ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.
Nearly a decade ago, I had this thought that, at the end of the year, it would be nice to tell a few little stories. We call them “mini-stories.” Mini-stories maybe don’t rise to the level of being a fully reported story, and often there’s something silly or interesting that was on the producer’s mind. Maybe it’s an outtake from a reported episode–maybe it’s something completely new. Mini-stories were a way to have some fun at the end of the year and for the staff to take a proper vacation. That was how it all started. But over the years, mini-stories have become a monster. Everyone started preparing really heavily for them, they started reporting them as full stories, and suddenly mini-stories were not so mini. So, this year, I decided unilaterally to stop mini-inflation and go back to the fundamentals. All the producers are going to join me in a Zoom room together and tell me stories that I have not heard before. I am not prepared. I don’t know anything about what’s going to be told to me. So let’s just jump in. And first up is producer Chris Berube. Chris, how are you doing?
CHRIS BERUBE: Roman, it is the most wonderful time of the year! Mini-stories! Let’s do this!
ROMAN MARS: I like the attitude. What do you have for us?
CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, I want to call back to a story we did a little bit earlier this year. It’s a story that I reported about the Great American Pyramid.
THE GREAT AMERICAN PYRAMID PROMO: A new pyramid is being built, not to glorify death, but as a monument that will celebrate life and man’s indomitable spirit to create. Feel the power of the Great American Pyramid…
ROMAN MARS: So, did you just want an excuse to play that clip again?
CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, pretty much. That’s the whole story. That’s all I got. No, I have more pyramid stuff. So, Roman, we did this story about the Great American Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee. Of course, today, the Great America Pyramid is a Bass Pro Shop. And when it opened in 1991, you know, it was supposed to be the tallest pyramid in the United States. But, Roman, did you know–shortly after the construction of the Great American Pyramid–there was an even bigger American pyramid?
ROMAN MARS: How much bigger are we talking?
CHRIS BERUBE: So, the Great American Pyramid was 32 stories high. I was there for the story. I was inside the building. It really feels cavernous when you’re in there, like it’s really big. And then in 1993, two years after the Pyramid opened, another pyramid opened in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it was 350 feet tall. So, that was a whopping 29 feet taller than the Great America Pyramid.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, that’s so mean. That reminds me of the sort of skyscraper wars in the early 20th century–like, just slightly taller.
CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, it feels petty, right? It feels extremely deliberate. And I assume it was on purpose. I asked around. I talked to people. Nobody could confirm that for me. But you have to assume, right?
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. So, in your story, if I remember correctly, the city of Memphis had a problem finding a use for the Pyramid after it sort of failed as a venue. It’s now this woodsy mall that has a Bass Pro Shop in it. So what are they doing with this Las Vegas pyramid?
CHRIS BERUBE: So the Vegas pyramid–it has had one use the whole time. It is a home to the Luxor Casino. Much like the Memphis pyramid, it also has a hotel inside. And it has lots of attractions for tourists. There’s this big room with lots of old Titanic stuff in it. It’s a really interesting building. And actually it has one very unique pyramid feature that I’d like to draw your attention to. There are no elevators inside.
BILLY PADOVESE: We actually have inclinators that go up the side of the building at 39 degrees.
CHRIS BERUBE: So, this is Billy Padovese. He’s the facilities director at the Luxor pyramid.
BILLY PADOVESE: It’s almost like a roller coaster as you’re going up the steep incline before the drop. It rides on a rail and wheels. It pulls you up the side.
ROMAN MARS: That is so cool. I love going up an incline plane. I love an inclinator. That was something that came up in the Great Pyramid episode. I loved the idea of it.
CHRIS BERUBE: That’s right. They actually never built theirs. They just built an elevator right in the center. So this one actually has inclinators on the side. But, Roman, there is one other feature of this pyramid that is very famous. It is very striking. So, at the top of the Luxor Pyramid, there is this very powerful light that beams up into the sky every night. I have shared a photo with you if you want to take a look at it. This is the beam.
ROMAN MARS: That is amazing-looking. That is, like, a little scary, like an ominous black pyramid with light coming out of it. It’s kind of like Stargate–that movie Stargate. Does that predate you, Stargate?
