You Are What You Watch
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In January of 1981, Ronald Reagan took office as the 40th President of the United States. His first day, like most presidential first days, began with a tour of the White House. It's said that while Reagan was being escorted around the grounds, he had one particular request. He wanted to see the war room.

You can probably conjure up an image of the war room in your head. An underground bunker with ominous overhead lighting, a large circular table, and a big map of the world hung up on the walls.

But here's the thing. That war room simply does not exist. It's not in the White House. It's not in the Capitol building. Not one room in the Pentagon remotely resembles the war room Reagan had in mind. But Reagan believed it must have existed because he had seen it somewhere. And that somewhere was the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.

The design was so iconic that it's become our mental image of where we think important decisions should be made.

Airbnb and the soccer organization FIFA have since built their own replica war rooms modeled after the film, which is ironic given that Dr. Strangelove is a farce about the destructive insanity of the nuclear arms race. But that is the power of a good movie.

What we see on the screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends two hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day. That's a whopping 19% of our waking hours.

We conceive media as sometimes just a thing that's just kind of rolling or the ambient noise of our lives, things that we do to distract ourselves or turn our brains off. And what I contend and what the evidence kind of largely backs up is that this stuff is actually really meaningful. This is Walt Hickey, data journalist and author of a new book called You Are What You Watch. Walt makes the case for how much film and television shape us as individuals and as a society far beyond what we give them credit for.

I say that you are what you watch because obviously it's alluding to the idea that you are what you eat. But I was just kind of consistently struck how often I found people whose lives were meaningfully or permanently changed by a thing that they watched.

Today, Walt is here to talk about the delightful, surprising, dark, and sometimes counterintuitive ways movies and TV shape the world around us and how the world we live in influences the movie world. Right back.

Take, for example, the space race. Immediately after World War II, most people were really skeptical of space travel. And rockets? They were mostly known as deadly weapons that leveled cities during wartime. The notion that we might strap a human to one and send them to space was pretty out there. But that all changed thanks to a popular magazine and the Disney Corporation.

It took, essentially, Collier's magazine at the time had a massive circulation. It was one of the most popular magazines in America. And a journalist from Collier's had the opportunity to meet Werner Von Braun at a conference.

Wernher von Braun was one of Nazi Germany's top aerospace engineers. After the war ended, von Braun, along with over a thousand German scientists and engineers, were secretly brought to the United States to lead our space race mission. And so, you know, over the course of a number of conversations, this becomes a series within Collier's magazine that is read by millions, that is essentially detailing, hey, not only is it possible to get to space, but

with rockets. It's also possible to get to the moon and explore further beyond that. The series was ambitiously titled Man Will Conquer Space Soon and ran between 1952 and 1954. And among its many readers was the pioneering animator and media mogul, Mr. Walt Disney. And then Disney is obsessed with this. And then all of a sudden, um,

on his nationally broadcast Disneyland television show, has three different episodes featuring von Braun as well as a number of other scientists. But adapting, here's what could actually get us to space. Here's how we can use rockets to get there. Here's what it would be like in orbit. Here's what it means to be in orbit. And here's how one could hypothetically get to the moon and back. If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program,

I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within 10 years. And these have a remarkable effect because if you look at by the end of the decade, all of a sudden Americans now fully believe, oh yeah, we can get to the moon. And then over the course of the 60s, they really start to, you know, obviously believe that it'll happen within their lifetimes and within potentially by the 1980s and then very soon, very imminently.

But it really took persuasion because it took kind of a fundamental rebrand of what rocketry and physics could accomplish. And that was done through these big magazine features and, you know, these Disney television programs that were watched by lots and lots of people. Pop culture's contribution to space exploration didn't end with Walt Disney.

Decades later, in the 1990s, not one, but two different movies came out about the Earth being hit by a giant asteroid. And these two movies changed everything about how we think about space. What is this thing? It's an asteroid, sir. How big are we talking?

