506: Secret Identity

A bank robber on an undercover mission. A teenage girl with the powers of a tiger. A vigilante seeking vengeance in Ciudad Juárez. All have secret identities — but not all of them chose those identities for themselves. Start a Life Partners free trial https://thisamericanlife.supercast.com/?coupon=VIDEO?utm_id=lifepartners&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=shownotes to watch our new video, A Night of Stories and Improv. (00:00:00) Prologue: Ira attempts to solve perhaps the most unsolvable mystery at the Trees of Mystery in California: Who is the voice of Paul Bunyan? (7 minutes) (00:07:23) Act One: If you ever think about assuming a secret identity, you may want to take a little time to consider the possible consequences. Jon Ronson tells the tale of a bank robber who absolutely does not take that advice. (22 minutes) (00:31:33) Act Two: Elna Baker shares a story about her teenage cousin, Navey Baker, who maintains a secret identity while being a public figure: she's the school mascot, a tiger, at her high school. (11 minutes) (00:41:28) Act Three: While we were putting together this week's show, we heard about a real-life Avenger with a secret identity in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Writer Yuri Herrera lived on the border for several years and spent a lot of time in Juarez. He went back there to see what effect this secret Avenger has had on the city. (13 minutes) Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org https://www.thisamericanlife.org/506/transcript / This American Life privacy policy https://www.thisamericanlife.org/page/privacy-policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Ira Glass?

  OK, so a few years ago, I went to see this thing that happens all summer long on Highway 101 in Northern California, in the middle of the Redwood Forest. Little kids hold conversations with a statue that's five stories high.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  What do you eat?

• 0:31Speaker 03

  What do I eat? Mostly pancakes. What do you eat?

• 0:36Ira Glass?

  The statue is Paul Bunyan. Big red shirt, blue pants, hairy chest, black beard. He stands next to Babe, his 36-foot-tall blue ox. Adults talk to him, too.

• 0:46Speaker 04

  Hey, do you know Bigfoot?

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I play poker with him on Friday nights.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  Who else plays in that game?

• 0:53Ira Glass?

  Uh... What's your shoe size? Shouldn't you be in Minnesota? Where are the bathrooms? Tell me a joke. Paul and Babe are part of a roadside attraction called Trees of Mystery. Paul can turn his head in a slow swivel. He can wave. He can wink, all with the sort of stiff hydraulic-powered gestures you would expect from a statue built in 1962, which he is.

• 1:15Speaker 05

  Can I sing you a song?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Can you sing me a song?

• 1:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  You are very much welcome to sing me a song.

• 1:22Speaker 05

  OK. L is for the way you look at me. O is for the only one I see.

• 1:33Ira Glass?

  Don't be fooled by how great these two seem to be getting along.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  That's a good one.

• 1:36Ira Glass?

  Eight-year-old Morgan Gosage, like lots of kids, also has skeptical questions for Paul Bunyan. So many kids try to trap him into admitting he is not really Paul Bunyan. He's just a statue.

• 1:47Speaker 05

  Why can't you open your mouth when you talk?

• 1:51Speaker 03

  I can. I don't need to, though.

• 1:53Speaker 05

  Hmm. How come you never move?

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Because I'm not allowed to. There's all the OSHA regulations, like I can't swing my axe. I can't dance. I can't jump up and down.

• 2:07Ira Glass?

  Management, by the way, holds the line on this. When one of our producers first spoke with a woman in the gift shop and asked, "Who does the voice for Paul Bunyan?", the woman replied, "Paul Bunyan." Or, this is John Thompson. His family owns Trees of Mystery, and he runs the place. I ask him what Paul's made of. He says, "The same stuff as you or I, only more of it." I ask if Paul Bunyan's an employee.

• 2:30Speaker 06

  Well, you know, there's a fuzzy area there. Because he's so big, we can't really get him to do what we want him to do all the time. It's only been a few years. We got him to stop walking around in the daytime. He stepped on a couple cars, you know, and made a mess. But that's Paul.

• 2:47Ira Glass?

  John's daughter Hannah and his son-in-law Kylan both listened to him tell me this. They both seemed a little pained to have to keep up the pretense with me that Paul is real. And it's Kylan who pipes in with a very reasonable point, that if Paul Bunyan is just, you know, some guy pretending to be Paul Bunyan...

• 3:03Speaker 07

  You know, it really isn't as fun.

• 3:07Speaker 07

  I don't think the truth is really as interesting as people want to believe it is. It really isn't, you know?

• 3:17Speaker 06

  The bottom line, Ira, is that would you pull the mask off Mickey Mouse?

• 3:22Ira Glass?

  Me, no.

• 3:23Speaker 06

  Well, there you go.

• 3:24Ira Glass?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Speaker 06

  OK.

• 3:25Ira Glass?

  OK, and I'll be frank. I thought that this is where the story would end. We have an episode for you today about secret identities. And at this point, I would say something about, you know, how it's better not to find out who's behind the mask. And, you know, I'd start the show, WBEZ Chicago, all that, blah, blah, blah. And we would move on to Act One. But around closing time at Trees of Mystery, that plan fell completely apart. I was standing near Paul Bunyan, and this heavyset guy in a T-shirt and jeans and wire-rimmed glasses walked up to me. Hi, Ira.

• 3:57Speaker 06

  Dave Johnson.

• 3:58Ira Glass?

  Dave Johnson?

• 3:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:59Ira Glass?

  OK, I'll get a little closer.

• 4:00Speaker 06

  Oh, OK.

• 4:01Ira Glass?

  So you work here?

• 4:02Speaker 06

  Yes, I do.

• 4:03Ira Glass?

  What do you do here?

• 4:04Speaker 06

  I work at Sky Trail and do Paul Bunyan occasionally.

• 4:10Ira Glass?

  You're blowing their cover here.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:15Ira Glass?

  So is that you today?

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was me. It was hot up there.

• 4:21Ira Glass?

  Your face is totally flushed.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. It was about 95 up there.

• 4:26Ira Glass?

