It Could Happen Here Weekly 162

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 3 This is Matt Rogers from Los Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culture Resistance with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 10 What if you could boost your Wi-Fi to one of your devices when you need it most?

Speaker 12 Because Xfinity Wi-Fi can.

Speaker 14 Like when you need to upload 200 photos of your cat in a Santa hat to post online.

Speaker 16 We've all been there.

Speaker 17 And what if your Wi-Fi could proactively fix issues before they even happen?

Speaker 10 Xfinity Wi-Fi does that too.

Speaker 21 It's like having a little holiday helper.

Speaker 25 And what if your Wi-Fi had parental instincts built right in so your kids are always protected online?

Speaker 26 It's Wi-Fi that's not just smart, it's brilliant.

Speaker 28 And during the holidays, that's a gift we all could use.

Speaker 31 Xfinity, imagine that.

Speaker 32 Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos.
But with Anime, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 32 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 32 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Speaker 33 Need flexibility?

Speaker 32 Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly. Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.
Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

Speaker 32 That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch. Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now.
Sofas started just $699.

Speaker 32 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 34 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 36 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 37 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 40 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 44 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 45 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 44 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 43 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 1 A Dudley Board-certified OBGYN, an endocrinologist doctor, a naturopathic and licensed acupuncture doctor, and a certified health coach walk into a room. What do they talk about?

Speaker 1 GLP-1, of course, but more specifically, the difference between the synthetic version of your body's own hormone that are prescribed by doctors nationwide versus Metabolism Ignite product, which naturally increases your body's GLP-1 by 55%.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 slows digestion, leading to bloating and discomfort, versus Metabolism Ignite, which supports your digestion and gut health.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 side effects can lead to nausea, fatigue, and muscle loss, whereas Metabolism Ignite is powered by plants and there are no side effects.

Speaker 1 Some long-term results of GLP-1 links to weight gain after stopping the synthetic drug, which has been proven in multiple studies.

Speaker 1 In comparison to Metabolism Ignite, there is no weight regain and this product supports metabolic health. The prognosis these three medical practitioners all agree upon?

Speaker 1 Visit VeracitySelfcare.com and receive 15% off your first purchase with promo code iHeart.

Speaker 46 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 50 So as a sideline reporter, Game Day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

Speaker 52 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 50 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 55 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones.

Speaker 53 I mean, Mac loves them.

Speaker 55 You can't go wrong with the little crunchies.

Speaker 56 You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go.

Speaker 58 Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 21 Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 59 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 60 Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen here.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 After that, with the United Nations and other organizations. And Kevin, welcome to the show.

Speaker 21 I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 60 Yeah, hopefully I've done a good job introducing you. I'm always terrible at that.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 60 What we thought we'd talk about today, Kevin, is you've significant experience in Lebanon with UniFil.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 61 I think...

Speaker 60 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 like an enlisted soldier and as an officer i think yeah can you explain at first

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And in 2000, the Israelis withdrew from what they called a security zone, about like a 10-kilometer buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 In relation to your question about is it a volunteer mission? It is for most people.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 to become a volunteer for Lebanon because so many people wanted to go there. Because there is, you know, there's a bit of of financial incentive to do that as well.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So then I went back as an officer in 1993, where we had a seven-day war, Operation Accountability.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. So yeah, Lebanon was always well regarded by the Irish Defence Forces because it did a couple of things.

Speaker 21 It exposed troops to not just new cultures and new areas, but it exposed them to danger as well.

Speaker 21 And it also gave a chance for young NCOs and young officers to

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Plus, you're exposed to other cultures, whether it be the Nordic countries or, you know, you're exposed to different ways of operating.
And

Speaker 21 yeah, all in all,

Speaker 21 it's been a positive experience. But I would point out that since we started there, we've lost 48 troops killed in Lebanon.

Speaker 60 Yeah, that's because not an insignificant amount, especially considering the Irish Defense Forces are much smaller when people are more familiar with the US military, military, right?

Speaker 60 Which is more than a million people, you know, 48 is a significant amount.

Speaker 60 You talked about how it exposes you to other cultures, and obviously, one of them is like the Lebanese people, but it's a very international deployment, right?

Speaker 60 It's not, you're not just sort of sitting there on your Irish base with Irish Defence Forces people and not interacting with other militaries.

Speaker 60 So, can you explain like some of the other countries that have this long history there?

Speaker 21 When I went there in 1984, there was a battalion from Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, ourselves, the Netherlands, Norway, and Senegal. Wow.

Speaker 21 With a strength at the time of about 6,000.

Speaker 21 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 Canaane battalion and an Inteem Battalion.

Speaker 21 And now, essentially, since after the war in

Speaker 21 2006, they started building up. There's probably about 10,000 troops there at the moment.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 There isn't a 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 no with the likes of unso that you're much more exposed to uh other armies other nationalities because essentially every time you go patrolling you can't like two irish officers couldn't patrol together because if they see um an infringement, whether it's a firing close, whether it's one side sending drones into Lebanon or the other side sending Ketusha rockets into Israel.

Speaker 21 They're all violations.

Speaker 21 But to record it as a violation, you can't have two people from the same country. So

Speaker 21 you're much more exposed, as I said, to foreign nationalities.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah. And there's certainly a lot of nationalities.
I know the Indonesians are there now and the contingent from India.

Speaker 60 When people talk about Unifil now a lot, you'll see one of two accusations, right? You'll see that they're either

Speaker 60 there as allies of Hezbollah 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.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 It seems to me like that might make it difficult to do the things that UNIFIL is supposed to be doing. Is that fair?

Speaker 21 No, I think it's a fair assessment.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 if both sides are complaining about you, as you say, it probably does indicate that

Speaker 21 you're at least doing something right.

Speaker 21 So, UNIFIL,

Speaker 21 it's a peacekeeping mission, and they're there with the agreement of both parties.

Speaker 21 So, in other words, the Lebanese government and the Israeli government have agreed that UNIFIL be established in Lebanon. That's the first thing to point out.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 Latania 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Not UNIFIL going in looking for arms and weapons supported by the LAF. It's the other way around.

Speaker 21 And one of the difficulties that you're always going to have is that Lebanon is a divided society.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 Marionite Christian.

Speaker 21 Speaker of the house has to be Shia and the prime minister has to be Sunni.

Speaker 21 And that division was based on the last time there was a census in Lebanon, which was 1932.

Speaker 21 And since then, the dynamics have changed.

Speaker 21 So Hezbollah is not just a military organization. It's a political organization and it's a welfare organization.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I think a lot of people don't get that.

Speaker 21 And it's Shia. 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

Speaker 21 it's not just a military organization. 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And another factor that has proven extremely difficult is, so when Unifil patrol with the LAF, there is certain restrictions that even the LAF have in terms of entering certain areas.

Speaker 21 And what Hezbollah have done is that they have designated certain nature reserves. and generally speaking, the LAF won't go in there.
And if the LAF won't go in, Unifil can't go in.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 21 So the LAF are kind of, you know, 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, of course. And also they have another problem in terms of equipment.
They're sort of relying on other countries, the UK, the US, France, to supply them with equipment.

Speaker 21 But 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.

Speaker 60 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 62 Or the IDF. And

Speaker 21 Unifil itself is lightly armed. You know, it's not going around in tanks or anything.
Armoured cars, yes.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 the Leclerc tanks driving up and down the roads was nearly doing as much damage as the Merkava tanks during

Speaker 21 the war. And plus, Lebanon isn't a very tank-friendly area to be operating against, shall we say.

Speaker 62 Right, yeah.

Speaker 60 Was that when the IDF came in and their Merkava tanks and the French physically blocked them with their own tanks? I can't remember when that was.

Speaker 21 I'm not aware of that, but it could well happen because I know certainly back in the 90s.

Speaker 60 That may have been when it was.

Speaker 21 When Israel was operating the security zone, we, the Irish, and our colleagues from Finland and Norway had had numerous standoffs with Israelis Israelis trying to enter certain villages.

Speaker 21 Yeah. But

Speaker 21 yeah,

Speaker 21 I saw the day before yesterday,

Speaker 21 I think two bulldozers in the 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

Speaker 21 the frontier with Israel. Yes.

Speaker 21 I should point out as well for your listeners that Israel and Lebanon have been at a state of war since 1948. Yes.
They've never had a ceasefire or a peace agreement.

Speaker 60 And the tripartite agreement is the only place where they actually meet, right?

Speaker 21 Yeah, so there is a unifil host, a meeting normally right at 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.

Speaker 21 It hasn't been officially demarcated. Right.
The blue line, which I mentioned earlier on, simply verifies that the IDF have withdrawn into Israel, but it's not the border.

Speaker 60 Right.

Speaker 21 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 UNIPIL can help iron out between the two of them.

Speaker 21 And in 2022, they managed to organize a maritime boundary. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So the two countries actually have agreed their maritime boundary under the auspices of UNIFIL.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 UNIFIL does have some successes.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 We're back. And

Speaker 60 Kevin, you'd mentioned that you were in Lebanon in 2006. I think you said you were an unarmed observer at that time.
Is that right?

Speaker 21 Yeah, that's right, Jeff. So one of the oldest missions in the world is UNSO,

Speaker 21 United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization. And that essentially was established, I suppose, after the 48 war.

Speaker 21 And it had, we'll say, offices and observers in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. You know, they were quite effective in certain ways.

Speaker 21 Like certainly, the eventual peace agreement between Egypt and Israel was very much helped along by the presence of UNSO in Cairo and Sham Rasheikh. The peace agreement between Jordan.

Speaker 21 and Israel again was very much assisted by by UNSO. So they have a kind of a fairly fairly good track record.

Speaker 21 And what they bring to the table is that, first of all, they're unarmed military observers,

Speaker 21 which takes some of the sting out of having, you know, a heavily armed guy with a helmet and sunglasses walk around.

Speaker 21 And some armies, as you know, can tend to be more intimidating than others in

Speaker 21 how they carry themselves.

Speaker 21 So I went there, I went to the region in 2005 and I was working on the occupied Golan Heights, living in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee with my wife and two kids who then were four and five.

Speaker 21 And in February 06, I was transferred to Lebanon and we were living in the city of Tyr. The kids were going to a local English-speaking Arab school and Lebanon was absolutely thriving.

Speaker 61 It was happening.

Speaker 21 We had the kids in Beirut, we had them in Amman, down in Wadirum.

Speaker 21 And my normal routine, we had four observation posts along the frontier with with with israel yeah staffed by five guys who spend a week seven days up there then you come down for four or five and then go back up again

Speaker 21 and uh each team had its specific area to operate with and we'd say a specific battalion that we would interact with and and also quite importantly we had liaison assistants who were locals like translators but but they're a lot more important than that yeah and based on the the sectarian nature of 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.

Speaker 21 So we had huge interaction with the Loka Gendarmerie, with the mayors and the Muktars, and we were very much a force multiplier for UniFil because we could get information from people.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Whereas Unifil, by its nature, goes around in armored cars. Right.
And

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 60 Yeah, as opposed to someone in full battle rattle getting out.

Speaker 21 We definitely were. But the war kicked off on the 12th of July, 2006.

Speaker 21 And I had gone 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.

Speaker 21 The nearest UN position to us at the time was an Indian platoon position on top of a hill.

Speaker 21 From my past experience I had reckoned that there was a bit of stuff going on either in Shea the Farms which is a disputed area in the southeastern part of Lebanon, up in the mountains.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And you know, we knew we had a food facility, and we also knew we had a good bunker in the place. Yeah,

Speaker 21 so we headed back at a fair rate of knots, shall we say. And

Speaker 21 normally,

Speaker 21 when we would have two patrols out, there'd be one guy left in the patrol base, and he'd be responsible for graded checks and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 21 But what we'd do is, when we were about maybe a kilometer away, we would inform our headquarters

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And just as I had transmitted that, he comes up on the ear and 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

Speaker 21 two kilometers away, there was a huge IDF position.

Speaker 21 And they were just banging with Pine Fives and GPMGs, not directly 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 is familiar with with say an ak-47 or an n16 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 yeah and then you have heavy machine guns again belt fed and they're 12.7 or 50 caliber.

Speaker 21 So we were getting a fair bit.

Speaker 21 But it took us maybe an hour of listening to various news channels, both in Lebanon and in Israel, to realize that Hezbollah had carried out a cross-border attack, hit up an IDF convoy, kidnapped two who were seriously injured and subsequently died, and killed initially four.

Speaker 21 And then...

Speaker 21 against their own orders and Israeli Merkava went into Lebanon to have a kind of commanding view over where they thought the Hezbollah were bringing these guys.

Speaker 21 The Hezbollah knew that that's what they'd do and big anti-tank mine and killed four guys inside the Merkava. So Israel had lost eight and two kidnapped in the space of maybe an hour.

Speaker 21 So the reaction was

Speaker 21 fast and furious.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 it took us nearly six days to get get our liaison assistant back to her village. Oh, wow.
It took the UN nearly two and a half weeks to have acted with the families

Speaker 21 because at that stage,

Speaker 21 UNSA was a family mission.

Speaker 21 And where I was, I could see the jets dropping bombs into Tyr. And my wife could look up on the skyline knowing where I was and see the same thing happening.

Speaker 21 I was sort of used to being under fire, but it's a different thing to see your family under fire as well.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 eventually when they chartered a sort of a cruise liner from Cyprus to come over and like stand offshore and send in its

Speaker 21 lifeboats to bring the families out.

Speaker 21 So when this was being planned, UNSO had tried to organize that an armoured convoy would bring those UNMOs that were deployed on the four posts down to Tyr to say goodbye.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So when my wife and two kids that were five and seven at at that stage were getting into the lifeboat to bring them out to the ship, I rang her and I said, look, I'll see you when I see you.

Speaker 21 Jesus, yeah. Which is not a great way to end a family mission, let me tell you.
No.

Speaker 21 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%.

Speaker 21 We had one Italian captain shot in the back. He's now in a wheelchair.
Jesus. We had another Australian captain seriously injured.

Speaker 21 When the convoy she was in was, I suppose, targeted is probably the way to explain it. But

Speaker 21 she was thrown up against the inside of the armoured car and essentially her back was broken. She was evacuated with my wife and kids.

Speaker 21 And then I think it was the day later or two days later, the Israelis dropped the JDAM, which is a bunker busted missile into the post just up from me, killing four very good friends of mine.

Speaker 21 So, yeah, 2006 was a bit rough. Yeah.

Speaker 60 If you're comfortable, could we talk about that last one a little bit? Because I think it's one of the ones that like, there's no mistaking that UN position, right?

Speaker 60 It's not, you don't, and you don't accidentally just go dropping J damps left, right, and center all over the place.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So when it was rebuilt, it had the best bunker. in Lebanon.
So they dug down first and had like a lot of the bunkers currently in Lebanon are overgrown bunkers, but this was dug in down into the

Speaker 21 into the rock essentially.

Speaker 21 And it had its roof was about a meter and a half of reinforced steel and concrete

Speaker 21 with the two-story concrete building on top of it. So, without doubt, it was the best bunker in Lebanon.
Yeah, so that on this happened on the 25th of July, and on that particular day,

Speaker 21 we'd already lost the patrol base in Maroon Aras when Roberto

Speaker 21 was shot. And they had to, I have to say, in fairness,

Speaker 21 there's a liaison branch that kind of liaises between IDF and Unifil.

Speaker 21 And Unifil couldn't launch

Speaker 21 one of its helicopters to do a medevac.

Speaker 21 So the decision was made that the guys would get into an armored land cruiser and follow Israeli tank tracks back into Israel.

Speaker 60 They couldn't deconflict the airspace to launch it or what was stopping them launching the helicopter to evacuate?

Speaker 21 There was too much kinetic activity at that site. We wouldn't have been able to land it.
It was a battle on go.

Speaker 21 So they essentially followed Israeli tank tracks that had come into Lebanon.

Speaker 21 They followed those tank tracks back into Israel where they were met by an Israeli patrol and Roberta was flown to Rambam Hospital. But yeah, going back to

Speaker 21 Kiam on the 25th of July, we were all taking a fair bit of incoming. Where I was, it wasn't targeting.

Speaker 21 It was more sort of harassment fire. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Like

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But in the guys in Kiam were taking a good bit of artillery, but there was a lot of airstrikes coming in close.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 again,

Speaker 21 for your listeners, 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.

Speaker 21 Firing close from an artillery shell is 500 meters, and a firing close from an aerial bomb is a kilometer.

Speaker 21 So if it lands within a kilometer, it's officially designated as a firing close, and it's recorded. And

Speaker 21 both sides get you know, it's an official account of what's happening.

Speaker 21 So the guys were getting a you know a good few firings close from area bombs and there was three distinct waves of attack in the general area so naturally force commander unifil chief of staff on so unair quarters in new york were screaming at the israelis you know stop targeting this position yeah was there hezbollah in the area of course there was kiam is is a hezbullah stronghold But eventually that evening, the decision was made that the patrol base is going to be evacuated.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 24-7, 20-minute radish. So every 20 minutes, you had to respond to a radio check.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 He was requested a lock and time for a firing close. It's dangerous close.
It's dangerous close. Get them to stop.
And that was the last transmission.