Sir, our best estimate is 97.6 billion. It's the size of Texas, Mr. President. Yes, sir. Yeah, I love these stories because it's like Hollywood being influenced by science and then science being influenced by Hollywood. Because if you look at Armageddon and Deep Impact, those movies happened at the same time. And the reason that they happened at the same time was, you know, shortly before that, there was an astronomical event called Schumer-Galevi.

And essentially what happened was there was a comet that entered the solar system. It looked like it was going to crash into Jupiter. And so we pointed the Hubble at it and then we literally watched a comet crash into Jupiter. And we got pictures of the comet crashing into Jupiter. We had never done that before. We had never seen that happen in real time. And so this was a sensation because we actually got footage like, oh, stuff crashes into things all the time. This is also shortly after this original idea that an asteroid is the thing that killed the dinosaurs. Right.

emerges. And so you have these two things kind of in the ether, right? Kind of just floating in the air at the time. And then that's what genuinely inspires two films about asteroids potentially coming to hit Earth or in Deep Impact's case, a comet. And so you have that happen. And then it's years later, it's in 1999. And there's this congressional hearing about this program called NEOWISE. And NEOWISE is a near-Earth observatory. And the idea is that NASA wants money so it can count the stuff that's in our neighborhood that's very small and could potentially hit us.

And what gets mentioned during this congressional testimony but deep impact on Armageddon. And so you have a situation where these films emerged because of science being done and then they went to inform what eventually became funded through NASA of this near-Earth object detection facility. Media, nonfiction and fiction can have a deep impact – pardon the pun – accidentally can have a significant effect on how leaders actually genuinely perceive their world.

But sometimes film and TV can give people the wrong idea about how things work in real life. Think of bank heist films. In movies, bank heists are usually portrayed as elaborate, almost military-style tactical assaults. But in reality, bank robberies don't look anything like Inside Man or Heat. Bank heists are really, truly a declining art. And essentially, Hollywood had a very specific idea of what bank heists were.

They were very informed by bank heists of the 1930s and kind of this like prototypical Bonnie and Clyde style of a takeover, right? Where a bunch of people go in, they brandish guns, they secure the room, and then they empty the safe and then carry things out.

It involves a lot of coordination. And, you know, that was a type of crime that happened in that era. That's a kind of a professional style of bank robbery that is just no longer as common. Typically, what you're going to see now is you get like a note pass and a note that says something threatening. Like, I have a firearm. I have a bomb, something like that. Give me the money and then look at the money. And now typically the main question of whether or not a crime gets solved is, is that person able to leave the parking lot before the cops arrive?

And so the FBI kept rather detailed statistics on bank crimes over time. And realistically, the idea of a bank takeover was completely out of fashion even in the late 90s. But we still have this idea of like, you know, if you think about bank robbery films, they show lots of different ways to rob a bank. Stay down.

We want to hurt no one. We're here for the bank's money, not your money. Your money is insured by the federal government. You're not going to lose a dime. Think of your families. Don't risk your life. Don't try and be a hero.

But if a bank robber's normal tactic is passing a threatening note to a teller, there isn't really a great high-tech security system to thwart that. But you write that banks and insurance companies still invest in these sophisticated security systems to stop these takeover-style bank heists, even if they're not really a good idea.

Even though they don't really happen in the real world. Like, why is that? You know, the fantasy of a bank robbery for a very long time informed what people wanted in security out of a bank. Not because it kept the money safer in the bank, but because people wanted to see, oh, they've got cameras. Oh, they've got this safe. Oh, they've got this time release. Like, they were actually, you know, in order just to assure their customers that…

who were so accustomed to seeing this elaborate style robbery that they had to do these somewhat relatively performative things for a given bank that isn't going to actually get this kind of a crime. Yeah, people have these completely bogus notions about what a bank robbery looks like because now financial crime is done on the computer, which, you know, it doesn't exactly make for a compelling movie.

Absolutely. And like just the efficiency of doing it through crypto or the efficiency of doing it online or any of these kinds of scams that are related to person-to-person persuasion are vastly higher ROI than just an implied stick-up, right? The romantic idea of a daring bank robbery is kind of confined to history at this point.

