It Could Happen Here Weekly 162

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.
It's me, James, and I'm joined today by Kevin MacDonald, who previously served as a senior officer in the Irish Defence Forces with Special Forces experience and has significant experience working all over the world. After that, with the United Nations and other organizations.
Kevin, welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for having me. Yeah, hopefully I've done a good job introducing you.
I'm always terrible at that. Yeah.
What we thought we'd talk about today, Kevin, is you have significant experience in Lebanon with Unifil. And I think, obviously, when we've spoken about this before, we've spoken about it from a sort of looking at it from above strategic level.
But what we've not spoken about is what it looks like on the ground. So hopefully you can give us some insight into that, especially having been there both as an enlisted soldier and as an officer i think yep can you explain at first i think there's been a lot of of the confusion or misinformation about like how did these irish if we if we look at the irish soldiers that's that's the one you've obviously the most experience with how do they end up deployed to lebanon is it a voluntary thing do they sort of say, put their hand up and say, I want to do this, or is it your unit's going, so you're going? Okay, well, just I suppose as a brief reminder to your listeners, UNIFIL is the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, and it's been interim since 1978.
When it started first, the Irish were one of the first countries to sign up to deploy a battalion there. And we had a battalion in Lebanon from 1978 until 2000.
And in 2000, the Israelis withdrew from what they called a security zone, about like a 10 kilometer buffer zone in southern Lebanon. So when they did that and retreated to the frontier

between the two countries, Ireland departed its battalion. It left a few staff officers there,

but it didn't supply a battalion anymore. It was concentrating on the missions in Syria and

other places. And then after the 2006 war, they were asked to come back with a battalion.

And we've been there ever since with an infantry battalion.

In relation to your question about, is it a volunteer mission? It is for most people. However, there have been people who will be what's known as mandatory selected if they have certain skill sets, whether it be a doctor, whether it be whatever it happens to be.
If the army can't get sufficient volunteers, then they will mandatory select. But generally speaking, certainly in the early years, it was actually quite difficult to get, to become a volunteer for Lebanon because so many people wanted to go there.
Because there is, you know, there's a bit of financial incentive to do that as well. I deployed there as a private soldier in 1984.
I wasn't even 12 months in the army at that stage. Oh, wow.
And within two months, I was made an acting corporal. So then I went back as an officer in 1993, where we had a seven-day war, Operation Accountability.
Yeah. I was back in 1996 as an officer for another seven-day war, Operation Grapes of Wrath.
and I ended up there with my family as an unarmed military observer in 2006 for a full 34 days of carnage. So, yeah, Lebanon was always well regarded by the Irish Defence Forces because it did a couple of things.
It exposed troops to not just new cultures and new areas, but it exposed them to danger as well. Yeah.
And it also gave a chance for young NCOs and young officers to physically lead their troops in a challenging environment, which you don't always get, you know, when you're at home in Ireland or with the UK or whatever, you don't always get that type of leadership experience. Yeah.
Plus, you're exposed to other cultures, whether it be the Nord the nordic countries or you know you're exposed to different ways of operating and um yeah all in all it's been it's been a positive experience but i would find out that since we started there we've lost 40 troops killed in lebanon yeah it's because not an insignificant amount especially considering like the irish defense forces are much smaller than If people are more familiar with the US military, which is more than a million people, 48 is a significant amount. You talked about how it exposes you to other cultures, and obviously one of them is the Lebanese people.
But it's a very international deployment, right? You're not just sort of sitting there on your Irish base with Irish Defense Forces. People are not interacting with other militaries.
So can you explain some of the other countries that have this long history there? When I went there in 1984, there was a battalion from Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, ourselves, the Netherlands, Norway, and Senegal. With a strength at the time of about 6,000.
When I was there as an unarmed military observer with UNSO, which is a different mission, the strength had dropped to 2,000 in 2006 with just two battalions, a Canadian battalion and an Indian battalion. And now, essentially, since after the war in 2006, they started building up.
There's probably about 10,000 troops there at the moment. Wow the moment yeah the recent huge interaction at the battalion level between different nations in other words a battalion will have its own area of responsibility it's responsible for patrolling in that area yeah now with the likes of also that you're much more exposed to uh other armies other nationalities because essentially every time time you go patrolling, you can't, like two Irish officers couldn't patrol together.
Because if they see an infringement, whether it's a firing clause, whether it's one side sending drones into Lebanon or the other side sending Katyusha rockets into Israel, they're all violations. But to record it as a violation,

you can't have two people from the same country.

So you're much more exposed, as I said,

to foreign nationalities.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's certainly a lot of nationalities.

I know the Indonesians are there now

and the contingent from India.

When people talk about UNIFIL now a lot,

you'll see one of two accusations, right?

You'll see that they're either there as allies of Hezbollah in in lebanon which is not the case or you'll see that they're there as observers for the idf or spies for the idf and like obviously the fact that they're being accused of both probably suggests that they are neither because it would be fairly obvious if they were but can you explain the tripartite agreement it seems to me like that might make it difficult to do the things that unifil is supposed to be doing is that fair it's no i think it's i think it's a fair assessment um and if if you're if both sides are complaining about you as you say it probably does indicate that you're you're at least doing something right yeah so unifil it's it's a it a peacekeeping mission, and they're there with the agreement of both parties.

So in other words, the Lebanese government and the Israeli government have agreed that UNIFIL be established in Lebanon.

Yeah.

That's the first thing to point out. The second thing, which is kind of contentious now, especially with the extent of Hezbollah's tunnels is being exposed, is that there's a lot of generally misinformed chatter about what UNIFIL can and cannot do.
So after the 2006 war, Resolution 1701 was enforced or was brought in to develop more thoroughly the mandate for what UNIFIL can and cannot do. And one of the stated paragraphs is that UNIFIL will assist the Lebanese armed forces in taking steps towards the establishment between the Blue Line and the Latane River of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in this area.
And this is one of the failings, but it should be pointed out that it's the responsibility of the LAF, of the Lebanese armed forces, to instigate it, supported by UNIFIL. Right.
Not UNIFIL going in looking for arms and weapons supported by the LAF. It's the other way around.
And one of the difficulties that you're always going to have is that Lebanon is a divided society. Yeah.
It's an extremely rich and significant society. And I've lived there quite a lot and have great respect for the people and their traditions.
However, the sectarianism is kind of baked into how the government works, and that kind of works its way down. So the president has to be a Marianite Christian.
Speak with the House has to be Shia, and the prime minister has to be Sunni.

And that division was based on the last time there was a census in Lebanon,

which was 1932.

And since then, the dynamics have changed.

So Hezbollah is not just a military organization. It's a political organization and it's a welfare organization.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't get that.

And it's Shia.

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And the majority of the people in the south are Shia. And, you know, a lot of them get their schooling and their medication from Hezbollah.
So it's not just a military organisation. And there's various estimates, but you could be looking at, but we said prior to the present conflict, maybe 70,000 Hezbollah in south of Beirut, shall we say.

Yeah.

And some of them are full-time, some of them are part-time, some of them are just sympathizers, helpers, friends, you know. It's difficult.
And another factor that has proven extremely difficult is, so when Unifill patrol with the LAF, certain restrictions that even the laugh have in terms of entering certain areas and what hezbollah have done is that they have designated certain nature reserves and generally speaking the laugh won't go in there and if the laugh won't go in unifil can't go in right so the laugh are kind of you know that they have a balancing act to do in terms of retaining the trust of the people in the south and also not causing a sectarian divide within their own ranks yeah of course and also they have another problem in terms of equipment they're sort of relying on other countries uk the us fr like, say for instance, they have no tanks. Yeah.
They have a few helicopters. They're very much, like, there's no way they will take on Hezbollah.
No way. Right, yeah.
Or the IDF. And UNIFIL itself is lightly armed.
You know, it's not going around in tanks or anything. Armored cars, yes.
But the only time, the last time UNIFIL had tanks in Lebanon was just after the war when the french deployed with the leclerc tanks right which did not please the locals because the leclerc tanks driving up and down the roads was nearly nearly doing as much damage as the mercava tanks during the the war and plus lebanon isn't a very tank friendly area to be operating in shall we say yeah. Was that when the IDF came in and their Macaver tanks and the French physically blocked them with their own tanks? I can't remember when that was.
I'm not aware of that, but it will happen, because I know certainly back in the 90s... That may have been when it was.
When Israel was operating the security zone, we, the Irish, and our colleagues from Finland and Norway had numerous standoffs with Israelis trying to enter certain villages. Yeah.
But, yeah, I saw the day before yesterday the, I think, two bulldozers in a Merkava, or I said, yeah, two D9s broke down a UN watchtower and a UN fence at the UN Unifil headquarters in Nakura, which is a few K from the frontier with Israel. I should find out as well for your listeners that Israel and Lebanon have been at a state of war since 1948.
They've never had a seat or a peace agreement. And the tripartite agreement is the only place where they actually meet, right? Yeah, so there is a unifil post a meeting normally right at the the frontier where you can cross between one country and the other and i keep using the word frontier because it's not a border it hasn't been officially demarcated right the blue line which i mentioned earlier on simply verifies that the idf have withdrawn into is, but it's not the border.

However, going back to your point

about the tripartite agreement,

and that's where the senior Israeli officials,

senior Lebanese officials,

under the chairmanship of UNIFIL, meet,

and they discuss items of concern

that maybe UNIFIL can help

iron out between the two of them.

Right.

And in 2022, they managed to organize a maritime boundary. Okay.
Yeah. Between Lebanon and Israel, which was kind of fascinating because on the western side of Lebanon and the northwestern coast of Israel, there's huge gas fields.
Yeah. So the two countries actually, they've agreed their maritime boundary under the auspices of UNIFIL.

They still haven't agreed their land, but it's the first time that a Peacekeeping mission has arranged, encouraged, developed and led successfully discussions about a maritime boundary.

So UNIFIL does have some successes.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think it would be wrong to overlook those.

We'll take a quick break for adverts, then we'll come back. We're back.
And Kevin, you've mentioned that you were in Lebanon in 2006. I think you said you were in Unarmed and Serbia at that time.
Is that right? is that right yeah that's right jeff so one of the oldest missions in the world is unsub the united nations truce supervisory organization and that essentially was established i suppose after the 48 war um and it had we'll say offices and observers in egypt israel syria jordan and leban You know, they were quite effective in certain ways. Like certainly the eventual peace agreement between Egypt and Israel was very much helped along by the presence of Onso in Cairo and Shamr Sheikh.
The peace agreement between Jordan and Israel, again, was very much assisted by Onslow.

So they have a kind of a fairly good track record. And what they bring to the table is that, first of all, they're unarmed military observers.
Yeah. Which takes some of the sting out of having, you know, a heavily armed guy with a helmet and sunglasses walk around.
Yeah. And some armies, as you know, can tend to be more intimidating than others in how they carry themselves.
Yeah. So I went there, I went to the region in 2005, and I was working on the occupied Gaul and Heights, living in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, with my wife and two kids who then were four and five.
Wow. February 06, I was transferred to Lebanon and we were living in the city of Tyre.
The kids were going to a local English speaking Arab school and Lebanon was absolutely thriving. It was hopping.
We had the kids in Beirut. We had them in Amman, down in Wadi Rum.
And my normal routine, we had four observation posts along the frontier with with israel yeah daft by five guys who spent a week seven days up there then you come down four or five and then go back up again and uh each team had its specific area to operate with and we'll say a specific battalion that we would interact with and and also, quite importantly, we had liaison assistants who were locals, like translators, but they're a lot more important than that. Yeah.
And based on the sectarian nature of the area, you know, you'd always have a Christian, you'd always have a Shia, but you could have the Druze if you were further up to the north, you could have Sunni, and each team had four or five of these, because we used to send two patrols out each day so we had huge interaction with the local gendarmerie with the mayors and the moktars and we were very much a force multiplier for unifil because we could get information from people you know we used to stop and have lunch in some of the little restaurants and we were always talking to people and, you know, it was the window down, waving out, having a chat, learning a bit of Arabic. Whereas Unifil by its nature goes around in armoured cars.
Right. And even if you stop and you get out and you take off the sunglasses, people will just react differently to two guys with a local that they know in the car.
Yeah. As about someone in full battle rattle getting out.
We definitely were. But the war kicked off on the 12th of July, 2006.
And I had done on patrol to pick up our Christian liaison assistant in her village. And literally, we were heading off on patrol and over the radio.
all stations go to the nearest UN position immediately. The nearest UN position to us at the time was an Indian platoon position on top of a hill.
From my past experience, I had reckoned that there was a bit of stuff going on either in Shader Farms, which is a disputed area in the southeastern part of Lebanon, up in the mountains in the mountains so i said to the guy that was with me i said look this could be over in a couple of hours let's go straight back to our patrol base and you know we knew we had a food and facilities and we also knew we had a good bunker in the place yeah so we headed back at a at a fair rate or not shall we say and normally when when we would have two patrols out, there'd be one guy left in the patrol base and he'd be responsible for radio checks and all that kind of stuff. But what we'd do is when we were about maybe a kilometre away, we would inform our headquarters in Nakura that we're closing down at our final destination, which would give this guy time to come out and unlock the gate to let us in.
And just as I had transmitted that he comes up on the air and he says don't come in don't come in we're getting hit up. So at that stage we were at the gate and about maybe two kilometres away there was a huge IDF position and they were just banging with fine fives and gpmgs not directly at us but kind of in the general area yeah explain those weapon systems for people who aren't familiar like uh what's a gpmg for someone who's not oh okay sorry so um you've everyone's familiar with we'll say an ak-47 or an m16 uh which would be known as small arms In other words, the caliber is 5.56 or 7.62.
Yeah.

Then you have medium machine guns, which are generally belt-fed, and they're 7.62. And then you have heavy machine guns, again, belt-fed, and they're 12.7 or .50 caliber.
So we were getting a fair bit. But it took us maybe an hour of listening to various news channels both in lebanon and in israel to realize that hasbel had carried out a cross-border attack hit up a an idf convoy kidnapped two who were seriously injured and subsequently died and killed initially four and then against their own orders and israeli Merkava went into Lebanon to have a kind of commanding view over where the thought that

has gone. and then against their own orders.
And Israeli Merkava went into Lebanon to have a kind of commanding view over where they thought that Hezbollah were bringing these guys. Hezbollah knew that that's what they'd do and big anti-tank mine and kill four guys inside the Merkava.
So Israel had lost eight and two kidnapped in the space of maybe an hour. So the reaction was fast and furious.
And it took us nearly six days to get our liaison assistant back to her village. Oh, wow.
It took the UN nearly two and a half weeks to evacuate the families,

because at that stage, UNSEL was a family mission.

Yeah.

And where I was, I could see the jets dropping bombs into fear,

and my wife could look up on the skyline knowing where I was and see the same thing happening.

Oh, I was sort of used to being under fire,

but it's a different thing to see your family under fire as well.

Yeah.

And eventually when they chartered a sort of a cruise liner from Cyprus

Thank you. but it's a different thing to see your family under fire as well.
Yeah. And eventually when they chartered a sort of a cruise liner from Cyprus to come over and stand offshore and send in its lifeboats to bring the families out.
So when this was being planned, UNSO had tried to organise that an armoured convoy would bring those unmoves that were deployed on the four posts down to tier to say goodbye but where i was we were getting hammered with artillery fire and tank fire so i was the only one with family that couldn't get out so when my wife and two kids that were five and seven at that stage were getting into the lifeboat to bring them out to the ship i rang her and i said look i'll i'll see you when i see you Jesus, yeah. Which is not a great way to attend a family mission, let me tell you.
No. And then in the space of the next three days, we had a strength of 52 officers.
And in about three days, we lost over 10%. We had one Italian captain shot in the back.
He's now in a wheelchair. Jesus.
We had another Australian captain seriously injured. When the convoy she was in was, I suppose, targeted is probably the way to explain it, but she was thrown up against the inside of the armored car and essentially her back was broken.
She was evacuated with my wife and kids. And then, I think it was the day later or two days later, the Israelis dropped JDAM which is a bunker busting missile into the post just up for me killing four very good friends of mine so yeah 2006 was a bit rough yeah if you're comfortable could we talk about that last one a little bit because I think it's one of the ones that are like there's no mistaking that UN position right it's not you don't and you don't accidentally just go dropping jdams left right and center all over the place like the first thing i should say is that 21 years previously that observation post was completely destroyed but there was no one in it at the time yeah so when it was rebuilt it had the best bunker in lebanon so that they dug down and had, like a lot of the bunkers currently in Lebanon

are overgrown bunkers.

But this was dug down into the rock, essentially.

And it had, its roof was about a meter and a half

of reinforced steel and concrete.

Yeah.

With a two-story concrete building on top of it.

Wow.

So without doubt, it was the best bunker in Lebanon. Yeah.
So a two-story concrete building on top of it. Wow.
So without doubt,

it was the best bunker in Lebanon.

Yeah.

So that,

this happened on the 25th of July.

And on that particular day,

we'd already lost the patrol base in Maroon Arras

when Roberto was shot.

And they had to,

I have to say,

in fairness,

there's a liaison branch

that kind of liaises

between IDF and Unifil.

Okay.

And Unifil couldn't launch Thank you. have to say in fairness there's a liaison branch that kind of liaises between IDF

and UNIFIL. Okay.

And UNIFIL couldn't launch

one of its helicopters

to do a medevac. So

the decision was made that the guys would get into

an armoured Land Cruiser and

follow Israeli tank tracks back

into Israel. But they couldn't deconflict

the airspace to launch it or what was stopping

them launching their helicopter to evacuate?

