9: BONUS EP - Unsung Heroes

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Greetings.

You have reached the phone number of Tamerlane, real-life supervillain.

Please leave a message so we can stay in touch.

And most importantly, stay evil.

This is Tamerlane, a real-life supervillain whose bonkers online videos caught our attention.

So we reached out to him, and he agreed to chat with us from his secret lair.

I had to get all dolled up for you today and put on my best leather.

Tamerlane did our interview in his full supervillain regalia.

If you listen carefully, you can hear his leather pants squeaking. He has a shaved head and a beard dyed bright red.
He was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a manrored sunglasses. Well, I just think aviators just say to me, douchebag.
When I see people in aviators, don't you think they look douchey?

I do. They're like trying

excessively hard to be cool, so

I adopted that as my own.

Tamerlane took his name from a

Turco-Mongol conqueror who rampaged

across Central Asia in the 14th

century. He would leave pyres

of human heads outside

of cities that he was going to sack

and lay siege to, and I think he left a clear message. So he was a good inspiration for me.
But Tamerlane doesn't only take inspiration from ancient warriors. As a child, I was a huge fan of Mr.
T. So he was a little bit of an inspiration to me as well.
And in his more introspective moments, Tamerlane would say his persona came from even closer to home. Was there some sort of Nietzschean monster within us all? Some sort of Carl Jung's belief in the shadow self? Yes, I would say that the disconnect I had with my own family and my own father helped create this character.
Also, my disappointment in society, trying to be a good citizen, trying to do the right thing and get a nine to five job and work 40 hours a week and be an obedient servant of the fascial capitalist system. I think failing at that, and again, my disconnect from my family, yes, helped create this character.
As you might have gathered from his voicemail, an affinity for bloodthirsty warlords, Tamerlane identifies as a real-life supervillain. And a bit like Rex Velvet, he sees it as his duty to offer a kind of meta-commentary on the superhero world.
I was at home one day and I was stroking my beloved pet, And I noticed on the news a story came on about real-life superheroes. And mostly it would seem that these real-life superheroes spent their time handing out sandwiches and warm socks.
And I thought to myself, what arrogance. How dare they go around calling themselves real-life superheroes when they set the bar so low.
So I said to myself, well, self, you are a real-life supervillain by comparison. So from that day forth, I made it my goal to become the best real-life supervillain I could become.
Tamerlane isn't above his own heroics when the moment calls for it. One time, he says he got into a fight with a Wolverine impersonator at a nightclub.
It was a party, and he was squirting tequila into the mouths of minors, what he calls his enemies.

He also runs a supervillain YouTube channel where he reviews fast food. All right, guys, we're off to get some dessert.
This is the Dairy Queen, yeah. He's starred in short films, and he does charity work.
My charity is SaveTheChimps.org. Being that I am an anthropology major, I have a very close affinity to our chimpanzee cousins.
We didn't get to hear from Tamerlane in the main series because Tamerlane isn't a part of the Seattle superhero scene. He's from Miami.
He's just one of many people all over America and the world who've taken up a cape or mask, or in this case, a pair of leather trousers, and joined the real-life superhero community.

In the course of making the Superhero Complex,

I met a lot more than just Phoenix and his crew.

So in this bonus episode,

I wanted to fire up the Batmobile one more time and take you on a whistle-stop tour

of the rest of this wild world

and the folks like Tamerlane who inhabit it.

I'm David Weinberg,

and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio,

this is The Superhero Complex,

episode nine, Unsung Heroes. One person who got to know the real-life superhero world as well as I did is writer and broadcaster John Ronson, who we heard from in episode four.

John hung out with real-life superheroes from across America.

But like me, his introduction to this weird and wild world started in Seattle, in true Phoenix Jones style.

The first time I met him, he was in the emergency room.

I got off the plane in Seattle and got a message that he'd been shot, I think.

I was stabbed.

