866: Watch Out for That Tree

Ira Glass

Tom's an accountant. And he once said this thing to his kids that really stuck with them because it summed up so much about his personality and how he handles decisions at work and with his family. He said it's his job to assess risk. It was part of his thinking, even when he planned family vacations. Planning vacations would take him months. He'd get travel guides, check out national parks. He'd look for hidden gems near the parks that they could visit along the way. He'd check the local weather.

Ira Glass

Also mileage between each spot, number of hours on the road, places to stay, that kind of thing. OK. So one year, the plan was to go to Great Basin National Park in Nevada and hike. And whenever the family would go to a national park, they always liked to do at least one really strenuous and difficult hike as part of the trip. And on this trip, they decided to climb to the top of Wheeler Peak. Tom researched this in advance, of course.

Ira Glass

Of course, he checked the weather forecast for the day.

Ira Glass

His two kids-- Mark, who was 20. Angela, who was 18-- sped ahead up the trail as usual. Tom and his wife, Marion, weren't that far behind. And they're going up the switchbacks, just a lovely, perfect day-- until the two kids get hit by lightning.

Ira Glass

This, of course, is Angela. And I learned this family's story from her when she worked here at our radio show. Basically, she and her brother got to the top of the mountain before their parents. Dark clouds rolled in really fast. Within minutes, it was hailing, the temperature dropped, and there was lightning. The strike which hit Angela and Mark wasn't a direct hit. It probably hit some boulders next to them.

Ira Glass

They run down the mountain towards their parents, who were just a little ways down the mountain, crouched like turtles low in some shrubs so they don't get struck by lightning, getting pelted by hail. They have no idea this has happened to their kids.

Ira Glass

Finally, the kids reach them.

Ira Glass

The kids were shaken up, sore, but no serious injuries.

Ira Glass

Tom, meanwhile, felt two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, he'd taken precautions. He'd checked the weather. He had a spreadsheet. He knew he had planned as well as he could. But at the same time, he felt a lot of guilt for putting the kids in that situation.

Ira Glass

After this trip, he said, any day he took the family out for a hike--

Ira Glass

[LAUGHS]

Ira Glass

OK. So with respect to everybody's religious education right now, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes you make a plan, and random stuff happens that you really could not have anticipated. Today on our program, we have stories of people making very reasonable, very sound plans that emphatically do not work out for them. As somebody once said, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

This American Life, Act One, Forces Outside Our Control. April was going to be their month-- I mean the April that just passed, a couple of months ago. This couple had been waiting years for this. They'd been long distance for an insanely long time, six years. Then they both moved to New York, got married. But he was in school. Now, finally, he was out.

And they were at that moment as a young couple, when you're excited for your life to really kick in. She was pregnant, working full time as a dentist, just three weeks away from maternity leave. He had finished grad school in December. She was 28. He was 30. Noor and Mahmoud-- our story begins in March.

Ira Glass

You know, Reba, the sitcom from the early 2000s with country music star, Reba McEntire. I know, very random.

Ira Glass

OK, I'm kind of slow playing an important fact about these two people, and maybe it's time to be less coy about that. Mahmoud is Mahmoud Khalil. And the thing that had interrupted the plan for April is something you might have heard of. In March, he became the test case, the pioneer, the very first student protester that the Trump administration detained and tried to deport because of his participation in student protests. There was a video that Noor filmed of officers arresting him in the lobby of the student housing. Maybe you saw this. He's standing by the mailboxes when they put handcuffs on him.

Ira Glass

In the video, Mahmoud's back is to the camera. And he looks back towards Noor to comfort her, even though he's the one being arrested.

Ira Glass

He says, it's fine. It's fine. Habibi, it's fine.

Ira Glass

Noor gets on the phone with a lawyer.

Ira Glass

The video got a lot of attention, partly because it was the first video of a student arrested like this-- plainclothes officers, without a warrant, putting him into an unmarked vehicle, not answering basic questions.

Ira Glass

Mahmoud later said it felt like a kidnapping. Part of what was so shocking about it at the time was the fact that Mahmoud Khalil was not here on a student visa or some kind of temporary status. He's a permanent legal resident with a green card, married to a US citizen with a baby on the way, not the kind of person we thought of as a candidate for deportation at the time, long, long ago, back in March.

