Reply All - #52 Raising The Bar

Episode Date: January 21, 2016

Leslie Miley went from being a college dropout to Twitter's only black engineer in a leadership position. So why did he quit? Also a brand new Yes Yes No. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply Off. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Don't you feel like we're about to do like an NFL announcing thing? That's literally all I know about sports is the song for football. Is that the song for football?

Yeah, it's called the song for football. Are you ready to fall football? Do you remember Hank Williams, Hank Williams Jr. did that song? I know the songs for football. That's cool. So this week we have a really surprising, great piece that you reported,

but that is in the second half of the show. So first, we're going to have a yes, yes, yes, no. Let's go. Welcome to yes, yes, no, the segment on the show where we treat our boss like our dad and walk through the internet and explain things to him. These intros get more and more humiliating. This, of course, is our boss, Alex Bloomberg.

Thanks for doing this again. Sorry to embarrass you. But it seems like you like it because you keep coming back. Well, I learn things along the way. That's the good thing. All right, so this is a tweet, and it's from a Twitter user named Kept Simple, Kept underscore Simple. And the tweet reads as follows,

contrast the strong virile powerball with BB8, the powerless white cuckball. So PJ Vote. Do you know what this tweet means? I can see some of it. Like, I can see some iceberg over the water, but I don't know how much is that. Just answer the question.

I don't know. I kind of know. Alex Goldman, do you know what this tweet means? Yes, I do. You fully know? Yes. Alex Bloomberg, do you know what this tweet means? I do not. Well, Alex, how far do you make it in before you get lost?

Me? Yeah. I get lost at contrast, let's see, contrast the strong virile power ball with BB8. I get lost at BB8. BB-B-8. Okay, but before that, you. Do you know right now that the Powerball lottery is super high? Yeah, the Powerball lottery is over a billion dollars.

That I know, because I'm a human being. Okay. I wasn't calling it into question, but you don't know who BB8 is. No, I don't know who BB8 is. Okay, well, a lot of human beings, most human beings, saw the new... There's a new movie out. It's a little movie. It's called Star Wars.

Right, okay. And do you remember R2D2 in the old Star Wars movies? Yes. Archer D.Jito is the one that only spoke in beeps. Right. So there's a new droid that only speaks in beeps. His name's BB8. He looks like a volleyball with another volleyball on top of him.

He rolls around all the time and he says like, and that's like his whole length. He's very cute. He's very cute. Got it. We have now maxed out on my knowledge of this tweet. I don't understand what a cuckball is or why they're being compared. So there's a very specific reason why this person uses the phrase powerless white

cuckball. And we're about to dive into that. This feels already like one that I'm going to want to not save in my brain. Is that true? I'm really excited about where we're about to go. Okay, so are you familiar with the slang term cuck? As in like cuckled? Yeah.

So it's become this sort of catch-all word for like effeminate, cowardly men. People call them cucks. There was a New York people. Which people? Well, there was a New York Times article not that long ago about how. The phrase rhino, which used to mean Republican and name only, has sort of been supplanted by the phrase cuck-servative. Okay. So cuck is a slang term for like a cowardly, helpless creature.

Okay. And as you predicted, now we, now we're going to take a dip in the manosphere. Okay. Don't, can we not take a dip in a manosphere? I'm afraid we can't. I'm afraid that's how it has to be presented. The Manosphere being... There is a specific part of the internet,

and I'm not sure if they self-identify as the Manosphere, but there is like a sort of constellation of blogs that are men's rights activists, and they are sort of white supremacist adjacent. So Star Wars, the Force Awakens, came out late last month to much critical acclaim. Oh, no. I know where this is going.

And one of the things that people were very excited about was the fact that it had a female protagonist and a black protagonist. Got it. But there was a certain subset of the internet that was very mad about this. Their argument was that Ray, the main female character, used the force too well too early in the series, like she didn't get trained enough. And they were like, of course they would make a woman so good at the force. That was really like a serious argument.

They're complaining about. fictional fantasy affirmative action. Yes. Like they were saying like, oh, you, like, she only got so good at the force because she's at, well, that's amazing. She took a spot that a white man could have gotten into at the Jedi Academy.

