JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today, two very different stories about what it means to find yourself.

FAITH PENNINGTON: My name is Alecia Faith Pennington. And I am a US citizen by birth.

ROBERT: We're gonna start ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I was home-schooled my entire life.

ROBERT: ... with a cry for help.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I'm now 19 years old, and I'm unable to get a driver's license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, or vote.

ROBERT: This is the story of a woman who became sort of famous ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I didn't pick this situation for myself, and I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to get out of this.

ROBERT: ... for being invisible. For having no identity whatsoever.

FAITH PENNINGTON: If you've been through a similar situation or know anyone who can help, please contact me.

JAD: This story comes to us from our reporter Alexandra Young.

ALEXANDRA YOUNG: The young woman at the center of this story ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I was born in Texas.

ALEXANDRA: ... is Alecia Faith Pennington. Goes by Faith.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Born in Houston, and then we moved to Kerrville.

ALEXANDRA: She grew up in a really small town, about 45 minutes outside of San Antonio.

FAITH PENNINGTON: And it's kind of country.

ALEXANDRA: Faith's parents were very conservative, very religious. And they had created a place for their family that was separate from the rest of the world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Pennington: Well, hi there! Welcome to Pennington Point. I'm Lisa, and I just wanted to say a quick hello before we go ...]

ALEXANDRA: Faith's mom, Lisa, actually kept a video blog of life in the Pennington family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Pennington: Right now, the sun is shining, the birds are singing. It's so peaceful out here in the country. This is our front porch. We bought this old farmhouse ...]

FAITH PENNINGTON: And we had a little home farm. We had goats, chickens. We had rabbits at one point. A cow that we would, like, raise, you know, we'd butcher it and then freeze, like, all the meat and then eat it over the year.

ROBERT: So was this sort of approaching self-sufficiency? Or was it—was it—were you ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I think what my parents wanted to do was kind of reach that self-sufficient point, but they also really wanted to give their—something their kids to teach them, like, responsibility.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Pennington: Every day before you could go play, you had to do a chore. There was a chore—we had a chart and it would have the kids' names down one side ...]

ROBERT: How many of the—how many of you were there by then?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Nine children. Grace, Jacob, Hope, Faith, Patience, Noah, Adam, Elijah and Levi.

ALEXANDRA: Ooh! Got that down pat.

FAITH PENNINGTON: So [laughs].

ROBERT: Where were you in the pecking order?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Fourth.

ROBERT: Oh, right in the middle!

ALEXANDRA: And her parents, says Faith ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: They were kind, but very firm. Very strict. A lot of rules for how you're supposed to dress, and how you're supposed to look, and how you're supposed to carry yourself.

ALEXANDRA: What—what were some of those rules?

FAITH PENNINGTON: For the girls, you had to wear dresses and—with super-high collars. And we always had to wear sleeves. No sleeveless. We just didn't have a lot of access to things that they didn't want us to have access to. We didn't have internet until, like, you were, like, 18 and could get on the—allowed on the internet for, like, limited sites and stuff.

ALEXANDRA: What—what about television? Did you guys have that?

FAITH PENNINGTON: No. None of the kids watched television.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Pennington: If they love electronics, then they don't—they tend to not have as much of a passion for learning and working and their Bible reading, and ...]

ALEXANDRA: They didn't get to watch a lot of movies growing up. They only listened to Christian music.

ROBERT: Were you home-schooled or were you—did you go to public school or how did that work?

FAITH PENNINGTON: All home-schooled.

ROBERT: All home-schooled.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Every single one.

ROBERT: So even—so mostly you were with your family, then?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And was just kind of a moral thing? Like—like, we are trying to keep you holy, and ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I think they just wanted to keep, like, the things that they thought were, like, sinful in the world away from their kids, and try to, like, keep them safe and everything. Doing their best.

ROBERT: But they stuck to it. So if you said, "I want this," they would say, "No," and they win.

FAITH PENNINGTON: They'd say "Nope."

ALEXANDRA: But Faith actually, she was always just kind of pushing that line just a little bit.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I am definitely a lot more stubborn and a lot more free-spirited.

ALEXANDRA: And right around her 18th birthday ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: I just—I don't know. I reached a point. Like a breaking point. With—we were actually on, like, a little family meeting, and I was with the four oldest siblings. And my parents were kind of supposed to discuss things. And then my oldest sister asked—was asking my mom, she was considering getting a job and kind of asking advice or permission if she could, and they were like, "No. That brings in too much outside influence."

ROBERT: But she was 23.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Yeah.

ALEXANDRA: Hmm.

FAITH PENNINGTON: And then my brother said he wanted more internet because he was doing work for our church, and they're like, "I'm sorry, we can't do that," you know? You could be looking at things online and you know, we'd just—you have to shut it off. And then Hope, the one that's right next to me, she was 21, she was asking for a phone. And my parents were like, "Nah, you're not old enough to have a phone." You know, I'm looking at my older siblings and they had nothing ahead of them. We're not allowed to get jobs, not allowed to go to school. They have no life except living here on this little farm. They have no future. After that night I decided I was not gonna turn out like that. So I had an iPod, and I went down to my parents room and I snuck my grandpa's phone number. And since he had an iPhone, I could text him over WiFi from my iPod. So I did and I said, "Hey, when y'all come visit next weekend, I want to go back with you. I need help. Like, I need to get away from here. Can you take me back home with you?" And he said he would.

ROBERT: So Grandpa is not of the same mind as your folks.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Well, they weren't really on board with how my parents did things, but they always kept coming to see us. And so I knew that they cared about me, and so I felt safe to reach out to them.

ALEXANDRA: So the next week, her grandpa and her grandma show up at the farm.

FAITH PENNINGTON: And ...

ROBERT: And your plan was to just, you know—just—what were you going to—bolt? Or how were you gonna do this?

FAITH PENNINGTON: My grandpa was like, "You need to ask them first. You need to ask permission." So I did, and then they said, "No, you can't go with them." And then my grandparents approached me and were like, "So do you still want to go? Or—" And I finally decided that I did. No one had ever done anything like that in our family before. So the next morning, September 24, 2014, my mom was on her morning run and my dad was in his office. He was always there working in the morning. So none of them were in the house. And my grandparents said goodbye to the rest of the kids, then I just walked out the door with them.

ROBERT: With a—luggage? Or just with your regular ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: Just one suitcase. Yeah. My grandpa texted my mom and was like, "We're taking Faith with us. Just wanted you to know." And then my mom texted him and said, "Don't go anywhere yet. I'm coming back."

