--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Vox's Adam Clark Estes explains why that might be a good thing.
--:-- [Music transitions to a gentle background]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Adam Clark Estes, Vox's senior tech correspondent, got some bad news from his telephone. He got an alert from his bank, which is Chase, and the message said, your social security number has allegedly been compromised.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I got an alert from my bank, which is Chase, and the message said, your social security number has allegedly been compromised. Allegedly was a word that I really held on to, as hoped that maybe it wasn't true. But then I found out there was a lawsuit about a huge data breach. It comes from what may be the worst data breach ever. One reportedly that's resulted in the theft of the social security numbers of every American.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A couple weeks ago, it was confirmed. Me and a few hundred million other Americans got their social security numbers stolen. But Adam didn't just panic. He took action. He protected his information. And on Today Explained, he's going to teach you how to do the same.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And on Today Explained, he's going to teach you how to do the same. And he's going to argue, believe it or not, that this massive data breach is actually a good thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. I've never met an AI agent.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and, of course, the perfect cold weather staples.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Today Explained, Sean Ramos from I've gotten spammy messages warning me that my information has been stolen. You've gotten them too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've gotten them too. Adam Clark Estes recently got one that was real. It's true. We're always getting notified that our data is out there, that we're using a compromised password.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And there are so many of these alerts, we kind of stop paying attention to it. Data breaches happen all the time. I've been covering this space for over a decade, and I write about a big data breach maybe once a year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So my first thought was like, okay, this is another one of those. Every once in a while, they are a big deal. You might remember Equifax, the major credit bureau, was compromised a few years ago. and that led to everybody's information getting out there.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Financial and cyber experts warn the Equifax hack has the potential to haunt Americans for decades. But most of the time, it's kind of small time stuff. Your email might get leaked, some personal information, maybe your address, and that might lead to spammers spamming you more because they have your info.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your passwords might get out. And that might mean that, you know, somebody in the Philippines has your Netflix login and is watching movies.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: One reportedly that's resulted in the theft of the social security numbers of every American. But this wasn't an email or a notification about your Netflix password. This was about your social security number.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did your social security number and that of hundreds of millions of other people get compromised? The short answer is we don't know and we might never know.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But for the long answer, I want to zoom out a second and talk about the data brokerage industry. There's a whole industry that buys and sells your data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes it's data that you voluntarily given up. Sometimes it's data that's been stolen. You can kind of think of it as like a market where instead of produce, they're trading your information and sometimes social security number.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But in any case, there's lots of data about us floating around all the time. And pretty much anyone can get that data if they have money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes it's being sold out in the open in legit spaces. Sometimes it's in the dark web. And sometimes it's for nefarious purposes, like spamming you or scamming you.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And sometimes it's legitimate purposes, like if you have a business and you want to sell people background checks, you would need data for that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what happened in this case? Do we know? We don't know exactly what happened, but I can tell you what we do know.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And this is based on what some security researchers have figured out and some details from that lawsuit. So the breach happened due to a company called National Public Data getting hacked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what we know about National Public Data, it's a small company that sells background checks. And it's run by a former sheriff's deputy actor and reality TV star named Salvatore Verini.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Hey, what's up, Sal? What's going on, Big Mike? Nothing much, man. What are you up to? Nothing. How are you doing? Hey, man, I got to tell you something. I got a video. I got 100% proof the Earth is flat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You got to take a look at this. Sal. Sal. Mike is what they call a flat Earther. And, well, they think that the Earth is actually flat.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It doesn't seem like it's a very sophisticated operation. They happened to get a lot of data, and they weren't protecting it very well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We know now that the password to break into their database was actually hidden in plain text in another website that was also owned by Sal.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So somebody broke in, stole all the data. We first found out about this hack earlier this year when, on hacker forums, a known cyber criminal called USDOD started talking about a huge database of social security numbers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: USDOD is a hilarious name for a hacker. USDOD claimed they stole 2.9 billion records of personal data and were trying to sell them for $3.5 million.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But this hacker, they couldn't sell it. And eventually somebody got a hold of it and just posted it in a forum. And it's been floating around.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But earlier this month, that lawsuit I mentioned was filed. And then National Public Data, I think it was probably Sal himself, admitted they'd been hacked.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: In a statement on their website, NPD acknowledges the breach and says, we cooperated with law enforcement and governmental investigators and have implemented additional security measures.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This just sounds like, I don't know, like a Sopranos subplot. Some guy named Sal, I'm assuming he's in New Jersey somewhere, somehow compromises 270 million American social security numbers.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You supposed to push Robistix Robistix is our pick of the week This is like supposed to be your most prized personal information. How is this happening?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, it's out in Florida. First of all, you're right to be kind of upset or surprised by this. but first of all social security numbers are not a super secure thing it's literally nine digits it's a number that you know and you're not supposed to tell other people about unless the right person asks you and then you have to trust that they're not going to tell anybody else about it you know if you put it in a website they put the little asterisk over it when you put in the number that's how you know it's secure
