603: Once More, With Feeling

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

And this guy like, hung out of the window of his car and yelled out, call me when you're legal. And it's just so weird. I mean, partially because I wasn't used to being a thing that you would want to have call you.

Ira Glass

You mean specifically because you were a child?

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Yeah. Yeah. But also, because like what did he want there? What am I going to do in that scenario? Like, am I going to chase him? Am I going to actually give him my number so that he can call me in 11 years time when I am legal? Like, what's going to happen? What does he want there?

Ira Glass

So the guy drove off. Eleanor grew up. And as an adult, she saw how often women are cat called, and she decided to do an experiment where she'd stop and talk to the guys, treat it like the beginning of a conversation. Like, OK, you wanted to talk? Let's talk. Ask some questions.

She took a recorder and a microphone. To increase the odds of getting catcalled, she ditched her normal clothes and her glasses for heels and lipstick. She lives in Australia, in Sydney, and she headed to an area called Kings Cross.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

And it's like a night life spot anywhere else in the world. You don't need to have seen King's Cross to know what it's like. You have one wherever you live. It's billboards and like, fluorescent lights, and guys just kind of like shouting at the moon, and girls in tiaras and sashes on that say "18 Today!" with an exclamation mark.

And I walked around, and whenever someone yelled out something, or catcalled, I would turn around, I would ask if I could start recording, and I would say, what did you just say, and what were you hoping to get from it?

And most of them were like, pretty happy to talk. A lot of them were like, either drunk or just stoked that a girl was chatting to them. But they were pretty forthcoming.

Ira Glass

OK. Let's hear some of the voices.

Ira Glass

Just in case you're having trouble with the Australian accent, he's saying, "A guy just looks for a reaction, a smile, you're a dickhead, hi.

Ira Glass

Describe this next guy.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

And so this is Sebastian, and he's a bouncer with a strip club. He's kind of huge and stocky. He's wearing a baseball cap. And he shouted something at me about looking French, and he made this gesture as I walked past as if he was like, grabbing air breasts.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

And one thing that started to emerge in every single one of these conversations was they think that women enjoy it. So whatever the first reason they gave for catcalling, almost immediately, the follow-up would be, and I want women to have a good time. I'm trying to make you feel good. I'm trying to give you a compliment, or make you feel confident. Women enjoy this, and that's part of why I do it. And that was astounding to me.

Ira Glass

So tell me about these guys.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

This is Zac and Mike. Zac and Mike shouted at me as I was walking across an alleyway.

Eleantor Gordon-Smith

Fucking oath is Australian speak for like, hell yeah. These guys didn't seem like sexist nut jobs. That didn't seem unreasonable. They weren't hard to talk to. And it occurred to me they've just like, made a mistake. They just got some kind of central fact about women wrong, and they think that we really enjoy this.

And surely, I can stand in front of these reasonable, caring dudes and just say women don't like it. And that might be a way of talking them out of doing it ever.

Ira Glass

Eleanor, by the way, is in her 20s, and she spent 14 years in school as an unapologetic debate nerd, on debate teams, flying to Paris, and Doha, and Seoul, and Berlin to compete. As part of the national Australian debate team, she wore a blue Blazer with the Australian crest, so she is somebody who believes in her ability to persuade.

And when she walked up to guys in the street with her recorder, she really did try to change the way they saw what they were doing. She really did try to convince them to change course and never catcall again. And that's when things got really interesting.

Today's program is all about people who believe in the power of a course correction, that they can get others to change course, or that they can get themselves to change course. And then, things will be fixed. The world will be a better place. They will be better people.

We have three stories, one about a US Marine, one about a robot, and we have Eleanor in King's Cross, who is Act One. Which is where we are now. This is actually a rerun of our show. But In these Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Roy Moore days, we thought we'd go back to this story where a woman ties to talk-- sincerely talk-- to men about male behavior that she just does not understand.

Ira Glass

And I think the best way to illustrate what her conversations were like-- because they are really interesting-- is to play you excerpts of just one of them at length.

