Radiolab - The Curious Case of the Russian Flash Mob at the West Palm Beach Cheesecake Factory

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

We don’t do breaking news. But when Robert Mueller released his indictment a few days ago, alleging that 13 Russian nationals colluded to disrupt the 2016 elections, we had a lot of questions. Who are these Russian individuals sowing discord? And who are these Americans that were manipulated?? Join us as we follow a trail of likes and tweets that takes us from a Troll Factory to a Cheesecake Factory. This episode was produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen with reporting help from Becca Bressler and Charles Maynes.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. C.

See? Yeah. Hey, this is Chad from Radio Lab. So we were not planning on releasing a podcast today. But then Friday happened. The federal government tonight outlining an elaborate, expensive, and extraordinary assault on U.S. democracy. 13 Russian nationals and 13 Russian nationals and 13. three Russian companies accused of a massive effort.

Unless you have been living under Iraq for the past three days, you've probably heard that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, guy that President Trump keeps accusing of being engaged in a witch hunt, he has handed down some indictments. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States. They say that Russians were right here in the U.S. too. The indictment says the Russians tried to create chaos,

going so far as to travel to key states, The Russians allegedly sent operatives to America, traveling throughout nine states. Now, the picture that you get from the indictment is that there was this sort of like shadowy network of Russian nationals that had infiltrated the country with the idea of sowing chaos in the run-up to the 2016 election. And we just sort of wondered very simply, like, who are these Russians? And who are these Americans that were manipulated? How did it work? How do they feel about things now? So what we decided to do for this podcast.

just because we were curious, and just because, you know, it's fun for a podcast like ours to try and do fast turnaround stuff on occasion. We decided to see what we could find out. Producer Simon Adler takes it from here. Hey, Charles, are you there? Good. Hey, how you doing, Simon? I'm doing all right. A little sleepy, but other than that, I'm good.

So, not too long ago, I got in touch with this radio producer reporter based in Moscow by the name of Charles Mains. Do you want to do video? Just say hello? Yeah, that'd be great. I'm in sort of my pajamas, but yes. Yeah, it's fine. It was like three in the morning, New York time. But anyways, the reason I got in touch with him was to have him help facilitate and interpret an interview with this guy. Hi, my name is Vitaly I'm from Russia, from St. Petersburg. I'm sorry, I'm very bad speaking English. Oh, no, don't worry about it. That's what we got Charles for.

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you, Charles, translating. Okay, great. Yeah. So let's just start with, like, where are you from originally? I'm just curious, like, a little bit about who you are. Well, so Vitelli Bispalov, I mean, he's a kid from a small town in Siberia. A small town near Kazakhstan.

And he said from an early age, it was clear that he just really didn't fit in up there. He had blue hair for a time, dressed like a goth. And to be this kind of alternative character in Siberia is not an easy thing. I mean, he would tell these stories about walking down the street. He's kind of tough guys with short haircuts. They're calling him faggot. And so when he gets his chance to get out, he does. He moves to St. Petersburg, considered one of the most liberal

cities in Russia. And he moved there not looking for just any job, but specifically to be a journalist. Which he really felt was his calling. He refers to journalists as like superheroes or Batman. You know, so he heads of St. Petersburg and he thinks he's all set up. He's got a job with a local website. He's going to do some editing for them, maybe a little writing. But right away within short order, I believe the story is their business dried up. and so did the newspaper, and suddenly Vitaly is out of the job. And so it's kind of a crisis moment. So he starts looking around, and as he describes it, he gets up every day,

he starts sending out all these resumes. He was doing searches, just find anybody who will do anything that will let him use his writing skills, just trying to find something to do with text. Until finally, after almost a month of the, this. He comes across this one ad that's not really clear what they're offering or who's offering

it, but it mentions that there's some copy editing to be done, some writing. And the pay scale seems a lot higher. They're promising double the money that most people are offered for working in journalism in Russia. And right away, he

just thought this was just weird. But, you know, of course he's interested. How could he not be? And so he places a call. Now, it's worth noting everything that is about to happen to Vitale, we weren't able to fact-check 100%. But that being said, it does line up squarely with what others have reported. So anyway, fast forward a couple days. He ends up having an interview and they offer him the job, which he accepts.

