432: Know When To Fold ‘Em

Ira Glass

I was surprised this week during this interview I was doing, I sat down to talk to the guy, Jim McManus is his name, whose book, Positively Fifth Street, is the book that actually started me playing poker years ago. And we were going to do this interview about great poker hands. And you know that saying, know when to hold them, know when to fold them? This interview was going to be about moments when players showed an almost supernatural ability, an uncanny power to know whether they should get out of a hand before they're crushed.

Ira Glass

One of his books is actually a history of poker called Cowboys Full-- he knows all kinds of poker lore. And so Jim shows up with four examples, and three of them were poker hands.

Ira Glass

Of course, this is a perfect week to talk about politics as poker. All this week, Barack Obama's been in a high stakes game of chicken with Congressional Republicans over shutting down the government, each side firing what I guess Jim would call testing bets, insisting on their version of the federal budget, demanding the other side would fold. Each side calling the other's bluff day, after day, after day. Neither side willing to toss in their cards.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, to help our nation's leaders, and the rest of us as well, Know When To Fold 'Em. Stories about people who have to figure out when they should give up. When is it time for a tactical retreat? We have dictators, drunks, an ungrateful kid facing off with his parent, and a team of guys chasing a lone man through the Brazilian rain forest. None of them on today's show wants to fold their cards. And as Jim McManus points out, figuring out when to hold them and when to fold them isn't always so obvious, at least when it comes to real games of poker.

Ira Glass

Jim calls it the major hand in his life because it's the hand that made the most serious players in the world take notice of him. This was back in 2000. Jim was covering the World Series of Poker for Harper's Magazine, and he entered the tournament, his first one ever. And he was terrified. He actually ended up at the final table, walking away with a quarter million dollars, which would have been impossible without this hand against one of his poker heroes, TJ Cloutier.

Ira Glass

So, in this crucial life changing moment, Jim's across the table from TJ, and that is the hand that Jim gets-- ace, king. Jim bets, just like it says to do in the book. Everybody folds but TJ, who raises.

Ira Glass

Jim says that he knew the relevant passage from TJ's book so well that he could nearly recite it. And he knew that he should either raise or he should fold. And then he does neither. He matches TJ's bet-- he calls-- thinking that TJ is probably bluffing, but too scared to raise him. Next time TJ bets, Jim calls again. And the next time after that, which puts Jim all in. All his chips are now in the pot. And in the end, when all the cards come down, neither he nor TJ even has a pair.

Ira Glass

A mistake, because given the aggressiveness of TJ's bets, TJ very well could have had at least a little pair. even a pair of twos would have beaten Jim. But Jim was such an amateur at that point, he didn't fold the way an experienced player would.

Ira Glass

That's a rub. It's hard to know when to fold them and when to hold them, much less when to walk away and when to run. And even when you figure it out, even when you suss out exactly the right thing to do, the cards can come down in some crazy way that favors your opponent and you lose anyway. We have four stories of people navigating all of that away from the poker table. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Is This War or Is This Hearts? Dave Dickerson has this story of laying down his cards, which includes one of the most exemplary pieces of parenting I think I have ever heard of.

Dave Dickerson

When I was 28 years old, I came back home for the first time in six years fully aware that I was the black sheep. I had rejected my faith. I had rejected Tucson, Arizona. I was the only one in the family who wasn't married. I was the only one who couldn't even speak Spanish.

And I was just sitting with my dad in a booth at a diner, and it should have been just this kind of innocent thing, where I'm visiting after six years, and it's nice to catch up. But it wasn't like that. We were facing each other. We both had, as it happens, cowboy hats and cowboy boots. And I remember thinking, this is a showdown. Because my dad and I were at war. My dad didn't know this, but I was at war with him. I was at war with all Christians, and I was just waiting for an excuse to fire a shot.

I'd been raised an evangelical Christian-- you know, conservative, Bible-believing Christian-- and I loved it so much that I said, I'm going to be a pastor. I'm going to learn everything I can learn. And I went off and I majored in religious studies in college. And from my very first scholarly class in the history of the Bible, my faith began to crumble until there was nothing left. And I now had this game I could play, where if you open a Bible to any page, I could find five flaws in it.

