Writer/performer Danny Hoch performs a monologue taken from his one man show, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. It's a story about a guy who's been locked up for doing the most American activity possible: Selling stuff on the street (in this case Bart Simpson/O.J. Simpson t-shirts).

Host Ira Glass with Rory Evans, who describes the day her father fired his own mother from their family business, a machine shop called Evans Industries.

The story of Jug Burkett, a businessman in Dallas and a Vietnam vet, who years ago routinely started checking the bona fides of anyone in the news who claimed to have served in the Vietnam war. He says he's found hundreds of fakers, and he says that one of the tricky things about the fakers is that they often seem more like The Real Thing than real vets do.

Hillary Frank explains how an invitation to a business meeting, sent through the mail in 1963, kept two sides of a family from speaking to each other for most of the second half of the 20th Century.

What happens to you if you stay in sales all your life? 76-year-old salesman "Diamond" Jimmy Roy has sold everything from used cars to antiques to jewelery. Independent producer Dan Collison shadowed Jimmy Roy in his native Braddock, Pennsylvania, to talk to him about the philosophy that's kept him going as a salesman for over fifty years.

David Rakoff takes us inside the world of a Greek family-owned ice cream parlour, and what he learned about the husband and wife and son who owned it...and what he didn't figure out until later.

Becoming a salesman can make you more confident and happy, make you ignore it when someone tells you "no"...and why that might be a bad thing. The story of a man who sold radio advertising.