Magic Beans

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 6 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 7 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 4 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 12 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 14 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 15 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 17 Hey, I'm Lindsay.

Speaker 18 Hydrodonitis superativa, HS, caused bumps and abscesses that made me feel embarrassed. I talked to my dermatologist and started a treatment that works for me, Cosentix.
I found relief.

Speaker 19 Cosentix secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe hydridonitis superativa, HS. Don't use if allergic to COSENTICS.
Get checked for TB before starting.

Speaker 19 Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some were fatal.

Speaker 19 Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms, like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough. had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen.

Speaker 19 Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or COSENTIX.com.

Speaker 18 You're stronger than HS. Ask your dermatologist about Cosentix.

Speaker 1 If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Granger.

Speaker 1 Granger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers.

Speaker 1 Plus, you can rely on Granger for easy reordering so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.
Granger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 23 With Venmo Stash, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.

Speaker 25 Nice.

Speaker 26 Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card.

Speaker 22 From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands.

Speaker 28 Earn more cash when you do more with stash.

Speaker 29 Venmo Stash Terms and Exclusions Apply.

Speaker 25 Max $100 cash back per month.

Speaker 27 See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms.

Speaker 27 Call zone media.

Speaker 20 On the morning of February 2nd, 2017, William Christopher Gibbs had just finished his overnight shift as a forklift operator at a poultry processing plant in a small town in North Georgia.

Speaker 20 It was, technically, 8 a.m. on a Thursday morning, but he'd just gotten off work and he wanted to relax and have a few beers with a friend.

Speaker 20 Around noon, he got a phone call from another friend who wanted to join them, but he needed a ride.

Speaker 20 Gibbs agreed to drive down to the gas station to pick him up, but he'd need to rearrange some things in his car first.

Speaker 20 As he was cleaning out the front seat of his car, he touched something wet.

Speaker 20 A bottle he'd left on the floor of the passenger side was leaking.

Speaker 20 He panicked. He spent four hours considering his options before finally driving himself to the emergency room.
He had to tell the truth.

Speaker 20 He was sick, and if he wanted help, he'd have to tell them he'd been making ricin.

Speaker 20 It looked like a slam dump case, but less than two weeks before his trial was set to begin, a judge dismissed the indictment.

Speaker 20 Not for lack of evidence, the case was solid.

Speaker 20 But at the 11th hour, his public defender made an incredible discovery.

Speaker 20 A clerical error had accidentally legalized the possession of ricin,

Speaker 20 and no one noticed for over a decade.

Speaker 20 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 20 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 20 The story of William Christopher Gibbs and his bottle full of liquid ricin isn't actually very long.

Speaker 20 That was most of it, to be honest.

Speaker 20 But by the time I realized how little meat there was to the case, I'd already committed to a couple of interesting tangents.

Speaker 20 I mean, I wasted a whole day learning about ricin. I can't just throw that away.

Speaker 20 And it does introduce some new elements into the weird little guy's extended universe. We will, eventually, have to talk about the church of the creator.

Speaker 20 That was part of what made this story so sensational back in 2017.

Speaker 20 When this 27-year-old confessed to a nurse in rural Georgia that he'd accidentally exposed himself to homemade ricin,

Speaker 20 he was wearing a motorcycle jacket with a big patch on the chest that marked him as a member of a group called the Creativity Alliance.

Speaker 20 I doubt the nurse knew what it meant, but I imagine she described it to the cop that she immediately called about the bioweapon in the parking lot.

Speaker 20 The Church of the Creator doesn't actually exist anymore. Not under that name.

Speaker 20 The group William Christopher Gibbs had joined in the months before his arrest is called the Creativity Alliance.

Speaker 20 Depending on who you ask, it's either a successor to or a schism from the original church.

Speaker 20 There are a lot of almost identical sounding names in this story, so I apologize in advance.

Speaker 20 In 1973, Ben Claussen, an aspiring politician in Florida and the inventor of the wall-mounted electric can opener, self-published a book called Nature's Eternal Religion.

Speaker 20 It would become the foundational text of the weird new religion he'd just invented.

Speaker 20 He called it the Church of the Creator, or just creativity.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 religion isn't the word I would use, but it's the one they use. Just ask the Bureau of Prisons.

Speaker 20 They're constantly fielding lawsuits from incarcerated neo-Nazis who argue that their religious religious liberties are being violated by prison policies that ban their religious texts.

Speaker 20 Klausen would go on to write a book called The White Man's Bible.

Speaker 20 They call the head of the church Pontifex Maximus.

Speaker 20 They have commandments and religious holidays.

Speaker 20 We've talked about racist religions before.

Speaker 20 There are a couple of episodes that have touched on Christian identity, a wildly racist and anti-Semitic spin on regular Christianity that preaches that white Europeans are God's chosen people.

Speaker 20 But this is something else. This is not like that at all.

Speaker 20 They're both anti-Semitic, obviously, and they revolve around the superiority of white people, of course.

Speaker 20 But in creativity,

Speaker 20 there is no God.

Speaker 20 There are no deities at all. There's no afterlife.

Speaker 20 It is at its core just an elaborate way to be racist.

Speaker 20 And in a unique twist, in addition to being anti-Semitic, it's also quite explicitly anti-Christian. Their race is their religion.

Speaker 20 Their highest belief is the superiority of the white man and there is nothing above him.

Speaker 20 I promise we'll explore this more another day. There's a lot of weird lore here.
Claussen wrote a number of books and they're all very boring.

Speaker 20 But Gibbs is far from the first member of the Church of the Creator who found himself under indictment. So we'll come back to it.

Speaker 20 But that brings us to Rehoa.

Speaker 20 It's a shortened form of the phrase racial holy war. I've used the term a few times on the show.
It's a pretty common refrain among guys who yearn for a white ethnostate.

