Mar 26, 2013
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JAD ABUMRAD: Okay. So, you know, the core of our job, right, is to ask people questions. Right?
ROBERT KRULWICH: Yes.
JAD: Then we sit there for hours and edit the answers. And I've noticed that the answers sometimes have a kind of musicality to them. Like sometimes you get this.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: That's right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: No.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: No way.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
ROBERT: Oh. I know those. They are the sharp, quick…
JAD: …staccato
ROBERT: …beats.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: No.]
JAD: But there are times when you get a completely different music, you know, like. Say you're asking a hard question or a clarifying question. “Is it A or is it B.” Then, sometimes you get this.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Well it’s certain—I just…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: [sigh] He—his…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Um…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: Um…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: I mean yeah, well, but I think…]
JAD: You get this kind of melodic wavering.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: No, I—it's. I. Ugh.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: It. Well.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radiolab guest: No. You know. I don't know.]
JAD: In purely musical terms the pitches in the first one are like, pow, pow, pow. They're just precise and quick. But in that second category, the pitches are floating up or floating down. They're never stable.
ROBERT: You're not a normal person. Really?
JAD: No. It's like that's the sound of…
ROBERT: Doubt.
JAD: Doubt.
ROBERT: You know what we could do…
JAD: What’s that?
ROBERT: We have collected some stories which in a way they all have doubt in them. They have certainty in them, and what they all are kind of collisions, really.
JAD: We have three stories for you.
ROBERT: Difficult, complex, emotionally wrenching situations.
JAD: Kind of situations that you can't really walk away from.
ROBERT: …and you can't resolve them. So you have to do something. And that's this show that's going to be our show. We should call it…
JAD: Are you sure?
ROBERT: No, no. I don't know yet. I have to think about it.
JAD: No, that's what I'm suggesting as a name: “Are you sure?”
ROBERT: Are you—yes. Are you sure? He said, with certain amount of doubt.
JAD: Okay. I'm Jad Abumrad. He's Robert Krulwich, this is Radiolab. And to get things started…
ROBERT: Are you sure, that's good.
JAD: We start with a—a producer we’ve worked with for a very long time, Lulu Miller, a very interesting story, which takes many twists and turns. It begins actually with the fact that as a girl, Lulu really loved rocks. She just loved to sit on rocks. She loved to think about rocks. She just liked rocks.
LULU MILLER: They felt slightly animate in the way that a tree does or that an animal does that I know it's not a human, but it's a nice thing in the world that, for whatever reason, brings about a feeling of peace.
JAD: Then one day, seventh grade.
LULU: Mr. Pricer.
JAD: He's a science teacher.
LULU: He did a lesson on inorganic versus organic matter.
JAD: Mm-hmm.
LULU: And we make this huge list on the chalkboard. Organic matter. Trees? Yup. Dogs? Yep. Pasta. Sure. It's kind of blowing our minds because it seems like everything's organic. A corpse is organic. Even a table is organic…
JAD: …you know, because wood used to be alive.
LULU: And then he—he draws this, like, harsh white line on the chalkboard and he writes, “Inorganic metal, salt rocks.” And I was like, Oh.
JAD: No, it sounds a little bit silly, but this was actually a big deal for Lulu. I mean she—even when she worked with us, she would talk about this. But then you fast forward many years actually when she was leaving the show, she decided to bike across the country from California to New York and she meets somebody who changes things for her and her rocks and pretty much everything.
LULU: Well, I met him in the middle of possibly the loneliest place in the world. It's called the Loneliest Road in America. Highway Route 50. And it's just a two lane road that crosses the state of Nevada. Desert, desert, desert.
LULU: This is the sound of a busted bike, a broken spoke, a ripped tire…
LULU: Just desert stretches for a hundred miles at a time.
LULU: Oh. This road.
JAD: Did you end up having to ride 100 miles in one day?
LULU: Mm-hmm.
JAD: Damn.
LULU: Oh, yeah.
JAD: Okay, so you’re in the middle of this—this expanse of dread.
LULU: [laughs] Yes.
JAD: And what happens?
LULU: And we finally make it late in the afternoon to basically our end point for the day. Little gas station with a little diner. And we see out in front of the restaurant this bike that's like loaded down with so much gear. We're like, Oh…
JAD: …fellow traveler.
LULU: Yup. So we went in, picked him out immediately. He's the only other person in this kind of, like, biker bar, basically wearing Lycra. He's young. He's early twenties. Big red beard. This young dude from Kentucky with a little drawl.
JAD: What was his name?
LULU: His name is Jeff. Jeff. Jeff Vineyard. So his story was that he—he was about to be getting married and he was supposed to be doing this trip with his fiancee, Megan. But, at sort of at the last minute, just due to wedding planning, logistics and all that, she had decided not to come on the trip. But, you know, so he's doing it alone and just kind of thinking of it as a little bit of reflection time before he gets married.
JAD: Okay.
LULU: He had just finished grad school in geosciences, so geology and like trekking or statistical data.
JAD: And he was going the same direction that you guys are going?
LULU: He was going our way, too. And he said, you know, “Oh, mind if I ride with you to the campsite?” And we said, sure. And then we ended up riding together for about 11 days.
JAD: So you got to know him?
LULU: Really got to know him.
VOICE: So here’s another song.
LULU: This is us in Nevada.
JEFF VINEYARD: What hymns you know?
VOICE: Well, that was—do you know any of Amazing Grace?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah.
LULU: And that’s him singing.
JEFF VINEYARD: T’was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace…
LULU: The other little part to tell you beforehand is just that Jeff grew up very religious. Grandpa was a preacher and his fiancee, Megan, also very devout, very religious. Has always felt the presence of God.
JEFF VINEYARD: The hour I first believed.
LULU: He actually met Megan through his church. They met while doing mission work down in Louisiana.
LULU: Can we go look at a rock really quick?
JEFF VINEYARD: Okay.
LULU: Okay. So we meet this dude. He's a geologist. He sings all the time. And about three or four days into writing together that he says something that completely changes my understanding of the world.
LULU: Any clue what that is?
VOICE: No. Can I get some water and rinse him off real quick?
LULU: Yeah. Yeah.
LULU: We are pulled over to the side of the road in Utah and Jeff has this looking at some rocks, just washing it off.
JEFF VINEYARD: This—this might be a limestone.
LULU: And then he just starts casually mentioning how limestone is formed.
JEFF VINEYARD: So it's a sedimentary rock and it forms from what used to be the bottom of sea floors. What actually causes it to form is there is plankton in the water and lots of these small organisms that have very, very, very small shells, you know, microscopic. All that's left of these organisms after they die are their small shells get deposited on the sea floor, and then more shells get deposited over top of them. And then over the course of your many, many years, you have these very, very thick, almost like drifts of—of these plankton shells. And then, you know, there's tremendous pressure at the bottom of the sea floor, and they can press and they can press and they solidify and they turn into limestone.
LULU: You're saying that these rocks are made out of thousands of thousands of little…
VOICE: …critters.
JEFF VINEYARD: Critters. Pretty much.
LULU: I thought a rock couldn't have been—that's saying that—that that rock is composed of something—many thousands of things that were once alive.
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. I don't know whether I would necessarily call the shell part alive.
LULU: Doesn't matter. I'd heard what I needed to hear.
LULU: They do have a little bit of life inside them in a very real, tangible, singable way. Like, not a poetic idea. They do.
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah, they do. They do. I mean, it was there at one point.
LULU: I'm sure I must have in some other way learned this. I mean, this is basic rock knowledge, but I somehow missed it.
JAD: You sound very excited.
LULU: Yes. He gives me my friends back, like, with a scientist's wand.
JAD: All right.
LULU: But, but, but, yes, this is not actually the story I want to tell you.
