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The Unseen Trauma of America’s Drone Pilots

Killing targets in remote attacks has had a deep and troubling effect on those who fly the missions.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Over the past five years, a series of investigations by The Times has revealed the degree to which America’s air wars, which were supposed to be the most precise in history, have instead brought terror and tragedy to the civilians on the ground.

Today: My colleague, Dave Philipps, follows up on that reporting with a look at the toll that the program has taken on the drone pilots who have carried it out.

It’s Monday, May 9.

Dave, how did you first come to the story of Kevin Larson?

dave philipps

It was really out of the blue. Kevin Larson was this decorated drone pilot flying the Reaper drone. And he’d flown hundreds of missions, gotten a number of medals for it. And then he was charged with drug possession and distribution and convicted. And it was kind of a small case and a routine conviction, except for one thing. After the verdict came down, he took off out of the courtroom, basically ran.

michael barbaro

Hmm!

dave philipps

And a few days later, as the police were chasing him, they cornered him in a rural valley in the mountains of California, and he shot himself.

michael barbaro

Wow.

dave philipps

That day I got a call from a military lawyer who I’d known for years who had been in the courtroom when this young officer took off and had learned about his death. And what he said to me was, you should try to look into this. Because this isn’t just a case of drug use. I think it’s something more. I know what unit he was in. And there’s just probably a lot more to this young man’s story than just that he was running from a pretty minor conviction.

michael barbaro

So this guy calls you and says, there’s something bigger here and I think you should look into it.

dave philipps

Right. And that posed its own challenge because looking into the drone program of the military is almost impossible. Everything it touches is either secret or top secret. And then you have the additional problem that if you try to look at the background of any individual soldier, airman, officer, that’s really hard, too. Because there’s all sorts of laws that keep you from seeing personnel information, secret court files, or confidential court files. So it was a story that I immediately recognized, yes, there could be something here. But how do you get it?

michael barbaro

So what did you do?

dave philipps

Sometimes with a deceased service member the family is the best bet. And so I started there. And what his friends and his family said is that this was a really exceptional young man, a guy who’d been an Eagle Scout, a really sort of straight arrow who’d been raised by two police officers in Yakima, Washington, and gone to church every Sunday, played a lot of sports, always wanted to fly. And so he joined the Air Force. But when he joined the Air Force he was basically told, yeah, you’re going to fly, but you’re never going to leave the ground. We’re going to put you into the drone program.

michael barbaro

Interesting.

dave philipps

And what his mother said, that first he was disappointed but then he really seemed to like it. Because during the last 10 years, the drone program is really where all the action was. And he got to fly a lot of missions, more than 600 combat missions and fired about 180 missile strikes.

But his parents said that their son, who outwardly was doing amazing, was just this well-liked, gregarious, good looking guy who had a young wife who he loved. At the same time, they worried about him. Because the missions that he was doing, he never talked about them, at least not in detail. But occasionally he would make some kind of a side about what he was doing and what types of people his drones were really targeting. And his parents could tell that it was really bothering him.

michael barbaro

So his family doesn’t really know all that much about his work during his lifetime. But what they do know is that it has left him pretty uncomfortable?

dave philipps

Right. Right. And so not only did his parents not know the details, but there wasn’t much of a way for me to get the details. And I knocked on a lot of doors of men who had flown drones with him. And I don’t think a single one even responded to me. Because their community is so secretive.

And so, to be honest, I thought that this was one of these stories that was probably really interesting but that I couldn’t tell. There just wasn’t enough there. And for the time being I put it aside, not knowing if I’d ever get to come back.

But then something I didn’t expect happened that opened it back up again.

michael barbaro

Which is what?

dave philipps

We started doing some reporting on airstrikes in the fall of 2021 that really revealed that there was a pattern of problems in how they were picking targets. And the result was all sorts of people that shouldn’t be a legal military target — passerby, women, children, people just sitting in their homes or their cars, were getting killed by drone strikes.

michael barbaro

Right. Something we have covered here on the show.

dave philipps

Yeah. And in that process, I talked to a number of people who were active in the drone world, who were telling me what they saw. They were my sources for this reporting. But while I was talking to them, it was very clear that the work that these men and women were being asked to do was really troubling to them.