There was too much

kinetic activity at that

Thank you. to Israel.
They couldn't deconflict the airspace to launch it or what was stopping them launching their helicopter to evacuate? There was too much kinetic activity at that site. Yeah, yeah.
They wouldn't have been able to land it. It was a battle ongoing.
Okay, yeah. So they essentially followed Israeli tank tracks that had come into Lebanon.
They followed those tank tracks back into Israel where they were met by an Israeli patrol and Roberto was flown to Rambam hospital. But yeah, going back to, going back to Qiyam on the 25th of July, we were all taking a fair bit of incoming.
Where I was, it wasn't targeting. It was more sort of harassment fire.
Like the house next door took three direct tank rounds and it was five meters away jesus from our post and our post was tiny yeah but in in uh the guys in cam were taken um a good bit of artillery but there was um a lot of airstrikes coming in close and um again for your listeners the the un has a designation what it calls a firing close so we'll say a firing close from an m16 is i don't know something like 50 meters or something like that firing close from an artillery shell is 500 meters and a firing close from an aerial bomb is a kilometer so if it lands within a kilometer it's officially designated as a firing close and it's recorded and you know both sides get you know it's an official account of what's happening um so the guys were getting the you know a good few firings close from aerial bombs and there was three distinct waves of attack in the general area. So naturally, Force Commander Unifil, Chief of Staff also, UNO quarters in New York, were screaming at the Israelis, you know, stop targeting this position.
Was there Hezbollah in the area? Of course there was. Qiyam is a Hezbollah stronghold.
But eventually that evening, the decision was made that the patrol base was going to be evacuated. But because of the level of kinetic activity that evening, it was going to be done at first light the next morning.
And since the war had started, we had all been on a 24-7, 20-minute radio check. So every 20 minutes, you had to respond to a radio check.
So the last transmission from the post was from a canadian friend of mine ex-special forces really really cool and i could hear it in his voice he was requested a log in time for a firing close it's danger close it's danger close get them to stop and that was the last transmission so when they missed the next radio check we presumed another another shell had come in and blown all the aerials off the building. So myself and an Aussie friend of mine requested permission to take our armoured Landcroser and try and drive up and see what was happening.
That was refused by Unifilm. So they sent a patrol from the Indian Battalion, which was kind of, in fairness, it was nearer.
So we switched on to their radio frequency to hear what they were saying.

And so they approached the base.

They obviously had to break down the gate

and said the base had taken a direct hit

by an aerial bomb.

And at that stage,

we were still thinking

maybe they're trapped under the rubble

or something like that.

And then one of them transmitted,

we have found the body of a Chinese officer.

So we knew the four guys were killed. And the Indians found three bodies that night and brought them to the mortuary in Marjayun, which is a large Christian town.
So the next morning, there was, I think, five of us tasked to go up and identify the bodies.

Yeah.

So the first guy was Chinese, it was overpressure, killed him.

So that was an easy one to identify.

The next guy had no arms, no legs, and no head.

Jesus.

And where his head should have been was the chain of a dog tag.

And I went down into his body paracet. Oof.

I'm blind.

Yeah. And the other guy.
Yeah. So.
Yeah. It was a difficult, difficult procedure.
And then we had to try and arrange to get the bodies transferred into Israel to our human colleagues from Jerusalem. So they could go to Rambam Hospital and have, you know, a proper identification and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah, eventually be returned to their families, I suppose. And that was a difficult procedure because where the IDF said they could meet us, there was a minefield in front of us.
And where we said we could meet them, they thought it was too exposed. So eventually we went into a small, tiny Indianian platoon position and about 100 meters away there was a gate that the israelis used to use to come in and out when the security zone was there but the area between the un position and the gate hadn't been mind swept in six years but we had no choice we couldn't bring the guys back to the mortuary because it had resorted to using refrigerated trucks to store bodies because the mortuary was full yeah so there was a there was an idf company there under a i think it was a full brigadier and there's a war going on naturally yeah all the time gunships and katushas passing each other over our heads so when we had the three lads uh transfer over to our colleagues from jerusalem i stood in front of the idf brigadier and i lined up all the um troops and i says we're not going to have a minute's silence in memory of our friends who were murdered in the cause of peace and no having a having a minute silence in the middle of a battle is is an odd an odd experience yeah in fairness to this guy he stood to attention and because I lived in Tiberias, I had a small bit of Hebrew and I went over afterwards and thanked him for his respect.
Yeah. And we didn't find the fourth body until after the ceasefire.
Jesus. Yeah.
Yeah, that's rough. I'm sorry for that.
That's terrible to think about. So the obvious question is, I know the one you want to ask, why? Yeah.
I should have said it at the start. Anything I say here, it's my personal opinion.
So it can't be construed as being the views of the Irish Defence Forces. Yes, of course.
Or certainly not the views of the United Nations. They're my personal views.
Yeah. So, you know, people should just take it that it's Kevin Macdonald describing what happened to him and what his personal views on it are.
So why did they do it? Well, I think there's a couple of things. Hubris is one.
I think at that stage there were like a schoolyard bully who got bet and wanted to lash out at anything and everything. A second, probably more tactical reason is that the village of Qiyam is on a ridge.
We say at the end of the ridge closest to Israel, because it's only about four miles away, is where this OP was. And that's the reason it was there.
And between Qiyam and, we say, the frontier with Israel is the Hula Valley, which is the biggest manoeuvre space. If you want to manoeuvre armour and stuff into Lebanon with plenty of space, that's where you do it.
In fact, decided it's an old Vichy French airfield from the Second World War. So it's low space.
And I think they didn't want eyes on the ground seeing what they were doing. And one of the things for military observers is you observe and you report.
That's your task. Yeah.
So was there Hezbollah in the area around the OP around the op yes there was but as you probably know if you want to attack troops in the open you use airburst artillery shells which the israelis did in 1996 when they fired 15 of them into a u.n battalion headquarters killing 106 lebanese men women and children seeking shelter shelter in the u.n headquarters Yeah. But you don't fire fire a bunker busting missile into a un post to attack hezbollah the subtle difference yeah there's a huge difference yeah i suppose what people will ask is like it's i think it's important to explain this from the point of view of someone on the ground is obviously un troops are not there to fight they're there to, but they are an armed presence.
And so they'll wonder how or why the UN can or can't defend itself, the UNIFIL troops specifically in these positions. So can you explain your rules of engagement and how that works from the sort of on-the-ground perspective? Okay, well, the rules of engagement, we said for a peacekeeping mission, like we park on so to one side because they're unarmed.
But for a peacekeeping mission, so peacekeeping is generally based on three principles, consent, impartiality, and the use of force in self-defense of the mandate. So naturally, like the guys there at the moment aren't going to try and take on three or four more half of tanks first of all they don't have the capability to do it yeah that's an interesting do they not have if you can answer this that's fine do they have for instance javelins things like that do they have those weapon systems available um i'm not sure what they have currently certainly we have.
Okay. And it wasn't ever going to be an issue because that's kind of not our job.
Yeah. Like the sole responsibility to protect the people of Lebanon is the Lebanese government.
UNIFIL is there to assist. It's not there to say, okay, you step back, you know, we stand up and protect you.
That's not what UNIFIL or any peacekeeping mission. The only peacekeeping mission that eventually had an offensive capability built into its mandate was the mission that's now closing down in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it's MINUSCO.
Yeah. And they specifically changed the mandate to include an offensive capability to go after the M23 rebels in the Kivus in sort of the Northeast.
And when they did it, you know, attack helicopters, special forces, the lot, it was quite effective. But which kind of brings me to another point, because I just last year, I completed a master's in peace and conflict studies.
And mandates was the evolution of mandates is what I sort of look at and uh having robust mandates is all well and good but the tccs the true contributing countries have to have the ability the capability the training and the will to carry out the robust nature of the mandate so you know we have a saying in ireland paper never refuses ink you can put whatever you want into a mandate, but you have to be able to effectively implement the mandate.

Yeah.

And I think often that's the reason that maybe people are kind of broad

in how mandates are written,

but that's for someone way further up the food chain than me.

Yeah. So for those, like the people on the ground then and now, there's not a great deal they can do, right? They can attempt to ask the IDF to stop, which they did, which has historically not worked.
And they can take shelter in their bunkers bunkers which they did which is only helpful if they're not going to use bunker busting missiles to to uh to destroy that bunker so like it must be terrible like it's one thing to be engaged in combat with someone especially if you're a soldier right it's another thing i found myself in this situation last year to be effectively like unable to respond i'm thinking here of the turkish drone bombing and fighter jets and bombers in syria where i was but it's a horrible thing to be in that situation and is it for those peacekeepers it must be a really difficult sort of place to be well it is yeah and of course you know they're all conscious of the fact that their families back in are fully aware of what's going on. And shortly after the invasion, the IDF decided that they told Unifel they wanted them out, essentially.
And not just the Irish, but other nationalities said, we're not going. So the IDF, everywhere they go in Lebanon, the first vehicle is a D9 bulldozer because that is more robust than a Merkava.
And it can also very quickly throw up earthen ramparts to sort of protect from direct fire at the IDF troops. So they decided that they would literally conjoin an IDF position to the Irish position, hoping that they could intimidate the Irish into leaving.
And the position's name was 6-52, very close to the frontier. Ironically, when the Israelis withdrew in 2000, they recognized that this particular area was what we in the military would call key terrain, because that area overlooked a vulnerable part of northern Israel, villages like Avavim and a few others.
So the IDF requested Unifil to put a position there, which would say, stop Hezbollah from putting a position there. Right, yeah.
And then suddenly they're up close and personal trying to intimidate the Irish and other nationalities as well. Yeah.
So it's one of the things and I think one of the reasons that they didn't want Unifil and there's about 20 small of these small positions mainly close to the frontier. I think one of the reasons that they, and again, this is a personal point of view, I think one of the reasons that they didn't want Unifil in any of these positions was A, to turn it into a free fire zone.
But B, one of the things that Unifil is supposed to do is to monitor and report, monitor and observe. And of course, if you're not there, you can't do it.
That's actually one of the things that Unifil, even though they're hunkered in their bases with very little mobility, they can still monitor and observe what's happening in the general area. Now,

we'll say in the case of this position 6-5-2, if the IDF's ultimate gain or goal was to take a major Hezbollah stronghold, which is called Binchabayl, that's a good bit further north than this position. So the focus of attention would move on from, let's say, our guys and go a wee bit further north.

Yeah, so

that's sort of where they find themselves now, right? Is these... Can you explain, like, you've got these positions along the frontier and then you've got the headquarters that you just mentioned two days ago have been, I don't know, infringed by a bulldozer, attacked, depends how you want to say it.
Well, it makes a change from having a tanker unfired into an OP, which they did a few days previously. Yeah, and they've done consistently, right, for a month or so now, is firing directly into these observing positions.
Are these positions that are now, are they left isolated? Because the IDF will advance past and around them, in addition to firing directly at them. They're somewhat isolated.
Now, all these positions would be well-stocked with water and emergency rations and stuff like that. And as I mentioned before, Unifil do have a liaison branch, which I'm sure are talking to the IDF on an hourly basis.
Yeah. And they will coordinate the movements of Unifel, we'll say, to supply their positions.
Or I think last week they had a convoy that went into the city of Tyr, which is probably 12K from the headquarters to distribute aid, especially medical aid. Because Tyr is getting fairly whacked, like all of the South, I suppose.
So there is engagement to make sure that these posts aren't completely isolated, that there is a means of doing resupply. Yeah.
Israel stopped one of those at some point, didn't it? Was it a resupply movement? They stopped things on a regular basis. As I said, there is interaction like nothing happens in a vacuum like we said yeah the the irish italian headquarters would not send a convoy to 6-5-2 without it being communicated to the israelis and saying we're going to go on three vehicles at oh 700 hours blah blah blah and and get the confirmation back that yeah that's okay because you know the the mention the father war that that's often very real uh as you can imagine yourself it's a fairly real um thing that happens you know sometimes you know yeah instructions don't get um passed down or sometimes instructions are ignored for reason.
So it's a bit of a delicate balancing act but from what I understand it's working well. That's good.
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's working well in terms of like what's happening in Lebanon is bad and it'd be better if it wasn't.
But it's not at the same tier as it has been in Gaza. No, you're looking at maybe 3,500 compared to 43,500 killed.
Yeah, and so many of those being civilians, right? People who absolutely know business targeting. And that genocidal violence that we've seen in Gaza hasn't come to Lebanon.
And in part, I think we can attribute that to there being observers there. Is that fair to say? I think it's a fair point.
Of course there's no real, the UN footprint in Gaza, my understanding is it's extremely, extremely light. And as you know they've been banished UNRWA.
Whereas mean, UNIFIL has 10,000 troops in southern Lebanon. Yeah.
So there's very much more, maybe there's more consciousness, but they're still flattening the place. But it's, in terms of civilian casualties, as we said, it's not going on as long as Gaza either.
But on the, we'll say, the combat front, they're not exactly having things their own way either. They've been trying to take the village of Kievan for the last, I think, two weeks.
And my understanding is they haven't, they've destroyed it, but they haven't taken it. And it was like in 2006, they claimed that the town of Ben Shabayl was the Hezbollah capital of the south, which in a in a way it was.
But the turn of them to Grosny, but they never controlled it. They were still getting attacked, you know, days after they had seized it.
Right, yeah. They've never really established, like, control or, like, a monopoly on violence in the area.
And yet, they've not done that this time. And I think, I suppose the last thing I wanted to ask about is like, we've just talked about like why this mission is important.
And we've spoken about for like, you had your family there when they were being bombed. And like this investment in being there in Lebanon, being alongside the Lebanese people in your case with your own family, like it's one thatland's had for a long time ireland has historically amongst european nations been much better on the rights of palestine and palestinian people than than most european nations how is this peacekeeping mission perceived in ireland like are people proud that they're there oh yeah oh hugely proud and and you know the the irish have always been extremely proud of what our defense forces have achieved despite yeah it's been a very small defense force i think at the moment between the the navy the army and the air corps we're probably looking at in total 9 000 in total wow yeah very small and and then we're overseas in a lot of places as well so like deduct that from the 9 000 you're probably down to eight yeah um but we we do tend to punch above our weight um internationally we obviously have no colonial baggage which affects some other countries yes and i think generally speaking we're seen as a i'm not sure if honest broker is the right word but but certainly not as threatening and not coming with an agenda right yeah whereas other other countries might have a certain agenda for whatever political reasons at home and it's certainly in ireland's case as i said we were there from 78 until 2000 and now from 2006 to present day and a lot of it has been in the same general area so people would know by

you We were there from 78 until 2000, and now from 2006 to present day. And a lot of it has been in the same general area.
So people would know Irish soldiers. Some Lebanese talk with an Irish accent.
I've heard that. Yeah, it's mad.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. And depending on what part of Ireland the troops were from, you could even go further down.
Like some of them talk with a very broad Dublin accent.

Some of them would talk

with a very broad Cork accent

because of that interaction.

And I know one of the first big projects

the Irish did,

certainly from the early 80s,

was to build an orphanage

in a provincial capital called Tipneen.

And they've been doing that.

Even when we had no troops there,

guys were still sending money and toys and everything.'s been demolished last week um unfortunately jesus an orphanage it's like storybook evil stuff isn't it like uh yeah well you know it's just yeah there's a lot of evil stuff going on in the middle east at the moment unfortunately yeah yeah yeah i mean uh i've personally seen hospitals bombed and all that kind of stuff myself and it's uh it sometimes doesn't even make the news i mean that orphanage evidently didn't really make my news diet kevin thank you very much for sharing some of your experiences over there and um i'd love to have you on again to talk about the things you've the work you've done in africa down the line after after 11 and you've written a book right about your uh your experiences, peacekeeping and other things. Where can people find that? Okay, so this initially started off as a lockdown project during the COVID lockdown in the Central African Republic.
And initially it was just from my wife and family. But as it starts writing, you kind of start remembering.
And it's not just your typical military guy tells about how brave he was. I i've a separate career in mountaineering and a separate career in archaeology as well so it's a kind of a a much more different mishmash of of um of stuff going on so the the book is called a life less ordinary and it can be purchased uh online at mayobooks.ie great m-a-y-o-b-O-K-S.
Yeah. I like that balance.
I've always thought that, like, I'll go somewhere and I'll write about the worst things I saw there and the worst days I had there, and that'll be my story. But I've always wanted to write about, you know, the mountains of Kurdistan are beautiful, and I've really loved being there.
And there are other places that people think of them as wars, not countries. And I think I'd love to write about mountaineering, backpacking in these places where often it's really sad that you don't get to share that part.
I write about this in the book. I mean, like I've lived a few times in Lebanon and I've lived and worked in Jerusalem a few times.
And it's fascinating region oh yeah and the people on on both countries some I've some really good friends in Israel and some really good friends in Lebanon and I've been treated extremely well by people in in in both countries certainly if you've an interest in archaeology it's a place to be yeah where else could you but should not want to be you know like the Phoenicians in Tyre

and

no matter where you go in Tyre

you can pick up Roman pottery

or you can

see all these

amazing sights

whether it's

from the Phoenicians

from the Romans

from the Crusaders

it's just

it's all there in front of you

yeah yeah

cradle of civilization there

well thank you so much

for sharing your experiences Kevin

thanks so much

okay

cheers organization there. Well, thank you so much for sharing your the Marshall Islands.
They came to Majuro, as almost everything

that isn't breadfruit, pandanus or fish does, on a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to take them to their next destination, and so the residents of this tiny island, which at times is no wider than the single road which travels its whole length, decided that they'd have to share the food that they themselves had imported at great cost.
And they set about gathering apples, bananas, and anything else that they thought an elephant might like to eat, while it waited for a way off an island that barely has enough room for its own people, let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural as the tides of the sea, greet each other the same way they do strangers, by saying yoke.
The word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabua explain them. He's the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, so he seems like he'd be a good source.
I would say the word yakwe, yakwe is our greeting word. Yakwe has a lot of, several meanings.
And you can say, when you meet someone first time, you say yakwe. When you greet someone and when you also say goodbye, instead of saying goodbye, you also say yakwe.
So you can use that.

Also, like during the weekend,

there was a tournament, fishing tournament.

And if you were fishing and you got a,

you have a big fish on the line and you really,

you're about to land the fish but the line's not. do you see oh yeah yeah hello to the fish but you just say yeah because you lost the big catch so it can be used that way like when you lose someone or someone passed away you miss that person yeah so and so he was here but no one could hear so you we said, yeah.
So it has several meanings, but the deeper meaning of Yaku is, you are beautiful like the rainbow. Ia means rainbow, and we combine the two words, you are a rainbow.
You are beautiful as a rainbow. On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little dots

that appear in my photos of the beach at Marjuro.

But unlike those little specks of dust

that managed to sneak their way onto my camera sensor,

the Marshall Islands belong here.

Here is a pretty vague term.