Government agencies know how powerful pop culture can be in shaping public opinion at large. So they've learned a way to leverage the film industry to serve their purpose. The U.S. military, in particular, has a long and storied relationship with the movie industry. The military has been collaborating with Hollywood or the film industry in general since really kind of the beginning. You can go all the way back to Wings, which is the first Academy Award winning film, was made with support. You know, you need planes, you're going to call the military.

And so over the course of the early 20th century, it's very much hand in hand. Obviously, during World War II, there's an immense collaboration between the motion picture industry and the Pentagon or the then under construction Pentagon, I should say. And then you basically saw propaganda films made by Walt Disney Animation and so on and so forth.

By the time that you kind of get post-war, there's still an eagerness to collaborate between the pairs. But it actually gets a little controversial for the military because they collaborated on a film called The Longest Day, which was about the D-Day landings. Your assignment tonight is strategic. You can't give the enemy a break. Send them to hell.

But unfortunately, they were committing a lot of men and resources to this film at the same time that the Berlin crisis was going on. And that ticked off Congress to no end. And so that kind of put the kibosh on direct collaboration between the military and Hollywood for quite some time.

Then you get through the Vietnam era where Hollywood's not really interested in collaborating with the Pentagon. Like all the Vietnam movies, all the filmmakers who were making critical films of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, Pentagon wanted nothing to do with them. And so as a result, you really saw limited engagement. And then enter Tom Cruise. I'm going to send you up against the best. Sir, you two characters are going to Top Gun. I feel the need. The need for speed.

And essentially you have this idea for Top Gun and very early on in the Top Gun process, they basically reach out to the Navy and they're like, well, here's our script and we'd like to make this film. We think that you guys are going to like this film because it's a swashbuckling story of a daring fighter pilot and they basically let us know what you think. And the Navy goes over it and they're like, actually, we think that there's quite a bit of room for collaboration here.

We do have some notes, though. And so, you know, very early on, they weigh in and they're like, OK, so the love interest of Tom Cruise currently in the script. She works in the Navy. She's a supporting officer. We do not want to show that. That's the thing that we're trying to play down that, you know, inter-troop relations, so to speak. So make her a contractor.

The other thing is I saw these documents that were essentially the memos that were sent around the Pentagon saying, OK, we're weighing in on the bad guys in Top Gun. And so the first memo is typed up and it's from the Korea desk at the Pentagon. And it's like, hey, we've seen the Top Gun script. We would really strongly prefer if actually the North Koreans were not the bad guys in Top Gun.

We think that things are going OK on the peninsula right now. Don't want to mess things up. Why don't you just make them Gaddafi in Libya? And then scrawled in pencil on the top of that type memo is, hey, it's the Libya desk. Don't do that. Just make it a random country that is not named in the film because they were seeing that there was an opportunity here to directly influence perceptions of American foreign policy and the relationships that we have, even with adversarial countries in this kind of film.

And so the film was a smash hit. They play coy about exactly the impact that it had on retention and recruitment. But nevertheless, the Navy and even the Air Force, which was not involved with the film, saw an increase in interest in basically becoming a pilot.

significant increase in, you know, not only how often people wanted to join, but just the perception of the competence within these units and in these ranks. And as a result, it fundamentally changed the way that the military perceived Hollywood. All of a sudden, it went from being the Vietnam era. We don't mess with those guys. They don't mess with us to. Yeah, sure. You can borrow the USS Abraham Lincoln for a few weeks. You'll have to cut us a little token check. But like, yeah, no, we love that. And it really does.

Because it was funny when the second Top Gun came out in the last couple of years, there was a lot more joking about the idea that this was a weirdly fictional country with a large mountain range and a coast. We're all trying to find the country that did this. But at the time, I don't think I even registered it. You know, like back in the 80s. Of course, I was younger and dumber then. But still. This is the negotiation. It's like we will lend you.

an aircraft carrier or even just like men in uniform, right, for your film. We just get to approve the script. And that amount of leverage is for a filmmaker. That's a deal that you'll take because I can't build an aircraft carrier. James Cameron might be able to, but most directors can't. Like and then at the same time, it's just like, well, like, OK, so they'll get their notes on the script. They'll get to tweak it so that you don't mention potentially PTSD or any of the sexual assault problems that go on in the military and they'll get theirs.

