Behind the Scenes of Throughline
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Then sprinkle in some sound design to pique your interest. A little appetizer for your ears. And then some news tape to give you a little more context on what's happening. America's Viking 1 spacecraft landed on Mars early this morning and sent back two sharp pictures of the red planet. Or maybe it's a voiceover. The robot lander touched down flawlessly this morning in a sandy desert area. Let's see what it does.

Let's add a little reverb to this one. A Viking spaceship has landed safely on Mars seven years to the day after man first set foot on the moon. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arab-Louie. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Today on the show, behind the scenes of, well, this show.

Okay, so some of you listening have been with us since day one, and some of you might have just heard about the show. But whether you're a diehard fan sleeping in a ThruLine t-shirt every night, or maybe a new listener just trying to tune out the post-election news, here on this show, the team is always trying to tell stories that are informative, insightful, and entertaining.

So for the episode today, we're taking you behind the scenes of the show, telling you how it was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a little bit about how we make our special through-line sauce.

The ThruLine Riz, as the kids say. Or cringe, which is what my nine-year-old would say. Anyways, we're going to give you a special behind-the-scenes look where you'll hear from us and from people on our team about the show and some of the episodes we've made. By the way, these behind-the-scenes conversations and more already exist for our ThruLine Plus subscribers. So if you're not supporting us yet, but you want more ThruLine in your life, sign up now.

You can find out more at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Coming up, the origins of ThruLine or ThruLine's ThruLine. One of those. Hi, my name is Susan Ruzaz. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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So today, we thought it would be kind of fun to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how the show got started. Yeah, it's our origin, the ThruLine origin story. It all began. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, no. Yeah, it's like once upon a time. We got to cue the music. About six years ago. We got to cue the music. So, no, okay, so it starts in, I think it was October of 2015. I was brought to NPR by Guy Raz, who was the host of TED Radio Hour.

At the time, it's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. To work on a new show he was developing. And I had never worked in journalism or podcasting before. I had only worked on music for TED Radio Hour. And Guy, I think, wanted to take a chance on me and brought me in to work on a pilot for a new show. And it was really kind of a top secret project. They sat me kind of in the corner of the sixth floor, I think, or the fifth floor where we were at the time at NPR headquarters.

And I was just trying to figure out how to make a podcast. We had done interviews and we're just trying to figure it out. And I was kind of Cuban to myself. I wasn't talking to anyone. I think for the first three or four days, I went and looked at the names of the different people that were sitting around me. And I saw one name and the last name was Abdul Hatta. And I was like, that sounds like an Afghan name or I don't know, maybe Iranian name. That's kind of, you know, I was like, oh, I wonder who this person is. And a few days later...

Someone started sitting at that desk and it was run. And I was like super intimidated to talk to you. I was like, who is this? You like, I don't know. I thought you kind of dressed. You're a mipster. You're a Muslim hipster. This is so, it's so funny because like legit, like nobody in my life has ever, ever, ever, ever told me that my fashion or anything about me is cool enough to be intimidating.

I was like, no. I was like, should I go up and say hi to her? I'll take it. I was like, no. She's probably going to be like, who the hell are you? And I don't know how or who approached who first, but eventually we started talking to each other and like became friends.

And honestly, I don't even remember how we became friends. We were just suddenly friends. Yeah, I think we just started having lunch together and talking. Like for a little context, I had been at NPR for a few years at that point. I'd been kind of jumping around, working on different pilots for podcasts and things like that. And eventually by the time that Ramtin got there, I was sort of like antsy to also do something new.

And, you know, once we got to talking, it was crazy fast how quickly we started talking about the idea for what would become ThruLine. We were just sort of

naturally talking about history a lot, talking about religion and politics and, you know, all the things that are supposedly off limits to talk about. Those were like our natural first topics of conversation. And I think partly it was because we both have these, you know, immigrant backgrounds and coming from the Middle East. There was just a lot of like shared history of like personal history for us. And we had the idea of doing something that

That was like creatively different, experimental and sound that would also help, you know, explain the present through stories from the past. And we had no idea how you actually take an idea and make it into like a reality. But we decided to bring the idea to my boss at the time and we got our shot to make a pilot episode. Yeah, I mean, we kind of got a shot.

