Service Request #5: Dude, Where’s My Car?

KELLY PRIME: Well, I thought my car had been stolen. I was like, “Does that even happen?” I guess it does, but my car is really old. It’s, like, a 2011 Mazda 6, so I really didn’t know why anyone would want to take that car. 

DELANEY HALL: This is Kelly Prime. We work together at 99PI, and she lives in Brooklyn. And not too long ago, she had an experience that shook her. She and her friends had been out for the day in Coney Island, and they were stopping to get some takeout on the way home. They were looking for a place to park, not too far from the restaurant.

KELLY PRIME: And you know, this is Brooklyn, so there’s not a lot of parking available. And all the street parking looked like it was filled up. But on the right-hand side, we come upon this brightly lit, beautiful, empty parking lot in front of a 7-Eleven. 

DELANEY HALL: Irresistible, it sounds like. 

KELLY PRIME: Irresistable. An oasis. A lure, some might say. [LAUGHS] So we parked in the parking lot, pulled up, only car there, what a miracle, and just ran out into the supermarket and spent probably, like, 15 minutes grabbing our stuff. 

DELANEY HALL: They came back out, went to the 7-Eleven parking lot, and the car wasn’t there. 

KELLY PRIME: Disappeared. The car was gone. And I was sort of in denial for a second. I was like, “Well, surely…” I’m not that great at remembering where I parked anyway. But it’s not a big lot. And it’s super brightly lit. And there’s no cars there.

DELANEY HALL: So she and her friends went into the 7-Eleven to ask if anyone had seen anything. 

KELLY PRIME: We go to the register. And we’re like, “I think our car just got stolen. Did you see anyone steal a car?” And the guy was like, “No, it didn’t get stolen. It got towed.” And this guy is just acting like he’s never heard something more boring in his life. And he was like, “Yeah, like, 20 cars get towed a day. There’s a sign out there, call the number.” 

DELANEY HALL: Back out in the parking lot, they did find signs warning that unauthorized cars would be towed. One was in Cyrillic, one was covered in graffiti, and another was tucked away in a far corner of the lot. Kelly had the idea to pull up the Google reviews for the 7-Eleven, and they found dozens of people telling pretty much the same story. 

KELLY PRIME: It says, “I was their customer for many years, gave a great business for all those years till my car was towed less than six minutes’ absence.” “If you read the other one-star review, you’ll understand what’s going on.” “This store is running a scam. We bought drinks in the store and someone called the towing truck.” “Never buy anything from this store. Call 311.” “Terrible and unethical.” “They take your car hostage and get $150 from you.”

DELANEY HALL: I’m Delaney Hall and this is Service Request from 99% Invisible and Campside Media. We take your burning questions about infrastructure and we investigate. Kelly eventually got her car back that night, and we will get into that. But the whole experience left her with a question that she could not shake–or really a whole bunch of questions. 

KELLY PRIME: How is it that you can just park your car–15 minutes later, it’s gone? I don’t know who’s in charge of regulating this. I don’t know who empowers these tow truck guys–under whose authority are they working? It just feels like this black box of mystery that’s affecting clearly a lot of people if the Google reviews are to be believed. 

DELANEY HALL: Today, the black box of mystery of towing and impoundment… Who decides when your car gets taken? Who decides where it goes? And when things go wrong, which it turns out they do a lot, why is it so hard to fix? 

When we started trying to find the answer to Kelly’s question, I learned the term that describes this kind of practice. It’s called “predatory towing.” And it describes towers who actively hunt for cars to pick up and then demand inflated fees when owners try to get them back. Predatory towing happens everywhere. But in some places, it happens a lot. Detroit, Michigan, has a well-documented and long-running predatory-towing problem. And so that makes it a good case study for us. 

TOM BERRY: I mean, it’s a big business. It’s a multi-million dollar business, and they make a lot of money doing this. So that’s why they do it. 

DELANEY HALL: This is Tom Berry. He spent 35 years as a police officer in Detroit, and he retired as a lieutenant about a decade ago. Since then, he’s worked as a fraud investigator for insurance companies, and he has seen the towing industry from basically every angle. He’s been a cop who called tow trucks, and he’s been an investigator who’s uncovered how corrupt towing companies actually operate. 

DELANEY HALL: I’m curious, can you help us understand, in an ideal world, how is towing supposed to be a public good? What kind of service do towers provide when they’re working well? 

