The Wide Open

25:07One April day in 1978 Zig finds himself arguing the first court case of his life in front of the highest court in the country with the future of hundreds of families and this river that he loves at stake. He needed all the luck he could get. Zig had served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, and whenever he was going to go on a particularly hard hike, he'd wear this bright pair of green polyester boxer shorts. I found the lime green boxer shorts, and I was wearing those, plus I was wearing a snail darter t-shirt under my white shirt. I think I'd even reversed it so it didn't shine through. I tell you, being superstitious is not a sign of silliness, I think.

25:50It's sometimes part of what helps you gird your loins. And in this case, my loins were lime green polyester girded. To me, Zig's superstition makes sense. Zig's entire courtroom experience was arguing this case, just getting here to the highest court in the country. And the U.S. Attorney General was arguing for TVA. In terms of power, resources, and experience, Zig was outmatched. The proceedings start. We'll hear arguments first this morning in Tennessee Valley Authority against Hiram G. Hill. The mood of the courtroom made a difference, and the mood in the courtroom was, oh God, these guys shouldn't be here.

26:31Why did they bring this case? A big part of TVA's argument throughout has been, this project is more than 90 % done. there's a big structure spanning the river. They just need to drop some gates to sever the connection. They've already spent$100 million on the thing. The Endangered Species Act shouldn't be used to stop a project that's already nearing completion. And the Attorney General, Georgian with the booming foghorn leghorn voice named Griffin Bell, also tries to highlight the absurdity of the whole affair. He's brought a snail darter in a jar to the courtroom, and he holds it up for everybody to see.

27:05I have in my hand a daughter, snail daughter. It was Exhibit 7 in the case. Supposed to be a full-grown snail daughter about three inches in length. Is it alive? I've been wondering what it's in if it is. This makes Zig nervous. Arguments aside, Zig says it's a bad omen when your opponent gets that kind of laugh in court. And this is part of the same strategy Zig's opponents have been using since the start. They want the daughter to look tiny, ridiculous. When you're on your feet and arguing a case, to have the courtroom laugh at your opponent is gold. Zig gets up to deliver his part of the arguments.

27:52What purpose is served, if any, by these little daughters? Are they used for food? No, Your Honor. When Congress passed the law, it made it clear that the purpose of the act was to prohibit the extinction of species for a variety of reasons. One of them is where there was a food value at a direct economic value, others for scientific study and a philosophical question. So Zigg's saying that we might avoid extinction in general for economic or for philosophical reasons. But his argument for saving the snail darter in particular is something different. He says it's the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

28:31Its demise shows the havoc we've wrought on a watershed. It is highly sensitive to clean, clear, cool, flowing river waters. And after 68 dams through the TVA river system, 68 of them, one after another, the range of the snail darter has apparently been destroyed one by one until this last 33 river miles is the last place on Earth where the species and human beings as well have the qualities of the habitat. It's the last place it's been discovered, I take it. Your Honor, TVA has looked everywhere for snail darters. They've searched. Maybe the turning point in the case was when I got a laugh. Zig argues that the language of the Endangered Species Act is clear.

29:18The government can't take an action that jeopardizes a protected species. The facts are on his side. lower court judges had agreed that the Teleco Dam would obliterate the only known habitat of the snail darter. If it closes its gates, all signs point to extinction. The meat of his argument is all about the separation of powers. The court should enforce the law. If this seems like a ridiculous case, which, by the way, it's not, Zig says, it's not for the court to decide. That should go to Congress. The arguments wrap up. Thank you, Your Honor. Thank you, gentlemen. The case is submitted. I hadn't slept for two days, but I also feel this joy of optimism.

30:02Hank has just heard that he's passed the Tennessee bar, and so that's great. And so the students are jumping around. We whooped them. We got them. He goes outside to the flashing bulbs of the press. The mood is celebratory. Bell's youthful opponent said he sensed victory at hand and said Bell had an impossible case. I was very pleased we covered all of the issues that are involved in the case, especially... But he still needs to wait for the decision. And a couple months later, it arrives. The Supreme Court today handed down its decision in the case of the snail darter versus the Teleco Dam and Reservoir in Tennessee.

