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My apologies that this article is behind a pay wall. This is a story about Sabrina, who has autism, and her parents. It details the struggles that Sabrina's parents face in getting her the care she needs. Sabrina engages in aggression and self-injurious behavior. Sabrina's behaviors have resulted in 911 calls and emergency hospital visits.

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Thirteen-year-old Sabrina Benedict, center, with her parents, Crystol and Jeremy. Credit... Libby March for The New York Times

The Great Read

Unpredictable violence, chaotic outbursts and countless trips to the emergency room. What happens when an autistic teenager becomes unmanageable at home?

Thirteen-year-old Sabrina Benedict, center, with her parents, Crystol and Jeremy. Credit... Libby March for The New York Times

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The other children were heading home after school. But not Sabrina Benedict. A progression of mishaps had sent her into a tailspin. Earlier in gym class, a much smaller boy had sprinted toward her, scaring her. Then a teaching assistant had deviated slightly from their usual goodbye routine.

Now mid-meltdown, she lay prone on the sidewalk outside her school, her legs dangling in the street. She was only 13 years old, but she was 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, far larger than any of the teachers or school administrators who stood nearby, watching with concern. For a moment, the only sound was Sabrina's loud moans. She threw a shoe at a teacher. She took off her shirt. She cursed at the school staff arranged around her in a protective circle.

Summoned to the scene, her parents tried to soothe her. She kicked and swung until they backed off. On the Sabrina tantrum scale, so far this registered only a 4 out of 10, declared her father, Jeremy Benedict, who was pacing nearby. "It could go either way."

She might stand up, ready to go home. Or she might start smashing her head on the pavement. A knot tightening in his chest, her father focused on his breathing exercises.

This was the third time this week he had rushed to school for one of Sabrina's meltdowns. Lately, similar scenes had unfolded in doctors' offices, parking lots, Walmart, hospitals, on street corners and inside the raised ranch house where the Benedict family lives in Homer, N.Y., a town of 6,293 nestled in a valley near the geographic center of the state.

Sabrina, who was given a diagnosis of autism coupled with a rare genetic disorder, has exhibited aggressive behavior since she was a little girl. Now she towers over her parents. When she is happy, she gives them great big hugs, knocking them slightly off balance. When she is feeling shy, she crouches behind them. When she is frustrated, she sometimes hits them.

There have been so many 911 calls this past year that the family invited over several police officers and paramedics to meet Sabrina under more positive circumstances, when they weren't restraining her or strapping her to an ambulance stretcher.

On that October afternoon outside school, Sabrina eventually calmed herself. It was just another day, soon difficult to remember, as Sabrina's outbursts accelerated.

There is no widely recognizable name for the crisis that has gripped the Benedict family. But dozens of New York families with an autistic child are struggling through a version of it right now.

What the children and their caregivers are going through is not new. By adolescence, or sometimes earlier, a small percentage of children with autism become unmanageable for their parents, and no amount of parental patience or devotion will change that.

The pandemic has made matters worse, drawing more families into crisis and deepening it for those already there. When New York shut down in March 2020, the carefully designed routines and support systems relied on by families of autistic children largely vanished. Without school and day programming, the behavior of many autistic children regressed. Some stopped sleeping through the night; others began harming themselves for the first time.

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In interviews, parents across New York State described the same scenes of fear and helplessness: being attacked by an adolescent child, now bigger and more aggressive than before. The dread that their child might turn on a younger sibling. Their growing helplessness as their child's self-injuring behavior - relatively common among autistic children - escalates. The emergency room visits when there was nowhere else to go. And their eventual realization that the family home may be the wrong setting for their child.

A father in Brooklyn described his anguish at watching his autistic son smash his head repeatedly against the hardest nearby surface: the wall, the floor, the detachable shower head. A mother in Albany described her daughter's wild behavior: endless twirling, chewing on walls. Earlier this year, the girl was found in the yard with a broken arm, having either jumped or fallen out of a second-story window.

"One of the glaring weaknesses of the system is there is no real option for families whose children fall into that category," said Christopher Treiber, an associate executive director at the InterAgency Council of Developmental Disability Agencies.

A half-century ago, many children with autism ended up in notorious state institutions like the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, where those with developmental disabilities were left untended in filthy wards or strapped to beds.

In the years since these institutions were closed, there has been a clear presumption about what's best for many children with intellectual or developmental disabilities: They should live at home through childhood, attending special education classes and programs, eventually moving into group homes at some point in adulthood.

And for decades, this policy has kept families intact and provided richer, more connected lives for those with such disabilities. But the presumption can fail a small number of families like the Benedicts.

"We're not safe, and she's not safe," said Sabrina's mother, Crystol, who has sustained several concussions while trying to calm her daughter.

The state's answer to these families is to provide more support in the home. The Benedicts, like many people in a similar situation, were given a case manager and a budget to hire a home aide for their child. But a single aide is often unable to handle an aggressive teenager.

But if home life is untenable, where should Sabrina live?

In New York State, there are around 50 residential schools, mostly private and expensive, that specialize in working with children with disabilities ranging from autism to traumatic brain injuries. But the demand for spots is great, and these institutions are generally able to pick and choose whom to accept.

Each year, to meet this need, New York will pay, often grudgingly, for around 300 children with disabilities to attend out-of-state programs. Autistic children make up the largest share.

Still, these programs can be life-changing. Parents describe how their children, unmanageable at home, grew more communicative, resilient and happier and became less aggressive. They credit the structure and the rules the school provides, the responsive therapists and the experience of living with peers.

But gaining admission is a slow and sometimes adversarial process. The government can be reluctant to approve these placements, which can cost more than $300,000 a year - a cost shared by a local school district and other government agencies.

And placements usually happen only after a school district has proved unable to provide an "appropriate" education in a special education classroom. That can take months, even years. In this calculus, a deteriorating home life, like the one experienced by the Benedicts, receives relatively little weight.

By late last year, some 30 programs had rejected Sabrina. One objected to her "high level and frequency of aggression," according to a spreadsheet Jeremy keeps. Another stated: "Can't meet her needs." Another explained: "This youth would require 1:1 supervision in our milieu, and currently we are at max capacity in our milieu for youth who require 1:1 supervision."

The Benedicts still find happy moments in their home. Sometimes they play Uno together. Sabrina brims with enthusiasm as she shows her mother ballet moves, or talks about upcoming holidays, her favorite foods or her day at school. Or they flip through photo albums, remembering a vacation to Assateague Island.

One afternoon last year, Sabrina sat at the kitchen counter, drawing an intricate blueprint of a house where she imagined one of her teachers lived. When Crystol arrived home, Sabrina ran to greet her. Then she flopped down on the sofa in anticipation of a massage. Her mother knelt beside her. Crystol pretended to make a pizza on her daughter's back - kneading dough, spreading sauce and sprinkling cheese.

But within the hour, Sabrina would be overwhelmed with disappointment, frustration or an emotion she could not name. She would stomp her foot, hard. And begin to wail.

"Do you need help?" her father asked, his voice even, his eyes looking away.

Between wails, Sabrina announced, "I'm mad." But she shut down her parents' efforts to talk to her. "I hate you," she said. "Go away!"

At times like this, her mother encourages her to breathe in and breathe out. "Smell the roses and blow out the candles," she says. And her parents stand there frozen, waiting for what happens next.

When Crystol first saw Sabrina, asleep in a bassinet at the hospital, she cried with happiness. It was July 2008. Unable to have a baby on their own, she and Jeremy had become foster parents, planning to adopt. They brought Sabrina home when she was just a day and a half old.

They were undaunted by what the foster care agency told them: Sabrina's biological mother and father both had intellectual disabilities, and the father had been arrested on sexual assault charges.

"We were hoping that it was nurture versus nature, and that nurture was going to take over," Crystol recalled. "But, you know, nature took over."

When Sabrina was 5, genetic testing revealed that she had a rare chromosomal deletion associated with autism and developmental delays.

By then, Sabrina's tantrums seemed different from those of other children. One of the first big struggles unfolded at the optometrist, when Sabrina was held down for eye drops. Afterward, she began kicking her mother and wouldn't get in the car until the police intervened.

A rotation of therapists and counselors visited Sabrina at home. One was so disturbed by what she saw - Sabrina, age 7, slamming into walls and chairs and people - that she urged the Benedicts to call an ambulance. Sabrina spent three weeks in a state psychiatric hospital, the youngest patient there.

By 2018, Sabrina was too big for her parents to pick her up when she flung herself to the ground and refused to get up. By the next year, she was taller than her father, who is 5-foot-10.

Sabrina is more verbal than many autistic children with similar behavioral difficulties. Sometimes after an episode she will tell her parents what triggered her. "I'm really proud of her for that," said Crystol, who is a teaching assistant in a special education classroom. Though Sabrina's meltdowns often erupted quickly, her parents had become attuned to what might set one off. What happened on a July afternoon in 2019 was more frightening. Crystol had been standing at the kitchen counter making her daughter's favorite snack - a mix of nuts, pretzels and marshmallows - as Sabrina excitedly described that day's kickball game at summer school. Then Sabrina's tone changed.

"I'm going to kill you," Sabrina bellowed, before charging at her mother.

"The last thing I remember is her on top of me, hitting me," Crystol recalled. When she regained consciousness, Sabrina was still on top of her. But now Sabrina was pounding on her mother's chest and trying to revive her, clearly terrified.

Mother and daughter both went to the hospital, but in separate ambulances. Crystol had a concussion and a broken hip.

Sabrina, arriving in acute mental distress, would be hospitalized for 44 days. Not, according to the Benedicts, that the hospital had much in the way of treatment for her. That's just where some autistic children frequently land.

They are taken there by the police after violent outbursts or by parents who don't know what else to do. There is, parents and advocates say, literally nowhere else to take their children in an emergency. Though some return home quickly, many others languish in hospitals for months, rarely venturing outdoors and receiving little therapy or programming.

Decades after deinstitutionalization, some autistic children remain stuck in hospitals for lack of other options, and their parents are afraid or unable to bring them home.

Summer Ward, the 10-year-old girl who fell from the window, has been living on the seventh floor of Albany Medical Center for more than 100 days. According to her mother, Tamika Ward, as well as several others who have visited, Summer rarely leaves the hospital, which costs the county close to $3,000 a day. Summer's broken arm has healed, but she remains in a hospital room because no residential school has yet cleared a bed for her and going home is no longer an option.

Similar accounts recur in hospitals across the state, according to interviews with parents, hospital staff and adults who work with disabled children. They describe autistic children and adolescents alone in bare hospital rooms, watching YouTube videos for hours and gaining 10 or 20 pounds or more from inactivity and antipsychotics. Often they spend their days on mattresses on the floor, the chairs removed so they can't be thrown.

At the University of Rochester Medical Center, a 10-year-old girl with autism and nowhere else to go spent more than 152 days there last year, according to the hospital.

"They essentially become institutionalized by living in a hospital," said Dr. Michael Cummings, a Buffalo psychiatrist, who works at Erie County Medical Center.

Dr. Cummings said that, given lengthy wait times for residential-school placement, families need more options beyond the emergency room. He suggested that short-term programs and group homes for children, as well as respite centers for families, could fill the gap.

For Sabrina, it was during that 44-day hospitalization that her parents began to search for a residential placement. Many government agencies were involved: the local social services department, the state's Office of Mental Health, the state Office for People with Developmental Disabilities. During lengthy conference calls, Jeremy marveled at the number of government agencies and social service providers involved. He once counted 26 people on a single call. "They're all here for us," Jeremy recalled thinking.

But he began to reconsider this impression as the weeks passed. It seemed to him that someone on the call was always playing defense, arguing that Sabrina wasn't the right fit for their services. He recalled someone saying her IQ - around 64 - was too low for one program. Others had different objections, sometimes singling out one of Sabrina's diagnoses and saying it made her a different agency's responsibility.

Sabrina eventually got a spot in a short-term program in Buffalo for children with disabilities and mental health problems. Some weekends, her parents drove three hours each way to visit. But the program would keep Sabrina for only about a year, and she returned home in the spring of 2021.

After that, there was a crisis of some sort every three days on average.

Most mornings, Sabrina made it out the front door to go to her special education school in nearby Cortland. But what happened after that was often unpredictable.

Would Sabrina get in the van to school or run down the street? If she got in the van, what would happen when she arrived at school? Would she go inside? Or bang her head against the brick wall? If she went inside, would she make it to her classroom? One morning, her teacher greeted her too emphatically, causing her classmates to all look at her. Sabrina retreated into the hallway and began to grunt.

Jeremy eventually quit his job in quality assurance and food safety at the local university so he would be available to respond to each crisis. He often ended up on the ground with Sabrina, trying to restrain her from banging her head against the pavement. Sometimes he had to immobilize her for 30 minutes or more, the two of them struggling on the sidewalk.

There have been desperate moments when Jeremy has almost wished he could go back in time and undo everything. "I'm guilty of saying it," he said. "I wish I had a time machine."

But Crystol and Jeremy would remind themselves that they were giving Sabrina the best life they could. "It's gut-wrenching to think if we didn't take her in and adopt her, what kind of life would she have? Where would she be?" Jeremy said. "That's the oil that lights our fire and keeps us going."

Last August, Crystol was struggling to buckle Sabrina's seatbelt as her daughter was thrashing wildly, in the midst of a three-hour meltdown. It ended with Crystol unconscious from a blow to the head. It was her fifth Sabrina-induced concussion. Crystol thinks they have begun to affect her memory.

"Whether she knows it or not, I'm afraid of her," Crystol said recently.

Sabrina has a very particular bedtime routine. First she eats seven saltines. Then she play-acts elaborate scenarios. Her parents encourage her to try out happier story lines, but during most of the past year, Sabrina's bedtime play has often involved pretending to be a hospital patient. Instead of healing, she suffers one injury after another. And though she does befriend the nurses, she never leaves.

In December, a for-profit school in New Hampshire offered to admit Sabrina once it hired more staff members. It was the most promising news the Benedicts had heard since they began searching for a long-term residential placement in 2019.

"Boarding school" became the new bedtime game. Sabrina would imagine her first day there. She would get a key to her new room. She would open the door and meet her new roommate.

But as the weeks passed, the school kept shifting the timeline for when Sabrina might start. It might be another nine months. Jeremy and Crystol did not think they could make it that long.

As they played "boarding school" with Sabrina, her parents wondered if they were all preparing for the biggest change of their lives or just playing an imaginary game.

In January, Sabrina ran away from school yet again. It was bitterly cold and the roadside standoff took longer than usual. Afterward, Crystol couldn't stop shivering.

Back home Sabrina refused to change her clothes, which she had soiled. So they struggled some more. Her parents worried she would get another urinary tract infection: Some years, Sabrina had 10 or more, and they often ended in the emergency room, with Sabrina in restraints, screaming as a nurse injected her with sedatives or antipsychotics.

Later that night, Crystol told Jeremy that if he wanted to leave, she would understand. It took a moment for him to realize she meant leave, as in the family breaking apart.

By February, a different residential program - this one in Doylestown, Pa. - had offered Sabrina a spot. The online reviews didn't inspire confidence, but the Benedicts felt reassured after speaking with administrators.

After a few delays, that program, Foundations Behavioral Health, called with a start date: March 28. That month, Sabrina ran away from school once more, getting half a mile down the road. As a police officer blocked traffic, Crystol tried to coax Sabrina into the family van. "I need help," Sabrina said. "I want to go somewhere."

There is this place called Foundations, her mother said. "If you come with me in the van, we can talk about it." Sabrina followed.

In subsequent days, Jeremy and Crystol worried that the breakdowns might accelerate as the departure neared.

The guilt they had felt two years earlier when they began looking for a residential placement had long ago dissipated. They wanted Sabrina to have days that were defined by more than struggles and havoc. "She's been ready for a while," Crystol told herself.

As the start date approached, Sabrina packed and repacked her bag a dozen times. Allowed just one comfort item, she took a hard look at her three favorite dolls.

At bedtime on her last night at home, Sabrina reached her hands far above her head. "I'm this excited." Then she held them out in front of her, about a foot apart. "And I'm this nervous."

In the weeks that followed, Jeremy found a sales job. He and Crystol began to leave home more often. Sometimes they ate out together or strolled calmly down the aisles at Walmart. They had become so isolated, cut off from friends and family.