  His face really was bright red, though it took me a minute to realize what he meant when he said "up there." I had assumed that whoever was the voice of Paul Bunyan was, like, looking out a window from the gift shop, which is right across the way. Or maybe they were watching a video monitor somewhere and talking into a mic. But no. John and Kylan, in a stunning reversal in their media strategy, I have to say, walked me around to see the back of Paul Bunyan's right shoe. And there's a little door there, and they opened it up.

• 4:54Speaker 07

  We now see a ladder and a bunch of pipes and wires heading up.

• 4:59Ira Glass?

  I stick my head in and look up. It's dark and narrow. Kylan and Hannah offered to take me up. And I climb in first, and it was stuffy and hot and claustrophobic. It felt very easy to fall. So we just keep going up?

• 5:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:14Ira Glass?

  We climb this one ladder for what seems like a really long time, and then switch to another ladder, and then hoist ourselves through an opening. Holy [bleep].

• 5:27Ira Glass?

  It's like a little space capsule in here.

• 5:29Speaker 07

  Yes. It's about an eight-to-10-foot oval.

• 5:34Ira Glass?

  We're inside Paul's torso. It's lit by a single bare light bulb on a bare wire that looks like if you touched the wire, you would die. You see outside, through Paul's chest hair. The walls are covered in decaying, soundproofing tiles and torn insulation. There's a dingy old sink that the guys pee into on their shifts, and old pressure gauges from 1962 measuring the hydraulics, four levers to make Paul's eye wink or head turn. This is amazing. This is really like a magical place, I have to say.

• 6:08Speaker 07

  The coolest things, I think, are the, these old, old hydraulics that control everything. So you can feel this whole place shake.

• 6:18Ira Glass?

  That's the hand?

• 6:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  So, like, do you think it's better now that you know? Or is it worse? Or is it the same?

• 6:27Ira Glass?

  I have to say, this is better than not knowing. This is so cool in here, in this room with these steel beams cutting through it and the crappy sink where people pee. This really is like going inside the Wizard of Oz's head.

• 6:44Ira Glass?

  Of course, right? Anybody with a secret identity probably feels this. They're supposed to keep it secret, but it must be so tempting to tell people the truth. It must be so hard to keep your mouth shut for spies and for superheroes, because the truth is so insanely cool. How did Bruce Wayne not bring every woman he ever took on a date to see the Batcave? Is this the microphone?

• 7:08Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 7:10Ira Glass?

  Is it live?

• 7:11Speaker 07

  You'd probably have a better shot.

• 7:12Ira Glass?

  Oh, I would totally know how to work this. Yeah, this is totally technology that I know. One, two, three.

• 7:18Speaker 07

  That sounds...

• 7:18Ira Glass?

  Oh, it's on. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Paul Bunyan. Stay with us.

• 7:43Speaker 06

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• 8:02Speaker 00

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• 8:34Ira Glass?

  It's This American Life, Act One, You Can't Handle the Truth. So I'm just guessing here, but I would think that people usually take on a secret identity only after careful consideration, only after thinking through all the angles, taking some time. Jon Ronson has this story of a guy who takes on a secret identity in haste, without a lot of strategizing, without much long-term thinking. Today's show is a rerun, by the way. He reported this story back in 2013. Here's Jon.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  Sometimes the government stages crimes, like in the 1950s when the CIA was experimenting with LSD as a truth serum, and they set up a fake brothel in New York City. The prostitutes would spike the unsuspecting John's drinks with acid, while CIA agents sat behind a one-way mirror to see if they would blurt out secrets. This really happened. Just a few years ago, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was telling gun shops to sell weapons to drug smugglers. The idea was to track the guns into the Mexican cartels, but the operation fell apart when they lost track of them, and two turned up at the murder

• 9:43Speaker 06

  scene of a US Border Patrol agent. These kinds of covert operations happen quite a lot. Keep that in mind as you hear this story, which starts with a spate of attempted bank robberies in Northern Virginia in June 2012. The man who carried them out was a terrible bank robber, and I don't mean he was terribly evil. I mean, he was terrible at it. He'd stand there, demand money, suddenly look panicky, and run out the door. The entire spree lasted four days, five attempted robberies in all. He didn't make a penny. The police

• 10:23Speaker 06

  quickly caught up with him. He was a 21-year-old guy named Hurson Torres. But things took a strange turn when they sat him down for questioning. Tom Schoenberg is a legal affairs reporter, and he covered the story for Bloomberg Businessweek.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Initially, he didn't want to tell them anything, and he didn't tell them anything for a little bit. He started showing him pictures of his relatives that they had assembled and saying he could go to prison for 25 years. By that point, he was crying, and he said, "I'm going to tell you something, but you're not going to believe what I'm going to tell you."

• 11:05Speaker 06

  What Hurson told them was unbelievable. But within hours of questioning Hurson, the police began to think that his story might be true, and that Hurson was innocent. "It all started," he said, "a few days earlier. Hurson had got home from his shift unloading trucks at Target when he saw that he had a text message from an old high school friend, Carolina." Here's Tom Schoenberg again.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  And the message says, "Hey, I got a job for you. We're going to get paid 25K." And he's, you know, taps back, "Doing what?" She responds, "Robbing banks." And, you know, at first, he thought it was a joke. She explains that it's all legitimate, that it's for, you know, for the federal government, and he agreed to meet with her.

• 12:01Speaker 06

  Three hours later, and Hurson was meeting Carolina in a nearby Dick's Sporting Goods parking lot. She was already on the phone to her government contact, a man named Theo, who worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, a part of the Department of Defense. She passed the phone over to Hurson. Theo started telling Hurson that this was an operation using civilians to test the security of area banks. "He'd vetted Hurson," Theo said, "so he knew all about a misdemeanor theft charge from when Hurson was a teenager, the sort of charge that was sealed in juvenile records." And then Theo explained the job that Hurson was being recruited into.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  He calmly said they were going to, you know, the banks knew that this operation was happening, and he was going to tell them which bank to target. He explained how it would, how the whole operation would work out, that there would be no weapons involved, and that it was really a simple thing to go and see into these banks and see, would they turn over money when someone comes in there and presents them with a note asking them to do so?