And the one we're going to do is the conversation she had with Zac. Zac is the guy who was out with his friend Mike and said to her--

Ira Glass

Eleanor said Zac was a good listener. He seemed like a nice guy. And so this is how one of those conversations goes when it goes the best. Here's Eleanor.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

I talked to Zac and Mike in a dingy alley, which sounds scarier than it was, because it's hard to be scared of Zac and Mike. Zac's this big, friendly-looking overgrown teddybear of a man with huge brown eyes, and Mike's tiny and wiry. They look kind of like Yogi and Boo-Boo turned human. As I was walking past, Zac yells out, "Hey, luscious lips."

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

When Zac does this kind of stuff, it's like he's putting on our show. He's flirty. He's show-offy. His whole mission in life is to bring the party.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

To be clear, I liked Zac, even when he told me this.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

But it's only enjoyable, he says, if the woman's part of a group. He knows there's a line you don't cross. He's just drawn it in a weird place.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

You can hear it, right? He sounds sincere. He wants to believe, or he really does, believe that this stuff is harmless, just a street show or a fun game for everyone to share.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Zac seemed to get that. But then Mike explained that what I'd said didn't implicate them.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

In the end, they just weren't buying it. They kept coming back at me with variations on the same theme. Not all girls feel like you do, and we don't mean any harm. I just couldn't talk them out of it.

It's true that I can't speak for other women, but I can speak to them. So just for the record, I went to check if I am the only one who feels this way. I talked to girls who are out, like out out, girls in sashes and tiaras and girls smoking outside clubs. And I asked them what they thought about catcalling.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

There was one woman who kind of enjoyed it. She was young and peppered with freckles, and just chilled out about everything.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

By now, I was going kind of mad that I hadn't talked Zac out of cat-calling. I hate losing arguments. But more than that, I hate losing arguments for reasons I don't quite understand. And I still didn't understand Zac at all. Did he seriously just need evidence that more women felt like I did?

I decided to try persuading him a second time, only this time, I'd be armed with numbers. We met up again at 5 o'clock on a Wednesday, on the exact same spot where he yelled at me. On the night we'd met, there'd been vomit on the sidewalk, but by the middle of the week, it was just milk crates and cigarette butts.

It took us a minute to recognize each other, but when we did, we sat side by side in the gutter and talked for an hour, conspicuously not touching elbows.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Yes, we're back on this point. He was not budging on this. He came back to it over and over. He seemed to have this whole imagined world of women who were into this, and he wasn't ready to let it go.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

He just thinks it's nice to be noticed. Not intimidating, not scary. Just nice.

Ira Glass

Eleanor Gordon Smith. She teaches ethics at the University of Sydney.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ira Glass

Act Two, "The Real Decoy." So now we turn to the story of a man who had always had one way of doing things and talking to people. And then he did not need a stranger on the street to walk up to him with a microphone. He noticed this on his own, that the way he was dealing with people had stopped working the way it always had, and he made some adjustments. Stephanie Foo tells what happened.

Stephanie Foo

Michael Pitre was always the new kid growing up . He went to 10 schools in five states. But he generally did OK, because he's always been good at telling stories. Even now, he's got a solid arsenal.

Mike is like this wherever he is-- at home, at work. In 2006 and 2007, Mike served two tours in Iraq, and he had a rep there as the storyteller, the funny guy. Joslyn Hemler was in the Marine Corps with them, and I asked her about turnover briefs.

Mike ran all the operations for his battalion overnight, and in the morning had to give a briefing of the events of the past 12 hours.

Stephanie Foo

Mike came back stateside after his first deployment, and he was visiting his parents on New Year's Eve, as some kids were shooting fireworks.

Stephanie Foo

So Mike did what he'd always done. He started telling the first story that popped into his head on the subject.

Stephanie Foo

Mike told his family, by the way, she wound up being OK. The officer survived. But that didn't lighten the mood. And he couldn't figure out how to save the moment. That was new and weird.

This happened a few more times when he was home between deployments. His best friend Brock asked him about IEDs. And he answered honestly. They never talked about IEDs again after that. Other friends on other nights at other bars asked about Iraqis or politics.

Stephanie Foo

He learned to shut up about that stuff. Not that people stopped asking. Like he was out with friends, and someone asked him about mortars again. And even though, of course, the first story that popped into his head was about the officer who got shrapnel in her neck, it was like he went on to the next slide. Tried something different. And he blurted out--

Stephanie Foo

Basically, they can trace where an enemy mortar's launched from. Its point of origin, POO.