TOM BERRY: If it’s working good, which we all like to see, you live on Elm Avenue and you come out one day and you can’t get out of your driveway because somebody’s parked there. So, of course, you call the police because you got to go to work. And the police call the tow truck and the tow truck comes out and moves that car out of the way so you can go about your business. That’s a good deal. Also, we have accidents. Once they take care of the injured, we need to remove those cars from the road. The tow companies take them to a tow yard. So, they can be good. 

DELANEY HALL: In many cities, when there’s a crash that needs to be cleared or a vehicle that’s been abandoned on the street, police will call a private towing company to haul it away. That’s how it works in Detroit, too. Tom says that when he was a police officer, the department gave him a list of the tow companies that he was allowed to call. These were companies that had a contract with the police to cover a certain area of the city. And most officers would go down the approved list, calling companies until one was available to send a tow truck. But years later, as a lieutenant, Tom discovered that not all police officers were doing it that way. 

TOM BERRY: They were using a certain tower. They weren’t calling the scheduled towers, the towers on the list. They were calling their friend. 

DELANEY HALL: Some cops were calling tow companies they had a relationship with. And many of those companies were inflating their fees way beyond what a typical tow would cost. Then they’d pay kickbacks to the police officers who sent the business their way. 

TOM BERRY: And the corruption kind of swelled. It just keeps surmounting and eventually, you know, it comes crashing down. That’s what happened here in Detroit. 

DELANEY HALL: Eventually, there was a federal investigation into the corruption that Tom is talking about, and some cops went to jail. But that wasn’t the end of towing problems in the city. In fact, Tom says some of the most problematic towing doesn’t even involve the police. It involves situations like Kelly’s, where people get towed for parking in a private lot. 

DELANEY HALL: I’m curious if–kind of zooming out–you can walk me through how a predatory towing operation works. Like, what does a typical day look like? What are the most common schemes that you see? 

TOM BERRY: Well, I think that most tours are basically honest. First, I want to give them a little accolade. But so what happens to your friend there at the 7-Eleven? So, it’s illegal to park on private property and go to the doctor’s office, let’s say, or go do your shopping. So if you own a business in your city–McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever–and you have private citizens that aren’t patronizing your business, tying up your lot, and they keep coming in there and you’re losing customers because your lot’s full of people going to shop at Macy’s, then you’re mad. So you, the business owner, can contact, you know, Joe’s Towing and say, “Hey, I got a red Chevy out in my lot, can you come and get it? It’s been here for a half hour.”

DELANEY HALL: This practice makes sense. A business needs to keep its lot clear for actual customers. And that’s what happened to Kelly. She parked at a 7-Eleven, walked to a neighboring restaurant, and then came back to find her car gone. She technically broke the rules, and the tow company had the right to take her car. But there are sketchier tactics that some towers use to maximize the number of cars they can grab. For instance, spotters… 

TOM BERRY: Spotters are paid citizens that live in that area. I approach them and say, “Hey, I’m the owner of Joe’s Towing. And I know that your apartment overlooks the Burger King lot over here.” So we meet and say, “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. I want to watch this lot. And if you see somebody go into that lot and not use the business, you call me. And so I’ll be right there. And if I get the tow job, you get 50 or 100 bucks.” So tow truck makes cash. People make 50 bucks, no taxes. Everybody’s happy except the person that parked there. 

DELANEY HALL: [CHUCKLES] Except the person who parked there. So this is interesting. Some tow companies basically recruit a neighborhood network of eyes on the ground–of spies. 

TOM BERRY: That’s a good way to put it. “A neighborhood network.” Excellent. 

DELANEY HALL: People who are just keeping an eye on these various parking lots. And when they see someone park there and not use the business, they just give the tow truck driver a call and they get a kickback. 

TOM BERRY: Exactly! 

DELANEY HALL: In some cities, it’s illegal for tow companies to use spotters, but not in New York City or in Detroit. One tow company there became so notorious for using spotters they felt the need to put this little explainer video on their Facebook page. 

TOW COMPANY EXPLAINER VIDEO: A lot of people think a spotter is illegal, but it’s not. There’s nothing illegal about it. They’re just maintaining parking spaces for the property owner. 

DELANEY HALL: After the break, we’ll talk with a driver who used to work for that notorious Detroit tow company. 