And, of course, that wasn’t the story I was writing at the time, right? We were writing a story about how there were systematic problems that were killing people that the government wasn’t admitting to. But as I went on and I was talking to all sorts of drone crew members, I asked myself, well, isn’t this the story of Kevin Larson? Aren’t they experiencing the same stuff? I mean, they were doing the same work during the same time period in the same types of units.

And that allowed me to pick the story back up. Because all of a sudden, I had this chorus of people who could speak for Kevin’s experience when he couldn’t. What was challenging is finding some that would actually go on record because it’s such a secretive community. And in some cases, talking about it can even be illegal. But through some work we were able to get a number of people on record. And one of them was willing to talk to me on tape. He’s a drone pilot named James Klein.

dave philipps

Hi, can you hear me?

james klein

How are you, man?

dave philipps

Doing well. How are you doing?

michael barbaro

And what should we know about James Klein?

dave philipps

Well, he had been in the Air Force for years before becoming a drone pilot.

james klein

I loved traveling. I loved the missions we were doing. We went down to Haiti when the big earthquake happened. We went to Fukushima and got people out of there and brought supplies when that happened. I really enjoyed getting to see new places, getting to meet new people, getting to hear new stories and helping people out. So that’s what I was really hoping to do as a pilot.

dave philipps

And he had been an enlisted guy, a guy helping out on a crew of one of those giant transport planes. And he shifted over to the officer side because he wanted to fly. And he ended up in a drone squadron.

james klein

I was like, you know what? I can be at roughly the forefront of this, get to learn new technology and see how it plays out.

dave philipps

What that meant for him was he was living in Las Vegas, and he was commuting every day several miles north of the city to a remote base called Creech Air Force Base.

james klein

It’s all in a classified area. It’s on a skiff. There’s no windows, no cell phones allowed. So you leave all your cell phones out.

dave philipps

And there essentially the drone pilots would go through a secure top secret door every day. And inside they had cockpits that were linked by satellite to drones on the other side of the world.

james klein

So if I look to my right, immediately I have my sensor operator. Pilot’s always in the left. Sensor is always in the right.

dave philipps

And next to him was someone who was operating the cameras and the sensors. And they would receive orders to go on missions, to fly the drone to a certain spot, to watch, to aim and occasionally to fire. But it was ultimately an office job. You were working shifts, commuting sitting in a chair, even though you were doing combat.

james klein

So these things can start at 24-plus hours, depending on how you use them, and depending on how far the base is and everything like that. And they have cameras on them that are just mind boggling. And they have other technology on there that’s just — it’s insane. And what they can do is crazy.

dave philipps

James Klein, when he started this work, he really was a supporter of it. Because he felt that this tool, the Predator drone and the Reaper drone, they were amazing. Because he could fly over some remote valley in a dangerous land where, in the past, you might have had to put 100, 200 Marines. But here you could have a very precise weapon system with an amazing camera. And he felt that if that was used right and deliberately, it was better than any alternative.

james klein

And for a year-and-a-half, two years, you’ll build your spider network up. And you’ll find out, OK, this guy’s always meeting with him. And we’ve got some assets on the ground or whatnot that are also helping us. Oh, we have found this network and now we can paint a picture, and we know who’s doing what, what’s really important. Maybe we don’t want to kill all these people. Maybe we want to do something else with these people. Maybe —

dave philipps

And he said that for a long time it was used right. They had very strict protocols in place. They would watch a target to figure out who is the exact, precise, high-level leader that we need to hit to take this threat apart. And they would wait for the moment when they could do that without causing any other casualties.

michael barbaro

So he’s comfortable with the checks and balances and the decision-making process that he is participating in.

dave philipps

Yeah, at least at first. You got to understand that the pilots, they launch the missile. But they don’t get to make the decision about who they launch it at.