Speaker 21 So when they missed the next radio check, we presumed another shell had come in and blown all the aerials off the building.

Speaker 21 So myself and

Speaker 21 an Aussie friend of mine requested permission to take our armoured Landcruiser and try and drive up and see what was happening.

Speaker 21 That was refused by Unifil. 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.

Speaker 21 And so they approached the base. They had to obviously have to break down the gate and said the base had taken a direct hit by an aerial bomb.

Speaker 21 And at that stage, we were still thinking maybe they're trapped under the rubble or something like that. And then

Speaker 21 one of them transmitted, we have found the body of a Chinese officer.

Speaker 21 So we knew the four guys

Speaker 21 were killed.

Speaker 21 And the Indians found three bodies that night and brought them to the mortuary in Marajayun, which is

Speaker 21 a large Christian town.

Speaker 21 So, the next morning, there was, I think, five of us tasked to go up and identify the bodies. Yeah.

Speaker 21 So, first guy was Chinese, it was over pressure killed him, so that was an easy one to identify. The next guy had no arms, no legs, and no head.
Jesus, and where

Speaker 21 his head should have been was the chain of a dog tag. And I went down into his body parts and find it.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and the other guy, yeah.

Speaker 21 so yeah it was a difficult difficult procedure and then we had to try and arrange to get the bodies transferred into israel to to our you and colleagues from jerusalem so they could go to rambam hospital and have um have you know a proper identification and 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.

Speaker 21 And where we said we could meet them, they thought it was too exposed. So eventually we went into a small, tiny Indian platoon position.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But the area between the UN position and the gate hadn't been mine swept in six years. But we had no choice.
We couldn't bring...

Speaker 21 the guys back to the margarry because had resorted to using refrigerated trucks to store bodies because the mortar was full.

Speaker 21 So there was an IDF company there under, I think it was a full brigadier. And there's a war going on, naturally.
Yeah, all the time. Gunships and catouches passing each other over our heads.

Speaker 21 So when we had the three lads transfer over to our colleagues from Jerusalem, I stood in front of the IDF brigadier and I lined up all the UN troops and I said, we're now going to have a minute's silence in memory of our friends who were murdered in the cause of peace.

Speaker 21 And no,

Speaker 21 having a minute's silence in the middle of a battle is

Speaker 21 an odd experience.

Speaker 21 In fairness to this guy, he stood to attention. And because I lived in Tiberius, I had a small bit of Hebrew and I went over afterwards and thanked him for his respect.

Speaker 21 And we didn't find the fourth body until after the ceasefire. Jesus.
Yeah. Yeah, that's rough.

Speaker 62 I'm sorry for that.

Speaker 60 That's terrible to think about.

Speaker 21 So the obvious question is, I know what the one you want to ask. Why?

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And I should have said it 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.

Speaker 60 Yes, of course.

Speaker 21 Are certainly not the views of the United Nations. They're my personal views.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So why did they do it? Well, I think there's a couple of things. Hubris is one.

Speaker 21 I think at that stage, they were like a schoolyard bully who got bet and wanted to lash out at anything and everything.

Speaker 21 A second, probably more tactical reason is that the village of Kiyam 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.

Speaker 21 And that's the reason it was there. And between

Speaker 21 Kiam and we say the frontier with Israel is the Hula Valley, which is the biggest maneuver space. If you want to maneuver armor and stuff into Lebanon, with plenty of space, that's where you do it.

Speaker 21 In fact, decided is an old Vichy french airfield from the second world war so it's low space and i think they they didn't want eyes on the ground seeing what they were doing and like one of the things for military observers is you observe and you report that's your task yeah

Speaker 21 so was there hezbollah in in the area around the 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 UN battalion headquarters, killing 106 Lebanese men, women, and children, seeking shelter in the UN headquarters.

Speaker 21 Yeah. But you don't fire a bunker-busted missile into a UN post to attack Hezbollah.
There's a subtle difference.

Speaker 60 Yeah, there's a huge difference. Yeah,

Speaker 60 I suppose what people will ask is: like,

Speaker 60 I think it's important to explain this from the point of view of someone on the ground. It's like, obviously, UN troops are not there to fight.

Speaker 60 They're there to keep peace, but they are an armed presence. And so they'll wonder how or why the UN can or can't defend itself, the unified troops specifically in these positions.

Speaker 60 So, can you explain your rules of engagement and how that works for

Speaker 60 sort of on-the-ground perspective?

Speaker 21 Okay, well, the rules of engagement would say for a peacekeeper mission, like we park on so to one side because they're unarmed. But for a peacekeeper mission,

Speaker 21 so peacekeeping is generally based on three principles: consent, consent, impartiality, and the use of force in self-defense of the mandate.

Speaker 21 So naturally, like the guys there at the moment aren't going to try and take on three or four Marcapha tanks. First of all, they don't have the capability to do it.

Speaker 60 Yeah, that's an interesting. Do they not have, if you can't answer this, that's fine.
Do they have, for instance, javelins, things like that? Do they have those weapon systems available?

Speaker 21 I'm not sure what they have currently. Certainly, we didn't have.
Okay. And it wasn't ever going to be an issue because that's kind of not our job.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 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, ye step back, you know, we stand up and protect you.

Speaker 21 That's not, yeah, that's not what UNIFIL or any peacekeeping mission does. The only peacekeeping mission that eventually had an offensive capability.

Speaker 21 built into its mandate was the mission that's now closing down in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the congo and it's minuscule yeah and they specifically changed the mandate to include an offensive capability to go after the m23 rebels in in the kivus in in sort of the northeast and when they did it like you know attack helicopter special forces a lot yeah 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 was what i sort of looked at

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I think often that's the reason that maybe people are kind of broad in how mandates are written, but

Speaker 21 that's for someone way further up the food chain than me.

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And they can take shelter in their bunkers, which they did, which is only helpful helpful if they're not going to use bunker busting missiles to

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 60 It's another thing, and I found myself in this situation last year to be effectively like unable to respond.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And is it for those peacekeepers, it must be a really difficult sort of place to be.

Speaker 21 Well, it is, yeah. And of course, you know, they're all conscious of the fact that their families back in Ireland are fully aware of what's going on.
And

Speaker 21 shortly after the invasion, the IDF decided that they told Unified they wanted them out, essentially. And not just the Irish, but

Speaker 21 other nationalities said, we're not going.

Speaker 21 So the IDF, everywhere they go in Lebanon, the first vehicle is a D-9 bulldozer because that that is more robust than a merkavan and it can also very quickly throw up earthen ramparts to sort of you know protect from direct fire yeah 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 uh and the position's name was uh 6-52 very close to the frontier.

Speaker 21 Ironically, when the Israelis withdrew in 2000, they recognized that 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.

Speaker 21 So the IDF requested Unifil to put a position there, which would say, stop, Hezbollah from putting a position there. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 And then suddenly they're up close and personal trying to intimidate the Irish and other nationalities as well.

Speaker 21 So it's one of the things, and I think one of the reasons that they didn't want UniFill, and there's about 20 small of these small positions, mainly close to the frontier.

Speaker 21 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 Unified in any of these positions was A, to turn it into a free fire zone.

Speaker 21 But B,

Speaker 21 one of the things that UniFill 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 Unified,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Now, we'll say in the case of this position 6-5-2,

Speaker 21 if the IDF's ultimate gain or goal was to take a major Hezbollah stronghold, which is called Binchabile, that's a good bit further north than this position. So

Speaker 21 the focus of attention would move on from with our guys and go a wee bit further north. Yeah.

Speaker 60 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 it makes a change from having a tank run fired into an op which they did yeah 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 as the idea because the idf will advance past and around them and in addition to firing directly at them they're somewhat isolated no all these positions would be well stocked with water and and emergency rations and stuff like that

Speaker 21 and as i mentioned before unifil do have a liaison branch which i'm sure are talking to the idf on a on an hourly basis yeah and it will coordinate the movements of unifil would say to supply their positions or i think last week they had um a convoy went into into the city of tir which is probably

Speaker 21 12k from from the headquarters to district to distribute aid especially medical aid uh because tir is getting fairly whacked uh like all of the south i suppose yeah so there is engagement to to make sure that these posts aren't like completely isolated that that there is a means of of doing resupply yeah israel stopped one of those at some point, didn't it?

Speaker 60 Like was it a resupply movement?

Speaker 21 Yeah, to stop things on a regular basis.

Speaker 21 As I said, there is interaction, like nothing happens in a vacuum. Like we'll say,

Speaker 21 the Irish Battalion headquarters would not send a convoy to 6-5-2 without it being communicated to the Israelis and saying, we're going to go in three vehicles at 0700 hours.

Speaker 21 blah blah blah and and get the confirmation back that yeah that's okay because you know the the dimensions of fog of war and that that's not

Speaker 21 fairly real uh as you can imagine yourself it's it's a fairly real um

Speaker 21 thing that happens you know sometimes you know yeah instructions don't get um asked down or sometimes instructions are ignored for whatever reason so it's it's a bit of a delicate delicate balancing act but um

Speaker 60 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 what's happening in Lebanon is bad.

Speaker 60 And it'd be better if it wasn't, but it's not at the same tier as it has been in Gaza.

Speaker 21 No, you're looking at maybe 3,500 compared to 43,500 killed. Yeah.

Speaker 60 And so many of those being civilians, right? People who absolutely know business targeting.

Speaker 62 And like that.

Speaker 60 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?

Speaker 21 I think it's a fair point.

Speaker 21 Of course,

Speaker 21 there's no real the UN footprint in Gaza, my understanding is it's extremely, extremely light. Yeah.
And as you know, they've

Speaker 21 banished UNRWA.

Speaker 64 Yeah.

Speaker 21 Whereas, I mean, UNIFL has 10,000 troops in southern Lebanon. So there's very much more,

Speaker 21 maybe there's more consciousness. But they're still flattening the place.

Speaker 21 But it's in terms of civilian casualties as we said it's not going on as long as ghazi either but um on the we'll say the combat front they're not exactly having things their own way either uh they've been trying to take the village of kiam for the last i think two weeks and my understanding is they haven't they've destroyed it right but they haven't taken it and it was like in in um in in 2006

Speaker 21 they claimed that the town of binchebail was the Hezbollah capital of the south, which I suppose in a way it was. But they turned it into Grozmi, but they never controlled it.

Speaker 21 They were still getting attacked, you know,

Speaker 21 days after they had seized it.

Speaker 60 Right. Yeah, they've never really established like control or like a monopoly on violence in the area.
And yeah, they've not done that this time.

Speaker 60 And I think, I suppose the last thing I wanted to ask about is like, we've just talked about why this mission is important.

Speaker 60 And we've spoken about before, like, you had your family there when they were being bombed.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 60 like this investment in being there in Lebanon, being alongside the Lebanese people, in your case, with your own family, like it's one that Ireland's had for a long time.

Speaker 60 Ireland has historically, amongst European nations, been much better on the rights of Palestine and Palestinian people than most European nations.

Speaker 60 How is this peacekeeping mission perceived in Ireland? Like, are people proud that they're there?

Speaker 21 Oh, yeah. Oh, hugely proud.
And, you know, the Irish have always been extremely proud of what our defence forces have achieved, despite us being a very small defence force.

Speaker 21 I think at the moment, between

Speaker 21 the Navy, the Army, and the Air Corps, we're probably looking at in total 9,000.

Speaker 21 Total. Wow.
Yeah. Very small.
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.

Speaker 21 But we do tend to punch above our weight internationally. We obviously have no colonial baggage, which affects some other countries.
Yes. And I think generally speaking, we're seen as,

Speaker 21 I'm not sure if honest broker is the right word, but certainly not as threatening and not coming with an agenda.

Speaker 60 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Whereas other countries might have a certain agenda for whatever political reasons at home. And

Speaker 21 certainly in Ireland's case, as I said, we were there from 78 on 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.

Speaker 21 Some Lebanese talk with an Irish accent.

Speaker 60 I've heard that. Yeah, yeah, it's mad.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 21 it's true.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Some of them would talk with a very broad Cork accent

Speaker 21 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 Tipnim.

Speaker 21 And they've been doing that. Like even when we had no troops there, guys were still sending money and toys and everything.
That's been demolished last week,

Speaker 21 unfortunately.

Speaker 60 Jesus, an orphanage. It's like storybook evil stuff, isn't it? Like,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've personally seen hospitals bombed and all that kind of stuff myself.
And

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 And 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 11.

Speaker 60 And you've written a book, right, about your experiences peacekeeping and other things. Where can people find that?

Speaker 21 Okay, so this initially started off as a lockdown project during the COVID lockdown in the Central African Republic. And initially, it was just for my wife and family.

Speaker 21 But as you start writing, you kind of start remembering. And

Speaker 21 it's not just your typical military guy tells about how brave he was.

Speaker 21 I've a separate career in mountaineering and a separate career in archaeology as well. So it's a kind of a much more different mishmash of

Speaker 21 stuff going on. So

Speaker 21 the book is called A Life Less Ordinary. and it can be purchased online at mayobooks.ie.
Great. M-A-Y-O-B-O-O-K-S.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 But I've always wanted to write about the mountains of Kurdistan are beautiful. And I really loved being there.
And there are other places that people think of them as wars, not countries.

Speaker 60 And I think it would be, 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.

Speaker 21 Read or write about this in the book. I mean, like,

Speaker 21 i've lived a few times in lebanon and i've lived and worked in jerusalem a few times

Speaker 21 and it's a fascinating region oh yeah and the people on on both countries some i have some really good friends in israel and some really good friends in lebanon and i've i've been treated extremely well by people in in in in both countries certainly if you've an interest in archaeology

Speaker 21 where else could you could not want to be you know like the phoenicians in tear and no matter where you go in tear you can pick up roman pottery or you can see all these amazing sites, uh, whether it's from the Phoenicians, from the Romans, from the Crusaders.

Speaker 60 Uh, it's just it's all there in front of you, yeah, yeah, cradle of civilization, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, Kevin.
Thanks so much.

Speaker 21 Okay, cheers.

Speaker 4 This is Matt Rogers from Los Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 9 What if you could boost your Wi-Fi to one of your devices when you need it most?

Speaker 12 Because Xfinity Wi-Fi can.

Speaker 14 Like when you need to upload 200 photos of your cat in a Santa hat to post online.

Speaker 15 We've all been there.

Speaker 17 And what if your Wi-Fi could proactively fix issues before they even happen?

Speaker 10 Xfinity Wi-Fi does that too.

Speaker 21 It's like having a little holiday helper.

Speaker 25 And what if your Wi-Fi had parental instincts built right in so your kids are always protected online?

Speaker 26 It's Wi-Fi that's not just smart, it's brilliant.

Speaker 28 And during the holidays, that's a gift we all could use.

Speaker 31 Xfinity, imagine that.

Speaker 32 Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos.
But with Anime, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 32 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 32 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Speaker 32 Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.
That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Speaker 32 Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now. Sofas started just $699.

Speaker 32 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 Let's unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 can be a long-term solution for weight loss.
True, they can. If you want to be on a drug that changes your body's natural instincts.

Speaker 1 Myth number two, GLP-1 can fix your metabolism. False.
GLP-1s fix hunger and this leads to weight loss. Try the natural GLP-1 therapy, Metabolism Ignite.

Speaker 1 Get 15% off your first order with promo code iHeart at VeracitySelfcare.com. V-E-R-A-C-I-T-Y Selfcare.com.

Speaker 34 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 36 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 37 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 40 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 43 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 45 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 44 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 43 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 65 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 52 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 69 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber.

Speaker 66 They do so so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 72 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust.

Speaker 74 And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 75 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there?

Speaker 49 And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 77 Right now, in between naps to dinner or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 78 If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 56 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too.

Speaker 67 It all comes down to this: with Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 47 So grab your little ones' Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 60 About 20 years ago, maybe 30, a circus visited Majoro, the largest island on the Majoro atoll in the capital city of the Marshall Islands.

Speaker 60 They came to Majoro, as almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas, or fish does, on a boat.

Speaker 60 After performing, they couldn't find a boat to take them to their next destination.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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 Yokwe.

Speaker 60 The 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.

Speaker 21 you can use that

Speaker 21 also

Speaker 21 like during the weekend there was a tournament, fishing tournament. And if you were fishing and you caught a

Speaker 21 you have a big fish on the line and you were really

Speaker 21 and you're about to land the fish but the line's not.

Speaker 21 So what you say is, oh

Speaker 60 yakwee.

Speaker 21 Not hello to the fish, but you just say ya because you lost the big catch. So it can be used that way.

Speaker 21 Like when you lose someone or someone passed away, you miss that person. Yape, so and so he was here, but no one could hear, so you can say yape.

Speaker 21 So it has several meanings, but the deeper meaning of yakwe is

Speaker 21 you are beautiful like the rainbow. Iya means rainbow, and

Speaker 21 so we combine the two words. It's you are a rainbow.
You are beautiful as a rainbow.

Speaker 60 On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Marjuro.

Speaker 60 But unlike the little specks of dust that managed to sneak their way onto my camera sensor, the Marshall Islands belong here.