• 13:12Speaker 06

  Okay, so the, when he said that the banks knew, then, like, the bank head office knew, but the bank tellers didn't know, and the local managers didn't know?

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  Right. And so what would happen if Hurson kind of got into trouble in the bank? Like, if somebody tried to attack him or something in the bank or call the police?

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Right. He was, he was told, you know, and this is where his sort of timing of going into these banks and out was very, was very quick, was that he was told, "Do not stay in a bank for longer than five minutes. If anyone, you know, says they're going to call police, leave immediately. If you see any armed security officers there, you know, immediately leave. And if you get arrested, stay silent. We'll have you out within 24 hours."

• 14:04Speaker 06

  So how long after this phone call did the spate of robberies take place?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Immediately.

• 14:10Speaker 06

  Well, like, the next day?

• 14:13Speaker 04

  The same day.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  The same day?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  The same day.

• 14:17Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Hurson had plenty of reasons to go along with it. The government guy, Theo, was credible. He seemed to know all about Hurson's past. He said he may be able to get Hurson a full-time government job. Plus, Hurson was going to be well-paid. $25,000 if he managed to get money out of the banks, $2,500 if not. At the first bank, Hurson handed them a note, which read, "I need your help. I need money. My family is being held hostage, and a bomb will go off at 4:30 if you don't help. Don't call the police or the FBI." The teller asked Hurson to wait for a few moments. Hurson immediately ran out of the

• 15:05Speaker 06

  bank. Within minutes, the area was filled with police cars and a police helicopter. Theo was on Carolina's cell phone throughout it all, telling Hurson which bank to go to next and to not worry. Hurson made four more attempts over the next two days, co-opting his cousin, his brother-in-law, and a friend. They were all as hopeless as Hurson, running out of the banks before anyone could give them any money. Plus, they'd forgotten to bring a bag, so even if they had waited for the money, they'd have had to run out with it in their arms. At the last bank, the cousin just stood there while the others ran away, so the police questioned him. He gave them Hurson's name and address, which is how the

• 15:48Speaker 06

  spree ended. So there was Hurson at the police station, facing 25 years in prison and crying.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  So when he finally tells police, "Look, this, this is the story," he says, "Take a look at my phone. Look at my, you know, look at my Facebook account. Look at my email. It's all there." He also told them, "Go to my car, and in there, you'll find an immunity letter that Theo gave me."

• 16:17Speaker 06

  Theo had emailed Hurson a letter on Defense Intelligence Agency letterhead describing the bank operation, titled "Operation Downstrike," an operation involving civilian volunteers who would be immune from civil and criminal action. It asked police that, upon receipt of the letter, to assist in the operation. The officer in charge, a veteran detective named John Vickery, was skeptical, but the letter was perplexing. And then, six hours after Hurson was arrested, Detective Vickery got a call from a number he didn't recognize. It was Theo. He demanded to know what the police had done with Hurson. He sounded authoritative

• 17:02Speaker 06

  and exasperated, and explained that he was with the CIA. Detective Vickery was truly confused. After all, this was Virginia, CIA country. Vickery did deal with CIA people from time to time, but it seemed such a strange covert operation. Theo demanded a face-to-face meeting with the detective's superiors. Theo also called Washington area criminal defense lawyers, saying he was with the CIA, and he needed to hire civilian counsel to defend Hurson. The meeting place with the cops was set. He would be at the courthouse during Hurson's arraignment hearing. Theo would be wearing an American flag pin on his black

• 17:47Speaker 06

  suit. The day came, but Theo never showed. Eventually, the encryption on Theo's phone number was broken, and police traced the phone to a man called Josh Brady, who lived in a ranch house 100 miles south of Washington, DC. The police drove down there, and in an instant, three things became clear. The first was that Theo and Josh were the same person. The second was that Josh was not working for the CIA. He was 26 and living with his mother and grandmother. And the third was that Josh was totally convinced

• 18:31Speaker 06

  that he was working for them. Here's Tom.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  I interviewed Josh in, you know, jail in Virginia. And when I met with him, he told me pretty quickly that he was, you know, working with the CIA, and that I would say he was firmly convinced at that time that he, that they took a computer from him, from his house, that contained-

• 19:00Speaker 06

  All the information to prove that this was legitimate.

• 19:04Speaker 06

  Josh was initially charged with impersonating a government official and three counts of attempted bank robbery. But doctors found that Josh suffered from a variety of mental illnesses and disorders, so prosecutors dropped those charges and Josh was released into his mother's care in order to get mental health treatment. They declined to prosecute Hurson and Carolina was never charged. In the end, no one was prosecuted for the attempted bank robberies. But here's something I find especially interesting about this story. During the court proceedings, a court-appointed forensic psychologist had offered a second opinion about Josh Brady.

• 19:46Speaker 06

  He had diagnosed Josh with something really rare. It's a disorder that most people have never heard of. I'd never heard of it. It's called delusional disorder. Hurson Torres didn't want to talk to me for this story. Maybe he felt embarrassed about being taken in by Josh, but he shouldn't feel embarrassed because the whole scheme, it was plausible. That's the amazing thing about delusional disorder. The delusions are plausible. I mean, we all know that there are indeed folks who seem perfectly normal but turn out to be undercover agents. It doesn't violate the boundaries of reality. This is Dr.

• 20:26Speaker 06

  Evan Nelson, the court psychologist who diagnosed Josh Brady with delusional disorder. Dr. Nelson couldn't talk to me about Josh Brady's case, but he explained to me that delusional disorder is like a cousin to better-known psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. The big difference is that people with schizophrenia have crazy delusions that nobody believes, like believing that the CIA is using telepathy to read your thoughts or believing that you're Jesus Christ. Whereas the delusions that come with delusional disorder, they could be true. It's the difference between believing people are following you, which is entirely possible, and believing they're following you because they've inserted some sort of

• 21:10Speaker 06

  an X-ray machine in your body and they can covertly track you through a satellite that's orbiting Mars. That sort of violation of logic wouldn't be part of a delusional disorder. Delusional disorder is defined as a rare disorder, but a lot of clinicians like Dr. Nelson believe that it has to be underdiagnosed. There have to be people out there who don't realise that they are living inside someone else's delusion. Like, for instance, my friend Emily, which isn't her real name, and this isn't her real voice either.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Well, my husband had it, so I lived with someone with delusional disorder.

