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How to Give

Transcript for How to Give (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

So, I mean, yeah, I guess I was probably a little bit scared about things like that, and because, for a few reasons, I don't necessarily, like, I don't necessarily like having things removed from my body.

From 90.1 KZSU Stanford, It's State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

Last October, my friend Brian invited a bunch of us at our house to come help cater an event that was supposed to benefit his school.

It was a charitable event in La Honda, in the woods.

This is Rachel Hamburg.

She's a producer for State of the Human.

Rachel brought up this story in a meeting, and I asked her to tell it again here.

I thought it was interesting because it shows a side of giving that we don't really hear about too often, how much it takes to get people to give.

We're devoting our whole show this hour to giving, asking how we give, what we give, and like in Rachel's story here, why we give.

Okay, back to Rachel.

And I'm not exactly sure what I expected.

I expected it to be very fancy, I think, because he told us beforehand that the plates were $500 or something like that.

And you would be?

So we were catering, so our job was basically just to deliver the food to the people who were going to eat it, and to be very presentable and nice.

So picture Rachel and her friends, these are scruffy co-op kids, grain eaters, spiffed up for the occasion.

It's evening and they volunteered to help cater a nice charity dinner at a country club about an hour from Palo Alto.

They stand in their tuxes on a wet but well-manicured lawn.

So when we arrived, nobody was really there yet, but there were these beautiful white tables spread around this kind of rolling green that I think was actually normally a golf course.

There was a fountain in the middle of it that had been converted out of a swimming pool and it's shooting up these neon spurts of water and there's Ella Fitzgerald playing over these empty lawns and a gorgeous mansion behind it.

Nothing but blue skies.

The main event that night was a charity auction to help out a school in a poor neighborhood.

A big chunk of the school's budget would come from this fundraiser, from these guests who were now walking through a gate, turning over their credit card numbers and pledging that whatever they won at the auction that night, they had to buy.

No backing out.

And then as soon as they come through the gate, they are immediately presented with me and all the people, the other caterers who are with me, who are all holding two trays, one in each hand, full of very alcoholic beverages.

And the other people who are there are the 49ers cheerleaders.

And they're wearing their cheerleading outfits, which look like really like amazingly sexual, like outside of the context of being cheerleaders.

When was the first moment you saw the cheerleaders?

I think before they were just, there were a few isolated cheerleaders out in the yard, and you're kind of thinking like, huh.

And then they all show up right as, next to the alcoholic beverages and the people who've just signed their credit cards over.

And you're like, hmm, this looks like a trap.

Ha ha.

Rachel is not naïve about fundraisers.

Her mom's job actually involves advising a wealthy family on how to give money.

So Rachel knows about charity dinners and all that.

She knows you have to treat people well if you want them to give.

But she's also feeling pretty cynical.

She's feeling like this combination of hot cheerleaders and booze is something beyond just whining and dining.

But she can't put her finger on it.

So she just watches things.

The next thing that happens is basically that dinner does not start, this is supposed to be dinner, dinner does not start for at least an hour and a half, maybe two hours after people have been let in to this arena, right?

And meanwhile, the alcoholic drinks have not stopped.

So there are a few hors d'oeuvres, but basically people are just getting smashed.

And finally, dinner starts, and this is when the charity auction begins.

Soon, people are bidding thousands of dollars on items like children's birthday party with all of the cheerleaders of the 49ers, which would have been like my idea of hell as a child.

But anyway, different strokes.

Anyway, so the auction goes on, and the host knows how to work the crowd.

And the whole time, you know, the announcer is like kind of congratulating all these guys on their awesome wins and like talking about like, oh, you know, Chuck over there, you don't know, he's in a fighting mood, you know, so-and-so's not going to stop him, oh my God, look at him, oh, he raised the pedal.

Just getting them pumped up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, but in his way, there's like, I know you, right?

But he doesn't, he doesn't know Chuck.

After dinner, the fundraising gets taken up another notch.

The weirdest game was the last game, which was just this game where, when everybody is like at their most drunk, they're like, okay, so now we're going to play a little game.

Everybody who's willing to give away $100, please stand up.

And so most people stand up right, because everybody's got that amount and they're all drunk.

And then they're just like, everybody is going to give away $200, keep standing.

So how many people stood up for $100 and how many people stayed standing?

Most people stood up for $100, I think, and then people are dropping off every time.

It gets up to probably $5,000 or something, right?

And you're just like, wow, you didn't even have to give away a private dinner with seven of the 49ers cheerleaders in the bathroom of NOLA's or whatever.

You just had to be like, give me your money, go, it'll be fun.

Rachel realizes what's been making her feel so uncomfortable.

