Reply All - #53 In The Desert

Episode Date: February 4, 2016

Strangers keep coming to Mike and Christina’s house looking for their stolen cell phones. Nobody knows why. We travel to Atlanta to find out what’s going on, in our thorniest Super Tech Support yet. Be sure to check out Kashmir Hill's story on Fusion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote. And this week, Super Tech Support returns. If this is your first time hearing Super Tech Support, here's how it works. Someone on the internet has a problem And no matter how big or small it is, we fix it. Well, Alex fixes it because he's good at computers. This week, we pursue the thornyest computer glitch we've ever tackled.

We learned about it from our friend Kashmir. My name is Kashmir Hill. I am the editor of Fusion's Real Future. She's a veteran tech reporter. Alex talked to her in the studios. Also, I'm going to occasionally mute my microphone to cough like a madman because I have the worst cold in the world. Oh, no, okay.

Hold on just a second. Cashmere told us a story about this couple in Georgia. He's an engineer. She's a journalist. But they seem like normal, you know, 20-somethings who have this weird tech mystery in their lives. Here's how it started. They just moved into this house in Atlanta. They were settling in. And then a group of strangers knocked on their door.

A family came to the house and they were looking for a lost smartphone. And they thought it was just weird. They were like, oh, you know, your phone's not here. and the family said, well, our find my phone app says it is here. The blue dot, the dot that tells you where your phone is, it was right on the couple's house. But the phone wasn't there. It was just some kind of fluke.

But then... The next month, it happened again. A group of friends came, again saying their find my phone app, said that their phone was in this house. And it kept happening. And so now this has been going on for a year. People keep coming and knocking on their door, asking where their phones are.

Kashmir interviewed the couple, She wrote a story about it, and she waited for someone on the internet to read that story and just announced the definitive solution to the problem. And a bunch of people tried, but nobody seemed to be able to figure it out. So last week, we decided to do

what we always do in situations like this. Unleash Alex on the problem. We decided we'd send Alex down to Atlanta, he'd find out what was going on, and he'd fix it. Except, Alex's cold actually got worse. He got extremely sick. And so instead, we had to send the junior varsity team. Me.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So the couple, they live on this quiet, hilly street. I parked outside their house. Hey, PJ. Nice to meet you, Peter. Thanks to meet you. This is Mike and Christina. Christina's a music journalist.

Mike used to be one. That's how they met. Their house is very tidy. It's one of those places where it just, like, smells clean, and you feel like you should take your shoes off. We went inside. We're sitting at a kitchen table. We're just maybe like five feet away from the big window that looks out onto the street. And what were you thinking the first time it happened? What were the questions you were asking yourself when that first family was just on your front porch? What's going on here?

Yeah, honestly, I think my first reaction was just, I wonder if someone in the neighborhood's doing something shady, stealing phones or whatever. And it's just accidentally pointing to here. Yeah, I definitely didn't have any idea that it would turn into a thing. This thing has slowly taken over their lives. Dozens of people, strangers, have showed up at their door in the last year, often late at night. Like this most recent time that it happened, Mike was asleep on the couch. So I had fallen asleep on the couch watching Star Trek Voyager. As Christina will tell you, I fall asleep to Star Trek on the reg from TNG to Deep Space Nine and now Voyager. Anyway, so I had fallen asleep on the couch, woke up immediately and ding dong, ding dong, ding dong.

And someone's pounding on the door. I go to open the door. We had like two, three dudes standing up on the little stoop, and then another dude behind them who had like his hands in his jacket, which I was like, oh. Mike was worried the guy might have a gun. It's a refrain I kept hearing in Atlanta. Everybody has a gun here.

And they're not being paranoid. In Georgia, more people die from gunshots than car crashes. And as soon as I opened the door, you know, just immediately, they started yelling in my face, where is he, where is he, where is he? Our friends here, where is he? They were looking for a person. Yeah. Yeah.

Their friend had disappeared, and they were using Find My Phone to try to track them down. Christina is in the bedroom, but she hears this conversation, and she comes running out. Mike was talking to them. I turned on the porch light. I saw how young they were. And the first thought that crossed my mom was like, okay, so they're trying to find a missing person. They're freaking the fuck out. So I guess I had to very quickly just kind of put myself in their shoes.