FAITH PENNINGTON: She had texted my dad, and then they—they both came and tried to get me to get out of the car. They were like, "You have to get out of the car." And I was like, "I don't have to." And like, "Well, yeah you have to because we're telling you to." I'm like, "Well, no." So they got in and they actually asked my grandparents to get out. They were like, "Can you get out of the car and we'll get in so we can talk to her?" The only thing I had on my side is that I was buckled in the car and refused to get out. I think they were just kind of shocked. I was so torn. I mean, it felt like I was just melting.

ROBERT: And what was it that kept you in the seat?

FAITH PENNINGTON: I think it was just telling myself over and over that I knew it was the right thing to do, even though it didn't feel like it. I had to take control of my life. And after a while, they—my grandparents were like, "We have to go. Like, we need to leave now." And so ...

ALEXANDRA: They left. Just drove away.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: So these were like—this is 10 people that you are ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: ... connected to.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Yeah. They were my entire world. Like, yeah.

JENNY ELENIS: I was astonished that she had the boldness to carry out that plan.

ALEXANDRA: This is Jenny Elenis, Faith's aunt, her mother's sister, who like her grandparents didn't really subscribe to the Pennington worldview. But she would visit them from time to time at the farm.

JENNY ELENIS: You know for Faith, she believed she was walking into this world that was bad, that was potentially going to harm her.

ALEXANDRA: So that first night ...

JENNY ELENIS: She gets to my parents house.

FAITH PENNINGTON: My grandparents said, "Hey, you can sleep in this room."

JENNY ELENIS: And there's a TV in the guestroom.

ALEXANDRA: And they just toss a remote and leave her alone and said ...

JENNY ELENIS: You can watch whatever you want.

ALEXANDRA: Now Faith ...

JENNY ELENIS: She had never been allowed to pick her own TV shows.

FAITH PENNINGTON: No.

JENNY ELENIS: And so she—she turns it on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're looking for a place that gets full sun.]

JENNY ELENIS: And she said it was like a ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Eight to ten hours of sunlight a day.]

JENNY ELENIS: Like a gardening show or a home improvement show or something.

ALEXANDRA: And she's sitting there thinking ...

JENNY ELENIS: I don't know if this is bad for me.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Exactly. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Just pour a little water on top and if it drains away, you're great.]

FAITH PENNINGTON: Should I be watching this? Because that's kind of what my parents did. They were—they would kind of dictate what was right, what was wrong, you know? When someone would do something, they would be like, "Okay, that's wrong," or like, "Okay, that's right." And now that moral compass was gone.

JENNY ELENIS: She suddenly wasn't sure what was good and what was bad anymore. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I am so tired of the way we relate to one another.]

JENNY ELENIS: And 19 is a tough place to step into the world being that naive. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Just tell 'em you had sex with his wife! That'll kill.]

JENNY ELENIS: You know, she was asking me about sex. Like, how do you learn? What do you— I don't know anything.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I thought I knew what kind of man ...]

FAITH PENNINGTON: I didn't know anything.

ALEXANDRA: Even the most basic social norms.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Like, I don't know how I'm supposed to act.

ALEXANDRA: When she'd hang out with her cousin or other people her own age.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I didn't know what I'm supposed to talk about. I didn't catch most of, like, the references they'd make.

ALEXANDRA: All these other teenagers would be talking about ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: Shows.

ALEXANDRA: Boys.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Music.

ALEXANDRA: Movies.

FAITH PENNINGTON: School.

ALEXANDRA: And Faith?

FAITH PENNINGTON: I had no idea.

ALEXANDRA: She wanted to join this world we all live in, even in the most simple ways. She wanted to get a job and learn to drive, have an apartment. But she couldn't.

JENNY ELENIS: She didn't, of course, have a driver's license.

ALEXANDRA: No. Plus, she didn't have a Social Security number.

ROBERT: Oh!

JENNY ELENIS: Didn't have the birth certificate.

FAITH PENNINGTON: No.

ROBERT: Well, you were born. Didn't—when you were born, didn't they say, "Okay, well this is the hospital, we'll..."

FAITH PENNINGTON: Wasn't in a hospital. It was all home birth.

ROBERT: Oh!

FAITH PENNINGTON: Plus they specifically sought out midwives that would agree to file no records.

ROBERT: Why would you want to do that?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Sovereignty?

ALFRED ADASK: If you take some of these documents as they exist, they've got hooks in them.

ALEXANDRA: I actually talked to a bunch of people who ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The birth certificate seemed like a paper of ownership to me.]

ALEXANDRA: ... for political or religious or just privacy reasons, don't want this kind of documentation from the government.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's definitely been used for a measure of control.]

ALEXANDRA: Now Faith's parents, who actually wouldn't talk to me for this story ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: They're not specifically a part of that movement, but my dad kind of adopted some of those ideas, that the government should not have a number assigned to us.

ALEXANDRA: They purposefully raised Faith and her eight siblings to be outside of the system. And that's probably something they thought of as a gift. I guess the thinking is that Faith would be free from the rules of society. To Faith it didn't feel like freedom. It actually felt like prison. And this is where Faith's journey really began. Faith and her aunt and her grandma, they went online, started poking around. And ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: We realize that the first thing you need is a birth certificate.

JENNY ELENIS: Yes.

ROBERT: Oh, so you start at the beginning. So let's get you born.

JENNY ELENIS: Right.

ALEXANDRA: So ...

JENNY ELENIS: She applies to the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

FAITH PENNINGTON: A government office where they keep track of, like, births, deaths, marriages, adoptions.

JENNY ELENIS: And the Bureau of Vital Statistics does a search not only of that name, but of any, like, Jane Doe babies born in that area.

FAITH PENNINGTON: You know, to make sure that you weren't stolen at birth from some other parent or something like that.

ALEXANDRA: But they couldn't find anything.

JENNY ELENIS: So they said the next step is to go to court. So my mom contacts the court. And they wanted three pieces of information proving her birth facts.

ROBERT: What were they?

JENNY ELENIS: Well, there was a sworn affidavit by my mother. A swearing that, you know, she was at her birth. So we got that one.

ROBERT: Okay.

ALEXANDRA: So they needed two more documents.

JENNY ELENIS: She could get a doctor's records, but she doesn't have any.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I've never been to the hospital.

ROBERT: Really?

ALEXANDRA: Faith says she's never been that sick. Never even had an accident.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Never been to the dentist.

ROBERT: Never been to the dentist?

JENNY ELENIS: No school records.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I had never even set foot inside a school.

ALEXANDRA: Oh, wow!