Speaker 61 Here is a pretty vague turn.

Speaker 60 The 29 coral atolls and five islands that allow 54,000 marshalles to live on 182 square kilometers of land span an oceanic territory of 200,000 kilometers.

Speaker 60 It's like you took a small American town and scattered it across an area one and a half times the size of Alaska.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 It was on one of the bigger chunks of land that I recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Marjorow is an atoll.
That's a coral ring that encircles a lagoon.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 It's also home to about half the RMI's population.

Speaker 60 The highest point on the Atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If you want to get higher than that, then your only options are houses or palm trees.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean are everything.

Speaker 60 Their land and their ties to it define them. Without their place, they can't be themselves.

Speaker 60 Even though many thousands of Marshallese live in the diaspora of the United States, they still import handicrafts made from little shells and the outer islands and coconut husks.

Speaker 60 Many of them come back to the islands to retire.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 They've always existed on just a few square kilometers of land, among millions of square kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.

Speaker 60 But now it's threatening to take everything away from from them.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 They don't want to leave, but they can't stand alone against climate change either.

Speaker 62 But the Marshalese are resilient people.

Speaker 60 They've weathered many storms to get to where they are now. And the tiny museum in Majuro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic.
A nuclear bomb, the Second World War.

Speaker 60 But in the end, these did little to crush the incredible kindness of the tenacity of the Martialese.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Before they were named by a British sailor, the islands had their own name.

Speaker 60 I'll let Jeff, a Martialese 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 Martialese music, explain what they were called before that.

Speaker 21 That's before it it turn out uh turns into marshal.

Speaker 21 This word marshal came from this guy that

Speaker 60 uh found these islands,

Speaker 21 Captain Marshall.

Speaker 60 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 Madru Atoll.

Speaker 60 They look like the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms, vibrant coral reefs, white sand or turquoise water.

Speaker 60 I love free diving, and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and dozens of brightly coloured species of fish in almost infinite visibility, without even needing to pull on a wetsuit or a weight belt, might be the closest I'll ever get to flying.

Speaker 60 But I wasn't just here for a dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you a story of incredible resilience.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean onto the land and the resulting loss of places to live and grow food.

Speaker 60 And for others, it's a collapse of basic services, like power and clean water, that we take for granted.

Speaker 60 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 fantasise about online.

Speaker 60 It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic, and welcoming community.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 The name is a German bastardisation of a Marshallese word, Pikini. Pik, meaning plain surface, and ni meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat base where coconuts grow.

Speaker 60 But you likely don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway.

Speaker 60 If you've heard of Bikini at all, it's because of what the United States did there after the Second World War.

Speaker 60 On the 18th of July 1947, the Marshall Islands were placed in a strategic trust territory by the United Nations.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 As far as possible, I want to let the Martialese survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.

Speaker 60 They call what happened on Bikini in Enewatak at all the nuclear legacy of their country.

Speaker 60 Talking about the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic for the Martialese, 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 Martialese government that was very far from settled.

Speaker 60 and the numbers the US were offering were very far from sufficient.

Speaker 60 I was very fortunate to join a few other journalists on the tiny island of Bokenboten, a short boat ride away from Maritore, and home to perhaps the most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 80 My name is Chaka Bekidion.

Speaker 80 I'm from the Marshall Island.

Speaker 80 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

Speaker 80 National Nuclear Commission with

Speaker 80 our director, Mary Salk, and now our Commissioner, Ariana Tiban.

Speaker 81 All right. Yaoe, once again, my name is Ariana Tiben Kiluma.
I work as a commissioner and nuclear justice envoy for the RMI National Nuclear Commission.

Speaker 81 Once again, thank you very much for having us this afternoon.

Speaker 82 Welcome to the Marshall Islands. My name is Evelyn Ralpho.
I'm the Director for Education and Public Awareness. Once again, welcome.
Enjoy the rest of your days here.

Speaker 83 My name is Cincerline Pernet. I work with the National Nuclear Commission as an Hetman and Physical Officer.

Speaker 3 I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since the past said, we all go, so

Speaker 21 you support the past, go work on the same boat. Welcome to the Marshall Islands.

Speaker 81 She's from Megatto.

Speaker 82 She's from Megato.

Speaker 21 She's from Megatto. Yeah.

Speaker 81 The three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.

Speaker 81 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

Speaker 81 drives us to share this with you.

Speaker 60 Almost everyone in the RMI has a family family member directly impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that came after it.

Speaker 60 Although we know the name Bikini Atoll, the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Marjuro itself, thanks to the ill-advised decision to drop bombs on a day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.

Speaker 60 In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the same parking lot, there's a U.S. Department of Energy office.
I asked Jeff what that was doing there.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I saw there's a DOE

Speaker 64 office, like health office, in the street here.

Speaker 21 The one next to the hotel,

Speaker 21 that's the office where they do the

Speaker 21 radiation testing. And there's the one near the AMI, Air Marshall.

Speaker 21 That's the clinic for those survivors. Now the survivors, there's few of them left.
Like maybe less than 50. Wow.

Speaker 60 The RMI saw fighting in the Second World War. It's memorialized in murals across Majoro.

Speaker 60 In late 1943 and early 1944, the USA bombed and then fought the Imperial Japanese military, who had been occupying the island since 1914.

Speaker 60 US soldiers and Marines, along with Marshallese scouts, landed on Marjoro, Kwajilin, and Enueto on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat we took across the lagoon to Bochumboten.

Speaker 60 The fighting was fierce, and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall, the Americans lost 611 eleven men and suffered two thousand three hundred and forty one wounded.

Speaker 60 Two hundred and sixty one were missing.

Speaker 60 Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over eleven thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 It was the shadow of this war that was evoked in 1946, when 167 of Bikini Atoll's inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States.

Speaker 60 They initially accepted this settlement, quote, for the good of mankind and to end all wars, in the words of the U.S. Commandant at the time.

Speaker 60 Assisted by U.S. Navy Seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls.

Speaker 60 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 land mass of Bikini Atoll.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 I'll let Ariano explain what that removal process was like.

Speaker 81 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 and Christianity,

Speaker 81 and they were very afraid, they did not want to leave, but because of the amount of power that

Speaker 81 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

Speaker 81 fight against what was being

Speaker 81 asked of them.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 81 if you have time to look through

Speaker 81 documentaries of the nuclear legacy you will see a certain part where the commander 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

Speaker 81 and from their testimonies they had to take that shot over 40 times to make sure that they all said M1 at the same time to get the best shot they could for

Speaker 81 maybe for reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating time for them.

Speaker 60 Following their removal, the testing began.

Speaker 60 The idea was to test nuclear bombs on ships. So the US bought 95 ships, fully loaded with weapons and fuel.

Speaker 60 At this time, This would have ranked the Navy of Burkina Toll just outside the top five biggest fleets in the world. But those boats didn't stay afloat for long.

Speaker 21 Now,

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 3,350 experimental rats, goats and pigs died in the service of this strange nuclear experiment.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 The first test at 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 It was, one writer quipped, the atom bomb of fashion.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Leonard Mason visited the Bikinians on Rongerik and was appalled to find the people there had almost starved to death.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 The US built houses for Bikini Atoll residents on Ujjalangatoll,

Speaker 60 but it decided to use these for the residents of Enewatha Katoll, where it was also about to begin conducting nuclear experiments.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Also evacuated were Enewatak, Rongalap, and Watho Islanders.

Speaker 60 They too thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could go home in a short period of time.

Speaker 60 They too found out later that this was not the case.

Speaker 60 Over the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times, starved half to death, cheated of their compensation, and stripped of their ancestral homeland.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 81 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.

Speaker 81 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.

Speaker 60 That 15 megaton Bravo shot yielded more than 2.5 times the estimated 6 megaton explosion. when it was detonated on an artificial island in the Bikini Atoll.

Speaker 60 The device's mushroom cloud reached a height of 47,000 feet, which is 1,400 meters, and a diameter of 7 miles or 11 kilometers in about one minute.

Speaker 60 Eventually, it reached a height of 40 kilometers and a diameter of 100 kilometers. This took less than 10 minutes.

Speaker 60 It travelled more than 100 meters per second and covered 7,000 kilometers of Pacific Ocean and everything in it with nuclear fallout.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 Graves.

Speaker 60 Joint Task Force 7 ships, located 30 miles east of Bikini, in what was thought to be an upwind position, began detecting high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.

Speaker 60 Very soon after, they began travelling south at full speed to avoid the fallout.

Speaker 60 But directly downwind of the blast and unable to to travel were Rongalap and Alingena atolls.

Speaker 60 Ariana explained the impact of the fallout there, which residents were not warned about.

Speaker 60 American service people there were warned to stay inside and not eat or drink anything, but no such warning was given to the local residents.

Speaker 81 Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors from red to yellow to orange. It was just a very, very bright morning.

Speaker 81 And then they started hearing like thunderous roars a couple of minutes later and it was just like roars after roars.

Speaker 81 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.

Speaker 81 And these are accounts from Rongalab Atoll, which is the closest to Bikini. The fallout had started to arrive, and they were not sure what was going on.
There were men out fishing.

Speaker 81 There were also stories from these witnesses that prior to this test, the military had gone to Runruk and they had movie nights and they would show the community movies where it's snowing.

Speaker 60 Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo Shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel with the USA, were the recipients of the largest nuclear bomb it's ever detonated.

Speaker 3 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culture Resess with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culture Resist with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 9 What if you could boost your Wi-Fi to one of your devices when you need it most?

Speaker 12 Because Xfinity Wi-Fi can.

Speaker 14 Like when you need to upload 200 photos of your cat in a Santa hat to post online.

Speaker 16 We've all been there.

Speaker 17 And what if your Wi-Fi could proactively fix issues before they even happen?

Speaker 10 Xfinity Wi-Fi does that too.

Speaker 21 It's like having a little holiday helper.

Speaker 24 And what if your Wi-Fi had parental instincts built right in?

Speaker 25 So your kids are always protected online.

Speaker 26 It's Wi-Fi that's not just smart, it's brilliant.

Speaker 28 And during the holidays, that's a gift we all could use.

Speaker 31 Xfinity, imagine that.

Speaker 32 Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos.
But with Anibay, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 32 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 32 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Speaker 32 Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.
That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Speaker 32 Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now. Sofas started just $699.

Speaker 32 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 A Dudley board-certified OBGYN, an endocrinologist doctor, a naturopathic and licensed acupuncture doctor, and a certified health coach walk into a room. What do they talk about? GLP-1, of course.

Speaker 1 But more specifically, the difference between the synthetic version of your body's own hormone that are prescribed by doctors nationwide versus Metabolism Ignite product, which naturally increases your body's GLP-1 by 55%.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 slows digestion, leading to bloating and discomfort, versus Metabolism Ignite, which supports your digestion and gut health.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 side effects can lead to nausea, fatigue, and muscle loss, whereas Metabolism Ignite is powered by plants and there are no side effects.

Speaker 1 Some long-term results of GLP-1 links to weight gain after stopping the synthetic drug, which has been proven in multiple studies.

Speaker 1 In comparison to Metabolism Ignite, there is no weight regain and this product supports metabolic health. The prognosis these three medical practitioners all agree upon?

Speaker 1 Visit VeracitySelfcare.com and receive 15% off your first purchase with promo code iHeart.

Speaker 34 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 35 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 37 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 39 We got clear facts.

Speaker 42 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 43 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 45 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 44 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 43 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 65 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 52 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 69 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber.

Speaker 66 They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 72 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust.

Speaker 74 And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 75 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there?

Speaker 49 And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 77 Right now, in between naps to dinner or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 78 If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 56 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too. It all comes down to this.

Speaker 67 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 47 So grab your little ones, Gerber favorites at a store near you

Speaker 64 ho ho ho merry christmas robert evans here and uh we had been planning to make a new come episode uh 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 come conspiracies on the internet so we're just going to play the old come episode for you as a rerun i know that's not the most most effortful version of our job that I could have done this year, but also it's been a real shitty year for everybody.

Speaker 64 So let's just listen to an old come episode and pretend we gave you a new come episode. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Speaker 59 Dearly beloved, welcome to It Could Happen here.

Speaker 84 We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, electric word life.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 21 Come.

Speaker 84 Oh, yeah. You guys like that?

Speaker 61 Everybody really happy with that?

Speaker 62 I love that.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I'm feeling not at all like I want to kind of shower.

Speaker 63 Okay.

Speaker 21 And 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.

Speaker 21 Yep.

Speaker 84 Now we're all bonded together.

Speaker 61 So.

Speaker 84 How's everybody doing today? We've got Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout.

Speaker 84 And I should let people know I wasn't joking about the cum thing.

Speaker 84 So those of you who are too online

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 Jordan B. Peterson got sent a link to a Twitter account that is that purports to be spreading like hidden news about the evils of the Chinese communist regime.

Speaker 84 And they put out a video that was a segment from a British milking fetish pornography video.

Speaker 84 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

Speaker 84 rubber fetishists, right? And there's like a lot of medical fetish stuff tied into it. But the idea is that men are entirely wrapped up on hospital gurneys and giant pumps suck the cement out of them.

Speaker 84 So

Speaker 21 it's like a cow milker.

Speaker 60 The machine is very

Speaker 60 to what you would use to make it. So this cow.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And then everyone had the best day of their lives.

Speaker 61 And an hour or two later, he deleted it.

Speaker 21 Now, I have been continuing

Speaker 21 it. Yeah.

Speaker 60 So strange that he left the world of peer-reviewed academia.

Speaker 84 Yeah, it's wild that he's no longer a professor.

Speaker 84 It's very funny. We're continuing to give him shit for it online, but it set us off down an interesting road.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 There's a surprising number of semen-based conspiracies.

Speaker 84 Everybody did research on their own special thing. I wanted to start by talking about this Jordan Peterson cum

Speaker 84 video and giving kind of

Speaker 84 some of the background on it. So I believe it was last July,

Speaker 84 the Chinese Human Sperm Bank of Shanghai announced that it was hosting a competition for college students to find out whose semen was the best in terms of like, you know,

Speaker 84 a number of modal sperm per milliliter, I think is the way that they judge it.

Speaker 84 And basically the idea was that they were trying to find like people with sperm concentration greater greater than 60 million per milliliter.

Speaker 84 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 $1,200.

Speaker 84 Right. Now, the reason this is happening is that...

Speaker 84 uh china for the first time as a result of a number of different policies uh 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 But right around the time that this happened,

Speaker 84 a little bit after that, it came out that a

Speaker 84 Japanese company started selling what is called in the articles I found an automatic sperm extractor

Speaker 84 to Chinese sperm banks.

Speaker 21 Now,

Speaker 84 this is, I'm going to send y'all the link.

Speaker 60 I was hoping you would.

Speaker 84 Oh, yes, good friends. 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 $6,000,

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 So it has a number of purposes, including, I guess, to help guys stop coming too early.

Speaker 21 Which, hey, no shame.

Speaker 84 It's funny that someone built a machine for it.

Speaker 60 It's extremely funny. And that you can buy it on AliExpress.
It's like,

Speaker 60 I personally am not attaching anything I bought on Alibaba to sensitive parts of my body.

Speaker 63 $6,000.

Speaker 84 It's not cheap. Now, the primary, these are not being used for people who are coming too quickly.

Speaker 63 This is like the worst ever R2D2.

Speaker 84 It is weird.

Speaker 60 What's the orientation? Does it stand on the ground and you just approach it?

Speaker 63 You have to stand up.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 But what if you're a short king?

Speaker 84 I'm sure they have options.

Speaker 21 It has like the rough shape of like

Speaker 84 a handheld massage device, but it's kind of like formed like almost an Art Deco robot vagina.

Speaker 84 And basically from what I've read, kind of the reasoning is that like, hey, we need people to donate sperm.

Speaker 84 Some people feel weird about just masturbating in a clinic, and we hope this is a more pleasant experience for them.

Speaker 84 So again, this, we're laughing because like, look, a machine designed to capture semen is kind of a funny thing. That's okay.
No shame on anybody for that.

Speaker 84 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 start making

Speaker 84 ungrounded. I know, fertile ground.

Speaker 84 To make the completely

Speaker 84 ungrounded claim that 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.

Speaker 84 And I will say, you should try to find the videos of the automatic sperm extractor, this amazing Japanese machine, because it is funny. It is fascinating.

Speaker 60 I think we should share some of these on the CoolZone account.

Speaker 63 Do they have to

Speaker 63 change? I assume they have to change the table.

Speaker 21 Yes, they change it every time. Yeah, they change it every time.

Speaker 84 You can't clean that if you watch the video there's like a there's a rubber pump that like uh comes out like a like a sea urchin the thing that the penis goes in is also the capture device so it is removed with the the sperm donation when you take it out um so again this is you know funny because come 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.

Speaker 84 If you've lived, 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.

Speaker 84 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 spermjacking.

Speaker 63 How could it get better? How could it get better than that?

Speaker 84 Oh, it gets it. It gets better because

Speaker 84 the second is spurgling.

Speaker 21 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 63 These are like professionals who like come up with these terms, huh? These are.

