SPEAKER_11: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For a lot of people, being a professional baseball player sounds like a total dream job. I mean, you get paid millions of dollars to play a game. But there are downsides. Like if you have a bad night at work as a baseball player, it's usually in front of 40,000 screaming fans.
SPEAKER_08: This story is about one of those nights in Houston, Texas. The Toronto Blue Jays were losing to the hometown Astros when they called in pitcher Mike Bulsinger. That's baseball reporter Ben Ryder.
SPEAKER_11: He covered the game for 15 years as a writer at Sports Illustrated.
SPEAKER_08: Some Major League Baseball players have job security and $20 million salaries. They're paid huge bonuses just for getting drafted and their teams have spent years developing them. Then there are guys like Bulsinger.
SPEAKER_10: I signed for $1,000 with a billion dollar organization. So $1,000. I think it was $667 after taxes. So they don't have that much invested in you. You make jokes about it. It's like a bucket of baseballs for them.
SPEAKER_11: The night Bulsinger came in, he was facing a stacked Astros lineup. It starred players like Alex Bregman and Carlos Beltran. They were a total juggernaut.
SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah. I mean, they were unbelievable. From what you see the runs they're putting up. In my head, I was like, this is the best team in baseball.
SPEAKER_11: Bulsinger came into the game with a man on first and two outs. All he had to do was get one more out and the inning was over.
SPEAKER_10: Just get one out. I mean, in theory it should be easy.
SPEAKER_08: But instead Bulsinger walked his first batter. The second hit a three run homer. Then the Astros really started pouring it on.
SPEAKER_06: There's Beltran jumps on the first pitch.
SPEAKER_10: They're just kept getting hits, laying off pitches. I'm trying to remember a time I was rocked more than that and I just don't remember a time.
SPEAKER_08: Mike Bulsinger was stressed. He was a journeyman. One bad outing could be the difference between hanging on to his job or being sent down to the minor leagues. His major league career hung in the balance every single time he took the mound. The eighth batter he faced was Alex Bregman. With the bases loaded, Bulsinger was desperate not to give up another home run. So he turned to his best pitch, his slow looping curveball. But Bregman was ready for it and he hit it deep.
SPEAKER_10: At that point I was like, well, what else is new? Everyone else is hitting everything off me. Might as well just go over the fence.
SPEAKER_09: The ball kept going and going and going. And actually the Blue Jays caught it.
SPEAKER_11: Bulsinger got his one out and the inning was finally over. It had gone just about as badly as an inning can possibly go.
SPEAKER_08: Mike Bulsinger gave up four runs on four hits and three walks. He was stunned by what happened. He felt good that day. He was throwing good pitches. But the Astros just kept hitting them.
SPEAKER_10: I remember in the interview after the game I told the reporter, I was like, man, it's just like, it was like they knew what I was throwing. Like they were all over my stuff. There's nothing I could do.
SPEAKER_11: Mike Bulsinger was demoted to the minor leagues that night, like right after the game was over. And he stayed in the minor leagues. After 2017, he played a few seasons in Japan, but he would never pitch in the big leagues again.
SPEAKER_08: Bulsinger had a lot of time to replay that final inning in his head. He thought he'd thrown the ball well against the Astros. His arm felt good. His velocity was normal. His curveball was biting. It just hadn't mattered.
SPEAKER_11: It turns out there was a reason the Houston Astros hitters seemed like they knew exactly what pitches Bulsinger was going to throw. And that's because they did. And they knew because the Astros were engaged in an age old practice called sign stealing. They were cheating. Baseball is a game with a ton of nonverbal communication between players and coaches, all of which happens out in the open. Coaches will swipe their hands across their chest and down their legs to tell a player to steal a base or lay off a pitch. Infielders will wave at each other to move over a couple of feet to the left or to the right. There are thousands of moments like this in every game.