ROBERT: Bank? Any savings account?

FAITH PENNINGTON: No.

JENNY ELENIS: You can't get a bank account without a social.

ALEXANDRA: What about immunizations?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Mm-mm. My dad was super against all that.

ALEXANDRA: One of the court clerks asked if she had ever been baptized, because the certificate that you get when you're baptized in a lot of churches can work as one of the three pieces of evidence.

JAD: All right, okay.

ALEXANDRA: But it turns out the baptismal record didn't have her birthday on it, so it didn't count.

JAD: D'oh!

ROBERT: Did you ever get any mail addressed to your name at your parents house?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Yes, but it was all, you know, handwritten stuff. Which doesn't count.

ROBERT: So you have to go to the judge and say, what? What do you say to the judge?

JENNY ELENIS: Well, the judge won't listen. He just said, "We're not gonna hear the case, because you don't have enough to even— for me to even consider."

FAITH PENNINGTON: Because you have to have some kind of records.

JENNY ELENIS: You don't have enough proof.

ROBERT: So you're sitting there at a table and there's a lawyer sitting there opposite you, and you think, "So—so I know I was born."

FAITH PENNINGTON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: "I believe that I am this age. Now what do we do?" And he looks at you and says, or she looks at you and says ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: "I've never seen this before."

ALEXANDRA: She's seen people undocumented, but not someone born in this country invisible to the state and the federal government.

JAD: Wait, but if you're born in America, you're automatically a citizen. So shouldn't that just ...

ALEXANDRA: I mean, but it's not like when you're born there's, like, this halo floating over your house just letting everyone know. You have to prove it.

JAD: [laughs] Yeah. Well then, couldn't she get a—an immigration attorney to help?

ALEXANDRA: Well, no, not really. Because when an immigrant comes here from another country, they have this country of origin. And for Faith, in the eyes of the government, she has no country of origin. They just think of her as being from nowhere.

JENNY ELENIS: We called everyone, and we could not get help.

FAITH PENNINGTON: And we'd get, like, a little bit of a lead. Like, maybe this will work. And just, like, you're rejected every time. You know, it just looked hopeless.

ALEXANDRA: It got to the point where when she was at parties or just talking to people about her situation ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: They would say, like, "Oh, what do you do?" I'd say, "Oh, I don't exist." And it would kind of start this, like, weird conversation, and it would actually start a lot of conversations for other people. And it would kind of help me to, like, navigate stuff. And so it actually kind of helped me figure how to socialize.

ALEXANDRA: It's just this funny little thing she could say. But when she was alone, it wasn't funny at all.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I went through a really dark time during that. I went through a lot of depression. I was not self-harmful, but I was having a lot of suicidal thoughts. My family doesn't know, most of my friends don't even know. It just felt like I was just floating in, like, in the middle of just sea of just so much stuff. You know, I didn't know who I was. I kind of felt like I didn't really exist at all.

ALEXANDRA: We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Hey, Eliza here. It has been a while since I've read Sloan. 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. And today ...

ROBERT: The story of a woman who became famous for being ...

JAD: Infamously invisible.

JENNY ELENIS: So she decided that the only solution was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Faith Pennington: My name is Alecia Faith Pennington, and I am a US citizen by birth.]

JENNY ELENIS: ... to make this video.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Faith Pennington: I was born at home, and my parents neglected to file birth certificate or a birth record of any kind.]

ALEXANDRA: She just figured ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Faith Pennington: I was home-schooled my entire life, so I have no school records.]

ALEXANDRA: ... maybe there's somebody out there that has, you know, done this before.

FAITH PENNINGTON: So I was like, "Well, let's give it a shot."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Faith Pennington: I want to travel. I want to get an education. I want to just be a functioning American, but I can't until I can prove citizenship. If you've been through a similar situation or know anyone who can help, please contact me.]

ALEXANDRA: She put it up on YouTube.

FAITH PENNINGTON: And then that was it. I didn't expect anyone to watch it. But my phone was just like notification after notification. It was, like, dinging and dinging and dinging. In the first week it had over 1.3 million views. Like, it—I hadn't even, like, been on YouTube before that, let alone, like, posted a video. So it was crazy.

ALEXANDRA: It went up on Reddit, Twitter.

JENNY ELENIS: I remember seeing it on Yahoo!

ALEXANDRA: On the front of Snapchat Daily.

JENNY ELENIS: Oh my gosh!

ALEXANDRA: People just couldn't believe it. They were, like, can this seriously happen?

FAITH PENNINGTON: It just took off.

ALEXANDRA: And then she just starts getting all these emails.

FAITH PENNINGTON: It was insane. I was getting literally two emails every single second. That's not an exaggeration. I couldn't keep up with it. Like, I could not read all of them.

ALEXANDRA: Coming from, like, Germany and Israel.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Africa.

ALEXANDRA: Australia.

FAITH PENNINGTON: India. Like, it went worldwide.

ALEXANDRA: And what were people saying? What did they email you about?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Oh, all kinds. Like ... "I was not only touched by your screen presence, but I'm also very infuriated and frustrated by the circumstances of your dilemma."

ALEXANDRA: I actually sat down with Faith while she read through a bunch of these emails.

FAITH PENNINGTON: "Hello. I'm very intrigued by your story. I'm currently 23 years old ..."

ALEXANDRA: Some of them from home-schoolers.

FAITH PENNINGTON: "Hello, Alecia. My name is Jose."

ALEXANDRA: Some from the children of immigrants who felt, like, a sense of solidarity.

FAITH PENNINGTON: "I commend you for reaching out to the internet."

ALEXANDRA: But a lot of it was ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: "And I pray that you are able to get the documents you need." Just a lot of ton of encouragements saying, "I don't know how to help you, but I just want you to know I'm rooting for you. Like, don't give up." It was really empowering. Like, I didn't— I didn't— I wasn't very confident in who I was, so just to have so many people be like, "We're behind you?"

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I don't know. It felt really good to be recognized a little bit.

ALEXANDRA: But at the same time, it kind of made her more famously that woman who doesn't exist, the girl with no identity. And it didn't even solve her problem, because when people did offer advice, didn't really help.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Start working on not paying tax, they'll come to you. [laughs] I got people who just had, you know, dumb ideas of what to do. "Hey Alecia, if I knew you I'd offer to marry you so you can gain citizenship."

ALEXANDRA: Many of them were marriage proposals.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I got a lot of proposals, actually. "I'll get you pregnant if that will help."

ALEXANDRA: Oh my ...