My first thought, of course, was, oh, shit, I've just travelled from Britain and he's been stabbed. So that's how empathetic I was after a 12-hour flight.
So I got to the emergency room and he's there in a superhero outfit in the emergency room and he had been stabbed. But he's like, it's OK, you know.
I was stabbed earlier tonight, but I I'm gonna go out and patrol some more and I'm like are you sure then the doctor came in and

asked him about his family doctor and he named his pediatrician and I said are you a child but

it turns out you can he was like 23 and you can be with your pediatrician till you're 24 apparently

in America I did say to him look you've just been stabbed are you sure that you your pediatrician until you're 24, apparently, in America. I did say to him, look, you've just been stabbed.
Are you sure that you want to patrol? Like, I can honestly wait till tomorrow night. He's like, no, you know, I'm fine.
We're going out. A couple of nights later, they went on the patrol where they'd ultimately face down the crack dealers in Belltown.
But before that epic showdown, John said Phoenix was clutching at straws,

trying to find crimes to thwart. Phoenix saw somebody pass a baggie to someone else,

and he went, Yahtzee, and ran across the road and said, sir, this guy in this stupid

superhero outfit, sir, can I see that baggie? And it was pretzels. And he was like, so disappointed.
I was jealous that John had even this experience while on patrol with Phoenix. I wasn't so lucky.
We never even encountered a bag of salty snacks being exchanged suspiciously. Comparing notes on Phoenix Jones wasn't the only reason I wanted to talk to John.
He spent a lot of time with other different real-life superheroes too, and I was curious to learn what he'd made of the whole scene. He told me, in his experience, they fell into two camps.
You've got the sort of Phoenix-type ones who are into the costumes. costumes sometimes they even have like the special weapons like the web gun or the grappling hooks so you've got that sort of which phoenix was the clear like leader and they all looked up to him he had the best costume he was the most charismatic that lot were quite camp i remember we were looking at this group of crack addicts that they wanted to break up at the bus stop at three in the morning.
And the crack addicts were like looking at us and the superheroes were like murmuring to each other. And the crack addicts were presumably thinking, you know, what are they saying to each other? And what the superheroes were saying to each other was, oh, I love your black and yellow colour scheme.
The yellow really pops. So you had that genre of superhero, who were all pretty delightful, even though I didn't agree with what they were doing.
But then you had this other sort who I thought were much worse. John told me he'd met some superheroes who represented this second camp when he was in New York City.
He went on patrol with a group called the New York Initiative. And they left him feeling deeply uncomfortable.
They were barely superheroes at all. What they really were were vigilantes.
They didn't make much of an effort with the colour scheme. It was more just balaclavas.
And they wanted to break up drug dealers in Washington Square Park. But it was only when they ran towards this guy with lights, like flashlights.
I mean, they were terrifying this guy. They surrounded this guy and they had like floodlights and were like lit him up.
And the poor guy was like running away saying, you don't know me. You don't know anything about me.
You don't know why I'm here. You know, and I was on his side.
And this guy was selling weed to the students at NYU. And they did all of that.
You know, it's terrifying the life out of

this poor guy with lights, shaming for weed. Now, a few years later, weed's legal.
And you can stand

in Washington Square Park and smoke weed. And the police are fine because it's legal to do it.

So I had a very bad vibe with them. I thought they were very unpleasant.
Because after my piece came out, this one guy who was the ring leader of the New York crew was like really angry. It was like, you know, let's get Ronson.
And I remember somebody said to me, oh, he's really troubled. I never encountered this type of superhero in Seattle.
Everyone I talked to seemed to be more of the Phoenix camp, well-meaning folks who seemed to have their hearts in the right place. But John wasn't just uncomfortable with the real-life superheroes he met in New York.
He thinks the whole movement is flawed. I don't believe in real-life superheroing.
Like, I don't think it's something that people should do.

Look, the real police are very flawed too,

but they're flawed in a different way.

And quite often when we try to better the justice system,

we bring new problems to it.