And then you'll get yours. You'll get to borrow a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier for a few days. But again, it does affect the film that does get made. Absolutely. And you also mentioned that it goes the other way, that people in the government agencies, they watch these movies and they get ideas from fictional government agencies. Yeah. So my favorite –

There was this guy who retired from the CIA named Robert Wallace who was in the Office of Technical Service. And he basically relayed that like once a spy movie would come out into cinemas and be a hit, sometimes the guy who was running the CIA at the time would come to him and be like, how far along are we on that by the way? When do I get that? How long will it take to make it? Like some facial recognition thing.

Some gadget that contains something. It was within the realm of possibility because it was on screen and because the use case was demonstrated, they want to know when you can 3D print a face and put it on Tom Cruise. That's right.

I mean, even pretty recently, I read that President Biden watched Mission Impossible 7 and he got a little spooked and he actually signed an executive order with new security measures around AI. Yes. And like I saw that, I was like, yeah, that tracks. And part of it is that specifically with that kind of action and geopolitical action movies.

Yeah.

I'm a huge fan of what I would call competence porn. Like, I love, you know, watching people good at things do things. Like, if there's a movie of George Clooney, like, disassembling and reassembling a rifle, like, I could watch that for three hours. So, you know, these agencies have this incentive to present the public at large, you know, these incredibly capable, unimpeachable, fantastic fighter pilots who cannot be shot down. Like, these are the people that work for the military. And I'm really intrigued by this in terms of

Yeah.

is people's perception of policing because of their buddies Stabler and Benson. 100%. There's this idea that the things that we watch are accurate depictions because they show competent and very talented individuals succeeding at what they do reliably. Broadly speaking, that is kind of by design. So if you look at...

cop shows on TV, they're made with the assistance of, you know, liaisons from the police department. Even historically, the earliest applications of mass culture and mass media when it comes to cop shows was the glorification of the police and what they accomplished. And so, like, just to talk about Law & Order for a bit. Law & Order first came out in 1990. Homicides in New York City between then and now have gone down 75%. And so, you know, we have seen over the past several decades because of a number of

not simply just policing. Homicides go down very distinctly in most North American cities and crime go down just in general, right? However, Americans think that crime goes up every year. Gallup runs a survey every single year where they asked, is crime up or down or the same as it was last year? And majorities time and time again say that crime's up. And I think that there's something here.

Because I think the first thing that I noticed is that in 1990, there was one Law & Order on television for 23 episodes a year. And now if I turn on television, there are three Law & Orders. And let's even set aside all the Law & Order clones, the FBI, the Chicago's, what have you. There are three times as much Law & Order. And there's three times as much crime in New York City on television as there was when crime was four times higher than it was today.

And then the second thing that I notice is that most of the time they win. The cops find the bad guys. And if they don't find the bad guys, well, they get off because the justice system just can't handle it. And that is not the case. Fifty-six percent of homicides were cleared in New York City last year, right? The clearance rate, the solving crime rate in New York City for homicide is about 50-50 now. And that's not abnormal in the United States to be clear.

Part of that, crime is down but clearance rates are down too, is because police agencies in this country have more shifted to a deterrence model. The decision was made basically it makes more sense to have a lot more cops out in every single subway station on street corners to deter the possibility of crime happening in the first place than it does to have a lot of cops –

sitting at HQ who then get called when a crime happens to figure out who did it and then remove people from the population by imprisoning them after solving the fact that they've done a crime.

That is not represented on television. That is not how these shows operate because part of it is that they focus on elite units, right? And so they're focusing on the people who are still hanging out at HQ waiting for the phone to call. But as a result, I think we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what and how policing works in this country because it is completely unrecognizable with the format that we see displayed on televisions nationally.