CHRIS BERUBE: No. No, I’ve seen Stargate. I mean, to me, it reminds me of the opening credits of Ancient Aliens. Like, it’s just kind of this ridiculous-looking… Like, yeah, it is a black pyramid with a beam shooting straight up to a mothership or something. That’s what it looks like. And the Luxor Sky Beam has become this fixture of the Vegas skyline because it’s really hard to miss, obviously. So, at full power, the beam is said to have the same luminosity as 42 billion candles being lit at the same time. And it is so powerful, apparently, airline pilots can see the Luxor Beam from California. And actually, a couple of years ago, I drove into Las Vegas for a story. I was coming over this hill. And then suddenly you just see the beam. That’s, like, the first thing you see that indicates, “Oh yeah, Vegas is over there. We’re getting really close to Vegas.” It’s this incredible tool for navigation.
ROMAN MARS: So how does a beam like that work? Like, is it just one big light bulb? Is there lots of light bulbs? I can’t sort of fathom how you get something so bright and so clear.
CHRIS BERUBE: Right, so you’re correct. It is a series of very bright light bulbs that are all using xenon gas.
BILLY PADOVESE: It started out as spotlights that use a super bright light bulb. It’s a sun tracker. You know, when it gets dark outside, the light comes on. When it gets bright, it turns off.
ROMAN MARS: It’s certainly very Las Vegas to have, like, a bright light that turns on every single night, whether you want it or not. You know what I mean? But it’s so bright that you can see it from California, you said. And is that distracting? Is it dangerous if you’re flying a plane or something like that?
CHRIS BERUBE: I mean, that’s a great question. And as best I can tell, there have been no incidents with airline pilots, helicopters, or anything like that. But there is an issue that comes with operating a light of this size. It attracts the natural world.
BILLY PADOVESE: Just like when you turn on your light at home, that moth always goes towards the light. When we turn the beam on, there’s moths up there. And then, you know, with moths, it brings predators. Bats come in, and they eat. And there is an ecosystem up there.
CHRIS BERUBE: So, you get insects, you get bats, you get owls, and you get all kinds of birds that are drawn in by this thing. And Billy says that normally it’s fine. Like, they circle around the lights. Then the birds and the insects disperse when the light goes off. And it’s interesting because I first became aware of the Luxor Beam because of a news story in 2019 about a very serious bug problem that came to the Las Vegas strip.
ROMAN MARS: Oh no.
CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, I’m actually going to ask you to watch the video for a second and just give a reaction to what you’re seeing on screen.
NBC NEWSCASTER: In Sin City, it’s the insect invasion, putting on a show no one can escape. A 24/7 onslaught of grasshoppers. For many, the first impression felt downright biblical. A migrating horde of bugs so big that you could even see them from space…
ROMAN MARS: Oh, my God.
CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah. It just covered, like, every surface of the Vegas strip for a couple of weeks. And this was 2019. So, in 2019, Nevada had this very rainy winter, and then it had this very mild spring. And that is the exact cocktail for a productive breeding season for the pallid-winged grasshopper. And it is notable that these grasshoppers are drawn to artificial lights.
ELSKE TIELENS: What we saw was that the urban lights in Las Vegas sort of act as an attractant on the landscape, drawing these insects into what is otherwise very poor habitat, right? Parking lots and the strip of Vegas is not an interesting or attractive place for a grasshopper to be. But this light is drawing them in.
CHRIS BERUBE: So, this is Dr. Elske Tielens. She’s an insect biologist who studied this giant swarm of grasshoppers. And using radar data, she says it’s clear the grasshoppers were moving towards Vegas at night when all these artificial lights were on, right? So, at its peak, according to Dr. Tielens, there were about 45 million grasshoppers on the Vegas strip.
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] I can’t even imagine that number.
ELSKE TIELENS: It is a tremendous number. It’s more grasshoppers than Las Vegas gets human visitors over the course of a year.
CHRIS BERUBE: So Vegas was this magnet for grasshoppers. And in all this news coverage, there is footage of these grasshoppers swirling around in the Sky Beam. And Billy says, “Okay, yes, there were a ton of bugs. There were so many bugs. Nobody could walk around without being swarmed by bugs. But this was not specifically the Beam’s fault, right? Las Vegas has lots of artificial lights.” And Dr. Tielens says, “Yes, we cannot single out the Sky Beam here.”
ROMAN MARS: So is this still a problem? Was it just that season?
