848: The Official Unofficial Record

Ira Glass

There was another presidential election that happened recently in another country, and it was an astonishing one. And it has an aftermath that is ongoing. I don't know if you followed this very closely. I did not.

President Nicolás Maduro was up for reelection in Venezuela in July. A lot was on the line in this election. Their economy is in ruins, partly because of Maduro's policies, but made worse by US sanctions. Millions of people have left the country. One in five people have emigrated.

Also, during Maduro's time as president, there's been an increase in government surveillance and government repression, arbitrary detentions of government opponents or perceived opponents, security forces arresting people or killing people during protests. This is according to the United Nations and human rights groups.

But every six years in Venezuela, there's a presidential election. And the country does have a real political opposition. And the way they conduct their elections in Venezuela has all kinds of safeguards against election fraud.

It's a system put in place by the socialist president Hugo Chavez, because he didn't want there to be a shadow of a doubt. He wanted to prove to the world and to his opponents that he really had gotten the most votes every time. Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center observes elections all around the globe, once said that out of dozens of elections that they'd monitored, Venezuela's election system was, quote, "the best in the world."

And this year, that got put to the test, when this brutal government went to the polls with the very real possibility that they might get voted out of office. And the way it played out on the ground was this vast national drama in thousands of polling stations. Really, when you hear the details, it is remarkable what people did, hoping for a fair election.

Ira Glass

Today on our show, we have that story, and also a couple of other stories of people trying to set the record straight against very great odds. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let's just get to it. Act One of our show is called "Best Acta in a Dramatic Role." Nancy Updike has our story about Venezuela. Here she is.

Nancy Updike

The night of the election, the results were announced a little after midnight on television. One of the people watching was Ana Vanessa Herrero, a reporter for the Washington Post. She'd been out covering the election all day. On election night, she was alone in a hotel room, watching the results.

Nancy Updike

It was weird.

Nancy Updike

The electoral council said they'd been hacked, but presented no credible evidence of the hack. All they would say is that President Nicolás Maduro had won with just over 51% of the vote. No vote totals, just the percentage.

And the opposition, one hour after the electoral council's announcement, made their own live announcement on X. They said, actually, we won, and we can prove it. Turned out tens of thousands of volunteers in the opposition had managed to collect paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centers in the country, down to the level of each voting machine.

The opposition began publishing those results on a website that anyone, anywhere, would be able to access. And overnight, the world became different. Ana's been reporting in Venezuela for 15 years. She's lived there all her life. And this election was not like others she's covered.

Nancy Updike

I clued into this election after it happened, and I could not stop reading about it. This was a plan to document the country's entire voting record. It was extraordinary. The plan was called Seiscientos Kah, 600k, for the network of 600,000 people around the country the opposition estimated they would need to be in place on election day.

I wanted to see inside this election, inside the opposition's plan. I wanted to know how the opposition did what it did and how they did it so fast. In an era of chronic, virulent misinformation and mistrust, they pulled off a giant convincing.

So I talked to an organizer of 600k. You won't hear his voice. Police have been stopping people on the street, looking in their phones to see if they've been to protests or have expressed doubt about the official election results. The organizer told me he went into hiding after the election. Now he's left the country.

He said Seiscientos Kah was created because we knew winning the election was not enough. We need the capacity to prove and demonstrate that we won the election. Some of the plan was carried out in secret. Other parts were done in plain sight.

600k was set up to work essentially like a giant relay race. And instead of a baton, people would hand off a piece of paper. Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a long, narrow sheet of paper at the end of the voting day. It looks like one of those epic receipts from CVS or Rite Aid, but on special paper. And the receipt shows a tally of all the votes made on that specific machine for each candidate on election day.

Those receipts, the voting tallies are called, in Spanish, actas, A-C-T-A, acta. And the first runners in the relay race to get the acta in hand would be the witnesses. In Venezuela, each candidate is allowed by law to have an accredited witness at each voting machine in the country. Not just in each voting center-- at each voting machine, over 30,000 machines. Some voting centers have only one machine. Some have more.

The witnesses can't see people's votes. They just keep an eye on the process. And then at the end of the voting day, each witness is legally entitled to get a printed copy of the acta, the voting tally, from their voting machine.

The 600k plan was each opposition witness would get their acta and hand it off to someone else, the next person in the relay. That person opens an app the opposition created and then scans a QR code that's on the acta. The QR code contains all the results from that voting machine, and the app would send those results to the opposition's national command.

