871: The Thing About Things

Ira Glass

When Nunzio first saw the bike, he knew. It was a little Honda motorcycle from 1966, with an engine so small that, officially, I think you're supposed to call it a scooter. It was in a neighbor's yard. He was 13.

Ira Glass

His plan was he wanted to ride it around the railroad tracks with his buddies. They would hang out there or in the woods with their bicycles, get cigarettes from the older kids or a beer now and then. This was West Albany, New York, 1975. When Nunzio described this to me, the only thing I could picture was Stranger Things or the film Stand By Me. And then a friend of his brought that film up to describe what it was like.

Anyway, so Nunzio pays this neighbor $50 cash with money he earned mowing lawns. Nunzio wasn't great at school, but even at 13, he had an unusual talent for fixing things and for engines. Like, he fixed his own lawn mower engine at that age. And he was excited to get the scooter home and to work on it in this workshop under his parents' porch. When he did, he discovered--

Ira Glass

Also, holes in the gas tank. Carburetor needed rebuilding. Battery was shot.

Ira Glass

During that near-quarter century, it laid in pieces all over the ground under this porch, he says. But he didn't forget it. He'd think about it now and then, always intended to get back to the scooter and do the rebuild that he couldn't afford as a kid. It ended up taking him on a much more circuitous route than he could have imagined.

Basically, what happened is that in 1999, Nunzio's parents sold the house, and he collected all the parts from under the porch and hauled them to where he now lived with his wife and his two young kids at the time, laid the stuff out in his garage, and finally got to work. He started searching for scooter parts. This was 1999, before everything was on the internet, so it took some doing.

Says he spent about a year piecing the thing together, finally got the engine barely running, realized he needed somebody to do a proper rebuild of the engine. Found a shop in Schenectady, put the engine in a cardboard box, dropped it off. The guy said, great, give me four or five weeks. I'll have it for you, good as new.

Ira Glass

More months pass. Finally, six or seven months in, Nunzio says he calls the shop, and the phone is disconnected. He drives there. Seems to be permanently closed. Goes to the literal phone book. Remember? 1999. Calls people with the guy's last name, finds two relatives, he says, who say they haven't seen him. He knows he should just buy another engine, either a new engine or another old engine from the 1960s from the same model bike, but just can't bring himself to do it.

Ira Glass

Years go by. He kind of gives up on this engineless, hopeless bike. Finally one Sunday night, the kids are in bed. He goes online and searches for the name of the guy he left the engine with and learns, no wonder he can't find him. The guy is locked up, convicted on an illegal dumping charge. Nunzio figures out where he's doing time and visits him the very next day.

Ira Glass

OK, probably not the answer the guy was expecting.

Ira Glass

They got along so well, Nunzio ended up staying and chatting, he says, for close to an hour. And when he went and retrieved the engine, it was still in the original cardboard box he'd left it in. For everything he'd been told on the phone that they were working on it, it's nearly done, just a little more, he saw nobody had ever touched it.

I found and talked to the guy that Nunzio remembers, the repair shop owner. And for the record, he remembers none of these events from 20 years ago. And at first, he insisted that none of it ever possibly could have happened, but then talked a little more. He relented a little and said, maybe it did.

Nunzio told me that once he got the scooter engine back, he took a year meticulously rebuilding it himself to bring the whole bike back to cherry condition. This project he decided to take on in 1975 he finally finished three decades later. So much work. I had to ask--

Ira Glass

The point of the bike was not riding it. Some objects have a power over us that's special. They make us do crazy stuff, stuff we probably wouldn't do for another person, for years sometimes. Today on our show, we have stories of people caught in that kind of servile relationship with objects that they supposedly own. But in each of these stories, as you'll hear, the objects seem to be the ones calling the shots. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Act One, A Rock and a Hard Place. So let's start today with an object that a guy got a long time ago that first meant one thing to him, and then it came to mean something very different and much more important. Aviva DeKornfeld talked to the guy and has this story.