Speaker 84 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 Xia Bei Zhu,

Speaker 84 who stole, there's this, I think it was a Canadian company. No, it was a U.S.
company who had, so this is for like bull semen.

Speaker 84 And what 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,

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 You just want to keep making those sweet, sweet lady cows that are, you know, more useful to you in a financial sense. So there's a U.S.
company that developed a method of

Speaker 84 before insemination, looking through the sperm and like sorting out the sperm that will make female cows.

Speaker 84 And that is apparently hard to do. I mean, it sounds like it would be hard to do, right?

Speaker 84 And this, this, this Chinese businessman was like reverse engineering there. It's kind of actually, it's basically the same story as Jurassic Park.

Speaker 84 And anyway, this guy has gotten sued for a bunch of money.

Speaker 21 He got chased down by a velociraptor cathol.

Speaker 63 I hope it works out just as well as Jurassic Park.

Speaker 84 Yeah, it's very funny. I will say, there's a couple of really wild lines from this, the CBC story I found.
I'm just going to read one to you.

Speaker 84 Zhu's activities could best be described as Machiavellian.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And bragging, the law is strong, but the outlaws are 10 times stronger.

Speaker 21 True. Okay, okay.
What is this guy?

Speaker 21 Look,

Speaker 84 Jesse Xiabezu, my hero, the sperm bandit, incredible sperm jacker, one of the best sperglers in the business.

Speaker 60 This man lives on an island with his cow raptors.

Speaker 21 What a hero.

Speaker 84 There was also a case of a Japanese man who illegally took Wagyu cattle sperm to China to try to give them sperm.

Speaker 84 And like the Chinese government immediately caught him and was like, no, this is actually incredibly dangerous.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 So he got in a shitload of trouble. Yeah.
Anyway, that's my, that's my sperm stories, everybody.

Speaker 21 Thank you for sharing rubber.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 84 Thank you. Thank you for spurgling my knowledge, Garrison.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, it's it.

Speaker 84 How is that, James?

Speaker 58 How beautiful.

Speaker 21 Was that unscripted? Did you just like do that? Didn't even write that.

Speaker 21 Didn't even write that, Garrison.

Speaker 60 Yeah, it's on the back of his hand. He had a brainwave at two in the morning and it got that down.

Speaker 84 Those are the kind of things you can do when you've been podcasting as long as I know.

Speaker 21 Robert's been in the cum space for several years.

Speaker 84 I've been in those soggy trenches for a long time.

Speaker 60 All right, we are, after all, at work, so let me continue.

Speaker 60 So, I'm going to talk about what happens when you keep your calm inside you.

Speaker 60 Yeah, this is a thing

Speaker 21 that Garrison is.

Speaker 21 What are we doing today?

Speaker 84 This is critical journalism.

Speaker 60 We are making content.

Speaker 21 We're doing it. Okay.

Speaker 60 Talking of content, let's talk about the content of some Reddit posters. So

Speaker 60 what's called the semen retention movement, and this will shock many of you,

Speaker 60 began on Reddit.com.

Speaker 21 Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 61 Yeah.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like so many ones.

Speaker 23 I feel like

Speaker 84 I feel like if you'd typed that into your phone, it would have finished the sentence the same way.

Speaker 63 What has auto-directed you to Reddit?

Speaker 60 Oh, believe me, we're going to go there, Garrison, because when you Google sperm retention, you do indeed find some stuff on Reddit.

Speaker 60 Now, they've spun off from Reddit, right? They now have their own organization, which is nofap.com.

Speaker 60 And nofat.com is a community-centered sexual health platform.

Speaker 60 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 the

Speaker 60 this isn't the like not all semen retention, as we're going to learn, is based in helping people overcome addiction to porn.

Speaker 60 But

Speaker 60 so far as that is a thing that people actually have.

Speaker 60 I know someone was accusing Robert of being addicted to porn on

Speaker 60 his timeline this weekend.

Speaker 84 That would be because I keep ratioing Jordan Peterson with the

Speaker 84 pornography video that he mistakingly posted.

Speaker 21 That's correct. Yeah,

Speaker 21 yeah.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 60 I really hope he thinks it's like milking, like they have RFID colors and they get fed based on their production level. That would be great.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 59 And what did you, you're a, you're a medical doctor.

Speaker 21 Did you think that cum actually worked that way?

Speaker 84 That you could just stick a sucker on somebody anyway.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 Just get it out. Okay.

Speaker 60 So after this movement began on Reddit.com, it quickly pivoted to kind of offering all kinds of weird physical and mental health benefits.

Speaker 60 And that's where it was adopted by friends of the podcast, The Proud Boys. And luckily, we do have a bit of insight into why,

Speaker 60 into the exact nature of the no-fat fascism that the Proud Boys practice, thanks to Kyle Cheney, who's a politico reporter, who was reporting on the trial of one of the Proud Boys accused of sedition on January 6th, called Zach Rell.

Speaker 60 And at that trial, for reasons that I'm not exactly clear on,

Speaker 60 the Proud Boy, I guess it's like their handbook, like the kind of Proud Boy Bible was introduced.

Speaker 62 And

Speaker 60 into the record, somebody says, oh, yeah, it's in there.

Speaker 21 Yep.

Speaker 60 It's in the court record, buddy, because what 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.

Speaker 60 That means he must abstain from pornography during that time. And if he needs to ejaculate, and this is really weird, it must be within one yard of a woman.

Speaker 84 Fascinatingly specific.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah, right. And I like that they've gone with imperial measurements.

Speaker 60 With her consent, so that's nice. The woman may not be a prostitute.
So

Speaker 60 that's the proud boy's nature of their no-fab fascism. But

Speaker 29 I think the way of

Speaker 60 understanding why some people practice this perhaps best is to is to go onto Reddit.com. So I found a post by Reddit user u slash monk191817.

Speaker 60 It seems like a nice guy. And

Speaker 21 there are 400, 480 upvotes on this.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 60 so this guy has nine years of experience with semen retention. So I'm just going to read, I'm presuming it's a boy.

Speaker 21 What a lie.

Speaker 84 Him and some monks off the coast of fucking Lindsparn.

Speaker 63 That cannot be healthy.

Speaker 60 No, I don't think it is.

Speaker 60 There is, and we'll get to this evidence that you shouldn't do this.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 This may not be scientifically proven, but it's proven by experience.

Speaker 21 That's a red flag.

Speaker 84 That's interesting.

Speaker 60 Getting medical advice.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 This is called sexual energy transmutation in layman's terms.

Speaker 21 Oh, no.

Speaker 21 Wait, that's the layman's term?

Speaker 21 What's the non-layman term?

Speaker 60 It's got even more, I have no idea, spermozoic

Speaker 60 fucking fission.

Speaker 60 So for peak performance, it's always necessary to be powered by semen.

Speaker 60 It would be best to 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.

Speaker 60 If not serving that purpose, master whatever teach 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.

Speaker 60 There's more, so just contain yourself.

Speaker 21 Okay, great, great.

Speaker 60 Which is exactly the reason why core religions are based on celibacy.

Speaker 60 Because the 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.

Speaker 60 We should let semen retention be part of our lives, not something that is done for superpowers.

Speaker 60 For superpowers are, in my experience, the sudden ecstasy that we feel once we transition from the degenerated to the regenerated state.

Speaker 60 And that will stabilize after some time, similar to how a flight maintains stable altitude after takeoff.

Speaker 63 Very similar, actually. Yeah, that's basically the same thing.

Speaker 60 That's what you can hear when

Speaker 60 the engines are spinning up. It's just a dude trying really hard not to nut, and

Speaker 21 it makes that noise.

Speaker 63 I'm so excited for the next Marvel film where the superhero

Speaker 21 gains his power from no fat.

Speaker 84 Paul Rudd has to not come so he can get tiny.

Speaker 61 No fat man.

Speaker 60 Yeah. So, yeah, he didn't.
I should add that this person confesses to having lapsed at some point in the nine years.

Speaker 21 Poser. Poser.

Speaker 21 Poser.

Speaker 84 Yeah, it's stolen. That's like when I learned Lance Armstrong was on steroids.
It's just disappointing.

Speaker 60 Yeah, no one would have seen it coming. See what I did there?

Speaker 21 Okay.

Speaker 60 So this person then urges other posters on the semen retention subreddit to not use streaks to outperform others or look better about ourselves or bring others down.

Speaker 60 The battle with lust is a lifelong fight. And the more we get better at finding victories,

Speaker 21 the more we become better at...

Speaker 60 at finding victories over our internal battles, the better we become as high-valued men.

Speaker 61 Hell yeah, brother.

Speaker 84 I've often wished that, you know, if the 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.

Speaker 84 And James, that would be your quote. The battle against lust is a lifelong struggle.

Speaker 60 Yeah, that battle. I'll get some t-shirts knocked up and we can do a fun race.

Speaker 63 When we eventually get the Cools on on media offices, we have a portrait hanging on the wall of each of us with one quote underneath.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 60 Like on a plaque with a

Speaker 60 cools and

Speaker 2 when we take over the meta offices three weeks from now.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 60 There is a marketing company that has been emailing me for about six months telling me how cheap it is to buy a billboard by the side of a road and send a message to a loved one.

Speaker 21 So maybe

Speaker 21 great.

Speaker 21 Maybe I'll go ahead and get a little bit of a noble industry.

Speaker 84 I'll be doing bangerang.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 60 Well, they will be until I put my positive messages about the controlling lust and holding semen inside our bodies.

Speaker 21 True.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 60 return men to their former glory. So

Speaker 60 a lot of the Reddit posts rely on a couple of different studies, right?

Speaker 60 One of these studies measured participants. A lot of what they're doing is they're claiming to increase testosterone, right?

Speaker 62 Right out the back.

Speaker 60 The testosterone does have, as Lance Armstrong can tell you, some performance enhancing benefits.

Speaker 60 Sure. So Yeah.
It increases your muscle growth,

Speaker 62 your recovery from exercise, all that stuff.

Speaker 60 One of the studies measured participants' testosterone levels at baseline before masturbation and then in 10-minute intervals after masturbation, right?

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 60 at the end of the three weeks of abstinence, right?

Speaker 60 But the sample size was pretty small.

Speaker 60 And there's some theorizing that the boost was actually caused by the anticipated masturbation that they were about to do at the second.

Speaker 84 It was so ready to come.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, these guys are out.

Speaker 60 Yeah, just ready to pop after three weeks.

Speaker 60 The second study looked at a 45% increase after a few days, seven days of abstinence.

Speaker 60 But even the study showed this was a temporary peak that returned to normal, even with continuing abstinence. So

Speaker 60 there's just these two studies. They're pretty,

Speaker 60 they happened a long time ago.

Speaker 60 We'll post them all in the show notes if you guys want to read more about NoFap science.

Speaker 60 But we should just point out that there is, in fact, a multitude of evidence that this is a bad idea, that having sex is actually good for you.

Speaker 60 Having sex while trying not to ejaculate is probably not good for you.

Speaker 60 Probably not good for your relationship either.

Speaker 60 One would surmise.

Speaker 84 Pressure into that.

Speaker 23 Whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, if that's your thing, you do you.
Um, there was a study that investigated the motivations for semen retention among semen retainers.

Speaker 60 Uh, and it, a lot of it, it seemed like it, 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

Speaker 60 like guilty about yourself or like living with stress and self-loathing like that is bad for you, right? And that will reduce your testosterone level.

Speaker 60 Um, there's also some evidence to suggest that not ejaculating could give you prostate issues,

Speaker 59 which is yes.

Speaker 84 Yeah, there's,

Speaker 84 and this is like pretty debatable, like most things that people talk about

Speaker 84 in regards to coming and health. Like you can find some studies, like the studies on testosterone.
Some of them are kind of sketchy.

Speaker 21 Anyway, yeah, don't think also.

Speaker 59 Come or come.

Speaker 61 Either way,

Speaker 84 you know, it's whatever. But if you do have a chance to fuck one of those Alibaba robots, I recommend it.

Speaker 60 You don't pass that up.

Speaker 21 Let's talk about cum demons. Hell yeah.

Speaker 21 Wait, okay. Okay.

Speaker 63 Hard pivot here from

Speaker 21 you.

Speaker 21 We are not going as far afield from the no fat people as

Speaker 21 you would think. Okay.

Speaker 21 But, all right. Now, the year is 2020.
Everyone on Earth has collectively gone gone insane.

Speaker 21 This is the summer of 2020. So,

Speaker 21 this is the part of 2020 where fun stuff is happening. This is like late July.

Speaker 84 Oh, Garrison, that's when we met.

Speaker 60 So,

Speaker 63 we were getting just incredibly poisoned.

Speaker 21 Yeah, we sure were.

Speaker 85 That'll be fun in like 20 years.

Speaker 21 Well, well,

Speaker 21 a life or death struggle for the sort of the

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Donald Trump and Donald J. Trump.

Speaker 21 Donald J. Trump.
Wow. Donald Trump Jr., that one.

Speaker 21 That's the Trump that I'm going to be talking about. A little Trump here.
Yeah. Trumpets.
We're...

Speaker 21 You know,

Speaker 21 looking for

Speaker 21 their cure to COVID-19 on Twitter. And, okay, so as we probably all remember, right? The thing that they found was hydroxychloroquine.

Speaker 21 Okay, so one of the first ones that they found before I remacked in, this is before I've been in the chat.

Speaker 84 We found so much shit.

Speaker 60 Was it inside of them them all along, Mia?

Speaker 21 No,

Speaker 21 this is hydroxychlorocline, a thing that was probably,

Speaker 21 I hope they weren't full of hydroxychloroquine. I thought it was semen.
No, no, we'll get to that.

Speaker 21 The road is long, but it ends with cum demons. But we first must walk the road.

Speaker 21 So the road here is Donald, Donald Trump Jr.

Speaker 21 posts a tweet saying like that saying this is necessary watching about this video from this doctor named Dr. Stella Emmanue.

Speaker 21 Now, okay, so who is this person?

Speaker 21 She is

Speaker 21 part of a, oh, okay, I say part of. She runs this thing called Firepower Ministries,

Speaker 21 which

Speaker 21 are going great.

Speaker 21 She's also part of.

Speaker 84 I know broadly.

Speaker 21 Yeah, okay, cool. I'm good.

Speaker 21 She's also part of America's Frontline Doctors who are in the face group. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So we've kind of forgotten about them.

Speaker 61 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 21 These dip shits. Oh my god.
Okay. So this is, this is very, very, very much in the same vein as

Speaker 21 Architecture 9-11 Truth. They found a bunch of people who technically have medical degrees or like nurses who were like, no, no, vaccines are bad.

Speaker 21 And hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine is, well, we'll chloro quit COVID, chloroquid that one. Yeah,

Speaker 21 it's been a long day.

Speaker 21 I've slept for eight hours, but in

Speaker 21 like several distinct parts of the day that were not continuous, it's been things are going, things are going great.

Speaker 60 You'd have slept better if you'd taken some horse medicine first.

Speaker 21 Quite possibly. I mean, it's not like it could have gone worse.
Yeah, get some catching in you.

Speaker 21 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 cure COVID.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 okay, so who actually is this person?

Speaker 21 She is from Cameroon.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 Dr. Stella Emmanue was caught up in the unbelievably sort of

Speaker 21 like, I mean, right, like yes, objectively right-wing, also very, very weird wave of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity that's been sweeping across that part of Africa as part of sort of a...

Speaker 21 you know, a sort of like a very sort of long-range coordinated effort by right-wing Christian missionaries. So, okay, so for

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Like these are, these are the people who do faith healing.

Speaker 21 One of the very common sort of Pentecostal things is this belief that like, like you just, you talk to God.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Like he's probably not like, you're not like having a conversation in your head with

Speaker 19 that's changed. That's changed.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 This shit has, this shit has fucking taken over everywhere. It's really bad.

Speaker 21 And these people believe a lot of very, very weird stuff.

Speaker 21 So what do, I mean, okay, so like, you know, she, she has like some of the sort of standard like really really hardline like david ike like she believes that the the world's being run by aliens and like reptiles and yeah like the the vaccine has like alien dna in it to like take over your dude you know this is like sort of kind of facebook moments alex jones yeah right okay but

Speaker 21 okay i'm gonna read this quote from will sumner This is a quote from one of her

Speaker 21 sermons. They, which is demons, are responsible for serious serious gynecological problems, Emmanuel said.
We call them all kinds of names. Entromisius? Entromesius.
We call them molar pregnancies.

Speaker 21 We call them fibroids. We call them cysts.
But most of them are evil deposits from spirit husband, Emmanuel said of the medical show.

Speaker 21 God!

Speaker 21 God, no.

Speaker 21 They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence, men that can't get it up. So, all right, immediately, we have like, we have, there are several kinds of cum demons here that we're dealing with.

Speaker 21 So, there are like there's there's this sort of, okay, so a lot of this is drawn from what is a very like a genuinely unbelievably dubious piece of theology.

Speaker 21 So, when I was researching this, right, I saw I saw I saw someone,

Speaker 21 there was like a religious

Speaker 21 scholar who was writing this. He was like, oh, I immediately recognized the theology of this.
This is from, this is from Genesis 6.