Like, okay, if they're coming here looking for somebody who's missing, and maybe they've been trying to search for this person for a while, maybe they felt like they had a lead. How would I feel? She kept calm. She took out a posted note and a pen, and she asked them a bunch of questions in the hopes that somehow these guys might actually provide a clue. Okay, this is the drill. What's your name? What's your phone number? If you remember what app you're using, what kind of phone you were looking for.

And this strange line of questions actually diffused the situation because these dudes found it so weird that the alleged kidnapper was asking them about their cell phone provider that they just calmed down. The situation got explained and they went home. But it felt like a close call. And Mike is very worried about what will happen next time. You know, there's always that fear that, like, an unreasonable person is going to show up. Everybody owns a gun. Somebody with a gun might show up. Like, yeah, it stresses me out just to think about it.

Have they looked in their house to try and find, like, a trove of cell phones? That'd be crazy. And yes. I swept the house, talked about it. I'm looking for a receiver, an antenna, a box full of, you know, stolen cell phones hidden somewhere. Anything, anything, nothing. He showed me where he's locked. Through here, you got bathroom, Christina's office, our bedroom.

room, and then there's the whole basement downstairs, which I got my... Their house is a modern, recently renovated house. Nothing about it suggests that there's some secret room behind a bookcase. But Mike has looked anyway. He's pried off air conditioner events trying to find some secret stash of phones. He hasn't found anything. It seems clear that whatever is sending people to their house is not, like, an actual cash of phones buried in the basement.

So Mike has gone on the internet, and he's gone to all these messages. boards, and he's posed this question to experts and cobble together this other theory that he's now kind of obsessed with. Okay. So your cell phone has a bunch of different methods to find out where you are on a map. But one of them is just as simple as pinging nearby cell phone towers and then triangulating your position based on how far away the towers are. On this map, if you can see it, it'd be like... Mike brought up a map of his neighborhood, and he showed me something that was pretty weird. Their home is like surrounded by cell phone towers. They're extremely close by. There's one here. That's where the T-Mobile

tower is. And that's like, what, like four blocks away from you? Yeah, like right there. There's a sprint cell phone tower in this area. And then there's another one half a mile to the southwest by the police station here. Oh, but it literally does draw out a triangle.

Yeah, our own little Bermuda triangle. Mike thinks it's possible that somehow the fact that his house is in the middle of these three cell phone towers, that is screwing up everybody's maps. That is what is sending everybody to his house. So, of course, he's called the three different companies

who own these cell phone towers, and he's tried to see if he can get them to come out and fix it. Like T-Mobile, he reached out to them. So when I got in touch with them, they said, oh, well, these towers are all run by contractors, so we don't handle questions about this. You need to reach out to the contractor running this cell phone tower,

and that, you know, it was some generic email address that I emailed three times and nobody got back to me. Even if Mike's right about this Bermuda Triangle theory, he's still screwed because none of these phone companies are going to talk to him. In fact, nobody wants to talk to him about this. I tried to get in touch with AT&T, who makes their wireless router. They said, you know, you got to talk to the FCC about that. When we reached out to the FCC, they said, no, you need to get in touch with carriers and the device manufacturers. Everywhere we've gone,

government entity, corporate, you know, business, local law enforcement, everywhere we've gone, it's just been a lot of shrugs, a lot of, that's not our problem. You've got to go to somebody else. Nobody wants to take ownership with this problem. Maybe this is just like a simplistic solution, but have they thought about just moving? That's exactly what I said to them, that if it were made, I would just move. But they can't. They live in this house because they can afford to. They've been priced out of neighborhood after neighborhood, and they've landed here where they can afford it.

I mean, they said that neighborhood is basically just them, and then like a lot of older folks whose kids moved out and never came back. Plus, if they did try to move, then they'd likely have to disclose this insane, our house is haunted by, technology story to a potential buyer. I mean, I wouldn't buy that house. I wouldn't either. So they're definitely stuck here. Leaving is not an option. So we talked for a while, and it was just one of those conversations where I kept suggesting

things like, did you try this? Did you try this? And they tried all the things. And I felt useless. So finally, at 3 p.m., with no solution in sight, we decided to take a break. I went to go get a slice of pizza. I thought about the house. We'd spent all this time talking about this problem that was literally invisible.

Like something was beaming from somewhere and landing in the wrong place. It was frustrating. It was so intangible. So I drove back to their house and I parked the car. And I just started to wonder about the block itself. Was I missing something? Was the answer somewhere in these houses? So I got out of the car and I started walking around.