It's the fact that all these techniques are necessary.

Some 200 people have decided to do something good, give away their money to help a school.

But they don't just give it.

They're coaxed.

They're given gifts in return.

They're boozed up and put in competition to be the most generous.

Last man standing.

And it does seem to be geared toward men, doesn't it?

How else to explain the cheerleaders, if not as some primal stimulus?

Some catalyst of the ancient biological drive to display wealth for attractive women.

And why is all this necessary?

Why isn't enough just to help out some kids?

Yeah, so you detected the dark undercurrent.

Your radar for the darkness was very keen.

But what were the good things about it?

Yeah, I mean, there were lots of good things going on.

They gave away enormous amounts of money to a school.

That's awesome.

You don't sound like you believe it though.

You know, I do believe it.

I do believe it.

I think maybe the main difference is that these people are not a part of the community of the children that they're helping.

And the event is not designed to connect them.

To connect them with those kids in any way.

I have very mixed feelings about that because it is the most effective way to get a ton of money.

And I have absolutely no doubts about that.

And I think in the quote unquote real world, that's how it's done.

But I also think that if this is the only way to get the wealthy to give, we have a problem on our hands.

I don't think it's just certain people who need encouragement to give.

It's not just people who go to charity fundraisers.

It's all of us.

We all want to feel good about giving.

I do, Rachel does.

We all need to be enticed, either through guilt or with the promise that giving will make us feel good.

Philosophers can debate if giving is inherently selfish, and scientists can argue for program to look out for number one.

But it's the storyteller's job to give examples, to make the problem come to life.

So that's what we're doing on today's episode of State of the Human, How to Give.

We've got three stories for you of people trying to give and give well and how that works out for them.

First, it's a story about giving the shirt off your back.

Second, a story about giving from your body.

And last, it's a story about giving something you can't hold, but that might be the most meaningful gift of all.

Stick around.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

Today's show is How to Give.

You can't talk about giving or charity without talking about the developing world, places where Western poverty can seem cozy by comparison.

We in the West have so much that it seems natural to ask why we don't give more to people who really need it.

We're told that the money we spend on coffee in a year could, in another country, buy cataract surgery for a blind girl, send her brother to school, and feed their whole family for a year.

It's just so tempting to want to give our surplus to make the world a better place.

This next story is about someone who tried to do that.

Not with money, though, with t-shirts.

If you paid attention to the world of social media, marketing or charity in 2010, you might have seen this video.

Hey everybody, my name is Jason Sadler and I am starting a project called One Million Shirts.

I want to get a million shirts donated to the people of Africa, different countries, different villages, different towns.

In the video, Jason is standing in front of a closet overflowing with t-shirts.

His hair is buzzed and his muscles are huge.

He looks like he could be somebody's personal trainer, or one of those uber healthy business people who lives off exotic shakes.

Point is, he's got charisma.

And in this video, he's channeling that charisma toward getting a million t-shirts donated to the continent of Africa.

If you're like me, you've got an entire closet full of shirts that you probably don't wear anymore.

I'm a little bit more drastic than most.

I also run a company called iwearyourshirt.com, where I get paid to wear t-shirts for a living.

So, I really don't need any of my old t-shirts.

I plan on wearing t-shirts for a living for...

How does someone get paid to wear t-shirts for a living?

Every day he wears shirts with corporate logos on them.

It's part of a company he started from scratch.

Sadler's enthusiasm is contagious.

He's stoked in his video about Africa.

And when you watch the video, you get kind of stoked too.

And right now it's time for me to put my shirts together.

Let's see how many I've got to donate.

The project blew up when it hit the site mashable.com.

Their article was about how people can use social media to clothe Africa.

And it praised Sadler's Facebook and Twitter skills.

But not everybody thought the project was a good idea.

In fact, aid workers from all over the world basically hated it.

They filled up pages and pages of anti-Jason material in their blogs.

The blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough lists over 60 different blog articles that lambast Jason's video.

Here's one by a blogger named Teddy.

It's called Found, One Millionth Stupid Idea by Wannabe Do Gooders.

I'll just read a little excerpt.

Out of all the problems plaguing Africa, shirtless kids running around in tropical weather isn't a global crisis.

And don't get me started on the gratuitous use of poverty porn in your video.

Aid bloggers like Teddy took issue with a couple of the things in the project.

The first was economical.

Shipping t-shirts to Africa just isn't practical.

Way more money would go into the hands of international oil companies than would go into the hands of people who need it.

Plus, why send shirts to Africa when people in Africa can make their own shirts, creating jobs and making the kinds of shirts that they actually want?

But what bloggers really didn't like about One Million Shirts was how it felt overall, like this one part.

