Weird Little Check-in

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Hey, this is Weird Little Guys,

but there's no new Weird Little Guy this week.

I mean, there are definitely more weird little guys crawling out of the woodwork every day, and I've got a couple stories about them in development.

But this episode isn't a new guy.

Sorry about that.

We're a couple months into the show now, and I just wanted to take a minute to do a little navel-gazing.

So, this is just a little mini-episode to check in on how it's going, talk about what we're doing here, and shoehorn in some fun facts and odds and ends that got left on the cutting room floor of past episodes.

If we're being totally honest here, I just didn't get it together this week.

I lost a few days of research and writing time to a trial at the beginning of this month and lost another couple of days to travel for a family obligation this week and it just didn't come together in time.

I thought I had a topic that I could turn around quickly, but sometimes a story that seems really straightforward turns out to be anything but.

I found a surprising and strange twist to a story that I thought I knew and I wanted to give it the time it deserved to flesh it all the way out.

So we're doing something different this week.

But the timing is pretty good.

We're about three months into this thing and I have some reflections on the process so far.

I think the biggest realization I've had so far is that I may have overextended myself a little bit, if that wasn't obvious in what I'm doing right now.

What was I, a person who dropped out of college mainly because I have a very adversarial relationship with the concept of due dates, thinking when I signed up to write what is basically a 20-page research paper every week.

I mean, just a baffling decision on my part.

But I think it's going okay,

don't you?

I don't know if there's a fourth wall in podcasting, but if there is, I'm kind of constantly knocking on it.

I'm always right there on the edge of the story I'm telling you.

There will will be a few stories I tell you on this show that I am reluctantly, accidentally, haphazardly,

actually in,

not just as the narrator, but as a chaotic little side character.

And this little episode is sort of a meta-commentary on the storytelling process.

So I'm busting through that fourth wall like the Kool-Aid man today.

I totally get it if you're not into that.

You can just come back next week when I have a whole new weird little guy for you.

But in the years I've been doing this kind of work, I've always been in conversation with the audience.

And it feels so strange to me now that I'm adjusting to this new medium of podcasting, just not to have that at all.

Those conversations weren't always good.

I'll refer you back to the comment I made a second ago about being an unwitting side character in some weird little guy's journeys to federal prison.

But I always felt like I was telling a story to people who were speaking back to me.

I was getting their reactions and their input and their perspectives.

And sometimes that is part of the story while I'm still telling it.

And maybe that's a weakness or a flaw or...

A dead giveaway that I didn't go to journalism school or whatever, but it's the way I know how to do the work that feels meaningful to me and I'm too old to change now.

I alluded to it a bit in the mini-sode honoring the anniversary of Heather Heyer's death back in August.

But my introduction to covering court cases and the weird little guys at the center of them came from my own personal need to understand the men who came here.

to Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally in 2017.

When the handful of men who'd been charged for the acts of violence they committed that day first started appearing in court in late 2017, early 2018,

I was, coincidentally, unemployed.

So I had a lot of spare time to go to court and just

watch.

So I did.

And I started doing it just for myself.

I didn't have a lot going on and I wanted to see.

I wanted to know.

I didn't know what it was I needed to know or how I was going to find it out, but

I had the time and

I just sat and I watched.

And I started posting about what I was observing online.

I guess that's very millennial core of me.

But I realized very quickly that there was a hunger in this community for information about those proceedings that was more personal,

less detached than the coverage that was being offered by traditional media outlets.

I mean, if you just wanted the facts, there was plenty of news.

National outlets were still sending reporters to a lot of those hearings.

But there's something missing from that kind of coverage.

People wanted the facts, of course, and I did my best in those early days to get those facts right.

But they wanted more than that.

They wanted to be in conversation with those facts.

They wanted to be informed, but they wanted to be angry too.

And they deserved to be.

They wanted to know the ugly truth about what was going on, but they wanted it presented to them in a way that felt affirming.

and grounded in what they already knew to be true.

They wanted to feel heard and to ask questions, and they wanted to know not just what, but why.

And I did too.