Then another person in the relay would take the acta, the physical sheet, to a secret location. There were over 100 in the country. Once the runner got to that place, they would hand the acta off to the person there, who had a whole setup-- a laptop, a scanner, Starlink internet access, and a little generator, like for camping, the organizer said. He said we needed electricity that can't be turned off and internet access that can't be blocked.

The person with the scanner would run the acta through the scanner, and the image of the acta would be uploaded to the website the opposition had set up, where anyone could see it, along with the vote totals from that acta. Then, the acta itself, the long piece of paper, would go into a box. The box, when it was full, would be kept at another secret location.

There were layers of support for each part of this relay all around the country, organized by state, city, parish, and voting center. The organizer said every process had a person responsible for it, with defined work and the tools to make it work. The organizer said even inside the plan, no more than 10 people knew all the parts of it.

He said they mapped this out, 600k, based on lessons learned from counting votes in previous elections. And this time around, one thing that made a big difference was that for the first time in a national election, the actas had this QR code, which meant if the opposition witnesses could just get the actas, the full election results could go up on an opposition website right away. The whole operation depended on tens of thousands of witnesses each getting their acta, no matter what, a process that seems to have required a combination of stamina, quick thinking, and strategic belligerence.

Nancy Updike

Maria was a witness. Maria is not her real name, and this is not her real voice. We recorded someone else copying what Maria said as closely as possible, so we wouldn't put her at risk of being identified. Maria and her husband, Pedro-- also not his real name-- both volunteered for 600k.

Nancy Updike

Maria is in her 50s. She was a social worker, worked for the government for years. She said she grew up without money. Maria was the first in her family to go to university. That's when she met Pedro, who was into politics.

She and Pedro went all in on getting Hugo Chavez elected the first time he ran, because he promised changes that Maria and Pedro believed in-- poor people getting access to university and health care and opportunities for a better life. They saw those changes happen, then, over time, saw them unraveling.

Maduro, Chavez's successor, Maria said she never liked and never voted for him. In this election, she said she volunteered as a witness because she wants a different country for her kids, and she believes in the opposition.

So Maria trained to be a witness with a bunch of mostly other women, she said-- some retired, like her, some lawyers-- meeting in someone's living room. As an overall plan, 600k had so many technological aspects, but the witnesses' training focused on the most analog, low fi part-- talking to other people inside a voting center.

Nancy Updike

Maria and other witnesses were being trained for, essentially, a mass act of civil obedience, following and insisting on the law. At the training, they got a pamphlet outlining election law and procedures that they would take with them on voting day and be prepared to wield as needed. For instance, in Venezuela, there are military personnel at every voting center on election day, and Maria's training got into that specifically.

Nancy Updike

There are videos of witnesses in other parts of the country on election day who were locked out of their voting centers, reading the law out loud, saying, let us in. Some never got in. But Maria got in without problems. This is her account of her experiences on voting day. We've corroborated as much as we can without exposing her.

Polls opened at 6:00 AM. She and Pedro got to the voting center around 4:15 AM. Pedro would stay outside the voting center all day, rallying voters, keeping the peace, and being Maria's liaison to the rest of the 600k network.

Inside, there were two tables with voting machines. Maria was the opposition witness at one table. And she had an ally, the woman who was the opposition witness at the other table. From Maria's description, the two of them spent the day at their voting center playing-- tag-team chess? A co-obstacle course?

Hurdle number one-- Maria's first argument with the other side was about how many witnesses would be allowed inside the voting center. Every accredited witness has two backup witnesses.

Nancy Updike

Chavista, meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so Chavista.

Nancy Updike

Hurdle number two-- on this election day, Maria's voting center had only two tables, even though, in past elections, it's had more. Not only that--

Nancy Updike

Each vote requires a person's government-issued ID, their fingerprint, a choice on the voting machine, and a paper copy generated by the machine that the voter has to put in a box. So there are many points in the process where a person moving slowly can really gum things up. Maria suspected that putting all the old people in one line was a deliberate attempt to slow the process and discourage people from voting.

Nancy Updike

Looking into this, I think it's likely this was just random chance that more older voters were concentrated at one voting machine. Voters are pre-assigned to specific voting machines long before election day, but Maria still believes it was a deliberate attempt to slow down and discourage voting.