She took a fake fictional spot in the fantasy world that a fake white man in that fantasy world could have taken just as easily. Basically, an image popped up from 4chan. And it was all about how this movie was all about empowering people of color and women, and the only character for white men to identify with was the powerless white cuckball, the droid.

Oh, God. You know, here's my question. How far did they get into the movie? Because Han Solo comes back. Very quickly. Wait, but what does that have to do with contrast the strong, virile power ball? Someone's making a joke about what's going on right now with the lottery.

They're like the lottery is so big and strong right now at $1.3 billion or whatever it is at this point. Compare that with the lowly powerless white male surrogate, the baldroid from Star Wars, the Force Awakens. Wow. So I think we're at yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. We are at yes, yes, yes, yes. Would you like to explain back to us exactly what you learned? So, okay, once again the tweet,

contrast the strong virile powerball with BB8, the powerless white cuckball. So Kep Simple is making an absurdist comparison between the Powerball lottery, which is over a billion dollars right now, I think, at the time of this taping anyway, with BB8, who is the new R2D2 style character in the latest Star Wars movie,

and BB8, I now know, is in the Manosphere, a section of the internet that up until half an hour ago I didn't know existed and I wish I was back there now. Just as an answer, I'm not convinced that the Manosphere or dipping into the Manosphere exists outside Alex Goldman's Google search. No, no, no. The Manosphere is a real thing.

The Manosphere. I'm just Googling this. Oh my God, it has a Wikipedia entry. Yeah, Manosphere. Sorry, just to say, there's also Viva Love Manosphere.com. Oh, my God. Okay, I'm done. You resigning from the internet? I'm going on sabbatical. So anyway, so there's a section of the internet called the Manosphere.

One of the people from the Manosphere posted on Forchan that the only character in Star Wars movies that they could identify with was that, quote, powerless white cuckball. And that is the comment on Forchan that Kep Simple is referencing in his satiric tweet. Yeah, we're at yes, yes, yes. And like always, why do we keep doing this to ourselves? One day is going to try to friends. Why do we keep answering questions? I was so excited. I'm thinking back to that young, innocent, Alex Bloomberg of like 20 minutes ago,

who was very excited when you were about to launch into the story of the powerless white cuckball, and I was so excited that you're going to take me to a place of wonder. I mean, I would call it a place of wonder. Yeah, but you think it's going to be like Back to the Future One where everyone's on hoverboards, but it's like Back to the Future 2 where like the mean guys, in charge and it's a dystopia. Like every single time. Both of those things happen in Back to the Future too.

I'm sorry to break it to you. All of Back to the Future One takes place neither 1985 or 1955. It's in the second when they go to 2015. I hate you. I hate being friends with you. Like it brings me no joy. You're like a fucking human corrections column.

If it makes you feel any better, I pronounce everything wrong and I don't know what any words mean. Coming up after the break. Where do you keep you? your ketchup. Stick around. Welcome back to the show. So this next story is about ketchup,

stool samples, and a big debate about the right way to solve problems. Alex has a story. So, when I think of Silicon Valley, I think of this playground for rich techie guys. You know, offices with beanbag chairs, ping pong tables, Xboxes.

I don't ever picture neighborhoods are the people who live there and have actual not venture capital lives. But there's this guy, his name's Leslie Miley. He's a big shirt. in the Silicon Valley world. He's worked at Apple, Google, Yahoo.

And he's different than most of his peers in a couple ways. First of all, he's black. And second, he grew up in Silicon Valley, just a couple miles away from all the companies that he later worked at. But it might as well have been a different country. I reached him at his house on Skype. I'm a Silicon Valley native.

And, you know, sometimes a walk home from school was not fun. I'm African American. I'm a guy named Leslie. And, you know, it did not go far in my mainly Hispanic neighborhood. Back then, Leslie was just another poor kid in San Jose, the son of a General Motors assembly line worker and a stay-at-home mom, trying to avoid getting beat up on the way home from school. And so I would like take these really circuitous routes home, and I, you know, walk through strip malls and, you know, just whatever I could so I could avoid, you know, where I knew these guys were hanging out. And I just went into, I don't know, it was like, it was like a computer world or I can't even remember the name of it. And, you know, I would go in there and I saw these, these, what I thought were just video game machines.

