Stuff You Should Know - How Ghost Prisons Work

Episode Date: June 22, 2010

In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the controversial "ghost prisons," covert prisons created by the CIA after September 11th, 2001 to secretly detain and interrogate terrorist suspects in various locations around the world, including the U.S. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. Visit GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. That's GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark across this vast gulf of a table in our brand new VOC heavy studio. Yeah. Is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, right?

We're in, people. This is our brand new studio. This is our first time recording it. And now we've got to get used to this weirdness all over again. I know. Things just can't be normal, can they? So now we're in weird chairs and the table is huge. And Jerry, I can't even talk about Jerry

because she's not even in the room with us anymore. Wait, Chuck, did you just pronounce huge without the H, with the H being silent? Did you just say huge? I've been saying human being and huge ever since I came back from New York. Huge. Yeah, it's huge.

Huge. And Jerry isn't even in our vision, line of vision, and I hate that. Yeah, it's odd. Things are odd. There's like a burlap curtain. I'm wearing headphones. Made out of old potatoes.

All right, Chuck, let's get this going, all right? Enough griping from us. I know, seriously. Nobody cares. No one cares. I had like a great intro to this one. Let's hear it. But I can't remember.

Oh, yes, Chuck. You know that there's a lot of finger pointing about how 9-11 was allowed to happen, right? Is there? There has been. Okay. I don't know if there is any more. All right.

But at first there was a lot of finger pointing. A lot of that fell on Clinton. Oh, yeah, sure. Because Bush is pretty new. He was a newbie still as far as presidents go, and Clinton had been president for two terms. Blame it on the previous guy. It's an American tradition.

It really is. But the thing is Clinton's administration, Clinton's CIA, had passed along a list of high-valued targets of people in the al-Qaeda network before the September 11th attacks ever happened. And there was a lot of talk about what to do with this list of people after September 11th. Like, say, 11 a.m. on September 11th,

the talk started about what to do with this list as it became clear that this was al-Qaeda, that it carried out this heinous attack, right? And one of the things that we did with it was to publish a deck of cards. I have that deck. Do you really? Yeah, a friend of mine gave me that deck.

Yes. Do you remember that you could get them at convenience stores and American public beyond the lookout for these guys and also enjoy some Texas hold them with them as well? And mine is camo on the other side. Is it really? Yeah, that's appropriate.

But so there was a lot of talk about what to do with this list of people. We had their names in a lot of cases. We knew where they were. And one of the ideas that was suggested was to start assassinating all of them. And that one was, I think, probably fairly well entertained,

but the CIA had been, as far as we know, out of practice with assassinations for a while. Yeah, sure they have. So instead, we decided to start stepping up a program called Extraordinary Rendition. Right. Which would be a great band name as soon as I heard it. You think everything's a great band name?

No, I'm not. Everyone thinks everything's a good band name, but not me. No, okay. You're the exception, right? I'm the guy who named his band El Chippo. I know it's a good one. What was the other one? A designer kiddie or...

What? There was another band name recently that you liked. Oh, I don't know. Okay. Well, anyway, this Extraordinary Rendition program actually dated back to the Bush Senior presidency. Right. In January 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush signed

a presidential finding authorizing Extraordinary Rendition, which basically is kidnapping. Yeah, a finding, we should say, is sort of like an executive order. Right. It's one of those things that a president can just say, make it happen. But it's pretty much a secret executive order.

Right. I mean, its existence can be made public, but its contents aren't. Right. And actually, the executive order that Bush Senior signed allowing or authorizing Extraordinary Rendition is still classified, right? Yeah. But what we know is that it was used a couple of dozen times,

largely in the Clinton era. And for the most part, it was used to go into countries that harbor terrorists, kidnap the terrorists, and then bring them to American courts for trial. Yeah. Or other places. Well, that kind of stepped up after 2001. Right.

After Bush Junior came into power, the CIA stopped, I guess, kind of wanting to put their faith in American courts and risk the coin toss of an American jury going in favor of a terrorist. Right. So they started using Extraordinary Rendition to third party nations. Yeah. So now, not only are we kidnapping foreign nationals,

we're kidnapping foreign nationals and taking them to other countries that they don't have an affiliation with. Yeah. So that we can basically outsource torture, interrogation, that kind of thing, right? Yeah. And we should point out at this point that during this kind of rendition, this isn't the kind of rendition you want to hear

if you're a detainee, because it basically means you can't, you don't have a lot of contact with the outside world, as in none. Right. You don't have rights to habeas corpus. You can't call your attorney and say, you know, get me out of here on bail. Right.

