How baseball got its beat

Major League Baseball’s postseason is just a few weeks away, and here on Throughline we know the power of a good walk-up song. But how did baseball become such a musical sport? And where did the idea for walk up-music come from? Guests: John Thorn, author and Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball Nancy Faust, former organist for the Chicago White Sox Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. Correction: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly said that the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1952. The team moved ahead of the 1958 season. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:14Speaker 01

  I didn't care much about baseball for a lot of my life. But a few years ago, one song helped change that.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Let me take you back to 2022. The Mets, the team I kind of adopted when I married a diehard fan. Well, they were having an unusually good season.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  And a big reason for that was this pitcher on our team back then, Edwin Diaz.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Diaz was our closer, which meant he would come in late in the game, usually at a critical moment. Bringing Diaz off the bench was the Mets' way of saying to the other team, fun's over. This game is ours. And so, part of his job was to exude confidence, to put all the pressure on the other team's batter. And Diaz had a specific way of doing that, a way that commanded the whole stadium's attention.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  His walk-up song.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  A snippet of music blasted over the stadium speakers to hype up the crowd.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  It's often a song the player has picked themselves that says something about who they are or where they're from.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  It can be earnest.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And Diaz's walk-up track was this song called "Narco."

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Clips of Diaz walking up to the mound while Narco played in the background went viral. The Mets started handing out plastic trumpets to fans. The team mascots, Mr. and Mrs. Met, these anthropomorphized baseballs, pretended to play along to the trumpet solo while strobe lights flashed in the background. And finally, it got so big that the team brought in one of the song's artists, Timmy Trumpet, from Australia, to play the solo live while Diaz made his entrance.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Well, until last night, the Australian Timmy Trumpet had never attended a baseball game. Now, he will get his first view of an Edwin Diaz save opportunity.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  And if you were in the stands when that song came on, let me tell you, it was electric. And it kind of made me start to pay attention more and lean into the game. If you really stop and think about it, this whole walk-up music thing, it's kind of a weird ritual. But when you put it into context of all the other music you're hearing at the ballpark, it starts to make more sense.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Like, from the moment you step into the stadium, you're kind of surrounded by music.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Tens of thousands of people are singing together. Fans feel like they're actually becoming a part of what's happening on the field.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And so, I wanted to know, how and when did music become such a big part of baseball?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. It's playoff season for Major League Baseball, which the Mets sadly will not be playing in, just not our year. On today's show, we're rewinding through more than 100 years of baseball history. And we'll do it with the help of two people who were there for some of the seminal moments. Major League Baseball's official historian. So I take it you don't love walk-up music. I just want to get that on the record.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  I do not love walk-up music.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  And the organist who launched 1,000 walk-up songs.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  It wasn't very nice, and I was a little bit responsible.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  That's when we come back.

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  Hello, this is Lisa Malloy from Charlestown, New Hampshire. You're listening to The Throughline from NPR. I love listening to The Throughline because it helps me question my own preconceived notions and form a deeper understanding of why and how things developed.