Since then, the government has attempted to revoke or terminate the visas of over 6,000 students. And Mahmoud Khalil became a symbol, exhibit A for the aggressive new tactics that the administration is using to crack down on dissent. His case will help determine whether the president and secretary of state have the power to kick somebody out of the country for protesting, or anything else they think runs counter to the policy goals of the United States.

Here at our show, we started working on a story about Mahmoud back in March, in the early days when he was still in detention. At the time, some of the most powerful people in the country-- the president and the Speaker of the House-- were calling him an aspiring young terrorist and a mastermind of student violence, a radical, foreign pro-Hamas student. It was all so cartoonish. It made me wonder what the reality was. Who was this man-- Mahmoud Khalil?

And to figure that out, I teamed up with a reporter, Suzanne Gaber, who covered the Columbia protests and travels in some of the same circles as Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. And we interviewed people around Mahmoud Khalil who know him, who described him as a very particular kind of person, somebody who asks a lot of questions, someone who chooses his words with a lot of care. But while he was in detention, the government stopped us and other reporters from interviewing him. He came out in June and we talked to him, finally.

The Trump administration and rightwing media were still describing him as a menace to society. On the left, he was seen as kind of a folk hero. But not a lot has been written about who he really is or what it's been like for him to live through this from day to day-- his arrest, his detention, his new international notoriety. And I'm going to bring Suzanne Gaber on now to present this story with me from this point forward. Hey there, Suze.

Suzanne Gaber

Hey. So yeah, like you said, before the arrest, Mahmoud and Noor were at this turning point in their lives that they'd been planning for years. And specifically, they were focused on two dates coming up in April, just weeks away-- the due date for the new baby, and Mahmoud was about to start a new job, his first job after grad school.

And that moment, before all this happened-- one of their friends described it nicely to us. Her name's Jasmine Sarryeh. Mahmoud and Nour suggested we talk to her. She started as Mahmoud's friend. They're both Palestinian. They were at Columbia grad school together. But then she got close to Noor too. She was the witness at their wedding. Jasmine and Mahmoud were both involved in the Columbia student protests against the war in Gaza. And Jasmine pointed out that in the months before Mahmoud's arrest, he was winding down his student activism.

Suzanne Gaber

When it comes to getting these big, lifechanging plans in motion, Noor and Mahmoud seemed like they have a pretty equal partnership. They both say she's the worrier. He's the calm one. She's the organized one. And he's nonchalant, as he puts it.

Ira Glass

What she's talking about here is something that happened years ago, when he was living in Lebanon and he applied for a job. This is before he came to America. And this turns out to be one of those stories that all couples have, where one partner tells it to prove a perhaps unflattering point about the other partner. And the way this came up is that, in our interview, Mahmoud mentioned in passing that he procrastinates sometimes. And that's when Noor busted out with--

Ira Glass

In the end, they extended the deadline for everybody. He got the job and worked at it for four years.

Suzanne Gaber

So it's March of this year. They're on the cusp of this new life. And Mahmoud gets detained on March 8. ICE officers flew him from New York to Louisiana. He ended up 1,400 miles away in a facility in a remote town called Jena. He lived in a big room with 70 ICE detainees, bunk beds, three urinals, three toilets in that same room, no privacy, lights always on. Noor sent Jasmine to visit him because she was too pregnant to go herself.

Ira Glass

When Mahmoud describes his time, it's nowhere as dark. He was able to call Noor. He talked a lot to his lawyers, helped other prisoners with their paperwork and cases. And everybody around him says that he was always optimistic about his case. He believed he hadn't done anything wrong. And he trusted that the US is a place with rules and laws. That was definitely not true where he grew up. His childhood was in a refugee camp in Syria, where, as a teenager, he'd protested the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Two friends of his were disappeared. At those protests--

Suzanne Gaber

It's hard to imagine now. But when he was first detained, Mahmoud still thought maybe this wouldn't be a huge disruption. They'd get their lives back and he'd be out in time for those two dates in April, the start of his new job and the baby's due date.

