You’ll Never Believe Me But… is a lighthearted storytelling podcast about what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s funny. Guests come on and tell two stories, one real one fake, and laugh and joke about it with host Cutter as they enjoy storytelling while he tries to figure out which story is the real one.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Provided by Otter.ai
Cutter 0:00
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone. My name is cutter the you may know me as three bears in a coat on air on HD one, and welcome to this episode of, You'll never believe me, but. "You'll never believe me, but" is a storytelling podcast being produced here at WKNC about lying to me, every episode I have a guest on and they tell me two stories one real and one fake, and I have to decide which is real between them. For those of you that are new here, or for those of you that need a quick refresher, I'm gonna run down the three rules we have here before we get into today's episode. Rule number one, your story should not do significant damage to anyone else or their character. We're not trying to be outwardly mean to anyone other than ourselves. Rule number two, if someone else is featured in the story, you must either have their permission to say their name or use fake name for them. You agreed to come on the show and tell these stories but unless they agreed to have these stories told, just use a fake name. And rule number three, and this is the easiest one. All stories should start with. You'll never believe me but and then a brief synopsis before starting the story just so we all know what we're getting into, and it is a nice little nod to the show's title. So with all of that housekeeping stuff out of the way, let's go ahead and get into today's episode. Today's guest is Amanda a friend of the station and someone I'm excited to get to know as this is the first time that we've met Amanda, how are you doing today?
Amanda 1:31
I'm Great. I'm really excited to be here. I was a college radio nerd myself. So it's wonderful to be in a studio again.
Cutter 1:39
Awesome. Where did you go to college and what radio station?
Amanda 1:42
Undergrad, I went to George Washington University. So in DC, and we had very very, This is so much cooler, we had very little bandwidth to get very far. So I don't think even all the dorms were covered by the radio station. Definitely did not have the listenership that WKNC has.
Cutter 2:04
Yeah, I'm very lucky. WKNC is sizable. And it's got a long enough history that I think that that definitely helps. That's awesome. Well, I'm very glad to have you back in the studio, then. I was told that you have rehearsed your stories over a long drive on the way down. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Amanda 2:25
Absolutely. So I live in Michigan, technically. And I used to live here in Raleigh and work at NC State. But now I live in Michigan, and I am here visiting. And so we went to Atlantic Beach for last couple of days. And that was pretty incredible. Yeah, I got a little beach time and it was good. It wasn't busy. So that was especially nice. Oh, so yeah, had some time on the beach and swimming. And Patrick caught two sharks, which was very exciting. Little baby sharks,
Cutter 2:54
And that is your boyfriend?
Amanda 2:55
My boyfriend. Yep.
Cutter 2:56
Awesome. That's awesome. And so on the way back from Atlantic say to hear you rehearse your stories with Patrick, is that true?
Amanda 3:04
We listened to the second episode of this podcast, which was wonderful.
Cutter 3:08
Thank you. Thank you.
Amanda 3:10
It was great to hear. And so we listened to that. And I just was like, Okay, I had a bunch of different ideas, and just kind of narrowed them down and talk through what was you know, what was going to be most believable as my fake story.
Cutter 3:26
I feel like that's a lot of pressure on me now. Like, like, the stakes are so high. Everyone's getting so into it, which I am all for, by the way.
Amanda 3:33
Absolutely, absolutely, it is a great challenge. It's like, storytelling is so much more challenging than I ever thought it was. Anyway, I you know, I think I'm a natural storyteller, but I had to prepare for The Moth one time, I did The Moth on NPR.
Cutter 3:49
Oh wow, Amazing.
Amanda 3:51
And it was incredibly mentally challenging. Just they, you know, you can't do use any notes at all. And my story was about 12 minutes. And so you just would, you know, practice with picturing what was happening and talking about it. And it was a grand challenge. But but really fun. So I'm excited to be here. This is a really fun idea. And I like can't wait till I get to guess about yours.
Cutter 4:17
Oh I am very excited. I think that that's gonna be the most interesting is to see the development of it over time by the end of the season. So you, you talked about the moth, you do a lot of speaking Is that right? What all, Where all do you speak? What all do you do?
Amanda 4:32
So I speak a lot to medical students and nursing students and just to regular groups of people and teach them about different medical topics, mostly about ovarian cancer. And I'm also always just kind of working on projects that, you know, put me where I'm trying to raise awareness or as an advocate for a particular political issue. I do a lot of work on policy. and things like that, too. So
Cutter 5:01
amazing. That's impressive. Well, I'm honored to have a NPR featured Storyteller here on my podcast. Unless you have any questions for me, we can go ahead and jump right into it. I'm very excited.
Amanda 5:13
Sounds good. You will never believe me. But I was diagnosed with cancer on a trip to Nicaragua. And they had to get me to the hospital by emergency boat.
Cutter 5:23
Emergency boat is amazing. And wow, I don't even know where to start with that. unpacking it, I think the best place to start is just to let you tell the story.
Amanda 5:35
Absolutely. So in my, my professional career, I've always run service and leadership centers at different universities. So like, helping nerds save the world is kind of my specialty. And I love getting to take students abroad on service trips, you know, often, it's called, like Alternative Breaks at different schools and things like that. So a lot of people have done programs like that. We have them here at NC State. Amazing to go on to. And I got one summer, I had an incredible experience where I got to take 15 of my Stanford students at the time abroad to Nicaragua for like, about 8 weeks.
Cutter 6:18
Oh, my goodness, that's a long time.
Amanda 6:20
It was pretty much the whole summer. And the really cool part was it was all themed around, like natural medicine. And just understanding kind of medicine in the context of this developing country, and in this different context. And so a lot of these students were really intense type a pre med students. So even preparing to travel with them was sometimes challenging,
Cutter 6:46
I would imagine. Yeah.
Amanda 6:48
Even down to like, what do you pack becomes like a whole exercise. Being prepared and everything but, you know, you get to know people really well, during an experience like that.
Cutter 7:00
Absolutely, I mean, eight weeks is a long time long time
Amanda 7:03
