Endless Thread - Still Breaking

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Redditors discover a massive online conspiracy. A man risks life, limb and the ire of morning motorists to protect the ideal of a free and open internet.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. About a year ago, on May 9, 2017, a guy named Matt found something. I was home from work, sick, by myself in my basement, which is, of course, my natural habitat. Matt is a tax preparer from a little town in Massachusetts. His Reddit handle is Hockey Mass. What Matt found was deep in the weeds of a comment section on a website, part of a specific conversation on a specific website, which we'll get to. Just know that he was doing what you do when you're homesick in your natural basement habitat.

So I went to file a comment, and after I had filed my own comment, I started looking through a bunch of comments that other people had been filing and seeing the numbers kind of creep up and seeing the attraction that it was getting. Then Matt saw another comment that looked weird. It seemed like boilerplate. Like it just seemed off. And then I started looking for this text, seeing if this appeared over and over, and it did.

It came up 50,000 times. Funny thing is, someone else was having the exact same experience at almost the exact same time. Areditor named David Awad, in his natural interneting habitat, Edison, New Jersey. David is not like Matt a tax preparer.

I am a recovering software engineer. Currently, a grad student. So on the site, I filled out my own comments. Interestingly enough, though, I started looking at some of the other comments, and it was weird. Like, the very first one right on top of it was very scripted. At first, you know, you read that kind of thing, and you're like, who talks like that?

Matt and David independently came to the same conclusion. They had discovered a massive conspiracy. Or maybe they were both going crazy. They weren't crazy. They were actually late to the game. Someone had already found what they had found. My name is Corey. I'm an editor at a publishing company,

and my Reddit username is address unknown. As near as we can tell, if there was such a thing as a patient zero, you're the patient zero of this discovery. Yeah, I didn't find that language of that comment anywhere else on the internet. I was a little mystified and annoyed that it took two weeks for someone else to notice and pick up on it, but I was mostly just relieved that people were actually talking about it. Corey, David, and Matt had all independently stumbled on these thousands and thousands, actually close to five million fake comments, repeating over and over and over. And I was just sitting there in my kitchen at that point just being like, oh my goodness, like what have I discovered?

like, all excited about it, sending this stuff off and, you know, getting fired up. Matt emailed the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a couple of other places. You know, and then I told some of my family members, and then the next day they were like sending me articles being like, look at this. Like, this is an article about what you were talking about yesterday. I was like, I know, this is so cool. The next day, the story blew up. That was a year ago. And it is still a scandal. But nobody's really doing anything about it.

Yet. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. One does not simply walk into our show without knowing how it is made. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Sievertson, and we're coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. Today's episode is part of a story that some would call a slow-motion car crash, an epic failure that has the entire connected world's well-being hanging in the balance. It is about the Internet and the government and Redditors who found something fishy. It's about a story that broke a year ago, but is still breaking. So, today's episode, still breaking.

Hey, Amory. Oh, hey, Ben. I know. It took me a minute to say hello, but I wanted to set it up for you a little bit, you know? You and the listeners. Well, I think you broke the record. The record? For talking about net neutrality without mentioning the words, net neutrality. Ah, fair.

Time to come clean. This episode is about the net neutrality battle, but in fairness, there's a reason I didn't do it until just now. HBO's last week tonight host John Oliver explains. Net neutrality is objectively boring, and that used to work. So net neutrality is this idea that no matter how you're getting your internet, like which ISP or internet service provider you're paying to get online, you should be able to access any website just as quickly as the next. Yeah. think Verizon or Comcast isn't allowed to deliver you their TV streaming service faster than, say, Netflix. And for a while, this was debated and battled in the courts. And then in 2015, the Federal Communications Commission successfully changed its rules to include protections for net neutrality under something called Title II.

Which is why this comment story is really interesting, right? Because it all happened on the FCC's website a year ago. During this period of public comment, when citizens were supposed to be weighing in on the FCC rolling back those net neutrality protections. Funny in a way that the agency supposedly governing, you know, communication has these communication issues. Right. Now, some would say these issues come from the new guy running the agency under President Trump, named Ajit Pai. He wants to get rid of net neutrality protections because he's anti-regulation. He actually already did this, this week. On Monday, the FCC's rollback of net neutrality protections went into effect.