Speaker 20 Years ago, Before I rotted out my brain reading the foundational texts of various Nazi groups, I just assumed that Rehoa was a modern term. It feels very online, very mid-2010s to me.

Speaker 20 And I see it all the time in their online spaces where it's mixed in with meme speak that I recognize as 21st century inventions.

Speaker 20 But the word Rahoa is actually older than I am.

Speaker 20 It first appeared in a February 1986 issue of racial loyalty, the Church of the Creator newsletter.

Speaker 20 And you can tell Clausen wasn't sure the term was going to catch on right away. The first announcement that he'd invented a new word is brief and it's sort of buried on page five.

Speaker 20 And in this first announcement, Claassen says, we need a word for our struggle against the other races, something like jihad, but just for white people.

Speaker 20 And underneath his announcement that he's come up with this fantastic new word, he includes a pronunciation guide, which he writes out as

Speaker 20 Raha.

Speaker 20 He wrote out R-A-H-H-O-H-A-A.

Speaker 20 That to me says Raha.

Speaker 20 And members of his church must have read that the same way I did, because a few months later, he's revised this pronunciation guide to read Rahoa, R-A-H-H-O-W-A-H,

Speaker 20 which is clear to me. That reads as Rahoa to me, but later publications of those essays omit both of those and they just say, it rhymes with aloha.

Speaker 20 And Klaassen was so committed to his new word that a year later, he published an entire book called Rahoah, This Planet Is All Ours.

Speaker 20 He later wrote another book called On the Brink of a Bloody Racial War.

Speaker 20 Racial holy war was central to the Church of the Creator.

Speaker 20 And over the years, some members of the church followed through on that commandment. They racked up a couple of murders, some bombings, assorted weapons charges, assault cases.

Speaker 20 By 1993, the church was facing mounting legal and financial problems. Claussen's wife had died, and now he had cancer.

Speaker 20 In August of 1993, Ben Claussen died by suicide, leaving the church in the hands of an unworthy successor, a man who failed to even show up to court when a lawsuit was filed by the family of a man murdered by a member of the church.

Speaker 20 Leaderless and broke, the church fell into disarray.

Speaker 20 In 1996, a former member, a law student named Matt Hale, revived the group, forming a successor organization that he called the World Church of the Creator.

Speaker 20 This is a chapter that deserves its own episodes.

Speaker 20 But the short version of this arc is, in 2002, under Matt Hale's leadership, the organization lost a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by a religious organization that had already trademarked the phrase Church of the Creator in the 80s.

Speaker 20 A judge ordered Matt Hale and his World Church of the Creator to stop using the name. He wasn't allowed to call it that anymore.

Speaker 20 He did not take it well, and he heavily implied to his security chief that he'd really like it if that man would murder the judge who'd ruled against them.

Speaker 20 The man he tried to solicit for the murder of a federal judge was an FBI informant, and Matthew Hale will be in prison until 2036.

Speaker 20 It was after Hale went to prison that the church split into the two factions we have today, the Creativity Alliance and the Creativity Movement.

Speaker 20 The two groups hate each other, obviously, and the differences between them aren't the point right now. But all that to say, creativity is a Nazi religion.

Speaker 20 You don't necessarily have to be a member of any of those organizations to be an adherent of the religion, but if you are a member of a group, it's probably one of those two splinter groups that formed after Matt Hale went to prison.

Speaker 20 And that is where we find William Christopher Gibbs, the man who made Ricin in Georgia in 2017.

Speaker 20 By all accounts, he discovered creativity online sometime in the summer of 2016.

Speaker 20 And he got really into it, really fast.

Speaker 20 He created an account on the forums run by the Creativity Alliance in June of 2016, and their July newsletter published a letter from him.

Speaker 20 By September, he was considering getting Rehoa tattooed across his back.

Speaker 20 And he was stopped by a cop after people complained about him hanging around a public park trying to hand out racist flyers. flyers.

Speaker 20 After Gibbs was arrested, the creativity movement, the other faction of the church, issued a public statement clarifying that he was not one of theirs.

Speaker 20 They claimed that he had actually reached out to them when he was trying to join, but the messages he sent were very weird.

Speaker 20 Quote, he struck us as one of the most dysfunctional, incoherent, and mentally ill people we have come across, the statement read.

Speaker 20 Now that might sound unfair, but I read four frivolous lawsuits that he wrote and hundreds of posts that he's made on Facebook across multiple different accounts over the course of the last decade.

Speaker 20 And I'm willing to bet dysfunctional and incoherent was an understatement.

Speaker 20 It can be pretty hard to understand what he's trying to communicate sometimes. The thoughts just don't always quite connect.

Speaker 20 I should say at this point that Gibbs' mother would later tell the police that her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Speaker 20 This doesn't appear anywhere in the court records. It was never raised as a defense.
There was no request for a competency evaluation. All we have is his mother's claim at the time of his arrest.

Speaker 20 And obviously, mental illness doesn't cause racism. Racism isn't a mental illness.
The two are generally unrelated.

Speaker 20 And normally I wouldn't even bring it up, especially considering the lack of corroboration here.

Speaker 20 You can't diagnose a man based on his posts,

Speaker 20 but there's definitely something going on there.

Speaker 20 I think anyone who read any significant amount of his writing would be able to tell that this is someone who's struggling with something.

Speaker 20 And at least one of these Nazi groups could tell.

Speaker 20 Colin Campbell, the pontifex maximus of the Creativity Alliance, on the other hand, didn't see any red flags in this potential new member.

Speaker 20 After Gibbs was arrested, Campbell acknowledged that Gibbs had recently successfully completed his six-month probationary period and joined the group as a member.

Speaker 20 But he claimed that Gibbs had, quote, hardly any contact with us, just enough to pass as rational and dedicated to 100% legal white civil rights.

