781: Watching the Watchers

Ira Glass

OK, so we're going to start this week's show with something that's been going on behind the scenes of this year's midterm election. It's called the precinct strategy. This is something that's been around for a while, but it wasn't a big thing until last year when Steve Bannon-- remember, Steve Bannon?-- got a hold of the idea and started pushing it on his podcast.

Ira Glass

This right here is the video that started it off. It's from February 2021, just Steve Bannon being the Steve Bannon we've come to know. He's wearing at least three shirts. He's framed by a row of MAGA hats lined up on a mantel. And he's bringing on this guest, who is a long time Arizona activist named Dan Schultz.

Dan Schultz is here to solve a problem.

Ira Glass

OK, so what he lays out here, the way that Schultz and Bannon see this, the reason that Donald Trump isn't president anymore, it's not just election fraud by the Democrats. That's obviously a given for them. But the real problem in 2020 was the Republicans who let them get away with it, who didn't do every last thing in their power to keep President Trump in office.

What they're talking about is the mainstream Republicans in Arizona and Georgia and Michigan, people who went ahead and certified the election results for Joe Biden, accepted that Trump lost, did not stand by him in his neediest hour. To prevent that from happening again, Dan Schultz and Steve Bannon want an army of MAGA enthusiasts to be in place and be ready for the coming election in just a few weeks.

And they're going to do this by getting people to sign up for the lowest level positions in the Republican Party. It's a job called precinct committeeman.

Ira Glass

Precinct committeemen do all kinds of political grunt work-- door knocking, phone banking, leafleting. They often work as official poll watchers on election day for the party. But in addition, and this might not sound like a big deal but it's key-- they often elect officials higher up in the Republican Party, who elect the officials even higher up than that, who elect the state parties and the national party and decide where GOP is going to spend money and what races to back, they decide the party platform. They determine what the party officially stands for.

These are the jobs at the bottom that Steve Bannon wants to fill with people who believe that the last election was stolen, people who are very excited at the chance to do something, anything to prevent an election from being stolen again. And Bannon has kept the drumbeat going for months and months to get MAGA Stop the Steal people to sign up for these jobs.

For instance, in August, Bannon polled the audience of the Moment of Truth Summit in Missouri, which was hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy who's turned election conspiracy theorist.

Ira Glass

A few weeks back, Bannon asked one of his correspondents at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania to poll a group of supporters there.

Ira Glass

The person who first reported that there's this surge of new Stop the Steal recruits becoming precinct committeemen around the country for the Republican Party was Isaac Arnsdorf. He was at Propublica when he did that. These days, he's a politics reporter at the Washington Post. And he's been tracking this takeover of the Republican Party in swing states all over the country.

He allowed us to tag along with him. We were happy to go. He and one of our producers, Zoe Chace, hit the road together to see how the presence of these Stop the Stealers is changing things. If they get their way, it's going to shift the party and the way we do elections pretty fundamentally for years to come. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Magazona. So today on our show, we're going to look at how all this is playing out in Arizona, a place that some MAGA people like to call Magazona. And we chose Arizona because the movement there has really been setting the pace for the rest of the country.

People who believe the 2020 election was stolen tried to recall Republican officials there. They also pushed for a hand recount of millions of ballots that became a model for other states around the country who tried it.

Even though in Arizona it revealed that Joe Biden won the election with even more votes than they had thought, the audit in Arizona galvanized tons of people who wanted to do more. And lots of those people jumped into the precinct strategy.

So in Arizona, you can really see the effect that strategy is having. That is what Isaac and Zoe have been out there co-reporting. Here's Isaac.

Isaac Arnsdorf

All over the country, almost everywhere I called-- Georgia, Florida, Texas-- there were local level Republican officials who are getting flooded with new people wanting to become precinct committee members. A lot of these officials didn't know about the precinct strategy. They hadn't seen Steve Bannon's interview with Dan Schultz. And they were frankly a little puzzled by what was happening, like Kathy Petsas in Maricopa county, Arizona.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy is old school, an OG Republican, she says. She was stuffing mailers for the party when she was 12 or 13. When she was a teenager, she was awarded Outstanding Teenage Republican. She got to meet President Reagan in the Rose Garden. Puts a McCain sign on her lawn every year for his birthday.