ALEXANDRA: Some of them not so subtle.

FAITH PENNINGTON: Those ones I'd just, like, delete. I'm like, "Nope, nope."

ALEXANDRA: And also inside of those emails and comments, there was a conversation about whether what her parents did was right.

FAITH PENNINGTON: This one is from like the opposite perspective. It says, "Her parents didn't quote 'neglect' anything. They stood on and exercised their rights and wisely so. What they did was in her best interest. She just doesn't understand it, because she is young and she has led a protective life."

ALEXANDRA: A lot of these folks felt like Faith was blowing this gift that her parents had given her.

ALFRED ADASK: From my perspective, if you take some of these documents as they exist they've got hooks in them.

ALEXANDRA: This is Alfred Adask, who blogs about sovereignty and sovereign citizens.

ALFRED ADASK: First off, there's a case called Chisholm versus Georgia.

ALEXANDRA: Mm-hmm.

ALFRED ADASK: From 1793. And they're talking about European jurisprudence. The distinction between the prince and the subject.

ALEXANDRA: Mm-hmm.

ALFRED ADASK: And the distinction is that the prince gets his rights from God.

ROBERT: Right. That's when they say the king is anointed—the anointed ...

ALFRED ADASK: That's exactly right. In a coronation ceremony. But they go on and they say, "No such ideas obtained here," meaning within the United States of America, "At the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people. And they are the true sovereigns." And the word "sovereigns"  is plural.

ROBERT: Well, how do you deal with the opening phrase then in the Constitution, which is plural.

ALFRED ADASK: We the people.

ROBERT: "We" and "people," not I the person, one by one. But "We the people?"

ALFRED ADASK: Yup. When it says, "We the people," it means "We the sovereigns." Sovereigns are not a collective ...

ALEXANDRA: Which I think many, many people would argue.

ALFRED ADASK: I understand that, but if you are ...

ALEXANDRA: We ended up getting into this little tussle over the roles of government.

ALFRED ADASK: It's not invisibility ...

ALEXANDRA: What happens if ...

ALEXANDRA: ... and the Constitution. But eventually, we got back to Faith.

ALFRED ADASK: Once you have been recognized as a sovereign, how do you avoid—it's like getting rid of—I'm gonna— I'm just going— I want to—"Judge, I don't want blue eyes anymore."

ROBERT: But part of you must—part of you must go out and feel a little sorry for her, right? Like, she has a—she has a will to become something other than ...

ALFRED ADASK: She has a will to become a subject.

ROBERT: A subject. Yes. So—but I don't hear you condemning her.

ALFRED ADASK: She doesn't want to be free.

ROBERT: Oh. You are condemning her then, a little bit.

ALFRED ADASK: No. I'm saying she's making a choice. There's proviso in the Bible where people in the Old Testament, if you wanted to remain you could—you could volunteer to be a slave for some guy. Some people don't want to be sovereigns. It's not an easy ... 

ROBERT: No, they just want a job and they want to travel and they want to work for a living.

ALFRED ADASK: That's exactly right. But there's—there are consequences for her abandoning her status as a free woman.

ROBERT: Here's the weird irony. Because she has no birth certificate, because she has no passport, the state of Texas and the government of the United States say, "Well, we can't figure out how to make you visible." Like ...

ALFRED ADASK: Yeah, it is probably true.

ALEXANDRA: But then ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: My grandma was able to get in touch with Marsha Farney.

MARSHA FARNEY: Marsha Farney, state representative. I have House district 20.

ALEXANDRA: She is a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives.

MARSHA FARNEY: We would get together. I'd be with my staff and say, "What are the calls we've had come in this week?" And this one really caught our attention.

ALEXANDRA: As soon as she heard about it she said, "We need to do something about this." And she did.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Texas House of Representatives: This bill is an attempt to get a birth certificate for those ... ]

ALEXANDRA: Around a month after Faith's video went viral, Marsha Farney put together a bill and brought it before the House of Representatives in Austin.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Texas House of Representatives: I know the committee already read about this bill and they are keenly aware.]

ALEXANDRA: So the bill does a couple things. It makes the process logistically easier.

MARSHA FARNEY: We expanded where someone could apply for a delayed birth certificate. It was ...

ALEXANDRA: But it also outlines punishments for the parents. So in the case of Faith, right? If she asks her parents for documentation and they refuse ...

MARSHA FARNEY: Then that's punishable by up to a year in jail and up to $4,000 of a fine or a combination of both.

ROBERT: Really?

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Texas House of Representatives: Mr. Chairman, I know there are four witnesses here who want to testify on this bill.]

ALEXANDRA: And they held this hearing to kind of weigh the various sides.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alecia Southworth: Hi. I'm Alecia Southworth. Live in Georgetown, Texas, and I'm ...]

ALEXANDRA: And so Faith and her aunt and her grandma all went to testify.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alecia Southworth: Faith is my granddaughter and my namesake. I was in the room the day she was born. Unfortunately that is not ...]

ALEXANDRA: Her grandma filled in the state reps on what they've been doing the last six months.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alecia Southworth: We went to the DPS to get her a driver's license and they said no. They said go to the Social Security people. Social security people said no, go to the voter registration people.]

ALEXANDRA: All the meetings and dead ends and rejections.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alecia Southworth: Said no, go to the DPS. We were stuck in a do-loop. Well, I wasn't gonna quit there. For goodness sakes, she's a Texan. So Marsha Farney has offered us our only hope we have had since this started. I just—I urge you to pass this bill, take Faith out of limbo, and give her the life she desires.]

MARSHA FARNEY: My view was, just like we would not allow a parent to physically handicap a child, we should not allow a parent to handicap a child where they can't operate and function in society.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Texas House of Representatives: She is truly, although you've seen her standing here, a non-person. She could walk off the face of the Earth, and legally nobody would know she was gone.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, James Pennington: I think the bill's a little misguided]

ALEXANDRA: That's James Pennington, Faith's dad. He came out to the hearing and ended up on the Fox 7 newscast. And unfortunately, this is the only bit of tape we have of him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, James Pennington: I think it provides some pretty Draconian penalties for a process that's already there.]

[NEWS CLIP: There are six other children in this… ]

ROBERT: Hmm. It does seem a little—like, I think I don't disagree with that. I mean, does the State of Texas want to put—start putting parents in jail?

MARSHA FARNEY: We felt there was a need for some teeth to this bill, to get ...