• 21:53Speaker 06

  When you say your husband had it, does that mean he doesn't have it anymore?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Um, no, I mean, he probably still has it.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Emily asked to be disguised because she loves her husband and wants to protect his privacy. And so, in a show about secret identities, this weird robot voice is her one. Emily is the reason why I ever got to hear about Hurson and Theo. She sent me a link to Tom's article. In the message, she wrote, "Imagine being married to that lol." By "that," Emily meant a marriage filled with the chaos of a plausible delusion. I said I couldn't imagine it, so Emily agreed to talk about it. When Emily first met her husband and when they first got married, everything was fine. He told her he'd been in a long-term relationship before, but unfortunately, it didn't work

• 22:46Speaker 06

  out.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  He told me that his previous partner had been extremely unfaithful, unfaithful in the extreme. At the time, I just thought, "Oh, that's dreadful. You poor soul, I can't imagine what you've been through."

• 23:02Speaker 06

  Emily says that for the first five years of their marriage, everything was normal. But then her husband had a bad turn professionally and stressed him out. He worried about his job prospects and his finances, but mainly, he worried about losing Emily. He started accusing her of having crushes and flirting with friends and coworkers.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, it got to the point where I would be accused of sleeping with friends, coworkers, just random people that, like, if I caught someone's eye and smiled at them on the street, it would be, "How do you know that person? You had an affair with that guy, didn't you? That's why he was smiling at you."

• 23:43Speaker 06

  When, when would you have been having the affair? Because I presume that every night you were sleeping in the same bed as him.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he would literally accuse me of getting up in the middle of the night to sort of go have secret hallucinations.

• 24:00Speaker 06

  While, while he sleeps?

• 24:01Speaker 04

  While he was asleep, yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  So at this point, did you think, "Hang on, this is, this is beyond just kind of regular jealousy?"

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  There are five main subtypes identified with delusional disorder. There's the persecutory type, believing a person or group of people are out to get you. There's the erotomaniac type, believing a person, usually a famous person, is secretly in love with you and trying to be with you. There is somatic, thinking you've got a medical or health condition you don't have. Grandiosity, thinking you're special or have a high status, like, say, believing you work undercover for the CIA. And the last, as Emily discovered when she began desperately Googling for some kind of explanation, delusional disorder jealousy subtype.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  The diagnosis, made on the internet, was later confirmed by a psychiatrist. Emily's husband's delusions weren't real, but his anger was. Inside his delusion, she was cheating on him all the time. It was a living hell for them both.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  You know, when someone's screaming at you for like nine hours a day, you know, your first response is maybe to, you know, get angry and scream back, but like, it would just, I would just watch him and it would almost be like, the, the sound was turned down on a movie. It was just so sad to watch him be in such distress and, and be so sort of separated from reality. It was just the saddest thing to watch and kind of know that there's no way that you can help him.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  You know, I used to sort of invite people over for Sunday dinner and I do remember just him sort of announcing to the, to the, you know, the table of diners that, "My wife has a lot of affairs, she's a right slut." And like, you know, I didn't know whether to laugh it off or what.

• 26:21Speaker 06

  What did the people around the table do?

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I, I, I mean, this happens a lot, you know, people maybe just thought he was joking, you know, I mean, like, people just sort of like politely ignored it and moved on and people didn't know whether it was just a bad joke or...

• 26:37Speaker 06

  Maybe some people, maybe some people believed him.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  You know, I had one chap that was convinced that, you know, I was the nymphomaniac, that my husband had been boasting to everyone that I was. And so he, like, came into the bedroom once and, like, when I was staying at a friend's house and I just had to, like, roll over and pretend to be asleep.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  Well, if somebody came in and said, "I hear you enjoy having affairs with people, would you care?"

• 27:06Speaker 04

  I mean, he didn't, he didn't say anything, but he made a pass. So I just, like, pretended to be asleep because this is like, this is like a person that I knew and I didn't want to be embarrassed about seeing the next day.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Wow, he must have been so crushed because, you know, you're sleeping with everyone.

• 27:29Speaker 06

  And what, this is kind of a crazy question, but, you know, when a delusion is as powerful as these delusions were, was there ever a moment, even though you knew you weren't having any affairs with anyone, was there ever a moment when you thought, "My God, maybe I am having an affair?"

• 27:45Speaker 04

  I was honestly, I mean, because, you know, my husband was a very rational human being. I mean, he was highly scientific. So when someone's that rational and, and sort of that, that grounded in like, you know, that level of reality, there was a point where I thought, well, you know, maybe I'm sort of sleepwalking or, or maybe I've got like a multiple personality disorder or something. You know, maybe I am the one that's mad.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  It's really difficult to treat delusional disorder. Dr. Nelson, the forensic psychologist, says logic doesn't work, they can't be talked out of it. Antipsychotic medications can work wonders for people with schizophrenia because they're good at tackling hallucinations, but for some reason, they're not so great on delusions. Dr. Nelson says medication can sort of lessen the delusions a bit, but they can't make them disappear. There is a best option, but it's a really frustrating one. Gradually over time, you reach a sort of a détente, which is... They're not willing to admit that their idea is a delusion,

• 29:06Speaker 06

  but they're willing to admit that acting on it isn't in their best interests. So I still suspect that my wife is cheating on me. But I know she says that it's not true, and I want to trust her. And our marriage is good. And every time I bring this up, I make it worse. So maybe I'll just have to tolerate a little bit of infidelity in exchange for keeping this marriage. So convince them that open marriages are the way forward.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know that that's necessarily an open marriage. I don't think they're consenting. But you're definitely talking about compromises. Same thing with the persecutory type and the grandiose type. You may not get to the point where they agree that they weren't really acting as a special agent for the FBI or where they agree that there isn't really a plot against them. But you might get them to the point where they agree that from a practical level, you've never been paid for your work from the FBI. So why bother to keep working for them?

