JOEL ROSE, HOST:
How much is a little bit of chaos worth to you? NPR's Henry Larson spoke to a guy who thinks it's worth about 10 bucks.
HENRY LARSON, BYLINE: The guy's name is Sammy Lett. He's from Minneapolis, and a couple months ago, he put up signs across the city with a promise.
SAMMY LETT: I put up a bunch of posters around Minneapolis telling people that I'd pay them $10 to tie my shoe.
LARSON: Here's where the chaos comes in.
LETT: The catch was that I was just going to be some random guy, and there wasn't going to be any easy way to distinguish between me and just some other random dude who happened to be sitting in the park with his shoes untied that day.
LARSON: Now, it should be said Sammy Lett is absolutely the kind of guy to do this type of thing. He's an artist, so he loves a good public stunt, and he loves a moral quandary even more.
LETT: The question at the heart of this whole thing was just whether that $10 was enough to get people to overcome that risk of embarrassment to see if they would just exercise their free will in a really insane way.
LARSON: So at the appointed time and place, he sits himself on the Minneapolis park bench, camera on, shoe slightly forward, laces untied.
LETT: The first thing that happens is a man comes up. And he ties the shoe of the person on the bench directly next to me.
LARSON: Uh-oh.
LETT: And the guy on the bench looks up from his book, and he says what the h*** are you doing?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Kind of weird to tie random people's shoes, bud.
LARSON: The other man, the one who picked the wrong shoe, walks away looking freaked out. But person after person keeps coming up and picking the wrong shoe. It happened so many times that Sammy Lett starts to get suspicious.
LETT: I was keeping a live log of notes throughout this experience. I think, at this point, I was just sort of getting super paranoid. I was writing, like, is this subterfuge? Is he a saboteur? Is he messing with me?
LARSON: The man to his right is a decoy.
Wait. He's taking credit for your thing.
LETT: Yeah. Well, you know, I was initially kind of excited by it. I did notice, though, that he had $10 bill sticking out of his book as a bookmark. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, that's a little mean.
LARSON: Finally, after a while, a couple of people tie Sammy Lett's shoe. He gives them the money. Things are looking up.
LETT: But then the first guy who had initially been yelled at by the decoy came back, and he comes up to me, and he just stands there for a second. And I'm like, oh, boy, what's about to happen?
LARSON: Enter Miles Chastain (ph), our chastened shoe tier, who actually hadn't been scared off. In fact, he thought there might have been a decoy this whole time. And now he was back for seconds.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MILES CHASTAIN: This is my second go at this. And so I approached the second guy. He looked up at me. I got down on my knee. I tied the shoe.
LETT: And he gets down. He ties my shoe, and I hand him the $10. And he immediately rips the bill in half and says I do this for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHASTAIN: I do this for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL RIPPING)
LARSON: Wow.
LETT: Yeah.
LARSON: The moment heard there captured on video is remarkable, but there's one question left for Miles Chastain.
Why?
CHASTAIN: I work in coffee. I work at a bar. I work for tips a lot of the time. And especially that day, I had spent upwards of six hours just doing the same thing - working for tips. And I wanted to show with certainty that the money means nothing and that this was an act of complete free will.
LARSON: Sammy Lett set out to see if 10 bucks was enough for people to create some chaos. But the decoy man and Miles Chastain, our resilient shoe tier, proved all some people really need is an invitation. Henry Larson, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF WALE SONG, "BLANCO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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