Endless Thread - Kickin' It

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

More than 115 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. Alex from Brockport, New York, is determined not to be one of them. He's currently 5 months clean, after using heroin for 5 years, and Reddit is one of several resources that helped him get there. Ben and Amory go to Brockport to talk to Alex, and to the family and friends that supported him along the way.

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. We just picked up a Redator named Alex in the town of Brockport, New York. Just go around here and then go loop to the left here and go straight out the other side. Oh, you got that the side road. Cool. Brockport is a small town near Lake Ontario's southern shore. Just outside of New York State's third largest state. City, Rochester. Alex is 23 years old, skinny white guy, he smokes Marlboro Red 100s, sings in a metal band,

grew up skateboarding, went to the local high school, local four-year college. He's got brothers. His dad and mom split up when he was a little kid, but he seems good with it. He points stuff out as we drive by, giving us the tour. There's a big sledding hill on the right. On the left, there's a big cemetery. Alex says there's a tower in the middle of that cemetery that you can climb and sea all over the place. In the frigid winter, this part of New York State feels pretty desolate, even to outsiders trying to pick out the good stuff. It's a nice little town.

No, no. No, it's not. It looks charming, but this town's got a very bad heroin problem and it's very poor. Holly, New York, this was the first town in the county to have the opiate epidemic hit it. On paper and in person, today at least, Alex is a pretty normal and amiable guy. But here's the thing about him. In the statistic that about one in six people Alex's age in the U.S. have struggled with drug addiction, Alex is the one.

We're in the car together because we just picked him up from group, as he calls it, where every week he and a bunch of other men get together to talk about how their recovery is going. That's where I went to school, actually. That's where I first used opiates, right in that building there. First time I ever knotted out, it was next to my current girlfriend in English class. Yeah, and that's my mom's house, that great one. Oh, okay. The good news is that Alex isn't the really bad kind of statistic.

The 65,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. in a year kind of statistic. Alex made it out, so far. How many days are you clean now? Let's see. Got my counter here, my app. I've been cleaned four months and 15 days this time around. Four months and 15 days. Yep.

Feels great. Is that the longest you've been clean? since you started using? Yep. Yep. By how much? By a month and a half. Last time I was clean for about three months.

But this time is different than any other time. I would say every other time I was clean, I was just abstaining. I'd say this is the first time I'm recovering. Clean is happening to me. The days are passing. And people ask and I have to look at my app now. What's your app? It is Clean Time Counter.

It's a cool little. little half. It just counts you days for you. Using the internet as a tool, whether you're trying to get high or stay clean, isn't new. Back in the 1990s, when Ecstasy was exploding in popularity, there were websites constantly updated with photos of pills and information about whether they were good or not. The same kind of sites exist today. Blue light is a website people use. It's mostly functions as a harm reduction website. So helping people use, but hopefully preventing them from over.

Yeah. You can't learn where to get it on there. That's against their rules, but it is common to see information about that. And then in contrast to that, there's like Reddit, you know, R-slash-opiates recovery. I use that one a lot. Right here. Here is where Alex's story goes from familiar to something a little different. To be a young man and a heroin addict, sadly, isn't all that unique in America right now. But the fact that Alex used Reddit to fight off the demons, that's something. Alex's story gets we're going to talk to Alex about his experience, about his mom's job, which definitely plays a role in this story, and we are going to go to a place in real life that we're honestly a little scared to go. Rochester's open-air drug market, where even in the depths of winter, you can still get offered a free sample.

Today's episode, kicking it. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer, Amory Sievertson. We are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, and we're making this show with little help from our friends at Reddit. So, Amory, we went out to Brockport and Rochester, New York, together in my car, major road trip. All in one day, I might add. Yep, and the road trip basically continued when we got. that to where Alex lives.

We spent a lot of the day in the car, driving around or just sitting in parking lots, and we were visiting Alex because of this post he put on Reddit. Yeah, the post was a photo of himself from his days using heroin, next to a photo of himself after he got clean. And they actually didn't look that different to us. No, they didn't. But Alex saw something different in that older photo. I mean, my skin was pale.