And here's what I saw. Two-thirds of the block was just houses like Mike and Christina's. These nice one- or two-story family homes, small, well-kept yard. But then every maybe fourth house was just utterly destroyed and abandoned. Like missing roof, missing exterior walls, copper stripped out. And then you'd look next door and you'd see a nice house with some really cute lawn ornaments. Next house, foreclosure papers nailed to the wall. It felt like two neighborhoods were trying to happen at the same time.

So, for example, the house three doors down from Mike and Christina's. So this is the house like three doors down? There were stone steps up from the curb. And I walked up the steps and immediately I was like knee high in this big overgrown yard. The front yard's all brambles. And then I get to the front door. The front door's just been kicked in. The windows are boarded up.

There's like some shoes and a bag that is filled with what I think is just feces. And then there's a middle. Wait, you went into the house? Whoever had been there had moved on. Like it didn't seem like somebody had slept there last night. But yeah, there was not like a great reason for it, but it was weird because I was in the house, I was super creeped out,

and I saw like there was the front room I was in, and then there was this middle room where a lot of the floor was gone. It looked really unsafe, so they didn't want to go in there. Oh, wow, there's a lot of holes in the floor. And then past the middle room, there was this shut door. God, this is like a horror story. And I wanted to, like, I wanted to see what was behind the door, and I didn't want to open the door

because I could, like, hear a horror story music in my head. But the other thing was I was just picturing a room that would just be, like, teeming with, like, gleaming new cell phones and iPads. That was obviously the answer, right? You just went into the room and... It was not the answer. I did not go into the room.

I was too scared. For all I know, it is filled with cell phones. But that's still not the answer to this problem. No. But hang on, because things are about to get weirder after the break. Also, we'll have a solution. Okay, stick around. This episode of Reply All is brought to you by audible.com.

Audible.com provides over 180,000 audio programs from the leading audiobook publishers. Audible is offering our listeners a free 30-day trial membership now. One book you could check out is Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. When I was 14 years old, one of my teachers at the gymnasium, introduced the class to Geisler's, glass cylinders, vacuum tubes. I haven't actually read it yet, but he writes, I think the only music blog I actually like to read, which is called said the gramophone. It's really good. I feel like good music writing is just good writing. I don't really listen to a wide diversity of music,

but I'll read him writing about music I haven't heard. And the reason I actually want to hear the book is because it's fiction. If he can make music writing interesting, I bet he's even better when he gets to just make up a story. So if you want to check out that book, us conductors, or any other book, go to audible.com slash reply to start your free trial today. Show your support for Reply All and get a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash reply. This episode of Reply All,

is brought to you by Casper. Casper makes obsessively engineered mattresses at a fraction of the price. Casper combines two technologies, latex foam and memory foam, to make it so you can have a good night's sleep. PJ and I were talking about sleeping and dreaming. I love hearing people's dreams, and it turns up PJ is not such a fan. It's like art movies. Like there's no story. Yeah, those are fun to watch. Haven't you ever watched Un Shenandoloo? I hate it because it felt like a dream. Okay, what's the weirdest dream you've ever had? I dream probably once a week about either fighting zombies or I can't escape someone. I'm running and I'm not moving.

Uh-huh. God, this is so boring. Here's what I think should happen. Since you like hearing about other people's dreams so much, people should email you their dreams, and you should read all their dreams, and you can come back and say with the most interesting dreams somebody you don't know had.

You have to read every single one of them. Oh my God, nothing would make me happier. Send your dreams to reply all dreams at gimletmedia.com. I am so into this idea. And if you want to sleep and dream better, try a Casper. You can try sleeping on a Casper for 100 days with free delivery and painless returns. Get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash reply

and using the promo code reply at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. So after I'm done exploring the neighborhood, I go back and I meet Mike and Christina for dinner. It's 6 p.m. We're at the kitchen table, we're eating takeout, cassidias from LaFonda, and then there's this knock at the door. Are you David? Yes, I am. I'm Christina.

David. Nice to meet you. David Maynor. So David is this guy. He's a cybersecurity expert. And just that week, he had tweeted at Christina and he said, seriously, I might really be able to solve your problem. I own the right cure.

And Alex, I have to say, David looks exactly like you, eerily like you, just more muscular and with better posture. Oh, okay. So you with good posture. So I'm a short formless Goldman and he's a tall muscular one. This guy is your best quality. qualities. And none of your bad ones. So he's like Arnold Schwarzeneg...