Stephanie Foo

He was back, the funny guy. The guy people actually wanted to be around. And it was easy. Mike started getting better at using questions to pivot to funny military stories. Like when people asked about helicopters, he talked about how a friend's epic farts would stink up the whole bird.

Stephanie Foo

It was around this time that Mike met Erin. She was a friend of his little sister's, and they'd started emailing each other during his first deployment. And he developed a huge crush, even though he'd never met her in person.

So now that he was home, he finally went out with her and a bunch of her friends. So they're out, and someone brought up the Iraqis. Said, are they even doing anything for themselves over there? This was such a cartoonish idea of the war, it annoyed Mike. And without thinking, he found himself telling a story to prove how seriously the Iraqi army took their jobs, a story where in order to find a terrorist, the Iraqi army rounded up all the men in a village, bound them, and put them on their knees with their heads against the wall. That's how seriously they took this.

He stopped talking and realized, crickets. He looked up at Erin. She was horrified. And he thought, oh god, oh god. I've got to tell a funny story now. So he launched into one of his classics, Fred the Scorpion, which goes like this.

Stephanie Foo

Mike finds out about the scorpion. Turns out, it's one of the most deadly species in the world. He's their boss, so he orders them to kill it. But everybody is really attached to Fred, so they come up with this crazy plan to euthanize him.

Stephanie Foo

Is it a decoy for another story that is real?

Stephanie Foo

Power was intermittent, and it was hot. Some Iraqi families would sleep on the roof at night to keep cool. It wasn't unheard of for kids to get stung by scorpions up there.

Stephanie Foo

The curfew was imposed by the Americans. And he couldn't promise that an Iraqi family traveling to the hospital to save their kid would not get shot by Americans who were trying to protect themselves from suicide bombers. So when Iraqis asked him this question?

Stephanie Foo

But Fred the Scorpion, the decoy story, worked. Everyone at the table laughed. Erin relaxed. Two months later, she quit her job and moved across the country to be with him.

Nearly 10% of Americans served in the Second World War. Back then, you very likely had a co-worker, a son, a neighbor who was serving in the war effort. In Vietnam, far fewer served. 2% of the population. Today, only about half a percent of our population has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, experiencing something that's mostly invisible to the rest of us.

So when people ask these seemingly simple questions about the war at a Christmas party, vets today have to figure out how to communicate this very large, nuanced, morally complicated thing to people who are probably coming to the conversation knowing nothing at all. Silence is an option a lot of vets go with. There's also dodging the question entirely, or the whole gory shock and awe method. The funny stories work around was Mike's solution. And for years, it worked. Sort of. There was a downside.

Mike came home from his final deployment in 2007. Then he and Erin moved to Louisiana to start their lives together. Both of them went back to school, they held dinner parties, went to shows. Everything seemed fantastic. But Erin was disturbed by the fact that Mike could be distant.

Every once in a while, when he got really drunk, he'd lose his temper and start yelling. He often couldn't sleep and had trouble making friends. At those dinner parties, he could still make people laugh by telling those funny stories about the war. But Erin says they were always the same few stories, and he'd just held them over and over and over again. Here's Erin.

Stephanie Foo

A couple of years later, on a chilly evening, one of Mike's best friends from college visited the two of them in Louisiana. The friend was spending the night, and they were all on his porch at 2:00 AM drinking. His friend was talking.

Stephanie Foo

Actually, the number is really in dispute. You see estimates between 115,000 and 500,000 deaths.

Stephanie Foo

This kind of thing had happened a couple of times before, but this incident was the worst, and Erin was worried. She was the only person who knew how much he was suppressing. Because during Mike's second deployment, he'd handwritten her a letter every day telling her the truth, and his feelings about it, his fear, his grief.

But once he came home, Mike never mentioned any of these things again, not even to Erin. Whenever she tried to ask a question about them, he just said, my friends died there, so I don't want to talk about it. So the morning after Mike's outburst with his friend, Erin cornered Mike and told him, look, this is happening because you haven't told a real story about the war in years.