Everyone in Maria's account of this day, she just refers to by their title, like they're in a play. First, the chavista. Next up, the soldier. There were actually three soldiers at the voting center. The soldiers are in voting centers, supposedly, to guard the voting process.

Maria focused on the one in charge, prodding him if she saw anything that went against what was outlined in the election law pamphlet she was holding. All day, she was on him-- any small deviation from the official process. And, she said, in the middle of the day, she really got on his case because the line for the other voting machine stopped altogether. And she said it stayed stopped for more than two hours.

Nancy Updike

There's a fervor in the way Maria describes her own vigilance that day that might sound familiar to Americans, like another country's Stop the Steal movement, which also mobilized voters around the country to go to their voting center on election day with a copy of local election laws and their suspicion and their willingness to speak up.

Venezuela's election was like that, and it wasn't at all. The politics in Venezuela don't really map onto a, "Well, who are the Republicans, and who are the Democrats?" grid. The political party in power has the word "socialist" in its name, but mainly, it's an authoritarian government. The opposition is a coalition that ranges in economic ideas from center-left to Margaret Thatcher, and it hasn't been in power for 25 years.

Venezuela's voting system is very different from ours. In the United States, each state has different rules and procedures for voting, different days and hours people are allowed to vote, different timelines for counting votes, different officials who certify results.

In Venezuela, it's one system across the whole country. And one of the most important things they have is that for every vote, the voting machine produces a paper copy of the vote that the voter takes in hand and puts in a box at the voting center.

And at the end of the day, about 30% of those boxes are randomly opened for a hand count of the paper ballots as a cross-check on the machine's count. Witnesses watch this hand count, often, not just the accredited witnesses. By law, anyone is allowed to watch the hand count in their voting center, as long as there's enough room.

And then at the end of the day, there's the acta, a summary of vote totals from the entire day. Actas look the same all over the country. They are a recognizable and agreed-upon measure of voting results in Venezuela, each one with a unique identifier tying it to a specific voting center and voting machine.

So Maria was at the voting center to keep an eye on the process, to complain, to make a fuss if she thought something was unfair, or if the process was stalling out. But at the end of the voting day, if the law was followed, she would walk out, not just with a bunch of stories about what looked fishy, but with the actual results in her hand, the acta. The acta isn't about suspicions and observations and complaints. It doesn't raise questions about who won. It answers them.

Ira Glass

The last hurdle of the day-- and it's a big one-- after the break. Stay with us.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. We are in the middle of Nancy Updike's story about the Venezuelan election and the opposition's very elaborate attempt to get a real vote count. Nancy picks up where she left off.

Nancy Updike

The last hurdle of the day came after voting closed. Maria calls the character in this part the bureaucrat, a woman from the electoral council who stepped in to deal with the voting machines. The machines finalize the numbers and transmit them to the electoral council. The data are encrypted and sent through a dedicated wireless phone line that is just for the voting data and is only accessible through the voting machines.

Nancy Updike

The electoral council later blamed the interrupted transmission of voting results on a hack, the one they never provided credible evidence for. Maria, in her voting center, was watching the transmission problems in real-time, standing next to the bureaucrat at the voting machine.

Nancy Updike

Maria said she couldn't get her copy of the acta until the machine transmitted the results. So this problem with the machine, this breakdown in transmission, led to a sort of slapstick routine inside her voting center.

Nancy Updike

Oh, my god.

[LAUGHTER]

Nancy Updike

Versions of this happened at other voting centers, including people moving the machines outside to see if they could get a signal there. Maria could only spend so much time on this table moving craziness, though.

Nancy Updike

Finally, the data were transmitted and the results at Maria's voting center were official. It was a blowout.

Nancy Updike

Maria's euphoria was short-lived. The electoral council, known as the CNE, made their announcement just after midnight, saying Maduro had won.

Nancy Updike

On election night, Venezuelans uploaded videos recorded outside different voting centers all around the country. A similar scene repeated over and over-- one person in front of a crowd at night, reading the voting center's results out loud, sometimes holding the acta and using a cell phone light to read the tiny print straight from that, announcing totals for President Maduro and for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia.

This is a video from La Guaira. There's a woman reading results from a piece of paper, shouting to the crowd, "Table two-- Edmundo, 303. Maduro, 194."