Basically what you're describing is an Arnold Schwarzenegger, a tall, muscular guy who has all of my qualities. And I am the Danny DeVito in this equation. Yeah. Oh, God, this is horrible. Yeah, it is. Anyway, he immediately just sweeps through the den into the kitchen. And as he's walking in, he's saying that he's pretty sure he solved the whole thing in the time it took him to walk from the car to the house. So he starts pulling out all these gadgets.

You know how you always have your backpack with your computer in it? Mm-hmm. He's got two backpacks. Oh, my God. It really is like me. So what is this? It's like a translucent box around this circuit board looking thing. This is a software-defined radio.

And what's this? This is a spectrum analyzer. So we are now all huddled around the kitchen table. The cassidias have been cleared to the couch, and David has seven different devices laid out, plus his laptop. And right off the bat, he has a couple theories. So he powers up one of his devices, this little gray box with a long antenna, and he started scanning. Christina, Mike, and me, we are transfixed, but also a little bit confused.

And so to explain, David opens his laptop and he shows us this graph. It looks like one of those heart rate monitors at the hospital. Like, it's a line that's squiggling, and it has a few very big spikes on it. So you see how it's peaking at 738? Yeah, it's like a line graph. Yeah, that's going to be Verizon. So there's something Verizon-based really close. This peak over there, that's a local Verizon cell phone tower, this peak over here, that's a local 18T cell phone tower.

David's trying to make sure that there's nothing broadcasting nearby that shouldn't be. I assume how he knows which spike actually belongs to who, and he asked me if I have an iPhone. And then he tells me to dial this phone number. Star 301. 3.01. Pound. And now I'd touch around one, pound. 1, 2, 3, 4.5.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. pound star Pound star Dial Whoa It didn't go to a phone call It went to field test Yeah

This is a secret menu What? Yes Come on Yes That is some James Bond shit And I was like Are there other secret menus

And he was like There's tons of secret menus And I was like Like what He's like you wouldn't understand Any of them So this will tell you Information about the tower

That you're So this menu that David Had me bring up on my phone It showed him All this information about the local AT&T cell phone tower that my phone had connected to. And he could look at that information

and he could say, like, in this neighborhood, AT&T is supposed to be broadcasting at this frequency. And all along his chart, he knew where each cell phone company was supposed to be. AT&T is at 300 hertz,

checks out. Verizon's at 600 hertz, checks out. There's a radio station. Okay, that's supposed to be there. He wanted to make sure that everything made sense, that there weren't any rogue signals,

that nothing is showing up that's not supposed to be there. Oh, my God. is anything showing up that's not supposed to be there? Yes. Like, there's something weird here at 979, and I've never seen that before. This is it right here.

So there's this spike, and it's a big spike at a frequency where nothing is allowed. Wait, wait, like how big? Are we talking bigger than the other ones? Like the size of a cell phone tower. Oh, my God, this is getting so good. It's going to get even better. So David says that this rogue signal, the spike, this could actually be the FBI.

The FBI has a device called a cell phone. stingray that basically impersonates cell phone towers. They use it to spy on people's phones, but because GPS uses cell phone towers to locate people, the stingray can have this side effect of basically confusing everybody's blue dots. If you had the FBI outside faking it, your phone looks up and goes, oh, hey, I'm actually here. And you look at you, but I'm nowhere close to there. Why am I? Why am I here? Because the tower selling you will give me bogus information.

So that was like one possibility that you would drive up and there would just be like a van. outside. Yeah, like a pizza delivery van or something. So the spike looks really suspicious. But David says that just to be sure, he wants to double check using a different scanner. So he checks. Yeah.

Yeah, so there's really nothing weird going on. And the thing's gone. It was a false positive. And there's obviously no van in the front. I mean, I look it twice. Now what? He has another theory. Don't worry.

So now, David shows us another sort of map on his computer. Alex, you know when you're picking a Wi-Fi network on your laptop and you get a list of all the other Wi-Fi networks around you? Yeah. So David can access the full list. Like if you imagine a mile radius around your apartment, every single Wi-Fi network that's broadcasting, it's like a staggering amount, David can see that. And so he brings out this website called Wiggle.net. And he showed us, like, for instance, where he lives, just this typical Atlanta neighborhood.

And it is nuts. So these are Wi-Fi networks downtown. This is where I live. And it looks like a million sentences scrawled on top of each other. Like, you can't. It's just a total mess. Right.