CHRIS BERUBE: No, Las Vegas is not still overwhelmed by grasshoppers. This was a fairly short phenomenon. So, these grasshoppers don’t live super long. Most of them died off pretty fast. So, the workers in Las Vegas had to clean up these giant piles of dead grasshopers. But after seeing all this footage, it is hard for me not to think about the giant swarms of grasshoppers when I think about the Sky Beam and the Luxor Pyramid. It was not their fault, but it is hard to get that image out of my head.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it is a haunting image. Well, thank you so much, Chris. This is fantastic. So are you gonna give us, like, pyramid stories all the time now? You’re the pyramid correspondent?
CHRIS BERUBE: I guess I could do the Transamerica Pyramid next?
ROMAN MARS: Absolutely, that’s what’s next. That’s what I want.
CHRIS BERUBE: I guess so. I should note, that is actually the tallest pyramid in America. I think the Luxor is, by volume, the biggest pyramid. Transamerica’s tallest. I don’t know. Are you going to send me to Egypt? Maybe that’s the next step in all of this.
ROMAN MARS: We’ll work on it. Thank you, Chris.
CHRIS BERUBE: Thanks, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: Up next, waiting patiently in our Zoom room–actually, probably not waiting all that patiently, honestly, she was the one complaining the most about having to sit on the rest of the Zoom with the rest of us–is Vivian Le. Vivian, what do you have for us?
VIVIAN LE: Roman, you asked us to keep it simple. So I am leaning out this year, and I’m just going to share a website that I’ve been fascinated with for years now, I think. So, Roman, can you do me a favor? Go to your browser and type in “gail.com.”
ROMAN MARS: “Gail.com.”
VIVIAN LE: And then what do you see?
ROMAN MARS: It says, “Hello and welcome to gail.com FAQ.” This is a very simple text-based website. It’s a gray background–black type–and it has a few questions and answers.
VIVIAN LE: Yes. And so the whole website is maybe a page long. There’s, like, nine questions and answers. And the first question reads, “Question, why isn’t there any content here? Can’t you at least throw up a picture of your cat for the internet to check out?”
ROMAN MARS: And the answer is: “Sorry, I have a cat, but she’s pretty unexciting by internet standards. As for why there is very little content here, we wanted to keep the server’s attack surface as small as possible to keep it safe.” Intriguing. So what are we looking at here?
VIVIAN LE: So, although there is very little content on gail.com, this webpage actually gets a ton of traffic. And that’s because gail.com is a really common typo for gmail.com.
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] Oh, that’s so funny. That totally checks out. That totally seems like an internet thing. That’s awesome.
VIVIAN LE: Yeah, exactly. So according to the gail.com FAQ page, in the year 2020, it received a total of 5,950,012 hits, which was an average of about 16,257 hits per day. So it’s a pretty steady flow of people missing the “M” in Gmail. And I was curious. So I checked the stats for our website, 99pi.org, which you plug at the end of every single episode. And gail.com gets about three times as much traffic as us–and much of that by accident, too.
ROMAN MARS: Okay. So, who actually owns gail.com?
VIVIAN LE: I mean, Gail does.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, it’s as simple as that? So then who’s Gail?
VIVIAN LE: I honestly don’t know much about her. From what I could tell, Gail is a pretty private person. I haven’t been able to find any interviews with her. And I’ve actually been trying to get in touch with her for about four years now, so I feel like I could safely say she’s not interested in speaking with me. But according to the FAQ page, Gail received the domain name as a birthday present from her husband back in 1996, which was actually about eight years before Gmail even existed. And fun fact, her husband who gifted her the domain–his name is Kevin and he is the owner of kevin.org, which redirects you to his LinkedIn profile.
ROMAN MARS: He was a man ahead of his time.
VIVIAN LE: Oh, yeah, Kevin was living in the year 2004. So, according to Gail’s FAQ page too, her email provider rejects around 1.2 million misaddressed emails to gail.com a week.
ROMAN MARS: Whoa, so that’s a whole nother level of server load. In addition to the six million visits, they get all this email that is not meant for them. That is crazy. I mean, you would think that with all these accidental visits every year to gail.com, it would be kind of a valuable property. Like, you could put up more than just a FAQ page. Or even that Google itself would want to buy it just to avoid any of this confusion…
VIVIAN LE: Yeah, I don’t know if Google has ever attempted to buy gail.com. But it does already own a bunch of misspelled versions of google.com.