Like, all we got was like, okay, yeah. I'm putting a little Rosie spin on it. I know, I know. Basically, he was like, your boss Izzy's a nice guy. He was a nice guy. He still isn't a really nice guy. And he was kind of like, yeah, you can use the studio if you want. And let me know if you need a little couple bucks to rent a studio time or whatever. And we kind of went off. And probably he didn't have any idea like what we were about to do. But-

We just started – yeah, that's it. We started just making it, honestly, on our – Figuring it out. The other thing we had left out is that by this time, the pilot I was working on became How I Built This.

From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. And Run is now kind of like under the table working on How I Built This, like producing for the show because... Are we allowed to say this on the record? Yeah, we're going to say this because this is so long ago now.

Because, you know, I was working on it and Run was like, like she said, looking for something new or whatever. And I was like, yeah, let's work together on this thing. We were buddies and we both started producing. We're basically the first two producers and also Casey Herman, who's still there now. We're basically producing that show like the first year and having a blast, I think, working together. That was the thing that like brought us together. Like we were in the studio together. We were like doing all the things. And so we were also...

making what would become Dueline on the side. We were going and doing interviews at like places. We're acting like, I think, you know how they say fake it till you make it. We were definitely faking it like at that point. Yeah. We were like, what is this even going to sound like? I mean, just figuring out what are we going to sound like? We didn't, we were never hosts before. So it was like, we were learning as we went everything. We definitely had some interviews that, you know, I wouldn't want to revisit. It didn't go so well. It didn't go so well.

But honestly, it was just sort of a process of like, all right, you just got to like keep at it. Listen, figure out what sounds good. Like, what is this going to sound like? What is this going to be? And then we eventually ended up with like the first pilot episode, which was actually not the first episode that is in the feed. And here is where begins a passion story that is equal in power in Islam to the passion of the Christ in Christianity.

Takes three weeks to travel. It was an episode that ended up being called War of the Worlds. And it was about the history of the Sunni-Shia divide in Islam. It came from like a personal place for both of us. And we were like, you know what? Let's really infuse ourselves into the show today.

So that they don't think anybody else can host it other than us. Because, you know, we're producers. And, you know, in terms of the production side of things, we had that covered. But we wanted to make sure that nobody would kind of step in and host instead of us. And to Ramtin's credit, you know, he was like, hell no, nobody's going to come in and like turn this show into something else. Like we came up with the idea. We're making it. And it was really just like the two of us doing everything for the first like year together.

And then we, at one point, we're working on another pilot because they wanted us to do a couple more pilots to really like get some experience under our belts. Before we say that, you should talk about what happened when we played the- That's right. That's right. So before they told us to go off and make more pilots, we had to actually like play this first pilot episode, War of the Worlds, for my boss at the time.

So we like booked a studio at NPR headquarters. We like dimmed the lights and we sat in there with my boss and just played it. And around maybe 40 or 45 minutes, however long it was later,

He, you know, we turn on the lights and he's like, wow, like there's something here. Like this is really good. The quote is, I remember the quote. He said, this is the future. I just heard the future of NPR. Future of NPR. Future of NPR. Future of NPR.

Which was like... Is that what he said? Yeah, he's like, this is the future of NPR. Yes, I heard him say that. I think I was so like... It was so nice. Because like how... We had no idea what he was going to say. And he's not like a BS-er. Like if he didn't like it...

He wouldn't have been mean about it, but he would have not responded like that if he had been like, oh. And this is a guy who worked, you know, had worked on Radiolab, like working with them in the past, had been at WNYC. He had like a lot of experience. So if he didn't think there was anything to it, he wouldn't have said that. So it was like really exciting. That was so validating because otherwise we were just sort of like in our little like, you know, keep in mind we're working on this like –

in the evenings and on the weekends, like in between our day job of making a high post. And so, you know, this was like super validating for us because we were like, okay, it's not just us who thinks there's something here. Like an outside perspective is actually telling us like, no, there's something here. And then that set the ball in motion for us to make a few more pilot episodes over the next year and a year, year and a half or so. And while I remember we were working on one episode about the history of U.S. North Korea and

And Lawrence Wu, who is still a producer on the show to this day, overheard us. And he was at the time, I think, an intern on how I built this. And he was like, Yo, what are you guys talking about? Hey, what are you all talking about? We were like, oh, we're working on this show that we're hoping will get greenlit. And he's like, Really? Yeah.