On one of her first nights at school, Sabrina refused to go to bed and became aggressive, leading staff members to restrain her forcibly, according to Jeremy. Another night she fell in the bathroom, hurting her ankle. And there was another child who seemed to be bullying her, tripping her and hitting her with a stick.

But somewhat miraculously, this has not derailed her. She likes her roommates and the classes, particularly art and dance. She has shown patience and empathy to other children, including a nonverbal classmate who got into Sabrina's toiletries and ate her deodorant.

Jeremy and Crystol visit Sabrina every third or fourth weekend. And each night Sabrina calls home around 7 p.m. That call has become the focal point of her parents' day, the moment they look forward to and then grow apprehensive about as it approaches.

Sabrina never fails to describe what she had for lunch and for dinner. Most evenings she will say: "I had a good day, I'm being good, I didn't have any issues." And very recently, she has started adding, "And I'm not just saying that to make you feel better."

The calls are brief. But most nights they are so reassuring they leave her parents almost giddy.

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Sabrina's Parents Love Her. But the Meltdowns Are Too Much.

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The Great Read Unpredictable violence, chaotic outbursts and countless trips to the emergency room. What happens when an autistic teenager becomes unmanageable at home? Thirteen-year-old Sabrina Benedict, center, with her parents, Crystol and Jeremy. Credit... Libby March for The New York Times Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.

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This is the Alameda County Sherif Department raising money for special olympics.  I took this picture on June 4, 2022 while my husband and I went out to breakfast.  I thought it was a great example of print media instead of digital media.

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I had a hard time choosing which link I wanted to use for Yulissa.  She is the first certified Zumba instructor with Down syndrome.  She travels and gives Zumba lessons across the world. Her personal Instrgram page is here: https://www.instagram.com/yulissaarescurenaga/?hl=en

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0:00 / 1:42•Watch full video

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Meet Yulissa: World’s first certified  Zumba instructor with Down syndrome

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This article was really interesting and had a lot of information. "When children with disabilities attend school, an inaccessible learning environment and a lack of support for learning hinders their education."  Although I knew this seeing it in print it hit me differently.   I've bookmarked this site as I plan to go back to it and read other articles.  Taken directly from the website: "The purpose of the IEI is to accelerate action by countries and support their efforts in making education more inclusive."

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Inclusive Education Initiative: Transforming Education for Children with Disabilities

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Inclusive Education Initiative: Transforming Education for Children with Disabilities

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This is beautiful and I'm glad I found it.  After listening to this song I did a quick google search to learn more about the people singing this song and the story behind the song.  I found an interview with Royston Tan who directed this music video and Don Richmond who composed the music.  In response to one of the questions asked to Don about the inspiration of the song he responded, "It came from a place that recognizes that all of us, every single person, struggle in our own way. But within that struggle to go about our lives lies a spirit that is unbreakable."

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Look Beyond My Disability, See The True Me - 'Fire in the Rain' Music Video

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This is a must listen.  Elsa a Deafblind women tries to reconcile how she feels about Helen Keller.  As a child she was compared to Helen Keller which she hated.  She thought she escaped this until she saw online people saying Helen Keller was fake and everything about her wasn't true.  Elsa being a Deafblind person felt she needed to respond.  There is so much more to this story though and it completely changed what I thought I knew about Helen Keller.

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Fantasy writer Elsa Sjunneson has been haunted by Helen Keller for nearly her entire life. Like Helen, Elsa is Deafblind, and growing up she was constantly compared to her. But for a million different reasons she hated that, because she felt different from her in a million different ways. Then, a year ago, an online conspiracy theory claiming Helen was a fraud exploded on TikTok, and suddenly Elsa found herself drawing her sword and jumping to Helen's defense, setting off a chain of events that would bring her closer to the disability icon than she ever dreamt. For over a year, Elsa, Lulu and the Radiolab team dug through primary sources, talked to experts, even visited Helen's birthplace Ivy Green, and discovered the real story of Helen Keller is far more complicated, mysterious and confounding than the simple myth of a young Deafblind girl rescued by her teacher Annie Sullivan. It's a story of ghosts, surprises, a few tears, a bit of romance, some hard conversations, and a possibly psychic dog. This episode was reported by Elsa Sjunneson and Lulu Miller. It was produced by Sindhu Gnanasambandan and Rachel Cusick, with help from Sarah Qari, Tanya Chawla, and Carolyn McClusker. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Additional Mixing by Arianne Wack.

Special thanks to Georgina Kleege, Julia Bascom, Desiree Kocis, Peter C. Kunze, Andrew Leland, Sara Luterman, Alexander Richey, Will Healy, Nate Jones, Nate Peereboom, and Pamela Sabaugh (who was our voice of Helen Keller).

ASL TRANSCRIPTION

Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.
Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past - like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!Radiolab is on YouTube!

DOWNLOAD BRAILLE READY FILE HERE ( https://zpr.io/s23JtuYxyrNA)

Elsa Sjunneson, Kim Nielsen, Georgina Kleege, Katie Booth, The Invention of Miracles: language, power, and Alexander Graham Bell's quest to end deafness
Haben Girma, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law
Play[ing] her part correctly: Helen Keller as Vaudevillian Freak ," Disability Studies Quarterly Desiree Kocis, " Did Helen Keller Fly A Plane? " (she did), Peter C. Kunze, " What We Talk about When We Talk about Helen Keller ," Children's Literature Association Quarterly
The archives of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

JAD ABUMRAD: Here I am, here I am.

[singing to a jokey improvised tune]

JAD: Lulu Miller, she's a killer. [now confused]

JAD: Do you not hear me, Lulu? I hear you typing.

[clacking stops]

LULU MILLER: Oh, oh, oh, oh. I'm just-hold on. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] I was like, I can hear your deep breathing and typing. And I was like ...

LULU: [laughs] Oh my God, I'm sorry.

LULU: Was I, like, mouth breathing?

JAD: No, it was fine. I just-it wasn't mouthy, so much as I could hear you very close by.

LULU: Okay. Well, now that I've figured out how to operate my headphones, should I just jump in?

LULU: This is Radiolab. And the journey I want to take you on today? First of all, quick warning, it does involve a fair amount of explicit language. There's some swears, so maybe not the right one for kids. And it all really kicks off ...

LULU: [singsong] Elsa can you hear me?

LULU: With a woman named Elsa Sjunneson.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I'm doing well but it's like, this is an insane couple of weeks.

LULU: Elsa is a busy woman. She is a fencer, a swing dancer, a teacher, an activist.

LULU: Do you identify as a sci-fi writer?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I identify as a speculative fiction writer.

LULU: Speculative fiction writer. Okay, so what does that mean for a day?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I get up in the morning and I feed my cat and I make tea. and I sit down at my desk. And then I will kind of [deep tones descend] periscope down for the afternoon to work in my own fantasy world.

[music: slow subtle start, drama brewing]

LULU: She's written stuff for Marvel, published books.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I'm currently working on a novella that is about a blind assassin that involves service dragons.

[drama and excitement of the music stirs, ramps up sharply]

LULU: Oh hell, yes! Okay, so take me back ...

LULU: And anyway, about a year ago ...

LULU: ... and any memories about, like, where you were, what you were doing.

LULU: Elsa got in touch with me to tell me about something that had just happened to her.

ELSA SJUNNESON: So I was in my kitchen in my house that I was living in in Seattle, and I was making shrimp. And because I have ADHD, I was looking at Twitter while also cooking. Not exactly advisable. And I saw this tweet.

[music: fast paced orchestra builds intrigue.]

LULU: A tweet that led her ...

[ ARCHIVE CLIP, TikTok video: [Voice trembling with emotion] I just wanted to say Helen Keller is not fucking real.]

LULU: And then to a whole world of videos.

ELSA SJUNNESON: People on TikTok saying Helen Keller was a fraud.

[orchestral music stops]

JAD: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

JAD: What does that mean? What does that mean? So-are you-well, she was a real lady.

LULU: She was definitely a real lady, but the TikTokers were questioning that story we all know about her. You know, the story that she was both deaf and blind.

LULU: Totally cut off from the world. Until this lady, the quote-unquote "miracle worker," Anne Sullivan, showed up, and then using a technique called finger spelling, taught her language culminating in this dramatic moment by a water pump where Helen Keller finally understood the word "water," and then went on to write a dozen books, tons of articles and travel the world. And the people in these TikTok videos were like ...

[Music reprises. Dramatic, orchestral.]

[Music mellows. the feeling of intrigue remains]

[Crescendo as orchestral music concludes]

LULU: So back in her kitchen in Seattle, Elsa is watching all these videos just so angry.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Honestly yeah, it was rage.

LULU: So she fires off this tweet.

ELSA SJUNNESON: If you think that Deafblind people can't write books you can bite me because I have one coming out in October.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was born partially deaf and partially blind.

LULU: ... herself is Deafblind.

LULU: She has Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids and glasses and reads using a magnifier. That's how she's able to tweet and talk with us today.

LULU: And so her tweet promptly goes viral.

LULU: So then Elsa's kind of watching, like, thousands of likes and reshares. She's suddenly realizing she has thrust herself into the limelight as Helen Keller's bodyguard and defender.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Oh God. Oh no. Just ...

LULU: ... the last thing that she wants to be.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I want nothing to do with this person.

JAD: She felt not good about Helen Keller?

JAD: Wait. So wait. Why would-why would you not have good ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: I spent most of my life feeling constricted by Helen Keller's ghost.

[music: gentle and exploratory. shuffling drums and resonant mallets.]

LULU: Elsa said that the ghost of Helen Keller has messed with her life in such tangible, real ways that it's affected how her life played out. And she's come to see that it's not just her life but all of our lives, our brains that are haunted by Helen Keller in a pretty surprising and insidious way.

[music fades out with echo]

LULU: So allow me to just take you back where the haunting all began for Elsa.

LULU: Okay, so we're going to the mid-'90's Seattle. Nirvana's on the air. Elsa, little Elsa is on the-she's on the floor in her third grade classroom.

LULU: Sitting next to her classmates.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I had giant coke bottle glasses. Like, the 1990s were not kind to low-vision children.

LULU: And her teacher pulls out a picture book about Helen Keller.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I distinctly remember seeing the illustration that sort of everybody sees, which is where she's standing there with her hand underneath the faucet at the pump, signing the word "water" into Annie Sullivan's hand. And, like, I just sort of remember being like, "Well, I know I can't see and I can't really hear that well but, like, this isn't me."

LULU: She said she knew, of course, that she had some trouble seeing.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I ran into things a lot [laughs].

LULU: And some trouble hearing, which became particularly apparent during verbal spelling tests.

ELSA SJUNNESON: The words that I was hearing my classmates say weren't the words that I was supposed to be writing down.

LULU: Oh, so like, they'd say, "Fly," and you'd spell "Thigh" or something.

[music: light, ethereal tones floating in space]

LULU: But whenever someone would compare her to Helen Keller, which she said happened a lot ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: It was always, "But I'm not like that." And I think that's because I was always told, like, "But you're not really Blind. But you're not really Deaf." Like ...

LULU: Elsa says her family had always told her that there was nothing really different about her. You know, "Your glasses are just a little thicker than other kids."

ELSA SJUNNESON: The hearing aids were just, you know, to help me a little bit.

[music stops]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I consistently would try things that were probably not a good idea.

LULU: Things like downhill skiing, horseback riding.

LULU: Oh, I'm looking at the screen. You've got an awesome sword.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Yeah. This is an early 20th-century German dress sword.

[sound of metal on metal]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I have been fencing since I was 9.

JAD: How does-how does that work? Wouldn't it be scary if you can't really see the swords and things?

ELSA SJUNNESON: Fencing is actually not about seeing a sword. You're dealing with the fact that you actually can feel tension in somebody else's blade.

LULU: Yeah. So anyway, Elsa as a kid was doing all this really rad stuff including, you know, the everyday adventures that any kid has in childhood, like climbing trees.

[music: classical guitar plucks here and there, slow, nostalgic]

ELSA SJUNNESON: There was this one tree in Ravenna Park in Seattle. [crickets, rustling leaves, bird chirps] It's enormous. Because of how big this tree was, a lot of light didn't filter through, so it was kind of a dark, hide-y place.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I remember being able to sort of use one spot to kind of lift myself up.

LULU: She knew this tree really well, and knew every branch.

ELSA SJUNNESON: There was sort of a sloping tree bit.

LULU: And she would just go higher ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I remember it was a lot of sliding.

ELSA SJUNNESON: More like whole body contact with the tree.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Eventually, I could get all the way up to the top of the tree.

LULU: How did you feel there?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I felt safe there. It felt like an escape. So one day I was up in the tree, and then the sky opened.

[A rumble. The music swells, reminiscent of rain drops hitting a hard surface]

LULU: There was a huge rainstorm.

ELSA SJUNNESON: The tree had changed. The environment of the tree had changed.

[ominous shift in the music. deep groaning tones]

ELSA SJUNNESON: What if I slipped and now I can't figure out how to grab onto a different spot? And it was kind of like, "Well, how do I get down safely?"

LULU: And suddenly she got lost.

ELSA SJUNNESON: But the texture of the tree had changed. And everything about how I act with my space is about texture.

LULU: She did feel like she knew the world, but then you add rain, and then she's suddenly lost in this tree she knows so well.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I literally couldn't get out of the tree. There were things that I definitely didn't know the limits of until they sort of, smacked me in the face.

[Music builds to a single high-pitched string tone. Then cuts out]

LULU: She said her childhood was scattered with moments like these, moments no one else could really relate to, moments where she wished there was someone who got it. And she said this sense of frustration and loneliness with those frustrations really came to a head when her family moved to New York City ...

[bustling subway turnstiles, footsteps]

[bucket drumming. An increasingly cacophonous mix of pedestrians, trains, and a garbled PA announcement]

ELSA SJUNNESON: You know, in Seattle, my family drove me to school. But in New York, I was getting up every morning at 6:45 and getting on the subway.

[bucket drumming grows louder. Then stops.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I would just stare at the ground.

[The soundscape blurs as a deep drone. Footsteps.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: Because otherwise I would trip and fall.

LULU: And so one morning, it's taking forever for her to get to school.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Like, with stairs I would stop at each step and shuffle my feet out and then I would take a step down.

LULU: And she arrives late to her classroom.

ELSA SJUNNESON: My English teacher stopped me at the door and she was like...

[music abruptly stops]

ELSA SJUNNESON: ...[mocking] "Elsa, I'd like to talk to you for a second about your classmate's essay. He wrote his essay about you and how he admires you, and I would like him to read it out loud in front of the class this morning."

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I'm just like, "Um, what?" [laughs]

LULU: She says, "Okay." Goes and takes her seat.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And he stands up in front of our class and reads his essay. And the first line of the essay is, "I admire Elsa because she's like Helen Keller."

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I just wanted to, like, sink several thousand feet below the surface of the Earth.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I mean, I think-I think I would have been embarrassed. Like, why are you making a big deal of me doing things that everybody else does? Like, everybody else goes on the subway, everybody else goes up and down the stairs at school. Why do you admire me for doing them?

LULU: Did you again have the, like, "And I'm nothing like her." Like, was there also that part of it? He's wrong?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I think it was even more like, "Oh, maybe I am a little bit like her."

[music: piano notes descend repetitively, off-balance.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: Like, I think it might have been the first time I started to realize that there could be something.

LULU: And for Elsa that thought was ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: Terrifying.

[music: deep foreboding bells layer in]

LULU: Because when she thought about what became of Helen Keller as an adult ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: She lives with her teacher and her teacher's husband. Was I just supposed to live with my parents and my grandparents? Like, what was I supposed to do?

[music: somber strings layer in]

LULU: The images Elsa had of Helen Keller's adult life painted a kind of nightmare for her. There was Helen Keller wearing pearls and smiling.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Holding a flower.

LULU: There she was, holding a book. There she was ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: Holding Anne Sullivan's hand. Sitting on Anne Sulivan's lap. As a grown up!

LULU: Slowly growing grayer and grayer.

ELSA SJUNNESON: It seems through the photos ...

LULU: Her smile getting wider and wider.

[Music grows in intensity]

ELSA SJUNNESON: She just becomes more and more of this very, like, staid artifact. Would you want to be compared to somebody whose entire monolithic mythology is about how she had to be taught how to conform?

