Amanda

I was going to say.

Bye, guys.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

This is Amanda, and you're not gonna believe this bullshit.

I'm feeling very excited and nervous and energized and vulnerable, hoping that you love this new little series I'm hosting that I am loosely calling You're Not Gonna Believe This Bullshit.

It's going to be a set of shows throughout the year that are sort of Real Housewives meets History Channel meets TED Talk meets your favorite etymology book.

My goal is to bring you one thing that seems maybe obscure or isolated or niche, like cat ladies, pre-celibacy, the carbon footprint, birth control, the bar exam, the CIA, something we sort of take as given.

And we're going to bust it open.

We're going to dig back into the history of that thing, how it was invented, because of course everything is invented for someone else's profit and at someone else's expense.

And we're going to peel back what that seemingly inevitable idiosyncratic one thing reveals about everything, about power and culture and our daily lives.

And it will be about our actual lives because nothing is more political than our daily lives.

I have a hunch that most structural power is built of tiny Jenga pieces that seem insignificant, isolated, and obscure.

That those who are on top of the structural power system need us to believe and see as natural and inevitable.

And that the more we take them out, turn one and another over in our hands and really examine it, the closer we are to toppling the whole damn thing and being able to build back a sturdier structure that we can all live and breathe and thrive inside of.

That's my dream.

And if we fall short of that dream, we'll at least have some really interesting context to reframe the way we interpret what we see in the news and experience in our lives.

And at the very, very least, we'll have some sexy new facts to share at the dinner table or bus stop or grocery line.

I'm anxious because I hope you will love this series.

And I'm trying to be brave because I think it's going to be fun and important.

So here we go, y'all.