• 30:06Speaker 06

  The only way to move forward is for everyone to be submissive to the delusion. So someone like Emily never gets justice, never gets an apology for being taken all wrong. The delusion always wins. A few years ago, Emily and her husband split up. You know, people and places are triggers. So I actually became a trigger in my husband's life. So, you know, the only way for him to sort of be healthy is to remove the triggers. So that's him moving to another new town and leaving me. And, you know, I'm sure that he'll, you know, find another woman in a new town,

• 30:52Speaker 06

  tell her the same story about the wife that was extremely unfaithful, and the cycle will begin again.

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Incidentally, Josh Brady, the fake CIA agent who orchestrated the robberies, he's been arrested again. A little under two months after he was released and remanded to psychiatric counseling, he was picked up again, this time charged with impersonating a Department of Homeland Security agent.

• 31:29Ira Glass?

  John Rotten, his latest book is called The Castle. As we were around this story a few years back, Josh Brady was convicted of violating his supervised release and sentenced to two years at a minimum security prison, where a judge recommended he receive psychiatric treatment. In 2019, he used a fake alias again and was found guilty of bribing a woman to file a false case of sexual assault.

• 31:57Ira Glass?

  Coming up, a woman avenger takes to the streets with a gun and a mission of justice. Men fear her. Nobody knows her name. That's one of the stories after the break in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bankguide for details. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC. This episode is sponsored by Carvana, which offers the following message. Carvana Value Tracker lets you see what your car is worth, understand how the value changes, and sell your car when the time's right. Try it now on carvana.com.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Support for NPR and the following message come from Legacy Box, preserving family stories by converting home movies, film, and slides into digital files. Co-founder Adam Baselager shares an early customer experience that left a lasting impression.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  We had a lady walk into our office, and she had terminal cancer. And she walked in with her daughter. She had a massive box of videotapes, and she said, I need help. I want to share the stories before it's too late. And for young guys that had just started a business, we were like, we've got to pour our soul into this business.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Learn more at legacybox.com/NPR.

• 33:20Ira Glass?

  It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, secret identities. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, Tiger Tiger Burning Bright. So one of our producers, Elna Baker, has this cousin named Navy. And back when we first broadcast today's program, Navy had a secret identity. It actually wasn't so secret. She was the school mascot, a tiger at Gilbert High in Gilbert, Arizona. And Navy was one of those kids who was just completely transformed by that. Her second identity gave her power. Here's Elna to explain.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  I used to babysit Navy. And she's always been able to completely lose herself in characters. To a degree, honestly, you don't see in most kids. Like, when Navy was four or five, she was obsessed with dogs. So she'd tape a tube sock to her butt for a tail and crawl on all fours. She'd drink from a bowl. She'd do that thing where she'd drag her butt along the carpet to scratch it. She'd sniff people's crotches. She was method.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Like, we had, like, old collars, dog collars around the house. I'd put those on, and I'd tie a leash to, like, a little stroller. And I'd run around the house pretending I was like a sled dog.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I was fine with her being a dog until she started crapping in our yard. I didn't like it. I think that was very funny. It is funny, though.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  That's Navy's dad, Carl. And at first, I thought he was joking. But it turns out, one day, he's looking out the window.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  And I'm watching her, and she's acting like a dog, kind of walking around the backyard. And next thing you know, she takes her pants and goes crap in the backyard.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  And then I, like, kicked my feet back, like, to cover up the poop.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Now, I don't know how many times she did it before that. This whole time I was picking up, like, my dog's poop, I may have been picking up my kid's poop.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  And as she got older, Navy discovered a more socially acceptable way to do the same thing. When, in second grade, the elementary school mascot, a husky dog, stopped by her class for the first time. Navy's mind was blown, because here's this person who got to act like an animal all the time. She became obsessed with mascots. I know this because I babysat her for a whole week when she was 10. And while her siblings were outside in the yard playing, Navy was inside practicing mascot routines she'd found on YouTube. She'd be dressed up in this old tiger Halloween costume. A tiger, because that's the mascot for the local high school. All of this started to worry Navy's dad, Carl. He was really hoping it would be like a passing phase.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  I don't know if many parents, like, wake up one morning and go, oh, my gosh, I can't wait for my daughter to be a mascot.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  And did you make fun of mascots when you were in high school or middle school?