The 29 coral atolls and 5 islands

that allow 54,000 Marshallese to live on 182 square kilometers of land, span an oceanic territory of 200,000 kilometers. It's like you took a small American town and scattered it across an area one and a half times the size of Alaska.
Even though the RMI is 98% water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshallese, whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to daughter, and ties families to the remote islands that make up the low-lying atolls of the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks of land that I recorded the music you heard a minute ago.
Marjoro is an atoll. That's a coral ring that encircles a lagoon.
And its biggest island is about 30 miles long, but often less than 100 yards wide. There's one road that runs the length of it, and sometimes also spans the width of it.
It's also home to about half the RMI's population. The highest point on the atoll lies just 3 metres above sea level.
If you want to get higher than that, then your only options are houses or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor of the Napa Auto Parts Store, which also houses the UNDP and the Marshall Islands Olympic Committee, you can see the whole island.
For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean are everything. Their land and their ties to it define them.
Without their place, they can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live in the diaspora of the United States, they still import handicrafts made from little shells on the outer islands, and coconut husks.
Many of them come back to the islands to retire. But slowly, the ocean is taking those islands back.
Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall Islands have, or what they can do to halt the creeping advance of the ocean.
They've always existed on just a few square kilometres of land, among millions of square kilometres of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything, but now it's threatening to take everything away from them. One day, they fear their islands will become uninhabitable, as salt water invades the water table and their trees die, while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep away their homes and their possessions.
They don't want to leave, but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But the Marshallese are resilient people.
They've weathered many storms to get to where they are now. The tiny museum in Majuro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic.
A nuclear bomb, the Second World War.

But in the end, these did little to crush the incredible kindness

of the tenacity of the Marshallese.

The islands that make up the RMI have been inhabited by indigenous people

for thousands of years, and they've been variously ruled

by the Spanish, German, Japanese and United States governments

before becoming an independent republic.

Before they were named by a British sailor, the islands had their own name.

I'll let Jeff, a Marshallese Renaissance man who was at once our driver,

the head of the World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands,

a registered nurse and the custodian of an

incredible collection of Marshallese music, explain what they were called before that.

Before, we used to call it Lolli, like L-O-L, Lolli, L-O-L, L-A-P, L-A-P.

That's before it turns into Marshall. Because this word Marshall came from this guy that found these islands.
Captain Marshall. Undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad place to find yourself on a summer afternoon.
And in the time I spent there, I took several trips to the smaller islands around Maduro Atoll. They look like the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms, vibrant coral reefs, white sand and turquoise water.
I love freediving, and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and dozens of brightly coloured species of fish in almost infinite visibility, without even needing to put on a wetsuit or a weight belt, might be the closest I'll ever get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a dip in the ocean.
I'm actually here to tell you a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on the left and on the right, spends much of its time and money preparing for its own imagined version of a crisis.
For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war. For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean onto the land and the resulting loss of places to live and grow food.
And for others, it's the collapse of basic services, like power and clean water, that we take for granted. These are all storms that the tiny island nation has already weathered and it hasn't done so in the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers fantasize about online.
It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic and welcoming community. There's a lot we can learn from the people of the Marshall Islands and their story and so this week I'll be doing my best to share the stories that they shared with me.
If you're familiar with the islands, it's likely because of the history of one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll. The name is the German bastardization of a Marshallese word, Pikini.
Pick meaning plain surface. And ni, meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat base where coconuts grow.

But... Pikini.
Pik meaning plain surface, and ni meaning coconut tree. It's a flat base where coconuts grow.
But you likely don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Bikini Atoll, it's because of what the United States did there after the Second World War.
On the 18th of July 1947, the Marshall Islands were placed in a strategic trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was administered by the United States, which was supposed to administer the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants and of international peace and security.
But a year before the trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll, a site that would, over the next 15 years, become the most heavily bombed place on earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map, and much of their population left dead, sick, and without the land that defines them and their ability to thrive on these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean. As far as possible, I want to let the Marshallese survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.
They call what happened on Bikini and Eniwatak at all the nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially at a time when none of them have been paid the compensation they were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new agreement with the Marshallese government that was very far from settled, and the numbers the US were offering were very far from sufficient.
I was very fortunate to join a few other journalists on the tiny island of Bokanbotan, a short boat ride away from Marjoreau, and home to perhaps the most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch, walked around the island,

and then had a talk on the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors. I'll let them introduce themselves.
My name is Chaka Bekidion. I'm from the Marshall Island.
I am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Island, and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with our director Mary Sok and our Commissioner Ariana Tibun. Alright, once again my name is Ariana Tibun-Kiluma.
I work as a Commissioner and nuclear justice envoy for the RMI National Nuclear Commission. Once again, thank you very much for having us this afternoon.
My name is Evelyn Ralfo. I'm the director for education and public awareness.
Welcome. Enjoy the rest of your days here.
My name is Sincirlene Burnett. I work with the National Nuclear Commission as an enhancement and physical officer.
I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since the PASC, we all go. So that's the way you support the PASC, go work on the same boat.
Welcome to the Marshall Islands. She's from Mediato.
She's from Mediato. She's from Mediato.
Yeah. The three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.
They were exposed to fallout. Her mother was exposed to fallout.
Her mother, Grace's mother, was also exposed to the radioactive fallout, as well as my great-grandfather. I think that's what really drives us to share this with you.
Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that came after it. Although we know the name Bikini Atoll, the entire republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Maduro itself, thanks to the ill-advised decision to drop bombs on a day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.
In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the same parking lot, there's a US Department of Energy office. I asked Jeff what that was doing there.
Yeah, I saw there's a DOE office, like health office, in the street here. The one next to the hotel, that's the office where they do the radiation testing.

And there's the one near the AMI, MRSO.

That's the clinic for those survivors.

Now the survivors, there's few of them left.

Like, maybe less than 50. The RMI saw fighting in the Second World War.
It's memorialized in murals across Marjuro. In 1943 and early 1944, the USA bombed and then fought the Imperial Japanese military, who had been occupying the island since 1914.
U.S. soldiers and marines, along with Marshallese scouts, landed on Marjurah, Kwajulin, and Eniwetok on Higgins' boats that were virtually identical to the boat we took across the lagoon to Bokumbotan.
The fighting was fierce, and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall, the Americans lost 611 men and suffered 2,341 wounded.
261

were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over 11,000 men and had 358 captured.

Today, the Bikini Atoll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of the ships and planes

that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a shadow of this war that was evoked in 1946, when 167 of Bikini Atoll's inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States.
They initially accepted this settlement, quote, for the good of mankind and to end all wars, in the words of the US Commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy SEBs, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls.
Nine of the 11 family heads from Bikini elected to be transported 125 miles to Rongarik Atoll, an island with about one quarter of the landmass of Bikini Atoll. Many believed the island to be haunted and by the time the navy left them with a few weeks of water and food they had every reason to be afraid.
I'll let Ariana explain what that removal process was like. They had asked the people if they were willing to give up their homelands for the good of mankind and to end all wars.
And because our people are people of faith in Christianity, they were very afraid. They did not want to leave.
But because of the amount of power that the that the military showed up with with their big ships compared to our small canoes and the amount of troops that were on that island on that morning it was very hard for them to you know fight against what was being you know asked of them. And if you have time to look through documentaries of the nuclear legacy, you will see a certain part where the commander, a commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt, he was sitting down and asking the chief at that time, can we use this island for the good of mankind? And in response, the people all respond in unison,

emman, which means okay.

And from their testimonies,

they had to take that shot over 40 times

to make sure that they all said emman at the same time

to get the best shot they could for reports to the UN.

But it was a very frustrating time for them. Following their removal, the testing began.
The idea was to test nuclear bombs on ships. So the US bought 95 ships, fully loaded with weapons and fuel.
At this time, this would have ranked the Navy of Bikini Atoll just outside the top five biggest fleets in the world. But those boats didn't stay afloat for long.
Now, you might think that, given the testing was on ships, the Atoll's navy would be some kind of mid-century Mary Celeste. But you'd be wrong.
3,350 experimental rats, goats and pigs died in the service of this strange nuclear experiment. Some of them after being subjected to the great indignity of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation.
It's rather staggering that this research was being done three years after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable human suffering does not seem to have been top of the priority list.
The first test of the island somehow misfired. The gathered press were disappointed and many of them went home.
But the second, codenamed Baker, didn't.

Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission,

called the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove a 2,000-foot-wide pillar of

water into the air. It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of radiation across the

islands of the atoll, which at the time the residents had been expecting to return to.

Thank you. SS Arkansas, and released massive amounts of radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the time the residents had been expecting to return to.

Just five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Royard, a French mechanical engineer

who was working as manager of his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit

design named the bikini after the atoll.

It was, one right equipped, the atom bomb of fashion. The people of the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
In January of 1948, just two years after their removal, Dr Leonard Mason visited the bikini in Zon Rongerig and was appalled to find the people there had almost starved to death. We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one of them said to him.
Mason, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, asked that food and water be bought immediately. The US built houses for Bikini Atoll residents on Ujjalang Atoll, but it decided to use these

for the residents of Aniwathak Atoll, where it was also about to begin conducting nuclear

experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents alongside a runway before

they eventually chose Kili Island, a land of less than one square kilometre, as their

next home. Also evacuated were Aniwathak, Rongalap and Wathaw Islanders.
They too thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could go home in a short period of time. They too found out later that this was not the case.
Over the course of their exile, they have been moved several more times, starved half to death, cheated of their compensation, and stripped of their ancestral homeland. For the next 12 years, the United States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in 1954 with the Bravo shot of Operation Castle, also known as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know of the US ever deploying.
Within those 12 years, there were 67 known devices that were tested here. There could have been more, but all we know of is 67.
One of them was the Castle Bravo shot that yielded 15 megatons, which when scientists calculated, the equivalent of the Bravo shot would have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half times every single day for 12 years. That 15 megaton Bravo shot yielded more than 2.5 times the estimated six megaton explosion when it was detonated on an artificial island in the Bikini Atoll.
The device's mushroom cloud reached a height of 47,000 feet, which is 1400 meters, and a diameter of 7 miles or 11 kilometers in about one minute. Eventually, it reached a height of 40 kilometers and a diameter of 100 kilometers.
This took less than 10 minutes. It traveled more than 100 metres per second and covered 7,000 kilometres

of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot, weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favourable, but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first test was taken by Dr Alvin C.
Graves. Joint Task Force 7 ships

located 30 miles east of Bikini

and what was thought to be an upwind position, began detecting high levels of radiation just two hours after the test. Very soon after, they began travelling south at full speed to avoid the fallout.
But directly downwind of the blast and unable to travel were Rongelap and Alingenai Atolls. Ariana explained the impact of the fallout there, which residents were not warned about.
American service people there were warned to stay inside, not eat or drink anything. But no such warning was given to the local residents.
Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors from red to yellow to orange.

It was just a very, very bright morning. And then they started hearing like thunderous roars a couple of minutes later.
And it was just like roars after roars. And it was a very frightening time because this was just not something, you know, does not happen every day.
And then around 10 a.m., the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts from Rongalap Atoll, which is the closest to Bikini.
The fallout had started to arrive and they were not sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to this test, the military had gone to Rungruk and they had movie nights and they would show the community movies where it's snowing.

Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo shot for the people who, despite never having any quarrel with the USA, were the recipient of the largest nuclear bomb it's ever detonated. Ho, ho, ho.
Merry Christmas. Robert Evans here, and we had been planning to make a new come episode to give you all a white Christmas this year.
But you know what I didn't wind up wanting to do right during the holidays when we didn't have to work is spend hours researching some other weird cum conspiracies on the internet. So we're just going to play the old cum episode for you as a rerun.
I know that's not the most effortful version of our job that I could have done this year. But also it's been a real shitty year for everybody.
So let's just listen to an old cum episode and pretend we gave you a new cum episode. Merry Christmas, everybody.
Dearly beloved, welcome to It Could Happen here. We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, electric word life.
It's a thing that only happens with the addition of a couple of ingredients, and one of those ingredients is the subject of our episode today. Oh, yeah.
You guys like that? Everybody really happy with that? I love that, yeah. I'm feeling not at all like I want to kind of shower okay you can you can you can hear the moment where we're all like simultaneously questioning every single decision we've ever made in our entire lives yep now we're all bonded together so how's everybody doing today we've got uh meal wong garrison davis james stout um and i should let people know i wasn't joking about the cum thing.
So those of you who are too online will know this. Those of you who are not online enough, this is one of the online things that you will want to know because it's very funny.
And the gist of it is that like four days ago, Dr. Jordan B.
Peterson got sent a link to a Twitter account that purports to be spreading like hidden news about the evils of the Chinese communist regime. And they put out a video that was a segment from a British milking fetish pornography video.
Now, if you're not aware, the milking, as far as I can tell, I believe they're kind of descended from the long lineage of like a rubber fetishists. Right.
And there's like a lot of medical fetish stuff. It tied into it.
But the idea is that men are entirely wrapped up on hospital gurneys and giant pumps suck the semen out of them. So it's like a cow milker.
The machine is very similar to what you would use to milk a cow. This Twitter account put this up, claiming that it was the Chinese government stealing the semen of young men, and Jordan Peterson shared it, saying it was an unbelievable act of evil.
And then everyone had the best day of their lives, and an hour or two later, he deleted it. Now, I have been continuing.
Coward. Coward.
Cowards are deleting it. Yeah.
So strange. So strange that he left the world of peer-reviewed academia.
Yeah. It's wild that he's no longer a professor.
Yeah. It's very funny.
We're continuing to give him shit for it online. But it set us off down an interesting road.
And because some other stuff fell through, we're going to talk about the wide world of weird right wing cum conspiracies. Most of them, at least, are going to be right wing.
There's a surprising number of semen based conspiracies. Everybody did research on their own special thing.
I wanted to start by talking about this this Jordan Peterson cum video and giving kind of some of the some of the background on it. So I believe it was last July the Chinese human sperm bank of Shanghai announced that it was hosting a competition for college students to find out whose semen was, was the best in, in terms of like, you know, a number of modal sperm per milliliter, I think, is the way that they judge it.

And basically, the idea was that they were trying to find like people with sperm concentration greater than 60 million per milliliter. And if they visited a sperm bank a set number of times in a six month period, they could receive a prize that was equivalent to about twelve hundred dollars.
right now the reason this is happening is that uh china for the first time as a result of a number

of different policies, had negative population growth very recently. And this is the thing that can cause a problem for a country for a variety of reasons.
So the government is trying to shore up birth rates. And there are a lot of couples in China that have had issues conceiving.
And so there's a huge amount of demand for sperm in the country right now. So this is not a weird story.
It is actually a thing that happens all around the world regularly. But right around the time that this happened, a little bit after that, it came out that a Japanese company started selling what is called in the articles i found an automatic sperm extractor uh to chinese sperm banks now this is i'm gonna send y'all the link i was hoping you would oh oh yes good prince thanks oh yes we're all going to see this so the machine's price listing on alibaba where it sells for about $5,000 to $6, yes.
Good friends. Thanks.
Yes, we're all going to see this. So the machine's price listing on Alibaba, where it sells for about five to six thousand dollars, describes it as a device that, quote, merges modern digital technology, automatic control technology and simulation technologies with semen collection and premature ejaculation desensitization training function.
So it has a number of purposes Including to help guys stop coming too early

Which has desensitization training function. So it has a number of purposes including guys stop coming too early No shame.
It's funny that someone built a machine for it It's extremely funny and that you can buy on Ali Express. It's like I personally am not attaching anything I bought an Alibaba to sensitive parts of my body.
$6,000. It's not cheap now the primary these are not being used for people who are coming to too quickly um this is like the worst ever r2d2 this it is it is weird what's the orientation does it stand on the ground and you just approach it you you have to stand up yeah but what if you're a short king i said i'm sure they have options it has like the rough shape of like a handheld massage device but it's kind of like formed like almost an art deco robot vagina and basically from what i've read kind of the reasoning is that like hey we need people to donate sperm some people feel weird about just masturbating in a clinic and we hope this is a more pleasant experience for them.
So, again, we're laughing because, like, look, a machine designed to capture semen is kind of a funny thing. That's OK.
No shame on anybody for that. But the fact that you have both the government trying to encourage people to donate sperm and this weird machine kind of created fertile ground for a bunch of right wing weirdos to to start making fertile ground sorry grounded i know fertile ground to commit to make the completely un uh ungrounded claim that like the government was trying to steal people's semen right and that is the basis of dr jordan b peterson's fun little freak out on the internet and i i will say you should try to find the videos of the automatic sperm extractor this this amazing japanese machine because it is fascinating yeah i think we should share some of these on the cool zone account do they have to like like like change like i assume they have to like yes they change it every time yeah you can't clean that if you watch the video there's like a there's a rubber part that comes out like a sea urchin.
The thing that the penis goes in is also the capture device, so it is removed with the sperm donation when you take it out. So again, this is, you know, funny because cum, but there's nothing sinister here.
It's just in the same way that literally everything is, people have like spun it up into a nonsense thing. But because of this beautiful, beautiful story, which I hope we've all gotten to enjoy, I got to do a lot of work on the some of you.
If you live, if you've worked in agriculture, you're not going to be surprised that stealing cum is a massive industry. Like it is a there is a lot of money to be made in stealing semen.

There's enough money to be made in stealing semen

that there are two different official terms

that I have found for semen theft.

The first is sperm jacking.

How could it get better?

How could it get better than that?

Oh, it gets better because the second,

the second is spurgling. Oh, my gosh.
These are like professionals who come up with these terms, huh? That is a marketing genius. There actually is.
I did find in my research there is one actual Chinese- based sperm conspiracy. It's just not a very sinister one.
There's this Chinese businessman, Jesse Jabezu, who stole there's this I think it was a Canadian company. No, it's a US company who had so this is for like bull semen.
And one of the things that you want for bull semen is you don't want, if you're inseminating cows, you want all of the babies to be female generally, right? Because bulls are not very, with outside of certain specific, if you're like trying to make more breeders or whatever, if you're in industrial agriculture, you don't want any of the boys, right? You just want to keep making those sweet, sweet lady cows that are more useful to you in a financial sense. So there's a US company that developed a method of before insemination, looking through the sperm and sorting out the sperm that will make female cows.
And that is apparently hard to do. I mean, it sounds like it would be hard to do, right? And this Chinese businessman was like reverse engineering there.
It's kind of actually, it's basically the same story as Jurassic Park. And anyway, this guy has gotten sued for a bunch of money.
He got chased down by a herd of a velociraptor cattle. I hope it works out just as well as Jurassic Park jurassic park yeah it's very funny i will say there's a couple of really wild lines uh from this the cvc story i found i'm just gonna read one to you um zoo's activities could best be described as machiavellian at various points he outlined a plan to make xy that's the american company quote feel all the time the sword of damocles is on their heads and brag the law is strong but the outlaws are 10 times stronger okay okay this guy is look yeah jesse jabezu my hero the sperm bandit incredible sperm jacker one of the best spermers in the business this man lives on an island with his cow wrapped what a hero um there was also a case of a japanese man who illegally took wagyu cattle sperm to china to try to give them sperm and like the chinese government immediately caught him and was like no this is actually incredibly dangerous like you're not allowed to just take animal breeding material into the country without because you know there's a wide variety of reasons that that could be end horribly.
So he got in a shitload of trouble. Yeah.
Anyway, that's my, that's my sperm stories, everybody. Thank you for sharing.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you for spurgling my knowledge, Garrison. We're back.
And James is here to talk to us about the kind of sperm jacking that you do when you don't jack i'm talking about jacking your own sperm by keeping it inside of you semen retention yeah it's it uh how was that james how beautiful was that unscripted did you just like do that didn't even write that yeah didn't even write that garrison yeah it's on the back of his hand he had a brainwave at two in the morning and i got that down those are the kind of things you can do when you've been podcasting as long as i know robert's been in the cum space for several years i've been in those soggy trenches for a long time all right we are after all at work so let me continue uh so i'm going to talk about what

happens when you keep your calm inside you uh okay yeah this is a thing what are we doing today this is critical journalism we are making content talking of content let's talk about the content of some Reddit posters. So what is called the semen retention movement, and this will shock many of you, began on Reddit.com.
Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like so many wonderful things.