You see that with social media shaming,

and I think you see it with the real-life superheroes. So one of the main things is just that they're too into it.
You see that with social media shaming and I think you see it with the real life superheroes. So one of the main things is just that they're too into it and when you're too into something that's when the problems start, that's when you commit miscarriages of justice.
So that was my main animus was that they were too into it. They were into the fame, it was like a badge of honor to thwart a crime.
And I don't think crime fighters should feel about crime that way. It should be more pragmatic and by the book.
I found this to be true for Phoenix Jones as well. I think his desire for fame and compulsion to find crime don't serve him well in his attempt to live up to the ideals of a superhero.
But despite John's reservations about the real-life superhero community's crime-fighting tactics, he told me that Phoenix was his favorite out of all the heroes he met. Phoenix was the best.
I mean, that's why you're doing him. He was just the most charismatic, funny, charming.
Inevitably, then, some of them will be, like, angry and troubled. And he didn't feel like that.
Some of them would be, like, nerdy kind of misfits. And I think Phoenix was a misfit, but not in a kind of gamer type.
I mean, I'm sure he is a gamer, but he wasn't like one of those

sort of nerdy guys who just spends too long sitting in front of his computer and decides to like buy an outfit and go out and do it on the streets, of which there were other superheroes who were like that, you know, a little out of shape, and you could tell that they were just passing through. I asked John if he still thought of Phoenix that way, even after his 2021 conviction on drug conspiracy charges.
I was genuinely startled and saddened. Like everyone, one of my least favorite things is hypocrisy.
And obviously the first thing you think is, well, is he a hypocrite? But mainly I just felt sad. Like, I know from spending that time with Phoenix that he's a sweet guy, he wants to do good.
You know, Phoenix is a very unique person. He's this sort of weird kind of specialness to him.
It feels like it's a little sullied now because we wanted him to be, he was setting himself up as pure and we wanted him to be pure. John said that compared to the New York superheroes who just seemed angry and vengeful when they chased down drug dealers, Phoenix had seemed a lot more idealistic.
In fact, John said when they faced off with the crack dealers on the patrol we heard about in episode four, he really felt Phoenix was genuine. The conversation that I overheard with the crack dealer was like, I've got no choice.
This is how I feed my family. I've got no choice.
And Phoenix was like, sir, you do have a choice. I was like, you know, trying to be a positive influence.
And I'm sure that was real. That was part of what attracted him to us, was that he was innocent and sweet and pure.
And yeah, he was goofy. And yeah, there were definitely some bad sides to what he did, getting too into it.
But there was a kind of goofiness and a purity to him. And the problem with the drug allegation is that it's not pure anymore.
It's like hypocritical. And I heard that now people yell hypocrite at him as he walks down the street in Seattle.
Now, my guess is that there's a complicated set of circumstances as to why he ended up in that situation. But the problem is no one likes hypocrisy.
That was the same problem I had with Phoenix. But John said that for all Phoenix's flaws, there was still one moment that stuck in his mind.
My last memory of Phoenix were all of these kids just gathered around him, like so excited. Oh my God, it's Phoenix Jones, it's Phoenix Jones.
And he was a celebrity. As I walked away, I looked back and I saw these kids with Phoenix.
And I thought, well, he's no different to a superhero. He's giving these kids the same joy that a real superhero would.
So he is a superhero in a way. For all the ups and downs in Phoenix's superhero career, there's no denying that he has genuinely inspired people along the way.

And not just in the U.S.

The superheroes John met and the ones I've spent time with in this series so far

are all based in America.

But since the heyday of the Rain City crew,

the real-life superhero movement has gone international.

It's time to meet the Caped Crusaders who are fighting crime all over the globe. That's coming up.
Divorce can leave you feeling isolated,

like you're stuck on an island with no direction.

But you don't have to go through it alone.

At Hello Divorce, we guide you step-by-step,

offering everything from legal advice to financial planning

so you can find your way back to solid ground.

Start your divorce journey with the support you need at hellodivorce.com

because you deserve a better path forward. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Your gut is how your body processes everything that you consume.
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That's Star Star 488 to receive a link to the offer. This is Laurie Santos, and I'm here with Libby Abbott, Deputy Director of California Department of Healthcare Access and Information.
So Libby, how did the certified wellness coach profession come about? Knowing that we have a severe overall behavioral health workforce shortage in California, we knew we had to do something innovative to bring needed prevention, promotion, and early identification services. So we conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of students, parents, teachers.
So what we heard was that the youth want a more diverse workforce with workers who can relate to them and make them feel seen and heard.