ALEXANDRA: And it turns out that the Texas Statehouse and State Senate agreed. The bill ended up passing. Republicans voted for it. Democrats voted for it. There was actually only one no vote. But the next time Marsha Farney was up for re-election, she actually lost in the primaries, and according to the Texas Observer, who actually did a really nice podcast of Faith's story, there's this lobbying group called The Texas Home-School Coalition who donated a bunch of money to Farney's primary opponent.

ROBERT: So where does that leave Faith, though?

ALEXANDRA: Well, because of the bill, Faith was able to take her case to a different court, a higher court. And it seems like the bill allowed the judge to consider different kinds of evidence. So in the end, Faith was able to use an old orthodontist record and a piece of paper from her uncle, a doctor, who had treated her toe back when she was a kid. And in just a couple weeks ...

FAITH PENNINGTON: This is the birth certificate. Sometimes I just take it out and look at it. Sometimes randomly. I know it's—like, it's so dumb. It's like, it's your birth certificate, every person has one. But I'm like, "I have one, too!"

ALEXANDRA: Can you read it to me a little bit? Like, what's— what information is on here?

FAITH PENNINGTON: It has my name at the top and it has, like, my description, my sex, where I was born, the county, just ...

ALEXANDRA: What county does it say you were born in?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Harris County. I was born in Houston.

JENNY ELENIS: I'm hoping that the physical papers can, like, mirror the emotional thing that she's going through. Because I feel like it's like as she's getting the papers, she's appearing. So that by the time she gets that last one, She will know who she is, and then she will be that person, whoever that is. She's working so hard for it. I'm hoping that—that just that will have developed in her something, that she feels like it's more than a piece of paper, you know?

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

JENNY ELENIS: I'm hoping.

ALEXANDRA: So now Faith, she was actually able to get a driver's license, but she still doesn't have her social security number which means she can't get a real job. She can't open up a bank account. She's still really ...

ROBERT: She can't vote yet, right?

ALEXANDRA: She can vote, but she can't get health insurance. She might not be able to go to college, so I don't know what's gonna happen to her.

JENNY ELENIS: I remember asking her this question. Like, "When this is all over, do you know who you're going to be, you know? Because now this is who you are, you're the girl with no identity." And she was a little concerned that she wouldn't know who she was gonna be.

ALEXANDRA: If your—if your aunt asked you that same question again, like, who do you think you are now? Who do you think you are? No. [laughs] What—how would you answer that now?

FAITH PENNINGTON: Um, I don't know. Like, I just feel like me. Like, I'm just Faith.

JAD: Huge thanks to reporter and producer Alexandra Young. This piece was also produced by Brenna Farrell and Andy Mills.

ROBERT: And we had a lot of help from a lot of Texans, I should say. I think they're mostly Texans. Savannah Escobar, Rachel Coleman.

JAD: David Glenn, Chris Van Dusen.

ROBERT: Zen Allegra, Russell Whalen, liberty consultant Nick Reed.

JAD: The group Home School Alumni Reaching Out.

ROBERT: And the Lake Travis Zipline Adventure Company.

ALEXANDRA: Speaking of that last one, I should say when I went to go visit Faith in Austin, she's got green hair now. She's got a nose ring and a tattoo. She goes home from time to time, and she actually visited with her mom on Mother's Day. But when I was there she wanted to do something with me that she'd never done before.

FAITH PENNINGTON: I'm so excited you guys!

ALEXANDRA: So we decided to go ziplining.

ATTENDANT: Zip in six.

ALEXANDRA: And this one just happened to be called The Leap of Faith.

FAITH PENNINGTON: [screams] Whoo! [screams]

JAD: Coming up, one more story about finding yourself. Very different kind of story, this next one, with a very different kind of ending. That's coming up after the break.

[LISTENER: Hi this is Vincent Rojas from Norman, Oklahoma. 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. In this next section, I will be absent. When this story first aired on Radiolab, I was taking a break from the show. So, producer Molly Webster took the reins with Robert and they will bring you one more story of what it means to find yourself and truly live in the moment. So, let's get started.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. 

MOLLY WEBSTER: I'm Molly Webster.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab. And today.

MOLLY: Today we've got a guy asking a pretty common question.

ROBERT: Yeah, but the way he tries to solve this question is at first a thrill to him.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Then a crutch, then a curse and then it ends up in  an extraordinarily deep puzzle.

MOLLY: It comes to us from producer Andy Mills.

ANDY MILLS: Our story is about David Weinberg, a buddy of mine. And it starts off right around the time he gets out of high school.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah, I graduated from high school in 2000 and then went directly to university and then I got kicked out somewhere at the beginning of the second semester. And then left the town that I was living in and moved to the town where all my friends were going to college and ...

ANDY MILLS: He moves into, like, a group house.

DAVID WEINBERG: It was a party house.

ANDY: Him and a bunch of his friends.

DAVID WEINBERG: There was a giant cross in the front yard that my friends had found while tripping on acid and put in a shopping cart and they put it in the front yard.

ANDY: Our fact-checker actually found that they were tripping on mushrooms, not acid, but anyway ...

DAVID WEINBERG: A lot of drinking, a lot of partying.

ANDY: And for David, for a while, it was good.

DAVID WEINBERG: I'm hanging out with, like, the people that I care about most in the world. I feel incredibly free. And then I—it just started to get old.

ANDY: For one, every day when his friends would go off to class, David would have to go to work.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah. During the day, I was working as a janitor at the university where my friends went, and during the evenings I would deliver pizzas.

ANDY: And it went on like this for years. You know, day after day, they would party but then in the morning when his friends would go to class, he would go and clean toilets. And then deliver pizzas. All through sophomore year, they would go to class, he would clean toilets and then deliver pizzas. Junior year, class, toilets, pizzas.

DAVID WEINBERG: And, like, I think there was this rage that started to build up inside. I mean, I was really sick of cleaning the toilets of kids in the dorms who I resent but who I also recognized are able to do something that I wasn't able to do.

ANDY: And on top of that, by the time that most of David's friends were seniors, he was spending his weekends in jail for driving on a suspended license.

DAVID WEINBERG: So my life at that point was like cleaning toilets in the morning, delivering pizzas in the evening and then every weekend I was in jail. And there was kind of this breaking point. The one thing—one thing that we did a lot of—like, we listened to a lot of punk music. My friends were in punk bands. And we would just like get really drunk and like yell into the speakers. Probably like three or four nights a week. [laughs] You know? And one night, we were doing that. It was me, my friend Danny and my friend Mark, and something just snapped inside me. I just kinda lost it. Just started, like, grabbing chairs and hurling them through windows and just, like, smashed out all the windows in our house. You couldn't see the floor because there was, like, wreckage everywhere. And I was all bloody. I don't think it hit me until the next morning when I saw what it looked like. Like a hurricane had ripped through the house.