Speaker 21 So, okay, so I was like, okay, what the fuck are they talking about? So, 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,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Happy to do so. I mean,

Speaker 84 I could produce cum demons from almost anything.

Speaker 62 That is the power with the right machinery.

Speaker 84 You know what? I think we know exactly what the right machinery machinery is.

Speaker 21 Look,

Speaker 21 we know that we can produce come demons mechanically. Our challenge here is to produce them theologically.

Speaker 21 Okay.

Speaker 21 So I'll try.

Speaker 63 I will use all of my occult knowledge.

Speaker 84 We must find a way to evacuate the vast deferens of the soul.

Speaker 21 Okay, so

Speaker 21 I'm using the King James translation because that's the translation that all these psychos use.

Speaker 21 And it came to pass when men began to multiply on 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.

Speaker 21 Okay, so I do know where they're.

Speaker 63 I do know what they are doing. So the sons of God, those would be what, like fallen angels that have been procreating with women.

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 63 so this ties into like the book of Enoch stuff, which was made a little bit like after Genesis, but kind of it like retconned a lot of like the creation story.

Speaker 63 So I i can see where they're they're pulling cum demons from but it is it is a bit of a stretch

Speaker 59 yeah they're kind of you could say come demons in the way that like god seed

Speaker 21 yeah you could see it yeah it's that's it is a stretch now okay my my my my analysis of it is i i think i i i think they're pulling this out of their ass and i think they're pulling this out of their ass well it's like yeah it's related

Speaker 63 it's also about cum demons so yeah they're popping

Speaker 21 yeah like just okay like i i i i i have

Speaker 21 it is well known for people who follow me on Twitter that I have an immense and powerful disrespect for theology. But

Speaker 21 what part of the sons of God

Speaker 21 of that gets you to demons and not like, because again, isn't the whole point of Christianity that we are all God's children? Like,

Speaker 21 is this not a thing that they tell you in every single fucking circle? How do you read that and not think they're talking about people and immediately jump to come demon? Like,

Speaker 63 here's what's going on i i can i can explain this because this is the king james 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 fall 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 there cause they're they had they have a distinction between like the like the sons of like the sons of God versus

Speaker 63 what was the what was the thing they used to refer to refer to the daughters?

Speaker 21 The daughters of men.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 They are doing a specific thing, but it's it's a result of a whole bunch of like mistranslations and a whole bunch of various various like 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

Speaker 21 yeah i i i blame i blame martin luth this is martin luther's fault like the like the

Speaker 21 catholics were doing much farther

Speaker 21 here's the thing here's the thing

Speaker 60 you can keep it in high latin so the girls can't understand

Speaker 21 this is what martin luther i specifically because okay so this was already happening 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 going to do instead of that?

Speaker 21 I am going to, I am going to turn against the peasant revolt and

Speaker 21 I am going to bring about a level of anti-Semitism that is going to allow me to outflank the Inquisition on the right?

Speaker 21 He could have been fixing this bullshit. No,

Speaker 21 anti-Semitism. Woo, I got to keep my patron lords in power.

Speaker 84 He was

Speaker 84 German. Like, there's only so much you can ask.
That's true.

Speaker 63 Yeah. Well, I'm happy that we can all go to sleep at night night worrying about the sons of God implanting semen.

Speaker 21 Oh, there's also

Speaker 23 a thing I ever think.

Speaker 21 Okay, so

Speaker 21 that's cum demon type type one, right?

Speaker 21 That is, okay, so those are those are the demons that like they they have they have sex with women and they produce Nephilim from, or sometimes also you fuck up by Nephilim.

Speaker 21 There's a lot of sort of conflicting sort of theological.

Speaker 63 All that stuff comes from the book of Enoch. All that stuff is non-canon to the modern Bible, but it's where it's where it comes from.

Speaker 84 Fucking Council of Nicaea.

Speaker 21 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 counting down okay i was counting down you had faith yeah the the the other kind of of demon so you you have your incubi right who are another type of sex demon and the the incubi fuck men so they can steal their semen and there's there's there you know there's different sort of reasons of this there's another thing that she talks about which is that um there are witches who have like astral spirit sex with men in their sleep.

Speaker 21 And if you're like having a sex dream, it's because you're having astral spirit sex.

Speaker 21 Oh, no, no. Yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 84 like Bill Murray, I've experienced that. Oh, wait, no, that was Bill Murray.
Sorry.

Speaker 84 My mistake.

Speaker 21 I get our lives mixed up often. Oh, wait,

Speaker 21 yes. Okay, okay.

Speaker 21 The cloud, the fog is clearing.

Speaker 21 I've had sex with too many sex demons.

Speaker 21 It's a real issue. Okay, 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.

Speaker 21 We also have the actual actual 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 general new world order, etc. I have heard of this.
Honestly,

Speaker 63 some of my witch meetings. Yeah.

Speaker 84 I'm supposed to be aware of that. That is not as far far from the backstory to Warhammer 40,000 as it should be.

Speaker 21 That's very sadly true.

Speaker 60 I didn't want Warhammer 40,000 to come into our come episode, if I'm honest.

Speaker 84 Uh-huh. No, it's, I mean, look, there's a lot of people who are interested in both semen retention and Warhammer 40,000.

Speaker 63 That's a tight vendor.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 84 They all play Ultramarines.

Speaker 21 I was a

Speaker 84 pretty good Warhammer 40,000 joke for those of you who play.

Speaker 21 I also learned a couple days ago that

Speaker 21 one of the many crimes of the Emperor 40k was passing off an Amiri Bakara quote as his own.

Speaker 84 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 84 That was a good bit. That was a really good bit.

Speaker 84 It's little pieces like that that let you know that Dan Abnett's pretty bass. Yeah.

Speaker 59 That was my favorite part of the book.

Speaker 21 So funny.

Speaker 60 That's literally canon.

Speaker 63 I do have like three pages written on textile tanning, so we'll

Speaker 21 speak a little bit.

Speaker 60 That's the end of the section.

Speaker 21 Go off.

Speaker 63 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 Betadryl subreddit, the recreational Benadryl subreddit, you can find people who try to take enough Betadadryl to have sex with the Hatman, which is

Speaker 21 another form of trying to summon shadow people to steal your semen.

Speaker 21 Maybe

Speaker 84 you have to explain your terms for people here.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I'm a man.

Speaker 84 The Hatman 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.

Speaker 21 Yes. Or younger.

Speaker 84 And there's some people.

Speaker 63 Some people find the Hatman extremely attractive or some of the female shadow people variants. And they try to...

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 60 This website by the way absolute adventures on here. I'm just reading about how to use Christ's blood as a weapon Amazing.

Speaker 63 Oh, that's good.

Speaker 60 Yeah, yeah, no problems here.

Speaker 21 Yeah

Speaker 63 Do you know who won't steal your semen everybody?

Speaker 84 We can't promise that I I can.

Speaker 63 I can promise any advertiser on this show I've personally approved to make sure they will not come into into your bedroom and steal your semen.

Speaker 21 Wow.

Speaker 60 How does the approval process work? Is that of interest?

Speaker 63 I cannot divulge private.

Speaker 84 Pay since Garrison $40.

Speaker 63 We are going to close off by talking about

Speaker 63 sperm and testosterone.

Speaker 63 Two of our favorite topics for this episode for some reason.

Speaker 63 About a year ago, a trailer on Fox News dropped for a a new batch of Tucker Carlson originals titled The End of Men.

Speaker 63 It opens with the text that reads, In the current year, the cycle continues.

Speaker 86 Once a society collapses then,

Speaker 86 you're in hard times. Well,

Speaker 86 hard 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.

Speaker 87 And then they go on to re-establish order, and so the cycle begins again.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 At the gun range, they're just shooting like ten bottles of canola oil for some reason.

Speaker 21 Maybe they're uh

Speaker 60 them Mussolinis, like they're into the Mussolini stuff.

Speaker 62 He was a big fan of canola oil.

Speaker 63 By far the most bizarre thing.

Speaker 84 I mean, I suspect they're shooting the canola because it's like a seed oil thing.

Speaker 21 They think that like seed oils are a right-wing thing.

Speaker 84 Seed oils are like sucking out your testosterone.

Speaker 63 Anyway, it's something very silly.

Speaker 63 But by far, the most bizarre thing in this trailer is a shot of a naked man with outstretched arms, like Jesus on the Carassa style, standing in front of a lake at dusk with a white machine shining a glowing red light on his dick.

Speaker 21 What? And

Speaker 21 again,

Speaker 63 at the climax of the music from 2001 to Space Odyssey,

Speaker 63 there's this man facing balls first in front of this large red light at the end of this trailer.

Speaker 84 There should never have been any pause on our podcast or on Fox News for anyone to say the line, after the end of the climax climax of the music from 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Speaker 21 Oh, that's the thing we're objecting to from this episode. That's the line.

Speaker 60 Yeah, because it shouldn't have climaxed. It lost its power in that moment.

Speaker 63 Considering both like the...

Speaker 84 No, no, no, one sec, James. That was a very good joke.

Speaker 21 Thank you.

Speaker 60 Thank you for seeing me, buddy.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 63 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?

Speaker 84 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,

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 It's it's way too esoteric and weird to get into, but it's one of the things that like the the real

Speaker 21 fucked up Nazis like it.

Speaker 63 We're not going to get into it too much, but I think the previous November 2000.

Speaker 84 It's unsettling that it wound up adjacent to a Tucker Carlson episode because it's some like weird esoteric Nazi wizard shit.

Speaker 61 Yes.

Speaker 63 And that previous November, Joe Rogan posted a Kali Yuga meme, which went viral.

Speaker 63 It's about how hard times create strong men, which create good times, which lead to weak men, which create hard times. It's fucking silly.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 All of the chaos we're seeing right now was predicted in Hinduism thousands of years ago. Unquote.

Speaker 63 So Rogan was probably just like parroting something that he heard from one of his many fashy or Bagey friends, which considering Rogan's social circle, that could very well just be the same person.

Speaker 84 Yes, yeah. 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.

Speaker 84 And, you know, that's, I mean, that's honestly

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 Was some I was smoking weed with some sketchy dude who was going places he shouldn't have been on the internet.

Speaker 63 So a few months after Rogan posted this meme, we have Tucker Carlson making this whole mini-series surrounding this hard times create strong men kind of trend.

Speaker 63 It's taking cues from the online manosphere, and Tucker posited that weak, unmanly men are leading to the collapse of civilization, and a hardening of men is necessary to save it.

Speaker 63 According to Tucker,

Speaker 63 one of the threats to manhood is a quote-unquote total collapse in testosterone levels amongst men in recent years.

Speaker 63 And the solution goes beyond just your typical like anti-soy crusading that Tucker has done in the past. Now, Tucker has turned to the cutting-edge science of bromeopathic medicine as advocated.

Speaker 21 God damn it.

Speaker 21 That's even better.

Speaker 63 As advocated for by a quote-unquote fitness professional named Andrew McGovern, who touts that infrared light and testicle tanning is this deus ex maca for plummeting T levels in men.

Speaker 88 So obviously half the viewers right now are like what that's testicle tanning that's crazy

Speaker 88 but my view is okay testosterone levels like crash and nobody says anything about it that's crazy

Speaker 88 so why is it crazy to seek solutions?

Speaker 89 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

Speaker 89 don't trust the mainstream information.

Speaker 63 This TV special is constantly referred to as a documentary. So surely you would expect Tucker to try and interview scientists or anyone with expertise on this topic?

Speaker 21 No, Tucker.

Speaker 63 Of course not. Actually,

Speaker 21 I expect Tucker to talk to anyone serious.

Speaker 63 Andrew McGovern, our bromeopathic hero, works as a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness in Columbus, Ohio.

Speaker 21 Oh, my fuck.

Speaker 63 And he hasn't even been a trainer for very long. About a decade ago,

Speaker 21 not even a good one.

Speaker 63 About a decade ago, he was the manager of an Abercrombie and Fitch store in Miami.

Speaker 21 Oh, perfect. Yes, you know how to do it.
Now,

Speaker 21 that's where I get all of my prescriptions from.

Speaker 84 There's a guy who works at the Abercrombie and Fitch store.

Speaker 21 Wait, and but in Miami.

Speaker 21 Hey, if you want to get trim, that's where you get trim. Yeah, yeah.
That is

Speaker 21 that type of dude is emerging here.

Speaker 63 As of 2017, he was the director of operations for Petland retail stores.

Speaker 21 Duck!

Speaker 21 But this guy's resume is highly amusing.

Speaker 63 But Tucker, being a competent journalist, did not just interview one person, however.

Speaker 63 Kid Rock was brought on to be the sole voice of reason.

Speaker 84 You know, Garrison, you laugh, but Kid Rock is the other person I've gotten prescription drugs from. So

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 90 Dude, stop. Testicle tanning.
Come on.

Speaker 21 I haven't heard anything about it.

Speaker 21 Open your mind, Bobby.

Speaker 90 I'm starting a punk rock band, and it's called testicle tanning. That's the end of it.

Speaker 88 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 let me off like Kid Rock was not, did, did not buy into testicle tanning the same way Tucker seems to.

Speaker 84 Oh, God, is Kid Rock going to be the voice of reason?

Speaker 21 That's what I said. I said he was brought up to be the sole voice of reason.

Speaker 60 Yeah, but we thought you were joking because it's Kid Rock.

Speaker 21 We thought you were joking. I didn't believe you.
No, he's the only person that doesn't buy it.

Speaker 60 Kid Rock stands with science.

Speaker 84 It is indeed sweet home, Alabama, all summer long.

Speaker 63 Tucker was not the first person to advocate for testicular tanning as the solution to an allegedly problematic dip in testosterone levels.

Speaker 63 Dating back to 2015, you can find articles online such as, quote, former MLB player Gabe Kapler says men who want to get stronger should tan their testicles from Complex.

Speaker 63 And quote, I put a giant red light on my balls to triple my testosterone levels from Men's Health 2017.

Speaker 60 Is that written by Ben Greenfield by any chance? Because he normally pops up with these things.

Speaker 63 Which one?

Speaker 60 The men's health one.

Speaker 60 This is a guy who injected his own dick to make it bigger.

Speaker 63 I have it in my show notes here. This was written by someone named Ben Greenfield.

Speaker 21 Oh, look at that! Fucking jackpot!

Speaker 60 Whoa, this ball end has won it.

Speaker 21 James.

Speaker 21 So proud of you today, buddy. I'm so happy.
We have you on our team.

Speaker 84 James,

Speaker 84 are you taking performance-enhancing drugs for this podcast?

Speaker 60 Sadly, Robert, I'm not.

Speaker 21 This is so funny.

Speaker 60 We have stepped into a gold mine of content with Ben Greenfield, the guy who injected his own dick with stem cells to make it bigger.

Speaker 63 That's so funny.

Speaker 21 Oh, man. I urge you, I compel you.

Speaker 60 If you have any free time time in your day, just Google Ben Greenfield penis. There will be several articles and supposedly reputable outlets that will just fucking make you unwell.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 63 that is great to hear. But despite not being the first person to talk about testicular tanning, Tucker was certainly the most impactful.

Speaker 63 After the airing of The End of Men, testicular tanning showed a 7,000 increase in relative search interest on Google and a

Speaker 63 35,000 increase in tweets on the topic. Now, surely some of these things are stuff like

Speaker 63 making fun of it, right?

Speaker 23 Some of these tweets I'm sure is a lot of fun.

Speaker 63 A lot of it's also people who are just talking about it genuinely.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 Dermatologists and other healthcare professionals should be aware of these new viral health trends to best counsel patients and combat health misinformation. Unquote.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 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 compared to previous decades.

Speaker 84 Problems mankind has had on the whole. Not enough semen per cum shot is not one of them.

Speaker 63 Yes, and like compared to previous decades, there is this 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.

Speaker 63 It's suspected that pollution and environmental degradation

Speaker 63 are also suspected of being contributing factors with plastics like phthalate being known to interfere with the production of hormones like testosterone.

Speaker 63 But this area of research is still heavily contested, but still, that has not stopped fitness YouTubers and conservative influencers from tying this to like the soy boy feminization of men and drumming up panic to grow their social media followings, sell their supplements, and advertise affiliate products.

Speaker 63 The creme de la creme of red lights for testicular tanning is the Juve Light.

Speaker 63 Juve is a light therapy panel company which sells these LEDs.

Speaker 63 They're like this upscale wellness brand.

Speaker 63 The smallest model they have costs over $1,000, with the full body ones going for around $10,000.

Speaker 13 This is when you know it's a grift.

Speaker 60 If someone is telling you that they need to sell you sunlight, they are having a fucking laugh.

Speaker 63 Our friend Ben Greenfield advocates

Speaker 63 advocates that you spend the big bucks on Druve, lest you, quote, fry your balls to a crisp with a cheap knockoff.

Speaker 84 You wouldn't want to do that, would you?

Speaker 21 No, it seems like this is unwise.

Speaker 63 Yeah, it seems like it's maybe a bad idea.

Speaker 84 I, I, I can teach you how to, how to, how to cook your balls safely without spending any money at all.

