785: Through the Looking Glass

Ira Glass

In Ukraine, the government has set up this phone line. It's for soldiers to call-- Russian soldiers-- if they want to surrender.

[CONNECTING TONE]

Ira Glass

Ukraine's says over 3,500 soldiers have texted or called the number. One of my coworkers, Valerie Kipnis, has been looking into this hotline, and helpfully, speaks Russian. So what did they just say?

Valerie Kipnis

So they said, hello, to one another, and then the guy asked, is this Ukraine? And the guy on the hotline answered, yeah, this is Ukraine.

Valerie Kipnis

And then, the soldier said, I got a text that if we wish to surrender, call this number.

Ira Glass

He got a text?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah, people pass around the number on social media and Telegram. There's even a website for it. It's called Hochy-Zhit dot com.

Ira Glass

And that means--

Valerie Kipnis

"I want to live" dot com.

Ira Glass

That's very direct.

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. On it, it reads, "Servicemen of the Russian armed forces, do you notice that you're greeted not with flowers, but with fire and curses? Do you notice that your commanders run away first? Save your life, for yourself and your family. Stop fighting for other people's slogans. Contact us. Save your life."

Ira Glass

OK, so what happens in this call?

Valerie Kipnis

One interesting thing is that the guy doesn't seem to know if he can actually believe them. He's questioning if he can trust them.

Valerie Kipnis

He's saying, you won't be cutting our balls off?

Valerie Kipnis

And then, the hotline guy answers, no, those are myths you guys are being fed. No one's going to be cutting anybody.

Valerie Kipnis

Don't worry.

Ira Glass

Wait, but can I ask you, like, why would somebody who's calling this number-- like, why would they trust them?

Valerie Kipnis

Well, obviously, it's a scary decision, and they have to judge it for themselves. But on the website, it says, you know, we follow the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners of war. And they say they guarantee certain things-- three meals a day, medical service, legal support from international organizations, and regular communication with relatives.

Ira Glass

What else happens in this call?

Valerie Kipnis

Well, there's a bunch of stuff about, how does this actually work? Like, how do I surrender?

Valerie Kipnis

Where should we come by? The soldier asks.

Valerie Kipnis

The hotline guy says, if you're fighting, then you're probably located in a certain region.

Valerie Kipnis

Well, yeah. And you'll come pick us up?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. We need to understand where you are and whether you really want to surrender. For that, I need your information, and then I'll contact you.

Valerie Kipnis

And then, you can surrender, if you wish.

Ira Glass

Does the soldier sound nervous to you?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. On the call, you can kind of hear him trying to make the decision of whether to do this or not.

Valerie Kipnis

We didn't even want to come here. We were ordered. Now, I'm thinking about what I can do. The guy in the hotline says, so, as I'm telling you, if you want to, you can surrender, and then return back home.

Please understand there's a Geneva convention that says that a combatant has no criminal liability, so long as he did not commit war crimes, in which case, you'll be returned home through a prisoner swap.

Valerie Kipnis

The soldier says, "Understood."

Valerie Kipnis

Thank you.

Valerie Kipnis

The hotline guy says, yeah, call any time.

Ira Glass

OK, so then the guy just hung up?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah.

Ira Glass

Do we have any idea, like, whether he went through with it?

Valerie Kipnis

No idea.

Ira Glass

Oh.

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah.

Ira Glass

Were you able to find anybody who actually used the hotline, and then surrendered?

Valerie Kipnis

So I spent a lot of time trying to find someone who had done that, and I stumbled across an interview with a guy who tried. And he told his whole story.

Valerie Kipnis

So this is the guy.

Ira Glass

Tell me about him.

Valerie Kipnis

He's young, 22 years old, kind of lanky. He was studying to be a computer programmer, and then was drafted into the army last fall.

Ira Glass

Because they have, like, mandatory military service in Russia, still.

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. Every Russian guy has to do it. And there, he was assigned to be a rifleman and an assistant grenade launcher.

Ira Glass

Mm-hmm.

Valerie Kipnis

But he had friends in Ukraine. And from the start of the invasion, he was very skeptical of the war.

Ira Glass

And is he part of the invasion?

Valerie Kipnis

No, at least not right away. But he says he has a close friend who was sent into combat and dies the first day of the war.

Ira Glass

Oh, wow.

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. And then, he starts talking to his other friend, the only person he really trusts, who's in the army with him. And they start talking about, maybe we should surrender. Like, maybe we should leave.

