Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - How to Become a Listener Contestant with Peter, Miles, and Sofie

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Have you ever wanted to become a listener contestant on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me? Host Peter Sagal and producers Miles Doornbos and Sofie Hernandez-Simeonidis discuss how they select which callers make it to the air.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, everybody. It's Peter Sagal here with another midweek podcast about the secrets of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. And once again, we are here with two powers behind the throne, and that would be producers Miles Dernbos and Sophie Hernandez-Simonides. Hello, guys. Hello, Peter. Hi, Peter. How are you? I'm well. So today we are going to discuss, and Sophie and Miles are going to clue you all in, on how to get to be a caller on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Hey, congratulations on having the gumption to give us a call at Wait, Wait to play on the air. Tell us why you'd like to be on the show. Leave information on how we can get back in touch with you, and we'll give you a call.

leave information on how we can get back in touch with you, and we'll give you a call. So usually on Monday morning, I will make myself a nice little cup of coffee and sit down at my computer for anywhere from like an hour or two, because usually there's about like 50-ish, maybe sometimes closer to 70-75 voicemails to just sift through. So it'll be either myself or our amazing intern Vaish, who just listens to every single one of these voicemails. A lot of the times it's just judging on vibes. You know when you meet a new person and you kind of get a sense of like whether you want to keep talking to them or you're interested in them or sometimes maybe not, but we're really looking for individuality, personality, what makes you as a person interesting that millions of people will want to listen to you this upcoming weekend?

Hi, my name is ***. I'm a high school choir and musical theater teacher. And last year, I suffered a stroke at the beginning of the school year as a result of a pie in the face at an assembly. I'm now back to work full-time. I'm super excited about it. I'm recovering really well. But I want to... We licked a frog when we were camping last weekend and it made us trip. Sophie, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. One of the secrets to being a good caller is to be yourself. I think

that there's a pressure for people calling into us that they want to like audition for the panel. And we already have a panel of comedians who do that for us. So what we want is something that we can't get from the panel, which is whatever your kind of individual trait is that makes you interesting and makes you fun. So everybody out there who's listening to this and wants to be on the show is feeling as if they're like, oh my God, no wonder I've never been on the show. I'm not nearly interesting enough. And I want you all to know that's not true. You're very interesting. But if they wanted to prove to you guys how interesting they were, what would you recommend they do? So I think a big part is talking about,

A, what you do for a living, and B, what your hobbies are, or if you want to tell a good story that is interesting. Give me an example of a good story you might want to hear. I remember once there was a caller who told me a story about how he used to be a cab driver in New York, and many, many years ago, he drove Bill Curtis to work. On the air. Hi, you are on. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Hi, it's Jim. Hey, Jim. In New Jersey.

Oh, Jim from New Jersey. Oh, OK. Yeah, Jersey Jim. Jersey Jim. Where in Jersey? I'm from Jersey. Now I'm in Brick, but I used to be in Hudson County, where I used to go right across the tunnel and work as a cab driver in Manhattan. And one night in the early morning in the early 80s, I had Bill Curtis. No! Yes, he was making his way to CBS.

It was like early, early, something like 4 a.m. and the beginning of his day and the end of mine. Wow. Bill, you must remember meeting Jim, right? Yes, Jim. And I told everybody I walked to work. I'm going to ask because, you know, was he a good tipper? Yeah.

He was very avuncular. No, he was very, I can't speak for him. So what you're saying is no. He just told me that simple story, and that was enough to get me to be like, this person is interesting and has something to say. But other times you can do something interesting or have an interesting hobby. The one that comes to mind for me is Steph from when we were on tour in San Francisco. She called in and told us about her hobby and her way of making a living, which was making snail art.

I am an artist. I have a very small business making soap, candles, and unique snail art. I'm sorry, did you say unique snail art? Yes. Yes, snail art. Okay. It is art that focuses on snails. So I make sculptures out of snails. I do drawings of snails. It's all snail-related art. There's no snails involved. Wait a minute.

So when you say you make sculptures out of snails, you're not actually making sculptures out of snails. And if so... No, no, no. No, no, no. Sculptures of snails. Sculptures of snails. Right.

Made out of paper. Oh, do they ever like fool a snail who ends up being very frustrated? So if you don't have any amusing, interesting hobbies or specialties, how long should you do one after you start it, after listening to this podcast, until it qualifies listening to this podcast, until it qualifies you to be in the show. It's like a six-month minimum. You have to go find something quirky to do. I do think it takes three to six months before it becomes a dalliance into a hobby.

So I do think you have to get it up to hobby level. So it is between three to six months of snail art before you can legally leave a message saying that you do snail art. Okay, I think there's a rule there, everybody. Has anybody, to your knowledge, ever lied to get on the show? Like, pretended to be more interesting than they were? God, that's such a good question. There is somebody who didn't end up on the show.

Like Sophie was saying, there's kind of this firewall, which is Sophie or our intern, Vaish, listening to these messages, and then those get passed along to me, and I do a second round of interviews with these callers, where I will call out to them to make sure that, you know, they're still comfortable being on the show. They are who they said they were. And we had a woman call in who told us that she was a doctor. Her message was very sweet and very normal. And I called her up, and the first five minutes of our conversation were very normal.