That kind of thing. It's very secret. You're abducted. I think one of the stories you listed was a guy that they set up a fake fundraiser and invited this guy to it. Yeah. In order to capture him. Yeah.

After 9-11, like the world stage turned into like this plot exposition montage from a Mission Impossible movie. Right. Or a Simpsons episode. Sure. Yeah. People just started disappearing, actually. Yeah, pretty much.

And by the very socio or the very geopolitical definition of disappearing, it was they were kidnapped by a government entity and kept out of the purview of the courts and stripped of any kind of rights, right? Right. So the problem is we went from using a couple of extraordinary rendition on a couple of dozen people throughout the entire 90s to, by the New York Times estimate, at least 307 between late 2001 and

2005, that's probably a very, very low number, right? So we go from a couple of dozen in a decade to 307 and more in about four years and we don't exactly know where to put these people. The CIA didn't want to bring them to the US because they didn't want them to be prosecuted in American courts. Right. They wanted these people to lose all their rights and to disappear so that they could be kept for as long as the CIA wanted them, right?

Until they found out what they needed. So what they did was set up a network of secret prisons, right? Ghost prisons, as they're called. Yes, and they're known as ghost prisoners. There you go. And they are the podcast. Yeah, if only. Human Rights Watch, you've heard of that group.

They have a list on the Internet about a list of ghost prisoners, suspected ghost prisoners, and it's very long and the CIA is always like, we don't comment on that kind of thing because those lists are probably not accurate. Right. They towed the company line there. Right. Because the CIA couldn't say, yeah, that list is really accurate.

And we do this. The CIA for years and years and years after their cover was blown would never acknowledge that there were secret prisons, right? Well, yeah, but GW had to come clean in what, 06? In Atlanta. Oh, was it in Atlanta? It was Sonny Perdue standing next to him. Really?

Yeah, he acknowledged the existence of secret prisons. And it was probably after seeing GW. Right. It was probably just like a snafu or he didn't mean to say it. He was probably tricked into admitting it. Right. But he did. And so it came out that yes, these do exist.

But we don't use them any longer. And then in January of 2009, Obama, first thing he does is shuts down the CIA's secret prison network three years after they stopped using it apparently. Well, that was on a second full day in office. He did that. But ProPublica, you've heard of them too, right? Yes. They say that there are dozens of ghost prisoners still unaccounted for.

So he says he shut them down, but they say ProPublica, all these human rights groups, say that they don't know where these dudes are. Well, the other possibility is that the secret prisons have been shut down, but those people are dead. That was par for the course in a lot of ways for the CIA's secret prisons. If you have no rights whatsoever, if you die in custody, nobody cares. Like let's say or I shouldn't say no one cares. There's no accountability for that.

Right. So for instance, let's say you were, you died of affixiation because you were held in a shipping container. Yeah. Have you seen the road to Guantanamo? No. There's a kind of, I guess, dock. No, I know about it.

I just haven't seen it. It's worth seeing. Yeah. I mean, it's worth seeing. But there's a scene in there that shows that these people being rounded up and shipped across Afghanistan in a huge shipping container. And when they open the doors the next day, most of them are dead. It's gross.

It's really disturbing. Well, it's like when you get the pet turtle in the shoebox. You got a mom. Mom always says, remember the holes in the top. Yeah. So apparently mom wasn't around to remind them of this. No. People weren't thinking like that.

And the one dude froze to death? Yeah. And the secret prison, and I have to say they had some pretty cool code names. One of the first and one of the largest was codenamed Salt Pit. And it was in a brick factory, an abandoned brick factory outside of Kabul. And a junior CIA officer who was kind of new on this kind of thing ordered a detainee stripped naked and chained to the floor. And he was left overnight.

And it can get pretty cold apparently in Kabul. I guess so. And the guy froze to death. Yeah. And it's entirely possible that these two dozen people, and I'm surprised it's not more, but these two dozen people who are unaccounted for are dead. Right. That's probably the case.

Yeah. You mentioned the names. I dug up a couple of more. And I would say these are probably top 10 lists of camps you don't want to go to. But Camp Dark Prison was one. That's a bad one. My favorite was Camp Bond Steel, B-O-N-D-S-T-E-E-L. Nice.