SPEAKER_08: And the most important nonverbal communication is between the pitcher and the catcher. The catcher is responsible for knowing the opposing hitter's strengths and weaknesses and for suggesting what pitches to throw. He does it using a system of discrete hand signals. If you've seen a baseball game, you've seen this happen. The catcher crouches down. He puts one hand between the shin guards and he starts pointing his fingers towards the dirt.
SPEAKER_11: One finger means throw a fastball. Two is a curveball. Teams will mix up their signs like when a runner is on second who has a clear view of the catcher. But for the most part, this is just how it's done.
SPEAKER_08: If a batter knows what pitch is coming, it's a lot easier to get on base because that knowledge means they can figure out exactly when to swing or let a pitch go. Here's Mike Bulsinger. I think the hardest thing to do in any sport is to hit a baseball.
SPEAKER_10: So a pitcher already has an advantage right there. But a hitter not knowing what you're going to throw or where you're going to throw it, I mean, it's almost like hitting, unless you're extremely good at it, it's a guessing game.
SPEAKER_08: This is where sign stealing comes in. If you can decode an opposing pitcher's signs, you have a big competitive advantage.
SPEAKER_11: Sign stealing is a two-step process. First, someone has to see the catcher's signals, and then they have to communicate that information to the batter. And this whole process has to take place in a matter of seconds. This may sound like a lot of effort, but as long as there have been nonverbal signs in baseball, crafty players have been stealing them.
SPEAKER_08: In the early days of baseball, sign stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse of what the catcher was signaling to the pitcher.
SPEAKER_03: It's the axiom, which I heard many times, if you're not stealing, you're not trying.
SPEAKER_08: That's Paul Dixon, the author of The Hidden Language of Baseball. He says the first recorded instance of sign stealing goes all the way back to 1876, the very first year of the National League.
SPEAKER_03: There was a shack that had been built hanging from a telegraph pole overlooking the stadium in Hartford.
SPEAKER_08: The shack was hidden away from fans, almost like a hunting blind. Details are sketchy because this happened in 1876, but apparently there was a man hiding in the shack, probably with a pair of binoculars.
SPEAKER_03: And they were stealing a sign from there and giving them somehow down to the guys on the field and they were taking it from there.
SPEAKER_11: In those early days, sign stealing wasn't against the rules of baseball. There was no clear line that teams knew not to cross. Lots of people considered it cheating, but much like, you know, in Air Bud, there was nothing in the rule book that outlawed a dog from playing basketball. Nothing in the rule book stopped players from building a shack on a telegraph pole and spying on the other teams with binoculars.
SPEAKER_08: The sign stealing arms race may have had some big impacts on the game. Catchers in baseball used to lean over to receive pitches, but that made it too easy for other teams to steal their signs. So it's believed that that's why catchers began to squat.
SPEAKER_11: There have also been some more outlandish and creative efforts, like in 1900 there was an incident during a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies.
SPEAKER_08: The Reds shortstop Tommy Corcoran noticed the Phillies third base coach was always putting his foot in a specific patch of dirt on the field just before a pitch was coming in. And Corcoran thought, something's wrong here.
SPEAKER_03: He goes tearing across the field and starts kicking with his foot, digging up the dirt, and dirt is flying everywhere. And he comes with this little box, and in the box is a buzzer.
SPEAKER_11: Corcoran discovered that the Phillies coach had been stepping on the buzzer box.
SPEAKER_03: And the buzzer is taking a telegraphed signal and buzzing, but it's not loud enough to be heard, but he could feel it at the bottom of his foot.
SPEAKER_08: It turned out the Phillies coach was receiving a modified Morse code to tell him what pitch was coming. The message was coming from a Phillies player who was using binoculars to look through a peephole in the outfield fence to watch the other team's signs. The player relayed those signs to the coach using the buzzer, and then the coach sent that message to the batter. Again, this might sound like way too much effort to steal signs, but every team was looking for even the smallest edge to win ballgames. And it worked.