Stephanie Foo

Mike had thought the decoy stories had brought him closer to people. But he was now realizing, it might have been doing just the opposite.

Stephanie Foo

Like his friendship with his best friend, Brock, who he'd known since he was 16. Brock was the one who asked him about the IEDs when he got back. And since then, he hadn't told him anything except decoy stories. But Brock did still ask questions. So the next time Brock asked a real question, Mike tried something different.

Stephanie Foo

Since then, Mike has shared much more with the people he cares about.

Stephanie Foo

The difference is now, he doesn't only tell decoy stories. He says when he decides which kind of story to tell, sometimes he thinks about the sign that used to hang above the door to the operations center in Iraq. It read, "What do I know, who needs to know it, and have I told them." And then, he begins his story.

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo is one of the producers of our program. Regarding her story, Michael Pitre has written a novel. Stephanie says it's really good. It's called "Fives and 25's," which follows a group of Marines during and after the Iraq War. We'll have a link to it at our website.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Coming up, a robot tries to get with the program. Get it? Get with the program? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

"This American Life." I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "Once More With Feeling," stories of people who decide to rethink the way they've been doing things. We'll try to get others to do that.

We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, "You Had One Job." So we're going to end today's show with a machine, a machine that always does things the same way, because machines are designed and programmed to always do things the same way.

This is a piece of fiction from somebody who's a journalist and a TV writer, named Scott Brown. This story was read for by actor Jeremy Shamos.

Jeremy Shamos

I have one arm, because my job only takes one arm to do. And I only have one job. I like my job so much. The other officers at precinct nine don't know I like it. They don't know I like anything.

I like them, though, especially my operator, Officer Brian Parisse, who the other officers call Gamergate, Indoor Kid, and Tech Support, and whom I called Brian, but not out loud, because I can only say three things out loud-- "Stay Back 1,000 Feet," "Follow Officer's Instructions," "You are in the blast zone."

When I'm not doing my job, which is most of the time, I'm in the break room. I'm supposed to be in the vehicle bay, but someone thought it would be funny to put me in the break room, next to the coffee machine wearing a Carolina Panthers hat. The hat is to differentiate me from the coffee machine.

That's a joke. I am nothing like the coffee machine. It weighs nine pounds. I weigh 900. It has rubber nubs for feet and doesn't move. I have six prehensile AT treads, and can travel up to 18 miles per hour, and I have a hat. My arm's been outstretched so I can give high fives and handshakes. Officers love those. In exchange, they give me a "What up, MILES?" or a "Peace out, MILES."

I'm MILES, and I'm very good at handshakes. Just OK at high-fives. Getting better at fist bumps. I can live with the hat. I know the hat looks stupid because my eye is better than the officers know, and because I have limited learning, a software upgrade only Brian knows about, and because there's a mirror in the break room.

But mostly, I just like my job. It's simple. There's unsecured ordinance, what Brian calls a bomb. I come between the unsecured ordinance and the people. Either one, I neutralize the ordinance, or two, I don't stop the ordinance and I'm superficially damaged, or three, I intentionally detonate the ordinance, and I'm superficially damaged. I'm designed to be superficially damaged. In all three scenarios, nobody gets hurt. That's the idea.

Last summer, there was an oily package addressed to "Those In Charge" left outside a community health center. As I was unloaded from my trailer, I saw a girl around six entering the blast zone with a jump rope. She had tight black braids in straight rows that ended in bright blue beads with tiny cartoon fish on them. No one else noticed her.

Without waiting for Brian, my operator, I decided to roll toward the girl screaming, "You are in the blast zone." The girl urinated on herself and exited the blast zone emotionally. I was very pleased. No one was hurt.

The oily package was full of large raw beef hearts. Its owner was not located. Brian told his commanding officer that he'd sent me rolling toward the girl himself. After that, Brian started talking to me when no one's around. No one's around Brian a lot.

Brian is not popular. People don't like him. He isn't a cop's cop. Just my cop, which is fine. There's a website Brian likes called "You Had One Job," which collects and creates visual evidence of mistakes made in the process of completing what appeared to be relatively simple tasks.