And, you know, after like a day or two of playing them, they're like, if you're going to hang out here, you need to learn to do something more than just play a video game. And so they popped in like a programming language and that's how I learned. And they would sit with me and, you know, give me pointers and, you know, I get a task to do and then I could play a game. A few years later, Leslie went away to college. But after a couple semesters, he dropped out, and he found himself back in San Jose. And took a job as a security guard at Apple in the 90s. And because I had some programming experience, I had to hang out with the old school programmers who hadn't bathed in six or seven days.

And they taught me a lot. So that's how I got started. Leslie found his way into the tech world 15 years ago. doing back-end work on software at Walmart. And from there, he went on to work at some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, Yahoo. And three years ago, he was thrilled to land at Twitter. It's a really interesting company, and it has a lot of great things about it.

And in some ways, it may have been the best job I ever had. After the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the Black Lives Matter movement was using Twitter to organize, which was really inspiring for Leslie, It gave him a sense of purpose, and it made him proud to work there. This was honestly a dream job for Leslie, which is why I was so surprised to learn that in October, he quit. Not for another job somewhere, but because working at Twitter had just become too frustrating. And he tried to explain it to me by saying, yeah, well, Twitter, the product, was being used by all kinds of people.

Twitter, the company felt very white and very male. In fact, Leslie was the only black engineer in a leadership position at the entire company. You just kind of look around and you're like, wow. Look at who's getting promoted. Look at who's getting the accolades. You know, and then you look around and you're like, oh, we don't have any, you know, minorities in, you know, ethnic or racial minorities, you know, in any position above manager.

You know, what's up with that? He just didn't think that these problems were getting enough attention. He described a meeting he attended with Twitter's former diversity director, Janet Van Heiss. She was talking about diversity recruiting. I asked the question, what are we doing to increase diversity in engineering, specifically with African Americans and Hispanics. Her response was something along the lines,

well, I'm the only one, so I'm only concentrating on women right now. Realizing that this might be taken poorly, the senior VP of engineering, Alex Rotter, stepped in. And he's like, hey, diversity is absolutely important, and we're really going to lead in this, you know, but we're not going to lower the bar. To Leslie, this was infuriating. Lower the bar.

Who said anything about lowering the bar? And this happened all the time across his whole career. When he was at Apple, when he was at Google, someone would say something in a room full of people. And it was like Leslie was the only one hearing it. When I was at Google and an engineering director tossed me the book, Not an Ordinary Black Man by Brian Copeland, with a comment that maybe I will get along better after I read that book. Actually, it turns out the book's called Not a Genuine Black Man. But anyway, the guy gives him the book.

You know, the book is about a black guy living in a white neighborhood. You know, you get that book. I'm sitting on this couch and I get this book. And I'm like, okay, I need to talk to somebody. But I have no one here at my level or above my level who I can go and talk to about this. What do you think his intention was in that instance? Does it matter? I mean, I guess not.

I hate to be just blunt about it, but it does his intention at that point in time matter. And this attention will never matter. It's an ignorant thing to do, and it's a callous thing to do. Moments like these were isolating and tiring. And at Twitter, they were frequent enough that they began to weigh on him. And when he'd talked to his bosses, they'd tell him that he was the problem. You know, early in my career, my reviews would come back that I'm intimidating, I'm aggressive, I'm this, I'm that.

And, you know, I would always take that feedback, right? It's like, you know, take the feedback you try to get better. Take that feedback. You tried to integrate it. But to integrate this feedback, Leslie ends up trying desperately not to conform to the stereotype of an angry black man. And he ends up sanding off all the sharp edges of his personality. Just not being himself. Fast forward to a performance review while he was at Twitter. My manager at the time, the director at the time, was saying, he's like, yeah, you're just not aggressive enough.

Which, you know, I'm thinking, well, what the hell just happened here? Five years ago, I was too aggressive. Today, I'm not aggressive enough. You know, and then so I asked myself, have I overcompensated? You know, have I tried to make people so comfortable and not be the scary, intimidating black guy that I'm actually not being aggressive enough? Because I don't want to scare people. Even with all of its frustrations, Leslie still loved working at Twitter.