Some people only have half a shirt to their name.

Some children don't have a shirt at all.

Right then, a picture pops up of an African kid without a shirt on.

This is what Teddy was talking about when he mentioned poverty porn.

The image is supposed to make you feel guilty, and it does.

When you see that kid without a shirt on, you want to send one of your extra shirts all the way to Africa.

Well, it's not a coincidence that my blog is called Good Intentions Are Not Enough.

This is Saundra Schimmelpfennig.

She's one of the bloggers who chewed out Jason online.

There are these people that don't know anything about aid and development, just getting into communities and leading projects, even though they may not have any background and experience, they don't understand the language, they don't understand the culture, but they're given a pass because they have good intentions, and if anything is written about them, it's always the positive homeboy does good story that you get in your local newspaper.

Saundra has a name for this local homeboy story.

She calls it Whites in Shining Armor.

And that local newspaper never actually goes obviously to the location and talks to anyone else.

So the entire story is written from the perspective of the person who went, and you're not hearing the impact on the ground, and if that project fails, which they often do, that's never reported back to the newspaper because the person who was in the newspaper obviously doesn't want a story written about it.

It's easy to hear the frustration in Saundra's voice.

She's frustrated by the gap between people who make positive differences in the developing world and the people who just have good intentions.

His project really isn't that much different than hundreds, thousands, thousands of projects out there.

He just happened to have got into Mashable, which has a big enough audience that it was then seen by the aid blogosphere.

And so the aid blogosphere started to joke about it rather snidely.

And so Jason did a response video where he was rather snarky.

Hey, internet trolls, angry people on Twitter, whatever you want to call yourselves.

Be a man, 140 characters, you don't have the time to email me and you're going to talk to me on Twitter.

I don't care.

I don't drink haterade.

I really don't.

I'm going to go ahead and keep trying to give kids and families who don't have shirts in Africa clothing to wear, because you guys all seem to think that everyone in Africa has clothing.

I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to, you know, maybe step up and actually speak to somebody and not sit behind a computer.

I don't do that.

Have a great day.

I wish you all the best.

After Jason's response video, some people on Twitter organized a huge conference call over Skype, sort of as a way of saying, OK, let's give Jason what he asks for.

People from all over the world were there, including Jason, and also including Teddy, the guy who had blogged about poverty porn in the original 1 million shirts video.

Here's part of what Teddy said.

As an African, I've really become tired because everybody thinks that all Western organizations and all Western ideas are the best thing for Africa.

Sometimes they're not.

Most of the time, they're not.

A lot of the times, we have solutions and initiatives already on the ground that are kind of pleasant.

So when something like this just gets heaped on our economy, it doesn't help us.

It completely destroys us.

In the conference call, Teddy tells Jason exactly how he feels.

He's upset about Jason's project and projects like it because of the effects of American handouts in developing economies.

But there's a difference between being upset on Twitter and being upset in a conference call because in a conference call, you can be a little more sure that someone is listening.

And Jason was definitely listening.

The turning point in this whole thing was working with Teddy.

This is Jason speaking in an interview with one of our producers.

That was the turning point for me because that was somebody who wrote negatively about me from the beginning, chastised me openly, and then kind of came back and said, listen, I apologize for originally what I said.

I meant it, but I still, I want to help you and I want you to realize what was wrong.

Teddy and Jason made amends and they even started to collaborate.

He was the one who sat down with me on Skype and who worked with me and wanted to, literally every single day, if I needed questions answered, he would be there.

He would be there to answer those questions.

They drastically revised the One Million Shirts Project together, transforming it from a charity project into an entrepreneurial venture.

This new project would not send any shirts to Africa, but would keep them in the states and make laptop cases out of them.

Then they could sell the laptop cases and use the money to give college scholarships to African students.

Sending a bunch of people free handouts in other countries, it's not good for what's going on in their economies.

And while the intentions are in the right place, it's not actually gonna be a helpful thing.

What's remarkable about all of this is that Jason went so wrong trying to do something that seems essentially good.

He wanted to give t-shirts to people in Africa who didn't have them, clothing the poor.

That's like textbook benevolence, but it completely backfired on him.

Then he was able to transform the backlash into an entirely different project.

But when Jason stood back and looked at the revised version of the project, he realized it was not the project that he wanted.

It didn't feel right to me.

It didn't feel like it was actually going to do as much as I wanted to do.

I'm somebody who, when I start something, I have a goal in mind.

I want to hit that goal.

So when we completely changed the focus of it, the amount of time that it was taking, it just didn't seem like it was going to work for me.

So there it is, the death of 1 million shirts.

It was the project that wasn't going to do any good, and it was stopped before it ever really got started.