But lots of people are saying the fight is far from over. Emery, can you tell the rest of this crazy comment story? I sure can. So these comments appear in mass on the FCC's website that were anti-net neutrality. Okay. And they were pretty quickly discovered to not be real comments, as far as we can tell. Check. So people think these are fake and not just the result of an actual organized campaign.

because a lot of them were uploaded at the exact same time. And we should say there's a name for this sort of thing, astroturfing. It's when a group or organization tries to fake a grassroots movement by faking a bunch of online comments. This was textbook astroturfing with an odd twist. The names weren't all fake. A ton of them seemed to be real. And our Redditor, Matt, in his basement,

was one of the early people to figure this out. I started plugging these people's names into Facebook, and they were coming up with, you know, teenagers in Miami, elderly people in Georgia, all over the place. And I'm just, I just didn't understand. I was like, something's going on here. This is more than just a bunch of people having the same exact idea on this. Somebody is organizing this. But, yeah, obituaries was one of the things I found.

And that was, that was weird. Like, you're using dead people's names to push an agenda. It just seems so gross. bizarre and creepy, and that was probably one of the things that made me the most uncomfortable about it. A notable example among the comments? Former President Barack Obama, who had supported protecting net neutrality, supposedly logged on, commented on the FCC's website criticizing his own policies, which doesn't

make sense. Right. Obama going down to his own basement to comment against his own policies. So you know who we got, right, to clear this. all up, we got. Jeff Merkley, I'm a U.S. Senator from Oregon. That was cold, Ben. I know. But Senator Merkley is a big deal in his own right.

And he remembers when the announcement came that Ajit Pai was going to roll back net neutrality protections. I anticipated, based on the comments coming to my office, that there'd be overwhelming resistance to the new rules. The phone calls that came into my office were often rate of 100 to 1. If I had 101 calls, 100 of them would say absolutely preserve net neutrality, and then there'd be the one phone call saying we love what the FCC is doing to enrich the ISPs. I've never seen an issue in 20 years of involvement in policy and politics where the public

was so completely on one side. The senator is right. An overwhelming majority of American voters polled on this question, support net neutrality, 83%. After Redditors in the media had started buzzing about the fake FCC comments, the New York Attorney General's office started investigating, and it set up a tool to see if your name was used without your permission. And so a member of my staff proceeded to put my name in, and voila, it turned out my identity was one of those that had been stolen. And where I'm very much a proponent of net neutrality, suddenly there's this comment with

my name and my address, supporting the new obliteration of net neutrality rather than opposing it. Let's take a look at the actual comment that you're referring to here. It says, quote, the FCC's net neutrality rules were written in the Obama White House by political staff and tech industry special interests who overruled the FCC's own experts. The FCC's own chief economist Tim Brennan called the rules an economics-free zone. they should be repealed. And that is, of course, attributed to you. How would the real-life senator like to respond to that? The real-life senator would say exactly the opposite,

that this new rule is being cooked up for the powerful and the privilege to run and own the Internet, be able to charge all kinds of fees and all kinds of situations that destroyed as a level playing field for Americans and for that matter for the world. And we must fight this new rule ferociously. So a sitting U.S. Senator got his name stolen to post opinions on U.S. policy via the FCC's website. And not just him.

Senator Merckley, a Democrat, joined with a Republican whose name was also used fraudulently on the FCC's site. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. He's actually on the opposite side when it comes. to net neutrality, and he did decline our request to be interviewed. But they wrote a letter together saying, hey, identity theft, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, not cool. The letter asked Ajit Pai and the FCC what they were doing about this massive comment fraud, the result of which has been...

You know, a funny thing, they haven't responded to our letter. So we're looking forward to them actually telling us what they're doing, but our assumption right now is they are doing absolutely nothing. Why do we think they're doing absolutely nothing? Great question. Let's hear from someone who worked until just a few days ago at the FCC. Commissioner, how are you? This is Ben Johnson.