It was challenging. It was fun. But then, in October, his frustration bubbled over. It was during another conversation with Alex Rotter. We started, you know, the conversation of, hey, I think. think, you know, diversity in engineering, you know, we're not doing as well as we would like to do. You know, I have some thoughts. I have some ideals. I, uh, and then he showed at the conversation. He's like, well, I think it's, you know, it's a sourcing problem and we need to find out where

Kennets are falling out in the funnel. He's like, well, you know, we can just write a name classifier. You can write a name classifier that, uh, you know, like, like the name Nguyen is, probably 98% Vietnamese. So, you know, if you know, if you have a Tommy Nguyen, he's probably Vietnamese. To be clear, when Leslie says name classifier, what he means is a program that sorts people by their names. It would automatically identify non-white-sounding names, so they would jump out of the hiring pool. This was Alex Router's suggestion for how Twitter could find a diverse workforce. And first of all, a tool like that isn't even likely to work. If you run a name like Leslie Miley through it, it's pretty likely to assume that you're a white woman. But more than that,

for Leslie, the ick factor, something like this, was just off the charts. And, you know, and I'm sitting there and thinking about it, I'm an engineer, right? And so, So I'm like, I get this. But the black part of me, which is a major part of me, is like, really, really? I have to build a profiling tool. You're suggesting a profiling tool. I said, I'm not sure if this is legal and, you know, I'm actually not even sure if it's ethical to do something like that. It's like, yeah, but, you know, but we can solve that problem.

And I just realized this is not something that, you know, this person is thinking about this as a problem to be solved as an engineer only. And if they're going to look at solving the problem this way, you know, I don't want to be a part of it because that just does not sit well with me. For his part, Alex Rotter says that he didn't mean it the way that Leslie took it. But still, Leslie had had enough. He just said, that's it. And he walked away from his dream job. Leslie almost immediately started speaking out about his experience at Twitter. And he made this argument, one that I find really interesting. Leslie says that Twitter's last of diversity doesn't just affect the workplace atmosphere, but it goes straight to the heart of the product itself.

Obviously, if you don't have people of diverse backgrounds building your product, you're going to get a very, very narrowly focused product that may do one or two things really well, or it just may not do anything really well. And I think if you look at Twitter as a product, it doesn't do a lot of the simple things. Well, it doesn't do direct messaging well. It doesn't do media sharing really well, right? And if you had people from diverse backgrounds, you may have been able to expand, you know, what you thought was possible. Let me ask you this. How much of your desire to see more diverse workplaces comes from the fact that it's just morally correct to have more diverse workplaces versus it will make your product much better? Yes.

The answer to that question is yes. It's going to, you know, diverse teams have better outcomes. That is, there's so much have been written on that in the last 30 years. I don't even know why we're talking about it. And I think, you know, I hate sounding like, you know, like a total socialist, but a rising tide does lift all votes. Honestly, even though Leslie says that there's 30 years of research to back it up, this particular idea that diversity makes for better problems solving. I never heard of it. So I went and looked into it, and there are actually a ton of people studying this concept, like this guy. So my name is Scott Page. I'm a professor of complex

systems at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. Scott researches how teams perform, and in 2004, he published an experiment that tackled the idea of quote-unquote lowering the bar. I was interested in this question of, when would it be the case if I were trying to hire people that I should hire the best individuals. And when would it be the case that I should hire just even random people? I mean, random good people. Being a professor of complex systems, Scott used mathematical algorithms as a stand-in for people. And he'd give these algorithms really difficult math problems to solve. And then he'd make two teams, one full of highly effective algorithms all programmed to solve a problem in ways that are similar

to each other. Like how a group of smart people who all all graduated from the same college might behave. But then, Scott filled the other side of his model with less expert equations, all of which approached problems from totally different directions, like a team from different backgrounds. And so I was writing all these computer models and mathematical models, and in almost every model I wrote, what was happening is the team of the best individuals was not doing best.

The team considering of the best individuals was getting beaten by just randomly picking people. The experts were losing. If anything, they were the ones that needed the bar lowered. Granted, we're talking about zeros and ones. But still, it was strange. Scott was noticing that the so-called expert performers, the ones who tended to have really similar strategies,

when you put them on a team, they'd get stumped more or less at the same time. While the randomly picked, less expert algorithms, they always had some new strategy to try. And they won again and again. And Scott says the same thing happens in real-world experiments with people. When faced with a hard problem, a diverse team gets better results. And by diversity, he doesn't just mean race or gender. One way you can measure diversity is you can ask literally, you know, what knowledge bases do you have?