So I did my best to collect every detail and to make myself available to provide context where I could and comfort if I could.

I took on the role of audience surrogate.

for people in my community who couldn't spend all day in court.

I hate to out myself as someone who reads the comments.

It's very embarrassing, but I am.

And I've seen some feedback that some listeners don't care for what they call my habit of editorializing, of putting my own voice and my own judgment and my own feelings into the story.

There were some reviews taking issue with what they believed to be a put-on affect, this melodramatic flourish in the way that I speak.

That is, unfortunately, just the way that I talk.

And I've got a pretty thick skin when it comes to things like death threats.

But I'm surprisingly sensitive to what is completely sane and valid criticism.

You know, some weird little guy can post online about how he wants to carve his name into my chest and fuck my corpse or, you know, whatever.

And I can take that in stride.

But a perfectly normal person thinks I talk too fast, that's going to send me into a spiral.

You know, I'm working on that, okay?

I am pacing myself.

I've been doing exercises where I practice reading my script with a timer.

I'm trying.

So I did sit with that feedback about my narrative style being too personal or too emotional.

And ultimately, I decided to disregard it.

This is the only way that I know how to tell stories that weigh heavily on the soul because I learned how to do it while trying to tell stories that were deeply personal for me and for the audience I was communicating them to.

And because I learned how to tell these stories in that context, I know it's important.

It's not for everyone, and that's okay.

And it's not better than or even a substitution for more traditional journalistic approaches to telling these kinds of stories.

But there is a place for this kind of storytelling.

I'm a human being trying to make sense of the world that we live in.

And I hope that I can try to help you do that too.

I don't just want to present you the facts of a case, the timeline of a story, of a man's life, of a trial.

I'm not just showing you the most fucked up thing I can find for shock value.

I want us to try to understand what all of this means together.

When I take you on these little journeys into the story of some weird little guy, we aren't just staring evil in the face for something to do.

We're taking its mask off to really understand

a moment in history and to place a particular guy into his proper context.

There is one moment in my work that I have held on to like a life preserver on the days I find myself asking, what am I even doing?

Is this worth it?

What am I adding to the world by doing this at all?

And I hope this person doesn't mind me sharing it.

I don't know who they are, so I can't ask.

It's something so close to my heart that I almost don't want to let it out into the world.

I don't want to cheapen it or wear it out by saying it out loud.

See, this isn't actually my first attempt at a podcast.

Back in 2018, James Alex Fields Jr.

went on trial for murder, for...

Heather Heyer's murder.

And for two and a half weeks, I sat on a bench in a courtroom that was too crowded to hold the people of Charlottesville who were desperate to see some approximation of justice done.

So I sat on that bench and I took notes furiously for eight hours every day.

I think I gave myself carfal tunnel.

And then I came home and I wrote a script.

And then I recorded a little episode on the floor of my closet because it was the only place in my apartment where you couldn't hear the noise from the cars outside.

And I was recording and editing until 3 a.m.

every night and then getting back in my car a few hours later to go back to court.

And I didn't know anything about podcast editing.

I still don't.

I don't do that.

And I didn't do a very good job of it.

I really just cut out the parts where I was audibly crying.

It's still online somewhere.

It's not very good.

I'm not recommending it.

If that trial happened today, I would write that story very differently.

I wish I knew then what I know now about the law, about writing, about editing, about storytelling.

But

I did the best I could.

And it wasn't meant for everyone to hear.

It wasn't for all of you.

It was a labor of love for my community, for people I knew needed to hear those facts, but from someone who cared about them and would treat them with a fierce gentleness.

Someone who understood that they were afraid and wounded and angry and someone who respected their right to be that way.

They wanted to know the boring little details of what happened inside that courtroom, but the cool, neutral detachment of a nightly update on CNN felt like a slap in the face.

So I did my best.

And I found myself asking those questions a lot that month.

Why am I doing this?

I'm not even good at this.

What does it add to this glut of coverage of this trial for me to do this, for me to try to tell this story and to put this out?

It was a long.

Brutal and gruesome trial.

