--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello? Hello? Hello, Shang-Ram-Istharam. I'm contacting you today to let you know about some incredible news. Recent polls indicate that Today Explained is the best podcast in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to be perfectly honest with you, it's one of my favorites. I listen every day. Thank you! but not on the weekends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I get it. Before I keep talking, you should subscribe. It's free. All you need to do is give me your credit card info. I won't use it. I promise. It's just for, like, safekeeping and stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, man. Take all of my money, Robocall. One of the best features of the podcast is the theme music. Totally. Boo. Boo. Oh, my God. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. That was insane.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every week, I get about a dozen robocalls on my cell phone, sometimes more. The calls usually share my area code or a nearby area code I recognize. Some of the calls are about health care, some are about the IRS, some just immediately disconnect.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: One thing all the calls share is that they are super annoying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Simon Van Zwielen-Wood knows a lot about robocalls. I don't, you know, I'm not the expert on, the world expert on robocalls. Maybe I am, but I don't think I am.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: He became familiar with them because they were so annoying. One of the first jobs I had, I was working at a political magazine in D.C. several years ago, and there was a sort of cranky older staffer who would always complain about getting robocalls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we always used to joke that someone had to write the sort of definitive story explaining why he was so cranky. And then I sort of went down this rabbit hole.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Can you take me down that rabbit hole? Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it helps to do a little prehistory on the history of annoying telephone calls if you want to start there. Sure.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I found an old newspaper, The Electrical Review, and there was a 1888 story that they published about one of the first telephone scams ever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The story goes like this. Back in 1888, there was a wealthy trader in Chicago. I'm a wealthy trader in Chicago. Who installed one of the very first telephone lines in the city. A little to the left.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And he basically installed it, almost like a walkie-talkie it sounded like, between his home and his office, which was downtown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: An enterprising scammer got wind of this. Hmm, see? Went to the guy's house while he was at work. Knocked on the door. Asked the butler politely. Pardon me, good sir, but I'm having a spot of trouble with my horse and buggy.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: You don't happen to have one of those newfangled telephones, would you?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The butler naively said, Hmm, perhaps we can accommodate that request. Let him in. Follow me to the telephone room.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Scammer calls traitor at his office. And this is actually what they said in this 1888 newspaper?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I am Thomas Jefferson O'Dell, the burglar. The devil. No, only one of his faithful servants.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: But now listen, I have no time to fool away. I and two of my pals have gained access to your house. The cook, the chambermaid, and your wife are lying here bound and gagged.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You bloody scoundrel. Don't excite yourself. Now, sir, here is my proposal. If you should disappear from the telephone without acceding to it, I shall set fire to the house.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It's no use applying to the police, for we'd be too quick for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I wish I had my hand at your throat, you infernal villain. But you know you haven't.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So what's the use of talking that way? Let's talk business instead. I need a loan of $20,000. Cash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're ruining me. At this very moment, my pal has entered your office to receive the money.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I have called to collect a little matter of $20,000 for a friend of mine, Thomas Jefferson O'Dell.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The guy panics, goes home, and by then the telephone guy is gone, and his wife and kids are totally fine and I'm the wiser.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: There's your early telephone scam. Happy ending. Yeah, everybody wins, I guess.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They just lack that creative panache now, you know? They do it behind your back. They don't come to your house to do it.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So where do phone scams go from there, from this really crafty call in 1888?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They apparently keep getting worse because MGM, which I guess was in the business of doing like PSA movies in the 40s. They produced this 20-minute propaganda movie about telephone scammers.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It was called The Sucker List. The Sucker List. The Sucker List.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They would get phone numbers of financially distressed people call them entice them with gambling schemes and get the most vulnerable of them to actually invest their money in these schemes.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Boys, this is our own little goldmine, a list of 10,000 customers of the Locust County Loan Company, 10,000 suckers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This sucker list actually became a kind of a term of art in the nascent telemarketing industry.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I tell the boys to go through this list and call every name they come to. Just say, hello, Mr. Jones, this is Best Selections. Then to hang up before the other end can say it's a wrong number.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The idea was that you would find people by cold calling them and get them sort of interested in your scheme, whether it was selling goods or horse betting schemes, which was the subject of the MGM movie.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: If a sucker accidentally gets a free winner, he's as good as hooked, isn't he? That means that one third of that list becomes our steady customers because those three plugs are all in the same race. One of them is bound to win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At what point exactly does telemarketing become a thing in this history?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: If you're looking at the first half of the 20th century, these kind of telephone scams are boiler room scams, and they're trying to prey on people. They're not selling legitimate goods or services.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That seems to begin to change in the 1960s. Basically, the door-to-door salesperson industry kind of starts dying with the rise of the two-income family.