Camp Bond Steel. And thank you for spelling it. Well, it's not steel as in take, it's steel as in this is metal that I will beat you with. Right. This is metal that you will live behind for the rest of your life. So Camp Bond Steel. Because if you, well, let's talk about what you lose when you're in a CIA prison, the right to lose.

Traditionally, do you remember like a few years ago, the whole, you know, what are the people in Guantanamo Bay? Are they enemy combatants? Right. Are they noncombatants? Sure. Are there terrorists? Like what kind of rights do they have?

Right. Do they fall under the Geneva Convention? And it was largely decided by the Bush administration that no, these people didn't have Geneva Convention rights. Right. Right. With, under the purview of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross is charged with going to visit enemy combatants and prisoners of war.

Right. On both sides and see how they're treated with the secret prisons. First of all, the people, no one knew that these people had been, you know. Yeah. Kidnapped. What wouldn't be a very good secret prison. Exactly. If the Red Cross knew about it.

Where they were. Right. And yeah, they were denied, you know, the Red Cross, even after the Red Cross found out that they were here. And I know you've got this guy here and we want to visit them in the secret prison. We'll be quiet. Yeah. He's like, no, we're not letting you in.

Right. That kind of shook things up. That's a big deal. Sure. There's no habeas corpus. No. And like you mentioned earlier, they, they would go to countries where they typically might torture people.

And because the US isn't allowed to, obviously, to torture. They weren't at the time. Right. This is before it was, we decided, yeah, we torture. Right. But we outsourced it like you mentioned. Yeah. So we would let's say set up and I think you said the first one was in Thailand.

Yeah. So they were looking around. They're like, where would I go if I want to set up a secret prison where you might be able to torture somebody in Thailand was like, come on over. You can set up shop here. And they outsourced it. But from what I read in your article was, you wrote this, right? Yeah.

From what I read was the US could say like, hey, ask him about the microfilm. Right. We would pass along questions or direction or something like that. And the, the last, I wrote this thing in, I can't remember sometime in 2007. I think late 2007. And at the time, the last report I'd had of somebody being held in the secret prison was in Africa, I believe. North Africa, yeah.

And some Americans and Canadians reported having contact with Americans in these like African prisons. Yeah, Westerners. Yeah. Being held captive secretly. Sure. And some guy behind the curtain saying, use the dental drill. Exactly.

Is it safe? And he sounds like he's from Omaha. And he shouldn't because this is, you know, Africa. And other places, other, other black site host countries. Yeah. That's what they're called. Just like the black budgets and black ops. These are black sites.

Right. Or ghost prisons. So you put black in front of it and if it's related to the government. And there's no description. There's just like a huge budget on a line item. Yeah. That is the exit out. That's the secret prison.

Yeah. There are, some of the other countries are Azerbaijan, Oman, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Egypt, Algeria. All of these places were receiving prisoners. Didn't necessarily have a black site may have. Right. But then most of the black site countries, host countries were Eastern European, like Lithuania and Romania.

Yeah. But once, once it came out though, they would probably try to shut it down, right? Because they didn't want this to get out to the press. Well, not only did they not want it to get out to the press. They didn't necessarily want it to get out to the president of that country. And a lot of cases it was like the CIA, maybe a couple of, maybe the U.S. ambassador to that country. Right.

And a couple of like say Bulgaria's secret police, like high commanders. Those are the only people on the planet who knew that there was a secret prison in Bulgaria. What are they getting out of Romania? I wonder that myself too. I mean like. It's got to be money, right? Sure. It would have to be because I do really think Bulgarians are quite as amped up about American

patriotism as say, you know, the average American is. Yeah. I wouldn't think so. And especially a Bulgarian secret police officer, you know. Well, yeah. So yeah, I would think money. Well, yeah. What I said though a second ago is they would close like Thailand when the word got out that

they were doing this. And now we should close this, but it seems like every time it happened, they would just find a different country and then go set up shop there. Right. And with Eastern Europe in particular, it was a little prickly or ticklish because well, when the Washington Post broke this story, they even said in the article like we're not going to reveal the names of the host countries because it's so sensitive that these countries, governments are really going to have problems on their hands when it comes out.

Oh, yeah. And indeed they did at first. But the reason why is because these were all post-Soviet bloc countries that had adopted democracies after the fall of the Soviet Union and were now involved in this horrible secret prison network. Right. You were talking about when word got out. Do you know how word got out?