All the while, still not really knowing what the heck it is he will be doing. Exactly. It's just not really clear what it is. Okay, so tell me about that first day. He goes in. He describes initially just going into the entering into the foyer, the building, into the entrance. The building itself is cement, four stories tall, and the security is oddly strict. Like when he went up to them, they required him to hand over a bunch of documents, like his passport, just to get in. That's his first impression. Eventually, his boss shows up, this woman named Anna. She walks him down the halls.

and he said the whole place had like the feel of a hospital. He's not like a high school. Long corridors with little rooms to the left and right. People behind keyboards working on computers. And it's almost completely silent, except for the tapping of fingers on keys. Anyway, eventually, they duck into a room, Anna shows him his desk,

and this is finally when he gets a sense of what exactly is going on. Ana sits him down, says... We're doing new. about Ukraine. We just want you to write articles. It was 20 articles a day he had to do, sort of massage the text for. But the thing is, these didn't have to be brand new articles. But instead, he was told essentially take this article that's already been written, somebody else's article, and add to it and then change the content. So it's 70% original.

So what's important to know here is this was 2014. And Ukraine was in the early days of war. apocalyptic scene in central Kiev tonight. This morning, Kiev again awoke to the sound of gunfire. A civil war that Russia wanted to influence the outcome of. And to do so, they started experimenting with this new form of propaganda. That's right. What you saw was this campaign that was going on two fronts. On the one hand, you had state media, you know, pro-government media here.

Being broadcast from Russia into Ukraine, spinning the narrative for those. But then you have a certain amount of the population that perhaps doesn't watch state media. And this is where you get into this effort to kind of plug the holes in this story online. And this is what Vatali had been hired to do. To seal that story. So, you know, they told him to take an article that was about Ukraine. For example, according to Vatali, there was an incident in which a group of pro-Russian rebels had taken over a school in Ukraine, essentially holding the kids hostage.

And when the pro-Ukrainian soldiers, when they stormed the school, children died. Now, this actually happened and was covered by the Ukrainian media. But Anna, as I recall her name is... Anna, Vatali's boss. ...s take this real news story and rewrite it, leaving out the fact that there were ever any pro-Rubes. Russian troops there. Creating the impression that the pro-Ukrainian troops had stormed the school and massacred these children for no reason at all. And so once he had rewritten this article and made these small changes,

it would create a website with a .uA address. This is a Ukraine address. A site that looked like a local online Ukrainian newspaper. Extensibly written by Ukrainians for a Ukrainian audience. So he's being asked to write about Ukraine as if he was writing from Ukraine. Yes, exactly, exactly. And Vitaly, the way he describes it, while he's working on his newspapers involving events in Ukraine, pretending to be a Ukrainian journalist, he's citing blogs that are written ostensibly by Ukrainians, and he's pretty sure that blogger is upstairs and the next level up inside this building in St. Petersburg.

So it's a feedback loop. Well, and so I'm presuming on day one you've shown up there with these high-minded journalistic ideals and you have to realize that you've gotten yourself into something that in no way lives up to those ideals. How on earth did that feel?

Listen to, listen to, to the end of 2014 men, This is where he gets this really important moment where he's trying to decide what to do. He says to himself that he had kind of two thoughts, which is, you know, a, you get out of there and never come back, or B, you do go back and you find out more. What's going on there? And he gets this idea that, you know what, maybe I've got a scoop here. Maybe I can do an investigation. He sort of assigned himself to be kind of an undercover agent?

Exactly. Okay, just to zoom out here for a second, the job that Vatali had taken was, with an organization known as... The Internet Research Agency. Something called the Internet Research Agency. The Internet Research Agency. The Internet Research Agency. A shadowy Russian organization.

Which we've heard so much about in these past 72 hours. It's a private company established in 2013 by a Putin ally named... Yevgeny Pragozen. Yevgeny Prigozian. A Russian businessman with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Who, along with being the bearer of a rather strange nickname... ...dubbed chef to President Vladimir Putin by the...

