Endless Thread - A Trip Down Memory Lane

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

It's that time of the year again: Endless Thread is going on a winter break. But don't miss us too much. We'll be back in 2021 with a fresh, new, weird, and wonderful version of the show. Before we say goodbye for now, we check in with some of our favorite guests of episodes past. Episodes updated include: Get Motivated: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2019/01/11/get-motivated Infectious, Pt 1: Scabs, Pus, and Puritans: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2019/05/03/scabs-pus-puritans Brain Melt: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/11/09/brain-melt Nick, Jess, and David: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2019/12/20/autistic-redditors-explain-autism Shipwrecked: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2019/06/14/shipwrecked Dear Anon: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/11/16/dear-anon

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Yo, it is Friday, my dudes. TGIF, mother truckers. What's a mother trucker, Ben? I think it's like a lady long haul trucker who is also a maternal figure who you would definitely want to meet at a truck stop. And she might, she might like help you

avoid a puddle of slush and then say something like, watch your step there, darling. And you just like basically would want to like follow her to the ends of the earth. And she'd say things like, what in tarnation? Why not? Sure, why not? Yeah. Okay. That feels right to me. Yeah. Well, this is now the official definition of mother trucker.

I accept no substitutes. We digress as per usual. And we have some housekeeping for y'all. Thing one, we are about to go on our customary. winter break. We will miss you. You will miss us, hopefully. While we are on break, we are going back into the lab with Endless Thread. We'll be making some tweaks to the show informed by your feedback this past season as we get ready to rocket next season. Have no fear. We'll be back in your feed in 2021 with that fresh, new, tasty, weird, wonderful version of Endless Thread that we've

been working on. In the meantime, it's time to bid farewell to 2020 in the appropriate manner, I hope. Kill it with fire? Maybe. You might need holy water and silver bullets too. Or a vaccine. Actually, we will definitely need a vaccine. Most importantly, be excellent to each other and to yourselves in this holiday season.

In the meantime, we bring you a smorgas board of endless thread episode updates. So, Ben, we've been making this show for almost three whole years now. And during that time, we've talked a lot about personal resolutions and goals. And I think you had a New Year's resolution for 2020, didn't you? I think it was a continuation of 2019's resolution, which was Dadbod to Radbaud. And I regret to inform you this three-month plan is now a, it's now maybe a 30-year plan, maybe. But I am working out, so, you know, that's good. That's great. Yeah. Well, you know what? 2020 didn't go as planned for most people. But I, for once in my life, kept a resolution. So I'm just going to brag about it a tiny amount because I can't believe that I actually did it, which is I said I was going to do yoga once a week. And this week, a little early, I will have completed that. I counted them up 52 yoga classes in less than as many weeks.

But you still can't swim worth a dam. I can't swim worth a dam. That's okay. 20-21. We'll try again. We first started talking about New Year's resolutions in January of 2019. With an episode we did in honor of the Get Motivated subreddit, we spoke to a guy named Jared Wells, who has cystic fibrosis. It's a genetic disease that affects primarily the lungs and the digestive system.

And just a year earlier, Jared had hit a low point. Yeah, he was in bad shape health-wise. His lung function had taken a severe dip. He was underweight. He and his mom had been discussing hospice plans. But Jared told us that the very next day, after he had that conversation with his mom, he had this epiphany in the hospital, that there had to be more, that he wanted to really start fighting for his life.

So instead of continuing to let himself waste away, Jared started trying to bulk up. He started bodybuilding. What is the part of your body that you're most proud of right now? I'd have to see my abs. Can you describe what you look like now? So I'm about 150 pounds. My arms really aren't that big.

They're getting there. My thighs are still kind of thin. I've got some pretty decent calves. and then ripped ripped abs and then I'm building my chest up do you have like a target weight target like circumference of your bicep or something

no no target circumference or anything like that but I do I would like to be at least my goal weight is 180 180 yeah that's my goal weight too but I'm 30 pounds heavier than that hey man we're both 30 pounds away so hell yeah I'll meet you in the middle Sounds a good deal.