JAD: Huh?
LULU: It's not. I'm sorry. It took me a little long to get here, but the real story I want to tell you is about a very similar thing happening only with much bigger consequences, because we kept on riding…
LULU: I’m in the Utah Hills.
LULU: We make it through one of the hardest days of biking ever, and we finally make it to Cedar City, Utah, and we decide to go out for pizza to celebrate. We're taking a first bite. And then Jeff, who's usually so just like polite and sweet, he slams down his root beer and he says, “I was supposed to be getting married today.”
JAD: Wow. Did they—what does that mean?
LULU: Well, that's what we thought, we were like, what? Finally, he told us this whole story that actually a couple months before the bike trip, one Tuesday, they were making dinner together…
JEFF VINEYARD: We were at her house and we were cooking.
LULU: And he basically suddenly felt this feeling inside his chest.
JEFF VINEYARD: Like right behind my sternum. I just thought, “Shit, I don't believe in God anymore.”
LULU: Really?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. Yeah.
JAD: This just landed on him out of the blue?
LULU: Completely without warning.
LULU: Wait. Where? What was it? What did it feel like?
JEFF VINEYARD: I don't know. I don't even know if it was, like, words, but it was just, “I don’t believe in God.”
LULU: Were you then terrified?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. Who wouldn't be?
LULU: He'd believed in God his entire life. Yeah. And now gone.
JEFF VINEYARD: Just like that.
JAD: Was he thinking about something or…
LULU: I don't know. I kept asking him, and that was the best he could say. And Megan saw the look on his face and asked him what was wrong.
JEFF VINEYARD: I didn't say anything at the time. I'm just like, I just have indigestion, you know. But…
LULU: …a few weeks later…
JEFF VINEYARD: I filled her in on that. And that was probably, you know, Megan's a person of deep belief, and that was something she wanted her husband to be at least somewhat on board with. So…
LULU: …they put the wedding on hold.
JEFF VINEYARD: Postponed it in good faith that we will work things out.
LULU: So in a way, what he was doing on the bike trip was literally like scanning the hillsides to find some evidence of God to win back his bride.
JAD: Oh, so this wasn't like a pre-wedding reflective right thing at all?
LULU: No way.
JAD: And you're saying you wanted evidence?
LULU: Yes.
JEFF VINEYARD: Evidence or proof. I wanted to be on one side of the fence or the other.
LULU: His one demand for God was…
JEFF VINEYARD: If you exist and you're at all interested in people…
LULU: Show yourself.
JEFF VINEYARD: There's no reason you shouldn't.
LULU: So that whole time, when I was riding along thinking, “Yay, my rock buddies are back,” Jeff was waiting for some signal from the landscape.
JEFF VINEYARD: You know, there is a time where I'm climbing up this mountain, wind comes up behind me and, like, I'm thinking, Wow, this is great. It feels like I'm being pushed.
LULU: Yeah.
JEFF VINEYARD: Is this just the wind or is this something else? I don't know.
LULU: And for the three weeks he'd been riding, nothing had really convinced him.
JEFF VINEYARD: No, no.
LULU: And he was just frustrated.
JEFF VINEYARD: Despondent, angry.
LULU: And six days after what was supposed to be Jeff's wedding day…
JEFF VINEYARD: June 4.
LULU: We part ways. And then I had no idea what became of him.
JAD: Huh.
LULU: I didn't hear anything from him for almost a year. And then I guess he had my phone number from just, you know, we'd had each other's phones while we were traveling together. And he called and said that he was on a little road trip and he's going to be passing through Charlottesville. And could he stay with me for a night?
JEFF VINEYARD: Hello. Hello. Hello.
LULU: And I said, sure.
LULU: Do you want to set the—do you want to set the scene for us?
LULU: And basically, the second he arrives, I asked him, okay, so what happened in your. Have you found God? Are you with Megan?
LULU: And I wondered, like, where you are with all that.
JEFF VINEYARD: Oh, you know—golly, that’s right there.
LULU: He told me that toward the end of his ride, he started to get really anxious.
JEFF VINEYARD: Okay. Trips almost over, got like a week. [laughs]
LULU: [laughs] And are you thinking like lightning will show me an angel? What are you—what are you hoping to see?
JEFF VINEYARD: No, anything.
LULU: And then he tells me.
JEFF VINEYARD: There was a point outside of Hazard, Kentucky.
LULU: …where he was feeling really low.
JEFF VINEYARD: And then I was eating lunch at Arby's, and…
LULU: [laughs] I know.
JEFF VINEYARD: This is where the story gets embarrassing. A ceiling tile fell on my sandwich.
LULU: Okay.
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. And…
LULU: And like a plaster ceiling?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. Like one of the drop ceiling tiles. Just splat.
LULU: Wow.
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. And so.
LULU: And then what happened is a guy sitting over at the next table noticed him.
JEFF VINEYARD: Walks over and gives me a sandwich, and we got to talking. And, of course, like, you know, he's a minister and…
LULU: And Jeff just starts telling him everything that's going on. How he's having trouble with his faith and how he's not sure what's going to happen with Megan.
JEFF VINEYARD: So we talked about that for a while.
LULU: And at the end of the conversation, the man gives Jeff a blessing.
JEFF VINEYARD: Like a benediction. Have a good journey and be safe. And I hate to recount it because it just sounds so—the ceiling tile fell and the guy came over and talked to me like, is that really remarkable? But in that dark place, I feel like maybe it was. I don't know. I'm—I’m confused.
LULU: And when he finally made it home to Megan, that's what he told her. I don't know.
MEGAN SWEENEY: Yeah, we both just kind of sat there for a long time because we didn't really know what to do with that. But I knew in my heart that I wanted to marry someone who shared my faith and I just kept hoping that he would find his faith again. And this was just a phase or something, and it was much bigger than that.
LULU: And eventually…
MEGAN SWEENEY: I figured out what I wanted to do and cried a lot. And then I went and talked to him at his house.
LULU: She just sat him down and gave him his ring back.
MEGAN SWEENEY: It was really sad. Neither of us wanted that to happen. We cried together a little bit and then I think he needed me to just leave.
LULU: Yeah.
MEGAN SWEENEY: …it was definitely hard to walk out of that room.
JEFF VINEYARD: It didn't work out. So. I'm up in Columbus. I'm staying in Columbus because I like it there.
LULU: And you moved up to Columbus to be with her, right?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah.
LULU: So he got a job.
JEFF VINEYARD: Turning wrenches at a bicycle shop. Yeah, it's a long way from geostatistics. LULU: Yeah. Rocks.
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah.
LULU: I'm sorry, bro, I’m sorry. I didn't realize it was gonna be so...
JEFF VINEYARD: No, don't be.
LULU: I’m gonna turn this off.
JEFF VINEYARD: [sad laugh] Okay.
LULU: I turned off the tape recorder and took him out to a really good bar.
JAD: Yeah. Yeah.
LULU: He was headed back to Columbus, and, you know, just down and…
JAD: And that's it?
LULU: That was just it. That was kind of their ending. And I, you know, I figured that's end of story and then, yeah, another year goes by and luckily we move slowly on tape and stories and a strange invitation appears in my mailbox. I open it up, and it's an invitation to Jeff Vineyard and Megan Sweeney's wedding.
JAD: Really?
LULU: Mm-hmm.
JAD: Wait. A year goes by, and you just suddenly get a thing…
LULU: …to their wedding. That's…
JAD: …what happened?
JEFF VINEYARD: All right. Shall we commence, Lulu?
LULU: We shall commence.
LULU: Well, I didn't know it happened. Woo-hoo.
JEFF VINEYARD: Megan is walking up right now, actually.
MEGAN SWEENEY: Hi.