30:40The dam is a$116 million... This case has been identified as one involving a three-inch fish. The case also involves a$120 million dam, which was authorized by the Congress, and that dam is virtually completed and ready to operate. On a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court decides in favor of the snail darter. Because of this little fish, dam construction has to stop, even though it's about 90 % done. Chief Justice Warren Burger read the decision. In our view, the Congress has, wisely or not, decreed that the endangered species have priority over even a multi-million dollar dam. This case that started with the barroom conversation, funded by t-shirt sales, has prevailed against the power of the federal government.

31:40Today in what may be the Supreme Court's strongest endorsement yet for environmental protection, the snail darter prevailed. They've taken the case to the highest court in the country and, at least for now, stopped the dam. Our Constitution vests all such responsibilities in the political branches, and the matter is now in the hands of Congress. Justice Lewis Powell read the dissenting opinion. It was powerful. The court's decision casts a long shadow over the continued operation of even the most important projects, projects serving vital needs of society as well as national defense. If continued operation endangers the survival or the critical habitat of a newly discovered species, is a water spatter or cockroach, operation of the project could be brought to a halt.

32:34A three-inch fish defeated a 70-foot-high dam in the Supreme Court today. And unless Congress changes the law, the almost-finished multi-million-dollar Tennessee Valley Authority project will stand idle because of today's 6-3 court ruling. So you win in the Supreme Court. Do you recognize immediately that the battle's not over? Oh, absolutely. You don't get anywhere by compromising. You keep on fighting. And so I figured, you know, I fought the fight, but I'm going to keep on fighting, right?

33:09Ziggs won in the Supreme Court. But now the battle for the little T turns from the courts to Congress. He knows there's an assault on the fish and maybe even the Endangered Species Act coming. To get ahead of it, he'll have to win over both legislators and the people who vote for them. TVA, with deep connections in Washington and deeper pockets, was already a step ahead. The politicians and the powers within TVA, they went to Washington and their constituents were told it was stagnant. And we were backward, meaning dumb, and that we needed to be fixed. And we didn't need fixing. Zig learned the ins and outs of D.C.

33:57from fledgling green groups who'd roosted in the attic of a fast food joint for its cheap rent. He used code names to get information from agency insiders. My favorite is Daryl Stein, an anagram of snail darter. He'd learned how to handle the reins of D.C. politics with skill. But getting the public on his side was another story. TVA's message was clear and easy to understand. Build the dam. It's already almost done. It'll bring progress, jobs, and development. Zig's message is much harder to understand. Even though he's one in the country's highest court, the national media's relationship with the case has stayed more or less the same.

34:36It was the little fish versus the big dam builders in the Supreme Court. The snail darter is a fish less than two inches long. You wouldn't think that a fish this small could beat City Hall, much less a colossus as big as the Tennessee Valley Authority. The snail darker doesn't grow any bigger than a minnow, and that's a good thing, because it's already powerful enough to torpedo the$190 million Teleco Dam project in Tennessee. To Zig, the Teleco Dam was a clear example of pork barrel politics, spending for spending's sake. All along, he'd argued that the dam didn't make economic sense. There were alternatives that could preserve the river and the farmland and generate more for the economy than the dam ever would.

35:20Things like a non-intrusive industrial area and an interpretive trail that could draw tourists from nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But the press never grappled with that in a meaningful way. Here's Zig venting at the time. It's a shame the way the story has always been covered. Little fish, big dam, David and Goliath, that's the whole story. At least in the Bible, with David and Goliath, they talked about the battleground. Here you've got a valley that is not discussed in the press reports, and it's at the heart of the snail darter's survival, and it's at the heart of what the citizens have been fighting for for all these years.

35:59So as Zigg battles for the public and politicians, the congressional wheels get to turning. First, Congress amends the Endangered Species Act. The bill is championed by Tennessee's congressional delegation, and it creates a committee that can exempt projects from the ESA. It gets dubbed the God Squad. So the God Squad is agency leaders get together and they decide if it's okay to let a species go extinct, if the benefits to society outweigh the downsides of extinction. I'd change that and say that the heads of these agencies have been made into a new statutory body with the power to change federal law based on their vote.

36:46But they have to do it in person. It is a formal proceeding, like a court with a stenographer taking notes of the whole thing. Evidence is being brought in by the economists. Its extinction boiled down to bureaucracy. In January of 1979, the God Squad meets. On the agenda, a whooping crane case and the snail darter. Zig and some of the farmers whose land is on the line pack into a room of the Department of the Interior in D.C. Instead of the language of the law, like Zig debated in court, at issue now are facts and figures. Representatives of the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, the Army, they all analyzed the minutiae of the economics of the project.

