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When on? Foundation. Learn more at architecture.org. When I was a young nerd.

If I could only find a man like Aragorn.

I'm Tricia Bobita. I'm Greta Johnson, and from WBeeZ Chicago, this is The Nerdette Podcast. This week on the show, The Origin Story of one of the greatest nerds in all of public radio. And one of my favorites in all of pop culture. Peter Sagal. Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Quiz Show, Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, is here to talk to us about when he once turned his back on his nerdy passions, why he now loves Game of Thrones.

And why you should get a dog.

We are now officially part of the WBEZ podcast family.

This is the first episode launching season two, but it's not really a be easy

podcast until you make an appearance. So thank you for coming. And until you get the tattoos. Right. This is our bat mitzvvah. Oh, yeah. We're working on that. We're not official in the family. Today you are a podcast. Exactly. That's hilarious. Now it's official. Yep. So here on Nerdette, we like to think of nerd as a verb. So it's just anything that people are sort of obsessed with, passionate about.

You could be a baseball nerd, you could be a Star Trek nerd, you could be a nerd about just about anything. I have a problem with that. You do? Right off the top. All right. Because, and I've been somewhat vocal about this, when I was a young nerd, it was not a term of approbation. No one

ever walked around and said, hey, I'm a nerd for whatever. And these days, it's become a word

meaning enthusiast, maybe even fanatic, maybe expert. I've met people who call themselves

sex nerds. There's a woman actually who has the sex nerd podcast. Yes, Sandra.

My attitude toward to this is, A, when I was a young nerd, being a nerd meant you didn't have sex.

So sex nerd is an oxymoron.

Secondly, I'm actually serious about this.

Imagine you're a gay man, say, in your 60s.

And you're looking around and you're seeing these wonderfully happy out gay kids in their 20s or in 30s and they're having wonderful lives and they're out and they're just enjoying the freedom to be out and gay. But you're a 60-year-old gay man and you look at them and you're like, I'm very happy for them. But when I was their age, I was closeted, I was persecuted, it was tough, it was difficult, it was a struggle, it was hard to find people like me.

That's how I feel, looking at you young people calling themselves nerds.

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