Reply All - #140 The Roman Mars Mazda Virus

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

Ben loves podcasts, but he has a problem. When he tries to listen to one podcast in particular, his car stereo completely breaks. This week, Super Tech Support takes on one of its strangest cases — Roman Mars versus a 2016 Mazda sedan. LISTEN TO 99 % Invisible! Roman Mars' 99% Invisible podcast Podcasts featured in this episode iTunes: ^space^ - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/space/id1458545673 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/less-than-approximately-greater-than/id1458541805 100% Related? - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/100-related/id1458542752 88% Parentheticals - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/88-parentheticals/id1458545680 BONUS PODCAST!: {Blank} + {Blank} = FUN - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blank-blank-fun/id1458544361 RSS: ^space^ - https://feeds.megaphone.fm/carrotspacecarrot - https://feeds.megaphone.fm/greaterless 100% Related? - https://feeds.megaphone.fm/100pr 88% Parentheticals - https://feeds.megaphone.fm/88pr BONUS PODCAST!: {Blank} + {Blank} = FUN - https://feeds.megaphone.fm/blankblankfun Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJ vote. And this week, PJ, we have a super tech support. Super tech support is a segment on our show where listeners come to us with their weird unsolvable tech problems. And one of us usually you goes out and tries to solve it for them. Mm-hmm. And you have one.

I do. Tell me about it. So we got an email from a guy named Ben. He lives in Houston. And Ben is a huge fan of podcasts. He has his own podcast. He said he listens to over 100. podcasts, which like, I don't even know how that's possible.

He said that the one complaint he has about his podcast app is that it tallies how much time he spends listening to podcasts. It tells me how many overall days of podcasts I've listened to, and it's just more and more depressing. You know. Would you like to guess? Sure, yes. 40 days.

133. Oh, my God. And recently he started having this very strange podcast-related problem. Which is what? So Ben, not too long ago got a new car. It was a 2016 Mazda 6. And the thing that he was most excited about in his new car was that he could pair his phone using Bluetooth so that he could listen to podcasts. Oh, before he was like an Oxane guy?

Yes. Anyway, for some reason, the radio in his new car refuses to play one podcast and one podcast only. Which is? The Radiotopia podcast, 99% Invisible. Really? Yes. And it's driving him absolutely insane. His car Bluetooth has rejected Roman Mars in his stories.

Yes. Obviously, like, for people who don't know, 90% Invisible, host by Roman Mars. It's this really great nonfiction podcast. They tell, like, all these stories about design, like, how things work in the world and why they're made the way they're made, like, the stories behind those things. and apparently it's the one podcast that doesn't work on his car. That's right. So I asked Ben to play 99% Invisible through his car stereo while he was on the phone with me. Can you tell me exactly where you're sitting at the moment?

All right. I'm sitting at my driver's seat in my 2016 Mazda 6. Okay. And let me know when you press play. All right. So I'm going to press play right now. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The show does start playing, but like the display screen stops working. It totally freezes. The buttons aren't working properly. He has no control. It's just sort of playing on its own. So you can't interact with the screen at all. It still says whatever I played right before, 99% invisible. And then after about a minute...

Hang on, the screen just went black. And now it's cut off and restarted. and I'm not playing 99% invisible anymore because every time I've done that, if it's still playing, it will freeze again. How could you have a type problem where the trigger was like content? I know, it's weird, right?

It's very weird. It's like it would make more sense to me if like it broke down any time you tried to listen to like podcasts that weren't, if it didn't work for car talk. Like, okay, maybe his car doesn't want to hear stories about sick cars. Maybe that's like upsetting or something like that.

I really like that you've immediately, gone to like the car as a chief sentence. Do you have any theories about what's going on? I don't know. My best guess is that, because I looked at the file sizes, and I listen to things like hardcore history and blank check, which have big file sizes. And it's not that.

My best guess is maybe he's using some sort of weird audio codec that interacts strangely with my system, but I really couldn't tell you, so I don't know. Ben thinks that because Roman's voice is so, like, warm and close in his podcasts, maybe he's doing something specific and technical to the files to achieve that? That would be my actual guess. It's like there's something about the actual kind of file. The way that Roman is converting his podcast to an MP3,

that's just, like, too complicated for Ben's car system. And I was thinking about it, and I was like, these are the two constants in his problem. One is the podcast. It's always the same podcast. And the other is that it's always the same radio. I was like, maybe he just has to like a bad radio. But even if it's a bad radio, it's still interesting because like, why is this radio bad only with 99% visible?