[music fades out]

LULU: But at the same time, Elsa said that Helen Keller was basically the only role model that she could find for how to be Deafblind. And so she figured to finally free herself from this ghost, from the possibility of ending up with a life like hers is she would run in exactly the opposite direction-doing things that did not conform.

ELSA SJUNNESON: You know, in high school, my PE was stage combat and Lindy Hop, which uses a lot of aerials.

LULU: Things she figured Helen Keller would never do.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I marched. I learned how to be on the front line during the Iraq war protests. Even though I like swords.

LULU: Oh my God, you cannot get away from the nerdery in your story. [laughs]

ELSA SJUNNESON: [laughs] I don't believe governments should be blowing each other up.

LULU: She got deep into activism, anti-war stuff, giving speeches in her high school classes about how the government was failing folks with AIDS, secretly handing out condoms on the campus of a Catholic university.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Like, "I'm sorry, you have a bunch of horny undergrads. You cannot actually control them."

LULU: Speaking of which ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: Um, I have a "Mad-Eye" Moody routine that I wrote for a Harry Potter burlesque show.

LULU: In her 20s, she started performing burlesque.

LULU: Wait what was the routine?

ELSA SJUNNESON: It's to the Florence and the Machine song, "Girl With One Eye."

LULU: Hold on. I don't know if I know this song, so I'm just gonna play it really quick to get a quick sense, so I can get in the zone.

["Girl with one Eye" plays. A yearning indie rock guitar strums.]

SONG: [Soulfully] "I took a knife and cut out her eye"... [fades down]

LULU: Oh! Okay, cool. All right, so I'm there. Okay, so like ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: I come out on stage in a gray-silver wig and my actual master's robes. They're black, and then they have purple sparkly doctoral stripes, which I bedazzled the hell out of.

SONG: "...Girl with one eye."

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I take off the master's robes and I'm wearing an evening gown underneath. I pour myself a glass of champagne, I take off the rest of my clothes, and the end of the act is not actually taking off my bra or my underwear, the end of the act is when I take out my prosthetic eye, dropping the plastic shell into a glass of champagne and then drinking the champagne.

[music builds, cymbals crashing]

LULU: Oh my God! Did people just ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: They lost it.

[song swells and stops]

LULU: All right. I'm gonna just leave you there with that for a moment, and when we come back ...

JAD: Okay. That's quite an image.

LULU: [laughs] Yeah. Just take that in. When we come back, just at this moment where Elsa believes she has finally stamped out the ghost of Helen Keller from her life, the real Helen Keller comes a-knockin'.

JAD: Ooh. The real Helen Keller.
***
LULU: Okay, so boop! Back from break.

JAD: And yeah, I guess, take us forward, Lulu.

LULU: All right. So picking back up with Elsa, she's now living in New Jersey, she's married. She's been married for how long, Elsa?

ELSA SJUNNESON: We've been married for seven years.

LULU: She's teaching college writing classes by day.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Humanities 101 and 102.

LULU: Dancing swing and tango by night. You know, living her anti-Helen Keller dream life. When one morning in the fall of 2019, Helen Keller reappears in her life in the strangest way.

ELSA SJUNNESON: My routine was that every morning I would walk into the student center with my guide dog and pick up a coffee or a tea at the school cafe.

LULU: And there was one of those little bookshelves with free books on it that you can grab underneath the bar while you're ordering your coffee.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I remember very clearly my guide dog was, [chuckles fondly] like, nosing at the shelf.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was waiting for my chai latte and I'm like, "What are you doing? Can you please stop trying to eat books?"

LULU: And then according to her, he noses this one book off the shelf.

LULU: And when she brings it up closer to her eyes, she realizes it's The Miracle Worker! [music: gentle, twinkling metallic swell]

LULU: Yeah. Of course, the famous play based on Helen Keller's life. Not written by her, but based on her life.

LULU: But that's what she's ...

LULU: So-so yeah, so the dog noses this book off the shelf, and Elsa looks at it.

ELSA SJUNNESON: The back cover reads: "The wild animal. Deaf, blind and mute, 12-year-old Helen Keller was like a wild animal, scared out of her wits, but still murderously strong. She clawed and struggled against all who tried to help her." I was like, what is this? This is horrifying!

LULU: And she's like "Ugh!" This description is so extreme.

ELSA SJUNNESON: It was like looking at a train crash. I couldn't put it down.

LULU: And so she didn't. She takes it with her because she basically wants to go hate read it.

LULU: So once she's done with her classes, she goes to a bar.

ELSA SJUNNESON: So it was me and a copy of The Miracle Worker and a guide dog sleeping on my feet.

LULU: She's got a drink by her side, and she's, like, hunched over this book with her thick glasses and the magnifier up to her eyes.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I just started, like, reading the script.

[music: soft, cascading classic movie strings]

LULU: And so she reads through these over-the-top scenes of first, Helen's parents discovering their little baby has gotten sick and gone deaf and blind.

LULU: And then little Helen growing up into just this wild animal.

JAD: So I remember this from the movie, yeah.

LULU: Totally. She charges at her friend with scissors.

LULU: And she overturns her little sister's crib. And when Anne Sullivan arrives, she's ...

LULU: ... totally resistant.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And kicking things over and breaking plates and throwing food, and trying to run away from Annie, and trying to unlock the door.

LULU: Elsa says the stage directions for how the actress was supposed to play Helen had her literally acting ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: Like a dog.

LULU: This goes on for pages and pages and pages, until finally ...

LULU: The climatic scene at the water pump.

LULU: And then guess what?

[music: classic movie strings, building sincerity and drama]

[movie music crescendos and stops abruptly]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was, like, taking pictures of the script and sending it to my crib partner being like, "What the F is this? I never did this. No Deafblind person I know has ever done this."

LULU: And as she's sitting there, she's thinking ...

[music: slow pulsing chimes]

ELSA SJUNNESON: This just doesn't seem right to me.

LULU: And suddenly it hits her that she's never actually read anything that Helen Keller herself has written.

[music: shimmering develops into a soft, forward-moving beat.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I kind of was like, "Well, if I'm pissed about this book, I probably need to really go back and reframe how I feel about her."

LULU: So what did you do? Like, what-how did you research her?

LULU: So fast forward a few months ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: That was such a weird fall.

[music builds]

LULU: Elsa's marriage had been going through a rough patch that fall. So by early winter ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was like, "Well, okay. I'm moving to Seattle." And like two months later, there was a pandemic and I was in a 250-square-foot cottage with a dog and my mother.

LULU: And looking around at how her adult life was suddenly unfolding, she was like ...

[music: wispy strings come in, gentle tension]

ELSA SJUNNESON: This is exactly what I was afraid of.

LULU: And so not exactly sure the path forward, one day ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: I ended up just sort of-I remember I picked up Helen Keller's autobiography, finally. Like ...

[music starts to soar]

LULU: Ready to learn more about who she was, according to her.

LULU: These are Helen's words, which are gonna be read by a voice actress for the rest of the piece.

LULU: And a couple things struck Elsa almost immediately.

LULU: First of all, the idea of Helen Keller being totally cut off from the world before Anne showed up? Not true.

[music cuts out]

ELSA SJUNNESON: She had her own signs before Annie Sullivan showed up.

LULU: Yeah. So she had a sign for "Mom," and she had a sign for "Dad." The sign for her dad was just to put, like, imaginary glasses onto her face. And the sign for her favorite aunt was bonnet strings. Like, she would tie imaginary bonnet strings if she wanted her aunt.

LULU: And she had a sign for ice cream!

ELSA SJUNNESON: Yeah. I want ice cream. So I shiver.

LULU: Shiver her shoulders like this?

LULU: [laughs] That's so good.

LULU: As Elsa reads it, Helen was reaching out all along, trying to connect. And, you know, the wild animal thing, the Helen Keller of her own words was a girl who wandered the world, apologizing to dogs when she tripped over their tails. And, like, the scissor thing? She was just cutting her friend's hair.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Like, she wasn't a monster. She was, like, out there being a child.

LULU: And as Elsa keeps reading, she starts noticing these odd similarities.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Her first short story that she writes is actually science fiction.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Yeah. It's about fairies. Like, it's fantasy.

LULU: And Elsa, very early in reading this autobiography, stumbles across this very eerie scene.

ELSA SJUNNESON: A moment when she was climbing a tree.

LULU: Which I'm gonna read you a part of. Okay? Okay. She is describing this one particular tree, a cherry tree, not far from her house. All right. "The tree was so easy to climb that with my teacher's assistance, I was able to scramble to a seat in the branches."

[music: gentle airey tones]

[music concludes]

JAD: Whoa! It's like a pre-echo.

ELSA SJUNNESON: It was basically a mirror image to my own experience of climbing trees.

LULU: And this is really her through-the-rabbit-hole moment ...

[music: spirited orchestral waltz]

LULU: ... where she just starts wanting to find out everything she can about Helen Keller's life. So she gets these scholarly biographies, she reads letters and essays that Helen Keller published. And pretty quickly starts to realize the real Helen Keller led a very different life than Elsa could have ever imagined.

LULU: So we're now in early 1900s. Helen gets into Radcliffe College, which is like the womens' college at Harvard. And as she's there, she kind of gets in with these young academic progressives. She talks about these evenings where they're popping popcorn and drinking cider and talking about ideas and philosophers.

LULU: And so Elsa's reading all this, and she's like, "Wait a second!"

ELSA SJUNNESON: This is where my dislike of her does start to break down.

[music: dramatic solo violin waltz]

LULU: She gets so into socialism that she starts corresponding with socialist party leaders and writing all of these socialist texts. She hangs a big red flag in her office.

ELSA SJUNNESON: As a self-identified socialist, it made me pretty happy. [laughs]

LULU: And she starts writing about disability in all these super radical ways, saying that society is what causes disability and therefore society must change. And even though her dad was a former slaveowner, she is a huge public supporter of the NAACP, donates money.

[music concludes]

And wait, what was I just gonna tell you? What was I just gonna tell you? Brain? Brain?

LULU: Oh, yeah. At a certain point, the FBI starts keeping this big case file on her. Like, we looked through her case file. I mean, they were tracking letters she was writing to jailed dissidents.

[music resumes]

LULU: And then she helps to form the ACLU. And right around this time, Andrew Carnegie-famous industrialist-offers to pay her this fat pension. And she writes him back.

LULU: Totally turning down the offer.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I really, really admired the fact that, at a time when that was not popular, she said what she believed anyway.

LULU: And then she makes this weird movie that's called Deliverance that she stars in. And the day it comes out, the actors go on strike and so she boycotts her own premiere. [laughs]

[music trills out]

LULU: And she even gets a taste for the bright lights of the stage.

[music: "Star of Happiness" instrumental. Soft, romantic piano.]

LULU: In her early 40s, she begins performing on vaudeville. The song playing behind us is a song that was written just for her act, which partially involved her and Anne Sullivan telling the story about how she learned language-the kind of mythic, sanitized version you know.

[music fades out]

LULU: But then, toward the end of the act, Helen Keller would step forward and take questions from the audience. I'll just read you a transcript of a couple of them. Okay?

LULU: "What is your age?" "Between 16 and 60."

LULU: [mimics old-timey vocal intonation] "What do you think is the most important question before the country today?"

LULU: [continues to ham it up] "How to get a drink."

LULU: "Can you see any way out of our troubles?" [jokey voice] "Have you thought of divorce?" [laughs]

LULU: So she's like, kinda funny. And then-okay, and then it kind of dips into political things. So question: "Do you believe that spiritualism is the cure for the world's troubles?" Keller: "No, I think the world's troubles are caused chiefly by wrong economic conditions, and the only cure for them is in social reorganization."

LULU: And there was one more pretty significant detail about Helen's life that Elsa came across in a book by historian Kim Nielsen.

KIM NIELSEN: Keller fell in love.

LULU: This is Nielsen, who found unpublished journal entries and essays that helped her piece together this handsome figure that strode into Helen's life when she was in her 30s.

[music: longing electric guitar, mellow and soft, with a little bit of rock and roll]

KIM NIELSEN: And he was a young man who knew how to finger spell, so they could communicate directly, right? There were not a lot of-what-dating eligible men who knew how to finger spell.

LULU: So he is one of the few people who doesn't have to go through Anne Sullivan.

ELSA SJUNNESON: That just fills me with so much glee that she had that. [laughs]

LULU: And just think about that. Like, think about how hot it would be after a lifetime of being excluded from people talking to be in this way that excluded everybody else.

LULU: Like, imagine sitting at, like, a conference table at some formal event and then just like ...

[Bluesy electric guitar melody cries out]

LULU: ... saying whatever you want in your silent language that uses touch.

[music: mellow bluesy melody cries out again, ends on a long note]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was so sad that I hadn't read this earlier. I felt this ache because I could see myself in the pages of this book, and I was seeing-I saw more as I read more of it, but just, I felt a profound loss that I hadn't been able to access this before.

LULU: Why would knowing all that about her when you were a little girl have helped? Or what would that have given you?

ELSA SJUNNESON: It would have given me an actual role model.

LULU: So I know we need to stop for today, but let's just imagine this is a stop in a Radiolab episode. What's coming up after the break?

ELSA SJUNNESON: What's coming after the break is how Helen Keller is not all bright and shiny. Once I started doing research, I discovered that there was a dark side to Helen Keller that I was gonna have to deal with too.

LULU: Helen Keller is the topic of today's Radiolab. So picking back up ...

LULU: We left off when Elsa, a Deafblind woman, was just starting to really fall in love with Helen Keller, have all this kind of admiration and connection with her. But then she stumbles across something that Helen Keller wrote in 1915.

LULU: So at this point, Helen is in her mid-30s. And the backdrop is that there is this very famous medical case going on.

ELSA SJUNNESON: The Bollinger Baby case, which happened in Chicago. Basically, an infant was born with severe physical disabilities, and the doctor allowed the baby to die, and basically convinced the parents that that was the best choice because that child couldn't possibly live a good life.

LULU: And it became a huge national controversy.

ELSA SJUNNESON: People were calling the hospital. Like, people were involved.

LULU: So Helen Keller enters the fray. And she is now a super famous person, and everyone's kind of wondering what she's gonna say.

ELSA SJUNNESON: So Helen Keller weighs in like a month after the baby died. We have a letter that she wrote for The New Republic, and I'm going to read you part of her letter.

ELSA SJUNNESON: "It seems to me that the simplest, wisest thing to do ..."

LULU: This public letter goes on to suggest in this very flowery, erudite language ...

LULU: That when a baby is born with disabilities, a jury of doctors should be called in, and if the baby doesn't measure up to their standards ...

LULU: They should vote to let that baby die.

[music: gentle airey tones]

ELSA SJUNNESON: "They would act only in the cases of true idiocy, where there could be no hope of mental development." [voice breaks]

LULU: Were you just thirsty there? What was happening with your voice?

ELSA SJUNNESON: Uh, no. I was angry. Like, did you really have to write that letter? Like, why-why?

LULU: Elsa was just at a complete loss, wondering how is this same Helen Keller who was just years before saying society has to do better for disabled people, now publically-and in private writing around the same time-making a case for eugenics?

[music concludes]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I was horrified. I actually had one of those moments when your blood kind of runs cold. [laughs]

LULU: And it was shortly after reading that that the whole TikTok conspiracy theory bubbled up into her world.

LULU: And so she found herself newly resistant to defend Helen Keller.

LULU: But also wanting to call out the TikTokers for saying things that were not true. And so she came to us authentically lost, wanting to use reporting to figure out both how to feel about Helen Keller in her own heart, but also to just legitimately understand how Helen Keller came to want to remove disability from the world.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Well I just-I want to understand why.

[music: Orchestral pizzicato and piano. Cyclical. Suggests discovery.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: So I'm going to go find some people and see if I can get any of them to talk to me on the record.

LULU: So Elsa and I set out on a months'-long journey.

[phone ringing]

GEORGINA KLEEGE: Hi, I'm Georgina Kleege.

HABEN GIRMA: My name's Haben Girma.

JAIPREET VIRDI: I'm Jaipreet Virdi.

KATIE BOOTH: Katie Booth.

KIM NIELSEN: Kim Neilsen.

LYDIA X. Z. BROWN: Lydia X. Z. Brown.

LULU: Come with us on our adventure!

LULU: We talked to people who have spent years with Helen Keller's words.

JAIPREET VIRDI: Helen Keller was never a hero of mine. Even as a child, it was like, "Cool story. Good for her."