Now, to make this kind of progress, Jared was obviously hitting the gym big time, which was all fine and good until, of course, this year when gyms had to close up shop for a while. Having cystic fibrosis also means that Jared is immunocompromised. So I caught up with him recently to see how the pandemic has affected his regimen. I want to know everything, but I guess I'll just start with, are you still bodybuilding? So I did kind of have to take a step away from that just with everything that's going on in the world right now. You know, gyms are still open, but I, you know, with me being at such a high risk, I don't want to take that chance of, you know, catching COVID-19 or just getting sick in general. Yeah, of course. So I just kind of been staying away from the gym.

You know, I'm still exercising as much as I can. but until everything starts to clear up and things get better, I think it's best for me to stay away. And Jared told me he's actually already kind of a pro at keeping a safe distance from people. A lot of the times the CF patients, we have to be six feet away from each other. Oh, really? Just in general? Yeah. Any CF patient that's like close to another one, we have to stay six feet apart. just to prevent any, you know, sickness or germs that, you know, one CF patient might be used to, the other wouldn't be,

and could seriously compromise the health of that patient. So we're always at quite a distance from each other. So I'm pretty used to that. I mean, really the hardest thing was trying to find toilet paper. Welcome to the club. How's the 180 goal? Has Jared hit 180 yet? I wish I was there.

That is still the goal. I've pretty much just retained at like 150. I had had a few brief moments where I was hitting 160 and I was doing really well. But it can be really tough to retain that weight. You know, it's not tough for me, but it's tough for Jared. Well, there is an area in which Jared has made some major gains. There was a new medication introduced to the CF community that has been huge for pretty much every CF patient. I think it's about 90% of patients can use it.

And for me, when I started taking it, I think I jumped up about 12% in lung function in the first two weeks. Wow. Jared's also working on a nutrition certification and something called a transformation specialist. certification so he can help other people make huge positive changes in their lives. My biggest thing would be to not hesitate. The moment it pops in your head to do something like, you know, go work out or go for a walk, just get up and do it right then and there. Don't give yourself the opportunity to put it off. Well, Jared, thank you so much for making time to talk to us and keeping us updated on your life. Of course. And thank you again for having me.

a lot. Yeah, we're rooting for you, man. You let us know when you hit that 180. Oh, I definitely will. High fives, Jared. For our next update, we again travel back to a simpler time, the spring of 2019. When the public health disaster we were worrying about was measles. Measles, of course, is a disease we have an effective vaccine for, and which was declared eliminated in the United States back in the year 2000. But in the year 2019, Measles was making a comeback in a bad way, largely thanks to anti-vaxers, a vocal minority spreading misinformation about vaccines. So, Endless Thread released a five-part series about the history of vaccine skepticism, which has much deeper roots than any of us expected before reporting the series. Public health expert and epidemiologist Renee Nahara was a key part of our

reporting. He's the editor of an educational resource called The History of Vaccines. We checked in with Renee to see how he's handling the pandemic. It's totally something that I was not anticipating even when the pandemic began, and I was a little bit giddy as an epidemiologist saying, oh, this is going to be great. It's a pandemic. It's what we live for. It definitely is not fun anymore. Renee is the senior epidemiologist at a county health department in the D.C. area, and he says things escalated quickly.

I was working, you know, 60, 80 hours a week at the very least. I was made the branch director for the outbreak response, and so I was dealing with a lot of epidemiologists, public health nurses, and other professionals going to nursing homes, going to facilities that had an outbreak. Renee's wife also works in health care as a physician's assistant in an emergency department, and they also have a three-year-old daughter, who has been doing her own type of public health advocacy.

She wears her mask, no problem. She even has this phrase that she says, mask it or casket peoples, to people who are not wearing a mask. They don't understand what she's saying, thankfully. So I hope that she doesn't say it to the wrong person. But, you know, we're going to keep working. That's what we do.

While it's been a grim year, Renee is hopeful about the number of vaccines in production and the tools at scientists' disposal for fighting off the disease. Hopefully the science and everything that has gone into vaccines for the last couple of hundred years will go into making a COVID vaccine in what would be record time, right? The record right now is a mom's vaccine, which was four years from the time of conception to the time of delivery. Now we have a compressed timeline probably a year, probably a year and a half until we have a vaccine from when the pandemic began.