Speaker 84 Get a pair of double A batteries, take them right out of your, out of your, uh, your your your uh, your remote control.

Speaker 84 You stick the active end in a bottle of water, and then you put your hand on your testicles, and

Speaker 84 it'll complete the circuit and power your testicles up with electricity, which you can then ejaculate instead of cum.

Speaker 63 They'll probably give you superpowers too.

Speaker 84 Almost certainly, Garrison.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 60 Please do not connect batteries to your dick.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 As an ex unquote, as an example, here is a clip from fitness YouTuber Elliot Hulse's Strength camp with 1.7 million followers.

Speaker 21 Blast your balls with sunshine

Speaker 21 to increase testosterone. Now you can drop your jaws 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.

Speaker 21 A 1939 study suggests that UV light exposure to your testicles increases testosterone by 200%.

Speaker 21 If you want to join me in this experiment, you can find one of these bad boys on cozyhealth.com.

Speaker 21 Then just go to personallabs.com, get your blood tested, get your testosterone, then after eight to twelve weeks, check it again and find out if the nut rusting really works.

Speaker 63 So this whole idea goes back to this one 1939 study.

Speaker 21 1939?

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 60 Lots of good science in 1939, man.

Speaker 63 And if there's one thing I trust, it's science from 1939.

Speaker 21 Yep.

Speaker 21 Got any comments on race in the study?

Speaker 63 So this study was published in the the journal Endocrinology, and it found that frequent UV irritation to the genitals increased urinary androsterone, a metabolite of testosterone.

Speaker 63 It increased these levels by nearly 200%, quote unquote. Now, you'll be shocked to learn that there may be problems with this study.

Speaker 63 Guess how many test subjects were included in this study?

Speaker 21 I'm going to be generous and say eight.

Speaker 63 So Mia says eight.

Speaker 60 James? And Greenfield, just one.

Speaker 63 One, you say one. Robert,

Speaker 63 how many do you think are in the study?

Speaker 84 Geez, I think like seven was sacred to the Nazis, so I'm going to say that.

Speaker 63 Five. A grand total of five people are in the study.
Wow.

Speaker 21 I gave them too much credit.

Speaker 84 Oh, they had to pick the sacred Discordian number.

Speaker 59 Bullshit.

Speaker 63 Three of them are 54 years old and have manic depressive psychosis.

Speaker 63 The other two are 24.

Speaker 84 Honestly, not a bad, not a fairly representative sample for Tucker's audience.

Speaker 60 I was about to say the same thing, but this is actually who watches his show.

Speaker 63 The other two are 28 and 45 and have, quote, psychopathia with depressive features, which is a very old, old-timey term.

Speaker 21 Everyone on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 63 But I think what actually happened is I think they did this study at an asylum and just found people with depressive psychosis to do the study on. It's just these five random people.

Speaker 63 No individual graphed results were produced. It only showed the quote-unquote typical reaction.
And there wasn't even a control group for the study.

Speaker 84 Why bother what was good science?

Speaker 21 Why bother?

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 However, these studies either do not include human participants or do not specifically evaluate UV radiation exposure to the genitals.

Speaker 63 There is not a single other study since then that has done anything resembling like peer-reviewed science.

Speaker 21 You know what?

Speaker 84 Everybody,

Speaker 84 go to GoFundMe. Help CoolZone determine whether or not testicle tanning works, and we'll get that control group.

Speaker 21 so my other question about this is aren't aren't all these people getting fucking ball cancer

Speaker 21 we are we are about to get

Speaker 63 a year okay we are about to get to that

Speaker 63 because yes you may think that shining new fee lights on your balls might have some long-term problems yeah it's great that lonesomes aren't come back to the episode again

Speaker 63 So Weiss interviewed Seth Cohen, a urologist and the director of the sexual dysfunction program at NYU Langdon Health.

Speaker 63 Quote, I'm not aware of any science or data or any journal publications proving that red light therapy improves male testosterone.

Speaker 63 And quote, we change recommendations on medical therapies based on a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trials, large studies with thousands of patients.

Speaker 63 That's where you'll find if there's any really statistical significance between red light therapy and a placebo.

Speaker 63 Could these men who underwent red light therapy and came out and felt stronger and more manly,

Speaker 63 could that have been a placebo effect? Of course it could, unquote.

Speaker 63 so and as mia mentioned we have not really even gotten into the potential dangers yet uh close direct heat to your testicles actually damages sperm count uh 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

Speaker 63 to quote the to quote that study uh one last time uh 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.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 Unquote. Great.

Speaker 59 Heroic.

Speaker 63 So, guys, almost done here.

Speaker 63 But, man,

Speaker 63 it's pretty funny that all of the worst people you know are going to get ball cancer.

Speaker 62 Don't stop them.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 84 I, you know, there was a period of time in my life when I'd said where I will never wish cancer on anybody. But if you are deliberately exposing your testicles

Speaker 84 to the sun in the hope of getting superpowers because of Nazi science,

Speaker 84 it's okay.

Speaker 84 It's okay. Like,

Speaker 23 I'm not going to mourn that.

Speaker 63 To be fair,

Speaker 63 the 1939 study was from the United States, so it couldn't possibly be a lot of fun.

Speaker 21 I'm talking about the other Nazi science, like the Cali Yuga stuff. Yes,

Speaker 21 well, yeah.

Speaker 63 And

Speaker 63 I think a part of this whole narrative of the total collapse of men's testosterone levels, as Tucker puts it.

Speaker 21 Man, I fucking wish

Speaker 21 I could make my life so much easier.

Speaker 63 But I think this is more about men in power feeling that their position of assumed superiority is being threatened.

Speaker 63 Really, all of our quack science and conspiracy theory stories today all revolve around this like subliminal dog whistle. It's no mistake that Tucker titled his program, The End of Men.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 It targets some of young men's sexual insecurities while promoting this like anti-woke return to the old ways of rugged masculinity.

Speaker 84 yeah i i might add what because i 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 no what what this is and what because because we 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

Speaker 84 and with the fact that industrial agriculture and the process nature of a lot of our foods is having a negative impact on all of these things. Like it's consequences of capitalism, right?

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 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,

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 That's the motivation. And it happens outside of like man shit too.
Like that's all the right has anymore. Like their economic theories have been proven disastrously wrong.

Speaker 84 They have no actual ability to govern in a meaningful way other than by causing harm to people.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 63 And so that is that is most of the

Speaker 63 testicular tanning fun that I got into.

Speaker 60 We haven't even covered all the things that Ben Greenfield did to his dick in 2017.

Speaker 84 We'll get back on this subject, but it is time for us to end. This is already over an hour.

Speaker 59 So, I want to leave you all, all of you, all of you beautiful.

Speaker 84 First, I want to thank all of our beautiful correspondents for their research.

Speaker 84 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 rebag it while it's on.

Speaker 60 You'll be okay.

Speaker 85 That is our legally binding health advice.

Speaker 84 That's the end of the episode.

Speaker 3 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturesis with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 11 What if you could boost your Wi-Fi to one of your devices when you need it most?

Speaker 12 Because Xfinity Wi-Fi can.

Speaker 14 Like when you need to upload 200 photos of your cat in a Santa hat to post online.

Speaker 15 We've all been there.

Speaker 17 And what if your Wi-Fi could proactively fix issues before they even happen?

Speaker 10 Xfinity Wi-Fi does that too.

Speaker 21 It's like having a little holiday helper.

Speaker 25 And what if your Wi-Fi had parental instincts built right in so your kids are always protected online?

Speaker 26 It's Wi-Fi that's not just smart, it's brilliant.

Speaker 28 And during the holidays, that's a gift we all could use.

Speaker 31 Xfinity, imagine that.

Speaker 32 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 32 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 32 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 32 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 32 Sofas start at just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Speaker 21 Add a little

Speaker 32 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 A doubly certified OBGYN doctor and a licensed acupuncturist doctor walk walk into a room. What do they talk about?

Speaker 32 GLP-1, of course.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 slows digestion, leading to bloating and discomfort, versus Veracity Self-Care's Metabolism Ignite product, which supports your digestion and gut health.

Speaker 1 GLP-1 side effects can lead to nausea, fatigue, and muscle loss, whereas Metabolism Ignite is powered by plants and there are no side effects.

Speaker 1 Visit VeracitySelfcare.com and receive 15% off your first order with promo code iHeart. That's VeracitySelfcare.com.

Speaker 34 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 36 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 37 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 40 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 44 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 45 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 44 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 43 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 65 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 52 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 69 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber.

Speaker 66 They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 72 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust.

Speaker 74 And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 75 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there?

Speaker 49 And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 77 Right now, in between naps to dinner, or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 78 If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 56 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too. It all comes down to this.

Speaker 67 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 47 So grab your little ones, Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 59 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's happening here in your ear.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 59 you than it already is.

Speaker 59 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, what's which cell towers? It's pinged.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 59 Mia, welcome to the show that you also host.

Speaker 21 Yes,

Speaker 21 I am here.

Speaker 59 So what are we talking about today and who are we talking with?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 61 Well,

Speaker 59 a stalkerware stalker.

Speaker 21 Yeah, the person who hacked one of the stalkerware companies by Arsene Crime You, the famed hacker of the no-fly list, uh, yeah, returning guest.

Speaker 60 Always happy to have you on.

Speaker 21 Yeah, always happy to be on,

Speaker 21 yeah. So, I, I, I think, I think,

Speaker 21 I don't know, I think 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.

Speaker 21 And that's a mistake. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and so

Speaker 21 I guess the place where I want to start, before we get into the specific company that you did,

Speaker 21 is it still called owned?

Speaker 21 i kind of i it's fine to call it owned or pawned or whatever i i still do that sometimes people get confused um but yeah yeah but before we get into that i want to um i want to ask you a bit because you've done a lot of sort of

Speaker 21 i guess you call it research both actual research wise and then in terms of poking around their servers research and journalism and whatever you want to call it yeah hacksing yeah yeah

Speaker 21 so i i I wanted to just start off by asking if you can give sort of like a brief summary of what stalkerware is.

Speaker 21 Yeah, so stalkerware like as a category encompasses like a number of different types of apps.

Speaker 21 Most of them like on the service advertise themselves as like parental control software, which is already bad enough, just to be clear.

Speaker 21 That is like advertised for like spying on your children's phone, like seeing their location in real time, seeing their messages that they receive, any photo they take.

Speaker 21 Ostensibly, this is to like prevent bullying and help with them when they get depressed because they don't trust you and talk to you for whatever reason.

Speaker 21 But obviously a lot of these are then furthermore, because that's like that, sure, that's a like target audience, that's a demographic you can advertise to, but then there's this even bigger

Speaker 21 potential target demographic of people who are insecure in their relationship, mostly men, not only men, but who are then sought this idea that they can use software like this for stalking their partner, for finding out if they are cheating on you.

Speaker 21 Things like that. Which is obviously an even bigger problem, which once again, not to discount the problems that spying on your children is already like bad enough.

Speaker 21 But yeah, this leads to this whole like big industry of these apps being used

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 talking behind their backs it often kind of turns into like it obviously turns into this obsessive thing especially if you're solved 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 so 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 into 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

Speaker 59 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 the u.s there are states like california which gets uh pointed out in the very good tech crunch investigation on truth spy where there are really strict laws that journalists like you have to abide by as to when you can record someone that these these apps absolutely break.

Speaker 21 Yes, it's specifically a thing that also most of these apps will have like a disclaimer at the bottom that is like, this might be illegal in your jurisdiction, and please ask for consent before doing this.

Speaker 21 And then they have lots of tutorials on how to install this in someone's device without their consent. Yeah.

Speaker 21 But it's like always like, hey, we do not take any, like, it's not our fault if you break the law, basically.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Like, I'm not a lawyer, but 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.

Speaker 59 Yeah, the difference is that, like, with the gun industry, it's a product where there is a legal and an illegal, like, clear way to do it.

Speaker 21 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 do to use it for is to surveil your child, which unfortunately is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of their parents.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Quotes, because I do not agree with that.

Speaker 59 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 lose any court case.

Speaker 59 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 post these apps on people's phones without them knowing.

Speaker 21 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 uh 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

Speaker 21 no matter anything else because like that's the thing generally with domestic abuse cases it's really hard to prove abuse is happening.

Speaker 21 Stalkerware and any other type of spying device, like also physical GPS device trackers and stuff, that is immediate proof that

Speaker 21 there's controlling behavior going on, that you are being spied on. This cannot only be used and is explicit, admissible evidence.
This is also usually

Speaker 21 makes cases worse. Like not for you.
Like it just, yeah.

Speaker 21 It like...

Speaker 21 can potentially add charges and make it more serious and it 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 yeah 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 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 where you were with like co-possession or whatever in the US i i do not know us law very much around this but yeah there 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 zapoena so they will have to give out like who the account owner is behind like the spying on your phone.

Speaker 21 For some of them,

Speaker 21 there's also tools that help you find out who is spying on you or there is like someone with forensic background can help. Yeah.

Speaker 59 And I think people,

Speaker 59 one thing we should note is that if you're kind of curious, has my device been infected by some of these tools?

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 59 Or to your article on your website there's a tool you can use where you it'll tell you how to get your imsi i think i am ii imii yeah um which you just dial a thing on your phone and it gives you that number it's basically how you identify specific phones um and you plug that in it will let you know if your device has been compromised now like december last year uh up until there is the data and if you yeah it can pretty much tell you if you've been spied on using this specific tool until then for other other stuff, there's also guides usually on TechCrunch and otherwise also on stopstalkerware.org, which is the U.S.

Speaker 21 Coalition against Stalkerware.

Speaker 21 And also, just generally, I think a lot of more local anti-stalking, anti-abuse orcs are not as informed yet as they should be, but they're still a good point also to reach out to.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 59 Yeah.

Speaker 59 Now, one of my questions about Truth Spy that I'm hoping you can answer is I know that you can, like, text messages get transferred via it, like your call records, all that kind of stuff, and who you were calling.

Speaker 59 Does that include messages for like encrypted apps like Signal, or is that not accessible through this?

Speaker 21 It depends. Like for some of some of these, it will get signal messages, WhatsApp messages, and everything generally by reading the notification content.

Speaker 21 Because from notifications, you know what messages are. have been like received.
Sometimes it will only then have the received messages and not the sent messages.

Speaker 21 Often these also include a keylogger component that maps messages then sent back as well.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They're mostly just quick cache grabs and the harder to maintain features usually don't really work.

Speaker 59 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?

Speaker 59 Like, and that's actually just generally good advice. Notifications are a compromise of the security that Signal offers.

Speaker 21 Don't have them enabled, you know? Yeah, and or at the very least, disable them on the lock screen on Android. Yeah.

Speaker 21 I don't know how if that, I think that's also possible on iOS, but I think iOS doesn't show message content on the lock screen anyways. I'm not sure anymore.

Speaker 21 But yeah, it's just also small things like that.

Speaker 21 And also like one of the like key tells that someone probably tampered with your phone especially for android is uh 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 uh please get professional help uh do not just delete it do not like 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 Because, like, yeah, that is one of those things that, like, bringing it up or just deleting it can very quickly lead to, like, yeah, yeah, complicating the situation a lot.

Speaker 21 You know what else complicates the situation? These ads.

Speaker 21 And we are back.

Speaker 59 So, when it comes to the the actual fight against this stuff, obviously what you're doing is a big part of it.

Speaker 59 Getting inside these companies and finding out what they're doing and their capabilities is huge.

Speaker 59 In terms of what regular people or people who are interested in becoming activists about this can do,

Speaker 59 what does the struggle to actually fight this stuff look like?

Speaker 59 How do we put a bullet in this industry's head?

Speaker 21 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 I me and TechCrunch are like the only people really doing like journalism on this like regularly.

Speaker 21 And the important thing with like journalism and all of this is like awareness. It's very important to create awareness about this.

Speaker 21 That's also why I do the media work with like being on this podcast and things like that.

Speaker 21 I think the most important thing is to make people aware, like talk about this in your feminist circles or whatever, things like that.

Speaker 21 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 21 Because most people don't even know that this is a thing, that this is a like that there's just commercially available spyware that anyone can install on your phone.

Speaker 21 It's also 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, and like spread these articles,

Speaker 21 and let friends know that this is a potential thing. And then,

Speaker 21 yeah,

Speaker 21 the hard thing with this is that, like, obviously, it should

Speaker 21 probably help if there was some sort of legislation against some of this.

Speaker 21 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 actually get these apps shut down, because that's the world we live in.

Speaker 21 But the problem there is usually that, like, this notion that children are owned by their parents is too strong to really make a full case against these apps.

Speaker 21 And at the very best, what I can, like, the very best I'm kind of hoping for from

Speaker 21 legislators is just a ban on advertising these apps on use against other adults, which would be big already, but that doesn't really solve the issue because there's still going to be enough people who know of their use for use against adults.

Speaker 21 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 look you can just use this app you know uh 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 a patriarchal issue so yeah i i think that's also why like i am so focused on like the hacking and the 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.

Speaker 21 Because as I said, most of this is like quick cash grabs from like web design studios and outsourcing companies.