So I'd spent this entire time, not just with my dad, but certainly this particular evening, just waiting for a chance. Just mention the virgin birth, just once, and I'll tell you it's a mistranslation from Isaiah. Just mention Second Peter and I can prove to you it's a second century forgery. Say anything at all, please, please, about the Antichrist, revelation, the end times, anything like that, and I have a screed set up that's so blistering it would make Billy Graham feel ridiculous. And I had all this ammunition, and I couldn't wait to use it. I was just looking for an excuse. It had sort of turned me into a jackass.

Now, what my dad didn't know was that one of the reasons I was so excited is I actually was just coming off a victory. The previous night, I had argued my brother-in-law to a standstill. He had mentioned something about how proud he was about being a Christian, because everything in the Bible was so scientifically accurate. And I went a little nuts and I said, "Oh yeah, what about this thing?" And there's this tiny little section, just one sentence in like, Exodus, where the Israelites are fighting the Amorites or somebody, and God does a miracle where he makes the sun stand still for an entire day, in order to give the Israelites a chance to recover and give them more time to fight.

And I told my brother-in-law, "You really believe this? You believe this actually happened? That God stopped the entire planet from rotating, stopped gravity, all of things that would have to happen for the sun to stand still? Is that the most sensible thing the most powerful being in the world can do?" And my brother-in-law said, "Well, OK, that's weird, and I wish it weren't in there, but if I doubt that, where do I stop?"

And that, I knew, was as close as I was going to get to him saying, "You're right and I'm wrong." I remember looking at the clock, and it was 5:00 in the morning. I had argued this one point for seven hours. And I realized, this is like my job. I just put in a full working day. Obviously, I was obsessed.

At the time I was 28 years old. I was also a virgin, and I'd been a virgin because the Bible says so, because I thought Jesus wanted it that way. And then Jesus vanished on me. I had spent all of my life trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, and, you know, trusting that this would be rewarded. And then my faith collapsed.

And there's no betrayal like losing 10 years of your life, your sexual peak basically. I'm never going to get that back. And I was furious. And I didn't know who to blame. But I knew I could help other people from having the same horrible experience. And I was looking at my brother-in-law and thinking-- you know, we were arguing about Genesis, but in my mind I was thinking, there is no way you have a good sex life. You know, because the Bible doesn't care, and pleasure doesn't even matter in the Bible. But I can save you.

And with this kind of exciting, thrilling victory still humming in the back of my head, I was sitting there with my dad in the diner. Because a brother-in-law is one thing. A dad is someone else. I needed to save him. And so I said, "So, dad, what's your life like right now?" And he said, "Well, I found a new church home." And I heard church, and I perked up, and I was ready to go. But I thought, eh, church, not much to argue about there, people go to church, OK, it's nothing biblical.

And he said, "You know, it's a small church, and the pastor found out that I play the accordion, and he made me the music minister. That'll be nice." And again, I was like, [? tightened, ?] but I thought, "Meh, music ministry, no, nothing there." And then he said, "You know, this other kind of interesting thing is happening, I've been praying about it, and I think I'm going to be a missionary." And that struck a chord. I sat upright, and I went, "Oh really? A missionary? Where are you going to go?" And then he said, "Oh, Spain."

And I snapped. I said, "Oh, of course. Of course you're going to go to Spain. That is so arrogant. Only an evangelical Christian would say, oh, those poor benighted Spaniards need to learn about Jesus. You know," I said, "evangelical Christianity as a way, the whole model of salvation that you guys preach, wasn't even around till the 19th century. You claim to represent all of Christianity, and you're really just the tiny sliver at the end of the iceberg. And you know, the model of salvation you're even selling is so weird. Conversion should be the response of the whole person to a call from God on a deep personal level, and evangelical Christians have turned it into this transaction, like a merchandise, like a, try our God and your life will be better. Say this prayer, and now here's the merchandising table. It's just horrible."

"And Dad," I said, "You're saving people? What are you saving them from? Hell, may I guess? Because let me point something else out to you. Hell is a mistranslation from the King James of four completely different words for the afterlife. Gehenna, and hades, and sheol, and King James just kind of rounded them all up to hell. And the idea of eternal torture has no precedent in the Old Testament. It has never made any moral sense. And the second you believe in hell, you're undermining everything good. Because a morality based in fear can only bring out the worst in people, and never their best."

