This American Life - 233: Starting From Scratch

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to Jorge Just, who thought he'd started over successfully. He'd moved to New York, found an apartment that everyone told him was a great deal, things were looking good. Then a reality television show visited his building. (8 minutes)Act One: Molly FitzSimons tells the story of her father starting over. After 25 years in the same zip code, as an executive in the same company, he moved to Los Angeles and tried to start over in a new life with a new venture: A cable channel, with no people, no talking, no plots, but lots and lots of puppies. (15 minutes)Act Two: Mary Beth Kirchner documents one day in the life of a hustler named Joe, who wakes up every morning broke, hustles as much as $10,000 during the day and then loses most of it by the time he goes to bed. What it's like to start from scratch every day of your life. (18 minutes)Act Three: Jonathan Goldstein reads a story about the first people to ever start from scratch, a couple named Adam and Eve. (14 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Things are just starting to look up for Jorge when the thing with the TV happened. He'd just moved to a new town, started his life over, found some work, got a place. Years of searching around and vagueness were ending. It's going well. Like the way that I'm procrastinating now is by doing work, you know? You know, I'm coming into my own. I feel good. I'm paying bills relatively on time. He'd moved to New York City, which was scary, and lucked into an apartment that real New Yorkers told him was a find. A little studio in the East Village, one room, good location, cheap. And then one night he's sitting in his table, watching The Bachelorette on TV.

And it's the episode where The Bachelorette has whittled it down to four guys that she's going to pick one from eventually. And she's in New York City, visiting one of the potentials. And, you know, so he goes out to dinner with his family and they're, you know, they eat and, you know, they've got the shifty-eyed sister. And, you know, like, everybody's family acts the exact same way, you know? Right. And then they get in the limousine and they decide to go back to his apartment. And now, like, now I'm, now I'm on the edge of my seat. Because, you know, I just moved, I moved to New York.

Like, it's an enormous city. And I would be so excited if I could recognize the street. I would be so excited. It would just make me so happy. And so I'm totally, I'm totally excited. So they get out of the limo, and he hugs are in the street. And they pan, and they show a building. They show an awning.

and it's my awning. It's your building. It's my building. It's the awning to my building. It says the address. It says the street. It's, you know, it's possibly the only place in New York I actually know. You know what I mean?

And then he opens the door and she comes in and it's my lobby, you know? There's my lobby. There's the row of mailboxes, you know? And I'm just like, I'm out of my chair and I can't talk. I'm, like, you know, like, pointing at the TV. Like, if it were me, I would think, like, are they here right now, like, in the building? You, you're too smart. I mean, I was, you know, I couldn't think.

I was just like, you know what I mean? I was just like, it was, you know, I was just flabbergat. It just couldn't be happening, you know. He watches them take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Jorge lives on the fifth. they walk down the hall to a door and then Jorge realizes something else. He doesn't just live in the city as me.

He doesn't live in the same street as me. He doesn't just live in the same building as me. He basically lives in my apartment. He lives in the exact same apartment. It's the exact same layout. So wait a second. So the camera goes inside this apartment and you see your apartment, basically.

A much better version of my apartment. His is much better. The walls are whiter. The place is cleaner. The furniture is nicer. He has a half wall. He's got a half wall. A half wall with them brick, glass blocks?

It's like drywall, you know. But it seems like it has like some sort of like countertop kind of thing on it. And at that moment, Jorge gets this flash. He is not really doing all that well. His apartment is a kind of dump compared to this guy who's on TV. Plus, he's watching Trista Wren, the Bachelorette on TV, looking uncomfortable in his apartment on national TV. In fact, she bails on the guy.

She leaves the apartment and they cut to like that head-on interview, you know, and she's just looking into the camera and she says, I've dated guys with really bad apartments before. I can't judge him on that. I have to find out why he feels like he can live in an apartment like this. She ditched him because of the apartment? Yeah, yeah. Wait, he lost out on The Bachelorette because of the apartment.

Oh, yeah. And it was your apartment? But better. Over the next few days, it all sort of goes to hell for Jorge. He's depressed. His new life does not seem so shiny. His New York friends console him.

Look, they say. The Bachelorette had never seen a New York apartment before. She does not know how people here live. This means nothing. Which helps him for a while until one day, Jorge picks up the New York Post, and right there is an article about his neighbor, Toddman, the guy from the bachelor.

Chorrette, getting busted for cocaine. Third paragraph. Todman's fate on The Bacheloret was sealed the moment Ren set foot in his squalid Avenue A studio apartment. Do you understand the weight of that? Squalid. Squalid Avenue A studio apartment. So this isn't just like people from outside New York.

This is the New York Post. Nobody knows New York apartments. It's like the New York Post. These guys have been in the most squalid New York City apartments. It's squalid, you know? It's squalid, squalid, squalid. You know, there's not that many definitions for squalid. There's not many ways to look at the word squalid and think, hmm.