Aviva DeKornfeld

When Ted was six years old, his mom had just remarried, and his new dad had this idea for all of them to go on their first big trip as a family, a road trip.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The important stop for our story? The Petrified Forest National Park.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Petrified wood is kind of worth flipping out over. It's crazy to look at because it looks like a tree. You can see the texture of the bark and the grain of the wood and the tree rings, but it's a rock. Plus, in the process of becoming a rock over millions of years, the wood gets this rainbow coloring from all the mineral deposits. So it looks kind of magical.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ted's dad was the kind of guy who would bend the rules for his kids.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Until, one day, over 40 years later--

Aviva DeKornfeld

The idea that this petrified wood may have cursed him? This made a lot of sense to Ted because he thought he'd been cursed for years. For as long as he could remember, he'd had very bad luck, no matter where he was or what he did.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The bad luck found him when he was at home.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The bad luck followed him abroad, too.

Aviva DeKornfeld

When Ted went hunting for bird nests with his friends--

Aviva DeKornfeld

There's more.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Oh, and the bad luck came for his love life, too. His marriage started falling apart.

Aviva DeKornfeld

So for decades, Ted lived in fear of the next bad thing happening. And then his daughter told him about that article she'd found.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It's unclear where exactly this idea that petrified rocks curse people came from. I tried to run it down, but no one knows. And it didn't matter to Ted anyway. All he knew was that he was cursed, and he needed to get that wood back to the park as soon as possible. Handily, he happened to be working at the post office at the time. So the next day, he went to work and grabbed a priority box, flat rate because the rock was so heavy.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Ted carefully swaddled the petrified wood in bubble wrap to protect it and placed it in a box, along with his letter. It cost him $22 to ship, a steal if it breaks the curse.

The Petrified Forest National Park has a long history with rock thieves like Ted. In fact, that's why they became a national park in the first place. Local residents worried about the area being totally stripped and petitioned to turn the land into a park to protect it. Years ago, there was a study that found they could be losing wood at a rate of 12 tons per year. And so, for decades, the park tried all kinds of tactics to discourage theft-- vehicle inspections, fines, supervised tours, preemptively gifting people a little piece of wood bought from private land near the park. You might think that park rangers invented the curse as a deterrent, but no.

But somehow, word spread, making Ted just one of hundreds of people who have sent pieces of petrified wood back to the park. Matt Smith, the ranger in charge of processing the returned rocks, says that a rock arrives roughly once a week, often with a letter attached. There are now over a thousand letters in their archive.

It seemed strange to me. So many people all came to believe their bad luck came from a rock and felt compelled not just to return the rock, but to apologize and explain themselves? I wanted to read the letters for myself, so I flew out to the park in Arizona. Ranger Matt set me up with a desk and plopped down two big boxes stuffed with letters. I spent a full day sifting through them.

The first letter the park ever received was from a guy in India in 1935. From there, the letters are organized by year, mostly handwritten. The letters have a kind of frenzied urgency to them, like this one-- "Please release me. My life is hell," or this one-- which is oddly accusatory, considering they're the thief-- "You should tell people these are cursed before people take them. Sorry."

But lots of people go to great lengths to detail their woes, pages and pages that feel more like a journal entry than federal mail. The list of hardships attributed to the rocks are wide-ranging, including, but not limited to, layoffs, car accidents, robberies, cancer, divorce. A lot of beloved family dogs died. One guy had a failed vasectomy. Another fell through the ceiling of his house.

And one person's fiancé cheated on them with a Norwegian woman. There are a lot of mentions of idiot husbands and apologies on their behalf and tons of people who didn't even take the rocks themselves, but somehow looked at their lives and concluded that everything bad happened because of the rocks their parents or grandparents had stolen, like a weird, petrified version of inherited trauma.

One woman sent back a rock with a letter in the hopes of restoring her luck and then promptly sent another letter after she'd realized she'd sent in the wrong rock. In some letters, desperate people describe the ways in which their lives have been horrifically derailed. And then, at the bottom of the letter, a park ranger who's examined the rock has written a little note in pencil-- "Wood not from park." Brutal.

What's striking about reading so many of these letters back to back is how terrible and ordinary the pain they're recounting is. They're describing all the awful parts of life, the parts you know intellectually are on the table, but still feel shocking when they happen to you. I can imagine what a relief it could be to discover you'd been cursed. Because how nice would it be to get an explanation for why it's all so difficult? Plus, it means you just might have the power to undo it.

I talked to a few different rangers about this phenomenon, people stealing and returning their rocks. And they were all surprisingly blasé about the whole thing. They don't want people to steal rocks, obviously, but it turns out the amount they're losing every year really isn't that big of a deal. Over time, they figured out that they're not actually losing 12 tons of wood per year.

