Ira Glass

His dad owned a 9mm pistol and was always up at 4 in the morning to go running on a track.

It was the fact that his parents didn't have friends and never had anybody over to the house, which of course doesn't mean that you're a spy, but still.

Wait, anytime you'd go to the mall, your mom would remind you of this?

At the time, he says he chalked it up to 1990s Stranger Danger stuff, but later learned that other parents do not do this.

But he told me there was one more clue about his parents' jobs, a clue that was sitting right there during the years they moved back to Virginia.

Wait, what?

To be clear, they weren't literally across the street, but in a neighborhood right across the street.

Door to door, less than five minutes.

Pete's parents are both dead now.

They both retired from the CIA after long careers, which is why it's okay to talk about it here on the radio, by the way.

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.