I had never, it's like I knew it intellectually, but I'd never thought about the fact that, like, everything that's wireless is setting out tiny little zigzag waves that we can't see in the air, and they're all around us and all through us. It made me feel insane, honestly. Like, I felt like I was sitting in a room

where all this invisible stuff was being made visible, and I realized, like, I had no idea how secure any of it was. Did it feel like the end of the Matrix? No. But here's what's really crazy. So David is holding one. one of his three phones up. How many phones do you have, by the way? One? Basic. So he shows up, he's holding one of his... How many do you have? I'm not you, but he is you, but he's super you.

No, no, no. He's... God, this sucks. He had three phones on him, but he owns more phones than that. It sucks that... It sucks that this guy exists. I was like, how did you even learn all this stuff? Like, what is the major? And he's like, oh, I taught myself. I was interested in it. All right, keep going. Okay, so he pulls up this app on his device, and it, like, he looks at. And it, like, he pulls up this app on his device, and it lets him, like, enhance and show just the Wi-Fi devices on a very tight radius around the house, like, just about their block. He can see potentially anything that is broadcasting wirelessly. So, like, the neighbor's wireless routers, but also stuff in Mike and

Christina's house. Like, my Apple Watch could show up, or if they had, like, a nest, like a smart thermostat, or an internet TV, that would show up. Any device in range that is sending out beams of internet can show up. As you can see, there's like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve access points, like visible in the, in the neighborhood, right? Wait, so are you saying that there's only, like, ten people who have internet in this neighborhood? Well, no, they have wireless internet. Like, they might not have wireless internet, but it's really, I mean... That's...

Like, I've never seen a place in a city with this, like, few wireless access points. It's... It's weird. Especially, like, a place that's heavily popular. populated as Atlanta. Right. I mean, and I was driving around here, and I saw a couple of, like, boarded-up houses, but nothing that would be like this is the Wi-Fi desert of Atlanta.

Can I throw out a theory? Yes, you can. There are so few wireless access points in that neighborhood that it is inadvertently, that when people, that, how do I even describe this? I will tell you that you are warm as hell. So there are actually, like, two problems that are interlocking with each other here. And before we even get to the part you're talking about, we have to explain problem number one, which David also figured out. So computers, as you know, have IP addresses,

and you can look up somebody's IP address, and it'll say, this IP address originates in New Jersey or New York or a small town, whatever. And so some small company keeps track of IP addresses and the towns that they describe. And that small company feeds their data to a medium-sized company, and then they feed that to a bigger company. It's like how there's local and nationally yellow pages. Anyway, one of these local databases in Atlanta made a mistake. They had a big list of cell phones and computers and other devices that connect to the internet. And the company wrote down the wrong, like, real-world address for these devices. Your laptop, my cell phone, that wireless router. The company said that they were all at the same arbitrary point on a map,

an arbitrary point that just happened to be down the street from Christina and Mike's house. David drove out to see the arbitrary point, and he said it's just a random intersection. And there's like four houses. I thought it would be like a data center or like a little building where like all the network connections like would terminate to or something.

It's just four houses. So for lack of a better location, these companies have just said, this spot here in the center of southwest Atlanta. So that's problem one. Okay. Problem two, that's where the like, Wi-Fi desert thing comes in. Because locating somebody on a map by their IP address is actually

pretty imprecise. It doesn't get you like the blue dot on the house. It gives you the general area that the blue dot should go in. And so when the Find My Phone app or whatever boots up, it wants to tell you like exactly where that blue dot belongs. And so it says like broadly, like I know that you're in this neighborhood, but like where exactly are you in this neighborhood? Let's just look at all the Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood and we'll use them to sort of like triangulate. So it tries to do that. And it assumes that there are tons of devices broadcasting. But Mike and Christina have the absolute crazy bad luck of being like the one lone spot of activity in this internet desert. So this GPS overcorrects and sends everybody

to this one shining spot of activity, Mike and Christina's house. So everybody ends up getting sent to their house. That's so crazy. Yeah. At least that's David's theory. How sure are you? I would make a Vegas bet on it. Really? Yeah.

What's a Vegas bet? I'd bet money in Vegas on it. Okay. If you get a casino to carry this bet, I would bet on it. Very specific casino. Yeah. So what now? Well, we...