Maybe they mean... Kind of hip, you know? Somehow, without every meaning to, Jorge had the experience that a person would have if he actually went on to one of the reality shows and then got booted off the show. National Television came into his apartment and then kicked him off the island, by proxy.

He was like collateral damage to a reality show. You know, I never, I didn't want to be, I didn't want America to judge me and tell me my apartment sucked, you know. I didn't want that. But at that moment when I was, you know, when they came into my building, they opened that door and it was my apartment, I thought I was, you know, I thought that I was hot.

I thought that it was, you know. Yeah. That's, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like, you know. You know. What was it? Pooh, pooh, pooh, pooh, pooh, pooh, pooh. You lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you know.

Jorge says that if he hadn't just moved to New York City, If he hadn't just started this whole life, it would not have been the kick in the stomach that it was. Which brings us to today's radio program. From WBEC, Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, starting from scratch. Stories of people in that period of their lives when everything is up for grabs, they're starting over, everything is tenuous. Act one, puppy love, the business model.

Act two, making money the old-fashioned way. In that act, the story of a man, a limo driver, in fact. It begins each day from scratch with just a few bucks. It bills it to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands by the end of the day. Act three, the first starting from scratch. In that act,

Jonathan Goldstein revisits a possibly familiar tale of a man, a woman, a garden, and a snake. Stay with us. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply. It's rare to find a podcast that can actually change your life. But when the show is called Life Kit, that's kind of the whole point.

I'm Mariel Segarra. Three times a week on the Life Kit podcast, we guide you through a topic we could all use help with. from personal development to healthy living to managing your with takeaways so you can start living what you learn right away. Escouche a Life Kit podcast from NPR. This American Life from Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun, Act 1. Puppy Love the Business Model.

Okay, you know there are mom-and-pop grocery stores, mom-and-pop newspapers, but could you throw everything away, change your life, start your life over, and create a mom-and-pop cable network? Molly Fitzsimmons' own father tried, and she has the answer. Some people's fathers quit their jobs and become teachers. Some maybe retire early and start a new hobby like model building. My father, after turning over the reins of the business he'd owned and operated for 25 years,

started a cable channel from scratch. It was February 1995, and he was looking for something new to do, but he didn't know what. Then came the OJ trial. He just had back surgery, and the day they sent him home for bed rest happened to be the day that the trial began. During the long breaks in the action, he would flip through the channels. There was so much downtime in the trial, I had a chance to see everything that was on television all day long for weeks. You mean you just surfed around while... The slow points in the trial were most of the day, and I spent the time surfing around daytime television and seeing what it was.

What it was was mostly soap operas, talk shows, reruns, game shows, things that my father had no interest in. My father is a problem solver, and this was a problem. So I thought something else is necessary. There's a need for a parking place on television. If you don't want to watch something that is there, you could have the TV set on, and it'd be playing something that didn't bother you. and would hold the place until your favorite show or what you chose to watch. For my father, like for a lot of people,

simply turning off the television isn't an option. So he's stuck flipping through a bunch of shows that he hates, waiting for the OJ trial to come back on when a little light bulb goes off in his head. I recalled my wife and I walking to lunch on a Friday in downtown Cleveland, walking into a building where the Animal Protective League had puppies up for adoption.

And the crowd of people standing around these puppies included men in three-piece suits and women in fancy outfits and shoppers, moms with kids and strollers, the UPS man. And they stood together smiling and chuckling and even sometimes addressing one another. in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in a big city building, all because there were puppies. The puppies made them feel better. And so my, my thought jumped to if television needs some other kind of programming, what would be wrong with one channel out of the hundreds that there are that showed nothing but

puppies all day, all night, every day. The initial idea was all puppies all the time. You turn to the puppy channel and you would see 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, acting the natural comedians and cuties that they are. With no people, no talk, accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music. would be the puppy channel concept. What are you looking for here? I'm looking for Ted Turner's letter,

where he very nicely refused me in writing this time. My father's home office in Clearwater, Florida, is all decked out with family photos, artifacts from his years in the ad business, and an entire wall of file cabinets, which has the complete Puppie Channel archive. What's up? This is a demo that is on the way to being the pilot show.

He shows me a banker's box filled with videotapes and pulls out the one-hour pilot he made early on in the Puppie Channel development. It's professionally packaged. There's a close-up of a puppy on the cover with a word, woof, and two exclamation points. Okay, so,

It's a really, it's a cute cover. Let's put it in. When's the last time you watched this? I think it's been years since I watched this. Poppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies. You may recognize this voice. It's my dad. He also wrote the lyrics. Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies.

Puppies! The scene fades up to a family of old English sheepdog puppies, playing and barking in a wood-paneled suburban den somewhere, with mellow guitar music in the background. After a couple of minutes, a scene changes to. a corgi puppy running in circles on a snow-covered lawn. Soon, border collies are fighting over a sock on somebody's linoleum kitchen floor. It's exactly what you'd expect from my dad's description of the puppy channel. And what's so surprising is that it really is nothing more

than that. Throughout the hour-long pilot, puppies waddle around and sniff things, puppies wrestle and nuzzle each other adorably. It's a soft focus world of indescribable cuteness. Occasionally, my dad's singing interrupts a relaxing instrumental soundtrack. Wait, this is your voice, right? Puppies are everywhere. Puppies go anywhere. Watch the puppy channel now for Puppies on TV. That's like the theme song?