...is also one of the Russian national... mentioned in the Mueller indictment. Now, in the early days when Vatali was working there, it was his impression that there were roughly a couple hundred people working at the Internet Research Agency. But at its peak, the organization grew to employ as many as a thousand people. With an annual budget of millions of dollars, headed by a management group and arranged into departments,

including graphics, search engine optimization, information technology, and finance departments. Now, as Vatali told us, it was hard to know exactly what happened in this place because everyone was so siloed. But over his time there, he was able to make sense of some of it. The first floor was filled with people just like Vitaali, writing fake articles for fake sites. Second floor was known as the social media department. And these folks were responsible for pumping out memes, like the one where Hillary Clinton is shaking hands with the devil. The third floor was filled with people writing fake blogs, the same blogs that Vatali would pull quotes from.

And on the fourth floor, you'd find the YouTube and Facebook commenting trolls, along with the cafeteria. It was a 24-7 operation. This was a 24-7 operation. They never stopped making news. They never stopped generating content. Well, and who were your co-workers? There were quite a few people from other towns of Russia that moved to St. Petersburg.

There were some people who said were, frankly, activists in the opposition. But there are a lot of people that, you know, like, you know, they check in, they check out for work, they just punch the clock. And, you know, for them it was just like mopping a floor or, you know, or taking out the trash. Did you feel some guilt

or misgivings about what you were doing? No, he describes being really stressed out during this whole period. Because while he was, you know, on the one hand, I suppose he's gathering good material for what will hopefully be some grand expose

that he'll write. On the other hand, he just felt like he was just living this lie. Eventually, after three and a half months, Vatali did quit. And as he tells it, he'd had enough and just didn't feel like he could learn anything else. And so with his months of research, he went on to write an article in Russia that really didn't make a splash at all,

in part because the Internet Research Agency was already a pretty well-known organization in Russia at that time. Essentially other journalists had just beaten him to the punch. But then, in the wake of the 2016 election, with accusations of Russian meddling beginning to swirl. Tonight, a look inside Russia's disinformation campaign from 26-year-old Vitali Bespeloff. The American media took notice, and Vatali got a call from NBC. Is this it? This is the building? Yes, yes, yes, of course.

The troll factory. With his eyebrow pierced and a pink sweater on, Vatali answered questions for this brief evening news segment. Did you create fake accounts? Yes, he says. So you believe that this operation was backed by the Kremlin. Absolutely, he says. Besbalov also believes it's still up and running.

The Kremlin denies it, suggesting reports the factory even existed might be fake. And from that moment on, he really became the go-to guy, if you wanted to talk to somebody who had worked inside. Journalists from all over the world started reaching out to him, asking for interviews or comments, and keep in mind, these were all international journalists,

none of them Russian, until one day, not long after all this. Yeah, so he gets a call from this national television channel saying, basically, in an hour, we're going to run a story about you, and we really want you to come on our talk show. And he said, look, I'm busy,

I'm working, you know, I can't do it. And so, you know, they run with this piece. In this TV studio, on this set that looked like a cross between sort of the family feud and an evening news broadcast, the hosts just start picking Vitale apart and flashing images of him on this giant screen behind them. And what they've got is they kind of mine his online persona. They've got him hanging out in a club, making funny faces of the camera. They start kind of digging through his political views, the fact that he's a supporter of the liberal opposition.

You know, and they just make him out to be this kind of freak. And they're all laughing at him. And, you know, it's just an absolute public flogging, a total public humiliation. Wow. Well, he got caught in his own little misinformation loop there at the end.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, what's interesting is Vatali, you know, the way he describes it is that, you know, in some ways, when he was there, they were just trying to figure out the mechanisms, it was getting more sophisticated. and as he's leaving, his time is ending at the Internet Research Agency, he says that there was just about this time,

and he started seeing these posts for vacancies in other languages. Including English. Because then, yeah, there were vacancies in Englishmen, but he, maybe it was formed. So in a way, for him, it's this moment where he sees the troll farm, the troll factory, suddenly turning outward. Well, now, three years later, we know a bit more about this English initiative. In 2014, the company established a translator project focused on the United States.

In July of 2016, more than 80 employees were assigned to the translator project. And many of those employees apparently took some of the moves from their Ukraine Info War playbook and used them, pointed them at the U.S. The Russians also recruited and paid real Americans to engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies. The defendants and their co-conspirators pretended to be grassroots activists. In fact, I spoke to one reporter who told me about this incident in Houston when there were two protests happening at the same time. On one side of the street, a white nationalist protest. And on the other, a group of Americans for Muslims.