And preferably folks who come from their communities and reflect their backgrounds. And so who would make a good certified wellness coach candidate? Anyone who's currently working in mental health, substance use disorder, social work, or child welfare.
Coaches are people who are passionate about supporting our youth and equipping them with the tools that they need to navigate mental and behavioral health. To learn more, visit cawellnesscoach.org.
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Learn more at MyOut a cape and mask to ward off muggers or clean up the streets. So first stop on our superhero world tour is Japan.
I guess there are about 40 heroes in Japan. This is Clean Panther.
She wears a blue, red, and black kimono and a futuristic yellow panther mask that covers her whole head. Japan has the biggest real-life superhero scene I encountered outside of America.
But whereas the groups I met in Seattle were into crime fighting and homeless outreach, the big focus in Japan is picking up litter. That's how Clean Panther got her name.
My main activity is clean up town, so named Clean, and also combined with Panther. I love Black Panther, the Marvel superhero.
Clean Panther and her superhero crew go on litter patrols, picking up trash in Nagoya, Japan's fourth largest city. They're just some of many heroes with names like Hell Hero, Clean Arrow, and Maroon Sparrow, who gear up in fantastical masks and body armor to tidy up their cities.
For Phoenix Jones, a patrol that isn't focused on taking out bad guys is a patrol wasted. So I can imagine he wouldn't fit in too well

with the Japanese scene.

But they do have one thing in common.

The real-life superheroes of Japan

are great at social media.

They post videos of themselves cleaning up their towns,

shot like an action film

with a comic book movie soundtrack.

Over in Europe, they have their own superheroes too. Well, of course I can't give you my real name, but I go by The Incredible Spider.
The Incredible Spider is from the Netherlands. He likes to keep his superhero activities on the down low.
So he asked us to disguise his voice. I want to protect myself and the people I love.
I don't say that I work outside of the law, but sometimes it really has its benefits to not work specifically by the law, if you know what I mean. He says he divides his time between online vigilantism and real-life street patrols.
And his costume is a tribute to his favorite superhero, Spider-Man. He was basically the one character that really inspired me to do more, to do all this.
And it's also a symbol that people trust, people feel safe around Spider-Man. He wears a red suit with a white spider on the chest over stab-proof armor and a homemade protective spider mask.
He even builds his own Spider-Man-inspired gadgets, like a DIY web slinger. I got some wetshooters with a fluid that has like a pepper spray mixture in it.
So if somebody were to attack me, I can like simply pepper spray them and they wouldn't see it. Like it's all covered in the suit so people wouldn't see it coming.
The incredible spider has a pretty defined aesthetic, albeit one that borrows heavily from one of fiction's most well-known superheroes. It's not easy to come up with your own superhero identity.
Sometimes it takes time to refine it. There's also another Dutch superhero who went through a lot of different alter egos before he ultimately landed on the perfect alias.
My first alias I've used was Blue Tornado. I was called Blue Tornado because those were the only two English words I knew back at the time.
After that, it was Black Shadow. Then Green Assassin for a while.
I just jumped to my closet like, what's the most superhero combination of clothes I have right now? And it was an all-black suit, and that's when I started Shadow Panther. And Shadow Panther was the alias I actually got arrested with because they thought I was trouble.
This was a few years ago, when Shadow Panther was around 17. I was walking through a park because the killer clown hype was raging back then.
If the killer clown hype passed you by, it was an international hoax that got a lot of traction around 2016. There were rumors and news stories about evil clowns popping up all over the world who supposedly preyed on children.
And it was like, hey, I'm going out there in the park trying to catch killer clowns. And I had this like huge iron bar with me to protect myself, you know.
And this couple of guys came by and they asked me what I was doing. So I just started explaining.
So the two guys called the police who weren't impressed. And what I would give to have been there to see Shadow Panther decked out in his full costume, explaining to the cops that he was there to fight off killer clowns.
I tried to mimic like a panther's face, but it kind of was like a snake face. It had like little teeth at the mouth opening and stuff, and safety goggles in it.
It was completely made of trash bags and duct tape. That run-in with the cops was basically the end of the Shadow Panther era.
Now he's known as Blood Slash, and he says he's given up on ridding the world of killer clowns. I'm there to help people out with small things, pointing the directions and stuff, and if trouble is going down, I'm trying to be there to be one of the people that has their phone in their hands,

calls the alarm number, that kind of things. I have to say, to me, the name Blood Slash doesn't really say, I'm your friendly neighborhood helper warden.
But maybe it won't be the final

alias this intrepid hero tries on for size. If he ever decided to take up the good old iron bar

again and head to Seattle,

I think Blood Slash would find a kindred

spirit in Midnight Jack.