Speaker 20 And I doubt that Gibbs had any sort of background knowledge or understanding of the schisms within the movement. This is just something he found online.

Speaker 20 He may not have even realized that these were two very different groups run by people who hated each other.

Speaker 20 But when one group turned him away because he seemed unstable,

Speaker 20 the other welcomed him.

Speaker 20 So on February 2nd, 2017, Gibbs was wearing his Creativity Alliance patch when he got to the hospital, complaining of ricin exposure.

Speaker 20 And shortly after he arrived, someone at the hospital called the police.

Speaker 20 What about HIPAA? You're probably asking. Or maybe you're not.
But his lawyers did.

Speaker 20 And the judge denied a motion to suppress evidence stemming from disclosures made by the hospital.

Speaker 20 HIPAA does allow medical providers to disclose what would otherwise be protected information if it's necessary to prevent a serious and imminent threat to the health and safety of others.

Speaker 20 Like if, for example,

Speaker 20 if a patient comes into the hospital and says he was trying to make a biological weapon and it's outside in his car.

Speaker 20 Within the hour, investigators from the Fannin County Sheriff's Office were in his hospital room.

Speaker 20 He wasn't under arrest. They just wanted to get a better idea what was going on here and how alarmed they should be.

Speaker 20 Gibbs explained that he'd ground up the castor beans and put them in a bottle bottle of nail polish remover, and that all of those implements and materials were in his car outside.

Speaker 20 Gibbs assured the officer that it's, quote, nothing to worry about.

Speaker 20 And when the officer pressed him, asking if the substance in the car was poisonous, Gibbs replied, quote,

Speaker 20 he said it's not, unless it's inhaled or injected.

Speaker 20 This singular line in one filing written by the judge has a citation in the footnotes to a sealed document. And it never comes up again.

Speaker 20 There's never any other mention of Gibbs having communicated with anyone about making the ricin, so I guess it'll be a mystery forever.

Speaker 20 But he's assuring the officer that there's no danger to the public. It's fine.
Don't worry about it. It's not a big deal.

Speaker 20 But at the same time,

Speaker 20 He's gone to the emergency room because he thinks he's been poisoned. And as this conversation is happening, he's pretty agitated that he isn't receiving adequate treatment for this exposure.

Speaker 20 He's upset that they haven't given him an IV, for example.

Speaker 20 And in an interview later that evening, he's hacking and coughing and nervously asking an FBI agent, what are the symptoms of ricin poisoning?

Speaker 20 So he clearly thinks he's been exposed to something very dangerous.

Speaker 20 The officer called in backup. And by around eight o'clock that evening, deputies had moved all of the other cars in the parking lot out of what they were now calling the hot zone.

Speaker 20 A hazmat team from another county arrived to search the car.

Speaker 20 FBI agents rolled up in black SUVs, and the Army National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team was on site to provide assistance if needed.

Speaker 20 The bottle recovered by the hazmat team tested positive for Ricin.

Speaker 20 But it was a small amount, and it was all contained within the vehicle. There was was no danger to the public.
Gibbs was released from the hospital. He was fine.

Speaker 20 After being interrogated that night by the FBI, Gibbs was initially held at the county jail on just a misdemeanor charge of reckless conduct.

Speaker 20 A few weeks later, though, a federal grand jury indicted him on a single count of possession of a biological agent or toxin by a person who didn't have the proper registration.

Speaker 20 That's section 175B

Speaker 20 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.

Speaker 20 175B.

Speaker 20 The B is so critical here because 175B isn't a subcategory of Section 175, it's its own section.

Speaker 20 Section 175, Prohibitions with Respect to Biological Weapons, that carries a 10-year sentence. And 175B is a paltry five years.

Speaker 20 The difference between the two is intent.

Speaker 20 You have to prove that the defendant intended to use the toxin as a weapon if you want to charge them under 175.

Speaker 20 175B just means you had something you weren't supposed to have.

Speaker 20 That section was newly written in 2001. Certainly as some sort of frantic post-9-11 crackdown on scientists with out-of-date paperwork.

Speaker 20 Maybe they just wanted to know who had what, where, when, and why, even if it wasn't something they were planning to use as a weapon.

Speaker 20 Or maybe they just wanted to be sure they could charge cases where the facts were fuzzy.

Speaker 20 Bit of both, I think.

Speaker 20 So when I read news coverage of this case, and the reports all say the case against Gibbs was dismissed because Congress forgot to make Ricin illegal.

Speaker 30 I thought,

Speaker 20 that can't be right.

Speaker 20 I've read cases from this time period period that ended in a conviction related to ricin.

Speaker 20 There was one in Georgia just a few years before this, some militia guys with a harebrained scheme to disperse the toxin over large areas in major cities. It never would have worked.

Speaker 20 It wasn't a workable plan.

Speaker 20 They didn't even have ricin, and there was no indication that they had any idea how to make it or had sought that knowledge.

Speaker 20 It's a scary sounding plot, but even the judge doubted that a 70-year-old man was going to figure out how to do anything with those beans he bought.

Speaker 20 The hiccup is right here though.

Speaker 20 Those elderly militia men with a bag of raw castor beans were charged with Section 175.

Speaker 20 They were only conspiring to make the ricin.

Speaker 20 They did have the beans, and they were intending to use them as a weapon.

Speaker 20 Most cases where someone is arrested because they had some kind of biological agent or toxin, they go ahead and charge them with intent to use it as a weapon.

Speaker 20 Why else would the cops be at your house in a hazmat suit, right?

Speaker 20 And that law is pretty broad. It is enough to just attempt, threaten, or conspire to use it as a weapon.
You don't even have to have a plan that would actually work.

Speaker 20 I mean, in that militia case, They just had the beans. They hadn't even made the poison yet.