LULU: All right, well, first of all, I like—what happened because I know nothing.
MEGAN SWEENEY: Well, let's have him tell that story, and then I'll go from there.
JEFF VINEYARD: [laughs] I'd reached a point where I was actually back in attending church. I'd found a really friendly congregation here in town. I was just looking for something familiar because I moved up here and the one person I know is not in my life and I need something else. So I wasn't necessarily going for the preaching, I was just going for the experience and…
LULU: For kind of the pew on the bum and the—the people around you?
JEFF VINEYARD: Right? I mean, I was—I was singing with our church choir at that point because, you know, I wasn't really sure whether I had any faith or not but gosh darn it, I like singing.
LULU: And then he told me one day.
JEFF VINEYARD: Just some gosh darn sunday. I don't know what we were singing out or what the sermon was about, but we were taking communion. And as I was taking the elements, I just.
LULU: Said he just suddenly felt like the air charge.
JEFF VINEYARD: Like there is a palpable presence all around. Just—just almost like a tempest. I felt there was something there.
LULU: Was it something you felt up in your head? Was it something you felt…
JEFF VINEYARD: Sternum mostly beneath the sternum.
LULU: Huh.
JEFF VINEYARD: The tightness, a hand, something touching there.
LULU: Huh.
JEFF VINEYARD: Very strange. I don't know what to make of that. Still. I'm still not sure if it was something divine and otherworldly or if it was just a profound appreciation for the history of that gesture.
LULU: I almost just want to say, like Jeff, right now, do you believe in God?
JEFF VINEYARD: Yeah. It's just really different from what I felt earlier, and it’s still very uncertain.
LULU: Megan, when—when you hear him talk about doubt, is it scary? Is it something you can relate to? I mean, like, how does it strike you when he talks about it?
MEGAN SWEENEY: It is a little scary because I think it's still a hard thing for us.
LULU: Keep in mind, I'm talking to them 10 days before they're about to get married.
MEGAN SWEENEY: Is it 10 or 11? I think it's 10.
JEFF VINEYARD: …yeah. 10.
MEGAN SWEENEY: …some days sometimes it seems like we're really close on how we believe, and sometimes it seems like we're miles apart. But…
JEFF VINEYARD: It's—it's confusing sometimes, but that's—I don't know. I'm okay with that.
LULU: And Megan. Are you okay with that?
MEGAN SWEENEY: I am. I don't know if it's just me still wishing a little that his faith was a little more like mine. Maybe I haven't completely let go of that, but on a day to day basis we pray together in the evenings and are able to talk about religious things without fighting with each other. And I think that whatever differences we do have are okay now. Love is a choice. After a certain point we just chose that we were going to love each other anyway.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: Let’s pray. Loving God, I pray that as Megan and Jeff speak these words…]
JAD: They—they go forward and they get married?
LULU: Yeah. It was a religious ceremony and they say their vows.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: I Jeff, take you Megan to be my wife.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeff: I Jeff, take you Megan, to be my wife.]
LULU: Promise before God.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: And I promise before God, and all who are present here.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeff: And I promise…]
LULU: And what was just like as he's saying his vows you can hear…
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: And encourage you…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeff: Encourage you…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: …to develop God’s gifts…]
LULU: The biggest sob I've ever heard, just like, comes out of his voice. Like that it—it just felt, like, bigger than him. Jeff said later that what that was was not the sound of resolution but of relief.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: For as long as we both shall live.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Megan: For as long as we both shall live.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, officiant: It is now my great pleasure to introduce to you Megan and Jeffrey Vineyard.]
[cheering]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeff, Lulu, and Singer: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see…]
JAD: Big thanks to producer Lulu Miller will continue in a moment.
LULU: Hi, It's Lulu calling you from DC.
[JEFF VINEYARD: Hi, this is Jeff Vineyard.]
[MEGAN VINEYARD: I'm Megan Vineyards and I have the credits. Okay.]
[JEFF VINEYARD: Radiolab is supported in part...]
[MEGAN VINEYARD: By the National Science Foundation… ]
[LULU: …and, hold on, Jeff is calling me back—the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
[JEFF VINEYARD: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]
[LULU: More information about Sloan at...]
[JEFF & MEGAN VINEYARD: …www.sloan.org.]
[MEGAN VINEYARD: Radiolab is produced by WNYC.]
[JEFF VINEYARD: And distributed by NPR.]
[LULU: Okay. Bye.]
JAD: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today…
ROBERT: Oh, I don't know. We're talking about—we're in a doubtful state of mind, constant doubt. That's the topic.
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: Like in the last chapter, we met a person who had a—a real—a doubt pile up. He lost his faith in God. He lost his girl.
JAD: This may be an extreme example of something that we all go through every day, right? ROBERT: Yeah. I mean…
JAD: You wake up.
ROBERT: And then—and you're—and you have to get something done and then some little voice inside you says, you know, “You can't do that. Not today.”
JAD: “Yeah, not so sure about this?” But still you got to act, because you're an adult. So what do you do in that case? How do you act without the feeling of certainty?
ANNIE DUKE: Hello?
JAD: Hi.
ROBERT: Is this is Annie?
ANNIE DUKE: Yes.
ROBERT: Okay.
ROBERT: And we met someone who thinks about this all the time.
ANNIE DUKE: This is an area that I'm pretty well versed in.
JAD: Would this be your stock and trade?
ANNIE DUKE: This would be very much so.
ROBERT: Her name is Annie Duke.
ANNIE DUKE: I'm a decision strategist.
ROBERT: But you might know her better as a badass poker player.
ANNIE DUKE: Well, in 2004, I won a bracelet, which is a world championship. I also won the Tournament of Champions that year. That was the…
JAD: She has won a lot. Now, when we called up Annie, we had this idea about poker that I think a lot of people have, which is that it's like this game about tells and like reading your opponent, watching the way their nose quivers so that you can tell when they're bluffing or when they've got a good hand.
ANNIE DUKE: Nope. Tells are actually a very small part of the game.
ROBERT: …fact, she says, they often backfire.
ANNIE DUKE: I remember the first tournament I played after it was on TV. I had a hand that was kind of a close decision, and this guy moved all of his chips in to the pot. And God, he was just confident. Like I could see like he was really confident in his hand. So I threw my hand away.
ROBERT: But then in a subsequent game, she sees the same guy doing exactly the same thing. He pushes all his chips in, looking super confident.
ANNIE DUKE: I was like, Wow, he must have like a crazy hand, like two aces. And he turns his hand over, face up and he's super confident in it. And it was a really bad hand. It was just a hand that he thought was good. So the problem for me was that I read him totally correctly, but what I didn't understand was he didn’t…
ROBERT: …that he was a dunce. [laughs]
ANNIE DUKE: Let's call him inexperienced…
ROBERT: Okay.
ANNIE DUKE: He didn't know what a good hand or a bad hand was.
ROBERT: But then you get players who are a little bit more experienced and—and sometimes they would…
ANNIE DUKE: …do what's called a reverse tell.
JAD: Is that like a double fake?
ANNIE DUKE: Right.
JAD: They basically pretend to be overconfident. So she'd think they're dumb.
ANNIE DUKE: And in the biz we call that Hollywooding.
JAD: So she says, unless you've played someone a million times, it's really hard to know how to read them. And what's worse, the good players, they do nothing.
ANNIE DUKE: Doing nothing is the best choice.
ROBERT: If you try to disappear…
ANNIE DUKE: …you pick a spot on the table, stare at it.
ROBERT: So what do you do in the case where there aren't any signals to read? And the only thing you really know is that you know nothing?
ANNIE DUKE: Well, actually, what you sort of figure out is that you don't need to know. The real breakthrough moment for me was when I stopped trying to figure out anything with certainty…
JAD: And here Annie laid out a way of thinking.