After all, once upon a time,

Jack was just a guy in a mask

hiding in a bush with a baseball bat.

Over in Mexico,

the scene is a little different.

Mexico is home to one of my favorite offshoots

of the real-life superhero world.

Meet political scientist Jorge Canez.

A.K.A. El Piatonito.

Jorge studied urban planning and transportation in college.

When he was growing up in Mexico City, he discovered his true passion in life, road safety.

We built cities for cars, motorized cities, metal machines in the streets, killing everyone, literally. Jorge struggled to get other people as fired up about infrastructure as he was.
You know, it could be boring to talk about pedestrians with people, and nobody will read an academic paper about pedestrian road safety. Then, one night, Jorge and his best friend went to catch a Lucha Libre wrestling match.
It was something they did all the time. But that night was different.
Jorge watched the masked luchador fighters throw each other around the ring in their gleaming costumes. And a crazy idea popped into his head.
We need to do something fun. Why not, after the match, we buy a cape and a mask and go out to the streets to fight for the rights of pedestrians? And just like that, a new hero was born.
El peatonito. That's Spanish for the pedestrian.
For his first few outings, El peatonito wore a $5 cape. But then he got an upgrade.
My brother helped me with the design of the mask. It's a crosswalk with a pedestrian.
I told my grandmother to help me design my cape. And my cape has white and black stripes, just like a pedestrian crosswalk.
With his new super suit, El Peatonito set out to brave the onslaught of rush hour in Mexico City. He wove through road-raging drivers and toxic exhaust fumes with his black and white crosswalk cape streaming out behind him.
I push back cars that are obstructing the crosswalk. I paint sidewalks and I paint crosswalks and bikeways without any permits.
And my most controversial action in the streets is to walk on top of the cars parked on the sidewalk. Because the sidewalk is a space of pedestrians.
My mother tells me that I can get in trouble with the owner of the cars. El Peatonito has a lot in common with the real-life superheroes I met in the U.S.
But he prefers a different label. I don't like too much the word superhero.
I feel it sounds pretentious, I don't know, but I like more in Spanish the word luchador. It's a fighter, a fighter of the streets.
Lucha libre wrestling started out in the late 19th century, and it's famous for its high-flying takedowns and masked fighters who wear brightly colored capes. Each luchador creates their own superhero-esque persona.
Some of them symbolize good, and some embody evil. It's a message that we always have this struggle with the two sides of humanity, you know? We are all good and evil by nature.
And this representation with luchadores, with these wrestlers with colorful colorful masks and capes, it's a great way to express this internal battle of human being. Just like the real-life superheroes who came before Phoenix Jones, El Peatonito has his own cape-wearing predecessors in Mexico, too.
In the late 1980s, a luchador in red tights and a gold cape named Super Barrio Gomez fought for affordable housing after thousands of people were left homeless by an earthquake in Mexico City. But El Peotinito's main inspiration was a man named Antanas Mocas.
He was a mathematician and philosopher with thick glasses and a sandy beard. He roamed the city of Bogota, Colombia in red spandex underpants and a cape with a letter C painted across his chest.
It stood for Super Civico, Super Citizen. His central mission was to use his superpowers of comedy and performance to get people fired up about important issues.

He even turned up on TV naked, apart from his superhero logo, and took a shower to protest the lack of clean water in the city. And then, in 1995, he ran for mayor of Bogota.
He won the election and he was mayor of Bogotá.