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• 5:44Speaker 08

  Part one, take me out to the ballgame.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  When I think of going to a baseball game today, I have this vivid image of players are warming up. We're in between innings. You've got Sweet Caroline playing over the speakers. And some people are singing, some people are dancing.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  It's a vibe, right?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Well, I do comprehend that, but I can't say that I fully understand it. Because one of the joys of baseball, to me, is the silence between half innings. With walk-up music and nonstop audio, the need to secure attention, the attention of the fans, is relentless. And the idea of a kid going to a ballgame and being entitled to dream, that may be lost.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  John Thorne is a legend in the world of baseball history. He's Major League Baseball's official historian, and he writes a blog about baseball and the past called Our Game. The baseball John fell in love with as a kid sounded different than it does today.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  My first baseball game at a major league level was May 12, 1957, when I went to the Polo Grounds with my father. Johnny Padres threw a shutout, Duke Snyder hit a homer, and I was in heaven.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  In fact, the thing that really captivated John was the silence. It made everything else sound so much louder and clearer.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  I think of the ball hitting the bat in a peculiar way.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  The sound the ball made when it hit the bat, for Babe Ruth, it was there. For Josh Gibson, there was a sound off the bat.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  You might hear the leathery thud of a mitt cushioning a pop fly, a coach yelling at his player to keep running, steal second base. But there was music in baseball. If you knew where to listen for it, it had already been there for decades.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Okay, let's go back in time.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Well, back in time is where I'm comfortable.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Can you take me back to the very beginning of where baseball and music collide? Where is the starting point?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  The idea that an anthem would be played at a baseball game dates to 1862. The first enclosed ballpark, William Cammire's Union Grounds, opened on May 15, 1862, with a band present that played the Star Spangled Banner.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  John says it's unlikely anyone was singing along. The closest thing to a sound system at the Union Grounds in the 1860s may have been a guy on the field with an old-fashioned megaphone. But it introduced a ritual, a ceremonial place for music at the ballgame, especially, John points out, at important moments for the country. In a sense, music helped solidify baseball as America's pastime.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  The idea that the Star Spangled Banner and patriotism should be connected with baseball goes back to the height of the Civil War. But it was not universal until we had entered World War II in 1942.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  But during the decades in between those two milestones, music made a creeping crescendo. The National Anthem had opened the door, and new traditions marched in, like the seventh inning stretch.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  The idea of the seventh inning stretch goes back so far as to defy scholars.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  The seventh inning stretch started out as exactly what it sounds like, an opportunity to stretch your legs, get the blood pumping. But it would become a musical interlude, thanks to a song that came out in 1908, a song that would create both an industry and an invitation for more music at the ballpark.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," which we think of as the seventh inning stretch response, was actually a song about female suffrage.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was a suffrage anthem? "Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the ballgame. Buy me some peanuts and crackers." I'm just trying to-- where is the--

• 10:43Speaker 03

  No, but you're reflecting on the chorus. There are many other stanzas. And the original stanzas reflected an independent-minded woman who knows all about baseball and the players and wants to go to a game.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Her name was Katie Casey.

• 11:02Speaker 09

  Katie Casey was baseball mad, had the fever and had it bad. Just searched for the hometown for every school, Katie blue.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  When Katie's boyfriend asks if she wants to see a show, she says, "Nah, take me out to the ballgame." She knows all the players' names and when the ump makes a bad call.

• 11:30Speaker 09

  Gold's the umpire, he was wrong all along, good and strong.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And crucially, when the game is tied, she knows exactly what to do.

• 11:40Speaker 09

  Just to cheer up the boys, she knew she'd made the gang sing this song.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  She made the gang sing. And thus was born a new genre of music: baseball songs.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  The combination of sheet music and cylinder roll and 78-rpm records, it was a deluge in the 1910s. Baseball music was really, really popular, not so much with fans as with publishers.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So it was a marketing tool in some ways.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  To get people to go to the games.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, there were so many Tin Pan Alley-- look, George M. Coohan wrote a song that he issued in very nearly the same week as "Take Me Out."

• 12:26Speaker 01

  It was called "Take Your Girl to the Ballgame." And it was quickly followed up by other copycats, like "I Want to Go to the Ballgame." The tune may sound familiar. But even with all this new baseball music produced by Tin Pan Alley, by and large, there still wasn't a lot of group singing going on at actual ballparks. John says a big reason for that was technical.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  The sound systems were primitive.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  A brass band was still the best backing track available, until the radio came around. It's possible this new radio audience was responsible for the fresh wave of baseball music released in the decades that followed.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Radio brought us Joe DiMaggio's songs.

• 13:12Speaker 10

  Hello, Joe, what do you know?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  We need a hit, so here I go. 1941, Les Brown and his band of renown.

• 13:21Speaker 08

  Strike one. Strike two.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  And very stupid lyrics, exceedingly dumb, but it's a catchy tune.

• 13:36Speaker 11

  And not a free, Jolton Joe DiMaggio.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  And Simon and Garfunkel, what, 25 years later, sang "Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?" The nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Well, that's what we do with baseball. We turn lonely eyes to the game. The game, its strength is in the past, not in the present moment, so that marketers with relentless appeal to nonstop audio between innings may be making a mistake.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  But all that audio stayed outside the ballpark for decades.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  The idea that radio came in in 1920 didn't mean that fans were bringing radios to the ballparks until the 1950s, when transistor radios came in.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  At that point, fans sitting in the stands might hear a secondhand taste of the radio broadcast, carried through the air from a few rows over, where someone had the sound on transistor radio turned up.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  The idea of upsetting your neighbors by listening to rock music during the heat of a ballgame must have been daunting.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  John says some people brought earplugs to the ballpark. So you would bring your transistor radio, and everybody around you would be hearing the music that you're playing?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Correct, correct.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And if fans thought that was annoying, well, the volume was about to be turned way up.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  The idea that you would let go of attention and perhaps permit the strolling underneath the stands, this was a thing of the past.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  That's When We Come Back.