She's been a precinct committee member for 40 years. As district chair, she had 454 precinct committee slots. And she had a clear idea of who a precinct committee member should be-- someone who knows the neighborhood and the people in it, someone knowledgeable about local Republican politics.

And Kathy wanted to know who are all these new people who suddenly wanted to do this unglamorous job. She started taking the applicants out to meet one on one.

Isaac Arnsdorf

To be clear, not all the new applicants thought the election was stolen. But a lot of them did. And Kathy thought what they were saying was nuts. As the district chair, Kathy had the authority to appoint the new precinct committee members or not. Other chairs in other districts were like, cool, whatever. Sign them up. But Kathy decided she was going to screen the new people.

Isaac Arnsdorf

So those people who just registered to vote, talking about massive fraud, pleasure to meet you. See you around. Kathy's going to look for someone else to fill that slot.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy didn't think people who were telling her about massive voter fraud would make good messengers for the party. They weren't wild about her either.

Zoe Chace

I spoke with one of the people Kathy was trying to keep out of the precinct committee, Merissa Hamilton. And when I brought up Kathy's name, Merissa lunged, lobbing the worst insult you could against a fellow Republican.

Zoe Chace

Kathy actually seems to be a Once Trumper. Says she supported him in 2016, just not anymore. Still, Kathy insists she never supported Biden and didn't tell anybody else to either. The idea is anathema to Kathy.

Zoe Chace

Merissa says she heard that Kathy even recruited Democrats to switch parties and become Republicans, in order to install them as precinct committeemen under her control, to keep control of her legislative district. This may have happened in only one case, I think. And I believe Kathy didn't know the Republican donor she recruited was actually a registered Democrat in her mad dash to recruit PCs who didn't believe the election was stolen.

Anyway, Merissa found out the kinds of people Kathy was recruiting all while people like her were being ignored, and she was mad. Also, Kathy stopped holding regular PC meetings. She says because of COVID. Merissa thinks it was to keep people out, so she wouldn't have to hear from those who disagreed with her within her legislative district. People say LD here.

Zoe Chace

This feud isn't just Kathy versus Merissa. Everywhere you go, there's some version of old school Republicans getting overrun by MAGA election deniers at this ground floor precinct level of the party. Merissa believes the election was compromised. We'll never know who won, she says, but thinks of herself as more reasonable than other Stop the Stealers, and a data expert of sorts because of work she's done in the past in supply chain management.

Right after 2020, she launched her own research project into how many dead people were voting. She claimed to have found 33. The attorney general then looked at it and found that only one of those was real. It wasn't a nefarious ballot harvester from the Democrats. It was a Republican who'd voted her recently deceased mother's ballot, and she was indicted. Merissa says Kathy ridiculed any research into the 2020 election, which made her especially mad. Kathy says she has no idea what Merissa is referring to, but Kathy doesn't have any patience for that kind of research, it's true.

Zoe Chace

Merissa started rallying other PCs and wannabe PCs who'd been blocked by Kathy Petsas to do something about her.

Zoe Chace

They called a meeting, a meet and greet, she called it. Others called it a resistance meeting.

Zoe Chace

Then Merissa and her crew found a workaround in the bylaws, a way to go over Kathy's head-- to get people onto Kathy's precinct committees. She could send the applications to the Republican county chair, who wasn't on team Kathy.

Zoe Chace

That's what Merissa says. Kathy says it was more like 25 to 30 people who got in over her head. In any case, that's how Merissa and a whole bunch of new Stop the Steal recruits got on Kathy's committee. Kathy was trying to jam a lid on a pot that was boiling over.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Even before this attempt to take over precinct committee positions, the Arizona Republican Party was pretty dominated by MAGA people. And after they tried to recall the Republican elected officials who certified the election, and after they spent millions of dollars to recount ballots by hand, their next target was this election, the midterms. They wanted to put Stop the Stealers in office who would actually do in future elections what Republican officials wouldn't do in 2020.