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Now, that's kind of an awkward question. Doesn't everybody? You know, I remember being in junior high, really just trying to fit in. And I just didn't know if this, being this, would be something that she would be accepted in. I mean, is this something that she gets branded as kind of the odd girl who likes to dress up like a tiger?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  For years, her parents kept trying to get her interested in other things, more quote unquote, "normal" things, like ballet, you know, Girl Scouts. But Navy had tiger tunnel vision. It all came to a head one Friday night at her brother's football game.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Our older son was playing football in high school, and Navy's still in junior high. And I came home from work, and I'm like, hey, Navy, we got to hurry up. We got to get to Justin's game.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  And I was like, I want to wear my mascot costume. Please let me wear it.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  And I thought in my head, I says, I don't know if I feel comfortable with me taking my daughter to a football game dressed up like a mascot at a high school. Because, A, you don't go to high school there, and it's just kind of bizarre me walking into a football game with a tiger.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  And I was like, I don't want to go to the game if I can't wear my suit.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  And I says, you know what? Then stay home. So we're at the football game, and she's texting my wife and just saying, hey, you know, you don't love me, you don't support me as the mascot. You love the football player, son, but you don't love the mascot daughter. And finally, she texts me, she goes, listen, I still want to kind of please come to the game. So we say, hey, your grandma and grandpa haven't got here yet. We'll call them. They'll pick you up.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  And I took that as, hey, I can wear the costume. So I get in the car, I'm wearing my costume. And my grandfather, he says, he goes, did they say that you could wear it? And I was like, yeah. And so I showed up, got out of the car, and everyone was like, oh, my gosh. He said, hey, it's a tiger. And then I go and I look up, and I was like, oh, it's my parents. And I could tell they were not happy.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  And she looks at us, we look at her, and those big, giant mascot eyes, and she beelined it onto the field. And I thought, oh, my gosh, we're going to, what's going to happen? The sophomore cheerleaders didn't realize that she wasn't supposed to be there. And she's unbelievable. The crowd loves her. She's doing the wave. She's doing the cheers. She's leading the cheerleaders. Football players are taking pictures with her. And no one has idea that it's a girl that's in eighth grade.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Yes, everyone loved me. The crowd was cheering for me. Oh, I forget.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  I can't even tell you. Like, I felt like this is my calling.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  And that's when I finally said, listen, you have a gift. You should go and do it 100%.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  This ended up being her big break. The high school athletic director was there and he came up to her after and said, look, if you want to do this again, just, you know, let us know. You're great. And then he told her that she should try out to be the mascot when she got to high school. So since freshman year, she's been the Gilbert High Tiger. And all family pride aside, she is the best mascot I have ever seen. When she puts her costume on, which looks like a buff tiger, Navy transforms.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  She goes from being this awkward husky Mormon tomboy. Right, she's Mormon, but she puts the costume on and then starts grinding like a male stripper. And it's hard not to think, like, are we allowed to do that? The kid has serious swagger.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  There's times where I sometimes forget it's my daughter. Like, I don't picture her dancing, because she doesn't like walk around the house dancing. Immediately when she puts that outfit on, she knows all these moves. She can pretty much do any of the new fad dance moves. Beyonce's Single Lady, she can do that. She could do Psy. She can do Michael Jackson. The two don't really match up. It's bizarre.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  She's been on the news. She's in the paper. In town, her parents are known as the Tigers' parents. Some people come to games just to see her. The football team sucks. Sorry, Navy. And she's gotten so much attention that recently, the Suns' gorilla, that's the mascot for the Phoenix Suns, tweeted at her, "You're inspiring. That's no hashtag monkey business." Here she is at a dance-off against her rival, the Chandler Wolf. They're staring each other down across the 50-yard line. There's the tiger. There's the tiger. We love the tiger. The Wolf does the lawnmower. Navy, as the Tiger, throws her head back and laughs, as if to say, "That all you got?" And then she busts out Gangnam Style.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  She dances around him in a circle, shuffling and shimmying on the turns. And then she stops, face to face, and flicks her paws at him like, "What are you gonna do about it?"

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Then slowly, she backs away.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And he shrugs, like, "I have nothing," and then bows to her, shakes her hand, and walks off the field. Okay, so that insanely confident person, cut to the next day at school, and she's just like this super awkward teenager, who doesn't want any attention drawn to her.

• 41:01Speaker 05

  Navy Baker is shy. Like, during classes, I just won't talk to kids around me. I just kind of like sit there and do my work, be quiet. Like, I'm nervous to go to Taco Bell and order me a freaking burrito.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  And is it weird to be two people?

• 41:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like Superman. I mean, Superman, glasses, and his suit and tie, and then all of a sudden, he rips the suit and tie off and he's Superman. Except if I put clothes on to become a tiger.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  This is how extreme it is. Navy's never been able to do a cartwheel. But then, one practice, with all the cheerleaders there, she thought, "The Tiger would do a cartwheel right now." And so she did one, just like that. She's done cartwheels in front of thousands since. But then Navy, the person, still can't do a cartwheel, which seemed, like, impossible to me. So I asked her to try one, out of costume.

• 41:59Speaker 05

  This is scary. I might hit something.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Navy pushed off and crumpled to the ground. It wasn't an act. It was horrible.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  You had a good start, but...

• 42:13Speaker 02

  What made you give up the minute your hands touched the floor?

• 42:16Speaker 05

  I don't know. I got scared and I sat down.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  So I told her to put her tiger costume on and try again. All right. You're all zipped up.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  And now for the head. I'm gonna like, ugh, hang on. It's hard to breathe in here.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  All right, talk to me. Do you feel different all of a sudden?

• 42:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely. My heart's racing right now. My legs feel like running a mile. Like, I just feel like, let's go crazy. Let's go, let's go slide somewhere. Let's go slide on my belly and onto the court.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  All right, here we go, Tiger. Let's see this cartwheel.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, you did it. All right.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Tiger is fist pumping the air. Tiger is bowing. All right, you want to take your hat off?

• 43:08Speaker 05

  I felt a lot better doing it in the costume than I did outside the costume.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  What is it about that costume that lets you be that way?

• 43:16Speaker 05

  Well, definitely the fact that no one can see your face. So then I was like, oh, who's that? Like, oh, they look stupid. So that's like another thing I'm scared of, like, oh, people are gonna judge me from what I look like. Like, I have broad shoulders, big old calves, and it's just, I'm a big kid. So, I mean, the Tiger's kind of like based off on like what I really want to be, like this fearless person and doesn't care.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  When you watch Navy onstage, it's clear that she's the one with the confidence. This is Navy's confidence. It's not the Tiger's. I keep trying to get her to see this, but the more I grill her, the more she insists. It's the Tiger. It's all the Tiger.

• 44:09Ira Glass?

  Dana Baker. Like I said, today's show is a rerun, and these days, she is no longer a producer at our show, but a writer, working on a new memoir, Navy. Why don't you become the mascot at Boise State for five years? She's also appeared in the reality TV show about school mascots, very short-lived TV show, called Behind the Mask. These days, she's an occupational therapist. Act Three, Blonde Avenger. So back when we were putting together today's radio show, we heard about this real-life adventure with a secret identity in Mexico, on the roads that run through Juarez, that incredibly violent city near the border, and the roads that run to the Makilas, the factories on the border. Writer Yuri Herrera lived on the border for years and spent a lot of time in Juarez.

• 44:55Ira Glass?

  It's the inspiration for the setting of his first novel. And he has this story about a wave of unusual crimes that happened back in 2013 when we first ran the story, a warning that much of the story is not right for little kids and mentions sexual violence.