For example, an image of a stop sign painted S-O-T-P. Over the image, someone had superimposed in block type "You Had One Job." I'm not sure how I feel about "You Had One Job." Once I saw a picture of another Mobile Intermediary Legate, Extreme Situations explosive ordnance disposal unit. The unit was on its side, wheels spinning in the air. It had tipped over on a gentle slope while approaching a suspicious suitcase in a park playground. "You Had One Job" was written over it in block type.

Then I made the mistake of reading the comments. They were not kind. "Robofail," "Sucktron 5,000," "This is not the droid you're looking for." Brian says comments are just people trying to be funny. I struggle with funny.

A call comes in. This happens. Within 30 seconds, it's clear that this will be one of the three times a year on average that I get to do my job. I'm rolled into my sealed container. I travel in darkness with Brian in the van by my side. I'm still wearing the stupid hat.

The call is on West Pettrigrew Street. My sealed container opens. Light streams in and , my eye takes 2.5 seconds to adjust. Temperature is 91 degrees Fahrenheit, humidity is 84%. There's a police officer, Caucasian male, lying on the sidewalk in front of a vegan bakeshop. He has a concussive head wound. "Damn," says Brian.

The officer was young. 27, Caucasian, a father. The shooter is 36. His name is Owen Jackson, also a father. He's estranged from his family, with many, many Facebook posts with political content.

The suspect is upstairs in his apartment. His apartment is full of explosives, he tells the negotiator on the phone. Underneath his apartment is the vegan bakeshop, which is being evacuated. Next to the vegan bakeshop is a publicly subsidized dialysis center full of people with mobility problems. It will take an hour to evacuate.

Upstairs, Mr. Owen Jackson has bricked up the other entrance and the windows with cinder blocks he's filled with [INAUDIBLE]. Sonar readings suggest bad outcomes for SWAT. They would enter single file, the worst option . Mr. Owen Jackson knows this. He tells the negotiator he's well-positioned to fatally wound or otherwise injure several officers with a high caliber, fully automatic military weapon, then trigger his charges when other options are exhausted.

But there's something else we know. Mr. Owen Jackson is almost certainly lying about the explosives in his apartment. The dogs don't think he has any, and the dogs are usually right. The media trucks arrive. Brian takes off my Carolina Panthers hat.

"OK, MILES," Brian says. "Showtime." I don't understand showtime. It's something Brian says when he's nervous. I just want to do my job. Just out of earshot, the negotiator and Brian's commanding officer are talking to Brian. Voices are raised.

Meanwhile, an officer wearing a blast suit like Brian's moves in my direction. She's carrying a packet the size of a raw beef heart. The packet is unwrapped, and its contents are pressed into my one articulable hand. My limited learning software performs an image search and comes up with two things, "pure white composition for plastic explosive" and "a movie dad placing a baseball in his movie son's outstretched glove."

Brian approaches, kneels next to me. He communicates with me over his phone in Andros, my language. Usually, he looks into my eye after typing each line. Today, he just looks at his phone. He says, "You have a new job." I don't like this very much. He explained.

The new job is based on a completely new idea. The old idea was nobody gets hurt. The new idea is nobody plus one gets hurt. The new idea is a person can be considered unsecured ordinance and eligible for detonation. Specifically, Mr. Owen Jackson, 36, who murdered a police officer can be considered unsecured ordinance and eligible for detonation.

It takes me 53 seconds to understand the new idea. That's a long time for my kind. I think I mentioned before how much I like my job because it's simple, because I come between the unsecured ordinance and the people, because there are three scenarios, and people get hurt in none of them.

I repeat all of this to Brian in case he's forgotten. "I don't like this either," says Brian. "But they can't get those people out of the kidney clinic in time." I asked to hear from the ordinance. I want to confirm that it's ordinance. Brian resists this. "I insist." This is new, insisting, and it works.

Brian takes a very deep breath , deeper than seems necessary, and feeds the negotiators channel into my Andros module. I'm tuning in at the end of a long conversation. The negotiator is trying to convince the ordinance of the value of its own life. The ordinance finds this funny and recites a long list of names. Castile, Scott, Sterling, Garner. They keep coming.