There was graphic testimony about blood and tissue embedded in the shattered windshield of the car.

Doctors showed us x-rays and autopsy reports.

James Alex Fields Jr.

was being tried not just for murdering Heather Heyer, but for the injuries he'd caused to eight of the dozens of people badly injured in that attack.

And each of those eight victims testified about their injuries.

I tried to treat each victim with the care and tenderness they deserved, not just choosing the most salacious details about the horrors they'd endured.

And then one night I got a message from a stranger.

It was about the podcast.

This stranger, this gentle soul, had been one of the street medics who was there on 4th Street when it happened.

They had rendered aid that saved people's lives.

They were, understandably, pretty traumatized by what they'd seen that day and they were having trouble consuming coverage of the trial.

But someone had passed along to them a detail that I had included that had been left out of a lot of other coverage of the trial.

This street medic had a crystal clear memory of the moment they covered a woman's compound leg fracture so she couldn't see it.

Amidst the chaos and the screaming and the blood, they had the presence of mind to make sure that this woman they did not know and would never see again didn't have to see her own bone sticking out of her flesh.

And they did the best they could with the medical supplies they had in their backpack to splint her leg and to stop the bleeding and to keep her calm until an ambulance came.

And then they went home.

They didn't know that woman.

They didn't know her name.

There was no way to follow up.

So they'd been left wondering for more than a year, was she okay?

They'd lost sleep asking themselves, did I do it right?

Did I help her?

Can she walk?

Did I make a mistake in that moment that cost someone their mobility?

And when that woman took the stand at trial, she testified about the medic covering the bone sticking out of her leg.

She said she didn't know how bad it was until she got to the hospital.

And she said on the stand that she's okay now.

She has a metal rod in her leg, but she's okay.

She can walk without pain.

Her life isn't over.

She's moving on.

And that wasn't headline news.

It was just nine minutes on the stand.

I know it was nine minutes because I bought a little digital watch all those years ago and I still obsessively time stamp my handwritten notes, marking the time several times per page off in the margins.

She was one of nine witnesses who testified that day alone.

And the brief moment in her nine minutes of testimony, where she said she's okay now, didn't make it into the newspaper.

It wasn't on MSNBC.

It wasn't in the wire stories.

But for someone out there in the world, it was everything.

It was closure and it was peace.

And for six years, that single moment of peace that I got to give to a stranger who had risked their life to save someone else's has been a North Star for me.

It's a lighthouse in the storm when I can't remember why I'm writing anything at all.

And now, years later, I'm not just writing about local cases for a local audience, but I try to carry that same level of responsibility to my audience with me.

I'm trying to weave together stories of terrible men who did terrible things in a way that shines a light into the darkness rather than leading you into that darkness and leaving you there to fend for yourself.

I'm not always going to get it right.

I know that.

But I promise you, I am agonizing about the ethics of this work to the point of madness.

I'm doing my best.

And I want to navigate what that means for us collectively, together.

So that's all I have to say about my personal style of narration today.

But this is an ongoing conversation and it's one I'll never be done having, and I'll try to have it with you.

There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

Variety has the solution.

Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Where do you see the business actually heading?

Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted hosted by co-editor-in-chief, Cynthia Littleton.

The only constant in Hollywood is change.

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It was an unimaginable crime.

It's four consecutive life terms for Brian Koberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.

The defense are on a sinking ship.

It was clear at that point he was out of options.

Nearly 30 months of silence until

bombshell development Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

No trial, no testimony.

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts: one of burglary, and then four counts of murder.

In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

Why did the prosecution take this?

They were holding all the cars.

How on earth could you make a deal?

What message does that send?

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me.

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There are a lot of things about podcasting I did not know when I started doing this show, and some things I didn't even know enough to know, I didn't know them.

It didn't even occur to me until I was a handful of episodes deep that I forgot to tell you who makes the show possible at all.

God bless them, none of them said anything to me about it.

I left myself a little reminder to record some kind of closing credits segment, but it's buried under a stack of other reminders for things like change furnace filter and email national archives about that transcript again,

both of which I've been meaning to do for weeks now.

