A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.

If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this American Life.

org.

For three weeks, Joe Biden said as forcefully as a human being possibly could say that he would not step down.

And for three weeks it was this agonizing drip, drip, of people trying to get him to reconsider and

of voters around the country wondering if he was going to reconsider fed by a

steady stream of daily news stories that red tea leaves and applied electron

microscopes to the tiniest scraps of evidence looking for any miniscule

signs indicating that maybe it could happen maybe Biden would rethink things.

Democrats wondering what it might take to 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

Nicky Haley who once called Trump unhinged another former Trump rivals

People who once seem like they hated Trump and spoken out against him.

Took the stage to show how they'd reconsidered.

And even Trump himself, the centerpiece of the whole thing, seemed to be presenting himself as a changed man,

somebody who would reconsider who he wants to be in the wake of his near assassination.

He presented a notably gentler, uniter, not divider, side of himself. All this reconsideration of course was in the

service of getting the swing voters of the swing states do some reconsideration

...