And during his administration, he fired all the corrupt transit police and he hired mimes to control traffic. You heard that right.
He hired 420 mimes with white painted faces and fluorescent dungarees. They fanned out across the city, mocking people who broke traffic laws and helping pedestrians cross the roads.
The result was a 50% drop in traffic fatalities. And this superhero mayor, Super Civico, also brought down homicide rates by 70% with his other unusual policies.
At one point, he got 45,000 citizens to gather in the streets and inflate balloons. They were painted with the image of someone who they felt had persecuted them in some way.
Together, the citizens popped the balloons in a form of citywide performance therapy. I had the privilege to talk with him about this, and he told me that it's a way to have a civic theater in the streets.
You know, people love to see theater and spectacles in the streets, and that's a great way to send a message in a peaceful way. And then I decided, like, we need a pedestrian superhero in Mexico City.
This is a world I desperately want to live in. One where our philosopher mayor wears a cape to celebrate the humble citizen.
A city run by a visionary leader who hires hundreds of mimes as traffic police. What a beautiful sight that must have been.
Why can't we have that? I would even settle for a world in which one of my elected officials was a real-life supervillain. Like, oh, I don't know, Lord Mole.
I've got an old Russian tank commander's helmet and a big overcoat. And goggles, obviously, because Mole is a mole.
He's short-sighted. But he needs the glasses and the goggles because he also is a scientist.
Despite his supposedly villainous persona, Lord Mole is actually a good guy. He spends a lot of his time out on the streets of Birmingham, England, doing homeless outreach or charity fundraising with his son, who is also a real-life superhero.
My son, Andrew, was being called Electro Kid by the other heroes because of all of the treatment that he'd had in hospital for a brain tumour and then Electro Lad as he got a bit older and then he became Proton because of the Proton Beam therapy. So our favourite organisation to raise money for is the Birmingham Children's Hospital.
Lord Mole runs a real-life superhero collective called the UK Initiative. It's part of a larger superhero network called the Initiative, which exists all over the world.
Got groups in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Africa, South America, and obviously the UK.

As it turned out, two of the leaders were only a few hours away from me, just outside of San Francisco. So what's it like to run the real-life equivalent of an international Avengers squad? That's coming up.
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We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns, so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Your stomach is a mess and you feel lousy.
Something is just off, but you don't know what. Yeah, we get it.
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Your gut is how your body processes everything that you consume. Stop ignoring the signs.
It's time to do something real. Get Viome and fix your gut now.
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This is Laurie Santos, and I'm here with Libby Abbott, Deputy Director of California Department of Healthcare Access and Information.

So Libby, how did the certified wellness coach profession

come about?

Knowing that we have a severe overall

behavioral health workforce shortage in California,

we knew we had to do something innovative

to bring needed prevention, promotion,

and early identification services.

So we conducted extensive interviews

with hundreds of students, parents, teachers. So what we heard was that the youth want a more diverse workforce with workers who can relate to them and make them feel seen and heard, and preferably folks who come from their communities and reflect their backgrounds.
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myoutdesk.com If the real-life superhero movement has a spiritual home,

it's a bakery in the Bay Area called Superhero Desserts.