That's the third puppy channel theme. Oh, look at that one. With a big ears flopping up in the air. At some point while we're watching, my dad's wife, Carol, who's been listening quietly to our conversation from the other side of the room, comes over and starts cooing at the television. Carol went with my father on most of the puppy channel shoots and actually had the idea for what became the big climactic final scene of the pilot. Here's a scene of all ten of the dogs on a sofa and how they get off. Some of them are vigorous in getting off. Some of them are little. reluctant.

This was your idea, Carol? I thought it would be cute. It's not just cute. It's also suspenseful. Most of the puppies immediately jump or tumble off the couch onto the carpeted floor, but a couple of them stay up there looking sort of confused. It's a pretty long sequence. I glance around the room during it and realize that all of us are smiling,

and we're watching with rapt attention to see if the two cowardly puppies will ever find their way down off the couch. One of the two finally does, leaving only one puppy left. And to give you an idea of the drama of the moment, let me put it this way. We all find ourselves talking to the TV. Come on, you can do it. Come on. You can do it.

Come on. No, wrong way. Finally, after a good three or four minutes, the last puppy sort of half jumps, half falls off the couch. And all of us cheer. A moment, yes. Success. Nice move into slow-mo there. The whole time my dad was doing the puppy channel, I could never decide if I thought the idea was genius or totally insane.

And the thing that made it seem super smart was the same thing that made it seem. seem kind of crazy, namely, puppies. Suddenly, my businessman dad was talking so much and so fervently about puppies. It was kind of weird. And my question was always, how would the Puppy Channel possibly make any money? When I asked my father this question, he was so convincing that I started to wonder why it's not on television right now. Here's how it would work. There'd be fees from cable operators, and there'd be product placements and sponsorships. You'd see a bunch of puppies tearing into a bag of Puppy Chow, for example, or a scroll across the bottom of the screen saying, this hour of the Puppy Channel brought to you by Milkbone. In focus groups, it did

well. 37% preferred it to TBS, 41% to CNBC. And remember, my dad didn't need a huge audience to succeed. At the time we created the puppy channel, television channels with the tiniest little sliver of audience were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Court television sold one-third of its stock for $100 million, which presumably means the thing was worth $300 million, and their primetime ratings was one-tenth of one percent of the TV audience at that time. Based on our research, that even though the puppy channel would appeal to a very small segment, of people, that segment would be big enough to make it a success. But even a small cable channel was a huge venture compared to anything my father had done

before. By his reckoning, he needed to raise $17 million to get on the air, or he needed a big cable company to buy his idea. And so, he and Carol started hustling, and after 25 years of being at the center of their own small, familiar world, they suddenly found themselves in middle age, on the fringes of a much larger and stranger one. There were cable conventions. We had a little tiny booth, way in the corner, and we had a million people coming around wanting to get our video. And what was your role there? Dog. What? I dressed as a dog.

Painted my nose black. Yeah, I couldn't get this black out of the pores of my nose for days. Whose idea was it for you to wear a dog suit? I think it was your father's. Of course it was your father's. Would I have voluntarily done that? These are the things you do for love. Fortune Magazine published a photo of Carol in her dog suit.

The media loved the Puppie Channel. There was an article about it on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter. There were favorable blurbs in Entertainment Weekly in USA Today. Everybody loved it. Everybody, except the ones who, at this stage, mattered most. People like Ted Turner, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch all got the Puppie Channel pitch. But my father couldn't make the sale. One of the TV professions that we talked to was talking about the amount

of space on a satellite, they call it bandwidth today, that it takes to have a commercial TV network shown. He said something like, you'd ask us to give up six mega-slacks of goobishnop to put just puppies on there? And the answer is yes, but if you are the guy who owns the six mega goops of schlaken docks, you're maybe not going to give it up for puppies. But why? I mean, so he just, he doesn't like puppies, or? No, it's a foreign concept to want to go way far off the beaten path. The puppy channel is way off the beaten path. It has no people. It has no talk. Usually when you describe this, you do mention that there would be no talk. And that seems to be a big part of what you liked about

the idea. Why do you think? Why do you think? that is. Why were you so interested in a channel where nobody talked? Having a human being in the picture talking about what the puppies were doing or talking about something struck me as against the concept originally of just having a quiet place on television that was all relaxing, all comfort, all easy and pleasure giving in a very, very low-key way. One person my father talked to characterized the puppy channel as the antidote to television. And in the end, I think that's probably why it never worked out. My dad hadn't just imagined a new cable network.