Isaac Arnsdorf

That's Kari lake, former local news anchor, now a candidate for governor. She said she would not have certified the 2020 election results. Same goes for Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, which is the top elections official. Finchem is also an Oath Keeper who was at the Capitol on January 6, though he says he wasn't involved in the violence.

Both Lake and Finchem want to get rid of vote counting machines, get rid of voting by mail. If they take office, they'd be in the position to refuse to certify future elections. These are the candidates that the new precinct committee people are generally supporting. In the primary, they had competition from more mainstream establishment Republicans, politicians who didn't claim the election was stolen, people Kathy supported.

[DOORBELL RINGS]

Zoe Chace

A few days before the August primary, Kathy is out door knocking, getting out the vote for Karrin Taylor Robson, establishment candidate running against the aforementioned election truther, Kari Lake. Kathy is the most determined, maybe desperate door knocker I've ever met. Almost seven days a week for months now, she's door knocking. She wears the same big sunhat each day, washes her vote t-shirt most nights. It's almost a full time job, seems like.

Today, she's brought Beau with her, running for secretary of state. Says he was recruited by the business community of Phoenix because the real Republicans are concerned that the Trump endorsed Oath Keeper, Finchem, is leading in the polls.

Zoe Chace

Change is not really what Kathy is selling, unfortunately. We only stop at one house where someone's outwardly enthusiastic for her candidate, Karrin. At our last stop, Kathy leans over a fence as a woman explains why she'd never vote for her.

Zoe Chace

And as we walk away, we hear a distinct "fuck you" called after us. Back in the car, they're moving on to the next neighborhood.

Zoe Chace

Arizona is known as a fairly conservative state, at least until 2020. But actually only about a third of the state's registered voters are Republicans. A little less than a third are Democrats. The rest are independents. So whoever wins the general has to win with independents.

Kathy thinks the Kari Lakes of the world can't do that. But that's not who's voting in the Republican primary, not who's filling up the precinct slots in the local Republican Party.

Isaac Arnsdorf

One of the biggest things these Stop the Steal newbies are doing, now that they're part of the party organization at the bottom rung as precinct committee people, is that they're setting up an infrastructure to watch all the voting locations in the midterms, to catch the fraud they didn't catch in 2020.

They've signed up as official Republican Party poll watchers at voting locations. On primary day, outside one of those locations, a big suburban church in Mesa, we meet up with Peggy Dumas, someone who never paid attention to her precinct until she just became a committee member.

She's got her snacks, her knitting, a notebook, and a pen to take notes. It's her first time poll watching. She picked a quiet polling place. I thought Peggy would be excited to get a piece of the action, to catch the cheaters red handed. But actually she didn't want that.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Basically, she's scared she's going to hulk out.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Going with her as she voted just before her shift, Peggy was super suspicious that something was going to go down. She brought her own pen to vote, because in 2020, some of the polling places provided Sharpie pens. And there was a conspiracy theory that the machines couldn't read those ballots.

Zoe Chace

Peggy is a classic new precinct committee member. Before it was the Sharpies, it was the birth certificate.

Zoe Chace

This was a tough time for Peggy, in a way. She says she quit her job during the pandemic. She thought she might be ready to retire. Her job was, she helped people who were underwater figure out how to pay off their debts.

She lives alone with her dogs, whom she dotes on. And she ended up spending a ton of time on her phone, reading about the election being stolen by nefarious actors. Like a lot of people I talked to, the radicalizing moment for Peggy was the moment that Fox called the election for Biden so early. Like, it just seems so obvious to her that the fix was in. There must be more Trump voters than Biden ones in Arizona, long car caravans of them, rallies with thousands and thousands of people.

The only way Biden could have won is cheating. And for Peggy, just the frustration that nobody did anything about it. She saw the Bannon video. She signed up as a PC.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Now that all these people who believe there's fraud everywhere are going to be stationed inside the polls, I wanted to find out what instructions they were getting. What were they going to do once they were there? We tried getting into one of these trainings in Arizona, but the state party wouldn't let us. But this is happening all over the country. It's the same idea, and we were able to listen in on a training in Georgia.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Hang on. The deal with this-- in lots of states, including Georgia, it's illegal to deliver other people's ballots, except family and household members. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Democrats going around with big stacks of fake ballots and sticking them in dropboxes. So if that's what you see, here's what the trainer says you should do.