Ira Glass

The job was with Oxfam, the humanitarian aid group, doing policy at the United Nations, focusing specifically on the Middle East and the Palestinian territories. It was exactly the kind of job he'd been working towards for years. He'd worked in Lebanon for a group that ran schools for refugees, taught himself English, did similar work for refugees at the British embassy, and then got himself into Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

The start date was coming up, April 1. And when he was arrested, it probably would have been good employee etiquette to contact his future bosses at Oxfam, but he figured that they had heard. He and Noor talked all the time on the phone when he was in detention. And she had access to his email. And he would ask her, did they email? Did they email? Remember, baby on the way-- they were anxious to become a two-income household. They heard nothing. His start date came and went. And two days later, an email arrived, rescinding the job offer.

Ira Glass

Mahmoud and Noor assume that if he hadn't been arrested by the Trump administration, he would still have the job, that it would be hard for Oxfam or for any group doing development work to hire somebody that the White House named as a terrorist sympathizer. Oxfam declined our request for an interview about this. It was April 3 that Mahmoud heard he lost the job. The baby was due April 28.

Suzanne Gaber

Noor told me that she had a deep fear about giving birth alone. And everyone kept telling her, don't worry. Don't worry. Your first baby is usually late. Mahmoud will be out by then. Then she went into labor a week early, April 20. Immediately, she called Mahmoud's lawyers. It's happening. Try and get him out. They asked for an emergency furlough, which prisons sometimes give in urgent family situations like this. They hoped Mahmoud could fly to New York for just the birth with an ankle monitor and check-ins with the government. They were denied in less than an hour. And they ended up in this situation that they both feared-- Noor in a hospital room without him.

Suzanne Gaber

It was 4:00 AM. Mahmoud's crouched on the floor in Louisiana. He's in a room with 70 detainees, and most of them were asleep. So he whispered over the phone.

Suzanne Gaber

Her mom put the phone close enough to her ear so that she could hear him. Every 45 minutes, the phone line would cut out because the detention center limits the length of phone calls. So he'd call back, hoping they would answer.

Suzanne Gaber

When the baby was finally born, a boy they named Deen, they took the phone and put it to his ear. In Muslim families, the father will often recite the adhan, the call to prayer, right after the baby is born, welcoming them into the world. Mahmoud had thought about that moment a lot.

Suzanne Gaber

Two days later, Noor's mom and sister took her home from the hospital. They went to park the car. She took Deen upstairs.

Suzanne Gaber

So April 3, Mahmoud didn't get the new job. April 21, the baby came, and he wasn't there. He was still in detention. And it wasn't clear when or if he'd get out.

Ira Glass

This is as good a spot as any to talk about the charges that were keeping Mahmoud in detention and upending his life and to talk about the stakes of this case for the whole country. Traditionally, of course, the kind of thing that Mahmoud did-- he was part of student protests-- would have been seen as being protected by the Constitution. It's part of our right to free speech. But the argument that the administration is making in court is that the secretary of state has the power to decide if somebody's presence in the United States undermines US foreign policy and then kick them out of the country. This is based on an immigration law enacted at the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s.

And the things that the administration believes that Mahmoud Khalil has done that merit getting kicked out of the country, that would override his right to free speech, those things actually are not spelled out in the government's filings in the case. But when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to explain how Mahmoud undermines US policy at a press conference, she said, Mahmoud first came here to study.

Ira Glass

The administration found a new line of attack on this subject this summer, when Mahmoud did not condemn Hamas in an interview on CNN and another interview on Ezra Klein's podcast, saying the question was a distraction and that he condemned the killing of all civilians. The Department of Homeland Security posted in response, quote, "Mahmoud Khalil refuses to condemn Hamas because he is a terrorist sympathizer, not because DHS painted him as one." As for the administration's bigger point, that the protests themselves were antisemitic, Mahmoud says exactly what so many people say, that it's possible to criticize Israel's actions in Gaza without being either antisemitic or aligned with Hamas.