37:32And one of the government bigwigs in the room, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, says, If you look at this project, it's 95 % finished. And if you take the total benefits of this project, for the final 5%, it still doesn't make economic sense. And the whole room breaks out into laughter. because everybody knows that this is a pile of crap. So the chairman goes around, does anybody have another opinion? No, they take a vote unanimously. This project is not worth completing. To clarify, it's not worth completing and it only has, what, 5 % of the whole project to go and it's still...

38:14Only 5 % of the budget still to spend and the total project benefits don't add up to 5%. By the actual numbers, the committee reports that the dam would generate about$6.5 million every year. But it would cost$7.2 million to operate. So it would be firmly in the red. Zig hoped for an explosion in the media. To him, this was major news. It wasn't covered by the press. Because it didn't fit the cliché. So the story, if it appears, is like on page 22. And it says, the fish wins again. The Endangered Species Committee today barred the Tennessee Valley Authority from completing the dam, which is almost finished, because it might doom the species.

38:57What is, excuse me, the drama of this is that for 19 years the farmers have been fighting, saying that this project made no sense. And now finally, an unprecedented, unique, extraordinary presidential-level economic interrogation has said they're right. The project will destroy more than it would ever create. And the farmers finally have won their land back. Except that if America doesn't know, then the pork barrel can keep on rolling.

39:42Now, you might think this is the end of the story for this nail-darter. It's won in the Supreme Court, and now it's won in this special economic analysis created by Congress, too. But Tennessee's congressmen weren't finished with the fish yet. There's one name in particular to keep in mind here, Howard Baker. He's from Tennessee, and he's Senate Minority Leader, with ambitions of running for president. This two-inch fish, which surely kept the lowest profile of all of God's creatures until a few years ago, has since become the bane of my existence and the nemesis of what I had fondly hoped would be my golden years.

40:17Baker was often called the Great Conciliator. He worked to cross party lines and make deals. His stepmother once said, he's like the Tennessee River. He flows right down the middle. I've been locked in mortal combat with the lowly snail darter for what now seems like an eternity. And I'm embarrassed to say that I've taken a sound trashing so far. Baker had voted for the ESA back in 73. Back then, most of the talk was about majestic, charismatic animals, eagles, wolves, and whales. Not cold, slimy stuff like the snail darter. And locally in Tennessee, polls showed the public was firmly on the side of the dam.

40:56Baker helps craft another bill. This called out the Teleco Dam in particular. It said, despite the Endangered Species Act, and any other federal law it might be breaking for that matter, the dam will be built. That bill doesn't get passed, but like a ghost, its spirit lives on. The idea gets tacked on to this much larger spending bill, and it gets ping-ponged back and forth between the House and the Senate. Until, eventually, the fate of the fish and the river and the farmers comes down to this one final hearing in a Senate committee. We beat it twice in the Senate and twice in the House. And then the third time it goes up again.

41:35So this is like a line in a huge appropriations or basically a budget bill, right? Billions and billions of dollars. So and this is just one line saying the dam can go ahead. Just one line. It's called a rider and it's stuck onto this Christmas tree so that we can't stop it. there will be people who want this law to go through because it's going to bring all kinds of money down to their congressional districts. By Zig's telling, as senators cast their votes, there was this clock ticking down. And with about 10 seconds to go, it becomes clear that Zig has won yet again, just by a hair. But then Howard Baker asks for a timeout just before the buzzer, a three-minute break.

42:17It's like a March Madness game, but for a budget bill. With the clock stopped, we'd won. Baker walks over to another senator who'd voted for the darter, puts his hand on his shoulder, and whispers something in his ear. This senator changes his vote. And so do four others. Time runs out. Zig, Hank, and Carolyn had taken this case from a passed-around hat in a meeting of farmers to the highest levels of government. They'd won in the courts, and for so long they'd held off the legislature. But all it took was this one loss. And that was the vote that killed the river. President Jimmy Carter signed the bill.