Isaac Arnsdorf

This is the point they keep coming back to over and over-- gather evidence that Republicans can use in lawsuits to challenge the results, not just in this county in Georgia but everywhere.

Isaac Arnsdorf

I'm not sure that following someone out to their car and taking pictures of their license plate wouldn't lead to a confrontation. But the thing that really struck me was the people taking the training. They weren't shying away from the action like Peggy. They sounded like they were spoiling for a fight. They wanted to catch wrongdoers in the act.

Isaac Arnsdorf

I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Most of this training was pretty by the book, a PowerPoint with lots of boring details about the state law. The poll watchers get long, detailed checklists of all the little things they're supposed to write down and photograph, even the serial numbers for the zip ties that are used to lock up the voting machines, tons of stuff that could be used in a lawsuit challenging the results.

Zoe Chace

Back in Arizona, I'm doing a ride along with another first time poll watcher on primary day.

Zoe Chace

Marc's not an official poll watcher with the Republican Party. He's operating sort of off the books. He volunteers with We the People AZ Alliance. It's a group co-founded by one of the newer district chairmen. Marc's whole job during the primary is to drive around in an enormous black car and observe polling places from the parking lot, looking for infractions. He takes notes in a little book.

Marc dates his distrust of the government back to 911. One of the many tattoos that covers his arms commemorates the towers.

Zoe Chace

We head to another polling station. When we pull out, someone replaces us, apparently.

Zoe Chace

At the next place, we see something suspicious. Someone may be campaigning inside the 75-foot perimeter. They appear to be right on the line to me. Marc's trying to snap a good picture of them with their faces to include in his report.

Zoe Chace

He jumps out of the car. I have no idea why. I know he told me not to, but I follow him. He takes a selfie with them and then comes back to the car. He's clearly mad at me.

He's writing down his report. 4:28, he's whispering. Which is the time. We're burned at that place now, he says.

Zoe Chace

Anything of note in Marc's reports is put into a spreadsheet, I'm told. So if it's like someone gets out of a red Honda with a whole bunch of ballots, and then later someone else sees a red Honda and someone getting out with a bunch of ballots, it'll be caught. And they can investigate further if that's maybe an illegal ballot harvester.

[CHATTERING]

Isaac Arnsdorf

It's primary night. I'm with Kathy at the watch party for her candidate, the establishment candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson. We're in a ballroom at a really fancy resort. They're serving canapes, duck, and Gruyere tarts. The crowd here is feeling great right now because Karrin Taylor Robson is leading Trump endorsed Kari Lake.

Karrin lives in LD 28, Kathy's district.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy and I go to the bar for a drink. So I stop recording for a while. As the night goes on, the results start to change as more election day ballots are counted. Kari Lake is closing the gap. Finally, she takes the lead.

For a few minutes, I'm alone with Kathy. She's tearing up and staring off blankly. I'm going to be sick, she says at one point. I can't be a PC in this. I turn my recorder on again.

Isaac Arnsdorf

After the primary, Kathy has to think about what to do. She isn't going to go out knocking on a thousand doors for these nominees who she can't stomach. There are some local candidates she'll campaign for and registering people to vote. She's been approached to sign on to some lists of Republicans endorsing the Democratic candidates, but Kathy won't go there.

She isn't the party chair in her district anymore. She actually decided not to run again, but the newbies didn't let her go quietly anyway. They made their move with a formal proceeding against her a few months before the primary, before her term as district chairman ended.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy describes this proceeding as a kangaroo court. It was a trial overseen by the county chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, MCRC, and adjudicated by a committee of her fellow district chairmen.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Upfront, there's a long table with the executive committee, like a tribunal, with small tables around the room with the other district chairmen, who are like the jurors. Kathy sits at the table nearest the door. The charge against her? She was accused of endorsing a Democrat in a Phoenix city council race last year.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Eventually, the prosecutor gives up on the Socratic method and just reads aloud from Kathy's quote in the newspaper, saying something nice about the Democratic city council candidate. Kathy argues that this quote is not an endorsement, and the race wasn't even partisan. One of Kathy's supporters points out that Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate who the Stop the Stealers love, she supported Obama in 2008.