Nancy Updike

Table four-- Edmundo, 342. Maduro, 162.

Nancy Updike

Hundreds of these videos. The opposition website had actas from 83% of the voting machines in the country. The numbers showed the opposition had won 7.3 million votes. Maduro got 3.3 million.

According to these numbers, it was 2 to 1 in favor of the opposition. Even if Maduro got every vote in the remaining 17% of the actas, he still couldn't win. And since the actas show data down to the voting machine, they also showed that Maduro lost in lots of places he had won in the past.

There was a frenzy of people after the election, combing through the website with the actas and the vote totals. Were the numbers real? Were the actas real? The Washington Post looked into the website's data and concluded, yes, the actas were genuine and accurate. The Associated Press also concluded the actas' information was accurate.

Another website collected the videos people had uploaded reading the results on election night, geolocated them, and matched them to the actas from the voting center where they were from. Academics in Venezuela, Brazil, and the United States analyzed the website's actas and totals and concluded, yes, they're real.

As for the electoral council in Venezuela, the CNE, the website has been down almost continuously since the election. We reached someone there by phone. When we asked for an email address to send questions, the person who answered the phone said, we don't do email. When we asked for a spokesperson we could contact to ask our questions, they said there isn't one at the moment.

Maduro has called the opposition effort to create their own vote tally, quote, "a coup." The electoral council still hasn't published voting machine totals to back up their claim that Maduro won. It's as if what 600k did was so decisive, the government's not even bothering to argue the case and propose an alternate set of facts. Instead, in the absence of evidence, they're relying on force.

After the election, there were mass detentions-- over 1,500 people, according to the Venezuelan human rights group, Foro Penal. The UN put out a report last month about the post-election detentions and violence.

The report said people charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred after the election included, quote, "opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathized with the opposition or criticized the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community," end quote.

A member of the UN fact-finding mission said in a statement that out of the people detained after the election, quote, "many were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men."

The opposition candidate for president, Edmundo González Urrutia, fled Venezuela and got asylum in Spain. The leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, is in hiding. I sent an email asking about the UN report to multiple email addresses for the Permanent Mission of Venezuela to the UN and got no response. An email we sent to the Ministry for Communication and Information came back with a reply saying our email had been blocked.

Nicolás Maduro is still the president. And in January, if nothing changes, he will take office for a third six-year term. To state the obvious, elections aren't democracy. They're not enough. Venezuela's great voting system was created under Hugo Chavez after he was elected.

And over the course of successive elections, Chavez ended presidential term limits. He consolidated control over the Supreme Court and the military. The legislature is no longer a check on presidential power. And now Maduro has all of that at his disposal, as he tries to put the results of this election behind him.

I asked people I talked to for this story, what is the value of this huge effort by the opposition to document the outcome of the election if it doesn't lead to political change? What does it mean to try and create the conditions for certainty about an electoral result, and have that not carry the day?

For some Venezuelans I talked to, it was simple. This effort showed that a majority of voters in this country want a change in government, and it showed the government pretending that's not true.

What the opposition effort led to is a record, and from that record, a broad consensus about the election, even among Venezuelans who may have very different ideas about the country's problems and solutions, its history, and its future. There is value in knowing whether the person who holds the most power in your country is there because a majority voted for him, or in spite of the fact that a majority voted against him.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. Her story was produced by Anayansi Diaz Cortes. Anayansi was also the interpreter for Maria's interview. The story was edited by Laura Starecheski. Just this week, for the first time, President Biden started referring to the candidate whose 600k showed got the most votes, opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, as the president-elect of Venezuela.

Coming up, an entire class of animals calls for a recount. They want an end to the lies about them. I mean, OK, I guess it's human beings who want the recount, not the animals themselves. But you get the idea. Anyway, that's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, the official, unofficial record, stories about people trying to set the record straight against great odds, real and perceived. We have arrived at act two of our show-- Act Two, "Meanwhile, in America."

I thought this was an interesting sign of the times. It started out in a very familiar scene and then went into a direction I did not expect. It happened on election night. My co-worker Zoe Chace and I were in Michigan in separate locations.

It was late, but nobody knew yet who was going to win. And Zoe was at what would later become the Trump victory party in Michigan. And she ambled up to some people she talked to in the past, Republican activists, including Todd Gillman.