So we're looking at 2021, mid-2020, late-2020, to have the vaccine fully available. Okay, there's been a lot of good vaccine news recently, but four years as the previous record? that's a little bit yikes. Another yikes is the amount of vaccine skepticism and distrust driven by misinformation that is out there. But Renee says one silver lining of how bad the pandemic has been is that it's a motivator for people who are on the fence to follow the science instead of the conspiracy theories. I have seen plenty of anti-vaccine people change their tunes when it comes to COVID-19. Now they want the vaccine.

Now they want to push for it. Now they want it because they can see how a disease without a vaccine, seem to control it can really get out of hand. Next up is an update on an episode we did back in November of 2018 called Brain Melt. You remember this one, Ben? I would have, but my brain melted. Oh. Just kidding.

I do remember this. This was a woman named Stephanie who had something pretty freaky happen in the third trimester of her pregnancy. It started with insomnia and restless leg syndrome, but as she got closer to her due date, she started acting strange. Yeah, Stephanie, became distant and incoherent and even started hallucinating. So her family took her to the emergency room where she got an MRI.

And the lady operating it was trying to get me to stop moving. But it's like I had restless leg syndrome so I couldn't stop moving my legs. And so I started crying. And the last thing I remember is her saying, if you don't stop moving, we're going to have to start this over again. And then I black out. I don't remember anything after that for the next two weeks. During that two-week period, Stephanie's baby was delivered by C-section. She doesn't remember it at all, or anything about the first week of her baby's life.

She eventually came too, and her daughter is totally healthy, thankfully. But what happened to Stephanie, why her brain went haywire, her doctors couldn't say definitively. We spoke to one of those doctors in the episode, a neurologist named Joanna O'Leary. When I first got into medicine, I thought that I would know the answer to everything. But the further you get into medicine, the more you realize that, you know, our tools are not as sensitive as we want them to be, and we don't have as many tools as we need to answer every question. And if we can't figure it out, often we just end up watching people over time and seeing if it becomes more apparent what's going on. Now, obviously, in Stephanie's case, she didn't have time because her brain was melting. her neurologist's best guess at the time was autoimmune encephalitis,

a swelling in the brain that may have been caused by some sort of bacterial infection. And it can result in permanent brain damage. But Stephanie seemed to have made almost a full recovery when we spoke to her two years ago. Emphasis on the almost, though, because when I reached back out to her about having a follow-up conversation, she said that listening back to herself on the podcast now makes her cringe. I think in the episode I spoke really slowly and at the time I thought I was like

yeah I feel great like I'm good I'm you know I'm back but then right now when I listen to myself I'm like oh my gosh I think I'm talking so slow so I don't think I was back Stephanie told me she did months of speech therapy to get her vocabulary back which helped with getting what she calls her

sassy sarcastic personality back do you feel like you are back to what was Stephanie 100% before this all happened? Or do you feel like you're just operating on kind of a different level now? Well, it's hard to explain. I would say that I notice tiny differences where I'd be quick to make like a sarcastic remark. Maybe it doesn't come as quickly. Like I'm a little slower on the joke or the uptake. But no one but myself would not.

know that, you know, but it's something that I notice. So I guess if I had to, like, honestly answer, I would say maybe I'm, you know, 95 percent, but everyone else thinks that I'm great. And that's fine. Stephanie's doctors still aren't sure what exactly caused her encephalitis, but they're pretty sure that it was triggered by her pregnancy. So Stephanie and her husband have decided not to have any more children, at least not biologically. Stephanie's daughter is a I'm bunchous, happy, two and a half-year-old now. And she's been spending a lot of time with her while working from home during these corona times, which has been great.

But overall, these pandemic months have been a really anxious time for her family. I'm really afraid of getting it. I think my husband's really afraid of me getting it because we've read a couple articles where encephalitis is one of the symptoms. So, and again, I don't know if I'm more prone to it or, whatever, but it's just like that scares me a lot. So we're on the more cautious side because I don't, like I said, I don't want to go into the hospital again, especially if people can't come visit me. Like, without the support I had last time, I just, I don't know how I would fare, you know? And so, I mean, life is so precious and you got to treat it that way.

We'll be back in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

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Almost exactly one year ago, at the end of 2019, we made an episode called Nick, Jess, and David. We featured the stories of three autistic redditors, each with different experiences and perspectives about what it means to be autistic. Jess, if you remember, was the teenager who was eating Panda Express in a Utah food court when her mom told her she was autistic. Her response? How cool, that makes sense. Like, yeah, it's definitely nice having the diagnosis because, like, you know, not having it wouldn't mean I'm not autistic. It just means now it's like I have a name for the stuff I go through.