james klein

I mean, from a pilot’s perspective, we’re just a taxi driver. That’s all we do. We —

dave philipps

That comes from someone that they universally refer to as the customer.

michael barbaro

Hmm!

dave philipps

And the customer could be a lot of different people. It could be the C.I.A. It could be a colonel who’s running a bunch of ground troops on the ground in Afghanistan. It could be a secret Special Operations strike cell that’s looking at targets and saying, hey, OK, here’s the bad guys. Hit them now.

james klein

We drive the signals intelligence that we have on the aircraft. And we drive the Hellfires to wherever the customer requires them to be. And then we position the aircraft the way we know best for what they want.

dave philipps

Whatever the customer wants, the pilot is supposed to give it to him.

james klein

The initial customer I came in with cared only about building up those networks. And I would almost say elimination was secondary to that. It was much more important for them to build those networks and be able to, like I said, and maybe not even eliminate, maybe do something else on the ground.

dave philipps

And that was fine when he started, because he had a lot of faith in the customer. The customer seemed to be deliberate and well-informed and patient.

james klein

The biggest shift for me was changing squadrons. I changed squadrons. I had a new customer. It —

dave philipps

But as time went on, the customer started to change.

james klein

Whereas, the first customer, oh, you found something? Let’s follow it for two years. This customer might be like, you found something? Give us 30 minutes here real quick. All right, pass on it, or hey, we think we should be doing something with this. Prepare to strike.

dave philipps

Late in the Obama administration ISIS invaded Syria and Iraq. And they loosened the restrictions on who could be the customer. And then President Trump came into the White House and he loosened them even more. And so at one point the customer was sometimes the President of the United States or more often a high-level general or admiral.

But over time, as these rules loosened, the customer became oftentimes a mid-level enlisted person on the ground. And the targets that they were picking and approving were much less careful. What drone pilots were telling me about this era was that the strikes became — I think problematic is probably too nice of a word.

A rushed strike might be targeting what people thought was an enemy command post, except it’s a school and it’s full of civilians or it’s a market. Or the car that they thought was carrying the terrorist leader, in fact, was carrying a family. So James, he was not only watching this, but he was launching a lot of this stuff. And he became very troubled because he lost faith that the customer really knew what they were doing.

james klein

So my sensor and I were flying. And we’re flying around this town. I believe at the time it was during the ISIS thing. And at the time —

dave philipps

One story he told me about was a time when he was asked to watch a river that ISIS was using to transport supplies.

james klein

So we’re watching this river. And there’s ISIS on both sides of it. So we see two guys walking. And there’s a lot of dust in the air on this day. But you see two guys, and they’ve got two things on their back, which, you know, the JTACs, like do you think those could be AKS or anything like that?

dave philipps

His drone was told by the customer to follow two men along the river in Syria because they appeared to be armed.

james klein

And then the analyst goes, hey, those kind of look like fishing poles. And we look at them, and we’re like, oh yeah, those are fishing poles. We didn’t know what they were before, but the more they said it, they were fishing poles. And five minutes later they’re down there fishing.

dave philipps

And he and his essentially co-pilot — the man whose job it is to look at the video feed — said, wait a minute. These guys, they’re not armed. And the customer’s response was, well, stay ready to fire anyway because we might need to take these guys out.

james klein

I went like, hey man, these are fishing poles. That’s what the analyst is saying. Why are we still looking at these? And he’s like, well, you just never know.

dave philipps

And his response, essentially, was no. He refused to fire that day.

james klein

And my sensor on that day was one of the guys that had come from the first unit with me. And both of us were just staring each other like, what are they doing? What are these guys doing? Why are they so adamant about shooting? Why does this guy still want to shoot two fishermen?

dave philipps

And that afternoon he prevails. The shot is not taken. These men are not vaporized on the side of the river. And you would think that he’d feel pretty good about that. But in the moment, I think that was the point where he started to really doubt what he was doing and the system as a whole.

james klein

And it was at that point that I realized, what if I didn’t want to push back? Then yeah, maybe there’s two fishermen who end up dying that day.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Dave, this is clearly a kind of turning point for James?