Ira Glass

I don't know if you could catch that. He said the cheat is going to happen at 2:00 in the morning, and that a truck with California plates showed up at the convention center, where they were at that very moment, counting absentee ballots for Detroit. Online was a video of three supposed culprits carrying suspicious packages into some building at 11:00 PM.

Ira Glass

All right, let's do a quick camera cut to the convention center. Nice. Wow. Good music, too. OK, so I'm there in the convention center that night with hundreds of other very tired-looking people, not exactly watching the steal come in, but with someone who was on high alert for any possible vote stealing shenanigans, one of the lead Republican poll challengers at the convention center, a guy named Jeff Schaeper.

So Zoe told me what she just heard about mysterious ballots arriving at the convention center at 11:00 PM on a truck with California plates. And this next moment, the one where I told Jeff about it, is the moment that I thought was so interesting.

And to get its significance, I should tell you first that Jeff Schaeper is a serious election skeptic. Back in 2020, he was one of hundreds of people who rushed to this very spot, the Detroit convention center, certain that Democrats were here, stealing the election for Joe Biden. Maybe you remember the crowds in Detroit chanting, "Stop the count."

Ira Glass

OK, so that's where Jeff was back then. A Republican-led investigation in the state Senate later found no fraud, no harm to the vote count in Detroit. But Jeff is still convinced to this day the Democrats were in there, throwing illegal ballots into the system.

Ira Glass

To use for fraud, he means.

Ira Glass

Jeff started to work on election stuff full-time after that, became the number two person at an activist group called Michigan Fair Elections that does all sorts of lawsuits and election monitoring and public education. That's how he ended up on election night 2024 as one of the lead Republican election challengers in Detroit, the location in Michigan, I think it is fair to say, that Republicans were most suspicious about.

Before he retired, Jeff was a systems guy in the auto industry. He's got the air of a very sincere dad patiently helping you with your homework. He also likes a good tagline.

Ira Glass

That one came up in a bunch of stories he told me.

Ira Glass

So that's Jeff. And here's the moment that I thought was interesting. When I told Jeff this breaking news about the trucks with California plates at 11:00 PM, this election skeptic was not having it.

Ira Glass

He tells me that 11:00 PM is when you would expect ballots to show up at the convention center. And those three supposed vote stealers in the video posted on X, they're carrying a white box, a red bag, and another box.

Ira Glass

I should say, for all the factual information that I saw Jeff give out on election night, he and his group do also spread information that does not seem as credible, like, for example, the idea that Michigan's voter rolls-- which, like other states, have a lot of inactive voters on them-- are a real problem and might be used for widespread fraud. Michigan's secretary of state disputes that. He and I talked about it. Neither convinced the other.

On election day, Jeff and the other Republican poll challengers that I talked to, they were pretty happy with what they were seeing. Throughout the day, they all said the same things to me, that Detroit had adjusted a few procedural things in handling ballots since 2020, and those fixes were working. Ballots were counted in batches of 50 by small teams. Nobody moved on until there was agreement about each batch. It was a good, clean count.

Ira Glass

Adjudication to settle disputes. Jeff is involved in those because he's one of the lead Republican challengers. He says in eight days of counting--

Ira Glass

He and other Republicans said this to me throughout the day, well before the results came in. And I'll be honest, I am not sure I believe they all would have stuck by that if Harris won. After all, last time, it seems like nothing happened that could throw an election. Many court cases and a bipartisan state senate investigation found no evidence of a steal. But they found all kinds of evidence and continue to believe it.

But this time, Trump won, and the election doubters have been pretty quiet. Late in the evening-- or I guess it was the early morning-- after it became clear that Michigan and the rest of the swing states were going to go for Trump, I asked Jeff if he felt like this was partly his doing, like his years of work on election monitoring had paid off in an election that he could trust. Did he feel a sense of victory?

Ira Glass

This is not going away, the doubts about elections in our country, the scrutinizing and arguing over them. It was interesting, in the wake of Trump's very solid victory, that it was mostly the Democrats you saw on social media wondering if the election was stolen.

There wasn't a ton of that. It was a tiny whisper of a complaint, compared to the nonstop multimedia barrage of videos and charts we got in 2020 from Republicans. But if the election had been more of a real squeaker and Harris lost, I bet we would have heard a lot more of that. It is easy to see the appeal of that kind of doubt.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Oh, What a Hangled Web We Weave." OK, a quick heads up before we start this next story that it mentions a part of the male anatomy. Take that under advisement, pro and con. Decide what you're going to do. It is not what the story is about.