Not just once a week, but three times a night. Yeah. You know, there was a reaction specifically following the death of George Floyd. But like, wow, like before that happened, the year before that happened, 60 percent of dramas on the major networks were police procedurals, cop shows and legal dramas. And that is a lot.

For many Americans, it's their most reliable look not just at policing, but at cities, right? If you think like, you know, I live in Queens, I live in New York. But like if I turn on a television from the suburbs, New York's representation on screen is a crime infested hellhole that requires, you know, the special the dedicated detectives of the special victims units services one time a week. And like, you know, that is just out of step with actually what has gone on in the city over the past 20, 30 years.

In your book, I was fascinated by this strange connection between violence in the movies and violence in the real world. I grew up in an era where there was this notion that violent movies, you know, get people riled up and then they go out and commit crimes. And I was actually surprised to know that, you know, there's a little kernel of truth in that. I always thought it was just complete nonsense. But you also say that violent movies can actually bring crime down. Can you tell me that story?

A hundred percent. I'm obsessed with this story because I think it has genuinely changed the way that I see what the media can do. So in a laboratory setting, if we show people violent imagery, violent videos, they will become more agitative. They will become more likely in lab tests to react violently or react more aggressively to various different things after being primed. Like this is known, this has been repeated. So these two researchers, Stefano Della Vigna and Gordon Dahl, they're economists. And they were basically just like, okay,

There's ample laboratory evidence that showing people aggressive imagery can make them more aggressive. And so one would think that if you, as we do in this country, release violent films that are seen by hundreds of thousands to millions of people.

That if you are having these nationwide violence priming events, you should be able to detect that in actual statistics of assaults. That if you are having this mass exposure to violence and we know that violence causes potentially more aggressive reactions, that ought to manifest within the data. And so they pulled crime data for major American cities for which it was available on every single weekend possible.

over the course of several years. And they pulled also, you know, weather, which is obviously something of an antagonistic factor sometimes depending on the heat. And then essentially they realized that they had an actually rather interesting natural experiment, which is that they realized that, you know, we don't have released National Violent Movies Day here. There's no specific day in America that we release violent films. And so as a result, violent films can be compared apples to apples to nonviolent films that are released in the same weekend of a given year. So

So what effect do these violent movies have on crime data? Not only did they not find evidence that it increased assaults, they actually found evidence that it decreased assaults. And their explanation for this is that if I am, let's just say, a man between the ages of 16 and 23,

Which from a public health perspective, those are the people who behave irrationally violent in public most of the time. You have an interesting cocktail of hormones going on. It's a complicated time in life. Brains aren't fully developed, but bodies are. And as a result, that's a lot of folks who are going to impetuously do these kinds of assaults. So if I'm that kind of guy and I go see a violent film in a cinema for two hours, you know, get there half an hour early, leave half an hour after, drink soda, eat popcorn, I'm

That three hours is three hours that I am not spending outside. I'm not spending doing risky behaviors. And more importantly, I'm not spending it drinking. And the single largest correlated factor to behaving violently is alcohol. And so what you're doing is essentially is you're turning down all the other risks. You're having this self-sequestration of people who are instead of potentially being dangerous areas, potentially getting up to no good. Instead, they're seeing people

Something violent. And the priming effect, whatever it may be, is overwhelmingly drowned out by what they would have been doing in lieu of that.

That is amazing to me. And it's so much so that ultra violent things are more effective in this than mildly violent movies because the ultra violent movies attract the young men. Yeah. Ideally, you'd be able to sequester people in cinemas and you would just show them Barbie. Right. But like in reality, if you want to get people into the cinema, you have to have it be Joker. You have to have it be Saw. You have to have it be something like that.

Yeah, yeah. But it also means that if I want to go see Deadpool on a Friday night, I'm surrounded by 17-year-old knuckleheads who want to punch me. Any one of these men would kill you, Roman. After the break, Walt comes back to tell us a surprising story about how the American film industry was completely changed by tax codes. ♪

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Rules and restrictions apply. So we've talked a lot about how movies influence the world, but there was one story in your book that I love. It's about how the world, specifically tax codes of all things, influenced how movies are made. Can you tell us that story? Yeah, I was doing a big lit review and I found this one footnote that basically suggested that there's this prevailing theory that, you know, Jaws didn't invent the blockbuster, Gerald Ford did. And I was like,

What? And so I went back to the tape and figured out what on earth is this referring to? And there was basically a tax reform that was passed in 1976 that directly changed the way that movies could be funded. Where from 1970 to 1976, a very popular form of funding of film happened.