It seems like that was the best thing that could have happened, given the circumstances.

Thank you for.

Thank you for watching.

Before this story completely finishes, there's kind of a weird addendum, which is this.

Not long after he laid one million shirts to rest, Jason became passionate about fighting human trafficking.

I know that the majority of people out there don't understand what's really going on, but when you hear a story of human trafficking in person, it's very difficult to hear.

Jason wanted to make a difference, so he devised a plan, and in his new project, Jason would buy slaves.

Yes, he would buy humans from the developing world, and he would set them free.

And immediately, the guy Teddy reached out to me, and he was like, you can't do this.

You can't be a part of this, because what you don't realize is it's just, it's perpetuating the cycle of human trafficking.

You can't have people taking kids out, because that just means more kids go in.

If you buy slaves, you support the slave trade industry.

Teddy told Jason not to go through with the project.

That was a tough one to swallow, because what are you supposed to do?

You're basically just supposed to sit there and say nothing, and that's the most help you can do.

That really sucks.

Jason is thwarted again by someone who understands the situation more fully, telling him why he shouldn't get involved.

In my mind, the great thing about this last part of the story is that Jason scrapped the project after he'd written one single blog post about it.

All he needed was one email from the right person, and he knew the project wasn't a good idea.

You know, I slapped myself in the forehead and was just like, I should have thought about that more before I wrote it, but I can't take those things back.

You know, and so many people emailed me and were like, holy crap, like, I didn't even, you know, I didn't even think about these things going on in the world.

So, you know, maybe I opened some people's eyes to some things.

I don't know, I'm not trying to be some great leader in this.

I'm just trying to say that I learned lessons and I hope people learn them for me.

Thank In the end, Jason Sadler will probably be remembered as a great leader in the field of knowing when to let go of a project.

It wasn't easy for him, and I think we can all agree that it was a good thing for this project to fail over here in the States instead of failing in Africa.

Today, Jason is still running iwearyourshirt.com, and he now donates 12 days out of every year to support the nonprofit world by wearing the t-shirts of nonprofit companies for free.

That story was produced by me and Will Rogers.

Thanks to Jason Sadler, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, and Teddy aka TMS Ruge for lending their voices.

Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Today's show is How to Give.

You just heard the story of someone who wanted to give, but didn't know the best way.

Now it's a story of two people who knew exactly what to give, but weren't sure if they wanted to.

Dana Kledder, fiction editor for the Stanford Storytelling Project, tells this tale of two donors.

This is Nick.

I'm Nick.

Nick's an amiable guy, a thoughtful guy, a guy who does nice things for his friends.

But this is a story about doing something really nice for someone who isn't a friend, someone he didn't know.

So that morning, I was lying in bed and I was supposed to have already gotten up, but I hadn't yet just because I was really tired and didn't want to do anything.

The phone rings and Nick listens to an offer, a chance to do something of great consequence.

It was actually someone from the bone marrow registry and they were very awake and cheerful and I was still half asleep.

A friend had convinced Nick to join the registry a few months back.

People who suffer from blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma or autoimmune diseases can be saved by a bone marrow transplant.

The trick is in matching the donor with the patient.

According to the marrow registry, only one out of every 540 registry members will become actual donors.

Nick learned that he might be a match for a patient needing a transplant.

Basic tests had proven he was a possible donor.

Now Nick had to make a decision.

Should he submit to more tests that would confirm him as a true match?

I mean, you hear a lot about bone marrow being so, I guess, intense.

You hear about it being a painful process and you hear about it being a procedure and surgery and things like that.

But at the same time, I'm like, I don't think I've ever even given blood.

There are two ways of donating bone marrow.

The first is done under general anesthesia.

Doctors stick a giant steel needle into your pelvis and suck out your marrow.

There's also a new technique which is basically just like giving blood.

Nick wasn't sure which procedure he'd have to undergo.

It's up to the patient's doctor to decide what the most effective method of harvesting marrow will be.

So, I mean, yeah, I guess I was probably a little bit scared about things like that, and because, actually, since I don't necessarily like, I don't necessarily like having things removed from my body.

But the same time I thought, but this is such a good thing for someone, it could really make change someone's life, I should be willing to do that.

And then I thought, well, if they're saying I get the blood work and then it's two, three months from now, that's during spring break.

And do I want to spend my spring break, potentially, in the hospital, or at the very least, kind of having to take it easy.

But then I thought, well, but someone else might have already been in the hospital for five weeks, I can give up three days.

And I wasn't really sure because it was, I had a lot of reservations, but I didn't necessarily feel like my reservations justified me saying no.

No.