You'll find it in a red brick building

with a glass fridge out front full of cakes

with the has a spiritual home. It's a bakery in the Bay Area called Superhero Desserts.
You'll find it in a red brick building with a glass fridge out front full of cakes with elaborate fondant toppings. Inside it's cozy.
There are fairy lights hanging up and photos on the walls of people dressed up in superhero costumes. It's run by Edwina and Mike, a.k.a.
Rock and Roll and Nightbug. If you catch them in costume, Nightbug is decked out in red and black with a smooth red mask that covers his whole face and black mesh holes over his eyes.
Rock and Roll likes to switch up her look, but you might find her with long, bright pink hair, knee-high black boots, and a purple cape. They're two of the leaders of a global superhero network with chapters all over the world called The Initiative.
They're also husband and wife. But they didn't start out their real-life superhero journey together.
I had been doing it without the wife's knowledge because I had figured, well, you know what? If they are completely crazy, and I go out twice, and I'm like, this is not for me, I can just forget the whole thing ever happened. Nightbug had heard about some heroes in his neighborhood doing costumed safety patrols and he wanted to check it out.
So one night he pulled on a mask and snuck out to join them. Several patrols later, Nightbug figured it was time to let his wife in on the secret.
And he said, OK, you know, I know I told you about this movie I want you to come see. It's called Superheroes.
And so we went to this theater, the Roxy, in San Francisco, and there were all these weird guys standing around in costume outside. And I thought, wow, you guys really take these shows seriously.
You're all dressed up. It turned out the movie was a documentary.
I realized, oh, my God, this is about people who are trying to be real life superheroes. And the arc of the movie is beautiful in that you're lapping at these people at first.
You're ridiculing them, you know, with the rest of the audience. And then you see the sacrifices they make, the determination and just the dedication they have.
By the end of it, you're rooting for these guys. I was, and so was the audience by the sound of it.
They were all clapping at the end. After the credits rolled, some of the people who'd come dressed up in costumes assembled at the front of the movie theater for the director's Q&A.
Nightbug said he needed to use the bathroom. The questions happen, he's not back.
Ten minutes later, I'm going, oh my gosh, is he okay? I'm looking at my watch. And this guy in this costume walks up right to the front of the theater where the other heroes are.
And he takes this place and they go, hey guys, this is Night Bug. I went to the back and I was going, looking for just any man to go into the bathroom, check on my husband.
And then I hear my husband's voice and I go, oh, thank goodness. And I turn around, but it's not my husband talking.
It's Nightbug. I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut.
And I was speechless. I couldn't believe it.
So that's how I was introduced to it. After that, were you like, oh, this is great? Or you were like, I don't know about this? Oh, my God.
Immediately, immediately. The same things were running through my head.
Oh, my God. How long has he been doing this? How did he keep this from me? And I love this.
How can I get into it? Edwina, soon to be known as rock and roll, was pretty well qualified for superhero work. We've been martial artists and instructors for decades now.
And I was the head of security for a nightclub in San Francisco. It felt like being a bouncer, but for the entire city of San Francisco.

These days, Nightbug and Rock and Roll are something of a superhero power couple.

They founded the California chapter of the international superhero group, The Initiative, in 2011.

Thirteen more Initiative chapters have sprung up since.

As it happens, the New York branch of The Initiative is the same group John Ronson went on patrol with, though a lot of the membership has turned over since then. From their base in California, rock and roll and Nightbug have become magnets for aspiring superheroes all over the world.
We used to get several emails a month from people who were like, oh yeah, I can move things with my mind. You know, oh, yeah, can you demonstrate that?

Oh, no, no, no, I can't do it over video because there's always some excuse.

I think it's a masterpiece of an understatement to say that we get a few. We get like out of 10 people, I'd say seven people are just unrealistic about dudes.

We don't grow up taking down drug lords.

It's not what we do. You'll find out really quickly that you don't actually have superpowers.
To make sure their budding recruits stay grounded on this plane of reality, Rock and Roll and Nightbug run a Facebook page where they and other veteran superheroes offer advice. They even have their own podcast called Heroes 101.
The initiative wasn't the only reason I wanted to talk to rock and roll and Nightbug. Phoenix Jones repeatedly claimed to be the only true real-life superhero, one who was flawless at crime fighting.
But as you know, I had my doubts. So every time I interviewed a superhero for this series, I asked them who they thought was the best example of a real-life superhero out there today.
And again and again, people told me rock and roll and night bug. So I was curious to meet them and find out what they were up to.
Turns out it was a lot. They started out doing community outreach to unhoused people in their community every week.
We were going broke, to put it plainly. We'd make 200 burritos and, you know, every week and then bring them out with socks and water and everything else.
And pretty soon we went, we can't do this anymore. At the time, rock and roll had been watching a lot of the great British baking show.
And so I was baking so much that my friends were going, you know, if your family's getting sick of all the sugar and you can't do anything with it, why don't you just have a pop up, take the money and do something good with it? Oh, my God. There you go.
That's how their bakery Superhero Desserts was born. 15 percent of their profits go to fund superhero community outreach events every month.
We had 50 people the last time, 60 people the time before, and they all got together wearing superhero costumes and making burritos and things together. They also carry out safety patrols, run free self-defense classes, and according to their website, they've personally collected 11,000 used needles from the streets of California.
When I talked to Rock and Roll and Nightbug about the Seattle superhero scene, they told me they were close with Evo and Crystal Marks, and they were big fans of Red Ranger too. But they were less complimentary about our old friend, Phoenix Jones.
To be perfectly blunt, and Phoenix knows this, we've said it before to him, Phoenix has a kind heart, but Phoenix has made a lot of really bad decisions.

