[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're gonna feature a story from our friends over at Reply All.

ROBERT: Which is a podcast produced by Gimlet Media.

JAD: Hosted by PJ Vogt, Alex Goldman.

ROBERT: We're gonna let you hear a taste of Reply All.

JAD: You know, because it's an amazing show. The entire staff's, like, secret favorite show. Not even secret, actually. And this story, it just kind of grabbed us.

ROBERT: Now we're not gonna play you the whole story that they did. We're gonna play you most of it. And we may intervene from time to time just to sort of—because we bubble over with questions sometimes.

JAD: Exactly. And this story actually doesn't come from PJ and Alex. It comes from one of their producers, Sruthi Pinnamaneni.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yes.

JAD: And the story sort of centers around a couple and their son.

[car door slams]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So let me start by introducing you to the couple, Amy Green.

AMY GREEN: Hi!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Hi.

AMY GREEN: Come on in!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And Ryan Green.

AMY GREEN: Oh, we have our buffalo chicken. Oh, wait, you got hot wings from yesterday?

RYAN GREEN: No, I already ate those. I think that's why I'm suffering this morning.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: They live in a small house in Loveland, Colorado. They fell in love chatting online, got married as soon as they turned 21. They moved into this house the very next day.

RYAN GREEN: Let me respond to some emails and then we'll head down.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: They had their first son, Caleb, their second son, Isaac. Ryan was a computer programmer, and Amy took care of the kids. They were just living in a mess of diapers and toys, going to church every Sunday. And then in 2009, they had Joel.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: When Joel was born, how old were you?

AMY GREEN: I—gosh, I was thinking about this the other day. If I was 25 when Caleb was born, and then when Isaac was born, I would have been, like, 27. Yeah, I think I was 28. I was 28 when Joel was born. Figured it out. [laughs]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Everything was normal. Fine. And then just a little before his first birthday, Amy noticed that his head was a little tilted, just kind of cocked to one side. A couple days later, he starts throwing up. Can't keep any food down. And so they do a bunch of tests, and the doctor says, "Listen, your son has a lesion. It's a cancer." So they biopsy the tumor, and then they come back with this news that it's something called an AT/RT. It's very, very difficult to treat.

AMY GREEN: So when you have an AT/RT, you go through all the most intense chemotherapy and all the most intense radiation. They throw the kitchen sink at it. And doing that, you have about a 50 percent chance of surviving for five years.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: I double checked this, and it turns out the odds of survival are even grimmer. It's a 50 percent chance of surviving just two years.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: When you hear this kind of news, is there any part of you that's like, what if you don't do the treatment?

AMY GREEN: I remember before his first surgery asking them a lot about, like, will he have to have chemotherapy? And thinking to myself, because I can't—we can't—we can't do this. This is crazy. We can't do this. But then as time wore on, and by the time we actually even heard about the tumor, then you're just thinking like, "Oh. Well, 50 percent. Like, that's half. Like, we've got a good shot that he gets through this."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: What do you think, Isaac? He's in the hospital, so they're taking care of him.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: This is from a home video of Joel's brothers meeting him in the hospital. Isaac is two and a half, looking kind of scared. Joel is a little over a year old. He's lying in a small red wagon, hooked up to an IV. He's skinny, and his head is perfectly round.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: His food goes through that tube. Yeah.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So they start going through this treatment. It starts off with intense radiation, and then just, you know, months of chemotherapy, which I didn't know what that meant. It means that you just hold the baby for six, seven, eight hours a day, and you just lie in a bed with them while they get these infusions.

RYAN GREEN: And so it'd be, like, this eight-hour pump. And you'd hook it up at night, and it would be this, like, this white milky substance that would provide all of his nutrition because he couldn't swallow very well.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: One day, it was Amy's shift. She was holding Joel.

AMY GREEN: I was sitting in his room with him. I was singing him a song and clapping, and he was clapping his hands. And then he was sort of like, babble-singing along. And so, like, for me, it was just one of those moments that you felt like, "Oh, I'm always gonna remember this." Like, sometimes you just have a moment and you go, "I'm gonna remember this the rest of my life." And then that made me sad because I thought, oh, like, but the reason I think I'll remember this the rest of my life is because he could die. Until eventually I did just kind of decide, like, I think I need to be all in. Like, I think I need to love him like mad. And I think we need to live our lives like he's gonna live.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And that's what they did for a year. And then in November 2010, just before Joel's second birthday, the doctors call them in, and they say, "We're really sorry. Joel has another tumor. All these chemicals we've been pumping into him, they didn't do anything, and so it's time for us to stop. He will eventually die. We're not sure, but we think in about four months. You know, this is it."