[AD BREAK]

DELANEY HALL: Well, I guess to start, could you just introduce yourself, like your name and where you are and what you’re doing? 

SHANE NATION: My name is Shane Nation. I’m in Detroit, Michigan. And I currently tow. And I’ve been in the industry for about five years. 

DELANEY HALL: When I spoke with Shane, he was in his tow truck between calls on his lunch break. As far as I can tell, there aren’t a lot of tow truck drivers who are willing to talk with a journalist about the realities of the job, but Shane is one of them. He started in the industry when he was just 16 years old. 

SHANE NATION: Once I started working in the industry, it’s like a bug. It’s very hard to go do something where you’re not as free, like go sit in an office or inside all day long. And honestly, it’s not boring. There’s people that have been towing for 25 years, and they’ll tell you that they learn new stuff every day because it’s just genuinely that type of job. 

DELANEY HALL: So, for people who are not familiar with towing, what is a typical day like in the life of a tow truck driver? 

SHANE NATION: You normally sit in the truck. You play on your phone–do whatever to let time pass. And then you just wait for police calls to come in. Those could look like impounds, like somebody got arrested and we would tow their car to impound lot. It could look like a car crash and we have to be out there cleaning the scene on the highway or something. And it could be as simple as your mom broke down and she just needs a tow to the mechanic shop to get her car fixed. 

DELANEY HALL: Have you towed your mom? 

SHANE NATION: Yeah, not my mother. Luckily, she buys newer vehicles and gets warranties and stuff. But family members, yes. 

DELANEY HALL: So they’re like, “Ah, I know exactly who to call: Shane.”

SHANE NATION: Yeah, unfortunately, that is what seems to be what they do. 

DELANEY HALL: Shane’s first real towing job was with a company in Detroit that had a reputation for predatory towing. Shane doesn’t actually have a problem naming this company. He’s spoken on TV in Detroit about them. But we don’t want to name them in this episode. We don’t want Shane to get in trouble. 

SHANE NATION: So since day one there, they would say, “Hey, look, we’re on the news all the time. It is what it is. People don’t like their car getting towed.” So that’s pretty much how I was told there, like, “Hey, you’re going to see that we’re this, this, and that. And just don’t believe it because, you know, we’re just doing the public service and some people don’t appreciate that.”

DELANEY HALL: At first, Shane thought, “Maybe that’s just how the world works. People just complain to the media a lot.” Plus, he liked his job. He liked the trucks and getting greasy and how every day was interesting and new. A lot of the jobs he was doing were private property impounds or PPIs. That’s when a tow company has a contract with a property owner, like an apartment complex or a 7-Eleven, to tow cars that shouldn’t be there. And this company that Shane worked for was aggressive about it. They would work with spotters, like the ones Tom told us about. They had people sitting in the parking lot, watching and waiting for someone to park illegally. 

SHANE NATION: We had two different spotters. They would sit in tinted out cars and just wait for somebody to pull up. We would sit around the corner. And we wouldn’t be no further than five minutes away. 

DELANEY HALL: One of the lots Shane worked was across the street from the Med Center, which is a cluster of major hospitals in downtown Detroit. People would park in the apartment complex lot and then walk across the streets to visit someone in the hospital. And Shane’s job was to tow their cars the moment they walked away. 

SHANE NATION: We’d pull up right away, grab their car, and drive off with it. Now these people–sometimes they would come out and they’d be screaming, yelling, “I don’t have another car! How am I supposed to get to work? How am I supposed to take my kids to school?” And when I was 17, I’m not gonna lie, I had no remorse for them. I didn’t feel bad for them at all. But once I started getting older and having bills to pay and understanding that it’s genuinely hard out here in the world to survive–especially on a low income–and then somebody’s come in and taken your car when you’re just trying to visit, you know, your mom or your dad that’s in the hospital, I can understand now that’s just a really crappy thing to do to somebody. 

DELANEY HALL: Shane says he would sometimes spend whole shifts sitting in his truck near that one parking lot waiting for spotters to call in tows because that single lot was sort of a gold mine. 

SHANE NATION: It’s 100% returns other than the fuel you used on profits. So, I mean, they’re making a killing just towing 15 to 20 cars a day off that one lot. And they have all of downtown Detroit. So, I mean, it’s a big operation. 