Not only that. But we got another email from another person experiencing exactly the same problem with exactly the same podcast. That is so weird. All right. So I have to figure this out. Cool. How are you doing? I'm good. How you doing? I'm good.

It is a pleasure to hear your voice, not on a podcast. Yes. Yeah, me as well. I was very delighted to get your email. Are you totally in the dark as to why I would reach out to you? Totally. So I told Roman why I was calling him, and I told him about what was going on with Ben's car. There's one that causes his car stereo to find. freeze, shut down, and restart. And Roman had actually heard about this problem from other listeners.

Yeah, I don't know what it is. We got some details for it a few times from a few different people, but I've never really figured it out. All Roman knows is that in some cars, Bluetooth plus car radio plus 99% invisible causes everything to break. But he has no idea why. So I ran Ben's theory by him. He was like, well, Roman obviously cares about the sort of texture of the sound.

Maybe he's doing something very specific to his files. And I'm curious, like, what is your setup like? Do you have a strange microphone of some kind? No, I mean, we have a couple. I use like a shotgun mic in the studio. But you're not using some kind of special encoding settings that are different from the rest of Radiotopia? No. No.

Roman said that he had a theory that he's actually pretty confident about, which is the thing that makes his podcast unusual is that it uses the percent sign. The percent sign? As in the percent sign, 99 percent invisible? Yeah. Oh. He was like, it must just not play well with the stereo for some reason. So it's like, because the stereo can also display the name of the podcast, there's something about just there being a symbol where it doesn't expect there to be a symbol, it breaks.

Yeah. And it really bums Roman out, honestly. He's been hearing about it for years from other people who are not been. But, like, what can he do about it? He's not going to change the name of the podcast. You know, like, I would love it to be fixed. And I really, if somebody's a fan of the show, I really hate for them not to be able to hear it. Like, I wish it could be better.

But I think I recognize the futility of me fighting it, I think, is the thing. I feel like a primary fundamental tenet of supertexts. support is realizing that something is futile and well over well outside of our capability and putting on a football helmet and running headfirst into it anyway well i mean if you solve it i would be really grateful it just it just like when it just seemed like these this is one of those things where all these technologies are budding up against each other and all i am is some little bit of grit that gets caught between the gears of, you know, tech companies, you know, not knowing how to pass things off and talk to each other. That's what I feel like I am.

The irony of this was crazy making. Like, 99% invisible. A podcast dedicated to explaining the beauty of good design, that is the one podcast that breaks when you try and play it on Ben's Mazda. It just felt like an imbalance in the universe that I had to correct. And Roman's theory about the percent sign, it felt really plausible to me. So I thought I'd start there. And I figured, like, if the percent sign is giving the car trouble because it's a special character, other special characters should break the car too. So I just wanted to test that theory.

Basically, you're thinking like classic tech support problem. Like you have to replicate the glitch to understand it to solve it. Exactly. So I started thinking about other special characters. Like, you know, what about like the carrot or the curly brackets or whatever? The curly brackets? You know, the curly brackets. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they look like they'd be music notation. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we wanted to make a podcast that would break his stereo. And to do that, we devised a test. Uh-huh. Who's we? Me?

Most of the team, to be honest. Okay. It was me, Tim, Anna, Fia, Emmanuel Shruthy Domiano I was about to make funny you guys

because I was like oh why does it take that many people to make a podcast but it's like literally it takes that many people to make this podcast so why wouldn't it

also we didn't make one podcast how many podcasts did you make well let's just start at the beginning okay so the first podcast

we made is called carrot space carrot you know the carrot which is about the six the little pointy the pointy upwards arrow yeah okay

it's called carrot space carrot Mm-hmm. Whose job was it to make the podcast art? It was mine. Okay. Oh, that's pretty nice. It's like a child's drawing of like a Bugs Bunny carrot.

And then in the background, there's a planet. Oh, I get it. It's like carrots and space. I'm just going to play it for you. Okay. You're in Alex Coleman territory. That's synth. Hello.

Welcome to the carrot space carrot. Podcast. I recorded this in my attic. I feel like this is the ASMR that like printers listen to when they're trying to go to sleep at night. The atomic red carrot has slim roots that travel forward through time. You're describing what? The atomic red carrot.

Time produces Dawkes Corrota or Queen Anne's Lace. Don't you just feel like relaxed? No, I don't feel relaxed. How do you feel? I feel like a robot's trying to mug me. Like a robot's trying to hypnotize me to go to sleep so it can mug my data. Queen Anne's Lace. Annihilates negative Queen Anne's Lace.