To us, this was a surprising response. Because it's easy for neurotypical people to slip into thinking of autism as a disability. When for a lot of people, including Jess, they wouldn't change that part of themselves. even if they could. Still, Jess was facing some big challenges when we last talked, including an intense sensitivity to light. She was covering herself up with hoodies and multiple pairs of sunglasses, feeling trapped in a room at times.

Anyway, you called her up to check in. Jess, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. It's nice to talk to you again, my friend. Yeah, it is really weird hearing your voice again. But like in a good way. Jess is back at school now, 11th grade, and she's doing a lot better health-wise. I remember the last time, like we were recording, I had on two pairs of sunglasses, a hoodie over my head to block light from the sides and a sun had on indoors.

And the only reason I had the lights on was so the woman who was recording my end of the audio, the interview could see. I was really unhealthy. but since then, I've done a lot to, I mean, be able to sit here now wearing no sunglasses or hat. Doctors are still a little unclear about what caused Jess's intense form of light sensitivity. But Jess thinks it was a result of a lifetime of masking, a word that refers to the ways she has adapted her behavior over the years to better fit what is typically deemed to be normal. I think that's what happened to me. called burnout. And because a lot of like social things just don't come naturally to me, it just takes

more energy out of me to like go through the same things. It just sort of at one point, your body, my body was just like, I can't do this anymore. And it took a year for it and need to recover. Have you learned anything additional about what it means to be autistic since we last talked to you? I think I have. I think a big part of it is being resilient. It's this sort of quiet resilience about, you know, being born into this world that like never quite makes sense but just at least I never really had time or like the means to stop and be like why like something is off. Why like things just weren't clicking. And I got to give props to my younger self. Like, I don't remember a lot, but yeah, it was really tough.

One of the things that is not changed in Jess's life is her love of writing. When we spoke to Jess last year, she explained that writing was a way to help her process her own experiences and also to help neurotypical people better understand her the way that she experiences the world. Last year, she shared a poem with us about a time she attended a friend's birthday party. This year, she told me about a whole new type of poetry she's gotten into. It's called Martian poetry. It's a niche genre of poetry where people write about everyday mundane things from the perspective of a Martian for whom those mundane things don't fully make sense. I found that oftentimes when I'm writing from the perspective of, you know, a kid who's like half Martian and human or whatever, it's sort of, it, like, undoes this mental block I've learned to have in my mind.

I just have always tried to like express myself in a way that I want neurotypical people to understand. And it's not even a conscious thing. But when I write from the Martian kid, like I'll realize I actually think that's how I feel about that. But because I'm not writing it for me, I'm writing it for the fictional Martian kid. I can sort of it like circumvents this, this filter I've learned to always use. which I actually think is really fascinating. I find I'm glad I've found this way to sort of get my thoughts out

because my thoughts are pretty interesting, I think. Do you want to read us something? Sure, let me pull it up. One topic Jess is tackled in her Martian poetry, memory. Specifically, the idea of being unable to physically touch memories and only being able to interact with them in other ways. It's called You Cannot Touch a Memory. You cannot touch a memory. It has no form or mass. An electric drawing penned in gray records your every past. You cannot touch a memory. They only can be made, but age or force or your own mind can take one away. You cannot touch a memory, but you have touched my heart. I find my mind is heavier than it was at the start. I think this is what people mean when two must break apart. The massless memories they carry make a heavy heart.

There's sadness leaking out my eyes. It dribbles down my cheeks. It sits in the wet corners of my paradoxal crease. I'm leaving with my heart now. I'm leaving yours way down. With a piece of mine, I have a piece of yours. Hey, I'll see you around. We'll see you around.

And Jess, if you're listening to this episode on the day it came out, happy freaking 18th birthday. One of the other episodes we've been wanting to update you on is also about an important day, but it's a tough one. It was the day that a 28-year-old man died suddenly and left his partner, T.J. in shock and grief. The kind of grief that lasts for a long time and makes the person grieving think about the process of grieving itself.