And it isn't a simple choice, because we're also choosing what kind of person we want to be.

It's rare that a decision reveals so much about who we really are.

Nick says he's almost hoping that he turns out not to be a match.

A part of me is hoping that, just because it would be a lot easier to not have to do anything more.

But at the same time, there's also definitely that reward, rewarding feeling of having done something to make a difference in someone else's life.

So, now Nick's waiting to hear back.

And if he is a confirmed match, a true match, he'll have to make a difficult decision.

Will he be the person who gives, or the person who doesn't?

On the one hand, he faces pain and discomfort.

On the other, the chance to give something extraordinary.

Only someone who's donated bone marrow can understand.

I got, I connected with this young woman who had cancer.

This is Mandeep.

Okay, I'm Mandeep Gill.

I'm a researcher in cosmology here at Slack.

Mandeep stood where Nick stands now.

E-mailed her and said, hey, you know, I see that you're waiting for your...

He knew he was a potential bone marrow match and had to decide if he wanted to go forward.

And you know, up to a certain point, you can pull out.

And her donor pulled out, and so she actually passed away.

I mean, I just checked sometime later, and she, you know, I read that.

This woman wasn't Mandeep's potential match, but she might as well have been.

Her donor backed out, and she died.

Mandeep knew he had to follow through and give, but he had some of the same worries as Nick.

There's not too many times, especially for males in life, that we choose to have any pain in our life.

But he was also excited.

I was thinking, well, this is like, wow, I'm going to save a life, you know.

It's like, kind of cool.

Mandeep had to donate with the old procedure.

They turn you over on your stomach.

Take a big, huge needle, like over a foot long, and they stick it in your pelvis, and they punch it through the bone into the scaffolding, which is inside your pelvis, and they suck out a bunch of bone marrow and blood, along with it.

They just do this a bunch of times.

So if you look back at my pelvis, you can still see little spots where the scars are, where they went into it.

Under general anesthesia, Mandeep felt nothing, but a painful recovery lay ahead.

And when I woke up, I couldn't walk or stand up for a while, because it was just shooting pains down, you know, down the back, the lower back.

And I was tired for about six weeks.

It was just, I was sluggish.

So, that's the procedure, you know?

I mean, a little bit of pain for, well, a lot of pain for a week and a lot of tiredness for six weeks, but, you know, there was a human life.

That's the world that I wish we lived in, where everybody just stepped up and at least once in life was willing to go through some amount of, you know, pain to save another person's life.

Most of us hang on to what's ours.

Time, money, marrow.

When we give it up, we want something in return, a good deal.

The hand says take and the mouth says take, but deep in most of us, there's something saying give.

It's just because you feel decent, you know, you feel when you look back at life, you feel like, that's a cool thing I did.

Thanks to Mandeep Gill and Nick Hartley for telling their stories.

Nick is a sophomore at Stanford.

Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

Today's show is called How to Give.

You've heard stories of giving the money from your wallet, the shirt off your back, and even the marrow from inside your bones.

There's something else you can give though.

It's not something you can wear, spend, or even hold in your hands.

But this thing, it might be the most important thing you can give.

Our next story is about that thing.

We start on a Saturday morning in an apartment in Manhattan.

A quiet woman with dark shoulder-length hair.

My name is Kristina Kulin.

Is sharing breakfast with her extended family.

Her aunt, her cousin, her cousin's husband, and their baby daughter.

And her little baby daughter.

And we sat down for bagels in the way we had often done in the past.

Kristina's in her early 30s, and she's been in a rut for a while, actually.

Like almost the last decade.

But this morning, as she looks at the faces of her family, she feels so happy.

Because it's my family.

I love them so much.

Sharing breakfast with them is another woman.

She's a short woman with dark eyes dressed in black sweatpants and a dirty black shirt.

And she was so sad.

This feels weird for Kristina.

On the one side, comfort and family.

And on the other, this tar pit of sadness.

And soon things get even weirder.

Her family, they start to leave.

So at a certain point, my cousin's husband took the dog out for a walk.

And then my cousin and my aunt and the baby, they left to go get more orange juice.

But they never came back.

The sad woman stands and walks around the breakfast table all the while telling Kristina how terrible she feels.

She sits down next to Kristina and her sadness is all Kristina can see.

And Kristina feels her heart start to break for this woman in a panic she looks for her family, but they aren't there.

To have started out in such a happy scene surrounded by family and to see them all leave.

I still have such an emotional reaction to it even now.

If something seemed off to you about that scene, like it wasn't reality, you're right.

It wasn't reality.

It was a kind of play put on just for Kristina.

That sad woman, she wasn't a real person, she was an actor.

Kristina's family was really her family, but the scene was a performance put on just for Kristina.