Well, is this a Thailand one? No. Word got out on what then? Like the existence of the secret prison network. Oh, period. Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't a canary singin'?

Singin' like a canary? No. There was still pigeon. Basically it was the CIA's fault. They didn't do their legwork. They didn't do their homework. Oh, with the manifest for the planes. Yes.

So this is what cracks me up. The CIA is kidnapping people, taking them to a secret prison network that they've set up. Is there honest about flight manifests? Right. Right? Yeah, that's what I don't get. So there was a Swedish TV producer who basically did some hard-hitting journalism.

I think it was called Cold Facts. It was the translation of the Swedish show. It's Sven Svensson. We'll call him Sven Svensson. I think that's good. And if that's not his name, I'll bet Sven Svensson is better than his real name. So Sven was, I guess, investigating the extradition of two Swedish citizens to Egypt for questioning. They were suspected terrorists.

So Sven starts looking into the plane that took them there. Right. And it was a Gulfstream 5. Yeah, they chartered these, right? Yeah. It was a Gulfstream 5, and it was registered to a company Sven found out very quickly. It's called Premier Executive Transport Services, and it was registered in DETA, Massachusetts. So Sven calls Premier Executive Transport Services, leaves a message, wants to know about, you

know, why they would be transporting suspected terrorists to Egypt, and 15 minutes later gets a call from the Swedish intelligence service saying, like, stop asking questions. And so Sven starts looking a little further and apparently finds out very quickly and in a very short order that there are 36 planes chartered by the CIA. Making odd stops. That are all, yeah, making odd stops with the nationalities of the people on board, and they would go from, like, say, Afghanistan to Egypt to Morocco and then to Guantanamo. Yeah, they're flying from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, but somehow they can't get a direct flight,

and they stop off at, like, four places along the way. And then at each stop, there's somebody whose, you know, country of origin is Oman, and they, but they get off, you know, in Cuba. Right. You know? Yeah. So, yeah, it was very flimsy. All of the companies were dummy corporations that had, like, PO boxes listed, and yeah,

the Swedish intelligence service basically tipped this guy off, and he blew the whistle. Right. And then in 2004 was when it really started rolling. Yeah. Spin, spin, spin. It's an RIP. So, these prisons, Josh, we're not saying that, you know, these are nice guys that shouldn't be picked on.

These, you know, these are big, big time. The one in Thailand, I think the first one, their first guest, their first overnight guest, was Abu Zubaita. Yeah. And he was a top al-Qaeda guy. He was captured in a shootout in Pakistan, was recovering in the hospital, and I think he probably knew what was going on. You know, he's in the hospital saying, I'm still not feeling that great, maybe I should

stay here a little longer, and then he recovers, and then they're like, well, why don't you come stay in our private hotel? Was he the one that they kidnapped out of his hospital bed in Somalia? No, no, no. They just said he was... He was in Pakistan? Yeah, he was just recovering after a shootout, and then they brought him to their little, the secret hotel, and you pointed out that he was treated well.

Well, he was tortured and treated well. So, you said they fed him breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Yeah, and he loved KitKats, and they gave him KitKats all the time. Did he? I don't know, that's what I read. Well, it said they fed him, he was treated well because they fed him baked chicken and candy bars, but what if on his little questionnaire he filled out like allergic to chocolate and I hate chicken?

Oh, that's entirely possible. I just wanted to bring that up. There's also Chuck, a list on Mother Jones, I think, of music, the music of torture, something like that. Metallica's hyped the list, I know that. Metallica, Rick Astley. Oh, really? Yeah, the Barney Rong.

Did Rick roll their... Yeah. Wow. Yeah, the Barney song at Guantanamo, very loudly over and over and over again, and Meow Mix commercial. Really? Yeah. Wow. That's the Cook's Pest Control here locally.

Looky, looky, looky, here comes Cookie, Cook's Pest Control. The guy mentioned that Abu Zubdaya, Zubaya, he was joined shortly thereafter by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Who's a high value, high, high value target? So I'm sure when he checked in to the Secret Hotel, the other guy was like, oh crap, this is not good. That is that it took us as many years as it did to start assassinating people. I think it was just in the last couple of months that news broke of some programs that

the CIA was outsourcing to Z-Worldwide Blackwater and other contractors, ex-Delta Force guys who were going into Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and assassinating Al-Qaeda leaders and other terrorist guys, right? So I wonder why we didn't just do that at first, instead, you know, started, I guess we needed info, intelligence, we had none, so I guess it's probably why they were like, well, we can't kill them. Yeah, we want them alive. We need to know what's going on.