JAD: But as Sruthi goes on to explain in the story, that definitely wasn't it. Because there's this one night when the situation was pretty much at its worst, when something happened.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Joel had a stomach bug. He was throwing up, got dehydrated. So Ryan spent the night with him in the hospital.

RYAN GREEN: I just remember him really wanting apple juice because that was one of his favorite things at the hospital. But then I'd give it to him, and he'd just throw it up again.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And he's crying and crying, and his cries just get more frantic and animal, and there's nothing that Ryan can do.

RYAN GREEN: By the end of the night, he had just such sunken eyes. But I just remember, like, I wanted to hold him, and I couldn't put him down because he would get so upset.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And when Ryan finally did put him down, Joel would start hitting his head against the wall of his crib. Eventually, Ryan himself started to lose it. He was crying, too. And then in the early hours of the morning, he lay down and prayed.

RYAN GREEN: And I remember that's when he stopped crying, and he fell asleep. And it was just one of those—it's one of those few moments in life where, like, it felt like an answer from God. And it wasn't like I heard a voice or saw, you know, a burning bush or anything like that, but it was just. It felt so much like mercy.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And beyond just sheer relief, Ryan had this other thought—frankly, a weird thought. This whole ordeal reminded him of a video game. Like, you have to get the baby to stop crying. So you keep trying things: give him juice, bounce him, talk to him. But the weird thing is, in this awful game, none of those things actually work. They're all, like, fake choices. Ryan thought, what if I could make a game like this where you, the player, you don't really have control? And so he started to think, like, I wonder if I could make that, if I could make that scene.

ROBERT: If he could make the scene of Joel in desperation and then give him an option? Is that the thing? Is there an act of saving?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: No.

ROBERT: No.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: No.

JAD: So wait, he's gonna make the video game where everything you do doesn't work, the baby still cries.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah. I think he was just intrigued by that because it seemed bizarre.

JAD: Yeah, I'll make a video game where you can't do anything except pray.

ROBERT: I don't know if that has a very high likelihood of being a popular game.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: I think the popularity of it was so not essential. He wasn't even thinking that because he wasn't thinking, "Oh, this is a game that I will release." It was almost like a thought experiment, right, in his brain where he's thinking, you know, usually people come into a game trying to solve it, and I wonder how if I could make this game where they couldn't, they would understand me and how I feel right now.

JAD: Oh!

AMY GREEN: I remember he really was like, "I want to make a game about that day that Joel was dehydrated in the hospital." And I said, "That's terrible! That's not a game, and no one will want to play that." Like, I think that that word 'game' meant, like, something you do in your leisure time, you know? And so who wants to spend their leisure time reliving the worst moment of a man's life? So I said, "Do not make that. That is horrible."

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But he clung to the idea. So finally, Amy said, "Okay, I'll give you three months."

[applause]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Thank you.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So a few months later, it's the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Alongside Assassin's Creed 3, Battlefield 4, the new Oculus Rift VR headset ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... there was Ryan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: I'm gonna talk to you about a personal game that I'm making. My son Joel had just turned one year old the day that we found the monster in his brain.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Ryan is standing in front of a bunch of young tech dudes. They're listening kind of half heartedly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Joel is alive and fighting his eighth tumor. Our doctors fight for him. Our family fights for him. And we serve a God that's the God of the living, not the dead. In the middle of all this pain and suffering and mud and morass that cancer has wrought in our family, we have a drink of water that's made of hope and love and light, and we hope to share it with you.]

[applause]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Amy stayed home, fretting because they were almost out of money, and she was worried that Ryan would come home feeling crushed. But that's not what happened. Ryan got back and said "It was amazing. This person introduced me to that person. That person. There's two or three different people who want to fund my game."

JAD: Wait, so you're saying there's actually a market for a game like this? Like, there's people ...

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: So I want to be clear. The world of these kinds of emotional games, it's a small one, right?

JAD: Yeah.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But there are people. There are investors in there who are looking for games that are doing something different, looking for games that are meaningful in some way. And so I think a few of them played through the scene, this dehydration scene, and they thought, "Okay, let's see what a full-fledged version of this would be." And we're just—you know, it's like the video game generation has grown up, right? Like, if you were born in the '80s or the '70s, like, you played games for certain reasons when you were a kid. And now we're grown up, and we're having these different experiences, like a child going through cancer or, you know, the death of my father or these things, which suddenly you're like, why can't I tell these stories with video games?