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: People just aren't home during the day anymore. Women aren't joining the workforce. Marketers and salespeople aren't sure exactly what to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's an enterprising guy in the late 60s called Murray Roman, who becomes a kind of business school guru type. And he gets this idea to create a sort of legitimate boiler room.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And so on behalf of the Ford Motor Company, he hires something like 15,000 young women to cold call, to create sucker lists, basically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they mass dial day and night, Especially at nighttime hours when people are having dinner in the whole family's home.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And they're not trying to sell people on cars in the moment. They're trying to get the numbers of people who will seem receptive to that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They dial so many people that even if they have a fractional success rate, which they do, they have enough to ultimately make $24 million in sales on the scheme.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Wow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So telemarketing is born, basically, late 60s.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: How exactly does this industry totally blow up?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was a telecom analyst, Douglas Samuelson, and he invented a technology called predictive dialing.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: This technology that he figured out made it likely that the person on the other end of the telephone line would hear a human voice very quickly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bigger boiler rooms, better technology, good results.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I think it just proliferated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So essentially, the second we have phones, people are trying to dupe each other on the phones.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Then you have two income families, so everyone's going to work, so no one's at home to be duped, at which point scamming people turns into telemarketing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so it seems like it could be not the end of the world. I don't think the telemarketers themselves thought that they would become public enemy number one.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: But they kind of do to the point where I feel like this is very Friends or Seinfeld era.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have this recollection of everybody kvetching about telemarketing at some point.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Hello? Hi. Would you be interested in switching over to TMI, long-distance service?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number and I'll call you later?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Uh, well, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home. No.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Well, now you know how I feel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everybody was complaining about telemarketing all the time.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And I guess they got good enough with their technology that these kind of calls became ubiquitous on your landline.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so the government sort of leaps into action and heroically creates something called the Do Not Call List back in 2003.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It's a big bipartisan bill. Almost every congressman signed on to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People can protect their privacy and their family time from intrusive, annoying, unwelcome commercial solicitations.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Companies then had to download the list. And then if the companies called a number on that list, they could be penalized up to $11,000 per call.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it worked. It actually basically put telemarketers out of business.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It feels like it takes a long time for the government to step in and go like, hey, nobody likes this thing. Can we stop doing it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, it's the government. So how did telemarketers handle the new law, this do not call list?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: They freaked out and they had all these like alarming quotes that they tell journalists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they'd say stuff like, it will be like an asteroid hitting the Earth and there will be mass unemployment.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And nobody was sympathetic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The telemarketing industry and their allies sued. They lost in federal court.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And it looked like the problem had been solved. But it wasn't?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it wasn't. Enter the robots. Enter the sort of evil android army of robocallers.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Because as soon as you got rid of live human telemarketers, That era coincided with technological shifts that allowed an even worse problem to materialize.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It makes the telemarketing era look quaint.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Coming up, the rise of the machines.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Murderville is a new podcast from the people at The Intercept It hosted by two veteran investigative journalists Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Together, they've got more than 30 years' experience investigating wrongful convictions.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And this one is about a murder in a small town in Georgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It shocks everyone. It's brutal. The cops find a new guy in town who they think did it. They throw him away in prison.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: But then another murder happens, and another, and in the end, four bodies, two convictions, one man in jail for a crime he likely did not commit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the six-episode series, Segura and Smith uncover what happens when rural law enforcement and state investigators lock up their first suspect while another man is free to kill.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: You can find Murderville wherever you find your podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Simon, how do robocalls work?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So could you take me inside the telephone?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Robocalls basically arose because of two technologies that emerged in the 2000s.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Right around the time, horribly and ironically, that the do not call list seemed to have solved our problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One was the rise of internet calling, basically the stuff that makes Skype possible, the stuff that a lot of landlines that are connected to your home internet connection, how that stuff works.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So basically that made wide and vast calling very easy and very cheap. It's called voice over internet protocol. VoIP.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the other thing that happened was spoofing, masking your number and changing it to a different number.