Plus, people returning rocks? That's just more work for them. The rangers can't determine where exactly in the park the rocks came from, so all the returned rocks just get tossed into a pile. Ranger Matt took me to see it. It's big, maybe 15 feet wide, a few feet tall, with rocks of all sizes.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Actually, he could. Couldn't resist. After Ted returned the rock, he came into a lot of money unexpectedly. He also stumbled into a great, below-market-rate deal on a house. He did get divorced, but that, too, felt like good luck. Ted doesn't know for sure if returning the rock is what changed his luck because that was actually just one part of a much broader reckoning for him.

But whatever it was, he says it worked. These days, his luck has turned around so much that his whole job is based on having good luck. He goes to estate sales and flea markets looking for treasures and sells them online. Like this one time, he was poking around at a sale in an old house and found an old cool-looking duck call.

Aviva DeKornfeld

He bought it for $9 and posted it to a hunting Facebook group. Within an hour, he got a message from a guy who said, call me right away. So Ted did.

Aviva DeKornfeld

These days, Ted feels better in all kinds of ways, like things have been put right in his life, like the rock, which is back where it belongs. He'd felt guilty about taking it. That's true for a lot of people. The vast majority of the hundreds of letters I read mentioned guilt. Most people felt bad about having done the wrong thing and just wanted to try and make it right.

A lot of the letters come from people at the end of their lives, doing a little psychic housekeeping before they go. Some of the letters are so simple. Like, what else can I say? I was wrong, and I'm sorry. Or, I don't regret much, but I regret taking this rock. I found Ted's letter in the archive, too, handwritten. He says, "I pray that the return will deem forgiveness from God, the Petrified Forest National Park, and the people of the United States of America." And he apologizes.

That big pile of returned rocks, the rangers have a name for it. It's called the Conscience Pile, which I find kind of moving. We make mistakes, and so often, our attempts to make things right fall short. But I think if you're the kind of person who takes the time to mail a rock back to a national park years after taking it, you're probably on the right track.

Ira Glass

Aviva DeKornfeld is one of the producers of our program. Thanks to Ryan Thompson, who noticed some of the letters on display on a trip to the park and then made a book of the letters called Bad Luck, Hot Rocks. That's how we first heard about the story. Coming up, Jonathan Goldstein leaps in to help a family who are not entirely sure they want or need his help with the stuff they own. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Thing About Things, stories of objects that, in one way or another, become our bosses. It's like we are doing their bidding. It's like we're working for them. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, A Few Hundred of My Favorite Things.

Sometimes our attachment to things can be a real problem. You definitely can get too attached. Jonathan Goldstein is a longtime contributor to our show. His own show, Heavyweight, is back now with new episodes after a long hiatus. And one of the new episodes is about some parents whose stuff has become a problem for their kids. As always, on Heavyweight, Jonathan jumps in to help.

What I love about this particular story is how it unfolds over time-- over years, actually-- and then arrives at the end at these moments that-- I don't know. I don't want to say too much about this. You should just hear them. Here's Jonathan's story.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends. And today, he's coming to me with a problem.

Jonathan Goldstein

Etta and Milton are both pushing 90. And Gregor's problem is that they refuse to move out of their house. It's the same three-story Victorian Gregor grew up in. He was 12 when the family first moved in. He still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the moving truck or moving trucks.

Jonathan Goldstein

One for the family's belongings. The other five? For the collections. Some people collect coins. Some people collect comic books. Gregor's mother, Etta, collects collections.

Jonathan Goldstein

Then there are the 19th century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythes. Etta Ehrlich is an artist, and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Etta sees beauty in everything. And in her hands, everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter of dried bird poop.

Jonathan Goldstein

None of this would be a problem, except that a large, cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.

Jonathan Goldstein

And so Gregor wants to move his parents into a smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is Etta.

Jonathan Goldstein

All this, all the collections is what's keeping Etta in the house. And of all her many collections, of all her milking stools and antique rolling pins, it's her collection of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Etta has thousands-- wine bottles, perfume bottles, old decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Etta is a Buddhist. And her bottles are not just bottles, but a series of meditations. Because on each of the bottles, in fancy fonts and careful calligraphy, Etta places a message in the form of a zen-like riddle.

Jonathan Goldstein

Other inscriptions are "Stop schlepping your old being into the future," or, "We cling to illusions of control." After hearing a few, I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet Etta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring, or much of anything else.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is Gregor's dad, Milt.