And this one scene was only a small part of a much larger performance.

In total, it would last 36 hours, and its stage would stretch hundreds of miles, from Manhattan to upstate New York.

The group behind all this is called Odyssey Works.

You'll hear the story of Kristina's Odyssey in a bit, but first you should get to know a little bit about Kristina, the same way Odyssey Works had to.

Odyssey Works consists of a group of artists from New York and San Francisco.

They make art for free.

Here's how their website describes what they do.

Immersive, site-specific, long-duration performances for very small and fully participatory audiences.

But you can think of them as interactive plays for a single person.

Art in a single serving cup.

It starts with the application.

Kristina's sister had forwarded one to her, knowing she wasn't really in a good place and thinking maybe this would get her out of it.

The application asked what Kristina regretted, what she loved, what she feared.

It asked if she was happy, and if she wasn't, why?

It was like applying for a friendship with your therapist.

At the time that I filled out the application, I think I was about 30, and I was very unhappy.

And all I could see was this very narrow road ahead of me, just the daily grind, going to work, coming home, going to sleep, going to work, coming home, going to sleep.

It's like I had blinders on, and I had been struggling so much that I kind of was feeling hopeless at a certain point.

You can probably relate to this, especially if you've ever been in your 20s or 30s, feeling stuck in your life, losing sight of meaning.

What Kristina's talking about is pretty universal, but her unhappiness had its own particulars, a relationship she didn't want to be in, close family living far away, a sick mom living in upstate New York, depending on her.

No one thing was making Kristina miserable, but all the same, she was.

When I got the call from Odyssey Works that they had selected me, I was really shocked.

I had been so stuck for so many years, and really had been trying to find some way out of the rut that I was in, and here was something that came to me.

Hi, I'm Abraham Burickson.

I'm the artistic director of Odyssey Works.

Abe picked Kristina out of more than 30 applicants to have an Odyssey Works performance made for her.

He remembers studying her application and finding it fascinating.

One question in particular caught his attention.

It asked what Kristina's favorite and least favorite movies were and why.

Kristina's answer is pretty revealing.

I'll read a shortened version of it.

Ingmar Bergman, especially Winter Light and The Silence for how sad they are.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for how happy it is.

Singing in the Rain for Gene Kelly's Joyful Dancing.

Swing Time and Top Hat for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' Joyful Dancing.

She loved these absolute forms, these Fred Astaire films, Happy Happy Happy, Ingmar Bergman, Sad Sad Sad, right?

And nothing in between.

Happy, happy, happy, sad, sad, sad.

This was a key clue to understanding Kristina, and Abe knew how important it was to listen to these clues, understanding people in order to make art for them.

That was the thought that activated Odyssey Works, and led Abe to bury his best friend.

My good friend Matthew and I, Matthew founded Odyssey Works with me.

We were down doing a writer's retreat in Big Sur, and we took this long walk down the beach, trying to get at the core of the problem.

The problem was that they made art, but they felt like they were making it for themselves.

Who even knew if it had any effect on people?

Even the people they imagined they were making it for.

We have this idea of the ideal audience, but really, who is that person?

And if there is an ideal, then why not just go find that person and make the work for them?

They treat art like a love poem.

You write a love poem for your beloved, you think about the way she sees the world, the kind of language that she uses, the time of day when it would be best to give it to her, the pace, her attention span, all these things, so that this poem will have the ideal impact.

Most of us limit this kind of attention to the people we love.

And this was how Odyssey Works began, just for friends.

Matthew actually was the first to get one.

He'd been thinking a lot about cycles of birth and death.

Abe decided this meant they should bury him in the sand.

And then it took him, I don't know, 45 minutes to dig his way out.

And he was so ecstatic at the end of this that he tore off all his clothes and ran and jumped into the ocean.

And you know how cold that is.

So at that point, what are you thinking?

I was thinking, awesome.

So going back to Kristina, after Abe picked her, he conducted follow-up interviews, asking more questions about her life and her fears and everything that meant anything to her.

This went on for three months, three months of the Odyssey Works team inserting themselves into Kristina's mind, planning the perfect work of art.

Abe and the rest of them even asked for her dream journals.

Picture, a half dozen artists lying on their backs in a dark room, trying to dream a stranger's dreams.

That's Odyssey Works.

It's a difficult thing to describe what it is.

And I think a lot of people, when they heard about it, kind of expected it to be that I would be sitting in the audience, there would be one chair in the audience, and I'd be sitting and looking up at a stage.

And obviously, that is not what ended up happening.

As you can imagine, a lot can happen in 36 hours.

Starting Saturday morning, Kristina was guided from scene to scene by different members of Odyssey Works.