DELANEY HALL: Given the company’s reputation, sometimes the Detroit police would show up to see what was going on. Or they’d respond to complaints from people who were getting their cars towed. But the company was ready for that. Shane says they trained their employees on what to say when the police arrived, which laws to mention in their arguments for towing a certain car. Shane’s interactions with the public weren’t any better. It was all so confrontational. 

SHANE NATION: They would always beg and plead, and that’s understandable, especially if you don’t have the money. It was standard. I was constantly, for lack of a better word, the a-hole in every predicament I’ve ever– Every interaction I had, I was the aggressor. And it just wasn’t a good feeling. 

DELANEY HALL: If you think about it, it is kind of wild that these non-law enforcement private companies are allowed to just take people’s unattended vehicles. Shane says that bad practices are common in the world of private property impounds because there are basically no checks in the system. 

SHANE NATION: Definitely. It’s the least regulated. You’re not pulling up on a police scene with police there. And you’re not going up on a broken down vehicle with the car’s owner there. You’re pulling up an unattended vehicle that you have full access to. And I mean, you just hook up this car and you call the police nearby and you go, “Hey, I’m towing this car because it’s parked incorrectly on this lot.” There’s no verification of this whatsoever. You just call the police and you tell them you’re doing it and they put the car in lien so it can’t be reported stolen. That’s all it is to PPIs. And there’s just no verification in the system. So everybody exploits it. 

DELANEY HALL: So you’re doing this at this apartment complex a lot. You’ve gotten a little older. You’re like, “This doesn’t feel good” because you understand kind of the implications of having your car towed. It’s expensive. It’s a huge headache. So what happened from there? 

SHANE NATION: So it was never that I wanted to continue doing it. It was kind of the fact that I had bills to pay and my own family to feed is why I stayed there for so much longer after that time period. But yeah, I hated it every day after that. It made me lose my love for towing. And I genuinely just wanted out in any way, shape, or form by the end of it. 

DELANEY HALL: Shane was having a full-blown crisis of conscience. He dreaded going to work and spending all day towing people who he believed didn’t really deserve it. Eventually, he left the predatory tow company. He thought he might go back to working in fast food. But instead, he started with a different company, where he was doing different kinds of tows. 

SHANE NATION: I just didn’t want to do PPIs. That was my biggest thing. Private property impounds feel like they’re just not necessary, at least in the way they did it. It was just unnecessary. I did them so much 24/7 that I just didn’t want to do them ever again. And that was my main thing. 

Where I’m at now, all I do is services. I’m not towing anybody’s car because I want to. It’s simply they call or the police call and I’m going there to either clean up the wreck or I’m there to get those people home. Especially where I’m at now, it’s never the case that I’m going there for any other reason other than to service them. 

DELANEY HALL: These conversations with Tom and Shane helped me understand so much better what might have happened with Kelly’s car. She was involved in a private property impound situation. She parked at that 7-Eleven illegally. There may have been a spotter that saw her do it. And the company probably had a relationship with a tower, who was contacted as soon as she walked away. So, after standing in the parking lot trying to figure out what to do, she and her friends decided to call the tow company. 

KELLY PRIME: And so we called the number. And we actually had to call, like, multiple times to get the information we needed because we’d call and then they would hang up or we’d call and sort of not get the right information. 

DELANEY HALL: At one point, Kelly asked the tow company to confirm that they had her car by reading back the license plate number. 

KELLY PRIME: And they’re like, “We can’t give you the license plate.” And at one point they were like, “Yeah, we have your car, but come back tomorrow.”

DELANEY HALL: It was all extremely confusing. But eventually Kelly took a cab home to let her dog out for a walk, and her friends decided to go get the car themselves. The impound lot was about a mile from the 7-Eleven, and they had to walk there. They eventually found the place. And through the holes in the front gate, they could see Kelly’s car. 

KELLY PRIME: They got there and there was a building that was brightly lit up inside, indicating that perhaps the office was not actually closed. But they were brought into this building. And the guy was like, “It’s gonna be $350 to get your car back because the office is closed right now.”

DELANEY HALL: Wow. That’s a lot of money. 

KELLY PRIME: Yeah, especially– I’m pretty sure the sign said 125. Like, the sign had a pay scale on there. And he was immediately like, “That’s gonna be 350.”

DELANEY HALL: So there’s sort of this negotiation going on. 