LULU: People who swim through her archives.

KIM NIELSEN: I'm a historian at the University of Toledo.

SUE PILKILTON: Sue Pilkilton. Executive director of the Helen Keller birthplace.

LULU: People who wander the rooms in Helen Keller's childhood home.

SUE PILKILTON: Located in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

LULU: How long have you been working there?

LYDIA X. Z. BROWN: Just say it. She advocated eugenics. That's fucked up.

LULU: We talked to people who hate her.

SUE PILKILTON: We don't focus on that.

LULU: Who really love her.

SUE PILKILTON: We try to focus on the positive.

LULU: And those in between who are just trying to understand why ...

[Music shifts, more probing]

LULU: ... Helen Keller, arguably the most famous disabled person in the history of the world, advocated for eugenics.

LYDIA X. Z. BROWN: Am I allowed to just scream into the void right now?

[music stops with echo]

HABEN GIRMA: It's not the full story.

LULU: Somewhere along the way, Elsa and I had this conversation with Haben Girma.

HABEN GIRMA: I'm a human rights lawyer, speaker and author. So I am known as the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School.

LULU: Elsa had known Haben online for a while, but this was the first time they'd ever talked directly.

HABEN GIRMA: To know what's being said, to know what Elsa is saying, I have a typist who's typing what Elsa says. I'm reading it in braille and then responding by voice.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Great. All right.

LULU: And Haben told us that, after the Bollinger case, later in Helen's life ...

HABEN GIRMA: She did change her mind and come out against eugenics.

ELSA SJUNNESON: Did she, though?

[Clacking of Haben's typist in background]

ELSA SJUNNESON: I still haven't found hard proof of that, other than comments that I've seen where people have said that she changed her mind. And I want to see more.

HABEN GIRMA: Understandable.

LULU: So we dug and dug and dug and dug, and eventually we did find two different documents that both come about 20 years later, so when Helen Keller's in her late 50s. And the first one was that she wrote a letter to the former editor of the New York Times saying America needed to change its eugenicist immigration policies so that disabled people could escape the Nazis and find safe harbor in the US.

LULU: And then that same year, 1938, there was another huge case involving a baby. And this time it was a little girl named Helaine Colan, who in order to live, the doctors were gonna have to remove her eyes. And her parents weren't sure what to do. And this time, when Helen Keller weighed in, she said ...

JAD: Wow. Okay. So your sense from those two documents is that she did change her mind?

LULU: Well, that was like-that was kinda my sense, but then Elsa ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: So it definitely sounds like she changed her mind, but we also see her with more empathy toward Blind kids than we do toward physically disabled kids or Deaf kids or toward people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

LULU: Yeah. Like it's only worth it ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: It's only worth it if they're smart.

LULU: She said that this is one of the ways that Helen Keller haunts all of us today, because those beliefs that certain lives are worth less than others are still with us in our laws, our policies, and that could have been a moment where an influential, beloved celebrity challenged the thinking enough to set society off on a different course.

HABEN GIRMA: I don't blame Helen Keller. It's complicated.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I see you being very protective of Helen. And I know that in our community, there are people who don't like her. Have you ever been asked if you're being too soft on her?

HABEN GIRMA: [laughs] No, I don't think so. Do you think I'm too soft on Helen?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I don't-I don't know. I mean, I think eugenics is a pretty hard line for me.

HABEN GIRMA: So Helen supported eugenics, then realized it was wrong and advocated against it. Are you saying you've never made a mistake in your life? You've never supported the wrong thing and then realized, "Wait a minute, that's terrible. I'm not supporting that anymore?"

ELSA SJUNNESON: No, I'm not. I'm saying I wish she hadn't, which I think is a little different.

LULU: Haben says she shares Elsa's disappointment.

HABEN GIRMA: She supported eugenics, which is horrible and terrible. But one thing I do have to point out is this was back in around 1915. A different world.

LULU: But she couldn't not consider the time during which Helen wrote some of these things. As Haben pointed out, this was the height of the eugenics movement. Universities were teaching pro-eugenics courses. More and more states were passing sterilization laws. This was just the backdrop to Helen's life. And it was also in the foreground.

HABEN GIRMA: She was in deeply ableist circles. If you're in certain circles and you hear things over and over again, you start to believe it.

LULU: And the person with maybe the biggest influence on her in this regard was her very, very close friend ...

[Analog telephone bell ringing]

ELSA SJUNNESON: Yeah, who most non-disabled people know of as the man who invented the telephone, but Deaf people know him as the man who tried to erase us.

JAIPREET VIRDI: Bell denounced this idea of interdeaf marriages because he believed it would create a deaf variety of the human race.

LULU: That's Jaipreet Virdi.

JAIPREET VIRDI: Historian of medicine, technology and disability.

KATIE BOOTH: He's advocating for fewer Deaf children to be born.

LULU: Writer Katie Booth.

KATIE BOOTH: And he is not listening to the pushback where people are saying, "What? Like, so what if we have Deaf babies? What's wrong with Deaf babies?"

LULU: The two of them explained just how intimate a part of Helen's life Bell was.

JAIPREET VIRDI: Alexander Graham Bell had a tremendous influence on Helen Keller.

LULU: They first met when she was just six years old, when he helped her get in touch with Anne Sullivan. And then they stayed really close. He became almost like a grandpa to her.

KATIE BOOTH: He was a mentor to her. She dedicated The Story of My Life to him.

LULU: But all the while, he's coaching her on these ideas, sometimes literally finger spelling them into her palm, that people born deaf are inferior in some way unless they could learn to speak using their mouths.

JAIPREET VIRDI: For Bell, speech was the ultimate marker for assimilation. Bell really suppressed sign language acquisition for a lot of Deaf people.

LULU: And Helen didn't really challenge him on that. She tried for years to succeed by his standard of speaking with her oral voice.

KATIE BOOTH: She did. She wanted to learn to speak. Other people did not want her to.

LULU: And there's also evidence of her ignoring requests from Deaf organizations to collaborate.

JAIPREET VIRDI: The Deaf community in 20th century did feel abandoned by Helen Keller.

JAD: Oh, wow. I did not know that.

LULU: Yeah, I didn't either. And the more we kept learning about her life, the more we saw the ways that her beliefs about disability would circle back onto her.

LULU: So do you remember Helen's boyfriend, Peter?

LULU: Things got so serious that they got engaged.

LULU: And they went and took out their marriage license.

LULU: And then, when Helen's family heard the news, everything exploded. They questioned Peter's intentions and they chased him off-at one point with a gun.

LULU: Yeah. And Helen, after resisting a little bit, never really pushed back.

LULU: Yeah. And writer Katie Booth made sense of why she didn't fight harder to be with him by pointing us to something Helen wrote a few years later.

KATIE BOOTH: She writes about it in Midstream, her book.

LULU: A piece of writing that Elsa had never seen before.

[music slowly fades in: Gentle harp, ethereal, aching, floating in fog.]

ELSA SJUNNESON: Hearing that just punches me in the chest. It is like a direct hit to the chest. I don't know any other way of putting it. Because she clearly had been told that no one would want her.

LULU: And this was actually the first moment that Elsa said, "And I get that." Because she was like, "Because I, in some deep, hard place in me, feel that too."

ELSA SJUNNESON: Being a burden is the thing that I struggle with the most. It started for me as just being scared that I was gonna be too much for people. But as I learned more about the world-and I think as Helen Keller learned more about the world-I learned more about the ways that I was viewed as a burden. And maybe it's not said about you directly, but people talk about disabled people being burdens on society all the time. Social security is a burden. Medicare is a burden. And those things stack up in your mind.

LULU: Elsa said this moment in our reporting journey was a huge turning point for her because she finally realized just how badly Helen Keller thought about herself. And once she could see that, it became clear to Elsa how that view of herself drove one of the biggest decisions in her life.

[music transitions to 'The Star of Happiness' soft, romantic piano]

LULU: A decision that may be the key to why we were all left with a mythic, sanitized version of the Helen Keller story.

LULU: And to explain, for our final stop on this journey, we are gonna head back to Helen's vaudeville stage show that she did. [noise from a crowd] She's become kind of a legend on the stage. Her shows are selling out. She was making so much money that her family would rib her about it. And by many accounts, she was loving it.

[distant applause]

LULU: She loved the huge audiences, the travel, the other performers, who included jugglers and frog-eaters and stand-up comedians and singers.

LULU: And then quite abruptly she quits.

[Music and applause cut out]

LULU: Even though vaudeville begs her to say, she takes a job with the AFB.

KIM NIELSEN: The American Foundation for the Blind. And they ask Keller to work for them.

LULU: Kim Nielsen says that it's an organization that's done incredible work raising money for people who are Blind, but Helen Keller's role in many ways, was to be a spokesperson for them, and to tell her story of overcoming disability.

[music: lilting harp]

LULU: This is her actual oral voice.

LULU: And that version of her made dollar bills roll in.

KIM NIELSEN: She became a really effective political lobbyist and fundraiser.

LULU: But what wasn't a great fundraising technique was her talking about her socialist beliefs.

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: She was the darling of the American masses as long as she played her part correctly and, you know, didn't bring too many of her politics into her public engagements.

LULU: And in that way, Susan Crutchfield, a disability researcher, said that Helen Keller had to muzzle herself.

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: And she always had to have that persona that would appeal to the folks who would donate money to the cause.

[Harp music becomes more prominent]

SUE PILKILTON: Oh, here's the pump. You gotta have a photo of that.

LULU: She even allowed for others to take over her childhood home in Alabama.

SUE PILKILTON: Can you imagine? Now this is the pump where Helen learned her first word: "Water."

LULU: And turn it into a sort of museum of the miracle story.

SUE PILKILTON: This pump speaks many languages.

LULU: Where they lead tour groups to the water pump, and perform The Miracle Worker every summer, and pump out this sanitized version of her story.

SUE PILKILTON: You know, our story here is about her young life and the things that she accomplished. So, you know, that's about all we can say.

[music concludes: uneasy pang]

LULU: What Kim Nielsen and Sue Crutchfield helped us realize was that, in this weird way, Helen Keller herself created the Helen Keller myth. The day that she walked away from vaudeville was the day that she began hiding away all the colorful, complicated sides of herself: the radical political views and the romance and the wisecracks, and left us with a lie.

SUE PILKILTON: We have the miniature statues of Helen Keller. We have a great magnet that has one of her sayings on it. That's a big seller for us. And of course we have a DVD, The Miracle Worker, the original black and white version.

JAD: Why would she tell-why would she do that when she had such a funner, more interesting life?

LULU: Well, we can't ever really know for sure, but Sue Crutchfield found a pretty good clue.

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: This is from a letter that she wrote to her mother in the '20s where Helen said, "The truth is, mother ..."

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: "She" meaning Anne was not happy in vaudeville. And then Helen goes on to say, "I ..."

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: But Anne Sullivan's health at that point in 1924 is just declining.

SUSAN CRUTCHFIELD: And they had to arrive at some kind of compromise.

LULU: And the compromise they came to was Helen Keller walking away.

JAD: That doesn't feel like a compromise, that feels like a-wow. You feel like Helen Keller, at this point, should just have her career. I mean ...

LULU: Yeah. [laughs] I think when I first heard about this decision I was thinking about how close Helen and Anne had become in their later years. I mean, Helen writes all these beautiful things about the value and power of friendship. And so when I was talking to Elsa about it ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: When you have a disability, casting off the people who are the most supportive of you and who help take care of you is a really dangerous thing to do. It's even more dangerous in the time period that Helen Keller lived in. And I think that's what happened with Helen, is that she couldn't bear to lose this person.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And so she did feel obliged, even though it wasn't right for her. And I think that that was the choice that Helen had to make over and over again in her life. She didn't get married. And that was something that I think, reading between the lines, she wanted. And that was taken away from her. And vaudeville it sounds like was another thing that she didn't get to do because of the same people.

LULU: So where I'm la-de-da-ing on friendship, you see a kind of gnarly and unappealing obligation.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I think that Helen Keller really had to sacrifice a lot of her happiness for the people that she said she loved.

LULU: Which was something Elsa knew a little bit about too.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I had been thinking about leaving my marriage for a long time. And I couldn't do it. I kept thinking, "But what about the insurance?" I had all these "but what abouts" because I felt like I was too vulnerable to leave the safety net.

LULU: So she kept not doing it until one morning, after a string of bad months.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I'd been really, really frustrated with feeling like I was a burden all the time on my partner.

[music: gentle, long notes]

LULU: Elsa decides to just ignore the voice telling her she wouldn't be able to make it on her own.

ELSA SJUNNESON: It is four o'clock in the morning, and my alarm goes off. And my guide dog, Astra, is wagging his tail at me. He's like, "We're ready to go!" And I pick up my suitcase and I walk down the stairs. [a double-bass gently plays] And I ordered my Uber, and I can feel my heart pounding in my chest because I'm leaving.

LULU: She gets to the airport.

ELSA SJUNNESON: And I check my bag, and I walk with my dog through security. I hate TSA with the fiery passion of someone who has no sight in one eye and can't hear very well. And I remember that they had to pat me and the dog down. And I'm fumbling my ID. Like, I can't find things. They're talking at me, I can't hear them. And I can feel all of the fears in my body about whether or not people will be able to support me or whether I'll be able to support myself. And ...

LULU: She keeps walking through the blurry airport onto the plane, trying to push down that voice, the one that Helen Keller had too.

ELSA SJUNNESON: It does sneak in. It does show up in certain places. It's really hard.

LULU: She bumped into it as she began to build her new life in Seattle. It could come up when she was job hunting or when she was inviting a new love interest over to her apartment for a home-cooked meal. She said that voice can ...

ELSA SJUNNESON: Lurk in the kitchen with me and tell me that, like, I'm not good at cooking. And ...

LULU: And every time that voice comes up, she has to choose to ignore it.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I'm still working through it. It's a daily practice. It takes time to undo it.

[music: upbeat shuffling percussion and resonant mallets]

LULU: All right, so where does things stand with Helen Keller now that you can see her clearly? Like, did this work? Do you feel like you've reconciled or that you're able to move past her? Or do you feel like you're just tethered, or-I don't know.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I really wish that I could get a Oujia board and make her go away.

ELSA SJUNNESON: But I don't think I can. I think that that's one of the curses of being a Deafblind woman is that I do have this ghost hanging over my shoulder. And she is a complicated ghost. She is not gonna let go of her unfinished business.

ELSA SJUNNESON: I don't think that there's ever going to be a clean or easy way to exorcize.

LULU: Hey, what are you-before-I mean, it's been a year since we first sat down together. I mean, what are you working on now, just in your own writing?

ELSA SJUNNESON: I've been working on a project for a while. It's early stages right now, but it is a horror story based on The Miracle Worker.

LULU: [laughs] No way! Why horror?

ELSA SJUNNESON: When people thrust their perception of how you should be onto you, that is horror.

[music becomes more suspenseful]

LULU: So is this just kind of like, if you can't beat 'em, haunt 'em? Like, are you just haunting her back?

ELSA SJUNNESON: [laughs] Maybe.

LULU: Is anyone gonna get murdered?

ELSA SJUNNESON: Oh, probably. [laughs]

[snippet of Ludacris rapping: "Move bitch, get out the way, get out the..."]

[music shifts suddenly, jazzy and smooth: "Ohh.... ya don't know somebody until they're gone."]

[music shift again, touch of suspense]

ELSA SJUNNESON: If you're coming to me with the source material that's saying that somebody's murderously strong, and you want to make that person conform to your reality, someone's gonna die.

[music shifts again: jazz clarinet with dissonant tones and growls]

LULU: That'll do it. This episode was reported by Elsa Sjunneson and me. It was produced by Sindu Gnanasambandan and Rachael Cusick with help from Sarah Qari, Tanya Chawla and Carolyn McCusker, with sound and music from Jeremy Bloom and mixing help from Arianne Wack. LULU: A very special thanks to the talented Pamela Saba, who was the voice of Helen Keller. Thanks also to Julia Bascone, Desiree Coaches, Peter Kunz, Alexander Ritchie, Andrew Leland, Sara Luderman, Nate Jones, Nate Peerbaum, Will Healy, the pianist who resurrected Helen Keller's long lost vaudeville show tune from sheet music. Thanks also to the accessibility team: Eboni Gaytan, April Jackson, Annie Dieckman, Shannon Finnegan and braille transcriber, Sharon von See. Speaking of braille, alongside the transcripts we post for every episode, we have a braille transcript for this episode. It's right up on the episode page, so let folks know about it if they might be interested. We're always trying to become more accessible, so if you have thoughts on how to improve, please let us know.