The county chair's not having it. I don't know what this has to do with anything, she says.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy's asked to step out of the room. She refuses, challenges the secret ballot.

Isaac Arnsdorf

She goes down fighting, but she goes down. The verdict is guilty. Kathy gets stripped of her voting rights as a precinct committee member. We talked about it later on the phone.

Isaac Arnsdorf

Kathy still goes to her district meetings, even though she's not the chair anymore. The new chair is one of the guys who plotted to overthrow Kathy. There's an ongoing dispute over whether she's allowed to vote on anything. She spends the meetings needle pointing. The meetings open with prayers now. That's new.

Isaac Arnsdorf

So Kathy is gritting her teeth, refusing to give up because she's sure the party under this new leadership is bound to implode. And when it does, she wants to be there to pick up the pieces. We talked about it with her and her husband Bill over dinner after the meeting.

Isaac Arnsdorf

I told Bill I wasn't so sure. Making the MAGA movement endure without Trump is what the precinct strategy is all about. It's making election denial a permanent fixture of the GOP, institutionalized within the party organization itself, so deeply ingrained that you can't extract it. You can't just lop off the head. It's MAGA all the way down.

Ira Glass

Thank you, Steve Bannon. Isaac Arnsdorf, is a national political reporter at the Washington Post. Zoe Chace is one of the producers of our show. Isaac is working on a book about the MAGA movement trying to take over the Republican Party and America. It's called Ground Game. It'll be out next fall.

Coming up, righteous middle schoolers monitoring a teacher, who of course is supposed to be monitoring them. 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, watching the watchers, people deciding on their own that it is their job to make sure that bad things don't happen, and then beginning their own surveillance of suspected wrongdoers. We have arrived at Act 2 of our show. Act 2, I'll Be Watching You.

Sixth grade isn't that old, but it's old enough to tell right from wrong. And it's old enough to know that adults aren't always perfect. And at Davisville Middle School in Rhode Island, this one sixth grader couldn't help but notice that one of his teachers was doing stuff that just felt a little weird.

Much, much later, the teacher would be removed from the school for his behavior. But at this stage, early on, this sixth grader was seeing certain things for the first time. Like at Halloween.

Ira Glass

Every time this teacher did other things, he says, the kinds of stuff the kids notice, he asked a girl to take off her shoe and wiggle her toes for him, made an unsettling joke about how everybody should come to school in their bathing suits, and as the school year continued, that one girl from Halloween was a special target.

Ira Glass

He says other girls made comments, too.

Ira Glass

And it wasn't just the way this teacher was with the girls. The sixth grader says that he was kind of a jerk with the boys. He says any kind of off task behavior would get you reprimanded if you were a boy, sent to the office. He says a teacher actually bragged that so many kids had complained about him in the past for being strict. He said they could try themselves. Wouldn't do any good.

All this bothered this sixth grader enough that he went to two different adults. One of them was his mom. And he didn't go into a lot of depth, but he told them this teacher is a creep, flirts with the girls in class. He's a pedo. And both adults were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Take a breath.

Ira Glass

He and his friends couldn't let it go, though. They'd talk about it when they'd hang out, when they were online playing Minecraft or Super Smash Brothers. It just seemed wrong.

And so, lacking any power to do anything else, they talked about it and joked about it. Finally, they decided to do the one thing you can do when you can't fix what's wrong with the world but still feel a strong sense of outrage. They became watchers. They decided to document everything the teacher did with the girls that seemed weird or inappropriate to them in a Discord channel they set up.

Discord, if you don't know, is a messaging platform. They called the Discord channel--

Ira Glass

To be clear, he knows he's using the word pedo loosely. The Pedo Database was an inside joke between a small group of boys who hated this teacher because he was so harsh with them. But they were also totally serious about the way he was treating the girls.