My stance, I was slouching and just kind of like just, had this fuck-it stance. I don't care stance. And my eyes and the smile, like, that's not my real smile. I was not happy, happy. I could look at my eyes and tell I'm high. I know what, if I don't remember if I was high or not at an event, I could tell by looking at my eyes in the picture.

Like this hollow, dead, I'm not really here. I've checked out kind of look. The real detail was more in the comments to the picture, and Alex's replies to those comments. We got Alex to read some of that to us in his apartment. Here's what he wrote to someone who commented that they had no idea how addictive heroin was. If you want an idea,

just imagine looking at your mother crying, your girlfriend angry and begging you to please stop, imagine them threatening to cut you out of their lives, bargaining with you, trying to help, doing anything they can. Imagine your cute old grandmother saying, you're breaking my heart. Imagine being ashamed, having pawned your most prized possessions,

owing a lot of money to a lot of people. Imagine having the flu times a thousand and wanting to die. Imagine having multiple close calls where you did too much and couldn't breathe. Imagine having a college degree and knowing that all you have to do to get rid of your misery

is simply not use heroin again. Then imagine getting in your car, driving to the shady part of the city at 2 a.m. Going into a rundown house with scary people and seeing a gun on the table. Spending money you borrowed from your 15-year-old brother for gas, on heroin, and then doing it the second you get back to your car.

Then you go home, you lie to your girlfriend who's been your best friend since fifth grade. You look her straight in the eyes when you're about to nod out and tell her that you're clean, feeling great, and you hope she's proud. You have no fucking idea why you do this. You just know you can't stop. People share stuff on the opiates recovery community all the time. The subreddit has around 11,000 subscribers. There are daily check-ins where users can talk about how they're doing and what their challenges are

and get support from each other. In some ways, it's similar to group, the one Alex goes to every week. It's also worth acknowledging here that some people have used many, if not all, of the Internet's platforms to facilitate illegal activity, like doing drugs in one way or another. If it's on the Internet and it facilitates communication, it can facilitate illegal activity. Yeah, and like a lot of people, Alex has tried to kick heroin more than once in the five years he's been an addict. And he actually used the opiates recovery community long before he got clean for this strange reason. He just didn't buy into the idea that sober life was possible or even that much better.

You know, the most common thing I did was sit there and search all day for people who had been clean for a while and said they were happy because I needed to believe that was possible. And I didn't. I needed to see that 100 times before I could even begin to believe it. Because I would see one post like that and I would be like, like, there's no way. And then I would see two posts where people are clean for a year and having heavy cravings. And I'd be like, yeah, that's what it's like. That's going to be me. And it's like one post like that against 100 posts saying I'm happy, I'd take the one.

Because I just couldn't believe that there was way out of that. And it was hard. And you true, I mean, I can't even tell you how many times I gave up hope. How many times I have resigned myself to being a heroin addict for the rest of my life? I mean, the only hope I had it sometimes was like, I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow because I can't do this. Alex got to this place, this irrational place where he read people's stories of happy sobriety on Reddit and was half convinced they were BS in a pretty familiar way. He got a knee injury in high school from skateboarding and was prescribed some oxycodone. The injury persisted, so he got more prescriptions.

Vicodin was the one that made him feel truly amazing. He found that when he took the pills, a lot of bad things. stuff went away. Anxiety, low-level pain, it was like floating through the world. It felt pretty damn good. By then he was in college and buying oxies from a classmate. Do you remember like the first time you tried heroin? Mm-hmm. I do. I went to go buy oxies. He didn't have enough. He said, but I got bags. I said, no. Okay, I'm not. He's like, I mean, you're doing 120 milligrams of oxy date, dude. It's the same fucking thing. And this is way cheaper. And I was like, yeah, I don't want to shoot it up.

He was like, just fucking snort it, dude. Like, don't be a bitch. Okay, I'll give a shot. So I did it. I didn't really care for it the first time. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be this mind-blowing high that I couldn't even comprehend,

but it wasn't. It was just really nice and warm. In a way, it was more mild than the oxies because I hadn't taken as much. But that's when I decided heroin wasn't dangerous right then and there. like, I mean, oxies are getting me higher than this, so whatever. I'll just snort heroin sometimes.