I guess it's like the idea of like going through like a dark tunnel and like you can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel but like you don't know where the tunnel ends. And so you just keep going through the tunnel until you get to the other side. And you don't really know when that will be. But you just have to keep, otherwise you're stuck in the middle of the tunnel, right? Four years ago, T.J.'s partner died suddenly one morning of a brain aneurysm that was caused by an underlying heart condition, which she and his family didn't even know about.

It was a really difficult and shocking thing. And while T.J. was spending time on Reddit, she started to find people who have understood what she was going through in a way that nobody else really could. I had posted, I think, in like, grave support, just kind of saying, like, I don't know what to do. I lost my partner, and I don't know how to function. And somebody said, oh, you can go to widowers, which has really been a saving grace for me in a lot of ways. Despite the name, the R-slash widowers community is not just for widowers. The community describes itself as a place for anyone who has lost a companion to share and heal.

There are people who lost partners years ago, and there are people who lost partners hours ago. A super common post in this community was a very touching description of what it's like to lose someone, written by a guy nobody really knew named G. Snow. G Snow's a teacher, and one day he saw a post on Reddit from a user who said they were 17 and their best friend had just died. So I just kind of responded off the top of my heart. It took no more time to write it than whatever my typing skills were. I never really intended it to be for any other audience except for that 17-year-old.

It was just me writing to him or her. I don't know which. The passage has been floating around ever since, and it has taken on a life of its own. Sometimes G. Snow will open up his computer and have 40, new messages about this stream of consciousness piece of writing he did. He says he responds to every single message. We made this episode about a year and a half ago. How's TJ doing? Well, for one thing, she's got a new way to describe grief. You know, grief is kind of like, let's compare it to a ball. And you put that ball inside of a box and at first it fills the entire box. But then over time, the ball gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

And at some point, it might just be a tiny stone. And it's not because the ball gets smaller, but the box gets bigger, that you fill it with other things. T.J. says that for her, these days, the grief of losing her partner is more like a marble in her pocket. It will always be there, but it doesn't weigh her down as much as it used to. She's also used it, and the touching message G. Snow wrote about losing someone to help others. About this time last year, a friend of a friend lost her husband in a terrible accident in New York City. And my friend told me about her friend who was feeling very lost, who was only 29 years old, which was the same age I was when I lost my partner.

unexpectedly. And so I was able to connect with her and I was able to share with her G. Snow's reading. And I introduced her to the widower's community, which she says has helped her. So, you know, I feel like in the way that G. Snow said his writing was a gift, I feel like I'm now giving that gift to other people who have experienced the same thing in my own life. And I'm hopeful that in the way that it's helped me, that it's helped other people. TJ, thanks a lot for checking in. Yeah, thank you guys. If you want to read G. Snow's message, head to our website, WbUR.org.org slash endless thread.

Okay, we've got one more update for you. And if this isn't straight out of the before times, I don't know what it is. Hey, Ben. Hey, Amory. It's Chris Waters. You might remember me as the architect. The architect. Crusher of dreams, builder of puzzles.

The person who sent Amory and me on a wild goose chase around historic Alexandria, Virginia, because that is his job. After a viral Reddit thread in which Chris basically created a custom scavenger hunt for another redditor, is part of the site's annual Secret Santa Santa. gift exchange, he launched the company Constructed Adventures. Which is kind of what you might imagine. You hire Chris, aka the architect, to put together something, and then you go to the start spot, and you're off.

Needless to say, we humble podcast hosts who don't get out that much were pretty into it. And not just because it started at a cute little creepery that was filled with books. Oh, we got a cipher. Oh, I see something. Okay. It says locate the green book behind you. Turn to page 192. Oh, my God.

Use this page to decode the message. Oh, my God. Some of us were maybe just a little bit excited, and we had a fantastic time running all over historic Alexandria, like Nick Cage and Diane Kruger. I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence. Can you imagine, though? going out into the real world, running around, grabbing a bunch of door handles,

eating inside of a restaurant, sounds amazing. It sounds so good. When we talked to Chris, business was really starting to pick up. Our adventure with him was Adventure 42. Since then, he's come close to doubling that number. In short, it's been wild. I've traveled all over the United States. I've been everywhere from Asheville, North Carolina, Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Portland, Phoenix, Miami, New Jersey, San Antonio, just kind of hitting every point of the U.S. I've also been to a couple other countries, did a merit proposal in Barcelona. I actually got deported from Canada. That's a wild story. Not quite as interesting as you might think, but still really fun. Here's the thing, though. Pandemic times for a real-life adventure architect? Not great.