JAD: Hmm. And what was Amy's reaction when she heard people wanted to fund the game?

AMY GREEN: It really blew my mind, because I'm still just like, "Because of your dehydration game that I told you to never make" And he realizes, like, you've never played it. Like, you've never played the scene. So I put on the headphones.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: She finds herself back in the hospital room. You don't see Joel. You see an empty crib, and you can hear him crying. You're playing as Ryan. You can move your mouse around the screen, and options appear. You can give him juice. You can try to bounce him. You can walk into the bathroom, look out the window. But no matter what you do, his crying just gets worse and worse.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Okay, buddy. Okay. I'll hold you. Please stop!]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: After five or six minutes of this, Ryan sits in a chair, drops his head into his lap, and prays.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: And you've brought us this far. He's still here. And not dead, not there with you.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then with you, the crying stops.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Peace. He sleeps.]

AMY GREEN: So I put on the headphones, and I just lost it. And I was just crying and crying. And I knew Joel was okay, and he was, like, right there. Like, Joel was right there with us. And yet it brought me back to that space in a much more real way than I thought that a video game could.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Amy didn't need any more convincing. She said, "Okay, let's do this. Let's pull the rest of our savings and make this game." They named it That Dragon Cancer.

JAD: I'm just gonna use the same tease that Reply All used in their podcast. Coming up, Ryan and Amy encounter what might be the world's biggest design problem.

[LISTENER: This is Riley Lawrence from Woodland Hills, California. Radiolab is supported in part 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 are back with again, Reply All's story. It's about a couple who have a kid who's fighting cancer, and the mom and dad have decided to express the experiences that they're going through in, of all things, a video game.

JAD: Yeah. So Amy and Ryan and their six-person team, they begin to build these scenes of the game, these surreal vignettes where you, the player, you take on different characters, and every scene, your job, your role basically, is to kind of take care of baby Joel.

ROBERT: So let's now go back to the piece and to Sruthi.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The first scene is at the pond. You start off as a duck. You paddle towards a little boy. It's Joel, or this origami version of him. He doesn't have eyes or a mouth, but he has a voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: [child's laughter]]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And that is actually Joel's laugh as you hand him pieces of bread and he throws them into the water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Here you go, Joel. Here's a piece. Okay, now you throw it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Joel's almost five, right?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The kid speaking here is Isaac, Joel's brother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: But he can't talk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: That's true.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: I can talk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Yeah, I know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Why can't Joel?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Well, Joel got sick right after he turned one, and ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Kind of slowed him down a little bit, buddy.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And there's other vignettes. Like, there was this one time in a hospital when to keep Joel entertained, Ryan blew up surgical gloves like balloons. It's this gorgeous scene where you see Joel floating into the nighttime sky towards the moon, holding onto these surgical balloons. And then you see these black burrs appear from the corner. That's the cancer. And they pop the balloons one by one. And throughout these scenes, you play mini games, you discover rooms, listen to voicemails from Amy. There's even little levels you can beat. But the cancer is always around the edges of this world, thorny and black and creeping in. And at one point, you'll arrive here, the waiting room where doctors tell Amy and Ryan that Joel's cancer is terminal. As they break the news, rain starts pouring into the room and Ryan slowly starts to slip under the water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: We've given you a lot to think about already today, but we're going to have you come back Monday and we can talk about palliative treatment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: We're very good at end-of-life care. We're very good at managing pain and masking symptoms at the end of life.]

JAD: Just to jump in for one second. We asked Sruthi, so as Ryan and Amy and the team were crafting these scenes, what was happening with Joel? And she says what happened surprised everybody.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Thing that happened was that tumor where, you know, the doctor said, "Listen, he's terminal. It's gonna be over soon." They radiate the tumor, and it goes away. And then a few months later, he gets another tumor. They radiate, and it goes away. And then this happens again and again and again. And so he's two years old, he's three years old, he's four years old. He's doing things that the doctors never thought he would do. Like, he turned two and a half and said his first word, "Uh oh!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Mmm. Num num!]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: He starts to swallow again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: Joel, don't jump the food.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Starts to walk when he's three.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: Way to go!]

AMY GREEN: He just became this miracle baby.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Somebody in their church said they had a vision. A woman in the church told her that she had a vision that Joel would do great things. Another reason they wanted to make this about Joel is because they felt as if, you know, as Christians, they were living a miracle, and they wanted to share this with people and show them. And then a doctor calls them in and he says, "Listen, Joel has a new tumor. But this tumor is different. It's in a place that we've already radiated."

