{"id":17736,"date":"2025-09-23T17:29:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T21:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17736"},"modified":"2025-10-02T21:05:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T01:05:57","slug":"episode-655-hunter-prosper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-655-hunter-prosper","title":{"rendered":"Episode 655 – Hunter Prosper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 655:
\nHunter Prosper<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_655_-_Hunter_Prosper.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“No matter who you are, you have emotions that I have felt. Our experiences are different, but I can speak to the emotions. I’ve felt love and you’ve felt love. I’ve felt anxiety and you’ve felt anxiety. That connectedness makes me feel less alone in the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>ICU nurse Hunter Prosper<\/a> joins me this week as we celebrate his wonderful new book, STORIES FROM A STRANGER: Every Person Has a Story<\/a> (Simon Element). We talk about the ICU experiences that led him to start talking to strangers in public and asking them deep questions about their lives five years ago, how those conversations have changed him, why he started sharing them online, how he figured out the questions he wanted to ask, and how long it takes just talking to someone before they’re both comfortable with him recording the questions. Along the way, we get into how we each approach the dance of having a conversation with someone we’ve never met, what it was like to discover he had an audience, whether people speak differently when the phone comes out, and how it felt to see a book-length version of this project. We also discuss how he wants to explore new ways of making his videos, how it felt to discover there’s a group-chat of his past strangers (that he’s not invited to), why he’ll always be a nurse first and not a ‘content creator,’ going traveling with his fiancee to do interviews and photos for the book, what he sees when he looks in the mirror, and more. Oh, and things get heavy<\/em> once I tell him it’s okay to ask me some questions. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read STORIES FROM A STRANGER<\/a>!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“I was starting to get burned out from listening to people’s stories, because when I listened and then had to perform CPR on them, I wasn’t able to disconnect the two when I got home.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n