He'd imagined a new way to think about what television can be. What you'd get from watching the puppy channel would be very different than what you get watching the Food Network or QVC. or law and order, for that matter. In his business plan, along with all the spreadsheets and financial outlines, under the section titled Vision, it says only, to make television more helpful, and under mission, to help people relax and feel better. My father conceived of the Puppy Channel as a refuge from regular TV,

but implicit in this notion is the idea that regular TV is something you need a refuge from, And that's a tough sell to the people who make it. After five years of hard work, my father decided to pull the plug. I'm just going to put it out there and say, I think the world wasn't ready for the puppy channel. If there were a thousand television channels, the puppy channel might be in there.

If there were 600 television channels regularly being, sent out by the satellites, the puppy channel might be there. There's a number where the puppy channel fits in. We just don't know what that number is. When we find out what that number is, I'll be there with my dad, and we'll be singing this song.

Take us out, Dad. I love the little puppies, pretty little puppies. I love the little puppies on the puppy channel, every little pup on TV Molly Fitzsimmons and her dad since we first broadcast this story

all the way back in 2003 we have obviously seen the incredible demand for cute puppy videos on YouTube there's the puppy bowl on animal planet there's dog TV a channel intended to be watched

by dogs Molly's dad Dan Fitzsimmons died in 2016 but obviously was far ahead of his time Molly says that he delighted in the fact that his idea a cozy corner of the world

for watching puppies caught in the act of being cute forished in all these other forms. Act two, making money the old-fashioned way. Well, now we bring you the story of somebody who starts from scratch every single day with next to nothing and tries to build it up to something. Mary Beth Kirshner tells the story. Every day, Joe plays this game.

He starts with enough small bills to make change lots of fives and ones, then the clock starts. It's 1.30 in the morning. I go out with almost nothing in my pocket in the morning. Sometimes I end up with thousands. Sometimes I end up broke at the end of the 10. So how much do you have in your pocket today? I got $32 in my pocket today.

By 6 o'clock, I should have at least a couple hundred dollars. And, you know, I take it from there. By 6 a.m., he meets. Joe, who doesn't want me to use his last name, drives a super-stretched limousine in Las Vegas. Joe says he prefers starting in the middle of the night. He doesn't like crowds or traffic. Here's how his game works.

By driving his limo to and from the airport mostly, Joe slowly earns enough, a few hundred dollars, to play blackjack in the casino. And then pretty much the sky's the limit. Sometimes I end up with 10 grand, you know. One time I started out with like $32 or $33. Like today? Like today.

And I wound up with $84,000 at the Gold Coast. $84,000? $4,000. How do you turn $32? I try and build it up to like $1,000, and then I play with the $1,000. I build it up to $3,000, and then you get on a run. Joe's a bit of a legend in Las Vegas gambling circles.

I'd heard about him from a pawnbroker south of the strip who said Joe was a regular customer who came every month for about a year. Among the stories he told me which led me to Joe that he'd never worked a day in his life, that he lived only on a trust fund until he was 50 controlled by his father who despised his love of gambling. On his 50th birthday, the legend went.

Joe inherited 6 million. He instantly spent the first million on a house. The remaining five, he gambled away. It took him five hours. Joe says not true, but based on the truth. He did inherit millions of dollars from his family and did lose a big piece of it gambling, but over years, not hours.

People tell me, oh, look at the kind of life you lead, you know. I mean, one day I could have a million dollars the next day I'd be broke, but I love it. I love the action. I love the adrenaline. I get an adrenaline rush from it. One day you have a million dollars in the next day you're broke? Yeah.

Is that an exaggeration? No, it's not an exaggeration. I mean, I had days where I went in and I won, like, at the horseshoe, I won $680,000. I started the day out with like $50 in my pocket. And I went out and I bought two homes with some of the money. And I ended up losing the other money. Then I needed money. So I borrowed on the houses.

And then I lost the houses. I couldn't pay it. I go up and down, you know. It's like a rollercoaster, but I really enjoy doing it, you know. I think without it, I'll just wilt away and die. See, this is one of the hotels of Barbary Coast, one on me if I go in there and sit down for two minutes, they'll tell me to get up and leave.

Joe has a long history of winning big in the casinos, so much so, and this is clearly true, about a dozen of them in Las Vegas have kicked him out. He says most of them think he cheats. Nobody could be that lucky, they say. Among the places where he's still allowed to play, none wanted their names mentioned or would allow me to record in their casinos today.

So we were limited to taping outdoors, where most of Joe's game happens anyway. Sometimes you stand here for like half hour and nobody will, you know, but as soon as they come out to take a cab, I approach them, you know? First stop, His favorite, nameless hotel and casino, where the doorman lets him approach potential customers

from the circular driveway out front. Joe tips the doorman for each ride he gets, so he gives Joe first dibs on every person who walks out the door. You guys need a cab? Why long this? $15? $15? With the approval of the doorman, lots of people say yes.

