficult circumstances where she lived in Southern California and her friends in high school would go take trips to Mexico, which she couldn't do because she put herself in danger. Those are those small things that really illuminate how precarious things are for you. And she worked in restaurants and she was sort of uncertain about what she could make of herself in large part because she
She was undocumented and there was a lot of risk involved in anything that she wanted to do. And ultimately the U.S. after 9-11 creates a program called MAVNI and it focuses on giving people who don't have status or are immigrants citizenship if they commit themselves to the army doing jobs that Americans can't do, which is another trope when we talk about immigration is that they're doing a lot of the work that Americans can't or won't do. So she speaks Korean. She joins NAVNI.
the army and she's sent to actually Korea where she works as a translator and as a doctor and becomes... She works as a doctor? She's trained as medical staff and ultimately becomes a doctor down the line. But while she's in the army, she's getting all of this training and she's really finding herself. She's experiencing this burst of opportunity really
meeting a pathway forward for her after years and years of not having that. And she returns to the States and ultimately is discharged from the army because they canceled the MAVNI program after years of success stories and essentially put people like her who had served the army in limbo and
by not granting them citizenship, by holding it up, and essentially by saying that you were suspicious because you had foreign ties, even though the whole point of them signing on was because they had these other language skills or abilities that Americans didn't have. And it's a really frustrating story in large part because this is exactly who you want to become an American citizen, somebody who is devoted to finding a way forward and pursuing
participating and being a citizen, not just an individual, being a citizen. And eventually she manages to get her citizenship. But the harrowing part of the story is she then spends a lot of her time going down to Mexico where she is spending time with deported veterans who were in the exact same boat that she was in. They came back from the army and they ran into trouble with the laws, a lot of people who leave the army do, and they ultimately got deported despite serving in the army. They weren't citizens and they were thrown out of the country.
And it's a really difficult story in large part because these are people who came out of the army and didn't have support and were kind of left to find their own way in a difficult circumstance. And because they didn't have citizenship, they were deported despite having risked their lives to serve the country. That's just unbelievable to me. I mean, the whole point of the program was come serve the United States and at the end
will make you a citizen. You are literally like earning your citizenship. And the United States has done this for, I thought, for a long time. That was like a way for people to become citizens, join the military. We're desperate. We're an all-volunteer army. And then it turns out they lure her into the military with the promise of citizenship.
pull the rug out from under her and from under all these other people. They're stuck in Mexico now. They can't be citizens. And I have to imagine this is only going to get worse in the current administration that there
there would be no appetite to do things like this. Am I right that it wasn't just MAVNI, but this is sort of like a long standing tradition? Yes, this is a long standing tradition. You know, going back to Valley Forge, there were immigrants who were promised citizenship serving in the army. And that goes all the way through World War II was kind of the high water mark of people serving hundreds of thousands of troops from other countries were serving here and doing it as a way to not just join society, but become American in all these different ways.
And more recently, we have seen the xenophobia rear its head. And the way that this plays out is that the US Army has a recruitment problem. They're not doing well. And so they're lowering the standards for who can join the ranks as a result of it. And that means we're getting people who have perhaps not up to the normal standards of health or
psychological well-being or people who have espoused racist beliefs. So there's unfortunately a white supremacist sort of thread in the army. And that is something that, just broadly speaking about the military, is something that people have raised alarms about. And those are shortfalls that could be made up by bringing more people in from around the world who are desperate and eager to serve and would do the best possible job they could.
Again, it's another frustrating aspect of how we treat citizenship and what we see in terms of immigration. And there had been some positive momentum in terms of lobbying and sort of what they call humanitarian parole issued by the Biden administration. They were slowly bringing some of these people back who served in the army and were, you know, were isolated in places like Tijuana. And, um,
Unfortunately, I would imagine that that stops. And these are people who have never known a place like Mexico as an adult, don't speak the language, have family living in the United States, family connections, jobs that they've all been separated from entire lives. And that is something that deportation really speaks to when we talk about it as sort of this abstract thing of separating people who don't have citizenship. We're also dividing communities.
And that's something that we miss when we talk about this deportation threat in terms of rending the social fabric of American life. I understand how in this case, her hard work didn't lead to a straight path to citizenship. But how do you think this whole story relates back to the thesis of your book? How does it tie back to...
the myth of individualism or the myth of 99% perspiration? It's a great question. And I wrestled with it a little bit too, because I thought the story was so important. But for me, the idea of earning it has been a big part of the earning your citizenship, earning your status here has been a big part of what it means to be an American producing.
being productive and serving in the army is meant to be one of those things that you can do to tangibly show your commitment to, um,
the country as a national project and the defense of communities. And so the way that this connects to me to the individualistic story, first of all, the way that we market the army as an army of one, be all you can be, it's inherently very individualistic. And I think that that's a really fascinating component of what we talk about, even as the army is supposed to be this thing that is, first of all, it is the most beloved institution we have in terms of public opinion polls, but it's this cohering force where
all of these people from different walks of life come together and serve. And that is a powerful emblem of community. But again, that's not really how we talk about it. And that's not really how it's marketed. And that's not really how we're drawing from communities anymore. It's narrowed as our country has gotten more divided and more polarized. It has become a thing that
The army is a signifier of a certain political persuasion and all of those other things that we've kind of lost. In a way that threatens democracy, that seems anti-democratic to not have people want to serve their country or to have the army have this kind of reputation for drawing in people with extremist ideology.