• 45:09Speaker 06

  The first murder happened at 7:45 a.m. on August 28th on Bus Route 4A. That morning, a woman hailed bus 718, climbed the steps, pulled a gun, and shot the driver. The driver jumped out of the bus, trying to escape, but died on the sidewalk. The killer witnesses said was a middle-aged woman with dyed blonde hair, or maybe it was a wig, wearing a cap, plaid shirt and jeans. Nobody saw how she escaped, or at least nobody would say. The second murder happened 24 hours later, on the same route. A woman boarded the bus downtown and a few blocks later requested a stop.

• 45:55Speaker 06

  She walked towards the exit and motioned as if she were looking for the bus fare. But instead, she drew her gun, spat words into the driver's ear, and shot him twice in the head, then fled the scene.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  One day later, a news website from El Paso called La Polaca, which specializes in covering the political gossip of Juarez, received an email. "You think that because we are women, we are weak, and that may be true, but only up to a point. Because even though we have nobody to defend us, and we have to work long hours until late into the night to earn a living for our families, we can no longer be silent in the face of these acts that enrich us.

• 46:47Speaker 06

  We were victims of sexual violence from bus drivers working the Makila night shifts here in Juarez. And although a lot of people know about the things we've suffered, nobody defends us, nor does anything to protect us. That's why I am an instrument that will take revenge for many women. For we are seen as weak, but in reality, we are not. We are brave. And if we don't get respect, we will earn that respect with our own hands. We..." The women of Juarez are strong.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  The email was signed by someone calling herself Diana, Hunter of Bus Drivers.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first disappearances of young women in Juarez. Or at least, when people started recording these disappearances and considering them as being related. After a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped and then found dead with signs of rape and strangulation. After that, the number of women who were killed just kept growing. It went from dozens of reported murders in a year to hundreds. So many women, it was hard to count accurately. In 2010, the number peaked. At least 304 women were murdered that year. The circumstances of the crimes were eerily similar.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  One day, a girl would disappear on the way to work or on the way home. And if there was any news about her, it would be when her body was found in the desert or an abandoned lot, often with traces of rape and torture. Sometimes, they were found together, in mass graves. Oscar Maynes, who worked some of these cases as a criminologist, explained to me the way the authorities became complicit in the murders. First, they denied the problem, he said. Then they played it down, and finally they blamed the victims' lifestyle and their families. The criminologist resigned, he says,

• 49:03Speaker 06

  after realizing his superiors were more interested in covering up investigations and tampering with evidence than in finding justice.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  So when I heard about the case of this woman, this Diana, who supposedly was trying to do something by herself, I wondered, after all these years without justice, if women in Juarez would look at Diana and say, “It’s about time.” So I went down there to ask them.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  As you can imagine, most of the women I approached to get their opinions were reluctant to speak to a stranger about the woman who’d murdered bus drivers. “I know nothing about it,” said a woman with a small child on the bus, only to fix her eyes on the back of the seat afterwards and not glance in my direction again. “I have no opinion about that,” another one said, before quickly entering a mall. But also, one day, I got this answer. When I heard about what she did, I said, “How great that someone’s doing what many of us should have done.” This was Laura, 25 years old, pregnant with her second child. When I asked her, “If you were to run into Diana on the street,

• 50:21Speaker 06

  what would you say to her if you knew it was her?” She said without a doubt, “I would congratulate her.”

• 50:29Speaker 06

  There is a sense among the general population that buses are a bad place to be by yourself. Just this week, a bus driver was arrested for allegedly raping a girl on her way to school. About this, Laura said, “I remember when I was in high school, I would hear a lot about it. My friends would say to me, ‘If you are going on the route and no one’s there, take a pen with you with the point facing outward, because you never know.’ That’s been happening for years, years, and it’s the same for the ladies working in the maquilas.”

• 51:08Speaker 06

  There’s no evidence that the bus drivers who were killed by the blonde woman had actually committed a crime at all, but Laura didn’t seem concerned about that. In a city where justice rarely brings results, maybe, at some point, you settle to get the justice available to you.

• 51:26Speaker 06

  Just a couple of weeks before the Diana the Hunter case, Laura’s younger sister, Maria Alejandra, 20 years old, suffered a home invasion. A man came in through her bedroom window in the night, armed with a gun, and tried to rape her. She recognized him, he lived in the neighborhood. After the man left her house, Maria Alejandra told her sister what happened and that she was going to report it to the police. Laura told her not to do that. “What for?” They knew how the police work. Laura told me. I told her not to go, not to expose herself, because they would ask questions and check her.

• 52:07Speaker 06

  I think between the police, they’ve created a sort of code, so you basically are putting yourself out there to suffer one humiliation after another.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  My father was with us. He wanted to go kill him. And my husband too. And me too. I said, “I’ll kill him. I said, “I’ll go, and I’ll kill him. Since we know who it is, we’re gonna go and do it with our own hands.”

• 52:41Speaker 06

  But despite Laura’s pleading, Maria Alejandra, after talking to her friends, decided to go to the police anyway. And things went down exactly as Laura predicted. Even though the doctors had said that there was evidence of sexual assault, Maria Alejandra says the police questioned her as if she was making it all up. “Why didn’t she have bruises? What took her so long to report the intrusion?” “I would have to almost be dying for them to investigate,” Maria Alejandra says they told her.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  Laura was angry. Now the opportunity for revenge was gone. I said to her, “I told you, we should have done something before, because now, if we took action, they would know who did it. Because that’s how justice works here. The victims are the ones that are in jail.”

• 53:39Speaker 06

  In 2001, police did apprehend a bus driver, Victor Garcia Uribe. He was arrested with a colleague and accused of murdering eight women who were left in an old cotton field. He denied any involvement in the killings, but the police kept questioning him. Finally, after long hours of interrogation, he confessed to taking part in those murders and in the murders of three other women. “Yes,” he said, “he enjoyed killing them.” “Yes,” he said, “they did it under the influence of marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol.” “Yes, they loved to rape them and kill them, and then they would throw them afterwards in an empty field.”