Isn't this a lot nicer than a cab? A lot nicer. Say? It's 2 a.m. With our first $15 coming in. Joe says he started waking up at these hours when he worked in New York operating vending machines and coffee carts,

gambling in Atlantic City on the weekends. There too, he says, most of the casinos kicked him out. By the time he came to Vegas 14 years ago, he says he was ready to retire, but he gambled full-time for the first eight years he was here. Well, he's not a dishonest man by no means.

But, you know, he's an opportunist. He's the type of guy, if there's an opportunity for him to, you know, to work the odds or make a dollar, you know, he'll make 10. He's one of them guys. George, please don't mention my full name either or where I work, is a casino manager in one of the few places where Joe now plays. We met in an empty hotel ballroom, far from the casino floor. They think he counts cards.

He doesn't. He's very good at knowing when the decks goes cold, when there's not a chance of winning. If I were to own a casino and have a thousand Joe's walking around in my casino, I'd be out of business in short order. Well, maybe not. Joe walks away with his winnings, but then he always comes back for more play. And that combination, George says, does to Joe what it does to everyone. I see the numbers. There's not a player in this place, like not any casino I've ever been in.

that has won more than they lost. Never? I'd say never. When you see the cumulative numbers. And that's one reason why Joe is driving a limo. These guys are going on the strip club, that would be great. That's 100 bucks. 5 a.m., and we've got $180.

Joe has his eye on a group of guys who've clearly been out on the town for most of the night. Joe's hoping these four are looking to go to a strip club because he gets a kickback of 20. $20 a person. Do you guys having fun? You want the radio on? Radio is optional.

It's more money. I got anything you want, as long as you got money. Joe tells me he also takes guys to the brothels, a half-hour drive from Las Vegas, and collects even more. We take people out there, and we usually get 30. Now, for the holidays, they're doing 40% of what the person spends. If a person spends $1,000. spends $1,000, we get $400 kickback for bringing them out there.

What do you mean for the holidays? Until December. They're doing like a special. Instead of 30%, they're giving us another 10%. Because I have pictures of everything in my trunk. I have a menu also. They have a menu of all the stuff you could do there. As we drive, the stories keep coming.

There was the day Joe won big at the racetrack and flew to London on the Concord. just for dinner. Or the two-day stretch, he was playing 20,000 a hand at the Hilton and walked away with over a million dollars. These kinds of stories can't be confirmed, but I wanted to believe them. So he offers to show me what's in his trunk. See, this is about a half a million dollars in markers right in him. Joe hands me a three-inch stack of receipts from casinos all over town totaling about a half million dollars. Evidence, he says, he wants me to see, that these can't all be lies. And what are those 20,000? Yeah, they loan me 20,000 to sit and play with. Ah.

You know, if you lose, you've got 30 days to pay it back. These are 20,000, 20,000. Yeah, they're old. They're all like... 25,000. What's this? This is my uncle in Forbes magazine. You made like close to a billion dollars. He's your uncle? Yeah, that's my uncle. Billionaire? Yeah. Later, when I look into it, that story checks out, as does the one about his aunt, who Joe says sits on the board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He says

she's the one who bails him out when he gets over his head in debt. Joe admits he's the black sheep in the family. How much do they give you? $41. It's 7.30 a.m. and we're up to $350 from the run to the strip club and five trips to the airport. We just keep going around and around. There's a brief lull. Joe says it's time to go into the casino. I'm going to go play a little blackjack. The only thing is, I don't know if they don't let you. Of course, they want. The casino won't let me record his play, of course, but

I watch. I'm going to play with $100 now. I know. I'm making $50 or $60 and like $15 minutes or less. Joe sits in front of a woman dealer with an empty table and he's got that look, almost

like a drinker who bellies up to a bar. every night, like he belongs there. He signals the woman for cards and chips and quick, shortcut hand signals. Each hand takes less than a minute. He plays a few and easily wins his $60 in 10 minutes or less. Before I know it, we're out again. 8 a.m. was $410. He says it's getting to be peak time for airport runs.

See, now it gets busy, you know, so I don't have a chance to really go in and gamble Because I'm, you know, as long as I keep the cash coming in, if it's low, I supplement it with gambling. If it's not, I just, you know. But you wouldn't rather be gambling? I'd rather be working. Really? Yeah. What happened to your feeling about the gambling?

I mean, you gambling, you did nothing but gambling. I just do it, you know, because I'm so hyper, I have to have something to do. You know, I used to sit, like, I was at the Flamingo one time, and I had about $40,000 in chips in front of me. And I was playing, I was playing, like, $2,000. I have and I told the doorman if you get a good ride like to a golf course come and get me you know so like for $75 anyway he came up to the table and he told me I got a ride for $75 and people in the pit they all think I'm nuts you know I just stopped I took my money and I ran down to take the guy for $75 and here I am playing two grand there you know I try and separate the

two one has nothing to do with the other you know I don't understand that I know nobody does That's how I am, you know? But do you understand that? I don't, you know, I just... Gambling to me is gambling. Work is work, you know? 10 a.m., and we've got $650. We've had three more airport runs,

and the last customer just gave him a $25 tip. Only in America. But Joe says today his game is subdued compared to the past. At age 54, he's had some heart trouble, and that's changed the stakes. A year ago, his daughter was home from college and noticed he didn't look well and called for an ambulance. Joe was having a heart attack. It was pretty scary because you see, and I think he might have been in a casino, but I'm not here.