And I just rambled on like this. And I knew, essentially, while I was doing this, I was also assaulting his dream. You know, saying everything he was excited about, that he was sharing with me, was misbegotten, was a bad idea, was morally corrupt. But all he had to do was admit I was right and then we'd be OK. And I really didn't know what was going to happen now, because I'd just fired the first shot.

And he just quietly let me do my thing. And when I'd settled down and gotten my piece out, he said, "David, I'm really proud of everything you've done. And I'm really glad that you enjoy studying all these things, and thinking all these thoughts. But I've got to tell you, before I became a Christian, I was miserable. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to get a divorce from your mom."

And I remembered, suddenly, like I was six years old and I was back in the car, and I remember driving in the station wagon with my dad from South Dakota to Tucson, because dad had had a miserable life, had a nervous breakdown, he was rebuilding everything. And he was holding a cigarette out the window the whole ride down. I remember-- as a child, this had had a strong impression on me-- about halfway through the trip, he simply threw away all of his cigarettes. Never picked them up again. That was his conversion. That was the start of the change in his life.

And my dad continued. He said, "You know, when I first went to Grace Chapel," which was the church where he had converted. He said, "I thought those people were crazy." And when I was eight years old, I had gone to Grace Chapel with him. And this was a charismatic church. The kind where people raise their hands, and they speak in tongues, and they anoint people with oil, and they pray for miraculous healings, and people roll on the ground sometimes, or dance.

And my dad said, "You know, I was just staring at the stuff these people were doing, and I thought, this is crazy. But I could not ignore the love in that room, and the care they had for each other. And I kept going back, and I kept going back. And I wanted it to make sense to me, and I wanted it. And finally one night, I prayed. And I said, God, if I have to cut my own head off to be happy, I will do it. So I know you've gone to college, and you've learned all these things, but here's what I know, David. I followed Jesus and the lord gave me a family."

My parents really had almost gotten divorced. I remember one time I ran across a notebook where my dad and my mom had divided everything up on a piece of paper. You know, who was going to get the TV and that kind of thing. They'd gotten. that close. And then my dad converted, and he said, "No, we're sticking this out. I'm going to make this work." And it had.

And my brother, too. He's deeply conservative, listens to all the right wing talk radio and so forth. And he's got to be convinced that I'm going to hell. But this one time, I was on this trip, and I was a student, and he gave me $300. And he said, "Don't bother repaying it."

And I remember looking at my dad, and I thought-- had sort of expected to argue like I had with my brother-in-law. Not to win, but to come to some kind of armistice, some kind of truce where we're like, "Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I see your point. It's a good point." I hadn't expected to lose completely. Because you can't argue with decency. You can't argue with goodness.

The thing about the Bible is, it's huge. I could poke at it because I could pick at anything I wanted-- you know, talking snakes, virgin birth. But eventually, I came around to thinking, well, maybe religion doesn't have to be consistent. Maybe you can just like it enough for it to be good. Maybe religion can be something more like-- like, I'm a big Star Trek fan. And if you asked me, I would say, I love Star Trek. But if you asked me to defend individual episodes, I would be at a loss, because I can't go to bat for everything Star Trek did. I just love the concept.

And maybe religion could be like that. So what I said to my dad was, "Oh, look, here comes the waitress." And we got our Sprite, and had our hamburgers, and we looked at each other, raised the glass, had a bite. And my dad didn't know this, but we were having communion.

Ira Glass

Dave Dickerson. He's the author of a book of short stories like this one called House of Cards.

[MUSIC - "CHRISTIANS AND PAGANS" BY DAR WILLIAMS]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Kings Do Not Fold. What's a dictator? Yes, an absolute ruler, yes, a tyrant, yes to all that. But a dictator is also, in the vast majority of cases, someone who is absolutely, fundamentally not leaving. 30 years in office, 40 years in office, these are not people who know when it is time to step aside. Witness the last few months of news from the Mideast, which Nancy Updike has some thoughts about.

Nancy Updike

Looking at one dictator at a time, it's easy to get caught up in what's unique about him. For instance, some specific brutality his regime favors-- Kim Jong-il's forced labor camps. Or you can get distracted by his eccentricities-- Muammar Qaddafi's very special, no light reflecting black hair dye, Saddam Hussein's side career as a novelist.