KELLY PRIME: Oh, yeah! There’s totally a negotiation. And it included, like– At first they said, “Oh, because I’m not physically there, that’s an extra fee.” And then they said, “Oh, the business is closed. It’s after hours. So that’s another fee.” But there wasn’t actually a fee structure. It was just a negotiation, like a bartering. 

DELANEY HALL: They were just making it up. 

KELLY PRIME: Yeah! They kidnapped my car and then, like, ransomed it for an uncertain amount of money based on how much cash my friends had on hand. Like, it’s crazy they can do that. 

DELANEY HALL: But according to Tom, the retired cop, toll companies do this all the time. They pretend they’re closed so that people have to come back the next day, and that allows them to inflate the storage fees they charge. They demand to see registration and insurance, which is often in the car that’s been impounded, and so people have to run around gathering new documents. 

TOM BERRY: Might take them a day–might take them two days–to go get that information and bring it back to satisfy the tow company. Meanwhile, another 50 bucks a day. Another 50 bucks today for keeping your car. 

DELANEY HALL: Often, these businesses don’t disclose their fee structures. And even when they do, the fees can be manipulated. 

TOM BERRY: “So, well, it came in on the second at 11 o’clock at night. And here it is the third. And it’s one o’clock in the morning. Well, that’s two days’ storage. That’s $110.” “Well, wait a minute! My car’s only been here for two hours!” “Yeah, but that’s the way it is.”

DELANEY HALL: Because it has technically touched two days, even if it was just a few hours in the middle of the night. I see. 

TOM BERRY: Exactly. 

DELANEY HALL: Kelly’s friends were lucky, if you can call it that, because they showed up that same night. They eventually paid $200 to get the car back. 

KELLY PRIME: It’s really, really sketchy. Like, none of this feels legal. You can just take someone’s car, ransom it, and figure out an amount of money between you. And then they said, “No receipt.” So they just had to pay their $200. How else are you gonna get your car back? Like, these five guys have it. What else are you gonna do? 

DELANEY HALL: It almost seems like the towers don’t want you to get your car back. Or, at the very least, they might not mind if you don’t retrieve your car. 

TOM BERRY: Well, what some of these tow companies do–they know good cars and bad cars. You know what I mean by that? “Hey, that’s an older car, but it’s got good treads on it. Good struts. You know, it looks pretty okay. I could probably get some money for that.” So they kind of pull that to the side of the auction that they have every 30 days. Cars are valuable. 

DELANEY HALL: So this is another way they’re making money.

TOM BERRY: [LAUGHING] Exactly. 

DELANEY HALL: They hold a person’s car until the fees are so high that the person can’t afford to retrieve it. And then they sell that car at auction, scrap it for parts, and make money on the car itself. 

TOM BERRY: That’s why it’s a multi-million dollar business–towing is. And people don’t realize that. 

DELANEY HALL: For that reason, Tom says bad towers might target cars that look a little bit junky or old–like Kelly’s 2011 Mazda–cars that look like they might be underinsured or their owners might not have hundreds of dollars on hand to get them back. 

TOM BERRY: Because they’re easy targets. And generally those owners of those cars don’t squeak. They don’t make complaints. I don’t know if that’s their reasoning, but it sounds reasonable to me. Go after the low hanging fruit versus the high hanging fruit. 

DELANEY HALL: Towers can get away with this in part because there’s very little oversight. The towing industry is regulated by a patchwork of laws across the country. They vary state by state. According to research done by a consumer watchdog group, only about half of states set a cap on towing or impoundment fees, more than 30 states don’t require rates to be displayed or disclosed, 13 states don’t even require the towing company to notify you that your car has been towed, and in 34 states, kickbacks are legal, all of which creates a massive gray area. 

DELANEY HALL: Some of what they do just sounds like aggressive business practices, like towing companies working and proactively to tow illegally parked cars and to make money. And I guess I’m wondering, when do you think it crosses the line from going hard for business to something more like fraud? 

TOM BERRY: I don’t know where the line is, but there’s certainly a wavy line there that nobody knows about. 

DELANEY HALL: It’s interesting what you’re saying because it strikes me as part of the problem, which is that you hear about these tactics that bad towers use, and they just seem unfair. And yet, it’s not totally clear they’re breaking some law. 