I feel like, I feel like.

Because no one's getting laid with their own Reddit.

I feel like if you'd type that into your phone,

it would have finished the sentence the same way.

Yeah, yeah.

What is auto-directing you to Reddit.com?

Oh, believe me.

We're going to go there, Garrison,

because when you Google sperm retention,

you do indeed find some stuff on Reddit.

So.

I'll bet. Now, they've spun off from Reddit, right? right then i have their own organization which is nofap.com uh and nofap.com is a community-centered sexual health platform i'm uh i'm using i'm allowing them to define themselves here i guess designed to help people overcome porn addiction and compulsive sexual behavior which is not necessarily like like the the This isn't...
Not all semen retention, as we're going to learn, is based in helping people overcome addiction to porn. But so far as that is a thing that people actually have.
I know someone was accusing Robert of being addicted to porn on his timeline this weekend. That would be because I keep ratioing Jordan Peterson with the pornography video that he mistakenly posted.
That's correct, yeah. I just want him to respond so I can ask him, Jordan, tell me in your own words what you thought was happening in that video.
I really hope he thinks it's like milking. They have RFID collars and they get fed based on their production level.
That would be great. Yeah.
And what did you, you're a, you're a medical doctor. Did you think that come actually works that way? That you could just stick a sucker on somebody anyway.
Yeah. Just get it out.
Okay. So after, after this movement began on Reddit.com, it quickly pivoted to kind of offering all kinds of weird physical and mental health benefits.
And that's where it was adopted by friends of the podcast, the Proud Boys. Luckily, we do have a bit of insight into the exact nature of the no-fap fascism that the Proud Boys practiced, thanks to Kyle Chaney, who's a Politico reporter, who was reporting on the trial of one of the Proud Boys accused of sedition on January 6 called Zach Rell that trial, for reasons that I'm not exactly clear on the Proud Boy I guess it's like their handbook the kind of Proud Boy vibe was introduced and into the record Oh yes, it's in there yep it's in the court record buddy because once the lawyers decided that it was pertinent to the case so a proud boy may not ejaculate alone more than once in every 30 days that means he must abstain from pornography during that time and if he needs to ejaculate this is really weird it must be within one yard of a woman.
Fascinatingly specific. Yeah, yeah, right.
And I like that they've gone with imperial measurements. With her consent, so that's nice, the woman may not be a prostitute.
So that's the proud boys' nature of their nofap fascism. But I think the way of understanding why some people practice this perhaps best is to go on to reddit.com.
So I found a post by Reddit user u slash monk191817. It seems like a nice guy.
And there are 480 upvotes on this. What I did was I went to semen retention.
I looked at, you know, sorted by popular posts. Found this one from a bunch of numbers.
And so this guy has nine years of experience with semen retention. So I'm just going to read.
I'm presuming it's his. Oh, boy.
What a life. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Him and some monks off the coast of fucking Lin's farm.
That cannot be healthy. No, I don't think it is.
There is, and we'll get into evidence that you shouldn't do this. So, in his nine years of experience, he has experienced the following things.
Semen, when retained in our bodies, has healing, rejuvenating effects. Loss of semen has the opposite effects.
This may not be scientifically proven, but it's proven by experience.

That's a red flag.

That's interesting.

Getting Reddit medical advice.

While attempting any task that demands high physical, mental, or intellectual abilities,

if we are semen retention powered, we would actually enjoy the task, which would otherwise seem dull.

This is called sexual energy transmutation in layman's terms.

Oh no.

Wait, that's a layman's term the what's the non-layman term i just it's got even more i have no idea spermozoic uh fucking fission uh so for peak performance it's always necessary to be powered by semen it would be best to use use semen only for regeneration purposes since nature originally intended it

for regeneration

and not use it for sexual purposes

apart from to create a child.

If not serving that purpose,

master whatever techniques are useful

in not letting the seed out

while having sex.

At the end of the day,

don't let your seed out

like a worthless thing.

There's more,

so just contain yourself.

Okay, great, great.

Which is exactly the reason why core religions are based on celibacy.

Because opposite of regeneration is degeneration,

which will cause a man to fall into a lower state,

controlled by his lower nature, rather than when he's subduing it.

We should let semen retention be part of our lives,

not something that is done for superpowers.

For superpowers are, in my experience, the sudden ecstasy that we feel once we transition from the degenerated to the regenerated state. And that will stabilize after some time, similar to how a flight maintains stable altitude after takeoff.
Very similar, actually. Yeah, that's basically the same thing.
That's what you can hear when the engines are spinning up. It's just a dude trying really hard not to nut and it uh it makes that noise so excited for the next marvel film where this where the superhero gains his power paul rudd has to not come so he can get tiny no fat man oh uh yeah so yeah he didn't i should add that this person confesses to having lapsed uh at some point in the nine years.
Poser. That's like when I learned Lance Armstrong was on steroids.
It's just disappointing. No one would have seen it coming.
See what I did there? This person then urges other posters on the Seema Retention subreddit to not use streaks to outperform others or look better about ourselves or bring others down. The battle with lust is a lifelong fight, and the more we get better at finding victories...
Yeah, buddy. The more we become better at finding victories over internal battles, the better we become as high-valued men.
Hell yeah, brother. I've often wished that if the pandemic hadn't been a thing and i could force you all to work in a central location i could have like a wall of murals where i put under each of your faces a quote from an episode that you've participated in and james that that would be your quote the battle against lust is a lifelong struggle yeah i'll get some t-shirts knocked up and we can do a fundraiser when we eventually get the calls on many offices we have a portrait hanging on the wall of each of us with one quote underneath yeah yeah yeah like on a plaque with a yeah yes yes when we get the calls when we when we take over the meta offices three weeks from now yeah there is a marketing company that has been emailing me for about six months uh telling me how cheap it is to buy a billboard by the side of a road and send a message to a loved one so maybe great maybe i'll go with the billboard industry's gonna be fucking doing banger, yeah.
Well, there will be until I put my positive messages

about controlling lust and holding semen inside our bodies.

True.

And return men to their former glory.

So a lot of the Reddit posts rely on a couple of different studies, right?

One of these studies, measured participants,

a lot of what they're doing is they're claiming to increase testosterone, right?

Right at the back.

Testosterone does have, as Lance Armstrong can tell you some performance enhancing benefits um sure so yeah uh you know increases your muscle growth your uh your recovery from exercise all that stuff um one of the studies measured participants testosterone levels at baseline before masturbation and then uh in 10 minute intervals after masturbation right uh and then they were asked to abstain for three weeks and they came back and they did the process again testosterone was higher in the baseline measurement at the at the end of the three weeks of abstinence right um but the sample size was pretty small uh and there's some theorizing that the boost was actually caused by the anticipated masturbation that they were about to do at the second uh it was so ready to come yeah yeah just ready to pop after three weeks uh the second study uh looked at a 45 percent increase after a few days seven days of abstinence uh but uh even a study showed this was a temporary peak that returned to normal even with continuing abstinence so there's there's just these two studies they're pretty uh they were they happened a long time ago uh we'll post them all in the show notes if you guys want to read more about nofap science um but we should just point out that there is in fact a multitude of evidence that this is a bad idea uh that having sex is actually good for you having sex while trying not to ejaculate is probably not good for you uh probably not good for your relationship either um one would surmise uh there are sure into that whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah if that's your thing you do you um there was a study that investigated the motivation for semen retention among semen retainers uh and it a lot of it it seemed like it people were people who felt that like either sex or masturbation was unhealthy or wrong or sinful and uh there is evidence to show that like feeling uh like guilty about yourself or like of living with stress and self-loathing like that is bad for you right and that will reduce your testosterone level um there's also some evidence to suggest that not ejaculating can give you prostate issues uh which yes um yeah there's there's and this is like pretty debatable like most things that people talk about in regards to coming and health. Like you can find some studies like the studies on testosterone.
Some of them are kind of sketchy. Anyway, don't come or come.
Either way, you know, it's whatever. But if you do have a chance to fuck one of those Alibaba robots i recommend it you don't pass that up let's talk about cum demons hell yeah wait okay okay hard hard pivot here from so okay we we are not going as far afield from the no fat people as as as you would think

okay but all right now

the year is 2020 everyone

on earth has collectively gone insane

uh this is this is

this is the summer this is the summer of 2020

so this is the part of 2020 where fun

stuff is happening this is like late

july oh garrison

that's when we met so yeah

we were getting just

incredibly poisoned

yeah we sure were

I'm sorry. late July.
Oh, Garrison, that's when we met. So, yeah, we were getting just incredibly poisoned.
Yeah, we sure were. That'll be fun in like 20 years.
Well, well, well, life or death struggle for the sort of the life or death struggle for the fate of the United States and whether or not people are going to be continuously murdered by the cops is being waged in the streets. Donald Trump and Donald J.
Trump. Donald J.
Trump. Wow.
Donald Trump Jr., that one. That's the Trump that I'm looking for here.
Trumpette. We're looking for their cure to COVID-19 on Twitter.
And okay, so as we probably all remember, right? The thing that they found was hydroxy. Okay, so one of the first ones that they found before before ivermectin this is this is before they found so much shit yeah was it inside of them all along man no this is this is this is hydroxychloroquine a thing that was probable i hope i hope they weren't full of hydroxychloroquine i thought it was semen no no we'll get to that where there's a the the the road is long but it it ends with cum demons.
We first must walk the road. So the road here is Donald Trump Jr.
Post a tweet saying like this is necessary watching about this video from this doctor named Dr. Stella Emanue.
Now okay who is this person um she she is part of a oh okay i say part of she runs this thing called firepower ministries

which oh no so you don't think they're going great um she's also i know i know broadly yeah

okay cool i'm good she's also part of america's frontline. Yeah, okay, cool.
I'm good. She's also part of America's Frontline Doctors, who are...
Oh, this group. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So people have forgotten.
Yeah, these dipshits. Oh, my God.
Okay. So this is very much in the same vein as Architecture 9-11 Truth.
They found a bunch of people who technically have medical degrees or, like, nurses like nurses who were like no no uh vaccines are bad and hydroxychloroquine hydroxychloroquine is well chloroquine covid cork with that one yeah it's it's it's been it's been a long day i i've slept for eight hours but in like several distinct parts of the day that were not continuous it's been things are going things are going great better if you'd taken some horse medicine first quite possibly i mean it's not like it could have gone worse yeah get some catch so all right all right so so this person's from the very sketchy doctors who are trying to sell like a bunch of random shit to to cure covet and okay so who actually is this person um she is from cameroon and dr stella emmanue was caught up in uh the unbelievably sort of like i mean right like yes objectively, also very, very weird wave of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity that's been sweeping across that part of Africa and as part of sort of a, you know, sort of like a very sort of long range of coordinated effort by right wing Christian missionaries. So, okay, so for people who don't know your Christianity very well, the Pentecostals and the charismatic Christians are, like, firmly in the very, very weird camp of Christians.
Like, these are the people who do faith healing. One of the very common sort of Pentecostal things is this belief that, like, you just, you talk to God.
Like, God's in your head, and you just have conversations with him. Now, unfortunately for like all of us, and this is, you know, a thing that is a not insignificant contributing factor to why the last, I don't know, 10 years have been so batshit is that like, this originally was kind of an isolated Pentecostal thing.
And like the broader evangelicals were like, no, no, no. God only talks to me, like your pastor.
Like he's probably not like you're, you're not like having a conversation in your head with but that's changed that's changed yeah this this shit has this shit has fucking taken over everywhere it's really bad um and these people believe a lot of very very weird stuff so what do i mean okay so like you know she she has like some of the sort of standard, really hardline, like David Icke shit. Like she believes that the world's being run by aliens and like reptiles and like the vaccine has like alien DNA in it to like take over your DNA.
You know, this is like sort of kind of Facebook moments. Alex Jones shit.
Yeah, right. Okay, but okay, I'm going to read this quote from Will Sumner.
is a quote from um one of her first her sermons they which is demons are responsible for serious gynecological problems emmanuel said we call them all kinds of names entromesius entromesius we call them molar pregnancies we call them fibroids we call them cysts but most of them are evil deposits from spirit husband immanuel said of the medical god no they are responsible for miscarriages impotence men that can't get it up so all right immediately we we have like we have there are several kinds of cum demons here that we're dealing with so there are like there there's there's this okay so a lot of this is drawn from what is i a very like a genuinely unbelievably dubious piece of theology so when i was researching this right i saw i saw i saw someone there was there was like a religious uh scholar who was writing this he was like oh i immediately recognized the theology of this this is from this is from uh genesis 6 so okay so i was like okay what what the fuck are they talking about so i i went back and i read gen okay so i went back and i read the genesis and i'm going to read the two this is this is from genesis chapter 6 verses 1 and 2 and i am just going to read these two sentences and i am going to see if you two can produce cum demons from this okay happy to do so i mean i i could produce cum demons from almost anything that is that is the power with the right machinery you know what i think we know exactly what the right machinery is look we know that we can produce demons mechanically. Our challenge here is to produce them theologically.
Okay. I'll try.
I will use all of my occult knowledge. We must find a way to evacuate the vast deference of the soul.
Okay, so I'm using the King James translation because that's the translation that that all these psychos use and it came to pass when men began to multiply in the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them that the sons of god saw the daughters of man that they were fair and they took them wives of all which they chose okay so i i do know whether i i do know what what they are doing so the sons of god those would be what like fallen angels that have been procreating with women yeah yeah yeah so like this this ties into like the book of enoch stuff which was made a little bit like after genesis but it kind of it it like retconned a lot of like the uh creation story so i i can see where they're they're pulling cum demons from but it is it is a

bit of a stretch yeah they're kind of you could say cum demons in the way that like god seed yeah you could see it yeah it's that's it is a stretch now okay my my my analysis because i i think i i think they're pulling this out of their ass and i think they're pulling this out of their Well, it's right.

It's also about cum demons, so yeah, they're probably going to have the ass.

This is so big.

Big and true. out of their ass and i think they're pulling this out of their ass well it's right it's also come demons so yeah they're like just okay so like i i i i have i it is well known for people who follow me on twitter that i have an immense and powerful disrespect for theology but what what part of the sons of god like what part of that gets you to demons and not because again, isn't the whole point of Christianity that we are all God's children? Like, is this not a thing that they tell you in every single fucking story? How do you read that and not think they're talking about people and immediately jump to come demon? Here's what's going on.
I can explain this because this is the King the king's version so this was made in a post book of enoch world around the around the alleged birth of jesus the book of enoch got very popular um and this this introduced the idea of a fallen angel the fallen fallen angel isn't really in the bible at all it's only it's only in like non-biblical um abrahamic texts so this this idea then kind of got planted into a lot of like catholic mythology as well so when they're they're caused they have a distinction between like the like the sons of like the sons of god versus um what was the what was the thing they used to refer refer to the daughters the sons of the daughters of men exactly so the daughters are human where the the the sons are like came from god so that is some type of fallen angel that has been cast down to earth yeah that is like there i they are doing a specific thing but it's it's it's a result of a whole bunch of like mistranslations and a whole bunch of various various like uh christian and gnostic texts that have been that have been misinterpreted for thousands of years by the catholic church and it creates a really weird theology that is indistinguishable from like castlevania so yeah i i blame martin luther this is martin luther's fault like the catholics were doing this here's the thing here's the thing man was to keep it in high latin so the proles can't understand this is this is what martin luther i'm specifically

because okay so this was already happened the catholic church was already doing this right but martin luther had a chance to fix this shit and he was like do you know what i'm gonna do instead of that i am going to i am going to turn against the peasant revolt and i'm going to do a i'm going to bring about a level of anti-semitism that is going to allow me to outflank the Inquisition on the right?

He could have been fixing this bullshit.

No! Anti-semitism!

Woo! I gotta keep my

patron lords in power.

He was German. Like, there's only

so much you can ask. That's true.

Yeah. Well, I'm

happy that we can all go to sleep at night worrying

about the sons of God implanting semen.

Oh, there's also...

That's the only thing I ever think about.

That's cum demon type one, right?

That is... Okay, so those

are the demons that, like,

they have sex with women

and they produce Nephilim

from... Or sometimes also you get

fucked by Nephilim. There's a lot of sort of conflicting

sort of theological things here. All that stuff comes from the Book of Enoch.