ANNIE DUKE: I just.
JAD: A way of taming doubt that we find completely fascinating. And that has paid off for her to the tune of about $4,000,000 dollars.
ANNIE DUKE: Well, you know, I think that…
JAD: Do you mind if we just back up?
ANNIE DUKE: Okay.
JAD: Like, how did you get to be Annie Duke?
ANNIE DUKE: Well, I was—I was born Annie Lederer, and then I married someone with the last name Duke and thought, “That’s much easier.”
JAD: No, I mean I mean, The Annie Duke.
ANNIE DUKE: Well, I went to Columbia undergrad, double major in English literature and psychology.
JAD: Ah, psychology. There we go.
ANNIE DUKE: Then I went to UPenn, studied cognitive psychology there. I—I had a National Science Foundation fellowship. And then right at the end—just really had this realization that I didn't really want to be an academic. Holy hell. Like, what am I going to do now? Okay, well, I need some money. I'll play some poker while I'm figuring it out.
JAD: And have you played a lot of poker up to that point?
ANNIE DUKE: No, but I'd watch my brother play a lot.
HOWARD LEDERER: Well, she—she would come out and she would sit behind and watch.
JAD: That’s Annie’s brother.
HOWARD LEDERER: This is Howard. Howard Lederer.
ROBERT: Sounds exactly like his sister, but with a deeper voice.
ANNIE DUKE: He started mentoring me…
HOWARD LEDERER: A little bit…
ANNIE DUKE: …and I started making money right away.
HOWARD LEDERER: She was very competitive.
ROBERT: Was your mother tearing out her hair at this point or was she agreed?
ANNIE DUKE: Well, at that point, my parents had just given up hope.
HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah.
ANNIE DUKE: My brother, when he was 18, he my grandfather…
HOWARD LEDERER: My grandfather had cut the family a $2,000 check.
ANNIE DUKE: For the two of us to help with college. And my brother gambled it away in a little poker room in the back room.
HOWARD LEDERER: Well, that might have been the very early fact. I was a terrible poker player.
JAD: Howard has since become a very decorated poker player…
ROBERT: And he's also been in the news recently because an online poker company he was associated with called Full Tilt has gotten into some legal difficulties.
JAD: But back when he was starting he says he would play in these tiny little games.
HOWARD LEDERER: 36 hours straight, which was not atypical for me back then.
JAD: And it was all very seat of the pants.
HOWARD LEDERER: But I, but I—I arrived in this wonderful situation.
JAD: He was fortunate. He happened to be learning the game, which he would later teach to his sister at a time, you know, 1983, 1984, when the game.
ROBERT: Was changing radically…
HOWARD LEDERER: Poker—poker was this Texas gambler thing happening in Vegas…
ROBERT: Like the cliche we just talked about. You know, you play with your gut.
HOWARD LEDERER: With the Texas dolly and Amarillo Slim and who knows what's going on over there.
ROBERT: But then, like in so many other things, the geeks took over.
HOWARD LEDERER: Well, you know, there were these games I was playing in.
ROBERT: People will peg the change to different times, different places. But for Howard, it began in New York.
HOWARD LEDERER: Yup.
JAD: When he joined this regular game…
HOWARD LEDERER: A huge game. These are Wall Street traders, world champion bridge players, brilliant people.
JAD: They get together after Wall Street closed, play for about eight hours, then go to a bar and carefully deconstruct the eight hours they just played.
HOWARD LEDERER: You know, “Hey, what were you thinking and why did you do that? Why you—you weren't really bluffing, but you made this big bet.”
ROBERT: And out of those conversations came a style of play that you now find everywhere. HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah, hold on. Okay, listen, if you Google the phrase right now Hold’em Odds Chart you're going to be…
JAD: You said hold ‘em? Hold‘em odds…
ROBERT: Hold‘em…
HOWARD LEDERER: Hold‘em odds chart.
ROBERT: We ended up talking to our friend Mike about all this.
MIKE PESCA: My name is Mike Pesca, I cover sports for NPR.
JAD: And he's also spent a fair amount of time in underground poker clubs.
MIKE PESCA: By the way, it's always a misnomer, because in New York City, they're always on the ninth floor of an office building or something like that.
ROBERT: [laughs] Really?
ROBERT: Anyway, he showed us these—these charts. Okay. And what?
JAD: Oh, my God. Look at this thing.
ROBERT: What is it?
JAD: It's like my nightmare.
JAD: It's like a spreadsheet with tons and tons of numbers.
MIKE PESCA: Well, first I'll say this.
JAD: But Mike says, Don't be afraid. These charts—this is how you achieve Zen…
ROBERT: …in an uncertain world.
MIKE PESCA: Okay, let's say—let me give you a situation. Let me give you a situation. You're playing the game of hold'em and there's only one card to come. The river card, that is the last card in hold’em. And you figure, in fact…
JAD: Just to explain, in Texas Hold'em, each player gets two secret cards that they can see and the dealer puts down a bunch of community cards one by one that everyone can see, and the game is who can combine their secret cards with the community cards to make the best hand.
MIKE PESCA: Exactly.
JAD: Now, say one of your secret cards is a heart.
MIKE PESCA: And on the board, the community cards include three—three hearts.
JAD: Okay, I've got one in my hand. That's four. Dealers about to deal another card.
MIKE PESCA: And if the last card is a heart.
JAD: Well, damn, I would have a flush. So I want to know.
MIKE PESCA: What are the odds…
JAD: …of me getting that last heart?
MIKE PESCA: Every decent poker player will know how to calculate this automatically.
ROBERT: …and for the non decent ones, well then there's the chart.
MIKE PESCA: You know, there are 13 of every suit in the deck, you know there are 13 hearts in the deck. And there are three hearts on the board.
JAD: One in my hand.
MIKE PESCA: That means that you can figure that there are…
JAD: 13 minus 3, minus 1.
MIKE PESCA: Nine cards in the deck out of the 46 that we don't know about.
JAD: That can complete my flush.
MIKE PESCA: Now, look at this chart.
JAD: All right. I'm looking at nine.
MIKE PESCA: See where the number nine is?
JAD: Yeah.
MIKE PESCA: All the way to the right.
JAD: Uh-huh, nine, flush draw, nine.
MIKE PESCA: So when you do the odds, you wind up having about a 20% chance of victory.
JAD: Of getting that last heart.
MIKE PESCA: Yeah.
JAD: Okay. So what do you do in this circumstance?
ROBERT: One more time? My odds are?
JAD: Your odds are 20%.
ROBERT: 20%...
JAD: Do you—do you bet? Do you go for it? Do you stay in? Be bold. Or do you fold?
ROBERT: I keep—I fold…
JAD: …totally.
ROBERT: I fold.
JAD: Of course you fold.
ROBERT: I—I walk away.
JAD: Get out of there.
ROBERT: I quit the game.
JAD: Live to fight another day.
ROBERT: Exactly.
HOWARD LEDERER: No.
MIKE PESCA: No, no, no, no.
ANNIE DUKE: Nope.
HOWARD LEDERER: No.
JAD: Not necessarily. Annie says there are times when 20, 25% sure means bet, bet, bet.
ANNIE DUKE: I know that sounds counterintuitive. So let me explain what I mean.
JAD: And this is the nut of it, right here.
ANNIE DUKE: Let's say that someone bets $100 and there's already $200 in the pot. Okay? That means that for you to continue with your hand, you have to put in $100. So if you win the pot, you'll win $300. And if you lose the pot, you’ll lose $100, right? In order to break even, you could lose the pot three times because you’d lose $100 three times, so that would be -300 and you could win the pot once.
JAD: That makes sense.
ANNIE DUKE: Right? Because you're going to get 300 and then you would break even.