ANDY: Yeah.

ANDY: And all of his friends ...

DAVID WEINBERG: Everyone was just sort of stunned.

ANDY: They were sort of like, "What's going on?"

DAVID WEINBERG: And then—you know, when you confront a reality like that, everything just sort of gets stripped away and you're just left with this question that's like, "Who am I and what am I doing with my life?"

ANDY: And around that time, David was driving around delivering pizzas, listening to the radio, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.]

ANDY: ... heard this story.

DAVID WEINBERG: This Scott Carrier story called "The Test."

ANDY: Oh yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: I was hired to interview men and women in the state of Utah who received Medicaid support for a treatment of mental illnesses, generally diagnosed as…]

DAVID WEINBERG: And it just, like, stopped me in my tracks.

ANDY: Alright so the story is by a guy named Scott Carrier, he's a frequent contributor at This American Life. And it's basically about how he gets this new job.

DAVID WEINBERG: He gets this job driving around the state of Utah interviewing schizophrenic people, giving them this test.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: I took the job because I had no other. I took the job because I had just quit my steady job, my professional job.]

ANDY: And this is happening at a point where Scott's life is falling apart.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: What I wanted more than anything was to put my boss on the floor and stand on his throat and watch him gag.]

DAVID WEINBERG: He talks about how he hates his boss.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: Then my wife moved out, took the kids and everything.]

DAVID WEINBERG: His wife had just left him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This American Life: So I took the job and did the job, and my life will never be the same.]

ANDY: And David says as soon as he heard that story ...

DAVID WEINBERG: I remember thinking, like, "I need to figure out how to become a radio producer." That's what I need to do.

MOLLY: [laughs] Why?

ROBERT: Why does he want to become a radio producer?

ANDY: Well, Scott Carrier is really good at what he does.

ROBERT: Yes.

ANDY: There's something about him that is magnetic. But maybe more importantly, in this story, Scott is stuck. Not too dissimilar from where David finds himself. And what Scott does is he turns his stuckness into a story. And in doing so, kind of gives it meaning. And when David hears it he thinks, "Well maybe I can do that too."

ROBERT: I see.

MOLLY: Makes sense.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID WEINBERG: It was like, okay, this is my ticket.

ANDY: So that summer he lined up a job at this camp.

DAVID WEINBERG: And I bought this minidisc recorder.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Recording.]

ANDY: Got himself a mic.

DAVID WEINBERG: The little mic that you could clip onto your shirt.

ANDY: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Recording inside the tent.]

ANDY: He and his buddy Mark, who had just graduated, they left Colorado and headed to upstate New York.

DAVID WEINBERG: My idea was like, okay, I'll just go around and get all these recordings and then I'll write these story about what it all means and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Day one.]

DAVID WEINBERG: Sort of like On the Road but with recordings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: On the line, on the line.]

DAVID WEINBERG: We recorded the kids at the camp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You want to step out?]

ANDY: This bar fight when he was out with the other counselors.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: What's going on over there, is there a keyboard or something?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Yeah, we brought the keyboard. It's awesome.]

ANDY: He and Mark flirting with girls.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: What have you got these out for, buddy?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Listen, this is the coolest thing in the world. Put these on.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: All right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Isn't that cool?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: It's a live recording of what's happening right now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Right now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Yeah.]

DAVID WEINBERG: I distinctly remember just being in complete awe of hearing recordings that I had made where nothing was happening.

MOLLY: [laughs]

DAVID WEINBERG: The idea that I could make a recording and listen to it, it was like ...

ANDY: Like early man sees a mirror, you know, and just can't stop staring at it.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah.

ANDY: He actually wasn't interviewing people or anything like that. He sort of decided that he wanted to record moments as they happened to him. And he figured the best way to do that was to record secretly.

DAVID WEINBERG: I had cut a small hole in all of the pants and shorts that I had in the pocket. So I could get up in the morning, put the minidisc recorder in my pocket, and then I'd run the cord down my shirt. And any time something interesting was happening, I would slip my finger in my pocket and just press the record button.

ANDY: At first just some moments here and there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: You look really scary.]

ANDY: These possible scenes for a story maybe.

[ARCHIVE CLIP Abraham.]

ANDY: Then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: We gotta get on the 7 train.]

ANDY: He and his buddy Mark moved to New York City.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I still remember ...]

ANDY: Now everything sounds interesting.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, protester: The system must be overthrown!]

ANDY: So he's recording more and more.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Monday, upper middle east side.]

ANDY: Then every day.

ANDY: After New York, he and Mark hitchhiked across Europe together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mark: My name's Mark.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: And I'm David.]

ANDY: And at this point, David is recording people who pick him up.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, driver: What are you doing in Europe?]

ANDY: He and Mark and their other buddy, Tom, on the side of the road.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: When the rhythm of the cars on the highway, it's even, it's solid, it's almost like waves on the ocean.]

DAVID WEINBERG: You know, every street performer, I would run up to, stand next to and record.

ANDY: Just everything.

ANDY: And you're still thinking to yourself, "Man, I'm just getting gold."

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah! I'm just like, you know, this the raw material for my first great story, you know? I think I tried—I separated myself from—it's kinda cliché like,"Oh yeah, you graduated from college and you backpack around Europe." And it's like, "No, no, no. I'm not one of those people. Like I'm actually making a grand documentary. I'm a somebody. I'm not just like everybody else."

ANDY: Yeah.

ANDY: Meanwhile, David is accumulating hundreds and hundreds of hours of tape. And one thing you'll hear if you manage to listen through all of it is just him hanging out with his buddy Mark.

DAVID WEINBERG: He was just one of those people, we became instant friends the moment we met. 

ANDY: Mark was a year older than David. He was really into music, sound engineering.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing]]

DAVID WEINBERG: We had this perfect dynamic where Mark had, like, enough talent. Like, he could actually play music and, like, riff these funny songs on the spot.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing]]

DAVID WEINBERG: And I sort of brought the raw enthusiasm to it.

ANDY: [laughs]

ANDY: And the two of them, together ...

DAVID WEINBERG: We would just end up in these crazy places.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] "Walkin' on Sunshine"]

DAVID WEINBERG: Oh yeah.

ANDY: Do you remember this recording?

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah, I remember it. We were in Croatia, and we ended up at this huge, amazing party. It was like in this old, abandoned, cavernous building with just hundreds of beautiful Croatian people.