Speaker 21 Yeah, that are just making a quick buck from this because otherwise they don't get paid enough.

Speaker 21 Like that's the sad thing really is how much of this industry is in all of these countries Western companies outsource their IT to because there's lots of IT companies there and they are entirely reliant on like Western companies giving them very underpaid tasks.

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 You like find some weird niche of like a tech product you can quickly build. Yeah.
And this is like one of those easy niches. It's like always the scummy stuff.

Speaker 21 And, and like, yeah, it's that's also why like so many of these companies are like based out of Vietnam, out of Iran and whatever.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 You're just the cheap workforce, right? So yeah,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 59 Yeah, of course. But like, yeah, you got to get paid.

Speaker 21 And that's. Yeah.

Speaker 21 And that's like why I think making it more scary to operate in this industry is like the way to go because like with 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 are seem to be slowly moving towards just building other software primarily yeah

Speaker 21 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 look at is just pushing them more into the shadows, which is not going to solve the issue at all.

Speaker 21 Yeah. I

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 59 There's a tendency to ignore some of like the theory around how to actually win a conflict. And all of it,

Speaker 59 all strategy, really, when you're talking about like defeating an opponent, revolves around denying and taking operational area from them, right?

Speaker 59 Yeah, and that's what you're talking about when you talk about, well, we need to stop this.

Speaker 59 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?

Speaker 59 It's making sure that they're not able to operate without being seen. It's basically

Speaker 59 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 operate, right?

Speaker 59 Like that's yeah, 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.

Speaker 59 These things are too durable.

Speaker 21 There's too many countries at play to do that.

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 21 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 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.

Speaker 21 This is how we like stop people from falling victims to this most people who are a victim of stalkerware apps have never heard of stalkerware apps before uh and i think that's like 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 is this can also be leveraged against like the abusers in this scenario.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I think that's also like a very important angle at the end of the day, is just to make it clear, like, yeah, no, not even you are like

Speaker 21 secure from this, having consequences for your life, like beyond like direct interpersonal or legal consequences.

Speaker 21 This can and in the past has result in like your email address being on a list of people who have do abuse to people online. You don't want to be on such a list.

Speaker 21 I think that's also important, just to like

Speaker 21 point out, there isn't one stock of our app that's not eventually going to get hacked. There is a big war against these apps.

Speaker 21 They're all like, there's so many different hacking groups that keep sending me data from these.

Speaker 21 Like, I'm already working on another article that already, once again, affects like the data of like, I think like 80,000 more like abusers, and it's just the abuser data this time, but I'm still going to report on it.

Speaker 21 Like, it's, it's, it's, this is not going to stop. Uh, it's even also not gonna stop when I stop uh reporting on this myself.
Like, I've there's been work before me done on this.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Like, just look at the Wikipedia page for Stalkerware. Uh, there's an ever-growing list of these apps that have been hacked.

Speaker 21 And I think at this point, the like official count being kept by one of the people at TechCrunch is that like 13 apps, uh, a few of which have been hacked two or three times. Yeah.

Speaker 21 These are not, these are not secure apps for anyone.

Speaker 59 No, no, no, of course not. Yeah.
And they,

Speaker 59 yeah, I mean, 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And also they don't care. Like, like I said,

Speaker 21 it's a cash crap. It's nothing else.

Speaker 21 There's a few apps that are like a little more than a cash crap, but that'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 graph from a company that has better developers or more money to do the initial investment.

Speaker 21 The thing is also like most of these companies don't have a lot of initial investment.

Speaker 21 And I think the important thing to consider as well here is one big area of this that I have not yet started tackling, but I do want to like look into more sometime is 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 stalkerware company and 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.

Speaker 21 And I might soon have some proof for some of that. But that's how these are advertised.

Speaker 21 It's everyone who advertises soccerware to you, who has a big platform, is doing that because they're getting money, not for any other reason.

Speaker 21 We need to do more ads. We will be back shortly.

Speaker 21 And we are back.

Speaker 59 Well, that's all I had, Mia. What do you got?

Speaker 21 Yeah, I guess there's

Speaker 21 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, is great.

Speaker 21 One of the things that he brings up that I think is another,

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 payment platforms because a lot of payment platforms look at this and go, wait, hold on. Yeah, so that's when you've talked about that a little bit.
That's an angle we've also been fighting on a lot.

Speaker 21 Like me and Sang, we work on most of these stories together. Like

Speaker 21 it's kind of funny. We both got each other into the stock aware thing back in 2020, as I mentioned.
That was the first time I stumbled into a stock aware app with a security issue.

Speaker 21 I reached out to some random journalist at TechCrunch about it.

Speaker 21 And now he is the only one talking talking about this forever because I reached out to him that one time and he got sucked into this horrible horrible world of spying.

Speaker 21 But yeah, like one of the things we focus on a lot is 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.

Speaker 21 And there are different companies and whatever. But then like eventually they get taken down from that as well.

Speaker 21 And usually we can get them taken down from most like Western hosters, like especially US hosters will immediately take them down.

Speaker 21 You do not want to risk being the company hosting spyware on US grounds. Yeah.
Yeah, you just like same with EU hosters.

Speaker 21 Like the few companies that we've seen that were on Hetzner, they immediately react because it's like, yeah, no,

Speaker 21 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.
It will have like image

Speaker 21 consequences. And that's an important thing that is maybe also something you can do as more like a grassroots thing.

Speaker 21 It's also like if you find one of these apps and if you see, oh, they're using like PayPal or whatever, just reach out. I think PayPal is even harder to reach as like just an average lay person.

Speaker 21 Don't expect them to reply.

Speaker 21 They might still take action you will have to manually check paypal doesn't really reply to things ever but yeah same also with like hosting company if you see they're hosted on like a european or american hosting company uh just 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

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And also, once again, like if you have tips about any of these companies, be it having found a vulnerability just or insider info, especially, I'm always very happy about insider info.

Speaker 21 You can reach out to either me or Zach Whitaker. We're both very happy to talk about this.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 Yeah, that's something that's been used really effectively by right-wingers to target sex workers. This has been a huge thing.
There's been a bunch of campaigns to get get platform companies.

Speaker 13 And yeah, so it's...

Speaker 21 It's interesting that for once we can use the very restrictive and conservative rules of payment providers for our good.

Speaker 61 Yeah.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's like revenue for them. But yeah.

Speaker 21 It's generally worth trying. And I'm always glad like if someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't have to do that ourselves.

Speaker 21 I think me and Sack and a few other people actively working on this are doing more than enough work currently. But yeah, just if you find one of these things, don't go digging too deep.

Speaker 21 It's a depressing world. But if you stumble upon one of these somewhere or whatever,

Speaker 21 just report them.

Speaker 21 It's going to disrupt their operations. And if it happens often enough, they might just give up.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 And I mean, like, in cases like the Truth Spy, they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 And 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, that's

Speaker 21 obviously not a thing the US government will like if you do that, generally speaking. They moved like millions like that.
So yeah

Speaker 21 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 like if you go online and you search for something shady like anything like be it piracy or whatever you don't expect it to be the best experience ever like you know you're getting some weird service and it's probably going to be half broken but yeah like most of these soccer apps start at like 40 a month like and more and then sometimes for more features you pay like up to 60 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 there 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 feminist spaces and things like that, because this is such a big angle of modern tech-enabled abuse that I really think should be more of a topic.

Speaker 21 Especially on the left,

Speaker 21 this is bad.

Speaker 59 Yeah, no, this is like critically bad. I agree entirely.

Speaker 21 And also the whole thing with all of this data being so easily accessed. Your data can end up getting sold on some dark web forum.
You're both as the abuser and as the target, right?

Speaker 21 And the government can find these. Like I have no, like this is, this is not me making a statement of that's a thing that's happening.

Speaker 21 But there's nothing preventing the government from hacking these companies and getting like like I sometimes like whenever I get these data sets and it's always hard to work with data sets that include like non-consensually collected data of people, right?

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 21 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 uh always like the odd correction facility officer who has signed up for one or two of these apps or 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 trucks uh who have stalkerware on their phones it's you know

Speaker 59 yeah And it's one of those things where there are laws, like technically, if my understanding of the laws around this are correct, it is illegal for an organization like the FBI to utilize these apps.

Speaker 59 But

Speaker 21 yes, but we have an organization called the NSA who

Speaker 59 and it is on paper illegal for them to do this with a third-party app.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 59 And if those agencies, you don't, you just don't check in on what they're doing. You know what they're using.

Speaker 21 But like, yeah. Or like if an inform, or like if an informant like sends you this data, like you're not going to say no, right? Exactly.

Speaker 21 And also you don't really need to disclose that because it's information you got from an informant. You do not need to disclose to the informant in court ever.
So yeah, it's like

Speaker 59 it's, it's very, there are, there are ways around, you know, the laws that we put up.

Speaker 59 Not that we shouldn't continue to extend those laws, but you shouldn't, like, just because, well, they're not allowed to use this doesn't mean they can't get access to the info.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Yeah.
And also, there's also this important thing, like, there's more, like, also globally, like, there's other governments that can't just be using this.

Speaker 21 Like, for one of the apps, I got the data for.

Speaker 59 The Colombian government, the Russian government doesn't give a shit.

Speaker 21 That was also 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

Speaker 21 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 yeah alibaba spyware right yeah

Speaker 21 like 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.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 yeah, I assume some people have probably done that before, but it does involve admitting to a crime. So, yeah.

Speaker 21 It's like, yeah, these companies just get away with not giving a shit about their product because, like, yeah.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 59 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, always. Is there anything you wanted to plug before we roll out here?

Speaker 21 Just my blog, I think, where I do this journalistic work and also more.

Speaker 21 There's about to be another cool investigative piece out soon, which tangentially involves more tracking and whatever, and also involves Hollywood and more.

Speaker 21 It's a crazy big story, I promise.

Speaker 21 That will be out hopefully in a month or so. But yeah, my blog at maya.crimeu.gay, maya.crimeu.gay, crimeu sn crimew,

Speaker 21 yeah, and gay as in gay.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 Yeah, just check out my blog. At the bottom of the blog, there's all my links to my social media.

Speaker 21 For anyone who's like listening to this and has been wondering where I am, I am back on Twitter as well. Yeah.

Speaker 21 For now. For now.

Speaker 9 That's for all of us these days.

Speaker 21 That's always like a horrible answer at this point. But yeah, I am back on Twitter.
I am posting there sometimes. Yeah.

Speaker 21 All right. Well, thank you.

Speaker 2 And thank you all for listening.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 3 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culture Resist with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culture Resist with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 9 What if you could boost your Wi-Fi to one of your devices when you need it most?

Speaker 12 Because Xfinity Wi-Fi can.

Speaker 14 Like when you need to upload 200 photos of your cat in a Santa hat to post online.

Speaker 16 We've all been there.

Speaker 17 And what if your Wi-Fi could proactively fix issues before they even happen?

Speaker 10 Xfinity Wi-Fi does that too.

Speaker 21 It's like having a little holiday helper.

Speaker 25 And what if your Wi-Fi had parental instincts built right in so your kids are always protected online?

Speaker 26 It's Wi-Fi that's not just smart, it's brilliant.

Speaker 28 And during the holidays, that's a gift we all could use.

Speaker 31 Xfinity, imagine that.

Speaker 32 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 32 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 32 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 32 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 32 Sofas started just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 21 Add a little

Speaker 32 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 Let's unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 can be a long-term solution for weight loss.
True, they can. If you want to be on a drug that changes your body's natural instincts.

Speaker 1 Myth number two, GLP-1 can fix your metabolism. False, GLP-1s fix hunger and this leads to weight loss.

Speaker 1 try the natural GLP-1 therapy metabolism ignite get 15% off your first order with promo code iHeart at veracity self-care.com V-E-R-A-C-I-T-Y self-care.com

Speaker 34 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 36 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 37 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 40 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 43 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 45 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 44 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 43 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 65 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 52 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 69 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber.

Speaker 66 They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 72 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust.

Speaker 74 And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 75 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there?

Speaker 49 And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 77 Right now, in between naps to dinner or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 78 If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 79 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too.

Speaker 56 It all comes down to this.

Speaker 67 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 47 So grab your little ones, Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 21 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 61 If Robert can do his A tonal streaks, then I can sing off key. Yo, I'm back, homie.
All up in your feed.

Speaker 61 watch these rap kids 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 it man i love y'all thanks for showing up and shout out all the latinos who tapped in too honda le puez hey contodo mi gente Benaca, buen valido.

Speaker 61 Listen, we got to really invite our Latino brothers and sisters, our tios and dias, and also our Asian black people, the Pinoys and Pinays, our Ates and Cuillas.

Speaker 61 You're all a part of our delegation here. All of our Usos.
We love y'all. The whole diaspora of people who season their chicken and wash their legs.
I love y'all.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 21 I got you.

Speaker 61 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

Speaker 61 about the death

Speaker 61 of the music festival. It already happened here.

Speaker 61 All right. Now, y'all know

Speaker 61 I'm playing about all this. Like, I'm only talking to the melanated folks.
Y'all know I'm playing right. I mean, this is while I slowly wink at the brown folk.
I'm just playing.

Speaker 61 I'm sorry. I'm messing around.
It's a cold opening. You know,

Speaker 61 you guys got a great sense of humor here. All right, let's get to it.
Festivals. Like, am I right?

Speaker 61 You know, if you're anywhere within a five to ten 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.

Speaker 61 And as an artist, it was like. Festivals were kind of in a lot of ways how I marked the years.

Speaker 61 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 he's, again, these are people you're like, dang, I can't believe that was a whole year, you know, and it was a good way to make sure as an artist that you were making new music and had something new to perform.

Speaker 61 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 golden hour set, the crowd isn't shit faced yet.

Speaker 61 You know, they're at the top of their molly.

Speaker 61 You're 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.

Speaker 61 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 Astro World. I say that not as a joke.

Speaker 61 I'm saying things can go wrong. But oh, the experience, man.
Like, I don't know how old you are. And obviously you can't answer me.
Do you remember the last like big festival you went to?

Speaker 61 You know, back when your knees were good and it was okay for you to stand for 12 hours and there's somebody, you know, having sexual intercourse in the port-a-potty, you know, you're stepping over barf, right?

Speaker 61 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...

Speaker 61 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 operas, like that's their thing.

Speaker 61 They spend their summer going to music festivals. festivals since 2012 up to 2014 like the music fest has been guys

Speaker 61 we've kind of been on borrowed time we've we lived through a music festival renaissance according to npr since 2013 everything sold out the four mega giants right so coachello bonnaroo la la palooza in chicago austin city limits music festival in texas it was like this

Speaker 61 never-ending flow of amazing amazing events. And you know what? They were kind of affordable.

Speaker 61 In the next five years, you had things taking forth like Pitchfork in Chicago, Hangout Music Festival, on the beach in the Gulf Shores, Outside Lands, Bali Music, Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Festival, Forecastle Festival, right?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Part of this was because we listened to radio. You were exposed to more things.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Like whatever type of music you like, whatever subgenre, whatever part of the world you want to go to, there's a music festival that you can show up at.

Speaker 21 Now,

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Okay, you ready for this?

Speaker 61 Shindig 2024, Melt 2024, Sideways Festival, Nasdaq, Field Maneuvers, Tower Z, The Quintent, Big Slap, Electric Zoo, Peach 2024, All the Music Festival, Life is Beautiful Festival, Country Thunder Florida, Suwannee 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.

Speaker 61 Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Booneville, 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.

Speaker 61 Riverside Festival Glasgow in where? Glasgow. Soul Bloom, Sacramento.
TW Classic 2024 in Belgium. Calamijas in Calamijas, Spain.
Caldora Music Festival in Queensland.

Speaker 61 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 Byron Boy, Australia, Body and Soul Festival in Ireland, Moonrose Festival.

Speaker 61 I'm tired of,

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Ashley King wrote this article on August 23rd, 2024 for Digital Music News.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 trade festival association that represents the interests of over 200 independent UK music festivals that range from 500 to 80,000 people.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 That brings the total number of festival closures, either due to cancellation or postponement, up to 192 since 2019. 192 festivals.

Speaker 61 Some may argue that, well, damn, you shouldn't have had that many festivals. Coachella.

Speaker 61 Lollapalooza, and of course, the infamous Burning Man with the most on-brand people that go that call themselves burners.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 It's like the white guy with dreadlocks. I mean, white people with dreads are

Speaker 61 just most of the time, okay?

Speaker 61 Like, this may may sound like a joke i'm deadly serious they be so okay with themselves and will 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 didgerido 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

Speaker 61 for the first time. And the tickets are usually released in tears and some go on sale in the beginning of the year.
And then this part I'm getting from The Guardian.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Festivals were a way for you to discover new music, to meet new friends. It's like camp for like your 20s, you know, you get to wear your dumbass outfits, right? You get to stand out in the sun.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 So the question is, why?

Speaker 61 Who killed the music festival? Why is the festival not festiving?

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 What the hell is happening, y'all?

Speaker 21 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 62 We're back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 I don't think I need to tell you what a music festival is because, I mean, I think you know what it is.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 That's just me being an old head. But either way, man, they're a great time.