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  This is Tom calling from Hudson, New York. I've been a Throughline Plus and Throughline supporter since the very beginning, and I love the way that the show always gives a context for what's going on today. I was delighted to hear one of my pieces of music on a recent podcast. Love it. I love what you do. Keep doing it. Thank you. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.

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• 17:16Speaker 08

  Part two, hey, hey, goodbye.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  It's a hot summer evening in Chicago, July 1977.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Stadium lights blaze down on the baseball field, jerseys sticky with the summer humidity.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  The White Sox are at bat, two runs down to the Kansas City Royals in a game they want to win badly. But they've got to get something going. The stands buzz with tension.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Fans jump out of their seats, beer and peanuts spill in the stands.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  The White Sox organist is beaming in her glass booth behind home plate. As the pitcher winds up for the next batter, she leans forward, her fingers hovering over the keys.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And that's when, creeping up in the background, you start to hear it.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  A chorus of "Nah, nah, goodbye" sneaking through the crowd, getting louder and louder as the fans start to catch on.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  The announcer has to raise his voice to be heard over the tidal wave of singing.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And this is when the White Sox explode.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  They load the bases. Batting four runs for the lead.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  The other team is forced to take out their pitcher.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And as he steps off the mound, the Chicago fans serenade him off the pitch.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Even louder.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  When you start to play and the whole stadium starts singing along, what were you thinking? What were you feeling?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I thought, am I hearing things? I mean, I realize everybody's singing along.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  And it was more than just taking me out to the ballgame, to hear everybody singing along.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  It wasn't something I was used to. It wasn't very nice. It wasn't this kind of thing you typically hear at a ballgame. This was like taunting.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  And I was a little bit responsible.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Nancy Faust did not mean to change the way we hear baseball forever. In fact, she didn't even mean to become a stadium organist. Did you grow up rooting for the White Sox? Is that how you ended up working with them?