She began in Manhattan and ended up in Ithaca, New York, hundreds of miles away.

To describe everything that happened in between would take about a day and a half.

But certain moments stood out for Kristina.

These moments gave a shape to their performance.

Movement from happy, happy, happy, sad, sad, sad, to something else.

I think I figured there was something to learn from what was going on.

Okay, we're back to Kristina's Odyssey.

We left her at breakfast with the saddest woman in New York.

Her name's Jen Harmon.

My name is Jen Harmon, and I played the archetype of a very, very depressed woman.

She's an actress and a dancer and a member of the Odyssey Works team.

Jen's character was based on meeting Kristina and getting to know her.

When I first met her, I was at a children's birthday party of her cousin's child, and I played a nanny for hire.

She lied.

Abe blew Jen's cover a little bit for their next meeting.

He sent Kristina over to Jen's place to talk about a monologue that Jen was working on.

Kristina might have suspended her disbelief a bit.

She probably knew, on some level, Jen was going to be part of her performance.

But the two bonded, and Jen got to know her.

I remember her saying that, my friends just don't understand.

My friends don't understand me, and they don't understand this dilemma.

I had to think about Kristina in a very particular way in terms of the part of her that was quite stuck and felt sad.

And so, I had to think about those parts of her, and then I had to think about those parts of myself.

And I think there's something quite poignant about having someone try to share with you or mirror back or show you part of your own struggle.

Christina got it.

That moment of breakfast, she was seeing her saddest self.

And yeah, it's a performance.

It's not reality.

But it was true.

And I'm sure on some level, I knew that she was reflective of my emotional state a lot of the time.

You know, I had often felt withdrawn and not participating in positive scenes in my own life.

So I think she was there as a reminder of that.

But Christina's Odyssey was just beginning.

Soon, there was a knock on the door.

It was my next guide.

And there was a moment where Jen asked me to stay with her because she was so sad.

And my guide was, you know, he had high energy and he said, it's time to go.

We're going to the next place.

And so I had, in that moment, I had the choice, do I stay with this sad person who seems to need me for comfort, or do I embrace the unknown and keep going?

If you feel bad for Jen here, that's nice of you.

But remember, she's a prop.

This is Kristina's Odyssey.

Sometimes you need to ditch the anchor.

And there was no question in my mind I was gonna keep going.

But I think the next pivotal moment probably was where I was taken down into the subway.

The loneliest, most disgusting, least loved place, right?

And there were several people on the platform with very sad, sad energy, holding dead plants.

No one was saying anything.

It's the most sort of lonely, dark kind of experience that you could imagine.

Now might be a good time to interject one fact about Kristina.

She hates New York, and she hates subways.

Abe knew this from reading her Odyssey Works application.

On it, she'd listed as her least favorite place in the world, a New York City subway.

It was the place where her loneliness and sadness haunted her the most.

Every day after work, she'd get on the subway, take her seat and cry.

We got onto the train when it came into the station, and again, no one said anything, and the rest of the people on the train really didn't care.

No one was looking at us.

It was just a very classic New York moment.

Sad, sad, sad is coming to an end.

Things are about to change.

Kristina arrives in Grand Central Station in New York City.

In the crowd, she spots a familiar stranger.

He gives her a train ticket to Ithaca and a beautifully bound hardcover book.

It's a reimagination of the famous Italian novel, If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

It's one of Kristina's favorite books.

This reimagination, though, is for Kristina.

It's based on interviews with her and on her dream journals.

This is a book made for Kristina.

The last chapter of the novel brings in some themes from recurring dreams that I've had often over the last few years about being pregnant and being very upset about being pregnant.

And I can read.

Let's see here.

So the chapter is called Where Everything Falls.

And this is the first paragraph.

You are pregnant with ghosts.

When you concentrate on your breathing, you can feel two ghosts breathing inside you as well.

The rhythm of blood.

The days like a bridge, these ghosts inside you, they're not even twins.

They say the body is mostly water.

At evening, you feel yourself draining away.

You're no longer the person they will become, but every cell and fiber, the small bones in their ears, their flesh was, their flesh is yours.

And as the pages go on, they begin to fragment and tear and gradually become illegible.

Chaos has come on the scene.

The train ride lasts about six hours.

Kristina disembarks at Ithaca, New York.

They've left the city for trees.

A tree, Kristina wrote on her application, is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Abe's there to greet her.

They get in his car, and playing on the stereo is Kristina's favorite piece of music.

Music.

Claire de Lune by Debussy.

But this is not the Claire de Lune Kristina knows.

This is a warped version created by Odyssey Works.