You have to remember that at the time, the top marginal tax rate was 80, 90%. So if you were like a wealthy dentist, that last dollar that you make is mostly going to Uncle Sam. And so there became this kind of scheme. There was an article in Business Week that was called How to Make Money and Move. And it like talked to these folks. Like there was articles like, hey, I'm, you know, here's, I'm in Tax Magazine. Here's how you should do this stuff. Here's all that you got to do. And like,

Like Bloomberg Businessweek had an entire subsection of a feature in the early 70s basically saying here's how to make money by investing in movies. Basically, you would get a bunch of wealthy people who would put money into a project. They would take out a big loan, invest all the loan into developing the film, and then that would come off to the IRS as a very significant loss on your taxes even though you only put in a little bit. So you saved a bunch of money. Yeah.

And then that movie would get made, get released, and then you'd get the proceeds of it. And sometimes it would make money. Sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would make a lot of money, right? Sometimes you would get a one flu over the cuckoo's nest or shampoo or dog day afternoon. And that was very popular for a number of years. And then the IRS got wise to it and they were like, we don't want this to happen anymore. Please stop this, Congress. And so in 1976, they passed this Tax Reform Act. And so typically people understand Jaws came out.

It was a huge blockbuster, changed everything. After Jaws came out, everyone else just started making Jaws. And that's when the era of the blockbuster movie started. And what this illustrated was that that's not wrong. Jaws was a huge hit and people made a lot of movies that looked like Jaws. Studio funded, studio director, studio cast, studio, this kind of stuff, all kind of internally funded.

But that's not the whole picture. It's like an extinction level event happened for every other kind of movie out there that they couldn't make anymore because of this tax cleverness that was no longer permitted. And so a whole kind of class of film could no longer get made. And so the only kind of film that could get made was these studio-backed productions.

That's so interesting because that whole idea of a bunch of dentists giving you the money to do a movie is like such a thing that I didn't understand what people were talking about when they said it. But like I've heard of that before. Sometimes they're being quite literal. Like James Cameron made Xenogenesis, I think was he was like his first feature. It ended up being a short, but he basically just went to the dentist in town.

And I think two dentists put up some checks for him. And then the movie was good enough with the special effects that Roger Corman was like, all right, you're with me, Jimmy. And then got him into the industry as a result.

You can see a lot of directors kind of got their start making that kind of film. They got people to take a risk on them to make that kind of film. And structurally, is the industry succeeding at that anymore? There is some of that in the independent space, but you did kind of have a situation where the IRS was vaguely subsidizing the generation that would become New Hollywood in a lot of different ways. And then when that went away,

it significantly changed the entire market for how you could make a movie. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is great. The book is so much fun. People are gonna have so much fun reading it. Thank you so much for talking with me. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really dig the show. This was a real treat.

Walt Hickey's book is out now. It's called You Are What You Watch, How Movies and TV Affect Everything. It's got cool charts. It's got pictures. It's got short stories that you'll love. Probably one touching on your favorite movie franchise. You should definitely check it out.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Sarah Baik with assistance and mixing by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Laushma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Potok, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful.

Uptown, Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I'm a proud community owner. Other teams may come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our newly launched Discord server. We're on there talking about the Power Broker and our favorite architecture. There's even like a movie channel. We can talk about what you're watching, and you can find a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.com.

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When you buy a new house, you might say, Shut the front door! Winning! No, seriously. Shut the front door. We own this house now. But you actually need to say, Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. That's right. The local State Farm agent is there to help you choose the coverage you need. Welcome to my crib. No one says that anymore, but I don't care. So, just remember, Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. State Farm, Bloomington, Illinois.