One thing that's genuinely confusing about the administration's argument in all these student deportation cases is this idea that a student protester can somehow undermine US foreign policy. Like, what could that possibly mean? Sure, students were asking the government to change its foreign policy and not keep funding Israel. But urging some policy change is just normal politics in the United States. President Trump did it when he ran for office. That is not undermining any policy.

The only clue that the administration has given about what this might mean came in April, when the government submitted to the court a brief memo, from the secretary of state, saying that Mahmoud's presence in the United States, quote, "undermines US policy to combat antisemitism around the world and in the United States," but again, no explanation of how this one grad student, who is no longer a grad student, was achieving that lofty goal.

In fact, in immigration court, the administration argued that it should not have to make any kind of argument or explanation or present any evidence at all for how Mahmoud is undermining US foreign policy. The government's lawyers argued that if the secretary of state says that that's true, then that's that, no discussion needed. That's all that's required to deport him. If the government wins this case, presumably the secretary of state would be able to declare, without any explanation or any proof, lots of other people are deportable.

I did reach out to both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, asking how Mahmoud's actions undermine US foreign policy. The furthest I got was this not-very-illuminating answer to my question from a senior State Department official. Quote, "As you know, there's ongoing litigation with respect to this matter. However, our position is that the actions of the United States with respect to Mahmoud Khalil were correct and necessary and fully supported both by fact and by law."

In May, a federal judge ruled that the law that the government is using to go after Mahmoud is unconstitutionally vague. And then in June, the judge said that Mahmoud was likely being targeted for deportation by the administration for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. And he set him free.

Suzanne Gaber

Mahmoud flew home to New York June 21 after 104 days in detention. When Noor and Deen greeted him at the airport, it was only the second time Mahmoud had seen his son in person. The first was in a cold courtroom in Louisiana. And from the moment he returned to New York, there was something new derailing the life he had and Noor had planned-- his own fame.

Suzanne Gaber

His second day in New York, he was mobbed like the Beatles at a rally near Columbia. Security had to push people back. He gave a speech in front of a church, which his friend, Jasmine, decided to skip. She went inside the church and took care of Deen.

Suzanne Gaber

Mahmoud's fame infected everything about their lives. A few weeks after he was released, they were still living in Columbia student housing, an apartment they'd have to move out of soon. Mahmoud was supposed to be finding an apartment for them. And he'd been putting it off.

Suzanne Gaber

Oh, you have a cap, like you're in disguise.

Suzanne Gaber

He needs the disguise because there have been so many threats against them. And he's recognized so often when he goes out without it. When Noor walks on the street with baby Deen, people come up to her. One time, a stranger asked, is that Mahmoud Khalil's son? She didn't know if it was going to be good or bad. It's scary. And mostly, they've avoided leaving the apartment. And when Mahmoud does decide to go outside, it's to go to Washington to spend the day talking to members of Congress or to stand on stage in front of 3,000 people with comedian Ramy Youssef and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Ira Glass

This positive side of his fame, the fact that people pay attention to him, seems, for now, to be deeply outweighed by the negative side. Mahmoud told us that, given the choice, he would no question prefer the life that he was lining up for this year-- the job at Oxfam, being there for Deen's birth, and not being famous-- over the life that he's ended up in. Case in point, it is really not clear what kind of job he's going to be able to get.

Ira Glass

There are two different cases that are going to determine whether Mahmoud will be deported. One is in federal court and may be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. The other is in immigration court. That one could be decided in a few months and could result in his expulsion. If it does, the government says it'll either send him to Syria, where he was born but doesn't have citizenship, or to Algeria, where he's a citizen but has never lived.

Suzanne Gaber

I was at a hearing in immigration court where they talked about where to send him. Four expert witnesses said if he were sent to either place, Mahmoud would be at great risk to be harmed or killed. Probably the most heartwrenching moment of that hearing happened near the end of the day. Mahmoud said if he were deported, he wanted to go alone. He didn't want to expose Noor and Deen to any extra danger because of him.

When he said this in his testimony, I looked over, and I could see Noor crying. Later, she told me this is how he always is, protective of her and his family, now Deen. It's sweet, she said, but sometimes she doesn't agree.