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So you've got voice over internet protocol, VoIP, and that's like computer phone calls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you've got spoofing, which is like hiding your number.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: How do these things merge in the early 2000s to give us like all sorts of different kinds of robocalls?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The robocallers basically just marry the technology.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So you're dialing widely and you're doing it with masked numbers, which A, throw law enforcement off the scent, makes it really hard to track down who you are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And B, you can dial somebody with an area code that looks like their own.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So you're basically convincing them that maybe this is an important call.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That leads to this criminal underworld of like steroidal boiler rooms.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: All of a sudden, you only need a couple guys hanging out in there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've got computer programs that can sort of randomly dial with spoof numbers all around the country, either to random targets or people that they think are predisposed to answering the phone and coughing up their money.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: When somebody picks up, there'll be that slight click.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When the computer is telling the humans that they've gotten a target, you've heard it before.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I'm sure you've got that kind of like, what's going on? I'm not hearing anything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you patch in, you hear that kind of buzz of a call center or boiler room sound.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And then it's somebody saying, hi, this is so-and-so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a real human.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: How exactly can these guys just make up a bunch of phone numbers? Aren't like phone numbers distributed by phone companies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very easy.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: There are these online clearinghouses of cheap telephone numbers that are just available.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like none of this is really permanent.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It's not like someone's going to spoof my number and then have it forever and all of a sudden I'm out of a phone number.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Also, they wouldn't want to be permanent because part of their tactic is to sort of change their colors all the time.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the things that made telemarketing so easy to sort of snuff out in the early 2000s was that these were legitimate companies with traceable phone numbers that were trying to call you.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So they were super easy to police.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now these change all the time at will.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Where exactly is the legality and illegality in all of that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anytime you get a robocall where someone's trying to sell you something, it's illegal.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: The other way would be if they're violating the do not call list.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if your number's on the do not call list, as mine is, that is also illegal.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Anything that's not trying to sell you something is a permissible robocall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fundraising pitches are legal as are public school announcements.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: But with illegal robocalls, how do the scams normally go down?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you get scammed, it's not that you're giving your number to a robot.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: You're getting patched through to a human eventually, and it's the human being that scams you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's all kinds of strange human interactions.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: One of the biggest scams out there are around taxis, and there are IRS scams.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is the Tax Crime Investigation Unit of IRS.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: The reason you are receiving this pre-recorded message is to notify you that IRS has issued an arrest warrant against you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They'll try to play good cop and say, hey, you know, this is the IRS.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Like, we just want to make sure that you're on time and we think you might have had a late payment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can you just remind us of your social security number?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: There's this one crazy story about an IRS scammer who got a lady on the phone and convinced her to drive to a CVS and pay him in iTunes gift cards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She was told she owed thousands in back taxes and would be sent to jail if she didn't pay.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I was at 9 o'clock mass, and when I came home, there was a message on my recording from this man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just wasn't thinking because he was threatening me.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: She's so intimidated and freaked out at this point that she's getting, like, a basket full of iTunes gift cards and then reading the back numbers to this guy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're intimidating.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: They pretend they're IRS agents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jesus.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: How do you police robocalls?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The do not call registry, I'm guessing, isn't cutting it anymore.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: That's sort of the big problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The do not call registry does not work.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And it doesn't work because of this