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I got a question for you real quick real quick adam um what's your social security number uh i almost did it i almost told you this is the number that we use to prove our identity and it's not a great system but it's the system we've got and sometimes you type it into a legitimate bank website and they protect that data and sometimes you type it into something that looks like your bank's website but in fact you clicked on a link in a text message or email and you got phished and now your social security number is in the hands of hackers and probably being bought and sold on the dark web.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how big a deal is it if your social security number is being bought and sold by hackers on the dark web? How big of a deal is this hack?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: If your social security number is in the hands of a hacker, it can be a big deal. They can use that to steal your identity, and that can be a real pain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In terms of how big of a deal it is, it's huge. I mean, in terms of scale, we're talking about not just hundreds of millions of people, but nearly 3 billion records were in this database that was stolen.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: That doesn't mean 3 billion people were impacted. That would be almost half the world's population. But we do know that 272 million Americans' social security numbers are in there, at least.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I asked this question to a lot of data security experts, and what they told me was really interesting. They said it's bad and it's big, but a lot of this info was already out there.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: They said a lot of these social security numbers actually belong to people that are deceased. One security researcher I talked to actually found himself in the breach and basically said that all of the information about him was either incorrect or outdated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nevertheless it's a lot of information it's out there and it's not going anywhere the implication here is that this isn't the first time it won't be the last time why does this keep happening adam data breaches keep happening for a lot of converging reasons first of all hackers are good at hacking they keep getting better as as much as we try to protect our information in different ways they they figure it out and they they hack it's what they do.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: There's also a ton of data about us floating around online, and there aren't really rules for companies who are trading this data. There aren't rules for them to protect it. There aren't privacy rules for consumers, and the data industry is largely unregulated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why is that? I mean, as recently as a few minutes ago, I asked you for your social security number, And of course, it's a crazy thing to ask someone. And yet online, it's just like this free for all.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Why aren't we doing a better job of protecting this information? The Internet has historically been lightly regulated or completely unregulated in some spaces.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thinking here is that we have this powerful new communications technology. So if we regulate it, we might limit its potential, namely its business potential.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Written before Facebook or Google were invented, Section 230 says in just 26 words that internet platforms are not liable for what their users post.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in the past couple of decades, there's been an increasingly loud chorus of people that say we need better data privacy laws.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You might remember around 2010, Mark Zuckerberg started talking about how it was the end of privacy online, how it was no longer a social norm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information in different kinds, but more openly with more people.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And that social norm is just something that's evolved over time. He got roasted for that at the time, but in some ways he was right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've been losing privacy online as we've been using the Internet more and more because there's been nothing to keep companies from gathering data about us and using that in various ways or selling it.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: There have been a lot of attempts at a comprehensive consumer privacy legislation. We've identified some basic principles to both protect personal privacy and ensure that industry can keep innovating.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some states like California have their own laws. Europe has historically been better at protecting its citizens' privacy.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But in the U.S., these bills come up and they never seem to make it to law. So right now we don't actually have a national right to data privacy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so in the meantime, your information may be out there and it may stay out there or it may one day soon get out there. It all sounds kind of rough for our information.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But you wrote an article for our homepage, Vox.com, called The Massive Social Security Number Breach. is actually a good thing, which is a very provocative headline.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is this a good thing? And for whom? Well, the fact that I got an alert from my bank and ignored it, but then went back and said, oh no, I've got to do something about this is good.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: If only because I'm not the only person who had that reaction. I've been hearing from my friends. I think that I've been hacked. What do I do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there is something to do. And I think a lot of people are going to do it. OK, what you have to do with Adam when we're back on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Adio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up. And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform they say all enriched with that actionable data