AMY GREEN: He explained to us that he cannot continue to radiate an area too much or it can cause brain death. And it was right on the brain stem.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The doctors say we're not gonna radiate this time.

JAD: And what happened to Joel?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: His condition, like, very rapidly deteriorated. He's having more trouble breathing. He can't swallow again. A lot of the things that he was able to do like walk and eat, he stops. And so they invite their entire church community to come to their house and pray.

AMY GREEN: We had a prayer night just praying for him to be healed. And we just had everyone over, and we spent, you know, hours just worshiping and praying.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: There's video footage of this night. It's in their small living room. There's family members, friends, people from their church community. Ryan is holding Joel, and they're praying.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: All we have is death here on this Earth. That's all we have. The only hope we have is your resurrection, God. So why would hope hurt us? All I have is my disappointment. That's what I start with. But I have hope that you can fill my disappointment, that you make it right, that you redeem it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: God, it's the blind who see, and it's the deaf who hear, and it's the dumb who speak. And God, I believe you do all of those things. I believe that you could do all of those things in my child.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: What's your strongest memory from that night?

RYAN GREEN: I think it's just realizing that he was going to die that night. It's that space of being with a bunch of people that desperately want the same thing that you will, and are crying out for that grace and that mercy to kind of invade a situation.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Joel died later that night. It was March 13, 2014.

AMY GREEN: I feel like, in a way, because we were believing that he would be healed, and because we were believing that even if he died, maybe he'd be raised from the dead, like, which is wild. And you don't have to put that in your story, because it's weird. And I so get that it's weird, but because we still believed that he could live, I feel like we didn't go through all the processes of getting ready for him to die, the way that maybe you would if you were certain that this was it.

ROBERT: So at this point in the tale, Sruthi tells us, well, they had to finish the game. I mean, they'd invested an enormous amount of time and heart and talent in building this game, but now the facts have changed.

JAD: Yeah, it started as a game that was supposed to be about the experience of fighting cancer, but also the experience of triumphing over cancer. But can't be that game anymore. So, like, what do you do as game designers, as parents? How do you finish a game where you don't have many choices—and you can't win? For this part, as we were talking with Sruthi, I mean, it's so visual.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: She just sat down and walked us through, as descriptively as she could, how Ryan and Amy—particularly Ryan—tried to solve this design problem.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The end of the game, they weren't sure, but it was basically gonna be a two-part scene where there's the moment of his death. You know, and they weren't sure how to do that, but there's a moment of his death, and right after that a moment where he goes to heaven, essentially. There's this little island. And so Ryan sets about making the scene of his death. It starts off pretty simple. It's in a hospital. There's little Joel sitting on a green chair, and there's some tubes of this neon fluid feeding into him. And there's these pipes that rise up above him, which are like pipe organ pipes. And there was a little bit of gameplay where you can play the pipe organ. Anyway, and then after that, he said, "Well, this isn't enough. This is the scene where my son dies, and so it must be just, like, epic." And so he creates this almost European-style oversized cathedral where the walls are soaring up and the ceilings are intricate and contain all these different—like, it's almost as if he's coding Joel's body into the architecture. So he has pieces that look like ribs, and there's this part that looks like his heart. I can show you guys these pictures. So I'm trying to think how I do that.

JAD: Maybe just hold up your laptop to the glass.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah, this is—so just quickly, I want to show you. This is ...

JAD: Oh, wow.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Yeah. So that's ...

JAD: Oh, that's amazing!

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Right?

JAD: That's amazing. It's so pretty!

ROBERT: I was not prepared for the beauty of this. Very intricate interlacing arches, light cascading down.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: That's the ...

ROBERT: Catacombs.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... stained glass. These very ornate ceilings. And so he starts building that, and it's beautiful, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And then suddenly he feels like, you know, this is too light. And so then the cathedral becomes a place of darkness, and all the lights are neon.

JAD: Oh, so now it's very dark. There's trees growing into the cathedral now.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: That's the cancer.

JAD: Huh.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then he's in this space, and he's like, so what should people be able to do in this space? We have all this, you know, these tubes and things for chemo. I want to put in the machines that were keeping Joel alive. So we were feeding him with these nutrition IV things. We had these oxygen tanks. And so he starts building actual equipment that the user would have to, like, fiddle with the levers and, you know, make things just right so that Joel's getting what he needs to stay alive. But then he thinks, "Oh. Well, if they do it wrong, then they'll feel as if Joel died because of them, and that's terrible." And so then he says, "You know what? Scrap this whole thing."