DAVID WEINBERG: That was such a great day.

ANDY: But then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Do you want French fries, veggies or apple sauce?]

ANDY: ... Dave and Mark went back to the States. Mark went over to Seattle to record an album with his band and David

DAVID WEINBERG: I got a job waiting tables at an Applebee's.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: You guys want any dinner salads or a soup before the meal?]

ANDY: Back in his hometown. Living in his parents' basement.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, manager: And if you guys aren't taking two seconds to try to upsell, you're taking money out of your pocket.]

DAVID WEINBERG: This kid that I hung out with the most that I worked with was this meth addict. I would go over to his place after work and, like, drink beer and play video games and he would get high. And it was like really depressing. It was a hard time. It was [bleep].

ANDY: And David has all of this tape. Like tons and tons and tons of tape from times with Mark in New York, in Europe. But he has no idea what to do with it. So he just keeps hitting record.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, manager: Weinberg.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, manager: Set up for the night shift.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: All right.]

DAVID WEINBERG: Like, that was the period when I needed the wire the most because it was like this sucks but, like, I'm gonna get through this and this will be a chapter in the story. I spent a lot of my time with my finger gently resting on the minidisc player. I could feel the discs spinning when it was recording. It was just very satisfying, comforting, you know?

ANDY: Like a pulse, in a way.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah, yeah.

ANDY: Like it's still going.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Excuse me. Excuse me? You know what we should get? One of those bells? Bing!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Ding ding ding ding ding ding!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Or really, just if they just make a speaker. Like, ding! And then it just keeps getting louder and louder 'til you make the drink.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I put drinks before everything else.]

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

MOLLY: I'm Molly Webster. And today we're in the middle of the story about David Weinberg, who is recording almost every day of his life. He was in Applebee's working as a waiter and living in his parents' basement.

ANDY: Right. But he did eventually save up enough money to travel again. Went to Alaska, things like that. And he says that well, when times were bad, like at Applebee's, he needed these recordings to make his life feel like it had, like, meaning. When times were good, he couldn't stop recording because he was worried that he was gonna miss something.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah, occasionally like something would go wrong. Like I lost three or four recorders. They broke down over the course of the years that I was recording. And whenever a recorder broke, there would be a period where I'd have to wait for the new recorder to come.

ANDY: Uh-huh.

DAVID WEINBERG: And I just felt like on edge all the time. In this weird twisted way, like, I felt like I was missing out on life because I wasn't recording it.

ANDY: So when you would get the recorder it would be like a relief?

DAVID WEINBERG: Oh yeah, I'd be like, "Oh thank god! I can–" like, you know, this pressure would be released and I could go back to recording. And I would just feel like myself again, you know?

ANDY: But then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Hey, is Brian ahead of you or behind you?]

ANDY: David ended up in Seattle where he met back up with Mark.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah. And Mark and I got in some big arguments in Seattle before I left.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mark: Something that you said that was private.]

DAVID WEINBERG: He just told me one night at the bar, "I just hate the fact that you record me all the time." and, you know I was recording that conversation too.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: I want to get to the heart of this.]

DAVID WEINBERG: And he just laid it all out for me. You know, like, he was someone who spent his day, all day, in a recording studio, meticulously laying down perfect tracks. You know, that was his life. And so to him, the idea that you would sort of like, record everything, it was wrong for a lot of reasons. One of which was just that he didn't think the experiences warranted that. And then he had, like, philosophical objections to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mark: When I live my life, I live it like it's fleeting, everything is ephemeral.]

DAVID WEINBERG: That like what makes life great and worth living is that it is this fleeting thing that's temporary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mark: I like my life being temporary. I don't want—posterity is only good in certain doses.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: All right.]

DAVID WEINBERG: And when you are trying to constantly record it and capture it, you're just taking away from that aspect of life.

MOLLY: It's like don't keep trying to capture the essence of this thing, just be there in the essence of the thing.

ROBERT: Be there.

ANDY: Right, so here you've got David saying that, you know, he's recording all the time so as not to miss anything. And Mark is saying, "No, by recording all the time you are missing everything."

DAVID WEINBERG: It got to the point that he said that he didn't want to be recorded anymore. And it was, like, really getting in the way of our friendship because it puts a ceiling on where your relationship can go when someone feels like they can't open up to you in that way. It just puts this wedge in between you in a way that's just awful.

ANDY: Did you stop recording at this point, or ...?

DAVID WEINBERG: Well, I couldn't stop recording, and so I was always recording. And the recording was like, almost like a uniform for this person that I wanted to be. It's like you're in a play and you think you're living this life and then when the disc stops, suddenly, like, the lights go up and you realize it's all fake. Just like, face it, dude. Like, you're just drifting.

ANDY: At this point, David has around 2,000 hours of tape. Because he keeps on recording, he's not really hanging out with Mark anymore. And he ends up drifting down to New Orleans. And this is not very long after Hurricane Katrina.

DAVID WEINBERG: And it's like, you know—like, you know, everyone had a story with a flood and it was like— no. So I would, like, listen to these peoples' harrowing journeys.

ANDY: So he decided to do something that he had never really done before and started interviewing people.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Yeah I've been here since the start, but I've been living in New Orleans East.]

ANDY: Telling their stories.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: How has it changed since then?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Changed that much since Katrina?]

ANDY: With their permission, not recording them secretly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: This store here opened up, you know?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: So where were you doing your grocery shopping before?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I was doing it down in ...]

ANDY: And then he started getting those stories onto New Orleans Public Radio stations.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're listening to WWOZ Street Talk. Stories of New Orleans' cultural rebuilding.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm telling you man, I appreciate that discipline. Man, I was growing upêI was growing up just terrible, man.]

ANDY: And then at night, he'd go home and he would listen to audio from the wire.

DAVID WEINBERG: Tape of like me in some bar, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: I think I offended everyone in that bar.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Yeah, you—yeah, you didn't make that many friends there.]

DAVID WEINBERG: Like super drunk, and it's like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: I called them all [bleep].

DAVID WEINBERG: Like, what? Why did I think this mattered? Like, why, you know? And then also this, like, dynamic started to change in my mind, where, like, it's one thing to record your own life—and then yes, to be fair I was also recording other people but it was always framed around me and everyone else was just supporting characters. But then when I started doing stories in New Orleans, it was like, this is not about me, this is about other people and, like, suddenly it did start to feel dirty to record people and then I just stopped. I was just like, "I don't wanna do this anymore."

ANDY: What about that feeling you were talking about just moments ago, where without the recorder recording what's happening that you felt as if you were missing out?