And at first, they're on the same page. But then, the closer they get to the front line, the less on-board his friend starts to get.

Valerie Kipnis

And one night, after he gets news of a successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv, he decides to go alone. He's actually in Russia. That's where he's based. And he says, after an eight-hour shift, he walks out of the barracks, heads west with a map and compass, and walks for two days.

Ira Glass

This seems so dangerous. Like, the Ukrainians could see him coming and just decide to shoot him.

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah. Or the Russians could see him fleeing. And after walking, finally, he makes it to the border.

Valerie Kipnis

And that's when he calls the hotline. The interviewer asks him about it.

Ira Glass

Wait, who is doing the interview?

Valerie Kipnis

So it's one of these two Ukrainian YouTubers who seem to have some connection with the Ukrainian government.

Valerie Kipnis

The soldier says he heard about the hotline from friends living in Ukraine, and also, this girl, a good friend of his. The host asks, what's her name? She'll probably watch this.

Valerie Kipnis

He says, her name is Anya.

Valerie Kipnis

He reaches the hotline over Telegram. They told him to make his way to a village in Ukraine, where Ukrainian servicemen would be waiting for him. He got his last bits of energy together and started to make his way over.

Valerie Kipnis

When I got to where they told me to go, it was sunset, not totally dark yet.

Valerie Kipnis

And I just looked at the village for a long time.

Valerie Kipnis

Truth be told, I was scared I wouldn't make it, that I'd just get shot. That was the scariest part.

Valerie Kipnis

And then, the interviewer interrupts. He says, seeing as you're here now, you didn't get shot. And he says, yeah, but I know what I look like in a Russian uniform. There could be an incident where I would get shot without any questions.

Ira Glass

So what happens.

Valerie Kipnis

So once he gets there, he meets a Ukrainian woman and asks her for directions.

Valerie Kipnis

She says, my kids can walk you there. They're going to come back alive, right? And he swears that he won't hurt anyone. So the kids walk him to the school gymnasium.

He gives the boy his pocketknife as a "thank you." And then, he's in--

Valerie Kipnis

How many times were you beaten?

Valerie Kipnis

Not once.

Valerie Kipnis

How about tortured?

Valerie Kipnis

Never. In fact, they offered us candy and sweets. Though, I should point out, the UN has documented human rights abuses against Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine. They weren't reported to be systematic.

Ira Glass

Yeah. Well, what about the fact that they're allowing video interviews with prisoners of war to go online?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah, that's potentially a violation of the Geneva Conventions. There are rules in there about not turning prisoners of war into subjects of public curiosity.

Ira Glass

So then, after that, he's basically in a POW camp, like, waiting for a prisoner swap to go home?

Valerie Kipnis

I'm not sure he wants to go back. And I'm not sure what would happen to him if he did. He's given his full name on YouTube, admitting publicly he deserted the Russian army. Also, he says that he doesn't believe in Russia's version of the war. Like he says in the video, you're on your way to kill innocent people that are just defending their own country.

Valerie Kipnis

Then, when the interviewer asks him if he'd like to make a call home--

Valerie Kipnis

He says, no, politely. His parents have different views on the war than him. Instead, he calls his friend, Anya, the one who told him about the hotline. There's a short clip of him on the phone.

Valerie Kipnis

He updates her on his status, and then says--

Valerie Kipnis

Tell me how you're doing. My life is such a mess right now.

Ira Glass

The way Russia sees the war and the way Ukraine sees it are like two different realities. But you know, there are so many places where that kind of thing is true, where one reality bumps up against another. And people try to coax each other across the line from one side to the other.

But crossing over-- not that many people do it, because it's so hard to do. It seems so dangerous. Today, on our program, we have people trying to sweet-talk each other across that line, with reason and with guile and with whatever they got. It's such an act of faith in each other even to try-- kind of inspiring, really. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us, please.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Flies, Meet Honey. So this woman, Aubree, has been calling elections administrators all over Texas for nearly two years. And as a case study of people trying to coax others over to their side, it's not going too well.

She questions them, accuses them. There's one call I want to play a little bit of-- kind of, sums things up. At the beginning of the call, the official is very calm, saying things like--

Ira Glass

But pretty quickly, Aubree is asking him about things that he can't comment on, because they're the subject of lawsuits. Lawyers have told them not to talk about them publicly. But Aubree-- she doesn't accept that. She keeps pushing.

