Ira Glass

But when Pete learned about this, it really did make their lives seem so much more impressive.

I'm not exactly sure how to ask this question, so I'm just going to ask this straight out.

The one thing that I know about spies from movies is that they're all really, really hot.

Were your parents really hot?

There's this concept that originally was in video games and then it spread to TV shows and to social media where, okay, say in a video game, there's the universe that everything takes place in, right?

And then at some point, the game creators do a new lore drop where they give backstory or reveal important details that suddenly make everything seem different and richer and more complicated.

She had a whole new light.

Pete had that.

He had a new lore drop in his actual life.

He thought his parents were one thing, then went backstory that changed his whole picture of them.

So what's it like to live through in real life?

Beats as everybody goes through the thing when they grow up, where they're going to see their parents, not just as the boring human furniture around the house of their childhood.

And for most of us, the new information that we absorb about our parents happens over years.

The new lore drop version that Pete got was just kind of the accelerated program.

Today on our show, we have other human beings who are not video game characters and they're not fictional people on long-running television series who get hit with all new information about their own lives.

Backstories that rewrite everything.

New lore drops in real life.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

Today on the show, I will still be playing the part that I always play here.

And I have not learned that I am a princess from Genovia and my grandmother is actually Julie Andrews.