JAD: Sruthi showed us maybe 60 different sketches, different iterations of the cathedral that were all super detailed in a kind of Terry Gilliam on steroids sort of way. Like, for instance, there was one sketch where Ryan had built an entire amusement park in the cathedral, and that was supposed to represent all of Joel's favorite things.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And then he's like, "Wait. But now there's just too much stuff. It's distracting." So then he takes out the whole amusement park, and then he puts in these prayer candles because he's like, "You know, really what I want people to take away is this feeling I had on the last night of Joel's life, where all you can do now is pray. And so you light one of these candles, and you hear a prayer from that night."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, video game: Lord, my God, let this boy's life return to him.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Green: I will not let you go unless you bless him.]

AMY GREEN: And it's been hard, I think, for both of us to get to a place where we say it can't say all the things. The cathedral can't say all the things we want it to say.

RYAN GREEN: I just had to cut something else in the game because we couldn't finish it.

AMY GREEN: And it's hard because you just want to never finish it and make it as beautiful as possible. And I don't know, like, there's part of me that feels like we betrayed a project by finishing it and by saying it can only be so much.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: But of course they have to finish it. There's investors, there's a release date.

RYAN GREEN: What's disappointing to me is how quickly it fades. Joel, how the memories and the person of Joel fades because he's not here. He becomes more and more an idea. This game is not him. It's just an echo of him. It's not—it's not even the best echo of him. I think that's the thing that I'm struggling with as we're approaching the end of this, like, what did we do all this for? Why—why is it that—why did we do this?

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: The game is coming out mid-January. The cathedral, to Ryan, will always be unfinished.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Can you show me the last scene with the pancakes?

RYAN GREEN: Sure.

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Ryan was able to finish the place that comes right after the cathedral. It's the scene where you say goodbye to Joel. You find yourself in a boat next to Joel. There's no oars. You're headed towards an island. You get there, you walk along a small path, and you end up in a clearing in the woods. There's a picnic blanket, and Joel's sitting on it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I remember you. You made it, too. I'm glad you're here. I love it here. I bet you like it, too.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And around him are all the things he loved the most.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: Look at all of these pancakes.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: A huge stack of pancakes, way, way bigger than him. A little dog.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I always wanted a dog, and now I got one.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And bubbles. You can blow him bubbles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love bubbles. So bubbles. Look, I can catch one!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ryan Green: You can blow them for as long as you want. Okay. Okay, Joel.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love the bubbles. Come here, Mandy. Have another pancake. Mandy loves syrup. Me too. Syrup is my favorite part.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And you just keep blowing bubbles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I love bubbles. So bubbles.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And at some point ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: Look, I can touch one.]

SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: ... you just walk away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joel: I want my bubbles. Mandy loves to catch the bubbles. She likes to bite them. I love bubbles.]

JAD: It's like, wow, that's the choice you get in the end at the end of this game is to not stop until you're ready to walk away.

ROBERT: Hmm. It's not much of a choice.

JAD: No. Very big thanks to Sruthi Pinnamaneni and the whole team at Reply All: PJ Vigt, Alex Goldman and our former producer, Tim Howard. We love you, Tim. Hi, Tim. Fia Bennon, Kalila Holt, Peter Clownlee, my first editor, and Rick Kwan.

ROBERT: And definitely go check out Reply All. You can find them at Gimlet-Media.com. Gimlet, G-I-M-L-E-T.

JAD: They're so—it's so fun. It's such a fun show.

ROBERT: It is. We were on a—you know, on stage with them in a—in a thing. And we thought we were, you know, good.

JAD: We thought we were good, and they were so much better than us. They were so much better than us.

ROBERT: They had this ...

JAD: Such a good story. I think it actually might be coming up in their stream next week, maybe?

ROBERT: Yeah. You want to check it out. It's about a woman who shoots everybody every night for years and years, over and over. And she's like ...

JAD: Don't say the rest.

ROBERT: Also, thanks to David Osit and to Malika Zouhali-Worrall, who made a documentary also about Ryan and Amy. They called theirs Thank You For Playing. I saw it. It's pretty good.

JAD: And thank you for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll see you next time.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: You have two new messages. To play the message, press 2.]

[SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: Hey hey, Radiolab. Sruthi here. Just reading the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. The staff includes: Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster Soren Wheeler and Jamie York with help from Simon Adler, Alexandra Lee Young, Abigail Keele, Stephanie Tam and Micah Loewinger. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Bye, guys.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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