Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People

You’ve  heard us talk about it. Here’s your reminder. In the last nearly TEN YEARS of Beautiful Anonymous, Gethard has had 499 unforgettable conversations with our callers. This Friday, October 17th, we’re recording number 500. We'll be live at Kevin Smith’s Smodcastle Cinemas in beautiful Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Get your tickets now, then come hang out, grab a shirt, get to know one another, and maybe win a chance to ...

Gethard talks with a caller who shares her story of adopting a young girl and what happened when, after a year, that child chose to return to her foster family. It’s an honest conversation about one person’s experience with adoption, the unpredictability of parenthood,  and finding a way forward when something you’ve hoped for doesn’t turn out the way you imagined.

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An Australian on a solo vacation calls in from Italy. She and Gethard chat about travel, trade stereotypes about each other’s countries, and get into how the rest of the world views the U.S. right now, all while the caller gives us a little walking tour of the charming Italian town she's calling from.

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This call starts at Burning Man but quickly opens up into a far more complicated conversation about grief, abuse, healing, and the long work of rebuilding. But the playa stays in the mix throughout, a touchstone for how this caller has tried to redefine life along the way. And, of course, we make a stop at the Orgy Dome.

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This week, Geth talks with a railroad worker who shares what it’s really like on the job. They get into the nitty-gritty of trains, unions, and infrastructure, and explore how the rails often reflect bigger truths about where the country is headed. 

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This week, Geth talks with a firefighter/EMT who’s training to be a paramedic. They get into the vital importance of volunteer work, what it’s like to serve in rural communities versus tourist towns, and how showing up in moments of crisis can remind you what humanity is all about.

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Raised by a zoologist in a house full of wild animals, this psychology professor’s life has remained just as untamed: coaching junior roller derby, a stint making high-end chocolate, parenting a trans kid, and that’s just for starters. Unpredictable but never aimless, her conversation with Gethard is just as wide-ranging as her life.

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This week’s caller takes us into the complicated, messy, and deeply human world of sex work. The conversation stretches from personal experience to bigger questions about society. It's thoughtful, challenging, and impossible to boil down.

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Does what it says on the tin. Gethard talks to a polyamorous witch librarian who once worked the front desk at a brothel, surprisingly perfect training for library life. They get into the realities of coven community, late-discovered neurodivergence, leaving a faith tradition, and why public libraries are such vital spaces, now more than ever. It’s wide-ranging but never scattered. More like a life filed neatly into se...

Here’s the pitch: Engineer by day. International award-winning clown by night. Learned to read and walk in her 20s. This caller has a lot going on, and every story branches into a whole new world of surprises.

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A couple weeks back, Gethard talked with a lawyer whose husband came up a few times. We learned two key facts about him: he’s got a lot of birds, and he works on a tugboat. Well, he got through this week, and that means Geth got to ask him a few questions about the birds and a million more about life aboard a tugboat. It’s a conversation packed with oddly fascinating details about this very specific, rarely discussed j...

This week, Gethard talks to a Vietnam veteran with a lifetime of stories. He’s never listened to the podcast, but his granddaughter has, and she encouraged him to call in as a way to share and preserve the experiences he’s carried for decades. He recounts some harrowing moments from his childhood before walking us through the catastrophic day in Vietnam that changed the course of his life. It’s a conversation about tra...

This week’s caller is a medical device engineer with a deeply personal stake in the healthcare system. She talks with Gethard about living with a rare liver disease, how Martin Shkreli changed the course of her life, and the three-legged, half-tailed foster cat who might just send her back to therapy.

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This week’s caller joined Gethard at 10:30 on a Friday night to talk about wrestling and her love of a New Jersey ska band, but the conversation quickly turned into something else entirely. We hear about her tugboat captain husband (who happens to have Geth’s secret dream job), her own work representing our most vulnerable population, and the utterly baffling hobby that’s taken over her home. Somehow, this one-hour cal...

In another installment of our unofficial “The Young People Are Alright” series, a 19-year-old entrepreneur calls in to talk about hustle culture, mental health, and the lessons he’s learning from his first relationship. He’s thoughtful, ambitious, and asking big questions about what it means to grow up in a world where the American Dream feels increasingly out of reach and the future is anything but certain.

This week’s caller is a mom of two young boys doing her best to face life head-on. Her oldest son is autistic and recently diagnosed with depression. She talks with Gethard about parenting a neurodivergent child, advocating in a world that doesn’t always get it, and staying grounded through it all with warmth, humor, and zero B.S.

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This week’s caller is a pediatric nurse with a newborn at home, and she’s learning in real time how her job is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to new mom anxiety. She and Geth talk about sleepless nights, the emotional toll of pediatric care, and why it’s hard to turn off worst-case-scenario thinking when you’ve seen it all firsthand. Plus, a short but sweet cameo from her husband. 

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This week’s caller is a medieval recreationist who sews their own centuries-old clothing and has an overactive bladder. And that’s just scratching the surface. And that’s just scratching the surface. From homemade centuries-old clothing to body stuff to one wild reveal with two minutes left, this episode is a non-stop ride through one person’s delightfully specific world.

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Good morning! For reasons no one can quite explain, Beautiful/Anonymous has a long and proud tradition of attracting band directors, and this week’s caller keeps the streak alive. She and Gethard talk about everything from what makes trombonists so goofy to figuring out which woodwinds are the biggest divas. Oh, and also: the time she found out her long-term partner was sneaking around on a foot fetish website.