ROBERT: So you could lose $100 on Monday. $100 on Tuesday. You could lose another 100 on Wednesday. But if you win the 300 back on Thursday, yeah, you're good.
JAD: You just need to win one out of every four times.
ANNIE DUKE: So that means that you have to win the pot 25% of the time.
ROBERT: Those your pot odds…
MIKE PESCA: Pot odds are what dictates good bets.
ANNIE DUKE: The amount that's in the pot determines how certain you have to be that your hand is good.
JAD: …which is a really cool concept, I think, because if—if your pot odds are 25% then all you really need to be is 25% sure that you have a good hand.
ROBERT: Which you are in the hearts case.
ANNIE DUKE: Sometimes you have to be 40% sure, sometimes you have to be 30% sure. You know, if there's $70 in the pot and you only have to call 10, you know, now you're in the 15% range in terms how certain you have to be that your hand is good.
JAD: In that case, you can bet this hand that you're really not sure about knowing that while you might lose this time…
MIKE PESCA: If I do that a million times in my poker life, the law of high numbers indicates that I'm going to be very much a winner in the long run. It might be the very long run, but you should be ahead in the long run.
ANNIE DUKE: Because it's not—it's not about winning the hand all the time. It's about winning the hand enough of the time.
JAD: That is what she got watching her brother.
ANNIE DUKE: I'm sure that I’m just quoting him.
ROBERT: And that's warm comfort? I mean, that's—that's weird. So the math—the probabilities are what you carry—care about most.
ANNIE DUKE: Yeah, because that sort of embracing of uncertainty does some really wonderful things for you. If you're in a situation where you only have to have the best hand 25% of the time, if you're playing well, you're going to have a bad hand a lot of the time. it's okay. It's actually irrelevant.
JAD: And that's really the big bonus of this way of thinking. You begin to learn how to avoid that very human tendency to feel…
ANNIE DUKE: …shamed. Embarrassed.
JAD: When you lose, you just float right above it.
HOWARD LEDERER: If you're making good decisions, then you're making good decisions.
ANNIE DUKE: You have to be somewhat outcome blind…
JAD: …but, sometimes that's not so easy.
ROBERT: No. Case in point.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: …there is no event on the planet like it.]
JAD: 2004.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: The World Series of Poker, main event!]
JAD: Biggest tournament in all of poker.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: What a tournament this is to handle emotionally.]
ROBERT: Three people left at the table.
JAD: Annie Duke, this guy, Phil Hellmuth who is a big player and Annie’s brother Howard.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: They've played together for so long but never for 2,000,000, never been in this type of position...]
JAD: 2,000,000 is on the line.
ROBERT: They get their cards.
ANNIE DUKE: And…
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Annie Duke with sixes.]
ANNIE DUKE: I had two sixes.
ROBERT: Pretty good hand.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: And she'll open with 70,000.]
JAD: Big fat opening bet.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Over to Phil.]
JAD: Phil thinks, “No…”
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Phil Hellmuth immediately gets out of the way again.]
JAD: He folds.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: …over to Howard Lederer.]
JAD: And here's where things get interesting. Instead of folding like that guy Phil.
ANNIE DUKE: My brother moved in on me.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Lederer: C’mon.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Howard goes all in against his sister.]
JAD: Uh-oh.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Decision now to Andy with the pocket sixes.]
JAD: Annie thinks, “Should I stay in? Should I bail?”
ANNIE DUKE: Well, mathematically, two sixes actually rates to be the best hand there. So…
JAD: Brother, it's on.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: Yeah, I call.]
JAD: However, when they turn over their cards, and remember she has two sixes.
ANNIE DUKE: Actually…
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: …he's got a seven.]
ANNIE DUKE: It turned out he had two sevens.
HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: He gets what he wants, a 4 to 1 favorite and he knows she's in trouble. Her brother in a commanding position.]
ANNIE DUKE: And he was 82% to win the hand.
JAD: They both knew that if they play this hand 100 times, he's going to win about 82 of them.
ROBERT: The only thing that can save her is if the dealer now turns over a six, there's an 18% chance.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: And here comes the flop.]
ROBERT: Dealer turns over the cards.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Annie gets her six and a full house.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: Oh, God.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer 2: And she immediately feels horrendous for her brother.]
ANNIE DUKE: And I won the hand.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: That's the end of the line for Howard Lederer. Annie Duke knocks her big brother out.]
ROBERT: In the video you see her getting up from the table.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: I’m sorry, Howard.]
ROBERT: And she hugs her brother.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer: Oh, this is very difficult for Annie.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Lederer: Wow, what a six Annie.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, World Series of Poker announcer 2: You see her emotions.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Lederer: You must have mixed feelings about that baby.]
HOWARD LEDERER: Look, I was 82% win to that pot. That was incredibly unlucky hand for me.
JAD: Yeah, she’s your sister, too.
MIKE PESCA: I would have just been like, “I taught her how to do that!”
HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah. No, I wanted to win that hand, that's for sure. I—I was upset.
ANNIE DUKE: When my mom watched that she called me up and she was, like, in tears. And she was like, How could you knock your brother out of the tournament? And I was like, I—now I know who your favorite is.
ROBERT: [laughing]
MIKE PESCA: Now, here's the thing. If you—if your superior cards do not win the day, you know, we have our vocabulary to deal with that. It's called a bad beat…
JAD: …a bad beat.
MIKE PESCA: A bad beat is when you had the cards that should have won and you got beat.
JAD: Wow. There's a term that should catch on right there.
MIKE PESCA: If, say, in stock investing, you're to say, “Look, you invested for all the right reasons, but the stock went down because someone you never heard of shorted it.” That was a bad beat.
JAD: You know what I wonder.
ROBERT: What?
JAD: Like, you know, this whole…
HOWARD LEDERER: Rigorous, probabilistic way of thinking.
JAD: Is that something that you just acquire once you know the math? Or do you have to first be of a certain caste of mind in order to kind of get into it?
ROBERT: Well…
JAD: ‘Cause I'm not sure it would work for me.
ROBERT: You have to be from a pretty unusual family to know—to get consolation from that.
ANNIE DUKE: All right. I'll tell you what our family's like. So, my brother and my brother in law both knew my boyfriend before we—me and my boyfriend started dating. Okay.
ROBERT: Right.
ANNIE DUKE: And they—when they found out we were going on a date, they made a market for what the probability was that we would actually end up “together” together.
HOWARD LEDERER: There is a—there is a bet he was willing to give me $27, if they get married I have to give him a hundred. I was offering him 73 to 27.
ROBERT: What is wrong with you?
ANNIE DUKE: And I was like, “Are you insane? We haven't gone on a date together yet.”
HOWARD LEDERER: Exactly. They've never gone on a date yet. I made one of the best bets ever.
JAD: I assume you’d be happy to lose that bet.
HOWARD LEDERER: I'm going to—I’m going to be thrilled. But—but that's how gamblers think. I mean, it's not a bad way or it taints anything. It's that's the way that we memorialize the fact that we had a fundamental difference of opinion.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
ROBERT: Well, okay. So that way that works. You know, if you're betting on your sister's marital status, I suppose. But if it—if it's—if it's bigger stakes, like going back to the beginning of the program, where we were concerned with the presence or un-presence of God, that's not a mathematical thing.
SOREN WHEELER: Oh, well, I'm not so sure that's true.
JAD: Soren, would you like to say something?
SOREN WHEELER: Well, you know, there was a guy named Pascal. I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
ROBERT: I have.
SOREN WHEELER: Who thought that you could do exactly that. So he was one of the first thinkers of probability. And so all this stuff we've been talking about. But he at some point was also struggling with the question of God, and he couldn't decide for sure. He always thought there was a chance he did exist, a chance he didn't, so he didn't know what to do. So he came up with an idea. He said, “If I decide to believe in him—In that scenario. If he exists eternal forever, happy, happy.”