ROMAN MARS: That makes sense. Like “goggle?”
VIVIAN LE: That’s exactly correct. Yes, they do own goggle.com. They also own googel.com. Gooogle with three O’s. And then my personal favorite is goolge.com. So, if you type any of those into your web browser, it’ll actually take you to Google. A lot of companies–like larger companies–will buy the common misspellings of their websites to prevent people from doing this thing called typo-squatting. Have you ever heard of that, Roman?
ROMAN MARS: I haven’t heard of it, but I can kind of get it through context. Could you describe it a little bit more?
VIVIAN LE: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s like when a bad actor purposefully registers a similar misspelling of a domain name to trick people into visiting their site. They use it for phishing schemes too, where they’ll try to sell it back to the company for a profit.
ROMAN MARS: Which is clearly not what Gail was doing. She predates all of this stuff.
VIVIAN LE: Gail seems just perfectly content chilling on the domain name. She says pretty adamantly in the FAQ page, if you read it, “Yes, I know that I can monetize this. But no, I am not interested, so thank you very much.”
ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome. Long live gail.com! I’m a big fan of Gail without knowing who she is personally. This is a great story, Viv, and you kept to the mini-parameters very, very nicely. So thank you so much.
VIVIAN LE: I did as little work as possible, yes. But before I go, I did want to leave you with my second favorite example of a mistyped website. So, Roman, you know the site github.com, right?
ROMAN MARS: Yes. Yes. It’s sort of this website for checking in and storing coding projects and stuff like that, right?
VIVIAN LE: Yeah. Yeah, nobody really knows what it is. [LAUGHS] But it’s spelled github.com. But can you do me another favor? Go back to your browser and type in guthib.com. So just invert the “U” and the “I” in GitHub.
ROMAN MARS: GutHib. Big four words that say, “You spelled it wrong.” Period. Awesome. That’s so great. Well, thank you so much for this story, Vivian. I really had fun.
VIVIAN LE: Thank you, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: Okay, we’re going to take a quick break here. And we’ll be right back with another mini-story…
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: Okay. We are back. And in the hot seat now is producer Jayson De Leon. Hey, Jayson.
JAYSON DE LEON: Hey there, Roman Mars. So, we are wrapping up 2025 here. And one of the highlights for me, at least, was the conclave. Do you remember the conclave?
ROMAN MARS: Not, like, the movie, Conclave, but you mean the real conclave?
JAYSON DE LEON: I mean the spectacle of the conclave. I mean the Catholic Church’s conclave.
ROMAN MARS: Where we got the Chicago pope?
JAYSON DE LEON: Yes! Yeah, it’s a Chicago pope. Did that rock your world, Roman? I know you’re a Chicago guy.
ROMAN MARS: Well, I thought it was delightful that he was a Chicago pope. When you know who the pope’s favorite baseball team is, I think you’re entering a different world.
JAYSON DE LEON: It’s so true. For me, I’m a big hat guy. And seeing the pope rock a White Socks hat, I was like, “Is this dude part of NWA? Like, what is going on?”
ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome.
JAYSON DE LEON: So, anyway, I bring this up because one of the first actions the pope took actually really hit home for me specifically. So, I live in Rhode Island. And Pope Leo declared the first miracle of his papacy right here in my home state.
ROMAN MARS: Okay. I did not hear about this. So tell me about the miracle of Rhode Island.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, so this miracle took place in Pawtucket, which is a small city right on the border with Providence. And the story goes that, on the night of January 14th, 2007, a baby boy was born with a faint pulse. So, the medical team worked on him for, like, over an hour. And they just didn’t have any signs of improvement. And pretty soon they couldn’t find a heartbeat at all. So, the attending doctor recited a prayer–basically this final plea to a 19th century Spanish priest from his hometown. And right after the doctor said this prayer, the boy’s heartbeat returned. His breathing was normal, and miraculously, he grew up without complications.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, wow. Well, that’s such a scary moment, of course. I don’t know if I would necessarily qualify this as a miracle. I don’t know if I want to weigh in on sort of divine intervention, but I’m really happy it turned out this way.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yes, likewise. Look, I don’t want to particularly get into the miracle or not miracle of this all. But the reason I’m bringing this to the table is because I just find it interesting that this happened back in 2007, like, 19 years ago.
ROMAN MARS: So wait. The incident happened in 2007, but Pope Leo declared it a miracle this year.