But I've been pretty glued to the coverage of all these Middle East dictators who've been under siege for the last few months. And the other day, after listening to yet another speech by one of them, I drew up a rough checklist. I want to read it here. I've been calling it, "the 11 Stages of Mideast Dictator Damage Control." It's a working title.

And not every dictator does them exactly the same way, or does them in exactly the same order. But in general, it goes like this.

Stage one, shut down the internet. Stage two, send thugs. On foot, or on horseback if you're in Egypt. Stage three, attack and arrest journalists. Stage four, shoot people. Stage five, promise to investigate who shot people. Stage six, do a meaningless political reshuffle. Stage seven, blame Al Jazeera. Stage eight, organize paid demonstrations in favor of your regime. Stage nine, make a condescending speech about how much you love the youth. Stage 10, threaten that the country will fall into chaos without you. Stage 11, blame foreign agitators. There is actually a stage 12, but it's the one the dictators never want to get to, because it is leave. Get out.

I called a guy named Marc Lynch to make sure I wasn't hallucinating these 11 stages repeating in one dictatorship after another. Marc runs the Middle East Studies program at George Washington University. He blogs at foreignpolicy.com. When I started reading him my list, he got excited and put the phone down for a second.

He went over to his computer, because he's actually been seeing a bunch of these lists in the Arabic language media, plus tons of comments about the weirdly similar script these dictators seem to be following. Every day, people are weighing in from Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen.

Nancy Updike

And that joke raises the central question here. With two dictators, Egypt's and Tunisia's, already thrown out by their people, why would any other dictators keep plodding through the same 11 stages the previous ones did?

Nancy Updike

The fact that they're unable to hear and take seriously their protesters' demands is clearest in the speeches these dictators have been giving. Each one is full of these bizarre echoes of the others.

Nancy Updike

So here is former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak making the speech that, in retrospect, seems to have become the template for other dictators, although no one's been able to reproduce Mubarak's exact blend of condescension and menace. Here he is doing step five from the list, promising to investigate who shot people.

Nancy Updike

The youth. That's stage nine, talking about his love for the youth.

[SPEAKING ARABIC]

Nancy Updike

Utter nonsense delivered with utter conviction. By the time Mubarak spoke these words, more than 300 people had been killed during the protests in Egypt. Of course, nothing Mubarak said saved him from progressing to stage 12 and leaving. But other dictators learned by watching what happened to him, and they've managed to hold on by just repeating and escalating steps two through eight-- the thugs, the political reshuffles, the paid counter-demonstrations, the shootings and killings.

Nancy Updike

It is grim. There are dead and jailed protesters in six countries now. And most of these dictators aren't going anywhere.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike's one of the producers of our show. Coming up, they tried to make me go to rehab, and I said, no, no, no, I will go to Minnesota. That is in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bringing you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Know When To Fold 'Em, stories of people who wait way too long before folding their cards, dropping out, stepping aside, stepping down. Sometimes, to be fair, out of sheer confusion as to what's best. We've arrived at act three of our show.

Act Three, Gin Rummy. One of the principles of treating alcoholism is that there's hope for everyone. Everyone still has the possibility of quitting, you're not supposed to give up on anybody, you never fold your cards. But in Saint Paul, and a few other places too, they have something that clinically they call housing for chronic late stage alcoholics, but most people just call a wet house.

The idea is, alcoholics live there-- you have to be an alcoholic to get in, people are referred from detox centers-- and they let them continue to drink. Which is the opposite of most shelters. Most shelters, if you're caught drinking you are out, at least until you sober up. Same goes for rehab centers, and treatment programs-- if you're drunk, you're gone.

This idea of a place where drunks can stay drunk and get housing makes a lot of people angry. The one in Saint Paul, called St. Anthony Residence, is run by Catholic charities, but with some state money in there, too. Reporter Marc Sanchez visited St. Anthony House to see how it works.