I'm doing well, Ben. How are you? This is the woman who, until just recently, was maybe net neutrality fans' last best hope. Her name is Minion Clyburn. She's been at the FCC for almost a decade until June 2018. Which right now is right now. She's a commissioner, not the chair. There are five total, including the chair, and that means there's always a political majority. The FCC is one of the most powerful agencies most people never heard of.

I think people think about us when there is some type of Super Bowl of wardrobe malfunction or somebody says a three, four, five-letter word that startles someone over the broadcast airwaves. The FCC does a bunch of stuff. It says what you can and can't say on the radio. like, fuck shit, motherfucker, sucker, cuck hole, etc. It also dictates how frequencies are used by TV and radio channels. Do you think it's fulfilling its mission right now?

I would give it a C-minish. This in part is why Commissioner Clyburn is leaving. She voted four net neutrality protections back in 2015 when she was on the Democratic majority of the commission. But that commission now has. a Republican-leaning majority. And Clabrin says she's really worried about Ajit Pi and others stripping away net neutrality protections.

I worry that without a regulatory body on the beat, that those voices that we have heard so loudly, the young people down in Florida that just graduated, that continue to use this platform to get the word out, the only reason we heard about Ferguson and Black Lives Matters, and other types of movement is because they got a foothold online and a platform that was open that net neutrality principles were in place so they could not be stifled. We could live in a world that is no longer the case. That's a pretty dystopian vision of the possibilities of the future of the country, right?

Well, you know, I think we're very spoiled and rightfully so in this nation. We, I think, believe, because of what we, have now, that we will always have it and it will be more abundant. If you are a student of history, not even a deep student of history, you will see that pendulums can swing in extreme ways. Does Commissioner Clyburn remember the whole astroturfing fake comment fiasco? I remember it clearly when the Attorney General reached out to this office. There was basically radio silence coming from the FCC majority. I and my conference, and my colleagues, I and my colleague, we were outrage because the FCC did not even pretend that it was going to investigate

any of these allegations. Why do you think that is? I'm perplexed. You must have your own feelings about why the majority decided not to investigate this. I did use the word perplexed because of my southern upbringing. And so I tried to find a word that will let you know how bothered I am. without saying the word that I'm extremely bothered. And so now you're bringing that out and me.

So I'm extremely bothered. And there are stronger words that I could use, but, you know, I have to have to find myself on the radio. But why do you think it is? I mean, why do you think that this is happening? I mean, because some people would go a step further and say that essentially, you know, some of your fellow commissioners and the chair of the FCC

are essentially, so far in the pocket of industry that they're not even willing to investigate clearly fraudulent comments during the public comment period on its website. I will say to you very plainly, and I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say their minds were already made up, that they were not in favor of the rules that we put in place that I think were incredibly balanced. I think we should describe here the other side of all of this, which comes from a Jeep pie and big telecom companies and internet service providers. Internet providers say they pay big bucks to put in a bunch of infrastructure that big tech companies use for free.

They also say that small internet providers can be hurt by net neutrality because they have to spend a lot of money to abide by the rules and they can't be innovative in how they make money. Basically, the argument here is regulation is not the way. To get a little more detail on the other side, we called this guy. So I'm Brendan Carr. I'm one of the commissioners here at the Federal Communications Commission. Commissioner Brendan Carr is part of the Republican majority on the FCC right now.

He says a lot of narratives out there about this whole net neutrality repeal thing are overblown. This fear that we're unleashing a new restraint or off and that you are at the winner is concerning, rightfully so, to lots of consumers. But that's not the reality of the legal regime that we're going into. Why has the FCC not opened an official investigation into what happened last year with the fake comments being posted during your agency's open comment period? Well, we do have an obligation to, you know, review the record and review filings. And to your point, we do see mass uploads, but sometimes it's legitimate mass uploads on both sides of an issue. There could be a petition or letter writing campaign. They go up once.