JAYSON DE LEON: He declared it a miracle in June of this year.
ROMAN MARS: Wow. Okay. So, why the time gap? What was going on there?
JAYSON DE LEON: On there. So, yeah, I called up a priest to talk about this. His name is Father Dorian Llewellyn. He’s a theologian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. And Father Dorian told me that in order to declare a miracle in the Catholic Church, you have to go through a pretty elaborate process.
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: It’s a bureaucratic–necessarily bureaucratic–process. And I have to tell you a little secret, which is that Vatican bureaucracy is not the most efficient in the world.
ROMAN MARS: I kind of gathered that from the Conclave movie, actually. So, how does this process work? Like, how does the Catholic Church define a miracle?
JAYSON DE LEON: So I should say off the top here that I’m gonna focus on medical miracles specifically because me and Father Dorian mostly talked about that. And so, yeah, these medical miracles have to check three boxes. The first, the healing must directly follow a prayer to a holy person. The second, the healing must take place in ways that the best informed scientific knowledge cannot account for. And the third is that the healing must be lasting.
ROMAN MARS: Interesting. So how is it determined whether all those three criteria happened in the Rhode Island miracle?
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, so in the case of the Rhode Island miracle, the Diocese of Providence caught wind of this story. And the first thing they do is they get a group of people together to investigate it.
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: So you have to look at it almost like a government commission. So you have to meet with the people. You have to take notes. You have to take into account medical records. It’s forensic in that way. You’re trying to investigate, “Well, what are the facts? Tell us the facts before we start interpreting them.”
ROMAN MARS: I mean, this almost sounds like a TV show. So, like, who is part of this investigative team? This is so exciting.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, you have the Chicago pope, which could be a TV show. Now you have Medical Miracles, which is probably another show.
ROMAN MARS: Absolutely! I bet you if I’ve turned on Hulu with TLC right now, that show is on there right now.
JAYSON DE LEON: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
ROMAN MARS: I guarantee it.
JAYSON DE LEON: But anyway, this investigative team… Generally, there’s a bishop involved. There’s a local team from the church that tries to get firsthand accounts of the event. The church also gets independent doctors to look at medical records, and they basically try to figure out if there’s some scientific explanation for what happened. And if the group determines that there’s still something that can’t quite be explained, then it goes higher up the chain.
ROMAN MARS: How high up the chain are we talking? It goes to the Vatican?
JAYSON DE LEON: It goes to the Vatican, yeah. So, the local diocese–they basically put together this dossier that goes to a department in the Vatican called the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. And they have an office in the Vatican City.
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: Yeah, there is an office. You know, I mean, it’s a physical office, in which people go to work and drink coffee and have lunch and… [CHUCKLES].
JAYSON DE LEON: “What’s the miracle today that we’re looking at?”
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: Yeah, they do. I mean, it’s part of the portfolio.
JAYSON DE LEON: So, Roman, something I should explain here is that the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints is a department that oversees the beatification and canonization process. Do you have any idea what those words are?
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s how you determine if a holy person is actually a saint.
JAYSON DE LEON: That’s right. There’s a process to determine who is worthy of sainthood in the Catholic Church. And the reason miracles go through this office is because you need two miracles to become a saint.
ROMAN MARS: So it’s like this is your resume. Under special skills, it’s like, “Started stopped hearts” and stuff like that. You need a couple of miracles on your resume to make it to sainthood.
JAYSON DE LEON: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so, in the Rhode Island miracle, that 19th century Spanish priest that the doctor prayed to–that priest is now on the path to sainthood.
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: The Rhode Island miracle is involved in the beatification of a Spanish priest whose file was dormant for a long, long, long time. And then, I think, somebody got really interested in the case and literally blew the cobwebs off and started doing more investigation.
ROMAN MARS: So, what’s the next step here? Like, the case is now in the Vatican’s hands, and what happens?
JAYSON DE LEON: Right, so in this department at the Vatican–the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which I just love saying–they perform basically a whole other investigation into the miracle. They gather their own eyewitness accounts. They go back through the medical records. And for a long time, there was actually an official role in this office for the devil’s advocate.
ROMAN MARS: Wait, so is this, like, the origin of that term, “devil’s advocate?”
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, it comes from this.
ROMAN MARS: Holy moly!