42:56The dam, the law said, would be built. Here's Hank Hill in a news report back then. It's sort of like saving a very close friend from a raging fire, only to have him run over by the fire truck after you pull him out. In the video, he's wearing a suit and tie. By now, Hank's finished law school and he's learned how to fit in, at least a little bit, with the legal establishment. But today, reflecting on the long battle for the snail darter, there's still that little bit of rebel in him. I would not change anything, except that I might have kicked Howard Baker in the balls, made him sit down that day.

43:35But probably not, because I'd have gone to prison for that. I don't think I'd have changed anything. At that moment, with the fate of the river sealed by Congress and the president, Ziggs still had hope. He saw one more legal mechanism that might save the valley, and it would involve leaving the snail darter behind. He worked with the Cherokee tribe, and together they filed one more lawsuit. This one argued that the little t is crucial to the tribe's First Amendment rights to freedom of religion. Not many Cherokee remained in the area. Tribal members had been removed in the 1800s, forced to march the so-called Trail of Tears, a grueling journey to Oklahoma in which more than 4 ,000 died, But lead plaintiffs were descendants of tribal leaders who claimed the area was vital to continue to gather medicine and that their culture originated from there.

44:26Dan McCoy, tribal chairman of the Eastern Band of Cherokee at the time, talked with a reporter about the case back then. Why did the tribe wait so long to file a lawsuit? Well, as you know, the Endangered Species Act that came into play that stopped the dam at one time, we felt here at Cherokee that this was going to go through and would halt it. But evidently we've lost that battle, you know, indirectly. One way to look at this last Hail Mary is cynical. This lawsuit, after the loss in Congress, is yet more proof that the snail darter itself was never all that important. Like the fish, the tribes in this view were just another tool.

45:06If anything, it shows the real goal here was to stop the dam and save the valley. But to be clear, tribal members had been involved in protests against the dam since the late 1960s. It's hard to overstate the historic and cultural importance of the area to the Cherokee. The Cherokees say they do expect to carry the lawsuit to higher courts, even the U.S. Supreme Court, if they have to. Richard Crowe echoed the sentiments of the Indian heritage. It was told to me by my parents that this is our beginning. it. We must not let it die, not let it go. If we have to give this up, it's going to be one of the greatest loss to my people now, to my people in generations.

45:58More than a decade earlier, University of Tennessee archaeologists, at the invitation of TVA, began hurriedly excavating sacred sites along the river, trying to get at graves and artifacts before the floodwater could. The remains of more than a thousand Native people were dug up, most of them relocated to a University of Tennessee basement. Department of the Interior officials had written that the archaeological remains there couldn't be matched by any other area of that size in the country. In a news report from back then, a reporter's talking with a tribal member, but they don't ID and by name, which maybe says something about the press's relationship with tribes in those days.

46:36What would Jimmy Carter do if we went down to Peanut County and start flooding some of his ancestors' graves? We'd be put in jail. And they would probably for life. We can't even die in peace. They'd dig us up 200 years later to see what killed us. While that case was in the courts, after years of protesting, flying to and from D.C. and pushing to stop the dam, demolition began on Carolyn Ritchie's home in mid-November 1979. That same day, Mama happens to go by our house because we still go by. It's still home. And she goes by and lo and behold, they're tearing it down. TVA's there and they're tearing it down.

47:16She flies on up to the house where we're staying at, gets some Instamatic cameras because it's all we had, some little Kodak drop in the thing and go. And so she stood there. and how she kept her hands steady. And we have snapshots, snapshots, snapshots of them tearing our things down. Everything she had ever fought for and written letters for, she took pictures of it. Some reporters back then had talked with her family about it. Jean Ritchie, her husband, and four children have lived in this home for 28 years. Get home, man! We raised our children here. We've lived here the most of our married life.

47:51A lot of happy memories. and the sound of children growing up.

48:04Not long after Carolyn Ritchie's home was demolished, the dam closed its gates, cutting off the flow of the river along with the cold, clean, moving water the snail darter needed to survive. As of 1125 this morning, the state of Tennessee has a new lake, the Teleco Lake. Zig still had hopes the damage could be mitigated through the Cherokee lawsuit. The gates to the dam could be lifted again. The flooding could stop. It may be the last time that we'll be able to see our sacred Cherokee village sites and burial grounds. And this area, our elders have always told us, this is where we began. Ultimately, Zig and the tribe lost the case.