Ira Glass

As you can hear, this gets hotter and hotter. He's an elections administrator in a county in central Texas and has had years of Stop the Stealers now, questioning him like this. They flood elections offices with records requests. They sue.

Before long in this call, Aubree is quoting Texas legal code that she believes mandates that all ballots in Texas should be pre-numbered sequentially, starting at one, which isn't done today, with computers counting votes. And the elections administrator snaps.

Ira Glass

Because of these kinds of encounters between elections officials and activists, it gets very personal sometimes. In the last few years in Texas, lots of election administrators have quit or retired. The entire staff of an elections office in Gillespie County quit at the same time, because of accusations of fraud, obscene, racist emails, threats.

People call the cops on these officials and try to get them arrested while they're doing their jobs. But there is another path. That woman, Aubree Campbell, that you just heard-- she happens to live in a county in Texas-- Tarrant County, where the elections administrator is not the guy who you just heard on the phone.

The official in Tarrant County is this singular, kind of, remarkable figure. We learned about him from Natalia Contreras, who's been reporting on elections in Texas for months now, for Votebeat, which covers all this in depth around the country. Natalia says, there's really nobody else like him that she's been able to find.

He's very effective, for some special reasons that Natalia will explain in a bit. His name is Heider Garcia. And watching him, it's hard not to feel like if anybody could convince the election doubters that our elections can be trusted-- or at the very least, if anybody can make headway with them, it would be this guy.

And to try to see how successful he is in winning over the election skeptics and the Stop the Stealers, and to see the limits of that success. Earlier this month, on election day, Natalia and Zoe Chace from our staff co-reported a story where the two of them followed Heider around as he managed the election in Tarrant County and as he dealt with the election doubters-- and Aubree, in particular. Here are Natalia and Zoe.

Natalia Contreras

Let's start with Aubree. She's just one of many people in Texas who have made it almost their full-time job to challenge election officials.

Zoe Chace

And they all have some kind of story like this to explain how they got into it. In Tarrant County, when Joe Biden won, it didn't really make any sense to Aubree. It's a Republican county. Republicans won down the ballot. But the president-- somehow, Biden won.

Natalia Contreras

Aubree doesn't look like other activists I see in this world, who are mostly elderly and retired. She's 33, but looks way younger. She's white, petite, round, hipstery eyeglasses, leather jacket. She describes herself as a conservative metal head. She stands out.

Natalia Contreras

This is Heider Garcia.

Zoe Chace

It's 6:30 AM on election day. Heider Garcia is the kind of person who carries around his own coffee grinder to grind his own beans for his morning coffee. Fastidious? Neurotic? He has high standards for himself and his coffee.

He oversees every aspect of the election with the same fastidiousness. He sets the whole thing up. He trains the workers. He tells us he's been working on not being a micromanager, which you only say if you are.

Natalia Contreras

Heider's taking a particular approach with people like Aubree. It's something I haven't seen any other Texas election officials do. His strategy is to go as far as humanly possible to answer every question and address every suspicion. He treats everything they say like it's worthy of an answer.

It's like radical patience. And when you see him do it, you see why other officials don't. Because it takes hours. It's a big part of his job now, on top of all the work of running an election.

They call with some issue. He's like, come in. Let me walk you through it. Let me show you around. Here's a typical example.

Zoe Chace

In theory, any election official could go this far-- answer every question-- if they wanted to. Though, in some ways, Heider's uniquely suited for this, he's a computer engineer. He's designed voting machines.

So he can answer, in detail, any question, technical or not, in a way few officials ever can. And for this election morning, as people are going out to vote, he's rigged up his office like some kind of air traffic control tower. It's a big room, and he's installed this enormous screen in it, and we're looking at every polling place marked on a huge Google map-- 316 of them.

They're all color-coded with wait times. If there's a problem at a polling place, the color changes to mark the level of urgency-- low, medium, critical. Then, on a separate map, Heider can see, if a tech is dispatched to fix something, he can watch them travel out there on the map, like an Uber. We can see how long it's going to take. Not long after the polls open, around 8 AM, he gets a call.

[KNOCKING ON DOOR]

[PHONE RINGING]

Natalia Contreras

Heider holds up the phone to me. He points at it and says, it's Aubree. Hey. Morning. Doing good.