All that stuff is non-canon to the modern Bible, it's where it's where it comes from fucking council of nicaea okay but there's also there's also a second there's also the second kind of cum demon right which is these are these these are well okay so succubi and incubi are based here we go i knew it i was i was down. I was counting down.
You had faith. The other kind of demon...
So you have your Incubi, right, who are another type of sex demon. The Incubi fuck men so they can steal their semen.
There's different sort of reasons of this. There's another thing that she talks about which is that there are witches who have astral spirit sex with men in their sleep.
And if you're like having a sex dream it's because you're having actual spirit sex no no yeah i mean like i'm like bill murray i've i've experienced that oh we know that was bill murray sorry i my mistake i get our lives mixed up often oh wait i know yes okay okay the the cloud the the fog is clearing i've i've had i've had sex with too many sex demons it's it's a real issue okay so so all right so we have the sex demons who are like trying to impregnate you we have the sex demons who are trying to steal your cum we also have the actually we have the actual projecting projecting witches right and the actual projecting witches are trying to steal people's cum as part of an illuminati plot to create like an even more powerful witch and the even more

powerful witch is going to use gay marriage

and children's toys to like destroy

the fabric of western civilization and thus

bring about sort of

general new world order etc

I have heard of this inside

some of my witch meetings

that is not as far

from the backstory to Warhammer

40,000 as it should be

that's very sadly

true I didn't want Warhammer 40,000 as it should be. That's very sadly true.
I didn't want Warhammer 40,000 coming to our come episode, if I'm honest. No, it's, I mean, look, there's a lot of people who are interested in both semen retention and Warhammer 40,000.
That's a tight Venn diagram. They all play Ultramarines.
that was a tight vendetta crap yeah yeah they all play ultramarines that was a that's yeah pretty good warhammer 40 000 joke for those of you who play i i also i also learned a couple days ago that i one of the many crimes of the emperor 40k was passing off in amiri bakara quote as his own oh yeah that that is that was that was a good bit that was a really good bit it's little pieces like that that let you know that dan abnet's pretty base yeah that was my favorite part of the book so funny that's like that's literally canon i do have like three pages written on uh on testicle tanning we should. Yeah.
That's the end of the sex demons. Go off.
Well, okay. The one thing I will add on is that one of the more funny modern versions of these, if you go on the Benadryl subreddit, the recreational Benadryl subreddit, you can find people who try to take enough Benadryl to have sex with the hat man, which is another form of trying to summon shadow people to steal your semen.
You have to explain your terms for people here. The hat man is a tall, thin man wearing a hat who appears when you take hallucinogenic doses of Benadryl because you can't afford better drugs

because you're 17.

Yes.

Or younger.

That's the hat man.

Some people find the hat man extremely attractive

or some of the female shadow people variants.

And they try to...

I have read multiple reports

of people explaining their sexual experiences

with shadow people.

Anyways, the President of the United States

and his son were promoting this,

so this is great.

This website, by the way,

absolute adventures on here.

I'm just reading about how to use Christ's blood

as a weapon.

Amazing.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, yeah, no problems here.

Yeah.

Do you know who won't steal your semen, everybody?

We can't promise that i i

can i can promise any advertiser on this show i've personally approved to make sure they will not come into your bedroom and steal your semen wow how do you do how's the approval process work instead of interest i i i cannot divulge private they sent garrison 40 dollars we are we are going to close off by by talking about uh sperm and testosterone um two two of our favorite topics for this episode for some reason uh about about a year ago a trailer on fox news dropped for a new batch of tucker carlson originals The End of Men. It opens with the text that reads, In the current year, the cycle continues.
Once a society collapses, then you're in hard times. Well, iron sharpens iron, as they say, and those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive.
And then they go on to reestablish order, and so the cycle begins again. Now, there's a few funny things about this video, from the ripped shirtless dudes milking cows to wrestling each other and shooting bottles of canola oil.
At the gun range, they're just shooting like 10 bottles of canola oil for some reason. Maybe they're into the Mussolini stuff.
He was a big fan of canola oil. By far the most bizarre.
I suspect they're uh the muscolini's like they're into the muscolini stuff you know he was a big fan of canola by by far the most bizarre i suspect they're shooting the canola because it's like a seed oil thing they think that like seed oil it's a right wing thing seed oils are like sucking out your testosterone anyway it's something very silly but by far the most bizarre thing in this trailer is a shot of a naked man with outstretched arms like Jesus on the cross style standing in front of a lake at dusk with a white machine shining a glowing red light on his dick.

What?

And again, at the climax of the music from 2001 A Space Odyssey, there's this there's this man facing balls first in front of this large red light at the end of this trailer. There should never have been any cause on our podcast or on Fox News for anyone to say the line after the end of the climax of the music from 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Oh, that's the thing we're objecting to from this episode. That's the line.
Yeah, because it shouldn't have climaxed. It lost its power in that moment.
Considering both like the... No, no, no, one sec, James.
That was a very good joke. Thank you.
Thank you for seeing me, buddy. Yeah.
So considering both like the text at the beginning and then some of the narration that we just heard in the trailer they're kind of doing this weird like kali yuga thing right that is that is a bit of a bit of what's going on here because kali yuga again you can listen to our episodes on savitri devi for a little more information about this but it's like this weird right-wing uh con like quasi-apocalyptic concept that evolved during an intermix between some of the early nazis and some of the people who are currently behind the present leader of india it's it's way too esoteric and weird to get into but it's one of the things that like the real yeah the real fucked up nazdy nazi shit um we're not going to get into it too much but i think the previous november it's unsettling that it it wound up adjacent to a tucker carlson episode because it's some like weird esoteric nazi wizard shit yes um and that previous november joe rogan posted a kali yuga meme which went viral it's it's about how hard times strong men, which create good times, which lead to weak men, which create hard times. It's fucking silly.
The accompanying text on the Instagram post that Rogan did said, civilizations move in predictable cycles. We are in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict.
All of the chaos we're seeing right now is predicted in hinduism thousands of years ago unquote so rogan was probably just like parroting something that he heard from one of his many fashy or new agey friends which considering rogan's social circle that could very well just be the same person yes yeah one of his fucking sparring buddies is either friends with the nazi or just stumbled upon a fucking the wrong podcast and then told him that when they were smoking weed and yes you know yeah that's i mean that's honestly to it's problematic because of his platform but that's how i learned everything about esoterica that i learned when i was in my 20s was some i was smoking weed with some sketchy dude who was going places he shouldn't have been on the internet so a few months after rogan posted this meme we have tucker carlson making this whole mini series surrounding this hard times creates strong men kind of trend uh it's taking cues from the online manosphere and tucker posited that weak unmanly men are leading to the collapse collapse of civilization and a hardening of men is necessary to save it. According to Tucker, one of the threats to manhood is a quote-unquote total collapse in testosterone levels amongst men in recent years.
And the solution goes beyond just your typical anti-soy crusading that Tucker has done in the past. Now, Tucker has turned to the cutting-edge science of bromeopathic medicine as advocates for by a quote-unquote fitness professional named Andrew McGovern, who touts that infrared light and testicle tanning is this deus ex machina for plummeting T levels in men.
So, obviously, half the viewers right now are like, what? That's testicle tanning? That's crazy. But my view is, okay, testosterone levels crash and nobody says anything about it.
That's crazy. So why is it crazy to seek solutions? It's not crazy to seek solutions.
And I think I was recently exposed to a term called bromeopathy. And I think there's a lot of people out there right now that don't trust the mainstream information.
This TV special is constantly referred to as a documentary so surely you would expect tucker to try and like interview scientists or like anyone with expertise on this topic no of course not actually not not not the case to talk to anyone serious andrew mcgovern our our bromeopathic hero works as a personal trainer Lifetime Fitness in Columbus, Ohio. Oh my fucking god.
And he hasn't even been a trainer for very long. About a decade ago...
Not even a good one. About a decade ago, he was the manager of an Abercrombie and Fitch store in Miami.
Oh, perfect! Yes, yes. Okay, now, that's where i get all of my prescriptions from is a guy who works at the abercrombie and fitch store wait and but in miami hey if you want to get trim that's where you get trim yeah yeah that is that type of dude is emerging here as of 2017 he was the director of operations for Petland Retail Stores.
Stop! How does this keep getting funnier? This guy's resume is highly amusing. But Tucker, being a competent journalist, did not just interview one person, however.
Kid Rock was brought on to be the sole voice of reason.

You know, Garrison, you laugh, but Kid Rock is the other person I've gotten prescription drugs from, so.

Real bastion in the platonic cave of men stands Kid Rock and a guy from Abercrombie and Fitch.

And we must only be their shadows.

Dude, stop testicle tanning. Come on.

I mean, I haven't heard anything that good in a long time. Open your mind, Bobby.
I'm starting a punk rock band, and it's called testicle tanning. That's the end of it.
I mean, don't you think at this point, when so many of the therapies, the paths they've told us to take, have turned out to be dead ends that have really hurt people, why wouldn't open-minded people seek new solutions i i don't know what the hell is going on in this world i'm not even sure if i understood that question but some days i just want to stop this planet and let me off like kid rock was not did did not buy into testicle tanning the same way tucker seems to oh god is kid rock gonna be the reason? That's what I said. I said he was brought on to be the sole voice of reason.
Yeah, but we thought you were joking because it's Kid Rock. I thought you were joking.
I didn't believe you. No, he's the only person that doesn't buy it.
Kid Rock stands with science. It is indeed Sweet Home Alabama all summer long.
Tucker was not the first person to advocate for testicular tanning as the solution to an allegedly problematic dip in testosterone levels dating back to 2015 you can find articles online such as quote former mlb player gabe capler says men who want to get stronger should tan their testicles from complex and quote i put a giant red light on my balls to triple my testosterone levels from a men's health 2017 is that written by ben greenfield by any chance because he normally pops up with these things which which which one the the men's health one let me let me it's a guy who injected his own dick to make it bigger i have it in my show notes here was written by someone named Ben Greenfield. Oh, look at that fucking jackpot! Oh, this bellend has won it.
James, so proud of you today, buddy. I'm so happy we have you on our team.
James, are you taking performance-enhancing drugs for this podcast? Sadly, Robert, I'm i'm not this is so funny we have stepped into a gold mine of contact with ben greenfield the guy who injected his own dick with stem cells to make it bigger that's so funny oh man i urge you i compel you if you have any free time in your day just google ben greenfield penis there will be several articles at supposedly reputable outlets that will just fucking make you unwell well that's that is great to hear but despite not being the first person to talk about testicular tanning tucker was certainly the most impactful um after the airing of the end of men testicular tanning showed a 7,000 increase in relative search interest on Google and a 35,000 increase in tweets on the topic. Now, surely some of these things are stuff like making fun of it, right? Yeah, the tweets, I'm sure, is a lot.
A lot of it's also people who are just talking about it genuinely. To quote a study published in a jmir a dermatology publication quote the promotion of testicular tanning generated significant public interest in an evidence lacking and potentially dangerous health trend dermatologists and other healthcare professionals should be aware of these new viral health trends to best counsel patients and combat health misinformation unquote so like in terms of actual data a 2017 meta-analysis of studies on sperm counts found that in north america europe australia and new zealand men's sperm counts have declined by about 50 between 1973 and 2011 now these results have not been enough to really cause broad concern unless you're like a right-wing influencer for men because there doesn't really seem to be an equal drop in testosterone levels um compared to the problems mankind has had on the whole not enough semen per cum shot is not one of them yes and and like compared to previous decades there is this uh maybe like a 20 decrease in total testosterone levels amongst adolescent and young adult males.

But that's highly fluctual, and it's impacted heavily by diet.

It's suspected that pollution and environmental degradation are also suspected of being contributing factors with plastics like phthalate being known to interfere with the production of hormones like testosterone. But this area of research is still heavily contested.
But still, that has not stopped fitness YouTubers and conservative influencers from tying this to the soy boy feminization of men and drumming up panic to grow their social media followings, sell their supplements, and advertise affiliate products. The creme de la creme of red lights for testicular tanning is the juve light a light juve is a light therapy panel company which sells these leds um they're like this they're like this upscale wellness brand um the smallest model they have costs over a thousand dollars with the full body ones going for around $10,000.
This is when you know it's a grift. If someone is telling you that they need to sell you sunlight they are having a fucking laugh.
Our friend Ben Greenfield advocates quote advocates that you spend the big bucks on juve lest you quote fry your balls to a crisp with a cheap knockoff you wouldn't want to do that would you no this is unwise yeah it seems like it's maybe a bad idea i i can teach you how to how to how to cook your balls safely without spending any money at all get a pair pair of AA batteries. Take them right out of your

remote control. You stick

the active end in a bottle

of water, and then you put your hand on

your testicles.

It'll complete the circuit

and power your testicles up with

electricity, which you can then ejaculate

instead of cum. They'll probably give you

superpowers, too.

Almost certainly, Garrison. Legally, this is not a recommendation to do this.
If you do this, that shit's not on us. You did that of your own volition.
Please do not connect batteries to your dick. To quote that JMIR study evaluating the public's interest in testicular tanning, quote, The interest in this topic may be partially explained by the immense attention and advertising men's sexual health and hormone replacement or hormone enhancing therapies receive in the u.s although subsequent media coverage largely disfavored testicular tanning due to lacking evidence and potential dangers other health influencers came to defend and encourage the practice of testicular tanning specifically by using uv light as an unquote As an example, here is a clip from fitness YouTuber Elliot Hulsey's Strength Camp, with 1.7 million followers.
Blast your balls with sunshine to increase testosterone. Now you can drop your draws and let your balls get kissed by the sun, or you can try one of these light panels to roast my nuts and be more manly.

A 1939 study suggests that UV light exposure to your testicles increases testosterone by 200%.

If you want to join me in this experiment, you can find one of these bad boys at cozyhealth.com.

Then just go to personallabs.com, get your blood tested, get your testosterone.

Then after eight to 12 weeks, check it again and find out if the nut rusting really works.

Thank you. Then just go to personallabs.com, get your blood tested, get your testosterone.
Then after eight to 12 weeks, check it again and find out if the nut rusting really works. So this whole idea goes back to this one 1939 study.
1939? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of good science in 1939, man.
And if there's one thing I trust, it's science from 1939. Yep.
Got any comments on race in this study? So this study was published in the journal Endocrinology, and it found that frequent UV irritation to the genitals increased urinary androsterone, a metabolite of testosterone. It increases levels by nearly 200%, quote unquote.
Now, you'll be shocked to learn that there may be problems with this study. Guess how many test subjects were included in this study? I'm going to be generous and say eight.
So, Mia says eight. James? Ben Greenfield, just one.
One, you say one. Robert, how many do you think are in this study? Jeez, I think like seven was sacred to the nazis so i'm gonna say that five a grand total of five people are in the study wow i gave them too much credit oh they had to pick the sacred discordian number bullshit three of them are 54 years old and have manic depressive psychosis the the the other are 28.
Honestly, not a bad, not a fairly representative sample for Tucker's audience. I was about to say the same thing.
This is actually who watches his show. The other two are 28 and 45, and have, quote, psychopathia with depressive features, which is a very old-timey term.

Everyone on Twitter, etc., etc.

But what actually happened is

I think they did this study at an asylum

and just found people with depressive psychosis

to do this study on.

It's just these 500 people.

No individual graft results were produced.

It only showed the quote-unquote typical reaction.

And there wasn't even a control group for the study. Why bother? It was good science.
Why bother? Not to mention there's many problems with measuring testosterone in the first place because it changes broadly day to day and by age. And it's very kind of unreliable.
To quote the JMIR study again, quote, beyond this questionable study, research has shown that exposure to UV radiation may increase sex steroid hormone levels. However, these studies either do not include human participants or do not specifically evaluate UV radiation exposure to the genitals.
There is not a single other study since then that has done anything resembling like peer-reviewed science you know what why everybody go to go to gofundme help cool zone determine whether or not testicle tanning works and we'll get that control group okay so my other question about this aren't aren't all these people getting fucking ball cancer we are about to get to that because yes you may think that shining UV lights on your balls might have some long term problems it's great that Lance Armstrong's come back to the episode again so Vice interviewed Sethhen a urologist and the director of the sexual dysfunction program at nyu langdon health quote i'm not aware of any science or data or any journal publications proving that red light therapy improves male testosterone and quote we change recommendations on medical therapies based on a double blind placebo controlled randomized large studies with thousands of patients. That's where you'll find if there's any really statistical significance between red light therapy and a placebo.
Could these men who underwent red light therapy and came out and felt stronger and more manly, could that have been a placebo effect? Of course it could, unquote. So, and as Mia mentioned, we have not really even gotten into the potential dangers yet.
Close, direct heat to your testicles actually damages sperm count. On top of the risk of giving yourself ball cancer by blasting concentrated UV light on your genitals for 20 minutes a day every day of the week, which is what is recommended.
Jesus Christ. To quote that study one last time, quote, research shows that excessive exposure to UV radiation may lead to higher rates of genital tumor formation and decreased sperm counts as spermatogenesis is temperature dependent.
Thus, given the current obsession with optimizing male hormone levels, the high cost of red light therapy, and misleading information labeling of testicular tanning by prominent influencers, there may be an increase in men exposing themselves to UV radiation and developing associated complications. Unquote.
Great. Heroic.
So, almost done here. But man, it's pretty funny that all of the worst people you know are gonna get ball cancer don't stop him yeah i you know there was a period of time in my life when i said where i would never wish cancer on anybody but if you are deliberately exposing your testicles for the sun and to the sun in the hope of getting superpowers because of Nazi science science it's okay it's it's okay like i'm i'm not gonna mourn that to be fair that i the 1939 study was from the united states so it couldn't possibly still be not i'm talking about the other nazi science oh yes yes yeah yeah yeah well yeah um and i think i i think a part of this whole narrative of like the total collapse of men's testosterone levels as as tucker puts it man i fucking wish yeah my life so much easier but i think this is more about men in power feeling that they're positioned of assumed superiority is being threatened really all of our quack science and conspiracy theory stories today all revolve around this subliminal dog whistle.
It's no mistake that Tucker titled his program The End of Men. In all of the stories we're covering today, it is the fear of emasculation that is the hook used to drum up fear and anger about how liberal feminism is eroding manhood.
It targets some of young men's sexual insecurities while promoting this anti-woke return to the old ways of rugged masculinity. Yeah, I might add, because I think you're missing one aspect of it.
I think you're identifying what he's signaling to his listeners and what they get out of it. But I also think that what he and the other folks who are kind of in positions of power and influence in the right, get out of this, because they're not, they don't believe this, they're not actually motivated by that.
Now, what this is, and what because we do not know specifically why like testosterone rates may be lower, why sperm counts are definitely lower, but it likely has to do with a massive variety of industrial pollutants in the environment.

And with the fact that industrial agriculture and the processed nature of a lot of our foods is having a negative impact on all these things. It's consequences of capitalism, right? And because the consequences are getting increasingly hard to ignore, the thing that people like that need to do is find either a cure for them or another way to blame or another thing to blame them on, right? And so if the aspect, the things that are horribly unhealthy about the society that we have built is causing men to suffer consequences in their bodies, the thing to do on the right is to blame that shit on the liberals emasculating men.
And the solution is whatever kind of shit we can sell you, right? Like, that's what's going on here. That's the motivation.
And it happens outside of like, man shit to like, that's all the right has anymore. Like their their economic theories have been proven disastrously wrong.
They have no actual ability to govern in a meaningful way other than by causing harm to people. So it's entirely about taking the consequences of the world that they advocate and blaming them on someone else and selling you snake oil to deal with it.
Yeah, exactly. And so that is most of the testicular tanning fun that I got into this morning.
We haven't even covered all the things that Ben Greenfield did to his dick in 2017. We'll get back on this subject, but it is time for us to end.
This is already over an hour. So I want to leave you all, all of you, all of you beautiful.
First, I want to thank all of our beautiful correspondents for their research. And I want to leave all of you with this simple piece of advice.