Can I work on this? You know what? I want in. And Lawrence just jumped into the trenches with us and started, like, booking and researching and doing all this stuff. And so it was the three of us at that point just working on this, what had begun as, you know, kind of a pipe dream. And it was a lot of long nights, a lot of work. A lot of work went into those early years, even before the show went out into the world. Kind of crazy to think about it. Yeah.

You're listening to ThruLine, where we go back in time to understand the present. It was a lot of work. We had a lot of champions on the inside, people who really supported us. Totally. Nigel Eaton, of course, Anya Grunman, folks here at NPR really support us and the teams that we were working on support us. But it was a long journey that really was born out of our friendship. And I think the thing I hope folks that are listening to the show still hear that because I think it

the show wouldn't have not existed if we weren't friends first i think and really like enjoyed working with each other because it was really hard but i really wanted to do it for you and i think you really wanted to do it for me and that was i think the thing that sustained the show through that difficult i mean to sustain our effort through that difficult time and since it sustains the show to this day so hopefully listeners can really hear that um

I'm sorry, I'm getting all emo. That's so nice. I'm getting all emo on y'all, but it's true. It was just really... No, it's true because when you're like, you know, and you hit obstacles, we hit a lot of obstacles along the way. And it's really hard to keep yourself motivated in the face of like setbacks and also have like daunting amount of work on your plate. Like I was about to curse, but I'm keeping it PG over here. But, you know, it's like, it's really hard to kind of sustain that passion. And I think...

Yeah, I think our connection is, it's foundational to everything. And I think we've been lucky, you know, now over the last, like, few years to expand the team with other people who are able to, like, really believe in that same vision that we had at the beginning. It's, like, kind of wild, actually, I think, right, for both of us to think that, like, people now believe in the show enough that they want to come and want to, like, take it to the next level. Like, we're constantly trying to push ourselves in terms of,

the sound of the show, in terms of the ideas of the show, in terms of

kind of everything about the show we wanted to just be a reflection of the way that the team is evolving too. And so a lot of the great ideas and the way that the show evolved has been a reflection of the people who've come onto the team. That's thanks to all of you who listen, who are listening to this now. We had no idea this many people would listen or be passionate about this show. And we're really grateful to all of you for listening. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, and hopefully hearing about the origins of this show. I don't know if

Give you a little bit of entertainment. Give you a little break from your day. We hope you enjoyed our conversation. And in a way, it's kind of like a How I Built This episode, turning our pipe dream into the show it is today. Coming up, what it takes to find and produce a story with people that have lived through a historical event.

This is Michael Cummings from Savannah, Georgia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I appreciate the connections that you both make from the past to help us understand the present and hopefully look for a better future. Thank you. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

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So a lot of what we do at ThruLine takes us to faraway places in the distant past. But sometimes we get to tell stories about living history and get to talk to the people who were actually there. We were in our red truck and we were coming back from a trip from the ocean. And all of a sudden we came upon these big yellow caution signs that said caution PCB chemicals spilled along roadways.

PCBs, otherwise known as polychlorinated biphenyls, are man-made industrial chemicals used in factories. They're highly toxic, can cause skin lesions, and are associated with several kinds of cancer. I saw it on the side of the highway. It looked greasy. It was substance there that I knew that shouldn't be there.

What happened next turned a small rural North Carolina community into the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, a movement that seeks to ensure an equitable and healthy environment for everyone. Helicopters flying all over. I just couldn't believe it. As we approached the landfill, there were highway patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were going to beat us or what.

In this next conversation, you'll be hearing from producers Lawrence Wu and Devin Katayama about the making of our episode, Two Miles Down the Road. Here's Lawrence. So I wanted to ask you, Devin, you know, how'd you find this story and why'd you pitch this? Yeah, yeah. So it's basically, when I think about pitches, I kind of just...

Take time to sit quietly and try to think about like what in the world is going on. What are like the big stories? How am I feeling about the world? And I kind of just follow my interests. And I think a lot of us producers on the show do that. And so one thing that came to mind was this term environmental justice. It's a term that I've been hearing for a really long time that, you know, to some degree I reported on as a reporter in my previous job. And I think it's a term that I've been hearing for a really long time.

But it's a term I also feel like carries a lot of weight and means like a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And so like we do on this show, you kind of just start like, what is the history of X? What is the history of environmental justice?