I guess that's enough to really get your heart rate up. Yeah. So, I mean, if you ask me, I think he probably was, but he never told me for sure. Joe's daughter knew what she was doing. She's studying to be a doctor in medical school in the Middle East. I talked with her via her cell phone while she was working at a hospital in some remote spot in Israel. She asked that I not use her name, not even her first name.

What did you tell your friends your dad did? Now when I was growing up, because now even I don't, only a few people in my class really know of my good friends even. What did you tell them then? Then I would say, well, he's not really doing anything now,

but he had real estate in New York. And sometimes I'd just make things up, but I'd say he's a chef. And so, but it was always funny because I was running joke between, you know, me and my dad. But when I was growing up, I just couldn't tell people because nobody else had a dad like that. And so I felt like they would either not believe me or I would sound ridiculous. And they just wouldn't understand. But he, he had never had a problem with me saying to anyone, you know, what he does, that he gambles.

When Joe moved to Las Vegas, his daughter was just entering high school. He raised her practically as a single parent, starting from the time she was born when his ex-wife had a breakdown. It wasn't until they moved to Las Vegas that she says she really understood just how much her father gambled. I guess what always blew me away in the beginning is we would walk in and everybody would know him. And they would know me too because he would talk about me, and I would say to him, how do these people know you? I was amazed by that. And they would joke with him and they'd say, are you back again? They'd say, well, what do you need today?

Because he would go in sometimes and he'd say, I need a pool today. How much money does it take to build a pool? $20,000. I don't remember how... How long did that take? Literally 10 minutes, maybe. One, two, three, and that was it. But as much as she knows her dad's wins,

she remembers the times when they were broke, really broke. We would have to search for quarters on the floor. And my uncle would... This is really funny to buy a hamburger or something like that. Search for quarters on the floor in your uncle's? Yeah, he would search. We would pick them up and I would go and get a hamburger. But that was in the very beginning.

I mean, even when things are really bad, he can always find a way out of it. And even I would be amazed. I mean, because I would say to him, there's no way. How are you going to do that? And he'd say, don't worry. We'll find a way. And there's always a way. And he can just laugh about it.

Which airline you're going to? Southwest. Southwest. It's noon, and Joe has $1,100. The limo business has been steady for hours. It's a good time for business, but Joe wants to take a break to call his daughter. I've talked to her, like, five times a day.

It's late night in Israel. He just wants to hear about her day. Hi, honey, it's me. I just called to say hi. So what's happened since your daughter is going? Well, that's when I started to work. I never worked when she was here. It's just like filled my void maybe in a way.

I just think about it. But I miss her so much. When I see her, it's like, it's the greatest feeling in the world. And we're at the airport now. This is zero level. Oh, I'm going to go upstairs and see how busy it is. People are looking for rooms.

It's 1.30 p.m. and we're up to $1,300. $1,400. We've just dropped off yet another ride at the airport. And for a little variety, Joe says he's going to show me how he also sells hotel rooms. These are hotel rooms the casino's given for free because he gambles so much. I got to make it seem like I'm just, you know, walking casual. Joe's carefully checking out a middle-aged couple in shorts and tennis shoes. Just as he's about to approach them, We're interrupted. Hi, this is Joe.

Oh, how you doing, Dave? What's up? A lucrative job has come up. He says some high roller wants to charter his limo for three hours. For three hours? Did you tell him it's 75 an hour, though? Joe says these guys are seldom big tippers, but it's worth the gamble. This customer, a handsome mid-30s Middle Easterner, says, no recording, please.

So Joe tells me to take a break, and he'll catch up with me when he's done. He says my family lost their homes when they're juiced, you know, took over Israel. It's 5 p.m. and I have no idea how much money Joe has. When we reconnect, he looks exhausted, but hyped up. Since I left him, he's finished with the charter, been to the casino to gamble, where he won $500. But there's more. He's anxious to tell me about how he's ended the day. Tell me this again.

So this guy at the end of the day, you thought this was going to be the end of the day. I just asked him, I asked him, I said to him, I said to him, where are you from? So he says, Lebanon. I said, oh, I said, I speak Arabic, you know. I said, I was born in Baghdad. I was really born in Baghdad, Iraq.