You can ask what experiences you've had. Scott says that language, age, geography, personal hardship, they all inform how we solve problems in crazy subtle ways. And he gave me this example that I find totally mine. blowing. Where we keep our ketchup. Now, it turns out if you're British or if you're African-American from the South, not as a rule, but generally speaking, you're likely to keep your ketchup in the cupboard. If you're not British and you're not African-American from the South, you tend to keep your ketchup in the fridge. And you could think, Viva la de France, who cares, right? Well, it actually does matter because suppose you run out of ketchup. If you're out of ketchup and you're a ketchup and you're a

ketchup in the fridge person, what are you going to use? Well, you might use mayonnaise, you might use mustard, because those are the things that you think of as next to ketchup, right? If, alternatively, you're a ketchup in the cupboard person and you run out of ketchup, what's next to the ketchup in the cupboard? Well, malt vinegar. So, the more diverse the backgrounds, the more associations you get, and the more paths towards solving a hard problem. And there are actually a lot of real-life examples of this. Carl Zimmer, a science writer for the New York Times, he says that this ketchup story completely tracks with what he sees in the science world. You know, if a scientist is looking at a problem and thinking about how am I going to solve it,

there's a range of approaches that they may think of just based on their training. You know, and they can't even imagine that there's another way of approaching it. You know, they can't imagine that there's ketchup in the pantry, really. And the fact is that another scientist can walk in and be like, oh, look, you're looking at this totally the wrong way. Carl had a great example of this kind of cross-pollination. So going back about eight years... There was this gastroenterologist who was dealing with a patient who was dying of a horrible gut infection, and everything he had been trying wasn't working.

And so he had heard that if you give a patient a stool transplant from a healthy person, that somehow that could cure these kinds of infections. a stool transplant. The gastroenterologist, Alexander Koretz, he tried it and it worked. The dying patient had a complete recovery in just a couple days. But Koretz didn't understand why. To figure out just what was going on,

he needed the help of someone else, a woman named Janet Jansen. I remember, like, the first time that I talked to Janet Jansen, and I said, wait a minute, so you're not a medical doctor. And she's like, no, no, no, no, I'm an ecologist. I'm like, well, what do you study? And she's like, I study dirt.

And I just, I thought maybe I called the wrong person or something. But as Jansen explained, when she looked at the stool sample, she saw something that Koretz didn't. She saw a thriving ecosystem, just like the ecosystems in healthy soil. What had happened with the stool transplant was that basically a healthy ecosystem had been restored and had taken the place of the sick one. And it's not just stool samples. The microwave. It's thanks to a guy who is developing radar for the military.

The discovery of the double helix, mostly the work of a zoologist and a physicist. Sure, it can be tricky to pull off. But scientists know that if they're stuck on a problem, they need to talk to someone who keeps the catch-up somewhere else. So between Scott Page's mathematical models and the entire history of scientific breakthrough, it seems pretty clear to me that Silicon Valley would benefit immensely

for more diversity, which is awesome. I mean, this is probably the first time in my life that the profitable thing was also the morally correct thing. But, unfortunately, because I was excited about this idea, I mentioned it to my co-worker Adam Davidson. I'm Adam Davidson co-host of Gimlet's surprisingly awesome with Adam McKay, and I also write a column for the New York Times Magazine. He's also the founder of the radio show Planet Money

and an expert on economics. And Adam says yes. diverse workforce. It's a beautiful idea, and I'm all for it. But when it comes to Silicon Valley, there are two big problems. And the first is that we don't have proof that this works in Silicon Valley yet. Because to prove it, you'd want to look at all of those diverse Silicon Valley companies, and they don't really exist. I was looking at the numbers just this morning for Silicon Valley, looking at African Americans in Silicon Valley. Right. And it is, even though I knew I was going to be shocked, I was still shocked by the numbers. The highest

is that 6% of engineers at some companies, I think, are African-American, but far more typical is less than 1% are African-American. And then in positions of real power and authority, it's much, much smaller than that. You need a larger set of data to work from. Yes, a problem with, whether it's institutional racism or whatever it is, a problem with having an incredibly small number of minorities working in positions of power in fast-growing companies is it's really hard to make any conclusive determination about them because there's just aren't enough. So in order to prove that the value of diversity in the workforce, you need to first have diversity in the workforce to be able to prove that it's valuable.