And so I originally thought of doing this whole episode where we kind of look at the very beginning decades ago and bring it all the way up to, you know, how it's become such a messy, interesting, important topic today. You were talking about, you know, what made the story so compelling was the people that were involved in the movement.

And I think that's one of the cool things about this episode, working on this with you, is that, you know, we talk to people who have this lived history. And so before we get more into that, how'd you find these guests? How'd you track them down? You know, because they're not, it's not like they're our typical scholar historian with their, you know, their university email out there. Right, right, right, right. Well, that's actually, so that's one of the cool things about this story, like you said. And we don't do too many stories, you know, more modern, more recent history. So a lot of our

Yeah.

And they're from a really small town. I mean, Warren County itself is a pretty big county, but Afton and the place where this happened is really small. So I kind of just followed the trail. The 40th anniversary of this event happened in 2022. And so I knew names of people who had been on panels, who had recently talked about this. And I found a local reverend there who was on one of these panels, reached out to him. He was very quick to respond to me.

And if this means that we have to bodily stand in front of trucks, bulldozers, road scrapers, even give up our lives so that someone else can live many years in the future, I say it is our duty to sacrifice that.

After I got Reverend Willie T. Ramey's contact, it was really easy to find most of the people who are in this episode. Yeah, it just sounds like he's just super connected in terms of that local network. And like everybody in the area knows of each other, right? So it's one of those, you find one person, it's really easy to find the rest. Except, I will tell you, I had trouble finding the Ferruccios.

who are very much important and featured in this episode. So that was kind of an interesting story, finding them. In 1977, Debra and Ken Ferruccio made a big decision. They decided to leave Ohio and move to a small town in Warren County, North Carolina. I moved here because I was looking for a rural community and a beautiful environment. I kind of take a long...

And here I am. Yeah, so I actually don't know how you found them. So, yeah, so the Frugios, just a little bit of background. They are really part of the core group of folks who found out that a landfill was going to be built nearby. And they really started organizing just a few people, which blossomed into hundreds of people later on. So they were hard to find.

They had recently done a podcast of their own about this event in Warren County, about this landfill being built. So I knew that they were out there doing stuff. And I contacted them through their website for the podcast or for the work that they were doing. And I still didn't hear back. And it was getting to the point where I had researched it enough to know, like, I couldn't do this story without them, without hearing how it kind of formed at the very beginning. And I think I reached out to...

spouse of their daughter. Okay, yeah. Who was... I think I got the email from like some... I think he was a professor somewhere on the East Coast. I can't exactly remember where. And he wrote back really quickly and said, I think that they would be really happy to hear from you. And from there...

It just took off. And I guess they weren't checking their emails from the website. And there really wasn't any other contact information that I could find except for one old email and some public notes from way back when, some public record for Debra. But yeah, after that, they were very responsive.

It just goes to show like part of the work is also just being persistent. You have to find if one email works, you have to find phone number or friend of a friend of a friend. Totally. I feel like we've been running into that a lot lately, like just trying to track people down, book people, book people. Yeah, it's messy when it gets international. We've been doing a lot of that lately. Yeah. Yeah. So on the topic of the guests that were featured on this episode.

They obviously lived through this history. You know, they were part of this one event that kicked off an entire movement spanning decades now. And so, you know, oftentimes we're speaking to a historian and they're telling us things that they've been researching for decades and decades. But it's a different experience talking to someone, you know, that has lived through that moment. They were actually there on the ground. So what makes it different from our typical kind of interviews that we do? Yeah.

It's kind of fun, but it's also kind of tricky. For one, you're telling somebody's story. So this is somebody's very personal perspective, things that they went through. You know, so some of the context, the greater context, the reflective context that we get from some of our more academic guests can be lost. But what you gain is something very personal. And in this case, like we just needed to know what organizing looked like. The old fashioned way, word to mouth, door to door.

Church to church, friend to friend, cousin to cousin, brother to brother, sister to sister, family to family. But it's also tricky because you've got to fact check, right? Like the things that they're saying for the most part. I mean some things you don't have to fact check like how they're feeling. But there's a lot that you have to double check and make sure like did this meeting happen on this day? Were these people at this particular meeting who spoke who they said they heard from? Right.

And so that's what made this episode a little bit tricky. Like we had great story. We had great like facts that they provided. And one of the things that I really relied on here was the local archives of local newspapers, right?