What Joe didn't tell the guy is that he's Jewish. I said, are you Muslim? He says, yeah. I said, I said, oh, those Jews. I said, what they're doing is terrible, you know, to the Palestinian. And then he just, he didn't know, all his adrenaline just started going, you know,

and he just, so he like, he wants. wanted to go out with me tonight. He wanted to hire the car from five hours tonight. And I said, no, I said, I'm too tired. I said, so he says, well, I'll call you tomorrow. I said, fine, you know. He's like, buddy, buddy. But he gave me 500 bucks. He said, all right. See, that's what I call it. A perfect day. You go out with like 32 bucks. You go home with two grand. As we take off, Joe's still hanging on to today's winnings in a wad of bills,

folded up like it's a double cheeseburger in one of his hands on the steering wheel. $230 he gave me as a two. I don't know how much is that bad. But think of it. If Joe just worked five days a week making $2,000 a day and never lost it back,

that'd be a half million dollars a year. It's a wonderful country. Mary Beth Kirshner, she's now a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute. Coming up, when the creator of the universe starts from scratch. That's in a minute from Chicago Bubble Radio, when our program continues. It's this American life, I'm Ira Glass. Each you're going to program, of course, would use a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme.

Today's program is a rerun, starting from scratch. Stories of people starting over, with all those. the vulnerability and rawness that comes with starting from nothing. We've arrived at Act 3, the first starting from scratch. Well, before there was money or gambling or TV or puppies or even the idea of before there was this story about when everything started from scratch. Here's Jonathan Goldstein.

In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth, and yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point, he tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them, and God had to step in. Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself, when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you. But it's a stranger who you have created, and he's a stranger who you have created. And he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created, and you have been sitting

at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years. And yet still, you have nothing to talk about. It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted. Before he created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now he was still lonely. And so was Adam. then came eve since the garden of eden was the very first village and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot it broke down in this way eve mayor adam village idiot and that is the way it was from the very beginning

sometimes when adam would start to speak eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart. But he would only say stuff like, little things are really great because you could put them in your hand as well as in your mouth. Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. In her dreams, Eve danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies, and there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug, and then she would hear snoring. She would wake up. She would wake up, and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers, his dog-food breath blowing right up her nostrils. Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across

her chest and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it. Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them, except for God, Eve had no one. She would complain to the Lord any chance she got. Adam is a Nimrod, she would say, and the Lord would remain silent. God was the best and all that,

and she loved the hell out of him, but when it came to trash talk, he was of no use. Adam was constantly trying to impress her. Look what I have made, he said one bright morning, his hands cut together. Eve looked into his hands. She pulled away and shrieked.

Adam was holding giraffe feet. I've sculpted it, said Adam. It is for the Lord. He opened his hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck. On some days, Adam galloped about exploring. His hair was wiry, and when it got sweaty, it hung down in his eyes. Adam was cute this way. On one such day, he saw a snake.

Adam made the snake's acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back. Wow, that's smart, said the snake through gritted teeth. Their eyes locked, and in that very moment the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was a lummix, and that as king of the earth, his reign would very soon end. There was a new sheriff in town, and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake. He could tell all of this just by simply looking into his idiot eyes. I've seen you around with another one like you, he said to Adam.

But instead of the dead legless snake between the legs, she has chaos there. That's Eve, said Adam, all animated. I named her that myself. God made her from out of my rib. He showed the snake, the scar on his side. The snake looked at Adam in silence. The idea of Adam, Adam the Shlemiel, Adam the Fool, being God's favorite, was enough to give the snake a migraine.

You aren't at all like I imagined, the snake said. I thought you'd be closer to the ground, more pliant, greener. I tried to explain to God that to make you balanced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don't know why I bother. Adam sat and listened wide-eyed. Eve hadn't the patience to sit and chat like this, so when the snake suggested they get into the habit of meeting every once in a while to talk, Adam was very excited to do so.

As they laced on their back, staring up at the sky, the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world, and that he used to pal around with God in the dark, back before creation. He said that in the darkness, it was a truer, freer time, that in the darkness was the good old days. He told Adam that back in the very beginning, he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place, but that God was just too stubborn to listen to reason. Make the earth out of sugar, I told him. Instead of stingers, give bees' lips they can kiss you with.

Adam didn't always agree with the snake. In fact, a lot of what the snake said went straight over his head. But there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood. He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself, I sure could go for a good dose of snake. You would think that after all the time they spent together,

the snake would finally find it within himself to start liking Adam, just a little bit. But instead, he only grew to hate him more. He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam's wife, Eve. From what he heard from Adam, she was hot and smart. Often he would imagine running into her and the instant synergy they would have. Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are, he would say, say, wrapping himself around her calf. The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, buck-toothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp. Adam had the IQ of a

coconut husk, but he was still human. The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed. Sometimes I'd think you were watching me, the snake imagined saying to Eve, because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me, ribbons made of raw pork intestines. I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek at me from behind a tree. But all I'd see were the hedgehogs, which mocked me. Come, my dear, let us eat from the tree of knowledge. On Eve's very first day, Adam had explained to her the rules of the garden, just the way God had explained them to him.