Ira Glass

Logging the date was actually something they got from watching TV and movies, true crime.

Ira Glass

And every few weeks, the teacher did something noteworthy enough that one of the boys would jot it down on a pad secretly, right then in class, or type it directly into Discord on his phone, adding an entry to the database log. These kids finished with that teacher, moved on to the next teacher.

But to keep the log going, they enlisted kids who had him the next year. And they read the new entries.

Ira Glass

The reporter who broke this story and revealed the Pedo Database to the world is Amanda Milkovits of the Boston Globe. And the reason it became public, the reason she wrote a story is that in April of this year, the teacher was removed from his job and put on leave because of allegations that he'd stalked a girl, a pre-teen at the school. After that happened, there was a public appeal to families in the school for any information about other incidents involving this teacher.

Ira Glass

We reached out to this teacher for an interview about all this, but he didn't return our calls or texts. One thing about this story, the name of the teacher has not been made public, or the names of the minors involved, including the boys who ran the Pedo Database. In fact, the voice that you've been hearing for this interviewee is a young actor, Azhy Robertson, who's imitating the real student as closely as possible to keep that kid anonymous.

Though after reporter Amanda Milkovits published her story in the Boston Globe, it was picked up widely, got passed around on social media, and, naturally, the news got back to the school.

Ira Glass

After the teacher got put on leave and the Pedo Database made the news, a young woman, an adult, came forward and said that she'd also been harassed by the same teacher years ago. She wrote a letter to the Pedo Database boys. She said, "when we're young, we're told that adults know best, that they know everything. Now as an adult, the only thing I know is that stupid kids just turn into even stupider adults.

When I was a student in this teacher's class, I felt helpless against his harassment and bullying. None of the other adults took my feelings seriously, not to mention the blind eye that teachers would turn to the creepy relationships that he had with other students.

Hearing that the same thing still happening in his class nearly seven years after I left leaves me feeling sad and frustrated with the school system's lack of action. Thank you so much for standing up for all the students who didn't have a voice. You're very brave for taking a stand against something you knew was wrong. And you should be very proud of yourselves for that. Thank you."

The boy told me that it felt good to read that. It made it feel like a bigger deal, what they'd done.

Years ago, I was friends with a political reporter at the Rand Daily Mail, the big opposition newspaper in South Africa back during the height of apartheid. They published story after story about terrible things the white government was doing back then. Over decades, it had little or no effect on the government at all. The brutality in bantustans and suppressions of dissent continued.

He and I talked once about what the point of publishing was in that setting. Said that even if it didn't seem to be doing much good right then, he and his editors felt that it was important that there was a record, that someone noted what was happening and wrote it down, so that later nobody could deny it happened.

Can I say, OK, when I finished writing this story yesterday, that's where I ended this story. Because it seemed like a good way to capture what these middle school boys had done. But then, today on my way to work, I thought about the Stop the Stealers in Act 1 of today's show.

And I realized how that idea, the idea that if you make a factual record of what happened, a truthful record, that in the future nobody can deny it. That idea feels like it's from just another era. Things are so different today. The Stop the Stealers continue to believe a whole set of lies about the 2020 election being stolen, and they are trying to remake the world based on denying what really happened. And I know that is not an especially uplifting note to end the show on today, but I think in dark times, it does no good to pretend that you're not living in dark times.

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Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld. She also produced Act 2. The people who put together today's show include Chris Benderev, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Cassie Howley, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Will Peischel Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman.

Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Sabrina Hyman, Frank Rizzo, Stephen Richer, Vanessa Barchfield, Robert Fitzgerald, Sandra Dowling, Cheryl Rosado, Sally Grubbs, Susan Knox, the Marietta Diner, Dan Eggan, Ariel Plotnick, Sabby Robinson, Sean Carter, Marilyn Thompson, Jack Hitt, Tim Conlon, Phillip Rakita, and Emily Abbott.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there are lists of favorites, videos, all kinds of other stuff there. Again, thisamericanlife.org This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he and I went to karaoke together this week. He sang Britney Spears, but I don't know. He just never gets the lyrics right.

Ira Glass

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

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