I think I've had enough for this podcast. Okay. So we made this podcast. We uploaded it to podcast apps and to an RSS feed. Uh-huh. We gave it to Ben. Uh-huh. And I asked him to try it in his car.

Go ahead and listen. And we'll see if it breaks your car stereo. All righty, let's do it. And play. Can you look at your screen and see how this is affecting your stereo? So I have to tell you, it's, uh, It is functioning completely normally. Interesting.

It also means it's not filtering for the quality of podcasts. So then we wanted to make a podcast to test the less than symbol, the tilde, which is the symbol that means approximately and the greater than symbol. Okay. I'm just going to play you the beginning. Okay. That's jaunty. Hi, this is Samin Nasrat. Welcome to Greater Than Less Than Approximately.

You got Samin Nasrat to make your fake podcast. Yes. Jesus. Samin wrote the book Salt, Fat, acid, heat, and she also has a Netflix show by the same name. Such a waste of talent. Today, I'm

joined by a cooking noob Alex Goldman. Hey, thanks for having me. Oh, I'm so glad you could be here. You got her to teach you cooking? I've been trying to learn cooking for a book for like a year. A berry clafouti is basically a pancake with berries in it.

But instead of being cooked on the stove, it's cooked in the other. Okay. She taught you this? I feel like you can do that with me today? I feel very excited. For a Mazda? What you have to understand about this is this isn't your average cooking show, because the only way that she could give me instructions is by telling me the ingredients

were less than approximately or greater than a... A... I hate my heart. It's just such waste. Less than approximately or greater than some other thing. So let me find an example here. The measurement for the sugar should be about... Have you ever had one of those toys that you know those stress balls?

Yes. Okay, you should put about a stress ball amount of sugar into the bowl. So you're saying like greater than one of those super balls? This is. Yes, greater than a super ball. So stupid. So stupid. Okay.

Okay. For the eggs, can you add an amount of eggs that's greater than the number of nipples you have? So you're saying like, less than the sides of a square. Correct. Anyway, the berry clafout tea I made, as you might imagine. Didn't turn out good. Was not edible.

Yeah. So did this break the Mazda? He popped it in his podcast player. All right. Hi, this is Samin Nasrat. Welcome to greater than less than approximately. It seems to be working just fine. Okay.

So at this point, we have tried the carrot, the tilde, the less than sign, the greater than sign. We even made another podcast where we tested the plus sign, the equal sign, the curly brackets. None of them are replicating this problem. Have you ever had the thing happen where you go to get like an object repaired and the people in the repair shop care about the object differently than you care about it? Do you know what I mean? Like they're like, oh, what this guitar really needs is like to be a double-neck guitar? And you're like, no, it doesn't. But then they're just like doing it and they're often doing it.

You realize they have more of a relationship to the work they want to do than to helping you? I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, me neither. Okay. But of course, at this point, we were definitely going to test the percent sign, right? Right. Some would argue you could have just started by testing the percent sign. Some would.

Some would argue you seem to just want to make a bunch of garbage podcasts. How dare you call these garbage? So we made a podcast that was called 100 percent related? Hi, my name's Alex Goldman, and you're listening to 100 percent related? The premise of this is a couple days ago I was talking to our editor, Tim Howard, and he insisted that I was only 50% related to my dad because I only have 50% of my dad's genes. Hello?

Father. So you're 50% related to your dad and you're 50% related to your mom? My opinion is I'm 100% related to both of my parents. But in Tim's worldview. Yes. And so what we did is we got my dad, a former judge, to adjudicate this argument.

What should I call you? Should I call you Judge Goldman or should I call you... Now, you can call me Mark. Okay, he seems very biased in this, but whatever. Now, I'd like for you to lay out your case, Tim, because what you're saying is insane. Well, it really just seems to me that if you were 100% related, you would be Mark. And you are not.

You're 50% related. So, okay. What all I'm saying is like, I'm 100% related to anyone who's my relative. So you are as related to your father as any other human being. That's what you're saying. Me and Tim are on the same page. Spoiler alert. So was my dad.

Oh, Tim. Your dad took Timside? Yes. Good man. So. Why is this the podcast? Because I like arguing with you. It's like for fans of arguing with you.

Yeah. Oh, I don't feel good. So the percent sign. Oh, right. There's a point to this. There's a point to this. He listened to the thing. I feel like I've fallen into your vortex.