Natalia Contreras

This is the kind of call she makes to election officials all over Texas. Like, something seems fishy here. And what do you have to say for yourself before it goes viral?

Natalia Contreras

It's literally the map we're looking at that's also on the elections website, with the wait times of polling places. It's not a map of outages.

Zoe Chace

Shockingly amicable. It doesn't escalate. And she seems to believe him, which is wild to me, to see one of these election fraud activists actually take the word of an elections official. She seems to trust what he's saying, because of all her dealings with Heider to this point. Heider says she calls a lot.

Natalia Contreras

Heider's clicking around on his computer. He's watching the polling places. He has calls coming in. He's checking in with his wife and kids. He's got the news on. He says he's glad he's not in Arizona.

He's also on Twitter and on Telegram. He spends a lot of time, election day and always, monitoring what the activists are saying to anticipate what they're going to want from him.

Zoe Chace

Heider is so fanatical about following these channels, that when he hears about a new conspiracy theory, he'll dive deep and work it all the way out, so he can disprove it if anyone brings it up. Like, this one guy Aubree was talking about-- this kind of famous right-wing activist, Seth Keshel, who goes by Captain K. He had some math that supposedly proved that Trump won Tarrant County.

Heider just happens to have a whiteboard and markers handy. He starts drawing a line graph to show us.

Zoe Chace

He walks us through it, just like he did for Aubree. The Captain really drives him crazy. Just today he saw him railing against early voting on his telegram channel.

Zoe Chace

We checked-- it's at least the past six years.

Natalia Contreras

Heider started monitoring the stuff at first, because he was worried about his own safety. Back in 2020, he was at the center of a national trolling firestorm. Because even though he was born in the United States, he grew up in Venezuela and worked for a while for the voting machine company Smartmatic. You know Smartmatic-- it's at the center of a ton of conspiracy theories. Heider's name blew up.

Zoe Chace

That's Michelle Malkin on Newsmax. Trump allies Sidney Powell and Lou Dobbs were also talking about him. After that, he got lots of racist messages. He got death threats. People shared his home address online.

And suddenly local activists in Texas had this hometown supervillain to investigate, and talk about, and publicize. People made their own videos. Aubree made one that's two hours long. It's called Heider Smartmatic Garcia, and it included a lot of inaccurate information about his time with Smartmatic.

Natalia Contreras

At some point, Heider decided he had nothing to hide. He didn't do anything wrong. He went on the offensive, submitted testimony to Congress, threatened to sue Aubree for defamation. She put out an apology video.

Zoe Chace

I just want to be clear. Aubree is not some big, famous internet activist. She has fewer than 1,000 followers. She works in restaurants. She's part of this whole world of people out there on Telegram and stuff like that, since the election sharing their own analysis of what they think is election fraud-- probably sincerely, and asking for donations. What makes Heider so mad about Aubree and some others is he sees it like she's using this narrative of him that she's fighting this big, bad Venezuelan operative to build up her own brand.

Natalia Contreras

Throughout the morning, Heider's constantly running back and forth, checking in on the people managing the phone bank, to the point where one of them literally says to him, Heider, I need to focus now. His phone keeps blowing up with calls about minor technical issues, machines going down at polling places.

Zoe Chace

There's other types of problems-- people problems. One poll worker, while demonstrating how to help voters vote, accidentally voted as someone else with a similar name. There's a problem with the poll judge-- well, with the alternate to the judge.

Zoe Chace

Mostly Heider's upbeat, excited, jokey. When his assistant Troy brags about how he's about to buy an F-150 hybrid, Heider's like, can you not drive it to work right after the election? People are going to be like, see, they got that big George Soros payout-- your "Ford Soros," he says.

Natalia Contreras

Heider's phone rings. It's Aubree again.

Natalia Contreras

In a mostly Republican part of town, a controller went out. The line was long. This is the kind of thing that happens in every election. Usually it's no big deal, but now everyone is suspicious they're being targeted.

Natalia Contreras

This happened on a huge scale in Arizona, and people did throw a fit about it. Aubree tells Heider she's going to go check it out for herself.

Zoe Chace

It's almost like he's deputized her. Sometimes they seem like colleagues. I can't tell whose strategy that is, or whether it's working, but it seems to calm things. In the end, the broken scanner wasn't a big deal.

Natalia Contreras

Finally, when we get near 7:00 when polls will close, poll watchers start piling in from voting sites around the county. Not as many as we had expected. When Aubree walks in, her first question is about Heider.