So everything was amazing. and then pandemic hit, and it crushed me. As you could imagine, I'm an event planner, and I'm doing about as well as you would imagine an event planner would do in a global pandemic, which is not that great. But I'm definitely okay. I'm very lucky and I'm very thankful for what I have,

and I know a lot more people got hit a lot harder than myself. So I'm happy to say that the business still exists I am still working, I am still doing things, but I'm not traveling nearly as much. Actually, I'm not traveling at all. It's been wild. Chris has pivoted, but not to doing what a lot of people in his line of work have done, aka creating Zoom-based treasure hunts. It just didn't feel like it could be in the spirit of constructed adventures. So instead, he's decided to help train the next group of architects.

And the YouTube channel is dedicated to inspiring, and teaching people how to build a fun, immersive treasure scavenger hunt. The initial thought was parents have their kids at home, and they have to work, and they have to try to keep their kids entertained, and the kids can't leave. And so it was little tutorials to try to teach parents, okay, you're going to use a compass and blacklights and set this up. It'll take you, you know, 30 minutes to set up, and then it'll take your kids an hour, an hour and a half to finish, and so you net gain, you know, 30 minutes to an hour of time to

yourself, hopefully if it's done right. And it's kind of gone from there. I've gotten really active in the Constructed Adventure subreddit, which is the same thing. It's dedicated toward inspiration, help when people want to create some immersive fun day. This, for me, is gold, Jerry Gold. Of course, my kids are toddlers, so they'd probably just try to eat, break, or turn any clues they found into some kind of race car or rocket ship. I bet Chris could work with that vibe. I bet he could.

He says, by the way, that he's a little more sedent. these days. When we last met him, he was effectively homeless. He had a PO box and not much else as he traveled around the world. Very architect of him. But now he lives in Portland, Oregon, running YouTube videos out of his office and making money through Patreon. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though. And as much as the pandemic has changed all of our lives, certain things remain eternal. A lot of marriage proposals have happened during the pandemic. And so that's been really, really fun. helping people put together something while everyone's hands are a little bit tied, can't go to restaurants, can't do these things. So consultation and Patreon has kind of kept me afloat. And then I'm just

lucky that my business doesn't have a lot of overhead. I canceled the GPS tracker subscription I had. I had to put my CPA on pause because, you know, don't need to handle a lot of money when there isn't a lot. And I'm just kind of surviving, making these tutorial videos, trying to help people and preparing myself to be ready when, you know, the pandemic ends and we hit another roaring 20s. I'm expecting a second renaissance. Same, Chris. Big same. Yeah, I cannot wait until Chris and all of us get back to real life adventuring, serendipitous, or constructed by the architect.

And I sent her and her husband on this fun treasure hunt kind of into the mountains to go snowshoeing where they found a chest that was hanging by a net with a bag of sand counterbalance. it and she had the her bow and arrow that she'd been instructed to bring with her and she had to shoot down the chest

and that was a lot of fun and then the one after actually got a young lady from Minneapolis Minnesota. Thank you guys for listening by the way if you want to go back

to any of these episodes Get motivated our infectious series Brain Melt Nick Jess and David shipwrecked and Deer Anon you can find links

to each of them in our show notes and at WBUR dot org slash endless thread Also, it takes a big group effort behind the scenes to make this show every week. So thank you to everyone who made the latest season of Endless Threadday's success. That's Josh Swartz, Matt Reed, Paul Vicus, Kat Brewer, Iris Adler, Frank Hernandez, James Lindberg,

Kaya Williams, and especially our friends at Reddit, Michael Pope, Tom Beattie, Victoria Chow, and so many others, too many to thank. We love you all. And listeners, please stay in touch while we're on break. Let us know if you've got an idea for a story. we should chase down a mystery, we should solve a history we need to tell. We will get right on that. As soon as we finish eating all the fruit cake, lodkas, et cetera.

Last one to a holiday food coma is a huge dork. Challenge accepted. Bye! Bye!