It's sad that he's the biggest name you see, but, you know, we don't want people thinking the rest of us are like him. Rock and Roll and Nightbug definitely fall into the category of superhero that Phoenix derisively calls real-life sandwich handlers.
Though at times, Phoenix has apologized for these types of remarks and said he wants to be able to get along and work alongside all types of superheroes. But then he'll launch into a rant about how people who give out food in costumes are assholes.
So it's hard to take him at his word when he claims to be above the petty superhero infighting. Rock and Roll and Nightbug told me they aren't interested in doing this work for glory or fame.
Another accusation, Phoenix often lobs at other superheroes. We try to hammer it into the community.
Look, it's awful, if you think about it, to want to be someone's hero because you're essentially hoping that someone will have the worst day of their life. So for you to want to be, oh, I want to rescue someone today, just hope that everything's quiet.
And if you happen to be there for someone, that's great for you, not so great for them. I think that is probably an ideal attitude that any superhero should have when they head out on a patrol of their community.
At the end of the day, I would say that I'm a supporter of the real-life superhero community. I think if you're judging real-life superheroes solely on their ability to fight crime, I would say the movement as a whole has under-delivered on that promise.
But I personally never had any experiences with the kind of superheroes John

Ronson met, the ones whose hearts did not appear to be in the right place. So my take is a little

different than his. I don't see the movement itself as flawed.
I think any movement will have

its bad apples, the ones who seem to be doing more harm than good. But at least in my experience,

I think the vast majority of real-life superheroes do way more good for society than harm.

It's hard to quantify just how much good they do, but attempts have been made.

A 2016 study at the University of Sydney looked at real-life superheroes and found that on average, they spent 19 hours a week on superhero activity, which I assume is way more time than most people spend volunteering to help their own community. And I love the idea of every town having its own unique superheroes, its own home team, so to speak, instead of a superhero monoculture dominated by the large corporations that control the intellectual property of DC and Marvel.
I'm all for the diversification of the superhero universe, and I wholeheartedly support people's individual expression. Who doesn't love seeing a kick-ass homemade costume? I wish there were more real-life superheroes in every city, for kids to encounter out in the wild, for the good humanitarian work they do, and for the sheer joy of having eccentric characters

roaming the streets,

living out their own fantasies

of what it means to be a hero.

The Superhero Complex is hosted and written by me, David Weinberg, and reported by me, Amalia Sortland, and Caroline Thorna. Production from Amalia Sortland and Caroline Thorna.
Sean Glenn, Max O'Brien, and David Waters are executive producers. Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz.
Production management from Cherie Houston, Frankie Taylor, and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Rob Spate.
Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Original music is composed by Paul Hausden.
Special thanks to Peter Tangen, Willard Foxton, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvell, Beth Ann Macaluso, Oren Rosenbaum, Shelby Shankman, and all the team at UTA

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This is Laurie Santos, and I'm here with Charlotte Noble, Certified Wellness Coach. Charlotte, why did you apply to become certified as a wellness coach? For me, it was all about having that introductory level position into mental health.
And also, it's being there for students who are really dealing with mental health challenges in a rural community. Today's young people, they're facing so much.
And I feel really passionate about providing them with the kind of early accessible support that can make a huge difference. What would you like people to know about the unique challenges that children and youth face today? They're growing up in a world now that's pretty complex in ways that we didn't have to deal with before.
I mean, they're immersed in the digital age with social media that can really define their self-worth and their identity. So often setting almost like these impossible standards.
On top of that, feeling the weight of academic pressures, economic uncertainties and, you know, social issues in day-to-day life. To learn more, visit cawellnesscoach.org.
What's slowing your business down? Endless emails? Scheduling headaches? Christina Mendonca here. I've been a business owner too.
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customer service. They've got you covered at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house.

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