So clearly we were wrong about all the special characters breaking the radio, which surprised me. But I just wanted to confirm the one thing that we were actually confident was true, which was that the percent sign would break the radio. So I give Ben the podcast. All right. Let's do it. All right. I have to know, is it freezing your stereo? Alex, I'm really sorry to say, no. It is totally normal. But how is that possible? So clearly this caught me off guard. So Roman's whole theory that he found so obvious does not seem to be founded. It doesn't seem to be founded.

And so at this point, I just start thinking that it has to be something within the file itself that they are uploading that's busted, that it doesn't actually have anything to do with the percent sign. Interesting. But then Ben tells us something that, again, befuddles us. Okay. Which is, Ben found a copy of a 99% invisible episode on YouTube and tried playing games. that over his car stereo. So he was like, I'm going to see if pirated 99PI works. Yeah.

And? It breaks the car. It breaks the car? I mean, it breaks the stereo. It does the same thing. Yeah. Which is weird because it just means like it's not actually anything about the file itself. Because when someone's uploading a podcast to YouTube, that's like a totally new file.

Yes. It's like the content. It's like the car is sentient and doesn't like Roman Mars. And so Ben was like the only option is that there must be some, some, some, sonic frequency that is breaking the car. And I was like, there's like a note in Roman's voice that if he were just sitting in a Mazda

and started talking too loud, the car would just explode. That's wild. Also, when I was a kid, there's a rumor that there was one note that would make you poop your pants. Oh, yeah, the brown note. Yeah.

I'm very familiar. That's not real. I don't think it's real. We both know that's not real, but I'm glad you brought it up. Okay. I've been thinking about it this whole time. I could hear you thinking about it.

I've been thinking about it since this story began. And I've been like, I'm in mixed company. I can't bring this up. I can't believe you stopped yourself from saying something one time. Do you think Roman was thinking about it? Do you think everybody was thinking about it the whole time? Brown note?

Yeah. I hope so. Okay. So we're like, okay, we have no idea. We're like totally back to square one. You got to find the brown note. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

And the other reason this doesn't make any sense is because Roman has another podcast. About Trump and the constitutional law. Yeah, it's called What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. And what happens with that one? It plays fine. Roman's voice doesn't break the radio on that podcast only when it's 99% visible. Huh. So what happened?

You called John Mazda? We called the company that makes the radio. We called Ben's Mazda dealer. We are specifically dealing with a Mazda tech problem from a person who's in your service area. And I was wondering if I could ask you a question or two about it. They weren't familiar with the issue. So we called Andrew Kukluitz, the CTO of PRX, the public radio exchange. Hello, this is Alex.

How are you doing? Oh, hey, Alex. How are you? I'm good. He's in charge of how the show gets uploaded to podcast apps and RSS feeds. So you're just calling everybody being like, have you heard of this? Yeah. And Andrew said that he'd heard of it and that he'd always figured, like Roman, that it was the percent sign. But I told him about the tests that we'd done.

And all of them worked, including 100 percent related. No. Yeah. Crap. That's, oh, these are like so painful, these kind of bugs. No one knew what was going on. And then... I want to solve this ahead of you.

Uh, so did Ben. He actually got back in touch with us and said, Hey, I've been running some tests on my own. I tried uploading a couple podcasts. And what I found is that it's not the percent sign alone that is causing this issue. it is the percent sign followed by an uppercase eye that shuts down the radio. Lowercase eye, it doesn't? Uppercase eye, it shuts down.

That's all we know. We don't know why. Uppercase eye, your car doesn't fly. Lowercase eye, podcast in the sky. That's exactly right. So, I mean, so we're getting closer. And then, you know our pal Kurt Melby who works a gimlet? Works at gimlet?

Who I play Fortnite with most weekends? who does coding at the office? Yeah. He had an idea. Kurt? Alex. Thank you for coming into the studio today. Thank you.

Glad to be here. So the reason that we have you here is because you're the person who actually uploaded the podcasts that we made. Yeah, that was fun. I don't know if you know this, but none of them worked. I listened to them also, and they were pretty entertaining. But yeah, I know, I'm not surprised that that didn't work. All right, smart guy. Kurt says, I have a theory.

And the theory is that in the programming language C, uh-huh. Oh, I know what it is. I know what happened. Literally 99% means something. It means turn off your stereo in the programming language C. You're close, but not exactly. In the programming language C, basically in some scenarios, the percent sign means,

hey, the character immediately following me, the character immediately following the percent sign. think about that like code rather than like text. Oh. And start parsing that as though it's asking you to run commands. And there's a thing called print F in C. It's like used very, very commonly and heavily. And other languages have copied this feature to interpolate is the technical term. Interpolate the number into the string.