TOM BERRY: You’re absolutely right. There’s a big gray area there. Huge! So the only way to stop it is get a law. Make a law or an ordinance in the city you can make it. And prosecute them! And don’t take your foot off the gas. And unfortunately, many cities don’t fight it until it’s so out of control that now they can’t get it all back in the box. You know, the box has been opened and that crap’s flying all around. How are you going to get that box closed again? It’s difficult. And that’s what happens when you let little things like the little tow… “Hey, you charged for four days’ towing, you only had it one.” When you do that, if you don’t stop it, it’s just gonna be six days, seven days because that’s just what happens. That’s just human nature. It’s just going to keep growing. So the only way to stop it, in my opinion, is sort of nip it in the bud. Stop it when it’s small so we can control it. 

DELANEY HALL: Tom’s advice is to pass regulations and then crack down. But some cities have tried a different approach. They’ve just cut private towers out entirely, and they’ve set up their own public towing operations. But getting that going can be a heavy lift. It requires a city to acquire land for the impoundment lot and trucks to do the towing and people to staff the operation. 

DELANEY HALL: How common is it for a city to have their own trucks–their own lot? 

TOM BERRY: I don’t think it’s common. I think it is a rarity. 

DELANEY HALL: And why isn’t it more common? 

TOM BERRY: It’s a lot. Who’s gonna oversee it? Are you gonna have policemen oversee it? There’s so many cost considerations, I think, that they just don’t wanna do it. They want somebody else to do it, which I would too. I think that’s what happens with the cities; they don’t want to deal with it. 

DELANEY HALL: What’s one piece of advice you have for someone whose car has just been towed? 

TOM BERRY: Of course, it’s a situation. If it’s legitimate, you had an accident and the police come out in a normal city and they’re gonna tow it to their yard, that’s the way it should go. If you got insurance on your car, let it run its course. Make your claim. Call your company. Make an insurance claim. But be aware of, especially in parking, private property tows. It’s extremely lucrative. When you pull into a lot, if you see a sign that this area is controlled by Tom’s towing and “violators will be towed,” pay attention to those signs because a lot of those places got somebody watching. And they’re gonna tow you. Be careful where you park. 

DELANEY HALL: What I hear you saying is basically don’t get towed. Do not get yourself caught up in this situation. 

TOM BERRY: If you come out and they got the car on the hook, okay, pay the drop fee. Pay it. Just pay it right down. You’re saving yourself time, aggravation, trouble, problems… Just pay it. Try to negotiate it down. And this is what I tell people. Let’s say it’s 400. Say, “Oh my God, would you take 250?” Barter. Barter. Barter. 

DELANEY HALL: But get your car back. 

TOM BERRY: Yeah, get your car back. Don’t leave it. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. 

DELANEY HALL: We started with the question. 

KELLY PRIME: How is it that you can just park your car at a 7-Eleven, 15 minutes later it’s gone and you have to negotiate a ransom with some guy in a dark parking lot and that is an actual business? 

DELANEY HALL: And we have a pretty good answer. The reality is that towing regulation varies state by state. But in many places, towing companies have contracts with private businesses to monitor and tow illegally parked cars in their lots. Some towers use spotters. Those are people who keep an eye on parking lots and call the tow company as soon as they see someone park there illegally. Some tow companies don’t post their fees and then bargain with people once they show up to try and reclaim their car. And in many states, there are few regulations governing how tow companies operate. 

With that, Kelly, consider your service request resolved. 

Today on the show, you heard Kelly Prime, an editor with 99% Invisible. You also heard Tom Berry, a retired police officer who’s now an investigator for the insurance industry, and Shane Nation, a tow truck driver in Detroit. 

What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Is there something in your life that you use every day but you don’t actually understand how it works? Submit your service request by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to servicerequestat99pi.org. 

And remember, if your car gets towed, try to negotiate the price down. Or better yet, don’t get towed in the first place. 

I’m Delaney Hall. Infrastructure is everywhere. And we’re here to help you decode it. 

Service Request is a production of 99% Invisible and Campside Media. The show is produced and fact-checked by Julia Case-Levine and edited by Shoshi Shmuluvitz. Mix by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. Theme song and music by Swan Real. Additional editing by Emmett Fitzgerald and Vivian Le. Show art by Aaron Nestor.

Roman Mars is our boss at 99pi. Kathy Tu is our Executive Producer. Matt Shaer is the Executive Producer at Campside. We are a part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99pi, at 99pi.org.