Actually, I'm going to get up and change that filter right now while I'm thinking about it.

And while I'm checking things off my to-do list, I have to take a little sidebar to gush a little bit about the team at CoolZone Media.

This show would not exist at all if executive producer Sophie Lichterman hadn't come up up with the idea, given it its name, convinced me that I could do it, convinced the network that I could do it, and then held my hand for months while I figured out what she already knew.

That this show was the perfect way to tell these stories.

Maybe she just wanted me to stop derailing other conversations with my excited outbursts about some new weird guy that I found and she thought she could get some peace if she found me another outlet for that.

And the show wouldn't get done every week if not for supervising producer Ian Johnson.

There's so much business stuff that happens that I am blissfully unaware of.

I don't know how the show gets into your phone.

I just type my little scripts every week.

I think Ian takes care of the rest of that.

All of the research and note-taking and conspiracy theorizing and writing is done by me.

Apparently some podcasts have like a separate guy who does the research, but even if such a guy were to present himself to me, the research is my favorite part.

I would never let that go.

The moment each week when I have to close my 200 browser tabs and stop researching so I can start writing is always bittersweet.

How I wish I could do twice as much research and half as much writing, to be honest.

But if that's all there was to the show, just research and writing, it would be unlistenable.

Every week, I read my little script into my microphone in my home office, and then I think,

oh no,

oh, that was a mess.

I'm thinking it right now.

I'm reading into my little microphone in my home office.

It's three in the morning and this file is late.

And I'm thinking, oh no.

you know, I'm retaking lines 15 times.

I burped into the microphone more times than I'm willing to admit.

I'm so sorry, Rory.

I'm always having to stop and look up something like, How to pronounce some town in Michigan because you know they don't say it normal, and I know I'd never hear the end of it if I just read it, assuming they would say it like the rest of the world.

Like, Milan, Michigan.

It says Milan.

It says Milan.

That's a city we've all heard of.

But it's Milan.

And there are still, to this day, takes that have to be cut because

you can hear my voice thickening with grief.

That's the sound of the tears threatening to spill over.

It's someone else's job to edit that out now, but if it ever stops happening, I think the show is over.

If I can do this without feeling it at all, then my heart has gotten too hard and it's time to stop.

It's time to close my laptop and walk away and walk into the sea because I've lost my humanity.

But every week, somehow, my editor, Rory Gagan, returns to me something that I barely recognize, something all cleaned up and beautiful with perfectly placed music beds.

And that music, I have seen so many listeners asking about the opening theme.

That was created just for the show by the incredibly talented Brandon Dickert.

This is another one of those podcasting things that I never even thought to wonder about.

But of course it's someone's job to make custom music for a show.

And when Sophie told me it was time to brainstorm what kind of music we wanted for the show, I completely froze.

Like,

how could I possibly know what kind of musical vibe I'm trying to create here?

I mean, how is it even possible to describe a sound you've never heard?

Like, I know music can evoke an emotional response, but the idea of reverse engineering that is like asking me to translate hieroglyphics.

It felt impossible.

What does that even mean?

So I sent her a bunch of very stupid ideas, and she was very patient with me.

I had a meltdown.

I was googling things like spooky sounding music, comma, not scary, and whimsical, spooky tunes.

I just panicked.

And I sent more bad ideas.

And I've just gone back to my email now to see what it was that I finally came up with that was good enough for the experts to work with.

And it was a bulleted list that says, Twin Peaks theme,

interstitial music for an evil NPR broadcast, a riff on the X-Files theme, question mark,

David Lynch's Elephant Man theme, but more lively.

And Tim Burton, spooky but goofy.

Something like Danny Elfman?

And I could not have had such good luck if I planned it.

Brandon Dickert wrote back,

I play in a band with the bass player from Oingo Boingo, so I'm very familiar with the Elfman vibe.

What?

He's just casually in a band with John Avila, no big deal.

So when people compliment the music and I say, I know, isn't it incredible?

I'm not tooting my own horn.