dave philipps

Well, yes and no. Like it’s a turning point in his attitude towards the drone program and whether it’s right or wrong. But it’s not a turning point for the Air Force. The Air Force still expects him to show up to work the next day.

michael barbaro

Right.

dave philipps

And that’s really hard, because he doesn’t know what the customer is going to ask him to do. He may ask him to target another pair of fishermen or something worse. And that really, really starts to weigh on him.

james klein

Depression shows in different ways. For me it was, I’m just going to shut myself inside — basically inside myself, not tell anyone about what’s going on, just be a curmudgeon all the time.

dave philipps

It affects his sleep. It affects his mood. Every day he wakes up fearful of going in and what he’s going to be asked to do. And it basically makes him totally miserable.

michael barbaro

And is he able to talk to anyone about all this, inside the military?

dave philipps

Well, that’s really tough. Because the Air Force, for sure, has spent a lot of money and effort in getting mental health professionals into these drone squadrons. So there is some help there. But James, he didn’t necessarily see that as help he could use. Because I think there’s a lot of stigma in the military. And if you say the wrong thing, you’ll be taken off of flight status. And he just wasn’t sure that going in and talking to someone would do any good. And it might do a lot of harm.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm. So it doesn’t seem like much of an option. So basically he’s stuck.

dave philipps

Right.

james klein

I knew in my head I was sabotaging my life.

I was almost leaning into how much I disliked it.

dave philipps

So basically, he decided to just suck it up.

james klein

So I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. I would focus on it intentionally all day almost. And then question myself on why I felt so terrible all the time.

dave philipps

Pretend nothing was wrong.

james klein

My wife’s confused as to why I’m not really talking anymore. I’m always moody. She’s trying to help. But I’m not letting her.

dave philipps

But pretending nothing was wrong at work didn’t necessarily work at home.

james klein

She would just be like, how’s work going? I’d be like, it’s going great. And she’d be like, do you want to go out and eat? No, I don’t. Well, you just went out to the bar with all your friends last night. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t want to go. I just want to go to sleep. Why? Didn’t you sleep last night?

And like as we were having the conversation, I’d be like, I really should be hanging out with her more. I should. But then I’d be like, no, you shouldn’t be happy right now, so don’t go do it. Don’t be happy.

dave philipps

The stress, the anger that he was feeling inevitably was taken out on his relationship with his wife.

james klein

And then I would use that the next day, of like, oh, now your marriage isn’t doing great. Great, look what you’ve done kind of thing.

dave philipps

He couldn’t talk about what was bothering him because it was all classified, but it was still eroding their relationship.

james klein

The trigger point was, she’s like, I can’t do this.

dave philipps

And finally it comes to a head when his wife says, I think I need to leave you.

james klein

And I was like, I completely understand. I completely understand why you can’t do this. Because I know what I’m doing. I’m fully aware of what I’m doing to myself.

dave philipps

And this is the moment when he realizes that he really needs to take action.

james klein

Where I was like, you know what? I need to get out of this. So I went to the commander. I said, I can’t do this anymore. I need something different.

dave philipps

And he ends up getting transferred to another unit where he’s still working with drones. But he’s not anywhere near missions where he pulls the trigger. And he spends a couple of years doing that until he finishes out his Air Force contract and leaves the military.

When I spoke to him he was on the other side of this experience. He works in insurance now. He’s reconciled with his wife. And he and his wife have a child. But he’s still to this day I think trying to make sense of those years that he was in the seat of a Reaper and trying to heal from them.

michael barbaro

So for James, the only way to solve this is for him to leave the drone program altogether?

dave philipps

Right. Because you can’t fix the program. You can’t continue to refuse to do what the customer wants. Pilots have very little say in all of this, even though physically they control everything. And what he said is that there were a lot of other people like that. People that just couldn’t take it. And so they quietly sort of drift out of the system.

michael barbaro

So I’m really curious, since James’s story was a way for you to understand the experience of Kevin Larson, this drone pilot who took his own life, what exactly did it end up revealing to you?

