Unprepared: Stories about unprepared parents
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we present two stories from people who found themselves without the tools they needed.
Part 1: When Jack Walsh finds out his first child will be born in just a few days, he panics.
Part 2: After experiencing hearing loss, Jeannie Gaffigan receives the startling news that she has a brain tumor.
Jack Walsh is an Emmy-winning television producer, a generally engaging storyteller, a halfway-decent writer, and the world’s worst guitar player. He has performed at the Moth, the Atlanta Science Festival, DragonCon, and, strangely, a Yom Kippur service. A native of Canton, NC, he now lives in Decatur, GA, with his wife and two daughters.
Jeannie Gaffigan is a director, producer and comedy writer. She co-wrote seven comedy specials with her husband Jim Gaffigan, the last 5 of which received Grammy nominations. Jeannie was the head writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW, and collaborated with Jim on the two New York Times Bestsellers, DAD IS FAT and FOOD A LOVE STORY. Jeannie’s own book, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU PEARS, debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Jeannie, with the help of her two eldest children and some other crazy moms, created THE IMAGINE SOCIETY, INC., a not for profit organization that connects youth-led service groups. Most impressively, she grew a tumor on her brain stem roughly the size of pear.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt right. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. We are your host, Erin Barker, and Liz Neely. And this week, in keeping with our recent themes, turns out we're presenting stories about being unprepared. |
| 0:39.6 | I think a lot of us felt unprepared for this current moment in time. |
| 0:44.6 | I mean, yeah, how could we, how could we not? |
| 0:47.2 | It just, I mean, I'm somebody who loves my spreadsheets and my color coding and my plans and my strategies and being unprepared so |
| 0:55.3 | profoundly unprepared it just hurts and it's really it's upsetting and scary yeah for for others of us |
| 1:03.4 | the feeling of being unprepared is a little more familiar but still still what can we do |
| 1:10.6 | about the fact that we feel so unprepared right now? |
| 1:13.8 | Oh, I have a couple ideas. And for me personally, the first is like just acknowledging the fact |
| 1:19.7 | that we can't predict, like all the worrying and all the attempts to control everything |
| 1:24.5 | are not going to help us be better prepared in the future. That's the |
| 1:28.3 | nature of disasters, right? But for me, another really big idea is what's called the cycle of |
| 1:37.1 | panic and neglect. This is something my husband Ed wrote about before, that when an emergency |
| 1:42.9 | hits, we all freak out. |
| 1:44.5 | But then once it passes, we tend to do things like we cut funding and then we relax our, |
| 1:49.7 | you know, our preparedness measures. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Story Collider, Inc., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Story Collider, Inc. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.