DAVID WEINBERG: I mean, that didn't go away. That definitely didn't go away. I mean, I feel like that still to this day. I sometimes feel like, "Man, I wish I was recording this!" You know? But it just forced me to really think hard about what moments in life were worth capturing and what weren't.

ANDY: You know, so, like, if you do try to capture a moment, then you're kind of out of that moment. But if you don't, then poof, it's gone.

MOLLY: Well it has the potential to be lost.

ANDY: Right, I think that we all can relate to this idea. But for David, the crux of that ...

MOLLY: Tension.

ANDY: To do it or not, like, that became really difficult for him, in part because of what happened next. A few months after he had quit recording, he was talking to Mark who, you know, is still back in Seattle, is very happy to hear that David wasn't recording anymore. And so Mark decided to go down to New Orleans to visit David and their buddy Danny, who lives down there too.

DAVID WEINBERG: And this is—man, this is hard because I haven't really told the real story about what happened with Mark. I'm trying to think. I'll tell you the real story and ...

ANDY: Yeah, just shoot.

DAVID WEINBERG: The—so Dan—Danny and Mark and I were really close, the three of us. And one thing we would do a couple times a year, we would all go up to the mountains together and just have this great trip together as friends. We were gonna do that in New Orleans, and so we got on our bikes and we rode down to the river and sat along the river for a while. And then we took the ferry over to the west bank, the other side of the river. You know, like, New Orleans is glittering across the water.

ANDY: Got stoned.

DAVID WEINBERG: And it was just magical. And like—we were sitting there for a long time, just talking, like, having one of those deep philosophical conversations ...

ANDY: David, for the first time in a long time, was not recording, wasn't worried about capturing the moment, so ...

DAVID WEINBERG: My mind was free to not think about the recording, you know? And then I was actually more present in some way, you know? And it just felt like it always did when we were close. And I wanted to keep hanging out there and Mark was getting kinda antsy. He wanted to go explore the city. You know, he wanted to go exploring. And I was just like, didn't really feel like it. I just sort of didn't want to be around other people. I was happy to be there with them. And then Mark just jumped up and took off, like just sprinted away. And we were like, "Whoa, that was weird." It feels very strange.

ANDY: David says that Mark said something in that moment but he can't, like, remember exactly what.

DAVID WEINBERG: And so we got on our bikes and we were only, like, only maybe a hundred yards, two hundred yards from the ferry that was parked there. And by the time we got to the bridge that connects the land to the ferry, I saw that Mark's bike was laying on its side on the ramp. I was just like, "Well, that's weird." You know, in my mind—when I think back about it, I feel like things happened very slowly. Why is Mark's bike laying down? Why are all those people shouting? They're looking into the river. Why are they looking into the river? And I look into the river and there's Mark. And he's swimming in the Mississippi and he's shouting something and I can't figure out what he's saying. And I was just like, "Holy shit." Like, this is really bad. And then I got really, really scared and I looked at Danny and Danny looked totally terrified. And he started to—you know, he was going down river obviously, it's a river, so there was a point I could see off in the distance. There was a boat, like a rescue boat had gotten into the water and Mark started to drift around the bend and he disappeared out of view.

ANDY: David and Danny, they kinda walk up and down the river looking for Mark. They couldn't find him. Then it gets dark, and Danny and Mark, they just head home and wait for news there. The next morning, still no news. A few days later, the authorities, they gave up their official search for Mark and assumed that he was dead. And a week or so later, they found his body.

DAVID WEINBERG: He had drowned.

ANDY: And I should just add that there is no reason to suspect that this was a suicide.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah.

ANDY: I'm sorry that Mark passed, man. That's—that's a tough story to hear.

DAVID WEINBERG: Yeah.

ANDY: Thinking about this through the lens of, like, you being someone who has a compulsion, an obsession that is now under control but still lives in you, is there a part of you that you had been recording that day?

DAVID WEINBERG: Um, I don't know.

ANDY: The thing is, David says, not long after Mark had died, he started going through a lot of his old recordings. And sometimes he would hear on them these great moments between the two of them. But a lot of times, he says that almost like, he could hear that ceiling that those recordings had put on his friendship with Mark.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Man I wanna [bleep] take a boat down the coast so bad.]

[RECORDING, MARK: Yeah, nothing I wanna do more.]

DAVID WEINBERG: I was acting different than I would have if I hadn't been recording.

ANDY: Hmm.

DAVID WEINBERG: You know? I was conscious that I was on tape all the time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mark: Even if the boat, even if you know ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Weinberg: Danny was saying he was willing to, like ...]

DAVID WEINBERG: And I also hear myself in these recordings often stepping over him. Like he'll say something and then I'll jump in and just like, clearly I'm just like—I'm on my own train of thought and I'm not really listening to him. And that bothers me a lot. I'm glad I don't have—I think I'm glad that I—I don't know. It's just so hard, because on the one hand I'm glad that I don't have to live with that tape and that it doesn't exist.

ANDY: But at the same time, David says ...

DAVID WEINBERG: I feel like maybe I missed something. And maybe there's some part of what happened that night that I can't—that I missed! All I know is that he just said, "Let's get out of here," and, like, jumped up. I don't even remember how he put it. I just remember that all of a sudden he was gone. If I had that recording maybe I could make sense of it and maybe something would be more clear about it. I think about that a lot. But then I also think what would Mark have wanted? And, you know, what—that probably trumps whatever clarity—I don't know. Yeah. But I still think about it a lot. I still think about what I would get from those recordings if I had them. And yeah. And I don't.

MOLLY: A big thank you to David Weinberg for opening up his audio archive and sharing it all with us and sharing this story.

ROBERT: And thank you Andy Mills, who produced the whole thing.

ANDY: And listened to all of those hours of tape.

ROBERT: [laughs]

MOLLY: [laughs]

ANDY: I should add here, a little update on David, he's actually a producer at KCRW. He's got this series that you should all check out called Below the Ten.

MOLLY: Ooh!

ANDY: And if you want to know more about that, maybe listen to ...

ROBERT: Below the ten what?

ANDY: It's a series about people, like very one of a kind, interesting people who live in LA. It's called Below the Ten. If you want to hear it, find links to it, or hear little snippets from the archive, you can find all that on our website. That's a thing you could do. I don't know if that's a thing we should say.

ROBERT: Which is Radiolab.org.

ANDY: That's it. Still it.

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[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich,Annie McEwen, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Alexandra Leigh Young, Stephanie Tan and Micah Loewinger. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]

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