I don't actually know. Wait, he doesn't know how to fix it? No, I mean, it's not that he doesn't know how, is that it's such a hopelessly complicated bureaucratic mess that you can't actually fix this without getting politicians involved. Like multiple politicians at many levels, and then teaching those politicians the finer points of IP address Arcana. But weirdly, Mike and Christina, they're extremely jazzed to get this news.

They are so grateful to David. And how do you feel? I mean, I feel great because this is like the first, really solid direction in which we can head because like literally actual evidence to back it up and not just our guesswork yeah once we made the story public we've been bombarded with potential you know theories like what could be causing this like literally before he was coming over like our plan was just just kind of sit down and list everything that everybody on the internet has said about what could potentially be causing this and just

you know drawing a game plan for I don't know the next six months or something this is not something no this is much better better and we appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming over. They're happy because at least now their problem has a name. They know what they have to do next. Right. But it's weird because like when I was down there, I kept feeling really frustrated. It was like, what have we done in this like modern world where we've built technology that's so complicated? Like we don't understand it. It's ruining these people's lives. You know what I mean? You sounded like kind of like a grumpy old man.

Yeah. I felt like a grumpy old man. But then I was thinking about it and realized like it has literally always been like this. Like the moment we discover technology, we start using it. We don't wait to figure out how it works or how it can go wrong. The person who discovered fire was like, this is awesome. It provides heat and light. And then only like a week later, it did someone accidentally burn themselves horribly and be like, what? And I was like, I don't know. We haven't worked out all the bugs yet.

Like it's always like that. We move too fast. We figure it out later. But what is cool is that in that period of time where we're using stuff that we don't understand that well, the people who somehow get it, like the people like David, They feel magical. Like, when he came in and he solved whatever was going on in that house, it felt as much like an exorcism as it did,

like someone doing really complicated technical work. Yeah, I have to say that when he appears in the story, I got really excited. Yeah, and I think you would have understood it better than I did. Also, I just love this crap. So the other week, I have a weird Wi-Fi password at my house. What's your Wi-Fi password? We'll cut it out. It's big perverted.

Ew, why? It's part of the lyrics of a song. Okay. You're going to get arrested. And so we had a babysitter coming over a couple days ago, and Sarah was like, this babysitter's in high school, you need to change your Wi-Fi password. So, like, I was like, great, I love resetting routers. I'm having a very fun time doing this.

You really felt excited about restarting the router? I really was like, I want to go and look and see what kind of old stuff do I have lingering around in my settings on this router, because I've had it for 10 years. So I was like excited to go take a look at it. I can't identify with that feeling at all. And like I just would have loved to see his utility belt. Not that I would ever approach that level of technical know-how. But you're more equipped to appreciate it.

Yeah. It's like how I'm sure there are a lot of people in art school who can't paint like Rembrandt, but really like looking at Rembrandts. I want to make funny, but I think that's totally right. Huh. Okay, how about this? Next time there's an opportunity to go see like the Sistine Chapel of wireless router

misconfiguration problems, I promise you, you do the story, not me. Oh, thank you so much. I promise I'll never get sick again if I can go do that. Okay. I would laugh, but I'd cough. Reply all is me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman.

We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Truthy Penamennini, and Fia Bennon. Our editor is Peter Clowney. Production assistance from Mervin de Gagnos. We were mixed by David Herman, Matt Lieber is the person who can fix the things that are broken and complicated. Special thanks to Dana Riley. Huge, enormous, continental-sized thanks to Kashmir Hill for first finding this story.

If you'd like to read her reporting about it, which is excellent, you can find it at Fusion.net. We'll also have a link in the show description for this episode. Our theme song is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. You can find more episodes at our website, replyall. or on iTunes at iTunes.com slash reply all. Next week, all of Gimlet is going dark. The radio factory is closing as we work together on weird secret projects.

People from different teams are going to be doing different roles. It's going to be very strange. But for you, the important part is that we will not have an episode. Or at least we're not supposed to. Who knows? Sometimes we break the rules here. Thanks to our sponsor, Casper, an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price. Casper has a risk-free trial and return policy.

You can try sleeping on Casper mattresses for 100 days with free delivery and painless returns. Get $50 toward any mattress purchase now by visiting www.cassper.com and using the promo code reply at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of Replyall is brought to you by audible.com. Audible.com provides over 180,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers. If you want to listen to it, Audible has it. Show your support for Reply All and get a free 30-day trial. at audible.com slash reply. That's audible.com slash reply.