Speaker 20 So in the Gibbs case, they must not have felt that they could meet even that burden.

Speaker 20 I guess they really thought that they wouldn't be able to convince a jury that he was ever going to do anything other than spill it in his car.

Speaker 20 So they charged him with the lesser offense, 175B.

Speaker 20 And again, that's just having one of these biological agents or toxins without properly registering that possession with the government.

Speaker 20 And those two laws, they're in the same chapter. They use most of the same words.
How could it be that one of them applies to ricin

Speaker 20 and one of them doesn't?

Speaker 20 The answer took me too long to figure out. It's very complicated and it's very silly.

Speaker 20 So just to get a little schoolhouse rock on you here, we have laws, right?

Speaker 20 The United States Code is the codification of all of the permanent federal statutes, those things that become law after Congress passes a bill.

Speaker 20 But we also have something called the Code of Federal Regulations.

Speaker 20 After passing a law, Congress can delegate the authority to a government agency to write the regulations that help that agency interpret and implement those laws.

Speaker 20 It's more complicated than that, but... I know nobody wants to hear me struggle to explain regulatory law, so I'm not gonna.

Speaker 20 So in this case, Congress passed a bill that said it's illegal to have biological agents or toxins. Okay,

Speaker 20 solid law.

Speaker 20 But they're not experts on microbiology, so they leave it to the Department of Health and Human Services to list what sorts of things need to be criminalized by this law specifically.

Speaker 20 And Rison was on that list.

Speaker 20 In the first code section, there actually is no list. It just says biological agent or toxin, and that's defined very broadly.

Speaker 20 But in this specific section in 175B, the code section that requires you to register with the Secretary of Health and Human Services if you possess certain what are called select agents,

Speaker 20 you gotta list them. They're select agents.
You have to select them.

Speaker 20 So instead of listing those select agents by name in the law, it specified that it applied to biological agents and toxins that are, quote, listed as non-overlap or overlap, select biological agent or toxin in sections 73.4 and 73.5 of Title 42 Code of Federal Regulations.

Speaker 20 Okay, so I assume Ricin must be missing from that list, right? That's why the case got dropped.

Speaker 20 So I found a copy of the 2017 version of the Code of Federal Regulations and I flipped to Title 42, Section 73, and

Speaker 20 ricin's on the list.

Speaker 20 I control-F'd it. I found ricin in Section 73.
I can see it. What happened?

Speaker 20 And here's where it gets so silly.

Speaker 20 So the law was passed in 2001. In 2001, the statute made specific reference to the list of toxins found in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 42, Section 72.6.

Speaker 20 Then in 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services made some formatting updates to their rules and regulations. So Congress amended the law in 2002 to match the updated reference.

Speaker 20 So now the law says that the list is in Appendix A of Section 72. Perfect.
Everything's matching up.

Speaker 20 In 2004, Congress amended the law again, updating that reference again, because Health and Human Services had made some more formatting changes and now the list of toxins is in Section 73.4 and 73.5.

Speaker 20 Perfect. The law and the regulation still match.

Speaker 20 Until three months later.

Speaker 20 Health and Human Services did a little bit of reformatting of their rules and regulations. They eliminated an unnecessary section, so everything got shifted by point one.

Speaker 20 So now the list of toxins with ricin on it is section 73.3.

Speaker 20 And the law wasn't amended to match.

Speaker 20 It's like a dead link, right?

Speaker 20 The law requires the list. The law says that the things on the list are illegal, but it points you to a really specific place.

Speaker 20 And that's not where the list is anymore.

Speaker 20 And if it only criminalizes the things on the list and there is no list, then

Speaker 20 it's not illegal.

Speaker 32 Incoming with the old gays. It's Jessé, Bill, Robert, and Mick with a special bonus episode of Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

Speaker 32 No matter what time of year it is, we know it's important to uplift the spirit of pride, which is relatively easy when Palm Springs celebrates in November.

Speaker 33 The first pride I went to, it made me feel like I was really part of something.

Speaker 33 People being so joyous in the streets and being themselves.

Speaker 33 We've really come a long way and I realized I am standing on the shoulders of so many millions of queer people who sacrificed their lives for what we have today.

Speaker 32 Silver Linings with the Old Days is brought to you in partnership with iHeart's Ruby Studio and Viv Healthcare. Listen on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 6 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 7 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 4 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 12 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 14 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 15 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 30 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 30 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 30 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 30 After being diagnosed with both CIDP CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 31 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 30 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 23 With Venmo Stash, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.

Speaker 25 Nice.

Speaker 26 Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card.

Speaker 22 From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go-to's and start earning cash back at those brands.

Speaker 28 Earn more cash when you do more with Stash.

Speaker 29 Venmo Stash Terms and Exclusions apply.

Speaker 25 Max $100 cash back per month.

Speaker 27 C terms at venmo.me slash stash terms.

Speaker 20 Obviously, this was a mistake. They'd made updates in tandem twice before.

Speaker 20 Twice.

Speaker 20 The regulations changed and they updated the law to match so that the numbers still matched. They just didn't do it the third time.

Speaker 20 And in the law, it lists the name of the regulation they're talking about. It just has the wrong number.

Speaker 20 Surely that doesn't make it legal to make ricin.

Speaker 20 But I found two judges who said that's exactly what it did.

Speaker 20 In this case, in 2018, a judge in the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the indictment against William Christopher Gibbs.

Speaker 20 Judge Richard Story wrote, It falls to Congress to write the laws or to amend them if they yield unfair or unwanted results.

Speaker 20 The role of the courts, on the other hand, is limited to fairly reading and applying the laws Congress writes, not to change them.

Speaker 20 In other words, Congress fucked up, but a judge can't change the law. He can't apply the law that he thinks should have been passed.