The piece begins normal, but slowly begins to disintegrate, like the pages of the book, like Kristina's ordered view of the world.

This is confusing.

This is scary.

It was raining, and it was dark, and we were walking along the edge of a gorge.

About an hour after her arrival, Kristina's invited to go on a walk.

And it was slippery and dark, and I couldn't see anything, and I was very afraid.

This is not typical behavior for Kristina.

This is kind of daring.

I've always been very afraid of physical harm, and so I think that probably was the most terrified I was during the weekend, because I was looking at my mortality there.

Who knows what could have happened?

And there was part of me that said, no, I can't do this.

And then there was another voice that ended up being stronger that said, I'm committing to this entirely.

So if I die by falling off the edge of this cliff, at least I committed to the moment.

Kristina does not die by falling off the cliff.

She survives and climbs back out of the gorge, and she gets a breather for dinner.

By now, she's in a completely altered state, totally out of her element and unsure.

Yet at the same time, calm, ready for what comes next.

So, it was after dinner that my guide took me outside.

Again, it was a very rainy night.

It was completely dark where we headed, and we walked for a long time.

And one thing I remember during that walk was the sound of frogs in the trees.

And just that it smelled so good.

It just smelled fresh and green and delicious.

And we go up to the top of this lookout, and you look out over the fields, and it's dark and empty.

And there was a man on a stone fence holding an umbrella over his head as though he were tightrope walking.

And so I stepped up onto the fence next to him, and he gave me the umbrella, and I stood looking out into the dark over this hill.

We bang the gong.

All these little lights go on, must have been 50 or so, way out, you know, up to half a mile away.

And so looking down, it looked like I was looking down at the sky with the stars lighting everything up.

It was beautiful.

When have you felt most understood?

Was it when someone said to you, I understand?

Or was it when someone knew enough not to say anything at all?

At dawn the next morning, one of the actors brought Kristina to a sculpture Odyssey Works had made.

The sculpture was a loose dome of long curved sticks about 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall, standing in the middle of a huge field of grass.

A translucent sheet on it flapped in the wind.

Inside was a television, a filing cabinet, a printer, a computer, all the detritus of Kristina's life.

Abe called it the bidden of possibility.

Here, Kristina was shown her life, so she could start it anew.

Pretty soon after that, Kristina went home.

She says it took her a while to understand what had happened.

I think when the performance ended, I was pretty blank.

I was happy.

I had had a really wonderful time, but I don't think I started processing it until three or four months after it ended, to be truthful.

When Kristina did sort out her thoughts, she realized the experience had changed her, not by making her into a different person, but by showing her who she was.

For me, the experience really was a rite of passage.

It was a ceremonial, sacred space that showed me my courage and my strength in the face of absolute uncertainty.

Not just for a weekend, but for the rest of my life, for months at a time, and I think it really helped me to know that I have a lot of courage and I embrace uncertainty and I can embrace the unknown.

Not long after the Odyssey Works performance ended, Kristina moved to upstate New York, to Saratoga, to be closer to her mom.

She says Odyssey Works didn't make her do it, but it helped.

I absolutely feel they gave me a gift.

And it's something I've struggled with for almost a year now since the performance to find some way to thank them.

And maybe it'll happen in 20 years, who knows, but it's important to me to someday extend a thank you to them.

Did you feel like it was everything you wanted it to be as a gift?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

It's such a difficult concept, the gift.

When you say gift, you think of a package with a bow.

You know, but when you receive a gift, it's not the package or the object inside.

You could have bought yourself that.

But it's the act of the giving.

Then when you open it and it's just the right thing, say, you know, the feeling is not, oh, thank God I have the right thing now.

The feeling is somebody, somebody understood me well enough to know exactly what the right thing was.

What do you have to give to somebody?

Only your attention.

To really be attended to is like, that's gold.

What else do you really want?

We come in with nothing, we leave with nothing, and in between we have this chance to attend to one another.

And so it seems to me that a gift is just sort of a moment of that.

Odyssey Works continues to put on performances.

You can find information about upcoming performances and ways to get involved at odysseyworks.org.

Today's program was produced by me, Charlie Mintz, with lots and lots of help from Jonah Willingans, Natasha Ruck, Rachel Hamburg, Sandra Clark, Kristi Hartman and Will Rogers.

We'd like to thank our contributors today, Mandeep Gill, Nick Hartley, Jason Sadler, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, Teddy aka TMS Ruge, Abraham Burickson, Kristina Kulin and Jen Harmon.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Hume Writing Center and Stanford Continuing Studies.

Remember that you can find an episode of this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes and on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Tune in next week for stories of nakedness.

What do we expose when we're exposed?

For the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human, I'm Charlie Mintz.