Turns out both protests were covertly organized by Russians connected to the Internet research agency. According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians. And it was this phrase, out of all of the ludicrous revelations of the indictment, that really got us thinking, who were these unknowing Americans? How did they end up at these fake protests? And how did they think about it now? So producer Annie McEwen and I, we started calling around and we found three people at the center of one of the more famous fake protests mentioned in the indictment.

The so-called Florida Flash Mob. We'll hear all about that after the break. This is Radio Lab. We'll continue in a moment. Hi there. This is Kirsten recording from Orlando, Florida. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrad.

So after those indictments came down against the three Russian companies and 13 Russian nationals who were accused of creating fake protests across the country, our producers, Simon Adler and Annie McEwen, got interested to try and locate some people who had gone to these protests and maybe unwittingly took part in what was a covert Russian operation. And they managed to find three people. All right. You can hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Fine.

First up, a woman named Anne-Marie Margaret Thomas. Who lives in Florida. I live in Jupiter, Florida currently. Anne is in her 50s. She works as a real estate agent. And also... Oh, Shandau. I long to see you.

Beautiful. A singer. Wow. She's also a huge Trump fan, very active. on Twitter. And in early August, 2016, she was contacted first on Twitter, then over the phone, by two guys. Joshua and Matt, UCLA students. They said they were working with Hollywood producers. Matt and Josh, these are two people from Hollywood?

Probably is a film school, right? I don't know. They didn't give me that much information. But on the phone, Ann thought Joshua's voice sounded familiar. I better not. I shouldn't say who I think it is. Who did you think it was? Come on. Yeah, I'm really curious. Who do I think it is? John Christopher. Who's that? Yeah, who's John Christopher?

His stage name is Yonnie. Huh. Yonni, the musician. Wait, this is Yanni, the like orchestra, New Age piano god guy? Yeah, yeah, but I think she's just guessing. Like, there's no actual evidence looking Yonnie to any of this. What was the organization they were working with? This was the march for Trump.

group, and they were a grassroots organization, started in the United States, Texas, and California. What did they ask you, or what did they say when they contacted you? Well, they were, they said they were wanting to do rallies. And they, Hollywood people wanted to hire. They actually want to hire three actors, one to play Trump, one to play Bill Clinton, and one to play Hillary. Interesting. They basically told her that they wanted to do this, like, performance, art, theater, protest type thing. Now, at the same time, she was talking to these guys.

On the other side of Palm Beach County, Harry Miller, I'm retired. I'm active on Twitter, to a point. Another Trump fan, guy by the name of Harry Miller, who had a pretty big following. 60, 70,000, someone in there. He also got contacted on Twitter and over the phone. There was a conversation about a desire to put on a, something like a flash mob or something,

supporting Donald Trump. Sorry, who was it that contacted you? I believe his name was Matt. What did Matt say in his original sort of communication? This is extremely paraphrased because I don't have a distinct memory of all of it. And initially, I was very suspect of him. And the reason I was suspect is because he had a strong accent. And at the time, there was a lot of commotion about Muslims.

And I thought he was a Muslim of some kind and was trying to set something up. What did his voice sound like? It wasn't like you. you know, or an American, you know, was articulate. It was, it was broken. Well, and so he said he wanted a flash mob, and what did he, what did he say he wanted you to do? He was asking me about making a trailer with a jail type of thing on it.

Essentially, the guy with the accent told him, I want you to stage an event where you have a cage, and you're going to need to build this cage. But you're going to have this cage, and at the event, there will be a Hillary Clinton impersonator and a Bill Clinton impersonator, and I want you to put them in the cage like you're putting them in jail. And you should do this outside so that lots of people can see you and they can chant,

lock her up, lock her up, and you should take lots of photos and lots of videos, and you should send them to us. And I did eventually say yes because he had an elaborate website, and he told me it was part of a big group of people. Do you remember the name of the website? Being patriotic. It's dismantled according to the FBI now. In fact, I tried to pull it up.

I can't get it either. What was odd is they insisted on paying me. How did they end up paying for it? They sent me to a check cashing place. And how much money was it? I found an estimate, and I'd written an estimate around $505 for it. But it did come from out of the country. I do recall that.