LULU: A few books to shout out for this one. First and foremost, Kim Nielson's The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. It's a fascinating read, and we relied on it heavily to make this episode. Next up, Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Elsa Sjunneson has a new memoir out called Being Seen: Beautiful, Troubling, Full of Snark. And finally, Katie Booth's The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness. We had a much longer conversation with Katie Booth about her personal connection to this topic. It became quite an emotional and stirring conversation. Flipped my brain around about a lot of stuff. And we are putting that up on The Lab, our members-only feed. So if you are a member, you can find that there. And if you are curious about becoming a member, go check out Radiolab.com/thelab . Wow, that was a lot of credits. If you made it all the way through, thanks for hanging out. We'll be back next week.
-30- New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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Fantasy writer Elsa Sjunneson has been haunted by Helen Keller for nearly her entire life. Like Helen, Elsa is Deafblind, and growing up she was constantly compared to her. But for a million different reasons she hated that, because she felt different from her in a million different ways.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of my favorite podcasts of all time.  In this episode he interviews Brian Grazer, an American film and television producer and writer.  We learn Brian has Dyslexia at minute 20 but you would never know he has a disability except for the fact that he freely shares this information both in this podcast and in real life.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillippo. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

[00:00:22] Today on the show, Brian Grazer, he co-founded Imagine Entertainment along with Ron Howard. Over the years, the films and TV shows he's been involved with have been nominated for a total of 43 Academy Awards and 131 Emmys. The films they produced over at Imagine have grossed over $13 billion, which is just bananas. But aside from success in film, movies, and television, Brian is an incredibly curious person. For 30 years, he's made it his mission to meet a new person every week or so and sit down with them for a very specific curiosity conversation. Much like myself, Brian started off as a shy kid and had to work around his anxiety and a learning disability to become one of the most iconic folks in the film industry. He then networked his way from courier in a closet all the way to the peak of Hollywood. And of course, I'm getting the lowdown on how he networks and builds relationships both back in the day and even now that he's at the top of the game. Brian is a riot and this conversation was really fun. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and not only is Brian talking networking, but I'm doing the same.

[00:01:24] Six-Minute Networking: It's how I get guys like Brian on the show. It's how I get every guest on the show. It's a networking course for you that I've created and it's free. It's over at jordanharbinger.com/course. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course in the newsletter. Come join us and you'll be in great company.

[00:01:41] All right, here's Brian Grazer.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:44] I was mentioning that we have a weird start because we're both Catholic Jews who almost joined the Freemasons through the law school route.

Brian Grazer: [00:01:53] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:54] That sort of circles back to the mastery idea because I think part of that for me comes up as trying to make up for lost time because one thing that really struck me when I read the Curiosity book was, I also couldn't look at the teacher or anyone else when I was a kid.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:07] Why couldn't you?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:08] I couldn't pay attention in class.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:11] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:11] I was having a really hard time. I still feel that sometimes, so I did the look away, the look down or look away.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:17] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:18] And that created the social anxiety that I had as a kid --

Brian Grazer: [00:02:22] I understand. They fit each other.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:24] Because it's like you can't get over social anxiety when you can't look at someone, you're doing this when you're talking to them. It's weird.

Brian Grazer: [00:00:00] Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:31] It just makes it worse because you know you're being weird.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:33] Yeah, exactly. Even today, going to a party, not feeling like you have enough confidence to go in there with confidence and it's all that stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:44] Yeah, of course, and I think for me I still feel in some ways like I'm faking it. I wonder if you feel the same way.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:52] I don't, but Ron Howard, my partner, my symbiotic mate --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:57] Hetero life partner.

Brian Grazer: [00:02:58] Hetero life partner. We won Oscars for Beautiful Mind. We'd been up for winning Oscars before, we didn't win. Now, we actually won and we're sitting in this little waiting area to go in front of like a bank of 300 journalists and photographers, and he's getting a stomach ache. We already won. He goes, "Oh, man, I have a stomachache." It's usually me. He goes, "I have a stomachache." He said, "Do you have..." I said, "I have these Tums." I handed him the Tums. He ate the Tums. He felt like that helped a little bit and goes, "Wow. Thanks." He said, "Do you think anyone will ever find us out?" And I go, "You've got to be kidding. We're geniuses. Are you crazy?" Here's again evidence that we know. We don't not know, we absolutely know.

[00:03:47] I don't think that ever but I look at it like this. I have extreme optimism, hope, and enthusiasm on one hand. I feel like I do tap into my internal heartbeat of what that truth is and that truth really turns out to be like the most valuable commodity in any conversation. But on the other hand, even though I've got this whole thing of like I will make this workout, wheel it into working out. The hundred movies that I produced. I do also think like what's going to go wrong -- I don't know if we should say that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:19] You can say whatever you want.

Brian Grazer: [00:04:20] I know there's going to be a bunch of things that go wrong. Always a bunch of things that could go wrong. Even though I have high expectations on the result, I think the journey is going to be fraught with unpredictable problems.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:34] I know you're a pretty hands-on producer by your own account. I wonder, are you the one that normally yells at people, or is it Ron? It's hard to imagine Ron Howard being like, "You, dumb piece of shit!" He's like a little Opie, right?

Brian Grazer: [00:04:48] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:48] But now is a grown super accomplished man; still I can't break that image.

Brian Grazer: [00:04:52] Yes, yeah. Okay, so he doesn't yell at people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:55] Yeah, no surprise.

Brian Grazer: [00:04:57] I mean he got mad -- hey, look this is like 35 years -- he got mad on the set once at an actor. He said something like, "God damn it!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:05] Yeah. "Gosh darn it! Get off my set!"

Brian Grazer: [00:05:08] It was something like that. It was a really crabby old character actor, star in his own in his right. He just kept kind of like pushing on Ron. Eventually, Ron yells, "Gosh darn it. You're off," and he let him go, which was pretty amazing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:26] Bring the coffee in here. Bring the coffee in here.

Brian Grazer: [00:05:27] Hot set, hot set, pal. All right. Thanks. Okay. Should I yell him right in front of you?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:34] No, that's okay. That's Hollywood though, right?

Brian Grazer: [00:05:36] Well, I don't yell at people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:39] No, that's worse, then. You make them feel bad and then they know they've done wrong. Because if you yell at someone, they're like, "Wow, jeez." But if you just say, "I'm disappointed in you. I thought better. I expected more." Then they're like, "Shit, I'm such a piece."

Brian Grazer: [00:05:52] I had a boss that yelled all the time. He yelled like all of the time and I just saw just the physics work against him. I was like 22 and I'd watched this man, Edgar, yell at people. If he's not yelling at me, he's yelling at someone else, and I'd look at people looking at me like, "Is this going to end? What's going on with this guy?" So I just thought I don't want that to happen to me. I get very wound up, but I don't show the person like that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:29] Internally you're like super pissed off, but externally you're going to deal with it.

Brian Grazer: [00:06:33] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:35] I wonder if you feel like human connection in your quest for human connection maybe saved you from a life that you thought you were going to have? Because you have a learning disability, right?

Brian Grazer: [00:06:44] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:45] But that was undiagnosed as a kid.

Brian Grazer: [00:06:46] Correct.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:47] So movies are a good escape. But I wonder if being creative is kind of like, "Well, I'm not good at sitting down reading all this stuff, so maybe a creative pursuit rescues me from a life of like breaking rocks," which -- we're not built for that man, especially you.

Brian Grazer: [00:07:01] No we're not. What I did is I turned a disability into a superpower. So first, the disability produces a lot of shame. A disability is a disability, and so it's hard if you just keep, you know fighting for that little bit of oxygen out of the middle of the ocean, you'll get it and you will then use that bit of oxygen to animate powers inside of you that you didn't think existed. It creates a person that's resourceful. Like you were doing right then. You were fixing all of these things. There was what, not a SIM card. What was that?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:43] Yeah, there's no SD card.

Brian Grazer: [00:07:44] There's no SD card.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:45] There was, which is even worse. That's not even Mark's fault.

Brian Grazer: [00:07:46] I don't want to see you blow up or anything, but you didn't. You actually found the problem, you isolated the problem, then you fixed the problem, and so similarly I can do the same thing with stories and movies. I can get my hands on the carburetor and fix the engine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:05] But there's more to that story, of course. You were nominated for 43 Academy Awards, 131 Emmys. I don't think I'm getting nominated for anything.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:12] 196.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:13] 196, well jeez, you've got to update your Wikipedia, man.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:15] Yeah, we've been wanting to meet for two years. Oh, was it in the Wikipedia?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:20] That's probably where I got that. I assume.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:23] You're never going to be able to change that. They're going to fight you tooth and nail. You try to change your Wikipedia. Good Lord.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:28] I think I might have to put some effort into it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:31] Don't have Will do it. It'll never get done. Poor Will.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:34] It's a funny show. I love that. You're right. That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:38] Unintentionally funny show.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:40] Unintentional.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:41] I was going to save this for later, but the best award story might be the one that you actually didn't get for Braveheart. Can you tell me about that?

Brian Grazer: [00:08:49] Yeah, okay, sure

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:50] That was ridiculous.

Brian Grazer: [00:08:50] I read a 12-page outline written by the astronaut Jim Lovell, on a failed journey to go to the moon and it was called Apollo 13. I ended up buying the rights to this failed journey, which became a book, and then we thought "Well, geez, how are we going to make this into a movie? Everybody knows the ending." Then we figured out if we got Tom Hanks, the world would want to save Tom Hanks.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:17] I knew you did that! I knew it! Because I was like, why didn't they put you know, like --

Brian Grazer: [00:09:21] Wow, you are smart. Kevin Costner or somebody.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:24] Yeah, even Kevin Costner, you want to see him come back, but there was somebody else I was thinking like, "Oh, they didn't put him in there and there's a good reason," and I'm trying to think who it was.

Brian Grazer: [00:09:32] Like an action-starry guy, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:33] Yeah, or like --

Brian Grazer: [00:09:35] Wasn't Steven Seagal, was it?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:36] No that would be -- you wanted to win an award for that movie.

Brian Grazer: [00:09:40] Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:41] I'm trying to think. I even wrote down -- I knew that you had to put Tom Hanks in there for that reason. It will come to me.

Brian Grazer: [00:09:47] That was the reason. We had a whole list of actors including Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise and other action stars, and probably the one you're thinking about. I had this sort of moment where I thought about: Who does the world want to save the most? The guy is not on the list. This guy named Tom Hanks, and that became our choice and it was a good choice for all of us because the world did want to save him and they lived inside of his soul and had tremendous empathy for this journey that was filmed. We ended up making the movie with Tom Hanks. It is incredibly successful financially and so far exceeded what we ever thought -- and then gets nine Oscar nominations.

[00:10:29] So now with the nine Oscar nominations, I'm thinking now in this new race not just to make money, but now we're in the Oscar race. Comes down to the day before the Oscars and everyone is saying, "Oh, you're going to win, Brian. You're going to win for best picture. Apollo 13 is going to win. It's patriotic. It's intersecting with NASA's anniversary."

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:52] Oh, yeah.

Brian Grazer: [00:10:52] Yeah, fortunate, and so a lot of things were very much going in our favor, the patriotism, the heart, the success, and Las Vegas odds. People were. "You're going to win. It's Apollo 13." A very famous financial wizard named Mike Milken said, "I wanted to come over and see you. I want you to say eight words when you accept the award." I said, "I can't even think like this." But it was like a lock, we were winning. I write this speech. I'm ready to say the speech because I'm positive, we're winning, so I have my speech in my tuxedo pocket. The final envelope of the night is read by Sidney Poitier, the Oscar-winning actor, who's very deliberate about how he communicates, slow and deliberate. He's got the envelope in his hand for the Best Picture. He got the envelope in his hand and he's opening it very slowly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:48] Of course.

Brian Grazer: [00:11:49] Which is torturous. Then I think I see a B for Brian imperceptible as it was, rolling off his lip, and I'm in the sixth row and I'm looking and I get up to accept the Oscar because all those signals and I'm imagining and I get up them to accept the Oscar, and he says, " Braveheart." Then I was so embarrassed. I walk back to my seat and I turn around only for a second to sit down and I see a guy say, "Loser!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:25] Oh, my God.

Brian Grazer: [00:12:26] Chairman of another studio does this to me. I don't know why I'm such a loser. And then Jim Lovell, the actual astronaut, reaches over Tom Hanks and Ron Howard to get to my wrist and he says, "I never made it to the moon either." He put the whole thing into complete perspective.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:46] Yeah. He never made it to the moon, but no one went, "You idiot. You tried to go to the moon." You just had a premature celebration.

Brian Grazer: [00:00:00] That's true.

Jordan Harbinger: And then, I don't know, Harvey Weinstein or somebody was like, "Hey, you're a loser."

Brian Grazer: [00:12:57] Yeah, that's the guy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:00] Was it him?

Brian Grazer: [00:13:01] He is now in prison.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:02] His now predictable behavior.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:03] Predictable!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:05] When somebody does something really terrible in Hollywood, you just go, "It's probably Weinstein. Unless it happened after right now because he's in prison."

Brian Grazer: [00:13:11] You're so funny! My God. Okay!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:15] Your books are about human connection, but you post a lot of food photos for a guy.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:19] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:19] In a book about human connection.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:20] Food videos.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:21] Food video! Like, I know what you have for breakfast every day. It does make sense, though. I do the show in person because the human element is so huge.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:28] It is.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:29] Eye contact.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:29] Oh, yeah. It's important, we're doing this together.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:32] Yeah, that's right.

Brian Grazer: [00:13:33] Yes. I do these food videos and I say stupid things, kind of silly things, but I'm always exposing what I'm eating, as you know. Only this Saturday, I had an amazing chef and I was eating Japanese food, and I had these amazing spare ribs. I said, "I call them Saturday ribs," and my friend Bob Iger, who goes under another --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:00] Oh, yeah.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:01] Then he says, "Oh Saturday ribs, that's fascinating." Because there's nothing inventive about calling something Saturday ribs.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:09] Yes, you don't get to come up with the names of the movies that you produce. It's somebody else's job.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:14] Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:15] Bob Iger, interesting guy.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:16] He's very accomplished. Accomplished as you can be.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:20] Yeah. I mean, he's the chairman of Disney or the president or CEO.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:25] No, chairman, CEO of Disney and he just wrote a book himself called The Ride of a Lifetime. I'm now selling his book. But yeah well, but we're closest of friends. Oddly, we both wrote books around the same time and released them only a week apart. My book Face to Face was out first -- and that's the one to purchase.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:46] That's right. Don't worry about Bob. He can make everyone at Disney go buy it.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:48] Bob is doing fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:49] He's fine.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:51] Bob is great. He bought Marvel. He bought Pixar. He's bought everything, and now he bought Fox.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:56] And he's got Disney stock. Don't worry about Bob.

Brian Grazer: [00:14:57] He's killing it. Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:58] When you started your career in Hollywood, you started networking your butt off right away. Tell me about that, because I know you got your first job at Warner Bros. in '74 as a legal clerk. That's really kind of funny, like a glorified sort of courier at that point, right?

Brian Grazer: [00:15:14] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:15] "Clerk" in air quotes.

Brian Grazer: [00:15:17] Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:18] Like, "Here, you take this envelope, then you bring it over there," but you made the best of that. Tell us what you did to make that a job that wasn't too --

Brian Grazer: [00:15:25] Well, okay, you almost didn't define it as demeaning as it really was.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:28] Right, yeah, I'm trying to cut you a little slack, but you turned it into like a really good opportunity.

Brian Grazer: [00:15:34] I turned this absolutely zero job into an amazing opportunity. It was a zero job, just like you said. My job was just to deliver papers, Warner Bros. documents, if they even happened. The first week, I just sat in an office, this big, no windows, just looking around. Actually, somebody caught me once, Jeff Katzenberg. He said, "I saw you." I was sitting back in my chair. I was throwing pencils into the ceiling, actually a ceiling like this, because he brought it up to me only last night because I had a book party actually. He goes. "Remember when I met you? You were throwing pencils into the ceiling!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:12] Like, trying to stick pencils into acoustic tiles by throwing them really hard?

