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Life Kit

Lost your keys? A better way to find them

Life Kit

NPR

Health & Fitness, Self-improvement, Kids & Family, Education, Business

4.33.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Searching for an item you've misplaced, like a passport, wedding ring or keys, can get frustrating quickly. Luckily, there are tips to help make your search process faster, smoother and calmer. Life Kit digital editor Malaka Gharib talks with visual search experts about their best tricks for finding what's lost. This episode originally published October 31, 2024.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

0:05.4

RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.

0:12.1

Learn more at RWJF.org.

0:15.6

You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.

0:23.4

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

0:25.8

A few years ago, our digital editor, Malika Grieb, lost her passport two days before a big international trip.

0:32.7

Getting a new passport expedited would cost her hundreds of dollars, and she wasn't sure if it would even get to her in time.

0:38.2

You can imagine how stressed I was. I mean, the last time I saw my passport was on the bed.

0:42.6

But I retraced my steps about a dozen times and nothing. She was so stressed about the missing

0:47.9

passport. She even took off work to look for it. I mean, I was really frazzled. I tore up the

0:52.9

house, and I was checking the most random places like the bathroom cabinets.

0:57.8

That experience made Malika think, you know, there has to be a more methodical way of finding lost objects.

1:04.2

Right. I mean, like, what do researchers know? And what about people like detectives and search and rescue responders, how do they hunt stuff down?

1:11.5

On this episode of Life Kit, how to find the stuff you've lost. And we're not just going to tell

1:16.3

you to look harder if you've lost something. Malica will bring you useful techniques to find

1:21.3

things that don't have an air tag on them, whether that's something sentimental, like a

1:26.1

class ring, or something valuable, like an

1:29.2

envelope pull of cash, or something you need to cross the border.

1:32.9

And I'll reveal how I finally found my missing passport.

2:02.9

I'm going to... Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

2:09.9

RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.

2:12.9

Learn more at RWJF.org.

...

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