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And they say you can build AI automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's strawberry.me slash unstuck.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork. If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there. I would love to know. Please email me, noelle at king.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Upwork, you can find specialized freelancers in IT, web development, AI, design, admin support, marketing, and more.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Experts who they say are ready to help you take your business to the next level.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plus, Upwork makes posting your job easy with no cost to join.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You can register, browse freelancer profiles, get help drafting a job post, or even book a consultation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is Upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talents ready to help your business grow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back with Adam Clark, Estes from Vox.com. And Adam, you wrote this thing that said that this whole social security number breach was actually a good thing.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: You had friends texting you, calling you, asking what to do. And you actually had an answer for them. What is it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Freeze your credit files.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: What killed the dinosaurs? Guys, AIDS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can go to their websites and you can freeze your credit files.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And that is going to stop other people from opening accounts in your name.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that even mean? I mean, I've heard that before. I've certainly never done it. But what exactly does that entail, freezing your credit files?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Does that mean if I want to, like, I don't know, apply for a car loan, I can't do it anymore?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So basically what those three major credit bureaus do is they track everything about your financial life, who you have accounts with, how much you owe to whomever.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: They're the ones that issue credit reports. And if you want to get a car loan, the bank or whoever you're getting that loan from will want to see your credit report to prove that you are who you are and you're a good person to give a loan to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when you freeze your credit files with those bureaus, they basically won't let anybody else get access to that report.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: So that means you can't get a new car loan. It also means the hacker can't come and steal your identity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It does not mean that it will be that way forever. You can unfreeze those files.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But if you don't need a car loan, you can go ahead and freeze the file and protect yourself. But what if you do need a car loan? You can unfreeze your credit file.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So depending on the credit bureau that you're freezing and unfreezing with, and you should do all three, it can take 24 hours or up to 72 hours to unfreeze the file, but it's very easy, like the flip of a switch to unfreeze it once it's frozen.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Okay, fair enough. Is this something that you did when you found out that your social security number had been compromised earlier this month?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I did. I froze my credit files with all three of the major bureaus, and I was worried that that was going to be hard and time consuming.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It really wasn't. It used to be, and you might think that it is hard. I froze my credit files a few years ago and then got really tripped up trying to unfreeze them because they gave me like a pin that I had to write down and quickly lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I eventually got them unfrozen. But these days you just basically set up an account with a credit bureau, log in, freeze it, unfreeze it. You're done. It's really easy.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: How long did it take? How easy was it? It took me less than 10 minutes with all three bureaus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And some of them I had to set up new accounts. So like if you already have accounts, it's a couple of minutes.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Okay. Does it cost money? It is free. It's free. It's free by law. It's free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's free. They also have to give you a credit report once a week if you ask for it.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But after that 2017 Equifax breach, some laws changed and now it's free and easy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh. So there aren't laws to protect your social security number, but there are laws that demand that this process of freezing your credit is free. It's progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Well, you know, I know this isn't your job to like help your colleagues protect their social security numbers. But but can I ask, since we're talking about this, that you just tell me how to do it and I'll do it right now while we're in this interview?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Because my social security number must just be out there unfrozen, just just baking in the hot sun. Hey, freeze. The heat is on. Yeah, let's do TransUnion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And instead of asking you to Google it, which is like what you tell a friend, let's just go to transunion.com and then I'll walk through it with you.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Oh, I already Googled it, but I still there We ended up in the same place Okay I at transunion There a nice lady smiling at me She looks very happy Her credit probably safe At the very top Adam I don know if you aware it says impacted by a recent data breach This is our what to do after a data breach We have to do that because we have you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do I do? Click on member login.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Member login. Got it. Very clear. Credit monitoring service center. True identity. Oh, service center says dispute. Manage freeze. Service center says dispute. Manage freeze. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. First name, John, middle name, secret, last name, ROMS from address.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you lived here for more than six months? Indeed I have.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Email, noelle at king.com. Mobile number, easy peasy, date of birth, March. Oh, and they want a, they want the last four of my social.