"Do you know where he is?" she says to someone. "He probably doesn't want me walking around here too much on my own." Again, Heider and Aubree interact like colleagues almost-- colleagues who don't really like each other, frenemies?

Natalia Contreras

Notice how they're talking past each other-- but so politely.

Zoe Chace

Finally, it's time to count the votes. There's one hilarious looking ritual first.

Zoe Chace

The absentee ballots are on a USB drive. And to move that USB drive into the tally room where they'll be added to the results, the drive is lifted high into the air for all watchers to see and marched like a winning quarterback into the next room. It's symbolic of Heider's whole approach to things-- flamboyantly transparent.

Zoe Chace

Someone holds a GoPro up high so the entire march of the USB drive is recorded in case anyone asks later, what happened between the two rooms?

Natalia Contreras

We get to the back room where they're counting votes. This is where the hardcore election skeptics are camped out for the night.

There's Amy. She's in a red, white, and blue dress with a clipboard, scrutinizing the way the ballot bags are sealed. Mike, he's a retired air mechanic who says, if we can audit planes, why can't we do better with elections here? He's there. Karen, she has a lawsuit against Heider.

There's maybe a dozen people he deals with regularly, like Aubree. He knows all of these people well, and he's trying to anticipate what they'll want. And does it work? Are they satisfied?

Natalia Contreras

Again, here's Aubree.

Natalia Contreras

Like what?

Natalia Contreras

Do you think that's helped in any way your confidence in the system, if you will?

Zoe Chace

Even after everything Heider's done to convince her otherwise, she doesn't believe the process is secure enough in Tarrant County to say for sure that the votes were accurately counted. This past year I've wondered, can you convince someone that an election is not stolen?

And what I realized watching Heider is, that is not the right question to ask right now. That's an endpoint we're not going to arrive at. The activists aren't going away. Instead, what Heider is trying, he's integrating the election skeptics and all their questions into the elections office and the way it works.

Natalia Contreras

And in this new normal on this election night, the job's gone as well as he could hope. The activists still have their doubts, a few of them already setting up meetings with Heider for later that week. There's a new conspiracy every day.

But no one yells. No one throws a fit saying they're being obstructed. And Heider rushes around to everyone, like the anxious owner of a restaurant, checking on their regulars, making sure they have everything they need. And the votes get counted.

Ira Glass

Natalia Contreras is a reporter with Votebeat. You can find her work at Votebeat.org. Zoe Chace is a producer on our show.

Coming up, we watch a guy during the exact moment he is crossing through the looking glass to the other side. And we can see it, because he's on national TV on a game show. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Through the Looking Glass. People trying to coax each other across the border from one way of seeing the world to another way.

Ira Glass

We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Who is Ryan Long?

So in this story you're going to see a guy trying to actually coax himself through the looking glass from one reality into another. Lots of people actually saw him do this. One of our producers, Bim Adewunmi, was one of them.

Bim Adewunmi

Back in May, I became mildly obsessed with a stranger on TV. It was a big guy. He looked Black, biracial maybe, and he was wearing a light purple shirt under a black vest.

I was ill on my sofa. It was 7:00 PM on a Friday. You know what that means.

Bim Adewunmi

A rideshare driver. I watch a lot of Jeopardy, but if you don't, you might not know that it is not that common among all the professors and the grad students and other learned contestants to see an Uber driver. Also unusual in my years of watching-- big Black guys.

Ryan won that first game, and then he kept on winning. In the end, he won almost $300,000 over 16 games, becoming the ninth winningest Jeopardy winner of all time. After pretty much every win, he would do this thing that I began to look forward to. He'd grip the lectern, look down, almost defiantly refusing to meet the host's eye, and shake his head. His body language basically screamed "this can't be real, this is impossible."

Bim Adewunmi

I took a photo of Ryan on my TV screen that first night he won, and posted it to Instagram. "You have my sword," I captioned the photo, a line from "The Lord of the Rings."

Here's a thing about me-- I love trivia. I was a childhood library lurker who hoarded facts, just waiting to bust them out and impress people. I love remembering dates and locations, and I delight in wordplay.

Watching Ryan win again and again reminded me of myself a little, except he was me to the power of 100. It sounds condescending and weird, because we're about the same age, in our very late 30s, but I was proud of him, I think.

I rarely feel affection for Jeopardy winners. They're too mannered, too serious, too odd. But I was rooting for Ryan. I felt like I knew him.