Yes. So for now, a lot of companies don't want to take the risk. and they do want to keep their investors happy by making money fast. And that speed, that pressure, it creates the second big problem. Startups, of course, want to grow quickly. And diversity may make that more difficult. One theory is sameness is really good, especially for fast-growing startups. That when people have the same cultural background, the same educational background,

they can communicate much more quickly. They can collaborate much more easily. There's much less misunderstanding. So I was actually thinking about this on the way here. Like you and I are Jewish guys who worked in public radio. Yes. We work for a company that has a lot of them. And you call me and said, hey, can you come on the podcast and talk about this thing?

And we did not have to talk long. I knew instantly what you meant. I knew instantly what you would kind of like see as a success and what you'd see as a failure. Right. And it was very easy. But Adam says, imagine a different scenario, a company that decides to hire a bunch of employees from all over the world. They have different expertise, different cultural references, even different ways of arguing. So you could understand why there'd be an initial cost, you know, initial disruption to that.

But that over time, you would start getting the benefit. Like, oh, these people have a different education. They have a different perspective. The benefit comes later. But if you're the most numbers-focused, profit-maximizing CFO, why do I want to be the first one? Why don't I want to be the, I'd rather be the eighth one? You don't have to look far for examples of this.

On Monday, Apple's board of directors rejected a proposal for improving diversity in the company, calling it unduly burdensome and not necessary. And that seems to be where we're at right now with Silicon Valley. A lot of profit-driven companies that would happily be the eighth one to try a new approach. But Leslie Miley, he doesn't want to be the eighth one to try this approach. He wants to be the first.

Right now, he's working on a new venture. He can't tell me much about it yet, but he believes that this company will be the exception in Silicon Valley because it will be staffed with people from all sorts of backgrounds. And he says that it's not all that hard to build a company like this. You just need to ask people you're interviewing a new set of questions that most companies aren't asking yet. What I really need to do is look for the best talent, you know, given a kind of a list of different differing criteria.

Like, how did you get to where you are? How did you get to where you are? Which is to say, you made it here to this interview. You've probably overcome a lot of obstacles to do that. I'd like to hear about it. And do you think that's just a question that should be asked in lieu of what Ivy League school did you attend? or even what school did you attend? I totally think that's a question people should ask.

If you're not asking that question, you know, is you really asking that question you're not hiring, you're not hiring, right? You know, I want to hear people say, hey, yeah, I had to go to community college, or, you know, I had to take a year off because they didn't have the money. You know, I mean, those are the experiences I want to hear from people, you know, because it shows that they're a little, that they have, I don't want to say more rounded, but they're a rounded individual. They have different life experiences, and they're going to bring that to the tape.

This idea that Adam Davidson brought up, that diverse teams can slow a company down, cost it time and money. I brought it to Leslie, and he just didn't seem to care. I've read a lot of the studies about how having diverse teams can impact efficiency. And I think that's absolutely the case in most cases that it does, because people have to learn their different communication styles. They have to start having a greater understanding of the person they're working with as a human being. So it is going to take a little.

it's going to create friction, it's going to cause friction, it's going to slow things down initially. And for those of you who say, hey, we have to move fast, so we just want to get people who all know the same thing, you know, I say go to hell because that's just your, that's lazy. We should all be trying to get better. And if getting better means you have to be uncomfortable for a little while, you know what, so be it. Twitter declined to comment specifically on Leslie's story or to talk to us for this piece. A spokesperson sent us a statement about the company's commitment to diversity, which you can read on our website.

Reply All is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnaminani, and Fia Bennon. Our editor is Peter Clowney, production assistance from Mervin de Gagnos. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is one of those nights that is so fun and gets so out of hand

that when you describe it to your friends, you can tell that they don't totally believe you. Special thanks this week to Shankar Vedantam of the Hidden Brain Podcast for all his help with this episode. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Thanks to the Raya brass band for use of their song Unify. You can find us on our website,

replyall.fail, or on iTunes at iTunes.com slash replyall. We're taking next week off to work on some stories, so we'll see you in a couple weeks. Thanks for listening.