So we can waterboard them. Yeah. And then eight years later, we'll start assassinating them. And give them KitKats, apparently. So latest news on this. Yeah, there's some pretty recent stuff going on. Yeah, did you read about the Physicians for Human Rights report? Yes.

So basically, there were physicians present at a lot of these enhanced interrogations. And not just in an observational manner, evidently. Well, that's what they were supposed to be there for, was basically like, hey, you just almost drowned. So let me make sure you're still alive and breathing and good health, right? Yeah. That's okay, actually, apparently, as far as the American Medical Association and international treaties are concerned.

You're allowed to do that, you're still fulfilling your purpose as a physician. They took it a step further, right? Yes, they did. They have a report out, Josh, called Experiments in Torture, Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the Enhanced Interrogation Program. And from what I gathered, the long and short of it is they were gathering information that could later be used to defend and court the torturers. Is that right?

I think they were quantifying pain thresholds, like if you waterboard this guy for this long, he'll experience a pain of eight. Right. So they were kind of writing an outline of what you can do and still get defended in a court of law. Right, which transferred their position as physicians to researchers. And it transferred the position of these detainees as patients to test subjects. So they were engaging in human experimentation and gathering data from torture, which is

totally illegal. But isn't everything about the ghost prison network illegal? Yeah. Pretty much everything that took place as far as the CIA was concerned after 2001 was illegal. And it's not like we're little babes in the woods. It's not like the CIA has just been on the up and up since then, but this is recent. This is going on now still, I imagine.

Yeah, there was another joint study, a 226 page report published in January of this year. And it's a joint study by the, well, there's like four different groups. I won't read all of them, all human rights groups. And they said of a particular concern to the authors, I'm going to read this verbatim, beyond the overall illegality of the entire project conceived and executed by the Bush administration is the fate of dozens of men held in secret prisons run by the CIA are transferred to CIA prisons. So they estimate, you said a couple of dozen.

You said a couple dozen, I thought that I know they're saying that 94 prisoners had been redacted and had enhanced interrogation techniques to varying degrees performed on 28 of the 94. So this was part of the whole torture memo thing. How is it that low? I would think it would be way more than that. Yeah. You know, I would too.

So. Well, that's what they found out. Yeah. So who knows, it may have been more. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Yeah.

It's weird. America in the 21st century was a weird place. The first decade was odd. Yeah. If you ask me. But Obama's trying to shut these down and I think has for the most part. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know.

But I'm not, I'm not saying that there's not, you know, hinky stuff going on there too. Definitely not. Again. I'm not a little babes in the woods. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Go To Meeting, the affordable way to meet with clients and colleagues. For your free 30-day trial, visit gotomeeting.com slash stuff. You got anything else?

No, I'm good. If you want to learn more, you can read my 2007 article, Was There, Was There, a secret CIA prison network, just type in CIA and prison in the handy search bar, howstuffworks.com. And that takes us, of course, to listener mail. No, no, Josh, we're going to do just a little quickie New York recap for those of our friends who could not be there. Dude, New York was huge. It was odd and weird and surreal and awesome.

One of the things I learned about our fans, at least our fans in the Brooklyn area, they're very self-aware and self-conscious people and that makes them highly relatable to us. So like the question, the biggest question I got was, this must be very weird for you, huh? I didn't get that much. I got it every time. And every time I answer, it's like, yeah, actually, it's really weird. Maybe that's because you were standing there like, twitching.

Yeah. But I got it a lot and it was nice that actually I found it disarming. Yeah, that's good. So everyone knows we went to New York, we had a few media opportunities, we did a few interviews. But Monday night was when we had our happy hour at the knitting factory in Brooklyn. With the onion, which dude, we couldn't have done any of this without the onion. Thank you to Dan and Joe for putting this stuff together and just being our buds. Yeah, that was a real treat to get to know those guys for sure.

Treat? It was. A sincere sensation. I know, you sound like my dad. It was a real treat, Josh. So we have our happy hour, we get there, tons of people show up. The fire department comes at one point because there were too many people there, which was so awesome.

No, I know. I was like, what's this? Is this someone fire? And they weren't in a hurry. They were just kind of standing around talking to people, like trying to gauge the amount of people, I think. So we got to meet people, we got to hang out with people and drink adult beverage with people.