JAYSON DE LEON: It comes from this one job at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. And the role for the devil’s advocate was to find arguments against canonization. And one way you could do that is by poking holes in the miracles.
ROMAN MARS: Wow. Oh, I am so fascinated by this process. That’s so interesting.
JAYSON DE LEON: I think the process is really interesting too, but it did change in the 1980s. That title isn’t really the title anymore. They have a different, more administrative kind of role or whatever. But today, the people who are poking holes in these miracles are mostly the medical experts. And Father Dorian actually knows a few of these people.
FATHER DORIAN LLEWELLYN: My impression with them is that they’re more likely to weigh on the edge of natural–declaring something to have a natural, purely medical explanation. They are not in the business of creating miracles or declaring miracles. You know, it’s not in their interest, as they want the process to be as objective and as credible as possible.
ROMAN MARS: That is so interesting. It’s so fascinating to have all this apparatus around him. And like you said, these are all full-time jobs. They go to the office. They do a thing. Like, who is putting this all together? Who pays for all this stuff?
JAYSON DE LEON: That is a great question, Roman, because I think getting a miracle through this process is kind of a miracle in and of itself. So it can cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars to go through the beatification and canonization process. And it’s in that process that miracles get reviewed. So it’s definitely not cheap. And it helps big time if you have a booster or someone with a lot of money who’s interested in the cause. And actually, one of the big reasons these causes get stuck in a sort of purgatory is because it’s just so expensive to keep these things moving.
ROMAN MARS: So what then happens if this miracle makes it through this new round of medical review and then a second investigation? Does it become a miracle at that point?
JAYSON DE LEON: So it has one more level to go through. And this is essentially going in front of a bunch of bishops and theologians at the Vatican. And they’re determining, “Hey, is the person on the path to sainthood really a saint? Are we positive that they are worthy of sainthood?”
ROMAN MARS: This is where you just make sure that they’re not, like, an ex-murderer or something.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yes. Oh, my god. That would be bad But also part of this process that they’re going through is just determining, “Are these miracles good? Are we buttoned up? Are we sure?” Because if someone can easily explain away one of these miracles, that’s not a good look for the church.
ROMAN MARS: But it’s also not a good look for the church to call something a miracle if it is done by a person who isn’t really saint-worthy either. So it becomes kind of… It’s like you want the miracle to be a miracle. You also want the saint to be saintly. And if the two come together, then they’re both kind of verified by each other.
JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of that going on for sure. But you know, if it’s able to jump through all these hoops–this miracle–it goes up to the pope. And ultimately they say yay or nay. And in this Rhode Island case and a lot of cases, this can take years–even decades–for all of this to square away. And for me at least, that’s what I find interesting about this process. It just goes a pretty long way to make a miracle mean something just because if you can call anything a miracle, then nothing is a miracle.
ROMAN MARS: That’s right. If you give out too many miracles, then everyone can be a saint. And you don’t want that either.
JAYSON DE LEON: I’m no saint, Roman. But yes, that’s the logic.
ROMAN MARS: Did I tell you one of my favorite pieces of vox pop tape that was ever recorded and put on the radio was when Ratzinger was selected as pope? And there’s this NPR story featuring this young man who’s just losing it for Ratzinger. And he’s, like, over the moon at Ratzinger becoming pope. And he’s like, “We have a new pope! And it’s an awesome new pope! We have two great popes right after another!”
YOUNG MAN: Oh, it’s awesome! Such an awesome pope following an awesome pope, like Pope John Paul the Great! This is really amazing! Two awesome popes right after the other! It means that he’ll continue with the great work of Pope John Paul! I’m sure he’ll continue World Youth Day! And he’s just an awesome holy man…
ROMAN MARS: It just cracks me up, and it makes me smile. This person is happier about this than I’ve ever been about anything in my entire life. And he just makes me happy to hear him. “Two great popes, one after the other!” Anyway…
Well, this was fascinating stuff. I had no idea where all this stuff came from. I love it. Well, happy holidays to you and the family, Jay. And have a brilliant 2026.
JAYSON DE LEON: I appreciate it, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, Vivian Le, and Jayson De Leon. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.
Special thanks this week to Emily Labejof at the Luxor for help on Chris Berube’s story.
Next week Kurt Kohlstedt is going to take us Beyond the 99% Invisible City. It’s a very fun episode next week. And then we’ll be back with more mini stories in the new year.
Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars.
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.
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