Marc Sanchez

There're no guys passed out in front of St. Anthony Residence when I pull up. No broken bottles on the sidewalk, either. The building itself looks like it should have a sign on the outside advertising loft apartments. Inside, it's surprisingly nice free housing. 60 rooms, quite and orderly. Every guy who lives here-- they're all men, by the way-- each guy gets his own room with a lock on the door.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served up by the kitchen staff. Or if you miss a meal, you can grab a sandwich anytime you want. Each resident collects $89 a month in general assistance from the state, and after buying essentials like razors and toothpaste, several of the guys told me that at least half their money goes towards booze.

Marc Sanchez

That's Nick. And for privacy's sake, I'm only going to use his and other residents' first names.

Marc Sanchez

You're not allowed to have booze in your room, so if it's 3:00 in the morning, he has to go to a little patio out back, the one place here where you can drink. If guys have any alcohol on them when they come home, they check it in at the front desk, where someone's on duty 24 hours. The staff member will take out a big black marker and tag the bottle with its owner's last name. The alcohol is simply placed on a table in a room behind the front desk. There's no lock and key.

Marc Sanchez

The guy showing me around is Bill Hockenberger. He's the program manager at St. Anthony. Bill's a recovering alcoholic, and he used to run with some of these guys in his drinking days. He's been sober for almost 16 years now, but he says he could have easily ended up living here.

We go to his office, and before I even have a chance to sit down, he goes to a metal filing cabinet and pulls out a yellow candy box with a picture of a cartoon cactus on it. It's filled with photos.

Marc Sanchez

Bill's story rivals anyone's at St. Anthony. It wasn't until his body completely shut down-- his liver was failing, he fell into a coma for nine days-- that he quit for good.

Marc Sanchez

Bill's quick to point out that St. Anthony's services aren't treatment. But there's an on-site nurse who administers preventative care twice a week. Residents also meet with counselors who set goals like getting a state ID or making a trip to the dentist. And if staff notices a pattern in someone coming in and falling over drunk, they'll step in.

Marc Sanchez

Nell Hurley is another person who went from drinking to trying to help drinkers. She runs the Minnesota Recovery Connection. They're basically the yellow pages for recovery in the state. When word got out about St. Anthony in the recovery community, people were upset. She says it's hard for her to justify not stepping in.

Marc Sanchez

Again, Bill Hockenberger.

Marc Sanchez

The biggest argument for a wet house like St. Anthony is one I heard from a resident named Paul. And it comes down to this: before he came here, Paul used to sleep under a bridge, even in the winter.

Marc Sanchez

As for how many guys make it into treatment from St. Anthony, they tally that up once a year. In their 2010 report, out of the 87 guys who were served, only 10 went into treatment. After all, that isn't their goal here.

And when I visited, I had this feeling-- it's nice and clean and everyone's respectful of each other, but it's really sad. Walking down the hallway I could hear muffled TVs playing in their rooms, and I got the sense that people are slowly killing themselves behind their closed doors. During that year when 10 guys went into treatment, three other residents died. When that happens, Deacon James Meyer comes in for services. Everyone calls him Deacon Jim.

Marc Sanchez

Maybe this is obvious, but trying to care for alcoholics is messy. When I was in his office, Bill showed me a letter from a resident who had checked into St. Anthony in October of 1992, almost 20 years ago. Last summer, Bill coaxed him into trying a treatment facility up north, but in the letter, the guy told Bill that he was done, and he wanted to move back to St. Anthony in the spring.

Bill wrote back and told the guy he was proud of him for getting as far as he had, and that he should try to stay where he is. He should stick with the program. But sure, he said, he'd take him back. A month later, the guy moved back into St. Anthony. He's there now, drinking again.

Ira Glass

Marc Sanchez is a producer from Minnesota Public Radio, he normally works on a feature called Minnesota Sounds.

[MUSIC - "SORRY YOU'RE SICK" BY TED HAWKINS]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Solitaire and Everything's Wild. Now this story of tenacity and not giving up, and then, suddenly, I would say kind of heroically, giving up completely, and laying down the cards in an unprecedented, kind of amazing way.

This story happens in Brazil, in a part of Brazil that was all rain forest, almost nobody lived there until the 1970s. Then development came very quickly, a million people in just a couple decades moved there, cutting down rain forest, replacing it with logging operations and ranching, building towns and cities. Monte Reel was the South American correspondent for the Washington Post when he first heard about what happened. It all started as a rumor going around logging camps back in the mid-1990s.