Speaker 61 But please understand that festivals, music festivals go like back to, get this, 582 BC, at least according to white people's history.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 History started in Greece.

Speaker 61 We were too busy building pyramids, right?

Speaker 21 Anyway, I'm going to lead out what, oh, but that'd be cracking me up.

Speaker 61 They'd be like, the first music festival on record in ancient Greece during the Pytheon Games, which is fine.

Speaker 61 It's fine. It's fine.
But understand,

Speaker 61 ain't no way in the world this is the only one that ever happened. Anyway, so 582 BC, right?

Speaker 61 And like the Olympic Games, the Python Games took place every four years and included poetry, reading a speech. Right.
And other musical game-like competitions.

Speaker 61 People gathered to enjoy like 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 like the 17th century where you have like classical music festivals and like the type of like exclusivity, right?

Speaker 61 Where like when in the 17th century, when like classical music just basically ate Europe and music festivals originally were like supposed to be a gathering where people could like what you think, gather and celebrate music.

Speaker 61 However, here's where it starts coming into focus. The wealth gap was widening across Europe.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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 like the history of music festivals.

Speaker 61 One could argue like this like the prototype of like the VIP section, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 61 Like, you know, where you can get the pit tickets or you can stand outside with the pours and just listen from the outside.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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

Speaker 61 making art is like, you can't have this like restricting access, right? Because it becomes this just like upper class.

Speaker 61 Art is this creation of the leisure class because one, they have the patrons who pay for them to be able to sit down and contemplate the stars. Like you got all precious about it.
You feel me?

Speaker 61 So, some of that has to do with, again, the wealth gap.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 To avoid the scrutiny of the elite, groups of musicians with similar tastes would gather in dye bars and underground clubs. By the time the war had ended, jazz cemented itself as the genre of the era.

Speaker 61 So now we're talking Harlem Renaissance, juke joints, and the emergence of like, again, this where black people come in. A lot of times, the role that just

Speaker 61 the all-out anti-black racism

Speaker 61 has

Speaker 61 unintentionally,

Speaker 61 because of it, created some of the most dopest things,

Speaker 61 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 are trying to attend to.

Speaker 61 They like, yo, school look fun.

Speaker 61 Well, because we weren't allowed in yours. Anyway, so let me continue.
So World War II played a pivotal role in creating the Newport Folk Festival organized by Lewis and Elaine Loriland.

Speaker 61 A couple met during World War II and came together to revolutionize Rhode Island's music artistic community by promoting jazz.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 Obviously, Woodstock, which was the invention Monterey International Pop Music Festival. This is the rock festival as we know it.
Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, The Who.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 They become a statement. And a big one was...

Speaker 61 in the 90s when they did the Berlin Wall Tearing Down Music Festival, which was an amazing thing, right?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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

Speaker 61 when they tried to redo Woodstock. Just a shit show with like limp biscuit and all them.
You a shit show.

Speaker 61 There's a documentary on Netflix about the absolute disaster that that new Woodstock was. Y'all, I'm talking like y'all thought Astro World was bad where them kids was raging so much and people died.

Speaker 61 You talking about understaffed. Y'all think Firefest was a disaster, disaster my nigga well no i don't think anything was worse than firefest so far a good thing it didn't happen like

Speaker 61 y'all remember fire fest

Speaker 61 oh lord honestly i can't believe i made it almost 20 minutes into this and then mention firefest because it is the perfect example of what went wrong in the music festival world because

Speaker 61 like i said this disaster in the 90s to 2000s if you were able to survive like i said earlier like the Bonnaroos, 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?

Speaker 61 Telluride for folk music. You became the go-to places that if you are going to try to have a career as an artist, you have to play one of these festivals, no matter how much money.

Speaker 61 you don't make at these things. You have to do it because this is where not only do you get the necessary cosine, you also get discovered.

Speaker 61 Like as far as fans, like you make new fans, you sell merch, people walk away with the t-shirt, you're on this t-shirt that says Bonnaroo 2021 and your name is on.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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're ready for this.

Speaker 61 In the boom years, according to an analysis done by Finance Buzz, in 2014, general admission prices for major music festivals increased by 55%.

Speaker 61 That outpaced just inflation, period. Y'all jacked up the price.
So, so listen, so if you're Ja Rule headass, of course I'm going to build a festival.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 But you know what? Capitalism being capitalism, it's going to keep capitalism. Let's talk about what killed the festival.

Speaker 21 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 61 You see, I just did my own fade-out and fade-in music.

Speaker 21 Y'all see that?

Speaker 61 No, don't ask me what note that was.

Speaker 61 So,

Speaker 61 what killed the festival?

Speaker 61 Well, a number 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.

Speaker 61 Like, again, you know, Astral World, like, but Astral World is just a good picture of everything that went wrong in the concept of a music festival. So the first problem is, yeah, capitalism.

Speaker 61 Sometimes you are led to believe that what is will always be, right?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And how a bubble pops is almost always our own fault in this sense.

Speaker 61 The housing bubble, you know, of 2008, when your mommy and them lost their house, because the reality was they shouldn't have never got that loan in the first place.

Speaker 61 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 too good.

Speaker 61 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 is the two-doe boys.

Speaker 61 Yeah, Pitchfork, like this the blog era. You know what I'm saying? When Fader was like a thing that you would want to go suit.
So, like, it all kind of worked together around this time.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Because if you charge 400, then I could argue I'm getting bigger acts.

Speaker 61 So in the boom years, according to this analysis by Finance Buzz, ticket prices since 2014 for most music festivals increased by 55%.

Speaker 61 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 costs 575 to go to if you was going you was probably gonna 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 up you know who bought complex buzzfeed and you know who bought it from buzzfeed network

Speaker 61 n-twrk

Speaker 61 it's an investment firm you know who owns the pitchfork festival condi nast a media company they bought the blog and folded it into gq

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 It also costs too much to make the festival. According to John Rostin, he's the CEO that AIF, the Independent Association of Festivals.

Speaker 61 He says the toilet hire, I just need to buy Porter Potties in 2021 was $28,000 for the exact same amount of toilets in 2024 is $54,000. That's just the toilets.

Speaker 61 You know what happened at Astro World? He didn't have enough security. It costs so much.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Sometimes it just be labels who be putting on these artists that they're trying to break. And then the artists be trash.
They don't be trash because they trash.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 experience that I think I've told before, which is the most terrifying experience I've ever had on tour.

Speaker 61 You don't have them experiences. You ain't played shows where there's more people at the bar or it's more people that work there than come to see you.
You not ready for no festival stage.

Speaker 61 So it's just not fun for the consult. 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.

Speaker 61 This need to be my favorite artist. I'm not finna stand around 12 hours.
pay this much money to really only see one act I like. That don't make no damn sense.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 You had to cancel stuff. Nobody knew this was coming.
Like the L's companies took.

Speaker 61 I took personal, I canceled a tour. Not only did I cancel a tour, I released a poetry book that I couldn't tour.

Speaker 61 I mean, I personally lost tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in touring revenue, in book book sales, in merch sales, in all of it.

Speaker 61 Like 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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,

Speaker 61 those years are when you're discovering. All research says is like your taste in music happens in those years, right?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Whatever you was listening to then is probably still your favorite era.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Little things like that, the dragonfly, Whiskey a Gogo, the Viper Room, all these like smaller spots that when for us out of LA, these were like rites of passage.

Speaker 61 This is how you get to say i saw them win i knew who will i am was for 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 corner you know what i'm saying and it was fun

Speaker 61 i knew false other people they're in san diego you would just drive down like just at the gas lamp like leon bridges hell he opened for us You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 61 Like, again, like we said in the earlier, these, these bands that you was passionate about, you were 17 with your little emo hair swooped over your eyes. This who you were crying over.

Speaker 61 You understand what I'm saying? Like hugging onto your little iPad, you know, doing that, doing that MySpace picture when you're looking down. You know, that's the white people thing.

Speaker 61 Like, this is when you went to go see them.

Speaker 61 If that era for you was a pandemic, you didn't acquire a taste for going out like that. You saw concerts inside a Fortnite.

Speaker 61 So, what I'm saying is,

Speaker 61 one of the biggest things about Gen Z is is they don't go out.

Speaker 61 It's just, it's just the reality. Not only do they ain't got no money, they ain't got no money because again, inflation and finances, the cost of living is insane.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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 gonna move out. I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not mad.

Speaker 61 I ain't gonna push you out of this house because where you gonna go? You gonna get seven roommates? I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry.
They do fewer drugs. They drink less.

Speaker 61 And they don't go nowhere. Cause one, they anxious as hell.
They nervous around being around that many people.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Cause you ain't got no friends. You don't go nowhere.

Speaker 21 right

Speaker 61 i'll 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 gotta 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 is this what I'm gonna spend it on, right?

Speaker 61 Because it's worth her money. She loves them.
She loves her. She got the album.
She went to the listening party. She's like, this is who I'm going to go see.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 It shot themselves in the foot because the big dogs, just like I said, happened in the 1700s, are doing fine.

Speaker 61 If Live Nation and Ticketmaster own every venue, they only gonna put the artists that they won't own there. It costs too much.

Speaker 61 So they're like, oh, I don't understand what's going on with y'all festivals. I know we doing all right.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 I'm calling it Staples because I'm from LA. I know it's just a corporation.
He played Staples four nights in a row where the Lakers played, but that was after doing four nights.

Speaker 61 at the Honda Center in Orange County. These are eight Southern California shows.
Sold Sold them all out. Why the hell would I give that money to Coachella when I could do it myself?

Speaker 61 Live Nation already taking a huge ass cut. Ticketmaster already taking a huge ass cut.
Scalper's already taking a huge ass cut.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 You know what else the music industry did to itself?

Speaker 61 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 gonna like that which means you know we know old 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 the point i was making earlier why you 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 We're all looking at the same aesthetic. So, therefore, all coffee shops look the same.
The same thing happened with music, the algorithm. So,

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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, low, look at this, no, look at this.

Speaker 61 You're stuck to doing it yourself. And hopefully you can climb out your algorithm, right?

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 Let's just say, okay, K-pop. You finna fly all them acts from Korea? How much you going to sell these tickets for? How many K-pop acts do you get? You don't book nobody local?

Speaker 17 Do you know how much money that would cost?

Speaker 61 Or you say, I'm going to 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.

Speaker 61 Nobody's about a three-day pass. So one day might be trash.
And how do you bill it? What does a flyer look like? I don't know half of these people.

Speaker 21 I ain't never even heard of that.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 Nigga, 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?

Speaker 61 And the consumer says, again,

Speaker 61 is this worth my money? I'm willing to throw this money at this big act because that's who the algo, that's who I know. They're not going to risk no more because music discovery is now algorithmic.

Speaker 61 You're not just going to go pull up at a spot and be like, who's this opener? They're dope. The industry did it to itself.
You killed your own performance market.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 All that's left are the big industry artists. And why, again, would they give their ticket sales to a festival?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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 flooded.
Ain't no more nice days outside.

Speaker 61 I ain't finna stand outside all day. You crazy? You gonna 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.

Speaker 61 Okay.

Speaker 21 Now,

Speaker 61 again,

Speaker 61 let's rebuild the world. What can we do better? That's in our control.

Speaker 61 So.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And if it really resonates, 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.

Speaker 61 That's why Universal was just like, man,

Speaker 61 tried to dare all that. You know?

Speaker 61 So if an artist blows up on TikTok, you really like that. Sound like, yo, like go to that artist page, go to their music.

Speaker 61 Like, you know, instead of just like shooting a video, like that stuff's short-lived if you're an artist. Like, obviously, you hope that one day that happens, but that's not sustainable.

Speaker 61 You can't tour off that. That's what happened to a lot of artists.
Why iSpice canceled half her tour dates is because there's not songs. There's TikTok audios.
You feel me?

Speaker 61 That helps the artist know when they try to go get a show that they can prove that like, hey, listen, these are listeners.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Why I have that is because I toured so hard. I played every possible possible dumb, ugly venue I possibly could, like got it out the mud, shook hands, stayed after,

Speaker 61 stayed at the merch table, took pictures, got email addresses, got phone numbers, came back, you know, signed everything.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 I'm not cranking out music that feeds the algorithm.

Speaker 21 You're right.

Speaker 61 But when I drop an album, they know. So my request as the consumer is follow that artist, like cloak to the album.
And secondly, the most obvious one is like, dude, buy merch. Oh, my God.

Speaker 61 Y'all, I'm saying like, merch has been the difference between car insurance and not for me.

Speaker 61 Merch has been the difference between, can my daughter stay in her, you know dance class her after school like ballet class merch like merch is how we paid for our daughters so during the pandemic hell merch it it paid our rent because it's all he had now as an artist you need to have dope merch that's i mean

Speaker 61 if your merch sucks i mean it is what it is i can't ask you to you know purchase something that's trash Artists, make dope merch. You know,

Speaker 61 I have vinyl. Vinyl costs a lot, but you can go to my website.
There's vinyl. Like that stuff, those make a difference.

Speaker 61 And then I'd also ask, like, if you really dig an artist, this is on the artist's job too, like sign up for their newsletter, find out when they're touring and just go to their shows.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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 well i i'll be silly on stage but we're very very professional we keep i take my reputation very serious we make sure that like the talent buyer, the venue is everybody taken care of.

Speaker 61 We're not yelling at the soundman. You know, we keep a clean green room.
Like those are things you could do as an artist.

Speaker 61 But as a consumer, like I know the algorithm's fighting against you, but like if you really like a group, go out of your way. Even if it's on the discovery things, again, the big people, it's easy.

Speaker 61 Beyonce's tickets are going to come find you. You ain't got to go find them.
But Johnny Swim, but the hot shakes, right? That's what they call it. Go find them.

Speaker 61 Because at the end of the day, it's your presence. If you're going to stay in music, you have to get butts and seats.
Is this for us to save music festivals? I don't care. They did that to themselves.

Speaker 61 I'm just trying to save live music because truly, truly,

Speaker 61 there is nothing like it.

Speaker 21 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 59 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 91 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 91 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 91 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 Let's unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 can be a long-term solution for weight loss.
True, they can.

Speaker 1 If you want to be on a drug that changes your body's natural instincts, myth number two, GLP-1 can fix your metabolism. False, GLP-1s fix hunger, and this leads to weight loss.

Speaker 1 Try the natural GLP-1 therapy, Metabolism Ignite. Get 15% off your first order with promo code iHeart at veracityselfcare.com.
V-E-R-A-C-I-T-Y self-care.com.

Speaker 47 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 50 So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

Speaker 52 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 51 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 55 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones.

Speaker 53 I mean, Mac loves them.

Speaker 55 You can't go wrong with the little crunchies.

Speaker 56 You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go.

Speaker 58 Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 92 This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. Fantasy football can be exhausting.
I mean that literally. You're so anxious over your lineup, you can't fall asleep.
Best way to deal with it is Unisom.

Speaker 92 There's a reason it's the number one doctor-recommended over-the-counter sleep aid brand. It helps you fall asleep faster, wake up less, and feel refreshed in the morning.

Speaker 92 Plus, Unisom sleep tabs are clinically tested and proven effective and completely non-habit forming. So make the ultimate sleeper pick and put it to bed with Unisom.
Use as directed.

Speaker 93 Hey guys, this is Ashley Cadetti from the Ben and Ashley Eye Almost Famous podcast. And I have a new favorite place to shop online.
It's called BOM.

Speaker 93 They have high-quality pieces that are affordable and ethically sourced.

Speaker 72 Also, they have a ton of cozies.

Speaker 93 If you haven't shopped there yet, you're missing out. Their fall collection is giving cozy.

Speaker 67 Cool, girl, energy.

Speaker 93 Like denim, dresses, sweaters, all the stuff that you actually want to wear. So go to bohem.com.
That is B-O-H-M-E.com.

Speaker 75 Trust me, you're going to have a pretty full cart.

Speaker 6 This is Bowen Yang from Los Coltristas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 60 And guess what?

Speaker 21 I'm Matt Rogers from Los Coltristas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. And guess what?

Speaker 61 What? I'm stressed.

Speaker 10 I got invited to a friend's giving, and now there's the big question of what to bring.

Speaker 17 Well, just bring a bottle of Casamigos.

Speaker 21 Oh, Casamigos, of course.

Speaker 5 Nothing brings people together like a batch of Casamigos margaritas.

Speaker 61 A Casamigos margarita really is the perfect cocktail.

Speaker 17 Plus, Casamigos goes with everything.

Speaker 21 Turkey, stuffing, stuffing, mac and cheese.

Speaker 6 Oh, I was thinking more cranberry juice or ginger beer, but that works too.

Speaker 19 Well, you know, the iconic rule of culture number 743.

Speaker 21 Anything goes with my Casamigos.

Speaker 13 This France giving, you know what everyone will be grateful for?

Speaker 21 Casamigos. I was going to say you and Casamigos.
Oh,

Speaker 24 let's keep it in that order.

Speaker 20 Please drink responsibly.

Speaker 10 Imported by Casamigo Spirits Company, White Plains, New York, Casamigos tequila, 40% alcohol by volume.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.