He had tweeted after his winning run something that stuck with me, something about a box. "Sometimes," he wrote, "it seems like society put you in a box and you are classified as a certain thing, with a certain destiny, even though you may feel differently inside."

I wondered how somebody who felt so familiar to me had ended up dominating the Jeopardy stage. What was that like for him? What box did he think he was in, and how had Jeopardy helped him break out of it?

Honestly, I just wanted to meet him. And so, along with my colleague and co-Ryan fan, Zoe Chace, I got on a train to Philadelphia. He met us in his new truck at the station.

Bim Adewunmi

Which, by the way, we knew immediately that was Ryan's car. It still has that new car gleam, and it is huge-- exactly the car you would expect from a man whose happy place is his car. Even before he became a rideshare driver, he would spend hours driving around navigating the potholes of Philly with his music on. So Zoe and I ended up spending all day on the road with him and meeting a couple of his friends. And the first question from Ryan felt like something you might ask a friend.

And about 20 minutes after we'd met, an aside about Michael Jackson's autobiography somehow led us here.

I'll tell you this for free-- There is no loneliness like the loneliness of those of us in the "Timothy Dalton is the best James Bond" camp.

The road to the Alex Trebek stage at Sony Pictures Studios started early for Ryan. Like me, he was a voracious reader who liked to read the dictionary for fun. Unlike me, Ryan was reading the newspaper by the age of two.

And his mom Angela told me he used to carry the cards from the trivial pursuit game she'd bought. One of his favorite childhood books was "Anguished English," an anthology of grammar humor. And, yes, Ryan loved Jeopardy.

Ryan, who's a big man now, describes himself as "husky" when he was a kid, which made him feel awkward and self-conscious. Plus, he was also in the midst of working out his mixed identity back then. His mom is Black and his father was white. And on top of that, he was an obviously smart kid. So they put him in the gifted classes, which also made him feel a little isolated.

Bim Adewunmi

This was his first understanding that people have ideas about you, and those ideas might not match how you feel about yourself. It was also the first time Ryan felt put into that box that he tweeted about. And in order to fit, he had to cut parts of himself off.

In the end, Ryan didn't do great at school. His parents had split up when he was 13, and he'd gone to live with his dad. A few years later, when he was 17, his father died and Ryan moved back in with his mom.

According to Ryan, he barely graduated high school, and then did a year of community college before dropping out. It's like he got so used to hiding away the brightest parts of himself, that he got really good at it-- too good. The way Ryan tells it, he settled into the role of underachiever, and that made him prone to self-sabotage.

Bim Adewunmi

For all the potential of his big brain, Ryan had the feeling that life was slipping him by. And when he became a father in his 30s, the question of lost potential became moot. He needed money to live and to provide, so he did all sorts of jobs-- airport security worker, warehouse grunt, package handler, office clerk.

Bim Adewunmi

But then in January 2021, Ryan got sick with COVID. He had it really bad, and was in hospital for three weeks. He had to be given oxygen to stay alive. And he still has the photo of his saturated lungs, given to him by his doctor as a reminder of how close he came to death.

When he was discharged, he was a wreck. His knee gave out and he got diabetes. More than 20 years of the working grind seemed to catch up to him all at once.

Bim Adewunmi

Getting COVID and surviving it was, in Ryan's own words, "a rockfall that turned into a landslide." It made him want to get out of his old habit of minimizing himself, this urge to snatch defeats from the jaws of victory.

That's when he got the call from Jeopardy. He'd taken the online test on a whim. And now, Ryan thought, this could be the thing he'd been hoping would come along to shake things up.

That question I'd had about his journey to Jeopardy, it turns out the literal trip was a joint effort. He had about $200 to spare that month, and he had to make his own way to California. So he turned to his mom and his friends. He borrowed his mother's luggage and packed some black trousers plus two shirts-- one he'd bought himself, and the other bought by his mom.

Remember how he made the decision as a teenager to hide his light under a bushel so he could be more normal? Now he was making another decision-- this time the guy whose tendency was to downplay his intelligence and his abilities was not going to get in his own way.

Bim Adewunmi

He got on the plane to California. He'd never been off the east coast in his life. He was determined to enjoy himself. And he told himself, no expectations. Unlike some other wannabe winners, he did no tutorials on technique, no arduous studying.