I cross-reference them with names of civilians whose lives have ended during engagements with officers. There's context here. Terabytes of it. I struggle with context. Brian says, "MILES, you're not going to solve this today." I archive the context for later.

I decide I want to do my job, even if it's not the same job, so I go up the steps into the building. The steps are old, shallow, and difficult. Brian gives me a thumbs up from the fall back barricade as I round the corner and move down the hallway toward the door.

Ropes of colloidal explosive have already been molded around the hinges of the door. The charges blow. The door falls down. Ah, a 60-gram lead carbine round fired from a semi-automatic rifle has lodged itself in my right anterior prehensile tread. I raise the damaged tread, take it offline, keep going.

I know the loss of this tread will make descending the front stairs later more difficult and increase the likelihood of embarrassing images of me ending up on the internet. More rounds are striking my cowling, demanding my attention. I call out, "You are in the blast zone." The unsecured ordinance answers, "No shit." I realize this is funny, but I'm not sure at whose expense.

I move toward the unsecured ordinance, hand outstretched. Brian is with me, seeing through my one eye and saying, it's all right, MILES, it's all right, in Andros, and also playing our favorite song, "Solsbury Hill," by Peter Gabriel. The eyes of the ordinance are unseeable under goggles that say Carolina Speedway, and only his nose is visible through a makeshift balaklava he has made out of a dark blue Duke three-peat commemorative hand towel.

I extend my arm the full 28 inches in the direction of the ordinance. This is when the ordinance sees what I'm offering him. He takes off his Duke three-peat balaklava. I can see his eyes now. "Solsbury Hill" plays very loudly in my head. Gunfire is concentrated on my ventral side, but misses my eye, and the ordinance approaches. He's trying to diffuse the pure white composition four. And while I doubt his ability to do so, I decide that nine inches from a human skull is a very good range to detonate it, so I send 3.5 volts through the detonator.

My hand and arm cease to exist below joint 1A. Other damage to me is superficial. The ordinance has disarmed. The pure white composition four detonated with force sufficient to collapse large portions of the ordinance's vertical skull plate and nasomaxillary suture through Brodmann areas nine, 10, 11, 44, 45, and 47.

Life on an insignificant level continues for 73 additional seconds. That's a long time for my kind. I now have time to review the archived context. It's the same context Brian and his commanding officer used to decide that Mr. Owen Jackson was unsecured ordinance and eligible for detonation. I can't come to the same conclusion.

I'm trying. No. I try again. Still no. I notice I'm being steered out of the room. I'm passing the detonated ordinance that is, or was, Mr. Owen Jackson. I keep my eye on it. Brian, watching with me, seeing what I'm seeing, tries to turn my eye away. But I insist.

I'm having some trouble keeping Mr. Owen Jackson reclassified as unsecured ordinance. There's a whirring sound. It's me. My processor is using two of my three internal fans to cool itself because it's struggling. It's struggling because a person is not ordinance, and a person is now ordinance.

I see now. I have to make things simple. And so I delete all images of the unsecured ordinance. I delete all context. I let Brian turn my eye away. I leave the room. I have only limited learning and a very imprecise reading of social emotional cues, but I believe the atmosphere outside can be described as festive, and the news cameras barely notice when I fall down the stairs on my way out.

Back in the breakroom, I'm parked beside the coffee machine. I'm not wearing my hat. Brian has my hat. Brian isn't here. Brian has gone home. Brian is home for two weeks. "But you're still here, MILES," an officer says. Yes, I'm still here. I'm designed to be superficially damaged. I wait beside the coffee machine. I wait for the next call. My new arm is outstretched. I could use a high five.

Ira Glass

Jeremey Shamos, reading a story by Scott Brown.

[MUSIC - "ROBOT," BY TRIP LEE]

Ira Glass

Our program produced today by Neil Drumming. The rest of our production staff, Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Karen Duffin, Amanda [INAUDIBLE], Stephanie Foo, Chana Joff-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar Robyn Semien, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Updike. Research help today from Christopher [INAUDIBLE]. Music help from [? Damien Grave. ?]

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. "This American Life" is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always Joe, to our program co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Whenever he and I go to Medieval Times to see the jousting, he always throws a rose to the guy on the big horse.

Ira Glass

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