• 20:14Speaker 04

  It's funny, I was just thrust into this position because my family were not sports fans at all. My true love was always animals. I grew up thinking perhaps I could be a veterinarian. I had no aspirations to become a baseball organist.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  But music ran in Nancy's family. Her mom was a professional organist. She taught Nancy how to play when she was four years old.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  When I was going to college, I was filling in for my mom when she couldn't make a job, playing music for luncheons or banquets that was attended by the general manager of the White Sox. And so he heard me play, and that's how this whole thing developed.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  When Nancy Faust walked into the organist booth at White Sox Stadium for the first time, she was 23 years old. Her short blonde hair was pulled back into pigtails. She hadn't been to a baseball game in years, and she didn't know it, but she was about to revolutionize the game.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  The booth was like a fishbowl with big, single-pane windows on the front and sides. Sitting behind her organ, Nancy could see the whole stadium surrounding her, thousands of seats. But Nancy says she wasn't that nervous.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  I knew I'd played a really mean anthem. I knew that was really good. And I think it was the year of the lowest attendance ever. And so even though the organ was out there in centerfield, there was very few people around me. So if I did mess up a little, nobody would remember. A lot of people.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, less pressure. Attendance had been an issue at White Sox games for years.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Things were so bad in those days. I remember the general manager saying, "Oh, we had a crowd of 8,000 and we blew it." Nowadays, 8,000 just wouldn't cut it.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  It was an issue the team's previous manager had been obsessed with correcting. Bill Vek was convinced the answer was to juice up the fan experience. He injected adrenaline into the stands whenever he could, most famously with the exploding scoreboard, a 130-foot-wide electronic screen that launched fireworks, blasted sound effects, and lit up with pixelated pinwheels anytime the Sox hit a homerun. And Vek was also thinking about music.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  The first organist at Comiskey Park was hired in 1959 or '60, actually. Bill Vek owned the team at that time, and he did something unusual. He placed the organ outdoors among the fans instead of in a booth, which is a traditional thing that you would do.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  But Nancy says the organist repertoire was still pretty limited.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  The National Anthem and Take Me Out to the Ballgame and about an hour as people entered the field.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  In her first few years playing for the White Sox, Nancy stuck to the script she was given. But besides the musical skill set she'd been hired for, Nancy had a second talent. She's witty, quick on her feet. Her sense of humor has a surprising bite to it. So as she started to become more comfortable with the players and the mechanics of the game itself, Nancy let herself improvise more. She played off the things she saw happening around her.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  And the third year that I was there, Dick Allen was a sensational player, and he just commanded attention.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  And when he'd walk up to the plate, people left the bathrooms or left the popcorn stand. They wanted to see Dick Allen play because he was a great homerun hitter.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  And so out of the blue, I played "Jesus Christ Superstar" for him because that was popular at the time. And it just seemed like I'd play it and he'd hit a homerun, and the place went crazy.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  And if this story were a song, this is the moment where the whole orchestra would come in. The beat would pick up, the momentum would swell, because Nancy hit a groove. The fans who sat around her booth started coming to her with more ideas for other players on the team.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  They'd say, "Oh, that guy, he was in the watch department and the store closed, and he was stuck in the watch department so then I could play. Does anybody know what time it is?" You know, or something like that, when he'd come to bat.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  So you were choosing the songs for the players, basically with collaboration from the fans?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Yes, and then it grew into, because I was the only music provider, you know, it'd see, you'd do "Rainbow in the Sky" or "A Cat Run on the Field", or somebody'd throw an inflatable doll into the park. Somebody'd lost a ball in the sun. I were blinded by the light. And there was always just something kind of funny, or there was a song for whatever happened. It wasn't even just the ballplayers.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Before we get too carried away here, we should note Nancy was not the first organist ever to do this. That honor goes to Gladys Gooding, who played the organ for the Brooklyn Dodgers three decades earlier in the 1940s and '50s. She also riffed off players' names and the mood in the stadium, like Nancy would go on to do. But when the Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles, Gladys didn't go with them, and the tradition apparently stopped. When Nancy Faust and White Sox fans picked it up back in the 1970s, something was different. Maybe it was the timing, the big marketing swings from baseball team owners. Maybe it was that the organs were more commonplace in stadiums now, and fans came to the game ready to party.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Or maybe it was just thanks to the special connection Nancy built with the fans surrounding her booth. The energy she brought to the game was contagious.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  It sounds like through your organ playing and the music, you were becoming almost like a part of the game.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  I guess you'd say that. I'd say I called myself like a soundtrack for whatever was happening, even more than just ballplayers. I don't even know that the players were paying attention to what I was playing. I thought they had their mind on the game.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  But the players most definitely were paying attention. In 1977, after that game where Nancy led fans in a sing-along to "Hey, Hey, Goodbye", a visiting pitcher told a reporter, "You stand out on the mound with runners on base and Zisk at the plate and the crowd of 30,000 singing 'Kiss It Goodbye,' and it shakes your confidence."

• 26:31Speaker 04

  I have read in books since then, people recalling the old days when the players would say, "Oh, I hated to hear that. When I heard that 'Nah, nah, goodbye,' they'd just make them cringe."

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, Richie Zisk, the White Sox' big homerun hitter, said of the same fans, "I don't know whether they come to see us or we come to see them. But I'll tell you this, it's helped. It get you charged up."

• 26:55Speaker 04

  So I guess I had an impair, but I just didn't.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  You got in their head. You got in their head, Nancy.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  I have learned that, yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Along with the legendary White Sox commentator, Harry Carey, Nancy was part of cementing another tradition.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  They started singing along to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during every seventh inning stretch.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  The two of them put on a double act that other teams across the country would be inspired to follow. And it's a duet Nancy still carries on today. On her home organ with her dog Cooper, who perches on an ottoman, front paws in the air as he sings along.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And one of the most amazing parts to me about this story is Nancy Faust cannot read music. All those songs she played off the cuff over the course of her career, she did all of that by ear. You sing her a few bars of anything, and she can play it back for you on the organ seconds later. So obviously, I had a request. So that's the, that's the, that's the main part of it, you know?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I don't know, is that, how does that feel?