dave philipps

Well, Kevin Larson’s father had told me this story, and I didn’t really get it until I talked to guys like James Klein. It was a story where one day, he was sitting with his son at home and asked him, so what are you doing down at that Air Force base? And his son, sort of in a moment of candor, shook his head and told him, on this recent mission I was told to go track an Al-Qaeda terrorist and kill him. And then once he was dead, I was told to track the body and follow it to the cemetery, and then whoever showed up for the funeral, I was told to kill all of them, too.

michael barbaro

Wow.

dave philipps

And his dad was really troubled by it. And he said his son was too. And, of course, who wouldn’t be? But I didn’t understand that a lot came along with that. Not only is the customer asking you to do things that you don’t want to do, but you don’t know if the customer is going to do the same thing the next day and the day after that. And you don’t feel that you have anyone to turn to that you can talk to about it. In fact, because of the stigma of not being “real combat troops,” quote, unquote, you’re not even sure if you’re deserving of feeling that trauma.

And so all of that stuff, it just stays inside and slowly erodes these pilots. It erodes their relationships. It erodes their marriage. It erodes their selves. And that helped me make sense not only of how heavy that experience was for Kevin Larson but why this guy, who had been an Eagle Scout, raised by cops, going to church every Sunday, why he ended up with a drug conviction that ended his Air Force career.

michael barbaro

So explain that.

dave philipps

Well, the types of drugs he was doing was very specific. It was mushrooms and it was MDMA, which is commonly called Ecstasy or Molly. Those are two psychedelic drugs. And they are both drugs that there is a lot of clinical evidence to show they really can help with depression, with P.T.S.D. And what his wife said is that it was working. For weeks afterwards she would see an improvement in his mood, in his sleep, in everything.

But, of course, this type of thing is also completely illegal in the military. And when the Air Force found out, of course they charged him with a number of crimes. And they sent him to court martial and to trial. And what’s interesting is that the trial, it’s not a question of, hey, was this guy traumatized by killing civilians in a foreign land? It’s just a question of, did he do the drugs or not? His mental health never came up. And very quickly, the jury convicted him. And he was waiting for sentencing.

michael barbaro

Wow.

dave philipps

So they were supposed to do the sentencing after lunch. And the judge let everybody out and said be back in an hour. And Kevin Larson never came back.

Instead, he rushed off the base, across town to his house, packed up some food and some supplies in his Jeep and took off, not telling anyone where he was going. He headed into the mountains of California, and he started heading north. And while he’s driving the Air Force is putting out essentially an APB, saying, be on the lookout for this guy. He’s a deserter with a drug conviction. He may be armed. He may be dangerous. Apprehend him if you can.

And he’s in Northern California, in Redwood Valley, when highway patrol spots him and pulls him over. He stops, but as soon as the officer reaches his window, he gases it and takes off and tries to lose the police out on a windy dirt road up in the mountains. But the police know something that he doesn’t. It’s a dead-end road, and there’s no way out for him.

So they just sort of park at the bottom of the valley and wait and wait.

Eventually night falls. And in the morning, with reinforcements, the police officers from the Air Force, officers from the sheriff’s department all head up there to try and see if they can flush him out.

So at that point Kevin Larson’s basically trapped. And he’s been waiting all night behind a big boulder. He’s got an assault rifle with him. He’s got his phone. But there’s no service, so he can’t call his family or the police. So he just makes a recording and starts talking to his family saying to each one of them that he loves them, that he’s sorry that all this happened. But he doesn’t want to go to prison, and he doesn’t see any other way out.

And there’s so much in there that he doesn’t say. He doesn’t talk about the more than 600 missions he went on. He doesn’t talk about any of the airstrikes. And maybe it’s because he runs out of time. Because at the end of the video he sort of stops and looks up. And there’s an angry buzzing, sort of like a hive of bees, and he says, I can hear the drones. They’re looking for me.

michael barbaro

Wow.

dave philipps

They were hunting him like he had hunted people before. He very quickly realizes that this is the end, and he shoots himself.

michael barbaro

So when that lawyer called you and said about Kevin Larson, you should look into this. There’s a bigger story here. The bigger story that he was referring to and the bigger story that you found is really a mental health crisis among Air Force drone pilots.

dave philipps

Yeah. I mean, the Air Force has been tracking and surveying these drone crews for years. And they know that this stuff is traumatic. They know that 20 percent of them have clinically high levels of emotional distress. They know that witnessing civilian casualties can make you eight times more likely to have P.T.S.D. They know all of this stuff. They just don’t know what to do about it.

