It's not like New Zealand was like, oh, no, I couldn't possibly have all the nuclear arms people are trying to give me.

Welcome to your wrong about. I'm Sarah Marshall.

It is the fall.

And we are joined today by our 80s correspondent Maris Kreitzman, author of I Want to Burn This Place Down.

We're going to have a conversation today about the Cold War, about what it was like to be a kid in the 80s, about the

responsibilities that we put on children as adults in a world where we feel perhaps a little

bit too much licensed to be cynical. And more than anything about a 10-year-old girl named

Samantha Smith, who did everything that she could to remind us of our shared

humanity. And we are also going to talk just a little bit about the Golden Girls. I loved having

this conversation with Maris today about both a topic that came to mean a lot to us and also about

what it's like to inhabit a world where your youthful idealism has to

galvanize into something that you are able to keep feeling and living and doing day by day

and what exists in the place between idealism and cynicism.

And I'm very happy to go to that place with you. We also loved

getting to talk about the book that we read to research this topic, which is America's Youngest

Ambassador by Lena Nelson. There's so much more to this story than we could get into.

Please seek it out and read it and also go to samantha smith.infra.

We also have, as always, some very fun bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus,

and our most recent one with Hollywood correspondent Eve Lindley is about, of course,

Alvira, Mistress of the Dark, and Cassandra Peterson, the woman behind the boobs.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for taking this journey with us and for continuing your own journey day by day.

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