Speaker 20 Citing that decision in the Gibbs case, Judge James Moody in Arkansas dismissed a similar case against Alexander Jordan in 2020.

Speaker 20 Jordan was 21 when he called 911 in a panic, believing he'd poisoned himself.

Speaker 20 He claimed that he'd created the ricin because he was thinking of ending his own life.

Speaker 20 And when first responders arrived, he did warn them to be careful around the substance. He didn't want people to get hurt.

Speaker 20 After his arrest, he was sent to a psychiatric facility to await trial, but the trial never came.

Speaker 20 Congress amended the law to correct the mistake after what happened in the Gibbs case. So in 2019, the law has been fixed.

Speaker 20 But Alexander Jordan was charged in 2018, before the law changed.

Speaker 20 And while the correction to the law made it clear that they'd always intended to criminalize Ricin,

Speaker 20 it wasn't illegal when Jordan did it.

Speaker 20 Judge Moody wrote, there is no ambiguity. The government should not be allowed to prosecute the defendant for conduct that was not made illegal until after he committed the challenged acts.

Speaker 20 Congress had 15 years to amend the statute.

Speaker 20 Now, it's possible there are other cases, but I only found one other case with a pretty similar set of circumstances.

Speaker 20 So someone who was charged only under the possession statute for conduct that occurred after 2005, but before 2019.

Speaker 20 And in this third case, the judge was presented with the decisions that had already been made in the Alexander Jordan and William Gibbs cases.

Speaker 20 He read those opinions and he said, judges can disagree. Everybody can tell what Congress meant.

Speaker 20 Honestly, I think it's kind of a reasonable opinion in this case. I think everybody can tell what Congress meant.
Statutory interpretation is not interesting to me.

Speaker 20 So maybe that judge and I are wrong.

Speaker 20 And this case was a little different because Debbie Sears-Hill had already pled guilty, so it's not the same as just dismissing an indictment.

Speaker 20 She would have to revoke her guilty plea and vacate her sentence.

Speaker 20 But it is interesting that a third judge looked at the same facts and had an entirely opposite read on the situation.

Speaker 20 After the federal case against Gibbs was dropped, he spent one more week in jail.

Speaker 20 The feds had released him, but he'd only been in federal custody since his arrest. Fannin County, Georgia, wanted a couple days' time for a probation violation.

Speaker 20 His arrest for reckless conduct on the day he showed up at the hospital violated the terms of a 2012 plea deal for an old burglary conviction.

Speaker 20 But that was it.

Speaker 20 Because the case never went to trial, though, we don't know what happened.

Speaker 20 There's nothing on the record about what Gibbs planned to do with the Ricin.

Speaker 20 Most of the reporting on the case focuses on the two details we do know.

Speaker 20 He made ricin, and he was a self-professed adherent of creativity, a white supremacist religious movement.

Speaker 20 There is a heavy implication that he must have been plotting some kind of racially motivated terror attack.

Speaker 20 And I'll admit, that's where my mind went too.

Speaker 20 But that's because I didn't know very much about ricin.

Speaker 20 It's a toxin found in the seeds of the castor oil plant. And don't get me wrong, it is extremely toxic.
Do not make ricin.

Speaker 20 Do not chew on castor beans, which is incidentally one of the most common causes of toxicity.

Speaker 20 It is thousands of times more poisonous than cyanide or rattlesnake venom.

Speaker 20 And it's really easy to make.

Speaker 20 I'm not...

Speaker 20 going to tell you how to make ricin, and I just want to put it on the record that all those Google searches I made last night night for how to make ricin, how to extract ricin from castor bean, castor bean acetone, castor bean solvent extraction, that was for work, okay?

Speaker 20 If the FBI is listening, that was for work. I don't even have any beans.
I hated chemistry in high school. I just like to have a robust understanding of the case, okay?

Speaker 20 But several articles I read by doctors and toxicologists and chemists all seem to agree.

Speaker 20 Any idiot can figure it out.

Speaker 20 It's easier than cooking meth, and plenty of people do that every day just fine.

Speaker 20 The instructions are pretty easy to find online, and it's something you can do at home with normal household solvents. You don't need any special equipment or scientific knowledge.

Speaker 20 The results achieved by your average home chemist are going to vary pretty widely depending on a variety of factors, but

Speaker 20 in most cases, you're going to end up with something you definitely shouldn't eat.

Speaker 20 So it's highly toxic.

Speaker 30 There's no known cure.

Speaker 20 And it's very easy to make at home with things that are cheap and legal to buy.

Speaker 20 This must be a terrorist weapon of choice, right?

Speaker 20 This must be happening all the time.

Speaker 20 Not exactly.

Speaker 20 Ricin has existed for as long as the castor oil plant has.

Speaker 20 You can get ricin toxicity from just eating the seeds of the plant.

Speaker 20 It was first isolated in a lab by a German microbiologist in 1888. And within a few years, people were trying to figure out how to use it as a weapon.
During World War I, the U.S.

Speaker 20 military experimented with trying to create toxic dust clouds that can be unleashed on the battlefield. Inhalation of powdered ricin would be extremely toxic.

Speaker 20 But it's hard to get the particle size right so that it aerosolizes. It's hard to control a cloud of poisonous dust, and with no antidote, you risk your own troops if the wind shifts.

Speaker 20 Experimentation with ricin-coated bullets and shrapnel was pretty quickly abandoned, in part because it would be a violation of the Hague Conventions, but in a more practical sense, Bullets get very hot and high heat denatures the toxin, so it just wouldn't work anyway.

Speaker 20 During World War II, several countries experimented with bombs that would release ricin without superheating it.

Speaker 20 But ultimately, there were cheaper, easier, more controllable ways to get the exact same horrible results. So, ricin was never really used on the battlefield.

Speaker 20 It's just not that useful for large-scale attacks.

Speaker 20 It's possible, sure, people have tried.