Bim Adewunmi

On the day of his first game Ryan felt overwhelmed, but he worked through it. He let himself cry, which was an effective release valve for some of the emotional turmoil he was feeling. And then he pumped himself up with some music. Once he felt more in control, he headed to the studio to the show he'd watched since he was a little boy in Philly.

Bim Adewunmi

So that was a somewhat nerdy beginning of his 16-game streak. He puts the success down to two things-- knowing stuff and staying calm under pressure.

Bim Adewunmi

In game mode, Ryan's demeanor was testament to the decision he'd made to go out there and just have fun. He laughed at himself when he flubbed the Daily Double, or realized he had bet too low on an easy answer. He delivered his cute little anecdotes in the "getting to know you" segments. But once the game was won, that easy grace was gone.

Bim Adewunmi

Instead, when his new total winnings were announced, he'd do that thing I loved. The head duck, and looking like he wanted the ground to swallow him up.

Bim Adewunmi

That's Brad Pearson. He was a challenger of Ryan's, also a Philly local. The two of them stayed friends after the show. They even had a little watch party at Brad's house the night his episode aired.

Over cheesesteaks, he told us about playing against Ryan in his fifth game. Contestants get to watch preceding games before they tape theirs. And all eyes were on Ryan, the returning champ, game after game. Brad was sitting with Tony, another of the pool of challengers.

Brad noted the same thing I did-- that Ryan was a real all-rounder, banging out answers to everything from biblical locations, to the alumni of Saturday Night Live.

Bim Adewunmi

Ryan actually moved away when Brad was talking about him so admiringly. It's like the glare of praise was too bright for his eyes. He couldn't look directly at it. He did something similar when his mom bragged about him, and again when his friend Mari, who we also met, mentioned how great of a guy he was.

His face got all scrunched up, like it physically pained him to hear. But even so, over the course of his games, he beat contestants with far more impressive on-paper CVs. Even after winning, he knew that he wasn't seen as a typical Jeopardy winner.

Bim Adewunmi

Ryan's tweet thread about the box, he'd written that he didn't really believe a person could break out of the box. But, he added, I feel like this thing that just happened is proof that you can. And I wondered what he'd found outside of the box since he had managed to get out.

Returning to Philly, it was hard for Ryan to know how to act. His episodes wouldn't be on television for another few weeks. It was like he had to pretend something monumental hadn't just happened to him.

There's no way to talk about Ryan's time on the show without talking about the money he won. $299,400 is quite the windfall. He no longer works as a rideshare driver, having paid off his old car and bought this new truck.

On the advice of his mom, he met up with a couple of people from a community improvement group for advice about what to do with this new earnings. Their advice was that he prioritize himself first, a concept that was completely foreign to him, and set up a chain reaction of self improvements.

Bim Adewunmi

Ryan started working out again. He got himself a therapist. He went digging in his family tree and found a book written by his third-time great grandfather, a staunch Methodist abolitionist. And he bought movies.

Bim Adewunmi

Getting to finally buy Criterion movies, working on his LaMotta style self-loathing, spending hours researching family history, the whole "Project Ryan," it's being facilitated by the most precious commodity his Jeopardy run brought him.

Bim Adewunmi

I had come to Philly to talk to Ryan about navigating outside expectations as they crashed up against what he thought about himself, and I got that. But I also got this accidental reflection on American capitalism, and how so many of us are served so poorly by the way life is currently set up as all work and no time. Jeopardy provided a very specific Ryan-shaped escape hatch. It gave him the space to stare into that crack between realities, and fish out all the elements of what his life could be.

Ira Glass

Bim Adewunmi is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Lilly Sullivan. People who put together our show include Bim Adewunmi, Elna Baker, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michal Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Cassie Howley, Chana Joffe-Walt, Valerie Kipnis, Tobin Low, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Laura Starecheski, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Nathan Rott, Kateryna Malofieieva, Jessica Huseman, Troy Harvard, Stacey Behymer, Lizzy Berryman, Rachel VanLandingham, Jake Perlman and Jacob Rockey.

Our website, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free during your holiday travel, and where we have merch for all your gift giving needs, including new t-shirts, sweatshirts, and onesies, posters, temporary tattoos. Where does all this magic happen? 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, he has always wanted that job at NASA-- you know the one doing the countdown when they launch a rocket? But I don't know, I don't think he's got the right stuff.

Torey Malatia

Three, two, one?

Ira Glass

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