Our favorite 2025 project levels up

Hey there —

Today’s podcast episode represents the culmination of a big year’s work by the whole Arm and a Leg team — and of a lot of years’ work by everybody who’s contributed to the show and helped it along.

And I think it represents the beginning of something new, and so exciting.

When I first imagined An Arm and a Leg, I thought of it as following in the footsteps of shows like Planet Money and 99 Percent Invisible: Projects that illuminate hidden, nerdy, complex, and often important stories and ideas — grounding them in curiosity, humanity, and a sense of humor.

And I hope we still do those things. Part of what makes the health care industrial complex so powerfully oppressive is its complexity and opacity. Unpacking that — breaking it down — remains important.

But by the time I’d made the first couple seasons of An Arm and a Leg, I started to understand: That wasn’t enough.

The problems with health care were so much worse — so much more urgent, for so many people — than I’d really understood at first.

So this show needed to put a much bigger emphasis on what I started calling “self-defense” against those problems.

“Self-defense” became the theme for our third season, featuring the story of an investigative reporter who shamed a Memphis hospital into giving up medical-debt lawsuits, a dive into one listener’s question that became a refrain of ours: Can they freaking DO that?!? (Answer in that case: not if you know how to fight back), and another listener’s demonstration of their own ninja-level skills at fighting off overwhelming medical expenses.

The “ninja” idea stayed with me, and in a follow-up episode, I talked with my colleague Sally Herships about the idea of creating a kind of “dojo” — a self-defense school.

From my (very limited) understanding, a dojo isn’t just a place for learning to kick and punch and throw. It’s a place for learning to become an effective force for peace and justice — through techniques for effective communication, negotiation, and resourceful problem-solving. And for learning how to fight effectively when necessary.

Students at a dojo develop these skills not just for their own safety, but to use on behalf of others, and the community as a whole. And as students learn more — and advance in rank — they take on responsibility for teaching and mentoring others.

It was kind of a big ambition.

That was February 2020. I spent the next few weeks planning a building-the-dojo season, and just as I thought I had it mapped out… the pandemic started. Everything shut down. We made a COVID season, and brought back the dojo idea later that year — including an episode with a self-defense teacher that I still think is one of the most useful episodes we’ve ever done.

But… I’m not an organizer. I’m not even that organized. I’ve never run an actual dojo, or even spent that much time in one.

And just making a podcast on a shoestring budget was a big job. We started this newsletter, First Aid Kit, as a kind of teaching tool, but… I couldn’t manage it on my own while also making the show. The schedule slowed from weekly to monthly to … occasional.

Then this year, we got some extra resources, including funding that let me pay Claire Davenport and Emily Pisacreta to take over First Aid Kit and bring it back as a weekly resource. They’ve done an amazing job.

… and they created space for listeners to start, well, building a dojo of sorts. Taking what they’d learned from the show, and mobilizing it to help other people. Creating new resources.

If you’ve been following along this year, you’ve read about the resource guide that med student Thomas Sanford has been developing.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear how that guide is ready to level up — with help and inspiration from dozens of other listeners — and how you can be part of spreading it around, improving it, and adapting it for your immediate community.

I hope you’ll take time to listen. I pretty much guarantee you’ll feel great afterwards — which is not something most journalists can promise you about their work.

And if you’re ready to get involved, I’ve got two places to point you:

First, we’ve got a guide right here: armandalegshow.com/helpers.

You’ll find a link you can share with anyone who needs it, a PDF you can print out and distribute, a template you can use to customize the list however you need, background information about the project, and a sign-up sheet so we can all keep working together.

Second: If you haven’t donated to support An Arm and a Leg — or heck, even if you have — I hope you’ll take a minute and pitch in what you can.

Thank you SO much for contributing  — and for listening, reading, and sharing your thoughts and stories with us. Thanks for giving our team the best jobs we can imagine — and for the resources we need to keep doing them.

Here’s to what we’ll do together in 2026.

— Dan