And he said percent I in C. in C is a command, whereas percent R, which would be 100 percent related, question mark, is not. So like... What's the command? What does percent I tell a computer to do? So I have it up here. It has to do with basically the percent in C has to do with displaying integers in C. I know.

This is very confusing. Oh, my brain's math. Yeah, I know. So percent and then a bunch of different letters tell it to display integers in a certain, in a certain, in a certain way. But basically what's happening, it sounds like, is the car stereo, it gets what it thinks is an audio file, what is an audio file. And it's like, okay, this part of the information I have is just for the humans.

This is like the title to display. Yeah, 99. And then there's the... And then it's like, okay, now here's some stuff for you, the robots to understand. And it gets a bunch of gobbly guck and it gets confused and it shuts down. Yes. Wow. So there's a bunch of different commands and C that would cause this to happen.

Okay. And so we were like, okay, if Kurt's right, we should be able to test this with other commands, and those should also mess up the car stereo. And so we made one more podcast. Oh, no. Okay. With another one of the recognized pieces of syntax, which is the letter P, which is the letter P, which when it follows the percent sign becomes the pointer address, whatever that means. Okay. But whatever, as long as it's going into code, it should shut down the stereo if that's what's happening.

happening. So we made a podcast that's called 88% parentheticals. Uh-huh. Here you go. This is Sarah Koenig, and you're listening to 88% parentheticals. So wrong. I'm going to tell you about this document I'd been waiting for. There's one piece of paper that was going to change everything I thought I understood up to now. It arrived on a Monday. Monday began like a normal day. I was walking to work with my dog, whose name is Bruno, by the way.

He didn't come with that name. I named him Bruno. He's a rescue dog. He came with a name like Bradley or something, which I really didn't like. So I changed it to Bruno, which, by the way, is the name I also wanted to name my son. We're in a parenthetical. I understand. I understand what you've done with Bruno. And we get there. It's a short walk like maybe 10 minutes, which is crazy because people are always like, what podcast do you listen to? What podcast do? Because you make podcasts. And I'm like, not that many because I have such a short walk to work. Anyway, but get to my house. That's just wrong. Okay. I've heard enough. Okay. I don't want to live in a woman. world where you can take up Sarah Canem's time with this. Also, there's people that are like, oh, when's the next season of cereal coming out? Like, 20 minutes later than it would have.

So what happened? Well, we sent it to Ben, and it didn't break the car stereo. What? It didn't break it. So that screws up the whole theory? Absolutely. I mean, we didn't just try percent P. We tried a bunch of different things that should have broken the car.

stereo in the same way that percent I does, and none of them cost a problem. So what then? Is Kurt's theory bunk? Kurt's theory appears not to work. The only combination that did anything was percent followed by an uppercase eye. Okay, but we don't know why. No, we don't. And it is driving me nuts. After the break, we finally find an answer for Ben. Welcome back to the show. Okay, so here's where we stand at this point. All we know, we know, we know, we know. know is that percent uppercase eye is the one command that can possess a car stereo. And Roman Mars just had the terrible luck of embedding that command in the name of his podcast.

We don't know why, and we don't know how to fix it. And this is the point in the story where Andrew Kukluwitz comes to the rescue. Andrew Kuklowets? Remember, he's the CTO at Public Radio Exchange, the company that distributes 99% invisible. Uh-huh. he really dove. Like, he really invested himself in this. What does that mean that he really invested himself in it?

Well, you know, we were trying to figure out a way to diagnose this properly without actually having access to the code. And you'd done everything you could. You made a bunch of nonsense podcasts for no reason. You talked to somebody who worked at a Mazda dealership and one guy at work. We also called Mazda. Andrew got onto like a Mazda owner's message board and found the actual. code for the Mazda Connect infotainment system. Really?

And within the code found the name of one of the original authors of the original code, which he then gave to us. The author of the code for the Mazda Car Stereo program? Yes. Wow. His name is Brandon Guzman. Is it embarrassing that I don't know, that I didn't already know, that you can look in code and see the code's author?

Like, I didn't know that. There's a way to write your authorship in your code. and it's been done forever. And is it always like that, like a signature on a painting? Mm-hmm. It's a little, a lot of times it's harder to find. You have to have access to the code to see the authorship. Yeah.