Well, then it was way cheaper, so I snored heroin all the time. How much is heroin in comparison? So oxy's a dollar a milligram. I got such a tolerance. I was up to 120. To convert that over to heroin, I would say, if you're coming off of oxy onto heroin, you're going to start with maybe like a half a bundle a day at that dose. So you're talking 30 bucks every two days, 40 bucks every two days.

Put it very, very quickly. Heroin tolerance builds so quick, quicker than you believe. Like, within weeks, you're already using double that. Eventually, you get up to the point where three bundles a day is whatever. So then you've got two choices. Buy more or start shooting it. I mean, people just have this huge misconception. Everybody thinks that, okay, your average heroin addict uses a needle and lives on the street.

No. Your average heroin addict is, you know, a middle-class white kid snorting it. You say you went to college for four years? Mm-hmm. Did you get a degree? Yep. And you were using this whole time? Entire time.

This is a point where we should say that addiction runs in the family. It's something Alex's dad has struggled with, too. In fact, one time when Alex is in the thick of it, he gets in the car with a bunch of drug provisions and drives straight from home all the way to Texas in one shot. to visit his dad, and then he drives to Florida, and then back home. Whether this is addict behavior or 20-something behavior, Alex doesn't have a lot to say about that trip.

It didn't result in much, except more using. This is around the time that he starts dating Casey, the girl he's known since they were both in fifth grade. If you just scratch the surface of Alex's life, it seems fine. But in truth, he's now in a place he can't seem to get out of, where he's backsliding financially and using constantly. Emery, this was interesting. He told us that he ends up finding a way to use out in the open.

Yeah, and we won't go into too much detail about this because Alex doesn't want this to become a kind of how-to. But eventually he figures out how to incorporate the heroin into a common cold treatment that he can take in front of people without them even realizing he's getting high. And that includes Casey. Well, before we started dating, he would do it openly in front of me.

But after we started dating, he did start hiding it from me. And there were a couple times that I had found pills in his car one time. And I remember one weekend specifically, he was laying on my couch and just sweating through his clothes. And I was like, what's wrong with you? Are you sick? What's going on? Are you withdrawing? You know, and I asked him outright, and he denied, deny, deny, deny, deny.

Now Alex is asking friends and family for loans of $20, $40 at a time. He even steals pain meds from his dead grandfather, which, sure, his grandfather isn't going to use them, but this is something that Alex is still grappling with, long after the fact. I can't fucking believe I did that. How did that happen? I knew they were there and a few months after he had passed I just couldn't help myself

I was really sick had work so I went and took him I know you wrote about that I think on Reddit right and you talk about you talk a little bit about feeling like that's something

that you can't really atone for yeah I have no way to tell my grandpa I'm sorry for doing that but you feel like he knows I'm not sure I hope so I think I do feel a little better after talking to my grandmother about it

coming clean with her and she cried on the phone and said you know it's okay honey I'm just glad you're doing better now that's how you can make up for it keep doing better now and that helped me a lot but I can't even tell you how

just disgusted with myself I am for that and that's also a huge roadblock to recovery for most addicts because you're just so ashamed with the things you've done why bother Like, why bother redeeming yourself when you're such a shitty person? Alex did find an answer to that question, eventually, a reason to redeem himself.

But before we get to that, we have to get to downtown Rochester. Yeah, because eventually addictions evolve. Money gets tighter, and it has to go further. So Alex has to go further. To a neighborhood with the best deal, it's what's called an open-air drug market. We will take you there in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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Wherever you get your podcast. So our road trip with Alex around Monroe County, New York continues. He's going to take us to the open-air drug market in Rochester, the county seat, about 40 minutes away from Brockport. I think we're ready to go. Okay, I'm ready. Cool. Open-air drug markets are pretty uncommon. They're places where buyers can find dealers all times of the day any day.