Speaker 20 You could aerosolize it over a large area. You could put massive quantities of it in a water supply and people would get sick and they might die.

Speaker 20 But it's not the best tool for that job.

Speaker 20 You have to use a lot of it, and it would be hard to make it at that kind of scale. It's very difficult to control for particle size if you're trying to aerosolize it.

Speaker 20 Some chemicals used in water treatment would render it useless.

Speaker 20 A few countries kept trying to figure out how to use it at scale, but it never took off.

Speaker 20 So maybe that just means it's better suited for use up close.

Speaker 20 A paper published in a 2021 issue of Toxicon, the official scientific journal of the International Society on Toxinology, found 50 cases of ricin intoxication in the scientific literature during a 40-year period from 1980 to 2020.

Speaker 20 And in that 40-year period, they found 50 cases described in the scientific literature. 74% were accidental exposures.
And only six people died.

Speaker 20 And those were only the cases that ended up in a medical journal. So minor incidents where everyone was fine don't warrant a case study.
So I assume in the real world that fatality rate is even lower.

Speaker 20 Okay, but surely, surely all six of those deaths were some kind of sinister plot, right?

Speaker 20 The paper didn't say. It was written by scientists.
They're more focused on things like hydrolyzing ribosomes and polypeptide chains with disulfide bonds. I don't know, that's not my business.

Speaker 20 So I poked around the medical literature a little bit on my own, and I found half a dozen case studies discussing deaths by suicide.

Speaker 20 almost all of which involved someone injecting themselves with a ricin solution.

Speaker 20 There was one paper about a man who died after ingesting an herbal remedy that he didn't know contained powdered castor beans.

Speaker 20 And I found another dozen or so papers about non-lethal ricin poisonings. And all of those were either suicide attempts or accidents.

Speaker 20 You know, a child chewing up some seeds, a woman eating castor beans because an herbalist told her it would make her hair grow thicker, things like that.

Speaker 20 I looked everywhere for proof that ricin has ever actually been used to kill someone on purpose. Someone other than oneself.

Speaker 20 I looked in media coverage, medical journals, court records, government reports on bioterrorism, the Army's handbook on management of biological casualties. I looked everywhere.

Speaker 20 It has happened one time.

Speaker 20 People have tried. People have come close.
People have gotten very sick.

Speaker 20 But at least as far as any publication I can find by any government entity, the only time rice has ever been used to successfully murder someone was in 1978.

Speaker 32 Incoming with the old gays, it's Jessé, Bill, Robert, and Mick with a special bonus episode of Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

Speaker 32 No matter what time of year it is, we know it's important to uplift the spirit of pride, which is relatively easy when Palm Springs celebrates in November.

Speaker 33 The first pride I went to, it made me feel like I was really part of something.

Speaker 33 People being so joyous in the streets and being themselves.

Speaker 33 We've really come a long way and I realized I am standing on the shoulders of so many millions of queer people who sacrificed their lives for what we have today.

Speaker 32 Silver Linings with the Old Days is brought to you in partnership with iHeart's Ruby Studio and Viv Healthcare. Listen on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 6 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 7 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 4 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 12 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 14 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 15 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 30 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 30 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 30 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 30 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 31 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 30 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 23 With a mustache, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.

Speaker 25 Nice.

Speaker 26 Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card.

Speaker 22 From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more, pick a bundle with your go-to's and start earning cash back at those brands.

Speaker 28 Earn more cash when you do more with Stash.

Speaker 29 Venmo Stash Terms and Exclusions Apply.

Speaker 25 Max $100 cash back per month.

Speaker 27 See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms.

Speaker 20 The victim was Georgie Markov, a political dissident from Bulgaria.

Speaker 20 He was standing at a bus stop in London when he felt a sharp prick in the back of his leg.

Speaker 20 He didn't realize it at the time, but an assassin had shot him with a tiny pellet containing ricin. fired out of a device concealed inside of an umbrella.

Speaker 20 Markov died in the hospital four days later.

Speaker 20 This was a highly sophisticated operation, allegedly carried out by the Bulgarian secret police with assistance from the KGB.

Speaker 20 The pellet was finely machined, less than two millimeters in diameter, with tiny holes drilled in it to form a reservoir for the poison.

Speaker 20 The device used compressed air to fire the pellet at short range, circumventing the problem posed by the heat of a traditional gun barrel.

Speaker 20 Investigators believe the pellet was also coated in a sticky substance designed to melt at the temperature of the human body, which would then release the poison.

Speaker 20 That's not something your average home chemist could pull off.

Speaker 20 There are cases of attempted murder using ricin.

Speaker 20 And aside from a few very high-profile assassination attempts, mostly involving the KGB,

Speaker 20 They seem to be predominantly crimes of intimacy.

Speaker 20 They happen in the home.

Speaker 20 Injection, inhalation, and ingestion.

Speaker 20 These are the three routes to ricin poisoning.

Speaker 20 Injection is favored by assassins and those taking their own lives.

Speaker 20 Inhalation is unpredictable and hard to weaponize.

Speaker 20 So, most of the stories I could find of someone who was non-lethally but intentionally poisoned with ricin,

Speaker 20 it was because someone put it in their food. A husband, a wife, a neighbor, a mother.

Speaker 20 I couldn't find any instances where a victim died from this, but it's possible that they're out there and it's just not the kind of thing that shows up in a DHS report or a bioterrorism medical manual.

Speaker 20 So people are giving their husbands kidney failure and diarrhea, but why did I think this was some kind of super weapon?

Speaker 20 I feel like it lives in the same place in my brain as anthrax.

Speaker 20 And I know I'm not the only one, because in 2013 alone, three separate people sent a bunch of letters full of ricin, trying to recreate the hysteria of the 2001 anthrax letters.