Can you describe what this, once the construction was complete, what your truck looked like? Yeah, I have an F-354 pickup truck. Big truck. Yeah. And I built a chain link fence, three sides, and then one side with a gate. And on four corners, I had American flags, of course. And there was a lot of talk about who was going to go in the cage. And he says, oh, we'll hire some actors.

No one would play Trump. No, we would play him. Anne says the two, quote, UCLA guys, suggested that she play Hillary. And she agreed. And I made the costume. I made the costume from a nurse's outfit. And on the back it said, inmate. I went to the Hollywood mask store, and I bought a full head mask of Hillary.

And so what were, like, you're told to, what were you told, like, show up at this place, at this time, at this date, and you just did it? I don't know if you know in Palm Beach, but it was city place in front of cheesecake. factors where this happened. Harry was told to show up August 20th, 1 p.m. outside the cheesecake factory. That's where this was going to go down. Boy, that was another thing. I kept asking, are you going to be there? Who's going to run this thing? Where do I go? Oh, no, you just go to a city place, don't know.

So he shows up in front of the cheesecake factory with his truck, with the big cage he'd built on the back, and sure enough, there were people there, including Anne, dressed up as Hillary Clinton. We were given a script. What were your lines? Do you remember? Remember? Let me see. Well, we were, I was supposed to talk about my computer tablet and my e-mails. And then I was supposed to tell some jokes. She was there with her very good friend Greg, who she convinced to be the Bill Clinton impersonator.

I sort of needed money at the time, so. What did you do, Greg, to get to prepare to play the part of Bill Clinton? I had to shave. You had to shave. Do you normally have like a mustache or something? I shaved once back in the 70s. Then I shaved again with when Jerry Garcia died. And then I shaved when I had to play Bill Clinton.

Wait, you shaved like three times in your life? That's about it. How did it feel to be in this cage along with Anne and be like this sort of strange actor in this moving play? Well, first off, it was hot, and I was in a dark blue suit, and it was August, and it's Florida, so it's like 94 degrees. And all I could think of was I wanted a beer. That makes sense. And I just wanted it to be over.

So you didn't have very much fun? No, it wasn't a whole lot of fun. It would just work. Right. It was Annie having fun? Well, yeah, I guess she was. was. Bill was supposed to find a lady that would be standing around like a news lady and try to flirt with her.

Hey, Bill, don't look now, but I just seen Monica. And then they put us in town. She was in the state department. And they sat in the cage for a while. What you see in the Facebook live video is a few dozen people in the parking lot outside the cheesecake factory. They're just standing around the cage with Annie inside of it, who's pretending to be sad about being locked up. She was pretty good. She could have been an actress.

You know, she's looking exasperated and, you know, all that. We spent a day doing that. Took a lot of pictures. Had a good time. Pictures, of course, ended up on social media. And according to Harry, that thing on Twitter got over 500,000 hits in 24 hours, you know. You're aware that much of the mainstream media at the moment is reporting that this was a Russian,

like, how does it make you feel that, there's now this possibility that you were... Oh, yeah, but I was... The FBI came here to talk to me about it. Okay. When did you speak with the FBI? Oh, they came to my house. Yeah, how long ago?

Last week. What did they ask you? Well, they discussed with me pretty much what you were discussing with me, but not in as much depth as you did. The young guy was kind of unexperienced. He was cuter than Christian Bale, too. Cueter than Christian Bale, too. The young guy.

We reached out to the FBI. They responded with no comment. Are you concerned that you may be part, like that you may have been used as a puppet by people in St. Petersburg? No, I wasn't used as a puppet. But would you have done it had they not reached out to you in the first place? Well, I wanted to help Trump. But this is a situation where our own federal government is telling you that this is essentially become an interstate conflict where Russia,

intentionally manipulated people. Do you find that troubling? Well, we're not all that stupid Harry Miller and me and his wife, veterans. No, we're not that stupid. You know, this whole thing's being investigated. And I'm like known as the unwitting, real American. So she's referring to a word that Rod Rosenstein used in the press conference

when he announced these indictments. He said that these Russians... They established social media pages and groups to communicate with unwitting Americans. Unwitting? I'm the one whose idea was to put the date of Benghazi on the prison uniform. I'm not unwitting. And I'm not a Russian.