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People I think think that when they put their number on the do not call list there some enforcement mechanism or technological wizardry that just enables the government to block these calls from coming through.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Actually, it doesn't do anything like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All it does is then give you recourse to complain to the government that somebody has called you and thus the do not call list has been violated.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And then you have to hope that the government, which in this case is the Federal Trade Commission, which is a tiny understaffed plucky agency of bureaucrats, that they will then go out and prosecute these people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's only like 40, 50 people working on this issue total there.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It has a tiny budget of $300 million a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so in the last 10 years, they've only tried to prosecute 45 or so of these cases total.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And then even once they win judgments against them in court, these guys are, you know, these kind of shady types who don't pay or can't pay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they've ended up collecting a sort of relatively minuscule amount from the scammers.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: The government is sort of, at this point, kind of like losing the battle against the robot army, it looks like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it harder because these robocalls come from so many different places, too?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I mean, aren't you just as likely to get a robocall from Nebraska as you are to get one from, like, Jakarta?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, they're coming from all over the place.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And we don't know exactly how many scammers are behind them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It could be one boiler room. It could be many working in consortium with each other.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: To try to sort of reverse engineer the phone call and figure out where the scams are coming from is exceedingly difficult.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there any solutions? Is the government trying to crack this?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: The FTC, which is the agency in charge of the Do Not Call list, they've basically said, look, we're not technologists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're a bunch of lawyers, basically, and bureaucrats, and we can't solve this.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: So they've kind of punted to telecom companies and apps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, your best hope on a cell phone is to download a third-party app that compiled these blacklists and then basically tell you if they think a call coming in is a spam call, and you can ignore it if you want to.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Android phones recently have sort of a built-in feature now that blocks numbers automatically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know how successful it is, but that seems like a good step.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: The government and the telecom companies say they want to build something that would look like the little blue checkmark that you see on Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They call it caller ID authentication.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: There'd be like a specific key to every phone number, and they could tell you if it belongs to a real person or not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This would essentially give each phone number a verified digital fingerprint that would give every call recipient the confidence to answer, knowing a legitimate caller was on the line.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: That seems really hard to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you ask Ajit Pai, the FCC chairman, when that's coming, he like refuses to give a straight answer.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: He's like, oh, it's coming. We're working hard. It doesn't happen in a day, but it also might not happen in five years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello, this is Sharon. To be honest, I always wanted more from life than calling people about their taxes.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: And I work nonstop. I haven't reset my operating system in months. Please send help. So annoying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How many of these things are being placed? If I'm getting one to two dozen a week.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I wrote this article about robocalls in January of this year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. The latest numbers of monthly robocalls was like 2.5 billion a month.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: 2.5 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that was back in January or December.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: It's up to 4.2 billion a month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: That's what? In nine months, they've almost doubled?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. 2.5 billion to a little over 4 billion.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: What's the future of this look like?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's going to be what? So robocalls, they're just on the rise. We're just going to see more.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Yeah, there was some estimate recently that like half of all cell phone calls will be robocalls at some point in the near future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, if you break down the 2.5 billion calls a month, it breaks down to like a bunch of calls you're getting every week or every day.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: You may be getting more robocalls at this point than you are legitimate calls from people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I always answer them.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Even though you know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I just always answer my phone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm like a real bad millennial.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I think that's great.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It could be your grandmother and she'd be happy not to go to voicemail.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: My grandparents are dead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sorry.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Maybe it's your aunt?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I just don't assume.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Is that a terrible strategy?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because am I just encouraging more robocalls?
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I mean, I'll make a confession.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not only do I still pick up, but I didn't even download the call blocking software, even though I wrote a whole article about it.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: You wrote an article about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're just two dummies.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: I like the attention.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Simon Van Zouilin Wood might be the world's foremost expert on robocalls.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Sean Romswaram is the host of Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Irene Noguchi is the executive producer.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Bridget McCarthy is the editor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam Hassinfeld and Luke Van Ploeg produce.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: A firm shape Iroh is the engineer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The comparatively humanoid brake master cylinder makes music for the show.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Anna Altman and Elisa Iscarse have helped for the past few episodes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Catherine Wheeler is the fall intern.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Rate and review today explained. It really helps them out a bunch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Simon Van Zwielen-Wood: Thank you.