Speaker 20 If you're too young to have watched 9-11 happen on the TV at school, back in 2001, Letters containing spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis were mailed to the offices of several news outlets and to Senators Tom Daschell and Patrick Leahy.

Speaker 20 At least 22 people developed anthrax infections, and five of them died.

Speaker 20 Even if you are too young to remember the Amerathrax case unfolding in real time,

Speaker 20 the image of mysterious white powder in an envelope is sort of ubiquitous now.

Speaker 20 Every police procedural drama has an episode with poisoned mail.

Speaker 20 Because again, this was happening just a few weeks after 9-11,

Speaker 20 and everyone had kind of lost their minds. This incident rewired our brains to believe that any one of us could be the victim of a bioterrorism attack.

Speaker 20 And it spawned a lot of real-world copycat hoaxes.

Speaker 20 In 2008 alone, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service responded to nearly 3,000 incidents of suspicious substances sent through the mail.
And a majority of those cases were, quote, unknown white powders.

Speaker 20 From 2007 to 2008, the FBI investigated nearly a thousand potential crimes involving possible biological agents found in conjunction with a threatening note.

Speaker 20 And most of those cases, too, were white powder letters.

Speaker 20 But they're never real.

Speaker 20 They're never real.

Speaker 20 A guy mailed baking powder to the IRS with a letter that says, here's anthrax, and he spelled anthrax wrong. A man in the UK mailed protein powder to an MP.

Speaker 20 It's sugar or salt or flour.

Speaker 20 In one case, nine cops in Florida were hospitalized and held in quarantine because they found a box of white powder and they assumed it was a bioweapon.

Speaker 20 It was cocaine.

Speaker 20 But the fear that these incidents cause is real. And that's enough for most hoaxers.

Speaker 20 But what if you didn't just want to do a hoax?

Speaker 20 What if you wanted to do it for real, but you don't know how to make anthrax?

Speaker 20 A lot of the literature emphasizes that it's not hard to make anthrax.

Speaker 20 They just mean it's possible for a non-state actor to do. They don't necessarily mean it's possible for you to do.

Speaker 20 You need some actual lab equipment and some specialized skills, at least the kind of lab skills you would learn in a college-level microbiology class.

Speaker 20 But ricin.

Speaker 20 Ricin's easy to make.

Speaker 20 And if in the wake of the anthrax letters, white powder is what's scary, ricin can be a white powder too.

Speaker 20 It's perfect for an aspiring terrorist without a lot of skills.

Speaker 20 So these are people who are taking an extra step.

Speaker 20 If they just wanted to scare people, They could mail powdered sugar like everybody else. But they went out of their way to make ricin.

Speaker 20 So they must want something to happen. They must want someone to get sick.

Speaker 20 But they don't seem to realize that ricin doesn't work that way.

Speaker 20 There's no evidence that anyone has ever gotten sick from a ricin letter. And I don't just mean they haven't died.
We've covered that nobody's dying from this. No one's gotten sick.

Speaker 20 Unlike anthrax, You can't absorb ricin through your skin. It doesn't work that way.

Speaker 20 It can cause illness if inhaled, similar to anthrax, but the home chemist is unlikely to create a ricin powder fine enough to aerosolize.

Speaker 20 To get sick from one of these ricin letters, you would have to eat it.

Speaker 20 Surely the people doing this have some idea how ricin works. I mean, they did the research to figure out how to make it.
Surely information about how it works is accessible in a similar place.

Speaker 20 It's impossible to say why most of these people believed something that was just provably scientifically impossible to result in the intended outcome.

Speaker 20 But there are some cases, starting about 15 years ago, where we do know the answer to that question, and it's so embarrassing for them.

Speaker 20 They saw it on Breaking Bad.

Speaker 20 Risin was a recurring plot device for four of the five seasons of the television show Breaking Bad.

Speaker 20 If you haven't seen the show, it's pretty good. You should check it out.

Speaker 20 Brian Cranston plays Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth to pay for his medical bills. Hijinks ensue.
He gets pretty good at crime.

Speaker 20 I don't really remember, it's been a few years.

Speaker 20 In a season two episode that aired in March of 2009, Walter White is teaching his young assistant, Jesse Thinkman, how to make make ricin so they can use it to poison a Mexican drug kingpin.

Speaker 20 In that episode, the first time ricin appears in the show, they're really overplaying it. As Walter is explaining the plan, they're leaning over the table looking at the beans.

Speaker 20 Walter slaps Jesse's hand away as he reaches out to touch them. And Jesse's incredulous and he says, seriously? You can get poisoned from beans?

Speaker 20 And Walter tells him, yes.

Speaker 20 Again, even the finished product, even once you have extracted the toxin from the bean,

Speaker 20 you can probably touch it. You can definitely touch the beans.

Speaker 20 Just don't chew them up and swallow them.

Speaker 20 The ricin is teased throughout the show.

Speaker 20 And there's always this implication that it is the perfect murder weapon, that sprinkling it on someone's food or giving them a ricin-laced cigarette to smoke spells certain death.

Speaker 20 In the series finale in 2013, Walter White kills a drug smuggler by switching out the sweetener packet that she puts in her tea for one filled with ricin.

Speaker 20 And since that episode aired, there have been at least five cases in which the defendant outright admitted that they got the idea to purchase, manufacture, or use ricin because they saw it on that show.

Speaker 20 The make-believe meth dealer on TV told them it was easy, deadly, and often overlooked as a cause of death because the symptoms are more easily explained by some ordinary illness.

Speaker 20 In the most egregious instance, a 37-year-old woman in London went online to purchase ricin just days after seeing the series finale.

Speaker 20 And in that episode, Walter White put ricin in a woman's tea.

Speaker 20 But when Kuntal Patel logged onto the dark web to try to buy ricin, she was ultimately sold a similar poison called Abrin.

