A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org for three weeks, Joe Biden said as forcefully as a human being possibly could say that he would not step down.
And for three weeks, it was this agonizing drip, drip, drip of people trying to get him to reconsider and of voters around the country wondering if he was going to reconsider, fed by a steady stream of daily news stories that read tea leaves and applied electron microscopes to the tiniest scraps of evidence, looking for any miniscule signs indicating that maybe it could happen.
Maybe Biden would rethink things.
Democrats wondering what it might take to change Biden's mind.
Meanwhile, over in the other half of the country, in Raid State America, at the Republican National Convention, people who had changed their minds and reconsidered firmly held convictions were a big part of the festivities.
Donald Trump picked as vice president a man who once said about him, my God, what an idiot.
J.D.
vance, Nikki Haley, who'd once called Trump unhinged, and other former Trump rivals, people who once seemed like they hated Trump and spoken out against him, took the stage to show how they'd reconsidered.
And even Trump himself, the centerpiece of the whole thing, seemed to be presenting himself as a changed man, somebody who had reconsidered who he wants to be in the wake of his near assassination and presented a notably gentler, uniter, not divider, side of himself.
All this reconsideration, of course, was in the service of getting the swing voters of the swing states to do some reconsideration of their own about who they might be picking for president this fall.
I sometimes feel like the rarest thing in the world is to witness somebody actually changing their mind, you know what I mean?
Changing their mind about something big, some fundamental belief.
I mean, I know it happens, right?
Most of us know people who are never going to have kids who decide they're going to go for it.
Or we know Democrats who became Republicans.
We know pro lifers who switch to pro choicers when it happens.
It's a seismic thing.
And that point of transition, when you're flipping from one way of seeing things to the new way, that is a weird, awkward thing to live through.