And apparently, trying to get rid of them can be really tricky. A show of police force can sometimes just remove the competition and pop up. punish the low-level criminal activity without really tackling some of the underlying issues causing the market in the first place. But they also do damage to the social fabric in the communities where they exist. It's dangerous to go to a place like this with a recorder out, so we have to hide it. And because on this day, Alex is feeling strong, and because he feels like this time his quitting is going to stick, this is one of the places he wants to show us during our visit. And this is a big deal, because despite his candor and his candor,

and his clarity and his commitment to being clean, the struggle is real for Alex. Take this example he tells us about on the way there. Triggers. So triggers. One of my triggers is an ATM. Because when you're in withdrawal and you're about to go get more heroin,

you have to hit the withdrawal button. So I'd be like withdrawal? Yes, I am in withdrawal. Wow. But I'm not going to be once I hit this withdrawal button. Go get more. Alex says it's not the sound so much as just standing there at an ATM.

So usually when he needs cash, he just gets someone else to take it out for him. So that way he doesn't get the nagging craving. A little bit of anxiety and a subtle, strong tug. He says it's like being hungry or thirsty, which at first doesn't sound that serious until you think about how fundamental those feelings are and how consistently they come up. Hence Alex's drug commute.

Like I said, I made this drive every day, man. Every single day. You do something like this every single day, you're going to start to learn the rules for transactions, including what to ask for when you show up. People call heroin is boy. They call it boy, and cocaine is girl. So you go out to the city to score some boy, and people will flag you down. If you're not from the neighborhood, they know.

If you're driving around and you don't look like you're from the area, they don't recognize you from the neighborhood. They'll sample, sample, sample at your car. And what that is is, is they're driving around. trying to flag you down and give you a free sample with the understanding that if it's any good, you'll buy a bundle or so. Rochester is one of New York State's original boom towns because of the Genesee River running through it.

The Genesee Brewing Company has been here since 1878. Its colorful brewhouse building is big and bright and lit up as we drive by in the settling dusk. A few blocks later, we pull into this neighborhood, which, to be honest, at first, looks pretty normal. A little run down, but normal. There are people shoveling the snow. This neighborhood somehow didn't get visited by the city's snow plows. People are out in the slushy street. School buses are dropping kids off. There's a lot going on. And I don't mean to knock on. Like, I mean, there are community spaces out here. There's programs. There's amazing people out

here doing amazing things. There's businesses here. I mean, this is not just... Right. Well, clearly, there's a lot going on. Yeah. It's not just a bad area. I mean, there's great stuff but if you're gonna go get drugs in Rochester this is where you want to be this is the place this would be the main area yeah so we can go straight and go down at North Clinton and stuff what are these people doing there it is what did he said yo he said yeah he was there he wanted us to pull over there they're selling yeah right there this guy too maybe usually the younger kids will be selling usually kids So that was them trying to flag us down.

Like I said, oftentimes they'll yell, that guy by the car probably. Oftentimes they'll yell sample, but he just said yo and kind of waved at us. That was him trying to... What about this guy with the red hat? Very possible. Who knows?

These guys are, like, definitely working. Yep, they're on the phone. Yep. This guy too? Sam. Oh, that guy too, wow. It's like five people all in a row. That's nothing.

Summertime. Wow, it's this is so crazy because there are school buses everywhere. It doesn't matter. I know. That's their older brothers. You know, the kids on the school bus, that's their older brothers. So. Crazy.

Yeah. How are you doing? What? Are you feeling okay? Yeah, I feel like I'm like a scientist in a way right now. Like I don't feel like an emotional connection right now. I feel like I'm observing and just showing you guys. Okay, good.

I don't feel any type of relation to this right now. If I was driving through here, like I don't feel like an emotional connection to you right now. alone for no purpose or had to go, you know, maybe to work in the area or something, that it might be a little different. Yeah. I'd be in my thoughts more, but I'm just showing you guys right now and I think that's interesting. Seven. Boy girl.

We're good. Yeah. Boy girl. Boy girl. There was. Wow. On the drive back to Brockport, Alex is excited. We're all going to go over to his mom's house to eat, but also to talk because his mom

played a key role in Alex getting clean. She sat him down one day. She put a drug test on the table in front of him and basically said, you say you're clean. He wasn't. So prove it. If you're clean, great. I'll stop bothering you. If you're not clean, you are totally cut off. None of your friends, none of your family is going to help you anymore. And Alex knows that she did her due diligence because of something about Alex's mom that we haven't told you yet. You're retired. Yes. But you worked in the county force. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. What did you do? Can you talk? Just a road deputy for 20 years. Yep. Alex's mom is a career cop. More of that story in a minute.