Brian Grazer: [00:16:15] That what I was doing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:16] I didn't even know you could do that. I've never been that bored, I guess.

Brian Grazer: [00:16:18] Yeah, and I was at the height of boredom, and then eventually they said a week later, "Okay, deliver these papers to Warren Beatty." I had to deliver papers to Warren Beatty, who is living and working out of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and an assistant was down there and said, "Hand me the papers, punk." You know, that kind of thing. And I made this up, I was 22, I said, "Oh, the papers are legal documents that aren't valid unless I hand them directly to Mr. Beatty." And the guy goes, "Give me the fucking papers." And so I said, "I'm sorry, but they're invalid and I have to go back to the office to Warner Bros. in Burbank with the papers." "All right." So then I got upstairs. My job was now just to hand them to Beatty, but I turned it into, like, a conversation. And I was really enthusiastic and I lit up, I guess, and he lit up back, and I turned that moment transaction into like, an hour conversation. Then I thought, "I can do this all the time. I can do it every time I have to deliver papers." So I remember William Peter Blatty, he wrote the book The Exorcist, the best-selling book. I can name all these big names.

[00:17:31] But when I had no one to deliver something to, which quite often occurred, I would just do outgoing calls to people that I admired in the movie business. I'd write a letter to Lew Wasserman -- they didn't have emails in the day -- and then I'd follow up immediately with a phone call saying, "I just sent a letter to Mr. Wasserman. My name is Brian Grazer," and they'd hear my fresh, excited, young voice, fresh out of college, and they always said yes. I mean, I did say, "I work at Warner Bros. This is unassociated with studio business, but I want to meet your boss for the following reason and I guarantee you I do not want a job," and I was --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:07] That's indemnified.

Brian Grazer: [00:18:08] Yeah, that's very essential in greeting because I indemnified them from embarrassment.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:12] And the "I do not want a job" is important, because that's what they're thinking is, "This person wants something from me. They're just trying to be famous and Hollywood, and I'm so sick of that." And that's probably why these assistants didn't get fired for letting you talk to their boss in the first place, although Warren Beatty probably fired his assistant if you talked to him for an hour after that.

Brian Grazer: [00:18:30] Maybe I could maybe ask him!

Jason DeFillippo: [00:18:35] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Brian Grazer. We'll be right back.

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[00:22:32] Thanks for listening and supporting the show and to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Brian Grazer. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player. So you don't miss a single thing. Now back to our show with Brian Grazer.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:26] It's a great speech though to come up with people to meet in the movie business because you kind of don't really get to do that very often. And I know you set a goal to meet one person, new person, in the movie business every single day.

Brian Grazer: [00:23:37] Every single day, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:38] And that's impressive.

Brian Grazer: [00:23:39] You have to create discipline. And so I was good even with, again, dyslexia. I never solved it, but probably I found a way in junior high to read and I was able to spell and to this day I can still of course read, but it takes effort and discipline. But the bottom line, I created this discipline of every day I would go meet a new person. And so that was just really a function of saying I'm going to disrupt my comfort zone every single day and put myself in a situation where I have to learn about the language of physics or I have to learn the language of whatever that is to meet somebody so I can communicate with them. For you, I had to learn about your podcast. I didn't know everything about your podcast, but I realized all the really smart people that you've met. I think I was able to understand the theme of what you're trying to do. You come in, you're informed, and you can be interesting. I think the goal in life is to be interesting because if you're actually interesting, then you'll be interested and people will be interested in you. And so that makes the bridge of connection valuable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:51] That's one of those --

Brian Grazer: [00:24:52] I have to have something to say --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:54] Yeah, like be interested in other people to get them interested in you.

Brian Grazer: [00:24:57] Tom Hanks always used to say during Splash, "Here he is. Today's version of Dale Carnegie."

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:02] Oh, really?

Brian Grazer: [00:25:03] He was always teasing me. "He is Dale Carnegie. What question do you have, Dale?"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:08] Wow. Tom Hanks is making fun of you. That's a bucket list item for most people, I think.

Brian Grazer: [00:25:14] It was a regular activity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:16] Yeah. I'm sure. He seems like a funny dude.

Brian Grazer: [00:25:18] He is a funny, smart dude.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:20] Yeah, he has to be.

Brian Grazer: [00:25:21] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:22] In 10 minutes though, with Lew Wasserman, changed the way that you look at the movie business. Didn't he kind of like rip you to shreds and throw a legal pad and say like, "Do some real work!" Something along those lines?

Brian Grazer: [00:25:31] He did. I tried to meet Lew Wasserman. Everybody said yes. Lew Wasserman said yes. I got him to say yes because I cornered his assistant Melody and many other people working with him. The minute he saw me, he realized, like, "This is bullshit."

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:45] "Who is this kid?"

Brian Grazer: [00:25:45] "Who is this kid?" So he said, "Sit still" or "Stand still." He wouldn't let me in the office. He went to his office, came back with a big legal pad. It was a yellow legal tablet and a pencil and said, "Take this." He hands me the pad and then the pencil and he said. "Put the pencil to the pad and it has greater value than they do as separate parts. Get out." You know, like "Beat it!" So I got in the elevator feeling pretty embarrassed that he did it in front of a bunch of people, but it was the most valuable lesson I learned. I learned that you have to come in with something -- you have to own something -- meaning you have to give life to ideas, and so write them down and then you own something. It doesn't even have to be perfect. Don't have someone say, "What's going on?" and you go, "Nothing." You can't say "Nothing!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:37] "I'm just here to take up your time and your oxygen in your office." "Take a selfie."

Brian Grazer: [00:26:42] You are super funny! Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:45] Well, the book's about curiosity --

Brian Grazer: [00:26:46] "Take a selfie!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:47] Lew Wasserman would be like, "Hold on, let me get the camera guy." The one guy in the building with a camera.

Brian Grazer: [00:26:51] Yes!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:52] Curiosity's such an American, or maybe Western value. I mean, it's really not --

Brian Grazer: [00:26:56] It is, by the way. I can speak to that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:59] Yeah, let's do it.

Brian Grazer: [00:27:00] Our company, Imagine, has Chinese investors.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:04] I was just going to bring up China! Yeah.

Brian Grazer: [00:27:06] And I told one of our early investors, they read my book, and they loved the book. So I said, "I would like to do a location-based entertainment that involves curiosity, but I don't want to go through that right now." And he looked at me like, "Not a good idea." And I said, "But you liked my book!" And then I got him to explain what curiosity means in China -- his interpretation of me. If curiosity is directed towards productivity, like it's literally -- it's not meandering, it's not a casual thing. Curiosity is used to case build or build something that is a product of value --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:54] Right. Tangible.

Brian Grazer: [00:27:55] That is tangible. Then

China likes that. But if it's a casual dalliance, if it's a hobby or flirtation, they don't like it. It's a negative word. It has to be very defined.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:09] Especially if you're questioning, "Should this be the way that it is right now?" This order we have --

Brian Grazer: [00:28:14] Existential curiosity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:17] Or curiosity about whether or not you're being governed in the best way possible. Then it becomes fatal in China and Russia.

Brian Grazer: [00:28:23] Yeah, or "Why are we doing facial recognition everywhere? Why would we do that?"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:28] "It's convenient for you to get arrested when we're looking for you." Yeah, that kind of thing. You have built your life around these curiosity conversations, which when I read it, I went like, "Oh, it's kind of like my podcast, only he's not recording it," in a way.

Brian Grazer: [00:28:40] Sort of like that. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:42] I love that idea, though. Can you tell us what those are? I think that's useful for people that aren't just like podcasters or movie producers. More people should do it.

Brian Grazer: [00:28:50] More people should do it. And you don't have to go reach out and meet Jonas Salk, who I did, or Princess Di, or Michael Jackson, or Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. You can do that. I've learned a lot from my Uber driver. Just recently from a Serbian, first of all, I didn't know he was Serbian, but I had to ask him. And he was a very big guy and he was an Uber driver. I started talking about martial arts, which I'm very interested in martial arts. I have done three different disciplines. And he said, "Oh, well, in Russia, we have one called Systema." And so, I didn't know what that was. You do, apparently. And so I said, "Can I pay you to teach me this?" and he did.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:32] It's like kind of Krav Maga-esque and it's based on reality. It's not based on like doing things in the corner by yourself.

Brian Grazer: [00:29:40] You're using -- if you think about a wave in an ocean, so using the energy of that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:46] I think they use it in the Army over there.

Brian Grazer: [00:29:48] I'm sure they do.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:48] Or Special Forces and stuff like that.

Brian Grazer: [00:29:50] You're good to do this job.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:52] What?

Brian Grazer: [00:29:53] Curiosity job.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:54] Oh, this job?

Brian Grazer: [00:29:55] You're very good at this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:56] Thank you!

Brian Grazer: [00:29:57] You said, how do I use it? So basically --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:00] Well, you had a cultural attache. This person was like your booker.

Brian Grazer: [00:30:04] Yeah, my booker, but I did it for 20 years before the cultural attache.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:08] Good, I still have a few years left before I hire my own.

Brian Grazer: [00:30:10] So I had 20 years of doing this on my own, scrambling around and begging and groveling, which I still do now because --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:16] It works.

Brian Grazer: [00:30:17] It works!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:19] That's how we got here. They finally said, "Listen, Veronica, if you don't book Brian, I'm going to keep whining to you every week." And she was like, "Fine."

Brian Grazer: [00:30:28] Yeah, that's what happened. You did it. Here we are.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:30] You're my Lew Wasserman, except I brought my own iPad. No legal pad required. How do we get these meetings if we're not Hollywood heavyweights or podcasters with a social media following or whatever?

Brian Grazer: [00:30:43] You have to think about subjects that interest you. Well, first of all, if nothing interests you at all, then this is not the thing you should do.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:51] Remedial curiosity each time.

Brian Grazer: [00:30:53] But if you're interested in anything -- architecture, how a building looks -- and you realize, "Oh, I like the looks of that building," and then you say to yourself, "Why does that building look that way? Oh, it's the architect." Then it's not just the design on the inside, it's the architect. It's Disney Hall. Then you go, "Why does Disney Hall look like that?" "Oh, it's this architect." "Really? Who do you think that is?" "His name is Frank Gehry." "Wow, he must be a young guy." "No, he's 90." "Interesting. Wow, I'd like to meet a guy, like, that could do that at 90. I'd like to know what it's like to still be vital at 90. Plus, I'd like to know how he was able to come up with this sort of design, and is that a consistent design in all of his architecture?" You have to like sort of iterate all these questions.

[00:31:41] No, and then you're a nobody. Honestly, I still feel like I'm a nobody. I mean, I have accomplishments, but I do feel I feel like I have to scramble. How do I scramble? I have three assistants. They have to do stuff. They're supposed to make calls. I don't let them make calls. I say, "No calls." I'm making every call right from here myself. Every call is done by me. It's faster. It's more efficient. And guess what? I get to know the assistants. The assistants are going to rule the world and I've been doing that...if you think of the Creative Artists Agency, there's two guys, there's four guys, but two, they really run it. Someone named Richard Lovett and someone named Bryan Lourd. They used to work for people and I would call their bosses, but I talk to them. Richard Lovett goes, "You used to talk to me. I worked for Fred Specktor." So, it's really important to do that. First of all, it creates good karma. It activates your enthusiasm because you can't go, "Hey, can I talk to your boss?" You have to --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:39] You could now, but why start now?

Brian Grazer: [00:32:41] You go, "Hey, is Bryan in?" Bryan Lourd, in that case, or to be fair about it, Ari Emanuel.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:50] Sure.

Brian Grazer: [00:32:51] I called Ari's office even if he couldn't. I'd just go, "Hey, is Ari in?" "Hey, sure!" Because then they want to connect you. They have something vested in it. There was a director I was trying to get approved by Universal Pictures, and so I called the boss, the executive. I called and said, "Hey, is so-and-so in?" and they said, "Well, he's leaving." I said, "Before he leaves the country, he needs to have a meeting with this one director." "He's got no time." I go, "Please. He's got to meet this director, please, please, please?" "Who are they?" I say the names, and the assistant goes, "We love them." All of a sudden it became "Off. CAA's, Thursday afternoon." We showed up. They approved them, they're now directing Friday Night Lights, the movie, the new movie again.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:38] So don't outsource your networking, basically, because a lot of people do that. They go, "Oh I don't want to do that anymore." So, they hire someone for 20 bucks an hour. You're laughing because that's twice as much as you pay the person.

Brian Grazer: [00:33:52] Yes, that, and outsourcing your network. Yeah. It's very true. I mean I understood it in the day when people used the systems to make the calls, jumped right into a speaker box and they could sound like The Wizard of Oz and like some big deal. I'm surprised that Hollywood doesn't do that. Tech guys do that. They don't use the systems to make calls, really. Brian Chesky is a very good guy who created Airbnb, who actually stole my assistant. I became friends with him because he stole my assistant, but I was okay because he didn't go to a producer in Hollywood. He didn't go to Jerry Bruckheimer and go, "He's better than you, Brian." He went to Brian Chesky, who's created Airbnb that makes sense!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:38] So you would have taken it personally if she had gone to somebody else in the same niche.

Brian Grazer: [00:34:41] Yeah. I would have been, "Jeez, what happened? What's going on?"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:45] Yeah, I can see that, though. We're competitive with people that are kind of within that magnetism range of where we are, in our same orbit, but if somebody goes and works for somebody on the other side of a totally different industry, it's hard to compare.

Brian Grazer: [00:34:58] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:59] You're too different. You can't really --

Brian Grazer: [00:35:00] All my superstars are people that got yelled at by Scott Rudin. I've taken all of them. He's really talented, really gifted, tremendous sense of quality. Ironically, Scott Rudin and I both worked for the guy that yelled! There was a guy, Edgar J. Scherick. He was the boss, and Scott and I were equals as two guys that were just punks trying to get up in the business.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:22] Two punching bags.

Brian Grazer: [00:35:25] Well said!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:26] So you met Jonas Salk. Was that like one of your first big sort of curiosity conversations?

Brian Grazer: [00:35:30] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:31] And you puked on him, right?

Brian Grazer: [00:35:33] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:34] At least you puked on a doctor.

Brian Grazer: [00:35:35] Yeah. I know! That was the good news. So I was so nervous. I was very excited about meeting my childhood hero, Dr. Jonas Salk, who created the polio vaccine. But it took two years to finally get someone to agree for Jonas Salk that I could meet him. And I had so much excitement. I had so much pre-anticipatory excitement -- anxiety -- that when I approached him to say, "Mr. Salk," I kind of projectile vomited. But he is a doctor, so he wanted me to lay down. I was feeling faint anyways, and he summoned a glass of orange juice, and just the comfort of his hand on my head, I was back to life.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:20] That's quite an impression. I think he probably remembered that for a long time. I would imagine.

Brian Grazer: [00:36:24] Then he said he really liked me. I did curiosity conversations with he -- Jonas Salk until sort of the end of his life.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:32] Wow.

Brian Grazer: [00:36:33] We became friends for the remainder of his life.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:36] "Just sit three feet away, or here's the air sickness bag for the next time." Yeah. I think if somebody was so nervous that they puked on me, I don't know if I'd be like, "When's our next meeting?" You know? Good for him, though. Clearly a caring guy --

Brian Grazer: [00:36:52] "Let's do this on the phone!"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:53] Yeah. "We'll do the interview remotely next time. Thanks for puking on me, Jordan."

Brian Grazer: [00:36:57] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:57] You have worked with a lot of amazing people over the years. Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, heaps of others. How do you manage strong personalities like that? I almost feel like you can't. You know, you can't really be like, "Denzel, this is ridiculous. Behave yourself." Not that you would have to with him, but I don't think you could if you needed to.

Brian Grazer: [00:37:14] No I can't. You can't do that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:16] So what? You just have to hope that they're cool to work with? That they work well?