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Should I trust them with it? I think you can trust them with it. I would say double check the website if it's the website you want to be on if you are else is transunion.com.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Okay, please send me a helpful tips and news about my service, including special offers at transunion.com. Hell no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Uh, create a password. Miles, Brian, one, two, three. Oh, they do not like the strength of that password.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Wow, they really want a serious password. 12 to 64 characters. 64 characters? Yikes. 64 characters. Sounds like an Ocean's Eleven movie. You know what I mean? That's awful. That is awful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Um, okay. I don't know, man. This is like a much more, I mean, uh... We can jump to the part of the episode where I talk about password managers.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Isn't that placing a lot of trust in these services? Gotta trust somebody. Ugh. I'm not so sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, question. What was your high school mascot? What was your first teacher's last name?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I actually don't remember. He does. I wasn't even called first card. There's no names. There's no names. Say where you want. Oh, credit freeze. There's a little snowflake. Yes, that's me. A little snowflake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your report does not have a credit freeze in place. It says it's available. And then there's a huge button that says add freeze. That's the button to click.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Doing it. Okay, it says once your credit freeze is in place, you may leave the freeze in place to ensure your credit report is not accessible for new credit applications.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You may also choose to remove the credit freeze entirely. It's up to you.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Okay, I'm going to continue. That's the option to continue. Thank you for your request. A freeze is now in place. A freeze is now in place on your TransUnion credit report. It will stay in place until you request its removal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have now prevented others from viewing your TransUnion credit report. Help prevent identity thieves from getting credit in your name.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Did we do it? We did it. Wasn't that easy? You know, it wasn't hard. It wasn't hard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, mildly. But what? You're saying that, you know, there's a payoff. Yeah. Well, do you know what's more annoying than doing that? I can guess.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: It's getting your identity stolen. But wait, I have to do this three times now? Like I've done it once. I have to do it two more times with what? Experian and Equifax?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes. How much do you want to sit here while I do those two?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: I don't mind. That's sweet of you. I bet our producer does mind. he just wrote to me i mind okay what if you have kids do kids even have credit is this just like a 18 plus thing kids have identities which is the big thing here when your child is born in the united states they're given a social security card a number on it and they have an identity if you have a young child they probably don't have a credit file yet but you can actually contact the credit bureaus, get them to create a file, and then freeze it for you to protect their identities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And experts tell me you should do this. So if you've got like four kids, you do have like an afternoon's worth of work ahead of you here. Maybe not an afternoon. It's a little bit different than freezing your own credit file. There's a form involved that you actually have to mail in, but it's worth doing because actually child identity theft is rising more quickly than adult identity theft.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And you might not even know your child's identity has been stolen until they're 16 or 18 and get their driver's license or apply for a student loan. And if they find out at that point in time, their identity has been stolen and they have multiple credit cards that are maxed out and a mortgage on four houses in Florida, probably, it's going to be a huge headache.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's worth taking the small step now to avoid that headache in the future. To get back to the title of your recently published piece at Vox, the massive social security number breach is actually a good thing. Is it a good thing because it will encourage people to do what I just did to freeze their credit? Is that the argument you're making?
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: The argument i'm making is that it's a good thing because we're talking about this right now it's a good thing that my friends were asking me about how to freeze their credit files and it's a good thing that a lot more people are going to do it it is the first line of defense between you and identity thieves and like one security expert told me if you haven't had your identity stolen yet it's not because you're special it's just because they haven't gotten to you yet the information about she was out there and it's only a matter of time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that worldview is a little bit paranoid, but I think that he has a point. Think about it this way. In your home, you have things that are valuable to you. And if other people got those things, it would be upsetting. But we have security measures in place. You have a lock in your front door.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But if someone breaks that lock and comes into your house, you can call the police and they will come in and help you because those systems are in place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the internet doesn't quite work like that. You have a lot of valuable information that's out there and people are stealing it and buying and selling it all the time.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: And there's not really an internet police that's coming after them. Of course, there are like cybercrime divisions of the actual police, but the scale of this problem is so big. It's literally every person in the United States and every person in the world that's online could be a victim of cybercrime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if there were the right amount of protections and regulations in place, we wouldn't have data breaches where hundreds of millions of American social security numbers are compromised.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: Adam Clark Estes. You know where to find him because I said it several times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I also said Miles Bryan produced the show today.
--:-- Adam Clark Estes: But I didn't say that Matthew Collette edited our program today and that Laura Bullard fact-checked it and that Patrick Boyd and Andhra Kristen's daughter mixed it, but I did say this is Today Explained.