SPEAKER_11: Sign stealing probably helped a team win the World Series in 1948. Bob Veller, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland team, used a telescope he brought back from World War II to pick up signs. They won the championship, and Veller was pretty unrepentant about it.
SPEAKER_03: Later he said, hey, all's fair in love and war, and when you're trying to win a pennant. And the 1948 World Series is all over.
SPEAKER_11: Sign stealing occupied a gray zone in baseball ethics. On one hand, players were hiding it from their opponents and from fans. On the other, everybody knew it was happening. One player, a Hall of Famer named Roger Sornsby, did an interview with True Magazine that was published under the headline, you've got to cheat to win in baseball.
SPEAKER_08: Because of this ethical gray area, for years it went like this. A team would be caught sign stealing. The other team would say, hey, cut it out. And then they would come up with a new way of doing it. For years, Major League Baseball did nothing. But their view on sign stealing changed after a technological breakthrough in the 1950s. NBC had just invested in a camera with an 80-inch Spacemaster telephoto lens and unveiled it for a game of the week.
SPEAKER_11: The broadcasters realized that they could now clearly see the catcher's signs and told the audience what was coming before each pitch.
SPEAKER_03: One of the people who happened to be watching the game that day was the commissioner, who was Ford Frick at the time. And he thought it was a horrible idea. He saw that he immediately went to NBC to agree not to use the camera again ever. If the guys in the booth could pick it up, the dugout could have the TV on.
SPEAKER_11: In 1962, the commissioner took a baby step to discourage sign stealing.
SPEAKER_08: Frick said publicly that he would overturn any game if it was proven the winning team had stolen signs using mechanical means, like a camera or a buzzer system, or even binoculars.
SPEAKER_11: This was the line in the sand in terms of baseball ethics. Players were allowed to steal with their eyes, because that was considered a skill, but you couldn't steal signs using technology.
SPEAKER_08: Frick never actually punished anybody for sign stealing. And it took Major League Baseball 40 years to make an official rule about it. In 2000, they finally banned sign stealing by electronic means. They had to do it, because technology was moving so quickly at that point.
SPEAKER_11: The 2000 rule was meant to stop cell phones from being used to steal signs. But by the early 2010s, baseball clubhouses were filled with video screens. Some of them were installed by the league itself when they started allowing teams to use video replay to challenge umpire's calls. The presence of all these new screens made cheating incredibly tempting.
SPEAKER_02: Major League Baseball brought the snake into the Garden of Eden and then were surprised when the players took a bite of the apple.
SPEAKER_08: After a century of back and forth, by the 2010s there was finally a clear line in the rules of baseball. Sign stealing using technology was not okay. But with screens everywhere, it felt like a matter of time before someone crossed that line and got caught doing it.
SPEAKER_11: Before they were winning games and sending opposing pitchers back to the minor leagues, the Houston Astros were one of the worst teams in the history of baseball. Starting in 2011, they lost 100 games three years in a row. Some of their games had local TV ratings of 0.0, which meant that Nielsen couldn't confirm a single Houstonian who watched the games. They earned nicknames like the Lastros and the Disastros, which are pretty good.
SPEAKER_08: To turn things around, the Astros took a page from the Moneyball playbook and hired a fleet of math nerds. They worked on sophisticated algorithms that would help the Astros decide which players to draft and what strategies to execute on the field. The stats team was called the Nerd Cave. And so Ben, you know this because you actually covered the Astros firsthand.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I did.
SPEAKER_08: So in 2014, I spent a lot of time in the team's front office for a story for Sports Illustrated. And when I got there, I found I was really impressed with what I saw. I came away convinced that they were on the path to turning things around. So before the story ran, my editor asked me to estimate the year it's all going to come together. And I gave him my best guess. So at the end of 2014, the issue containing my piece hit mailboxes across the country with a cover that reads, your 2017 World Series champs. Turns out I was right.