Brian Grazer: [00:37:19] With real very accomplished people like Denzel or Tom Hanks or Eddie Murphy or Russell Crowe, or I could go on, you have to have a communication system where you're warm and honest so they feel your heart. When people feel your heart, they're rooting for you. They don't want to be on bad behavior. But there are times that they would become impatient with some part of the process and you have to fix something. That's inevitable. And the way I think I did that was even if I'm afraid, I appear to be fearless. So you have to appear to be fearless, and when you appear to be fearless, then you can be loose. And if you're loose, you're honest, and there's a better chance you are to hit that ball, make it work. And so I try to be loose and open-minded and absolutely know that I will say things that are mistakes that they could prey upon, and know what I'm going to say when they do. Which is like, "Hey, I make mistakes, but my intention is the following." Always know what your intention is with somebody. Always know -- whether it's a movie or a startup company -- you have to have intentionality. What is that intentionality? Because of the execution, they'll be so much fallibility involved in that execution, you have to be prepared to know what you intend to achieve and be able to state that and evangelize even when things are off course.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:54] That makes sense. I suppose that way it doesn't make sense for them to pounce on you if they feel like you're being vulnerable with them. You're not trying to maintain an air of perfection.

Brian Grazer: [00:39:04] Yeah, in trying to maintain an air of perfection, you're going to go wrong. You're going to say something that's not true, then they'll ding you for that. By acting like you're perfect, that's almost arrogance, which they're really allergic to. Artists are truth detectors. If you just show your truth, if you're intelligent, and you're well-read and you just show your truth, then usually they will be attracted to that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:30] That makes sense, because I was wondering how you build trust with people that are always targets for being taken advantage of. You have to signal that it's okay for them to trust you, but these are people where, I mean, I'm sure Jim Carrey -- or Denzel -- has a million fake friends all over the place and they just are immediately guarded even by somebody that's working with them, because they're like, "What does this person want that?" That's going to be their default.

Brian Grazer: [00:39:53] It is. Yeah. That's for sure.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:55] It's actually got to be quite isolating for people like that. So if you can show that you understand that, there's probably some level of sympathetic in there.

Brian Grazer: [00:40:02] I'm tempted to tell this Jim Carrey story, so being tempted means I will.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:07] Yeah do it.

Brian Grazer: [00:40:08] So basically, I produced Liar Liar, which was a massive hit and great for me and great for Jim. It was a win-win. I always try to go for a win-win. Certainly, I don't try to convince anyone of even an hour with me if it's a win-lose. If it's me trying to get something off you, and I know if it's transactionally oriented and that person doesn't know that it's transactionally oriented, then there's deceit in the conversation. That's how I see it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:39] Yeah, they're keeping score and you're not. So they get mad when you don't do what they want you to do and you're like, "What the Hell? I thought we were just having lunch." And they're like, "I don't want some lunch. I wanted you to read my script, you prick."

Brian Grazer: [00:40:50] Exactly, that's really true. With Jim Carrey, I already did two giant hits with him. I did The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Liar Liar and then one other movie. You know, he's hard to work with, but he's a genius. He got really mad at somebody on the set and he kicked over the monitors, and that scared everybody.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:11] Like the TVs, like the screens?

Brian Grazer: [00:41:12] Yeah, those screens, there's a director chair, and you're watching the monitors, and he kicked them over. And it was like a temper tantrum kind of thing. He's so brilliant and I want the best for him, of course. But when he did that, my impulse was to grab him and hug him and even though he was really -- he can be intimidating because he's physically big and physically very strong.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:36] Is he? You wouldn't think!

Brian Grazer: [00:41:38] He's big. He has big shoulders and big arms and he's physically really strong because he gets adrenalized quickly. He can get hyperadrenalized, and when you're hyperadrenalized, you're very strong. You lift cars up and stuff like that. So he's sort of that person, and so I just hugged him and I said, "You know, Jim, you've just got to be happy. You're the biggest movie star in the world right now. You have to be happy with that." And it was a really touching moment and he just sort of gained his footing, you know, like rebalanced and it became a good day. He turned the day around for everybody.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:17] The second part of that, I guess, would be, "And those were $20,000. We're taking them out of your check." He strikes me as the kind of guy who, along with a lot of other artists who, no matter what, they will never be really happy with what's happening in their life.

Brian Grazer: [00:42:32] That's interesting. There's many artists, but Tom Hanks is happy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:37] He seems like he's happy. That's probably why other people like him so much. And I think Jim Carrey is brilliant and insightful, but he's brilliant and insightful in the way where you go, "Wow, that comes from a lot of pain." Like when you're watching him talk about things on YouTube, you're just like, "That's not a guy who's like, hanging out with his family and having fun."

Brian Grazer: [00:42:54] Tom has the right dosage of pain to cause him to want to avoid it, avoiding pain or shame. There's the right amount, the balance is right. It motivates him. He's very, very perfectionistic. He'll seem like a really regular guy -- he's just definitely not a regular guy. He has really supersonic skills not only as an actor but as a curator of picking ideas that are right for him, discarding the ones that aren't, just dealing with his managing choices, the things he does on CNN. He's very extraordinary not just as an actor, but he does every job. He knows what it feels like.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:36] He's a magical personality. But this is your show, this is your episode of the show.

Brian Grazer: [00:43:41] Yeah, sorry. Yeah!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:42] So how do you keep in touch and stay connected to people that are hyper-scheduled like that? You are so busy. I'm super busy. It's a constant struggle to be like, "Let me just give this person a call." They're not going to answer they're freaking in a meeting. They're always in a meeting. They're always doing something.

Brian Grazer: [00:43:57] So how do I reach people when they're super busy or how do I--?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:00] You don't even have to reach them. Maybe you're just staying in touch with them in some other way. Like for me, I text a lot of people because I know they'll eventually read it when they're like getting in the car, going to the next place. But they don't want to be on the phone.

Brian Grazer: [00:44:12] Well, this blows Veronica's mind, my wife, who you referred to. I will call everybody, because then they see the phone ring. And they almost always answer the phone because they're used to this consistent pattern of getting emails or texts or WhatsApps. So if you call them, they think, "Oh, wow. This --"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:31] "It must be important."

Brian Grazer: [00:44:32] "It's important. This is an aberration! This could be interesting to me!" And so I call them. I make it short. But I talk.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:41] That's the key: you make it short.

Brian Grazer: [00:44:42] Got to make it short. Got to cut to the chase. When people call me and they go, "Hey!" And the minute they do the, "Hey!" like that, Okay. Now what's happening? I don't think I'm better. I just want to know what the point is. I want to know: what's our story on this call? And so get to the point so we can both be engaged in it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:02] Yeah, that makes sense. You're training people to pick up the call because they know it's going to be five minutes and not 55 minutes.

Brian Grazer: [00:45:08] Yeah, they know Brian understands time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:10] Yeah, that makes sense. That's important to signal. I think a lot of people try to be small talkie because it seems more polite, but it's a waste of time.

Brian Grazer: [00:45:16] It's a waste of time and nothing fun comes out of small talking. This morning I called my friend Jimmy Iovine. He's a brilliant guy, he's created many music companies. Anyway, he created Beats, that became Beats by Dre. He's someone you should have on your show.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:34] I will take you up on that.

Brian Grazer: [00:45:34] Oh my god. He's a master. Basically, at 20-and-a-half years old, because people go, "Wow, why is he a billionaire?" I go, "Why is he a billionaire? I'll tell you why! He was sweeping floors in a music studio. He found a way to become the assistant to the assistant of John Lennon as an engineer. He shows me a picture of John Lennon and he, at 20-and-a-half years old, and he's important to John Lennon. He earned it. These kind of people are so interesting to me. They're earning it from the very beginning and becoming experts, and have far exceeded their 10,000 outlier hours.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:46:11] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Brian Grazer. We'll be right back after this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:19] This episode is sponsored in part by Xero. We've been using Xero for years. It's a cloud-based accounting software. We actually went after them to sponsor the show because Jen loves it. It's fast it's intuitive and it's easy to use. I actually met the founders years ago, and they're just great people. Even for people that hate the idea that they even have to do accounting in their business at all, and I know that might sound ridiculous, but we need, not you, we are out there. Accounting is not something I love doing but Xero makes it painless. That's, to say the least. A lot of our entrepreneur friends use it. It's what the cool kids are using these days for accounting for the business. It's you can give access to an unlimited amount of users. So, you're not swapping logins with people, contractors people who shouldn't have access to everything. You can also give access to your accountant so they can get reports out of there without going in and seeing every little thing that you're working on or your business's cash flow if they don't need access to that. Also, if you need an accountant, Xero can actually refer you to some of these experts here. You can also pay by month. There's no contract and they're really good with multiple currencies. I remember that was their thing a few years back. It was like if you're accepting payment in New Zealand dollars, in Taiwan dollars, in US dollars, in Canadian dollars, and in Mexican pesos, Xero has no problem reconciling all that stuff with up-to-date exchange rates. It's just built-in there. That was what they originally were really, really good at and it's just improved from there. Again, no contract. So, if you're a terrible manager, hypothetically, of course, and you go out of business in a few months. You don't have them banging down your door for some annual contract. Not that they would do that. They're too nice. These are people from New Zealand. They're not coming after you it's too far anyway, and now you're thinking, well they're in New Zealand, what if I need help. Well, they've got 24/7 support for you and you can screw everything up at 11 PM on a Sunday, and you'll be fine by Monday morning. You can also view things from your iPhone or Android app. If you're obsessively compulsively checking on your business on your phone like I am. And this helps when you check your dashboard in an Uber on the way to the airport because you need to get something for somebody. Xero is a great product. I highly recommend it if you have any businesses and you plan on like making some money doing it. Jason.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:38] This episode is sponsored in part by Figs. Figs are scrubs that are for people who actually have to spend more than five minutes in scrubs. Look if you're going to wear scrubs for a Halloween costume, fine get the cheap ones. But if you actually work in scrubs, you know, you're one of the people that needs them like a nurse, doctor dentist, people who work in medical healthcare. These are awesome people that deserve to work in something. That's not a repurposed recycled bed sheet and Figs are what these people deserve frankly. These are super high-quality scrubs. I mean, they're stylish their functional. They have nice zip pockets. They're easy to wash. They're not this weird sort of shaped...When I go to scrubs, people look like they're wearing a freaking pillowcase. Scrubs are comfortable. They are designed well. They're high-quality medical apparel. So that medical professionals look their best, feel their best, perform their best. They're antimicrobial. So, they protect from germs and bacteria. They're really soft. They wick moisture. They've got four-way stretch. Forget the yoga waistband. They come in a variety of styles from classic to straight leg, jogger skinny styles. So, they're built like the people who work at the hospital or in the medical profession are built as well. By the way, every time you shop at Figs, they give scrubs to healthcare providers in need around the world through what they call Threads for Threads. Basically, you buy one and then somebody in another country who maybe needs it but can't afford gets a pair or two. They've donated hundreds of thousands of sets in over 35 countries. These make great gifts for the lifesavers in your life. You can get gift cards for Figs. So next time your doctor, nurse, dentist, dermatologist pediatrician friend saves the day, tell them thank you and send them some Figs, and trust me a lot of medical professionals. They don't even know this stuff exists and I feel like this should be the new default for those people at their job because these are human clothes for important people, and I think Figs does a great job with this. I was wearing them and I thought these are really the next level. Jason.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:03] This episode is also sponsored in part by ZipRecruiter. Hiring can be a slow process and Cafe Altura's COO, Dillon Miskiewicz, needed to hire a director of coffee for his organic coffee company, but he was having trouble finding qualified applicants. Director of coffee, it sounds like a pretty cool job title. It sounds like what an owner would want. Anyway, Dillon switched to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you, it finds them for you. That's actually a big deal. Because what it does, it identifies people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job, so you get qualified candidates really fast. I was just at a week-long entrepreneur event in Mexico and since a lot of the people there listen to podcasts as a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners do, people were joking about ZipRecruiter because they advertise on so many shows including this one. And so, what a lot of these folks were doing, we're talking about this in the pool, what a lot of folks do, yes, ZipRecruiter post to a bunch of different job boards, but the real key here is you're going to get hundreds or possibly thousands of responses. ZipRecruiter's matching technology finds the relevant people who've applied, filters the applicants, and you can find a new director of coffee if you need to, just like Dillon, just a few days. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day and that experience was definitely echoed in the pool time conversations among the business owners that I talked to this week. I was very impressed by that. A lot of people had been using ZipRecruiter. It's not. Just something you hear a lot about on this podcast. It's something that a lot of people especially business owners and entrepreneurs are using to find a lot of really great help out there. So definitely give it a spin and definitely let us know what you think of ZipRecruiter if you do. Jason.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:52:50] See why ZipRecruiter is effective for businesses of all sizes. Try ZipRecruiter for free at our web address ziprecruiter.com/jordan. That's ziprecruiter.com/jordan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

[00:53:07] Thanks for listening and supporting the show, your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Brian Grazer.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:28] You feel like ideas come from all corners of your brain and I'm wondering what you mean by that, because I would love to sort of show people who also feel that way that there's nothing wrong with the way that they think. Does that make sense?

Brian Grazer: [00:53:40] Yeah, you know, that's an old-fashioned measurement tool. That's like thinking about the way I think, the way my thought is measured, is through an IQ test and it's singular like that. So now we've proved that certainly, curiosity is, if you use it, you learn a lot and there's a randomness involved in it. And so you're just trusting the randomness and that's a system unto itself. My system, which you could say, "Oh, that's a singular system or discipline," it's allowing for the randomness. Because I have seen like in either A Beautiful Mind or the case of Apollo 13, it all accessed my insights that enabled me to have value to both of those movies that became huge successes, came from a woman named Veronica de Negri that I met in 1985. So basically in 1984, I thought "Wow, I think I want to meet this musician named Sting, because Sting was like a schoolteacher in England and all of a sudden, he's now a rock star -- what is that guy's journey?" He was kind enough to grant me a meeting. I got to meet him. And a year later after that meeting, he said, "You know, I'm having a barbecue. Why don't you come over?" He'd just done the Amnesty Tour and a woman named Veronica de Negri was there. She'd been tortured in Chile under dictator --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:02] Pinochet.

Brian Grazer: [00:55:03] Pinochet, exactly. I said, "How did you survive?" That became a long story, that long story got me focused on how people survive when they're being tortured, and they live in an alternate reality -- another story. So if you think about thought, our present thought would be this: She knew she had to redial that present thought because that present thought was experiencing unpredictable pain every day. So she created another story with another thought system and within that story and thought system she could survive this 18 months of unbearable pain, which of course, if you use those insights and transport them to A Beautiful Mind, a schizophrenic, you realize that's the cinematic way to begin the movie, is through an alternate reality. Because it then makes it a thriller, not just a drama.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:52] Yeah, that does make sense.

Brian Grazer: [00:55:53] Was that too circuitous?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:55] No, I think it makes sense. You've said that your curiosity helps you make movies and that sounds like what we're talking about. You take just as much with your talk with the activist Veronica de Negri as you do with the astronaut, and they both go into Apollo 13.

Brian Grazer: [00:56:09] Yes, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:10] In a different way -- or A Beautiful Mind.

Brian Grazer: [00:56:11] I just think if you're a thoughtful person, and you're not lazy, and you create disciplines, any kind of discipline -- even just saying hello to somebody is a discipline. Looking at them and just saying, "Hi," and then you don't have to be active using curiosity as actively as I, as long as you have a discipline to improve yourself. And the only thing you have to do to improve yourself is disrupt your comfort zone. Put yourself in situations that are kind of like this sink-or-swim survival. Like I'm going to be smart on this show, or I'm not going to be smart on this show. I'm going to be the best I can be on the show -- see, I'm failing at this! But I'm okay feeling, but the point is you have to institute some disciplines upon yourself and you use those disciplines to grow.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:03] You've said that learning from someone in front of you is better than sex, better than success. And I love that because I usually get into, like, the flow state when I'm doing an interview that's going well. I totally agree with it. I think if I say this conversation is better than sex, that might come across a little creepy, but I'm fine with that. Emotional curiosity is something that you talk about in the book as well. You connect feelings and mindset to someone else's work and then try to bring it into your work. This might be tricky. But what does that mean? How do you do that?