Jonathan Goldstein

As for Milt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by, is Etta. Milt is a poet, and after over 60 years of marriage, he still writes poems about her, rhapsodizing about the way she creates art or cooks or the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Etta dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings.

Jonathan Goldstein

Of Milton and his three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most ready to serve, the child his parents hand a to-do list when he comes to visit.

Jonathan Goldstein

And so because Etta can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that will allow Etta to both keep her stuff and still move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her--

Jonathan Goldstein

Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the 1960s, Etta and Milt bought a 200-year-old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing. Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the Etta B. Erlich Museum. Convincing one's mother to downsize by way of a feral farmhouse museum that, by Gregor's own admission, is probably a breeding ground for the hantavirus, has all the makings of a classic cockamamie scheme. But this is just the beginning.

For his plan to build a museum to work, Gregor will need his siblings on board. So as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his sister, Lexi. Lexi is the level-headed one of the three, and I want to get her read on the plan.

Jonathan Goldstein

Perhaps this plan is a bit half-baked, but I figure I might have more luck getting Gregor's brother, Dimitri, on board. Dimitri has never been afraid of a scheme that runs a little pink on the inside.

[LINE RINGING]

So I give him a call. We haven't spoken since I moved from New York, where Dimitri lives, to Minnesota.

Jonathan Goldstein

Dimitri is a martial arts instructor who has kickboxed his way across Thailand. He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities--

Jonathan Goldstein

--and a musician who had a song go platinum three times in Belgium.

Jonathan Goldstein

Before Dimitri can launch into his next sentence, I jump in.

When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dimitri offers a laundry list of issues.

Jonathan Goldstein

And along with his friend Theo's trouble, there was also his friend Sonam's trouble in that cursed place.

Jonathan Goldstein

But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter. Whenever he's tried to clear space in his parents' home, it refills overnight, suggesting Etta's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked at its psychological root. She needs to learn how to let go. And for this, Dimitri has just the solution.

Jonathan Goldstein

Etta was a pack-a-day smoker, a habit she hung on to for nearly 30 years.

Jonathan Goldstein

Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the 1970s, I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis.

Jonathan Goldstein

Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self-control to stop eating brontosaurus burgers.

Jonathan Goldstein

It gave The Fonz the confidence to jump Snake Canyon on his motorcycle.

Jonathan Goldstein

As a boy, I always wondered what it would feel like to have my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts.

Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time, effort, nor those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you. Fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems and that museums belong in a museum, Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.

Jonathan Goldstein

I need to tell Gregor that I like Dimitri's idea much better than his, but I need to tread lightly. From Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin, I know how competitive brothers can be. And unlike the Lord or Alexander Rae Baldwin, I don't want to be seen playing favorites.

Jonathan Goldstein

Going to movies is Gregor and my thing. Clearly, I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the merits of hypnotism.

Jonathan Goldstein

Swept up in a wave of brotherly bonhomie, I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing--

Jonathan Goldstein

--and immediately regret it.

Jonathan Goldstein

With Gregor and Dmitri aligned and friends again at my expense, I set out in search of the one-eyed hippie hypnotist, Saul Feldstein. But it turns out Saul died in 2019 at the age of 91. So I reach out to other hypnotists, all of whom pretty much hang up on me once I explain the project. So hypnotism is out. The museum is out. I'm stuck with my crap personality, and Etta is stuck with her house full of crap. And Gregor is still at an impasse. But things are about to change.

Gregor tells me that Etta has been offered a show at the Carter Burden gallery in Manhattan. Etta is an outsider artist, so the offer of her own exhibition feels like finally, at the age of 88, she's being invited inside. The show, with its formal invitations and coat check, feels like validation.

It's the kind of opportunity Etta has always hoped for. And for Gregor, it feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good homes outside her home. The show opens on March 21, 2019. Gregor and I make a plan to speak the morning after so he can tell me how it went. When we speak, what Gregor tells me is that things that night took a wild turn.

Jonathan Goldstein

It was almost like a cartoon version of my mom's success story in that some stranger guy came up and was like, you're a beautiful woman.

Jonathan Goldstein

Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having as good a time. He spent most of the evening in the corner, nibbling on crackers. At the end of the night, Gregor approached him.