If you feel like your testicles aren't getting enough solar radiation,

simply purchase a glass cutter and an old microwave,

cut a circular hole in the microwave and feedback it while it's on.

You'll be okay.

That is our legally binding health advice.

That's the end of the episode. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's happening here in your ear.
And one of the things that we love talking about here is a critical ingredient towards creeping authoritarianism, towards growing corporate control and surveillance over all of our lives, which is, of course, technology that makes it even easier to monitor you than it already is. And we're not talking primarily about like the government

monitoring you because they can, you know, do stuff like just pull your phone data from a,

you know, which cell towers is pinged. We're talking about the kind of stuff that allows

basically whoever can get an app on your phone to track and stalk you. And yeah, I'm going to

first introduce Mia Wong. Mia, welcome to the show that you also host.
Yes, I am here. So what are we talking about today and who are we talking with? Yeah, so we are talking about stalkerware, which is the sort of broad name for the category of software that Robert's been talking about.
And we are talking about someone who hacked one hacked one well a stalkerware stalker yeah the person who hacked one of the stalkerware companies my arson crime you the famed hacker of the no fly list uh yeah returning guest always happy to have you on yeah always happy to be on yeah so i i think i think i don't know i i think there's there's a real tendency among and i see this among leftists a lot for kind of good reasons and kind of not good reasons to really only focus on state and like large corporate actors in terms of surveillance and that's a mistake yeah totally yeah and so I

I and large corporate actors in terms of surveillance. And that's a mistake.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, and so I guess the place where I want to start, before we get into the specific company that you...
Is it still called Owned? It's fine to call it Owned or Pond or whatever. I still do that.
Sometimes people get confused, but yeah.

Yeah.

But before we get into that,

I want to,

I want to ask you a bit,

cause you've done a lot of sort of,

I guess you could call it research,

both actual research wise.

And then in terms of poking around their servers,

research and trend realism and whatever you want to call it.

Yeah.

Hacks.

Yeah. Yeah.
So I, I wanted to just start off by asking if you can give sort of like a brief summary of what stalkerware is yeah so so so stalkerware like as a category encompasses like a number of different types of apps most of them like on the surface advertise themselves as like parental control software which is already bad enough, just to be clear. That is advertised for spying on your children's phone, seeing their location in real time, seeing their messages that they receive, any photo they take.
Ostensibly, this is to prevent bullying and help with them when they get depressed because they don't trust you and talk to you for whatever reason. But obviously a lot of these are then furthermore because that's like, sure, that's a target audience.
That's a demographic you can advertise to. But then there's this even bigger potential target demographic of people who are insecure in their relationship, mostly men, not only men, but who then solve this idea that they can use software like this for stalking their partner for finding out if they are cheating on you things like that which is obviously an even bigger problem which once again not to discount the problems for that spying on your children is already like bad enough but yeah this lead this leads to this whole like big industry of these apps being used um by partners against each other like also just by people like against anyone in the in their surroundings that they suspect might be doing something shady might be like talking behind their backs it often kind of turns into like it obviously turns into this obsessive thing especially if you solve this idea that this this app can magically solve like interpersonal issues like with anything that sells you this magic idea of being able to solve any problem that these people start kind of spying on everyone in their like circles um to some of them like not everyone most like a lot of people only spy on like their partner or like their child or whatever but it often like spirals out of control this, like controlling everyone and their surroundings, knowing what everyone is up to, where they are, and spending like hundreds of dollars a month on doing so.
And yeah, that's pretty fucked up, if you ask me. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things that's interesting, too, it's also in a lot of cases illegal.
This is going to vary, you know, from country to country and state to state. But in u.s there are states like california which gets pointed out in the very good tech crunch investigation on truth spy where there are really strict laws that journalists like have to abide by as to when you can record someone that these these apps absolutely break yes it's specifically a thing that doesn't most of these apps will have like a disclaimer at the bottom that is, this might be illegal in your jurisdiction.
And please ask for consent before doing this. And then they have lots of tutorials on how to install this on someone's device without their consent.
Yeah. It's like always like, hey, we do not take any, like, it's not our fault if you break the law, basically.
Which obviously, like, it's so far, not a lot of this has been challenged in court. but i don't think this would hold up too long like i'm not a lawyer but uh i don't think just saying we make a product to do crimes with if you do crimes with it it's not i mean it works for the gun industry so yeah the difference is that like the with the gun industry it's a product where there is a legal and an illegal, like, clear way to do it.

The thing with stalkerware as well is that, like, a lot of them will also explicitly say the only real use of this we allow you to use it for is to surveil your child, which unfortunately is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of their parents. In quotes, because I do not agree with that.
Yeah, it's one of those things where people using it, like someone installing an app on

their exes or their partner's phone or whatever, without consent, could very easily would lose

any court case.

Whether or not the company would get in trouble, I think is going to rely a lot on the stuff,

the videos they're posting about like how to put how to get these apps on people's phones without them knowing but like they do have that out with like no it's just for surveilling children which is great and for anyone else you need consent or whatever but i think it is important yeah to point this out very early for anyone who's listening to this because they think they might have stalkerware on their phones or because they know they have stalkerware on their phones you can use this in a domestic abuse case this will immediate this is explicit proof that abuse is happening no matter anything else because like that's the thing generally with domestic abuse cases it's really hard to prove abuse is happening stalkerware and any other type of spying device like also physical gps device trackers and stuff that is immediate proof that there is a that there's controlling behavior going on uh that you are being spied on this cannot only be used and there's explicit admissible evidence uh this is also usually like makes cases worse like not not for you like it just yeah it it like can potentially add charges and make it more serious and it can help making cops give a shit about like abuse which yeah i hate that i need to say that but yeah it's like it makes it more serious because yeah there's like spyware and whatever it's easy evidence first off like you can prove they're spying on you and second if you are in one of the states where that violates the law then you can immediately say this person is breaking the law like we this is we don't have to debate whether or not they've they've crossed a line yeah and even if it doesn't directly break the law to spy on someone on a partner like it depending on the on the region it can be kind of a hazy like thing especially if it's a device you might co-own if it's like a state where you where you with like-possession or whatever in the u.s i do not know u.s law very much around this but yeah there's like laws like that but usually still the fact that you're being spied on can be used as proof for other abuse things you might be alleging because it's like hard proof that something is happening and also usually these companies will somewhat have to respond to sapoina so they will have to give out like who the account owner is behind like the spying on your phone for some of them we can also there's also tools that help you find out who is spying on you or there's like someone with forensic background can help yeah and i i think people uh one thing we should note is that if you're kind of curious has my my device been infected by some of these tools? The one that we've been talking about most, Truth Spy, if you go to that TechCrunch article. Or to my article, it also has a link.
Or to your article on your website. There's a tool you can use where it'll tell you how to get your IMSI, I think.
IMII, yeah. Which you just dial a thing on your phone and it gives you that number.
It's basically how you identify specific phones and you plug that in. It will let you know if your device has been compromised.
Now, like December last year, up until there is the data. And if you, yeah, it can pretty much tell you if you've been spying on using this specific tool until then for other stuff there's also guides usually on tech crunch and otherwise also on yeah stop stalkerware.org which is the u.s coalition against stalkerware and also just generally uh i think a lot of like more local uh anti-stalking anti-abuse orgs are not as informed yet as they should be but there's still a good like point also to

reach out to or like yeah yeah now one of my questions about truth spy that i'm hoping you

can answer is i i know that um you can like text messages get transferred via it like your call

records all that kind of stuff get and who you were calling does that include messages for like

encrypted apps like signal or is that not accessible through this it depends like for some

for some of these it will like get signal for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal

for some of these it will like get signal signal

for some of these it will like get signal signal

for some of these it it will get Signal messages, WhatsApp messages and everything generally by reading the notification content. Because from notifications, you know what messages have been received.
Sometimes it will only then have to receive messages and not the sent messages. Often these also include like a keylogger component that maps messages then send back as well.
It depends a lot what these apps collect. But for most of them, also the collection for other texting apps is usually kind of broken.
None of these apps are really well maintained. They're mostly just quick cash grabs.
The harder to maintain features usually don't really work. And it seems like based on that, one thing people can do outside of checking to see if their device has been compromised is do stuff like turn off notifications for apps like Signal, right? And that's actually just generally good advice.
Notifications are a compromise of the security that Signal that signal offers don't have them enabled you know yeah and or at the very least disable them on the lock screen on android yeah i don't know how if that i think that's also possible on ios but i think is doesn't show message content on the lock screen anyways i'm not sure anymore uh but yeah it's just also small things like that and also like one of the like key tells that someone probably tampered with your phone, especially for Android, is if Google Play Protect is disabled and you do not remember disabling it for something else, it was almost definitely disabled because someone installed something on your phone. Just try re-enabling it and it will probably tell you something.
The thing also to keep in mind, if you find stalkerware on your phone, please get professional help. Do not just delete it.
Do not necessarily confront whoever you think might be your abuser about it, unless you're very sure that that's the situation you can handle. Because that is one of those things that bringing it up or just deleting it can very quickly lead to complicating the situation a lot.
You know what else complicates the situation? These ads. And we are back.
So when it comes to the actual fight against this stuff obviously what you're doing is a big part of it getting inside these companies and um finding out like what they're doing and their capabilities is is huge for in terms of like what regular people or people who are interested in becoming activists about this can do. What is the struggle to actually fight this stuff look like?

Like, how do we put a bullet in this industry's head?

I think one of the biggest things and also like why I do the work I do with like hacking

it, with encouraging others to like send me data, be that insiders from these companies,

sending it either to me or like TechCrunch specifically currently, because like me and

TechCrunch are like the only people really doing like journalism on this like regularly uh uh and the important thing with like journalism and all of this is like awareness it's very important to create awareness about this that's also why i do the media work with like being on this podcast and things like that uh i think the most important thing is to make people aware like talk about this in your feminist circles or whatever uh things like that especially bring it up just also in like general info things about abuse or how to detect abuse i think the most important thing to do against stalkerware is demystify it because most people don't even know that this is a thing that this is like that there's just commercially available spyware that anyone can install on your phone it's just important to not like give in to some sort of paranoia as with any of these things it's just important to like yeah generate awareness talk about it send like spread these articles um and let friends know that this is a potential thing and then yeah i i the hard thing with this is that like obviously it should should will probably help if there was some sort of legislation against some of this it's going to be very hard to get any proper legislation that ends this industry because in most western countries which are the only countries which unfortunately would have enough power to like actually get these apps shut down because that's the world we live in but But the problem there is usually that this notion that children are owned by their parents is too strong to really make a full case against these apps. And at the very best I'm hoping for from legislators is just a ban on advertising these apps on use against other adults which would be big already but that's yeah doesn't really solve the issue because there's still going to be enough people who know of their use for use against adults and there's going to be enough people on like reddit threads talking about hey well yeah you oh you're not sure if your government is cheating on you you can just use this app you know that's also how most of this marketing for this works it's just yeah at the end of the day this is like a patriarchal issue so yeah i i think that's also why like i am so focused on like the hacking and they're like blowing these companies up and showing like who's behind them it's because at the end of the day the most effective thing we have against these companies is like the grassroots movement of making them too scared to run in this business making it not profitable enough because as i said most of this is like quick cash grabs from like web design studios uh and outsourcing companies yeah that are just making a quick buck from this because otherwise they don't get paid enough like that's the sad thing really is how much of this industry is in uh all of these countries uh western companies outsource their it to uh because there's lots of it companies there and they are entirely reliant on like western companies giving them very underpaid tasks and you have this problem that you now have a bunch of employees and not enough money to always pay them.

And what do you do?

You find some weird niche of a tech product you can quickly build. Yeah.
And this is one of those easy niches. It's always the scummy stuff.
That's also why so many of these companies are based out of Vietnam, out of Iran and whatever. It's just companies that already have it hard enough to do business globally where the it industry is like falling apart because there's not enough like local customers and anything that's international you're just the cheap workforce right so yeah it's it's it's once again also like a class problem i don't like most people working in this industry know that they're working in a like scummy industry yeah of course but like yeah you gotta get paid and that's yeah and that's like why i think making it more scary to operate in this industry is like yes the way to go because like with just like these like four hacks that have happened against these companies over the last like half a year or so two of them three of them three of them have shut down completely others seem to be slowly moving towards just building other software primarily yeah it's just like yeah it's it's it's like with any other like shady industry that the best we can do is just to not make it profitable to run the software because at the very best, anything else we would get is just pushing them more into the shadows, which is not going to solve the issue at all.
Yeah, I think a lot about like strategic thinking, which I do believe is kind of often in part because of how rightfully negative most people on the left think about the military. There's a tendency to ignore some of like the theory around how to actually win a conflict.
And all of it, all strategy, really, when you're talking about like defeating an opponent revolves around denying and taking operational area from them, right? And that's what you're talking about when you talk about, well, we need to stop this. One of the first things we can do as part of fighting this is to stop them from being able to advertise certain places, right? And that's what you're talking about.
When you talk about, well, we need to stop this, you know, one of the first things we can do as part of fighting this is to stop them from being able to advertise certain places, right? It's making sure that they're not able to operate without being seen. It's basically cutting down their area, their space to maneuver, their ability to profit, which cuts down their money, their access to people, their ability to actually like operate, right? Like that's what we're looking at in terms of how do you kill this stuff? It's not one single, really.
I use the comparison of like a bullet, but it's never going to be one bullet. These things are too durable.
There's too many countries at play to do that. Yeah.
That's also why I like put so much emphasis on doing media work about this and getting more people to talk about this and, and getting more awareness of this out there, to the point where I'm willing to work with more conservative newspapers on this, because everyone needs to know about this at the end of the day. This is how we stop people from falling victims to this.
Most people who are a victim of stalkerware apps have never heard of stalkerware apps before. And I think that's one of the biggest ways to tackle this.
And on the other hand, we also have, I think, another big leverage point with how many of these are getting hacked, because none of these apps are very secure. That's another thing.
This can also be leveraged against the abusers in this scenario. I think just pointing out to them that all of these apps get hacked all the time, and that this is how they get found out that this is how their data of them as abusers ends up landing on the internet i think that's also like a very important angle at the end of the day it's just to make it clear like yeah no not even you are like secure from this having consequences for your life like beyond like direct interpersonal or legal consequences this can and in the past has result in like your email address being on a list of people who do abuse to people online.
You don't want to be on such a list. I think that's also important just to like point out there isn't one stalker app that's not eventually going to get hacked.
There is a big war against these apps. They're so many different hacking groups that keep sending me data from these.
I'm already working on another article that already, once again, affects the data of, I think, 80,000 more abusers. And it's just the abuser data this time, but I'm still going to report on it.
This is not going to stop uh it's even also not going to stop when i stop reporting on this myself like i've there's been work before me down on this i i also the first time i got involved in finding stalkerware was back in 2020 people have been hacking these apps forever and will keep hacking them like just look at the wikipedia page for stalkerware uh there's an ever-growing list of these apps that have been hacked and i think at this point the like official count being kept by one of the people at tech crunch is that like 13 apps uh a few of which have been hacked two or three times yeah these are not these are not secure apps for No, no, no, of course not they uh yeah i mean it it makes sense that like an app dedicated to violating people's privacy for money would also basically violate the privacy of the people using it yeah and also they don't care like like i said it's a it's a cash grab it's nothing else uh there's a few apps that are like a little more than a cash grab but it's usually just because they're made like they're still a cash grab but they're like more well made but it's because they're a cash grab from a company that has better developers or more money to do the initial investment the thing is also like most of these companies don't have a lot of initial investment and i think the important thing to consider as well here is um one big area of this that i have not yet started tackling but i do want to like look into more sometime is um a big reason this industry is so big and most of these apps have a lot of users despite there being so many of them is uh the affiliate marketing industry once again our very beloved friend yeah all of these apps are parts of various affiliate marketing networks some of them started by stalker where company some of them just other like things to advertise all the shady things like all those phone number locator apps or whatever that's also part of those same affiliate marketing networks. And there's lots of money flowing here,

and there's lots of money flowing to very big tech YouTube channels.

And I might soon have some proof for some of that,

but that's how these are advertised.

It's everyone who advertises stalkerware to you who has a big platform

is doing that because they're getting money, not for any other reason.

We need to do more ads.