Sure. but in this case, we're talking about like Barack Obama leaving comments, you know, at criticizing his own policies. That seems to rise to the level of we should look into this. Well, here's, you know, what we did do is this, which is you can look at our decision. And our decision, you know, through the footnotes, will point to you to every single thing that we relied on on the record. Sure. And I get what you're talking about here, but I feel like that's not a direct answer to the question, which is like there's clearly, been fraud and abuse of the commenting system, why haven't you launched an official investigation into that? Well, I don't know the current status of that. What I can say is that back when I was general counsel,

we were reached out to on this issue from then Attorney General Schneiderman's office. Sure. if there has been some back-and-forth communications with them about the issue, I don't know the current status, as you point out. We did not get much of a direct answer on the comments, but we did get over and over the argument that small Internet service providers were suffering because of net neutrality protections. Also, Carr's argument that the FCC wasn't the right place for those protections,

that it's the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, or Congress, that are better venues for protecting net neutrality. Essentially, he was saying it's not our job, despite the vast majority of opinions stating otherwise, majority of opinions outside of the FCC, that is. It's cool to go based on our best judgment in light of all of that, and people aren't ultimately going to agree with us on the policy cuts that we make, and that's perfectly fine.

But I do think we ran, you know, a process here that we can be proud of and a transparent, open process. Do you have a family? I do, yep. Two boys, four-year-old, one-year-old. Cool. How do you think they're going to view the legacy of this decision that happened this week? They love their dad and they're very proud of the work I do. Commissioner Carr's perspective is what's winning out right now inside the FCC. That is why after nearly a decade at her post, Commissioner Clyburn says she left.

She's outgunned. So she's going to try to have more impact outside the FCC. And speaking of outside the FCC, do you remember, earlier this year, there was someone who was advocating for net neutrality and they demonstrated outside the FCC by literally slowing down traffic and allowing cars to go in a fast lane for an added fee? Not only do I remember the security guys remember real vividly. After the break, a man risks life and limb and the ire of morning motorists to protect the ideal of a free and open internet. 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. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions,

the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Emery, what is your favorite analogy for net neutrality? You mean my favorite net neutrality?

Oh. The only analogy I can think of is a highway. All right. Well, I think the whole information super highway thing really just won't go away for some reason, which is why we get all these traffic analogies, right? They'll never go away. Yeah, which is why we're going to talk to Rob. He makes viral internet videos, and one of those videos has 46 million views.

So probably the project that I currently am most well-known for was a video called 10 hours of walking in New York City as a woman, where this girl walks through the streets of New York, and she is cat-called again and again and again and again. Rob had an idea for a new viral video a while back, a video protest you might call it. Rob's worried about an unfair system that will punish the little guy. like him, and make his work impossible. So we wanted to show that theoretical future with a real-life analogy. Show a world without net neutrality.

We're dealing with an issue that is very difficult to communicate to people, especially people who aren't very tech-savvy, right? So if we could make this parallel between the issues of internet traffic and street traffic, then perhaps people would understand what we were talking about. Rob's got a target, the FCC building in Washington, D.C. He gets a cheap hotel booked for January of 2017. He runs a bicycle. He gets a crew, a helper from New York.

They buy a bunch of contraband. Home Depot, I can remember that one because we had to buy, like, from three or four different home depots to get enough traffic ones to shut down a whole lane of traffic. They've got the whole thing staked out, Ocean's Eight style. Rob and his conspirator are going to block one of the lanes in front of the federal government agency building with the cones. In the other lane, we'll be Rob riding his bike very slowly. To let other people pass him for a price of $5. They have some signage, it's all set, just two problems.

Just two problems? We'll start there. First problem, Rob Bliss is a nice boy. I was born and raised in the Midwest. I don't want to inconvenience anyone. I want to just be nice. The idea that I am intentionally upsetting people, that was probably one of the hardest mental hurdles I had to make with this.