Brian Grazer: [00:57:32] Okay. So, let's use that Frank Gehry example. I'm meeting this architect Frank Gehry, which I did do by the way. I pulled that randomly, but nothing is random, I suppose. I know that I can't talk to a master architect in-depth about architecture. Because I can only learn so much on YouTube or you know reading books or and you only have a certain amount of time you can read a book and now, we all know how to study quickly. There's lots of methods to study quickly. There was a previous architect that I didn't -- I didn't want to meet any architects. It was very early in my curiosity conversations about 25 years ago. And my cultural attache keeps telling me, "Meet this architect named Rem Koolhaas," who's a master architect himself. I said, "I get it. He's a master. I don't want to meet an architect." Bottom line, he says to me -- this guy, my attache -- says, "Why?" I said, "Because I think architecture is a manipulation of space as beautiful as it could be; it has nothing to do with feelings or emotion." He said, "I don't know. I think you could be wrong. You should meet him." So, I meet Rem Koolhaas. I say hello. The first thing he says, "Architecture is like a living organism." Because I wouldn't understand the big picture. It's like a living organism. And you have to think of architecture as a living organism because living organisms are going to be flourishing or not flourishing inside of the shell -- the architectural shell. Unless you centrally care about people's feelings and flow -- as you brought up flow -- like you're creating environments that are inspirational to human beings. That is the goal. And so I didn't even realize it, so I had it completely wrong and it was funny to me because I would have never bet that an architect would talk about feelings or emotionality or describe it through architecture through imagining a living organism.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:32] You're taking these insights that are seemingly disconnected from your work.

Brian Grazer: [00:59:37] Yes,

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:37] And then through these curiosity conversations or podcasts or other input sources. Then you take them and they trickle into your work, and do you credit a lot of your success in your work because of the outside input that most people just don't ever get?

Brian Grazer: [00:59:51] Yes. I definitely do. I credit all of these curiosity conversations and just my most recent book, Face to Face, it's saying yes instead of no. When you walk past people to get to your office or the parking or the receptionist that's not even your receptionist, and if you're saying yes, I see you as a human being, and you go, "Hey!" It lives in a constellation of events in your consciousness that somehow then might seep into your subconscious state, but it gives you a competitive edge over other people. It gives you a tip on the jump ball because someone might say something in a conversation years later and you go, "Oh, wait a second. I remember it! The receptionist or the Uber driver talked about Systema!" And yeah, you know, it's just like all these dots connect. The more open you are to all of the dots in the constellation of dots that are available to you, that you continue to expand upon, the more opportunity you have.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:51] It makes sense. It goes along with what you said, and I can't remember if this is the first or the second book, were you said instincts have no value unless they are informed.

Brian Grazer: [01:00:58] Yes. I know.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:59] And I wish more people would listen to that. Because everyone now is like, "Well my intuition says..." And I'm like, "You're in your fifth marriage with a guy who's horrible and strange, like I don't know if you should be listening to your intuition. You should probably stop."

Brian Grazer: [01:01:17] Yes, "Why don't you read a book? Or see somebody? Get some help!"

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:20] It's like when George Costanza on Seinfeld, he goes, "I'm going to do the opposite of what George would normally." Do you remember that?

Brian Grazer: [01:01:25] Yes, of course.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:25] Yes, of course, everything starts working out in his life. It just makes sense.

Brian Grazer: [01:01:30] It's very funny. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:30] This is how we get better instincts. We inform our instincts not by like, going to study something in-depth, necessarily.

Brian Grazer: [01:01:36] This sounds very categorical, but in that space. The helicopter parents, which I might be classified as one of them. You know, parents have enough money and they care about their kids. They're overly protective. They say, "Trust your instincts." But if your kid doesn't read a book, don't trust your instincts. Read some books, read something, meet people, learn. But it's like in show business it's very magnified, because people go, "Why do you like that actor?" or "Why do you like that story?" "Because I trust my instincts." But your instincts aren't informed. You don't know anything.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:10] You're an attorney. Your instincts are enough. Your creative instincts are -- you went to law school.

Brian Grazer: [01:02:17] You read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, do that, and then come back and start trusting your instincts.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:22] Exactly. And I mean, Malcolm's latest book, he was on the show last week, Malcolm's latest book is all about, "Hey, your instincts? Probably totally wrong. People get shot because you think your instincts are correct and it's not really a good look."

Brian Grazer: [01:02:36] Yeah, it's true about him. Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:38] This well pretty well in my opinion, Brian. I know you've got to go in a few minutes, but my fear on the show is having a situation like you had with Isaac Asimov. You want to tell us about that?

Brian Grazer: [01:02:50] I love that story. Basically, we're both the same person. He and I are both curious people. I was a very curious person and I seek to meet Isaac Asimov, as you would seek to meet somebody. Isaac Asimov was the leading writer and probably the most prolific and both valid writer of science fiction.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:12] He had, like, dozens and dozens and dozens of books. He had so many -- so much work.

Brian Grazer: [01:03:16] He wrote like a book a month or so --

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:18] And they weren't even all science fiction. He had like books on -- textbooks and stuff. He was just an incredible guy.

Brian Grazer: [01:03:24] So I wanted to meet Isaac Asimov because of all these extraordinary accomplishments, because he was the esteemed Isaac Asimov. And so I flew across the country, coach seat because I wasn't Brian Grazer, then -- I was the beginning of Brian Grazer. Mini-Brian Grazer! And I meet with Isaac Asimov and his wife at the Ritz-Carlton Central Park in the bar. I'm remembering this. I sit down with he and his wife and they both order ginger ales. I do a quick exchange with both of them, starting off like I normally start up. I'm thinking I'm smart and she says, "Isaac, you know what? I don't think he knows your work well enough -- you know, like robotics and stuff -- I think we should get up and go right now."

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:16] Right in front of you.

Brian Grazer: [01:04:17] Right in front of me! They are having this conversation in front of me. And so, Isaac said, you know, like --

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:23] "You're the boss."

Brian Grazer: [01:04:25] Yeah, pretty much! "You're the boss!" And under five minutes, they just got up and left. They left. They said, "We're leaving," and they got up and they walked away. They couldn't do it. That was the end!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:35] What did you take from that? I wouldn't --

Brian Grazer: [01:04:37] First, it was really embarrassing, and I felt like that was wrong of them. Years later, I thought, "They could have right. I didn't know enough and they could have suffered through it or we could have found commonality. But in order to write a book a month, you have to use your time wisely, and she said she could detect I didn't know enough about what he did for a living, and that's not respectful enough, and we're leaving. Goodbye." So I try to be well-researched.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:09] I envy people who can just do that.

Brian Grazer: [01:05:11] Oh, yeah, me too.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:12] I mean how many meetings have you sat through where you're like, "I knew two minutes in this was going to be a waste of time?"

Brian Grazer: [01:05:16] Many.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:17] Many! Especially in Hollywood. How many times in A Beautiful Mind did people have to remind Russell Crowe to just like "Hey, you're American! Speak with an American accent!" Because it's kind of like through the movie, he's just like not going to do that. He just talks in his own way

Brian Grazer: [01:05:32] In his own way, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:33] He's got like a little accent. You're like, "I don't think that's a Boston accent."

Brian Grazer: [01:05:36] Well, he'd just won an Oscar, so that made it tough. We hired him pre-Oscar, and then he won an Oscar for Gladiator, so now we were really on our toes. You can't really argue and go, "You don't know what you're doing, Russell!" You can't say that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:54] Yeah, he can just do him, and that's what I meant, I think --

Brian Grazer: [01:05:57] He was very good, by the way, but he did have that thing that you just said.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:58] It must be hard to take -- did you see little Gladiator kind of mannerisms on the professor at that point? I mean, it must be hard to switch cold turkey and jump into another character.

Brian Grazer: [01:06:12] Yeah. It's probably -- well, that it is probably hard. Because in order to be convincing as a character, you have to live in that character. You're not just memorizing. It's not a TED Talk or something.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:21] So you end up schizophrenic Gladiator genius. Kind of a weird mix. Kind of a weird mix to be around for, I don't know, a hundred hours a week or however long it takes to shoot a movie.

Brian Grazer: [01:06:32] Yeah, very long time.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:33] Brian, thank you very much! This was a really fun show!

Brian Grazer: [01:06:35] Sure!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:38] Great big thank you to Brian Grazer. The link to the book will be in the show notes. It's called Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection. There's a video of this interview as well on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com/youtube. And of course, there are also worksheets for each and every episode so you can review what you've learned today hear from Brian Grazer. Those are at jordanharbinger.com in the show notes. We also now have transcripts for each episode and those can be found in the show notes as well.

[01:07:03] We're teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our Six-Minute Networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. The problem with kicking the can down the road, you know doing it later, putting down for a minute, you can't make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake is not digging the well before you get thirsty. So, make sure you build those relationships much like Brian did so when you need them, you can hit the big time. They take just a few minutes per day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. Find it all for free at jordanharbinger.com/course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in great company. Speaking of building relationships, find me on social media at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

[01:07:50] And this show it's created an association with PodcastOne. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger and Jason DeFillippo, edited by Jase Sanderson, show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own; and yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting which should be in every episode. So, please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

[01:08:33] A lot of people ask me which podcast and media I listen to. Of course, one of my favorite YouTube channels is Smarter Every Day. Then I've got Destin here with me from the channel. I always thought you know, if anything ever happens to that guy, God forbid, I'm taking that name.

Destin Sandlin: [01:08:45] Oh, yeah. It's a great name, and I will really fortunate to get that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:48] You were man. You thought ahead, and you've got a new podcast, which also has a great name, No Dumb Questions, also a great name. Actually, one of your recent episodes it's less science and more just right up my alley right now. It's called Congrats...On A Life with Chapters. And for somebody like me who just had a kid. This is very timely.

Destin Sandlin: [01:09:06] Oh, yeah, no doubt man. So, what was going on is I'm a father of four kids, man, and I was in a career. I was testing rockets for like 15 years. And then I got to this point where I'm like, man, it's time for something to change but I'm really kind of in the groove here. Like I know what I'm doing. I'm comfortable with it and from listening to your show, I know that you're all about self-improvement and stuff and I finally got to the point, I was like, you know, something has to change and so I decided to leave my job that I love to go, I don't know how to say it other than, like temp to level up like I went back to school. So right now, I'm a student with four kids and a kind of half of a career behind me. We call this call a different chapter in life. So, we call the episode Congrats...On a Life With Chapters, and we just discuss all those things. I mean, it's really hard to come up with a decision like that. I mean you've done that. You were a lawyer, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It was a lawyer and then it was like, oh I'm going to teach guys how to meet and attract women and then it was like, whoa, this is really creepy and I'm not 25 anymore. So, I got to grow out of that. You know, I don't even know what I am now, that's probably why that episode resonated so well with me because I'm not even sure what the heck I'm doing and the more people I talked to who are like pushing 40 or just past 40. I realize man we just kind of all secretly winging it hoping nobody notices.

Destin Sandlin: [01:10:19] Of course we are and we all have imposter syndrome, every one of us. Yeah. I think there's an art to figuring out like when is one chapter coming to a close and what is it time to open up another chapter. And that's why I enjoy your program and I think people would like gaming that out with Matt and I. Matt's a humanities guy. I'm a science guy. We like to talk about different things in our lives. And yeah, I think people might enjoy that episode. So, thanks for letting me talk about it here. I really appreciate that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:44] Of course man, I will link to that episode specifically in the show notes and you can find No Dumb Questions the podcast anywhere you find your podcasts.

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Brian Grazer | The Art of Human Connection | Jordan Harbinger

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillippo. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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I found this podcast while completing this assignment.  It's a podcast I had actually never heard of before.  I chose to listen to the episode "Black Doctors with Disabilities."   Justin Bullock is black, gay, bipolar, and a doctor.  In episode 95 "Black Doctors with Disabilities" he shares his struggles with mental health and on becoming a doctor.  He said "the purpose of state medical boards is to protect patients." He then goes on to say "I would argue that making people afraid to get care or to disclose their disability, I don't think that is protecting patients."

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Alice Wong: Disability Activist, Media Maker, Consultant

This is life from a disabled lens. Disability Visibility is a podcast hosted by San Francisco night owl Alice Wong featuring conversations on politics, culture, and media with disabled people. If you're interested in disability rights, social justice, and intersectionality, this show is for you. It's time to hear more disabled voices in radio. Disability Visibility is a production of the Disability Visibility Project®, an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability media and culture. Text transcripts and links for each episode are available at: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/podcast/ Twitter: @DisVisibility

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This is life from a disabled lens. Disability Visibility is a podcast hosted by San Francisco night owl Alice Wong featuring conversations on politics, culture, and media with disabled people. If you're interested in disability rights, social justice, and intersectionality, this show is for you. It's time to hear more disabled voices in radio.

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My niece and nephew are at the age where they watch Peppa Pig.  I watched Mandy Mouse has a Birthday Party which originally aired in 2019.  Unfortunately my niece and nephew weren't with me.  Just before minute 6 the characters ask Mandy Mouse about her wheel chair and she explains her legs don't work like theirs.  The characters ask, "can you walk on your legs?"  She says "no" and then shows off her wheel chair.  Later in the episode Mandy Mouse needs help going up a hill and gets help from Peppa pig.

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Mandy Mouse's Birthday Party! | Peppa Pig Official Channel

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This is probably my favorite television series of the year that I have watched so far.  I highly recommend you check it out.  I'll try not to give too much of it away except that Autumn is bipolar.  She runs out of medication during the series which fits along really well with the story line.

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0:00 / 2:22•Watch full video

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Outer Range - Official Trailer | Prime Video

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This is really interesting show but is probably not for everyone.  As the people on the island consume communion they slowly begin to see improvements in their daily lives.  For example, one character realizes she doesn't need her glasses, another notices her mother's Alzheimers symptoms are reversing.  The most noticeable improvement is when Leeza Scarborough, a main character in the show, walks again and doesn't need her wheelchair.

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0:00 / 2:31•Watch full video

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In this video I learned wheelchair basketball was invented by veterans after WWII and is the grandfather of the Para Olympic games. Several of these Veterans returned to the basketball courts they played on prior to becoming disabled.

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0:00 / 0:31•Watch full video

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Wheelchair Basketball Competition Held In Harlem

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Gaten Matarazzo plays Dustin Henderson in Stranger Things. Both Gaten and his character have Cleidocranial Dysplasia (CCD). There are references to this throughout the series but it is never a main focus and it is easy to forget. For example, in season 4 episode 2 Dustin tells his friend he went too far with his remark about his teeth. If you didn't know or remember that Dustin has CCD you would probably miss the reference to his disability.

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Watching this again made me cry. Feda was a huge advocate for people with autism.  In the video above she talks about her son getting diagnosed and the struggles she faced getting him the help he needed.  She tragically died in a fire while trying to get her severely autistic son out of a burning house.  I wanted to share another link: https://www.autism-society.org/news/autism-society-san-francisco-bay-area-leader-feda-almaliti-and-son-muhammed-passed-away-in-tragic-fire/

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Hey, I'm Ryan. I usually go by Ryan O or RYANO. I hail from northern Nevada in the grungy, yet surprisingly classy, (and newly renovated) Reno, Nevada. I like my climate like I like my data: evolving, uncompromising, and progressive. I am a master of science; that is, I have an M.S. in Applied Behavior Analysis, however, my interests have grown to include many other interests, including entrepreneurship and capturing perspectives and stories through various mediums. These interests and skills have allowed me to work with a lot of great people. I've started three businesses, started numerous active joint venture agreements, a behavioral think-tank, a podcast, a professional development movement, helped organizations that support people with Intellectual Disabilities, to list a few. Currently, I lead product development and distribution for High Sierra Industries as a Learning Systems Development Specialist. I focus outside this role on building a community of thought leaders and doers to create content that increases the transparency of behavior analytic technologies with the hopes of creating a platform that truly saves the world. My interests are all over, from artificial intelligence and machine learning applications to the theory and philosophy behind Why We Do What We Do ( wwdwwdpodcast.com). In my spare time you can find me consuming social media, prepping/climbing a giant mountain, or walking around with my camera in my hand (and, occasionally, all simultaneously). Connect with me personally on most all social platforms via @TheDailyBA and let me know what drives you to pursue the Behavior Analysis vision.

Where to Find The Daily BA

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"I Didn't Want Parents to Suffer Like I Did..." - The Daily BA

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Hey, I'm Ryan. I usually go by Ryan O or RYANO. I hail from northern Nevada in the grungy, yet surprisingly classy, (and newly renovated) Reno, Nevada. I like my climate like I like my data: evolving, uncompromising, and progressive. I am a master of science; that is, I have an M.S.

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I grew up watching Family Ties staring Michael J Fox.  He was later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.  It was a pleasant surprise seeing him appear in this show "The Good Fight" as a lawyer.  His character also has Parkinson's disease.