Jonathan Goldstein

On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but completely unconscious. Etta began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was driven to the hospital, where the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke, but they couldn't say for sure. In the waiting room, Etta turned to Gregor and said, you might as well order the dumpsters right now, meaning, you win, empty out the house, because if Milt isn't coming back to it, that's it.

How do you know when the Damoclean sword of mortality isn't just dangling above you, but actually falling? How do you know when it's time to pick up the remote, turn off Rachel Maddow, and finally act? The night, a milestone in Etta's career, was meant to symbolize a turning point. And it was, just not the kind she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from the hospital, but his collapse signaled a change for Gregor, too. For so long, he'd been saying, maybe it's time, but maybe it was time to stop saying maybe.

Jonathan Goldstein

I want to talk with Etta about the night of the art opening and the way it affected her thinking about remaining in the house.

Jonathan Goldstein

In the aftermath of the art show opening, as Etta's new reality sunk in, another plan began to take shape, one that Etta came up with. Her idea is to pair each of her message-on-a-bottles with the right person. In this way, each one will find the right home.

Jonathan Goldstein

A few weeks later, I call Gregor to see how Etta's bottle drive is coming along.

Jonathan Goldstein

Even though I should know better, know how Gregor will dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer, my curiosity gets the better of me. And so I keep asking Gregor what the bottle says, which he uses as an opportunity to dissect my personality. All I can say, he says, is that it addresses some of your deep-seated issues.

Jonathan Goldstein

Over the next couple of years, Etta continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in the past, Etta was only able to give away a few, Gregor estimates that she hands out about a hundred. During this time, Milt is in and out of the hospital, with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood pressure to an actual heart attack.

But then, in the summer of 2021, it's Etta who received some bad news. Two years after Gregor and I first spoke, Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain. They went to three different hospitals in five days, and the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months, but of weeks. In what felt like only days, Etta went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to be carried up the stairs herself.

With Etta's illness, Gregor decides to move in-- the whole family does-- into the big, packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed is set up on the main floor in Etta's old office. And Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at Etta's bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable. He tells her it's OK to go, that everything is OK.

Jonathan Goldstein

In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Etta.

Jonathan Goldstein

The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Etta could dance out of the world gracefully, no grasping. It's the living who are left to grasp.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is Gregor's sister, Lexi, again. Like Etta, Lexi is an artist. And like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after all the years trying to get her mom to let go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so hard to let go of that very same stuff.

Jonathan Goldstein

You can try to move your aging parents out of their house. You can treat death like a to-do list with items to check off. But ultimately, you can't control how people live or die. Even after Etta's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dimitri and his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't have to be alone. And over the next few years, Gregor, in fits and starts and with disregard for what anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only, it's become less about a full-fledged museum open to the public and more of just a place to honor his mom.

And then one day, Gregor texts saying he found a sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it, written in Etta's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel what seems like yards and yards of bubble wrap. Etta had taken great care. The bottle is a beautiful blue, the blue of a childhood toy. It's curvaceous and feels good in my hand. Upon it, Etta laid out her words to me.

Jonathan Goldstein

I do. But how dare she? I'm kidding. Cue the outro music. Cue the dime store insight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go.

My feeling about what comes after death is constantly changing. I don't have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling. And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, just like colorful bottles are vessels, just like podcasts and houses packed with stuff, and all of art is. It's all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful, but it's there to help us get closer to the non-stuff. Because, like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein. That story is part of the new season of his show, Heavyweight. It was produced by Phoebe Flanagan with help from Kalila Holt and Stevie Lane. If you do not know Heavyweight, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. I have to say, one great episode to start with is Jonathan's original season 1 episode that's called Gregor, about his friend Gregor, who you just heard, who, in that episode, is on a mission to get justice from the pop star Moby.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld. The people who helped put the show together today include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Suzanne Gaber, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mando, Stowe Nelson, Robin Reid, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, and Marisa Robertson-Textor. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Emma Munger. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. A reminder that if you like our show and listen to it a lot, please consider signing up as a This American Life Partner. Do it for the stuff you get, or do it simply because you want to help us keep making the show the way we do it now. Join at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners.

Thanks this week to Life Partners Fabian Frey, Cathy D, Anastasia Ragland, and Nancy Berault.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. After just one week, making maybe 1,500 homemade AI videos, he's quitting Sora.

Ira Glass

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