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 going to 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 with Life Partners now pay for almost 25% of our budget, which is huge.

And sincerely, thanks to all of you who signed up.

But looking ahead, we need that number to be 50%.

That's what to 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 here, 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.

This is not how most podcasts are made.

Of the 400,000-plus podcasts that are being made right now, most of them are, you know, their interviews or their

conversations without all those extra steps. We would like to believe that there is still a future

for this old school way of making a show. And we see that future with your help. And, you know, you get stuff when you sign up. You get bonus episodes.

There's a greatest hits archive that you get in your podcast feed. You get to listen without any

ads. But you don't have to want that stuff. You just need to want the thing that you're going to hear

...