JAD: If you believe in him and he happens to be there, then you win. You win the pot.
SOREN WHEELER: Big time forever, like infinite. Now, if I decide to not believe in God, that's my other option.
JAD: Uh-huh.
SOREN WHEELER: And now I’m—I'm a not believer. If he does exist…
JAD: You don't believe.
SOREN WHEELER: Very, very, very bad eternal damnation.
JAD: Then you go to hell.
SOREN WHEELER: Yeah. Then you go to hell. So there's a huge, infinite payoff to believing in God and there's an infinite downside to not believing in God.
JAD: So the pot odds, so to speak...
SOREN WHEELER: So no matter how—yeah so because no matter how unlikely it is that God actually exists—this is like Annie having an infinite amount of—of money on the table, no matter how bad her cards are, how unlikely it is she thinks she'll win you got to bet. You have to bet.
JAD: The pot. Odds are saying that you must believe in God is what you're—is essentially…
SOREN WHEELER: That's what Pascal said. Pascal said, if you do the math the way Annie does the math believe, in God. What are the odds on God?
ROBERT: See, though, but that's ridiculous, by the way. No, that's ridiculous.
SOREN WHEELER: Why wait, wait. Why? Because you feel like Pascal’s faith is lesser? His belief in faith because he got to it through math is somehow lesser than, I don’t know, say, St. Augustine, or someone you respect?
ROBERT: Because, yes, because—because we’re talking here about grace and love and being connected, and it’s—it is—it is a daredevil-ly, heart of your hearts, full of emotion, that's what rules here and that's what guides you. It is not calculating the odds.
JAD: I don't know the odds are looking pretty divine right now.
[LISTENER: This is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: And we're still talking about certainty versus doubt. And in this final story, the two once again collide. But this time it's in a way that's almost unimaginable.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I remember running along railroad track, a seldom used railroad track, but just thinking, God, it would be a blessing if a train just came along and flattened me. It was like…
JAD: We need to warn you now. If there are younger, sensitive listeners listening right now, this next piece depicts graphic violence and it can be pretty disturbing. So if you're listening with kids, this would be a good time to ask them to leave the room or to—for you to put on headphones.
ROBERT: This piece comes from our producer, Pat Walters.
PAT WALTERS: I guess we could just start at the beginning. So could you just, I don't know, set the scene? It was 1985?
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Yes, it was 1985.
PAT: So this is Penny.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Penny Beerntsen.
PAT: And in 1985 Penny and her husband, Tom.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Yeah, I—I'm here.
PAT: …were living in Wisconsin…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …on the shores of Lake Michigan.
PAT: In a little town called Manitowoc.
TOM BEERNTSEN: …owned a small third generation and family business.
PAT: And what kind of business was that?
TOM BEERNTSEN: Beernsten’s Candies, we’re open seven days a week, 10 to 10, 363 days a year.
PAT: But sometimes in the summer Penny and Tom would cut out early and…
TOM BEERNTSEN: Go to the beach. That's where we went that day.
PAT: July 29th, 1985.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Blue skies, probably in the seventies. Perfect day to be at the beach with your family.
PAT: They parked the car…
TOM BEERNTSEN: Two, three o’clock in the afternoon and…
PAT: Set up camp near the water.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And I was reading a book about Lizzie Borden, the infamous ax murderer.
PAT: But after about an hour of reading this book, Penny set it down and…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Said to my husband, I can't believe I'm reading this gruesome book on a beautiful day. I'm going to go for a jog.
PAT: Penny heads north along the water.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And when I was within about a half mile of my starting point, there was a guy standing with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder. And as I jogged by, he said, “It's a great day.” I glanced at him and said, “It's a beautiful day for a jog.” I didn't really think anything of it. Jogged three miles, turned around, and I saw…
PAT: …same guy.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …come out from under a half fallen tree and head towards me.
PAT: She started to run, and we should say this next part gets graphic and violent.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …made the mistake of running into the water to try and get away from him and realized how slowly I was running in the water. As I got—ran back to the beach, this man caught up with me, put me in a chokehold and said, “We're going to take a little walk up into the sand dunes.” He pushed me up over this sand first dune where were no longer visible to anybody, started asking me to do sexual things. He was trying to remove my swimsuit and I twisted to try and get away and he tightened his grip and said, “Do what I tell you, I've got a knife.” Two thoughts went through my mind. Stay really calm and get a good look at this guy. PENNY BEERNTSEN: Caucasian, sandy blond hair, curly beard and mustache, hairy hands, short, stubby fingers.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: He pushed me down on the ground and was kneeling over me and when I was refusing, he would what he would do was he would strangle me until I would about lose consciousness, then he would loosen his grip and say, now, are you going to do it? And I would refuse. And as I'm talking, I managed to get one leg up and I kicked him in the groin. But unfortunately it didn't incapacitate him. It enraged him, and he said, No, I'm going to kill you now. You're going to die.
PAT: Meanwhile, Tom is getting worried.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Because she was so predictable in her patterns, she would normally be gone 45 minutes to an hour.
PAT: After an hour and a half, he started pacing the beach.
TOM BEERNTSEN: At 2 hours…
PAT: He called the cops.
TOM BEERNTSEN: The police brought in jetskis…
PAT: Like, were you thinking that she had?
PAT: I thought—I was fairly convinced that she probably had drowned. In Manitowoc, you don't think about crime. You didn't lock your doors. You didn't, you know, many people left their keys in their car.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: He started hitting my head either on a rock or a tree stump, some hard object. At one point he broke my nose and then strangled me till I lost consciousness.
PAT: Sometime later, Penny woke up.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: When I came to, I was lying on my back in the sand.
PAT: She saw that she was naked and alone.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I thought, maybe he's in the woods, you know, watching to see if—if I have survived or if he's accomplished what he set out to do. So I tried to stand up, was too weak and fell over.
PAT: And she noticed when she fell down that her hands were covered in blood.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And I thought, this is evidence. I need to preserve this. So I crawled through the sand kind of on my knees and the heels on my hands.
PAT: Making sure she was keeping her fingers up out of the sand.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: As soon as I saw her, I knew that she had been beaten. You never want to see someone like that. And, you know, I hope I never see that again.
PAT: The paramedics rushed Penny to the ER. Next thing she remembers, she was lying in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Stitching facial cuts. And then there's a female deputy who's questioning me.
PAT: She asked Penny to describe the guy.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Caucasian, sandy, blond hair. Curly. Hairy hands, stubby fingers.
PAT: And the next morning, the cops brought Penny down to the police station for a lineup.
PAT: And this is where you go into a room and there's a one way mirror.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: You can see them, they can't see you.
PAT: There were nine guys.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Each of the nine had a number around their neck from 1 to 9.
PAT: She looked at one guy, then another, then another.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And when I came to, I don't know if he was number three, I don't recall exactly…
PAT: One particular guy of the nine.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I remember the color draining from my face, visceral gut reaction, like, “Oh my God, this is the guy.”
PAT: Barely any time had passed since the attack. She was positive. The sheriff wasn't surprised they'd had their eye on this guy for a while. His name was Steven Avery. He'd been arrested for some small-time stuff, burglary, cruelty to animals and most recently…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Attempted assault at rifle point.
PAT: He’d pulled a gun on a woman.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: So…
PAT: So the DEA indicted him for attacking Penny. The trial was fast.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Very fast.
PAT: Penny got on the stand and said…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I was 100% certain that Steven Avery was the man who assaulted me. FRED HAZLEWOOD: She—she—she had no doubt. She looked people squarely in the eye. Her recollections were unequivocal. She was a very strong witness.