We will be back shortly. And we are back.
Well, that's all I had, Mia. What do you got? Yeah, I guess there's another thing I wanted to ask a little bit about, which Zach Whitaker, who's been one of the journalists at TechCrunch doing a lot of the research on this.
One of the things that he brings up that I think is another, I don't know, it's kind of a playing with fire angle on them. But one of the issues that these companies seem to have is payment platforms because a lot of payment platforms look at this and go wait hold on yeah so yeah i was going to talk about that a little bit that's an angle we've also been fighting on a lot like me and we work on most of these stories together like i it's kind of funny we both got each other into the stalkerwer thing back in 2020 as i mentioned that was the first time i stumbled into a stalkerware app with a security issue i reached out to some random journalist at tech crunch about it and now he is the only one talking about this forever because i reached out to him that one time and he got sucked into this horrible horrible world of uh spying but yeah like one of the things we focus on a lot is uh reporting these companies to their payment providers to their server hosters to the point where sometimes like for weeks sac will just wait for them to switch to a new provider after we got them taken out from like paypal and then from their other paypal account where they're just using like the checkout experience from one of their completely unrelated software projects which they will later claim is not related at all and there are different companies and whatever but then like eventually they get taken down from that as well and usually we can get them taken on from most like western hosters like especially us hosters will immediately take them down you do not want to risk being the company hosting spyware on u.s grounds yeah yeah you just like same with eu host there's like uh the few companies that we've seen that were on

heads nerd they immediately react because it's like yeah no like under eu law you don't want to

like risk that and also just because you don't want to host that like there's no reason for you

to host shit like that uh it will have like image consequences and that's an important thing that is

Thank you. because you don't want to host that.
There's no reason for you to host shit like that. It will have image consequences.
And that's an important thing that is maybe also something you can do as more like a grassroots thing. It's also like if you find one of these apps, and if you see, oh, they're using PayPal or whatever, just reach out.
I think PayPal is even harder to reach as just an average layperson. Don't expect them to reply.
They might still take action. You will have to manually check.
PayPal doesn't really reply to things ever. But yeah, same as with hosting company.
If you see they're hosted on a European or American hosting company, just reach out. Be like, hey, there's someone running spyware on your thing.
Also use the word spyware, not stalker, where they will not know what that is and it is spyware so yeah and that can usually get them taken down and often they don't have proper backups and will have a few months of data missing and it's like yeah that's how you slowly grind them to a halt yeah and also once again like if you have tips about any of these be it having found a vulnerability, just or insider info, especially I'm always very happy about insider info. You can reach out to either me or Zach Whitaker.
We're both very happy to talk about this. Yeah.
yeah that's something that's been used really effectively by right-wingers to target sex workers it's been a huge thing there's been a bunch of campaigns to get platform companies and

yeah so it's interesting that for once we can use the very restrictive and conservative rules of payment providers for our good yeah but yeah basically any of the big payment providers will not respect something like this some of the like small regional odd ones probably won't really give a shit. They have no reason to.
It's like revenue for them. But yeah, it's generally worth trying.
And I'm always glad if someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't have to do that ourselves. I think me and Zach and a few other people actively working in this are doing more than enough work currently.
But yeah like just if you find one of these things don't go digging too deep it's a depressing world but if you stumble upon one of these somewhere or whatever uh just just report them it's it's it's going to disrupt their operations and if it happens often enough they might just give up yeah and i mean like in in cases like like the truth spy they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to um to to get to money easily because they like started with like mostly just in like with the market they could get with their vietnamese payment providers right eventually they realized well the us is like this really big market right but for really easy like us stuff we need like a paypal thing right so they made like over 12 fake american identities with fake passports and fake addresses and sign up to paypal a whole bunch of times and had various employees at the company move money around yeah that's um obviously uh not a thing the us government will like if you do that uh generally speaking uh they moved like millions like that so yeah which is pretty crazy like that the money the amount of money that's moving in this industry is crazy like yeah actually like most of these app apps will be half broken which no one ever complains about because like it's shady like you you don't expect, if you go online and you search for something shady, like anything, be it piracy or whatever, you don't expect it to be the best experience ever. You know you're getting some weird service and it's probably going to be half broken.
But yeah, most of these talk-over apps start at like $40 a month and more. And then sometimes for more features, you pay up to $60 or $ or 70 or so and then all of these have like tens of thousands of users sometimes hundreds of thousands of users yeah you can you can do the math yourself it's crazy this is a really big industry which makes it so crazy to me that it's like not a thing that's talked about more especially in like feminist spaces and things like that because this is such a like big angle of like modern tech enabled abuse that i yeah really think should should be more of a topic yeah especially on the left like this is this is bad yeah no this is like critically bad i agree entirely and also like that the whole thing with like all of this data being so easily, your data can end up getting sold on some dark web forum.

You're both as the abuser and as the target, right? And the government can find these. This is not me making a statement of that's a thing that's happening.
But there's nothing preventing the government from hacking these companies and getting shit. Yeah.
Like, I sometimes, like, whenever I get these data sets, and it's always hard to work with

data sets that include, non-consensually collected data of people right yes but like i do always like do some due diligence checks like mostly trying to find if the government is using a specific app sometimes yes there is always like the odd correction law facility officer who has signed up for one or two of these apps or like education people and whatever. But then I also sometimes search through the text messages for just some code words and the amount of people moving drugs have stalkerware on their phones.
It's, you know. Yeah.
And it's one of those things where there are laws like technically, if I if my understanding of the laws around this are correct, it is illegal for an organization like the FBI to utilize these apps. But...
Yes, but we have an organization called the NSA who... And it is it is on paper illegal for them to do this with a third party app.
But one thing that often gets done, particularly by the FBI, but not just by them, is it's not illegal for law enforcement agencies to contract with private agencies. And if those agencies, you just don't check in on what they're doing.
You know what they're using. But like, yeah.
Or like if an informant like sends you this data like you're not gonna say no right exactly exactly and also you don't really need to disclose that because it's information coming up from an informant you do not need to disclose that informant in court ever so yeah it's like it's it's very there are there are ways around you know the laws that we put up not that we shouldn't continue to extend those laws but you shouldn't like just because well you're they're not allowed to use this doesn't mean they can't get access to the info yeah yeah and also there's all this important thing like there's like also globally like there's other governments that can't just be using this like for one of the apps i got the indian government the russian government don't give a shit like another thing where i like for one of the apps i got data for there was some indication that at some point the colombian national police did a bigger evaluation of using uh commercials spyware for their use because you're in a country with not that big of a like police budget in comparison you cannot afford like all the cool israeli tools everyone else has so what do you do you just look for random apps you can find you know yeah you you find the walmart the kirkland version the wish.com version i guess yeah yeah yeah alibaba spyware right yeah i don't think most of them moved forward with this because these apps fucking suck like they're bad like that's that's the other thing like they don't even really do their job well they're bad and you don't know who is behind them you cannot even go up to someone and be like yo don't do this you also cannot go to the cops and be like this company is scamming me because yeah i assume some people have probably done that before but uh it does involve admitting to a crime so yeah it's like yeah these companies just get away with not giving a shit about their product because like yeah yeah well i think that's that's all we had thank you maya for both the work you're doing and for talking to us yeah is there anything you wanted to plug before we uh we roll out here just my just my blog i think where like i do this journalistic work and also more there's about to be another cool investigative piece out soon which tangentially involves more tracking and whatever uh and also involves like hollywood and more it's it's it's it's a crazy big story uh i i promise uh that will be out like hopefully in a month or so uh but yeah my blog at maya.crimeu.gay, crimeu as in crime W, yeah, and gay as in gay. Yeah.
Yeah, just check out my blog. At the bottom of the blog, there's all my links to my social media.
For anyone who's like listening to this and has been wondering where I am I am back on Twitter as well yeah

for now for now

that's for all of us these days

that's always like a for now

but yeah I am back on Twitter

I'm posting there sometimes

yeah

alright well

thank you and thank you all for listening

we will be back tomorrow

unless this comes out on a Friday,

in which case we'll be back at some other point, but soon.

I'm out. oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh if robert can do his atonal streaks then i can sing off key yo i'm back homie all up in your feed watch these rap just get all up in your feed that's a wu-tang reference again to the black delegation shout out y'all showing up on the uh in the subreddit you feel me black folks showing up and showing out i appreciate y'all i was wrong it's more than five of us i shout out to you man i love y'all thanks for showing up and shout out all the Latinos who tapped into, ándale pues.
Hey, con todo mi gente.

Ven acá.

Buen valido. I love y'all.
Thanks for showing up. And shout out all the Latinos who tapped in too.
Andale pues. Hey, con todo mi gente.

Ven acá.

Buen valido.

Listen, we got to really invite our Latino brothers and sisters, our tios and tías,

and also our Asian black people, the Pinoys and Pinais, our Ateis and Cuias.

You're all a part of our delegation here.

All of our Usos.

We love y'all. The whole diaspora of people who season they chicken and wash they legs i love y'all and to this whole delegation once we add it all together there's about 20 of us to you i say y'all want something from the gas station i've got you so today i don't want to ruin your breakfast i don't want to ruin your coffee I'm just going to ruin your music this is about the death of the music festival it already happened here all right now y'all know I'll be playing I'm playing about all this like I'm only talking to the melanated folks y'all y'all know I'm playing right I mean this is why like while I slowly wink at brown folk.
I'm just playing. I'm sorry.
I'm messing around. It's a cold opening.
You know, you guys got a great sense of humor here. All right, let's get to it.
Festivals, like, am I right? You know, if you're anywhere within a five to 10 mile radius of my age, I mean, festivals is like, these are like a rite of passage. You know, I am not only a festival goer, but a festival performer.
And as an artist, it was like, festivals were kind of in a lot of ways how I marked the years. There were people that I really only saw like once a year when I was at that festival, whether it was other acts, other bands, or even a lot of times the volunteers or the people that like put the event together, like believe it or not, you kind of make friends, you know? And again, these are people you're like, dang, I can't believe I was a whole year, you know? And it is a good way to make sure as an artist that you were making new music and had something new to perform.
Oh, and make sure you had some new merch because, you know, if you played your cards right, if you've listened to my show, I've talked a lot about like, you know, the science of festivals and as a performer of like, this could either be a complete waste of time and money if you're on at like the main stage at like 12 noon when it's like a trillion degrees outside, you know, but if you can get that right as the sunset, like if you're not the headliner, if you could get that right at sunset, right where the sun just breaks the horizon line coming down that that golden hour set, the crowd isn't shit faced yet. You know, they're at the top of their molly.
You feel you riding the high. It is just settled in whatever drugs that these people are on, they've kind of just settled in right there.
They're relaxed. They're willing to sing along.
Nobody's getting trampled yet. It's not like the frenzy that kind of happens at the headliner situation where like, somebody might die.
Shout out Astroworld. I say that not as a joke.
I'm saying things can go wrong. But oh, the experience, man.
I don't know how old you are, and obviously you can't answer me. Do you remember the last big festival you went to? Back when your knees were good, and it was okay for you to stand for 12 hours? And there's somebody having sexual intercourse in the port-a-potty.
You're stepping over barf, right? And you just paid $30 for a bottle of water, you know, that you could stuff into your clear backpack because you weren't allowed to bring anything else in there. But man, that's probably a euphoria, especially if it's a group or a band that you really like that you saved up all year to go see.
You know, some people were like festival hoppers, like that's their thing. They spend their summer going to music festivals.
Since 2012 up to 2014, the music fest has been, guys, we've kind of been on borrowed time. We lived through a music festival renaissance.
According to NPR, since 2013, everything sold out. The four mega giants, right? So Coachello, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Austin City Limits, Music Festival in Texas.
It was like this never ending flow of amazing, amazing events. And you know what? They were kind of affordable.
In the next five years, you had things taken forth like Pitchfork in Chicago, Hangout Music Festival on the beach in the Gulf Shores, Outside Lands, Bali Music, Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Festival, Four Castle Festival, right? And I'm even going to add in this before all this for hip hop stuff, dude, we had Rock the Bells. Like we lived in a time where you could see all of your favorite artists in the most epic locations.
You'd see people who, if you were to try to buy their tour ticket, it would cost the same amount if they were headlining the thing, but you could see all your favorite acts. Part of this was because we listened to radio.
You were exposed to more things. And it was probably the fun part about a lot of times about music festivals because you probably saw that act your favorite band your favorite rapper you saw them at a hole in the wall five years ago which was like 10 bucks to get in and you might have snuck in or got on the list because you knew somebody that knew the DJ and now you're like I followed this crew from when they were like playing a hole in a wall with 10 people where there was more staff at the bar than on this.
And now you're like, dude, you feel like you were a part of their evolution. Like you saw Chance at the subterranean.
Now he's headlining Bonnaroo. What a feeling.
You're a part of the story. Well, that's probably a relic of the past.
And let's talk about it. So festivals for most of the last decade have been everywhere.
Like whatever type of music you like, whatever sub-genre, whatever part of the world you want to go to, there's a music festival that you can show up at. Now, in 2024, more than half of them across the world were canceled.
I lost count on this page I'm about to read to y'all From musicfestivalwizard.com Festivals canceled so far in 2024 Okay, you ready for this? Shindig 2024, Melt 2024, Sideways Festival Nas Stock, Field Maneuvers Tower Z, The Quintentin, Big Slap Electric Zoo, Peach 2024 All the music The Music Festival, Life Is Beautiful Festival, Country Thunder, Florida, Suwanee Roots Festival, EDC China, Lucidity Festival in Santa Barbara, Desert Days in Lake Paris, Pine Fest in the UK, Good Vibes Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Boonville, El Dorado Music Festival in the UK, Sudden Little Thrills in Pittsburgh, Big Ridge Rock Fest in Virginia, Lollapalooza Paris, Music Midtown Atlanta, Lovers and Friends Fest in Las Vegas, which I was really sad about, Riverside Festival Glasgow in where? Glasgow, Soul Bloom, Sacramento, TW Classic 2024 in Belgium. Calamijas in Calamijas, Spain.
Caldor Music Festival in Queensland. Made in America Festival, Philadelphia.
Oblivion Access, Austin, Texas. Meadows in the Mountains 2024 in Bulgaria.
Imagine Festival in Rome, Georgia. Splendor on the Grass in Byronron Boy, Australia, Body and Soul Festival, in Ireland, Moon Rose Festival.
I'm tired of, I'm not even done yet. I'm not even halfway through this thing.
Festivals died in 2024. Digital News reports that 60 festivals in the UK alone canceled.
Ashley King wrote this article on August 23rd, 2024 for Digital Music News. And in that, she says the United Kingdom has lost 192 music festivals since 2019, according to the Association of Independent Festivals, the AIF, which is a not-for-profit trade festival association that represents the interests of over 200 independent UK music festivals that range from 500 to 80,000 people.
The AIF estimates that the UK lost 96 events during the COVID pandemic, 36 festivals, and in 2023, more than 60 to date in 2024. That brings the total number of festival closures, either due to cancellation or postponement, up to 192 since 2019.
192 festivals. Some may argue that, well, damn, you shouldn't have had that many festivals.
Coachella, Lollapalooza, and of course, the infamous Burning Man with the most on-brand people that go that call themselves burners.

Now, I don't want to sit here and make fun of you burners because I'm pretty sure a lot of y'all

listen to this show, number one. And number two, I don't know if there's anybody more free,

anybody more comfortable in their own skin. Listen, this might sound like a joke, okay?

I'm dead serious. It's like the white guy with dreadlocks.
I mean, white people with dreads are

I don dead serious. It's like the white guy with dreadlocks.
I mean, white people with dreads are just most of the time. Okay.
Like this may sound like a joke. I'm deadly serious.
They be so okay with themselves and we'll do whatever they got to do to continue to stay present and be cool with themselves. And no notes.
It's the guy doing hypostatic breath work, freestyling for way too long in the didgeridoo section. You know what I'm saying? Like, like he's super okay with himself.
Anyway, Burning Man for the first time since 2011 did not sell out for the first time. And the tickets are usually released in tiers and some go on sale in the beginning of the year.
And then this part I'm getting from the Guardian. But the main starting in April, right, which typically gets snapped up in minutes.
Like Burning Man sells out in minutes. 73,000 people are able to attend Burning Man.
But this is the first time since 2011, they did not sell out. Coachella, same.
They saw a 15% decline in tickets. It's the biggest festival in North America.
Coachella is. 15% ticket decline.
Festivals were a way for you to discover new music, to meet new friends. It's like camp for your 20s.
You get to wear your dumb ass outfits. You get to stand out in the sun you get to drink you get to day drink and you get to just lose your mind for a little bit this might be the end the inling you may have attended your last music festival as we know it so the question is why who killed music festival? Why is the festival not festiving?

Why is it not festive?

Why can't y'all sell no tickets?

Do we not like music anymore?

Do you like music still?

I thought I still like, do you like music still?

What the hell happening, y'all? Oh, oh, oh, oh, back, back, back. To understand the future as to what the hell happened, we have to ask ourselves how we even got here.
Such a nerd I am. I don't think I need to tell you what a music festival is because, I mean, I think you know what it is.
It's an incredibly overpriced concert that features maybe four groups that you like, where you are going to stand outdoors somewhere, brave the weather, day drink, and then get to lose your mind for the last like three hours and just really enjoy, you know, a moment that you'll really never forget. Depending on how nasty and ratchet you are, how outside you are, you might look up.
You know what I'm saying? I don't look. It's none of my business.
I suggest you don't. That's just me being an old head.
But either way, man, they're a great time. But please understand that festivals, music festivals go like back to get this 582 B.C., at least according to white people's history, because, you know, silly you, nothing happened anywhere else except for Europe.
There was no music festivals in Africa, Central, South America, Asia, nowhere else. History started in Greece.
We were too busy building pyramids, right? Anyway, I'm going to lead out. Oh, but I'd be cracking me up.
They'd be like the first music festival on record in ancient Greece during the Pythion Games, which is fine. It's fine.
It's fine. But understand, ain't no way in the world this is the only one that ever happened.
Anyway, so 582 BC, right? And like the Olympic Games, the Pythion Games took place every four years and included poetry, reading a speech, and other musical game-like competitions. People gathered to enjoy hymns and instruments, instrumental performances at the Apollo.
At the Apollo, I'm so black. Dedicated to Apollo, which was the god of arts and music.
Now, fast forward to the 17th century where you have classical music festivals and the type of exclusivity, right? Where in the 17th century, when classical music just basically ate Europe. And music festivals originally were supposed to be a gathering where people could like what you think, gather and celebrate music.
However, here's where it starts coming into focus. The wealth gap was widening across Europe.
So festivals gradually became kind of like how they are where they're a little bit exclusive, catering primarily to more higher educated, upper class. And the shift became apparent as events became more exclusive and had increasingly restricted access.
This is from ndlbeast.com. They have a whole section on the history of music festivals.
One could argue this prototype of the VIP section, where you can get the pit tickets or you could stand outside with the pours and just listen from the outside.

So this trend kind of continued for centuries where like elite class, I think, almost like was the beginning of the breaking of music in general. They would control the access to culture.
I have a friend that wrote a book called Don't Be Precious. Now, me and this friend differ in a lot of ways, but he's just a punk rock dude.