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So we're headed into Alex's mom, Amy's house. She just retired from the police force. But when we get inside and start our interview in the dining room, Alex hovers at the edges, hanging back in the kitchen. He seems agitated, or at least. unsure of where to stand while we talk to his mom? You know, I thought at first that it was just college experimenting, you know, stupid kid stuff, partying, you know, and then I think it started to become clear when I realized he has stolen his younger

brother's medication. His brother had surgery on his arm from a sports injury and had a prescription for hydrocodone. He had stolen it all and replaced him. it with, I think, Advil or ibuprofen or something. And I was, wow, this is a bigger problem than I realized. Had you had experience with, you know, the opioid epidemic as a cop? Yes. Yeah. And when I, when I first started, we never, I don't remember seeing it at all. You know, we had crack and marijuana. And slowly it started to kind of infiltrate the county. And it was, you know, those, kids, that nobody was really surprised that they were in trouble. And then it seemed to be, you know, more and more and more. And I had a couple of overdoses that I had handled.

What was that like? You know, I think cops and nurses, we have a certain, like you can kind of just keep your emotional distance from it. Yeah. And so it was just part of the job. It was like, oh, that's too bad. And, you know, let me get this report done so I can go home kind of thing. and I hate to be callous about it, but, you know, it's just part of what we do. Do you feel like that thinking about it that way changed for you when you realized that a member of your family? Definitely. Definitely. Well, and, you know, when I started to see more and more of it in, you know, quote-unquote, regular families, for lack of a better term, yeah, definitely that. I was shocked to find out that Alex was doing it.

You were working for the police in a small town and he was using in the same place. Was that difficult? Mortified. I was mortified and scared to death that somebody would find out. And, you know, it would be fodder for gossip and I would be judged and I would have been. I'm not too sure how many people at my former job. No, I mean, there's a couple of people who do, but I'm not sure. You know, it's not something I chose to discuss with them.

Can you describe a low point for his struggle with drugs? Right after I found out he had relapsed, he was still living here, and we had gotten into an argument, he broke the bathroom door because we were fighting, and I remember, and I'm not a crier, but I called my brother sobbing. I'm like, I can't do this, I don't know what to do, you know. And then I realized that he had stolen my medication after I had breast cancer, cancer surgery. That was pretty shocking. There was actually that when you were laying on the floor in the waiting room at the detox place and they said they didn't have a bed, I said, well, we're not

leaving. So he laid on the floor. It was filthy. And I thought, oh, dear Lord, I never thought I would see that. Yeah. You said that at that time, you said we're not leaving? And at the time, he was homeless because I had kicked him out. And they said, well, we don't have. We don't have. We're not leaving. And at the time, he was homeless. And they said, well, we don't have anything. I said, well, we're not leaving. And so that's what we did. We sat there, and he's on the floor moaning and, you know, sick. And I think they finally got sick of looking at him. And they were like, we got to do something with his kids. So they finally admitted him. So that was good. I was really glad that paid off my abstinence. Is there some point where you will feel like he's safe?

I don't think there's ever a point where an opiate addict is safe. I think as time goes on, the risks are lower, but I don't, you know, I don't know that you're ever safe. I recently read a story of somebody who was clean for 10 years and relapsed, so there's always that risk. But I don't have any control over that, so that had to learn that. Was that hard to learn as someone who's an enforcer? It was hard to learn, and it was also hard to not blame myself.

Because as a mother, of course, you feel responsible of everything your child does, even when that child is an adult. So both of those were very hard things. Is there anything you guys want to say to each other? Alex is still hanging back in the kitchen, so he's hard to hear. But what he says here is, I'll gladly apologize again to my mother and to the rest of my friends and family.