I had nothing to do with that.

I'm just...

So impressed and grateful for the theme Brandon Dickert wrote for me.

And as for the show itself, I think I'm getting the hang of it.

One problem I will absolutely never have is a lack of ideas.

I am never going to run out of guys.

There are, in fact, entirely too many guys.

I have a running list of episode topics I'd like to get to that's a year long already, and every week my research into one weird little guy turns up at least one or two new options for guys who probably need their own episode.

If anything, the problem is I lose a whole day of research time every week to tracking down some strange loose end that really just needs to get added to the list for a future episode.

And every weird little guy I do get to is just bursting at the seams with strange facts and side stories that end up cut because I just don't have the stamina to weave together every thread.

When the first episode came out, I was kicking myself because I forgot to include a particularly funny little tangent.

That episode was about Kevin Alfred Strom, the neo-Nazi pedophile who was the original source of a quote often misattributed to Voltaire.

Back when he got arrested for possession of child sexual abuse material, he was actually living here in the Charlottesville area.

A strange coincidence, I suppose.

It really makes you wonder what it is about this place that attracts Nazis.

But two years after he completed completed his very brief federal sentence, he started a blog.

And that's not really surprising.

He was an early adopter of the format and he'd been running the online publication for the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance for many years.

He has a lot of websites, so Kevin Strohm making a website isn't the surprising thing here.

But this one didn't have his name on it.

In fact, he didn't want anyone to know that it was his website at all.

It was made to look like a local news website for the Charlottesville area, and it had a number of posts about innocuous local goings-on.

This was back in 2010.

That was the year that we had a really wild late-season snowstorm, just unbelievable amount of snow for this area.

So there were a couple of posts on this, you know, quote-unquote local news blog about the weather, about enforcement of the city's snow removal ordinance, and the giant mountain of snow in the Barracks Road shopping center parking lot that we all called Mount Chipotle for months before it finally melted away.

But mixed in with these low-stakes, local public interest stories and what looked like a high school essay about the film Nosferatu written by his teenage son,

There were a couple of opinion pieces about how this Kevin Strom guy really isn't so bad.

And, you know, he was railroaded by a politically motivated prosecution because of his pro-white beliefs.

And aside from a few weirdly personal attacks on Strome's ex-wife and those uncomfortable pro-pedophilia op-eds, the site was like 70% normal.

I mean, that other 30% is really, really not normal, but most of the posts were normal.

And most of the content isn't about Kevin Strome

but the site's IP address provides us a little clue

a lot of websites were created using that same IP address like a lot like over a hundred a lot

and a lot of those websites definitely belong to Kevin Strome because they're things like his personal website, KevinAlfordstrom.com, his ham radio website, his third wife's personal blog, several websites belonging to National Alliance, websites devoted to Strom's hero, the anti-Semite Ravilo P.

Oliver, and a bunch of Nazi-themed parks domains with no content on them, things like mindkampf.net and turnerdiaries.org.

Some of the sites don't have any immediately clear connection to Kevin Strom or obvious pro-Nazi content?

So it kind of looks like he may have been earning money on the side doing perfectly normal web development work.

So I've put a reminder on my to-do list to check out what kinds of clients were hiring a Nazi pedophile to make their business website in 2010.

There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

Variety has the solution.

Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Where do you see the business actually heading?

Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

The only constant in Hollywood is change.

Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now.

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It was an unimaginable crime.

It's four consecutive life terms for Brian Koberger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

The defense are on a sinking ship.

It was clear at that point he was out of options.

Nearly 30 months of silence until...

Bombshell Development Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

No trial, no testimony.

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.

In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

Why did the prosecution take this?

They were holding all the cars.

How on earth could you make a deal?

What message does that send?

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And for all the time I spent detailing Gerald Drake's internet activities in the second episode,

the one about the Civil War reenactor using a fake anti-fascist group as cover for the bomb threats he was sending his former friends,

I forgot to tell you about his hobby of pretending to be a cop on Reddit.

I mean, his TripAdvisor reviews were a rich vein of content.