PAT: This is Fred Hazelwood. He was the judge on the case.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: Here in Manitowoc county.
PAT: Tell—tell me about his alibi.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: His alibi was that he just didn't have the time to commit the crime.
PAT: Because he was shopping.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: He bought some paint, I believe, or drywall compound. I'm not sure what. He was also working that day before the alleged assault, helping his family pour cement for some project at home. That was his testimony, and the testimony of a whole bunch of other witnesses.
PAT: 16. Only problem was nearly all of them were family.
TOM BEERNTSEN: And the stories were too similar.
PAT: This is Tom again.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Virtually identical.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Sounded like they had gotten together and talked.
TOM BEERNTSEN: That was a credibility issue that affected the defense witnesses.
PAT: And there was one other big problem for Avery, his clothes.
TOM BEERNTSEN: There was not a microscopic speck of concrete dust on any of the clothes that he wore that day. And he indicated at the trial that he had worked the end of the concrete chute. Well, anyone that has ever done that at the end of a concrete truck knows that that just comes out and splashes.
PAT: After deliberating for two days, the jury found Steve Avery guilty.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Guilty on three counts, as I recall.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: Yeah. Sexual assault.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: 15 years.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: …attempted murder.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: 15 years…
FRED HAZLEWOOD: I believe false imprisonment.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Two years for false imprisonment.
PAT: 32 years all together.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: To be served consecutively.
PAT: So you go back to the chocolate shop and try to carry on with life as it was before?
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Right. Essentially.
PAT: But that obviously wasn't so easy.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Nightmares, flashbacks.
PAT: She was angry…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: You know, blowing up at my kids.
PAT: Her husband.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Sometimes I wouldn't want my husband to be protective, and other times you would think he was being protective. And I would say, like, I can take care of myself.
PAT: When a guy in the street whistled at her.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I turned around and just let loose with every obscenity in the book, you know.
PAT: So she started seeing a therapist, which helped a little. But even a year after Steve's conviction, she was still struggling with all this anger. And then one snowy afternoon.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Maybe winter of '86, '87.
PAT: She went to see a talk by the social worker.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Dr. Mark Umbreit from the University of Minnesota. And I don't remember exactly what he said. I don't think he used the word forgiveness, but he said at some point victims reached the point where they understand that the anger and hatred they're feeling is really damaging themselves and their families, and they need—need to let go of it. And I left the presentation at the next break. I went home, I got my cross-country skis, I went to Point Beach State Park and skied to the point where I was—exact spot where I'd been assaulted and basically said to myself, Steve, you don't have power over me anymore. So that was a turning point.
PAT: Penney actually started working in the prisons. She'd go and tell inmates her story.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Hoping to teach the impact of crime and hope that they might make the leap to changing their behavior.
PAT: Meanwhile…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Steven Avery has a number of appeals and he's turned down at all his appeals.
PAT: She told the district attorney.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: If anyone, someone just breathed Steven Avery's name in court I want to be notified and I want to be there for every hearing. I did show up and I'm getting more and more angry every time there's appeal. Like, is there no finality? Is there no closure to this?
PAT: He kept asking the court to review the evidence over and over again…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …and I'm thinking, why is he so persistent?
PAT: And then one Sunday morning in.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: In early September.
PAT: In 2003, 18 years after Steve Avery's conviction, Penny gets a call from her lawyer friend Janine.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And Janine has called and said, “Can I stop by? I want to talk to you about a restorative justice initiative at Marquette.”
JANINE GESKI: That, frankly, was the truth. But it wasn't why I was driving to Manitowoc on a Sunday.
PAT: On her way, Janine called Penny's husband, who had left town for a business trip that morning.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Janine told me what she had just discovered and heard.
PAT: It was about a DNA test. She asked him to turn around.
JANINE GESKI: Tom and I both pulled into the driveway…
TOM BEERNTSEN: …together.
JANINE GESKI: …simultaneously.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I walk outside and both of them are ashen.
PAT: And in that moment ...
TOM BEERNTSEN: She knew.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I knew instantly.
TOM BEERNTSEN: I’ll always remember the look on her face.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: The DNA is back. It is not Steven Avery.
JANINE GESKI: She just. She just fell apart. I told her I wanted to go in and sit down. And she went and sat on the couch next to Tom and…
PAT: …explained to her the Wisconsin Innocence Project had reevaluated some of the biological material from the crime scene…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Some hairs.
PAT: …and determined…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …that an innocent person has spent 18 years, I think it was 18 years, one month and 13 days in prison for something he did not do.
JANINE GESKI: You know, she looked very frightened. And I said, Penny, I want you to remember all the good you've done.
JAD: Working in the prisons, all the men you've reached.
JANINE GESKI: You know, I mean, she didn't say much.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I remember feeling if I wrote down every good deed I had done from the day I was born until today, it would not possibly be sufficient to balance the scales in terms of this horrendous error that I've made. That day was worse than the day I was assaulted.
PAT: And there was one more thing.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Then I learned. Not only was there exoneration, but there was a hit.
PAT: The court told Penny that the DNA belonged to a man.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Named Gregory Allen.
PAT: Who at that moment was in prison for a…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Very brutal rape of a woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he had actually been charged with an attempted assault on the same beach where I was assaulted. His nickname was The Sandman because he liked to come up over the sand dunes and grab someone.
PAT: And for ten years, while Steve Avery was in prison, he’d walked free.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: So I'm thinking, how many other women have had their lives turned upside down and inside out because I misidentified the man who assaulted me.
PAT: As it turned out, Gregory Allen was serving his sentence, a 60-year sentence.
TOM BEERNTSEN: At the prison in Green Bay.
PAT: Where Penny had actually been working.
TOM BEERNTSEN: And as a matter of fact, he was about two weeks from being in Penny's next class.
PAT: No way.
TOM BEERNTSEN: And—no, absolutely. And so Penny would never have known this man that would have been sitting feet away from her. In his cell they found a scrapbook where he had documented all the appeals of Stephen Avery over all those years.
PAT: Oh, that's really creepy.
TOM BEERNTSEN: That's more than creepy.
PAT: September 11, 2003, Steve Avery was set free as soon as he walked out of the gate at the prison, he was mobbed by reporters.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: It was the news story in Wisconsin, and he was considered a celebrity. There was a legislator who actually put together a Steven Avery fund that people can contribute to because he really had no resources and no job skills because he's been in—in prison for 18 years. You know, there was a beauty salon in Green Bay that gave him a makeover. I remember sending my husband out at home and saying, no, I just need to be alone. And I decided I'm going out running. And I remember running along railroad track, a seldom used railroad track, but just thinking, God, it would be a blessing if a train just came along and flattened me. It was like, what do I do? I can't make this right.
PAT: She says, every time she saw Steven Avery's face…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: He was on the front page of the local Manitowoc newspaper every day for two to three weeks.
PAT: Two things would happen. She'd think, “How could I have done this to this man?” But at the very same moment, she thought that…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: The hair on the back of my neck would stand up.
PAT: Even after you knew?
PENNY BEERNTSEN: After I knew, I knew intellectually he was innocent. But emotionally, this is the man who I've seen in my nightmares and flashbacks for 18 years.
PAT: So those two weeks after where his face is in the paper every day must have been very strange.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: It was strange. Yeah. And then it's also strange to feel like an offender. A little aside here, when I saw Gregory Allen's picture, a picture of my actual perpetrator, there was absolutely no physical reaction from me. I would swear I'd never seen it before in my life. So, my therapist said to me, You will never be able to attach to Gregory Allen the feelings you had towards Steven Avery. What you have to do is work on removing those feelings from Steve and looking at Steve as this is an innocent person.