Ira Glass

And that's where this interruption in their plans has left them. They don't know if they'll end up here or abroad, together or apart. They're waiting to see what the new plan for their life is going to be. Coming up, a 16-year-old plans a prank, and a complete stranger from Honduras ends up in a million-dollar deal. What could possibly go wrong with that? That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Watch Out for That Tree-- stories of people who carefully, meticulously plan for one future, and then the plans are derailed by forces much bigger than they are. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Engineer.

The plan that goes a-kilter in this act is actually a prank, a prank done years ago by a child who has now grown up into an adult. His name's Kieran. As a kid growing up in England, he was obsessed with soccer. And his first baby pranks happened on the day that soccer teams in England finished adding new players to their rosters. This always got live TV coverage. Kieran and his friend would head down to where the cameras were set up, doing live news spots.

Ira Glass

But then when they got to middle-school age, they got more ambitious with their pranking. They wanted to start a rumor and get it onto their favorite TV channel, Sky Sports News. Kieran says they designed the rumor to be kind of amusing but also plausible. The rumor they made up was that the soccer player, William Gallas, was going to sign with a not very good team, Birmingham.

Ira Glass

So these kids, they called up a hotel in Birmingham and booked a room in the player's name. This player, William Gallas, is French. So Kieran pretended to be a French sports agent with a kind of terrible French accent.

Ira Glass

That task finished. Room is reserved. He called up the press.

Ira Glass

That "what else can we do?" is the plan that they launched into next, a plan that succeeded at a level that stunned these two kids. OK. So I first heard this story on a podcast I've been listening to Pablo Torre Finds Out, which-- I don't know exactly how to describe this. It's sort of an investigative reporting sports show that's also pretty funny. Anyway, Kieran told the story to Pablo, and then Pablo agreed to adapt it for our show. And so here now to tell you this story is Pablo Torre.

Pablo Torre

At age 16, Kieran Morris was experiencing what can only be described as a puberty of the ego. He was still light headed, a little high off the intoxicating success of his French accent, and now he wanted more. He wanted to go big-game hunting, find another soccer player and engineer an even bigger prank on the global soccer media. The only question was which player they should use. And then one day, in the summer of 2012, the London Olympics happened to be on TV, Honduras versus Morocco.

Pablo Torre

So they went in a few times over months and kept juicing the numbers.

Pablo Torre

But from the beginning, the boldest thing they did is something you can still see right now, forever etched into the Wikipedia history of the page for Olympia midfielder Alexander Lopez. Because Kieran Morris went back to add one more line, a nickname, which be placed at the very top.

Pablo Torre

Diego Maradona is one of the two or three greatest players in the history of soccer. That sound was him achieving immortality in the 1986 World Cup for Argentina against England. He is also one of its most colorfully reckless characters, to say the least. And all of this is to say that Kieran comparing an effectively anonymous soccer player named Alexander Lopez to Diego Maradona was absurd, a real heat check.

But for the people who'd never paid attention to soccer in Honduras, meaning pretty much everyone, this nickname was also plausible. And so the next step of Kieran's plan was to call up a newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's London Times. And the persona Kieran invented this time was an eager freelance journalist named Neil Barker. And as soon as Neil Barker heard a human voice on the other line, he pitched that human an item he had just heard about an Olympic-level prospect named Alexander Lopez.

Because the Honduran Maradona, Neil Barker said, was signing with Wigan, a team in the English Premier League based in Greater Manchester. And Neil Barker sounded legit.

Pablo Torre

The Houston Dynamo signing the Honduran Maradona immediately became Kieran's defining story, because of course it did. Kieran Morris told the story of how he pranked this dumb soccer team-- these credulous Americans in Texas who were so unfamiliar with his favorite sport that he conned him into dropping a million dollars on an edited Wikipedia page-- and he told this yarn, in those terms, to anyone and everyone who would listen.

Pablo Torre

Lopez only lasted a few seasons in Houston-- didn't play a lot. And Kieran began to wonder if his prank had been part of the reason things worked out so badly for Alexander Lopez, if he had callously tampered with the life of a promising young soccer player, setting him up for a fall in Houston, giving fans unrealistic expectations, disappointing coaches and teammates. Kieran felt guilty. And so, about a decade later, Kieran pitched yet another British newspaper, the Guardian this time, on the untold backstory of the Honduran Maradona, the true story of what he'd done.