Problem two, Rob is not what you'd call a cyclist. So I'm out there. I got the knee pads, the elbow pads, the helmet. You know, I am just bundled up ready for it. I have to confess, I'm actually petrified of riding a bicycle in traffic. I take a deep breath and I walk out. It's like a four-lane street in a city. Normal traffic. Traffic generally rolling around 20, 30 miles an hour. I'm wearing a huge reflector vest as well. People are staring at me. So I drop the cones all the way down the street by a good, pretty like a large city block. And then I run back up to my bicycle, run back, grab the bike, hop on, and zoom out into the street and then bike as slowly. as possible. As you might guess, drivers on their morning commute, not psyched. But Rob had his answers for when the windows came down and the voices got raised or the cop showed up. I would pretty much just quote Ajie Pai and the comments that he had made against net neutrality right. And so I

would just repeat his logic. Why are you pretty good to call the traffic action, sir? Well, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to restore automotive freedom. The idea is... Automotive freedom, a play on Ajit Pai's proposal to repeal net neutrality protections, which he called restoring internet freedom. Eventually, the cops did show up, and Rob had to shut down his protest. But that hotel room, it wasn't booked for one night only. Rob planned to come back. Not only was the FCC on that street, but also ICE.

So it was like heavy-duty federal stuff all around. So there's a lot of security all around. But one of the security guards, who I think was working for ICE, was like, this is America, you can do what you want to, you can do what you want to, because this is America. And he was just like all about it. And I don't know if he knew what I was up to or not or if he just like respected the protests. But, you know, I thought that was a good vibe. And that's what I was thinking too. Three days.

That's how long Rob got away with it for about an hour each day during the morning commute. I was surprised to have as good of a relationship. with the police as I did. I would come at them from such a sincere place. I was like, wow, this is a great business idea. I will take over the street and then charge people to use it. That's genius. I came at it from such a dry standpoint

that I think they couldn't figure out if I was serious or not. The resulting video has been viewed about 180,000 times on YouTube. YouTube, which as of this podcast episode publishing, still doesn't cost more to watch than the video service of an internet service provider. Did you hear anything from the FCC during or after your demonstration? Oh, that would have been so nice.

But sadly, not the case. I have definitely not heard from anyone. I think they would prefer... You're just waiting by the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Keep me just some crazy protester guys, I think, as far as I am to them. But the thing is, Rob wasn't doing this for the FCC, really.

He was doing it at the FCC and four internet users. And while it may not even be close to the most viral video Rob Bliss has made, he seems good with it. Because as objectively boring and esoteric of an idea as net neutrality is, as down and out as it seems right now, now that the FCC has killed rules protecting it, net neutrality has people in its corner. Yeah, we've got another redditor for you. His name is Aditya Sully Gramma, Adi for short. he's in high school. Yes, I am.

What are you doing at school? What's going on? Just finished up with all my classes. I have finals this week and next week. You're sliding into summer. Yep. And even though this kid is only a sophomore, he's been a net neutrality advocate for a while.

Back in 2014, he saw a coordinated online awareness campaign that was part of the run-up to the FCC and stating net neutrality protections a year later. How old were you? I was 12 then. Okay. Yep. And so ever since then, that is kind of the coming of age woman almost, like, maybe the government isn't trying, doesn't always have your best interest in mind.

That's like an interesting idea because I feel like a lot of the people who are against net neutrality enforcement would say something similar. Yeah. Like the government doesn't always have your best interest in mind or like their misintentioned or wasteful or something like that. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. So what would you say to those folks? That maybe sometimes it doesn't have your best interest in mind. That's definitely true.

But what we should do with that is not blindly disapprove of everything the government's doing. What we should do with that is kind of just look into what they're doing more. This is another argument that I hear a lot is the idea that like, oh, it's only been in place since 2015. What's the big deal and rolling it back? Yeah, I've seen that argument a lot. ISPs have actually been violating net neutrality before the rules were put in place. Adi's right. There are lots of examples of this. AT&T blocking the use of Skype, for instance, in the mid-2000s because it competed with the company's own voice services,

or Verizon saying that Google had to block a Wi-Fi hotspot service so that Verizon could charge a $20 fee for its own services. Do you remember the news of the astro-turfing on the FCC site? Yeah, pretty crazy. What did you think about that when you first learned about it? That I usually go by the line, you know, never attribute to malice, what he can attribute to ignorance. And, you know, government definitely fits that a lot of times. But this is beyond that if it was actually instigated by people affiliated with the FCC, that this is definitely a malicious action, definitely designed to manipulate what people are seeing,

definitely designed to manipulate the figures about who supports nationality and what's, you know, how many people, what percentage of people supported. Do you believe that it's telecom companies that are making this happen? It could be, it could be anyone. It could just be conservative lobbying groups for all I know. What do you think about a G-Pai? I don't like him. He's a, as an Indian American, he's kind of an insult to Indian Americans, if we can say that.