48:49This was truly the end. How did that feel? I mean, terrible. I mean, I knew that the farmers had been right for 19 years. I knew that I'd been right for the last six years. I knew that there were so many good people who were hoping that the law and the facts and the common sense would prevail in the American democracy.

49:25It may feel like the tribes got short shrift here, and that's because they did. The story of the tribe's relationship with the Little Tennessee River became but a footnote to the drama of the little fish in the dam. Most of the tribal members involved in this case have since passed on. One person who was involved did get back to us, but he was in too poor of health for an interview. Big picture The idea that the dam could threaten a 3-inch fish Garnered the attention of a nation And stopped a more than$100 million dam For more than half a decade The idea that a dam could threaten a human culture Died quietly in the courts Teleco is still the last dam built by TVA Tell them this is where we live This is where we live This is a commercial for what's there today.

50:16A planned community for retirees. Three golf courses, a yacht club, a country club, small industrial parks. About 7 ,300 people live there on the banks of Teleco Lake. That's far short of the bustling city of 30 ,000 TVA originally thought would develop there. But people do go there to boat and paddleboard, fish for bass and catfish. And tell them it starts right here. at Teleco Village.

50:47But there aren't any more snail darters there. There's also a museum commemorating the birthplace of Sequoia, a Cherokee leader. The historic Cherokee towns of Chota and Tanasi, the ancestral homes of the Cherokee people, are underwater. There are memorials on the shore of the lake, near where the sites once existed. Today, Carolyn still goes back to what used to be the river, every now and then. In a way, it still feels like her home. She harvests the daffodils, she calls them Easter flowers, that bloom on what used to be her family's property. There are still old grain silos exposed above the water.

51:24It still pulls me. I can see where the barns were and where I stood on a little limestone elk crop and used to dry my feet in the spring when I first go barefoot and the sun was out and the rock was warm but my feet were wet from the dew and I'm pitty-patty and make footprints all over it. And that rock's the only thing that's recognizable. I'll always go back as long as I can drag myself up there. In 2022, more than 40 years after the Teleco Dam closed its gates, one more twist developed in the snail darter story. Whether on land, air, in the water, animals help shape our identity. and now one of those special creatures is celebrating a huge milestone.

52:12The snail darter never went extinct. In fact, the government declared its population had grown enough, it had recovered. It didn't need federal protections anymore. The snail darter fish is no longer considered endangered. Back in the 1970s, TVA frantically tried to relocate the fish to other rivers. Those days in court and the legislature, it was too soon to tell if any of it would take. But it did, and small natural populations were later discovered outside the Little Tee too. Today, it persists in small numbers on other rivers, not the Little Tee, in part because TVA has to continue to oxygenate the water and open a dam's floodgates at certain times of the year to clean the silty river bottoms.

52:53So the fish lived, but the hope it symbolized for Zig and Carolyn and many more perished. I still wake up in the night thinking of things I could have done, or if I'm still back there in my mind, things I can do to save the river. We lost everything. But I don't think unless you have a connection to the land, you can ever truly understand the loss, what that means.

53:30Today, the fish lives on in other ways, too. This moment showed all sides the power the Endangered Species Act could wield. For the first time, but far from the last, the Endangered Species Act became a way to achieve goals far grander than putting a stop to extinction. Next time on The Wide Open. A team of activists uses the power of the ESA to make a splash much larger than one little fish in one river. When we started doing environmental litigation, we were seeing like immediate and rapid success where we were no longer speaking truth to power. We were seizing power. During my dad's deposition, he said, I'd like to take them out the barn and beat the hell out of them.

54:23We're very reasonable people, dealing with a very chaotic and unreasonable world. If these agencies weren't so serially addicted to serving the corporate interests that they're supposed to be regulating, then they wouldn't be in this pickle.

54:59Our theme music is by Isaac Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodrigue, featuring Jordan Bush on pedal steel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodrigue. Jake Birch mixed this episode with help from Alice Sauter. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham, and fact-checking is by Victoria Traxler. Special thanks goes to Leah Swartz for the conservation education and support. I also want to thank everybody who's talked with me about the ESA, even those who didn't make it into this episode. along with, of course, Carolyn Ritchie, Zig Plotter, and Hank Hill. And also Chapman and McLean Way for the absolute treasure trove of Archive.