And this is something I hadn't really done in my career that I really loved for this particular episode because NPR has access to a database of old newspaper archives. And the local Warren County publications were invaluable. They provided so much like play-by-play information.

Not only like dates and things that the governor was saying and things like that, but actual play-by-play of the residents. Like this is where local media really thrives and why it's really important. Like they were kind of the record that I followed for the most part or fact-checked against. And then, you know, what else makes it special is the fact that you can –

a lot of different people's perspective about this event. Often when we're doing stories that are millennia old or centuries old, it's hard to get multiple perspectives. You know, we might get multiple things that happen to groups of people, but we don't always get that personal like touch.

And so with this particular episode, and actually you dealt with a lot of the people's stories because you dealt with the section related to the actual protest that kind of was a convergence of a lot of people. It's just kind of, I don't know, it's cool to have that. Yeah, I would say just like it was really fun working on the part where it's going through the protests from that morning to the months, years after that.

And for me, I think one of the great joys you're talking about, you know, people's personal experiences, like one of my favorite stories in this episode was

The protesters, they're put in, it's not a jail, but they're basically detained and they're hungry. And basically some women, really kind women across the street, you know, fried up some chicken and started throwing it over the fence. And it's just such a scene. So what the ladies did is they got some of these young guys to throw it over the fence. So we would be in the yard saying, chop me a biscuit, or cut

Can I have a thigh? Or let me have a breast. And over the road and over the fence, the food would come and we ate it. And so I'm curious to know, you know, what are some of your favorite stories that some of the guests told that might not have made it onto the episode?

I think that guy who told that story about the chicken being thrown over the fence, Walter, he also told us that Dolly Burwell, who's one of the main activists who we feature in this episode, that his mom babysat for Dolly while she was at protests and organizing and things like that. And I think that like, for me...

First off, of course, like everybody knows each other in this area, but also like this is such a space and town, like people are also helping each other out, throwing chicken over fences or babysitting and everybody's kind of connected in some way. So finding those little connections is,

I think was really fun. And then like, I mean, this made it in the episode, but one of my favorite anecdotes was Reverend William Ramey, who's one of the early organizers who kind of gets called upon to help figure out like how they're going to organize at the beginning. He kind of goes in,

into this barn at midnight with this small group of people and he's asked to come and he doesn't really know. He's a black reverend in a very white space, white town, meeting white people in the barn at midnight and he kind of tells us this story about how he's getting to the barn. Now, Reverend Ramey, unsurprisingly, didn't like the idea of meeting people who he didn't know in a barn at midnight.

But he was also curious. And I go into the barn and I look around and there is nobody there that looks like me. And how there's this old bulb just hanging from the barn ceiling. I mean, he's very much a storyteller in this sense. And like, he doesn't know what to expect. And then he kind of

learns like, hey, we need to get our act together. How are we going to do this thing? So those kinds of stories are the other kinds of stories that you get when you talk to the people who've actually lived through these experiences. I kind of wanted to ask you one question. So you produced part three, which was the day of the main protests. And it's this iconic moment where

for this event. It's really what got all the headlines and national press and pictures when you look back on that. Like that's the time that the media was paying attention was when the protests happened. So how did you go about producing it? Because I know we had some personal stories. I also know there was some raw video from that time. So what was that like for you and how'd you go about doing it?

Yeah, I mean, that whole section, I mean, it's just one scene after another, right? So it starts very quiet. It's the morning. They all gather at the church. They're going to go out and sit on this march. And then it quickly escalates to them confronting police or kind of state troopers.

and then another scene follows. So I just thought of it as scenes contain scenes. I mean, for me, just producing, it's moving to see like this is how an event, this is how a community rallies together to really fight for a change.

And this is how it's done. Your bodies have to be there. Your physical personhood has to be out there on the streets, lying near the ditch where the dump site is. All these things, like it's really just empowering to hear and just it gives you hope.

I'm not a super optimistic person, but just listening to the different guests retelling that day, especially on the day of the protest, and on the more kind of technical side, the production side, because I have all these different perspectives from the guests, I was able to kind of mix them in and weave them together. So it really feels like they're all building on each other, telling just one story together. I'm sure it was there to intimidate us.

And I felt, my God, we're going to war here. Helicopters flying all over. I just couldn't believe it. As we approached the landfill, there were highway patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were going to beat us or what. What we were seeing was State Highway Patrol and National Guard police cars just parked. They went way down the road.