And my favorite story about this is early in the development of Atari games. Atari would not allow the author of the game to put their name on it. Because they're just being a company about it. Yeah. And so the author of the game adventure created this incredibly arcane set of things that you had to do in the game so that you would find a secret room. that just flashed his name in the center of the screen. That's brilliant and sad.

Like, it's just sad that they had to go to that much work to just be like, I made this. Anyway, so you got in touch with Brandon. Yes. He works on exercise technology now. I work for a company called ShapeLog. We develop connected strength products. As a person who's terrible at exercising, I'm not your target audience. Yeah, the irony is the entire office of us working on this or not either.

We're more like stay up late and sit at our computer longer people. So we told Brandon what was going on with Ben's car, and he told us that he was pretty sure he knew what was going on. Which is. So what he said was... One thing that caught my eye immediately is that there's a percent symbol in the name. And that has some special meanings in things like a URL. In a URL, certain characters are allowed in certain characters.

are not. So our operating theory was that percent I was breaking the radio because the percent sign followed by the letter I meant something in the programming language C. But what Brandon told us was, no, that program wasn't even written in C. It was written in a totally different programming language. Okay. And to the radio, the percent I doesn't actually mean anything. And what Brandon thinks the problem is, is that the code should tell the radio to ignore things that it doesn't understand or that don't mean anything. But in this case, for whatever reason, it's not. So the radio sees percent I and just keeps desperately trying to figure out what it means. So it's like it's having a panic attack. Kind of. It's like I, present, present I. Present I.

And so then I was like, okay, so why is the stereo restarting? And Brandon told me that when they designed the car, they made it so that the radio was regularly sending a little message to the rest of the car saying, I'm working, I'm working, I'm working, Brandon called it a heartbeat. Uh-huh. And the hardware layer is listening for that. And as long as it gets it, it's happy. If it doesn't get it, it will assume that the UI has frozen and it will restart it to a known quid state.

It's saying, it's not communicating with me. Something is wrong. And it just starts over. Yeah. So if it freezes up. And it doesn't send the heartbeat. It is trained to automatically shut down and start back up. Got it.

So that is why the computer is, that's why the series is staying. So it has a panic attack and then takes a nap, and it wakes up and tries again. I really like how much effort we've put into personifying these cars. I just understand that they're sentient. I feel like this doesn't actually go against my original theory. Like everybody else, they freak out when they don't have the right answer. Right. There is one other thing that was suggested to us several times along the way.

Ben's car stereo firmware is a few iterations out of date. So the theory is that if you just updated the firmware. If you updated the firmware, it might fix this problem. According to Mase, it will. But Ben looked into getting his firmware updated and it was just too expensive for him. However, that doesn't mean that we don't have a more permanent solution for Ben and Roman. Because Andrew Kukluitz from PRX had a very sweet. idea. Maybe we got to publish a version of 99% Invisible with some slightly different

titles or something. I'd be willing to create the Mazda version of the feed. That would be great. That'd be super cool. There's just like a 99% invisible for Ben and other Mazda owners feed. Well, I can say that people in Nissan have also reported having this problem. But yes, for Mazda owners and Nissan owners who are having problems with the specific infotainment system. That's a very niche podcast. So I called Ben up one more time. Just let me know if when you got it set up and ready to roll. What I'll do?

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Tim Harford is a master at picking out the perfect little story. And everything's working fine? Economic principle. Yeah. So this totally works. It's playing normally, not freezing at all.

It's perfect. So if listeners have the same problem as Ben where their car loses its mind every time it tries to play 99% Invisible, there is a solution now. They can go to 99% Invisible's website, 99% Invisible.org or 99% Invisible.org. Go to the contact section, send them an email. They will send you a feed that will work in your car. And all the podcasts that we made to test Ben's car, they will be available wherever you listen to podcasts. We will put links in the show notes, so people should definitely check them out. Or don't.

Why would you say that? It just is a waste of... Sarah Koenig put in so much work, Samin. You've wasted a lot of good people's time, and now you're trying to waste additional good people's time by listening to them. No, I think that... I think that that is the case. We can take it on your judge podcast and figure it out. Do you want to do that one?

I don't. I really don't. Because we could call me back right now. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We're produced by Shruthy Pidiminani, Fia Bennan, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, and Emmanuel Jochi. Our shows edited by Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Juan and Kate Balinski.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Christina Ayale de Josa. Special thanks this week to Kalila Holt, Jim Fisher, Sydney Mamelis, Peter Oliphant, and Eli Manning. And another big thank you to Kurt Melby for all this help. Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Matt Lieber is Roddy McDowell in Fright Night. You can listen to our show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.