• 54:22Speaker 06

  But two days later, in court, Garcia Uribe did a complete one-eighty. Again, he denied that he was involved in the murders. He said he only confessed because officers had kidnapped him, taken him to a police academy, and tortured him until he did. He said they’d beaten him and burned him with cigarettes. Still, the judge convicted him and sentenced him to 50 years. Garcia Uribe was freed in 2005, after it was proven that the authorities had tortured him into confessing.

• 55:02Speaker 06

  “What makes me laugh,” Laura told me, “is how the bus drivers are so scared. That’s what really makes me laugh.” I didn’t see this myself, but Maria Alejandra says she’s seen bus drivers who posted a sketch of Diana near their dashboards. And when a woman who looks like her tries to board the bus, they don’t let her. She says, “They close the doors quickly now, and she’s heard that some are carrying knives on them.”

• 55:29Speaker 06

  “You know what it is,” Laura said, “in this country, people don’t have balls.” “That’s what my dad has always said,” Laura told me. “We don’t have balls,” he says, “because if we had a little bit more balls, many things wouldn’t be happening. We don’t express what we think, we don’t express how we feel, and we don’t act in accordance with what we think. And that’s our problem. That’s what we are lacking.”

• 55:57Speaker 06

  So I asked her, “But wait, weren’t you on the verge of taking things into your own hands with your sister?”

• 56:05Speaker 06

  “Yeah, but I’m not the kind of person who would do it.” “Sure, in the moment I reacted, and I thought about it, but I would never do it. I would never try to kill anyone. It’s not how I was brought up. I’m not like that.”

• 56:28Speaker 06

  While I was in Juarez, I spent more time riding the buses on Route 4 than doing anything else. These buses, the Juarez Public Transportation Buses, are old school buses imported from the US. They are noisy, old buses, reasonably clean but in a state of decay that everyone accepts. I rode in the back of the bus and in the front of the bus. I rode it at the time of the killings, in the morning, and late at night, when the last bus was about to finish the route. Sitting there, I wonder if the guy driving my bus was scared at all, nervous. I wonder if in moments on his route, he was thinking about Diana the Hunter

• 57:11Speaker 06

  and the words she said to the second bus driver on the morning of August 29. “Ustedes se creen muy chingones.” “You all think you are so tough,” right before shooting the driver twice in the head and running away.

• 57:28Speaker 06

  She hasn’t been spotted since, and there’s no proof that the email signed by Diana actually came from the woman who did the shootings. Whoever chose Diana’s name chose well. Diana the Hunter is the goddess of women and childbirth, who, like many other Roman gods, acts out of basic human feelings, like rage and revenge.

• 57:53Speaker 06

  There is, on one of Mexico City’s most famous streets, a statue of Diana the Hunter. And there’s a replica of it outside a restaurant in Juarez. She’s muscular, strong, holding a bow with her arms stretched back, about to shoot.

• 58:11Speaker 06

  Maybe that image was in this one driver’s mind on a bus I was riding, when he opened the door, and a woman came in, and he said, “What? Are you Diana the Hunter?” “No, of course not,” she replied. “What, are you afraid of me now?”

• 58:30Speaker 06

  “Well, yeah,” he replied. “Shouldn’t I be?”

• 58:41Ira Glass?

  Yuri Herrera. His latest book is Season of the Swamp. We commissioned a piece of artwork of Diana the Hunter on the bus to go with his story from this artist named Alice Leora Briggs. She's been doing these incredible drawings of scenes from Juarez. You can see this piece of artwork at our website. We also have a link to her other drawings at thisamericanlife.org.

• 59:21Ira Glass?

  Well, today's program was produced by Brian Reed with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show, Julie Snyder. Production help on today's rerun from Adrianne Lilly, Stone Nelson, and Ruby Schwartz. Research help today from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Research and Spanish translation by Annie Corial. Music from Damien Graef, from Rob Geddis and Anthony Roman. Original instrumental music in today's program by Roger Neal. Special thanks today to Daniel Alakon and Radio Ambulante, to Diane Washington Valdez, Ana Arana, Judith Turea, Chris Epperson, the Route 4 drivers in Juarez who spoke to Yuri, Lu Teddy at String and Can, Jessica Eden, and Eric Black in KHSU.

• 1:00:04Ira Glass?

  Also, thanks to the Phil at Trinity College Dublin, F the Hist. Thanks also to all of our This American Life partners. They support our show, they keep us going. And to thank them, we give them bonus episodes and a newsletter and other stuff, like, for example, the recent show that I did onstage in Los Angeles that we streamed live for our life partners. In that show, I told stories, then comedians improvised based on the stories. It was a really fun night, and you can see this video for free yourself. You can see this by signing up for a free trial subscription at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners and use the offer code VIDEO. And our hope is that you'll sign up and you'll look around at all the stuff you get and

• 1:00:47Ira Glass?

  enjoy the video and decide you want to stay. If you don't, no hard feelings. We're still friends, but we hope you give it a try. Again, thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. Offer code is VIDEO. That link is also in the show notes with code applied. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, the staff had to stop inviting him to their kids' birthday parties. He'd get so excited around the slip and slide. My heart's racing right now. My legs feel like running a mile. Like, I just feel like, let's go crazy. Let's go, let's go slide somewhere. Let's go slide on my belly. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

• 1:01:50Ira Glass?

  Next week on the podcast of This American Life. May terms are here. People are calling their friends, trying to convince them who to vote for, like this call about Abdullah Sayed in Michigan.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  What is it about him you don't trust? His nationality. I want to vote for an American. He is an American. He's Arabic-American. No, not in my book. We're African-American. That's different.

• 1:02:14Ira Glass?

  Persuasion. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Rosetta Stone, offering an alternative approach to language learning. Moving past rote memorization, the app guides users to intuitively think in a second language using images and contextual audio, mimicking how people acquire speech as children. The platform also includes advanced speech recognition technology that compares a learner's pronunciation directly with native speakers to refine accent precision. Learn more about their new Rosetta Stone Sapphire app at rosettastone.com.