We were met by the commander of the highway patrol. If you do not cease this unlawful act, you will be arrested. If we did not turn around and go back, we would be arrested. I mean, it's one, it's definitely one of my favorite episodes to produce on just on that aspect alone. Because like you said, we don't get a lot of opportunities to speak to guests who've lived through, you know, a really important moment.

Did you see some of the things that they were describing or the people who they were describing in the news, like in some of the footage too? Yeah. Yeah. So that was also really cool too. It was definitely really helpful to watch these old local news for TV news footage because

It was exactly how everyone was describing it. It's like the one mile or two mile march to the site, confronted with policemen wearing, you know, helmets, batons, people sitting, you know, just civil disobedience. There was even images of the bus that they would put them and detain them and, you know, drive them away. And so, yeah, that was really great to have access to. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting because like so much of history is,

you know historians and people we kind of just fill in some of the gaps you know in some ways and when you can actually see the history happening and then also get told it reflectively like years decades later it's it's kind of cool well it was really great working on this episode with you um too thanks so much for chatting i'm glad we got to talk about this episode thank you lawrence

Now you know a little bit more about how the sauce is made and how rewarding it can be to make an episode like two miles down the road. And for an episode like this, and really every episode on ThruLine, there are a bunch of drafts and different iterations before it reaches your ears. And for every good story in an episode, there are at least five more that could have made the cut.

Coming up, how we decide which stories get greenlit and which stories end up on the cutting room floor.

Hi, this is Kamiar Marashi from Novato, California, listening to ThruLine. I love your show. I've been listening to it for years. It's informative. It provides all sorts of interesting facts and information that I would have never known about. And I really get an enjoyment listening to it while I'm driving to the ocean to go kayaking. Thank you so much.

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In this next conversation, we're taking you behind the scenes of our 2023 episode, Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines, looking at the rise, fall, and resurrection of a Filipino political dynasty. As of the 21st of this month, I signed Proclamation No. 1081, placing the entire Philippines under martial law.

In the episode, we looked at how Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos rewrote and even invented histories to make their authoritarian rule appear preordained and even divine.

It's a technique still being used today by their son, Philippine President Bongbong Marcos. We'll let producers Anya Steinberg and Christina Kim take it from here.

So today, we're going to take you behind the scenes of an episode that got released back in May 2023. And I have my fellow producer, Anya Steinberg, here to chat with me about it. Hey, Anya. Hey, Christina. So where should we start with this? Since this episode was your idea, how about you tell us about where that idea came from? Yeah.

Yeah. So this was an episode I actually pitched because right before joining ThruLine, I was the race and equity reporter at KPBS. And one of the last stories that I was able to work on was actually when Bongbong Marcos won the presidential election.

It seems like foreign news. And I was a local beat reporter in San Diego. So you wouldn't think that that was a story I was going to cover. But there's such a huge Filipino diaspora all over the United States, especially in California and in San Diego. So I had the opportunity to like talk to Filipinos.

in San Diego about their reactions to this election. And it was divided. There was folks who were just like, this is appalling. So many of my family members were tortured under this regime or, you know, my family immigrated out of the Philippines in order to like escape the Marcos dynasty.

But on the flip side, you know, there was also folks who had very fond memories of Marcos, even though, you know, he was a dictator for multiple years. They thought that the country was actually better run under Marcos. And they also believe that Bongbong Marcos is

should have the opportunity to prove himself, that he wasn't just a replica of his father. So it was divided. And the more I talked to people, the more I realized, like, this is an important story that is truly an American story. This isn't just foreign news. This impacts people who are living in the United States. And there's so many lessons we can draw upon about

narratives about why people are drawn to certain political figures, what motivates them and kind of the divisions, right? Because just the way the Philippines is divided, I see those same divisions playing out here in the United States, you know, with our politics. Right, right. There's so many parallels between these two stories. And I feel like one of the things that drew me to it was just this idea of history repeating itself. Like,

I remember when we were first talking about this before you pitched it, you said something along the lines of, you know, his father was a dictator and now he's the president. And this is within like a generation's worth of time. How can that happen? And that question itself is just a fascinating story to work from. That's right. So I was lead producing this, but we were in the trenches together from like day one. And I know in the beginning, like we together pretty much learned

the entire history of the Philippines at some point, like pre-colonial. And we were trying to whittle down the story. And we did decide to focus exclusively on the Marcos. So, you know, something that we talk about in the episode is that the Marcos' come to power

In large part because they are excellent myth makers. They are so good at controlling the narrative and creating a compelling story, you know, about their rags to riches ascension, about them not being elites and thus more relatable. And then as we hear onward, like to more grandiose myth making. Fernand and Imelda campaigned with pizzazz.

