This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

At some point in your life you probably encountered a problem in the built world, something that

was poorly designed and the fix was obvious to you. Maybe a door that opened the wrong

way, were a poorly painted marker on the road. I noticed this kind of stuff all the time,

even more so now after creating this show. I'm sorry if you do too because you listen

to this show. And mostly when we see these things, we grumble on the inside and then do

nothing.

There are all sorts of reasons for our inertia. We don't know how to fix it. It's not

ours to fix. We could get in trouble.

That's producer David Weinberg.

You might notice these little design flaws for years, silently fuming, until one day.

He called me instead, you know, okay, we're doing it.

It was early Sunday morning, August 5th, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. Richard Ancrum

and a group of friends were on the fourth street bridge over the 110 freeway. They were

about to commit a crime.

It's going to be a high profile, dangerous situation. Not only could I get arrested, I could

kill somebody. Really, I was terrified of that.

But let's back up. About 20 years prior, Richard Ancrum, an artist living in Orange County,

was driving north on the 110 freeway. As he passed through downtown Los Angeles, he was

going to merge onto another freeway, the I-5 North. But he missed the exit and got lost.

And for some reason, it just stuck with him.

Years later, when Richard moved to downtown Los Angeles, he was driving on the same stretch

...