Ira Glass

So this team led by Marcelo dos Santos would head out on these missions to find this guy. And they were scared that if ranchers or developers get to him first, they'll do to him what they usually do-- kill him. The team wants to reach the guy and then figure out a safe place where other tribes live that maybe they could relocate him to.

So they're heading out into the rain forest, but making first contact with any isolated tribe is incredibly dangerous. Often there's violence. Monte Reel says that 120 in this government agency FUNAI have been killed over the years.

The team assumes that the guy that they're looking for, who they call the Indio-- the Indian-- doesn't speak any language that they know. So as they walk through the jungle, they make these whistling sounds so that he doesn't think that they're trying to sneak up on him. The leave gifts for the guy-- seeds, machete, stuff he might find useful-- hoping that he understands that they're leaving this as gifts specifically for him.

Ira Glass

Then, in late 1996, they got their first break. Satellite photos showed a clearing in the rain forest where there was no reason for a clearing to exist. When they go there, they find the remains of a village, over a dozen huts.

Ira Glass

The team assumed that everybody in the village had been slaughtered, which can make the guy even more wary of outsiders, less interested in being found.

Ira Glass

So you figure, a guy on foot who's technologically still somewhere in the Bronze Age, maybe, versus modern people with satellite tracking, and vehicles, and expertise-- how long could he evade them? Two years. It takes two full years before they spot him again. And they are tenacious. They do not give up, because they feel like time is running out. They've got to establish a relationship with this guy so he trusts them, before anybody else finds him and kills him.

Sometimes they find huts, sometimes they find signs of him. Finally, they see the guy himself.

Ira Glass

So they not only fold their hand, they change the game. At the team's urging, the Brazilian government did this thing it had never done before. It set aside 31 square miles of forest for this one guy. In Rondonia, which was going through rapid development, this was incredibly controversial, and there was a political fight over it. FUNAI personnel assigned to the project became such lightning rods that one after another had to be replaced.

There was a feeling in Rondonia that was kind of like a states' rights argument in our country. The national government of Brazil-- bureaucrats and politicians from the capital-- was making them set aside this huge swath of land for just one man, which seemed crazy to lots of people. But not only did the 31-square-mile refuge become the law, the law included the fact that if somebody went in and killed the lone tribesmen who lived there, the state still would not turn over the land to development, which removed the incentive to just go in and murder the guy.

Government teams periodically would go in and check on him to be sure he was still there and still OK. But they did not try to interact with him, which worked. He started taking the gifts they left. He used the machete. He planted the corn seed. At one point, they actually got into a hut that he had not abandoned and they saw that that weird rectangular hole on the floor had a hammock slung over it. And they speculated that digging the hole so deep was probably some kind of spiritual ritual.

One day, one of the team members, Paulo Pereira, was walking through the forest, didn't know the Indian was around.

Ira Glass

Paulo looked down and realized that he was standing right near the lip of a hole that the Indian had dug and lined with sharp spikes to capture animals. The Indian was trying to warn him. The Indian didn't want him hurt.

Ira Glass

All this led Monte to look into the research on what extreme isolation does to people. He says there've been a few studies. And they show that it's not how isolated you are, it's how isolated you feel. It's a matter of perception. Different people in the same situation perceive it differently. He says isolation also tends to make people more spiritual, which then makes them feel less alone.

Monte's heard of one other example of a man in Brazil who was the last survivor of his tribe. The man's name is [? Cada Pirru ?] and he spent almost 10 years wandering after the rest of his people were massacred. He was found in a town hundreds of miles from where his village had been and was put into a reserve with a different tribe.

When he first arrived, it was almost like a homecoming-- everybody celebrated. But soon, he built a hut off by himself in the forest alone. After all those years of solitude, he didn't want to be around other people.

Monte Reel's book about the quest to find and save the one lone tribesman is called The Last of the Tribe.

[MUSIC - "THE GAMBLER" BY ELMER]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, and Alissa Ship. Production help from Eric Mennel. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Jen Berman's filling in as our West Coast producer.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast or find old episodes you've never heard and listen to them for absolutely free, thisamericanlife.org. We're on Twitter at thisamerlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who got so offended the other night as he was walking to his car in the radio station parking lot.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Narrator

PRI. Public Radio International.