55:37Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review, post on social media, do all the things. Help us spread the word. We'll be back in a week with another episode of The Wide Open. This project was produced in collaboration with the Montana Media Lab at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The Wide Open is also a production of Montana Public Radio. The Wide Open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana.

56:14After the break, more of my conversation with Nick Mott.

56:24I'm back with Nick Mott. We just heard the second episode of his new series, The Wide Open. So, Nick, it turns out that the story of the snail darter is still ongoing because on January 3rd, there was a New York Times article that stated that there were some new ichthyologists that said that the snail darter might not actually be a species at all. Do you know anything about that What's going on with that? I'll say I know what's going on just a little bit because it really blew my mind. They did this genetic analysis that said the snail darter was basically identical to this other darter called the stargazing darter that exists elsewhere.

57:00And so it's not its own species at all. As a person who reported this story from 50 years ago and see this news, how does it affect your view of the outcome and the fight that you described? I mean, to me, it doesn't affect the outcome at all because the dam got built. Yeah, that's true. Is that the point? Yeah, the dam ended up getting built. But fundamentally, it shows, I think, that this battle and so many endangered species battles aren't just about the species. I think the species is deeply important, but the battle is about the ecosystem. And we don't have the legal tools to protect ecosystems in the same way that we do to protect species.

57:44So species become this proxy for something much bigger. And the dam was built and it did have that impact on that river valley. Like this darters that were living there aren't living there anymore because they can't survive there. It flooded out this beautiful, historically and culturally significant area that was also home to this darter. Like the issue was never only the species. The issue was the farmers and the tribes, like Zig repeatedly says in the episode, and the fish. Right, right. And so taken in totality, the fish is the thing that you can sue on. The fish is the thing that stopped the dam for the longest period of time as opposed to any other argument.

58:27But if everyone knows that they're really fighting about something else, but they're just using the ESA as a tool, like is that a problem? You know, as a reporter, I actually go back and forth on this. lawsuits using the Endangered Species Act have absolutely skyrocketed. And for a lot of federal officials, it's a major nightmare and headache and time suck. It stopped what some argue to be vital projects. But at the same time, I think it's more central than ever because the extinction crisis is worse than it's ever been. We're facing climate change, which the framers of the Endangered Species Act didn't foresee.

59:01In the case of the snail darter, we didn't have tools to protect it in any other way. And the fish did prove expedient, but it also proved effective. And sometimes that's what's necessary. Like for some of the most pressing ecological issues of our time, for climate, for extinction, for just loss of biodiversity overall, sometimes we need to have legal backstops. And, you know, our bottom line, making more money, you know, increasing GDP, whatever that is, isn't going to do it. Like we have to have these backstops. I think it's both of these things at once. Like it is sometimes stretched beyond its intended use.

59:39But sometimes it's important to be stretched beyond its intended use because we're facing challenges that nobody that wrote the law ever could have foreseen. Do you walk away from this like a fan of the ESA? Do you think this is the right tool? I am a fan of the ESA. I think it's done magnificent work to protect species, but it does have real problems too. It's really hard to remove protections for species. These lawsuits we've been talking about are spiraling and arguably out of control. And many people argue that, like, we didn't understand ecology back when it was passed. We need different and maybe stronger protections that can actually target ecosystems and save ecosystems rather than having to use a species to do so.

1:00:21Like maybe we need different laws that give us similar outcomes, but just specifically articulate what we're trying to do here. Yeah, yeah. They don't need to be kind of sneaky in nature. Like they don't need to be all built around this one species or this biological definition of a species to have value. It really could be save this area because this area has value for all these different reasons. Exactly. But it'd be so hard to get something like that passed. So we got to work with what we got. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it is such a good series. I love it so much. So thank you so much for talking with us and producing it.

1:00:58I just had a blast. Thank you for featuring the show. It's been wonderful talking with you.

1:01:07Subscribe to The Wide Open wherever you get your podcasts. Our interview with Nick Mott, what's produced by Joe Rosenberg and Kelly Prime. 99PI's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Kirk Holstead is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. For us, the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Laj Madon, Swan Real, Jacob Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99 % Visible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

1:01:44We are all over Blue Sky, and our Discord server is thriving. There's a link to those, as well as every past episode of 99PI. at 99pi.org.