Speaker 20 And when she received it, she dumped it into her mother's Diet Coke.

Speaker 20 Her mother survived, and Patel got a three-year sentence.

Speaker 20 In the span of just a couple of years, Ishtiak Salim in Pennsylvania, Muhammad Ali in Liverpool, Daniel Millsman in D.C., and Alexander Jordan in Arkansas all said they got the idea from the show.

Speaker 20 And I'm sure they're not the only ones.

Speaker 20 In 2013, in the middle of Breaking Bad's final season, three separate people in three entirely unrelated cases

Speaker 20 made Ricin, put it in envelopes, and mailed it to important people.

Speaker 20 Letters went to a federal judge, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the CIA, an Air Force base, a Mississippi state representative. Two of the letter writers sent one to Barack Obama.

Speaker 20 Obviously, no one got hurt. You can't get sick from a Ryson letter.

Speaker 20 And I can't prove that Matthew Bouquet, James Douchke, or Shannon Richardson were breaking bad fans.

Speaker 20 But come on.

Speaker 20 I think I'd be willing to put money on the fact that Shannon Richardson, at least, was watching the show.

Speaker 20 Because I know she loved prestige TV.

Speaker 20 She was an actress.

Speaker 20 She'd had a small role as one of the zombies on The Walking Dead.

Speaker 20 And I don't think she actually wanted to poison Michael Bloomberg or Barack Obama.

Speaker 20 She was trying to get rid of her husband. I don't know why she didn't just poison her husband.
This seems very elaborate. But she was in the middle of a divorce.

Speaker 20 And I guess she wanted to speed things along. So she manufactured ricin in her kitchen.
mailed it to the president, and then called the police to say she thought her husband had done it.

Speaker 20 She is, of course, in federal prison.

Speaker 20 By 2019, William Christopher Gibbs was home. His ordeal was over, his case was dropped.

Speaker 20 He filed a number of lawsuits against various law enforcement agencies involved in this, but they were all incoherent and quickly dismissed.

Speaker 20 In 2021, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance posted in the group's group's online forum that Gibbs had been excommunicated from the church.

Speaker 20 It's not totally clear why they waited until 2021. Again, he was arrested in 2017.

Speaker 20 But Reverend Colin Campbell's lists of reasons was as follows.

Speaker 20 Insufficient explanation for the use of beans that make ricin.

Speaker 20 Use of titles he is not authorized to use, Reverend, Pontifex and Pontifex Maximus.

Speaker 20 General disobedience as a prospective church member. Use of Aryan Brotherhood imagery without authorization and for personal gain.

Speaker 20 Usage of outlaw motorcycle club names without authorization and for personal gain.

Speaker 20 Attempting to declare wars in the name of creativity against outlaw motorcycle clubs.

Speaker 20 Okay, so he does start out with the beans. There's a little bit in there about how really he should have had a good reason for making ricin.

Speaker 20 They're not saying he shouldn't have made Reisen. They just want clarification on why he was doing that.

Speaker 20 But everything else on this list, this is overwhelmingly just made-up stuff. It's weird Nazi church stuff.

Speaker 20 They're mad that he called himself a reverend in the Nazi church when he wasn't really a reverend. He pretended to be the pope of Nazi church online.

Speaker 20 He posted things online that might make people think he he was more important, more involved than he really was, or involved with people or groups that he wasn't.

Speaker 20 Honestly, I think the worst thing on this list is that he was trying to start fights with motorcycle clubs in the name of the church. Nobody wants that heat.

Speaker 20 Even though he is officially excommunicated from the Creativity Alliance, He's made quite a few posts in the last four years that indicate he's still an adherent of creativity, that godless religion of white supremacy.

Speaker 20 He still calls himself Pontifex Maximus, sometimes.

Speaker 20 He'll post Rehoah every now and again.

Speaker 20 But he also posts Crowley and sigils and snippets of the Necronomicon, and sometimes what appear to be Christian prayers.

Speaker 20 And earlier this year, he posted his last will and testament, in which he names Kim Jong-un the executor of his estate.

Speaker 20 So, hard to say what he believes.

Speaker 20 We'll probably never know why he was making ricin in his car between shifts at the chicken plant.

Speaker 20 It wasn't really enough to hurt anybody, even if he tried to use it.

Speaker 20 Although the fact that he panicked and went to the hospital seems to indicate that he didn't know that.

Speaker 20 If I had to guess, and I shouldn't,

Speaker 20 If he did plan to do anything with it, it was probably what most people do with it. They hurt someone close to them.

Speaker 20 Congress accidentally legalized ricin for 15 years.

Speaker 20 And the only two people who benefited from that mistake were a confused racist in Georgia who spilled it in his car and a man in Arkansas who changed his mind about ending his life.

Speaker 20 There's no moral to this story.

Speaker 20 Just don't eat your mail

Speaker 20 and don't chew on any mysterious beans.

Speaker 20 Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolzo Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Soby Licherman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 20 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music is composed by Brad Dickert.

Speaker 20 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.

Speaker 20 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 6 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 7 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 4 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 12 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 14 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 15 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 23 With Venmo Stash, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.

Speaker 25 Nice.

Speaker 26 Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card.

Speaker 22 From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more, pick a bundle with your go-to's and start earning cash back at those brands.

Speaker 28 Earn more cash when you do more with Stash.

Speaker 29 Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply.

Speaker 25 Max $100 cash back per month.

Speaker 27 See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms.

Speaker 17 Honestly, honestly.

Speaker 34 Honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 34 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 34 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 17 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 35 The busiest time of the year, it's here. Between parties, shopping, and decorating.
Who has time?

Speaker 35 With Airtasker, you can get anything done, cleaning, wrapping, even someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse. Download the Airtasker app or go to AirTasker.com.

Speaker 35 Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.