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LM Lisbeth Mikoleit On What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath

“When you're doing shows, directors always want the flashy skills … Because I understand that if I do a crazy hard trick and I move really slow, people will probably clap and they'll like it. But they never ever will clap as much as when I just run in little circles around my head. Never ever.”

What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath · October 2026

“When you're doing shows, directors always want the flashy skills … Because I understand that if I do a crazy hard trick and I move really slow, people will probably clap and they'll like it. But they never ever will clap as much as when I just run in little circles around my head. Never ever.” — Lisbeth Mikoleit, What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath

The contortionist on what audiences actually respond to. Her hardest work depends on slow control of tiny muscles, but the crowd-pleaser is a fast, familiar move: running her legs in little circles around her head.

What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath · 2026-10-18 Listen to the episode → More from Lisbeth Mikoleit →

Transcript

What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath Around 20:38 into the episode
Lisbeth Mikoleit

…error for someone like me. If I tried that, like it would probably be saving me from injury. But for you, it's like a false alarm. Exactly. Exactly. It's like you're constantly trying to do the exact opposite of what would be smart and safe, but it thinks it's protecting you. It's very frustrating.

Dan Heath

Yeah. Well, so give me an example. Like paint us a picture of what you would look like on stage doing something that kind of exploits your mastery of these micro muscles.

Lisbeth Mikoleit

Okay, so this is a thing that actually comes up a lot because when you're doing shows, directors always want the flashy skills, and it's really important that you can do those flashy skills. Because I understand that if I do a crazy hard trick and I move really slow, people will probably clap and they'll like it. But they never ever will clap as much as when I just run in little circles around my head. Never ever.

Dan Heath

Wait, let me just process that. When I run in little circles around my...

L

So it's like if you're laying down and you run your legs up around over your head in like a little circle like a spider, people go crazy, and that's almost everybody's finale trick because it's like guaranteed something about it being so like fast and also visually like accessible, like a normal…

Dan Heath

Oh, so it's almost like beyond their comprehension. So they they don't have the same like bodily intuition or something.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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