He had lifted his head up and had made his back stiff. He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1914. 40s would. Another kind of woman, someone softer than Eve, might have found this charming. He explained that except for the tree of knowledge, every tree in the garden was theirs to eat from. I am a fan of the pear, Adam said. It is not unlike an apple whose head craves God. Tell me more about this tree of knowledge, said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it, the tree of knowledge. It sounded very poetic. There's not much to tell, said Adam. If we eat from it, we will will die. From then on, Eve talked about the tree of knowledge all the time. It was tree of

knowledge this and tree of knowledge that. It's like it wasn't a tree at all, but a movie star. Sometimes, she would just stand by the tree and stare at it. It was on such an occasion that she met the snake. When Eve first caught sight of him, she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day. A booby that percolated her vomit to just beneath her tonsils, a dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature's cruelty, and a death watch beetle that filled her with existential dread. But still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from 60 to 80 percent oilier than she would have ever imagined.

Hi, said the snake, in the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It's fruity. We were told not to eat from that tree, or else we would die, said Eve. Die. What an ignorant thing to say, said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass in the side of his mouth. If there is an escape hatch from paradise, then it isn't really paradise, is it? The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve. He could see he was making an impression.

All I'm saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake. I could talk about it all day and you still won't get it. You have a right to at least try it, right? I'm not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble. A nibble isn't really eating, is it? Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating.

She looked at the tree. The way the sun shined through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to, nibble the fruit. Then the snake said, Think about it. Does God want companions who can think for themselves or does he want a bunch of lackeys and yes, men? Wouldn't God want a few surprises?

It would seem to me that God's telling you not to eat the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God. The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely. At least give it a lick. Eve looked at the fruit, then she looked at the snake. Then, slowly, she parted her lips and pushed her. out her tongue, all wet and warm and uncertain.

She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit. The snake smiled. Has anyone died? he asked. Now take a tiny little nibble, just a speck, just a sea. The fruit was squishy and tart. She smushed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes. It was a bit like trying on new glasses.

It was a bit like an amyl nitrate popper. It was a bit like a big, wet kiss on the lips right at first when you weren't sure if you wanted to be kissed or not. She felt a thousand little feet kicking at her uterus. The idea of her own nudity, as well as atoms, had always felt more like a Nordic, co-ed health spa thing. Now, with the fruit of knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing.

Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks. Her thighs, the way they swished against each other, were like scissors cutting through velour. With her lips still glistening in Tree of Knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam. The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass. And as she receded into the distance,

he thought something along the lines of, Now that's what I'm talking about. Kiss me, Adam, said Eve, taste my lips. Adam, like any lummocks truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way, and thus he knew how to avoid it like the plague. But yet, there was also this. Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him.

It felt like a very lucky thing. When he took her in his arms, he told her that he loved her with his whole entire heart. He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted. Then it started to rain, and Eve began to cry. During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the garden more and more.

A couple of times he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn't try too hard anyway. He didn't want to bother God any more than he already had. When Adam met someone that he really liked, he would say, I so wish you could have been there. It didn't seem fair to him that he was the one that got to be in Eden. This sunset isn't bad, he'd say, but the sunsets in Eden.

They burned your nose hairs. They made your ears bleed. He couldn't even explain it right. When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God, he would say. And God was delicious. When you wanted him, you just grabbed him. Now when he ate fruit, he can only taste what was not there. But it wasn't all bad.

After Eden, Eve became much gentler with Adam. After getting them both cast out, she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love. She knew it was the very least she could do. She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place. Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve

had spent their early days in a beautiful garden naked and frolicing and the kids would say Ew! The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam

lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time. They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled. Where's grandpa's belly button? They all asked. He stared at the children. They were all his children.

And as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid. Jonathan Goldstein. This story appears in his book where he rewrites Bible stories called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible. His podcast, Heavyweight, is going to be returning this fall for a ninth season, now with Pushing and Industries. They already have some new episodes in the feed. You can find them wherever you're going to be. you get your podcasts. The world program was produced today by Wendy Dore and myself with Alex

Bloomberg, Diane Cook, David Kestimbaum, and Starly Kine, production help for today's show from Todd Bachman, Jane Marie, Aaron Scott, Alvin Mellath, and Ari Saperstein. Mixing help today from Catherine Raimondo. Our technical director for the show is Matt Tierney, help on today's rerun from Suzanne Gabber and Stone Nelson. So thanks today to Mr. George Lara. Thanks also to Kevin Scully, Dave Dahlstra, and Tony Mancini. Some of the funding for Mary Beth Persner's story about the Gambler came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Radio Fund back when such a thing existed.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our over 850 shows for absolutely free. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who I have to say got all angry this week when I told him we were going to be putting a story about puppies onto the public radio satellite. You'd ask us to give up six mega schlucks of Goobushnop to put just puppies on there? Well, yeah. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

of this American life. When Angela's family goes on vacation, her dad plans everything. One year, the plan went awry. I don't think I was particularly traumatized. Wow. You went to, like, you got hit by lightning. Like, lightning's not personal. The lightning wasn't like, Angela, you're ugly. The lightning was just doing its thing.

When nature, fate, or the federal government, mess with your plans, that's next week on the podcast or in your local public radio station. I'm going to be able to be.