PAT: Not long after his exoneration, Penny had written to Steve asking if she could meet him and apologize in person. And about a year and a half after his exoneration, he agreed.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I was so nervous.
PAT: Can you set the scene? Are you in like a—a little room?
PENNY BEERNTSEN: We’re in a very small office, like a two room office.
PAT: In a legislative building in the state capitol.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: There's a sofa, a few chairs.
PAT: Penny you got there first. And eventually Steve walked in.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Steve had his attorney, Keith Finley, there from the Innocence Project. I stand up, I extend my hand to Steve. He gives me this hearty handshake. Our lives have been intertwined for almost two decades, and it's the first time we've physically touched. He sits down. We talked about things, like he had a nephew who was killed in a car accident when he was in prison and couldn't go to the funeral. His grandmother died. He couldn't go to her funeral. His wife had divorced him. He's estranged from his children, and some of them I know, he had one daughter who really stood by him. And so I brought up these losses and…
PAT: Apologized for each one individually.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: He—he's very quiet, sort of just acknowledging him with a nod of his head. And he said, “I don't blame you. I blame the police.”
PAT: Because it turned out in the weeks before Penny was attacked, the police had been watching Gregory Allen.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Because he was a known sex offender. They were actually tailing him for two weeks prior to my assault, checking on him sometimes as often as a dozen times a day. On July 29th, 1985, the day I was assaulted, they checked on him once in the morning and then, due to a high volume of police calls, were unable to check on him any more that day. And that's the afternoon I was assaulted.
PAT: Eventually, after Penny and Steve had been sitting in that little room for a while...
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Time was up and we—there was no more to be said. And, I stood up and walked over to Steve and said to Steve is it okay if I give you a hug? And he didn't even respond, he just grabbed me in a big bear hug and I said so. Only he could hear “Steve, I'm so sorry.” And he said, “It's okay. This is over.” And for him to say, “It's okay, it's over,” when I know full well it's—his journey is just beginning and he's got a hell of a road. That's one of the most graceful things that's ever been said to me. Fast forward...
PAT: About two years after that meeting…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I get a call from Janine Geske, my attorney friend.
PAT: The one who delivered the news about the exoneration.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …who says…
PAT: …something's happened.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: There's a woman photographer who's missing.
[NEWS CLIP: Teresa Halbach disappeared October 31 after visiting the suspect, Steven Avery, to take pictures of a car he was selling.]
PENNY BEERNTSEN: And they are searching the Avery property.
JANINE GESKI: I encouraged her. I tried to tell her, stay out of this.
PAT: But Penny went on the local news.
JANINE GESKI: And said…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I cannot believe this.
JANINE GESKI: That she didn't believe it could be Steven Avery, that she didn't believe he would be capable of such a thing.
PAT: And other people in town thought that, too, that this was just another false accusation.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: But eventually, after a couple of days of searching the remains of Teresa's body…
[NEWS CLIP: Burned human bone and teeth.]
PENNY BEERNTSEN: …were eventually found in a burned barrel at the Avery auto salvage yard.
PAT: Steven Avery claimed that he was innocent, that he was set up by the police. But a few months later, his nephew came forward and he tells police in an interrogation that the day of the murder, he went to Steven Avery's trailer, he heard screams inside, Steven came to the door in a T-shirt and gym shorts. He was sweating. And inside the nephew sees Teresa Halbach bound to the bed. And what happens next, according to Steven's nephew, is one of the most awful things I've ever heard. Steven asks his nephew to rape Teresa with him, and then together they kill her.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Oh, my. Oh, my God. You start questioning your own judgment. I can't even trust my senses. I can't trust my eyes to tell me what, you know, what I thought I recorded accurately about the world. And then when he gets convicted for killing Teresa, it's like, you know what kind of character judge am I? Now I can't even judge character. I can’t.
PAT: She'd been certain twice and wrong twice. And then a worse thought occurred to her.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Would Teresa Halbach be alive today if I hadn't misidentified my assailant?
PAT: Meaning what exactly, like…
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Well, I accuse Steve of something he doesn't do. He's convicted. He spends 18 years in prison. Prison is enormously damaging to guilty people. What happens to someone who is innocent?
PAT: In other words, did her initial certainty that Steve Avery was her assailant, did that turn him into the guy who murdered Teresa Halbach?
FRED HAZLEWOOD: No, I—no, no…
PAT: Judge Hazelwood doesn't buy that argument.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: Not at all. Not at all.
PAT: For one, if you look at the group of people who've been set free after a wrongful conviction, the vast majority of them do okay. They don't commit serious crimes after they've been released from prison. And this was a man with a violent past.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: Oh, yeah.
PAT: Well before Penny, he pulled a gun on a woman.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: In the broad light of day.
PAT: And demanded that she...
FRED HAZLEWOOD: …come with him.
PAT: Nothing happened because the police intervened. But what if they hadn't?
FRED HAZLEWOOD: I saw the potential for violence in him, but I—I would be wrong to say I saw in him a Teresa Halbach. I—I didn't.
PAT: So I asked him if this case had shaken his confidence in his judgment, the way it had for Penny?
FRED HAZLEWOOD: At first I tried to figure out what in the world did we do wrong? And I pretty much came to the conclusion that…
PAT: At least, as far as the courts were concerned…
FRED HAZLEWOOD: We did get it right and we still got a bad result. That's—that's going to be a problem as long as humans judge other human activity, we're not always going to get it right.
PAT: That's actually the one thing we can be certain of, he says.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: But cases like Avery are—are rare. I was 25 years on the bench and 15 years or more as a lawyer before that, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like Steven Avery.
PAT: He says Steven Avery is an outlier. He’s the lesson you don't learn.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: It's like I was fishing last spring in Sanibel, on Sanibel Island, and I was in up to my waist trying to—fly casting for snook.
PAT: It’s a kind of fish.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: And all of a sudden this rather dark shape swam right by me about eight feet long. And I thought to myself, that's a bull shark. And here I am, waist deep and this shark, swam maybe a foot away from me as he went by. What if he’d bumped into me?
PAT: Yeah.
FRED HAZLEWOOD: What are the odds of this happening? But, you know, life is like that, we—we face the unexpected, the unknown, and...
PAT: But you're not going to never go fishing there again, are you?
FRED HAZLEWOOD: Oh, no, no, I wouldn't. That wouldn't keep me from going fishing.
PAT: Then again, the judge didn't get bitten. I kept thinking over and over at the end of this, like the Halbach family, how do they move on after something like this?
JAD: Did you call them?
PAT: I tried. Like, I reached out to a couple of the family members, but I never heard back.
JAD: And what about Penny?
PAT: Well, she and Tom sold the chocolate shop and moved to Chicago.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Well, I'm retired so right now I do a lot of volunteer work. Center on Wrongful Convictions, Children's Hospital. I volunteer at the Morton Arboretum, and so, a variety of things, and...
PAT: And all together she seems to be doing just fine.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: I mean, I question much more. I question things a lot more. Yeah, I think there's much more doubt and I think I'm much more comfortable living with uncertainty. I've kind of had—I mean, I have to be.
JAD: Producer Pat Walters. For more information on anything that you heard in this hour, visit radiolab.org. Thanks to Pat. Thanks to Lulu and all the producers who helped us with this episode and thank you guys for listening.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Tom Beerntsen calling.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Penny Beerntsen Calling.
TOM BEERNTSEN: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Our staff Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler…
TOM BEERNTSEN: Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenda Farrell, Molly Webster, Melissa O'Donnell, Daylan Keefe...
PENNY BEERNTSEN: Lynn Levy and Andy Mills. With help from Lulu Miller.
LULU: Nate Falls, Douglas Q Smith, Kelsey Padgett, and Megan Pam.
VOICE: End of message.
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