We got to meet Mark, Australian Wagga Wagga Mark. Yeah, thanks for the koozie, bud. Yeah, and we got to meet a lot of people who, and I remembered a lot of them. Sock Ninja showed up on Monday. Sock Ninja, the dude, Chris, Chris and his wife, whose wife was Kar-Jack, Chris Witt. He was there with his wife. And they were super awesome. They were almost kind of working for us.

They were helping with the t-shirts and taking photographs. Yeah, and there was Greg, I believe. He was kind of helping me, too. He was helping me move the line along and everything. There were some really genuinely cool people here. Everybody there was super cool. Yes, yes, as a matter of fact. And I need to say a special thanks to the banjo dude.

Remember him? Yeah. The guy with the banjo and his girlfriend, they gave us, well, a lot of people brought gifts and they brought me this, she made this really neat little egg where she had made a design of thread that was on the egg, was really intricate and very cool. And they also met my friend Justin and helped him out in some ways. And they were very, very cool kids. And I can't remember her name, but there's a fan that both of us met, but I talked to

her for a while. Grundy? She gave us, no, not Grundy, but hey Grundy. She gave us a molecular gastronomy book. Oh, yeah, yeah. She just wrote in today. I can't remember her name. I can't remember her name.

But thank you for it. Yeah, yeah. It was very awesome. So hopefully, we'll possibly look for a molecular gastronomy podcast. Right. And I got CDs and like, a lot of bands that were like, hey man, listen to this. Yes. And we have to go listen to the Large Hadron podcast.

Yes. I have not yet, but we need to go check them out. And so that was Monday. But then we had our Wednesday, flash forward to Wednesday, and we had our all star trivia night at the Bell House in Brooklyn. And this was nuts. Yes. We had an all star team that we cobbled together.

Probably like 500 people or so showed up to play trivia. Standing room only for sure. It was crazy. In this big room, it was a big venue. It was like a concert venue. Yes. Like I could see sticks playing there. But yeah, it was standing room only, I would say about 500 people.

And we cobbled together this really awesome trivia team. Yeah. Go ahead and lower the boom there. Okay. So we had Jackson Public, who creates this super cool cartoon called Adventure Brothers that you may be familiar with. He was one of the head riders on the tick. Yes.

And he was brought along by our buddy, John Hodgman. We can say our buddy. Yeah, we can now. I feel like he's our friend. He is. He is. You can feel that way. Right.

And we had Jackson along because he actually saved our butts like several times with questions. Yeah. There would have been like five, six questions that we wouldn't have gotten had it not been for him. And he was a very cool guy. Uh-huh. Wyatt C. Neck from The Daily Show came along. Another buddy.

Super cool. We actually had lunch with Ian Hodgman one day. Yes. The esteemed Joe Randazo, the editor-in-chief of The Onion, who again we couldn't have done any of this without. Joe was awesome. Joe was there just looking pumped. You know, because he works out and sort of smokes and he's very intimidating.

And then Ira Glass. Yes. Ira Glass. The man that we stare up at in the iTunes rankings every day. Yes. Ira Glass was there. On our team. Not there to berate as he was there on our team.

He was very cool. And I just need to say that he came up to me afterward and was blown away. Do your impression, Chuck. Oh, and I don't want to start impressioning Ira Glass. Your fans are amazing. That was pretty good. That was close. He was blown away by the enthusiasm of the stuff you should know, Army.

And he doesn't, and Randazo came up too and he's like, man, Ira doesn't get this sort of like rock star thing much. So he was tickled to be there, I think, and have people, you know, fawning over him and telling him how much they loved him, which is something he deserves. And Hodgman. We mentioned John Hodgman was on our team. And he was one of the funniest, quickest, witted, smartest guys I've ever met in my life.

Agreed. I'm with you 100% on that one. Like I told my buddy Scotty about that and he said, you're really quick though, man. I said, yeah, but when I quickly make like a fart joke, Hodgman is that quick, but he references like an 18th century poet. And it fits and it's funny. It's like a drag racer in like a 15 year old donkey in competition in that one. Thank you.

Yeah. Same here, buddy. I've got like the 12 year old donkey thing going on. All right. So yeah. Thanks everybody. Thank you very much everybody who helped that. And it was such a success when we had such a good time that we're like, why would we

spend any more time at the office? Let's go hit other cities. So look for other cities in the very near future and we want to know where we should go next. So if you have a suggestion of what city where we should go, that kind of thing, you want to play us in trivia, let us know, send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works?

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