SPEAKER_05: In October 2017, Mike Bulsinger was sitting at a bar watching the Houston Astros play
SPEAKER_11: game seven of the World Series. This was only three months after his final major league game. Astros were playing one of Bulsinger's old teams, the LA Dodgers.
SPEAKER_10: The Dodgers, you know, I love every single one of them. It was the greatest organization that I ever played for them. So I wanted them to win. But you felt the Astros deserved it. Oh, what? I mean, yeah, 100%. I mean, I think to me they had the better lineup. It is what it is.
SPEAKER_08: Mike Bulsinger had mixed emotions about the whole series. He respected the Astros for their talent. And baseball fans everywhere were rooting for them. The Astros weren't just winners. They were likable winners. They were playing in Houston's second World Series ever. And they made it the same year Hurricane Harvey devastated their home city. Their stars like Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman were fun to watch. It was a real Cinderella story.
SPEAKER_04: The Sports Illustrated cover in 2014. And the article by Ben Reader.
SPEAKER_00: They nailed it.
SPEAKER_11: Hey, that's you. Yeah, although they kept pronouncing my name wrong.
SPEAKER_08: Anyhow, the Astros were champions.
SPEAKER_11: If you have a lineup like that, if you're hitting the ball like that, putting up numbers
SPEAKER_10: like that, there's no reason why you shouldn't win. You know, when you have good pitching, you're putting up 10 plus rounds a game, it feels like how can you lose? Me, Mike Bulsinger, and almost everybody else assumed the Astros took the World Series because
SPEAKER_08: of their mix of young talent and the shrewd decision making from the nerd cave. But two years later, we learned the truth. There was a lot more to the story. The Houston Astros cheated their way to a World Series championship in 2017.
SPEAKER_11: In late 2019, a whistleblower came forward, a pitcher who had played with the Astros for three seasons. They have a guy on the record, a guy that was on the team.
SPEAKER_01: Mike Fiers, a pitcher who laid out exactly what they do.
SPEAKER_11: Mike Fiers alleged that the Astros had been sign stealing during their championship season. While the team had these fancy modern algorithms and an entire cave full of data nerds, their sign stealing plan was a lot like those used 50 years earlier. It was a mix of high-tech tools and low-budget mischief.
SPEAKER_08: The Astros had a camera aimed directly at the other team's catcher, which broadcast to a TV in the tunnel behind the dugout. To communicate the pitch to the batters, Astros players would watch the TV, and when they saw a fastball coming, they did nothing. Any other pitch, they would hit a bat against a plastic garbage can. It sounded like this. Here it is again. We tried to come up with an analogy for what it sounds like, but really, it sounds exactly like a bat hitting a plastic garbage can. Major League Baseball opened a full investigation into the accusations. The Astros' manager and general manager were suspended and then fired by the team. The team was fined $5 million, which is not a lot of money for a franchise worth nearly $2 billion.
SPEAKER_11: The investigation confirmed the Astros had been sign stealing during the 2017 and 2018 seasons, and during the playoffs, and maybe even the World Series.
SPEAKER_08: The Astros are still the 2017 World Series champions. Even though many baseball fans insist they deserve a massive asterisk, some of the game's biggest stars think that too, like Aaron Judge of the Yankees.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just don't think it holds any value. You cheated and you didn't earn it.
SPEAKER_08: And Mike Trout, the best player in baseball.
SPEAKER_04: It's sad for baseball. It's tough. They cheated. And I don't agree with the punishment. The Astros' scandals created many what-ifs that can never be answered.
SPEAKER_08: No one denies that the Astros were a really talented team, but would they still be World Series champions if they hadn't cheated? Data analysts have tried to answer that question, and several prominent ones have found the advantage the Astros got from sign stealing might have been surprisingly small. Of course, a small advantage can mean a lot in such a competitive sport.
SPEAKER_11: These questions aren't so abstract for someone like Mike Bulsinger. An analysis by a computer programmer revealed that when the Astros faced Bulsinger, they banged on their trash can lid 54 times, the most times the Astros had used that system in all of 2017.
