All right, everybody. How you doing out there? Welcome to the program. This is Brad Listy. This is The Other People Show. I'm in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you. I hope you're doing okay wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow the show on social media, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, and support the show at

patreon.com slash other ppl pod.

Today I have a new flashback episode for you, a relatively new tradition here on the program

where I share outtakes from the archives.

Today I'm going to be sharing an outtake from a 2019 conversation that I had with

Tim O'Brien. Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Caciato.

His other books include The Things They Carried, which was a Pulitzer finalist and was named by the New York Times as

a book of the century. His novel in the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize,

and in 2013, Tim O'Brien was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Along with that, there is the good news that Tim O'Brien has a brand new novel due out later this

year. It is called America Fantastica, and it will be published in October by Mariner Books.

I spoke with Tim O'Brien in episode 616 of this podcast, back when he was out

touring the country in support of his memoir entitled Dad's Maybe Book. He came to my house. This is

when I was doing in person still before the pandemic and before everything got turned upside down. And it remains to this

day one of the most powerful and most memorable exchanges that I've had on this show. It really

stuck with me. And I've thought about it a lot since it happened, wondering why it was so impactful.

And the truth is, I don't fully know. I know that Tim and I really hit it off.

So maybe we were just in a good mood. Maybe there was something in the air. You never quite know

why this stuff happens. But there was a magic for me anyway to this conversation. You would have

to ask Tim if he agrees. But for me, it was really quite something.

So much so that I ended up memorializing it a bit in my novel, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything,

which features, among other things, a narrator named Brad, who has a podcast called other people

...