And the first five minutes of our conversation were very normal. And then she started telling me about her conspiracy theory that all air fresheners in public places were actually mind control devices forcing us to shop more and think less. And then because I am a doormat, I stayed on the phone with her for an hour. And at the end, I subscribed to her newsletter. I was about to say, not only do I completely understand that, I'm kind of angry she didn't end up on the show, because I've had that suspicion myself. So generally, just good note, don't call in about your paranoid

delusions about air fresheners. So then, Miles, you call them back. You do this sort of check-in with them. You're sort of double-checking the vibe impression that Vaish and Sophie might have gotten. Like, oh, there are cool people. How do people end up choosing a game?

Do you let them choose the game they want to play? I don't, because if I do, we would never have a bluff the listener caller. Regular listeners will notice that the only game that you have a chance of losing is the bluff the listener game. We've never had anyone lose who's Bill and the only limerick caller that we've ever had lose, we invited on next week and read them a special limerick where the last phrase

was their name. Tim, great to talk to you again. Glad to be back. So Tim, last week you lost our game. Well, this is what we've decided to do. We have written a special limerick just for you. If you get this one right, it'll give you a total score of two out of three and you will win. Okay? So here's your chance. Great. Here we go. Carl? It appears that our facts were quite slim.

Someone else wrote Snoop's drug book, not him. You were quite brave to play, but we led you astray. We're so sorry. Now what's your name? Tim! Yes! You got it right! Parenthetically, the limerick game is a lot harder if you're doing it on the phone with lots of people listening. Everybody thinks that's so easy.

You're in your car, you're in your kitchen, you're shouting out the answers. It's harder. It is significantly harder, and I think that their Philip Godekar limericist has gotten more obtuse as time has gone on which can, there are sometimes incredible limericks that if you read on

the page you're like this is brilliant but if you hear somebody read to you you're so busy focused on some wonderful hyphenated imaginary word that Philip has created that you won't get the actual answer. Right. All right, here's your last limit.

For pizza, this trend is a slaughter felon. It's even got my quiet daughter yelling. There's cheese and red sauce, but the dough is a loss. For its crust, they are using sliced. Watermelon. Yes! What? I guess we've talked about from our end a lot, Peter,

because you avoid this whole first part of the process. Yes, I am completely uninvolved. So your first interaction with these collars is when we're actually recording the show live. So my question to you is, in those moments, what makes a good collar? The collars I like are the ones who actually surprise me. Like snail art was great.

I've never heard of anybody making snail art or the people who have odd occupations or things I've never heard of, or sometimes people who do things that I've always had questions about. So for example, one that comes to mind, we had somebody who called him as a personal trainer and having employed personal trainers

to little to no effect in my life, I genuinely had a question for that personal trainer. I'm going to ask you a question. I have on occasion made use and profitable use of a personal trainer. When you guys say, you're doing great, that was great, are you telling the truth? Absolutely not. Yeah. Are you telling the truth? Absolutely not. Yeah.

There is something to be said for your interaction with a caller, which is not always something that we can predict. But you can tell, I think, when you are hitting it off with a caller and when the caller is hitting it off with you. with a caller and when the caller is hitting it off with you. And that makes, this is like the secret formula that is hard to quantify within the conversations that we have beforehand. And it's nice to know that a big part of that is that you have questions about what personal training is like, and we can just answer those questions for you and we'll be set. So if we were to summarize our advice to the people who might be listening to this, who want to be a caller on Wait, Wait, who haven't had that honor yet, we would say, be yourself, be honest, don't try anything, you know, funny, but at the same time, be utterly charming, delightful, and get that laugh. Right. How easy is that?

It's simple. I don't understand what the problem is. just for those who might be feeling a little down on themselves, if you have left a voicemail and we haven't given you a call back, we get, again, about 75 voicemails every week. And from those voicemails, we're only going to pull three or four listener contestants for that following week. So if you haven't gotten a call back, it's not because Sophie immediately deleted your phone call. It's just that's a numbers game sometimes, too.

If it's any comfort, Car Talk, our sister show in many ways, with the same executive producer, Doug Berman, worked the same way. You left voicemails and their production staff would call you up. And during the period in which Car Talk was still in the air, and our show was on the air as well, we often followed them, I actually had a car problem. And I called in to be on Car Talk. And because I was a host of this other show, they did me the courtesy of calling me back to tell me I wouldn't be on Car Talk. So there you are, everyone. We've all been there. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. If you have been out there wondering how to become an on-air contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, you have got it from the horse's mouths. Come, an on-air contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

You have got it from the horse's mouths. And I mean that in the metaphorical sense, not in any way, you know, an anatomical sense. They're lovely, attractive people. I do walk on all fours. It's true. Miles Dernbaugh is producer of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Thank you so much. Thank you, Peter.

And, of course, Sophie Hernandez-Simionides, who will be leaving us just as I feel I have finally learned how to pronounce your name correctly, which breaks my heart. Oh, thank you, Peter.