I'm an American, and I decided that I didn't want to vote for Hillary. Yeah, and I guess I'm not saying you're stupid at all. I think what's interesting here is I don't think you or Greg North or Harry Miller, I think that you all had really good intentions that you believed in this man and you wanted to go out and support him. And I think what gets complicated here now is we find out that even though you supported this man, and maybe in the end of the day, you helped him win, that there was some nefarious work going on behind the scenes that led you to do this.

And I would have complicated feelings about that. And I'm just trying to figure out if you do or don't. No, because I did not believe that it be the case for the people that I dealt with. I did not think it was a Russian movement. I've got an article up here in front of me, and in the indictment, they refer to Matt Skeber, who is, I think, the Hollywood man that you talked to. They refer to him as an... We used to it from Texas, and he went to UCLA.

Okay, excuse me. And he was involved to a certain point, and then he said he was going home. Yeah, I'm looking at a document right here saying that Matt Skeber is an invented person. Well, maybe that's an invented name, but he was a young guy. He sounded like what he said he was. Maybe he did give me a bogus name. But you don't believe he was working for Russia. Well, I don't know, because if he lied about his name, who knows?

That's what he told me. He said his name was Matt, and he was UCLA soon. And the email that I had was this Josh, Josh Milton. I'll let you know that Josh Milton, they're saying, is also a made-up person. You know, but I might be wrong. But I'm not usually wrong. I think it's hilarious. I really do.

Because then obviously what happened from what I gathered from this is I was the one dealing with the Russians, not Trump. How about that one? What do you think about that? How does it make you feel? It's silly. It's silly.

Because, you know, I don't think I'm stupid, but I don't see a real motive here and how this could change any votes. And they're claiming it disrupted the election. Where does this interfere with our elections? I don't know. I don't know how that could be. I really, but again, had they not contact me, I'd never, my whole life spent up there with a page on that corner. Say, we'll offer up. And Harry says he understands that what the invisible men on the other end of the phone seemed to want was to create a visual stunt, one that they could then take on the road.

They wanted me to go to New York. Oh, they did. They wanted you to bring the cage to New York. Yeah, I told him I would, too. I wasn't adverse that. And the whole thing to him was, it just didn't matter if it were Russians or not. But to Anne's friend Greg, the guy who played Bill Clinton, he thinks about the whole thing very differently. Well, had I known that I was working for the Russians, I would have asked for a lot more money. Okay. But I have never felt good about the thing because I might have had a little bit of influence on Donald Trump being elected, and I think that was a mistake for America.

And he doesn't feel that way, but I do. So is the feeling almost a sort of guilt? I'm not, I don't feel guilty. I was being paid to do a job, and I did the job, and I did the job to the best of my ability, and people told me that I did the job well. Okay. Well, so how does it feel to know that you were sort of used? I find it a little irritating.

Nobody likes to be used. Irritating to me feels like a bit of a mild word for how I might feel. Well, I don't know. I'm thinking that this might be played on the radio, so I can't really use the words that I would like to use. Nah, I'm pissed the shit. Well, it sounds like you and Anne have very different interpretations of whether Russia was involved or not. Does that get between your relationship?

Well, let's see. Do I love any? Yes, I do very, very much. Do we see eye to eye on everything? No, we don't. We all do crazy things for love. Even dress up like Bill Clinton, shave our beards, and go in a prison cage. Oh, I've done crazier things than that, but I feel duped as an American,

not by the Russians, but by my fellow Americans. The Russians can't come up. here and vote. We voted the way we wanted to vote. I don't know if I'm making me sense from now. Yeah, it sounds a little bit like you're saying that what's frustrating is the fact that it wasn't actually Russia that started the fire. They were just blowing on it and maybe making it a little worse. But the truly disheartening thing is the fact that the fire was ignited here without Russia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. I mean, I can't. I can't. I can't talk about this anymore.

Call back sometime. Just call back sometime. I got something to say about everything. I'm an old man. Okay, good. Well, we'll make use of that. All right, Greg. Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you, man. Bye-bye. Bye now. This piece was produced by Simon Adler and Anna McEwen. We had reporting assistants from Becca Bressler and Charles Mainz. Very special thanks to Casey Michelle and Lara Eisensey. And of course, to Yanni. I'm Chad Abumrad.

Thank you guys for listening. This is Molly Moodick from Phoenix, Arizona. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Beth El-Hobti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Lateef Nasser, Melissa Odds. Donald, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aroncic, Shima

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