SPEAKER_08: And a lot of those bangs happened during Bulsinger's short appearance in the game. Someone hit the trash can immediately before 12 of his 29 pitches.
SPEAKER_10: It just makes you mad. It thinks, you know, what would have happened if I'd had a pitch in that game? So then you start to question things about your career now and then. It truly was the most embarrassing moment in my career. 100 percent. I've never been more embarrassed myself.
SPEAKER_11: Ever. Mike Bulsinger filed a legal complaint against the Astros on February 10, 2020. In the complaint, he blamed them for effectively cheating him out of his career. He's seeking damages. And he wants the team to give up 31 million dollars in bonuses that the players received for winning the World Series, which would be donated to charity.
SPEAKER_10: It makes you mad every once in a while. It truly does because you put so much work into getting to this spot in your career. And then you kind of find out, hey, this was taken away by people that cheated.
SPEAKER_08: This isn't exactly the first time somebody's broken the rules of baseball. In the early 2000s, there was the steroid scandal. And since the beginning of baseball, players have doctored the ball or put cork in their wooden bats or slid into their opponents' legs cleats up. They say baseball is a game of inches, a game in which every small advantage matters. And the Astros embraced every edge they could find as they transformed themselves from a laughingstock into a champion. But when it came to baseball's age-old tradition of sign stealing, the Astros didn't just push to the edge, but over it.
SPEAKER_11: This episode is adapted from The Edge, a six-part series hosted by Ben Rider. You can download it now wherever you get your podcasts. We'll have more with Ben after this.
SPEAKER_11: When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluver technology, 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet, the perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3mscreens.com slash brighter to get your new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3mscreens.com slash brighter. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. That's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Chances are you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com. So I'm back again with Ben Rider and as we're talking this week, the Amy Coney Barrett hearings are happening in Washington. And during the hearings, the Senator Ben Sasse started attacking the Astros for seemingly no reason. So here's a clip of that.
SPEAKER_07: I'd like to talk about the Houston Astros who are miserable cheaters. Sorry, Cornyn and Cruz, but both of the Texas senators sit on this committee. But I think all baseball fans know that the Houston Astros cheat. They steal signs, they bang on cans. They've done a whole bunch of miserable things historically, and they deserve to be punished probably more than they have been.
SPEAKER_11: And then Ted Cruz defended the Astros. And it feels really weird that this is happening during a Supreme Court hearing. What did you make of all this?
SPEAKER_08: What I made of it, Roman, was that the Astros are now the go-to symbol for villainy for everybody, right? No matter who you are, no matter what you think, you can point at what the Astros did as representative of villainy, as representative of corruption, and there's little risk in doing it. That's what I took away from that.
SPEAKER_11: Right, right. So you mentioned on the show that you've covered the Astros and you wrote about them for Sports Illustrated and you actually wrote a whole book called Astro Ball. So when you heard about the sign stealing, what did you think? Were you like personally disappointed?
SPEAKER_08: I was really, really surprised because I had spent so much time with this team over the years I'd written a whole book about them, as you said, and I had no idea about this. But I was also interested in part of my own reaction, which is that while I was surprised by the particulars, I wasn't entirely shocked to hear that the Astros had been the one to do this just because they did everything to an extreme, right? Their pursuit of the edge went so far in every way. Most of them perfectly legal that it kind of made sense that, oh, maybe they just took sign stealing, which as we know from the episode is an age old tradition in baseball, to a new extreme as well. So that was kind of what sent me on my quest here and sent me into the making of my podcast to answer that and many other questions about a subject I thought I knew really well.
SPEAKER_11: So we talk about this long history of sign stealing in various ways in which people did it and it was really egregious and violated norms and ways in which it was not so egregious and people kind of thought it was okay. Where did the Astros fit into all this?