Well, I want to switch gears a little bit. When we first got on, you said for the book, you were talking to a lot of people who are overworked and that was cathartic for you. What did you mean by that? Well, I've been traveling to do events for the kind people and friends and family who owe me favors to come out and support the book and go to events and talk about things. But
You have good conversations with people that are facilitated. Then you have a Q&A segment of a book talk. And this is something where anything goes. And you'd be surprised at the kind of questions that come up.
And what I've really found over the last few weeks of being out on the road is people are really eager and kind of desperate to talk about how unsustainable life feels in America right now in ways that I think speak to the loneliness and sort of isolation that we're all feeling. And also the need for an open space to air those kinds of feelings that feels unbearable.
safe or non-judgmental. And that's not what I ever intended with the book, but it's been a really fascinating thing to have people talk about childcare and needing everything to go right in order to have just a day go by or a month or a year go by without some kind of
calamity, destabilizing their lives. And I'm not talking about people who are struggling financially. I'm talking about well-to-do people with college degrees and nice jobs and dual income households who are absolutely underwater in terms of
responsibilities in terms of making it all work. And it's genuinely surprising to kind of hear these stories. It's not surprising in a lot of ways, but it is surprising because these are the people who are most set up to succeed in theory, who are looking around and saying, this isn't working out. This is really stressful and really isolating and atomizing.
And it's just been a surprise and it's been fascinating to be privy to those kinds of conversations, in part because it does feel weirdly therapeutic and cathartic. And I'd be interested to know if these are conversations you have among your friends or people around you that, again, kind of speak to surprise based on the ideals that we cherish of society.
Getting a good job, getting an education and focusing on, you know, the balance of life and family and work and having that still be completely upended when one small thing goes wrong. Yeah, I think it really does come back to this, the pernicious idea of individualism that is so foundational today.
In the U.S. because you're like told to get the great job and to go to the great school and to make it on your own. And then you quote unquote make it sort of and you're on your own and you don't have the support that you need to do family partnerships.
education, like to raise children, to be all Clinton about it, like takes a village and, you know, we're losing the village and becoming increasingly more isolated and alone, right? The Surgeon General was at this last year, I guess, warned that Americans were really lonely. And I think that does go back to, comes back to your book, Adam. So thank you for writing it. Thank you so much.
It's meant to also be fun in large part because the history is so kind of absurd and has these really bizarre curiosities about innovation and the ideas that we have around it. So I had a lot of fun writing it, even though the subject matter is,
Again, I wrote it before the election. And now that we have gone through this process and we are in Trump 2.0, it has a different heaviness and weight and burden that I think is really emblematic of Trump.
the struggles that people are going through that we're too disconnected from each other to have effective feedback mechanisms to understand why. I think that's really what a lot of it comes down to is that we're not just politically divided. We are economically divided. We don't live in neighborhoods where, you know, a doctor and a doc worker would, you know, their kids would play on the same street or go to the same school anymore. And that was truer in the 1980s. That was true in the 1990s. You can look at the data of how we've clustered. And it's really challenging to understand
have good faith towards people you don't know who believe in different things if you don't have access to them. And that is a big part of our struggle. It is social and it is economic and it is civic and it really all encompasses the world of work that is our main lens for seeing what life is here. And that's not good for us. We're really seeing how that's playing out badly.
Okay. I think I'm going to end it there. I don't think. Do you want, I could, I mean, I have a joke maybe. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Hit us with a joke or something weird that you learned out, out on your American, your grand American road trip. Oh God, this is going to be depressing now too. Okay. No. Okay. The. We're not adding it if it's depressing. So. You know, the one about the guy at the calendar factory. Well, he got fired for taking a day off. Yeah.
Oh my God. That was funny like 20 years ago, wasn't it? 20 years ago, that was a killer joke. And now we're like, uh, don't, maybe not. I'm impressed you remember it. I can't remember a single joke. Maybe I'll remember that one because we have it here on the podcast for posterity. Adam, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. This is a real pleasure and I'm grateful for your time.
And that's it for our show this week. Thanks to Jessamyn Molly and Shaina Roth for producing. Ben Richmond is Senior Director of Podcast Operations. I'll be back in your feed on Saturday along with Elizabeth and Felix for a regular episode of Slate Money. And until then, thanks for listening.
Get that Angel Reef special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends?
Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories. About campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is: Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time?
What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.