Fernand gave rousing speeches. There are still a thousand rivers to be crossed. Imelda serenaded crowds with love songs. And they even had a motion picture made.

So what we did with this episode and what I know we did together so well is tell it in a quote unquote melodramatic fashion in this kind of larger than life way. And we were really, really focused on finding those stories. And as a result, we found too many stories. And we like to start all of our episodes with what we call a cold open.

And that was the part that was assigned to you, Anya. And what we do with cold opens is we want to intrigue you. We want to give you like a really good little story, a little entree in before we kind of tell you what the episode is about. And then we continue in with our parts one, two, and three. But Anya, you were given the cold open for this one. And-

What happened? What happened? It was a daunting task. I actually wrote and produced a very different cold open than what finally aired as part of the episode. It happened around 1971 in South Cotabato on the island of Mindanao. Mindanao is part of the Philippines.

On Mindanao, the lush, emerald-green jungle butts right up against white sand beaches. Back in 1971, deep in the rainforest and high in the mountains, hid a secret. A group of about 24 individuals were found, and this was the discovery of a so-called Stone Age cave-dwelling people. They are going to see Momodaka Dewata Tasadai, the bringer of good fortune to the Tasadai.

That is their name for Amanda Elizalde. According to most accounts, Manuel Elizalde stumbled upon these people. At the time, Manuel Elizalde was serving in the Philippine government under President Ferdinand Marcos as a member of his cabinet. He got tipped off by a local who had sort of mentioned some interaction with this community that had lived kind of further in the inland.

You know, these folks had never had contact with modern civilization. They didn't have the same dietary practices or agricultural practices. They were, in fact, foragers. Their tools were incredibly rudimentary. So what they were found with was suggestive of them being so far back in time.

It's such a profound and almost ambitious way to describe a people. And it was feeding this idea and frenzy that people wanted to believe. On the island of Mindanao, the last frontier of the Philippines, the forgotten people engage in man's oldest struggle. They are fighting for the right to exist. They are fighting for their lives. People were drunk on the tasaday. Huge international attention flooded in surrounding the tasaday.

My name is Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, and I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. International reporters were interested in the discovery. And so this kind of fantastic event was this anthropological phenomenon for intellectuals, for the political community, for random citizens who would just sort of see that, you know, this was quite the marvel to perceive.

The Tacitai had lived apart from civilization for so long that this level of attention was dizzying, maybe even harmful. To a point where Elie Salde and the Philippine government started to wonder if this golden age of research had to come to a close for the Tacitai's own good. So in a few years, the Marcos administration would actually call off all visits and say no one was allowed anymore into this place.

And so Belizalde created this reservation that reportedly kept the Tacitay safe from any further scrutiny, investigation or research visits. And there the Tacitay would stay, cordoned off from the rest of the world, free to live as they always had until...

actually entered into the reservation only to discover that these 24 cave-dwelling people were in fact not of the Stone Age, but were likely paid by Elizalde and his team to act as though they were from the Stone Age. And all of the pieces started coming together that what was in fact perhaps perceived at first as this anthropological phenomenon was really a hoax. Within the blurry story of the Tacitai, one thing is clear.

The Tacitai had a purpose. They were fabricated for a reason. I mean, one has to really see it in this larger trajectory that the Marcoses were really creating for themselves. This narrative arc that would be essentially, you know, tied back to the Stone Age and brought up, you know, to 1971 with them.

to have a peoples that are coming out of the shadows of hundreds of years of colonization, the ravages of World War II, into this new decolonized experiment only to discover perhaps the most untainted, peaceful peoples. I think that really creates this romantic notion of the Philippines at the time that Marcos and Imelda for sure are able to capitalize upon.

For me, as a historian looking back, I would say, actually, this was a great ruse, but it was a wonderful distraction. Okay, so if you listened to the episode, we all know this is not how the episode started. We actually did decide to begin with the Filipino folktale of Malacca Samaganda, which I mentioned. Those are the kind of Adam and Eve of Filipino folklore. The sky told the tired bird to build its nest on one of these islands.