And his approach to making art is like, you can't have this like restricting access, right? Because it becomes this just like upper class. art is this creation of the leisure class because one they have the patron to pay for them to be

able to sit down and contemplate the stars like you got all precious about it you feel me so some of that has to do with again the wealth gap so when you restrict access to hearing music it draws deeper into the divides between like the educated upper class and then the traveling folk musicians who performed for the commoners. And that's like the stuff you see on, you know, corny little movies.
Then the world wars come. Right.
And there's like a music revival. Right.
So when the first world war broke out, obviously change of lifestyle, meaning everything went to like, you know, war effort. So this is a really interesting quote.
It says on the same MDL Beast, as society focused on wartime efforts and staying safe, the exclusivity of music festivals to the upper class disappeared. In a turn of events, the working class population was now turning to music more than ever.
Jazz and folk emerged as popular genres, right? To avoid the scrutiny of the elite, groups of musicians with similar tastes would gather in dive bars and underground clubs. By the time the war had ended, jazz cemented itself as the genre of the era.
So now we're talking a Harlem Renaissance, juke joints, and the emergence of like, again, this where black people come in. A lot of times the role that just the all out anti-black racism has unintentionally, because of it, created some of the most dopest things, some of the most dopest American experiences.
Well, I just read up on how with HBCUs, which are historic black colleges, that now white people trying to attend them. Because they like, your school of fun.
Well, because we wasn't allowed in yours. Anyway, so let me continue.
So World War Two played a pivotal role in creating the Newport Folk Festival organized by Lewis and Elaine Loryland. A couple met during World War Two and came together to revolutionize Rhode Island's music artistic community by promoting jazz.
With the foundation in jazz and blues and country and pop music, they expanded to attract over 11,000 people in 1954. Then the 60s, the birth of the Modern Music Festival, right? Obviously, Woodstock, which was the invention Monterey International Pop Music Festival.
This is the rock festival as we know it. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who.
It was the place to be a cultural experience as we know it again is that. Then you got like the Berlin Wall and the music revolution.
This is where festivals become political and cultural. They become a statement.
And a big one was in the 90s when they did the Berlin Wall Tearing Down Music Festival, which was an amazing thing, right? Where underground stations, power plants, World War II bunkers, and abandoned buildings all started to serve as makeshift concert halls. This is why Europe became such a place for music festivals.
It became a sign of freedom and solidarity. And then the music festival took a shit.
They just died in the 90s after this. All can be explained in when they tried to redo Woodstock.

Just a shit show with like Limp Bizkit and all them.

You a shit show.

There's a documentary on Netflix about the absolute disaster that that new Woodstock was.

Y'all, I'm talking like y'all thought Astroworld was bad where them kids was raging so much and people die you talking about understaff y'all think Fyre Fest was a disaster my nigga well nah I don't think anything was worse than Fyre Fest so far good thing it didn't happen like y'all remember Fyre Fest oh lord honestly I can't believe made it almost 20 minutes into this and then mentioned Fyre Fest. Because it is the perfect example of what went wrong in the music festival world.
Because, like I said, this disaster in the 90s to 2000s, if you were able to survive, like I said earlier, like the Bonnaroo's, Coachella's, Austin City Limits, if you were able to survive Lollapalooza, then you came out the other end and became the go-to places, right? Telluride for folk music, you became the go-to places that if you were going to try to have a career as an artist, you have to play one of these festivals. No matter how much money you don't make at these things, you have to do it because this is where not only do you get the necessary cosign, you also get discovered.
Like as far as fans, like you make new fans, you sell merch. People walk away with a T-shirt.
You're on this T-shirt that says Bonnaroo 2021 and your name is on. So like, even if you're way down on the bottom, grab your little screenshots, take your little Instagram photos because now you're in the game and the game it was, which leads us to what went wrong because this was not only a money-making endeavor.
This was a money-making endeavor. In 2014, are y'all ready for this? I don't think you ready for this.
In the boom years, according to an analysis done by Finance Buzz, in 2014, general admission prices for major music festivals increased by 55%. That outpaced just inflation, period.
Y'all jacked up the price. So listen, so if you're Ja Rule headass, of course I'm gonna build a festival.
You're looking at Burning Man, you're looking at Bonnaroo, you're looking at all these things. You're like, bro, let's just get an island and make a festival.
There's so much money to be made. But you know what? Capitalism being capitalism.
It's gonna keep capitalizing. Let's talk about what killed the festival.
Oh, of things first of all yo ass for not going. I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. We're not blaming the victims here.
Some of these answers are pretty obvious, like again, you know, Astroworld, like, but Astroworld is just a good picture of everything that went wrong in the concept of a music festival. So the first problem is, yeah, capitalism.
Sometimes you are led to believe that what is will always be, right? That's what a stable economy lulls you into believing. But anybody that knows how money works, it's booms and busts.
The bubble will pop. And how a bubble pops is almost always our own fault

in this sense. The housing bubble, you know, of 2008 when your mama and them lost their house

because the reality was they shouldn't have never got that loan in the first place.

These people knew good and well that you was not able to keep up with that mortgage,

but we were selling too many houses. It was going going too good so the thing was for almost a you know almost a decade you couldn't make enough festivals the industry couldn't keep up with the demand and yo this the blog era this the two dough boys yeah pitchfork like this the blog era you know i'm saying what fader was like a thing that you would want to go through.
So like, it all kind of worked together around this time. Before all these spots got bought out, Hip Hop DX, like, all these pages got bought out.
Like I said before, it was like this boom in 2014 of a trillion festivals that started happening. Now, what happened was ticket prices.
That's the first one. we're making so much money, you realize, dang, if I charge 100, I bet you I could charge 200.
If I charge 200, I bet you I could charge 400. Because if you charge 400, then I could argue I'm getting bigger acts.
So in the boom years, according to this analysis by Finance Buzz, ticket prices since 2014 for most music festivals increased by 55%. Like that's super outpacing even inflation in the same time period.
This isn't like cost of living type shit, type beat. No.
Oh, I'm raping y'all. Do you know that Burning Man cost $575 to go to? If you was going, you was probably going to make some sort of like art installation to destroy.
You doing that on your own money, which meant what? Same thing happened in the 17th century. It just becomes a place for the elite because can't nobody else afford to go.
You know what else happened to a lot of festivals is corporations bought them. You know who bought Complex? BuzzFeed.
And you know who bought it from BuzzFeed? Network. N-T-W-R-K.
It's an investment firm. You know who owns the Pitchfork Festival? Condé Nast, a media company.
They bought the blog and folded it into GQ. It's just a corporation.
Capitalism. Capitalism broke the festivals.
Under the banner of capitalism, not so much the cost of the ticket and the soaring cost of living, it also costs too much to make the festival. According to John Roston, he's the CEO that AIF, the Independent Association of Festivals, he says the toilet hire, I just need to buy porta potties in 2021 was $28,000 for the exact same amount of toilets in 2024 is $54,000.
That's just the toilets. You know what happened at Astroworld? He ain't have enough security.
It costs so much. You honestly cannot afford to put together a festival that will be alluring enough to consumers to justify spending that much money.

So what do you get? A gang of corporate sponsors. And you know what a gang of corporate sponsors at

a music festival is? Whack. It's a horrible ass experience because you're just watching a gang of

commercials. Sometimes it just be labels who be putting on these artists that they trying to break

and then the artists be trash. They don't be trash because they trash.
They be trash because

This is... a gang of commercials.
Sometimes it just be labels who be putting on these artists that they trying to break and then the artists be trash. They don't be trash because they trash.
They be trash because they're not ready for this size stage. They ain't put in the work.
They didn't do the, you know, Gurney, Illinois experience that I think I've told before, what is the most terrifying experience I've ever had on tour. You don't have them experiences.
You ain't played shows when there's more people at the bar or there's more people that work there than come to see you. You're not ready for no festival stage.
So it's just not fun for the kids. So I'm not going to buy it.
You can't justify this price. If I'm going to spend that much money, I need to really, really, really, really like this band.
This need to be my favorite artist. I'm not going to stand around 12 hours, pay this much money to really only see one act I like.
That don't make no damn sense. And we'll talk about why they only like that one artist a little bit later.
So remember this point I'm making. The second and most obvious one is COVID, which leads into the third and fourth.
You had to cancel stuff. Nobody knew this was coming.
Like the L's companies took. I canceled a tour.
Not only I canceled a tour, I released a poetry book that I couldn't tour. I mean, I personally lost tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in touring revenue, in book sales, in merch sales, in all of it.
I lost so much because you just had to. And I'm still trying to get that money back.
A lot of festivals just have never been able to make their money back from what they lost. So there's not enough money now.
Obviously, when the pandemic ended, there was a lot of pent up energy to be like, I need to go outside. But that's because me and you didn't spend two years of our high school experience, our two first years of college stuck at home.
Remember, that's the time when you get the taste to go outside. When you start finding your drinking buddies, your outside friends, your music friends.
You have to remember those years, dude. Dude, those years are when you're discovering.
All research says is like your taste in music happens in those years, right? If I were to ask you what's your favorite area of music, most likely, it's not always, but most likely, it was like the music you listened to in 11th grade. It's probably your favorite era.
Whatever you was listening to then is probably still your favorite era. Now, obviously, that's not true for everybody.
But dang, if you were 17, you're discovering new music, you want to go to like the corner house of blues, right? You know, this is obviously, I'm California centric. You wanted to hit the glass house, man, because you just heard about this new band.
Little things like that, the Dragonfly, Whiskey A Go-Go, the Viper Room, all these like smaller spots that when for us out of LA, these were like rites of passage. This is how you get to say, I saw them win.
I knew who Will.i.am was from the Black Eyed Peas because I saw him at the Little Temple, which is now called the Virgil, when he did a beat battle. They were at the you know i'm saying and it was fun i knew false other people there in san diego you would just drive down like just at the gas lamp like leon bridges hell he opened for us you know i'm saying like again like we said in earlier these these bands that you was passionate about you was 17 with your little emo hair swooped over your eyes.
This who you was crying over. You understand what I'm saying? Like hugging onto your little iPad, you know, doing that doing that MySpace picture when you looking down.
You know, it's the white people thing like this is when you went to go see them. If that era for you was a pandemic, you didn't acquire a taste for going out like that.
You saw concerts inside of Fortnite. So what I'm saying is one of the biggest things about Gen Z is they don't go out.
It's just, it's just the reality. Not only do it, they ain't got no money.
They ain't got no money because again, inflation and finances, the cost of living is insane. But look it.
Gen Z don't drink like we used to drink. They do fewer drugs.
They have less sex. Part of that is because, one, they hella anxious and I don't blame them.
I'm looking at my daughter now and I'm like, I'm sorry, baby, you probably not going to buy no house ever. I don't even know when you're going to move out.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm not mad.
I ain't going to push you out of this house because where you going to go? You going to get seven roommates? I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry.
They do fewer drugs. They drink less.
That's it. And they don't go nowhere because one, they anxious as hell.
They nervous around being around that many people. And if they are going to go out, if you ask them, the number one thing they say is like I ain't got nobody to go with I mean I could go I ain't got nobody to go with Because you ain't got no friends You don't go nowhere Right I be looking at my own child like Why you here cuz Like don't you You don't go nowhere She's starting to now But listen You got to really really really really, really, really Want to see this person That you're going to see She bought Billie Eilish tickets In February The concert next month She decided if I'm gonna spend this money This one I'm gonna spend it on Right? Because it's worth her money She loves them She loves her She got the album She party.
She's like, this is who I'm going to go see. They don't look and see who's playing or just pull up at a dope music spot and just be like, oh, I wonder who's playing.
I'm going to discover new music. No, that don't happen.
You can't put on no festival if people ain't willing to come, which leads me to one of the other problems they did, which is the music industry itself. They shot themselves in the foot because the big dogs just like I said happened in the 1700s are doing fine if live nation and ticket master own every venue they only gonna put the artists that they won't own there it costs too much so they're like oh I don't understand what's going on with y'all festivals.
I know we doing all right. Because if you are an industry artist with the machine behind you, number one, you don't need a festival.
You booked a Greek theater yourself. Why would I allow myself as an artist for you to pay me? Guess who turned down Coachella next year? Rihanna and Kendrick.
Why would either of them play that when they know they can be the only artist and sell just as many tickets? Kendrick played Staples. I'm calling it Staples because I'm from L.A.
I know it's just a corporation. He played Staples four nights in a row where the Lakers play.
But that was after doing four nights at the Honda Center in Orange County. These are eight Southern California shows.
Sold them all out. Why the hell would I give that money to Coachella when I could do it myself? Live Nation already taking a huge-ass cut.
Ticketmaster already taking a huge-ass cut.. Scalpers already taking a huge ass cut.
There's no reason for me to give my time and my ticket draw to you when they can all go to myself. You did this to yourself, music industry, by locking out all the small venues.
You know what else the music industry did to itself? Streaming. The algorithm.
That also killed the festival. You know why? Because you're fed the same music.
Algorithm says you like this. You probably going to like that.
Which means, you know, we know all people be like music all sound the same because it does. Because the goal is to play music that feeds the algorithm.
You create music that gets your streaming numbers up. This is the point I was making earlier, why you're like, I don't know nobody else on this thing, and I'm only really concerned about the headliner.
This is the point I was making earlier. Algorithm.
You create music that works on TikTok. So music has this formula.
They did the same thing with coffee shops. You know why coffee shops look like brutalist mid-century modern? All of them? Instagram.
We're all looking at the same aesthetic. So therefore, all coffee shops look the same.
The same thing happened with music. The algorithm.
them. So you have these entire, very specific niches, but can everyone in your weird niche, are there 30 artists in your very weird niche that can bring 10,000 people out to a field? No, because there's only 40 of y'all that like this music.
That's online streaming. There's no human editorial.
There's no DJ that's saying, yo, dude, look at this. No, look at this you're you're stuck to doing it yourself and hopefully you can climb out your algorithm right g mcdonald says a genre unfocused festival poster lineup starts to just look like a playlist that has been made and personalized for somebody else okay you want to do a genre specific one let's just say okay k-pop you finna fly all them acts from korea how much you gonna sell these tickets for how many k-pop acts do you get you don't book nobody local do you know how much money that would cost or you say i'm gonna do a k-pop day all right so you do a three-day festival one day's k-pop one day's edm one day's hip-hop uh nobody's buying a three day pass.
So one day might be trash.

And how do you build it? What does the flyer look like? I don't know half of these people. I never even heard of that.
No single act can sell a festival. And if you try to do a multi different act thing, it's just going to confuse the consumer.
So if you're putting on the festival, Your only option is to just go big.

This has to do with money.

So you are going to over the consumer. So if you're putting on the festival, your only option is to just go big.
This has to do with money. So you are going to overspend, right? Because it's like, how are you going to get people here? You get Taylor Swift.
Do you know how much money you got to offer somebody like a Taylor Swift for her to give her performance to your festival rather than just to do her own show and the consumer says again is this worth my money i'm willing to throw this money at this big act because that's who the that's who i know they're not gonna risk no more because music discovery is now algorithmic you're not just gonna go pull up at a spot and be like who's this They're dope. The industry did it to itself.
You killed your own performance market. And because Live Nation bought up all the small venues where artists really get their chops and really create fan bases, and really you get to discover and make connections with it, there's no places for them to play.
All that's left are the big industry artists. And why would they give their ticket sales to a festival and lastly climate change is hot as hell the last two burning bands poured rain and flooded before that it was like 129 million degrees it's hot it's too hot to be out there like this.
Climate, y'all. Ain't enough water.
It's hot as hell. It's hot as hell.
Or it's flooding. It's hot or it's flooding.
Ain't no more nice days outside. I ain't finna stand outside all day.
You crazy? You gon' make me pay extra for shade? It's an extra $100 so I can have an umbrella? I'm good. Just hold on.
We're staying home. Staying home.
Okay. Now, again, let's rebuild the world.
What can we do better? That's in our control. So control so festivals might be done but it doesn't mean we don't still love music if you're a music lover here are some suggestions i can give you that would keep your favorite bands in the game the first is the easiest one for you which of course is buying or streaming their music.
If you're going to stream, here's the thing, dude. I'm not an old guy to say that like your release radar or your new music Friday, that algorithmic playlist that's like customized just for you.
It's great. My request that I think would help is this.
If a song pops on and you dig it, save it, number

one. And then two, go to the album.
Go to that artist's page and give them a follow and listen

to the album. You heard the song.
The song was dope. And if it really resonated, I'm not begging

you to do something that you don't like. Listen to that album.
You know, the whole like artist

blowing up on TikTok. That's why Universal was just like, man, tried to dead all that.
So if an artist blows up on TikTok, you should really like this. I'm like, yo, go to that artist page.
Go to their music. Instead of just shooting a video, that stuff's short-lived if you're an artist.
Obviously, you hope that one day that happens, but that's not sustainable. You can't tour off that.
That's what happened to a lot of artists. Why I Spice canceled half her tour dates is because there's not songs.
There's TikTok audios. You feel me? That helps the artists know when they try to go get a show that they can prove that like, hey, listen, these are listeners.
When you go to my Spotify page, when you go to any Spotify page, the first number you see is monthly listeners, but that don't mean followers. I have this weird upside down thing.
Most people have more monthly listeners than followers. I'm the opposite.
I have three times more followers than monthly listeners, which means these people are going to be alerted when I drop

music. Why I have that is because I toured so hard.
I played every possible dumb, ugly venue I possibly could, like got it out the mud, shook hands, stayed after, stayed at the merch table, took pictures, got email addresses, got phone numbers, came back, signed everything. I would stay after the show for an extra hour until everybody got their picture and everybody got their stuff signed.
Hard fought. So that way, you're right.
I'm not cranking out music that feeds the algorithm. You're right.
But when I drop an album, they know. So my request as the consumer is follow that artist, like go to the album.
And secondly, the most obvious one is like, dude, buy merch. Oh my God.
Y'all, I'm saying like merch has been the difference between car insurance and not for me. Merch has been the difference between can my daughter stay in her, you know, dance class, her afterschool, like ballet class.
Merch. Like merch is how we paid for our daughters.
During the pandemic, hell, merch, it paid our rent because it's all he had. Now, as an artist, you need to have dope merch.
If your merch sucks, it is what it is. I can't ask you to purchase something that's trash.
Artists, make dope merch. I have vinyl.
Vinyl costs a lot, but you can go to my website. There's vinyl, like that stuff, those make a difference.
And then I'd also ask, like, if you really dig a artist, this is on the artist job to like sign up for their newsletter, find out when they're touring and just, and go to their shows. And when you get there, like another game, I think I told this on the hood politics podcast too,, where it's like most of the time as the artist, I keep the door, like meaning the

ticket sales and then the venue keeps the bar.

So their thing is like, well, they're going to make a ton of money on the bar.

But that's how I get to come back is if this venue says, oh yeah, he brought, you know,

300 people here.

They respected my staff.

They bought drinks and me as an artist, my team, I'll be silly on stage, but we're very, very professional. I take my reputation very serious.
We make sure that like the talent buyer, the venue is everybody taking care of. We're not yelling at the sound man.
You know, we keep a clean green room. Like those are things you could do as an artist.
But as a consumer, I know the algorithm's fighting against you,

but if you really like a group, go out of your way,

even if it's on the discovery things.

Again, the big people is easy.

Beyonce's tickets are gonna come find you.

You ain't gotta go find them.

But Johnny Swim, but the hot shakes, right?

That's what they call it.

Go find them.

Because at the end of the day, it's your presence. If you're going to stay in music, you have to get butts in seats.
Is this

for us to save music festivals? I don't care. They did that to themselves.
I'm just trying to

save live music because truly, truly, there is nothing like it. from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

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