This reporting trip-- this guilt trip-- is what brought Kieran Morris at long last to Houston, home of the hapless Dynamo, where he could finally discover what really happened once his million-dollar invention showed up for work. Dynamo management remembered Lopez clearly.

Pablo Torre

You kind of need to be a bit more like the Honduran Maradona that was promised, who was, again, like Maradona, one of the fastest and most physical athletes, as well as one of the most infamous, right? But he's known for his athleticism, his physicality, his speed-- also, obviously, rampant cocaine use, as a side note. But the point is that the guy who arrived, he was less than, unsurprisingly, what that fake nickname you made up had suggested.

Pablo Torre

And as Kieran was canvassing the training ground, talking to all these people who work for the Dynamo, he started realizing something important. He discovered that the people he thought were these credulous Americans had actually done the research. They'd taken some international trips to Honduras themselves. It was one thing to write that press release and copy those fake statistics off Wikipedia, which the Dynamo clearly did, but they hadn't outsourced their entire scouting department to some British teenager.

But there was one more thing that Kieran had to do now that he was telling the true story of the Honduran Maradona. And it was simple. Kieran Morris needed to come clean to Alexander Lopez himself. No, Kieran hadn't ruined Lopez's life, it turned out. But he tried to mess with it, did his best, gave him that absurd nickname without ever really thinking through the consequences. So this was a kind of weird confession.

Lopez was now playing for a team in Costa Rica. Kieran found his agent, calmed his own nerves, and, without explaining to the agent why he kept on insisting on interviewing Alexander Lopez in person, Kieran got on a plane. And one day, at a Costa Rican Hilton, the Honduran Maradona walked in.

Pablo Torre

They talked through his career. Lopez had no bad memories of Houston. He had a rough time on a Saudi Arabian team for a while but quit that contract, went to Honduras.

Pablo Torre

And after stalling for as long as he could with details about Lopez's career, Kieran started edging up to the reason he was even there. Had Lopez ever heard of this nickname, the Honduran Maradona?

Pablo Torre

That nickname, The Engineer, is so perfect. It's so perfect because Kieran thought he was the engineer rerouting Alexander Lopez's life. But he wasn't. This entire time, Alexander Lopez had been engineering Alexander Lopez's trajectory, because of course he was, through all the ups and downs which meant that the legend that Kieran had most invented was his own.

Ira Glass

That story was adapted from the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which Pablo likes to say is a show about sports, the way Moneyball is a book about baseball. I've been enjoying it. And he just had a big story this week about salary caps and Kawhi Leonard that made national headlines. Thanks also to his producer, Chris Tumminello.

Our program was produced by Lilly Sullivan with help from Suzanne Gaber. People who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Audrey Fromson, Cassie Howley, Chana Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mando, Stowe Nelson, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Laura Starecheski, Christopher Swetala, and Marisa Robertson-Textor. Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. This week, we say goodbye to our office coordinator, Jendayi Bonds. She is off to teach music to kids, which, frankly, is a much more interesting job than the job she had with us. And she gets to use her talents way more in this new job. We will miss her, though.

Special thanks today to Valerie Caesar, Maryam Alwan, Grant Miner, Carly Schaffer, Ramzi Kassem, Joseph Howley, Jude Taha, Diala Shamas, Shezza Abboushi Dallal, Rosy Fitzgerald, Amber Von Schassen, My Khanh Ngo, Nora Benavidez, Sara Yasin, Ramy Youssef, Lily Saltzberg, Gaia Caramazza, and the filmmakers of The Encampments.

It has been an entire week since I have mentioned that if you become a This American Life partner, you get ad-free listening, you get a greatest-hits archive right in your podcast feed, and you get access to bonus episodes. There are now dozens of them. Some of them are honestly really kind of wonderful. To check them out, subscribe at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners.

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 got into his first bar fight this week. What did it feel like?

Ira Glass

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