So after the story about Kevin Larson came out, I called James Klein, and I asked him what I always ask sources. After a really big story comes out I ask, did I screw it up? And he laughed. He said, no. You did pretty good. And I said, OK, well, what do you think is the larger story of this?

james klein

And the weird part is, they say it’s like a video game and you kind of have to desensitize yourself to where it is.

dave philipps

And he’s like, well, we have this new kind of warfare, drone warfare. And everyone thought it would be better. And, in fact, it’s just different.

james klein

What’s combat? Is it getting shot at? Is it watching somebody die? I mean, we kill people.

dave philipps

And in a lot of cases, these guys were conducting more combat than anyone else in the United States military.

james klein

You know what infantry doesn’t have to do, is they don’t have to follow that body to the funeral. They don’t have to watch the wife and kid cry. They don’t have to watch the friends and stuff like that.

dave philipps

But because they were not in a war zone, they weren’t counted as combat troops. And you can look at their personnel files, and it’ll say that essentially that they had no exposure to war.

So what became clear to me, talking to James, was that the United States had built this whole system of drones intended to keep troops out of harm’s way. But by removing them from the battle, they had, in fact, exposed them to just a ton of unseen trauma.

michael barbaro

Well, Dave, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

dave philipps

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. In Eastern Ukraine, dozens of civilians are feared dead after a Russian airstrike leveled a school, where local officials said that about 90 civilians had been sheltering in what could be one of the deadliest attacks since Russia renewed its offensive in the region. But —

archived recording (justin trudeau)

Today, we send a resounding message to the world that Canada and our allies continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine.

michael barbaro

In a sign of how much Western Ukraine is beginning to return to normalcy, First Lady Jill Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both made visits over the weekend, in a show of support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

archived recording (justin trudeau)

Putin and his accomplices will fail. Ukraine will prevail. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

michael barbaro

And rallies in defense of abortion rights were held in cities across the U.S. over the weekend, as supporters of Roe v. Wade reacted with fury to the draft Supreme Court opinion striking it down.

archived recording (beto o'rourke)

The only thing the other side is interested in is power, power over women’s bodies, control over the women of the State of Texas —

michael barbaro

The largest rally appeared to be in Texas, whose Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, a law denounced during the rally by his Democratic rival, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke.

archived recording (beto o'rourke)

And when we win, every woman in the state of Texas makes her own decisions about her own body, her own future and her own health care. You all with us?

michael barbaro

Today’s episode was produced by Asthaa Chaturvedi, Mooj Zadie and Kaitlin Roberts. It was edited by Marc Georges and Michael Benoist. Contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk, of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Asthaa ChaturvediMooj Zadie and

Marc Georges and

Dan Powell and


This episode contains descriptions of suicide.

Over the past five years, a series of investigations by The Times has revealed the terror and tragedy that America’s air wars, despite being promoted as the most precise in history, have brought to civilians on the ground.

The program has also exacted a heavy toll on the military personnel guiding the drones to their targets. They include soldiers such as Capt. Kevin Larson, a decorated pilot, who died by suicide after a drug arrest and court-martial.

For suicide prevention resources in the United States, go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.


Dave Philipps, a national correspondent covering the military for The New York Times.

Image
Capt. Kevin Larson’s service dress jacket. He participated in 650 combat missions from 2013 to 2018 out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times

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David Philipps contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky and John Ketchum.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli and Maddy Masiello.

A correction was made on 
May 9, 2022

An earlier version of this episode misstated Justin Trudeau’s title. He is Canada’s prime minister, not president.

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