Once on land, the bird was struck by a bamboo stalk that was blowing in the breeze. Annoyed, it pecked at the bamboo. And then the bamboo split. The first Filipinos emerged from these bamboo stalks. The first man, Malakas. Which means strength. And the first woman. Maganda, who was beautiful. And that's how the world began.

And in the end, we did decide to do that because that's who Marcos and Imelda Marcos, his first lady, modeled themselves after. So it was just kind of a more clear through line, if you will. But we really love the story of the Tassadai. So we did try to make it work. So thank you, Anya. But Anya, you know, you sound designed this and you made it. So can you tell us

a little bit about what you were thinking and what this story was. Among the team, I think cold opens are the most notoriously difficult to produce. I think we could all agree on that. I agree. They're the most changed every time.

They have a lot of work to do. And especially for an episode like this, there was a lot of things that I was holding in my head going into the script that I was like, oh, my gosh, this is overwhelming. Like, number one, we have to tell the listeners that we're going to the Philippines and some listeners might have never heard of the Philippines. So we have to tell them a little bit about what that place is like.

What are the people like that live there? When did it become the Philippines? Just like any sort of background that seems like necessary for setting up where we're going. And then we're trying to introduce these larger themes that we're going to kind of

unspool and unravel throughout the episode of like myth building and melodrama. We have to introduce the family, the Marcoses, and talk a little bit about what was going on at the time, but not too much because we don't want to spoil what's going to come next. And so when I sat down to make it, I think a place where I start a lot with cold opens is like, how am I going to take people to this scene? How am I going to build a story?

because you want to suck the listener right in. You want to have sound design. You want to have music. You want to have archival. And so I immediately went to YouTube and I was just watching all these documentaries of when in the 1970s they found, discovered, quote unquote, the Tassadai. And these were like fascinating movies. I probably watched hours and hours of them because it's just...

All these people flying over the jungle, discovering these mythical, supposedly untouched by civilization group of people. And so it was an interesting historical moment to look back on and realize that this documentary is essentially fake, but nobody knew it when they were making it. I remember like going...

And watching some of those videos with you and some of these documentaries, I mean, this wasn't just Filipino documentary makers. This was the entire world. Like National Geographic was there. U.S. newsmakers were there. And the tone and the way in which they talk about these people was already very telling. The fact that there's this like...

primitive people that had been untouched by Western society or the modern world. There was a real colonial gaze to the way that these documentaries you were looking at were even talking about these people, which I know added an additional layer to you, right? That's like an additional layer to the story. It's like, from whose perspective do we hear about these people? And what does that tell us about power? And how do we contextualize that in the story? So there was a lot going on in this book.

There was a lot going on. And I wanted to start the open in a way that you didn't know where it was going to end up. I didn't want to say, you know, there was this made up group of people who lived in the jungle in the Philippines. It was a lie. Like when the cold open starts, I'm basically framing it so that you think you're also tricked. You think that this is a real life discovery that happened in the 70s of these

I think Kathleen Gutierrez says so-called Stone Age cave dwelling people like you're there. And then as you discover that it's all a lie, like I built it in a way so that you're discovering it while I'm discovering it at the same time. You know, we had discussions about this early on. That's interesting because what we were trying to say, and again, it was too complicated for a cold open, was that.

even a lie can have real life consequences. A lie has a life of its own and the life that it leads is real. And there was so much nuance there that I know we both loved, but even though it didn't work for the episode, it still really works for, I think, the story we were trying to tell. And you did such an amazing job at it. It was such a pleasure to work on this episode with you and really fun to look back on it. Thanks so much for chatting. Thanks, Anya.

Now, every time you listen to a new ThruLine episode, you can wonder how many other actual cold opens were there. And the answer is a lot. But I promise you, the one you're getting in the episode is always the best possible one.

That was our final behind-the-scenes conversation for this episode. But it doesn't have to end for you. If you want more behind-the-scenes conversation and how we think through episodes and topic ideas and just so much more, you can sign up for ThruLine Plus, which also helps support our work here. You can find out more at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine.

And a quick note to listeners. Reverend Willie T. Ramey, who you heard from in our environmental justice episode, actually passed away in June 2024. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Nina Puchalski, Puneet Matiwala, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Voice over work in this episode was done by Laurence Wu. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josephine Nyunai. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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