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Something like that?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yes, amazing. Nancy Faust retired from her job as the White Sox organist in 2010. White Sox fan and former President Barack Obama sent her a letter to personally congratulate her on her career. And that organ booth she occupied for decades is now dedicated to her.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Is it just a great life?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And every once in a while, Nancy comes out of retirement for special occasions, like--

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Pope night. So I've been doing my religious, got to have faith and don't stop believing.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  And yet, when she returns to the ballpark, there's a twinge of nostalgia. Most of the music is now planned ahead of time, loaded onto a soundboard.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Eventually, when the parks had the ability to play can music, they asked the player, what would you like to hear? And this would inspire him. And so that's what they're doing now, and they call it walk-up music. So I was, my job was more abbreviated then.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Nancy is diplomatic in how she talks about this change. John Thorne, Major League Baseball's official historian, is less so.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Baseball's strength is in its past.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  He's nostalgic for that feeling of sitting in the stands, hearing that crack as a baseball bat makes contact with the ball. It can almost take you back in time.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  I mean, the ability of baseball to connect generations of fans. It's the hand to the grandson at, at the ballgame.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  To John Thorne, the booming loudspeakers, the mascot races, the electronic use to clap, the walk-up songs, they're all distractions, things that pull his attention away from the game he loves. But for other baseball fans, I wonder if music has done the opposite, invited them in, forged a connection where they didn't feel one before.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  In one of your articles, you wrote that baseball music is memorable, neither for wit nor melody, but for its associations with the game we love. Can you, can you describe what you mean by that?

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Baseball songs, like baseball novels and baseball movies, are by and large crappy.

• 30:49Speaker 13

  It was the dying Cub fans' last request, so here it is. Do they--

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Steve Goodman, dying Cub fans' last wish, and Simon and Garfunkel,

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Les Brown and his band of renown. These are all junk. These are all junk, every bit of it.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I guess when you say, when you say most of the music is terrible, what's funny is like, I guess, when I really think about it, I'm like, "Sweet Caroline, like, the best song in the world?"

• 31:21Speaker 03

  It's terrible. It's a horrible song.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  I mean--

• 31:30Speaker 01

  But then there's the deeper conversation about what gives a song its heft, or what makes it good. To me, one of the most nostalgic kind of sounds is the singing, the fans, people standing together, participating in something together, singing together, off-key mostly, right?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  And I feel like, in a way, that act of standing and singing together is the thing that, for a lot of people, connects them to the past.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  I think, I think you're right. And I think that the fan who experiences baseball only through video clips on his cellphone is missing the appeal. The appeal is to escape from yourself and be someone else at the ballpark or in front of the television. And to commune not only with the past, but with yourself.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  John, before I let you go, if there's one song that you would choose to walk up to, if you had to choose, what would it be?

• 32:53Speaker 03

  It would be Sister Winona Cars' "The Ballgame."

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I actually don't know it. I'm not going to ask you to sing it unless you really feel compelled to.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  No, no, I will not volunteer. However, I do refer you to YouTube.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Instead, we asked Nancy Faust to play us out.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. If you have a favorite walk-up song, or if you're holding on to a musical sports memory that still gives you goosebumps every time you think of it, we want to hear them. Email us at [email protected], or call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. And don't forget to tell us your name, where you're calling from, and please say you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Atabluie. This episode was produced by me and-- Sarah Wyman.

• 34:03Speaker 16

  Julia Redpath.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Jasmine Romero.

• 34:06Speaker 16

  Molly Marcello. Amy Padula.

• 34:08Speaker 08

  Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music by Ramtin Atabluie and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Cheyenne Butler, and Josie Guttell. I'm Rand Adirfatah. Thanks for listening.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 34:50Speaker 17

  In a midterm election, it's hard to keep track of all those small, down ballot races. So some voters are using AI chatbots to figure out who to support.

• 35:00Speaker 16

  Sometimes if you push back to hallucinations, the chatbot will confess that it made something up. But in other cases, you know, it will double down.

• 35:07Speaker 17

  What you should know about using AI for election research. Listen now on the NPR Politics Podcast.