I was not a good person for a few years. I was very selfish, and I struggled a lot. And I didn't treat myself or anybody around me right. And he says that he hopes that some people someone else who's struggling will hear this and will be able to apologize to their family and friends someday. The thing I would say is I hope that you see yourself through my eyes and realize, you know, how I see you as just brilliant and nothing would give me greater pleasure than seeing you

and your brothers succeed and go out into the world and, you know, do good and all of that. That means more to me than anything that I could ever accomplish. Thanks a lot for talking to us. You're welcome. Pretty soon, Alex's younger brother shows up. His younger brother, whose discovery of Alex's heroin in the house, was a tipping point for their mom. Then Alex's friend Jeff and his wife arrive.

They're optimistic that this time it's for real. So when he went in the second time to inpatient, and we went in to visit, I could see right away that he was back to the old Alex making like stupid, completely inappropriate jokes. And, you know, just being his old self again, I could see that coming back. And I was really happy to see that that I had my friend back. Eventually, the last guest arrives.

Garbage Plates. Thank you so much. Alex has been talking in breathless terms about this local delicacy since, like, before we even got here. Garbage plate is a tater-taught French-fried cheeseburger meat sauce, subomination all thrown together in a styrofoam container. Bake beans, meat sauce, cheeseburger, french fries. Even though the reason for people gathering at Alex's mom's house is to talk to us about the hellish experience of his addiction and how it has impacted everyone in the room,

everyone here is pretty damn happy. Jeff and Alex's mom are arguing about President Donald Trump. She's the sole supporter and everyone razzes her about it. People are telling old stories, stories not about Alex. Alex's addiction, and it feels at once regular and special. Really special, actually. Did you feel that, Emery? Oh, completely.

And it reminded me of something Alex told us earlier that day, while we were sitting in the car together. There was a series of moments where different things clicked, but I will say the one big moment where I realized what I want out of life is when my mother talked to me in rehab on the phone. And she was talking about how her and her and her fiancé went shopping for dehumidifiers. She was so excited. Like she got a good deal on this dehumidifier,

and she's comparing them and talking about the differences in them. It was just the most boring shit in the world. So mundane. And I just couldn't help but think, that's all I want. I just want to be able to go with my girlfriend and get excited about getting a good deal on a dehumidifier. Because when you're a heroin addict,

all you can think about is I'm going to pawn that dehumidifier. or I would never buy one of those. That's not even in my top thousand list of things I would buy right now. And I knew that it clicked for me when Casey and I were shopping for shower curtains. And I felt myself excited to go put them up in the bathroom because we had picked the ones we liked and really put some thought into it. And I paid my money that I earned with my job for them, you know, with her. And that felt amazing to just care about something that mundane.

On the day this episode comes out, Alex will be exactly five months and 15 days clean. I texted him this week to ask if he still felt like Reddit played an important role in his recovery. Absolutely, he responded. Browsing Reddit and feeling that sense of community helped me. I spent hours looking at those success stories just to try to believe I could have a life after dope. When you're in that hole, you don't think you'll ever be whole again. About a week ago, Alex posted on a law enforcement Reddit community. The title, former opiate addict interested in becoming a police officer.

Judging by the responses, it sounds like a long shot. But some EMT and paramedic workers responded, suggesting Alex consider going that route, a career path that could fulfill his goals of trying to help fight the epidemic that almost made him a casualty. Alex has other big plans, too. He wants to have kids, to be a really good father, maybe move out of the area with Casey.

They've been talking about Florida. Another far future thing. But beyond that stuff, right now, his goals are pretty small, or at least incremental. Recovery. One amazing, mundane day at a time. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she always says, No, no, no, no, no.

Yes! Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of... Mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who truly believe that... We are! Our web producer is Megan Kelly,

who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and always says... Aw. Our intern is Chris Yulian, who, when we put him on a task, he politely says, Hold my fear! Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we have our weekly meeting with him, we can all agree. It was oddly satisfying. Our theme music

is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Jarrett 089I for our artwork this week titled Album Cover. His Instagram is Curious Grunge underscore Art if you're curious. You can find that piece in a bunch of other stuff at WBUR.org slash

Endless Thread. We are also on Reddit, Endless underscore Thread is our username. And Redditors, if you want to make art for an upcoming episode, hit us up. Thanks to Josh Swartz, by the way, producer WBUR, who helped us a bunch on this episode. You should know our show is produced by Amory Sievertson every week. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson.

I'll let myself out.