From Burger King in Madrid to Five Guys in Paris, the man absolutely loved to tell you about a fast food meal in a faraway place.

And I spent hours reading his posts on the Sex Doll forum.

I mean, quite frankly, it would have been malpractice if I didn't tell you that the last thing he did before getting arrested by the FBI was post about the great customer service at a company called Sex Doll Queen.

I left out some of the nastier sex doll stuff.

I mean, I saw things that I wish I hadn't.

And it just felt superfluous to tell you that he bought a doll secondhand at an estate sale.

But when he, in turn, was trying to sell it on the sex doll forum, he assured the other users that not only had he never used it, but he knew the dead guy he bought it from never used it either because he was too sick before he died.

So it's basically brand new.

But I can't believe I forgot to tell you he spent years cosplaying as a retired cop on Reddit.com.

He had a bunch of posts spanning several years where he claimed to be a retired police officer.

And that's just simply not possible.

He worked for 25 years for the St.

Clair County, Michigan Road Commission as an equipment welder.

It's not like he has a LinkedIn.

I can't pin this down with absolute certainty, but I'm assuming he lost that job when he went to jail for sexual imposition of a minor in 2003.

And so that would mean he got that job when he was 20 years old.

And he certainly didn't become a cop in his 50s after becoming a registered sex offender.

He couldn't even buy a gun at a store, let alone carry one for work.

So he was never a cop.

I'm really sure of that.

But he was never a Confederate soldier either.

He just liked pretending to be those things.

And sometimes it seemed like he liked imagining being a cop, like it was...

part of a kind of sexual fantasy for him.

Like in this post from 2017.

Pulled over a car for speeding and as I walked up to it, I see it is driven by the most drop-dead, gorgeous blonde I have ever seen in my crummy life.

My brain overrode my mouth and I said out loud, what was I thinking?

God, I'd love to fuck that.

She heard me and smiled.

She knew she wasn't getting a ticket from me.

Or this post, also from 2017.

Did undercover, and we were even allowed to do small amounts of drugs, and did hook up with the babes.

A good undercover officer becomes the creep to not be called out.

But in a lot of the posts where he's claiming to be a former cop, he's definitely trying to use that as a position of perceived authority to lend more weight to his opinion.

Usually that opinion is about something really racist.

On a post about racial differences in standardized test scores, Gerald claimed that when he was a police officer, they had a special dumbed-down version of the sergeant's exams for black officers because otherwise they'd never get promoted.

He claimed that black officers would get points on their exam just for spelling their own names right.

But it's worth noting that Gerald misspelled the word sergeant in his post about this.

And a lot of the things that get left out are just these strange little tangents you didn't even know you were missing out on, like how Gerald had a Poshmark account that he used to buy designer panties for his sex dolls.

But other things that I accidentally leave out or just run out of room for are things that you might have been left wondering about.

Like in the Berry Black episodes, I devoted a lot of time to the side story of the Casanova Lounge.

the only gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania in the late 90s.

But by the time the Casanova Lounge's story ended, Barry Black wasn't part of it anymore.

So I just sort of left that thread dangling.

And I did see some listeners asking about whatever happened to Pat Kramer and her bar.

The Casanova Lounge closed its doors in 2001 after a tumultuous four years in existence.

The Kramers sold the property to Madeline and Barry Lehman, who turned it into a private banquet space for Christian events.

They renamed the building Baker House, with Bakah being the Hebrew word for a half shekel.

In Exodus, a Bakah is listed as the amount paid as an annual temple tax for the use of the sanctuary.

And the building was used for church groups, baby showers, wedding receptions, ladies' Bible studies.

Around 2008, it started being used for actual church services, and it was for many years a Somerset County polling location.

The laymen sold the property in 2014 to to one of those troubled youth outdoor adventure camps run by a former Marine drill sergeant.

But the Kramers stayed in the hospitality industry.

They opened a restaurant in another town nearby and ran it for more than a decade before they finally retired.

In the episode, I mentioned that some of the patrons at the Casanova called Pat Kramer mother.