SPEAKER_08: Well, as we heard, everybody cheats in baseball, but it's kind of like everybody else is going 75 in a 65 mile an hour zone, right? And the Astros went straight to 100. And what they did also fit into their kind of technocratic MO, which the baseball world had really started to turn against. This was an age old, fun, admired tradition. And they took all the fun and artistry out of it, right? It almost used to be like a caper film. The telescopes here, the binoculars here, what the Astros did was just kind of like mechanized dominance and it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
SPEAKER_11: So one of the big questions that we ask in this episode is part of the series is would the Astros be World Series champions without sign stealing? They made the playoffs this year. They did not make it to the World Series. Out of the right of second in the pitch, swinging a Popfly shallow right charging Margot.
SPEAKER_06: He is under it. And the Tampa Bay Rays have just won the American League pennant for the second time in franchise history. The Rays are on their way to the World Series.
SPEAKER_11: Does that kind of settle the question? I mean, what do you think?
SPEAKER_08: No, I don't think it settles the question. And that's one of the tragedies of this entire story is that we'll never be able to go back and replay that history fair. And why did a team that was already so talented feel like they had to do this? They were so good anyway, right? We met Mike Bulsinger in our episode just now. A guy who throws 90 miles an hour, whose ERA is near five in his career, which isn't so great. A team like the Astros could have knocked him around. They could have ended his career anyway, fairly, but it wasn't fair. So one of the things I really want to know is why did a team with all this talent take this extra step it didn't even necessarily need?
SPEAKER_11: It kind of reminds me of the Watergate break in. Like Nixon was so far ahead, but they still had to break into the DNC to make himself feel better about, you know, like to make him more comfortable with winning. He had to cheat to win even though he was winning. It's sort of a weird tragedy to have people like that. You know, you know, I made this podcast with a prologue projects, including the guys who
SPEAKER_08: made the Watergate season of slow burn. They're not big sports people, but they certainly know about scandals like this. And I think it was that element that really connected with them and continues to.
SPEAKER_11: So we're only covering one small aspect of the entire series that you're doing called the edge. So what can people expect when they subscribe to this, what they're going to rush out and subscribe right now to the edge? Like what are they going to hear?
SPEAKER_08: Well there's a lot more to this. You know, you'll learn a lot more about why they did it, exactly who was doing it, the specific dynamics within the organization that led to corruption like this taking root. And I'm going to give you a little teaser. You also learn something else that they were running a second sign stealing system parallel to the first at the same time. But you're going to have to subscribe to the edge to find out about that. I'm not giving that away right now. Oh, I love it.
SPEAKER_11: I love it. That's fantastic. Well, that's so cool. It's called the edge. Ben Rider is our reporter and was the host of the whole series. Thank you so much for doing the story with us. It was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_08: So much fun Roman. Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_11: This week's episode was adapted from the edge, which is produced by prologue projects in partnership with cadence 13. The show is made by Ben Rider and Sam Lee. The team at prologue projects includes Leon Nafock and Andrew Parsons. 99% invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube music by Sean Real sound mix by Kevin Ramsey fact checking by Francis Carr. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kirk Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmitt Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Christopher Johnson, Abby Madone, Katie Minow, Sophia Klatsker and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco produced on radio row, which is scattered across the North American continent. But the geographic center, the exact mathematical geographic center is centered right there lands right there in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are founding member of radio topia from PRX a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artists own podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org on Instagram and Reddit too. But you can get the brand new New York Times best selling book 99% invisible city at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_11: Perfect sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. CERTA's new and improved perfect sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover. The CERTA perfect sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at certa.com.
SPEAKER_05: At Discount Tire, we know your time is valuable. Get a 30% shorter average wait time when you buy and book online. Did you know Discount Tire now sells wiper blades? Check out our current deals at DiscountTire.com or stop in and talk to an associate today. Discount Tire.
SPEAKER_04: Fox Airsoft 10244 S Progress Lane Parker CO 80134 S Progress Lane Parker CO 80134 S Progress