Yes, you can. Why? Because essentially, like, he does not have the public's best interest in mind. Definitely is very ardent in trying to. strip away our internet rights. How old are you now? I'm 16 right now. So you're 26.

Yep. And net neutrality has not been protected for 10 years. What is your internet life like? Everybody sees different news. Everybody has a different portrayal of reality. Everybody is talking about their own alternative facts necessarily about instead of, you know, one consistent truth like we're seeing now, even as it's eroding away. So that's one issue.

then there's definitely going to be a lot of class separation based on this kind of action. In fact, the people who aren't as well off right now are going to fall even further behind once internet prices rise for equal access. So it can definitely get dystopic. Okay. So we've got like maybe five million fake comments posted by, we may never know, because the FCC refuses to investigate. We've got people leaving the FCC because they don't think it's an effective way to fight for the identity. idea of net neutrality or other issues of digital equity and justice anymore. We've got Redditors still fired up about all of this, and kids who might be part of future efforts to

push back. But the rules to protect net neutrality just got rolled back. So what's next? So a couple things happen now. Big companies that suffer because of the rule change think Netflix or Google might bring a court case. Just like the companies that fought against net neutrality protections a few years back, think Verizon, Comcast, etc. Or they might just pay up. Pay internet service providers, creating a system of a splintered internet where the companies that can afford to pay for access to users do, while the little mom and pop internet companies and startups can't.

Something a lot of the people we talk to are worried about is a more insidious idea, that basically the companies that want to take advantage of a lack of net neutrality are going to wait and tell people for people. forget about it. Here's that high school kid, Adi, again. I know that the action that ISPs are going to take is going to be way more gradual. So it's more like, you know, you have a frog in a kettle. And instead of like boiling it immediately and the frog jumps out, they're just going to start turning the pressure, the temperature up and up. What I'm most afraid of is the fact that people are going to forget about what's going on. You know, it's human nature, right? It's not in the

news anymore necessarily. Or it's not going to be in the news anymore. in a month or two month or three months. Man, this is bumming me right out. How are we going to internet in the future, Ben? Well, Emery, you're big Star Wars fan, right? I've been known to enjoy a Star War. Or two, or seven. Eight now.

Okay, a new hope. See what I did there? Yes. So who's Luke Skywalker in this case? Like, who's our new hope? I think it's the states, like states' rights. A thing that you might think about as a fight against, against federal government regulation, but in this case, it might also help to light the way for advocates.

Here's former FCC Commissioner Minion Clyburn again. I am uplifted by the two and maybe three states that have passed their own net neutrality rules. I'm excited about the 23 or 24 attorneys general who said that we're going to govern ourselves in a certain way that if these internet service providers do not abide by. net neutrality principles that they cannot do business in the state. Huh, state's rights, who would have thought? Yep. And remember Senator Merkley? His state is on the list. My home state in Oregon, the state legislature has passed a bill that says the state will not

do business with any internet service provider that violates the basic tenets of net neutrality. And several other states have done the same thing. So that's more of a grassroots movement that is spreading. There's your new hope, Amory. Thanks, bud. You got it. Now we've got to get out of here. Why?

You know, we've got to binge all the things and do all of our interneting. Just while West World, the free and open internet might not be around forever. Quick, load up those videos of cats attacking toddlers. You got it. By the way, just for the record, we did reach out to FCC chair at Jeet Pie, but he wasn't available for an interview. 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 says,

W-T-F. 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, whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us... Nature is...

Lit. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes... Aw. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we try to have a serious meeting with him, he's all... Our theme music is by Squelcher.

This week's episode, Art, is called Digital Age Submursion. It is from Reddit user underscore spec. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up. The show is produced by Josh Swartz, also my co-host and producer Amory Seavertson.

I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself. out.