The story is about a creepy and dangerous creature that does all kinds of terrible things. It's also about somebody who takes issue with every word that I just said about that creature. And they want a recount. They want a reconsideration. They want us all to examine the facts and stop believing the fake news about this creature. Lilly Sullivan met up with this person to hear her out.

Lilly Sullivan

This person is my friend, Kelsey Padgett. And if you run into her at a dinner party or a bar-- maybe you happen to be standing behind her in the security line at the airport-- she might ask you this.

Lilly Sullivan

And this is Kelsey's mission-- to expose the lies about this spider being a wanton murderess, correct the record, and restore her good name. Kelsey used to work as a park ranger in New York, by the way. She also used to report science stories. And over the years, she's amassed an absurd amount of information about these spiders.

Lilly Sullivan

Kelsey says the female eating the male-- OK, this has happened, but very rarely. And it's barely a noticeable trait if you look around at what the rest of spiders are doing.

Lilly Sullivan

Meanwhile, the male spider, he's no Mr. Rogers. Check out what he does.

Lilly Sullivan

A lot of species of spiders do this bridal veil thing. One theory is the one Kelsey lays out, that the male's trapping the female. There's another newer one, too-- which is more accepted by scientists now-- that it's more seduction than a trap. As a scientist put it when they explained it to me, it's bondage. Yep, spiders do bondage.

Myth number two-- that her bite is fatal.

Lilly Sullivan

Interestingly, most of the black widow bite victims back then seemed to be male. In an older study, they were 80% male. Here's a theory as to why.

Lilly Sullivan

Hangles. Yep, that's what she said.

She thinks all these penis bites happening so regularly might be one of the reasons there were so many deaths back then.

Lilly Sullivan

Anyway, the point is, once more people had indoor plumbing, along with improved access to medical care, the numbers, which weren't that high to begin with, they've gone way down. And in the last several decades, there's no record of anyone dying from a black widow spider. No one.

In fact, the black widow is usually a pretty shy spider. Scientists have even done tests where they poke and prod her, trying to elicit a bite. And she turns to other defenses first-- tries to run away, curls up into a little ball no bigger than a quarter. Sometimes she throws silk at the danger to try to escape. The bite is her last resort.

Lilly Sullivan

And Kelsey has a proposal to set the record straight-- change the spider's name. Easy. Get rid of the name that mires her in all this twisted lore she doesn't deserve.

Lilly Sullivan

The ones she likes best, though--

Lilly Sullivan

She looks like a button, after all-- a little round one. So I decided to test out this new name on the people I thought were the best suited to judge.

Lilly Sullivan

I spoke with eight people who'd been bitten, talked to 11 others over email. Here are some of them.

Lilly Sullivan

Not everyone who's bit has a bad reaction like this. And again, bites are very rare. And a lot of the time, they're mild. But when it's bad, it's bad. So I ran Kelsey's idea by them. Do you think we should rename the black widow spider, the shoe button spider? 13 people weighed in. No one was into it.

Lilly Sullivan

This is Jenna. She got bit eight years ago in a porta potty at Coachella.

Lilly Sullivan

Someone else who'd been bit told me, honestly, I think black widow is an excellent name. And were I a spider, I would feel really cool with a name like that.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan is one of the producers of our program. Kelsey Padgett is the co-host of the podcast, Fierce Rivalries, about big rivalries in history, but also gossipy, petty feuds of all sorts. It is available wherever you get your podcasts.

["WRITE THIS DOWN" BY GEORGE STRAIT]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced by Zoe Chace. The people who put together today's show include Michael Comite, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Kristina Olias, Nadia Reiman, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, and Matt Tierney.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Tim Daly, Dorothy Kronick, Annelise Pineda, Javier Corrales, Veronica Bayetti Flores, Francisco Toro, and Francisco Rodriguez.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. To become a This American Life Partner and get all kinds of bonus content, bonus episodes, AMAs, ad-free listening, plus hundreds of greatest hits episodes right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks to two Life Partners, Jihan Gibson, Pria Elizabeth Harmon, Kelly Scherer, and Sally Sloan.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He says that every weekend, he sits there, listening to his local public radio station. My voice comes on.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

["WRITE THIS DOWN" BY GEORGE STRAIT]