And as she aged, She still did most of the cooking at her own restaurant.

And in her last few years in her restaurant kitchen, her customers called her Nana.

Her husband Merrick Kramer passed away in 2022, but Pat's still out there enjoying her retirement.

And on that note, maybe I don't need to say this.

I hope I don't need to say this.

But please don't take it upon yourself to find or contact the subjects of the show.

Any of them.

them.

Don't find the weird little guys or their victims or their neighbors or their families or the side characters in their stories.

I'm not sure why that's an urge people sometimes feel, but if you do feel that pull, please resist it.

After the Frank Sweeney episodes came out, I saw that a listener to the show had sought out and found a social media profile belonging to Frank's German girlfriend, and they they posted a link on her page to the episode about him.

And, you know, if Frank were to find this episode on his own and listen to it, that's one thing.

I have no control over that.

But there's no need to tap the glass, so to speak, right?

You don't need to insert yourself into that process.

It's just kind of weird and rude and it just doesn't feel right to me.

I mean, I can't stop you from doing it.

I'm just telling you, it would be my preference that you not do that.

I try not to provide unnecessary personal details about people, and I change the names of the victims in Frank's story.

But I don't want to have to worry about listeners of the show using my research to harass anyone.

So enjoy the stories.

Talk about them amongst yourselves.

Tell me what you think of them.

But please don't seek out the people in these stories to tell them what you think of their lives.

Especially when it comes to people who found themselves a part of these stories through no fault of their own.

People like the Kramers.

So

let's keep in touch.

You and me.

I'm not great at that in my personal or professional lives, but...

I'd like to have that line of communication open.

I set up an email address for the show.

It's weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.

So if you'd like to send me a message that's just between the two of us, that's the best way to do it.

A lot of listeners have reached out to me on Twitter, either by tweeting at me or at the network or by direct message to me.

And I do try really hard to read all of your messages, but it's really easy for those to get buried or lost in the shuffle.

But if you send an email to the show, at least they'll all be in one place where I can always find them again.

Again, I'm not promising this means I'll get any better at answering anybody, but at least this way I'll know where all of the messages I'm not answering even are, so I can properly orient my anxiety about that.

And if you've got something to say about the show that isn't something you want to keep between the two of us, you could post it on the subreddit.

I sound like a grandma right now.

I think I'm probably not using the right internet terminology.

Just before the show launched, Ed Zitron, the host of Better Offline, gave me some absolutely fucking unhinged advice.

Honestly, Ed.

He told me that I should go ahead and make my own subreddit for the show.

that I should be the moderator of that subreddit, and that I should engage directly, often, and if necessary, adversarially with the listeners.

And I think Ed does do that on his subreddit.

I have a lot of respect for Ed, and I really enjoy his show, but I think what I told him at the time was: I would rather lay down in traffic than do any of that.

As human beings, we are simply not wired to know this much about what strangers think of us, and that sounded like a recipe for madness.

But

I'm also very weak and when I saw that someone else had created a subreddit for the show, I couldn't help myself.

I thought I could play it cool and pretend I wasn't checking in on the posts every week, but I ended up creating a Reddit account so that I could pop in and answer questions occasionally.

So if you're so inclined, You could go there and post your thoughts or feelings or questions or whatever.

Be nice though.

I'm not the moderator of that space.

I don't know the person who is.

But don't make their life hard.

Don't make anybody's life hard if you can help it.

And please don't be weird.

Whether you're sending an email to me directly or posting on the subreddit or leaving a review or whatever.

You know the old saying, sing like no one is listening, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching.

Well, I've got a slightly different version that's been more useful to me in my life.

And it's email like you're going to get subpoenaed and post like you're going to have to hear it read back to you in a hostile tone during a deposition.

Because if you don't want to explain the joke to your mom, your boss, or a federal judge, don't write it down.

That's just some free life advice for you in general.

But really, like, please don't email me something that's going to make you the subject of an episode.

I already have too many ideas on the list, and I really don't want to have to put your picture on my red stream more.

Weird Little Guides is the production of CoolZone Media.

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